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Volume One: The Objective Logic
Book One: The Doctrine of Being
With What must Science Begin?
§ 88
It is only in recent times that thinkers have become aware of the difficulty
of finding a beginning in philosophy, and the reason for this difficulty and
also the possibility of resolving it has been much discussed. What philosophy
begins with must be either mediated or immediate, and it is easy to show
that it can be neither the one nor the other; thus either way of beginning is
refuted.
§ 89
The principle of a philosophy does, of course, also express a
beginning, but not so much a subjective as an objective one, the
beginning of everything. The principle is a particular determinate
content — water, the one, nous, idea, substance, monad, etc. Or, if it
refers to the nature of cognition and consequently is supposed to be only a
criterion rather than an objective determination — thought, intuition,
sensation, ego, subjectivity itself. Then here too it is the nature of the
content which is the point of interest. The beginning as such, on the other
hand, as something subjective in the sense of being a particular, inessential
way of introducing the discourse, remains unconsidered, a matter of
indifference, and so too the need to find an answer to the question, With what
should the beginning be made? remains of no importance in face of the need for
a principle in which alone the interest of the matter in hand seems to lie, the
interest as to what is the truth, the absolute ground.
§ 90
But the modern perplexity about a beginning proceeds from a further
requirement of which those who are concerned with the dogmatic demonstration of
a principle or who are sceptical about finding a subjective criterion against
dogmatic philosophising, are not yet aware, and which is completely denied by
those who begin, like a shot from a pistol, from their inner revelation, from
faith, intellectual Intuition, etc., and who would be exempt from method and
logic. If earlier abstract thought was interested in the principle only as
content, but in the course of philosophical development has been impelled to
pay attention to the other side, to the behaviour of the cognitive process,
this implies that the subjective act has also been grasped as an essential moment of objective truth, and this brings with it the need to unite the
method with the content, the form with the principle. Thus the principle ought
also to be the beginning, and what is the first for thought ought also to be
the first in the process of thinking.
§ 91
Here we have only to consider how the logical beginning
appears; the two sides from which it can be taken have already been named, to
wit, either as a mediated result or as a beginning proper, as an immediacy.
§ 92
This is not the place to deal with the question apparently so important in
present-day thought, whether the knowledge of truth is an immediate knowledge
having a pure beginning, a faith, or whether it is a mediated knowledge . In so
far as this can be dealt with preliminarily it has been done elsewhere.
Here we need only quote from it this, there is nothing, nothing
in heaven, or in nature or in mind or anywhere else which does not equally
contain both immediacy and mediation, so that these two determinations
reveal themselves to be unseparated and inseparable and the opposition
between them to be a nullity. But as regards the philosophical discussion of
this, it is to be found in every logical proposition in which occur the
determinations of immediacy and mediation and consequently also the discussion
of their opposition and their truth. Inasmuch as this opposition, as related to
thinking, to knowing, to cognition, acquires the more concrete form of
immediate of mediated knowledge, it is the nature of cognition as such
which is considered within the science of logic, while the more concrete form
of cognition falls to be considered in the philosophy of spirit. But to want
the nature of cognition clarified prior to the science is to demand that
it be considered outside the science; outside the science this
cannot be accomplished, at least not in a scientific manner and such a manner
is alone here in place.
§ 93
The beginning is logical in that it is to be made in the element of
thought that is free and for itself, in pure knowing. It is mediated because pure knowing is the ultimate, absolute truth of consciousness. In
the Introduction it was remarked that the phenomenology of spirit is the
science of consciousness, the exposition of it, and that consciousness has for
result the Notion of science, i.e. pure knowing. Logic, then, has for
its presupposition the science of manifested spirit, which contains and
demonstrates the necessity, and so the truth, of the standpoint occupied by
pure knowing and of its mediation. In this science of
manifested spirit the beginning is made from empirical, sensuous consciousness
and this is immediate knowledge in the strict sense of the word; in that
work there is discussed the significance of this immediate knowledge. Other
forms of consciousness such as belief in divine truths, inner experience,
knowledge through inner revelation, etc., are very ill-fitted to be quoted as
examples of immediate knowledge as a little reflection will show. In the work
just mentioned immediate consciousness is also the first and that which is
immediate in the science itself, and therefore the presupposition; but in
logic, the presupposition is that which has proved itself to be the result of
that phenomenological consideration — the Idea as pure knowledge.
§ 94
Logic is pure science, that is, pure knowledge in the
entire range of its development. But in the said result, this Idea has
determined itself to be the certainty which has become truth, the certainty
which, on the one hand, no longer has the object over against it but has
internalised it, knows it as its own self — and, on the other hand, has given
up the knowledge of itself as of something confronting the object of which it
is only the annihilation, has divested itself of this subjectivity and is at
one with its self-alienation.
§ 95
Now starting from this, determination of pure knowledge, all that is needed
to ensure that the beginning remains immanent in its scientific development is
to consider, or rather, ridding oneself of all other reflections and opinions
whatever, simply to take up, what is there before us.
§ 96
Pure knowing as concentrated into this unity has sublated all reference to
an other and to mediation; it is without any distinction and as thus
distinctionless, ceases itself to be knowledge; what is present is only simple
immediacy.
§ 97
Simple immediacy is itself an expression of reflection and contains a
reference to its distinction from what is mediated. This simple immediacy,
therefore, in its true expression is pure being. Just as pure knowing is
to mean knowing as such, quite abstractly, so too pure being is to mean nothing
but being in general: being, and nothing else, without any further
specification and filling.
§ 98
Here the beginning is made with being which is represented as having come to
be through mediation, a mediation which is also a sublating of itself; and
there is presupposed pure knowing as the outcome of finite
knowing, of consciousness. But if no presupposition is to be made and the
beginning itself is taken immediately, then its only determination is
that it is to be the beginning of logic, of thought as such. All that is
present is simply the resolve, which can also be regarded as arbitrary, that we
propose to consider thought as such.
§ 99
Thus the beginning must be an absolute, or what is synonymous here,
an abstract beginning; and so it may not suppose anything, must
not be mediated by anything nor have a ground; rather it is to be itself the
ground of the entire science. Consequently, it must be purely and simply an immediacy, or rather merely immediacy itself. Just as it cannot possess
any determination relatively to anything else, so too it cannot contain within
itself any determination, any content; for any such would be a distinguishing
and an inter-relationship of distinct moments, and consequently a mediation. The beginning therefore is pure being
§ 100
To this simple exposition of what is only directly involved in the simplest
of all things, the logical beginning, we may add the following further
reflections; yet these cannot be meant to serve as elucidations and
confirmations of that exposition — this is complete in itself — since they are
occasioned by preconceived ideas and reflections and these, like all other
preliminary prejudices, must be disposed of within the science itself where
their treatment should be awaited with patience.
§ 101
The insight that absolute truth must be a result, and conversely, that a
result presupposes a prior truth which, however, because it is a first,
objectively considered is unnecessary and from the subjective side is not known
— this insight has recently given rise to the thought that philosophy can only
begin with a hypothetical and problematical truth and therefore
philosophising can at first be only a quest. This view was much stressed by
Reinhold in his later philosophical work and one must give it credit for the
genuine interest on which it is based, an interest which concerns the
speculative nature of the philosophical beginning. The detailed
discussion of this view is at the same time an occasion for introducing a
preliminary understanding of the meaning of progress in logic generally; for
that view has a direct bearing on the advance; this it conceives to be such
that progress in philosophy is rather a retrogression and a grounding or
establishing by means of which we first obtain the result that what we began
with is not something merely arbitrarily assumed but is in fact the truth, and
also the primary truth.
§ 102
It must be admitted that it is an important
consideration — one which will be found in more detail in the logic itself —
that the advance is a retreat into the ground, to what is primary and true, on which depends and, in fact, from which originates, that with which
the beginning is made. Thus consciousness on its onward path from the immediacy
with which it began is led back to absolute knowledge as its innermost truth.
This last, the ground, is then also that from which the first proceeds, that
which at first appeared as an immediacy. This is true in still greater measure
of absolute spirit which reveals itself as the concrete and final supreme truth
of all being, and which at the end of the development is known as freely
externalising itself, abandoning itself to the shape of an immediate being
—opening or unfolding itself [sich entschliessend] into the creation of
a world which contains all that fell into the development which preceded that
result and which through this reversal of its position relatively to its
beginning is transformed into something dependent on the result as principle.
The essential requirement for the science of logic is not so much that the
beginning be a pure immediacy, but rather that the whole of the science be
within itself a circle in which the first is also the last and the last is also
the first.
§ 103
We see therefore that, on the other hand, it is equally necessary to
consider as result that into which the movement returns as into its ground. In this respect the first is equally the ground, and the last a derivative;
since the movement starts from the first and by correct inferences arrives at
the last as the ground, this latter is a result. Further, the progress from
that which forms the beginning is to be regarded as only a further
determination of it, hence that which forms the starting point of the
development remains at the base of all that follows and does not vanish from
it. The progress does not consist merely in the derivation of an other, or in
the effected transition into a genuine other; and in so far as this transition
does occur it is equally sublated again. Thus the beginning of philosophy is
the foundation which is present and preserved throughout the entire subsequent
development, remaining completely immanent in its further determinations.
§ 104
Through this progress, then, the beginning loses the one-sidedness which
attaches to it as something simply immediate and abstract; it becomes something
mediated, and hence the line of the scientific advance becomes a circle. It
also follows that because that which forms the beginning is still undeveloped,
devoid of content, it is not truly known in the beginning; it is the science of
logic in its whole compass which first constitutes the completed knowledge of
it with its developed content and first truly grounds that knowledge.
§ 105
But because it is the result which appears as
the absolute ground, this progress in knowing is not something provisional, or
problematical and hypothetical; it must be determined by the nature of the
subject matter itself and its content.®
§ 106
The said beginning is neither an arbitrary and merely provisional
assumption, nor is it something which appears to be arbitrarily and tentatively
presupposed, but which is subsequently shown to have been properly made the
beginning; not as is the case with the constructions one is directed to make in
connection with the proof of a theorem in geometry, where it becomes apparent
only afterwards in the proof that one took the right course in drawing just
those lines and then, in the proof itself, in beginning with the comparison of
those lines or angles; drawing such lines and comparing them are not an
essential part of the proof itself.
§ 107
Thus the ground, the reason, why the beginning is made with
pure being in the pure science [of logic] is directly given in the science
itself. This pure being is the unity into which pure knowing withdraws, or, if
this itself is still to be distinguished as form from its unity, then being is
also the content of pure knowing. It is when taken in this way that this pure
being, this absolute immediacy has equally the character of something
absolutely mediated. But it is equally essential that it be taken only in the
one-sided character in which it is pure immediacy, precisely because here
it is the beginning. If it were not this pure indeterminateness, if it were
determinate, it would have been taken as something mediated, something already
carried a stage further: what is determinate implies an other to a first.
Therefore, it lies in the very nature of a beginning that it must be
being and nothing else. To enter into philosophy, therefore, calls for no other
preparations, no further reflections or points of connection.
§ 108
We cannot really extract any further determination or positive content for the beginning from the fact that it is the beginning of philosophy.
For here at the start, where the subject matter itself is
not yet to hand, philosophy is an empty word or some assumed, unjustified
conception. Pure knowing yields only this negative determination, that the
beginning is to be abstract. If pure being is taken as the content of
pure knowing, then the latter must stand back from its content, allowing it to
have free play and not determining it further. Or again, if pure being is to be
considered as the unity into which knowing has collapsed at the extreme point
of its union with the object, then knowing itself has vanished in that unity,
leaving behind no difference from the unity and hence nothing by which the
latter could be determined. Nor is there anything else present, any content
which could be used to make the beginning more determinate.
§ 109
But the determination of being so far adopted for the beginning could
also be omitted, so that the only demand would be that a pure beginning be
made. In that case, we have nothing but the beginning itself, and it
remains to be seen what this is. This position could also be suggested for the
benefit of those who, on the one hand, are dissatisfied for one reason or
another with the beginning with being and still more so with the resulting
transition of being into nothing, and, on the other hand, simply know no other
way of beginning a science than by presupposing some general idea, which
is then analysed, the result of such analysis yielding the first
specific concept in the science. If we too were to observe this method, then we
should be without a particular object, because the beginning, as the beginning
of thought, is supposed to be quite abstract, quite general, wholly form
without any content; thus we should have nothing at all beyond the general idea
of a mere beginning as such. We have therefore only to see what is contained in
such an idea.
§ 110
As yet there is nothing and there is to become something the beginning is
not pure nothing, but a nothing from which something is to proceed; therefore
being, too, is already contained in the beginning. The beginning therefore
contains both, being and nothing, is the unity of being and nothing; or is
non-being which is at the same time being, and being which is at the same time
non-being.
§ 111
Further, in the beginning, being and nothing are present as distinguished from each other; for the beginning points to something else — it is a
non-being which carries a reference to being as to an other; that which begins,
as yet is not, it is only on the way to being.
That which begins, as yet is not, it is only on the way to being. The
being contained in the beginning is, therefore, a being which removed itself
from non-being or sublates it as something opposed to it.
But again, that which begins
already is, but equally, too, is not as yet. The opposites, being
and non-being are therefore directly united in it, or, otherwise expressed, it
is their undifferentiated unity.
§ 112
The analysis of the beginning would thus yield the notion of the unity of
being and nothing — or, in a more reflected form, the unity of
differentiatedness and non-differentiatedness, or the identity of identity and
non-identity. This concept could be regarded as the first, purest, that is,
most abstract definition of the absolute — as it would in fact be if we were at
all concerned with the form of definitions and with the name of the absolute.
In this sense, that abstract concept would be the first definition of this
absolute and all further determinations and developments only more specific and
richer definitions of it. But let those who are dissatisfied with being as
a beginning because it passes over into nothing and so gives rise to the unity
of being and nothing, let them see whether they find this beginning which
begins with the general idea of a beginning and with its analysis
(which, though of course correct, likewise leads to the unity of being and
nothing), more satisfactory than the beginning with being.
§ 113
But there is a still further observation to be made about this procedure.
The said analysis presupposes as familiar the idea of a beginning, thus
following the example of other sciences. These presuppose their subject-matter
and take it for granted that everyone has roughly the same general idea of it
and can find in it the same determinations as those indicated by the sciences
which have obtained them in one way or another through analysis, comparison and
other kinds of reasoning. But that which forms the absolute beginning must
likewise be something otherwise known; now if it is something concrete and
hence is variously determined within itself, then this internal relation is
presupposed as something known; it is thus put forward as an immediacy which,
however, it is not; for it is a relation only as a relation of distinct
moments, and it therefore contains mediation within itself. Further,
with a concrete object, the analysis and the ways in which it is determined are
affected by contingency and arbitrariness. Which determinations are brought out
depends on what each person just finds in his own
immediate, contingent idea. The relation contained in something concrete, in a
synthetic unity, is necessary only in so far as it is not just given but
is produced by the spontaneous return of the moments back into this unity — a
movement which is the opposite of the analytical procedure, which is an activity
belonging to the subject-thinker and external to the subject matter itself.
§ 114
The foregoing shows quite clearly the reason why the beginning cannot be
made with anything concrete, anything containing a relation within itself. For
such presupposes an internal process of mediation and transition of which the
concrete, now become simple, would be the result. But the beginning ought not
itself to be already a first and an other; for anything which is in its
own self a first and an other implies that an advance has already been
made. Consequently, that which constitutes the beginning, the beginning itself,
is to be taken as something unanalysable, taken in its simple, unfilled
immediacy, and therefore as being, as the completely empty being.
§ 115
If impatience with the consideration of the abstract beginning should
provoke anyone to say that the beginning should be made not with the beginning,
but straightway with the subject matter itself, well then, this subject matter
is nothing else but the said empty being; for what this subject matter is, that
will be explicated only in the development of the science and cannot be
presupposed by it as known beforehand.
§ 116
Whatever other form the beginning takes in the attempt to begin with
something other than empty being, it will suffer from the defects already
specified. Let those who are still dissatisfied with this beginning tackle the
problem of avoiding these defects by beginning in some other way.
§ 117
But we cannot leave entirely unmentioned an original beginning of philosophy
which has recently become famous, the beginning with the ego. It came
partly from the reflection that from the first truth the entire sequel must be
derived, and partly from the requirement that the first truth must be
something with which we are acquainted, and still more, something of which we
are immediately certain. This beginning is, in general, not a contingent
idea which can be differently constituted in different subjects. For the ego,
this immediate consciousness of self, at first appears to be itself both an
immediacy and also something much more familiar to us than any other idea;
anything else known belongs to the ego, it is true, but is still a content
distinguished from it and therefore contingent; the ego, on the contrary, is
the simple certainty of its own self.
§ 118
But the ego as such is at the same time also
concrete, or rather, the ego is the most concrete of all things — the
consciousness of itself as an infinitely manifold world. Before the ego, this
concrete Being, can be made the beginning and ground of philosophy, it must be
disrupted — this is the absolute act through which the ego purges itself of its
content and becomes aware of itself as an abstract ego. Only this pure ego now
is not immediate, is not the familiar, ordinary ego of our consciousness to
which the science of logic could be directly linked for everyone. That act,
strictly speaking, would be nothing else but the elevation to the standpoint of
pure knowing where the distinction of subject and object has vanished. But as
thus immediately demanded, this elevation is a subjective postulate; to
prove itself a genuine demand, the progression of the concrete ego from
immediate consciousness to pure knowing must have been indicated and exhibited
through the necessity of the ego itself. Without this objective movement pure
knowing, even in the shape of intellectual intuition, appears as an arbitrary
standpoint, or even as one of the empirical states of consciousness with
respect to which everything turns on whether or not it is found or can be
produced in each and every individual. But inasmuch as this pure ego must be
essential, pure knowing, and pure knowing is not immediately present in
the individual consciousness but only as posited through the absolute act of
the ego in raising itself to that stand-point, we lose the very advantage which
is supposed to come from this beginning of philosophy namely that it is
something thoroughly familiar, something 'everyone finds in himself which can
form the starting point for further reflection; that pure ego, on the contrary,
in its abstract, essential nature, is something unknown to the ordinary
consciousness, something it does not find therein. Instead, such a beginning
brings with it the disadvantage of the illusion that whereas the thing under
discussion is supposed to be something familiar, the ego of empirical
self-consciousness, it is in fact something far removed from it. When pure
knowing is characterised as ego, it acts as a perpetual reminder of the subjective
ego whose limitations should be forgotten, and it fosters the idea that the
propositions and relations resulting from the further development of the ego
are present and can already be found in the ordinary consciousness — for in
fact it is this of which they are asserted. This confusion, far from clarifying
the problem of a beginning, only adds to the difficulties involved and tends
completely to mislead; among- the uninitiated it has given rise to the crudest
misunderstandings.
§ 119
Further, as regards the subjective determinateness
of the ego in general, it is true that pure knowing frees the ego from the
restricted meaning imposed on it by the insuperable opposition of its object;
but for this reason it would be superfluous at least to retain this subjective
attitude and the determination of pure knowing as ego. This determination,
however, not only introduces the disturbing ambiguity mentioned, but closely
examined it also remains a subjective ego. The actual development of the
science which starts from the ego shows that in that development the object has
and retains the perennial character of an other for the ego, and that the ego
which formed the starting point is, therefore, still entangled in the world of
appearance ® and is not the pure knowing which has
in truth overcome the opposition of consciousness.
§ 120
In this connection a further essential observation must be made, namely that
although the ego could in itself or in principle [an sich] be
characterised as pure knowing or as intellectual intuition and asserted as the
beginning, we are not concerned in the science of logic with what is present
only in principle or as something inner, but rather with the determinate
reality in thought of what is inner and with the determinateness possessed
by such an inner in this reality. But what, at the beginning of the
science, is actually present of intellectual intuition-or of the
eternal, the divine, the absolute, if its object be so named-cannot be anything
else than a first, immediate, simple determination. Whatever richer name be
given to it than is expressed by mere being, the consideration of such
absolute must be restricted solely to the way in which it enters into our
knowing as thought and is enunciated as such. True, intellectual
intuition is the forcible rejection of mediation and the ratiocinative,
external reflection; but what it enunciates above and beyond simple immediacy
is something concrete, something which contains within itself diverse
determinations. However, as we have remarked, the enunciation and exposition of
such concrete beginning is a process of mediation which starts from one of
the determinations and advances to the other, even though the latter returns to
the first; it is a movement which at the same time may not be arbitrary or
assertoric. Consequently, it is not the concrete something itself with which
that exposition begins but only the simple immediacy from which the movement starts.
And further, if something concrete is taken as the beginning, the conjunction
of the determinations contained in it demand proof, and this is lacking.
§ 121
If, therefore, in the expression of the absolute, or
eternal, or God (and God has the absolutely undisputed right that the beginning
be made with him) — if in the intuition or thought of these there is implied
more than pure being — then this more must make its appearance in
our knowing only as something thought, not as something imagined or
figurately conceived; let what is present in intuition or figurate conception
be as rich as it may, the determination which first emerges in knowing is
simple, for only in what is simple is there nothing more than the pure
beginning; only the immediate is simple, for only in the immediate has no
advance yet been made from a one to an other. Consequently, whatever is
intended to be expressed or implied beyond being, in the richer forms of
representing the absolute or God, this is in the beginning only an empty word
and only being; this simple determination which has no other meaning of any
kind, this emptiness, is therefore simply as such the beginning of philosophy.
§ 122
This insight is itself so simple that this beginning as such requires no
preparation or further introduction; and, indeed, these preliminary, external
reflections about it were not so much intended to lead up to it as rather to
eliminate all preliminaries.
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