A. Being

Being, pure being, – lacking every further determination. Within its indeterminate immediacy it stands equal to nothing but itself, and it is not unequal to anything else either; it harbors no diversity within itself, nor any facing outward. Any determination or content whatever – one discriminated within it, or one through which it would be posited as distinct from an other – would keep it from being held fast in its purity. It amounts to pure indeterminateness and emptiness. – Within it nothing presents itself for intuiting, supposing that intuiting may be spoken of at this point; or rather it is nothing but this pure, empty intuiting as such. There is just as little in it that could be thought, or it is, in the same way, merely this empty thinking. Being, that indeterminate immediate, is in fact nothing – nothing, no more and no less.

B. Nothing

Nothing, the pure nothing; it is simple self-equality, complete emptiness, want of determination and of content; undifferentiatedness within its own self. – To the extent that intuiting or thinking may be brought up at this point, it is taken as a difference whether what gets intuited or thought is something or nothing. Intuiting or thinking nothing accordingly carries a meaning; the two being held apart, nothing is (exists) within our intuiting or our thinking; or rather nothing is that very empty intuiting and thinking; and it is the same empty intuiting or thinking that pure being is. – Nothing, then, is the same determination – or better, the same lack of determination – and so is throughout the same as what pure being is.

C. Becoming

1. Unity of Being and Nothing

Thus pure being and pure nothing are one and the same. What the truth is, is not being and not nothing either, but rather that being into nothing, and nothing into being, – does not pass over, – but has passed over. Yet no less is the truth not their undifferentiatedness; it lies rather in this, that they are not one and the same, that they stand absolutely distinguished, and yet are equally unseparated and inseparable, and that immediately each vanishes into its opposite. Their truth, then, is this movement of the one's immediate vanishing into the other; the becoming; a movement wherein the two stand distinguished, yet by a difference that has dissolved itself just as immediately.

Remark 1

The customary counterpart set against something is nothing; yet something is by now already a determinate being, one marked off from other somethings; hence the nothing standing opposed to something – the nothing belonging to some something or other – is equally a nothing that is determinate. In the present context, though, what we must take is the nothing in the simplicity of its indeterminateness. – Were one to hold it more correct that, instead of nothing, non-being be opposed to being, there would be nothing to object to in view of the result, for in non-being the reference to being is contained; both, being and the negation of it, are enunciated in One, the nothing as it is in becoming. But at first it is not a matter of the form of opposition, that is, at the same time of reference, but of the abstract, immediate negation, nothing purely for itself, the relationless denial, – which one could also express, if one likes, by the mere: not.

The simple thought of pure being was enunciated first by the Eleatics, above all by Parmenides, as the absolute and as the sole truth, and in the fragments that survive from him with the pure enthusiasm of a thinking that grasps itself for the first time in its absolute abstraction: only being is, and nothing is not at all. – In oriental systems, essentially in Buddhism, the nothing, the void, is as is well known the absolute principle. – The profound Heraclitus brought forward against that simple and one-sided abstraction the higher total concept of becoming, and said: being is as little as nothing is, or again everything flows, that is, everything is becoming. – The popular sayings, especially the oriental ones, that everything which is has the germ of its ceasing-to-be in its very birth, and that death conversely is the entry into new life, express at bottom the same uniting of being and nothing. Such formulations, however, rest upon a substratum where the passing over occurs; time keeps being and nothing asunder, since they are represented as alternating within it, and they are not thought in their abstraction, nor consequently in a way that lets them be in and for themselves the same.

Ex nihilo nihil fit – this ranks among the propositions that metaphysics invested with weighty significance. In it there is either only the vacuous tautology to be seen: nothing is nothing; or, if becoming were to have an actual significance in it, then rather, since only nothing becomes out of nothing, no becoming is in fact present in it, for nothing there remains nothing. Becoming contains this, that nothing does not remain nothing but passes over into its other, into being. – Later metaphysics, above all the Christian sort, threw out the proposition that nothing yields nothing, and in doing so claimed a transition from nothing over into being; no matter how synthetically, or how merely representationally, that proposition was taken there, even the most imperfect of unions still harbours a point at which being and nothing meet and cease to be distinguished. – Whatever genuine weight the proposition out of nothing, nothing comes; nothing is precisely nothing carries, it carries by standing opposed to becoming as such, and with that against the world's creation out of nothing. Whoever maintains, and even waxes passionate in maintaining, that nothing is precisely nothing, has no awareness of thereby endorsing the abstract pantheism of the Eleatics, and in substance the Spinozist variety too. A philosophical outlook that takes as its principle: being is only being, nothing is only nothing, has earned the title system of identity; and pantheism has its essence in just this abstract identity.

Should this outcome – that being and nothing are one and the same – strike a reader as startling on its own account, or look paradoxical, there is no need to dwell on the matter; the astonishment itself is what deserves astonishment, an astonishment that presents itself as something so novel in philosophy and forgets that determinations occurring in this science are of a wholly different order from those of ordinary consciousness and of the so-called common human understanding, which is not exactly the sound understanding but rather the understanding trained up into abstractions and into belief – superstition, rather – in abstractions. Exhibiting the unity of being and nothing would be no hard task, in any example one likes, in any actual thing whatever or any thought. Of being and nothing we have to repeat what was stated above regarding immediacy and mediation (mediation being what contains a reference to one another and therewith negation), namely that neither in heaven nor on earth is there anything whatever which does not contain within itself both being and nothing. Granted, because what is spoken of in such cases is some something or other and something actual, the determinations no longer stand there in that consummate untruth which belongs to them as being and nothing, but stand rather under a further determination, taken say as positive and negative – the one a being that has been posited and reflected, the other a nothing posited and reflected; yet within positive and negative, the abstract groundwork of the one is being and of the other nothing. – Thus in God himself the quality, activity, creation, power, and so forth, essentially contains the determination of the negative, – they are a bringing forth of an other. But an empirical elucidation of that assertion by means of examples would here be altogether superfluous. Now that this unity of being and nothing underlies everything once and for all as the first truth and constitutes the element of all that comes after, becoming itself aside, every further determination of logic – existence, quality, indeed every concept of philosophy – furnishes an example of it. – But the self-styled common or sound human understanding may be referred, insofar as it rejects the unseparatedness of being and nothing, to the attempt to hunt out an example in which the one is to be found separated from the other (something from limit, restriction, or the infinite, God, as was just mentioned, from activity). Only the empty thought-things, being and nothing themselves, are these separated ones, and it is they that are preferred by that understanding to the truth, the unseparatedness of the two, which is everywhere before us.

One cannot wish to have the intention of meeting on all sides the confusions into which ordinary consciousness puts itself in the face of such a logical proposition, for they are inexhaustible. Only a few can be mentioned. Among the sources of such confusion is this, that consciousness approaches an abstract logical proposition of this kind carrying representations of some concrete something, and loses sight of the fact that nothing of that sort is under discussion, that what is under discussion is being and nothing in their pure abstraction alone, and that these are what must be kept firmly in view.

Being and non-being are one and the same; hence it makes no difference whether I am or fail to be, whether this house stands or does not, whether these hundred thalers figure in my financial estate or are absent from it. – This inference, or application of that proposition, completely alters its sense. The proposition contains the pure abstractions of being and nothing; the application, however, makes of them a determinate being and a determinate nothing. But of determinate being, as has been said, there is no talk here. A determinate, a finite being is one that refers itself to an other; it is a content standing in a relation of necessity with other content, with the whole world. Having regard to the way the whole hangs together in reciprocal determination, metaphysics was able to advance its – fundamentally tautological – claim that the destruction of a single mote of dust would bring the entire universe down with it. Among the instances marshalled against the proposition at issue, a something turns up for which being or not being is no matter of indifference – yet what decides the case is never the being or the non-being as such, but rather its content, whereby it hangs together with other things. If a determinate content, some determinate existence, is presupposed, then this existence, because it is determinate, stands in manifold reference to other content; it is not indifferent to it whether a certain other content with which it stands in reference is or is not; for only through such reference is it essentially what it is. The same is the case in representation (when we take non-being in the more determinate sense of representation as against actuality), in whose interconnection the being or the absence of a content that is represented as standing determinately in reference to other content is not indifferent. –

This consideration contains the same as what makes up a main moment in the Kantian critique of the ontological proof of the existence of God, a critique to which, however, regard is here given only with respect to the distinction occurring in it between being and nothing in general and determinate being or non-being. – As is well known, in that so-called proof the concept of a being was presupposed to which all realities accrue, hence also concrete existence, which was likewise assumed to be one of the realities. What the Kantian critique fastened on above all was that concrete existence, or being (the two counting here as equivalent in meaning), is neither a property nor a real predicate – meaning: it is no concept of anything capable of accruing to the concept of a thing.⁶ – Kant means thereby to say that being is no determination of content. – Hence, he continues, the possible contains no more than the actual; a hundred actual thalers contain not the least bit more than a hundred possible ones; – namely, the former have no other determination of content than the latter. For this content considered as isolated it is in fact indifferent to be or not to be; there lies in it no difference of being or non-being, this difference does not touch it at all; the hundred thalers do not become fewer if they are not, nor more if they are. A difference must first come from somewhere else. – »On the other hand, Kant recalls, in my financial estate there is more with a hundred actual thalers than with the mere concept of them, or with their possibility. For where actuality is concerned the object is not simply held analytically within my concept; rather it accrues synthetically to my concept, (a concept that is one determination of my state,) and yet this being outside my concept adds not the slightest to the hundred thalers as thought.«

Two sorts of states are here presupposed, to keep to the Kantian expressions, which are not without a confused ponderousness: the one, which Kant calls the concept, by which representation is to be understood, and another, the financial estate. For the one as for the other, the estate as well as the representing, a hundred thalers are a determination of content, or »they are added to such a determination, as Kant expresses it, synthetically;« I as possessor of a hundred thalers, or as non-possessor of them, or again I as representing a hundred thalers to myself, or not representing them, is indeed a different content. Put in more general terms: once being and nothing acquire a determinate content, the two abstractions stop being abstractions at all; being now amounts to reality, the determinate being of 100 thalers, and nothing to negation, the determinate non-being of those same thalers. This determinateness of content itself, the hundred thalers, taken also abstractly for itself, is unchanged the same in the one as in the other. But inasmuch as being is further taken as financial estate, the hundred thalers enter into reference to a state, and for this state such a determinateness as they are is not indifferent; their being or non-being is only alteration; they are transposed into the sphere of existence. So when someone presses against the unity of being and nothing the objection that it surely does matter whether this or that (the 100 thalers) is or is not, the deception lies in our pushing the difference off onto bare being and non-being, onto my having or not having the hundred thalers – a deception resting, as was shown, upon the one-sided abstraction which drops out the determinate existence that these examples in fact contain and clings to being and non-being by themselves; conversely the same abstraction turns the abstract being and nothing that ought to be grasped into a determinate being and nothing, into an existence. Only existence contains the real difference of being and nothing, namely a something and an other. – It is this real difference that hovers before representation, instead of abstract being and pure nothing and their merely intended difference.

As Kant expresses it, »through concrete existence something comes into the context of the whole of experience,« »we thereby get one object of perception more, but our concept of the object is not thereby augmented.« – This means, as follows from what has been elucidated, this much: through concrete existence, essentially because something is determinate concrete existence, it stands in interconnection with an other, and among others also with something perceiving. – »The concept of the hundred thalers, says Kant, is not augmented by perceiving.« The concept here means the hundred thalers noted before as represented in isolation. Isolated in that fashion they do count as an empirical content, yet a severed one, lacking interconnection and lacking determinateness as against an other; the form of self-identity strips from them their reference to an other and renders it a matter of indifference that they should be perceived or go unperceived. Yet what gets called the concept of the hundred thalers is a spurious concept; the form of simple self-reference does not of itself belong to a content so bounded and finite; that form is imposed on it, loaned to it, by the subjective understanding; a hundred thalers are no self-relating item but something alterable and transient.

The thinking or representing before which only a determinate being, existence, hovers, is to be referred back to the mentioned beginning of science which Parmenides made, who purified and raised his representing, and with it the representing of later times, into pure thought, into being as such, and thereby created the element of science. – What is the first in science has had to show itself historically as the first. And the Eleatic one or being we are to regard as the first of the knowledge of thought; water and material principles of that sort are indeed supposed to be the universal, but as matters they are not pure thoughts; numbers are neither the first simple thought nor the thought that remains with itself, but the thought wholly external to itself.

The referral of particular finite being back to being as such, in the complete abstractness of its universality, must count as the very first demand, theoretical and indeed practical alike. Suppose a great to-do is made over the hundred thalers, on the grounds that my financial estate is affected by my having them or not, and all the more by whether I exist or fail to, whether an other exists or fails to; then – leaving aside that there will be financial estates to which possessing a hundred thalers makes no odds – one may be reminded that a human being is meant to lift his disposition up into this abstract universality, one where it genuinely makes no odds to him whether or not the hundred thalers are, whatever quantitative ratio they may stand in to his financial estate, and equally none whether he himself is or is not, that is, is or is not amid finite life (a state, a determinate being, being what is meant here), and so on – even si fractus illabatur orbis, impavidum ferient ruinae, as a Roman put it, and the Christian is supposed to dwell in such indifference still more fully.

There is still to be noted the immediate connection in which the elevation above the hundred thalers and above finite things in general stands with the ontological proof and with the cited Kantian critique of it. This critique has made itself universally plausible through its popular example; who does not know that a hundred actual thalers are different from a hundred merely possible thalers? that they make a difference in my financial estate? Because the hundred thalers display this diversity, concept – that is, determinateness of content taken as bare possibility – stands distinct from being; hence God's concept likewise stands distinct from his being, and as little as I can extract the actuality of the hundred thalers out of their possibility, just as little can I »pick out« his concrete existence from the concept of God; and it is in this picking out of God's concrete existence from his concept that the ontological proof is supposed to consist. Granted the correctness of it, that concept differs from being, God differs still more widely from the hundred thalers and from the rest of finite things. What constitutes the definition of finite things is precisely that concept and being diverge in them, that concept and reality, soul and body, admit of being parted, and that finite things are on this account transient and mortal; God's abstract definition, by contrast, consists in just this, that with him concept and being stand unseparated and inseparable. A genuine critique of the categories and of reason amounts to just this: bringing cognition to an understanding of that difference, and restraining it from carrying over onto God the determinations and relations belonging to the finite.

Remark 2

Yet a further ground can be adduced, one that abets the repugnance felt towards the proposition concerning being and nothing; this ground is that the result issuing from the consideration of being and of nothing finds only imperfect expression in the proposition: being and nothing is one and the same. The stress falls by preference on the being one and the same, as happens in judgment as such, where the predicate is what first states what the subject is. So the sense appears to be a denial of the difference, a difference which all the same crops up immediately in the proposition itself; for the proposition gives voice to both determinations, being and nothing, and holds them in it as differentiated. – Nor can it be the intention that one abstract from them and hold fast to the unity alone. Such a sense would betray its own one-sidedness, seeing that what is to be abstracted from stands there in the proposition none the less, and is named. – Now to the extent that the proposition: being and nothing is the same, gives voice to the identity of these determinations while in fact no less holding the two of them in it as differentiated, it stands in contradiction with itself and dissolves. Fix this a little more closely and what has been posited here is a proposition which, looked at more closely, carries the movement of vanishing by its own doing. But with that, there takes place in the proposition itself precisely what is supposed to make up its genuine content, namely becoming.

So the result is what the proposition contains; the proposition is that result in itself. The point to be brought to notice here, though, is a deficiency: the proposition does not itself express the result; it takes an external reflection to recognize it there. – On this head a general observation has to be made straight away at the outset: a proposition in the form of a judgment is no fit vehicle for speculative truths; acquaintance with this circumstance would go far towards clearing away many a misunderstanding of speculative truths. A judgment is an identical reference of subject and predicate; one abstracts in it both from the subject's carrying yet more determinatenesses than the predicate's, and from the predicate's reaching further than the subject. Where the content is speculative, however, what is non-identical in subject and predicate counts no less as an essential moment, and just this the judgment leaves unsaid. Much in more recent philosophy wears a paradoxical and bizarre look for anyone unacquainted with speculative thinking, and that look is in great part to be charged to the form of the simple judgment, whenever that form is pressed into service for expressing speculative results.

With a view to expressing the speculative truth, the deficiency is at first made good by appending the counter-proposition, namely: being and nothing is not the same, which was equally enunciated above. Only, a fresh deficiency then arises: the two propositions stand unconnected, so that they exhibit the content merely as antinomy, whereas their content does bear on one and the same thing, and the determinations which the pair of them express are meant to be united outright – a uniting which can then be enunciated only as an unrest of factors at once incompatible, as a movement. To make it one-sided is the most usual wrong inflicted on speculative content, that is, to lift out only the one of the propositions into which such content admits of resolution. That this proposition does get asserted cannot then be denied; yet so correct as the report is, so false is it, for once a single proposition has been taken from the speculative, the other would have at the very least an equal claim to be heeded and reported. – Here too the, so to speak, unfortunate word: unity calls for particular mention; unity marks a subjective reflection even more than identity does; it is taken above all for the reference that issues from comparison, from reflection carried on externally. To the extent that such reflection lights on the same in two diverse objects, a unity is at hand in such fashion that the objects being compared are presupposed to stand in complete indifference towards this unity of theirs, so that the comparing and the unity are nothing to the objects themselves, and are a doing and determining external to them. Hence what unity expresses is a wholly abstract selfsameness, and it rings the harsher and the more startling the more outright the difference shown by the terms of which it is enunciated. In place of unity it would to that extent be better to speak only of unseparatedness and inseparability; only, the affirmative side of the whole reference goes unexpressed in that.

The entire, true result which has emerged here is accordingly becoming, a becoming that is not just the unity, one-sided and abstract, of being with nothing. What it consists in, rather, is a movement of this sort: that pure being is immediate and simple, that on that very account it is quite as much pure nothing, that the difference of the two is and yet quite as much sublates itself and is not. Quite as much, then, does the result assert the difference of being and nothing, though only as a difference supposed.

One supposes that being is rather the outright other of what nothing is, that nothing is plainer than their absolute difference, and that nothing could look easier than being able to state it. Just as easily, though, may one become convinced that this cannot be done, that the difference is unsayable. Those who would insist on the difference of being and nothing may challenge themselves to state wherein it consists. Were there any determinateness in being and nothing through which the two were distinguished, then, as has been recalled, what one would have would be a determinate being and a determinate nothing, not being in its purity and nothing in its purity, which is what they still are at this stage. Their difference is therefore quite empty, the indeterminate is what each of the two equally is; the difference accordingly rests not in them themselves but only in a third, in supposing. But supposing is a form belonging to the subjective, which has no place in this order of the exposition. The third, though, wherein being and nothing have their subsistence, must make its appearance here as well; and it has appeared, it is becoming. Within it they are as differentiated; becoming has being only so far as they are differentiated. This third is something other than they; – their subsisting only in an other says equally that for themselves they have no subsistence. Becoming is the subsistence of being quite as much as of non-being; or rather their subsistence is nothing but their being in One; and it is just this subsistence of theirs which quite as much sublates their difference.

The challenge to state the difference of being and nothing carries within it the further challenge to say what then being and what nothing is. Those who balk at recognizing each of the two only as a passing over into the other, and who assert this or that of being and of nothing, may indicate what they speak of, in other words, may put forward a definition of being and of nothing, and demonstrate its correctness. Until that first requirement of the older science has been met, a science whose logical rules they otherwise allow to hold and do apply, all those assertions about being and nothing are mere assurances, nullities in point of science. If it has elsewhere been said that concrete existence, taken at first as equivalent in meaning to being, is the completion of possibility, then a further determination, possibility, is thereby presupposed, and being is enunciated not in its immediacy but rather as something not self-subsistent, as conditioned. For being that is mediated we shall keep in reserve the expression: concrete existence. Being, though, one does no doubt represent to oneself – under the image, say, of light in its purity, as the brightness of a seeing undimmed, and nothing as sheer night, and one hangs their difference on this familiar sensuous diversity. In fact, however, let this seeing be represented rather more precisely and one may easily grow aware that absolute brightness lets one see exactly as much and exactly as little as absolute darkness, that either seeing is as good as the other, a pure seeing, a seeing of nothing. Light in its purity and darkness in its purity are two vacuities, and they are one and the same. Only in light that is determinate – and light gets its determination from darkness, – hence in dimmed light, and likewise only in darkness that is determinate, – and darkness gets its determination from light, – in illumined darkness, can anything be distinguished, since dimmed light and illumined darkness are the first to have the difference in them themselves, and thereby to be determinate being, existence.

Remark 3

That unity whose moments, being and nothing, are moments that cannot be parted is itself, at the same time, distinct from them, and so stands over against them as a third, whose own most proper shape is becoming. Passing over says no more than becoming does; only, in the former the two terms, from one of which the passage is made to the other, are pictured rather as lying at rest apart from one another, with the passing over taking place between them. Whenever and in whatever way being or nothing is brought into discussion, this third has to be there; for the two do not stand on their own — they have their place only within becoming, within this third. Now this third takes on a multitude of empirical shapes, and abstraction pushes these aside or lets them go, in order to secure its own products, being and nothing, each in isolation, and to present them as safe from any passing over. The reply to so simple a manoeuvre on abstraction's part is equally simple: one need only recall empirical concrete existence, wherein this abstraction is itself no more than a something, and possesses an existence. Failing that, what one meets with are forms of reflection meant to pin down the separation of what cannot be separated. In and for itself, any such determination already harbours its own contrary within it, and there is no need to fall back on the nature of the matter and appeal to that: the determination of reflection can be thrown into confusion on its own ground, simply by taking it just as it presents itself and showing up its other within it. It would be wasted effort to try to net, as it were, every twist and every notion of reflection and of its ratiocination, with a view to closing off the exits and the sidesteps whereby it hides its self-contradiction from itself. For that reason I likewise decline to take account of the numerous so-called objections and refutations that have been raised against the position that neither being nor nothing is anything true, and that becoming alone is their truth; the cultivation of thought required for grasping how void such refutations are — or rather for chasing such notions away oneself — comes about solely through the critical cognition of the forms of the understanding; but those who are richest in objections of this kind pounce with their reflections on the very first propositions, without having gained, through further study of the logic, any awareness of the nature of these crude reflections, or having had such awareness given to them.

A few of the phenomena may be examined that come of isolating being and nothing from each other, of positing the one outside the province of the other, so that the passing over is thereby denied.

Parmenides clung to being, and he did so with the greatest consistency, inasmuch as he declared of nothing at the same time that it is not at all; being alone is. Being taken so entirely on its own is the indeterminate; it therefore bears no reference to anything else, and it looks accordingly as though no further advance were possible from such a beginning — no advance, that is, out of the beginning itself — and as though any advance could come about only by having something foreign attached to it from outside. Hence the advance to the proposition that being is the very same as nothing looks like a second, absolute beginning, – a passing over standing on its own, which would accrue to being from without. Were being to possess a determinateness, it would not be the absolute beginning at all; it would then hang upon something else and would not be immediate, not the beginning. If, on the other hand, it is indeterminate, and to that extent a genuine beginning, then it likewise possesses nothing whereby it might carry itself over into an other – it is at once the end as well. Nothing can burst forth out of it any more than anything can burst into it; in Parmenides no less than in Spinoza, no advance is to be made from being, or from absolute substance, to the negative, to the finite. If an advance is made all the same — which, as noted, can only happen externally, given a being without reference and hence without advance — then that advance amounts to a second, fresh beginning. Thus Fichte's utterly absolute, unconditioned first principle runs: A = A, positing; the second principle is opposing; and this one is supposed to be in part conditioned and in part unconditioned (and so contradictory within itself). What we have here is an advance made by external reflection, which no less denies again what it began with as an absolute – opposing being the negation of the first identity – than it turns its second unconditioned, in the very same breath and quite explicitly, into a conditioned. Yet if there were any title whatever for advancing, i.e. for sublating the first beginning, the ground for it would have to lie in that first itself, namely that an other could bear reference to it; the first would accordingly have to be something determinate. But this is just what neither being nor absolute substance claims to be; quite the reverse. It is the immediate, that which is still wholly indeterminate.

The most eloquent accounts — perhaps by now forgotten — of how impossible it is to get from an abstraction to anything beyond it, and to a unification of the two, come from Jacobi, written in the service of his polemic against the Kantian synthesis of self-consciousness à priori, in his Abh. on the undertaking of criticism to bring reason to understanding (Jacobi's Works, Vol. III). He frames the task (p. 113) in this way: that within something pure — whether of consciousness, of space, or of time — the emergence or the producing of a synthesis be displayed. »Let space be one, time be one, consciousness be one; – now say how any single one of these three ones makes itself purely manifold within its own self; – each is but one and no other; – a uniformity, a Der- Die- Das- selfsameness! with no Der-ness, no Die-ness, no Das-ness; for these are still dozing, along with the Der, Die, Das, in the infinite = 0 of the indeterminate, out of which each and every determinate thing is first supposed to issue! What is it that brings finitude into those three infinities; what fertilizes space and time à priori with number and with measure, turning them into a pure manifold; what sets pure spontaneity (I) oscillating? How does its pure vowel reach a consonant, or rather, how does its soundless unbroken breathing break off, interrupting itself, so as to win at least some kind of vowel-sound, an accent?« – One can see that Jacobi has quite definitely recognized the non-essence of abstraction, be it so-called absolute, i.e. merely abstract, space, or time of that same kind, or pure consciousness, the I, of that same kind; and he holds to it precisely in order to maintain that no advance is possible to an other, to the condition of a synthesis, nor to the synthesis itself. The synthesis that constitutes the point at issue must not be understood as a joining together of determinations already on hand externally, – for one thing, the question is precisely that of generating a second alongside a first, of something determinate alongside the indeterminate initial term; for another, the question concerns the immanent synthesis, synthesis à priori, – the unity of what is differentiated, a unity in and for itself. This immanent synthesis of being and nothing is becoming; but since the meaning that first suggests itself for synthesis is that of an external gathering-together of things externally on hand over against one another, the term synthesis, synthetic unity, has rightly fallen out of use. – Jacobi asks, how the pure vowel of the I arrives at a consonant, what it is that brings determinateness into indeterminateness? – the what? would admit of an easy answer, and Kant did in fact answer this question in his own manner; but to ask after the How? is to ask in what fashion and mode, according to what relation and the like, and thus to demand that a particular category be specified; yet fashion and mode, categories of the understanding, cannot come into play here. The question after the how? belongs itself among reflection's bad habits: it inquires after comprehensibility while presupposing its own rigid categories, and thereby knows itself armed in advance against any answer to what it inquires after. In Jacobi it does not even carry the loftier sense of an inquiry after the necessity of the synthesis, since he persists, as has been said, firmly in the abstractions, and does so in order to assert that synthesis is impossible. He gives a particularly graphic description (p. 147) of the procedure by which one arrives at the abstraction of space. »For that stretch of time I must seek purely to forget that I ever saw, heard, stirred, or touched anything at all, myself expressly not excluded. Purely, purely, purely must I forget all motion, and let this very forgetting be my most urgent business, since it is the hardest thing of all. Whatever I have thought away, I must let it be got rid of wholly and utterly as well, retaining nothing at all beyond the intuition, kept standing by force, of infinite unchangeable space alone. Neither, then, may I think myself back into it as something distinct from it and yet bound up with it; I may not let it merely surround and permeate me; instead I have to pass over into it entirely, to become one with it, to change myself into it; nothing of myself may I leave over save this intuition of mine, so that I may regard it as a truly self-subsistent, independent, single and solitary representation.«

With continuity as purely abstract as this, that is, with representing so indeterminate and so empty, it makes no odds whether one names such an abstraction space, or pure intuiting, or pure thinking; – it comes to the very same as what the Indian calls Brahma when, motionless outwardly and equally unstirring in sensation, representation, imagination, desire and so on, he gazes for years together at nothing but the tip of his nose, uttering inwardly only Om, Om, Om, or else nothing whatever. Taken as consciousness, this dull and empty consciousness is – being.

Within this emptiness, Jacobi goes on, what happens to him is the reverse of what, according to Kantian assurances, ought to happen to him; he does not come upon himself as a many and a manifold, but rather as one, devoid of all plurality and manifoldness; indeed, »I am impossibility itself, I am the annihilation of all that is manifold and plural, – out of my pure, utterly simple, unalterable essence I can not reinstate even the least thing, nor conjure it back into myself as a ghost; – and so, in this purity, everything outside-and-alongside-one-another, and all manifoldness and plurality that rests upon it, is disclosed as something purely impossible.«

This impossibility amounts to nothing beyond the tautology: I cling to the abstract unity and shut out all plurality and manifoldness, I confine myself to what is undifferentiated and indeterminate, and I avert my eyes from everything differentiated and determinate. Kant's synthesis à priori of self-consciousness — that is, the activity by which this unity sunders itself and maintains itself in that sundering — Jacobi dilutes into this very same abstraction. That »synthesis in itself«, the »original judging,« he converts one-sidedly into »the copula in itself; – an Is, Is, Is, lacking beginning, lacking end, and lacking any What, Who and Which; this repeating of the repetition, carried on to infinity, is the sole occupation, function and production of the very purest synthesis; that synthesis is nothing but the bare, pure, absolute repeating itself.« Or rather, in point of fact, since there is no break in it, i.e. no negation, no differentiating, it [is] not a repeating at all but merely undifferentiated simple being. – Yet is this still synthesis, once Jacobi drops precisely that whereby the unity is a synthetic unity?

In the first place, when Jacobi installs himself in this fashion in absolute, i.e. abstract, space, time, and consciousness too, one has to say that he thereby places himself in, and holds fast to, something empirically false; there is no space and time, i.e. none is empirically on hand, that would be an unbounded spatial and temporal something, that would not be filled throughout its continuity with existence and alteration bounded in manifold ways, such that these limits and alterations belong to spatiality and temporality unseparated and inseparably; and consciousness, likewise, is filled with determinate sensing, representing, desiring and so on; it exists in no separation from some particular content. – The empirical passing over goes without saying in any case; consciousness may well make empty space, empty time and empty consciousness itself, or pure being, into its object and content, yet it does not remain there — it not merely moves but positively forces its way out of such emptiness towards a better, i.e. in some manner more concrete, content, and however wretched a content may otherwise be, to that extent it is better and truer; a content of just this kind is a synthetic one in general, synthetic taken in the wider sense. Thus Parmenides finds himself with shine and opinion on his hands, the opposite of being and of truth; thus Spinoza with the attributes, the modes, extension, motion, understanding, will and so on. Synthesis holds within it and exhibits the untruth of those abstractions: within it they stand in unity with their other, and so not as subsisting for themselves, not as absolutes, but as relative through and through.

But displaying the empirical nullity of empty space and the rest is not the point at issue. Consciousness can, to be sure, fill itself abstractively with that indeterminate as well, and the abstractions so held onto are the thoughts of pure space, of time, of pure consciousness, of pure being. What has to be displayed as null is the thought of pure space and the rest, i.e. pure space and the rest in it itself — displayed, that is, as being already, as such, its own contrary, as having its contrary already forced its way into it in it itself, as being already on its own account the having-emerged-from-itself, determinateness.

This, however, follows immediately upon them. They are, as Jacobi describes at length, results of abstraction, and they are expressly determined as indeterminate — which, to fall back on its simplest form, is being. Yet it is precisely this indeterminateness that constitutes its determinateness; for the indeterminate stands over against the determinate; standing so over against it, the indeterminate is itself the determinate, or the negative, and indeed the pure, wholly abstract negative. What external reflection, and internal reflection too, gives voice to when it sets being equal to nothing, pronouncing it an empty figment of thought, a nothing, is just this indeterminateness or abstract negation which being thus has in it itself. – Or one may express it so: since being is what lacks all determination, it is not the (affirmative) determinateness that it is, and hence is not being but nothing.

Within the pure reflection of the beginning — the beginning being made, in the present logic, with being as such — the transition still lies hidden; since being has been posited merely as immediate, the nothing in it likewise breaks out merely immediately. All the determinations that come after, however, beginning at once with existence, are more concrete; in existence there is already posited whatever contains and generates the contradiction of those abstractions, and with it their passing over. Where being is that simple, immediate term, the reminder that it is a result of complete abstraction, and hence already on that count abstract negativity, nothing, is left in the rear of the science — a science which, within its own bounds and expressly setting out from essence, will present that one-sided immediacy as something mediated, at the point where being as concrete existence, together with the mediator of this being, the ground, is posited.

Armed with that reminder, one can represent the transition of being into nothing as something easy and trivial in itself, or, as the phrase goes, explain it and make it comprehensible, by saying that being, which has been made the beginning of the science, is of course nothing, since one may abstract from everything, and when everything has been abstracted from, nothing is left. But, so the argument may run on, the beginning is thus not anything affirmative, not being, but precisely nothing, and then nothing is the end as well, quite as much as immediate being is, and indeed still more so. The quickest course is to let such ratiocination run on and to observe what sort of results these are that it plumes itself upon. That nothing should on this showing be the result of that ratiocination, and that the beginning should now be made with nothing (as in Chinese philosophy), would not be worth so much as turning one's hand over, for before the hand were turned this nothing would just as surely have converted itself into being, (see above: B. Nothing). But further, granting the presupposition of that abstraction from everything — everything being, after all, something that has being — it needs to be taken more precisely; abstraction from all that has being yields at first abstract being, being in general; it is the same in the cosmological proof of God's existence, drawn from the world's contingent being: in rising above that contingent being the proof still carries being up along with it, determining being as infinite being. It is possible, however, to abstract from this pure being too, to throw being in with all the rest that has already been abstracted from; then nothing is left. One can now, provided one is willing to forget the thinking of nothing, i.e. its overturning into being, or knew nothing of it in the first place, keep going in the style of that can; for it is possible (thank God!) to abstract from nothing as well (the creation of the world being, after all, likewise an abstraction from nothing), and then what is left is not nothing, since it is just this that is abstracted from, but one has thus come back round to being. – This can gives an external game of abstracting, in which abstracting is itself nothing but the one-sided doing of the negative. To begin with, it lies in this can itself that being is as much a matter of indifference to it as nothing is, and that just as surely as each of the two vanishes, each equally comes to be; but it is a matter of equal indifference whether one starts from the doing of nothing or from nothing; the doing of nothing, i.e. mere abstracting, is neither more nor less something true than the bare nothing is.

The dialectic by which Plato handles the one in the Parmenides is likewise to be counted rather as a dialectic belonging to external reflection. Both being and the one are Eleatic forms, and they are the same. Yet they also admit of being distinguished, and that is how Plato takes them in the dialogue in question. Once he has stripped away from the one all the sundry determinations — whole and parts, being in itself, being in an other and so forth, figure, time and so forth — the result is that being does not accrue to the one, since a something acquires being in no way other than according to one of those modes (p. 141. e. Vol. III. ed. Steph.). Plato then takes up the proposition: the one is; and one should look in his text to see how the transition from this proposition to the non-being of the one is effected; it comes about by comparing the two determinations of the proposition presupposed, the one is: the proposition holds the one and being; and the one is holds more than saying merely, the one. In their being diverse the moment of negation lodged in the proposition is displayed. Clearly this route rests on a presupposition and is an external reflection.

Just as the one is here brought into connection with being, so being — which is supposed to be held fast abstractly for itself — is most simply displayed, without any need to enter into thinking, within a connection that carries the contrary of what is meant to be maintained. Being, taken as it immediately is, pertains to a subject, is a thing said, possesses an empirical existence in general, and thereby has its footing on the ground of restriction and of the negative. Whatever expressions or turns of phrase the understanding may resort to when it balks at the unity of being and nothing and calls upon what is immediately on hand, in that very experience it will come upon no being save determinate being, being together with a restriction or a negation, – the very unity it repudiates. The assertion of immediate being thus shrinks to an empirical concrete existence, whose display the assertion cannot reject, since the immediacy outside of thinking is precisely what it means to hold on to.

It stands the same way with nothing, only inversely, and this reflection is a familiar one, made about nothing often enough. Nothing, taken in its immediacy, presents itself as something having being; for by its nature it is the very same as being. One thinks nothing, one represents it, one speaks of it; therefore it is; nothing has its being in the thinking, the representing, the speaking and so forth. This being, however, is also distinguished from it; hence one says that nothing is indeed present in thinking, in representing, but that on that score it is not, that being does not accrue to it as such, and that only thinking or representing constitutes this being. In drawing this distinction it can as little be denied that nothing stands in reference to a being; but within the reference, even though the reference also carries the difference, a unity with being is on hand. However nothing may be uttered or displayed, it shows itself in connection, or in contact if one prefers, with a being, unseparated from a being, in short within an existence.

But when nothing is displayed in this way within an existence, there is still apt to hover before the mind this difference of nothing from being: that the existence of nothing is in no way anything accruing to nothing itself, that nothing does not have being for its own in it, that it is not being as such; nothing is said to be mere absence of being, darkness on this view no more than the absence of light, cold no more than the absence of warmth, and so on. Darkness, so it is said, carries meaning only in relation to the eye, in an external comparison with the positive, with light; cold too is only a something within our sensation, while light and warmth, like being, are on their own account the objective, the real, the efficacious, of an utterly other quality and worth than those negatives, than nothing. One may frequently find it advertised as a most important reflection and a weighty piece of cognition that darkness should be only absence of light and cold only absence of warmth. Of this shrewd reflection it may be remarked empirically, within this field of empirical objects, that darkness does in fact prove efficacious within light, in that it determines light into colour and thereby first confers visibility upon light itself, seeing that, as was said earlier, in pure light one sees as little as in pure darkness. Visibility, however, is an efficacy in the eye, and in it that negative has just as large a share as light does, which passes for the real and the positive; cold, likewise, makes itself sufficiently felt by water, by our sensation and so on, and if we refuse it so-called objective reality, absolutely nothing is thereby won against it. Something further would have to be faulted here, namely that in this case too, as above, what is spoken of is a negative of determinate content, and one does not stay put at nothing itself, over against which being, considered as empty abstraction, has neither anything less nor anything more. – Cold, darkness and determinate negations of that sort are, however, to be taken straight away on their own, and one must see what gets posited with them in view of the general determination under which they have been brought in here. They are supposed to be, not the nothing at large, but light's nothing, warmth's nothing and so forth – the nothing of something determinate, of some content; determinate nothings, then, nothings with a content, if one may speak so. But a determinateness, as will emerge further along, is itself a negation; hence these are negative nothings; and a negative nothing is something affirmative. The overturning of nothing, by way of its determinateness (which appeared just now as an existence in the subject, or in whatever else it might be), into something affirmative strikes the consciousness that stands firm in the abstraction of the understanding as the most paradoxical thing imaginable; simple though the insight is, or indeed just because of its simplicity, the insight that negation of negation is positive strikes one as trivial, something the proud understanding therefore need not attend to, granted the matter is right enough, – and it is not merely right: because determinations of this kind are universal, it has infinite reach and universal application, so that it would be well worth attending to.

One further remark may be made about how the passing over of being and nothing into one another is determined: it too is to be grasped without any additional determination of reflection. It is immediate and altogether abstract, owing to the abstractness of the moments that pass over, that is, inasmuch as the determinateness of the other, by means of which they would pass over, is not yet posited in these moments; nothing is not yet posited in being, notwithstanding that being essentially is nothing, and vice versa. For this reason it is not permissible to bring more determinate mediations to bear here, nor to grasp being and nothing within some relation or other, – that passing over is as yet no relation. One may therefore not say: nothing is the ground from which being comes; or being is the ground from which nothing comes; – nothing the cause of being and so forth; or that the passage into nothing can take place only on the condition that something is, and the passage into being only on the condition of non-being. The manner of the reference admits of no further determination unless the sides referred to are determined further at the same time. The nexus of ground and consequent and so forth does not have bare being and nothing any longer as the sides it joins, but expressly a being that is ground, and a something which, though it be only a posited and not self-subsistent, is nevertheless not the abstract nothing.

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.