Existence and Actuality

Abstract

In the whole series of concepts containing content and not equivalent to ‘nothing’ in Hegel’s Science of Logic, we encounter a clash between two tendencies — the ‘tranquil’, stable tendency that seeks and discovers identity, and the ‘unstable’ tendency that reveals nonidentity and provokes the search for new identity. For all their contradiction, they lose their meaning without each other and in this sense are complementary. Complementarity does not mean here that, besides its identifying tendency, reason seeks multiformity, change, motion in a complementary way. It means that complementary concepts lose their content without each other, as in the case of the wave and corpuscular aspects of the microcosm. Modern nonclassical representations make Hegel’s abstract constructs very concrete and physically perceptible.