The Nature of Identity

^'119' I am aware of the “thing” as a one. I have to keep it fixed in this true character as one.

If in the course of perceiving, something crops up to contradict that unity. When perceiving, various different properties also turn up. These seem to be the properties of the thing.

• This creates diversity cancels the unity in the thing.
• This diversity falls on us.

But the thing is a “one”. It is:

• white to our eyes
• tart to our tongue
• cubical to our feeling, and so on.

The entire diversity of these aspects comes from us, not from the thing.

• We find them falling apart from one another, because the organs they affect are quite distinct.
  • The eye is entirely distinct from the tongue, and so on.

We are, consequently, the universal medium where such elements get dissociated, and exist each by itself.

We thus regard the characteristic of being a universal medium as our reflection. In this way, we preserve and maintain the self-sameness and truth of the thing, its being a “one”.

^'120' Consciousness puts these diverse aspects to its side of the account. However, each of these aspects by itself are how it appears in the universal medium, specifically determined.

White is only opposed to black, and so on. The thing is a “one” just by the fact that it is opposed to other things*.

It does not, however, exclude others from itself, so far as it is “one”. To be “one” is to be in a universal relation of self to self. Hence, a thing is rather like all because of it being “one”.

• It is through the determinate characteristic [identity] that the thing excludes other things.

Things themselves are thus determinate in and for themselves. They have properties by which they distinguish themselves from one another.

The thing has several properties because property is a specific characteristic in the thing itself.

1. This is because the thing is true being, is a being inherently in itself.

• What is in it is its own essential nature, and not on account of other things.

2. Hence, its properties are not on account of other things and for other things, but inherent in that thing itself.

3. Its properties are self-contained, each in and for itself. They are indifferent to one another.

In other words, the thing is the “also”, the general medium, wherein the many properties subsist externally to one another, without touching or affecting one another, and without canceling one another; and, so taken, the thing is taken as what it truly is.

^'120' On this mode of perception arising, consciousness is at the same time aware that it reflects itself also into itself.

• In perceiving, the opposite moment to the “also” crops up.

This moment, however, is the unity of the thing with itself.

• It is a unity which excludes distinction from itself.

It is consequently this unity which consciousness has to take on itself. For the thing as such is the subsistence of many different and independent properties.

Thus we that a thing “is white, and also cubical, and also tart”, etc.

• But so far as it is white it is not cubical, and so far as it is cubical and also white it is not tart, and so on.

Putting these properties into a “one” belongs solely to consciousness which has to avoid letting them coincide and be one (i.e. one and the same property) in the thing.

• This is why it introduces the idea of “in-so-far” to meet the difficulty.
• Through this, it:
  • keeps the qualities apart, and
  • preserves the thing in the sense of the “also”*.

Consciousness at first makes itself responsible for the “oneness” in such a way that what was called a property is represented as being “free matter” (materia libera). (3)

In this way, the thing is raised to the level of a true “also”, since it thus becomes a collection of component elements (materials or matters), instead of being a “one” becomes a mere enclosure, a circumscribing.

^'122' Consciousness thus had an idea for a thing which is different from its current idea for the thing.

It alternately makes itself and the thing, into:

• a pure atomic many-less “one”, and
• an “also” which resolved into independent constituent elements (materials or matters).

Through this comparison, consciousness thus finds:

• that its way of taking the truth contains diverse moments of apprehension and returns on itself
• that the truth itself about the thing manifests itself in this twofold manner*.

As a result of experience, the thing exhibits itself in a specific way to the consciousness seeing it.

• But at the same time, it is reflected back into itself out of that way of presenting itself to consciousness.

In other words, the thing contains within it opposite aspects of truth, a truth whose elements are in antithesis to one another.

^'123' This second form of perceptual procedure takes:

• the thing as the true selfsame, and
• itself as the reverse, as the factor that leaves sameness behind and goes back into self.

Consciousness, then, gets away also from this procedure.

• Its object is now the entire process which was previously shared between the object and consciousness.

The thing is a “one”, reflected into self.

• It is for itself, but it is also for an other.
• It is an other for itself as it is for another.

The thing is, hence, a being that has difference of a twofold kind.

• But it is also “one”.

Its being “one”, however, contradicts the diversity it has.

Consciousness would, consequently, have again to make itself answerable for putting the diversity into the “one”.

• It would have to keep this apart from the thing.

It would thus be compelled to say that the thing “in-so-far as” it is for itself is not for another.

But the oneness belongs to the thing itself, too, as consciousness has found out. The thing is essentially reflected into self.

The “also”, the distinction of elements indifferent to one another, falls within the thing as well as the “oneness”.

• But since both are different, they do not fall within the same thing, but in different things.

The contradiction which is found in the case of the objective content as a whole is assigned to and shared by two objects.

• The thing is, thus, selfsame.

But this unity with itself is disturbed by other things.

In this way, the unity of the thing is preserved.

At the same time, the otherness is preserved outside the thing, as well as outside consciousness.

^'124' The contradiction in the object is in this way allotted to different things. Yet the isolated individual thing will still be affected with distinction.

The different things have a subsistence on their own account.

The conflict between them takes place on both sides in such a way that each is not different from itself, but only from the other.

Each, however, is thereby characterized as a something distinctive, and contains in it essential distinction from the others.

• But at the same time not in such a way that this is an opposition within its being.
• On the contrary, it is by itself a simple determinate characteristic which constitutes its essential character, distinguishing it from others.

Since the diversity lies in it, this diversity does necessarily assume the form of a real distinction of manifold qualities within it.

• But because the determinate characteristic gives the essence of the thing, by which it is distinguished from others, and has a being all its own, this further manifold constitution is something indifferent.

The thing thus contains in its unity the qualifying “in-so-far” in 2 ways which have unequal significance.

• This oppositeness becomes not a real opposition on the part of the thing itself, but – so far as the thing comes into a condition of opposition through its absolute distinction – this opposition belongs to the thing with reference to an other thing lying outside it.

The further manifoldness is doubtless necessarily in the thing too, and cannot be left out; but it is unessential to the thing.