The Second Stage

 

 The second stage traces relations, and finds that things do not exist in immediate independence, but that each is related to others, and it comes to say that "Were a grain of sand to be destroyed, the universe would collapse." A thing either is in one state or another; if it is in any one state, it is not changing, nor likewise if it is already in another; therefore a thing cannot change. When self-activity notices that its perception is connected with concepts. It perceives each and every object as a result of a process. Thus it knows an object in its class rather than as a unique individual. Common sense fails when applied to particulars. Each object is related to something else, and changes when that changes. The second stage only reduces all to dependence and finitude, and does not show us how any real, true, or independent being can be found to exist. It holds fast to the stage of mediation alone, just as the first stage held by the immediate. But we believe that ideas possess more truth, more reality, than the objects of perception. The force is more real than the object, because it outlasts an object. Force also causes things to originate, to change, and disappear. The force is the activity side of the self-activity. The essential unity of all processes and forces leads us to the doctrine of the correlation of forces. Reflection makes all things relative because the objects that we perceive are all of them in a process of origination, change, and decay. All objects of the senses are relative in the stage of reflection. They are transitory, and have originated in the past from other, beings, in an endless series. Each is not the whole of itself, but only a fragmentary realization of its true self (Harris 1969).

Beings only exist in there relations; relations are essentially negative.  The negative is essentially a relative and it can relate only to itself. But self-relation is always identity. All positive forms, all forms of immediateness or being, all forms of identity, are self-relations, consisting of a negative or relative, relating to itself. Since this relation is that of the negative, it negates itself in its very relation, and hence its identity is a producing of non-identity. Identity and distinction are produced by the self-same process and thus self-determination is the origin of all identity and distinction likewise. This is the speculative stand-point in its completeness (Harris 1969).

Self-activity is the negative unity of the self as subject of the act. It is passive only as determined, as the object, but not as subject. Now, as subject it is entirely without the determinations of the world of experience, it is wholly transcendent. The subject encompasses the negative unity as the subject considered apart from the object. The understanding arrives at a negative unity, which, is an original, a causa sui (Harris 1969). This is self-activity. The analysis of self-activity finds self as subject and self as object. Self as determiner and self as determined. The negative unity is the end of analysis, and as causa sui it is the beginning of synthesis (Harris 1969). Self-activity determines itself and produces distinctions within itself. It externalizes or makes itself objective.