Sheer Being and Thought
Some Further Notes on Houlgate's Reading of Hegel's Being Logic
I wrote earlier on the difference between the Pippinian and Houlgatian interpretations of Hegel’s Logic (and yes, that was a tacit reference to Hegel’s Differenzschrift). In the current piece, I want to elaborate a bit more on Stephen Houlgate’s take on what he calls ‘sheer being’. It will still be extremely exploratory, without delving into the detail of Hegel’s own text, let alone into the secondary literature on the beginning of the Logic (apart from Houlgate, important work in this area is offered by Robert Pippin, Dieter Henrich, Rolf-Peter Horstmann, and more recently Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer in his massive 3-volume commentary on the Logic). The piece is chiefly critical of a particular, sophisticated and influential reading of the Logic, and doesn’t make propositions on how a positive reading of the Logic might look like.
These are just some more critical reflections on what I take to be an ultimately unsuccessful way of approaching Hegel’s Logic, one though that seems very influential and intuitively plausible. Hegelians are prone to esotericism when it comes to talking about Being.1 I am increasingly suspicious of their attempts to defend ontological readings of Hegel’s Being Logic, such as we can find in the work of Houlgate (but also many others). Below I shall comment in turn on various passages I quote from a recent essay by Houlgate (Houlgate 2018) and elaborate on some of the central arguments. It speaks for itself that Houlgate’s work belongs to the most important and interpretatively most exact studies in Hegel scholarship. Personally, I have benefited from his work tremendously and couldn’t have come to my current, still inchoate, understanding of Hegel without his work. I’d go so far as to say that in general one can’t come to grips with Hegel’s Logic without having read Houlgate’s commentaries (I’m myself grossly negligent in this department since I have yet to begin his recent two-volume set on the Being Logic). Houlgate’s Hegel is close to the true Hegel, but I believe not yet close enough! The devil is in the details.
1.
Speculative logic is … ontology because pure thought, in abstraction from all it is normally taken to be, is itself nothing but sheer being. … Thought in its utter abstraction is thus no more and no less than indeterminate being. (2018:102)
Houlgate takes the Logic to be an ontology, because, as he says, ‘pure thought … is itself nothing but sheer being’.2 It is even ‘directly ontological’ (2018:115). What Houlgate means by this is that the Logic is an essay in rational metaphysics in the pre-Kantian style: it concerns the ‘direct thought, or intellectual intuition, of being and thus a metaphysics in a pre-Kantian, rationalist sense’ (2018:113).
In order to get to this intuition of sheer Being, we just need to abstract from all that we normally take thought to consist in, and with it all the laws that govern it. In other words, we must abstract from, forget for a moment about, the laws of logic, even the most basic principles of thought, such as the principle of contradiction and the principle of excluded middle.
This is related to Houlgate’s much-trumpeted idea about the ‘presuppositionlessness’ of the procedure of the Logic, which is Hegel’s own new kind of methodology, though he certainly doesn’t want to call it a methodology, as this wrongly suggests a distinct form that can be applied to a content that is separable from it. But there is something methodological or procedural about the proposal (the ‘resolve’) Hegel makes at the start (and especially in the introductory chapter). It is comparable to the Cartesian procedure of doubt in that we suspend normal ways of thinking and standard beliefs of account giving in metaphysics.
Literally everything about what we normally take for granted, including the most basic principles of logic, must be suspended. We must literally think freely, as freely as possible. What we are left with after this abstraction is the ‘pure’, ‘sheer’ being of thought, according to Houlgate. What, at first blush, I take him to mean here is that after such an abstraction we are left with the very fact alone of thinking. That sounds plausible enough even though, at first, not very informative (for how does that get the dialectic going?). But it is not exactly what Houlgate really means by it, or at least not only.
2.
At the start of Hegel’s speculative logic … we are confronted by thought in the abstract and by being as such, since the two completely coincide. Such logic, as it proceeds, thus discloses the true nature of thought and being at the same time. (2018:103)
[B]eing that belongs to thought … is no less being as such. (2018:103)
[S]peculative logic must be understood in two ways at the same time. It is the logical account of the categories of thought through which alone being is intelligible, and at the same time the direct ontological study of being in which a category is known to be … a “rational determination of the real”. (2018:113, emphasis added)
Logic is thus initially ontology, not just as the derived thought of being, but as the direct thought or intuition of being schlechthin. (2018:113)
[L]ogic is … the study of thought and the direct consciousness of being at the same time. (2018:115, emphasis added)
Here we begin to see that Houlgate doesn’t just mean that we start out with the sheer fact of thinking. It appears that the act of abstraction yields an additional result, namely, that we are being ‘confronted’ with ‘being as such’, not just ‘thought in the abstract’; otherwise the emphasis on the connective ‘and’ in the first quotation would be superfluous here. This is also indicated by the last sentence in the first quotation: logic ‘discloses the true nature of thought and being at the same time’ (emphasis added). This suggests that two things are being revealed, but simultaneously. It’s therefore not just the disclosure of thought alone that is the issue. That is, not just the Being of thought is what is being disclosed, but in that the Being of thought is disclosed Being itself is being disclosed. This makes the logic strictly ontological, for it is Being itself that is the subject matter of the analysis.
Now this Being is, at this beginning of the analysis in the Logic, not something apart from thought, despite the fact that Houlgate seems to hint at two separable ‘entities’, thought and Being. There is thus an assumption of an initial identity between the two. This is Houlgate’s prima facie monistic take on the Logic: we start from an absolute identity, not from an absolute difference. The Being at the start is not Being ‘out there’, but rather just the same as indeterminate thought. In other words, there is nothing additional to the ‘sheer being’ of thought that would be a reference to Being as such, namely, a putative Being without thought. This is what Houlgate at any rate suggests:
[I]t is the thought of thought itself as pure being and being in turn is initially nothing other than this pure being. (2018:103)
At the outset … thought conceives of itself as simple being—being that is not the being of thought in particular but sheer being as such. (2018:113)
There is thus an identity of thought and Being, right at the start, even though that that identity remains, at that point, indeterminate since we don’t know anything further about either Being or thought than the sheer fact of them, or rather, the sheer fact of thought as sheer Being. But it gets tricky. Thought appears largely to fall by the wayside in Houlgate’s account, after all. Houlgate isn’t as much as a monist or absolute-identitarian as he professes to be.
3.
The focus is on Being from the word go in Houlgate’s account. It seems that the logic that ensues from that very first thought is, not the logic of thought disclosing what is meant by ‘Being’ and its determinations, but rather Being itself that discloses itself and its determinations, which are then registered, ‘discovered’ in thought, namely in the account of the Logic. The Logic describes nothing but the unfolding of Being itself, by Being itself. The Logic is thus a kind of vehicle for Being for self-disclosing its truth. Like the Holy Scriptures, on a particular reading, the Logic is the Word or Logos of Being that comes down to us straight from Being itself.
Houlgate writes:
[I]ndeterminate being with which we begin itself turns, logically, into the realm of finite things and objects, and eventually nature, that surrounds us. (2018:103, boldface added)
…and then demonstrating that precisely such being, through its own inner logic, turns into being as we usually understand it, being that is “out there”. (2018:103, emphasis added)
The language of ‘discovery’ is Houlgate’s own:
[O]ntology is logic—the discovery of the structure of being within the structure of thought. (2018:109)
Note the adverb ‘logically’ in the first quotation, and ‘through its own inner logic’ in the second one. What does that mean: indeterminate Being logically turning itself into the realm of finite things etc.? What heavy lifting is the term ‘logically’ supposed to be doing here? How can Being itself turn itself into something more determinate in a logical manner without involving some categories of thought? Of course, Houlgate acknowledges the involvement of thought given the unity of thought and Being, but not in the way one would expect, namely as thought a priori determining whatever there is to say about Being. Thought appears to be an afterthought. For
we first bring indeterminate being to mind and then discover that such being itself takes the form of the world about us. (2018:104, emphasis added)
The simplicity of the first act in the analysis is not an actual act of thought in a standard thought process and nor is it something other than Being that drives the logic (cf. Houlgate 2014:67):
[T]his simplicity is explicitly neither thought, nor freedom, nor the process of proof, but just sheer indeterminate being. (2018:108)
Thought in its utter abstraction is … no more and no less than indeterminate being. (2018:102)
[W]hat is before us is nothing but being … and it is this indeterminate being alone that moves logic forward (by vanishing into nothing and so proving to be ‘becoming’). (2018:109, emphasis added)
Thought seems to be relegated to an after-the-fact chronicling of categories that are in the first instance determinations of the real. Categories ‘are just ways of being: being something, being finite, and so on’ (2018:114, emphasis added). Houlgate fully ontologises the Logic to the point of saying that even thought itself is nothing but a particular manifestation of Being, which is always the basic irreducible foundation, throughout the Logic:
[Being] will not cease to be irreducibly itself, even when it becomes the “idea of cognition”. (Indeed, even thought as a mode of self-consciousness, spirit—the thought that undertakes the logic—is a mode of being: it is being-that-has-become-thought.) (2018:116, boldface added)
This is why Houlgate insists, in contrast to Pippin, that the first thought in the account is not just the ‘indeterminate thought of being’, but also ‘thought as indeterminate being’ (2018:114).
When Hegel says that the beginning is pure Being, how should we read this? Is it the mere notion of ‘pure Being’ with which we start, or is it real Being (realiter), of which we have an intuition? Houlgate seems to think it is an intuition of real Being. Of course this intuition is not a sensible one, but an intellectual intuition. So an intellectual intuition seems to lie at the root of the Logic. But if that is the case, how can we get from an intellectual intuition to the development of the Concept? What is an intellectual intuition in any case, according to Houlgate? How is this different from starting from the notion of ‘pure being’?
Bar the world-emanating-from-cosmic-mind type of interpretation or a super-idealist but very un-Hegel-like content-of-individual-minds reading, how should the idea of the being of thought, as Houlgate proposes, be interpreted? How does the world of real objects out there result from this first thought, the thought of indeterminate, sheer Being that is also the sheer Being of thought, if it is not in the emanating-from-mind kind of way, either on the cosmic or individual scale?
4.
So, apparently, the sheer Being that is indeterminate Being is the Being of which I have an intellectual intuition at the start of the logic, or it is sheer Being that is somehow manifest. But then it vanishes into nothing. Now what could this ‘nothing’ be? It is not a mere concept (as on Pippin’s reading), so is it literally nothing, the literal nullification of the sheer Being of which I just a moment ago had an intellectual intuition, i.e. sheer Nothing? It must be sheer Nothing in the literal sense, because it must be seen on an equal footing with sheer Being, which is not collapsible into the thought of Being, according to Houlgate. But what is sheer Nothing other than, well, nothing?
Furthermore, has the intellectual intuition thereby also suddenly vanished since the Being of which I had an intuition is the sheer Being of thought? Even more remarkable is that in that the intellectual intuition, the sheer Being, vanishes into Nothing, it thereby becomes something else, namely, ‘becoming’. Now how does this work, if it is not just an explanation of a way in which mere metaphysical notions are seen to be related to each other even in their opposition, however that relation may be qualified? How can indeterminate Being suddenly be literally nothing and then become something3 again, and what’s more, become something a little less indeterminate? And what’s even more: how can the simultaneous reciprocal vanishing into one another, as Hegel suggests is the case, be a real process of sheer Being? If sheer Being vanishes into Nothing, the process of sheer Being’s own unfolding stops then and there. There is no further development, unless of course sheer Being is some kind of monolithic, unchangeable Being in the background, enduring across all dialectical mutations. A big invariable Substance after all!
But this can’t of course be the case, for it invites a kind of infinite regress. Being itself is the ‘mover’ of the dialectic, as Houlgate himself says (see e.g. Houlgate 2014:67), therefore it can’t be excluded from the negation that is the essential characteristic of this movement.4 It itself vanishes of its own accord into Nothing. No sheer Being remains or endures even after only the first step. But equally Nothing vanishes into Being, so Nothing becomes Being, so that it seems that via Nothing’s vanishing Being is retained in some altered sense. But both Being and Nothing are ‘nur das Werden’ (Houlgate 2014:70). There is only becoming! Sheer Being has vanished by the very first step.
This process doesn’t make sense on a purely ontological reading (the ‘sheer Being’ reading), as if literally a state of Being, sheer Being, annihilates itself in order to then create itself anew literally ex nihilo, for if Being should be interpreted literally, then Nothing too: Nothing is not-Being. So Being turns into not-Being, nothings itself, to put it somewhat cheekily, and through this it becomes ‘becoming’. Not-Being turns itself into Being and becomes ‘becoming’ too! This is how Hegel indeed appears to describe it, but it cannot be taken literally to involve an actual state of Being, even if only sheer indeterminate Being, of which I am intuitively aware to boot, a direct representation of sheer Being, to turn itself—which is what Houlgate suggests—into Nothing, whilst simultaneously Nothing supposedly does the same.
This only makes sense if Being and Nothing are contemporaneous (‘simultaneously’), but wasn’t it sheer Being that we started with, and not Nothing? Yes, but Nothing is the same indeterminate immediacy. True. That’s how it is first figured out in the next step of the analysis. If, however, that analysis should rather be taken in the sense of being a process of the ‘inner logic’ of Being itself, then it can’t be something that is the next step in the analysis, for it should be happening simultaneously: Nothing would then literally be that with which we start, as it is with Being (whatever that means on that reading).
But that’s not what Houlgate says: for some inexplicable reason we must start with sheer Being, in the ontological, literal sense of the term, in the sense namely, that there is sheer Being that is not collapsible into its conception (as it is for Pippin).5 In a conceptualist reading, it doesn’t really matter whether you begin with Being or Nothing, because the net effect is the same: I’m thinking nothing in particular, nothing determinate, the pure ‘Bestimmungslose’, as Hegel says (GW 21:86), in both cases. In Houlgate’s version, sheer Being is, and continues to be, always in the background regardless of what’s going on in thought. While Houlgate agrees that sheer Being is the pure indeterminate, he still appears to want to retain a sense of Being in the common usage of the term, given that he is so adamant that it not be reduced to Being’s conceptualisability.
Unless he has a more developed account of this in his recent big book—which I admit I haven’t read—this sounds unconvincing. It seems to be saying that it is indeterminate Being that moves the dialectic forward. But in what sense, and in virtue of what? In virtue of its mere pure indeterminacy? If we look at the logic of the concepts, then we can see that there is a way in which the concepts ‘being’ and ‘nothing’ both share essential characteristics (immediacy, indeterminacy) so that they thus collapse into each other—note the ‘each other’; it’s not a one-way unidirectional vanishing. But this vanishing cannot be something inherent in sheer Being, whereby Being itself is the movement of negation, for how can Nothing then vanish into Being in virtue of the same movement of negation? Negation must account for both their vanishings into each other, and it can’t do so if negation is identified with Being as the sole movement of the dialectic.
The movement of negation is a conceptual ‘operation’ carried out in thought (apperceptively) however minimal this thought might be: it is the realisation, in thought, that the immediacy and indeterminacy of the concept of sheer Being is the same as the immediacy and indeterminacy of the concept of Nothing. As opposites, separately in their immediacy, they are utterly devoid of determinacy. A modicum of determinacy they will get in their opposition alone, i.e in what Hegel labels ‘becoming’. So the idea or thought or notion that ‘being’ and ‘nothing’ must be seen in their unity as conceptual opposites first gives them some determinacy and mediacy, which in their immediacy, regarded as separate terms, they did not have. The oppositioning, as it were, yields their first determination.
The vanishing into each other is not some esoteric process going on in Being (or Nothing, for that matter). Rather, it is what is shown by Reason, namely, that opposites are only intelligible in their synthetic unity. In his early work Hegel took Kant’s productive imagination, or the figurative synthesis operative in the sensible content of our perceptions, to be Reason itself, which lies at the root of identity and difference, Being and Verstand.6 The negation that drives the dialectic is nothing but the objective unity of apperception, i.e. the productive imagination or the intuiting intellect, in which the identity as well as difference of Being and Nothing are simultaneously established as reciprocally constitutive (and thus reciprocally opposing or negating each other).
The ostensible mistake is now to think that on such a reading the categories are just categories, and leave out Being. How can the negation-operation in thought be just that, without it having some basis in Being itself? This is what Houlgate thinks if we look at Being and Nothing as mere notions, as concepts, however indeterminate. Houlgate thinks that it’s alright to think that we are dealing with conceptual or categorial structures, but he emphasises that these categorial structures are, first and foremost, the structures of Being itself, inherent to Being; they are the categorial structures of thought only when we subsequently discover ‘what being itself proves to be’ (2018:113–14).
What happens here is that Houlgate covertly reinserts a dualism between thought, thinking about categorial structures, and Being, in which these categorial structures should be seen to be instantiated—or, if the term ‘instantiate’ is inappropriate here: ‘being, which shows to be characterised by these categorial structures in itself’. Houlgate himself speaks of them as being ‘inherent to’ Being; even ‘concept’ is, according to Houlgate, ‘an ontological structure inherent in being as such’ (2018:114). Houlgate wants an identity theory of thought and Being, but in fact proposes a quasi-dualist reading of the Logic by adopting an ontologist reading for which thought only supervenes on the ontological foundation (at the earliest in the Concept Logic, but in actual fact only in the Philosophy of Spirit, so in fact outside the body of the Science of Logic). The categorial structure is the structure of how Being is, it is not something that is imposed on it from without. This latter way of putting it is in fact how Houlgate interprets a reading like Pippin’s: presumably, while the latter professes an identity between thought and Being, Being is left out because the emphasis is squarely on thought.
I suggest that Houlgate’s reading of the Logic is not really a unified reading of the identity thesis about thought and Being but a concurrentist one: the Logic is an account of the categories of thought and ‘at the same time’ an account of the categories of Being. The account of the categories of thought concurs precisely with that of Being. The concurrentism, however, is unidirectional: the categories are categories of Being of which we ‘are directly conscious’ in thought, but one can’t take Houlgate’s reading in such a way that the categories are, first and foremost, to be seen as categories of thought which express, of their own account and a priori, something substantial about Being.
That is why he so insistently opposes his reading to Pippin’s, for whom the Being Logic, as much as the rest of the Logic, is precisely a logic, rather than primarily an ontology, of the categories that thought thinks, in virtue of which and only in virtue of which we can determine Being’s intelligibility. Pippin’s reading is not concurrentist in the sense that the categories of Being map exactly onto the categories of thought and vice versa, but his reading does express a true identity of thought and Being: the full determinacy of thought ipso facto expresses Being’s determinacy. It is not the case, for Pippin, that the categories of thought map exactly onto the categories of Being, for there is no separable set of categories of Being on which the categories of thought would be mappable. The conceptual or categorial determinacy of thought is all there is, and it articulates what can in principle be known about Being, full stop. There is no gap to be bridged, no mapping to be done, no explanation required for why and how the categories of Being should be seen as the categories of thought. The logical, dialectical running through all of the categories of thought, thinking having completed the thinking of its thinking in all its ostensible ‘contradictions’, will do all of the work of establishing the identity of thought and Being. There is no ‘inner logic’ of Being that would somehow have to be seen as identical to the logic of thought.
By contrast, Being has primacy for Houlgate. The determination is wholly Being’s own work; we are just onlookers, as it were, of and in Being’s own unfolding. In fact, as we saw before, even thought itself is just a category of Being, as he says. Hence, he says that the Logic must be an ontology first (2018:114).
But because of this unidirectional interpretation, Houlgate is not capable of explaining how we come to think about the categories of Being, how the categories of Being are isomorphically mapped within the structure of thought. It is as if he believes that the categories of Being just present themselves in their developing movement from indeterminacy away to determinacy. The determinacy is not thought’s own; thought merely passively registers the determinacy of the categories, which are the inherent structures of Being. We merely discover what Being itself does of its own accord in virtue of its inner dynamic.
This is for example demonstrated by a striking passage in an earlier article of Houlgate’s:
Die logische Entwicklung, die Hegel nachvollzieht, ist aber kein Produkt unseres Denkens. Im Gegenteil wird sie durch das Sein und das Nichts selbst hervorgebracht, und sie wird bloß durch unser Denken explizit gemacht. Die Entwicklung der Kategorien in der Logik wird also nicht durch unser Denken bestimmt, sondern umgekehrt: unser Denken selber wird durch die den Kategorien immanente Eigendynamik vorangetrieben. (2014:67)
It looks like Houlgate has a very subjectivist-psychological understanding of das Denken that is at play in the Logic, and he projects this on Pippin. But Pippin’s stressing the ‘thinking thinking thinking’ has got nothing to do with what we merely believe is the case nor with how categories supposedly cause how we think about the categories, but rather precisely with the logic, the a priori conception of all that is involved in the analysis of Being. This logic is of course a logic that is not a view from nowhere, as it were. Concepts don’t move themselves, they must be predicates in judgements, as Kant showed. But psychology is not an element that is part of it. Also Pippin’s focus is entirely on the ‘logische Entwicklung’ of concepts, however: in thought. Houlgate’s point threatens to reintroduce a dualistic constellation that was supposed to be superseded, a dualism between thought and Being.
Houlgate might protest against this portrayal of his view, for he might say that there’s an identity between thought and Being from the outset (as he does seem to say at times). This means that the categories of Being that unfold before thought are ipso facto mapped in thought. The categorial structure of Being is one for one ‘replicated’ in thought, in virtue of the fact that thought is directly conscious of Being, and hence also of the unfolding of the various categories. But again, how does this work with categories like ‘nothing’ and ‘becoming’? Are we literally intuitively aware of Nothing? Does Being literally turn into Nothing and then Becoming literally arises out of it? If sheer Being is there all along in the irreducible background, as Houlgate is keen to stress with his non-collapsibility thesis, then Being doesn’t really vanish into Nothing, after all.
For Houlgate, there is nothing that thought a priori contributes to the determination of the categories: the categories of Being are their own determinacy, which in their unfolding is registered in thought; the Logic is then not so much a logic strictly speaking but rather a phenomenology of Being, à la Heidegger (this is not how Houlgate would see it, of course). But it is hard to see how this can be interpreted as in conformity with Hegel’s post-critical, Kantian approach, for it is directly contrary to it. One can’t have one’s cake and eat it: either one’s Hegel is Spinozist or rationalist in the pre-Kantian sense, as Houlgate believes, or it is Kantian. Houlgate thinks it’s possible to have both, but his ontological reading precludes the possibility of seeing Hegel as a post-Kantian, in the crucial sense that objects must conform to the forms of thought, namely, in the strict Kantian sense of an identity theory of thought and object, rather than the forms of thought conforming to the objects. Translated to the Hegelian project of the Logic, this means that the logic takes precedence over Being in terms of Houlgate’s sheer Being. Logic determines Being’s intelligibility, not Being itself.
References:
Houlgate, S. (2014) ‘Der Anfang von Hegels Logik’, in A. Koch / F. Schick / K. Vieweg / C. Wirsing (eds), Hegel—200 Jahre Wissenschaft der Logik, Deutscher Jahrbuch Philosophie, Bd. 5 (Hamburg: Meiner), pp. 59–70.
— (2018) ‘Thought and Being in Hegel’s Logic. Reflections on Hegel, Kant and Pippin’, in L. Illetterati & F. Menegoni (eds) Wirklichkeit. Beiträge zu einem Schlüsselbegriff der hegelschen Philosophie, Veröffentlichungen der Internationalen Hegel-Vereinigung, Bd. 28 (Frankfurt a.M: Klostermann), pp. 101–18.
Schulting, D. (2017) ‘On Hegel’s Critique of Kant’s Subjectivism in the Transcendental Deduction’, in D. Schulting, Kant’s Radical Subjectivism. Perspectives on the Transcendental Deduction (London/New York: Palgrave Macmillan), 341–70.
© Dennis Schulting, 2022.
As in the previous post, I again capitalise ‘Being’ so as to differentiate it from the present participle. It is in no way suggested that ‘Being’ so capitalised refers to a substance-like entity; it merely indicates the grammatically substantive use of the verb. Houlgate does not use the capitalisation, so when I quote him, the lower case is naturally left as it is.
[edited on August, 17, 2022] It is often suggested, wrongly I think, that the term ‘ontology’ and the cognate ‘ontological’ has nothing got to do with transcendental philosophy or can be seen as separable from ‘logic’ and literally as referring to what Houlgate calls ‘sheer Being’. I think the contrast ‘ontology’ vs. ‘logic’ is a straw man. Even for Kant, whose statement in the Critique of Pure Reason (at B303/A247) that transcendental philosophy replaced ontology seems to preclude it, ontology is ‘immanent thinking’, i.e. ‘a science of things the objective reality of whose concepts can be securely established’ (Br. AA 11:313–14). This is as late as 1792. In other words, there is no opposition strictly speaking between an ontology and a logic and I think Houlgate would not object to this. The point however is—and this is where Houlgate and Pippin diverge—how we see the extent to which an ontology is not just a logic (which it always also was), but a transcendental logic, a logic namely that doesn’t just register the categories of Being in an account of their relations but rather shows how our capacity to think actively establishes the relations between the categories of Being. Transcendental philosophy has become (replaced) what Wolff called Philosophia prima sive ontologia. Sure, Kant is much less sanguine about the continued usefulness of the term ‘ontology’, if we take his famous pronouncement at B303/A247 at face value. But given the rhetorical aspect of that statement in the Critique, we might expect him to make that sharp contrast, to indicate the Critique’s distancing from the rationalists’ confidence in having knowledge of Being’s intelligibility. But a series of contemporary Reflexionen indicate he doesn’t shy away from the continued use of the term. In the aforementioned letter to Beck from 1792, he’s quite clear about it. Hegel, I think, took this in the right direction. He had no qualms about talking about Being without however relinquishing Kant’s critical distance from the rationalists: the Logic as a true transcendental philosophy and ontology.
I don’t mean the category ‘something’ here, which will appear only later on in the dialectic.
Houlgate (2014:67–70) is very good at describing this idea of vanishing of Being and Nothing into each other.
See Schulting (2017).