The general intent of this paper is to examine Hegel's preoccupation with the question of beginnings. To anticipate, in Hegel's view every account in respect to its beginning – indeed, everything in respect to its beginning – is both immediate and mediated. All things therefore begin having already begun; all things begin in medias res. But if all things begin having already begun, all things begin as a rupture of one sort or another.

This necessity of rupture puts the problematic of beginnings for Hegel into clear focus: system, in order to be system, must involve closure; but because of the nature of beginnings, system must also involve rupture. A judicious view of the texts show, I think, that Hegel is not willing to give up either thesis. Consequently, if the system is to be viable, the rupture cannot efface the closure; but if the system is to begin, the closure must not efface the rupture. Rupture and closure must coexist. Hegel's concern with beginning, then, is a concern with how legitimately to initiate the system without either ignoring or effacing rupture, and without preempting the possibility of closure.

In Parts One and Two I will establish Hegel's clear awareness of rupture and of the part it plays in the system. If we examine the Preface and Introduction to the Science of Logic and to the Phenomenology of 1807 we find Hegel discussing a series of ruptures – indeed a circle of ruptures – which begin with a rupture at the beginning of the Science of Logic. There is first this rupture in the system as system, instantiated in the necessary reference by the Logic back to the Phenomenology. Behind this, there is a rupture in the Phenomenology itself in its own mediated beginnings, a rupture rooted in the immediate experience of natural consciousness. Behind this second rupture there is a third, a rupture in the contemporary Zeitgeist as it is instantiated in the natural attitude of natural consciousness. This rupture takes the form of the loss in natural consciousness of traditional certitude, a loss brought about by the incursion of Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy on this natural, everyday consciousness. If we reflect back to the first rupture noted – that at the beginning of the Logic and put it into the context of this causal chain of ruptures, we see that philosophy in fact experiences a self-caused rupture. This self-caused rupture is due to philosophy's own effects on the Zeitgeist as internalized by natural consciousness at the end of the eighteenth and in the first half of the nineteenth centuries.