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Section One: Determinateness (Quality)

Being is the indeterminate immediate; it is free from determinateness in relation to essence and also from any which it can possess within itself. This reflectionless being is being as it is immediately in its own self alone.
Because it is indeterminate being, it lacks all quality; but in itself, the character of indeterminateness attaches to it only in contrast to what is determinate or qualitative. But determinate being stands in contrast to being in general, so that the very indeterminateness of the latter constitutes its quality. It will therefore be shown that the first being is in itself determinate, and therefore, secondly, that it passes over into determinate being — is determinate being — but that this latter as finite being sublates itself and passes over into the infinite relation of being to its own self, that is, thirdly, into being-for-self.

Chapter 1 Being

A.Being

Being, pure being, without any further determination. In its indeterminate immediacy it is equal only to itself. It is also not unequal relatively to an other; it has no diversity within itself nor any with a reference outwards. It would not be held fast in its purity if it contained any determination or content which could be distinguished in it or by which it could be distinguished from an other. It is pure indeterminateness and emptiness. There is nothing to be intuited in it, if one can speak here of intuiting; or, it is only this pure intuiting itself. Just as little is anything to be thought in it, or it is equally only this empty thinking. Being, the indeterminate immediate, is in fact nothing, and neither more nor less than nothing.

B.Nothing

Nothing, pure nothing: it is simply equality with itself, complete emptiness, absence of all determination and content — undifferentiatedness in itself. In so far as intuiting or thinking can be mentioned here, it counts as a distinction whether something or nothing is intuited or thought. To intuit or think nothing has, therefore, a meaning; both are distinguished and thus nothing is (exists) in our intuiting or thinking; or rather it is empty intuition and thought itself, and the same empty intuition or thought as pure being. Nothing is, therefore, the same determination, or rather absence of determination, and thus altogether the same as, pure being.

C.Becoming

1. Unity of Being and Nothing

Pure Being and pure nothing are, therefore, the same. What is the truth is neither being nor nothing, but that being — does not pass over but has passed over — into nothing, and nothing into being. But it is equally true that they are not undistinguished from each other, that, on the contrary, they are not the same, that they are absolutely distinct, and yet that they are unseparated and inseparable and that each immediately vanishes in its opposite. Their truth is therefore, this movement of the immediate vanishing of the one into the other: becoming, a movement in which both are distinguished, but by a difference which has equally immediately resolved itself.

Remark 1: The Opposition of Being and Nothing in Ordinary Thinking

Nothing is usually opposed to something; but the being of something is already determinate and is distinguished from another something; and so therefore the nothing which is opposed to the something is also the nothing of a particular something, a determinate nothing. Here, however, nothing is to be taken in its indeterminate simplicity. Should it be held more correct to oppose to being, non-being instead of nothing, there would be no objection to this so far as the result is concerned, for in non-being the relation to being is contained: both being and its negation are enunciated in a single term, nothing, as it is in becoming. But we are concerned first of all not with the form of opposition (with the form, that is, also of relation) but with the abstract, immediate negation: nothing, purely on its own account, negation devoid of any relations — what could also be expressed if one so wished merely by 'not'.
It was the Eleatics, above all Parmenides, who first enunciated the simple thought of pure being as the absolute and sole truth: only being is, and nothing absolutely is not, and in the surviving fragments of Parmenides this is enunciated with the pure enthusiasm of thought which has for the first time apprehended itself in its absolute abstraction. As we know, in the oriental systems, principally in Buddhism, nothing, the void, is the absolute principle. Against that simple and one-sided abstraction the deep-thinking Heraclitus brought forward the higher, total concept of becoming and said: being as little is, as nothing is, or, all flows, which means, all is a becoming. The popular, especially oriental proverbs, that all that exists has the germ of death in its very birth, that death, on the other hand, is the entrance into new life, express at bottom the same union of being and nothing. But these expressions have a substratum in which the transition takes place; being and nothing are held apart in time, are conceived as alternating in it, but are not thought in their abstraction and consequently, too, not so that they are in themselves absolutely the same.
Ex nihilo nihil fit — is one of those propositions to which great importance was ascribed in metaphysics. In it is to be seen either only the empty tautology: nothing is nothing; or, if becoming is supposed to possess an actual meaning in it, then, since from nothing only nothing becomes, the proposition does not in fact contain becoming, for in it nothing remains nothing. Becoming implies that nothing does not remain nothing but passes into its other, into being. Later, especially Christian, metaphysics whilst rejecting the proposition that out of nothing comes nothing, asserted a transition from nothing into being; although it understood this proposition synthetically or merely imaginatively, yet even in the most imperfect union there is contained a point in which being and nothing coincide and their distinguishedness vanishes. The proposition: out of nothing comes nothing, nothing is just nothing, owes its peculiar importance to its opposition to becoming generally, and consequently also to its opposition to the creation of the world from nothing. Those who maintain the proposition: nothing is just nothing, and even grow heated in its defence, are unaware that in so doing they are subscribing to the abstract pantheism of the Eleatics, and also in principle to that of Spinoza. The philosophical view for which 'being is only being, nothing is only nothing', is a valid principle, merits the name of 'system of identity'; this abstract identity is the essence of pantheism.
If the result that being and nothing are the same seems startling or paraodoxical in itself, there is nothing more to be said; rather should we wonder at this wondering which shows itself to be such a newcomer to philosophy and forgets that in this science there occur determinations quite different from those in ordinary consciousness and in so-called ordinary common sense-which is not exactly sound understanding but an understanding educated up to abstractions and to a belief, or rather a superstitious belief, in abstractions. It would not be difficult to demonstrate this unity of being and nothing in every example, in every actual thing or thought. The same must be said of being and nothing, as was said above about immediacy and mediation (which latter contains a reference to an other, and hence to negation), that nowhere in heaven or on earth is there anything which does not contain within itself both being and nothing. Of course, since we are speaking here of a particular actual something, those determinations are no longer present in it in the complete untruth in which they are as being and nothing; they are in a more developed determination, and are grasped, for example, as positive and negative, the former being posited, reflected being, the latter posited, reflected nothing; the positive contains as its abstract basis being, and the negative, nothing. Thus in God himself, quality (energy, creation, power, and so forth), essentially involves the determination of the negative-they are the producing of an other. But an empirical elucidation by examples of the said assertion would be altogether superfluous here. Since the unity of being and nothing as the primary truth now forms once and for all the basis and element of all that follows, besides becoming itself, all further logical determinations: determinate being, quality, and generally all philosophical Notions, are examples of this unity. But self-styled sound common sense, if it rejects the unseparatedness of being and nothing, may be set the task of trying to discover an example in which the one is found separated from the other (something from limit or limitation, or, as just mentioned, the infinite, God, from energy or activity). Only the empty figments of thought, being and nothing themselves are these separated things and it is these that are preferred by 'sound common sense' to the truth, to the unseparatedness of both which is everywhere before us.
We cannot be expected to meet on all sides the perplexities which such a logical proposition produces in the ordinary consciousness, for they are inexhaustible. Only a few of them can be mentioned. One source among others of such perplexity is that the ordinary consciousness brings with it to such an abstract logical proposition, conceptions of something concrete, forgetting that what is in question is not such concrete something but only the pure abstractions of being and nothing and that these alone are to be held firmly in mind.
Being and non-being are the same, therefore it is the same whether this house is or is not, whether these hundred dollars are part of my fortune or not. This inference from, or application of, the proposition completely alters its meaning. The proposition contains the pure abstractions of being and nothing; but the application converts them into a determinate being and a determinate nothing. But as we have said, the question here is not of determinate being. A determinate, a finite, being is one that is in relation to another; it is a content standing in a necessary relation to another content, to the whole world. As regards the reciprocally determining context of the whole, metaphysics could make the — at bottom tautological — assertion that if a speck of dust were destroyed the whole universe would collapse. In the instances against the proposition in question something appears as not indifferent to whether it is or is not, not on account of being or non-being, but on account of its content, which brings it into relation with something else. If a specific content, any determinate being, is presupposed, then because it is determinate, it is in a manifold relationship with another content; it is not a matter of indifference to it whether a certain other content with which it is in relation is, or is not; for it is only through such relation that it essentially is what it is. The same is the case in the ordinary way of thinking (taking non-being in the more specific sense of such way of thinking as contrasted with actuality) in the context of which the being or the absence of a content, which, as determinate, is conceived as in relation to another, is not a matter of indifference.
This consideration involves what constitutes a cardinal factor in the Kantian criticism of the ontological proof of the existence of God, although here we are only interested in the distinction made in that proof between being and nothing generally, and determinate being or non-being. As we know, there was presupposed in that so-called proof the concept of a being possessing all realities, including therefore existence, which was likewise assumed as one of the realities. The main thesis of the Kantian criticism was that existence or being (these being taken here as synonymous) is not a property or a real predicate, that is to say, is not a concept of something which could be added to the concept of a thing. By this Kant means to say that being is not a determination of the content of a thing.' Therefore, he goes on to say, the possible does not contain more than the actual; a hundred actual dollars do not contain a whit more than a hundred possible ones; that is, the content of the former has no other determination than has the content of the latter. If this content is considered as isolated, it is indeed a matter of indifference whether it is, or is not; it contains no distinction of being or non-being, this difference does not affect it at all. The hundred dollars do not diminish if they do not exist, or increase if they do. A difference must come only from elsewhere. 'On the other hand,' Kant reminds us, 'my fortune benefits more from a hundred actual dollars than from the mere concept of them or from their possibility. For in actuality, the object is not merely contained analytically in my concept, but is added synthetically to my concept (which is a determination of my state), although the hundred dollars in my thought are not themselves increased one whit by this being which they have apart from my concept.'
There are presupposed here two different states (to retain the Kantian expressions which are not free from a confused clumsiness): one, which Kant calls the concept (by which we must understand figurate conception), and another, the state of my fortune. For the one as for the other, my fortune and the figurate conception, a hundred dollars are a determination of a content or, as Kant expresses it, 'they are added to such a concept synthetically'; I as possessor of a hundred dollars or as not possessing them, or even I as imagining or not imagining them, is of course a different content. Stated more generally: the abstractions of being and nothing both cease to be abstractions if they acquire a determinate content; being is then reality, the determinate being of a hundred dollars; nothing is the negation, the determinate non-being of them. This determinate content itself, the hundred dollars, also grasped isolatedly in abstraction is unchanged the same in the one as it is in the other. But since, furthermore, being is taken as a state of my fortune, the hundred dollars stand in relation to this state, as regards which the determinateness which they are is not a matter of indifference; their being or non-being is only an alteration; they are transposed into the sphere of determinate being. When, therefore, it is urged against the unity of being and nothing that it is nevertheless not a matter of indifference whether anything (the hundred dollars) is, or is not, we practise the deception of converting the difference between whether I have or have not the hundred dollars into a difference between being and non-being-a deception based, as we have shown, on the one-sided abstraction which ignores the determinate being present in such examples and holds fast merely to being and non-being, just as, conversely, the abstract being and nothing which should be apprehended is transformed into a definite being and nothing, into a determinate being. Determinate being is the first category to contain the real difference of being and nothing, namely, something and other. It is this real difference which is vaguely present in ordinary thinking, instead of abstract being and pure nothing and their only imagined difference.
As Kant expresses it, 'through its existence something enters into the context of the whole of experience. ... we obtain thereby an additional object of perception without anything being added to our concept of the object'. As our explanation has shown, this means simply that something, through its existence, just because it is a determinate existence, is essentially in relationship with others, including also a percipient subject. The concept of the hundred dollars, says Kant, gains nothing by their being perceived. Concept here means the hundred dollars previously noted as thought in isolation. As thus isolated they are, it is true, an empirical content, but cut off, having no relationship with any other content and possessing no determinate character relatively to such; the form of identity-with-self strips them of any connection with an other, so that it is a matter of indifference whether they are perceived or not. But this so-called concept of the hundred dollars is a spurious concept; the form of simple self-relation does not belong to such a limited, finite content itself; it is a borrowed form attached to it by the subjective understanding; the being of the hundred dollars is not self-related but alterable and perishable.
The thinking or figurate conception which has before it only a specific, determinate being must be referred back to the previously-mentioned beginning of the science made by Parmenides who purified and elevated his own figurate conception, and so, too, that of posterity, to pure thought, to being as such and thereby created the element of the science. What is the first in the science had of necessity to show itself historically as the first. And we must regard the Eleatic One or being as the first step in the knowledge of thought; water and suchlike material principles are certainly meant to be the universal, but as material they are not pure thoughts; numbers are neither the first simple, nor the self-communing thought, but the thought which is wholly external to itself.
The reference back from particular finite being to being as such in its wholly abstract universality is to be regarded not only as the very first theoretical demand but as the very first practical demand too. When for example a fuss is made about the hundred dollars, that it does make a difference to the state of my fortune whether I have them or not, still more whether I am or not, or whether something else is or is not, then-not to mention that there will be fortunes to which such possession of a hundred dollars will be a matter of indifference-we can remind ourselves that man has a duty to rise to that abstract universality of mood in which he is indeed indifferent to the existence or non-existence of the hundred dollars, whatever may be their quantitative relation to his fortune, just as it ought to be a matter of indifference to him whether he is or is not, that is, in finite life (for a state, a determinate being is meant), and so on — si fractus illabatur orbis, impavidum ferient ruinae was said by a Roman, and still more ought the Christian to possess this indifference.
There remains still to be noted the immediate connection between, on the one hand, the elevation above the hundred dollars and finite things generally, and on the other, the ontological proof and the Kantian criticism of it we have cited. This criticism, through its popular example, has made itself universally plausible: who does not know that a hundred actual dollars are different from a hundred merely possible ones? that they make a difference to the state of my fortune? Because this difference is so obvious with the hundred dollars, therefore the concept, that is, the specific nature of the content as an empty possibility, and being, are different from each other; therefore the Notion of God too is different from his being, and just as little as I can extract from the possibility of the hundred dollars their actuality, just as little can I extract from the Notion of God his existence; but the onotological proof is supposed to consist of this extraction of the existence of God from his Notion. Now though it is of course true that Notion is different from being, there is a still greater difference between God and the hundred dollars and other finite things. It is the definition of finite things that in them the Notion is different from being, that Notion and reality, soul and body, are separable and hence that they are perishable and mortal; the abstract definition of God, on the other hand, is precisely that his Notion and his being are unseparated and inseparable. The genuine criticism of the categories and of reason is just this: to make intellect aware of this difference and to prevent it from applying to God the determinations and relationships of the finite.

Remark 2: Defectiveness of the Expression 'Unity, Identity of Being and Nothing'

Another contributory reason for the repugnance to the proposition about being and nothing must be mentioned; this is that the result of considering being and nothing, as expressed in the statement: being and nothing are one and the same, is incomplete. The emphasis is laid chiefly on their being one and the same, as in judgments generally, where it is the predicate that first states what the subject is. Consequently, the sense seems to be that the difference is denied, although at the same time it appears directly in the proposition; for this enunciates both determinations, being and nothing, and contains them as distinguished. At the same time, the intention cannot be that abstraction should be made from them and only the unity retained. Such a meaning would self-evidently be one-sided, because that from which abstraction is to be made is equally present and named in the proposition. Now in so far as the proposition: being and nothing are the same, asserts the identity of these determinations, but, in fact, equally contains them both as distinguished, the proposition is self-contradictory and cancels itself out. Bearing this in mind and looking at the proposition more closely, we find that it has a movement which involves the spontaneous vanishing of the proposition itself. But in thus vanishing, there takes place in it that which is to constitute its own peculiar content, namely, becoming.
The proposition thus contains the result, it is this in its own self. But the fact to which we must pay attention here is the defect that the result is not itself expressed in the proposition; it is an external reflection which discerns it therein. In this connection we must, at the outset, make this general observation, namely, that the proposition in the form of a judgment is not suited to express speculative truths; a familiarity with this fact is likely to remove many misunderstandings of speculative truths. Judgment is an identical relation between subject and predicate; in it we abstract from the fact that the subject has a number of determinatenesses other than that of the predicate, and also that the predicate is more extensive than the subject. Now if the content is speculative, the non-identical aspect of subject and predicate is also an essential moment, but in the judgment this is not expressed. It is the form of simple judgment, when it is used to express speculative results, which is very often responsible for the paradoxical and bizarre light in which much of recent philosophy appears to those who are not familiar with speculative thought.
To help express the speculative truth, the deficiency is made good in the first place by adding the contrary proposition: being and nothing are not the same, which is also enunciated as above. But thus there arises the further defect that these propositions are not connected, and therefore exhibit their content only in the form of an antinomy whereas their content refers to one and the same thing, and the determinations which are expressed in the two propositions are supposed to be in complete union-a union which can only be stated as an unrest of incompatibles, as a movement. The commonest injustice done to a speculative content is to make it one-sided, that is, to give prominence only to one of the propositions into which it can be resolved. It cannot then be denied that this proposition is asserted; but the statement is just as false as it is true, for once one of the propositions is taken out of the speculative content, the other must at least be equally considered and stated. Particular mention must be made here of that, so to speak, unfortunate word, 'unity'. Unity, even more than identity, expresses a subjective reflection; it is taken especially as the relation which arises from comparison, from external reflection. When this reflection finds the same thing in two different objects, the resultant unity is such that there is presupposed the complete indifference to it of the objects themselves which are compared, so that this comparing and unity does not concern the objects themselves and is a procedure and a determining external to them. Unity, therefore, expresses wholly abstract sameness and sounds all the more blatantly paradoxical the more the terms of which it is asserted show themselves to be sheer opposites. So far then, it would be better to, say only unseparatedness and inseparability, but then the affirmative aspect of the relation of the whole would not find expression.
Thus the whole true result which we have here before us is becoming, which is not merely the one-sided or abstract unity of being and nothing. It consists rather in this movement, that pure being is immediate and simple, and for that very reason is equally pure nothing, that there is a difference between them, but a difference which no less sublates itself and is not. The result, therefore, equally asserts the difference of being and nothing, but as a merely fancied or imagined difference.
It is the common opinion that being is rather the sheer other of nothing and that nothing is clearer than their absolute difference, and nothing seems easier than to be able to state it. But it is equally easy to convince oneself that this is impossible, that it is unsayable. Let those who insist that being and nothing are different tackle the problem of stating in what the difference consists. If being and nothing had any determinateness by which they were distinguished from each other then, as has been observed, they would be determinate being and determinate nothing, not the pure being and pure nothing that here they still are. Their difference is therefore completely empty, each of them is in the same way indeterminate; the difference, then, exists not in themselves but in a third, in subjective opinion. Opinion, however, is a form of subjectivity which is not proper to an exposition of this kind. But the third in which being and nothing subsist must also present itself here, and it has done so; it is becoming. In this being and nothing are distinct moments; becoming only is, in so, in so far as they are distinguished. This third is an other than they; they subsist only in an other, which is equivalent to saying that they are not self-subsistent.
Becoming is as much the subsistence of being as it is of non-being; or, their subsistence is only their being in a one. It is just this their subsistence that equally sublates their difference.
The challenge to distinguish between being and nothing also includes the challenge to say what, then, is being and what is nothing. Those who are reluctant to recognise either one or the other as only a transition of the one into the other, and who assert this or that about being and nothing, let them state what it is they are speaking of, that is, put forward a definition of being and nothing and demonstrate its correctness. Without having satisfied this first requirement of the ancient science whose logical rules they accept as valid and apply in other cases, all that they maintain about being and nothing amounts only to assertions which are scientifically worthless. If elsewhere it has been said that existence, in so far as this at first is held to be synonymous with being, is the complement to possibility, then this presupposes another determination, possibility, and so being is not enunciated in its immediacy, but in fact as not self-subsistent, as conditioned. For being which is the outcome of mediation we shall reserve the term: Existence. But one pictures being to oneself, perhaps in the image of pure light as the clarity of undimmed seeing, and then nothing as pure night — and their distinction is linked with this very familiar sensuous difference. But, as a matter of fact, if this very seeing is more exactly imagined, one can readily perceive that in absolute clearness there is seen just as much, and as little, as in absolute darkness, that the one seeing is as good as the other, that pure seeing is a seeing of nothing. Pure light and pure darkness are two voids which are the same thing. Something can be distinguished only in determinate light or darkness (light is determined by darkness and so is darkened light, and darkness is determined by light, is illuminated darkness), and for this reason, that it is only darkened light and illuminated darkness which have within themselves the moment of difference and are, therefore, determinate being.

Remark 3: The Isolating of These Abstractions

The unity, whose moments, being and nothing, are inseparable, is at the same time different from them and is thus a third to them; this third in its own most characteristic form is becoming. Transition is the same as becoming except that in the former one tends to think of the two terms, from one of which transition is made to the other, as at rest, apart from each other, the transition taking place between them. Now wherever and in whatever form being and nothing are in question, this third must be present; for the two terms have no separate subsistence of their own but are only in becoming, in this third. But this third has many empirical shapes, which are set aside or ignored by abstraction in order to hold fast, each by itself, these its products, being and nothing, and to show them protected against transition. Such simple procedure of abstraction can be countered, equally simply, by calling to mind the empirical existence in which that abstraction is itself only a something having a determinate being. Or else it is some other form of reflection which is supposed to effect the separation of what is inseparable. Such determination carries within itself its own opposite, and, without referring back and appealing to the nature of the thing itself, the determination of reflection can be refuted in its own self by taking it just as it presents itself and pointing out in it its own other. It would be favour in vain to attempt to intercept all the shifts and turns of reflection and its arguments in order to cut off and render impossible to it all the evasions and digressions by which it conceals from itself its own self-contradiction. For this reason I, too, refrain from taking notice of many of the so-called objections and refutations which have been advanced against the proposition that neither being nor nothing truly is, but that their truth is only becoming. The intellectual training which alone can afford an insight into the nullity of such refutations, or rather spontaneously dispel such random fancies, is effected only by a critical knowledge of the forms of the understanding; but those who are most prolific with such objections straightway launch their reflections against the first propositions without first acquiring or having acquired, by a further study of logic, an awareness of the nature of these crude reflections.
We shall consider some of the results which appear when being and nothing are postulated in isolation from each other, each outside the sphere of the other, with the consequence that their transition is denied.
Parmenides held fast to being and was most consistent in affirming at the same time that nothing absolutely is not; only being is. As thus taken, entirely on its own, being is indeterminate, and has therefore no relation to an other; consequently, it seems that from this beginning no further progress can be made — that is, from this beginning itself — and that progress can only be achieved by linking it on to something extraneous, something outside it. Hence the progress made in affirming that being is the same as nothing appears as a second, absolute beginning-a transition which is independent of being and added to it from outside. If being had a determinateness, then it would not be the absolute beginning at all; it would then depend on an other and would not be immediate, would not be the beginning. But if it is indeterminate and hence a genuine beginning, then, too, it has nothing with which it could bridge the gap between itself and an other; it is at the same time the end. It is just as impossible for anything to break forth from it as to break into it; with Parmenides as with Spinoza, there is no progress from being or absolute substance to the negative, to the finite. If, nevertheless, there is progress — which as has been remarked, in the case of relationless, and so progress-less being can be accomplished only in an external manner-then this progress is a second, a fresh beginning. Thus Fichte's absolutely primary, unconditioned principle: A = A, is thesis; the second is antithesis. This latter is supposed to be partly conditioned, partly unconditioned (and so an internal contradiction). This is a progress by external reflection which, having negated the absolute with which it began-the antithesis is the negation of the first identity-straightway expressly converts its second unconditioned into a conditioned. But if there were any justification at all for the progress, that is, for sublating the first beginning, then this first would itself have to be of such a nature that an other could connect itself with it; and therefore it would have to be determinate. But neither being, nor even absolute substance, claims to be such: on the contrary. Being is the immediate, that which is still utterly indeterminate.
The most eloquent, perhaps forgotten, descriptions of the impossibility of advancing from an abstract first to something beyond it, and effecting a union of both, are made by Jacobi in support of his polemic against the Kantian a priori synthesis of self-consciousness in his Treatise on the Undertaking of the Critical Philosophy to Bring Reason to Understanding. He states the problem thus: that there be demonstrated the originating or producing of a synthesis in a pure [unity], whether of consciousness, of space, or of time. “Let space be one, time be one, consciousness be one ... Now tell me how does any one of these three ones purely make itself into a manifold within itself ... each is only a one and no other; a one and the same sort, a self-sameness without any distinction of one from the other; for these distinctions still slumber in the empty infinitude of the indeterminate from which each and everything determinate has yet to proceed! What brings finitude into those three infinities? What impregnates space and time a priori with number and measure and transforms them into a pure manifold? What brings pure spontaneity (ego) into oscillation? Whence does its pure vowel get its consonant, or rather how does its soundless, uninterrupted sounding interrupt itself and break off in order to gain at least a kind of 'self-sound' (vowel), an accent?” It is evident that Jacobi recognised very clearly the insubstantial nature, the non ens, of abstraction, whether so-called absolute (i.e. only abstract) space, or abstract time, or abstract pure consciousness, the ego; he remains fixed in such abstraction in order to maintain the impossibility of a transition to an other (the condition of a synthesis), and to the synthesis itself. The synthesis, which is the point of interest, must not be taken as a connection of determinations already externally there; the question is partly of the genesis of a second to a first, of a determinate to an indeterminate first principle, partly, however, of immanent synthesis, synthesis a priori — a self-subsistent, self-determined unity of distinct moments. Becoming is this immanent synthesis of being and nothing; but because synthesis suggests more than anything else the sense of an external bringing together of mutually external things already there, the name synthesis, synthetic unity, has rightly been dropped. Jacobi asks how does the pure vowel of the ego get its consonant, what brings determinateness into indeterminateness? The what would be easy to answer and has been answered by Kant in his own manner; but the question how means: in what peculiar manner, in what relationship, and so forth, and thus demands the statement of a particular category; but there can be no question here of a peculiar manner, of categories of the understanding. The very question how itself belongs to the bad habits of reflection, which demands comprehensibility, but at the same time presupposes its own fixed categories and consequently knows beforehand that it is armed against the answering of its own question. Neither has it with Jacobi the higher sense of a question concerning the necessity of the synthesis; for he remains, as has been said, fixed in the abstractions in order to maintain the impossibility of the synthesis. Especially graphic is his description of the procedure for reaching the abstraction of space. ‘For a time I must try clean to forget that I ever saw, heard, touched or handled anything at all, myself expressly not excepted. Clean, clean, clean must I forget all movement, and precisely this forgetting, because it is hardest, I must make my greatest concern. just as I have thought away everything in general, so I must also completely and entirely get rid of it, retaining nothing but the forcibly arrested intuition alone of infinite immutable space. I may not therefore again think into it my own self as something distinct from it and yet connected with it; I may not let myself be merely surrounded and pervaded by it: but I must wholly pass over into it, become one with it, transform myself into it; I must leave nothing over of myself but this my intuition itself, in order to contemplate it as a genuinely self-subsistent, independent, single and sole conception.’
With this wholly abstract purity of continuity, that is, indeterminateness and vacuity of conception, it is indifferent whether this abstraction is called space, pure intuiting, or pure thinking; it is altogether the same as what the Indian calls Brahma, when for years on end, physically motionless and equally unmoved in sensation, conception, fantasy, desire and so on, looking only at the tip of his nose, he says inwardly only Om, Om, Om, or else nothing at all. This dull, empty consciousness, understood as consciousness, is — being.
In this void, Jacobi now continues, he experiences the opposite of what Kant assures him he should experience; he does not find himself to be a many and manifold, but rather a one devoid of all plurality and variety; indeed, ‘I myself am the impossibility, the annihilation of all that is manifold and plural — cannot from my pure, absolutely simple, immutable being produce again or spook into myself even the least bit of anything ... Thus all separatedness and juxtaposition, and all manifoldness and plurality based thereon, are revealed (in this purity) as a sheer impossibility.’
This impossibility amounts to nothing else than the tautology: hold fast to abstract unity and shut out all plurality and manifoldness, confine myself to the differenceless and the indeterminate and shut my eyes to all that is differentiated and determinate. The Kantian a priori synthesis of self-consciousness, that is, the function of this unity to differentiate itself and in this differentiation to preserve itself, is attenuated by Jacobi into the same abstraction. That ‘synthesis in itself’, the ‘original act of judgment’, he converts one-sidedly into ‘the copula in itself — an "is, is, is", without beginning or end and without what, who or which. This repetition of repetition ad infinitum is the sole business, function and product of the absolutely pure synthesis; it is itself empty, pure, absolute repetition itself.’ Though, in fact, since there is no breaking off, that is, no negation or distinguishing in it, it is not a repetition but merely undifferentiated, simple being. But, then, is this still a synthesis if Jacobi omits precisely that which makes the unity a synthetic unity?
In the first place, it must be said that when Jacobi thus fixes himself in absolute or abstract space, time and consciousness, he places and fixes himself in this way in something which is empirically false; there is, that is, there is empirically present, no such space and time which is not spatially and temporally limited, or whose continuity is not filled by manifoldly limited determinate being and change, so that these limits and changes belong, unseparated and inseparable, to the nature of spatiality and temporality; similarly, consciousness is filled with determinate sensation, conception, desire and so on; it does not exist separated from some particular content. The empirical transition, moreover, is self-evident; consciousness can of course make empty space, empty time, and even empty consciousness itself or pure being, its object and content, but it does not stop at that; it goes beyond it or rather presses forward out of such a vacuity to a better content, that is, to a content which in some way or other is more concrete, and which to that extent is better and truer however bad it may be in other respects; just such a content is in general synthetic, this word being taken in its more general sense. Thus Parmenides has to reckon with illusion and opinion, the opposite of being and truth; Spinoza likewise, with attributes, modes, extension, movement, understanding, will, and so on. The synthesis contains and demonstrates the falsity of those abstractions; in it they are in unity with their other, not, therefore, as independently self-subsistent, not as absolute, but purely as relative.
The demonstration of the empirical nullity of empty space, and so forth, is not, however, what we are concerned with. Consciousness by making abstraction can, of course, fill itself with such indeterminates also and the abstractions thus held fast are the thoughts of pure space, pure time, pure consciousness, or pure being. It is the thought of pure space, etc. — that is, pure space, etc., in its own self — that is to be demonstrated as null: that it is as such already its own opposite, that its opposite has already penetrated into it, that it is already by itself the accomplished coming-forth-from-itself, a determinateness.
But this is found immediately in them. They are, as Jacobi profusely describes them, results of abstraction; they are expressly determined as indeterminate and this — to go back to its simplest form — is being. But it is this very indeterminateness which constitutes its determinateness; for indeterminateness is opposed to determinateness; hence as so opposed it is itself determinate or the negative, and the pure, quite abstract negative. It is this indeterminateness or abstract negation which thus has being present within it, which reflection, both outer and inner, enunciates when it equates it with nothing, declares it to be an empty product of thought, to be nothing. Or it can be expressed thus: because being is devoid of all determination whatsoever, it is not the (affirmative) determinateness which it is; it is not being but nothing.
In the pure reflection of the beginning as it is made in this logic with being as such, the transition is still concealed; because being is posited only as immediate, therefore nothing emerges in it only immediately. But all the subsequent determinations, like determinate being which immediately follows, are more concrete; in determinate being there is already posited that which contains and produces the contradiction of those abstractions and therefore their transition. When being is taken in this simplicity and immediacy, the recollection that it is the result of complete abstraction, and so for that reason alone is abstract negativity, nothing, is left behind, outside the science, which, within its own self, from essence onwards will expressly exhibit the said one-sided immediacy as a mediated immediacy where being is posited as existence and the mediating agent of this being is posited as ground.
In the light of such recollection, the transition from being into nothing can be represented, or, as it is said, explained and made intelligible, as something even easy and trivial; of course the being which is made the beginning of the science is nothing, for abstraction can be made from everything, and if abstraction is made from everything then nothing is left over. But, it may be continued, the beginning is thus not an affirmative, not being, but just nothing, and nothing is then also the end, at least as much as immediate being, and even more so. The shortest way is to let such reasoning take its course and then wait and see what is the nature of its boasted results. That nothing would be the result of such reasoning and that now the beginning should be made with nothing (as in Chinese philosophy), need not cause us to lift a finger, for before we could do so this nothing would no less have converted itself into being (see Section B above). But further, this abstraction from everything (which 'everything' nevertheless is an affirmative being) having been presupposed, then it must be understood more exactly; the result of making abstraction from all that is, is first of all abstract being, being as such; just as in the cosmological proof of the existence of God from the contingent being of the world, in which proof we rise above such contingent being, being is still taken up with us in our ascent and is determined as infinite being. Of course, one can also abstract from this pure being, being can be thrown in with the all from which abstraction has already been made; then nothing remains. Now if we want to forget the thinking of nothing, that is, its conversion into being, or are ignorant of it, we can proceed in the style of 'one can'; we can for example (God be praised!) also abstract from nothing (for the creation of the world, too, is an abstraction from nothing), and then what remains is not nothing, for it is just from this that we have made abstraction; we have in fact arrived at being again. This, 'one can', gives an external play of abstraction, in which the abstracting itself is only the one-sided activity of the negative. It is directly implied in this very form of 'one can', that for it being is just as indifferent as nothing, and that with the vanishing of either of them there is equally an arising of the other; but it is equally a matter of indifference whether one starts from the doing of nothing, or from nothing; for the former, that is the mere abstracting, has neither more nor less of truth in it than mere nothing has.
The dialectic employed by Plato in treating of the One in the Parmenides is also to be regarded rather as a dialectic of external reflection. Being and the One are both Eleatic forms which are the same thing. But they are also to be distinguished; and it is thus that Plato takes them in that dialogue. After removing from the One the various determinations of whole and parts, of being-within-itself, of being-in-another, etc., of shape, time, etc., he reaches the result that being does not belong to the One, for being belongs to any particular something only in one of these modes. Plato next deals with the proposition: the One is, and we should refer to Plato himself to see how, starting from this proposition, he accomplishes the transition to the non-being of the One. He does it by comparing the two determinations of the proposition put forward: the One is; it contains the One and being, and 'the One is' contains more than when we only say: the One. It is through their being different that the moment of negation contained in the proposition is demonstrated. It is evident that this course has a presupposition and is an external reflection.
Here the way in which the One is connected with being is such that being, which is supposed to be held fast abstractly by itself, is demonstrated in the simplest way and without any effort of thought, to be in a union which implies the contrary of what is supposed to be maintained. Being, taken as it is immediately, belongs to a subject, is something enunciated, has an empirical existence in general and stands therefore in the field of limitation and the negative. In whatever phrases or turns of speech understanding may express itself in attacking the unity of being and nothing and appealing to what immediately confronts us, it will find just in this very experience nothing but determinate being, being with a limitation or negation — that very unity which it rejects. The assertion of immediate being thus reduces to an empirical existence, and it cannot reject the demonstration of this because it is to the immediacy which is outside of thought that it wants to cling.
The same is the case with nothing, only contrariwise, and this reflection on it is familiar and has been made often enough. Nothing, taken in its immediacy, shows itself as affirmative, as being; for according to its nature it is the same as being. Nothing is thought of, imagined, spoken of, and therefore it is; in the thinking, imagining, speaking and so on, nothing has its being. But, further, this being is also distinguished from it; it is therefore said that although nothing is in thought or imagination, yet for that very reason it is not nothing that is, being does not belong to nothing as such, but only thought or imagination is this being. With this distinguishing it is equally not to be denied that nothing stands in relationship to a being; but in the relation, even though it contains the difference, there is present a unity with being. In whatever way nothing is enunciated or indicated, it shows itself connected with, or if you like in contact with a being, unseparated from a being, that is to say in a determinate being.
But when the presence of nothing in a determinate being is thus demonstrated, there still lingers on the thought of this difference of it from being, namely that the determinate being of nothing does not at all pertain to nothing itself, that nothing does not possess an independent being of its own, is not being as such. Nothing, it is said, is only the absence of being, darkness thus only the absence of light, cold only absence of heat, and so on. And darkness only has meaning in relation to the eye, in external comparison with the positive factor, light, and similarly cold is only something in our sensation; on the other hand, light and heat, like being, are objective, active realities on their own account, and are of quite another quality and dignity than this negative, than nothing. One can often find it put forward as a weighty reflection and an important piece of information that darkness is only the absence of light, cold only absence of heat. About this acute reflection in this field of empirical objects, it can be observed that darkness does in fact show itself active in light, determining it to colour and thereby imparting visibility to it, since, as was said above, just as little is seen in pure light as in pure darkness. Visibility, however, is effected in the eye, and the supposed negative has just as much a share in this as the light which is credited with being the real, positive factor; similarly, cold makes its presence known in water, in our sensations etc., and if we deny it so-called objective reality it is not a whit the worse for our doing so. But a further objection would be that here, too, as before, it is a negative with a determinate content that is spoken of, the argument is not confined to pure nothing, to which being, regarded as an empty abstraction, is neither inferior nor superior. But cold, darkness, and similar determinate negations are to be taken directly as they are by themselves and we shall then see what we have thereby effected in respect of their universal determination which has led them to be introduced here. They are supposed to be not just nothing but the nothing of light, heat, etc., of something determinate, of a content; thus they are a determinate, a contentful, nothing if one may so speak. But, as will subsequently appear, a determinateness is itself a negation, and so they are negative nothings; but a negative nothing is an affirmative something. The conversion of nothing through its determinateness (which previously appeared as a determinate being in a subject thinker, or in some other form) into an affirmative, appears to the consciousness which is fixed in the abstraction of the understanding as the acme of paradox; the insight that the negation of the negation is something positive, simple as it is, or rather because of its very simplicity, appears as a triviality to which haughty understanding need pay no heed, although the correctness of the insight is admitted-and the insight is not only correct, but, because of the universality of such determinations, it has its infinite extension and universal application, so that it were indeed well to pay attention to it.
A further remark can be made about the determination of the transition of being and nothing into each other, namely that it is to be understood as it is without any further elaboration of the transition by reflection. It is immediate and quite abstract because the transient moments are themselves abstract, that is, because the determinateness of either moment by means of which they passed over into each other is not yet posited in the other; nothing is not yet posited in being, although it is true that being is essentially nothing, and vice versa. It is therefore inadmissible to employ more developed forms of mediation here and to hold being and nothing in any kind of relationship-the transition in question is not yet a relation. Thus is it impermissible to say: nothing is the ground of being, or being is the ground of nothing or nothing is the cause of being, and so forth; or, transition into nothing can only occur under the condition that something is, or into being only under the condition of non-being. The kind of connection cannot be further determined without the connected sides being further determined at the same time. The connection of ground and consequent, etc., has no longer merely being and nothing as the sides which it connects, but expressly being which is a ground, and something which, although merely posited and not self-subsistent, is yet not the abstract nothing.

Remark 4: Incomprehensibility of the Beginning

What has been said indicates the nature of the dialectic against the beginning of the world and also its end, by which the eternity of matter was supposed to be proved, that is, the dialectic against becoming, coming-to-be or ceasing-to-be, in general. The Kantian antinomy relative to the finitude or infinity of the world in space and time will be considered more closely under the Notion of quantitative infinity. This simple, ordinary dialectic rests on holding fast to the opposition of being and nothing. It is proved in the following manner that a beginning of the world, or of anything, is impossible:
It is impossible for anything to begin, either in so far as it is, or in so far as it is not; for in so far as it is, it is not just beginning, and in so far as it is not, then also it does not begin. If the world, or anything, is supposed to have begun, then it must have begun in nothing, but in nothing — or nothing — is no beginning; for a beginning includes within itself a being, but nothing does not contain any being. Nothing is only nothing. In a ground, a cause, and so on, if nothing is so determined, there is contained an affirmation, a being. For the same reason, too, something cannot cease to be; for then being would have to contain nothing, but being is only being, not the contrary of itself.
It is obvious that in this proof nothing is brought forward against becoming, or beginning and ceasing, against this unity of being and nothing, except an assertoric denial of them and an ascription of truth to being and nothing, each in separation from the other. Nevertheless this dialectic is at least more consistent than ordinary reflective thought which accepts as perfect truth that being and nothing only are in separation from each other, yet on the other hand acknowledges beginning and ceasing to be equally genuine determinations; but in these it does in fact assume the unseparatedness of being and nothing.
With the absolute separateness of being from nothing presupposed, then of course — as we so often hear — beginning or becoming is something incomprehensible; for a presupposition is made which annuls the beginning or the becoming which yet is again admitted, and this contradiction thus posed and at the same time made impossible of solution, is called incomprehensible.
The foregoing dialectic is the same, too, as that which understanding employs the notion of infinitesimal magnitudes, given by higher analysis. A more detailed treatment of this notion will be given later. These magnitudes have been defined as such that they are in their vanishing, not before their vanishing, for then they are finite magnitudes, or after their vanishing, for then they are nothing. Against this pre notion it is objected and reiterated that such magnitudes are either something or nothing; that there is no intermediate state between being and non-being ('state' is here an unsuitable, barbarous expression). Here too, the absolute separation of being and nothing is assumed. But against this it has been shown that being and nothing are, in fact, the same, or to use the same language as that just quoted, that there is nothing which is not an intermediate state between being and nothing. It is to the adoption of the said determination, which understanding opposes, that mathematics owes its most brilliant successes.
This style of reasoning which makes and clings to the false presupposition of the absolute separateness of being and non-being is to be named not dialectic but sophistry. For sophistry is an argument proceeding from a baseless presupposition which is uncritically and unthinkingly adopted; but we call dialectic the higher movement of reason in which such seemingly utterly separate terms pass over into each other spontaneously, through that which they are, a movement in which the presupposition sublates itself. It is the dialectical immanent nature of being and nothing themselves to manifest their unity, that is, becoming, as their truth.

2. Moments of Becoming: Coming-to-Be and Ceasing-to-Be

Becoming is the unseparatedness of being and nothing, not the unity which abstracts from being and nothing; but as the unity of being and nothing it is this determinate unity in which there is both being and nothing. But in so far as being and nothing, each unseparated from its other, is, each is not. They are therefore in this unity but only as vanishing, sublated moments. They sink from their initially imagined self-subsistence to the status of moments, which are still distinct but at the same time are sublated.
Grasped as thus distinguished, each moment is in this distinguishedness as a unity with the other. Becoming therefore contains being and nothing as two such unities, each of which is itself a unity of being and nothing; the one is being as immediate and as relation to nothing, and the other is nothing as immediate and as relation to being; the determinations are of unequal values in these unities.
Becoming is in this way in a double determination. In one of them, nothing is immediate, that is, the determination starts from nothing which relates itself to being, or in other words changes into it; in the other, being is immediate, that is, the determination starts from being which changes into nothing: the former is coming-to-be and the latter is ceasing-to-be.
Both are the same, becoming, and although they differ so in direction they interpenetrate and paralyse each other. The one is ceasing-to-be: being passes over into nothing, but nothing is equally the opposite of itself, transition into being, coming-to-be. This coming-to-be is the other direction: nothing passes over into being, but being equally sublates itself and is rather transition into nothing, is ceasing-to-be. They are not reciprocally sublated — the one does not sublate the other externally — but each sublates itself in itself and is in its own self the opposite of itself.

3. Sublation of Becoming

The resultant equilibrium of coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be is in the first place becoming itself. But this equally settles into a stable unity. Being and nothing are in this unity only as vanishing moments; yet becoming as such is only through their distinguishedness. Their vanishing, therefore, is the vanishing of becoming or the vanishing of the vanishing itself. Becoming is an unstable unrest which settles into a stable result.
This could also be expressed thus: becoming is the vanishing of being in nothing and of nothing in being and the vanishing of being and nothing generally; but at the same time it rests on the distinction between them. It is therefore inherently self-contradictory, because the determinations it unites within itself are opposed to each other; but such a union destroys itself.
This result is the vanishedness of becoming, but it is not nothing; as such it would only be a relapse into one of the already sublated determinations, not the resultant of nothing and being. It is the unity of being and nothing which has settled into a stable oneness. But this stable oneness is being, yet no longer as a determination on its own but as a determination of the whole.
Becoming, as this transition into the unity of being and nothing, a unity which is in the form of being or has the form of the one-sided immediate unity of these moments, is determinate being.

Remark: The Expression ‘To Sublate’

To sublate, and the sublated (that which exists ideally as a moment), constitute one of the most important notions in philosophy. It is a fundamental determination which repeatedly occurs throughout the whole of philosophy, the meaning of which is to be clearly grasped and especially distinguished from nothing. What is sublated is not thereby reduced to nothing. Nothing is immediate; what is sublated, on the other hand, is the result of mediation; it is a non-being but as a result which had its origin in a being. It still has, therefore, in itself the determinate from which it originates.
'To sublate' has a twofold meaning in the language: on the one hand it means to preserve, to maintain, and equally it also means to cause to cease, to put an end to. Even 'to preserve' includes a negative elements, namely, that something is removed from its influences, in order to preserve it. Thus what is sublated is at the same time preserved; it has only lost its immediacy but is not on that account annihilated.
The two definitions of 'to sublate' which we have given can be quoted as two dictionary meanings of this word. But it is certainly remarkable to find that a language has come to use one and the same word for two opposite meanings. It is a delight to speculative thought to find in the language words which have in themselves a speculative meaning; the German language has a number of such. The double meaning of the Latin tollere (which has become famous through the Ciceronian pun: tollendum est Octavium) does not go so far; its affirmative determination signifies only a lifting-up. Something is sublated only in so far as it has entered into unity with its opposite; in this more particular signification as something reflected, it may fittingly be called a moment. In the case of the lever, weight and distance from a point are called its mechanical moments on account of the sameness of their effect, in spite of the contrast otherwise between something real, such as a weight, and something ideal, such as a mere spatial determination, a line.[See Phil. Nat. §261] We shall often have occasion to notice that the technical language of philosophy employs Latin terms for reflected determinations, either because the mother tongue has no words for them or if it has, as here, because its expression calls to mind more what is immediate, whereas the foreign language suggests more what is reflected.
The more precise meaning and expression which being and nothing receive, now that they are moments, is to be ascertained from the consideration of determinate being as the unity in which they are preserved. Being is being, and nothing is nothing, only in their contradistinction from each other; but in their truth, in their unity, they have vanished as these determinations and are now something else. Being and nothing are the same; but just because they are the same they are no longer being and nothing, but now have a different significance. In becoming they were coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be; in determinate being, a differently determined unity, they are again differently determined moments. This unity now remains their base from which they do not again emerge in the abstract significance of being and nothing.

Chapter 2 Determinate Being

In considering determinate being the emphasis falls on its determinate character; the determinateness is in the form of being, and as such it is quality. Through its quality, something is determined as opposed to an other, as alterable and finite; and as negatively determined not only against an other but also in its own self. This its negation as at first opposed to the finite something is the infinite; the abstract opposition in which these determinations appear resolves itself into the infinity which is free from the opposition, into being-for-self.
The treatment of determinate being falls therefore into three parts:

A. Determinate being as such
B. Something and other, finitude
C. Qualitative infinity.

A. DETERMINATE BEING AS SUCH

In determinate being (a) as such, its determinateness is first of all (b) to be distinguished as quality. This, however, is to be taken as well in the one determination of determinate being as in the other — as reality and negation. But in these determinatenesses determinate being is equally reflected into itself; and posited as such it is (c) something, a determinate being.

(a) Determinate Being in General

From becoming there issues determinate being, which is the simple oneness of being and nothing. Because of this oneness it has the form of immediacy. Its mediation, becoming, lies behind it; it has sublated itself and determinate being appears, therefore, as a first, as a starting-point for the ensuing development. It is first of all in the one-sided determination of being; the other determination, nothing, will likewise display itself and in contrast to it.
It is not mere being, but determinate being [Dasein], etymologically taken, being in a certain place; but the idea of space is irrelevant here. Determinate being as the result of its becoming is, in general, being with a non-being such that this non-being is taken up into simple unity with being. Non-being thus taken up into being in such a way that the concrete whole is in the form of being, of immediacy, constitutes determinateness as such.
The whole is likewise in the form, that is, in the determinateness of being, for being has likewise shown itself in becoming to be only a moment — a sublated, negatively determined being; but it is such for us in our reflection, it is not yet posited as such in its own self. But the determinateness as such of determinate being is the determinateness which is posited, and this is implied in the expression Dasein [there-being or being which is there]. The two are always to be clearly distinguished from each other; only that which is posited in a Notion belongs in the dialectical development of that Notion to its content; whereas the determinateness that is not yet posited in the Notion itself belongs to our reflection, whether it concerns the nature of the Notion itself or is an external comparison. To draw attention to a determinateness of the latter kind can only serve to elucidate or indicate in advance the course which will be exhibited in the development itself. That the whole, the unity of being and nothing, is in the one-sided determinateness of being is an external reflection; but in the negation, in something and other and so on, it will come to be posited. It was necessary here to draw attention to the distinction referred to; but to take account of all the Remarks which may be prompted by reflection would lead to the prolixity of anticipating what must yield itself in the subject matter. Such reflections may facilitate a general view and thereby an understanding of the development, but they also have the disadvantage of appearing as unjustified assertions, grounds and foundations for what is to follow. They should therefore not be taken for more than they are supposed to be and should be distinguished from what is a moment in the development of the subject matter itself.
Determinate being corresponds to being in the previous sphere, but being is indeterminate and therefore no determinations issue from it. Determinate being, however, is concrete; consequently a number of determinations, distinct relations of its moments, make their appearance in it.

(b) Quality

Because of the immediacy of the oneness of being and nothing in determinate being, they do not extend beyond each other; so far as determinate being is in the form of being, so far is it non-being, so far is it determinate. Being is not the universal, determinateness not the particular. Determinateness has not yet severed itself from being; and indeed it will no more sever itself from being, for the truth which from now on underlies them as ground is the unity of non-being with being; on this as ground all further determinations are developed. But the relation in which determinateness here stands to being is the immediate unity of both, so that as yet no differentiation of this unity is posited.
Determinateness thus isolated by itself in the form of being is quality — which is wholly simple and immediate. Determinateness as such is the more universal term which can equally be further determined as quantity and so on. Because of this simple character of quality as such, there is nothing further to be said about it.
Determinate being, however, in which nothing no less than being is contained, is itself the criterion for the one-sidedness of quality as a determinateness which is only immediate or only in the form of being. It is equally to be posited in the determination of nothing, when it will be posited as a differentiated, reflected determinateness, no longer as immediate or in the form of being. Nothing, as thus the determinate element of a determinateness, is equally something reflected, a negation.
Quality, taken in the distinct character of being, is reality; as burdened with a negative it is negation in general, likewise a quality but one which counts as a deficiency, and which further on is determined as limit, limitation.
Both are determinate being, but in reality as quality with the accent on being, the fact is concealed that it contains determinateness and therefore also negation. Consequently, reality is given the value only of something positive from which negation, limitation and deficiency are excluded. Negation taken as mere deficiency would be equivalent to nothing; but it is a determinate being, a quality, only determined with a non-being.

Remark: Quality and Negation

Reality may seem to be a word of various meanings because it is used of different, indeed of opposed determinations. In philosophy one may perhaps speak of a merely empirical reality as of a worthless existence. But when it is said that thoughts, concepts, theories have no reality, this means that they do not possess actuality; in itself or in its notion, the idea of a Platonic Republic, for example, may well be true. Here the worth of the idea is not denied and it is left its place alongside the reality. But as against mere ideas, mere notions, the real alone counts as true. The sense in which, on the one hand, outer existence is made the criterion of the truth of a content is no less one-sided than when the idea, essential being, or even inner feeling is represented as indifferent to outer existence and is even held to be the more excellent the more remote it is from reality.
In connection with the term 'reality', mention must be made of the former metaphysical concept of God which, in particular, formed the basis of the so-called ontological proof of the existence of God. God was defined as the sum-total of all realities, and of this sum-total it was said that no contradiction was contained in it, that none of the realities cancelled any other; for a reality is to be taken only as a perfection, as an affirmative being which contains no negation. Hence the realities are not opposed to one another and do not contradict one another.
Reality as thus conceived is assumed to survive when all negation has been thought away; but to do this is to do away with all determinateness. Reality is quality, determinate being; consequently, it contains the moment of the negative and is through this alone the determinate being that it is. Reality, taken as we are supposed to take it, in the so-called eminent sense or as infinite - in the usual meaning of the word-is expanded into indeterminateness and loses its meaning. God's goodness is not to be goodness in the ordinary, but in the eminent sense; not different from justice but tempered by it (a mediatory expression used by Leibniz), just as, conversely, justice is tempered by goodness; and so goodness is no longer goodness, nor justice any more justice. Power is supposed to be tempered by wisdom, but in that case it is not power as such for it would be subject to wisdom; wisdom is supposed to be expanded into power, in which case it vanishes as the wisdom which determines the end and measure of things. The true Notion of the infinite and its absolute unity which will present itself later, is not to be understood as a tempering, a reciprocal restricting or a mixing; such a superficial conception of the relationship leaves it indefinite and nebulous and can satisfy only a Notion-less way of thinking. When reality, taken as a determinate quality as it is in the said definition of God, is extended beyond its determinateness it ceases to be reality and becomes abstract being; God as the pure reality in all realities, or as the sum total of all realities, is just as devoid of determinateness and content as the empty absolute in which all is one.
If, on the other hand, reality is taken in its determinateness, then, since it essentially contains the moment of the negative, the sum-total of all realities becomes just as much a sum-total of all negations, the sum-total of all contradictions; it becomes then straightway the absolute power in which everything determinate is absorbed; but reality itself is, only in so far as it is still confronted by a being which it has not sublated; consequently, when it is thought as expanded into realised, limitless power, it becomes the abstract nothing. The said reality in all realities, the being in all determinate being, which is supposed to express the concept of God, is nothing else than abstract being, which is the same as nothing.
Determinateness is negation posited as affirmative and is the proposition of Spinoza: omnis determinatio est negatio. This proposition is infinitely important; only, negation as such is formless abstraction, However, speculative philosophy must not be charged with making negation or nothing an ultimate: negation is as little an ultimate for philosophy as reality is for it truth.
Of this proposition that determinateness is negation, the unity of Spinoza's substance — or that there is only one substance — is the necessary consequence. Thought and being or extension, the two attributes, namely, which Spinoza had before him, he had of necessity to posit as one in this unity; for as determinate realities they are negations whose infinity is their unity. According to Spinoza's definition, of which more subsequently, the infinity of anything is its affirmation. He grasped them therefore as attributes, that is, as not having a separate existence, a self-subsistent being of their own, but only as sublated, as moments; or rather, since substance in its own self lacks any determination whatever, they are for him not even moments, and the attributes like the modes are distinctions made by an external intellect. Similarly, the substantiality of individuals cannot persist in the face of that proposition. The individual is a relation-to-self through its setting limits to everything else; but these limits are thereby also limits of itself, relations to an other, it does not possess its determinate being within itself. True, the individual is more than merely an entity bounded on all sides, but this more belongs to another sphere of the Notion; in the metaphysics of being, the individual is simply a determinate something, and in opposition to the independence and self-subsistence of such something, to the finite as such, determinateness effectively brings into play its essentially negative character, dragging what is finite into that same negative movement of the understanding which makes everything vanish in the abstract unity of substance.
Negation stands directly opposed to reality: further on, in the special sphere of reflected determinations, it becomes opposed to the positive, which is reality reflecting the negation — the reality in which the negative has an illusory being [scheint], the negative which in reality as such is still hidden.
Quality is especially a property only where, in an external relation, it manifests itself as an immanent determination. By properties of herbs, for instance, we understand determinations which not only are proper to something, but are the means whereby this something in its relations with other somethings maintains itself in its own peculiar way, counteracting the alien influences posited in it and making its own determinations effective in the other — although it does not keep this at a distance. The more stable determinatenesses, on the other hand, such as figure, shape, are not called properties, nor even qualities perhaps, because they are conceived as alterable, as not identical with the being [of the object].
'Qualierung' or 'Inqualierung', an expression of Jacob Boehme's, whose philosophy goes deep, but into a turbid depth, signifies the movement of a quality (of sourness, bitterness, fieriness, etc.) within itself in so far as it posits and establishes itself in its negative nature (in its 'Qual' or torment) from out of an other — signifies in general the quality's own internal unrest by which it produces and maintains itself only in conflict.

(c) Something

In determinate being its determinateness has been distinguished as quality; in quality as determinately present, there is distinction — of reality and negation. Now although these distinctions are present in determinate being, they are no less equally void and sublated. Reality itself contains negation, is determinate being, not indeterminate, abstract being. Similarly, negation is determinate being, not the supposedly abstract nothing but posited here as it is in itself, as affirmatively present [als seiend], belonging to the sphere of determinate being. Thus quality is completely unseparated from determinate being, which is simply determinate, qualitative being.
This sublating of the distinction is more than a mere taking back and external omission of it again, or than a simple return to the simple beginning, to determinate being as such. The distinction cannot be omitted, for it is. What is, therefore, in fact present is determinate being in general, distinction in it, and sublation of this distinction; determinate being, not as devoid of distinction as at first, but as again equal to itself through sublation of the distinction, the simple oneness of determinate being resulting from this sublation. This sublatedness of the distinction is determinate being's own determinateness; it is thus being-within-self: determinate being is a determinate being, a something.
Something is the first negation of negation, as simple self-relation in the form of being. Determinate being, life, thought, and so on, essentially determine themselves to become a determinate being, a living creature, a thinker (ego) and so on. This determination is of supreme importance if we are not to remain at the stage of determinate being, life, thought, and so on — also the Godhead (instead of God) — as generalities. In our ordinary way of thinking, something is rightly credited with reality. However, something is still a very superficial determination; just as reality and negation, determinate being and its determinateness, although no longer blank being and nothing, are still quite abstract determinations. It is for this reason that they are the most current expressions and the intellect which is philosophically untrained uses them most, casts its distinctions in their mould and fancies that in them it has something really well and truly determined. The negative of the negative is, as something, only the beginning of the subject [Subjekt] — being-within-self, only as yet quite indeterminate. It determines itself further on, first, as a being-for-self and so on, until in the Notion it first attains the concrete intensity of the subject. At the base of all these determinations lies the negative unity with itself. But in all this, care must be taken to distinguish between the first negation as negation in general, and the second negation, the negation of the negation: the latter is concrete, absolute negativity, just as the former on the contrary is only abstract negativity.
Something is the negation of the negation in the form of being; for this second negation is the restoring of the simple relation to self; but with this, something is equally the mediation of itself with itself. Even in the simple form of something, then still more specifically in being-for-self, subject, and so on, self-mediation is present; it is present even in becoming, only the mediation is quite abstract. In something, mediation with self is posited, in so far as something is determined as a simple identity. Attention can be drawn to the presence of mediation in general, as against the principle of the alleged mere immediacy of knowledge, from which mediation is supposed to be excluded; but there is no further need to draw particular attention to the moment of mediation, for it is to be found everywhere, in every Notion.
This mediation with itself which something is in itself, taken only as negation of the negation, has no concrete determinations for its sides; it thus collapses into the simple oneness which is being. Something is, and is, then, also a determinate being; further, it is in itself also becoming, which, however, no longer has only being and nothing for its moments. One of these, being, is now determinate being, and, further, a determinate being. The second is equally a determinate being, but determined as a negative of the something — an other. Something as a becoming is a transition, the moments of which are themselves somethings, so that the transition is alteration — a becoming which has already become concrete. But to begin with, something alters only in its Notion; it is not yet posited as mediating and mediated, but at first only as simply maintaining itself in its self-relation, and its negative is posited as equally qualitative, as only an other in general.

B. FINITUDE

(a) Something and other are at first indifferent to one another; an other is also immediately a determinate being, a something; the negation thus falls outside both. Something is in itself as against its being-for-other. But the determinateness also belongs to its in-itself and is
(b) its determination; this equally passes over into constitution which, being identical with the determination, constitutes the immanent and at the same time negated being-for-other, the limit of the something. This limit is
(c) the immanent determination of the something itself, which latter is thus the finite.
In the first section, in which determinate being in general was considered, this had, as at first taken up, the determination of being. Consequently, the moments of its development, quality and something, equally have an affirmative determination. In this section, on the other hand, the negative determination contained in determinate being is developed, and whereas in the first section it was at first only negation in general, the first negation, it is now determined to the point of the being-within-self or the inwardness of the something, to the negation of the negation.

(a) Something and an Other

1. Something and other are, in the first place, both determinate beings or somethings.
Secondly, each is equally an other. It is immaterial which is first named and solely for that reason called something; (in Latin, when they both occur in a sentence, both are called aliud, or 'the one, the other', alius alium; when there is reciprocity the expression alter alterum is analogous). If of two things we call one A, and the other B, then in the first instance B is determined as the other. But A is just as much the other of B. Both are, in the same way, others. The word 'this' serves to fix the distinction and the something which is to be taken affirmatively. But 'this' clearly expresses that this distinguishing and signalising of the one something is a subjective designating falling outside the-something itself. The entire determinateness falls into this external pointing out; even the expression 'this' contains no distinction; each and every something is just as well a 'this' as it is also an other. By 'this' we mean to express something completely determined; it is overlooked that speech, as a work of the understanding, gives expression only to universals, except in the name of a single object; but the individual name is meaningless, in the sense that it does not express a universal, and for the same reason appears as something merely posited and arbitrary; just as proper names, too, can be arbitrarily assumed, given or also altered.
Otherness thus appears as a determination alien to the determinate being thus characterised, or as the other outside the one determinate being; partly because a determinate being is determined as other only through being compared by a Third, and partly because it is only determined as other on account of the other which is outside it, but is not an other on its own account. At the same time, as has been Remarked, every determinate being, even for ordinary thinking, determines itself as an other, so that there is no determinate being which is determined only as such, which is not outside a determinate being and therefore is not itself an other.
Both are determined equally as something and as other, and are thus the same, and there is so far no distinction between them. But this self-sameness of the determinations likewise arises only from external reflection, from the comparing of them; but the other as at first posited, although an other in relation to the something, is nevertheless also an other on its own account, apart from the something.
Thirdly, therefore, the other is to be taken as isolated, as in relation to itself, abstractly as the other; the to eteron of Plato, who opposes it as one of the moments of totality to the One, and in this way ascribes to the other a nature of its own. Thus the other, taken solely as such, is not the other of something but the other in its own self, that is, the other of itself. Such an other, determined as other, is physical nature; it is the other of spirit. This its determination is thus at first a mere relativity by which is expressed, not a quality of nature itself, but only a relation external to it. However, since spirit is the true something and nature, consequently, in its own self is only what it is as contrasted with spirit, the quality of nature taken as such is just this, to be the other in its own self, that which is external to itself (in the determinations of space, time and matter).
The other simply by itself is the other in its own self, hence the other of itself and so the other of the other — it is, therefore, that which is absolutely dissimilar within itself, that which negates itself, alters itself. But in so doing it remains identical with itself, for that into which it alters is the other, and this is its sole determination; but what is altered is not determined in any different way but in the same way, namely, to be an other; in this latter, therefore, it only unites with its own self. It is thus posited as reflected into itself with sublation of the otherness, as a self-identical something from which, consequently, the otherness, which is at the same time a moment of it, is distinct from it and does not appertain to the something itself.
2. Something preserves itself in the negative of its determinate being [Nichtdasein]; it is essentially one with it and essentially not one with it. It stands, therefore, in a relation to its otherness and is not simply its otherness. The otherness is at once contained in it and also still separate from it; it is a being-for-other.
Determinate being as such is immediate, without relation to an other; or, it is in the determination of being; but as including within itself non-being, it is determinate being, being negated within itself, and then in the first instance an other-but since at the same time it also preserves itself in its negation, it is only a being-for-other.
It preserves itself in the negative of its determinate being and is being, but not being in general, but as self-related in opposition to its relation to other, as self-equal in opposition to its inequality. Such a being is being-in-itself.
Being-for-other and being-in-itself constitute the two moments of the something. There are here present two pairs of determinations: 1. Something and other, 2. Being-for-other and being-in-itself. The former contain the unrelatedness of their determinateness; something and other fall apart. But their truth is their relation; being-for-other and being-in-itself are, therefore, the above determinations posited as moments of one and the same something, as determination which are relations and which remain in their unity, in the unity of determinate being. Each, therefore, at the same time, also contains within itself its other moment which is distinguished from it.
Being and nothing in their unity, which is determinate being are no longer being and nothing — these they are only outside their unity — thus in their unstable unity, in becoming, they are coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be. The being in something is being-in-itself Being, which is self-relation, equality with self, is now no longer immediate, but is only as the non-being of otherness (as determinate being reflected into itself). Similarly, non-being as a moment of something is, in this unity of being and non-being, not negative determinate being in general, but an other, and more specifically — seeing that being is differentiated from it — at the same time a relation to its negative determinate being, a being-for-other.
Hence being-in-itself is, first, a negative relation to the negative determinate being, it has the otherness outside it and is opposed to it; in so far as something is in itself it is withdrawn from otherness and being-for-other. But secondly it has also present in it non-being itself, for it is itself the non-being of being-for-other.
But being-for-other is, first, a negation of the simple relation of being to itself which, in the first instance, is supposed to be determinate being and something; in so far as something is in an other or is for an other, it lacks a being of its own. But secondly it is not negative determinate being as pure nothing; it is negative determinate being which points to being-in-itself as to its own being which is reflected into itself, just as, conversely, being-in-itself points to being-for-other.
3. Both moments are determinations of what is one and the same, namely, the something. Something is in itself in so far as it has returned into itself out of the being-for-other. But something also has in itself (here the accent falls on in) or within it, a determination or circumstance in so far as this circumstance is outwardly in it, is a being-for-other.
This leads to a further determination. Being-in-itself and being-for-other are, in the first instance, distinct; but that something also has within it the same character that it is in itself, and, conversely, that what it is as being-for-other it also is in itself-this is the identity of being-in-itself and being-for-other, in accordance with the determination that the something itself is one and the same something of both moments, which, therefore, are undividedly present in it. This identity is already formally given in the sphere of determinate being, but more expressly in the consideration of essence and of the relation of inner and outer, and most precisely in the consideration of the Idea as the unity of the Notion and actuality. People fancy that they are saying something lofty with the expression 'in itself', as they do in saying 'the inner'; but what something is only in itself, is also only in it; 'in itself' is only an abstract, and so even external determination. The expressions: there is nothing in it, or, there is something in it, imply, though somewhat obscurely, that what is in a thing also belongs to the thing's being-in-itself, to its inner, true worth.
It may be observed that the meaning of the thing-in-itself is here revealed; it is a very simple abstraction but for some while it counted as a very important determination, something superior, as it were, just as the proposition that we do not know what things are in themselves ranked as a profound piece of wisdom.
Things are called 'in themselves' in so far as abstraction is made from all being-for-other, which means simply, in so far as they are thought devoid of all determination, as nothings. In this sense, it is of course impossible to know what the thing-in-itself is. For the question: what? Demands that determinations be assigned; but since the things of which they are to be assigned are at the same time supposed to be things in-themselves, which means, in effect, to be without any determination, the question is thoughtlessly made impossible to answer, or else only an absurd answer is given. The thing-in-itself is the same as that absolute of which we know nothing except that in it all is one. What is in these things-in-themselves, therefore, we know quite well; they are as such nothing but truthless, empty abstractions.
What, however, the thing-in-itself is in truth, what truly is in itself, of this logic is the exposition, in which however something better than an abstraction is understood by 'in-itself', namely, what something is in its Notion; but the Notion is concrete within itself, is comprehensible simply as Notion, and as determined within itself and the connected whole of its determinations, is cognisable.
Being-in-itself, in the first instance, has being-for-other as its contrasted moment; but positedness, too, is contrasted with it. This expression, it is true, includes also being-for-other, but it specifically contains the already accomplished bending back of that which is not in itself into that which is its being-in-itself, in which it is positive. Being-in-itself is generally to be taken as an abstract way of expressing the Notion; positing, properly speaking, first occurs in the sphere of essence, of objective reflection; the ground posits that which is grounded by it; still more, the cause produces or brings forth an effect, a determinate being whose self-subsistence is immediately negated and which carries the meaning of having its matter [Sache], its being, in an other. In the sphere of being, determinate being only proceeds from becoming, or, with the something an other is posited, with the finite, the infinite; but the finite does not bring forth the infinite, does not posit it. In the sphere of being, the self-determining even of the Notion is at first only in itself or implicit — as such it is called a transition; and the reflected determinations of being such as something and other, or finite and infinite, although they essentially refer to each other or are as a being-for-other, they too count as qualitative, as existing on their own account; the other is, the finite ranks equally with the infinite as an immediate, affirmative being, standing fast on its own account; the meaning of each appears to be complete even without its other. On the other hand positive and negative, cause and effect, however much they may be taken as isolated from each other, are at the same time meaningless one without the other. There is present in them their showing or reflection in each other, the showing or reflection in each of its other. In the different spheres of determination and especially in the progress of the exposition, or more precisely in the progress of the Notion towards the exposition of itself, it is of capital importance always clearly to distinguish what is still in itself and what is posited, the determinations as they are in the Notion, and as they are as posited, or as being-for-other. This is a distinction which belongs only to the dialectical development and which is unknown to metaphysical philosophising, which also includes the critical philosophy; the definitions of metaphysics, like its presuppositions, distinctions and conclusions, seek to assert and produce only what comes under the category of being, and that, too, of being-in-itself.
Being-for-other is, in the unity of the something with itself, identical with its in-itself; the being-for-other is thus present in the something. The determinateness thus reflected into itself is, therefore, again in the simple form of being, and hence is again a quality: determination.

(b) Determination, Constitution and Limit

The in-itself into which something is reflected into itself out of its being-for-other is no longer an abstract in-itself, but as negation of its being-for-other is mediated by the latter, which is thus its moment. It is not only the immediate identity of the something with itself, but the identity through which there is present in the something that which it is in itself; being-for-other is present in it because the in-itself is the sublation of the being-for-other, has returned out of the being-for-other into itself; but equally, too, simply because it is abstract and therefore essentially burdened with negation, with being-for-other. There is present here not only quality and reality, determinateness in the form of simple being, but determinateness in the form of the in-itself; and the development consists in positing this determinateness as reflected into itself.
1. The quality which is constituted by the essential unity of the in-itself in the simple something with its other moment, the presence in it of its being-for-other, can be called the determination of the in-itself, in so far as this word in its exact meaning is distinguished from determinateness in general. Determination is affirmative determinateness as the in-itself with which something in its determinate being remains congruous in face of its entanglement with the other by which it might be determined, maintaining itself in its self-equality, and making its determination hold good in its being-for-other. Something fulfils its determination in so far as the further determinateness which at once develops in various directions through something's relation to other, is congruous with the in-itself of the something, becomes its filling. Determination implies that what something is in itself, is also present in it.
The determination of man is thinking reason; thought in general, thought as such, in his simple determinateness — by it he is distinguished from the brute; in himself he is thought, in so far as this is also distinguished from his being-for-other, from his own natural existence and sense — nature through which he is directly connected with his other. But thought is also present in him; man himself is thought, he actually exists as thinking, it is his concrete existence and actuality; and, further, since thought is in his determinate being and his determinate being is in thought, it is to be taken as concrete, as having content and filling; it is thinking reason and as such the determination of man. But even this determination again is only in itself as something which ought to be, that is it, together with the filling which is incorporated in its in-itself, is in the form of the in-itself in general, in contrast to the determinate being not incorporated in it, which at the same time still confronts it externally as immediate sense-nature and nature.
2. The filling of the in-itself with determinateness is also distinct from the determinateness which is only being-for-other and remains outside the determination. For in the sphere of quality, the differences in their sublated form as moments also retain the form of immediate, qualitative being relatively to one another.
That which something has in it, thus divides itself and is from this side an external determinate being of the something, which is also its determinate being, but does not belong to the something's in-itself. The determinateness is thus a constitution.
Constituted in this or that way, something is involved in external influences and relationships. This external connection on which the constitution depends, and the circumstance of being determined by an other, appears as something contingent. But it is the quality of something to be open to external influences and to have a constitution.
In so far as something alters, the alteration falls within its constitution; it is that in the something which becomes an other. The something itself preserves itself in the alteration which affects only this unstable surface of its otherness, not its determination.
Determination and constitution are thus distinguished from each other; something, in accordance with its determination, is indifferent to its constitution. But that which something has in it, is the middle term connecting them in this syllogism. Or, rather, the being-in-the-something showed itself as falling apart into these two extremes. The simple middle term is determinateness as such; to its identity belongs both determination and constitution. But determination spontaneously passes over into constitution, and the latter into the former. This is implied in what has been said already; the connection is more precisely this: in so far as that which something is in itself is also present in it, it is burdened with being-for-other; hence the determination is, as such, open to relationship to other. The determinateness is at the same time a moment, but contains at the same time the qualitative distinction of being different from the in-itself, of being the negative of the something, another determinate being. The determinateness which thus holds the other within it, being united with the in-itself, brings the otherness into the latter or into the determination, which, consequently, is reduced to constitution. Conversely, being-for-other isolated as constitution and posited by itself, is in its own self the same as the other as such, the other in its own self, that is, the other of itself; but thus it is self-related determinate being, the in-itself with a determinateness, and therefore a determination. Consequently, in so far as determination and constitution are also to be held apart, the latter, which appears to be grounded in something external, in an other in general, also depends on the former, and the determining from outside is at the same time determined by the something's own, immanent determination. But further, the constitution belongs to that which the something is in itself; something alters with its constitution.
This alteration of something is no longer the first alteration of something merely in accordance with its being-for-other; the first was only an implicit (an sich seiende) alteration belonging to the inner Notion; now alteration is also posited in the something. The something itself is further determined and the negation is posited as immanent in it, as its developed being-within-self.
In the first place, the transition of determination and constitution into each other is the sublation of their difference, resulting in the positing of determinate being or something in general; and since this latter results from that difference which equally includes within it qualitative otherness, there are two somethings which, however, are not opposed to each other only as others in general — for in that case this negation would still be abstract and would arise only from comparing them. But the negation is now immanent in the somethings. As determinate beings they are indifferent to each other, but this their affirmation is no longer immediate, each relates itself to itself only by means of the sublation of the otherness which, in the determination, is reflected into the in-itself.
Thus something through its own nature relates itself to the other, because otherness is posited in it as its own moment; its being-within-self includes the negation within it, by means of which alone it now has its affirmative determinate being. But the other is also qualitatively distinguished from this and is thus posited outside the something. The negation of its other is now the quality of the something, for it is as this sublating of its other that it is something. It is only in this sublation that the other is really opposed to another determinate being; the other is only externally opposed to the first something, or rather, since in fact they are directly connected, that is in their Notion, their connection is this, that determinate being has passed over into otherness, something into other, and something is just as much an other as the other itself is. Now in so far as the being-within-self is the non-being of the otherness which is contained in it but which at the same time has a distinct being of its own, the something is itself the negation, the ceasing of an other in it; it is posited as relating itself negatively to the other and in so doing preserving itself; this other, the being-within-self of the something as negation of the negation, is its in-itself, and at the same time this sublation is present in it as a simple negation, namely, as its negation of the other something external to it. There is a single determinateness of both, which on the one hand is identical with the being-within-self of the somethings as negation of the negation, and on the other hand, since these negations are opposed to one another as other somethings, conjoins and equally disjoins them through their own nature, each negating the other: this determinateness is limit.
3. Being-for-other is the indeterminate, affirmative community of something with its other; in the limit the non-being-for-other becomes prominent, the qualitative negation of the other, which is thereby kept apart from the something which is reflected into itself. We must observe the development of this Notion, which manifests itself, however, rather as an entanglement and a contradiction. This contradiction is at once to be found in the circumstance that the limit, as something's negation reflected into itself, contains ideally in it the moments of something and other, and these, as distinguished moments, are at the same time posited in the sphere of determinate being as really, qualitatively distinct.
[a] Something, therefore, is immediate, self-related determinate being, and has a limit, in the first place, relatively to an other; the limit is the non-being of the other, not of the something itself: in the limit, something limits its other. But the other is itself a something in general, therefore the limit which something has relatively to the other is also the limit of the other as a something, its limit whereby it keeps the first something as its other apart from it, or is a non-being of that something; it is thus not only non-being of the other, but-non-being, equally of the one and of the other something, consequently of the something as such.
But the limit is essentially equally the non-being of the other, and so something at the same time is through its limit. It is true that something, in limiting the other, is subjected to being limited itself; but at the same time its limit is, as the ceasing of the other in it, itself only the being of the something; through the limit something is what it is, and in the limit it has its quality. This relationship is the outward manifestation of the fact that the limit is simple negation or the first negation, whereas the other is, at the same time, the negation of the negation, the being-within-itself of the something.
Something, as an immediate determinate being, is, therefore, the limit relatively to another something, but the limit is present in the something itself, which is a something through the mediation of the limit which is just as much the non-being of the something. Limit is the mediation through which something and other each as well is, as is not.
[b] Now in so far as something in its limit both is and is not, and these moments are an immediate, qualitative difference, the negative determinate being and the determinate being of the something fall outside each other. Something has its determinate being outside (or, as it is also put, on the inside) of its limit; similarly, the other, too, because it is a something, is outside it. Limit is the middle between the two of them in which they cease. They have their determinate being beyond each other and beyond their limit; the limit as the non-being of each is the other of both.
It is in accordance with this difference of something from its limit that the line appears as line only outside its limit, the point; the plane as plane outside the line; the solid as solid only outside its limiting surface. It is primarily this aspect of limit which is seized by pictorial thought — the self-externality of the Notion — and especially, too, in reference to spatial objects.
[c] But further, something as it is outside the limit, the unlimited something, is only a determinate being in general. As such, it is not distinguished from its other; it is only determinate being and therefore has the same determination as its other; each is only a something in general, or each is an other; thus both are the same. But this their primarily immediate determinate being is now posited with the determinateness as limit, in which both are what they are, distinguished from each other. Limit is, however, equally their common distinguishedness, their unity and distinguishedness, like determinate being. This double identity of both, of determinate being and limit, contains this: that something has its determinate being only in the limit, and that since the limit and the determinate being are each at the same time the negative of each other, the something, which is only in its limit, just as much separates itself from itself and points beyond itself to its non-being, declaring this is to be its being and thus passing over into it. To apply this to the preceding example and taking first the determination that something is what it is only in its limit: as thus determined, the point is therefore the limit of the line, not merely in the sense that the line only ceases in the point, and as a determinate being is outside it; neither is the line the limit of the plane merely in the sense that the plane only ceases in it-and similarly with surface as limit of the solid; on the contrary, in the point the line also begins; the point is its absolute beginning. Even when the line is represented as unlimited on either side, or, as it is put, is produced to infinity, the point still constitutes its element, just as the line is the element of the plane, and the surface that of the solid. These limits are the principle of that which they limit; just as one, for example as hundredth, is the limit, but also the element, of the whole hundred.
The other determination is the unrest of the something in its limit in which it is immanent, an unrest which is the contradiction which impels the something out beyond itself. Thus the point is this dialectic of its own self to become a line, the line the dialectic to become a plane, and the plane the dialectic to become total space. A second definition is given of line, plane and total space: namely, that the line originates through the movement of the point, the plane through the movement of the line, and so on. But this movement of the point, line and so on, is regarded as something contingent or as only thus imagined. This point of view is, however, really retracted in so far as the determinations from which the line and so on are supposed to originate are their elements and principles which, at the same time, are nothing else but their limits; and so the origin is not considered as contingent or as only thus imagined. That point, line and plane by themselves are self-contradictory, are beginnings which spontaneously repel themselves from themselves, so that the point, through its Notion, passes out of itself into the line, moves in itself and gives rise to the line, and so on, lies in the Notion of limit which is immanent in the something. The application itself, however, belongs to the consideration of space; to give an indication of it here, the point is the wholly abstract limit, but in a determinate being; this is taken as still wholly abstract, it is so-called absolute, that is, abstract space, a purely continuous asunderness. But the limit is not abstract negation, but is in this determinate being, is a spatial determinateness; the point is, therefore, spatial, the contradiction of abstract negation and continuity, and is, therefore, the transition, the accomplished transition into the line, and so on; just as also, for the same reason, there is no such thing as a point, line or plane.
Something with its immanent limit posited as the contradiction of itself, through which it is directed and forced out of and beyond itself, is the finite.

(c) Finitude

The being of something is determinate; something has a quality and in it is not only determined but limited; its quality is its limit and, burdened with this, it remains in the first place an affirmative, stable being. But the development of this negation, so that the opposition between its determinate being and the negation as its immanent limit, is itself the being-within-self of the something, which is thus in its own self only a becoming, constitutes the finitude of something.
When we say of things that they are finite, we understand thereby that they not only have a determinateness, that their quality is not only a reality and an intrinsic determination, that finite things are not merely limited — as such they still have determinate being outside their limit — but that, on the contrary, non-being constitutes their nature and being. Finite things are, but their relation to themselves is that they are negatively self-related and in this they are negatively self-related and in this very self-relation send themselves away beyond themselves, beyond their being. They are, but the truth of this being is their end.
The finite not only alters, like something in general, but it ceases to be; and its ceasing to be is not merely a possibility, so that it could be without ceasing to be, but the being as such of finite things is to have the germ of decease as their being-within-self: the hour of their birth is the hour of their death.

[a] The Immediacy of Finitude

The thought of the finitude of things brings this sadness with it because it is qualitative negation pushed to its extreme, and in the singleness of such determination there is no longer left to things an affirmative being distinct from their destiny to perish. Because of this qualitative singleness of the negation, which has gone back to the abstract opposition of nothing and ceasing-to-be as opposed to being, finitude is the most stubborn category of the understanding; negation in general, constitution and limit, reconcile themselves with their other, with determinate being; and even nothing, taken abstractly as such, is given up as an abstraction; but finitude is the negation as fixed in itself, and it therefore stands in abrupt contrast to its affirmative. The finite, it is true, lest itself be brought into flux, it is itself this, to be determined or destined to its end, but only to its end — or rather, it is the refusal to let itself be brought affirmatively to its affirmative, to the infinite, and to let itself be united with it; it is therefore posited as inseparable from its nothing, and is thereby cut off from all reconciliation with its other, the affirmative. The determination or destiny of finite things takes them no further than their end. The understanding persists in this sadness of finitude by making non-being the determination of things and at the same time making it imperishable and absolute. Their transitoriness could only pass away or perish in their other, in the affirmative; their finitude would then be parted from them; but it is their unalterable quality, that is, their quality which does not pass over into its other, that is, into its affirmative; it is thus eternal
This is a very important consideration; but certainly no philosophy or opinion, or understanding, will let itself be tied to the standpoint that the finite is absolute; the very opposite is expressly present in the assertion of the finite; the finite is limited, transitory, it is only finite, not imperishable; this is directly implied in its determination and expression. But the point is, whether in thinking of the finite one holds fast to the being of finitude and lets the transitoriness continue to be, or whether the transitoriness and the ceasing-to-be cease to be. But it is precisely in that view of the finite which makes ceasing-to-be the final determination of the finite, that this does not happen. It is the express assertion that the finite is irreconcilable with the infinite and cannot be united with it, that the finite is utterly opposed to the infinite. Being, absolute being, is ascribed to the infinite; confronting it, the finite thus remains held fast as its negative; incapable of union with the infinite, it remains absolute on its own side; from the affirmative, from the infinite, it would receive affirmation, and would thus cease to be; but a union with the infinite is just what is declared to be impossible. If it is not to remain fixed in its opposition to the infinite but is to cease to be, then, as we have already said, just this ceasing-to-be is its final determination, not the affirmative which would be only the ceasing to be of the ceasing-to-be. If, however, the finite is not to pass way in the affirmative, but its end is to be grasped as the nothing, then we should be back again at that first, abstract nothing which itself has long since passed away.
With this nothing, however, which is supposed to be only nothing, and which at the same time is granted an existence in thought, imagination or speech, there occurs the same contradiction as has just been indicated in connection with the finite, but with this difference, that in the case of that first nothing it only occurs, whereas in finitude it is explicitly stated. There it appears as subjective; here it is asserted that the finite stands perpetually opposed to the infinite, that what is in itself null is, and is as in itself null. We have to become conscious of this; and the development of the finite shows that, having this contradiction present within it, it collapses within itself, yet in doing so actually resolves the contradiction, that not only is the finite transitory and ceases to be, but that the ceasing-to-be, the nothing, is not the final determination, but itself ceases to be.

[b] Limitation and the Ought

This contradiction is, indeed, abstractly present simply in the circumstance that the something is finite, or that the finite is. But something or being is no longer abstractly posited but reflected into itself and developed as being-within-self which possesses a determination and a constitution, and, still more specifically, a limit which, as immanent in the something and constituting the quality of its being-within-self, is finitude. It is to be seen what moment are contained in this Notion of the finite something.
Determination and constitution showed themselves as sides for external reflection; but the former already contained otherness as belonging to the something's in-itself; the externality of the otherness is on the one hand in the something's own inwardness, on the other hand it remains, as externality, distinguished from it, it is still externality as such, but present in the something. But further, since the otherness is determined as limit, as itself negation of the negation, the otherness immanent in the something is posited as the connection of the two sides, and the unity with itself of the something which possesses both determination and constitution, is its relation turned towards its own self, the relation of its implicit determination to the limit immanent in the something, a relation in which this immanent limit is negated. The self-identical being-within-self thus relates itself to itself as its own non-being, but as negation of the negation, as negating the non-being which at the same time retains in it determinate being, for determinate being is the quality of its being-within-self. Something's own limit thus posited by it as a negative which is at the same time essential, is not merely limit as such, but limitation. But what is posited as negated is not limitation alone; the negation is two-edged, since what is posited by it as negated is the limit, and this is in general what is common to both something and other, and is also a determinateness of the in-itself of the determination as such. This in-itself, therefore, as the negative relation to its limit (which is also distinguished from it), to itself as limitation, is the ought.
In order that the limit which is in something as such should be a limitation, something must at the same time in its own self transcend the limit, it must in its own self be related to the limit as to something which is not. The determinate being of something lies inertly indifferent, as it were, alongside its limit. But something only transcends its limit in so far as it is the accomplished sublation of the limit, is the in-itself as negatively related to it. And since the limit is in the determination itself as a limitation, something transcends its own self.
The ought therefore contains the determination in double form: once as the implicit determination counter to the negation, and again as a non-being which, as a limitation, is distinguished from the determination, but is at the same time itself an implicit determination.
The finite has thus determined itself as the relation of its determination to its limit; in this relation, the determination is an ought and the limit is a limitation. Both are thus moments of the finite and hence are themselves finite, both the ought and the limitation. But only the limitation is posited as finite; the ought is limited only in itself, that is, for us. It is limited through its relation to the limit which is already immanent in the ought itself, but this its restriction is enveloped in the in-itself, for, in accordance with its determinate being, that is, its determinateness relatively to the limitation, it is posited as the in-itself.
What ought to be is, and at the same time is not. If it were, we could not say that it ought merely to be. The ought has, therefore, essentially a limitation. This limitation is not alien to it; that which only ought to be is the determination, which is now posited as it is in fact, namely, as at the same time only a determinateness.
The being-in-itself of the something in its determination reduces itself therefore to an ought-to-be through the fact that the same thing which constitutes its in-itself is in one and the same respect a non-being; and that, too, in this way, that in the being-within-self, in the negation of the negation, this in-itself as one of the negations (the one that negates) is a unity with the other, which at the same time is a qualitatively distinct limit, through which this unity is a relation to it. The limitation of the finite is not something external to it; on the contrary, its own determination is also its limitation; and this latter is both itself and also the ought-to-be; it is that which is common to both, or rather that in which both are identical.
But now further, the finite as the ought transcends its limitation; the same determinateness which is its negation is also sublated, and is thus its in-itself; its limit is also not its limit.
Hence as the ought, something is raised above its limitation, but conversely, it is only as the ought that it has its limitation. The two are inseparable. Something has a limitation in so far as it has negation in its determination, and the determination is also the accomplished sublation of the limitation.

Remark: The Ought

The ought has recently played a great part in philosophy, especially in connection with morality and also in metaphysics generally, as the ultimate and absolute concept of the identity of the in-itself or self-relation, and of the determinateness or limit.
'You can, because you ought' — this expression, which is supposed to mean a great deal, is implied in the notion of ought. For the ought implies that one is superior to the limitation; in it the limit is sublated and the in-itself of the ought is thus an identical self-relation, and hence the abstraction of 'can'. But conversely, it is equally correct that: 'you cannot, just because you ought.' For in the ought, the limitation as limitation is equally implied; the said formalism of possibility has, in the limitation, a reality, a qualitative otherness opposed to it and the relation of each to the other is a contradiction, and thus a 'cannot', or rather an impossibility.
In the Ought the transcendence of finitude, that is, infinity, begins. The ought is that which, in the further development, exhibits itself in accordance with the said impossibility as the infinity.
With respect to the form of the limitation and the ought, two prejudices can be criticised in more detail. First of all, great stress is laid on the limitations of thought, of reason, and so on, and it is asserted that the limitation cannot be transcended. To make such as assertion is to be unaware that the very fact that something is determined as a limitation implies that the limitation is already transcended. For a determinateness, a limit, is determined as a limitation only in opposition to its other in general, that is, in opposition to that which is free from the limitation; the other of a limitation is precisely the being beyond it. Stone and metal do not transcend their limitation because this is not a limitation for them. If, however, in the case of such general propositions framed by the understanding, such as that limitation cannot be transcended, thought will not apply itself to finding out what is implied in the Notion, then it can be directed to the world of actuality where such proportions show themselves to be completely unreal. just because thought is supposed to be superior to actuality, to dwell apart from it in higher regions and therefore to be itself determined as an ought-to-be, on the one hand, it does not advance to the Notion, and, on the other hand, it stands in just as untrue a relation to actuality as it does to the Notion.
Because the stone does not think, does not even feel, its limitedness is not a limitation for it, that is, is not a negation in it for sensation, imagination, thought, etc., which it does not possess. But even the stone, as a something, contains the distinction of its determination or in-itself and its determinate being, and to that extent it, too, transcends its limitation; the Notion which is implicit in it contains the identity of the stone with its other. If it is a base capable of being acted on by an acid, then it can be oxidised, and neutralised, and so on. In oxidation, neutralisation and so on, it overcomes its limitation of existing only as a base; it transcends it, and similarly the acid overcomes its limitation of being an acid. This ought, the obligation to transcend limitations, is present in both acid and caustic base in such a degree that it is only by force that they can be kept fixed as (waterless, that is, purely non-neutral) acid and caustic base.
If, however, an existence contains the Notion not merely as an abstract in-itself, but as an explicit, self-determined totality, as instinct, life, ideation, etc., then in its own strength it overcomes the limitation and attains a being beyond it. The plant transcends the limitation of being a seed, similarly, of being blossom, fruit, leaf; the seed becomes the developed plant, the blossom fades away, and so on. The sentient creature, in the limitation of hunger, thirst, etc., is the urge to overcome this limitation and it does overcome it. It feels pain, and it is the privilege of the sentient nature to feel pain; it is a negation in its self, and the negation is determined as a limitation in its feeling, just because the sentient creature has the feeling of its self, which is the totality that transcends this determinateness. If it were not above and beyond the determinateness, it would not feel it as its negation and would feel no pain.
But it is reason, thought, which is supposed to be unable to transcend limitation — reason, which is the universal explicitly beyond particularity as such (that is, all particularity), which is nothing but the overcoming of limitation! Granted, not every instance of transcending and being beyond limitation is a genuine liberation from it, a veritable affirmation; even the ought itself, and abstraction in general, is in imperfect transcending. However, the reference to the wholly abstract universal is a sufficient reply to the equally abstract assertion that limitation cannot be transcended, or, again, even the reference to the infinite in general is a sufficient refutation of the assertion that the finite cannot be transcended.
In this connection we may mention a seemingly ingenious fancy of Leibniz: that if a magnet possessed consciousness it would regard its pointing to the north as a determination of its will, as a law of its freedom. On the contrary, if it possessed consciousness and consequently will and freedom, it would be a thinking being. Consequently, space for it would be universal, embracing every direction, so that the single direction to the north would be rather a limitation on its freedom, just as much as being fixed to one spot would be a limitation for a man although not for a plant.
On the other hand, the ought is the transcending, but still only finite transcending, of the limitation. Therefore, it has its place and its validity in the sphere of finitude where it holds fast to being-in-itself in opposition to limitedness, declaring the former to be the regulative and essential factor relatively to what is null. Duty is an ought directed against the particular will, against self-seeking desire and capricious interest and it is held up as an ought to the will in so far as this has the capacity to isolate itself from the true. Those who attach such importance to the ought of morality and fancy that morality is destroyed if the ought is not recognized as ultimate truth, and those too who, reasoning from the level of the understanding, derive a perpetual satisfaction from being able to confront everything there is with an ought, that is, with a 'knowing better' — and for that very reason are just as loath to be robbed of the ought — do not see that as regards the finitude of their sphere the ought receives full recognition. But in the world of actuality itself, Reason and Law are not in such a bad way that they only ought to be — it is only the abstraction of the in-itself that stops at this-any more than the ought is in its own self perennial and, what is the same thing, that finitude is absolute. The philosophy of Kant and Fichte sets up the ought as the highest point of the resolution of the contradictions of Reason; but the truth is that the ought is only the standpoint which clings to finitude and thus to contradiction.

[c] Transition of the Finite into the Infinite

The ought as such contains limitation, and limitation contains the ought. Their relation to each other is the finite itself which contains them both in its being-within-self. These moments of its determination are qualitatively opposed; limitation is determined as the negative of the ought and the ought likewise as the negative of limitation. The finite is thus inwardly self-contradictory; it sublates itself, ceases to be. But this its result, the negative as such, is [a] its very determination; for it is the negative of the negative. Thus, in ceasing to be, the finite has not ceased to be; it has become in the first instance only another finite which, however, is equally a ceasing-to-be as transition into another finite, and so on to infinity. But [b] closer consideration of this result shows that the finite in its ceasing-to-be, in this negation of itself has attained its being-in-itself, is united with itself. Each of its moments contains precisely this result; the ought transcends the limitation, that is, transcends itself; but beyond itself or its other, is only the limitation itself. The limitation, however, points directly beyond itself to its other, which is the ought; but this latter is the same duality of being-in-itself and determinate being as the limitation; it is the same thing; in going beyond itself, therefore, it equally only unites with itself. This identity with itself, the negation of negation, is affirmative being and thus the other of the finite, of the finite which is supposed to have the first negation for its determinateness; this other is the infinite.

C. INFINITY

The infinite in its simple Notion can, in the first place, be regarded as a fresh definition of the absolute; as indeterminate self-relation it is posited as being and becoming. The forms of determinate being find no place in the series of those determinations which can be regarded as definitions of the absolute, for the individual forms of that sphere are immediately posited only as determinatenesses, as finite in general. The infinite, however, is held to be absolute without qualification for it is determined expressly as negation of the finite, and reference is thus expressly made to limitedness in the infinite-limitedness of which being and becoming could perhaps be capable, even if not possessing or showing it-and the presence in the infinite of such limitedness is denied.
But even so, the infinite is not yet really free from limitation and finitude; the main point is to distinguish the genuine Notion of infinity from spurious infinity, the infinite of reason from the infinite of the understanding; yet the latter is the finitised infinite, and it will be found that in the very act of keeping the infinite pure and aloof from the finite, the infinite is only made finite.
The infinite is:

(a) in its simple determination, affirmative as negation of the finite

(b) but thus it is in alternating determination with the finite, and is the abstract, one-sided infinite

(c) the self-sublation of this infinite and of the finite, as a single process — this is the true or genuine infinite.

(a) The Infinite in General

The infinite is the negation of the negation, affirmation, being which has restored itself out of limitedness. The infinite is, and more intensely so than the first immediate being; it is the true being, the elevation above limitation. At the name of the infinite, the heart and the mind light up, for in the infinite the spirit is not merely abstractly present to itself, but rises to its own self, to the light of its thinking, of its universality, of its freedom.
The Notion of the infinite as it first presents itself is this, that determinate being in its being-in-itself determines itself as finite and transcends the limitation. It is the very nature of the finite to transcend itself, to negate its negation and to become infinite. Thus the infinite does not stand as something finished and complete above or superior to the finite, as if the finite had an enduring being apart from or subordinate to the infinite. Neither do we only, as subjective reason, pass beyond the finite into the infinite; as when we say that the infinite is the Notion of reason and that through reason we rise superior to temporal things, though we let this happen without prejudice to the finite which is in no way affected by this exaltation, an exaltation which remains external to it. But the finite itself in being raised into the infinite is in no sense acted on by an alien force; on the contrary, it is its nature to be related to itself as limitation,— both limitation and as an ought-and to transcend the same, or rather, as self-relation to have negated the limitation and to be beyond it. It is not in the sublating of finitude in general that infinity in general comes to be; the truth is rather that the finite is only this, through its own nature to become itself the infinite. The infinite is its affirmative determination, that which it truly is in itself.
Thus the finite has vanished in the infinite and what is, is only the infinite.

(b) Alternating Determination of the Finite and the Infinite

The infinite is; in this immediacy it is at the same time the negation of an other, of the finite. As thus in the form of simple being and at the same time as the non-being of an other, it has fallen back into the category of something as a determinate being in general — more precisely, into the category of something with a limit, because the infinite is determinate being reflected into itself, resulting from the sublating of determinateness in general, and hence is determinate being posited as distinguished from its determinateness. In keeping with this determinateness, the finite stands opposed to the infinite as a real determinate being; they stand thus in a qualitative relation, each remaining external to the other; the immediate being of the infinite resuscitates the being of its negation, of the finite again which at first seemed to have vanished in the infinite.
But the infinite and the finite are not in these categories of relation only; the two sides are determined beyond the stage of being merely others to each other. Finitude, namely, is limitation posited as limitation; determinate being is posited with the determination to pass over into its in itself, to become infinite. Infinity is the nothing of the finite, it is what the latter is in itself, what it ought to be, but this ought-to-be is at the same time reflected into itself, is realised; it is a purely self-related, wholly affirmative being. In infinity we have the satisfaction that all determinateness, alteration, all limitation and with it the ought itself, are posited as vanished, as sublated, that the nothing of the finite is posited. As this negation of the finite the in-itself is determinate and thus, as negation of the negation, is affirmative within itself. But this affirmation as qualitative, is immediate self-relation, is being; and thus the infinite is reduced to the category of a being which has the finite confronting it as an other; its negative nature is posited as the s imply affirmative, hence as the first and immediate negation. The infinite is in this way burdened with the opposition to the finite which, as an other, remains at the same time a determinate reality although in its in-itself, in the infinite, it is at the same time posited as sublated; this infinite is the non-finite-a being in the determinateness of negation. Contrasted with the finite, with the sphere of affirmative determinatenesses, of realities, the infinite is the indeterminate void, the beyond of the finite, whose being-in-itself is not present in its determinate reality.
The infinite as thus posited over against the finite, in a relation wherein they are as qualitatively distinct others, is to be called the spurious infinite, the infinite of the understanding, for which it has the value of the highest, the absolute Truth. The understanding is satisfied that it has truly reconciled these two, but the truth is that it is entangled in unreconciled, unresolved, absolute contradiction; it can only be brought to a consciousness of this fact by the contradictions into which it falls on every side when it ventures to apply and to explicate these its categories.
This contradiction occurs as a direct result of the circumstance that the finite remains as a determinate being opposed to the infinite, so that there are two determinatenesses; there are two worlds, one infinite and one finite, and in their relationship the infinite is only the limit of the finite and is thus only a determinate infinite, an infinite which is itself finite.
This contradiction develops its content into more explicit forms. The finite is real determinate being which persists as such even when transition is made to its non-being, to the infinite; this, as has been shown, has only the first, immediate negation for its determinateness relatively to the finite, just as the finite as opposed to that negation has, as negated, only the significance of an other and is, therefore, still [only] something. When, therefore, the understanding, raising itself above this finite world, ascends to its highest, to the infinite, this finite world remains for it on this side, so that the infinite is only set above or beyond the finite, is separated from it, with the consequence that the finite is separated from the infinite; each is assigned a distinct place — the finite as determinate being here, on this side, and the infinite, although the in-itself of the finite, nevertheless as a beyond in the dim, inaccessible distance, outside of which the finite is and remains.
As thus separated they are just as much essentially connected by the very negation which separates them. This negation which connects them — the somethings reflected into themselves — is the limit of the one relatively to the other, and that, too, in such a manner that each of them does not have the limit in it merely relatively to the other, but the negation is their being-in-itself; the limit is thus present in each on its own account, in separation from the other. But the limit is in the form of the first negation and thus both are limited, finite in themselves. However, each as affirmatively self-related is also the negation of its limit; each thus immediately repels the limit, as its non-being, from itself and, as qualitatively separated from it, posits it as another being outside it, the finite positing its non-being as this infinite and the infinite, similarly, the finite. It is readily conceded that there is a necessary transition from the finite to the infinite — necessary through the determination of the finite — and that the finite is raised to the form of being-in-itself, since the finite, although persisting as a determinate being, is at the same time also determined as in itself nothing and therefore as destined to bring about its own dissolution; whereas the infinite, although determined as burdened with negation and limit, is at the same time also determined as possessing being-in-itself, so that this abstraction of self-related affirmation constitutes its determination, and hence finite determinate being is not present in it. But it has been shown that the infinite itself attains affirmative being only by means of negation, as the negation of negation, and that when this its affirmation is taken as merely simple, qualitative being, the negation contained in it is reduced to a simple immediate negation and thus to a determinateness and limit, which then, as in contradiction with the being-in-itself of the infinite is posited as excluded from it, as not belonging to it, as, on the contrary, opposed to its being-in-itself, as the finite. As therefore each is in its own self and through its own determination the positing of its other, they are inseparable. But this their unity is concealed in their qualitative otherness, it is the inner unity which only lies at their base.
This determines the manner in which this unity is manifested: posited in determinate being, the unity is a changing or transition of the finite into the infinite, and vice versa; so that the infinite only emerges in the finite and the finite in the infinite, the other in the other; that is to say, each arises immediately and independently in the other, their connection being only an external one.
The process of their transition has the following detailed shape. We pass from the finite to the infinite. This transcending of the finite appears as an external act. In this void beyond the finite, what arises? What is the positive element in it? Owing to the inseparability of the infinite and the finite — or because this infinite remaining aloof on its own side is itself limited — there arises a limit; the infinite has vanished and its other, the finite, has entered. But this entrance of the finite appears as a happening external to the infinite, and the new limit as something that does not arise from the infinite itself but is likewise found as given. And so we are faced with a relapse into the previous determination which has been sublated in vain. But this new limit is itself only something which has to be sublated or transcended. And so again there arises the void, the nothing, in which similarly the said determinateness, a new limit, is encountered — and so on to infinity.
We have before us the alternating determination of the finite and the infinite; the finite is finite only in its relation to the ought or to the infinite, and the latter is only infinite in its relation to the finite. They are inseparable and at the same time mutually related as sheer others; each has in its own self the other of itself. Each is thus the unity of itself and its other and is in its determinateness not that which it itself is, and which its other is.
It is this alternating determination negating both its own self and its negation, which appears as the progress to infinity, a progress which in so many forms and applications is accepted as something ultimate beyond which thought does not go but, having got as far as this 'and so on to infinity', has usually reached its goal. This progress makes its appearance wherever relative determinations are pressed to the point of opposition, with the result that although they are in an inseparable unity, each is credited with a self-subsistent determinate being over against the other. The progress is, consequently, a contradiction which is not resolved but is always only enunciated as present.
What we have here is an abstract transcending of a limit, a transcending which remains incomplete because it is not itself transcended. Before us is the infinite; it is of course transcended, for a new limit is posited, but the result is rather only a return to the finite. This spurious infinity is in itself the same thing as the perennial ought; it is the negation of the finite it is true, but it cannot in truth free itself therefrom. The finite reappears in the infinite itself as its other, because it is only in its connection with its other, the finite, that the infinite is. The progress to infinity is, consequently, only the perpetual repetition of one and the same content, one and the same tedious alternation of this finite and infinite.
The infinity of the infinite progress remains burdened with the finite as such, is thereby limited and is itself finite. But this being so, the infinite progress would in fact be posited as the unity of the finite and the infinite; but this unity is not reflected on. Yet it is this unity alone which evokes the infinite in the finite and the finite in the infinite; it is, so to speak, the mainspring of the infinite progress. This progress is the external aspect of this unity at which ordinary thinking halts, at this perpetual repetition of one and the same alternation, of the vain unrest of advancing beyond the limit to infinity, only to find in this infinite a new limit in which, however, it is as little able to rest as in the infinite. This infinite has the fixed determination of a beyond, which cannot be reached, for the very reason that it is not meant to be reached, because the determinateness of the beyond, of the affirmative negation, is not let go. In accordance with this determination the infinite has the finite opposed to it as a being on this side, which is equally unable to raise itself into the infinite just because it has this determination of an other, of a determinate being which perpetually generates itself in its beyond, a beyond from which it is again distinct.

(c) Affirmative Infinity

In this alternating determination of the finite and the infinite from one to the other and back again, their truth is already implicitly present, and all that is required is to take up what is before us. This transition from one to the other and back again constitutes the external realisation of the Notion. In this realisation is posited the content of the Notion, but it is posited as external, as falling asunder; all that is required is to compare these different moments which yield the unity which gives the Notion itself; the unity of the infinite and the finite is — as has often been remarked already but here especially is to be borne in mind — the one-sided expression for the unity as it is in truth; but the elimination, too, of this one-sided determination must lie in the externalisation of the Notion now before us.
Taken according to their first, only immediate determination, the infinite is only the beyond of the finite; according to its determination it is the negation of the finite; thus the finite is only that which must be transcended, the negation of itself in its own self, which is infinity. In each, therefore, there lies the determinateness of the other, although according to the standpoint of the infinite progress these two are supposed to be shut out from each other and only to follow each other alternately; neither can be posited and grasped without the other, the infinite not without the finite, nor the latter without the infinite. In saying what the infinite is, namely the negation of the finite, the latter is itself included in what is said; it cannot be dispensed with for the definition or determination of the infinite. One only needs to be aware of what one is saying in order to find the determination of the finite in the infinite. As regards the finite, it is readily conceded that it is the null; but its very nullity is the infinity from which it is thus inseparable. In this way of conceiving them, each may seem to be taken in its connection with its other. But if they are taken as devoid of connection with each other so that they are only joined by 'and', then each confronts the other as self-subsistent, as in its own self only affirmatively present. Let us see how they are constituted when so taken. The infinite, in that case, is one of the two; but as only one of the two it is itself finite, it is not the whole but only one side; it has its limit in what stands over against it; it is thus the finite infinite. There are present only two finites. It is precisely this holding of the infinite apart from the finite, thus giving it a one-sided character, that constitutes its finitude and, therefore, its unity with the finite. The finite, on the other hand, characterized as independent of and apart from the infinite, is that self-relation in which its relativity, its dependence and transitoriness is removed; it is the same self-subsistence and affirmation which the infinite is supposed to be.
The two modes of consideration at first seem to have a different determinateness for their point of departure, inasmuch as the former is supposed to be only the connection of the infinite and the finite, of each with its other, and the latter is supposed to hold them apart in complete separation from each other; but both modes yield one and the same result: the infinite and the finite viewed as connected with each other — the connection being only external to them but also essential to them, without which neither is what it is — each contains its own other in its own determination, just as much as each, taken on its own account, considered in its own self, has its other present within it as its own moment.
This yields the decried unity of the finite and the infinite — the unity which is itself the infinite which embraces both itself and finitude — and is therefore the infinite in a different sense from that in which the finite is regarded as separated and set apart from the infinite. Since now they must also be distinguished, each is, as has just been shown, in its own self the unity of both; thus we have two such unities. The common element, the unity of the two determinatenesses, as unity, posits them in the first place as negated, since each is supposed to be what it is in its distinction from the other; in their unity, therefore, they lose their qualitative nature-an important reflection for rebutting that idea of the unity which insists on holding fast to the infinite and finite in the quality they are supposed to have when taken in their separation from each other, a view which therefore sees in that unity only contradiction, but not also resolution of the contradiction through the negation of the qualitative determinateness of both; thus the unity of the infinite and finite, simple and general in the first instance, is falsified.
But further, since now they are also to be taken as distinct, the unity of the infinite which each of these moments is, is differently determined in each of them. The infinite determined as such, has present in it the finitude which is distinct from it; the former is the in-itself in this unity, and the latter is only determinateness, limit in it; but it is a limit which is the sheer other of the in-itself, is its opposite; the infinite's determination, which is the in-itself as such, is ruined by the addition of such a quality; it is thus a finitised infinite. Similarly, since the finite as such is only the negation of the in-itself, but by reason of this unity also has its opposite present in it, it is exalted and, so to say, infinitely exalted above its worth; the finite is posited as the infinitised finite.
Just as before, the simple unity of the infinite and finite was falsified by the understanding, so too is the double unity. Here too this results from taking the infinite in one of the two unities not as negated, but rather as the in-itself, in which, therefore, determinateness and limitation are not to be explicitly present, for these would debase and ruin it. Conversely, the finite is likewise held fast as not negated, although in itself it is null; so that in its union with the infinite it is exalted to what it is not and is thereby infinitised in opposition to its determination as finite, which instead of vanishing is perpetuated.
The falsification of the finite and infinite by the understanding which holds fast to a qualitatively distinct relation between them and asserts that each in its own nature is separate, in fact absolutely separate from the other, comes from forgetting what the Notion of these moments is for the understanding itself. According to this, the unity of the finite and infinite is not an external bringing together of them, nor an incongruous combination alien to their own nature in which there would be joined together determinations inherently separate and opposed, each having a simple affirmative being independent of the other and incompatible with it; but each is in its own self this unity, and this only as a sublating of its own self in which neither would have the advantage over the other of having an in-itself and an affirmative determinate being. As has already been shown, finitude is only as a transcending of itself; it therefore contains infinity, the other of itself.

Similarly, infinity is only as a transcending of the finite; it therefore essentially contains its other and is, consequently, in its own self the other of itself. The finite is not sublated by the infinite as by a power existing outside it; on the contrary, its infinity consists in sublating its own self.
This sublating is, therefore, not alteration or otherness as such, not the sublating of a something. That in which the finite sublates itself is the infinite as the negating of finitude; but finitude itself has long since been determined as only the non-being of determinate being. It is therefore only negation which sublates itself in the negation. Thus infinity on its side is determined as the negative of finitude, and hence of determinateness in general, as the empty beyond; the sublating of itself in the finite is a return from an empty flight, a negation of the beyond which is in its own self a negative.
What is therefore present is the same negation of negation in each. But this is in itself self-relation, affirmation, but as return to itself, that is through the mediation which the negation of negation is. These are the determinations which it is essential to keep in view; but secondly it is to be noted that they are also posited in the infinite progress, and how they are posited in it, namely, as not yet in their ultimate truth.
In the first place, both the infinite and the finite are negated in the infinite progress; both are transcended in the same manner. Secondly, they are posited one after the other as distinct, each as positive on its own account. We thus compare these two determinations in their separation, just as in our comparison — an external comparing — we have separated the two modes of considering the finite and the infinite: on the one hand in their connection, and on the other hand each on its own account. But the infinite progress expresses more than this; in it there is also posited the connection of terms which are also distinct from each other, although at first the connection is still only a transition and alternation; only a simple reflection on our part is needed to see what is in fact present.
In the first place, the negation of the finite and infinite which is posited in the infinite progress can be taken as simple, hence as separate and merely successive. Starting from the finite, the limit is transcended, the finite negated. We now have its beyond, the infinite, but in this the limit arises again; and so we have the transcending of the infinite. This double sublation, however, is partly only an external affair, an alternation of the moments, and partly it is not yet posited as a single unity; the transcending of each moment starts independently, is a fresh act, so that the two processes fall apart. But in addition there is also present in the infinite progress their connection. First there is the finite, then this is transcended and this negative or beyond of the finite is the infinite, and then this negation is again transcended, so that there arises a new limit, a finite again. This is the complete, self-closing movement which has arrived at that which constituted the beginning; what arises is the same as that from which the movement began that is, the finite is restored; it has therefore united with itself, has in its beyond only found itself again.
The same is the case with the infinite. In the infinite, the beyond of the limit, there arises only another limit which has the same fate, namely, that as finite it must be negated. Thus what is present again is the same infinite which had previously disappeared in the new limit; the infinite, therefore, through its sublating, through its transcending of the new limit, is not removed any further either from the finite-for the finite is only this, to pass over into the infinite-or from itself, for it has arrived at its own self.
Thus, both finite and infinite are this movement in which each returns to itself through its negation; they are only as mediation within themselves, and the affirmative of each contains the negative of each and is the negation of the negation. They are thus a result, and consequently not what they are in the determination of their beginning; the finite is not a determinate being on its side, and the infinite a determinate being or being-in-itself, beyond the determinate being, that is, beyond the being determined as finite. The reason why understanding is so antagonistic to the unity of the finite and infinite is simply that it presupposes the limitation and the finite, as well as the in-itself, as perpetuated; in doing so it overlooks the negation of both which is actually present in the infinite progress, as also the fact that they occur therein only as moments of a whole and that they come on the scene only by means of their opposite, but essentially also by means of the sublation of their opposite.
If, at first, the return into self was considered to be just as much a return of the finite to itself as return of the infinite to itself, this very result reveals an error which is connected with the one-sidedness just criticised: first the finite and then the infinite is taken as the starting point and it is only this that gives rise to two results. It is, however, a matter of complete indifference which is taken as the beginning; and thus the difference which occasioned the double result disappears of itself. This is likewise explicit in the line — unending in both directions — of the infinite progress in which each of the moments presents itself in equal alternation, and it is quite immaterial what point is fixed on or which of the two is taken as the beginning. They are distinguished in it but each is equally only the moment of the other. Since both the finite and the infinite itself are moments of the progress they are jointly or in common the finite, and since they are equally together negated in it and in the result, this result as negation of the finitude of both is called with truth the infinite. Their difference is thus the double meaning which both have. The finite has the double meaning of being first, only the finite over against the infinite which stands opposed to it, and secondly, of being the finite and at the same time the infinite opposed to it. The infinite, too, has the double meaning of being one of these two moments — as such it is the spurious infinite — and also the infinite in which both, the infinite and its other, are only moments. The infinite, therefore, as now before us is, in fact, the process in which it is deposed to being only one of its determinations, the opposite of the finite, and so to being itself only one of the finites, and then raising this its difference from itself into the affirmation of itself and through this mediation becoming the true infinite.
This determination of the true infinite cannot be expressed in the formula, already criticised, of a unity of the finite and infinite; unity is abstract, inert self-sameness, and the moments are similarly only in the form of inert, simply affirmative being. The infinite, however, like its two moments, is essentially only as a becoming, but a becoming now further determined in its moments. Becoming, in the first instance, has abstract being and nothing for its determinations; as alteration, its moments possess determinate being, something and other; now, as the infinite, they are the finite and the infinite, which are themselves in process of becoming.
This infinite, as the consummated return into self, the relation of itself to itself, is being-but not indeterminate, abstract being, for it is posited as negating the negation; it is, therefore, also determinate being for it contains negation in general and hence determinateness. It is and is there, present before us. It is only the spurious infinite which is the beyond, because it is only the negation of the finite posited as real — as such it is the abstract, first negation; determined only as negative, the affirmation of determinate being is lacking in it; the spurious infinite, held fast as only negative, is even supposed to be not there, is supposed to be unattainable. However, to be thus unattainable is not its grandeur but its defect, which is at bottom the result of holding fast to the finite as such as a merely affirmative being. It is what is untrue that is unattainable, and such an infinite must be seen as a falsity. The image of the progress to infinity is the straight line, at the two limits of which alone the infinite is, and always only is where the line — which is determinate being — is not, and which goes out beyond to this negation of its determinate being, that is, to the indeterminate; the image of true infinity, bent back into itself, becomes the circle, the line which has reached itself, which is closed and wholly present, without beginning and end.
True infinity taken thus generally as determinate being which is posited as affirmative in contrast to the abstract negation, is reality in a higher sense than the former reality which was simply determinate; for here it has acquired a concrete content. It is not the finite which is the real, but the infinite. Thus reality is further determined as essence, Notion, Idea, and so on. It is, however, superfluous to repeat an earlier, more abstract category such as reality, in connection with the more concrete categories and to employ it for determinations which are more concrete than it is in its own self. Such repetition as to say that essence, or the Idea, is the real, has its origin in the fact that for untrained thinking, the most abstract categories such as being, determinate being, reality, finitude, are the most familiar.
The more precise reason for recalling the category of reality here is that the negation to which it is opposed as the affirmative is here negation of the negation; as such it is itself opposed to that reality which finite determinate being is. The negation is thus determined as ideality; ideal being [das Ideelle] is the finite as it is in the true infinite — as a determination, a content, which is distinct but is not an independent, self-subsistent being, but only a moment.

['Das Ideale' has a more precise meaning (of the beautiful and its associations) than 'das Ideelle'; the former is not yet appropriate here and for this reason we have used the expression 'ideell'. We do not make this distinction though when speaking of reality; the expressions 'reell' and 'real' are used practically synonymously and no interest is served by giving the words different shades of meaning. - Author's note.]

Ideality has this more concrete signification which is not fully expressed by the negation of finite determinate being. With reference to reality and ideality, however, the opposition of finite and infinite is grasped in such a manner that the finite ranks as the real but the infinite as the 'ideal' [das Ideelle]; in the same way that further on the Notion, too, is regarded as an 'ideal', that is, as a mere 'ideal', in contrast to determinate being as such which is regarded as the real. When they are contrasted in this way, it is pointless to reserve the term 'ideal' for the concrete determination of negation in question; in that opposition we return once more to the one-sidedness of the abstract negative which is characteristic of the spurious infinite, and perpetuate the affirmative determinate being of the finite.

TRANSITION

Ideality can be called the quality of infinity; but it is essentially the process of becoming, and hence a transition — like that of becoming in determinate being — which is now to be indicated. As a sublating of finitude, that is, of finitude as such, and equally of the infinity which is merely its opposite, merely negative, this return into self is self-relation, being. As this being contains negation it is determinate, but as this negation further is essentially negation of the negation, the self-related negation, it is that determinate being which is called being-for-self.

Remark 1: The Infinite Progress

The infinite — in the usual meaning of the spurious infinity — and the progress to infinity are, like the ought, the expression of a contradiction which is itself put forward as the final solution. This infinite is a first elevation of sensuous conception above the finite into thought, the content of which, however, is only nothing, that is, it is expressly in the form of not-being — a flight beyond limited being which does not inwardly collect itself and does not know how to bring the negative back to the positive. This incomplete reflection has completely before it both determinations of the genuine infinite: the opposition of the finite and infinite, and their unity, but it does not bring these two thoughts together; the one inevitably evokes the other, but this reflection lets them only alternate.
This alternation, the infinite progress, is exhibited whenever one remains fixed in the contradiction of the unity of two determinations and of their opposition. The finite is the sublating of itself, it includes within itself its negation, infinity — the unity of both; there is a movement away from the finite to the infinite, to the beyond of the finite — the separation of both; but beyond the infinite is another finite — the beyond; the infinite contains finitude-the unity of both; but this finite, too, is a negative of the infinite-the separation of both; and so on. Thus, in the causal relation, cause and effect are inseparable; a cause which had no effect would not be a cause, just as an effect which had no cause would no longer be an effect. This relation yields, therefore, the infinite progress of causes and effects; something is determined as cause, but as finite (and it is finite for the very reason that it is separated from its effect) it, too, has a cause, that is, it is also an effect; hence the same thing that was determined as cause is also determined as effect — the unity of cause and effect; now that which is determined as effect again has a cause, that is, the cause has to be separated from its effect and posited as a different something; but this fresh cause is itself only an effect — the unity of cause and effect; it has an other for its cause — the separation of both determinations, and so on to infinity.
Thus the progress can be put in the following more characteristic form. The assertion is made: the finite and infinite are a single unity; this false assertion must be corrected by the opposite: they are absolutely different and opposed to each other; this must be corrected again by declaring that they are inseparable, that the determination of each lies in the other, by the assertion of their unity, and so on to infinity. What is required in order to see into the nature of the infinite is nothing difficult: it is to be aware that the infinite progress, the developed infinite of the understanding, is so constituted as to be the alternation of the two determinations, of the unity and the separation of both moments and also to be aware that this unity and this separation are themselves inseparable.
The resolution of this contradiction is not the recognition of the equal correctness and equal incorrectness of the two assertions — this is only another form of the abiding contradiction — but the ideality of both, in which as distinct, reciprocal negations, they are only moments. The said monotonous alternation is actually the negation of their unity and also of their separation. In it, also actually, there is present what was pointed out above: that the beyond of the finite is the infinite, but equally beyond the infinite again the finite finds itself reborn; consequently, in this process the finite is united only with itself, and the same is true of the infinite — so that the same negation of the negation results in an affirmation, this result thus proving itself to be their truth and primary determination. In this being which is thus the ideality of the distinct moments, the contradiction has not vanished abstractly, but is resolved and reconciled, and the thoughts are not only complete, but they are also brought together. In this detailed example, there is revealed the specific nature of speculative thought, which consists solely in grasping the opposed moments in their unity. Each moment actually shows that it contains its opposite within itself and that in this opposite it is united with itself; thus the affirmative truth is this immanently active unity, the taking together of both thoughts, their infinity — the relation to self which is not immediate but infinite.
Thinkers have often placed the essence of philosophy in the answering of the question: how does the infinite go forth from itself and become finite? This it is supposed, cannot be made comprehensible. In the course of this exposition the infinite, the Notion of which we have reached, will further determine itself and will show in all its varied forms what is demanded, that is, how (if we want so to express it) the infinite becomes finite. Here we are considering this question only in its immediacy and with respect to the meaning considered above which is usually attached to the infinite.
It is supposed that it depends altogether on the answering of this question whether there is a philosophy; and while people pretend that they are willing to let the decision rest on this, they also believe themselves to possess in the question itself a sort of puzzle, an invincible talisman, by which they are firmly secured against the answering of the question and consequently against philosophy and the entering of its portals. Even in other subjects, to understand how to put questions presupposes a certain education, and this holds good even in the case of philosophical topics if one is to obtain a better answer than that the question is an idle one.
With such questions it is usually claimed as a reasonable assumption that the matter does not depend on the words, but that the point at issue can be understood from one or other of the ways in which the question is expressed. Expressions of sensuous conception like going forth and suchlike, which are used in the question, arouse the suspicion that they spring from the level of ordinary conception and that for the answer, too, conceptions which are current in everyday life are expected and in the form of a sensuous simile.
If instead of the infinite being as such is taken, then the determining of being, a negation or finitude in it, seems easier to understand. Being, it is true, is itself the indeterminate; but that it is the opposite of determinate being, this is not directly expressed in it. In the infinite, on the other hand, this is expressed; it is the not-finite. The unity of the finite and infinite thus seems to be directly excluded, and that is why incomplete reflection is most stubbornly opposed to this unity.
But it has been shown that it is at once evident without going into further detail about the determination of the finite and infinite, that the infinite as understood by said reflection, namely, as opposed to the finite, has in it its other, just because it is opposed to the finite, and therefore is already limited and itself finite — the spurious infinite. The answer, therefore, to the question: how does the infinite become finite? is this: that there is not an infinite which is first of all infinite and only subsequently has need to become finite, to go forth into finitude; on the contrary, it is on its own account just as much finite as infinite. The question assumes that the infinite, on the one side, exists by itself, and that the finite which has gone forth from it into a separate existence — or from whatever source it might have come — is in its separation from the infinite truly real; but it should rather be said that this separation is incomprehensible. Neither such a finite nor such an infinite has truth; and what is untrue is incomprehensible. But equally it must be said that they are comprehensible, to grasp them even as they are in ordinary conception, to see that in the one there lies the determination of the other, the simple insight into their inseparability, means to comprehend them; this inseparability is their Notion. But the separate self-subsistence of the said infinite and finite assumed in the question is an untrue content, and the question already implies an untrue connection between them. Instead, therefore, of answering the question, we must deny the false presuppositions contained in it, that is, the question itself. The question as to the truth of the said infinite and finite involves a change of standpoint and this change will cause a recoil upon the first question of the embarrassment it was intended to produce. This question of ours is something new for the reflection which is the source of the first question, since such reflection does not contain the speculative interest which, for its own sake and before it connects determinations, sets out to ascertain whether these, as presupposed, are something true. But in so far as the falsity of that abstract infinite, and of the finite which equally is supposed to remain standing on its side, is recognised, there is this to be said about the coming or going forth of the finite from the infinite: the infinite goes forth out of itself into finitude because, being grasped as an abstract unity, it has no truth, no enduring being within it; and conversely the finite goes into the infinite for the same reason, namely that it is a nullity. Or rather it should be said that the infinite has eternally gone forth into finitude, that, solely by itself and without having its other present within it, the infinite no more is than pure being is.
The question as to how the infinite goes forth to the finite can contain still another presupposition, namely that the infinite in itself includes the finite, hence is in itself the unity of itself and its other, so that the difficulty is connected chiefly with the separating of them, which is in opposition to the presupposed unity of both. In this presupposition, the opposition which is insisted on merely has another form; the unity and the differentiation are separated and isolated from each other. But if the former is taken, not as the abstract indeterminate unity but, as it already is in the presupposition, as the determinate unity of the finite and the infinite, then the differentiation of both is already present in it too — a differentiation which is thus at the same time not a releasing of them into a separate self-subsistence, but which leaves them as ideal moments in the unity. This unity of the finite and infinite and the distinction between them are just as inseparable as are finitude and infinity.
The proposition that the finite is ideal [ideell] constitutes idealism. The idealism of philosophy consists in nothing else than in recognising that the finite has no veritable being. Every philosophy is essentially an idealism or at least has idealism for its principle, and the question then is only how far this principle is actually carried out. This is as true of philosophy as of religion; for religion equally does not recognise finitude as a veritable being, as something ultimate and absolute or as something underived, uncreated, eternal. Consequently the opposition of idealistic and realistic philosophy has no significance. A philosophy which ascribed veritable, ultimate, absolute being to finite existence as such, would not deserve the name of philosophy; the principles of ancient or modern philosophies, water, or matter, or atoms are thoughts, universals, ideal entities, not things as they immediately present themselves to us, that is, in their sensuous individuality — not even the water of Thales. For although this is also empirical water, it is at the same time also the in-itself or essence of all other things, too, and these other things are not self-subsistent or grounded in themselves, but are posited by, are derived from, an other, from water, that is they are ideal entities. Now above we have named the principle or the universal the ideal (and still more must the Notion, the Idea, spirit be so named); and then again we have described individual, sensuous things as ideal in principle, or in their Notion, still more in spirit, that is, as sublated; here we must note, in passing, this twofold aspect which showed itself in connection with the infinite, namely that on the one hand the ideal is concrete, veritable being, and on the other hand the moments of this concrete being are no less ideal — are sublated in it; but in fact what is, is only the one concrete whole from which the moments are inseparable.
By the ideal [dem Ideellen] is meant chiefly the form of figurate conception and imagination, and what is simply in my conception, or in the Notion, or in the idea, in imagination, and so on, is called ideal, so that even fancies are counted as ideals — conceptions which are not only distinct from the real world, but are supposed to be essentially not real. In point of fact, the spirit is the idealist proper; in spirit, even as feeling, imagination and still more as thinking and comprehending, the content is not present as a so-called real existence; in the simplicity of the ego such external being is present only as sublated, it is for me, it is ideally in me. This subjective idealism, either in the form of the unconscious idealism of consciousness generally, or consciously enunciated and set up as a principle, concerns only the form of conception according to which a content is mine; in the systematic idealism of subjectivity this form is declared to be the only true exclusive form in opposition to the form of objectivity or reality, of the external existence of that content. Such idealism is [merely] formal because it disregards the content of imagination or thought, which content in being imagined or thought can remain wholly in its finitude. In such an idealism nothing is lost, just as much because the reality of such a finite content, the existence filled with finitude, is preserved, as because, in so far as abstraction is made from such finite reality, the content is supposed to be of no consequence in itself; and in it nothing is gained for the same reason that nothing is lost, because the ego, conception, spirit, remains filled with the same content of finitude. The opposition of the form of subjectivity and objectivity is of course one of the finitudes; but the content, as taken up in sensation, intuition or even in the more abstract element of conception, of thought, contains finitudes in abundance and with the exclusion of only one of the modes of finitude, namely, of the said form of subjective and objective, these finitudes are certainly not eliminated, still less have they spontaneously fallen away.

Chapter 3 Being-for-self

In being-for-self, qualitative being finds its consummation; it is infinite being. The being of the beginning lacks all determination. Determinate being is sublated but only immediately sublated being. It thus contains, to begin with, only the first negation, which is itself immediate; it is true that being, too, is preserved in it and both are united in determinate being in a simple unity, but for that very reason they are in themselves still unequal to each other and their unity is not yet posited. Determinate being is therefore the sphere of difference, of dualism, the field of finitude. Determinateness is determinateness as such, in which being is only relatively, not absolutely determined. In being-for-self, the difference between being and determinateness or negation is posited and equalised; quality, otherness, limit — like reality, being-in-itself, the ought, and so on-are the imperfect embodiments of the negation in being in which the difference of both still lies at the base. Since, however, in finitude the negation has passed into infinity, into the posited negation of negation, it is simple self-relation and consequently in its own self the equalisation with being, absolutely determined being.
Being-for-self is first, immediately a being-for-self — the One.
Secondly, the One passes into a plurality of ones — repulsion — and this otherness of the ones is sublated in their ideality — attraction.
Thirdly, we have the alternating determination of repulsion and attraction in which they collapse into equilibrium, and quality, which in being-for-self reached its climax, passes over into quantity.

A. BEING-FOR-SELF AS SUCH

We have arrived at the general Notion of being-for-self. All that is now necessary to justify our use of the term for this Notion is to demonstrate that the said Notion corresponds to the general idea associated with the expression, being-for-self. And so indeed it seems; we say that something is for itself in so far as it transcends otherness, its connection and community with other, has repelled them and made abstraction from them. For it, the other has being only as sublated, as its moment; being-for-self consists in having so transcended limitation, its otherness, that it is, as this negation, the infinite return into itself. Consciousness, even as such, contains in principle the determination of being-for-self in that it represents to itself an object which it senses, or intuits, and so forth; that is, it has within it the content of the object, which in this manner has an 'ideal' being; in its very intuiting and, in general, in its entanglement with the negative of itself, with its other, consciousness is still only in the presence of its own self. Being-for-self is the polemical, negative attitude towards the limiting other, and through this negation of the latter is a reflectedness-into-self, although along with this return of consciousness into itself and the ideality of the object, the reality of the object is also still preserved, in that it is at the same time known as an external existence. Consciousness thus belongs to the sphere of Appearance, or is the dualism, on the one hand of knowing an alien object external to it, and on the other hand of being for its own self, having the object ideally [ideell] present in it; of being not only in the presence of the other, but therein being in the presence of its own self. Self-consciousness, on the other hand, is being-for-self as consummated and posited; the side of connection with an other, with an external object, is removed. Self-consciousness is thus the nearest example of the presence of infinity; granted, of an infinity which is still abstract, yet which, at the same time, is a very different concrete determination from being-for-self in general, the infinity of which has a determinateness which is still quite qualitative.

(a) Determinate Being and Being-for-self

As already mentioned, being-for-self is infinity which has collapsed into simple being; it is determinate being in so far as the negative nature of infinity, which is the negation of negation, is from now on in the explicit form of the immediacy of being, as only negation in general, as simple qualitative determinateness. But being, which in such determinateness is determinate being, is also at once distinct from being-for-self, which is only being-for-self in so far as its determinateness is the infinite one above-mentioned; nevertheless, determinate being is at the same time also a moment of being-for-self; for this latter, of course, also contains being charged with negation. Thus the determinateness which in determinate being as such is an other, and a being-for-other, is bent back into the infinite unity of being-for-self, and the moment of determinate being is present in being-for-self as a being-for-one.

(b) Being-for-one

This moment expresses the manner in which the finite is present in its unity with the infinite, or is an ideal being [Ideelles]. In being-for-self, negation is not present as a determinateness or limit, or consequently as a relation to a determinate being which is for it an other. Now though this moment has been designated as being-for-one, there is as yet nothing present for which it would be-no one, of which it would be the moment. There is, in fact, nothing of the kind as yet fixed in being-for-self; that for which something (and here there is no something) would be, whatever the other side as such might be, is likewise a moment, is itself only a being-for-one, not yet a one. Consequently, what we have before us is still an undistinguishedness of the two sides which may be suggested by being-for-one; there is only one being-for-other, and because there is only one, this too is only a being-for-one; there is only the one ideality of that, for which or in which there is supposed to be a determination as moment, and of that which is supposed to be a moment in it. Being-for-one and being-for-self are, therefore, not genuinely opposed determinatenesses. If the difference is assumed for a moment and we speak of a being-for-self, then it is this itself which, as the sublatedness of otherness, relates itself to itself as the sublated other, and is therefore 'for one'; it is related in its other only to its own self. Ideal being [Ideelles] is necessarily 'for one', but it is not for an other; the one for which it is, is only itself. The ego, therefore, spirit as such, or God, are 'ideal' because they are infinite; but as being for themselves they are not 'ideally' different from that which is 'for one'. For if they were, they would be only immediate existences, or, more precisely, determinate being and a being-for-other, because that which would be for them would be, not themselves but an other, if they were supposed to lack the moment of being 'for one'. God is, therefore, for himself in so far as he himself is that which is for him.
To be 'for self' and to be 'for one' are therefore not different meanings of ideality, but are essential, inseparable moments of it.

Remark: The German Expression, 'What For a Thing' (Meaning 'What Kind of a Thing')

The German expression for enquiring after the quality of anything — an expression which appears strange at first sight — 'What for a thing [was für ein Ding] something is, brings into prominence, in its reflection-into-self, the moment here considered. This expression is in its origin idealistic, since it does not ask what this thing A is for another thing B, not what this man is for another man; on the contrary, it asks what this thing, this man, is for a thing, for a man, so that this being-for-one has at the same time returned into this thing, into this man himself; in other words that which is, and that for which it is, are one and the same — an identity, such as ideality also must be considered to be.
Ideality attaches in the first place to the sublated determinations as distinguished from that in which they are sublated, which by contrast can be taken as the real. But thus the ideal is again one of the moments, and the real the other; but the significance of ideality is that both determinations are equally only for one and count only for one, which one ideality is, without distinction, reality. In this sense self-consciousness, spirit, God, is ideal as an infinite relation purely to self. Ego is for ego, both are the same, the ego is twice named, but so that each of the two is only a 'for-one', is ideal; spirit is only for spirit, God only for God, and this unity alone is God, God as spirit. Self-consciousness, however, as consciousness, enters into the difference of itself and of an other — or of its ideality, in which it produces conceptions, and of its reality, inasmuch as its conception has a determinate content which still has the side of being known as the unsublated negative, as a real, determinate being. However, to call thought, spirit, God, only an ideal being, presupposes the standpoint from which finite being counts as the real, and the ideal being or being-for-one has only a one-sided meaning.
In a previous Remark the principle of idealism was indicated and it was said that in any philosophy the precise question was, how far has the principle been carried through. As to the manner in which it is carried through, a further observation may be made in connection with the category we have reached. This carrying through of the principle depends primarily on whether the finite reality still retains an independent self-subsistence alongside the being-for-self, but also on whether in the infinite itself the moment of being-for-one, a relationship of the ideal to itself as ideal, is posited. Thus the Eleatic Being or Spinoza's substance is only the abstract negation of all determinateness, without ideality being posited in substance itself. With Spinoza, as will be mentioned later, infinity is only the absolute affirmation of a thing, hence only the unmoved unity; consequently, substance does not even reach the determination of being-for-self, much less that of subject and spirit. The idealism of the noble Malebranche is in itself more explicit. It contains the following fundamental thoughts: because God includes within himself all eternal truths, the ideas and perfections of all things, so that they are his and his alone, we see them only in him; God awakens in us our sensations of objects by an action in which there is nothing sensuous, whereby we imagine to ourselves that we obtain not only the idea of the object which represents its essential nature, but also the sensation of its existence. As then the eternal truths and Ideas (essentialities) of things are in God, are ideal, so also is their existence in God ideal, not an actual existence; though they are our objects, they are only for one. This moment of explicit and concrete idealism which is lacking in Spinozism is present here, in that absolute ideality is characterised as a knowing. Pure and profound as this idealism is, the above relations on the one hand still contain much that is indeterminate for thought and, on the other hand, their content is directly quite concrete (sin and salvation, etc., enter directly into them); the logical determination of infinity on which they would have to be based is not explicitly realised, and thus this lofty and rich idealism, though it is the product of a pure, speculative spirit, is still not the product of a pure, speculative thinking which alone can truly establish it.
The Leibnizian idealism lies more within the bounds of the abstract Notion. The ideating being, the monad, of Leibniz is essentially ideal [Ideelles]. Ideation is a being-for-self in which the determinatenesses are not limits, and consequently not a determinate being, but only moments. Ideation is also, it is true, a more concrete determination, but here it has no further signification than that of ideality; for with Leibniz, even that which lacks consciousness is an ideating, percipient being. In this system, then, otherness is sublated; spirit and body, or the monads generally, are not others for one another, they do not limit one another and do not affect one another; all relationships generally which are based on a determinate being fall away. The diversity is only ideal and inner and in it the monad remains related only to itself; the alterations develop within the monad and are not relations of it to others. What is taken to be, in accordance with the real determination, a determinately existent relation of the monads to one another, is an independent, only simultaneous becoming, enclosed within the being-for-self of each of them. That there is a plurality of monads, that therefore they are also determined as others, does not concern the monads themselves; this is the reflection, external to them ' of a third. They are not in themselves others to one another; the being-for-self is kept pure, and is free from the accompaniment of any real being. But herein lies, too, the inadequacy of this system. The monads are such ideating, percipient beings only in themselves, or in God as the monad of monads, or even in the system. Otherness is equally present, whether in the ideation itself or in whatever shape the third assumes which considers them as others, as a plurality. The plurality of their determinate being is only excluded, and that only momentarily, the monads being posited as not-others only by abstraction. If it is a third which posits their otherness, it is also a third which sublates it; but this entire movement which gives them their ideality falls outside them. Should it be pointed out that this movement of thought itself falls, nevertheless, only within an ideating monad, the reply must be that the very content of such thinking is within itself external to itself. The transition from the oneness of absolute ideality (the monad of monads) to the category of the abstract (connectionless) plurality of determinate being, is immediate and uncomprehended (it is effected through the image of creation); and the transition from this plurality back to the oneness is equally abstract. Ideality, ideation generally, remains something formal, as also does ideation raised to the form of consciousness. just as consciousness is conceived as a one-sided form which is indifferent to its determination and content, in the above-mentioned fancy of Leibniz — namely, that the magnetic needle, if it possessed consciousness, would regard its direction to the north as freely determined by itself — so, too, ideality in the monads is a form remaining external to the plurality. Ideality is supposed to be immanent in them, their nature is supposed to be ideation; but their relationship is on the one hand their harmony, which does not fall within the sphere of their determinate being and is, consequently, pre-established; and on the other hand, this determinate being of theirs is not grasped as a being-for-other, or, further, as ideality, but is determined only as an abstract plurality; the ideality of the plurality and the further determination of it to harmony are not immanent in and proper to this plurality itself.
Other idealisms, as for example those of Kant and Fichte, do not go beyond the ought or the infinite progress, and remain in the dualism of determinate being and being-for-self. True, in these systems, the thing-in-itself or the infinite shock or resistance principle [Anstoss] enters directly into the ego and becomes only something for it; but it proceeds from a free otherness which is perpetuated as a negative being-in-itself. The ego is therefore undoubtedly determined as ideal [das Ideelle], as being for itself, as infinite self-relation; but the moment of being-for-one is not completed to the point where the beyond, or the direction to the beyond, vanishes.

(c) The One

Being-for-self is the simple unity of itself and its moment, being-for-one. There is before us only a single determination, the self-relation of the sublating. The moments of being-for-self have collapsed into the undifferentiatedness which is immediacy or being, but an immediacy based on the negating which is posited as its determination. Being-for-self is thus a being-for-self, and since in this immediacy its inner meaning vanishes, it is the wholly abstract limit of itself-the one.
Attention may be drawn in advance to the difficulty involved in the following exposition of the development of the one and to its cause. The moments which constitute the Notion of the one as a being-for-self fall asunder in the development. They are: (1) negation in general, (2) two negations, (3) two that are therefore the same, (4) sheer opposites, (5) self-relation, identity as such, (6) relation which is negative and yet to its own self. The reason for the separation of these moments here is that the form of immediacy, of being enters into being-for-self as a being-for-self; through this immediacy each moment is posited as a distinct, affirmative determination, and yet they are no less inseparable. Hence of each determination the opposite must equally be asserted; it is this contradiction, together with the abstract nature of the moments, which constitutes the difficulty.

B. THE ONE AND THE MANY

The one is the simple self-relation of being-for-self in which its moments have collapsed in themselves and in which, consequently, being-for-self has the form of immediacy, and its moments therefore now have a determinate being.
As self-relation of the negative the one is a process of determining — and as self-relation it is an infinite self-determining. But because being-for-self is now in the form of immediacy, these differences are no longer posited only as moments of one and the same self-determination, but as at the same time affirmatively present. The ideality of being-for-self as a totality thus reverts, in the first place, to reality and that too in its most fixed, abstract form, as the one. In the one, being-for-self is the posited unity of simple being and determinate being, as the absolute union of the relation to other and self-relation; but, further, the determinateness of being also stands opposed to the determination of the infinite negation, to the self-determination, so that what the one is in itself is now only ideally present in it, and the negative consequently is an other distinct from it. What shows itself to be present as distinct from the one is its own self-determining; the unity of the one with itself as thus distinguished from itself is reduced to a relation, and as a negative unity it is a negation of its own self as other, exclusion of the one as other from itself, from the one.

(a) The One in its own self

In its own self the one simply is; this its being is neither a determinate being, nor a determinateness as a relation to an other, nor is it a constitution; what it is, in fact, is the accomplished negation of this circle of categories. Consequently, the one is not capable of becoming an other: it is unalterable.
It is indeterminate but not, however, like being; its indeterminateness is the determinateness which is a relation to its own self, an absolute determinedness-posited being-within-self. As the one is in accordance with its Notion a self-related negation, it has difference in it — a turning away from itself to an other; but this movement is immediately turned back on itself, because it follows from this moment of self-determining that there is no other to which the one can go, and the movement has thus returned into itself.
In this simple immediacy the mediation of determinate being and of ideality itself, and with it all difference and manifoldness, has vanished. There is nothing in it; this nothing, the abstraction of self-relation, is here distinguished from the being-within-self itself; it is a posited nothing because this being-within-self no longer has the simple character of something but, as a mediation, has a concrete determination; but as abstract, though it is identical with the one, it is distinct from its determination. This nothing, then, posited as in the one, is the nothing as the void. The void is thus the quality of the one in its immediacy.

(b) The One and the Void

The one is the void as the abstract relation of the negation to itself. However, the void as the nothing is absolutely distinct from the simple immediacy, the also affirmative being of the one, and since they stand in one and the same relation, namely, that of the one, their difference is posited; but as distinct from the affirmative being of the one, the nothing as the void is outside it.
Being-for-self determined in this manner as the one and the void has again acquired a determinate being. The one and the void have negative relation to self for their common, simple base. The moments of being-for-self emerge from this unity, become external to themselves; through the simple unity of the moments there enters the determination of being and the unity thus reduces itself to being only one side, and so to a determinate being; and in this it is confronted by its other determination, the negation as such, likewise as a determinate being of the nothing, as the void.

Remark: Atomism

The one in this form of determinate being is the stage of the category which made its appearance with the ancients as the atomistic principle, according to which the essence of things is the atom and the void. The abstraction which has developed into this form has acquired a greater determinateness than the being of Parmenides and the becoming of Heraclitus. Lofty as is this abstraction, in that it makes this simple determinateness of the one and the void the principle of all things, deriving the infinite variety of the world from this simple antithesis and boldly presuming to know the former from the latter, it is equally easy for figurate conception to picture here atoms and alongside them the void. It is, therefore, no wonder that the atomistic principle has at all times been upheld; the equally trivial and external relation of composition which must be added to achieve a semblance of concreteness and variety is no less popular than the atoms themselves and the void. The one and the void is being-for-self, the highest qualitative being-within-self, sunk back into complete externality; the immediacy or being of the one, because it is the negation of all otherness, is posited as being no longer determinable and alterable; such therefore is its absolute, unyielding rigidity that all determination, variety, conjunction remains for it an utterly external relation.
However, with the first thinkers the atomistic principle did not remain in this externality but besides its abstraction had also a speculative determination in the fact that the void was recognised as the source of movement, which is an entirely different relation of the atom and the void from the mere juxtaposition and mutual indifference of these two determinations. That the void is the source of movement has not the trivial meaning that something can only move into an empty space and not into an already occupied space, for in such a space it would not find any more open room — understood in this sense, the void would be only the presupposition or condition of movement, not its ground, just as the movement itself, too, would be presupposed as already existing, the essential point, its ground, being forgotten. The view that the void constitutes the ground of movement contains the profounder thought that in the negative as such there lies the ground of becoming, of the unrest of self-movement — in which sense, however, the negative is to be taken as the veritable negativity of the infinite. The void is the ground of movement only as the negative relation of the one to its negative, to the one, that is to itself, which however is posited as having determinate being.
But in other respects, the further determinations of the ancients concerning the shape and position of the atoms and the direction of their movement, are arbitrary and external enough and, in addition, stand in direct contradiction to the basic determination of the atom. Physics with its molecules and particles suffers from the atom, this principle of extreme externality, which is thus utterly devoid of the Notion, just as much as does that theory of the State which starts from the particular will of individuals.

(c) Many Ones: Repulsion

The one and the void constitute the first stage of the determinate being of being-for-self. Each of these moments has negation for its determination and is at the same time posited as a determinate being; according to the former determination the one and the void are the relation of negation to negation as of an other to its other: the one is negation in the determination of being, and the void is negation in the determination of non-being. But the one is essentially self-relation only as related negation, that is, it is itself that which the void outside it is supposed to be. Each, however, is also posited as an affirmative determinate being, one as a being-for-self as such, the other an unspecified determinate being in general, and each is related to the other as to another determinate being.
The being-for-self of the one, is, however, essentially the ideality of determinate being and of other: it relates itself not to an other but only to itself. But since being-for-self is fixed as a one, as affirmatively for itself, as immediately present, its negative relation to itself is at the same time a relation to an affirmative being; and since the relation is just as much negative, that to which it relates itself remains determined as a determinate being and an other; as essentially self-relation, the other is not indeterminate negation as the void, but is likewise a one. The one is consequently a becoming of many ones.
Strictly, however, this is not really a becoming, for becoming is a transition of being into nothing: the one, on the other hand, becomes only one. The one, as related, contains the negative as a relation, has it therefore within it. Instead of a becoming, then, there is present first the immanent relation of the one itself; and secondly, since the relation is negative and the one is at the same time affirmatively present, the one repels itself from itself. The negative relation of the one to itself is repulsion.
This repulsion as thus the positing of many ones but through the one itself, is the one's own coming-forth-from-itself but to such outside it as are themselves only ones. This is repulsion according to its Notion, repulsion in itself. The second repulsion is different from it, it is what is immediately suggested to external reflection: repulsion not as the generation of ones, but only as the mutual repelling of ones presupposed as already present. We have now to see how the first repulsion, repulsion in itself, determines itself to the second, to external repulsion.
First of all we must establish what determinations are possessed by the many ones as such. As an explication of what the one is in itself, the becoming of the many, or the generation of the many, vanishes immediately; the products of the process are ones, and these are not for an other, but relate themselves infinitely to themselves. The one repels only itself from itself, therefore does not become but already is; and what is represented as repelled is likewise a one, a one that is. To repel and to be repelled applies equally to both, and makes no difference.
The ones are thus presupposed relatively to one another — supposed or posited by the repulsion of the one from itself; pre-supposed as not posited. Their positedness is sublated, and as related only to themselves they are affirmative beings relatively to one another.
Thus plurality appears not as an otherness, but as a determination completely external to the one. The one, in repelling itself, remains self-related, like that which to begin with is taken as repelled. That the ones are related to one another as others, are brought together into the determinateness of plurality, does not therefore concern the ones. If plurality were a relation of the ones themselves to one another then they would limit one another and there would be affirmatively present in them a being-for-other. Their relation-and this they have through their implicit unity — as here posited is determined as none: it is again the previously posited void. The void is their limit but a limit which is external to them, in which they are not to be for one another. The limit is that in which what are limited both are and are not: but the void is determined as pure non-being, and this alone constitutes their limit.
The repulsion of the one from itself is the explication of that which the one is in itself; but infinity as explicated is here the infinity which has come forth from itself; it has come forth from itself by virtue of the immediacy of the infinite, the one. It is a simple relating of the one to the one, and no less also the absolute absence of relation in the one; it is the former according to the simple, affirmative self-relation of the one, and the latter according to the self-same relation as negative. In other words, the plurality of the one is its own positing; the one is nothing but the negative relation of the one to itself, and this relation-and therefore the one itself-is the plural one. But equally, plurality is absolutely external to the one; for the one is, precisely, the sublating of otherness; repulsion is its self-relation and simple equality with itself. The plurality of ones is infinity as a contradiction which unconstrainedly produces itself.

Remark: The Monad of Leibniz.

We have previously referred to the Leibnizian idealism. We may add here that this idealism which started from the ideating monad, which is determined as being for itself, advanced only as far as the repulsion just considered, and indeed only to plurality as such, in which each of the ones is only for its own self and is indifferent to the determinate being and being-for-self of the others; or, in general, for the one, there are no others at all. The monad is, by itself, the entire closed universe; it requires none of the others. But this inner manifoldness which it possesses in its ideational activity in no way affects its character as a being-for-self. The Leibnizian idealism takes up the plurality immediately as something given and does not grasp it as a repulsion of the monads. Consequently, it possesses plurality only on the side of its abstract externality. The atomistic philosophy does not possess the Notion of ideality; it does not grasp the one as an ideal being, that is, as containing within itself the two moments of being-for-self and being-for-it, but only as a simple, dry, real being-for-self. It does, however, go beyond mere indifferent plurality; the atoms become further determined in regard to one another even though, strictly speaking, this involves an inconsistency; whereas, on the contrary, in that indifferent independence of the monads, plurality remains as a fixed fundamental determination, so that the connection between them falls only in the monad of monads, or in the philosopher who contemplates them.

C. REPULSION AND ATTRACTION

(a) Exclusion of the One

The many ones have affirmative being; their determinate being or relation to one another is a non-relation, is external to them — the abstract void. But they themselves are now this negative relation to themselves as to affirmatively present others — the demonstrated contradiction, infinity posited in the immediacy of being. Thus repulsion now simply finds immediately before it that which is repelled by it. In this determination repulsion is an exclusion; the one repels from itself only the many ones which are neither generated nor posited by it. This mutual or all-round repelling is relative, is limited by the being of the ones.
The plurality is, in the first place, non-posited otherness, the limit is only the void, only that in which the ones are not. But in the limit they also are; they are in the void, or their repulsion is their common relation.
This mutual repulsion is the posited determinate being of the many ones; it is not their being-for-self, for according to this they would be differentiated as many only in a third, but it is their own differentiating which preserves them. They negate one another reciprocally, posit one another as being only for-one. But at the same time they equally negate this being only for-one; they repel this their ideality and are. Thus the moments which in ideality are absolutely united are separated. The one is, in its being-for-self, also for-one, but this one for which it is is its own self; its differentiation of itself is immediately sublated. But in plurality the differentiated one has a being; the being-for-one as determined in exclusion is, consequently, a being-for-other. Each is thus repelled by an other, is sublated and made into that which is not for itself but for-one, and that another one.
The being-for-self of the many ones shows itself, therefore, as their self-preservation through the mediation of their mutual repulsion in which they mutually sublate themselves and each posits the others as a mere being-for-other; but the self-preservation at the same time consists in repelling this ideality and in positing the ones as not being for-an-other. This self-preservation of the ones through their negative relation to one another is, however, rather their dissolution.
The ones not only are, but they maintain themselves through their reciprocal exclusion. Now in the first place that which should enable the ones to maintain their diversity in opposition to their being negated is their being, in fact, their being-in-itself as opposed to their relation-to-other; this being-in-itself is that they are ones. But this is what they all are; they are in their being-in-itself the same instead of this latter being the fixed point of their diversity. Secondly, their determinate being and their relation to one another, that is, their positing of themselves as ones, is the reciprocal negating of themselves; but this likewise is one and the same determination of them all, through which then they rather posit themselves as identical; similarly, because they are in themselves the same, their ideality, instead of being posited through others, is their own, and they therefore repel it just as little. Consequently, as regards both their being and their positing, they are only one affirmative unity.
This reflection that the ones, determined both as simply being and as inter-related, show themselves to be one and the same and indistinguishable, is a comparison made by us. But we have also to see what is posited in them in their interrelatedness. They are — this is presupposed in this inter-relatedness — and they are only in so far as they reciprocally negate one another and at the same time hold themselves aloof from this their ideality, their negatedness, that is, negate this reciprocal negating. But they are only in so far as they negate; consequently, since this their negating is negated, their being is negated. It is true that since they are, they would not be negated by this negating, which for them is only something external; this negating by the other rebounds off them and touches only their surface. And yet it is only through this negating of the others that the ones return into themselves: they are only as this mediation, and this their return is their self-preservation and their being-for-self. Since their negating is ineffectual because of the resistance offered by the ones either as simply affirmative or as negating, they do not return into themselves, do not preserve themselves, and so are not.
The observation was made above that the ones are the same, each of them is a one like the other. This is not only a relating of them by us, an external bringing of them together; on the contrary, repulsion is itself a relating; the one which excludes the ones relates itself to them, to the ones, that is, to its own self. Hence the negative relationship of the ones to one another is only a going-together-with-self. This identity into which their repelling passes over is the sublating of their diversity and externality which they, as excluding, ought rather to maintain relatively to one another.
This positing of themselves by the many ones into a single one is attraction.

Remark: The unity of the One and the Many

Self-subsistence pushed to the point of the one as a being-for-self is abstract, formal, and destroys itself. It is the supreme, most stubborn error, which takes itself for the highest truth, manifesting in more concrete forms as abstract freedom, pure ego and, further, as Evil. It is that freedom which so misapprehends itself as to place its essence in this abstraction, and flatters itself that in thus being with itself it possesses itself in its purity. More specifically, this self-subsistence is the error of regarding as negative that which is its own essence, and of adopting a negative attitude towards it. Thus it is the negative attitude towards itself which, in seeking to possess its own being destroys it, and this its act is only the manifestation of the futility of this act. The reconciliation is the recognition that the object of this negative attitude is rather its own essence, and is only the letting go of the negativity of its being-for-self instead of holding fast to it.
It is an ancient proposition that the one is many and especially that the many are one. We may repeat here the observation that the truth of the one and the many expressed in propositions appears in an inappropriate form, that this truth is to be grasped and expressed only as a becoming, as a process, a repulsion and attraction-not as being, which in a proposition has the character of a stable unity. We have already mentioned and recalled the dialectic of Plato in the Parmenides concerning the derivation of the many from the one, namely, from the proposition: the one is. The inner dialectic of the Notion has been stated; it is easiest to grasp the dialectic of the proposition, that the many are one, as an external reflection; and it may properly be grasped externally here inasmuch as the object too, the many, are mutually external. It directly follows from this comparison of the many with one another that any one is determined simply like any other one; each is a one, each is one of the many, is by excluding the others — so that they are absolutely the same, there is present one and only one determination. This is the fact, and all that has to be done is to grasp this simple fact. The only reason why the understanding stubbornly refuses to do so is that it has also in mind, and indeed rightly so, the difference; but the existence of this difference is just as little excluded because of the said fact, as is the certain existence of the said fact in spite of the difference. One could, as it were, comfort understanding for the naive manner in which it grasps the fact of the difference, by assuring it that the difference will also come in again.

(b) The one One of Attraction

Repulsion is the self-differentiating of the one, at first into many, whose negative relationship is without effect because they presuppose one another as affirmatively present; it is only the ought-to-be of ideality. In attraction, however, ideality is realised. Repulsion passes over into attraction, the many ones into one one. Both repulsion and attraction are in the first place distinct from each other, the former as the reality of the ones, the latter as their posited ideality. The relation of attraction to repulsion is such that the former has the latter for presupposition. Repulsion provides the material for attraction. If there were no ones there would be nothing to attract; the conception of a perpetual attraction, of an absorption of the ones, presupposes an equally perpetual production of them. Spatial attraction as pictorially conceived makes the flow of attracted ones proceed uninterruptedly; in place of the atoms which vanish in the centre of attraction, another multitude comes forth from the void, and so on to infinity if one wishes. If attraction were conceived as accomplished, the many being brought to the point of the one one, then there would be present only an inert one and no longer any attraction. The ideality present in attraction still also bears within itself the determination of the negation of itself, the many ones of which it is the relatedness: attraction is inseparable from repulsion.
In the first place, attraction belongs equally to each of the many ones as immediately present; none has any precedence over another; this would result in an equilibrium in attraction, or, strictly speaking, an equilibrium of attraction and repulsion itself, and an inert state of rest in which ideality would have no determinate being. But there can be no question here of a precedence of such a one over another, for this would presuppose a specific difference between them; rather is attraction the positing of the immediately present undifferentiatedness of the ones. It is only attraction itself that is a positing of a one distinct from other ones; these are only immediate ones which should maintain themselves through repulsion; but through their posited negation arises the one of attraction, which is consequently determined as mediated, the one posited as one. The first ones, as immediate, do not in their ideality return into themselves but have this ideality in another one.
The one one, however, is the realised ideality, posited in the one; it is attraction through the mediation of repulsion, and it contains this mediation within itself as its determination. Thus it does not absorb the attracted ones into itself as into a centre, that is, it does not sublate them abstractly. Since it contains repulsion in its determination, this latter at the same time preserves the ones as many in it; through its attracting, so to speak, it acquires something for itself, obtains an extension or filling. There is thus in it the unity of repulsion and attraction in general.

(c) The Relation of Repulsion and Attraction

The difference of the one and the many is now determined as the difference of their relation to one another, with each other, a relation which splits into two, repulsion and attraction, each of which is at first independent of the other and stands apart from it, the two nevertheless being essentially connected with each other. Their as yet indeterminate unity is to be more precisely ascertained.
Repulsion, as the basic determination of the one, appears first and as immediate, like its ones which although generated by repulsion are yet also posited as immediate. As such, repulsion is indifferent to attraction which is externally added to it as thus presupposed. Attraction on the other hand is not presupposed by repulsion in such a manner that the former is supposed to have no part in the positing and being of the latter, that is, as if repulsion were not already in its own self the negation of itself and the ones were not already in themselves negated. In this way we have repulsion abstractly on its own account and, similarly, attraction relatively to the ones as affirmatively present, has the side of an immediate determinate being and comes to them as an other.
If repulsion is thus taken merely by itself, then it is the dispersion of the many ones into somewhere undetermined, outside the sphere of repulsion itself; for repulsion is this, to negate the interrelatedness of the many: the absence of any relation between them is the determination of the many taken abstractly. But repulsion is not merely the void; the ones, as unrelated, do not repel or exclude one another, this constitutes their determination. Repulsion is, although negative, still essentially relation; the mutual repulsion and flight is not a liberation from what is repelled and fled from, the one as excluding still remains related to what it excludes. But this moment of relation is attraction and thus is in repulsion itself; it is the negating of that abstract repulsion according to which the ones would be only self-related affirmative beings not excluding one another.
In starting, however, with the repulsion of the determinately present ones and so, too, with attraction posited as externally connected with it, the two determinations although inseparable are held apart as distinct; but it has been found that not merely is repulsion presupposed by attraction, but equally, too, there is a reverse relation of repulsion to attraction, and the former equally has its presupposition in the latter.
As thus determined they are inseparable and at the same time each is determined as an ought and a limitation relatively to the other. Their ought is their abstract determinateness in the form of the in-itself, but with this determinateness each is simply directed away from itself and relates itself to the other, and thus each is through the mediation of the other as other; their self-subsistence consists in the fact that in this mediation each is posited for the other as a different determining: repulsion as the positing of the many, attraction as the positing of the one, the latter as at the same time a negation of the many, and the former as a negation of their ideality in the one, so that attraction, too, is attraction only through the mediation of repulsion, just as repulsion is repulsion through the mediation of attraction. But the fact that in this interdependence the mediation of each through the other is rather negated, each of these determinations being a self-mediation, becomes evident after a closer consideration of them and brings them back to the unity of their Notion.
In the first place, that each presupposes itself, is related only to itself in its presupposition, this is already implied in the relationship between repulsion and attraction in their initially still relative character.
Relative repulsion is the mutual repelling of the present many ones which are supposed to be immediately given. But that there are many ones, this is repulsion itself; any presupposition which it might have is only its own positing. Further, the determination of being which might belong to the ones apart from the circumstance that they are posited — whereby they would be already there-belongs likewise to repulsion. The repelling is that whereby the ones manifest and maintain themselves as ones, whereby they are as such. Their being is repulsion itself, which is thus not a relative determinate being over against another such, but relates itself simply and solely to its own self.
Attraction is the positing of the one as such, of the real one, in contrast to which the many in their determinate being are determined as only ideal [ideell] and as vanishing. Attraction thus directly presupposes itself — in the determination, namely, of the other ones as ideal, which ones are otherwise supposed to be for themselves, repelling others, and therefore also any attracting one. Ideality, as opposed to this determination of repulsion, does not belong to the ones only through the relation to attraction; on the contrary, it is presupposed, it is the ideality inherent in the ones in that, as ones — including the one conceived as attracting — they are not distinguished from one another, are one and the same.
Further, this self-presupposing of the two determinations each for itself, means that each contains the other as a moment within it. The self-presupposing as such is the one's positing of itself in a one as the negative of itself-repulsion; and what is therein presupposed is the same as that which presupposes-attraction. That each is in itself only a moment, is the transition of each out of itself into the other, the self-negating of each in itself and the self-positing of each as its own other. The one as such, then, is a coming-out-of-itself, is only the positing of itself as its own other, as many; and the many, similarly, is only this, to collapse within itself and to posit itself as its other, as one, and in this very act to be related only to its own self, each continuing itself in its other. Thus there is already present in principle (an sich) the undividedness of the coming-out-of-itself (repulsion) and the self-positing as one (attraction). But in the relative repulsion and attraction, which presuppose immediate, determinates existent ones, it is posited that each is in its own self this negation of itself and is thus also the continuity of itself in its other. The repulsion of the determinately existent ones is the self-preservation of the one through the mutual repulsion of the others, so that (1) the other ones are negated in it-this is the side of its determinate being or of its being-for-other; but this is thus attraction as the ideality of the ones; and (2) the one is in itself, without relation to the others; but not only has being-in-itself as such long since passed over into being-for-self, but the one in itself, by its determination, is the aforesaid becoming of many ones. The attraction of the determinately existent ones is their ideality and the positing of the one, in which, accordingly, attraction as a negating and a generating of the one sublates itself, and as a positing of the one is in its own self the negative of itself, repulsion.
With this, the development of being-for-self is completed and has reached its conclusion. The one as infinitely self-related — infinitely, as the posited negation of negation — is the mediation in which it repels from itself its own self as its absolute (that is, abstract) otherness, (the many), and in relating itself negatively to this its non-being, that is, in sublating it, it is only self-relation; and one is only this becoming in which it is no longer determined as having a beginning, that is, is no longer posited as an immediate, affirmative being, neither is it as result, as having restored itself as the one, that is, the one as equally immediate and excluding; the process which it is posits and contains it throughout only as sublated. The sublating, at first determined as only a relative sublating of the relation to another determinately existent one-a relation which is thus itself not an indifferent repulsion and attraction — equally displays itself as passing over into the infinite relation of mediation through negation of the external relations of the immediate, determinately existent ones, and as having for result that very process of becoming which, in the instability of its moments, is the collapse, or rather going-together-with-itself, into simple immediacy. This being, in the determination it has now acquired, is quantity.
A brief survey of the moments of this transition of quality into quantity shows us that the fundamental determination of quality is being and immediacy, in which limit and determinateness are so identical with the being of something, that with its alteration the something itself vanishes; as thus posited it is determined as finite. Because of the immediacy of this unity, in which the difference has vanished but is implicitly present in the unity of being and nothing, the difference as otherness in general falls outside this unity. This relation to other contradicts the immediacy in which qualitative determinateness is self-relation. This otherness sublates itself in the infinity of being-for-self which makes explicit the difference (which in the negation of the negation is present in it) in the form of the one and the many and their relations, and has raised the qualitative moment to a genuine unity, that is, a unity which is no longer immediate but is posited as accordant with itself.
This unity is, therefore, [a] being, only as affirmative, that is immediacy, which is self-mediated through negation of the negation; being is posited as the unity which pervades its determinatenesses, limit, etc., which are posited in it as sublated; [b] determinate being: in such determination it is the negation or determinateness as a moment of affirmative being, yet determinateness no longer as immediate, but as reflected into itself, as related not to an other but to itself; a being determined simply in itself-the one; the otherness as such is itself a being-for-self; [c] being-for-self, as that being which continues itself right through the determinateness and in which the one and the intrinsic determinedness is itself posited as sublated. The one is determined simultaneously as having gone beyond itself, and as unity; hence the one, the absolutely determined limit, is posited as the limit which is no limit, which is present in being but is indifferent to it.

Remark: The Kantian Construction of Matter from the Forces of Attraction and Repulsion

Attraction and repulsion, as we know, are usually regarded as forces. This determination of them and — the relationships connected with it have to be compared with the Notions which have resulted from our consideration of them. Conceived as forces, they are regarded as self-subsistent and therefore as not connected with each other through their own nature; that is, they are considered not as moments, each of which is supposed to pass into the other, but rather as fixed in their opposition to each other. Further, they are imagined as meeting in a third, in matter, but in such a manner, that this unification is, counted, as their truth., on the contrary; each is regarded also as a first, as being in and for itself, and matter, or its determinations, are supposed to be realised and produced by them. When it is said that matter has the forces within itself, they are understood to be so conjoined in this unity that they are at the same time presupposed as intrinsically free and independent of each other.
Kant, as we know, constructed matter from the forces of attraction and repulsion, or at least he has, to use his own words, set up the metaphysical elements of this construction. It will not be without interest to examine this construction more closely. This metaphysical exposition of a subject matter which not only itself but also in its determinations seemed to belong only to experience is noteworthy, partly because as an experiment with the Notion it at least gave the impulse to the more recent philosophy of nature, to a philosophy which does not make nature as given in sense-perception the basis of science, but which goes to the absolute Notion for its determinations; and partly because in many cases no advance is made beyond the Kantian construction which is held to be a philosophical beginning and foundation for physics.
Now it is true that matter as it exists for sense perception is no more a subject matter of logic than are space and its determinations. But the forces of attraction and repulsion, in so far as they are regarded as forces of empirical matter, are also based on the pure determinations here considered of the one and the many and their inter-relationships, which, because these names are most obvious, I have called repulsion and attraction.
Kant's method in the deduction of matter from these forces, which he calls a construction, when looked at more closely does not deserve this name, unless any exercise of reflection, even analytical reflection, is to be called a construction; and later philosophers of nature have in fact given the name of construction to the shallowest reasoning and the most baseless concoction of unbridled imagination and thoughtless reflection — and it is especially for the so-called factors of attraction and repulsion that such philosophers have shown a predilection.
For Kant's method is basically analytical, not constructive. He presupposes the idea of matter and then asks what forces are required to maintain the determinations he has presupposed. Thus, on the one hand, he demands the force of attraction because, properly speaking, through repulsion alone and without attraction matter could not exist; and on the other hand he derives repulsion, too, from matter and gives as the reason that we think of matter as impenetrable, since it presents itself under this category to the sense of touch by which it manifests itself to us. Consequently, he proceeds, repulsion is at once thought in the concept of matter because it is immediately given therein, whereas attraction is added to the concept syllogistically. But these syllogisms, too, are based on what has just been said, namely, that matter which possessed repulsive force alone, would not exhaust our conception of matter.
It is evident that this is the method of a cognition which reflects on experience, which first perceives the determinations in a phenomenon, then makes these the foundation, and for their so-called explanation assumes corresponding basic elements or forces which are supposed to produce those determinations of the phenomenon.
With respect to this difference as to the way in which cognition finds the forces of repulsion and attraction in matter, Kant further remarks that the force of attraction certainly just as much belongs to the concept of matter 'although it is not contained in it'; this last expression is italicised by Kant. However, it is hard to perceive what this difference is supposed to be; for a determination which belongs to the concept of anything must be truly contained in it.
What causes the difficulty and gives rise to this vain subterfuge, is that Kant from the start one-sidedly attributes to the concept of matter only the determination of impenetrability, which we are supposed to perceive by the sense of touch, for which reason the force of repulsion as the holding off of an other from itself is immediately given. But if, further, the existence of matter is supposed to be impossible without attraction, then this assertion is based on a conception of matter taken from sense perception; consequently, the determination of attraction, too, must come within the range of sense perception. It is indeed easy to perceive that matter, besides its being-for-self, which sublates the being-for-other (offers resistance), has also a relation between its self-determined parts, a spatial extension and cohesion, and in rigidity and solidity the cohesion is very firm. Physics explains that the tearing apart, etc., of a body requires a force which shall be stronger than the mutual attraction of the parts of the body. From this observation reflection can just as directly derive the force of attraction or assume it as given, as it did with the force of repulsion. In point of fact, if we consider Kant's arguments from which the force of attraction is supposed to be deduced (the proof of the proposition that the possibility of matter requires a force of attraction as a second fundamental force, loc. cit.), it is apparent that their sole content is this, that through repulsion alone matter would not be spatial Matter being presupposed as filling space, it is credited with continuity, the ground of which is assumed to be the force of attraction.
Now if the merit of such a construction of matter were at most that of an analysis (though a merit diminished by the faulty exposition), still the fundamental thought, namely, the derivation of matter from these two opposite determinations as its fundamental forces, must always be highly esteemed. Kant is chiefly concerned to banish the vulgar mechanistic way of thinking which stops short at the one determination of impenetrability, of self-determined and self-subsistent puncticity, and converts into something external the opposite determination, the relation of matter within itself or the relation of a plurality of matters, which in turn are regarded as particular ones — a way of thinking which, as Kant says, will admit no motive forces except pressure and thrust, that is, only action from without. This external manner of thinking always presupposes motion as already externally present in matter, and it does not occur to it to regard motion as something immanent and to comprehend motion itself in matter, which latter is thus assumed as, on its own account, motionless and inert. This stand-point has before it only ordinary mechanics, not immanent and free motion. It is true that Kant sublates this externality in so far as he makes attraction (the relation of matters to one another in so far as these are assumed as separated from one another, or matter generally in its self-externality) a force of matter itself; still, on the other hand, his two fundamental forces within matter remain external to and completely independent of each other.
The fixed difference of these two forces attributed to them from that external standpoint is no less null than any other distinction must show itself to be which, in respect of its specific content, is made into something supposedly fixed; because these forces are only moments which pass over into each other, as we saw above when they were considered in their truth. I go on to consider these other distinctions as they are stated by Kant.
He defines the force of attraction as a penetrative force by which one bit of matter can act directly on the parts of another even beyond the area of contact; the force of repulsion, on the other hand, he defines as a surface force through which bits of matter can act on each other only in the common area of contact. The reason adduced that the latter can be only a surface force is as follows: ‘The parts in contact each limit the sphere of action of the other, and the force of repulsion cannot move any more distant part except through the agency of the intervening parts; an immediate action of one part of matter on another passing right across these intervening parts by forces of expansion (which means here, forces of repulsion) is impossible.’
But here we must remember that in assuming 'nearer' or 'more distant' parts of matter, the same distinction would likewise arise with respect to attraction, namely, that though one atom acted on another, yet a third, more distant atom (between which and the first atom, the second atom would be), would first enter into the sphere of attraction of the intervening atom nearer to it; therefore the first atom would not have an immediate, simple action on the third, from which it would follow that the action of the force of attraction, like that of repulsion, is equally mediated. Further, the genuine penetration of the force of attraction could of necessity consist only in this, that every part of matter was in and for itself attractive, not that a certain number of atoms behaved passively and only one atom actively. But we must at once remark with respect to the force of repulsion itself that in the passage quoted, 'parts in contact' are mentioned which implies solidity and continuity of a matter already finished and complete which would not permit the passage through it of a repelling force. But this solidity of matter in which parts are in contact and are no longer separated by the void already presupposes that the force of repulsion is sublated; according to the sensuous conception of repulsion which prevails here, parts in contact are to be taken as those which do not repel each other. It therefore follows, quite tautologically, that where repulsion is assumed to be not, there no repulsion can take place. But from this nothing else follows which could serve to determine the force of repulsion. However, reflection on the statement that parts in contact are in contact only in so far as they hold themselves apart, leads directly to the conclusion that the force of repulsion is not merely on the surface of matter but within the sphere which was supposed to be only a sphere of attraction.
Kant assumes further that 'through the force of attraction, matter only occupies space but does not fill it'; and 'because matter through the force of attraction does not fill space, this force can act across empty space since there is no intervening matter to limit it'. This distinction is much the same as the one mentioned above where a determination was supposed to belong to the concept of a thing but not to be contained in it; here, then, matter is supposed only to occupy a space but not to fill it. There it is repulsion, if we stop at the first determination of matter, through which the ones repel one another and so are only negatively related to one another, here that means, by empty space. Here, however, it is the force of attraction which keeps space empty; it does not fill space by its connection of the atoms, in other words, it keeps the atoms in a negative relation to one another. We see that Kant here unconsciously realises what is implicit in the nature of the subject matter, when he attributes to the force of attraction precisely what, in accordance with the first determination, he attributed to the opposite force. While he was busy with establishing the difference between the two forces, it happened that one had passed over into the other. Thus through repulsion, on the other hand, matter is supposed to fill a space, and consequently through repulsion the empty space left by the force of attraction vanishes. In point of fact repulsion, in doing away with empty space, also destroys the negative relation of the atoms or ones, that is, their repulsion of one another; in other words, repulsion is determined as the opposite of itself.
To this effacing of the differences there is added the confusion arising from the fact that, as we observed at the beginning, Kant's exposition of the opposed forces is analytic; and whereas matter is supposed to be derived from its elements, it is presented throughout the entire discourse as already formed and constituted. In the definition of surface and penetrative force both are assumed as motive forces by means of which matter is supposed to be able to act in one or other of these ways. Here, therefore, they are represented as forces, not through which matter first comes into being but through which matter, as an already finished product, is only set in motion. But in so far as we are speaking of the forces through which different bodies act on one another and are set in motion, this is something quite different from the determination and relation which these forces were supposed to have as [constitutive] moments of matter.
The same opposition of attractive and repulsive forces is made by their more developed form of centripetal and centrifugal forces. These appear to offer an essential distinction, since in their sphere there is a fixed single one, a centre, in relation to which the other ones behave as not for themselves, so that the difference between the forces can be linked to this presupposed difference between a single central one and the others which are not independent relatively to it. But if they are to be used for explanation — for which purpose they are assumed to be (like the forces of repulsion and attraction) in an inverse quantitative ratio so that the one increases as the other decreases — then the phenomenon of the motion and its inequality ought to be the result of these forces which were assumed for the purpose of explanation. However, one need only examine the accounts (any of them will do) of a phenomenon like the unequal velocity of a planet in its orbit round the sun, based on the opposition of these forces, to become aware of the confusion which prevails in such explanations, and the impossibility of disentangling the magnitudes of the forces, so that the one which in the explanation is assumed to be decreasing can just as well be assumed to be increasing, and vice versa. To make this evident would require a lengthier exposition than could be given here; but what is necessary for this purpose is adduced later on in connection with the inverted relation.