In my opinion, Hegel’s project can only be successful by the implicit conversion of nothingness into negation. A universalizing idealism must set out certain absolute categories that allow no unaccounted for excess. Thus, immediacy and mediation must be found to negate each other, essentially depend on each other and ultimately establish each other in an apodictic transformation. However, negation itself is a transformation. If Being and nothingness are juxtaposed, nothingness must retain the essential characteristics of negation. That is, in order to maintain categorical exclusivity aspects that move toward non-relational or non-relevancy must be deemphasized. In so doing, the force of the Logic is brought to the fore and the categorical ambivalences are subsumed as accidental, nonsensical or irrelevant. Pure Being for Hegel is empty. To merely think that something ‘is’ is absolutely indeterminate, featureless, empty and vacant; thus, the move from Being to its antithesis, nothing. If Being and nothingness and Being and not-Being are equivocal, differences must be relegated to a wasteland of irrelevancy. The Hegelian deduction from Being to nothingness is the transition from thesis to antithesis, the categorical negation of Being. The tour de jour that thrusts itself forward in any historical paradigm will undermine its own accounting of Error.
In Newtonian physics the evident predictability of its model downplayed the known errors and failures of the theory and favored its accomplishments for centuries. However, the implicit errors are what drove Einstein to discover the relativity of time and space and fundamentally overturn classical physics. In any Logic, or categorical classification the success of the category and its imperative are measured by its categorical specificity and uniqueness. To the degree that categorical characteristics are blurred by its members, errors come to the fore and the certainty of the categorical distinction is weakened. Error is the unaccounted for excess that the System cannot overcome.
With regard to Being and not-Being the ‘not’ of Being is simply the category of all that is not contained in the category of Being, its logical negation. The category of Being essentially implies it’s negation because any category, as bounded and determined, excludes all the members not brought under its Law. Justice then measures appropriateness and properness relative to Law, the categorical requirement. However, courts apply jurisprudence to determine violations of individual members. When errors are made that confuse categorical determinants the system of absolutes, categorical determinates, are brought into question – the force of Law is dispersed and categorical relevancy becomes a movement of concern. However, if the categories of Being and nothingness remain absolute then justice is meaningless with regard to these categories. These categories cannot be justified but only canonized; errors cannot be allowed and presuppositions rendered irrelevant – this move is violence. It can only be sustained by force and repetition.
For Hegel, the dialectic seems at many points to deny and prohibit the possibility for categorical error or at least attempt to postpone its deductive proofs by subsuming it in further progressions that retroactively are thought to sustain the originating categories. In so doing, the universal categories of Being and nothingness are thought to be concretized; presuppositions and criticism dismissed or thought to be already accounted for by later movements. This destination can only be arrived at from a recurring empirical force that recapitulates the universal likeness of members to its category and pushes the dissimilarities to the antithetical, the logical negation of its category. In this way, justice can be deemed universal and Law established as concrete not vis-à-vis the justice of the categories themselves but as decreed Truth.
Nothingness as antithetical to Being is nominalized as the logical case of the negation of Being. However, the logical case must sacrifice certain important dissimilarities in the notion of nothingness. Nothingness does not depend on Being as its negation. There is a kind of ‘prior to’ or better, non-relational significance that is thought with nothingness. Any attempt to delineate nothingness viz. negation of Being, can only be done in ‘bad faith’; making nothing something antithetical to Being and Being as ‘pure’. In this case, ‘pure’ is an absolutely empty concept and an analogous comparison is made to nothingness as if to exhaust further distinctions.
Descartes points out that the notion of infinity always overflows itself, the notion of nothingness always eludes the concept of itself, absolute purity or abstraction. Its being or non-being are indeterminate not at odds with Being. This is perhaps similar to Hesiod’s notion of chaos. Nothingness does not negate Being or deductively follow from Being as nothingness is absolutely irrelevant and non-relational with Being. Relations always necessarily imply ‘somethings’. To found a relation, an absolute deduction, from Being to nothingness is a bit of sleight of hand and trickery to equivocate pure abstraction with nothingness.
Hegelianism seems to push categories vis-à-vis idealism, the ideal form of an empirically denuded category. Already encapsulated in idealism is the vaccine from accountability and justice. Even the particular for Hegel seems to be an ideal particular and thus plays into the ideal universal. While denying the pure abstract forms of Kant, a more concrete form of idealism is touted. The concrete form is the logical deduction, the supposed tautological certainty that is acquired when justice is suspended. A certain kind of reciprocity of categories, the movement from nothingness back to Being as given in the vacuum of pure abstraction prohibits ambivalence, the out of phase with itself that Levinas thinks with ipseity; the identity of the self as accusative not nominative. Specific beings as Being are not redacted into an identity but diffused and blurred across beings and Being, self and other, individual and community. Beings do not exist as monadic constitutes of ideal categories that afford no excess, no categorical ambivalence, no Error. Idealism is just as much a reduction as materialism. The mechanism at work depletes, abstracts and refuses justice. Its Law is proclaimed not justified. The third other is only another case of the ideal not a reason for deliberation and justice. Moreover, justice is itself subsumed into its own abstract category; denuded of substitution, the imperative to answer for the other. Ethics is yet another idealization that consists in itself, in self-determination. Even more, other determination of self is inverted and reciprocated into self determination of other. The self and other are master becoming slave and slave becoming master so they can complete themselves in one another which preserves their distinction while at the same time announcing self-consciousness.
The reciprocating movement from Being to nothingness and nothingness to Being is movement, becoming. The reciprocating movement of self and other is self-consciousness. There is no residue unaccounted for in these idealizations, no erosion of the eternal categories and no place for Error. The force of light is obliteration of Spirit. That is, Spirit obliterates justice, the necessity to account for oneself, to give place to Error. Light, as the Error of the eye, of sight, deems Truth as what is seen, as what presents itself in presence. Its purity is thought together with the proper. The proper is given carte blanche, tacit acceptance as the real and conversely the unseen is subsumed by the hinterland, the other than real, the negation of proper and thus, the improper. In this vein, Foucault would indict the contingency of civilization on the necessity for madness, the implicit requirement for the proper too be what it is on the basis of the improper. This dialectic forces an essential categorical imperative on itself that can only continually re-affirm itself through force and repetition. This move in its ‘purest’ form is logical. The Logic accounts for all excess and ultimately, can only re-affirm itself, for Hegel, as the concrete universal. Error has been accounted for, dismissed and deemed accidental. Parmenides has won the Aristotelian day albeit taken from the problematic arena of ontology to the more sure footed stage of logic. Aristotle’s proclamation against Parmenides,
“What is cannot come to be (since it already is), while nothing can come to be from what is not”
has been discounted in the Hegelian edict that nothing does come from ‘what is not’ and also from what is in the absolute emptiness of pure Being. In this way nothingness resolves in essence, it no longer exceeds the thought of itself but has found place in categorical certitude. How could nothingness not be what it ‘is’ in the vacuity of Being and the ‘not’ of ‘is’? How could there be Error in this thought? How could sense be made of any excessiveness to the Hegelian edict? Wouldn’t this excess be non-sensible, improper, accidental; a mere faux pas of Error? How could the ‘reality’ of Error be posed without only re-affirming the inevitable outcome of the categorical imperative? A certain kind of circularity, a singularity, a hermeneutic circle would result that would have to be dismissed out of hand. After all, the proof of such a lunacy could only be made from the Logic that would immediately discount any basis for its assertion. In this then the reduction that can never achieve an exteriority, it can only forever repeat itself.
As the Logic is complete within itself, labor must absolve itself in finality. Labor achieves itself in its telos, the result of its effort. Labor is merely the means to capital. Its end justifies it means. What is endued with meaning is not the effort of labor but the outcome of labor, capital. In this way, Marx would want to think the notion of alienation. The Error, what is alienated, left behind, discounted, taken account of is what it takes to produce an outcome, the means of production. The means of production is justified by capital. Is it any wonder that acquiring capital would make short thrift of what it takes to produce it? The production is an afterthought; labor has value only by its ideal completion in capital. Thus, those that live by profit (viz. Adam Smith) have short-circuited the means to capital to only acquire the end and in Smith’s thinking:
“But the rate of profit does not, like rent and wages, rise with prosperity, and fall with the declension of the society. On the contrary, it is naturally low in rich, and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin. The interest of this third order, therefore, has not the same connection with the general interest of the society as that of the other two (219 Wealth of Nations).
Thus the interests of the third class run contrary to the interests of the other two; expansion actually raises the cost of labor and rent and increases competition, thereby lowering profits, so much so that the ruination of a country is actually in the best interests of the third class.” (see link cited above)
From this then, the excess of capital is labor. The excess has been accounted for in its completion, capital. Even more so, in modern markets, derivatives of derivatives and risk of capital depletion are abstracted into packages of mathematical ‘certainties’; labor has been relegated to the universal emptiness of abstraction. Capital beyond any mere laborers possible dreams has been, by many orders of magnitude, severed from any realistic possibility for a laborer. The outcome has been severely restrained from labor and reserved for those that live by profit. From this then, the particular has only been shown to be an example of the universal – without excess to its categorical relationship. The Logic has once again been affirmed in its correctness and universal claim.
Thus, justice has been resolved in its end not its means. The only needs that remain is to convince the laborers that the capital they are denied justifies their existence and satiates their concerns for equity. The System has founded and given meaning to their completion and their gratitude should be for the ‘job creators’ and dispensers of the capital that justifies their existence and makes meaning (the opposite of alienation) possible. The laborer’s meaning is not given by their work but by the entrepreneurs of capital, those that make capital possible.
This then is what has made post modernism possible.