With What Must the Beginning of Science Be Made?

Only in more recent times has the awareness arisen that it is a difficulty to find a beginning in philosophy, and the ground of this difficulty, as well as the possibility of resolving it, has been discussed in manifold ways. Either something mediated or else something immediate has to serve as philosophy's beginning, and neither alternative, as is readily shown, is open to it; whichever of the two ways of beginning one adopts, therefore, runs into its refutation.

A beginning is voiced in the principle of a philosophy too, granted, though what gets voiced is an objective beginning rather than a subjective one, the beginning of all things. Some content or other, determined this way or that, is what a principle amounts to – water, the one, nous, idea – substance, monad, and so forth; and should it instead bear on the nature of cognition, counting thereby as a criterion merely rather than as an objective determination, thinking, intuiting, sensing, I, subjectivity itself, then here as well the interest is aimed at the determination of content. The beginning as such, by contrast, remains unnoticed and a matter of indifference, as something subjective in the sense of a contingent manner of introducing the exposition, and hence the need behind the question with what one is to begin remains insignificant beside the need for the principle, since in the principle alone the interest of the matter seems to lie, the interest in what the true is, what the absolute ground of everything is.

What lies behind the modern perplexity over the beginning, though, is a further need, unknown as yet to anyone whose dogmatic business is the demonstration of the principle, or whose sceptical business is the hunt for a subjective criterion against dogmatic philosophizing, and flatly disowned by anyone who sets out as though discharged from a pistol, out of an inner revelation of his own, out of faith, intellectual intuition and the like, wanting himself excused from method and logic. Where thinking in its earlier abstract mode cared at first for the principle only as content, yet in the course of cultivation was driven to heed the other side as well, the way cognition conducts itself, there the subjective doing likewise gets grasped as an essential moment of objective truth, and the need makes itself felt for method to be at one with content, form with principle. Hence the principle is to be the beginning as well, and whatever ranks as prius for thinking is to rank likewise as the first along the course thinking takes.

Our concern at this point goes no further than the manner in which the logical beginning shows itself; the two aspects under which it admits of being taken have been named already, either mediatedly, as a result, or immediately, as a beginning proper. The question that appears so important in the culture of our time, whether the knowledge of truth is an immediate knowledge that begins absolutely, a faith, or rather a mediated knowledge, is not to be discussed in this place. Insofar as such a consideration can be undertaken provisionally, this has been done elsewhere (in my Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, 3rd ed., Preliminary Notion, § 61 ff.). Here only this much may be adduced from it, that there is nothing, nothing in heaven or in nature or in spirit or wherever it may be, that does not contain immediacy just as much as mediation, so that these two determinations show themselves to be unseparated and inseparable and that opposition shows itself to be a nullity. But as concerns the scientific discussion of the matter, it is every logical proposition in which the determinations of immediacy and of mediation, and hence the discussion of their opposition and their truth, occur. To the extent that this opposition, referred to thinking, knowledge, cognition, assumes the more concrete figure of knowledge either immediate or mediated, cognition's nature at large receives treatment inside the science of logic, while in its further concrete form it falls to the science of spirit and to the phenomenology thereof. Wanting to get clear about cognition already before the science amounts to demanding that the matter be thrashed out outside it; and outside the science that cannot be managed at least in the scientific manner, the only manner in question here.

What makes the beginning logical is that it has to be made within the element of thinking that is freely for itself, in pure knowledge. It is thereby mediated in that pure knowledge is the last, absolute truth of consciousness. It was remarked in the Introduction that the Phenomenology of Spirit, the science of consciousness, is the exposition of how consciousness has as its result the concept of science, i.e. pure knowledge. To that extent logic has for its presupposition the science of appearing spirit, which contains and displays the necessity and hence the proof of the truth of the standpoint that is pure knowledge, as well as its mediation in general. In this science of appearing spirit the starting point is empirical, sensuous consciousness; and this is knowledge that is immediate in the proper sense; there it is discussed what there is to this immediate knowledge. Consciousness of other sorts – belief in divine truths, inner experience, knowledge by way of inner revelation and so forth – proves on the slightest reflection to be very improperly listed as immediate knowledge. In that treatise immediate consciousness is likewise the first and immediate thing in the science, hence the presupposition; in logic, however, the presupposition is what had proved itself to be the result of that consideration – the idea as pure knowledge. Logic is pure science, i.e. pure knowledge in the entire compass of its development. But in that result this idea has determined itself to be the certainty that has become truth, the certainty which on the one side no longer stands over against the object but has made it inward, knows it as itself – and which on the other side has given up the knowledge of itself as of something that stands over against the objective and is merely its annihilation, has divested itself of this subjectivity and is unity with its own divestment.

Now, so that from this determination of pure knowledge the beginning of its science may remain immanent, there is nothing to do but to contemplate it, or rather, setting aside all reflections and all opinions one otherwise has, simply to take up what is present.

Having collapsed into this unity, pure knowledge has sublated every reference to an other and to mediation; nothing in it is differentiated; and with that the undifferentiated itself stops being knowledge; there is present nothing but simple immediacy.

An expression of reflection is what simple immediacy is in its own right, since it bears on the difference from what is mediated. In its true expression, therefore, this simple immediacy is pure being. If by pure knowledge nothing is meant save knowledge as such, quite abstractly taken, then by pure being likewise nothing is meant save being at large; being, and nothing else, stripped of every further determination and filling.

Being figures here as that which begins, exhibited as having arisen by way of mediation – a mediation, indeed, which is at once the sublating of itself – on the presupposition of pure knowledge as the outcome of finite knowledge, of consciousness. Suppose, however, that nothing whatever is to be presupposed and that the beginning is itself to be taken immediately: then its only determination lies in its having to be the beginning of logic, of thinking on its own. Nothing is at hand save the resolve, arbitrary as one may well judge it, to consider thinking as such. The beginning must accordingly be an absolute one, or, what here amounts to the same, an abstract one; it may thus presuppose nothing, may be mediated by nothing and may possess no ground; rather it has itself to serve as the ground on which the whole science rests. What it must be, then, is an immediate pure and simple, or better still, just the immediate itself. Since no determination over against anything else is possible for it, neither can it harbour one within, nor any content, for anything of that sort would be a distinguishing and a relating of distinct terms to one another, and so a mediation. So the beginning is pure being.

With that plain account of what belongs, in the first instance, to this simplest of all things, the logical beginning, some further reflections may still be added; their office, however, cannot really be to elucidate or corroborate an account already finished in itself, since they are prompted merely by representations and reflections that may cross our path beforehand and that nevertheless, like every other antecedent prejudice, must find their disposal inside the science itself, so that strictly one would have to refer them to patience for that.

Out of the insight that the absolutely true has to be a result while a result, conversely, has a first truth for its presupposition – a truth that, being first, is on the objective view not necessary and on the subjective side not cognized – recent times have generated the thought that philosophy can begin only with a hypothetical and problematic truth, and that philosophizing can accordingly at first be no more than a searching, a view urged repeatedly by Reinhold in the later stretch of his philosophizing, one to which justice requires granting that a genuine interest underlies it, an interest concerning the speculative character of the philosophical beginning. Setting this view out affords at the same time an opening for a provisional grasp of what logical progression means in general, since regard for the forward course is something that view carries within itself right away. And indeed it represents the matter thus, that advancing in philosophy is rather a going backwards and a grounding, through which alone it turns out that what one began with is not merely something arbitrarily assumed but is in fact partly the true, partly the first truth.

One must grant that it is an essential consideration – one that will emerge more closely within logic itself – that the forward movement is a return into the ground, to the original and the true, on which what the beginning was made with depends and by which it is in fact brought forth. – Consciousness, for its part, travelling from the immediacy with which it starts, gets brought back to absolute knowledge as the truth innermost to it. And this final term, the ground, is likewise that out of which the first issues, the first that had stepped forward at the outset as an immediate. – Still more is absolute spirit, which turns out to be the concrete and final, highest truth of all being, cognized as freely divesting itself at the end of the development and releasing itself into the shape of an immediate being – as resolving upon the creation of a world that contains everything that fell within the development preceding that result, and that, through this reversed position, together with its beginning, is transformed into something dependent on the result as the principle. What is essential for science is not so much that a purely immediate be the beginning, but rather that the whole of it is a circle in itself, in which the first also becomes the last and the last also the first.

Hence there follows, on the other side, as equally necessary, that what the movement goes back into as into its ground is to be regarded as result. Regarded that way, the first is quite as much the ground and the last a derivative; since one sets out from the first and reaches the last, as the ground, through valid inference, that last counts as a result. The advance, further, from that which makes the beginning is to be regarded only as a further determination of it, so that what begins remains at the base of everything that follows and does not vanish from it. The advance does not consist in this, that merely an other is derived, or that there is a passing over into a genuine other; – and insofar as this passing over does occur, it just as much sublates itself again. Thus the beginning of philosophy is the foundation present and preserving itself in all subsequent developments, that which remains throughout immanent in its further determinations.

Through this advance, then, the beginning loses the one-sidedness that attaches to it in this determinateness of being an immediate and an abstract in general; it becomes something mediated, and the line of scientific forward movement thereby makes itself into a circle. – At the same time it turns out that what makes the beginning, being therein still the undeveloped and contentless, is not yet truly cognized at the beginning, and that only the science, and indeed in its entire development, is the completed, content-filled and first truly grounded cognition of it.

But just because the result only comes forth as the absolute ground, the progress of this cognition is not something provisional, nor something problematic and hypothetical, but must be determined by the nature of the matter and of the content itself. That beginning is neither something arbitrary and merely assumed for the time being, nor something appearing arbitrary and presupposed as a request but of which it nevertheless shows in the sequel that one did right in making it the beginning; it is not as with the constructions one is instructed to make for the purpose of proving a geometrical proposition, where it turns out only afterwards, in the proofs, that one did well to draw just these lines, and then, in the proofs themselves, to begin with the comparison of these lines or angles; taken by itself, in this drawing of lines or comparing, it is not comprehended. Thus the ground why in pure science the start is made from pure being has just been indicated immediately in that science itself. This pure being is the unity into which pure knowledge goes back, or, if this knowledge itself is still to be held as form distinct from its unity, then pure being is also its content. This is the side according to which this pure being, this absolutely immediate, is just as much something absolutely mediated. But it must just as essentially be taken only in the one-sidedness of being the purely immediate, precisely because it is here as the beginning. Insofar as it were not this pure indeterminateness, insofar as it were determinate, it would be taken as something mediated, as something already carried further; something determinate contains an other to a first. It lies, then, in the nature of the beginning itself that it be being and nothing else. No further preparations are therefore needed in order to enter into philosophy, nor any other reflections and points of connection.

From the fact that the beginning is the beginning of philosophy, no closer determination or positive content for it can properly be derived either. For philosophy is here at the beginning, where the matter itself is not yet at hand, an empty word or some assumed, unjustified representation. Pure knowledge yields only this negative determination, that the beginning is to be the abstract beginning. Insofar as pure being is taken as the content of pure knowledge, this knowledge has to step back from its content, to let it have its own way and not determine it further. – Or again, since pure being is to be regarded as the unity into which knowledge, at the very summit of its union with the object, has collapsed, knowledge has disappeared into that unity, leaving behind neither a difference from it nor, in consequence, any determination for it. – Beyond that, no something and no content of any kind is at hand with which the more determinate beginning might be made.

But even the determination of being hitherto assumed as the beginning could be left out, so that all that would be required is that a pure beginning be made. Then nothing is at hand but the beginning itself, and it would remain to be seen what it is. – This position could at the same time be offered as an amicable proposal to those who, on the one hand, are not satisfied that the start is made with being, from whatever reflections, and still less with the outcome that being has, namely to pass over into nothing, – and who, on the other hand, know of no other way at all than that a science should begin with the presupposition of a representation – a representation that is thereupon analysed, so that the outcome of such analysis then furnishes the first determinate concept in the science. If we too observed this procedure, we would have no particular object, since the beginning, as the beginning of thinking, is to be wholly abstract, wholly universal, wholly form without any content; we would thus have nothing at all but the representation of a mere beginning as such. It is therefore only to be seen what we have in this representation.

There is as yet nothing, and something is to become. The beginning is no pure nothing, rather a nothing out of which something is due to issue; being, then, lies contained in the beginning already. Both are held in the beginning, therefore, being and nothing; the beginning is their unity; – or it is non-being that is being at once, and being that is at once non-being.

Being and nothing are moreover at hand in the beginning as distinguished, seeing that the beginning gestures at something else; – it is a non-being standing in relation to being as to an other; whatever begins is not yet; it is merely on its way to being. Being is thus held in the beginning as that which withdraws from non-being, or sublates the latter as its opposite.

Yet again, what begins already is, while quite as much it also is not yet. The opposites, being and non-being, are therefore in it in immediate union; or the beginning is their undifferentiated unity.

Analysing the beginning would accordingly deliver the concept of a unity of being with non-being – in more reflected form, of a unity of being-distinguished with being-not-distinguished – or of the identity of identity and non-identity. One might take that concept for the first, purest, i.e. most abstract definition of the absolute; – and indeed so it would be, were the form of definitions and the name of the absolute at issue at all. On that reckoning, with the abstract concept as the first, every subsequent determination and development would amount to nothing but a more determinate, richer definition of this same absolute. But those who are not satisfied with being as the beginning, on the ground that it passes over into nothing and that from this the unity of being and nothing arises, may see whether they are any better satisfied with this beginning, which begins with the representation of the beginning and with the analysis of it, an analysis that will doubtless be correct but that likewise leads to the unity of being and nothing, than they are with making being the beginning.

But a further consideration is still to be made concerning this procedure. That analysis presupposes the representation of the beginning as familiar; the procedure has thus followed the example of other sciences. These presuppose their subject matter and assume, as a request, that everyone has the same representation of it and may find in it roughly the same determinations that they, through analysis, comparison and other reasoning, adduce and state about it from here and there. But that which makes the absolute beginning must likewise be something otherwise familiar; now if it is something concrete, hence determined within itself in manifold ways, then this connection, which it is within itself, is presupposed as something familiar; it is thereby given out as something immediate, which, however, it is not; for it is a connection only as a connection of distinct terms, and thus contains mediation within itself. Further, with the concrete there enters the contingency and arbitrariness of analysis and of the various ways of determining. Which determinations are brought out depends on what each person finds in his immediate, contingent representation. The connection contained in a concrete, in a synthetic unity, is a necessary one only insofar as it is not found ready-made but is brought forth by the movement of the moments themselves in going back into this unity; – a movement that is the opposite of the analytic procedure, which is a doing external to the matter itself and falling within the subject.

Contained in this is also the more precise point that what the beginning is to be made with cannot be something concrete, cannot be such as contains a connection within its own self. For such a thing presupposes a mediating and a crossing over from a first to another within itself, of which the concrete that has become simple would be the result. But the beginning is not itself to be already a first and an other; something that is a first and an other within itself already contains a having-advanced. What makes the beginning, the beginning itself, is therefore to be taken as something unanalysable, in its simple, unfilled immediacy, hence as being, as the wholly empty.

If someone, impatient with the consideration of the abstract beginning, were to say that the start should be made not with the beginning but straightaway with the matter, then this matter is nothing but that empty being; for what the matter is, this is precisely what is to emerge only in the course of the science, what cannot be presupposed as familiar before it.

Whatever other form be taken in order to have a beginning other than empty being, that beginning suffers from the defects cited. Those who remain dissatisfied with this beginning may set themselves the task of beginning otherwise while avoiding these defects.

But one original beginning of philosophy cannot be left entirely unmentioned, one that has made itself famous in more recent times, the beginning with the I itself. It came partly from the reflection that from the first truth everything that follows must be derived, partly from the need that the first truth be something familiar and, still more, something immediately certain. This beginning is in general not a representation of the sort that is contingent and may be constituted one way in one subject and another way in another. For I, this immediate self-consciousness, itself appears at first partly as something immediate, partly as something familiar in a far higher sense than any other representation; something otherwise familiar does indeed belong to the I, but it is still a content distinguished from it and therewith at once contingent; the I, by contrast, is the simple certainty of itself. But the I in general is also at the same time something concrete, or rather the I is what is most concrete – the consciousness of itself as an infinitely manifold world. For the I to be the beginning and ground of philosophy, the separating off of this concrete is required – the absolute act through which the I is purified of itself and, as abstract I, enters into its consciousness. Yet this pure I is now not an immediate, nor the familiar, ordinary I of our consciousness, to which the science could be attached immediately and for everyone. That act would properly be nothing other than the elevation to the standpoint of pure knowledge, on which the difference of the subjective and the objective has vanished. Demanded thus immediately, however, such elevation is a subjective postulate; for it to prove itself a genuine demand, the concrete I's advance from immediate consciousness to pure knowledge would have had to be displayed and set out on that I, out of a necessity of its own. Lacking that objective movement, pure knowledge, determined also as the intellectual intuition, comes across as a standpoint adopted at will, or indeed as one among the empirical states of consciousness, where everything hangs on this, whether the one person finds it inside himself or is able to bring it about, while another is not. But insofar as this pure I must be essential pure knowledge, while pure knowledge is posited in individual consciousness only through the absolute act of self-elevation and is not immediately at hand in it, precisely that advantage is lost which is supposed to spring from this beginning of philosophy, namely that it is something simply familiar which everyone finds immediately within himself and to which further reflection could be attached; that pure I is rather, in its abstract essentiality, something unknown to ordinary consciousness, something that it does not find within itself. There enters with this rather the disadvantage of a deception, that the talk is supposed to be of something familiar, the I of empirical self-consciousness, whereas in fact the talk is of something remote from this consciousness. The determination of pure knowledge as I carries with it the continuing recollection of the subjective I, whose restrictions are supposed to be forgotten, and keeps present the representation that the propositions and relations that emerge in the further development of the I occur in ordinary consciousness, since it is surely that of which they are asserted, and can be found within it. This confusion, instead of immediate clarity, produces rather only an all the more glaring bewilderment and a complete disorientation; outwardly it has provoked the crudest misunderstandings of all.

As regards, further, the subjective determinateness of the I in general, pure knowledge does indeed strip the I of its restricted meaning of having its insuperable opposite in an object. For this reason, however, it would be at the very least superfluous to retain this subjective posture and the determination of pure essence as I any longer. Yet this determination not only carries with it that disturbing ambiguity, but also, considered more closely, it remains an I that is still subjective. How the science that sets out from the I actually develops makes plain that within it the object holds and keeps the perennial determination of an other for the I, and hence that the I one starts from is not pure knowledge, which has truly surmounted the opposition of consciousness, but is still caught up in appearance.

Here the essential remark is still to be made that, if in itself the I might well be determined as pure knowledge or as intellectual intuition and asserted as the beginning, still in science it is not a matter of what is present in itself or inwardly, but of the existence of the inward in thinking, and of the determinateness that such an inward has in this existence. But whatever of intellectual intuition – or, should its object be called the eternal, the divine, the absolute, – whatever of the eternal or the absolute is there at the beginning of science, that can be nothing else than a determination first, immediate and simple. Whatever richer name it be given beyond what mere being expresses, the sole thing that can come into consideration is the way such an absolute enters thinking knowledge and the utterance of that knowledge. Intellectual intuition is indeed the forcible rejection of mediating and of demonstrative, external reflection. But what it utters over and above simple immediacy is something concrete, something that contains different determinations within itself. The uttering and the exposition of such a concrete, however, is, as already remarked, a mediating movement that begins from one of the determinations and advances to the other, even if the latter goes back to the first; – it is a movement that at the same time may not be arbitrary or assertoric. What is therefore begun from in such an exposition is not the concrete itself but only the simple immediate from which the movement proceeds. Besides, if a concrete is made the beginning, the proof is lacking which the connection of the determinations contained in the concrete requires.

Suppose, then, that in the expression of the absolute or the eternal or God (and God would hold the most incontestable right to have the beginning made with him), suppose that what lies in the intuition or the thought of these is more than pure being holds: then whatever so lies there has to emerge into knowledge as thinking and not as representing; and let it be as rich as it likes, the determination that emerges into knowledge first is something simple, since in the simple there is nothing beyond the pure beginning; simplicity attaches to the immediate alone, because only there has no advance from one term to another yet taken place. Anything the richer forms of representing the absolute or God are supposed to utter or contain over and above being amounts, at the beginning, to an empty word and to being alone; and this simple thing, carrying no further meaning, this emptiness, is quite simply where philosophy begins.

So simple is this insight that the beginning as such calls for no preparation and no further introduction; and these preliminary ruminations about it could not have aimed at leading up to it, but rather at clearing every preliminary away.

General Division of Being

Being is first determined over against an other in general;

Secondly, it is determining itself within itself;

Thirdly, once this provisionality in the dividing has been cast aside, being amounts to the abstract indeterminateness and the immediacy wherein it has to serve as beginning.

Under the first determination, being demarcates itself from essence: as its development proceeds, being exhibits its own totality as but One sphere of the concept, and confronts that sphere with another one standing to it as a moment.

Under the second, being constitutes the sphere into which its determinations and the entire movement of its reflection fall. Within that sphere being will posit itself under three determinations

I. as determinateness, and in that guise, quality;

II. as determinateness sublated – magnitude, quantity;

III. as quantity determined qualitatively; measure.

This division is here, as was recalled in the introduction concerning such divisions in general, a provisional listing; its determinations have first to arise out of the movement of being itself, and thereby to define and to justify themselves. About the deviation of this division from the customary listing of the categories, namely as quantity, quality, relation and modality, which in Kant are moreover supposed to be only the titles for his categories, though in fact they are themselves categories, only more general ones, – nothing is to be recalled here, since the whole exposition will show what deviates in general from the customary order and significance of the categories.

Only this much may perhaps be noted, that elsewhere the determination of quantity is listed before quality, – and this – like most things – without further ground. It has been demonstrated already that the beginning takes being as such – qualitative being – as its point of departure. From the comparison of quality with quantity it is easily evident that the former is by nature the first. For quantity is quality already become negative; magnitude is the determinateness that is no longer one with being but is already distinguished from it, quality sublated, become indifferent. It includes the alterability of being, without the thing itself, being, whose determination it is, being altered by it; whereas qualitative determinateness is one with its being, neither goes beyond it nor stands within it, but is its immediate restrictedness. Quality is therefore, as the immediate determinateness, the first, and the beginning is to be made with it.

Measure is a relation, but not relation in general, rather the determinate relation of quality and quantity to each other; the categories that Kant comprises under relation will take their place quite elsewhere. Measure can also be regarded as a modality, if one likes; but since in Kant modality is no longer supposed to constitute a determination of the content but only to concern the content's reference to thinking, to the subjective, this is a wholly heterogeneous reference that does not belong here.

The third determination of being falls within the section on quality, inasmuch as being, as abstract immediacy, lowers itself to a single determinateness over against its others within its own sphere.

First Section. Determinateness (Quality)

Being is the indeterminate immediate; it stands free of the determinateness directed against essence, and free as well of any determinateness it might come to receive inside itself. Such being, void of reflection, is what being is when taken in immediacy, at nothing but its own self.

Because it is indeterminate, it is quality-less being; but in itself the character of indeterminateness accrues to it only in contrast with what is determinate or qualitative. Yet over against being in general there stands determinate being as such, and with that the indeterminateness of the former is itself what makes up its quality. What will emerge, accordingly, is that the first being is determinate in itself, and hence

Secondly that it passes over into existence, is existence; but that this, as finite being, sublates itself and, into the infinite relation of being to itself,

Thirdly, passes over into being-for-itself.

Chapter 1. Being

A. Being

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

B. Nothing

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

C. Becoming

1. Unity of Being and Nothing

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

Remark 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Remark 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

Remark 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Remark 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Moments of Becoming

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

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

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

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

3. Sublation of Becoming

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

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

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

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

Remark

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

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

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

Chapter 2. Existence

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

Accordingly, three divisions make up the exposition of existence:

A. existence as such,

B. something and an other, finitude,

C. qualitative infinity.

A. Existence as Such

Within existence

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

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

c. Something, an existent.

a. Existence in General

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

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

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

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

b. Quality

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

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

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

Remark

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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