The opening of Hegel’s Science of Logic can be read as a description of a limit-state of thought.
Pure being is devoid of all determination. There is nothing in it to distinguish, nothing to retain as content — strictly speaking, nothing to think. If thought is understood as a search among distinctions already at hand, this is where everything should end.
But for Hegel, this is precisely where movement begins.
This allows us to see behind his categories a more originary gesture — bare distinction: a distinction whose sides are not yet positively determined, and of which it is not yet possible to say what exactly distinguishes one from the other.
We usually assume the reverse. First there are (A) and (B), and then thought discovers a distinction between them. But in the more radical case, distinguishing itself first produces the sides as sides of a distinction.
On this reading, being and nothing can be understood as the first form in which this initially almost contentless movement is clothed. Bare distinction cannot remain bare for long: in order to hold it, and then to carry thought further, we give its sides names, minimal determinations, and relations. Intuition clothes distinction in structure. Here we are concerned specifically with how ordinary thought encounters bare distinction, not with the unfolding of distinction as such.
This is where the difficulty begins. Thought almost immediately projects already familiar forms onto bare distinction. Moreover, the new may take on the garments of an already superseded element: it can use old concepts and relations, but in a different configuration. The novelty is already visible, while the mechanism of its emergence remains hidden behind familiar forms, making it still harder to understand.
It is easy to assume that thought already possesses a space of possible concepts and must logically pass from one to the next. Then there arises a seemingly logically clean question which, in fact, has nothing to do with what is at stake: why should nothing follow specifically from being, and becoming from the two?
But perhaps what is primary is not this content at all, but the form of generation itself: the absence of determination, the emergence of distinguishability, the appearance of sides, and the subsequent unfolding of structure.
The positing of bare distinction then appears as a provocation, setting in motion a process that immediately begins to struggle with this new incompleteness and to clothe the provocation in a minimally familiar form — thought. In this sense, thought is a kind of recognition.
Such a reading requires moving from thought understood only as search to thought understood as generation.
Search takes place within an already given space of possibilities. Generative thought is capable of producing a distinction together with which a new space of the possible comes into being.
When there is nothing left to find, when distinctions have become degenerate and movement has sunk into the repose of its element, thought does not stop. It can produce bare distinction.