It might seem that saying things have determinate qualities undermines their dynamism, while emphasizing things dynamism of things fuzzies all the boundaries to the point where there are no things at all.

Desmond, again, demurs. We cannot have a pure flux without any determinacy, because then “there would be no distinct center of perception (the ‘self’) trying to make out things and shapes in the fog: there would be no thing in this pure indefiniteness.” But this is not how the world comes to us:

Creation, Desmond claims, is “universal impermanence,” yet “things stand out in the flux of impermanence. They stand out, not because they stand in the static sense, but because both they and the impermanence are determinations of the original power of being.”

Things emerge like a landscape come to shapeliness in a morning fog, but Desmond argues that “it is not right to say that the determinate was simply statically there in the indeterminate, the way supposedly a picture is ‘suspended’ in the photographic negative.” The emergence of things is a “dynamical appearing in which the constituents that compose the appearing are themselves dynamical.” A thing comes to the foreground against a background that “helps to outline its difference,” but in this foregrounding, “neither the ‘this,’ nor the foreground nor the background are static.” If emergence were no more than the hidden becoming plain, there “would be no real development at all, merely the application of an extrinsic manipulation to give overtly what was always statically there covertly.”