Abstract

This is a short story about vision, thought, and contradiction and the role they play in the first half of Hegel's Science of Logic. The Logic begins with a descent, in this case, the fall from Being into Nothingness. Later, at nearly the exact middle of each text, there is a certain paradox in which everything is at stake, the category of contradiction. At this exact moment, thinking both fails and is birthed anew in a speculative guise. In this section, we engage some of Analytic philosophy's influential interpretations of Hegel's strange use of contradiction. In order to get there, we turn to a curious art work, James Turrell's Pleiades, as an aesthetic example of that first fall. We will then progress through the text, with thought and vision as our dual guide, at quite a quick pace, not slowing down until we enter Hegel's story of contradiction, where I will show the explosive nature of contradiction. This will allow us to see how Hegel harnesses the power of contradiction in order to generate the second half of the story of the Science of Logic. I begin with the descent of being into nothingness, the moment when darkness