Defectiveness of the Words 'Unity, Identity of Being and Nothing'

Remark 2: Defectiveness of the Expression ‘Unity, Identity of Being and Nothing’

¹⁴⁷ The sameness of being and nothingness is made repugnant because the statement ‘being and nothing are one and the same’, is incomplete.

The emphasis is laid chiefly on their being one and the same, as in judgments generally, where it is the predicate that first states what the subject is.

Consequently, the sense seems to be that the difference is denied, although at the same time it appears directly in the proposition; for this enunciates both determinations, being and nothing, and contains them as distinguished.

At the same time, the intention cannot be that abstraction should be made from them and only the unity retained. Such a meaning would self-evidently be one-sided, because that from which abstraction is to be made is equally present and named in the proposition.

The proposition ‘being and nothing are the same’ asserts the identity of these determinations.

But, in fact, it equally contains them both as distinguished, the proposition is self-contradictory and cancels itself out.

Bearing this in mind and looking at the proposition more closely, we find that it has a movement which involves the spontaneous vanishing of the proposition itself. But in thus vanishing, there takes place in it that which is to constitute its own peculiar content, namely, becoming.

¹⁴⁸ The proposition thus contains the result, it is this in its own self. But the fact to which we must pay attention here is the defect that the result is not itself expressed in the proposition; it is an external reflection which discerns it therein.

In this connection we must, at the outset, make this general observation, namely, that the proposition in the form of a judgment is not suited to express speculative truths; a familiarity with this fact is likely to remove many misunderstandings of speculative truths.

Judgment is an identical relation between subject and predicate; in it we abstract from the fact that the subject has a number of determinatenesses other than that of the predicate, and also that the predicate is more extensive than the subject.

If the content is speculative, the non-identical aspect of subject and predicate is also an essential moment, but in the judgment this is not expressed. It is the form of simple judgment, when it is used to express speculative results, which is very often responsible for the paradoxical and bizarre light in which much of recent philosophy appears to those who are not familiar with speculative thought.

¹⁴⁹ To help express the speculative truth, the deficiency is made good in the first place by adding the contrary proposition: being and nothing are not the same, which is also enunciated as above.

But thus there arises the further defect that these propositions are not connected, and therefore exhibit their content only in the form of an antinomy whereas their content refers to one and the same thing, and the determinations which are expressed in the two propositions are supposed to be in complete union-a union which can only be stated as an unrest of incompatibles, as a movement.

The commonest injustice done to a speculative content is to make it one-sided, that is, to give prominence only to one of the propositions into which it can be resolved. It cannot then be denied that this proposition is asserted; but the statement is just as false as it is true, for once one of the propositions is taken out of the speculative content, the other must at least be equally considered and stated. Particular mention must be made here of that, so to speak, unfortunate word, ‘unity’.

Unity, even more than identity, expresses a subjective reflection; it is taken especially as the relation which arises from comparison, from external reflection. When this reflection finds the same thing in two different objects, the resultant unity is such that there is presupposed the complete indifference to it of the objects themselves which are compared, so that this comparing and unity does not concern the objects themselves and is a procedure and a determining external to them. Unity, therefore, expresses wholly abstract sameness and sounds all the more blatantly paradoxical the more the terms of which it is asserted show themselves to be sheer opposites. So far then, it would be better to, say only unseparatedness and inseparability, but then the affirmative aspect of the relation of the whole would not find expression.

¹⁵⁰ Thus the whole true result which we have here before us is becoming, which is not merely the one-sided or abstract unity of being and nothing.

It consists rather in this movement, that pure being is immediate and simple, and for that very reason is equally pure nothing, that there is a difference between them, but a difference which no less sublates itself and is not. The result, therefore, equally asserts the difference of being and nothing, but as a merely fancied or imagined difference.

¹⁵¹ The common opinion is that:

• being is the sheer other of nothingness
• nothingness is clearer than their absolute difference
• nothingness seems easier than to be able to state it.

But it is equally easy to convince oneself that this is impossible, that it is unsayable.

Let those who insist that being and nothing are different tackle the problem of stating in what the difference consists.

If being and nothing had any determinateness by which they were distinguished from each other then, as has been observed, they would be determinate being and determinate nothing, not the pure being and pure nothing that here they still are.

Their difference is therefore completely empty, each of them is in the same way indeterminate; the difference, then, exists not in themselves but in a third, in subjective opinion. Opinion, however, is a form of subjectivity which is not proper to an exposition of this kind. But the third in which being and nothing subsist must also present itself here, and it has done so; it is becoming.

In this being and nothng are distinct moments; becoming only is, in so, in so far as they are distinguished.

This third is an other than they; they subsist only in an other, which is equivalent to saying that they are not self-subsistent.

Becoming is as much the subsistence of being as it is of non-being; or, their subsistence is only their being in a one. It is just this their subsistence that equally sublates their difference.

¹⁵² The challenge to distinguish between being and nothing also includes the challenge to say what, then, is being and what is nothing.

Those who are reluctant to recognise either one or the other as only a transition of the one into the other, and who assert this or that about being and nothing, let them state what it is they are speaking of, that is, put forward a definition of being and nothing and demonstrate its correctness. Without having satisfied this first requirement of the ancient science whose logical rules they accept as valid and apply in other cases, all that they maintain about being and nothing amounts only to assertions which are scientifically worthless. If elsewhere it has been said that existence, in so far as this at first is held to be synonymous with being, is the complement to possibility, then this presupposes another determination, possibility, and so being is not enunciated in its immediacy, but in fact as not self-subsistent, as conditioned. For being which is the outcome of mediation we shall reserve the term: Existence. But one pictures being to oneself, perhaps in the image of pure light as the clarity of undimmed seeing, and then nothing as pure night — and their distinction is linked with this very familiar sensuous difference. But, as a matter of fact, if this very seeing is more exactly imagined, one can readily perceive that in absolute clearness there is seen just as much, and as little, as in absolute darkness, that the one seeing is as good as the other, that pure seeing is a seeing of nothing. Pure light and pure darkness are two voids which are the same thing. Something can be distinguished only in determinate light or darkness (light is determined by darkness and so is darkened light, and darkness is determined by light, is illuminated darkness), and for this reason, that it is only darkened light and illuminated darkness which have within themselves the moment of difference and are, therefore, determinate being.