The Logic of Nature

Abstract

The philosophy of nature has become virtually an oxymoron for the prevailing philosophical consensus. Reason, we are told, is powerless to conceive what nature is in itself but must instead hand over all understanding of physical reality to empirical science. Philosophy may reflect upon how natural science models its data, scrutinizing the consistency of scientific theories and the way research projects are framed, but reason must never go beyond its frail limits to provide a priori ampliative, synthetic knowledge of what holds universally and necessarily of nature. Insofar as the problems of knowing nature a priori apply to any extension of a priori knowledge beyond reason's knowledge of itself, philosophy should have no aspirations beyond, on the one hand, developing the formal logic of a thinking incapable of generating contents of its own and, on the other, doing “philosophy of science,” finding some regulative, methodological coherence in the endeavors of the empirical sciences.The rejection of any philosophy of nature may today be rampant, but it is itself incoherent. It relies upon a reduction of reason to a formal thinking that may analyze what is contained in terms given by experience in general and linguistic usage in particular but is incapable of knowing universally necessary truths about itself or any other topic. Reason's knowledge of itself is no more analytic than its knowledge of what is other than itself, for what reason is cannot be presupposed as something given but, rather, must be established. Hence any proscription to know nature a priori is just as inconsistent as the subjection of all thought to formal logic from which that prohibition stems.The great philosophers of the past have had no such qualms about tackling nature with reason. They all, however, have recognized that nature cannot be immediately addressed but must follow from prior philosophical investigation, without which nature remains unthinkable.The pioneers of the three fundamental options for philosophical investigation, Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel, may all agree that the philosophy of nature is not first philosophy, but they all characterize the philosophical presuppositions of the philosophy of nature differently, with important consequences for how nature gets conceived. For Aristotle, nature is inconceivable without first thinking the categories of being in general, which determine every particular type of being insofar as any have being at all. According to the metaphysical approach that Aristotle pioneers, ontology constitutes first philosophy insofar as philosophical investigation must begin with that privileged given that underlies all else by providing the most universal principles that determine each and every subject matter. Insofar as everything depends on being, nothing but being per se seems able to play that foundational role. Whereas ontology thereby must come first, the philosophy of nature comes next, preceding the account of the psyche, as well as that of ethics and politics and poetry. The philosophy of nature falls in between ontology and these “human” sciences because nature provides the given existing condition for all the other domains involving living minds and their conventions and productions. Nonetheless, because the categories of being determine everything that is, they cannot distinguish nature from being or nature from the psyche and its realizations. This raises the question of how reason can advance from knowledge of being to knowledge of nature, given that the categories of ontology must be further supplemented to grasp what is specifically natural.Ontology has something to offer to bridge the gap between being and nature, at least insofar as being as such is conceived by Aristotle to be grounded in a highest divine being, which plays a further determining role with regard to nature. That determining role, however, is necessarily highly restricted, given how the highest being ends up requiring a pure, unconditioned actuality that can only be an immaterial self-thinking thought. Since such a highest being only thinks itself, it cannot provide any form to nature, let alone any matter. Moreover, since self-thinking thought is directed solely to its own self-contemplation, it cannot furnish any efficient causality to set nature in motion. Rather, the only way Aristotle can consider the highest being to be able to affect nature is if nature moves itself in the way in which love moves the lover to make the beloved its end. In this way, nature makes the highest being its end. Yet, since the highest being is a purely self-realizing activity of self-thinking thought that depends on nothing else, it is hard to see how nature can make the highest being its end. Insofar as the highest being can have no potentiality, it cannot be moved, either by itself or by anything else, and therefore it must set nature into motion as an unmoved mover. Moreover, as Aristotle duly recognizes, the movement effected by the highest being must be just as changeless as its own eternal self-thinking. Some part of nature must thus exhibit an eternal self-equal change, namely, unceasing circular locomotion, which then can somehow impart upon other parts of nature variable locomotions that facilitate qualitative and quantitative alterations of preexisting material substances.These material substances are available insofar as nature, as a type of being, will exhibit the universal categories that ensure that what is natural will be individual substances, combining form and matter, and subject to determination by efficient and final causality, as well as formal and material causality. What distinguishes nature is what allows it to be determined by the highest being, namely, that it can move itself so as to be determined by final causality. Self-motion must come into play because the highest being lacks efficient causality. As Aristotle argues in the Physics, all motion and all change ultimately depend upon locomotion, since alteration in quality and magnitude depends upon locomotion, without which contact, compression, and expansion cannot occur.1 Accordingly, in nature, efficient, formal, and final causality coincide, signifying that the form of natural things is active and self-realizing, a soul rather than an externally imposed archetype, as an artifact embodies.2It remains mysterious how natural substances can be self-moving yet brought into locomotion and other motion by a self-thinking thought figuring as an unmoved mover. How can the locomotion of natural substances serve the end of the highest being when that being is restricted to self-contemplation and is in need of nothing else for its own absolute actuality?Moreover, how can natural substances be self-moving while deriving locomotion from the highest being? This problem might be resolvable if the self-motion of natural substances involved some further motion determined by their own specific natures that they undergo upon the occasion of imparted locomotion.3 In this way, for example, cats and swallows will respond in their own species-specific ways to communicated locomotion, such as being thrown out of a window.In any event, the edicts of foundational ontology and the minimal natural feature of self-motion mandate that the most abstract features of nature—space and time—are determined from the outset in terms of place and place-related time. Since nothing can be without substance and natural substance moves itself in virtue of what form it has, space becomes minimally characterized in terms of place, which designates the boundary that some natural substance may have.4 Time, for its part, is characterized as the measure of the motion of a natural substance, just as the eternal circular locomotion of a natural substance provides the absolute measure and sustainer of time itself.5Yet can space be defined in terms of place, and can time be defined in respect of motion, or do place and motion, as well as natural substance, presuppose space and time? Moreover, how does reason move from the theory of being to the further specifications specific to nature without relying upon groundless stipulation? Or, ontologically speaking, how does being as such provide for the being of nature? Even if the highest being is invoked as an unmoved mover, natural substance with the character of self-movement (i.e., of containing the principle of motion within itself) must be presupposed before specifically natural movements can be engendered.More generally, so long as philosophy begins with some privileged given that serves as a first principle for everything else that is and can be known, the application of that principle requires the presupposition of independent factors to be subject to determination by it. Since the first principle of being has some given determinacy, it cannot owe its own primary character to its performance as ultimate foundation. Accordingly, it is not self-determining, so that further determinations are just its own development. Rather, it will determine what is other than itself. Consequently, the principles of ontology will have to be applied to some extraneously given factors in order to have anything to determine. What these are, as well as that they are, cannot be established by any first principle. Once the legitimacy of the description and presence of these factors is called into question, any move from ontology to the philosophy of nature gets stopped dead in its tracks.An even more basic challenge confronting any philosophy of nature predicated upon ontology is whether philosophy can start by reading off the character of being without taking for granted the authority of its knowing. The attempt to overcome such an assumption and the dogmatism it involves fuels a turn to investigate knowing in order to establish the authority of cognition so as to proceed next to a nondogmatic knowledge of what is, on the basis of which nature might then be known a priori. Ontology now gives way to epistemology as first philosophy, with any philosophy of nature awaiting the success of the preliminary investigation of knowing. That investigation can only establish the objectivity of knowledge without reverting to dogmatic direct appeal to what is if the object of knowing is determined by the structure of knowing. Only then can the investigation of knowing itself shed light on what can be known about objects.Although this foundational epistemology is undertaken to pave the way for a nondogmatic metaphysics providing knowledge of being and, subsequently, of special types of being, such as nature and the reality of freedom, what holds true universally and necessarily of objectivity must now be established within the erstwhile preliminary investigation of knowing. Because all knowable objectivity will have to be determined by the selfsame structure of knowing, objects will all be subject to determination from without by an external necessity that applies equally to them all, no matter what they are. Accordingly, objectivity will be a realm of mechanistic determination, in which objects will be subject to laws of matter applying to all irrespective of their form or import. Knowable objectivity will thereby be a domain of objects governed by material laws of efficient causality, in which all objective processes will amount to the lawful locomotion of matter. Kant, who pioneers this transcendental approach of foundational epistemology, acknowledges that nature, to the extent that it can be known, is a law-governed physical reality of phenomena. Accordingly, what universal and necessary knowledge can be obtained about nature must lie in nothing but the mechanics of bodies in motion as they can appear to the knowing that determines the form in which they are given in experience. Although Kant still maintains the pretense of following the Critique of Pure Reason with a metaphysics of nature and a metaphysics of freedom, he acknowledges that these must largely consist in amplifications of what is already mandated about knowable objects in general within foundational epistemology. Not surprisingly, in Kant's Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, the philosophy of nature that is there developed applies the categories that determine objects of experience in general to material bodies in general. Kant maintains that reference to matter adds an empirical element, insofar as the forms of space and time and the categories bear upon physical nature only when the material of tactile sensation comes into play.6 Matter, however, is itself abstract, being just as much a universal and necessary ingredient of outer experience as space and time or the categories that connect representations in terms of the forms of judgment. Hence, matter has an a priori character that can allow for a priori knowledge of physical nature.Whereas Kant does not give the categories and the judgments from which they derive any order of successive constitution, his a priori account of matter in motion necessarily begins with an account of the formal nature of motion, where matter enters in only as a point in space-time, devoid of any qualitative dimensions. This so-called phoronomy comes first, because the forms of motion must be provided for before any dynamic constitution of matter can be considered, which itself must precede any account of mechanics.7 The dynamic constitution of matter out of moving forces of repulsion and attraction depends upon the construction of motion in general, just as the relation of bodies in mechanical interrelation presupposes the dynamic construction of matter that first enables bodies to fill space and physically interact.Significantly, Kant's treatment of physical nature does not begin with space and or time but, rather, with motion, which involves place.8 From the outset, reference to matter is at hand, as is the employment of space and time and the categories that allegedly determine objects of experience in general. Although matter only figures in a so-called quantitative manner at the start, the a priori account of corporeal nature invokes all the above factors as resources that the philosophy of nature can employ without having to establish them on its own.In his foundational epistemology, however, Kant introduces space and time, as well as the categories and the forms of judgment, by simply stipulating their given roles in cognition. Not only does he claim that no explanation can possibly be provided for why space and time are our pure forms of intuition,9 but he introduces his tables of judgments and categories as gifts of tradition while claiming that the categories cannot even be defined since any definition employs judgments that take them for granted.10 Moreover, Kant introduces space and time as independent givens devoid of any intrinsic connection, even though he will argue in his “Refutation of Idealism” that time cannot be objectively apprehended without experience of objects in space.11All these stipulations would leave the philosophy of nature unimpeached if foundational epistemology were capable of doing what Kant does not achieve, namely, establishing nondogmatically the character and role of space and time, as well as of the categories determining objects in general. In that case, starting with a formal account of matter in motion would not strangle the philosophy of nature with arbitrary assumptions. Kant's inability to escape pointing to space and time and the categories as irreducible assumptions is not, however, a failing of just his own implementation of foundational epistemology. It is instead symptomatic of how the transcendental turn to investigate knowing cannot help but make dogmatic claims about cognition. Any attempt to supplant ontology with epistemology as first philosophy makes claims about knowing that are just as immediate as those that foundational ontologists make about what is. To turn to investigate knowing without making knowledge claims about the given automatically presupposes that cognition is distinct from its object, since otherwise knowing cannot be investigated on its own. This equally renders the knowing under investigation different from the knowing of the foundational epistemologist, who knows a knowing that is not a knowing of knowing but a knowing of an object distinct from itself. Accordingly, the foundational epistemologist must take his or her own cognition for granted since a different cognition is what is put under scrutiny. As a consequence, any subsequent construction of objects in general, and of material objects in particular, will be relative to these assumptions. Further, since foundational epistemology must leave objectivity determined by the structure of knowing, whatever is mandated about corporeal nature remains an account of appearances as the subjectivity of knowing allegedly experiences them. These difficulties call into question two defining features of the philosophy of nature that issues from the transcendental turn: the starting point with formal motion and the reduction of a priori knowledge of nature to a pure mechanics of matter in motion.12The philosophy of nature is placed on a completely different footing once ontology and foundational epistemology are supplanted by Hegel's pioneering attempt to do philosophy without taking for granted anything about what is or anything about knowing. Presuppositionless philosophy can be launched with a science of logic to the extent that logic's thinking of thinking operates with the removal of any opposition between the subject and object of knowing. Any investigation that addresses a topic different from its own thinking must take for granted the knowing it employs as well as the boundaries of its subject matter. To eliminate these dual relativizing conditions, philosophy must overcome the opposition of topic and method, and this is precisely what logic undertakes by endeavoring to validly think valid thinking. Since, however, logic cannot begin with any given method of thinking or any preconception of thinking without question-begging, logic must set out with no determinate subject or object, that is, with indeterminacy. To the extent that determinacies arise, their development can constitute a theory of determinacy as well as a self-determined thinking of thinking. A theory of determinacy can only begin from indeterminacy, since any determinate starting point would take some determinacy for granted instead of accounting for determinacy. To the extent that the science of logic provides the theory of determinacy, it considers determinacy as such, be it given, determined, or self-determined, without any further qualification. Consequently, the categories that arise in logical development will not be categories of nature or of the psychologically realized thinking of mind, even if these nonlogical domains were to embody determinacies in general.The move beyond the totality of determinacy to whatever can be something more than determinacy as such cannot legitimately be made by introducing any alleged givens or employing any added procedures of construction. Doing so would only reintroduce the problems of foundationalism and its reliance upon arbitrary assumptions that plague fundamental ontology and foundational epistemology. What is other to the self-developed totality of determinacy cannot derive its otherness from any extraneous source. The only possible nondogmatic basis for the otherness of nonlogical determinacy must lie in the totality of determinacy itself.Moreover, the totality of determinacy not only must provide the only resource for what is other to itself but must engender that otherness in virtue of nothing other than the consummation of its own totality. In other words, nonlogical determinacy can minimally consist in nothing other than the self-othering or the self-externality of the totality of determinacy.This self-externality will be in virtue of nothing but logical determinacy, and for this reason, it can constitute the first and minimal determinacy of nonlogical determinacy. If it is to prove itself to be the minimal specification of nature, it will have a dual provisional character.On the one hand, the self-externality of the totality of determinacy will constitute the primary determination of nature in the sense that it will involve no other natural determinations and will instead be contained by and underlie all further specifications of nature. On the other hand, this minimal determinacy of nature will be the most basic specification of not just nature but every other nonlogical domain that incorporates and presupposes natural determinacy. Although nature will no longer be conceivable as something founded on privileged ontological givens or determining structures of knowing, it will still be intermediary, falling necessarily between the self-development of determinacy and the development of the life of the mind. This is because the world of mind must still presuppose nature insofar as rational agency operates theoretically and practically in a mind-independent natural world, providing the enabling condition for individuals who can think and will and together enact the conventions and cultures constituting history.Together, these provisos stamp any development beyond the self-externality of the totality of determinacy with a dual identity. As the minimal threshold of nature, this self-externality will prove to be the initial specification from which the entirety of nature will constitute itself. As the minimal threshold for all nonlogical determinacy, this self-externality will end up being the most basic constituent in the totality of a universe containing intelligent life and the productions of rational agency, which culminate in the worldly philosophical engagements that conceive logic, nature, and mind. These dual identifications have important ramifications for how the philosophy of nature develops.Hegel himself presents the starting point of the philosophy of nature as the result of the science of logic and identifies the transition as a free release whereby the logical totality becomes external to itself.13 This release is free insofar as it does not depend upon any independent ground but, rather, results simply from the achieved closure of logic. That closure occurs when the development of determinacy arrives at a category, the Absolute Idea, comprising a self-knowing that is at the same time the entire development of determinacy that it consummates. This renders the preceding whole self-transparent without reinstating any opposition between knowing and its object. It does, however, give that whole an immediate being insofar as it stands on its own without being mediated by anything else. Accordingly, as Hegel points out, the self-developed totality of determinacy is thereby external to itself, in that it has a being in addition to its self-knowing process. This is expressed in how the self-externality of the Absolute Idea, which provides the minimal threshold of nonlogical determinacy, could be said to consist in logical totality further qualified by the immediacy of being.14This characterization might suggest that the development of nature will consist in an application to the Absolute Idea of each one of the logical determinacies in the same order in which they occur within the logical development. Several problems rule out this approach, which Edward Halper and Graham Schuster have advocated.15On the one hand, such “development” would require a third party to reach back to the sequence of categories in logic and apply them in the same order to the successive determinations of nature. At each juncture, one natural determinacy would be followed by another, not in virtue of what it is but thanks to an external application of a specific logical category extracted from the logical development, in which each category's specification entails a self-transformation engendering its own logical successor. Bringing the logical sequence to bear upon nature would reinstate a separation of method and subject matter and prevent nature from being developed in virtue of its own constitution.It might be countered that no deus ex machina need intervene precisely because the logical categories develop themselves. The being that applies to the Absolute Idea is just as much a nothing that applies to the Absolute Idea, resulting in a becoming that applies to the Absolute Idea and so forth. Admittedly, being may be nothing, and nothing may be being, and together they constitute becoming. Their development, however, does not involve anything else that they carry along with them, whereas the unfolding of nature is the self-constitution of a natural totality that comprises the emergent subject of its whole development.If nature is to be presented without taking for granted its character, each successive determination must provide all that is required to constitute what immediately follows in the conception of nature. The only principle that can be at work in linking these conceptual stages together is the unity of the whole that emerges as the outcome of the whole development. This unity is not logical totality or the totality of determinacy per se but, rather, the unity of nature itself, which will prove to be a constituent in the self-constitution of the totality of mind. Different determinacies will have to enter into the further qualification of the totality of determinacy per se. Nonetheless, how they enter will depend upon what that further qualification comprises in its entirety at each step along the way. This is not just a matter of the additional categories supervening upon logical totality. It, rather, involves the whole that is at hand thanks to the combination of both.At various junctures in the Philosophy of Nature, Hegel points out how the development of the concept of nature diverges from any direct application of the logical sequence to the Absolute Idea. For example, he notes that the concept of nature begins with categories of quantity, rather than those of quality, which occupy the first sections of the Science of Logic.16 Elsewhere he notes how nature involves orderings that go beyond the threefold differentiation of the concept (universality, particularity, and individuality).17 These divergences do not signify that the concept of nature must rely upon contents found outside of what develops immanently from the self-externality of the totality of determinacy per se. Rather, they illustrate how the development of nonlogical determinacy has an ordering connected to its own specific content.Space can be the starting point of the conception and reality of nature insofar as it is nothing but the self-externality of the totality of determinacy. Space is a self-standing totality, containing each particular space entirely within itself. Every aspect of space, however, is self-external, having itself beyond itself. The immediate otherness of the totality of space, the nonbeing of space, both falls within space and has itself outside itself. Namely, the point is the spatial negation of space, which has another point external to itself, which, subject to the same externality, becomes a line. Yet the line, the negation of the point, is itself external to itself insofar as the line is bounded by another line bounded by yet another, giving rise to a plane. For its part, the plane is immediately self-external, yielding planes stacking continuously upon another other, producing a three-dimensional space whose boundary can only be another volume in continuity with others without end.All these determinations arise simply from the self-externality of the totality of determinacy and enable space to have its rudimentary character without presupposing time, motion, or matter. They do not arise by applying in succession nothing, becoming, and determinacy to the Absolute Idea but, instead, involve determinations of homogeneous continuity that underlie quantity.As Hegel notes, space in and of itself is devoid of any real differences, which only place, motion, and matter can together provide. For this reason, space as such is absolute in the meager sense of lacking any of the abiding spatial differences that first allow for relative space and the differentiation of “inertial frames of reference.”18 What sets the stage for the constitution of determinate place is none other than space's own self-externality. Just as every otherness in space is self-external, so the infinite extension of voluminous space is external to itself in the only way in which spatial totality can be. Namely, space as a whole is self-external in the negation afforded by time, which consists in nothing other than the differentiation of space from itself at one moment from the next. Since space cannot help but be self-external, the spatial totality is immediately distinguished from itself in such a way that the external being of space once more gives way to itself without end. Since each moment of this self-supplanting succession is subject to the same self-removal, each differentiated self-externality of space is a now, poised to revert to the past and usher in the future. Although Kant introduced time and space as inexplicable facts of “human intuition” with no intrinsic connection, his argument in the “Refutation of Idealism” reflects how time is dependent upon space for its own constitution. Although Kant there bases the dependence of time upon space on a reflection upon the prerequisites for being conscious of any objective temporal sequence, his argument ultimately illustrates how the passage of time is bound up with the abiding persistence of space from moment to moment.Insofar as time brings spatial totality into an ever regenerating self-externality, the spatial here has become a here and now, a spatiotemporal location providing the most abstract place. Situating itself both spatially and temporally, this place allows a particular space to extend in time and have duration while enabling a now to extend in space and have a determinate locale. Nonetheless, the continuity of space and time renders one enduring and extended spatiotemporal location otherwise indistinguishable from any other. Insofar as every moment in time is just as much a now, poised between past and future, as any other, and insofar as every particular space is located on the same terms as every other, one place cannot be kept apart from what bounds it in space-time. Since any proximate spatiotemporal location is just as much a place, distinguished from others in just the same way, place becomes different from itself. Thereby place gives rise to motion, wherein location differentiates itself in time, marking the change from one place to another in the passage of time, just as much as time differentiates itself in space, distinguishing one moment from another in successively altering positions.Hegel compares these complementary sides of motion to the coming to be and ceasing to be in which becoming consists.19 He thereupon suggests that motion resolves itself similarly to how the two sides of becoming cease their respective “transitions,”20 giving rise to a paralyzed unity of being and nothing, constituting determinacy. Ceasing to be ceases insofar as the nothing it arrives at is immediately being, just as coming to be ceases insofar as the being it engenders is immediately nothing. Analogously, although both sides of motion involve continuous alterations of spatiotemporal location, the change of place no less carries along the selfsame place, insofar as nothing more is at hand to distinguish one from another. This place, which remains at one with itself through its own alteration, retains its own enduring extension. Insofar as this enduring extension is self-related and thereby excludes relation to other, it provides a minimal spatiotemporal reality.This resolves the great puzzle of accounting for matter, a puzzle analogous to the more radical conundrum of accounting for determinacy. The daunting problem in both cases is that the factor in need of an account cannot be determined by employing anything sharing in its character without question-begging. Just as determinacy cannot be accounted for by using any determinate factors, so matter cannot be constituted out of any material constituents. Hegel's account of determinacy as the immediate unity of being and nothing solves the problem by using only the meager resources of the indeterminacies of being and nothing. Similarly, the emergence of a self-related exclusive enduring extension enables matter to be composed of the immaterial factors of space, time, and motion. Matter, minimally speaking, is just that which exclusively occupies an enduring extension. To do so, it must enduringly keep itself external to itself while retaining its continuity. That is, matter must minimally comprise an enduring circumscribed field of coextensive forces of repulsion and attraction. A force field that exists for just a moment is indistinguishable from empty space-time, just as is a force field that endures but does not extend beyond a point. Matter must both endure and have a determinate volume and do so as self-related and exclusive. The most elementary nonlogical realization of that self-related exclusivity is a determinate force field conjoining repulsion and attraction.Repulsion and attraction are logically inseparable. Repulsion has nothing to repel without attraction and otherwise disperses to an empty infinity, whereas attraction has nothing to attract without repulsion and otherwise collapses into an empty point. Although Kant eventually admits that repulsion and attraction cannot operate apart from one another,21 his similar dynamic account of matter still begins by introducing repulsion and attraction as separately given forces while describing them in mechanical terms, as if the forces constitutive of matter could be explained in terms of the repulsion and attraction of one body and another.22 The proper account must keep to the demands of structural priority, ensuring that nothing in the dynamic account of matter includes any material factors. This proviso rules out any role for mechanical relations, which presuppose material bodies.Insofar as the dynamic constitution of matter out of the immaterial constituents of space, time, place, and motion is not specific to any particular place and motion, the exclusive being of matter allows for an indefinite plurality of bodies in an otherwise undetermined dispersal in space and time. Insofar as each determinate matter consists in the same type of force field of repulsion and attraction, the stage is set for bodies to interact in mechanical terms, as well as to exert gravitational forces that operate both with respect to each body's own center of gravity and with respect to centers of gravity lying outside each one.Significantly, the emergence of matter does incorporate a slew of logical categories, including aspects of becoming, reality, continuity and discreteness, and repulsion and attraction. It should be evident, however, that these categories do not figure in any strict replication of the order of their own logical development, which would require inserting all the categories between determinacy and quantity. Instead, the categories that do enter in take their place in terms of the constitution of nature, where what determines the order of treatment is how the content at hand comes to be internally structured. Time must follow space because temporality consists in the self-externality of spatial totality. Place must follow time because place involves spatiotemporal determination. Motion must follow place because motion consists in the self-alteration of place in terms of its dual parameters of space and time. Finally, matter must follow motion because matter minimally contains the self-relatedness of place within motion. The role of logical categories in these determinations of nature depends on what is immanent in nature, rather than what is independently immanent in logic.