These are not objects to start with. These are thinkers and students in a classroom learning how to discuss an object.
So the object seems to move, emerging from a dark background a bit fuzzy and as it approaches we notice something for the first time. It is a boundary. The surrounding darkness has consolidated, pulled itself into the shape of a distinction. We look back to the object and for the first time it seems clear. Negation.
We take a pause. What here has happened? Out of the not yet something its opposite came forward as the evidence of a thing, a negative that is not in itself a space or a line except as it is a space or a line around that one thing and in that sense it has drawn in as a remnant the other sense of nothing. In the first sense not quite a thing, in the second sense the Absolute. From indistinction emerges distinction, a boundary presenting what is not as the other side of a thing, a negative necessary to the positing of a thing.
In spite of appearances It is not It, at first, that is changing. It begins with us as students in seeking understanding. How to see, how to know, how to concretize an abstraction into our lives.
Philosophy of Right is a practice, a student workbook for achieving the illumination about the universe’s self determination that is emerging, clarifying and occurring as the students who see it in ourselves.
To learn the abstractness of a thing occurs in a reverse sequence to the subtraction from a thing, when a viewer overlooks some specificities in the prioritization of others, a natural situation for the focus of the human eye. Total environmental awareness in a situational emergency brings thought to more detail through adrenaline and reduces the abstraction of the washed out equally present reality.
Instead of adrenaline into the system, Hegel is proposing a squint. A sideways glance is an attempt to see just one as it truly is, without all my assumptions poured all over it filling up and soothing out its bumps and cracks. A lack of intention with my attention is a habit to be corrected by care and attention to what is out there and other than me, first to see and gradually to know it in increasing concreteness, a phenomenologist of spirit.
We turn our bodies this way, at the neck, to see its indistinction. Notice its shadow. Then get up and move to the other side.