DASEIN

The first movement of Hegel's logic, if one can use this musical expression, runs through the first two chapters of the first part of Being, Quality. After this, in the third chapter, Hegel takes another tangent in order to link this first study with Quantity; but the first two chapters form an unquestioned unity of development.

The guiding thread of this movement is the notion of determinate being. In it Hegel manages to express his basic ontological vision of finite being as the necessary and yet inadequate and hence vanishing vehicle of infinite being. He establishes this vision in an argument about Being.

The germ of the whole thing is contained in the first famous argument in the opening lines. Let us start with the simple notion of being and we shall see that it is inadequate. Nothing is simply without having some determinate quality. Simple being which was nothing but this, i.e., was neither animal, vegetable, nor mineral, etc., would be nothing. And this is the famous first argument of the logic: pure being turns out to be pure emptiness, nothing; and reciprocally, this nothing which is purely indeterminate is equivalent to pure being. Hence the notion of pure being frustrates its own purpose. We cannot characterize reality with it alone, and we are forced to move to a notion of being as determinate, as having some quality and not another. Being can only be thought as determinate.