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This Hegel identifies with the “thing-by-itself”, the Kantian Ding-an-sich shown
here “in its genesis”. “It is seen to be the abstract reflection-on-self, which is
clung to, to the exclusion of reflection-on-other-things and of all predication of
difference.” The Thing in-itself of Hegel, that is (to which he will come here), is
not the abstract Kantian thing-in-itself, which Hegel calls Thing by-itself. Thus in
the "mental" as opposed to the "natural" World" the in-itself, by which we are
"meant to understand" what objects "strictly and properly are", is not an
apprehension of an object "in its truth". It has to become for-itself, or him- or
herself.
So too the state-in-itself, immature, patriarchal, does not yet correspond to its
notion, in which alone it is concretely realised, as “the logic of political principles
demands”. This applies to all growth from germ-like beginnings or indeed our
own process of successive concept-formation. “All things are originally in-
themselves, but that is not the end of the matter.” “The thing in general passes
beyond” this, “the abstract reflection on self”. As being what it essentially is it
manifests itself as a reflection, and that upon “other things” which in turn thus
manifest themselves. In this sense “it has properties”.
The Thing, as here spoken of, becomes the “explicit unity” of ground and
existence. It is a concrete thing in virtue of its differences from, its reflections on,
other such things. These Properties are “expressed by the word ‘have’”. This is
different though from the having of qualities in “the sphere of being”. The quality
there “is directly one with the somewhat” (etwas), which “ceases to be when it
loses the quality”. But the thing “is an identity which is also distinct from the
difference”; “also”, i.e. as well as being one with it! These properties or
“attributes” share something of the removal from reality, the abstractness, of the
Past qua Past, which is “absorbed or suspended being”, proper to the mind only
as “its reflection-into-self”, since “in the mind only it continues to subsist”. In this
sense absolute Mind does not, cannot, re-member. It cannot even forget what is
not, though it perfectly perceives and determines us as performing such
operations (upon what is not). Hegel does not really take us far afield here. He
merely reminds us of the field in its entirety.
Identity is never found without difference. So the properties “are the existent
difference in the form of diversity”. In “the thing we have a bond which keeps the
various properties in union”, properties, not qualities. The Somewhat, by contrast,
is “directly identical” with its quality, does not merely “have” it, as here:
These "distinct properties and their external relation which they have to
one another in the thing, constitute the Form" (my stress). This is "the
reflective category of difference, but a difference which exists and is a
totality" as, in Aristotle, Form (morphe, forma) is what makes a thing to be
what it is, giving it its entelechy or actuality. Forma dat esse. Hegel might
seem, again, to be reverting to Aristotle here, but it is an Aristotelianism in
line with the most searching interpretations of it in our own day. The form
is in a real sense the whole of the thing. Matter, as Aristotle too goes on to
analyse, is not some "stuff" with which a composite is thus formed but,
rather, possibility itself, the Ground in Hegel, even, taking it more
"physically", perishability or mutability, beyond, as the "ground", the
particles of physics and their behaviour.
“Thus the Thing suffers a disruption into Matter and Form. Each of these is
the totality of thinghood and subsists for itself.” Matter “contains, as an
existence, reflection-on-another, every whit as much as it contains self-
enclosed being.” It is “indeterminate” existence, the Ground, again. This
makes it though “the totality of form”. Form, however, involves reflection-
into-self just as much, thus having “the very function attributed to
matter”. Thus it was possible for Aquinas, reasoning hylomorphically, to
postulate angels, equated with the Aristotelian “separated substances”, as
existent forms. “Both are at bottom the same”, though “no less distinct”.
The disruption, that is, is dialectical, and so "The Thing, being this totality,
is a contradiction."