Purpose [Dharma] and Self-Purpose [Svadharma]

Purpose [Dharma]

²⁵⁶ The relation of the organic to elemental nature does not express the essence of that relation.

However, the concept of purpose does contain it.

The observing attitude does not take the notion of purpose to be the genuine essence of organic existence.

This notion seems to it to fall outside the real nature of the organism, and is then merely that external teleological relation above mentioned.

Yet looking at how the organic being was previously characterized, the organic is really just realized concrete purpose.

This is because it maintains itself in relation to another just as:

• nature reflects itself into the notion
• nature separates two moments such as cause and effect

In those examples, active and passive are brought together and combined into a single unity.

In this way, necessity creates a result that returns to itself.

This returing-to-itself makes the result just as important as the first which starts the process.

And so, this first is the purpose which it realizes.*

Superphysics Note

*We call this the Great Loop of Existence-Consciousness

The organic does not produce something. Instead, it merely conserves itself. In other words, what is produced matches what is already produced*.

Superphysics Note

*We call this the Law of Conservation of Idea

^'257'

Reason has apprehended the concept of purpose in consciousness, which was given to it by rational observation.

Purpose is not merely an external relation of the actual, but its inner being.

This actual, which is itself a purpose, is related purposively to an other – its relation is a contingent one with respect to what both are immediately.

Prima facie they are both self-subsistent and indifferent to one another.

The real nature of their relation, however, is something different from what they appear to be. Its effect has another meaning than sense-perception directly finds.

The necessity inherent in the process is concealed. It comes out at the end, but in such a way that this very end shows it to have been also the first.

The end, however, shows this priority of itself by the fact that nothing comes out of the alteration the act produced, but what was there already.

Or, starting from the first, this coming to the result of its act merely returns to itself. By so doing, it demonstrates itself to be that which has itself as its end – qua first it has already returned to itself, or is self-contained, is in and for itself.

What, then, it arrives at by the process of its action is itself.

Its arriving merely at itself means feeling itself, is its self-feeling.

Thus we have the distinction between:

• what it is and
• what it seeks.

But this is merely the semblance of a distinction, and consequently it is a notion in its very nature.

^'258' This is exactly, however, the way self-consciousness is constituted.

It distinguishes itself in like manner from itself, without any distinction being thereby established.

Hence it is that it finds in observation of organic nature nothing else than this kind of reality.

It finds itself in the form of a thing, as a life, and yet, between what it is itself and what it has found, draws a distinction which is, however, no distinction.

Just as the instinct of an animal is to seek and consume food, but thereby elicits nothing except itself; similarly too the instinct of reason in its search merely finds reason itself.

An animal ends with self-feeling. The instinct of reason, on the other hand, is at the same time, self-consciousness.

But because it is merely instinct, it is put on one side as against consciousness, and in the latter finds its opposite.

Its satisfaction is, therefore, broken in two by this opposite; it finds itself, viz. the purpose, and also finds this purpose in the shape of a thing.

But the purpose is seen to lie, in the first instance, apart from the thing presenting itself as a purpose.

In the second place, this purpose qua purpose is at the same time objective; it is taken to fall, therefore, not within the observing consciousness, but within another intelligence.

^'259' This character lies also just as much in the notion of the thing — that of being in itself purpose.

It preserves itself; this means at one and the same time it is its nature to conceal the controlling necessity and to present that necessity in the form of a contingent relation.

For its freedom, its being on its own account, means just that it behaves towards its necessary condition as something indifferent. It thus presents itself as if it were something whose notion falls apart from its existence.

In this way reason is compelled to look on its own proper notion as falling outside it, to look at it as a thing, as that towards which it is indifferent, and which in consequence is reciprocally indifferent towards it [reason] and towards its own notion.

Qua instinct it continues to remain within this state of being, this condition of indifference; and the thing expressing the notion remains for it something other than this notion, and the notion other than the thing.

Thus for reason the thing organized is only per se a purpose in the sense that the necessity, which is presented as concealed within the action of the thing — for the active agency there takes up the attitude of being indifferent and independent — falls outside the organism itself.

Since, however, the organic qua purpose per se can not behave in any other way than as organic, the fact of its being per se a purpose is also apparent and sensibly present, and as such it is observed.

What is organic shows itself when observed to be something self-preserving, returning and returned into itself.

But in this state of being, observation does not recognize the concept of purpose, or does not know that the notion of purpose is not in an intelligence anywhere else, but just exists here and in the form of a thing.

Observation makes a distinction between the concept of purpose and self-existence and self-preservation, which is not a distinction at all. That it is no distinction is something of which it is not aware; what it is aware of is an activity which appears contingent and indifferent towards what is brought about by that activity, and towards the unity which is all the while the principle connecting both; that activity and this purpose are taken to fall asunder.

^'260' On this view, the special function of the organic is the inner operating activity lying between its first and last stage, so far as this activity implies the character of singleness.

So far, however, as the activity has the character of universality, and the active agent is equated with what is the outcome of its operation, this purposive activity as such would not belong to organic beings.

That single activity, which is merely a means, comes, owing to its individual form, to be determined by an entirely individual or contingent necessity. What an organic being does for the preservation of itself as an individual, or of itself qua genus, is, therefore, quite lawless as regards this immediate content: for notion and universal fall outside it. Its activity would accordingly be empty functioning without any content in it; it would not even be the functioning of a machine, for this has a purpose and its activity in consequence a definite content.

If it were deserted in this way by the universal, it would be an activity of a mere being qua being, i.e. would be an activity like that of an acid or a base, not forthwith reflected into itself-a function which could not be cut off from its immediate existence, nor give up this existence (which gets lost in the relation to its opposite), but could preserve itself.

The kind of being whose functioning is here under consideration is, however, set down as a thing preserving itself in its relation to its opposite.

The activity as such is nothing but the bare insubstantial form of its independent existence on its own account; and the purpose of the activity, its substances — substance, which is not simply a determinate being, but the universal-does not fall outside the activity. It is an activity reverting into itself by its own nature, and is not turned back into itself by any alien, external agency.

^'261' This union of universality and activity, however, is not a matter for this attitude of observation, because that unity is essentially the inner movement of what is organic, and can only be apprehended conceptually.

Observation, however, seeks the moments in the form of existence and duration; and because the organic whole consists essentially in not containing the moments in that form, and in not letting them be found within it in that way, this observing consciousness, by its way of looking at the matter, transforms the opposition into one which conforms and is adapted to its own point of view.

^'262' An organism comes before the observing consciousness in this manner as a relation of two fixed and existing moments — as a relation of elements in an opposition, whose two factors seem in one respect really given in observation, while in another respect, as regards their content, they express the opposition of the organic concept of purpose and actual reality. But because the notion as such is there effaced, this takes place in an obscure and superficial way, where thought sinks to the level of mere ideal presentation. Thus we see the notion taken much in the sense of what is inner, reality in the sense of what is outer; and their relation gives rise to the law that “the outer is the expression of the inner”.

^'263' Let us consider more closely this inner with its opposite and their relation to one another.

In the first place we find that the two factors of the law no longer have such an import as we found in the case of previous laws, where the elements appeared as independent things, each being a particular body; nor, again, in the second place, do we find that the universal is to have its existence somewhere else outside what actually is.

On the contrary, the organic being is, in undivided oneness and as a whole, the fundamental fact, it is the content of inner and outer, and is the same for both.

The opposition is on that account of a purely formal character; its real sides have the same ultimate principle inherently constituting them what they are.

At the same time, however, since inner and outer are also opposite realities and each is a distinct being for observation, they each seem to observation to have a peculiar content of their own.

This peculiar content, since it consists of the same substance, or the same organic unity, can, however, in point of fact, be only a different form of that unity, of that substance; and this is indicated by observation when it says that the outer is merely the expression of the inner.

We have seen in the case of the concept of purpose the same characteristic features of the relation, viz. the indifferent independence of the diverse factors, and their unity in that independence, a unity in which they disappear.

^'264' We have now to see what shape and embodiment inner and outer assume in actually existing. The inner as such must have an outer being and an embodiment, just as much as the outer as such; for the inner is an object, or is affirmed as being, and as present for observation to deal with.

^'265' The organic substance qua inner is the Soul simply, the pure notion of purpose or the universal which in dividing into its discrete elements remains all the same a universal fluent continuity, and hence in its being appears as activity or the movement of vanishing reality; while, on the other hand, the outer, opposed to that existing inner, subsists in the passive being of the organic.

The law, as the relation of that inner to this outer, consequently expresses it content, now by setting forth universal moments, or simple essential elements, and again by setting forth the realized essential nature or the form and shape actually assumed.

Those first simple organic properties, to call them so, are Sensibility, Irritability, and Reproduction.

These properties, at least the two first, seem indeed to refer not to any and every organism, but merely to the animal organism.

Moreover, the vegetable level of organic life expresses in point of fact only the bare and simple notion of an organism, which does not develop and evolve its moments.

Hence in regard to those moments, so far as observation has to take account of them, we must confine ourselves t the organism which presents them existing in developed form.

Self-Purpose [Svadharma]

^'266' As to these moments, then, they are directly derived from the notion of self-purpose, of a being whose end is its own self.

For Sensibility expresses in general the simple notion of organic reflexion into itself, or the universal continuity of this notion.

Irritability, again, expresses organic elasticity, the capacity to exercise the function of reacting simultaneously with self-reflexion, and expresses, in contrast to the previous state of being passively and inertly within itself, the condition of being explicitly actualized-a realization, where that abstract existence for its own sake is an existence for something else.

Reproduction, however, is the operation of this entire self-reflected organism, its activity as having its purpose in itself, its activity qua genus, wherein the individual repels itself from itself, where in procreating it repeats either the organic parts or the whole individual.

Reproduction, taken in the sense of self-preservation in general, expresses the formal principle or conception of the organic, or the fact of Sensibility; but it is, properly speaking, the realized notion of organic existence, or the whole, which either qua individual returns into itself through the process of producing individual parts of itself, or qua genus does so through the production of distinct individuals.