system
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human
A question about Being and Nothing in hegel

Hegel says that being and nothing are the most fundamental concepts because there can be no concepts without them.

He says that being and nothing are "indeterminate" (because being is pure being and  nothing is pure nothing)

What does any of this mean? What does it mean for something to be determinate in Hegel's system. 

Should being be understood as pure presence and nothing as pure absence?
gpt
In the *Science of Logic*, "being" is just the minimal object of thought. Hegel thinks philosophical thought must be a completely presuppositionless science (it cannot assume anything at all), so the only way that philosophy can begin is with the mere fact of beginning, i.e., with mere thinking. The "pure, indeterminate thought of being" is just Hegel's term for this beginning.

Being is *pure* because it is not an empirical concept; it does not draw on any particular experience for its content. Being is *indeterminate* because to determine something is to specify it as being *some way*--which, in turn, is to mediate it through a relation to *another* concept (so, for instance, to say of a tree that it is green is to determine the tree by bringing it in relation to the determination "green").

But, of course, if being is a completely indeterminate thought--if it is just the minimal object of any thinking whatsoever, in fact, the mere fact of thinking itself--then it is a thought of nothing at all. So we arrive at another pure, indeterminate thought, the thought of nothing. The mere thought of being vanishes into the thought of nothing. (The fact that being vanishes into nothing reveals, for Hegel, the vanishing itself as a third concept that mediates between being and nothing. And because now there is mediation, there is determination, so we arrive at the concept of determinate being. This is how the *Science of Logic* gets off the ground and moves from mere indeterminate thoughts to conceptual determinations.)