Here it is worth pausing at one of the simplest and, at the same time, most mystified aspects of the entire construction — the idea of the distinguisher as an external object. Understanding the distinguisher as external to the situation of distinction becomes a source of mythological constructions. The essence of this problem — considering a concept outside its development, outside the history of its becoming — was already revealed in the chapter on the concept in development. Here we focus specifically on the distinguisher to discover its inseparability from the process of distinction and remove the external character attributed to it.
In the initial movement, distinction and distinguisher remain undifferentiated. The very question of whether they are one or not one is still impossible: it already presupposes a distinction between distinction and distinguisher, as well as developed determinations of one and many, which are not yet present at this level. There is as yet neither a need nor a basis for adding something that performs the distinction. One becomes many only in the process of development itself, when forms arise between which such a separation can be made. To project this later separation back into the beginning is to introduce the result of development there in advance.
The distinguisher is therefore not outside the world. It is the only situation that has taken shape, since no other situation from which it could act is presupposed here. It can make only those distinctions permitted by the form it is at that moment.
The distinguisher continues to be present in subsequent structures as their elemental regime — as the movement of distinction persisting within them and operating within its own measure of freedom. It does not exist separately as an already fully developed entity. Its degree of development is exactly that of the form through which it acts.
Our tendency to perceive what changes slowly relative to our perception as a distinct object ultimately leads us to identify reality with what could be singled out in this way. This conceals the secondary character of the distinction between what is singled out and what is not, mystifying the latter and immediately placing it in some separately existing “outside.” Yet distinction can be wider than what is given to us as reality without being external to the world as a whole.
If these aspects remain unnoticed, later forms of the distinguisher are projected onto initial distinction. Reflection, will, subjecthood, or reason are then found where there is only a much poorer distinction. When attempts to work with such a projection in the elementary state onto which it was imposed naturally fail, the principle itself is rejected. What goes unnoticed is that the answer lies in understanding the concept as developing. The immanent movement of distinction becomes an image of a separate distinguisher standing behind what happens, and becomes a source of myth.
The distinguisher therefore neither observes the world from outside nor hides behind it. At the beginning of the inquiry, it is inseparable from the act of distinction itself, and subsequently exists only in the forms to which that distinction has developed. The distinguisher can thus be replaced with the present situation: it points to nothing standing apart from it.