Hegel_SOL_doctrine_of_being_part1 m.mp3 (male voice)

book one

The Doctrine of Being

with what must the beginning of science be made? It is only in recent times that there has been a new awareness of the difficulty of finding a beginning in philosophy, and the reason for this difficulty, and so also the possibility of resolving it, have been discussed in a variety of ways. The beginning of philosophy must be either something mediated or something immediate, and it is easy to show that it can be neither the one nor the other; so either way of beginning runs into contradiction. The principle of a philosophy also expresses a beginning, of course, but not so much a subjective as an objective one, the beginning of all things. The principle is a somehow determinate content water, the one, nous, idea, or substance, monad, etc. or, if it designates the nature of cognition and is therefore meant simply as a criterion rather than an objective determination, as thinking, intuition, sensation, I, even subjectivity, then here too the interest still lies in the content determination. The beginning as such, on the other hand, as something subjective in the sense that it is an accidental way of introducing the exposition, is left unconsidered, a matter of indifference, and consequently also the need to ask with what a beginning should be made remains of no importance in face of the need for the principle in which alone the interest of the fact seems to lie, the interest as to what is the truth, the absolute ground of everything. But the modern perplexity about a beginning proceeds from a further need which escapes those who are either busy demonstrating their principle dogmatically or skeptically looking for a subjective criterion against dogmatic philosophizing, and is outright denied by those who begin, like a shot from a pistol, from their inner revelation, from faith, intellectual intuition, etc. and who would be exempt from method and logic. If earlier abstract thought is at first interested only in the principle as content, but is driven as philosophical culture advances to the other side to pay attention to the conduct of the cognitive process, then the subjective activity has also been grasped as an essential moment of objective truth, and with this there comes the need to unite the method with the content, the form with the principle. Thus the principle ought to be also the beginning, and that which has priority for thinking ought to be also the first in the process of thinking. Here we only have to consider how the logical beginning appears. The two sides from which it can be taken have already been named, namely either by way of mediation as result, or immediately as beginning proper. This is not the place to discuss the question apparently so important to present-day culture, whether the knowledge of truth is an immediate awareness that begins absolutely, a faith, or rather a mediated knowledge. In so far as the issue allows passing treatment, this has already been done elsewhere (in my Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, 3rd edn, in the Prefatory Concept.). Here we may quote from it only this, that there is nothing in heaven or nature or spirit or anywhere else that does not contain just as much immediacy as mediation, so that both these determinations prove to be unseparated and inseparable and the opposition between them nothing real. As for a scientific discussion, a case in point is every logical proposition in which we find the determinations of immediacy and mediacy and where there is also entailed, therefore, a discussion of their opposition and their truth. This opposition, when connected to thinking, to knowledge, to cognition, assumes the more concrete shape of immediate or mediated knowledge, and it is then up to the science of logic to consider the nature of cognition in general, while the more concrete forms of the same cognition fall within the scope of the science of spirit and the phenomenology of spirit. But to want to clarify the nature of cognition prior to science is to demand that it should be discussed outside science, and outside science this cannot be done, at least not in the scientific manner which alone is the issue here. A beginning is logical in that it is to be made in the element of a free, self-contained thought, in pure knowledge; it is thereby mediated, for pure knowledge is the ultimate and absolute truth of consciousness. We said in the Introduction that the Phenomenology of Spirit is the science of consciousness, its exposition; that consciousness has the concept of science, that is, pure knowledge, for its result. To this extent, logic has for its presupposition the science of spirit in its appearance, a science which contains the necessity, and therefore demonstrates the truth, of the stand-point which is pure knowledge and of its mediation. In this science of spirit in its appearance the beginning is made from empirical, sensuous consciousness, and it is this consciousness which is immediate knowledge in the strict sense; there, in this science, is where its nature is discussed. Any other consciousness, such as faith in divine truths, inner experience, knowledge through inner revelation, etc., proves upon cursory reflection to be very ill-suited as an instance of immediate knowledge. In the said treatise, immediate consciousness is also that which in the science comes first and immediately and is therefore a presupposition; but in logic the presupposition is what has proved itself to be the result of that preceding consideration, namely the idea as pure knowledge. Logic is the pure science, that is, pure knowledge in the full compass of its development. But in that result the idea has the determination of a certainty that has become truth; it is a certainty which, on the one hand, no longer stands over and against a subject matter confronting it externally but has interiorized it, is knowingly aware that the subject matter is itself; and, on the other hand, has relinquished any knowledge of itself that would oppose it to objectivity and would reduce the latter to a nothing; it has externalized this subjectivity and is at one with its externalization. Now starting with this determination of pure knowledge, all that we have to do to ensure that the beginning will remain immanent to the science of this knowledge is to consider, or rather, setting aside every reflection, simply to take up, what is there before us. Pure knowledge, thus withdrawn into this unity, has sublated every reference to an other and to mediation; it is without distinctions and as thus distinctionless it ceases to be knowledge; what we have before us is only simple immediacy. Simple immediacy is itself an expression of reflection; it refers to the distinction from what is mediated. The true expression of this simple immediacy is therefore pure being. Just as pure knowledge should mean nothing but knowledge as such, so also pure being should mean nothing but being in general; being, and nothing else, without further determination and filling. Being is what makes the beginning here; it is presented indeed as originating through mediation, but a mediation which at the same time sublates itself, and the presupposition is of a pure knowledge which is the result of finite knowledge, of consciousness. But if no presupposition is to be made, if the beginning is itself to be taken immediately, then the only determination of this beginning is that it is to be the beginning of logic, of thought as such. There is only present the resolve, which can also be viewed as arbitrary, of considering thinking as such. The beginning must then be absolute or, what means the same here, must be an abstract beginning; and so there is nothing that it may presuppose, must not be mediated by anything or have a ground, ought to be rather itself the ground of the entire science. It must therefore be simply an immediacy, or rather only immediacy itself. Just as it cannot have any determination with respect to an other, so too it cannot have any within; it cannot have any content, for any content would entail distinction and the reference of distinct moments to each other, and hence a mediation. The beginning is therefore pure being. After this simple exposition of what alone first belongs to this simplest of all simples, the logical beginning, we may add the following further reflections which should not serve, however, as elucidation and confirmation of the exposition this is complete by itself but are rather occasioned by notions and reflections which may come our way beforehand and yet, like all other prejudices that antedate the science of logic, must be disposed of within the science itself and are therefore to be patiently deferred until then. The insight that absolute truth must be a result, and conversely, that a result presupposes a first truth which, because it is first, objectively considered is not necessary and from the subjective side is not known this insight has recently given rise to the thought that philosophy can begin only with something which is hypothetically and problematically true, and that at first, therefore, philosophizing can be only a quest. This is a view that Reinhold has repeatedly urged in the later stages of his philosophizing, and which must be given credit for being motivated by a genuine interest in the speculative nature of philosophical beginning. A critical examination of this view will also be an occasion for introducing a preliminary understanding of what progression in logic generally means, for the view has direct implications for the nature of this advance. Indeed, as portrayed by it, progression in philosophy would be rather a retrogression and a grounding, only by virtue of which it then follows as result that that, with which the beginning was made, was not just an arbitrary assumption but was in fact the truth, and the first truth at that. It must be admitted that it is an essential consideration one which will be found elaborated again within the logic itself that progression is a retreat to the ground, to the origin and the truth on which that with which the beginning was made, and from which it is in fact produced, depends. Thus consciousness, on its forward path from the immediacy with which it began, is led back to the absolute knowledge which is its innermost truth. This truth, the ground, is then also that from which the original first proceeds, the same first which at the beginning came on the scene as something immediate. It is most of all in this way that absolute spirit (which is revealed as the concrete and supreme truth of all being) comes to be known, as at the end of the development it freely externalizes itself, letting itself go into the shape of an immediate being resolving itself into the creation of a world which contains all that fell within the development preceding that result and which, through this reversal of position with its beginning, is converted into something dependent on the result as principle. Essential to science is not so much that a pure immediacy should be the beginning, but that the whole of science is in itself a circle in which the first becomes also the last, and the last also the first. Conversely, it follows that it is just as necessary to consider as result that into which the movement returns as to its ground. In this respect, the first is just as much the ground, and the last a derivative; since the movement makes its start from the first and by correct inferences arrives at the last as the ground, this last is result. Further, the advance from that which constitutes the beginning is to be considered only as one more determination of the same advance, so that this beginning remains as the underlying ground of all that follows without vanishing from it. The advance does not consist in the derivation of an other, or in the transition to a truly other: inasmuch as there is a transition, it is equally sublated again. Thus the beginning of philosophy is the ever present and self-preserving foundation of all subsequent developments, remaining everywhere immanent in its further determinations. In this advance the beginning thus loses the one-sidedness that it has when determined simply as something immediate and abstract; it becomes mediated, and the line of scientific forward movement consequently turns into a circle. It also follows that what constitutes the beginning, because it is something still undeveloped and empty of content, is not yet truly known at that beginning, and that only science, and science fully developed, is the completed cognition of it, replete with content and finally truly grounded. But for this reason, because it is as absolute ground that the result finally emerges, the progression of this cognition is not anything provisory, still problematic and hypothetical, but must be determined through the nature of the matter at issue and of the content itself. Nor is the said beginning an arbitrary and only temporary assumption, or something which seems to be an arbitrary and tentative presupposition but of which it is subsequently shown that to make it the starting point was indeed the right thing to do; this is not as when we are instructed to make certain constructions in order to aid the proof of a geometrical theorem, and only in retrospect, in the course of the proof, does it become apparent that we did well to draw precisely these lines and then, in the proof itself, to begin by comparing them or the enclosed angles though the line-drawing or the comparing themselves escape conceptual comprehension. So we have just given, right within science itself, the reason why in pure science the beginning is made with pure being. This pure being is the unity into which pure knowledge returns, or if this knowledge, as form, is itself still to be kept distinct from its unity, then pure being is also its content. It is in this respect that this pure being, this absolute immediate, is just as absolutely mediated. However, just because it is here as the beginning, it is just as essential that it should be taken in the one-sidedness of being purely immediate. If it were not this pure indeterminacy, if it were determined, it would be taken as something mediated, would already be carried further than itself: a determinate something has the character of an other with respect to a first. It thus lies in the nature of a beginning itself that it should be being and nothing else. There is no need, therefore, of other preparations to enter philosophy, no need of further reflections or access points. Nor can we derive a more specific determination or a more positive content for the beginning of philosophy from the fact that it is such a beginning. For here, at the beginning, where the fact itself is not yet at hand, philosophy is an empty word, a received and yet unjustified notion. Pure knowledge yields only this negative determination, namely that the beginning ought to be abstract. If pure being is taken as the content of pure knowledge, then the latter must step back from its content, allowing it free play and without determining it further. Or again, inasmuch as pure being is to be considered as the unity into which knowledge has collapsed when at the highest point of union with its objectification, knowledge has then disappeared into this unity, leaving behind no distinction from it and hence no determination for it. Nor is there anything else present, any content whatever, that could be used to make a more determinate beginning with it.

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