Essence must appear.

Being is the absolute abstraction; this negativity is not something external to it, but being is rather being, and nothing but being, only as this absolute negativity. Because of this negativity, being is only as self-sublating being and is essence. But, conversely, essence as simple self-equality is likewise being. The doctrine of being contains the first proposition, “being is essence.” The second proposition, “essence is being,” constitutes the content of the first section of the doctrine of essence. But this being into which essence makes itself is essential being, concrete existence, a being which has come forth out of negativity and inwardness.

Thus essence appears. Reflection is the internal shining of essence. The determinations of this reflection are included in the unity purely and simply as posited, sublated; or reflection is essence immediately identical with itself in its positedness. But since this essence is ground, through its selfsublating reflection, or the reflection that which returns into itself, essence determines itself as something real; further, since this real determination, or the otherness, of the ground-connection sublates itself in the reflection of the ground and becomes concrete existence, the form determinations acquire therein an element of independent subsistence. Their reflective shine comes to completion in appearance.

The essentiality that has advanced to immediacy is, first, concrete existence, and a concrete existent or thing – an undifferentiated unity of essence and its immediacy. The thing indeed contains reflection, but its negativity is at first dissolved in its immediacy; but, because its ground is essentially reflection, its immediacy is sublated and the thing makes itself into a positedness.

Second, then, it is appearance. Appearance is what the thing is in itself, or the truth of it. But this concrete existence, only posited and reflected into otherness, is equally the surpassing of itself into its infinity; opposed to the world of appearance there stands the world that exists in itself reflected into itself.

But the being that appears and essential being stand referred to each other absolutely. Thus concrete existence is, third, essential relation; what appears shows the essential, and the essential is in its appearance. – Relation is the still incomplete union of reflection into otherness and reflection into itself; the complete interpenetrating of the two is actuality.