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which thought is necessarily concerned; laws of thought are laws of "thinking", and thinking is both form and
content: (2) observation gives each law an absolute being of its own, as if it were detached from the unity of
self-consciousness, whereas this unity is the fundamental principle of each and al the laws, which only exist
in and by the single process of that unity. Hence a type of logic confined to "observing" laws of thought is
necessarily untrue. Observation again fails in the second case because it is impossible to separate mind from
its total environment. Observational or empirical psychology therefore is incapable of giving an adequate
account of mind the constitution of the environment enters into and in part determines the constitution of the
psychic events, and the latter cannot be explained even as events without interpreting the former at the same
time.]]
b. OBSERVATION OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS IN ITS PURE FORM AND
IN ITS RELATION TO EXTERNAL REALITY-LOGICAL AND
PSYCHOLOGICAL LAWS
Observation of nature finds the notion realized in inorganic nature, laws, whose moments are things which at
the same time are in the position of abstractions. But this notion is not a simplicity reflected into self. The life
of organic nature, on the other hand, is only this self-reflected simplicity. The opposition within itself, in the
sense of the opposition of universal and individual, does not make its appearance in the essential nature of
b. OBSERVATION OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS IN ITS PURE FORM AND IN ITS RELATION TO EXTER
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THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF MIND
this life itself with one factor apart from the other. Its essential nature is not the genus, self-sundered and
self-moved in its undifferentiated element, and remaining at the same time for itself undifferentiated in its
opposition. Observation finds this free notion, whose universality has just as absolutely within it developed
individuality, only in the notion which itself exists as notion, i.e. in self-consciousness.
When observation now turns in upon itself and directs itself on the notion which is real qua free notion, it
finds, to begin with, the Laws of Thought. This kind of individuality, which thought is in itself, is the abstract
movement of the negative, a movement entirely introverted into simplicity; and the laws are outside reality.
To say "they have no reality" means in general nothing else than that they are without any truth. And in fact
they do not claim to be entire truth, but still formal truth. But what is purely formal without reality is an ens
intellectus, or empty abstraction without the internal diremption which would be nothing else but the content.
On the other hand, however, since they are laws of pure thought, while the latter is the inherently universal,
and thus a kind of knowledge, which immediately contains being and therein all reality, these laws are
absolute notions, and axe in one and the same sense the essential principles of form as well as of things. Since
self-directing, self-moving universality is the simple notion in a state of diremption, this notion has in this
manner a content in itself, and one which is all content except sensuous, not a being of sense. It is a content,
which is neither in contradiction with the form nor at all separated from it; rather it is essentially the form
itself; for the latter is nothing but the universal dividing itself into its pure moments.
In the way in which this form or content, however, comes before observation qua observation, it gets the
character of a content that is found, given, i.e. one which merely is. It becomes a passively existing basis of
relations, a multitude of detached necessities, which as a definitely fixed content are to have truth just as they
stand with their specific characteristic, and thus, in point of fact, are withdrawn from the form.
This absolute truth of fixed characteristics, or of a plurality of different laws, contradicts, however, the unity
of self-consciousness, contradicts the unity of thought and form in general. What is declared to be a fixed
and inherently constant law can be merely a moment of the self-referring, self-reflecting unity, can come on
the scene merely as a vanishing element. When extricated, however, by the process of considering them, from
the movement imposing this continuous connexion, and when set out individually and separately, it is not
content that they lack, for they have a specific content; they lack rather form, which is their essential nature.
In point of fact it is not for the reason that they are to be merely formal and are not to have any content, that
these laws are not the truth of thought; it is rather for the opposite reason. It is because in their specificity, i.e.
just as a content with the form removed, they want to pass for something absolute. In their true nature, as
vanishing moments in the unity of thought, they would have to be taken as knowledge or as thinking process,
but not as laws of knowledge. Observing, however, neither is nor knows that knowledge itself; observation
converts its nature into the shape of an objective being, i.e. apprehends its negative character merely as laws
of being.
It is sufficient for our purpose here to have indicated the invalidity of the so-called laws of thought from the
consideration of the general nature of the case. It falls to speculative philosophy to go more intimately and
fully into the matter, and there they show themselves to be what in truth they are, single vanishing moments,
whose truth is simply the whole of the think process, knowledge itself.
This negative unity of thought exists for its own sake, or rather it is just being for itself and on its own
account, the principle of individuality; and its reality consists in exercising a function, it is an active
consciousness. Consequently the mental attitude of observation will by the nature of the case be led on
towards this as being the reality of those laws of thought. Since this connexion is not a fact for observation,
the latter supposes that thought with its laws remains standing separately on one side, and that, on the other
side, it obtains another objective being in what is now the object observed, viz. that acting consciousness,
b. OBSERVATION OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS IN ITS PURE FORM AND IN ITS RELATION TO EXTER
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THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF MIND
which exists for itself in such a way as to cancel otherness and find its reality in this direct awareness of itself
as the negative.
In the active practical reality of consciousness, observation thus finds opened up before it a new field.
Psychology contains the collection of laws in virtue of which the mind takes up different attitudes towards
the different forms of its reality given and presented to it in a condition of otherness. The mind adopts these
various attitudes partly with a view to receiving these modes of its reality into itself, and conforming to the
habits, customs, and ways of thinking it thus comes across, as being that wherein mind is reality and as such
object to itself; partly with a view to knowing its own spontaneous activity in opposition to them, to follow
the bent of its own inclinations, affections, and emotions, and carry off thence what is merely of particular
and special moment for itself, and thus make what is objective conform to itself. In the former it behaves
negatively towards itself as single and individual mind, in the latter negatively towards itself as the universal
being.
In the former aspect independence [or self-dependence] gives what is met with merely the form of conscious
individuality in general, and as regards the content remains within the general reality given; in the second
aspect, however, it gives the reality at least a certain special modification, which does not contradict its
essential content, or even a modification by which the individual qua particular reality and peculiar content
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