Life in the Middle Voice

Abstract

Because Hegelian ontology unfolds as a dialectical logic of implications without a foundational transcendental structure grounding it, it has been aligned with the category of “becoming” and process ontology more than with the category of “being” and substantive ontology. Of course this is an oversimplification, just as is Derrida’s characterization of “Aufhebung” as a “master category” as if it is a transcendental determiner guiding the entire dialectical development,¹ or the all-too-common “great entity” interpretations of Hegel criticized by Kolb.² While it is true enough that becoming emerges through the unsustainability of the category “being” with which the Logic begins, becoming too is superseded through its own implicit contradictions. This is a problem with post-Nietzschean anti-foundationalist attempts to valorize “becoming” over “being”³ — to collapse ontological determinacies back into “becoming” is to always return to the same determinacy, namely, “becoming,” which means that such efforts fail to get what they want. In other words, to really get at becoming, the determinacy of “becoming” itself must likewise “become.” To the degree that it remains becoming, it remains the same and therefore is not becoming. Thus in Hegelian ontology “becoming” too cannot remain the determinacy that it is.