Working document: Hegel’s Preface, negativity, in-flection, language, and the emergence of an ontological perspective
Introduction: the meaning of recapitulation
This document arises as a recapitulation of a long, slow, and conceptually demanding work on and around Hegel. Its purpose is not to serve as a substitute for reading the Phenomenology of Spirit itself, nor to definitively close the questions that opened up in the course of our conversations. On the contrary, it is intended to gather the main lines of the work, to recognize the points at which the reading of Hegel was turning into independent thought, and to indicate those places in its movement where concepts appear that no longer function merely as hermeneutic means, but as elements of a possible new philosophical perspective.
The distinctive character of this work lies in the fact that Hegel’s Preface was not read as an isolated introductory text, but as the place where method, ontology, logic, phenomenology, theory of knowledge, philosophy of language, and the question of the Absolute meet. Within this reading, it was continually confirmed that Hegel’s sentence rarely remains merely what, at first, it appears to be. It almost always demands patience, memory of previous passages, and a readiness not to forget what had already been won. For this reason, it was often repeated in our work that we have no right to forget. Without memory of the mediations already carried out, every new result becomes a dead formula; with an appropriate form of interiorization, it becomes a moment in the development of the Whole.
The recapitulation that follows does not intend to be a mere survey of theses. It seeks to emerge as a pulsating flow of thought and to show directly how the fundamental concepts are formed, transformed, mutually intersect, and intertwine. At the center of this flow stands Hegel’s fundamental thought that substance must be thought also as subject. In our in-flection, this thought took shape in the thesis that what truly is is not an inert, passive, and dead substratum, but immanent-intelligible plasticity of is-ness: a living, self-forming, noetic-poietic-noematic activity that determines itself, posits itself, alienates itself, returns to itself and, in its highest forms, knows itself.
This document will therefore have a twofold task. The first task is recapitulative: to gather what has been said in the course of the work on Hegel’s Preface, especially concerning the negative, truth, what is false, method, understanding, formalism, individual being, quality, language, and science. The second task is constructive: to show how, from this reading, an outline of an ontology is born—one that does not abandon Hegel in a purely external manner, yet does not repeat him as an already existing system. This ontology moves toward the concepts of plasticity, poietic intelligibility, the unconscious intelligibility of nature, in-flection, and language as an exceptionally distinctive immediacy of self-conscious Being.
It is important to emphasize at once that what is at issue here is not a completed system. What has emerged is a very compact germ of a possible ontology that still needs to be developed further. Its concepts are not without risk. They are rich, but precisely for that reason they can become too broad. They carry speculative energy, but must constantly be guarded against formalism. All further work must therefore unfold under a twofold demand: creative courage and corrective rigor. Without the former, thought moving through Hegel’s Phenomenology remains mere commentary; without the latter, it becomes an empty metaphysical construction.
In this sense, this document is both a map and a register of warnings. A map, because it shows where we have arrived. A register of warnings, because it shows that no concept may be treated as a magic formula. Hegel’s critique of table-fixating understanding and formalism must “supervise” our own concepts as well. Immanent-intelligible plasticity of is-ness, noetic-poietic-noematic activity, in-flection, unconscious intelligibility, and non-noematic effect can remain alive only if, each time, they demonstrate the inner necessity of their own validity. They must not be indifferent labels attached to the corresponding forms of immediacy; they must represent categories derived from the very movement of what truly is.
Hegel’s Preface as a school of patience and remembrance
Our reading of the Preface proceeded under the assumption that Hegel’s text does not permit haste. Every assertion that appears to repeat an earlier thesis soon proved to be a new articulation of the result of the preceding mediation. Passages that might be treated as mere reminiscences became decisive points. This was especially true of our consideration of the negative, that which is false, the concept of method, and formalism. Hegel constantly repeats, but his repetitions are never mere treading water; they are moments of transformation: he brings the preceding determination back on a new plane, under new pressure, in a different constellation.
Thus the reading of the Preface was also an exercise against forgetting. When Hegel speaks of that which vanishes, he does not mean that it should simply be left behind us. That which vanishes must be regarded as essential. If we fix it as a truth without remainder and declare it self-subsistent, it becomes false; if we forget it, truth becomes impoverished. Genuine speculative truth is not a dead positive that rests over against superseded errors, but a result that remembers within itself all its negative, vanishing, and transformed moments.
From this crystallized one of the fundamental hermeneutic theses: partial determinations of the Absolute are not simply false. They are true as moments, but not as isolated, self-subsistent oases of the real. When, for example, that which truly is is determined as being, this determination is not incorrect. It would be nonsensical to say that immanent-intelligible plasticity of is-ness is not something that is. But the determination of being is so abstract that it conceals more than it reveals. It strikes the truth, but only impoverishedly. Therefore, it must vanish as something independent, yet remain preserved as a moment of further movement.
This model applies to the movement of every concept. Being, substance, subject, spirit, the Absolute, noesis, noema, plasticity, in-flection — none of these determinations may be treated as the final word. Each of them may have its right, but only in its proper place, at a given moment in the development of in-flection. When they lose their place and begin to sound like wholly independent and self-subsistent forms of immediacy, they become that which is untrue. When they return to the living, pulsating movement of thought, they become moments of truth. In this sense, truth is not a sequence of discarded errors and one finally discovered proposition, but the substantial continuum of transformed determinations.
The Preface, thus, proved to be a text that does not introduce us into the system from without, but already conducts the elementary schooling of the system itself. It teaches that truth cannot simply be received, obtained from someone, least of all as something ready-made. It teaches that the negative is not simply false. It teaches that method is not some external tool, but the movement of the thing itself. It teaches that the understanding must be preserved, yet surpassed. It teaches that philosophy must not paste determinations onto content, but must follow the inner life of the object. For this reason, the Preface became for our work more than a hermeneutic theme; the Preface — for us — grew into the site at which the very possibility of speculative thinking is decided.
Our reading moved between devotion to Hegel’s speculation and, at first, a vague sense of its insufficiency, and later the need to expand it and transform it from within. We never intended to turn Hegel into an unquestionable authority, nor to use him as a pretext for floating and empty arbitrariness of thought. For that reason, each of our formulations had to return to Hegel’s text and withstand its pressure. When Hegel spoke of the concept, we asked whether the concept must include poietic plasticity. When he spoke of thought, we asked whether we could remain with his determination or whether thought had to acquire a still deeper articulation and thereby be expressed as the activity of noetic-noematic formation. When he spoke of science, we asked whether its completion must think language through in a distinctive way.
From this work emerged a distinct hermeneutic position. Hegel’s speculative thought is not merely an object of interpretation, but an inter-active element in the development of a different ontological position. And it must immediately be acknowledged: this development is possible only insofar as Hegel’s thought remains a corrective. Every one of our terminological innovations must pass through the mercilessness of the Hegelian gaze: does it demonstrate the necessity of the transition, or merely produce an appearance of depth? Does it derive its content from the content’s own immanent movement, or merely apply a schema? Does it respect negativity, or turn it into a rhetorical ornament? In this sense, Hegel remains the discipline of our thought even when we attempt to think across his shadow.
The Absolute as Immanent-Intelligible Plasticity of Is-ness
The central concept that took shape in the course of the work is the concept of the Absolute as immanent-intelligible plasticity of is-ness. This concept does not designate a new metaphysical label for an old substance. It attempts to grasp what truly is as a living activity of self-determination, self-formation, and self-positing. The Absolute is not the inert substratum of all things, nor the mere sum of existing beings. It is, in every determinate being, that which determines, in every form that which forms, in every difference that which produces difference, and, in every return to itself, recognizes its own otherness.
The expression “of is-ness” points to is-ness itself, to the elemental “is” that cannot be separated from what truly is. And yet, is-ness itself, insofar as it is treated as something independent and self-subsistent, becomes a moment of what is false. It must be understood as plasticity: not as motionless identity, but as a living, pulsating activity of self-transformation. Plasticity here is not scholastic potentia; it is not a compressed and ready-made reality awaiting its own actualization. It is the immanently intelligible activity of Being through which it brings forth its own determinations, forming itself through their meaningful-ideational concretization, becoming this and that, through which it folds itself into discrete particularizations, but also returns to itself precisely through them.
The adjective “immanent-intelligible” has a decisive function. It prevents plasticity from being understood as blind energy or irrational vitality. Being must be thought as plasticity, but its plasticity is not formless. It is intelligible: within it there appear form, measure, relation, rhythm, structure, meaning, eidos, noema. Yet this intelligibility is not merely the product of reflective consciousness. It exists even before self-consciousness, as the unconscious intelligibility of nature, as that which produces the organic symmetry of the leaf, as that which creates the structural determinacy of its venation, the law-governed determinacy of its chlorophyll function, sonic proportions, the rhythm and pulse of all that is organic. Being is intelligible even before it knows that it is intelligible.
From this follows one of the most important differences with respect to excessively narrow idealisms. If we understand thought as the immanent-intelligible aspect of Being, we must not understand it formalistically, least of all as calculation, calculus, tabular ordering or an operation upon signs. Thought must be understood in analogy with the pulsating Nous that does not close itself off within pure conceptual calculability, but poietically empties itself, forms, gives itself, brings otherness forth from itself and introduces itself into otherness. Being thinks by producing individual forms of the immediate. Being knows by transforming itself into the object of its own knowledge. It comprehends by folding itself into what it comprehends. Thus, “thought” in our register is inseparable from plasticity.
This concept of the Absolute is not opposed to Hegel’s claim that substance is subject; it seeks to extend it. Substance is subject because it is not a dead substratum but self-movement, negativity, returning to itself. But if subjectivity is understood only as pure conceptual self-transparency, the poietic richness of Being is lost. Therefore, for us the Absolute is determined as noetic-poietic-noematic activity. It is not merely thought thinking itself, but thinking-creative-meaningful activity: a force that knows, forms and produces concrete beings as concretizations of immanent meaningful-ideational determinations.
This ontological perspective requires that we regard no being as a mere object, a concretization of a lifeless and inert world of things. Every being is a discrete particularization of the Absolute, but not in the manner of an external emanation from some ready-made fullness. It is the place at which plasticity determines itself as a determinate WHAT. At the most immediate layer of the manifestation of what truly is, to comprehend something and to be that something are not completely separate processes. In the pure immediacy of self-formation, plasticity comprehends itself by positing itself. Noema is not an external design, but the immanent dictum of determinacy: the inner meaningful directive according to which Being, the non-something that is, becomes this being.
Yet this self-production first takes place unconsciously. Being produces a leaf, a body, a sound, a crystal, the human being, natural and spiritual forms, but in these forms it does not yet know fully what it is doing. In Hegelian terms, it is still only in itself and is not yet for itself what it is in itself. Only through self-consciousness, experience, negativity, language, and science does the Absolute begin to know its own self-production. Therefore, the phenomenological path is, in fact, the path from unconscious intelligibility to the speculative self-consciousness of intelligibility.
The concept of immanent-intelligible plasticity of is-ness must therefore remain doubly open. On the one hand, it must be sufficiently speculative in its rigor so as not to slip into a purely poetic metaphor. On the other hand, it must be sufficiently broad in its poietic character so as not to produce a complete reduction of Being to thought. Its strength lies precisely in the attempt to think the unity of intelligibility, creativity, meaning, form, immediacy, and self-consciousness. Its danger is that it may become an all-explanatory designation. Its further development therefore requires constant derivations, and not mere repetitions.
Noetic-Poietic-Noematic Activity
The concept of noetic-poietic-noematic activity arose from the need that that which truly is not be thought merely as pure thinking, nor merely as a creative force, nor merely as a set of meaningful contents. It designates the threefold, yet inseparable structure of Being itself: the noetic, the poietic, and the noematic. Each of these dimensions may be distinguished reflectively-analytically, but none of them may be hypostatized, that is, treated as something self-subsistent and independent in relation to the other two. Their unity is proto-ontological: it is prior to every reflective differentiation among them and, in the ontological sense, absolutely inseparable.
The noetic designates the activity of apprehending, grasping, conceiving, and understanding, but also the activity of creating entirely new noematic moments. It is not a psychological function of the subject in the narrow sense, but the immanent productivity of Being through which already established noematic contents are not merely grasped but, confronted with their own insufficiency, become an impetus for the emergence of new meaning-ideational determinations. These new determinations are not necessarily deducible from the preceding ones: noematic content that has already been established may provoke the noetic toward supplementation, transformation, or a radically new self-determination that only post festum may appear to have been contained in what preceded it. In nature, the noetic exists as the inner intelligibility of that which is immediate; in spirit as consciousness and self-consciousness; in speculative science as the source of all knowledge that knows that no immediacy constitutes absolute otherness (ontologically irreducible difference), but rather the other-being of its own in-itself.
The noematic designates meaning-ideational content: the WHAT of a meaning-ideational expression, the other-being of some immediacy in the medium of meaningfulness. Depending on the level and register of analysis, it may be terminologically fixed as eidos, idea, determination, concept, category, pure meaning, etc. Noema is not dead content before thinking. In our ontology, noema is the inner meaningful dictum of immanent-intelligible plasticity of is-ness: a meaningful determination in which Being self-posits as a discrete, particularized immediacy, as the so-called individual existent. When we say that a leaf appears in accordance with the noema of the leaf, we do not mean an external or pre-given plan that exists independently of the leaf, but the inner meaningful dictum according to which immanent-intelligible plasticity of is-ness self-forms and self-posits as a leaf.
The poietic designates that which has been repressed in many idealist systems: the creative, formative, productive, plastic. Being is not merely immanently intelligible, as we continuously emphasize, but continuously self-forms and self-posits; it not only expresses itself meaning-ideationally (knows itself), but insofar as it thinks, it also produces itself as the WHAT of its own thinking; it is not only intelligible, but also ungraspably lavish. Precisely because its intelligibility and poieticity cannot be separated, the poietic moment permits the introduction into ontology of leaf, sound, body, colour, venation, scent, language, rhythm, face, light, without reducing them to mere illustrations of the concept. In them, Being is not merely thought, but self-positingly self-expresses itself.
These three moments must be thought together. Pure noetic without the noematic would be empty grasping, mere thought without content. Pure noematic would, without the noetic, prove to be dead, motionless ideational staticity, something akin to the Platonic idea that exists and is regardless of whether the real world exists. Pure poietic without noetic-noematic intelligibility would be blind production of discrete particularizations without any inner measure. Noetic-poietic-noematic activity designates precisely their inseparable connection: the Absolute grasps a determinate WHAT, determines itself meaningfully in that WHAT, and shapes and self-posits itself as that WHAT — in one and the same ontological punctuality.
This concept made it possible to expand Hegel’s expression “thinking” without abandoning its speculative foundation. Hegel is right insofar as determinate being does not permit itself to be thought as unintelligible bare givenness: its determinacy is intelligible and conceptually articulated. But if we understand thinking too narrowly, we shall lose poiesis. Therefore, for us thinking is not understood as calculus, but in analogy with the image of the active emptying of Nous into the infinitude of forms — not as an emanation from some pre-completed fullness, but as a living intelligibility which, insofar as it grasps and understands its own determinations, becomes body, leaf, sound, language, history. This is not an abandonment of thinking, but its return to a deeper fullness.
It is particularly significant that noema is not understood as something that develops itself. That which develops reflectively isolated noematic contentfulness is always noetic activity. Noematic contentfulness — if we may speak in this way of something that is merely a moment in the fluctuation of noetic-noematic activity — constitutes a motive taken up by the noetic moment of immanent intelligibility. And just as in the creation of a melody, noetic activity mediates, supplements, alters, and pre-otherizes the adopted noematic contentfulness, as a rule supplementing it with entirely new noematic moments. If we were to render noema autonomous, we would fall into abstract onto-logism. Noema is alive only as a moment of activity. Being, substance, subject, the Absolute, leaf, body, language: each of these determinations must be understood as a moment in the movement of noetic-noematic activity, and not as a moment of self-movement. It is precisely at this point that our position diverges from the manner in which, in Hegel’s speculative logic, the development of content can appear as the self-movement of the concept: for us, developmental productivity does not belong to noematic content as such, but to the noetic activity of which that content is one of the living moments.
For this reason, noetic-poietic-noematic activity constitutes one of the crucial nodes of the entire project. It preserves Hegel’s idea of the development of the concept, yet emphatically rejects the idea of the self-movement of the concept, Husserl’s sensitivity to the noetic-noematic structure, the Schellingian intuition of unconscious natural productivity, and its own ontological thesis concerning the plasticity of Being. But its further elaboration must be careful. It must be shown how these three moments differ, how they mutually mediate one another and act inseparably together, and how noetic-poietic-noematic activity itself, in the language of science, arrives at a self-conscious understanding of its own structure.
Negativity, the False, and Truth as Movement
One of the most important lines of our work concerned Hegel’s distinction of the negative from the usual conception of the false. Common-sense consciousness and formalistic understanding are inclined to understand the negative as merely untrue, rejected, null, that which ought to be left behind. Hegel, on the contrary, shows that the negative is the very soul of movement. Without negativity there would be no experience, transition, determination, difference, development, return into itself. The negative is not the refuse of truth, but the way in which truth becomes concrete.
At the outset, negativity was considered as a relation between a partial determination and what substance is in itself. A determination can be negative insofar as it does not exhaust the truth of the Absolute. But this inadequacy does not mean that the determination is simply false. It is false only if it is absolutized. The determination “being” pertains to the Absolute because the Absolute is, but it pertains to it so abstractly that it must be superseded. It is not nonsense, but the first and the poorest moment of truth. In this first register, the negative thus appears as insufficient or abstract. But this is not the only meaning of Hegelian negativity.
Later, the concept of negativity expanded to its ontological level. Negativity is no longer merely the expression of the inadequacy of knowledge, the partiality of a conceptual determination that is hypostatized or elevated onto the pedestal of a determination that exhausts all Truth, but the very power of substance to separate out from itself one of its immanent aspects, positing it as determinate being. In doing so, this aspect should not be understood as a ready-made determination concealed in the Absolute, but as that which in immediacy exists in a state of absolute fusion and undifferentiatedness, and only through negativity attains discrete determinacy. In the Hegelian sense, negativity is separation and the positing of determinate existence. This means that determinate being arises only through an utterly peculiar form of differentiation, a differentiation in which the Absolute confronts itself or, what is the same, within which that which is absolute posits itself over against itself. For something to be this, it must separate itself from absolutely fused immediacy; it must become determinate other in relation to that which it itself is not; it must have a limit, quality, form. Negativity is the ontological price of determinacy and, at the same time, the manner of the self-disclosure of the infinitude of that which is absolute. But this infinitude is not merely the infinity of already existing aspects: it is the dynamic infinitude of a creative power that permanently surpasses even the infinite set of already arisen determinations, producing entirely new moments of its own immanence. The Absolute, accordingly, is not merely infinite in its aspects—it is at once infinitely self-surpassing.
In our language, this means that immanent-intelligible plasticity of is-ness posits its determinations of whatness by separating itself from itself within itself. It draws its own aspects out of fusion into relative independence, positing them as relatively self-subsistent immediacies, yet not outside itself as absolutely transcendent. It doubles itself within itself. Every individual being is the result of such a doubling: Being as a certain this. Negativity is the process by which the Absolute bends into discrete particularization, becomes other to itself, and thereby produces determinate content through which it will return to itself, becoming also for itself what it is in itself.
The same structure of differentiation that manifests itself on the ontological level as the negative is repeated, on the level of self-consciousness, in understanding. Understanding is the form of self-conscious noetic activity of immanent-intelligible plasticity of is-ness by which, from determinate immediacy, its individual aspects are separated out and fixed in meaning as particular determinations. The very act of differentiation is not erroneous; on the contrary, without it there would be no determinate knowledge. The problem arises when understanding hypostatizes and absolutizes the separated determination, proclaiming it to be the determination in which all the Truth of the given immediacy is exhausted. The statement “Being is material,” for example, can express one real aspect of Being; it becomes false only when materiality ceases to count as a moment and is posited as the exhaustive truth of what Being is. In this sense, understanding self-consciously reproduces the power of negativity to separate, but in its limited form it does not complete its movement: it remains with the separated difference and does not return it into the living immanence of the whole from which it was separated.
But negativity also has another direction: return into itself. If there were only separation, we would have dispersal; the whole would be lost in the dispersion of infinite multiplicity. Negativity is therefore not merely the positing of otherness, but also the sublation of the isolated independence of that otherness. Determinate being becomes a moment of Truth when its development returns into the immediacy of that which truly is. Such immediacy is no longer fused indistinguishability, but a result that bears within itself the multiplicity traversed, mediated immediacy. Truth then is not the negation of difference, but difference returned into the whole.
From this there also developed a critique of dogmatism. Dogmatism thinks truth is a finished proposition, a dead result, minted coin that can be handed over to another. Hegelian truth, on the contrary, must be lived through as a path. The same statement may be correct, but consciousness that has not traversed within itself the path of its arising does not yet possess its truth. Truth therefore demands the transformation of the consciousness that arrives at it. It is not transmitted from without; it is born through the experience of negativity which consciousness, as a discrete particularization of the Absolute, must live through and endure.
The false, in the Hegelian sense, is not an independent principle opposed to truth. It is truth in a partial, abstract, fixed form. When a determinate moment is extracted from movement and proclaimed the whole, it becomes false. But when it returns to its place, it becomes a moment of truth. Therefore, the false is not discarded like rust from a tool, but sublated: negated, preserved, and transformed. Speculative truth must remember its false as its own history.
This thought had a great consequence for our ontology. No determination of the Absolute may be treated as final. Being, substance, subject, noesis, noema, plasticity, in-flection, language — all these are possible moments, but each of them must pass through the negativity of its own limit. The system will not be strong if it finds one word for everything, but if it shows how each word must pass into another and be preserved in it. Only in this way can formalism be avoided and the life of the concept preserved.
Negativity thus proved to be the pulse of the very development of the Absolute. It is that which does not allow Being to remain dead sameness. It is the inner tension of self-positing and self-return. It is the force of difference, but also the force of the return of difference into the whole. In it one sees why substance must be subject: only that which is capable of being other to itself and of returning to itself in this otherness can be living truth.
Substance as Subject, Consciousness, and Experience
Hegel’s assertion that that which truly is must be understood not only as substance but also as subject was one of the fundamental axes of our work. In its simplest form, it means that the Absolute is not a dead ground whose changes occur only insofar as they are provoked in a purely external manner, but a living self-movement that comes to itself through its self-determinations and self-positings. Substance is subject because it is not content with being exclusively in itself; it must also become for itself what it is in itself. It must enter into otherness, endure alienation, pass through experience, and return to itself as self-consciousness, as knowledge.
The Phenomenology of Spirit depicts precisely this path, not as an external history of different forms of consciousness, but as the inner experience of their own limitation. Consciousness initially stands before the object as before something given, independent, and absolutely other; it believes that truth resides in the object, while its knowledge need only conform to it. Yet experience shows that neither knowledge nor the object remain what they were at the beginning. By measuring its knowledge against the object, consciousness discovers their inequality, but precisely through this discovery it changes both the form of its own knowledge and what counts for it as the object. What initially appears as pure externality is gradually disclosed as a moment of the movement of consciousness itself, that is, of spirit; therefore, for us who follow this process, every new object already bears within itself the trace of previously endured negation. The phenomenological path is not, accordingly, a series of finished propositions about the world, but a process in which consciousness, through its own negativity, produces new forms of knowledge and new forms of objecthood, until the difference between what it knows and what is ceases to hold as a relation between two absolutely alien sides and becomes the mediated equality of knowledge and its content.
In our language, awareness is a particular form of manifestation of noetic-poietic-noematic activity. In it, the Absolute appears as discrete being-for-itself, but at first it does not know what it is in itself. Awareness is therefore something that is at once magnificent and alienating — to put it that way. It is the site of the possible return of the Absolute to itself, but also the site of the greatest delusion: it can take its particular I as an independent substance, as a micro-absolute. This is the awareness that radiates the opinion of its own self-subsistence, independence, and complete irreducibility in relation to any other immediacy whatsoever. Such opinion could also be designated as the unconscious narcissism of the Absolute in its particularized form: the expression of its ardent enthusiasm that it finally is also for itself, but precisely this form of awareness of immanent-intelligible plasticity of is-ness proves to be particularly exposed to the path of despair and the experience of the negative, for it takes its own partial form for itself as the exhaustive truth of what is in itself.
Experience is the movement in which this delusion is not rejected from without, but disintegrates through its own inner untenability. Consciousness approaches the object convinced that before it stands something independent, enduring, and determined in itself, and measures its knowledge against this supposedly immovable truth of the object. But precisely in this measuring negativity arises: consciousness discovers the inequality between what it knows and what the object shows it to be. Yet thereby not merely one of its judgments collapses. The very form of knowledge changes, and together with it changes what counts for consciousness as the object, because the preceding “in itself” proves insufficient to withstand its own experience. What appeared as pure externality is now disclosed as a moment of a deeper movement in which knowledge and object mutually transform one another. Therefore, experience is neither a psychological accumulation of lived experiences nor a mere expansion of the inventory of cognition, but the logic of the self-mediation of spirit: a process in which consciousness loses, one after another, its false immediacies, endures the collapse of their claims to absoluteness, and precisely through this loss becomes capable of gradually recognizing, in what initially seemed to it absolutely other, its own otherness — the otherness in which that which truly is distances itself from itself only in order that, mediated by the experience of the negative, it may return to itself.
A special place is occupied by the Ego. Ordinary consciousness takes the Ego as the firmest point, as a private and autochthonous essentiality that stands above every content. But the Ego, too, initially represents nothing other than the poorest form of knowledge that noetic-poietic-noematic activity has of itself. Namely, noetic-noematic activity, expressing and enunciating this mere I, feels the identity of itself with itself. Yet it enunciates nothing more than the most impoverished tautology in which X=X, while it remains entirely unknown what, in fact, this X is. And yet even such an impoverished I, this simple Ego, becomes the nodal point of an exceptionally complex noematic configuration into which the noematic expressions of the most diverse immediacies successively “fall”: body, memory, language, habits, affects, relations, history, desire, pain, shame, hope. The Ego is concrete only if it is understood as a living particularization, and not as an immobile center of self-possession. When a human being undergoes a profound change and says that they appear to themselves as someone else, this may be the moment in which the earlier form of the self is sublated, abolished, and transformed into a considerably more complex noematic self-expression of noetic-noematic activity itself.
The body is understood in this context as the most discrete form of particularization of immanent-intelligible plasticity of is-ness itself, as its hypercomplex immediacy within which it attains an exceptional form of existence, being-for-itself. The body, accordingly, is not the inert externality of the soul, nor a machine that the I disposes of and governs. It is the living externality of inwardness, the site of vulnerability, rhythm, affect, voice, touch, pain, enjoyment, expression. In the body, plasticity does not stand before itself merely as a bare concept, but as mediated immediacy, as sensing, as quivering, immanently pulsating and immanently active form of appearance of that which truly is.
These considerations led to the concept of discrete particularization. Every concrete being is a discrete form in which the Absolute posits itself as something, separating a determinate immediacy from its own immanence without remainder and granting it relative independence. When, in such a particularization, noetic-poietic-noematic activity attains a self-conscious form, the possibility opens for it to know that its own self-subsistence is not absolute, but represents a moment of the far broader movement of that which truly is. But such knowledge is not given immediately: precisely for this reason, spirit must pass through an entire series of figures of experience, negativity, and self-mediation — through sense-certainty, perception and understanding, then through self-consciousness, the struggle for recognition, the experience of lordship and bondage, labour, the relation to death and unhappy consciousness, then through reason, spirit and religion, all the way to absolute knowing. None of these figures is simply discarded when it proves insufficient; it disappears only as an independent claim to the totality of Truth, while its true content remains aufgehoben — cancelled, preserved, and transformed — in the more developed figure that arises from its own experience.
Hegel’s remembrance, Erinnerung, became for us speculative interiorization. The forms of spirit are not mere historical stages that are simply and without remainder discarded. They are positive necessary moments and negative vanishing moments. In the totality of knowledge, they are preserved as positivities immanent to every future form of life, but vanish as its independent forms. This means that the Absolute does not come to itself by skipping over its earlier forms, but by living through, losing, surpassing, and preserving them. Its knowledge is immediate life, and its life in truth becomes knowledge of itself.
Therefore substance as subject is not merely a metaphysical thesis, but the basis of the phenomenological method. If that which truly is were only an unmoving substantial ground, the relation of science to it would necessarily remain external: thought would stand over against a finished object, describe it, classify its properties and apply to it concepts and methodological procedures prepared in advance. But if substance is subject, then the movement of truth cannot be something that knowledge subsequently adds to it. It must be in-flection, self-conscious production of a form of immediacy that had once already been unconsciously posited and produced. It must belong to the very life of that which is — to its differentiation, emergence into otherness, negativity, mediation, and return to itself. Science, therefore, in its developed form, must not be an external description of a finished content, but an immanent tracing of its self-presentation: it must allow the inner differences of the object to show themselves through the relations among its own moments, rather than having the philosopher introduce them from without as an alien schema. In our language, however, this does not mean that noematic content develops and thinks itself of its own accord, but that immanent-intelligible plasticity of is-ness, through its noetic-poietic-noematic activity, appears to itself in its own determinations as its own otherness and through them attains ever more developed knowledge of itself. Knowledge is therefore not an activity applied to alien material: it is a form of the life of that which truly is, the moment in which it, having passed through its own otherness, returns to itself and, in the language of science, begins to understand that otherness as its own.
Formalism, Mathematical Method, and Tabular Understanding
A large part of the work on the third sentence of the third paragraph of the Preface was devoted to Hegel’s critique of formalism. Formalism is a mode of thinking that believes it has understood a thing if it successfully subsumes it under a scheme prepared in advance, rather than allowing its determinations to show themselves from the inner relations of the content itself. It has at its disposal pairs, tables, oppositions, determinations, and rubrics: subjectivity and objectivity, contraction and expansion, magnetism and electricity, east and west, universality and particularity. It then simply and indifferently applies them to the most diverse contents, creating an appearance of depth and system.
Hegel’s critique is merciless because formalism attempts to imitate speculative thought. True speculation indeed connects what appears to ordinary consciousness absolutely remote and irreconcilable; it shows that substance must be understood as subject, that matter does not constitute a stark opposition to what is spiritual, that the object of consciousness is not absolutely alien to consciousness. But every such connection must be derived from the inner movement of the content. Formalism skips over this exceptionally demanding and complex derivation. It produces an unusual connection, calls it genius, but is incapable of deriving the inner movement of the content from which such a connection would have to emerge.
This is why Hegel ridicules images in which understanding is declared to be electricity, and what is living is equated with nitrogen, the animal with the south or the north. The problem is not that remote connections can never be meaningful. The problem is that their immanent emergence is not shown. If it is said that life is connected with nitrogen in a biochemical sense, this can be a concrete investigation. But if it is said that the living simply is nitrogen, without derivation, then we have association instead of mediation. Formalism passes off mere association as thought that develops immanently from the content itself.
The mathematical method was the subject of particular criticism. Hegel does not reject mathematics as such, but rejects the adoption of the mathematical model of method in philosophy. Mathematical cognition operates with relations of magnitude, constructions, proofs, and the external connecting of presupposed forms. It may be rigorous, but such rigor does not constitute an expression of the self-movement of content, but rather an external operation with presupposed determinations. Mathematics adheres to the law of excluded middle in the way that a drunkard clings to a fence. Philosophical truth cannot be exhausted by a proposition supported with reasons while the opposing proposition is refuted by counter-reasons. That is a polemical model, not a speculative one.
In philosophy, a determination is not refuted externally, but itself shows its own limit. Matter does not show itself to be immanently intelligible because someone adduces reasons against matter, but because its pure immediacy shows itself to be an empty and absolutely non-indifferent immediacy. Such a transition is not the proving of one proposition against another, but the inner dialectic of the determination itself. Thus negation in philosophy is not mathematical refutation, but the transformation of the concept arising from its own inner limit.
Tabular understanding manifests itself as a form of intelligibility that arranges contents, but does not show their inner connection and their concept. It withholds for itself, or in fact does not know, what is most important: the immanent compatibility of different determinations, their mutual mediation as moments of the same concept. If it knew this, it would show it. But it does not show how content gives rise to its determination from itself; it merely places it in a rubric. The result is clarity without life, a skeleton with little labels, a grocer’s shop with boxes and labels. Everything is clear, but the living and pulsating essence remains completely concealed there.
The critique of formalism had immediate significance for our work. Our own concepts could easily become formalistic labels. If we merely affix the expression “plasticity of is-ness,” “noema,” “in-flection,” or “discrete particularization” to everything we encounter, then we have made our own version of a graph-paper notebook that thinks it is philosophy. Therefore it must constantly be shown how a concrete determination from within shows its own limit and motivates the noetic supplementation and transformation by which a new determination arises. The leaf must not be merely an example of plasticity; it must be shown how plasticity in it truly takes shape as venation, tissue, relation to light and chlorophyll function.
This critique also gave rise to a discussion of Kant. Kant is the profound background of the problem, since it was precisely he who posed the question of the relation of categories, sensibility, intuition, understanding, schema and experience. However, Hegel’s immediate target is not only Kant’s transcendental deduction, but the broader post-Kantian formalism. Kant’s schema is not simply an expression of the sterile pedantry of an apothecary; it is a serious attempt at mediating categorical determinations and determinations of intuition — to put it thus — which nevertheless does not attain the truth of their immanent belonging-together and the unity of the universal and of the particular. Hegel holds that this attempt remains insufficient because the difference between sensibility and understanding, form and content, is not derived as an inner moment of one and the same content, but remains tied to different sources of cognition. His alternative is more radical: content itself must show itself as conceptually mobile.
Therefore science cannot be a mere arrangement of already finished determinations nor the subsequent affixing of concepts to mute content. What formalism introduces from outside, true science must show as something that grows out of the inner tension of the object itself. Method is therefore not a tool applied to the object like a ruler to an already drawn line, but the way in which thought follows how a determinate immediacy differentiates itself, shows its limit, motivates a new noetic articulation, and is transformed into a richer form of understanding. In this sense, science does not arrange dead material, but follows the work of noetic-poietic-noematic activity in its own determinations. Formalism necessarily fails here: it can classify, name, and connect, but it cannot show why precisely that determination arises, why it passes into another, and why both belong to one and the same living whole. Precisely for this reason, its clarity remains external, while the object, though perfectly classified, remains philosophically unexplained.
Understanding as a Necessary but Insufficient Form of Being-for-Itself
In our work, understanding was not treated as a mere enemy of truth. Hegel’s critique of formalism can easily lead to the mistaken conclusion that understanding should simply be discarded. Yet understanding is a necessary moment of the self-consciousness of substance. It distinguishes, determines, fixes, establishes limits, and makes it possible for content to appear as determinate being. Without understanding there would be no quality, determinacy, conceptual discipline, nor the possibility for the Absolute to become for itself through differentiation.
Understanding is therefore the form of being-for-itself of that which truly is. In it, noetic-poietic-noematic activity arrives at a particular form of self-relation: it knows itself through differences. But precisely here lies the ambivalence of understanding. Its strength is differentiation; its weakness is the hypostatization of what is differentiated. It posits difference, but often fails to return it to the life of the whole. It sees subject and object, universality and particularity, cause and effect, form and matter, but leaves them as external oppositions.
Understanding therefore succeeds in its task, but must not proclaim its task the whole of truth. It succeeds in positing determinacy; it fails when it takes determinacy as dead independence. It succeeds in distinguishing; it fails when it forgets difference as the difference of the Absolute itself within itself. It succeeds in organizing; it fails when it proclaims the table knowledge. Its truth is great, but partial. As a moment, understanding is indispensable; as an absolutized form, it becomes formalism.
This is particularly important in understanding individual being. Individual being exists only if it has quality, limit, determinacy, equality with itself. Understanding expresses this side of substance as substance that exists individually. It makes it possible to say: this is this, and not that. Quality is the simple determinacy by which a being is a determinate being. In this sense, understanding belongs to the very ontological structure of individuality.
But if understanding stops at quality as a dead designation, it again loses the thing. Quality is not merely a property pasted onto being; it is the inner differential form of being. Through quality, being distinguishes itself from others, but also gathers itself within itself. It exists with itself. Understanding can register this simplicity, but speculative thought must show how it arises, how it develops, how it passes into other determinations, and how it returns into the whole.
In relation to Kant’s philosophy, understanding was understood as a very high, but still insufficient form of the Absolute’s self-relation to itself. Transcendental philosophy knows that the object of experience is not simply given, that the subject participates in the constitution of experience, that there are conditions of possibility of cognition. But it still separates sensibility and understanding, intuition and category, form and matter, thing-in-itself and appearance. Therefore, it remains the representation of reason concerning itself, but not yet speculative knowledge in which content itself shows its conceptual necessity.
Understanding senses rationality, but does not yet know it as its deeper truth. It seeks law, universality, unity, and necessity, but often posits them externally. Reason, in the speculative sense, does not violently sublate understanding, but preserves and surpasses it. It retains the power of distinction, but returns what is distinguished into movement. It does not reject quality, concept, limit, and category, but liberates them from hypostatization. Understanding must be sublated in the Hegelian sense: negated as the final form, preserved as a necessary moment.
In our register, understanding is the form in which plasticity of is-ness narrows its lavishness into fixed noematic differences. This narrowing is necessary, for without it there would be no determinacy. But if the poietic and plastic life from which differences arise is forgotten, understanding becomes dead. Speculative in-flection therefore does not destroy understanding, but returns it to its origin: it shows that every difference posited by understanding is a difference of plasticity itself within itself.
In-flection as Method and as the Self-Conscious Ontogenesis of Objecthood
One of the most original concepts that took shape in the course of the work is the concept of in-flection. It arose from the need to name a thinking that is not mere reflection. Reflection, in its simple form, does not penetrate into the immediacy of the object — to put it thus — but remains upon its surface, hastening to meet itself and its own determinations. It isolates properties, names, classifies, compares, posits determinations, but can remain external to the thing itself. In-flection, by contrast, signifies the bending of thought toward the immanence of the object, an attempt to repeat in thought itself an inner movement, the development of the object’s immediacy.
Hegel’s formula that scientific cognition must surrender itself to the life of the object was crucial to the emergence of this concept. Scientific thinking must not remain a superficial observation that merely reflects, spinning out determinations from itself, never truly approaching the object. It must sink into the object, follow the pulse of its inner movement, allowing this very movement to determine, as a motivating force, the course of its noetic-noematic activity. But this immersion into the immediacy of the object is not a passive submersion. It is an active conceptual repetition of the life of the object in thought. It is a self-conscious repetition, a conscious shaping of a form of immediacy whose ontogenetic positing previously and unconsciously has already occurred. It is precisely here that in-flection emerges.
In-flective thinking does not merely ask which properties the object has. It asks how the object became what it is. How did that which truly is bend itself, limit itself, differentiate itself, condense itself, and posit itself over against another in order to appear as this leaf, this body, this sound, this figure of spirit, this concept? In-flection attempts to repeat the ontological birth of objecthood, but now at the highest degree of self-conscious articulation — to put it thus. It is therefore not merely an epistemological act, but an onto-cognitive procedure.
This is especially important because every discrete particularization already arises as an unconscious in-flection of immanent-intelligible plasticity of is-ness. Plasticity produces itself in accordance with the dictum of the noema, that is, the inner meaningful “directive” corresponding to a determinate being. It posits itself as leaf, body, crystal, human being, language, but it first does so unconsciously, as it were behind its own back. In-flection in thinking attempts to carry out that unconscious process anew, but now in full speculative consciousness.
One may therefore say that in-flection is the self-conscious repetition of the immanent self-shaping of plasticity of is-ness into the discrete immediacy of determinate objecthood. It is not a subjective construction. The point is not that thought invents the object, but that it reconstructs within itself the inner trajectory of its shaping, arriving at its immediacy from within that immediacy itself rather than from subjective arbitrariness. In in-flection, the object is not copied externally, but is noetically-noematically produced anew in thought. It ceases to be mere givenness and becomes conceptually reanimated being: a being whose coming-to-be and place within the whole become intelligibly transparent.
In-flection therefore stands opposed to formalism. Formalism has a ready-made schema and places content within it. In-flection has no right to decide in advance what the object is. It must allow the object to show its inner measure. But in-flection is not mere empirical description either. It does not remain with a multiplicity of properties, but follows how this multiplicity gathers itself into a determinate simplicity. It patiently proceeds through the content until the determinate articulation of the object reveals its own limit and thereby directs noetic-noematic activity toward a new, richer determination.
In this sense, in-flection is a method of speculative thinking, but also more than a method. It is the form in which the finite discrete particularization of the Absolute participates in the self-cognition of Being. When a human being in-flectively thinks a leaf, a body, language, or Hegel’s determination, he does not stand as an external subject before an alien object. He is a discrete particularization of the same plasticity that attempts to repeat self-consciously within itself the ontogenetic shaping of another particularization of that same plasticity. Knowledge is then not the application of a concept to content, but the self-encounter of Being in its own other-being.
For this reason, in-flection also has a linguistic dimension. It is not carried out in a voiceless interiority, but in language. Language is not a mere sign, but the mediated immediacy of self-conscious plasticity; it is the immediacy in which in-flective thinking knows itself. When the object is shaped anew in language in an in-flective and noetic-noematic manner, the sentence is not merely a description, but an event of the concept. Speculative language does not affix labels, but attempts to bear the movement of the in-flective articulation of content. In it, the Absolute is not merely thought, but begins to speak its own self-shaping.
The concept of in-flection could therefore become one of the central concepts of a future ontology of immanent-intelligible plasticity of is-ness. It preserves Hegel’s demand that method not be an external form imposed upon the object, but that thought shape its path according to the immanent measure of the content itself; yet it simultaneously shifts this demand into the framework of noetic-poietic-noematic activity: what sets a new conceptual articulation in motion is not the autonomous self-movement of an already formed noema, but the encounter of noetic activity with the inner determinacy of the object, which directs it, as a motivating force, toward a new shaping of meaning. In-flection is therefore not merely a mode of cognition but a self-conscious repetition of the ontogenesis of objecthood: an attempt to repeat, in the medium of concept and language and now in full speculative consciousness, what first occurred unconsciously in the plasticity of is-ness as a determinate discrete immediacy. Precisely for this reason, it must remain radically open toward the object: it has no right to know in advance what it will find in it, nor to turn its own neologisms into a new table of formalism, but must each time anew demonstrate its legitimacy by showing how a determinate immediacy becomes intelligible out of its own inner measure. Its further elaboration must therefore descend into the concrete: it must show how leaf, sound, body, language, egological self-consciousness, a historical figure of spirit, being, negativity, or the concept itself are thought in-flectively, and how, in each of these cases, the relation to the object is transformed from external observation into a self-conscious retracing of its ontogenesis. Only then will it be possible to show that in-flection is not a new label added to the existing philosophical vocabulary, but a real speculative method — perhaps even that form of thought in which one discrete particularization of Being ceases to understand itself as an absolutely isolated subject and begins to participate in the non-egological self-cognition of that which truly is.
Nature, the Leaf, and Unconscious Intelligibility
One of the most fruitful intellectual digressions during our work concerned a birch or linden leaf. At first glance, it is an ordinary natural thing. Yet precisely such immediacy proved to be a powerful corrective to every dry ontology. The leaf is not merely an example of the general concept of life, nor a mere organ that can be functionally described. It is a discrete particularization in which immanent-intelligible plasticity of is-ness has taken shape as a green surface, venation, chlorophyll activity, tissue, pores, a relation to light, organic symmetry, and immeasurable microscopic complexity.
This sight made it possible to express more clearly the concept of unconscious intelligibility. The leaf does not think, chlorophyll does not understand, stomata do not possess reflective consciousness. But the absence of self-consciousness does not mean the absence of intelligibility. The leaf is intelligible in itself, because what it is in itself is nothing other than immanent-intelligible plasticity of is-ness. Its structure, form, function, rhythm of growth, and relation to light are not chaotic. They are meaningfully formed, internally measurable, organized, harmonized. In it, intelligibility is not uttered; it itself is what grows.
This distinction between being intelligible and knowing one’s own intelligibility (which presupposes the meaningful expression of intelligibility itself within itself) became important for the entire system. Nature is not unintelligible matter to which the human being externally gives meaning. We can understand it because it is already intelligibly structured. Our thinking does not produce its intelligibility, but encounters it, follows it, and, at best, in-flectively reproduces it. The leaf is therefore already a concept that has become tissue, but a concept that does not yet know itself as concept.
In Hegel’s language, nature is the Idea in the form of other-being, that is, in the form of externality in which its intelligibility does not yet know itself as intelligibility. Yet in our work this other-being cannot be understood as a mere impoverishment of the concept, nor as an ontologically less valuable stage whose truth would be exhausted only in spirit’s return to itself. In nature there is splendor: a poietic fullness of concrete formations in which immanent-intelligible plasticity of is-ness appears as organic measure, rhythm, structure, function, color, growth, and immeasurable differentiation of the immediate. The leaf has no self-consciousness, but the absence of self-consciousness does not annul the density of its determinacy or reduce it to the mere externality of the concept; on the contrary, precisely in this non-self-conscious form, intelligibility already acquires a concrete, organic existence that no isolated abstract category can exhaust. Nature should therefore not be thought of as an unintelligible externality that receives meaning only in spirit, but as a domain in which intelligibility does not yet know itself, yet already takes poietic shape in the astonishing fullness of its immediate forms.
Precisely for this reason, the leaf becomes a privileged site at which this ontology is tested. Its astonishing harmony of form, function, color, relation to light, water and air, venation, tissue, and growth does not constitute proof of some transcendent order, nor a remainder standing outside intelligibility, but rather the concrete formation of the immanent intelligibility of Being: the way in which immanent-intelligible plasticity of is-ness unconsciously organizes itself as a determinate natural immediacy. Before the leaf, speculative thought must therefore neither impose in advance a ready-made conceptual determination nor reduce its concreteness to a single abstract category; it must in-flectively follow the inner measure of its formation, allowing its poietic fullness to motivate an ever richer noetic-noematic articulation. The leaf is then neither a mere example of an already formed concept nor mute material to which the human being subsequently ascribes meaning, but a site at which intelligibility, still without self-consciousness, already exists immediately as form, function, relation, and growth.
This line of thought also extended to sound. Sound has a mathematically and arithmetically expressible structure: frequency, proportion, harmonic relations, rhythm. But sound is not merely number. It is vibration, tremor, resonance, bodily receptivity, atmosphere, affective force, and the poietic formation of a particular immediacy. It is precisely in sound that it becomes evident that the intelligibility of a thing is not exhausted by its formal or mathematical determinability: noetic activity can articulate sound through a multitude of noematic determinations, but none of these determinations, taken in isolation, exhausts the concrete fullness of its being. Sound is an intelligible structure that is at once received, lived, and transformed; its sensuous, bodily, and affective immediacy does not stand outside intelligibility, but demands an ever richer noetic-noematic articulation that will not reduce its concreteness to a single determination.
The same holds for the body, the face, light, scent, color, and aesthetic splendor. Such immediacies are not beneath the concept but, in one entirely determinate sense, above it: they are sites at which every finite conceptual articulation can be sublated, showing that the concept must unceasingly expand its own receptivity and capacity for articulation. If the truth of Being is reduced to an already formed or finite noematic determinacy, the infinite domain of its self-appearance will be lost: not because it stands outside intelligibility, but because the concreteness of the immediate can contain more than any determinate conceptual articulation succeeds in expressing. It can, namely, contain even such moments as we have designated non-noematic effects of noetic-poietic-noematic activity: moments that are not unintelligible, but that cannot be translated without remainder into noematic content, and which precisely for that reason constitute the limit-value — limes — of every noetic-noematic striving toward the complete articulation of the immediate. The body, the face, light, scent, or color are therefore not partial objectifications of the concept that the concept itself must leave behind, but immediacies whose sensuous, affective, and ideational-poietic fullness motivates its further noetic formation. The ontology of plasticity must be capable of such sensuous-speculative attention: of thinking that does not annul immediacy by conceptually determining it, but rather continually expands its own determinations under the pressure of that which is given to it and which exceeds the very schematism concept–immediacy, insofar as immediacy is understood as something the concept could exhaust without remainder.
The non-noematic effect, let us repeat this once more, does not designate some provisionally not-yet-noematic content that existing conceptual articulation has simply not yet succeeded in grasping, but which some future, richer noema could in principle appropriate without remainder. On the contrary, it designates that moment of immediacy which, although by no means unintelligible, cannot in principle be exhausted or fully translated into purely meaningful-ideational content. Noetic-noematic activity can approach it indefinitely, producing ever new determinations, perspectives, and ever richer noematic configurations, but that which motivates them never turns without remainder into noema. In this sense, the non-noematic effect represents a kind of limes of noetic-noematic articulation: not a void of knowledge that could one day be filled, but the expression of the structural inexhaustibility of Being in the face of every finite conceptual form. Melody is a paradigmatic example of such a relation. We can articulate it through tonality, intervals, rhythm, harmonic relations, motivic structure, tension, and resolution, but none of these determinations, nor even their sum, is what melody is in the immediacy of its experienced being. What appears in it is not an irrational or chaotic remainder outside intelligibility; on the contrary, precisely because of its orderliness, inner necessity, and inexhaustible meaningful fullness, it may be designated as paradoxically supra-intelligible: not as that which stands outside intelligibility, but as that which exceeds the possibility of its being exhausted conceptually without remainder. The non-noematic effect can therefore sublate an attained noematic content: not by disclosing merely its provisional incompleteness, but by showing the very finitude of every noematic form and compelling noetic activity to a new self-surpassing. The new noema may be richer, more precise, and deeper, but it too remains exposed to the same surplus that drives it further. The non-noematic — here, this means the supra-intelligible. In this sense, the non-noematic is not a remainder of unintelligibility, but precisely that site at which it becomes evident that the intelligibility of Being is broader than every concept and that the Absolute is not only infinite in its aspects but also infinitely self-surpassing.
Therefore, in this outline nature can no longer be understood as an ontologically lower stage whose truth would be exhausted only with the emergence of self-conscious spirit. It is the domain of unconscious intelligibility, of poietic splendor, and of the immediate self-formation of immanent-intelligible plasticity of is-ness: a domain in which intelligibility has not yet acquired the form of a self-conscious meaningful relation to itself, but is thereby neither less real, nor less internally determined, nor poorer than its later conceptual articulations. The leaf, the crystal, the animal, water, sound, light, the body — are not examples to which an already completed concept would subsequently give meaning, but discrete formations in which Being immediately organizes itself as structure, relation, rhythm, growth, sensibility, color, resonance, and form. Their intelligibility can be articulated noetically without limit, but their concrete fullness need not therefore ever be transformed without remainder into noema: precisely in them appears the possibility of the non-noematic, that is, the supra-intelligible, as the limes of every finite conceptual determinacy. Nature is therefore not a mute remainder beneath the concept, but one of the sites at which the concept itself encounters the limit of its own finitude and is compelled ceaselessly to sublate itself, expand, and surpass itself. In this sense, the splendor of nature is not an external ornament of the Absolute, but one of the most immediate expressions of its infinite poietic capacity to be more than every form in which it has already become determinate — and precisely therefore more than every concept through which that determinacy has thus far succeeded in being uttered.
Language as the Immediacy of Self-Conscious Plasticity
One of the most important corrections in the course of the work concerned the claim that content is completed in the element of the concept. That formulation is justified in Hegelian terms, but remained open to the danger of an abstract-logical interpretation, as though conceptual content could be fully completed before attaining its own immediate existence in language. Hence the decisive addition was introduced: true knowledge is completed not only as the noematic determinacy of the concept, but as its absolutely mediated immediacy in language. Language is neither a mere external sign of an already finished concept, nor a subsequent means of communicating it, but a poietically produced immediacy in which noetic-poietic-noematic activity, directing itself toward itself, developing a meaningful-ideational expression of its own structure and understanding this new content, immediately shapes itself as word, term, syntagm, and statement. In language, therefore, to know does not cease also to mean to be the content of knowledge: self-understanding becomes the immediacy of its own expression.
Precisely for this reason, language is the place at which the internal becomes external, but not in such a way that some already completed thought subsequently leaves its invisible interiority and clothes itself in an external sign. The externality of language poietically arises from the very movement of self-understanding and therefore remains the immanent bearer of that which is expressed within it. In language, thought attains form, sound, rhythm, syntax, style, duration, inscription, and voice, but these moments are not its accidental packaging: they belong to the immediacy in which meaningful-conceptual content begins to exist as its own expression. Language is, insofar, absolutely mediated immediacy: the result of noetic self-relation, noematic self-determination, and poietic self-shaping, in which that which is understood does not remain merely the content of knowledge but immediately becomes the form of its own existence. Language is therefore not merely the poietic form of the concept, but the poietic immediacy of self-comprehending intelligibility—the place at which what activity knows about itself appears as voice, word, term, syntagm, sentence, and inscription.
This thesis is important because it prevents speculative knowledge from being understood as some voiceless self-transparency in which the poietic moment, after Being has arrived at self-understanding, would become superfluous and vanish before pure conceptuality. If language represents the absolutely mediated immediacy of self-comprehending intelligibility, then precisely in it it becomes evident that noetic-poietic-noematic activity, even in its most developed self-conscious forms, does not cease to be poietic: what it apprehends and knows does not remain enclosed in formless interiority, but immediately produces itself as its own linguistic existence. Word, term, syntagm, sentence, and text are therefore not external traces of a previously completed thought, but modes in which its meaningful-ideational content poietically takes shape and becomes present. Even in philosophy and speculative science, Being does not abandon its own plasticity in order to withdraw into pure abstraction: it remains formative precisely in language, in which the word bends toward what it is to express, the sentence develops the inner trajectory of meaning, meaning attains rhythm, style bears the tension of thought, and syntax becomes one of the modes in which the very movement of self-understanding is immediately realized.
Language is therefore a distinctive, absolutely mediated immediacy. It is neither the natural immediacy of a leaf, a body, or a crystal, in which immanent-intelligible plasticity of is-ness poietically takes shape still without a self-conscious meaningful relation to its own intelligibility, nor is it a pure abstraction from the immediate. In language, that which truly is produces the immediacy of its own self-understanding: the meaningful-ideational content that noetic-noematic activity develops concerning itself poietically attains existence as word, term, syntagm, sentence, voice, or inscription. This is the immediacy of self-conscious plasticity—not because the Absolute would first produce forms and then externally speak their intelligibility, but because its intelligibility itself becomes, in language, the uttered immediacy of its own knowledge of itself. In the language of science, content is therefore no longer an alien object posited over against the subject, but the other-being of self-understanding itself: what is noetically apprehended and noematically determined poietically becomes its own linguistic immediacy, in which knowledge not only articulates its content but immediately is the mode of its appearance.
Of course, not every use of language is speculative. Language can lose its connection with the living movement of noetic-poietic-noematic activity and turn into a space of formalism, empty predication, ready-made labels, and superficial analogies, in which words function like dead slips of the understanding that merely arranges already fixed determinations. Then the ontogenesis of expression itself is forgotten: the word is taken as an external sign of some already completed content, rather than as an immediacy arising from noetic apprehension, noematic determination, and poietic self-shaping. Therefore, the difference between non-speculative and speculative language is not simply a difference between two kinds of words, but between two modes of their being and use. Speculative language is that in which linguistic immediacy remains included in the living self-understanding of Being: expression does not merely designate what has already been known, but participates in the emergence of new noematic contents and in their poietic becoming as immediacy. In it, through exposition itself, there unfolds not the self-movement of the concept, but the movement of noetic-poietic-noematic activity which, understanding ever more richly its own immanence, produces ever more determinate forms of its linguistic existence.
In Hegel’s Preface this dimension of language has not yet been singled out as an independent theme, but it is continuously active and present in the very manner of exposition. Hegel’s sentence is not mere packaging for an already completed thought, nor a neutral medium through which finished content is merely conveyed to the reader; it attempts to bring forth thought in its very emergence, to shape immediately, through its own syntax, rhythm, delays, reversals, and returns, the movement of noetic-noematic articulation. Its complexity is therefore not decoration, but the poietic trace of a process of thought that is not only communicated in language but also occurs in it. To read Hegel therefore means to pass through the sentence, to allow its internal organization to transform the initial understanding of content, and to allow what at its beginning seemed to be a determinate meaning to attain, at its end, a different, more mediated noematic form. In this sense, Hegel’s language can be understood as one of the great historical examples of speculative in-flection: as a language in which thought, expounding its object, simultaneously transforms its own articulation and poietically produces the immediacy in which new understanding can appear.
For our future ontology, language must therefore receive a special place, since precisely in it the relation between what immanent-intelligible plasticity of is-ness is in itself and the way in which that which is becomes for itself is transformed in a distinctive manner. In nature, its intelligibility poietically takes shape without a self-conscious meaningful relation to itself; in self-consciousness, noetic-noematic activity begins to develop the meaningful-ideational expression of its own immanence; in language, however, this self-understanding attains its own absolutely mediated immediacy. Linguistic form is therefore not the mere utterance of already arisen self-consciousness, but the immediacy that self-conscious plasticity poietically produces precisely as the existence of what it has apprehended about itself. Word, term, or sentence bears within itself the entire movement that precedes it—noetic self-relation, noematic determination, negativity, mediation, and poiesis—but this movement does not appear in them as something external to their immediacy: it is sedimented in their meaning, syntax, rhythm, voice, and inscription. Language is therefore an immediacy that is not a return to original givenness, but an immediacy that became possible only through mediation and that precisely for that reason can be the immediate form of Being’s self-understanding.
Language, however, does not bear only noematically determined content. Its immediacy simultaneously includes sound, rhythm, tone, colour, style, syntactic tension, and an entire series of effects that cannot be reduced without remainder to the WHAT of a statement, although for that reason they are by no means unintelligible. Precisely here language reopens the space of the non-noematic, that is, supra-intelligible: an expression can be conceptually precise, and yet its concrete linguistic existence can contain more than can be exhausted by pure meaningful-ideational articulation. Philosophical language therefore cannot be merely a matter of conceptual precision; it must also be the poietic shaping of the immediacy in which the concept exists, because the manner in which something is said is not necessarily an external addition to what is said. This does not mean that philosophy should become poetry in the bad sense, but that it must acknowledge that expression can belong to truth itself: the rhythm of a sentence, the choice of words, syntax, tone, and style can bear a non-noematic effect that does not annul conceptual content, but exposes it to the limit of its own exhaustibility and thereby motivates its further self-surpassing. If the Absolute is plasticity, then even the most rigorous thought does not abandon the poietic; it immediately produces its meaningful-ideational content as a determinate linguistic form, whose concreteness can be richer than every noematic determination expressed within it.
It can therefore be said that in-flection attains its own completed immediacy in language: it attempts to reproduce noetically-noematically the objecthood that it neither creates arbitrarily nor endows with meaning from without, following the inner trajectory of its emergence, and then poietically shapes it as a new, linguistic immediacy. The object is therefore not described from an external point of view in speculative language; its becoming, differentiation, mediation, and inner measure are attempted to be repeated in the very movement of the sentence, such that linguistic expression becomes the absolutely mediated immediacy of its self-conscious understanding. When this succeeds, language is no longer an addition to knowledge nor a means of its subsequent communication, but the mode in which knowledge immediately exists: what is noetically apprehended and noematically determined poietically becomes word, syntagm, sentence, and text. In such linguistic immediacy, that which truly is does not know itself as an abstract identity that remains enclosed within itself, but as equality with itself that can endure its own other-being: it recognizes itself in the objecthood it understands, and produces its own understanding as an immediacy that is uttered, written, and meaningfully shaped. Language is, insofar, one of the highest forms in which the poietic does not disappear in knowledge, but precisely through knowledge continues to produce new immediacies of self-understanding.
Relation to Hegel and the Place of the New Perspective
Our thought developed through Hegel, but did not remain within the bounds of Hegelianism. Hegel provided the fundamental discipline of thought: substance understood as subject, negativity, experience, sublation, the life of the concept, the critique of formalism, and the understanding of science as the self-movement of content. Without these moments, the outline of an ontology of plasticity of is-ness could hardly have acquired the requisite inner rigor. Yet, in the course of the work, it became evident that this horizon had to be surpassed. The concepts of poietic plasticity, the unconscious intelligibility of nature, non-noematic effects, and language as the immediacy of self-conscious plasticity began to designate a space in which the new perspective could no longer be understood merely as an extension of Hegelian thought.
In comparison with Hegel, one of the deepest differences lies in the fact that this perspective accepts neither the self-movement of the concept as the bearer of the ontological process nor the Absolute as primarily conceptual-logical self-transparency. Hegel attributes life and inner movement to the concept; in this perspective, however, the concept is not an independent agency that, through its own negativity, passes from one determination into another, but a noematic moment of a broader noetic-poietic-noematic activity. Hence nature, the body, sound, aesthetic splendor, and poietic forms do not acquire philosophical validity only insofar as they are translated into the movement of the concept. The new perspective seeks to preserve speculative rigor while at the same time opening a space for the splendor of Being whose modes of manifestation are not exhausted by noematic-conceptual determination.
In relation to Schelling, this perspective shares a sensibility for nature as unconscious productivity, but does not relinquish the demand that the natural be thought conceptually rather than merely intuited immediately. Nature is therefore understood as unconscious intelligibility: as a productivity that does not yet know itself, but is not for that reason devoid of inner determination and meaning. In relation to Husserl, sensitivity to the noetic-noematic structure is retained, but ontologically radicalized and expanded by the poietic moment, so that the noematic is no longer the sole mode in which activity can have an effect. In relation to process ontologies, it shares the conviction that reality is not inert substance but becoming; yet this becoming is not allowed to remain mere change or flow, but is understood as an intelligible, meaningful, and form-generating event.
The originality of this perspective does not rest on the assumption that all its elements are unprecedented, for almost every major concept has lines of affinity within the history of philosophy. Its distinctiveness lies rather in the way these elements are brought together into a new configuration. Hegelian negativity, Husserl’s noetic-noematic distinction, poietic self-formation, the unconscious intelligibility of the natural, the non-noematic splendor of sound and language, and in-flective thinking understood as the self-conscious ontogenesis of objecthood together form an architecture of thought that can no longer be reduced without remainder to any one of its historical presuppositions. If its internal connections are further elaborated and consolidated, this architecture may acquire the form of an autonomous ontological perspective.
However, the value of this perspective depends on its inner discipline. Its greatest danger lies in its own concepts becoming so broad that they begin to explain everything while no longer deriving anything determinate. At that point, speculative thought could easily turn into precisely the kind of formalism it seeks to overcome. Thus “plasticity of is-ness” must not become a magic word, nor “in-flection” a new label for already familiar processes. “Noetic-poietic-noematic activity” must display its concrete transitions, differences, and effects. Every concept must work, not merely shine.
The second danger is the leveling of inner differences. If we say that a leaf is intelligible, we do not thereby attribute self-consciousness to it. If we say that to be and to comprehend belong to different modalities of the same plasticity of is-ness, natural self-formation, reflective consciousness, and speculative knowledge cannot therefore be equated. On the contrary, it is precisely their shared ontological basis that demands that their differences be preserved even more rigorously. A distinction must be maintained between the in-itself intelligibility of the natural, for-itself self-consciousness, the linguistic immediacy of knowledge, and, finally, the absolute return of plasticity to itself. Without such differentiation, unity would turn into leveling, and the entire ontological architecture would lose its inner articulation.
The third danger is the closure of its own language. The concepts employed by this perspective are necessarily dense and demanding, because they attempt to grasp relations for which the customary philosophical vocabulary often lacks sufficient expressive capacity. Yet precisely for this reason their inner grammar must be elaborated: it is necessary to determine precisely what is meant by is-ness, plasticity, the noetic, the poietic, the noematic, in-flection, discrete particularization, non-noematic effect, and the language of science. It is not enough for each of these concepts to be suggestive; it must be clear how they differ from one another, where they touch, and in which transitions they can legitimately participate. Without such a conceptual grammar, the entire perspective risks remaining a private architecture of thought.
Despite these dangers, the core of the project remains philosophically serious. It is not mere poetic metaphysics, for it demands conceptual justification and inner motivation from every transition, although it does not presuppose that the new must necessarily arise from the preceding determination. Nor is it a cold system, for it preserves the sensuous, aesthetic, and existential splendor of what is. Its greatest strength lies in the attempt to think Being as intelligible, but not abstract; as noetic, but not calculative; as plastic, but not irrational; as poietic, but not arbitrary; as linguistic, but not merely verbal.
The current status of the project can therefore be determined as follows: it is not yet a completed system, but it already represents the core of a possible ontology. It has its fundamental concepts, a clearly profiled problem, the methodological concept of in-flection, a determinate relation to Hegel, and a developed self-critical awareness of the dangers of formalism, leveling, and the closure of its own language. What it still lacks is an elaborated architecture of relations, mediations, and justified transitions between its conceptual levels. Further work must show how one arrives from Being at plasticity of is-ness, how noetic-poietic-noematic activity emerges within plasticity, how unconscious intelligibility relates to the emergence of language, and how in-flective thinking can acquire the form of science.
Tasks for Further Work
The first task of further work is the elaboration of a conceptual grammar. Without it, the system will remain difficult to traverse. Precise, but not banally scholastic, determinations of the key concepts must be written: Absolute, Being, is-ness, plasticity, immanent intelligibility, noetic, poietic, noematic, noema, dictum of the noema, discrete particularization, in-flection, non-noematic effect, language of science, Great Noesis, Great Noema. Every concept must have an origin, a function, a difference from related concepts, and a limit of use.
The second task is the derivation of transitions. It is not enough to say that the Absolute is plasticity; it must be shown why the determination of being is insufficient, why substance must become subject, why subject is insufficient without poiesis, why poiesis is not blind but intelligible, why intelligibility must become language. The system will be philosophical in the strict sense only when its concepts proceed from one another, not as free associations, but as necessary transformations.
The third task is concrete in-flective analysis. Several privileged objects should be taken and it should be shown how in-flection thinks them: leaf, sound, body, Ego, language, Hegel’s concept of negativity, perhaps a work of art or a musical experience. For each of them, it must be shown how the object is not described externally, but how its inner genesis is repeated in thought. These analyses would protect the system from abstract generality.
The fourth task is the elaboration of the relation to Hegel. It is necessary to determine clearly what is taken over, what is corrected, what is expanded, and where the perspective diverges. Hegel’s thought of substance as subject, negativity, and the life of the concept remains the foundation. But the concept of poietic plasticity, non-noematic effects, and language as the immediacy of self-conscious plasticity constitute its own expansions. These expansions must be presented as necessary, not as arbitrary additions.
The fifth task is a philosophy of language. Language proved to be one of the most important sites of future work. Hegel’s reflections on language should be investigated, but its own thesis must also be set forth: language is the immediacy in which in-flective-speculative reason knows itself; it is the poietic body of the concept; it is the place where the difference between in-itself and for-itself no longer appears as a dominating externality, because content speaks itself as knowledge’s own other-being. This thesis must be elaborated cautiously, so that language is not mystified.
The sixth task is the relation to the natural sciences. Hegel’s critique of empirical physics and formalistic predication must not be understood as a rejection of science. It is necessary to show the difference between empirical explanation and the speculative concept. Physics can explain the conditions of magnetism, biology the process of photosynthesis, chemistry the structure of chlorophyll; philosophy asks how these processes are moments of the unconscious intelligibility of Being. These two levels must not be confused, but neither must they be separated as alien to one another.
The seventh task is the preservation of the existential dimension. This ontology did not arise from academic distance, but from the living experience of thought, body, music, nature, unrest, language, and Hegel’s text. This is not a weakness, if it is disciplined. Philosophy need not be impersonal in order to be rigorous. But existential force must become conceptually mediated; otherwise, it remains an impression. It is therefore important that personal experiences of splendor, leaf, sound, or language be translated into speculative analysis, rather than merely recorded poetically.
The eighth task is the form of the future manuscript. A possible architecture might have three major parts. First: a critique of formalism and understanding’s reflection through Hegel. Second: a positive ontology of plasticity of is-ness, noetic-poietic-noematic activity, and unconscious intelligibility. Third: in-flection, language, and speculative knowledge. Such a structure would make it possible for the project not to dissipate, but to pass gradually from critique to systematic exposition.
Finally, the ninth task is the constant presence of correctives. This work must remain open to contestation, precision, and reshaping. It must not become a private dogma. Hegel must remain one of the correctives, but not the only one. Comparison with Schelling, Husserl, Plotinus, Spinoza, Whitehead, contemporary philosophies of plasticity, process ontologies, and theories of language is necessary. Not in order to dissolve the project into other systems, but in order for it to acquire clearer limits and greater objective force.
Conclusion: The State of the Outline
The work on Hegel and around Hegel thus far shows that something more than a commentary on the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit has arisen. What has arisen is the core of an ontological perspective that attempts to think what truly is as immanent-intelligible plasticity of is-ness, that is, as noetic-poietic-noematic activity that unconsciously and consciously self-forms into discrete particularizations, nature, body, consciousness, language, and knowledge.
This perspective is deeply indebted to Hegel. Without Hegel’s negativity, substance as subject, the life of the concept, phenomenological experience, and the critique of formalism, it would not have its rigor. But it is not exhausted in Hegel. It insists on poietic plasticity, the unconscious intelligibility of nature, non-noematic effects, language as the immediacy of self-conscious plasticity, and in-flection as the self-conscious repetition of the ontogenesis of objectivity. Therein lies its distinctiveness.
The greatest gain of the work thus far is the understanding that truth is not a dead result, but a movement that remembers its moments. Partial determinations are not merely false; they are true as moments and untrue as the whole. Negativity is not mere denial, but the ontological power of determination and return. Understanding is not an enemy, but a necessary and insufficient form of being-for-self. Language is not an external sign, but the immediacy in which knowledge exists for itself. Nature is not mute matter, but unconscious intelligibility.
The greatest risk is the formalism of its own concepts. Precisely for this reason, this document must be read as a working recapitulation, not as a final system. Its value lies in gathering the principal lines and showing where work must continue. The real test still lies ahead: to derive concepts from their inner necessities, show their transitions, carry out concrete in-flective analyses, and develop a philosophy of language capable of bearing the weight of speculative knowledge.
If this is done, the outline of an ontology of immanent-intelligible plasticity of is-ness could become a serious independent perspective: neither mere poetic metaphysics, nor cold logical idealism, nor a formalistic system of labels, but thought that attempts to remain faithful to Being in its intelligible, poietic, sensuous, linguistic, and self-conscious splendor. Such an ontology would have to prove again and again that what it speaks is not an external schema, but an in-flective repetition of the life of the thing itself.
The work thus far can therefore be assessed conclusively as follows: it is not completed, but it has opened a real possibility. Its concepts have force, but require discipline. Its intuitions have depth, but require architecture. Its proximity to Hegel gives it support, and its need to expand Hegel gives it its own task. In this task lies the meaning of further work: not to add concepts, but to compel them to live, to move, to show their right, and in the language of science to become the self-conscious immediacy of what truly is.
Recapitulation of Work on Hegel and Outline of an Ontology