"static" concepts we transmute and falsify the "fluent"
reality. As Professor James says "The essence of life is its continuously
changing character; but our concepts are all discontinuous and
fixed ... When we conceptualize we cut out and fix, and exclude everything
but what we have fixed. A concept means a _that-and-no-other_." But are
our concepts static, fixed, and discontinuous? What if the very
concepts we employ in reasoning should exemplify the universal flow of
life? Hegel finds that indeed to be the case. Concepts we daily use,
such as quality and quantity, essence and phenomenon, appearance and
reality, matter and force, cause and effect, are not fixed and
isolated entities, but form a continuous system of interdependent
elements. Stated dogmatically the meaning is this: As concavity and
convexity are inseparably connected, though one is the very opposite
of the other--as one cannot, so to speak, live without the other, both
being always found in union--so can no concept be discovered that is
not thus wedded to its contradiction. Every concept develops, upon
analysis, a stubbornly negative mate. No concept is statable or
definable without its opposite; one involves the other. One cannot
speak of motion without implying rest; one cannot mention the finite
without at the same time referring to the infinite; one cannot define
cause without explicitly defining effect. Not only is this true, but
concepts, when applied, reveal perpetual oscillation. Take the terms
"north" and "south." The mention of the north pole, for example,
implies at once the south pole also; it can be distinguished only by
contrast with the other, which it thus _includes_. But it is a north
pole only by _excluding_ the south pole from itself--by being itself
and not merely what the other is not. The situation is paradoxical
enough: Each aspect--the negative or the positive--of anything appears
to exclude the other, while each requires its own other for its very
definition and expression. It needs the other, and yet is independent
of it. How Hegel proves this of all concepts, cannot here be shown.
The result is that no concept can be taken by itself as a
"that-and-no-other." It is perpetually accompanied by its "other" as
man is by his shadow. The attempt to isolate any logical category and
regard it as fixed and stable thus proves futile. Each category--to
show this is the task of Hegel's _Logic_--is itself an organism, the
result of a process