Nothing seems as simple, as irrefutable, and yet as unconvincing, as Hegel’s opening argument about the concepts of “being” and “nothing” – that they shift into one another, and that their play of mutual replacement is finally resolved into a third concept of “becoming.” In the context just defined, however, these moves do make sense. The problem is still that of Kant’s Transcendental Logic, namely that of determining the least that must be said of an object (Gegenstand) in order to recognize it sufficiently as such. But Kant and Fichte had begun by saying too much – Kant, by introducing a schema of ready-made categories which he had neither derived nor would further develop; and Fichte, by promoting freedom as an avowedly extraconceptual cause. And for this reason, as we have just seen, they incurred the formalism and the subjectivism that Hegel decried in them. Most of all, they failed to see that the truth of an object (Gegenstand) is only to be found in the discourse about it, so that any opaqueness as to what that object is, or whether it is at all, must be resolved from within the original discourse itself by developing it according to rules internal to it.[1]There is no exit from language. This is the central point of Hegel’s position and the meaning of his repeated claim that the content of discourse is generated by its form.[2]
ፍትህ ለሁሉም / Justice for All