The Philosophy of Nature (Naturphilosophie)

Summary

I now move on to the presentation of the system as it emerged completely independently of Fichte. Here, then, the beginning was no longer the finite or human I, but the infinite subject, namely (1) the absolute subject (das Subjekt überhaupt), because it alone is immediately certain, but (2) the infinite subject, i.e. the subject which can never stop being subject, can never be lost in the object, become mere object, as it does for Spinoza via an act of which it itself is not conscious.

The subject, to the extent to which it is still thought in its pure substantiality, is still free of all being (Seyn), and although not nothing, yet as nothing. Not nothing because it is yet subject, as nothing because not object, because it does not exist in objective being (nicht im gegen-ständlichen Seyn seyend). But it cannot remain in this abstraction, it is, so to speak, natural for it to want itself as something, accordingly as object. But the difference of this becoming object from what must also be thought as preceding Spinoza's substance is that the latter loses itself completely, thus wholly without reservation, when it goes over into the object, and thus is only encountered as such (as object); but the subject is not blind, but rather infinite self-positing, i.e. it does not stop being a subject in becoming object; infinite self-positing, then – not in the merely negative sense that it is only not finite or could not become finite at all, but rather in the positive sense, that it can make itself finite (make itself into something), but emerges victorious from that finitude, again as subject, or; it only raises itself again into a higher potential of subjectivity by that becoming-finite, becoming-object.