In this chapter we will concentrate on Hegel's writings on mechanics and this section's conceptual rendering of the genesis of materiality in order to substantiate our thesis concerning the radical exteriority constitutive of Hegelian nature, its minimal conceptual structuration, which is strikingly apparent at this zero level of the natural register. This is not, however, to suggest that this basal register is completely devoid of intelligible structure, because to do so would be to collapse into a Cartesian-Kantian- Fichtean, even Sartrean, dualism which Hegel rejects in toto. Such a move would make the ways in which thought is able to think such a field of (quasi-) objects mysterious if not utterly contradictory, a Kantian thing-in- itself about which one should not be able to say anything, but about which one nevertheless says a great deal. After all, to think about nature is conceptual, and that conceptualisation must have traction in the world if Hegel is to avoid a painful solipsism. Our thesis insists that the natural register, at this zero level, is informed by the most minimal conceptuality and that it is this skeletal determination that constitutes its instability, its contrast to the sophisticated modes of conceptual mediation that we find, for instance, in the register of spirit proper, its historical productivity in terms of socio-economics, politics, art, and even philosophy. This immanent limitation of the natural register is what we will demarcate more generally by ‘the spurious infinite’.

A conceptual analysis of nature, for Hegel, starts with what must be the most basic and all-encompassing feature of the register before articulating what must be involved in specific fields of emergent complexity (chemistry, biology). Speculative reflection, in consultation with the results of empirical science, generates a conceptual schematic that outlines what must be in place for any object to be considered natural. Since, for Hegel, nature is constituted by externality all the way down, his analysis must begin at the extreme of the most indeterminate externality. Looking to capture that extreme conceptually, he isolates the category of space. Hegel writes: ‘The primary or immediate determination of nature is the abstract universality of its self-externality, its unmediated indifference, i.e. space.’ He further characterises the externality of space as, juxtaposition, collaterality [Nebeneinander].