On
the Beginning
- Neither something purely mediate nor immediate can be the beginning, since such a thing would already be mediated by the other side of the dichotomy
- In the past, the beginning was often made from an already determined particular content
- Kant first showed the necessity of demonstrating how subjective moments of thought constitute the objective world – the need for the unity of principle / content with form / subject
- Logic presupposes the concept of science, which is the end-product of the Phenomenology of Spirit
- An absolute beginning of logic is not to be made by appeal to something beyond, but rather must be made from something which is just here, in front of us – this is pure being
- Being is not to be understood as one side of the subject/object distinction – this is because being is to be seen here as a result of the Phenomenology of Spirit
Objections
and Alternative Beginnings
1.
The beginning as such is that which is possible (Reinhold)
- Progress in philosophy is in fact a retrogression to a higher ground
- Being is the ground of the logical development of science, but it is at the same time the result to which all the subsequent discoveries are presuppositions
- This relation between the two directions in terms of method and in terms of result – this shows that the science of logic proceeds by way of an immanent deduction
2.
The beginning as such is sufficient in itself
- What is this representation of a beginning?
- Since something is to be deduced from this, it ought to be a nothing with a content, i.e. being
- This means that the concept of the beginning as such already is a unity of being and nothing
- The distinction between being and nothing is already there, presupposed
- Here we have the “most abstract definition of the absolute”
- Being is thus more simple than this concept
3.
That which is known to all is the beginning
- The relations presupposed in such a content cannot be presupposed in the science of logic
- No concrete content can thus be the beginning
4.
The beginning must be made from a given fact
- What is called a “fact” ought to be the result of a science, not its presupposition
- The fact at hand at the beginning just is pure being
5.
The “I” is the beginning, since this contains immediate
certainty
- If the “I” is a familiar, immediate content, then it is an empirical consciousness, and as such cannot qualify for a universal beginning
- If the pure, universal “I” is deduced from the concept of the “I,” then the “I” is no longer immediate, and as such is no longer a beginning
- If the “I” refers to pure knowledge which is beyond the subject/object distinction, then it is merely a confusing name to give to this pure knowledge, which is more appropriately called “being”
“Being”
is the only term which can neutralize the beginning of thought. Thus,
by definition, being requires no further preliminary remarks for its
comprehension.
The
science of logic is the immanent deduction of the categories.
“Quantity
is quality which has already become negative” - meaning that
quantity constitutes a domain distinct from immediate phenomena.
Measure
= relation between quality and quantity (which is also the position
of Ernst Cassirer.)
Division
of the Doctrine of Being
- Determinateness (Quality)
- Quantity
- Measure – which returns to Quality
Division
of Quality
- Being or Determinateness (pure being is already distinguished from determinate being; this prepares the ground for sublated being, where indeterminate being comes to exist in its negative relation to determinate being)
- Existence (being determined in negative relation to determinateness; existence is not identical to determinateness, which is an important point)
- Being-for-itself (existence is finite, and in its finitude it returns into itself out of its negative relation to its other, and this return constitutes existence as infinite, as being-for-itself)
Chapter
1 – Being
A. Being
- Equal to itself = not unequal to another
- No differentiation, which means that it is nothing
B. Nothing
- Simple equality with itself
- Pure lack
- Unlike being, nothing is intuitable as such (very important difference!)
- Being and nothing are identical except for the one fact that the former cannot be intuited whereas the latter can
C. Becoming
- Both being and nothing turn out to be presuppositions of one another
- Each thus vanishes into the other as logically distinct yet temporally identical moments
- Movement arises, and this is the truth of being, which is to say that it is becoming
Remarks
- Parmenides first elevated being as pure thought out of determinate beings, but was too one-sided in his attachment to the One
- Heraclitus was more profound with his thought of the becoming
- “Ex nihilo, nihil fit” - from nothing comes nothing – is a superficial assertion which is either an empty tautology or a falsity in light of the thought of becoming
- Christianity has paved the way towards the thought of something arising out of nothing
- Pantheism is the school of thought which clings to the thought that both being and nothing are static, self-identical, and self-subsisting
- This leads into Spinoza's assertion of conatus and his idea that this can only be obstructed by something external to it
- If this unity of being and nothing in becoming sounds absurd or amazing, then it is rather these reactions which are absurd and amazing
- Every particular thing is both being and nothing, immediate and mediated
- Parallels Collingwood's principle of the “overlap of classes”
- The entire subsequent logic is a series of examples or actual manifestations of becoming
- All the concepts of philosophy belong to this flow
Hegel's
basic ontology of thought ends here. The rest is an immanent
deduction of the categories out of becoming.
