The Essentialities or Determinations of Reflection

§ 860

Reflection is determinate reflection; hence essence is determinate essence, or it is an essentiality.

Reflection is the showing of the illusory being of essence within essence itself. Essence, as infinite return-into-self, is not immediate but negative simplicity; it is a movement through distinct moments, absolute self-mediation. But it reflects itself into these its moments which consequently are themselves determinations reflected into themselves.

§ 861

Essence is at first, simple self-relation, pure identity. This is its determination, but as such it is rather the absence of any determination.

Secondly, the proper determination is difference, a difference that is, on the one hand, external or indifferent, diversity in general, and on the other hand, is opposed diversity or opposition.

Thirdly, as contradiction, the opposition is reflected into itself and withdrawn into its ground.

Remark: A = A

Hegel’s Science of Logic

Laws of Identity and Diversity Remark: A = A

§ 862

The categories of reflection used to be taken up in the form of propositions, in which they were asserted to be valid for everything. These propositions ranked as the universal laws of thought that lie at the base of all thinking, that are absolute in themselves and incapable of proof, but are immediately and incontestably recognised and accepted as true by all thinking that grasps their meaning.

§ 863

Thus the essential category of identity is enunciated in the proposition: everything is identical with itself, A = A. Or negatively: A cannot at the same time be A and not A.

§ 864

In the first place, there is no apparent reason why only these simple determinations of reflection should be grasped in this particular form, and not also the other categories, such as all the determinatenesses of the sphere of being.

We should then have the propositions, for example: everything is, everything has a determinate being, and so on, or: everything has a quality, quantity, etc. For being, determinate being, and so forth, are, simply as logical categories, predicates of everything. According to its etymology and Aristotle’s definition, category is what is predicated or asserted of the existent.

But a determinateness of being is essentially a transition into its opposite; the negative of any determinateness is as necessary as the latter itself; as immediate determinatenesses, each is directly confronted by the other. Consequently, if these categories are put in the form of such propositions, then the opposite propositions equally appear;

Both present themselves with equal necessity and, as immediate assertions, are at least equally correct. The one, therefore, would demand proof as against the other, and consequently these assertions could no longer be credited with the character of immediately true and incontestable propositions of thought.

§ 865

The determinations of reflection, on the contrary, are not of a qualitative kind. They are self-related, and so are at the same time determinations removed from determinateness against an other.

Further, in that they are determinatenesses which are in themselves relations, to that extent they already contain within themselves the prepositional form.

For the difference between proposition and judgement is mainly that in the former the content constitutes the relation itself or is a specific relation. The judgement, on the contrary, transfers the content to the predicate as a universal determinateness which is for itself and is distinct from its relation, the simple copula.

When a proposition is to be converted into a judgement, then the specific content — if, for example it is a verb — is changed into a participle, in order to separate in this way the determination itself and its relation to a subject.

For the determinations of reflection, on the contrary, as positedness reflected into itself, the prepositional form itself lies immediately at hand. Only, since they are enunciated as universal laws of thought, they still require a subject of their relation, and this subject is: everything, or an A, which equally means each and every existent.

§ 866

On the one hand, this prepositional form is a superfluity; the determinations of reflection are to be considered in and for themselves. Further, these propositions are defective in that they have for subject, being, everything. In this way, they resuscitate being and enunciate the categories of reflection-identity, and so on-of the something as a quality which something has in it, not in the speculative sense, but meaning that something as subject persists in such a quality as simply affirmative [als seiendes], not that it has passed over into identity, and so on, as into its truth and its essence.

§ 867

But lastly, although the determinations of reflection have the form of equality-with-self and therefore of being unrelated to an other and without opposition, yet they are determinate against one another, as we shall find on closer examination of them, or as is immediately evident from the categories of identity, difference, and opposition; their form of reflection, therefore, does not exempt them from transition and contradiction. The several propositions which are set up as absolute laws of thought, are, therefore, more closely considered, opposed to one another, they contradict one another and mutually sublate themselves.

§ 868

If everything is identical with itself, then it is not different, not opposed, has no ground. Or, if it is assumed that no two things are the same, that is, everything is different from everything else, then A is not equal to A, nor is A opposed to A, and so on. The assumption of any of these propositions rules out the assumption of the others. The thoughtless consideration of them enumerates them one after the other, so that there does not appear to be any relation between them; it has in mind merely their reflectedness-into-self, ignoring their other moment, positedness or their determinateness as such which sweeps them on into transition and into their negation.