Chapter 8 Chapter III Forces and Intellect; Phenomena and the Extrasensory World

In the dialectical process of perceptual certainty, consciousness finds that the senses of hearing and seeing disappear, and in the stage of perception it reaches some concepts, but these concepts are initially summarized by it as unconditional universals.This unconditional universal, taken as a static and simple essence, is nothing in itself but the extreme side of being-for-itself; for it is opposed to non-being.But if the unconditional universal is associated with non-being, it becomes non-essential itself, and consciousness cannot be freed from the illusion of perception, but the universal proves itself to have been freed from the conditioned Freed from being-for-itself, and returned to itself. —This unconditional universal, which is henceforth the true object of consciousness, remains an object of consciousness; for consciousness has not yet grasped its concepts as concepts.A distinction must essentially be made between consciousness and objects.For consciousness the object returns to itself in relation to something else, and thus becomes a concept in itself; but consciousness is not yet a concept for itself, and therefore does not know itself in the object which returns to itself.From our point of view (analyzing the process of cognition), the object becomes an object in itself through the movement of consciousness, but in the process of development of the object, consciousness is also involved in it, so the return to itself is twofold—the object returns to itself in itself. Things, consciousness returning to itself as I-in-itself—is the same or just a process.However, because in this movement consciousness only takes objective things rather than consciousness itself as its content, consciousness must give objective meaning to the result obtained, and consciousness must withdraw from the result formed, so for consciousness , the object is the objective thing, the essence.

In this way it is true that the understanding sublates its own untruth and the untruth of the object; the concept of truth which it thus reaches is only as a truth existing in itself, not yet a concept, in other words, it lacks the consciousness of consciousness. Being-for-itself: The understanding recognizes the validity of this truth, but is not yet aware of itself in it.This truth alone realizes its own essence, so that consciousness does not seem to have a part in its free realization, but merely watches it, recognizing its free realization as a mere fact.Therefore, when we analyze this process of cognition, we must first stand in the position of consciousness and call ourselves "concepts", because concepts can grasp the whole and can develop what is contained in the results; Object, this object appears before consciousness as an existing thing, then consciousness for the first time becomes the consciousness that forms concepts or the consciousness that can use concepts to grasp objects.

The result achieved is the unconditional universal, initially in the negative and abstract sense in which consciousness negates the many one-sided concepts contained in the universal and understands them abstractly, i.e. i.e. discard them. But the result itself has a positive meaning in which the unity of being-for-itself and being-for-others in the result is established, or the absolutely opposite is immediately established as the same.At first it seems that this concerns only the mutual form of the moments; but being-for-itself and being-for-others are equally content itself, since this opposition can really have no other quality than what is achieved in the result, —The consequence of this is that what is recognized as real in perception actually belongs only to the form and is lost in its unity.This content is at the same time universal; there can be no other content here which, by virtue of its particular character, avoids returning to that unconditional generality.

If there is such a content, it must somehow exist for itself and be related to something else.But to be for itself and to be related to others generally constitutes its own nature and essence, and the truth of its nature and essence is that unconditional universal; so the result is purely universal. But since this unconditional universal is the object of consciousness, the distinction of form and content appears in it; The common medium of the matter, on the other hand, seems to return to its own unity, in which their independent existence is cancelled.The former is the dissolution of the independent existence of things, or the passivity that shows the existence of things for others, and the latter is the existence of things for themselves.We can see how these moments express themselves within their essence—the unconditional commonality.It is evident that, first of all, since they exist only within this unconditional commonality, they are generally no longer in a situation external to each other, but are in themselves rather aspects of themselves superseded, and only their mutuality is established. mutual transition.