“For Heidegger, phenomenology surpasses the “vulgar” usage of the phenomenon only inasmuch as it renders manifest not simply the manifest, but indeed the nonmanifest. “What is it that phenomenology is to “let us see”? What is it that must be called a “phenomenon” in a distinctive sense? What is it that by its very essence is necessarily the theme whenever we exhibit something explicitly? Manifestly, it is something that proximally and for the most part does not show itself at all: it is something that lies hidden, in contrast to that which proximally and for the most part does show itself; but at the same time it is something that belongs to what this shows itself, and it belongs to it so essentially as to constitute its meaning and ground.” The phenomenon has to come to manifestation only inasmuch as it is not at first apparent. The phenomenon is first characterized by its unapparentness. Let us cite some other texts in order to confirm this surprising inversion: “Being-covered-up [Verdecktsein] is the counterconcept to phenomenon, and such concealments through covering up [Verdeckungen] are really the immediate theme of phenomenological reflection. What can be a phenomenon is first and foremost covered up, or known in a tentative form. … There are accidental concealments and there are necessary ones, given in the very Being of their way of discovery and its possibilities. Every phenomenological proposition, though drawn from original sources, is subject to the possibility of concealment when it is communicated as an assertion. … This possibility of petrification of what it has drawn out and demonstrated in an original way is implied in the concrete labor of phenomenology itself.” Or again: “The critical reflection at this point showed us that phenomenological questioning can begin in the most obvious of matters [im Selbstverständlichen]. But this “matter of course” means that the phenomena are not really exposed to the light of day [offen zutage], that the ways to the things themselves are not without further ado ready-made, and that there is the constant danger of being misled and forced off the trail—which precisely and in general constitutes the sense of phenomenology as a research that clears.” In short, if “φαινόμενον is that which shows itself,” there remains “the astonishing possibility that a being may show itself as something which it nevertheless is not,” such that, properly speaking, “the phenomenon is experienced as enigmatic.” The Husserlian phenomenon is defined by, and therefore confined to, evidence, such that any residue of nonevidence must disappear from the “reduced phenomenon.” On the contrary, the Heideggerian phenomenon, originating in the rise to visibility of the not-yet visible, implies by right and in principle what is unapparent in apparition. In one case evidence reduces apparition to presence (and thus to objectivity for consciousness), and in the other case apparition reveals as such the unapparent whose contrast haloes the apparent. Instead of offering the certain evidence of an object for consciousness, the phenomenon offers itself as the enigma of the forever unobjectifiable play of the apparent with the unapparent. Phenomenon no longer signifies the certain object, but a certain play of the apparent in its apparition. Consequently, the work of phenomenology is to render apparent not only the unapparent, but even the play between the apparent and the unapparent within apparition: “‘Behind’ the phenomena of phenomenology there is essentially nothing else; on the other hand, what is to become a phenomenon can be hidden. And just because the phenomena are proximally and for the most part not given, there is need for phenomenology. Covered-up-ness is the counter-concept to ‘phenomenon.’” - Jean-Luc Marion

Hegel may have been the German Proclus in his logic, but as Cyril O’Regan points out in The Heterodox Hegel, he was also the German Valentinus in his heterodox theology, affirming a form of creation ex Deo qualitatively distinct from that of Neoplatonists like Plotinus and Proclus (despite other differences between those two) and in fact much closer to Valentinus, emphasizing particularly the radical alienation of the Idea in nature as a sort of constitutive incommensurability of the latter with the former, which was interpreted by Baader and Schelling as a kind of “cosmic fall” thesis (though Hegel demurred, deflecting by petitioning a “conceptual” translation). In this way, I think we can actually see Hegel’s critique of Leibniz as similar to the broadly Valentinian Gnostic resistance to the “naturalist” tendency of Plotinus and his school. As Allison Coudert argues, Leibniz’s ontology can be seen as a kind of Kabbalistically inflected Neoplatonism, but one which never solved the “problem of matter,” leading Christian Wolff to literally coin the term “idealism” derisively in reference to Leibniz. Of course, Hegel can also be read as a kind of “naturalist,” as advocated by Terry Pinkard, for example; @PervertGuide argues, however, that Hegel should be read as a “catastrophic naturalist,” along the lines of the catastrophe theory developed by the mathematician René Thom. As of earlier today, I have also changed my plans for the upcoming “Nature Lost, Nature Regained” conference in Rome in June 2026. I will be presenting a collaborative paper with @PervertGuide developing this reading of Hegelian dialectics through René Thom’s “biomathic” theory of catastrophic morphogenesis, qualified by a critical comparison of the more Gnostic Hegel with the more orthodox thought of Maximus the Confessor and his conception of “cosmic fall.”