BECOMING VIII: ESSENCE

The Infinite, as the unity of quality and quantity in measure, is simple relation to
self (sich auf sich beziehen) and uniquely so. For only the Infinite is itself its own
measure or, we might say, “judges all things”. Now Being is immediacy simply.
Hence it is the Beginning (of logic). Not that we immediately find Being without
the possibility of critique (this seems to be the basis of McTaggart’s view that
Hegel “had no right” to assume Being as beginning his dialectic). Rather, the
immediate, immediacy, is what Being initially names. Any question of what is or
is not immediate, however, just does not and cannot arise here. It, as category,
i.e. its possibility, is the condition for anything arising, or rather resulting, at all.

Being or immediacy, which by the negation of itself is a mediation

with self and a reference to self, - which consequently is also a
mediation which cancels itself into reference-to-self, or immediacy, -
is Essence (111).

Being is Essence, “being and all its forms”. It is as if he had said Being is
immediacy beyond all idea of immediacy, since this term “immediacy” is already
a (defining) mediation, a step beyond the beginning. So it “cancels itself” again,
or perpetually, thus becoming or manifesting itself as Essence or, one might say,
comprehensively mutual reference as such. It is not merely the type or form of
reference, i.e. the form which is reference as due, merely, to “our reflection on
what takes place”. That is, it is not merely the passing of one category into
another, which we had, so to say, subjectively taken to be the very dialectic
itself, but which was merely our starting out upon the ladder which we were
going to have to kick away. It is not, that is, the mere abstract idea of reference,
still less of essence. The categories remain, but as mutually referring to the
extent that “there is no real other”. Anything and anything has “its own other”,
immanently. Transition is excluded, as twice dead metaphor, giving way to
relation. Yet this remaining relation is “self-relation”, the same in difference. This
is the celebrated or maligned contradiction of Trinitarianism, as it were
universalized. This, quite obviously, is where Hegel the one-time seminarian is
“coming from”. After that we may see him as thinking his way either out of it or
deeper into it. In his own philosophy these two processes are anyway the same!
Those who advocate skipping a line whenever he mentions God simply refuse or
fail to read him. Being and Nothing are now seen to have no sense except in
mutual reference. “In God there is light and no darkness at all”, proclaims an
apostolic writer. But he still has to say it. They are in themselves referred to their
other, as condition for “surprise”. The positive as positive negatives the negative,
as the negative negatives the positive. This is the ancient post-Eden state of
being “as gods, knowing good and evil”, the sic et non transcending the either/or.
This mutual reference is “explicit”. That is, it is intrinsic to any “one” whatever, in
a way which finally overthrows language and predicative judgment, as has slowly
to appear, again as a form of kicking away a ladder or previous but indispensable
position from which it results, as the era of the algae destroyed itself in giving
way to the more complex life-forms, indispensably, or so runs the theory. “In
Being everything is immediate, in Essence everything is relative.” Yet in the end
we will see that everything cannot be relative, that relation itself will be
subverted, transformed, superseded.

Being is Essence. Yet “in essence the actual unity of the notion is not realized,
but only postulated by reflection” (112). Essence “is self-relatedness, only in so
far as it is relation to an Other”, an Other as necessarily postulated, however.
Still, “Essence… is Being.” Being, all the same, is now “deposed to a mere
negative, to a seeming”, to our own starting-point. Essence is so to say a more
true or “objective” being, “reflecting light into itself”, active. “The Absolute is the
Essence” (112). In general, if everything, taken distributively, is mediated by
something else, then everything is its other and every other is its other again.
Therefore one cannot advance from one thing to another as if that thing, or any
“thing”, stood alone and independent. All, rather, must be taken at once and not
merely posited thus, as if there were some anterior position from which to do
this. This is Essence. Essence, that is, precludes anything’s having its own
exclusive and particular essence. Essence negates essence, in that self-relation
which negates any possible relation. Hegel calls it immanent Being, Being gone
into itself, never going beyond, being there (Dasein we might again say, though
with new insight backwardly applied) “in the beginning”. We have now to
understand, however, how, all the same, the actual unity of the notion is not
realised yet, but postulated by reflection. Only so will we be able later to
appreciate what that realization or “advance” will show itself ever to be.

Hegel here makes a connection between Essence and our sense of the past, our
past tense, in fact, as it emerges in (German) language before or without any
explicit notion of The Past being formed. He clearly recalls a similar moment in
Aristotle where, however, no appeal to any testimony of a language-form is
made. Essence, says, Aristotle, is what was to be, quod erat esse, ti en einai. In
German, however, he notes, Wesen, essence, is “the term used for the past
tense”, putting it the other way round (equally validly), as it were. First we
distinguish past from present, the seeming, then we begin to subvert, overcome
the finite notion of time altogether. Of course at the end of that process we will
have to see that we never “began” anything at all. “No birth no death” (Buddhist
saying). We might say that our unreflected notion of a past is (was) our first
“model” for the changeless relation of each to other (its others) in the Notion
which, moving backwards now, is Essence. To promote Benthamism from the
Understanding to the Notion of Reason, we say in effect that each is to count for
all and none for less than all. Why, though, unless each is all, I am (count for)
“you”? It is only the “ought” thus based upon “is” that could really count at all.

Things really are not what they immediately show themselves. There
is thus something more to be done than simply rove from one quality
to another… there is a permanent in things… in the German auxiliary
verb ‘sein’ the past tense is expressed by the term for Essence
(Wesen):… gewesen… This anomaly of language… correct
perception… Essence we may certainly regard as past Being,… (112,
Zus.).
We have, that is, finished transcending Being, while it is still “at the same time
preserved”. That is, all “times” are so to say possessed, the alpha and omega of
the Absolute. The past is a kind of first picture of this, since the future is, in
realist or common-sense perception, just as future not real at all, an ens rationis
or “being of reason”. The present, as immediacy, is transcended in Essence as
use of the past tense is the same as denying the immediacy of what it otherwise
affirms. In the sweep of the logic this is equivalent to Aufhebung of pastness and
hence of Time with all its antinomies and contradiction. But the same of course
may be said of the whole of Nature. We may ask, did the dinosaurs “really” rant
and roar over millions of years, the sun rise and set, without rational observation?
“The outside is the inside.” That is, out and in are “out”. Have a cup of tea!
(Buddhist saying). “Come ye apart a while” (Christian saying). “The content is the
same” (Hegel).

Hegel also notes that Wesen can denote aggregates, collections, as of Press, Post
or Revenue (Steuerwesen), referring thus to them as “not to be taken single, in
their immediacy, but as a complex, and then, perhaps… in their various
bearings.” He asserts, “this usage… is not very different in its implication from
our own.” This refers especially to the “various bearings”, a potential relation
(bearing), as belongs to rationality, of each thing with everything and hence with
every other thing, as is claimed now, today, for the particles of physics viewed,
by physicists at least, as potential ultimates, relata salvaged while standing
before the abyss of the Notion. Hegel, however, thinks we can as well begin with
the Steuerwesen, making the last first, as he will later reverse cause and effect
prior to overcoming it all together, as indeed Hume’s analysis had called for. It is
quite clear that Hegel does not reject but incorporates or “saves” philosophical
skepticism or, just, skepticism. “What is God”, asked Thomas Aquinas, unless
finally unknowable or “incomprehensible”. Yet, unlike the Ding-an-sich, God, the
Absolute by definition (whether we like the proper name or not), is not, Hegel
thinks, to be likewise dropped, since just anything else is a type and symbol of it.
Thus das Unzulängliches ist getan, he will have read in Goethe, not merely as
justifying imperfect actions (it forgives them rather) but as situating anything
finite whatever in the dialectical advance “from shadows to reality”, a new slant
on a well-rehearsed, indeed ancient conception.

“People also speak of finite Essences, such as man.” He mentions a plural he

does not himself allow. This has implications regarding “man”. It was significant
when Kant began speaking not of man but of “the rational creature”. What Hegel
claims to show though is that “creature” too must overcome itself as notion, as
when he says, again, that created things, nature, the finite spirit even, are, “in
their difference from God, untrue” (83, Zus., as finally prefacing the whole Logic
beginning at 84). Aristotle was pointing in the same direction when he showed
(Metaphysics VII) that the determining essence of man lay not, really, in the
composite “rational animal” but, as with everything, in the ultimate or specific
difference, which is rationality. The “rational soul” determines everything, even
the form or appearance of the body. Thus it is forma corporis, which is as much
as to say that “the body” has no form of its own. While the Thomists, following
their master, maintain this “unicity of the substantial form” against Scotist ideas
of a simultaneous hierarchy of forms (used to affirm the divinity of the dead body
of Christ during the three days in the tomb, while for Aristotle any dead member
or body is only equivocally a limb or body at all), they are hampered, by
traditional constraints, in following this through to the end. They need not be,
given that a particular theory of body or matter as standing over against spirit on
its own level was never essential to the Christian kerygma. The ancient heresy of
docetism was the claim that uniquely Christ was only an appearance and not real
flesh. If flesh is overthrown intrinsically within itself as “untrue” the picture is
different altogether. One should also note that “flesh” in Biblical writings,
although certainly connoting an immediacy, refers principally to temporal visible
life as alienated from God, as nothing. “All flesh is as grass”, i.e. as the life of
grass, “which today is and tomorrow is cast into the oven”. Life, Hegel says,
“runs away”, ceases to be, i.e. is not, is aufgehoben. Resurrection, we may think,
as conceptualized by the Jews already before Christian times, is a figurative
attempt to capture this, rather than postulation of the same old thing, “this petty
pace”, all over again.

So the focus is not man1, not the rational creature even, if we want to transcend
figure and say it as it is (though thus using the essentially metaphorical resource
which is language to its utmost), but infinitely differentiated spirit where all are
one another. The “very term Essence implies that we have made a step beyond
finitude:” the title therefore is “inexact” for man. Man is a disposable category, a
specious identification of the “I”, and even of me who writes here. I rather can
identify with everyone and everything everywhere, like the Good Samaritan,
hopefully, or, to a degree, the ancient totemists. Calling God the highest or
supreme Essence, as one of several, Hegel now goes on to say, is unsatisfactory,
since it employs the category of quantity which “has its proper place within the
compass of the finite”. “God… is the Being.” On its own, however, this suggests
“scant recognition of the finite”. Yet “true Being is just the superseding of all that
is immediate.” Just! Say rather, precisely… “things, as they immediately are,
have no truth.” The finite, we seem to find, is also something like a caput
mortuum of abstraction, unless we take it as in the infinite, which thus abstracts
from nothing. In fact, as Freedom, it does not even abstract from Nothing or Non-
Being, having its opposite within itself, as, Hegel often notes, is proper to Reason.

Self-relation in Essence is the form of Identity or of reflection-into-

self, which has here taken the place of the immediacy of Being (113).

For philosophy to be genuine we ought always to be able to discern a simple or

immediate scheme behind what only appears as a bunch of technicalities. That is
why the supposed technicalities can negate and cancel themselves and make
use of past or discarded expressions in ways that are unthinkable in the finite

1
This surely is the historical background, if there should be one, to Heidegger’s
reservations regarding Sartrian humanism, existentialism as belittling a free and infinite
life of Mind, as we find too in Unamuno or, of course, Kierkegaard. Ultimately this is a
religious handicap stemming from a spuriously sacral order in which philosophy was
dubbed, impossibly, the “handmaid” (ancilla) of theology or divine science “handed
down” (tradita). But if another makes one free then one is free and gratefully (grace-fully)
so.
sciences. So, behind the doctrines of being and essence we have the two
moments, simply, of immediate manifestation then contrasted with the natural
question as to what things really are, Lewis Carroll’s bank-clerk become
hippopotamus, so to say. The case is the same in Thomas Aquinas, and quite
obvious in the Greek philosophers from whom form and matter, say, morphe
(shape) and hyle (wood), took their rise. Beginning from this Hegel arrives at a
conception he calls Essence which is not immediately relatable to versions of it in
other thinkers, and this is in general true of philosophical terms. The univocity,
that is, is never strict. Such strictness, indeed, is just what Hegel finds to be the
hallmark of the Understanding as re-stricted. He wants, we shall see, to banish it
from logic in particular, though this is often or even typically identified with it.

The unintelligence of sense, to take everything limited and finite for

Being, passes into the obstinacy of understanding, which views the
finite as self-identical, not inherently self-contradictory (113).

“Everything is itself and not another thing.” To this saying, beloved of the most
obstinate of philosophers (G.E. Moore), Hegel opposes, implicitly, the ecstatic
“This also is thou; neither is this thou”. Let us not be bashful of the ecstatic, upon
which philosophy has not, indeed, a handle but an intrinsic window, as being able
to explain and situate both art and religion and, indeed, itself. In the logic as so
far developed he has shown that this, the “inherently self-contradictory”, is so.
What remains is, naturally, what will follow. Of course we have here an
illustration of our thesis of the necessary non-technicalty of speculation, theoria,
since Hegel’s thought is as much as anyone else’s of value only insofar as it does
not contradict itself. Being at one time a bank-clerk and at another a
hippopotamus is not a contradiction, given a certain estimate of finite reality as
indeed unreality. But of course to say that finite is self-contradictory, even
though finitely uttered, is not self-contradictory. That is to say, Bernard
Lonergan’s category of a “contradiction in performance” is inherently equivocal
or, to put it another way, Practical reason is just that; it must not be reduced to
Understanding, to “universal prescriptivism”, for example. This is the whole
thrust of the doctrine of epieicheia, of interpreting the will of the law-giver so as
to, as it seems, break the law.

What this has to do with Essence is the exhibiting of a total pattern of inter-
relatedness which necessarily subverts relation as such. It is, we have seen,
Indifference which is Essence. A picture is emerging of reality as something as it
were “full of eyes”, in that any point or element (facet) of it whatever is beholds
and/or encompasses itself and all the rest within itself, as real seeing is an initial
form of doing. There is in English an uncanny pun, in this connection, between
“eye” and “I”, since it will be eventually I, the subject, which does this and is
indeed Subjectivity as such, since otherness is ultimately subverted. This though
is the same as to say that Self is subverted in the other, which is always its other.
All this, by the way, provides intrinsic ground as to why one cannot be limited to
simply expounding Hegel’s thought as a personal or individual philosophy. There
are no such abstract or “precise” (prescinded) individuals. “I am you.” As he
himself insisted while writing, and just here, it is Being itself which modulates
into, which ever was, Essence. In this sense it is not a work of Mind, of anyone’s
mind. The same must apply, ought to apply, to our own writing, as we said above
about reading also. This is what was meant by “understanding spiritual things
spiritually” or, for that matter, the “treasure in earthen vessels”, never mind now
who said it. We attend to what was said, rather, following, here to, hegel’s
example. The parable of “the unjust steward” might seem a good precedent, as
is the idea of “bringing forth from one’s treasure things new and old”.

The task remains, however, of understanding Hegel’s text, here in the

Encyclopaedia. We now seem to have an “external” Being contrasted with “the
true Being (of Essence)” which is then “called the Unessential. But that turns
out a mistake” (114):

Because Essence is Being-in-self, it is essential only to the extent that

it has in itself its negative, i.e. reference to another, or mediation.
Consequently, it has the unessential as its own proper seeming
(reflection) in itself… The sphere of Essence thus turns out to be a
still imperfect combination of immediacy and mediation.