Hegel wrote that ‘sense’ is a wonderful word, because it has two opposite meanings: On the one hand, it indicates the senses – sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste – and all that has to do with sensibility. On the other hand it indicates meaning, as in ‘it makes no sense’. This circumstance cannot be considered accidental. The sensible and the intelligible have a common root, as we have seen, and this root is found in the environment, in the interactions and inscriptions that take place within it, and in recording as a metaphysical condition of interactions and the environment: in reproductive imagination instead of productive imagination, in repetition instead of creation. If meaning can be grasped by the senses before the spirit, it is because it is outside before being inside.

How does spiritualisation happen? On the level of technology, Hegel observed that iteration is what ensures the transition from material to spiritual. The technology to which Hegel refers is the practice of embalming corpses in the Egyptian religion, which he interpreted as a first intuition of the immortality of the soul. And he noted that death, as suggested by embalming, occurs twice: first as the death of the natural; then, with embalming, as the birth of the spirit. Without recalling the long tradition that, from Plato to Hegel, sees the body as the material aspect of the sign, Hegel's thesis is that the simple preservation of matter, which makes it iterable, generates the process of alteration that ensures the passage from the material to the spiritual, from passivity to activity, from the pyramid to consciousness.

Perfect repetition is not the norm, but the exception. For example, for the organisms that reproduce asexually (which are evolutionarily older than those that reproduce sexually), mutations, i.e. alterations, take place as errors in the copying of DNA, i.e. in the principle of iteration. From these exceptions come good or bad things, at least if we take the point of view of humans, such as genetic mutations, whether they be useful for the evolution of the species or result in the death of the individual, as in the case of neoplasms. This is how, finally, we have alteration: the rank of soldiers comes together, or, outside the metaphor, perceptions (in the Aristotelian example) turn into meanings.