@phdthesis{Heuberger2022,
  author    = {Heuberger, Adrian},
  title     = {Das Erste ist das Letzte und das Letzte ist das Erste},
  doi       = {10.25932/publishup-54984},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-549846},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  pages     = {224},
  year      = {2022},
  abstract  = {The following paper argues that Hegel's Science of Logic is a radical attempt to conceive the absolute as having no outside. This can already be noticed in the beginning of the Logic: If there can be nothing outside the absolute, then the beginning cannot be outside the absolute either. Consequently, the beginning must be made with the absolute itself. However, setting the beginning as absolute is at the same time testing the beginning of its absoluteness. And the beginning does not pass this test. For it is the nature of a beginning to be only a beginning and not the whole. And thus it is also not the absolute. The beginning is the most distant determination from being the whole and must therefore be considered as the most non-absolute in Logic. Consequently, the beginning is both: It is a beginning with the absolute and it is a beginning with the most non-absolute. The very beginning of the Logic is already a self-contradiction. The Logic must free itself from this contradiction. And this liberation is what makes the progress that leads beyond the beginning and in which the beginning is sublated. The progress develops subsequent determinations. Each of them is posited as absolute, but none of them can satisfy this absoluteness so that each of them is sublated again in subsequent determinations. Every determination that follows the beginning undergoes this movement of absolutisation, of failing to fulfill absoluteness, and of sublating itself, until - at the very end of Logic - this very movement is recognised as that which alone is capable of fulfilling absoluteness. For if every determination is submitted to this movement, then there is no outside to this movement. And therefore, it must be the absolute. On its progress to elaborate the true meaning of the absolute, the Logic returns repeatedly to the determination of its beginning, in order to catch up with presuppositions that had to be made for exposing its initial determination. The following passages will be of particular interest for catching up with these presuppositions: the transition into the science of Essence, the transition into the science of Notion and the concluding chapter of the Logic. For even at the very end, the Logic returns to its beginning. This led to the following statement by Hegel, which also inspired the title of this paper: The first is also the last and the last is also the first.},
  language  = {de}
}