This identity of opposites is, of course, the great stumbling-block in Hegel’s logic to many minds, and it has been the butt of much mockery. But to reject this category is to deny the validity of every step of the path to it. Hegel has already shown the identity (not the sameness) of opposites. It is there for the thinker who traces the dialectic. Being turned in our hands into not-being or nothing; that which merely is, equally is not. The identity is there and is patent in the dialectic, although it is not manifest to the mind limited to such principles. If imperfect thoughts do imply their opposites, there must be some more perfect principle of thought within which this implication falls as content. And such thought is an identity of opposites. In this category of the notion Hegel has brought within the content of thought the power which gave the dialectic life; the dialectic has now become for itself what it is in itself. If we, in real earnest, reject this position, it is difficult to see what shift thought can make. There is no stable mean between the utter nominalism of Antisthenes and the concrete logic which treats the assertion of the identity of different things not as a sign of the impotence of thought, but as a statement of the nature of reason and of reality. When we think coherently, so that the identity of the universal and particular is manifest, the result is the concrete universal or true individual. The unity lives only in the differences, and the latter have their meaning and being only in the whole which they utter forth. The universal which does not thus articulate itself is abstract; it is at most a common element—a glorified particular—and hence not really a universal at all. Similarily, the particular abstracted from its context loses all that makes it what it is, it lapses into the pure being which is nothing. The concrete universal, thus, or the notion, is the truth both of the universal and of the particular; it is the category where they are identical.
This analysis, however, must not be understood abstractly; the identity in question does not exclude difference. The fault of Spinoza’s philosophy is that he achieves unity at the expense of difference; he files down the two aspects until they have an indifferent shape and so can be mistaken for one another. But for Hegel the negative aspect, difference, tension, opposition, is a moment—though only a moment.
