The Inner Realm

^'143' This true being of things does not exist immediately for consciousness.

Rather, consciousness takes up a mediated relation to the inner. In the form of understanding, it looks through the intervening play of forces into the real and true background of things.

The middle term combines the 2 extremes:

1. Understanding
2. The inner of things

The middle is the explicitly evolved being of force. From now and henceforth, it is a vanishing process for understanding itself.

Hence it is called ‘Appearance’ (Erscheinung).

Being which is per se straightway non-being we call a ‘show’, a semblance (Schein).

• It is, however, not merely a show, but appearance, a totality of seeming (Schein).

This totality as totality or universal* is what makes up the inner world, the play of forces in the sense of its reflection into itself.

There, consciousness has before itself in objective form the things of perception as they truly are, that is, as:

• moments turning, without halt or separate subsistence, directly into their opposite,
• the “one” changing immediately into the universal,
• the essential becoming at once something unessential, and vice versa.

This play of forces is consequently the development of the negative. But its true nature is the positive element, viz. the universal, the implicit object, the object existing per se.

The being of this object for consciousness is mediated through the movement of appearance, by which the content of perception and the sensuous objective world as a whole, get merely negative significance.

There, consciousness is turned back on itself as the truth. But, being consciousness, it again makes this truth into an inner being of the object, and distinguishes this reflection of things from its own reflection into self. This is just as the mediating process likewise is for it still an objective process.

For consciousness, this inner nature is therefore an extreme placed over against it.

But it is on that account the truth for it, because therein, as in something essentially real, it possesses at the same time the certainty of its own self, the moment of its own self-existence.

But it is not yet conscious of this basis [its self-existence]. This is because the independence, its being on its own account, should have the inner world within it.

• That independence would be nothing else than the negative process.
• This negative process, however, is for consciousness still objective vanishing appearance, and not yet its own proper self-existence (Fürsichseyn).

Hence the, inner is notion. But consciousness does yet know the nature of the notion.

The Supersensible World: The Inner, Appearance, Understanding

Within this inner truth, this absolute universal has gotten rid of the opposition between universal and particular.

• This absolute universal has become the object of understanding
• It is a supersensible world which henceforth opens up as the true world, lying beyond the sensuous world which is the world of appearance.

Away from the changing vanishing present lies the permanent beyond (Jenseits).

• It is an immanent inherent reality (ein Ansich), which is the first and therefore imperfect manifestation of Reason, i.e. it is merely the pure element where the truth finds its abode and its essential being.

Our object henceforward has thus the form of a syllogistic inference, whose extremes are the inner being of things and understanding.

Its middle term the sphere of appearance. The course of this inferential process, however, furnishes the further characterization of what understanding detects in the. inner world by the aid of the middle term; and gives rise to the experience understanding goes through regarding this relation of the terms when joined and united together.