Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: The Science of Logic by Hegel & Di Giovanni & George Di Giovanni

Author:Hegel & Di Giovanni & George Di Giovanni [Hegel & Giovanni, Di & Giovanni, George Di]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0521832551
Amazon: B004EYSWG2
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2010-07-02T04:00:00+00:00

3. Opposition

In opposition, the determinate reflection, difference, is brought to completion. Opposition is the unity of identity and diversity; its moments are diverse in one identity, and so they are opposites.

Identity and difference are the moments of difference as held inside difference itself; they are reflected moments of its unity. Likeness and unlikeness are instead the externalized reflection; their self-identity is not only the indifference of each towards the other differentiated from it, but towards being-in-and-for-itself as such; theirs is a self-identity that contrasts with identity reflected into itself, hence an immediacy which is not reflected into itself. The positedness of the sides of external reflection is therefore a being, just as their non-positedness is a non-being.

On closer consideration, the moments of opposition are positedness reflected into itself or determination in general. Positedness is likeness and unlikeness; these two, reflected into themselves, constitute the determinations of opposition. Their immanent reflection consists in that each is within it the unity of likeness and unlikeness. Likeness is only in a reflection which compares according to the unlikeness and is therefore mediated by its other indifferent moment; similarly, unlikeness is only in the same reflective reference in which likeness is. – Each of these moments, in its determinateness, is therefore the whole. It is the whole because it also contains its other moment; but 11.273this, its other, is an indifferent existent; thus each contains a reference to its non-being, and it is reflection-into-itself, or the whole, only as essentially referring to its non-being.

This self-likeness, reflected into itself and containing the reference to unlikeness within it, is the positive; and the unlikeness that contains within itself the reference to its non-being, to likeness, is the negative. – Or again, both are positedness; now in so far as the differentiated determinateness is taken as a differentiated determinate reference of positedness to itself, opposition is, on the one hand, positedness reflected into its likeness with itself; and, on the other hand, it is the same positedness reflected into its inequality with itself: the positive and the negative. – The positive is positedness as reflected into self-likeness; but what is reflected is positedness, that is, the negation as negation, and so this immanent reflection has the reference to the other for its determination. The negative is positedness as reflected into unlikeness; but positedness is the unlikeness itself, and so this reflection is therefore the identity of unlikeness with itself and absolute self-reference. – Each, therefore, equally has the other in it: positedness reflected into self-likeness has the unlikeness; and positedness reflected into self-unlikeness, the likeness.

The positive and the negative are thus the sides of opposition that have become self-subsisting. They are self-subsisting because they are the reflection of the whole into itself, and they belong to opposition in so far as the latter is determinateness which, as the whole, is reflected into itself. Because of their self-subsistence, the opposition which they constitute is implicitly determinate. Each is itself and its other; for this reason, each has its determinateness not in an other but within.

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