Concept in Development

Here it is worth taking another step that is usually easy to overlook.

A familiar concept is perceived as a relatively fixed definition through which we observe a changing reality. Change is then assumed to happen to the thing, while the concept is merely refined, replaced, or applied to a new state.

In the movement considered here, this is not the case. A determination arising from distinction enters new relations, discovers its own boundaries, and in doing so unfolds content that was previously present only in an undeveloped form. Its later form does not merely replace the previous one, but carries the history of its own becoming.

This is why, already in the first distinction, we can discover movement as the movement of distinguishing, extension as a witness to distinction, and choice as its enactment — everything that can appear much later as separate, developed forms. Everything we are accustomed to knowing in an explicit, separated, and named form does not yet exist here in its familiar form, but is already present in the initial movement in an undeveloped form.

This does not mean that ready-made categories are hidden in the beginning and then simply extracted from it. On the contrary, what matters is that their subsequent history develops them and makes it possible to distinguish and name the sides of what was initially given as a much poorer and still undifferentiated movement.

A concept therefore cannot be fully understood through its definition at a single point. To understand it is to trace how it became what it is, which earlier forms it retains, what was previously present in it in an undeveloped form, and which further distinctions become possible from it.

Development here is not an external event happening to an already finished concept. It belongs to the concept itself as its mode of existence.