Logic as a Metaphysical science

⁹⁴ Logic is pure [metaphysical] science.

It is pure [metaphysical] knowledge in the entire range of its development.

The result of pure knowing is the Idea which has become truth.

The certainty of truth no longer has the object over against it.

Instead, this certainty:

• has internalised the object
• knows it as its own self
• has given up the knowledge of itself as of something confronting the object of which it is only the annihilation, has divested itself of this subjectivity and is at one with its self-alienation.

⁹⁵ From this, the determination of pure [metaphysical] knowledge begins with:

• getting rid of all other reflections and opinions
• simply taking up what is before us

⁹⁶ Pure [metaphysical] knowing as concentrated into this unity has sublated all reference to an other and to mediation.

It is thus distinctionless. It is only simple immediacy and stops being knowledge.

⁹⁷ Simple immediacy is itself an expression of reflection.

It references itself with what is mediated.

This simple immediacy [relation], therefore, is pure being [metaphysical existence].

Pure knowing is to mean abstract [metaphysical] knowing.

Pure being is being [existence] in general.

⁹⁸ Here the beginning is made with being which is represented as having come to be through mediation, a mediation which is also a sublating of itself.

There is presupposed pure knowing as the outcome of finite knowing, of consciousness. But if no presupposition is to be made and the beginning itself is taken immediately, then its only determination is that it is to be the beginning of logic, of thought as such.

All that is present is simply the resolve, which can also be regarded as arbitrary, that we propose to consider thought as such.

⁹⁹ Thus, the beginning must be an absolute, or what is synonymous here, an abstract beginning;

And so it may not suppose anything, must not be mediated by anything nor have a ground; rather it is to be itself the ground of the entire science.

Consequently, it must be purely and simply an immediacy, or rather merely immediacy itself.

Just as it cannot possess any determination relatively to anything else, so too it cannot contain within itself any determination, any content; for any such would be a distinguishing and an inter-relationship of distinct moments, and consequently a mediation. The beginning therefore is pure being

¹⁰⁰ To this simple exposition of what is only directly involved in the simplest of all things, the logical beginning, we may add the following further reflections;

Yet these cannot be meant to serve as elucidations and confirmations of that exposition — this is complete in itself — since they are occasioned by preconceived ideas and reflections and these, like all other preliminary prejudices, must be disposed of within the science itself where their treatment should be awaited with patience.

¹⁰¹ Absolute truth is a result.

Conversely, a result presupposes a prior truth which, however, because it is a first, objectively considered is unnecessary and from the subjective side is not known.

This insight has recently given rise to the thought that philosophy can only begin with a hypothetical and problematical truth and therefore philosophising can at first be only a quest.

This view was much stressed by Reinhold in his later philosophical work and one must give it credit for the genuine interest on which it is based, an interest which concerns the speculative nature of the philosophical beginning.

The detailed discussion of this view is at the same time an occasion for introducing a preliminary understanding of the meaning of progress in logic generally; for that view has a direct bearing on the advance.

This it conceives to be such that progress in philosophy is rather a retrogression and a grounding or establishing by means of which we first obtain the result that what we began with is not something merely arbitrarily assumed but is in fact the truth, and also the primary truth.

The advance is a retreat into the ground, to what is primary and true, on which depends and, in fact, from which originates, that with which the beginning is made.

Thus consciousness on its onward path from the immediacy with which it began is led back to absolute knowledge as its innermost truth. This last, the ground, is then also that from which the first proceeds, that which at first appeared as an immediacy.

This is true in still greater measure of absolute spirit which reveals itself as the concrete and final supreme truth of all being, and which at the end of the development is known as freely externalising itself, abandoning itself to the shape of an immediate being —opening or unfolding itself [sich entschliessend] into the creation of a world which contains all that fell into the development which preceded that result and which through this reversal of its position relatively to its beginning is transformed into something dependent on the result as principle.

The essential requirement for the science of logic is not so much that the beginning be a pure immediacy, but rather that the whole of the science be within itself a circle in which the first is also the last and the last is also the first.