Being is Becoming

Part 4 of a discussion of certainty and its importance.

Last time, we talked about how the one foundational certainty—thought is—is the unity of thought and being. Because we have immediate and certain access to this unity, we can say something certain about what thought and being actually are, but at first glance this one certainty, that thought is, doesn’t tell us very much. However, this first unity, this first certainty, will turn out to contain everything that it means to be and to be known, and Hegel’s Science of Logic illustrates being’s self-exposition into everything with which we’re familiar, and more.

This week, I want to walk through the first couple stages of the Logic. I’m a little reluctant to do so because this was never meant to be a Hegel blog, not to mention that what comes next might seem extremely abstract and remote from our everyday concerns. However, I think it’s worthwhile because, as I claimed in my very first post, there is a straight line between understanding the underlying principle of reality and taking effective action in the world. It will be helpful to remember, as I mentioned last week, that what we’re talking about here is not some thought of being that we’re just playing around with in our heads. What we’re talking about is our experience of the world we live in, but as a pure unity, a pure “this” before we apply labels and divisions. The rest of this post will try to show how all the various things we’re familiar with begin to emerge from the backdrop of this unity, but never fully separate from it.

So, we begin with Being. Being is the pure, immediate reality we encounter before applying any labels or identifying anything within it. This immediate reality contains even our experience of this immediate reality, because, again, there are no distinctions at all, not even between thought and being. However, as we observe this Being or think this empty thought of Being, we realize that Being becomes (as Hegel hinted in the introduction) Nothing. What at first appeared to be total fullness turns out to be indistinguishable from total emptiness, just as pure light is as blinding as pure darkness. We mean for there to be a difference, a contrast, but it can’t be found in either Being or Nothing because each is identically determined by its total indeterminacy, defined by its lack of definition. When we mean to consider Being, we find that it passes over into Nothing, and vice versa. What, then, is the nature of the difference between the two, and where does it come from?

The breakthrough comes with the realization of the relationship between Being and Nothing, that they are not in fact two separate things but rather the constitutive features, the moments, of a singular process that both contains and is created by them. As we observe Being, we see it become Nothing, which in turn becomes Being again; as we observe Nothing, we see it become Being, which in turn becomes Nothing again. It turns out that Being and Nothing both become more fully determined, more fully defined, when they are considered in the context of the other, because we discover that Being is not merely empty indeterminateness, but also that which becomes Nothing. In other words, Being is revealed to also be Ceasing-To-Be. Likewise, Nothing is not merely empty indeterminateness, but is also that which becomes Being: Nothing is revealed to also be Coming-To-Be. It is the greater definition of Being and Nothing that arises from their opposition that constitutes their difference, and not only do Being and Nothing make each other different, they make each other more fully what they are. They appeared to be the same, but each pointed beyond itself to the dynamic relationship that more fully defines them. Though we thought we were looking at Being (or Nothing), it turns out that what we’ve been looking at is Becoming: the process of Being and Nothing each becoming its other.

So, what did we just witness? The development of Being into Becoming was that of the implicit becoming explicit. Becoming was always implicit in Being, but it was only in Being’s own development during our observation that Becoming became explicit. As we observed Being’s development, we learned that to be always also means to become. Each new stage of the development of Being is not the emergence of something new; rather, it just becomes clearer what we’ve been looking at all along. This is how it will turn out that absolutely everything is contained within this first thought of Being: implicit in the thought of Being are all the various ways of being—being positive, being negative, being real, being a thing, being finite, being infinite, being an animal, being a person, being the Absolute.

But just as Becoming was always implicit in Being, somehow contained within it, so Becoming also contains Being (and Nothing) within it. Everything is carried forth through Being’s own self-development, and there will never be a moment when Being will stop being what it is and become something that somehow isn’t Being. So, if there can never be anything that is not Being, and Being always contains everything implicitly within it, then a fascinating conclusion follows: there can never be anything that is not everything contained within Being. Hegel describes the science of Being as essentially circular, with the beginning grounding the end and vice versa, but we can see already that reality is also fractal: every particular element contains the whole, and the completely simple contains the infinitely complex. 

The story of Indra’s Net illustrates this principle beautifully:

Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out infinitely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel in each "eye" of the net, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number. There hang the jewels, glittering "like" stars in the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring.

As a wise person once said: everything is everything. 

Next week, we’ll wrap up this little series on certainty with a discussion of the ethical implications of the last few posts, namely: what does it mean that there’s only one certainty, but that it contains everything? How should that change how we live?

See you then.