The Law of Pure Distinction

c. The Law of Pure Distinction: the Inverted World

This second supersensible world is in this way the inverted world (verkehrte Welt). One aspect is already present in the first supersensible world. This is why it is the inverted form of this first.

The inner being is, thereby, in its character of appearance completed.

For the first supersensible world was only the immediate raising of the world of perception into the element of universality. It has its necessary counterpart in this world of perception, which still retains as its own the principle of change and alteration.

The first kingdom of laws dispenses with this principle, but receives it in the form of an inverted world.

¹⁵⁸ By the law of this inverted world, then, the selfsame in the first world is the unlike of itself, and the unlike in the first is equally unlike to itself, or it becomes like itself.

Expressed in determinate moments, this will assume the form that what by the law of the first is sweet, is, in this inner, inverted reality, sour; what is there black is here white.

What, by the law of the first, was north pole in the case of the magnet, is, in its other supersensible inner world (viz. in the earth), south pole; “while what was there south pole is here north pole.

Similarly, what by the first law is in the case of electricity the oxygen pole becomes in its other supersensible reality hydrogen pole; and conversely, what is there the pole of hydrogen becomes here the pole of oxygen. To take another sphere of experience: revenge on an enemy is, according to the primitive immediate law, the supreme satisfaction of injured individuality.

This law, however – that of standing up against one who does not treat me as a substantial self, showing him that I am a substantial being, and even doing away with him as a reality – this law is transmuted by the principle of the other world into the very opposite, the reinstatement of myself as the true reality through the removal of the alien hostile being is turned into self-destruction.

If now this inversion, which is brought out in the punishment of crime, is made into a law, it also is again only the law of a world which has an inverted supersensuous world standing in antithesis to itself, where that which is despised in the former comes to honour, and that which in the former is honoured meets with contempt. The punishment which, by the law of the former, disgraces a man and annihilates him, turns round in its inverted world into the pardoning grace which preserves his being and brings him to honour.

¹⁵⁹ Superficiully, this inverted world is the antithesis of the first world in the sense that it:

• has the latter outside itself
• repels that world from itself as an inverted reality

The one is the sphere of appearance, while the other is the inherent being; that the one is the world as it is for an other, the other again the world as it is for itself.

In this way, to use the previous examples, what tastes sweet is properly, or inwardly in the thing, sour; or what is north pole in the case of the actual magnet belonging to the sphere of appearance, would be, in the inner or essential being, south pole.

What is shown to be oxygen pole in electricity as a phenomenon, would be hydrogen pole in the case of electricity not failing within the sphere of appearance.

Or again, an act which in appearance is a crime would in its inner nature be capable of being really good – a bad act may have a good intention; punishment is only in appearance punishment; in itself or in another world it might well be, for the criminal, a benefit.

But such oppositions of inner and outer, appearance and supersensible, in the sense of two sorts of reality, are no longer to be found here. The differences repelled are not divided anew and assigned to two substances such as would support them and lend them a separate subsistence, the result of which would be that understanding would leave the inner region, and fall back again on its previous position.

The one aspect or substance would be once more the world of perception, where the one of those two laws would carry on its existence, and in opposition to it an inner world, just such a sensible world as the first, but in the sphere of ideas; one that could not be indicated, seen, heard, and tasted as a sensible world, and yet would be thought of as such a sensible world.

But in point of fact, if the one element set up is a perceived reality, and its inherent being, as its inverted form, is at the same time a sensuously represented element, then sour, which would be the inherent nature of the sweet thing, is a real thing just as much as the latter, viz., a sour thing; black, which would be the inherent nature of white, is the actual black; the north pole, which is the true reality of the south pole, is the north pole present in the same magnet; the oxygen pole, the inherent nature of the pole of hydrogen, is the given oxygen pole of the same voltaic pile.

The actual crime, however. finds its inversion and its inherent nature qua possibility, in the intention as such, but not in a good intention; for the truth of intention is simply the deed itself.

The crime, so far as its content goes, recoils upon itself. Its finds its inversion in actual punishment.

This is the reconciliation of the law with the reality set up against it in crime.

Finally, the actual punishment carries its inverted reality with it in such a way that it is a kind of realization of the law, whereby the activity, which the law exercises in the form of punishment, is cancelled in the process, a manner of realization through which the law, from being actively operative, becomes again quiescent and authoritative, and the conflict of individuality with it, and of it with individuality, is extinguished.

¹⁶⁰ From the idea, then, of inversion which constitutes the essential nature of one aspect of the supersensible world, we must dissociate the sensuous idea of keeping distinctions substantively fixed in a different element that sustains them.

This absolute notion of distinction must be set forth and apprehended purely as inner distinction, self-repulsion of the selfsame as selfsame, and likeness of the unlike as unlike.

We have to think pure flux, opposition within opposition itself, or Contradiction. For in the distinction, which is an internal distinction, the opposite is not only one of two factors – if so, it would not be an opposite, but a bare existent – it is the opposite of an opposite, or the other is itself directly and immediately present within it.

I put the opposite here and the other, of which it is the opposite, there; that is, I place the opposite on one side, taking it by itself without the other.

Just on that account, however; since I have here the opposite all by itself, it is the opposite of its own self, that is, it has in point of fact the other immediately within itself.

Thus the supersensible world, which is the inverted world, has at the same time reached out beyond the other world and has in itself that other; it is to itself conscious of being inverted (für sich verkehrte), i.e. it is the inverted form of itself; it is that world itself and its opposite in a single unity. Only thus is it distinction as internal distinction, or distinction per se; in other words, only thus is it in the form of Infinity.