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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 September 2021
ESSENCE
The truth of being is essence.
Being is the immediate. Since the goal of knowledge is the truth, what being is in and for itself, knowledge does not stop at the immediate and its determinations, but penetrates beyond it on the presupposition that behind this being there still is something other than being itself, and that this background constitutes the truth of being. This cognition is a mediated knowledge, for it is not to be found with and in essence immediately, but starts off from an other, from being, and has a prior way to make, the way that leads over and beyond being or that rather penetrates into it. Only inasmuch as knowledge recollects itself into itself out of immediate being, does it find essence through this mediation. – The German language has kept “essence” (Wesen) in the past participle (gewesen) of the verb “to be” (sein), for essence is past – but timelessly past – being.
When this movement is represented as a pathway of knowledge, this beginning with being and the subsequent advance which sublates being and arrives at essence as a mediated term appears to be an activity of cognition external to being and indifferent to its nature.
But this course is the movement of being itself. That it is being's nature to recollect itself, and that it becomes essence by virtue of this interiorizing, this has been displayed in being itself.
If, therefore, the absolute was at first determined as being, now it is determined as essence. Cognition cannot in general stop at the manifold of existence; but neither can it stop at being, pure being; immediately one is forced to the reflection that this pure being, this negation of everything finite, presupposes a recollection and a movement which has distilled immediate existence into pure being. Being thus comes to be determined as essence, as a being in which everything determined and finite is negated. So it is simple unity, void of determination, from which the determinate has been removed in an external manner; to this unity the determinate was itself something external and, after this removal, it still remains opposite to it; for it has not been sublated in itself but relatively, only with reference to this unity.
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