Introduction

§ 1036

Essence must appear.

Being is the absolute abstraction. This negativity is not something external to being, which is being, and nothing but being, only as this absolute negativity.

This is why being only is as self-sublating being and is essence.

But, conversely, essence as simple equality with itself is likewise being. The doctrine of being contains the first proposition: being is essence. The second proposition: essence is being, constitutes the content of the first section of the doctrine of essence. But this being into which essence makes itself is essential being, Existence; it is a being that has come forth from negativity and inwardness.

§ 1037

Thus essence appears. Reflection is the showing of illusory being within essence itself. Its determinations are enclosed within the unity simply and solely as posited, sublated determinations; or, reflection is essence which, in its positedness, is immediately identical with itself. But since essence is ground, it gives itself a real determination through its reflection, which is self-sublating or which returns into itself; further, since this determination, or the otherness, of the ground relation sublates itself in the reflection of the ground and becomes Existence, this endows the form determinations with an element of self-subsistence. Their illusory being completes itself to become Appearance.

The essentiality that has advanced to immediacy is, in the first instance, Existence, and an existent or thing — as an undifferentiated unity of essence with its immediacy. It is true that the thing contains reflection, but its negativity s, in the first instance, extinguished in its immediacy; but because its ground is essentially reflection, its immediacy sublates itself and the thing makes itself into positedness.

§ 1038

Secondly, then, it is Appearance. Appearance is that which the thing is in itself, or its truth. But this merely posited Existence which is reflected into otherness is equally the transcending of its itself in its infinitude; to the world of appearance is opposed the world that is reflected into itself, the world of essence.

§ 1039

But the being that appears and essential being, simply stand in relation to one another. Thus Existence is, thirdly, essential relation; what appears manifests what is essential, and this is in its Appearance.

The relation is the still-imperfect union of reflection-into-otherness and reflection-into-self; the perfect interpenetration of both is actuality.