THE UNITY OF IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE AS THE ...

Gravity is a force that acts at a distance. Although Newton himself simply
described the mathematical laws that govern gravity without hypothesizing about its
nature, post-Newtonians generally made certain further assumptions, rejecting the
Cartesian explanations of falling objects and of orbital rotation, explanations that rely
solely upon the transference of motion through the contact of matter in a plenum. They
likewise rejected more traditional forms of atomism – i.e. conceptions of the world as a
collection of particles that bump around in the void like billiard balls without any
attractive forces. However, with the acceptance of gravity as a genuinely attractive force
that acts at distance, a new conception of the physical world becomes possible. On this
conception, objects are not merely pushed along in terms of efficient causality. In
gravity, objects move because of the striving implicit in their orientation towards some
spatio-temporal point in the future. With regards to gravity, the motion of objects cannot
be solely explained in terms of the state from which the object comes, but rather it must
also be explained in terms of the state towards which the object is moving. Gravity,
construed as an attractive force that acts at a distance, opens a space in the natural world
for final causality, for the categories associated with purposive action. Thus in somewhat
Hegel’s claim that gravity is the unity of repulsion and attraction, because (unlike Newton) he does not
understand gravity to be a force by which matter is passively attracted. True, he allows us to say (with
Newton) that ‘matter is attracted by the centre’; but he makes it abundantly clear at several points that
gravity is actually matter’s own, active ‘seeking’ or ‘striving’ to unity with other matter.” This passage
makes a useful distinction between force, construed merely as something acting upon things, and force as
the striving by which a thing determines itself. For further discussions of Hegel’s conception of gravity
that follow a similar line of interpretation, see Dieter Wandschneider’s essays “Die Stellung der Natur im
Gesamtenwurf der hegelschen Philosophie,” and “Die Kategorien ,Materie’ und ,Licht’ in der
Naturphilosophie Hegels.”
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