Third Section. Actuality

Actuality is essence and concrete existence in their unity; in it the shapeless essence and the unsteady appearance; – or the subsistence that lacks determination and the manifoldness that lacks subsistence, have their truth. Concrete existence is indeed the immediacy that has come forth out of ground, but it has not yet posited form in itself; in determining and shaping itself it is appearance; and as this subsistence, determined merely as reflection-into-an-other, works its way on into reflection-into-self, it turns into two worlds, two totalities of content, one of them carrying the determination of being reflected into itself, the other that of being reflected into an other. The essential relation, however, exhibits their form-reference, and the completion of that reference is the relation of inner and outer: that the content of the two is but one identical foundation and quite as much but one identity of form. – Since this identity has now emerged with respect to form as well, the form-determination of their diversity is sublated, and it stands posited that they are one absolute totality.

This unity of the inner with the outer is absolute actuality. Such actuality, though, is at first the absolute as such; – insofar as it stands posited as a unity wherein form has sublated itself and turned itself into the empty or external difference of an outer and an inner. Towards this absolute, reflection bears itself as something external, one that contemplates the absolute rather than being the absolute's own movement. Yet since reflection essentially is that movement, it is, as the absolute's own negative return into itself,

Secondly, actuality proper. Actuality, possibility and necessity make up the formal moments of the absolute, or the reflection belonging to it.

Thirdly, the absolute and its reflection in their unity make up the absolute relation, or rather the absolute in relating to its own self; substance.

Chapter 1. The Absolute

The absolute's simple, solid identity is indeterminate, or rather within it every determinateness of essence and of concrete existence, indeed of being at large as well as of reflection, has dissolved. To that extent the determining of what the absolute is turns out negative, and the absolute itself shows up as nothing but the negating of every predicate, as the empty. Yet since it has quite as much to be pronounced the position of every predicate, it shows up as the most formal of contradictions. Where that negating and this positing are the business of external reflection, what we have is a formal, unsystematic dialectic which with little trouble picks up the sundry determinations here and there, and with just as little trouble displays on the one side their finitude and mere relativity, while on the other, the absolute hovering before it as the totality, it declares of the absolute that all determinations dwell within it – without being able to raise these positions and those negations into a genuine unity. – What ought to be exhibited, however, is what the absolute is; yet this exhibiting can be neither a determining nor an external reflection, whereby determinations of the absolute would arise; it is rather the exposition, and indeed the absolute's own exposition, a mere showing of what it is.

A. The Exposition of the Absolute

The absolute is neither merely being nor yet essence. The first of these is immediacy unreflected, the second immediacy reflected; each, moreover, is totality in its own self, though a determinate one. At essence, being steps forth as concrete existence; and the reference between being and essence has developed as far as the relation of the inner to the outer. Essence is what the inner is, though as the totality carrying essentially the determination of standing referred to being and of immediately being being. The outer, for its part, is being, though with the essential determination that, standing referred to reflection, it is immediately and just as much an identity with essence devoid of relation. The absolute itself is the absolute unity of the two; it is what at bottom makes up the ground of the essential relation, a relation which as relation has merely not yet gone back into this identity of its own and whose ground is not yet posited.

What emerges from this is that the absolute has for its determination to be the absolute form, though at the same time not as that identity whose moments are merely simple determinatenesses; – rather as the identity each of whose moments is in its own self the totality and so, indifferent as it is towards form, the complete content of the whole. Conversely, though, the absolute is the absolute content in such fashion that the content, indifferent manifoldness as content is, has the negative form-reference in it, whereby its manifoldness is only one solid identity.

The identity of the absolute is thus absolute in virtue of this, that its every part is itself the whole, or its every determinateness the totality, that is, that determinateness generally has become a shine wholly transparent, a difference vanished in its positedness. Essence, concrete existence, world that is in itself, whole, parts, force, – to representation such reflected determinations look like true being valid in and for itself; the absolute, set against them, is the ground wherein they have gone under. – Now because in the absolute form is only simple identity with itself, no determining of itself goes on in the absolute; for determination is a difference of form, which in the first instance holds as such. But because it contains at the same time all difference and form-determination generally, or because absolute form and reflection is what it itself is, the diversity of content must also come to the fore in it. Yet absolute identity is what the absolute itself is; this is its determination, since all the manifoldness of the world that is in itself and of the world that appears, of the inner and the outer totality, is sublated in it. – Within the absolute there is no becoming, for it is not being; nor is it the determining that reflects itself, for it is not the essence determining itself merely within itself; neither is it an expressing of itself, for it is as the identity of inner and outer. – But so stated, the movement of reflection stands over against this absolute identity of its. Sublated in that identity, reflection is only the identity's inner; and just with this it is external to it. – To begin with, therefore, its whole business consists in sublating within the absolute what it itself does. Being the beyond of manifold differences and determinations, and of the movement these make, it lies at the absolute's back; hence it does indeed take those differences up, yet at the same time lets them go under; and so it is that negative exposition of the absolute spoken of earlier. – In its genuine presentation this exposition is the whole logical movement so far, that of the sphere of being and of essence, whose content was neither snatched up from outside as given and contingent, nor plunged into the absolute's abyss by a reflection standing outside it, but has determined itself in its own self through the inner necessity it has and, as being's own becoming and essence's reflection, has gone back into the absolute as into its ground.

This exposition, however, has at the same time a positive side of its own; namely so far as the finite, in foundering, proves this nature of standing referred to the absolute, or of containing the absolute in its own self. This side, however, is less the positive exposition of the absolute itself than the exposition of the determinations: namely that the absolute is their abyss, yet their ground as well, or that what lends them, the shine, a subsistence is the absolute itself. – Shine is not the nothing; it is reflection, reference to the absolute; or it is shine so far as the absolute shines in it. In this way the positive exposition still detains the finite short of its vanishing, taking it for an expression and likeness of the absolute. Yet the finite's transparency, which lets nothing but the absolute be glimpsed through it, ends in vanishing altogether; for there is nothing about the finite that could keep for it any difference from the absolute; it is a medium swallowed up by what shines through it.

Therefore this positive exposition of the absolute is itself no more than a shining; for the truly positive that it and the expounded content contain is the absolute itself. Whatever further determinations turn up, the form wherein the absolute shines is something null, taken up by the exposition from outside, something on which it wins a beginning for what it does. A determination of that kind does not have its beginning in the absolute, but only its end there. This expounding is therefore indeed absolute doing by virtue of the reference it has to the absolute, into which it goes back, but not by virtue of its starting point, a determination lying outside the absolute.

In fact, however, the expounding of the absolute is the absolute's own doing, one that begins with itself just as it arrives at itself. The absolute, taken merely as absolute identity, is determinate; namely as identical; reflection has posited it thus, in contrast to opposition and manifoldness; or it is nothing but the negative belonging to reflection and to determining generally. – Not only that expounding of the absolute is on that account something imperfect; so too is this absolute itself, at which alone one arrives. Or an absolute of that sort, one that is merely as absolute identity, amounts to no more than the absolute of an external reflection. Hence it is not the absolutely-absolute but rather the absolute standing in a determinateness; or it is attribute.

But the absolute is not attribute merely because it is the object of an external reflection and hence something determined by that reflection. – Or reflection is not merely external to it; rather, immediately, and just because it is external to it, it is internal to it. What makes the absolute absolute is just that it is no abstract identity, but the identity of being with essence, the identity of inner with outer. So it is itself the absolute form, the form that makes the absolute shine within itself and determines it to attribute.

B. The Absolute Attribute

The expression that has been used, the absolutely-absolute, designates the absolute as returned into itself in its form, the absolute whose form equals its content. Attribute is the merely relative absolute, a conjunction that means nothing else than the absolute standing in a form-determination. For form, ahead of its completed exposition, is at first only as yet inward, or, what comes to the same, only outward, in general, to start with, determinate form, that is, negation in general. Since form at the same time is as the absolute's form, however, attribute is the absolute's whole content; it is the totality that showed itself earlier under the shape of a world, or as one of the two sides of the essential relation, either of them being itself the whole. Yet the two worlds, the appearing one and the one that is in and for itself, were each meant to be opposed to the other in its essence. Of the essential relation it did hold that its one side was equal to the other: the whole came to as much as the parts; force's expression to a content the same as force's own; and the outer in general to what the inner is. Yet at the same time each of these sides was meant to have an immediate subsistence of its own besides, the one as the immediacy that is, the other as the reflected immediacy. In the absolute, by contrast, these distinct immediacies are brought down to shine, and the totality which attribute is stands posited as its true and sole subsistence; whereas the determination in which that totality stands is posited as the unessential one.

The absolute is attribute for this reason, that as simple absolute identity it stands in the determination of identity; and to determination in general other determinations can now be attached, for instance that there are several attributes. But since the meaning of absolute identity is just this, not only that every determination is sublated, but that identity is itself the reflection which has sublated its own self, all determinations are posited in it as sublated ones. Or totality is posited as the absolute totality, that is, attribute has the absolute for its content and its subsistence; the form-determination it carries, by which it is attribute, is therefore likewise posited, immediately as mere shine, the negative as negative. The positive shine that the exposition gives itself through attribute, in taking the finite within its restriction not for something that is in and for itself but dissolving the finite's subsistence into the absolute and widening the finite into attribute, sublates the very thing that attribute is; it sinks attribute, and its own distinguishing activity, into the simple absolute.

But since reflection, distinguishing in this fashion, thereby comes back only to the absolute's identity, it has at the same time not got clear of its externality and reached the genuine absolute. All it has attained is the indeterminate, abstract identity; that is to say, the identity which stands in the determinateness of identity. – Or, where reflection in the capacity of inner form determines the absolute to attribute, this determining still remains diverse from externality; the absolute is not penetrated by that inner determination; its expression consists in vanishing, as something merely posited, at the absolute.

Form, then, whether it be taken as outer or as inner, the form by which the absolute would be attribute, is at the same time posited as null in its own self, as an external shine, or as a mere way and manner of being.

C. The Mode of the Absolute

Firstly, the attribute is the absolute as it stands in the simple identity of itself with itself. Secondly, the attribute is negation, and this as negation is the formal reflection-into-itself. These two sides constitute at first the attribute's two extremes, and the attribute is itself their middle term, being as it is the absolute and equally the determinateness. – Of these two extremes the second is the negative as negative, the reflection that is external to the absolute. – Or insofar as this reflection is taken as the inner of the absolute, and the absolute's own determination is to posit itself as mode, then the mode is the absolute's being-outside-itself, the loss of itself into the alterability and contingency of being, its having-passed-over into the opposite without return into itself; the totality-less manifoldness of determinations of form and of content. –

The mode, the externality of the absolute, is however not this alone, but the externality posited as such externality, a bare way and manner; and so the shine as shine, or the form's reflection into itself; and so the identity with itself that the absolute is. In fact, then, it is first in the mode that the absolute stands posited as absolute identity; it is nothing but what it is, namely identity with itself, as negativity that refers itself to itself, as shining posited as shining.

Insofar, then, as the exposition of the absolute takes its start from the absolute's absolute identity, moves on to the attribute, and thence to the mode, in all this it has traversed its moments completely. But firstly, therein it does not merely comport itself negatively towards these determinations; rather this doing of its is the reflecting movement itself, as which the absolute only truly is the absolute identity. – Secondly, what it thereby has to do with is not merely something external, and the mode is not just the outermost externality; because it is the shine as shine, it is rather the return into itself, the reflection that dissolves itself, as which the absolute is absolute being. – Thirdly, the expounding reflection has the look of setting out from determinations of its own and from something external; of picking up the modes, or likewise the determinations of the attribute, as found already outside the absolute; and of having for its doing merely the carrying of them back into the indifferent identity. But in truth the determinateness with which it begins it already has on the absolute itself. For as first indifferent identity the absolute is itself nothing but the determinate absolute, or the attribute, in that it is the absolute unmoved and as yet unreflected. Since it is determinateness, this determinateness pertains to the reflecting movement; through that movement alone is the absolute determined as the first identical, and through it alone likewise does the absolute possess the absolute form, so that it is not what is self-equal but what is self-equating.

The genuine meaning of the mode is accordingly that it is the absolute's own reflecting movement; a determining, yet not one by which the absolute would come to be an other, but only of what it already is; the transparent externality which is the showing of the absolute itself; a movement out of itself; and yet such that this being-turned-outward is quite as much inwardness itself; and hence quite as much a positing that is not mere positedness but absolute being.

If, then, the question is put about a content of the exposition, what it might be that the absolute shows? the difference of form and content is in the absolute already dissolved anyway. Or just this is the content of the absolute, to manifest itself. The absolute is that absolute form which, in dirempting itself, remains simply identical with itself, the negative as negative; or which closes together with itself, and only so is the absolute self-identity that is quite as much indifferent towards its differences, or absolute content; the content, accordingly, is nothing but this exposition itself.

The absolute, as this self-sustaining movement of exposition, as the way and manner which is its absolute identity with itself, is expression – not of an inner, not against an other – but is only as an absolute manifesting of itself for itself; thus it is actuality.

Remark

To the concept of the absolute, and to the relation which reflection bears towards it as this has here set itself out, there corresponds the concept of Spinozistic substance. Wherein Spinozism is a deficient philosophy is this, that reflection and its manifold determining are an external thinking. – Substance in this system is one substance, a single totality admitting of no separation; determinateness there is none but is held within this absolute and dissolved there; and it counts for a great deal that whatever appears to natural representation, or to the determining understanding, as self-subsistent and hovers before it as such is, within that necessary concept, brought down wholly to a mere positedness. – Determinateness is negation – such is the absolute principle of Spinozistic philosophy; this true and simple insight is what grounds substance's absolute unity. But Spinoza halts at negation taken as determinateness or quality; he does not press on to cognize it as absolute, that is, as self-negating negation; accordingly his substance does not itself contain the absolute form, and the cognizing of that substance is no immanent cognizing. Substance is indeed the absolute unity of thinking and of being or extension; it thus harbours thinking itself, though only in its unity with extension, which means: not as severing itself from extension, hence not at all as determining and forming, nor yet as the movement that comes back and starts out from itself. Partly, thereby, substance is without the principle of personality – the very defect that has chiefly stirred indignation against the Spinozistic system; – partly the cognizing is that external reflection which fails to grasp and to derive out of substance what has the look of the finite, the determinateness of the attribute and the mode, and itself as well, and which is at work instead as an understanding standing outside, taking the determinations up as given and leading them back to the absolute, though never fetching their beginnings from it.

The concepts which Spinoza furnishes of substance are those of the cause of itself, – that substance is that whose essence encloses concrete existence within itself; – that the concept of the absolute stands in need of no concept of another out of which it would have to be formed; – deep and correct as these concepts are, they are definitions, taken up immediately at the entrance of the science. Mathematics, and the other subordinate sciences, have to make their start from something presupposed, which constitutes their element and positive foundation. But the absolute cannot be something first and immediate; the absolute is essentially its result.

Following on the definition of the absolute, there next appears in Spinoza the definition of the attribute; and it is determined as that wherein the understanding apprehends substance's essence. Setting aside that the understanding is by its nature assumed to come later than the attribute – Spinoza determines it, after all, as a mode – the attribute, determination as determination of the absolute, is in this way made dependent on an other, on the understanding, which enters over against substance as something external and immediate.

Spinoza determines the attributes further as infinite, infinite moreover in the sense of an infinite plurality. Only two of them, to be sure, actually come up in the sequel – thinking and extension – and no showing is given of how the infinite plurality necessarily narrows itself down to the opposition, and to this determinate opposition, of thinking and extension. – These two attributes are on that account picked up empirically. Thinking and being present the absolute in a determination; the absolute itself is the absolute unity of both, so that they amount to unessential forms merely, the order among things running the same as the order among representations or thoughts, and the one absolute being surveyed under those two determinations by nothing but the external reflection, by a mode – now as a totality of representations, now as a totality of things and of their alterations. Just as it is this external reflection that draws the difference, so it is also this reflection that carries the difference back into the absolute identity and submerges it there. This whole movement, however, takes place outside the absolute. Granted, the absolute is itself also thinking, and so far the movement is only within the absolute; but, as was remarked, within the absolute it is only as unity with extension, and so not as this movement, which is essentially the moment of opposition as well. – The sublime demand Spinoza makes upon thinking is that it consider all things under the shape of eternity, sub specie aeterni, that is, as they are in the absolute. In that absolute, however, which is only the unmoved identity, the attribute, like the mode, is there only as vanishing, not as becoming, so that this vanishing too takes its positive beginning only from without.

The third, the mode, is in Spinoza affection of substance, the determinate determinateness, that which is in another and is conceived through this other. Strictly, the attributes have nothing but indeterminate diversity for their determination; each is to express substance's totality and to be conceived out of itself; but insofar as an attribute is the absolute as determinate, it harbours otherness and is not to be conceived out of itself alone. It is thus in the mode that the attribute's determination first gets properly posited. This third stays mere mode besides: on the one hand it is something immediately given, on the other its nullity goes uncognized as reflection into itself. – The Spinozistic exposition of the absolute is thus far indeed complete, in that it starts from the absolute, lets the attribute come next, and ends with the mode; but these three are merely counted off one after another, with no inner developmental sequence, and the third is not the negation as negation, not a negation referring itself negatively to itself, through which it would in it itself be the going-back into the first identity, and that identity the genuine one. What is missing, then, is the necessity of the absolute's progress into unessentiality, and equally the dissolving of unessentiality, in and for itself, into identity; or there is wanting the becoming of identity no less than of its determinations.

In like fashion, in the oriental representation of emanation the absolute is the light that lights itself. But it does not merely light itself; it also streams out. Its outstreamings are removals from its unclouded brightness; the progeny that follow are less perfect than those before them, out of which they arise. The streaming out is taken only as a happening, the becoming only as an ongoing loss. So being grows ever murkier, and night, the negative, is the last term of the line, which does not go back into the first light.

The defect of reflection into itself, which attaches to the Spinozistic exposition of the absolute as it does to the doctrine of emanation, is made good in the concept of Leibniz's monad. – To the one-sidedness of a philosophical principle the opposite one-sidedness is wont to be set over against it, and, as everywhere, the totality is wont to be present at least as a scattered completeness. – The monad is a one, a negative reflected within itself; it is the world's content in its totality; the diverse manifold has in it not merely gone under but is kept in a negative fashion; Spinozistic substance unifies all content, yet the world's manifold content is not in that substance as such, but in the reflection standing external to it. The monad is therefore essentially representing; finite though it be, however, it has no passivity; the alterations and determinations in it are rather manifestations of itself within itself. It is entelechy; the revealing is its own act. – With this the monad is also determinate, marked off from others; the determinateness falls into the particular content and into the way and manner in which the manifestation proceeds. The monad is therefore in itself, in respect of its substance, the totality, not in its manifestation. This limitation of the monad falls of necessity not into the monad as self-positing or representing, but into its being-in-itself, or it is an absolute limit, a predestination posited by a being other than the monad itself. Further, since bounded things are only in referring themselves to other bounded things, while the monad is at once an absolute shut up within itself, the harmony of these boundings – the reference, that is, of the monads to one another – lies outside them and is, again, pre-established by another being, or in itself.

It comes to light that through the principle of reflection-into-itself, which makes up the monad's fundamental determination, otherness and outside influence generally are indeed done away with, the monad's alterations being its own positing – yet that, on the other side, passivity through an other has merely been converted into an absolute restriction, a restriction upon being-in-itself. Leibniz credits the monads with a certain perfection within themselves, a sort of self-subsistence; they are created beings. – Looking more nearly at their restriction, this exposition yields the result that the self-manifestation which accrues to them is the totality of form. A concept of the highest importance is this: that the monad's alterations are represented as actions without passivity, as manifestations of the monad's own self, and that the principle of reflection into itself, or of individuation, stands forth as essential. It is further necessary to let finitude consist in this: that content, or substance, is held distinct from form, and then further that the one is limited whereas the other is infinite. But in the concept of the absolute monad what would have to be found is not merely that absolute unity of content and form, but the nature of reflection besides – namely, as the negativity referring itself to itself, to repel itself from itself, whereby it is positing and creating. In the Leibnizian system there is, to be sure, this further point present as well, that God is the source of the concrete existence and of the essence of the monads, that is, that those absolute restrictions in the monads' being-in-itself do not have being in and for themselves but disappear in the absolute. These determinations, however, exhibit nothing but the ordinary representations, left without philosophical development and never raised into speculative concepts. Thus the principle of individuation does not obtain its deeper working-out; the concepts concerning the distinctions among the various finite monads, and concerning their relation to their absolute, do not issue from this essence itself, or in an absolute manner, but pertain to ratiocinative, dogmatic reflection, and have accordingly reached no inner coherence.

Chapter 2. Actuality

The absolute is the unity of inner and outer as first unity, one that is in itself. The exposition showed itself as an external reflection which, for its part, has the immediate before it as something come upon, but which is at the same time the movement of that immediate and its reference to the absolute, and as such carries it back into the absolute and determines it to be nothing but a way and manner. Yet just this way and manner is the absolute's own determination, that is, the absolute's first identity, or its unity as merely being in itself. And indeed through this reflection not only is that first being-in-itself posited as an essenceless determination, but, because the reflection is negative reference to itself, that mode comes about only through the reflection. This reflection, as sublating itself in its determinations, and generally as the movement returning into itself, is what alone is truly absolute identity, being at the same time the determining of the absolute, or the absolute's modality. The mode is accordingly the externality of the absolute, though equally only as that absolute's reflection into itself; – or the mode is the absolute's own manifestation, such that this expression is the absolute's reflection-into-itself, and with that its being-in-and-for-itself.

Being manifestation in this sense, that the absolute is nothing further and has no content beyond being the manifestation of itself, the absolute is the absolute form. This reflected absoluteness is what actuality is to be taken for. Being is not yet something actual; it is immediacy in its first shape; the reflection of being is therefore becoming, a passing over into another; or the immediacy of being is not being-in-and-for-itself. Higher than concrete existence, too, stands actuality. Concrete existence is indeed that immediacy which has come forth out of ground and conditions, or out of essence and the reflection of essence. Hence it is, in itself, what actuality is, namely real reflection, but it is not yet the unity of reflection and immediacy as posited. By developing the reflection contained within it, concrete existence therefore passes over into appearance. Concrete existence is the foundered ground; its determination is that the ground be restored, and so it becomes essential relation, its final reflection being that its immediacy stands posited as the reflection-into-itself, and inversely; this unity, wherein concrete existence or immediacy, and being-in-itself, ground or the reflected, are moments outright, is now actuality. The actual is on that account manifestation; its externality does not draw it into the sphere of alteration, nor is it a shining of itself within an other; rather it manifests itself, which means that in its externality it is itself, and that only in that externality, namely only as the movement which differentiates and determines itself from itself, is it itself.

In actuality, then, taken as this absolute form, the moments are present only as sublated or formal ones, not yet realized; their diversity thus belongs at the outset to external reflection and has not been determined as content.

Actuality, being itself the immediate form-unity of inner and outer, thereby falls under the determination of immediacy as against the determination of reflection-into-itself; or it is an actuality over against a possibility. Their reference to each other is the third term, which determines the actual just as much as being reflected into itself, and determines this reflected being at the same time as immediately concretely existing. This third is necessity.

But at first, seeing that actual and possible are formal differences, the reference between them is likewise only formal, and consists merely in this, that the one as well as the other is a positedness, or it consists in contingency.

Now inasmuch as in contingency the actual, like the possible, is positedness, both have thereby acquired determination upon themselves; from this arises, secondly, real actuality, and along with it real possibility no less, and relative necessity.

The reflection of relative necessity into itself yields, thirdly, absolute necessity, which is absolute possibility and actuality.

A. Contingency, or Formal Actuality, Possibility and Necessity

1. Actuality counts as formal to the extent that, being actuality in its first shape, it is immediate, unreflected actuality merely, and so stands within this determination of form alone, not as the totality of form. Nothing further, then, does it amount to than a being or a concrete existence at large. Yet since it is essentially not bare immediate concrete existence but the unity of form joining being-in-itself, or inwardness, with externality, it harbours being-in-itself or possibility straightaway. What is actual is possible.

2. Actuality reflected into itself: such is this possibility. But this being-reflected, a first on its own account, is likewise something formal, and hence amounts at large to no more than the determination of identity with itself, or of being-in-itself taken generally. Because, however, what the determination here is, is totality of form, this being-in-itself gets determined as sublated, or as standing essentially only in reference to actuality: as the negative of actuality, posited in the character of a negative. Two moments are thus harboured in possibility; first the positive one, that possibility is a being-reflected into its own self; but seeing that within the absolute form it has been lowered to a moment, being-reflected-into-itself no longer counts for essence, and so carries, second, the negative import that possibility is a deficient thing which points away to an other, to actuality, and rounds itself out there.

Taken on the first, the merely positive side, possibility is the bare form-determination of identity with itself, the form of essentiality. So construed, it is that relationless, undetermined vessel which holds anything whatever. – On the reading given by this formal possibility, whatever does not contradict itself is possible; and so the realm of possibility is a manifoldness without bound. Yet every manifold thing carries negation in it, being determined within itself and against an other; indifferent diversity passes generally over into opposition, and opposition is nothing other than contradiction. Whence everything is quite as much a contradicting thing and hence an impossible one.

– To pronounce this merely formal thing of something – it is possible – is accordingly as shallow and as empty as the principle of contradiction together with any content taken up into it; A is possible amounts to just this much, that A is A. Where one declines to go into the unfolding of the content, that content wears the form of simplicity; only by its being dissolved into its determinations does difference come forth in it. Holding fast to that simple form, one leaves the content as an item identical with itself, hence as a possible. But by this, as by the formal proposition of identity, nothing whatever gets said.

More than the merely identical proposition is contained, however, in the possible. The possible is reflected being-reflected-into-itself; or the identical simply as moment of the totality, determined thereby as also not being in itself; hence it carries the second determination of being a possible merely, together with the ought of form's totality. Strip possibility of this ought and it is essentiality as such; the absolute form, though, carries with it that essence is itself only a moment and has its truth not without being. Possibility is this bare essentiality, so posited that it is a moment merely and falls short of the absolute form. Being-in-itself is what it is, yet determined as no more than a posited; or equally determined not to be in itself. – In its own self, then, possibility is likewise the contradiction; it is the impossibility.

The nearest expression of this is that possibility, being a form-determination posited as sublated, has some content or other in it. As possible, this content is a being-in-itself which is at once a sublated one, an otherness. Since the content is thus a merely possible one, an other content, its very contrary, is quite as possible. A is A; just so - A is - A. What each of the two propositions expresses is the possibility of its own content-determination. As these identical propositions, however, they stand indifferent to one another; the one does not posit that the other should join it. Possibility is the comparing reference of the pair; its determination, as a reflection of the totality, carries the point that the contrary too shall be possible. Hence it is the referring ground whereby, on that very account, since A = A, - A = - A as well; the possible A harbours the possible Not-A also, and this reference is itself what determines the two as possible.

Being this reference, though – that within the one possible its other is likewise contained – it is the contradiction which sublates itself. And since by its determination it is the reflected, and, as has now shown itself, the self-sublating reflected, it is thereby the immediate too, and with that it turns into actuality.

3. Not the first actuality but the reflected one is this, posited as the unity of itself with possibility. Possible is what the actual as such is; it stands with possibility in immediate positive identity; possibility, however, has determined itself as merely possibility; whence the actual too stands determined as merely a possible. And immediately so, since possibility is harboured immediately within actuality and is harboured there as a sublated one, as possibility merely. Turn it round: actuality, being in unity with possibility, amounts to immediacy sublated; – or, since formal actuality is nothing but an immediate first, it is a moment merely, actuality sublated merely, that is to say, possibility merely.

Herewith the determination is at once more closely expressed, of the respect in which possibility is actuality. For not yet is all actuality meant by possibility; real and absolute actuality have not yet come up for discussion; – it is as yet that actuality alone which turned up first, the formal one namely, which determined itself to be possibility merely, and hence formal actuality, which is nothing but being or concrete existence at large. To everything possible there belongs, accordingly, some being or some concrete existence.

Contingency is this unity of possibility with actuality. – A contingent is an actual determined at once as no more than possible, one whose other or contrary obtains just as well. Such actuality is accordingly bare being or concrete existence, yet posited in its truth so as to carry the worth of a positedness or of possibility. Turn it round: possibility, being reflection-into-itself or being-in-itself, stands posited as positedness; whatever is possible is an actual in this sense of actuality, carrying no more worth than contingent actuality carries; it is itself a contingent.

Two sides, then, are offered by the contingent; first, to the extent that possibility belongs to it immediately, or, which comes to the same, to the extent that possibility lies sublated within it, it is not positedness and not mediated either, but immediate actuality; no ground belongs to it. – Since this immediate actuality accrues to the possible as well, the possible stands determined as contingent quite as much as the actual does, and is likewise a groundless thing.

But second, the contingent is the actual taken as a merely possible or as a positedness; and just so the possible, being formal being-in-itself, is positedness merely. Neither of the two, therefore, is in and for its own self; each has its genuine reflection-into-itself rather in an other, or it has a ground.

So the contingent lacks a ground for the reason that it is contingent; and quite as much does it possess a ground for the reason that it is contingent.

It is the posited, unmediated turning over into one another of inner and outer, or of being-reflected-into-itself and of being; posited in that possibility and actuality each carries this determination in its own self, and this because they are moments of the absolute form. – Thus in its immediate unity with possibility actuality amounts to concrete existence alone, determined as a groundless thing which is only a posited or only possible; – whereas taken as reflected and determined against possibility it stands severed from possibility, from being-reflected-into-itself, and so is quite as immediately a mere possible too. – Just so possibility, being simple being-in-itself, is an immediate, a mere being at large; or set in opposition to actuality it is quite as much a being-in-itself void of actuality, a mere possible, but precisely on that account once more a concrete existence at large that is not reflected into itself.

Contingency is this absolute restlessness of the becoming belonging to these two determinations. Yet just because each turns over without mediation into the one opposed to it, within that opposite it equally and absolutely closes with itself, and this identity of the two, of each within the other, is necessity.

An actual is what the necessary is; as immediate it is therefore a groundless thing; quite as much, though, does it have its actuality through an other, that is, in its ground, while being at once that ground's positedness and the ground's own reflection into itself; whatever possibility the necessary has is a sublated one. So the contingent is necessary, both because the actual, determined as a possible, has thereby had its immediacy sublated and thrust off into ground or being-in-itself and into a grounded, and because this its possibility, the ground-reference, stands absolutely sublated and posited as being. The necessary is, and this being of it is itself the necessary. In itself it likewise is; this reflection-into-itself differs as an other from that immediacy of being; and the necessity belonging to what is amounts to something other. So what is, taken on its own, is not the necessary; yet this being-in-itself is for its part positedness merely, sublated and itself immediate. In this way actuality, within what is distinguished from it, within possibility, is identical with its own self. Being this identity, it is necessity.

B. Relative Necessity, or Real Actuality, Possibility and Necessity

1. Necessity as it has now emerged is formal, its moments being formal, that is, simple determinations which make up a totality only as immediate unity, or as the immediate turning over of the one into the other, and which accordingly do not wear the shape of self-subsistence. – Within this formal necessity, then, the unity is at first simple and stands indifferent to its own differences. Being the immediate unity of the form-determinations, such necessity is actuality; but an actuality possessed of a content, since its unity now stands determined as indifferent to the difference of the form-determinations, namely of actuality itself and of possibility. Being an indifferent identity, this content harbours the form too as indifferent, that is, as determinations merely diverse, and it is manifold content at large. Such actuality is real actuality.

As such, real actuality is at first the thing of many properties, the world in its existing; it is not, however, that concrete existence which dissolves into appearance; being actuality, it is rather at once being-in-itself and reflection-into-itself; amid the manifoldness of bare concrete existence it maintains itself; its externality is an inward comporting to itself alone. Whatever is actual can act; a thing announces its actuality by what it brings forth. Its comporting towards an other is the manifestation of itself – not a passing over, for that is how the something which is refers itself to an other; – nor yet an appearing, for that is how the thing stands only in relation to others; it is a self-subsistent, but one which has its reflection-into-itself, its determinate essentiality, in another self-subsistent.

Real actuality now likewise carries possibility immediately in its own self. The moment of being-in-itself is contained in it; but being as yet the immediate unity only, it stands within one of form's determinations, and so, as that which is, is marked off from being-in-itself or possibility.

2. Being the being-in-itself of real actuality, this possibility is itself real possibility, at first the content-filled being-in-itself. – Formal possibility is reflection-into-itself only as that abstract identity whereby something does not within itself contradict itself. But once one goes into the determinations, circumstances and conditions of a fact so as to cognize its possibility from them, one no longer halts at the formal sort; one is considering its real possibility.

Immediate concrete existence is what this real possibility itself is – no longer, though, for the reason that possibility as such, as a formal moment, is immediately its own contrary, an unreflected actuality; rather, being real possibility, it carries this determination at once in its own self. Hence the real possibility of a fact is the existent manifoldness of circumstances bearing upon it.

This manifoldness of existence is thus indeed possibility as much as actuality, yet their identity is as yet the content only, which stands indifferent to these determinations of form; they, accordingly, make up the form as determined over against their identity. – Or again, immediate real actuality, just because immediate, stands determined over against its possibility; being determinate in this way and hence reflected, it is real possibility. Real possibility, now, is indeed form's posited whole, but form in its determinateness – actuality, namely, as formal or immediate, and possibility likewise, as abstract being-in-itself. The actuality which makes up a fact's possibility is therefore not its own possibility; it is the being-in-itself of another actual; it is itself the actuality due to be sublated, possibility as possibility only. – Real possibility, then, makes up the whole of conditions, an actuality dispersed and unreflected into itself, yet determined to be the being-in-itself of an other and destined to go back into itself.

Whatever is really possible is thus, by its being-in-itself, a formally identical thing which by its simple content-determination does not contradict itself; but by its developed and differentiated circumstances too, and by everything with which it hangs together, it must, as the self-identical thing it is, not contradict itself. Yet second, being manifold within and hanging together manifoldly with an other, while diversity in its own self passes into opposition, it is a contradicting thing. Should a possibility be under discussion and its contradiction be required to show, one need only hold to the manifoldness which it harbours as content or as the concrete existence conditioning it; out of that its contradiction is easily hunted up. – This, however, is no contradiction of comparison; rather, manifold concrete existence is in its own self just this, to sublate itself and to founder; and therein it carries essentially, in its own self, the determination of being only a possible. – Let all the conditions of a fact be completely at hand and the fact steps into actuality; – completeness of conditions is totality as it stands at the content, and the fact itself is this content, determined to be an actual as much as a possible. Within the sphere of conditioned ground the conditions have their form – the ground, namely, or the reflection that is for itself – outside them, a reflection which refers them into moments of the fact and brings forth concrete existence in them. Here, by contrast, no presupposing reflection determines immediate actuality to be a condition; it is posited instead that actuality is itself the possibility.

Within real possibility as it sublates itself, what gets sublated is now a twofold; for possibility is itself the twofold of being actuality and possibility. 1) The actuality is the formal one, a concrete existence which showed itself as self-subsistent and immediate, and which by being sublated turns into reflected being, into the moment of an other, thereby gaining being-in-itself in it. 2) That concrete existence stood determined also as possibility, or as the being-in-itself, but of an other. As it sublates itself, then, this being-in-itself is sublated along with it and crosses over into actuality. – The movement of real possibility sublating its own self accordingly brings forth the very moments already at hand, each merely coming to be out of the other; in this negation, therefore, it is no passing over either, but a closing together with itself. – On formal possibility it held that, something being possible, not it itself but its other was possible as well. Real possibility no longer confronts such an other, being real precisely so far as it is itself actuality too. As the immediate concrete existence belonging to it, the circle of conditions, sublates itself, real possibility makes of itself the being-in-itself which it already is, namely the being-in-itself of an other. And as conversely its moment of being-in-itself thereby sublates itself at the same stroke, it turns into actuality, into the very moment which it likewise already is. – What disappears is thus this: that actuality stood determined as the possibility or the being-in-itself of an other, and possibility conversely as an actuality which is not that one whose possibility it is.

3. The negation of real possibility is accordingly its identity with itself; being thus, within its own sublating, the recoil of that sublating into its own self, it is real necessity.

What is necessary cannot be otherwise – what is possible at all certainly can; for possibility is that being-in-itself which is positedness merely and hence essentially otherness. Formal possibility is this identity as a crossing over into what is simply other; real possibility, though, having in it the other moment, actuality, is already necessity itself. Whatever is really possible can therefore no longer be otherwise; under such conditions and circumstances nothing else is able to ensue. Real possibility and necessity are thus distinguished in semblance only; necessity is an identity which does not first come to be but lies already presupposed at the ground. Real necessity is accordingly a content-filled reference; for the content is that identity which is in itself and stands indifferent to the differences of form.

This necessity, however, is at the same time relative. – It has, that is, a presupposition from which it starts; in the contingent lies its point of departure. For the real actual as such is the determinate actual, and it has its determinateness at first as immediate being in this, that it is a manifoldness of existing circumstances; but with this immediate being taken as determinateness it is also the negative of itself, is being-in-itself or possibility; so it is real possibility. As this unity of the two moments it constitutes form's totality, a totality still external to itself; its way of uniting possibility and actuality is that 1) manifold concrete existence is immediately or positively the possibility – a possible, a self-identical thing at large, just because it is an actual; 2) so far as this possibility of concrete existence gets posited, it stands determined as possibility only, as actuality's immediate turning over into its contrary, – as contingency, in other words. That possibility, then, which immediate actuality carries in it in being a condition, is the being-in-itself only as the possibility of an other. Because this otherness, as was shown, sublates itself, and because this positedness comes in its turn to be posited, real possibility does indeed turn into necessity; but necessity so arrived at starts out from that unity of possible and actual which is not yet reflected into itself; – such presupposing and the movement that returns into itself lie still apart; – or necessity has not yet determined itself out of itself into contingency.

At the content the relativity of real necessity shows itself thus, that the content is as yet the identity indifferent to form only, hence distinct from form and a determinate content at large. On that account the really necessary is some limited actuality or other, which for the sake of this limitedness is in another respect a contingent merely.

So in fact real necessity is in itself contingency as well. – At first this shows up thus, that the really necessary is, by form, indeed a necessary, but by content a limited thing, and through its content has its contingency. Yet contingency lies contained in the form of real necessity too; for as was shown, real possibility is the necessary in itself only, while posited it is the otherness of actuality and possibility to one another. Contingency is therefore contained in real necessity; real necessity is the return into itself out of that restless otherness of actuality and possibility to one another, but not a return out of its own self to itself.

In itself, then, the unity of necessity and contingency is here at hand; absolute actuality is the name to give this unity.

C. Absolute Necessity

Real necessity is determinate necessity; formal necessity as yet carries neither content nor determinateness upon it. Wherein the determinateness of necessity consists is this, that necessity has its own negation, contingency, present in it. Such is the result it has yielded.

In its first simplicity, however, this determinateness is actuality; hence determinate necessity is, and immediately so, actual necessity. Such actuality, which itself as such is necessary, holding necessity within it as its being-in-itself, counts as absolute actuality; – actuality that admits of being no otherwise, its being-in-itself being not possibility at all but necessity itself.

Yet just because it stands posited as absolute — posited, that is, as being itself the unity of itself and of possibility — this actuality amounts to no more than an empty determination; or it is contingency. – That its determination is thus empty reduces it to a mere possibility, to something able just as readily to be otherwise and to be determined as merely possible. But that possibility is the absolute one; for it consists precisely in being open to determination as possibility no less than as actuality. Since it is this indifference towards its own self, it stands posited as an empty, contingent determination.

Real necessity, then, does not merely harbour contingency in itself: contingency also becomes in it; but such becoming, taken as externality, amounts to nothing beyond that necessity's own being-in-itself, since it is no more than an immediate being-determined. Nor is that all it is: it is necessity's own becoming – the presupposition necessity had turns out to be a positing that it does itself. For qua real necessity it is the sublatedness of actuality within possibility and inversely; – and since it is this simple turning over of either moment into the other, it is likewise their simple positive unity, each of them, as we saw, going together with itself alone within the other. On that showing it is actuality — but an actuality having being solely as this simple going together of form with itself. Its negative positing of those moments is accordingly the presupposing itself, the positing of itself as sublated, of immediacy, in other words.

Precisely therein, however, does this actuality get determined as something negative; out of the actuality that was real possibility it is a going together with itself; the new actuality therefore emerges only out of its own being-in-itself, out of the negation of itself. – Herewith it stands at once determined immediately as possibility too, as something mediated by way of its negation. Such possibility, though, comes immediately to nothing more than this mediating, wherein being-in-itself — the possibility itself, that is — and immediacy count equally as positedness. – Necessity it is, then, that sublates this positedness no less than it posits immediacy and being-in-itself, and that in the very same stroke determines such sublating as positedness. So it is it itself that determines itself into contingency; – repelling itself from itself in its being, having in that very repelling done nothing but return into itself, and having, in that return taken as its being, repelled itself from its own self.

Thus has form, in realizing itself, worked through every one of its differences and rendered itself transparent, and qua absolute necessity it is nothing but this simple identity of being in its negation or in essence with its own self. – Gone likewise is the difference between content and form itself; for that unity of possibility within actuality, and inversely, is form standing indifferent towards itself in its determinateness or positedness, the content-laden fact upon whose surface the form of necessity externally ran itself out. Taken so, however, it is the reflected identity of the pair of determinations, indifferent as against them, and thereby the form-determination of being-in-itself set over against positedness; and it is this possibility that makes up how limited the content of real necessity was. Absolute necessity, though, is the dissolving of that difference, and its content is just this difference as it penetrates itself within it.

Absolute necessity, then, is the truth into which possibility and actuality generally withdraw, and formal and real necessity along with them. – What has emerged is that it is being which, within its negation, within essence, refers itself to itself and is being. Simple immediacy or pure being it is, no less than simple reflection-into-itself or pure essence; it consists in the two of these being one and the same. – Whatever is necessary without qualification is for the sole reason that it is; beyond that neither condition nor ground belongs to it. – Equally, though, it is pure essence, its being being simple reflection-into-itself; it is, because it is. Qua reflection it does have ground and condition — save that itself is the only ground and condition it has. Being-in-itself belongs to it, but this being-in-itself of its is its immediacy, and its possibility its actuality. – It is, then, because it is; as the going together of being with its own self it is essence; yet since this simple thing is at the same time immediate simplicity, it is being.

Absolute necessity is in this way the reflection or form of the absolute: unity of being and essence, a simple immediacy that is absolute negativity. On the one hand, accordingly, the differences it has do not stand as determinations of reflection but as a manifoldness that is, as differentiated actuality wearing the shape of self-subsistent others set against each other. On the other hand, their reference being absolute identity, necessity is the absolute turning round of its actuality into its possibility, and of its possibility into actuality. – Hence absolute necessity is blind. On the first side, the differentiated terms, determined as actuality and as possibility, wear the shape of reflection-into-self as of being; each of the two is therefore a free actuality, of which neither shines in the other, neither prepared to display upon itself so much as a trace of its reference to the other; grounded within itself, each is in its own self what is necessary. Necessity qua essence lies shut up inside this being; so the contact these actualities have through one another looks like a mere empty externality, and the actuality of the one in the other is mere possibility, contingency. Being, after all, stands posited as absolutely necessary, as that mediation-with-itself which is the absolute negation of mediation-through-another, or as a being identical with being alone; an other having its actuality in being therefore counts as something unqualifiedly merely possible, as empty positedness.

This contingency, however, is rather the absolute necessity itself; it is the essence belonging to those free actualities that are necessary in themselves. That essence shuns the light, for in such actualities there is no shining, no reflex; grounded purely within themselves, shaped for themselves, they make themselves manifest to themselves alone, – for they are nothing but being. – Their essence, though, will break forth upon them and lay open what it is and what they are. The simplicity their being has, their resting upon themselves, is absolute negativity; it is the freedom their shineless immediacy possesses. This negative breaks forth upon them since being, through this its essence, is contradiction with its own self; – breaks forth, moreover, against such being in the shape of being, and so as the negation of those actualities, a negation absolutely diverse from the being they have, as their nothing, as an otherness confronting them with just as much freedom as their being has. – And yet in them it was not to be misread. In the configuration wherein they rest upon themselves they stand indifferent towards form, a content, and so differentiated actualities with a determinate content; and this content is the mark pressed upon them by necessity — which, absolute return into its own self within its determination, let them go free as absolutely actual — the mark it appeals to as witness of its right, the mark whereby they are now laid hold of and go under. This manifesting of what determinateness is in truth, namely negative reference to its own self, is a blind going-under into otherness; the shining that breaks forth, or reflection, occurs in the beings as becoming, as the transition of being into nothing. But being, conversely, is quite as much essence, and becoming is reflection or shining. Their externality is in that way their inwardness, their reference absolute identity; the transition of what is actual into what is possible, of being into nothing, is a going together with its own self; contingency is absolute necessity; and it is contingency itself that presupposes those first absolute actualities.

This identity of being within its negation with its own self — such identity is now substance. As in its negation, or as in contingency, it is this unity; and so it is substance as relation to its own self. What the blind transition of necessity amounts to is rather the absolute's own exposition, its own movement within itself — an absolute that in externalizing itself rather displays that very self.

Chapter 3. The Absolute Relation

Absolute necessity is not so much what is necessary, and still less a necessary something, but rather necessity; – being purely and simply as reflection. Relation it is, for it is a differentiating whose moments are themselves its whole totality and which therefore absolutely subsist, though in such fashion that all this is but One subsisting, the difference being merely the shine belonging to the expounding, and that shine the absolute itself. – Essence taken as such is reflection, or the shining; essence taken as absolute relation, however, is shine posited as shine, and as this referring to itself it is absolute actuality. – Expounded at the outset by external reflection, the absolute now expounds its own self, doing so as absolute form or as necessity; and such expounding of itself is its positing of itself, so that it is nothing beyond this self-positing. – Just as the light of nature is neither a something nor a thing, its being lying wholly in its shining, so manifestation is that absolute actuality which stands equal to its own self.

Hence the sides of the absolute relation are no attributes. Within the attribute the absolute shines in one of its moments only, a moment presupposed and taken up by external reflection. What expounds the absolute, though, is absolute necessity, identical with itself in that it determines its own self. Being the shining that stands posited as shine, it makes the sides of this relation into totalities, since they are as shine; for as shine the differences are themselves together with what is opposed to them, that is, the whole; – and conversely, they are shine on the ground that they are totalities. Such differentiating, or shining, of the absolute is accordingly no more than the identical positing of its own self.

This relation, in the immediate concept it has, is that of substance and accidents: the absolute shine's immediate vanishing, and its becoming, within its own self. So far as substance determines itself into being-for-itself as against an other, or the absolute relation determines itself as real, there is the relation of causality. Lastly, so far as this latter, being something that refers itself to itself, passes over into reciprocity, the absolute relation stands thereby posited too according to the determinations it holds within it; and this posited unity of it within its determinations, which as the whole itself, and thereby just as much as determinations, are posited, is then the concept.

A. The Relation of Substantiality

Absolute necessity is absolute relation, since it is not being as such but that being which is because it is, being taken as the absolute mediation of itself with its own self. This being is substance; the ultimate unity of essence with being, substance is what is being in all being; neither the unreflected immediate, nor yet an abstraction standing behind concrete existence and appearance, but immediate actuality itself, and that actuality as absolute reflectedness into itself, as subsistence that is in and for itself. – Qua this unity of being with reflection, substance is essentially its own shining and its own positedness. The shining is a shining that refers to itself, and in this way it is; substance as such is precisely this being. Conversely, taken as only the positedness that is self-identical, this being is shining totality, accidentality.

Such shining is the identity that belongs to form; – the unity of possibility and actuality. First of all it is becoming — contingency, that is, as the sphere within which coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be occur; for on the determination of immediacy the reference between possibility and actuality is an immediate turning over of the two, as terms that are, into one another, of each into what to it is merely other. – Yet since being is shine, their reference, as a reference of terms identical or shining in each other, is reflection as well. At each of its moments, therefore, the movement of accidentality displays how the categories of being and the determinations of reflection of essence shine within one another. – The immediate something has a content; its immediacy is at once reflected indifference as against form. Determinate this content is, and inasmuch as such determinateness is a determinateness of being, the something passes over into an other. Quality, though, is a determinateness of reflection too; taken that way it is indifferent diversity. Diversity, however, quickens itself into opposition and goes back into ground, which is the nothing but is also reflection-into-self. Ground sublates itself; being itself, however, reflected being-in-itself, it is possibility, and in its transition — a transition that is quite as much reflection-into-self — this being-in-itself is the necessary actual.

This movement of accidentality is substance's actuosity, as the quiet emerging of itself. Active it is not against something, but only against itself, as against a simple element offering no resistance. Sublating what is presupposed is the vanishing shine; it is only in the doing which sublates the immediate that this immediate first arises, or that the shining in question is; the beginning made from one's own self is above all a positing of that very self from which the beginning proceeds.

As this identity of the shining, substance is the totality of the whole; it grasps accidentality within itself, and accidentality is the whole of substance itself. That substance is differentiated into the simple identity of being and into the alternation of the accidents upon it is one form of its shine. The former is the formless substance of representation — representation for which shine has not been determined as shine, and which clings instead to such indeterminate identity as though to something absolute — an identity possessing no truth, being merely the determinateness of immediate actuality or equally of being-in-itself or of possibility; – form-determinations, these, and they fall within accidentality. –

The other determination, the alternation of the accidents, is accidentality's absolute unity of form, substance as the absolute power. – An accident's ceasing-to-be is its going back, as actuality, into itself as into its being-in-itself or its possibility; but this being-in-itself of the accident is itself no more than a positedness, and hence it is actuality too, and since these determinations of form are just as much determinations of content, what is thus possible is, in point of content as well, an actual determined otherwise. By way of the actuality with its content, into which it translates what is possible, substance manifests itself as creating power; by way of the possibility into which it carries back what is actual, as destroying power. The two, however, are identical: creating is destructive and destroying creative, for within substantial necessity the negative and the positive, possibility and actuality, are absolutely conjoined.

The accidents as such – and there are several of them, multiplicity being one among the determinations of being – hold no power over one another. They are the something that is, or that is for itself, concretely existing things with manifold properties, or wholes consisting of parts, self-subsistent parts, forces standing in need of solicitation by one another and having one another for their condition. So far as an accidental thing of that sort seems to exercise a power over another, what is at work is the power of substance, which grasps both within itself and, being negativity, posits an unequal worth, determining the one as ceasing to be and the other, with another content, as coming to be, or determining the former as passing over into its possibility and the latter as thereby passing into actuality; – substance that eternally cleaves itself asunder into these differences of form and of content, eternally cleanses itself of such one-sidedness, and yet within that very cleansing has fallen back into determination and cleavage. – Hence one accident drives another out for no other reason than that its own subsisting is this very totality of form and content, within which it goes under quite as much as its other does.

By reason of the substance's immediate identity with the accidents, and of its presence in them, there is as yet no real difference at hand. Substance in this first determination has not yet been manifested in the full measure of its concept. Should substance, as the self-identical being-in- and-for-itself, be distinguished from itself as the totality of the accidents, then, as power, it is what mediates. Such mediating is necessity, the positive persisting of the accidents within their negativity and their bare positedness within their subsistence; and so this middle term is the unity of substantiality and accidentality itself, while its extremes possess no subsistence of their own. Substantiality is on that account nothing but the relation as immediately vanishing; it does not refer itself to itself as something negative; being the immediate unity that power has with its own self, it stands in the form of its identity merely, and not in that of its negative essence; the one moment alone, namely the negative or the difference, is what vanishes without qualification, and not the other, the identical one. – This may be looked at in the following way too. Shine, or accidentality, is indeed in itself substance by virtue of the power, yet it is not posited as this self-identical shine; so accidentality alone, and not its own self, serves substance for shape or positedness; it is not yet substance as substance. To begin with, then, the relation of substantiality consists in nothing more than this, that substance reveals itself as formal power whose differences are not substantial; in fact it is only as the inner of the accidents, and these are only upon the substance. Or else: this relation is only the shining totality as becoming; but it is quite as much reflection; accidentality, which in itself is substance, is for that very reason posited as such as well; so it is determined as negativity referring itself to itself, and, over against itself, determined as simple identity with itself referring itself to itself; and is substance that is for-itself and powerful. Thus does the relation of substantiality pass over into the relation of causality.

B. The Relation of Causality

Substance is power, and power reflected into itself — power that does not merely pass over but posits the determinations and distinguishes them from itself. Since in its determining it refers itself to its own self, it itself is what it posits as something negative or turns into positedness. Such positedness is thus, quite generally, substantiality sublated, what is merely posited, the effect; whereas substance that is for itself is the cause.

At the outset this relation of causality is only that relation of cause and effect; and taken so it is the formal relation of causality.

a. Formal Causality

1. The cause is what is original over against the effect. – Substance, qua power, is the shining, or has accidentality. Qua power, however, it is quite as much reflection-into-self within its shine; and so it expounds its transition, and this shining is determined as shine, or the accident stands posited as being merely something posited. – In its determining, though, substance does not set out from accidentality as though accidentality were an other in advance, only now to be posited as determinateness; the two are rather One actuosity. Substance determines itself as power; yet this determining immediately amounts of itself to a sublating of the determining, and to the return. It determines itself, – it, the determining term, is in this way what is immediate and at the same time what is already determined; – so, in determining itself, it posits this already determined term as determined, has thereby sublated positedness, and has gone back into itself. – Conversely, this return, being substance's negative reference to itself, is itself a determining, a repelling of substance away from itself; the determinate term from which substance appears to make its start, and which it appears only now to posit as such, as a determinate found on hand, comes to be through this very return. – So the absolute actuosity is cause; – substance's power in its truth as manifestation, a manifestation which, immediately in the becoming of what is in itself, namely of the accident, which is the positedness, also expounds it, positing it as positedness; the effect. – The effect, then, is first just what the accidentality of the substantiality relation is, namely substance as positedness; but second, whereas the accident as such is substantial only through its vanishing, as something in transition, as effect it is positedness identical with itself; within the effect the cause has been manifested as whole substance, manifested, that is, as reflected into itself within positedness itself as such.

2. Substance as the unposited original confronts this positedness reflected into itself, the determinate taken as determinate. Being as absolute power a return into itself, and this return being itself a determining, substance is not any longer the bare in-itself belonging to its accident; it stands posited as that being-in-itself as well. Only as cause, accordingly, does substance possess actuality. But this actuality — that its being-in-itself, its determinateness within the relation of substantiality, now stands posited as determinateness — is the effect; whatever actuality substance has as cause it therefore has only within its effect. – Herein lies the necessity which the cause is. – Cause is the actual substance, seeing that substance as power determines its own self; but it is at the same time cause, seeing that it expounds this determinateness or posits it as positedness; and so it posits its actuality as the positedness or as the effect. Effect is the other of the cause, the positedness set against what is original and mediated by that original. Being necessity, however, the cause sublates this mediating of its own no less, and in determining itself as what originally refers itself to itself over against the mediated it is the return into itself; for positedness is determined as positedness and hence is identical with itself; hence it is within its effect first of all that the cause is what is genuinely actual and self-identical. – On that account the effect is necessary, precisely because it is manifestation of the cause, or is that necessity which the cause is. – Only as this necessity is the cause self-moving, making its start from itself without being solicited by another, and the self-subsistent source of bringing forth out of itself; – it must act, and its originality consists in this, that its reflection-into-self is determining positing and the reverse, both being one unity.

The effect therefore contains nothing at all that the cause does not contain. The cause, conversely, contains nothing that is not within its effect. Cause is cause only so far as it brings an effect forth; and the cause is nothing but this determination, to have an effect, and the effect nothing but this, to have a cause. Within the cause as such there lies its effect, and within the effect the cause; so far as the cause had not yet acted, or so far as it were to have left off acting, it would not be cause; – and the effect, so far as its cause has vanished, is effect no longer but an indifferent actuality. –

3. Within this identity of cause and effect the form whereby the two are distinguished, as what is in itself and as the positedness, is now sublated. The cause goes out within its effect; and with that the effect has gone out as well, for the effect is nothing but the determinateness of the cause. This causality gone out within the effect is accordingly an immediacy indifferent towards the relation of cause and effect, an immediacy that has that relation upon it externally.

b. The Determinate Relation of Causality

1. The cause's identity with itself in its effect is the sublation of its power and of its negativity, hence the unity indifferent to the differences of form: the content. – Only in itself, therefore, does content stand referred to form, which here is causality. Content and form are thereby posited as diverse, and form, as against content, is itself only an immediately actual causality, a contingent one.

Further, content thus taken as determinate is a content diverse within its own self; the cause is determined in respect of its content, and thereby so is the effect. – Since being-reflected is here immediate actuality as well, content is to this extent substance – actual, yet finite substance.

What we now have before us is the relation of causality in its reality and finitude. Taken as formal, it is absolute power's infinite relation, whose content is pure manifestation, or necessity. Taken as finite causality, by contrast, it has a given content, and spends itself as a difference external to that identical element which, throughout its determinations, remains a single substance.

Because of this identity of the content, such causality amounts to an analytic proposition. The same fact is what shows up now as cause and now as effect, there as a subsistence peculiar to itself, here as positedness or as a determination in something else. Since these determinations of form are external reflection, to determine an appearance as effect and to climb from it up to its cause, so as to grasp and explain the appearance, is a procedure of the subjective understanding which as regards the fact is tautological; one and the same content simply gets repeated; the cause holds nothing that the effect does not. – Rain, for instance, is cause of the wetness that is its effect; – rain makes wet is an analytic proposition; the water which the rain is, is also the wetness; as rain, this water merely has the form of a fact for itself, while as wateriness or wetness it is something adjectival, a posited item that is supposed no longer to carry its subsistence within itself; and either determination is as external to the water as the other. – So the cause of this colour is a colouring agent, a pigment that remains one and the same actuality: once under the form, external to it, of something active, that is, hooked up externally with an active thing distinct from itself, and once under the equally external determination of being an effect. – The cause of a deed is the inner disposition in an acting subject, a disposition which, as the outer existence it gains through the action, is the same in content and in worth. Where the motion of a body is taken as effect, its cause is said to be an impelling force; yet before the impact and after it one and the same quantum of motion is at hand, the same concrete existence that the impelling body held and passed on to the body struck; and it forfeits exactly as much as it passes on.

The cause – the painter, for example, or the impelling body – certainly carries yet another content: the painter, as the colours and the form binding them into the painting; the body, as a motion of determinate strength and direction. But this further content is a contingent adjunct that is no business of the cause; whatever qualities the painter has, abstracted from his being the painter of this painting, do not enter the painting at all; only so much of his properties as displays itself in the effect is there in him as cause, and by his remaining properties he is no cause. Whether the impelling body is of stone or of wood, green or yellow and so forth, none of that enters its impact; in those respects it is not cause.

Regarding this tautology in the causal relation, it should be observed that the relation seems not to contain it whenever what is named is not the proximate but the remote cause of an effect. The alteration of form which the underlying fact undergoes on its passage through several intermediate links hides the identity it keeps throughout. And in this multiplication of causes that have interposed themselves between it and the last effect, the fact simultaneously ties itself in with other things and circumstances, so that what holds the complete effect is not that first item pronounced to be the cause, but only these several causes taken together. – Suppose, for example, a man came into circumstances that developed his talent by the loss of his father, whom a bullet struck in a battle: that shot (or, going further back, the war, or a cause of the war, and so on into infinity) might then be named as the cause of the man's skill. Yet it is evident that this shot, for instance, is not on its own that cause, but only its being tied in with other determinations at work. Or rather it is no cause whatever, only one single moment belonging to the circumstances of the possibility.

For above all, the inadmissible application of the causal relation to relations of physically-organic and of spiritual life still needs remarking. Here, to be sure, what gets called cause shows itself to be of a content other than the effect, but precisely because whatever works upon a living thing is by that thing determined, altered and transformed on its own account, because the living thing will not let the cause reach its effect, which is to say that it sublates the cause as cause. So it is inadmissible talk when nourishment is called the cause of blood, or when these foods, or cold and damp, are called causes of a fever and so forth; as inadmissible as naming the Ionian climate the cause of the Homeric works, or Caesar's ambition the cause of the collapse of Rome's republican constitution. In history at large, spiritual masses and individuals are in play and in mutual determination with one another; but it lies in the nature of spirit, in a far higher sense than in the character of what is living at large, rather not to absorb into itself another original thing, or to refuse a cause any continuation into itself, breaking it off instead and transforming it. – Relations which, however, belong to the idea and are first to be considered there. – One further remark may be made here: to the extent that the relation of cause and effect is allowed, albeit in a non-literal sense, an effect cannot be greater than its cause, since the effect is no more than the cause made manifest. In history it has become a stock piece of wit to have great effects spring from small causes, and to put forward some anecdote as the first cause of a far-reaching and profound occurrence. A cause of that sort is to be reckoned nothing more than an occasion, an external prompting which the inner spirit of the occurrence could well have done without, or in whose place it might have used any of a countless host of others as a starting point in appearance, in order to vent itself and render itself manifest. Conversely, indeed, something so petty and contingent on its own account has been determined into that spirit's occasion only by spirit. That arabesque painting of history, letting a great figure sprout from a wavering stalk, is therefore an ingenious treatment no doubt, but an utterly superficial one. In this emergence of the great out of the small there is indeed present, generally speaking, that inversion which spirit performs upon what is external; but on that very account the external is no cause within spirit, or rather this inversion is itself a sublating of the causal relation.

2. This determinateness of the causal relation, however – that content and form are diverse and mutually indifferent – reaches further than that. A determination of form is at the same time a determination of content; hence the two sides of the relation, cause and effect, are also a different content. Or: since content exists only as the content of some form, it carries the form's difference within its own self and is diverse in essence. Yet since the form it has is causality, and causality is a content identical in the cause and in the effect, the diverse content hangs together externally with the cause on the one hand and with the effect on the other; it therefore does not itself enter into the acting or into the relation.

This external content, then, stands in no relation; – an immediate concrete existence; – or, since as content it is the identity of cause and effect that is in itself, it too is an identity that is immediate, an identity that is. So it is some thing or other, carrying manifold determinations of its existence, and among others this one too, that in some respect or other it is cause, or effect as well. In it the form-determinations, cause and effect, have their substrate, their essential subsistence that is, – and each of them a particular one –, for their identity is their subsistence; – yet at the same time it is their immediate subsistence, not their subsistence as unity of form, or as relation.

This thing, however, is substrate and substance both, since the identical subsistence that it is, it is only as that of the relation. It is moreover a finite substance, being determined as immediate in contrast to its own causality. Causality nonetheless belongs to it, for it is equally the identical element only as the identical element belonging to this relation. – Taken as cause, then, this substrate refers itself negatively to itself. But that self to which it refers is, firstly, a positedness, since the substrate stands determined as immediately actual; taken as content, such positedness is any determination whatever. – Secondly, causality falls outside it; and so causality is what makes up its positedness. Being causal substance, then, its causality lies in referring itself negatively to itself, that is, to its positedness and to external causality. Hence the acting of this substance sets out from something external, works itself free of that external determination, and its return into itself preserves its immediate concrete existence while sublating its posited existence, and with that its causality altogether.

A stone in motion, for example, is a cause; its motion is one determination it has, but alongside that it holds a host of others – of colour, of shape and so forth – which play no part in its causality. Since the stone's immediate concrete existence lies apart from its reference of form, that is, from causality, the latter is something external; its motion, and the causality accruing to it in that motion, are in the stone mere positedness. – Yet the causality is also its own: this lies in the fact that its substantial subsistence is its self-identical reference to itself, while that reference now stands determined as positedness and is therefore at once a negative reference to self. – Its causality, aimed at itself as at the positedness, or as at something external, accordingly lies in sublating that positedness and, by removing it, coming back into itself, – so that to this extent it is not in its positedness that it is identical with itself; it merely restores its abstract originality. – – Or again: rain causes the wet, and the wet is water just as the rain is. What gives this water the determination of being rain, and of being cause, is that another has posited that determination in it; – some force or other, whatever it may be, has lifted the water into the air and drawn it together into a mass whose gravity brings it down. Its distance from the earth is a determination foreign to the water's original identity with itself, to gravity; and its causality lies in doing away with that distance and re-establishing that identity, thereby sublating its causality as well.

The second determinateness of causality now under consideration concerns the form; this relation is causality as external to itself, is the originality which in its own self is quite as much positedness or effect. Uniting the opposed determinations in this way, in a substrate that is, is what makes up the infinite regress from causes to causes. – One starts from the effect; as effect it has a cause, that cause has a cause once more, and so onward. Why does the cause in turn have a cause? that is, why does the same side, determined a moment ago as cause, now count as effect, so that a fresh cause is demanded for it? – Because the cause is something finite, something determinate as such; determined as one moment of the form in contrast with the effect, and so with its own determinateness, its negation, lying outside it; but just for that reason the cause is itself finite, carries its determinateness within it, and so is positedness or effect. That identity of theirs is likewise posited, yet it is a third thing, the immediate substrate; and causality is external to itself just because here its originality is an immediacy. The difference of form is accordingly first determinateness, determinateness not yet posited as determinateness; it is otherness that is. Finite reflection halts at this immediate on the one side, strips the unity of form away from it, and allows it to count as cause in one respect, as effect in another; from the other side it pushes the unity of form off into the infinite, and by that perennial going-on confesses its own impotence to reach it and hold it fast.

With the effect it stands immediately the same way, or rather the infinite progress from effect to effect is wholly one and the same thing as the regress from cause to cause. In the regress the cause turned into an effect which has another cause in turn; and conversely the effect turns into cause, which then has yet another effect. – The determinate cause we have considered sets out from an externality and, in its effect, comes back to itself not as cause but rather forfeits its causality there. Conversely, though, the effect reaches a substrate that is substance, a subsistence originally self-referring; on that substrate, accordingly, this positedness becomes positedness, which is to say that this substance, as soon as an effect gets posited within it, behaves as cause. The first effect, however – the positedness reaching the substrate from outside – is an other as against the second, the one brought forth by it; for the second stands determined as its reflection-into-itself, the first as an externality upon it. – Yet because causality here is causality external to its own self, it likewise does not return into itself in its effect; therein it becomes external to itself, its effect turns once more into positedness upon a substrate, – upon an other substance, which however just as much makes of it a positedness, or manifests itself as cause, thrusts its effect away from itself again, and so onward into the bad infinite.

3. What has come about through the movement of the determinate causal relation is now to be seen. – Formal causality is extinguished in the effect; thereby the identical element of these two moments has come to be; but with that the unity of cause and effect only as in itself, a unity upon which the reference of form is external. – This identical element is thereby immediate as well, in both determinations of immediacy: firstly as being-in-itself, a content along which causality runs its external course; secondly as an existing substrate wherein cause and effect inhere as form-determinations held apart. Therein they are one in themselves, yet on account of this being-in-itself, or of the form's externality, each of them is external to its own self, and thus, in its unity with the other, is determined as other as against it too. So the cause does have an effect, and is at once itself effect; while the effect, besides having a cause, is also itself cause. But the effect which the cause has, and the effect that it is; – equally, the cause which the effect has, and the cause that it is, are diverse.

What the movement of the determinate causal relation has now brought about, however, is this: that the cause is not only extinguished in the effect, and with it the effect as well, as happened in formal causality, but that in its extinction the cause comes to be once more in the effect, and that the effect, though it disappears into cause, equally comes to be once more there. Every one of these determinations sublates itself in positing itself, and posits itself in sublating itself; there is no external transition of causality from one substrate to another here, for this becoming-other on causality's part is at once its own positing. Causality thus presupposes itself, or conditions itself. That identity which formerly only was in itself, the substrate, now stands determined as a presupposition, or as something posited over against acting causality, and the reflection that was until now merely external to the identical element now stands in relation to it.

c. Action and Reaction

Causality is a presupposing doing. The cause stands conditioned; it refers itself negatively to itself as to something presupposed, to an external other which, however, is in itself nothing but causality itself, and that only in itself. As has emerged, that other is the substantial identity into which formal causality passes over, an identity that has by now determined itself as the negative of that causality. Put otherwise, it is the very thing that was the substance of the causal relation, only that facing it now stands the power of accidentality as itself substantial activity. – It is the passive substance. – What is passive is the immediate, or what is in itself without also being for itself; – pure being, or essence in the sole determinateness of abstract identity with itself. – Facing the passive substance stands the acting substance, which refers itself negatively to itself. This latter is the cause to the extent that, within determinate causality, it has restored itself out of the effect by negating itself; in its otherness, or as an immediate, it comports itself essentially as something positing, and by its own negation mediates itself with itself. Here, then, causality no longer has a substrate that it might inhere in, nor is it a form-determination as against this identity; it is the substance itself, or rather: what is original is causality alone. – The substrate is that passive substance which causality presupposed for itself.

And now this cause acts; for it is the negative power directed upon itself, while being at once its own presupposed; so it acts upon itself as upon an other, namely upon the passive substance. – In doing so it firstly sublates that substance's otherness and returns in it into itself; secondly it determines that substance, positing this sublating of its otherness, or this return into itself, as a determinateness. Since that positedness is simultaneously the cause's return into itself, it is in the first place its effect. Conversely, however, since in presupposing it determines itself as its own other, the cause posits the effect in the other, that is, in the passive substance. – Or: because that passive substance is itself the doubled thing, namely a self-subsistent other and simultaneously a presupposed one, already identical in itself with the acting cause, the acting of that cause is itself doubled; it is both at once: a sublating of the substance's being-determined, that is, of its condition, or a sublating of the passive substance's self-subsistence; – and a sublating of its own identity with that substance, whereby it posits itself in advance, or as an other. – This last moment is what preserves the passive substance; in relation to it that first sublating shows itself simultaneously thus, that only some determinations in the substance get sublated and that its identity with the first substance happens to it externally, in the effect.

To that extent the passive substance suffers violence. – The appearance of power is what violence is, or power as something external. But power is external only to the extent that the causal substance, in acting, that is, in positing itself, is presupposing as well, which means that it posits itself as something sublated. So conversely the doing of violence is quite as much a doing of power. The other upon which the violent cause acts is only an other which that power has itself presupposed; the cause's effect upon it is a negative reference to itself, a manifesting of itself. What is passive is a self-subsistent thing that is only something posited, broken within itself, – an actuality which is condition, and indeed condition as it now stands in its truth, namely an actuality which is nothing but a possibility, or, put the other way, a being-in-itself that is merely the determinateness of being-in-itself, merely passive. Hence, for whatever has violence done to it, violence is not merely something that can be done: it must be done to it; and whatever holds violence over the other holds it solely because it is that other's own power which therein manifests itself and manifests the other. What violence does to the passive substance is merely to posit it as what it in truth is, namely, since it is the simple positive, or immediate substance, to be for that very reason nothing but something posited; the advance status it has as condition is the shine of immediacy, and acting causality strips that shine from it.

Through the impact of another's violence, then, the passive substance has nothing done to it but its right. What it loses is that immediacy, a substantiality foreign to it. What it receives as something foreign, namely being determined as a positedness, is its own determination. – But once it is posited in its positedness, in its own determination, it is far from being sublated thereby; rather it thereby merely closes with itself, and so is originality in the very being-determined it undergoes. – On one side, then, the active substance preserves or posits the passive one, namely insofar as the active makes itself into something sublated; – on the other side it is the passive's own doing to close with itself and thereby make itself the original and a cause. Its being-posited by an other and its own coming-to-be are one and the same thing.

Since the passive substance has now been turned into cause itself, the effect in it is firstly sublated; that is what its reaction consists in generally. As passive substance it is in itself the positedness; and the positedness was also posited in it by the other substance, to the extent, that is, that it took on the other's effect upon itself. Its reaction accordingly holds the same doubling: firstly, that what it is in itself becomes posited; secondly, that what it becomes posited as exhibits itself as its being-in-itself; being in itself positedness, it receives an effect upon itself from the other, but since that positedness is conversely its own being-in-itself, this is its effect, and it exhibits itself as cause.

Secondly, the reaction turns against the first acting cause. For the effect which the formerly passive substance sublates within itself is precisely that effect of the first. But a cause has its substantial actuality only in its effect; with the sublating of that effect, its causal substantiality is sublated too. This happens firstly in itself through itself, in that the cause makes itself into effect; within that identity its negative determination disappears and it turns into something passive; secondly it happens through the formerly passive substance, now reacting, which sublates the first cause's effect. – Within determinate causality the substance acted upon does likewise become cause again, and it acts in opposition to an effect having been posited in it. It did not, however, react back against that cause; it lodged its effect instead in yet another substance, and so the progress of effects into infinity made its appearance; for there the cause is as yet identical with itself in its effect only in itself, and hence on one side disappears in an immediate identity, in its repose, while on the other it rouses itself once more in an other substance. – Within conditioned causality, by contrast, the cause in the effect refers to itself, since its own other is its condition and thus something presupposed, and since its acting is on that account quite as much a coming-to-be as it is a positing and a sublating of the other.

Further, the cause thereby comports itself as passive substance; but, as we saw, this passive substance emerges as causal substance by way of the effect that has been worked upon it. That first cause, the one that acts first and takes its effect back into itself as reaction, thereby comes forward once more as cause; and by this the acting which under finite causality ran off into the bad-infinite progress is bent back, becoming an acting that returns into itself, an infinite reciprocal acting.

C. Reciprocity

In finite causality, what relate to each other in acting are substances. Mechanism lies in this externality of causality: namely, that within its effect the cause's reflection into itself is simultaneously a repellent being; or that, within the identity the causal substance keeps with itself in its effect, that substance stays no less immediately external to itself, while the effect has gone over into another substance. In reciprocity this mechanism now stands sublated; for reciprocity holds, first, that the original persisting belonging to immediate substantiality disappears; second, that the cause comes to be; and thereby originariness as mediating itself with itself through its own negation.

To begin with, reciprocity exhibits itself as a causality running both ways between presupposed substances that condition each other; toward the other, each is at once an active and at once a passive substance. Since on this footing both are passive no less than active, whatever difference there was between them has already sublated itself; the difference is a shine of perfect transparency; what makes them substances is solely their being the identity of active and passive. Hence reciprocity of itself amounts to no more than an empty manner and mode; nothing further is called for than an external drawing together of what is already there both in itself and as posited. For the present, what stand in reference to one another are no longer substrates but substances; through the movement of conditioned causality whatever presupposed immediacy was left over has sublated itself, and nothing now conditions the causal activity except the acting-upon, that is, the cause's own passivity. Further, this acting-upon does not proceed from some other original substance, but precisely from a causality that is itself conditioned by an acting-upon, that is, is something mediated. What is thus at first external, coming upon the cause and constituting the side of its passivity, turns out to be mediated by the cause itself, produced by the cause's own activity, and hence to be the passivity that this activity has itself posited. – Causality is at once conditioned and conditioning; what conditions is the passive side, yet no less is what is conditioned passive. Such conditioning, or passivity, amounts to the cause's negation of itself, since the cause essentially turns itself into effect and is cause for just that reason. Reciprocity is accordingly causality and nothing else; the cause does not simply have an effect, rather in the effect it refers as cause to its own self.

With this, causality has gone back into its absolute concept and has at the same time reached the concept as such. To begin with it is real necessity; absolute identity with itself, in such a way that necessity's difference, together with the determinations that inside it refer to each other, substances, are free actualities over against each other. So understood, necessity is the inner identity, while causality is that identity's manifestation, in which the shine of substantial otherness belonging to it has sublated itself and necessity has been lifted into freedom. – Within reciprocity, original causality displays itself as coming-to-be out of its negation, that is, out of passivity, and as ceasing-to-be into that same negation, hence as a becoming; yet in such fashion that this becoming is equally nothing more than a shining; going over into an other is reflection-into-itself; the negation that constitutes the cause's ground is the cause's positive coming-together with itself.

Necessity and causality have thus disappeared in all this; they hold together both the immediate identity as connection and reference, and the absolute substantiality of the differentiated terms, and so their absolute contingency; the original unity of substantial diversity; in short, the absolute contradiction. Necessity is that being which is because it is; the unity that being has with itself in taking itself for ground; conversely, though, precisely in having a ground it fails to be being, and is nothing whatever but shine, reference, or mediation. Causality is this posited transition whereby original being, the cause, goes over into shine or bare positedness, and positedness in turn into originariness; the very identity of being with shine, however, is still inner necessity. This inwardness, this being-in-itself, sublates the movement of causality; therewith the two sides that stand within the relation forfeit their substantiality, and necessity discloses itself. What turns necessity into freedom is not its disappearing, but solely the manifesting of that identity of its own which is as yet merely inner; and such manifestation is the identical movement of the differentiated within itself, the reflection of shine as shine into itself. – Contingency, conversely, thereby becomes freedom at the same stroke, since the sides of necessity, which wear the shape of actualities that are free on their own and do not shine within one another, now stand posited as identity, so that these totalities of reflection-into-itself, for all their difference, also shine as identical, or are posited as nothing but one and the same reflection.

Absolute substance, which as absolute form distinguishes itself from itself, accordingly no longer repels itself away from itself as necessity, nor does it break apart as contingency into indifferent substances lying outside one another; instead it differentiates itself, on the one side, into the totality which – formerly the passive substance – counts as something original, being the reflection out of determinateness back into itself, a simple whole holding its own positedness within it and posited therein as identical with itself, namely the universal; – on the other side, into the totality – formerly the causal substance – as into the reflection that likewise runs out of determinateness back into itself, toward a negative determinateness, which, being the determinateness identical with itself, is just as much the whole, though posited as the negativity identical with itself; – namely the singular. Immediately, however, since the universal is self-identical only by holding determinateness within it as sublated, and hence is the negative qua negative, – it is that very negativity which singularity is; – and singularity, being in like manner the determined determinate, the negative qua negative, is immediately that very identity which universality is. Their simple identity is particularity, holding in immediate unity the moment of determinateness that comes from the singular and the moment of reflection-into-itself that comes from the universal. These three totalities are consequently one single reflection, which as negative reference to itself differentiates itself into those two, though into a completely transparent difference, namely into determinate simplicity, or simple determinateness, and that is their one single identity. – Such is the concept, the realm of subjectivity, or of freedom.

Second Part. The Subjective Logic, or the Doctrine of the Concept

Foreword

The part of the logic here presented, holding as it does the doctrine of the concept and forming the third part of the whole, is issued under a title of its own besides: System of Subjective Logic; and this for the sake of those well-disposed toward the science who are used to caring more about the materials handled here, which fall within the range of what one ordinarily calls logic, than about the remaining logical topics that the first two parts went through. – As regards those earlier parts, I was in a position to appeal to the forbearance of equitable judges on the score of how little prior work there was that might have furnished me a support, materials, and a thread along which to advance. With the part now before the reader I have to appeal to that same forbearance on the very opposite score; for the logic of the concept finds a material lying ready that is altogether finished and set hard, one might say ossified, and the task is to bring it back into flux and to strike the living concept afresh out of stuff so dead; building a new city on empty ground has its difficulties, yet there at least the material is plentiful, whereas hindrances of quite another kind abound where the business at hand is to give a fresh layout to a town long standing, firmly built, and never out of occupancy and use; among much else, one has to make up one's mind to leave a good deal of the available store, however highly it is otherwise prized, entirely unused. –

But above all, the greatness of the subject matter itself may be adduced in excuse of the imperfect execution. For what subject matter is loftier for cognition than truth itself? – Yet the doubt whether it is not precisely this subject matter that stands in need of an excuse is not far to seek, if one recalls the sense in which Pilate said the question: what is truth? – according to the poet:

– – – – with the mien of the courtier who, short-sighted yet smiling, condemns the cause of earnestness. That question then encloses within itself the sense, which may be regarded as a moment of politeness, and the reminder, that the goal of cognizing truth is something notoriously given up and long since settled, and that the unattainability of truth is something acknowledged even among philosophers and logicians by profession. – But if in our times the question of religion about the worth of things, of insights and of actions, a question which as to its content has the same sense, is once more vindicating its right more fully, then philosophy may surely hope that it will no longer be found so striking when philosophy too, first of all in its own immediate field, asserts its genuine goal anew, and, after having sunk into the manner and into the unpretentiousness of the other sciences with regard to truth, strives to raise itself to that goal again. For the attempt itself no excuse can properly be permitted; but for the carrying out of it I may still mention, by way of one, that my official duties and other personal circumstances allowed me only a scattered labour in a science that requires, and is worthy of, an unscattered and undivided exertion.

Nuremberg, 21 July 1816.

On the Concept in General

What the nature of the concept may be admits of immediate statement as little as the concept of any other subject matter admits of being immediately set up. It could well appear that, for the concept of a subject matter to be stated, the logical is presupposed, so that the logical in turn could have nothing else ahead of it, nor be a derivative, in the way geometry sends on ahead those logical propositions that show up in the application to magnitude and get used in that science, doing so in the shape of axioms, of underived and underivable determinations of cognition. Now though the concept must count not just as some subjective presupposition but as absolute foundation, it can be so only insofar as it has made itself the foundation. The abstractly immediate is doubtless a first; yet just as this abstract thing it is rather a mediated one, and hence one whose foundation has first to be looked for if it is to be grasped as it truly is. Its foundation must therefore be immediate, to be sure, but immediate in such fashion that it has made itself so out of the sublating of mediation.

Seen from this side, what the concept first of all amounts to is the third term over against being and essence, over against the immediate and reflection. To that extent being and essence count as the moments of the concept's becoming; the concept, however, is their foundation and their truth, the identity wherein they have gone under and are held. Being held in it is theirs because it is their result, yet they are so held no longer as being and as essence; that determination belongs to them only for as long as they have not gone back into this unity of theirs.

It is the objective logic, treating of being and essence, that properly makes up the genetic exposition of the concept. Taken more closely, substance already is the real essence, or essence so far as it has joined with being and entered actuality. Substance is thus the concept's immediate presupposition; what the concept is as manifested, substance is in itself. Hence the dialectical movement of substance on through causality and reciprocity is the immediate genesis of the concept, whereby the concept's becoming gets exhibited. But this becoming carries the sense that becoming carries everywhere: that it is the reflection of what passes over into its ground, and that the apparently other into which the first has passed is what makes up that first one's truth. The concept is therefore the truth of substance; and because substance's determinate mode of relation is necessity, freedom comes to light as the truth of necessity and as the concept's mode of relation.

Substance's own necessary onward determining is the positing of that which is in and for itself; and the concept is precisely this absolute unity of being and reflection, namely that being-in- and for-itself obtains only through being no less reflection or positedness, and that positedness is being-in- and for-itself. – What this abstract result means is made clear by setting out its concrete genesis; there the nature of the concept lies; but that setting-out had to come before the treatment of the concept. The chief moments of that exposition, (fully worked through in the 2nd book of the objective logic) may therefore be gathered here in brief:

Substance is the absolute, the actual which is in and for itself; – in itself as the plain identity of possibility and actuality, an absolute essence holding all actuality and possibility within itself; for itself, this same identity as absolute power, or as a negativity that refers itself purely to itself. – What the movement of substantiality posited through these moments consists in is this,

1) That substance, being absolute power or self-referring negativity, sunders itself into a relation wherein those hitherto simple moments stand as substances and as original presuppositions. – The determinate relation between them is one of a passive substance, that is, of the originariness belonging to plain being-in-itself, which, powerless and not self-positing, is merely original positedness; – and of an active substance, of the negativity that refers itself to itself and which, as such, has posited itself as an other and refers itself to that other. That other is just the passive substance, which the active one, out of the originariness of its power, has presupposed for itself as its condition. – The presupposing here has to be understood thus: that the movement of substance itself stands at first under the form of one moment of its concept, namely being-in-itself, so that the determinateness of one of the two substances in the relation counts also as the determinateness of the relation itself.

2) The second moment is being-for-itself: power posits itself as self-referring negativity, and by that sublates once more what it had presupposed. – Now the active substance counts as the cause; it acts; which is to say that it has become the positing, as before it was the presupposing, so that a) power gets the shine of power along with it, and positedness the shine of positedness. What in the presupposition was original turns, within causality, into what it is in itself, and turns so through the reference to an other; a cause yields an effect, and yields it upon another substance; it is now power in reference to an other; so far it appears as cause, but it only is one through this appearing. – The effect strikes the passive substance, which thereby comes to appear as positedness too, and only therein is it passive substance.

3) Yet more than this mere appearance is present here; namely a) the cause acts on the passive substance and alters the latter's determination; but that determination is positedness, and there is nothing else in it to alter; the further determination it takes on is causality; the passive substance accordingly turns into cause, power and activity. b) the cause posits the effect in it; what the cause posits, however, is the cause itself, self-identical in the acting; it is the cause that steps into the passive substance's place. – On the side of the active substance likewise, a) acting is the translating of cause into effect, into the cause's other, into positedness, and b) in the effect the cause displays itself as what it is, the effect being identical with the cause and no other; in acting, then, the cause displays positedness as what it essentially is. – From both sides, therefore, from the identical no less than from the negative referring of the one to the other, each turns into the opposite of itself; and each turns into that opposite in such wise that the other, and so each as well, stays identical with itself. – Yet identical referring and negative referring are one and the same; only in its opposite is substance self-identical, and therein lies the absolute identity of the two substances that were posited as two. Through acting, then, that is, by positing itself as its own opposite, which is at once the sublating of the otherness it had presupposed, namely of the passive substance, the active substance shows itself as cause or original substantiality. Inversely, the acting-upon manifests positedness as positedness, the negative as negative, and so the passive substance as negativity referring to itself; and in this its own other the cause merely closes with itself. By such positing the originariness that was presupposed, the originariness that is in itself, comes to be for itself; but this being-in-and-for-itself obtains solely because the positing is equally a sublating of what was presupposed, or because absolute substance has returned to itself only out of and in its positedness and is absolute by that route. This reciprocity, then, is the appearance which sublates itself once again; the revealing of the shine of causality, wherein the cause is as cause, the revealing that this shine is shine. Such infinite reflection into self, that being-in-and-for-itself first obtains by being positedness, is the completion of substance. But with this completion we no longer have substance itself; we have something higher, the concept, the subject. That the relation of substantiality passes over occurs by its own immanent necessity, and amounts to nothing beyond substance's manifesting of itself: that its truth is the concept, and that the truth of necessity is freedom.

It was already brought to mind earlier, in the 2nd book of the objective logic (p. 376 f., Remark), that the philosophy which takes its stand on the standpoint of substance and goes no further is Spinoza's system. There too the defect of that system was exhibited, in regard to form as much as to matter. To refute it, however, is quite another thing. Concerning the refutation of a philosophical system, the general remark has likewise been made elsewhere that the skewed notion must be driven out of it, as if the system were to be presented as false throughout, and as if the true system stood to the false merely as its opposite. The context in which the Spinozistic system appears here yields of its own accord that system's true standpoint, and the answer to the question whether it is true or false. Out of the nature of essence the relation of substantiality generated itself; that relation, together with its presentation broadened into a whole within a system, is thus a necessary standpoint that the absolute takes up. So a standpoint of that kind may not be treated as an opinion, as some individual's subjective and arbitrary manner of representing and thinking, as a straying of speculation; speculation is on the contrary carried over to it of necessity along its road, and to that extent the system is true through and through. – But it is not the highest standpoint. Just to that extent, though, the system cannot pass for false, as something standing in need of and open to refutation; the only thing in it to be reckoned false is the claim that it should be the highest standpoint. For that reason the true system cannot stand to it in a relation of bare opposition either; for then this opposite would itself be one-sided. Being the higher, it must instead hold the subordinate within itself.

Nor, further, may the refutation come from without, that is, proceed from assumptions lying outside that system, assumptions it fails to answer to. It has only to withhold recognition from them; a defect counts as a defect only for whoever starts from the needs and demands built upon those assumptions. In this sense it has been said that for anyone who does not presuppose, as settled on his own part, the freedom and self-subsistence of the self-conscious subject, no refutation of Spinozism is possible at all. In any case a standpoint so lofty, and in itself already so rich, as the relation of substantiality does not pass that assumption by but harbours it as well; among the attributes of Spinozistic substance is thinking. Rather it knows how to break down the determinations under which such assumptions run counter to it and to draw them into itself, so that within it they turn up in the modifications that suit it. The whole nerve of refuting from outside then lies in clinging stiffly, on one's own side, to the opposed forms of those assumptions, for instance to the thinking individual's absolute subsistence on its own, over against that form of thinking which in absolute substance gets posited as identical with extension. A genuine refutation has to go into the opponent's force and take its stand within the compass of his strength; assailing him outside himself and carrying the day where he is not does nothing to advance the fact. The one refutation of Spinozism can accordingly lie only in this, that its standpoint be acknowledged first as essential and necessary, and secondly that this standpoint raise itself out of itself to the higher one. Taken purely and wholly in and for itself, the relation of substantiality carries itself over into its opposite, the concept. Hence the exposition of substance given in the preceding book, the exposition which carries over to the concept, is Spinozism's one true refutation. It is the uncovering of substance, and this uncovering is the genesis of the concept, whose principal moments were gathered above. – Substance's unity is its relation of necessity; so taken, however, it is merely inner necessity; once substance posits itself by way of the moment of absolute negativity, it turns into manifested or posited identity, and with that into the freedom that constitutes the concept's identity. The concept, the totality that issues from reciprocity, is the unity of reciprocity's two substances, though these now belong to freedom, since their identity is no longer a blind one, that is, an inward one; they have essentially the determination of being shine or moments of reflection, so that each has closed just as immediately with its other or with its positedness, each holds its positedness within itself, and each is thus posited in its other purely as self-identical.

With the concept, then, the realm of freedom stands open. It is the free, since the identity in and for itself that makes up substance's necessity is at once there as sublated, or as positedness, and since this positedness, in referring itself to itself, is that very identity. Gone is the opacity which the substances standing in the causal relation had for one another, for the originariness of their subsistence has passed over into positedness and so become a clarity transparent to itself; the original fact is such by being nothing but the cause of itself, and that is substance set free into the concept.

This yields for the concept, straightaway, the closer determination that follows. Since being-in-and-for-itself immediately is as positedness, the concept in its simple self-reference is absolute determinateness; a determinateness which, however, referring itself to nothing but itself, is just as immediately simple identity. But this reference of determinateness to itself, as its closing with itself, is equally the negation of determinateness, and in this self-sameness the concept is the universal. Yet this identity has just as much the determination of negativity; it is negation or determinateness self-referred, and so the concept is singular. Each of the two is the totality, each carries the other's determination in itself, and for that reason these totalities are as plainly only one as this unity is the sundering of itself into the free shine of that duality; – a duality which, in the difference of singular and universal, looks like complete opposition, yet is so far shine that with the one being grasped and uttered the other is grasped and uttered immediately in it.

What has just been laid out counts as the concept of the concept. Should it appear to depart from what one otherwise means by concept, one might ask for a demonstration of how the very thing that has here come out as the concept lies contained in other representations or accounts. For one thing, though, no confirmation resting on the authority of everyday understanding can be at issue; within the science of the concept, the concept's content and determination admit of verification only through that immanent deduction in which its genesis lies, a deduction now behind us. For another, whatever else gets offered as the concept of the concept must surely allow the one deduced here to be recognized in it. But finding out what others have said of the nature of the concept is no easy matter. For the most part they do not take up the search at all, taking it for granted that everybody understands well enough on his own what is meant in speaking of the concept. Of late one might think oneself all the more excused from any labour with the concept, since, just as for a while the fashion ran to charging imagination, and then memory, with every conceivable ill, it has this good while been the custom in philosophy, and partly remains so, to pile every slander on the concept, to bring into contempt what is the highest of thinking, and to look instead upon the incomprehensible and upon non-comprehension as the highest summit, in science as in morals.

I confine myself here to one remark which may help in taking in the concepts developed here and may make it easier to find one's way among them. So far as the concept has thriven into a concrete existence that is itself free, it is nothing else than the I, or pure self-consciousness. Concepts I certainly have, meaning determinate concepts; the I, though, is the pure concept as such, the concept come to existence. So when one calls to mind the basic determinations making up the nature of the I, one may take it that what is being called to mind is something well known, that is, something familiar to representation. The I, however, is first this pure self-referring unity, and is so not at once but by way of abstracting from every determinateness and every content and retreating into the freedom of a self-sameness without restriction. So it is universality; a unity that is unity with itself only through that negative bearing which shows up as abstracting, and which therefore holds all being-determined dissolved within it. Secondly, the I is just as immediately, as self-referring negativity, singularity, absolute being-determined, setting itself over against an other and shutting it out; individual personality. That absolute universality which is just as immediately absolute singularizing, and a being-in- and for-itself that is out and out positedness and is this being-in- and for-itself only by its unity with positedness, makes up the nature of the I no less than that of the concept; of neither is anything to be grasped unless the two moments named are taken up at once in their abstraction and at once in their complete unity.

When one speaks in the usual manner of the understanding that I have, one means by it a faculty or property standing to the I as a thing's property stands to the thing, – to an indeterminate substrate that is not the true ground and determinant of its property. On such a representation I have concepts, and the concept, in the way I also have a coat, a colour, and other outward properties. – Kant pressed past this outward relation borne to the I by the understanding as faculty of concepts, and by the concepts themselves. Among the profoundest and most correct insights to be met with in the Critique of Reason belongs this, that the unity making up the essence of the concept is discerned as the originally synthetic unity of apperception, as the unity of the: I think, or of self-consciousness. – This proposition makes up the so-called transcendental deduction of the category; yet it has always passed for one of the hardest pieces in Kant's philosophy, – for no other reason, surely, than that it requires one to move past the mere representation of the relation borne to a thing and its properties or accidents by the I and the understanding or the concepts, and to press on to the thought. – Object, Kant says, Kritik der reinen Vernunft S. 137. 2te Ausg. is that in whose concept the manifold of a given intuition stands united. All uniting of representations, however, calls for unity of consciousness in the synthesis of those representations. Consequently this unity of consciousness is what alone makes up the referring of representations to a subject matter, and so their objective validity, and on it rests the very possibility of the understanding. From this Kant marks off the subjective unity of consciousness, the unity of representation as to whether I am aware of a manifold simultaneously or one after another, which hangs on empirical conditions. The principles of the objective determination of representations, by contrast, are said to be drawn solely from the fundamental proposition of the transcendental unity of apperception. By the categories, which are these objective determinations, the manifold of given representations is determined so as to be brought to the unity of consciousness. – On this presentation, the concept's unity is that whereby something is not a bare determination of feeling, not intuition nor even bare representation, but object; and this objective unity is the unity of the I with itself. – To comprehend a subject matter consists in fact in nothing else than that the I makes it its own, penetrates it, and carries it over into its own form, namely into the universality which is immediately determinateness, or the determinateness which is immediately universality. In intuition, or even in representation, the subject matter is still something outward, something alien. By comprehending, the being-in- and-for-itself it possesses in intuiting and representing gets turned into a positedness; the I penetrates it in thinking. As it stands in thinking, though, it first is in and for itself; as it stands in intuition or representation it is appearance; thinking sublates the immediacy with which it first comes before us and thereby makes a positedness of it; yet this positedness of its own is its being-in- and for-itself, its objectivity. Such objectivity, then, the subject matter possesses in the concept, and the concept is the unity of self-consciousness into which the subject matter has been taken up; its objectivity, or the concept, is thus itself nothing else than the nature of self-consciousness; it has no moments or determinations save those of the I itself.

By a principal proposition of Kant's philosophy it is thus warranted that, to know what the concept is, the nature of the I should be called to mind. Conversely, though, this requires that the concept of the I be grasped as it was set out just above. Stop at the bare representation of the I such as floats before our everyday consciousness, and the I is no more than the simple thing, given also the name of soul, to which the concept attaches as a possession or property. Such a representation, which never engages in comprehending either the I or the concept, can be of no use for easing or bringing nearer the comprehending of the concept.

Two further sides bearing on the concept are contained in the Kantian presentation cited, and they call for some further remarks. In the first place the stage of the understanding has the stages of feeling and of intuition sent ahead of it; and Kant's transcendental philosophy holds it for an essential proposition that concepts without intuition are empty, valid only as references of the manifold which intuition supplies. Secondly the concept has been given out as the objective side of cognition, hence as the truth. Yet on the other side it gets taken as something merely subjective, out of which reality, by which, being set over against subjectivity, objectivity is to be meant, cannot be fished; and generally the concept and the logical are pronounced something merely formal which, abstracting as it does from content, does not hold the truth.

As to the first, then, that relation of the understanding or concept to the stages presupposed for it, everything turns on which science is under treatment, if the form of those stages is to be settled. In our science, as pure logic, the stages are being and essence. In psychology it is feeling and intuition, and then representation at large, that get sent ahead of the understanding. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, as the doctrine of consciousness, the climb to the understanding went by way of the stages of sensuous consciousness and then of perceiving. Kant sends ahead of it feeling and intuition alone. How incomplete this ladder is to start with he himself lets one see, in that he attaches to the transcendental logic, or theory of the understanding, one further treatise by way of appendix, on the concepts of reflection; – a sphere lying between intuition and the understanding, or between being and the concept. On the fact itself it is to be noted in the first place that those shapes of intuition, representation and the like are the property of self-conscious spirit, which as such does not come under consideration in logical science. True, the pure determinations of being, essence and concept do make up the foundation and the inner simple scaffolding of spirit's forms; spirit as intuiting, and equally as sensuous consciousness, stands in the determinateness of immediate being, while spirit as representing, and also as perceiving consciousness, has lifted itself from being to the stage of essence or of reflection. But such concrete shapes are as little the business of logical science as are the concrete forms which the logical determinations take on in nature, forms that would be space and time, then space and time filling themselves out, as inorganic nature, and organic nature. Nor, likewise, is the concept here to be looked at as an act performed by the self-conscious understanding, nor as subjective understanding, but rather as the concept in and for itself, one that makes up a stage of nature quite as much as one of spirit. Life, or organic nature, is that stage of nature at which the concept steps forth; but as a blind concept, one that does not seize itself, that is, one that does not think; as such the concept falls only to spirit. Of that unspiritual shape of the concept, however, as of this spiritual one, its logical form is independent; the necessary advance notice on this was already given in the Introduction; it is a point not to be justified first inside logic, but one about which one must be clear before logic.

Yet however the forms preceding the concept may be shaped, what matters secondly is the relation in which the concept is thought to stand to them. Both the usual psychological representation and Kant's transcendental philosophy take that relation thus: the empirical material, the manifold of intuition and representation, is at first there on its own, whereupon the understanding comes up to it, brings unity into it, and by abstraction lifts it into the form of universality. On this showing the understanding is a form empty on its own, getting reality in part only from that given content, and in part abstracting from it, that is, dropping it as something which is however unusable for the concept alone. In neither operation is the concept what is independent, what is essential and true in that antecedent material; the material is rather the reality in and for itself, which cannot be fished out of the concept.

It must of course be granted that the concept as such is not yet complete, but has to lift itself into the idea, which alone is the unity of concept and reality; as must emerge in the sequel from the nature of the concept itself. For the reality it gives itself may not be picked up as something external, but has, on scientific demand, to be derived from the concept itself. But the material given through intuition and representation is truly not what may be urged against the concept as the real. »It is only a concept,« runs the customary saying, whereby not merely the idea but sensuous, spatial and temporal palpable existence gets set over against it as something more excellent than the concept. The abstract then passes for something lesser than the concrete because so much material of that kind has been dropped from it. Abstracting, on this opinion, means that out of the concrete, and merely to serve our subjective ends, one mark or another is lifted out in such a way that, with so many other properties and constitutions of the subject matter dropped, nothing is meant to be taken from these in worth or in dignity; they are rather left standing as the real, only over there on the other side, and still in full force; so that it is merely the incapacity of the understanding that it cannot take up such wealth and must make do with the scanty abstraction. Now if the given material of intuition and the manifold of representation is taken for the real as against the thought and the concept, that is a view whose being laid aside is not merely a condition of philosophizing but is already presupposed by religion; how could there be any need or sense of religion if the fleeting and surface appearance of the sensuous and the singular still passed for the true? Philosophy, however, delivers the comprehended insight into how things stand with the reality of sensuous being, and it sends those stages of feeling and intuition, of sensuous consciousness and so forth, ahead of the understanding just so far as they are its conditions in its becoming, yet only in such fashion that the concept arises out of their dialectic and nullity as their ground, and not that the concept should be conditioned by their reality. Abstracting thought is therefore not to be viewed as a mere shunting aside of sensuous material, as though that material took no harm in its reality thereby; it is rather the sublating of the material and its reduction, as mere appearance, to what is essential, and this shows itself only in the concept. If, to be sure, what is to be taken up out of the concrete appearance into the concept is only meant to serve as a mark or sign, then it may of course be some merely sensuous singular determination of the subject matter, picked out from the rest for the sake of some external interest, and of the same sort and nature as the rest.

A chief misunderstanding at work here is the notion that the natural principle, or the beginning from which the natural development, or the history of the individual as it educates itself, sets out, is the true and the first in the concept. Intuition or being are indeed, by nature, the first, the condition for the concept, yet they are not on that score the unconditioned in and for itself; in the concept their reality is on the contrary sublated, and with it the shine they carried as the conditioning real. Where it is not truth that is at issue but only the history of how things proceed in representing and in appearing thinking, one may of course rest with the tale that we begin from feelings and intuitions, that the understanding draws a universality or an abstraction out of their manifold, and that it naturally requires for this the foundation which, throughout such abstracting, remains standing for representation in the entire reality with which it first showed itself. Philosophy, however, is meant to be no tale of what occurs, but a cognition of the true within it, and out of the true it is further to comprehend what in the tale looks like mere occurrence.

If, in the superficial representation of what the concept is, all manifoldness falls outside the concept, and only the form of abstract universality or of empty reflection-identity accrues to it, one may recall right away that elsewhere too, in stating a concept or giving a definition, over and above the genus, which itself is strictly not pure abstract universality, the specific determinateness is expressly required. Were one to reflect with a little thoughtful attention on what that means, it would come out that distinguishing is thereby held to be a moment of the concept quite as essential. Kant opened this consideration with the exceedingly important thought that there are synthetic judgments à priori. That original synthesis of apperception is among the profoundest principles for speculative development; in it lies the beginning of a true grasp of the nature of the concept, and it stands wholly counter to the empty identity or abstract universality which harbours no synthesis in it. – The carrying out, however, answers poorly to such a beginning. The very expression: synthesis readily leads back to the representation of an external unity and a mere joining of things separate in and for themselves. Thereupon Kant's philosophy stayed with the psychological reflex of the concept and reverted to the claim that the concept remains conditioned by a manifold of intuition. It gave out the cognitions of understanding and experience as an appearing content, not because the categories are themselves merely finite, but on grounds of a psychological idealism, since they are supposedly nothing but determinations arising from self-consciousness. Here belongs too the claim that the concept is once again to be void of content and empty without the manifold of intuition, for all that it is à priori a synthesis; being that, it surely carries determinateness and difference within itself. As it is the determinateness of the concept, and with that the absolute determinateness, singularity, the concept is ground and source of all finite determinateness and manifoldness.

The formal position it keeps as understanding reaches its consummation in Kant's account of what reason is. In reason, the highest stage of thinking, one would look for the concept to shed the conditionedness that still clings to it at the stage of the understanding, and to reach consummated truth. That expectation, however, is disappointed. Because Kant determines reason's bearing toward the categories as merely dialectical, and takes the result of that dialectic to be simply the infinite nothing, the infinite unity of reason forfeits the synthesis as well, and with it the beginning of a speculative, truly infinite concept; it sinks into the well-known wholly formal, merely regulative unity of the systematic use of the understanding. It is pronounced an abuse for logic, which is meant to be no more than a canon of appraisal, to be viewed as an organon for producing objective insights. The concepts of reason, in which one had to sense a higher power and a deeper content, keep nothing constitutive about them any longer, as the categories still did; they are mere ideas; using them is to be perfectly permissible, but by these intelligible essences, in which all truth was to unlock itself entirely, nothing more is to be meant than hypotheses, and to credit these with a truth in and for itself would be sheer caprice and rashness, seeing that they – can turn up in no experience. – Would one ever have thought that philosophy would refuse truth to intelligible essences for want of the spatial and temporal material of sensibility?

Bound up immediately with this is the point of view under which the concept and the vocation of logic generally have to be regarded, a point of view taken in Kant's philosophy just as it is taken commonly; namely the relation borne by the concept and its science to truth itself. From Kant's deduction of the categories it was cited above that on it the object, namely that in which intuition's manifold stands united, is this unity only through the unity of self-consciousness. Here, then, the objectivity of thinking is definitely pronounced, an identity of concept and thing that is the truth. It is likewise granted on all hands that when thinking makes a given subject matter its own, the latter thereby undergoes an alteration and is turned from a sensuous one into a thought one; that this alteration, however, so far from changing anything in its essentiality, means rather that only in its concept does the subject matter stand in its truth; that in the immediacy wherein it is given it is nothing but appearance and contingency; that the cognition of the subject matter which comprehends it is cognition of it as it is in and for itself; and that the concept is its objectivity itself. On the other side, however, it is with equal assurance maintained once more that we cannot after all cognize things as they are in and for themselves, that truth lies beyond the reach of cognizing reason; that the truth consisting in the unity of object and concept is after all mere appearance; and this once again on the ground that the content is nothing but the manifold of intuition. On this point it has already been recalled that in the concept, on the contrary, just this manifoldness gets sublated so far as it belongs to intuition in opposition to the concept, and that the subject matter is led back by the concept into its non-contingent essentiality; that essentiality enters appearance, and precisely for that reason appearance is not something merely essenceless but the manifestation of essence. The manifestation of essence grown wholly free, however, is the concept. – The propositions recalled here are no dogmatic assertions, for the reason that they are results issuing through themselves from the whole development of essence. Where this development has now brought us is the insight that the form of the absolute standing higher than being and essence is the concept. Since on this side the concept has brought under itself being and essence, to which, from other points of departure, feeling and intuition and representation also belong, and which appeared beforehand as conditions of it, and since it has shown itself to be their unconditioned ground, what is left over now is the second side, to whose treatment this third book of the logic is devoted, namely the presentation of how the concept builds in and out of itself the reality that vanished within it. It has therefore been granted that the cognition standing merely at the concept purely as such is still incomplete and has so far reached only abstract truth. Its incompleteness lies not in its wanting that supposed reality alleged to be given in feeling and intuition, but in the concept's not yet having given itself its own reality, one generated out of itself. Herein lies the absoluteness of the concept, proved against and upon the empirical material, more precisely upon its categories and determinations of reflection: that this material has no truth as it shows up outside and before the concept, but only in its ideality, or identity with the concept. The deriving of the real from the concept, if one cares to call it deriving, consists at bottom first of all in this, that the concept in its formal abstraction proves itself unfinished and, by the dialectic grounded within it, goes over to reality in such a way as to generate reality from itself, not in such a way as to fall back again upon a finished reality met with over against it, taking refuge in something that has announced itself as the unessential in appearance because, after looking round for something better, it found nothing of the kind. – It will always be marked out as something to wonder at how Kant's philosophy discerned the relation of thinking to sensuous existence at which it halted to be merely a relative relation of bare appearance, and how very well it acknowledged and pronounced a higher unity of the two in the idea at large, and for instance in the idea of an intuitive understanding, and yet halted at that relative relation and at the claim that the concept is and stays cut off from reality outright, – so declaring to be the truth what it gave out as finite cognition, and declaring to be extravagant, illicit, and mere things of thought what it discerned as truth and of which it set up the determinate concept.

Since it is logic here in the first instance, and not science at large, whose relation to truth is in question, it must further be granted that logic, as the formal science, neither can nor should contain that reality which forms the content of philosophy's further parts, of the sciences of nature and of spirit. To be sure, these concrete sciences step out into a more real form of the idea than logic does, yet not so as to turn back to that reality which consciousness gave up in raising itself above its appearance into science, nor so as to revert to the use of forms like the categories and determinations of reflection, whose finitude and untruth logic has exhibited. Logic shows rather the raising of the idea to that stage from which the idea turns creator of nature and steps across into the form of a concrete immediacy, whose concept then breaks this shape apart again so as to come to itself as concrete spirit. Set against these concrete sciences, which have and keep the logical, or the concept, as their inner shaper just as they had it as their pre-shaper, logic is of course itself the formal science, but the science of absolute form, a form that is totality within itself and holds the pure idea of truth itself. On itself this absolute form has its content or reality; the concept, not being the trivial, empty identity, has in the moment of its negativity, or of absolute determining, the differentiated determinations; content in general is nothing else than such determinations of absolute form; content posited by that form itself, and therefore also answering to it. – This form is on that account of quite another nature than the logical form is commonly taken to be. It is already for itself the truth, since this content answers to its form, or this reality to its concept, and it is the pure truth because the form's determinations do not yet carry the form of an absolute otherness or of absolute immediacy. – Kant, when he comes to speak (Critique of Pure Reason, p. 83) with reference to logic, of the old and famous question: What truth is? bestows at the outset, as something trivial, the nominal explanation that truth is the agreeing of cognition with its subject matter; – a definition of great, indeed of the highest, worth. Recall that definition alongside transcendental idealism's basic claim, that rational cognition has no power to seize things in themselves, that reality lies flatly outside the concept, and it shows at once that such a reason, unable to bring itself into agreement with its subject matter, the things in themselves, and such things in themselves, out of agreement with the concept of reason, and a concept out of agreement with reality, and a reality out of agreement with the concept, are untrue representations. Had Kant measured the idea of an intuitive understanding against that definition of truth, he would have handled this idea, which expresses the agreement demanded, not as a thing of thought but rather as truth.

»What one wants to know, Kant goes on, is a universal and secure criterion of the truth of any cognition whatever; such a one would have to hold of all cognitions without distinction of their objects; but since with it one abstracts from all content of cognition (reference to its object), while truth bears on just this content, it would be altogether impossible and absurd to ask after a mark of the truth of this content of cognitions.« – The usual representation of logic's formal function finds very definite expression here, and the reasoning quoted looks highly convincing. First off, however, one must note that formal reasoning of this sort commonly fares so as to forget, in its talking, the very fact it laid down as its basis and of which it speaks. It would be absurd, so runs the claim, to inquire after a criterion of the truth of the content of cognition; – but by the definition truth is constituted not by the content but by that content's agreeing with the concept. A content of the sort spoken of here, without the concept, is conceptless and hence essenceless; after a criterion of the truth of such a thing one indeed cannot inquire, but for the opposite reason; namely not because, by reason of its conceptlessness, it is not the agreement demanded, but because it can be nothing beyond something belonging to opinion void of truth. – Let us leave aside the mention of content, which here breeds the confusion that formalism falls into every time and that makes it say the reverse of what it wants to bring forward whenever it takes up explaining, and let us hold to the abstract view that the logical is merely formal and rather abstracts from all content; – then what we have is a one-sided cognition meant to contain no subject matter, an empty form without determination, which is therefore as little an agreement, since agreement essentially takes two, – as little truth. – In the à priori synthesis of the concept Kant possessed a higher principle wherein duality within unity, and so what truth demands, could be discerned; but the sensuous material, the manifold of intuition, held too much sway over him for a passage away from it to the consideration of concept and categories in and for themselves, and to a speculative philosophizing.

Logic being the science of absolute form, this formal element must, if it is to be something true, carry on itself a content suited to its form, and all the more so in that the logically formal is pure form, so that the logically true must be the pure truth itself. This formal element has therefore to be thought as far richer in determinations and content within itself, and as of infinitely greater potency upon the concrete, than it is usually taken for. The logical laws by themselves, (setting aside the heterogeneous matter anyway, the applied logic and the remaining psychological and anthropological stuff,) are usually cut down, besides the proposition of contradiction, to a few thin propositions about the conversion of judgments and the forms of syllogisms. Even the forms that occur there, along with their further determinations, are picked up merely in a quasi-historical way and are never put to the test of whether they are anything true in and for themselves. Thus, for instance, the form of the positive judgment passes for something in itself entirely correct, where whether such a judgment is true supposedly hangs on the content alone. Whether this form is in and for itself a form of truth, whether the proposition it utters, the singular is a universal, is not dialectical in itself, is an inquiry that never gets a thought. It is flatly assumed that this judgment is by itself able to contain truth, and that the proposition uttered by every positive judgment is a true one; though it is immediately plain that it wants what the definition of truth demands, namely the agreeing of concept and subject matter; take the predicate, here the universal, for the concept, and the subject, which is the singular, for the subject matter, and the one fails to agree with the other. Now if the abstract universal that serves as predicate does not yet make up a concept, to which more certainly belongs; – as such a subject too is not yet much beyond a grammatical one, how should the judgment be capable of containing truth, when its concept and its subject matter do not agree, or when it wants the concept, and probably the subject matter as well? – Rather it is impossible and absurd to want to catch truth in forms of that kind, such as the positive judgment is, and judgment in general. As little as Kant's philosophy considered the categories in and for themselves, declaring them instead, on the skewed ground that they are subjective forms of self-consciousness, to be finite determinations unfit to contain the true, so much the less did it subject to critique the forms of the concept that make up the content of ordinary logic; it rather took over a part of them, namely the functions of judgment, for determining the category, and let them pass as valid presuppositions. Even were nothing more to be seen in the logical forms than formal functions of thinking, they would on that score alone deserve the inquiry how far by themselves they answer to truth. A logic that fails at this can lay claim at most to the worth of a natural-history description of the appearances of thinking as they are met with. That Aristotle was the first to undertake this description is an infinite merit of his, one that must fill us with the utmost admiration for the strength of that spirit. But it is needful to go further, and to discern in part the systematic connection, in part however the worth of the forms.