Both Here and Not-Here? On the Logic of Transition and Hegel's Unnecessary Embrace of Contradiction

The thesis of this paper is that what Hegel took as the existent contradiction of motion was only an apparent one that dissolves upon a closer inspection of the structure of transition itself, or what I call, action. By establishing transition or action as the exclusion of possibilities through the determination of one, determination is shown to be both positive and logically prior to, conceptually separable from, temporally simultaneous with, and ontologically inseparable from—exclusion or negation. Along with this, direction is shown to be a presupposition of motion as opposed to being identical with it. Once these distinctions are made, they are applied to Zeno’s paradoxes of the Dichotomy and the Arrow, resolving them through logical and conceptual analysis without recourse to mathematics or physics, and revealing motion to be demonstrably non-contradictory and coherent without abandoning the concept of transition or requiring that the transitioning object be indeterminate in the instant thereof. Once the structure of transition has been validated in motion, a general account of transition as such follows which shows change/action/transition/becoming not to be definable without circularity due to its status as a first principle, yet articulable in terms of its intelligibility.