Chapter 2 Preface: On Scientific Cognition II. The Development Process from Consciousness to Science

1.Absolute as the concept of subject It seems to me—and the truth of which can only be proved by the statement of the system itself—that the crux of the matter consists in not only comprehending and expressing real things or truths as substances, but also comprehending and expressing them expressed as the subject.At the same time, it must also be noted that substantiality itself contains both the immediacy of the universal (or universal) or knowledge itself, and the immediacy of being or being the object of knowledge. —If the concept of God as the One Substance annoyed an entire age when it was proclaimed, this is partly because of an instinctive feeling that self-consciousness in such concepts is not preserved but Completely destroyed, but partly because people insist on the contrary that thinking is thinking, that universality itself is this singleness or this indifferent and unmoving substance.And if there is a third view, that thought is in itself united with substantial being, and that immediacy or intuition is thought as thought, it depends on whether this intellectual intuition does not fall back into nothingness. in the singularity of anger and whether it does not re-state reality itself in an unrealistic way.

① Refers to Spinoza's philosophy. ——Editor of Lasson Edition ② refers to the philosophy of Kant and Fichte. ——Editor of Lasson Edition ③Refers to Schelling's philosophy. ——Editor of Lasson Edition And the living entity is only a real being, or, to put it another way, its being is only in so far as it is the movement that establishes itself, or mediates between its own transformation and itself. Truly the subject.Substance as subject is pure and simple negativity, and only as such, is the process of splitting the single into two or of doubling its opposites, which in turn is this indifferent distinction and its Opposite negation.So only this identity which is reconstructing itself, or the reflection of itself in something else, is absolute truth, and the original or immediate unity, in itself, is not absolute truth.Truth is its own consummation, such a circle that presupposes its end as its end and has its end as its beginning, and is only real when it is realized and has reached its end.

The life of God and the knowledge of God are thus quite a game of self-love; but if the idea lacks in it the seriousness, pain, tolerance, and labor of the negative, it degenerates into piety, and even into A tasteless move. This divine life is indeed pure self-identity and unity in its own right, and it does not take seriously the otherness and alienation and the overcoming of this alienation.But this in-itself is the abstract universality, and in the abstract universality the nature of being-for-itself is ignored, so the self-motion of the form is also ignored at all.Just because the form is declared to be equal to the essence, it is a great misunderstanding to think that it is enough to know only the in-itself or the essence and that the form can be neglected, and that there is no need for the realization of the essence or the unfolding of the form if there is an absolute principle or absolute intuition. .Just because form is as essential to essence as essence itself, essence should not be understood and expressed only as essence, as immediate substance, or as the pure intuition of God itself, but also as Form has all the richness of the unfolded form.Only in this way is the essence truly understood and expressed as something real.

Truth is all.But the whole is only that essence which develops itself to perfection.With regard to the Absolute, we can say that it is essentially a result, that it is only at the end what it really is; and that its nature is precisely here, because according to its nature it is the reality, the subject, or the self-forming .It is true that it seems contradictory to understand the absolute essence as the result, but a little consideration will reveal the falsehood of this contradiction.The beginning, the principle, or the Absolute is only a universal when first stated directly.When I say "all animals" it does not count as zoology, so we all know that the words God, Absolute, Eternal, etc. do not say what is contained in them, in fact The word only expresses intuition as something immediate.Something more than such words, even if it becomes only a sentence, contains a transformation into something else (this transformed other must be reabsorbed), or a mediation.And this mediation is repugnant, as if to admit that mediation has more meaning than merely showing that it is not the absolute and never exists in the absolute, would be tantamount to giving up absolute knowledge.

But in fact people's aversion to mediation is simply due to ignorance of mediation and the nature of absolute knowledge itself.For mediation is nothing but self-identity in motion, in other words it is self-reflection, moment of self-existing self, pure negativity, or, in its pure abstraction, mere formation. process.This mediation, self, formation in general, is, because of its simplicity, precisely both immediacy in the making and immediacy itself. —Therefore, it would be a misunderstanding of reason if mediation or reflection were excluded from absolute truth if they were not understood as absolutely positive moments.It is this reflection which makes the truth a developed result, while at the same time sublating the opposition between the result and its formation; since this formation is likewise unitary, it is not the same as the form of the truth (the truth is expressed in the result). (to the singularity), it is rather the process of returning to the singularity.It is true that the fetus is man in itself, but not man for itself; it is man for itself only as educated reason, which makes itself that which it is in itself.This is rational reality.But the result itself is mere immediacy, because it is conscious freedom, it is at rest in itself, and it does not set aside the opposition to let it run its course, but comes to terms with it.

What has been said above may also be expressed as follows: reason is purposeful action.In the past, some people misunderstood nature and misunderstood thinking, exalting nature above thinking, especially denying that there is purpose in external nature, thus putting the general form of purpose in a very disreputable position.However, Aristotle once defined nature as a purposeful action, and we also believe that the purpose is a direct, static, and motionless thing; the motionless thing itself can cause motion, so it is the subject.Its power to move is, in the abstract, being-for-itself or pure negativity.The end is the beginning only because the beginning is the end; or, in other words, reality is the concept of this reality only because the immediacy, as end itself, contains the "self" (das Selbst) or the pure Reality.

The realized purpose or concretely existing reality is the movement, the unfolding process of becoming; but it is precisely this movement which is "itself" and which is identical with the immediacy and simplicity of the beginning in that it It is the result, that which returns to itself; but what returns to itself is precisely "self," and "self" is the self-associated identity and simplicity. Because of the need to imagine the Absolute as a subject, one uses propositions such as: God is eternity, God is the moral order of the world, or God is love, etc.In such propositions, truth is only directly regarded as subject, rather than expressed as a self-reflecting movement.In such propositions one begins with the word God.But the word itself is just a meaningless sound, an empty name.This voice or name has content and meaning only after the predicate has said what God really is; the empty beginning is a real knowledge only when it reaches this end.In this case we do not see why one does not confine himself to eternity, the moral order of the world, etc., or, as the ancients did, to pure concepts, Being, One, etc., which are meanings in themselves, And add meaningless tones?But by this noun, one just means that what is established here is not a general being or essence or universal, but something that reflects itself, a subject.But at the same time, it should be noted that this subject is only conjectured.The subject in speculation is taken as a fixed point, to which the predicates are attached as their support by a movement; and this movement is that of the person who knows the fixed point, and cannot be regarded as the fixed point at all. The movement of itself; but only through the movement of the fixed point itself can the content be represented as subject.According to the process by which this motion takes place, it cannot be the motion of a fixed point; but since this fixed point is assumed, this motion cannot be anything else but external.Therefore, the above-mentioned speculation about the Absolute as the subject is not only not the reality of the concept of the subject, but even makes reality impossible, because the speculation regards the subject as a static point, but reality is itself in motion.

Among the conclusions that can be drawn from the above discussion, this one can be emphasized: knowledge can only be stated if it is real as a science or system; and a so-called philosophical principle or principle, even if it is true , as long as it is only a principle or principle, it is already false; it is therefore easy to disprove it.To refute a principle is to expose its flaws, but it is flawed because it is only a universal or principle or beginning.If the refutation is thorough, it must have been developed from the principle itself, and not fabricated from external counterclaims or opinions.A refutation of a principle is, therefore, a development of that principle and a complement to its defects, if the refutation is not because it attends only to the negative aspects of its own action and is unaware of the positive aspects of its development and consequences. Thus misrecognizing its own words. ——

The true unfolding of the beginning is, of course, an act of affirmation of the beginning, but at the same time it is an act of negation, that is, of denying its one-sidedness of being only immediate or merely an end.Thus one could just as well say that the unfolding or realization is a refutation of the ground (Grund) of the system, but it is more correct to regard the unfolding of the beginning as a sign that the ground or principle of the system is in fact only Just the beginning of the system. To say that truth is real only as a system, or that substances are essentially subjects, is the idea expressed by the statement that the Absolute is Spirit.Spirituality is the noblest concept, the concept of the new age and its religions.Only the spiritual is real; the spiritual is that which exists in essence or in itself - that which is related to itself and determined, other-being and for-itself - and which is in this determination or in its otherness remains in itself;—or it is in itself and for itself. —but first of all it is only for us or in itself this being for itself, which is the spiritual substance.It must be a being-in-itself for itself, it must be knowledge of the spiritual and of itself as spirit, that is to say, it must be its own object, but both immediate and It is the sublated, self-reflected object.The object is for itself only for us when its mental content is produced by the object itself; but when it is also for itself, this self-production, the pure concept, is at the same time It is again the objective element of the object in which the object acquires its concrete existence and is therefore in its concrete existence the object which reflects itself for itself. —Spirit so developed that it knows itself to be spirit is science.Science is the reality of the spirit, the kingdom that the spirit builds for itself in its own element.

2.knowledge generation process Pure self-knowledge in the Absolute Otherness—this Ather itself—is the basis and ground of scientific or universal knowledge.It is consciousness in this element that the beginning of philosophy assumes or requires.But this element achieves its completion and acquires its transparency only in the movement of its formation.It is pure spirituality, which, as universal, has the mode of simple immediacy;—this simple, when it exists as simple, is the basis of science, that is, The kind of thinking that exists only in the mind.Because of this factor, this immediacy of mind is its substance in general, so this immediacy is essentiality purified, reflection, existence; for reflection is simple immediacy for itself. To be in itself is to be reflected in itself.Science, from its own side, requires the self-awareness of the individual to go beyond this ether in order to be able to live with science, to be able to live in science, and to live truly.On the other hand, the individual has the right to demand that science at least furnish him with a ladder on which to reach this foothold and show him that this foothold is within himself.The right of the individual to make claims is based on his absolute autonomy; he knows that in any form his knowledge is autonomous, because whether his form of knowledge is recognized by science or not, whatever its content , in any form of knowledge the individual is the absolute form, that is to say, he is always the immediate certainty of himself, or, if we prefer another term, always the unconditional being.If we say that when consciousness understands objective things as opposed to itself, and understands itself as opposed to objective things, the standpoint of consciousness is the scientific opposition: in this scientific opposition, consciousness only knows that it is in its In itself, this is rather a total loss of spirit; conversely, the scientific element is a distant beyond of consciousness: in this distant beyond consciousness no longer possesses itself.Either of these two aspects appears to the other as a reversal of the truth.It is an attempt by naive consciousness to entrust itself directly to science, which, without knowing what forces impelled it, would like to try once more to walk head-down; That force is an unprepared and obviously unnecessary coercive force that consciousness must try to suppress. —Science, whatever it may be in itself, appears as an antithesis to direct self-consciousness when it is connected with it; As the principle of its actuality, science acquires a form of unreality, since the principle of actuality itself is outside science.Science must therefore combine such factors with itself, or it must even indicate what and how such factors are its own.Lacking such reality, science is only a content in itself, an end in itself, not yet spirit, but only the substance of spirit.This thing-in-itself must alienate itself, must become for-itself, which is tantamount to saying that this thing-in-itself must make self-consciousness one with itself.

What this part ② describes is the formation process of general science or knowledge.The first knowledge, or immediate spirit, is that which has no spirit, it is sensuous consciousness.In order to become real knowledge, or to produce scientific factors, to produce scientific pure concepts, the first knowledge must go through a long and difficult road. —This way of formation, as it will appear in its content and in the various forms in which it manifests, will not be what one would first think of leading the unscientific consciousness into science. It will not be an introduction to science; nor will it be an account of the foundations of science; certainly not a sudden pistol-firing exhilaration: dealing directly with absolute knowledge at the outset, and ignoring other views that merely declare Even if it has been liquidated. ① In "Logic in the Jena Period" (manuscript) [Larsson's "Complete Works of Hegel", Volume 18, p. 197], Hegel once said: "Ether is the absolute spirit related to itself, but this absolute The spirit does not know itself to be the absolute spirit". ——French translator ②In the first edition, there is a note: "The first part of the scientific system", and Hegel deleted this sentence in the later editions. ——English translator 3.individual upbringing To lead an individual from his uneducated state to knowledgeable is a task which we should understand in its general sense, and the individual in general should be considered in terms of his development, self-awareness the spirit of. —As regards the relation of the particular individual to the universal individual, it is this: every [particular] moment appears in the universal individual in the concrete form and unique shape it acquires.A particular individual is an incomplete spirit, a concrete form, and there is always a certainty that governs the entire existence of a concrete form, and the other provisions in it are only vague outlines.For in the higher spirit the lower being is reduced to a moment of indistinctness; what was formerly the fact itself is now only a relic whose form has been veiled into A simple shade.Every individual, who is essentially a higher spirit, has traveled through such a historical path, and his passage through this past is like a person who wants to learn a higher science and recalls that he has already Like the content of the preparatory knowledge that he has learned, he evokes the memory of those old knowledge without arousing his interest and making him stay in the old knowledge.Each individual, as far as content is concerned, must also go through the stages of development that the universal spirit has gone through, but these stages are as a shell that the spirit has shed, as a road that has been opened and paved. passages that are walked by individuals.Thus, in the field of knowledge, we see that much knowledge, once sought after by the spiritually mature, has now been reduced to children's knowledge, children's exercises, and even children's games; The process of recognizing the rough outlines of world cultural history.This vestige of the past has become the acquired property of the general spirit, which constitutes both the substance of the individual and, because it appears outside the individual, the inorganic nature of the individual. ——The development and formation in this sense, if viewed from the perspective of the individual, then the formation of the individual lies in the individual obtaining these ready-made properties, digesting his inorganic nature and taking it for himself.But if viewed from the side of the universal spirit, since the universal spirit is the substance, then this development is nothing but the substance which gives itself self-consciousness, which develops itself and is reflected in itself. Science has to describe both the development and necessity of this forming movement, and the form assumed by that which has settled down to become the link and property of the spirit.The goal is to give the mind insight into what knowledge really is.To be impatient is to hope for the impossible, to hope for the end without the means.Be patient, on the one hand, which means that the distance of the road must be endured, because each link is necessary; It is a complete individual form, and only when its determination is considered as a complete or concrete thing, or only when the whole is considered in the uniqueness of this determination, each part Only when it has been fully or absolutely examined. —Because not only the individual substance, but even the world-spirit has the patience to pass through these forms over a long period of time, and has the patience to undertake the difficult work of forming world history (in every form of world history the world-spirit has been It can embody its entire content within the range that the form can express), and because the world spirit cannot easily achieve its self-consciousness, so according to the nature of the matter, if the individual wants to grasp its substance, it is There can be no shortcuts; but even so, the difficulty of the individual task has been reduced, because everything is already done in itself [historical fact], the content is no longer actuality, but sublated as possible reality, or immediacy overcome; the [old] form has become the epitome of form, a simple determination of thought.Since the content is already a thing in the mind, it is the wealth of the entity; the individual no longer needs to transform the concrete existence into the form of the self-existence, but only needs to convert the self-existence that has been presented in the memory—not just the original Nor is it the existence-in-itself submerged in concrete existence—transformed into the form of being-for-itself.The circumstances of such action should be described in detail. From this point of view from which we now start this movement, one process which we can save as a whole is that of the sublation of concrete existence.But what cannot be spared but must be more highly transformed is our representation (Vorstel-lung) of individual forms and our familiarity with them (Bekanntschaft).The concrete being withdrawn into the spiritual substance is only transferred directly into the element of the ego by means of the above-mentioned first negation; therefore, this wealth acquired by the ego still has an incomprehensible quality. Immediateness, immobile indifference, etc., are the same qualities as concrete existence itself; concrete existence is only thus passed into appearance.At the same time, by entering into appearance, concrete existence becomes a familiar thing, and the spirit of concrete existence no longer cares about such a thing, so it no longer has any activity or interest in it.If the activity which no longer cares about concrete existence is itself only the movement of a particular spirit which does not conceptually grasp itself, then, on the contrary, [true] knowledge is aimed at the representation thus constituted, at this familiarity. of something!It is the action and thought interest of the Universal Self. Generally speaking, what is known is not really known precisely because it is known.One of the most common self-deceptions is to assume that something is already familiar when you know it, and then just leave it alone.Such knowledge does not know how it came about, so no matter how you talk about it, you can't move away from the original place and move forward.Subject and object, God and nature, and intellect and sensibility, etc., are taken unchecked as familiar and efficient, constituting both a fixed point of departure and a fixed point of destination.These strongholds are stationary, and the movement of knowledge goes back and forth between them, and thus only moves on their surface.In this case, the so-called understanding and testing is to see whether the sayings about these things exist in everyone's concept, whether everyone thinks it is like this, and really recognizes that it is like this. The analysis of a representation, so far as it has been done in the past, is nothing but the subversion of its familiar form.To resolve a representation into its original elements is to reduce it to its moments which, at least not in the form of the present representation, constitute the immediate property of the ego.Such an analysis can, of course, analyze only thought, that is, only known fixed and static determinations.But the unreality thus decomposed is an essential moment; for the concrete is itself in motion only because it has decomposed itself into unreality.Disintegration is the power and work of the understanding [understanding], the most astonishing and greatest of all powers, or even the absolute power.Since the circle is self-closing, self-reliant, and retains its moments within itself as a substance, it is an immediate relation, and therefore nothing surprising.But the contingent itself, which is a real thing only in so far as it is connected with something else apart from its own surroundings, can acquire a unique existence. And unique freedom, which means an incomparably great power of the negative, is the faculty of thinking, of the pure self.Death, if we will call that unreality, is the most terrible thing, and it takes a great deal of strength to keep what is dead.Powerless Beauty hates the Intellect because the Intellect insists on doing what it cannot do.But the life of the spirit is not a life of fearing death and surviving the ravages of life, but a life of daring to bear death and surviving in death.Spirit wins its authenticity only when it preserves itself in absolute fragmentation.The spirit is such a power, not because it ignores the negative things as something positive, just like we usually just say that something negative is nothing or false and forget it, then turn around and say no more. On the contrary, the spirit is such a power because it dares to face the negative face to face and stay there.The spirit dwelling on the negative is a kind of magical power, which transforms the negative into existence.And this magic is that which has been called the subject above; the subject, when it gives concrete existence to the determinateness in its own element, supersedes the abstract, that is to say, the immediacy which exists only in general. sex, and in doing so it becomes real substance, being, or immediacy which is mediated by nothing outside itself. In this way, what is in appearance becomes the property of pure self-consciousness; but this ascent to universality is only one aspect of spiritual development, which is not the whole formation of spirit. ——The research methods of ancient people are very different from modern research. The research of ancient people is the education and formation of real natural consciousness.The ancient student, by examining every detail of his life in detail, and by philosophizing about everything that came before him, created for himself a universality that permeates things.But modern man is different, he can find a ready-made abstract form; he grasps and absorbs this form, it can be said that he just externalizes the internal things without intermediary and creates the universal things (universals) in isolation, Instead of producing the inner and universal things from the concrete things and the variety of reality.The present task, therefore, consists not so much in taking the individual out of the immediate sensuous mode and making it a thought and thinking substance, but rather in sublating those fixed thoughts so as to make the universal animate in reality.But it is much more difficult to make a fixed thought fluid than to make a sensual being fluid.The reasons for this are those already stated above: the determinations of thinking have the ego, the power of the negative, or pure reality as their substance and their element of existence, while the determinations of sensibility have only the powerless abstract immediacy or existence itself. for its entity. For thought to become fluid, it must be pure thinking, that is, this inner immediacy which recognizes itself as a moment, or must abstract itself from its own pure certainty;—this self-abstract of certainty , not self-abandonment and abandonment, but the sublation of the fixity contained in its own establishment, not only the fixity of the self itself as a purely concrete thing opposed to different contents, but also the sublation of the self-fixity presented in The elements of pure thought thus share in the fixity of the various contents of the unconditional ego.Through this movement, pure thoughts become concepts, and pure thoughts are really pure thoughts, their own motions, circles, this is their substance, this is spiritual essence (GeistigeWesenheiten). This movement of pure essence constitutes the nature of the scientific process in general.This movement, as far as its content is concerned, is the inevitable developmental movement of the expansion of its content into an organic whole.Because of this movement, the path to the concept of knowledge also becomes a necessary path of complete formation.The preparation of this piece of knowledge is thus no longer an accidental philosophizing which is always fortuitously combined with incomplete consciousness of these or those objects, relations, Starting from his own ideas, he demonstrates the truth through repeated reasoning, deduction and extension.And this path to knowledge will include in its necessity the entire objective world of consciousness through the movement of concepts. Moreover, such a systematic statement is the first part of science because the actual existence of the mind as the first is nothing but immediacy or beginning, and the beginning is not the return to the beginning.The element of immediate actual existence is therefore the determinacy by which this part of science is distinguished from the other parts.And it is impossible to describe this distinction without discussing some of the fixed ideas that usually arise in this respect.