of contradiction—in order to declare that the saying of Heraclitus’s contains a contradiction, that it is illogical and thus ‘untrue.’ The logical is neither an authority nor a source of the true and the truth. If, in light of the saying of the thinker and on the basis of the preceding observation, we dismiss ‘logic’ and conventional thinking, but still nevertheless must consider what is said in the saying, a solution is immediately provided for us—namely, that we throw ourselves headfirst into ‘dialectic,’ which we know (at least from hearsay) [126] not only does not eliminate ‘the contradiction’ and ‘the illogical,’ but indeed recognizes in the contradiction the ‘true.’ In the absolute metaphysics of German Idealism, aft er Kant had already made the significance of contradiction visible in his ‘Doctrine of the Antinomies,’ contradiction is not taken as something to be avoided in thinking, but rather as what thinking preserves so that the contradiction may be overcome and dissolved within a higher unity. As Hegel writes: “The dissolved contradiction is thus the ground, the essence as unity of positive and negative”;2 “Speculative thinking exists solely in the fact that thinking retains the contradiction and thereby itself therein, but does not let itself, as is commonly thought, be governed by it nor allow its determinations to be steered toward yet other contradictions or dissolved into nothing.”3 Hegel also writes, in his Lectures on Aesthetics:
Whosoever claims that nothing exists that bears within itself a contradiction as an identity of opposites must also maintain that nothing living exists. For the power of life and, even more so, the might of the Spirit consists in just this: in positing contradiction in itself, enduring it, and overcoming it. This positing and dissolving of contradiction between the ideal unity and the real separation of the elements constitutes the unceasing process of life, and life exists only as process.4
(It was from out of this metaphysics of contradiction that Kierkegaard formulated his doctrine of paradox, thereby demonstrating himself to be the most extreme of all Hegelians.)
Whether we overzealously and rashly drag the saying of Heraclitus’s before the tribunal of the so- called logical, or whether we indiscriminately attack the saying of the inceptual thinkers with the method of a later metaphysics, in each case we miss what is the primary and simple necessity for us: namely, that we attempt to think the saying in what it says, [127] and truly carry out this attempt of thinking in such a way as to thereby exert our understanding.
2 Hegel, Werke , IV , 540.
3 Ibid., IV, 547/8.
4 Ibid., XII, 171/2.
94 The Inception of Occidental Thinking