First Part. The Objective Logic
(Cicer. Tuscul. quaest. lib. II. cap. 1.) Est enim philosophia paucis contenta judicibus, multitudinem consulto ipsa fugiens, eique suspecta et invisa.
Preface to the First Edition
The complete transformation which philosophical thinking has undergone among us over the last twenty-five years or so, the higher standpoint that the self-consciousness of spirit has attained over itself in this period, has so far had little influence on the shape of logic.
What bore the name of metaphysics before this period has been eradicated, so [to] speak, stem and stump, and has dropped out of the roster of the sciences. In what quarter do the tones of the erstwhile ontology, of rational psychology, of cosmology, or indeed of the erstwhile natural theology, still get leave, or still have leave, to make themselves audible? Investigations into the soul's immateriality, for instance, or into mechanical causes and final ones: what interest could they still be expected to arouse? the remaining proofs of the existence of God, too, are adduced only historically, or for the purposes of edification and the elevation of the heart. It is a fact that interest has been lost partly in the content, partly in the form of the former metaphysics, partly in both at once. Remarkable as it is when a people finds, say, the science of its own constitutional law, when it finds its convictions, its ethical habits and virtues, become useless to it, at least as remarkable is it when a people loses its metaphysics, when the spirit that occupies itself with its own pure essence has no actual existence in that people any more.
The exoteric doctrine of the Kantian philosophy – that the understanding may not fly beyond experience, since otherwise the faculty of cognition becomes theoretical reason, which of itself gives birth to nothing but chimeras – has justified from the side of science the renunciation of speculative thinking. This popular doctrine was met halfway by the clamor of modern pedagogy, by the distress of the times which fixes its gaze on immediate need, the clamor, namely, that just as for cognition experience is what comes first, so for competence in public and in private life theoretical insight is even harmful, while practice and practical training generally are the essential thing, the only thing that furthers us. – Since science and common human understanding thus worked into each other's hands to bring about the downfall of metaphysics, there seemed to be staged the odd spectacle of a cultivated people without metaphysics; – like a temple otherwise adorned in every variety but without a holy of holies. – Theology, which in earlier times was the keeper of the speculative mysteries and of a metaphysics that was, to be sure, dependent upon it, had surrendered this science in exchange for feelings, for what is practically popular, and for learned history. Corresponding to which change is the fact that elsewhere those solitaries, who were sacrificed by their people and set apart from the world so that the contemplation of the eternal, and a life serving that contemplation alone, should be present, not for the sake of any use but for the sake of the blessing, – disappeared; a disappearance which, in another connection, may be regarded as essentially the same phenomenon as the one just mentioned. – So that, once these darknesses had been driven off, the colourless occupation of the inwardly turned spirit with itself, existence seemed to have been transformed into the cheerful world of flowers, among which, as everyone knows, there is no black one.
Things have not gone quite so badly for logic as for metaphysics. That through it one learns to think, which formerly counted as its use and thereby as its purpose – as though one first had to learn to digest and to move about through the study of anatomy and physiology –, this prejudice has long since faded away, and the spirit of practicality no doubt intended for logic no better a fate than for its sister. Notwithstanding this, and probably for the sake of some formal usefulness, logic was still left a rank among the sciences, indeed it was even retained as a subject of public instruction. This better lot, however, concerns only its outer fortune; for its shape and content have remained the same as they were handed down through a long tradition, though in that transmission they had been thinned out and starved more and more; the new spirit that has dawned upon science no less than upon actuality has not yet made itself felt in logic. But it is once and for all in vain, when the substantial form of spirit has reshaped itself, to want to keep the forms of an earlier culture; they are withered leaves, pushed off by the new buds that are already being generated at their roots.
The ignoring of the general change is by now, in the scientific sphere too, beginning to run out. Unnoticed, even the opponents have grown familiar with the other ways of representing things and made them their own, and though they persist in acting coy toward their source and their principles and conduct themselves contradictorily toward them, they have had to put up with the consequences all the same and have not been able to fend off their influence; for their ever more insignificant negative stance they know no other way of gaining a positive importance and a content than by joining in the talk of the new ways of representing things.
From the other side, the time of ferment with which a new creation begins seems to be over. In its first appearance such a creation is apt to behave with fanatical hostility toward the far-flung systematizing of the earlier principle, apt in part also to be fearful, losing itself in the extension of the particular, and in part to shy away from the labor that scientific elaboration requires and, in the need for such elaboration, to reach first for an empty formalism. What is demanded now, with so much the more urgency, is that the material be worked up and elaborated. An age, no less than an individual, passes through a phase of formation in which everything turns chiefly on acquiring the principle and holding fast to it in its still undeveloped intensity. What is required at the higher level, however, is that the principle should turn into science.
Whatever may already have been done in other respects for the substance and for the form of science, logical science, which makes up metaphysics proper or pure speculative philosophy, has hitherto still found itself greatly neglected. What I understand more precisely by this science and by its standpoint I have indicated provisionally in the Introduction. Equitable judges will, I hope, take into account that this science had once again to be begun over from scratch, that the subject matter is of the kind it is, and that no preliminary studies lay ready which the recasting here undertaken might have drawn upon, even though the labor of many years was unable to lend this attempt any higher degree of completeness. – Seen from the vantage point that is essential, what is at stake throughout is a new concept of scientific treatment. Given that philosophy is to be science, it cannot, as I have recalled1 in another place, take over for this purpose a method on loan from some science ranked beneath it, mathematics for example; just as little may it settle for categorical assurances of an inner intuition, or avail itself of ratiocination proceeding from grounds supplied by external reflection. Rather, it can only be the nature of the content that moves itself in scientific cognition, since at the same time it is this own reflection of the content which first posits and generates its determination itself.
The understanding determines, and it keeps its determinations fixed; reason is negative and dialectical, for it melts the determinations of the understanding away into nothing; and it is positive, for it brings forth the universal and grasps what is particular as contained within it. Just as the understanding is taken as something separate from reason in general, so too dialectical reason is apt to be taken as something separate from positive reason. But in its truth reason is spirit, which is higher than both, being reason that understands, or understanding that reasons. It is the negative, that which makes up the quality of dialectical reason as much as of the understanding; – it negates the simple, and so posits the determinate difference of the understanding, and it just as much dissolves that difference, and so is dialectical. It does not, however, hold to the nothing of this result, but is therein just as much positive, and has thereby restored the first simple, but as a universal that is concrete within itself; a given particular is not subsumed under this universal, rather in that determining and in the dissolution of it the particular has already determined itself along with it. This movement of spirit, which in its very simplicity confers determinateness upon itself and, within that determinateness, confers upon itself its own self-sameness, and which accordingly constitutes the immanent unfolding of the concept, is cognition's absolute method and at once the soul immanent in the content itself. – Only on this self-constructing path, I maintain, is philosophy capable of being objective, demonstrated science. – In this manner I have attempted to present consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Consciousness is spirit as knowledge that is concrete and indeed caught up in externality; but the onward movement of this subject matter rests solely, like the development of all natural and spiritual life, on the nature of the pure essentialities that make up the content of logic. Consciousness, as spirit in its appearing, which on its way frees itself from its immediacy and its external concretion, becomes pure knowledge, which gives itself those pure essentialities themselves, as they are in and for themselves, as its subject matter. They are the pure thoughts, spirit thinking its own essence. Their self-movement is their spiritual life, and it is that through which science constitutes itself and of which science is the exposition.
The relation of the science that I call the Phenomenology of Spirit to logic is herewith indicated. – Turning to the outward connection: the first part of the System of Science,2 the part containing the phenomenology, was designated to have a second part come after it, one that was to hold the logic together with philosophy's two real sciences, that of nature and that of spirit, and that would thereby have brought the system of science to its close. But the necessary extent that the logic had to acquire in its own right has led me to let it come out on its own; within an expanded plan it therefore makes up the first sequel to the Phenomenology of Spirit. Later I shall let the working out of the two named real sciences of philosophy follow. – This first volume of the logic, however, contains as its first book the doctrine of being; the second book, the doctrine of essence, as the second section of the first volume; the second volume, on the other hand, will contain the subjective logic, or the doctrine of the concept.
Nuremberg, 22 March 1812.
Preface to the Second Edition
I have entered upon this new reworking of the Science of Logic, of which the first volume herewith appears, well aware both of the difficulty of the subject matter in itself and then of its exposition, and of the imperfection that attaches to the treatment of it in the first edition; however much I have laboured, after many further years of occupation with this science, to remedy that imperfection, I still feel I have cause enough to claim the reader's indulgence. One warrant for such a claim may in the first place be founded on the circumstance that for the content there was to be found in the earlier metaphysics and logic chiefly nothing but external material. Universally and frequently as these were pursued – the latter on down to our own days – such labour touched the speculative side very little; on the whole the same material has rather been repeated over and over, by turns thinned out to a trivial superficiality, by turns the old ballast fetched up anew in still greater bulk and dragged along, so that through such efforts, often wholly mechanical, no gain could accrue to the philosophical import. To set forth the realm of thought philosophically – that is, in its own immanent activity, or, what says the same, in its necessary unfolding – had for that reason to be a fresh undertaking, and one begun over from the start; but that acquired material, the familiar forms of thought, is to be regarded as a most important model, indeed as a necessary condition, a presupposition to be gratefully acknowledged, even if it yields only here and there a meagre thread, or the lifeless bones of a skeleton, and these even tossed together in disorder.
The forms of thought are in the first instance set out and deposited in human language, and in our days it cannot be recalled often enough that what distinguishes the human being from the animal is thinking. Into everything that becomes for him something inward, a representation as such, into everything that he makes his own, language has forced its way, and whatever he turns into language and utters in it contains a category, whether wrapped up, mixed in, or worked out; so natural to him is the logical, or rather the logical is his own peculiar nature itself. But if nature in general, as the physical, is set over against the spiritual, then one would have to say that the logical is rather the supernatural, which forces its way into all the natural comportment of the human being, into his sensation, intuition, desire, need, drive, and thereby makes it into something human at all, even if only formally, into representations and purposes. A language has this in its favour, that it commands a wealth of logical expressions – distinctive ones, set apart – for the determinations of thought themselves; of the prepositions and articles, many already belong to relations that rest on thinking; the Chinese language is said in its development not to have got that far at all, or only poorly; but these particles appear in a wholly serviceable role, only a little more detached than augments, inflectional signs and the like. Far more important is it that in a language the determinations of thought are brought out as nouns and verbs and so stamped with objective form; the German language has many advantages here over the other modern languages; some of its words even have the further peculiarity of possessing not merely different but opposed meanings, so that in this one cannot fail to recognize a speculative spirit of the language itself; it can afford thinking a joy to come upon such words and to find, in a naive way and already lexically, the union of opposites – which is a result of speculation, though for the understanding it is nonsense – present as one word with opposite meanings. Philosophy therefore has no need at all of a special terminology; a few words are indeed to be taken over from foreign languages, though these have already acquired their citizenship in it through use, and an affected purism would be least in place just where everything most decisively turns on the matter itself. – The onward march of cultivation as a whole, and of the sciences especially, even the empirical and sensuous among them, inasmuch as they in general move within the most ordinary categories (e.g. that of a whole and the parts, of a thing and its properties, and the like), gradually brings higher relations of thought to light as well, or at least raises them to greater universality and thereby to closer attention. If, for instance, in physics the thought-determination of force has become dominant, in more recent times the category of polarity – which incidentally is pressed far too much à tort et à travers into everything, even into light – plays the most significant role, the determination of a difference in which the differentiated are inseparably bound together; – that in this way one has moved on from the form of abstraction, of identity, by which a determinateness such as force acquires a self-subsistence, and that the form of determining, of difference, which at the same time remains as something inseparable within identity, has been brought out and has become a current representation, is of infinite importance. The study of nature carries with it, through the reality in which its objects hold themselves fast, this compulsion: to hold fast the categories which within it can no longer be passed over, even if this happens with the grossest inconsistency towards others that are also left in force, and not to permit the passage – which happens more easily in the spiritual domain – over to abstractions from the opposition and to generalities.
But since the logical objects, like their expressions, are thus something universally known to anyone with an education, then, as I have said elsewhere, what is familiar is not for that reason cognized, and it can even provoke impatience to have to occupy oneself still with what is familiar – and what indeed could be more familiar than precisely the determinations of thought that we employ on all sides, that come out of our mouths in every proposition we utter. This preface is meant to indicate the general moments of the course of cognition that starts out from this familiar material, and of the relation of scientific thinking to this natural thinking; that much, taken together with what the earlier Introduction contains, will suffice to give a general representation of the sense of logical cognition, of the kind one demands to have in advance of a science, prior to the science, which is the matter itself.
It is to be regarded in the first place as an infinite advance that the forms of thinking are set loose from the stuff in which they lie sunk in self-conscious intuiting and representing, as also in our desire and volition, or rather in a desire and volition that is itself representational (– and no human desire or volition occurs without representation –), that these universalities have been brought out for themselves and, as Plato and then above all Aristotle did, made into an object of consideration on their own account; this gives the beginning of the cognition of them. “Only after nearly everything necessary,” says Aristotle, “and what belongs to the comfort and intercourse of life was at hand, did men begin to trouble themselves about philosophical cognition.” “In Egypt,” he had remarked before, “the mathematical sciences were developed early, because there the priestly class was early placed in a position to have leisure.” – In fact the need to busy oneself with pure thoughts has as its precondition a far journey which the spirit of humanity must already have completed; it is, one might say, a need arising from a need of necessity already stilled, from the state of needlessness at which it must have arrived, the abstraction from the material of intuiting, imagining, etc., from the concrete interests of desire, of the drives, of the will, in which material the determinations of thought lie wrapped up. In the still spaces of a thinking that has come to itself and is only within itself, the interests that move the life of peoples and of individuals fall silent. “On so many sides,” says Aristotle in the same connection, “is the nature of the human being dependent; but this science, which is not sought for any use, is alone the one free in and for itself, and for that reason it seems not to be a human possession.” – Philosophy in general still has to do with concrete objects in its thoughts – God, nature, spirit – but logic occupies itself wholly and solely with these thoughts for themselves in their complete abstraction. This logic is therefore wont to fall first of all to the study of youth, which has not yet entered into the interests of concrete life, lives in leisure with respect to them, and has as yet only to occupy itself, for its own subjective purpose, with acquiring the means and the possibility of becoming active in the objects of those interests, and so still occupies itself with these objects theoretically. Among these means, in contrast to the view of Aristotle just cited, logical science is reckoned; the labour spent on it is a preliminary work, its place the school, upon which the seriousness of life and activity for genuine purposes is only then supposed to follow. In life it comes to the use of the categories; they are demoted from the honour of being considered for their own sake to that of serving in the spiritual business of living content, in the creating and exchanging of the representations that bear upon it, – partly as abbreviations by virtue of their universality; – for what an infinite mass of singular details of outer existence and of activity does the representation: battle, war, people, or sea, animal, etc., gather together into itself; – how in the representation: God, or love, etc., is an infinite mass of representations, activities, states, etc., epitomized in the simplicity of such representing! – partly for the closer determination and discovery of objective relations, where however the import and the purpose, the correctness and truth of the thinking that mixes itself in, is made wholly dependent on what is at hand, and no content-determining efficacy is ascribed to the determinations of thought on their own account. Such use of the categories, which was earlier called natural logic, is unconscious, and if in scientific reflection they are assigned in spirit the relation of serving as means, then thinking as such is made into something subordinate to the other determinations of spirit. Of our sensations, drives, interests we do not readily say that they serve us; rather they count as self-subsistent forces and powers, so that we ourselves just are this – to feel thus, to desire and will this, to place our interest in this. But again we may rather become conscious that we stand in the service of our feelings, drives, passions, interests, and of habits anyway, than that we have them in our possession, still less that, given our intimate unity with them, they serve us as means. Determinations of mind and spirit of this sort soon show themselves to us as particulars over against the universality as which we become conscious of ourselves and in which we have our freedom, and we take ourselves to be rather caught up in these particularities, to be dominated by them. Accordingly we can far less suppose that the forms of thought which run through all our representations – be these merely theoretical, or contain a material belonging to sensation, to drive, to the will – serve us, that we have them in our possession and not they rather us; what is left over for us as against them, how are we, how am I to set myself up as the more universal above them, when they are themselves the universal as such. When we put ourselves into a sensation, a purpose, an interest, and feel ourselves restricted and unfree therein, then the place into which we are able to withdraw out of it and back into freedom is this place of self-certainty, of pure abstraction, of thinking. Or again, when we mean to talk of things, it is their nature or their essence that we name their concept, and a concept exists only for thinking; but of the concepts of things we shall be far less inclined to say that we dominate them, or that the determinations of thought whose complex they are serve us; on the contrary, our thinking has to restrict itself in accordance with them, and our arbitrary choice or freedom is not to want to trim them to suit itself. Insofar, then, as subjective thinking is our very own, innermost doing, and the objective concept of things constitutes the matter itself, we cannot get outside that doing, cannot stand above it, and just as little can we get beyond the nature of things. We can however leave the latter determination aside; it coincides with the former insofar as it would yield a relation of our thoughts to the matter, but only something empty, because the matter would thereby be set up as a rule for our concepts, whereas the matter can be for us nothing other than our concepts of it. If the critical philosophy understands the relation of these three terms in such a way that we place the thoughts as a middle between us and the things, in the sense that this middle rather shuts us off from the things instead of joining us together with them, then against this view the simple remark is to be set that just these things, which are supposed to stand on the other extreme beyond us and beyond the thoughts that relate to them, are themselves thought-things, and, as wholly indeterminate, are only a single thought-thing (– the so-called thing-in-itself) belonging to empty abstraction itself.
But this may suffice for the standpoint from which the relation vanishes according to which the determinations of thought are taken merely as being for use and as means; more important is what further hangs together with this, according to which they are wont to be grasped as external forms. – The activity of thinking that works through all our representations, purposes, interests and actions is, as was said, busy unconsciously (natural logic); what our consciousness has before it is the content, the objects of the representations, that with which the interest is filled; on this relation the determinations of thought count as forms that are only on the import, not the import itself. But if it stands as was indicated above, and as is otherwise generally conceded, that the nature, the peculiar essence, the truly abiding and substantial amid the manifoldness and contingency of appearing and of transient expression, is the concept of the matter, the universal in it itself, just as every human individual, infinitely peculiar though it be, has in itself the prius of all its peculiarity in being human, and every single animal the prius of being animal, then there would be no saying what an individual of that sort is still supposed to be once this foundation is stripped from a being furnished with ever so many further predicates besides, granted that this foundation, like the others, can be called a predicate. The indispensable foundation, the concept, the universal that is thought itself – insofar as one can abstract from the representation attaching to the word: thought – cannot be regarded merely as an indifferent form that would be on a content. But these thoughts of all natural and spiritual things, the substantial content itself, are still such a content as contains manifold determinacies and still has in it the difference of a soul and a body, of the concept and a relative reality; the deeper foundation is the soul for itself, the pure concept, which is the innermost of the objects, their simple pulse of life, and equally the pulse of the subjective thinking that thinks them. The task is to raise into consciousness this logical nature, which ensouls spirit and stirs and works within it. Instinct-like doing differs from intelligent and free doing in general in that the latter takes place with consciousness; when the content of what drives is brought out of immediate unity with the subject into objectivity before it, the freedom of spirit begins – of that spirit which, caught in the instinctive operation of thinking, is splintered in the bonds of its categories into an infinitely manifold material. In this net firmer knots tie themselves here and there, which are the points of support and direction of its life and consciousness; they owe their firmness and power precisely to this, that once brought before consciousness they are concepts, existing in and for themselves, of its essentiality. For the nature of spirit the weightiest point is the relation, not merely of what it is in itself to what it actually is, but of the former to that as which it knows itself; this self-knowing is, just because spirit is essentially consciousness, a basic determination of its actuality. To purify these categories, which are effective only instinctively as drives, and which are brought into the consciousness of spirit at first singly and therefore variably and confusedly, thus affording it only a fragmentary and uncertain actuality, and thereby to raise spirit within them to freedom and truth – this, then, is the higher business of logic.
What we specified as the beginning of the science, whose high worth on its own account and at the same time as a condition of genuine cognition was acknowledged above – namely to treat the concepts and the moments of the concept in general, the determinations of thought, in the first instance as forms distinct from the material and merely attaching to it – this at once announces itself in its own self as a procedure inadequate to the truth that is specified as the object and purpose of logic. For taken in that way, as bare forms held apart from the content, they are posited as standing in a determinateness which brands them finite and leaves them unfit to hold a truth that is infinite in itself. However much the true may in other respects be again associated with limitation and finitude, this is the side of its negation, of its untruth and unactuality, precisely of its end, not of the affirmation which it is as the true. Against the barrenness of the merely formal categories the instinct of sound reason has at length felt itself strong enough to abandon the knowledge of them with contempt to the province of a school logic and school metaphysics – at the same time disdaining the worth that the mere consciousness of these threads has on its own account, and remaining unconscious that in the instinct-like doing of natural logic, and still more in the more reflective rejection of any acquaintance with and cognition of the determinations of thought, it is caught in the service of an unpurified and hence unfree thinking. The simple fundamental determination, or common determination of form, of the collection of such forms is identity, which is asserted in the logic of this collection as a law, as A = A, as the principle of contradiction. Sound reason has so far lost its reverence for the school – which is in possession of such laws of truth and in which they are still carried on in this way – that it laughs at it on that account and holds a man to be intolerable who according to such laws knows how to speak truly: the plant is a – plant, science is – science, and so forth infinitely. Concerning the formulas too which give the rules of syllogizing, which is in fact a chief use of the understanding – so unjust is it to fail to recognize that [they] have their field in cognition, within which they must hold, and at the same time that they are essential material for the thinking of reason, – the equally just consciousness has established itself that they are indifferent means at least as much of error and of sophistry, and that however one may otherwise determine truth they are unusable for the higher, e.g. the religious truth; – that they concern in general only a correctness of cognitions, not the truth.
The incompleteness of this way of considering thinking, which leaves truth to one side, can be made good only by drawing into the thinking consideration not merely what is usually reckoned to the external form, but the content along with it. It soon shows itself of its own accord that what in the nearest and most ordinary reflection is separated from form as content is in fact not supposed to be formless, not without determination in itself; so it would be only the empty, something like the abstraction of the thing-in-itself, – that it rather has form within itself, indeed has animation and import through form alone, and that it is form itself which merely turns about into the shine of a content, and thereby also into the shine of something external to this shine. With this introduction of the content into the logical consideration, it is not the things but the matter, the concept of things, that becomes the object. Here, however, one may also be reminded that there are a multitude of concepts, a multitude of matters. What restricts this multitude, however, has partly been said already: that the concept as thought in general, as universal, is the immeasurable abbreviation as against the singularity of things in the multitude in which they hover before indeterminate intuiting and representing; partly, though, a concept is at once, first, the concept in its own self, and of that there is but one, and it is the substantial foundation; in the second place, however, it is indeed a determinate concept, and this determinateness in it is what appears as content, but the determinateness of the concept is a determination of form of this substantial unity, a moment of form as totality, of the concept itself, which underlies the determinate concepts. Such a concept is not an object of sensuous intuition or of representation; it is only object, product and content of thinking, and is the matter existing in and for itself, the logos, the reason of what is, the truth of what bears the name of things; least of all is it the logos that is to be left outside logical science. It must therefore not be an arbitrary choice whether to draw it into the science or to leave it outside. If the determinations of thought which are merely external forms are genuinely considered in their own selves, there can emerge only their finitude and the untruth of their supposed being-for-itself, and, as their truth, the concept. Hence logical science, in treating the determinations of thought which in general run through our spirit instinctively and unconsciously and which, even when they enter into language, remain non-objective and unnoticed, will also be the reconstruction of those determinations that are brought out by reflection and fixed by it as subjective forms external to the material and the import.
The exposition of no subject matter would be capable in and for itself of being so strictly and wholly immanently plastic as that of the development of thinking in its necessity; none carries this demand with it to such a degree; its science would in this respect have to surpass even mathematics, for no subject matter has within itself this freedom and independence. Such a presentation would require – as this is present in its own way in the course of mathematical consequence – that at no stage of the development should a determination of thought or a reflection occur that does not emerge immediately at that stage and has not come over into it from the preceding ones. Such abstract perfection of exposition must of course in general be renounced; already because the science has to begin with the purely simple, and hence with what is most universal and emptiest, the presentation would permit only these quite simple expressions of the simple themselves, without any further addition of a single word; – what might in the nature of the case take place would be negating reflections that took pains to hold off and remove what representation or an unregulated thinking might otherwise mix in. Such incursions into the simple immanent course of the development are, however, contingent on their own account, and the effort to fend them off is thereby itself afflicted with this contingency; besides, it is futile to want to meet all such notions, precisely because they lie outside the matter, and incompleteness would at least be what would here be demanded for systematic satisfaction. But the peculiar restlessness and distraction of our modern consciousness allows nothing else than that one should likewise take more or less account of the reflections and notions that lie near at hand. A plastic presentation then also demands a plastic sense for receiving and understanding; but such plastic youths and men, listeners who so calmly, with the self-denial of their own reflections and notions – with which thinking for oneself is impatient to prove itself – follow nothing but the matter, as Plato depicts them, could not be set up in a modern dialogue; still less could such readers be counted on. On the contrary, opponents have shown themselves to me too often and too violently who were unwilling to make the simple reflection that their notions and objections contain categories which are presuppositions and which themselves first stand in need of critique before they are used. The unconsciousness about this goes incredibly far; it makes for the fundamental misunderstanding, the bad, that is to say uncultivated, behaviour of thinking something else in the case of a category under consideration and not this category itself. This unconsciousness is the less to be justified in that such an other consists of other determinations of thought and concepts, whereas in a system of logic just these other categories must likewise have found their place and will there be subjected to consideration for themselves. This is most striking in the preponderant mass of objections and attacks upon the first concepts or propositions of logic, being and nothing and becoming, which last, itself a simple determination, indisputably holds within it – the simplest analysis shows as much – those two determinations as moments. Thoroughness appears to demand that one examine before anything else the beginning, as the ground upon which all the rest is raised, indeed that one go no further until it has proved itself firm, and on the contrary, if this is not the case, that everything still to follow be rejected. This thoroughness has at the same time the advantage of affording the greatest relief for the business of thinking; it has before it the whole development enclosed in this germ, and takes itself to be done with everything when it is done with this germ, which is the easiest thing to dispose of, since it is the simplest, simplicity itself; it is the small amount of labour required that essentially recommends this so self-satisfied thoroughness. This limitation to the simple leaves free play to the arbitrariness of a thinking that will not itself remain simple but brings its reflections to bear upon it. With the good right of occupying itself at first only with the principle, and of not thereby entering upon the sequel, this thoroughness in its own business does the very opposite, namely brings in the sequel, that is, other categories than the principle alone, other presuppositions and prejudices. Such presuppositions – that infinity is different from finitude, that content is something other than form, the inner something other than the outer, that mediation likewise is not immediacy, as though one did not know such things – are at the same time brought forward by way of instruction and are not so much proved as recounted and asserted. In such instructing as a manner of conduct there lies – one cannot call it anything else – a silliness; but in point of substance there lies in it partly the illegitimacy of merely presupposing such things and simply assuming them, partly and still more the ignorance that it is the need and the business of logical thinking to investigate precisely this, whether such a finite without infinity is anything true, likewise such abstract infinity, further a formless content and a contentless form, such an inner for itself that has no expression, an externality without inwardness, and so on – whether these are something true, likewise something actual. – But this cultivation and discipline of thinking, through which a plastic comportment of thinking would be brought about and the impatience of intruding reflection overcome, is procured only by going further, by the study and the production of the whole development.
At the mention of Platonic exposition, whoever labours to erect anew a self-subsistent edifice of philosophical science in modern times may be reminded of the story that Plato reworked his books on the state seven times. The recollection of this, a comparison insofar as it might seem to enclose one within itself, could only press one all the more towards the wish that a work belonging to the modern world, one having before it for elaboration a deeper principle, a harder subject matter and a material of richer compass, might have been granted the free leisure of working it through seven and seventy times. As it is, however, the author, looking at the work in the face of the magnitude of the task, has had to be satisfied with what it was able to become under the circumstances of an external necessity, of the unavoidable distraction caused by the magnitude and many-sidedness of the interests of the age, and even under the doubt whether the loud noise of the day and the deafening garrulity of a conceit vain enough to confine itself to that noise still leave room for participation in the dispassionate stillness of a cognition that only thinks.
Berlin, 7 November 1831.
Introduction
General Concept of Logic
In no science is the need felt more strongly to begin from the subject matter itself, without any preceding reflections, than in the science of logic. In every other science the object it treats and the scientific method are distinguished from each other; and its content, too, does not make an absolute beginning but depends on other concepts and hangs together on all sides with other material. These sciences are therefore granted leave to speak of their ground and its connections, and likewise of method, only lemmatically, to apply without further ado the forms of definition and the like that are presupposed as known and accepted, and to make use of the ordinary manner of argumentation in fixing their general concepts and fundamental determinations.
Logic, by contrast, cannot presuppose any of these forms of reflection, or rules and laws of thinking, for they constitute a part of its own content and first have to be grounded within it. But not only the statement of scientific method, the concept itself of science as such belongs to its content, and indeed constitutes its final result; what it is, therefore, it cannot say in advance, but rather its entire treatise brings forth this knowledge of itself only as its last word and as its completion. Likewise its object, thinking or more precisely conceptual thinking, is essentially dealt with within it; the concept of thinking generates itself in the course of it, and thus cannot be sent on ahead. Nothing that this introduction sends on ahead, then, is meant to establish the concept of logic or to vindicate beforehand and scientifically its content and its method; the intent is rather, by way of a handful of clarifications and reflections offered in a ratiocinative and historical mode, to bring nearer to representation that vantage point out of which this science has to be viewed.
To accept logic as the science of thinking in general carries with it the understanding that such thinking amounts to the mere form of a cognition, that logic leaves all content out of account, that the so-called second constituent belonging to a cognition, the matter, has to be supplied from some other quarter, and hence that logic — a science from which that matter is utterly independent — can do no more than state the formal conditions of true cognition, while real truth itself it neither contains nor even furnishes the road to, since the very thing that makes truth truth, namely the content, falls outside it.
To begin with, however, there is already something inept in the claim that logic leaves every content aside, that its teaching covers only the rules of thinking, incapable of going into what gets thought or of heeding how the latter is constituted. For thinking, along with the rules of thinking, is precisely what is meant to be its object, and in that object logic already possesses, without mediation, a content all its own; there too it possesses that second constituent of cognition, a matter whose constitution is very much its concern.
But secondly, the representations on which the concept of logic has rested up to now have in part already perished, and in part it is time that they should vanish altogether, that the standpoint of this science should be grasped at a higher level, and that it should gain a completely altered shape.
Ordinary consciousness takes for granted, once and for all, a divorce between the content of cognition and its form, between truth and certainty, and it is on this divorce that logic's concept has rested until now. It is presupposed, first, that the material of cognition is present in and for itself as a finished world outside thinking, that thinking for itself is empty, that it comes to that matter externally as a form, fills itself with it, only thereby gains a content, and so becomes a real cognizing.
These two components then stand toward each other, – (for they are supposed to have the relation of components, and cognition is compounded out of them mechanically or at most chemically –) in the following order of rank: that the object is something complete and finished for itself, something that can entirely dispense with thinking for its actuality, whereas thinking is something deficient which has first to complete itself on some material and, as a pliable indeterminate form, has to make itself adequate to its matter. Truth is the agreement of thinking with the object, and in order to bring this agreement about, – for it is not present in and for itself, – thinking is supposed to yield and accommodate itself to the object.
Third, inasmuch as the diversity of matter and form, of object and thinking, is not left in that misty indeterminacy but is taken more determinately, each is a sphere severed from the other. In its receiving and forming of the material, therefore, thinking does not get beyond itself; its receiving and its accommodating itself to the material remain a modification of itself, and it does not thereby become its own other; moreover, self-conscious determining belongs to it alone in any case; and so, even in its relating to the object, it does not come out of itself over to the object, which remains a thing-in-itself, simply a beyond of thinking.
What such opinions about how subject and object stand to one another put into words are the determinations making up the nature of our everyday consciousness, consciousness as it appears; yet once these preconceptions are transferred to reason, as though the very same relation held good there, as though that relation possessed truth in and for itself, they turn into the errors whose refutation — carried through every region of the spiritual and the natural universe — is philosophy itself, or rather, since they block the doorway into philosophy, errors to be discarded before one enters.
In this respect the older metaphysics had a higher concept of thinking than has become current in more recent times. For it laid down as its basis that what is cognized through thinking of and in things is alone what is genuinely true in them; hence not things in their immediacy, but things first raised into the form of thinking, as things thought. On this metaphysics' reckoning, then, neither thinking nor its determinations stand foreign to objects; they are what those objects essentially are, so that things and the thinking of them (– a kinship our language, too, puts into words –) tally in and for themselves, thinking in its immanent determinations and the genuine nature of things making up one single content.
But the reflecting understanding took possession of philosophy. One must know exactly what this expression is meant to say, an expression otherwise much used as a catchword; by it is to be understood in general the abstracting and hence separating understanding, which persists in its separations. Set against reason, it conducts itself as plain common-sense and pushes its own opinion: that sensuous reality is the ground on which truth stands, that thoughts are merely thoughts, meaning that substance and reality accrue to them only from sensuous perception, and that reason, so long as it stays in and for itself, spins out nothing but chimeras. In this renunciation by reason of itself the concept of truth is lost; reason is restricted to cognizing only subjective truth, only appearance, only something to which the nature of the subject matter itself does not correspond; knowledge has sunk back into opinion.
This turn, however, which cognition takes, and which appears as a loss and a step backwards, has at its basis something deeper, on which the elevation of reason into the higher spirit of modern philosophy rests altogether. One must look for the ground of that now widely shared representation in an insight, namely into how the determinations of the understanding stand in necessary conflict with themselves. – Reflection, as named a moment ago, consists in passing beyond the concrete immediate and in determining and separating it. But it must just as much go beyond these its separating determinations, and in the first instance relate them. At the standpoint of this relating, their conflict comes to the fore. This relating of reflection belongs in itself to reason; the elevation above those determinations, which arrives at the insight into their conflict, is the great negative step toward the true concept of reason. But insight not carried through falls into the misunderstanding that it is reason which lands in contradiction with itself; it fails to recognize that the contradiction is precisely the raising of reason above the limitations of the understanding and the dissolving of them. Instead of taking the last step upward from here, cognition has fled back from the unsatisfactoriness of the determinations of the understanding to sensuous concrete existence, supposing that in it it has what is firm and self-consistent. But since on the other side this cognition knows itself as cognition only of what appears, its unsatisfactoriness is conceded, yet at the same time it is presupposed that although things-in-themselves are not correctly cognized, still within the sphere of appearance there is correct cognizing; as though it were, as it were, only the kind of objects that differed here, and the one kind, namely things-in-themselves, did not fall within cognition, while the other kind, namely appearances, did. It is as if correct insight were attributed to a man, with the addition that he is nevertheless capable of having insight into nothing true, but only into what is untrue. The latter supposition is preposterous, and precisely as preposterous is a true cognition that would fail to cognize its object such as the object is in itself.
The upshot already mentioned of the critique of the forms of the understanding was that no application to things in themselves belongs to these forms. – Which can mean nothing else than that the forms are, on their own account, something untrue. Yet inasmuch as they are allowed to go on holding good for subjective reason and for experience, nothing about the forms themselves has been altered by the critique, which leaves them shaped for the subject exactly as they had once been shaped for the object. Should they not suffice for the thing-in-itself, however, then the understanding they are said to belong to has all the less reason to tolerate them or make do with them. Determinations of the thing in itself they cannot be; determinations of the understanding they can be still less, given that the understanding ought at any rate to be granted the dignity of a thing-in-itself. The same conflict afflicts the determinations of the finite and the infinite, be it that one applies them to time and space, to the world, or that they count as determinations lying within spirit; black and white yield a grey just as surely when brought together on a wall as when brought together while still on the palette; and if our representation of the world falls apart once the determinations of the infinite and the finite get transferred onto it, then spirit itself, holding the two of them within it, is all the more something that contradicts itself, something that falls apart. – It is not the constitution of the material or of the object, to which they would be applied or in which they would be found, that can make a difference; for the object has the contradiction in it only through and according to those determinations.
That critique has therefore only removed the forms of objective thinking from the thing, but left them in the subject just as it found them. For in doing so it did not consider these forms in and for themselves, according to their own peculiar content, but simply took them over lemmatically from subjective logic; so that there was no question of a derivation of them in themselves, or even of a derivation of them as subjective-logical forms, still less of a dialectical consideration of them.
Transcendental idealism, carried through more consistently, recognized the nullity of the spectre of the thing-in-itself still left over by the critical philosophy, that abstract shadow cut off from all content, and had the purpose of destroying it completely. This philosophy also made the beginning of letting reason exhibit its determinations out of itself. But the subjective posture of this attempt did not let it come to completion. Subsequently this posture, and with it that beginning too and the development of pure science, was abandoned.
What is commonly understood by logic, however, is considered entirely without regard to metaphysical significance. This science, in the condition in which it still finds itself, has of course no content of the sort that counts as reality and as a genuine subject matter in ordinary consciousness. But it is not for this reason a formal science, lacking truth rich in content. In that material which is missed in it, a lack to which its unsatisfactoriness is usually ascribed, the domain of truth is in any case not to be sought. Rather, the emptiness of the logical forms lies solely in the manner of considering and treating them. Inasmuch as they fall apart as fixed determinations and are not held together in organic unity, they are dead forms and do not have dwelling within them the spirit that is their living concrete unity. But with that they lack solid content, – a matter which would be substance in its own self. The content that is missed in the logical forms is nothing other than a firm foundation and concretion of these abstract determinations; and such a substantial essence is customarily sought for them on the outside. But logical reason itself is the substantial or the real, which holds all abstract determinations together within itself and is their solid, absolutely concrete unity. One need not, then, go hunting far afield for whatever tends to get called a matter; should logic be reckoned devoid of substance, the blame lies not with logic's object but purely with the way that object is taken up.
This reflection leads more closely to the statement of the standpoint from which logic is to be considered, in what respect that standpoint differs from the way this science has been treated hitherto, and how it is the sole genuine standpoint on which logic is henceforth to be placed for good.
In the Phenomenology of Spirit I presented consciousness in its forward movement from the first immediate opposition of itself and the object up to absolute knowledge. Every form assumed by the relation of consciousness to the object lies along this road, and what issues from it is the concept of science. This concept therefore requires no justification here (apart from the fact that it emerges within logic itself), because it has received one there; and it is capable of no other justification than just this bringing forth of it by consciousness, for which all its own shapes dissolve into this concept as into their truth. – The most that any ratiocinative grounding or clarification of the concept of science can achieve is to set that concept before representation and to yield some historical familiarity with it; whereas whatever definition one gives of science, or of logic more narrowly, finds its proof nowhere but in the necessity with which science comes forth. A definition with which some science makes an absolute beginning can contain nothing other than the determinate, correct expression of what, by general admission and acknowledgment, one represents to oneself as the object and purpose of the science. That one represents precisely this to oneself under it is a historical assurance, in regard to which one can only appeal to this or that recognized view, or, properly speaking, can only plead that one might let this and that pass as recognized. There is no end to it: one person adduces from here, another from there, a case and instance according to which something more and other still is to be understood by this or that expression, so that a closer or a more general determination has to be taken up into its definition and the science arranged accordingly. – Furthermore, it depends here on argumentation what all is to be drawn in or excluded and up to what limit and extent; but argumentation itself lies open to the most manifold and most varied opinions, on which in the end arbitrary choice alone can settle a fixed determination. In this procedure of beginning the science with its definition, there is no talk of the need that the necessity of its object, and thereby of itself, should be exhibited.
In the present treatise, accordingly, the concept of pure science together with its deduction counts as presupposed, to the extent that the Phenomenology of Spirit amounts to precisely that deduction and nothing besides. Every mode of consciousness has its truth in absolute knowledge, since — as the course consciousness ran made plain — nowhere but in absolute knowledge does the divorce of the object from certainty of self come wholly undone, truth turning equal to that certainty and that certainty equal to truth.
Pure science thus presupposes liberation from the opposition of consciousness. It contains the thought, insofar as it is just as much the subject matter in its own self, or the subject matter in its own self, insofar as it is just as much pure thought. As science, truth is pure self-developing self-consciousness and has the shape of the self, in that what is in and for itself is the known concept, but the concept as such is what is in and for itself. This objective thinking, then, is the content of pure science. So little, therefore, is it formal, so little does it want for the matter that an actual and true cognition demands, that its content is on the contrary the absolutely true and nothing else, or, should one still care to employ the word matter, the genuine matter, – matter of a kind, though, to which form is nothing external, seeing that such matter is itself pure thought and therewith absolute form. Logic is on this showing to be grasped as pure reason's system, as the realm of pure thought. This realm is truth such as it is in and for itself, stripped of all covering. One may accordingly put it this way: the portrayal of God is what this content is, God as he is in his eternal essence prior to the creation of nature and of any finite spirit.
Praise goes to Anaxagoras as the first to have voiced the thought that the world's principle is nous, thought, and that as thought the essence of the world is to be determined. With this he laid the foundation for an intellectual view of the universe, whose pure shape must be logic. What is at issue in logic is not a thinking about something that would lie at its base for itself outside thinking, not forms that would yield mere marks of truth; rather, the necessary forms and the proper determinations of thinking are the content and the highest truth itself.
In order at least to take this up into representation, the opinion must be set aside that truth has to be something palpable. Such palpability is carried, for example, even into the Platonic ideas that are in God's thinking, as though they were, so to speak, existing things, only in another world or region, outside of which the world of actuality is to be found, possessing a substantiality distinct from those ideas and real only through this distinctness. Nothing else is the Platonic idea than the universal, or more exactly the object's concept; a something has actuality in its concept alone; where it diverges from its concept it stops being actual and counts as a nullity; and palpability, together with sensuous being-outside-itself, falls on that null side. – From the other side, however, one can appeal to ordinary logic's own representations; for it is assumed, for example, that definitions do not contain determinations that fall only within the cognizing subject, but the determinations of the object, which constitute its most essential, its ownmost nature. Or again, where one infers other determinations from determinations already given, the supposition is that whatever has been inferred is nothing extraneous, nothing foreign to the object, but rather accrues to the object itself, being answering to such thinking. – It underlies the use of the forms of concept, judgment, syllogism, definition, division and so forth quite generally that these are not merely forms of self-conscious thinking but also of objective understanding. – Thinking is an expression that attributes the determination contained in it preeminently to consciousness. Yet whenever the claim is made that understanding, that reason dwells in the world of objects, that universal laws govern the life and the alterations of spirit and of nature, then it stands conceded that objective worth and concrete existence attach no less to the determinations of thinking.
The critical philosophy had, it is true, already converted metaphysics into logic, yet it — and the later idealism along with it — out of dread before the object, assigned the logical determinations a significance essentially subjective, as was recalled a moment ago; by that very move the determinations stay encumbered with the object they had fled, and a thing-in-itself, an infinite impetus, was left clinging to them as something beyond. Science, however, has to be able to presuppose that release from consciousness's opposition, and such release lifts the determinations of thinking clear of that timid, unfinished standpoint and calls for them to be considered in and for themselves, free of any such restriction and deference, as the logical, the purely rational.
Kant elsewhere counts logic, namely the aggregate of determinations and propositions that in the ordinary sense goes by the name of logic, fortunate in that so early a completion has fallen to its lot in advance of other sciences; since Aristotle, he says, it has taken no step backward, but no step forward either, the latter because to all appearances it seems to be closed and complete. – If logic has undergone no change since Aristotle, – as indeed the changes, when one looks at the more recent compendia of logic, frequently consist in nothing more than omissions, – then what should rather be inferred from this is that it stands all the more in need of a total reworking; for two thousand years of continued labour by spirit must have procured for it a higher consciousness of its thinking and of its pure essentiality within itself. Set the shapes into which the spirit of the practical and of the religious world, and the spirit of science, have lifted themselves in every kind of real and ideal consciousness beside the shape that logic — spirit's consciousness of its own pure essence — currently occupies, and the disparity shows itself too large for even the most superficial look to miss at once that this last-named consciousness falls wholly short of those earlier elevations and is unworthy of them.
In fact the need for a transformation of logic has long been felt. In the form and the content in which it shows itself in the textbooks, it has, one may say, fallen into contempt. It is still dragged along more from a feeling that a logic of some kind cannot be done without, and from a still persisting habituation to the tradition of its importance, than from any conviction that that ordinary content and the occupation with those empty forms have value and use.
The expansions given to it for a time by psychological, pedagogical and even physiological material have since been fairly generally acknowledged to be disfigurements. In and for itself a large part of these psychological, pedagogical, physiological observations, laws and rules must appear very stale and trivial, whether they stand in logic or wherever else. Above all, such rules as, for example, that one should think through and examine what one reads in books or hears spoken; that if one does not see well one should come to the aid of one's eyes with spectacles, – rules which the textbooks of so-called applied logic gave, and indeed in all seriousness divided into paragraphs, so that one might attain truth, – must strike everyone as superfluous, except at most the writer or the teacher who is at a loss how to pad out by something or other the otherwise too short and lifeless content of logic.
Why such content should be so devoid of spirit has already been accounted for above. Fixed and unbudging is how its determinations hold good, and they are set into no relation with one another but an external one. Since with judgments and syllogisms the operations are chiefly traced back to, and founded upon, the quantitative side of the determinations, the whole affair comes to rest upon a difference that is external, upon comparison and nothing more, and turns into a wholly analytic procedure, a conceptless computing. The derivation of the so-called rules and laws, above all of inference, is not much better than fingering little sticks of unequal length in order to sort and join them according to their size, – than the children's pastime of picking out the matching pieces from pictures cut up in various ways. – Hence this thinking has not unjustly been equated with reckoning, and reckoning in turn with this thinking. In arithmetic numbers are taken as the conceptless, which apart from its equality or inequality, that is, apart from its wholly external ratio, has no significance, which is a thought neither in its own self nor in its relation. When it is worked out in a mechanical way that three-quarters multiplied by two-thirds makes one-half, this operation contains roughly as much and as little thought as the calculation whether this or that kind of syllogism can occur in a given figure.
If this dead skeleton of logic is to be brought to life by spirit as substance and content, its method must be the one through which alone it is capable of being pure science. In the condition in which it finds itself, hardly an inkling of scientific method is to be discerned. It has roughly the form of an empirical science. Empirical sciences have found, for what they are supposed to be, their own peculiar method of defining and classifying their material as well as this can be done. Pure mathematics likewise has a method of its own, one fitted to its abstract objects and to the quantitative determination that is the sole respect under which it regards them. What is essential on the score of this method, and generally on the subordinate rank of the scientific character attainable in mathematics, I stated in the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit; the method will nevertheless come up for closer consideration inside logic itself. Spinoza, Wolff and others let themselves be seduced into applying it to philosophy as well, and into making the external course of conceptless quantity into the course of the concept, which is in and for itself contradictory. Hitherto philosophy had not yet found its method; it looked with envy at the systematic edifice of mathematics and borrowed its method from it, as was said, or made do with the method of sciences that are only mixtures of given material, empirical propositions and thoughts, – or helped itself out by the crude discarding of all method. But setting out what alone can serve as the true method of philosophical science belongs to logic's own treatise; for method is nothing but consciousness of the form belonging to the inner self-movement of logic's content. In the Phenomenology of Spirit I have set out an example of this method on a more concrete object, on consciousness3. There we have shapes of consciousness, each of which in its realization at the same time dissolves itself, has its own negation for its result, – and has thereby passed over into a higher shape. The sole thing needed in order to secure scientific advance, and the thing whose quite simple insight one must essentially labour to reach, – is the recognition of that logical proposition according to which the negative is positive in equal measure, or according to which whatever contradicts itself resolves not into a zero, into abstract nothing, but essentially into nothing more than the negation of its particular content, so that a negation of this kind is not negation of everything but the negation of the determinate subject matter that is resolving itself, and so is determinate negation; whence the result essentially harbours within it that from which it results; – which is strictly speaking a tautology, since otherwise the result would be an immediate and no result at all. Because the negation that results is determinate negation, a content belongs to it. What it amounts to is a new concept, though one higher and richer than its predecessor; enriched, namely, by that predecessor's negation or opposite, it holds the earlier concept within itself and something over and above it besides, being the unity of the earlier concept with its own opposite. – In this way the system of concepts as such has to form itself, – and to complete itself in an unstoppable, pure course that takes in nothing from outside.
Far be it from me to imagine that the method I have pursued in this system of logic, – or rather the method this system pursues in its own self, – admits of no further perfecting, no thorough working-out in detail; and yet I know withal that no other method is the true one. This is already evident of itself from the fact that the method is nothing distinct from its object and content; – for it is the content within itself, the dialectic, which it has in its own self, that moves it forward. It is clear that no expositions can count as scientific which do not go the course of this method and are not in keeping with its simple rhythm, for it is the course of the subject matter itself.
Conformably with this method I would recall that whatever divisions and headings for books, sections and chapters are stated in the work, together with any explanations attached to them, have been made to serve a preliminary survey, and that their worth is properly speaking only historical. Neither the content nor the body of the science includes them; they are assemblages put together by external reflection, a reflection that has already traversed the execution as a whole and so knows the sequence of its moments beforehand and announces that sequence before the subject matter itself has brought it on.
In the other sciences such advance determinations and divisions are likewise, taken by themselves, nothing other than such external indications; but within those sciences too they are not raised above this character. Even in logic, for example, one finds it said, »logic has two main parts, the doctrine of elements and methodology,« and then under the doctrine of elements there stands, without further ado, the heading: laws of thinking; – then first chapter: on concepts. First section: on the clarity of concepts, and so forth. – Determinations and divisions of this sort, arrived at with no deduction and no justification at all, are what makes up the systematic framework of such sciences and the whole of their coherence. A logic of that kind takes its vocation to lie in declaring that concepts and truths have to be derived from principles; yet in what it names method, deriving is not so much as distantly contemplated. The order consists, say, in putting like things together, in sending the simpler ahead of the composite, and in other external considerations. But as regards an inner, necessary connectedness, it stops at the register of the divisional determinations, and the transition is effected only by its now saying: second chapter; – or: we come now to judgments, and the like.
The headings and divisions occurring in this system, too, are meant to have by themselves no other significance than that of a table of contents. Apart from that, however, the necessity of the connectedness and the immanent emergence of the differences must be found in the treatment of the subject matter itself, for it falls within the concept's own further determining.
That through which the concept leads itself further is the negative indicated above, which the concept has within its own self; this constitutes the genuinely dialectical. Dialectic, which has been regarded as a separate part of logic and, with respect to its purpose and standpoint, one may say, entirely misconstrued, thereby acquires an altogether different position. – Even Platonic dialectic, in the Parmenides itself and elsewhere still more directly, has in part only the intention of dissolving and refuting restricted assertions through themselves, and in part simply the nothing for its result. Ordinarily dialectic is looked upon as an external and negative doing that does not belong to the subject matter itself, that has its ground in mere vanity as a subjective craving to set what is firm and true into wavering and to dissolve it, or that at least leads to nothing but the vanity of the object treated dialectically.
Kant placed dialectic higher, – and this aspect belongs among the greatest of his merits, – in that he took from it the semblance of arbitrariness which it has according to the ordinary representation, and exhibited it as a necessary doing of reason. So long as it passed for nothing but the art of conjuring up deceptions and producing illusions, it was simply presupposed that it plays a false game and that its whole force rests solely on concealing the fraud; that its results are merely got by trickery and are a subjective shine. Kant's dialectical expositions in the antinomies of pure reason certainly deserve no great praise when they are examined more closely, as will be done at greater length in the course of this work; but the general idea that he laid down as basis and made prevail is the objectivity of shine and the necessity of the contradiction that belongs to the nature of the determinations of thinking: in the first instance, to be sure, in the manner in which these determinations are applied by reason to things in themselves; but precisely what they are in reason and in regard to what is in itself, that is their nature. This result, grasped in its positive side, is nothing other than the inner negativity of those determinations, their self-moving soul, the principle of all natural and spiritual liveliness as such. Halt, though, at the merely abstract-negative side of the dialectical, and what comes out is nothing but the familiar claim that reason cannot cognize the infinite; – an odd outcome, given that the infinite is what is rational, to declare reason unable to cognize the rational.
In this dialectical element, as it is taken here, and hence in the grasping of the opposed in its unity, or of the positive in the negative, consists the speculative. It is the most important aspect, but for the still unpractised, unfree power of thinking the most difficult. If such a power is still engaged in tearing itself loose from sensuously concrete representing and from argumentation, it has first to practise itself in abstract thinking, to hold concepts fast in their determinateness and to learn to cognize from them. An exposition of logic for this purpose would have to keep, in its method, to the division spoken of above and, with respect to the closer content, to the determinations that emerge for the individual concepts, without entering into the dialectical. In outward shape it would come to resemble the ordinary presentation of this science, though in content it would also differ from it, and it would still serve to practise abstract if not speculative thinking, a purpose which the logic made popular by psychological and anthropological ingredients cannot even fulfil. To spirit it would offer the image of a whole ordered methodically, even though what is the soul of that edifice – the method, which has its life in the dialectical – would not itself show up in it.
Touching the formation and the relation of the individual to logic, let me note in closing that grammar and this science alike present themselves under two distinct aspects, with two distinct values. To whoever first steps up to logic, and to the sciences at large, it is one thing; to whoever returns to logic out of them, another. Whoever begins to get acquainted with grammar finds in its forms and laws dry abstractions, contingent rules, in general an isolated multitude of determinations that display only the value and the significance of what lies in their immediate sense; cognition at first cognizes in them nothing but them. Only to one who commands a language and knows other languages alongside it for comparison can a people's spirit and formation become perceptible within the grammar of that people's tongue; those very rules and forms carry from then on a value that is filled out and alive. Through the grammar he can cognize the expression of spirit as such, logic. Just so, one who steps up to science meets in logic, to begin with, an insulated system of abstractions that, shut up within itself, extends over none of the other branches of knowledge and science. Measured rather against the riches of one's representation of the world, against the content of the other sciences with its air of reality, and set beside absolute science's pledge to lay bare the essence of those riches, the inner nature of spirit and of world, the truth, this science, in the abstractness of its shape, in the colourless and chilly plainness of its pure determinations, looks far more likely to deliver anything whatever than that pledge, and to stand substanceless in the face of such riches. The first acquaintance with logic restricts its significance to itself; its content counts as merely an isolated occupation with the determinations of thinking, alongside which the other scientific occupations have a material and substance of their own, on which the logical exercises at most a formal influence, and indeed one that comes about more of itself, and for which the scientific shape and the study of it can, at a pinch, well enough be done without. The other sciences have on the whole thrown off the regular method of being a sequence of definitions, axioms, theorems and their proofs and so forth; so-called natural logic makes itself felt in them on its own account and gets along without any special cognition directed at thinking itself. Above all, however, the material and content of these sciences takes itself to be entirely independent of the logical, and is besides more appealing to sense, feeling, representation and practical interest of every kind.
So logic must indeed first be learned as something that one understands and sees into well enough, but in which scope, depth and further significance are at first missed. Only out of a deeper knowledge of the other sciences does the logical rise up for subjective spirit as something not merely abstractly universal but as the universal that embraces the wealth of the particular within itself; – just as the same moral maxim in the mouth of a youth who understands it quite correctly does not possess the significance and the scope that it has in the spirit of a man experienced in life, for whom it expresses the whole force of the substance contained in it. Thus the logical first receives the appreciation of its worth when it has become the result of the experience of the sciences; out of that it presents itself to spirit as universal truth, not as a particular piece of knowledge alongside other material and realities, but as the essence of all this other content.
Granted that at the outset of study the logical is not there for spirit with this conscious force, spirit receives through the logical no less the inward force by which it is guided into truth of every sort. A realm of shades is what the system of logic is, a world of simple essentialities set free from every sensuous concretion. The study of this science, the sojourn and the labour in this realm of shadows, is the absolute cultivation and discipline of consciousness. In it consciousness carries on a business remote from sensuous intuitions and purposes, from feelings, from the merely meant world of representation. Considered from its negative side, this business consists in keeping at a distance the contingency of argumentative thinking and the arbitrariness of letting these or the opposite grounds occur to one and pass as valid.
Above all, however, thought thereby gains self-subsistence and independence. It becomes at home in the abstract and in advancing through concepts without sensuous substrates, becomes an unconscious power for taking up the remaining manifoldness of bodies of knowledge and sciences into the rational form, for grasping and holding fast what is essential in them, for stripping off the external and in this way drawing the logical out of them, – or, what is the same, for filling the abstract foundation of the logical acquired beforehand through study with the substance of all truth, and for giving it the value of a universal that no longer stands as a particular alongside other particulars but reaches across all of this and is its essence, the absolutely true.
General Division of Logic
In what has been said about the concept of this science and about where its justification falls, it is implied that the general division can here be only provisional, can as it were be given only insofar as the author already knows the science and is therefore in a position to state here in advance, historically, into which principal distinctions the concept will determine itself in the course of its development.
Yet the attempt may be made to render intelligible in advance and in a general way what is required for dividing, although here too a procedure of the method must be laid claim to which receives its full elucidation and justification only within the science. – To begin with, then, let it be recalled that what is presupposed here is that the division has to be bound up with the concept, or better still, has to reside within the concept itself. Far from being indeterminate, the concept is determinate in its own self; and what the division does is to set out this determinateness of the concept in developed shape; the division is the concept's judgment, not a judgment passed upon some object picked up externally, but rather the concept's own judging, that is, its determining of itself in its own self. Being right-angled, being acute-angled and so forth, as also being equilateral and so forth, the determinations by which triangles get divided up, have no place in the determinateness of the triangle as such, which is to say no place in what people are accustomed to call the concept of the triangle, no more place than there is, in what [holds] for the concept of animal in general, or of mammal, bird and so on, for those determinations by which animals get divided into mammals, birds and so on, and these classes in turn into further genera. Such determinations are taken up from elsewhere, from empirical intuition; they come to that so-called concept from outside. In the philosophical treatment of dividing, the concept must show itself as containing their origin.
But the concept of logic itself has been given in the introduction as the result of a science lying beyond it, and hence here likewise as a presupposition. Logic accordingly determined itself as the science of pure thinking, having for its principle pure knowledge, a unity that is not abstract but, for that very reason, concrete and living, in that within it the opposition of consciousness between something subjectively being-for-itself and a second such being, an objective one, is known as overcome, and being is known as the pure concept in its own self, and the pure concept as the true being. These, then, are the two moments contained in the logical. But they are now known as being inseparable, not, as in consciousness, each also as being for itself; solely because they are at the same time known as distinguished, (yet not as being for themselves), is their unity not abstract, dead, motionless, but concrete.
This unity constitutes the logical principle at the same time as element, so that the development of that difference which is immediately within it goes forward only within this element. For since the division, as has been said, is the judgment of the concept, the positing of the determination already immanent in it and hence of its difference, this positing must not be grasped as a redissolving of that concrete unity into its determinations as these are supposed to count as being for themselves, which here would be an empty falling back into the earlier standpoint, the opposition of consciousness; that opposition has rather vanished; that unity remains the element, and the differentiating of the division, and of the development generally, no longer steps out of it. With this, the determinations which earlier (on the way to truth) counted as being for themselves, such as a subjective and an objective, or thinking and being, or again concept and reality, however they may have been determined in one respect or another, are now in their truth, that is, in their unity, brought down to the status of forms. Even as they differ, therefore, they each remain in themselves the whole concept, and what the division does is simply to posit this concept under determinations that are its own.
Thus it is the whole concept that is to be considered the one time as the concept which is, the other time as concept; there it is only concept in itself, the concept of reality or of being, here it is concept as such, concept which is for itself, (as it is, to name concrete forms, in the thinking human being, but also already, though not as a conscious and still less as a known concept, in the sentient animal and in organic individuality generally; but concept in itself it is only in inorganic nature). – Logic would accordingly be divided in the first instance into the logic of the concept as being, and of the concept as concept, – or, to make use of the otherwise customary though most indeterminate and therefore most ambiguous expressions, – into objective and subjective logic.
But in accordance with the underlying element of the unity of the concept within itself, and hence of the inseparability of its determinations, these determinations must further, even insofar as they are distinguished and the concept is posited in their difference, at least stand in connection with one another. There results from this a sphere of mediation, the concept as the system of the determinations of reflection, that is, of being as it passes over into the being-within-itself of the concept, a concept which in this way is not yet posited for itself as such but is at the same time burdened with immediate being as with something also external to it. This is the doctrine of essence, standing as it does in the middle, between the doctrine of being and the doctrine of the concept. – In the general division of this logical work it has still been placed under objective logic, inasmuch as, although essence is already the inner, the character of the subject is expressly to be reserved for the concept.
Kant4 in recent times has counterposed to what has usually been called logic yet another, namely a transcendental logic. In part, that which has been named objective logic in the present work would answer to what in him goes under the head of transcendental logic. His way of marking it off from what he terms general logic runs thus: α) it takes into consideration those concepts which refer a priori to objects, and so refrains from abstracting from every content of objective cognition, or else, it holds the rules for the pure thinking of an object; and β) it goes at the same time into where our cognition originates, so far as that cognition is not to be credited to the objects. – It is this second side to which Kant's philosophical interest is exclusively directed. His governing idea is that the categories are to be vindicated as belonging to self-consciousness, to the subjective I itself. Because it is determined in this way, the view halts inside consciousness together with its opposition, and it has let something over and above the empirical element of feeling and of intuition remain behind, something not posited or determined by self-consciousness in its thinking, a thing-in-itself, foreign to thinking and outside it; and yet one sees readily enough that an abstractum of that sort, the thing-in-itself, is nothing but a product of thinking, of thinking indeed in its merely abstracting mode. – When other Kantians have put the determining of the object by the I in these terms, that the I's objectifying counts as an originary and necessary deed of consciousness, such that within this originary deed the representation of the I is not yet on hand, – since such a representation would first be a consciousness of that consciousness, or would itself be an objectifying of that consciousness, – then this objectifying deed, once released from the opposition of consciousness, is more precisely what can be taken quite generally for thinking as such. 5 But this doing should no longer be called consciousness; consciousness encloses within itself the opposition of the I and its object, an opposition not present in that original doing. The name consciousness casts upon it the shine of subjectivity even more than does the expression thinking, which here, however, is to be taken quite generally in an absolute sense, as infinite thinking unburdened with the finitude of consciousness, in short as thinking as such.
Now inasmuch as what engaged the Kantian philosophy was the so-called transcendental aspect of the determinations of thought, the treatment of those determinations themselves came off empty-handed; what they are in their own selves, apart from that abstract relation to the I which is one and the same for all of them, how each is determined over against the others and how each stands related to the others, was never made a subject of consideration; and so cognition of their nature has not been advanced in the slightest by this philosophy. The only interesting thing bearing on this occurs in the critique of the ideas. – For philosophy to make actual progress, however, it was necessary that thinking's interest be drawn toward the formal side, toward the I, toward consciousness as such, which is to say toward the abstract relating of a subjective knowledge to an object, and that in this manner cognition of the infinite form, of the concept, that is, be set under way. In order to attain this cognition, however, that finite determinateness in which the form is as I, as consciousness, had still to be stripped away. The form thus thought out into its purity then contains within its own self the capacity to determine itself, that is, to give itself content, and to give it in its necessity, – as a system of the determinations of thought.
The objective logic thus takes rather the place of the former metaphysics, which was the scientific edifice concerning the world that was to be raised by thoughts alone. – If we take account of the last shape in which this science was developed, then it is first of all and immediately ontology whose place the objective logic takes, – that part of the said metaphysics which was to investigate the nature of the Ens in general; – the Ens comprehends within itself both being and essence, a difference for which our language has fortunately preserved distinct expressions. – But then the objective logic also comprehends within itself the rest of metaphysics insofar as this sought to grasp with the pure forms of thought the particular substrates taken in the first instance from representation, the soul, the world, God, and the determinations of thinking made up the essential element of the manner of consideration. But logic considers these forms free from those substrates, the subjects of representation, and considers their nature and worth in and for themselves. That metaphysics omitted to do this and thus incurred the just reproach of having employed them without critique, without the prior investigation whether and how they are capable of being determinations of the thing-in-itself, in Kant's expression, – or rather of the rational. – Hence it is the objective logic that supplies the genuine critique of these forms, – a critique that examines them, not under the abstract form of apriority set against the aposteriori, but in the particular content each of them has.
The subjective logic is the logic of the concept, – the logic of an essence that has sublated its reference to a being or to its shine, and that in its determination is external no longer, but is rather the free and self-subsistent subjective which determines itself within itself, or rather is the subject itself. – Since the subjective carries with it the misunderstanding of something contingent and arbitrary, as also of determinations generally that belong to the form of consciousness, no particular weight is here to be placed on the difference between subjective and objective, a difference that will later be developed more closely within logic itself.
Broadly speaking, then, logic does indeed break up into objective and subjective logic; taken more precisely, however, its parts are three:
I. The logic of being,
II. the logic of essence as well as
III. the logic of the concept.
Book One. The Doctrine of Being
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.