(1) The proposition that Being and Nothing is the same seems so
paradoxical to the imagination or understanding, that it is perhaps
taken for a joke. And indeed it is one of the hardest things thought
expects itself to do: for Being and Nothing exhibit the fundamental
contrast in all its immediacy,--that is, without the one term being
invested with any attribute which would involve its connexion with
the other. This attribute however, as the above paragraph points out,
is implicit in them--the attribute which is just the same in both. So
far the deduction of their unity is completely analytical: indeed the
whole progress of philosophising in every case, if it be a methodical,
that is to say a necessary, progress, merely renders explicit what
is implicit in a notion.--It is as correct however to say that Being
and Nothing are altogether different, as to assert their unity. The
one is _not_ what the other is. But since the distinction has not at
this point assumed definite shape (Being and Nothing are still the
immediate), it is, in the way that they have it, something unutterable,
which we merely _mean._
(2) No great expenditure of wit is needed to make fun of the maxim that
Being and Nothing are the same, or rather to adduce absurdities which,
it is erroneously asserted, are the consequences and illustrations of
that maxim.
If Being and Nought are identical, say these objectors, it follows that
it makes no difference whether my home, my property, the air I breathe,
this city, the sun, the law, mind, God, are or are not. Now in some of
these cases, the objectors foist in private aims, the utility a thing
has for me, and then ask, whether it be all the same to me if the
thing exist and if it do not. For that matter indeed, the teaching of
philosophy is precisely what frees man from the endless crowd of finite
aims and intentions, by making him so insensible to them, that their
existence or non-existence is to him a matter of indifference. But it
is never to be forgotten that, once mention something substantial, and
you thereby create a connexion with other existences and other purposes
which are _ex hypothesi_ worth having: and on such hypothesis it comes
to depend whether the Being and not-Being of a determinate subject are
the same or not. A substantial distinction is in these cases secretly
substituted for the empty distinction of Being and Nought. In others
of the cases referred to, it is virtually absolute existences and
vital ideas and aims, which are placed under the mere category of
Being or not-Being. But there is more to be said of these concrete
objects, than that they merely are or are not. Barren abstractions,
like Being and Nothing--the initial categories which, for that reason,
are the scantiest anywhere to be found--are utterly inadequate to
the nature of these objects. Substantial truth is something far
above these abstractions and their oppositions.--And always when a