Doctrine of Being: Quality - Being (2)

Clarifications

1. The concept / thought of becoming should not be confused with their empirical examples.

• E.g. It is not the case that the proposition “the house exists” is identical to “the house does not exist”
• This is because such examples already presuppose determination, and thus are not really examples of becoming at all
• All determinate beings have an essential relation to other determinations outside themselves (more to follow on this later on)

2. Kant has famously claimed that “being is not a predicate” - but Kant's example of $100 as either being / non-being is confusing and wrong-headed for the reasons mentioned in (1). To have or to not have $100 are not the same as the mere being or non-being of $100. The former already is existence, where there is a distinction between a something and an other is presupposed. More to follow on this too.

3. Reference to Parmenides will secure simultaneously a logical and historical beginning in philosophy.

• “What is the first in science had of necessity to show itself to be the first historically” (64)

4. Abstraction out of finite determinateness is not only theoretically necessary, but also practically so. This experience elevates our spirit above all particular things, and thus paves the way towards a higher point of view. It also is the per-requisite for the Christian experience.

5. Finite thing = something in which its concept and its being are distinguished.

• God is not a finite thing, thus, Kant's criticism of the Ontological Proof is unsound, since the latter is based on examples and intuitions which are essentially finite
• A true critique of pure reason consists in preventing the determinations of finite things to be applied to infinite beings such as God

6. The internal contradiction of the proposition “being and nothing are the same” expresses becoming as the truth of both sides, but this expression is still only implicit in the proposition itself. Thus, the proposition alone cannot give us the idea of this truth.

• One needs to also inscribe the opposite proposition - “being and nothing are different” - into the first judgment; but this proposition is merely an antinomy when read in isolation
• A particular, isolated judgment cannot express a speculative truth, since it fails to make explicit the moments of non-identity between the subject and the predicate
• “The paradoxical and even bizarre light in which much of recent philosophy is cast for those not intimate with speculative thought is due in many ways to the form of the simple judgment when used to convey speculative results” (67)
• The concept of unity – in the context of the “unity of being and nothing is becoming” - needs to be freed from its figurative connotations (e.g. “hot cocoa is a unity of cocoa beans and milk”) in order for it to convey the unity of being and nothing
• Pure unity implies inseparability, but it is also a positive force of thought, i.e. more than just a lack of separation

7. No other definition of pure being is possible without falling into the fallacies just clarified above.

• As it has been already shown, mediated being is already a “concrete existence”
• In a sensuous analogy, being is exemplified in light, since determinate perception in light is only possible when light shines in darkness and/or vice versa
• Becoming is a movement internal to being, and so is not necessarily a transition from one object to its external other

Errors due to the isolation of being from nothing and vice versa

1. Parmenides

• A = A, being = being, needs something external to it in order to give rise to a determinate object
• But this positing of something external is not a movement which is demonstrated as being internal to the simple self-identity of being, and so it is not continuous with the absolute beginning which was made above
• This “something external” is thus a second beginning which is wholly unjustified

2. Fichte

• I = I and non-I = non-I are two acts of positing either a thesis or an antithesis
• But this procedure brings two external elements together, and as such is not a relation developed out of the first beginning of being = being
• In which case the “I” is already a determinate something, and thus this method is also fallacious

3. Jacobi's critique of such errors

• The real task of logic is to show how determinations (visual objects, consonants, etc.) arise from within pure being (light, sound, etc.)
• Synthesis is already a twofold process of separation and unification internal to a thought
• Becoming is the first and most fundamental example of a synthetic unity
• The shortcoming in Jacobi is that the way in which the question is framed precludes any prospect of progress
• “[Jacobi's] totally abstract purity of continuity, that is, with this indeterminateness and emptiness of representation, it is indifferent whether one names this abstraction “space” or “pure intuition” or “pure thought.” It is altogether the same as what an Indian calls Brahma, when for years on end, looking only at the tip of his nose, externally motionless and equally unmixed in sensation, representation, phantasy, desire, and so on, he inwardly says only Om, Om, Om, or else says nothing at all. This dull, empty consciousness is just this – being” (72)
• The Kantian synthetic unity of self-consciousness is thus reduced merely to false and one-sided unity without difference in Jacobi's thought
  • But Jacobi's pure consciousness is empirically false – there is no such thing as a purely empty consciousness
  • This is why Parmenides / Spinoza had to have recourse to opinions, semblances, accidents, modes, etc.
• Logic already contains the seed for empirical differences
  • E.g. “existence” already contains the source out of which its own contradictions arise
• Being as immediacy is the current subject-matter; being as the product of an act of abstraction out of an empirical manifold will later be dealt with in the chapters on essence
• The being / nothing alternative presents itself as the recurring point of all acts of abstraction

4. Plato's Parmenides

• The distinction between “The One” and “The One is” is presupposed in this work
• Thus, the dialectic is already not internal to the One but rather an external comparison between the One and its Other
• Nothing is not simple absence, anymore than darkness is not simply an absence of light; it is rather a part of light which is required for colour to arise
• “Cold as the absence of heat” is not merely negative; since heat, qua determinateness, already is a negation (in what sense this is the case will be dealt with in the forthcoming), cold here is a negation of the negative, or a positive concrete existence (more on this later)

On the Cosmological Proof concerning the Genesis of the World

• “Since being is already present and thus cannot further be created, not genesis is possible if we start with being; but since nothing can only produce nothing, it too cannot create the world; thus, either way, the world cannot have a beginning”
• This proof ignores or neglects a third way which is the unity of being and nothing in becoming
• Nonetheless, four elements are clearly distinguished: being, nothing, coming-to-be, and ceasing-to-be
• In order to admit the reality of the latter two, neither being nor nothing is powerful on its own to ground these elements; a fifth term, namely becoming, is required for a grounding of coming-to-be and its opposite
• But since becoming is totally neglected, the proof is entirely incomprehensible and badly contradictory
• The same kind of sophistical argument is deployed in the conception of infinitesimals (more to come on this later on)
  • For the truth is that infinitesimals only exist as vanishments, which are neither pure beings nor pure non-beings
• The spectacular success of mathematics is precisely due to the recognition that everything is a synthetic unity of becoming

All methods of thought which uncritically assumes a static, fixed distinction between being and nothing can be called sophistry. By comparison, dialectic presents the internal necessity of being passing into nothing and vice versa.

Moments of Becoming

• Both being and nothing first come on the scene as present, then secondly reappear as the presuppositions of each other
• The second pair is the sublated being / nothing
• Sublated being / nothing are the proper constituents or moments of becoming
• Becoming has four components, being / nothing as presence and the same pair as sublated

Sublation of Becoming

• Being / nothing thus vanish as moments of becoming
• The fact that these vanish results in an absolute internal contradiction; becoming is intelligible only as the movement of two terms, so if we remove these terms and their distinction, then becoming also vanishes
• However, this “vanishing of becoming” returns into being, this time as the negation of the immediate, indeterminate simplicity with which the beginning was originally made
• As such, being is now mediated, and is determinateness
• The production of such determinatenesses is the truth of becoming
• These constitute existence

Remark on Aufhebung or Sublation

• A sublated nothing is mediated by that from which it is sublated; this is thus not identical with the simple, immediate nothing
• The movement between being and nothing will be repeated henceforth in existence etc.; but it will never again surface explicitly as it did in this chapter