Force and the play of Forces

^'139' The interplay of the 2 forces in this way arises from and consists in the 2 being thus determined with opposite characteristics*.

It is in their being for one another in virtue of this determination and in the complete and exchange of their characteristics – a transition direct from one to the other, whereby alone these determinations, in which the forces seem to appear independently, have being.

For example, the inciting force is set up as universal medium.

On the other hand, the force incited as a force repressed.

But the inciting force is a universal medium just by the very fact that he repressed force is repressed.

The repressed force is really what incites the inciting force and makes it the medium that it claims to be.

The inciting force is an inciting force only through the repressed force.

• It loses just as readily this character given to it.
• This is because its incitement passes, or has already passed, into the character of the repressed.

The inciting force acts in an external way and takes the part of universal medium.

• But it only does so because it was incited by the repressed force.
• This means that:
  • the repressed force gives it that position
  • the repressed force is really the universal medium
  • It gives the inciting agency this incitefulness just because this incitefulness is essentially its own, i.e. because it is really its own self.

^'140' The distinctions themselves reveal distinction in a twofold manner.

On one hand, they are distinctions of content.

• This is because one extreme is force reflected into itself, while the other is a medium for the constituent elements involved.

On the other hand, they appear as distinctions of form.

• This is because one incites and the other is incited.
• The former is active, the latter is passive.

As regards the distinction of

Their content is distinct to us who are analysing the process.

As regards distinction of form, however, they are independent.

in their relation parting asunder of themselves, and standing opposed.

In the perception of the movement of force, consciousness becomes aware that the extremes, in both these aspects, are nothing per se, that rather these sides, in which their distinction of nature was meant to consist, are merely vanishing moments, an immediate transition of each into its opposite.

For us who are analysing the process, however, it was also true that per se the distinctions, qua distinctions of content and form, vanished. On the side of form, the active, inciting, or independent factor was in its very nature the same as what, from the side of content, was presented as repressed force, force driven back into itself.

The passive, incited, or related factor was, from the side of form, the same as what, from the side of content, took shape as universal medium for the many constituent elements.

^'141' Thus, the notion of force becomes actual when resolved into 2 forces. We see too how it comes to be so.

These 2 forces exist as independent entities. But their existence lies in a movement each towards each. In order to be, each has to get its position purely through the other. Their being has purely the significance of disappearance.

They are not like extremes that keep to themselves something positively fixed.

They do not merely transmit an external property to one another through their common medium and by external contact.

They are what they are solely in this medium and in their contact with each other.

We have there immediately both force as it is independently, force repressed within itself, and also its expression, force inciting and force being incited.

These moments are thus not allotted to two independent extremes, offering each other only an opposite pole.

Rather their true nature consists simply in each being solely through the other, and in each ceasing eo ipso to be what it thus is through the other. This is because it is the other.

They have thus no substances of their own which could support and maintain them.

The notion of force rather maintains itself as the essence in its very actuality. Force exists only in its expression. At the same time, force is nothing else than a process of cancelling itself.

This actual force, when represented as detached from its expression and existing by itself, is force driven back into itself. But this feature is itself merely a moment in the expression of force.

The true nature of force thus remains merely the thought or idea of force. The moments in its realization, its substantial independence and its process, rush, without let or hindrance, together into one single undivided unity, a unity which is not force withdrawn into itself (for this is merely one of those moments), but is its notion qua notion.

Thus, the realization of force necessarily is the dissipation or loss of reality at the same time.

It has thereby become something quite different, viz. this universality, which understanding knows from the start or immediately to be its essential nature, and which shows itself, too, to be the essence of it in what is supposed to be its reality, in the actual substances.

^'142' So far as we look on the first universal as the notion of understanding, where force does not yet exist for itself, the second is now its essential reality, as it is revealed in and for itself.

Or, conversely, if we look on the first universal as the immediate, which should be an actual object for consciousness, then this second has the characteristic of being the negative of sensuously objective force: it is force, in the form in which, in its true being, force exists merely as object for understanding. The first would be force withdrawn into itself, i.e., force as substance; the second, however, is the inner being of things qua inner, which is one and the same with the notion qua notion.