If different domains can be traced back to common principles of distinction and development, it is easy to go somewhat further and conclude that their differences are thereby dissolved.
As we have already seen, one distinction can be available through different traces, while the same carrier can become a trace of different distinctions depending on the relations into which it enters. Replacing a trace therefore does not necessarily mean losing identity, while preserving a trace or name does not yet guarantee that identity is preserved.
At the level of a developed structure, what is retained may not be a collection of individual traces, but the way they are organized — a boundary, a connection, or some invariant. The structure then remains the same up to transformations that preserve this organization. Its identity becomes a question of which transformations it withstands and where a different structure begins.
Simpler movement can continue to be present in a more complex form as its elemental regime. But preserving the elemental regime does not make the structure arising over it the same thing. What was already present is retained as something new arises: identity at one level does not eliminate differences at another.
The physical, biological, mental, or social can likewise preserve common principles of distinction and development without becoming different names for the same content. Structural correspondence can be discovered between them, even an isomorphism within a particular description. But such correspondence establishes identity only in the chosen respect, leaving differences in content, constraints, and further possibilities of development.
The converse is also true: a common origin does not require identical structures. Generative development produces new distinctions that may change the very organization relative to which identity was previously established. The criterion of “the same” must then also be revised: the previous mode of comparison proves insufficient for the content that has arisen.
In this version of the ontology, we shifted attention from the unfoldings of individual categorical lines to the principles that make them possible. Yet in describing these principles, we found ourselves within an unfolding again: one distinction led to another, concepts were refined through their relations, and what had been found became the basis for the next step.
Unfolding proved to be not only the object of inquiry, but also the movement of inquiry itself. In examining anything, we make distinctions, retain them, and discover the relations that arise. The principle of unfolding operates within this process rather than being applied to it as an external instruction.
The move to describing principles did not take us outside unfolding, but made its immanence to inquiry more apparent: even a description of the grounds of development itself develops.
The unity of developed forms should be understood by unfolding the history of their emergence, attending to what each has produced that is genuinely new. A common framework allows different unfoldings to be related, but does not replace the inquiry into the respects in which they are identical and those in which they differ.