PreviousWelcome

Everywhere you go, here you are

"The meaning of the river flowing is not that all things are changing so that we cannot encounter them twice but that some things stay the same only by changing."[1] (Heraclitus)

The word by way of preface which seeks to break through the screen stretched between the author and the reader by the book itself does not give itself out as a word of honor. But it belongs to the very essence of language, which consists in continually undoing its phrase by the foreword or the exegesis, in unsaying the said, in attempting to restate without ceremonies what has already been ill understood in the inevitable ceremonial in which the said delights. (Emanuel Levinas, "Totality and Infinity", 1961/1969, p. 30)

There is no last word on any substantive topic.

The hermeneutic circle.

"Everything is the same thing: you learn more who you are." (Tom Gee)

If you keep doing different things, you are doing a same thing, namely "something different from what you previously did". If you circle around to do something you have previously done before, then you are doing a same thing, namely "revisiting something you previously did".

Which would you rather repeat: (A) seeing n things at depth 1, or (B) seeing one thing at depth n? I (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) generally choose #B, becuse I've already done M A's for M > 0, but never been to level N+M for M > 0. There's something dimensionally different in revisiting the same thing than in visiting new things, although, obviously, they are extensionally different. No matter how many points you visit on the x-y plane, you will neve r encounter any point in the z ≠ 0 dimension.

MusicalNotes
The Musician
....it was in Bosnia, the biggest single act of ethnic cleaning I had witnessed to date.... and there was an old man who stopped to talk to us.... and he was 80 years old and he looked as though he had already died.... and I asked him do you mind if I ask you Are you a Croat or a muslim? And he said, "I'm a musician".... (BBC World Service, June 26, 2022 03:00AM-06:00AM BST, Internet Archive)

+2024.02.16 v033
 PreviousReturn to Table of contents
⇒ Go to: L'esprit de l'escalierNext


Footnotes

  1. Compare: (A) a pond, and (B) a river.


No matter how high you go, you never get above the surface; No matter how deep you go, you never get below the surface. Making effort but going nowhere. Entropy will get you in the end.


This page has been validated as HTML 5.