The category of "appearance" comes right after the category of "thing." In the context of Hegel's Science of Logic, therefore, it is appropriate to say that "a thing appears," and in order to read the two sections on "thing" and "appearance," it is also important to ask: "how does a thing appear?"
For Hegel, appearance gives stable subsistence to the otherwise unstable thing. For the thinker who is thinking about how things appear, therefore, the correct way to think is not to focus on appearance in order to see how a thing is constituted out of it, but rather to focus on the thing to see how it becomes stabilized.
"Thing" is a core category of "concrete existence" [Existenz]. Concrete existence is first the result of the movement of abstract essence which is taken as immediate. Abstract essence develops the framework for the entire Doctrine of Essence, and this development begins with the most abstract, namely, the category of reflection. In essence, a determination or quality comes to be through being negated, which means that an essential quality is never present and is instead always past. At first, there is only the form of positing this essential quality, but Hegel develops the chapter on abstract essence in such a way that these qualities come to constitute a totality, a totality which accounts for all determinations of being which are excluded from what is present as being. For example, outside my window there is a tall, old fir tree that is present. As a being, it has a certain quality and a certain quantity which combine into a measure - hence, I can call it "tall" (since this is an appropriate measure which the tree exhibits immediately) and so forth. However, I also know that the tree is, in itself and independently of my perception of it, something which has come to be out of a seed and a stem. In abstract essence, the seed, the stem, as well as all the measures and their relations, are posited as the "timelessly past" essences of the tree. The present, grown and old tree is only a shine of these essences. The developed totality of a tree, its full reproductive cycle, is its concrete existence.
In concrete existence, essence exists as a totality, and this totality is at first the "thing." Although concrete existence is a result of the movement of positing the essences, as a "thing" this movement is "sublated," that is, temporarily forgotten or suspended, treated as null. Therefore, the "thing" is totality in its immediacy. As immediate totality, and as a category of essence, the "thing" divides into the essential and the inessential. First, the thing divides into concrete existence as the inessential and the "thing in itself" as the essential. But the "thing in itself" is just the totality of essential qualities which pertain to the thing. In this way, the thing next becomes a "thing with many properties." The thing is the inessential, while the many properties, each subsisting as things in themselves, are the essential. Thirdly, these properties are united as things in themselves or for themselves, and so they come to constitute matters. The thing is thus the totally empty vessel in which the many different matters come to be and subsist.
On the one hand, the thing holds the many matters together. Thus, it is thanks to the tree qua thing that heat matter, wood matter, etc. find stable mutual subsistence. On the other hand, the thing is also the dividing point of the many matters. If a thing is not a tree but another thing, then different matters will constitute it, in which case the matters are, conversely, also constituted differently by the change in the thing. Although empty, the thing has this function of altering the matters with itself. In this way, the thing is, on the one hand, the becoming of matters, but on the other hand also the medium through which the matters find stable subsistence.
Within the same thing, therefore, a matter both is and is not. It is, because the thing is what posits the matter in its determinateness. It is not, because in being altered the matter founders, sinks to the ground, so to speak, and subsists, waiting to play its role when the conditions arise. For example, the pigments of the leaves of a tree subsist even within the seed, for the seed is already implicitly the leaf, and the leaf is where the pigments, qua "color matter," find their moment of being. In this way, the being of a matter is treated as an appearance.
Without appearance, the matters lose their being, for they would no longer have a "beyond" in which they subsist as they once were. Appearance allows for the repetition which is necessary for the matters to find stable, self-identical subsistence. A thing therefore appears because, in order to function as the place where a totality of essential qualities subsist, it must treat each essential quality as subsisting in its absence. Or, to put it differently, appearance is a category which resolves the contradiction of a matter being present in its very absence.
