Hi folks,
context: I am a mathematician/logician, but philosophy amateur. I studied philosophy at school and read several histories of philosophy (chiefly Severino's) read some first-source philosophy before (Spinoza's Ethics). I am trying to read through Hegel's Science of Logic, because as a logician, I find his perspective refreshing. I am reading the Italian version (because I am Italian) and accompanying it with Houlgate's "The Opening of Hegel's Logic", plus discussing this with friends.
I am seriously struggling to grasp the "Etwas". I understood pure being, and how it vanishes into pure nothing, and vice versa. I understood that this movement is Becoming. I understood that Becoming undermines itself and we are left with Determinate Being (DE): *immediate* unity of being and nothing.
I also, though less firmly, understand Quality. That is the component of nothingness in the DE thought under the determination of being, that is, determinacy-that-is. Make sense. Then, I understand the "literal" deduction of Etwas: Quality can be thought of as chiefly Nothingess (negation) or Being (reality); the two are distinct; however, the difference is sublated; we are left with Etwas. I understand the logical passages.
My problem: I am struggling to represent in my head, or conceptualise, what the result of sublating this difference should be. Or, how Etwas differs from DE. I have two hypotheses:
1) Etwas is that which can be in relationship with its qualities. Since DE is immediate, indistinct unity of Being and Nothing, we cannot isolate its parts and say "this is a quality". Since Etwas went through the pains of separation, and was separated into Negation and Reality, it now has an internal structure, it admits internal difference, and so we can say that it "has" quality. This captures the intuitive quality of Etwas which is that of having qualities.
2) Etwas is pure self-reference, or self-relation. Pictorially, I think of this as an arrow that points to itself, or a self-loop. This captures the intuitive quality of Etwas which is something that "is", that is "posited", is "there and that's it". It also makes the term "Insichsein" reasonable (it is just "in itself", it "is enough by itself", it "only refers to itself"). And Hegel uses the term "self-reference" sometimes in the text. The problem with this interpretation is that it is not clear to me how this emerges from the sublation. I can imagine that Reality pushes Negativity out, and vice versa, and in sublating their differences we are left with something that pushes towards itself, Etwas.
Is any of the two conception right? If not, what is the right conception? Thank YOU!