Hossein Jorjani
First publication: 2026 – 07 – 18
Gurvitch dismisses Hegel’s dialectic as “a carefully disguised dance in place,” arguing that all movement ultimately returns to the Absolute and therefore produces no genuine novelty. The present observation accepts Gurvitch’s criticism of Hegel’s teleological conception of history. It questions only the generality of the metaphor by which that criticism is expressed by asking a broader philosophical question: Must every process that appears stationary be regarded as devoid of genuine change?
Modern science suggests otherwise. Many systems exhibit long periods of apparent stability while continuously altering their future possibilities. In evolutionary biology, neutral mutations may persist through countless generations without producing any immediate phenotypic effect, yet later become advantageous, disadvantageous, or functionally significant when either the genetic background or the environment changes. Likewise, in metabolic control analysis, individual biochemical or genetic changes may remain effectively silent because control is distributed across the network; only subsequent changes reveal their functional importance.
These examples illustrate a more general principle. A system may appear unchanged at the macroscopic level while its latent structure is continually being modified. What changes is not necessarily its present state but the range of states that become accessible in the future.
The philosophical distinction is therefore not between movement and rest, but between dynamic stability and teleological circularity. A dynamically stable system preserves or transforms its future possibilities, even when its present behaviour appears unchanged. A genuinely circular process, by contrast, returns to a predetermined endpoint without altering the space of future possibilities. Apparently repetitive motion may therefore conceal profound historical change.
Hossein Jorjani 