If the immanent intelligibility of the plasticity of is-ness produced exclusively ideational contents—noemata, meanings, concepts and representations—it would be difficult to avoid the suspicion that what truly is had been transformed into a kind of universally expanded consciousness. The noematic, however, is only one modality of the intelligible. An intelligible determination need not exist as content for a consciousness; it may take objective form as structure, rhythm, relation, corporeal organization, affective modification or an operatively valid configuration of reality.
The poietic moment of noetic–poietic–noematic activity therefore cannot be understood merely as the production of new noemata. Poiesis designates the capacity of activity to carry a meaningful determination—both overcoming and preserving it—into real determination. Its effect is then no longer the idea of a form, but form itself; not the noema of a relation, but an established relation; not the meaning of organization, but an organization that exists, endures, acts and receives further determinations.
The structure of a crystal, for example, is not a noema possessed by the crystal. Its symmetry, limitations and laws of combination are not contents of its consciousness, yet neither are they formless arbitrariness. In them, intelligible difference assumes objective form. In a living organism, the same possibility appears at a higher degree of intensity: as self-maintenance, development, responsiveness and plastic transformation. Intelligibility has here become corporeal, processual and operative without thereby becoming noematic.
Even the gravitational field, understood in the Einsteinian sense as the dynamic geometrical structure of spacetime, may serve as a carefully delimited example. It is not a thought about the relation between bodies, but a real configuration of relations determining the possible paths of bodies and light. General relativity does not prove our ontology, but it provides a physical analogy for a determination that objectively holds and operates without being the content of a consciousness.
Non-noematic effects therefore show that the intelligibility of the plasticity of is-ness is ontologically broader than noematic validity. The noema is not the primordial form of every intelligibility, but one of its more developed and reflective modalities. The noetic, the poietic and the noematic remain inseparable principles of a single activity, although they are not equally explicit in every form of existence. In some forms poietic formation predominates; in others, receptivity; with perception there emerges a field in which the other begins to hold as other.
Perceptual transparency lies precisely at the boundary between the non-noematic and the noematic. It does not signify the absence of structure, but the non-obstruction of otherness by one’s own structure. The corporeal and processual configurations of perception are not noemata; nevertheless, through their activity a field arises in which the other can become present precisely as other. Non-noematic organization becomes the bearer of noematic validity.
The different intensities of this movement may therefore be provisionally expressed in the following sequence:
immanent intelligibility — non-noematic formation — receptivity — transparency — noematic validity — self-conscious self-presence.
This sequence is neither an already demonstrated cosmological history nor a division of reality into separate ontological levels. It is a map of possible intensifications of the same primordial non-indifference: the capacity of what is to receive difference, to allow it to acquire immanent validity and to be transformed through it.
We are not thereby claiming that a crystal, a gravitational field or a living organism secretly thinks. Consciousness is not a property arbitrarily attributed to everything that exists. It is an intensification of a deeper ontological structure within which otherness can already produce an internal difference. In perception, this non-indifference becomes transparent to the other; in self-consciousness, transparency itself becomes present to itself.
The immanent intelligibility of the plasticity of is-ness is therefore not exhausted in noematic contents. Its poietic character produces non-noematic articulations in which intelligible difference becomes real determination. Consciousness is not a second substance added to an ontologically dead reality, but one of the possible intensifications of the primordial non-indifference, receptivity and poietic openness of what truly is.