We begin by trying to reach the limit of thought — the point at which ready-made objects, categories, and logical constructions can no longer serve as a basis.
This point cannot be understood by trying to analyze it with familiar logic. It is better to try a simple exercise in thinking for yourself and imagine an abstraction at the limit of thought — the emptiest thing it is possible to think. Alone with this abstraction, thinking first makes a distinction, through which one and the other appear. One and the other can be called anything — “being” and “nothing,” 1 and 0, or any other names. This does not give the initial distinction any more content: it remains the first and poorest distinction.
If this primary distinction is kept in focus for a while, setting aside the interpretations that arise, something new is discovered: it is impossible to say exactly how one differs from the other. The sides exchange places and become indistinguishable, although the fact of the initial distinction does not disappear.
We usually pass over this fleeting experience as insignificant, failing to notice that here thinking first discovers itself as generative in its simplest form. The resulting indistinguishability of what was previously distinguished is not simply one of the two initial sides. It is something third, arising from what was previously distinguished and containing its sides. From two extremely impoverished sides, a new, still almost empty determination arises. In philosophy, the closest name for this movement is becoming.
This is not a logical error to be corrected with more precise definitions, but an observable fact of how thinking works. It can be understood above all by reproducing this experience: any more developed ways of interpreting it already presuppose structures whose origin we are trying to trace.
In this way we discover the limit of the abstraction available to us and first encounter the generative character of distinction. This experience becomes the only available basis for the entire construction that follows. It is not offered as something to accept on faith: one can try to reproduce it and either recognize it as such a basis or reject it as an artifact of thinking — an illusion produced by the attempt to hold this abstraction.
Everything that follows explores what possibilities of development open up if this experience is accepted as the ultimate available basis of human thought. The world may be wider than what a human being can distinguish — one can only agree with this. We investigate what becomes accessible to humans at the limit of their capacity to distinguish, without drawing an unambiguous conclusion about how the world works. Thus, this is not a proof of the structure of the world, but a sequential unfolding of the experience of thinking itself.