Kant
In Hume we find a notion of causality which involves one object of sense being shown to have some sort of an association with another not in any way necessarily contained by it. For experience never affords us certainty that the connection between two moments is actually causal and not just apparently connected in our own senses, and this too forbids it being analytical. A necessarily causal event could contain entirely its effect as such. However, this negative determination is nonetheless made a priori and therefore was impossible for him to reconcile completely against his empiricism producing a kind of deadlock.
As a result he attributed its necessity not to its being a form of cognition which allows for the possibility of experience, but to mere force of habit, and in doing so ends up, “Mistaking subjective necessity for objective.” If we could determine the conditions which Kant believes led Hume to make this sort of mistake, it would function as a sort of scaffolding leading us to his thought from Hume’s. The question of the possibility of metaphysics demands that we clear up its grounds in the history of philosophy even going well beyond Kant, where he himself was drawing heavily from. Of course we should keep in mind Kant’s insistence that his system being a new one, it will look incomprehensible in certain ways from the point of view of the old.
Kant understood this notion of causality as a form of synthetic a priori cognition to be instructive in a preliminary way but also insufficient. In the Prolegomena, Kant argues that pure mathematics in the form of arithmetic and geometry is also a form of synthetic a priori cognition, and so Hume had come up short in his analysis of the synthetic a priori. More particularly, Hume’s clasically analytical method in general distracts him away from metaphysics as a matter of constructive synthesis as is demanded by Kant. Because he had merely accepted his predecessors’ (Leibniz, Locke) characterization of mathematics as a purely logical/analytic matter grounded in the law of contradiction, he had not there deduced from its origin in the faculty of intuition its fully imaginative character. In fact, the relation of causation can be generalized such that all of the categories of experience can be shown to be synthetic a priori forms of cognition, and not only causality as Hume had alluded to.
Logic is not to be explained by appeal to psychologism, metaphysics, or anthropology. Logic constitutes the formal rules of all thinking, it is not any one of these things and delimited by the others. Unfortunately, much work has followed these routes for a long time after Aristotle. Criticism is necessary for reason to advance, and so reason is necessarily connected here with the discursive. But if we overextend the bounds of reason to speculation, we actually broaden the principle of sensibility on its own and this serves instead to narrow reason.
At the same time Kant also wants to deprive the dialectic. In this way discourse is subsumed by reason, rather than reason in dialectic. The distinction between things as objects of experience and things in themselves is necessary. Mere objects of possible experience can’t bring us to God, freedom, or immortality.
In criticism we overcome materialism, fatalism, atheism, unbelief, enthusiasm/superstition, and finally both idealism & skepticism. A priori cognitions are in the common understanding, which is not represented by any of these narrow programs. Criticism also is not merely opposed to the a priori outcomes of science which can be construed as dogmatic, but rather is set against unwarranted dogmatism without self-critique.
The synthetic a priori can’t proceed by way of law of non-contradiction, as with the determination of analyticity. The faculty of sensibility is described by the doctrine of elements, in which a great multitude gets presented to the senses. The faculty of understanding is described by the doctrine of method, in which the elements are organized by cognitive function. Transcendental philosophy has no empirical content of its own, but proceeds synthetically in this sort of manner.
Why do we begin with aesthetic, then move to the logic? The apprehension of sensation is followed by the rational procedure of logic, the sensible precedes the reasonable. Pure intuitions removed of all trace of the sensible are represented in the mind a priori. The science of all such principles constitutes the transcendental aesthethic.
Transcendental freedom is an uncondition event which can only be posited, because every event which gets experienced does so as having been caused in time by something else prior to it. Practical freedom therefore is only the convenience of not being driven by the various pathological impulses pervading nature. Though this would similarly be posited, being a matter of sensation it is instead assumed in a sort of way as given. And we can of course verify all the time that there is some or another given sensation.
We can determine that an action was free of this impulse or that one, but we could only know with certainty that it was free of all impulse if we had determined that it was entirely an unconditioned event. There would be no way of perfectly dividing up all pathology otherwise, this practice is only an imperfect affair. But to do so would free it of all content that could characterize it as an event. Kant turns this around to say that if appearances were merely things in themselves to begin with, there would be no such dialectic of freedom concerning nature.
If there is no free action every event has no beginning, because it must be a consequence of something other than happening itself freely. Freedom is necessary in addition to consequences of laws of nature. But consequences do not make their conditions possible. It is not only possible but necessary to reach the idea (not the appearance) of the unconditioned. Even if the intelligible cause of each apppearance is inaccessible each one of their effects as appearances can be seen. The mistakes which arise as a result of this dialectic Kant calls transcendental illusion.
Aenesidemus
Aenesidemus contends that more than anything, the Critique of Pure Reason has opened up the problem of representation. Does any side accurately account for the nature of representations? If Kant is correct, he needs to have overcome Hume’s doubts against dogmatism. Another correlative question is whether Reinhold’s philosophy of elements is a separate project from the Critique. Reinhold believes that Kant has produced a successful science and that his own further application of it serves as additional evidence of this fact. Aenesidemus rather argues that Kant’s foundational project does not get off the ground at all and so that Reinhold’s extension of it can not possibly be doing any work either.
Are representations produced by their associated faculty which determines necessarily their appearance? All this says is they can’t be thought apart. But that they can’t be thought apart could only be a merely historical oddity or cultural artifact. A necessary state of being doesn’t follow from thought of its possibility. This results in all sorts of dogmatic ontological conclusions Kant had hoped to put to rest. How far the principle of sufficient reason extends is undecided; whether representations are connected with things in themselves by any other method is undecided.
Not only should we be skeptical of the necessity of representation, synthesis can demonstrably take place outside of its form as a subjective mental judgment. Kant himself points out that outer sensations are no less subjective than inner ones may be viewed as objective. The sensation of necessity also originates from objects, not just in the mind. We need to decide if there is a natural pre-established harmony which grounds a connection to the thing in itself.
Fichte
On p.64 of the Introduction to the Science of Knowledge, Fichte ridicules the idea that the conditions for the possibility of existence must always precede existence. For then we should be lead to question where comes from the existence of the original conditions of possibility. And of course it is certainly existence which precedes the conditions and not the other way around. There could also be a cycle in which existence produces conditions which produces further existence, but existence could not have come out of non-existing conditions originally. What escapes this system are not conditions of possibility, but the self - to which any existence ascribed will be insufficient and overcome. And so presumably we can always ask for the conditions of the possibility of the existence of a self and what will precede them and entail the existence of those conditions is nothing other than the self whose existence was under question to begin with.
Fichte says Kant wavers on whether the intellectual intuition is equivalent with some otherwise undescribed notion called ‘pure apperception’, but he also notices that it is often described as taking the form of an action. And what greater action is there in the Kantian system for the intellectual intuition to take up than the categorical imperative? Thus, for Fichte the intellectual intution must be essentially described as an acting out of the categorical imperative. This reveals a connection shared between what are classically viewed as deeply metaphysical problems on one hand and what Fichte believes finally will entail their practical resolution in an ethics of all things on the other. This suggestion would be appalling to metaphysicians of all sorts.
On one view if there is something to be pointed out as the subject in or along with the self then it would need to be determined and delimited and the boundaries set such that they could be said to be distinct from one another. But Fichte suggests rather that we do away with any notion of a non-self subsisting outside of the self. Instead, the subject is what sets forth the task for itself to oppose something objective to it and then they are united in synthesis again by the same self. The self in this case must posit itself but it is left unexplained why this must happen, it is simply the case that it does. Fichte also suggests that the self’s striving over its own limitations is reflected back against its own course of action, and in this way it produces the need to posit itself again above and over its own reflection of its limitations. The self’s duty in the categorical imperative is not to something outside but to its striving toward its own endless overcoming.
Fichte notices that finite things can not be absolutely opposed to one another in the way that would be required for this endless striving over opposites to take place. This is because what all finite things share is determinability. At some point we are always going to run out of the totality of all accidental properties that exist among the finite things to oppose to one another and be left with only their mutual determinability. Infinite things are alike in the same way for indeterminability. The self’s activity then must act across this gap which exists between the finite and the infinite and nothing else, and therefore it must in addition to being finite also extend into the infinite unboundedly.
Schelling
Because philosophy is thinking it is necessarily ideal and opposed to any theory deriving from the primacy of being, which seems to sadly characterize much of what has been called philosophy leading up to Schelling. The transcendental science is separate from any possible explanation for nature, because it is what grounds those. Objects are constructed by the intution, which includes so-called ’natural’ objects, and the proof is by an overarching idealism which grounds both ideas in general and therefore also all particular ideas about nature. Knowledge connects presentation with objects which grounds the truth of the presentation as actually being apparent. So the nature of a thing is not the essence of its being but our own understanding of it.
How can we think of presentations conforming to objects and of objects conforming to presentations? Classically, the direction is said to hold in only one direction. So either objects get presented to us or we have a form of presentation which all objects must follow from. Kant has properly shown that objects are conditioned by both, but it remains unclear under his definitions how this can remain true for objects of nature which are conceivably unconditioned by the mind. Schelling clarifies that nature is a judgment of mind rather than falling outside of it, as it is one about a division between things internal to it.
Hegel
Observation and Reason in The Phenomenology of Spirit
Science has two modes in which it is engaged, in the first it sets out to accumulate knowledge through an investigation of the world, and in the second this knowledge becomes consolidated into a complex made up of all of the simple results it has accumulated over time. In engaging in the second form however we end up beginning to see this alone as a basis for further study of the world, and it is itself treated as a blank slate from which new primary investigations arise. Of course these are actually founded on the past successes which made everything possible, but the process of science becomes reaccepted as a merely implied form of reasoning. Furthermore, even though we actually do accumulate knowledge in exactly this way, when we treat the complex itself we are still performing the same kind of simple investigation about the world as what we had been doing when we ‘began’ in the first place. We are always left with the absolute in the form of a simple idea, and this will tend to mask all of the details and complexities that science actually has to undergo. An accident can take place within the self-enclosure of experience which we name death. But it would not be right to avoid it necessarily, because the true subject shares a special relation with it. Both are conditioned by and take their power from negativity. They only gain their own essence from acting as a force of negativity against the positive causal chain of determinant being. It is a prevalent mistake to try and see negativity as another part of the self-enclosure of everything into one singular unity, and then the notions of the absolute and God are attributed to it.
Self-Alienation in The Phenomenology of Spirit
This section covers the self-alienation that follows after consciousness takes on its first immediate notion of a spiritual character, which ends up in yet another irreconcilable conflict that arises out of an issue of immediacy. This follows similarly from the sort of inevitable conflict which results from the immediacy in the earlier section on sense-certainty, that ends in the realization of the appearance of a universal ethical order that cuts through personal individuality as some selfhood taking in the senses and acting upon them alone.
The kind of spiritual order which gets arrived at is finally viewed as a set of contingent demands made on us that comes from outside, which results in the lawfulness that for a time manages to uphold the community. But it is entirely external to them, and nothing about them is required of it to be in the particular way that it fashions itself. Hegel compares this to the actualization of Stoicism as a philosophical force on the world scene. For Stoicism is indifferent to all content, and anything can be put into the form of thought.
In the Roman Empire, you find that you are a person, but you are just one person among many persons, and end up in a state of self-alienation. This section quickly covers a period of a thousand years of history commonly called the dark ages that follows the fall of the reign of the Roman empire.
Consciousness realizes that in order to earn a true spiritual character it can’t take this shortcut but must go through a process that Hegel refers to as ‘bildung’, or the cultivation of a self through participating in a practice of one’s culture. Through their obedience and work, one participates in the life of the state and takes on the universal skills that allows one to participate in it. Although consciousnesses continue to participate in this world, they at the same time form a faith in another second world in which salvation can finally be brought to them. It is in another sense however, only the alienation of the workers from their own work.
Everything works, but it works toward death as its distant semi-conscious end in order to finally pass over into the second world. It has to regard its own individuality as inessential in order to become at one with the universal. The split of the two worlds is so disastrous that it finally results in the French Revolution.
The universal cultural content that gets arrived at here has something that’s not present in the earlier merely legal personhood. For instance, the notion of the good is what is at one with itself in the universal, whereas the bad is what is opposed to itself within it. But why isn’t this arbitrary, couldn’t the good and bad be something independent? We realize that language allows us to redefine everything, even the very terms we thought were indestructible, like good, bad, and truth, or lies. It is our responsibility to take part in this interplay of redefinitions of what it means to be in the world as defined by the terms that it involves.
But what is shared between the honest person, and the perverse who deliberately corrupts language, is a truth that is retained in the notion, no matter whether the content is of a lie. A lie, of course, is only a merely rhetorical opposition to some deeper truth, that may always potentially be arrived at nonetheless.
Spirit in The Phenomenology of Spirit
Self consciousness apprehends itself to be universal in so far as it finds itself among a community of self-consciousnesses, it recognizes itself as reflected in their shared universality. What is shared in particular by each and every one of these self-consciousnesses is an Other which it recognizes itself in. Our relations to other self-consciousnesses can be of some complexity, and for example they are not only relations to objects but they may partially be mediated by other objects. This becomes quite clear when our desires coincide with each other, or come into conflict against one another.
Materialists at the time had reduced everything to bare matter devoid of the kind of internal spiritual relation to God that once held fast. The Enlightenment is a great project of debunkment of all such former metaphysical beliefs. But if the aim of the Enlightenment is absolute freedom for man, what has it actually achieved in knocking everything down except for itself? The individual realizes that its notion of Nature is simply the appearance of the making of its own laws. We are left alone in the world to ourselves, along with possibly our own capacities that we may have of determining what there is. In order for there not to be simply be chaos, we must engage in a construction of world through laws that at least partly receive their adequation from others. The will of all, one universal democracy that excludes any problematic sense of individuality, decides the way of the world.
Because we all see that we are all each one another just coming up with these laws arbitrarily and hoping that they come to match up with one another, this dire stage of consciousness results in the absolute terror of the French Revolution. It is only by flingling one’s life into the revolution ‘selflessly’, at the expense of death for many, that one might essentially lose one’s individuality. What is curious about this is that it involves moral action done for the ends of others, even if we are at one and the same time completely rejecting oneself. Where does this moral action ultimately result from?
In the first world of spirit one finds oneself placed among an ethical order. Secondarily, absolute freedom is reached, and one’s false commitments to an arbitrarily created ethical order become overcome. But this results in a complication between these two sorts of views. Hegel overcomes it by introducing a third order, of morality, in which one’s duty is in particular to be beautiful and to maximize beauty. It is only by seeing what is given as beautiful necessarily that we overcome the inessentiality that we are always at risk of when deciding upon facts between the first two worlds. All selves can find themselves as bound by this law so much as they realize themselves as members of the moral community of flourishing. The action of their own laws they put into place take into account the objectivity of the community they find themselves among, alongside an accompanying analysis of the laws which determines the community taken in and of itself to be another separate legal institution separate from each lawbound individual.
The harmony for self-consciousness between nature and duty here is merely a thought, because it cannot simply make them become reconciled in actuality. Its every attempt will be thwarted by some indifferent error or another, and the task appears to be infinite. It is not only a task we are severely impressed by, but it will always remain incomplete.
In the ethical order, one must carry out ones duties. Conversely, in morality, duty is relegated to pure thought, and placed off into some realm of the beyond. There is a question of what is the relation between such moral duty and our nature and community, but ultimately the way our moral activity plays out will shape the world we live in, who we live among, and how we live among them. Furthermore, if morality is primarily contemplative, its activity must be carefully excercised by its very intimate relation to other vulnerable self-consciousnesses. We see though that these self-consciousnesses face the same moral problem as ourselves in relation to us, and so their must be yet another third holy consciousness to resolve the matter completely. This holy consciousness’ assumed search for the answers in-the-last-instance serves to free ourselves from the apparently impossible infinite task we were faced with in definitely arriving at an objective moral stance and an accompanying immortality. Of course, this freedom comes with the ultimate cost of always being confronted with the possiblity of one’s final end.
Faith and Morality in The Phenomenology of Spirit
Self consciousness apprehends itself to be universal in so far as it finds itself among a community of self-consciousnesses, it recognizes itself as reflected in their shared universality. What is shared in particular by each and every one of these self-consciousnesses is an Other which it recognizes itself in. Our relations to other self-consciousnesses can be of some complexity, and for example they are not only relations to objects but they may partially be mediated by other objects. This becomes quite clear when our desires coincide with each other, or come into conflict against one another.
Materialists at the time had reduced everything to bare matter devoid of the kind of internal spiritual relation to God that once held fast. The Enlightenment is a great project of debunkment of all such former metaphysical beliefs. But if the aim of the Enlightenment is absolute freedom for man, what has it actually achieved in knocking everything down except for itself? The individual realizes that its fallacious notion of Nature was simply the appearance of the making of its own laws. We are left alone in the world to ourselves, along with possibly our own capacities that we may have of determining what there is. In order for there not to be simply be chaos, we must engage in a construction of world through laws that at least partly receive their adequation from others. The will of all, one universal democracy that excludes any problematic sense of individuality, decides the way of the world.
Because we all see that we are all each one another just coming up with these laws arbitrarily and hoping that they come to match up with one another, this dire stage of consciousness results in the absolute terror of the French Revolution. It is only by flingling one’s life into the revolution ‘selflessly’, at the expense of death for many, that one might essentially lose one’s individuality. What is curious about this is that it involves moral action done for the ends of others, even if we are at one and the same time completely rejecting oneself. Where does this moral action ultimately result from?
In the first world of spirit one finds oneself placed among an ethical order. Secondarily, absolute freedom is reached, and one’s false commitments to an arbitrarily created ethical order become overcome. But this results in a complication between these two sorts of views. Hegel overcomes it by introducing a third order, of morality, in which one’s duty is in particular to be beautiful and to maximize beauty. It is only by seeing what is given as beautiful necessarily that we overcome the inessentiality that we are always at risk of when deciding upon facts between the first two worlds. All selves can find themselves as bound by this law so much as they realize themselves as members of the moral community of flourishing. The action of their own laws they put into place take into account the objectivity of the community they find themselves among, alongside an accompanying analysis of the laws which determines the community taken in and of itself to be another separate legal institution separate from each lawbound individual.
The harmony for self-consciousness between nature and duty here is merely a thought, because it cannot simply make them become reconciled in actuality. Its every attempt will be thwarted by some indifferent error or another, and the task appears to be infinite. It is not only a task we are severely impressed by, but it will always remain incomplete.
In the ethical order, one must carry out ones duties. Conversely, in morality, duty is relegated to pure thought, and placed off into some realm of the beyond. There is a question of what is the relation between such moral duty and our nature and community, but ultimately the way our moral activity plays out will shape the world we live in, who we live among, and how we live among them. Furthermore, if morality is primarily contemplative, its activity must be carefully excercised by its very intimate relation to other vulnerable self-consciousnesses. We see though that these self-consciousnesses face the same moral problem as ourselves in relation to us, and so there must be yet another third holy consciousness to resolve the matter completely. This holy consciousness’ assumed search for the answers in-the-last-instance serves to free ourselves from the apparently impossible infinite task we were faced with in definitely arriving at an objective moral stance and an accompanying immortality. Of course, this freedom comes with the ultimate cost of always being confronted with the possibility of death.
Contradictions of Burial Rights in The Phenomenology of Spirit
During the aftermath of the battle to the death over what is right in morality, we come to try and express to each other our duties. In this way, we attempt to impress on one another that our own duty has actual force as a moral law. Such public expression, that one’s duty must be adequated by others, becomes to be seen as the very essence of conscientiousness. The validity of our conduct was only internal before, there was in fact no necessary essential content to it.
In mutual forgiveness, out of reconciliation, each party rescinds their judgment on the evil of the other. One has taken oneself outside of the problem of the conflicting laws of the state, and opinions over good and evil, and who is in the wrong. The individual extracts themselves from these dilemmas, and understands themselves in a different way than how they had in the realm of the moral. Every dimension that seemed alien is no longer so, it gets viewed now as a rational component to the self. In the religious community each recognizes that the other has realized their absolute pure essence. But, how we relate to this absolute will still play out through a problematic form of representation.
Spirit that merely knows itself as spirit is for Hegel, of course, too immediate. This is why he holds the artist that is member of the state and a religious community in such high esteem. They are not only able to understand themselves as spirit, but shape its very character in the fashion of their own rational being. This too is not enough. The third form of religion, true religion, always has a metaphysically representative form. For even an artist’s work of art that is considered by all to be a perfect depiction, is also at the same time only viewed as an impossible grasping toward the beyond. And empirically in all world religions, one is only given their relation to the divine through such representative forms as heirarchical communities, forming works of religious art, or in philosophy by way of demonstration through a priori argument that secretly and very presumptuously does the duty for us of adequating our relation with nothing other than the absolute being, God. But would such a being really be in need of representation by mere human beings, except unless they could not possibly grasp its actual form?
Hegel’s insistence that God is dead because Jesus died on the cross should be offensive to most everybody. For Christians, they commonly either ignore this aspect of Christian doctrine, or if they attempt to take it seriously they will makeshift a work around that allows for God’s return. For atheists, they must make some sense of the fact that by definition of death, the existence of some actual, real being has come to an end. It is not merely that people have stopped believing in God, and for that matter there are more believers today than ever before.
If the natural is to be viewed as divine, but always placed further away in something alien to what has been found so far and determined to have actually been merely natural and not of the divine, then it will end up undercutting itself. Under this conception of representation by the divine, what has happened to the indepdence of the human animal?
In understanding the consciousness has obtained absolute knowledge of the dynamic relations of objects but it lacks self-knowledge of itself as spirit.
The unhappy consciousness dealt with the beyond and hte supersensible but the unity of itself as an individual and as a self consciousness could not find reconciliation except in this religious community.
The Absolute and the Religious Community in The Phenomenology
At the end of the Phenomenology of Spirit the religious truth of the individual is found in his place in the Church, while the Church exists in order to allow the individual to find his real essence. Neither side can complete the process without the other. This poses a problem for many religious authoritarians and spiritualist insurrectionaries alike. As Hegel states very clearly in the beginning, the process will be slow because each moment must be contemplated for itself. In the normal course of things we only arrive at the meaning of a thing in-itself, which is in fact its subjective meaning for-us. The moment in-itself is negated one-by-one of its determinant relations to all other moments in time, which are infinite. The process will be completed nonetheless, marked by the living symbol of the absolute.
This is the way in which the problem of fully internalizing a meaningless death becomes resolved. The subject becomes involved in works of art, but a bid must always be made to God that the work will some how become completed. We have only our own broken nature to carry the project out on ourselves. This is the connection to the infinite, which is not so much the eternal ground of everything as it is a merely empty but necessary remainder.
Being in The Science of Logic
Being simply determines its qualities, and essence produces logical reflection of complementary opposites by necessity. As such, all of what we thought was the being of reality or the essence of truth from the first two sections, should really just be seen as moments of concepts being thought. Hegel says that the determination of being and essences as judgments, “Must be seen as forming a sequence of stages.” But we now proceed to explicitly develop what was previously only happening in those cases implicitly.
Bare universality is what is common to each of a set of particularities, which takes the form of a genus. We have so far developed instances of being and truth ‘in-itself’, but we have not yet arrived at any sense of a being or truth ‘for-itself’. There can no longer be a simple dialectical turning over as took place in the sections on being and on essence. Rather, there will be the cumulative growing of a community of people who share in an interrelated dialectical complexity of concept formation. True universality is not a mere instance of a collection of objects, but took thousands of years to develop through living human community in this manner.
Hegel also explains that need and drive are the most ready examples of the case to be made against a materialist theory of mere finitude. We are often found to be carrying ourselves well past the point of simple ‘satisfaction’ of desire, which even if actually fulfilled as it turns out always reproduces itself immediately again - whether of some other form or the same. Why would we not simply exist in a state of peace with our desires if they held the “stability and invincibility” that is suggested by simplistic theories of satisfaction meted out by acting merely on the basis of desire or need?
The idea of life, or its truth, is arrived at through the process of life and death. In death, life is freed from the particularity of a singular organism. A single creature on its own could not produce the truth of spirit, as Hegel describes, “The death of the merely immediate singular organism is the emergence of spirit.”
Measure in The Science of Logic
In the measure section, we find a thing in which qualitative changes are followed by quantitative changes and then the quantitative and qualitative changes each in turn retroactively work back against on one another and on themselves in a convoluted and reciprocal manner. What remains is the internal essence of the thing on which all of these things are taking place, which is absolutely indifferent to all of them, because it is self-subsisting in spite of all of these changes or possibly persists even and only because of them.
Essence can only take on qualities in so far they are relative to a certain process that mediates them. Its qualities can be in and of themselves, otherwise they would not have any distinctions from anything else. Their quantitative and qualitative changes, intensive and extensive magnitudes, can only take place in relation either to themselves or to other things - but they must be in relation to something. Even one quantitative value on its own has no actual being except for the associated quality with which it measures.
If in measure we find a notion of absolute indifference inherent in the thing, then necessarily the essence of a whole may or could be viewed as separate from the essence of each of its individual parts. This is exactly where the concept of essence comes from, is the absolute indifference that inevitably gets produced within the very field of being itself in the form of measure.
The free will of the human being is its internal essence which is absolutely indifferent to many of the changes that it is able to take on and remain inwardly unchanged by them, except to pay them their due recognition. Hegel says that in the free reflection that follows from this new possibility, “We ought to advance to a closer insight into the inner harmony and lawfulness of nature.”