Logic is the science of thinking in general

42
Ancient metaphysics had in this respect a higher conception of thinking than is current
today. For it based itself on the fact that the knowledge of things obtained through
thinking is alone what is really true in them, that is, things not in their immediacy but as
first raised into the form of thought, as things thought. Thus this metaphysics believed
that thinking (and its determinations) is not anything alien to the object, but rather is its
essential nature, or that things and the thinking of them our language too expresses
their kinship are explicitly in full agreement, thinking in its immanent determinations
and the true nature of things forming one and the same content.
43
But reflective understanding took possession of philosophy. We must know exactly what
is meant by this expression which moreover is often used as a slogan; in general it stands
for the understanding as abstracting, and hence as separating and remaining fixed in its
separations. Directed against reason, it behaves as ordinary common sense and imposes
its view that truth rests on sensuous reality, that thoughts are only thoughts, meaning that
it is sense perception which first gives them filling and reality and that reason left to its
own resources engenders only figments of the brain. In this self-renunciation on the part
of reason, the Notion of truth is lost; it is limited to knowing only subjective truth, only
phenomena, appearances, only something to which the nature of the object itself does not
correspond: knowing has lapsed into opinion.
44
However, this turn taken by cognition, which appears as a loss and a retrograde step, is
based on something more profound on which rests the elevation of reason into the loftier
spirit of modern philosophy. The basis of that universally held conception is, namely, to
be sought in the insight into the necessary conflict of the determinations of the
understanding with themselves. The reflection already referred to is this, to transcend the
concrete immediate object and to determine it and separate it. But equally it must
transcend these its separating determinations and straightway connect them. It is at the
stage of this connecting of the determinations that their conflict emerges. This connecting
activity of reflection belongs in itself to reason and the rising above those determinations
which attains to an insight into their conflict is the great negative step towards the true
Notion of reason. But the insight, when not thorough-going, commits the mistake of
thinking that it is reason which is in contradiction with itself; it does not recognise that

the contradiction is precisely the rising of reason above the limitations of the
understanding and the resolving of them, Cognition, instead of taking from this stage the
final step into the heights, has fled from the unsatisfactoriness of the categories of the
understanding to sensuous existence, imagining that in this it possesses what is solid and
self-consistent. But on the other hand, since this knowledge is self-confessedly
knowledge only of appearances, the unsatisfactoriness of the latter is admitted, but at the
same time presupposed: as much as to say that admittedly, we have no proper knowledge
of things-in-themselves but we do have a proper knowledge of them within the sphere of
appearances, as if, so to speak, only the kind of objects were different, and one kind,
namely things-in-themselves, did not fall within the scope of our knowledge but the other
kind, phenomena, did. This is like attributing to someone a correct perception, with the
rider that nevertheless he is incapable of perceiving what is true but only what is false.
Absurd as this would be, it would not be more so than a true knowledge which did not
know the object as it is in itself.
45
The criticism of the forms of the understanding has had the result already mentioned, that
these forms do not apply to things-in-themselves. This can have no other meaning than
that these forms are in themselves something untrue. But then if they are allowed to
remain valid for subjective reason and experience, the criticism has not produced any
alteration in them: they are left in the same shape for the subject knower as they formerly
possessed for the object. If, however, they are inadequate for the thing-in-itself, still less
must the understanding to which they are supposed to belong put up with them and rest
content with them. If they cannot be determinations of the thing-in-itself, still less can
they be determinations of the understanding to which one ought at least to concede the
dignity of a thing-in-itself. The determinations of finite and infinite conflict in the same
way, whether they are applied to time and space, to the world, or are determinations
within the mind just as black and white produce grey whether they are mixed on a
canvas or on the palette. If our conception of the world is dissolved by the transference to
it of the determinations of infinite and finite, still more is spirit itself, which contains both
of them, inwardly self-contradictory and self-dissolving: it is not the nature of the
material or the object to which they are applied or in which they occur that can make a
difference for it is only through those determinations and in accordance with them that
the object contains the contradiction.
67
That which enables the Notion to advance itself is the already mentioned negative which
it possesses within itself; it is this which constitutes the genuine dialectical moment.
Dialectic in this way acquires an entirely different significance from what it had when it
was considered as a separate part of Logic and when its aim and standpoint were, one
may say, completely misunderstood. Even the Platonic dialectic, in the Parmenides itself
and elsewhere even more directly, on the one hand, aims only at abolishing and refuting
assertions through themselves and on the other hand, has for its result simply
nothingness.

Dialectic is commonly regarded as an external, negative activity which does not pertain
to the subject matter itself, having its ground in mere conceit as a subjective itch for
unsettling and destroying what is fixed and substantial, or at least having for its result
nothing but the worthlessness of the object dialectically considered.
68
Kant rated dialectic higher and this is among his greatest merits for he freed it from
the seeming arbitrariness which it possesses from the standpoint of ordinary thought and
exhibited it as a necessary function of reason. Because dialectic was held to be merely the
art of practising deceptions and producing illusions, the assumption was made forthwith
that it is only a spurious game, the whole of its power resting solely on concealment of
the deceit and that its results are obtained only surreptitiously and are a subjective
illusion. True, Kant's expositions in the antinomies of pure reason, when closely
examined as they will be at length in the course of this work, do not indeed deserve any
great praise; but the general idea on which he based his expositions and which he
vindicated, is the objectivity of the illusion and the necessity of the contradiction which
belongs to the nature of thought determinations: primarily, it is true, with the significance
that these determinations are applied by reason to things in themselves; but their nature is
precisely what they are in reason and with reference to what is intrinsic or in itself.
This result, grasped in its positive aspect, is nothing else but the inner negativity of the
determinations as their self-moving soul, the principle of all natural and spiritual life.
But if no advance is made beyond the abstract negative aspect of dialectic, the result is
only the familiar one that reason is incapable of knowing the infinite; a strange result for
since the infinite is the Reasonable it asserts that reason is incapable of knowing
the Reasonable.
147
Another contributory reason for the repugnance to the proposition about being and
nothing must be mentioned; this is that the result of considering being and nothing, as
expressed in the statement: being and nothing are one and the same, is incomplete. The
emphasis is laid chiefly on their being one and the same, as in judgments generally,
where it is the predicate that first states what the subject is. Consequently, the sense
seems to be that the difference is denied, although at the same time it appears directly in
the proposition; for this enunciates both determinations, being and nothing, and contains
them as distinguished. At the same time, the intention cannot be that abstraction should
be made from them and only the unity retained. Such a meaning would self-evidently be
one-sided, because that from which abstraction is to be made is equally present and
named in the proposition. Now in so far as the proposition: being and nothing are the
same, asserts the identity of these determinations, but, in fact, equally contains them both
as distinguished, the proposition is self-contradictory and cancels itself out. Bearing this
in mind and looking at the proposition more closely, we find that it has a movement
which involves the spontaneous vanishing of the proposition itself. But in thus vanishing,

there takes place in it that which is to constitute its own peculiar content, namely,
becoming.
148
The proposition thus contains the result, it is this in its own self. But the fact to which we
must pay attention here is the defect that the result is not itself expressed in the
proposition; it is an external reflection which discerns it therein. In this connection we
must, at the outset, make this general observation, namely, that the proposition in the
form of a judgment is not suited to express speculative truths; a familiarity with this fact
is likely to remove many misunderstandings of speculative truths. Judgment is an
identical relation between subject and predicate; in it we abstract from the fact that the
subject has a number of determinatenesses other than that of the predicate, and also that
the predicate is more extensive than the subject. Now if the content is speculative, the
non-identical aspect of subject and predicate is also an essential moment, but in the
judgment this is not expressed. It is the form of simple judgment, when it is used to
express speculative results, which is very often responsible for the paradoxical and
bizarre light in which much of recent philosophy appears to those who are not familiar
with speculative thought.
149
To help express the speculative truth, the deficiency is made good in the first place by
adding the contrary proposition: being and nothing are not the same, which is also
enunciated as above. But thus there arises the further defect that these propositions are
not connected, and therefore exhibit their content only in the form of an antinomy
whereas their content refers to one and the same thing, and the determinations which are
expressed in the two propositions are supposed to be in complete union-a union which
can only be stated as an unrest of incompatibles, as a movement. The commonest injustice
done to a speculative content is to make it one-sided, that is, to give prominence only to
one of the propositions into which it can be resolved. It cannot then be denied that this
proposition is asserted; but the statement is just as false as it is true, for once one of the
propositions is taken out of the speculative content, the other must at least be equally
considered and stated. Particular mention must be made here of that, so to speak,
unfortunate word, 'unity'. Unity, even more than identity, expresses a subjective
reflection; it is taken especially as the relation which arises from comparison, from
external reflection. When this reflection finds the same thing in two different objects, the
resultant unity is such that there is presupposed the complete indifference to it of the
objects themselves which are compared, so that this comparing and unity does not
concern the objects themselves and is a procedure and a determining external to them.
Unity, therefore, expresses wholly abstract sameness and sounds all the more blatantly
paradoxical the more the terms of which it is asserted show themselves to be sheer
opposites. So far then, it would be better to, say only unseparatedness and inseparability,
but then the affirmative aspect of the relation of the whole would not find expression.
150

Thus the whole true result which we have here before us is becoming, which is not
merely the one-sided or abstract unity of being and nothing. It consists rather in this
movement, that pure being is immediate and simple, and for that very reason is equally
pure nothing, that there is a difference between them, but a difference which no less
sublates itself and is not. The result, therefore, equally asserts the difference of being and
nothing, but as a merely fancied or imagined difference.