Preface

In the preface to a philosophical work, it is customary for the author to give an explanation – namely, an explanation of his purpose in writing the book, his motivations behind it, and the relations it bears to other previous or contemporary treatments of the same topics – but for a philosophical work, this seems not only superfluous, but in light of the nature of the subject matter, even inappropriate and counterproductive. For whatever it might be suitable to say about philosophy in a preface – for instance, to give some historical instruction about the biases and the standpoint of the text, or some talk about the general content and the results together with a set of scattered assertions and assurances about the truth – none of these can count as the way to present philosophical truth. – Moreover, because philosophy essentially is in the element of universality, which encompasses the particular within itself, it might seem that even more so than in the other sciences, in philosophy what is indeed salient about its subject matter,¹ even its perfect essence, would be expressed in the goal of the work and in its final results, and that the way the project is in fact carried out would be what is inessential. In contrast, if a person were to have only a general notion² of, for example, anatomy, or, to put it roughly, if he were to have an acquaintance with the parts of the body taken in accordance with their lifeless existence, nobody would thereby think that he has come into full possession of the salient subject matter of that science, which is to say, its content. One would think that in addition he would have to go to the trouble to pay attention to the particularities of the science. – Furthermore, that kind of an aggregation of little bits and pieces of information has no real right to be called science, and a conversation about its purpose and other such generalities would be in no way distinct from the ordinary historical and uncomprehending way in which the content, or these nerves and muscles, and so forth, is itself discussed. In the case of philosophy, on the other hand, this would give rise to the following incongruity, namely, that if philosophy were indeed to make use of such a method, then it would have shown itself to be incapable of grasping the truth.

Determining the relation that a philosophical work professes to bear vis-à-vis other efforts at dealing with the same object also introduces an extraneous interest, and it thereby only renders obscure what is supposed to be at stake in taking cognizance³ of the truth. The more that conventional opinion holds that the opposition between the true and the false is itself fixed and set, the more that it customarily expects to find itself in either agreement or in contradiction with any given philosophical system, and, if so, then in any explanation of such a system, the more it will only see the one or the other. It does not comprehend the diversity of philosophical systems as the progressive development of truth as much as it sees only contradiction in that diversity. The bud disappears when the blossom breaks through, and one might say that the former is refuted by the latter. Likewise, through the fruit, the blossom itself may be declared to be a false existence of the plant, since the fruit emerges as the blossom's truth as it comes to replace the blossom itself. These forms are not only distinguished from each other, but, as incompatible with each other, they also supplant each other. However, at the same time their fluid nature makes them into moments of an organic unity in which they are not only not in conflict with each other, but rather, one is equally as necessary as the other, and it is this equal necessity which alone constitutes the life of the whole. However, in part, contradiction with regard to a philosophical system does not usually comprehend itself in this way, and, in part, the consciousness which apprehends the contradiction generally neither knows how to free the contradiction from its one-sidedness, nor how to sustain it as free-standing. Nor, when it seems to be in the shape of a struggle against itself, does it generally take cognizance⁴ of the moments as reciprocally necessary.

Those who demand both such explanations and their satisfactions may well look as if they are really in pursuit of what is essential. Where else could the inner core of a philosophical work be better expressed than in its purposes and results, and how else could this be more determinately discerned⁵ than by differentiating it from all the other things that this age brings out in the same sphere? However much that sort of doing is supposed to count for more than just the beginning of cognition, or if it is supposed to count as actual cognition itself, still it is in fact to be reckoned as being little more than a contrivance for avoiding what is really at stake, or as an attempt to combine the semblance of both seriousness and effort while actually sparing oneself of either seriousness or effort. – This is so because the subject matter is not exhausted in its aims; rather, it is exhaustively treated when it is worked out. Nor is the result which is reached the actual whole itself; rather, the whole is the result together with the way the result comes to be. The aim for itself is the lifeless universal in the way that the tendency of the work itself is a mere drive that still lacks actuality; the unadorned result is just the corpse that has left the tendency behind. – Likewise, differentiatedness is instead the limit of the thing at stake. It is where the thing which is at stake ceases, or it is what that thing is not. To trouble oneself with such purposes or results, or to make distinctions and pass judgments on one or the other is thus an easier task than it might seem to be. Instead of occupying itself with what is at stake, this kind of doing has always thereby gone one step beyond it. Instead of dwelling on the thing at issue and forgetting itself in it, that sort of knowing is always grasping at something else. It instead remains in being at one with itself as it is at one with the matter at issue and gives itself over to it.⁶ – The easiest thing of all is to pass judgment on what is substantial and meaningful. It is much more difficult to get a real grip on it, and what is the most difficult of all is both to grasp what unites each of them and to give a full exposition of what that is.

The beginning both of cultural education and of working one's way out of the immediacy of substantial life must always be done by acquainting oneself with universal principles and points of view. Having done that, one can then work oneself up to the thought of what is at stake and, of no less importance, to giving reasons for supporting or refuting one's thoughts on those matters. One must grasp the subject matter's concrete and rich fullness according to its determinateness, and one must know both how to provide an orderly account of it and to render a serious judgment about it. However, the commencement of cultural education will first of all also have to carve out some space for the seriousness of a fulfilled life, which in turn leads one to the experience of the crux of the matter,⁷ so that even when the seriousness of the concept does go into the depths of the crux of the matter, this kind of acquaintance and judgment will still retain its proper place in conversation.

The true shape in which truth exists can only be the scientific system of that truth. To participate in the collaborative effort at bringing philosophy nearer to the form of science – to bring it nearer to the goal where it can lay aside the title of love of knowing and be actual knowing – is the task I have set for myself. The inner necessity that knowing should be science lies in the nature of knowing, and the satisfactory explanation for this inner necessity is solely the exposition of philosophy itself. However, external necessity, insofar as this is grasped in a universal manner and insofar as personal contingencies and individual motivations are set aside, is the same as the internal necessity which takes on the shape in which time presents⁸ the existence of its moments. To demonstrate that it is now time for philosophy to be elevated into science would therefore be the only true justification of any attempt that has this as its aim, because it would demonstrate the necessity of that aim, and, at the same time, it would be the realization of the aim itself.

In positing that the true shape of truth lies in its scientific rigor – or, what is the same thing, in asserting that truth has the element of its existence solely in concepts – I do know that this seems to contradict an idea⁹ (along with all that follows from it), whose pretentiousness is matched only by its pervasiveness in the convictions of the present age. It thus does not seem completely gratuitous to offer an explanation of this contradiction even though at this stage such an explanation can amount to little more than the same kind of dogmatic assurance which it opposes. However much, that is to say, the true exists only in what, or rather exists only as what, is at one time called intuition and at another time called either the immediate knowing of the absolute, or religion, or being – not at the center of the divine love, but the being of divine love itself – still, if that is taken as the point of departure, what is at the same time demanded in the exposition of philosophy is going to be instead the very opposite of the form of the concept. The absolute is not supposed to be conceptually grasped¹⁰ but rather to be felt and intuited. It is not the concept but the feeling and intuition of the absolute which are supposed to govern what is said of it.

If such a requirement is grasped in its more general context, and if its appearance is viewed from the stage at which self-conscious spirit is presently located, then spirit has gone beyond the substantial life which it had otherwise been leading in the element of thought – it has gone beyond this immediacy of faith, beyond the satisfaction and security of the certainty that consciousness had about its reconciliation with the essence, and it has gone beyond the universal present, or, the inner as well as the outer of that essence. Spirit has not only gone beyond that to the opposite extreme of a reflection of itself into itself which is utterly devoid of substance; it has gone beyond that extreme too. Not only has its essential life been lost to it, it is conscious of this, and of the finitude that is its content. Turning itself away from such left-over dregs, spirit, while both confessing to being mired in wickedness and reviling itself for being so, now demands from philosophy not knowledge of what spirit is; rather, it demands that it again attain the substantiality and the solidity of what is, and that it is through philosophy that it attain this. To meet these needs, philosophy is not supposed so much to unlock substance's secret and elevate this to self-consciousness – not so much to bring chaotic consciousness back both to a well-thought-out order and to the simplicity of the concept, but, instead, to take what thought has torn asunder and then to stir it all together into a smooth mélange, to suppress the concept that makes those distinctions, and then to fabricate the feeling of the essence. What it wants from philosophy is not so much insight as edification. The beautiful, the holy, the eternal, religion, and love itself are all the bait required to awaken the craving to bite. What is supposed to sustain and extend the wealth of that substance is not the concept, but ecstasy, not the cold forward march of the necessity of the subject matter, but instead a kind of inflamed inspiration.

Corresponding to this requirement is a laborious and almost petulant zeal to save mankind from its absorption in the sensuous, the vulgar, and the singular. It wishes to direct people's eyes to the stars, as if they had totally forgotten the divine and, as if they were like worms, each and all on the verge of finding satisfaction in mere dirt and water. There was a time when people had a heaven adorned with a comprehensive wealth of thoughts and images. The meaning of all existence lay in the thread of light by which it was bound to heaven and instead of lingering in this present, people's view followed that thread upwards towards the divine essence; their view directed itself, if one may put it this way, to an other-worldly present. It was only under duress that spirit's eyes had to be turned back to what is earthly and to be kept fixed there, and a long time was needed to introduce clarity into the dullness and confusion lying in the meaning of things in this world, a kind of clarity which only heavenly things used to have; a long time was needed both to draw attention to the present as such, an attention that was called experience, and to make it interesting and to make it matter. – Now it seems that there is the need for the opposite, that our sense of things is so deeply rooted in the earthly that an equal power is required to elevate it above all that. Spirit has shown itself to be so impoverished that it seems to yearn for its refreshment only in the meager feeling of divinity, very much like the wanderer in the desert who longs for a simple drink of water. That it now takes so little to satisfy spirit's needs is the full measure of the magnitude of its loss.

All the same, this parsimony vis-à-vis what one receives, or this stinginess vis-à-vis what one gives, is inappropriate for science. Whoever seeks mere edification, who wants to surround the manifoldness of his existence and thought in a kind of fog, and who then demands an indeterminate enjoyment of this indeterminate divinity, may look wherever he pleases to find it, and he will quite easily find the resources to enable him both to get on his high horse and then to rant and rave. However, philosophy must keep up its guard against the desire to be edifying.

Even to a lesser extent must this kind of science-renouncing self-satisfaction claim that such enthusiasm and obscurantism is itself a bit higher than science. This prophetic prattle imagines that it resides at the center of things, indeed that it is profundity itself, and, viewing determinateness (the horos) with contempt, it intentionally stands aloof from both the concept and from necessity, which it holds to be a type of reflection at home in mere finitude. However, in the way that there is an empty breadth, there is also an empty depth, just as likewise there is an extension of substance which spills over into finite diversity without having the power to keep that diversity together – this is an intensity without content, which, although it makes out as if it were a sheer force without dispersion, is in fact no more than superficiality itself. The force of spirit is only as great as its expression, and its depth goes only as deep as it trusts itself to disperse itself and to lose itself in its explication of itself. – At the same time, if this substantial knowing, itself so totally devoid of the concept, pretends to have immersed the very ownness of the self in the essence and to philosophize in all holiness and truth, then what it is really doing is just concealing from itself the fact that instead of devoting itself to God, it has, by spurning all moderation and determinateness, instead simply given itself free rein within itself to the contingency of that content and then, within that content, given free rein to its own arbitrariness. – While abandoning themselves to the unbounded fermentation of the substance, the proponents of that view suppose that, by throwing a blanket over self-consciousness and by surrendering all understanding, they are God's very own, that they are those to whom God imparts wisdom in their sleep. What they in fact receive and what they give birth to in their sleep are, for that reason also only dreams.

Besides, it is not difficult to see that our own epoch is a time of birth and a transition to a new period. Spirit has broken with the previous world of its existence and its ways of thinking;¹¹ it is now of a mind to let them recede into the past and to immerse itself in its own work at reshaping itself. To be sure, spirit is never to be conceived as being at rest but rather as ever advancing. However, just as with a child, who after a long silent period of nourishment draws his first breath and shatters the gradualness of only quantitative growth – it makes a qualitative leap and is born – so too, in bringing itself to cultural maturity, spirit ripens slowly and quietly into its new shape, dissolving bit by bit the structure of its previous world, whose tottering condition is only intimated by its individual symptoms. The kind of frivolity and boredom which chips away at the established order and the indeterminate presentiment of what is yet unknown are all harbingers of imminent change. This gradual process of dissolution, which has not altered the physiognomy of the whole, is interrupted by the break of day, which in a flash and at a single stroke brings to view the structure of the new world.

Yet this newness is no more completely actual than is the newborn child, and it is essential to bear this in mind. Its immediacy, or its concept, is the first to come on the scene. However, just as little of a building is finished when its foundation has been laid, so too reaching the concept of the whole is equally as little as the whole itself. When we wish to see an oak with its powerful trunk, its spreading branches, and its mass of foliage, we are not satisfied if instead we are shown an acorn. In the same way, science, the crowning glory of a spiritual world, is not completed in its initial stages. The beginning of a new spirit is the outcome of a widespread revolution in the diversity of forms of cultural formation;¹² it is both the prize at the end of a winding path just as it is the prize won through much struggle and effort. It is the whole which has returned into itself from out of its succession and extension and has come to be the simple concept of itself. The actuality of this simple whole consists in those embodiments which, having become moments of the whole, again develop themselves anew and give themselves a figuration, but this time in their new element, in the new meaning which itself has come to be.

On the one hand, while the initial appearance of the new world is just the whole enshrouded in its simplicity, or its universal ground, still, on the other hand, the wealth of its bygone existence is in recollection still current for consciousness. In that newly appearing shape, consciousness misses both the dispersal and the particularization of content, but it misses even more the development of the form as a result of which the differences are securely determined and are put into the order of their fixed relationships. Without this development, science has no general intelligibility,¹³ and it seems to be the esoteric possession of only a few individuals – an esoteric possession, because at first science is only available in its concept, or in what is internal to it, and it is the possession of a few individuals, since its appearance in this not-yet fully unfurled form makes its existence into something wholly singular. Only what is completely determinate is at the same time exoteric, comprehensible, and capable of being learned and possessed by everybody. The intelligible form of science is the path offered to everyone and equally available for all. To achieve rational knowledge through our own intellect¹⁴ is the rightful demand of a consciousness which is approaching the status of science. This is so because the understanding is thinking, the pure I as such, and because what is intelligible is what is already familiar and common both to science and to the unscientific consciousness alike, and it is that through which unscientific consciousness is immediately enabled to enter into science.

At its debut, where science has been brought neither to completeness of detail nor to perfection of form, it is open to reproach. However, even if it is unjust to suppose that this reproach even touches on the essence of science, it would be just as unjust and inadmissible not to honor the demand for the further development of science. This opposition seems to be the principal knot which scientific culture is currently struggling to loosen and which it does not yet properly understand. One side sings the praises of the wealth of its material and its intelligibility; the other side at any rate spurns the former and insists on immediate rationality and divinity. Even if the first is reduced to silence, whether by the force of truth alone or just by the bluster of the other side, and even if it feels overwhelmed by the basics of the subject matter which is at stake, it is still, for all that, by no means satisfied about those demands, for although they are just, those demands have not been fulfilled. Only half of its silence is due to the other side's victory; the other half is due to the boredom and indifference which result from the continual awakening of expectations by promises never fulfilled.

When it comes to content, at times the other side certainly makes it easy for itself to have a vast breadth of such content at its disposal. It pulls quite a lot of material into its own domain, which is to be sure what is already familiar and well-ordered, and by principally trafficking in rare items and curiosities, it manages to put on the appearance of being in full possession of what knowing had already finished with but which at the same time had not yet been brought to order. It thereby seems to have subjected everything to the absolute Idea,¹⁵ and in turn, the absolute Idea itself therefore both seems to be recognized¹⁶ in everything and to have matured into a wide-ranging science. However, if the way it spreads itself out is examined more closely, it turns out not to have come about as a result of one and the same thing giving itself diverse shapes but rather as a result of the shapeless repetition of one and the same thing which is only externally applied to diverse material and which contains only the tedious semblance of diversity. The Idea, which is true enough for itself, in fact remains ensnared in its origin as long as its development consists in nothing but the repetition of the same old formula. Having the knowing subject apply the one unmoved form to whatever just happens to be present and then externally dipping the material into this motionless element contributes as much to fulfilling what is demanded as does a collection of purely arbitrary impressions about the content. Rather, when what is demanded is for the shapes to originate their richness and determine their differences from out of themselves, this other view instead consists in only a monochrome formalism which only arrives at the differences in its material because the material itself has already been prepared for it and is something well known.

In so doing, this formalism asserts that this monotony and abstract universality is the absolute, and it assures us that any dissatisfaction with such universality is only an incapacity to master the absolute standpoint and keep a firm grip on it. However much there was once a time when the empty possibility of imagining¹⁷ things differently was sufficient to refute a view,¹⁸ and however much the general thought, the same mere possibility, had also at that time the entirely positive value of actual cognition, nonetheless nowadays we see the universal Idea¹⁹ in this form of non-actuality get all value attributed to it, and we see that what counts as the speculative way of considering things turns out to be the dissolution of the distinct and the determinate, or, instead turns out to be simply the casting of what is distinct and determinate into the abyss of the void, an act lacking all development or having no justification in its own self at all. In that mode, to examine any existence in the way in which it is in the absolute consists in nothing more than saying it is in fact being spoken of as, say, a “something,” whereas in the absolute, in the A = A, there is no such “something,” for in the absolute, everything is one. To oppose this one bit of knowledge, namely, that in the absolute everything is the same, to the knowing which makes distinctions and which has been either fulfilled or is seeking and demanding to be fulfilled – that is, to pass off its absolute as the night in which, as one says, all cows are black – is an utterly vacuous naiveté in cognition. – The formalism which has been indicted and scorned by the philosophy of recent times and which has been generated again in it will not disappear from science even though its inadequacy is well known and felt. It will not disappear until the knowing of absolute actuality has become completely clear about its own nature. – Taking into consideration that working out any general idea²⁰ is made easier by first having it right before us, it is worth indicating here at least very roughly what those ideas are. At the same time, we should also take this opportunity to rid ourselves of a few forms which are only impediments to philosophical cognition.

In my view, which must be justified by the exposition of the system itself, everything hangs on grasping and expressing the true not just as substance but just as much as subject. At the same time, it is to be noted that substantiality comprises within itself the universal, or, it comprises not only the immediacy of knowing but also the immediacy of being, or, immediacy for knowing. – However much taking God to be the one substance shocked the age in which this was expressed, still that was in part because of an instinctive awareness that in such a view self-consciousness only perishes and is not preserved. However, in part, the opposite view, which itself clings to thinking as thinking, or, which holds fast to universality, is exactly the same simplicity, or, it is itself undifferentiated, unmoved substantiality. But, thirdly, if thinking only unifies the being of substance with itself and grasps immediacy, or intuition grasped as thinking, then there is the issue about whether this intellectual intuition does not then itself relapse into inert simplicity and thereby present actuality itself in a fully non-actual mode.

Furthermore, the living substance is the being that is in truth subject, or, what amounts to the same thing, it is in truth actual only insofar as it is the movement of self-positing, or, that it is the mediation of itself and its becoming-other-to-itself. As subject, it is pure, simple negativity, and, as a result, it is the estrangement of what is simple, or, it is the doubling which posits oppositions and which is again the negation of this indifferent diversity and its opposition. That is, it is only this self-restoring sameness, the reflective turn into itself in its otherness. – The true is not an original unity as such, or, not an immediate unity as such. It is the coming-to-be of itself, the circle that presupposes its end as its goal and has its end for its beginning, and which is actual only through this accomplishment and its end.

The life of God and divine cognition might thus be expressed as a game love plays with itself. If this Idea²¹ lacks the seriousness, the suffering, the patience, and the labor of the negative, then it lowers itself into edification, even into triteness. In itself that life is indeed an unalloyed sameness and unity with itself, since in such a life there is neither anything serious in this otherness and alienation, nor in overcoming this alienation. However, this in-itself is abstract universality, in which its nature, which is to be for itself, and the self-movement of the form are both left out of view. However much the form is said to be the same as the essence, still it is for that very reason a bald misunderstanding to suppose that cognition can be content with the in-itself, or, the essence, but can do without the form – that the absolute principle, or, the absolute intuition, can make do without working out the former or without the development of the latter. Precisely because the form is as essential to the essence as the essence is to itself, the essence must not be grasped and expressed as mere essence, which is to say, as immediate substance or as the pure self-intuition of the divine. Rather, it must likewise be grasped as form in the entire richness of the developed form, and only thereby is it grasped and expressed as the actual.

The true is the whole. However, the whole is only the essence completing itself through its own development. This much must be said of the absolute: It is essentially a result, and only at the end is it what it is in truth. Its nature consists just in this: to be actual, to be subject, or, to be the becoming-of-itself. As contradictory as it might seem, namely, that the absolute is to be comprehended essentially as a result, even a little reflection will put this mere semblance of contradiction in its rightful place. The beginning, the principle, or, the absolute as it is at first, or, as it is immediately expressed, is only the universal. But just as my saying “all animals” can hardly count as an expression of zoology, it is likewise obvious that the words, “absolute,” “divine,” “eternal,” and so on, do not express what is contained in them; – and it is only such words which in fact express intuition as the immediate. Whatever is more than such a word, even the mere transition to a proposition, is a becoming-other which must be redeemed, or, it is a mediation. However, it is this mediation which is rejected with such horror as if somebody, in making more of mediation than in claiming both that it itself is nothing absolute and that it in no way is in the absolute, would be abandoning absolute cognition altogether.

21. However, this abhorrence²² of mediation stems in fact from a lack of acquaintance with the nature of mediation and with the nature of absolute cognition itself. This is so because mediation is nothing but self-moving self-equality, or, it is a reflective turn into itself, the moment of the I existing-for-itself, pure negativity, or, simple coming-to-be. The I, or, coming-to-be, this mediating, is, on account of its simplicity, immediacy in the very process of coming-to-be and is the immediate itself. – Hence, reason is misunderstood if reflection is excluded from the truth and is not taken to be a positive moment of the absolute. Reflection is what makes truth into the result, but it is likewise what sublates the opposition between the result and its coming-to-be. This is so because this coming-to-be is just as simple and hence not different from the form of the true, which itself proves itself to be simple in its result. Coming-to-be is instead this very return into simplicity. – However much the embryo is indeed in itself a person, it is still not a person for itself; the embryo is a person for itself only as a culturally formed and educated rationality which has made itself into what it is in itself. This is for the first time its actuality. However, this result is itself simple immediacy, for it is self-conscious freedom which is at rest within itself, a freedom which has not set the opposition off to one side and left it only lying there but has been reconciled with it.

What has just been said can also be expressed by saying that reason is purposive doing. Both the exaltation of a nature supposedly above and beyond thinking, an exaltation which misconstrues thinking, and especially the banishment of external purposiveness have brought the form of purpose completely into disrepute. Yet, in the sense in which Aristotle also determines nature as purposive doing, purpose is the immediate, the motionless, which is self-moving, or, is subject. Its abstract power to move is being-for-itself, or, pure negativity. For that reason, the result is the same as the beginning because the beginning is purpose – that is, the actual is the same as its concept only because the immediate, as purpose, has the self, or, pure actuality, within itself. The purpose which has been worked out, or, existing actuality, is movement and unfolded coming-to-be. However, this very unrest is the self, and for that reason, it is the same as the former immediacy and simplicity of the beginning because it is the result which has returned into itself. – What has returned into itself is just the self, and the self is self-relating sameness and simplicity.

The need to represent the absolute as subject has helped itself to such propositions as “God is the eternal,” or “God is the moral order of the world,” or “God is love,” etc. In such propositions, the true is directly posited as subject, but it is not presented as the movement of reflection-taking-an-inward-turn. One proposition of that sort begins with the word “God.” On its own,²³ this is a meaningless sound, a mere name. It is only the predicate that says what the name is and is its fulfillment and its meaning. The empty beginning becomes actual knowledge only at the end of the proposition. To that extent, one cannot simply pass over in silence the reason why one cannot speak solely of the eternal, the moral order of the world, etc., or, as the ancients did, of pure concepts, of being, of the one, etc., or, of what the meaning is, without appending the meaningless sound as well. However, the use of this word only indicates that it is neither a being nor an essence nor a universal per se which is posited; what is posited is what is reflected into itself, a subject. Yet, at the same time, this is something only anticipated. The subject is accepted as a fixed point on which the predicates are attached for their support through a movement belonging to what it is that can be said to know this subject and which itself is also not to be viewed as belonging to the point itself, but it is solely through this movement that the content would be portrayed as the subject. Because of the way this movement is constituted, it cannot belong to the point, but after the point has been presupposed, this movement cannot be constituted in any other way, and it can only be external. Thus, not only is the former anticipation that the absolute is subject not the actuality of this concept, but it even makes that actuality impossible, for it posits the concept as a point wholly at rest, whereas the concept is self-movement.

Among the many consequences that follow from what has been said, this in particular can be underscored: It is only as a science or as a system that knowing is actual and can be given an exposition; and that any further so-called fundamental proposition or first principle of philosophy, if it is true, is for this reason alone also false just because it is a fundamental proposition or a principle. – It is consequently very easily refuted. Its refutation consists in demonstrating its defects; however, it is defective because it is only the universal, or, only a principle, or, it is only the beginning. If the refutation is thorough, then it is derived from and developed out of that fundamental proposition or principle itself – the refutation is not pulled off by bringing in counter-assertions and impressions external to the principle. Such a refutation would thus genuinely be the development of the fundamental proposition itself; it would even be the proper augmentation of the principle's own defectiveness if it were not to make the mistake of focusing solely on its negative aspect without taking note of its results and the advances it has made in their positive aspect. – Conversely, the genuinely positive working out of the beginning is at the same time just as much a negative posture towards its beginning; namely, a negative posture towards its one-sided form, which is to be at first only immediately, or, to be purpose. It may thereby be taken to be the refutation of what constitutes the ground of the system, but it is better taken as showing that the ground, or the principle, of the system is in fact only its beginning.

That the true is only actual as a system, or, that substance is essentially subject, is expressed in the representation that expresses the absolute as spirit – the most sublime concept and the one which belongs to modernity²⁴ and its religion. The spiritual alone is the actual; it is the essence, or, what exists-in-itself. – It is what is self-comporting, or, the determinate itself, or, otherness and being-for-itself – and, in this determinateness, to be the self-enduring in its being-external-to-itself²⁵ – or, it is in and for itself. – However, it is first of all this being-in-and-for-itself for us, or, in itself, which is to say, it is spiritual substance. It has to become this for itself – it must be knowing of the spiritual, and it must be knowing of itself as spirit. This means that it must be, to itself, an object, but it must likewise immediately be a mediated object, which is to say, it must be a sublated object reflected into itself. It is for itself solely for us insofar as its spiritual content is engendered by itself. Insofar as the object for itself is also for itself,²⁶ this self-engendering, the pure concept, is, to itself, the objective element in which it has its existence, and in this manner, it is, for itself in its existence, an object reflected into itself. Spirit knowing itself in that way as spirit is science. Science is its actuality, and science is the realm it builds for itself in its own proper element.

Pure self-knowing in absolute otherness, this ether as such, is the very ground and soil of science, or, knowing in its universality. The beginning of philosophy presupposes or demands that consciousness is situated in this element. However, this element itself has its culmination and its transparency only through the movement of its coming-to-be. It is pure spirituality, or, the universal in the mode of simple immediacy. Because it is the immediacy of spirit, because it is the substance of spirit, it is transfigured essentiality, reflection that is itself simple, or, is immediacy; it is being that is a reflective turn into itself. For its part, science requires that self-consciousness shall have elevated itself into this ether in order to be able to live with science and to live in science, and, for that matter, to be able to live at all. Conversely, the individual has the right to demand that science provide him at least with the ladder to reach this standpoint. The individual's right is based on his absolute self-sufficiency, which he knows he possesses in every shape of his knowing, for in every shape, whether recognized by science or not, and no matter what the content might be, the individual is at the same time the absolute form, or, he has immediate self-certainty; and, if one were to prefer this expression, he thereby has an unconditioned being. However much the standpoint of consciousness, which is to say, the standpoint of knowing objective things to be opposed to itself and knowing itself to be opposed to them, counts as the other to science – the other, in which consciousness is at one with itself,²⁷ counts instead as the loss of spirit – still, in comparison, the element of science possesses for consciousness an other-worldly remoteness in which consciousness is no longer in possession of itself. Each of these two parts seems to the other to be an inversion of the truth. For the natural consciousness to entrust itself immediately to science would be to make an attempt, induced by it knows not what, to walk upside down all of a sudden. The compulsion to accept this unaccustomed attitude and to transport oneself in that way would be, so it would seem, a violence imposed on it with neither any advance preparation nor with any necessity. – Science may be in its own self what it will, but in its relationship to immediate self-consciousness, it presents itself as an inversion of the latter, or, because immediate self-consciousness is the principle of actuality, by immediate self-consciousness existing for itself outside of science, science takes the form of non-actuality. Accordingly, science has to unite that element with itself or instead to show both that such an element belongs to itself and how it belongs to it. Lacking actuality, science is the in-itself, the purpose, which at the start is still something inner, at first not as spirit but only as spiritual substance. It has to express itself and become for itself, and this means nothing else than that it has to posit self-consciousness as being at one with itself.

This coming-to-be of science itself, or, of knowing, is what is presented in this phenomenology of spirit as the first part of the system of science. Knowing, as it is at first, or, as immediate spirit, is devoid of spirit, is sensuous consciousness. In order to become genuine knowing, or, in order to beget the element of science which is its pure concept, immediate spirit must laboriously travel down a long path. – As it is established in its content and in the shapes that appear in it, this coming-to-be appears a bit differently from the way a set of instructions on how to take unscientific consciousness up to and into science would appear; it also appears somewhat differently from the way laying the foundations for science would appear. – In any case, it is something very different from the inspiration which begins immediately, like a shot from a pistol, with absolute knowledge, and which has already finished with all the other standpoints simply by declaring that it will take no notice of them.

However, the task of leading the individual from his culturally immature standpoint up to and into science had to be taken in its universal sense, and the universal individual, the world spirit, had to be examined in the development of its cultural education. – With regard to the relationship between these two, each moment, as it achieves concrete form and its own figuration, appears in the universal individual. However, the particular individual is an incomplete spirit, a concrete shape whose entire existence falls into one determinateness and in which the other features are only present as intermingled traits. In any spirit that stands higher than another, the lower concrete existence has descended to the status of an insignificant moment; what was formerly at stake is now only a trace; its shape has been covered over and has become a simple shading of itself. The individual whose substance is spirit standing at the higher level runs through these past forms in the way that a person who takes up a higher science goes through those preparatory studies which he has long ago internalized in order to make their content current before him; he calls them to mind without having his interest linger upon them. In that way, each individual spirit also runs through the culturally formative stages of the universal spirit, but it runs through them as shapes which spirit has already laid aside, as stages on a path that has been worked out and leveled out in the same way that we see fragments of knowing, which in earlier ages occupied men of mature minds, now sink to the level of exercises, and even to that of games for children. In this pedagogical progression, we recognize the history of the cultural formation of the world sketched in silhouette. This past existence has already become an acquired possession of the universal spirit; it constitutes the substance of the individual, or, his inorganic nature. – In this respect, the cultural formation of the individual regarded from his own point of view consists in his acquiring all of this which is available, in his living off that inorganic nature and in his taking possession of it for himself. Likewise, this is nothing but the universal spirit itself, or, substance giving itself its self-consciousness, or, its coming-to-be and its reflective turn into itself.

29. Science of this culturally educative movement is the detail and the necessity of its shaping, as what has been diminished into a moment and a possession of spirit. The aim is spirit's insight into what knowing is. Impatience demands the impossible, which is to say, to achieve the end without the means. On the one hand, the length of the path has to be endured, for each moment is necessary – but on the other hand, one must linger at every stage on the way, for each stage is itself an entire individual shape, and it is viewed absolutely only insofar as its determinateness is viewed as a whole, or, as concrete, or, insofar as the whole is viewed in terms of the distinctiveness of this determination. – Both because the substance of the individual, the world spirit, has possessed the patience to pass through these forms over a long stretch of time and to take upon itself the prodigious labor of world history, and because it could not have reached consciousness about itself in any lesser way, the individual spirit itself cannot comprehend its own substance with anything less. At the same time, it has less trouble in doing so because in the meantime it has accomplished this in itself – the content is already actuality erased to possibility, immediacy which has been mastered. That content, which is already what has been thought,²⁸ is the possession of individuality. It is no longer existence which is to be converted into being-in-itself. Rather, it is just the in-itself which is to be converted into the form of being-for-itself. The way this is done is now to be more precisely determined.

In this movement, although the individual is spared the sublation of existence, what still remains is the representation of and the familiarity with the forms. The existence taken back into the substance is through that first negation at first only immediately transferred into the element of self. The element thus still has the same character of uncomprehended immediacy, or, of unmoved indifference as existence itself, or, it has only passed over into representational thought.²⁹ – As a result, it is at the same time familiar to us, or, it is the sort of thing that spirit has finished with, in which spirit has no more activity, and, as a result, in which spirit has no further interest. However much the activity, which is finished with existence, is itself the immediate, or, however much it is the existing mediation and thereby the movement only of the particular spirit which is not comprehending itself, still in contrast knowing is directed against the representational thought which has come about through this immediacy, is directed against this familiarity, and it is thus the doing of the universal self and the interest of thinking.

31. What is familiar and well known³⁰ as such is not really known³¹ for the very reason that it is familiar and well known. In the case of cognition, the most common form of self-deception and deception of others is when one presupposes something as well known and then makes one's peace with it. In that kind of back-and-forth chatter about various pros and cons, such knowing, without knowing how it happens to it, never really gets anywhere. Subject and object, God, nature, understanding, sensibility, etc., are, as is well known, all unquestioningly laid as foundation stones which constitute fixed points from which to start and to which to return. The movement proceeds here and there between those points, which themselves remain unmoved, and it thereby operates only upon the surface. Thus, for a person to grasp and to examine matters consists only in seeing whether he finds everything said by everybody else to match up with his own idea³² about the matter, or with whether it seems that way to him and whether or not it is something with which he is familiar.

As it used to be carried out, the analysis of a representation was indeed nothing but the sublation of the form of its familiarity.³³ To break up a representation into its original elements is to return to its moments, which at least do not have the form of a representation which one has simply stumbled across, but which instead constitute the immediate possession of the self. To be sure, this analysis would only arrive at thoughts which are themselves familiar and fixed, or it would arrive at motionless determinations. However, what is separated, the non-actual itself, is itself an essential moment, for the concrete is self-moving only because it divides itself and turns itself into the non-actual. The activity of separating is the force and labor of the understanding, the most astonishing and the greatest of all the powers, or rather, which is the absolute power. The circle, which, enclosed within itself, is at rest and which, as substance, sustains its moments, is the immediate and is, for that reason, an unsurprising relationship. However, the accidental, separated from its surroundings, attains an isolated freedom and its own proper existence only in its being bound to other actualities and only as existing in their context; as such, it is the tremendous power of the negative; it is the energy of thinking, of the pure I. Death, if that is what we wish to call that non-actuality, is the most fearful thing of all, and to keep and hold fast to what is dead requires only the greatest force. Powerless beauty detests the understanding because the understanding expects of her what she cannot do. However, the life of spirit is not a life that is fearing death and austerely saving itself from ruin; rather, it bears death calmly, and in death, it sustains itself. Spirit only wins its truth by finding its feet in its absolute disruption. Spirit is not this power which, as the positive, avoids looking at the negative, as is the case when we say of something that it is nothing, or that it is false, and then, being done with it, go off on our own way on to something else. No, spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face and lingering with it. This lingering is the magical power that converts it into being. – This power is the same as what in the preceding was called the subject, which, by giving existence to determinateness in its own element, sublates abstract immediacy, or, is only existing immediacy, and, as a result, is itself the true substance, is being, or, is the immediacy which does not have mediation external to itself but is itself this mediation.

That what is represented becomes a possession of pure self-consciousness, namely, this elevation to universality itself, is only one aspect of cultural formation and is not yet fully perfected cultural formation. – The course of studies of the ancient world is distinct from that of modern times in that the ancient course of studies consisted in a thoroughgoing cultivation of natural consciousness. Experimenting particularly with each part of its existence and philosophizing about everything it came across, the ancient course of studies fashioned itself into an altogether active universality. In contrast, in modern times, the individual finds the abstract form ready-made. The strenuous effort to grasp it and make it his own is more of an unmediated drive to bring the inner to the light of day; it is the truncated creation of the universal rather than the emergence of the universal from out of the concrete, from out of the diversity found in existence. Nowadays the task before us consists not so much in purifying the individual of the sensuously immediate and in making him into a thinking substance which has itself been subjected to thought;³⁴ it consists instead in doing the very opposite. It consists in actualizing and spiritually animating the universal through the sublation of fixed and determinate thoughts. However, it is much more difficult to set fixed thoughts into fluid motion than it is to bring sensuous existence into such fluidity. The reason for this lies in what was said before. The former determinations have the I, the power of the negative, or, pure actuality, as their substance and as the element of their existence, whereas sensuous determinations have their substance only in impotent abstract immediacy, or in being as such. Thoughts become fluid by pure thinking, this inner immediacy, recognizing³⁵ itself as a moment, or, by pure self-certainty abstracting itself from itself – it does not consist in only omitting itself, or, setting itself off to one side. Rather, it consists in giving up the fixity of its self-positing as well as the fixity of the purely concrete, which is the I itself in opposition to the differences of its content – as the fixity of differences which, posited as existing in the element of pure thinking, share that unconditionality of the I. Through this movement, pure thoughts become concepts, and are for the first time what they are in truth: self-moving movements, circles, which are what their substance is; namely, spiritual essentialities.

This movement of pure essentialities constitutes the nature of scientific rigor per se. As the connectedness of its content, this movement is both the necessity of that content and its growth into an organic whole. The path along which the concept of knowing is reached likewise itself becomes a necessary and complete coming-to-be, so that this preparation ceases to be a contingent philosophizing which just happens to fasten onto this and those objects, relations, or thoughts arising from an imperfect consciousness and having all the contingency such a consciousness brings in its train; or, it ceases to be the type of philosophizing which seeks to ground the truth in only clever argumentation about pros and cons or in inferences based on fully determinate thoughts and the consequences following from them. Instead, through the movement of the concept, this path will encompass the complete worldliness³⁶ of consciousness in its necessity.

Furthermore, such an account constitutes the first part of science, since the existence of spirit as primary is nothing else but the immediate itself, or, the beginning, which is not yet its return into itself. Hence, the element of immediate existence is the determinateness though which this part of science renders itself distinct from the other parts. – The account of this difference leads directly to the discussion of a few of those idées fixes that usually turn up in these discussions.

The immediate existence of spirit, consciousness, has two moments, namely, knowing and the objectivity which is negative to knowing. While spirit develops itself in this element and explicates its moments therein, still this opposition corresponds to these moments, and they all come on the scene as shapes of consciousness. The science of this path is the science of the experience consciousness goes through.³⁷ Substance is considered in the way that it and its movement are the objects of consciousness. Consciousness knows and comprehends nothing but what is in its experience, for what is in experience is just spiritual substance, namely, as the object of its own self. However, spirit becomes the object, for it is this movement of becoming an other to itself, which is to say, of becoming an object to its own self and of sublating this otherness. And experience is the name of this very movement in which the immediate, the non-experienced, i.e., the abstract (whether the abstract is that of sensuous being or of “a simple” which has only been thought about) alienates itself and then comes round to itself from out of this alienation. It is only at that point that, as a property of consciousness, the immediate is exhibited in its actuality and in its truth.

The inequality which takes place in consciousness between the I and the substance which is its object is their difference, the negative itself. It can be viewed as the defect of the two, but it is their very soul or is what moves them. This is why certain ancients conceived of the void as what moved things in conceiving of what moves things as the negative, but they did not yet grasp this negative as the self. – However much this negative now initially appears as the inequality between the I and the object, still it is just as much the inequality of the substance with itself. What seems to take place outside of the substance, to be an activity directed against it, is its own doing, and substance shows that it is essentially subject. While substance has completely shown this, spirit has made its existence equal to its essence. Spirit is an object to itself in the way that it is, and the abstract element of immediacy and the separation between knowing and truth is overcome. Being is absolutely mediated – it is a substantial content which is just as much immediately the possession of the I, is self-like, or is the concept. With that, the phenomenology of spirit brings itself to its conclusion. What spirit prepares for itself in its phenomenology is the element of knowing. In this element, the moments of spirit unfold themselves into the form of simplicity which knows its object to be itself. They no longer fall apart into the opposition of being and knowing but instead remain in the simplicity of knowing itself, and they are the truth in the form of the truth, and their diversity is only a diversity of content. Their movement, which organizes itself in this element into a whole, is logic, or speculative philosophy.

Now because the system of spirit's experience embraces only the appearance of spirit, it seems to be the case that the advance from this system to the science of the true in the shape of the true is merely negative, and one might wish to be spared the negative (as the false) and demand instead to be taken without further ado straight to the truth. Why bother with the false at all? – What was mentioned above, namely, that perhaps we should have begun straight away with science, may be answered here by taking into consideration that aspect which has to do with the general make-up of the negative when it is regarded as the false. Ordinary ideas³⁸ on this subject especially obstruct the entrance to the truth. This will provide an opportunity to speak about mathematical cognition, which non-philosophical knowing looks upon as the ideal which philosophy must try to attain but towards which it has so far striven in vain.

The true and the false belong to those determinate thoughts that are regarded as motionless essences unto themselves, with one standing fixedly here and the other standing fixedly there, and each being isolated from the other and sharing no commonality. Against that view, it must be maintained that truth is not a stamped coin issued directly from the mint and ready for one's pocket. Nor is there “a” false, no more than there is “an” evil. To be sure, evil and falsehood are not as bad as the devil, since, if they are taken as the devil, they are made into particular subjects. However, as false and evil, they are only universals, even though they have an essentiality of their own vis-à-vis each other. – The false, for it is only the false which is being spoken of here, would be the other, the negative of substance which, as the content of knowing, is the true. However, the substance is itself essentially the negative, in part as the difference and the determination of the content, and in part as a simple differentiating, which is to say, as the self and knowing as such. To be sure, we can know falsely. For something to be known falsely means that knowing is unequal to its substance. Yet this very inequality is the differentiating per se, the essential moment. It is indeed out of this differentiation that its equality comes to be, and this equality, which has come to be, is truth. However, it is not truth in the sense that would just discard inequality, like discarding the slag from pure metal, nor even is it truth in the way that a finished vessel bears no trace of the instrument that shaped it. Rather, as the negative, inequality is still itself immediately present, just as the self in the true as such is itself present. For that reason, it cannot be said that the false constitutes a moment or even a constituent part of the true. Take the saying that “In every falsehood, there is something true” – in this expression both of them are regarded as oil and water, which cannot mix and are only externally combined. It is precisely for the sake of pointing out the significance of the moment of complete otherness that their expression must no longer be employed in the instances where their otherness has been sublated. Just as the expressions, “unity of subject and object” or of “the finite and infinite,” or of “being and thinking,” etc., have a certain type of clumsiness to them in that subject and object, etc., mean what they are outside of their unity, and therefore in their unity, they are not meant in the way that their expression states them, so too the false as the false is no longer a moment of truth.

The dogmatism of the way of thinking, in both the knowing of philosophy and the study of it, is nothing but the opinion that truth consists either in a proposition which is a fixed result or else in a proposition which is immediately known. To questions like, “When was Caesar born?”, “How many toise were there in a stadion and what did they amount to?”, etc., a neat and tidy answer is supposed to be given, just as it is likewise determinately true that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides of a right-angled triangle. However, the nature of such a so-called truth is different from the nature of philosophical truths.

With regard to historical truths, to take note of them very briefly, it is the case that insofar as they are examined in light of what is purely historical in them, it will be readily granted that they have to do with individual existence, with a contingent and arbitrary content, and with the non-necessary determinations of that individual existence. – However, even bare truths like those cited in the example do not exist without the movement of self-consciousness. In order to know any one of them, there has to be a good deal of comparison, books also have to be consulted, or, in some way or other, inquiry has to be carried out. Even in the case of immediate intuition, acquaintance with them is held to be of true value only when such acquaintance is linked to the reasons behind it, even though it is really just the unadorned result itself which is supposed to be at issue.

As for mathematical truths, one would hardly count as a geometer if one only knew Euclid's theorems by heart without knowing the proofs, or, so it might be expressed by way of contrast, without knowing them really deep down in one's heart. Likewise, if by measuring many right-angled triangles, one came to know that their sides are related in the well-known way, the knowing thus gained would be regarded as unsatisfactory. Nonetheless, the essentiality of the proof in the case of mathematical cognition does not yet have the significance and the nature of being a moment in the result itself; rather, in the result, the proof is over and done with and has vanished. As a result, the theorem is arguably one that is seen to be true. However, this added circumstance has nothing to do with its content but only with its relation to the subject. The movement of mathematical proof does not belong to the object but is a doing that is external to the item at hand. The nature of a right-angled triangle does not divide itself up in the manner exhibited in the mathematical construction which is necessary for the proof of the proposition expressing its ratio. The whole act of producing the result is a process and a means of cognition. – In philosophical cognition, the coming-to-be of existence as existence is also different from the coming-to-be of essence, or the inner nature of the thing at issue. However, in the first place, philosophical cognition contains both, whereas in contrast mathematical cognition exhibits only the coming-to-be of existence, i.e., the coming-to-be of the being of the nature of the thing at issue in cognition as such. Moreover, philosophical cognition also unites these two particular movements. The inward emergence, or the coming-to-be, of substance is an undivided transition into the external, or into existence, into being for another, and conversely, the coming-to-be of existence is its taking-itself-back into essence. In that way, the movement is the twofold process and coming-to-be of the whole, so that at the same time each posits the other, and, for that reason, each in itself also has both of them as two viewpoints. Together they make the whole by dissolving themselves and making themselves into moments of the whole.

In mathematical cognition, insight is an external doing vis-à-vis the item at issue. It follows that the true item at issue is thereby altered. The tools, the construction, and the proof thus do indeed contain true propositions. However, it must nonetheless be stated that the content is false. The triangle in the above example is taken apart, and its parts are then affixed onto other figures that the construction which is contained in the triangle permits to emerge. It is only at the end that the triangle which is really at issue is reinstated; it was lost to view during the course of the procedure and appeared only in fragments that belonged to other wholes. – Thus, we see here the negativity of the content making its entrance on to the scene, a negativity which would have to be called a falsity of the content just as much as, in the movement of the concept, one would have to speak of the disappearance of supposedly fixed thoughts.

But the genuine defectiveness of this kind of cognition has to do with cognition itself as much as it does with its material. – In the first place, as to what concerns cognition, no insight into the necessity of the construction is achieved. The necessity does not emerge from the concept of the theorem. Rather, it is imposed, and one is instructed to draw just these lines when an infinite number of others could have been drawn and to obey blindly the injunction without any more knowing on one's part other than the fond belief that this will serve the purpose of leading to the proof. This purposiveness also turns out later on to be only external because it is only afterwards, in the proof itself, that it first becomes evident. – Likewise, the proof itself takes a path that begins anywhere, without one knowing as yet what relation this beginning has to the result that is supposed to emerge. In the progress of the proof, it incorporates these determinations and relations and leaves others alone, but it does this without immediately seeing what necessity there is in the matter. It is an external purpose which controls this movement.

The convincingness³⁹ of this defective cognition is something of which mathematics is proud and which it brags about to philosophy, but it rests solely on the poverty of its purpose and the defectiveness of its material, and it is for that reason the kind of thing that philosophy must spurn. – Its purpose, or its concept, is magnitude. It is precisely this relationship which is non-essential and devoid of the concept. For that reason, the movement of knowing in mathematics takes place only on the surface; it does not touch on the thing that really matters, does not touch on the essence, or the concept, and hence it does not constitute any kind of comprehension of what is at stake. – The material that provides mathematics with this gratifying wealth of truths consists of space and numerical units. Space is the existence in which the concept inscribes its differences as it would in an empty, dead element in which the differences themselves are just as unmoved and lifeless. The actual is not something spatial as it is taken to be in mathematics; neither concrete sensuous intuition nor philosophy wastes any time with the kinds of non-actualities which are the things of mathematics. In such non-actual elements, there are then only non-actual truths, which is to say, fixed, dead propositions; one can call a halt to any of them, but the next begins anew on its own account without the first itself having moved on to another and without any necessary connection arising out of the nature of the thing at issue. – It is also on account of that principle and element – and what is formal in mathematical convincingness consists in this – that knowing advances along the line of equality. Precisely because it does not move itself, what is lifeless does not make it all the way to the differences of essence, nor to essential opposition, or to inequality, nor to the transition of one opposition into its opposite, nor to qualitative, immanent self-movement. For it is magnitude alone, the inessential difference, that mathematics deals with. It is the concept that divides⁴⁰ space into its dimensions and determines the combinations of space's dimensions and combinations within space's dimensions; mathematics abstracts from that. Mathematics does not consider, for example, the relation of line to surface, and when it compares the diameter of a circle with its circumference, it runs up against their incommensurability, which is to say, a ratio lying in the concept, or an infinite, which itself eludes mathematical determination.

46. Immanent, so-called pure mathematics also does not set time, as time, over and against space as the second material for its study. Applied mathematics, to be sure, deals with time in the way it deals with motion and other actual things, but it incorporates synthetic propositions, i.e., propositions about their ratios which are determined by their concept. It takes those synthetic propositions from experience, and it only applies its formulae to those presuppositions. That the so-called proofs of such propositions which applied mathematics frequently provides, such as those concerning the equilibrium of the lever, the relation of space and time in falling motion, etc., should be given and accepted as proofs, is itself only proof of how great the need for proof is for cognition, since even where it has no more proof, cognition still respects the empty semblance of proof and even thereby attains a kind of satisfaction. A critique of those proofs would be as odd as it would be instructive; in part it would cleanse mathematics of this kind of false polish, and in part it would point out both its limitations and thereby the necessity for another type of knowing. – As for time: One might presume that time, as the counterpart to space, would constitute the material of the other division of pure mathematics, but time is the existing concept itself. The principle of magnitude, or the principle of the conceptless difference, and the principle of equality, or that of abstract, lifeless unity, are incapable of dealing with that pure restlessness of life and its absolute difference. Only as something paralyzed, in fact, as the [quantitative] one, does this negativity thereby become the second material of this cognizing, which, itself being an external activity, reduces what is self-moving to “stuff” simply in order now to have in that “stuff” an indifferent, external, lifeless content.

In contrast, philosophy does not study inessential determinations but only those that are essential. The abstract or the non-actual is not its element and content; rather, its element and content is the actual, what is self-positing, what is alive within itself, or existence in its concept. It is the process which creates its own moments and passes through them all; it is the whole movement that constitutes the positive and its truth. This movement just as much includes within itself the negative, or what would be called “the false” if it were to be taken as something from which one might abstract. It is what disappears and which is instead itself to be taken as essential, but not as having the determination of something fixed, something cut off from the truth, which along the way is to be set aside (who knows where?) as something that lies outside of the truth, just as the truth also cannot be thought of as what is lifelessly positive and completely at rest. Appearance is both an emergence and a passing away which does not itself emerge and pass away but which instead is in itself and which constitutes the actuality and the living movement of truth. The truth is the bacchanalian revel where not a member is sober, because, in isolating himself from the revel, each member is just as immediately dissolved into it – the ecstasy is likewise transparently and simply motionless. Judged in the court of that movement, the individual shapes of spirit do not stably exist any more than do determinate thoughts, but they are also equally positive, necessary moments just as much as they are negative, disappearing moments. – In the whole of the movement, taken as being at rest, what distinguishes itself in it and what gives itself existence is preserved as the kind that remembers, as that whose existence is its knowing of itself, just as this self-knowing is no less immediate existence.

It might seem necessary to state at the outset the principal points concerning the method of this movement, or the method of science. However, its concept lies in what has already been said, and its genuine exposition belongs to logic, or is instead even logic itself, for the method is nothing but the structure of the whole in its pure essentiality. However, on the basis of what has been said up until now, we must be aware that the system of representations relating to philosophical method itself also belongs to an already vanished cultural shape. – However much this may perhaps sound somewhat boastful or revolutionary, and however much I take myself to be far from striking such a tone, still it is worthwhile to keep in mind that the scientific régime bequeathed by mathematics – a régime of explanations, classifications, axioms, a series of theorems along with their proofs, principles, and the consequences and inferences to be drawn from them – has in common opinion already come to be regarded as itself at the least out of date. Even though it has not been clearly seen just exactly why that régime is so unfit, little to no use at all is any longer made of it, and even though it is not condemned in itself, it is nonetheless not particularly well liked. And we must be prejudiced in favor of the excellent and believe that it can put itself to use and bring itself into favor. However, it is not difficult to see that the mode of setting forth a proposition, producing reasons for it, and then also refuting its opposite with an appeal to reason is not the form in which truth can emerge. Truth is the movement of itself in its own self, but the former method is that of a cognition which is external to its material. For that reason, such a method is peculiar to mathematics and must be left to mathematics, which, as noted, has for its principle the conceptless relationship of magnitude, and takes its material from dead space as well as from the equally lifeless numerical unit. In a freer style, that is to say, in a mélange of even more quirks and contingency, it may also endure in ordinary life, say, in a conversation or in the kind of historical instruction which satisfies curiosity more than it results in knowing, in the same way that, more or less, a preface does. In everyday life, consciousness has for its content little bits of knowledge, experiences, sensuous concretions, as well as thoughts, principles, and, in general, it has its content in whatever is present, or in what counts as a fixed, stable entity or essence. In part consciousness continues on this path, and in part it interrupts the whole context through a free, arbitrary choice about such content, in which it conducts itself as if it were an external determining and manipulation of that content. It leads the content back to some kind of certainty, even if it may be only the feeling of the moment, and its conviction is satisfied when it arrives at some familiar resting place.

However, let it be granted that the necessity of the concept has banished the slipshod style of those conversations which are composed out of only clever argumentation, and let it also be granted that it has also banished the inflexibility of scientific pomposity. Nonetheless, it does not follow, as we have already noted, that its place ought be swapped for the un-method that bases itself on either vague sentiments or on inspiration, nor does it follow that it should be swapped for the capriciousness of prophetic chatter. Both of these approaches despise not only the scientific rigor of the necessity of the concept; they despise scientific rigor altogether.

When triplicity⁴¹ was rediscovered by Kantian thought – rediscovered by instinct, since at that time the form was dead and deprived of the concept – and when it was then elevated to its absolute significance, the true form was set out in its true content, and the concept of science was thereby engendered – but there is almost no use in holding that the triadic form has any scientific rigor when we see it reduced to a lifeless schema, to a mere façade, and when scientific organization itself has been reduced to a tabular chart. – Although we spoke earlier in wholly general terms about this formalism, now we wish to state more precisely just what this approach is. This formalism takes itself to have comprehended and expressed the nature and life of a shape when it affirmed a determination of the schema to be a predicate of that life or shape. – The predicate may be that of subjectivity or objectivity, or it may be that of magnetism, electricity, or, for that matter, contraction or expansion, east or west, and so forth. All of them can be infinitely multiplied, since in this way of proceeding each determination or shape can be used as a form or moment of the schema for every other determination, and each moment can profitably perform the same service for the other – a circle of reciprocity whose result is that one neither learns from experience about the thing at issue, nor does one learn what one or the other of the reciprocal elements is. In such a way of proceeding, what partly happens is that sensuous determinations are picked up out of ordinary intuition, determinations which of course are supposed to mean something different from what they say, and what partly happens is that the pure determinations of thought, or what is meaningful in itself, such as subject, object, substance, cause, the universal, etc., are each used as uncritically and unquestioningly as they are used in everyday life, indeed, in the same way that expressions like “strong” and “weak” and “expansion” and “contraction” are used. In the former case, the metaphysics is thereby as unscientific as are those sensuous representations in the latter case.

Instead of being expressed according to the inner life and the self-movement of its existence, such a simple determinateness of intuition, which here just means sensuous knowing, is now expressed in terms of a superficial analogy, and this external and empty application of the formula is called construction. – It is the same case with that kind of formalism as it is with all others. How dull a man's head must be if he could not in a quarter of an hour come up with the theory that there are asthenic, sthenic, and indirectly asthenic diseases and then come up with just as many cures, and who could not in a short time be thereby transformed from an experienced man into a theoretical physician, since, after all, it was not so long ago that such a kind of instruction sufficed to do precisely that. However much the formalism of nature-philosophy teaches that understanding is electricity, that animals are nitrogen, or even that they are equivalent to south or north poles, and so forth, and however much it represents these matters as baldly as it is expressed here, and however much it concocts its brew with even more terminology, still, when an inexperienced person encounters this nature-philosophy, something like the following can occur. When that person encounters the kind of force which brings together the kinds of things which otherwise seem so far removed from each other, and when that person also then comes face to face with the violence suffered by what is sensuous and motionless as a result of this combination, or a combination which only confers the mere semblance of conceptual thought on all of this and which thus spares itself the main point, namely, expressing the concept itself, expressing what the sensuous representations mean – when that happens, then such an inexperienced person may very well be led to a kind of admiration, astonishment, or even a veneration for the profound geniuses who can pull off such a feat. He may also feel a certain delight at the vividness of such determinations, since they replace the abstract concept with something more intuitive and make it more pleasing. He may even congratulate himself for feeling a kinship of soul with such a splendid way of viewing things. The flair for displaying that sort of wisdom is as quickly acquired as it is easy to practice, but when it becomes familiar, its repetition becomes as intolerable as the repetition of any other bit of sleight of hand once one has seen through the trick. The instrument of this monotonous formalism is no more difficult to handle than the palette of a painter which contains only two colors, perhaps red and green, the former for coloring the surface when we require a historical piece, the latter when we require a landscape. – It would be difficult to decide which is thereby grander: The ease with which everything in heaven and earth, or even for that matter, everything under the earth, is bathed with that broth of color, or the fantasy about the excellence of this universal tool, since each underwrites the other. This method, which consists in taking the pair of determinations out of that universal schema and then plastering them onto everything in heaven and earth, onto all the natural and spiritual shapes and then organizing everything in this manner, produces nothing less than a “crystal clear report on the organism of the universe.” This “report” is like a tabular chart, which is itself a little bit like a skeleton with small bits of paper stuck all over it, or maybe a bit like the rows of sealed and labeled boxes in a grocer's stall. Either of these makes just as much sense as the other, and, as in the former case, where there are only bones with the flesh and blood stripped off of them, and as in the latter case, where something equally lifeless has been hidden away in those boxes, in this “report,” the living essence of what is at stake has been omitted or concealed. – It was previously noted that this style at the same time culminates in monochromatic, absolute painting, in being ashamed at the differences existing in the schema and thus looking on them as belonging to reflection. It thus submerges them into the void of the absolute, from out of which pure identity, a pure formless whiteness, is produced. The monochromatic nature of the schema and its lifeless determinations, together with this absolute identity and the transition from one to the other, are each and every one the result of the same lifeless intellect⁴² and external cognition.

The excellent not only cannot escape the fate of being deprived of life and spirit, of being flayed and then seeing its skin wrapped around lifeless knowing and that lifeless knowing's vanity. But even in this fate, one still takes cognizance⁴³ of the power excellence exercises over the heart, if not over the spirit; one also takes cognizance⁴⁴ of the constructive unfolding into universality and the determinateness of form in which its consummation consists, which alone makes it possible for this universality to be put to such superficial use.

Science may organize itself only through the proper life of the concept. The determinateness which was taken from the schema and externally stuck onto existence is in science the self-moving soul of the content which has been brought to fulfillment. On the one hand, the movement of “what is”⁴⁵ consists in becoming an other to itself and thus in coming to be its own immanent content; on the other hand, it takes this unfolding back into itself, or it takes its existence back into itself, which is to say, it makes itself into a moment, and it simplifies itself into determinateness. In that movement, negativity is differentiating and positing of existence; in this latter return into itself, negativity consists in the coming-to-be of determinate simplicity. In this way, the content shows that its determinateness is not first received from an other and then externally pinned onto it; rather, the content gives itself this determinateness, it bestows on itself the status of being a moment, and it gives itself a place in the whole. The understanding, which likes to put everything in its own little pigeon-hole, retains for itself the necessity and the concept of the content which constitutes the concrete, or actuality itself, the living movement of the subject matter which it puts in order, or rather, the understanding does not retain this for itself; it does not get to know⁴⁶ it, for if it were to have this insight, it would surely indicate that it had it. It has no cognizance at all of the need for such insight; if it did, it would refrain from schematizing, or at least it would know that it knows no more than what is made available through a table of contents. A table of contents is all that the understanding offers, but it does not supply the contents itself. – However much determinateness such as, for example, magnetism, is in itself concrete, or is actual, it is nonetheless downgraded to the status of something lifeless since it is only predicated of another existence, and no cognizance⁴⁷ is taken of the immanent life of this existence, nor of how it has its indigenous and distinctive self-production and exposition. The formal understanding leaves it to others to add this main point. – Instead of entering into the immanent content of the subject matter, the understanding always surveys the whole and stands above the individual existence of which it speaks, or, what amounts to the same thing, it does not see it at all. However, scientific cognition requires instead that it give itself over to the life of the object, or, what is the same thing, that it have the inner necessity of the object before it and that it express this inner necessity. Absorbing itself in its object, it forgets the former overview, which is only a reflection of knowing out of the content and back into itself. However, sunken into the material and advancing in that material's movement, knowing returns back into itself, but not before the fulfillment, or the content, takes itself back into itself, simplifies itself into determinateness, reduces itself to one aspect of an existence, and passes over into its higher truth. By this movement, the simple whole, surveying itself, emerges out of the wealth in which its reflection seemed to be lost.

As it was previously expressed, because substance is in its own self subject, all content is its own reflective turn into itself. The stable existence, or the substance of an existence, is its self-equality, for its inequality would be its dissolution. However, self-equality is pure abstraction, but this pure abstraction is thinking. When I say, “quality,” I say, “simple determinateness”; it is by way of its quality that one existent is distinguished from another or that it is even determined that it is an existent at all. It is for itself,⁴⁸ that is, it stably exists through this simplicity with regard to itself. However, by doing so, it is essentially thinking. – It is here that one conceptually grasps that being is thinking, and it is here that the insight which tries to steer clear of that ordinary, non-comprehending talk of the identity of thinking and being finds its place. – Now, as a result the stable being of existence is self-equality or the pure abstraction, is the abstraction of itself from itself, or it is itself its own inequality with itself and its own dissolution – its own inwardness and withdrawal into itself – its coming-to-be. – Since this is the nature of what exists, and to the extent that what exists has this nature for knowing, this knowing is not an activity that treats the content as alien. It is not a reflective turn into itself from out of the content. Science is not the former idealism which replaced the dogmatism of assertion with the dogmatism of assurance, or the dogmatism of self-certainty – but rather, while knowing sees the content return into its own inwardness, its activity is instead sunken into that content, for the activity is the immanent self of the content as having at the same time returned into itself, since this activity is pure self-equality in otherness. In this way, that activity is a kind of cunning which, while seeming to abstain from activity, is looking on to see just how determinateness and its concrete life takes itself to be engaged in its own self-preservation and its own particular interest and how it is actually doing the very opposite, or how it is doing what leads to its own dissolution and what makes itself into a moment of the whole.

55. However much in the foregoing the significance of the understanding was stated in terms of the self-consciousness of substance, still, at least on the basis of what has already been said, it now becomes clear what its meaning is, according to the determination of substance as existing. – Existence is quality, self-equal determinateness, or determinate simplicity, determinate thought, and this is the understanding which is appropriate to existence.⁴⁹ It was for that reason that Anaxagoras first took cognizance⁵⁰ of Nous as the essence. Those who succeeded him grasped the nature of existence more determinately as Eidos or Idea, which is to say, as determinate universality, as a kind. The term, “kind,” perhaps seems too ordinary and too petty for the Ideas which are all the rage nowadays, such as beauty, holiness, and the eternal. However, “Idea”⁵¹ means neither more nor less than “kind,” or “species.” Yet nowadays we often see that an expression which determinately designates a concept is scorned, and whereas another is preferred to it simply for the reason that it belongs to a foreign language and that it both shrouds the concept completely in a fog and thereby sounds more edifying. – Just for the reason that existence is determined as a “kind,” it is simple thought; Nous, simplicity, is substance. On account of its simplicity, or its self-equality, it appears to be fixed and enduring. However, this self-equality is just as much negativity, and that fixed existence thereby passes over into its own dissolution. Its determinateness at first seems to be only through its relating itself to an other, and its movement seems imposed upon it by an alien power. However, that it has its otherness in itself and that it is self-moving are contained in that simplicity of thinking itself, for this is the self-moving and self-distinguishing thought, the thought which is its own inwardness, which is the pure concept. In that way, the intelligibility of the understanding is a coming-to-be, and as this coming-to-be, it is rationality.

Logical necessity in general consists in the nature of what it is to be its concept in its being. This alone is the rational, the rhythm of the organic whole, and it is just as much the knowing of the content as that content itself is the concept and the essence – that is, it is this alone which is the speculative. – The concrete shape which sets itself into movement makes itself into simple determinateness, and it thereby elevates itself to logical form and is in its essentiality. Its concrete existence is only this movement, and it is immediately logical existence. It is therefore unnecessary to apply externally a formalism to the concrete content. That content is in its own self a transition into this formalism, but it ceases to be the latter external formalism because the form is the indigenous coming-to-be of the concrete content itself.

On the one hand, this nature of scientific method is inseparable from the content, and on the other hand, it determines its rhythm through itself, and it has, as has already been noted, its genuine exposition in speculative philosophy. – Although what is stated here expresses the concept, it cannot count for more than an anticipatory affirmation. Its truth does not lie in this narrative exposition. For that very reason, it is not in the least refuted by any assertion to the contrary that the movement instead conducts itself in this or that way, or by calling to mind common conceptions⁵² as if they were truths both settled and familiar, or if something new is also served up and combined with the assurance that it flows forth from the shrine of inward, divine intuition. – This kind of reception is usually the first reaction on the part of knowing when something unfamiliar appears to it. It usually resists it in order to save both its freedom and its own insight and its own authority against alien authority, since the shape in which anything is comprehended for the first time always appears as that of alien authority – it also stages its resistance in order to rid itself of any semblance of the kind of shame which supposedly lies in something's having been learned, just as in those cases where the unfamiliar is greeted with applause, the reaction is of the same sort as what in another sphere consisted of ultra-revolutionary speech and action.

What thus matters to the study of science is that one take the rigorous exertion of the concept upon oneself. This requires concentrated attention to the concept as such, to simple determinations, such as, for example, being-in-itself, being-for-itself, self-equality, and so on, for these are pure self-movements of the kind that one might even call souls were it not that their concept denotes something higher than that. The habit of marking progress in representational thought finds interruption by the concept irksome; likewise, so does formal thinking in the way it employs non-actual thoughts to argue cleverly for this or that thing. That habit should be called materialized thinking, a contingent consciousness which is sunken into what is material and which at the same time finds it exceedingly difficult to lift its own self out of this matter and to be at one with itself. In contrast, only clever argumentation amounts to freedom from content and to the vanity that stands above all content. This vanity is expected to make the effort to give up this freedom, and, instead of being the arbitrary principle moving the content, it is supposed to let this freedom descend into the content and move itself by its own nature, which is to say, to let it move itself by means of the self as its own self and then to observe this movement. This refusal both to insert one's own views into the immanent rhythm of the concept and to interfere arbitrarily with that rhythm by means of wisdom acquired elsewhere, or this abstinence, are all themselves an essential moment of attentiveness to the concept.

There are two aspects to merely clever argumentation that call for further notice and which are to be contrasted with conceptually comprehending thinking.⁵³ – On the one hand, merely clever argumentation conducts itself negatively towards the content apprehended; it knows how to refute it and reduce it to nothing. It says, “This is not the way it is”; this insight is the merely negative; it is final, and it does not itself go beyond itself to a new content. Rather, if it is again to have any content, something other from somewhere else has to be found. It is reflection into the empty I, the vanity of its own knowing. – What this vanity expresses is not only that this content is vain but also that this insight itself is vain, for it is the negative which catches no glimpse of the positive within itself. Because this reflection does not gain its negativity itself for its content, it is not immersed in the subject matter at all but is always above and beyond it, and thus it imagines that by asserting the void, it is going much further than the insight which was so rich in content. On the other hand, as was formerly pointed out, in comprehensive thinking, the negative belongs to the content itself and is the positive, both as its immanent movement and determination and as the totality of these. Taken as a result, it is the determinate negative which emerges out of this movement and is likewise thereby a positive content.

But in view of the fact that such thinking has a content, whether the content is that of representations, or of thoughts, or is a mixture of the two, there is another aspect to it which makes such conceptual comprehension so difficult for it. The peculiar nature of this aspect is closely connected with the essence of the Idea itself as it was described above, or rather it expresses how the Idea appears as the movement which is itself that of thinking comprehension.⁵⁴ – For just now in its negative conduct, which was previously discussed, clever argumentative thinking is itself the self into which the content returns, and so too, the self in its positive cognition is a represented subject to which the content is related as accident and predicate. This subject constitutes the basis in which the content is bound and on the basis of which the movement runs back and forth. Comprehending thinking conducts itself in quite a different way. While the concept is the object's own self, or the self which exhibits itself as the object's coming-to-be, it is not a motionless subject tranquilly supporting the accidents; rather, it is the self-moving concept which takes its determinations back into itself. In this movement, the motionless subject itself breaks down; it enters into the differences and the content and constitutes the determinateness, which is to say, the distinguished content as well as the content's movement, instead of continuing simply to confront that movement. The solid basis which merely clever argumentation had found in the motionless subject thus begins to totter, and it is only this movement itself which becomes the object. The subject, which brings its content to fulfillment, ceases to go beyond this content and cannot have still other predicates or accidents. As a result, the dispersal of the content is, to the contrary, bound together under the self, and the content is not the universal which, as free from the subject, could belong to many others. The content is thereby in fact no longer the predicate of the subject; rather, it is the substance, the essence, and it is the concept of what it is which is being spoken of. Since the nature of representational thinking consists in marking advances with accidents or predicates and then, because they are nothing more than predicates and accidents, going beyond them, it is impeded in its course by what in the proposition has the form of a predicate being the substance itself. It suffers, to picture it in this way, from a counter-punch. Starting from the subject as if this were an enduring ground, it on the contrary finds that by the predicate being the substance, the subject has passed over into the predicate and has thereby become sublated. And since in this way, what seems to be the predicate has now become self-sufficient, or has become the whole show itself, thinking cannot freely roam about but is instead detained by this weight. – At first, it is usually the subject as the objective fixed self which is made into the ground. The necessary movement advances from here to the multiplicity of determinations, or the predicates. It is here that the knowing I takes the place of that subject, and it is here that it is both the binding together of the predicates and the subject supporting them. However, while that former subject enters into the determinations themselves and is their soul, the second subject, which is to say, the knowing subject, finds that the former, which it was supposed to be over and done with, and which it wants to go beyond in order to return into itself, is still there in the predicate. Instead of being able to be what sets the predicate in motion, the subject, as merely clever argumentation over whether this or that predicate is supposed to be attached, has instead something to do with the self of the content. The subject is not supposed to be for itself, but it is supposed to be together with this content.

61. What has been said can be expressed formally in this way. The nature of judgment, or of the proposition per se, which includes the difference between subject and predicate within itself, is destroyed by the speculative judgment, and the identical proposition, which the former comes to be, contains the counter-stroke to those relations. – This conflict between the form of a proposition per se and the unity of the concept which destroys that form is similar to what occurs in the rhythm between meter and accent. Rhythm results from the oscillating midpoint and unification of both. In that way, in the philosophical proposition, the identity of subject and predicate does not abolish their difference, which is expressed in the form of the proposition. Instead, their unity emerges as a harmony. The form of the proposition is the appearance of the determinate sense, or the accent that differentiates its fulfillment. However, when the predicate expresses the substance and the subject itself falls under the universal, there is the unity in which that accent fades away.

Some examples will clarify what has been said. Take the proposition: “God is being.” The predicate is being; it has a substantial meaning in which the subject melts away. Here, “being” is not supposed to be a predicate. It is supposed to be the essence, but, as a result, “God” seems to cease to be what it was through its place in the proposition, namely, to be a fixed subject. – Thinking, instead of getting any further with the transition from subject to predicate, feels instead inhibited, since the subject has dropped out of the picture, and, because it misses the subject, it is thrown back to the thought of the subject. Or, since the predicate itself has been expressed as a subject, as being, as the essence which exhausts the nature of the subject, it finds the subject also to be immediately present in the predicate. Now, instead of having taken an inward turn into the predicate, and instead of having preserved the free status of only clever argumentation, it is still absorbed in the content, or at least the demand for it to be so absorbed is present. – In that way when it is said, “The actual is the universal,” the actual, as subject, vanishes into its predicate. The universal is not supposed to have only the meaning of a predicate such that the proposition would state that, “The actual is the universal”; rather, the universal ought to express the essence of the actual. – Thinking thus loses its fixed objective basis which it had in the subject, when, in the predicate, it was thrown back to the subject, and when, in the predicate, it returns not into itself but into the subject of the content.

For the most part, this unfamiliar impediment forms the basis for the complaints about the unintelligibility of philosophical literature even when the individual has otherwise met the conditions of cultural formation for understanding such philosophical writing. In what is said about this, we see the reason behind the specific reproach which is so often leveled against such writings, namely, that so much has to be read over and over again before it can be understood – a reproach which has to do with such definitive unreasonableness that, if it were justified, no rejoinder would be possible. – It is clear from the above what is at stake here. The philosophical proposition, because it is a proposition, evokes the common opinion about both the usual relationship between subject and predicate and the customary procedure of knowing. This procedure and common opinion about such a procedure destroys its philosophical content. Common opinion then learns from experience that it means something other than what it took itself to have meant, and this correction of its opinion compels knowing to come back to the proposition and now to grasp it in some other way.

There is a difficulty which should be avoided, which consists in the commingling of the practices followed by speculation and those of merely clever argumentation, namely, when what is said of the subject at one time means its concept and then at another time means its predicate or its accident. – Each of those modes interferes with the other, and it is only the kind of philosophical exposition which rigorously excludes the ordinary relations among the parts of a proposition which would be able to achieve the goal of plasticity.

In fact, non-speculative thinking also has its rights, which are valid but which are ignored in the speculative proposition. The sublation of the form of the proposition must not only take place in an immediate manner through the mere content of the proposition. Rather, this oppositional movement must be given expression. It must not only be the internal impediment to thought, but rather this return into itself on the part of the concept must be shown. This movement, which constitutes what otherwise would have to be accomplished by proof, is the dialectical movement of the proposition itself. It alone is actual speculation, and it is only the expression of that movement which is a speculative account. As propositional, the speculative is only the internal impediment and the non-existing return of essence into itself. Hence, we often see philosophical accounts referring us to this inner intuition and thus sparing us the exposition of the dialectical movement of the proposition which we had demanded. – The proposition ought to express what the true is, but essentially “the true” is subject. As the latter, it is only the dialectical movement, this course of self-engendering, advancing, and then returning into itself. – In the case of cognition of other sorts, the proof constitutes this aspect of expressed inwardness. However, once dialectic has been separated from proof, the concept of philosophical demonstration has in fact been led astray.

On this point, it is worth remembering that the dialectical movement likewise has propositions for its parts or elements. Thus, the highlighted difficulty seems to recur continually and to be a difficulty in the nature of the subject matter. – This is similar to what happens in the case of ordinary proofs, namely, that the reasons it employs themselves need to be based again on other reasons, and so on, ad infinitum. However, this form of giving reasons and stating conditions belongs to that kind of proof which both differs from dialectical movement and which thereby belongs to external cognition. With regard to dialectical movement itself, its element is the pure concept; it thereby has a content that is out-and-out the subject in its own self. Therefore, there is no kind of content that comes forward which behaves as an underlying subject and which gets its significance by being attached to this as a predicate. Taken in its immediacy, that kind of proposition is only empty form. – Apart from the sensuously intuited or represented self, it is for the most part the name as a name, which denotes the pure subject, the empty, conceptless “one.” For this reason, it would, for example, be expedient to avoid the name, “God,” because this word is not immediately the concept but is rather at the same time the genuine name, the fixed point of rest of the underlying subject, whereas in contrast, e.g., “being,” or “the one,” “individuality,” “the subject,” etc., themselves immediately point to concepts. – Even when speculative truths are stated about that subject, their content lacks the immanent concept because that content is only present as a motionless subject, and in these circumstances, speculative truths easily take on the form of mere edification. – From this side, too, there is an obstacle based in the habit of grasping the speculative predicate according to the form of a proposition instead of grasping it as concept and essence. This obstacle can be increased or diminished depending on the way in which philosophical truths are rendered. The exposition which stays true to its insight into the nature of what is speculative must retain the dialectical form and must import nothing into it except what is both comprehended and is the concept.

The study of philosophy is hindered by the conduct of only clever argumentation, but it is hindered equally as much by the kind of acculturation which refuses to engage in such clever argumentation and which instead bases itself on widely accepted truths. The possessor of those widely accepted truths thinks he has no need to re-examine them; rather, he takes them to be fundamental, and he believes he is enabled not only to assert them but to be both judge and jury by means of them. In this regard, it is especially necessary to make philosophizing again into a serious business. In all the sciences and the arts, in all skills and crafts, the firm conviction prevails that in order to master them, one must spend a considerable amount of trouble in learning and practice. On the other hand, with regard to philosophy, there is a prejudice which in fact now seems to prevail, namely, that although anyone with eyes and fingers who acquires leather and a last is not for that reason in a position to make shoes, everybody nonetheless immediately understands how to philosophize and how to pass judgment on philosophy simply because he possesses the standard for doing so in his natural reason – as if he did not likewise possess in his own foot the standard for making a shoe. – It seems as if the possession of philosophy only consists in the lack of any specific kind of knowing and plan of study, and that as soon as one begins to acquire any such knowing and plan of study, philosophy itself ceases. Philosophy is quite often held to be a kind of formal knowledge, devoid of all content, but what is severely lacking in such a view is the insight that according to the content of any kind of knowledge and science, what counts as truth can only deserve the name of truth when philosophy has had a hand in its production. Other sciences may try as much as they like to get by without philosophy and to rely only on clever argumentation, but without philosophy, they are unable to possess any life, spirit, or truth in themselves.

With a view to genuine philosophy, we see the following. In lieu of the long course of cultural formation, a movement as rich as it is profound and through which spirit arrives at knowing, we now see the view that both the immediate revelation of the divine and the views of healthy common sense, neither of which are bothered or educated by any other type of knowing or by genuine philosophy, are supposed to be a complete equivalent for philosophy, and that they are as good a surrogate for philosophy as chicory is lauded as a surrogate for coffee. It is not pleasant to note how ignorance mixed with formless, tasteless crudity, which is itself incapable of concentrating its thoughts on an abstract proposition and even less so on the connections among many such propositions, assures itself at one time that it is itself freedom and is tolerance of thinking, and at another time it even assures itself of its own genius. Genius once was, as everyone knows, all the rage in poetry, just as it is nowadays also the rage in philosophy. However, instead of poetry, what was produced by this type of brilliance was, when it made any sense at all, only trivial prose, or, when it went beyond that, just loony chatter. Now in the same way natural philosophizing, which holds itself to be too good for the concept and which through this deficiency takes itself to be an intuitive and poetical thinking, trades in the arbitrary combinations of an imagination which is quite simply disorganized by its own thoughts – it trades in constructions that are neither fish nor fowl, neither poetry nor philosophy.

On the other hand, when it is flowing down the more peaceful riverbed of healthy common sense, natural philosophy dishes out at best a rhetoric of trivial truths. When it is reproached about the meaninglessness of what it offers, it assures us in reply that the sense and fulfillment of its meaning lies in its own heart and must in the same way also be present in the hearts of others; by using such phrases as the “heart's innocence,” “purity of conscience,” and so on, it supposes that it has spoken of final things against which nobody can object nor beyond which anything more can be demanded. However, what was supposed to happen there was not that the best was to be hidden away in inwardness; the best was supposed to be drawn up out of that deep well and brought up to the light of day. Such philosophizing could have long ago spared itself the trouble of bringing forth final truths of that sort. They were long since to be found, say, in the catechism, in popular proverbs, etc. – It is not difficult to grasp such truths in their indeterminateness and distortions, and it is often not difficult to point out that in those truths themselves, there is a consciousness of their very opposite. If their proponent takes the trouble to pull himself out of the disarray into which he has led himself, he will fall into new confusions and may very well make an outburst to the effect that such and such is settled and that anything else is sophistry – a slogan used by plain common sense against culturally mature reason, just as, for as long as anyone can remember the phrase, “day-dreaming” has summed up how those ignorant of philosophy have taken note of it. – While the proponent of common sense appeals to feeling, to an oracle dwelling within, he has nothing more to do with anyone who disagrees. He only has to explain that he has nothing more to say to anyone who does not find and feel the same thing in himself. – In other words, he tramples the roots of humanity underfoot. For the nature of humanity is to drive men to agreement with one another, and humanity's existence lies only in the commonality of consciousness that has been brought about. The anti-human, the only animalistic, consists in staying put in the sphere of feeling and in being able to communicate only through such feelings.

No matter how much a man asks for a royal road to science, no more convenient and comfortable way can be suggested to him than to put his trust in healthy common sense, and then for what else remains, to advance simply with the times and with philosophy, to read reviews of philosophical works, and perhaps even to go so far as to read the prefaces and the first paragraphs of the works themselves. After all, the preface provides the general principles on which everything turns, and the reviews provide both the historical memoranda and the critical assessment which, because it is a critical assessment, is on a higher plane than what it assesses. One can of course traverse this ordinary path in one's dressing-gown. However, if one is to take exaltation in the eternal, the holy, and the infinite, then one should take one's strides on that path when clad in the vestments of the high priest – a path which itself already has instead Immediate Being at its center, and which consists in the inspired resourcefulness of deep and original Ideas and of the lightning flashes of elevated thought. But in the same way that those depths do not reveal the wellspring of the essence, these sky-rockets are not yet the empyrean. True thoughts and scientific insight can only be won by the labor of the concept. Concepts alone can produce the universality of knowing, which is not the common indeterminateness and paltriness of plain common sense, but rather that of culturally mature and accomplished cognition. – It does not bring forth some uncommon universality of a reason whose talents have been ruined by the indolence and self-conceit of genius; rather, it brings forth this truth purified into its native form, which is capable of being the possession of all self-conscious reason.

While I have posited that science exists as a result of the self-movement of the concept, and while my way of looking at all the aspects of this diverges from current ideas⁵⁵ about the nature and shape of truth – all of which are in fact quite opposed to my own views (and not only the ones I have cited but others as well) – there does not seem to be much promise at all that an attempt to expound the system of science according to the characterization I have given of it will be received favorably. In the meantime, I can bear in mind that, for example, the excellence of Plato's philosophy has sometimes been said to lie in his scientifically valueless myths, and there have also been times, which have even been called times of religious enthusiasm,⁵⁶ in which the Aristotelian philosophy was esteemed for the sake of its speculative depth and when Plato's Parmenides, perhaps the greatest work of art of the ancient dialectic, has been taken to be the true disclosure and the positive expression of the divine life. There have even been times when there was a great deal of obscurity created by ecstasy, and this misunderstood ecstasy was in fact supposed to be nothing but the pure concept itself. – Furthermore, what is excellent about the philosophy of our time is that it has posited that its very value lies in scientific rigor itself. And even though others take a different view, it is only through its scientific rigor that the philosophy of our time has in fact begun to make itself felt. I can thereby also hope that this attempt to vindicate science's right to the concept and to expound science in this, its own distinctive element, will know how to force its way through the crowd by way of the inner truth of what is at stake. We must hold on to the conviction that it is the nature of truth to prevail when its time has come, and that it only appears when its time has come, and that it thus never appears too early nor does it appear for a public not yet ripe enough to receive it. We must also hold on to the conviction that the individual requires this effect in order to confirm for himself what is as yet for him still only his own solitary affair and in order for him to experience as universal what is initially only something particular to him. However, on these occasions, the public should often be distinguished from those who conduct themselves as its representatives and spokesmen. The public conducts itself in many respects quite differently from the latter, indeed in some ways even as opposed to them. However much the public will good-naturedly put the blame upon itself when a philosophical work does not quite appeal to it, still these representatives, so convinced of their own authority in the matter, will put all the blame instead on the authors. The work's effect on the public is more silent than the acts of these “dead burying their dead.”⁵⁷ However much the general level of insight is on the whole nowadays more highly cultivated, and the public's curiosity more wakeful, and however much its judgment more swiftly determined, still “the feet of them that shall carry thee out are already at the door,”⁵⁸ and thus such a matter needs to be distinguished from a more gradual effect which rectifies the attention extorted by those imposing assurances and their dismissive acts of censure. After a while, some are thus provided with a world of their own, whereas for some others, after a certain period of time, there is simply no posterity at all.

For the rest, at a time when the universality of spirit has grown so much stronger, and, as is fitting, when what is purely singular has correspondingly become even more a matter of indifference, and so too when the universality of spirit now both sticks to its entire breadth and claims all the cultural wealth it has built up, then the share in the total work of spirit which falls to the activity of any individual can only be very small. As the nature of science implies, the individual must thus all the more forget himself; namely, although he must become what he can and must do what he can, there is nonetheless even less which must be demanded of him, just as he in turn must both anticipate less for himself and may demand less for himself.

First Part Science of the Experience of Consciousness⁵⁹