Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Volume 1 (of 3)Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Philosophy
Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Volume 1 (of 3)
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Philosophy -- History
However abstract this principle might be to Leucippus, he was
anxious to make it concrete. The meaning of atom is the individual,
the indivisible; in another form the One is thus individuality,
the determination of subjectivity. The universal and, on the other
side, the individual, are great determinations which are involved
in everything, and men first know what they have in these abstract
determinations, when they recognize in the concrete that even there
they are predominant. To Leucippus and Democritus this principle, which
afterwards came to light with Epicurus, remained physical; but it also
appears in what is intellectual. Mind indeed, is also an atom and one;
but as one within itself, it is at the same time infinitely full. In
freedom, right and law, in exercising will, our only concern is with
this opposition of universality and individuality. In the sphere of
the state the point of view that the single will is, as an atom, the
absolute, may be maintained; the more modern theories of the state
which also made themselves of practical effect, are of this kind. The
state must rest on the universal, that is, on the will that exists
in and for itself; if it rests on that of the individual, it becomes
atomic and is comprehended in accordance with the thought-determination
of the one, as is the case in Rousseau’s _Contrat Social_. From what
Aristotle tells us in the passage last quoted, Leucippus’ idea of all
that is concrete and actual is further this: “The full is nothing
simple, for it is an infinitely manifold. These infinitely many, move
in the vacuum, for the vacuum exists; their conglomeration brings
about origination” (that is, of an existing thing, or what is for the
senses), “disintegration and separation result in passing away.” All
other categories are included here. “Activity and passivity subsist in
the fact, that they are contiguous; but their contiguity is not their
becoming one, for from that which is truly” (abstractly) “one there
does not come a number, nor from that which is truly many, one.” Or,
it may be said, they are in fact neither passive nor active, “for they
merely abide through the vacuum” without having as their principle,
process. Atoms thus are, even in their apparent union in that which
we call things, separated from one another through the vacuum which
is purely negative and foreign to them, _i.e._ their relation is not
inherent in themselves, but is with something other than them, in which
they remain what they are. This vacuum, the negative in relation to the
affirmative, is also the principle of the movement of atoms; they are
so to speak solicited by the vacuum to fill up and to negate it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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