Being is the indeterminate immediate; it is free of determinateness with respect to essence, just as it is still free of any determinateness that it can receive within itself. This reflectionless being is being as it immediately is only within.
Since it is immediate, it is being without quality; but the character of indeterminateness attaches to it in itself only in opposition to what is determinate or qualitative. Determinate being thus comes to stand over and against being in general; with that, however, the very indeterminateness of being constitutes its quality. It will therefore be shown that the first being is in itself determinate, and therefore, secondly, that it passes over into existence; existence; that this latter, however, as finite being, sublates itself and passes over into the infinite reference of being to itself; it passes over, thirdly, into being-for-itself.
Being is the indeterminate immediate. It is indeterminate in that it has no determinations, i.e. qualities. Nothing can be predicated of being. It is immediate in that it is not mediated by anything: there is nothing that mediates our notion of being. Being is not a notion that is arrived at through scientific practice or through logical deduction; it is, in a sense, “given”. It presents itself to us without any mediation or reflection.
Hegel seems to be saying that the immediacy of being implies its indeterminateness. If that is the case, the original definition of being is redundant and can be reduced to “the immediate”. Presumably, the immediacy of being implies its “being without quality” since any quality is a mediation.
The indeterminateness of being can only be understood by contrasting it with what is determinate or qualitative. Hence, determinate being must be understood before we can understand being in general. There is a paradox of indeterminate being in that indeterminateness is itself a determination. Hence, Hegel will attempt to show that we start with (1) determinate being, which then “passes over” into (2) existence, which, as finite being, “sublates” itself and “passes over into the infinite reference of being to itself”, which then passes over into (3) being-for-itself.
This is the over-arching goal of Section I: Determinateness (Quality).
Being
Being, pure being – without further determination. In its indeterminate immediacy it is equal only to itself and also not unequal with respect to another; it has no difference within it, nor any outwardly. If any determination or content were posited in it as distinct, or if it were posited by this determination or content as distinct from an other, it would thereby fail to hold fast to its purity. It is pure indeterminateness and emptiness. – There is nothing to be intuited in it, if one can speak here of intuiting; or, it is only this pure empty intuiting itself. Just as little is anything to be thought in it, or, it is equally only this empty thinking. Being, the indeterminate immediate is in fact nothing, and neither more nor less than nothing.
- “Not unequal with respect to another” I have no idea what he means by this.
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.
- “It makes a difference whether something or nothing is being intuited or thought” Hegel seems to be talking of determinate nothing here rather than indeterminate nothing. Indeterminate nothing is never an object of thought, it is rather thought itself, without any object of thought.
Unity of Being and Nothing
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 identity of being and nothing can be argued for from the identity of indiscernibles: there is nothing to distinguish Being from Nothing, therefore Being and Nothing are the same.
- Hegel also claims Being and Nothing are not the same, that they are “absolutely distinct, yet equally unseparated and inseparable”. What happens is that “each immediately vanishes in its opposite”. Being vanishes into Nothing, and Nothing vanishes into Being. We realize when thinking of Being, we were really thinking of Nothing the entire time, and vice versa.
- This “vanishing” implies “movement”, Being becomes Nothing and Nothing becomes Being.
- In this movement, we can still at some level distinguish between Being and Nothing, but the distinction has already dissolved itself as soon as it is grasped, “has dissolved itself”, not “dissolves itself”.
Remark 1
The unity of Being and Nothing should not be confused with the claim that it is the same whether some object exists or not, for the existence or non-existence of an object relates to determinate being and determinate nothing. Hegel uses Kant’s example of one hundred dollars: as content, there is no difference between the actual one hundred dollars and the mere possible one hundred dollars. However, there is a real difference between the existence and non-existence of the one hundred dollars: if the one hundred dollars actually exists, I will be one hundred dollars richer.
Remark 2
There is a paradox in the statement (A) “Being and Nothing are the same”, because identity is asserted of two different things. Being is Being, not Nothing and Nothing is Nothing, not Being. What this shows is that (A) contains a contradiction, and hence immediately dissolves itself. The judgement (A) asserts identity of being and nothing, yet what Hegel calls the “speculative content” of the judgement, or the content that arises after reflection, says that being and nothing are not identical. We can never grasp Being and Nothing. As soon as we conceive of being, we conceive of nothing and as soon as we conceive of nothing, we conceive of being. When this leads us to say being and nothing are the same, we are immediately forced to say being and nothing are not the same. What is the truth is rather that Being and Nothing are “moments” of something else, namely Becoming. Being and Nothing are like slippery eels that we can never get a hold of, but we can observe swimming around.
But the common practice is to imagine being, as if it were a picture of pure light, the clarity of unclouded seeing, and then nothing as the pure night – and the distinction between the two is then enshrined into this well-known sensuous difference. But in fact, if this very seeing is more accurately imagined, one can readily perceive that in absolute light one sees just as much and just as little as in absolute darkness; that the one seeing is just as good as the other; that pure seeing is a seeing of nothing. Pure light and pure darkness are two voids that amount to the same thing. Only in determinate light (and light is determined through darkness: in clouded light therefore), just as only in determinate darkness (and darkness is determined through light: in illuminated darkness therefore), can something be distinguished, since only clouded light and illuminated darkness have distinction in them and hence are determinate being, existence.
Remark 3
The unity of Being and Nothing, whose moments are Being and Nothing, is something separate from both Being and Nothing. It is a third thing that Being and Nothing have their subsistence in, i.e. Becoming.
For Parmenides, being is the indeterminate beginning, and nothing is absolutely opposed to being. In this way, there is no way to go from being to anything else, that is to say, being is the end as much as it is the beginning. In order to proceed from being, being either has to be determinate, or something must affect being from outside. In the former case, being cannot be a true beginning, since it would be determined by something else; however, in the latter case, being must be conditioned by something outside itself to be able to be affected by said thing, hence it must be determinate.
Jacobi repeats the above argument in a different form. He asks, given the unity of space, time, and consciousness, how they can give rise to the manifold of sensory experience. Where is the advance to an other in pure space, pure time, and pure consciousness that would make a synthesis possible, and how does the synthesis itself work? Jacobi asserts that such an advance is impossible.
Hegel remarks that the notion of synthesis in question here is not one of external determinations, i.e. of one term at hand and another term at hand, taken as existing separately, but rather immanent synthesis, or synthesis a priori, a prototypical example being the synthesis of being and nothing in becoming. Hegel says that the question of “what brings determinacy to indeterminateness” has already been answered by Kant (unsure what he’s referencing), and he dismisses the question of “how does the indeterminate become determinate”. The problem with Jacobi’s argument is that he abstracts from becoming to being, and then stubbornly persists in being and ignores all plurality in becoming. Hegel says that being and nothing are untruths, nonentities, and abstractions.
Remark 4
Nothing can begin, either in so far as something is, or in so far as it is not; for in so far as it is, it does not begin to be; and in so far as it is not, it also does not begin to be. – If the world, or anything, had begun, it would have begun in nothing; but in nothing there is no beginning – or nothing is not a beginning; for a beginning implies a being, but nothing contains no being. Nothing is only nothing. In a ground, a cause, and so on, if this is how nothing is determined, there is contained an affirmation, being. – For the same reason, too, something cannot cease to be. For then it would have to contain nothing, but being is only being, not the opposite of itself.
This argument is incorrect because it holds being and nothing as entirely divorced from each other.
The Moments of Becoming
Becoming is the unseparatedness of being and nothing, not the unity that abstracts from being and nothing; as the unity of being and nothing it is rather this determinate unity, or one in which being and nothing equally are. However, inasmuch as being and nothing are each unseparated from its other, each is not. In this unity, therefore, they are, but as vanishing, only as sublated. They sink from their initially represented self-subsistence into moments which are still distinguished but at the same time sublated.
Grasped as thus distinguished, each is in their distinguishedness a unity with the other. Becoming thus contains being and nothing as two such unities, each of which is itself unity of being and nothing; the one is being as immediate and as reference to nothing; the other is nothing as immediate and as reference to being; in these unities the determinations are of unequal value.
Becoming is in this way doubly determined. In one determination, nothing is the immediate, that is, the determination begins with nothing and this refers to being; that is to say, it passes over into it. In the other determination, being is the immediate, that is, the determination begins with being and this passes over into nothing – coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be.
Both are the same, becoming, and even as directions that are so different they interpenetrate and paralyze each other. The one is ceasing-to-be; being passes over into nothing, but nothing is just as much the opposite of itself, the passing-over into being, coming-to-be. This coming-to-be is the other direction; nothing goes over into being, but being equally sublates itself and is rather the passing-over into nothing; it is ceasing-to-be. - They do not sublate themselves reciprocally - the one sublating the other externally - but each rather sublates itself in itself and is within it the opposite of itself.
Sublation of Becoming
The equilibrium in which coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be are poised is in the first place becoming itself. But this becoming equally collects itself in quiescent unity. Being and nothing are in it only as vanishing; becoming itself, however, is only by virtue of their being distinguished. Their vanishing is therefore the vanishing of becoming, or the vanishing of the vanishing itself. Becoming is a ceaseless unrest that collapses into a quiescent result.
This can also be expressed thus: becoming is the vanishing of being into nothing, and of nothing into being, and the vanishing of being and nothing in general; but at the same time it rests on their being distinct. It therefore contradicts itself in itself, because what it unites within itself is self-opposed; but such a union destroys itself.
This result is a vanishedness, but it is not nothing; as such, it would be only a relapse into one of the already sublated determinations and not the result of nothing and of being. It is the unity of being and nothing that has become quiescent simplicity. But this quiescent simplicity is being, yet no longer for itself but as determination of the whole.
Becoming, as transition into the unity of being and nothing, a unity which is as existent or has the shape of the one-sided immediate unity of these moments, is existence.
Remark
Hegel’s use of the word “aufheben” (“to sublate”) is meant to emphasize that in sublation, the thing sublated is both destroyed and preserved. Hegel says that something which is sublated does not turn into nothing, since nothing is immediate and that which is sublated is always mediated. Rather, that which is sublated still “has in itself… the determinateness from which it derives”. He further says “something is sublated only in so far as it has entered into unity with its opposite”.
George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Immanuel Kant Parmenides Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi