2 - Twists and turns of Hegel's contradiction

Summary

Contradiction is ubiquitous in the Logic as well as in Hegel's system. Not just a contradiction, or some contradictions, determined in each case by the particular terms related to one another. Rather, what Hegel presents is contradiction as such, as a general figure of thought and therefore of being insofar as it is thought. Hegel offers what one might call a deduction of contradiction as an unavoidable moment of thought.

This deduction is given in the Doctrine of Essence. Not only is a chapter devoted to it (The Essentialities or Determinations of Reflection, which culminates with a section on contradiction: see GW 11, 258–291; S. 6, 35–80; L. 409–443), but one might maintain, as Mure did, that in a sense the whole Doctrine of Essence is an exposition of contradiction.

[T]o Hegel every category of Essence is a contradiction of inseparably coupled moments. In Essence Being and Nothing have at length emerged respectively as essential and unessential, but these two moments are now together in each phase of every triad: Essence is only Essence as the Essence of Being. “Die Wahrheit des Seins ist das Wesen.”

Contradiction is, at the heart of each object that is thought, the unity of essence and being. This unity is manifested, for a thought that is not sufficiently critical, as the unity of essence and seeming (Schein) which is nothing but “the seeming of essence within itself” (in sich selbst Scheinen).