C Transition into Essence

§ 803

Absolute indifference is the final determination of being before it becomes essence; but it does not attain to essence. It reveals itself as still belonging to the sphere of being through the fact that, determined as indifferent, it still contains difference as an external, quantitative determination.

This is its determinate being, contrasted with which absolute indifference is determined as being only implicitly the absolute, not the absolute grasped as actuality. In other words, it is external reflection which stops short at conceiving the differences in themselves or in the absolute as one and the same, thinking of them as only indifferently distinguished, not as intrinsically distinct from one another.

The further step which requires to be made here is to grasp that this reflection of the differences into their unity is not merely the product of the external reflection of the subjective thinker, but that it is the very nature of the differences of this unity to sublate themselves, with the result that their unity proves to be absolute negativity, its indifference to be just as much indifferent to itself, to its own indifference, as it is indifferent to otherness.

§ 804

But we are already familiar with this self-sublating of the determination of indifference; in the development of its positedness, this determination has shown itself to be from every aspect a contradiction. It is in itself the totality in which every determination of being is sublated and contained; it is thus the substrate, but at first only in the one-sided determination of the in-itself, and consequently the differences, namely, the quantitative difference and the inverse ratio of factors, are present in it only in an external manner. As thus the contradiction of itself and its determinedness, of its implicit determination and its posited determinateness, it is the negative totality whose determinatenesses have sublated themselves in themselves and in so doing have sublated this fundamental one-sidedness of theirs, their [merely] implicit being [Ansichsein]. The result is that indifference is now posited as what it in fact is, namely a simple and infinite, negative relation-to-self, its inherent incompatibility with itself, a repelling of itself from itself. The process of determining and being determined is not a transition, nor an external alteration, nor an emergence of determinations in the indifference, but is its own self-relating which is the negativity of itself, of its [merely] implicit being.

§ 805

Now these repelled determinations do not possess themselves, do not emerge as self-subsistent or external determinations, but first, as moments belonging to the implicit unity, they are not expelled from it but are borne by it as the substrate and are filled solely by it; secondly, as determinations which are immanent in the explicated unity, they are only through their repulsion from themselves. The being of the determinations is no longer simply affirmative as in the entire sphere of being, but is now a sheer positedness, the determinations having the fixed character and significance of being related to their unity, each consequently being related to its other and with negation; this is the mark of their relativity.

§ 806

Thus we see that being in general and the being or immediacy of the distinct determinatenesses, no less than the implicit being, has vanished and the unity is being, an immediate presupposed totality such that it is this simple self-relation only as a result of the sublating of this presupposition, and this presupposedness and immediate being is itself only a moment of its repelling, the original self-subsistence and self-Identity is only as the resulting coming together with itself. Being, in its determining, has thus determined itself to essence, a being which, through the sublating of being, is a simple being-with-itself. ®