Being is the indeterminate immediate

Highlighted text is Lenin’s underlining. The ® access his annotations.

Section One: Determinateness (Quality)

¹³⁰ Being [current general existence] is the indeterminate immediate.

It is free from determinateness in relation to essence and also from any which it can possess within itself.

This reflectionless being [existence] is being [existence] as it is immediately in its own self alone.

¹³¹ Because it is indeterminate being, it lacks all quality.

But its indeterminateness is only in contrast to what is determinate or qualitative.

But determinate being [specific existence] stands in contrast to general being [existence].

• The very indeterminateness of [general existence] is the quality of [general existence].

Thus, [specific existence] is in itself determinate.

[General existence] becomes [specific existence] as a finite being that:

• sublates itself and
• passes over into the infinite relation of being [general existence] to its own self [specific existence].

This turns it itno being-for-self.

¹³² What is pure being [existence] without any further determination?

[Current general existence] is equal only to [Current general existence].

[Current general existence] :

• is equal relatively to an other [existence]
• has no diversity within itself nor any with a reference outwards.

[Current general existence] would not be pure [existence] if it contained any determination or content which would make it different from another [existence].

It [Current general existence] is pure indeterminateness and emptiness.

There is nothing to be intuited in it.

[Current general existence] is only this pure intuiting itself.

Just as little is anything to be thought in it, or it is equally only this empty thinking.

[Current general existence] is in fact nothing.

¹³³ What is pure nothing[ness]?

It is simply:

• equality with itself
• complete emptiness
• absence of all determination and content

In so far as intuiting or thinking can be mentioned here, it counts as a distinction whether something or nothing is intuited or thought.

To intuit or think nothing has, therefore, a meaning.

Both are distinguished and thus [the idea of] nothing exists in our thinking.

[The idea of] nothing is empty intuition and thought itself. It is the same empty thought as pure being [Current general existence].

C Becoming

1. Unity of Being and Nothing [existence and the idea of nothingness]

¹³⁴ Pure Being [existence] and pure [idea of] nothing[ness] are, therefore, the same.

• [Pure existence] has passed over [the idea of] nothing[ness]
• [the idea of] nothing[ness] has passed into [Pure existence]

This makes them not the same.

Their truth is therefore, this movement of the immediate vanishing of the one into the other.

This movement is called ‘becoming’.

• This distinguishes both.

Remark 1: The Opposition of Being and Nothing in Ordinary Thinking

¹³⁵ Nothing is usually opposed to something.

But the being of something is already determinate and is distinguished from another something.

And so therefore the nothing which is opposed to the something is also the nothing of a particular something, a determinate nothing. Here, however, nothing is to be taken in its indeterminate simplicity.

Should it be held more correct to oppose to being, non-being instead of nothing, there would be no objection to this so far as the result is concerned, for in non-being the relation to being is contained: both being and its negation are enunciated in a single term, nothing, as it is in becoming. But we are concerned first of all not with the form of opposition (with the form, that is, also of relation) but with the abstract, immediate negation: nothing, purely on its own account, negation devoid of any relations — what could also be expressed if one so wished merely by ’not'.