The Law of Force

^'146' The inner world is so far for consciousness a bare and simple beyond, because consciousness does not as yet find itself in it.

It is empty, for it is the nothingness of appearance, and positively the naked universal.

This type of inwardness suits those who say that the inner being of things cannot be known. (2)

But the reason for the position would have to be taken in some other sense.

Certainly, there is no knowledge of this inner world.

But this is not because our reason is too short-sighted, or limited, or whatever.

• This is simply because in the void there is nothing known.
• This is because its very characteristic lies in being beyond consciousness.

The Supersensible as an Appearance

The result is the same if you place a blind man amid bright colors or amid total darkness.

• He sees both in the same way.

We would take as true the untrue if there were only the phenomenal world of appearance and none of the inner world.

The void is pure and simple.

• It is also devoid of all mental relations and distinctions of consciousness qua consciousness
• It is even called the holy of holies, the inner sanctuary

We fill it up with dreamings, appearances, produced by consciousness itself so that there may be something in this empty void.

It would have to be content with being treated so badly, for it would not deserve anything better, since even dreams are something better than its own barren emptiness.

^'147' The inner world, or the supersensible beyond, exists.

It comes to us out of the sphere of appearance which is its mediating agency.

Appearance is its essential nature and its filling.

The supersensible is the established truth of the sensible and perceptual.

• The truth of the sensible and the perceptual lies, however, in being appearance.

The supersensible is then appearance qua appearance.

We distort the proper meaning of this, if we take it to mean that the supersensible is therefore the sensible world, or the world as it is for immediate sense-certainty, and perception.

For, on the contrary, appearance is just not the world of sense-knowledge and perception as positively being, but this world as superseded or established in truth as an inner world.

It is often said that the supersensible is not appearance; but by appearance is thereby meant not appearance, but rather the sensible world taken as itself real actuality.

^'148' Understanding is our object here.

It finds itself in this position, that, for it, the inner world has come about to begin with, only as the implicit inherent being, universal and still without a filling.

The play of forces has simply and solely this negative significance of not being something per se;

Its only positive significance is that of being the mediating agency, but outside understanding.

The relation of understanding to the inner world through mediation is, however, its own process, by which the inner world will be found to receive fullness of content.

3. Law as the True nature of Appearance

Understanding has directly to do with the play of forces.

But the real truth for it is the inner world, bare and simple.

The movement of force is consequently the truth only by being something simple.

Regarding this play of forces, however, we saw that its peculiarity lay in this, that

The force which is awakened into activity by another force is really the inciting force for the original inciting force,

• In this way, we have a direct, complete exchange of the incited and inciting. This determines whether they are either a universal medium or negative unity.

Upon its entrance, it ceases immediately to be what it was before it entered. By its appearance in determinate shape, it awakens or incites the other side. This then gives itself expression, i.e. the latter is now directly what the first was to be.

Each of these 2 sides, the relation of inciting and the relation of the opposed determinate content, is on its own account an absolute process of permutation and transposition.

• But these two relations are again themselves one and the same.

The formal distinction of being incited and of inciting to activity is the same as the distinction of content, i.e. the distinction between the incited factor as such, viz. the passive medium, on the one side, and the inciting factor, viz. the active medium, the negative unity, or the “one” on the other side.

In this way, there disappears all distinction of contrasted and opposed particular forces, which were meant to be present in this process.

For they rested solely on the above distinctions. Along with both those distinctions, the distinction between the forces collapses likewise into merely one.

There is thus neither force nor inciting and being incited to action, nor the characteristic of being a stable medium and a unity reflected into self, there is neither a particular which is something on its own account, nor are there diverse opposites.

What is found in this flux of thoroughgoing change is merely difference as universal difference, or difference into which the various opposites have been resolved.

This difference as universal, consequently is what constitutes the ultimate simple element in that play of forces, and is the resultant truth of that process.

It is the Law of Force.