Andy Blunden

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Hegel's analysis of reflection in terms of the correspondence between phenomena and their essence is founded on his critique of formal logic. It is the most difficult section of the Logic, and in it Hegel explains his concept of contradiction.
It is often the case in reading The Logic, the key to understanding a section is found in the last paragraph of the preceding section:
Measure is implicitly Essence; and its process consists in realising what it is implicitly. The ordinary consciousness conceives things as being, and studies them in quality, quantity, and measure. ”

“ 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 ”

“ We are able to "make a point of" this unlikeness, we find that this unlikeness is not just accidental or passing, but essential:
Difference implicit is essential difference, the Positive and the negative: and that is this way. The Positive is the identical self-relation in such a way as not to be the Negative, and the Negative is the different by itself so as not to be the Positive. Thus either has an existence of its own in proportion as it is not the other. The one is made visible in the other, and is only in so far as that other is. Essential difference is therefore Opposition ”

“ A particular flower has no knowledge of the Sun; but it turns towards the Sun, reflecting its orientation, because of eons of evolution of the organic world under sunlight. In trying to understand that process, we shall find the actual mechanics by means of which the flower finds the Sun and turns itself towards it very complicated, and invisible without very developed science, and actually of very little use in understanding the process of photokinesis ”

“ 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. ”

“ Water is water whether it be hot or cold, and whatever the amount of solubles it contains. Things continually change, and like the frog who gets boiled because it does not notice the increasing temperature of the water, we "lay aside" the quantitative changes in Being, and say "A= A". Water is good for drinking, making concrete or irrigating our crops whatever its temperature and colour. ”

“ Here, properties in the organism which are the outcome of a long process of adaptation by the species are manifested actively by the individual in the immediate influence of other bodies in the environment the like of which have been present during this period of development. The concept of reflection, as the correspondence of mental images with the material world which is the source of those images, is the basis of the materialist approach to cognition. ”

“ The refutation of a philosophy, therefore, only means that its barriers are crossed, and its special principle reduced to a factor in the completer principle that follows. [Shorter Logic § 119n]
Reflection in Nature and Society As noted at the start of this section, reflection is a universal property of matter, the mutual interaction of every particle in the Universe with every, which other could be said to constitute the "materiality" of the world. ”