Hegel_SOL_doctrine_of_being_part2m.mp3 (male voice)

But, it may be said, the determination of being assumed so far as the beginning can also be let go, so that the only requirement would be that a pure beginning should be made. Nothing would then be at hand except the beginning itself, and we must see what this would be. This position could be suggested also for the benefit of those who are either not comfortable, for whatever reason, with beginning with being and even less with the transition into nothing that follows from being, or who simply do not know how else to make a beginning in a science except by presupposing a representation which is subsequently analyzed, the result of the analysis then yielding the first determinate concept in the science. If we also want to test this strategy, we must relinquish every particular object that we may intend, since the beginning, as the beginning of thought, is meant to be entirely abstract, entirely general, all form with no content; we must have nothing, therefore, except the representation of a mere beginning as such. We have, therefore, only to see what there is in this representation. As yet there is nothing, and something is supposed to become. The beginning is not pure nothing but a nothing, rather, from which something is to proceed; also being, therefore, is already contained in the beginning. Therefore, the beginning contains both, being and nothing; it is the unity of being and nothing, or is non-being which is at the same time being, and being which is at the same time non-being. Further, being and nothing are present in the beginning as distinguished; for the beginning points to something other it is a non-being which refers to an other; that which begins, as yet is not; it only reaches out to being. The being contained in the beginning is such, therefore, that it distances itself from non-being or sublates it as something which is opposed to it. But further, that which begins already is, but is also just as much not yet. The opposites, being and non-being, are therefore in immediate union in it; or the beginning is their undifferentiated unity. An analysis of the beginning would thus yield the concept of the unity of being and non-being or, in a more reflected form, the concept of the unity of differentiated and undifferentiated being or of the identity of identity and non-identity. This concept could be regarded as the first, purest, that is, most abstract, definition of the absolute as it would indeed be if the issue were just the form of definitions and the name of the absolute. In this sense, just as such an abstract concept would be the first definition of the absolute, so all further determinations and developments would be only more determinate and richer definitions of it. But let those who are not satisfied with being as the beginning, since being passes over into nothing and what emerges is the unity of the two let them consider what is more likely to satisfy them: this beginning that begins with the representation of the beginning and an analysis of it (an analysis that is indeed correct yet equally leads to the unity of being and non-being) or a beginning which makes being the beginning. But, regarding this strategy, there is still a further observation to be made. The said analysis presupposes that the representation of the beginning is known; its strategy follows the example of other sciences. These presuppose their object and presume that everyone has the same representation of it and will find in it roughly the same determinations which they have collected here or there, through analysis, comparison, and sundry argumentation, and they then offer as its representations. But that which constitutes the absolute beginning must likewise be something otherwise known; now, if it is something concrete and hence in itself variously determined, then this connectedness which it is in itself is presupposed as a known; the connectedness is thereby adduced as something immediate, which however it is not; for it is connectedness only as a connection of distinct elements and therefore contains mediation within itself. Further, the accidentality and the arbitrariness of the analysis and the specific mode of determination affect the concrete internally. Which determinations are elicited depends on what each individual happens to discover in his immediate accidental representation. The connection contained within a concrete something, within a synthetic unity, is necessary only in so far as it is not found already given but is produced rather by the spontaneous return of the moments back into this unity, a movement which is the opposite of the analytical procedure that occurs rather within the subject and is external to the fact itself. Here we then have the precise reason why that with which the begin- ning is to be made cannot be anything concrete, anything containing a connection within its self. It is because, as such, it would presuppose within itself a process of mediation and the transition from a first to an other, of which process the concrete something, now become a simple, would be the result. But the beginning ought not itself to be already a first and an other, for anything which is in itself a first and an other implies that an advance has already been made. Consequently, that which constitutes the beginning, the beginning itself, is to be taken as something unanalyzable, taken in its simple, unfilled immediacy; and therefore as being, as complete emptiness. If, impatient with this talk of an abstract beginning, one should say that the beginning is to be made, not with the beginning, but directly with the fact itself, well then, this subject matter is nothing else than that empty being. For what this subject matter is, that is precisely what ought to result only in the course of the science, what the latter cannot presuppose to know in advance. On any other form otherwise assumed in an effort to have a beginning other than empty being, that beginning would still suffer from the same defects. Let those who are still dissatisfied with this beginning take upon themselves the challenge of beginning in some other way and yet avoiding such defects. But we cannot leave entirely unmentioned a more original beginning to philosophy which has recently gained notoriety, the beginning with the I. It derived from both the reflection that all that follows from the first truth must be deduced from it, and the need that this first truth should be something with which one is already acquainted, and even more than just acquainted, something of which one is immediately certain. This proposed beginning is not, as such, an accidental representation, or one which might be one thing to one subject and something else to another. For the I, this immediate consciousness of the self, appears from the start to be both itself an immediate something and something with which we are acquainted in a much deeper sense than with any other representation; true, anything else known belongs to this I, but it belongs to it as a content which remains distinct from it and is therefore accidental; the I, by contrast, is the simple certainty of its self. But the I is, as such, at the same time also a concrete, or rather, the I is the most concrete of all things the consciousness of itself as an infinitely manifold world. Before the I can be the beginning and foundation of philosophy, this concreteness must be excised, and this is the absolute act by virtue of which the I purifies itself and makes its entrance into consciousness as abstract I. But this pure I is now not immediate, is not the familiar, ordinary I of our consciousness to which everyone immediately links science. Truly, that act of excision would be none other than the elevation to the standpoint of pure knowledge in which the distinction between subject and object has disappeared. But as thus immediately demanded, this elevation is a subjective postulate; before it proves itself as a valid demand, the progression of the concrete I from immediate consciousness to pure knowledge must be demonstratively exhibited within the I itself, through its own necessity. Without this objective movement, pure knowledge, also when defined as intellectual intuition, appears as an arbitrary standpoint, itself one of those empirical states of consciousness for which everything depends on whether someone, though not necessarily somebody else, discovers it within himself or is able to produce it there. But inasmuch as this pure I must be essential, pure knowledge and pure knowledge is however one which is only posited in individual consciousness through an absolute act of self-elevation, is not present in it immediately we lose the very advantage which was to derive from this beginning of philosophy, namely that it is something with which everyone is well acquainted, something which everyone finds within himself and to which he can attach further reflection; that pure I, on the contrary, in its abstract, essential nature, is to ordinary consciousness an unknown, something that the latter does not find within itself. What comes with it is rather the disadvantage of the illusion that we are speaking of something supposedly very familiar, the I of empirical self-consciousness, whereas at issue is in fact something far removed from the latter. Determining pure knowledge as I acts as a continuing reminder of the subjective I whose limitations should rather be forgotten; it leads to the belief that the propositions and relations which result from the further development of the I occur within ordinary consciousness and can be found pre- given there, indeed that the whole issue is about this consciousness. This mistake, far from bringing clarity, produces instead an even more glaring and bewildering confusion; among the public at large, it has occasioned the crudest of misunderstandings. Further, as regards the subjective determinateness of the I in general, pure knowledge does remove from it the restriction that it has when understood as standing in unsurmountable opposition to an object. But for this reason it would be at least superfluous still to hold on to this subjective attitude by determining pure knowledge as I. For this determination not only carries with it that troublesome duality of subject and object; on closer examination, it also remains a subjective I. The actual development of the science that proceeds from the I shows that in the course of it the object has and retains the self-perpetuating determination of an other with respect to the I; that therefore the I from which the start was made does not have the pure knowledge that has truly overcome the opposition of consciousness, but is rather still entangled in appearance. In this connection, there is the further essential observation to be made that, although the I might well be determined to be in itself pure knowledge or intellectual intuition and declared to be the beginning, in science we are not concerned with what is present in itself or as something inner, but with the external existence rather of what in thought is inner and with the determinateness which this inner assumes in that existence. But whatever externalization there might be of intellectual intuition at the beginning of science, or if the subject matter of science is called the eternal, the divine, the absolute of the eternal or absolute, this cannot be anything else than a first, immediate, simple determination. Whatever richer name be given to it than is expressed by mere being, the only legitimate consideration is how such an absolute enters into discursive knowledge and the enunciation of this knowledge. Intellectual intuition might well be the violent rejection of mediation and of demonstrative, external reflection. However, anything which it says over and above simple immediacy would be something con- crete, and this concrete would contain a diversity of determinations in it. But, as already remarked, the enunciation and exposition of this concrete something is a process of mediation which starts with one of the determinations and proceeds to another, even though this other returns to the first and this is a movement which, moreover, is not allowed to be arbitrary or assertoric. Consequently, that from which the beginning is made in any such exposition is not something itself concrete but only the simple immediacy from which the movement proceeds. Besides, what is lacking if we make something concrete the beginning is the demonstration which the combination of the determinations contained in it requires. Therefore, if in the expression of the absolute, or the eternal, or God (and God would have the perfectly undisputed right that the beginning be made with him), if in the intuition or the thought of them, there is more than there is in pure being, then this more should first emerge in a knowledge which is discursive and not figurative; as rich as what is implicitly contained in knowledge may be, the determination that first emerges in it is something simple, for it is only in the immediate that no advance is yet made from one thing to an other. Consequently, whatever in the richer representations of the absolute or God might be said or implied over and above being, all this is at the beginning only an empty word and only being; this simple determination which has no further meaning besides, this empty something, is as such, therefore, the beginning of philosophy. This insight is itself so simple that this beginning is as beginning in no need of any preparation or further introduction, and the only possible purpose of this preliminary disquisition regarding it was not to lead up to it but to dispense rather with all preliminaries. general division of being Being is determined, first, as against another in general; secondly, it is internally self-determining; thirdly, as this preliminary division is cast off, it is the abstract indeterminateness and immediacy in which it must be the beginning. According to the first determination, being partitions itself off from essence, for further on in its development it proves to be in its totality only one sphere of the concept, and to this sphere as moment it opposes another sphere. According to the second, it is the sphere within which fall the determinations and the entire movement of its reflection. In this, being will posit itself in three determinations: one. as determinateness; as such, quality; two. as sublated determinateness; magnitude, quantity; three. as qualitatively determined quantity; measure. This division, as was generally remarked of such divisions in the Introduction, is here a preliminary statement; its determinations must first arise from the movement of being itself, and receive their definitions and justification by virtue of it. As regards the divergence of this division from the usual listing of the categories, namely quantity, quality, relation and modality for Kant, incidentally, these are supposed to be only classifications of his categories, but are in fact themselves categories, only more abstract ones about this, there is nothing to remark here, since the entire listing will diverge from the usual ordering and meaning of the categories at every point. This only can perhaps be remarked, that the determination of quantity is ordinarily listed ahead of quality and as a rule this is done for no given reason. It has already been shown that the beginning is made with being as such, and hence with qualitative being. It is clear from a comparison of quality with quantity that the former is by nature first. For quantity is quality which has already become negative; magnitude is the determinateness which, no longer one with being but already distinguished from it, is the sublated quality that has become indifferent. It includes the alterability of being without altering the fact itself, namely being, of which it is the determination; qualitative determinateness is on the contrary one with its being, it neither transcends it nor stays within it but is its immediate restrictedness. Hence quality, as the determinateness which is immediate, is the first and it is with it that the beginning is to be made. Measure is a relation, not relation in general but specifically of quality and quantity to each other; the categories dealt with by Kant under relation will come up elsewhere in their proper place. Measure, if one so wishes, can be considered also a modality; but since with Kant modality is no longer supposed to make up a determination of content, but only concerns the reference of the content to thought, to the subjective, the result is a totally heterogeneous reference that does not belong here. The third determination of being falls within the section Quality in-as-much as being, as abstract immediacy, reduces itself to one single determinateness as against its other determinacies inside its sphere.

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