For decades this paragraph has given me more difficulty than any other paragraph in the entire Phenomenology.

As I read it now what makes it so difficult is that he seems to go back and forth between speaking about the thing and speaking about its properties.

In 116 Hegel identifies the true with the universal and self-identical. In 117 It is the need to attribute a self-identity to what is universal that creates a conflict that provokes a progress.

There is also a double vision in play between the thing as object and the thing as a multitude of properties.

First, there is the object as self-identical taken as a One. But we also perceive (the double vision) properties that transcends this One that also have the character of a universal.  

To accommodate the property as universal, what is self-identical must be reconceived as a community of such properties.

So, what accounts for the move from the first to the second sentence is first the double vision and then the conflict instigated when the properties as universal call for a self-identity specific to a collection of such properties.

However, because the property is determinate, the object needs to be posited more precisely as a One that excludes – once again the vision pertaining to one – here the property - leads to a revision in the other – the object.

We have learned when Hegel gave his account of the thing how the thing as self-conflicted must be conceived both as a One that excludes and as a passive medium.

What is new is how he now goes on to characterize this One that excludes as a broken up One given that the one can be broken up and taken as a collection of determinate properties that exclude what they are not.

But these properties that exclude what they are not nonetheless are gathered with other properties that are not determinately different but indifferently different.

A sugar cube is white not blue. But as white it is indifferent to its being a cube. This indifference allows such  properties to be gathered.

The properties as gathered calls for a reconception with the community or what Hegel here calls the continuity in general now taken as self-identical as a universal common medium.

That is, the properties as gathered, because they are gathered as indifferent, have a continuity or self-identity that is taken as a medium.

But because of the double vision, this is not the end of the matter. What I perceive as true – with a shift of focus – is not the universal medium but single properties found in this medium.

Here the fact that the focus is on the single property is used by Hegel to end the progression. With our vision fixed on the property as single Hegel claims we are thrown back into sense certain cognition.

It seems that with the single property we could just as easily have noted the plurality and returned to the community, starting the cycle for a second time. However, this would not have been a perfect cycle in that we would have left out the first move which was to identify the object as a One.

So, there seems to be something significant about this falling back into sense certain knowing that currently eludes me.

But it is safe to say that as Hegel presents the matter, this first attempt to grasp the object of perception does not get off the mark.

• Alan