Chapter 1 - Quantity

Summary

PURE QUANTITY

Quantity is sublated being-for-itself. The repelling one that behaved only negatively towards the excluded one, now that it has gone over in connection with it, behaves towards the other as identical to itself and has therefore lost its determination; being-for-itself has passed over into attraction. The absolute obduracy of the one has melted away into this unity which, however, as containing the one, is at the same time determined by the repulsion residing in it; as unity of the self-externality, it is unity with itself. Attraction is in this way the moment of continuity in quantity.

Continuity is therefore simple, self-same reference to itself unbroken by any limit or exclusion – not, however, immediate unity but the unity of ones which have existence for themselves. Still contained in it is the outsideone- another of plurality, though at the same time as something without distinctions, unbroken. Plurality is posited in continuity as it implicitly is in itself; the many are each what the others are, each is like the other, and the plurality is, consequently, simple and undifferentiated equality. Continuity is this moment of self-equality of the outsideness-of-one-another, the selfcontinuation of the different ones into the ones from which they are distinguished.

In continuity, therefore, magnitude immediately possesses the moment of discreteness – repulsion as nowa moment in quantity. – Steady continuity1 is self-equality, but of many that do not become exclusive; it is repulsion that first expands self-equality to continuity. Hence discreteness is, for its part, a discreteness of confluents – of ones that do not have the void to connect them, not the negative, but their own steady advance and, in the many, do not interrupt this self-equality.

Quantity is the unity of these moments, of continuity and discreteness. At first, however, it is this continuity in the form of one of them, of continuity, as a result of the dialectic of the being-for-itself which has collapsed into the form of self-equal immediacy.Quantity is as such this simple result in so far as the being-for-itself has not yet developed itsmoments and has not posited them within it.