Form, Matter and Content

The first part of the Hegel's logic is Being, and the second is Essence. Being is being-in-itself, an entity unconscious of itself. Of course, when the existence is devoid of consciousness talking about being-in-itself and thing-for-itself signals Hegel's excessive anthropomorphism. So, we have to reduce these concepts to the human world, where the subject and object meet each other. An individual, a group of men or a not-yet-emergent social development may be considered as a being unconscious of itself.

Anyway, Essence is a process to reveal a new formation of consciousness. Stages or divisions of Essence are Contemplation, Appearance and Actuality. The first stage, contemplation, is the dialectic of Form and Matter. The second stage, Appearance, refers to the interaction of Form and Content. We take Matter as an entity, a substrate, in its most abstract shape. Like the mythical ether that once was thought to be the uniform matter out of which all objects are made, like play-doh used by kids to shape their world. However, in reality, matter is not abstract and has elements with their interactions. Therefore, a shapeless matter turns into a concrete content. An individual living in a society is the same in various times; it has more or less the same organism and physiological matter that appears as a human being. However, his/her content is the product of countless factors. Therefore, in Hegel's logic, the first division of Essence refers to abstract form and matter. This is just the beginning of the process of unfolding the object. The second division, Form-Content, is a step towards concreteness.

In all stages of this process, we should not forget all these concepts don't stand outside of the Subject, the human consciousness, and that all these processes reflect real processes. How Form is connected to Content is an old debate in philosophy and literature and art. I like to discuss it more in the future.

Thing-in-itself

Some questions and points for thinking and discussing:
Thing-in-itself is the thing unconscious of itself! But this is a false idea. Thing-in-itself and thing-for-itself are meaningless without man's mind. It does not stand outside of mind.
Thing-in-itself does not actually exist because any level of knowledge, even vague and superficial, is a knowledge. Even naming a thing brings it to our mind and makes it thing-for-us.
Concerning social and intellectual objects, where the object and subject are the same or interrelated, the thing-in-itself does exist. How do you think about this?