Andy Blunden

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ Here Hegel is explaining Essence as the history of how a notion of something comes into being. In the first place there is just immediate consciousness "one damn thing after another" and then we recognise various things which do not simply pass away to be replaced by something else like unconnected images one after another, but something that lies behind Being. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When this movement is pictured as the path of knowing, then this beginning with being, and the development that sublates it, reaching essence as a mediated result, appears to be an activity of knowing external to being, and irrelevant to being's own nature. ”

“ Everything, it is said, has an Essence; that is, things really are not what they immediately show themselves. There is something more to be done than merely rove from one quality to another, and merely to advance from qualitative to quantitative, and vice versa: there is a permanence in things, and that permanence is in the first instance their Essence. ”

“ Essence in Natural and Social Developments When a social movement first finds a voice, it speaks not with its own voice, but in the language of concepts which history has given it. Thus the first working class organisations were the guilds inherited from feudalism. Before speaking through a mass revolutionary socialist party, the workers build their own bourgeois parliamentary party. ”

“ Essence is in fact the process of development of Reflection which leads to the Notion. Reflection begins with Identity, the identification or recognition of a thing. This identity is upset and undergoes a contradictory development. This development is called Essence.
We will return to Reflection and the various subjects Hegel expounds under this category in the next chapter, after a consideration of the subdivisions of Appearance and Actuality.
Appearance (Form & Content) The movement of essence is in general the becoming of the Notion. ”

“ Actuality is the process of concretising the picture of the thing with all its possibilities and interconnections, of understanding of a thing in terms of all the conditions of its existence, the factors determining its growth, etc. ”

“ The sphere of Essence thus turns out to be a still imperfect combination of immediacy and mediation. In it every term is expressly invested with the character of self-relatedness, while yet at the same time one is forced beyond it. It has Being - reflected being, a being in which another shows, and which shows in another. And so it is also the sphere in which the contradiction, still implicit in the sphere of Being, is made explicit. ... [The Shorter Logic, § 114, The Unessential]
The theory of Essence is the most difficult branch of Logic. ”

“ The Development of Essence In the sphere of Essence one category does not pass into another, but refers to another merely. In Being, the forms of reference is purely due to our reflection on what takes place: but it is the special and proper characteristic of Essence. In the sphere of Being, when somewhat becomes another, the somewhat has vanished. ”

“ As a movement grows, its growth and continued existence is subject to conditions, it goes in fits and starts. As the process becomes stronger, it does not simply overcome conditions, but the conditions themselves become part of the process and development becomes irresistible. This the stage of Actuality, the eve of being in and for itself (the Notion) .
The Essence of Capitalism The Essence of capitalism is the production of surplus value. ”

“ Each view or essence is not destroyed by its negation, but overcome, retained and superseded by a still deeper essence, such as in the history of astronomy from flat Earth to geocentric to heliocentric to infinite unbounded Universe, to the Big Bang, etc. ”

“ The relation is the still-imperfect union of reflection-into-otherness and reflection-into-self; the perfect interpenetration of both is Actuality. [Science of Logic Section Two of the Doctrine of Essence]
The Development of Appearance Appearance is the dialectic of Form & Content, or to put it another way, Form & Content is the "essence of appearance". Appearance is firstly the truth of existence, realised as essential relation. Appearance develops in a process with the build-up of a multiplicity of forms, all standing in contradictory relationship to their content. ”

“ The problem or aim of philosophy is often represented as the ascertainment of the essence of things: a phrase which only means that things, instead of being left in their immediacy, must be shown to be mediated by, or based upon, something else. The immediate Being of things is thus conceived under the image of a rind or curtain behind which the Essence is hidden. ”

“ Freedom and Necessity This understanding of the thing, at which the dialectical development of the opposite tendencies within a thing has become quite comprehensive, brings thought to the Notion of the thing, the conception of the object as a unity of opposites - to the "freedom of the Notion".
When anything is said to be necessary, the first question we ask is: Why? Anything necessary accordingly comes before us as something due to a supposition, the result of certain antecedents. ”

“ Form and content are a pair of terms frequently employed by the reflective understanding, especially with a habit of looking on the content as the essential and independent, the form on the contrary as the unessential and dependent. ”

“ It is called "mediated" knowledge, because we use concepts to perceive Being, and these concepts have themselves their origin in Being. We recognise a scoundrel because "we've met his type before". Thus Essence is the movement of Being itself, rather than something external to, foreign to Being. ”

“ It is this relation, therefore, in which reflection usually takes shelter when the conviction grows that things can no longer be studied satisfactorily from a causal point of view, on account of the infinite progress already spoken of. ”

“ Here Hegel points out that in Being, things come and go, rise and fall, and pass into one another - the opposites are independent of one another, whereas in Essence the opposites contradict one another and exist in contrast or opposition to one another. As a concept of the thing reaches its limit, and is transcended, it is superseded by its Other. ”

“ Frequently, social movements go through a process of transforming from one form to another, of "shedding form" until finding the form which is true to its content. The converse process takes place when we are trying to determine what something is ”

“ In the course of time, we come to know the content of this form and in fact, the content manifests itself; the enthusiastic new recruit becomes a real member, occupying a specific position in the spectrum of political opinion in the organisation, exhibits certain strengths and weaknesses and responds to events developing along a particular line which not only was not previously visible, but could not be said to have previously existed. ”

“ What seems at first inessential, accidental, not bearing on the question at issue at all, may prove in fact to be essential, but can only be so perceived as we run into contradictions and are forced to penetrate deeper. ”