Remark 4

Everything said so far shows what is really at issue in the dialectic that assails the beginning of the world, and its downfall along with it, a dialectic meant to establish matter's eternity – at issue, that is, in the dialectic that assails becoming, coming-to-be or ceasing-to-be as such. – Kant's antinomy about whether the world is finite or infinite in space and in time receives closer treatment below, where the concept of quantitative infinity comes up. – A firm grip on the opposition between being and nothing is what carries that plain, familiar dialectic. Proof that neither the world nor anything else admits of a beginning runs as follows:

Nothing can begin – not insofar as something is, and not insofar as it is not; for insofar as it is, its beginning is not still to come; and insofar as it is not, it does not begin either. – Suppose the world, or anything else, had begun: then its beginning would have lain in the nothing, but in the nothing – or rather, the nothing itself – there is no beginning; a beginning encloses a being within it, while no being is held in the nothing. Nothing is only nothing. Determine the nothing as a ground, a cause, or the like, and an affirmation, a being, is thereby contained in it. – Ceasing, likewise, is ruled out for the same reason. Being would then have to hold the nothing within it, whereas being is only being, never the opposite of itself.

Clearly, what gets urged here against becoming – against beginning and ceasing, that unity of being and nothing – comes to no more than an assertoric denial of it, coupled with the ascription of truth to being and to nothing severally, each apart from the other. – This dialectic is nevertheless more consistent, at least, than representation carried on by reflection. Reflection holds it for perfect truth that being and nothing stand only apart; on the other hand it grants beginning and ceasing the status of determinations equally true; and in granting them it factually presupposes that being and nothing are not apart.

Presuppose that being is absolutely severed from nothing, and beginning, or becoming, does indeed turn into something inconceivable – as the refrain so often runs; for the presupposition laid down cancels the beginning or becoming that one nonetheless again admits, and just this contradiction, self-posited and by one's own doing left insoluble, receives the name of the inconceivable.

That same dialectic is what the understanding brings to bear against the concept of infinitely-small magnitudes furnished by higher analysis. Fuller treatment of that concept comes further on. – Such magnitudes, taken as such, received the determination of being ones that are in their vanishing – not prior to that vanishing, since then they would be finite magnitudes; – and not subsequent to their vanishing either, since then they would be nothing. The objection raised against this pure concept, and repeated without end, is that magnitudes of the sort must be either something or nothing; that between being and non-being no intermediate state is to be found (state is here an unfitting, barbarous expression). – Once again the absolute separation of being from nothing has been taken for granted. The demonstration has run the other way, however: being and nothing are in truth one and the same, or, to adopt that idiom, nothing at all is there which fails to be an intermediate state between being and nothing. It is precisely the assumption gainsaid by the understanding to which mathematics owes its most brilliant successes.

Reasoning of the kind adduced, which sets up the false presupposition that being and non-being are absolutely apart and then halts there, deserves the name not of dialectic but of sophistry. Sophistry, after all, reasons from a groundless presupposition let through uncritically and without reflection; whereas what we call dialectic is the higher rational movement in which terms of that sort, seemingly separate through and through, pass into one another by their own doing, by what they are, and in which the presupposition sublates itself. That being and nothing exhibit their unity, becoming, as their truth belongs to the dialectical, immanent nature of the two themselves.

2. Moments of Becoming

Becoming – coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be – is being and nothing in their unseparatedness; not that unity which abstracts away from being and from nothing; as unity of being and nothing, however, it is that determinate unity in which being no less than nothing is. But inasmuch as being and nothing are each of them unseparated from what is other to it, each is not. In this unity, then, they are, but as vanishing ones, only as sublated. From the self-subsistence initially represented of them they sink down into moments, still differentiated yet at the same time sublated.

Take them according to this differentiatedness of theirs, and each is, within the same, unity with the other. Becoming, accordingly, contains being and nothing in the shape of two such unities, and each of them is itself a unity of being and nothing; the first of them being as immediate together with reference to nothing; the second, nothing as immediate together with reference to being; unequal value attaches to the determinations within these unities.

Becoming stands in this way under a twofold determination; in the first, the nothing figures as immediate, that is, the determination sets out from the nothing, which refers itself to being, which is to say passes over into it; in the second, being figures as immediate, that is, the determination sets out from being, which passes over into the nothing, – coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be.

Becoming is what both are, one and the same, and even as directions thus differentiated they interpenetrate one another and paralyse one another. Ceasing-to-be is the one; being passes over into nothing, and yet nothing is quite as much the opposite of its own self, a passing over into being, coming-to-be. The other direction is that coming-to-be; nothing passes over into being, and yet being quite as much sublates its own self and is rather that passing over into nothing, is ceasing-to-be. – Neither sublates the other reciprocally, nor does one sublate the other from without; rather each sublates its own self and is within its own self its opposite.

3. Sublation of Becoming

Coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be settle into an equilibrium, and that equilibrium is at first becoming itself. But becoming likewise collapses into quiescent unity. Within it being and nothing occur only as vanishing; and yet becoming as such subsists solely through their differentiatedness. Their vanishing is therefore becoming's vanishing, or the vanishing of vanishing itself. Becoming is an unrest without footing, one that sinks together into a quiescent result.

One might put the point otherwise: what becoming amounts to is being's vanishing into nothing and nothing's vanishing into being, and the vanishing of the two of them altogether; yet it rests at the same time upon the difference between them. In its own self, then, it stands in contradiction with itself, since it unites within it terms opposed to each other; and a union of that kind wrecks itself.

The result here is having-vanished, though not in the manner of nothing; so taken it would amount merely to a relapse into one of the determinations already sublated, and not to a result of nothing and of being. Rather, it is that unity of being and nothing which has become simplicity at rest. Simplicity at rest, however, is being, though equally so no longer for itself, but as determination of the whole.

Existence is becoming taken as this transition into the unity of being with nothing, a unity that is in the manner of what is, or that bears the shape belonging to the immediate, one-sided unity of these moments.

Remark

Sublating, and the sublated (the ideal), counts among the most important concepts of philosophy, a fundamental determination recurring absolutely everywhere, whose sense wants grasping with precision and, above all, keeping distinct from nothing. – Whatever sublates itself does not on that account become nothing. The immediate is what nothing is; a sublated something, by contrast, is a mediated one – non-being, but non-being as result, issuing from a being; and so it has the determinateness out of which it comes still within itself.

In the language, sublate bears a twofold sense: it says as much as to store up, to preserve, and at the same time as much as to bring to a halt, to make an end. Already the storing up encloses the negative within it, namely that something gets withdrawn from its immediacy, and thereby from an existence lying open to external effects, so as to be preserved. – The sublated is thus at once something stored up, something that has forfeited its immediacy alone and is not for that reason destroyed. – Lexically, the two determinations of sublating set out here may be entered as two meanings of the word. Yet it must strike one that a language should have arrived at employing a single word for two opposed determinations. Speculative thinking finds it gratifying that language should supply words carrying a speculative meaning in their own selves; German has several such. The double sense of the Latin: tollere (famous through the Ciceronian jest: tollendum esse Octavium) does not extend so far, its affirmative determination reaching only to lifting up. Something counts as sublated only insofar as it has entered into unity with what stands opposed to it; under this closer determination, as something reflected, the name moment suits it well. Weight and distance from a point go by the name of the lever's mechanical moments, owing to the selfsameness of their effect for all the diversity otherwise between something real, as a weight is, and something ideal, the bare spatial determination, the line; (see the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, 3rd ed., § 261, Remark.) – The observation will force itself upon one still oftener that philosophical terminology draws on Latin expressions for reflected determinations, either where the mother tongue supplies none, or, where it does supply them, as here, because its own expression recalls the immediate rather, while the foreign tongue recalls the reflected.

What closer sense and expression being and nothing acquire, now that they have become moments, must emerge when existence is considered, existence being the unity in which the two are stored up. Only in their differentiatedness from one another is being being and nothing nothing; in their truth, that is, in their unity, both have vanished as the determinations they were and are now something other. Being and nothing are the same; and precisely because they are the same, they are being and nothing no longer, carrying instead a different determination; within becoming they figured as coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be; within existence, a unity determined otherwise, they figure again as moments otherwise determined. Henceforth this unity stays their foundation, and out of it they no longer step forth into the abstract meaning of being and of nothing.

Chapter 2. Existence

Determinate being is what existence is; and its determinateness, determinateness that is, is quality. By virtue of its quality something is set over against an other, is alterable and finite, and stands determined negatively outright, not merely over against an other but within itself. The infinite is this negation of its own, standing at first over against the finite something; and the abstract opposition wherein these determinations make their appearance resolves itself into infinity without opposition, into being-for-itself.

Accordingly, three divisions make up the exposition of existence:

A. existence as such,

B. something and an other, finitude,

C. qualitative infinity.

A. Existence as Such

Within existence

a. as such, what falls to be distinguished first is its determinateness

b. as quality. Quality, though, has to be taken in the one determination of existence quite as much as in the other, namely as reality and as negation. Within these determinatenesses, however, existence is quite as much reflected into its own self; and, posited so, it is

c. Something, an existent.

a. Existence in General

Out of becoming existence issues. Existence is being and nothing in simple oneness. Its simplicity gives it the form of an immediate. Its mediation, becoming, lies behind it; that mediation has sublated itself, and existence therefore makes its appearance as a first, as that from which one sets out. At first it stands under the one-sided determination of being; the other that it holds within it, the nothing, will equally come forward in it, over against the first.

It is not mere being but existence; taken etymologically, being at a certain place; the representation of space, however, has no business here. Existence, in keeping with its becoming, is being at large along with a non-being, and this in such a way that the non-being has been taken up into simple unity with being. What constitutes determinateness as such is non-being taken up into being in such fashion that the concrete whole stands in the form of being, of immediacy.

The whole likewise stands in the form – that is, the determinateness – of being, since being too has shown itself within becoming to be no more than a moment – a sublated one, negatively determined; but so it stands for us in our reflection, not yet posited in its own self. The determinateness of existence as such, by contrast, is the posited one, and it lies too in the expression there-being. – The two are always well worth telling apart; only what is posited in a concept belongs to the developing consideration of that concept, to its content. Determinateness not yet posited in the concept itself belongs, rather, to our reflection, whether it concern the nature of the concept itself or be an external comparison; and to call attention to a determinateness of the latter kind can serve only for elucidation, or as a forward hint of the course which the development itself will exhibit. External reflection is at work in saying that the whole, the unity of being and of nothing, stands in the one-sided determinateness of being; in negation, though, in something and other and so forth, it will come to be as posited. – The point here was to draw attention to the distinction indicated; but to render account of everything reflection might allow itself to remark would lead into the prolixity of anticipating what has to emerge from the matter itself. Reflections of this kind can serve to ease the survey and with it the understanding, yet they no doubt also bring the drawback of looking like unwarranted assertions, grounds and foundations for what is to follow. One should take them, therefore, for nothing more than what they are meant to be, and keep them apart from whatever is a moment in the advance of the matter itself.

Existence corresponds to the being of the sphere before it; being, however, is the indeterminate, so that no determinations emerge in it. Existence, by contrast, is determinate being, a concrete; several determinations, differing relations among its moments, therefore open up in it at once.

b. Quality

On account of the immediacy in which being and nothing are one within existence, neither reaches out beyond the other; just so far as existence is a being, just so far is it non-being, is it determinate. Neither is being the universal, nor determinateness the particular. From being determinateness has not yet detached itself; nor indeed will it detach itself from being any more; for what now lies at the base as the true is the unity of non-being with being; and upon this as base all further determinations emerge. Yet determinateness stands here in a reference to being which is the immediate unity of the pair, so that no distinguishing of the two has as yet been posited.

Determinateness thus isolated for itself, as determinateness that is, is quality; – something wholly simple, immediate. Determinateness at large is the more universal term, one that may equally be the quantitative, or determinate in some further way. Owing to this simplicity there is nothing further to say of quality as such.

But existence, wherein nothing is contained quite as much as being, is itself the measure for the one-sidedness of quality as merely immediate determinateness, or determinateness that merely is. In the determination of nothing quality is equally to be posited, whereby the immediate determinateness, the determinateness that is, gets posited as a differentiated, reflected one; and nothing, so taken as the determinate element of a determinateness, is likewise something reflected, a negating. Quality, taken as differentiated and passing for that which is, is reality; quality burdened with a negating, negation at large, is likewise a quality, though one passing for a lack, and it determines itself further on as limit, restriction. An existence is what both are; but in reality, quality carrying the accent of being one that is, it stays hidden that reality holds determinateness and hence negation too within it; reality accordingly passes merely for something positive, from which negating, limitedness, lack are supposedly shut out. Were negation taken as mere lack, it would be what nothing is; an existence, though, is what it is, a quality determined merely with a non-being.

Remark

Reality may look like a word of many meanings, being used of determinations that differ and even stand opposed. In the philosophical sense one speaks, say, of merely empirical reality as an existence without worth. Say of thoughts, of concepts, of theories that they have no reality, and what is meant is that no actuality belongs to them; in itself, or in the concept, the idea of a Platonic republic, for instance, may well be true. The idea is not here refused its worth, and it gets left standing beside reality into the bargain. But when so-called mere ideas, mere concepts, are what it faces, the real passes for the sole truth. – One-sided in equal measure is the sense in which, on the one hand, external existence is credited with deciding the truth of a content, and the way in which, on the other, the idea, the essence, or the inner feeling too, is represented as indifferent towards external existence and even held the more excellent the further it stands removed from reality.

With the expression reality goes a mention of the older metaphysical concept of God, the concept laid at the base, above all, of the so-called ontological proof that God exists. The sum total of all realities was the determination given to God, and of that sum total it was said to contain no contradiction within itself, no reality there sublating another; a reality, after all, is to be taken solely as a perfection, as something affirmative with no negation in it. So taken, the realities stand in no opposition to one another and contradict one another not at all.

This concept of reality carries the assumption that reality would still remain were all negation thought away; but thereby every determinateness of reality is sublated. Reality is quality, existence; the moment of the negative is therefore contained in it, and by that alone is it the determinate thing it is. Where it gets taken in the so-called eminent sense, or as infinite – in the word's ordinary meaning – as reality is supposed to be taken, it gets stretched into the determinationless and forfeits its meaning. God's goodness, it is said, must be goodness not in the usual but in the eminent sense, not distinct from justice but tempered by justice (a Leibnizian term of mediation), and conversely justice tempered by goodness; then goodness is goodness no longer, nor justice justice. Power, it is said, must be tempered by wisdom; but then it is not power as such, since it would stand subjected to wisdom, – wisdom must be stretched into power, but then it vanishes as the wisdom determining purpose and measure. The true concept of the infinite, together with its absolute unity, which is to emerge later on, is not to be grasped as a tempering, a mutual limiting or blending – such being a superficial relation kept in indeterminate fog, one with which only conceptless representing can rest content. – Reality, taken in that definition of God as determinate quality, ceases to be reality once carried out past its determinateness; it turns into abstract being; and God as the purely real in all that is real, or as sum total of all realities, is as void of determination and content as the empty absolute in which everything is one.

Take reality, on the contrary, in its determinateness, and then, because the moment of the negative is essentially contained in it, the sum total of all realities turns quite as much into a sum total of all negations, into the sum total of all contradictions, in the first instance perhaps into absolute power, wherein everything determinate is absorbed; but since such power itself only is insofar as something not sublated by it still stands over against it, it turns, once thought as stretched into carried-out, restrictionless power, into the abstract nothing. That real in all that is real, the being in all existence, which is supposed to give voice to the concept of God, is nothing else than abstract being, the same as what nothing is.

Determinateness is negation posited as affirmative, and this is Spinoza's proposition: Omnis determinatio est negatio, a proposition whose importance is infinite; only, negation as such is abstraction without form; speculative philosophy, though, must not be blamed for treating negation, or the nothing, as something ultimate; the nothing is that for it just as little as reality is the true.

The unity of Spinozistic substance – that only One substance is – follows as the necessary consequence from this proposition, that determinateness is negation. Thinking and being, or extension, the two determinations Spinoza in fact has before him, he was bound to set as one within this unity, since, being determinate realities, they are negations, and their infinity is their unity; by Spinoza's definition, treated of further on, the infinity of something is its affirmation. Attributes, therefore, is how he conceived them, that is, as such as lack a particular subsistence, a being-in-and-for-itself, and are only as sublated, as moments; or rather they are not even moments for him, since substance is what in its own self is wholly without determination, while the attributes, like the modes as well, are distinctions drawn by an understanding external to it. – Nor, in the same way, can the substantiality of individuals hold up against that proposition. The individual is reference to itself through setting limits to everything other; but these limits are thereby limits of itself as well, references to an other, and its existence does not lie within its own self. No doubt the individual is more than what is merely limited on every side, yet this more belongs in another sphere of the concept; within the metaphysics of being it is something determinate outright; and against any such thing, against the finite as such, being in and for itself, determinateness asserts itself essentially as negation and sweeps the individual into that same negative movement of the understanding which lets everything vanish into the abstract unity, substance.

Reality has negation standing immediately over against it; further on, within the proper sphere of the reflected determinations, negation is set over against the positive, which is the reality that reflects upon negation, – reality wherein the negative shines, the negative that within reality as such still lies hidden.

Quality counts pre-eminently as property only in the respect wherein it shows itself, within an external relation, to be an immanent determination. By the properties of herbs, for instance, one understands determinations that are not merely proper to a something at large, but such that through them the something maintains itself in a peculiar manner in relation to others, refusing to let the alien effects posited in it hold sway within it, and making its own determinations tell in the other instead – though it does not thereby keep the other off itself. Determinatenesses of a more quiescent sort, figure or shape for instance, one is not apt to call properties, nor indeed qualities, insofar as they are represented as alterable, as not identical with being.

Qualirung or Inqualirung, an expression of the Jacob-Böhmean philosophy, a philosophy going into the depths but into a murky depth, signifies the movement of a quality (the sour, the astringent, the fiery, and so on) within its own self, insofar as in its negative nature (in its torment) it posits and consolidates itself out of another, and is in general that unrest of its own within itself by which it brings itself forth and maintains itself only in struggle.

c. Something

Determinateness has been marked off, on existence, as quality; and on quality, itself an existent, the difference is present – the difference between reality and negation. Now however much these differences are on hand within existence, just as much are they null, sublated. Negation is contained in reality itself, which is existence, not some indeterminate, abstract being. Conversely negation is itself existence – no nothing pretending to abstractness, but posited as it stands in itself: as a being, as belonging within existence. So quality at large is nowhere severed from existence, and existence is nothing else than determinate, qualitative being.

More is at work in this sublating of the distinction than a bare withdrawal of it, an external letting-fall of it once more, or a plain going-back to the plain beginning, existence taken simply. Dropping the difference is not possible; for it is. So the fact on hand is threefold: existence at large, difference upon it, and the sublating of that difference; existence not as it was at the outset, without difference, but self-equal once more, through sublation of the difference, its simplicity mediated by that very sublating. That the difference stands sublated is existence's own determinateness; existence is thereby being-within-itself; existence counts as an existent, as something.

Considered as a simple relation to self that has being, the something amounts to the first negation of negation. Whatever we call existence, life, thinking and the rest determines itself essentially into an existent, a living thing, a thinker (I), and the rest. Such determining matters supremely, lest one halt at existence, life, thinking and the rest, or indeed at Godhead (rather than God), treating these as universalities. Representation is right to reckon something a real thing. All the same, something remains a determination lying very near the surface, in the way that reality and negation do, and existence with its determinateness: no longer the void pair, being and nothing, yet abstract determinations through and through. Hence too their currency in ordinary speech, and hence the heavy use made of them by a reflection untrained in philosophy, which decants its distinctions into them and supposes that in them it possesses something firmly and properly determined. – Taken as something, the negative of the negative marks no more than the subject's beginning; – being-within-itself is so far altogether indeterminate. It goes on determining itself, next as a being-for-itself, and onward, until only in the concept does it acquire the subject's concrete intensity. At the base of every one of these determinations lies negative unity with self. Yet here negation as the first, negation as such, wants careful separating from the second, which is negation of negation, the concrete, absolute negativity, the first being by contrast only the abstract negativity.

Taken as negation of negation, something has being, for such negation restores relation to self in its simplicity; – and by the same stroke something is the mediating of itself with itself. That mediating of itself with itself is on hand already in the simplicity of the something, more determinately afterwards in being-for-itself, in the subject and the rest – already in becoming too, though there merely as mediation wholly abstract; mediation with itself stands posited in the something so far as the latter counts as simply identical. – Against the principle of an asserted bare immediacy of knowing, one from which mediation is to be shut out, the fact that mediation is on hand at all may well be pointed out; henceforth, though, no special notice of the moment of mediation will be needed, for mediation lodges everywhere, at every turn, within each and every concept.

Read merely as negation of negation, this mediation with self, which something in itself is, has nothing concretely determined for either of its sides; so it falls together into that simple unity called being. Something is, and so is an existent as well; further, in itself it is also becoming, only a becoming whose moments are no longer merely being and nothing. One moment, being, has now turned into existence and then into an existent. The second is an existent no less, determined however as the negative of the something – an other. Something as becoming is a passing-over whose moments are themselves somethings, and for that reason it is alteration; – a becoming grown concrete already. – Still, at this stage the something alters only within its concept; nothing yet posits it as mediating and as mediated; for now it merely keeps itself simply in its relation to self, its negative counting as equally qualitative, an other and nothing further.

B. Finitude

a. Something and an other; to begin with, each is indifferent toward the other; an other is likewise an immediate existent, a something; negation therefore falls outside the two of them. Over against its being-for other, something is in itself. Determinateness belongs, however, to its in-itself as well, and is

b. its determination, which passes over no less into constitution; and constitution, being one with that determination, makes up the immanent and simultaneously negated being-for-other, the limit of something, which

c. is the something's own immanent determination, whereby something is the finite.

Within the first division, where existence at large came under consideration, existence, as first taken up, bore the determination of what has being. For that reason the moments of its unfolding — quality and something — are likewise of affirmative determination. Here, on the other hand, it is the negative determination resident in existence that unfolds; there it was still only negation at large, first negation, whereas now it stands determined up to the point of the something's being-within-itself, up to negation of negation.

a. Something and an Other

1. Something and an other are both, firstly, existents or somethings.

Secondly, each is just as much an other. Which of the two gets named first and is called something merely on that account makes no difference; (in Latin, when both occur in one sentence, each is called aliud, or the one the other, alius alium; where reciprocity obtains the analogous expression runs: alter alterum.) Should we call one existence A and the other B, then B counts at first as determined to be the other. But A is quite as much the other of B. In like manner both are others. For pinning down the difference, and the something to be taken affirmatively, the word this serves. Yet this voices precisely the point that such distinguishing and singling out of the one something is a subjective designating, one falling outside the something itself. Into this external act of pointing the whole determinateness falls; not even the expression this harbours a difference; each and every something is a this quite as much as it is also an other. One supposes that with this one utters something perfectly determinate; overlooked is the fact that language, being a work of the understanding, utters only what is universal, except in the name of a singular object; the individual name, however, is a senseless thing in the sense that it voices nothing universal, and it looks like a merely posited, arbitrary affair for the same reason that individual names can be arbitrarily adopted, conferred, or likewise changed.

Otherness accordingly looks like a determination alien to the existence so determined, or like the other outside the one existence; partly because an existence gets determined as other only through a third party's comparing, partly because it gets so determined only on account of the other lying outside it, and is not such for itself. Every existence, as was noted, simultaneously determines itself, for representation as well, quite as much as an other existence, so that no existence is left over that would be determined only as an existence, that would not lie outside an existence and hence not be itself an other.

Determined as something no less than as other, the two are hence the same, and no difference between them is yet on hand. This selfsameness of the determinations falls, however, likewise only within external reflection, within a comparing of the two; but on the way the other is at first posited, it stands for itself indeed in relation to the something, yet also for itself outside of it.

Thirdly, then, the other must be taken in isolation, in relation to itself; abstractly as the other, Plato's τὸ ἕτερον, which he ranges among the moments of totality and sets over against the one, thereby granting the other a nature of its own. So grasped, the other stands alone as such: not some thing's other, but the other in its very self, i.e. its own other. – An other of that kind, other by its very determination, is physical nature; nature is the other of spirit; and so this determination of nature is initially sheer relativity, voicing no quality of nature itself but merely a relation external to nature. Since spirit, however, is the true something, and nature therefore in its very self only what it is over against spirit, nature's quality — taken for itself — consists precisely in being the other in its very self, the being-outside-of-itself (in the determinations of space, of time, of matter).

The other for itself is the other in its very self, therefore its own other, and so an other of the other – hence what is downright unequal within itself, self-negating, what alters. Just as much, though, it stays identical with itself, since whatever it altered into is the other, which carries no further determination besides; and what alters is determined in no other manner, but in the very same, namely to be an other, whence in that other it converges only with itself. Posited accordingly as inwardly reflected, with otherness sublated, it is a something identical with itself, from which otherness — simultaneously a moment of it — is something distinct, something not accruing to it as the something itself.

2. Something maintains itself within its non-existence; with that non-existence it is essentially one, and with it essentially not one. So it stands in relation to its otherness; purely its otherness it is not. Otherness is contained within it and withal still severed from it; it is being-for-other.

Existence taken as such is immediate, relationless; or it stands under the determination of being. But existence, enclosing non-being within itself, is determinate being, being inwardly negated, and thus at first an other – yet since throughout its negating it likewise maintains itself, it is merely being-for-other.

Within its non-existence it maintains itself, and is being; not being at large, however, but being as relation to self over against its relation to other, as self-equality over against its inequality. Being of that sort is being-in-itself.

The two moments of the something are made up by being-for-other and being-in-itself. Two pairs of determinations turn up here: 1) something and an other. 2) being-for-other, and being-in-itself. The first pair carries the relationlessness of its determinateness; something and other fall asunder. Their truth, though, lies in their relation; being-for-other along with being-in-itself are accordingly those same determinations, only posited as moments of one selfsame thing, as determinations that are relations and that abide within their unity, the unity of existence. Each of them thereby contains upon itself, withal, its own moment that differs from it.

Within their unity, which is existence, being and nothing are being and nothing no longer; – only apart from that unity are they such; and so within their restless unity, in becoming, they amount to coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be. – Being within the something is being-in-itself. Being, the relation to self, self-equality, is now no longer immediate, but relation to self solely as the non-being of otherness, (as inwardly reflected existence). – Non-being likewise, as a moment of the something within this unity of being and non-being, is not non-existence at large but an other, and, more determinately, given the distinguishing of being from it withal, a relation to its non-existence, being-for-other.

Being-in-itself, accordingly, is firstly a negative relation to non-existence: otherness lies outside it and it stands opposed thereto; so far as something is in itself, otherness and being-for-other have been taken away from it. Secondly, though, it bears non-being upon itself too; for it itself is the non-being of being-for-other.

Being-for-other, however, is firstly the negation of that simple relation of being to itself which is supposed at first to be existence and something; so far as something lies within an other, or for an other, it goes without a being of its own. Secondly, though, it is not non-existence as pure nothing; it is a non-existence referring to being-in-itself as to its inwardly reflected being, exactly as, in reverse, being-in-itself refers to being-for-other.

3. The two moments are determinations of one selfsame thing, the something, namely. Something is in itself so far as it has come back into itself out of being-for-other. Yet something also carries a determination or circumstance in itself (the accent here falling on in) or in it, so far as this circumstance stands externally in it, a being-for-other.

A further determination follows from this. At first being-in-itself and being-for-other stand diverse; but that something carries in it the very same that it is in itself, and inversely that whatever it is as being-for-other it likewise is in itself – herein lies the identity of being-in-itself with being-for-other, on the determination that the something is itself the selfsame in both moments, which are therefore undivided within it. – Formally this identity turns up already within the sphere of existence, more expressly where essence comes under consideration and then the relation of inwardness to outwardness, and most determinately of all where the idea comes under consideration, as unity of concept and actuality. – With the in-itself, as with the inner, one supposes oneself to be uttering something lofty; but whatever something is merely in itself is equally merely in it; the in-itself is an abstract determination only, and therefore itself an external one. The phrases: there is nothing in him, or there is something in it, carry with them, darkly perhaps, the thought that whatever is in a thing belongs likewise to its being-in-itself, to its inner and genuine worth.

One may remark that the sense of the thing-in-itself emerges here — a very simple abstraction, though for a while a very important determination, a sort of noble possession, just as the dictum that what things are in themselves stays unknown to us once passed for prized wisdom. – Things get called in-themselves so far as one abstracts from every being-for-other, which means generally: so far as they are thought without any determination whatever, as nothings. In that sense, to be sure, what the thing-in-itself is cannot be known. For the query: what? insists that determinations be stated; but since the things about which they are to be stated are meanwhile supposed to be things-in-themselves, that is, precisely without determination, the impossibility of answering has been lodged thoughtlessly in the query itself, or else one produces merely a preposterous answer. – That absolute about which nothing is known save that everything within it is one: the thing-in-itself is the very same. Hence one knows perfectly well what is in these things-in-themselves; as such they are nothing but truthless, empty abstractions. What the thing-in-itself is in truth, however, what is genuinely in itself — of that the logic is the exposition, where by in-itself something better than abstraction is meant, namely what a thing is in its concept; and this concept is inwardly concrete, comprehensible as concept generally, and inwardly knowable as determinate and as the interconnection of its determinations.

Being-in-itself has being-for-other for its opposing moment at first; but positedness also gets set over against it; that expression does harbour being-for-other too, yet it definitely holds within it the bending-back, already accomplished, of what is not in itself into what constitutes its being-in-itself, wherein it is positive. Being-in-itself is customarily to be understood as an abstract manner of voicing the concept; positing properly enters only within the sphere of essence, the sphere of objective reflection; the ground posits what has its ground in it; the cause does still more, it brings forth an effect, an existence whose self-subsistence is immediately negated and which bears upon it the sense of having its matter, its being, in an other. Existence, within the sphere of being, merely issues forth out of becoming; or, along with something, an other is posited, along with the finite the infinite — the finite, though, brings forth no infinite, does not posit it. Within the sphere of being the concept's own self-determining is as yet only in itself, and so goes by the name of a transition; the reflecting determinations of being as well — something and other, say, or the finite and the infinite — count as qualitative, subsisting on their own, however essentially they refer to one another or exist as being-for-other; the other is, and the finite counts, exactly like the infinite, as immediately being and as standing fast on its own; the sense of each looks complete apart from its other. Positive and negative, by contrast, cause and effect, however much they too get taken as existing in isolation, have withal no sense apart from one another; their shining into one another, the shining of its other within each, is on hand upon them themselves. – Across the various circles of determination, and especially in the advance of the exposition, or more closely in the concept's advance toward its exposition, it is a chief matter to keep distinguishing well what is still in itself from what is posited, how determinations stand as within the concept and how they stand once posited, i.e. as being-for-other. Such a difference belongs to dialectical development alone, and metaphysical philosophizing, which takes in the critical sort as well, does not know it; metaphysics' definitions, like its presuppositions, distinctions and inferences, mean to assert and bring forth only what is, indeed only what is in itself.

Being-for-other, within the unity of something with itself, is identical with its in-itself; being-for-other is thus upon the something. Determinateness thus inwardly reflected is thereby once more simple and existent, hence once more a quality – the determination.

b. Determination, Constitution and Limit

No longer an abstract in-itself is the in-itself into which something has been reflected back into itself away from its being-for-other; as the negation of that being-for-other it is instead mediated by it, and being-for-other is thus its own moment. Not merely the immediate self-identity of the something, it is the identity through which the something is in it what it is in itself as well; being-for-other is in it, since the in-itself is what sublates that being-for-other, is out of it and in itself; but equally so already, since the in-itself is abstract and hence saddled essentially with negation, with being-for-other. Present here is not quality and reality alone, determinateness as merely being, but a determinateness that is in itself, and the development consists in positing it as just this determinateness reflected into itself.

1. Within the simple something the in-itself essentially stands in unity with that something's other moment, its being-in-it, and the quality which it there is may be called the something's determination, so long as this word is taken in the stricter sense that marks it off from determinateness in general. Determination is affirmative determinateness – the being-in-itself to which something in its existence stays true, over against the entanglement with an other that would determine it, holding itself in its self-equality, and asserting that self-equality within its being-for-other. It fulfils its determination to the extent that the further determinateness which at first grows up in manifold ways out of its comportment towards an other becomes, in keeping with its being-in-itself, the something's own fullness. Contained in determination is this: that whatever something is in itself shall be in it as well.

Thinking reason is the determination of the human being: thinking in general constitutes his simple determinateness, and it is what marks him off from the animal; thinking in itself he is, insofar as thinking is set apart also from his being-for-other, from that naturalness and sensibility of his own by which he hangs together immediately with an other. Yet in him thinking is present too; the human being is himself thinking, he is there as one who thinks, and in thinking lies his concrete existence, his actuality; and further, thinking being in his existence and his existence in thinking, thinking is concrete, to be taken with content and fulfilment, thinking reason, and in this way the determination of the human being. Yet this determination too is once again only in itself, an ought – that is, it stands, with the fulfilment built into its in-itself and in the form of the in-itself generally, against the existence not built into it, an existence which meanwhile persists as immediate sensibility and nature confronting it from outside.

2. Also distinct from the fulfilment of being-in-itself with determinateness is the determinateness that is only being-for-other and stays outside the determination. For in the field of the qualitative, differences keep an immediate qualitative being over against each other even in their sublatedness. Thus what the something has in it divides, and from this side it is an external existence of the something, one that is indeed its existence and yet does not belong to its being-in-itself. – So determinateness is constitution.

Something constituted this way or that is grasped as caught up in external influence and in external relations. Contingent is how this outward connection appears, the connection on which constitution hangs, and so too the being-determined by an other. But to be handed over to such externality and to have a constitution is itself the quality of the something.

Where something alters, the alteration lands in the constitution; constitution is what in the something turns into an other. Something preserves itself in the alteration, which strikes only this unsteady surface of its otherness, not its determination.

Determination and constitution stand distinguished from one another in this way; something, taken according to its determination, is indifferent towards its constitution. What binds the two, though, the middle of this syllogism, is what something has in it. Being in the something, however, proved rather to break apart into those two extremes. Determinateness as such is the simple middle; to its identity determination belongs no less than constitution. But of its own accord determination goes over into constitution, and constitution into determination. This lies in what precedes; the connection, more precisely, runs thus: to the extent that what something is in itself is in it as well, being-for-other clings to it; determination as such therefore lies open to the relation to an other. Determinateness is a moment and yet harbours at the same time the qualitative difference, differing from being-in-itself, of being the negative of the something, another existence. United with being-in-itself, determinateness that thus takes the other up into itself brings otherness into being-in-itself, into determination, and determination is thereby demoted to constitution. – Conversely, when being-for-other is isolated as constitution and posited on its own, it is in it just what the other as such is, the other in its own self, that is, of its own self; taken so, however, it is existence relating to itself, being-in-itself with a determinateness, and hence determination. – Hence, so far as the two are also to be kept apart, constitution – which looks as though it were grounded in an externality, in an other generally – depends on determination too, and the determining that comes from elsewhere is at once determined by the something's own, immanent determining. But constitution belongs, furthermore, to what the something is in itself; along with its constitution something changes.

No longer is this change of the something the first alteration, the one merely with respect to its being-for-other; that first alteration was only the one existing in itself, belonging to the inner concept; now the alteration is posited in the something as well. – Further determination accrues to the something itself, and negation gets posited as immanent to it, as the being-within-itself it has developed.

At first the passing over of determination and constitution into each other is the sublating of their difference, and existence, or something in general, is thereby posited; and since this result comes out of that difference, which equally holds qualitative otherness within it, there are two somethings, though not merely others over against each other in general – the negation would then still be abstract and would fall only within the comparison – for the negation is now immanent to the somethings. Indifferent to each other they are as existent, yet this affirmation of theirs is immediate no longer; each relates to itself by means of the sublating of otherness, an otherness reflected in determination into being-in-itself.

Thus out of itself does something comport itself towards the other, for otherness stands posited within it as a moment of its own; negation is embraced within its being-within-itself, and only by means of that negation does it now have affirmative existence at all. From this existence, however, the other is qualitatively distinct too, and is on that account posited outside the something. Nothing but the quality of the something is the negation of its other, for something is what it is by sublating its other. Only now does the other genuinely come to stand over against an existence itself; over against the first something the other stands merely externally, or else – the two hanging together in fact absolutely, that is, by their concept – their connection runs thus, that existence has passed over into otherness, something into an other, and something is an other quite as much as the other is. To the extent, then, that being-within-itself is the non-being of the otherness which it contains and which is nevertheless distinguished from it as being, the something is itself the negation, the ceasing of an other in it; posited it is as comporting itself negatively against that other and as thereby preserving itself; – this other, the being-within-itself of the something as negation of negation, is its being-in-itself, and this sublating is at once in it as simple negation, namely as the something's negation of the other something lying outside it. One determinateness of the two there is, identical with the being-within-itself of the somethings as negation of negation, and, since these negations stand against each other as other somethings, it closes them together out of themselves and equally parts them from one another, each negating the other, – the limit.

3. Indeterminate, affirmative community of something with its other is what being-for-other amounts to; within the limit the non-being-for-other comes to the fore, the qualitative negation of the other, which is thereby fended off from the something reflected into itself. The development of this concept is what has to be watched, though it turns out to be rather an entanglement and a contradiction. That contradiction is at hand right away in this: as the negation of the something reflected into itself, the limit holds the moments of something and other within it as ideal, while these same moments, as distinct moments, stand posited at the same time in the sphere of existence as real, as qualitatively distinct.

α. Something, then, is immediate existence relating to itself, and it carries a limit first of all as against an other; not of the something itself but of the other is this limit the non-being; in it the something sets bounds to its other. – Yet a something in general is what the other itself is; so the limit which the something has as against the other is likewise the other's limit as a something, the limit by which the other fends off the first something as its own other, or it is a non-being of that something; the limit is therefore non-being not of the other alone, but of the one and of the other something alike, and so of something in general.

But since it is essentially the non-being of the other just as much, something at the same time is by virtue of its limit. In doing the limiting, something is indeed brought down to being limited itself; its limit, though, as the ceasing of the other in it, is at the same time nothing other than the being of the something; this is through the limit what it is, and has in it its quality. – Outwardly this relation displays the fact that limit is simple negation, the first negation, while the other is at once negation of negation, the being-within-itself of the something.

As immediate existence, then, something is the limit as against another something, but it possesses that limit in its own self and is something by the mediation of a limit which is equally its non-being. Mediation is what the limit is, that by which something and other both are and are not.

β. To the extent, now, that something within its limit is and is not, these moments being an immediate, qualitative difference, the existence of the something and its non-existence fall apart from each other. Outside its limit (or, however one may picture it, inside) something has its existence; and the other, being a something, lies outside that limit as well. Between the two the limit is the middle, and in it they cease. Their existence they have beyond each other, away from their limit; the limit, as the non-being of each, is what is other to them both.

– Given this diversity of the something from its limit, only outside its limit, the point, does the line appear as line; the surface as surface outside the line; the body as body only outside the surface bounding it. – This is the side on which limit falls first into representation, – the being-outside-itself of the concept, – and it is chiefly in this aspect that limit is taken up in spatial objects too.

γ. Further, however, the something as it stands outside the limit is the unlimited something, existence merely in general. So taken it is not marked off from its other; it is existence and nothing more, and therefore shares the same determination with its other, each being merely something in general, or each being an other; both are in this way the same. But this existence of theirs, immediate to begin with, now stands posited together with determinateness as limit, wherein the two are what they are, distinguished from one another. The limit, though, is equally their common distinguishedness, being their unity and their distinguishedness alike, as existence is. Contained in this twofold identity of the two, of existence and limit, is this: that the something has its existence in the limit alone, and that, limit and immediate existence being at the same time each the negative of the other, the something which is only in its limit separates itself just as much from itself, points out past itself to its non-being and declares that non-being to be its being, passing over into it accordingly. Applied to the earlier example: the one determination says that something is only in its limit what it is; – the point, accordingly, is not the limit of the line in the sense merely that the line ceases in it and has its existence outside it; – nor the line the limit of the surface in the sense merely that the surface ceases in the line, and so likewise with the surface as limit of the body. In the point the line also begins; the point is the line's absolute beginning, and even where the line is pictured as unlimited towards both its sides, or, as the phrase goes, as prolonged into infinity, the point makes up its element, as the line makes up the element of the surface, the surface that of the body. Of what they limit these limits are the principle, in the way that the one, as the hundredth for example, is a limit and yet an element of the entire hundred too.

The other determination is the unrest of the something within its limit, wherein it is immanent, the unrest of being the contradiction that despatches it out past itself. The point, therefore, is this dialectic of its own, to become line, the line the dialectic of becoming surface, the surface that of becoming total space. A second definition of line, surface and total space is given to the effect that the line comes about through the motion of the point, the surface through the motion of the line, and so on. This motion of the point, of the line and so on, is regarded, however, as something contingent, or as merely so pictured. In fact this is taken back again by the claim that the determinations out of which line and so on are supposed to come about are their elements and principles, and these are nothing but their limits at the same time; the coming-about is thus not held to be contingent or merely a matter of picturing. That point, line and surface, each for itself, are self-contradictory beginnings which repel themselves away from themselves, so that the point by its own concept passes out of itself into the line, moves in itself and lets the line come about, and so on – lies in the concept of the limit immanent to the something. The application belongs, however, to the consideration of space; to hint at it here: the point is limit made wholly abstract, yet limit in an existence; that existence is still taken quite indeterminately, it is so-called absolute, that is to say abstract, space, being-outside-one-another that is utterly continuous. Because limit here is not abstract negation but is in this existence, because it is spatial determinateness, the point is spatial, is the contradiction between abstract negation and continuity, and with that the passing over and having-passed-over into line and so on, just as indeed there is no point, and no line and no surface either.

Posited with its immanent limit as the contradiction of its own self, and by that contradiction pointed and driven out past itself, something is the finite.

c. Finitude

Existence is determinate; a quality belongs to something, and within its quality something stands not merely determined but limited; that quality constitutes its limit, and, saddled with such a limit, something remains for now an affirmative existence at rest. What makes up its finitude, however, is this negation once developed – developed so far that the opposition of its existence to the negation which is its immanent limit is itself the being-within-itself of the something, and the something is thereby nothing other than becoming in its own self.

When we say of things that they are finite, this does not mean merely that some determinateness attaches to them, that quality belongs to them only as reality and as determination existing in itself, nor merely that they are limited while still keeping an existence outside their limit, – it means rather that their very nature, their being, is made up of non-being. Finite things are, yet their reference to themselves runs thus: as negative they refer to themselves, and in that very self-reference they despatch themselves past themselves, past their own being. They are indeed, yet what this being holds as its truth is their end. Not only does the finite alter, as any something does; it ceases to be, and this ceasing-to-be of it is no mere possibility, as if the finite could be and yet not cease to be. Rather, the being of finite things as such consists in carrying the germ of ceasing-to-be as their being-within-itself; their hour of birth is likewise their hour of death.

α. The Immediacy of Finitude

Such mourning is carried along by the thought of the finitude of things, since finitude is qualitative negation driven to its sharpest point, and within the simplicity of a determination like that no affirmative being distinct from their determination to perish is any longer allowed them. It is because of this qualitative simplicity of the negation – a negation fallen back into the abstract opposition, over against being, of nothing and of ceasing-to-be – that finitude counts as the understanding's most obstinate category; negation as such, constitution, limit, each of these tolerates its other, existence; even abstract nothing, taken on its own, is surrendered as a mere abstraction; finitude, though, is the negation fixed in itself, and for that reason it confronts its affirmative with unrelieved harshness. Set flowing the finite may well be, for it is itself just this, to be determined towards its end, though towards its end alone; – what it amounts to is rather a refusal to be carried over affirmatively to its affirmative, to the infinite, a refusal to be bound up with it; posited it is, then, as inseparable from its own nothing, and any reconciliation with its other, the affirmative, is thereby severed. Finite things have no determination further than their end. In this mourning of finitude the understanding digs itself in, making non-being the determination of things while making it at once imperishable and absolute. Only in their other, in the affirmative, could their perishableness cease to be; their finitude would in that case detach itself from them; but finitude is a quality of theirs that cannot alter, one which never crosses over into its other, never into its affirmative, and so it is eternal.

The consideration is a very important one; that the finite be absolute – no philosophy, no view, no understanding will of course consent to have such a standpoint fastened upon it; quite the reverse stands expressly in the assertion made of the finite; limited and perishable is what the finite is; the finite is only finite, never the imperishable; this lies immediately in its determination and in its expression. Everything turns, though, on whether the view holds fast to the being of finitude, whether perishableness endures, or whether perishableness and ceasing-to-be do themselves cease to be? That precisely this does not happen is the fact of the matter in that very view of the finite for which ceasing-to-be is made the last thing of the finite. Expressly asserted is this, that finite and infinite do not tolerate each other and cannot be reconciled, that the finite stands utterly opposed to the infinite. Being, absolute being, is what gets ascribed to the infinite; facing it, the finite is accordingly held fast as the infinite's negative; unable to be reconciled with the infinite, the finite stays absolutely on its own side; affirmation would come to it from the affirmative, from the infinite, and it would thereby cease to be; only, a unification with the infinite is precisely what gets pronounced impossible. Should the finite not endure over against the infinite but cease to be instead, then, as already remarked, what is last is just this ceasing-to-be of the finite, and not the affirmative, which could only be the ceasing-to-be of ceasing-to-be. Suppose, on the other hand, that the finite were not to cease to be in the affirmative, and that its end were grasped as the nothing: then we should find ourselves back at that first abstract nothing which has itself long since ceased to be.

Now with a nothing of this kind, one that is supposed to be only nothing and to which a concrete existence is at the same time granted, in thinking, in representing, or in speaking, there arises the very contradiction just indicated in the case of the finite, except that there it merely arises, whereas in finitude it is express. In the former case the contradiction looks subjective; in the latter the claim is made that perennially the finite stands over against the infinite, that what is null in itself is, and that it is as something null in itself. This is what has to be brought to consciousness; and the development of the finite shows that in it, as this contradiction, the finite collapses inwardly, yet genuinely resolves the contradiction in this direction: not that the finite is merely perishable and ceases to be, but that ceasing-to-be, the nothing, is not what is last but itself ceases to be.

β. Restriction and the Ought

In the abstract, to be sure, this contradiction lies right at hand in the finitude of the something, or in the fact that the finite is. But something, being, is posited abstractly no longer; reflected into itself it is, developed as being-within-itself that has determination and constitution in it, and, said more precisely, that has a limit in it – a limit which, immanent to the something and constituting the quality of its being-within-itself, is finitude. Which moments this concept of the finite something contains is what now has to be seen.

For external reflection determination and constitution turned out to be sides; determination, though, already held otherness within it as something belonging to the in-itself of the something; on one side the externality of otherness lies within the something's own inwardness, on the other it stays distinct from that inwardness as externality, being externality as such still, yet in the something. Since otherness is now further determined as limit, and hence itself as negation of negation, the otherness that is immanent to the something stands posited as the connection between the two sides, and the something's unity with itself – a unity to which determination belongs no less than constitution – is its connection turned back against itself, the connection of its in-itself-existing determination to its immanent limit, a connection negating that limit within it. Being-within-itself, self-identical, refers itself in this way to itself as to its own non-being, yet as negation of negation, negating a non-being which meanwhile keeps existence within it, for that non-being is the quality of its being-within-itself. The something's own limit, posited by the something as a negative that is essential at the same time, is limit as such no longer but restriction. Restriction, though, is not the only thing posited as negated; two-edged is the negation, since what it posits as negated is the limit; the limit, namely, is quite generally the common element of something and other, and is also a determinateness of the being-in-itself of determination as such. This being-in-itself, accordingly, taken as the negative connection to a limit that is also distinguished from it, as the negative connection to itself qua restriction, is the ought.

If the limit that is in something at all is to be a restriction, then in its own self the something must simultaneously go out beyond it, must in its own self refer to it as to something non-existent. Quietly and indifferently the existence of the something lies, as it were alongside its limit. Something goes out beyond its limit, however, only insofar as it is that limit's sublatedness, the being-in-itself negative towards it. And since within the determination itself the limit is there as restriction, something thereby goes out beyond its own self.

So the ought contains a doubled determination: on the one hand determination as in-itself-existing over against negation, on the other hand that same determination as a non-being distinguished from it qua restriction and yet itself in-itself-existing determination at the same time.

The finite has thus determined itself as the connection of its determination to its limit; the determination, in that connection, is the ought, the limit is restriction. Both are accordingly moments of the finite, and both are therefore finite themselves, ought as well as restriction. Posited as the finite, however, is restriction alone; the ought is limited only in itself, and hence only for us. Limited it is through its connection to the limit already immanent in it, but this limitation of it is wrapped up within being-in-itself, for by its existence, that is, by its determinateness over against restriction, it is posited as the being-in-itself.

What ought to be is, and simultaneously is not. If it were, it would be no mere ought to be. Essentially, then, the ought has a restriction. Alien this restriction is not; that which only ought to be is the determination, now posited as it in truth is, namely as being at the same time only a determinateness.

The something's being-in-itself in its determination therefore lowers itself to an ought, because the very thing which makes up that being-in-itself is, in one and the same respect, present as non-being; and this in such fashion that within being-within-itself, the negation of negation, that being-in-itself is, as the one negation (the negating factor), unity with the other negation, which, being qualitatively other at the same time, is limit, so that the unity stands as a connection to it. Not an external thing is the restriction of the finite; rather its own determination is its restriction as well; and this restriction is itself and the ought together; it is what both have in common, or rather that in which both are identical.

As ought, though, the finite now goes further, out beyond its restriction; the very determinateness that constitutes its negation is sublated as well, and is so its being-in-itself; its limit is likewise not its limit.

Raised above its restriction, then, something is as ought, while conversely only as ought does it have its restriction. Inseparable are the two. Something has a restriction to the extent that negation is in its determination, and the determination is likewise the sublatedness of the restriction.

Remark

Of late the ought has been given a large part to play in philosophy, above all where morality is concerned, and metaphysically too as the ultimate and absolute concept of the identity of being-in-itself, or of reference to itself, with determinateness, or the limit.

You can, because you ought – this expression, from which much was expected, lies in the concept of the ought. For being beyond the restriction is just what the ought is; in it the limit is sublated, and so the being-in-itself of the ought is an identical reference to self, hence the abstraction of being able. – Conversely, though, it holds just as well: You cannot, precisely because you ought. For within the ought there lies just as much the restriction as restriction; that formalism of possibility has confronting it, in the restriction, a reality, a qualitative otherness, and the reference of the two to each other is contradiction, hence a not-being-able, or rather impossibility.

It is in the ought that the going out beyond finitude, infinity, has its beginning. The ought is that which, as development proceeds and in consequence of that impossibility, presents itself as the infinite progress.

Two prejudices touching the form of restriction and of the ought deserve a closer censure here. In the first place, a great deal is customarily made of the restrictions of thinking, of reason and so forth, and the assertion is put forward that the restriction cannot be gone beyond. What such an assertion fails to notice is that, in the very determining of something as a restriction, that restriction has already been passed beyond. For only in contrast to its other as such, that is, to its unrestricted, does a determinateness, a limit, count as determined into a restriction; the other of a restriction is precisely the beyond of it. Stone and metal do not pass beyond their restriction, and this because the restriction is not a restriction for them. If, however, in the face of such general propositions of understanding-bound thinking – that the restriction cannot be gone beyond – thinking declines to put itself to work and see what lies in the concept, then one can point it to actuality, where propositions of that sort turn out to be the most unactual of all. Just because thinking is supposed to be something higher than actuality, to hold itself at a distance from it in loftier regions, and so is itself determined as an ought, on the one hand it does not advance to the concept, and on the other it befalls it that its bearing is as untrue towards actuality as it is towards the concept. – Since the stone does not think, does not so much as feel, its limitedness is no restriction for it, which is to say, in it there is no negation for the feeling, representation, thinking and so forth that it does not have. Yet even the stone, being a something, is differentiated into its determination or being-in-itself and its existence, and to that extent it too passes beyond its restriction; the concept that it is in itself contains identity with its other. Should it be an acidifiable base, then it is oxidizable, neutralizable and so forth. In oxidation, neutralization and so forth its restriction of being there only as a base sublates itself; it passes beyond it; just as the acid sublates its restriction of being an acid, and in the acid as in the caustic base the ought to go beyond their restriction is so much at hand that they can be held fast as acid and caustic base – water-free, that is, purely non-neutral – only by force.

Where the concept is held in a concrete existence not merely as abstract being-in-itself, but as a totality that is for itself – as drive, as life, sensation, representing and so forth – there that existence accomplishes out of itself this being beyond the restriction and this going beyond it. The plant passes beyond the restriction of being a seed, and likewise beyond that of being blossom, of being fruit, of being leaf; the seed becomes the unfolded plant, the blossom fades and so forth. That which feels is, within the restriction of hunger, thirst and so forth, the drive to go beyond this restriction, and it carries this going-beyond through. It feels pain, and the privilege of a feeling nature is to feel pain; a negation is in its self, and that negation is determined in its feeling as a restriction, precisely because what feels has the feeling of its self, which is the totality and as such lies beyond that determinateness. Were it not beyond it, it would not feel that determinateness as its negation and would have no pain. – Reason, however, thinking, is supposed to be incapable of going beyond the restriction – reason, which is the universal, which for itself is beyond that, that is, beyond all particularity, and which is nothing other than the going beyond the restriction. – Admittedly not every going beyond and being beyond a restriction is a genuine liberation from it, a genuine affirmation; the ought itself is already such an incomplete going-beyond, and so is abstraction generally. But pointing to the wholly abstract universal suffices against the equally abstract assurance that the restriction cannot be gone beyond, just as pointing to the infinite as such already suffices against the assurance that the finite cannot be gone beyond.

A notion of Leibniz's that has an air of ingenuity may be mentioned here – that a magnet, if it had consciousness, would take its northward orientation for something its will had determined, a law of its own freedom. On the contrary: had it consciousness and with it will and freedom, it would be a thinking thing, so that space would be for it a universal space containing every direction, and the one direction northward would accordingly be a restriction upon its freedom, quite as it restricts a human being, though not a plant, to be held fast in one single spot.

The ought, on the other side, is the going beyond the restriction, but a going-beyond that is itself only finite. Its place and its validity therefore lie in the field of finitude, where it holds fast to being-in-itself against what is restricted and asserts it, against what is null, as the rule and the essential. Duty is an ought turned against the particular will, against selfish desire and arbitrary interest; to the will, insofar as in its mobility it can isolate itself from what is true, the true is held up as an ought. Those who set the ought of morality so high, and who suppose that morality is to be destroyed if the ought is not acknowledged as ultimate and true – and likewise the reasoners whose understanding grants itself the unceasing satisfaction of being able to bring an ought, and with it a knowing-better, against everything that is, and who for that reason are just as unwilling to have the ought taken from them – do not see that, for the finitude of their spheres, the ought is fully acknowledged. – But in actuality itself things do not stand so sadly with rationality and law that they merely ought to be, with nothing remaining but the abstractum of being-in-itself, any more than that the ought were perennial on its own self and – what comes to the same – finitude absolute. Kant's and Fichte's philosophy gives out the ought as the highest point at which the contradictions of reason are resolved, whereas it is rather only the standpoint of persisting in finitude and thereby in contradiction.

γ. Transition of the Finite into the Infinite

Taken for itself the ought contains the restriction, and the restriction contains the ought. What their reference to each other amounts to is the finite itself, which holds them both within its being-within-self. Qualitatively opposed to one another are these two moments of its determination: what determines the restriction is that it negates the ought, and what determines the ought is, in like manner, that it negates the restriction. The finite is in this way the contradiction of itself within itself; it sublates itself, passes away. Yet this result of its own, the negative as such, is α) nothing else than its own determination, since what stands here is a negative of what is negative. Hence the finite, in passing away, has not passed away; to begin with it has merely become an other finite, which however is equally a passing-away in the shape of a transition into yet another finite, and so on, into infinity perhaps. But β) should this result be examined more closely, then in passing away – in this its self-negation – the finite has reached its being-in-itself, having therein come together with its own self. Just this result is contained in each of its moments; the ought goes out beyond the restriction, that is, beyond its own self; but the beyond of it, or its other, is nothing but the restriction itself. The restriction, in turn, proves to be immediately out beyond its own self towards its other, which is the ought; this ought, though, is the very same sundering of being-in-itself and existence that the restriction is, is the same thing; going out beyond itself, therefore, the restriction likewise does no more than come together with itself. This identity with itself, the negation of the negation, is affirmative being, and hence the other of the finite – the finite being that whose determinateness is supposed to lie in the first negation; – that other is the infinite.

C. Infinity

Taken in its simple concept, the infinite may at first be counted a new definition of the absolute; as the determinationless reference to itself it is posited as being and becoming. Out of the series of determinations that can pass for definitions of the absolute, the forms of existence drop away, since the forms belonging to that sphere are for themselves immediately posited only as determinatenesses, as finite ones generally. The infinite, though, counts as absolute without qualification, for it is expressly determined as negation of the finite, so that in it express reference is made to limitedness – of which being and becoming, even if they neither have nor display any limitedness on themselves, might yet perhaps be capable – and limitedness of that sort is negated on it.

By this very fact, however, the infinite has not yet in truth been withdrawn from limitedness and finitude; what matters above all is that infinity in its genuine concept be marked off from bad infinity – reason's infinite from that which belongs to the understanding; this last, however, is the finitized infinite, and it will turn out that precisely in wanting to hold the infinite pure of the finite and remote from it, one only finitizes it.

The infinite is

a. in simple determination the affirmative as negation of the finite;

b. yet in that very way it enters into reciprocal determination with the finite; it is the abstract, one-sided infinite;

c. the self-sublating of this infinite, and likewise of the finite, as one single process, – is the genuine infinite.

a. The Infinite in General

Negation of the negation, the affirmative, being that has restored itself out of limitedness – such is the infinite. The infinite is, and in a more intensive sense than the first immediate being; it is genuine being; it is the elevation out of restriction. At the name of the infinite, light dawns upon heart and spirit, for therein spirit is not merely abstractly with itself but lifts itself up to its own self, into the light that is its thinking, its universality, its freedom.

What emerged first of all for the concept of the infinite was that existence determines itself as something finite within its being-in-itself, and passes out beyond the restriction. It belongs to the nature of the finite itself to go out beyond itself, to negate its negation, and to become infinite. Accordingly the infinite is not something finished for itself, standing above the finite, such that the finite would have and keep its abode outside it or beneath it. Nor is it we, as a merely subjective reason, who pass out over the finite into the infinite. Say that the infinite is reason's concept, and that by reason we lift ourselves above what is temporal – all this one lets happen quite without detriment to the finite, which is not touched at all by an elevation that stays external to it. Insofar, however, as the finite is itself raised into infinity, no alien force whatever does this to it; on the contrary, this is its own nature – to refer itself to itself as restriction, as restriction as such no less than as ought, and to go out beyond that restriction, or rather, being reference to itself, to have negated it and to be out beyond it. Infinity does not come about in a sublating of finitude generally; rather, the finite is nothing but this, to become infinity of itself, through its own nature. Infinity is its affirmative determination, that which it genuinely is in itself.

Thus in the infinite the finite has vanished away, and what there is, is the infinite alone.