Phenomenology of Spirit, Preface, paragraph 65

Indeed, non-speculative thinking also has its right, validity, albeit not heeded in the manner of speculative proposition. Abolishing the form of the proposition must take place not only in an immediate manner, through the mere content of the proposition. Rather, this counterposed movement must be expressed, and not only that internal restriction, but what must also be expounded is this return of the concept into itself. This process, which constitutes what formerly had to be accomplished by proof, is the internal dialectical movement of the proposition itself. This alone is the actual speculative, and only the expression thereof is speculative exposition. As proposition, the speculative aspect is merely the internal restriction and the non-existent return of essence into itself. Hence we often find philosophical expositions referring us to this inner contemplation, thereby sparing us the exposition of the dialectic movement of the proposition which all the while is what we wanted. The proposition ought to express what the true is, but in essence it is subject; being so, it is merely the dialectical movement, this self-generating, -leading, and in-itself-returning course. With other forms of cognition, the proof constitutes this side of the expressed inwardness. But once dialectic has been separated from proof, the concept of philosophical proof has indeed been lost.

Phenomenology of Spirit, Preface, paragraph 64

A difficulty which should be avoided consists in mixing up the speculative with the argumentative manner, when what is said of the subject has at one time the significance of its concept, and at another time the significance of its predicate or accident. The one mode of thinking interferes with the other; and only that philosophical exposition can manage to become workable [plastisch] which resolutely excludes the ordinary way of relating the parts of a proposition.

Phenomenology of Spirit, Preface, paragraph 63

This unaccustomed inhibition is largely what lies behind the complaints concerning the unintelligibility of philosophical writings, when otherwise the individual has in him the requisite mental cultivation for understanding them. In what has been said we see the reason for the specific charge often made against these writings, that a good deal has to be read repeatedly before it can be understood – an accusation which is meant to convey something improper and final, so that, if grounded, would admit of no further reply. The explanation thereby is clear from the above. The philosophical proposition, being a proposition, calls up the view of the usual relation of subject and predicate, and the usual comportment of knowledge. This comportment and the view thereof destroys its philosophical content; the view finds that things are intended otherwise than it thought, and knowledge, by this correction of its view, is compelled to come back to the proposition and comprehend it otherwise.

Phenomenology of Spirit, Preface, paragraph 62

To explain what has been said by examples: in the proposition “God is being,” the predicate is “being;” it has substantial significance, in which the subject dissolves. Being is here not meant to be predicate but essence; thereby does God seem to cease being what He was when the proposition was posed, viz., the fixed subject. Thinking, instead of getting any farther with the transition from subject to predicate, feels itself, in that the subject is being lost, rather inhibited and, because it misses the subject, thrown back on the thought of the subject. Or again, since the predicate has itself been pronounced to be a subject, to be being, essence, which exhausts the nature of the subject, it finds the subject directly present in the predicate too: and now, instead of having, in the predicate, gone into itself, and preserved the free position of argumentation, it is absorbed in the content, or, at any rate, the demand is present to be so. Similarly when it is said: “the real is the universal,” the real, as subject, passes into its predicate. The universal is not only to have the significance of a predicate, as if the proposition expressed this: the real is universal; rather, the universal is meant to express the essential nature of the real. Thinking thereby loses that fixed objective ground which it had in the subject, just as much as in the predicate it is thrown back on the subject, and therein returns not into itself but into the subject of the content.

Phenomenology of Spirit, Preface, paragraph 61

Formally, what has been said can be so expressed that the nature of judgment [Urteils] or of the proposition in general, which contains the distinction of subject and predicate, is destroyed by the speculative proposition; and the proposition of identity [der identische Satz], which the former becomes, contains the counter-thrust to that relation. This conflict of the form of a proposition in general and the unity of the concept which destroys that form is similar to what we find between meter and accent in the case of rhythm. Rhythm results from the floating center and union of the two. So likewise with the philosophical proposition, the identity of subject and predicate is not intended to destroy their distinction, as expressed in the form of the proposition; rather, their unity is to arise as a harmony. The form of the proposition is the manifestation of the determinate sense, or the accent which differentiates its realization [Erfüllung]; but that the predicate expresses the substance while the subject itself drops into the universal is the unity wherein that accent fades away.

Phenomenology of Spirit, Preface, paragraph 60

But considering that such thinking has a content, whether of imaginings or thoughts or a mixture of both, there is another side to it that makes conceptual comprehension difficult for it. The peculiar nature thereof is closely connected with the essence of the idea above described, or rather expresses the idea in the way it manifests itself as the movement which is thinking comprehension. For just as argumentative thinking in its negative conduct, of which we just spoke, is nothing but the self in which the content returns, so also, by contrast, is the self in its positive cognition an imagined subject to which the content refers as accident and predicate. This subject constitutes the basis to which the content is attached and upon which the movement runs back and forth. Conceptual thinking goes on in quite a different way. Since the concept is the actual self of the object, manifesting itself as the becoming of the object, it is not a subject in repose, bearing accidents unmovingly, but is a self-moving concept taking up its determinations into itself. In this movement, the subject in repose itself collapses; it enters into the distinctions and the content; instead of standing over against the determinateness, i.e., the articulated [unterschiedenen] content and the movement thereof, it constitutes that determinateness. Thus the solid basis which argumentation found in the resting subject totters, and this movement itself becomes the object. The subject filling its content ceases to be something transcending this content, and cannot have further predicates or accidents. Conversely, the distractedness of the content is thereby bound under the self; the content is not the universal which, free of the subject, corresponds to more. Consequently the content is in truth no longer predicate of the subject; it is the very substance, the essence and concept of that which is being considered. Imaginative thinking [das vorstellende Denken], since its nature consists in dealing with accidents or predicates, and going beyond them – rightly so, they being nothing more than predicates and accidents – is checked in its course when, in a statement, that which has the form of a predicate is itself the substance. It is met by a counter-thrust, as we may say. Starting from the subject, as if this remained at the root, it discovers, by the predicate being in reality the substance, that the subject has passed into the predicate, and has thereby ceased to be subject: and since in this way what seems to be predicate has become the entire, independent mass, thinking cannot wander freely, but is arrested by this weight. Usually the subject is first laid at the root as the objectively fixed self, from whence the necessary movement proceeds to the multiplicity of determinations or predicates. Here the knowing I itself takes the place of that subject and is the link of the predicates and the subject retaining them. But since the former subject enters into the determinations themselves, and is their soul, the subject in the second case – viz. the knowing subject – finds that the former, with which it is supposed to be finished and which it wants to go beyond in order to return into itself, is still there in the predicate: and instead of being able to be the doer in the movement of the predicate – as argumentation, whether this or that predicate should be attributed – it has really to do with the self of the content, shall not be something on its own account [für sich], but be joined with the content.

Phenomenology of Spirit, Preface, paragraph 59

With regard to the conduct of argumentation, both sides are to be observed in terms of which conceptual thought opposes it. In part, that negative relates in opposition to the conceived content, knows how to refute it and reduce it to nothingness. This insight is the bare negative, showing that something is not; it is the last thing, that cannot itself proceed beyond itself to a new content; in order for it to regain a content, something else must be undertaken somewhere else. It is reflection in the empty I, the vanity of its knowledge. Vanity of this kind brings out not only that this content is vain but also that this insight itself is vain; for it is the negative with no perception of the positive within it. In that this reflection does not even gain its own negativity as its content, it is not inside the matter, but ever above and beyond it; for this reason it imagines that by asserting emptiness it is going far beyond the insight that embraces and reveals a wealth of content. By contrast, in the case of conceptual thinking, as was above indicated, the negative falls within the content itself, and is the positive, both as its immanent movement and determination, and as the entirety of what these are. Looked at as a result, it is the determinate negative, the outcome of this movement, and consequently just as well a positive content.