Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Volume 1 (of 3)
Georg Hegel · en
In the first place we have here the abstract idea of Being and
non-being in a form altogether immediate and general; but when we look
closer, we find that Heraclitus also conceived of the opposites and
their unification in a more definite manner. He says: “The opposites
are combined in the self-same one, just as honey is both sweet and
bitter.” Sextus remarks of this (Pyrrh. Hyp. I. 29, §§ 210, 211; II. 6,
§ 63): “Heraclitus, like the Sceptics, proceeds from ordinary ideas; no
one will deny that healthy men call honey sweet, while those who are
sick will say it is bitter.” If it is only sweet, it cannot alter its
nature in another individual; it would in all places and even to the
jaundiced patient be sweet. Aristotle (De mundo, 5) quotes this from
Heraclitus: “Join together the complete whole and the incomplete” (the
whole makes itself the part, and the meaning of the part is to become
the whole), “what coincides and what conflicts, what is harmonious and
what discordant, and from out of them all comes one, and from one,
all.” This one is not an abstraction, but the activity of dividing
itself into opposites; the dead infinite is a poor abstraction as
compared with the depths of Heraclitus. All that is concrete, as that
God created the world, divided Himself, begot a Son, is contained in
this determination. Sextus Empiricus mentions (adv. Math. IX. 337) that
Heraclitus said: “The part is something different from the whole and
is yet the same as the whole; substance is the whole and the part, the
whole in the universe and the part in this living being.” Plato says in
his Symposium (p. 187, Steph.; p. 397, Bekk.) of Heraclitus’ principle:
“The one, separated from itself, makes itself one with itself like the
harmony of the bow and the lyre.” He then makes Eryximachus, who speaks
in the Symposium, criticize this thus: “In harmony there is discord, or
it arises from opposites; for harmony does not arise from height and
depth in that they are different, but from their union through the art
of music.” But this does not contradict Heraclitus, who means the same
thing. That which is simple, the repetition of a tone, is no harmony;
difference is clearly necessary to harmony, or a definite antithesis;
for it is the absolute becoming and not mere change. The real fact is
that each particular tone is different from another—not abstractly so
from any other, but from _its_ other—and thus it also can be one. Each
particular only is, in so far as its opposite is implicitly contained
in its Notion. Subjectivity is thus the “other” of objectivity and not
of a piece of paper, which would be meaningless; since each is the
“other” of the “other” as its “other,” we here have their identity.
This is Heraclitus’ great principle; it may seem obscure, but it
is speculative. And this to the understanding which maintains the
independence of Being and non-being, the subjective and objective, the
real and the ideal, is always difficult and dim.