Paradox

HEGEL’S WORLD OF CONTRADICTIONS 307say that it is between both, this is to convey nothing at all,for were it between both, it would be in a place, and thispresents the same difficulty. But movement means to be inthis place and not to be in it, and thus to be in both alike;this is the continuity of space and time which first makesmotion possible. Zeno, in the deduction made by him,brought both these points into forcible opposition.(1892, 274)Zeno’s only mistake was his assumption that contradictoryphenomena cannot be real. Zeno thought he was supportingParmenides’ conclusion that all is one. But if becoming ismore basic than being, Zeno’s paradoxes of motion reallydemonstrate the pervasiveness of change.Hegel associates rest with the principle that everything isidentical with itself. Change comes from the principle of contradiction.A cherry develops from a bud in the same manner thatan amended theory develops from the refutation of an earlierview. “He who claims that nothing exists which carries in it acontradiction as an identity of opposed determinations is at thesame time claiming that nothing alive exists. Indeed the force oflife and, even more, the power of the Spirit, consists in positingthe contradiction in itself, in enduring and overcoming it.”(1970, 162) With the exception of Heraclitus, the major Greekphilosophers regarded permanence as real and change as illusory.This bias is clear from their use of reductio ad absurdum.They treat contradiction as a mark of unreality. Hegel thinkscontradictions are more real because they control development:But it is one of the fundamental prejudices of logic, ashitherto understood and of ordinary thinking, that contradictionis not so characteristically essential and immanent