1.54 Vacuum

Section 44 (first updated 2.14.2021)

Motion as Generation

Motion is generation. Motion is not merely a change of position in space but the coming-to-be of determination itself. A sphere in a vacuum is the clearest illustration of this point. If a perfectly symmetrical sphere exists in a vacuum with no other object relative to it, there is no possible empirical means to discern whether it is moving or at rest. Motion, in this case, is not locational but genetic: it concerns the becoming of the object as an event rather than its displacement in space.¹

This leads directly to Whitehead’s notion of ingression. Ingression is the passage of an object into recognition. Objects are not static entities that later enter events; rather, objects are what they are because events are what they are.² Nature is such that there can be no events and no objects without the ingression of objects into events. The separation of objects from events is an abstraction performed by thought, not a feature of reality itself. In reality, objects and events are identical as phases of the same process—the passage of nature.³

To recognize an object as distinct is already to presuppose a duration. The very act of discriminating one object from another is identical with the temporal span of an event. The question of ingression therefore does not concern where an object is in space, but how an event is constituted as an object in time. Ingression names the manner in which an event becomes objectified within a temporal structure.⁴

Motion, Relativity, and Discernibility

Consider again the sphere in a vacuum. A sphere can only be discerned as moving if there is another object relative to which its motion can be defined. Motion is therefore not an intrinsic property of the object alone, but a relational determination. An object moving in space is itself an event localized to the conception formed by that relation. Where an object is can only be discerned through what it is, and what it is emerges from its relations to other objects. These relations are the forms that events assume in order to constitute a happening, that is, a reality.⁵

Empirical accounts confirm this. In a perfect vacuum containing only a single object, there is no experimental means to determine whether that object is accelerating or at rest. Acceleration itself becomes indiscernible without relational reference. Motion, then, cannot be reduced to displacement in empty space; it must be understood as event-generation.⁶

Light as Pure Generation

This description is especially illuminating in the case of light. When light exists alone in space, as a particle, it has no relative position to any other object except space itself. Relative to space alone, light takes itself as the object of motion. In doing so, it externalizes itself in place of space while remaining identical with itself—this is its wave character. Light becomes a constant exceeding of itself, a perpetual self-transcendence.⁷

This property of motion is inseparable from generation. Light is generative not merely metaphorically but physically: it produces life through photosynthesis, regulates biological rhythms, enables the synthesis of vitamin D, and underlies countless other processes essential to living systems. Motion here is not movement through space but the reproductive activity of being itself.⁸

Conception, Abstraction, and Discrepancy

From an absolute standpoint—within a perfect vacuum—there is no discrepancy between conception and object. The mere conception of a thing is simultaneously its being. Discrepancy arises only when abstraction occurs. Any particular thing that can be picked out as distinct marks a divergence between the event as a whole and its conceptual isolation. This is precisely what Whitehead means by abstraction: the selective emphasis of certain aspects of an event at the expense of its full concreteness.⁹

The understanding is a highly developed form of this abstraction. If conception were entirely fixated on the object, it would be reducible to the object’s variability, and the explanation of multiplicity would collapse. Aristotle already recognized this difficulty in distinguishing thought from object while maintaining their necessary correlation.¹⁰

Becoming and Duration

The being of an object is therefore always a becoming, and this becoming is simultaneously its conception. Conception, at the most elementary level, is duration—the measure of how long an object persists as this object. During a given duration, conception stabilizes an object; as that duration dissolves, conception breaks through into another configuration, giving rise to a new object.¹¹

Conception thus functions like penetrability. Light penetrates all objects; sound penetrates some; other forces penetrate to varying degrees. Penetrability is the external quality of becoming. Internally, becoming is the object itself emerging into being—like the blossoming of a flower, which unfolds from within rather than being imposed from without. Motion, generation, and conception are therefore not separate processes but different aspects of the same ontological activity.¹²

Footnotes

1. Aristotle, Physics, IV.8–9; see also Galileo’s principle of relativity.
2. Whitehead, A. N., Process and Reality, Part II, Ch. II.
3. Whitehead, The Concept of Nature, Ch. II.
4. Whitehead, Process and Reality, on ingression and eternal objects.
5. Leibniz, Correspondence with Clarke, on relational space and motion.
6. Einstein, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory, Ch. III.
7. Wheeler, J. A., “Law Without Law,” in Quantum Theory and Measurement.
8. Schrödinger, E., What Is Life?
9. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, Ch. V.
10. Aristotle, De Anima, III.4–5.
11. Bergson, H., Creative Evolution.
12. Goethe, Metamorphosis of Plants, and Whitehead, Modes of Thought.

he illustration of a sphere in a vacuum reveals an important feature of geometric and ontological dynamics. The vacuum is not merely “empty” in the sense of lacking things; it is also continuous. As continuous void, it is the ever-present absence of determinate being—the ongoing not-being into which any object may enter. Wherever there is an object, there is also this continuous lack of what the object is not, a field of potential transition rather than simple emptiness.

If there is no distinction between one object and another, but only a distinction between object and void, then the sphere emerges as the most basic object imaginable. The sphere is the geometric principle of self-relation: it is identical with itself at every point on its surface. Its perfect symmetry makes it the pure expression of self-identity. Because every direction from its center is equivalent, the sphere has no privileged orientation and no internal differentiation by which motion could be discerned.

When an object is distinguished only from the void, and not from other objects, its motion cannot be determined. Motion becomes perceptible only when the sphere stands in relation to another object, that is, when two bodies occupy different positions within the same continuous void. Only then can we say that one object is here while another is there, and that one changes position relative to the other over time. Motion is therefore not an intrinsic feature of an isolated object but a relational phenomenon arising from distinctions within a continuum.

The void, understood as a continuum, is not simply the negation of objects but the condition of their differentiation. It is the uninterrupted field of “not-this-object,” the persistence of non-identity that allows an object to occupy a determinate position at a determinate time. To say that an object is here now necessarily implies that it is not there now, and that it may be there later. These inverse equivalences—here/not-here, now/not-now—are not contradictions but complementary logical relations. Together, they constitute the total being of the object as something that endures through change.

However, there is strictly speaking no such thing as a single object in a void. The idea of an isolated object is itself an abstraction produced by an observer who cannot conceive the full web of relations at once. What we call “an object” is a limited disclosure of a relational totality, presented within a particular reference frame that fixes space and time in a determinate way. Objects appear discrete only because the observer’s capacity to grasp relations is finite.

In reality, there is no object without relations, and no motion without differentiation. What exists are events within a continuous field, temporarily stabilized by relational distinctions. The “single object” is therefore not an ultimate feature of reality, but a conceptual shorthand for a node within an ongoing, relational continuum of becoming.

Photosynthesis

Living organisms depend upon light not merely for survival but for reproduction, and reproduction is the most fundamental expression of life. In plants, photosynthesis is not only a metabolic process but the condition under which growth, flowering, and propagation occur. The survival of an individual organism is inseparable from the reproduction of its species; reproduction is the way life sustains itself across time. In this sense, light functions as a universal generative medium—the substance through which living forms continually re-produce themselves.

Light does not simply sustain life externally; it is incorporated into life’s internal processes. A duck becomes a duck not merely by consuming matter, but by participating in a developmental process mediated by energy, rhythm, and form—ultimately grounded in light. Light is thus not only a physical stimulus but a principle of becoming, a medium through which form actualizes itself in matter.¹

Photosynthesis is therefore not merely a biological process that ensures self-continuity and reproduction at the most elementary levels of plant life. More fundamentally, it expresses the way all life persists in nature. In this sense, living forms can be understood as simulations or condensations of solar activity—derivations of energy originating from the Sun, or more generally from stellar sources.

A star itself can be conceived as a further condensation of energetic possibility: a concentrated source that contains, in a unified particle-like state, a vast range of potential variations. This concentration gathers within itself the conditions for innumerable future events. In its most abstract form, it appears as a self-contained sphere of energy in a vacuum. Yet from this spherical unity, energy propagates outward through self-regeneration and self-reproduction, unfolding as wavelengths that extend its identity across space and time.

As light radiates outward, it encounters other systems and enters into new condensations—forming increasingly complex structures that are not external to it but are further differentiations of its own potential. These structures represent a distribution of possibilities that were already contained within the original energetic unity, now disclosed across multiple levels of organization.

When a plant absorbs light from the Sun and uses it to form its visible structure, what we perceive is ultimately the outcome of this generative process. The plant’s form is a material articulation of light’s self-differentiation. What the observer sees is the cumulative result of countless light-events combining and stabilizing into a coherent structure. Human observers themselves are an even more advanced articulation of this same process—a hierarchical realization of possibilities that originate from light’s capacity to reproduce and transform itself.

Inertia and the Fullness of Potential

Inertia is often described as emptiness or neutrality, but this is a misleading abstraction. Inertia is not empty; rather, it is full of unrealized possibilities that are in a state of equilibrium with one another. These possibilities are mutually exclusive in actuality but coexist as potentialities. At any given moment, only one of them is realized relative to an observer’s present, while others remain unrealized but not unreal.

This structure becomes evident when we consider perspective and recognition. From my point of view, events occurring downtown are indeterminate—they exist for me as possibilities. Yet those same events are fully actual for someone present there. What is potential from one standpoint is actual from another. Potentiality, therefore, is not a lack of reality but a relational mode of reality, dependent on position, access, and recognition.²

If one were to treat this situation as chaos, one would miss the point. The world is not chaotic simply because it is differentially accessible. Rather, potentiality is distributed across perspectives, and inertia names the condition under which multiple potential determinations coexist without collapse into a single actuality.

Inertia as Simultaneity

Inertia is the precondition that allows an object to express multiple potential variations simultaneously. It is one of the most primitive forms of simultaneity. Classical physics defines inertia as the tendency of a body to remain at rest or in uniform motion unless acted upon by an external force. But philosophically, what it means for a thing to remain unchanged is that its determination is self-maintaining, independent of external intervention.

When one force acts upon another, we describe the interaction as an external relation. Yet internally, both forces belong to the same system. Their interaction expresses not mere opposition but internal contradiction, or complexity, within a unified process.³

The condition of rest functions like a plane upon which a line is drawn: it is the field in which determinate relations can unfold. For example, when we observe matter in an inertial context, we see that a single object can exhibit multiple states at once. An ice cube, at a given moment, is solid, melting into liquid, and evaporating into gas. These are not successive states strictly separated in time, but simultaneous determinations within one process.

This insight echoes Aristotle’s conception of substance as an underlying substratum that persists through change. Substance is neither pure matter nor pure form but the unity of both. Matter expresses substance externally as a manifold of qualities, while form expresses it internally as organizing principle. They are inversions of the same conception, not separable components.⁴

Motion and Dominance

An object can express multiple states simultaneously because the conceptions of those states act relative to one another through motion. Motion determines which form becomes dominant in a given context. Inertia, by contrast, is the condition in which no single determination excludes the others—a state in which forms superimpose rather than eliminate one another.

Motion is therefore the definite determination by which a form asserts dominance within the object’s identity, while inertia is the condition that preserves the object’s openness to variation. Inertia is not passivity but structured indeterminacy, the ground that allows transformation without annihilation.

Thus, motion and inertia are not opposites. Motion actualizes; inertia conserves. Together they describe the logic of becoming: how form emerges, persists, and yields to new form without the loss of substance.

Footnotes

1. Aristotle already treats light as a fundamental actuality in De Anima II.7 and De Sensu, while modern biology confirms its central role in reproduction through photosynthesis and morphogenesis.
2. This aligns with Aristotle’s distinction between potentiality (dunamis) and actuality (energeia) in Metaphysics Θ, as well as with Whitehead’s relational theory of actuality.
3. Compare Hegel’s account of force and interaction in Science of Logic, where opposition is internal to unity rather than externally imposed.
4. Aristotle, Physics I.7 and Metaphysics Z–H; see also Generation and Corruption for simultaneous qualitative change.

Light is the principle of self-reproduction because it is first a self-unity, a self-identical individuality. In scientific terms, this corresponds to its particle aspect: a fundamental, spherical concentration of energy possessing the capacity for indeterminate motion. This motion is not merely displacement in space but self-propagation. Light produces itself across different occupancies of space and time, and in doing so it necessarily operates as a wave—that is, as the extension of its own self-identical potentialities.

As a wavelength, light expresses the possible variations of itself across possible moments. These variations are not external additions but intrinsic differentiations of the same identity. Taken together, they constitute the total temporal structure of the reference frame within which light appears. The particle and wave aspects are thus not two separate realities but two expressions of a single process: light’s capacity to remain identical with itself while continuously generating its own spatial and temporal manifestations.

Indra’s Net is an ancient intuition of the very process we have been describing: light as a self-identical principle that propagates outward while maintaining unity, generating the platform upon which possible events are distributed as sequences of experience for distinct observers.

In the classical image, Indra’s Net is an infinite web of transparent “jewels” or spheres. Each sphere reflects every other sphere, and within each reflection the entire net is present again, endlessly. A single object, illuminated by a light source, radiates energy outward. That light is captured and refracted by each transparent sphere, producing a distinct image within each one. Yet every image remains a reflection of the same original object and the same originating light.

From a single object, infinitely many perspectives emerge—not because the object is fragmented, but because its self-identical light is refracted through different relations. Each sphere captures one angle, one moment, one configuration of the same reality. The web as a whole is therefore not a collection of separate things, but a distributed unity of perspectives, in which each node contains the whole in a particular way.

In this sense, Indra’s Net anticipates a relational ontology: reality is not composed of isolated substances but of interpenetrating events of reflection. Light is the medium that allows this interpenetration to occur, preserving identity while generating multiplicity. What appears as many distinct experiences across observers is in fact the structured unfolding of a single source across an infinite field of relations.

Indra’s Web can be understood as an ancient intuition of what modern science describes in terms of molecules, compounds, and structural networks of matter. At the most fundamental level, molecules are not isolated units but relational structures—stable configurations of atoms whose identities are defined entirely by their connections. Each molecule exists only insofar as it participates in a wider web of relations: bonds, fields, energies, and interactions. In this sense, the molecular world already presupposes a logic strikingly similar to Indra’s Web, where each node reflects and contains the structure of the whole network.

In contemporary chemistry and biology, compounds are best described as spatially organized, often spherical or quasi-spherical structures whose stability arises from symmetry, resonance, and shared energetic states. These structures do not merely touch one another externally; they interpenetrate through fields and bonds, forming higher-order assemblies. Photosynthesis provides a clear example. A plant does not use sunlight as a material substance but as an energetic and informational input. Photons excite electrons within chlorophyll molecules, initiating a cascade of molecular transformations that reorganize carbon dioxide and water into glucose. From this process, proteins and complex biological structures emerge. Light, in this sense, is the generative principle that animates molecular configurations into living form.

Seen from this perspective, all matter can be understood as light structured into geometric and relational models. Atomic orbitals, molecular bonds, and crystalline lattices are expressions of energy stabilized into form. What ancient thinkers intuited symbolically as a web of reflective spheres is now described mathematically and experimentally as networks of interacting molecules, each reflecting the total energetic conditions of the system in which it participates. Every molecule “contains” the whole, not by representation, but by being a local realization of universal physical laws.

Indra’s Web therefore anticipates the modern scientific understanding that reality is not built from independent substances but from interconnected structures of energy and form. Just as each jewel in the net reflects all others, each molecule embodies the same fundamental principles—quantization, symmetry, and relationality—through which the universe expresses itself at every scale. What differs between ancient metaphor and modern science is not the insight itself, but the language used to articulate it.

The intensity or magnitude of the Sun is commonly thought to be determined by relative distance. For example, plants are located at varying distances from the Sun, and therefore the Sun appears to them as a gradient of different relative magnitudes of light extension. Modern science commonly claims that the seasons are controlled by the relative distance of the Sun to the Earth during Earth’s orbit around it.

The prevailing idea is that the Earth orbits a greater star—the Sun—and has a relative relationship to it. This orbit is not perfectly symmetrical, as there are no perfectly symmetrical objects in nature. Nature always exhibits a degree of asymmetry. Just as there are no perfect circles observed in nature, the orbits of planets around their greater stars are not perfect circles but slightly oval or elliptical. These planets orbit stars of greater mass and gravitational attraction, yet it is unclear why such attraction does not cause a complete collapse, ultimately consuming all planets, as black holes do at the most extreme macroscopic and microscopic levels of matter. In black holes, matter is infinitely compressed into an object so dense that not even light can escape—only light enters, possibly extending infinitely forward like a wormhole.

Because planetary orbits are asymmetrical, there is a variation in the time it takes to complete one revolution versus another. Since the orbit is not a perfect circle but an oval, the object appears closer to the star at one point in its orbit and farther away at another. Modern science uses this illustration to explain the seasons, claiming that the Earth becomes slightly closer to the Sun at certain times and slightly farther away at others. These relative distances are said to determine the degree of energy absorption—the intensity or density of light interacting with the observer—where closer is hotter and farther is colder.

However, this explanation based solely on relative distance does not fully address the issue. One could presuppose a different assumption and still arrive at the same observable results. If magnitude were determined only by distance, the same outcome could also be explained by the Sun generating different levels of intensity within itself—cooling or heating independently of distance. In this view, the Sun becomes its own source of heating and cooling, regardless of external relations.

Rather than temperature being caused by external distance—colder when farther, warmer when closer—the Sun could generate varying intensities of energy internally. The Sun, after all, is inherently hot and possesses its own internal source of energy. It continuously generates energy through an internal principle rather than relying on external relations. From this perspective, distance becomes a secondary quality, while energy generation is the more fundamental cause.

If the Sun is fundamentally a fusion body, then it remains such as long as it exhibits the properties of fusion. Within its relatively fixed relationship to the Earth, the Sun could generate different magnitudes of intensity on its own—making itself hotter or cooler at different times, rather than merely appearing so due to changes in distance. Each relative position on the Earth occupies a different relational dimension with respect to the Sun, and the Sun stands in a unique constant relation to each location. All such relations result in perceived differences in magnitude.

Even within a single object, such as a planet, different aspects or components occupy unique relative positions in relation to the same star or Sun. As a result, magnitude is not solely a function of distance, but of the unique relational position between observer, object, and energy source.

Matter, understood as the external relation, is what an object is not in itself but is for another in perception. At the same time, this externality is precisely how the object expresses itself to that other. What the object is externally—its materiality, position, and interaction—is therefore inseparable from how it is apprehended by something else.

The internal aspect of the object, by contrast, is what the object is as itself: its self-identity, its unity with its own expression. Yet even here, the object is not identical with what perceives its expression. While the object is internally unified with its expression, it simultaneously stands in relation to an other that perceives it. Thus, while being within its own expression, the object is perceiving an other, just as another is perceiving its expression. Being is therefore always relational, even in self-identity.¹

This relationality constitutes the substratum of objects: each object exists only insofar as it bears relations to other objects, and each relation discloses a distinct variation of qualities. Motion, at its most fundamental level, is not mere displacement in space but the change of quality—the alteration of one determination into another—extended across relations between objects.²

A clear example is found in the atomic structure of a single compound such as water. As temperature changes from cold to hot, the same molecules undergo a transformation in their relations: they move from being closer together to being further apart. What we observe as melting or evaporation is not a change of substance but a reconfiguration of internal relations among the same components.³

When an ice cube freezes rather than melts, its motion determines it more fully in the solid state rather than the liquid state. Although the three states of matter—solid, liquid, and gas—internally presuppose one another, the crucial point is that they can be simultaneously implicated while maintaining a single identity. The ice cube may be solid while melting at the surface and evaporating at the boundary, yet it remains the same object throughout these transitions. Motion, then, is the temporal unfolding of qualitative differences within identity.⁴

True change in the being of a thing is therefore passage, not locomotion. Locomotion—the movement of an object from one place to another—often preserves a stable quality and form, and is thus closer to an inertial condition. An object in locomotion maintains its determination while bearing an external trajectory. Motion, in the deeper sense, occurs when qualities themselves transform.⁵

Such motion is always relational. Ice in relation to a freezer exhibits solidity; ice in relation to the sun exhibits liquidity. The condition of being solid or liquid is not intrinsic in isolation but emerges from the relation between the ice cube and its environment. The freezer and the sun are not merely external influences; they are co-determinants of the ice cube’s state. The ice cube with the freezer generates solidity; the ice cube with the sun generates liquidity.⁶

Accordingly, the motion of an object is not something it possesses independently, but the way it is conceived relative to another object. Motion is the expression of difference within relation, and change is the manifestation of being as becoming.

Footnotes

1. Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book VII, on substance as relationally disclosed through form and matter.
2. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, on motion as a function of events and qualitative transition rather than mere spatial displacement.
3. Democritus and later atomist interpretations; modern thermodynamics confirms phase transitions as relational rearrangements rather than changes in substance.
4. Aristotle, Physics, Book III, on potentiality and actuality coexisting within the same subject.
5. Galileo and Newton treat locomotion as inertial preservation; your distinction aligns more closely with Hegel’s notion of qualitative motion (Science of Logic).
6. Relational ontology: see Leibniz’s principle of sufficient reason and Whitehead’s doctrine of internal relations.

A vacuum, in and of itself, is therefore not merely a lack of something, nor simply an empty region in which an object happens to be located. We often imagine an object placed within an empty area and then identify that absence of things—no-thing—as the vacuum. In reality, however, a vacuum is itself a conception: it is the condition that allows objects to be identifiable and to bear relations to one another. As such, the vacuum possesses a quality and exhibits a function.

That which is truly nothing is inconceivable. What cannot be conceived by an observer cannot exist as anything at all, because it bears no function, no determinacy, and no relation. Even the act of speaking about “nothing” already confers upon it a form of being. To refer to nothing is necessarily to treat it as something—if only as that which enables other things to appear, interact, and be distinguished. Thus, the vacuum cannot be equated with absolute nothingness. Its function may not be a specific or unique activity in the manner of a physical object, but rather the facilitation of other functions: the enabling condition under which objects, events, and relations become possible.

In this sense, the vacuum is not an object among objects, but neither is it mere absence. It is a structural condition of intelligibility, a mediating field in which determinate beings can arise, persist, and be related. Absolute nothingness would be entirely without function and therefore without conceivability; the vacuum, by contrast, is precisely that through which conceivability itself is made possible.

Footnotes

1. Aristotle, Physics, Book IV, esp. 208b–213a, where the void is rejected as pure non-being and treated as a conceptual limit required for explaining motion.
2. G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, Book I (“Being, Nothing, Becoming”), on the impossibility of pure nothing and the necessity of mediation.
3. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Transcendental Aesthetic, on space as a condition of the possibility of appearances rather than a thing in itself.
4. Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature, on the vacuum as an abstraction from relations rather than an independently existing entity.

Subject to Vacuum: Light

The initial logical stages of consciousness are directly invariant with the fundamental emergence of physical phenomena. For this reason, theoretical physics repeatedly subjects phenomena to a vacuum: the vacuum functions as an ontological limit case, a conceptual derivation of being from nothing. When light is introduced into a vacuum, physicists aim to demonstrate how motion constitutes energy, or conversely, how energy manifests as motion.

This procedure, however, contains a contradiction—one that Hegel understood not as merely negative, but as positively productive. For Hegel, contradiction is not a defect of thought but the very engine of determination. It is not simple negation, but a unity of contra (opposition), contrary (difference), and dictation (governing determination). This synthesis forms what may be called contradistinction: first, the distinction of contraries; second, the maintenance of their difference not by mere separation, but by the mediating process that constitutes the very field—what appears as a vacuum—within which difference becomes discernible.¹

The notion of the inverse is introduced to explain how mediation generates contrary poles within a single continuum. The spectrum of opposites—being and nothing, light and void—is not externally assembled, but internally constituted by mediation itself. Each pole is intelligible only as the inverse of the other.

This ontological inverse relation between being and nothing illuminates the physical enigma of light. Light both is energy in motion and exhibits motion as energy—most clearly in phenomena such as ionizing radiation and radioactive decay. If we subject light to a vacuum, how is motion to be discerned? The error lies in attempting to explain light’s motion through locomotion, a concept that presupposes already-constituted objects moving through space. But locomotion cannot explain the origination of motion itself.

In a vacuum, whenever light extends into what it is not—void—it becomes measurable only by reinstating the very reference point whose origin we seek to explain. To say that light “moves into empty space” already assumes a distinction between light and vacuum as independently existing entities. This assumption is precisely the mistake: it presupposes the hypothetical relation that is meant to be explained. By treating light as contained within a void, physics inadvertently reifies both terms instead of grasping their mediated unity.²

In ancient metaphysics, especially Aristotle’s, motion (kinesis) is not primarily locomotion but becoming—the passage from potentiality to actuality.³ To explain how light constitutes energy, we must first explain how light becomes. Only from this becoming can motion and energy be derived. The experimental strategy of subjecting light to a vacuum is therefore not about movement through space, but about isolating the conditions of becoming.

A vacuum functions as a measuring tunnel: it presupposes duration, extension, and comparison. Light in a vacuum appears as a wave; when the vacuum is treated as a tunnel of extension, light manifests wavelength. When the vacuum is treated as a point-like limit, light appears as a particle. The so-called wave–particle duality is therefore not a property of light alone, but a consequence of how the void is conceptually imposed upon the phenomenon. A change in conception produces a change in manifestation.⁴

Only by capturing the moment of becoming—prior to work, prior to energy expenditure—can we understand how motion converts into energy. Energy is not primarily what performs work; it is the quality of activity itself, the doing that precedes the result.

All measurement proceeds negatively: a principle is first measured by what it is not. Measurement presupposes that the phenomenon is not yet fully known; it is delimited against a horizon of possible behaviors. A phenomenon reveals what it is by excluding what it could be. If we take the initial point as nothing, this corresponds physically to the notion of a singularity—pure potential energy. Nothing is what being is potentially.⁵

In the first ontological advance, nothing externalizes itself as being. This externalization is simultaneously self-expression. Being is not the negation of nothing, but its expressed form. This transition does not produce two independent terms—nothing here and being there—but a mediated unity in which each is intelligible only through the other.

This mediation introduces the first moment of direction—not spatial displacement, but inversion. Direction here is not movement away from something, but the determination of difference within unity. It is the earliest physical analogue of orientation.

When physicists locate motion in light, they often point to microscopic behavior—photon interactions, ionization, decay. Yet what is really being observed is the manifestation of a deeper ontological structure: a continuum in which magnitude emerges from infinitesimal distinction. The concept of the infinitesimal expresses the first articulation of space itself. The self-externalization of being from nothing gives rise to the first notion of dimensionality.⁶

Light cannot extend beyond a void, because in doing so it simply reaffirms itself. The vacuum becomes the limit of light—but not as an external boundary. If void and light were externally distinct, both would have to occupy a shared space, which would already presuppose a higher container. Instead, light and void are inverse determinations of the same continuum.

Thus the mediation between light and void reveals that light does not move beyond itself, but turns inward, filling itself with itself. This inward inversion is the first moment of magnitude. Light externalizes itself while remaining identical with itself—precisely Hegel’s description of self-related negativity.⁷

At this point, a third determination emerges. From the one-dimensional unity of being and nothing, and the two-dimensional contrast between them, we arrive at a three-dimensional articulation. Light acquires form—spherical, self-contained. This corresponds physically to the emergence of composite structures (for example, electrons) and philosophically to the transition from pure process to individuated object.⁸

In the case of the Schwarzschild radius, the void conceived as a particle represents the self-identity of nothing. Conceived as a tunnel, it becomes the wave-like extension of emptiness—space itself. This shift is not merely physical but perspectival: it reflects a change in consciousness. When consciousness confronts nothing, it discovers being; when it confronts being, it discovers capacity. Energy is thus revealed as pure potentiality.

Actualization occurs through determination. When consciousness seeks a particular being, it encounters it—and discovers that the distinction between “always having been there” and “coming into being now” collapses. Becoming reveals itself as recognition.

When light inverts its motion inwardly—no longer merely extending into void but containing itself—it achieves the first moment of self-determination. From this arises the possibility of stable physical forms, free motion, and self-contained bodies. From a single determination unfolds an entire spectrum of physical qualities.

Footnotes

1. G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, Book I, “Being,” on contradiction as determinate negation.
2. Aristotle, Physics, Book IV, on void as a conceptual limit rather than an independent entity.
3. Aristotle, Physics, Book III, on motion (kinesis) as the actuality of potentiality.
4. Niels Bohr, complementarity principle; also Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy.
5. G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, “Being, Nothing, Becoming.”
6. Leibniz, infinitesimals; Whitehead, Process and Reality, on extensive continuity.
7. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, on self-related negativity and light.
8. Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature, on events, objects, and emergence.

On the other hand, we are not saying—contra a common reading of Martin Heidegger’s What Is Metaphysics?—that nothingness is disclosed only through beings and never exists except as a by-product of objects. Heidegger argues that nothing is revealed through the experience of beings as a whole, and never as an isolated object in itself.¹ However, we are not claiming that nothing does not exist because it bears a negative relation to itself and thereby negates its own existence. Nor are we claiming that nothing is merely the absence or lack of being, such that being is primary and nothing is simply “what is not there.”

That view arises from an ontological error that is conveniently derived from immediate observation. We first notice beings, and then logically infer that where beings are absent there must be nothing—and from this we conclude that nothing cannot exist. Ontologically speaking, however, this inference reverses the order of principles. Nothingness is the first principle, not a derivative concept.

At first glance, this appears to contradict the dominant modern scientific assumption upon which much of physics rests: that being cannot come out of nothing, that creation ex nihilo is impossible. According to this view, there must always be prior conditions that necessitate the emergence of any object or event. Yet with the development of quantum mechanics, we increasingly encounter phenomena that appear abruptly, without any determinate causal precursor. Energy fluctuations, particle–antiparticle pairs, and vacuum events seem to originate not from a clearly identifiable source, but from what is effectively a non-source—or more precisely, from the system’s own internal indeterminacy.²

Moreover, at macroscopic and cosmological scales, we encounter theoretical entities such as black holes and white holes, which suggest the emission or absorption of energy from regions whose causal origins remain fundamentally opaque.³ To conflate an unknown source with a state of nothingness may indeed be a logical error—if we assume a strict separation between observer and phenomenon, between mind and nature. However, if mind and nature are taken as indivisible constituents of a single reality, then they can be understood as principles of one another. In that case, an unknown element within consciousness can legitimately be interpreted as a state of nothingness within nature itself.

If mind is a quality of nature—if it is one of nature’s fundamental expressions—then it is not extraordinary that beings should appear to come out of nothing. In mental life, this happens constantly. Ideas and thoughts arise seemingly from nowhere. We can describe them in terms of neural activity, or trace them back to prior thoughts, but such causal explanations inevitably lead to an infinite regress. A regress of this kind cannot genuinely explain causation; it merely reaffirms the same substance under different descriptions. One cannot explain a cause by endlessly offering another cause of the same kind.⁴

Materialist accounts therefore encounter a paradox. We may say that thoughts arise from neural processes, but when asked where those neural processes originate, we point to matter; when asked where matter originates, we invoke more fundamental physical structures; eventually, we reach a level where the cause of matter itself can only be described abstractly or theoretically. At that point, we are no longer dealing with empirical material causes, but with something closer to what Plato and the rationalists identified as Forms or intelligible principles.⁵

Furthermore, neural activity is not identical to the thoughts it produces. Thoughts possess qualitative, experiential, and intentional dimensions that cannot be reduced to their material substrates. Within consciousness, novelty is continuously generated. In this sense, thoughts arise out of nothing into being, and return from being into nothing, just as natural phenomena do. This is not unlike energy generation at the quantum level, where emergence and dissolution are intrinsic to the system.

The same pattern can be observed in life itself. A child is born through its parents, who serve as the passage of nature for the offspring. Yet the personality, consciousness, and inner life of that child are so radically unique that it is reasonable—phenomenologically speaking—to say that they came out of nothing. The passage exists, but the individuality is not derivable from it. In this way, nothingness is not the absence of being, but the ground of novelty, the condition under which genuinely new determinations can arise.

Footnotes

1. Martin Heidegger, What Is Metaphysics?, trans. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977).
2. See David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, and discussions of vacuum fluctuations in quantum field theory.
3. Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time; Roger Penrose, The Road to Reality.
4. Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book II, on the impossibility of explaining causes through infinite regress.
5. Plato, Timaeus; also Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, on the limits of empirical causation and the necessity of intelligible principles.

Nothing

When we speak of the term nothing, what do we mean? Is nothing merely the deprivation of something—the absence of a “thing”? Is it simply the negation of being, such that it stands as the other of being? Metaphysically, the concept of nothing possesses a concrete reality and an actual existence in the world. For this reason, it is essential to understand nothing not as a linguistic convenience, but as a principle of reality.

If the concept of nothing bears real existence, then it can only be understood logically, for existence itself is inherently logical. By logic in metaphysics, we do not mean a conventional or debatable system of rules, but the laws of thinking that are deducible from first principles—principles that are self-evident and true in themselves. Nothing does not stand opposed to something as an external negation; rather, nothing logically coexists with something. Each category presupposes another, just as numbers do: no number exists in isolation, and no determination is intelligible without reference to what it excludes and includes simultaneously.¹

Reason presents itself in the world as Nature. The term nature, according to Plato, does not signify a particular region of things but the whole of what is—the totality of the universe. In the Timaeus, Socrates treats nature as an intelligible order structured by reason, not as a mere collection of material objects.² Nature, in this sense, is not static but processual.

Nature is an evolutionary process. It begins with reason and with nothing, which coexist from the very outset. Thus, we do not begin with a single isolated principle, but with two principles that are identical with one another: nothing and something. Their identity lies in the fact that neither can be understood without the other. This identity is first recognized as existence alone, and this recognition formulates what we call the Self.

The recognition that existence is alone—relative to nothing—is simultaneously the recognition of the Self. To be the Self is to stand in relation to nothing. The Self is either itself or nothing; there is no third option. This raises the question: what is the Self? The Self is anything that is, but insofar as anything that is something always coexists relative to nothing, a void remains within everything. Nothing is therefore not external to beings but internal to them as their condition of determinacy.

The Self, expressed logically as I = I, is not a static identity but an activity—an intention toward itself. It is self-relating being. Yet because what the Self is has no predetermined limit—because it is not fixed to any particular determination—reason is inherently oriented toward its own infinitude. Reason is the intention of being toward what it can be, and nothing is the openness that makes this intention possible.

Footnotes

1. G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, Book I, “Being,” where being and nothing are shown to be inseparable moments whose unity gives rise to becoming.
2. Plato, Timaeus, esp. 27d–29d, where nature (physis) is presented as a rationally ordered whole shaped by intelligible principles.
3. Aristotle, Metaphysics Γ, on first principles as self-evident and indemonstrable foundations of thought.

last update 1.8.2026