The Beginning with the Ego

¹¹³ The said analysis presupposes as familiar the idea of a beginning, thus following the example of other sciences.

These presuppose their subject-matter and take it for granted that everyone has roughly the same general idea of it and can find in it the same determinations as those indicated by the sciences which have obtained them in one way or another through analysis, comparison and other kinds of reasoning.

But that which forms the absolute beginning must likewise be something otherwise known.

Now if it is something concrete and hence is variously determined within itself, then this internal relation is presupposed as something known; it is thus put forward as an immediacy which, however, it is not; for it is a relation only as a relation of distinct moments, and it therefore contains mediation within itself.

Further, with a concrete object, the analysis and the ways in which it is determined are affected by contingency and arbitrariness. Which determinations are brought out depends on what each person just finds in his own immediate, contingent idea.

The relation contained in something concrete, in a synthetic unity, is necessary only in so far as it is not just given but is produced by the spontaneous return of the moments back into this unity — a movement which is the opposite of the analytical procedure, which is an activity belonging to the subject-thinker and external to the subject matter itself.

¹¹⁴ The foregoing shows why the beginning cannot be made with:

• anything concrete
• anything containing a relation within itself.

For such presupposes an internal process of mediation and transition of which the concrete, now become simple, would be the result.

But the beginning ought not itself to be already a first and an other; for anything which is in its own self a first and an other implies that an advance has already been made. Consequently, that which constitutes the beginning, the beginning itself, is to be taken as something unanalysable, taken in its simple, unfilled immediacy, and therefore as being, as the completely empty being.

¹¹⁵ If impatience with the consideration of the abstract beginning should provoke anyone to say that the beginning should be made not with the beginning, but straightway with the subject matter itself, well then, this subject matter is nothing else but the said empty being; for what this subject matter is, that will be explicated only in the development of the science and cannot be presupposed by it as known beforehand.

¹¹⁶ Whatever other form the beginning takes in the attempt to begin with something other than empty being, it will suffer from the defects already specified. Let those who are still dissatisfied with this beginning tackle the problem of avoiding these defects by beginning in some other way.

¹¹⁷ But we cannot leave entirely unmentioned an original beginning of philosophy which has recently become famous, the beginning with the ego.

It came partly from the reflection that from the first truth the entire sequel must be derived, and partly from the requirement that the first truth must be something with which we are acquainted, and still more, something of which we are immediately certain.

This beginning is, in general, not a contingent idea which can be differently constituted in different subjects. For the ego, this immediate consciousness of self, at first appears to be itself both an immediacy and also something much more familiar to us than any other idea.

Anything else known belongs to the ego, it is true, but is still a content distinguished from it and therefore contingent; the ego, on the contrary, is the simple certainty of its own self.

¹¹⁸ But the ego as such is at the same time also concrete, or rather, the ego is the most concrete of all things — the consciousness of itself as an infinitely manifold world.

Before the ego, this concrete Being, can be made the beginning and ground of philosophy, it must be disrupted — this is the absolute act through which the ego purges itself of its content and becomes aware of itself as an abstract ego. Only this pure ego now is not immediate, is not the familiar, ordinary ego of our consciousness to which the science of logic could be directly linked for everyone.

That act, strictly speaking, would be nothing else but the elevation to the standpoint of pure knowing where the distinction of subject and object has vanished. But as thus immediately demanded, this elevation is a subjective postulate; to prove itself a genuine demand, the progression of the concrete ego from immediate consciousness to pure knowing must have been indicated and exhibited through the necessity of the ego itself.

Without this objective movement pure knowing, even in the shape of intellectual intuition, appears as an arbitrary standpoint, or even as one of the empirical states of consciousness with respect to which everything turns on whether or not it is found or can be produced in each and every individual.

But inasmuch as this pure ego must be essential, pure knowing, and pure knowing is not immediately present in the individual consciousness but only as posited through the absolute act of the ego in raising itself to that stand-point, we lose the very advantage which is supposed to come from this beginning of philosophy namely that it is something thoroughly familiar, something everyone finds in himself which can form the starting point for further reflection; that pure ego, on the contrary, in its abstract, essential nature, is something unknown to the ordinary consciousness, something it does not find therein.

Instead, such a beginning brings with it the disadvantage of the illusion that whereas the thing under discussion is supposed to be something familiar, the ego of empirical self-consciousness, it is in fact something far removed from it.

When pure knowing is characterised as ego, it acts as a perpetual reminder of the subjective ego whose limitations should be forgotten, and it fosters the idea that the propositions and relations resulting from the further development of the ego are present and can already be found in the ordinary consciousness — for in fact it is this of which they are asserted.

This confusion, far from clarifying the problem of a beginning, only adds to the difficulties involved and tends completely to mislead; among the uninitiated it has given rise to the crudest misunderstandings.

¹¹⁹ Further, as regards the subjective determinateness of the ego in general, it is true that pure knowing frees the ego from the restricted meaning imposed on it by the insuperable opposition of its object.

But for this reason it would be superfluous at least to retain this subjective attitude and the determination of pure knowing as ego.

This determination, however, not only introduces the disturbing ambiguity mentioned, but closely examined it also remains a subjective ego.

The actual development of the science which starts from the ego shows that in that development the object has and retains the perennial character of an other for the ego, and that the ego which formed the starting point is, therefore, still entangled in the world of appearance ® and is not the pure knowing which has in truth overcome the opposition of consciousness.

¹²⁰ In this connection a further essential observation must be made, namely that although the ego could in itself or in principle [an sich] be characterised as pure knowing or as intellectual intuition and asserted as the beginning, we are not concerned in the science of logic with what is present only in principle or as something inner, but rather with the determinate reality in thought of what is inner and with the determinateness possessed by such an inner in this reality.

But what, at the beginning of the science, is actually present of intellectual intuition – or of the eternal, the divine, the absolute, if its object be so named – cannot be anything else than a first, immediate, simple determination.

Whatever richer name be given to it than is expressed by mere being, the consideration of such absolute must be restricted solely to the way in which it enters into our knowing as thought and is enunciated as such.

True, intellectual intuition is the forcible rejection of mediation and the ratiocinative, external reflection; but what it enunciates above and beyond simple immediacy is something concrete, something which contains within itself diverse determinations.

However, as we have remarked, the enunciation and exposition of such concrete beginning is a process of mediation which starts from one of the determinations and advances to the other, even though the latter returns to the first; it is a movement which at the same time may not be arbitrary or assertoric. Consequently, it is not the concrete something itself with which that exposition begins but only the simple immediacy from which the movement starts. And further, if something concrete is taken as the beginning, the conjunction of the determinations contained in it demand proof, and this is lacking.

¹²¹ If, therefore, in the expression of the absolute, or eternal, or God (and God has the absolutely undisputed right that the beginning be made with him) — if in the intuition or thought of these there is implied more than pure being — then this more must make its appearance in our knowing only as something thought, not as something imagined or figurately conceived; let what is present in intuition or figurate conception be as rich as it may, the determination which first emerges in knowing is simple, for only in what is simple is there nothing more than the pure beginning; only the immediate is simple, for only in the immediate has no advance yet been made from a one to an other.

Consequently, whatever is intended to be expressed or implied beyond being, in the richer forms of representing the absolute or God, this is in the beginning only an empty word and only being; this simple determination which has no other meaning of any kind, this emptiness, is therefore simply as such the beginning of philosophy.

¹²² This insight is itself so simple that this beginning as such requires no preparation or further introduction; and, indeed, these preliminary, external reflections about it were not so much intended to lead up to it as rather to eliminate all preliminaries.

General Division of Being

Being is determined:

1. As against another in general
2. As immanently self-determining
3. Setting aside the preliminary character of this division, it is the abstract indeterminateness and immediacy in which it must be the beginning.

According to the first determination, being is classified as distinct from essence, for later in its development it proves to be in its totality only one sphere of the Notion and to this sphere as moment, it opposes another sphere.

According to the second determination, it is the sphere within which fall the determinations and the entire movement of its reflection. Here, being will posit itself in three determinations:

1. Quality – as determinateness as such
2. Quantity, Magnitude – as sublated determinateness
3. Measure – as qualitatively determined quantity

¹²⁶ At this stage, this division is, as was remarked of these divisions generally in the Introduction, a preliminary statement; its determinations have first to arise from the movement of being itself and in so doing define and justify themselves.

As regards the divergence of this classification from the usual presentation of the categories, namely, as quantity, quality, relation and modality — these moreover with Kant are supposed to be only titles for his categories though they are, in fact, themselves categories, only more general ones — this calls for no special comment here, as the entire exposition will show a complete divergence from the usual arrangement and significance of the categories.

¹²⁷ This only perhaps can be remarked, that hitherto the determination of quantity has been made to precede quality and this as is mostly the case — for no given reason.

The beginning is made with being as such, therefore, with qualitative being. It is easily seen from a comparison of quality with quantity that the former by its nature is first. For quantity is quality which has already become negative;

Magnitude is the determinateness which is no longer one with being but is already differentiated from it, sublated quality which has become indifferent.

It includes the alterableness of being, although the category itself, namely Being, of which it is the determination, is not altered by it. The qualitative determinateness, on the other hand, is one with its being: it neither goes beyond it nor is internal to it, but is its immediate limitedness. Quality therefore, as the immediate determinateness, is primary and it is with it that the beginning must be made.

Measure is a relation, but not relation in general, for it is the specific relation between quality and quantity; the categories which Kant includes under relation will come up for consideration in quite another place.

Measure can also, if one wishes, be regarded as a modality; but since with Kant modality is supposed no longer to constitute a determination of the content, but to concern only the relation of the content to thought, to the subjective element, it is a quite heterogeneous relation and is not pertinent here.

The third determination of being falls within the section Quality, for as abstract immediacy it reduces itself to a single determinateness in relation to its other determinatenesses within its sphere.