The Isolating of These Abstractions

Remark 3: The Isolating of These Abstractions

§ 153

The unity, whose moments, being and nothing, are inseparable, is at the same time different from them and is thus a third to them; this third in its own most characteristic form is becoming. Transition is the same as becoming except that in the former one tends to think of the two terms, from one of which transition is made to the other, as at rest, apart from each other, the transition taking place between them. Now wherever and in whatever form being and nothing are in question, this third must be present; for the two terms have no separate subsistence of their own but are only in becoming, in this third. But this third has many empirical shapes, which are set aside or ignored by abstraction in order to hold fast, each by itself, these its products, being and nothing, and to show them protected against transition. Such simple procedure of abstraction can be countered, equally simply, by calling to mind the empirical existence in which that abstraction is itself only a something having a determinate being. Or else it is some other form of reflection which is supposed to effect the separation of what is inseparable. Such determination carries within itself its own opposite, and, without referring back and appealing to the nature of the thing itself, the determination of reflection can be refuted in its own self by taking it just as it presents itself and pointing out in it its own other. It would be favour in vain to attempt to intercept all the shifts and turns of reflection and its arguments in order to cut off and render impossible to it all the evasions and digressions by which it conceals from itself its own self-contradiction. For this reason I, too, refrain from taking notice of many of the so-called objections and refutations which have been advanced against the proposition that neither being nor nothing truly is, but that their truth is only becoming. The intellectual training which alone can afford an insight into the nullity of such refutations, or rather spontaneously dispell such random fancies, is effected only by a critical knowledge of the forms of the understanding; but those who are most prolific with such objections straightway launch their reflections against the first propositions without first acquiring or having acquired, by a further study of logic, an awareness of the nature of these crude reflections.

§ 154

We shall consider some of the results which appear when being and nothing are postulated in isolation from each other, each outside the sphere of the other, with the consequence that their transition is denied.

§ 155

Parmenides held fast to being and was most consistent in affirming at the same time that nothing absolutely is not; only being is. As thus taken, entirely on its own, being is indeterminate, and has therefore no relation to an other; consequently, it seems that from this beginning no further progress can be made — that is, from this beginning itself — and that progress can only be achieved by linking it on to something extraneous, something outside it. Hence the progress made in affirming that being is the same as nothing appears as a second, absolute beginning-a transition which is independent of being and added to it from outside. If being had a determinateness, then it would not be the absolute beginning at all; it would then depend on an other and would not be immediate, would not be the beginning. But if it is indeterminate and hence a genuine beginning, then, too, it has nothing with which it could bridge the gap between itself and an other; it is at the same time the end. It is just as impossible for anything to break forth from it as to break into it; with Parmenides as with Spinoza, there is no progress from being ot absolute substance to the negative, to the finite. If, nevertheless, there is progress — which as has been remarked, in the case of relationless, and so progress-less being can be accomplished only in an external manner-then this progress is a second, a fresh beginning. Thus Fichte’s absolutely primary, unconditioned principle: A = A, is thesis; the second is antithesis. This latter is supposed to be partly conditioned, partly unconditioned (and so an internal contradiction). This is a progress by external reflection which, having negated the absolute with which it began-the antithesis is the negation of the first identity-straightway expressly converts its second unconditioned into a conditioned. But if there were any justification at all for the progress, that is, for sublating the first beginning, then this first would itself have to be of such a nature that an other could connect itself with it; and therefore it would have to be determinate. But neither being, nor even absolute substance, claims to be such: on the contrary. Being is the immediate, that which is still utterly indeterminate. ®

§ 156

The most eloquent, perhaps forgotten, descriptions of the impossibility of advancing from an abstract first to something beyond it, and effecting a union of both, are made by Jacobi in support of his polemic against the Kantian a priori synthesis of self-consciousness in his Treatise on the Undertaking of the Critical Philosophy to Bring Reason to Understanding. He states the problem thus: that there be demonstrated the originating or producing of a synthesis in a pure [unity], whether of consciousness, of space, or of time. “Let space be one, time be one, consciousness be one … Now tell me how does any one of these three ones purely make itself into a manifold within itself … each is only a one and no other; a one and the same sort, a self-sameness without any distinction of one from the other; for these distinctions still slumber in the empty infinitude of the indeterminate from which each and everything determinate has yet to proceed! What brings finitude into those three infinities? What impregnates space and time a priori with number and measure and transforms them into a pure manifold? What brings pure spontaneity (ego) into oscillation? Whence does its pure vowel get its consonant, or rather how does its soundless, uninterrupted sounding interrupt itself and break off in order to gain at least a kind of ‘self-sound’ (vowel), an accent?” It is evident that Jacobi recognised very clearly the insubstantial nature, the non ens, of abstraction, whether so-called absolute (i.e. only abstract) space, or abstract time, or abstract pure consciousness, the ego; he remains fixed in such abstraction in order to maintain the impossibility of a transition to an other (the condition of a synthesis), and to the synthesis itself. The synthesis, which is the point of interest, must not be taken as a connection of determinations already externally there; the question is partly of the genesis of a second to a first, of a determinate to an indeterminate first principle, partly, however, of immanent synthesis, synthesis a priori — a self-subsistent, self-determined unity of distinct moments. Becoming is this immanent synthesis of being and nothing; but because synthesis suggests more than anything else the sense of an external bringing together of mutually external things already there, the name synthesis, synthetic unity, has rightly been dropped. Jacobi asks how does the pure vowel of the ego get its consonant, what brings determinateness into indeterminateness? The what would be easy to answer and has been answered by Kant in his own manner; but the question how means: in what peculiar manner, in what relationship, and so forth, and thus demands the statement of a particular category; but there can be no question here of a peculiar manner, of categories of the understanding. The very question how itself belongs to the bad habits of reflection, which demands comprehensibility, but at the same time presupposes its own fixed categories and consequently knows beforehand that it is armed against the answering of its own question. Neither has it with Jacobi the higher sense of a question concerning the necessity of the synthesis; for he remains, as has been said, fixed in the abstractions in order to maintain the impossibility of the synthesis. Especially graphic is his description of the procedure for reaching the abstraction of space. ‘For a time I must try clean to forget that I ever saw, heard, touched or handled anything at all, myself expressly not excepted. Clean, clean, clean must I forget all movement, and precisely this forgetting, because it is hardest, I must make my greatest concern. just as I have thought away everything in general, so I must also completely and entirely get rid of it, retaining nothing but the forcibly arrested intuition alone of infinite immutable space. I may not therefore again think into it my own self as something distinct from it and yet connected with it; I may not let myself be merely surrounded and pervaded by it: but I must wholly pass over into it, become one with it, transform myself into it; I must leave nothing over of myself but this my intuition itself, in order to contemplate it as a genuinely self-subsistent, independent, single and sole conception.’

§ 157

With this wholly abstract purity of continuity, that is, indeterminateness and vacuity of conception, it is indifferent whether this abstraction is called space, pure intuiting, or pure thinking; it is altogether the same as what the Indian calls Brahma, when for years on end, physically motionless and equally unmoved in sensation, conception, fantasy, desire and so on, looking only at the tip of his nose, he says inwardly only Om, Om, Om, or else nothing at all. This dull, empty consciousness, understood as consciousness, is — being.

§ 158

In this void, Jacobi now continues, he experiences the opposite of what Kant assures him he should experience; he does not find himself to be a many and manifold, but rather a one devoid of all plurality and variety; indeed, ‘I myself am the impossibility, the annihilation of all that is manifold and plural — cannot from my pure, absolutely simple, immutable being produce again or spook into myself even the least bit of anything … Thus all separatedness and juxtaposition, and all manifoldness and plurality based thereon, are revealed (in this purity) as a sheer impossibility.’

§ 159

This impossibility amounts to nothing else than the tautology: hold fast to abstract unity and shut out all plurality and manifoldness, confine myself to the differenceless and the indeterminate and shut my eyes to all that is differentiated and determinate. The Kantian a priori synthesis of self-consciousness, that is, the function of this unity to differentiate itself and in this differentiation to preserve itself, is attenuated by Jacobi into the same abstraction. That ‘synthesis in itself’, the ‘original act of judgment’, he converts one-sidedly into ‘the copula in itself — an “is, is, is”, without beginning or end and without what, who or which. This repetition of repetition ad infinitum is the sole business, function and product of the absolutely pure synthesis; it is itself empty, pure, absolute repetition itself.’ Though, in fact, since there is no breaking off, that is, no negation or distinguishing in it, it is not a repetition but merely undifferentiated, simple being. But, then, is this still a synthesis if Jacobi omits precisely that which makes the unity a synthetic unity?

§ 160

In the first place, it must be said that when Jacobi thus fixes himself in absolute or abstract space, time and consciousness, he places and fixes himself in this way in something which is empirically false; there is, that is, there is empirically present, no such space and time which is not spatially and temporally limited, or whose continuity is not filled by manifoldly limited determinate being and change, so that these limits and changes belong, unseparated and inseparable, to the nature of spatiality and temporality; similarly, consciousness is filled with determinate sensation, conception, desire and so on; it does not exist separated from some particular content. The empirical transition, moreover, is self-evident; consciousness can of course make empty space, empty time, and even empty consciousness itself or pure being, its object and content, but it does not stop at that; it goes beyond it or rather presses forward out of such a vacuity to a better content, that is, to a content which in some way or other is more concrete, and which to that extent is better and truer however bad it may be in other respects; just such a content is in general synthetic, this word being taken in its more general sense. Thus Parmenides has to reckon with illusion and opinion, the opposite of being and truth; Spinoza likewise, with attributes, modes, extension, movement, understanding, will, and so on. The synthesis contains and demonstrates the falsity of those abstractions; in it they are in unity with their other, not, therefore, as independently self-subsistent, not as absolute, but purely as relative.

§ 161

The demonstration of the empirical nullity of empty space, and so forth, is not, however, what we are concerned with. Consciousness by making abstraction can, of course, fill itself with such indeterminates also and the abstractions thus held fast are the thoughts of pure space, pure time, pure consciousness, or pure being. It is the thought of pure space, etc. — that is, pure space, etc., in its own self — that is to be demonstrated as null: that it is as such already its own opposite, that its opposite has already penetrated into it, that it is already by itself the accomplished coming-forth-from-itself, a determinateness.

§ 162

But this is found immediately in them. They are, as Jacobi profusely describes them, results of abstraction; they are expressly determined as indeterminate and this — to go back to its simplest form — is being. But it is this very indeterminateness which constitutes its determinateness; for indeterminateness is opposed to determinateness; hence as so opposed it is itself determinate or the negative, and the pure, quite abstract negative. It is this indeterminateness or abstract negation which thus has being present within it, which reflection, both outer and inner, enunciates when it equates it with nothing, declares it to be an empty product of thought, to be nothing. Or it can be expressed thus: because being is devoid of all determination whatsoever, it is not the (affirmative) determinateness which it is; it is not being but nothing.

§ 163

In the pure reflection of the beginning as it is made in this logic with being as such, the transition is still concealed; because being is posited only as immediate, therefore nothing emerges in it only immediately. But all the subsequent determinations, like determinate being which immediately follows, are more concrete; in determinate being there is already posited that which contains and produces the contradiction of those abstractions and therefore their transition. When being is taken in this simplicity and immediacy, the recollection that it is the result of complete abstraction, and so for that reason alone is abstract negativity, nothing, is left behind, outside the science, which, within its own self, from essence onwards will expressly exhibit the said one-sided immediacy as a mediated immediacy where being is posited as existence and the mediating agent of this being is posited as ground.

§ 164

In the light of such recollection, the transition from being into nothing can be represented, or, as it is said, explained and made intelligible, as something even easy and trivial; of course the being which is made the beginning of the science is nothing, for abstraction can be made from everything, and if abstraction is made from everything then nothing is left over. But, it may be continued, the beginning is thus not an affirmative, not being, but just nothing, and nothing is then also the end, at least as much as immediate being, and even more so. The shortest way is to let such reasoning take its course and then wait and see what is the nature of its boasted results. That nothing would be the result of such reasoning and that now the beginning should be made with nothing (as in Chinese philosophy), need not cause us to lift a finger, for before we could do so this nothing would no less have converted itself into being (see Section B above). But further, this abstraction from everything (which ’everything’ nevertheless is an affirmative being) having been presupposed, then it must be understood more exactly; the result of making abstraction from all that is, is first of all abstract being, being as such; just as in the cosmological proof of the existence of God from the contingent being of the world, in which proof we rise above such contingent being, being is still taken up with us in our ascent and is determined as infinite being. Of course, one can also abstract from this pure being, being can be thrown in with the all from which abstraction has already been made; then nothing remains. Now if we want to forget the thinking of nothing, that is, its conversion into being, or are ignorant of it, we can proceed in the style of ‘one can’; we can for example (God be praised!) also abstract from nothing (for the creation of the world, too, is an abstraction from nothing), and then what remains is not nothing, for it is just from this that we have made abstraction; we have in fact arrived at being again. This, ‘one can’, gives an external play of abstraction, in which the abstracting itself is only the one-sided activity of the negative. It is directly implied in this very form of ‘one can’, that for it being is just as indifferent as nothing, and that with the vanishing of either of them there is equally an arising of the other; but it is equally a matter of indifference whether one starts from the doing of nothing, or from nothing; for the former, that is the mere abstracting, has neither more nor less of truth in it than mere nothing has.

§ 165

The dialectic employed by Plato in treating of the One in the Parmenides is a dialectic of external reflection.

Being and the One are both Eleatic forms which are the same thing.

But they are also to be distinguished. This is how Plato takes them in that dialogue.

After removing from the One, the various determinations of whole and parts, of being-within-itself, of being-in-another, etc., of shape, time, etc., he reaches the result that being does not belong to the One. This is because being belongs to any particular something only in one of these modes.

Plato next deals with the proposition: the One is, and we should refer to Plato himself to see how, starting from this proposition, he accomplishes the transition to the non-being of the One.

He does it by comparing the two determinations of the proposition put forward: the One is; it contains the One and being, and ’the One is’ contains more than when we only say: the One. It is through their being different that the moment of negation contained in the proposition is demonstrated. It is evident that this course has a presupposition and is an external reflection.

§ 166

Here the way in which the One is connected with being is such that being, which is supposed to be held fast abstractly by itself, is demonstrated in the simplest way and without any effort of thought, to be in a union which implies the contrary of what is supposed to be maintained. Being, taken as it is immediately, belongs to a subject, is something enunciated, has an empirical existence in general and stands therefore in the field of limitation and the negative. In whatever phrases or turns of speech understanding may express itself in attacking the unity of being and nothing and appealing to what immediately confronts us, it will find just in this very experience nothing but determinate being, being with a limitation or negation — that very unity which it rejects. The assertion of immediate being thus reduces to an empirical existence, and it cannot reject the demonstration of this because it is to the immediacy which is outside of thought that it wants to cling.

§ 167

The same is the case with nothing, only contrariwise, and this reflection on it is familiar and has been made often enough. Nothing, taken in its immediacy, shows itself as affirmative, as being; for according to its nature it is the same as being. Nothing is thought of, imagined, spoken of, and therefore it is; in the thinking, imagining, speaking and so on, nothing has its being. But, further, this being is also distinguished from it; it is therefore said that although nothing is in thought or imagination, yet for that very reason it is not nothing that is, being does not belong to nothing as such, but only thought or imagination is this being. With this distinguishing it is equally not to be denied that nothing stands in relationship to a being; but in the relation, even though it contains the difference, there is present a unity with being. In whatever way nothing is enunciated or indicated, it shows itself connected with, or if you like in contact with a being, unseparated from a being, that is to say in a determinate being.

§ 168

But when the presence of nothing in a determinate being is thus demonstrated, there still lingers on the thought of this difference of it from being, namely that the determinate being of nothing does not at all pertain to nothing itself, that nothing does not possess an independent being of its own, is not being as such. Nothing, it is said, is only the absence of being, darkness thus only the absence of light, cold only absence of heat, and so on. And darkness only has meaning in relation to the eye, in external comparison with the positive factor, light, and similarly cold is only something in our sensation; on the other hand, light and heat, like being, are objective, active realities on their own account, and are of quite another quality and dignity than this negative, than nothing. One can often find it put forward as a weighty reflection and an important piece of information that darkness is only the absence of light, cold only absence of heat. About this acute reflection in this field of empirical objects, it can be observed that darkness does in fact show itself active in light, determining it to colour and thereby imparting visibility to it, since, as was said above, just as little is seen in pure light as in pure darkness. Visibility, however, is effected in the eye, and the supposed negative has just as much a share in this as the light which is credited with being the real, positive factor; similarly, cold makes its presence known in water, in our sensations etc., and if we deny it so-called objective reality it is not a whit the worse for our doing so. But a further objection would be that here, too, as before, it is a negative with a determinate content that is spoken of, the argument is not confined to pure nothing, to which being, regarded as an empty abstraction, is neither inferior nor superior. But cold, darkness, and similar determinate negations are to be taken directly as they are by themselves and we shall then see what we have thereby effected in respect of their universal determination which has led them to be introduced here. They are supposed to be not just nothing but the nothing of light, heat, etc., of something determinate, of a content; thus they are a determinate, a contentful, nothing if one may so speak. But, as will subsequently appear, a determinateness is itself a negation, and so they are negative nothings; but a negative nothing is an affirmative something. The conversion of nothing through its determinateness (which previously appeared as a determinate being in a subject thinker, or in some other form) into an affirmative, appears to the consciousness which is fixed in the abstraction of the understanding as the acme of paradox; the insight that the negation of the negation is something positive, simple as it is, or rather because of its very simplicity, appears as a triviality to which haughty understanding need pay no heed, although the correctness of the insight is admitted-and the insight is not only correct, but, because of the universality of such determinations, it has its infinite extension and universal application, so that it were indeed well to pay attention to it.

§ 169

A further remark can be made about the determination of the transition of being and nothing into each other, namely that it is to be understood as it is without any further elaboration of the transition by reflection. It is immediate and quite abstract because the transient moments are themselves abstract, that is, because the determinateness of either moment by means of which they passed over into each other is not yet posited in the other; nothing is not yet posited in being, although it is true that being is essentially nothing, and vice versa. It is therefore inadmissible to employ more developed forms of mediation here and to hold being and nothing in any kind of relationship-the transition in question is not yet a relation. Thus is it impermissible to say: nothing is the ground of being, or being is the ground of nothing or nothing is the cause of being, and so forth; or, transition into nothing can only occur under the condition that something is, or into being only under the condition of non-being. The kind of connection cannot be further determined without the connected sides being further determined at the same time. The connection of ground and consequent, etc., has no longer merely being and nothing as the sides which it connects, but expressly being which is a ground, and something which, although merely posited and not self-subsistent, is yet not the abstract nothing.

Remark 4: Incomprehensibility of the Beginning

§ 170

What has been said indicates the nature of the dialectic against the beginning of the world and also its end, by which the eternity of matter was supposed to be proved, that is, the dialectic against becoming, coming-to-be or ceasing-to-be, in general. The Kantian antinomy relative to the finitude or infinity of the world in space and time will be considered more closely under the Notion of quantitative infinity. This simple, ordinary dialectic rests on holding fast to the opposition of being and nothing. It is proved in the following manner that a beginning of the world, or of anything, is impossible:

§ 171

It is impossible for anything to begin, either in so far as it is, or in so far as it is not; for in so far as it is, it is not just beginning, and in so far as it is not, then also it does not begin. If the world, or anything, is supposed to have begun, then it must have begun in nothing, but in nothing — or nothing — is no beginning; for a beginning includes within itself a being, but nothing does not contain any being. Nothing is only nothing. In a ground, a cause, and so on, if nothing is so determined, there is contained an affirmation, a being. For the same reason, too, something cannot cease to be; for then being would have to contain nothing, but being is only being, not the contrary of itself.

§ 172

It is obvious that in this proof nothing is brought forward against becoming, or beginning and ceasing, against this unity of being and nothing, except an assertoric denial of them and an ascription of truth to being and nothing, each in separation from the other. Nevertheless this dialectic is at least more consistent than ordinary reflective thought which accepts as perfect truth that being and nothing only are in separation from each other, yet on the other hand acknowledges beginning and ceasing to be equally genuine determinations; but in these it does in fact assume the unseparatedness of being and nothing.

§ 173

With the absolute separateness of being from nothing presupposed, then of course — as we so often hear — beginning or becoming is something incomprehensible; for a presupposition is made which annuls the beginning or the becoming which yet is again admitted, and this contradiction thus posed and at the same time made impossible of solution, is called incomprehensible.

§ 174

The foregoing dialectic is the same, too, as that which understanding employs the notion of infinitesimal magnitudes, given by higher analysis. A more detailed treatment of this notion will be given later. These magnitudes have been defined as such that they are in their vanishing, not before their vanishing, for then they are finite magnitudes, or after their vanishing, for then they are nothing. Against this pre notion it is objected and reiterated that such magnitudes are either something or nothing; that there is no intermediate state between being and non-being (‘state’ is here an unsuitable, barbarous expression). Here too, the absolute separation of being and nothing is assumed. But against this it has been shown that being and nothing are, in fact, the same, or to use the same language as that just quoted, that there is nothing which is not an intermediate state between being and nothing. It is to the adoption of the said determination, which understanding opposes, that mathematics owes its most brilliant successes.

§ 175

This style of reasoning which makes and clings to the false presupposition of the absolute separateness of being and non-being is to be named not dialectic but sophistry. For sophistry is an argument proceeding from a baseless presupposition which is uncritically and unthinkingly adopted; but we call dialectic the higher movement of reason in which such seemingly utterly separate terms pass over into each other spontaneously, through that which they are, a movement in which the presupposition sublates itself. It is the dialectical immanent nature of being and nothing themselves to manifest their unity, that is, becoming, as their truth.

2. Moments of Becoming: Coming-to-Be and Ceasing-to-Be § 176

Becoming is the unseparatedness of being and nothing, not the unity which abstracts from being and nothing; but as the unity of being and nothing it is this determinate unity in which there is both being and nothing. But in so far as being and nothing, each unseparated from its other, is, each is not. They are therefore in this unity but only as vanishing, sublated moments. They sink from their initially imagined self-subsistence to the status of moments, which are still distinct but at the same time are sublated.

§ 177

Grasped as thus distinguished, each moment is in this distinguishedness as a unity with the other. Becoming therefore contains being and nothing as two such unities, each of which is itself a unity of being and nothing; the one is being as immediate and as relation to nothing, and the other is nothing as immediate and as relation to being; the determinations are of unequal values in these unities.

§ 178

Becoming is in this way in a double determination. In one of them, nothing is immediate, that is, the determination starts from nothing which relates itself to being, or in other words changes into it; in the other, being is immediate, that is, the determination starts from being which changes into nothing: the former is coming-to-be and the latter is ceasing-to-be.

§ 179

Both are the same, becoming, and although they differ so in direction they interpenetrate and paralyse each other. The one is ceasing-to-be: being passes over into nothing, but nothing is equally the opposite of itself, transition into being, coming-to-be. This coming-to-be is the other direction: nothing passes over into being, but being equally sublates itself and is rather transition into nothing, is ceasing-to-be. They are not reciprocally sublated — the one does not sublate the other externally — but each sublates itself in itself and is in its own self the opposite of itself.

3. Sublation of Becoming § 180

The resultant equilibrium of coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be is in the first place becoming itself. But this equally settles into a stable unity. Being and nothing are in this unity only as vanishing moments; yet becoming as such is only through their distinguishedness. Their vanishing, therefore, is the vanishing of becoming or the vanishing of the vanishing itself. Becoming is an unstable unrest which settles into a stable result.

§ 181

This could also be expressed thus: becoming is the vanishing of being in nothing and of nothing in being and the vanishing of being and nothing generally; but at the same time it rests on the distinction between them. It is therefore inherently self-contradictory, because the determinations it unites within itself are opposed to each other; but such a union destroys itself.

§ 182

This result is the vanishedness of becoming, but it is not nothing; as such it would only be a relapse into one of the already sublated determinations, not the resultant of nothing and being. It is the unity of being and nothing which has settled into a stable oneness. But this stable oneness is being, yet no longer as a determination on its own but as a determination of the whole.

§ 183

Becoming, as this transition into the unity of being and nothing, a unity which is in the form of being or has the form of the onesided immediate unity of these moments, is determinate being.

Remark: The Expression ‘To Sublate’ - next section