Absolute Truth is a Result of Logic

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 to what is primary and true.

This truth is the origin and cause of that with which the beginning is made [the start of thought].

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 is also where consciousness first came from, which at first appeared as an immediacy.

This is true in still greater measure of

This truth is the absolute spirit which reveals itself as the concrete and final supreme truth of all being.

At the end of the development, this absolute spirit is known as:

• freely externalising itself
• abandoning itself to the shape of an immediate being
• opening or unfolding itself into the creation of a world which contains all that fell into the development which preceded

This development:

• is a reversal of its position relatively to its beginning
• results in it transforming 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 of logic be within itself a circle in which the first is also the last and the last is also the first.

¹⁰³ The returning movement should also be considered as a result.

In this respect:

• the first is equally the ground
• the last is a derivative

This is because:

• the movement starts from the first.
• by correct inferences, the movement arrives at the last as the ground, as a result.

The movement exposes the the beginning.

• This beginning should be regarded as only a further determination of the movement.

Hence that which forms the starting point of the development:

• remains at the base of all that follows
• does not vanish from it

The progress does not consist merely in the derivation of an other, or in the effected transition into a genuine other.

In so far as this transition does occur it is equally sublated again.

Thus, the beginning of philosophy is the foundation which is present and preserved throughout the entire subsequent development, remaining completely immanent in its further determinations.

¹⁰⁴ Through this progress, the beginning:

• loses the one-sidedness which attaches to it as something simply immediate and abstract
• becomes something mediated

Hence, the line of the scientific advance becomes a circle.

Since that which forms the beginning is still undeveloped and devoid of content, it is not truly known in the beginning.

It is the science of logic in its whole compass which first constitutes the completed knowledge of it with its developed content and first truly grounds that knowledge.

¹⁰⁵ But because it is the result which appears as the absolute ground, this progress in knowing is not provisional or problematical and hypothetical.

It must be determined by the nature of the subject matter itself and its content.®