Preface

A prefatory explanation of the kind habitually set before a book — about the purpose the author has set himself in it, and about the occasions that prompted it and the relation he takes it to bear to other treatments, earlier or contemporary, of the same subject — seems, with a philosophical work, not only superfluous but, given what such a work is by nature, actually unfitting and counter to its own purpose. For whatever it would be fitting to say of philosophy in a preface, and in whatever way one might say it — a historical statement, say, of the tendency and standpoint, of the general content and the results, a stringing together of assertions and assurances about the true that run back and forth — none of this can pass for the way in which philosophical truth is to be set out. — Moreover, since philosophy essentially inhabits the element of universality, which encloses the particular within itself, there arises here, more than in other sciences, the semblance that the purpose or the final results already express the matter at hand, and express it even in its complete essence, over against which the working-out would be what is really inessential. In the case of a general representation, by contrast, for example of what anatomy is, roughly an acquaintance with the parts of the body regarded in their lifeless existence, one remains convinced that one does not yet have the matter at hand, the content of this science, in one's possession, and that beyond such a representation one must take trouble over the particular. — Furthermore, in an aggregate of items of acquaintance of this kind, which does not rightly bear the name of science, talk about the purpose and about universalities of that sort differs in no way from the historical and conceptless manner in which the content itself is spoken of, these nerves, these muscles, and so on. With philosophy, by contrast, an inconsistency would arise: such a manner would be put to use, and yet philosophy itself would be exhibiting that manner as incapable of grasping truth.

In the same way, determining the relation that a philosophical work takes itself to have to other efforts on the same subject drags in an alien interest and obscures what really matters in the cognition of truth. The more rigidly opinion fixes the opposition of the true and the false, the more it also expects either agreement with or contradiction of an existing philosophical system, and sees in a statement about such a system nothing but the one or the other. It comprehends the diversity of philosophical systems not so much as the progressive development of truth as it sees in that diversity nothing but contradiction. The bud vanishes when the blossom bursts forth, and one might say that the blossom refutes the bud; in the same way the fruit pronounces the blossom a false existence of the plant, and steps in as the plant's truth in place of it. These forms are not merely distinguished from one another; they also displace one another as mutually incompatible. Yet their fluid nature makes them, at the same time, moments of an organic unity, within which they are so far from clashing that one is needed no less than another, and only such parity of necessity constitutes the life of the whole. But contradiction of a philosophical system, for one thing, seldom comprehends itself along these lines, and for another, the apprehending consciousness is as a rule at a loss to release it from its one-sidedness, or to preserve it in such release, and to recognize, under the guise of what looks quarrelsome and self-opposed, moments that are necessary to each other.

The demand for explanations of this kind, and the satisfying of that demand, may perhaps seem to be pursuing what is essential. In what could the inner life of a philosophical work be more fully expressed than in its purposes and results, and by what could these be cognized more determinately than by their difference from whatever else the age produces in the same sphere? But if such an activity is to count for more than the beginning of cognition, if it is to count as actual cognition, then it must in fact be reckoned among the devices for evading the matter at hand while combining two things: the show of seriousness and effort about it, and the actual sparing of oneself both. — For what exhausts the matter at hand is not its purpose but its working-out; neither does the result constitute the actual whole, which is instead the result taken together with its becoming; purpose on its own amounts to the lifeless universal, as tendency amounts to a mere driving that still wants its actuality, and the naked result is a corpse, with that tendency left lying behind it. — Likewise, difference is rather the limit of the matter at hand; it is where the matter stops, or it is what the matter is not. Exertions of this sort over the purpose or the results, and over the differences and appraisals of the one and the other, are therefore easier work than they may seem. For instead of engaging with the matter at hand, such activity is always beyond it; instead of lingering in it and forgetting itself in it, such knowledge is always reaching for something else, and stays with itself rather than being with the matter and giving itself over to it. — The easiest thing is to appraise what has substance and solidity, harder to grasp it, and hardest of all, uniting both, to bring forth its presentation.

The beginning of culture, of the work of emerging from the immediacy of substantial life, will always have to be made by acquiring an acquaintance with universal principles and points of view, by first working one's way up to the thought of the matter at hand in general, and no less by supporting it with reasons or refuting it, by apprehending its concrete and rich fullness in terms of determinatenesses, and by knowing how to deliver a proper report and a serious judgment upon it. But this beginning of culture will soon give way to the seriousness of a life that has been filled out, a seriousness that leads into the experience of the matter at hand, and once it is further added that the seriousness of the concept descends into the depths of that matter, such acquaintance and appraisal will keep their fitting place in conversation.

The shape that is truly truth's own, the shape in which it exists, can be nothing but its scientific system. To help bring philosophy closer to the form of science — closer to the goal at which it can drop its name as love of knowledge and be actual knowledge — is what I have taken as my own undertaking. That knowledge should be science is an inner necessity grounded in the nature of knowledge, and nothing explains this satisfactorily except the presentation of philosophy itself. The outer necessity, however, insofar as it is grasped in a universal way, apart from the contingency of the person and of individual occasions, is the same as the inner, in the shape in which time represents the existence of its moments. Attempts with this purpose could be justified truly in only one way, namely by exhibiting that the time has come for philosophy to be raised to science, since such a demonstration would establish the necessity of that purpose and indeed would carry the purpose out along the way.

To locate the true shape of truth in scientific character — which amounts to claiming that truth possesses the element of its existence in the concept alone — is, I am well aware, apparently at odds with a representation, and with the consequences of that representation, that is as presumptuous as it is widespread in the convictions of the age. An explanation regarding this contradiction therefore does not seem superfluous, even if here it can be nothing more than an assurance, just like the thing it is directed against. For if the true has its existence only in that, or rather only as that, which goes now by the name of intuition, now by immediate knowledge of the absolute, religion, being — not being at the center of divine love, but the being of that center itself — then from that standpoint what gets demanded for the presentation of philosophy is precisely the reverse of the conceptual form. What is wanted is that the absolute be felt and intuited rather than comprehended, and that feeling and intuition of it, not its concept, should hold the floor and be given utterance.

Apprehend the appearance of such a demand in its wider connection, and look at the stage at which self-conscious spirit now stands, and it turns out that spirit has left behind the substantial life it formerly led in the element of thought — left behind that immediacy of its faith, and left behind the contentment and safety of that certainty which consciousness possessed regarding its reconciliation with essence and with essence's universal presence, inner as well as outer. It has not only gone beyond that, into the other extreme of a substanceless reflection of itself into itself, but beyond this extreme as well. Not only has spirit lost its essential life; it is aware as well of that loss, and aware of the finitude that constitutes its content. Turning from the husks, admitting that it lies in wickedness and heaping abuse on itself for that, spirit now asks of philosophy less that it supply knowledge of what spirit is than that philosophy be the road by which it may regain that substantiality and the solidity of being. What this need asks of philosophy, then, is less that it unlock the closedness of substance and lift substance into self-consciousness, — less that it lead substance's chaotic consciousness back to an order that has been thought through, back to the concept's simplicity, than that it pour the separations of thought together again, stifle the differentiating concept and restore the feeling of essence, providing edification rather than insight. Beauty, holiness, eternity, religion and love are the bait held out to arouse an appetite for biting; and what is to sustain the wealth of substance and carry its spread forward is not the concept but ecstasy, not the coldly advancing necessity of the matter but a fermenting enthusiasm.

Answering to this demand is the strenuous effort, showing itself as almost zealous and irritable, to tear human beings out of their absorption in the sensuous, the common and the singular, and to direct their gaze upward to the stars, as though, forgetting the divine altogether, they were on the point of contenting themselves with dust and water, like the worm. In earlier days they had fitted out a heaven with thoughts and images in sprawling abundance. Everything that is took its meaning from the filament of light that bound it to that heaven; instead of dwelling in this present, the gaze ran up along that filament out past the present, to the divine essence, to a present that belongs, if one may put it so, to the beyond. Spirit's eye had to be forced around onto what is earthly and pinned there; and a long stretch of time was required before that clarity which only the supraterrestrial had possessed could be worked into the torpor and muddle where the sense of the here below was lying, and before attention to what is present as such, the attention that came to be called experience, could be made interesting and given validity. — Now the opposite need seems to be at hand: sense is so firmly rooted in the earthly that it takes an equal power to raise it above that. So poor does spirit show itself that, like the wanderer in a sandy waste who craves one plain draught of water, all it appears to long for by way of refreshment is the scanty feeling of the divine in general. By this, by what suffices for spirit, the magnitude of its loss can be measured.

This frugality in receiving, or parsimony in giving, is nevertheless unbecoming to science. Anyone who is after edification only, who wants his earthly manifoldness of existence and of thought wrapped in fog and demands the indeterminate enjoyment of an equally indeterminate divinity, is welcome to search out wherever such things may be had; he will have no trouble finding the means to work himself into some rapture and to strut about with it. Philosophy, however, must beware of wanting to be edifying.

Even less may this frugality, having renounced science, lay claim to the position that enthusiasm and murk of that sort stand higher than science does. Such prophetic speech takes itself to be residing exactly at the midpoint and in the depths, regards determinateness (the horos) with disdain, and holds itself away on purpose from the concept and from necessity, treating these as a reflection whose only home is finitude. Emptiness of breadth, however, has its counterpart in emptiness of depth; substance may be extended, spilling out into a finite manifoldness with no force to hold that manifoldness together — and here, correspondingly, we have an intensity void of content which, maintaining itself as sheer force without any spread, comes to the same thing as superficiality. Spirit's force reaches exactly as far as its expression, and its depth exactly as far as spirit ventures, in laying itself out, to spread abroad and to lose itself. — At the same time, when this conceptless substantial knowledge pretends to have sunk the self's own peculiarity into essence and to be philosophizing truly and in holiness, it conceals from itself that its disdain for measure and determination leaves it not devoted to God at all, but merely indulging, now the contingency of content within itself, now its own arbitrariness within that content. — In abandoning themselves to the untamed fermenting of substance, they suppose that by veiling self-consciousness and surrendering the understanding they are his own, to whom God gives wisdom in their sleep ; and so what they in fact conceive and bring to birth in sleep is dreams.

One can see easily enough, besides, that ours is an age of birth, an age passing over into a new period. With the world of its existence and its representing as that world has stood hitherto, spirit has made a break, and it is now on the verge of letting that world sink away into the past, and is engaged in the labor of its own transformation. Never, admittedly, is spirit at rest; it is caught up rather in a movement that presses ever onward. But just as with a child, after a long quiet nourishment, the first breath breaks off that gradualness of a merely additive advance — a qualitative leap — and now the child is born, so too the spirit that is forming itself ripens slowly and quietly toward its new shape, dissolving one little piece after another of the structure of its preceding world, whose tottering is indicated only by isolated symptoms; the frivolity and the boredom that spread through what still stands, the indeterminate presentiment of something unknown, are harbingers that something else is on the way. Such gradual crumbling left the physiognomy of the whole unaltered; what breaks it off is the sunrise, which, as a bolt of lightning, sets the formation of the new world in place at a single stroke.

Yet this new thing has as little a complete actuality as the newborn child does, and it is essential not to lose sight of this. Its first appearance is only its immediacy, or its concept. Laying a foundation leaves a building unfinished, and in just the same way the concept of the whole, once reached, is still not that whole. Where what we want to look upon is an oak, sturdy in its trunk, wide in its branches, massed in its foliage, it does not content us to have an acorn held up instead. Science likewise, crowning as it does a world of spirit, has not reached completion in its beginning. What the new spirit begins with is a product of sweeping upheaval among manifold forms of culture, the price paid for a road much twisted and for exertion and effort just as manifold. It is the whole that has returned into itself out of succession as well as out of its own extension, the simple concept of that whole that has come to be. What makes this simple whole actual, however, is that the configurations which have turned into moments develop and take shape once more, only now within their new element, within the sense that has come to be.

On one side the new world, in its first appearance, amounts so far to no more than the whole shrouded in its simplicity, that is, to the universal ground of the whole; on the other side, consciousness still holds the wealth of the preceding existence present in recollection. In the newly appearing shape it misses the spread and particularization of the content; still more, however, it misses that development of form by which the distinctions are determined with assurance and ordered into their fixed relations. Lacking such development, science is without universal intelligibility and carries the semblance of being an esoteric possession held by a few singular individuals; — an esoteric possession, since science so far is present only in its concept, only as its inner side; held by a few singular individuals, since its unspread appearance renders its existence something singular. Not until something is determinate through and through is it also exoteric, open to comprehension, and able to be learned and made everyone's property. Science in the form that belongs to the understanding is the path to science laid open to everyone and leveled for everyone, and consciousness approaching science makes a just demand when it asks to reach rational knowledge by way of the understanding; for thinking, the pure I in general, is what the understanding is; and whatever belongs to the understanding is already familiar, is what science shares with unscientific consciousness, and by way of it the latter can step immediately into the former.

Science that is only beginning, and has therefore brought neither its detail to completeness nor its form to perfection, is exposed to censure on that account. But if such censure is meant to strike its essence, it would be as unjust as it is inadmissible to refuse to acknowledge the demand for that development. The chief knot at which scientific culture currently exhausts itself, and about which it has yet to reach a proper understanding of itself, appears to be this opposition. One side bangs the drum for a wealth of material and for intelligibility; the other side spurns intelligibility, at any rate, and bangs the drum for rationality and divinity that are immediate. Suppose the former side has been silenced, whether by truth's force alone or by the other's impetuosity, and suppose that as regards the ground of the matter it felt itself overwhelmed : it is still not satisfied as regards those demands of its own, since they are just and yet remain unmet. Its silence belongs only half to victory; the other half belongs to the boredom and indifference that usually follow when expectation is constantly aroused and the promises are never fulfilled.

With respect to content, the others sometimes make it easy enough for themselves to have a great range. They haul a mass of material onto their own ground, namely what is already familiar and already ordered, and since they occupy themselves chiefly with oddities and curiosities, they seem all the more to have in hand the remainder, with which knowledge in its own fashion had long since finished, and at the same time to have mastered whatever is still unregulated, and thus to bring everything under the absolute idea, which accordingly looks to have been cognized in every last thing and to have ripened into a science of wide extent. Examine this extension more closely, though, and it turns out not to have come about because some one and the same thing had shaped itself diversely; it is instead a repetition, devoid of shape, of that one same thing, which is merely applied from without to varied material and so takes on a tedious semblance of diversity. The idea, true enough taken by itself, in fact never gets past its own beginning if the development consists in nothing but such a repetition of the same formula. The one unmoved form led around by the knowing subject over whatever is at hand, the material dipped from outside into this motionless element, all of this is no more the fulfillment of what is demanded, namely a wealth springing from itself and a self-determining difference of shapes, than arbitrary notions about the content are. It is rather a monochrome formalism, which arrives at a difference of material only because that material has already been prepared and is already familiar.

All the while this formalism maintains that its monotony and abstract universality are the absolute; it assures us that dissatisfaction with that universality is an incapacity to take possession of the absolute standpoint and to hold fast to it. Where once the empty possibility of representing something in another manner was enough to refute a representation, and that same bare possibility, the universal thought, likewise carried the entire positive worth of actual cognition, so here in the same way the universal idea, in this form of unactuality, has every value ascribed to it, while the dissolving of what is distinguished and determinate, or rather the hurling of it down into the abyss of the void, a hurling neither developed further nor justified in itself, passes for the speculative manner of consideration. To consider some existence or other as it is in the absolute here consists in nothing more than saying of it that, although it has just been spoken of as a something, in the absolute, in A = A, there is no such thing at all, since there everything is one. Pitting this single item of knowledge, that within the absolute all is equal, against a cognition that distinguishes and is filled out, or that seeks and demands such filling, — or passing off one's absolute as the night wherein, so people are wont to say, all cows are black; such is the naivety of an emptiness in cognition. — The formalism that the philosophy of recent times denounces and reviles, and that has generated itself anew within that very philosophy, will not disappear from science, however well its inadequacy is known and felt, until the cognition of absolute actuality has become completely clear to itself about its own nature. — Considering that a general representation, when it precedes the attempt to carry it out, makes the grasp of that attempt easier, it is useful to indicate here in rough outline what that representation is, with the further intention of using the occasion to clear away certain forms whose habitual use is an obstacle to philosophical cognition.

As I see it, and this insight of mine has to justify itself by the presentation of the system, everything comes down to apprehending and expressing the true not merely as substance but every bit as much as subject. One should note at once that what substantiality encloses within itself is the universal, or the immediacy of knowledge, no less than that immediacy which counts as being, or as immediacy for knowledge. — The age in which the determination was pronounced took offense at grasping God as the one substance, and one ground of that offense lay in an instinct that self-consciousness merely goes under there rather than being preserved; but then the opposite position, which holds fast to thinking as thinking, universality, is that very same simplicity, that undifferentiated and unmoved substantiality; and if, in the third place, thinking unites the being of substance as such with itself and apprehends immediacy, or intuiting, as thinking, then the question still remains whether this intellectual intuiting does not lapse back into inert simplicity and present actuality itself in an unactual fashion.

Living substance, further, counts as being that is subject in truth, or, what says the same, as being that is actual in truth, only to the degree that it constitutes the movement whereby it posits itself, the mediation between its becoming-other and itself. In its character as subject it is pure simple negativity, precisely thereby the splitting-in-two of the simple, the doubling that sets up an opposition, which in turn negates this indifferent diversity along with its opposition; the true is only this equality that restores itself, this reflection into itself within otherness — and not an original unity as such, nor an immediate one as such. It is the becoming of itself, a circle whose end is presupposed as its purpose and taken for its beginning, and which is actual only through the working-out and through its end.

God's life and divine cognition may well, then, be pronounced a play of love with itself; yet this idea sinks to edification, indeed to insipidity, where seriousness, pain, patience and the negative's labor are absent from it. In itself that life is doubtless an untroubled equality and unity with itself, a life for which otherness and estrangement, and the overcoming of that estrangement too, are no serious matter. But this in itself is the abstract universality in which its nature, namely to be for itself, and with that the self-movement of form as such, is left out of account. When form is pronounced equal to essence, it is precisely for that reason a misunderstanding to hold that cognition might rest content with the in-itself or with essence while sparing itself the form; — that the absolute fundamental proposition, or absolute intuition, might render the working-out of the one or the development of the other superfluous. Just because form is as essential to essence as essence is to itself, essence must be apprehended and expressed not simply as essence, that is, as immediate substance or as the divine's pure self-intuition, but every bit as much as form and in the full wealth of form developed; only so does it come to be apprehended and expressed as something actual.

The true is the whole. Yet what the whole is, is just the essence completing itself by way of its own development. Of the absolute one has to say that it is essentially result, and that what it in truth is, it is only at the end; its nature consists in precisely this, in being something actual, a subject, or a self-becoming. However contradictory it may look to say that comprehending the absolute means comprehending it essentially as a result, a little reflection sets this semblance of contradiction straight. Pronounced first and immediately, the beginning or principle or absolute amounts to no more than the universal. Just as little as the word all animals, when I use it, can pass for a zoology, just so plainly do the words divine, absolute, eternal and so on fail to pronounce what is contained in them; — and words of that sort do in fact express nothing more than intuition as the immediate. Anything exceeding such a word, the passage to a mere proposition included, constitutes a becoming-other which must be withdrawn again, constitutes a mediation. But mediation is just what is held in horror, as if absolute cognition were surrendered the moment more is made of it than the claim that it is nothing absolute and has no place at all in the absolute.

This horror in fact stems from an unfamiliarity with the nature of mediation and with absolute cognition itself. For mediation is nothing other than self-equality in motion; it is reflection into itself, the moment of the I that is for itself, pure negativity, or simple becoming. The I, or becoming as such, this mediating, is by virtue of its very simplicity nothing other than immediacy in the making and the immediate itself. — To shut reflection out of the true, and to fail to apprehend it as a positive moment of the absolute, therefore amounts to a misrecognition of reason. Reflection it is that turns the true into a result, and yet reflection equally sublates this opposition to the true's becoming, since that becoming is just as simple and hence in no way distinct from the form of the true, the form of showing itself as simple in the result; rather, that becoming is precisely this having gone back into simplicity. — Granted that the embryo is a human being in itself, it is nonetheless not one for itself; it counts as one for itself only as reason cultivated, reason that has made of itself what in itself it is. Only this is its actuality. Yet simple immediacy is what this result itself is, since it amounts to self-conscious freedom resting within itself, freedom that has not pushed the opposition off to one side and left it lying there, but has reconciled itself with it.

What has been said can also be put by saying that reason is purposive activity. Elevating a supposed nature above a misjudged thinking, and above all the banishment of external purposiveness, has discredited the form of purpose altogether. Yet, as even Aristotle determines nature to be purposive activity, purpose is the immediate, what is at rest, which is nonetheless itself what moves, or subject. Being-for-itself, that is, pure negativity, is purpose's abstract force to move. Only because the beginning is purpose does the result turn out to be that same beginning; — or, only because the immediate, being purpose, holds the self, that is, pure actuality, within it does what is actual turn out to be the same as its concept. Purpose carried out, or the actual as existing, is movement and unfolded becoming; and this very restlessness is the self; and the self is equal to the beginning's immediacy and simplicity for the reason that the self is the result, what has gone back into itself — while what has gone back into itself is just the self, and the self is that equality and simplicity which relates to itself.

The need for representing the absolute as subject availed itself of propositions such as these: God is the eternal, or the moral world order, or love, and so forth. Within propositions of that kind the true gets posited as subject flatly and no more, without being set out as the movement in which it reflects itself into itself. A proposition of this sort begins with the word God. By itself this is a senseless sound, a bare name; not until the predicate do we learn what he is, and the predicate is the name's fulfillment and meaning; only in this end does the empty beginning turn into actual knowledge. So far as that goes, there is no seeing why one should not talk exclusively about what constitutes the meaning, namely the eternal, the moral world order and the like, or, as the ancients did, pure concepts, being, the one and so forth, without appending the senseless sound at all. But that word is precisely what indicates that what has been posited is not a being or an essence or a universal in general, but something reflected into itself, a subject. At the same time, however, this is merely anticipated. The subject is assumed to be a fixed point to which the predicates are fastened as to their support, by a movement that belongs to whoever knows about that point and that is not taken to belong to the point itself; yet only through such a movement would the content be presented as subject. Constituted as this movement is, it cannot belong to the subject; but given the presupposition of that fixed point, it cannot be constituted otherwise either, and can only be external. Anticipating in this way that the absolute is subject accordingly fails to be the actuality of this concept and does worse: it renders that actuality impossible, since the anticipation posits the concept as a point at rest, while the actuality is self-movement.

Of the several conclusions flowing from what has been said, one may be picked out: that knowledge is actual, and admits of presentation, only as science or as system. And a further one: that a so-called fundamental proposition or principle of philosophy, supposing it true, is on that very account false as well, precisely by being a fundamental proposition or principle. — Refuting it is easy, then. The refutation lies in exhibiting the deficiency of such a proposition; and deficient it is, seeing that it amounts only to the universal, only to the principle, the beginning. A thorough refutation will have been taken from the proposition itself and developed out of it, — not managed from outside by way of opposed assurances and stray notions. It would thus properly be the principle's own development, and so the completion of what is deficient in it, if only it did not mistake itself by attending solely to its own negative side and failing to become conscious of its advance and its result on their positive side as well. — The properly positive working-out of the beginning is conversely, and to the same degree, a negative relating to that beginning, that is, toward its one-sided form of being as yet merely immediate, merely purpose. It may accordingly be taken just as well for a refutation of whatever makes up the ground of the system, though better taken as an exhibiting that this ground, or principle, of the system amounts in truth to nothing but the system's beginning.

The representation that pronounces the absolute to be spirit gives expression to this: that the true has actuality only as system, or that substance is subject essentially — and this is the loftiest concept of all, one belonging to the modern age and to the religion of that age. Only what is spiritual is the actual; the spiritual is essence, or what has being in itself, — what relates itself, or the determinate, otherness and being-for-itself — and what, in this determinateness or in its being outside itself, stays within its own self; — or, it is in and for itself. — This being in and for itself, however, is something it so far is for us only, or in itself; which is to say, it is spiritual substance. It has to be this for its own self too, — has to be knowledge of the spiritual and knowledge of itself as spirit; that is, it has to be an object to itself, and just as immediately a mediated, which is to say a sublated object, an object reflected into itself. So long as its spiritual content is produced by spirit itself, spirit is for itself merely for us; but so far as it is for itself for its own self as well, this self-producing, the pure concept, is at the same time the element of objectivity in which spirit has its existence, and thus, within its existence, spirit is for its own self an object reflected into itself. — Spirit that knows itself in this way as spirit is science. Science is spirit's actuality and the realm that spirit builds for itself in its own element.

Science has its ground and soil in pure self-cognition within absolute otherness, in this ether as such, which is to say, in knowledge in general. That consciousness already find itself within this element is what philosophy, at its beginning, presupposes and demands. Yet only by the movement through which it comes to be does this element itself arrive at completeness and transparency. It is pure spirituality, or the universal in the manner of simple immediacy. Substance is the transfigured essentiality: reflection that is itself simple, reflection that is immediacy, being which is its own reflection into itself; and this because the element in question is spirit's immediacy, because substance at large is spirit. Science for its part demands of self-consciousness that it have raised itself into this ether, so that it can live with science and in science, and does so live. Conversely, the individual is entitled to demand that science extend to it at least the ladder reaching this standpoint. This right of the individual is grounded in its absolute self-subsistence, a self-subsistence it knows to be its own in each shape its knowledge takes; for in each such shape, recognized by science or not and whatever its content, the individual is likewise the absolute form, that is, it possesses the immediate certainty of itself, or, if one prefers that way of putting it, possesses thereby unconditioned being. Should science count as the other that standpoint of consciousness which knows objective things over against itself and knows itself over against them — and count what consciousness is at home in as rather the forfeiture of spirit — then consciousness in return finds science's element a distant beyond where it is no longer in possession of its own self. To each side the other presents itself as truth inverted. That natural consciousness should immediately commit itself to science is an attempt it makes, drawn on by something it cannot name, to walk for once on its head; the constraint of taking up so unfamiliar a posture and of moving about in it is a violence at once unprepared for and to all appearances needless, one that consciousness is expected to visit upon itself. — Whatever science may be in its own right, in its relationship to immediate self-consciousness science exhibits itself as something inverted over against it; or, since the principle of actuality lies in immediate self-consciousness, science wears the form of unactuality for as long as that self-consciousness stands outside it, on its own. Science, then, must bring that element into unity with itself, or rather must show that it belongs to science itself, and how. Devoid of actuality, science amounts merely to the in itself, to the purpose, which is still only something inner, not yet spirit but as yet spiritual substance alone. Expressing itself and becoming for its own self: this means nothing other than that self-consciousness must be posited by science as one with itself.

What the present Phenomenology of spirit sets forth, itself the opening part of the system of that science, is this becoming of science as such, or of knowledge. Knowledge as it first is, or immediate spirit, is what is devoid of spirit, that is, sensuous consciousness. Spirit has a long road to labor through before it can become knowledge in the proper sense, before it can bring forth science's element, that is, science's pure concept. — Set out as it is in its content and in the shapes that display themselves in the course of it, this becoming appears as something other than a guiding of unscientific consciousness toward science; other, too, than a grounding of science; — and other in any case than that enthusiasm which begins straight away with absolute knowing, as though shot from a pistol, and which settles with all other standpoints simply by declaring that it pays them no heed.

But the task of bringing the individual up to knowledge from its uncultured standpoint was one to be taken in a universal sense, with the world-spirit, the universal individual, examined in respect of its culture. — As for the relation between the two, in the universal individual every moment shows itself as it wins its concrete form and its own configuration. Spirit in its incompleteness, however, is what the particular individual is: a concrete shape the whole of whose existence devolves upon a single determinateness, while the remaining determinacies are there only in smudged outline. Within a spirit ranking above another, the concrete existence that ranks lower has sunk into an inconspicuous moment; what was once the matter itself survives as no more than a trace; its shape lies wrapped over and has turned into a plain shading. An individual whose substance is the higher-ranking spirit traverses this past much as a person embarking on some higher science reviews the preparatory acquaintance long since in his possession, so as to make its content present to himself; he summons back the recollection of it without taking any interest in it or lingering there. In the same way each singular individual runs through the stages of the universal spirit's culture, but as shapes that spirit has already laid aside, as stages of a road that has been worked out and leveled; just as, with regard to what we are acquainted with, we see what in earlier ages occupied the mature spirit of grown men sink into the acquaintance, the exercises, and even the games of boyhood, and just as we shall recognize in the pedagogical sequence the history of the world's culture traced out as if in silhouette. Such past existence has already been acquired as the property of the universal spirit, and it is this spirit that makes up the individual's substance, its inorganic nature. — In this respect, and viewed from the individual's own side, its culture consists in acquiring what lies there at hand, consuming its inorganic nature into itself, and taking possession of it for itself. But this is just as much nothing other than the universal spirit, or substance, giving itself its self-consciousness, that is, its own becoming and reflection into itself.

This movement of culture is what science presents: it presents the movement in its full elaboration and its necessity, and presents too, in its configuration, whatever has by now sunk to the rank of a moment and of spirit's own property. Spirit's insight into what knowledge is: that is the goal. Impatience demands the impossible, namely to reach the goal without the means. For one thing, there is the length of this road to be borne with, every moment of it being necessary, — for another, one must linger at each moment, since each is in itself a whole individual shape, and is regarded absolutely only to the extent that its determinateness is regarded as a whole, as something concrete, or that the whole is regarded in the distinctive character of this determination. — The individual, to be sure, can comprehend its substance with nothing less, since the substance of the individual, since the world-spirit, was patient enough to work its way through these forms over time's long extension and to shoulder the monstrous toil of world history, there being no smaller toil by which it could arrive at consciousness of itself. Meanwhile the individual has less trouble of it all the same, because in itself this has been accomplished — the content is already actuality extinguished into possibility, and immediacy subdued. Being already something thought, the content is the property of individuality; it is no longer a matter of converting existence into being-in-itself, but only of converting the in-itself into the form of being-for-itself, and the manner of this is to be determined more closely.

What the individual is spared in this movement is the sublating of existence; what still remains, however, is the representation of the forms and familiarity with them. Existence taken back into substance has, through that first negation, been transposed only immediately into the element of the self; hence it still bears the same character of immediacy ungrasped by the concept, of unmoved indifference, that existence itself has, or it has merely passed over into representation. — At the same time it thereby becomes something familiar, something spirit has finished with, and in which, therefore, spirit's activity and hence its interest no longer reside. Where the activity that has done with existence is mediation of the immediate or existing sort, and so is the movement merely of particular spirit, spirit that fails to comprehend itself, knowledge stands by contrast directed against the representation thus brought about, against this being-familiar; it is what the universal self does, and it is where thinking's interest lies.

What is familiar in general, just because it is familiar, is not cognized. It is the commonest self-deception, and deception of others too, when cognizing to presuppose something as familiar and to let it pass on that footing; for all the talking back and forth, such knowledge never budges from the spot, and never learns what is happening to it. The subject and object, and so on. God, nature, the understanding, sensibility, and so on, are laid down at the foundation, unexamined, as familiar and as valid, and they make up fixed points of departure as much as of return. The movement runs back and forth between them while they stay unmoved, and so it takes place only on their surface. Apprehending and examining likewise amount to just this: checking whether each person also comes upon what has been said of them within his own representation, whether this strikes him so and is familiar to him or not.

The analysis of a representation, as it used to be carried on, was already nothing other than the sublating of the form in which that representation was familiar. When one takes a representation apart into the elements it originally comprises, one is going back to its moments, moments which, whatever else, no longer carry the form the representation had when it was come upon, and which make up instead what the self immediately owns. Admittedly such analysis gets no further than thoughts, and these are themselves determinations of the familiar, fixed, quiescent kind. Yet this severed, unactual item counts as an essential moment in its own right; the concrete is what moves itself solely on the ground that it severs itself and renders itself unactual. Severing, as an activity, is the force and the labor of the understanding, of that most wondrous and greatest of powers, or rather of absolute power. A circle at rest, closed in upon itself, holding its moments as substance holds them, amounts to an immediate relationship and hence to nothing wondrous. But when the accidental as such, cut loose from the compass it belonged to, when what is bound and actual only in its interconnection with something else, gains an existence of its own and a freedom set apart, the negative shows its monstrous power there; there lies thinking's energy, the energy of the I in its purity. Death, if we choose to call that unactuality by such a name, is what is most fearful, and holding the dead fast is what calls for the greatest force. Beauty that lacks force hates the understanding, because the understanding expects of it what it is unable to do. It is not the life that shies away from death and keeps itself clean of devastation, but the life that bears death and holds itself fast within it, that is the life of spirit. Spirit wins its truth only insofar as it finds its own self in the state of being absolutely torn apart . Spirit does not hold this power in the manner of the positive that averts its eyes from the negative, the way we pronounce something to be null or false and then, having finished with it, pass on from it to something else; the power is spirit's only insofar as spirit gazes into the face of the negative and lingers there. Such lingering is the magic force by which the negative is converted into being. — This force is the same as what was called the subject above, which, in giving existence to determinateness within its own element, sublates abstract immediacy, that is, immediacy which merely is, and thereby is the true substance, being, or the immediacy that does not have mediation outside it but is this mediation itself.

That what is represented should become the property of pure self-consciousness, this elevation to universality as such, is only the one side, and not yet culture completed. — The manner of study in ancient times differs from that of modern times in this, that the ancient manner was the thorough culturing of natural consciousness. By trying itself out in particular against each portion of its own existence, and by philosophizing over whatever turned up, it brought itself forth as a universality that was thoroughly put into practice. In modern times, by contrast, the individual finds the abstract form already prepared; the exertion of seizing it and making it its own is more an unmediated driving forth of the inner and a truncated generating of the universal than an emergence of the universal out of the concrete and out of the manifoldness of existence. Now, then, the labor lies less in cleansing the individual of its immediate sensuous manner and turning it into a substance thought and thinking, than in the reverse: in actualizing and inspiriting the universal by sublating fixed, determinate thoughts. Rendering fixed thoughts fluid, however, is a far harder business than doing the same with sensuous existence. The reason has been given just above; those determinations have as substance and as element of their existence the I, pure actuality, the power of the negative, whereas the sensuous determinations have only that powerless, abstract immediacy which is being as such. Fluidity comes to thoughts when pure thinking, that inner immediacy, cognizes itself as a moment, or when pure self-certainty abstracts from itself — not by discarding itself or laying itself aside, but by giving up the fixity belonging to its self-positing: the fixity of the pure concrete, which is the I itself as against differentiated content, — and equally the fixity of the differentiated items that, once posited within the element of pure thinking, take part in the I's unconditionedness. It is by this movement that pure thoughts turn into concepts, and only so do they become what in truth they are: self-movements, circles, spiritual essentialities, that being what their substance is.

This movement of the pure essentialities constitutes the nature of scientificity as such. Regarded as the interconnection of its content, this movement is the necessity of that content and its expansion into an organic whole. Through this movement the road by which the concept of knowledge is reached likewise becomes a necessary and complete becoming, so that such preparation no longer amounts to a philosophizing left to chance, one that hitches itself to this or that object, relationship, or thought of imperfect consciousness just as contingency happens to supply them, or that tries to establish the true by ratiocinating to and fro, by inference and deduction from determinate thoughts; the road will rather, by the concept's own movement, take in the entire worldliness of consciousness in its necessity.

Furthermore, what makes an exposition of this kind the first part of science is that spirit's existence, taken as what comes first, is nothing but the immediate, the beginning, while the beginning is not yet spirit's return into itself. What marks this part of science off from the others is accordingly a determinateness, namely the element of immediate existence. — Stating this difference leads to the discussion of certain fixed thoughts that are apt to come up in this connection.

Two moments belong to consciousness, spirit's immediate existence: knowledge, and an objectivity that is negative toward knowledge. As spirit unfolds within this element and lays its moments out, that opposition accrues to them, so that every one of them makes its appearance as a shape that consciousness takes. Science of this road is science of the experience that consciousness undergoes; substance comes under consideration according as it, along with its movement, forms consciousness's object. Beyond what falls within its experience, consciousness neither knows nor comprehends anything; for what falls within experience is spiritual substance and nothing else, and this precisely as the object of its own self. Spirit does become an object, though, since spirit just is this movement of becoming something other to itself, that is, of becoming the object of its own self, and of sublating that otherness. And it is just this movement that goes by the name of experience: the movement in which the immediate, the unexperienced, that is, the abstract, whether the abstract of sensuous being or of the merely thought simple, grows estranged from itself, then comes back to itself out of that estrangement, and only now stands exhibited in its actuality and truth, and is likewise the property of consciousness.

Inequality obtains in consciousness between the I and the substance that is consciousness's object, and this inequality constitutes their difference, the negative as such. One may look upon it as the defect in both, and yet it is their soul, the moving principle in them; hence certain of the ancients comprehended the void as what moves, for while they did grasp the moving principle as the negative, they did not yet grasp this negative as the self. — Granted that this negative shows itself first of all as the I's inequality with the object, it is no less substance's inequality with itself. Whatever seems to proceed outside substance, to be an activity aimed against it, is substance's own doing, and in it substance reveals itself to be essentially subject. With substance having shown this to the full, spirit has brought its existence into equality with its essence; spirit is object to itself as it stands, and the abstract element, that of immediacy and of the severance of knowledge from truth, is overcome. Being is mediated absolutely; — it is substantial content which belongs, with the same immediacy, to the I as its own, content that is self-like, or the concept. With this the phenomenology of spirit closes. The element of knowledge is what spirit makes ready for itself therein. Within that element the moments of spirit now unfold in the form of simplicity, a form that knows its object to be its own self. They no longer come apart into the opposition between being and knowledge, but abide within the simplicity of knowledge; there they are the true, and in the form of the true, their diversity being one of content and nothing more. That movement of theirs, which within this element organizes itself into the whole, is logic, or speculative philosophy.

Now since that system of spirit's experience embraces only spirit's appearance, the step onward from it to the science of the true, of the true as it stands in the shape of the true, looks to be purely negative, and one might prefer to be let off the negative, off the false, asking to be brought to truth directly; why have any dealings with what is false? — The point already spoken of above, that one ought to begin straight away with science, is to be answered here from the side of what the character of the negative as the false actually is. The representations current about this are the chief obstacle to entering into truth. That will provide occasion for discussing mathematical cognition, in which unphilosophical knowledge sees the ideal philosophy would have to aspire to reach, though thus far, it holds, philosophy has aspired in vain.

The true and the false belong among those determinate thoughts which, motionless, pass for essences in their own right, one of them standing over there and the other over here, each isolated and fixed, with nothing in common with the other. The contrary has to be insisted on: truth is no struck coin, ready to be handed over and raked in just as it comes. Neither is there a false, as little as there is an evil. Not that evil and the false are as bad as the devil, since in the devil's guise they have actually been turned into a particular subject; taken as false and as evil they are merely universals, though they do retain an essentiality of their own, each against the other. — What the false would be, since the false alone is at issue here, is the other, that is, the negative of substance, and substance, being the content of knowledge, is what is true. The negative, however, is essentially what substance itself is, in part as the differentiation and determination of content, in part as a simple differentiating, that is, as self and as knowledge in general. One can indeed know falsely. To say that something is falsely known means that knowledge stands in inequality with its substance. Yet just this inequality is differentiating as such, which is an essential moment. Their equality does of course emerge from this differentiation, and equality so arrived at is what truth is. It is not truth, though, as if inequality had been discarded the way slag is discarded from refined metal, nor even as the tool is left behind once the vessel stands finished; rather, inequality remains immediately at hand within the true as such, at hand as the negative, as the self. It cannot be said on that account, however, that the false makes up a moment, still less a component part, of the true. That there is something true in every false thing, — in this expression the two count as oil and water do, which cannot mix and are joined only externally. For the very reason that their significance lies in marking the moment of complete otherness, their terms have to be dropped once that otherness of theirs stands sublated. There is an awkwardness in speaking of the unity of subject with object, of the finite with the infinite, of being with thinking, and so on: the awkwardness that object, subject, and the rest signify what they are outside their unity, so that within the unity they are not meant as their own terms state; and in the same way the false, qua false, has ceased to be a moment of truth.

What dogmatism amounts to, as a cast of thought within knowledge and within the study of philosophy, is simply this opinion: that the true has its place in some proposition, one that is a fixed result, or else one known immediately. To questions of the sort: when Caesar was born, how many toises made up a stadium and which stadium was in question, and so on, a tidy answer is supposed to be forthcoming, in exactly the way it holds determinately true that the hypotenuse squared equals the summed squares of the right triangle's two remaining sides. Truths of that so-called kind are different in nature, however, from truths of philosophy.

As regards historical truths, to mention them briefly, insofar, that is, as what is purely historical in them is considered, it is readily conceded that they concern singular existence, a content on the side of its contingency and arbitrariness, determinations of it that are not necessary. — Yet even bare truths such as the one adduced above as an example do not occur apart from the movement of self-consciousness. Coming to be acquainted with one of them calls for much comparing, for looking things up in books, or for investigation in some manner or other; and even where there is immediate intuition, it is only acquaintance with the fact together with its grounds that counts as having genuine worth, though strictly the bare result alone is supposed to be what is at stake.

As for mathematical truths, still less would anyone be taken for a geometer who knew Euclid's theorems outwardly, by rote, without their proofs, without knowing them, as one might say by way of contrast, inwardly. In the same way, the acquaintance someone might gain by measuring many right triangles, namely that their sides stand to one another in the familiar ratio, would be regarded as unsatisfying. In mathematical cognition, though, the proof's essentiality does not yet carry the sense and character of belonging to the result as one of its moments; within the result the proof is rather past and gone. Qua result the theorem is indeed something insight has seen to be true. That supervening circumstance, however, bears not on the theorem's content but merely on its relationship to the subject; the movement belonging to a mathematical proof is no part of what constitutes the object, but is a doing external to the matter. Thus the right triangle's nature does not of itself break down in the way the construction presents it, that construction being required for proving the proposition which expresses the triangle's relationship; the whole production of the result is a procedure and an instrument of cognition. — Philosophical cognition too distinguishes the becoming of existence as existence from the becoming of essence, that is, of the matter's inner nature. In the first place, though, philosophical cognition holds both together, whereas mathematical cognition sets out only the becoming of existence, that is, of the being that the nature of the matter has within cognition as such . In the second place, the former brings these two particular movements into union as well. The inner arising, or the becoming of substance, is inseparably a passing over into the outer, into existence, being for another; and conversely the becoming of existence is the taking of itself back into essence. The movement is thus the doubled process and becoming of the whole, such that each of the two at the same time posits the other, and each therefore also has both in it as two aspects; together they make up the whole in that they dissolve themselves and make themselves into its moments.

Within mathematical cognition insight is a doing external to the matter, from which it follows that the true matter is thereby altered. The means, construction and proof, does of course contain true propositions; but one must say with equal justice that the content is false. Torn apart in the example given above, the triangle has its parts assigned to other figures which the construction lets arise upon it. Only at the end is the triangle restored, the triangle that the business was really about, which in the course of the proof was lost from view and turned up only in pieces belonging to other wholes. — So here too we watch a negativity of the content set in, and it would deserve the name of a falsity of that content quite as much as does the vanishing of thoughts held to be fixed within the concept's movement.

The real deficiency of this cognition, however, concerns both the cognition itself and its material as such. — As regards the cognition, in the first place the necessity of the construction is not grasped by insight. It does not emerge from the theorem's concept but is laid down as a command, and one must obey the prescription blindly, drawing precisely those lines out of infinitely many that might have been drawn instead, knowing nothing further, having only the good faith that this will prove serviceable to the purpose of conducting the proof. Afterward this purposiveness does indeed show itself, a purposiveness that is merely external precisely because it shows itself only afterward, in the course of the proof. — Likewise the proof takes a road that begins somewhere, and one does not yet know in what relation this beginning stands to the result that is supposed to come out. Its advance takes up these determinations and relations and leaves others lying, without one's seeing immediately by what necessity; an external purpose governs this movement.

What mathematics takes pride in, and boasts of against philosophy besides, is the self-evidence of this deficient cognition; and that self-evidence has no other basis than the poverty of mathematics' purpose and the deficiency of its material, which makes it of a sort philosophy is bound to scorn. — Its purpose, or concept, is magnitude. This is precisely the unessential, conceptless relationship. The movement of knowledge therefore goes on at the surface; it does not touch the matter itself, nor the essence or the concept, and for that reason it is no comprehending. — Space and the one make up the material over which mathematics grants its gratifying treasury of truths. Space is that existence into which the concept writes its differences, an empty and dead element where they are quite as motionless and lifeless as it is. Nothing spatial in the sense mathematics considers it is what the actual is; with unactuality of the kind that mathematical things are, neither concrete sensuous intuiting nor philosophy concerns itself. An element so unactual accordingly yields nothing but unactual truth, that is, propositions that are fixed and dead; any of them may serve as a stopping place; the one that follows begins afresh on its own account, the first never moving itself onward into the second, so that no necessary interconnection arises in this way out of the nature of the matter itself. — On account of that principle and element, moreover — and this is where the formal side of mathematical self-evidence lies — knowledge proceeds along the line of equality. Since the dead does not move itself, it arrives at no differences of essence, at no essential opposition or inequality, and hence at no transition of one opposite into the other, at nothing qualitative, nothing immanent, at no self-movement. For it is magnitude, the unessential difference, that mathematics alone considers. From the fact that it is the concept which splits space apart into its dimensions and fixes their combinations, both among them and within them, mathematics abstracts; it takes no account, for example, of the relationship of the line to the surface; and where it sets the circle's diameter beside its circumference, it strikes upon their incommensurability, that is, upon a relationship of the concept, an infinite that escapes its determining.

Immanent, so-called pure mathematics does not set time as time over against space either, as the second material of its consideration. Applied mathematics does deal with time, as with motion and with actual things generally, but it draws from experience the synthetic propositions, that is, propositions about the relationships of such things as determined by their concept, and does no more than apply its formulas to these presupposed data. When the so-called proofs it frequently supplies for propositions like the one on the equilibrium of the lever, or on how space and time stand to one another in falling motion, and so on, are offered and taken as proofs, that is itself nothing but a proof of how large a need cognition has for proving, since where cognition possesses no more than that, it honors even the empty semblance of proof and derives a satisfaction from it. To criticize those proofs would be as remarkable a task as an instructive one, serving in part to strip mathematics of this false ornament, in part to exhibit its limit and thereby the necessity of a different knowledge. — Time, which one would suppose to furnish, as space's counterpart, the material for pure mathematics' remaining part, is itself the concept in its existence. Neither the principle of magnitude, of conceptless difference, nor the principle of equality, of abstract unliving unity, is able to take up that pure restlessness of life and absolute differentiation. This negativity therefore becomes the second material of such cognition only in paralyzed form, namely as the one, cognition being an external doing that degrades what moves itself into mere material, so as to have in it an indifferent, external, lifeless content.

Philosophy, on the other side, has no regard for unessential determination, but regards determination insofar as it is essential; what philosophy has for its element and its content is not the abstract, not the unactual, but the actual, which posits itself and has its life within itself: existence within its own concept. This is the process that generates its own moments and traverses them, and the positive, together with the truth of the positive, is constituted by the whole of that movement. Truth accordingly encloses the negative within itself no less, encloses that which one would name the false, supposing it could be viewed as a something to be abstracted from. What vanishes must rather be viewed as itself essential, not under the determination of something fixed that is to be severed from the true and left outside it, no one knows where, just as the true, for its part, is not to be viewed as the dead positive that rests on the far side. Appearance is that arising and perishing which does not itself arise or perish; it is in itself, and it constitutes the actuality of truth's life and the movement of that life. So understood, the true is that bacchanalian reel in which no member fails to be drunk, and since each member, in setting itself apart, dissolves with the same immediacy, — the reel is equally a transparent and simple repose. Before the tribunal of that movement the singular shapes of spirit do not subsist, any more than determinate thoughts do, yet they are just as much positive, necessary moments as they are negative and vanishing. — Take the whole of the movement as repose, and whatever within it differentiates itself and gives itself a particular existence is kept there as something that recollects itself, something whose existence consists in knowledge of itself, this knowledge being with equal immediacy existence.

Concerning the method of this movement, or of science, it might seem necessary to state a good deal in advance. Yet the concept of that method is already given in the foregoing, and its genuine exposition falls to logic, or is rather nothing but logic. For the method is nothing other than the structure of the whole set out in its pure essentiality. About what has hitherto passed as method here, however, we must be aware that the whole system of representations bearing on what philosophical method is belongs to a culture that has vanished. — Should this happen to sound like braggadocio or like revolutionary talk, a tone I know myself to be far removed from, then let it be considered that the scientific pageantry which mathematics has lent — explanations, divisions, axioms, chains of theorems, their proofs, principles, and the inferring and concluding drawn from them — has in general opinion itself already become at least obsolete. Even if its unfitness is not clearly seen through, still little or no use is made of it any longer, and even if it is not disapproved of in itself, it is at any rate not loved. And we must hold the prejudice in favor of what is excellent that it will put itself to use and make itself liked. It is not hard to see, however, that truth cannot make its entrance in the manner of setting up a proposition, adducing grounds for it, and refuting the opposing proposition by grounds in just the same way. Truth is the movement of itself within its own self, whereas that method is a cognition external to the material. For that reason the method is proper to mathematics, which, as was noted, has for its principle the conceptless relation of magnitude and for its material dead space along with the equally dead One, and it must be left to mathematics. It may also survive in a freer manner, that is, mixed with more arbitrariness and contingency, in ordinary life, in a conversation, or in historical instruction that serves curiosity rather than cognition — roughly the sort of thing that a preface is as well. The content that consciousness carries in ordinary life is made up of acquaintances, experiences, sensuous concretions, and thoughts and principles as well, in short whatever counts as something on hand, or as a fixed and resting being or essence. In part it runs along this content, in part it interrupts the connection by exercising a free arbitrariness over such content, and it relates itself as an external determining and handling of it. It traces the content back to something certain, be this only the feeling of the moment, and conviction is satisfied once it has arrived at a resting point familiar to it.

But if the necessity of the concept banishes the looser gait of ratiocinative conversation as well as the stiffer gait of scientific pomp, it has already been recalled above that its place is not to be taken by the unmethod of presentiment and enthusiasm, nor by the arbitrariness of prophetic speech, which despises not merely that particular scientificity but scientific rigor as such.

Just as little, once the Kantian triplicity — so far merely rediscovered by instinct, still dead, still without concept — has been elevated to the absolute meaning belonging to it, so that the genuine form has thereby been established together with its genuine content and the concept of science has come forth, is there any warrant for treating as scientific that employment of the form in which we watch the form dragged down into a lifeless schema, into a mere specter, and scientific organization dragged down into a table. — This formalism, already discussed above in a general way, whose manner we now want to set out more closely, supposes that it has comprehended and pronounced the nature and the life of a shape the moment it has asserted of that shape one determination of the schema as predicate — let it be subjectivity, or objectivity, or again magnetism, electricity and so on, contraction or expansion, the east or the west and suchlike, a series admitting of infinite multiplication, since by this procedure any determination or shape may be reused alongside another as form or moment of the schema, and each may gratefully do the other the very same service — a circle of reciprocity from which nothing is learned about the matter at hand, nor about what the one or the other of them is. Part of what gets taken up here consists of sensuous determinations drawn from common intuition, which are admittedly meant to signify something other than what they state; and part consists of what signifies in its own right, the pure determinations of thought — subject, object, substance, cause, the universal, and so on — employed just as unexamined and uncritically as they are in ordinary life, and just as strengths and weaknesses, expansion and contraction are; so that this metaphysics turns out to be as unscientific as those sensuous representations.

What now gets pronounced, in place of the inner life and the self-movement of its existence, is a simple determinateness of that sort, pronounced by intuition — here meaning sensuous knowledge — on the basis of some shallow analogy, and the name construction is given to this outward, empty application of the formula. — With such formalism it is the same case as with any other. How obtuse would a head have to be that could not, within a quarter of an hour, be taught the theory of asthenic, sthenic, and indirectly asthenic illnesses, with as many plans of cure to match, and could not in that brief span be converted from a mere routinist into a theoretical physician, seeing that until quite recently instruction of just that sort sufficed for it? Should the formalism of nature-philosophy come out with the lesson that the understanding is electricity, that the animal is nitrogen, or that it is equal to south or north and so on, or represents it — stated as nakedly as it is stated here, or else concocted with a greater apparatus of terminology — then inexperience may well be thrown into admiring astonishment before such a force, which clamps together what seemed to lie far apart, and before the violence that the resting sensuous item undergoes in that linkage, a linkage which thereby lends it the semblance of a concept while sparing itself the chief thing, the pronouncing of the concept itself or of the meaning of the sensuous representation; inexperience may worship a profound genius there, may likewise be tickled by the cheerfulness these determinations have, seeing that they put something intuitable in place of the abstract concept and so render it more gratifying, and may congratulate itself on the affinity of soul it divines with such magnificent doings. The knack of such wisdom is learned as quickly as it is easy to practice; its repetition, once it is known, becomes as unbearable as the repetition of a conjuring trick one has seen through. The instrument of this monotone formalism is no harder to handle than a painter's palette on which only two colors were to be found, say red and green, the one for coloring a surface when a historical piece was called for, the other when a landscape was. — Which of the two is greater would be difficult to settle: the cozy ease with which everything in heaven, on earth, and under the earth gets whitewashed with such a broth of colors, or the self-conceit over the excellence of this universal remedy; each props up the other. The yield of this method — which glues the handful of determinations of the universal schema onto everything heavenly and earthly, onto every natural and spiritual shape, and thereby files everything into its slot — amounts to nothing less than a crystal-clear account of the organism of the universe, that is, to a table resembling a skeleton with little tickets glued onto it, or the rows of closed canisters with their labels pasted on in a spice-dealer's booth, a table as plain as either of them, and one which, just as there the flesh and blood have been taken from the bones while here the equally unalive matter lies concealed in the canisters, has for its part left out or concealed the living essence of the matter. — That this manner at the same time perfects itself into a monochrome absolute painting, in that, ashamed of the differences of the schema, it sinks them, as belonging to reflection, into the emptiness of the absolute, so that pure identity, the formless white, may be produced — this has already been remarked above. That uniformity of coloring in the schema and its lifeless determinations, and this absolute identity, and the passing over from the one to the other, are each as dead an understanding as the other, and equally external cognition.

What is excellent, however, is unable to evade the fate of being drained in this way of life and of spirit, and of seeing its skin, flayed in that way, wrapped around lifeless knowledge and the vanity of such knowledge; nor is that the whole of it. Rather, in that very fate there is still to be cognized the power which what is excellent exerts upon hearts, if not upon spirits, and likewise the working-out into universality and determinateness of form wherein its completion lies, the working-out which by itself is what allows such universality to be turned to superficial use.

Science may organize itself only through the concept's own life; in science the determinateness which the schema pastes externally onto existence is instead the self-moving soul of the fulfilled content. The movement of what is consists, on the one side, in becoming another to itself and so becoming its own immanent content; on the other side it takes this unfolding, this existence of its own, back into itself, that is, it makes itself into a moment and simplifies itself into determinateness. In the first movement negativity is the differentiating and the positing of existence; in this return into itself it is the becoming of determinate simplicity. In this way it comes about that the content does not exhibit its determinateness as received from something else and pinned onto it, but gives it to itself and ranges itself, out of itself, into a moment and a place within the whole. The tabulating understanding reserves for itself the content's necessity and its concept, everything that makes up the concrete, the actuality and living movement of the matter it files into order — or rather, there is no reserving here at all, since it has no acquaintance with these things, and had it that insight it would surely have shown it. It is not even acquainted with the need for such insight; otherwise it would refrain from its schematizing, or at least would take no more credit for it than for a table of contents; it gives only the table of contents, but the content itself it does not deliver. — Even when the determinateness is one that is concrete or actual in itself, magnetism for example, it has nonetheless sunk to something dead, since it is merely predicated of another existence and is not cognized as the immanent life of that existence, or in the way it has within that existence its own native and proper self-generation and exhibition. This main thing the formal understanding leaves to others to add. — Rather than going into the matter's immanent content, it perpetually surveys the whole from above and positions itself over the singular existence it speaks of, which amounts to saying that it does not see that existence at all. Scientific cognition demands the opposite: that one give oneself over to the object's life, or equivalently that one hold the object's inner necessity before oneself and pronounce it. Immersing itself in its object in this way, it forgets that survey from above, which is only the reflection of knowledge out of the content back into itself. But once it is submerged in the material and moves on with the material's own movement, it does return into itself, though not before the point at which the fulfillment, or the content, withdraws into itself, reduces itself to the simplicity of determinateness, demotes itself to being one side of an existence, and crosses over into a higher truth of its own. By that means the simple whole that has itself in view emerges from the very riches in which its reflection had seemed to go astray.

Because substance, as the point was put above, is subject in its own self, every content whatever is a reflection of itself into itself. The subsistence, or substance, of an existence lies in self-equality; for inequality with itself would be its dissolution. Self-equality, however, is pure abstraction; and abstraction of that kind is thinking. To pronounce the word quality is to pronounce simple determinateness; by quality an existence stands differentiated from some other, or else is an existence at all; it is for itself, or subsists by way of this simplicity with itself. But thereby it is essentially thought. — Herein lies the comprehension that being is thinking; here belongs the insight that is usually missing from the ordinary, conceptless talk about the identity of thinking and being. — Since, then, what existence subsists in is self-equality, that is, pure abstraction, existence abstracts itself away from itself, or is itself the inequality it has with itself, and is its own dissolution — is its own inwardness and its taking of itself back into itself — is its becoming. — Given this nature of what is, and to the extent that what is bears this nature for knowledge, knowledge is not an activity that manipulates the content as something alien to it, not a reflection that goes out of the content back into itself; science is not the idealism that took over the place of asserting dogmatism in the guise of an assuring dogmatism or the dogmatism of the certainty of itself — rather, watching the content go back into an inwardness of its own, knowledge finds its activity submerged in that content, since the activity is the content's immanent self, and at the same moment come back into itself, since the activity is pure self-equality within otherness; and so the activity is the cunning that appears to hold itself back from all activity while it watches how determinateness and its concrete life, in the very supposition that they are pursuing self-preservation and a particular interest, turn out to be the inverted doing, a doing that dissolves itself and makes of itself a moment of the whole.

If above the significance of understanding was given from the side of substance's self-consciousness, then from what has been said here its significance becomes clear from the side of substance's determination as being. — Existence is quality: a determinateness equal to itself, that is, simplicity that has been determined, thought that has been determined; and this constitutes the understanding proper to existence. Thereby it is Nous, as which Anaxagoras first cognized essence. His successors comprehended more determinately what the nature of existence is, calling it Eidos or Idea, that is, determinate universality, species. The expression species may seem rather too common and too slight for the Ideas, for the beautiful and the holy and the eternal, that are rampant at this time. In fact, though, what the Idea says is no more and no less than species. Yet nowadays we often see an expression that designates a concept determinately scorned in favor of another which, if only because it belongs to a foreign language, wraps the concept in fog and thereby sounds more edifying. — Existence, just insofar as it stands determined as species, is simple thought; and Nous, that is, simplicity, is substance. For the sake of that simplicity, that self-equality, substance makes its appearance as something fixed and enduring. Yet negativity belongs to this self-equality no less; and by that route the fixed existence in question crosses over into its own dissolution. Determinateness looks at first as though it were determinateness only by virtue of a relation to something other, and as though its movement were worked upon it by a power foreign to it; but the fact that it carries its own otherness within it and is self-movement is precisely what that simplicity of thinking already contains, since such simplicity is thought moving and differentiating itself, and is inwardness of its own, the pure concept. Intelligibility, then, amounts to a becoming, and in being that becoming it amounts to rationality.

Logical necessity has its whole subsistence in this nature of whatever is, the nature of being its own concept in its being; nothing else is the rational, nothing else the rhythm belonging to the organic whole; it is knowledge of the content in exactly the measure that the content is concept and essence — or, put otherwise, it alone is the speculative. — By moving itself, the concrete shape turns itself into simple determinateness; in doing so it rises into logical form and stands in its essentiality; the concrete existence it has is nothing but this movement, and such existence is immediately logical. There is accordingly no need to lay formalism onto the concrete content from outside; that content is, in its own self, the crossing over into formalism, which then stops being this external formalism, because form is the native becoming of the concrete content itself.

This nature of scientific method — to be in part inseparable from the content, in part to determine its own rhythm through itself — has, as was already recalled, its proper exposition in speculative philosophy. — What has been said here does indeed express the concept, but can count for no more than an anticipated assurance. An exposition that is in part merely narrative does not house that truth; and just as little, therefore, is the truth refuted when someone gives the contrary assurance that this is not how things stand but that they stand thus and so, when habitual representations are called to mind and recited as settled and familiar truths, or when something new is served up and vouched for out of the shrine of inner divine intuition. — Such a reception tends to be the first reaction of a knowledge to which something was unknown, a reaction meant to rescue freedom and one's own insight, one's own authority against the alien authority — for it is in this shape that what has just now been taken in for the first time appears — and also to get rid of the semblance and the kind of disgrace supposedly involved in having learned something, just as, in the applauding acceptance of the unknown, the reaction of the same kind consists in what in another sphere was ultrarevolutionary speech and action.

What therefore matters in the study of science is to take upon oneself the exertion of the concept. What it demands is attention to the concept as such, to simple determinations like those of being-in-itself, of being-for-itself, of self-equality, and the like, determinations that are pure self-movements of a kind one might well name souls, were their concept not the designation of something higher than a soul. To the habit of running along representations, the interruption of that habit by the concept is just as irksome as it is to formal thinking, which ratiocinates back and forth in unactual thoughts. That habit is to be called a material thinking, a contingent consciousness that is merely sunk into the stuff and therefore finds it hard going to lift its self purely out of the matter while at the same time remaining with itself. The other, ratiocination, is by contrast freedom from the content and vanity over it; the exertion asked of this vanity is that it surrender such freedom and, rather than acting as the principle that moves the content at will, submerge that freedom in the content, let the content set itself moving by its own nature, that is, by the self belonging to the content, and observe this movement. To refrain from breaking in with one's own notions upon the immanent rhythm of the concepts, not to interfere with it through arbitrariness and wisdom acquired elsewhere: this abstinence is itself an essential moment of attention to the concept.

In ratiocinative relating two sides are to be brought out more clearly, the sides in respect of which comprehending thought is opposed to it. — In part, ratiocination relates itself negatively toward the content it has taken up: it knows how to refute that content and reduce it to nothing. The insight that such is not the case is the merely negative; it is the terminus, and of itself it never presses past itself toward some new content; for a content to be had once more, something else has to be fetched in from elsewhere. It amounts to reflection into the I left empty, the vanity of that I's knowledge. — What such vanity states, however, is not merely the vanity of this content but equally the vanity of the insight itself; for the insight is a negative that fails to descry the positive inside itself. Since such reflection never wins its own negativity for a content, it never gets inside the matter, remaining forever outside and past it; hence its fancy that, by asserting emptiness, it stands further ahead than any insight rich in content. In comprehending thought, by contrast, as was shown a moment ago, the negative is something the content itself owns, and it is the positive in two respects: as the content's immanent movement and determination, and as the whole that these make up. Apprehended as a result, the negative is what issues from that movement, the determinate negative, and with that it is just as much a positive content.

Yet so far as such thinking possesses a content, whether representations, or thoughts, or some blend of the two, it exhibits another side, one that puts obstacles in the path of its comprehension. That side has a curious nature, tied closely to the essence of the Idea as this was set out above; or rather it gives voice to that essence in the way the essence appears when it appears as the movement which thinking apprehension is. — In its negative relating, just discussed, ratiocinative thinking is itself that self back into which the content goes; correspondingly, in its positive cognition the self takes the form of a represented subject, and the content bears upon that subject as accident and as predicate. Such a subject furnishes the base onto which the content gets fastened, and along which the movement travels this way and that. In comprehending thought matters stand otherwise. Because the concept is the object's own self, a self exhibiting itself as the object's becoming, what stands there is not a subject at rest bearing accidents without motion, but the self-moving concept, the concept that draws its determinations back into itself. Within that movement the subject at rest goes under; it passes into the differences and into content, and instead of standing opposed to the movement it makes up the determinateness, that is, the differentiated content together with its movement. So the solid footing which ratiocination found in the subject at rest starts to give way, and the object is now nothing but this movement. A subject that fills its content out no longer reaches past it, and can take on no additional predicates or accidents. Conversely, the dispersal of the content is thereby bound under the self; the content is not the universal that, free of the subject, would belong to several. So the content has in truth stopped being a predicate of the subject: it is the substance, it is the essence and the concept of whatever is under discussion. Representational thinking, whose nature it is to run along the accidents or predicates and rightly to go beyond them because they are no more than predicates and accidents, is checked in this running along, since what has the form of a predicate in the proposition is the substance itself. It suffers, so to represent it, a counterthrust. Setting out from the subject, on the assumption that the subject will stay in place as the ground, it discovers instead — the predicate being the substance — that the subject has gone over into the predicate and been sublated in the process; and once what looks like the predicate has thus turned into the entire self-subsistent mass, thinking is unable to wander freely and is arrested by this heaviness. — In other cases the subject is first laid down as the objective, fixed self; from there the necessary movement runs on to the manifold of determinations or predicates; and at this point the knowing I itself takes over the place of that subject, being both the linking of the predicates and the subject in which they are held. Yet because the first subject passes into those very determinations and is the soul animating them, the second subject, namely the knowing one, comes upon the first still there in the predicate, precisely where it expects to have done with it and to withdraw from it into itself; and rather than getting to be the agent in the predicate's movement, ratiocinating over whether this predicate or that should be attached to the first subject, it finds it still has business with the self of the content, and is required to be not on its own but in company with that self.

Put in formal terms, the point may be stated thus: the speculative proposition destroys the nature that judgment or proposition has in general, a nature that encloses within itself the difference between subject and predicate, while the identical proposition into which the former turns holds the counterthrust against that relation. — Between the form of a proposition in general and the unity of the concept that destroys that form there is a conflict resembling the one that occurs in rhythm between the meter and the accent. Rhythm issues from the hovering middle between the two and from their unification. In the philosophical proposition, likewise, the identity that subject and predicate have ought not to annihilate the difference between them which the proposition's form expresses; their unity ought instead to come forth as a harmony. The proposition's form is the appearance of determinate sense, the accent marking off what fills that sense out; but the unity in which such accent fades away consists in the predicate's expressing the substance and in the subject's own falling into the universal.

To make the foregoing clear by examples: take the proposition God is being; here the being is the predicate, and it carries substantial meaning, meaning into which the subject melts away. Being is here supposed to be not a predicate but the essence, and thereby God seems to cease to be what he is through his position in the proposition, namely the fixed subject. — Thinking, rather than making headway in the transition from subject to predicate, feels itself checked instead, the subject having been lost, and is thrown back upon the thought of the subject because it misses it; or else, the predicate having itself been pronounced as a subject, as the being, as the essence that uses up the whole nature of the subject, thinking comes upon the subject immediately in the predicate too; and now, in place of having gone into itself within the predicate and won the free standing of ratiocination, thinking remains sunk in the content, or at any rate the demand stands that it be sunk in it. — The same happens when one says that the actual is the universal: as subject, the actual passes away within its predicate. The universal is meant to carry more than the meaning of a predicate, as though the proposition were stating that the actual is universal; what the universal is meant to do is voice the essence of the actual. — Thinking thus forfeits the firm objective footing it possessed in the subject, just as much as it is flung back onto that footing in the predicate and, within the predicate, returns not into itself but into the content's own subject.

On this unaccustomed checking rest, in large part, the complaints about the unintelligibility of philosophical writings, at any rate where the other conditions of culture needed to understand them are present in the individual. In what has been said we see the ground of the quite specific reproach so often made against them, that a good deal has to be read over repeatedly before it can be understood — a reproach supposed to contain something improper and final, such that, if it is well founded, it admits of no further reply. — It is clear from the above how matters really stand with this. Being a proposition, the philosophical proposition rouses the opinion one ordinarily holds about the relation of subject and predicate, and about the customary way knowledge relates. That way of relating, together with the opinion belonging to it, is destroyed by the philosophical content of the proposition; the opinion learns that the meaning intended is other than the one it took, and having its opinion corrected in this way forces knowledge to return to the proposition and construe it differently now.

A difficulty that ought to be avoided is constituted by the mixing of the speculative and the ratiocinative manner, when what is said of the subject has at one time the significance of its concept and at another only the significance of its predicate or accident. — The one manner disturbs the other, and only that philosophical exposition would succeed in being plastic which strictly excluded the ordinary kind of relation among the parts of a proposition.

In fact non-speculative thinking too has its right, a right that is valid but is not heeded in the manner of the speculative proposition. The sublating of the proposition's form must not take place merely in an immediate fashion, by way of the proposition's content alone. This opposed movement has to be pronounced; not only that inner checking, but the concept's return into itself must be exhibited. What proof was otherwise supposed to deliver is accomplished by this movement, which is the proposition's own dialectical movement. That movement alone is the actual speculative, and speculative exposition consists in nothing but the pronouncing of it. Taken as a proposition, the speculative amounts merely to the inner checking and to the non-existent return of essence into itself. We therefore often find ourselves referred by philosophical expositions to this inner intuiting, and thereby spared the exhibition of the dialectical movement of the proposition that we were demanding. — What the proposition is supposed to state is what the true is; yet the true is subject in its essence, and as such it is nothing but the dialectical movement, that course which generates itself, leads itself onward, and goes back into itself. — In cognition of other kinds, proof constitutes this side of pronounced inwardness. But once dialectic had been divorced from proof, the very concept of philosophical proving was in fact lost.

One may recall in this connection that propositions serve equally as the parts or elements of the dialectical movement; and so the difficulty just pointed out seems to come back perpetually, and to be a difficulty inherent in the matter itself. — This is similar to what occurs with ordinary proof, where the grounds it employs themselves require further grounding, and so on without end. This form of grounding and conditioning, however, belongs to that proving from which the dialectical movement differs, and thus to external cognition, whereas as far as the dialectical movement itself is concerned, its element is the pure concept, and with this it has a content that is through and through subject in its own self. No content occurs, then, that would behave as an underlying subject with its meaning accruing to it as a predicate; the proposition, taken immediately, is an empty form and nothing else. — Leaving aside a self given in sensuous intuition or in representation, what chiefly designates the pure subject, that empty conceptless One, is the name taken as name. That is why it can serve a purpose, for example, to steer clear of the name God: this word is not at once a concept as well, but is the proper name, the fixed repose of the underlying subject. Whereas being, for example, or the One, singularity, the subject itself as well, and so on, immediately indicate concepts. — Even where speculative truths get stated of such a subject, their content is still destitute of the immanent concept, since it is on hand merely as a subject at rest, and that circumstance readily gives such truths the form of bare edification. — Seen from this side, therefore, the obstacle residing in one's habit of construing the speculative predicate by the proposition's form instead of as concept and essence is something that the fault of philosophical delivery can itself both aggravate and lessen. Presentation must, true to the insight into the nature of the speculative, retain the dialectical form and take in nothing except insofar as it is comprehended and is the concept.

Just as much as ratiocinative relating, the non-ratiocinative conceit about settled truths is a hindrance to the study of philosophy — truths to which their possessor thinks he has no need to return, but which he lays down as the foundation and believes he can simply pronounce, and by means of which he can judge and pass sentence. From this side it is especially needful that philosophizing again be made into a serious business. Of all sciences, arts, skills, and crafts the conviction holds that possessing them requires manifold effort in learning and practicing them. With philosophy, by contrast, the prejudice now seems to reign that although everyone has eyes and fingers, and yet is not thereby able to make shoes when handed leather and tools, everyone all the same understands straight off how to philosophize and how to pass judgment on philosophy, since natural reason supplies him with the standard for it — as though his own foot did not supply him, equally, with the standard of a shoe. — The possession of philosophy seems to get located precisely in the want of acquaintance and of study, philosophy seeming to break off just where these begin. It is frequently taken for a formal knowledge empty of content, and there is a great want of the insight that whatever counts as truth in any acquaintance or science, its content included, can merit that name only when philosophy has produced it; that the other sciences, however much they may try it with ratiocination and without philosophy, are unable without philosophy to have life, spirit, or truth within them.

With regard to philosophy proper, we see immediate revelation of the divine and sound common sense — which has neither troubled itself with other knowledge nor cultivated itself through philosophizing proper — regard themselves straight off as a complete equivalent for, and as good a substitute for, the long path of culture, the movement as rich as it is deep by which spirit arrives at knowledge, as chicory is said to be a substitute for coffee. It is not a pleasant thing to observe that ignorance, and a crudeness as formless as it is tasteless, incapable of holding its thinking to a single abstract proposition and still less to the connection of several, assures us that it is now the freedom and tolerance of thought and now genius. The latter was once, as everyone knows, quite as rampant in poetry as philosophy finds it today; but what the productions of this genius yielded, when they yielded any sense at all, was trivial prose in place of poetry, or, where they overshot that, deranged talk. Just so today a natural philosophizing, which holds the concept beneath it and, for want of the concept, holds itself to be an intuiting and poetic thinking, carries to market whatever arbitrary combinations an imagination merely disorganized by thought throws up — structures that are neither fish nor meat, neither poetry nor philosophy.

Meanwhile natural philosophizing, drifting along in the quieter riverbed of sound common sense, regales us with a rhetoric of trivial truths. When it is taxed with how little these truths amount to, it answers with the assurance that their sense and their fulfillment are present in its own heart, and must be present in that way in others too, since with the innocence of the heart, the purity of conscience, and suchlike it takes itself to have uttered ultimate things, against which no objection holds and beyond which nothing further can be demanded. But the whole point was that what is best should not stay behind within, but be hauled up out of that shaft into the light of day. As for bringing forward ultimate truths of that sort, the trouble could have been spared long ago, for they have long been available in the catechism, in the proverbs of the people, and so forth. — It is not hard to catch such truths in their indeterminateness or their skewness, and often to exhibit to the consciousness that holds them the flatly opposite truth lying within that same consciousness. Struggling to pull itself out of the confusion stirred up inside it, this consciousness will only fall into fresh confusion, and will very likely burst out with the declaration that it is settled beyond dispute that matters stand thus and so, and that the rest is sophistries; — a catchword that ordinary common sense keeps ready against cultivated reason, just as ignorance of philosophy has noted down the expression reveries once and for all as its word for philosophy. — Once ordinary common sense appeals to feeling, its inward oracle, it is finished with anyone who does not agree; it has to declare that it has nothing more to say to whoever does not find and feel the same within himself; — in other words, it tramples the root of humanity underfoot. For the nature of humanity is to press toward agreement with others, and it exists only in the commonality of consciousnesses once that has been brought about. What is anti-human, what is animal, consists in stopping short at feeling and being able to communicate only by way of it.

If someone were to ask after a royal road to science, no more comfortable one could be named than to rely on sound common sense and, in order to keep pace with the times and with philosophy besides, to read reviews of philosophical writings, or even their prefaces and opening paragraphs, since the latter supply the universal principles on which everything turns, while the former add to their historical report an assessment which, precisely because it is an assessment, already stands beyond what it assesses. This ordinary road is traveled in a dressing gown, whereas in the vestments of a high priest the exalted feeling of the eternal, the holy, the infinite strides along — a road that is rather itself already immediate being at the center, the genius of deep original ideas and lofty flashes of thought. Yet just as such depth does not yet disclose the wellspring of essence, so these skyrockets are not yet the empyrean. True thoughts and scientific insight are to be won only in the labor of the concept. The concept alone can bring forth the universality of knowledge, which is neither the ordinary indeterminateness and meagerness of ordinary common sense but rather cultivated and complete cognition, — nor the extraordinary universality of an endowment of reason that spoils itself through indolence and the conceit of genius, but rather the truth ripened into its own native form, a truth capable of being the property of all self-conscious reason.

Since I place that whereby science exists in the self-movement of the concept, the reflection that the external aspects of our age's representations of the nature and shape of truth — those cited above and others besides — diverge from this, indeed run wholly counter to it, seems to promise no favorable reception for an attempt to present the system of science under that determination. In the meantime I can bear in mind that, if for example the excellence of Plato's philosophy is sometimes located in his scientifically worthless myths, there have also been times — times even called times of rapturous enthusiasm — in which Aristotelian philosophy was held in esteem for its speculative depth and Plato's Parmenides, surely the greatest artwork of ancient dialectic, was regarded as the true unveiling and the positive expression of divine life, and in which, for all the murkiness of what ecstasy produced, this misunderstood ecstasy was in truth supposed to be nothing other than the pure concept, — and further, that the excellence of the philosophy of our own time sets its worth precisely in its scientific character, and, even if others take it otherwise, in fact wins its validity only through that character. So I may also hope that this attempt to vindicate science for the concept and to present it in this, its own proper element, will know how to gain admittance through the inner truth of the matter. We must be convinced that the true has it in its nature to break through when its time has come, and that it appears only once that time has come, and for that reason never appears too early nor finds a public that is unripe; and also that the individual needs this effect in order to corroborate against it what is still his solitary matter, and to experience as something universal the conviction that as yet belongs only to particularity. Here, however, the public must often be distinguished from those who conduct themselves as its representatives and spokesmen. In several respects the former behaves otherwise than the latter, indeed in the opposite way. Where the public good-naturedly takes upon itself the blame for finding a philosophical work uncongenial, these others, secure in their competence, shove the whole blame onto the writer. The effect within the public is quieter than the doings of these dead when they bury their dead. If general insight is now on the whole more cultivated, its curiosity more alert and its judgment more quickly settled, so that the feet of those who will carry you out already stand at the door, one must often distinguish from this the slower effect which corrects the attention that imposing assurances have extorted, and corrects the dismissive censure as well, and which grants one sort of work a world of contemporaries only after some time, while another, once that time has passed, has no posterity left.

Since, moreover, in an age in which the universality of spirit has grown so much stronger and singularity has become, as is fitting, so much more a matter of indifference, that universality also holds to its full compass and cultivated wealth and demands them, so that the share of the total work of spirit falling to the activity of the individual can only be slight, the individual — as the very nature of science already brings with it — must forget itself all the more, must indeed become and do what it can, but just as surely less must be demanded of it, since it may itself expect less of itself and claim less for itself.

First Part. Science of the Experience of Consciousness

Introduction

It is a natural representation that philosophy, before it takes up the matter itself, namely the actual cognition of what is in truth, must first come to terms with cognition, which is taken to be the tool whereby one seizes the absolute, or the means through which one glimpses it. The worry seems warranted: partly, that there might be various kinds of cognition, and among them one more adept than another at reaching this final purpose, so that one would choose wrongly among them, — partly, too, that since cognition is a capacity of a determinate kind and compass, one grasps clouds of error rather than the sky of truth so long as its nature and its limit go without closer determination. Indeed this worry is bound to change into the conviction that the entire enterprise of gaining for consciousness, through cognition, whatever is in-itself is by its own concept preposterous, and that a boundary falls between cognition and the absolute which parts them utterly. For should cognition be the tool for taking possession of the absolute essence, it strikes one at once that applying a tool to a matter, far from leaving it as it is for itself, undertakes a shaping and an alteration of it. Or should cognition not be a tool of our activity but, in a manner of speaking, a passive medium across which the light of truth travels to reach us, then even so we do not obtain truth as it is in itself, but as it stands by way of and within this medium. Either way what we employ is a means that immediately yields the opposite of its purpose; or rather, what is preposterous is that we should resort to a means at all. Admittedly this defect looks remediable through an acquaintance with how the tool operates, since such acquaintance allows us to deduct from the result that share of the representation we get of the absolute through the tool which belongs to the tool itself, and so to keep the true unadulterated. Yet this improvement would in fact deposit us just where we already were. Strip from a shaped thing whatever the tool has wrought upon it, and the thing, — here the absolute — stands to us again at exactly what it was worth before an exertion thereby shown superfluous. Were the absolute merely to be brought nearer to us by the tool, without anything in it being altered, as a bird is by a limed twig, then, if it were not already in and for itself with us and willing to be so, it would surely mock this ruse; for in that case cognition would be a ruse, since through its manifold exertions it gives itself the air of doing something quite other than producing a merely immediate and hence effortless relation. Or if testing the cognition that we represent to ourselves as a medium teaches us the law by which it refracts rays, it is likewise of no use to subtract that refraction from the result; for cognition is not the bending of the ray but the ray itself by which truth touches us, and with this subtracted, all that would have been indicated to us is the bare direction, or the empty place.

Meanwhile, once the worry about lapsing into error has planted a mistrust of science, which sets about the work itself without scruples of this sort and actually cognizes, there is no seeing why the reverse should not hold: why a mistrust of that mistrust should not be planted, and the worry raised that this fear of erring is itself already the error. For it does presuppose something as truth, a good deal in fact, and props its scruples and its conclusions on what would itself first have to be tested for whether it is truth. What it presupposes is this: representations of cognition as a tool and as a medium, along with a difference of ourselves from this cognition; and chiefly this, that the absolute is stationed on one side while cognition on the other side, on its own and cut off from the absolute, is nonetheless something real, which is to say that cognition, standing as it does outside the absolute and therefore surely outside truth as well, is nevertheless truthful; a supposition by which whatever names itself fear of error rather betrays itself as fear of the truth.

This consequence arises because only the absolute is true, or only the true is absolute. It can be rejected by way of the distinction that a cognition which does not, as science would have it, cognize the absolute may still be true, and that cognition in general, though incapable of grasping the absolute, might still be capable of some other truth. But by now we can see that talk going back and forth like this comes down to a murky distinction between an absolute true and some other true, and that words like the absolute and cognition and the rest presuppose a meaning that it is our first business to attain.

Instead of bothering with such useless representations and turns of phrase about cognition as a tool with which to master the absolute, or as a medium letting us glimpse the truth and so on, — relationships that all these representations of a cognition cut off from the absolute and an absolute cut off from cognition no doubt amount to, — instead of the excuses that the incapacity of science draws from presupposing such relationships, so as at once to free itself from the labor of science and to lend itself the look of a serious and zealous effort, — as well as instead of wrangling with answers to all of this, these representations could be thrown out straightaway as contingent and arbitrary, and the use of words that goes with them, such as the absolute, cognition, also the objective and the subjective, and countless others whose meaning is presupposed as commonly familiar, could even be viewed as a fraud. For the pretense, partly that their meaning is commonly familiar, partly also that one is oneself in possession of their concept, looks rather like a way of sparing oneself the main task, namely that of supplying this concept. With better right, by contrast, the effort of paying any attention whatever to such representations and turns of phrase, which are meant to ward science off, could be dispensed with, since they constitute nothing but an empty appearance of knowledge, one that disappears the moment science steps forward. But in the very fact that it steps forward, science is itself an appearance; its stepping forward is not yet science carried through and spread out in its truth. It makes no difference here whether one represents it as being the appearance because it steps forward alongside something else, or calls that other, untrue knowledge its appearing. Science, however, must rid itself of this semblance; and its only way of doing so is to turn against it. For science can neither merely reject a knowledge that is not truthful as a common view of things, assuring us that it is itself a wholly different cognition and that such knowledge is nothing at all for it, nor can it appeal to an intimation of something better within that knowledge itself. By that assurance science would be declaring its being to be its force; but untrue knowledge makes the very same appeal, that it is, while assuring us that science is nothing to it; and one dry assurance is worth precisely as much as the next. Still less can science appeal to the better intimation supposedly at hand within untruthful cognition, as the pointer within that cognition toward science itself; for on one side it would once more be appealing to a being, and on the other to itself as it stands within untruthful cognition, that is, to a bad manner of its being, and so to its appearance instead of to its being in and for itself. For this reason the exposition of appearing knowledge is to be undertaken here.

Since this exposition has only appearing knowledge for its object, it does not itself seem to be science moving freely in its own peculiar shape; from this standpoint it may instead be taken as the road of natural consciousness pressing on toward true knowledge , or as the road of the soul journeying through the whole series of its configurations, stations that its own nature has staked out for it in advance, so that it may purify itself into spirit by attaining, through the complete experience of itself, acquaintance with what it is in its own self.

Natural consciousness will prove to be merely the concept of knowledge, or knowledge that is not real. But because it takes itself immediately for real knowledge instead, this road bears a negative meaning for it, and what amounts to the realization of the concept counts with it rather as a loss of its own self; for along this road it loses its truth. It may accordingly be viewed as the road of doubt, or, more properly, as the road of despair; for what happens along it is not what people usually mean by doubting, a jostling of this or that presumed truth, after which the doubt duly vanishes again and one comes back to the truth in question, so that at the end the matter is taken as it was before. It is instead the conscious insight into the untruth of appearing knowledge, for which what is most real is in truth only the unrealized concept. This skepticism that carries itself out to completion is therefore also not what a serious zeal for truth and science imagines it has made itself ready and equipped with for science; namely the resolve not to surrender oneself in science to the authority of other people's thoughts, but to test everything for oneself and to go by one's own conviction alone, or better yet, to bring forth everything oneself and hold only one's own deed to be the true. The series of configurations which consciousness runs through on this road is rather the detailed history of the cultivation of consciousness itself up to science. That resolve represents cultivation, in the simple manner of a resolve, as immediately settled and done with; this road, however, is the actual carrying out of it, over against that untruth. Following one's own conviction is admittedly more than submitting to authority; but the inversion of holding something to be so on authority into holding it to be so out of one's own conviction does not necessarily change the content of what is held, nor has truth thereby taken the place of error. Being stuck in the system of opining and of prejudice, whether on the authority of others or out of one's own conviction, differs only through the vanity that attaches to the latter way. Skepticism directed at the whole range of appearing consciousness, by contrast, is what first makes spirit competent to test what truth is, in that it brings about a despair over the so-called natural representations, thoughts, and opinions, which it makes no difference to call one's own or another's, and with which the consciousness that sets about testing straight away is still filled and burdened, thereby being in fact incapable of what it means to undertake.

The completeness of the forms of consciousness that is not real will emerge of itself through the necessity of the progression and of the interconnection. To make this comprehensible, one may note beforehand, in general terms, that when untruthful consciousness is exhibited in its untruth, the movement involved is not a merely negative one. Natural consciousness, to be sure, holds just such a one-sided view of the exposition; and a knowledge that makes this one-sidedness into its essence ranks among the shapes of incomplete consciousness, a shape falling within the course of the road itself, where it will present itself. This one-sidedness is skepticism, which in the result never sees more than pure nothing, and leaves out of account that this nothing is the determinate nothing of that out of which it results. The nothing, though, is in fact the truthful result only when it is grasped as the nothing of whatever it issues from; and so it is itself something determinate and possesses a content. The skepticism that ends with the abstraction of nothing, or of emptiness, cannot advance any further from it but must wait to see whether and what novelty presents itself to it, so as to cast that novelty into the same empty abyss. If, on the other hand, one apprehends the result as it is in truth, namely as determinate negation, then a new form has at once sprung up out of it, and within the negation the transition has been effected by which the progression through the full series of shapes comes about of itself.

The goal, however, is staked out for knowledge with the same necessity as the series of the progression; it lies at the point where knowledge has no further need to pass out beyond its own self, where it comes upon itself, and where concept corresponds to object, object to concept. The progression toward this goal is on that account unstoppable as well, nor is satisfaction to be found at any station short of it. Anything confined to a natural life cannot of its own power pass out beyond its immediate existence; something else drives it out past that existence, and this being torn away is its death. Consciousness, however, is for its own self its concept, and is thereby immediately the going beyond what is restricted and, since this restricted thing belongs to it, beyond its own self; along with the singular, the beyond is posited for it at the same time, even if only, as in spatial intuition, alongside what is restricted. Consciousness thus suffers this violence at its own hands, spoiling for itself its restricted satisfaction. Feeling this violence, anxiety in the face of truth may well draw back and struggle to preserve what is threatened with loss. But it can find no rest; it may want to stand still in thoughtless inertia, yet thought cripples thoughtlessness and the restlessness of thought disturbs the inertia; or it may dig itself in as sentimentality, whose assurance is that everything is good in its kind; and that assurance suffers violence from reason just as much, since reason finds a thing not good precisely insofar as it is a kind. Or the fear of truth may screen itself, from its own eyes as much as from other people's, behind the semblance that it is precisely the burning zeal for truth itself which makes it so hard, indeed impossible, for it to come upon any truth other than the sole truth of vanity: that of being ever more clever than any thoughts one may have, whether one's own or another's; and this vanity, which knows how to foil every truth so as to withdraw out of it into itself, and which gorges on this understanding of its own, an understanding that can always dissolve every thought and, in place of all content, come up with nothing but the dry I, is a satisfaction that has to be left to its own devices, since it shuns the universal and pursues being-for-itself alone.

Since so much has now been said provisionally and in general about how the progression goes and why it is necessary, it may still be useful to recall something concerning the method of carrying it out. Once this exposition is represented as a relating of science to appearing knowledge, and as an investigation and a testing of cognition's reality, it seems unable to proceed without laying down some presupposition or other as its standard. For testing consists in applying an assumed standard, and, in the equality or inequality with that standard which then results for whatever is being tested, lies the decision that it is either correct or incorrect; and the standard as such, and science too if science were the standard, is in all this assumed to be the essence or the in itself. Here, however, where science is only first stepping forward, neither science itself nor anything else has vindicated itself as being the essence or the in itself; and lacking any such thing, no testing seems possible at all.

This contradiction and its removal will emerge more determinately if we first recall the abstract determinations of knowledge and of truth as they occur in consciousness. Consciousness, namely, distinguishes from itself something to which it at the same time relates itself; or, as the point is put, something is for it; and the determinate side of this relating, of the being that something has for a consciousness, is knowledge. From this being for another, however, we distinguish being in itself; what is related to knowledge is equally distinguished from knowledge and posited as being outside this relation as well; the side of this in itself is called truth. What these determinations amount to in their own right need not occupy us any further at this point, for since appearing knowledge is our object, its determinations too are taken up at first just as they immediately offer themselves; and it is surely as they have been grasped here that they do offer themselves.

Now if we investigate the truth of knowledge, we seem to be investigating what knowledge is in itself. But in an investigation of this sort knowledge is our object, something for us; hence the in itself of it that would come out would rather be its being for us, and what we asserted to be its essence would be not its truth but only our knowledge of it. On such a showing the essence, or the standard, would lie within us, and whatever was to be measured against it, and to be decided about by that comparison, would be under no necessity to acknowledge it.

But the object we are investigating is of such a nature that it relieves us of this separation, or of this semblance of separation and presupposition. Consciousness supplies its standard from within its own self, so that the investigation turns into consciousness comparing itself with itself; for the distinction just now drawn falls inside consciousness. Within consciousness one thing is for an other, or consciousness carries in it the determinateness of the moment of knowledge at all events; at the same time this other is for consciousness not merely for it but also outside that relation, that is, in itself; the moment of truth. In whatever, then, consciousness within its own self declares the in itself or the true to be, we have the standard that consciousness itself sets up for measuring its knowledge against. If we call knowledge the concept, and the essence or the true what has being, the object, then the testing lies in watching whether concept corresponds to object. But if we instead call the essence, that is, the in itself, the concept of the object, while by the object we understand the object as object, namely as it is for another, then the testing lies in watching whether the object, for its part, corresponds to its concept. It is plain enough that the two come to the same; what matters, though, is to hold this fast for the whole investigation, that both these moments, concept and object, being for another, and being in its own self, fall within the very knowledge we are investigating, so that we have no need to bring standards along with us or to apply our notions and thoughts in the course of the investigation; dropping these is how we manage to consider the matter as it is in and for itself.

Now an addition on our part is rendered superfluous not merely in this respect, that consciousness itself already harbors concept and object, standard and what gets tested; we are also spared the labor of comparing the two and the testing proper, so that, since consciousness tests its own self, here too nothing is left to us but sheer watching. For consciousness is, on one side, consciousness of the object, and on the other, consciousness of its own self: consciousness of what for it is the true, and consciousness of its knowledge of that. Since both are for it, consciousness is their comparison itself; it comes to be for it whether or not its knowledge of the object stands in correspondence with the object. Admittedly the object seems to be for consciousness only in the way consciousness knows it; consciousness seems, as it were, unable to get round behind the object to see how it is not for consciousness but rather how it is in itself, and hence unable as well to test its knowledge against the object. Yet in the very fact that consciousness knows of an object at all, the difference is already at hand that for it one thing is the in itself, while another moment is knowledge, the object's being for consciousness. The testing rests on this distinction, which is present. If in this comparison the two fail to correspond, consciousness seems bound to alter its knowledge so as to make it conform to the object; but when the knowledge alters, the object itself in fact alters for consciousness too, since the knowledge at hand was essentially knowledge of that object; with the knowledge the object likewise becomes another, for it belonged essentially to this knowledge. In this way it dawns on consciousness that what previously was for it the in itself is not in itself at all, or that it was only for it in itself. So when consciousness finds, in the case of its object, that its knowledge does not correspond to that object, the object itself gives way as well; or the standard of the testing shifts once whatever it was meant to serve as standard for fails to hold up in the testing; and what gets tested is not knowledge alone but its standard along with it.

This dialectical movement, which consciousness carries out on its own self, on its knowledge no less than on its object, insofar as the new true object thereby springs up for it, is precisely what goes by the name of experience. In this connection one further moment in the course just mentioned is to be brought out more closely, a moment that will shed new light on the scientific side of the exposition that follows. Consciousness knows something, and what it has there as the essence, as the in itself, is this object; but the object is the in itself for consciousness as well, and thereby the ambiguity of this true enters in. Two objects, we see, are now before consciousness: the one is the first in itself, the other the being-for-consciousness of this in itself. This second one looks at the outset like nothing but consciousness's reflection into its own self, a representing not of an object but merely of its knowledge of that first object. But as was shown a moment ago, in the course of this the first object alters for consciousness; it stops being the in itself and turns into something that is only the in itself for consciousness; and so what is then the true is this: the being-for-consciousness of this in itself, which is to say that here we have the essence, or consciousness's object. This new object contains the nullity of the first; it is the experience made about that first object.

One moment attaches to this exposition of how experience runs its course on account of which the exposition seems not to square with what experience is ordinarily taken to mean. The transition, namely, which starts from the first object together with the knowledge of it and arrives at the other object about which experience is said to have been made, was specified thus: that the knowledge of the first object, or what the first in itself is for consciousness, is itself to become the second object. Whereas it otherwise seems that we make the experience of the untruth of our first concept on another object, one we happen to come upon contingently and externally, so that what falls within us is nothing but the pure apprehending of what is in and for itself. On the view just given, though, the new object exhibits itself as having come to be through a reversal of consciousness itself. Our own addition is this way of regarding the matter, through which the series of consciousness's experiences is raised into a scientific course; and it is an addition not present for the consciousness we are observing. But this is in fact the very circumstance already discussed above when the relationship of the present exposition to skepticism came up, namely that the result reached in each case on an untruthful knowledge must not collapse into an empty nothing, but has necessarily to be apprehended as the nothing of that whose result it is; a result which holds within it whatever of truth the preceding knowledge has. This presents itself here in the following way: since what at first appeared as the object descends, for consciousness, into a knowledge of it, and the in itself turns into a being of the in itself for consciousness, this is the new object, with which a new shape of consciousness also steps forward, one for which something other is the essence than was for the preceding shape. It is this circumstance that guides the whole succession of the shapes of consciousness in their necessity. What goes on for us, as it were, behind consciousness's back is only this necessity itself, the emergence of that new object as it offers itself to consciousness, which has no idea what is happening to it. There thereby enters into its movement a moment of the in itself, that is, of being-for-us, a moment that does not present itself to the consciousness caught up in the experience itself; the content, however, of what emerges for us is for it, and we comprehend only the formal side of it, its pure emerging; for it what has emerged is only an object, while for us it is at the same time a movement and a becoming.

Through this necessity, this road to science is itself already science, and, in respect of its content, therefore the science of the experience of consciousness.

The experience that consciousness undergoes concerning itself can, by its concept, comprehend within itself nothing short of the whole system of consciousness, the whole kingdom of spirit's truth, in such a way that the moments of that truth exhibit themselves under this peculiar determinateness, not as abstract, pure moments, but as they stand for consciousness, or as consciousness comes forward itself in its relating to them, so that the moments of the whole amount to shapes of consciousness. As consciousness drives itself onward to its true existence, it will reach a point at which it lays aside the semblance of being burdened with something alien that is only for it and is there as another, or where appearance becomes equal to essence, so that its exposition coincides at just this point with the proper science of spirit, and finally, in grasping this its own essence, consciousness will designate the nature of absolute knowing itself.