ABSTRACT
Many commentators seem puzzled by what Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel says of ‘becoming’; some have ignored it altogether, treating the union of being and nothing simply as determinate being. He does regard becoming as essential to Hegel’s ontology, since ‘ Geist can only be embodied, and yet the embodiments are all inadequate, and hence disappear to give place to others.’ Hegel’s attack on metaphysics is directed against the view of it as a super-science which puts in contact with that which lies behind the veil of appearance, for ‘there is nothing behind the curtain except that which is in front of it’. The substitution of dialectical logic for metaphysics is equivalent to taking history seriously, at every level of intellectual activity. ‘The paradoxical and bizarre light in which many aspects of modern philosophy appear to those unacquainted with speculative thought is frequently due to the form of the simple judgment when it is used to express speculative results.’.
