I. The Paradox of Conditions
Transcendental arguments occupy an uneasy place in contemporary philosophy. On the one hand, they seem unavoidable, for any serious account of knowledge, experience, or formal reasoning must, at some point, ask after the conditions under which such activities are possible at all. On the other hand, transcendental reasoning seems perpetually threatened by a familiar worry: how can one speak meaningfully about conditions of possibility without already presupposing what one claims to ground?
This worry is not merely rhetorical. It has a precise logical form. If the conditions of intelligibility are themselves intelligible only under further conditions, then a regress threatens: each appeal to grounding demands a higher-order ground. If, by contrast, the conditions are simply posited or declared self-evident, then the argument collapses into dogmatism. Either the transcendental recedes indefinitely, or it hardens into an unexplained given.
This dilemma was famously articulated by Schopenhauer in his criticism of the cosmological argument. He observed that the principle of sufficient reason is employed to generate an explanatory regress, only to be dismissed “like a hired cab” once it has carried the argument as far as it can go. The demand for explanation is invoked universally, and then silently suspended at the point where explanation becomes most difficult. Schopenhauer was right to regard such a maneuver as illicit. But his critique also reveals a deeper assumption shared by both the argument he rejects and the dilemma he exposes: namely, that any legitimate condition must itself be conditioned in the same way. Once this assumption is questioned, the apparent necessity of choosing between infinite regress and dogmatic arrest loses its force.
Much of modern philosophy can be read as an attempt to navigate between the horns of an infinite regress and the unexplained given. Empiricism resists transcendental claims by restricting legitimate inquiry to what is given, yet in doing so tacitly relies on norms of relevance, justification, and inference that are not themselves given. Rationalism seeks secure foundations, but risks mistaking formal consistency or conceptual clarity for sufficiency. Even deflationary approaches that aim to dissolve transcendental questions often do so by quietly presupposing the very intelligibility they decline to explain.
What complicates the matter further is the role of formal systems. Logic and mathematics seem, at first glance, to offer a way out. If the rules of inference, proof, and formalization can be made explicit, perhaps the conditions of intelligibility can be fully internalized within a system. On this view, what philosophy struggles to articulate, formal rigor might finally secure.
Yet the history of formal thought undermines this hope. The more powerful and expressive a formal system becomes, the more clearly it exhibits a distinction it cannot abolish: the distinction between what is derivable within the system and what counts as the system’s being correctly understood, applied, or taken as adequate. No formal calculus contains, as a theorem, the fact that it is the right calculus for the domain it is used to model. That recognition occurs, if at all, at a level not captured by the system’s own rules.
This is not a contingent limitation due to human finitude, nor merely a practical inconvenience. It is a structural feature of intelligibility. Any determination of rules, axioms, or inferential norms presupposes a prior space in which those determinations can be recognized as relevant, coherent, or successful. The question of conditions therefore cannot be eliminated by formalization; it is sharpened by it.
The paradox of transcendental inquiry can now be stated more precisely. The conditions of intelligibility cannot be objects within the same register as what they condition without ceasing to function as conditions. Yet they cannot be nothing, or merely subjective, without rendering intelligibility inexplicable. They must be real without being determinate in the same way that determined objects are real. They must ground without appearing as grounded.
The task, then, is not to escape this paradox, but to understand its structure. Only by doing so can we make sense of how intelligibility is possible at all—and why any attempt to fully objectify its conditions inevitably leaves something essential behind.
II. Formal Systems and the Excess of Meaning
Formal systems appear, at first glance, to offer the clearest counterexample to the paradox of intelligibility. In logic and mathematics, rules are explicit, symbols are well-defined, and validity is determined by purely formal criteria. If intelligibility could be fully internalized anywhere, it would seem to be here. The meaning of a proof, on this view, is exhausted by its derivability from axioms according to specified rules.
Yet it is precisely within this domain of maximal rigor that the paradox reasserts itself with greatest force. The twentieth century’s foundational results did not merely reveal technical limitations; they exposed a structural feature of formal intelligibility itself. A sufficiently expressive formal system can represent statements about its own syntax and derivations, but it cannot, on pain of inconsistency or incompleteness, secure from within the distinction between what is provable and what is true.
The significance of this result is often misunderstood. It is not simply that there exist true statements that cannot be proven within a given system. More importantly, the recognition of such statements as true is not itself a formal achievement of the system in question. Even when meta-mathematical claims are themselves formalized in stronger systems, the judgment that such formalizations are adequate, faithful, or relevant is not thereby captured. The meta-level recedes as it is formalized. What is gained in expressive power is accompanied by a renewed excess.
This excess is not accidental. A formal system, considered purely as a set of symbols and transformation rules, is indifferent to its own application. It does not determine the domain it is meant to model, nor does it certify that it is the appropriate system for that domain. Those determinations require judgments of interpretation, relevance, and adequacy—judgments that are not reducible to formal derivation without presupposing precisely what is at issue.
To recognize a formal system as a system—rather than as an uninterpreted calculus—is already to stand outside it in a space of intelligibility that the system itself does not generate. This space is not an optional supplement added by human users; it is a condition of the possibility of formalization as such. Without it, there would be no fact of the matter as to whether a symbol counts as a formula, a derivation as a proof, or a model as appropriate.
Attempts to eliminate this excess by further formalization merely reproduce the structure at a higher level. A meta-system may codify inference rules about object-level proofs, but the recognition that the meta-system is doing so correctly again depends on criteria not contained within its formal syntax. The hierarchy does not terminate in a final, self-validating system. What persists is the need for a horizon within which formal relations can be taken as meaningful at all.
This horizon is often described, misleadingly, as external or informal. But this characterization obscures its status. It is not external in the sense of being arbitrary, subjective, or contingent. Nor is it informal in the sense of being vague or merely intuitive. Rather, it is pre-formal: the condition under which form can be recognized as form, and rule-governed activity as rule-governed.
Formal systems therefore do not abolish the question of intelligibility; they intensify it. By displaying, with maximal clarity, the distinction between derivation and meaning, they reveal that intelligibility is not itself a formal property. It is that by virtue of which formal properties can matter at all.
The lesson is not anti-formal. On the contrary, it is only through formal rigor that this structure becomes visible. Logic teaches, by its own internal limits, that intelligibility cannot be fully objectified without remainder. That remainder is not a defect in the system. It is the condition that allows the system to appear as intelligible in the first place.
III. Determinability and the Indeterminate
The preceding analysis suggests that intelligibility is not exhausted by any set of determinate forms. Formal systems, inferential norms, and conceptual frameworks all presuppose a space in which they can be taken as meaningful, adequate, or appropriate. The question now is how to characterize this space without collapsing it into another determination, thereby repeating the very problem it is meant to address.
A crucial distinction must therefore be introduced: the distinction between determination and determinability. Determination concerns what is fixed, articulated, and rule-governed. Determinability concerns the capacity for such fixing to occur at all. While determinations are many, revisable, and domain-specific, determinability is singular in structure: it is the condition under which anything can count as a determination.
This distinction allows us to clarify the status of the “excess” encountered in formal systems. What exceeds formal determination is not a further, as-yet-undiscovered form, nor an incomplete specification waiting to be filled in. It is not an indeterminate object standing alongside determinate ones. Rather, it is the indeterminate field that makes determination possible without itself being determinable in the same way.
The indeterminate, in this sense, should not be confused with the vague, the arbitrary, or the merely subjective. Vagueness is a deficiency of determination; arbitrariness is a failure of constraint. The indeterminate at issue here is neither. It is structured precisely as openness to form. It does not issue determinate rules, but it orients determination by making relevance, coherence, and success intelligible as norms in the first place.
This structure becomes visible whenever attempts are made to formalize the process of revision, interpretation, or theory change. To specify rules for revising a system presupposes judgments about what counts as an improvement, a correction, or a deeper explanation. Those judgments cannot be exhaustively encoded without already assuming a background sense of what the system is for. The purpose that guides revision is not itself derivable from the system under revision.
Here again, regress threatens if one misunderstands the situation. One might attempt to introduce higher-order rules governing relevance or adequacy. But these, too, would require criteria for their correct application. The ladder of determination cannot be retained within the structure it enables. What halts the regress is not a final rule, but the recognition that determinability itself is not something to be determined.
The indeterminate, therefore, is not opposed to form. It is what allows form to arise without necessity. It constrains without dictating. It orders without specifying. In this sense, it is teleological without being mechanical: it orients determinations toward intelligibility without prescribing in advance what form that intelligibility must take.
This orientation is real. It is not projected by individual subjects, nor reducible to social convention, though it is encountered only through determinate practices. Nor is it an abstract metaphysical substrate. It is encountered wherever sense is made, reasons are given, or understanding is achieved. It is what allows a determination to count as about something rather than merely occurring.
We are thus led to a striking conclusion. Intelligibility depends on something that cannot itself be fully rendered intelligible in determinate terms without undermining its role. The condition for the possibility of determination is an indeterminate that does not compete with determinate structures, but sustains them. This is not a failure of theory. It is the structural signature of intelligibility itself.
The task now is to show that this structure is not an ad hoc invention, but has already been articulated—albeit under a different name—within the critical tradition. To do so, we must turn to the distinction between determining and reflecting judgment.
IV. Reflective Judgment and the Teleological Space of Intelligibility
The structure of intelligibility that has emerged thus far—an indeterminate orientation that makes determinate form possible without prescribing it—finds its most precise articulation in Kant’s distinction between determining and reflecting judgment. This distinction does not introduce a new metaphysical posit. Rather, it renders explicit a condition already at work wherever intelligibility is achieved.
Determining judgment operates by subsuming particulars under given universals. Where the rule is known in advance, application consists in identifying what falls under it. This is the paradigm case for formal systems: axioms are fixed, rules are explicit, and correctness is a matter of conformity. Determining judgment is indispensable wherever rigorous articulation is required.
Reflecting judgment, by contrast, operates under fundamentally different conditions. Here, the universal is not given in advance. One is confronted with particulars that demand unification, coherence, or sense, but without a determinate rule that dictates how this is to be achieved. The task of reflecting judgment is not to apply a rule, but to seek one—to orient inquiry toward intelligibility without knowing in advance what form that intelligibility will take.
This distinction is often misunderstood as merely epistemic or psychological, as though a reflecting judgment were a subjective heuristic supplementing genuine cognition. But this misreads its function. A reflecting judgment is not a matter of personal preference or aesthetic whim. It is the condition under which determinate judgments can be coordinated, revised, and meaningfully related to one another at all.
When multiple object domains, formal systems, or explanatory frameworks must be brought into relation, no higher-order determining rule can be presupposed without begging the question. The very act of coordination requires judgments of relevance, adequacy, and purposiveness that are not derivable from the systems being coordinated. Reflecting judgment names this irreducible function.
Kant characterizes reflecting judgment as teleological: it proceeds as if nature were ordered toward intelligibility. This “as if” is crucial. It does not assert that the order of nature is the product of an external designer, nor does it reduce purposiveness to subjective projection. Rather, it marks the structural necessity of orientation toward coherence in the absence of determinate rules. Teleology here is not a doctrine about ends, but a condition for the possibility of sense-making.
This teleological space is precisely what was earlier identified as determinability. It is the indeterminate orientation that allows determinate forms to be sought, evaluated, and revised without collapsing inquiry into arbitrariness or regress. Reflecting judgments do not generate determinate content, but they govern the movement by which determinate content becomes intelligible as content.
Crucially, this space cannot itself be formalized without distortion. To attempt to encode the rules of reflecting judgment would be to transform it into determining judgment, thereby presupposing the very orientation it is meant to explain. Reflecting judgments operate only where algorithmic closure is unavailable in principle. Their necessity is therefore structural, not provisional.
The structure at issue here bears a recognizable affinity to what has been described, within transcendental Thomism, as a pre-apprehension or anticipatory openness to being. But the affinity is limited and must not be overstated. Accounts that locate the horizon of intelligibility within the transcendental structure of the knowing subject, however refined, risk relocating an ontological condition into an epistemic register. The teleological space described here is not the result of any pre-grasp, implicit or explicit, on the part of a subject. It is the condition under which any grasp can count as intelligible at all. Subjects do not constitute this space, nor do they disclose it as its origin. They find themselves always already addressed by it.
Seen in this light, Kant’s Third Critique is not an appendix to critical philosophy, but its completion. Without reflecting judgments, the unity of reason fragments into isolated domains of determination with no principled way of relating them. With it, intelligibility is secured not by a final system, but by a regulated openness to form.
We are now in a position to draw a decisive conclusion. Intelligibility requires a real, irreducible, non-formal order that orients determinate structures toward meaning without determining their content. Philosophy can describe this order, and critique can delimit its function, but neither can generate it from within formal or empirical constraints. To name this order is not yet to explain it—but it is to acknowledge that intelligibility is grounded more deeply than any system can contain.
It is at this point that the question of Logos can no longer be deferred.
V. Logos and the Ground of Intelligibility
The preceding analysis has led, step by step, to a structure that philosophy cannot evade without loss. Intelligibility depends on a real, non-formal order that orients determinate structures toward meaning without itself being reducible to determination. This order is not an object among objects, nor a rule among rules, nor a projection of subjective preference. It grounds without being grounded in the same register. The question now is how such an order can be named without being misconstrued.
It is here that the concept of the Logos re-emerges with philosophical necessity rather than theological imposition. The Logos does not first designate a spoken word, a proposition, or a system of concepts. It names that by virtue of which articulation is possible at all. The Logos is the condition under which meaning can appear, without exhausting itself in any particular meaning that appears.
To invoke the Logos in this sense is not to posit a highest object or an explanatory mechanism. It is to acknowledge that intelligibility itself has a ground that is neither formal nor empirical, neither subjective nor arbitrary. The Logos is not a further determination added to the series of determinations; it is the order that allows determinations to count as meaningful rather than merely occurring.
This clarifies why the Logos cannot be captured within a system without contradiction. Any attempt to formalize the Logos would already presuppose the intelligibility it is meant to explain. The Logos is not what is said, but that by virtue of which anything can be said. It is not the content of meaning, but the source of its possibility. In this respect, the Logos stands in the same structural position as the indeterminate determinability earlier identified: real, irreducible, and non-competitive with determinate forms.
Philosophy can describe this structure and delimit its necessity, but it cannot generate it from within its own methods. While critique can show that intelligibility requires such a ground, it cannot provide the ground itself as an object of determination. This is not a failure of philosophy, but its fulfillment. Reason reaches its limit not in incoherence, but in recognition.
It is at this point that philosophical theology becomes unavoidable—not as a replacement for critique, but as its continuation under a different mode of discourse. Theology does not enter by adding new explanatory content, but by naming what philosophy has already uncovered but cannot finally articulate. The term Logos functions here not as dogma, but as a concept disciplined by metaphysical necessity.
The claim that “in the beginning was the Logos” is therefore not temporal, nor mythological. It is ontological. It affirms that intelligibility is not self-originating, that meaning is not an emergent accident of formal complexity, and that the space in which anything can be understood is itself grounded. Formal systems, scientific theories, languages, and even our most advanced machines do not create this space. They inhabit it. They respond to it.
This response is not compelled. Logos orders without coercion. It grants intelligibility without dictating form. It sustains the finite without abolishing finitude. Determinate structures are neither absorbed into an indeterminate abyss nor left to arbitrariness. They are upheld as meaningful precisely because the ground of meaning does not compete with what it grounds.
From this perspective, the theological claim that the Logos enters history does not negate metaphysical rigor, but radicalizes it. If intelligibility is grounded, then it is not indifferent to the forms it sustains. The Word does not remain aloof from determination, nor does determination exhaust the Word. Meaning can be borne by what does not generate it from itself.
This is not sentiment, metaphor, or consolation. It is a metaphysical consequence of taking intelligibility seriously. Logic itself teaches that meaning cannot be fully objectified without remainder. That remainder is not an embarrassment to be eliminated, but the sign that intelligibility is grounded more deeply than any system can contain.
The paradox of intelligibility is therefore not resolved by closure, but by acknowledgment. Meaning is possible because it is given before it is grasped, ordered before it is determined, and grounded before it is known. To name this ground is not to end inquiry, but to recognize the condition under which inquiry is possible at all.
Postscript: Theory Change and the Limits of Algorithmic Rationality
The structure described in this essay is not confined to abstract metaphysics. It becomes visible with particular clarity in cases of theory change in the sciences. Scientific rationality is often described as rule-governed, cumulative, and corrigible. Yet moments of genuine theoretical transition resist full algorithmic reconstruction.
Consider the adoption of a successor theory in a mature science—one that is not merely an extension of its predecessor, but reorganizes its explanatory framework. Such transitions are not governed by determinate rules that necessitate the abandonment of one theory and the adoption of another. No finite set of criteria—empirical adequacy, simplicity, scope, coherence—functions as a decision procedure whose satisfaction compels assent. Each criterion admits of interpretation, weighting, and trade-off, and no algorithm determines their relative authority in advance.
This does not mean that theory change is arbitrary, irrational, or merely sociological. On the contrary, it is often experienced by practitioners as compelling. But the form of this compulsion is not logical necessity. It arises from a judgment that a new framework makes better sense of the domain as a whole—by unifying phenomena, resolving tensions, or opening new paths of inquiry—without being derivable from the prior framework’s rules of assessment.
Such judgments are paradigmatic instances of reflecting judgment. They operate within an open space of intelligibility in which theories are oriented toward meaning, coherence, and explanatory power without being selected by necessity. Competing theories may coexist within this space, each intelligible, each defensible, yet not equally compelling. The eventual adoption of one over another is lured by intelligibility rather than forced by rule.
What makes this possible is not a hidden algorithm awaiting discovery, but the very structure this essay has traced: an indeterminate, teleological orientation that allows determinate frameworks to be evaluated as frameworks at all. The rationality of theory change depends on this space, but cannot reduce it to formal criteria without loss.
Scientific reason, at its most rigorous moments, thus bears witness to the same paradox that governs intelligibility as such. Its progress presupposes an order that guides without dictating, that attracts without necessitating, and that grounds rational judgment without itself becoming an object of determination.
Appendix: Why This Is Not a Hegelian Account
Because the argument of this essay proceeds at the level of intelligibility as such, it may invite comparison with Hegelian accounts of reason, meaning, and their relation to reality. That comparison is understandable. It is also misleading. The present position differs from Hegel’s at precisely those points that are decisive for the structure of the argument.
First, the account offered here does not operate by dialectical sublation. Hegelian intelligibility advances through contradiction, negation, and Aufhebung, such that earlier moments are aufgehoben—both preserved and overcome—in progressively more adequate conceptual determinations. By contrast, the indeterminacy identified in this essay is not a provisional lack awaiting conceptual resolution. It is an irreducible condition of intelligibility itself. Teleological orientation does not culminate in synthesis or closure, but remains operative precisely insofar as no final determination is possible in principle.
Second, this account explicitly denies the identity of thought and being. For Hegel, the rational is ultimately identical with the real, and intelligibility achieves its fulfillment in the complete articulation of this identity. Here, intelligibility grounds thought without being exhausted by it. Thought responds to intelligibility; it does not complete or actualize it. The possibility of meaning is more fundamental than any conceptual system that articulates meaning.
Third, the teleology at issue is non-necessitating. Hegelian development is governed by logical necessity: given one moment, the next must follow. The teleological spaces described here, by contrast, orient without compelling. They lure without necessitating. They allow for plural, non-equivalent determinations without implying that history, theory, or thought is driven toward a single, comprehensive resolution.
Fourth, subjectivity is not the site of reconciliation. Although Hegel’s system ultimately situates the realization of intelligibility within the self-unfolding of spirit—whether subjective, objective, or absolute—the present account resists any subject-centered grounding. The conditions of intelligibility are ontological rather than anthropological. Subjects participate in intelligibility, but they neither generate nor consummate it.
Finally, and most decisively, this account affirms a permanent remainder. Intelligibility cannot be fully objectified, formalized, or systematized without loss. This remainder is not a defect to be eliminated by further conceptual development, but the very condition under which meaning, judgment, and rational progress remain possible. Any account that denies this remainder in principle, or treats it as destined for eventual absorption into a complete system, differs fundamentally from the position defended here.
For these reasons, while the present argument shares with Hegel a refusal of superficial empiricism and an insistence on first-principles rigor, it rejects the core commitments that define a Hegelian metaphysics. Intelligibility does not achieve closure in system, history, or spirit. It grounds without being aufgehoben.
One may go further. The teleological space of intelligibility described in this essay is not merely compatible with the formulation of a Hegelian system; it is a necessary condition for its possibility. The articulation of any comprehensive dialectical system presupposes a prior horizon within which conceptual development can count as intelligible, progressive, and relevant rather than merely successive. That horizon cannot itself be the product of dialectical closure without circularity. The present account therefore does not reject Hegelian system-building from the outside; it situates it within a more fundamental structure of intelligibility that no system—Hegel’s included—can finally exhaust.
