blueness blossoms . . .” concludes with the words “Life is death, and death is also a life.”4 Here contradiction is unveiled as what unites and endures. This appears to contradict what Novalis writes in one of his fragments: “to annihilate the principle of contradiction is perhaps the highest task of a higher logic.”5 But the thoughtful poet means to say: The principle of common logic, namely the law of avoiding contradiction, must be annihilated and thus precisely validate contradiction as the basic trait of all that is actual. What Novalis says here is exactly the same as what Hegel thinks: annihilate the principle of contradiction in order to save contradiction as the law of the actuality of the actual.
By this reference to Hegel’s dialectical interpretation of the laws of thought, whereby they say more than their formulas state and whose prescriptions have never been followed by dialectical thinking, an exciting state of affairs comes to the fore, the adequate knowledge of which—the decisive experience of which—has not yet reached the ears of current thinking. Admittedly, we need not wonder about this. When even Hegel himself in that part of his Logic that deals with the laws of thought pronounces them “the most difficult,”6 how are we
4. Friedrich Hölderlin, “In lieblicher Bläue . . . ,” in Sämtliche Werke, historisch-kritische Ausgabe, vol. 6: 1806–1843: Dichtungen, Jugendarbeiten, Dokumente, ed. Ludwig von Pigenot and Friedrich Seebass, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Propyläen Verlag, 1923), 24–27, 27. English translation: Friedrich Hölderlin, “In Lovely Blueness . . . ,” in Poems & Fragments, ed. and trans. Michael Hamburger, 3rd ed. (London: Anvil Press Poetry, 1994), 714– 19, 719, translation modified.
5. Novalis, Fragment 1125 in Die Enzyklopädie, II. Abteilung: Philosophie, 2. “Über die Logik,” in Novalis, Briefe und Werke, vol. 3, ed. Ewald Wasmuth (Berlin: Lambert Schneider Verlag, 1943), 325–30, 330. Novalis, Entry 101 in “Aufzeichnungen von Juni bis Dezember 1799,” in Novalis, Schriften: Die Werke Friedrich von Hardenbergs, vol. 3: Das philosophische Werke II, ed. Richard Samuel with Hans-Joachim Mähl and Gerhard Schulz (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer Verlag, 1968), 556–94, 570.
6. G. W. F. Hegel, Encyclopädie der Wissenschaften im Grundrisse, 2nd ed., ed. Georg Lasson (Leipzig: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1911), §114, 128. G. W. F. Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse (1830), Gesammelte Werke vol. 20, ed. Wolfgang Bonsiepen and Hans Christian Lucas with assistance from Udo Rameil (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1992), 145. English translation: G. W. F. Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic, trans. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett Publishing Company, 1991), 179.