Just as one requires a contrast between light and dark to see anything so it is with pure Being, pure Being will require the darkness of pure Nothing before it can be thought at all. So far, everything is indeterminate, indeed pure Being is indeterminacy as such, in pure Being we think nothing but this is what we would perceive in a world of pure Nothing, hence we might as well say that pure Being is pure Nothing, they are identical. 'Being, the indeterminate immediate, is in fact nothing... Being, the indeterminate immediate is in fact nothing, and neither more nor less than nothing'.
'Nothing, pure nothingness; it is simple equality with itself, complete emptiness, complete absence of determination and content; lack of all distinction within. – In so far as mention can be made here of intuiting and thinking, it makes a difference whether something or nothing is being intuited or thought. To intuit or to think nothing has therefore a meaning; the two are distinguished and so nothing is (concretely exists) in our intuiting or thinking; or rather it is the empty intuiting and thinking itself, like pure being. – Nothing is therefore the same determination or rather absence of determination, and thus altogether the same as what pure being is'.
- 'The Science of Logic'
If pure Being and pure Nothing are the same from whence does their difference derive? Most assuredly there is a belief that Being and Nothing are different but belief counts for naught in logic, difference is to be inferred if it is to count. Does pure Being, the starting point, create difference? Of course not, for pure Being has no diversity within itself ... It would not be held fast in its purity if it contained any determination'. The origin of difference precedes pure Being, pure Being is 'equal only to itself', it is not equal to another, which makes sense, so far there is nothing but pure Being, nothing else is allowed to be distinguished, otherwise we have smuggled in foreign determinateness which is not yet permitted. But to be equal to oneself, is it not always true by definition, as in A = A? Here A is not equal to itself, rather, it is equal to another A, with different time/space coordinates than the first A, one cannot even express true self equality using an equal sign in virtue of an equal sign being a mediating term between two other terms and thus far we have only one term, pure Being, which is self-identical, and as such an anomaly in Hegelian Logic albeit in the end it is Spirit's victory that it becomes authentically self-identical. (Spirit is Hegel's name for the entire system of thought thinking itself). Pure Being is 'also not unequal with respect to another', a double negative meaning that there is no other, not that there is an other to which pure Being is 'not unequal'. Being is nothing more than simple self-relation.
'When thinking is to begin, we have nothing but thought in its pure lack of determination, for determination requires both one and another; but at the beginning we have as yet no other. That which lacks determination, as we have it here, is the immediate, not a mediated lack of determination, not the sublation of all determinacy, but the lack of determination in all its immediacy, what lacks determination prior to all determinacy, what lacks determinacy because it stands at the very beginning. But this is what we call 'being'. Being cannot be felt, it cannot be directly perceived nor can it be represented; instead, it is pure thought, and as such it constitutes the starting point. Essence lacks determination too, but, because it has already passed through mediation, it already contains determination as sublated within itself'.
- 'The Encyclopedia Logic'
Hegel implies that pure Being cannot be thought by concrete human intellect: 'Being is simple as an immediate; for this reason we can only intend it without being able to say what it is; therefore, it is immediately one with its other, non-being'. Whatever is conceivable is complex, and yet here I am thinking about pure Being and getting you to think about pure being. How so if such things cannot be thought? After all Hegel was critical of Kant's putative discovery that we can know nothing of the thing in itself, the object beyond phenomenal experience of it, yet Kant knows all about the thing in itself because he is naming it and describing its properties and given that we can think the thing-in-itself we are entitled to know why we cannot think pure Being. Well, here you are thinking, but this is inconsistent with the rules of pure Being. Absolute knowing 'has sublated [i.e., erased] all reference to an other' and since it is without distinction it has ceased to be knowledge. 'What is present is only simple immediacy ... being and nothing else, without any further specification and filling'.
Pure Being precludes an other that thinks. This means you. If pure Being were actually before us and not simply in our thoughts we would sink into the void of pure Being and the very fact that we are thinking at all is evidence that pure Being is not before us but rather it is evident that pure Being is never before us and not being but having been (Gewordensein) is to be apprehended as a becoming. I think therefore pure Being/Nothing relinquishes its part and much further down the road from pure Being is a self-conscious entity such as my self. But the unfolding of Logic has its audience including myself and now you for we are advanced, thinking beings engaged in the excavation of our own being. 'The whole is likewise in the form or determinateness of being, since in becoming being has likewise shown itself to be only a moment – something sublated, negatively determined. It is such, however, for us, in our reflection; not yet as posited in it'. He speaks 'for us', for us pure Being can be thought for we do it now but 'for itself' pure Being will not suffer us to contemplate it. In the presence of pure Being there can be no determinate thing that thinks and any endeavour to smuggle in thought or any other determinate being is thus far illegitimate.
'Pure being and pure nothing are therefore the same. The truth is neither being nor nothing, but rather that being has passed over into nothing and nothing into being – 'has passed over', not passes over. But the truth is just as much that they are not without distinction; it is rather that they are not the same, that they are absolutely distinct yet equally unseparated and inseparable, and that each immediately vanishes in its opposite. Their truth is therefore this movement of the immediate vanishing of the one into the other: becoming, a movement in which the two are distinguished, but by a distinction which has just as immediately dissolved itself'.
- 'The Science of Logic'
'In representation, or for the understanding, the proposition: 'Being and nothing is the same', appears to be such a paradoxical proposition that it may perhaps be taken as not seriously meant. And it really is one of the hardest propositions that thinking dares to formulate, for being and nothing are the antithesis in all its immediacy, i. e., without the prior positing of any determination in one of the two which would contain its relation to the other. But as was shown in the preceding paragraph, they do contain this determination; i. e., the one that is precisely the same in both. The deduction of their unity is to this extent entirely analytic; just as, quite generally, the whole course of philosophising, being methodical, i. e., necessary, is nothing else but the mere positing of what is already contained in a concept.-But correct as it is to affirm the unity of being and nothing, it is equally correct to say that they are absolutely diverse too-that the one is not what the other is. But because this distinction has here not yet determined itself, precisely because being and nothing are still the immediate-it is, as belonging to them, what cannot be said, what is merely meant'.
'No great expense of wit is needed to ridicule the proposition that being and nothing are the same, or rather to produce absurdities which are falsely asserted to be consequences and applications of this proposition; e. g., that, on that view, it is all the same whether my house, my fortune, the air to breathe, this city, the sun, the law, the spirit, God, are or are not. In examples of this kind, it is partly a matter of particular purposes, the utility that something has for me, being sneaked in. One then asks whether it matters to me that the useful thing is or that it is not. But philosophy is in fact the very discipline that aims at liberating man from an infinite crowd of finite purposes and intentions and at making him indifferent with regard to them, so that it is all the same to him whether such matters are the case or not'.
- 'The Encyclopedia Logic'
Pure Being is pure Nothing and since pure Being is self-identical then so is pure Nothing. Of pure Nothing Hegel remarks: 'In so far as intuiting or thinking can be mentioned here, it counts as a distinction whether something or nothing is intuited'. But thinking cannot be mentioned here for thinking stands opposed both to pure Being and pure Nothing, if you have a thought you have already trafficked in distinction contrary to the premises of pure Being. How we can proceed beyond pure Being if in it we are erased? Indubitably our relation to pure Being is characterised by ambiguity for we are thinking the unthinkable, and moreover we can merely borrow on advanced concepts such as human beings who think and who stand over against pure Being in violation of pure Being's rules to move the process along. Hegel concedes as much while speaking for us to remind us that we probably believe that something is different from nothing for indeed what could be more radically different from pure Being than pure Nothing? But they are the same, nothing is, after all, something, nothing is paradoxical: 'To intuit or think nothing has, therefore, a meaning; both [being and nothing] are distinguished and thus nothing is (exists) in our intuiting or thinking', and that Nothing is is a paradox reflecting the contention that there is no difference between pure Being and pure Nothing.
Satire No. 3 (excerpt)
by Aulus Persius Flaccus, (34 – 62 AD)
... Learn, you wretched creatures,
Discover the causes of things: what we are and what we
Are born for; what our station in life is; how and where
Navigating the turning-post is easy; what the limits to
Wealth should be; what it’s right to pray for; the use of
New-minted coins; how much to spend on your country;
Or your nearest and dearest; what the gods command
You to be; and where in the human world is your place.
Learn, and don’t begrudge doing so; ignore the smell
Of the pots in your larder, richly-stocked from defending
Fat Umbrians, of pepper and hams, mementoes of your
Marsian client; ignore the sprats still left in that first tub.
Here one of the goatish tribe of centurions may well say:
‘What I know is good enough for me. I’ve no wish to be
Like Arcesilas, or wretched Solon, with head bent and eyes
Fixed on the ground, chewing over their murmurings and
Rabid silences, weighing their words with protruding lips,
Reflecting on the fantasies of some clapped-out invalid:
That nothing is born of nothing, nor can return to nothing.
Is that what makes so you pale? Is that why you’re missing
Lunch?’
Coming up next:
The unity of Being and Nothing: Becoming
'Untitled', 1931, Man Ray
KING RICHARD II:
They shall be satisfied: I'll read enough,
When I do see the very book indeed
Where all my sins are writ, and that's myself.
Re-enter Attendant, with a glass
Give me the glass, and therein will I read.
No deeper wrinkles yet? hath sorrow struck
So many blows upon this face of mine,
And made no deeper wounds? O flattering glass,
Like to my followers in prosperity,
Thou dost beguile me! Was this face the face
That every day under his household roof
Did keep ten thousand men? was this the face
That, like the sun, did make beholders wink?
Was this the face that faced so many follies,
And was at last out-faced by Bolingbroke?
A brittle glory shineth in this face:
As brittle as the glory is the face;
Dashes the glass against the ground
For there it is, crack'd in a hundred shivers.
Mark, silent king, the moral of this sport,
How soon my sorrow hath destroy'd my face.
HENRY BOLINGBROKE:
The shadow of your sorrow hath destroy'd
The shadow or your face.
KING RICHARD II:
Say that again.
The shadow of my sorrow! ha! let's see:
'Tis very true, my grief lies all within;
And these external manners of laments
Are merely shadows to the unseen grief
That swells with silence in the tortured soul;
There lies the substance: and I thank thee, king,
For thy great bounty, that not only givest
Me cause to wail but teachest me the way
How to lament the cause.
- William Shakespeare, (1564 – 1616), 'Richard II', Act 4, Scene 1
'Lee Miller', 1929, Man Ray
To be continued ...