Logic as a Metaphysical science

⁹⁴ Logic is pure [metaphysical] science.

The result of pure [metaphysical] knowing is the Idea which has become truth.

The certainty of truth* no longer has the object over against it.

Instead, this certainty [between idea and perception]:

• has internalised the object
• knows it as its own self
• has given up the knowledge of itself as of something confronting the object of which it is only the annihilation, has divested itself of this subjectivity and is at one with its self-alienation.

⁹⁵ From this, the determination of pure [metaphysical] knowledge begins with:

• getting rid of all other reflections and opinions*
• simply taking up what is before us

⁹⁶ Pure [metaphysical] knowing as concentrated into this unity has sublated all reference to an other and to mediation.

It is thus distinctionless. It is only simple immediacy and stops being knowledge.

⁹⁷ Simple immediacy is itself an expression of reflection.

It references itself with what is mediated.

This simple immediacy [relation]*, therefore, is pure being [metaphysical existence].

Pure [metaphysical] knowing is to mean abstract [metaphysical] knowing.

Pure [metaphysical] being [existence] is being [existence] in general.

⁹⁸ Here, the beginning is made with being [existence] that exists through mediation.

• This mediation is also a sublating of itself.

[Metaphysical] knowing is the outcome of finite knowing, of consciousness.

[Metaphysical] knowing serves as the beginning of logic and thought if:

• no presupposition is to be made
• the beginning itself is taken immediately

All that is present is simply the arbitrary resolve to think about thought.

⁹⁹ Thus, the beginning must be an absolute, an abstract beginning.

The beginning:

• cannot suppose anything
• must not be mediated by anything
• cannot have a ground

Rather, the beginning :

• is itself the ground of the entire science.
• consequently must be purely and simply an immediacy
• is immediacy itself
• cannot be relative to anything else
• cannot contain within itself any determination or content
  • This is because any such determination or content would be a distinguishing and an inter-relationship of distinct moments.
  • This would turn it into a mediation.

The beginning of logic therefore is pure being [metaphysical existence]

¹⁰¹ Absolute truth is a result [of logic].

Conversely, a result presupposes a prior truth.

THis prior truth is:

• objectively considered unnecessary
• subjectively not known

This has led people to think that philosophy can only begin with a hypothetical and problematical truth.

Therefore, philosophising is only a quest.

Reinhold thinks this way.

He thinks that progress in philosophy is rather:

• a retrogression
• an establishing where we first obtain the result that what we began with is not something merely arbitrarily assumed but is in fact the truth, and also the primary truth.

The advance is a retreat into the ground, to what is primary and true, on which depends and, in fact, from which originates, that with which the beginning is made.

Thus consciousness on its onward path from the immediacy with which it began is led back to absolute knowledge as its innermost truth. This last, the ground, is then also that from which the first proceeds, that which at first appeared as an immediacy.

This is true in still greater measure of absolute spirit which reveals itself as the concrete and final supreme truth of all being, and which at the end of the development is known as freely externalising itself, abandoning itself to the shape of an immediate being —opening or unfolding itself [sich entschliessend] into the creation of a world which contains all that fell into the development which preceded that result and which through this reversal of its position relatively to its beginning is transformed into something dependent on the result as principle.

The essential requirement for the science of logic is not so much that the beginning be a pure immediacy, but rather that the whole of the science be within itself a circle in which the first is also the last and the last is also the first.