The mind's immediate existence, conscious life, has two aspects — cognition and objectivity which is opposed to or negative of the subjective function of knowing. Since it is in the medium of consciousness that mind is developed and brings out its various moments, this opposition between the factors of conscious hfe is found at each stage in the evolution of mind, 34 Phenomenology of Mind and all the various moments appear as modes or forms {Gestalten) of consciousness. The scientific statement of the course of this development is a science of the experience through which consciousness passes; the substance and its process are considered as the object of consciousness. Consciousness knows and comprehends nothing but what falls within its experience; for what is found in experience is merely spiritual substance, and, moreover, object of its self. Mind, however, becomes object, for it consists in the process of becoming an other to itself, i.e. an object for its ov.rn self, and in transcending this otherness. And experience is called this very process by which the element that is immediate, unexperienced, i.e. abstract — whether it be in the form of sense or of a bare thought — externalises itself, and then comes back to itself from this state of estrangement, and by so doing is at length set forth in its concrete nature and real truth, and becomes too a possession of consciousness.
The dissimilarity which obtains in consciousness between the ego and the substance constituting its object, is their inner distinction, the factor of negativity in general. We may regard it as the defect of both opposites, but it is their very soul, their moving spirit. It was on this accoimt that certain thinkers long ago took the void to be the principle of movement, when they conceived the moving principle to be the negative element, though they had not as yet thought of it as self. While this negative factor appears in the first instance as a dissimilarity, as an inequality, between ego and object, it is just as much the inequality of the substance with itself. What seems to take place outside it, to be an activity directed Preface 35 Preface 35 against it, is its own doing, its own activity; and substance shows that it is in reahty subject. When it has brought out this completely, mind has made its existence adequate to and one with its essential nature. Mind is object to itself just as it is, and the abstract element of immediacy, of the separation between l-mowing and the truth, is overcome. Being is entirely mediated; it is a substantial content, that is hkewise directly in the possession of the ego, has the character of self, is notion. With the attainment of this the Phenomenology of Mind concludes. What mind prepares for itself by the argument of the Phenomenology is the element of true knowledge. In this element the moments of mind are now set out in the form of thought pure and simple, which knows its object to be itself. They no longer involve the opposition between being and knowing; they remain within the imdivided simplicity of the knowing function; they are the truth in the form of truth, and their diversity is merely diversity of the content of truth. The process by which they are developed into an organically connected whole is Logic and Speculative Philosophy.
Now, because the systematic statement of the mind's experience embraces merely its ways of appearing, it may well seem that the advance from that to the science of ultimate truth in the form of truth is merely negative; and we might readily be content to dispense with the negative process as something altogether false, and might ask to be taken straight to the truth at once: why meddle with what is false at all? The point formerly raised, that we should have begun with science at once, may be answered here by considering the character of negativity in general regarded as 36 Phenomenology of Mind something false. The usual ideas on this subject particularly obstruct the approach to the truth. The consideration of this point will give us an opportunity to speak about mathematical knowledge, which the unphilosophical mind looks upon as the ideal Avhicli philosophy ought to try to attain, but has so far striven in vain to reach.
Truth and falsehood as commonly understood belong to those sharply defined ideas which claim a completely fixed nature of their own, one standing in sohd isolation on this side, the other on that, without any community between them. Against that view it must be pointed out, that truth is not like stamped coin* that is issued ready from the mint and so can be taken up and used. Nor, again, is there something false, any more than there is something evil. Evil and falsehood are indeed not so bad as the devil, for in the form of the devil they get the length of being particular subjects; qua false and evil they are merely universals, though they have a nature of their own with reference to one another. Falsity (that is what we are dealing with here) would be otlierness, the negative aspect of the substance, which [substance], qua content of knowledge, is truth. But the substance is itself essentially the negative element, partly as involving distinction and determination of content, partly as being a process of distinguishing pure and simple, i.e. as being self and knowledge in general. Doubtless we can know in a way that is false. To know something falsely means that knowledge is not adequate to, is not on equal terms with, its substance. Yet this very dissimilarity is the process of distinction in general, the essential moment in know- * C'p. Lessing, Nathan der Weise, IV. 6.
Prefdae 37 ing. It is, in fact, out of this active distinction that its harmonious unity arises, and this identity, when arrived at, is truth. But it is not truth in a sense which would involve the rejection of the discordance, the diversity, hke dross from pure metal; nor, again, does truth remain detached from diversity, hke a finished article from the instrument that shapes it. Difference itself continues to be an immediate element within truth as such, in the form of the principle of negation, in the form of the activity of Self. All the same, we cannot for that reason say that falsehood is a moment or forms even a constituent part of truth. That " in every case of falsity there is something true " is an expression in which they are taken to be like oil and water, which do not mix and are merely united externally. Just in the interest of their real meaning, precisely because we want to designate the aspect or moment of complete otherness, the terms true and false must no longer be used where their otherness has been cancelled and superseded. Just as the expressions " unity of subject and object," of " finite and infinite," of " being and thought," etc., are absurd if subject and object, etc., are taken to mean what they are outside their unity, and are thus in that miity not meant to be what its very expression conveys. In the same way falsehood is not, qua false, any longer a moment of truth.
Dogmatism as a way of thinking, whether in ordinary knowledge or in the study of philosophy, is nothing else but the view that truth consists in a proposition, which is a fixed and final result, or again which is directly known. To questirms hke, " When was Ceesar born? ", " How many feet made a furlong? ", etc., 38 Phenomenology of Mind a straight answer ought to be given; just as it is absolutely true that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides of a right-angled triangle. But the nature of a socalled truth of that sort is different from the nature of philosophical truth.
As regards truth in matters of historical fact — to deal briefly with this subject — so far as we consider the purely historical element, it will be readily granted that they have to do with the sphere of particular existence, with a content in its contingent and arbitrary aspects, features that have no necessity. But even bare truths of the kind, say, like those mentioned, are impossible without the activity of self-consciousness. To get to know any one of them, there has to be a good deal of comparison, books must be consulted, or in some way or other inquiry has to be made. Even in a case of direct perception, only when we know it along with the reasons behind it, is it held to be something of real value; although it is merely the naked fact itself that we are, properly speaking, supposed to be concerned about. — ' As to mathematical truths, we should be still less inclined to consider anyone a geometer who had got Euchd's theorems by heart (auswendig) without knowing the proofs, without, if we may say so by way of contrast, getting them into his head {inwendig). Similarly, if anyone came to know by measuring many right-angled triangles that their sides are related in the way everybody knows, v/e should regard knowledge so obtained as unsatisfactory. All the same, while proof is essential in the case of mathematical knowledge, it still does not have the.significance and nature of Preface 39 being a moment in the result itself; the proof is over when we get the result, and has disappeared. Qua result the theorem is, no doubt, one that is seen to be true. But this eventuality has nothing to do with its content, but only with its relation to the knowing subject. The process of mathematical proof does not belong to the object; it is a function that takes place outside the matter in hand. Thus, the nature of a right-angled triangle does not break itself up into factors in the manner set forth in the mathematical construction which is required to prove the proposition expressing the relation of its parts. The entire process of producing the result is an affair of knowledge which takes its own way of going about it. In philosophical knowledge, too, the way existence, qua existence, comes about (Werden) is different from that whereby the essence or inner nature of the fact comes into being. But philosophical knowledge, for one thing, contains both, while mathematical knowledge sets forth merely the way an existence comes about, i.e. the way the nature of the fact gets to be in the sphere of knowledge as such. For another thing, too, philosophical knowledge unites both these particular movements.
The inward rising into being, the process of substance, is an unbroken transition into outwardness, into existence or being for another; and conversely, the coming of existence into being is withdrawal into the inner essence. The movement is the twofold process in which the whole comes to be, and is such that each at the same time posits the other, and each on that account has in it both as its two aspects. Together they make the whole, through their resolving each other, and making themselves into moments of the whole.
40 Phenomenology of Mind In mathematical knowledge the insight required is an external function so far as the subject-matter dealt with is concerned. It follows that the actual fact is thereby altered. The means taken, construction and proof, contain, no doubt, true propositions; but all the same we are bound to say that the content is false. The triangle in the above example is taken to pieces, and its parts made into other figures to which the construction gives rise in the triangle. It is only at the end that we find again reinstated the triangle we are really concerned with; it was lost sight of in the course of the construction, and was present merely in fragments, that belonged to other wholes. Thus we find negativity of content coming in here too, a negativity which would have to be called falsity, just as much as in the case of the movement of the notion where thoughts that are taken to be fixed pass away and disappear.
The real defect of this kind of knowledge, however, affects its process of knowing as much as its material. As to that process, in the first place we do not see any necessity in the construction. The necessity does not arise from the nature of the theorem: it is imposed; and the injunction to draw just these lines, an infinite number of others being equally possible, is blindly acquiesced in, without our knowing anything further, except that, as we fondly believe, this will serve our purpose in getting at the proof. Later on this purposive device then comes out, and is therefore merely external in character, just because it is only after the proof is found that it comes to be known. In the same way, again, the proof takes a direction that begins anywhere we like, without our knowing as yet what relation 'Preface 4l iliis beginning has to the result to be brought out. In its Jourse, it takes up certain specific elements and relations md lets others alone, without its being directly obvious f?hat necessity there is in the matter. An external purpose controls this process.
The evidence peculiar to this defective way of knowing — an evidence on the strength of which mathematics plumes itself and proudly struts before philosophy — rests solely on the poverty of its purpose and the defectiveness of its material, and is on that account of a kind that philosophy must scorn to have anything to do with. Its purpose or principle is quantity. This is precisely the relationship that is non-essential, alien to the character of the notion. The process of knowledge goes on, therefore, on the surface, does not affect the concrete fact itself, does not touch its inner nature or notion, and is hence not a conceptual way of comprehendmg. The material which is to enable mathematics to proffer these welcome treasures of truth consists of space and nmnerical units {das Eins). Space is that kind of existence on which the concrete notion inscribes the diversity it contains — an empty, lifeless element in which its differences likewise subsist in passive, hfeless form. What is concretely actual is not something spatial, such as is treated of in mathematics. With unieahties like the things mathematics takes account of, neither concrete sensuous perception nor philosophy has anything to do. In an unreal element of that sort we find, then, only unreal truth, fixed lifeless propositions. We can call a halt at any of them; the next begins of itself de novo, without the first having led up to the one that follows, and without any necessary connexion having in this way 42 Phenomenology of Mind arisen from the nature of the subject-matter itself. So, too — and herein consists the formal character of mathematical evidence — because of that principle and the element where it appHes, knowledge advances along the hues of bare equality, of abstract identity. For what is hfeless, not being self-moved, does not bring about distinction within its essential nature; does not come at essential opposition or unlikeness; and hence involves no transition of one opposite element into its other, no qualitative, immanent movement, no seZ/-movement. It is quantity, a form of difference that does not touch the essential nature, which alone mathematics deals with. It abstracts from the fact that it is the notion which separates space into its dimensions, and determines the connections between them and in them. It does not consider, for example, the relation of line to surface, and when it compares the diameter of a circle with its circumference, it runs up against their incommensurability, i.e. a relation in terms of the notion, an infinite element, that escapes mathematical determination.
Inamanent or so-called pure mathematics, again, does not oppose, time qua time to space, as a second subjectmatter for consideration. Applied mathematics, no doubt, treats of time, as also of motion, and other concrete things as well; but it picks up/ from experience synthetic propositions — i.e. propositions expressing relations, relations determined by their essential nature — and merely applies its formulae to those propositions assumed to start with. That the so-called proofs of propositions like that stating the equilibrium of the lever, the relation of space and time in gravitation, etc., which applied mathematics fre- Preface 43 quently gives, should be taken and given as proofs, is itself merely a proof of how great the need is for knowledge to have a process of proof, seeing that, even where proof is not to be had, knowledge yet puts a value on the mere semblance of it, and gets thereby a certain sense of satisfaction. A criticism of these proofs would be as instructive as it would be significant, if the criticism could strip mathematics of this artificial finery, and bring out its hmitations, and thence show the necessity for another type of knowledge.
As to time, which we are asked to think of as the coimterpart to space, and as constituting the objectmatter of the other division of pure mathematics, it is the notion itself in the form of existence. The principle of quantity, of difference which is not determined by the notion, and the principle of equality, of abstract, lifeless unity, are incapable of deahng with that sheer restlessness of hfe and its absolute and inherent process of differentiation. It is therefore only in an arrested, paralysed form, only in the form of the quantitative unit, that this essentially negative activity becomes the second object-matter of this way of knowing, which, itself an external operation, degrades what is selfmoving to the level of mere matter, in order thus to get an indifferent, external, lifeless content.
Philosophy, on the contrary, does not deal with a determination that is non-essential, but with a determination so far as it is an essential factor. The abstract or unreal is not its element and content, but the real, what is self-establishing, has life within itself, existence in its very notion. It is the process that creates its own moments in its course, and goes through them all; and the whole of this movement constitutes its positive 44 ' Phenomenology of Mind content and its truth. This movement includes, therefore, within it the negative factor as well, the element which would be named falsity if it could be considered one from which we had to abstract. The element that disappears has rather to be looked at as itself essential, not in the sense of being something fixed, that has to be cut off from truth and allowed to lie outside it, heaven knows where; just as similarly the truth is not to be held to stand on the other side as an immovable lifeless positive element. Appearance is the process of arising into being and passing away again, a process that itself does not arise and does not pass away, but is fer se, and constitutes reality and the life-movement of truth. In this way truth is the bacchanalian revel, where not a soul is sober; and because every member no sooner gets detached than it 60 ipso collapses straightway, the revel is just as much a state of transparent imbroken calm. Judged by that movement, the particular shapes which mind assumes do not indeed subsist any more than do determinate thoughts or ideas; but they are, all the same, as much positive and necessary moments, as negative and transitory. In the entirety of the movement, taken as an unbroken quiescent whole, that which gets distinctness in the course of its process and secures specific existence, is preserved in the form of a self-recollection, in which existence is self-knowledge, and self-knowledge, again, is immediate existence.
It might well seem necessary to state at the outset the chief points in connexion with the method of this process, the way in which science operates. Its nature, however, is to be found in what has already been said, while the proper systematic exposition of it is Preface 45 the special business of Logic, or rather is Logic itself. For the method is nothing else than the structure of the whole in its pure and essential form. In regard, however, to what has been hitherto currently held on this point, we must be sensible that the system of ideas bearing on the question of philosophical method, belongs also to a stage of mental culture that has now passed away. This may perhaps seem somewhat roughhanded or revolutionary; and I am far from adopting an attitude of that sort; but it is significant that the scientific regime bequeathed by mathematics — a regime of explanations, divisions, axioms, an array of theorems, with proofs, principles, and the consequences and conclusions drawn from them — all this has already come to be generally considered as at any rate out of date.
Even though there is no clear idea why it is unsuitable, yet little or no use is made of it any longer; and even though it is not condemned outright, it is all the same not in favour. And we must have the prejudice and conviction that what is excellent can turn itself to practical account, and make itself acceptable. But it is not difficult to see that the method of propounding a proposition, producing reasons for it and then refuting its opposite by reasons too, is not the form in which truth can appear. Truth moves itself by its very nature; but the method just mentioned is a form of Imowledge external to its material. Hence it is pecuhar to mathematics and must be left to mathematics, which, as already indicated, takes for its principle the relation of quantity, a relation alien to the notion, and gets its material from lifeless space, and the equally lifeless numerical unit. Or, again, such a method, adopting a freer style, one involving more 46 Phenomenology of Mind of arbitrariness and chance, may have a place in ordinary Ufe, in a conversation, or in supplying matter-offact instruction for the satisfaction of curiosity rather than knowledge, very much like what a preface does. In every-day life the mind finds its content in different kinds of knowledge, experiences of various sorts, concrete facts of sense, thoughts, too, and principles, and, in general, in whatever Ues ready to hand, or passes for a sohd stable entity, or real being. The mind follows wherever this leads, sometimes interrupting the connection by an unrestrained caprice in deahng with the content, and takes up the attitude of determining and handhng it in quite an external fashion. It runs the content back to some touchstone of certainty or other, even though it be but the feeling of the moment; and conviction is satisfied if it reaches some familiar resting-place.
But when the necessity of the notion banishes from its realm the loose procedure of the " raisonnements " of conversation, as well as the pedantic style of scientific pomposity, its place, as we have already mentioned, must not be taken by the disconnected utterance of presageful surmise and inspiration, and the arbitrary caprice of prophetic utterance; for this does not merely despise that particular form of scientific procedure, but contemns scientific procedure altogether.
Now that the triplicity, adopted in the system of Kant — a method rediscovered, to begin with, by instinctive insight, but left Kfeless and uncomprehended —has been raised to its significance as an absolute method, true form is thereby set up in its true content, and the conception of science has come to light. But Preface 47 the use this form has been put to in the Kantian system has no right to the name of science. For we see it there reduced to a hfeless schema, to nothing better than a mere shadow, and scientific organisation to a synoptic table. This formahsm — about which we spoke before in general terms, and whose procedure we wish here to state more fully — thinks it has comprehended and expressed the nature and life of a given form when it proclaims a determination of the schema to be its predicate. The predicate may be subjectivity or objectivity, or again magnetism, electricity, and so on, contraction or expansion, East or West, and such hke — ■ a form of predication that can be multiplied indefinitely, because according to this way of working each determination, each mode, can be applied as a form or schematic element in the case of every other, and each will thankfully perform the same service for any other.
With a circle of reciprocities of this sort it is impossible to make out what the real fact in question is, or what the one or the other is. We find there sometimes constituents of sense picked up from ordinary intuition, determinate elements that certainly should mean something else than they express; at other times what is inherently significant, viz. pure determinations of thought — like subject, object, substance, cause, universality, etc. — these are apphed just as uncritically and unreflectingly as in every-day life, are used much as people employ the terms strong and weak, expansion and contraction. As a result that type of metaphysics is as unscientific as those ideas of sense.
Instead of the inner activity and self-movement of its own actual hfe, such a simple determination of direct intuition {Anschauung) — which means here 48 Phenomenology of Mind sense-knowledge — is expressed in terms of a superficial analogy, and this external and empty application of the formula is called " construction." The same thing happens here, however, as in the case of every kind of formalism. A man's head must be indeed dull if he could not in a quarter of an hour get up the theory that there are enervating, innervating, and indirectly enervating diseases and as many cures, and who could not — smce not so long ago instruction of that sort sufficed for the purpose — in as short a time be turned from being a man who works by rule of thumb into a theoretical physician. Formahsm in the case of speculative Philosophy of Nature {Naturphilosophie) takes the shape of teaching that understanding is electricity, animals are nitrogen, or equivalent to south or north and so on. When it does this whether as baldly as it is here expressed or concocted with even more terminology, such forceful procedure brings and holds together elements to all appearance far removed from one another; the violence done to stable inert sense-elements by connecting them in this way, confers on them merely the semblance of a conceptual unity, and spares itself the trouble of doing what is after all the important thing — expressing the notion itself, the meaning that underlies sense-ideas. All this sort of thing may strike any one who has no experience with admiration and wonder. He may be awed by the profound genius he thinks it displays, and be dehghted at the happy ingenuity of such characterisations, since they fill the place of the abstract notion with something tangible and sensuous, and so make it more pleasing; and he may congratulate himself on feeling an instinctive mental affinity for that glorious way of Preface 49 proceeding. The trick of wisdom of that sort is as quickly acquired as it is easy to practise. Its repetition, when once it is famihar, becomes as boring as the repetition of any bit of sleight-of-hand once we see through it. The instrument for producing this monotonous formahsm is no more difficult to handle than the palette of a painter, on which he only two colours, say red and green, the former for colouring the surface when we want a historical piece, the latter when we want a bit of landscape. It would be difficult to settlewhich is greater in all this, the agreeable ease with which everything in heaven and earth and under the earth is plastered with that botch of colour, or the conceit that prides itself on the excellence of its means for every conceivable purpose; the one lends support to the other. What results from the use of this method of sticking on to everything in heaven and earth, to every kind of shape and form, natural and spiritual, the pair of determinations from the general schema, and filing everything in this manner, is no less than an " account as clear as noonday " * of the organised whole of the imiverse. It is, that is to say, a synoptic index, hke a skeleton with tickets stuck all over it, or hke rows of pots standing sealed and labelled in a grocer's stall; and is as intelhgible as either the one or the other. It has lost hold of the hving nature of concrete fact; just as in the former case we have merely dry bones with flesh and blood all gone, and in the latter, what is hidden away in those pots has equally nothmg to do with hving things. We have already remarked that the final outcome of this style of thinking is,