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CHAPTER III
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two', constitutes reality. As a matter of fact “Being" and “Nothing” are said to be contradictory ‘moments' (or
that is, a seeing of Nothing. Pure light and pure darkness are two voids which are the same. We can distinguish only in determinate light, that is, since light is determined by darkness in clouded light-and, equally in determinate darkness, that is, since darkness; and this is just because clouded light and illumined darkness contain distinction in themselves and therefore are Determinate Being". Hegel's Science of Logic (tr. by W. H. Johnson and L. G. Struthers, 1929, London), Vol. I, p. 105. "The simple idea of pure Being was first enunciated by the Eleatics, as the Absolute and as sole truth; especially by Parmenides, whose surviving fragments, with pure enthusiasm of thought first comprehending itself in its absolute abstraction, proclaim that “Being alone is, and Nothing is not at all".--It is well known that in orientalsystems, and essentially in Buddhism, Nothing, or the Void, is the absolute principle.--Heraclitus was profound enough to emphasise in opposition to this simple and one-sided abstraction the higher total concept of Becoming, saying: "Being is no more than Nothing is", or "All things flow", which means, everything is Becoming - Popular sayings, chiefly oriental, to the effect that everything which is has in its birth the germs of its decay, while death conversely is entrance to a new life, express at bottom the same union of Being and Nothing. Ibid., pp. 95-96. Although Hegel is concerned, in the course of the present passage, with deriving confirmation, and, in some measure, authority or sanction, for his dialectic of synthesis (of being and non-being) from the illustrious ancient Greek, it is a well-known fact that the Greek thinker, viz., Heraclitus, is more correctly associated with propounding, in keen contrast with Parmenides, almost an uncomprising philosophy of change ('becoming used in a somewhat more onesided sense than by Hegel') than with reconciling the two opposed trends referred to, by Hegel, here. This is indicated by the very fragment just cited by Hegel, viz., "All things flow” as well as by analogies of fire etc. This consideration does not, however, affect the truth of Hegel's argument for the reconciliation or synthesis of being and non-being. Cf. "Being, first, is determined as opposed to Other in general." Ibid. 91.
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