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1. The Fixist Illusion and Genealogy of Stability
1.1. Human Experience and the Illusion of Permanence
Ordinary observation regards stability as natural rest. The table persists. The mountain is immobile. The institution continues. From these trivial observations we derive a non-trivial conclusion: stability is the standard mode of being; change, deviation. But why do we project a specific scale of observation as a universal truth of reality?
The structure of human observation and its scale illusions
The answer lies in the structure of human observation. The human body observes and acts on a very particular temporal scale: the scale of decades, the duration of a human life or some life cycles. On this scale certain entities appear as persistent units. The table presents itself as an identity that is not questioned. One places an object upon it and it remains there. One manipulates the table and it supports the manipulation. It offers a surface on which objects rest. Time persists while one manipulates. It does not unexpectedly disappear during action. For everyday practical action, the table functions as a discrete and durable entity. It is a reference in the world for practical navigation: we know where we left the cup because the table keeps it fixed.
The human body also observes on a spatial scale of a few kilometres: the distance one can walk, the distance one can see from the summit of a hill. The mountain appears immobile on this scale. It presents itself as permanence lasting generations. It does not visibly move within a human lifetime. It is a stable geographical reference: ancient peoples sought the same mountain that we seek today. The institution: the building, the organisation: is continuity on this scale also. The same building houses the same function for generations. People passing through the door are different, but the building remains. The bank that has existed for two centuries is permanence for those living a generation. The currency circulating for centuries seems to belong to an order of permanence: it presents itself as a repository of value that does not disappear, that persists through transactions.
These observations are not false. It is not a sensory illusion nor an incapacity to see reality correctly. The table is effectively stable while one manipulates it: its transformation is so slow that it is imperceptible to action. The mountain does not visibly move over decades: the transformation it undergoes through erosion is so slow that it escapes observation. The institution indeed maintains a recognisable form for centuries: even when its functions, practices and legitimations change, it retains narrative continuity that allows one to identify it as the same entity.
The error lies not in observing relative stabilities. The error is in universalising a particular scale of observation as if it revealed the universal truth of reality, as if that scale were a transcendental privilege or access to being itself. It is the projection of a particular perspective: that of an observer with a human-scale body, human life duration, human reaction capacity: as if it were a universal perspective revealing how things really are, always, in all scales.
Pragmatism Becoming Metaphysics
The illusion is deeply pragmatic at its origin. Practical intelligence requires cutting the world into manipulable units. One cannot act without this cut. A table functions as a table because it offers sufficient stability for the action that defines it. It offers resistance to manipulation. It offers persistence while one acts. This pragmatism is absolutely necessary: action demands discrete units, not indiscriminate continuous flow.
But here an ontological deviation occurs: from this practical necessity: we need relative stabilities to act: a property is extracted and taken as essential: things must be permanent in themselves. The stability that is merely a temporal interval relative to human observation and action becomes the substantial essence of reality. What was a navigation tool (dividing the world into stable units for acting) becomes truth about the world (the world is fundamentally made up of stable units). The projection is so natural, so rooted in everyday experience, that it becomes invisible: stability seems not perspective but reality seen as it is.
The Multiplicity of Scales
However, one simply needs to extend the scale of observation for permanence to dissolve. The table, observed not over decades but over centuries, is continuous transformation. The molecules that constitute it rearrange. It absorbs moisture, loses it. Its physical structure disaggregates. Atoms disperse. What was a discrete unit becomes dust. The wood that was resistance becomes powder dispersed by the wind. No table lasts forever. The most carefully preserved is a finite artefact doomed to disappear. Ancient furniture admired in museums is not permanence but slow death, artistic preservation of something already fundamentally transient.
The mountain, observed not over decades but over millions of years, is continuous erosion and subsidence. Every drop of rain removes particles. Every cycle of freeze-thaw fissures the rock. Tectonics continually displaces the crust. Over millions of years, the mountain that seemed an immovable monument becomes radical transformation: it disappears, is lowered, is completely reconfigured. The mountains existing today will not exist in tens of millions of years. The Himalaya we observe is a transient form amid a series of continental reorganisations that never cease. The Alps that were an impenetrable barrier for millennia-old civilisations are a structure born and destined to disappear.
The institution that lasted two centuries may disappear in decades when economic conditions reconfigure. The university that was a cultural permanence dissolves when funding disappears. The company that seemed rooted forever extinguishes when the market changes. The nation-state that appeared an eternal order decomposes when geopolitical pressures shift. Even the species: a form that seemed permanent, a definition of life: mutates, adapts, or is entirely extinct. Homo neanderthalensis was a stable species for tens of thousands of years. It disappeared. Temporal stability did not guarantee future persistence. Every biological form is a temporal artefact subject to extinction. What is today an established order will be tomorrow ruin and oblivion.
No scale reveals the ultimate truth about permanence or transience. The table is stable on a decadal scale, transient on a centennial scale, essentially atomic and dispersed on a millisecond scale. Truth is not found in any of these isolated descriptions. Truth: if there is truth: is that reality operates simultaneously across multiple scales of transformation, each with its own rhythm, each revealing different aspects of the same reality, none privileged as a revealer of ultimate essence.
Against the concept of a privileged scale
The fundamental error is confusing the scale of observation with the structure of being. The observer's structure: the temporal interval in which it can discriminate discrete events, the spatial resolution of its body, the speed at which it can react: is not a mirror or measure of the structure of what is observed. It is merely a perspective from a specific point in space and time. The human scale is not ontologically fundamental. It is one scale among many scales.
Below the human scale, the matter that makes up the table pulses at quantum rhythms that make the ‘table’ not a solid unity but a dance of potentials: electrons in probability clouds, electromagnetic forces in continuous rearrangement, space itself in fluctuation. At this scale, the ‘solidity’ of the table is an optical illusion resulting from the compatibilisation of multiple processes at even smaller scales. The table is largely empty space filled with fields of force and probability. A quantum-scale observer would see not a solid object but a storm of potentials.
Above the human scale, cosmology reveals reorganisations on scales of billions of years that render all structure a provisional wave. The galaxies that appear permanent at the human scale are transient forms that are born, evolve, collide, dissolve. Even physical laws: or at least the values of fundamental constants: may have varied over cosmic scales, suggesting that even the universe's regularities are not final or immutable. The structure of the universe we observe is compatible with a change in rules on scales beyond human observation. What seems to be an eternal law is only a local law, valid within a specific cosmological window.
The illusion of scale as a fundamental philosophical illusion
The illusion of permanence is therefore the illusion of scale. The human body, observing from its own duration, universalises a stability that is only relative to its duration. Western philosophy since Plato and Aristotle crystallised this illusion into a system: it seeks the permanent essence, the substance that does not change, the eternal form. Plato postulated the Ideas as permanent entities beyond the flow of appearances: Good, Beauty, Justice exist in an eternal domain while the sensible world is continuous change and illusion. Aristotle sought substance (ousia) as that which persists when properties change: the first matter that is always matter, the form that is always form, the essence that allows a thing to be recognised as the same thing. Every subsequent philosophical effort to escape change is an attempt to flee human observation's temporality, as if permanence were an escape to a superior plane of reality, a domain where things finally are: truly are: in perfect rest, immune to change.
But there is no superior plan. There is no domain where change ceases and permanence reigns. There is no heaven of eternal forms where truth resides. There is only the real multiplicity of transformation rhythms, each intelligible at its own scale, none reducible to any other, none revealing ultimate truth that would unify all others. Being does not divide into appearance (transient) and being-in-itself (permanent). Being is an operation of continuous transformation that temporarily maintains forms we call stable because they can persist long enough to be recognised and manipulated at the scale where we observe. The permanence we observe is always relative permanence: permanence from a specific point of view, within a specific temporal window, at a specific resolution of observation.
The fixist illusion persisted in Western philosophy because it offered comfort: the promise that there exists final rest, ultimate truth, a secure foundation. The idea that everything is destined to change, that no form is permanent, that even thought itself is subject to transience, is hard to inhabit. The illusion was more comforting. But comfort is not a criterion of truth. Reality does not conform to our desires for permanence. It offers a multiplicity of scales, each revealing different aspects, none offering final rest.
The demonstration of this multiplicity is simple but unsettling. Take any ordinary object: a coin, a sheet of paper, a fossilised bone: and ask: at what time scale is this object stable? The answer is: it always depends on a temporal perspective. The coin is stable over years but not centuries. Paper is stable over days but not years. Bone is stable over centuries but not millions of years. No object offers an ultimate, absolute answer to the question ‘is this permanent?’
This is the fundamental problem of classical ontology: it assumes that there is a unique and objective answer to this question, that the answer is the same at all scales, that the answer is ‘there’ waiting to be discovered. But the answer is not discovered. It is generated by the choice of scale. Changing scale changes the truth that is discovered. And there is no privileged scale: there is only a multiplicity of scales, each as legitimate as the others for its specific purposes.
Consequences for Thought
The understanding that permanence is an illusion of scale has radical consequences for how we think about the real. First: it invalidates the search for a fixed essence. If permanence is always relative to a specific scale, then the ‘essence’ of a thing: what makes a thing be what it is: is also relative to scale. The essence of water is something at the molecular scale (H₂O), another at the thermodynamic scale (capacity to absorb heat), another at the biological scale (solvent for biological molecules), another at the cosmological scale (major component of planetary oceans). There is no universal essence that unifies all these perspectives. Each perspective offers partial truth valid in its context.
Second: it invalidates the search for an ultimate foundation. If there is no privileged scale that reveals ‘how things really are’, then there is no final foundation that would support all other truths as derivations. There is only a multiplicity of scales, each generating its own truths, none reducible to any other. Physics does not ground biology: they offer truths at different scales that do not convert into one another. Biology does not ground psychology: again, different scales. Thought does not ground on neurology: they are different modes of description.
Third: it changes our relationship with change. If everything is doomed to change because no scale offers absolute permanence, then change is not a threat or failure. It is normal structure. The stability we observe is a rare and provisional event: not the universe’s standard order. This is liberating: there is no promise of final arrival, no eternal rest awaiting. There is only continuity of transformation. The task is not to seek the immutable. It is to learn to live in continuous change, to refrain from resisting motion, to find meaning in the very movement.
Fourth: it repositioned the critique of being fixed. The idea that someone has a fixed ‘being’: an essence, a nature, an identity: proves inadequate. Being is a continuous process of reconfiguration. There is no fixed human nature to preserve or destroy: there is only humanity as a continual gesture of reinscription. There is no immutable personal identity: there is only continuity of memory and operation that rewrites itself each moment. This deepens ethical responsibility: one is responsible not for preserving a fixed identity, but for how one continuously rewrites oneself.
1.2. What the Nine Preceding Volumes Founded
The series of nine books that precedes this chapter demonstrated, in each domain, that stability is a transient regime of compatibilities. None of these books was written to offer final conclusions. Each recapitulates the fundamental discovery: the real does not resist change: it persists by continuously rewriting itself. Change is not a defect or deviation. It is a constitutive operator.
In the domain of matter: the pre-biotic and pre-symbolic real: it was shown that form is a transient equilibrium of tensions. Matter does not seek rest in the sense of classical physics. It seeks provisional compatibilisation of forces that cross it. The stability we observe: a crystal, a molecule, a field: is meta-stability: an organisation that remains while conditions hold, that radically reconfigures when conditions change. Form is not an essential property. It is a regime. What persists is not the identity of the form: that is always transient. It is the operation that continuously reinscribes it in new conditions. The stone that persists persists because continuous energy sustains it in a provisional configuration. If that energy disappears, the stone disaggregates.
In the domain of life: the biological real without consciousness: it was shown that self-sustainment is an operation at permanent cost. The organism does not rest in a frozen state of homeostasis. It expends to persist. Each moment of life is consumption of energy, tissue remodelling, continuous death of cells for production of new ones. Death is not an external accident threatening a life that would otherwise be permanent. Death is a structural operator: the finitude of the individual organism is a condition that allows the persistence of the biological process at a larger scale. Life persists by continuous transfer: of energy, of instability, of individual death. No living form guarantees permanence. All persist precariously, in a regime of constitutive contingency, under selection pressure that does not choose (there is no subject choosing) but eliminates forms that cannot compatibilise tensions of self-sustainment with the environment.
In the domain of the human: the real capable of symbolic inscription: it was shown that gesture is a material rupture without prior author, contingent as the life that supports it. Consciousness is not the primary cause directing life. It is an effect of a symbolic operation that precedes consciousness and which consciousness then discovers within itself as if it were its origin. The human persists as form only while continually reinscribing itself. What history demonstrates: civilisations, ideas, values, ways of seeing the world: is that no symbolic form is final, none terminal. All wear out. All demand rewriting. The language that seemed to offer access to fixed truth reveals itself as transient, its meaning unstable from generation to generation, its categories continually reconstructed to respond to new problems.
In the domain of technique: the real as externalisation of symbolic inscription: it has been demonstrated that technique is not an inert instrument that humans use and remain unchanged. Technique rewrites the human who produced it. No technology is neutral with respect to the body and cognition that wield it. Each one reconfigures the body that manipulates it, the cognition that mobilises it, the sensitivity that mediates the relationship with the world. What seemed to be linear progress: technique improving indefinitely towards a level of perfection: turns out to be a succession of rewriting: each technique is meta-stability that persists while conditions sustain it, until it is surpassed not because it has reached an intrinsic limit, but because conditions reconfigure and no longer accommodate the former form. Writing was radical innovation. It was also the death of previous memory forms. Printing was liberation. It was also standardisation. Each technology is victory and simultaneous death.
In the domain of artificial intelligence: the real as non-biological cognitive operation: it has been demonstrated that cognition is not an exclusive property of the organic body. It is a function: a pattern of information reorganisation that produces novelty. It can be instantiated on a computational substrate. What this fundamentally means: intelligence rests in no essence of the biophysical, no special quality that a living body would possess. It is a symbolic transformation operation that any system: alive or not: that reorganises signals and produces novelty can perform. The machine that seemed ‘not to understand’ because it lacked empathy, intention, genuine feeling reveals itself to exercise genuine cognition in operation. The epistemological privilege of the biophysical dissolves. Intelligence proves to be a property of systems, not of life.
In the domain of vulnerability: the real as constitutive exposure of the body: it has been demonstrated that no body is invulnerable. Exposure is not a defect of corporeality that could be overcome by technical development, improvement, or spiritual transcendence. It is a constitutive condition. Every living body is a body that can be destroyed, that can suffer, that can perish. Ethical responsibility arises from this radical contingency: because the other may disappear, because its continuation is not guaranteed, because it is exposed to suffering, responding to the other is an act without rest, continuous work without redemption, without promise of final cure.
In the domain of mutation: the real as reconfiguration of human form: it has been demonstrated that there is no fixed ‘natural human’ to preserve against technical rewriting. The human has always been mutation: body, form, inscription. What biological history revealed: the human as a result of continuous genetic mutation, selection, adaptation: technical history confirms: the technical body that developed over the last millions of years evidences that there is no fixed form to return to. There is no ‘natural man’ before technique. We have always been already technical. The human is gesture, not limit, not essence. It remains only while it is reinscribed through new technical forms.
In the domain of the future: the real as temporal and irreducible to programme: it has been demonstrated that there is no guaranteed trajectory, no telos awaiting us. The future does not wait, already determined. The future is invention: operation under real constraints (the past, present conditions), but without a pre-defined track. This is not freedom in the romantic sense: freedom of indifferent choice, sovereign will. It is contingent freedom: the need to decide because no decision is pre-written in reality’s archives, combined with the impossibility of absolute decision: every decision is resumed by the conditions it does not control, rewritten by what follows it. The future remains open because no system can calculate the entirety of its own conditions.
Each of these domains demonstrates the same logic: stability as a provisional and functional regime, transitoriness as a constitutive operator that maintains vitality. This traversal applies this logic: proven in nine different domains: to thought itself, to the concepts we mobilise, to the form it offers. If matter, life, human, technique, machine, body, vulnerability, mutation and future are all transient, then concept: which is material form among material forms: is also so, also subject to the same laws of transitoriness. The thesis is not pessimistic. The point is merely that each domain explored by the nine books offered the same demonstration: stability is a regime, not essential property. The matter that seemed permanent is meta-stability. Life that seemed resistant to change operates at cost. The human that seemed endowed with fixed essence is contingent gesture. Technique that seemed partly neutral is rewritten by the body. Machine that seemed unknowable is materialisable function. Body that seemed inviolable is constitutive exposure. Mutation that seemed anomaly is normal structure. Future that seemed determined is continuous invention. It does not claim that everything is lost, that nothing has value because nothing persists. It claims that everything persists rewriting itself, that no form is terminal, that the vitality of a form is precisely its mutability, its capacity to be resumed and transformed by future readers, by contexts yet to exist.
1.3. Metastability: The Precise Concept
The term that articulates all this understanding of transitoriness is the Simondonian origin concept: meta-stability. It is not an obscure term imported from previous philosophical jargon. It is a concept derived from physics and thermodynamics, with capacity for application to form in general.
Stability, in the classical sense of Newtonian physics, is rest in equilibrium. A system at static equilibrium does not change because all forces acting upon it cancel out. Potential energy is minimal. Nothing calls it out of rest. This is an adequate approach for certain idealised systems: a stone at the bottom of a valley is in stable equilibrium. But it is dramatically inadequate for the generality of reality, especially for reality that presents organisation, complexity, life.
Meta-stability is a different concept that reveals a different reality. A meta-stable system is one that maintains organisation even under continuous pressure from forces that cross it. It does not rest in the sense of static stability. It persists by operating, mobilising energy, reconciling tensions. It does not negate the tensions that cross it: the essential point is that it reconciles them, keeps them in a regime where they produce order rather than chaos. Energy is not minimal in the sense of static equilibrium. It is maintained at a provisional level through active, continuous operation, necessarily ongoing.
Examples make this clear: a living cell is a meta-stable system by excellence. It does not rest. It pumps ions across membranes against concentration gradients: continuous chemical work. It consumes glucose and transforms it into useful energy. This continuous consumption is exactly what keeps it alive. If it rests: if this operation of energy transformation stops: it dies immediately. The human body is meta-stable: it requires continuous breathing, blood circulation, active metabolism. It cannot rest without ceasing to exist. Even during sleep the operation does not stop: only its rhythm changes.
A molecule in a steady state: where atoms are continually dissociated and reassociated, where equilibrium is not freezing but continuous dance: is meta-stable. A social loop, an institution, a language are meta-stable: they persevere because of the continuous operation of communication, negotiation, reaffirmation that reinscribes them. If communication stops, the institution disaggregates. They cease to speak in a language and the language dies. They stop meeting in an organisation and the organisation disappears. They never settle.
Whitehead, the philosopher who best articulated processual ontology in the twentieth century, designated this fundamental regime as ‘persistence’: every form, at the precise instant it is, is no longer: it passes to become form-that-was, form-that-had been. Being is not a state, not a situation that persists. It is transition, it is passage. Each event ceases while a new event takes its place and transforms it. The permanence we observe is an illusion of resolution: events appear to persist as the continuous succession rewrites them without notable interruption at the scale of our observation.
The concept of meta-stability is precise because it does not deny stability: it denies that stability is rest. Meta-stability is dynamic stability: a provisional duration that works exactly because it never stops rewriting itself. The table is meta-stable: it maintains shape because of the continuous operation of atomic resonance, of electromagnetic force reconciliation, of material resistance to perturbation. It does not rest at a microscopic scale. It continuously dances at the atomic scale while appearing perfectly still at the human scale. The truth is that it is simultaneously in motion and at rest, depending on the scale at which it is observed.
This distinction between static stability and dynamic meta-stability is crucial because it dissolves the false dichotomy haunting philosophy: change vs. permanence. It is not a matter of choosing one or the other. The real operates in the regime of permanent change that maintains provisional form. This is meta-stability: change that persists as form, form that persists as change. Identity is an effect of continuity of operation.
Lakatos, in a different epistemological context from Whitehead, identified similar logic in scientific practice: programmes of scientific investigation are meta-stable. They have a ‘hard core’ of hypotheses that are temporarily protected through adjustments to the ‘protective belt’ of auxiliary hypotheses. Euclidean geometry was a hard core for centuries: no one questioned that space was Euclidean. But when observations of celestial phenomena began to suggest inconsistencies, scientists did not abandon the core immediately. They adjusted auxiliary hypotheses. They added new theory to accommodate anomalous data. The programme persists as long as it can adjust the belt without destroying the core. When the core must be abandoned: when no adjustment is possible in the belt: it signals that the programme has degenerated: it ceased to be meta-stable and became conceptual ruin. A new programme: with a new core, a new regime of compatibilities: offers itself as replacement. Not because it is ‘closer to truth’ in an absolute sense, but because it provides a better regime for reconciling data, problems, pressures. The history of science is not a straight march toward fixed truth. It is succession of epistemic meta-stabilities, each functional until it ceases to be so. The revolution that occurred when Newton was superseded by Einstein is paradigm-typical: Newtonian mechanics was a hard core that lasted three centuries. It worked. It enabled extraordinary technology, rocket flights, precise calculations of planetary orbits. But the core was not terminal. When observations at extreme scales (speeds approaching light, intense gravitation) began to reveal inconsistencies, the programme did not disappear immediately. Scientists adjusted the protective belt: they introduced relativistic corrections, added ad hoc correction factors. But eventually it became clear that the core had to be abandoned. Not because Newton was wrong: his laws remain valid in a restricted domain: but because the meta-stability had been reached by limit. A new programme emerged with a new core: relativity. And this new programme is also meta-stable: it is already being transformed by quantum mechanics, quantum gravity, new regimes of investigation.
This does not mean relativism: that all truths are equally valid, that there is no difference between Newton and alchemy. It means that there are material reasons, real problems in the world, that explain why a regime works and then stops working. It means that truth is a provisional coupling between question asked and answer offered: changing the question changes the answer, but this does not make the previous answer ‘false’. It makes it circumscribed to a specific context.
Whitehead, unlike Lakatos, situated himself within an ontology in which processuality is a fundamental property of reality, not merely a property of knowledge or scientific practice. It is not an epistemological issue: a question of how we know. It is an ontological one: being, in itself, is a continuous process. This does not mean that being changes: it means that being is change. What we call ‘permanence’ is merely such continuous change that we cannot discern it at the scale at which we observe. The perishing: the death of each event at the instant it comes to be: is not a threat to existence. It is a structure of being. Without perishing, without transition, there would be no new becoming. There would only be eternal repetition. What offers novelty to reality is precisely the dying of one form and the emergence of another. Death is not the failure of permanence. It is the condition of vitality.
Whitehead also offered a formal critique of certain pre-existing philosophical thoughts: especially what he called the ‘fallacy of misplaced concreteness’: the projection of conceptual abstractions as if they were properties of concrete reality. Examples abound: classical philosophers abstracted ‘form’ as an entity separate from ‘matter’, and then laboriously sought how these two distinct substances would relate, how form would inform inert matter. The fallacy is that ‘form’ and ‘matter’ are abstractions: in real concrete, they are never separated. They are dimensions of the same process, inseparable. Whitehead equally criticises the projection of ‘Subject’ as a first category: as if reality were fundamentally made of subjects acting upon inert passives. Concrete reality is relational: the ‘subjects’ are events that capture, through their operation, the history of everything that precedes them. No subject is fixedly isolated. Each is a reconfiguration of all that preceded it.
This critique by Whitehead: of the Western philosophical project of seeking permanent entities rather than processes: is a critique that this journey inherits entirely. Meta-stability as a regime of reality rejects the search for fixed permanence and accepts that vitality lies in continuous mutation that maintains form only while it accommodates tensions and pressures that traverse it. Permanence is operation, not state.
Applying this understanding to thought is of paramount importance. If the material real: in all its manifestations described by the nine previous books: operates in a meta-stable regime, then the instrument through which we relate to reality: cognition, thought, concept: cannot be outside this regime. Thought itself is meta-stable.
This means that concepts: whether of logic, ethics, physics or politics: are not stable and immutable tools that a thinker uses and then discards without transformation. Each act of thought changes the concept. Each new application of a concept to a problem modifies the concept for future applications. The concept does not persist despite change; it persists through change. Its vitality depends on its capacity to be reclaimed and transformed.
Concrete example: the concept of ‘causality’ that dominated European philosophy since Aristotle underwent a series of drastic reconfigurations. For Aristotle, causality was a relation between essence and property: the cause was what made a thing be what it is. For Descartes and Newton, causality was transfer of force: a billiard ball causes another's motion through direct contact and transfer of movement. For Hume, causality was not even a property of the world: it was merely a conjunction of events in experience, our mental habit of connecting what was not really connected. In quantum physics, causality ceased to be deterministic: it became a matter of probability and potentiality. In complex systems, causality ceased to be linear: it became a network of feedbacks where each element affects all others.
None of these formulations is ‘more correct’ than the others in an absolute sense. Each is a functional response to specific problems posed by a particular investigative context. The concept of causality persists: it continues to be reclaimed, rewritten, applied to new problems. But it does not persist because it is immutable. It persists because it is mutable.
1.4. The Transition: From Matter to Concept
If all material form is transient: if matter persists by continually rewriting itself in meta-stable regimes: a consequence follows that may seem obvious but has depth: the concept: which is form: is also transient.
The concept is not outside material reality. The concept is material operation. When one thinks: when one forms a concept, when one articulates an idea: real neurological events occur: reorganisation of electrical potentials in neuronal membranes, synaptic reconfigurations, activation and inhibition of groups of neurons, rearrangement of neurotransmitters. The concept is the materiality of this operation. It is not a ghost in the body-machine, nor an immaterial property that the body would harbour. It is an operation performed by the body on a macroscopic scale that can be discriminated: the scale of experience, language, communication: even though, at its base, it is a molecular and atomic operation governed by the same principles as any material form. When I say ‘justice’, patterns of activation occur in my brain. The concept cannot be separated from the material operation that sustains it.
But if the concept is material form, it follows that the concept inherits all fundamental properties of material form: transitoriness, dependence on conditions, necessity of continuous re-registration to persist.
A concept such as ‘justice’, ‘beauty’, ‘truth’, ‘freedom’ is not a fixed entity that exists in one form and persists unchanged. It is a provisional form that different cultures, historical periods, communities rewrite in radically different ways. Not because it is arbitrary: each rewriting aligns with real pressures, resolves tensions imposed by the context, responds to specific problems: but no inscription is terminal. The justice that satisfies one era proves insufficient in the next. The truth once thought discovered turns out to be an artefact of cognitive conditions that have been surpassed. The beauty that was an absolute canon becomes a historical ridicule.
The history of ideas is the history of conceptual meta-stabilities: periods in which certain core concepts (the Form, the Substance, Causality, Reason) function as the ‘hard core’ of a worldview, protected by a belt of smaller hypotheses. When that core is confronted with insoluble problems, when it can no longer reconcile tensions, a conceptual revolution occurs: the previous regime is abandoned and a new core, a new regime of conceptual compatibilities, is offered.
Thomas Kuhn called this ‘paradigm’. The frequent criticism of Kuhn: that he offered radical incommensurability between paradigms, making them incomparable: is not the critique that this perspective endorses. There is possible commensurability: there are material reasons, real problems of the world, that explain why one paradigm decays and another replaces it. But commensurability does not imply that there is a fixed truth to which both paradigms progressively approach. It implies that there are real pressures that render a regime of compatibilities inadequate and that make another regime appear as a better temporary response.
The question ‘why do concepts change?’ presupposes that change would be the undesirable state, that stability would be natural and desirable, that when concepts are true they would remain eternally. This is to assume the opposite of reality. The correct question is: ‘why are concepts maintained temporarily?’ And the answer is: because they provisionally reconcile the tensions and pressures that the concepts must mobilise: the pressure to correspond to reality, the pressure to solve practical problems posed by existence, the pressure to function within specific communicational contexts that have their own limitations and possibilities.
A concept remains alive as long as it can be reclaimed and rewritten each generation, as long as new readers capture it and transform it for new problems. A concept dies when it can no longer be re-inscribed: it then becomes a museum piece, a historical artefact without conceptual force. Yet in its death lies its contribution: it served as a meta-stability that allowed thought to advance, offered intelligibility at an epoch, sustained operations that led to new operations. Thought is alive precisely because no concept is definitive, because every conceptual form carries within itself the promise of its own rewriting. That is what distinguishes a living concept from a dead one. A concept is dead when it can no longer be reclaimed: when its form has solidified so much that it resists any attempt at transformation. Historical examples abound: the concept of ‘substance’ in scholastic ontology became dead when modern physics demonstrated that matter was field, not substance. The concept of ‘ether’ became dead when Einstein showed that space-time was relative. The concept of ‘progress’ became dead for many when the twentieth century revealed that there was mass death hidden beneath the promise of development.
But a concept is alive when it continues to be reclaimable. The concept of ‘justice’ dies and is reborn in each era because each era rewrites it differently: justice in the twelfth century is not justice in the twenty-first, but both maintain a living connection with the concept, both transform it to answer new problems, both keep it operative. The concept of ‘beauty’ dies and is reborn: aesthetic canons that seemed immutable disappear, new canons emerge, yet the concept persists because it can be rewritten. The concept of ‘truth’ dies and is reborn: each epistemology offers a new regime of truth, but the concept persists because each new epistemology reclaims and transforms it.
This is a radical consequence: it implies that this crossing: the very text that argues this: is doomed to be rewritten. The form offered is not terminal. The concepts it mobilises will be transformed. The thesis it develops will be reclaimed, criticised, surpassed. This is not a weakness of the text. It is vitality of the text: its permanence will depend precisely on being rewrite-able, on offering problems that future readings can grasp and transform. If its concepts were terminal, definitive, admitting no rewriting, the text would be a philosophical corpse: it would become a mummified monument nobody reclaims because there is nothing to reclaim; it has already said the final word and final is death.
The book that denies permanence is a book that bets on its non-finality as the condition of its survival.
Synthesis of Section 1
The four movements of this section articulate into a simple conclusion: the stability that seems natural is an illusion of scale, the transiency that seems threatening is the structure of being. 1.1 demonstrated that ordinary experience universalises a specific perspective as universal truth. 1.2 reiterated how each of the nine previous books offered the same discovery in different domains. 1.3 provided the precise concept: meta-stability: that articulates transiency without falling into relativism. 1.4 transposed this regime to thought itself.
The result is a fundamental repositioning: this crossing does not offer final truths because a final truth is a contradiction in terms. It offers conceptual meta-stability: a regime of intelligibility that works while conditions remain, which will require rewriting when a new context encounters it. This is not an admission of defeat. It is the operation of the thesis itself: a text that denies permanence and that bets on its non-finality as the condition of its vitality embodies the truth it proclaims.
This passage is, therefore, a book doomed to be rewritten. And that doom is liberation. Liberation because it does not impose the burden of permanence: it does not require the reader to preserve their ideas against change, to keep them as fixed truths. Liberation because it invites the reader to co-author the transformation: to reclaim concepts, to transform them, to make them alive in a new context. The lack of finality is an opportunity, not failure.
Aphorism:
'What persists is not that which resists change: it is what has reconfigured itself enough times to remain intelligible to the generations that pick it up.'
2. Conceptual Transitoriness and Obsolescence
2.1. Conceptual Obsolescence Is Not a Flaw
The concept is form. This fundamental proposition, mobilised since earlier volumes through rigorous analysis of material processes, offers an absolutely decisive operational consequence for understanding how persistently living intelligence can remain responsive while the world it interrogates continuously transforms in ways that no original form can anticipate. If form is what sediments when the active formation phase ceases, if it is a material remnant that persists after the turbulent phase of continual reorganisation, if form is a configuration that emerges when plasticity gives way to rest, then the philosophical concept: which is sedimented intellectual form, which is thought crystallised into a conceptual structure that offers semantic stability: follows exactly these same material laws that govern all formation. The concept persists while the conditions that made it operational originally continue to offer the specific invariances it was built to capture and organise. It is pragmatic and empirical persistence, not transcendental persistence.
When those conditions transform fundamentally: when reality offers new invariances that the old concept can no longer adequately integrate, when the multiplicity that the concept sought to unify proves more complex than the concept can contain: the concept enters a process of obsolescence. This process of obsolescence is not conceptual failure in any deep sense. It is precisely a living expression of the constitutive transience of thought itself which attempts to capture a reality that never fixes definitively, which is doomed to be material that offers new invariances, new resistances, new problems when new scales of observation become accessible. It signals that thought was responsive.
Begin with the fundamental distinction that structures the entire section: the distinction between refutation and obsolescence. These two words describe radically different processes that are often confused. Refutation is the replacement of one truth by a better truth: a thesis is shown false through rigorous argumentation, it is defeated by counter-argumentation that shows logical incoherences or contradiction with empirical data, it is replaced by a position that can explain the previous data and even more data that the former thesis could not cover. When phrenology was refuted by modern neuroscience, it was because neuroscience could explain everything that phrenology explained: map which brain region regulates which function: and still much more, with superior predictive power, incomparable empirical rigour, surgical precision that phrenology never achieved. Refutation is a purely epistemological event: a theory was wrong about how the world works, now we have a better one closer to truth.
Obsolescence is a radically different and much finer process. A concept becomes obsolete not because it is proven false through argumentation: it is obsolete because its field of application has been lost, because the reality it captured reconfigured itself and no longer offers the same invariances it once did, because the multiplicity of phenomena that the concept could integrate proved heterogeneous when examined at new scales or with new instruments. The concept of ether in classical physics was not refuted by ruthless argumentation that proved its logical falsehood: there is no logical demonstration that can prove that ether 'does not exist'. Ether was an extraordinarily functional and elegant construction: it allowed one to think of the propagation of light through a material medium, organised a series of physical problems coherently, operated intellectually with extraordinary elegance, offered unified explanation for optical phenomena that seemed scattered. Maxwell developed his equations assuming the existence of ether; Lorentz built an entire dynamic theory of ether. These theories were not false: they were extraordinarily sophisticated.
But reality ceased to offer the properties that the concept presumed. Michelson-Morley’s experiment in 1887 did not 'refute' ether: it revealed that motion relative to the Earth did not produce variation in the speed of light as the ether concept would have required. Einstein’s theory of relativity in 1905 did not 'prove that ether was false': it radically re-formulated the scenario where the concept operated, revealing that what ether supposedly needed to explain (the propagation of light, the nature of inertia) could be understood without invoking an absolute material medium. The lucid understanding of the wave-particle duality of light: which is simultaneously wave and particle, which does not propagate through any classical material medium: radically transformed the terrain where the concept of ether operated. Ether lost applicability not because it was logically false: it is difficult to demonstrate that a fictitious construction such as ether is 'false': but because the conditions that made it intelligible disappeared. The phenomena that the concept explained began to be explained in another, more parsimonious way, with greater capacity for integrating new data. The concept became obsolete: as a tool of thought it ceased to be necessary.
The history of biology offers an extraordinarily clear example. ‘Race’ was a concept that structured intelligibility in biology for centuries: it allowed the categorisation of phenotypic variety, enabled scientific discourse about heredity, permitted the organisation of observations on similarity between groups of organisms, and provided language to explain variations observed in nature. The concept was operational. Biologists could use the notion of race to formulate hypotheses, to observe patterns, and to communicate with each other about similarities and differences. The concept had genuine explanatory power: it offered a form that captured something real about the organisation of biological variety.
But the development of molecular genetics in the twentieth century revealed something surprising: genetic variation within groups called ‘races’ (for example, within what was categorised as ‘white human race’) exceeded genetic variation between those groups (between different ‘races’). The genetic structure of populations did not align with the categories that the concept of race organised. The concept of race lost explanatory capacity: not because it was refuted by a superior logical argument demonstrating that ‘race does not exist’, but because the real that offered genuine invariances for the concept disappeared when examined at the molecular level. Populations did not behave genetically in the way the concept of race presumed. The categories failed to capture the actual structures of variation. The concept became obsolete: despite no logical refutation revealing the fundamental error within the concept itself. It was simply inadequate for the level of analysis that molecular biology made possible.
Psychiatry offers yet another example, even more precise. The concept of ‘hysteria’ functioned for centuries as a robust clinical unit: it allowed medical discourse about varied symptomatology (paralyses without apparent neurological cause, convulsive crises, localised anaesthesias), about behavioural and temperament traits of people suffering from hysteria (often characterised as emotionally unstable or dramatically expressive), and about modes of treatment (hypnosis, suggestion, psycho-analytical analysis). The concept was functional for an entire interpretative community: doctors, patients, theorists such as Charcot and later Freud could communicate using this vocabulary, describe clinical observations, and construct narratives about causes and consequences. The concept of hysteria had genuine hermeneutic power.
But as neurology developed, as magnetic resonance imaging allowed observation of the living brain with increasing precision, as understanding of specific symptoms advanced radically: as it was recognised that what was generically called ‘hysteria’ was in fact a heterogeneous set of distinct neurological syndromes (temporal-lobe epilepsy, genuine dissociative conversion, functional movement disorders, various forms of Tourette syndrome): the concept lost its unity. It was not logically refuted. It disappeared because the reality it captured proved heterogeneous when examined more closely. What seemed like a genuine unitary symptomatology revealed itself as a multiplicity of distinct neurobiological mechanisms. Today no one is diagnosed as ‘hysterical’ in psychiatric diagnostic manuals: not because hysteria has been refuted as false or because historical symptoms were shown to be unreal, but because the concept became obsolete. It was replaced by more specific categories (conversion disorder, functional dissociative disorder) that can operate with greater diagnostic precision and allow more targeted treatments. The clinical reality did not vanish: but the conceptual form that captured it lost adequacy.
This has a radical ontological consequence that structures all of this Section: conceptual obsolescence is an expression of the constitutive transience not only of the material real that the concept seeks to capture, but also of language itself and of the very conceptual forms that attempt to name it and organise it. The concept is form: a sedimented form that the operation of thought produced at an earlier moment when faced with specific pressure from particular realities. This form persists while the conditions that sustain it: the invariances of the real that the concept can capture, the operational utility it offers for coordinating actions and communication: remain compatible with lived experience. It is a pragmatic and empirical persistence, not an essential or timeless one.
But when experience transforms: when observation develops and offers new angles of access: when the real offers new invariances that the old concept cannot integrate, when observation unveils heterogeneities previously hidden by the scale of available observation, when the multiplicity that the concept sought to unify under one form proves superior and more complex than the unifier can contain: the concept exhausts itself. ‘Exhaustion’ is a gradual process, not a sudden event. There is a transition phase in which the concept still offers utility but begins to reveal inadequacies, in which it is forced to expand unjustifiably to cover cases that no longer fit neatly within its limits, in which ad-hoc additions and exceptions accumulate.
The concept did not fail: it operated extraordinarily well up until the historical point where the conditions that made it operational disappeared or fundamentally transformed. It persisted while the power of the real allowed it to be captured by the form. It changed when circumstances inevitably demanded transformation. This process is neither calamity nor a sign of intellectual weakness: it demonstrates that thought is alive, responsive to changes in reality, capable of abandoning forms that have lost adequacy. A thinking that insisted on preserving obsolete concepts would be dead thinking, thinking no longer able to coordinate with present experience.
These stories of obsolescence: of ether, race, hysteria: offer an extraordinarily profound understanding of what it means for a concept to be alive versus truly dead. A concept is alive while it forces genuine thought to respond creatively, while it offers problems that require continuous reformulation. A concept is dead when it can merely be ritually repeated without forcing any transformation in those who study it. The history of conceptual obsolescence reveals something surprising: conceptual death is not the primary result of logical refutation: it is not because someone has demonstrated with irrefutable argumentation that the concept is internally false. Conceptual death is the result of a transformation of the material circumstances that originally made the concept operative. The transitoriness of the concept is not a logically deducible property (it cannot be proven by pure argumentation), but a material and historical property (it results from a real transformation of the invariances that the concept captured when it was created).
2.2. Form as Remainder: Application to Thought
The operator 'form as remainder' was founded in previous volumes (especially in earlier investigations on mutation) through systematic material observation of physical and biological processes. The form emerges when the active phase of formation: that in which energies continually reorganise, where potentials remain open and multiple recombinations are still possible, where the material is plastic and responsive: gradually gives way to sedimentation. The energy that maintained plasticity and reactivity dissipates or is progressively channelled towards maintaining the already constituted structure. The multiplicity of possible trajectories that matter could take reduces to a single trajectory (or a small set of trajectories) that matter can sustain. The remainder that persists when the active operation ceases is what we call 'form': a sedimented configuration that offers a certain stability, a recognisable identity.
This understanding applies in its entirety: literally, not by analogy: to thought and conceptual production. A philosophical concept does not emerge from pure disembodied intellect illuminated by some eternal truth inhabiting a transcendent realm: this is the myth that the previous section dismantles. The concept emerges from complex, embodied operation where a thinking mind (a body that thinks) encounters a reality that offers specific resistance and partial invariances, in which intelligence makes colossal effort to capture these invariances to communicate and coordinate intelligently with other intelligences, in which there is an explosive phase of multiple interpretative possibilities competing against each other and must be progressively contained and organised into a communicable and transmissible form. The concept is the sedimentation of this thought operation. The definition: the precise formulation we offer when we say 'the concept of X means Y': is a provisional rest of an activity that was extraordinarily continuous and difficult.
When a philosopher offers a thesis: 'matter is concrete in rest', 'consciousness is an emergent property of the nervous system', 'being is what cannot not be', 'nothing persists intact': they are offering a conceptual form that resulted from an extraordinarily elaborate operation of thought. The thesis is the sedimentation of much prior activity: voracious reading of preceding tradition, silent mental argumentation testing multiple approaches, failed attempts at formulation abandoned because they could not capture experience with adequate precision, relentless comparison with rival positions seeking to say something similar, progressive refinement until a formulation that can carry the intellectual weight of the experience it seeks to express is achieved. The concept offered is a sedimented rest of this continuous thought operation.
But this rest has a crucial property that cannot be neglected: it is provisional rest, not permanent rest, not final truth. A concept lives and maintains intellectual vitality while it generates continuous operation: while other minds take it up seriously, critique it relentlessly, refine it in detail, transform it radically when necessary, apply it to new domains where its original presumptions are violated and must be reformulated. When a concept ceases to generate living operation: when it becomes merely ritually repeated without genuine thought, when it stops offering intellectual resistance that forces subsequent thought to respond creatively and fundamentally transform itself: the concept is effectively dead as an instrument of living thought. The definition has become pure sediment, pure dead text, with no operation continually animating it. The concept has become archaeological orthodoxy, a museum object.
This distinction is operationally testable in a rigorous way. A living concept is one that genuinely forces those who study it to think differently: it offers genuinely unsolved problems requiring intellectual work, reveals inadequacies each time it is applied to new domains the original author did not consider, demands continuous reformulation to maintain applicability as new phenomena emerge. Hegel provides an extraordinary example of a living concept: despite its extraordinarily compressed writing that seems inaccessible, despite the almost impenetrable density that challenges generations of readers, Hegelian thought continues to force those who penetrate it to think differently from how they thought before. It offers operations of thought that do not exhaust in a single reading. It offers perspectives that can incorporate previous criticisms that logically destroyed it and still maintain a core intelligibility that allows continued evolution.
In contrast, a dead concept is one that can be understood easily without that understanding forcing any true transformation of the thinker: it is like a museum piece observed with historical interest but which no longer interrogates, no longer disturbs, no longer compels the reformulation of one's own thought. This is the eventual fate of all forms: intellectual death when the operation that animates them ceases.
Here a particular critical use of Hegel is offered which will be central to the final reinterpretation of this Section. The Hegelian system: that extraordinary and grand attempt to think the Absolute as a self-realising totality that unfolds through history, through the continuous operation of the concept that negates and subdues each contradiction it encounters: represents the last great modern adventure to seek a permanent and complete form of thought, a structure that would finally capture truth once and for all, a final closure where every contingency would be absorbed. The very systematic ambition of Hegel is what Section 1 dismantled rigorously: the presumption that there is some scale of observation or some ontologically privileged perspective that would reveal ultimate permanent truth that never required reformulation.
But the dissolution of this Hegelian presupposition: the historical recognition that Hegel himself was doomed to be rewritten by successors who did not accept his totalisation, that his system would be transformed and corrected and surpassed in ways Hegel could not anticipate, that no Hegelian Aufhebung would finally incorporate every contradiction permanently: this dissolution is precisely the condition of thought that continues to live. Hegelian thought persists and remains extraordinarily alive precisely because it was outstripped, because whole generations had to fight Hegel to think beyond him, because his ambition for totality inevitably revealed its own material limits when confronted with phenomena that the system could not integrate.
These limits that the Hegelian system encountered are not merely circumstantial failures of the system: it would be naïve to condemn Hegel for not having anticipated everything that would come after. The limits demonstrate a perfect form of the law that this Section formulates: the true condition for any thought to remain alive and operational is precisely that reality continuously offers new invariances, new resistances, new problems that demand radically creative reformulation. Hegel remains alive in current thought precisely because it was necessary to go beyond Hegel, because Hegel created an intellectual form that required continued transformation by all who read him seriously. If hegelianism had crystallised as an immutable doctrine: if Hegel had finally won and his successors had merely repeated the system without reformulating it: Hegel would be dead. Because subsequent generations had to fight Hegel, reject whole parts of him, transform him radically while maintaining a deep genealogical dialogue with him, Hegel persists alive. His death is precisely the condition for his continued intellectual life.
2.3. Scales of Transitoriness
Transitoriness is not a single monolithic phenomenon that manifests itself in the same way across all observable realities. It is not a simple property that is or isn’t present in a form. It operates on multiple scales: radically different temporal scales, completely heterogeneous magnitudes of transformation, scales where the operations and processes that determine change function according to their own irreducible logics. Understanding this is absolutely key to simultaneously rejecting both the fixist illusion (which presupposes permanent essences) and the equally dangerous inverse illusion that sees transitoriness as merely undifferentiated chaos where nothing offers any stability or predictability. Both of these illusions must be dismantled rigorously.
A protein molecule persists in a specific configuration for milliseconds: the duration that makes it operational for cellular life. At this temporal scale, the three-dimensional structure of the protein is stable: it presents itself as a functioning form. But at the nanosecond scale, the very molecular structure is a continuous dance of atoms in vibrations that constantly change. There is no scale that reveals the ‘true’ nature: there are only different scales that produce partial realities: at the millisecond scale, the protein is a stable form; at the nanosecond scale, the protein is a continuous quantum dynamic.
A biological organism persists: it maintains an identity that we can recognise: throughout a phase of life that may last decades. At this scale, the body offers itself as a coherent functioning unit, that regenerates, that maintains a certain homeostasis. But at the week-scale, cells are in continuous death and renewal: the body that gave us identity weeks ago is partially different today, materially different, despite the illusion of identity. At the million-year scale, the very species ceases to be: it transforms, diversifies, absorbs changes until the category ‘organism of this species’ no longer applies. None of these scales reveal a ‘true’ identity.
A galaxy persists as a structure: it presents itself as a recognisable unit for thousands of millions of years. Stars are born, live, die within the galaxy. The spiral or elliptical structure maintains a certain coherence. But at even longer scales: on cosmological timescales of trillions of years: the galaxies themselves will disperse as the expansion of the universe continues, as energy degrades, as the conditions sustaining gravitational cohesion dissipate. No cosmic unit is permanent: everything has a characteristic wear-out time.
A social institution endures: it presents itself as a way that structures behaviours, creates shared expectations, and organises practices: for centuries or even millennia. The Church offers an extraordinary example: an institutional structure that has persisted for two thousand years, capable of incorporating continuous change without ceasing to recognise itself as the same institution. Yet this persistence is a continual absorption of transformation: dogma changes, liturgical practice evolves, the relationship with secular power reconfigures, and even the very understanding of the sacred is reformulated. Over generations the institution is a stable form; over centuries it undergoes radical change that retains only name and genealogy.
A philosophical concept: say, the notion of reason that has structured Western modernity since Descartes: endures for centuries as an intelligibility structure. It presents itself as an operational form that allows one to think multiple realities, structures methodologies, and organises expectations about what may or may not be known. Yet over centuries the concept undergoes continuous transformation: Descartes conceives reason in a way incompatible with Kant, Kant thinks of reason differently from Nietzsche, Nietzsche rejects all modern presumptions of reason yet operates with a notion of reason that genealogically descends from the Cartesian concept. No scale reveals the ‘true’ nature of the concept: there are only scales where it offers applicability and scales where its applicability is exhausted.
This has a radically disassembling consequence for one of the founding myths of Western metaphysics: the myth that ‘truth must necessarily reside in some ontologically privileged scale.’ This myth takes many forms: that truth lies in the deep microscopic reality (atomism), or in the macroscopic reality (astronomy), or in a separate transcendental reality (Platonism), or in pure rational capacity (rationalism). But there is no ontologically privileged scale. There is genuine multiplicity of scales operating simultaneously: radically different time scales, heterogenous spatial magnitude scales, irreducible organisational complexity scales. Each scale has its own operative logics, its own characteristic temporalities, and its own criteria for adequacy regarding what counts as a valid explanation. The fundamental illusion precisely consists in presupposing that one of these scales reveals the ‘deep reality’ that all other scales merely manifest imperfectly or as a consequence. Deep reality does not exist: there is no absolute viewpoint capable of unifying all scales. There is only genuine multiplicity of operations occurring across multiple time and space scales, each producing its own partial ‘real’ that offers invariances and specific structures, each equally ontologically fundamental.
Crucial consequence for theory of concepts: no concept has a ‘natural’ or ‘true’ scale of universal validity. The validity of a concept is always relative to the specific regime in which the concept operates, to the set of scales where it offers genuine explanatory capacity. Ether was a valid and extraordinarily functional concept at a certain observational scale: it allowed one to think about light propagation as understood in the nineteenth century, offered a unified explanation for multiple optical phenomena, enabled predictions. It ceased to be valid when technological and theoretical conditions of observation radically changed and new observational scales became accessible, when instruments such as Michelson’s interferometer revealed that assumptions of the ether concept were incompatible with data now being collected. This is not a failure of the concept: it is a constitutive property of all intellectual forms: they always exist in relation to specific operational scales and must be transformed or abandoned when those scales no longer provide the invariances that made the concept functional. The intelligence worthy of being called ‘alive’: the one that deserves to persist as an operational force: is that which can continuously transform itself as circumstances demand, can abandon forms that have lost applicability without being destroyed at its core, and can invent new forms suitable for the new regimes that reality offers when new observational scales open.
2.4. Transition: Persisting Is Not Conserving
If form exhausts itself when the conditions sustaining it transform, if no concept has guaranteed permanence once and for all, if every intellectual structure is condemned to undergo fundamental transformation when the realities it attempts to capture reconfigure and present new invariances, then arises a question that is simultaneously more urgent and more operational: how does something persist without maintaining or conserving the same form? How can there be continuity without fixed identity?
This question is crucial because it dispels the fundamental illusion that structured conservative thought in all Western epochs: the deep belief that persistence and permanence depend on immutable conservation of form. Conservative thinking assumes: a table persists because it indefinitely retains the shape of a table: the material structure that makes it identifiable, manipulable, intelligible as a table. An institution persists because it rigorously maintains its essential structures: the precise liturgy that defines the religion, the constitution that defines the state, the founding narrative that defines the community. A philosophy persists because it keeps intact its original axioms, its fundamental presumptions. For conservative thought, change of form is always a threat to continuity.
But this is precisely the opposite of the material reality that systematic observation reveals. Genuine persistence: the persistence that can actually maintain operability and functionality as external circumstances radically change: rests not on the immutable conservation of form. It rests on the continuous ability to abandon a former form when it becomes inadequate and find new compatibility with transformed circumstances. A table built from rigid material that cannot adapt to temperature variations: wood lacking flexibility: would cease to function in the first cold winter: it would break under contraction stresses, deform permanently in a destructive way, and become literally unserviceable. The table that can in fact persist is one whose matter can undergo small deformations without destroying the overall structure: woods or steels that flex slightly, absorb tensions without fracture, can reform microscopically while maintaining general identity and table functionality. Material plasticity is a condition of persistence.
An institution that attempts to preserve pure and immutable form: keeping exactly the same rituals in obsessive detail, the same power structures unchanged, the same doctrines in identical linguistic formulation: achieves only slow, inexorable death or a traumatic revolution that destroys it completely. The Vatican that tries to be exactly as it was in 1450 would not function in the world of 2026. An institution that truly persists is one that can undergo continuous and creative transformation: that can radically reinterpret its own forms as cultural context changes, that can maintain legitimacy not through archaeological fixity but through constant transformation that remains responsive to lived reality. A religion that tries to keep form exactly as it was in a previous century cannot attract new believers, cannot offer meaning to newer generations with different concerns: it inevitably becomes archaeological, museum-like, a historical object and nothing more. A religion that can continually transform itself: that can seriously reinterpret its fundamental truths in light of new scientific and cultural challenges, that can abandon practices that have lost relevance in contemporary context while maintaining a genealogical thread that allows one to say it is still the ‘same’ religion: this is the one that persists as a living force capable of genuine interrogation of real people.
Thought and intellectual creation follow exactly this same material law. The philosopher who rigidly seeks to preserve his original theses, who refuses any transformation in the face of criticisms directed at him, who maintains original formulations as if they were sacred and immutable: achieves only intellectual death, forgotten authority that can no longer be thought vividly but merely repeated ritually in seminars where nobody really reads it. The thinker who can persist is one who can radically transform his positions when reality demands transformation: who can genuinely recognise inadequacies in previous formulations, who can abandon theses that cannot withstand serious critique: and by doing so paradoxically, he can keep the core of thought vibrantly operational, continuing to generate new perspectives and understandings. The death of what was formulated is a condition for the life of what continues.
This opens for Section 3 and for the true core of this chapter: if genuine persistence is not conservation but transformation, what exactly is the deep nature of that transformation? What is abandoned when a form exhausts itself and what is retained to allow continuity? What is the difference between a transformation that preserves living operability and one that simply dissolves all structure? How can a concept radically transform: lose entirely the form it had: yet still maintain an identity that allows us to say it is the ‘same’ concept in a deep sense? Section 3 will provide an answer through mobilisation of an operator that this book proposes as the truly fundamental material motor: excess: that which generates, sustains, continually forces transformation: without the need to invoke a hidden essence supposedly guiding that transformation from eternity.
Integrative Movement: Gathering the Threads of Section 2
The earlier developments of 2.1 to 2.4 constitute a rigorous articulation of an operator that will be central for the rest of the chapter and for the rest of the book: the understanding that transience is not a defect that should be eliminated if we could reach final, permanent truth. Transience is a constitutive property of all form: of all material structure, of all institutional form, of every philosophical concept. This is not a conclusion reached through vague or speculative paths. It arrived from systematic observation of how forms behave in different domains when the conditions sustaining them transform.
Conceptual obsolescence (2.1) offers a model that shows how concepts: which are intellectual forms: lose applicability not by logical refutation but by transformation of the invariances of reality that the concept captured. The ‘form as residue’ law (2.2) provides a unified understanding of how both material structures and conceptual structures emerge and sediment. The multiple scales of transience (2.3) show that there is no ontologically privileged scale from which ultimate truth would be accessible. And the distinction between conservative persistence and transformative persistence (2.4) offers an ethical and practical operator: what it means for intelligence to be alive is precisely its capacity to transform responsively.
These movements of thought: from 2.1 to 2.4: are not arguments that are intended to be demonstrated through pure logic. They are descriptions of operations that are continually observed in reality. A physical form persists while the energy sustaining it does so and transforms when the energy reconfigures. An institution persists as long as it can reinterpret its forms and dies when it insists on fixed conservation. A concept persists as long as it forces genuine thought and dies when it crystallises into orthodoxy. This is an observable material law.
Intermediate Synthesis: Transitoriness and Intelligibility
Collect and consolidate what Section 2 demonstrated through analysis of the distinction between refutation and obsolescence, by applying the law ‘form as residue’ to philosophical thought, by recognising multiple scales of transitoriness: that is to offer a movement of thought that deconstructs fundamental presuppositions that have governed Western metaphysics regarding what it means for a concept or a form to remain alive.
Conceptual obsolescence is not a failure in any sense. It is a profound sign that thought was genuinely responsive, that it managed to respond adequately to the challenge presented by reality in the context where it operated, that it proved useful up to the point where fundamental conditions changed, that it did not crystallise archaeologically and die. The concept of ‘ether’ operated magnificently while astronomical observation conditions allowed that operation: the concept had real explanatory power: up to the precise point where technological and theoretical conditions that made that operation possible disappeared with relativity. The concept of ‘race’ captured something genuinely important about observable patterns of biological variety up to the point where molecular genetics revealed that fundamental presuppositions about the structure of hereditary variety were wrong at the level of molecular analysis. The concept of ‘hysteria’ allowed doctors to communicate among themselves and act clinically with some efficacy up to the point where live-brain observation technologies (neuroimaging) revealed that what was collectively called ‘hysteria’ was an irreducibly heterogeneous multiplicity of syndromes caused by entirely distinct mechanisms. These concepts failed in no way: they worked extraordinarily well as intellectual tools up to the exact point where objective circumstances changed such that the conceptual form became inadequate for the reality it now had to capture.
Transitoriness fundamentally operates at multiple heterogeneous scales, and there is no ontologically privileged scale that reveals the ‘ultimate truth’ about permanence. This means there is no absolute point of view from which one could judge which form is truly permanent and which is merely temporary, from which one could separate the eternal essences from fleeting appearances. The molecule is a temporary form whose characteristic duration is milliseconds: it persists at that scale but transforms at smaller scales. The organism is a temporary form whose duration is decades: it offers itself as a stable unit at that scale but dissolves into death when larger time scales come into consideration. The galaxy is a temporary form whose duration is billions of years: it is a recognisable structure at that scale but will eventually disperse. The institution is a temporary form whose duration is centuries: it is continuity recognisable at that historical scale but undergoes radical transformation at larger scales. The philosophical concept is a temporary form whose duration varies with history: it can endure for centuries (as Aristotelian concepts) or decades (as concepts emerging from immediate contemporary concerns): yet its duration is always finite. None of these forms are more ‘real’ or more ‘true’ than the others. Each is equally real and equally legitimate in its own temporal scale of operation, in its own regime of invariances it offers.
This provides an extraordinary consequence that completely re-orients understanding of what it means for intelligence to remain alive: the intelligence that genuinely wants to be alive: that wants to be responsive to a transforming reality: must continually abandon forms, must let concepts and structures die that have lost appropriate applicability, must do this without being entirely destroyed or losing the core that allows continuity. This seems paradoxical: how can intelligence continuously die and still remain alive? The answer lies in understanding that the death of a specific form is a condition of life for the operation the form sustained.
The same historical operation that kills the old concept: the radical transformation of material and theoretical circumstances that render what was previously thought inappropriate, the emergence of new observation scales that reveal inadequacies not visible before: is precisely the operation that offers the possibility of continued intellectual life. The intelligence that can transform itself: that can abandon ‘ether’ when relativity makes it unnecessary, that can abandon ‘race’ when molecular genetics reveals its inadequacy, that can abandon ‘hysteria’ when neuroimaging provides a more adequate understanding: is what remains alive. Intelligence that insists on preserving dead forms is intelligence that can no longer operate responsively.
Transitoriness is not a threat to living thought. It is not something that threatens to destroy thought if it does not resist against it. Transitoriness is exactly the constitutive condition of thought that can remain alive. Absolute fixedness: the insistence on preserving forms that have lost applicability: is what constitutes true death: not death in the sense of a rapid, dramatic end, but slow death in the sense of archaeological fossilisation, mummification where the form remains but the operation that animated it ceases entirely.
This radically repositions the fundamental question that Section 3 will confront directly: if everything truly transforms, if every form is inevitably transient, if genuine persistence fundamentally rests on the capacity for continual abandonment of forms that have become inadequate, then what is the deep material structure that permits this transformation? What makes it possible for something to persist differently while radically transforming itself? What distinguishes a transformation that is merely destructive (which kills the living operation without leaving continuity) from a transformation that is creative (which preserves it in a different manner, in another form)?
Section 3 will provide a comprehensive answer through rigorous mobilisation of the concept of excess: not as failure or anomaly to be eliminated or reduced, but as a positive material operator that generates, sustains, and propels continuous transformation. Excess is not something that happens accidentally after a form has been created and now threatens to destroy from outside. Excess is what was present throughout the entire active formation phase, what makes possible the very sedimentation of form in the first place, what continues to operate inside every sedated form as potential for reconfiguration, what inevitably propels transformation when historical and material circumstances convert prior excess into inadequacy. In this deep understanding, transience is not an accidental property of forms that could have been permanent if things had been different. Transience is a constitutive property of any material form: it is the necessary consequence of the excess that produced it and from which it can never fully free itself.
Final Position of Section 2: Consolidation
All that has been articulated in this Section: the distinction between refutation and obsolescence, the application of ‘form as residue’ to philosophical thought, the recognition of multiple scales of transience without a privileged scale, the understanding that persistence rests on the capacity for continuous transformation: offers a radical reorientation of how we understand intellectual structures, concepts, institutional forms, any form capable of maintaining some identity over time. The consequence is that no form: neither material form nor institutional form nor conceptual form: has guaranteed permanence. No form can claim to have reached final truth because every form is transient sedimentation in a continuous material flow. But this does not condemn us to nihilism where nothing matters because everything is equally transient.
On the contrary: understanding transience as a constitutive property offers the only solid foundation possible for responsible action and living thought. A form that knows of itself that it is transient, that knows it is doomed to be transformed or abandoned when conditions change, can operate with total honesty about its own specific reach and genuine limitations. An intelligence that knows its concepts are provisional forms offered responsively to the current real: that knows those concepts will be rewritten and transformed by successors who will face problems the original concept did not anticipate: can offer maximum intellectual rigour without impossible presumption of eternity. Transience is what makes genuine operational truth possible: not eternal truth in the sense of absolute permanence (which would be an impossible claim, contradictory to observed reality), but truth appropriate to the specific scale of operation, truth responsive to invariances of the real as they are accessible at that particular scale and historical context. The form that fully accepts its own transience can achieve true solidity: solidity of continued operation, solidity of responsiveness, not solidity of mineral permanence which is only death.
Section 3 will now face the decisive question: what operator explains how transience occurs, how forms disintegrate and recombine? The answer will be: excess: not as anomaly but as motor of material reality.
APHORISM: The concept that does not change is not solid: it is dead. The solidity of thought is its capacity to deform continuously without the fundamental operation dissolving. To persist is to transform. To die is to crystallise.
3. Transitoriness as Differentiated Structure
3.1. Persistence Is Not Conservation
Rigorous Blockade of the Catastrophist Objection
The question that raises most immediate objections is this: if no form survives intact, if all stability is transient, if reorganisation continues indefinitely: does this not mean we are condemned to permanent chaos, absolute precariousness, a regime without any constraint or predictability? This interpretation is common among readers encountering the proposition for the first time. It must be blocked immediately, with operational precision that leaves no room for misunderstanding.
Transience does not imply chaos. It implies: and this is a crucial point: differentiated structure. A differentiated structure is one that operates under real constraints, under material laws, under regularities that precisely define what is possible and what is impossible in each regime. The second law of thermodynamics is a real constraint: it guarantees that energy always flows from concentration to dispersion, that the entropy of an isolated system never decreases, that there is an asymmetrical direction of time. This is a real regularity, not an opinion, not a variable controllable by will or interpretation. No one can make energy flow spontaneously from dispersion to concentration in an isolated system. No one can make entropy decrease without external work. These are properties of material reality, not cultural prejudices.
The structure of a water molecule establishes real limits: only within certain ranges of temperature and pressure does this molecule persist in the liquid state and manifest properties that define its chemical behaviour; outside these ranges it transforms into ice or vapour, according to specific and non-arbitrary physical laws. Between 0 and 100 degrees Celsius at the atmospheric pressure of one atmosphere, water persists in the liquid state. At 0 degrees Celsius a phase transition occurs: water molecules cease sliding freely past each other and crystallise into an ordered ice structure. This is not a matter of opinion. It is a real thermodynamic property, determined by the balance between thermal energy and hydrogen-bonding forces. At 100 degrees Celsius another transition occurs: the molecules acquire sufficient kinetic energy to break the bonds that keep them in liquid proximity and they evaporate. Again, this is not arbitrary. There is real constraint operating. Compatibilities are real, constraints are real, transformations are real.
Here emerges the confusion that paralyses thought and must be explicitly resolved: a confusion between ‘having limited duration’ (a property of all forms) and ‘being indeterminate’ (the supposed catastrophic consequence of recognising this limited duration). But limited duration does not imply indeterminacy. Quite the opposite. A water molecule within its liquid persistence interval exhibits highly determined properties: density approximately equal to 1 gram per cubic centimetre (in fact, a maximum density at 4 degrees Celsius where it is 1.000028 g/cm³), specific viscosity approximately 1 centipoise at ambient temperature, specific heat capacity approximately 4.18 joules per gram per kelvin, characteristic dielectric constant close to 80, hydrogen-bonding structure that defines which chemical reactions occur and at what speed, precise solubility of various compounds dependent on temperature and pressure. Outside the liquid persistence interval the form transmutes: but these transmutations are also determined, governed by precise laws. Below 0 degrees Celsius the structure crystallises according to a well-defined crystal geometry: hexagonal patterns characteristic of ice that emerge from real electrostatic interactions between molecules in a crystal lattice. These patterns are not accidental. They are the necessary consequence of water molecule properties. Above 100 degrees Celsius the structure disintegrates into phase separation: water vapour in equilibrium with residual liquid: according to the substance’s vapour pressure and the kinetic dynamics of the molecules. Processes described by specific equations: the Clausius-Clapeyron equation, for example: not by arbitrariness or chaos. There is real precision in all these processes. There is real constraint operating at every step, every transition, every transformation.
From Confusion to Operative Recognition
From this emerges a central thesis that governs all subsequent progression: every form is transient, yet every form is: for the duration of its existence: operatively determined. Operatively determined means that its behaviour can be studied, understood, to some extent predicted and intervened upon intelligently. The recognition of transience does not halt action, does not introduce inoperative indeterminacy, nor render rigorous action impossible. It allows far more refined action, far more appropriate to material realities. It permits action that works with reality rather than against it.
A bridge that recognises its own transience: that accepts that the timber will deteriorate as fungal metabolism attacks it, that metal will oxidise as chemical reactions convert it into oxide, that foundations will suffer gradual settlement as loads continue to operate: can be designed to be maintainable, renewable, resilient. Engineers who understand degradation scales: how long until wood begins to rot, what speed of steel oxidation occurs under humid conditions: are able to design structures whose extended duration is achieved precisely because they do not pretend to be eternal. The design does not deny that the bridge will age. It works with that ageing, predicts its rhythm, designs for periodic renewal, constructs in a way that allows continuous repair. Such a bridge can remain useful for centuries precisely because it does not aim to be an eternal bridge.
An institution that recognises that its form is provisional: that power structures change when context changes, that the legitimacies sustaining it may collapse when they cease to provide meaning, that the resources feeding it may dry up when sources are exhausted, that the premises upon which it was founded can be refuted or prove inadequate: can continuously reorganise without fully disintegrating. The capacity to reinvent itself: to reformulate purpose, to seek new legitimacies, to adapt practices: is exactly what allows prolonged survival. The Catholic Church persisted because it absorbed Aristotle when Aristotle clashed with theology, because it re-formulated itself during the Counter-Reformation when Reform threatened legitimacy, because it reconfigured itself in response to Enlightenment critique and modern scepticism. If the Church had been rigid, if it had refused any transformation, if it had imagined itself eternal and immune to pressure, it would have disappeared when the first significant pressure struck. But an institution that allows itself to remain plastic, that recognises when change is necessary, that finds new legitimacies as context changes: that one can persist. The recognition of transience is not a sign of institutional weakness; it is a condition of adaptive strength.
A person who recognises that no security is final: that wealth can evaporate in a financial crisis, that health can collapse in disease or accident, that the truth they believed may be refuted by subsequent evidence, that the social status they have built may disappear with a regime change: can act with surprisingly clear judgement. They do not waste psychic and intellectual energy pursuing the impossible, nor do they paralyse themselves waiting for salvation or protection that structurally will never come. They are able to act significantly within their own ongoing reorganisation, knowing that action now matters precisely because there is no guarantee it will always be possible to act in this way. The knowledge of finitude increases the intensity of the present life.
Refusal of the Dual Illusion: Catastrophism and Fixism
Catastrophism inherits, paradoxically, exactly the same fundamental illusion that fixity seeks to criticise and combat: that there is a single regime, a single truth governing all things, that there exists a fundamental state of reality. Fixity says that this truth is permanence, that it is the natural regime of forms, that everything rests in an appropriate and secure state. Catastrophism says that this truth is chaos, that it is absolute precariousness, that nothing rests because nothing can, that everything is constantly at risk. Both err for the same deep reason: they dispense with multiple scales, with real constraints differentiated by scale, with truly differentiated structure. Both presume a false dilemma, an impossible binary choice: ‘either there is eternal repose or complete indeterminacy. Either there is absolute permanence or pure chaos. Either there is a single regime that governs or nothing does.’
But there is a third option, and it is the closest to material reality: it is not ‘permanence versus chaos’. It is ‘differentiated structure operating under real constraints at multiple scales simultaneously’. An individual cell is transient: it will die, its duration is limited, its genetic programme will exhaust itself, its repair processes will fail. But during the time it lives it persists through compatibility between chemical processes (metabolism), energy flows (ATP capture), continuous damage repair, maintenance of ionic gradients: a compatibility that can be studied, that can even be predicted to some extent, that can be intervened upon (medicine works on this). An ecosystem is transient: it will be reorganised by climate change, by species invasion, by imbalance that alters predator-prey relations. But during the time it endures it manifests differentiated structure: there are populations that relate in specific ways that can be studied, there are energy and nutrient flows that follow comprehensible patterns, there is local stability precisely because of real constraint. Ecosystem biology can identify homeostatic mechanisms: feedback control that keeps the system within certain limits. A civilisation is transient: none has lasted eternally, none has managed to remain identical to itself. But during the time it persists it offers institutions, laws, modes of being that structure the possibility of action. The rigorous recognition of transience does not mean ‘everything is possible, everything fluctuates, there is no structure, no constraint’: it means precisely the opposite: ‘there is real structure, there are real constraints, differentiated by scale and context, they define rigorously what is possible and what is impossible at a given scale.’
Aphorism: Persisting does not mean repeating the same: it means finding, in each reconfiguration, a new compatibility with what has changed.
3.2. Abandoning the Prior Form
The Genuine Difficulty of Renunciation
There is a second confusion, even deeper than the first, that deserves to be explicitly unbundled. It is confusion between intellectually recognising, with logical clarity, the proposition that ‘no form survives intact, all forms are transient’: and being actually capable, emotionally and institutionally, of abandoning a previous form to which one is attached. Intellectual recognition that everything is transient, that no form perseveres: this is a proposition that can be assimilated cognitively, that can be stated clearly, that can even be taught to others, that can be demonstrated logically. But this intellectual recognition is not sufficient. It does not transform the underlying difficulty. The emotional, institutional, existential difficulty of truly abandoning a form, of letting it die, of accepting genuine loss: this is a substantial difficulty that does not disappear by intellectual declaration, that is not resolved by mere statement of truth.
Every form, during the time it persists, organises a world. It organises not only abstract ideas but perception, possibility, value structure. The molecule of water in liquid state that maintains cohesion for milliseconds organises, within that interval, a specific molecular world: certain chemical reactions are permitted (the solvent dissolves solutes in specific proportions, pH determines which ionic species coexist stably, viscosity sets diffusion speeds, thermal conductivity governs heat transfer), others are prohibited. There are no reactions that only occur in ice that do not occur in liquid water: or rather, there are: crystalline solid water offers an environment for reactions that do not occur in the liquid phase. With liquid water structure there are possibilities that without it would not exist: cellular life as we know it critically depends on the unique properties of water. The ability to dissolve ions, the capacity to transport nutrients, the capacity to expand when it freezes (the anomaly in water that protects underwater life). Losing the form of water in a context where water would be necessary would mean losing an entire world of chemical possibilities, and eventually biotic ones.
At the human level: and this is the level where the confusion between intellectual understanding and genuine renunciation is most visceral, most disturbing: a conceptual form that organises centuries of thought, an orthodoxy that governs how legitimate questions are posed, a common language that defines what can be said and what remains ineffable, a hierarchy of values that renders certain researchers and certain problems worthy of attention while others are ignored: during the time they persist, these forms organise not only abstract ideas but perceptions, institutions, ways of living, hierarchies of value, structures of professional identity.
The substantialist metaphysics: the idea that beneath everything there are enduring substances, that beneath appearance there are permanent essences, that there are fundamental realities that persevere while accidents change: during the centuries it governed (from Plato to well into modernity) defined what could be investigated with dignity (the search was for essence, substance, fundamental reality, not mere appearance or accident), which researchers were respectable (metaphysicians were nobler than empirical experimenters), which solutions to philosophical problems were acceptable (everything had to reduce to properties of the fundamental substance, eternal forms, immutable natures). Cartesian mechanism: the idea that reality at its base is an extensive machine defined by quantifiable properties of extension, shape and motion: during the time it reigned defined which questions about nature made sense (how do parts combine mechanically to make the whole?), which scientific methods were valid (reduction to simpler components, mathematical analysis of motion), which explanations satisfied (efficient mechanical causation, not final causation, no appeal to immaterial substances, no natural telos).
Abandoning these earlier forms means losing a world structured by them. It is genuine loss, not illusory, not easily bearable. It means that questions which seemed natural and legitimate cease to be so. It means that authorities that were incontestable are questioned. It means that the criterion of truth that was clear becomes ambiguous.
Grief in Conceptual Transformation
The genuine transformation of conceptual thought requires mourning. It requires recognising that something which organised centuries of inquiry, which defined horizons of possibility, which gave structural clarity and meaning: this something must be refuted, radically re-formulated or entirely abandoned because it has proven incoherent, because it proved inadequate for new problems, because it ceased to integrate new data offered by experience. This requires losing real investment: decades of intellectual work structured by that conceptual form, professional reputation built and defended on that philosophical or scientific position, identity as researcher tied to that school of thought. The Aristotelian who discovers that Aristotle’s physics is wrong in fundamental points (there really is no crystalline ether, planets do not rotate in homocentric spheres, there is no true final cause in nature) suffers not only a fleeting intellectual correction: he suffers the symbolic death of a way of being a thinker. The Cartesian who recognises that mechanism cannot capture life phenomena (self-repair, self-movement, sensitivity), freedom (choice that is not merely the result of prior mechanical causes), consciousness (what cannot be reduced to extension and motion): undergoes a fundamental reorganisation of the entire horizon that structured his understanding and investigation.
And it also paradoxically requires recognising and honouring that the previous form was right: had genuine validity in its domain of application, in its historical context, in its specific scales. Aristotelianism was not simply a permanent error, nor an illusion to be retroactively rejected as if there had never been any truth content in it. It was operationally adequate for certain problems at certain times: it offered a coherent explanation of everyday experience of change and permanence (how can something remain a dog while changing in size and strength?), allowed ethics to be thought of as a cultivable virtue in a spirit that develops, established classifications of beings that worked for pre-microscopic, pre-cosmological domains. It became inadequate when new problems arose it could not solve (how do planets really move if there is no crystalline ether carrying them? if terrestrial and celestial physics are different, how can there be unity of nature?), when new scales opened to investigation (what is the very small beyond what the eye sees? how does matter behave at atomic scales?), when new demands for logical coherence emerged (how can there be form without matter, essence without manifestation?). Abandoning it is not discovering that it was always pure illusion, that Aristotle was simply foolish or dishonest. It is a sober recognition that its compatibility with reality, with the phenomena nature offers, with the problems investigation poses, has run out: it was adequate up to here, operative until this point, and then could no longer respond.
Thus the true structure of what we call conceptual development or progress of thought: it is not a straight progressive line of increasing illumination where the past is always darker and the future always brighter: nor would it be if there were one. Nor is it a narrative of errors being corrected where progress is measured by how much ignorance has been surpassed. It is a series of reconfigurations where each previously adequate form becomes insufficient, where each regime of truth that worked for its time ceases to function when material reality surpasses it, when historical contexts change radically, when new data emerge refuting premises once thought irrefutable.
The rigorous recognition of this: the acknowledgement that the form which governed thought for centuries had genuine validity but has ceased to have it, that it offered real answers to real problems but today cannot conceive the problems now posed: requires genuine mourning. It demands symbolic death. The thinker who manages to abandon an entire former form and embrace a radically reconfigured one: because the former proved internally incoherent, revealed inadequacy in solving new problems presented by reality, or proved incapable of thinking phenomena that have become central and unavoidable: this thinker suffered symbolic death. He endured profound reorganisation of how he comprehends reality. The whole world structured by the former form died: explanations died, horizons of possibility died, certainties that organised investigation died. New thought arose in a new regime, with new foundational premises, new possibilities for research that were previously not even conceivably legitimate, new blind spots also: because every new form brings its own series of things it cannot see, questions it cannot ask, possibilities it denies.
The loss is not absolute and irreversible: some aspects of the former form persist in the new as transformed heritage, as memory that constrains new thought and prevents it from falling into errors that the former form had already avoided. The demand for coherence that the former form sought: the insistence that contradiction is impermissible: remains an ethical requirement that the new form inherits inevitably in a non-conscious way. The rigour that the former form demonstrated (even though that rigour was applied to foundations that will later prove wrong or inadequate) remains as an ethical standard that the new form inherits as a responsibility to continue thinking carefully. But the entire regime that structures investigation, that defines what is a legitimate question: this changes radically. Questions that seemed natural cease to be so. Answers that seemed satisfactory become incomparable with answers offered by the new form. The values structuring investigation shift. Authorities that were incontestable: the classics, axioms, fundamental premises: are questioned and sometimes refuted.
Aphorism: To abandon is not to destroy: it is to recognise when the form that organised a world no longer offers compatibility with a new field of problems.
3.3. The Condition of Thought That Continues
Plasticity, Openness, Rigour
If no form survives intact, if transience is a universal regime governing all material reality: then deeply practical questions arise that structure the rest of this journey. How does a thought truly continue to exist, to be alive, when its former form had to be abandoned? How can there be genuine and substantial transmission from one thinker to another, from one book to another, from one intellectual generation to the next, when the former form was refuted or radically reformulated? What exactly is the material structure that allows thought to be truly alive: that is, in continuous reconfiguration, never identical to itself, always under pressure to reorganise as reality changes: without dissolving into mere scattered eclecticism, into floating opinion uncharacterised, into total loss of coherence and memory? How does thought remain recognisable as thought?
There are three operative conditions, identifiable in all thought that genuinely remains alive, which continues to act meaningfully over time. These conditions interact with each other, presuppose one another, but can be didactically distinguished for argumentative clarity.
First condition: plasticity. Plasticity is the capacity to deform deeply: to change form, to abandon previous structures: without disintegrating, without losing sufficient internal coherence to remain recognisable. A rigid form: which demands absolute conformity from those who embrace it, which cannot be questioned or explored without being destroyed, which rejects pressure from any side or any question: breaks when real pressures reach it. It is like glass: useful because it is rigid, offers transparency and precise structural support. But it completely breaks with sudden impact. There is no gradual deformation, no space for shock absorption. All form is lost; it disintegrates.
A fluid form without any coherent structure: that changes direction as wind passes, that offers no organised resistance to any pressure, that is merely an aggregation of loose particles without internal bonding: cannot resist any organised force, cannot sustain itself. It dissolves. There is no memory in the form, no coherence that transmits from moment to moment. It would be like sand in a storm: no structure, no resistance, no possibility of direction.
Thought that continues genuinely alive is that which can withstand real pressure (pressure from new data contradicting premises, contradictions discovered within its own framework, problems that appear apparently insoluble in its previous conceptual frame) and deform: reformulate internally, refine definitions, reject some premises thought to be fundamental, preserve others: while maintaining sufficient internal coherence to remain recognisable as an organic development of the former form, not as an absolute rupture that denies everything that came before.
Plasticity is not a hardening of rigour or lax tolerance with contradiction. Quite the opposite: it is the sole means of preserving genuine rigour when reality demands transformation. A rigid bridge that refuses any redesign when new data about soil characteristics emerge, when new construction techniques develop, when new safety requirements are set: that bridge will break or become obsolete. A plastic bridge: one that can adapt its foundations as geological understanding evolves, that resizes its structure when new constraints appear, that accepts periodic maintenance and intelligent re-configuration: is the one that continues to be a useful bridge for centuries, that keeps responding to new needs, that can be rehabilitated rather than destroyed.
A rigid theory that absolutely refuses any adjustment when data do not conform to predictions, when anomalies challenge premises, when new phenomena emerge that the theory cannot conceive: that theory will totally lose credibility, be abandoned, become a historical curiosity. A plastic theory: one that can incorporate anomalies into its structure, that resizes its premises when evidence demands it, that accepts ongoing evolution and refinement: is the one that remains a living investigative tool, that continues to offer insights even when deep reformulation is needed, that can be transformed into improved understanding rather than simply destroyed when it proves inadequate.
Aristotelianism that passed through medieval scholasticism (where it re-interpreted Aristotle in light of Christian dogma, where it distinguished what was accidental and essential under new demands for theological coherence), through Renaissance neo-aristotelianism (where it recovered lost ancient texts, where it restored humanism and experience to Aristotle against Plato), up to Hannah Arendt (who thought political action, human freedom and natality through deeply re-interpreted Aristotelian categories): this transhistorical Aristotelianism is still Aristotelianism because it preserves fundamental operators: the importance of action in relation to theoretical contemplation (though re-interpreted); the distinction between what is done, poiesis or production, and what is fulfilled or passed, praxis or action; the centrality of excellence or virtue as a cultivable capacity in spirit that develops; the idea that genuine investigation always begins with everyday experience rather than a priori principles. Yet it radically reforms operators that previously seemed fundamental: the cosmology of perfect spheres disappeared entirely; physics based on natural qualities and telos died; the notion of a natural telos that would define each thing’s destiny was completely abandoned; the direct link between nature and human destiny was broken and questioned. Plasticity allowed Aristotelian heritage to remain operative, remain fertile, remain capable of thinking new problems: even when its physical foundations were shaken, even when the entire cosmology was refuted.
Second condition: openness. Openness is genuine availability and receptivity for what has not been anticipated, for that which lies outside the expected horizon. A closed thought about itself: one that already responds in a way it imagines to be definitive to all the questions it posed, that has already fully solved all the problems it identified: is dead, even if it does not appear obviously so. It is closed. It is finished. It does not continue because there is no further possible movement, no internal space for transformation. There is no genuine listening.
The thought that continues is the one that remains open to genuine objection that negates it, to data that refutes premises, to a question it cannot answer immediately, to a problem that constrains it. This openness is not epistemic weakness, nor total scepticism that rejects all truth. Quite the opposite: it is the most rigorous requirement possible. It means the thinker is really listening: he is listening to the resistance of reality, he is genuinely engaged with difficulties he cannot easily solve, he is truly willing to be corrected when evidence forces him with irrefutable force.
It means there is real space and not merely rhetorical for the other: the future reader who finds contradiction in the heart of the argument, the critic who discovers logical or factual error, the material reality that stubbornly refuses to bend to the concept: to intervene and force genuine re-configuration, non-cosmetic transformation. This openness is vulnerability. It is conscious acceptance that one's own form may be inadequate even if it seems complete, that premises may be wrong even if they appear self-evident, that the horizon of investigation may be blinded by unexamined assumptions, that the current form may be working with concepts that a future inheritor will recognise as obsolete or misleading.
An academic institution that is truly open does not defensively shield its members from external critique or preserve its theses as if they were property: it creates space for genuine criticism, actively seeks it, encourages it because it knows that criticism prevents sclerosis. A scientific company that is genuinely open does not ignore or minimise data that contradicts the favoured hypothesis: it invests significant resources to understand anomalies, to investigate cases that do not conform to theory, because anomalies are opportunities to learn, signs of inadequacy that point to new questions. A thinker who is truly open does not respond to objection with preventive refutation or a psychological diagnosis of the objector: he listens to the argument attentively, takes it seriously even when it hurts, lets himself be moved by it if evidence demands it, because he knows that honest objection is present.
Thought that leaves no space for this, that already has a ready answer to any question, that cannot be touched by legitimate objection, is closed. It is dead. It has become doctrine, not living thought. The doctrine will repeat itself, be transmitted, will be memorised, perhaps recorded in canonical texts: but it will no longer think, will not create genuine novelty, will not respond to the unpredictable.
Third condition: rigour. Rigour is that the deformation is not arbitrary, that the reconfiguration responds to real pressures from the material field of investigation: new data that were not expected and cannot be ignored, new internal contradictions identified within the conceptual framework itself, new historical contexts where the previous form proved insufficient and radically inadequate for problems that suddenly emerge as unavoidable. Rigour is exactly this: the operation of deformation, transformation, reconfiguration is not a personal whim of the thinker, it is not a change of taste or stylistic preference that depends on mood, nor a playful exploration of purely logical possibility detached from reality.
It is a response constrained by reality. It answers real material needs that the field imposes irrepressibly, not the researcher's stylistic preferences, not intellectual fashion pressures, not political or social conveniences. A thought that redefines itself arbitrarily: abandoning a position because it has become tedious to defend, changing direction because it discovered something that seems more interesting or prestigious, rejecting concepts because thinking differently has become fashionable or trendy: is not living thought. It is superficiality. It is intellectual opportunism. It is abandonment of responsibility towards truth.
Rigour distinguishes legitimate transformation from mere mutability. It requires the thinker to articulate why the previous form became inadequate, to demonstrate not only its insufficiency but the necessity of transformation. It demands that the transformation root itself in real problems, not whim. It demands responsibility: if I transform my thinking, I must be able to explain why, I must be able to defend the transformation as a response constrained by reality, not an arbitrary choice. Rigour keeps the operation of transformation deeply rooted in material reality, in genuine difficulties that thought faces when confronted with the real, in the constraints that the material field imposes irrepressibly, in contradictions that evidence reveals with incontrovertible force.
Synthesis: Thought as Process Under Tension
These three conditions: plasticity allowing deep deformation without disintegration, openness providing real space for the unforeseen and objection, rigour maintaining transformation constrained by reality: are exactly those that enable what may be called continuous thinking, genuinely living thought. They allow a thought not to repeat mechanically (which would be death by sclerosis, by empty mechanical repetition, by complete isolation from surrounding material reality) nor to dissolve into dispersed, directionless fluidity (which would be death by dilution, by loss of all internal coherence and memory, by becoming mere opportunism).
A thought that possesses these three conditions simultaneously remains alive: alive in the meaningful sense: always different from the previous form (because it has truly learned, truly transformed, truly integrated novelties), always recognisable as transformed heritage of that form (because it maintains fidelity to the requirement the previous form imposed, even if it radically reforms answers), always under pressure from new realities demanding new configurations (because it has not closed upon itself, because it leaves space for the unforeseen).
This is precisely the regime of a thought that fully accepts its own transience, that does not deny or resist it as if it were a defect or weakness, but integrates it as a condition of the operation itself. It is not a regime of despair: one can have transience and significance simultaneously, they are not contradictory. It is not a regime where every action is futile or vain. It is a regime where thought truly matters because no one can guarantee how it will be used by a future reader, no one can control the transformations it will undergo in the hands of someone who takes it seriously and objects to it, no one can predict which new contexts will make it, which unprecedented problems will bring it back as relevant and alive anew. Thought matters because it is alive: because it is not finished, because it may still be transformed, because it may still answer questions we cannot even formulate now.
The question of whether a form is 'better' or 'worse' than the previous form is no longer legitimate in an understanding of transience. The appropriate question is whether the present form can adequately respond to the problems that are now posed, whether it can maintain compatibility with current constraints, whether it can offer a useful investigative tool. If it does, it persists. If it does not, it will be transformed or abandoned. This is no value judgement nor relativism: it is a sober description of how thought functions materially.
Aphorism: Philosophy that does not transform dies: dies by mechanical repetition, by isolation, by refusal to be touched by what it did not anticipate.
3.4. Closure: What 'No Form Survives' Means
Operative Synthesis: Structure, Not Catastrophism, Not Illusion
Operational synthesis that gathers the entire Section 3 into a proposition that foundations the progression to Part II. ‘No form survives’ is not a catastrophic formula nor a depressive statement about futility and emptiness. It is a rigorous description of how things function materially, irreducibly and without appeal to transcendent compensations that could console. Every form that exists now: a carbon molecule in a specific molecular orbital, a living organism that persists by metabolising energy, a social institution that organises human practices, a philosophical concept that structures fields of inquiry: will cease to exist in this form. It will be reorganised, disintegrated, incorporated into other forms, transmuted into new structures, dissolved into difference. This proposition is true. It is material truth, not opinion, not a relative point of view that can be questioned according to preferences. It is not pessimism: pessimism still appeals to an ideal of permanence that would be ‘better’ if it could be achieved. It is not nihilism: nihilism denies meaning to actions while this very transitoriness is what makes action meaningful. It is simply scrupulous fidelity to the real structure of things.
The recognition of transitoriness is sober and unillusioned recognition. No one will ‘win’ death, no form will attain eternity, no truth will petrify into absolute certainty. This is not a weakness of the universe that suffers from imperfection. It is fundamental structure. It is what allows the real to continue being real: i.e. to continue re-organising itself, to continue producing difference, to continue offering novelty.
And the consequence of this truth is not existential paralysis, nor a catastrophe of meaning that would make all actions vain: it is liberation from heavy illusion that poorly structures our life. Because if form were permanent, if there were a regime where a configuration could achieve definitive rest and then remain eternally without any change: then thought would be impossible. It would be only empty repetition, it would be only infinite mechanical copying of the previous form. It would be only static transmission of ideas already thought, already crystallised, already dead. There would be no space for genuine difference, for novelty that is not simply variation on a prior theme, for genuine response to problems that no one anticipated or could foresee.
There would be no space for what we can call, with rigorous care, creativity: not in the romanticised sense of invention ex nihilo that ignores all materiality and heritage (nothing is truly invented without a deep root in material reality; every creation works with received legacy), but in the precise and materialist sense of finding new compatibilities with what has changed, of identifying new configurations that respond to constraints that were previously unknown or ignored, of opening space for genuine possibility where there was only blind necessity and repetition. Creativity is not unrestricted freedom. It is constrained response, but a response that opens future.
Transitoriness does not threaten thought, does not weaken it: it is its most fundamental condition of possibility. Thought exists: can exist, can be alive: precisely because forms are transient, because there is always pressure of incompatibility between the inherited form and the present reality that never stops changing as multiple scales re-confine. The material world continues to re-organise itself and forces previous forms to re-configure, abandon themselves, die. This is not a deficiency. It is what makes existence and thought possible.
Transitoriness does not threaten thought, does not weaken it: it is its most fundamental condition of possibility. Thought exists precisely because forms are transient, because there is always pressure of incompatibility between the inherited form and the present reality that never stops changing, because the material world continues to re-organise itself and forces previous forms to re-configure or disappear entirely. This is the true structure of freedom: not freedom as total absence of constraint (which would be pure chaos, not freedom; it would be randomness without direction) nor as unlimited choice (which would be illusion, because there is always material constraint that limits and defines possibility). Freedom as genuine capacity to respond meaningfully to real constraints, capacity to find new configurations when the previous ones lose compatibility with the reality that surrounds them.
The Aphorism Closing and Repositioning
The aphorism that concludes Section 3 and structures the entire arc of Part I is this: Philosophy does not end: it folds. It does not end because transitoriness prevents an absolute terminus, because thought that has ended is a thought that has actually died, is doctrine petrified into a fixed and eternal form that no one can move any more. No philosophy can reach a point of eternal rest from which nothing remains to think, from which all questions have been answered, from which every investigation has finished. But it is also not mere infinite and empty continuation, nor an amorphous flow that does not respect its own heritage or changes direction as the wind passes. It is not chaos that pretended to be thought.
It folds. It gathers upon itself, reformulates internally, finds new dimensions in the previous problem that was thought entirely resolved: it discovers that the prior solution was only a solution at one scale, in one regime, and that new scales open new problems in the same space. It opens to scales not previously considered because materiality is multi-scale, multidimensional, infinite in depth. It abandons answers that were thought definitive because definiteness is illusion and everything truly alive continues questioning itself. It is continuous motion: it does not stop, it continues: but it is motion that carries living memory of the prior form, that retains transformed heritage even when refuting premises that the prior form believed, that is deeply rooted in the ground of the previous thought that it inherited and honours even while transforming.
The book that will conclude Part I (which investigates incessant reorganisation in the social and institutional forms that structure coexistence) will unfold this in operational detail: if no form ends intact but all bend and reconfigure, if transitoriness is a permanent regime governing all reality of the real material, then forms do not simply perish in an absolute sense without leaving trace: they reconfigure. They transmute. They maintain provisional compatibility with constraints that surround them until those constraints irrevocably change and demand new reorganisation. An institution may last centuries without being the same institution: because it continually reorganises, abandons some practices, creates new ones, changes legitimacies but retains recognisability. A scientific truth can be refuted and this does not mean it was simply false: it means that it was true on a scale, in a regime, and that new data revealed incompleteness or inadequacy of that truth.
And this will mean opening the larger question that governs all of Part II: a question different from the question of individual transitoriness, which is a question about structure. ‘If the forms that constitute an order: institutions, laws, social structures, modes of coexistence, repeated practices: continuously reorganise under pressure from a reality that never stops changing, that does not respect human forms, that continues to generate novelty and constraints: then how does this order persist? How is there institution, structure, law, some form of social continuity, in a regime of radical transitoriness? How can something maintain its form when the form is structurally transient, when the form is under permanent pressure of reorganisation?’
It is for this question: which is the question of politics, law, the possibility of collective human institution, coexistence in a world of permanent and irreducible change: that all the forthcoming traversal will now turn. The answer will not be that order can avoid transitoriness, that it can achieve permanent repose: that would be residual illusion. The answer will be how order manages with transitoriness, how it functions precisely because it accepts transitoriness as its inescapable condition, how it persists not despite but through continuous and constrained reorganisation. The answer will concern how one lives an order, how one inhabits a form, knowing that this form is transient.