Andy Blunden

“ Pure Being is the world an instant before you see it, it is the world through the eyes of a new born baby. Like the Zen teaching that demands of the devotee absolute awareness, absolute "thoughtlessness", it is, for consciousness, an unattainable moment - even though it is equally the beginning of all consciousness!
In the words of Jean Piaget:
"at first the universe consists in mobile and plastic perceptual images centred about personal activity. ”

“ Systematicity is a property of the objective world. The adequacy of countless concepts of systematicity in Nature has been proved by practice. However, with Marx, the concept of system in philosophy was transformed from an absolute to a relative. As marvelous a creation as is Hegel's system of the Absolute Idea, it is absurd to suppose that we can build up a systematic Notion of the world by perfecting such a system, or at least that a single writer can do so within the scope of a single book. ”

“ Being - Notion - Absolute Idea The world first appears in thought as "one damn thing after another", immediate perception. Laws and tendencies, form and content, cause and effect, etc., are all present in this world which presents itself to us, but these moments are not yet disclosed, they lie "behind" Being. ”

“ Reciprocity is undoubtedly the proximate truth of the relation of cause and effect, and stands, so to say, on the threshold of the notion; but on that very ground, supposing that our aim is a thoroughly comprehensive idea, we should not rest content with applying this relation. If we get no further than studying a given content under the point of view of reciprocity, we are taking up an attitude which leaves matters utterly incomprehensible. We are left with a mere dry fact; and the call for mediation, which is the chief motive in applying the relation of causality, is still unanswered. ”

“ Quality - Quantity - Measure The Subdivisions of Being are Quality, Quantity and Measure. Hegel says:
Quality is, in the first place, the character identical with being: so identical that a thing ceases to be what it is, if it loses its quality. Quantity, on the contrary, is the character external to being, and does not affect the being at all. Thus, e.g. a house remains what it is, whether it be greater or smaller; and red remains red, whether it be brighter or darker. Measure, the third grade of being, which is the unity of the first two, is a qualitative quantity. ”

“ When we have grasped the specific contradiction which makes the thing what it really is, then we have perceived it, we have recognised what it is. Not before then. This whole development of the Logic is required to prove this, but in this development of Reflection from Identity to Ground, Hegel has focused on the identity of Being and the Notion and found contradiction at the heart and kernel of the matter. Being can find its Other only in Notions which have their Ground in this dialectical unfolding which leads to inherent, essential contradiction. ”

“ Actuality is the unity, become immediate, of essence with existence, or of inward with outward. The utterance of the actual is the actual itself: so that in this utterance it remains just as essential, and only is essential, in so far as it is immediate external existence.
We have ere this met Being and Existence as forms of the immediate. Being is, in general, unreflected immediacy and transition into another. Existence is immediate unity of being and reflection: hence appearance: it comes from the ground, and falls to the ground. ”

“ The development of Being however, is just the passing of one aspect after another, one fact or statistic or mental picture after another without mutual contact or effect; Being is like a diary as compared to a real autobiography, like things appear when you have no idea about what's going on. Each moment passes away and is replaced by another. But in its development, Being accumulates the "factual material" which is to form the basis of reflection and the formation of conceptual knowledge. ”

“ A moment's reflection will show both that consciousness could not take a single step forward without the conviction of identity but equally that the "maxim of Identity" is wrong, that is, that it is a limited, finite truth that will fall over at the first hurdle. ”

“ When we act in the world as humans (rather than simply as lumps of hydrocarbon) we act both as part of the world, immediate actors and agents, driven by unconscious urges and the ordinary forces of Nature, and, as an Other, as conscious, social individuals expressing our theoretical Notion of the world by consciously negating it, translating an idea of the world as it ought to be and could be, and putting it into the world, changing the world to bring it into line with our more or less well-founded Notion of it.
Practice is action of a material subject in the world, according to its Notion. ”

“ The Essence of the Women's Liberation Movement The Essence of the modern Woman's Liberation movement is the value of woman's labour: in the genesis of the Women's movement the concept of Woman goes through a series of contradictory forms: Mother, God's Police, Woman as Equal, Woman as Separate, Woman as Exploited, etc., etc. It is the job of the historian of the Women's Movement to trace and understand the development of these concepts of Woman, which spring from the development of the productive forces and social relations in society as a whole. ”

“ Being is the immediate, that is, un-mediated, given in itself and not by means of something else, in a round about way. But right from the outset, Hegel makes it clear that "neither in Heaven nor on Earth" is there anything that is not equally mediated as immediate. "Being is immediate" is not an absolute, but a relative truth. To elevate it into an absolute (like the ancients and like the gurus of "awareness") is one relative moment or stage of the Absolute Idea. ”

“ The terms in Essence are always mere pairs of correlatives, and yet not absolutely reflected in themselves: hence in essence the actual unity of the notion is not yet realised, but only postulated by reflection. Essence - which is Being coming into mediation with itself through the negativity of itself - is self-relatedness, only in so far as it is relation to an Other - this Other however coming to view at first not as something which is, but as postulated and hypothesised. ”

“ It is the return of the Notion to Being, the unity of Being and its opposite, the Notion.
There is always a "gap" between what we set out to do and what we actually do, between our theoretical idea and our practical idea. ”

“ The movement of Being is this dialectic of quantity and quality. It is this passage of a quantity beyond its limits which throws forward the new quality and provides the motive force of contradictions which arise in the process of reflection. ”

“ The Appearance of Capitalism The appearance of capitalism is money - and money which makes money in the form of interest-bearing capital; wages, the apparent "fair day's pay for a fair day's work"; the rule of the market over people, the relation of person to person in the form of commodity-to-commodity: all appearances, real illusions, forms which have a real content.
Actuality (Cause & Effect) From Appearance, we have all the phenomena of the thing and in Actuality we see the truth of phenomena with all the inner and outer forms equally immediate and essential. ”

“ Diversity (Essential Identity) "A = A" only makes sense even in the strictest and valid application of formal logic if the first A is indeed not the second A. It is impossible to utter the law other than by making such a distinction!
To ask 'How Identity comes to Difference' assumes that Identity as mere abstract Identity is something of itself, and Difference also something else equally independent ... Diversity has, like Identity, been transformed into a maxim: 'Everything is various or different': or 'There are no two things completely like each other. ”

“ This immediate perception, or the world "in-itself", we call Being.
Human practice and individual consciousness may be said to "reconstruct" the world in the form of the mental images we have of it. These "mental images" are not just "snap-shots" of the various objects and processes, but the laws and concepts such as form, likeness, causality, means and end, genus and species, etc., etc., by which we both recognise and understand reality and reproduce it in our practice. ”

“ That which begins, as yet is not, it is only on the way to being. The being contained in the beginning is, therefore, a being which removed itself from non-being or sublates it as something opposed to it. [Science of Logic, With what Must Science Begin?]
And Hegel here shows how this internal contradiction which is discovered in a concept (in this case the concept of "Being") is its "motive force", which drives the concept towards its own negation, i.e. Being is Nothing, is therefore Becoming. ”

“ It is true that the thing contains reflection, but its negativity is, in the first instance, extinguished in its immediacy; but because its ground is essentially reflection, its immediacy sublates itself and the thing makes itself into positedness.
Secondly, then, it is Appearance. Appearance is that which the thing is in itself, or its truth. But this merely posited Existence which is reflected into otherness is equally the transcending of its itself in its infinitude; to the world of appearance is opposed the world that is reflected into itself, the world of essence. ”

“ The more developed the form of movement and interaction, the more symbiosis and interdependence, then the more manifest is the reflection of the properties and changes of one body in that of the other.
The microbiological world of enzymes and viruses is a vast tangle of processes mirroring one another, of reflection. The evolution of species in the biosphere is in a way, the reflection of the inorganic world, the evolution of one species, the reflection of its organic and inorganic environment. ”

“ A work of art that wants the right form is for that very reason no right or true work of art: and it is a bad way of excusing an artist, to say that the content of his works is good and even excellent, though they want the right form. Real works of art are those where content and form exhibit a thorough identity. ”

“ Being - Essence - Notion Between Being (Book I) - immediate perception, and the Notion (Book III) - the conception of immediate perception in terms of notions, lies Essence (Book II) . Essence is to do with how something of which we do not yet have a Notion enters consciousness - how we first form a notion of something. Being is about Notion-less perception; Essence is about the genesis or Becoming of the Notion; the Notion is about the development or concretisation of a concept.
We can only begin to grasp something new in terms of the concepts we already have. ”

“ Being in Natural and Social Movements A social movement exists (in Hegelian language) "in-itself" before it finds any kind of voice, let alone becomes conscious of itself and organised under its own banner and program. Before there is a working class, there are many thousands of wage workers. Using the methods of bourgeois sociologists we can identify wage workers or any other category that is subject to measurement as a "category", but this utterly abstract procedure in no way demonstrates the existence of a "thing". ”

“ It's a demonstration coming down the road", i.e. not a riot, for example, then we continue to perceive the event, make judgements, etc., on the basis of the same, past perception. We cannot time after time, instant after instant re-look at the approaching crowd as if we had never seen it before. (We can and must of course - that is the philosophy of Being, and it has its relative truth, too, but we have to move forward, we need to know what it is in truth and must move beyond mere immediacy) . Thus we again and again assert the maxim of identity, in order to go beyond it. ”

“ But the being that appears and essential being, simply stand in relation to one another. Thus Existence is, thirdly, Essential Relation; what appears manifests what is essential, and this is in its Appearance. ”

“ In other words, Being becomes only because we are also not of the world, because we have separated ourselves from the world and are its Other.
The Notion is the concept we have of the world - the Other of the world. It is abstract in the sense that each Notion corresponds to but one aspect of the world, just as each moment of Being, each event, passing impression or statistic, is abstract, meaningless and disconnected. ”

“ Being has not vanished: but, firstly, Essence, as simple self-relation, is Being, and secondly as regards its one-sided characteristic of immediacy, Being is deposed to a mere negative, to a seeming or reflected light - Essence accordingly is Being thus reflecting light into itself. [Shorter Logic § 112]
Being has not vanished in reflection, but is negated. In reflection we have the meeting of two different things (Being and Notion) , but Being meets not a stranger, but itself, as an Other, which is mediated, past Being. ”

“ Marx traces the contradictory development of value through various forms within pre-capitalist societies, reaching its fullest development as the money-form in the society of generalised commodity production, capitalism. The genesis of value constitutes the Essence of Capital. ”

“ The first premise of human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature. ”

“ The contradiction which makes its appearance in opposition, is only the developed nothing that is contained in identity and that appears in the expression that the law of identity says nothing. This negation further determines itself into difference and opposition, which now is the posited contradiction. But it is one of the fundamental prejudices of logic as hitherto understood and of ordinary thinking that contradiction is not so characteristically essential and immanent a determination as identity; but in fact, ... contradiction is the root of all movement and vitality ”

“ A new concept of something cannot spring right out of immediate perception, it must be mediated through a whole process through things we already know about, and this process is Essence. To ascertain the essence of things, what lies behind the immediate, we begin by recognising things, the concepts of which we already have in our brains. ”

“ In the beginning, any concept, social movement, etc., is indistinguishable from its whole social and historical context. The germ of a movement lies in the very conditions of its birth.
This stage of a social entity when it exists only in the most abstract sense of being a category of individuals is called "Being". It's first act will be precisely the recognition that it exists but it is Nothing. ”

“ Instead Hegel identifies the real beginning of the science: in Being, in Being in which subject and object are indissolubly immersed together, from which reflection emerges from the realisation that Being is Nothing, from absolute awareness which is also absolute unconsciousness. ”

“ The truth of being is essence. Being is the immediate. Since knowing has for its goal knowledge of the true, knowledge of what being is in and for itself, it does not stop at the immediate and its determinations, but penetrates it on the supposition that behind this being there is something else, something other than being itself, that this background constitutes the truth of being. ”

“ Of course, we cannot here go into either the actual physical nature of man, or into the natural conditions in which man finds himself geological, orohydrographical, climatic and so on. The writing of history always sets out from these natural bases and their modification in the course of history through the action of people. [First Premises of Materialist Method, Marx]
Here Hegel demonstrates this method in relation to his subject, Logic. The logical category of Being cannot be further determined or it is no longer "Being", but something else, some determination of Being. ”