The Universe in the Universe: System, Motion and Dimension in the Concept

Iain Hamilton Grant Freie Universitt Berlin, May 2012 In his unpublished writings from the 1920s,1 Kasimir Malevich develops his philosophical account of the essence of Suprematism as The Theory of the additional element in painting (1926). Of this additional element, he writes: Under the sign of the additional element is hidden a whole culture of action which can be defined by a typical or characteristic state of straight or curved lines. The introduction of new norms, the curved fibrous-shaped additional element of Czanne, will make the behaviour of the painter different from that caused by the sickle formula of Cubism or the straight line of Suprematism. [] After Futurism comes a new element, the supreme straight, which I have called the Suprematist additional element of dynamic order, the appropriate milieu for it is the air, as the necessary milieu for the aeroplane, for the aerodynamic structure of planites, aerial Suprematism. (WNO 156, 188) As opposed, for example, to Boyles and Lavoisiers elimination of elements from chemistry as only improbably corresponding to anything in nature,2 element for Malevich is a culture of action, defined by or determined as lines. Thus Malevichs dynamics provoke the extension of the cultures of action across all possible milieu; but it also provides a fascinating account of the dynamics of addition. An element is additional or futural, that is, just when it induces actions of which the field in which it does so was previously incapable. Yet addition is neither a mere acceptance of the given (the present), nor an elimination of the actions determined in it (the past): Czannes residual organicism, his fibrous lines, that curl, twist and knot, for instance, do not cease their motions under Cubisms sickle-formula, nor does the latter simply accept the former as the neutral basis on which its

Kasimir Malevich, The World as Non-Objectivity. Unpublished Writings 1922-25, ed. Troels Andersen, trs. Xenia Glowacki-Prus and Edmund T. Little (Copenhagen: Borgen, 1976). 2 Boyles distinction between elements in the chemical and in the metaphysical sense, in The Sceptical Chymist (1661) prepared the way for Lavoisiers ontological scepticism in his Trait lementaire de chymie, 1789, p.6: All that we can say concerning the number and nature of the elements is in my view confined to purely metaphysical inquiries: there are indefinite problems that one undertakes to resolve, and are susceptible of infinite types of solution; however, it is very probable that none of these in particular corresponds to nature.
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actions then take place. The stages in this analysis are not the stages on which actions take place, but rather stages in the morphogenesis of those actions themselves. Like Malevichs beloved Schopenhauer, everything is will and striving, nothing rests. In Malevichs dynamics, therefore, time, fields and motions form the lineaments of a Suprematism that is not solely concerned with beings or objects, but with determinant lines, and ultimately with Being itself. For this reason, we may call this an ontological, and the dynamics of the additional element an epistemic suprematism. That there is no given to receive, but only an element to add by way of which receiving receives, provides an apt parable for the situation of epistemology after Kant.3 Where for Kant the beyond the territories of the concept there surges only an ocean of indeterminacy, for the concept, any pre-conceptual landscape can only be the endless desert into where the concept begins its self-assembly. Yet such formulations the pre-conceptual, the indeterminate as such, the apeiron, even the desert that confronts the empty concept retain the function of the prius, of a antecedence with respect to the concept that remains troubling, even though this antecedence is not given, but precisely results from the onset of construction and is therefore perhaps only a philosophers myth, a result of the failure to grasp the culture or, better, the field of action proper to the concept. It is precisely this that provides the impetus towards the theory of the Selbstsetzung, the self- or auto-positing, of the concept. If the concept posits itself, the question of what is outside the concept is obviated, although the problem of what it thereby contains or conceives remains. Yet even a myth, a meaning, must arise. If the concept itself is not eternal because it is limited, something specific, something determining and determined, then it remains a peras acting on the apeiron, a limit introduced into the unlimited. The concept itself enjoys a career only part of which consists in its being conceived, whether such conceiving of the concept is undertaken merely formally, in a sense we will determine in what follows; or whether the conceiving is conceived as actually occurrent, that is, as taking place within some landscape of the given; or whether what is received, what is acted on, is alike not to the concepts content, but to the elements of its nature, that is, to what precedes the cultures of action that it must specifically differ from. Hence the ancient problems of by what cause the
As Jean-Franois Lyotard affirms in his excellent analysis of 23-9 of the Kritik der Urteilskraft (Paris: Galile, 1991), 223: Cest au contraire la pense qui, de loin, de haut, impose une finalit toute elle ce qui reste de la nature quand la forme naturelle nest plus donne (data) comme oeuvre dart, mais seulement reue, prise (accepta), dtourne.
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limit comes to be introduced into the unlimited,4 of in what respect the like is or may be conceived to be like what is like it5 whether emptily (kenoi ennoia), universally (koinai ennoia)6 or naturally (phuike ennoia)7 or whether likeness is or can be identical to identity; these are the problems that still confront the post-Kantian epistemic landscape in the form of the question: How does thinking arrive in the world? 1. We begin with the concept. But with the concept, nothing is given: explore it as we might, nothing can be found in it that would determine its content in advance. We do not yet then have a concept of anything at all and must therefore begin with the concept itself, or the concept of the concept, the universal concept, or the concept of the universe.8 Here <concept> becomes the object of the concept. But what is the concept of object thus derived? To discover this, we may enumerate the properties this substance, subject or suppositum has, and thus assume both objects and the concept <object> to have always and the same structure. Perhaps this is unavoidable, since experience presupposes discrimination, which is a conceptual act, a judgment. From such a position, the concept is unbounded towards the outside. Yet if there is no possible differentiation of the concept <object> from the object itself, the concept is either nothing at all or it becomes the source of all objects, that from which objects acquire what being they have. The concept becomes the Lord of Being, Herr des Seyns, or the womb of indeterminacy and the infinitude of potency from which whatever is, arises (SW XIII, 103). Retracing our steps, although nothing can be found within the concept <concept> to determine its content, it remains possible to determine something about what the concept <concept> is from its very formation. The former contains or conceives the latter such that whatever the concept is, the concept <concept>, being conceived in the former, suffers a lesser or a determinate extension than concept itself does. We may thus say that the concept presupposes determination, limitation, and define it therefore as what limits.

Plato, Philebus, 26aff. Empedocles, DK B103. 6 Aristotle presents Platonic Ideas as koinai or universals, before criticizing them as empty (kenos) in Metaphysics 991a20, 992a25, 1079b25. 7 The Middle Platonist Alcinous coins this Stoic term in his Handbook of Platonism or Didaskilos 4.6-8, 5.7. For discussions of the concepts Stoic roots, see see Diogenes Laertius discussion of Chryssipus DL 7.54; Aetius, SVF 2.83; and J.Sellars Stoicism (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2006) 70-77. 8 F.W.J. Schelling, System der gesammten Philosophie und der Naturphilosophie insbesondere SW VI, 185.
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What, however, does the concept limit? With this question, a further determination is derived. Firstly, as we have seen, the concept limits or determines the conceived. Secondly, as what limits, the concept stands in relation either (1) only to other concepts, in which case the concept is what limits everything except the concept itself. Better put, we might say that the concept is what limits whatever is conceived, so that there might be a difference between the concept <concept> and the concept as such, such that only the former would be limited, and the latter what limits once it has an object (even if this is itself). Or (2) as what limits, the concept now acquires the function of limiting with respect to what is not it. That is to say, even without an object, the concept suffers a limitation of its extension with respect to what is not it, such that the concept becomes its own object by the elimination of its neighbourhood, its field, domain or surroundings. For this reason, if we say that the indeterminate or indefinite concept has Being as its field or domain (we will return later to why this may be a faulty formulation), this is Being stripped of all that is, a desert devoid of all being [eine Wste alles Seyns] (XIII, 76), or the being proper only to not-being. Or again, perhaps rather than suffering a limitation of its own extension since as yet, only the concept, as what limits, can be conceived as acting the concept limits what is not it and therefore either (1) acts on what is not conceptual or (2) is different in kind from the non-conceptual. In case (1), there can be no difference in kind, and the concept limits directly. In case (2), the concept can only limit itself, and insofar as it does so, produces objects. Were it the case that the concept is different in kind from the conceived, nothing would be conceived that was not already the concepts conceiving. Were it different in kind from what is not conceived, this would mean that the concept of the inconceivable could have no content, while at the same time we could not conclude that being is conceivable. Rather, Being would exceed the range of the concept. Yet this being that exceeds reason, as we have just shown, can itself be conceived, at the very least as precisely that antithesis. We may therefore conclude that the concept is what divides the conceivable from what cannot be conceived but which nevertheless is. We call this realism with respect to the concept. Note that realism with respect to the concept the thesis that being exceeds what is conceived and yet this exceeding of the concept is itself conceivable does not rule out the concepts productive or generative capacity. The concepts self-limitation, or determination in general, gives rise to objects, as we have seen, even if, for the time being, these remain conceptual objects, of which the concept itself is an instance. This being the case, the divisions introduced by the concept constitute new entities, new products in whatever it is that is the field in which the concept as such

arises. In definite terms: this field is itself the concept in general. In so far as the concepts self-limitation produces in turn objects whose being extends no farther than the concept; in other words, insofar as its objects belong exclusively to the immediate surroundings within which they arise, we call this formalism. Such, for instance, obtains when McDowell pronounces the concept unbounded towards the outside,9 this outside is itself the outside in the concept (since any discrimination of bounds, any determination, cannot be other than the product of concepts, including that of the determination itself) or the concept <outside>. This constitutes an operation of the concept on the concept, a recursion of limitation, such that the substrate of such limitations is precisely the positing concept, or the concept that conceives the concept <concept>. Formalism, that is, obtains where the conceivable is a subset of the concept <concept>. My point is this: there is no decision to make between realism and formalism, as if the criterion of judgment were ethical rather than epistemic or ontoepistemic, as when, for instance, between dogmatic realism and critical idealism, Fichte locates the only possible ground of their difference neither in the nature nor in the idea of things, but rather in the philosophers character. The approach is misconceived because reality itself is non-exclusive with respect to formalism and realism, which is the conclusion Fichte ought to have reached (bearing in mind that ought to means, as Hegel noted, did or does not) regarding nature and the idea. It is also what is at issue in, for example, Badious denial that a philosophy of or as nature is possible (1997: 63). In both cases, whatever being is, it is augmented by the concept, not diminished, even when such augmentation takes place in a formal register: conceiving is not merely a new being-contained (I borrow the term begriffensein from Schellings Philosophische Untersuchungen ber das Wesen der menschilchen Freiheit, SW VII, 346), but a new object. 2. To ask How does thinking arrive in the world? is to contravene the Parmenidean injunction against non-identity, since according to this injunction, the advent of something presupposes that it was not and therefore that it, as having been not-being, cannot be. Yet the injunction is formed around the irreducibility of the concepts Being and Thinking. Either therefore Being and Thinking differ and form one, or they do not, in which case Being and Thinking are not. From the perspective of the present problem, however, the issue is how it is (1) that being and thinking can be and whether the can-being of Thinking entails its not-being without vitiating its being in consequence. Regarding the ontological dimension of the problem, if it is true that nothing that is, is capable of not-being, then being
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John McDowell, Mind and World (2e. Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1996), 83.

cannot not-be, nor can it not have been. If this is accepted (and in these terms it cannot not be accepted), then (2) if being and thinking are one, thinking is coeternal with Being, meaning either that all things think (Parmenides 132a), and there is no beginning for either being or thinking, neither is the becoming of being nor of thinking thinkable. Either therefore the question how does thinking arrive in the world falsely premises that thinking does in fact arrive, since it was always there; or the world into which thinking is hypothesised to arrive refers to the content of a thinking, a <world> that either therefore has nothing to do with the world as such or is exactly what the world is. According to this latter hypothesis, the thinkability of Being is a question of thinkables as constituting what is, or of concepts mediating ontology in the sense that the possible discrimination of isness, the judgment of being, can arise only on the basis of a conceptual field, which Being neither exceeds nor falls short of. From this perspective, the question of the origin of the world can equally comfortably be asked by naturalist-realists, that is, realists whose realism is restricted, on the basis of epistemic competition, to the best science of the day, that is, to the optimal functionality of the concept rather than to the actuality of what becomes conceptualised as it can by transcendentalists or idealists who symmetrically restrict the possibility of truths concerning reality either to the whole truth, since there can be no truths of the part; or necessarily partial truths, since all truths are riven by the irreducible partiality of the concept with respect to what is thinkable but indemonstrable, or, in short, with respect to the real. This is why from either perspective it was inevitable that the concept would soon be declared unbounded toward the outside, since by definition, the only bounds to which the concept is susceptible must themselves be conceptual, that is inside the concept. If the origin of the world remains onto-epistemically10 thinkable (NB, I do not say determinable as such), this is because it owes its origin to a Thinking and a Being whose beginnings are unthinkable as beginnings, and thinkable only as recursions of their objects or functions: the being of being, the thinking of thinking, etc. Yet even if we accept that these functions are operative that is, that that they wesen, in the verbal sense of wirklich sein I believe Schelling gives the term in the Freiheitsschrift11 in the concept, so that philosophy has as its speculative role to extend the inventory of
That is, what is, is knowable, so what is known is what is. See Rainer E. Zimmermann, Nothingness As Ground and Nothing But Ground (Forthcoming: Evanston Il: Northwestern University Press). 11 See my The Innermost centre of nature. Philosophical Inquiries into the essence of ground in Joseph Cohen, ed., New Essays on Schellings Philosophical Inquiries (Forthcoming. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
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the operations of which the concept is capable; and if we therefore accept that, when we ask where or in what is the concept operative?, any response that asserts the concept to be operative, for example in the universe, cannot avoid the entailment that this universe determines a universe and its potentialities as conceptual rather than designating something extra-conceptual. Yet the inevitability of the function entails neither that it exhausts the functionality of the concept, nor, since acknowledging this introduces inexhaustibility into the relation conceptuniverse, albeit on the basis of the concept, does it entail that the concept exhaust the actuality of the universe, such that to maintain that it did would be to beg the question. Therefore, neither can we seek to eliminate the conceptual recovery of the concept in the generative, iterative functionality of its recursive self-extension; neither yet can we concede that the concept (1) exhausts being, nor (2) that this function exhausts either the philosophical reality, or the reality tout court, of the concept.12 We might wish to argue at this point that we have as yet no reason to accept the thesis that the concept is not exhausted in its function, even where its function is its argument or extension. Nor do we wish to. We deny only that a concept is exhausted in one function, for the following reasons. To argue that the concept is so exhausted has three consequences: (1) the exhaustion of function entails the reduction of the concepts extension to =1, i.e., to just this but no other instance, meaning that there is just one concept for each argument, or that there is no concept of the concept because none survives its single-use exhaustion. (2) from the Parmenidean identity from which we began, Being would also suffer this single-use functional exhaustion, eliminating the possibility of a science of being qua being even where being is nothing more than the several senses in which it is said. (3) if function is a single-use exhaustion of the concept, then recursion, which is recursion just when it involves a second use of the same substrate (x ! x1) or when the argument or extension of the concept is the same as its function, is impossible. So if single use concepts, as realists have always argued, are not concepts at all, it follows that a concept necessarily functions more than once, or that its function repeats for different arguments, or that there is an energetic or informational asymmetry between concept and use. Nor need we argue here that the concept consists of several distinct types of function, only that its functionality is altered by its argument or extension (a concept is always an argument concerning the f-ness of an x). On the
Deleuze and Guattari reopened this investigation, explicitly indebted to the German Idealists, for contemporary philosophy in their Quest-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit, 1994), 16-7.
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basis therefore that one function of the concept is recursion of conceptual potentials, we may conclude that there must be at least one level of asymmetry or inexhaustibility between concept and function. Moreover, if in concert with the naturalists, transcendentalists, idealists and neopragmatists, we say that recursion is the primary function of the concept, we may add to this that if, as we have seen, recursion is simply the action of argument on function that guarantees the reusability of the same substrate, then the concept is whatever may be articulated or formed by instances of recursion. Recursion, in other words, is one means of the selfpositing of the concept. 3. The self-positing of the concept stipulates, like the Middle Platonist concept of !"#$%& '(()$* or natural concept-formation,13 that the concept has a career that exceeds it conceiver. +"#$%& '(()$*, however, insofar as it that operation of intellection when this, which is prior to the soul, becomes stored up in the body and so activated by memory, is explicitly lodged in nature. Self-positing similarly exceeds its conceiving if it applies to the concept, but seems in consequence not only to forego this lodging, but even to bypass any such nature since it guarantees the referential independence of the concept. In other words, a concept that is self-positing takes itself as its own object, such that its domains of reference are precisely that of which the concept qua concept is capable. The self-positing concept therefore acquires the functional (Frege) or operational (Schelling) character that enables it to act on its own. The concept becomes the agent of conceptualisation, receiving its content from its operations in experience or those operations that have a worldly character insofar as any such world is conceived. For how could a world that was not conceived be there (even if this being-there is already in the concept)? Two questions arise. Firstly, if it is true that, in the concept, there is a species of self-positing, in what does it consist? Is the concept, that is, the outcome, the finality of self-positing as such? Is the insuperable finality of self-positing, that is, the concepts actuality? If this question asks after what the concept itself is, of its essence, then secondly, we must ask after what it is that is conceived in the concept? What actuality would it have if the concept only conceives what is already limited by it? The second question assumes that at least one function of the concept is to define, to determine, to limit, the fundamental law of the possibility of

This is John Dillons considered translation of Alcinouss concept from the Handbook of Platonism 4.6.27-34, tr. with Introduction and Commentary (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993).
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thought.14 Accordingly, the concept is the self-positing of limitation. Limitation does not however occur unless something is limited. On the formalist hypothesis, this something is itself the concept. Yet if the concepts function is to limit, then it follows that nothing is a concept that does not limit, so that the concept that limits must itself presuppose a concept that limits it in turn, and that a third, and so on. If, on the other hand, the resultant regress is to terminate although there is no reason why it should, if the concept is nothing more than the recursive self-positing of limitation, so that its content and its form simply coincide something other than the concept must perform the limitation. In this case it is not only the concept that limits, rather the concept is itself limited by something that is not a concept, in which case the concepts self-positing must itself be constrained by what it is not, which, while this saves the content of the concept from empty self-replication, is contrary to the hypothesis of selfpositing. If we must then assume that the content of the concept the Begriffensein in the Begriff is not itself reducibly conceptual, and that it is therefore the non-conceptual that the concept limits, then the self-positing of the concept occurs in and of something other than it. This is the conclusion Schelling, investigating the nature of philosophy as science, reaches: What does defining mean? literally, to enclose within determinate limits. Therefore nothing can be defined that is not enclosed within specific limits by nature.15 Accordingly, the concept limits only what is limited by nature, so that Hamiltons fundamental law belongs not only to thought, but to what is thought of and is at first sight other than thought. Only what is limited can be defined and enclosed, that is, be conceptual content. It is because conceptual content is limited against what it is not, that limitation is intuitable,16 definable, or conceivable. What is not by nature so enclosed is what is not definable by the concept, except insofar as limitation presupposes the definable and the indefinable.

William Hamilton, Philosophy of the Unconditioned (1829) in Discussions on Philosophy and Literature. London: Brown, Green and Longmans, 1853, p. 14. 15 F.W.J. Schelling, ber die Natur der Philosophie als Wissenschaft, SW IX, 216. 16 F.W.J. Schelling, System des transzendentalen Idealismus (SW III, 408): Being (objectivity) is always merely an expression of a limitation of the intuiting or producing activity. There is a cube in this portion of space, means nothing else but that in this part of space my intuition can be active only in the form of a cube. The ground of all reality in cognition is thus the ground of limitation independent of intuition.
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While at first sight, far from being the architect of the theory of self-positing of the concept, Schelling appears to destroy it, it turns out that (1) the concept is extended, and has as its content the limitation that it performs on what is unlimited; and (2) that what the concept has as its content is therefore recursive not on its own operations, but rather on the operation of limitation itself, which occurs in nature and in the concept. The essence of the concept is therefore the operation17 of limitation, but limitation is not itself an operation proper to the concept alone. Moreover, if the limitation in nature is the limitation in the concept, what differentiates the two instances of the same process is that the latter has as its content not only the former, but also the limitations by which it has become the limitations it comprises, along with the concept of limitation itself, by which what is unlimited is also thought, since without this, no limitation can be conceived. In other words, limitation in the concept is an operation acting recursively or reduplicatively on itself and, in this acting, being conceived in turn. It is by the patient discrimination of limitations and their actions one upon the other that meaning or sense arises in a field that conceives it. The concepts worldly behaviour is therefore the specific fields it forms with the objects on which it depends in an understanding through which the concept passes. In one sense, a concepts operations are worldly when it articulates how its Gegenstnde articulate it, when it acts on the motions from which it arises, and augments them amongst those objects. It is an oversimplification to say therefore that the concept has an object, since the object what stands against the concept because it is not it is that on which the concept acts, its consequent, therefore, precisely because it conceives amongst what it is not. Limitation does not issue, therefore, from inside what limits. It does not isolate kind from kind, level from level, or form from reality, or produce a merely one-sided concept of the limit, because the limit is introduced into the unlimited. Thus, as the emergentist Samuel Alexander notes, a triangle is incomplete because it is only a fragment of the space with which it is continuous.18 To conceive the triangle therefore entails the conceiving of the space in which it is articulated, the space that is not only not-triangle but is the totality of all forms. Thus the continuity of the limited is itself limited by the introduction of limitation, that is, by the unlimited in which it arises. Although this cannot be the object of a concept therefore, it is

For Schelling therefore, essence is not therefore timelessly past being or Gewesenheit, as Hegel attests (Science of Logic Bk2. The Doctrine of Essence), but rather wirksam sein, the operative modes (SW VII, 409) of what is, or the becoming that being is. 18 Samuel Alexander, The Basis of realism, Proceedings of the British Academy VI (1914, 136), 2.
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nonetheless conceived in all conceiving. That is to say, the concept of the all is entailed by the limitations that articulate being. From this, we gain an important insight into what is posited in self-positing. If we assume a finality for self-positing, or that the posited in this instance, the concept confers actuality on the what posits itself, then all operations prior to its actuality are merely preparatory, proto-conceptual potentials or, what amounts to the same, not the concept but its mere negation. In consequence, there is no self-positing, no leading to the concept; rather, finality contains only the concept of what exists. If self-positing is in the concept, therefore, it cannot be the concept that is the self that posits it. Rather, the self of self-positing is the positing itself. Self-positing is the affirmation, that is, of the operation of positing, the positing of positing by itself. Not the philosophizing subject, writes Schelling, but rather the object itself (the absolute subject) moves itself (X, 111). Self-positing does not extend the career of the concept within itself, but rather extends it in the direction of what the non-conceptual or the preconceptual, just as the operations of what is non-conceptual are extended into the concept. Self-positing is properly therefore the coming to be posited of the concept, as it is of every Gegenstand. Accordingly, through the theory of self-positing we arrive at the concept of the operations or motions in the world by which limitation arises. The concept is not the source of limitation, therefore, but the consequent of operations that not only precede, but form it as they form form in general. 4. The concept is not its object in several senses. Firstly, nothing can be genuinely consequent unless it is other than its dependent, which is why every concept entails several Gegenstnde, namely: the self-limitation of the limited as its content (the determinant), the concept of this self-limitation (meaning), and the unlimited in which these limitations constitute local motions (the field). The dimensions of the concept can therefore be defined by the determinants of meaning in the indeterminate. In other words, amongst the motions proper to the concept, some are directed towards the objects it is not, some towards the objects it forms for itself, and some toward the unlimited articulated both by pre-conceptual and conceptual objects. This brings us to a second sense in which the concept is not its objects. Since the operations that act in the concept are those that act in the object, what determines is not the object as substantial form, but rather the operations by which the object stands against, that is, specifically resists,

the concept. The concept is thus the recursion of operation upon operation in the direction of the world. Moreover, since the operation of limitation is itself limited by the unlimited that not only survives, but therefore exceeds this division, the operations in the object can only arise from what they are not. Therefore, the object is itself the recursion of the self-operation of operation, or real self-positing. The concept, therefore, in operating upon operation, conceives self-positing as such. The concept is additionally not its objects in that it does not contain them, but only the actions dependent upon them. Operations thus form systems of antecedent and consequent motions in the unlimited that continue in the concept, and which have particular formal properties. Firstly, the recursion of limitation on limitation is necessarily selective, even though, since the triangle is a fragment of the space with which it is continuous, no operation is systemically possible that does not affect the system as a whole. The concept therefore does not merely contain instances of limitation, but in limiting limitations, acts on them. Similarly, what stands against the concept and stands out from the undetermined is local with respect to the limitations it articulates. Determination therefore entails an asymmetry with respect to what is determined, such that limitation is always exceeded by the undetermined. Finally, the concept is not its objects in the sense that it also exceeds them not only in the dimension of pre-conceptual and therefore pre-objective motions, but also in that of the understanding. We have had little to say about this until now, because just as self-positing does not mean that the concept is the source of its own actuality, neither is it the case that the understanding precedes its actualisation by the operations giving rise to it. Simply put, if the understanding is not eternal, it arises as the independent consequence of what is operationally antecedent to it: world, object and concept. The understanding therefore arises amongst and consequently upon those worldly operations it is appropriate to call nature, and grasps the dimensions in which the concept is operative as forming the contours of the understandings own operations. Indeed, the understanding is indissociable from the movements of the concept, which it grasps as form. Thus the concept systemically bonds objects and understanding, such that the movements of the latter consist in movements throughout that system, and include, at the limit, the movements from which that system itself arises. When we rightly say, therefore, that the concept is in the universe, this does not rule out that the universe is also in the concept, since the universe the concept is operative in continues to act in the concept.

From the concept as such in its extension towards Gegenstnde, we therefore gain the concept of breadth; from the operations of the nonconceptual in the concept, that of depth; from the operations of the concept on those of the object, height. For all this, the concept is not its object, in these five senses. Firstly, because the concept is consequent upon objects, not the same as them (identity, that is, is not extensional). Secondly, objects have no especial claim on the concept, since both are essentially operations. Self-positing, that is, is not the positing of any particular object, but of the operation of positing, or creating, in general. Thirdly therefore, the concept is formed of the motions that make it, being consequent upon the operations in what is other than it and on which it depends. Finally, the concept exceeds its objects since (a) it grasps the unlimited as antecedent to all limitation; and (b) its dimensions exceed the object in the direction of the understanding, in which form arises from the essential operations of essence, or the worldly. The understanding, or knowing, is at its most powerful not when it most closely approximates its objects, therefore, but when it movingly grasps the dimensions of the moving, wordly operations of objects and concepts; that is, when it most closely approximates these motions. It is this dimension of motion from which the understanding synthesizes the concepts of the universe. Finally, in the operations of the understanding, we may derive the dimension of motion wherein all other dimensions are articulated: the absolutely mobile, which cannot be grasped for a moment, which is only really thought in the last moment.19 The understanding, therefore, grasps the essence or operations of the concept in relation to the objects operative in it and towards which its own operations extend, as the universe in the universe.20 Insofar as the understanding itself arises as the consequent of the universe that produces it, the containing universe is the antecedent; yet as we have seen, it is precisely because of the consequent nature of the conceptual universe, the %)#,)- ()'.)-, that the antecedent is operative in it. We can now see why it is a mistake to consider a concept unbounded, whether externally or internally: the concept does not have bounds, but rather is itself the executor and consequent of limitation or division. What limits in the concept and is experienced as limitation in the understanding is not therefore the concept itself the grave error of every actualist formalism. It is rather the motion recurrent on motion that seeks to exceed
F.W.J. Schelling, Lectures on the History of Modern Philosophy, SW X, 150. [Das] All im All, F.W.J. Schelling, System der gesammten Philosophie und der Naturphilosophie insbesondere, SW VI, 207.
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the motions antecedent to objects and so to capture the source of things, the Mitwissenschaft der Schpfung (VIII, 200) or co-science of creation. It is indeed nature that is constituted by the worldly dimension of the preconceptual that remains operative in the concept, and the attempt to make the concept exceed its antecedents is the attempt to have nature issue from the concept. Nor conversely need we therefore accept that nature is something that is simply given, already existent. Again, asking after the essence of nature, we must, in company with the new essentialism currently evident in the philosophy of science, respond with Schelling that behind the thing then is not Being, but essence, power [Potenz], cause.21 Once again, then, even where a problematic excess of the consequent over all its antecedents is at issue, the displacement of Being by power, essence or cause, demonstrates that the motions by which this Mitwissenschaft arises is a co- that is not coeval, but issues from the same source. Neither is this a retreat to a given, under the rubric of a realism that seeks to undercut speculative reason and grant authority only to the perception collating instances, but only an insurmountable asymmetry in the generations of things. The concepts history therefore becomes not only a matter of its use by philosophers, but also of its instantiation in the universe. Finally, because the mobile that the understanding approximates across all the dimensions of the concept and the objects on which these consequents depend is and remains mobile, the understandings attempts to overreach the consequents, to absorb the dimensions of depth (of the object) wholly into the concept, does not merely seek to reach the origin of things before things, that is, the ground of all Being, but rather pushes back the dimension of motion such that it always exceeds the re-search. 5. From the concept <concept>, then, we have thus derived the universe that cannot but be its proper content. From it, we gained the dimensions of breadth (the concepts extension over an object-field), depth (the objects extension into the concept), height (the concepts conceiving these) and motion (the understandings grasping of the universe in the medium of the motions proper to its essence). What are our presuppositions? Firstly, that there is no more or less activity in the concepts extension than in other operations of essence. Secondly, that, if essence is operation, what is Being? Thirdly therefore, that essence is what is insofar as it is operative; insofar, that is, as Being is activity. Fourthly, that if we pay attention to the subject of this proposition that is, to Being we see that it is not Being for us, or Being insofar as it is posited, that is
21

Grounding of Positive Philosophy (1841), SW XIII, 75-6.

activity, such that the latter devolves onto that domain of Being for which there is such a concept. This has enabled not only the derivation or making explicit of the universe without sacrificing either the concept or the mobile essence, but also without sealing the concept against the world, that is, without abandoning nature, as McDowell is cheered for. It has therefore enabled an understanding of understanding, of the concept and the object, such that the field they articulate is one and the same with the operations essence launches in it, and subject to all the mutability of absolute mobility. The unboundedness of the concept towards the outside for which McDowell is also celebrated misconstrues the limiting and potentiating or recursive operations of the concept in the interests of its extension (what class of entities does the concept cover?). Moreover, since the practical interests governing McDowellian and Brandomian neo-Hegelianism, as of many others, rest and issue precisely on this disavowal of the extra-conceptual, we have shown that it is possible to construe the equation Being = activity without recourse to its reduction to the concept or to the practical considerations that obscure its signifance: that nothing that is, does not act. The consequence of this exploration of the Selbstsetzungslehre hypothesis is therefore that logic is transformed into a morphogenetics, as philosophers from Bosanquet to Thom and Chtelet have maintained.22 So the theory of the concept is equally a philosophy of the worldly, that is, of nature, insofar as it concerns the motion consequent upon the potentiated asymmetry of the system: world-concept-understanding and, accordingly, an ontological matter. Were this not the case, not only could we have no theory of the concept as remotely worldly, nor yet would the world produce concepts, as in fact it just has.

Bernard Bosanquet, Logic, or the Morphology of Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon, 1911); Ren Thom, Structural Stability and Morphogenesis (Reading, Mass: Benjamin/Cummings, 1975) and Morphogense et imaginaire (Paris: Les Lettres Modernes, 1978); Gilles Chtelet, La pense du mobile (Paris: Seuil, 1993) and Lenchantement du virtuel (Paris: ENS, 2010).
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