Hegel is not asking readers of his Science of Logic to abandon themselves to flights of wild Romantic fancy. He is asking us to follow Descartes and suspend judgement about what we have previously taken for granted until some way has been found to show whether or not our traditional ways of thinking are justified. He is insisting that ‘science should be preceded by universal doubt, i.e. by totalpresuppo$itioniessnes$\u He is asking us, therefore, to be more self-critical than we have hitherto been, not less, and to approach his logic in a spirit of openness.
But how are we to make sense of Hegel’s new sdence of logic? What precisely will it be trying to do? It will first of all seek to determine - without presuppositions - which cate
gories must logically (if not always and everywhere in fact) be employed in thinking and which are ‘either illusory attempts or illegitimate combinations of genuine categories’13 Furthermore, it will seek to determine how the necessary categories of thought are to be conceived and whether the distinctions that are traditionally drawn between categories
really hold. Hegel will thus attempt to discover the true determinations of thought and the truth o f those determinations. The categories disclosed by freely self-determining thought will be those that are best suited to modern free, historical self-consciousness. In chapter 1 I argued that all experience of the world, for Hegel, presupposes certain categories. It is now clear, however, that the appropriate conceptual presuppositions of modern self- consciousness must be determined by a science of logic that is itself free and - systemati
cally, though not historically - presupposition/ess.
By showing how specific categories are generated by freely self-determining thought, Hegel will provide a genuine derivation or ‘deduction* of those categories and make good what he sees as the deficiencies of Kant’s critical philosophy. In the Critique o f Pure Reason Kant provided a ‘metaphysical deduction’ of the categories by showing that they can be derived from the fundamental forms of judgement. (He also provided a ‘transcendental deduction’ of the categories by arguing that they constitute the indispensable conditions of our knowledge and experience of objects.) In his ‘metaphysical’ deduction, however, Kant simply assumed that the basic activity of thought is judgement and that judgement thus provides the key to understanding the true character of the categories. He did not consider the possibility that judgement itself might be a derivative mode of thought that is based upon inadequately determined categories and so might not actually ground an adequate understanding of the categories at all.
Hegel praised Kant for locating the source of our categories in the spontaneity of thought, rather than in sensation or imagination. He criticized Kant, however, for not deriving his conception of the categories from a consideration of the free activity of thought as such, but simply reading them off from the structure of judgement (as he under
stood it). In Hegel’s view - which is, of course, indebted to that of Fichte - Kant’s failure in this regard meant that he was unable to demonstrate definitively which categories thought by its very nature should employ and how those categories are properly to be conceived.
In addition to determining the necessary categories of thought, Hegel’s science of logic will also attempt to determine how far thought must respect the rules of formal logic and how far it must proceed in ways that formal logic cannot comprehend. If Hegel can derive his conclusions on this matter immanently from the free self-determination of thought, then he can claim to have provided a definitive understanding of the function and limits of all modes of reasoning - including mathematical, syllogistic and inductive reasoning - and to have avoided taking their unconditional or conditional validity for granted.
But how, exactly, is Hegel’s logic to proceed if it is to take nothing for granted (except, of course, the modern historical demand that philosophy be free and self-critical and so take nothing for granted)? If thought is to determine its own necessary characteristics and presuppose no determinate categories or principles in so doing, it must begin by abstract
ing from and suspending all given, determinate thoughts and must think a thought in which nothing determinate is thought, a thought which is thus utterly indeterminate. For Hegel, that thought is the indeterminate, empty thought of being (Sew).
One should be careful, however, not to be misled at this point. Hegel is not inviting us to think of concrete ‘reality’ or ‘nature’ or any particular determinate being. Each of these thoughts represents the thought of some determinate content, the thought of something.
But Hegel wants us to begin by merely thinking the indeterminate thought of being as such.
Remember that the logic is an attempt by thought to determine anew its own intrinsic character, categories and rules. Now consider what is the least that can be said about thought - the least that we can think about thought - to begin with. It is not that thought is syllogistic or that it is concerned with objectivity or that it is opposed to feeling; that is
already to think too much. The least that thought can think about itself is simply that it is.
The outcome of Hegel’s turning of Cartesian doubt against thought itself is thus not the conviction that 1 am, but merely the ineradicable thought that thought is. Thought can abstract from everything, but it cannot abstract from the thought that it is, from the thought of its own being. But, equally, since that thought is still wholly indeterminate, we cannot yet give any determinate meaning to the idea that we are thinking the simple being of thought All we can do, therefore, is think the presence to thought of utterly indetermi
nate being that cannot as yet even clearly identify itself as thought.
Thought that presupposes nothing does not yet think of itself as thought. It thinks utter indeterminacy: 'being, pure being - without any further determination’.14 This is not the thought of some transcendent ‘beyond*, nor is it the traditional metaphysical thought of the totality of all beings. It is simply the very least that thought can think - the only ‘thing*
that thought can think if it is not to think of anything determinate.
But, the wary reader is likely to object, thought surely cannot think simply of utter inde
terminacy; it must think something if it is to think at all. If it tries to abstract from all content, thought surely ends up thinking nothing whatsoever. Hegel agrees. The indeter
minate thought of being does indeed amount to the thought of nothing whatsoever. Being, construed in such an indeterminate way, is merely an empty word. At the beginning of Hegel’s logic thought thinks - or tries to think - the utter indeterminacy of being, but that thought is so utterly indeterminate that it evaporates in the very attempt to conceive it.
The thought of pure, indeterminate being thus slides into the thought of nothing {Nichts) because of its sheer indeterminacy.
Yet that does not simply put an end to presuppositionless thinking. We have abstracted from all determinate thoughts and been left thinking nothing at all, but we do not thereby stop thinking altogether. Thinking of nothing is not the same as simply not thinking.
Thought that suspends all its presuppositions and so ends up thinking of nothing deter
minate still remains thought, albeit utterly indeterminate and inchoate thought. Thus, even as we admit that we are actually thinking nothing whatsoever when we think of being, we must recognize that we are none the less still thinking. Moreover, we must recognize that nothing whatsoever is what we are thinking of. The moment we do this we acknowledge that sheer and utter nothing actually has an immediacy of its own for thought: sheer nothing is understood by thought precisely to be nothing rather than something. This means, however, that sheer and utter nothing in fact vanishes before our very eyes: for when we think of nothing, we necessarily think of sheer indeterminacy that is purely and simply what it is. That is to say, we think of empty, indeterminate be-ing. Just as the thought of sheer, indeterminate being slides into the thought of nothing, therefore, so the thought of nothing inevitably slides into the thought of being.
The attempt to begin to think without presuppositions has led us into an apparent impasse. We have begun with the njost indeterminate thought that can be thought, the thought of sheer, indeterminate being. However, the sheer indeterminacy of that thought deprives us of any way of specifying the difference between indeterminate being and nothing whatsoever. If we attempt to think or determine a difference between pure, inde
terminate being and nothing, that difference disappears the moment it is thought. Yet the thought of being is not reducible to the thought of nothing, is not simply and utterly nothing whatsoever. Being after all is. However, that in turn fails to establish any concrete difference between being and nothing, since the thought of nothing is the thought that
‘nothing is . . . in our intuition or thought’, and thus itself slides into the thought of being.15 We are thus left thinking of a difference between two indeterminate thoughts which is ineliminable, yet which collapses and disappears the moment it is thought.
Is there any way in which this apparent impasse can point towards further determina
tions of thought, or are we condemned to listen, in Richard Winfield’s words, to the ‘peren
nial braying of the same vacant term’?16 A way forward becomes clear if we attend to what happens to the thought of being as it is thought: it immediately collapses into the thought of pure nothingness. In thinking of pure being, therefore, thought does not simply think of pure being it thinks the disappearance of pure being into its immediate opposite.
Thought that thinks being thus thinks being not simply as being, but as something else, namely as the immediate transition into nothing whatsoever and back again into being. In this way thought becomes the thought of transition, of the immediate disappearance and reappearance of sheer, indeterminate being. In other words, the thought of pure being becomes the thought of pure becoming ( Werden).17
Groundlessly, immediately, presuppositionless thought has begun to determine itself. We do not have much to think yet, but we have made a beginning. Simply by attending to the indeterminate thought of being we have learned that utterly indeterminate thought is not simply, but becomes. We cannot yet say that it becomes determinate thought, however. We merely recognize that it becomes the still indeterminate and unstable thought of becoming itself. But how does indeterminate, presuppositionless thought proceed from this meagre beginning to determinate thought, to the determinate thought of determinacy and of something? How, in other words, does presuppositionless thought actually proceed to determine itself properly and thus become explicitly self-determining thought? Once more, progress is achieved by simply attending to what is involved in thinking the thoughts that we have been thinking so far.
Wherein lies the thought of simple becoming at which we have now arrived? In the thought of pure being disappearing into pure nothing, and vice versa. It is because being is conceived in such a pure and indeterminate way that it leaves us nothing to think and thus immediately disappears into - and so becomes - the thought of nothing at all. The thought of becoming is thus generated by the sheer indeterminacy and emptiness of the thought of pure being with which we begin. However, the thought that pure being disap
pears into pure nothingness undermines the purity and simplicity of our initial thought of being and means that we can no longer still conceive of being as pure being. Yet it is the thought of being as pure and indeterminate - as sheer being - which leads to the disap
pearance of the thought of being into the thought of nothing in the first place. If we are no longer able to think of being as pure being, therefore, we are no longer forced by that thought to think its constant, restless disappearance into its immediate opposite. Rather, we are led by the very disappearance of pure being into pure nothing (and of nothing into being) to give up the idea that each is purely what it is and utterly different from the other, to give up the attendant idea that each simply disappears into its opposite, and to think both thoughts together as a single unity. The thought of pure being only disappears into the thought of pure nothing because it is the wholly indeterminate thought of pure and utter being. However, the very disappearance of pure being and pure nothing into one another undermines the pure and immediate difference between the two and causes them to collapse into one. In this way, we settle into the thought that being and nothing do not merely pass over into one another, but are in fact indistinguishable.18
We have tried to sustain the indeterminate thought of sheer and utter being and we have failed. The outcome of our failure is the recognition that pure being is not simply pure beingy but is in fact indistinguishable from its immediate other, nothing (just as nothing itself is indistinguishable from being). This is the first settled, stable thought that we have had, the first thought that does not immediately disappear but that is - albeit to an utterly minimal degree - determinate. Note that, for Hegel, the difference between being and
nothing is not altogether eliminated: he maintains that in their irreducible difference the two thoughts of being and nothing prove to be quite indistinguishable. This thought is clearly paradoxical, but it is one with which we can, at least for a moment, rest
But what thought have we arrived at exactly? The thought that being is nothing and that nothing is being? But isn’t that just empty verbiage? Doesn’t it just leave us with one com
bined vacuous thought instead of two? And doesn’t it just dissolve everything into con
ceptual chaos? By no means. Paradoxically, it is precisely what establishes the conceptual possibility of genuine determinate difference. Consider where we have arrived in our pre
suppositionless thinking. We have been forced to give up our initial attempt to think pure being by itself, and we have been forced to think being and nothing together as one. This means that we can now think the thought that nothing is without thinking that we thereby lose the thought of nothing. The thought of nothing does not have to be the thought of pure and utter nothing to be the thought of nothing. Nothing is no less nothing just because it is nothing. Conversely, we can now think the thought that being is not anything - is nothing - determinate without thinking that we thereby lose the thought of being. The thought of being does not have to be the thought of pure and utter being, without any
‘contamination’ by the thought of nothing, to be the thought of being. Indeed, not only can we think of nothing as being nothing, and of being as being nothing - as not being any
thing - determinate; we have no choice but to think of them in that way. Our initial attempt to think pure being distinct from pure nothing failed. Presuppositionless thinking which begins by thinking pure, indeterminate being must therefore come to think being and nothing in terms of one another.
Hegel’s logic has not led us into conceptual chaos. Nor has it led us to the simple-minded positivist conclusion that the word ‘being’ means absolutely nothing at all and might as well be discarded. Nor, finally, has it led us into a kind of metaphysical nihilism which claims that, since being is nothing, only nothingness is. Hegel’s presuppositionless logic has led us to the paradoxical thought that nothing is itself to be thought of as being, namely as being non-being or not-being, and that being can only be thought of as what it is in so far as it is thought of as not being what it is n o t Note that nothing mutates logically into cnot-being’ {Nichtsein) and as such is indistinguishable from being (which is itself defined as not being what it is not). To say that being and nothing are indistinguishable is thus at the same time to say that being and not-being are indistinguishable. This baffling thought is, however, precisely what allows us to think the difference between being and not-being - a difference which is still ineliminably contained in the idea of the indistinguishability of the two terms - as a determinate difference.
At the beginning of the logic we thought of the difference between being and nothing as an immediate difference that did not require determination. We thought that all we needed to do was to think of being, to think that being is, in order to distinguish being from nothing. Now, however, we realize that we cannot sustain the thought of the im mediate difference of being and nothing, and that we can only think the determinate dif
ference between being and nothing or not-being if we think of each term as the other. The only way we can think even the most minimal determinate difference between being and not-being is by thinking that being is not not-being, and that not-being is not-being. Unless we can say of being that it is not what it is not, and of not-being that it is what it is, we cannot think any clear difference between the terms at all. The difference between being and not-being is, of course, still insufficiently determined by what we have said. However, that is not the point. We have not yet reached the stage of completely determinate thought;
we have not therefore thought all that has to be thought in order to think determinate dif
ference. We have merely thought the absolute minimum that needs to be thought to think
determinate difference. Free, presuppositionless thinking has thus provided us with our first necessary and unavoidable principle: that, however strange the thought maybe to ordi
nary understanding, the determinate difference between being and not-being can only be
nary understanding, the determinate difference between being and not-being can only be