The Glossary does not offer final and immovable definitions, but working determinations of concepts that emerge and are transformed within this philosophical archive.
Is-ness
Is-ness designates the elementary “is” — the very validity of being prior to its complete determination as this or that thing. It does not name yet another being among beings, but that by virtue of which anything at all can count as existent.
Is-ness is not the dead fact of existence. Is-ness is not “something,” but it certainly is not “nothing” either. As a point of departure, we may understand it as a “non-something.” It already bears within itself the possibility of differentiation, formation, and transition into determinate forms. It therefore cannot be wholly separated from intelligibility: what is, is not merely present, but is in some manner open to its own determination.
In-flection
In-flection is the speculative bending of thinking toward the inner form of the object. Unlike reflection, which can separate and classify the object and return it to the subject as possessed knowledge, in-flection allows the object to act within thinking and transform its manner of movement.
It does not signify a retreat into psychological inwardness, nor the disappearance of the thing within the subject. Thinking interiorizes the thing in order consciously to repeat within itself the thing’s inner ontogenesis.
Immanent-Intelligible Plasticity of Is-ness
By immanent-intelligible plasticity of is-ness we mean that which truly is, thought not as a completed and immobile Something, but as absolutely non-indifferent substance: as a reality whose immanence is originally capable of receiving the other as other, of allowing its difference to acquire inward validity, and of being reshaped from within through that validity.
Intelligibility here means neither the external comprehensibility of reality for some consciousness nor the already developed self-consciousness of substance itself. It denotes the ontological capacity for meaning-ideational computation as the condition of internal differentiation—the condition under which an encounter “with the other” does not remain a mere change of state but becomes an event; under which the other is not merely an external cause but an immanently valid otherness. The lowest trace of such validity is the non-thetic “is”: the proto-noematic validity of the other prior to perception, judgment, concept, and language.
Substance is therefore absolutely non-indifferent, not in the sense that each of its forms already feels, thinks, or possesses consciousness, but in the sense that receptivity cannot arise from a ground that would be absolutely indifferent toward itself and the other. Its receptivity is at the same time poietic: in receiving difference, it gives a different form to its own immediacy. “Plasticity of is-ness” thus denotes the inseparable unity of intelligible openness to difference, the receptive validity of otherness, and poietic self-transformation.