(b) Existence

Existence is the immediate unity of reflection-into-self and reflection-into-other. It follows from this that existence is the indefinite multitude of existents as reflected-into-themselves, which at the same time equally throw light upon one another – which, in short, are co-relative, and form a world of reciprocal dependence and of infinite interconnection between grounds and consequents. The grounds are themselves existences: and the existents in like manner are in many directions grounds as well as consequents.

The phrase 'Existence' (derived from existere) suggests the fact of having proceeded from something. Existence is Being which has proceeded from the ground, and has reinstated by annulling its intermediation. The Essence, as Being set aside and absorbed, originally came before us as shining or showing in self, and the categories of this reflection are identity, difference and ground. The last is the unity of identity and difference; and because it unifies them it has at the same time to distinguish itself from itself. But that which is in this way distinguished from the ground is as little mere difference as the ground itself is abstract sameness. The ground works its own suspension: and when suspended, the result of its negation is existence. Having issued from the ground, existence contains the ground in it; the ground does not remain, as it were, behind existence, but by its very nature supersedes itself and translates itself into existence.

This is exemplified even in our ordinary mode of thinking when we look upon the ground of a thing, not as something abstractly inward, but as itself also an existent. For example, the lightning-flash which has set a house on fire would be considered the ground of the conflagration; or the manners of a nation and the conditions of its life would be regarded as the ground of its constitution. Such indeed is the ordinary aspect in which the existence world originally appears to reflection – an indefinite crowd of things existent, which being simultaneously reflected on themselves and on one another are related reciprocally as ground and consequence. In this motley play of the world, if we may so call the sum of existents, there is nowhere a firm footing to be found: everything bears an aspect of relativity, conditioned by and conditioning something else. The reflective understanding makes it its business to elicit and trace these connections running out in every direction: but the question touching an ultimate design is so far left unanswered, and therefore the craving of the reason after knowledge passes with the further development of the logical Idea beyond this position of mere relativity.

Thing-in-itself § 124

The reflection-on-another of the existent is however inseparable from reflection-into-self: the ground is their unity, from which existence has issued. The existent therefore includes relativity, and has on its own part its multiple interconnections with other existents: it is reflected on itself as its ground. The existent is, when so described, a Thing.

The 'thing-in-itself' (or thing in the abstract), so famous in the philosophy of Kant, shows itself here in its genesis. It is seen to be the abstract reflection-on-self, which is so clung to, to the exclusion of reflection-into-other-things and of all predication of difference.

The thing-in-itself therefore is the empty substratum for these predicates of relation.

If to know means to comprehend an object in its concrete character, then the thing-in-itself, which is nothing but the quite abstract and indeterminate thing in general, must certainly be as unknowable as it is alleged to be. With as much reason however as we speak of the thing-in-itself, we might speak of quality-by-itself or quantity-by-itself, and of any other category. The expression would then serve to signify that these categories are taken in their abstract immediacy, apart from their development and inward character. It is no better than a whim of the understanding, therefore, if we attach the qualificatory 'in-itself'' to the thing only. But this 'in-itself' is also applied to the facts of the mental as well as the natural world: as we speak of electricity or of a plant in itself, so we speak of man or the state in-itself.

By this 'in-itself' in these objects, we are meant to understand what they strictly and properly are. This usage is liable to the same criticism as the phrase 'thing-in-itself'. For if we stick to the mere 'in-itself' of an object, we apprehend it not in its truth, but in the inadequate form of mere abstraction. Thus the man, in himself, is the child. And what the child has to do is to rise out of this abstract and undeveloped 'in-himself' and become 'for himself' what he is at first only 'in-himself' – a free and reasonable being. Similarly, the state-in-itself is the yet immature and patriarchal state, where the various political functions, latent in the notion of the state, have not received the full logical constitution which the logic of political principles demands.

In the same sense, the germ may be called the plant-in-itself. These examples may show the mistake of supposing that the 'thing-in-itself' of things is something inaccessible to our cognition. All things are originally in-themselves, but that is not the end of the matter. As the germ, being the plant-in-itself, means self-development, so the thing in general passes beyond its in-itself (the abstract reflection on self) to manifest itself further as a reflection on other things. It is this sense that it has properties.