BECOMING VII: MEASURE TO ESSENCE

The notion of quantity… implies inherent contradiction. This… is what

forms the dialectic of quantity. The result… is not a mere return to
quality, as if that were the true and quantity the false notion, but an
advance to the unity and truth of both, to qualitative quantity or
Measure (106, Zus.).1
The main interest of Measure has to be how it can intrinsically serve as the
springboard from being to essence, while it itself, like “the other stages of Being”
and every category “may serve as a definition of the Absolute”. This truth indeed
alone explains how a featureless Substrate, indifferent beyond all conceivable
difference, may also “serve” as such a definition and the best one at that, at the
moment of its appearance. Still, the (later) Encyclopaedia gets by with scarce or
no mention of either this term or its category, unless or in so far as this might be
assimilable to the Measureless.
Still, “it is the very essence of Being to characterise itself” (107, Zus., and here it
is “essence” with a small e), even though it should exit as a featureless Substrate
(in fact it never exits: being itself brings forth or becomes essence, as Hegel
stresses – we do not in our superior dialectical wisdom replace being with
essence, but only being as first or “immediately” apprehended). Like material
prima, the Substrate is abstract, i.e. it only “occurs” in reality under some “form”
or other from which it is yet conceptually separate, i.e. it is, in realist terms,
distinct yet not separate. Nonetheless the realist Aquinas, at first sight strangely,
includes material prima, along with God, angels and souls indifferently as (a?)
necessary being. Here we see, incidentally, otherwise than in Leibniz’s usage
(reduce in “analytical” philosophy to necessary truth only), how such necessity
does not connect with any distinction between creator and creature. But if
necessity is after all one, univocal, then Substrate and Absolute do in fact
coincide, are identical, with that Infinity which (necessarily) differentiates itself
infinitely, as, again, does Being. For this is “the very essence of Being”. 2 Or,
bonum est diffusivum sui, again infinitely, since nothing restrains it. McTaggart’s
frequent suggestion that the Absolute might be finite in some respects seems
perverse (there are well-known arguments), while the identity of bonum and all
the “transcendental predicates” with being, ens (thus also “diffusive”, though
never diffuse) is widespread (86).
Hegel, indeed, will pair quality and quantity in analogous or, rather, univocal ratio
with God and Nature (or nature). Ratio has to be univocal since, as Aristotle
shows, itself supplying the (univocal) ratio, as we say, of analogy. Yet it is not of
course unthinkable, it must indeed be conceded, that analogy is itself analogous,
no doubt ad infinitum. This circumstance, however, returns analogy itself to
1
Unless stated otherwise the numerical references in brackets in the text are to the
paragraphs of the Encyclopaedia of Hegel (Wallace translation).
2
In this context to try to bring in. as relating to, ”being” without a capital, i.e. not as a
category, would be like trying to introduce an unbound variable. In fact being was always
“nothing other” than what “first falls into the mind”, primum cadit in mente. Conversely,
however, this implies all that is claimed for Absolute Mind, called in some systems ipsum
esse subsistens.
univocity, which thus itself turns out to be analogical. In other words this
distinction, trumpeted more by Thomists than by Thomas, is of limited use. It is a
main thrust of Hegelian assertion that one can and must speak unambiguously
(despite the falsity of all predication, as he claims) of the Absolute. So here
Measure will reflect the reciprocal dependence upon one another of “God” and
nature, whereby, as in the old doctrine of the “divine ideas”, here the Notion, and
notions (as Bonaventura placed them all “in” the one Word), God, the Absolute, is
All in a total reversal of any possible “pantheism”, where some other all is said to
be God.
“Measure is the qualitative quantum” (107). It is “the completion of Being” where
being, again, is gone beyond into essence where, after all, nothing is or ever was
or could be, just “itself and not another thing”. All is inter-related, each is in fact
relation, so that ultimately there is no relation (nothing to relate) and ipso facto
no “each”. Nor, though, can Essence itself be one big Being. This is the
background to later discussions of Existence here, which carry over into later
discussions, often based on Meinong’s thought, of “sistology”. Essence is a
reality, beyond questions of Being or Non-Being, or even of abstract and
concrete. We do not have to say the Absolute is a super-Individual. We will see
that it is not. But neither is it abstract, since it demands all our love. Hegel is in
complete agreement with Deuteronomy here (cf. 159, final paragraph of main
text). Love, however, it must be conceded, is nowhere treated as a category.
See, however the Zusatz to 158, where amor intellectualis Dei (as in Spinoza) is
equated with being “determined by the absolute idea throughout”. This, a
Christian or a Freudian might figuratively say, would be the fulfilment of eros in
crucifixion and resurrection, Aufhebung of the category of life (or non-life). “My
eros is crucified” (Ignatius of Antioch). In Freud we have the death-instinct, as
such aimed at some good, I would argue (omnis agens agit propter finem).
Even if Being as a category is replaced or gives way to Essence yet the deeper
meaning, Hegel will stress, is that Being itself, with deeper penetration, discloses
itself as Essence and as essentially Essence, not, that is, as “the passage of
different into different, the different does not vanish: the different terms remain
in their relation” (110, Zus.). Difference itself is superseded by, as found based
upon, that infinite (and eternal) differentiation proper to the Notion. On just one,
still somewhat quantitative way of expressing or viewing it,

Big fleas have little fleas

Upon their backs to bite’em
And little fleas have smaller fleas
And so ad infinitum.

Here fleas serve not just for the particles of physics but for any units or ones. The
relations, however, are ultimately self-cancelling, since there are no longer any
finite “things” to make into relata. “Everything finite is false.” This is the basic
meaning (not cause) of Being’s yielding, so to say, to Essence. Everything finite
has its measure, beyond which it is “no more seen” since again, “the things
which are seen are temporal”, i.e. are not at all, are “tensed”, bound within mere
grammar, as Essence is not. We recall Wittgenstein’s suggestion, “Essence as
grammar?” The question should be raised, but only to be denied. Under realism
language and grammar are phenomena like any other (evolution as grammar?)
while under idealism the reality is Thought, Mind, itself bringing forth language as
sign (and finite category, due for “ungrateful” supersession) within itself, along
with all structure. By the same token, however, Hegel might reverse
Wittgenstein’s question to “Grammar as essence?”, in his sense of the latter term
as set forth in his logic. Here it would be grammar that is superseded. The
question needs to be asked, however, how far is the “scientific” distinction
between the manifest and the scientific or real world 3 different from that between
realism and absolute idealism? The scientists may have yet to follow this basic
principle through to the end, as one might think a basic contradiction in realist
accounts of evolution, of the brain thinking it, for example, might be moving
them already to do, though more in physics than in biology. Again, however,
Hegel’s category-name of “essence” cannot be equated without more ado either
with this term as used in daily speech or with the various Latin scholastic
conceptions of essentia.4

The relation between the three stages of the logical idea appear in a
real and concrete shape thus: God, who is the truth, is known by us in
his truth, that is, as absolute spirit, only in so far as we at the same
time recognise that the world which he created, nature and the finite
spirit, are, in their difference from God, untrue (83, Zus., concluding
the chapter “Logic Further Defined and Divided”).

Elsewhere, however, Hegel cautions in general against use of the unreflected

term “God” in philosophy as much as does, say, the physicist Paul Davies. What
he says here, all the same, is the decret and pivotal meaning of Measure. It is in
fact precisely as “alienated” in the “moment” we call Nature that the idea seems
to include things which precisely do not (pace Augustine) shout out their meaning
(ipse fecit nos). They are not beings-for-self. In the eternity of the Notion, as one
religious and poetical thinker expressed it, this “Content”:

The smallest portion of this edifice...

The very pavement is made up of life –
Of holy, blessed, and immortal beings
Who hymn their Maker’s praise continually.5
3
As set forth in, say, Wilfrid Sellars: Science, Perception and Reality (c.1966).
4
The biologist Richard Dawkins speaks of the superior simplicity of evolution as
contrasted with God in religion, ever more complex and so no explanation of anything.
Here he ignores the findings of Aquinas, Hegel and others that God, in the identity of
every idea in Essence (essentia divina in Aquinas) is absolutely simple and this not in any
“abstract” way but precisely as beyond anything finite or composite. The biologist may
well supersede this “moment” in his thinking, in Thought’s thinking itself. See my
“Christianity without (or within) God?” Open Theology, April 2009, online at
www.opentheology.com .
5
J.H. Newman, The Dream of Gerontius. Cp. Hegel, “Spirit is thus the self-supporting
absolutely real ultimate being” (Wesen), Phenomenology of Mind, tr. Baillie, p. 459, where
Measure, that is, is the principle of the earlier Limit, represented for the Greeks
by Nemesis, says Hegel, as overtaking with destruction all excess. The excess is
indeed the destruction (of the previous category of being). Maas, translated here
as “measure”, is also the German word for the cardinal virtue of temperantia,
temperance. Yet there exists also the Latin term mensura. Yet it is this Measure
which unites and reconciles Quality and Quantity, the what kind and the how
much (quantum) at the same time as it carries us out beyond Being, disclosing
Essence.
Beyond its measure a thing (quality) ceases to be itself. This was in fact the very
principle of Aristotelian substantial change, and the far-reaching agreement with
the early part of Aristotle’s Physics is unmistakeable in the more detailed The
Science of Logic. This, supremely on Hegel’s principles (“every philosophy is
true”), is but what we would expect. Under the figure of the “nodal line” Hegel
considers the anciently remarked antinomy between quantity and quality. When
does a head become bald, a heap of wheat a grain or two (or three plus)?
Substantial change is in itself instantaneous (here already there is paradox, if it
cannot be successive at all and is yet change: surely an identity, not merely of
“prime matter”, must be implicit, as Hegel will bring out), without “steps”, as one
“defining” form replaces another or “comes”.
In Hegel “the quantum shows itself as specifying”.6 A new form “comes”, the
“matter” as res or thing (not material prima) is “converted into a new quality”.
Yet there has always been a host of difficulties about this, about why we do not
merely have to do with a new “moment” of the substrate (hypokeimenon) or
about whether the two views might not be the same. They surely are not. Here,
where quantitative addition passes a new “node” to change or indeed supersede
(as therefore including it) quality, as ice becomes liquid water, “we meet... the
Measureless” (109), through excess. Nemesis has intervened. Here we have not,
strictly speaking, an example but an illustration. In Mind itself there can be no
examples, while in the “world”, the appearance, of sense the Idea is self-
alienated. Only with this proviso can “sense-cognition” be seen as quaedam
ratio, a kind of Reason. For here ratio, reason, “in the world”, is not Reason or
Spirit in itself as thinking the world, without however any real relation to it since
the world itself, as “moment”, is finally not real but as due for supersession is
superseded in primary germ. The world of immediate Being is untrue, to the point
that the “I”, though ever knowing itself, scarcely recognises itself there, being
more certain of itself “than that I have hands or feet” (as Newman said of his
certitude of God).
Only if we grasp this explanatory priority of illustration over example can we fully
appreciate Hegel’s view of the succession of “quantitative ratios” as being in
principle infinite. That is, for this we do not have to suppose endlessness in the
supply of transforming heat, water into steam and beyond, or beyond ice
conversely or anything similar. Quantity, the conclusion is, “is naturally and
he also speaks of “groups of articulated spirits”. The tendency of Essence, however, is to
posit identity between such groupings, as indeed between praise and being, maker and
made, cause and effect, q.v.
6
Robert M. Wallace, op. cit. ch. 4, 7/54.
necessarily a tendency to exceed itself” (109: this Zusatz has “is”, not “has”
merely), irrespective of demographic “peakings” and so on. This is “the process
of measure”, the not being able to step into the same river twice, the ultimate
ruin, looking ahead, of substance (as of individual life). The dialectic is “all of a
piece”. As Hegel says, we find this “nodal line” in Nature “under a variety of
forms”. Stringed instruments, for example, simply show how the separate
sequence, ladder, scale of notes, tones, semitones, quarter-tones and beyond
where the ear cannot follow, is “really” continuous flow stopping or repeating
nowhere. There are no instants, no points on the line even. And what of this line
itself, the line of process? It too offends against, does not square with the final
simplicity from which all proceeds, as mentioned above, in which alone all is
realised in, therefore, distributive and total negation of itself in its otherness from
“the Notion”, the self-thinking Mind itself.
The immediacy, that is, is “set aside”. In Measure quality and quantity,
succeeding to the more abstract “factors” of Being and Nothing, each are “only
through the instrumentality of the other”. Yet this unity too is “self-annulling”
into Infinity “as a negation of negation” (111). So now this “unity is explicitly...
simple relation-to-self, which contains in it being and all its forms absorbed” (my
emphasis). This is Hegel’s notion of the Substrate, whether or not it coincides at
all with Aristotle’s conception of a universal potentiality (in nature) which is one
with a natural perishability. In the first place, Hegel is not here doing philosophy
of nature simply, though it might follow therefrom, but logic as he has defined it,
ultimately the notion “in and for itself”. Logic has “sides” but no parts (79). Logic
is not merely “objective thought” but “objectivity” itself which, as spiritual,
converts into the boundless or universal Subjectivity of thought, of thinking. Such
thinking, however, is no longer contrasted, as if partial, with some other reality.
This is why Hegel insists that it is Being itself that modulates into essence as
always having been it. We are not dealing with a mere conceptual refinement but
with a metaphysical unveiling which, he will say (has said), is ultimately re-
velation, but from within. Inside and outside are mutually “cancelling”, in fact.
Being thus negating itself (forma dat esse and here, in the Substrate, following
on the Measureless, as is shown, without naming the Substrate, in 111, all forms
are “absorbed” or, rather, superseded en bloc) “is a mediation with self and a
reference to self”. This is what Hegel calls Essence, where all coincides with itself
in the other, all others, in a relation beyond relation, a relatedness rather but
without relata, as, to illustrate, positive and negative, not as being and nothing.
Quality and quantity were “like some and other” but now some and other are
superseded or at least on the way to it. The dialectic, again, is all of a piece, as
the pious possess what they hope for in hoping for it. Being itself, in “the process
of Measure”, is (and not merely has been) “thrown into abeyance and absorbed”,
without “several characteristics”. “Such Being is Essence, Measure is implicitly
Essence”, whether or not Measure implies a measurer. Nemesis was herself
Measure, and some claim that there can be thoughts without a thinker 7 as with
the spinning of a roulette wheel. For the dialectic, however, one thought, one
Begriff, emerges as “thinking itself”, as Act. This process, of Being as of Measure,
is one of “realising what it is implicitly”. It is not, that is, a chain of reasoning in

7
Cf. G. Frege, Der gedanke.
vacuo. Or, it is Reason (Vernünft) superseding Understanding (Verstand), in
Hegel’s transformation of these Kantian terms, of course “lifted” in the first place
from the living language of relational life in comm-unity, the “ordinary
consciousness”.
The transience of the categories is their ever referring to another, which in turn
refers. So there is no “passing into”, as it may seem when one thinks immediate
Being. Nothing “vanishes” here, for there is “no real other, but only diversity,
reference of the one to its other”, held simultaneously as it were. Transition itself
is abrogated, so that the dialectic itself must from now on be differently
conceived. “In the sphere of Being the reference of one term to another is only
implicit; in Essence on the contrary it is explicit” (111, Zus.).