Houlgate, S. (2022). Hegel on Being: Vol. 1. Quality and the Birth of Quantity in Hegel’s Science of Logic. Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 135-147.
If we keep all presupposition at bay in accordance with the demand of the Logic, we have no choice but to begin with utter immediacy that contains no determination at all. We name such purely indeterminate immediacy “being”. This name, understood as Hegel names it, does not connote any meaning as we use it in ordinary life, otherwise the process of its unfolding would depend on its ordinary usage, which introduces the host of presuppositions that underlie our daily lives, and thereby fail to live up to what the Logic requires us to do.
Yet it does not mean that being is the definition of such sheer indeterminate immediacy. If so, we would then once again renege on the demand for presuppositionlessness by ascribing indeterminate immediacy to being as its determination, in virtue of which we are committed to endorsing the contrast between immediacy and mediation or indeterminacy and determinacy. The phrases such as “indeterminate”, “immediacy”, “equal to itself”, which Hegel uses to describe pure being, are introduced not to give being any definition or determination but as tools for via negationis that rejects every attempt to attribute one to being. So strictly speaking, what is at hand is an undefinable category due to its lack of determinacy.
So devoid of determination that it is not definable at all, pure being is not even pure being because there is no determination to keep it distinguished from what it is not. Now we have indeterminate immediacy that is not pure being, which is named “nothing”. Again, the ordinary meaning of “nothing” is in play neither in the transition from being to nothing, nor in rendering explicit what is implicit in the category of nothing: “nothing” is just a name for indeterminate immediacy in which pure being is not present. To be sure, this is not to define nothing as indeterminate immediacy into which pure being has vanished. That would fall prey to the same problem in the attempt to define being as having such a definition. Now since pure nothing, just like pure being, is so indeterminate that it cannot even be distinguished from anything, it is not even pure being itself and thus not what it is. We already have a name for this indeterminate immediacy that is not nothing, i.e. being.
Now, albeit in the utmost absence of distinction, we come to have a distinction, namely the distinction between being and nothing, not definable yet distinguished from one another. Do we have anything determinate to grasp what the difference between being and nothing is? If not, is there even such a difference between them? The answer is that we don’t, and so there is in fact no difference between them. However, in saying that there is no distinction between being and nothing and they are the same, we are already making a distinction between them.
Therefore, pure being unfolds itself as a contradiction that being and nothing are distinguished from one another and yet are the same. Clearly, this is at odds with the law of noncontradiction; however, since this logical principle is held back in the presuppositionless enquiry of the Logic, we cannot simply get rid of the contradiction by assuming and appealing to the law of noncontradiction.