(b) Quality

¹⁹⁵ 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.

¹⁹⁶ 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.

¹⁹⁷ 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.

¹⁹⁸ 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

¹⁹⁹ 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.

²⁰⁰ 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.

²⁰¹ 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.

²⁰² 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.

²⁰³ 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.

²⁰⁴ 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.

²⁰⁵ 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.

²⁰⁶ 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].

²⁰⁷ ‘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.