The Antepenultimacy of the Beginning in Hegel's Science of Logic

I. Introduction

Perhaps the single most perplexing problem in Hegel's Science of Logic is the status of its beginning.

Hegel famously insisted that philosophy must be self-grounding. It cannot start from givens. For Hegel, presupposition is the enemy of science. "[S]tupid-I can find no other word for it," he remarked.1 Accordingly, if Hegel's own beginning rests on unjustified presupposition, then his project is defeated at the start. This is a problem Hegel worried about and claimed to have solved.2

Hegel is usually read as excusing his presuppositional beginning by making his first step the very last step of the Logic. On this interpretation, the beginning is admittedly a contingency or a choice by the subjective will of the philosopher,3 but the first step is proven when it becomes the last step in the logic. As Hegel puts it, "The essential requirement for the science of logic is not so much that the beginning be a pure immediacy, but rather that the whole of the science be within itself a circle in which the first is also the last and the last is also the first."4

I would like to propose a refinement, however. I wish to defend the proposition that the last, ultimate step of the Science of Logic is not the first step. Rather, the first step of the logic is the antepenultimate step-the third from the last-in the Science of Logic as a whole.

This interpretation allows for an answer to a question that has bothered readers of Hegel's first chapter on pure being. There, Hegel emphasizes the identity of being and nothing. If these are identical, how can their difference be discerned? The question boils down to this: Where does difference come from?5 If one thing is clear, the result of the identity of being and nothing is becoming-a concept that depends on a difference between being and nothing. Becoming, Hegel emphasizes, is "a movement in which both [being and nothing] are distinguished . . . . "6 Yet, in the obliterative regime of pure being, how can difference be accounted for?

If we see Hegel as beginning with the antepenultimate step in his logical system, we can provide a ready answer to the origin of difference, on which becoming depends. On my interpretation, difference is presupposed, as Hegel's critics have alleged. What is different in becoming is absolute knowing (the ultimate step) and pure immediacy (the antepenultimate step). Becoming summarizes the difference between these two-not the difference between being and nothing as such. To state this point in slightly different terms, pure being was supposed to be a...

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