A couple of thoughts on the concept of ‘form’: on the one hand 'form' refers to something merely apparent, as when we say ‘x took the form of y’ - for example, if someone were to say, ‘his anti-Semitism took the form of a violent animosity towards all things Israeli’. Here ‘form’ is an inessential appearance. On the other hand, 'form' refers to something like the inner structure, the essential workings – we might say ‘all Shakespeare’s sonnets have the same form despite the differences in content’ Or one thinks of the Heideggerian argument that Communism and Capitalist Democracy have the same form (the same technological hubris) despite stated ideological differences. Thus, on the one hand form refers to semblance, on the other hand to ‘essence’, or inner structure. One meaning seems to flip over into its exact opposite. The response to this ambivalence is not to concede that these are simply two different meanings, two different notions, but rather to ask what it is about the notion of form that produces this split. The ‘disposition’ toward these two contradictory meanings must in some sense be folded back into the notion itself.
The above might well be extended to thinking about Concepts in general. The sense that the ‘unfolding’ of the concept is internal to the concept itself can be related to this statement from Hegel:
The concept is the universal which maintains itself in its particulars (Aesthetics I, p.13)
Note the force of that ‘maintains’: isn’t the implication that the concept lives only in and through its ‘particularizations’, that it sustains and 'explicates' itself through these particulars, rather than being some rigid and invariable template. The Concept is nothing more than the very logic of this unfolding. This would in turn cause us to rethink Adorno’s philosophical ‘credo’quoted by me in another post:
Philosophy has, at this historical moment, its true interest in what Hegel, in accordance with tradition, proclaimed his disinterest: in the non-conceptual, the individual and the particular; in what, ever since Plato, has been dismissed as transient and inconsequential and which Hegel stamped with the label of lazy existence. Its theme would be the qualities which it has degraded to the merely contingent, to quantité négligeable [French: negligible quantity]. What is urgent for the concept is what it does not encompass, what its abstraction-mechanism eliminates, what is not already an exemplar of the concept.
(Young Hegelian has some interesting thoughts on the above, here.)