Being and Becoming

For Hegel the Metaphysics expresses the speculative idea (VGPh 151–2, HP 137), especially in book Λ where Aristotle speaks of divine thought. Hegel prefaces his exposition by recalling how Aristotle, even though he had no system, wrote that divinity cannot be jealous (Met. A 2, 983a 2–3). For Hegel this means that God communicates essence to the world (VGPh 150, HP 135–6; J/G 67). God and the world, reason and nature, do not fall asunder.

He proceeds to his analysis and begins by quoting Γ 1. First philosophy is the “science of that which is insofar as it is and what belongs to it in and for itself.” In Z 1, Hegel continues, Aristotle determines being more precisely as ousia. “In this ontology, or, as we call it, logic, Aristotle investigates and distinguishes four principles: (1.) the determinacy or quality as such through which something is a this; (2.) matter (hulê); (3.) the principle of motion (Bewegung); and (4.) the principle of the end or the Good (1, 3)” (ibid.). It seems clear that in Hegel's mind the four principles are Aristotle's four causes, and that these are expounded in the books on which he will mostly concentrate, Z, H, Θ, and Λ.