On the Concept in General

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Division

Looked at from the outside, the concept shows itself as the unity of being and essence. Of being, essence is the first negation, whereby being has turned into shine; the concept is the second, namely the negation of this negation; hence being reinstated, though as being's infinite mediation and negativity within its own self. – Within the concept, accordingly, being and essence no longer carry the determination in which they are as being and essence, nor do they stand merely in such a unity that each shines in the other. Into these determinations, therefore, the concept does not differentiate itself. It is the truth of the relation of substantiality, wherein being and essence reach, through one another, a self-subsistence and a determination that are fulfilled. What showed itself to be the truth of substantiality was substantial identity, an identity that equally, and solely, is as positedness. Positedness is existence and differentiating; hence being-in-and-for-itself has, within the concept, arrived at an existence commensurate with it and true, since that positedness is being-in-and-for-itself itself. This positedness makes up the concept's difference within it; its differences, because the concept is immediately being-in-and-for-itself, are themselves the whole concept; in their determinateness universal, and identical with their negation.

This, now, is the very concept of the concept. But it is only yet the concept of the concept; – or else the concept is itself likewise only the concept. Since it is being-in-and-for-itself so far as this is positedness, or the absolute substance so far as substance discloses the necessity of distinct substances as identity, what this identity is it must itself posit. Those moments in the movement of the substantiality relation through which the concept has become, together with the reality they exhibit, still lie within the transition into the concept; that reality is not yet there as a determination of its own, one sprung from the concept; it fell within the sphere of necessity, whereas the concept's own reality can only be its free determination, an existence wherein it is identical with itself, an existence whose moments are concepts and are posited by the concept itself.

First, then, the concept is the truth only in itself; being only something inner, it is to just the same degree only something outer. It is first of all, quite generally, an immediate, and in this shape the form belonging to its moments is that of immediate, fixed determinations. It makes its appearance as the determinate concept, as the sphere of the mere understanding. – Since a form of immediacy such as this amounts to an existence not yet befitting the concept's nature — the concept being the free that refers to nothing but itself — that form is an external one, within which the concept can count not as something in and for itself but as merely posited, as something subjective. – What the shape of the immediate concept constitutes is the standpoint from which the concept counts as a subjective thinking, a reflection lying outside the fact. This stage accordingly makes up SUBJECTIVITY, or the formal concept. Its externality shows in the fixed being of its determinations, by which each steps forward on its own as something isolated and qualitative, standing merely in an outward reference to its other. The concept's identity, however, being precisely the inner or subjective essence of those determinations, sets them into dialectical movement, whereby their singularization, and with it the concept's separation from the fact, is sublated, and their truth comes forth as the totality that is the objective concept.

II. The concept in its OBJECTIVITY is the fact itself as it is in and for itself. By its necessary further determination the formal concept turns itself into the fact, and so loses the relation of subjectivity and externality over against the fact. Or, put the other way round, objectivity is the real concept that has emerged out of its inwardness and gone over into existence. – Thus in this identity with the fact it possesses an existence that is its own and free. Yet this freedom is still an immediate one, not yet negative. Being one with the fact, the concept is submerged in it; its differences are objective concrete existences within which it is once more itself the inner. Being the soul of objective existence, it must give to itself the form of subjectivity which as formal concept it possessed immediately; and so it comes to stand over against objectivity in the form of the free — a form it did not yet possess within objectivity — and therein renders the identity that in and for itself, as objective concept, it has with objectivity, into one that is posited as well.

In this consummation, where within its objectivity the concept has the form of freedom as well, lies the adequate concept, the IDEA. REASON, being the sphere of the idea, is the truth that has unveiled itself to itself, wherein the concept possesses the realization utterly commensurate with it, and is free just so far as it cognizes this objective world of its own within its subjectivity, and its subjectivity within that world.

First Section. Subjectivity

The concept is at the outset the formal one, the concept at the beginning, or the concept that is in the mode of the immediate. – Within the immediate unity, its difference or positedness is at first still simple in itself and no more than a shine, with the result that the difference's moments are without mediation the concept's totality and are nothing but the CONCEPT as such.

Secondly, however, being absolute negativity, the concept dirempts itself and posits itself as its own negative, as its own other; and since it is as yet the immediate concept, this positing, or differentiating, carries the determination that each of the moments turns indifferent towards the others and comes to be on its own account; within such partition the concept's unity is nothing further than external reference. So taken, as the reference of moments posited as self-subsistent and indifferent, the concept is the JUDGMENT.

Thirdly, the judgment does hold within it the unity of a concept gone lost in its self-subsistent moments, but that unity is not posited. Posited it becomes by way of the dialectical movement of the judgment, which has thereby turned into the SYLLOGISM, into the concept completely posited; for within the syllogism the concept's moments stand posited as self-subsistent extremes quite as much as does their mediating unity.

But inasmuch as this unity itself, as the unifying middle term, and the moments, as self-subsistent extremes, at first confront one another immediately, the contradictory relation obtaining in the formal syllogism sublates itself, and the completeness of the concept goes over into the unity of totality, the concept's subjectivity into its objectivity.

Chapter 1. The Concept

It is customary for understanding to express the faculty of concepts in general, and to that extent understanding is marked off from the power of judgment and from the faculty of syllogisms, that is, from formal reason. Above all, however, it is placed in opposition to reason; taken that way it signifies not the faculty of the concept in general but that of determinate concepts, the governing representation being that a concept is ONLY something determinate. Where understanding in this sense is marked off from the formal power of judgment and from formal reason, it must be taken as the faculty of the individual, determinate concept. For judgment and syllogism, or reason, are themselves, taken formally, no more than something of the understanding, inasmuch as they fall under the form of abstract conceptual determinateness. Here, though, the concept does not at all count as something merely abstractly determinate; understanding is therefore to be marked off from reason only in this respect, that the former is merely the faculty of the concept in general.

This universal concept, the one now before us for consideration, holds three moments within it: universality, particularity, and singularity. That difference, along with the determinations the concept confers on itself in differentiating, makes up the side named earlier positedness. Because within the concept positedness is identical with being-in-and-for-itself, every one of those moments is as much the whole concept as it is a determinate concept and one determination of the concept.

First, the concept is the pure concept, that is, the determination of universality. Yet the pure, or universal, concept is likewise no more than a determinate, or particular, concept, one that ranges itself off to one side alongside the rest. Since the concept is the totality, and consequently, in its universality — in its purely identical reference to itself — is essentially the determining and the differentiating, it possesses in itself the yardstick whereby this form of its identity with itself, in permeating all the moments and gathering them into itself, just as immediately determines itself to be only the universal as against the moments' differentiatedness.

Secondly, the concept is thereby as this particular concept, or as the determinate concept, which stands posited as differentiated over against others.

Thirdly, singularity is the concept as it reflects itself out of difference into absolute negativity. Herein lies at once the moment in which the concept has passed out of its identity over into its otherness, thereby becoming the judgment.

A) The Universal Concept

Absolutely infinite, unconditioned, and free — such is the pure concept. Here, at the point where the treatise having the concept for its content begins, a backward look at the concept's genesis is once more called for. Essence has become out of being, and the concept out of essence, thus out of being as well. This becoming, however, carries the sense of a counter-thrust against itself, so that what has become is rather the unconditioned and the original. In passing over into essence, being has turned into a shine or a positedness, and becoming, the transition into an other, has turned into a positing; inversely, the positing, or essence's reflection, has sublated itself and reinstated itself as something not-posited, as an original being. The concept is the mutual interpenetration of these moments, so that whatever is qualitative and originally in being is only as positing and only as return-into-itself, while this pure reflection-into-itself is utterly the becoming-other, the determinateness, which for that very reason is equally an infinite determinateness that refers to itself.

Hence the concept is at the start absolute identity with itself in such wise that it is this identity solely as negation of the negation, solely as negativity's infinite unity with its own self. This pure reference of the concept to itself, which is such a reference by positing itself through negativity, is the universality of the concept.

Universality, being the supremely simple determination, would seem to admit of no explanation; for an explanation must enter upon determinations and distinctions and must predicate something of its subject matter, whereas the simple is thereby altered sooner than explained. Yet it is just the nature of the universal to be a simple of this kind, one that by virtue of absolute negativity harbours within itself the utmost of difference and determinateness. Being is simple in the manner of the immediate; on that account it is a merely supposed something, and what it is cannot be said; hence it stands immediately at one with its other, with non-being. Just this is its concept — to be a simple that vanishes immediately into its opposite; it is becoming. The universal, by contrast, is the simple that is at the same time the richest within its own self; for it is the concept.

It is therefore, firstly, the simple reference to itself; it is only within itself. But this identity is, secondly, absolute mediation within itself, and not a mediated something. Of the universal that is something mediated — the abstract universal, namely, the one set over against the particular and the singular — there will be occasion to speak only once the determinate concept is reached. – Yet even the abstract already involves this, that obtaining it requires that other determinations of the concrete be left out. Such determinations, being determinations at all, are negations; and the leaving out of them is likewise a negating. So in the case of the abstract too, negation of negation makes its appearance. This doubled negation, however, gets represented as though it were external to the abstract, as though the omitted further properties of the concrete were diverse from the retained one that makes up the abstract's content, and as though this operation of dropping the rest and keeping the one went on outside the abstract itself. The universal has not yet determined itself towards such externality over against that movement; within itself it still is that absolute mediation which is just the negation of negation, absolute negativity.

Given this original unity, the first negative — the determination — is to begin with no restriction upon the universal; on the contrary, the universal preserves itself within it and stays positively identical with itself. Considered as concepts, the categories of being were essentially just such identities of determinations with themselves within their restriction or their otherness; that identity, however, was the concept only in itself; it had not yet been manifested. That is why the qualitative determination as such went under in its other, having for its truth a determination diverse from itself. The universal, on the contrary, though it posit itself in a determination, stays therein what it is. It is the soul of that concrete in which it dwells, unimpeded and equal to itself amid the concrete's manifoldness and diversity. It is not swept along into becoming, but continues itself untroubled through it, possessing the strength of an unalterable, immortal self-preservation.

Nor, again, does it merely shine into its other, as a determination of reflection does. Being something relative, such a determination refers not merely to itself; it is a comportment. It announces itself in its other, yet as yet only shines in it, and the shining of each in the other, or their reciprocal determining, takes on — given their self-subsistence — the form of an outward doing. – The universal, in contrast, is posited as the essence of its determination, as that determination's own positive nature. For within the concept, the determination making up the universal's negative is utterly only as a positedness, or essentially only at the same time as the negative of the negative, and it only is as this identity that the negative has with itself — the identity which the universal is. So far, then, the universal is the substance of its determinations as well; yet in such fashion that what was for substance as such something contingent is the concept's own mediation with itself, its own immanent reflection. This mediation, which in the first place elevates the contingent into necessity, is however the reference manifested; the concept is no abyss of formless substance, nor necessity taken as the inner identity of things or states mutually diverse and mutually limiting, but rather, as absolute negativity, it is what gives form and creates, and since determination is there not as restriction but utterly just as much as sublated, as positedness, the shine is appearance in the sense of the appearance of the identical.

Hence the universal is free power; it is itself and reaches out over its other, though not as something violent; rather, within that other it remains at rest and with its own self. Having been called free power, it might equally be called free love and unrestricted blessedness, for it comports itself towards the differentiated only as towards its own self; in the differentiated it has come back to itself.

Determinateness has just been mentioned, even though the concept, being as yet only the universal and only identical with itself, has not yet advanced so far. But the universal cannot be spoken of apart from determinateness, which more closely is particularity and singularity; for the universal holds it in and for itself within its absolute negativity; determinateness is therefore not fetched in from outside when it is spoken of in dealing with the universal. Taken as negativity in general, or according to the first, immediate negation, the universal carries determinateness in general upon it as particularity; taken as a second negativity, as negation of the negation, it is absolute determinateness, that is, singularity and concretion. – The universal is accordingly the totality of the concept; it is something concrete, not something empty, but has rather through its concept a content — a content in which it not merely preserves itself but which is proper and immanent to it. Abstraction from the content is of course possible; what one thereby obtains, however, is not the concept's universal but the abstract, an isolated and defective moment of the concept, possessing no truth.

More closely, the universal shows itself in this way to be such a totality. So far as it holds determinateness within itself, that determinateness amounts not merely to the first negation but to the reflection of this negation into itself as well. Taken on its own together with that first negation, the universal is something particular, as will be considered straight away; but in this determinateness it remains essentially universal, and it is this side that has still to be grasped here. – For this determinateness, being in the concept, is the total reflection, the double shine: on the one hand the shine outwards, reflection into an other; on the other the shine inwards, reflection into itself. The outward shining establishes a difference over against something other; accordingly the universal has a particularity that finds its resolution in a higher universal. Now even so far as it is merely a relatively universal, it does not forfeit its universal character; it holds itself fast in its determinateness, and this not merely by remaining, in its conjunction with determinateness, indifferent towards it — in that case it would only be compounded with it — but by being what has just been named the shining inwards. As determinate concept, determinateness has been bent back into itself out of externality; it is the concept's proper, immanent character, essential precisely because, received into universality and permeated by it, of like extent and identical with it, it permeates universality in turn; such is the character belonging to the genus, determinateness undivided from the universal. To that extent it is no restriction running outwards but is positive, standing as it does, by virtue of universality, in free reference to itself. So even the determinate concept remains within itself an infinitely free concept.

As regards the other side, however — the side on which the genus is bounded by its determinate character — the remark has been made that, being a lower genus, it finds its resolution in a universal that is higher. Such a universal may in turn be taken as a genus, only a more abstract one, but it belongs once again solely to that side of the determinate concept which runs outwards. Truly the higher universal is the one wherein this outward-running side has been withdrawn inwards, the second negation, wherein determinateness is utterly only as something posited, as shine. Life, the I, spirit, the absolute concept are not universals merely in the manner of higher genera; they are concretes whose determinatenesses are likewise not merely species or lower genera, but which in their reality are utterly only within themselves and filled with themselves. So far as life, the I, finite spirit are indeed also only determinate concepts, their absolute resolution lies in that universal which must be grasped as the truly absolute concept, as the idea of infinite spirit, whose positedness is the infinite, transparent reality wherein it beholds its creation and, in that creation, its own self.

The true, infinite universal, which immediately is within itself particularity quite as much as singularity, is now to be examined more closely, and first of all as particularity. It determines itself freely; its becoming finite is no transition of the kind that occurs only within being's sphere; it is creative power, being the absolute negativity that refers to itself. As such it is the differentiating within itself, and this differentiating is determining, for the reason that differentiating is one with universality. It is thus a positing of the differences themselves as universal and as self-referring. By this means they turn into fixed, isolated differences. The finite's isolated subsistence, which earlier determined itself as its being-for-itself, and as thinghood too, as substance, has universality for its truth, and it is with this form that the infinite concept invests its differences – a form which is itself precisely one of those differences. Herein consists the concept's creating, something to be comprehended only within this innermost core of the concept itself.

B) The Particular Concept

Determinateness as such belongs to being and to the qualitative; as the concept's determinateness it is particularity. Particularity is no limit, as though it thereby stood towards an other that were a beyond of itself; rather, as has just been shown, it is the universal's own immanent moment; hence in particularity the universal is not in the company of an other but purely and simply at home with itself.

The particular harbours the universality that makes up its substance; the genus stays unaltered in its species; the species are not diverse from the universal but only from one another. With the other particulars to which it stands related the particular shares one and the same universality. Their diversity is at once universal as such, on account of their identity with the universal; it is totality. – Hence the particular does not merely contain the universal but exhibits it as well through its determinateness; to that extent the universal makes up a sphere which the particular has to exhaust. This totality, so far as the particular's determinateness is taken for mere diversity, appears as completeness. In that respect the species are complete when there simply are no further ones. For them no inner yardstick or principle is at hand, since diversity is precisely the difference devoid of unity, a difference at which universality, absolute unity though it be for itself, is a merely external reflex and an unlimited, contingent completeness. Diversity, however, passes over into opposition, into an immanent reference among the diverse. Particularity, by contrast, is such an immanent reference as universality in and for itself, and not through any transition; it is totality in its own self and simple determinateness, essentially principle. No other determinateness attaches to it than the one the universal itself posits, and this issues from the universal in the following manner.

The particular is the universal itself, yet it is the universal's difference, or reference to an other, its shining outwards; but apart from the universal itself no other is present from which the particular might be distinguished. – The universal determines itself, and thus is itself the particular; the determinateness is its difference; from nothing but itself is it distinguished. Its species are accordingly just these two: a) the universal itself, and b) the particular. As the concept, the universal is both itself and its opposite, which in turn is itself as its posited determinateness; it reaches out across that opposite and within it stays at home with itself. So it is the totality and the principle of its diversity, a diversity determined wholly and only by itself.

There is accordingly no genuine division other than this: that the concept places itself over on one side as the immediate, indeterminate universality; and just this indeterminateness makes up its determinateness, or its being a particular. Both are the particular, and are therefore coordinate. Both, as particular, are likewise the determinate over against the universal; to that extent they count as subordinate to it. Yet just this universal, against which the particular is determined, is thereby itself rather only one of the two facing each other. If we speak of two terms facing each other, we must again add that the two of them make up the particular, and not merely together, as if for external reflection alone they were alike in this, in being particulars; rather their determinateness over against each other is essentially at once only one determinateness, that negativity which in the universal is simple.

As difference displays itself here, it stands in its concept and thereby in its truth. Every earlier difference has this unity in the concept. As immediate difference in being, it is the limit of an other; as it is in reflection, it is relative, posited as essentially referring to its other; here, then, the concept's unity begins to be posited, though at first that unity is merely the shine upon an other. – The passing over and dissolution of these determinations carries only this true sense, that they attain their concept, their truth; being, existence, something, or whole and parts, and so forth. Substance and accidents, cause and effect are for themselves determinations of thought; they come to be grasped as determinate concepts so far as each is cognized in unity with its other or its opposite. – Whole and parts, cause and effect, for instance, and so forth, are not yet diverse terms determined against each other as particulars, for although in themselves they do make up one concept, their unity has not yet attained the form of universality; and thus the difference obtaining in these relations still lacks the form of being one determinateness. Cause and effect, for instance, do not constitute two diverse concepts; there is only one determinate concept here, and causality, like every concept, is something simple.

With regard to completeness it has emerged that the determinate element of particularity lies completely within the difference between the universal and the particular, and that these two by themselves make up the particular species. In nature, admittedly, more than two species turn up within a genus, just as these many species cannot stand to each other in the relation exhibited above. Such is nature's impotence: that it cannot hold fast to the rigour of the concept or set it forth, and loses itself in this conceptless, blind manifoldness. We may well marvel at nature in the manifoldness of its genera and species and in the endless diversity of its formations, for marvelling is without concept, and its subject matter is what lacks reason. Because nature is the concept's being-outside-itself, it is left free to indulge in such diversity, just as spirit, though possessing the concept in the shape of the concept, likewise lets itself in for representation and roams about in an endless manifoldness of it. The many natural genera or species deserve to be esteemed no higher than the arbitrary fancies that occur to spirit in its representations. Both do everywhere display traces and intimations of the concept, but they do not present it in faithful likeness, since they are the side of its free being-outside-itself; the concept is the absolute power just in this, that it can freely release its difference into the shape of self-subsistent diversity, external necessity, contingency, arbitrariness, opinion, all of which, however, must be taken for nothing beyond the abstract side of nullity.

The determinateness of the particular is simple as principle, as we have seen, but it is so equally as a moment of the totality, as determinateness over against the other determinateness. The concept, so far as it determines or differentiates itself, turns negatively upon its own unity and takes on the form of one among its ideal moments of being; as a determinate concept it possesses an existence as such. This being, however, no longer carries the sense of bare immediacy; it carries the sense of universality, of an immediacy that through absolute mediation is equal to itself and that just as much holds within it the other moment, essence or reflection. The universality in which the determinate is here clothed is the abstract one. Universality dwells in the particular as the particular's essence; but so far as the determinateness of difference is posited and thereby has being, universality is form in the particular, while the determinateness as such is the content. Universality turns into form where difference is present as the essential, whereas in the purely universal, conversely, difference is only as absolute negativity, not as a difference that is posited as such.

Determinateness is now, to be sure, the abstract over against the other determinateness; but that other is nothing but universality itself, so that universality too is the abstract; and the concept's determinateness, or particularity, is once more nothing beyond determinate universality. In it the concept is outside itself; and so far as what stands there outside itself is the concept, the abstract universal harbours every moment of the concept: it is α) universality β) determinateness γ) the simple unity of both; this unity, though, is an immediate one, and particularity is on that account not there as the totality. In itself particularity is this totality too, and mediation; essentially it is an excluding reference to an other, or the sublation of the negation, namely of the other determinateness, – of that other which, however, merely hovers before the mind as a supposing, since it vanishes at once and shows itself to be the very same as what was supposed to be its other. What renders this universality abstract is just this, that the mediation is merely condition and is not posited in the universality itself. Since it is not posited, the unity of the abstract carries the form of immediacy, and the content carries the form of indifference towards its universality, for the content is not there as that totality which is the universality of absolute negativity. The abstract universal is thus the concept indeed, but as something conceptless, as a concept not posited as such.

When talk turns to the determinate concept, what is generally meant is purely and simply such an abstract universal. Even by the concept in general one mostly understands no more than this conceptless concept, and understanding names the faculty of such concepts. Demonstration falls to this understanding, so far as it is said to proceed by way of concepts, that is, merely by way of determinations. Such proceeding by way of concepts consequently never gets beyond finitude and necessity; its supreme point is the negative infinite, that abstraction of a highest essence which is itself nothing but the determinateness of indeterminateness. Absolute substance, too, is admittedly not this empty abstraction but rather, as regards content, the totality; abstract it nevertheless is, because it lacks the absolute form, and the concept does not make up its innermost truth; identity of universality and particularity though it be, or of thinking and of being-outside-one-another, that identity is not the concept's determinateness; outside substance there stands rather an understanding, and indeed, just because it stands outside substance, a contingent understanding, in and for which substance is in diverse attributes and modes.

Abstraction, by the way, is not empty, as it is commonly called; it is the determinate concept; some determinateness or other constitutes its content; even the highest essence, that pure abstraction, has, as was recalled, the determinateness of indeterminateness; yet indeterminateness is itself a determinateness, since it is meant to stand over against the determinate. But once one states what abstraction is, the very thing it was meant to be sublates itself; it is stated as one with determinateness, and in this manner the concept, and abstraction's truth, is brought forth out of abstraction. – To that extent, however, every determinate concept is indeed empty: it holds no totality within it, but only a one-sided determinateness. Even where it has concrete content besides, for instance human being, state, animal, and so forth, it stays an empty concept so far as its determinateness is not the principle of its differences; the principle holds the beginning and the essence of the concept's development and realization, whereas any other determinateness of the concept is barren. If the concept is therefore decried as empty in general, what is being misjudged is precisely that absolute determinateness of it which constitutes the conceptual difference, and which is the sole true content within the concept's element.

Here belongs the circumstance for whose sake understanding has of late been thought little of and set so far behind reason; it is the fixity which understanding imparts to determinatenesses and thereby to what is finite. This fixed quality rests on the form of abstract universality we have considered; through that form they become unalterable. For qualitative determinateness, like the determination of reflection, essentially is as something limited, and by way of its restriction it has a reference to its other, and hence the necessity of passing over and of ceasing-to-be. The universality they possess in the understanding, however, lends them the form of reflection into themselves, whereby they are taken out of the reference to an other and have grown imperishable. Now if in the pure concept such eternity belongs to its nature, its abstract determinations would be eternal essentialities only as regards their form; but their content does not match this form; hence they are not truth and imperishability. Their content does not match the form, since it is not determinateness itself in the character of the universal, that is, not the totality of conceptual difference, and thus is not itself the entire form; the form belonging to the limited understanding is, however, for just this reason the imperfect one, namely abstract universality. – It should further be esteemed, though, as the infinite power of understanding that it separates the concrete into abstract determinatenesses and grasps the depth of difference, which alone is at once the power effecting their transition. The concrete of intuition is totality, but the sensible one, – a real material subsisting indifferently outside one another in space and time; this want of unity in the manifold, in which the manifold is intuition's content, ought surely not to be reckoned to intuition's credit as a merit and an advantage over what pertains to the understanding. The alterability the manifold displays in intuition already points towards the universal; what of this comes before intuition is only an other equally alterable, hence only the selfsame thing; it is not the universal that would step into its place and appear. Least of all, however, ought the intuitable element that its material brings along be reckoned to the credit of a science, geometry and arithmetic for instance, nor its propositions be represented as thereby grounded. The material of such sciences is on the contrary of a lower nature for just that reason; intuiting figures or numbers is no help towards a science of them; only thinking about them can bring such a science forth. – So far, however, as intuition is understood to mean not merely the sensible but the objective totality, it is an intellectual intuition, that is, its subject matter is not existence in its outer concrete existence but what in existence is imperishable reality and truth, – reality only so far as it is essentially in the concept and determined through it, the idea, whose closer nature has yet to emerge. What intuition as such is credited with possessing in advance of the concept is outer reality, the conceptless, which acquires a value only through the concept.

Since understanding accordingly exhibits the infinite power that determines the universal, or conversely lends fixed subsistence, through the form of universality, to a determinateness that in and for itself has no stability, it is not now understanding's fault if no further step is taken. It is a subjective impotence of reason that lets these determinatenesses count as they stand and cannot lead them back to unity by the dialectical force opposed to that abstract universality, that is, by their own peculiar nature, namely by the concept of those determinatenesses. By the form of abstract universality understanding does indeed lend them, so to speak, a hardness of being such as they possess neither in the qualitative sphere nor in the sphere of reflection; but through this very simplification it inspirits them at the same time, and hones them to such a point that only at this apex do they acquire the ability to dissolve and to pass over into what is opposed to them. The highest ripeness and rank anything whatever can reach is that in which its going-under sets in. That firmness of the determinatenesses into which understanding seems to run itself fast, the form of the imperishable, is the form of universality referring itself to itself. But that form belongs to the concept as its very own; and therefore the dissolution of the finite lies expressed within it, and in infinite proximity. Such universality immediately convicts the determinateness of the finite and brings out its inadequacy to universality. – Or rather, its adequacy is already present; what is abstractly determinate stands posited as one with universality; posited therefore precisely as not for itself, as it would be were it merely determinate, but solely as the unity of universality and itself, that is, as concept.

It is therefore to be rejected in every respect that understanding and reason should be sundered in the way usually done. If the concept is taken to be devoid of reason, what must rather be so taken is reason's own inability to know itself in the concept. The determinate, abstract concept is the condition, or rather reason's essential moment; it is form that has been inspirited, wherein the finite, by way of the universality in which it refers to itself, kindles itself from within, is posited as dialectical, and so constitutes the very beginning of reason's appearance.

Now that the determinate concept has in the foregoing been set forth in its truth, all that remains is to indicate what it has thereby already come to be posited as. – Difference, an essential moment of the concept which in the purely universal is nevertheless not yet posited as such, comes into its right within the determinate concept. Determinateness in the form of universality is bound together with universality into something simple; this determinate universal is determinateness referring itself to itself, the determinate determinateness, or absolute negativity posited for itself. But determinateness referring itself to itself is singularity. Just as immediately as universality is already in and for itself particularity, just as immediately is particularity in and for itself singularity as well, which is to be considered in the first place as the concept's third moment, so far as it is held fast over against the first two, but also as the concept's absolute return into itself, and simultaneously as its posited loss of its own self.

Remark

By what has gone before, universality, particularity and singularity are the three determinate concepts, namely if one wishes to count them. It has already been shown earlier that number is an unfitting form in which to cast determinations of the concept, and altogether the most unfitting for determinations of the concept itself; number, since it has the one for its principle, makes what is counted into things utterly severed and utterly indifferent to one another. It has emerged in the foregoing that the diverse determinate concepts are, quite simply, rather only one and the same concept than that they fall apart into number.

In the otherwise customary treatment of logic there occur all manner of divisions and kinds of concepts. The inconsequence in this strikes the eye at once, that the kinds are introduced thus: there are, according to quantity, quality and so forth, the following concepts. There are expresses no other warrant than this, that one comes upon such kinds and that they show themselves in accordance with experience. In this way one obtains an empirical logic, – an odd science, an irrational cognition of the rational. Logic thereby gives a very bad example of compliance with its own teachings; it permits itself, in its own case, to do the opposite of what it prescribes as a rule, that concepts are to be derived and scientific propositions (hence also the proposition that there are so and so many kinds of concept) are to be proved. – The Kantian philosophy commits a further inconsequence here: it borrows for the transcendental logic the categories, as so-called root concepts, from subjective logic, in which they had been picked up empirically. Since it concedes the latter, there is no seeing why the transcendental logic resolves to borrow from such a science instead of reaching out empirically at once on its own.

To adduce something of this, concepts are divided chiefly according to their clarity, namely into clear and obscure, distinct and indistinct, into adequate and inadequate. The complete, the overflowing and other such superfluities may also be brought in here. – As regards that division according to clarity, it soon shows itself that this standpoint, along with the differences that attach to it, derives from psychological rather than logical determinations. The so-called clear concept is said to be enough for telling one object apart from another; a thing of that sort is not yet to be called a concept, it is nothing more than the subjective representation. What an obscure concept might be has to be left resting on itself, since otherwise it would not be obscure but would turn into a distinct one. – The distinct concept is said to be one for which the marks can be given. Accordingly it is properly the determinate concept. The mark, taking hold of whatever is right in it, is nothing else than the determinateness or simple content of the concept, so far as that content is held apart from the form of universality. At first, though, the mark carries no such exact sense; quite generally it is merely a determination by which some third party makes a note of an object or of the concept for himself; it may accordingly be a quite contingent circumstance. On the whole it voices not so much the immanence and essentiality of the determination as that determination's reference to an external understanding. If this last is truly an understanding, it has the concept before it and notes it by nothing else than by what is in the concept. Should the mark be something other than this, however, then it is a sign, or else a determination pertaining to the representation of the fact rather than to its concept. – What the indistinct concept may be can be passed by as superfluous.

The adequate concept, however, is something higher; what really hovers before one there is the agreement of the concept with reality, which is not the concept as such but the idea.

If the mark of the distinct concept were really supposed to be the determination of the concept itself, logic would get into embarrassment over the simple concepts, which by another division are set over against the composite ones. For if a true, that is, an immanent mark were to be specified for the simple concept, one would not want to regard it as a simple one; but insofar as none were specified for it, it would not be a distinct concept. Here, however, the clear concept comes to the rescue. Unity, reality and the like determinations are supposed to be simple concepts, presumably only on the ground that the logicians could not manage to find out the determination of them and therefore contented themselves with having a merely clear concept of them, that is, none at all. For the definition, that is, for the specification of the concept, the specification of the genus and of the specific difference is generally demanded. It therefore gives the concept not as something simple but in two countable components. But surely such a concept is not for that reason supposed to be a composite. – What seems to hover before one in the case of the simple concept is abstract simplicity, a unity that does not contain difference and determinateness within itself and hence is also not the unity that belongs to the concept. So far as an object is in representation, in memory especially, or is also the abstract determination of thought, it can be quite simple. Even the object richest within itself: for instance spirit, nature, world, and God as well, taken up quite without concept into the simple representation belonging to the equally simple word: spirit, nature, world, God, is doubtless something simple, at which consciousness may halt without singling out for itself the peculiar determination or a mark; but the objects of consciousness are not meant to stay these simple things, not representations or abstract determinations of thought; they are to be comprehended, that is, their simplicity is to be determined along with their inner difference. – The composite concept, however, is surely nothing better than a wooden iron. Of something composite one may well have a concept; but a composite concept would be something worse than materialism, which takes only the substance of the soul to be a composite while still grasping thinking as simple. Uneducated reflection hits first upon composition as the entirely external reference, the poorest form under which things can be viewed; even the lowest natures have to be an inner unity. That the form of the untruest existence should on top of everything be transferred to the I, to the concept, goes beyond what was to be expected and must count as unseemly and barbaric.

Concepts are further divided chiefly into contrary and contradictory ones. – If the business in the treatment of the concept were to state what determinate concepts there are, then all possible determinations would have to be adduced – for all determinations are concepts, hence determinate concepts – and all the categories of being, like all the determinations of essence, would have to be listed among the kinds of concept. So too in the logics, the one at pleasure recounting more and the other fewer, we are told what sorts of concept there are. There are affirmative, negative, identical, conditioned, necessary concepts and so forth. Since such determinations already lie behind the nature of the concept itself, and therefore, when they are listed in connection with it, do not occur in their own proper place, they admit only of superficial verbal explanations and appear here without any interest at all. – At the basis of the contrary and contradictory concepts – a difference chiefly attended to here – lies the determination of reflection of diversity and opposition. They are regarded as two particular kinds, that is, each as fixed for itself and indifferent towards the other, without any thought of the dialectic and of the inner nullity of these differences; as though what is contrary did not equally have to be determined as contradictory. Their nature, and the essential transition of the forms of reflection which they voice, has been examined at the proper place. Within the concept, identity has grown into universality, difference into particularity, and opposition, in going back into the ground, into singularity. In such forms those determinations of reflection stand as they are in their concept. The universal showed itself as the identical and, at once, as what is diverse from or contrary to the particular and the singular; beyond that, as opposed to them, or contradictory; yet within that very opposition it is identical with them, their genuine ground, wherein they stand sublated. The same holds of particularity and of singularity, which are equally the totality of the determinations of reflection.

A further division of concepts is into subordinate and coordinate ones; – a difference that comes nearer to the determination of the concept, namely the relation of universality and particularity, where these expressions were also mentioned in passing. Only these too are usually considered as wholly fixed relations, and on that footing manifold barren propositions are set up about them. The most long-winded transaction about it again concerns the reference of contrariety and contradictoriness to sub- and coordination. Since the judgment is the reference of determinate concepts, the true relation has first to emerge in connection with it. That manner of comparing these determinations without any thought of their dialectic and of the ongoing alteration of their determination, or rather of the conjunction of opposed determinations present within them, makes the whole consideration of what in them is consonant or is not, as it were as though this consonance or non-consonance were something separate and abiding, into something merely barren and devoid of content. – The great Euler, infinitely fruitful and acute in grasping and combining the deeper relations of algebraic magnitudes, and especially the drily intellectual Lambert and others have attempted a notation by lines, figures and the like for this sort of relation among the determinations of the concept; the intention in general was to raise the logical modes of reference to a calculus; – or rather in fact to lower them. The very attempt at a notation presents itself at once as null in and for itself if one compares the nature of the sign with that of what is to be signified. The determinations of the concept, universality, particularity and singularity, are indeed diverse, like lines or the letters of algebra; – they are further also opposed, and to that extent would even admit of the signs of plus and minus. But they themselves, and altogether their references, – even if one stops short at subsumption and inherence, are of a quite different essential nature from letters and lines and their relations, from equality or diversity of magnitude, from plus and minus, or from a placing of lines one above another or their joining into angles and the positions of the spaces they enclose. Objects of that sort have, as against them, the peculiarity of being external to one another and of having a fixed determination. Once concepts are taken in a manner answering to signs of that sort, they have ceased to be concepts. Their determinations are nothing lying dead, as numbers and lines are, to which their reference does not itself belong; they are living movements; the differentiated determinateness of the one side is immediately internal to the other as well; what with numbers and lines would be a perfect contradiction is essential to the nature of the concept. – Higher mathematics, which for its part advances to the infinite and permits itself contradictions, is no longer able to employ its usual signs for exhibiting such determinations; for the notation of the still quite conceptless representation of the infinite approximation of two ordinates, or when it sets an arc equal to an infinite amount of infinitely small straight lines, it does nothing more than draw the two straight lines outside one another, and draw straight lines into an arc, but as diverse from it; for the infinite, on which everything there turns, it refers us to representing.

What tempted people into that attempt in the first place is chiefly the quantitative relation that universality, particularity and singularity are supposed to bear to one another; the universal counts as wider than the particular and the singular, and the particular as wider than the singular. The concept is what is concrete and richest, since it is the ground and the totality of the determinations that went before, the categories of being, the determinations of reflection; hence these too do indeed emerge in it. Its nature, however, is utterly mistaken if these are still clung to in it in that abstraction; if the wider compass of the universal is so understood as to make it a more, a larger quantum, than particular and singular are. Being absolute ground, the concept is the possibility of quantity, yet no less of quality, that is, its determinations are quite as much qualitatively differentiated; so they are already taken against their truth once they are posited under the form of quantity by itself. Furthermore, the determination of reflection is something relative, in which its opposite shines; it does not stand in an external relation, as a quantum does. The concept, though, is more than any of this; its determinations are determinate concepts, and essentially the totality of all determinations in their own right. It is therefore entirely unfitting, in order to grasp such an intimate totality, to want to apply relations of number and space in which all determinations fall apart; they are rather the last and worst medium that could be employed. Natural relations, such as magnetism, for instance, or relations of colour, would be infinitely higher and truer symbols for it. Since the human being has language, the means of designation peculiar to reason, it is an idle notion to want to look about for a more imperfect mode of presentation and to torment oneself with it. The concept as such can essentially be grasped only with spirit, whose property it not merely is but whose pure self it is. It is futile to want to hold it fast through spatial figures and algebraic signs for the behoof of the external eye and of a conceptless, mechanical mode of treatment, a calculus. Whatever else might be pressed into service as a symbol can, like the symbols for God's nature, at best awaken presentiments and echoes of the concept; but if it were meant seriously to express and cognize the concept, then the external nature of all symbols is unfit for that, and the relation is rather reversed: what in the symbols echoes a higher determination is cognized first through the concept, and [can] be brought nearer to it only through the severing of that sensuous accompaniment which was to have expressed it.

C) The Singular

Singularity, as has come out, is posited already through particularity; the latter is determinate universality; hence the determinateness that refers to itself, the determinate determinate.

1. At first, accordingly, singularity shows up as the reflection of the concept into itself out of its determinateness. It is that concept's mediation by way of itself, so far as its otherness has once more turned itself into an other, whereby the concept is re-established as equal to itself, though standing in the determination of absolute negativity. – What is negative in the universal, whereby the universal is a particular, was fixed above as the doubled shine; so far as this is a shining inwards, the particular stays a universal; by the shining outwards it is determinate; the return of this side into the universal runs two ways, either by the abstraction which drops the determinateness and mounts to the higher and highest genus, or else by the singularity into which the universal comes down within the determinateness itself. – At this point there branches off the side-road along which abstraction quits the path of the concept and abandons truth. That higher and highest universal to which abstraction lifts itself is nothing but a surface ever emptier of content; the singularity it spurns is the depth wherein the concept lays hold of itself and is posited as concept.

On one side, universality and particularity made their appearance as the moments of singularity's becoming. Yet it has been shown already that in their own selves they are the whole concept, so that in singularity they pass over into no other; what is posited there is only what they are in and for themselves. The universal is for itself in that it is, on its own part, the absolute mediation, self-reference only as absolute negativity. It is an abstract universal so far as this sublating is an external activity and with that a dropping of determinateness. Such negativity does indeed hang upon the abstract, but it remains outside it, a bare condition of it; it is abstraction itself, which sets its universal facing it, and which for that reason has no singularity within and is left conceptless. – Life, spirit, God, and the pure concept along with them, abstraction cannot grasp, and this because it withholds from its own products singularity, the principle of individuality and of personality, and so gets no further than universalities void of life and spirit, of colour and content.

So indivisible, however, is the unity of the concept that even these products of abstraction, though meant to let singularity fall away, are themselves rather singulars. Since abstraction lifts the concrete into universality while apprehending the universal only as determinate universality, what results is precisely singularity, which turned out to be determinateness referring to itself. Abstraction is thus a sundering of the concrete and a singularizing of its determinations; by it nothing but singular properties or moments get taken up, since its product has to hold within it what abstraction itself is. What marks off the singularity of abstraction's products from that of the concept is this, that in the former the singular counts as content and the universal as form, the two being diverse; – just because that content is not there as the absolute form, as the concept itself, or that form not as the totality of form. – Looked at more closely, though, the abstract shows itself as the unity of singular content with abstract universality, therefore as something concrete, as the very opposite of what it means to be.

On that same ground, being nothing but the determinate universal, the particular is also a singular; and the other way round, since the singular is the determinate universal, it is equally a particular. Clinging to this abstract determinateness, one finds in the concept three particular determinations, the universal, the particular and the singular; whereas before, only universal and particular were named as the species of the particular. Because singularity is the concept's return into itself as the negative, that very return can be ranged beside the others and counted off as an indifferent moment by the abstraction which in it is properly sublated.

Where singularity gets entered among the particular determinations of the concept, particularity becomes the totality embracing them all; and being that totality, it is their concrete, that is, singularity itself. It is the concrete on the side remarked upon earlier too, as determinate universality; taken so, it is the immediate unity wherein no one of these moments is posited as differentiated or as the determinant, and under this form it will serve as the middle term of the formal syllogism.

One notices without prompting that each determination made in the exposition of the concept thus far has straightway dissolved and lost itself in its other. Every distinction runs together in the very examination meant to isolate and secure it. Representation alone, for which abstracting has set them apart, manages to keep universal, particular and singular firmly asunder; on that footing they are countable, and for any further difference representation falls back on the wholly external difference of being, on quantity, which is nowhere less in place than here. – Singularity is where that true relation, the inseparability of the concept's determinations, stands posited; for being negation of negation, it holds their opposition and holds it at once within its ground or unity, the coming-together of each with its other. Since universality is in and for itself within this reflection, singularity is essentially the negativity of those determinations, and not merely so as to be a third term diverse from them; what is now posited, rather, is that positedness is being-in- and for-itself; that is, that each of the determinations belonging to the difference is itself the totality. The determinate concept's return into itself consists in its having the determination of being, in its determinateness, the whole concept.

2. Yet singularity is not the concept's return into itself alone; it is immediately the concept's loss. By way of singularity, in which the concept is thus within itself, it gets outside itself and enters actuality. Abstraction, being as the soul of singularity the reference of negative to negative, has proved to be nothing outward for universal and particular but immanent in both, and by it they are concrete, content, singular. Singularity, however, as this negativity, is the determinate determinateness, the act of distinguishing as such; by this reflection of the difference into itself the difference turns firm; the determining of the particular first arises through singularity; for singularity is that abstraction which now, just as singularity, is posited abstraction.

So the singular, as negativity referring to itself, is the immediate identity of the negative with itself; it is something that is for itself. Or else it is the abstraction which fixes the concept, in respect of its ideal moment of being, as an immediate. – The singular is accordingly a qualitative one or this. In virtue of this quality it is, first, the repelling of itself away from itself, and thereby the many other ones stand presupposed; secondly, it is now negative reference to these presupposed others, and so far forth the singular is exclusive. Universality brought into reference with these singulars as indifferent ones, – and into that reference it has to be brought, since it is a moment of the concept of singularity, – is merely what they have in common. Take the universal to mean whatever several singulars possess in common, and one has set out from their indifferent subsistence, mixing the immediacy of being into the determination of the concept. The poorest representation available of the universal, as it stands in reference to the singular, is just this external relation of it, as of something merely held in common.

In the reflective sphere of concrete existence the singular is as this, and it lacks that exclusive reference to another one which attaches to qualitative being-for-itself. As the one reflected into itself, this is for itself without repulsion; or else repulsion is here at one with abstraction and is the reflecting mediation, present in the this in such a way that the this is a posited immediacy, one shown by something external to it. This IS; it is immediate; yet it is only this so far as it is indicated. Indicating is the reflecting movement that draws itself together into itself and posits immediacy, though as something external to it. – The singular too, of course, is a this, the immediate brought forth out of mediation; only it does not carry that mediation outside itself, it is itself a repelling sundering, posited abstraction, and yet, in that very sundering, positive reference.

This abstracting on the part of the singular, being the reflection of difference into itself, is first of all a positing of the differentiated terms as self-subsistent, as reflected into themselves. They are immediately; but this severing is reflection as such besides, the shining of the one in the other; hence they stand in essential reference. Nor, further, are they merely singulars that are, set against one another; plurality of that kind belongs to being; singularity, positing itself as determinate, posits itself not in a difference that is external but in the difference of the concept; it shuts the universal out from itself, and yet, this being a moment of singularity itself, [it] refers itself to singularity no less essentially.

Taken as this reference among its self-subsistent determinations, the concept has lost itself; for so it is no more their posited unity, and they are no more as moments, as its shine, but as subsisting in and for themselves. – As singularity it turns back into itself within the determinateness; with that, the determinate has itself become totality. Its turning back into itself is therefore the absolute, original dividing of itself; or, as singularity, it is posited as judgment.