Excellent — those two points, Hegel’s dialectic of Being–Nothing–Becoming and Levinas’s concept of the il y a, are in many ways mirror images of each other: Hegel’s nothing is the engine of intelligibility and movement, while Levinas’s nothingness is the abyss that ethics must interrupt.

Let’s take them one at a time, slowly and clearly.

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1. Hegel: Being–Nothing–Becoming in The Science of Logic

a. The setup

Hegel begins The Science of Logic (1812) with the simplest possible thought: pure being (reines Sein).
He strips away every determination, every predicate — no quality, no relation, no content. Just “Being” in its purest abstraction.

But then he asks: what is this pure being?

It has no content, no determination, no difference.
It is indistinguishable from nothing.

“Pure Being and pure Nothing are therefore the same.” (Science of Logic, §87)

b. The paradox

If pure Being and pure Nothing are identical, how can we even think or speak of either?
Their identity cannot be static — it must move.

That movement, that oscillation or tension between Being and Nothing, is Becoming (Werden).

“The truth of Being and Nothing alike is therefore Becoming.” (§88)

So:

• Being without qualities collapses into Nothing (since it has no content).

• Nothing, when thought, becomes indistinguishable from the concept of Being (since it is the same absence of determination).

• The two are thus dialectically unstable: their very indistinguishability generates motion — Becoming.

c. The meaning

In this gesture, Hegel replaces static ontology with a dialectical ontology.
Being is not a fixed presence; it is self-differentiating. The becoming of determinations, the emergence of something rather than nothing, arises from their contradiction.

This is how Hegel begins his logic: by showing that the simplest abstraction (“Being”) already contains its own negation (“Nothing”), and that this contradiction is productive — it is what drives the unfolding of reality and thought alike.

So, for Hegel:

• Nothingness is not the negation of being but its dialectical partner.

• The universe is self-moving: every concept contains its own negation, which drives it forward.

• Becoming is the dynamic truth of both being and nothing — the pulse of reality itself.

In short:

“Being passes over into Nothing, and Nothing into Being, each is the other; their truth is this movement.”

Nothingness = generative negativity.
It is the engine of logic, not a void but a pulse.

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2. Levinas: The il y a — Horror of Neutral Existence

Levinas, writing in Existence and Existents (1947) and later works, takes almost the opposite stance from Hegel.
For him, nothingness is not productive or dialectical — it is horrific, a suffocating persistence that precedes and traps all meaning.

a. The il y a

The phrase il y a literally means “there is” — a neutral “isness,” existence without existent, being without beings.

Levinas describes experiences like insomnia or trauma where one cannot escape this sheer facticity — where existence itself feels oppressive, heavy, impersonal.

“There is, in general, being… being without beings, being as such. The horror of the night.” (Existence and Existents)

It’s a kind of anonymous, buzzing existence — a murmur of isness that can’t be escaped.

Unlike Heidegger’s nothing, which reveals beings as beings, Levinas’s il y a is a night without revelation.
It’s not the nothing that makes possible being, but the there-is that swallows beings whole.

b. The horror of neutral existence

For Levinas, this “neutral” existence is terrifying because it abolishes distinction:

• There is no subject, no object, no direction — only “there is.”

• It’s an unformed, impersonal persistence — an ontology without any exit.

• It’s the state of being without world, where meaning, relation, and otherness are suspended.

It’s not the void, but the impossibility of void — the horror that existence cannot cease.

c. Ethics as the interruption of the il y a

Levinas says that the only way out of this suffocating existence is the encounter with the Other — the ethical relation.
When the face of another person addresses me (“Thou shalt not kill”), it breaks the spell of neutral being.

This ethical encounter ruptures the totality of the il y a, introducing asymmetry, responsibility, and transcendence.
It is as if ethics itself opens a hole in existence — a breach that allows meaning, difference, and responsibility to arise.

Thus, where Hegel sees nothingness as dialectical movement, Levinas sees it as stagnation, horror, impersonal weight — overcome not by thought but by responsibility to the Other.

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In juxtaposition

Theme	Hegel	Levinas
Ontology	Nothingness is part of being’s self-movement	Nothingness is oppressive “there is”
Function	Generates becoming and differentiation	Threatens to dissolve difference and meaning
Response	Conceptual dialectic (reason)	Ethical awakening (responsibility)
Mood	Dynamic, affirmative, rational	Nightmarish, ethical, phenomenological

In other words:

• Hegel’s nothing is the birth of the world.

• Levinas’s nothing is the weight of an inescapable world, broken only by ethical transcendence.

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Would you like me to show how Levinas’s il y a indirectly responds to Hegel’s dialectic — that is, how his ethics can be read as a refusal of Hegel’s totalizing synthesis, a defense of irreducible alterity against the “consumption” of the Other by dialectical becoming?