Bare Distinction

The experience of the previous chapter brings us to what we will call “bare distinction” — a distinction whose sides have not yet acquired stable names or content. Even “one” and “the other” are already later designations for what is initially given only as the fact of having been distinguished.

It is called bare precisely because there is nothing here besides distinction itself. It does not arise in emptiness or out of nothing: both emptiness and nothing would already be determinations requiring their own distinctions. There is not yet even a background against which the distinction could be named. It thus arises in thinking as its initial act, without a name, and can be discovered only in the exercise in thinking proposed in the introduction.

Names appear much later. A more developed form of thinking projects familiar structures of later distinctions onto the initial distinction and, through this folding, names what originally had no name. A name helps retain a distinction, but does not belong to it from the outset.

Bare distinction is not a motionless element out of which everything else is then built externally. It already contains the simplest movement: the distinction that has arisen changes the situation, and this new situation itself becomes the basis for further distinction.

This movement is immanent. We do not need a separate distinguisher standing outside and deciding what should happen next. A new determination arises from what is present. This should not be confused with a sealed-off scheme: such a scheme would already presuppose a distinction between inside and outside, which is not yet present at this level.

This gives rise to the initial intuition of a generative world: the new is not selected from a ready-made set of possibilities, but arises together with a new distinction.

In this sense, everything that follows is already given in the beginning, but in an undeveloped form. Not as a hidden collection of ready-made things and categories, but as the possibility of content arising through the development of distinction.