Observation of Nature

From Universal to Particular

^'244' Unreflective Consciousness speaks of observation and experience as being the fountain of truth.

This gives the impression that observation were a matter of tasting, smelling, feeling, hearing, and seeing.

In its zeal for tasting, smelling, etc, unreflective consciousness has already determined for itself, really and rationally, the object being observed.

This determination of the object is important for Unreflective Consciousness as that apprehension.

The whole concern of Unreflective Consciousness is not simply in perceiving.

• Instead, what is perceived should have the significance of a universal, and not of a sensuous particular “this”.*

Superphysics Note

In Superphysics, Unreflective Consciousness is simply called passive-thinking

^'245' This universal is regarded only in the first instance, what remains identical with itself.

Its movement is merely the uniform recurrence of the same operation.

The consciousness thus far finds in the object merely universality or the abstract “mine”. It matches the object’s movement.

Since it does not understand that object yet, it must be the recollection of it. This recollection expresses in a universal way whatever is merely present in a particular form.

This description of things is made up of:

• a superficial way of educing from particularity
• a superficial form of universality which absorbs the sense element, without the sense element becoming a universal

This description of things is not yet a process effected in the object itself.

• This process happens solely in the function of describing.

When one object is being described, another object must be taken in hand and ever sought. This is to not stop the process of description*.

Superphysics Note

*This is because the mind always moves

If it is no longer easy to find new and whole things, then there is nothing for it but to turn back on those already found.

This is for consciousness to divide them still further into component parts and look out for any new aspects of thinghood that still remain in them.

There can never be an end to the material at the disposal of this restlessly active instinct.

To find a new genus of distinctive significance, or even to discover a new planet, can only fall to the lucky.

The Boundary line

An elephant, oak, gold, are made distinctive by a boundary line.*

Superphysics Note

*In Cartesian Physics, this abstract line is called superficies which we call edges

This line of demarcation separates genus and species. It passes through many stages into the endless particularization of the chaos of:

• plants and animals
• kinds of rocks or metals
• forms of earth, etc

Only force and craft can bring to light this line.

In this realm:

• universality means indeterminateness
• particularity now approximates to singleness

At this point and that even descends to it entirely, there is offered an inexhaustible supply of material for observation and description to deal with.

At the boundary line of the universal, consciousness does not find an immeasurable wealth. Instead, it finds merely the limitations of nature and of its own operation.

It can no longer know whether what seems to have being per se is not a chance accident.

What bears the impress of a confused or immature feeble structure, barely evolving from the stage of elementary indeterminateness, cannot claim even to be described.

^'246' This seeking and describing is concerned merely with things.

Yet we see that it does not continue in the form of sense-perception.

Rather, what enables things to be known is more important for description than the range of sense properties still left over.

• These properties are qualities which the thing cannot do without, but which consciousness dispenses with.

Consciousness makes a distinction into what is essential and what is unessential.

This lets the notion rise out of the dispersion of sensibility. Knowledge thereby makes it clear that it has to do at least quite as essentially with its own self as with things.

This twofold essentiality produces a certain hesitation as to whether what is essential and necessary for knowledge is also so in the case of the things.

On the one hand, the qualifying “marks” have merely to serve the purpose of knowledge in distinguishing things inter se; on the other hand, however, it is not the unessential quality of things that has to be known, but that feature in virtue of which they themselves break away from the general continuity of being as a whole, separate themselves from others and stand by themselves.

The distinguishing “marks” must not only have an essential relation to knowledge but also be the essential characteristics of the things, and the system of marks devised must conform to the system of nature itself, and merely express this system.

This follows necessarily from the very principle and meaning of reason.

The instinct of reason — for it operates in this process of observation merely as an instinct — has also in its systems attained this unity, a unity where its objects are so constituted that they carry their own essential reality with them, involve an existence on their own account, and are not simply an incident of a given particular time, or a particular place.

For example, the distinguishing marks of animals are taken from their claws and teeth.

Thus, knowledge distinguishes one animal from another. Each animal itself separates itself off thereby.

It preserves itself independently by means of these weapons, and keeps itself detached from the universal nature.

A plant, on the other hand, never gets the length of existing for itself.

It touches merely the boundary line of individuality.

This line is where plants show the semblance of diremption and separation by the possession of different sex-characters. This furnishes, therefore, the principle for distinguishing plants inter se.

What, however, stands on a still lower level cannot of itself any longer distinguish itself from another.

It gets lost when the contrast comes into play.

Quiescent being and being in a relation come into conflict with one another; a “thing” in the latter case is something different from a “thing” in the former state; whereas the “individuum” consists in preserving itself in relation to another.

What, however, is incapable of this and becomes in chemical fashion something other than it is empirically, confuses knowledge and gives rise to the same doubt as to whether knowledge is to hold to the one side or the other, since the thing has itself no self-consistency, and these two sides fall apart within it.

^'247' In those systems where the elements involve general self-sameness, this character connotes at once the self-sameness of knowledge and of things themselves as well.

These self-identical characteristics each describes undisturbed the entire circuit of its course and gets full scope to do as it likes.

This expansion of self-identical characteristics necessarily leads as readily to its very opposite – the confusion of these characteristics.

The qualifying mark is the general characteristic as the unity of opposite factors:

• what is determinate
• what is per se universal.

It must, therefore, break asunder into this opposition.

• On one side, the characteristic overmasters the universality in which its essence lies.
• On the other side, this universality equally keeps that characteristic under control.

This forces the universality onto its boundary line. There, it mingles together its distinctions and its essential constituents.

Observation keeps them apart.

Observation finds the principles overlapping and dominating one another. It sees confusions formed and transitions made from one to another.

Observation finds united what it took at first to be absolutely separated, and there separated what it considered connected.

Hence, observation holds the unbroken self-sameness of being.

But it also gets tormented with instances in that being such as:

• the essential marks of an animal
• the marks of a plant

This robs it of every determination, silence the universality it reached, and reduce it again to unreflective observation and description.

^'248' Observation, which confines itself to what is simple, thus finds its principle confused by its object.

This is because what is determined must by its very nature get lost in its opposite.

Reason, therefore, must pass from that inert stable characteristic and go on to observe it as it really is in truth, viz. as relating itself to its opposite.

“Essential marks” are passive characteristics. When expressed and apprehended as simple, these marks do not bring out what constitutes their real nature. These marks are really vanishing moments of its process of withdrawing and betaking itself into itself.

The instinct of reason now arrives at looking for the characteristic in the light of its true nature. This characteristic is that of essentially:

• passing over into its opposite
• not existing apart by itself and for its own sake.

Reason thus seeks after the Law and the notion of law, as existing reality.

But this feature of concrete reality will disappear before reason.

The aspects of the law will become for it mere moments or abstractions. In this way, the law comes to light in the nature of the notion, which has destroyed within itself the indifferent subsistence of sensuous reality.