Wanting to start philosophy at the beginning, Hegel reasoned that the most abstract concept, the most general category of thought, was "being" because everything is. However, to say of anything only that it is is not to say what it is, thus is to say nothing about it. Therefore (?), the thesis, being, implies and is even identical with its antithesis, nothing, although at the same time they remain contradictory because, if there is nothing, then there is no being. However, the less abstract/more concrete category of becoming synthesizes the notions of being and nothing while also producing being determinate, that which has become one thing rather than another. In human activity, an artisan might want simply to create an artifact but must then create a particular artifact, chosen either by commission or by his own creativity. On the cosmic level, when potential becomes actual, it must become a particular universe, not any other possible universe. (I suggest that potentiality is more abstract than Hegelian "being.")
Being determinate differentiates itself into many thesis-antithesis pairs, notably:
reality and appearance;
subject and object -
- all synthesized in the Absolute, the total reality, although, because Hegel was a philosophical idealist, he called this the Absolute Idea.
The three basic principles recognized by Hegel are:
interpenetration of opposites, as in the Taoist yin-yang symbol (see second image) and in Heraclitus' "The way up is the way down";
transformation of quantity into quality, e.g., when water boils, a quantitative increase in temperature becomes a qualitative transformation of liquid into gas;
the negation of the negation, i.e., antithesis negates thesis but is in turn negated by synthesis which incorporates opposites and becomes a new thesis.
This fits with the Alorian view of the universe as not isolated data but an organic whole.
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