Essence as Reflection Within Itself

§ 817

Essence issues from being. It is an effect of existence.

If essence is taken at first as an immediacy, then it is a specific determinate being confronted by another such.

It is only essential, as opposed to unessential, determinate being.

But essence is being that has been sublated in and for itself. It is only confronted by illusory existence.

The illusory existence, however, is created by the existing essence.

Essence is first reflection of existence. Reflection is its own identity. This identity can be reflected many times to reveal the identity.

Essence as the reflection-into-self by the process of identification converts itself into ground and passes over into Existence and Appearance.

Chapter 1 Illusory Being

§ 818

Essence from existence confronts existence as an opposite. This immediate existence is:

1. The unessential
2. Essenceless existence (more than unessential existence)

• It is illusory existence.

3. This illusory existence is essence’s own illusory existence.

The showing of this illusory existence within essence itself is reflection.

§ 819

Essence is sublated existence. It is simple equality with itself, as the negation of existence in general.

Essence thus exists in time, preserved by this sublating.

In this identification, essence itself is simply affirmative, immediate essence.

• Existence is only a negative relation to essence.

Therefore essence is an identified negation [of existence].

In this way, existence and essence are related to each other. Each has an existence, a time. These are indifferent to each other.

§ 820

But at the same time, existence is the unessential. In relation to essence, existence is identified as sublated exostemce.

Existence is only related to essence simply as an other.

§ 821

The distinction of essential and unessential has caused essence to relapse into a real identity.

This is because essence in its initial phase is has an identity in time, an affirmative essence.

Hence it is only as other over against existence.

The sphere of identified existence is thereby made the base.

Conversely, essence is an independent existence.

But it is so only in relation to an other, in a specific reference.

A thing can have an essential and an unessential side.

• This distinction is external to it.

It is a separation of one part of it from another that does not affect the thing itself.

§ 822

Essence is essential only relatively to what is unessential. This is because it is taken only as sublated existence or identified existence.

The first negation is the negation which is an identification through which existence becomes an identified existence, or identified existence becomes an other.

In this way, essence is only the first negation.

But essence is the absolute negativity of existence. It is existence itself. But it is not identified only as an other, but as an existence that has sublated itself both as:

• immediate existence and
• immediate negation, as negation that is infected with otherness.

Thus, identified existence has not preserved itself as an other.

We are in the sphere of essence. The time that is still distinguished from essence is not an unessential identity. It is time that is in and for itself null.

• It is only a non-essence, illusory existence.

B Illusory Existence

§ 823

1. Existence is illusory existence. The existence of illusory existence consists solely in the sublatedness of existence, in its nothingness.

This nothingness it has in essence and apart from its nothingness, apart from essence, illusory existence is not.

It is the negative posited as negative.

§ 824

Illusory existence is all that still remains from the sphere of existence.

But it still seems to have an time aspect that is independent of essence, an other of essence.

The other contains the 2 moments as:

• identified existence
• negated identified existence

Since the unessential no longer has existence, all that remains to it of otherness is the pure time of negated identified existence.

Illusory existence is this time, negated identified existence in the identity of existence.

It has identified existence only in relation to an other, only in its negated identified existence; the non-self-subsistent which is only in its negation.

All that is left to it, therefore, is the pure identity of time.

It is reflected time, a time which is only by means of its negation and which, when contrasted with its mediation, is nothing but the empty identity of the time of negated identified existence.