BECOMING III: FROM BEING-FOR-SELF TO QUANTITY

Being-for-self names, after Being and Being Determinate, the third section of the first of the three parts, viz.
Quality, of the Doctrine of Being. As such it leads into Quantity, the second part. The second section, Being
Determinate, however, itself progresses from Quality (in a more specified sense), Limit or Finitude and
Alterability to Infinity, whether "bad" or genuine and, via the latter, to Being-for-self as evincing "the category
of Ideality", proper to the finite. Its "readiest instance", however, is "found in the 'I'" and it is upon this we will
focus when charting the real or philosophical emergence of quantity from quality. By this we mean a procedural
necessity, though not that the Absolute is necessitated as if constrained to "create" in quantity, as it were. This
passage, rather, as logical or of the Mind, is intrinsic to Absolute Being itself, disclosed as Beginning (after
having de facto begun with it) by, finally, some form of an "Ontological Argument". In this sense God creates in
and not merely "at" the beginning.1 To the necessary all things, all categories of thought, are necessary and this is
one with or is the Ground of "blessedness" and Freedom.
Logic thus ends at the Beginning and even absolutely so, in that the idea is finally one with the Method itself of
the whole, of Thinking. No hole, no opening, is left such as are routinely taken as an escape from what we
mistake for the compulsion of Reason. The Freedom which Reason finally is, superseding any separation of
cognition and volition, is the presence of All to and in all, the identity of self with other and with other again, not
limited to the maintenance of the initial, as it appears, individual self, "ruined" before it begins. This "quality" is
one with the universal of universals which I, as conscious, am, subject become or passed to subjectivity. As such
I disclose pure quantity, a quantity which, as pure, is one with the One, however, the continuous not excluding
the discrete (or non-continuous) or anything else.
As Hegel sums it up (Enc. 98, Zus. 2), and it is characteristic that the insight comes to the fore in a consideration
of philosophical atomism, asking "whence these categories (quality and quantity) originate":

The fact is, quantity just means quality superseded and absorbed: and it is by the dialectic of
quality here examined that this supersession is effected…

i.e. absolutely or, which is the same, rationally. As Cicero had long ago argued, Reason is divine and therefore
Law (De legibus II, 4, 10). This is the same as to say that Reason itself is ab-solute, the being loosed (soluta)
from all or, in a word, Freedom, the overcoming, in being and exercise, of the categorical or limited, of the
Barrier. Hegel goes on:

First of all, we had Being: as the truth of Being, came Becoming: which formed the passage to
Being Determinate: and the truth of that we found to be Alteration. And in its result Alteration
showed itself to be Being-for-self, exempt from implication of another and from passage into
another… (my emphasis)

As such, finally, in Repulsion and Attraction (here we have Atomism, but also the dialectic of finite love) Being-
for-self "is clearly seen to annul itself", while yet remaining, and thus, all along the line "to annul quality in the
totality of its stages". "This also is thou, neither is this thou" expresses (as distinct from explaining) the
developed "mystical" perception of this.2 Quality thus emerges, not as "abstract and featureless" but as
indifferent to "determinateness or character", i.e. as quantity, here become figure for or expression of Mind, of
Freedom, or the undetermined, transcendent character thereof. Hence Quality was said, as a category "only of the
finite" (90, Zus.), to belong not properly to Mind but to Nature. Alternatively, or as we might interpret or vary 3
Hegel here, as a moment of Logic and hence necessary it presages (for us) the necessity of Nature, of the Idea in
alienation.

*********************

"If we now ask for the difference between something and another it turns out that they are the same." With these
words Hegel marks variability, becoming other, as of the essence of, as identical with, Determinate Being.4 Here,
just therefore, we must situate Time, variability's measure., and not make an absolute out of it. McTaggart and
not the lesser theologians was right here, at least if we are interpreting Hegel and with him Aquinas, Augustine
and the Apostle Paul. With God, absolutely speaking, or, simply, just absolutely speaking, there is neither
1
Augustine relates the angelic creation (of spirits) to this seeming wordplay, doubly relevant to us should there
in fact be no angels other than ourselves.
2
Hegel, we noted earlier, positively claimed the mystical character for philosophy, i.e. for philosophy.
3
This identification has become a truism of hermeneutics.
4
Compare our tentative identification of variation and determinate interpretation in our previous paragraph.
change nor shadow of turning. Change is maya and to be known absolutely as such. I am forever what I will be
while I never was anything. What is past is not. In realist philosophy the future is an ens rationis or, actually,
non-being. This however is merely to display the finitude of being, which the Absolute Idea is not. Infinitude
transcends being, in freedom. In the phrase "will be", in fact, the "be" attempts to contradict or immobilise the
"will", in vain. There is a continuous moving, ever new, symbolised by the wheel of fire, perpetual creative
utterance of the one entire Word, without parts, toward which the Parmenidean being strove.
We have no need, therefore, to try to justify or conform ourselves to the language of the Bible. The letter kills
and this is first premise of philosophy's freedom, its opening, as a moment, even to total scepticism as witness,
cited by Hegel, to the untruth of any and every predication, even this one. This too finds its parallel, however,
within the books of the Bible itself, as in Ecclesiastes, the Preacher.5
In other words the Bible too is rational, along with Semitic or oriental thought in general. Hegel's categorisation
of "the content" into philosophy, religion and art is just that, i.e. abstract. Any one of these qualities is generally
find linked inseparably in reality with one or both of the other two. In this sense the final absolutised "method" is
not merely and purely philosophy but, rather, Thought, and so Heidegger stands on good Hegelian ground here
in refusing to call his later work philosophy simply. The main work of Parmenides was, again under one aspect,
a poem. Thus we may after all take seriously, in acceptance or rejection, Beethoven's dictum that "music is a
greater revelation than the whole of religion and philosophy", or assertions as to "the truth of poetry" or
comparisons of Aquinas's thought to a cathedral.
Apologists such as Maritain set up an ultimately false opposition when they refer to the Greeks as "the chosen
people of Reason", as if Israel were "chosen" in total abstraction from Reason:

How odd of God

To choose the Jews!

It is not odd at all. Maritain touches on something concealed here which relates to Hegel's identification of I, of
subjecthood, as "universal of universals" and, hence, most reasonable of all. Just in reasoning one chooses to be
chosen, one "legislates for the universe". Election, that is, falls away as self-cancelling and the finite infinitude of
Jehovah, as it is often understood, with it. Rational self-awareness perfects the sense of election, of everlasting
transcendence, or that it is my world, as Jerusalem was taken, in a figure, as its still centre. So the Israelites won
victory after victory, not by force but by trickery or cunning, to use Hegel's term. They relied specifically upon
"the reason that is in the world. For what is the world without reason" (G. Frege, The Foundations of
Mathematics). Insofar as we identify with reason the world is saved from unreason. "Salvation is of the Jews".
The simple claim is built upon the former truism and Hegel sees it as fulfilled, in embryo maybe, in the unique
discovery of human personality as such, illustrated by the vanishing of slavery from the European home of the
Judaeo-Christian development. The later Wilberforce did not have the monopoly here; this process indeed got
well under way in early Christian times and has roots in ancient Israel as recorded too in the Old Testament. This
belongs with our theme of revelation, unveiling, as truth simply. Faith is not to be set against reason and is not
finally separate from it. This is the sense of credo ut intelligam, as of Greek paideia or development in general.
We find then that "something in its passage into another only joins with itself… self-related in the passage"
(Enc. 95). This is "the genuine infinity", negating negation, "restoring" Being as Being-for-self. So Hegel's
philosophy is not at all a philosophy of pure Becoming but exactly the opposite.
The Infinite cannot share anything, even Time, with the finite, without itself becoming finite and partial. The
being of the finite is only analogous, a way of speaking. Really, it is not. "Touched… by the infinite" it is indeed
"annihilated", it never was. So there is no "unity of finite and infinite". The former is rather a world of shadows
and we with it.
The absence of dualism when thus viewing the nothingness of the finite just is what is termed Being-for-self.
Here the finite is "absorbed", no longer what it was in our habitual misperception, the "habit of nature" as
distinct from natural law or as, in the tradition, opposed to "grace", having "contrary workings". Such nature,
Hegel makes plain in the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, must be totally killed, being doomed
intrinsically anyhow. Here, just here, again, enters Ideality and with it, as Being-for-self, enters "I" as its, and
Ideality's, "readiest example". The "I" knows itself to be at the centre, as none of Leibniz's monads have inter-
subjective content with any other. This is being-for-self, to be for self, in utter freedom, the kind of being
attributed traditionally to God and which alone can satisfy us, since we are rational beings, as if chosen,
therefore, to "know the universal". We are quodammodo omnia and, just as such or immediately, spirit. Anything
mediating would "appear beside" as paremphainomenon or material interference.6

5
Some exegetes claim that St. John's Gospel was conceived as an explicit answer to this book.
6
The argument of Aristotle's "book on the soul" (uniquely praised by Hegel) for the spirituality (immaterialitas)
of Mind.
Understood thus the Being-for-self is just One, an exclusive unit even if it exclude by wholly negating others.
This One is in a sense All and so already quantity, without character. Yet as such it is, he says, completed
Quality.
"The One is simple Self-Reference", "simple Being". As the One it is not a One or one of many since, rather, it
"has the unity of all within itself".7 Still it is "being modified", even though it "is immediacy". As such it is
determinate, but not thereby finite. It is, we might say, simple being but not simply or abstract being. This, the
abstract category, is altogether determinable or "empty" just because being itself is the most fundamental reality
or actuality "of every form".8 It cannot itself then have a form.
This is truth of intellect or of any intellect. As such it is what we call person and if intelligence could be
constructed artificially it would be personal, like the purportive creature of Mary Shelley's Count Frankenstein or
Kubrick's "Hal", though if either of these indeed should have had intelligence is an undecideable question. The
personal is the necessary differentiation of the real or concrete (non-abstract) infinity. Only persons can have the
unity of all within themselves by being essentially other and other of the other again. In this sense the bad
infinite is as known the good infinite, in its intrinsic ideality. It is and only is as known or thought. So it is not, as
transcending being, as the me on is contrasted with the merely ouk on in later Greek thought.
So any person is, has to be, this relation to all as, indifferently, relation to self which is other. Leibniz's monads
each had to be personal. Whether they then could ever, as fundamentally simple, be an atom or a particle in
nature is left open. If they could then these things would not be finite but infinite in Hegel's (good) sense.
He though asserts that "natural things never attain a free Being-for-self", i.e. if man is "disyinguished… from
nature altogether", just by "knowing himself as 'I'". I am You is the title of a new book (Springer, New York,
2004) by Daniel Kolac where he quotes the physicist Erwin Schrödinger (p. xv) as defending the same or a
closely similar position:

It is not possible that this unity of knowledge, feeling and choice which you call your own
should have sprung into being from nothingness at a given moment not so long ago; rather this
knowledge feeling and choice are essentially eternal and unchangeable and numerically one in
all men, nay in all sensitive beings. But not in this sense - that you are a part, a piece, of an
eternal, infinite being, an aspect or modification of it… For we should then have the same
baffling question: which part, which aspect are you? What, objectively, differentiates it from the
others? No,… you - and all other conscious beings as such - are all in all. Hence this life of
yours… is in a certain sense the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be
surveyed in one single glance (How I See the World, 1964, pp. 21-22).9

How is it that I can be one of the contingent and finite many, the child asks himself in uneasy wonderment. The
answer is that he cannot be, that he begets them all within himself, that we, if we should ever speak of "we",
beget one another, beget those who beget us. Thus we "cancel" the finite notion of begetting as that of
"members" is cancelled in the Pauline phrase "You are all members one of another", an impossible anatomy
taken literally. This is effectively Leibniz's conception too, only relatively a "position". That is, philosophy or
thought is the reality, not "Leibniz". Otherness is identity, the most "complete development" of contradiction,
comments Hegel without taking distance. He rather commends Leibniz above Spinoza as attaining to the
personal (Enc. 194, 151). This should be related to Hegel's thesis regarding individuality, particularity and
universality in relation to syllogistic formal logic as treated in the Doctrine of the Notion. Leibniz gave
individuality "a philosophic shape" in denying that it is abstractly individual (151).
Being-for-self then is ideality, which is "the truth of reality" and not merely "parallel" to it, but what it
"implicitly is". As McTaggart interpreted it, reality consists of persons, largely leaving implicit just how one
person is another and all. Ideality is "all in all". Yet "ideality only has a meaning when it is the ideality of
something" (96, Zus.). Nature cannot "exist without Mind" but the converse also holds, mutatis mutandis. Mind,
though "beyond Nature", "involves Nature as absorbed in itself". We rise "above the mere 'Either - or' of
understanding".
Our remark above concerning Reason and "election" in the light of rational self-awareness indicates a deeper
sense in Aquinas's remark, whether malgré lui or not, that "it is evident that it is this man who thinks". The one
7
Cf. J,M.E. McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology, Cambridge 1901, Chapter 2, "Immortality".
8
Aquinas, Summa theol. Ia, 3,4. Cp. Theron, "Esse", The New Scholasticism LIII, No. 2, Spring 1979, pp.206-
221.
9
Regarding this "whole" (sic) we may compare Hegel's remark on "the unchangeable" which "came to light as
the experience through which self-consciousness passes in its unhappy state of diremption". "This experience is
now doubtless not its own onesided process; for it is itself unchangeable consciousness; and this latter,
consequently, is a particular consciousness as well" (The Phenomenology of Mind, tr. Baillie, Hrper Torchbook,
New York, 1967, pp. 253-4, my emphasis: Hegel remarks that this consideration is "here out of place", not so in
our text now however).
thinking, that is, is precisely one. This is the sense of Being-for-self, as it is of Ideality within it (95) yet
superseding it dialectically, though still within Being's "doctrine". Reality is all now "the thoughts of one mind",
self-referring, immediate. What is not I (or me) is yet, more deeply, I. Ideality is the truth of just finite reality.
As simple, immediate, such being, as One, "excludes the other from itself." It is the One and knows no other.
Hence it is not even alone. So it is not finite but infinite as containing distinction or determinateness "absorbed
and annulled in itself". Monad-wise it has no conceivable contact with anything else. For it, as being for self,
there is nothing else and truly so. This, we may say without contradiction, is the truth of contradiction, which
Mind, the concept, originates.
This reference-to-self which is infinite is thus "at the same time negative". Further, the "relation of the negative
to itself is a negative relation" (97). I am, in another idiom, nothing at all, known only in my union with each and
every other. The I is that which, in its particularity, is constitutively denied, since it is universal or, rather,
universality, the "this man that thinks" and so loses himself as never having been and not merely as if this.
In this way the One repels itself and thus "makes Many Ones". This category of repulsion may have arisen, for
Hegel, with historical Atomism in mind (98) but it is not thereby speciously "yanked" in:

… the philosophic notion reaches… that the One forms the pre-supposition of the Many; and in
the thought of the One is implied that it explicitly make itself Many (97, Zus.).10

This is contrary, that is, to our picture of "the Many as a primary datum", the presumption of Empiricism,
treating "the One as only one among the Many". Thus Hegel in fact explains the (necessary) origin of historical
Atomism by re-discovering it, rather than basing his enquiry, which is utterly a priori, upon it. The world is thus
necessarily, and so in utter freedom, created within the intrinsic recesses of absolute Mind. "In God we live and
move and have our being", declares Paul, no "pantheist" (in Acts of the Apostles). It is freedom because
dependent upon nothing extrinsic. Mind but consults itself and this is the legitimate, free sense of "emanation"
(which contemporary Thomists such as David Burrell are re-discovering).
The One repels itself as Many within its own thought of itself. Even Trinitarian doctrine absolutises this absolute
repulsion. The Son, though one with the Father, is other than he, as begetting is not being begotten but there are
two real relations (and not of reason only or in "our" way of thinking) in one absolute processio.11 Here, anyhow,
every "atom" of the many would be in the same case.
This is what is meant by the relation of the negative to itself being negative. "No man comes to the Father except
through me" because, precisely, the Father, Being-for-Self, the One, totally empties himself, by a negation, into
that Other, or any Other. This is the deeper, philosophic meaning of that "religious" text and not some
specifically religious exclusivism. Reason rather, as exclusive, as the One containing all (and thus "setting all in
order") and thus, again, negating itself, stands at the centre, a "this" which is then everywhere, the point become
all, as if "elect". Christianity, the "absolute religion", is thus susceptible of the same absolute or philosophic
interpretation as any other religion.12 It is thus no religion at all. Are the others? Some Australian aborigines
believe that their ancestors created the world (and themselves therefore?). That is, thus far, a valid philosophy, to
which they may respond (correspond) theurgically (liturgically) like the Pythagoreans or some Neoplatonists, if
they so choose, or like the French revolutionaries placing the goddess of Reason upon the altar of Notre Dame, a
rather different lady.13
In repulsion here, the One making Many Ones in intrinsic negation, there is no trace of analogy, no opening for it
in the dialectic. We have rather, as development of the text will show, that unity beyond the organic, in which
each is necessary and immortal but as having the unity of all within self and hence not abstractly individual,
which McTaggart so celebrates. For Hegel however this is seen, is presented, as unfolding of divine or absolute
Mind, a theism become atheism while remaining theism precisely in its implicit infinitude of conception. The
godly must take the godless to themselves and vice versa. This, of course, would raise a question about prayer.
Thought thinks itself and that is prayer in the ground of its possibility if not in its fullest exercise. It is
contemplation, such as even Dostoyevsky's Stavrogin knew, though he endeavours to make us shudder at it.14
10
Note that the text here has "make" and not merely "makes".
11
Relation in Aristotelian and hence scholastic thinking is an accident of just one substance, its subject. So where
there are two subjects there are two relations.
12
Compare our remark, above, on Judaism.
13
Yet my point, and Hegel's, is that they are both the same, a Wisdom mediating all graces in "cunning". At
school, if I may offer a personal recollection, a "general knowledge" test asked, with some chronological
confusion after 1949, for the name of the founder of "the Chinese state religion". Karl Marx, I answered,
suspecting a trap. "But my boy", said the examiner, "communism is not a religion." I was stuck for the answer I
am now giving.
14
There is thus an ambiguity concerning his or anyone else's suicide, prima facie taken as failure or despair. "No
man takes my life from me; I lay it down of myself." May we not "imitate" that too, if and when the "hour"
comes? Controversy between Donatists and the orthodox Augustine hinged on precisely that point while the
Anyhow, "we who are many are one body" so whatever you do to one of these you do to me, to "I" and hence
yourself too, we may all say in "conscientisation", as it is lately called.
If we start with the Many we cannot say whence they come, as we can say that the One comes of itself within the
doctrine of Being, the immediate. The One makes itself Many "explicitly". It "is not, like Being, void of all
connective reference." This void, however, is Repulsion and not merely as it was "presented under the image of
the nothing existing between the atoms".
The One is "a reference", not as connecting something (etwas) with an other but as the unity of something and its
other or, more generally, of some and other. It is a negative connection with itself (rather as Being is "reduced"
to Nothing earlier on), a "self-repulsion". What it makes itself to be, in explicit self-denial or incompatibility, is
the Many. This is what the Many, the they, is. "They" are not a mere brute fact, just as there is no "God before
creation", as Boehme says, since God is here, thus far, this self-repulsion. Where we might differ from Boehme
is in his seemingly speaking of God as being something else, such as a not-being, "before" creation. But
ultimately there is agreement. One might take Boehme as meaning that a God taken alongside creation as
extrinsic to him is precisely finite and no God, that this that we call God is precisely what is not God. "I and my
father are one" or, to take a feminine variant, "I am he who is; you are she who is not" (and yet you are she, we
cannot help but add, as mother within the father and contrariwise).
So why is there a world? There is a world because thought thinks and, moreover, thinks but itself. Or, alienation,
"othering", is the state proper to just the Idea in nature. Repulsion is a figurative term, though all language is
manifestly built upon figure, for "the process of Being-for-self", taken from "the study of matter". The One
though is not "the repellent and the Many the repelled". The One just is repulsion and "each of the Many… is
itself a One." For Aquinas, the soul only knew itself in knowing another and here we get the deeper ratio of that
insight. Anyhow, such "all-round repulsion, just in virtue of its exceptionlessness, is by one stroke converted into
its opposite, - Attraction." I can only love another. That is all that is said here. Self-love of itself becomes love
for and between others.
Thus far the Many are "one the same as another", each is One or one of the Many. They "are consequently one
and the same." The centre is everywhere. As "those to which the One is related in its act of repulsion are ones, it
is in them thrown into relation with itself" and "has an equal right to be called Attraction", i.e. the One, Being-
for-self, "suppresses itself." Quality, character, at its extreme point of being determined in and for itself passes
over, in the original sphere which is Mind, into Quantity.
The philosophy of the Atomists is the doctrine in which the Absolute "is formulated as Being-for-self, as One
and many ones" (98). It too had or has its hour, as did Hegel's philosophy. This latter, however, was the moment
of the discovery of history, of "hour" as such, the hour of discovering the hour. In becoming thus conscious of
history, however, Hegel, or Reason, negates it as dialectic within which Time itself is a moment (of alienation).
This dialectic becomes its own end as Method (Enc. 237) just as thought thinking itself is this very thinking,
actus purus. Or, in religious figure, it is the Word or logos (logic) being ever-generated. Or, in art, it is a fugal
return upon the scene as in a "garden of forking paths" within which one ever returns upon self as all, unlimited
therefore. Or it is the book to "explain" all books within Mind's infinite library, which must be there to be found.
If there are composites there must be simples, wrote Leibniz, as good an example as any of the synthetic a priori.
These simples or "ones" are "surrendered" in physics, which rather "pins its faith" on molecules or particles, still
today, but with increasing stretching of these quanta back in the philosophical direction, despite the huge
incidental expenses of cyclotrons etc. The absolutely simple which must be, or where the spade turns, can never
be discovered in that empirical way, though it may seem to lead re-flection ever nearer. One has to stop digging
and bend back (re-flect) upon thought's very first thinking, as the ancient Atomists, "physicists" in the sense of
their philosophical orientation, were still trying to do. Schrödinger, Bohr and others have understood this, that
the whole world is mine alone, that I am the One, night and day, so to say. I am you, writes Kulic, himself
originally a doctoral candidate in physics. Music, even of Cole Porter, declares this. For if you are "the one",
then what else am I? The one seed, that is, does not "abide alone", "if it die" to all finite categories and thus only
incidentally, as it were, to life itself. Such is logic and nothing else can explain its terrible fascination, its
perpetual attempting to stifle itself in, literally, terror, seeking spurious relief from thinking.
In the physics of Hegel's time the Repulsion which "has an equal right to be called Attraction" is represented
with Attraction as two contrasted "natural forces". Force as a category will get its contradiction exposed when it
is later put by (aufgehoben) in the Doctrine of Essence. Hegel links this tendency, not so much a development as
a popular falling back from the metaphysics hitherto pursued within a select class of society, with the "modern"
atomism in political science. There "the will of individuals as such is the creative principle of the State" and the
in his view spurious "attracting force" is their "special wants". This is the weakness of contractualism, reducing
the State to an "external compact". Hegel here rejoins, as he will later develop, the Aristotelian view that it is
natural or intrinsic to man to belong to or, rather, constitute a State. Individuals abstracted from this are,
precisely, abstract. We who are many are One precisely because we who are one are many Ones, precisely in

sentiment is shared in the old warrior ethos, seeking glorious death (sic) in battle.
that sense, and vice versa. Democracy then is the high requirement upon each to stand, and stand up, for all; "one
man one vote". Each to count for all and none for less than all, as we might rephrase Bentham.
"The atom, in fact, is itself a thought" and "The only mere physicists are the animals." In repudiating
metaphysics we "adopt one-sided forms of thought" or unconscious metaphysics, Kuhn's "paradigms", "instead
of the concrete logical idea", i.e. just that, whatever it is, which is not one-sided. Hegel claims to reveal or
uncover what it is, but we anyhow need the type of enquiry it must intrinsically embody.
The nexus binding the many with the One is "founded upon their very nature", The ancients, in misidentifying
this as chance (or did they rather reinterpret chance itself? 15), failed to note that the Void was figure merely for
an intrinsic Repulsion or, indeed, nothing "between the atoms". This repulsion, along with attraction, Hegel has
deduced and not taken for granted. He thus establishes the necessity of matter precisely though as passing or
alienated phenomenon within the dialectic. Only by this route, he implies, will we come to our end as self-
possessed absolute Mind, the being bathed or swathed in "glory" of religion. Mind becomes incarnate or thus
alienates itself in "matter", as in space and time, under the primal play of light as first ideality 16, however, for and
in each "one" of us.
Even Kant, however, stressed that "matter" just is the unity of attraction and repulsion which is Being-for-self. It
is not some third "substrate" but just nothing actual at all, our name for the pure potentiality of nature as
experienced. Here atomism was already being transcended, as by Aristotle too.
Such then is the transition from Quality to Quantity, shown to "just mean" "quality superseded and absorbed"
and not something beside it merely. Here Being-for-self annuls itself and thereby quality. The "indifference to
determinateness" which we identified with Mind's universal at-homeness (as Quality) is here as it were reduced
to "the conception of an indifferent and external character or mode". It is, that is to say, precisely named as one
of our "ordinary conceptions", here to be got behind in a search for "whence these categories originate" and
"how they are related". Thus we have passed from Being-for-self to Quantity. For, after all, "a thing remains
what it is, though its quantity is altered (cf. alteration), and the thing becomes greater or less." The whole
doctrine of degree or hierarchy moves under the surface here, willy-nilly, while the question of Number too can
no longer be avoided, as flowers need "roots" to multiply themselves, deep in our primal and inductive earth or
Ground. Thus philosophy itself induces a kind of Joycean joy of words, through which we view the thing-in-
itself indeed, supremely expressible inasmuch as itself expressive, revealing and manifest in an excess of
"clarity" (claritas), most "knowable in itself"17 as, so to say, its own method and message thus manifest.

15
Cf. P.T. Geach, "The Ordainer of the Lottery" in Providence and Evil, C.U.P., Cambridge 1977.
16
For this identification see Enc., Philosophy of Nature. Under the rubric of "necessary beings" Aquinas
indifferently places God, angels, human souls and prime matter. For references see the article by Patterson
Brown in Aquinas, a collection of essays edited by Anthony Kenny, Macmillan Paperbacks, London. Only an
intuition of identity, driving principle of the later thinker's dialectic, could have caused such a blurring of the
customary chasm between created and creator.
17
Cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics I, 1.