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32 2 The Abstract-Formal By virtue of its fundamental properties the concrete-empirical cannot serve as the object of cognition in general, nor as the object of philosophical cognition in particular. Before it lies a profound, all-renouncing and renewing regeneration. Its chaotic character must encounter the principle of strict measure and inert order; its unrestrainable processal character must either fall or fade away with the establishment of a new form; its immediacy will see splitting and complication; its sensuousness is destined to die away; its singularity will be transformed into universality . However, philosophy itself cannot assume this task; philosophy is a system of completed knowledge, a closed circle of fully developed ideas; it has nothing to do with incomplete material and does not prepare it; it does not know half-truths and does not include within itself what is immature. Therefore, between philosophy and the sensuous intuition of empirical things there turns out to be an intermediate realm, purifying and preparing consciousness and its object; this realm is composed of the empirical sciences, empirical philosophy, and ordinary, so-called “formal” logic, united by a common methodological mode of constructing and understanding its object. This mode or method of handling the content being cognized is precisely “formal abstraction.” This entire group of subordinate sciences, or semi-sciences, does not at all realize, or acknowledge, its intermediate, or mediating, position . Empirical investigators and formal-logical thinkers consider their task to be the only scientific one, their methodological modes to be the definitively true ones, their limit to be the achieved apex. But this in no way means, Hegel thinks, that such is the objektive significance of their constructions and their modes. On the contrary: their self-assessment is no more than an encroachment, their claim is mere pretension, their work is measured on the scale of utility, but not truthfulness. Philosophical knowledge begins precisely where they finish; the light flares up precisely where they grow blind; the truth is revealed precisely in the place access to which they have fenced off from themselves by their prejudices. The significance of these subordinate sciences, the essence of their cognitive approach to the object, and the philosophical inadmissibility of this entire direction of thought are formulated by Hegel with astonish- 33 T H E A B S T R A C T - F O R M A L ing maturity and depth. All this is united and concentrated around the doctrine of the abstract-rationala or the formal. The most profound, fundamental vice of the concrete-empirical was its incapacity to become an object of thought, a thinkable objekt, and consequently an object of philosophical cognition. Indeed, what have thought and knowledge to do with what is not thinkable and not knowable ? Such is the nature of this apparently epistemological difficulty. Hence, the first task of the abstract medium is to introduce thinkability into the subordinate, empirical sphere. The abstract-formal is, first of all, thought:1 subjectively, the process of thinking; objectively, the “something” that is being thought. One could say that there is a change here in the very organ of spirit that serves to deal with the object; and just as hearing lives by sound and does not hear color, so thought does not sensuously intuit the given of the external world, but performs its own specific work. Thought is, in general, something abstract.2 It is necessary that, in one who is beginning to think, “sight and hearing should first grow dark,” so that he is “abstracted from concrete representation and drawn into the inner darkness of the night of the soul”; and so that he “learns to see in this medium, to hold determinations fast, and to distinguish.”3 Abstract thinking is already an inner process, a movement of the soul into itself, and, moreover, precisely an intellectual process, directed toward something intellectual, thinkable,4 if you will, toward something “ideal.”5 In this state the soul rejects an immediate confluence with the continuous stream of empirical phenomena, or an intuitive dissolution in the complexity and continuity of the concrete-empirical. A unique attraction of consciousness toward its center is revealed; consciousness separates itself off, gathers its forces, and counterposes itself to sensuous immediate being.6 Now consciousness is no longer “within it” but “outside of it”; it does not live “by it” but rather asks questions “about it.” Consciousness desires an accounting and determinacy; it seeks simplicity and stability. Consciousness sees “itself,” its own “I,” and the...

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