Hegel’s being and nothingness dialectic is taken up (aufhebung) into becoming. Hegel notes that being and nothingness are not really opposites as much as nothingness is the immediacy of abstract being. In this sense the dialectic here is not as much a play of absolute differences as universal and particular but a play of ‘sameness’ which nevertheless gets taken up, transformed, synthesized by becoming. In any case, the notion of being as abstract immediacy is first thought as nothing, as abstract, as NOT becoming. Hasn’t the existentialist taught us that being IS becoming? …nothing more or less. If I remember Hegel correctly the dialectic cannot go backwards, i.e., from synthesis to thesis and antithesis, becoming to being and nothingness. Isn’t there a progressive directional arrow of Spirit in Hegel’s dialectic? If we take Nietzsche’s maxim seriously that,

But no such agent exists; there is no “being” behind the doing, acting, becoming; the “doer” has simply been added to the deed by the imagination – the doing is everything. [Genealogy of Morals, Chapter 7, 13]

then aren’t we drawn to the conclusion that Hegel’s dialectic of being and nothingness is merely a verbal play? If we think of being and nothingness, abstract immediacy, then we must have already thought of being as not becoming, not yet lifted up to existence. Isn’t there already at work in Hegel’s thought a dichotomy, a binary opposition or at least a separation between being and becoming intrinsic from a prior and un-thought assumption? Have we thought of being as an absolute abstraction in order to ‘found’ existence and becoming? Has Hegel really revealed something profound or has he simply lapsed into the Latin, metaphysical belief that the mind does the body, being does becoming?

And, doesn’t this assumption have a progressive direction? Is there some kind of ‘creation ex-nihilo’ at work in Hegel’s cosmogony or idea-gony? Becoming rises up from being and nothingness. Existence is surmounted from being and nothingness. An ‘I’ is concretized, existential-ized as becoming, perhaps metaphorically as rising up from a kind of human vegetative state, from the emptiness of abstract immediacy. At play here is an ancient strife, polemos, a battle epitomized in the Roman misconception of Greek thinking, the thinking of truth, veritas, as oppositional from falsity. Heidegger points out the indo-European ‘ver’ as command, as rule, as higher imperium. I wonder if there is also a tale to be told here from the Roman dissimulated notion of Greek arche; origin, as rule rather than Hesiod’s notion of arche as yawning gap, differentiation not yet determined.

Truth then is taken as oppositional to false, fallere in Latin and from indo-European ‘to fall’, fallen-ness. To fall in Christianity is to not heed the command of the Lord. Here we have the beginning and most original Form of truth and falsity as absolutely oppositional. Hegel may be the most perfect expression; teleology of the Latinized absolute-ized reduction of truth to correctness, to truth as binary oppositions. Could Nietzsche have this in mind when he writes of the binary opposition of master and slave:

The watchwords of the battle, written in characters which have remained legible throughout human history, read: “Rome vs. Israel, Israel vs. Rome.” No battle has ever been more momentous than this one. [Genealogy of Morals, Chapter 7, 16]

Could this be the metaphysical canonization of slavery, of rule and imperium, we find in Constantinople Rome? Could Heidegger have this in mind when he writes of truth in his lecture on Parmenides? The excess of aletheia, unconcealed-ness, that Heidegger brings out from ancient Greece in contradistinction to the modern conception of truth is not thought from the binary opposition of conceal and un-conceal, semblance and truth, false and real? The rule, the order, the command determines origin and makes being possible without becoming or prior to becoming in some Idea-ological determination. If the order tells us that being and nothingness come before becoming, make becoming possible as the resolution of creation ex nihilo then the determination that being and becoming are differential, differentiated, draws its breath from the metaphysics of Rome. If these distinctions are merely verbal, merely historical repetitions of rutted patterns of habitual thought which oppositional-ize, deduced from artificial origins of being and nothingness that cannot stand in existence, in becoming, aren’t we really just reifying in auto-affection a beginning rule and order, a mathematics which cannot think excess to itself.

Heidegger thinks the excess of truth forgotten in Latin as aletheia. Nietzsche thinks it as the body doing the mind, becoming doing Being. Levinas think excess as the face of the other. Is there violence in ordaining that the rule reduce these terms to oppositions and transformations, that order oblivi-ate, forget its forgetting, make order the conquest of chaos, gap, differentiation without determination and not even be able to be able to escape its absolute subjectivism?