Quoted By:
From his book Less Than Nothing
>When Hegel defines nature, he says not only that it is the Otherness of the Idea, but that it is the Idea itself in its Otherness—however, what this “idealist” turn means is that Otherness should be displaced into nature itself: nature is not only the Other of the Idea, but Other with regard to itself. (So, insofar as the Idea returns to itself in spirit, one should raise the question: is spirit then also in some mode “Other with regard to itself”? Yes—precisely as what we usually call “second nature,” spirit petrified in spiritual substance.) This is why nature at its zero level is space: not only the Otherness of the Idea (the Idea in its Otherness), but Otherness with regard to itself—a coexistence of points (extensively side-by-side), with no content to it, no difference, the same throughout in its pure extensive in-difference. Far from being the “mystery” of something containing objects, space is literally the most stupid thing there is. And it does not get “sublated” in the sense that it is no longer there: natural objects which “sublate” space remain spatial objects! Where spatiality is negated is in chemism, magnetism, and then organism, where objects are no longer dead composites of elements-parts, where we get an “eternal” ideal unity which cannot be located at a certain point in space: there is no “center” of an organism at some point in space. Here, perhaps, Hegel points towards relativity (it has been noted that his critique of Newtonian space foreshadows the Einsteinian critique): if the zero level of nature is space, then natural objects should develop out of space, not be conceived as mysterious chunks of matter that from who-knows-where “enter” space. The only thing that can happen to pure space is asymmetry, its becoming de-homogenized, “curved”—so the idea that “matter” is the effect of curved space is implied by Hegel’s theory of space
