On Hegel’s ‘Science of Logic’ : A Realm of Shadows — part twenty nine.
‘Death and Life’
by Robert William Service (1874–1958)
’Twas in the grave-yard’s gruesome gloom
That May and I were mated;
We sneaked inside and on a tomb
Our love was consummated.
It’s quite all right, no doubt we’ll wed,
Our sin will go unchidden,
Ah! sweeter than the nuptial bed
Are ecstasies forbidden.
And as I held my sweetheart close,
And she was softly sighing,
I could not help but think of those
In peace below us lying.
Poor folks! No disrespect we meant,
And beg you’ll be forgiving;
We hopes the dead will not resent
The rapture of the living.
And when in death I, too, shall lie,
And lost to those who love me,
I wish two sweethearts roving by
Will plight their troth above me.
Oh do not think that I will grieve
To hear the vows they’re voicing,
And if their love new life conceive,
’Tis I will be rejoicing.
Appearance. Existence
Does God exist?
Usually this question means to ask whether God exists as an immediate being beyond thought. For Kant the question was undecidable. For the empiricists, the matter is unprovable. Hegel, ‘the Christian philosopher par excellence’, as Errol Eustace Harris, (1908–2009), describes him. rescues the inquiry by shifting the attention from the subject God to the predicate existence. The problem in the question is not on the side of God. It is entirely in the concept of Existence — a state quite inadequate to God.
Existence is Hegel’s word for advanced Being — the immediacy of being to which essence has restored itself again.
‘Concrete existence is the immediacy of being to which essence has again restored itself. In itself this immediacy is the reflection of essence into itself. As concrete existence, essence has stepped out of its ground which has itself passed over into it. Concrete existence is this reflected immediacy in so far as, within, it is absolute negativity. It is now also posited as such, in that it has determined itself as appearance’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
For being which is the outcome of mediation we shall reserve the term: Existence:
‘The challenge to produce the distinction between being and nothing also brings with it the challenge to state what, then, is being, and what is nothing. Those who resist acknowledging that the two are equally only a transition of the one into the other, and who assert this or that about being and nothing, let them declare whereof they speak, that is, let them advance a definition of being and nothing, and let them demonstrate that it is correct. Without having satisfied this first demand of the ancient science, whose logical rules they otherwise accept and apply, all their assertions about being and nothing are only assurances without scientific validity. If it has somewhere been said that existence, which is held from the start to be equivalent to being, is the completion of possibility, then another determination, namely possibility, is presupposed along with it; so being is not declared in its immediacy but precisely as not standing on its own, as conditioned. For being which is mediated, we shall reserve the expression concrete existence. But the common practice is to imagine being, as if it were a picture of pure light, the clarity of unclouded seeing, and then nothing as the pure night — and the distinction between the two is then enshrined into this well known sensuous difference. But in fact, if this very seeing is more accurately imagined, one can readily perceive that in absolute light one sees just as much and just as little as in absolute darkness; that the one seeing is just as good as the other; that pure seeing is a seeing of nothing. Pure light and pure darkness are two voids that amount to the same thing. Only in determinate light (and light is determined through darkness: in clouded light therefore), just as only in determinate darkness (and darkness is determined through light: in illuminated darkness therefore), can something be distinguished, since only clouded light and illuminated darkness have distinction in them and hence are determinate being, existence’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
Existence, the realm of Things, is still a deficient realm. Things are finite. On their own logic, they are doomed to pass away. For this very reason, God is no mere Thing:
It is the definition of finite things that in them the Notion is different from being, that Notion and reality, soul and body, are separable and hence that they are perishable and mortal The genuine criticism of reason is just this: to make intellect aware of this difference [between Notion and Existence] and to prevent it from applying to God the determinations and relationships of the finite.
‘It is the definition of finite things that in them concept and being are different; that the concept and reality, soul and body, are separable; that they are therefore perishable and mortal. The abstract definition of God, on the contrary, is precisely that his concept and his being are unseparated and inseparable. The true critique of the categories and of reason is just this: to acquaint cognition with this distinction and to prevent it from applying to God the determinations and the relations of the finite’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
Existence, in Hegel’s system, arises autochthonously from Ground. Ground is strikingly analysed by Hegel. It represents the idea that Form disappears. This active fact is the very content of Form. Ground represents this deeper content. It is the nature of Ground to erase itself. It is the proto-thing — a vanishing mediator of Things. When Ground self-erases, the Thing just is. It appears to be unproblematic and self-identical — an illusion that is necessary and inadequate to the nature of Things. Although a vanishing mediator, Ground equally stands for the proposition that a Thing is both dependent on yet distinguishable from its external Conditions. Hegel calls this contradictory state der Sache — the heart of the matter of Things. Der Sache is the immediacy which has proceeded from ground, but form is not as yet posited in it.
‘Actuality is the unity of essence and concrete existence; in it, shapeless essence and unstable appearance — or subsistence without determination and manifoldness without permanence — have their truth. Although concrete existence is the immediacy that has proceeded from ground, it still does not have form explicitly posited in it; inasmuch as it determines and informs itself, it is appearance; and in developing this subsistence that otherwise only is a reflection-into-other into an immanent reflection, it becomes two worlds, two totalities of content, one determined as reflected into itself and the other as reflected into other. But the essential relation exposes the formality of their connection, and the consummation of the latter is the relation of the inner and the outer in which the content of both is equally only one identical substrate and only one identity of form. — Because this identity has come about also in regard to form, the form determination of their difference is sublated, and that they are one absolute totality is posited’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
Having as yet no form, it remains for the Thing to appear. Existence, as Clark Butler points out, is therefore ‘phenomenalistic’. When it does, it will be both independent from, yet dependent on, context. Conditions determine a Thing. Yet each Condition is likewise a Thing, so that any one Thing is really a network of Things — a metonym. The existent therefore includes relativity and has its multiple interconnections with other existents: it is reflected on itself as its ground. The existent is, when so described, a Thing.
‘But the reflection-into-another of what exists is not separate from its inward reflection; the ground is the unity of these two, out of which existence has gone forth. Hence, what exists contains relationality and its own manifold connectedness with other existents in itself; and it is reflected within itself as ground. Thus what exists is thing’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
Existence comprises the first step in Hegel’s overall theory of Appearance. In Existence, a thing has an element of self-subsistence.
‘At first, therefore, appearance is essence in its concrete existence; essence is immediately present in it. That it is not immediate, but rather reflected concrete existence, constitutes the moment of essence in it; or concrete existence, as essential concrete existence, is appearance. Something is only appearance — in the sense that concrete existence is as such only a posited being, not something that is in- and for-itself. This is what constitutes its essentiality, to have the negativity of reflection, the nature of essence, within it. There is no question here of an alien, external reflection to which essence would belong and which, by comparing this essence with concrete existence, would declare the latter to be appearance. On the contrary, as we have seen, this essentiality of concrete existence, that it is appearance, is concrete existence’s own truth. The reflection by virtue of which it is this is its own’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
In medieval usage, existence stood for duration over time and an objectivity outside of our minds to the thing. The Thing at first is taken as self-grounded. But the immediate Thing sublates itself and the Thing makes itself into positedness. By positedness, Hegel means that the Thing is presupposed by something else — by the network of Things, by the world of Appearance, which stands over against the world that is reflected into itself, the world of essence.
‘But if it is said that something is only appearance, meaning that as contrasted with it immediate concrete existence is the truth, then the fact is that appearance is the higher truth, for it is concrete existence as essential, whereas concrete existence is appearance that is still void of essence because it only contains in it the one moment of appearance, namely that of concrete existence as immediate, not yet negative, reflection. When appearance is said to be essenceless, one thinks of the moment of its negativity as if, by contrast with it, the immediate were the positive and the true; in fact, however, this immediate does not yet contain essential truth in it. Concrete existence rather ceases to be essenceless by passing over into appearance’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
‘What appears points to something that appears’, explains Herbert Marcuse, (1898–1979). The worlds of Essence and Appearance stand in an Essential Relation. Still an imperfect union, this relation will piece out its imperfections and become Actuality. We start, then, with the existent Thing, wherein all its Conditions are united with the Ground in an immediacy. The proposition of Ground has previously been whatever is has a ground.
‘Just as the principle of sufficient reason says that whatever is has a ground, or is something posited, something mediated, so there would also have to be a principle of concrete existence saying that whatever is, exists concretely. The truth of being is to be, not an immediate something, but essence that has come forth into immediacy’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
That is to say, everything is mediated. The proposition of Existence is twofold: whatever exists has (1) a ground and is conditioned, and equally has (2) no ground and is unconditioned. Ground is therefore a vanishing mediator that has sublated itself when the Thing emerges into Existence. The Thing seems to exist on its own — without a Ground. But this moment of self-evidence is just that — a moment. On its own Logic, the Thing must dissolve. Returning to Anselm’s question, “Does God exist?”, for those wedded to the logic of self-identical Thinghood, the answer to this question can only be problematic. In Kantian terms, God’s existence is only a ‘permitted conclusion’.
‘As we can know only a small part of this world, and can still less compare it with all possible worlds, we may indeed from its order, design, and greatness, infer a wise, good, powerful, etc., Author of it, but not that He is all-wise, all-good, all-powerful, etc. It may indeed very well be granted that we should be justified in supplying this inevitable defect by a legitimate and reasonable hypothesis; namely, that when wisdom, goodness, etc, are displayed in all the parts that offer themselves to our nearer knowledge, it is just the same in all the rest, and that it would therefore be reasonable to ascribe all possible perfections to the Author of the world, but these are not strict logical inferences in which we can pride ourselves on our insight, but only permitted conclusions in which we may be indulged and which require further recommendation before we can make use of them. On the path of empirical inquiry then (physics), the conception of God remains always a conception of the perfection of the First Being not accurately enough determined to be held adequate to the conception of Deity. (With metaphysic in its transcendental part nothing whatever can be accomplished.)’
- ‘Critique of Practical Reason’
Kant famously divides the universe into phenomena and noumena. Knowledge is limited to matters empirical — to phenomenal Things. Concepts like God, free will, and things-in-themselves are noumenal. Of these we can know nothing. We can only believe in them. Yet belief is not knowledge. Indeed Kant was proud to have destroyed true knowledge in order to make room for faith.
‘The positive value of the critical principles of pure reason in relation to the conception of God and of the simple nature of the soul , admits of a similar exemplification; but on this point I shall not dwell. I cannot even make the assumption — as the practical interests of morality require — of God, freedom, and immortality, if I do not deprive speculative reason of its pretensions to transcendent insight. For to arrive at these, it must make use of principles which, in fact, extend only to the objects of possible experience, and which cannot be applied to objects beyond this sphere without converting them into phenomena, and thus rendering the practical extension of pure reason impossible. I must, therefore, abolish knowledge , to make room for belief . The dogmatism of metaphysics, that is, the presumption that it is possible to advance in metaphysics without previous criticism, is the true source of the unbelief (always dogmatic) which militates against morality’.
- ‘The Critique of Pure Reason’
Kant’s victory was Pyrrhic, confessing and even making a virtue of the ignorance of God. As Hegel puts it, knowing is supposed to have reached this conclusion, that it knows nothing.
‘So, on the other side, concrete existence also cannot be regarded merely as an immediate. Taken in the determination of an immediacy, the comprehension of God’s concrete existence has been declared to be beyond proof, and the knowledge of it an immediate consciousness only, a faith. Knowledge should arrive at the conclusion that it knows nothing, and this means that it gives up its mediating movement and the determinations themselves that have come up in the course of it. This is what has also occurred in the foregoing; but it must be added that reflection, by ending up with the sublation of itself, does not thereby have nothing for result, so that the positive knowledge of the essence would then be an immediate reference to it, divorced from that result and self-originating, an act that starts only from itself; on the contrary, the end itself, the foundering of the mediation, is at the same time the ground from which the immediate proceeds. In ‘zu Grunde gehen’, the German language unites, as we remarked above, the meaning of foundering and of ground; the essence of God is said to be the abyss (Abgrund in German) for finite reason. This it is, indeed, in so far as reason surrenders its finitude therein, and sinks its mediating movement; but this abyss, the negative ground, is at the same time the positive ground of the emergence of the existent, of the essence immediate in itself; mediation is an essential moment. Mediation through ground sublates itself but does not leave the ground standing under it, so that what proceeds from it would be a posited that has its essence elsewhere; on the contrary, this ground is, as an abyss, the vanished mediation, and, conversely, only the vanished mediation is at the same time the ground and, only through this negation, the self-equal and immediate’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
Yet, given that Kant’s allegiance to the dogma of ungrounded self-identity of the thing-in-itself — the thing not dependent on context — there was no other choice for him but to renounce knowledge. If noumenal things cannot be known, then the only possible result is atheism or dogmatism — each equally blind and each covertly the same. Each can be asserted only at the level of belief. The Logioc is Hegel’s ontological proof of God. By no means can this be accomplished at the level of Existence. Existence is the realm of finite Things, and God is no mere Thing. The proof of God belongs to the later stage of notional Objectivity. There a necessary Being invests itself in its predicate, so that there is a unity of Notion and Existence. This mediation of Notion and Existence is the proof of God. God can be known only through this fact. For this reason, man was early instructed to recognize God in his works.
‘God as living God, and better still as absolute spirit, is only recognized in what he does. Human kind were directed early to recognize God in his works; only from these can the determinations proceed that can be called his properties, and in which his being is also contained. It is thus the conceptual comprehension of God’s activity, that is to say, of God himself, that recognizes the concept of God in his being and his being in his concept. Being by itself, or even existence, are such a poor and restricted determination, that the difficulty of finding them in the concept may well be due to not having considered what being or existence themselves are. — Being as entirely abstract, immediate self-reference, is nothing but the abstract moment of the concept; it is its moment of abstract universality that also provides what is required of being, namely that it be outside the concept, for inasmuch as universality is a moment of the concept, it is also its difference or the abstract judgment wherein the concept opposes itself to itself. The concept, even as formal, already immediately contains being in a truer and richer form, in that, as self-referring negativity, it is singularity’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’.
In Hegel’s view, conceptual activity (der Begreifen) is the most authentic being.
Existence — the realm of finite Things — is or Hegel as it was for Kant a subjective realm. For Kant, existence is entry of a self-identical thing into the context of the totality of experience, that is, into the determination of an otherness and into relation to an other.
‘Inasmuch as mention may be made here of the proofs of the concrete existence of God, it is first to be noted that besides immediate being that comes first, and concrete existence (or the being that proceeds from essence) that comes second, there is still a third being, one that proceeds from the concept, and this is objectivity. — Proof is, in general, mediated cognition. The various kinds of being require or contain each its own kind of mediation, and so will the nature of the proof also vary accordingly. The ontological proof wants to start from the concept; it lays down as its basis the sum total of all realities, where under reality also concrete existence is subsumed. Its mediation, therefore, is that of the syllogism, and syllogism is not yet under consideration here. We have already commented above on Kant’s objection to the ontological proof, and have remarked that by concrete existence Kant understands the determinate immediate existence with which something enters into the context of total experience, that is, into the determination of being an other and of being in reference to an other. As an existent concrete in this way, something is thus mediated by an other, and concrete existence is in general the side of its mediation. But in what Kant calls the concept, namely, something taken as only simply self-referring, or in representation as such, this mediation is missing; in abstract self-identity, opposition is left out. Now the ontological proof would have to demonstrate that the absolute concept, namely the concept of God, attains to a determinate existence, to mediation, or to demonstrate how simple essence mediates itself with mediation. This is done by the just mentioned subsumption of concrete existence under its universal, namely reality, which is assumed as the middle term between God in his concept, on the one hand, and concrete existence, on the other. — This mediation, inasmuch as it has the form of a syllogism, is not at issue here, as already said. However, how that mediation of essence and concrete existence truly comes about, this is contained in the preceding exposition. The nature of the proof itself will be considered in the doctrine of cognition. Here we have only to indicate what pertains to the nature of mediation in general’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
Something, as existent, is mediated by an other, and existence in general is on the side of its mediation. In different terms, a thing exists when it is thought about. Yet the thing that enters into existence is taken as self-related, with no mediation. Opposition is left out of the Kantian thing and invested into the subjectivity of the thinker. On this definition, it is automatically apparent why the question, Does God exist?, is unsatisfactory. On Hegel’s definition, Does God exist? is the equivalent of asking Is God a thought?. The very posing of this question shows that God is a thought. The question Does God exist? therefore answers itself in the very posing of it. Yet it is a mediocre question. Unicorns exist, on this definition. Everything exists, if we only think of it.The ability to think things into being is what Kant called an intellectual intuition. Intellectual intuitions are an attribute to God. According to Charles Taylor: ‘Hegel reproaches Kant for not having cleaved to the notion of an intellectual intuition, which he himself invented. This would be an understanding, which unlike ours did not have to depend on external reception, on being affected from outside, for its contents, but created them with its thought. This archetypical intellect Kant attributed to God; it was quite beyond us. But God’s intellect is ultimately revealed to us for Hegel, it only lives in our thought. Hence we can participate in an intellectual intuition. God’s thought is ours’. An intellectual intuition amounts to ‘the direct apprehension of things as they are’, explains Stanley Rosen.
What we want to know, however, is the materiality of God — the place of God that is beyond mere finite, subjective thought. Yet Existence plays an important indirect role in Hegel’s notional proof. The question Does God exist? bids us to identify the ground of God — proof of its existence. The very question limits God to the status of a grounded — a caused thing that is not self-determined. Hegel’s brilliant tactic is to show that any adduced ground of God is itself a finite Thing which must waft away. Once God’s ground has wafted away, only God (yet to be proven) remains standing. Hegel’s theory of Existence therefore clears the way for the notional proof of God later in the Logic.
Anselm’s ontological proof adduces a ground for God’s existence. But this does not purport to be an objective ground (for then God would be grounded and less than God.) The adduced ground is merely a ground for cognition.
‘The proofs of the existence of God adduce a ground for this existence. It is not supposed to be an objective ground of the existence of God, for this existence is in and for itself. It is, therefore, solely a ground for cognition. It thereby presents itself as a ground that vanishes in the subject matter that at first seems to be grounded by it. Now the ground which is derived from the contingency of the world entails the regress of the latter into the absolute essence, for the accidental is that which is in itself groundless and self-sublating. In this way, therefore, the absolute essence does indeed proceed from that which has no ground, for the ground sublates itself and with this there also vanishes the reflective shine of the relation that was given to God, that it is grounded in an other. This mediation is therefore true mediation. But the reflection involved in that proof does not know the nature of the mediation that it performs. On the one hand, it takes itself to be something merely subjective, and it consequently distances its mediation from God himself; on the other hand, for that same reason it also fails to recognize its mediating movement, that this movement is in the essence itself and how it is there. The true relation of reflection consists in being both in one: mediation as such but, of course, at the same time a subjective, external mediation, that is to say, a self-external mediation which in turn internally sublates itself. In that other presentation, however, concrete existence is given the false relation of appearing only as mediated or posited’. — ‘The Science of Logic’
Such a ground is a finite thing and must vanish. But vanishing is God; when adduced grounds vanish, they become indistinguishable from God. Self-erasure, Hegel thinks, is a true mediation and hence a true proof that a thing exists. Proof for Hegel is nothing but mediated cognition. This mediation, Hegel says, is unknown to the ratiocinative (beweisende) reflection that asserts the validity of Anselm’s proof. By deeming the derived ground of God to be subjective only — a ground of cognition — the ontological proof removes its mediation from God himself. Anselm failed to see that Ground erases itself and becomes one with the Objective thing it posits. The ontological proof should have posited the true relationship” between God and subjective ground. God is both itself and the subjective ground. The subjective ground is the result of God’s self-externalization. ‘The metaphysical concept of ‘God’ …is devoid, in its Hegelian interpretation, of any … ‘anthropomorphic’ feature whatsoever, and rather coincides with … the omnitudo realitatum’, explains Giacomo Rinaldi.
God is a true infinite that becomes other (subjective ground) and stays what it is. This is what it takes to prove that God exists. Perhaps thinking of Kant’s fourth antinomy:
‘FOURTH CONFLICT OF THE TRANSCENDENTAL IDEAS. THESIS’.
‘There exists either in, or in connection with the world — either as a part of it, or as the cause of it — an absolutely necessary being’.
‘ANTITHESIS: An absolutely necessary being does not exist, either in the world, or out of it — as its cause’.
- ‘The Critique of Pure Reason’
Hegel remarks: the essence of God, it is said, is the abyss [Abgrund] for finite reason.
‘So, on the other side, concrete existence also cannot be regarded merely as an immediate. Taken in the determination of an immediacy, the comprehension of God’s concrete existence has been declared to be beyond proof, and the knowledge of it an immediate consciousness only, a faith. Knowledge should arrive at the conclusion that it knows nothing, and this means that it gives up its mediating movement and the determinations themselves that have come up in the course of it. This is what has also occurred in the foregoing; but it must be added that reflection, by ending up with the sublation of itself, does not thereby have nothing for result, so that the positive knowledge of the essence would then be an immediate reference to it, divorced from that result and self-originating, an act that starts only from itself; on the contrary, the end itself, the foundering of the mediation, is at the same time the ground from which the immediate proceeds. In ‘zu Grunde gehen’, the German language unites, as we remarked above, the meaning of foundering and of ground; the essence of God is said to be the abyss (Abgrund in German) for finite reason. This it is, indeed, in so far as reason surrenders its finitude therein, and sinks its mediating movement; but this abyss, the negative ground, is at the same time the positive ground of the emergence of the existent, of the essence immediate in itself; mediation is an essential moment. Mediation through ground sublates itself but does not leave the ground standing under it, so that what proceeds from it would be a posited that has its essence elsewhere; on the contrary, this ground is, as an abyss, the vanished mediation, and, conversely, only the vanished mediation is at the same time the ground and, only through this negation, the self-equal and immediate’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
Hegel agrees with this, in so far as reason surrenders its finitude but this abyss, the negative ground, is the positive ground of the emergence of simply affirmative being — of essence which is in its own self immediate.
The self-erasure of God is therefore the essential movement that brings God into Existence. In Existence, God as abyss is not left behind; the Ground is in immediate union with the existent thing. In this immediacy, mediation has vanished. Essentiality should be understood as the propensity of a thought to erase itself. Essentiality signifies that a concept is only an appearance — only a posited being, not a being in and for itself. This constitutes its essentiality, to have within itself the negativity of reflection, the nature of essence.
‘Something is only appearance — in the sense that concrete existence is as such only a posited being, not something that is in- and for-itself. This is what constitutes its essentiality, to have the negativity of reflection, the nature of essence, within it. There is no question here of an alien, external reflection to which essence would belong and which, by comparing this essence with concrete existence, would declare the latter to be appearance. On the contrary, as we have seen, this essentiality of concrete existence, that it is appearance, is concrete existence’s own truth. The reflection by virtue of which it is this is its own’.
‘The Science of Logic’
Relevant here is Hegel’s all-important earlier remark: What is thus found only comes to be through being left behind.
‘It is only by virtue of the sublating of its equality with itself that essence is equality with itself. Essence presupposes itself, and the sublating of this presupposing is essence itself; contrariwise, this sublating of its presupposition is the presupposition itself. — Reflection thus finds an immediate before it which it transcends and from which it is the turning back. But this turning back is only the presupposing of what was antecedently found. This antecedent comes to be only by being left behind; its immediacy is sublated immediacy. — The sublated immediacy is, contrariwise, the turning back into itself, essence that arrives at itself, simple being equal to itself. This arriving at itself is thus the sublating of itself and self-repelling, presupposing reflection, and its repelling of itself from itself is the arriving at itself’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
Here we have a preview of the Absolute Idea at the very end of the Logic. Absolute Idea constitutes the final erasure of mediation and the institution of a thing — the one and only thing — that really, truly, and purely is. The key to the Logic is that only self-erasure exists. Therefore, the self-erasure or self-sacrifice of God is proof that God exists. Hegel retreats from Golgotha to observe, against Kant, that Existence is not the mere predicate or determination of Essence. In such a case, Essence itself would not exist. Essence actually exists. Existence is essence’s absolute emptying of itself or self-alienation.
‘Concrete existence, then, is not to be taken here as a predicate, or as a determination of essence, of which it could be said in a proposition, ‘essence exists concretely’, or ‘it has concrete existence’. On the contrary, essence has passed over into concrete existence; concrete existence is the absolute self-emptying of essence, an emptying that leaves nothing of the essence behind. The proposition should therefore run: ‘Essence is concrete existence; it is not distinct from its concrete existence’. — Essence has passed over into concrete existence inasmuch as essence as ground no longer distinguishes itself from itself as grounded, or inasmuch as the ground has sublated itself. But this negation is no less essentially its position, or the simply positive continuity with itself; concrete existence is the reflection of the ground into itself, its self-identity as attained in its negation, therefore the mediation that has posited itself as identical with itself and through that is immediacy’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
Essence has not remained behind. It is Existence and is not distinct from it. A True Infinite, Essence has passed over into Existence in so far as essence as ground no longer distinguishes itself from itself as the grounded. Existence, then, is essentially mediation-with-self.
‘Now because concrete existence is essentially self-identical mediation, it has the determinations of mediation in it, but in such a way that the determinations are at the same time reflected into themselves and have essential and immediate subsistence. As an immediacy which is posited through sublation, concrete existence is negative unity and being-within-itself; it therefore immediately determines itself as a concrete existent and as thing’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
The determinations of the mediation are present in it, but in such a manner that they are also reflected into themselves and their subsistence is essential and immediate. Existence is a negative unity and a being-within-self. We have arrived at the Thing, ‘a web of contradictions’ says Jean Hyppolyte. Existence — the realm of the Thing — corresponds with Hegel’s discussion of perception in the ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’.
The Thing and Its Properties. (a) The Thing-in-Itself and Existence. The previous chapter culminated in the Absolutely Unconditioned [unbedingt], the something that has simply affirmative being. It was essentially that immediacy which has arisen through the reflection of mediation into itself.
‘Concrete existence as a concrete existent is posited in the form of the negative unity which it essentially is. But this negative unity is at first only immediate determination, hence the oneness of the something in general. But the concretely existent something is different from the something that exists immediately. The former is essentially an immediacy that has arisen through the reflection of mediation into itself. The concretely existent something is thus a thing’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
The Absolutely Unconditioned was the last stop in Ground, and Ground stands for self-erasure. When the Ground of Things disappears, the result is the self-identical immediate Thing — the favourite of common sense. The Understanding proposes that the Absolutely Unconditioned is a correlation between the Thing and its Properties. The Thing is essential and negative, leaning to the right side of the diagram. The Properties are on the left side of being.
The Properties of a Thing represent a Thing’s being-for-other. Hegel associates Properties with a Thing’s outward Existence — contrary to Kant, who defeated Anselm by asserting that existence is not an independent predicate of an object. The difference between Existence and the Thing is that Existence has within itself the moment of mediation.
‘The thing is distinct from its concrete existence just as the something can be distinguished from its being. The thing and the concrete existent are immediately one and the same. But because concrete existence is not the first immediacy of being but has the moment of mediation within it, its further determination as thing and the distinguishing of the two is not a transition but truly an analysis. Concrete existence as such contains this very distinction in the moment of its mediation: the distinction of thing-in-itself and external concrete existence.
So Existence c is where the thinker has the thought of the Thing. The Thing a is immediate. As immediate, it is the Thing-in-itself, nothing else but the empty abstraction from all determinateness.
‘Mention was already made above of the thing-in-itself in connection with the moment of immediate existence, of being-in-itself, and it was then remarked that the thing-in-itself is as such nothing but the empty abstraction of all determinateness, of which nothing can of course be known just because it is supposed to be the abstraction of all determination. — Once the thing-in-itself has been presupposed in this way, all determination falls outside it into an alien reflection to which it is indifferent. For transcendental idealism, this external reflection is consciousness. Now on this standpoint, because this philosophical system relegates to consciousness every determinateness of things, both according to form and content, it falls in me, in the subject, whether I see the leaves of a tree not as black but green, the sun as round and not square, whether I taste sugar as sweet and not bitter; or again, whether I determine that the first and the second stroke of a clock are successive and not simultaneous, or that the first is cause and not effect, etc. — This crude display of subjective idealism is directly contradicted by the consciousness of the freedom in accordance with which I know myself as rather the universal and indeterminate, and I separate off from myself those manifold and necessary determinations, recognizing them to be something external to me and pertaining only to things. — In this consciousness of its freedom the ‘I’ is to itself the true internally reflected identity which the thing-in-itself was supposed to be. — I have shown elsewhere that that transcendental idealism does not escape from the restriction of the ‘I’ by the object; in general, that it does not escape from the finite world, but that it only alters the form of the restriction, which remains absolute to it. This it does by simply transposing it from an objective to a subjective shape; by turning it into determinacies of the ‘I’, into an unruly alternation of these that occurs within the ‘I’ as if this were a thing, the kind of thing which for ordinary consciousness is a manifold of determinacies and alterations only pertaining to things outside it. — In the present treatment, only the thing-in-itself and the reflection at first external to it stand opposed; the latter has not yet determined itself as consciousness, nor the thing-in-itself as ‘I’. What has resulted from the nature of the thing-in-itself and of the external reflection is that this same externality determines itself to be the thing-in-itself, or, conversely, that it becomes the determination belonging to that first thing-in-itself. The inadequacy now of the standpoint at which that philosophy remains fixed consists essentially in its holding on to the abstract thing-in-itself as to an ultimate determination, or in opposing the determinateness and manifoldness of the properties to the thing-in-itself, whereas the latter in fact possesses that external reflection essentially within it and determines itself as one endowed with determinations that are its own, with properties, in this way demonstrating that the abstraction of the thing as a pure thing-in-itself is an untrue determination’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
Dialectical Reason holds that the difference between the Thing and its Existence falls apart into indifferent determinations.
‘The thing in itself is the concrete existent as the essential immediate that has resulted from the sublated mediation. Mediation is therefore equally essential to it; but this distinction in this first or immediate concrete existence falls apart into indifferent determinations. The one side, namely the mediation of the thing, is its non-reflected immediacy, and hence its being in general; and this being, since it is at the same time determined as mediation, is an existence which is other to itself, manifold and external within itself. But it is not just immediate existence; it also refers to the sublated mediation and the essential immediacy; it is therefore immediate existence as unessential, as positedness. — (When the thing is differentiated from its concrete existence, it is then the possible, the thing of representation, or the thing of thought, which as such is at the same time not supposed to exist. However, the determination of possibility and of the opposition of the thing and its concrete existence comes later.) — But the thing-in-itself and its mediated being are both contained in the concrete existence, and both are themselves concrete existences; the thing-in-itself exists concretely and is the essential concrete existence, but the mediated being is the thing’s unessential concrete existence’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
On the one side is the Thing-in-itself a as non-reflected immediacy. Contrary to Kant, who would say that the Thing-in-itself causes phenomena, Hegel suggests that the matter is quite the other way around. As to the notion that the thing-in-itself causes sensations, Hegel points out in the Phenomenology that this implies sensation is beyond reason, and the thing-in-itself is an ‘extraneous impulse’. The Thing-in-itself is the simple reflectedness of Existence, which is to say that Existence posits the Thing-in-itself.
‘The thing in itself, as the simple reflectedness of the concrete existence within itself, is not the ground of unessential existence; it is the unmoved, indeterminate unity, for it has precisely the determination of being the sublated mediation, and is therefore the substrate of that existence. For this reason reflection, too, as an immediate existence which is mediated through some other, falls outside the thing-in-itself. The latter is not supposed to have any determinate manifold in it; for this reason it obtains it only when exposed to external reflection, though it remains indifferent to it. (The thing-in-itself has colour only when exposed to the eye, smell when exposed to the nose, and so on.) Its diversity consists of aspects which an other picks out, specific points of reference which this other assumes with respect to the thing-in-itself and which are not the thing’s own determinations’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
The Thing-in-itself is not Ground to Existence, as Kant would have it. The opposite is true. Existence is Ground to the Thing-in-itself. Ground erases itself, so the Thing-in-itself (supposedly the Ground of phenomena) is sublated mediation and therefore only the substrate of the determinate being. Substrate stands for indifference; it stands in contrast to Ground, which is related to the Grounded. If the Thing-in-itself is substrate, Reflection — which stands for enduring notionality and being-in-and-for-self — necessarily falls outside the thing-in-itself. The Thing-in-itself is not supposed to contain within it any specific manifoldness; and it therefore only obtains this when brought into relationship with external reflection.
The Thing
That is to say, for Kant, if a thing is distinguished from another thing, the distinction falls on the side of the subject. Of the thing-in-itself, we can know nothing. The thing divorced from its existence is the Possible. Thus, the Thing-in-itself has colour only to the eye, smell to the nose. None of these properties is determined by the Thing-in-itself but is rather determined by an other.
The Thing and its Existence
Reflection is now external to the Thing. The Thing is immediate and aloof, and so is Existence. The two sides cannot maintain themselves as separate — this was the lesson of Diversity. Diverse things are self-identical — radically unrelated to other things. They are immediate beings. Immediate beings are wont to fade away. The Thing and Existence being diverse, they sublate themselves, and, in their immediacy, both sides are one and the same Diversity.
There is now a plurality of self-erasing Things-in-themselves. Two such things constitute the extremes of a syllogism whose middle term constitutes their external Existence.
‘This external reflection is henceforth a relating of the things-in-themselves to one another, their reciprocal mediation as others. The things-in-themselves are thus the extreme terms of a syllogism, the middle term of which is made up by their external concrete existence, the concrete existence by virtue of which they are other to each other and distinct. This, their difference, falls only in their connecting reference; they send determinations, as it were, from their surface into the reference, while remaining themselves indifferent to it. — This relation now constitutes the totality of the concrete existence. The thing-in-itself is drawn into a reflection external to it in which it has a manifold of determinations; this is the repelling of itself from itself into another thing-in-itself, a repelling which is its rebounding back into itself, for each thing-in-itself is an other only as reflected back from the other; it has its supposition not in itself but in the other, is determined only through the determinateness of the other; this other is equally determined only through the determinateness of the first. But the two things-in-themselves, since each has its difference not in it but in the other, are not therefore distinct things; the thing-in-itself, in relating as it should to the other extreme as to another thing-in-itself, relates to it as to something non-distinguished from it, and the external reflection that should constitute the mediating reference between the extremes is a relation of the thing-in-itself only to itself, or is essentially its reflection within itself; the reflection is, therefore, determinateness existing in itself, or the determinateness of the thing-in-itself. The latter, therefore, does not have this determinateness in a reference, external to it, to another thing-in-itself, and of this other to it; the determinateness is not just its surface but is rather the essential mediation of itself with itself as with an other. — The two things-in-themselves that should constitute the extremes of the reference, since they are supposed not to have any contrasting determinateness, collapse in fact into one; it is only one thing-in-itself that relates itself to itself in the external reflection, and it is its own reference to itself as to another that constitutes its determinateness’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
Because the Things-in-themselves sublate themselves, they send their being elsewhere — into a middle term toward which they are indifferent. In their indifference, the two Things-in-themselves collapse into one. There is only one thing-in-itself, which in external reflection is related to itself. In Hegel’s penultimate chapter, the True becomes an logical official step. What is True is that Kant’s notion of a transcendent thing-in-itself falls apart. Hegel calls this unitary Thing-in-itself the Totality of Existence. This collapse of the Things-in-themselves is the very determinateness of the Thing. Elsewhere Hegel complains that a thing in itself must become for itself, yet in Kant’s usage, the thing-in-itself is inert.
‘The situation here is no different than it is in respect to the thing-in-itself generally; that situation is, more precisely, that if we halt at objects as they are merely in-themselves, then we do not apprehend them in their truth, but in the one-sided form of mere abstraction. Thus, for instance, ‘man-in-himself’ is the child, whose task is not to remain in this abstract and undeveloped [state of being] ‘in-itself’, but to become for-himself what he is initially only in-himself, namely, a free and rational essence. Similarly, the State-in-itself is the still undeveloped, patriarchal State, in which the various political functions implied by the concept of the State have not yet become ‘constitutionalised’ in a way that is adequate to its concept. In the same sense the germ, too, can be regarded as the plant-in-itself. We can see from these examples that all who suppose that what things are in themselves, or the thing-in-itself in general, is something that is inaccessible to our cognition are very much mistaken. Everything is initially ‘in-itself’, but this is not the end of the matter, and just as the germ, which is the plant-in-itself, is simply the activity of self-development, so the thing generally also progresses beyond its mere in-itself (understood as abstract reflection-into-itself) to reveal itself to be also reflection-into-another, and as a result it has properties’.
‘The Encyclopaedia Logic’
Here we see Hegel’s Thing-in-itself does indeed become something by collapsing in on itself. Charles Taylor disagrees that the Thing-in-itself collapses. He holds that things might be the ‘peaceful coexistence of different properties in the thing’. And ‘Hegel’s claim that there is an unavoidable contradiction in the notion of the thing with properties is no stronger than his thesis that finite things in general are contradictory’. In his remarks, Taylor has not adhered to Hegel’s analysis of Diverse things, nor has he escaped the fundamental prejudice that, in spite of everything, things are self-identical.
The Totality of Existence
In other words, because the Thing-in-itself collapses of its own accord, it enters into Existence and is, indeed, nothing but Existence. Hegel calls the Thing’s determinateness the property of the thing. This determinateness of the thing-in-itself is the property of the thing. Though the point is still implicit, there is only one real Property of a Thing — self-erasure of its noumenal self and entry into the consciousness of the thinker (i.e., Existence).
Property. From The Totality of Existence, the Understanding has gleaned that the Properties of a Thing are the Totality of its Existence. Property therefore succeeds to the position of negative essentiality. Property is now the negativity of reflection through which Existence in general is an existent.
‘Quality is the immediate determinateness of something; the negative itself by virtue of which being is something. The property of the thing is, for its part, the negativity of reflection, by virtue of which concrete existence in general is a concrete existent and, as simple self-identity, is thing-in-itself. But the negativity of reflection, the sublated mediation, is itself essentially mediation and reference, though not to an other in general like quality which is not reflected determinateness; it is rather reference to itself as to an other, or mediation which immediately is no less self-identity. The abstract thing-in-itself is itself this relation which turns from another back to itself; it is thereby determined in itself; but its determinateness is constitution, which is as such itself determination, and in relating to the other it does not pass over into otherness and is excluded from alteration’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
That is, the Properties announce, We are not the Kantian thing-in-itself, thereby proving that they are the Thing-in-itself tout court. In other words, Properties are Things. Between The Thing and The Thing and its Properties, Properties and Things have switched places. In The Thing it saw the Thing as a negative unity of positive Properties. Now it thinks there is no-Thing apart from its properties. The Thing is on the side of Being by grace of Properties which nevertheless are distinguishable from and therefore are not the Thing. The Thing is a move of the Understanding, in the distinctive mode of Essence. Accordingly, The Thing is an immediacy that is both a sublated mediation and an identity-with-self. The Thing, as portrayed in the Totality of its Existence, is determinate, yet, in its relation to the other, it does not pass over into otherness; it is therefore free from alteration.
We now know, on the logic of Reflection, that the Properties are as much Thing-in-itself as the Thing-in-itself was. In The Thing, the Properties (each one being a Thing) presuppose the Thing, and by the Properties the Thing appears. The Properties are therefore the determinate relation of one Thing to another Thing. Property is a mode of relationship. It is the external reflection and the side of the thing’s positedness.
The Thing and its Properties
‘A thing has properties; these are, first, its determinate references to something other; the property is there only as a way of reciprocal relating; it is, therefore, the external reflection of the thing and the side of its positedness. But, second, in this positedness the thing is in itself; it maintains itself in its reference to the other and thus is admittedly only a surface where the concrete existence is exposed to the becoming of being and to alteration; the property is not lost in this. A thing has the property to effect this or that in an other, and in this connection to express itself in some characteristic way. It demonstrates this property only under the condition that another thing has a corresponding constitution, but at the same time the property is characteristically the thing’s own and its self-identical substrate; for this reason this reflected quality is called property. The thing thereby passes over into an externality, but the property maintains itself in this transition’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
That the Properties are implicated in a positedness is clear on the face of The Thing. The externality of the relation signals that the Thing can now be perceived by outside consciousnesses. In short, the Thing now at hand is a sophisticated version of the self-identical thing. Common sense holds that Things project their Properties outward. Properties are reliable indicia of what a Thing is. Legal scholars have emphasized the relationality of the legal concept of property. Some have taken property’s relationality to the extreme of saying that there are no things at all but only relations between persons. This justifies the conclusion that there is no separate legal doctrine of property, but rather only pure law that mediates between persons. Hegelian legal scholars, however, insist on the vital role of things separate and apart from persons as to which persons can have property relations.
Hegel says of this sophisticated self-identical Thing that it is only a surface with which Existence is exposed to the becoming and alteration of being.
‘Through its properties the thing becomes cause, and to be a cause is this, to preserve itself as effect. However, the thing is here still the static thing of many properties; it is not yet determined as actual cause; it is so far only the reflection of its determinations immediately existing in itself, not yet itself the reflection that posits them’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
In short, the Properties of the thing come and go; they are mere Beings. But the Thing stays what it is. Hegel notes that the Thing passes from being to having: As a term of relation, ‘to have’ takes the place of ‘to be’. True, something has qualities on its part too: but this transference of ‘having’ into the sphere of Being is inexact… the character as quality is directly one with the some[thing], and the something] ceases to be when it loses its quality. But the thing is reflection-into-self: for it is an identity which is also distinct from the difference, i.e. from its attributes. In many languages ‘have’ is employed to denote past time. And with reason: for the past is absorbed or suspended being, and the mind is its reflection-into-self; in the mind only it continues to subsist — the mind distinguishing from itself this being in it which has been absorbed or suspended.
‘The thing is the totality as the development of the determinations of ground and of existence posited all in One. According to one of its moments, that of reflection-in to-another, it has in it the distinctions according to which it is a determinate and concrete thing. These determinations are diverse from each other; they have their inward reflection not in themselves, but in the thing. They are properties of the thing, and their relation to it is [its] having [them]. Having, which is a relation, replaces being . Something does, indeed, also ‘have’ qualities in it, but this transference of having to what is is inaccurate, since determinacy as quality is immediately one with the something and since something ceases to be, when it loses its quality. The thing, however, is inward reflection, as the identity which is also distinct from the distinction, i. e., from its determinations.- ‘Having’ is used in many languages to indicate the past, and rightly, because the past is sublated being, and spirit is the inward reflection of the past. Only in this reflection does the past still have subsistence; though spirit also distinguishes this being that is sublated within it from itself’.
- ‘The Encyclopaedia Logic’
For instance, a sock is darned and patched and eventually contains no thread of its original manufacture. Yet it is the same sock. Such a sock is a True Infinite — it stays what it is while becoming something different. Thinghood is therefore negative in its constitution, and this very negativity is what allows for the Thing to survive quantitative change in its Properties. The negativity of Constitution was memorialized in Constitution. Constitution appeared on the left side of the page — the side of Being. But it represented the Understanding’s proposal about the true nature of the universe — that it is composed by external reflection.
Yet Property is not lost in this. Specific Properties come and go, but Property as such remains, so long as there is still a Thing before us. Property is the power of the Thing to affect another Thing. By sending forth its Properties to the external world, the Thing expresses itself to another Thing — by implication a conscious Thing (though the conscious thing is not yet derived). It demonstrates this property, Hegel writes, only under the condition that the other thing has a corresponding constitution. In other words, the Thing is an immediate Thing-in-itself and so is the (conscious) Thing it affects. It therefore follows that the affected Thing — the conscious subject — likewise leaves the affecting thing not unaffected. Perception is a compromise between True Infinite Things. At the same time, Hegel emphasizes, the property is peculiar to the first thing and is [the first thing’s] self-identical substrate. It is for this reason that this reflected quality is called property.
‘Essentially, therefore, the thing-in-itself has just shown itself to be thing-in-itself not only in such a way that its properties are the positedness of an external reflection; on the contrary, those properties are its own determinations by virtue of which it relates in some determinate manner; it is not an indeterminate substrate located on the other side of its external concrete existence but is present in its properties rather as ground, that is to say, it is self-identity in its positedness; but, at the same time, it is conditioned ground, that is to say, its positedness is equally reflection external to itself; it is reflected into itself and in itself only to the extent that it is external. — Through concrete existence the thing-in-itself enters into external references, and the concrete existence consists precisely in this externality; it is the immediacy of being and because of that the thing is subjected to alteration; but it is also the reflected immediacy of the ground, hence the thing in itself in its alteration. — This mention of the ground connection is not however to be taken here as if the thing in general were determined as the ground of its properties; thinghood itself is, as such, the ground-connection; the property is not distinguished from its ground, nor does it constitute just the positedness but is rather the ground that has passed over into its externality and is consequently truly reflected into itself; the property is itself, as such, the ground, implicitly existent positedness; it is the ground, in other words, that constitutes the form of the property’s identity, and the property’s determinateness is the self-external reflection of the ground; the whole is the ground which in its repelling and determining, in its external immediacy, refers itself to itself. — The thing-in-itself thus concretely exists essentially, and that it concretely exists essentially means, conversely, that concrete existence, as external immediacy, is at the same time in-itselfness’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
In Property the Thing passes over into externality. Through its Properties the Thing eventually becomes Cause. Cause preserves itself in Effect. For the moment, however, the thing is so far only the quiescent thing of many properties . It is so far only the implicit reflection of its determinations, not yet itself the reflection which posits them. In other words, the Thing is passive and its effect upon consciousness is implicit. But soon the Thing will be active. Eventually it will become self-consciousness itself. When that occurs, the Thing does indeed assert itself forcefully in the world. But we run before our horse to market. For now, the Thing-in-itself is no longer merely the positedness of an external reflection. Kant’s Thing was substrate devoid of determinations and lying beyond of its external Existence. Rather, the Thing’s Properties are its own determinations through which the thing enters into relationships in a determinate manner. The thing is present (in the Derridean sense) in its Properties. Jacques Derrida is famous for his critique of philosophy of presence — that is, of the assumption of self-identity that excludes negativity (or differance, as Derrida calls it).
It is identity-with-self in its positedness, a positedness that is a self-external reflection. It is reflected out of itself by its Properties but is also reflected into itself and “is in itself only in so far as it is external. At this stage the whole is ground that in its repelling and determining, in its external immediacy, is self-related ground.
The Reciprocal Action of Things. The Thing-in-itself exists. After The Thing and its Existence, there are a plurality of Things, distinguished from one another… through themselves.
‘The thing-in-itself exists in concreto by essence; external immediacy and determinateness belong to its being-in-itself, or to its immanent reflection. The thing in-itself is thus a thing that has properties, and hence there are a number of things distinct from one another, not because of some viewpoint alien to them but through themselves. These many diverse things stand in essential reciprocal action by virtue of their properties; the property is this reciprocal connecting reference itself, apart from which the thing is nothing; the reciprocal determination, the middle term of the things-in-themselves that are taken as extreme terms indifferent to the reference connecting them, is itself the self-identical reflection and the thing-in-itself which those extremes were supposed to be. Thinghood is thus reduced to the form of indeterminate self-identity having its essentiality only in its property. Thus, if one speaks of a thing or of things in general without a determinate property, then their difference is merely indifferent, quantitative. What is considered as a thing can just as well be made into a plurality of things or be considered as a plurality of things; their separation or their union is an external one. — A book is a thing, and each of its pages is also a thing, and equally so every tiny piece of its pages, and so on to infinity. The determinateness, in virtue of which a thing is this thing only, lies solely in its properties. It is through them that the thing differentiates itself from other things, for the property is the negative reflection and the differentiating; only in its property, therefore, does the thing possess in it the difference of itself from others. This is the difference reflected into itself, by virtue of which the thing, in its positedness, that is, in its reference to others, is equally indifferent to the other and to its reference to it. Without its properties, therefore, there is nothing that remains to the thing except the unessential compass and the external gathering of an abstract in-itselfness’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
Here at last we have the universe as aggregate of discrete Things — a state that Charles Taylor and others wrongly assumed to be at issue in chapter 2. Only here in chapter 13 do Things have staying power, through their negative (not affirmative) being. At this stage, Dialectical Reason asserts that, if a Thing has Properties, each Property is as much a Thing as the Thing was. Accordingly, a Property can only be known by its Properties, thereby launching a bad infinity in which every Thing has its Being beyond itself. In effect, the Thing-in-itself is back. Property does not correlate with its Ground in the Thing, as it is supposed to. Rather, two Things-in-themselves face each other in Reciprocal Action through their Properties. Kant thought that all determination fell outside of the thing-in-itself and instead was located in consciousness. To the thing-in-itself Kant opposed reflection. This claim, Hegel suggests, is directly contradicted by the consciousness of freedom, according to which I know myself rather as the universal and undetermined, and separate off from myself those manifold and necessary determinations, recognizing them as something external for me and belonging only to things. The ego conscious of its freedom represents the true identity reflected into itself, which the thing-in-itself was supposed to be. Slavoj Žižek protested that the ego is even less than the thing-in-itself, because the thing-in-itself has a positive content, even though we can’t perceive it. At this point of the Logic, however, the Thing-in-itself is not yet determined as consciousness or ego. Nevertheless, Hegel says that External Reflection is the thing-in-itself because it is presupposed as existing by the Kantian thing-in-itself. The Thing-in-itself is not opposed to, but is Reflection, and determines itself to be a thing with its own determinations, a thing endowed with properties. In other words, the Kantian thing-in-itself says, I am not External Reflection, thereby proving it is External Reflection. In this way the true thing-in-itself demonstrates the falseness of the abstract thing-in-itself.
Properties as Reciprocal Action
Things are what they are because of the Properties, but Properties are also other things. Property now stands for the reciprocal relation between things. Reciprocal determination is therefore the middle term of the duelling Things-in-themselves. The Things-in-themselves are supposed to remain indifferent to all relation — they are self-identical. Yet Things are entirely determined by their Properties. Apart from Property (now conceived as Reciprocal Action), the Thing is nothing.
Reciprocal Action of Things
Thinghood (Dingheit) is thus reduced to the form of indeterminate identity-with-self which has its essentiality only in its property. Thinghood is a phrase borrowed from Spinoza.
The Thing isolated from its Properties is merely quantitative — its being is entirely external to it. “There thus results a ‘totality; of existing things, among which, each individual is a ‘nullity’, explains Marcuse. The point, then, is that there is no essence beyond the appearance of the Thing. It is Appearance all the way down. Kant’s metaphysical Thing-in-itself is a nullity. To the extent we think of it, it is just another phenomenon among phenomena. ‘Behind the so-called curtain which is supposed to conceal the inner world, there is nothing to be seen unless we go behind it ourselves, as much in order that we may see, as that there may be something behind there which can be seen…’ explains Hegel in the Phenomenology. ‘If Hegel’s arguments in the consciousness section [of the Phenomenology] are successful, then the world has been found to be cognitively accessible; there isn’t anything more to the world than what it manifests’ postulates Taylor.
In Reciprocal Action, Things have a unity in the concept of Property, by which they are distinguished and related. Property is the continuity of one Thing into another. Yet every Property is itself a Thing. Without the Things called Properties, a Thing vanishes. Thinghood is therefore metonymic, as we first learned in Measure. Any Thing is simply the empty space unifying other Things (its Properties). And yet these Properties are the forceful appearance of the Thing in the World. As the unity of vanishing Things, Property itself is self-subsistent, and so Things have their self-subsistence in the concept of Property. The Thing is in truth, only that unessential compass which, though a negative unity, is only like the one of something, namely an immediate one. Previously, the Kantian Thing-in-itself was made into an unessential compass by an External Reflection, as seen in The Thing and its Existence.
Even then, External Reflection supposed that the Thing-in-itself was vaguely conceived as the essential, that is, somehow not divorced from phenomenon. Now the Thing-in-itself makes itself unessential. It sublates itself and enters into its phenomenal Properties. Hence property is now freed from the indeterminate and impotent connexion which is the one of the thing: it is that which constitutes the thing’s subsistence, a self-subsistent matter. Now, if there is to be a Thing, it is a Thing constructed out of diverse Properties. There are only various self-subsistent matters of this kind and the thing consists of them.
‘The property, which was supposed to connect the self-subsisting extremes, is therefore itself self-subsistent. The things are, on the contrary, the unessential. They are something essential only as the self-differentiating and self-referring reflection; but this is the property. The latter is in the thing, therefore, not as something sublated, not just a moment of it; on the contrary, the truth of the thing is that it is only an unessential compass which is indeed a negative unity, but only like the one of the something, that is to say, a one which is immediate. Whereas earlier the thing was determined as an unessential compass because it was made such by an external abstraction that omits the property, this abstraction now happens through the transition of the thing-in-itself into the property itself. But there is now an inversion of values, for the earlier abstraction still envisaged the abstract thing without its property as being the essential, and the property as an external determination, whereas it is the thing as such which is now reduced, through itself, to the determination of an indifferent external form of the property. — The latter is henceforth thus freed of the indeterminate and impotent bond which is the unity of the thing; the property is what constitutes the subsistence of the thing; it is a self-subsisting matter. — Since this matter is simple continuity with itself, it only possesses at first the form of diversity. There is, therefore, a manifold of these self-subsisting matters, and the thing consists of them’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
The Constitution of the Thing Out of Matters. In the Reciprocal Action of Things, Thinghood negated itself and became an unessential moment. Properties did the same (since they are Things). Properties in The Thing and its Properties are the very means by which all things are different, yet, in Reciprocal Action of Things, shown in Reciprocal Action of Things, all difference between Things is entirely erased. If Difference exists, it is supplied externally, not by the Thing. In the current section, Property, which distinguishes Things, is really the enduring mode by which Things are continuous with other Things. A Thing has its Properties, but it is not the only Thing with those Properties. Every Property is a universal. In its universal guise, particularizing Property is renamed Matters. At first, the Understanding, gazing back at Reciprocal Action of Things, proposes that Properties fail to distinguish one Thing from another. Property is therefore in the element of unessentially.
‘But, third, this turning back into itself, though a self-referring determination, is at the same time an unessential determination; the self-continuous subsistence makes up the self-subsistent matter in which the difference of things, their determinateness existing in and for itself, is sublated and is something external. Therefore, although the thing as this thing is complete determinateness, this determinateness is such in the element of inessentiality’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
Property is not what distinguishes Things. External reflection does. What is essential in Things is this external reflection. Dialectical Reason intervenes to point out that Property was previously shown to be a unity of externality and essentiality, because it contains reflection-into-self and reflection-into-an- other.
‘Considered from the side of the movement of the property, this result follows in this way. The property is not only external determination but concrete existence immediately existing in itself. This unity of externality and essentiality repels itself from itself, for it contains reflection-into-itself and reflection-into-other, and, on the one hand, it is determination as simple, self-identical and self-referring self-subsistent in which the negative unity, the one of the thing, is sublated; on the other hand, it is this determination over against an other, but likewise as a one which is reflected into itself and is determined in itself; it is, therefore, the matters and this thing. These are the two moments of self-identical externality, or of property reflected into itself. — The property was that by which things were supposed to be distinguished. Since the thing has freed itself of its negative side of inhering in an other, it has thereby also become free from its being determined by other things and has returned into itself from the reference connecting it to the other. At the same time, however, it is only the thing-in-itself now become the other of itself, for the manifold properties on their part have become self-subsistent and their negative connection in the one of the thing is now only a sublated connection. Consequently, the thing is self-identical negation only as against the positive continuity of the material’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
Inessentiality of Property
This pairing of reflection-into-self and reflection-intoan- other is given the name This Thing and Matters, with reflection-into-self on the negative side of internal essence and reflection-in-to-other on the side of external Existence. In Innessentiality of Property, Properties are reduced to moments. That is, they are reflected into their negative unity as into a substrate distinct from them, namely thinghood?
‘It is one of the commonest assumptions of ordinary thinking that a thing consists of many self-subsisting matters. On the one hand, the thing is treated as having properties; the thing is their substance. But, on the other hand, these different determinations are regarded as matters, and their subsistence is not the thing; on the contrary, the converse is the case; it is the thing rather that consists of them and is itself only their external bond and quantitative limit. Both the properties and the matters are the same content determinations, except that in the former case these determinations are moments reflected into their negative unity which is a substrate distinct from them, the thinghood; whereas in the latter case, they are a variety of self-subsistent matters, each reflected into its own self-unity. These matters are now further determined as independent subsistence; but they are also together in a thing. This thing has the two determinations, first, of being a ‘this’, and, second, of being the ‘also’. The ‘also’ is represented in external intuition as spatial extension; the ‘this’, the negative unity, is instead the puncticity of the thing. The matters are together in this puncticity, and their ‘also’ or their extension is everywhere this puncticity; for the ‘also’, as thinghood, is essentially determined also as negative unity. Therefore, where one of these matters is, in that one and same point the other is; the thing does not have its colour in one place, its aroma in another, its heat in a third, and so forth, but at the point where it is warm, there it is also coloured, sour, electric, and so forth. Now because these stuffs are not outside one another but are in one ‘this’, they are assumed as porous, so that one stuff concretely exists in the interstices of an other. But the one that occupies the interstices of the other is itself porous; conversely, therefore, the other concretely exists in its pores; and this applies not just to this second stuff, but to a third also, a tenth, and so forth. They are all porous, and in the interstices of each all the others are present, just as each is present with the rest in the pores of every other. They are, therefore, an aggregate of matters that interpenetrates one another in such a way that in penetrating the others each is equally penetrated by them, so that each again penetrates its own penetratedness. Each is posited as its negation, and this negation is the subsistence of an other; but this subsistence is just as much the negation of this other and the subsistence of the first’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
Properties defer to the Thing and were no-Thing on its own. Matters, in contrast, are more advanced. They are self-subsistent stuff.
‘The necessity of making the transition from properties to matters, or of assuming that the properties are truly matters, has resulted from the fact that they are what is the essential in things and consequently their true self-subsistence. — At the same time, however, the reflection of the property into itself constitutes only one side of the whole reflection, namely the sublation of the distinction and the continuity of the property (which was supposed to be a concrete existence for an other) with itself. Thinghood, as immanent negative reflection and as a distinguishing that repels itself from the other, has consequently been reduced to an unessential moment; at the same time, however, it has further determined itself. First, this negative moment has preserved itself, for property has become a matter continuous with itself and self-subsisting only inasmuch as the difference of things has sublated itself; thus the continuity of the property in the otherness itself contains the moment of the negative, and, as this negative unity, its self-subsistence is at the same time the restored something of thinghood, negative self-subsistence versus the positive self-subsistence of the stuff. Second, the thing has thereby progressed from its indeterminacy to full determinateness. As thing in itself, it is abstract identity, simple negative concrete existence, or this concrete existence determined as the indeterminate; it is then determined through its properties, by virtue of which it is supposed to be distinguished from other things; but, since through the property the thing is rather continuous with other things, this imperfect distinction is sublated; the thing has thereby returned into itself and is now determined as determined; it is determined in itself or is this thing. –’
- ‘The Science of Logic’
A Matter is reflected into its own unity-with-self. This Thing is now liberated from its Matters.
This Thing and Its Matters. Property was that by which things were supposed to be distinguished; but now that Matter has freed itself from this its negative side a, of inhering in an other, the thing a, too, has been freed from its being determined by other things and has returned into itself from the relation to other.
Matter is self-subsistent only when the Thing — the owner of the Property — is suppressed. If Matter is before us, the Thing is not. The Thing is abstract identity, the simply negative Existence, or Existence determined as the indeterminate? Matter negates This Thing and therefore contains the moment of the negative, and its self-subsistence is, as this negative unity, the restored something of thinghood. On the law of sublation, Thinghood is negated by and preserved in the Matters. So the Matters are as much Thing as no-Thing. As a Thing, it cannot endure. Now that This Thing has once more been separated from its Matters, it is merely the Thing-in-itself again. It has become an other to itself? This Thing is a self-identical negation only as against the positive continuity of the matter.
‘Considered from the side of the movement of the property, this result follows in this way. The property is not only external determination but concrete existence immediately existing in itself. This unity of externality and essentiality repels itself from itself, for it contains reflection-into-itself and reflection-into-other, and, on the one hand, it is determination as simple, self-identical and self-referring self-subsistent in which the negative unity, the one of the thing, is sublated; on the other hand, it is this determination over against an other, but likewise as a one which is reflected into itself and is determined in itself; it is, therefore, the matters and this thing. These are the two moments of self-identical externality, or of property reflected into itself. — The property was that by which things were supposed to be distinguished. Since the thing has freed itself of its negative side of inhering in an other, it has thereby also become free from its being determined by other things and has returned into itself from the reference connecting it to the other. At the same time, however, it is only the thing-in-itself now become the other of itself, for the manifold properties on their part have become self-subsistent and their negative connection in the one of the thing is now only a sublated connection. Consequently, the thing is self-identical negation only as against the positive continuity of the material’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
Speculative Reason summarizes Things by saying that they exist only by a kind of differentiation of This Thing and its Matters. The thing consists of self-subsistent matters which are indifferent to their relation in the thing. The relation is seen as “only an unessential combination of them and the difference of one thing from another thing depends on whether and in what amount a number of the particular matters are present in it.
‘The ‘this’ thus constitutes the complete determinateness of the thing, a determinateness which is at the same time an external determinateness. The thing consists of self-subsistent matters indifferent to the connection they have in the thing. This connection is therefore only an unessential linking of them, the difference of one thing from another depending on whether there is in it a more or less of particular matters and in what amount. These matters overrun this thing, continue into others, and that they belong to this thing is no restriction for them. Just as little are they, moreover, a restriction for one another, for their negative connection is only the impotent ‘this’. Hence, in being linked together in it, they do not sublate themselves; they are as self-subsistent, impenetrable to each other; in their determinateness they refer only to themselves and are a mutually indifferent manifold of subsistence; the only limit of which they are capable is a quantitative one. — The thing as this is just their merely quantitative connection, a mere collection, their ‘also’. The thing consists of some quantum or other of a matter, also of the quantum of another, and also of yet another; this combination, of not having any combination alone constitutes the thing’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
Matters now pass out of and beyond this thing, continue themselves into other things, and the fact that they belong to this thing is not a limitation for them. In short, a Matter is never unique to a Thing. If This Thing tastes bitter, bitterness in general is the property of many other Things as well. Property/Matter, supposed to signal the particularity of the Thing, is itself universal.
This Thing and its Matters
Particularity, then, depends upon universality (an idea Hegel emphasizes much further on). Elsewhere, the Matters coalesce into one Matter, which stand over against Form. There, Form takes the place of the Constitution of Things.
‘As the immediate unity of existence with itself, Matter is also indifferent with regard to determinacy; the many diverse matters therefore merge into the One matter (or existence in the reflective determination of identity). As against this One matter, these distinct determinacies and the external relation which they have to each other in the thing are the form-the reflective determination of distinction, but as existing and as totality. This One matter, without determination, is also the same as the thing-in-itself; but it is the thing-in-itself as inwardly quite abstract, c and it is indeterminate matter as being in itself that is also for-another, and first of all for the form’.
- ‘The Encyclopaedia Logic’
In the Logic, however, this pairing is placed earlier — in Ground. According to Rinaldi:
The superior speculative consistency of the deduction carried out … in the Encyclopaedia Logic is undeniable. First, it does seem rather arbitrary and artful to consider (relatively) complex and ontologically ‘concrete’ thought-determinations like those of Matter, Form, Content, Condition and the Unconditional as subcategories of a (relatively) empty and abstract logical-formal principle such as that of Ground. Second, Hegel’s concept of Appearance is substantially identical with Kant’s. Its content coincides with the indefinite multiplicity of Things-and- Properties, and thus with Existence itself. Yet it differs from [Existence] in that in Appearance such a content is posited not as positively existent, but only as a simple ‘phenomenon’ which is in itself merely negative, and can appear to be something positive and epistemologically valuable only to the consciousness of the ‘finite’ subject (to Common Sense). Finally, Hegel’s general conception of the categories of Essence as ‘determinations of reflections’ … is that they constitute rather ‘couples’ of (opposite) concepts than isolated thought-determinations. Now, Existence is unquestionably the “natural” immanent opposite of Essence, and therefore it seems quite appropriate to consider the two Denkbestimmungen as ‘moments’ of a unique logical totality’.
- ‘A History and Interpretation of the Logic of Hegel’
These points can be contended. First, Content is the habit of form erasing itself; this is abstract and consistent with the Ground of Things (self-erasure). Second, Existence traffics in multiple things, but Content is unitary — Form’s self-erasure, appropriately treated in Ground. Finally, Existence may be the opposite of Essence, but Ground is correlative and so Form-Content is appropriately treated there. In addition, Form and Content ended up as the same thing, consistent with the speculative nature of Ground.
Constitution of the Thing out of its Matters
The Thing is therefore no limitation for Matters, And, since each Property/Matter is itself a Thing, they do not limit each other. For this reason, a Thing has many Properties. Nevertheless, every Property is a Thing-in-itself. Therefore in their combination in the Thing they are impenetrable for one another, relate themselves in their determinateness only to themselves, and are a mutually indifferent manifoldness of subsistence. Properties are capable of only a quantitative limit. Such a limit, it will be recalled, is no limit; Quantity continues itself into its beyond, while the Quality of the thing remains unaffected. Meanwhile, the Constitution of the Thing is a merely quantitative relation between the Properties. The Thing is cobbled together by outside force and has no integrity of its own.
The Thing consists of some quantum or other of a matter, also of a quantum of another, and again of others; this connexion of having no connexion alone constitutes the thing. The Thing is about to dissolve. Externality of the Thing’s constitution and its dissolution is the very truth of what we call things.
Dissolution of the Thing. So far, the Thing is the merely quantitative connexion of free matters. It is purely negative and has its being outside itself. This Thing is whatever external reflection makes of it. It is the mere afterthought or also of the Properties.
‘This thing, in the manner it has determined itself as the merely quantitative combination of free matters, is the absolutely alterable. Its alteration consists in one or more matters being dropped from the collection, or being added to this ‘also’, or in the rearrangement of the matters’ respective quantitative ratio. The coming-to-be and the passing-away of this thing is the external dissolution of such an external bond, or the binding of such for which it is indifferent whether they are bound or not. The stuffs circulate unchecked in or out of ‘this’ thing, and the thing itself is absolute porosity without measure or form of its own’.
The thing as ‘also’ recalls similar remarks in chapter 3 of the Phenomenology, where the Thing is both an Also and a One. ‘The differentiation of the properties . … each property negating the others, thus falls outside of this simple medium; and the medium, therefore, is not merely an Also, an indifferent unity, but a One as well, a unity which excludes an other’. ‘It is the very nature of perceptual consciousness’, explains Michael Baur, ‘to be unable to reconcile the exclusive unity of the Thing with the presence in it of several distinct, sensible properties which can inhere in other Things as well. If perceptual consciousness attends to the distinctness of the properties in the Thing, then the Thing’s unity itself becomes problematic, sinking into a mere ‘Also’ if perceptual consciousness attends to the exclusive unity of the Thing, then such unity apparently excludes also the distinct properties which are supposed to inhere in the Thing’.
As such it is alterable. If too many of its qualities are taken away, or if too many properties are added, the Thing alters and becomes a different Thing than it was. Such a dissolution is also externally imposed. Meanwhile Matters circulate freely out of or into this thing; the thing itself is absolute porosity without measure or form of its own. The Understanding now proposes that the Thing is unstable and alterable. On this view, the Matters are only self-related. They are unrelated to a Thing because the Thing is Dissolved.
Dissolution of the Thing
Dialectical Reason intervenes to assert that Matters partake of reflection-into-self. They require the Thing. Accordingly, the Matters are correlative to the Tiling and connected to it after all. When this relation is emphasized, content as such is not reflected into itself. It relates itself to an other. The Thing is no mere ‘also’ to the Matters. It is equally the negative relation of the matters. Because they are determinatenesses, the Matters are negative Reflection. The negative Reflection is the ‘puncticity’ (Punktualität) of the thing. Puncticity appears in no English dictionary. Presumably the translator thoughtthat punctuality would mislead English readers. In the Phenomenology, puncticity or porosity of the Matters yields Force. When the Force of the Thing vanishes into the Force of the Understanding, the Understanding arrives at the idea of a beyond, or Appearance. In the Logic, however, Force is reserved for Essential Relation, two chapters hence — well after Appearance has made its appearance.
The thing is, therefore, the self-contradictory mediation of independent self-subsistence through its opposite.
‘So the thing, in the absolute determinateness through which it is a ‘this’, is the absolutely dissoluble thing. This dissolution is an external process of being determined, just like the being of the thing; but its dissolution and the externality of its being is the essential of this being; the thing is only the ‘also’; it consists only of this externality. But it consists also of its matters, and not just the abstract ‘this’ as such but the ‘this’ thing whole is the dissolution of itself. For the thing is determined as an external collection of self-subsisting matters; such matters are not things, they lack negative self-subsistence; it is the properties which are rather self-subsistent, that is to say, are determined with a being which, as such, is reflected into itself. Hence the matters are indeed simple, referring only to themselves; but it is their content which is a determinateness; the immanent reflection is only the form of this content, a content which is not, as such, reflected-into-itself but refers to an other according to its determinateness. The thing, therefore, is not only their ‘also’, is not their reference to each other as indifferent but is, on the contrary, equally so their negative reference; and on account of their determinateness the matters are themselves this negative reflection which is the puncticity of the thing. The one matter is not what the other is according to the determinateness of its content as contrasted to that of an other; and the one is not to the extent that the other is, in accordance with their self-subsistence’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
In the Thing so defined, Existence has reached its completion, namely it is intrinsic being or independent subsistence, and unessential Existence in one.
‘The thing is, therefore, the connecting reference of the matters of which it consists to each other, in such a manner that the one matter, and the other also, subsist in it, and yet, at the same time, the one matter does not subsist in it in so far as the other does. To the extent, therefore, that the one matter is in the thing, the other is thereby sublated; but the thing is at the same time the ‘also’, or the subsistence of the other matter. In the subsistence of the one matter, therefore, the other matter does not subsist, and it also no less subsists in it; and so with all these diverse matters in respect to each other. Since it is thus in the same respect as the one matter subsists that the other subsists also, and this one subsistence of both is the puncticity or the negative unity of the thing, the two interpenetrate absolutely; and since the thing is at the same time only the ‘also’ of the matters, and these are reflected into their determinateness, they are indifferent to one another, and in interpenetrating they do not touch. The matters are, therefore, essentially porous, so that the one subsists in the pores or in the non-subsistence of the others; but these others are themselves porous; in their pores or their non-subsistence the first and also all the rest subsist; their subsistence is at the same time their sublatedness and the subsistence of others; and this subsistence of the others is just as much their sublatedness and the subsisting of the first and equally so of all others. The thing is, therefore, the self-contradictory mediation of independent self-subsistence through its opposite, that is to say, through its negation, or of one self-subsisting matter through the subsisting and non-subsisting of an other. — In ‘this’ thing, concrete existence has attained its completion, namely, that it is at once being that exists in itself, or independent subsistence, and unessential concrete existence. The truth of concrete existence is thus this: that it has its in-itself in unessentiality, or that it subsists in an other, indeed in the absolute other, or that it has its own nothingness for substrate. It is, therefore, appearance’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
So it is the essential nature of things that they require outside help to be things. An outside will must gather up the Matters and unite them into thinghood; the truth of Existence is to have its being-in-self in unessentiality. Existence is merely Appearance. Its ground or substrate is its own nullity. In the Dissolution of the Thing and its passage into Appearance, each Matter belonging to the thing had self-subsistence. Yet each Matter interpenetrated the Thing and each other, so that the self-subsistence of one Matter is the self-subsistence of all the Matters. This was the puncticity (negative unity) of the thing, in which every Matter, as well as the Thing itself, interpenetrates one another.
Puncticity
====
Appearance
Pictorial thinking wants to hold on to perception and have before it self-identical things. But Matter should not be conceived as a self-identicality alongside its negation. Rather, in one and the same point lie self-subsistent Matter and its negation or porosity. Hegel thinks that the physical laws which state that gases expand to fill the volume in which it is contained are one-sided views. They show that for example a certain volume takes up the same amount of steam whether it is empty of atmospheric air or filled with it.
‘But when light is shone on this obscurity, it proves to be a contradiction (both subjective on the part of the representation and objective on the part of the subject matter), the elements of which are completely contained in pictorial representation itself. The latter runs into contradiction from the start for wanting, on the one hand, to hold on to perception and have before it things that have real being, and, on the other hand, for ascribing sensible existence to imperceptible things that are determined through reflection; the minute parts and the pores are at the same time supposed to be a sensible existence and their positedness is spoken of as if it were the same as the reality which belongs to colour, heat, etc. If representation were to consider this objective fog more closely, the pores and the minute parts, it would discover in them not just a matter and also the negation of it — so that matter would be here and its negation next to it; the pore and next to it matter again, and so forth — but that in ‘this’ thing it has, in one and the same point, (1) the self-subsistent matter, (2) its negation or porosity and the other self-subsistent matter, and that this porosity and the independent subsistence of the matters in one another as in one single point is a reciprocal negation and a penetration of the penetration. — Recent accounts of physics regarding the expansion of steam in atmospheric air and of various kinds of gases in one another bring out with greater precision one side of the concept concerning the nature of a thing that has here come to view. They show, namely, that for example a certain volume holds just as much steam whether empty or full of atmospheric air; also that the various gases expand into one another in such a way that each is for the other as good as a vacuum, at least that they are not in any chemical bonding with each other, each remains continuous with itself, uninterrupted by the other, and in penetrating the others it remains itself indifferent to them. — But the further moment in the concept of a thing is that in the ‘this’ one matter is present where another matter is, and that the penetrating matter is also penetrated at the same point, or that the self-subsistent is immediately the self-subsistence of an other. This is contradictory. But the thing is nothing else but this contradiction itself; that is why it is appearance’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
If two gases are in the volume, they interpenetrate. What is neglected is this: in this thing one matter is present where the other matter is, and the matter that penetrates is also penetrated in the same point. Is Hegel trying to deny atomism? For instance, does he argue that there is no oxygen and nitrogen but only atmosphere? This is not the issue. Rather, there might be Matters — oxygen and nitrogen — but the atmosphere is nevertheless a Thing pervaded with Matters. At no point is there only oxygen and no nitrogen. These matters pervade each other. Nothing — not even the atmosphere — is truly self-identical. Hegel brings home the point to the spiritual sphere. The soul is said to have forces or faculties. They interpenetrate the soul. Just as man in general is made to consist of soul and body, each of which has an independent being of its own, so too the soul is made to consist of so-called soul forces each of which has a self-subsistence of its own, or is an immediate, separate activity with its own peculiar nature. It is imagined that the intellect acts separately in one place and the imagination by itself in another, that intellect, memory, and so on, are each cultivated separately, and for the time being the other forces are left inactive on one side until perhaps, or perhaps not, their turn comes.
‘We find in the spiritual realm a situation similar to that of these matters, in the conception of forces or faculties of the soul. Spirit is a “this,” the negative unity in which its determinations interpenetrate, in a much more profound sense. But represented as soul, it is commonly taken as a thing. Just as the human being in general is made to consist of soul and body, each of which is taken as something subsisting on its own, so also the soul is made to consist of so-called soul-forces, each of which has a self-subsistence of its own, or is an activity with direct effects specifically its own. The assumption is that the understanding operates on its own here, the imagination there; that one can cultivate the understanding, the memory, etc., each for itself, leaving the others aside for the time being until, perhaps, their turn comes up, or perhaps not. Although the faculties, since they are transposed into a materially simple soul-thing which as simple is allegedly immaterial, are not portrayed as particular matters, as forces they are nevertheless equally assumed to be indifferent to one another, just like those matters. But spirit is not the contradiction that the thing is, which dissolves itself and passes over into appearance. Rather, it already is within it the contradiction that has returned into its absolute unity, namely into the concept; the differences are no longer to be thought in it as self-subsistent but only as particular moments in the subject, the simple individuality’.
– ‘The Science of Logic’
Of course modern science does not baulk at locating some of these forces in precise segments of the brain yet metaphysically such powers interpenetrate the entire being of a person and serve to identify the person as unique.
Coming up next:
The world of appearance.
Dedicated as always to my Muse in whose uniqueness I rejoice, there is no one on Earth like you.
See the pyramids along the Nile
Watch the sun rise on a tropic isle
Just remember, darling, all the while
You belong to me
See the marketplace in old Algiers
Send me photographs and souvenirs
But remember when a dream appears
You belong to me
I’ll be so alone without you
Maybe you’ll be lonesome too, and blue
Fly the ocean in a silver plane
Watch the jungle when its wet with rain
Just remember till youre home again
You belong to me
— -
To be continued …
