Force and the Understanding: The World of Appearance and the Supersensible World

^'132' Consciousness has found “seeing” and “hearing”, etc., pass away in the dialectic process of sense-experience.

• These experiences creates thoughts which it brings together.
• At the first instance, it is the unconditioned universal.

This unconditioned element is merely the one-sided extreme of self-existence.

• The non-essential would then stand over against it.

But if thus related to the latter, then:

• it would be itself unessential
• consciousness would not have got disentangled from the deceptions of perception

Whereas this universal has proved to be one which has passed out of such conditioned separate existence and returned into itself.

This unconditioned universal is the true object of consciousness.

Consciousness has not yet grasped its principle or notion.

There is an essential distinction between these two.

• On one hand, consciousness is aware that the object has passed from its relation to an other back into itself.
  • It becomes notion
• On the other hand, consciousness has no notion of how that object relates to that consciousness.

The thought of this object arose because it developed the idea of the object.

• The reflection is the same on both sides, i.e. there is only one reflection.

But in this movement, the objective entity was the content of consciousness.

• And so consciousness gives it an objective significance.

The Inherent Truth

^'133' Understanding has, eo ipso, done away with:

• its own untruth and
• the untruth in its object.

What has thereby come to view is the notion of the truth as implicit inherent truth.

• This truth is not yet notion.
• It lacks a consciously explicit existence for itself (Fürsichseyn)
• It is something which understanding allows to have its way without knowing itself in it.
• It pursues its own nature by itself, so that consciousness has no share in its process of free realization, but merely looks on and apprehends that realization as a naked fact.

We should step into its place and be the notion which works up into shape what is contained in the result.

This results at the unconditioned universal, in the first instance in the negative and abstract sense that consciousness negated its one-sided notions and abstracted them: it surrendered them.

This result, however, has inherently a positive significance.

It has established the unity of existence-for-self, and existence-for-another.

In other words, absolute opposites are immediately posited as one and the same reality.

At first, this seems to affect merely the formal relation of the moments to one another. But to be for-self and to be for-another constitutes the content itself as well. This is because the opposition, looked at truly, can have no other nature than what has come about in the result – viz. that the content, taken in perception for truth, belongs, in point of fact, solely to the form, and is dissipated into its unity.

This content is at the same time universal.

There can be no other content which by its peculiar constitution would refuse to return into this unconditioned universality. Such a content would be some specific way or other of being for-itself and taking up a relation to something else.

But to be in general for-self and to stand in relation to something else constitutes the very nature and meaning of that whose truth lies in being unconditionally universal; and the result is through and through universal.

This unconditioned universal is an object for consciousness. The distinction of form and content makes its appearance within it.

In the shape of content, the moments have the aspect in which they were first presented – that of being on one side a universal medium of many substantial elements, and, on the other, a unit reflected into self, where their substantial independence is overthrown and done away with.

The former dissolves the independence of the thing, is the condition of passivity which consists in being something for something else; the latter is its individual subsistence, its being something on its own account (für sich).

We have to see what shape these moments take in the unconditioned universal which is their essential nature. It is obvious at the outset that by existing only in this universal they do not at all lie any longer apart from one another, but rather are in themselves essentially self-cancelling aspects, and what is established is only their transition into one another.