1.truth as a scientific system In the preface to a philosophical work, if, as is customary in ordinary prefaces, a statement is made stating the aims and motives the author has in mind and the author's belief that his work is concerned with the same Such a statement would seem not only superfluous, but inappropriate and unfit for the nature of a philosophical work.For, in a preface, no matter how well-thought-out a statement of philosophy may be, for example, a historical account of its tendencies and viewpoints, its general content and results, or of the various schools of thought on matters of truth, An inclusive enumeration of assertions and assertions, and so on, is not, after all, a proper way and means of presenting philosophical truths.And since the universal element which philosophy deals with contains in its very nature the particular, it is easier in philosophy than in other sciences to make one feel as if in the end or final result the matter itself, or even the whole of it, The essence has been expressed, and the process of realization is nothing essential compared with the result.

On the contrary, in the general idea of ​​what anatomy is, for example (anatomy is the knowledge acquired of the parts of the body as dead beings), we are convinced that we have not yet possessed the facts themselves, the content of this science, Rather, the particularity must be explored further. ——Moreover, in such an accumulation of knowledge that does not deserve to be called science, the way of talking about universal things like purpose is usually the way of talking about the content itself, such as nerves, muscles, etc. In that historically non-concept way, the two are no different.But in the Preface to Philosophy: On Scientific Cognition, if such a method is used to explain first, and philosophy itself later proves that this method cannot grasp the truth, it will be very inconsistent.

Likewise, by stipulating the relation held by a certain philosophical work to other works dealing with the same subject, this introduces a foreign interest which obscures the crucial point of the knowledge of truth.The more human opinion regards the opposition of truth and error as fixed, the more it is accustomed to regard an attitude towards a given philosophical system as either for or against it, and in a statement concerning a certain philosophical system The more I get used to only looking for approval or disapproval in it.Such a person understands the different philosophical systems less as progressive developments of truth than he sees only contradictions in the different systems.When the flower opens and the bud disappears, it is said that the bud is negated by the flower; likewise, when it bears fruit, the flower is interpreted as a false form of existence of the plant, and the fruit appears instead as the true form of the plant. of flowers.These forms are not only different from each other, but also mutually exclusive and incompatible.But their fluidity makes them at the same time moments of an organic unity in which they not only do not contradict each other, but are equally necessary to each other; and it is this same necessity which constitutes the life of the whole. .But people are not accustomed to understand the contradictions of a philosophical system in this way, and the consciousness that grasps them usually does not know how to free them from their one-sidedness or keep them free from one-sidedness, and does not Know how to recognize the complementary links in the seemingly conflicting and contradictory forms.

The demand for an account of this kind, and the effort to satisfy it, is often regarded as the main task of philosophy.Where can the inner meaning of a philosophical work be expressed more clearly than in the aims and results of the work?How can this work be known more accurately than in terms of its differences from other contemporary creations of the same kind?But if such an act is not regarded as merely the beginning of knowledge, if it is regarded as actual knowledge, it becomes in fact a cunning evasion of the matter itself, an outward appearance of serious commitment to The appearance of things in themselves, but in fact no such serious effort is made at all. —Because a thing is not exhausted in its purpose but in its realization, and the real whole is not merely the result, but the result together with its production; the purpose itself is a dead universal, just as a tendency is a like the empty impulse of actuality; and the naked result is the dead body that throws away its tendencies. —In the same way, the difference is rather the limit of the thing; the limit is where the thing ends, or that which ceases to be the thing.The work of thus explaining ends or results, of distinguishing and judging this or that system, etc., takes much more effort than it appears at first glance.For such an action, instead of mastering things, is always detachment from them; such knowledge, instead of remaining in things and forgetting itself in them, is always grasping other things, and is not attached to them. , to be devoted to the thing, rather than to remain in itself. —The easiest work of that which has solid content is to judge, the more difficult is to understand it, and the most difficult is to combine the two and make a statement about it.

At the beginning of culture, that is, when men first strive to escape the immediacy of substantive life, it is always necessary to proceed in this way: to acquire knowledge of general principles and opinions, to strive for the first step to a general For or against it, to understand its specific and rich content according to its prescriptiveness, and to be able to make coherent statements and serious judgments about it.But this initial work of literacy has to give way at once to the seriousness of real life, which makes one directly experience the thing itself; depths, such a knowledge and judgment will retain their proper place in everyday discourse.

Only that true form in which truth exists is a scientific system of truth.It is precisely the purpose which I have cherished in this book, to bring philosophy closer to the form of science--if philosophy attains this goal, it can no longer be called the love of knowledge, but true knowledge.Knowledge must be science, and this inherent necessity arises from the nature of knowledge, and a satisfactory account of this can only be given by statements of philosophy itself.But external necessity, if we take it in a general form, apart from the individual and individual contingencies of the particular case, is the same thing as internal necessity, i.e., In the form that time assumes when it assumes its own moments of development.It would, therefore, be the only real justification for those who attempt to bring philosophy up to a scientific system if it can be revealed how philosophy rises in time to a scientific system, since time will indicate the necessity of this end, and even At the same time, it will be realized.

2.contemporary culture When I affirm that the true form of truth is its scientific nature, or, in other words, when I assert that the essence of truth is only in concepts, I know that this seems to be related to an idea and its The notion that all conclusions contradict each other is pretentious and has gained widespread confidence in our age.It does not seem superfluous, therefore, to give an account of this contradiction; and even this account is here no more than an assertion as direct as the idea it is against itself.That is to say, if truth exists only in what is sometimes called intuition, sometimes called direct knowledge of the Absolute, of religion, of being (not being in the center of divine love, but being of the center itself) of that kind, or even that truth exists as such a thing as intuition or immediate knowledge, it would be tantamount to saying that what we require in order to give systematic statements to philosophy is not the form of concepts but the form of concepts. Wuning is its opposite.According to this statement, the absolute should not be grasped with concepts, but should be felt and intuitive; what should be expressed and expressed in words is not the absolute concept, but the feeling and intuition of the absolute.

If we understand the emergence of such a claim in its more general relation, and consider it in relation to the present stage of development of the conscious mind, we shall find that the conscious mind has gone beyond the The substantive life lived in the element of thought goes beyond this immediacy of its belief, beyond its conscious conviction that the essence has been reconciled with its inner and outer universal presentation. That contentment and security.The conscious spirit not only goes beyond material life into the other extreme: disembodied self-reflection, but also goes beyond this disembodied self-reflection.Not only has it lost its essential life, but it is also aware of its loss and the limitation of its content.By rejecting these empty shells, by acknowledging and complaining of its dire condition, the conscious spirit now demands from philosophy not so much the knowledge of what it is itself, but chiefly what it has lost of being again through philosophy. The solidity and fullness that had been lost are restored.In order to satisfy this need, it is said that philosophy does not have to place so much emphasis on unsealing the reseal of the entity and raising it to the level of self-consciousness, nor on bringing the chaotic consciousness back to the orderliness of thought and the simplicity of concepts. , but the reverse mainly consists in stirring together what the thought has decomposed, suppressing the different concepts and building up the sensory experience of the essence.Philosophy is said to be less about providing insight than about giving inspiration or enlightenment.Beauty, holiness, eternity, religion, and love are all baits, and they are needed in order to arouse the desire to swallow the bait; the power by which the wealth of entities is maintained and developed is said to be not concepts but joy, not facts themselves calmly ordering The inevitability of progress is the wild passion with which we approach it.

To accommodate this demand is a very intense, almost anxious and impetuous effort to free man from his addiction to the grateful, the vulgar, the individual, and to set his eyes on the stars; as if Man has completely forgotten what is sacred and is contenting himself like a worm with earth and water.There was a time when man's heaven was filled with an infinite wealth of ideas and pictures.At that time, the meaning of everything that exists lies in the light, which connects all things with the sky; in the light, people's eyes do not stay in the real existence on this shore, but go beyond it, glimpse To the divine, to a, if we may say so, beyond reality exists.At that time, the eyes of the spirit must be forced to point to the worldly things and stay in the world; Time convinced men of the usefulness and efficiency of that attentive study of worldly things which is called experience. —and now the preoccupation seems to be just the opposite. Man's gaze is so attached to worldly things that it must be expended with equal effort to lift it above the world.The human spirit has shown its extreme poverty, just as the desert traveler longs for a sip of water, eager to gain a little feeling for ordinary sacred things.From the ease with which the mind is so contented, we can estimate how great its loss was.

Yet this ease of gratification in feeling, or such stinginess in giving, is not in the nature of science.Whoever seeks only revelation, whoever wishes to obscure the earthly variety of his life and thoughts, and seek only the obscure enjoyment of this obscure divinity, may go to him. where he can find it; he will easily find an instrument by which he can boast and boast.But philosophy must try to avoid trying to be revealing. This self-satisfied attitude of abandoning science, let alone claiming that such a ignorant enthusiasm is something higher than science. This prophetic speech, which considers itself to be at the very center and deepest, defies determination and certainty, and shuns concept and necessity, just as it shuns reflection, which is said to dwell only in the finite world.But as there is a vastness of emptiness, there is also a depth of emptiness; and as there is an extension of substance, which spreads out into the diversity of the finite world without power to hold them together, there is also a kind of Depth without content, which appears as mere force without extension, is really the same thing as superficiality.The power of the spirit is only as great as its external manifestations, and only as deep as it dares to expand and lose itself in its own unfolding.

Moreover, if this concept-less substantive knowledge pretends to have immersed its own identity in essence, and pretends to be engaged in true divine philosophical speculation, then this knowledge itself conceals the fact that: Not only does it fail to convert to God, but because it despises measures and rules, it now allows itself the contingency of content, now imposes on God its own arbitrary arbitrariness. —Because such spirits are so wholly surrendered to the unbridled zeal of substance, they think themselves to belong to God, who gives them wisdom in their sleep, if only they have veiled self-consciousness and renounced understanding; Because of this, in fact, what they receive and produce in sleep are nothing more than dreams. 3.Truth as a Principle and Its Expansion Moreover, it is not difficult to see that our age is an age of birth and transition of a new age.Man's spirit has broken with his old life and world of ideas, and is burying all the old things in the past and embarking on his self-transformation.In fact, the mind never stands still, it is always in motion.But just as, after a long pregnancy, the first breath interrupts—a qualitative leap—the gradualness that had been only gradual growth, and produces a child, so does the growing spirit slowly Quietly developing towards its new form, it dismantled its old world structure piece by piece.Only individual signs herald the impending collapse of the old world.The roughness and boredom with which the existing world is full, and the vague sense of something unknown, are present to indicate that something else is coming.But this gradual decay, which did not change the whole aspect, was suddenly interrupted by the rising sun, which, like lightning, established the new world's form. But this new world is no more a full reality than a newborn baby.This is very important and must be firmly remembered.It is only its immediacy or its concept that is presented first.We cannot say that a building is completed when its foundation is laid, nor can we take the conception we acquire of a whole as the whole itself.We are not satisfied when we expect to see an oak tree with a thick trunk and leafy branches, and what we see is not an oak tree but an acorn.Similarly, science, as the crown of the spiritual world, is by no means complete at the beginning.The beginnings of a new spirit are the product of a radical revolution in the forms of culture, the price paid for all the intricate paths and strenuous struggles.This beginning is the totality that returns to itself after inheriting the past and expanding itself, and is the mere conception of this totality.But this simple whole achieves its reality only when the former forms, which have now become moments, are redeveloped and take on a new form in their new elements with already formed meanings. Since on the one hand the first manifestation of the new world was only the whole concealed in its simplicity, or the general basis of the whole, so on the other hand the richness of the past life remained for consciousness Fresh in my memory.In the emerging form, consciousness no longer sees the unfolding and specialization of the content, but what it does not see is the development and formation of the form that precisely defines the differences and arranges the fixed relations between them. .Without this process of formation, science lacks the possibility of a general understanding, as if it were only an internal mystery of a few individuals; we say a mystery because in this case science is only It exists in its concept or inner nature; we say it is a few individuals, because in this case science has not yet appeared widely, so its objective existence is individual.Only what is fully defined is public and intelligible, and can be learned and become the property of everyone.The intellectual form of science is the way to science which is made available to all and paved for all, and the attainment of rational knowledge through the intellect is a legitimate claim to the consciousness of science; for intellect in general is Thought, that is, the pure self, and the intellectual is what is known and shared by science and non-scientific consciousness, through which non-scientific people can directly enter science. Since science has just begun, it is not exhaustive in content, nor complete in form, so it cannot but be condemned for it.But if this condemnation goes on to touch on the very nature of science, it would be as unjust as unwillingness to admit the need for science to continue.The opposition between these two aspects [condemning the incompleteness of science and opposing the continued development of science] is obviously the most important key point that the current scientific culture is exhausted and has not yet gained the proper understanding.While those on the one hand boast of the richness and intelligibility of its material, those on the other at least despise it all, boasting of immediate rationality and sanctity.Whether it is purely due to the power of the truth, or at the same time frightened by the opponent's momentum, the former has finally returned to silence now, but although they feel that they are overwhelmed by the opponent on the basis of facts, they have not stopped their above-mentioned demands because of this; The request is legitimate and has not been met.This silence of the former is only half due to the victory of the latter, and half to the weariness and indifference which always arise when promises continually arouse expectations and are never fulfilled. Those of the latter school sometimes do, and very conveniently, make great strides in content.Their method is to bring into their domain a great deal of material, that is, the familiar and the well-established; and because of their special love of noticing the strange and the novel, they seem to have mastered it all the more. All the rest of the matter which men have already known, they also appropriate what has not yet been put in order; and thus they subordinate everything under the Absolute Idea, so that the Absolute Idea seems to be known in all things, And has successfully developed into a developed science.But when we examine carefully, we find that they have achieved such development not because the same idea has acquired different images, but because the same idea has been repeated in the same way; it is only because it is applied externally. By using different materials, a boring appearance difference is obtained.If the development of an idea is but such a repetition of the same formula, the idea, though true in itself, is in fact always only a beginning.If the knowing subject only applies a single static form to the existing being, and the material is only thrown into this static element from the outside, then this is no more a fulfillment of the above-mentioned requirement than any arbitrary imagination of the content. Satisfaction, that is to say, what is produced in this way is not the rich content that arises from itself, nor the differences that each form stipulates for itself, but rather a monotonous formalism.This formalism makes a difference in content only because the difference is already available and well known. At the same time, such formalism also believes that this monotonous and abstract universality is the absolute; and asserts that anyone who is not satisfied with this universality is due to the inability to grasp and persist in this absolute point of view.If formerly the empty possibility of conceiving something in another way was sufficient to refute an idea, the empty possibility, i.e., universal thought, had the power of actual knowledge. all positive value, then we now likewise see that the universal idea in this empty form of unreality is given all value; And we see that the dissolution of distinction and determination, or, in other words, their throwing into a bottomless abyss of emptiness (which is neither a developed conclusion nor a self-evident path), is tantamount to the speculative Methods.Now, when considering what any determinate thing is in the Absolute, it means nothing more than saying: Although we are talking about it as a thing at the moment, in the Absolute, in A=A, there is no such thing at all. class of things, where everything is one.Whether one takes the knowledge that "all is one in the Absolute" against that which differentiates, is realized or is seeking to be realized, or speaks of its Absolute as night, as is commonly said of all Like the night in which cattle are black in the dark, these two practices are childish manifestations of intellectual emptiness. ——Since formalism has been reborn in philosophy after being denounced and condemned by modern philosophy, it can be seen that although its shortcomings are well known, before the knowledge of absolute reality does not fully understand its own nature, the form cannot Doctrine will not disappear from science. —Since we consider that the general concept comes first, and the elaboration on the general concept follows, which will make this exposition easier to understand, we find it useful to point out the outline of this general concept, and at the same time we want to Use this opportunity to destroy some forms, because habituation to these forms is an obstacle to philosophical understanding.