dialectic of experiences and concepts
Follow-up to Self–positing concepts and double articulation from Philosophy
it is the dialectic of experiences and concepts that has itself to be conceptualized in some way. can it be conceptualized? i think it cannot be conceptualized in 'mind'. concepts cannot conceive itself as concepts of concepts. the synthesis of the dialectic cannot be one of the contradicting elements. i propose the dialectic is realized in action: the encounter of subject and object, where experiences (chaosmos) and concepts 'explose' and 'implose' in a way that the One and the Many become something our mind fails to grasp. the unspeakale, the unwordable. in action experience and concept are inscribed in the body of reality. they are not 'forgotten' even if this memory is described and painted outside what we call human memory.
i have tried to describe this encounter in an essay on the antropogenesis, the transformation of apes into men, the emergence of mind (through visualization (all our words concenring mind refers to vision, in nearly all indogerman languages: e.g. 'wit' and 'wisdom' means 'that wat is seen' as in latin videre, Greek 'idea' Gothic 'withan' and old-indian 'weit'. this essay is unfortunately in Dutch, I will translate it in English in March, when I have finished: it is some 100 pages). it concerns the dialectic of 'nature' versus 'culture' which is the same dialectic.
so positing the dialectic is only the first step. 'now philosophers have to change the world'. most happily, this is done (but most of the times we do not see it, as we are afraid of the future). in this sense, there is a division of labour between philosophy, science and art. in the socialist revolution of the turn of the century around 1900, all three were brought together. this work has to be overdone.
Rather than a dialectic of subject and object (which D&G insist "give a poor approximation of thought [WhIP?85]), the relation or initial uptake between experience and concept is a function of what they call "the image of thought" projected by a given philosopher or philosophical corpus.
29 Jan 2006, 18:37
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