Hegelian Epistemology and
Metaphysics
Epistemology and
Metaphysics after Kant
Overview
of Hegelian Idealism:
·
Sought to give an account of the
universe and our place in it.
·
The universe is orderly and rational
(Logos).
·
By using our highest faculties (reason
and intuition) we can know our place in the scheme of things.
Kant argued for limitations on our ability
to know metaphysical or “Absolute Truth.”
(We cannot know
"things-in-themselves;" our knowledge is limited to the phenomenal
world of human experience.)
For Kant, the human intellect must
conceptualize the world with mind’s inherent categories which means knowledge
of the world is always mediated. (Think
of the near logical absurdity of conceiving of the world un-conceptualized.)
Though human knowledge is limited to
the world-experienced (phenomenal world), we yearn to know the noumenal world, reality-as-it-is in and of itself such as
the answers to metaphysical questions such as God, freedom, and
immortality. However, for Kant we can
have no theoretical knowledge of these though we continue (must continue) to
act on these ideals.
By contrast, Hegel claims that whatever
exists is (must be) knowable.
Kant,
Hegel claims, was mistaken when he said the noumenal
world (the world of things as they are in themselves) exists, but that we
cannot know it. What makes nature and the noumenal
world knowable is that its essence is Spirit
(which also is translated as Mind). Spirit,
said Hegel, is the Absolute (God) -the total reality.
Hegel
became particularly interested in what reason could do to unpack the Mystery of the Trinity and related
Christian Mysteries (That Jesus is Man and That Jesus is God and That God is
NOT the same as Man).
The
Nicene Creed
We
believe in one God,
the Father almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all that is seen and unseen.
We
believe in one Lord Jesus Christ,
eternally begotten of the Father.
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made, in in being with the Father;
through him all things were made.
The
central truth of Christianity is that Christ/ man/ creation is God from
God. History is God’s reclaiming His
self-alienated self. This is the process
of Absolute
Spirit (or Mind) is a rational and dynamic process.
“The is real is
rational, and what is rational is real.”
He
viewed absolute knowledge as a mode of spiritual life having its roots in
experience.
The Kantian Set Up
Determinism, Space, Time
and Substance
In the end, Kant saves
Newton's (and Spinoza's) determinism in his rule of causality, thus rejecting
Leibniz's "pre-established harmony" view as necessarily false. With some revisions, he accepts a large part
of Leibniz's view of space and time as relative, that is, relative to our
experience. He saves the notion of
substance because he says that one of the most important rules of our
experience is that we see objects as substantial (that is, as
"real").
But Kant does not accept
the view that substance is something independent of human experience, for such
a view, by definition, means that substance would be irrelevant to our
experience. So long as substance is
understood in empirical terms (objective/ mind independent stuff of objects)
then it’s fine. Nor does validate the
central dispute between Spinoza and Leibniz, whether there is but one substance
or many. No constitutive rule of our
experience is concerned one way or another.
Since it makes no difference to our experience, the dispute is a
metaphysician's game and not a possible topic for knowledge.
Kant's revolution is the
elimination of "reality" and "truth" as external to
ourselves. This is the rejection of
representational realism as a theory of knowledge and the correspondence theory
as a theory of truth. These are replaced
with a coherence (and maybe pragmatic) theory of knowledge and truth. Since Kant, many philosophers no longer view
human knowledge as the passive reception of sensations or intuitions. Thus the problems of philosophy have become
radically changed.
Kant destroyed the old
problems, in some sense, resolved the old disputes, and answered Hume's
skepticism, at least for a while. In
rejecting the correspondence theory of truth and the idea of a radically
"external" reality, he eliminated the basis of those problems,
disputes, and doubts. But new and even more virulent versions of those
problems, disputes, and doubts appear on the horizon. By denying us our anchor in reality, Kant
launches philosophy in a bold new direction, and he creates the dilemma that
still defines philosophy today: If we supply our own rules for experience, is
there any uniquely correct way of “describing” the way the world “is?” Indeed is “accurately picturing the world” anything that
concerns epistemology today?
The basis of Kant's
theory is that we supply the rules according to which we constitute our
experience. Truth can be talked about only within our experience and according
to those rules. But you can see what
happens when we raise the following question: What about people (or creatures)
who are very different from us? Will they use the same rules? Will they have the
same experiences? And, if we do differ
from them, who is "right"? Whose rules are "better"? Whose
experience is "true"?
You can see here the
problems of the coherence theory of truth coming to haunt Kant's philosophy.
Suppose there are two (or more) sets of rules, equally coherent? Can they both
be "true"? And the problems of
the semantic theory, too: What if there are different languages with different
basic concepts or categories, constituting different "facts"? Are
they all "true"? The Logical
Positivists in the twentieth century took this last part of Kant's epistemology
as a decisive attack on traditional metaphysics. They ended up endorsing a position sometimes
known as “scientism” and sought to “naturalize” traditional epistemological
questions. If all we mean by
“evidence” or “justification” is scientific evidence and justification, then
there is no “outside” of science by which to criticize or validate the
conclusions of science.
As empiricists in the Humean tradition Logical Positivists did not care for a lot
of the other stuff Kant said. But they
wholeheartedly endorsed his rejection of claims that made no difference
whatever to our experience. Again, any
claim that makes no difference to our experience- that cannot be tested (in
their qualified way)-is meaningless. We
have already looked at some of the limitations of this view. It’s very easy to
defend you metaphysics ans epistemology when you
claim not to be doing any.
But it is not clear that
you can naturalize them nor that science is the only domain of meaningful,
rational inquiry. We will look at this
in more detail presently.
As for the German
Romantic philosophers who immediately followed Kant, they soon replaced his
notion of "constitution" with the more radical notion of
"creation." We create our
realities. We are all artists, building our worlds. Notice the words realities"
and "worlds. There is no longer confidence,
much less a guarantee, that there is only one reality or one world. No Truth with a capital “T.”
Kant's most immediate
follower, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, gave a sort of pragmatic theory of
truth to come to the same conclusion. The
truth, according to him, is that which is most practical, most conducive to the
good life, and the evaluation of different realities depends wholly on the
practical consequences.
His most famous dictum:
"The kind of
philosophy a man chooses depends upon the kind of man he is."
Truth seems destined to
be replaced by many truths, our knowledge with the possibility of different
knowledges. Again, I postpone discussion of pragmatic epistemology until a
little later.
But before going to these
interesting places, let us be clear: Kant himself never accepted any of
this. According to him, there was still
but one possible set of rules and therefore only one way of constituting our
experience, whoever we are, wherever we're from, and no matter what kind of
conscious creature we happen to be. This
means: one world, one science, one reality, and one Truth. Kant tries to prove this in the central
section of The Critique of Pure Reason with his “transcendental
deduction.” Recall that any “deduction”
is an inference from one statement or groups of statements to another according
to a set of rules of inference. In this
case, Kant attempts to deduce from various statements that we believe, the
basic rules (concepts, categories) humans use to constitute human experience.
As we have previously
noted, this is what "transcendental" means, the basic rules of
human experience. But Kant does not
merely wish to deduce some such rules. Kant tries to prove that these are the
only rules that humans are able to use to constitute our experience. That is why it is so important to Kant. It
allows him his revolution without its anarchist consequences. Kant’s argument is enormously complicated,
one which scholars continue to debate. (i.e. precisely what it is or whether it is a valid
argument).
Regardless, Kant believed
that such a transcendental deduction would prove that, although it is we
ourselves who supply the rules of our experience and determine what can be true
for us, there is still only one truth for all of us. Philosophers are still arguing whether any
such transcendental argument (Kant's or not) might succeed. If one does, then
people must, in their basic rules, all agree.
(Of course, they will always disagree about particular matters; no two
chess players make all the same moves.) If there is no successful transcendental
argument, then there need be no such universal agreement. It then makes sense
to talk about different truths for different people.
This became a dominant
battle of twentieth-century epistemology (and philosophy in general) in the
United States and in Europe and continues today. This is not new to however. Those who believe that there is only one set
of rules and one truth are often called absolutists (though many philosophers
find that name overly pejorative because it sounds so dogmatic). Others, who believe that there are different
rules for different people and therefore different "truths," are
called relativists. (e.g. Plato, and Descartes,
for example, were absolutists and that Protagoras and the Sophists were
relativists.)
Kant was an absolutist.
Most of his followers were relativists.
(This is obscured by the confusing fact that many of them talked about
"the Absolute" all the time.)
Hegelian Thought
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Hegel (1770-1831)
Hegel is a German
philosopher who, during the age of Napoleon, wrote his Phenomenology of
Spirit (1807). It was the single
most powerful influence on European philosophy-after Kant's works-for the next
hundred years. Hegel argued that there were many different views of the world
that none of them should be thought to be wholly correct or incorrect in
exclusion of the others. These
“competing” views could still be compared and evaluated and even reconciled
according to a "dialectic."
These “competing” views
could still be compared and evaluated and even reconciled according to a
"dialectic.“
Over time these views increase in development, becoming ever more
inclusive, more “adequate” than those which the subsume. Hegel was in college (Tubingen Lutheran
seminary) when the French Revolution was raging just across the border. He was
just starting to put together his mature philosophy when Napoleon was attempting
to take over all of Europe. This
international turmoil helps us understand the global reach of Hegel's
philosophy and his bold effort to proclaim an "absolute" position
with reference to knowledge. Like many
young German intellectuals in that exciting period, he was trying to get
outside his provincial perspective and to understand the world from a larger,
even a "divine" point of view. Accordingly, Hegel's theory of truth is part
and parcel of his all-embracing system of thought.
Hegel begins by rejecting
many key metaphors. Especially he reject
the "correspondence" metaphors in which the world in itself (or
"the Absolute") is on one side and our knowledge (beliefs, sentences,
utterances) are on the other, separated by some distorting filter (our senses)
or actively altered by the machinery of our understanding. This Hegel believes is a trick of
consciousness. It is the nature of
consciousness to manifest itself as a relation between knower and known,
between subject and object. This is what
gives rise to the misleading metaphors.
In place of such
metaphors (and the skepticism they inevitably engender) Hegel suggests a
holistic worldview in which consciousness and the world are not separate, but
inseparably integrated. The “object” is
all that is and can be known about it. (If
you are hearing echoes of Berkeley here, good.)
In traditional terms,
this means that there is no world, no reality-in-itself apart from
consciousness (of it).
Hegel also suggests that
we give up the view that the “self” is essentially a feature of the individual. For Hegel. the self
-or "Spirit"- is shared by all of us.
We are manifestations of (Absolute) spirit. In Platonic language, one might say we all
"participate" in Spirit. Thus
we must give up our view of consciousness and the self as self-enclosed, and,
in some sense, "inside" us. Hegel
was familiar with some Asian thinkers and incorporated some Eastern views into
his notion of truth. (It is worth
noting here that Kierkegaard HATED Hegel… well his philosophical system at
least. It anonymizes the individual and
claims all conflicting positions are subsumed within syntheses.)
The truth (Absolute
Truth), according to Hegel, "is the whole"-that is, the unity of all
our consciousnesses and the world. This means that
there is no saying (and no point in attempting to say) what the world might be
apart from our conceptions of it. There
is not world/ reality apart from our conceptions of it. But if the world is nothing but the
synthesis of all our possible conceptions of it, then skepticism is
irrational. (There is nothing to be
skeptical about.)
Hegel, like Kant, is an
idealist. He calls himself an “absolute idealist” (in contrast to Kant's
"transcendental idealism"). This
means, simply stated, that reality is the product of mind. However, not merely individual minds, but of
the “cosmic mind,” "Spirit."
This means, simply
stated, that reality is the product of mind.
However, not merely individual minds, but of the “cosmic mind,”
"Spirit." Yet this opens the
way for the most radical departure from
Kant, who argued at great length that there could be but one possible
way of conceiving the world that is, one
a priori set of forms of intuition (space and time) and one set of
categories (substance, causality, etc.). Hegel's predecessor (Kant's immediate
successor) Fichte had already argued that there are, at least two basically
different ways of envisioning the world:
The scientific, objective
("dogmatic") way
The practical, moral. activist ("idealist") way-
Rather than being simply
"right" or "wrong," Fichte had declared famously that:
“The philosophy a man
chooses depends upon the kind of man that he is."
Hegel goes a giant step
further and provides a long series of possible conceptions of the world or
"forms of consciousness." These conceptions that are not divided into
"practical" and "theoretical," but all of which have both
their practical and their theoretical aspects.
(Once again Hegel rejects an age-old dichotomy.) Such views are not simply alternative
options, as if we could each simply choose one or another. The view one adopts depends upon the kind of
man that he is and the moment of history he lives.
The way we think the
world is already largely determined by our place in history, our language, and
our society. Nor is the variety of
forms of consciousness a demonstration of the now popular view that there is no
"correct" way of knowing. The
various forms of consciousness emerge one from another by way of improvement or
by way of opposition (as, for example, scientific theories tend to follow one
another), and (again, as in science) there is always the necessary sense that
they are all moving toward some final end-the correct view. Hegel insists that all these different
conceptions and ways of viewing the world are leading up to something to a
viewpoint that is not relative to any particular viewpoint or perspective.
This is the standpoint he
calls "absolute knowing." Hegel
proposes that various forms of consciousness emerge one from another. This is the history of consciousness. The
process leads us (consciousness) eventually to the Absolute
knowing. Every other philosopher we
have discussed, whether metaphysician or epistemologist essentially offered us
a static view of knowledge, a concept of the understanding that-except for
education from childhood and the detailed knowledge gained by the sciences-did
not change, did not grow, did not develop.
Hegel provides philosophy
(and humanity) with a historical perspective.
Our knowledge is not, as many philosophers had insisted ever since
ancient times, about what is apart from our knowledge of it. Truth develops, as the human mind develops.
Truth is not being but becoming.
Knowledge develops
through conflict and confrontation, or what Hegel famously calls a dialectic (a
term he borrowed from Kant but which goes back to the Greeks). This certainly resonates with Heraclitus.
(War is the father of all.) But whereas
the former sees history a cyclical oscillating between opposites, the latter
sees is an historical, narrative progression. It is Hegel who “discovers”
(arguably “invents”) the history of philosophy.
Other philosophers had
talked about their predecessors, of course.
(Aristotle, for instance, provided us with much of what we know about
the pre-Socratic philosophers.) But
what Hegel suggests is history in merely a haphazard sequence of refutations,
additions, and improvements to thought.
There is a “logic” to
this historical progress, an accumulation and development that could not really
have happened in any other way. This is
what gives history a narrative structure.
Reality/thought/ consciousness itself that is being converted.
The history of philosophy
is an incredible cosmic odyssey, a "phenomenology of spirit"-the
development through time not only of consciousness but of reality too. The plucky main character is one a quest and
discovered, with the advent of Hegelian philosophy his true identity. Once consciousness achieves self-consciousness
and the game is up. The story is over
and we are now living in the post-historical age. (The happily ever after
stage.) The goal of thought is and have always been thought, to reclaim itself.
In The Phenomenology
of Spirit, Hegel presents a dialectic of various forms of consciousness,
from the most primitive sensory perception to the most sophisticated views of
the Enlightenment and "Revealed Religion" (Christianity), culminating
in that final stage of "Absolute Knowing." There he rejects the traditional metaphors of
epistemology and argues that skepticism should not be taken at all seriously.
He then suggests the
holistic form of his overall system.
Starting from a clearly
Kantian perspective, Hegel taught that we have to stop talking about
"true" and "false" philosophies, and "true" and
"false" religions, political systems, societies, scientific theories,
and values.
There are only different
"forms of consciousness," some more sophisticated and perspicacious
than others, but none wholly true (or false) to the exclusion of others. Hegel
wholly endorsed the Kantian thesis that the world is nothing other than the way
in which we constitute it.
Hegel's dialectic was
essentially a dialectic of ideas, a series of confrontations of
various forms of consciousness so that we could see how they all form an
interlocking view of reality. But although philosophy and human history improve
through time-eventually reaching a form of absolute knowledge and (Hegel hoped)
world peace and universal freedom-the movement itself is by no mean a smooth
progression. It was often violent, both
in the intellectual realm and in the flesh-and-blood world of human politics,
which Hegel grimly referred to as "the slaughter-bench of
history."
One of Hegel's most
enthusiastic followers, a young student in Berlin named Karl Marx, thought that
Hegel had the dialectic of history turned upside down. It is not ideas that determine world history,
Marx argued, but rather the details of history-in particular the economic
details-that determine the ideas, including the ideas of philosophers. From this notion of dialectic Marx developed
his powerful and influential view of history as class conflict, replacing
Hegel's abstract "forms of consciousness" with the day-to-day battles
of wages, jobs, exploitation, and profits.
Hegel presents a view of
all-embracing "spirit" (also called "the Idea"). Spirit, in one sense, is God, but the concept
embraces all of humanity, all of history, and all of nature as well. The point
of his argument is that the world itself develops and changes, and so the
virtues and truths of one generation may well become inadequate to the next
generation. Yet this is not relativism
in the crude sense, such that a truth, for example, is only true for a
particular person or people.
First, such “truth” is
not relative but subjective; Genuine truth is to be
found in the world and not just in the minds of individuals. Second, to say
that a truth is inadequate from a later, probably more expansive, point of view
is not to say that it "was true but now is false;" rather, it shows
that we are slowly approaching an ever more adequate conception of the truth
and knowledge, which Hegel calls "Freedom." Freedom is God's purpose
developing through history and humanity.
The three stages
of which are Hegel’s version of: Thesis/Antithesis/Synthesis.
It has been suggested that we think of this process as
resembling a negotiation:
One party stakes out a position.
The other party stakes out an opposite position
.
A mediator suggests a third position that gives them both
what they wanted in a new way, so that their original positions are both denied
and fulfilled.
Hegel thinks that history itself has this structure.
The overall structure of history is:
·
Spirit in itself
·
Spirit for itself
·
Spirit in and for itself.
That is, pure Spirit or Reason
Sprit self-alienated/ projected as its opposite (matter)
out there as something it can contemplate.
Spirit reclaimed to itself as known matter.
·
Me
·
Me as my refection in a mirror (me as a
self-alienated projection)
·
Me as my awareness of my reflection.
Just like God, in order to know myself I must turn my
“self” into an object and then an object of my consciousness.
“We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the
Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
one in Being with the Father.
Through him all things were made.
The Nicene Creed (Curiously, NOT the Apostles Creed)
The process of mediation is the process in which
these opposites produce a new synthesis of Spirit in itself and Spirit for
itself.
Here is a political example that make this historical
dialectical process a little clearer:
·
Thesis: anarchy – no rule, everyone on his or
her own (Hobbes’ “state of nature”)
·
Anthithesis: monarchy
– one person in charge, everyone else must obey.
·
Synthesis: democracy – the joint rule of all,
everyone makes the rules, everyone must keep them.
When we view objects as separate from
each other, we do not understand the dialectic
process that will lead us to unity in the Absolute Spirit. He did not mean
the Absolute Spirit unifies objects that were once separate. Rather his contention is that the very idea
that the object known is separate from the knower is an illusion created by
consciousness. This illusion is finally
superseded with the advent of his philosophical system.
·
History (of the world- in particular
HUMAN history) is the Absolute Spirit in
process. Absolute Spirit eventually comes to know itself through the human
mind.
·
Absolute Spirit expresses itself
objectively in Nature before it becomes conscious of itself in human beings.
Through our subjective consciousness of objective nature, Spirit “returns to
itself."
·
Absolute Spirit first becomes conscious
of itself in the individual (Hegel called this subjective spirit).
·
When it reaches a higher consciousness
in the family, civil society, and the state, it becomes objective spirit.
The objective spirit appears in interaction between people. (Cultural
Institutions, Social Realities)
·
Hegel called his triadic method the dialectic process of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.
·
When Hegel said "The rational is
real, and the real is rational, " he was saying
Absolute Spirit expresses itself through nature, humans, and everything in the
world.
The Three Main Parts of Hegel's Philosophy.
1.
In Logic, Hegel examines the process by which we deduce the categories that
describe the Absolute from our experience of the actual.
2.
In Philosophy of Nature, the antithesis to the rational Idea
(thesis), he investigates nature as a rational structure and pattern in all of
reality.
3.
In Philosophy of Mind, he argues that the synthesis is
Absolute Spirit, and that the Absolute Spirit manifests itself in the minds of
individuals, social institutions, civil society, the state, and in art, religion,
and philosophy.
Logic
For Hegel, logic is a universal concept that
forms and precedes the natural world (Logos- the Laws-very much like
Heraclitus).
Absolute
Spirit is the ultimate form, the Ideal, or
what Hegel would call Absolute Idealism.
The dialectical system in his Logic is being, nothing (or nonbeing),
and becoming. Because being and nothing are empty
abstractions, he identified being with nothing. If I reflect on the concept of
being, then I also must introduce the opposite concept-nothing. We cannot reflect
on our existence without realizing what we are not. Hegel claims that this tension is synthesized
in the concept of "becoming."
If something is in the process of becoming (and everything is) then it
is both being and not being
Again
like Heraclitus he claims that reality is always in a state of change,
therefore becoming is the basis of all existence. All action/history results
from this process of becoming, and the mind is part of this process. If there
is no process, then there is nothing or nonbeing.
The dialectic of ideas takes on a triadic form. Thesis gives way to its opposite
(antithesis). The diametrically opposed
“consciousnesses” are preserved and transformed in a
synthesis of the two.
Being -> Nothing -> Becoming
A: Being
§ 132
Being, pure being, without any further determination. In its indeterminate immediacy
it is equal only to itself. It is also not unequal relatively to an other; it has no diversity
within itself nor any with a reference outwards. It would not be held fast in
its purity if it contained any determination or content which could be
distinguished in it or by which it could be distinguished from an other.
There is
nothing to be intuited in it, if one can speak here of intuiting; or,
it is only this pure 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.
B: Nothing
§ 133
Nothing, pure
nothing: it is simply equality with itself, complete emptiness,
absence of all determination and content — undifferentiatedness
in itself. In so far as intuiting or thinking can be mentioned here, it counts
as a distinction whether something or nothing is intuited or
thought.
To intuit or think
nothing has, therefore, a meaning; both are distinguished and thus
nothing is (exists) in our intuiting or thinking; or rather it
is empty intuition and thought itself, and the same empty intuition or thought
as pure being. Nothing is, therefore, the same determination, or rather
absence of determination, and thus altogether the same as, pure being.®
C: Becoming
1. Unity of Being and
Nothing
§ 134
Pure Being and pure nothing are, therefore, the
same. What is the truth is neither being nor nothing, but that being —
does not pass over but has passed over — into nothing, and nothing into being.
But it is equally true
that they are not undistinguished from each other, that, on the contrary, they
are not the same, that they are absolutely distinct, and yet that they are
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 both are distinguished, but by a difference which has
equally immediately resolved itself.
PURE BEING makes the beginning because it is on one hand
pure thought, and on the other immediacy itself, simple and indeterminate; and
the first beginning cannot be mediated by anything, or be further determined....
When thinking is to begin, we have nothing but thought in its merest
indeteminateness: for we cannot determine unless
there is both one and another; and in the beginning there is yet no other. The
indeterminate, as we here have it, is the blank we begin with, not a
featurelessness reached by abstraction, not the elimination of all character,
but the original featurelessness which precedes all definite character and is
the very first of all. And this we call Being. It is
not to be felt, or perceived by sense, or pictured in imagination: it is only
and merely thought, and as such it forms the beginning. Essence also is
indeterminate, but in another sense: it has traversed the process of mediation
and contains implicit the determination it has absorbed....
But this mere Being, as it is mere abstraction is therefore the absolutely
negative: which, in a similarly immediate aspect is just NOTHING. Nothing, if it be thus immediate and equal to
itself (is also conversely the same as Being is. The
truth of Being and of Nothing is accordingly the unity
of the two: and this unity is BECOMING.
The proposition that Being and Nothing is the same seems so
paradoxical to the imagination or understanding, that it is perhaps taken for
a joke. And indeed it is one of the hardest things thought expects itself to
do: for Being and Nothing exhibit the fundamental contrast in its immediacy,
-that is, without the one term being invested with any attribute which would
involve its connexion with the other. This attribute
however, as the above paragraph points out, is implicit in them, the attribute
which is just the same in both. It is
as correct however to say that Being and Nothing are altogether different, as
to assert their unity. The one is not what
the other is. But since the distinction has not at this point assumed definite
shape (Being and Nothing are still the immediate), it is, in the way that they
have it, something unutterable, which we merely mean.
It may perhaps be said that nobody can form a notion of the
unity of Being and Nought . . To say that we have no such conception can only mean,
that in none of these images do we recognise the
notion in question, and that we are not aware that they exemplify it. The readiest example of it is Becoming. Every one has a mental
idea of Becoming, and will even allow that it is one idea; he will further allow that, when it is analysed, it involves the attribute of Being, and also what
is the very reverse of Being, VIZ nothing: and that these two attributes lie
undivided in the one idea: so that Becoming is the unity of Being and Nothing.