Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1998 10:23:41 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Re: Avant-Garde ???


Saul wrote:

> As an aside  resistence is too once sided for it is a defensive posture, a
> rear garde action and is premised on the idea that lost is inevitable or
> that what we stand for  constitutes a  permanent opposition.  Such a stance
> only legitimates what we seeming either oppose or resist. 

I agree.  "Resistance" is not a useful term in this context; on the contrary.

> This in itself
> may be taken as indicative of the failure to understand that we seem to
> approach our conceptual truths through a process in which a proposition is
> addressed by a  counter proposition. The dialog between the two functions
> as a corrective one to the other for rather than  constituting an
> irreconcilable  contradition in which one term must over come the other the
> goal is to produce a synthesis that is new terms and conditions.

I question whether this is an accurate model, unless by "conceptual truth"
you mean by definition a truth that is approached in this manner.  I don't
believe that thinking proceeds by positing static "propositions" and that 
movement ensues from clashes between mutually contradictory, but in themselves 
inert, propositions.  I would say that motion is inherent to thinking, and that
"propositions" represent thinking in an artificial state of arrest, the way
a photograph represents a moving object.  One might say, in fact,
that to induce a self-reflexive self-consciousness is to release thinking
from the staticness of propositionalization. 


-m


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