Perception Or Things and their Deceptiveness

^'111' Immediate certainty does not make the truth its own.

• This is because its truth is something universal.
• Whereas certainty only wants to deal with the immediate perception.

Perception, on the other hand, takes what exists for it to be a universal.

• Universality is the general principle of perception
• The mini-perceptions immediately distinguished within it are also universal.

“I” is a universal. The object is a universal.

• This principle comes into being for those who are tracing the course of experience.

The understanding of perception (sense-certainty) depends on a series of acts of understanding.

• But the process of understanding what perception is, therefore, no longer depends on a series of acts of understanding
• Instead, this understanding is a logically necessitated process.

With emergence of that principle, both the mini-perceptions and the understanding of them, both arise.

• The mini-perceptions merely fall apart as happenings.
• The understanding is the logical process of perceiving those mini-perceptions.

Here, the object is in its essential nature, the same as the process of perceiving that object.

• The process is the unfolding and distinguishing of the elements involved.
• The object is these same elements taken together as a single totality.

To those who are tracing the process, the universal, qua principle, is the essence of perception.

• Its target perceptions become non-essential.

• But because both are themselves the universal, or the essence, they are both essential.
• But since they are opposites, only one can in the relation (constituting perception) be the essential perception.
  • The distinction of essential and non-essential has to be shared between them.

The target perceptions are the simple fact.

• It is the object, the essence of which does not care whether it is perceived or not

The perceiving, on the other hand, is the process.

• It is the insubstantial, inconstant factor
• It can exist or not exist
• It is the non-essential perception

^'112' What is this target perception?

Its principle is the universal, basically, a mediated principle.

Thus, the target perception must express this explicitly as its own inherent nature.

• By so doing, the target perception emerges as having many properties.

In immediate certainty, all the wealth of sense-knowledge was merely something alongside and by the way.

• This is because only perception has negation, distinction, multiplicity in its very nature.

Thus, the wealth of sense-knowledge belongs to perception, not to immediate certainty.

1. The Notion of a “Thing”

^'113' The immediate perception (This) is actually a determinate nothing that has content.

In this view, the sense-element is still present.

• Our sense-perceptions give us immediate certainty
  • This certainty leads to “meaning”

But this immediate perception (“This”) is not a type of immediate certainty. [The perception does not exost in time.]

• Instead, it is a universal. [It is timeless]
• It has the character of being the property.

Cancelling the immediate perception (This) [removing the time-factor] reveals the twofold meaning which we found contained in the negative.

• To cancel is both to negate and to preserve at the same time.

The ’nothing’ is a negation of the immediate perception (This) [in time].

• It preserves immediacy [the time factor]
• It itself is sensuous [can exist]
• But is has a universal immediacy [always can exist].

Existence, however, is a universal by its having in it mediation or negation.

• When it brings this universal explicitly out as a factor in its immediacy [time], it is a specifically distinct determinate property.
• As a result, there are many such properties set up at once, one the negation of the other.

They are expressed in the simple form of the universal [as a collective].

• They only become properties by adding another characteristic – they are self-related [relative to the original, central perceptoion].
• That is why these determinate characters are indifferent to each other.
  • Each is by itself, free from the rest.

The simple self-identical universality, however, is itself distinct and detached from these determinate characteristics that it has*.

• It is pure self-relation, the “medium” wherin all these characteristics exist.

In a bare, simple unity, one thing interpenetrates another, each without affecting the other*.

• Likewise, the parts of the simple self-identical universality are indifferent to each other
  • Each is by itself simply by participating in this universality.

This abstract universal medium we can call as “Thinghood”.

• It is merely the Here and Now, as This on analysis turned out to exist.
• It is a simple togetherness of many Heres and Nows.*

But the many (in the present case) are themselves simply universals in their determinateness.

This salt is a simple Here.

• At the same time it is manifold. It is
  • white
  • pungent
  • cubical in shape
  • of a specific weight
  • and so on.

All these many properties exist in a simple Here, where they interpenetrate each other.

None of these has a different Here from the others.

• Each is everywhere in the same Here where the others are.

At the same time, without being divided by different ‘Heres’, they do not affect each other in their interpenetration.

• Its being white does not affect or alter the cubical shape it has, and neither affects its tart taste, and so on.

On the contrary, since each is simple relation to self, it leaves the others alone and is related to these merely by being also along with them, a relation of mere indifference.

This “Also” is thus the pure universal itself, the “medium”, the “Thinghood” keeping them together.