1. Essential considerations concerning the conceptual language
What we call “being,” in accordance with the beginning of Western philosophy, Hegel calls “actuality”; and this designation is not a coincidence but is pre-determined in Aristotle as the first end of this beginning: ἐνέϱγεια—ἐντελέχεια.
What Hegel calls “being” (and essence), and we call “objectness”: Hegel’s designation is not a coincidence either but is determined by the transformation of metaphysics and by the specific character it received from Kant. Because now the being of beings (essence) as a category has the determination of objectivity [Objektivität]: “objectness” [Gegenständlichkeit].
Being and becoming. Being as becoming; cf. Nietzsche.
That which Hegel calls “being” is for him only a one-sided determination of being in our and (of actuality) in his sense.
But why [is] that which properly is the actual (the possible and the necessary)? Because—Greek—in it the full presencing of what is present, the consummate presence.
The re-interpretation of the “actual” (of ἐντελέχεια into “actus”): what is effective, successes.
If Hegel thus brings together the “nothing” with “being” in his sense, he seems to grasp the nothing only “abstractly” in a one-sided manner, and not and not even as the nothing of actuality. Or does he? Since being itself is nothing else than the nothing of actuality, the nothing is in the absolute sense the same as “being”—and it denotes that for “actuality” (beyng).
* * *
Being in our manner of speaking (Being and Time):
1. Beingness (ὂν ᾗ ὄν), and this in its entire history up until Hegel’s “actuality” and Nietzsche’s “will to power” (“life”).
2. Beyng—as the ground and the permission of beingness, the original φύσις.
3. Used only for (1.). (Being and beyng.)
Accordingly the question of being: 1. as the question of beingness, 2. as the question of the truth of beyng.
“Being” for Hegel: Beingness in the sense of the immediate representation of the object in its objectness as re-presentedness. Objectness.
“Being” for Nietzsche differentiated from “becoming”; also [for] Hegel!?
1. Thesis—antithesis—syn-thesis: judgment—I connect.
2. Consciousness—self-consciousness—reason (objectivity; “the categorial”—objectness); unity and beingness—there.
3. Immediacy—mediation—“sublation”; (connection?) linkage of 1. and 2. (Descartes) and absoluteness.
Origin of the “not” from the “absolute,” the latter as “consciousness” (thinking). Unity as the gathering into the present of what is most abiding.
Thinking as the unconditioned correlation of subject and object. Categories both objective and subjective.
The contemplation of history—“threefold”: 1. Absolute thought. 2. Being-with-oneself as freedom; knowing what the absolute thought is and presenting itself as it. 3. “Being” (as freedom) is “knowing”—unconditioned knowing (not “knowing” as belonging to being!).
Absolute concept = freedom.
Being-conscious / Da-sein.
“Becoming”—(i.e., something becomes what it “is”—it goes back into itself, back into its ground = to go to the ground[4]) to come to itself, to its essence; determining mediation.
Hegel begins with the becoming of that which becomes, i.e., of the absolute; within this beginning he begins with “being,” which as beingness is the nothing of beings, i.e., of what is absolutely actual and its actuality.
Beginning [Anfang]—from which something emerges [ausgeht] as that in which it remains and into which it grounds itself in emerging.
Inception [Beginn]—with which the emergence starts [anhebt] and what disappears as such, that from which one moves on and which is put away, that which is surmounted and that means at the same time is sublated.
Hegel begins with the beginning, this beginning is the absolute conception of the ego cogito—a properly modern interpretation of the ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος.[5] “Being” (actuality) as being-conscious, i.e., to be conscious of something, of an object, to have the latter for oneself as an object-of-consciousness.[6]
4. The pure thinking of thinking
The pure thinking of thinking and of that which it thinks in immediacy. That and how thinking as the guiding thread and the ground of the projection of the truth of being.
This a thinking from out of absolute thinking. (Cf. being and becoming, being and negativity, being and reason.)
“The higher standpoint which the self-consciousness of spirit . . . has achieved with respect to itself, . . .”1 (since the Critique of Pure Reason, through Fichte, Schelling, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit). To know itself as such—self-consciousness as the knowledge of the consciousness of the object. “Self-knowledge” the “basic determination” of the “actuality” of spirit.
The former metaphysics transformed. Metaphysics now: the “pre-occupation” of (absolute) spirit “with its pure essence.”2 “The substantial form of spirit has reconstituted itself.”3 What used to be metaphysica generalis now becomes “metaphysics proper”4 (or, the peak of metaphysics proper becomes the absolute metaphysica generalis), because in the Science of Logic absolute spirit, “god,” is purely with himself. Theology was formerly the highest stage of metaphysics proper and the metaphysica generalis was only an empty vestibule.
“The impatience of incidental reflection.”5 When the mere idea is not an intrusion—, when the whole as such is tackled in its unquestioned and unquestionable ground.[7]
Until the consummation of German Idealism, philosophy still remains supported and sheltered by the questionlessness of its basic position (certainty) and by the general aim and the interpretation of the totality of beings (Christianness). Since then a transformation has been in the making—unsupported and unsheltered,—even though for the time being and despite multiple modifications everything still remains what it used to be. Another historicity of thinking begins; the first thinker, who still is a transitional thinker, is Nietzsche. Between them scholarliness, historicism.
Hegel and German Idealism in general have remained without impact in terms of their proper system,—because not comprehended and because it posits itself as the consummation; thus only a historical oddity which so-called “life” has never bothered and will never bother to comprehend. Without “impact.”
But what does “impact” mean? How does a philosophy “have an impact”? Is it even essential to have an impact?
1. An impact by triggering opposition, i.e., the negation of philosophy, invoking the opposite: Thus also Schopenhauer—“life”—Nietzsche. Fact, progress, the tangible, that which confirms immediately.
2. That in this process concepts and conceptions are adopted and modified, only a consequence.
3. That a school and “philology” and scholarliness of the philosophy in question is produced is a matter of indifference. “Hegelianism” and the like.
The unusual fruitfulness of Hegel’s standpoint and principle and at the same time the complete boringness of the same;—that nothing further happens and that nothing further can happen.
Hegel is right when he declares “beings” and the actual of the immediate (true-to-life) representation and production to be the “abstract” (what is one-sided, abstracted, untrue). But what for him is comprehensive, what is brought along, what is true is “only” the (seemingly) unconditioned justification of the abstract—the most abstract, because the truth of beyng is that which is utterly unquestioned and unquestionable.
Where is the origin of Hegel’s “negativity”? Does Hegel show this origin, and how? “Negativity” and “thinking” as the guiding thread of the metaphysical interpretation of being. The μὴ ὄν1—“privation”—the opposition—the not.
The fullness and wholeness of the absolute as the condition of what is one-sided. Whence the one-sidedness? One-sidedness and “subjectivity.” Subjectivity and thinking. In what way is subjectivity many-sided? The “sides” (directions) of re-presentation (thing, I, I-thing-relation itself; why not into infinity?).
Being as beingness (re-presentedness).
Beingness as being-asserted (the categorial); cf. being—captured in the predicate (the categorial).
The categories—both “objective” and “subjective”—as “objective” or “subjective”—absolute.
The “subjective” as the thoughtness of the finite ego or of absolute (subjective-objective) spirit.
The thoughtness as such of “thinking” in the service “of life” (Nietzsche).
Thinking as form of enactment—thinking as guiding thread; cf. Being and Time. The unity of the two.
The first beginning and its end. Hegel—Nietzsche.
1. Not some “still higher standpoint” than Hegel, i.e., one of spirit and thus of modern metaphysics.
2. No such standpoint of spirit at all but one of Da-sein, and that means:
3. No metaphysical standpoint at all or beingness of beings, but of beyng; “metaphysics” in the broadest and at the same time proper sense.
4. If this a “standpoint” at all,—rather a transition as (standing forth [Er-stehen]) going toward (event).
The confrontation must never become a merely “incidental reflection”;1 that means, the standpoint, conceived as a basic metaphysical position, must be pursued from the ground of its own inquiry, and that means the basic position as a metaphysical basic position must at the same time be taken back from the guiding question (unfolding in the “system of science”2) into the basic question.
9. “The logical beginning” (“pure being”)
This beginning “is to be made in the element of a free, self-contained thought, in pure knowing.”1 Pure knowing—immediacy. “Pure knowing” is “the ultimate and absolute truth of consciousness”2—pure knowing as “consciousness” (and as truth)—mediation.
Hegel begins “with” “absolute knowing” (even in the Phenomenology of Spirit). What does beginning (of thinking) mean here? Not inception—where to proceed means to go forward—but that to which thinking holds on, that wherein thinking has contained itself in advance. But why is this containing necessary.
Pure knowing—“a certainty that has become truth.”3 Certainty: the knowing-oneself as knowledge, being oneself the object and objectness. “Knowledge” as it were vanished—“pure being”;4 the having-withdrawn5 as such. Truth here taken in the transcendental sense!
Pure knowing has divested itself from everything that is “other,” that could not be it itself, i.e., there is no other, no difference to the other—“the distinctionless.”6 “What is empty”7 is therefore simply the beginning of philosophy.
To what extent is it in the nature of the beginning (of thinking) (as the thinking of thinking) that it is being?
Beginning and consummation—unconditionedness of thinking.
1. G. W. F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, ed. G. Lasson (Leipzig, 1923). Preface to the first edition, 3. [Science of Logic, 7.]
2. Cf. ibid. [Science of Logic, 7.]
3. Ibid., 5. [Science of Logic, 8.]
4. Ibid. [Science of Logic, 8.]
5. Ibid. Preface to the second edition, 21. [Science of Logic, 21.]
1. {Hand-written supplement from the 1941 revision:} Plato’s μὴ ὄν; to what extent was negativity seen and how is this sight connected to the ἰδέα. The “discovery” of the privative–of the μὴ ὄν as ὄν. Historically: Heraclitus and “Parmenides.”
If Plato recognizes that-which-is-not as a being [das Nicht-seiende als Seiendes] and thus determines being in richer terms, the decisive question still remains, namely how he conceives of being—everything ἰδέα; whether, despite the whole recognition of the privative, being and even more so the “negative” are not misrecognized.
1. G. W. F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, ed. G. Lasson (Leipzig, 1923). Preface to the second edition, 21. [Science of Logic, 21.]
2. Ibid. Preface to the first edition, 7. [Science of Logic, 11.]
1. G. W. F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, ed. G. Lasson (Leipzig, 1923). Book I, 53. [Science of Logic, 46.]
2. Ibid. [Science of Logic, 46.]
3. Ibid. [Science of Logic, 47.]
4. Ibid., 54. [Science of Logic, 47.]
5. Ibid. [Science of Logic, 47.]
6. Ibid. [Science of Logic, 47.]
7. Ibid., 66. [Science of Logic, 55.]