has to get filled from without by separately-existing objects. It would
be truer to say that it is subjectivity itself which, as dialectical,
breaks through its own barriers and opens out into objectivity by means
of the syllogism.
193.] This 'realisation' of the notion,--a realisation in which the
universal is this one totality withdrawn back into itself (of which
the different members are no less the whole, and) which has given
itself a character of 'immediate' unity by merging the mediation:--this
realisation of the notion is the Object.
I his transition from the Subject, the notion in general, and
especially the syllogism, to the Object, may, at the first glance,
appear strange, particularly if we look only at the Syllogism
of Understanding, and suppose syllogising to be only an act of
consciousness. But that strangeness imposes on us no obligation to seek
to make the transition plausible to the image-loving conception. The
only question which can be considered is, whether our usual conception
of what is called an 'object' approximately corresponds to the object
as here described. By 'object' is commonly understood not an abstract
being, or an existing thing merely, or any sort of actuality, but
something independent, concrete, and self-complete, this completeness
being the totality of the notion. That the object (_Objekt_) is also
an object to us (_Gegenstand_) and is external to something else,
will be more precisely seen, when it puts itself in contrast with
the subjective. At present, as that into which the notion has passed
from its mediation, it is only immediate object and nothing more,
just as the notion is not describable as subjective, previous to the
subsequent contrast with objectivity.
Further, the Object in general is the one total, in itself still
unspecified, the Objective World as a whole, God, the Absolute Object.
The object, however, has also difference attaching to it: it falls
into pieces, indefinite in their multiplicity (making an objective
world); and each of these individualised parts is also an object, an
intrinsically concrete, complete, and independent existence.
Objectivity has been compared with being, existence, and actuality;
and so too the transition to existence and actuality (not to being,
for _it_ is the primary and quite abstract immediate) maybe compared
with the transition to objectivity. The ground from which existence
proceeds, and the reflective correlation which is merged in actuality,
are nothing but the as yet imperfectly realised notion. They are only
abstract aspects of it,--the ground being its merely essence-bred
unity, and the correlation only the connexion of real sides which are
supposed to have only self-reflected being. The notion is the unity of
the two; and the object is not a merely essence-like, but inherently
universal unity, not only containing real distinctions, but containing
them as totalities in itself.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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