Brandom
9/28/2010
Force and Understanding Notes
Outline of Force and Understanding:
I. Overview [132]-[135]
II. Force [136]-142]
a) Force and its Expression [136]-[137]
b) Independent Opposing Forces [138]-[140]
c) Reciprocal Action, the Play of Forces [141]-[142]
II. Law, the Supersensible World, and Explanation [143]-[155].
This is the First Supersensible World (FSW).
III. The Inverted World [156]-[160].
This is the Second Supersensible World (SSW) and the First Inverted World
(FIW).
IV. The Infinite [161-165].
This is the Third Supersensible World (TSW) and the Second Inverted World
(SIW).
Expository plan for seminar:
Start with FSW, as in (3). Then look back to the discussion of Force and Law, to get the FSW as
a “calm realm of laws.”
1.
The topics of this section are:
a) Theoretical entities, that is, ones that are only accessible inferentially. We have moved
to these from the sense universals (observables) of Perception, where we discovered that
their inferential articulation is essential to them. Now we consider universals purged of
that immediacy.
Note that in discussing theoretical, postulated (posited), entities generally in terms of the concept
of force we see the first example of Hegel’s conceptual allegory (cf. the characters in A
Pilgrim’s Progress). The discussion of force is the first place it is convenient to discuss my
allegory methodology for reading the Phenomenology. Must read claims at two levels:
 Specifically, about Newtonian force, and
 Generically, about theoretical concepts and entities.
a. is allegorical, or within the allegory.
b. Is what it is allegorical for, outside, in the target of the
allegory.
Thus, e.g. “expression of force” is observable consequence of theoretical states of affairs, and
“play of forces” is interaction of purely theoretical states (e.g. not with observables). Q: What of
“opposing forces”?
b) The status of modal claims, above all, statements of laws. These make explicit the
inferential-conceptual articulation of universals: the relations of material consequence
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and incompatibility that articulate their determinate content. In earlier notes I emphasize
that there are two things at issue here: alethic modal relations such as laws and
semantogenic relations. Hegel is, of course, identifying these—as Kant did before him,
and Sellars would do after him.
c) Holism
2.
From Force to Law:
a) Force and its Expression: The first dialectic begins with the fact that a single
unobservable state of affairs has a multiplicity of observable effects, consequences,
manifestations, or expressions. “[I]t is necessary that Force...express itself” [136]. Here
the point is that we must infer to the force from its observable expressions. But what is
responsible for the variety of expressions? Other forces. This moves us to:
b) Independent opposing forces: It must be the relation of one unobservable state of affairs
to some other unobservable state of affairs that is responsible for the diversity of
manifestations that it has, the variety of actualities that can express the possibility that it
is. “What appears as an 'other' and solicits Force, both to expression and to return to
itself, proves to be itself Force...”[138] From our phenomenologically lofty vantage point
we can see that although at this second stage progress has been made in addressing the
felt difficulty with which we began, that, namely, of accounting for the diversity of
expression, the way in which each single unobservable unfolds itself into a variety of
effects, a difficulty remains. For the various forces or theoretical objects are conceived as
"wholly independent forces" ([138], see also references to independence in [140] and
[141]). . What the notion of opposing forces has revealed is the essential
interdependence of the various theoretical postulates that a theory endorses. Explicit
attention now shifts from the moment of mutual independence of theoretical entities to
their reciprocal action--the 'play of forces'.
c) The play of forces: The lesson is a holist one: [T]heir essence rather consists simply and
solely in this, that each is solely through the other...[141]

Where we started out considering what is immediately given to us in perception as an
object of knowledge, we are now obliged to consider its role as a means by which we can
come to know about something that is not itself immediate. Instead of focusing on the
noninferential process from which it perceptual knowledge results, we focus on the
inferences it supports: looking downstream rather than upstream. Doing this is thinking
of immediacy as mediating our access to theoretical objects, by providing premises from
which facts about them can be inferred. Since they point beyond themselves inferentially,
besides being whatever they are immediately, noninferentially observable states of affairs
serve also to manifest or reveal other states of affairs, including theoretical ones, which
are only accessible by means of such inferential mediation.

This is the relation Hegel talks about under the heading of “force and its expression”
[Äußerung]—the relation, namely, between a theoretical object and its observable
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manifestations. Expression, making the implicit explicit, is one of Hegel’s master
concepts. It is (among other things) his preferred way of thinking about the relation
between what we are thinking about and what we think about it.

The first development of the crudest conception consists in the move to considering
“independent opposing forces” and then “reciprocal action or the play of forces”.1 It is
the dawning appreciation of the holistic nature of the inferences that connect us to
theoretical objects. Since our only access to these objects is by means of their inferential
connections, our grasp of the content of one theoretical claim cannot be independent of
our grasp of other contents that stand to it in material inferential and incompatibility
relations.

the fact that forces are only mediately (inferentially) accessible to us, while their
expressions can be immediately (noninferentially) accessible to us must not be taken to
imply that these two sorts of thing are intelligible independently of one another.

So we consider what happens when the restriction to observable objects is removed—that
is, when the idea is generalized from applying to objects of perception to objects of
thought in general. The result is the thought that it is the relation of one Force to others
that is responsible for the diversity of its manifestations.

The conception of what is immediately observable as the joint manifestation of a “play of
forces” accordingly incorporates a certain sort of holism about the theoretically
postulated entities: “their essence consists simply and solely in this, that each is solely
through the other.”2 Hegel uses an explicitly inferential idiom, whose home language
game is discussion of syllogisms, to express the holistic nature of the essentially
interacting theoretical entities. The forces “do not exist as extremes which retain for
themselves something fixed and substantial, transmitting to one another in their
middle term and in their contact a merely external property; on the contrary, what
they are, they are only in this middle term and this contact.”3

If no identity or difference, no individual or its relation to others, is intelligible prior to
any other, how is any identity or difference constituted? “They have, thus, in fact, no
substances of their own that might support and maintain them.”4 It seems that something
determinate needs to be fixed first, to get the whole scheme off the ground. This is what
one might have hoped that immediacy would supply. (Thus Quine conceived his holistic
web of belief as ‘anchored’ at its edges by perceptual experience, construed as deriving
its content noninferentially, from the pattern of stimulations of sensory surfaces that elicit
them.) But this is just what the discovery of the essential, and not just accidental,
1
Force and its expression are discussed at [M136-7]. Before going on to the crucial discussion of the significance
of the play of forces (at [M141-2]), he discusses supposedly independent opposing forces (at [M138-40]) as
‘soliciting’ of and ‘solicited’ by each other. By the end of the Phenomenology, we are supposed to be able to see
such ‘solicitation’ as a crude natural reflection of recognition relations among self-conscious individuals.
2
[M141].
3
[M141].
4
[M141].
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inferential articulation of the determinate content of the immediate deliverances of sense
debars.

[My holism story here.]
d) Law: For with the realization that necessitation is the essence of force, the issue of the
explanation of appearance is explicitly raised.
e) There is an important connection between:
a. Giving immediacy a new role, by focusing on its consequences, hence it as
revelatory of theoretical (which is not equivalent to real, but can be real), i.e.
what is not available as non-inferentially elicited. (Also, and related, as placeholder or vehicle of content, cf. holism and chicken-and-egg problem.) and
b. Concern with laws, first as they codify bridge principles connecting observation
and theory, and also inter-theoretic entity consequences.
From Law to the FSW:
1)
The actual, observable manifestations of theoretical objects—the products of the play of
forces—serve for the Understanding only as premises, from which to make inferences about the
objects whose interactions they express. These are objects individuated solely by the inferencesupporting laws they are subject to. The true essence of this first conception of the supersensible
world is taken consist in those laws: the “calm realm of laws”. Immediacy ‘vanishes’ for the
Understanding in playing only this mediating role.
1) For Hegel the contingency expressed by synthetic judgments is incorporated into the
(therefore) determinate necessity of concepts (in Kantian terms, into the rules for making
judgments) by the joint evolution of doxastic commitments (judgments) and inferential
commitments (concepts) that results from extracting hitherto implicit inferential
consequences of the judgments and concepts one finds oneself with, and adjusting both sorts
of commitments in the light of the materially incompatible commitments that emerge as their
consequences. In the same way the deliverances of immediacy (all of which will be synthetic
judgments in Kant’s sense) are incorporated into the mediated structure of concepts. Talk
about the goodness of inferences and talk about the contents of concepts are two sides of one
coin. But what follows from what depends on what else is true. So the contents of concepts
must not be thought of as settled independently and in advance of consideration of actual
judgments and inferences they figure in.
2)
Hegel thinks that adequate conceptions of form and content, of identity and difference,
cannot be adumbrated in advance of consideration of their role in explicating features of this
evolutionary developmental process. Concepts are not to be thought of (as for Kant) just in
terms of their role in judgment.

First, we must think of their inferential potential.
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
Second, we must think of that potential as actualized by combining those inferential
commitments with doxastic commitments (judgments, including synthetic ones) in
multipremise inferences that may yield discordant (materially incompatible)
conclusions.

Then we must think of the broadly inferential commitments implicit in concepts as
revisable in the light of those conclusions they actually lead us to, in concert with the
doxastic commitments we actually undertake.

Finally, we must identify concepts with the second order potential to develop (in the
context of other concepts and judgments) their contents by this process. At this point
we will be thinking of concepts as having Hegelian negativity as their form: as having
their determinate identity consisting in the way they develop by giving rise to
differences. The developing whole of holistically related inferential and doxastic
commitments, concepts and judgments, Hegel calls “the Concept”. In calling it
“infinite” at the end of his discussion of Force and Understanding, he is marking the
conceptual shift he is urging from the atomistic Kantian picture of antecedently
determinate concepts, each one what it is independently of its relation to any different
concepts, only externally related to those others in synthetic judgments whose truth is
irrelevant to the content of any concepts. It is the shift from conceiving concepts
according to the categories of Verstand to using those of Vernunft.

Pitch the story about how we need to radicalize Kant’s thought that concepts are
functions of judgment, by moving to include in the functional system that holistically
defines them-- inferences the judgments are involved in, and then the process by
which judgments and inferential commitments are groomed by the experience of
error—as the resolution of the dilemma about whether F=ma is a definition, hence
supporting no real explanations, but articulating semantic content, or relates
antecedently determined distinct contents (which seems then to push us towards
thinking with Kant that it is something about our Understanding that establishes
whatever connection there is). This is in (9) below.
3) Hegel summarizes this development:
In this way there vanishes completely all distinction of separate, mutually
contrasted Forces, which were supposed to be present in this movement…Thus
there is neither Force, nor the act of soliciting or being solicited, nor the
determinateness of being a stable medium and unity reflected into itself, there is
neither something existing singly by itself, nor are there diverse antitheses; on the
contrary, what there is in this absolute flux is only difference as a universal
difference, or as a difference into which the many antitheses have been resolved.
This difference as a universal difference, is consequently the simple element in
the play of Forces itself and what is true in it. It is the law of Force.5
5
[M148].
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By ‘law’ Hegel means what Kant meant: a rule that has objective validity. A rule unifies a
diverse set of instances, by applying to all of them. So we are now to look at the rules that relate
theoretical objects to each other and to their observable expressions.
4) The essence of the play of forces now appears in the form of the objective rules that govern it.
Three features of these laws merit mention.

First, as rules, they are general: they apply to many actual and possible instances.

Second, they are conditional or consequential: they say that if a specified condition is
satisfied, then a consequence of a definite sort will occur. This is to say that the laws
codify inferences.

Third, the laws specify the ways in which the occurrence of one theoretical state of
affairs can (in context) necessitate the occurrence of another: they have a modal force.
This is to say that they do not just specify what is in fact the case, but rather what
would happen, or must happen if a state of affairs of certain kind were to occur.
5) We can think about the various conceptual points that have been made in the discussion of
Consciousness in terms of the kinds of logical vocabulary that have been discovered to be
necessary to make explicit what is implicit in ordinary empirical knowledge claims. Besides
the demonstratives, with which we began as the basic way of trying to say what is meant in
immediate experience, we discovered that we need also anaphoric pronouns, to make it
possible to hold onto and recollect what is indicated by the demonstratives: to make what is
presented available for inference. Singular terms, predicates, and negation then turned out to
be needed to articulate the propositional content of simple observations. It now emerges that
quantifiers (for generality), conditionals (for the consequential element), and modal operators
(for necessity) would be needed as well, to make explicit the inferential connections that
relate observational and theoretical concepts—that is, to state laws.
6)
A law, as statable, is a kind of superfact. As a result, the concept of law still incorporates a
conception of the determinateness of conceptual contents that is structured by categories of
independence. No judgment, including one that states a law, can be thought of as simply true
or false, so long as the concepts it employs are defective. But they will be inadequate so long
as they contain the potential, when properly applied in concert with others to which they are
inferentially related, to lead in empirical circumstances to incompatible judgments. But that
holistic potential is not a merely regrettable, because dispensable, feature of the employment
of empirical concepts. For Hegel, as we are aiming to put ourselves in a position to see, that
residual ‘negativity’ of such concepts not only provides the normative motor for conceptual
and doxastic change, and thereby the mechanism whereby immediacy and contingency are
incorporated into concepts—mediated and given (made to have) the form of necessity—but is
what determines the content of such concepts, and so constitutes their determinateness. So
statable rules, even lawlike claims that codify proprieties of inference, are the wrong sort of
unit to look to for a solution to the unity-in-difference problem raised by acknowledgment of
the essential contribution made by inferential relations to other concepts in the constitution of
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the content of one concept. For such rules or laws still presuppose, rather than articulate the
nature and conditions of the intelligibility of, the determinately contentful concepts in terms
of which they are formulated.
7) Reflection on the role of the realm of laws reveals that the concept of law is doing two
different things, that two different conceptions of law are really in play. (Compare the
'doubling' of forces into unifying force whose expression is solicited and diversifying force
that solicits that expression.) On the one hand law is the principle of unity, of the unification
of diverse appearances by exhibiting them as necessary, that is as instances of a rule that
necessitates them. This is law as the principle of lawlikeness, law as the abstract form of
law.6 It is the principle that ultimately demands the unity of science, what appears in Kant's
philosophy of science as the ideal that science form a system, that all laws eventually be
capable of being exhibited as consequences of one law. Otherwise the realm of law, which
unifies diverse appearances, itself contains an irreducible contingency and diversity of laws.
On the other hand, laws must have determinate content, if they are to unify the restless
particularity of phenomena by exhibiting their connection as instances of rules. Explanation
cannot proceed according to empty or contentless laws, but requires determinateness and
content. For us, but not for the consciousness undergoing this experience, this splitting of the
realm of laws into a unifying principle or form and a set of diverse, determinately contentful
particular laws manifests the requirement that anything with determinate content acquire that
content in virtue of its role in a Notion, a system of relative identities constituted by their
relative differences. This principle arose for us already in the exposition of perceiving
consciousness. Law as unity must have diversity within itself if it is to have content. It
cannot be purely diverse if it is to be able to perform its unifying function. So law is seen to
'double' itself, just as force did, when the idea of its confrontation with an 'other' is reflected
upon, and its implicit presuppositions made explicit.
8) The final movement of understanding consciousness operating according to the conception of
supersensuous, necessitating law unfolds the consequences of the demand for determinate
content in the laws appealed to by explanation. Explanation, which "condenses the law
into Force as the essence of the law," finding in things a "ground constituted exactly the
same as the law".7 With the concept of explanation necessity becomes not an abstract form
or principle divorced from the determinate contents of the laws that govern actual appearance,
but rather a feature inherent in those laws themselves.
9) Consider Newton's fundamental law F=ma. Is this a definition, say of force? If it is, then we
can understand how it has the special status marked by calling it 'necessary'. But in that case
the distinctness of force from mass and acceleration is merely apparent. Explanation by
appeal to such an analytic 'law' then seems to be a cheat, a trick. For it just consists in
exhibiting or asserting the necessary interrelation of things that only appear to be distinct.
On the other hand, if this claim is not analytic, that is, if force is not being defined as the
product of mass and acceleration, then the explanatory invocation of this law would not be
misleading, and we would really learn something from it. But how in that case are we to
understand the alleged necessity of the law? What does it mean to say that things that are
6
7
[M150].
[M154].
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really distinct are also necessarily related to one another? Here, of course, Hegel is asking
Hume's question. How is it possible to make sense of a natural necessity that does not
collapse into uninformative analyticity or empirical contingency?
10) On the first horn of the dilemma, explanation appears as consciousness recognizing as
necessary connections between elements that are distinct only as consciousness has divided
them up in appearance. Here once again the supersensible in itself is conceived as a unity,
with diversity being merely an appearance for consciousness. On the second horn of the
dilemma, it seems that the necessity must be an importation of consciousness, a feature of its
formulation of laws or what things are for it, not something that could be considered as
grounded in what things are in themselves. Necessity resides in the Understanding, since the
unification into a rule or law of what are in themselves distinct things is its work. This latter
is of course Kant's strategy.
11) But these incompatibilities are not simply stipulated, or analytically true. They are features
of the contents comprised by a system, the Notion, that has produced them as the products of
a course of concrete experience. That experience is the movement of the system in response
to the immediate (noninferential in the sense of being commitments that are not the results of
a process of inferring, not in the sense of being articulated without reference to their
inferential roles) deliverances of perception, what is implicit in the world becoming explicit
for consciousness through observation. And that experience is the movement of the system
in response to the purely mediate deliverances of inference to the best explanation in
response to the explicit confrontation of incompatibilities among its commitments, what is
implicit in the system of concrete contents becoming explicit for consciousness through
reflection. These meanings have not evolved and cannot be grasped independently of what
is taken to be true. The necessity of their holistic interconnections cannot be reduced either to
a reflection of an antecedent and independent objective reality, nor to a reflection of an
antecedent and independent subjective reality. Determinate diversity of content and
universal unity of necessity as its form are aspects of the Notion that cannot be understood
independently of one another. (Cf. (2) above in this section.)
12) Focusing on explanation brings explicitly into view a topic that has been in the background
throughout the discussion of theoretical entities: the distinction between appearance and
reality.
Our object is thus from now on the syllogism [Schluß] which has for its extremes the
inner being of Things, and the Understanding, and for its middle term appearance; but the
movement [Bewegung] of this syllogism yields the further determination of what the
Understanding descries in this inner world though the middle term, and the experience
from which the Understanding learns about the close-linked unity of these terms. [145]
The end of Force and Understanding discusses the relationships among inference, explanation,
and the distinction between appearance and reality. The issues surrounding them are discussed
in the context of three conceptions of a reality beyond or behind appearance, which is
inferentially revealed by appearance:
a) the first supersensible world,
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b) the first inverted world, and
c) the second inverted world.
3.
First supersensible world (FSW):
a) The first step is to an Eddingtonian realism: What is real is the theoretical entities whose
interactions are responsible for the observable appearances. Primary qualities are real,
secondary qualities are not (they are appearances, resulting from our interaction with the
real). Science is the measure of primary qualities. What things are in themselves vs.
what they are only for consciousness. Example: Of Eddington’s two tables, it is the table
of the physicist that is real, not the table of observation (the scientific image table, not the
manifest image table).
b) This view is the converse of instrumentalism in the philosophy of science. That is the
view that it is only observable entities that are real. Theoretical entities are mere
calculational postulates, convenient in organizing observable facts, but not referring to
what there really is.
c) These two views, instrumentalism and the Strong Theoretical Realism that claims not just
that theoretical entities (e.g. forces) are or can be real, but that only they can be, are not
only converses. They both result from running together the appearance/reality distinction
and the observation/theory distinction. In fact these are orthogonal: some theoretical
entities are unmasked as appearances, and some observable entities are real.
d) But this does not get us all the way to the FSW. For the FSW is the “calm realm of laws.”
For this we must add that it is not the forces (theoretical entities). For this we must
i.
add to the theoretical realism that is the converse of instrumentalism
ii.
the relational realist claim that it is the relations that functionally articulate the
contents of these universals that are real, rather than the functional roles they
define; and
iii.
a conception of statements of laws as describing superfacts. They are facts,
because like ordinary facts, they state how things are. Laws are understood as
descriptions of how things are. They are superfacts because they govern the
relations among facts and possible facts.
The FSW is what you get if you put these three elements together.
(ii) comes from the holistic conclusion of the discussion of the “play of forces.”
Premises (i) and (ii) here are where we have gotten to by thinking about the play of forces.
e) Two claims H makes about FSW:
i. Don’t line up obs/theory and appearance/reality distinction (either in the theoretical
realist or the instrumentalist way); and
ii. Don’t treat either of them as an ontological distinction.
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13) The first conception of a supersensible world is what one gets by running together the
distinction between observable and theoretical things or states of affairs with the distinction
between appearance and reality.
14) One takes theoretical objects to be real and what is observable to be their appearance by
seeking to explain the latter in terms of the former, and not vice versa. The real is that in
terms of which one offers accounts, and what one accounts for is how things appear. This
sort of explanation reverses the direction of the inferences by means of which theoretical
objects are revealed (appear) to us. To find out about theoretical objects, we draw
conclusions from observational premises. To explain what we observe we draw conclusions
from theoretical premises.
15) In “the process called explanation”:
A law is enunciated; from this, its implicitly universal element or ground is
distinguished as Force; but it is said that this difference is no difference, rather
that the ground is constituted exactly the same as the law. The single occurrence
of lightning, e.g. is apprehended as a universal, and this universal is enunciated as
the law of electricity; the ‘explanation’ then condenses [zusammenfat] the law
into Force as the essence of the law…Force is constituted exactly the same as
law…the difference qua difference of content…is withdrawn.8
The metaconception of understanding that Hegel is considering in this part of his story does not
have a sufficiently good grip on the structure of the Concept to follow out this insight coherently.
But in explanation for the first time the identity of content of thought in its subjective aspect
(thinking) and objective aspect (what is thought about) appears, albeit darkly. When things go
well, there is an identity of content between a statement, claim or judgment and a fact, between a
propriety of inference and a law. It is a criterion of adequacy for Hegel’s metaconception of the
infinite Concept that it make sense both of this identity of content and of the difference of form
between the subjective certainty that can attach to that content and the objective truth that can
attach to it: the difference between what something is for consciousness, and what it is in itself.
16) It is a mistake, however, to identify the appearance/reality distinction with the
observable/theoretical distinction. The distinction between observable and theoretical objects
is not a distinction between two different kinds of objects at all. It is, as Sellars will later put
it, not an ontological distinction at all, but only a methodological one.
4.
The second supersensible world (SSW), which is the first inverted world (FIW):
a) This keeps the idea that statements of laws describe superfacts. It thinks the statements
expressing the semantogenic modal relations of exclusion and inclusion in virtue of
which universals and the concepts expressing them have the determinate contents they do
are descriptions of something.
8
[M154].
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b) But since those possible facts articulate the determinate contentfulness of facts, we think
of a nimbus of Tractarian Sachverhalten surrounding the Tatsachen.
c) The first conception of a supersensible world as inverted is the result of misconstruing a
genuine insight. The insight is Understanding’s discovery that the reality that is the truth
of appearance is the Concept, and that "it is a law of appearance itself."9 That law is a
law regulating differences, changes in which "the content of the moments of change
remains the same." "The differences are only such as are in reality no differences and
which cancel themselves." We have seen how in the Concept the contents consist in their
differences, which differences both thereby cancel themselves in the sense of defining
self-same unities, and do not cancel themselves entirely, in that the movement of
experience results. The idea of a calm realm of laws expressed in a changing realm of
appearance is thus replaced by a conception of law as not only a unifying rule, but as
equally the differentiating relations in virtue of which that unifying rule has a determinate
content.
d)
The mistake is to reify these essential, broadly inferential relations to construe them as
constituting a separate world: to think of the relation between these laws and the
appearance of which they are the law as a relation between two different kinds of thing.
The result of making that mistake is a very odd conception of reality:
According...to the law of this inverted [verkehrte] world, what is like in the first world is
unlike to itself and what is unlike in the first world is equally unlike to itself, or it
becomes like itself.10
Looked at superficially, this inverted world is the opposite of the first in the sense that it
has the latter outside of it and repels that world from itself as an inverted actual world:
that the one is appearance, but the other the in-itself; that the one is the world as it is for
an other, whereas the other is the world as it is for itself.11
The mistake is to make the distinction between the world as it appears and the world as it is in
itself, on this conception, into an ontological distinction.
1. The semantogenic statements of relations of exclusion and inclusion among properties
and states of affairs describe the first inverted world (FIW=SSW). For the non-actual relata,
the excluded possibilia relation to which is essential to the determinateness of the actual
things and states of affairs, are not observable (so what is described or represented is
supersensible), and they are the opposites of the actually instantiated ones.
2. The lesson is that statements of this sort do not represent or describe anything, but have a
different expressive function. They make explicit something that is implicit in the terms we
use to describe and represent the empirical world (including its supersensible, only
inferentially available portions).
9
10
11
[M156].
[M158].
[M159].
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3. Possible world semantics is a paradigm of a view that does take modal statements to
describe or represent states of affairs, but not states of affairs in the actual world we can find
out about empirically—not just the observable part of it, but also the part we can make
inferences about. What is described or represented is features of the universe of possible
worlds. The other possible worlds are inverted worlds in Hegel’s sense: what is true
there is things that are not true here, including many things that are incompatible with
what is true here. Further, the determinate contentfulness of the actual facts is to be
understood, according to possible worlds semantics, in terms of what is true in the rest of the
modal universe of possible worlds, outside the actual world.
4. Conclusion: Contemporary possible world semantics falls within the scope of what Hegel
denominates the “second supersensible world, the first inverted world” conception. Possible
world semantics is the contemporary form of the inverted world.
5. The First Inverted World (FII), which is the Second Supersensible World (SSW), sees the
relations that define the determinate contents of empirical facts (and of the corresponding
thoughts) as descriptive of something, as representing something. Since we cannot
immediately perceive (or infer) the instantiation of the properties that are materially
incompatible with those that we do take to be empirically instantiated (whether observably or
ones we find out about only inferentially), what the relational claims that must be true for
determinateness describe must be “jenseits”, over there, somewhere else, in some
supersensible world. Compare: In the First Supersensible World (FSW), we took statements
of laws to be descriptions of superfacts. (See (12) below and (7) above: Possible worlds are
the inverted world.)
6. Hegel’s description of the SSW is alarming, apparently unmotivated, and almost
obviously incoherent. It is alarming, in that the idea of a quasi-empirical world in which
what here is salty is there sweet, what here is cubical is there round, and so on sounds like a
fantasy. It is unmotivated, because (by contrast to the well-attested FSW view, which people
like Eddington, and lots of others subscribe to) who ever believed this? (I think Hegel is
bending his idiom out of shape to accommodate Schelling, in a heremeneutically generous
attempt to show that there was, after all, something to the silly things the young Schelling
said. Certainly he seems to be doing that in the Perception chapter, using the verbal
formulae of an Identitätsphilosophie when it is not clearly necessary to do so.) It is almost
obviously incoherent because one thing cannot (and this is an important Aristotelian point
from Perception) coherently conceive an object that has all the properties incompatible with
those that some particular object has. For they are often incompatible with each other. And
Hegel has obtrusively acknowledged and depended on this point in Perception. (But we’ll
see—(7) and (12)—that one significant answer is: possible world semantics.)
7. In fact, as I have long claimed, the point of this model is that we must think about the
status of the properties whose relation of exclusive difference from the given property are
essential to its identity: its semantogenic contraries. If statements of those relations are
descriptions, what are they descriptions of? The Tractarian Tatsachen are defined in part, as
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Wittgenstein fully appreciates, by the cloud of Sachverhalten with which they contrast. What
those statements are descriptions of is a SSW.
8. But looking at the issue somewhat more broadly, it concerns the cloud of excluded
possibilities, in virtue of which one particular fact counts as determinate at all. The
contemporary form of that view is possible world semantics. There the idea is that what
makes my claim mean what it does, what is determinate about a fact, is its inclusion in one
side, rather than the other, of a whole variety of partitions of the space of possible worlds. It
is surrounded by a cloud of mere possibilia. That is the modern-day version of the
SSW=FIW.
5.
The third supersensible world (TSW) =second inverted world (SIW) is infinity:
a) Laws as making explicit what is implicit in facts. The key here is that we give up the idea
that the statenments of laws describe anything, give up the idea that laws are superfacts.
Instead we see them as performing an expressive function, bringing out something that is
already implicit in the facts. What matters here is the distinction two ways of
understanding the inferential relations (or mediations) that conceptually articulate our knowledge:
i) as a special kind of reality behind appearances, and
ii) as something that is implicit in and expressed by them.
b) That such an inverted world ‘behind’ the one that appears to us cannot be pointed out is
not just because it is not here. If that world contains all the property instantiations
incompatible with each actual perceived instantiation—everything that determinately
negates every property that appears to us—it will contain instantiations incompatible with
each other. (Recall that this is why properties have abstract negations, and objects don't).
What is needed is to de-ontologize (and desensualize) the conception of the relation between
what is immediately available to us through perception and the conceptual element in virtue of
which it (or anything) is cognitively available to us at all.
From the idea, then, of inversion, which constitutes the essential nature of one aspect of
the supersensible world, we must eliminate the sensuous idea of fixing the differences in
a different sustaining element; and this absolute notion of the difference must be
represented and understood purely as inner difference.12 [160]
The final picture of the inverted world returns this supersensible beyond to its proper place
within, as implicit in, the realm of appearance. Inversion is the way in which the second
supersensible world is in the world of appearance. It is in it as the necessary connection of
opposites in constituting the contents of possible experience.
c) The supersensible world is the concrete mediated structure in virtue of which appearance
has a content.
Thus the supersensible world, which is the inverted world, has at the same time
overarched the other world and has it within it; it is for itself the inverted world, i.e. the
12
[M160].
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inversion of itself; it is itself and its opposite in one unity. Only thus is it difference as
inner difference, or difference in its own self, or the difference as infinity.13
d) The first conception of a supersensible world was a conception of a “calm realm of laws.”
Those laws are expressed by quantified, modally qualified conditionals. They underwrite
inferences from observable to theoretical states of affairs. And they were construed as
for that reason also underwriting the explanations of perceptible appearance in terms of
an underlying merely thinkable reality, consisting of objects individuated solely by the
roles they play with respect to those laws. Now we are to see that this thought about
appearance and reality should not be understood merely as the converse of the thought
about observable and theoretical states of affairs. Being a theoretical object—only
accessible inferentially—does not preclude being an aspect of appearance rather than
reality. And being an observable object—noninferentially accessible through
perception—does not preclude being an aspect of reality rather than appearance. The
essential inferential and so conceptual articulation of all awareness means that what is
observable is as thinkable as what is only inferrable. The fact that observable objects are
not only inferrable but perceivable does not mark an ontological difference between them.
And the laws according to which we make inferences, which articulate the conceptual
contents of both, also do not constitute a distinct ontological realm. The quantified,
modally qualified conditionals that express those laws do not describe a distinct kind of
state of affairs. Indeed, they do not describe anything. Rather they serve to make explicit
the inferential articulation in virtue of which anything is thinkable (and so, in some cases,
perceivable) at all.
The basis of those inferential relations (mediations) is the material incompatibilities (relations of
determinate negation) among the concepts. I’ve suggested that the connection is that p as entails
q just in case everything materially incompatible with q is materially incompatible with p. In
this sense, being a dog entails being a mammal, because everything incompatible with being a
mammal is incompatible with being a dog. So it is equally a mistake to think of those
incompatibilities in ontological terms of a distinct kind of thing. The material incompatibilities
that articulate the conceptual content of a state of affairs (whether perceptible or not) should be
understood as implicit in it.
e) Infinity: “Thus the supersensible world, which is the inverted world, has at the same time
overarched the other world and has it within it. It is for itself the inverted world, i.e. the
inversion of itself; it is itself and its opposite in one unity. Only thus is it difference as
inner difference, or difference in its own self, or difference as an infinity [Unendlichkeit].”
[M160]
f) [M161-2] on holism.
g) “Infinity, or this absolute unrest of pure movement, in which whatever is determined in
one way or another, e.g. has being,is rather the opposite of this determinateness, this no
13
[M160].
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doubt has been from the start the soul of all that has gone before; but it is in the inner
wolrd that it has first freely and clearly shown itself. Appearance, or the play of forces,
already displays it, but it is as ‘explanation’ that it first freely stands forth; and in being
finally an object for consciousness, as that which it is, consciousness is thus selfconsciousness.” [M163]
h) “Since this Notion of infinity is an object for consciousness, the latter is consciousness of
a difference that is no less immediately cancelled; consciousness is for its own self, it is a
distinguishing of that which contains no difference, or self-consciousness…The
necessary advance from the previous shapes of consciousness for which their truth was a
Thing, an ‘other’ than themselves, expresses just this, that not only is consciousness of a
thing possible only for a self-consciousness, but that self-consciousness is itself the
truth of those shapes. But it is only for us that this truth exists, not yet for
consciousness.” [M164]
i) “We see that in the inner world of appearance, the Understanding in truth comes to know
nothing else but appearance, but not in the shape of a play of Forces, but rather that play
of Forces in its absolutely universal moments and in their movement; in fact, the
Understanding experiences only itself.” [M165]
j)
Infinity: 160. From the idea, then, of inversion, which constitutes the essential nature of one aspect of
the supersensible world, we must eliminate the sensuous idea of fixing the differences in a different
sustaining element; and this absolute Notion of the difference must be represented and understood purely as
inner difference, a repulsion of the selfsame, as selfsame, from itself, and likeness of the unlike as unlike.
We have to think pure change, or think antithesis within the antithesis itself, or contradiction…Thus the
supersensible world, which is the inverted world, has at the same time overarched the other world and has it
within it; it is for itself the inverted world, i.e. the inversion of itself; it is itself and its opposite in one unity.
Only thus is it difference as inner difference, or difference in its own self, or difference as an infinity.
k) 161. We see that through infinity, law completes itself into an immanent necessity, and all the moments of
[the world of] appearance are taken up into the inner world. That the simple character of law is infinity
means, according to what we have found, (a) that it is self-identical, but is also in itself different; or it is the
selfsame which repels itself from itself or sunders itself into two. What was called simple Force duplicates
itself and through its infinity is law. (b) What is thus dirempted, which constitutes the parts thought of as in
the law, exhibits itself as a stable existence… But (c) through the Notion of inner difference, these unlike
and indifferent moments, space and time, etc. are a difference which is no difference, or only a difference
of what is selfsame, and its essence is unity. As positive and negative they stimulate each other into activity,
and their being is rather to posit themselves as not-being and to suspend themselves in the unity. The two
distinguished moments both subsist; they are implicit and are opposites in themselves, i.e. each is the
opposite of itself; each has its 'other' within it and they are only one unity.
l) 162. This simple infinity, or the absolute Notion…whose omnipresence is neither disturbed nor interrupted
by any difference, but rather is itself every difference, as also their supersession; it pulsates within itself but
does not move, inwardly vibrates, yet is at rest. It is self-identical, for the differences are tautological; they
are differences that are none. This self-identical essence is therefore related only to itself; 'to itself' implies
relationship to an 'other', and the relation-to-self is rather a self-sundering; or, in other words, that very selfidenticalness is an inner difference. These sundered moments are thus in and for themselves each an
opposite—of an other; thus in each moment the 'other' is at the same time expressed; or each is not the
opposite of an 'other' but only a pure opposite; and so each is therefore in its own self the opposite of itself.
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In other words, it is not an opposite at all, but is purely for itself, a pure, self-identical essence that has no
difference in it.
m) 163. Infinity, or this absolute unrest of pure self-movement, in which whatever is determined in one way or
another, e.g. as being, is rather the opposite of this determinateness, this no doubt has been from the start
the soul of all that has gone before; but it is in the inner world that it has first freely and clearly shown itself.
Appearance, or the play of Forces, already displays it, but it is as 'explanation' that it first freely stands
forth; and in being finally an object for consciousness, as that which it is, consciousness is thus selfconsciousness. The Understanding's 'explanation' is primarily only the description of what selfconsciousness is.
6.
“Thus the supersensible world, which is the inverted world, has at the same time
overarched the other world and has it within it. It is for itself the inverted world, i.e. the
inversion of itself; it is itself and its opposite in one unity. Only thus is it difference as inner
difference, or difference in its own self, or difference as an infinity [Unendlichkeit].” [M160]
7.
Holism is the big story of HI. Finite=atomistic, infinite=holistic. As Hegel puts the point
in the hyperbolic language characteristic of his ‘speculative’ concept of identity: “the absolute
antithesis [Gegensatz] is posited as a self-identical essence” [M134]. Determinate
contentfulness begins to appear as a kind of differentiated identity, as identity in difference.
This drives EVERYTHING.
8.
Hermeneutical challenges:
a. Relation between discussion of force and of law, explanation, understanding.
b. Lesson of the “inverted world”, and the “second supersensible world”.
c. Understanding the “infinity of the Concept”.
d. Understanding the argumentative rationale for the transition from discussion of
consciousness to that of self-consciousness.
Passages:
1. One of the lessons of Perception is that the essence of a thing is not (as it was for
phenomenal consciousness conceiving of itself as perceiving) being immediately perceptible.
The essence of the thing is rather the relations that articulate the intelligible content of
perception. This brings into view not perceiving, but understanding: the conceptual content
that is delivered immediately in perception, but can also be thought with otherwise than in
perception.
129. Thus the object in its pure determinatenesses, or in the determinatenesses which were
supposed to constitute its essential being, is overcome just as surely as it was in its sensuous
being. From a sensuous being it turned into a universal; but this universal, since it originates in
the sensuous, is essentially conditioned by it, and hence is not truly a self-identical universality at
all, but one afflicted with an opposition; for this reason the universality splits into the extremes
of singular individuality and universality, into the One of the properties, and the Also of the 'free
matters'. These pure determinatenesses seem to express the essential nature itself, but they are
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only a 'being-for-self' that is burdened with a 'being-for-another'. Since, however, both are
essentially in a single unity, what we now have is unconditioned absolute universality, and
consciousness here for the first time truly enters the realm of the Understanding.
130. Thus the singular being of sense does indeed vanish in the dialectical movement of
immediate certainty and becomes universality, but it is only a sensuous universality. My
'meaning' has vanished, and perception takes the object as it is in itself, or as a universal as such.
Singular being therefore emerges in the object as true singleness, as the in-itself of the One, or as
a reflectedness-into-self. But this is still a conditioned being-for-self alongside which appears
another being-for-self, the universality which is opposed to, and conditioned by singular being.
But these two contradictory extremes are not merely alongside each other but in a single unity, or
in other words, the defining characteristic common to both, viz. 'being-for-self', is burdened with
opposition generally, i.e. it is at the same time not a 'being-for-self'. The sophistry of perception
seeks to save these moments from their contradiction, and it seeks to lay hold on the truth, by
distinguishing between the aspects, by sticking to the 'Also' and to the 'in so far', and finally, by
distinguishing the 'unessential' aspect from an 'essence' which is opposed to it. But these
expedients, instead of warding off deception in the process of apprehension, prove themselves on
the contrary to be quite empty; and the truth which is supposed to be won by this logic of the
perceptual process proves to be in one and the same respect the opposite [of itself] and thus to
have as its essence a universality which is devoid of distinctions and determinations.
134. The result was the unconditioned universal, initially, in the negative and abstract sense
that consciousness negated its one-sided Notions and abstracted them: in other words, it gave
them up. But the result has, implicitly, a positive significance: in it, the unity of 'being-forself' and 'being-for-another' is posited; in other words, the absolute antithesis is posited as a
self-identical essence. At first sight, this seems to concern only the form of the moments in
reciprocal relation; but 'being-for-self' and 'being-for-another' are the content itself as well,
since the antithesis in its truth can have no other nature than the one yielded in the result, viz.
that the content taken in perception to be true, belongs in fact only to the form, in the unity of
which it is dissolved. This content is likewise universal; there can be no other content which
by its particular constitution would fail to fall within this unconditioned universality. A
content of this kind would be some particular way or other of being for itself and of being in
relation to an other. But, in general, to be for itself and to be in relation to an other constitutes
the nature and essence of the content, whose truth consists in its being unconditionally
universal; and the result is simply and solely universal.
2. [135]: “because this unconditioned universal is an object for consciousness, there
emerges in it the distinction of form and content” What warrants this ‘because’?
3. [136]: “the 'matters' posited as independent directly pass over into their unity, and their
unity directly unfolds its diversity, and this once again reduces itself to unity. But this
movement is what is called Force.” This is the first mention of force. It comes up as we are
talking about the identity-as-consisting-in-difference. We’ll see that the difference is the
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expression of force, it’s relation to others, and force is the identity that is constituted by that.
Law governs the relations between different ‘forces’ (and underwrites inferences), and so
articulates the essence or identity of force. So what we get is a conception of objects not as
essentially immediately perceivable, but as essentially nodes in a field of forces (the
ontological image of a semantic holism).
4. [136] “When we thus preserve the two moments in their immediate unity, the
Understanding, to which the Notion of Force belongs, is strictly speaking the Notion which
sustains the different moments qua different; for, in themselves, they are not supposed to be
different. Consequently, the difference exists only in thought. That is to say, what has been
posited in the foregoing is in the first instance only the Notion of Force, not its reality. In
point of fact, however, Force is the unconditioned universal which is equally in its own self
what it is for an other; or which contains the difference in its own self—for difference is
nothing else than being-for-another.”
5. [141] Force, as actual, exists simply and solely in its expression, which at the same
time is nothing else than a supersession of itself. This actual Force, when thought of as free
from its expression and as being for itself, is Force driven back into itself; but in fact this
determinateness, as we have found, is itself only a moment of Force's expression. Thus the
truth of Force remains only the thought of it; the moments of its actuality, their substances
and their movement, collapse unresistingly into an undifferentiated unity, a unity which is
not Force driven back into itself (for this is itself only such a moment), but is its Notion qua
Notion. Thus the realization of Force is at the same time the loss of reality; in that realization
it has really become something quite different, viz. this universality, which the
Understanding knows at the outset, or immediately, to be its essence and which also proves
itself to be such in the supposed reality of Force, in the actual substances.
6. 143. This true essence of Things has now the character of not being immediately for
consciousness; on the contrary, consciousness has a mediated relation to the inner being
and, as the Understanding, looks through this mediating play of Forces into the true
background of Things. The middle term which unites the two extremes, the
Understanding and the inner world, is the developed being of Force which, for the
Understanding itself, is henceforth only a vanishing. This 'being' is therefore called
appearance;
7. [143] This play of Forces is consequently the developed negative; but its truth is the
positive, viz. the universal, the object that, in itself, possesses being. The being of this object
for consciousness is mediated by the movement of appearance, in which the being of
perception and the sensuously objective in general has a merely negative significance.
Consciousness, therefore, reflects itself out of this movement back into itself as the True; but,
qua consciousness, converts this truth again into an objective inner, and distinguishes this
reflection of Things from its own reflection into itself: just as the movement of mediation is
likewise still objective for it.
8. 144. Within this inner truth, as the absolute universal which has been purged of the
antithesis between the universal and the individual and has become the object of the
Understanding, there now opens up above the sensuous world, which is the world of
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appearance, a supersensible world which henceforth is the true world, above the vanishing
present world there opens up a permanent beyond; an in-itself which is the first, and therefore
imperfect, appearance of Reason, or only the pure element in which the truth has its essence.
9. 145. Our object is thus from now on the syllogism which has for its extremes the inner
being of Things and the Understanding, and for its middle term, appearance; but the
movement of this syllogism yields the further determination of what the Understanding
descries in this inner world through the middle term, and the experience from which
Understanding learns about the close-linked unity of these terms.
10. 149. The absolute flux of appearance becomes a simple difference through its relation to
the simplicity of the inner world or of the Understanding. The inner being is, to begin with,
only implicitly the universal; but this implicit, simple universal is essentially no less
absolutely universal difference, for it is the outcome of the flux itself, or the flux is its
essence; but it is a flux that is posited in the inner world as it is in truth, and consequently it is
received in that inner world as equally an absolute universal difference that is absolutely at
rest and remains selfsame. In other words, negation is an essential moment of the universal,
and negation, or mediation in the universal, is therefore a universal difference. This
difference is expressed in the law, which is the stable image of unstable appearance.
Consequently, the supersensible world is an inert realm of laws which, though beyond the
perceived world—for this exhibits law only through incessant change—is equally present in
it and is its direct tranquil image.
11. 150. This realm of laws is indeed the truth for the Understanding, and that truth has its
content in the law. At the same time, however, this realm is only the initial truth for the
Understanding and does not fill out the world of appearance. In this the law is present, but is
not the entire presence of appearance; with every change of circumstance the law has a
different actuality. Thus appearance retains for itself an aspect which is not in the inner
world; i.e. appearance is not yet truly posited as appearance, as a superseded being-for-self.
This defect in the law must equally be made manifest in the law itself. What seems to be
defective in it is that while it does contain difference, the difference is universal,
indeterminate. However, in so far as it is not law in general, but a law, it does contain
determinateness; consequently, there are indefinitely many laws. But this plurality is itself
rather a defect; for it contradicts the principle of the Understanding for which, as
consciousness of the simple inner world, the True is the implicitly universal unity.
12. 153. There is still another form than that just indicated in which the indifference of law
and Force, or of Notion and being, is to be found. In the law of motion, e.g., it is necessary
that motion be split up into time and space, or again, into distance and velocity. Thus, since
motion is only the relation of these factors, it—the universal—is certainly divided in its own
self. But now these parts, time and space, or distance and velocity, do not in themselves
express this origin in a One; they are indifferent to one another, space is thought of as able to
be without time, time without space, and distance at least without velocity—just as their
magnitudes are indifferent to one another, since they are not related to one another as positive
and negative, and thus are not related to one another through their own essential nature. The
necessity of the division is thus certainly present here, but not the necessity of the parts as
such for one another. But it is just for this reason that that first necessity, too, is itself only a
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sham, false necessity. For motion is not itself thought of as something simple, or as a pure
essence, but as already divided; time and space are in themselves its independent parts or
essences, or, distance and velocity are modes of being or ways of thinking, either of which
can well be without the other; and motion is, therefore, only their superficial relation, not
their essence. If it is thought of as a simple essence or as Force, motion is no doubt gravity,
but this does not contain these differences at all.
13. [154] Force is constituted exactly the same as law;
14. 155. In this tautological movement, the Understanding, as we have seen, sticks to the
inert unity of its object, and the movement falls only within the Understanding itself, not
within the object.
15. [156] The Understanding thus learns that it is a law of appearance itself, that differences
arise which are no differences, or that what is selfsame repels itself from itself; and similarly,
that the differences are only such as are in reality no differences and which cancel
themselves; in other words, what is not selfsame is self-attractive. And thus we have a second
law whose content is the opposite of what was previously called law, viz. difference which
remains constantly selfsame; for this new law expresses rather that like becomes unlike and
unlike becomes like.
16. 157. Through this principle, the first supersensible world, the tranquil kingdom of
laws, the immediate copy of the perceived world, is changed into its opposite. The law was,
in general, like its differences, that which remains selfsame; now, however, it is posited that
each of the two worlds is really the opposite of itself. The selfsame really repels itself from
itself, and what is not selfsame really posits itself as selfsame. In point of fact, it is only when
thus determined that the difference is inner difference, or the difference in its own self, the
like being unlike itself, and the unlike, like itself. This second supersensible world is in this
way the inverted world and, moreover, since one aspect is already present in the first
supersensible world, the inversion of the first. With this, the inner world is completed as
appearance. For the first supersensible world was only the immediate raising of the perceived
world into the universal element; it had its necessary counterpart in this perceived world
which still retained for itself the principle of change and alteration. The first kingdom of laws
lacked that principle, but obtains it as an inverted world.
17. 158. According, then, to the law of this inverted world, what is like in the first world is
unlike to itself, and what is unlike in the first world is equally unlike to itself, or it becomes
like itself.
18. 160. From the idea, then, of inversion, which constitutes the essential nature of one aspect
of the supersensible world, we must eliminate the sensuous idea of fixing the differences in a
different sustaining element; and this absolute Notion of the difference must be represented
and understood purely as inner difference, a repulsion of the selfsame, as selfsame, from
itself, and likeness of the unlike as unlike. We have to think pure change, or think antithesis
within the antithesis itself, or contradiction. For in the difference which is an inner difference,
the opposite is not merely one of two—if it were, it would simply be, without being an
opposite—but it is the opposite of an opposite, or the other is itself immediately present in it.
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Certainly, I put the 'opposite' here, and the 'other' of which it is the opposite, there; the
'opposite', then, is on one side, is in and for itself without the 'other'. But just because I have
the 'opposite' here in and for itself, it is the opposite of itself, or it has, in fact, the 'other'
immediately present in it. Thus the supersensible world, which is the inverted world, has at
the same time overarched the other world and has it within it; it is for itself the inverted
world, i.e. the inversion of itself; it is itself and its opposite in one unity. Only thus is it
difference as inner difference, or difference in its own self, or difference as an infinity.
19. 161. We see that through infinity, law completes itself into an immanent necessity, and
all the moments of [the world of] appearance are taken up into the inner world. That the
simple character of law is infinity means, according to what we have found, (a) that it is selfidentical, but is also in itself different; or it is the selfsame which repels itself from itself or
sunders itself into two. What was called simple Force duplicates itself and through its infinity
is law. (b) What is thus dirempted, which constitutes the parts thought of as in the law,
exhibits itself as a stable existence; and if the parts are considered without the Notion of the
inner difference, then space and time, or distance and velocity, which appear as moments of
gravity, are just as indifferent and without a necessary relation to one another as to gravity
itself, or, as this simple gravity is indifferent to them, or, again, as simple electricity is
indifferent to positive and negative electricity. But (c) through the Notion of inner difference,
these unlike and indifferent moments, space and time, etc. are a difference which is no
difference, or only a difference of what is selfsame, and its essence is unity. As positive and
negative they stimulate each other into activity, and their being is rather to posit themselves
as not-being and to suspend themselves in the unity. The two distinguished moments both
subsist; they are implicit and are opposites in themselves, i.e. each is the opposite of itself;
each has its 'other' within it and they are only one unity.
20. 162. This simple infinity, or the absolute Notion, may be called the simple essence of
life, the soul of the world, the universal blood, whose omnipresence is neither disturbed
nor interrupted by any difference, but rather is itself every difference, as also their
supersession; it pulsates within itself but does not move, inwardly vibrates, yet is at rest. It is
self-identical, for the differences are tautological; they are differences that are none.
This self-identical essence is therefore related only to itself; 'to itself' implies relationship to
an 'other', and the relation-to-self is rather a self-sundering; or, in other words, that very selfidenticalness is an inner difference. These sundered moments are thus in and for
themselves each an opposite—of an other; thus in each moment the 'other' is at the
same time expressed; or each is not the opposite of an 'other' but only a pure opposite;
and so each is therefore in its own self the opposite of itself. In other words, it is not an
opposite at all, but is purely for itself, a pure, self-identical essence that has no
difference in it.
21. [163] “Infinity, or this absolute unrest of pure self-movement, in which whatever is
determined in one way or another, e.g. as being, is rather the opposite of this determinateness,
this no doubt has been from the start the soul of all that has gone before; but it is in the inner
world that it has first freely and clearly shown itself. Appearance, or the play of Forces,
already displays it, but it is as 'explanation' that it [BB: viz. infinity, the absolute unrest of
pure self-movement] first freely stands forth; and in being finally an object for consciousness,
as that which it is, consciousness is thus self-consciousness. The Understanding's
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Brandom
'explanation' is primarily only the description of what self-consciousness is.” This is the
rationale for the expository transition to Self-Consciousness: the holism of the infinite
Concept shows up on the side of subjectivity, in terms of our activity in drawing
consequences and extruding incompatibilities, i.e. in explaining. So that is where we must
look to understand it.
22. [163] talks about the progression from Appearance as the play of forces to the distinction
between Force and Law (a “difference that is no difference”).
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