Posted by
Ryan Krahn -
To briefly summarize the passages preceding page 105 in
The Science of Logic of Hegel (A.V. Miller 1969 translation) for contextual purposes, we have seen that Being is initially pure (indeterminate) and immediate which is to say that there is nothing we can say about it which will in any way distinguish it from something else; it is, here, abstract and serves as a presuppositionless starting-point to
philosophy.
Insofar as we cannot distinguish it from anything else and it is immediate, Being is Nothing – they are the same. But Being and Nothing are, at the same time, not the same, for they are two different indeterminacies, continually vanishing into one another, and insofar as they must vanish into the other they cannot be the same. They are indiscernibly distinct.This vanishing of one into the other is Becoming. The second(1) we think of Being, it vanishes into Nothing, and the second we think of Nothing, it vanishes into Being – this is the fluidity, the extreme indeterminacy, of Becoming. There are two moments, two processes, in, and which doubly determine, Becoming: ceasing-to-be and coming-to-be. As is straightforward from the descriptions themselves, ceasing-to-be is (immediate) Being changing into Nothing, and coming-to-be is (immediate) Nothing changing into Being. When either process is completed the process is immediately reversed: the result vanishes. This vanishing implies both a continuous disappearance (hiddenness, concealment) and reappearance (presencing, disclosure). Each moment implies and is, thus, united with the other moment: Being is Nothing and Nothing is Being. But the movement is always a to-and-fro, a back-and-forth, and this restricts the possibility of a side-by-side Being-Nonbeing unity. Insofar as this either of these processes of vanishing are circular and define Becoming each (coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be) is the very process of Becoming. But insofar as each vanishing is really the vanishing into the other it is understood as only a one moment of the greater process of Becoming. To describe Becoming this way is not the same as to say that, for example, my house IS and IS NOT, for in this example I am assuming a determination, and Becoming is not here seen to be a equation of the Being and Nonbeing of determinate things. That is, at this point the vanishing is Becoming, but not yet the becoming of something.But there does seem to be an indeterminate determination of differences, for Becoming is sustained only for as long as Being and Nothing are distinct, passing into one another. Another way to put this is that you cannot “pass into” something that is the same. Difference enables the possibility of the movement of “passing into” or “vanishing.” So Being and Nothing can only vanish into one another insofar as they are different but the very indistinguishability of Being and Nothing, or the processes of Becoming, Being-into-Nothing and Nothing-into-Being, is the vanishing of this difference. If this distinctness vanishes, then so does the vanishing itself; that is, the vanishing that is Becoming can no longer sustain itself and it, too, vanishes (this is a vanishing of the vanishing) and is replaced by a state of idleness, a Determinate Being (Dasein). This could be seen as the ‘self-undermining’ of Becoming.
As Becoming stops, Being and Nothing are still distinct in a way, but are no longer absolutely distinct; that is, all sense of pure Being and pure Nothing – in the sense that one excludes the other – have fallen away. This indistinguishability fuses Being and Nothing together in a unity where they are no longer purely themselves. This purity, now lost in the newfound co-existence of Being and Nothing, had been retained in Becoming, as each process would vanish entirely, establishing the other in its purity, and then vice-versa. When pure Being and Nothing can no longer reappear, when they no longer vanish in order to reappear, they cannot be restored in their purity, and thus their purity is lost. Determinacy arises in the face of the loss of purity, at the point of the sublation of pure Being and Nothing.This moment of self-impurification is the sublation of Becoming. The sublation of Being and Nothing’s former purity can be seen as a negation (it is the case that Being and Nothing are NOT pure, now), but not as an annihilation, because the moments of pure Being, Nothing and Becoming are now moments that led to a new configuration of Being (as Determinate). Insofar as it does not annihilate and builds upon what it has negated, it can be seen as a preservation. But Sublation is also a cessation in that Becoming is brought to a halt, no longer in an ever-changing to-and-fro with itself, but now settled into a pacified, “stable unity” or “oneness.” Sublation causes that which is sublated (in this case, Becoming) to lose its immediacy, but this is not analogous with a type of destruction that results in a nihilist reduction to Nothing, for Hegel refers to Nothing as sublated in this sublation.We see here that Hegel thinks that both Heraclitean difference and Paremenidean purity are in a way analogous and are internally unsustainable. This movement to Determinate Being does not rest on our desire, as philosophers, to stabilize Becoming nor on our inability to see Becoming as anything but leading to Determinate Being.
Rather, Hegel derives this logical movement of Becoming to Determinate Being, not on the basis of our personal demands but, from the internal logic of Being itself; that is, Being’s own structure necessitates this move to Determinate Being.(1) This measure of time (seconds) is used in a strictly figurative sense insofar as Time has not yet been introduced into the Logic because Being is still indeterminate and Time would determine Being if it were to be introduced. Thus, Being is primordial to time. So we can say that (pure) Being is nothing more or less than Becoming, it is immediately Becoming, as Gadamer has pointed out in Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hegel’s Dialectic, trans. P.C. Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976) 89
Posted by Ryan Krahn
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