Nate,
That passage sounded incredibly like something from Mikhailov's "Riddle of
the Self" but I couldn't locate it quickly. Where did you draw it from or
is it your own statement?
Paul H. Dillon
----- Original Message -----
From: Nate Schmolze <nate_schmolze@yahoo.com>
To: <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, September 12, 2000 5:27 PM
> " Now even in the most complex actions I am able to be my own critic
mainly
> because the sum total of historically completed actions lives in me,
> objectively unfolded in the language of my people. Besides my friends and
> tutors, my teachers and professors, I have constant interlocutors, critics
> and helpers in those who throughout the centuries posed and solved the
most
> serious and difficult riddles of existence, who in themselves, in their
> works personally experienced the problems of their time and argued with
the
> time, and with me, a representative of another culture that is still the
> same, continuing culture of humankind. And I together with them, in
> disputation with them, take part (even if I discover only for myself) in
the
> discovery of great ideas, ideals and evaluations. In myself I relive anew
> the clash of the notions of good and evil, beauty and happiness, truth and
> aim. They are born again in me and perhaps in some way they are new....
And
> now I myself on the basis of my own experience, assessing my own actions,
> know that thinking is not description, not the reproduction of that which
is
> given in the imagination, of that what I find in the spatial field of
> experience. Thinking is my movement, the movement of my knowledge in time.
> And this movement in time is possible because the different voices of
> different times, peoples, epochs and cultures constantly come to life in
my
> life. Teaching someone to think does, in fact, mean involving him in
active,
> objective intercourse, bringing human history into his life, teaching him
to
> feel, rejoice and suffer, to protest and admire, to know and thus to carry
> in himself a whole world in all its integrity as the known, conscious
world
> of our life. This is the only way to awaken the doer and the critic, the
> craftsman and the artist in a person. So now my different Selves live even
> in my dreams, arguing with each other, assuming the shape of other people
> including people that have never existed in this world. They argue,
imagine,
> act and even solve problems with which I and they wrestled during my
waking
> hours. But sometimes, just because in a dream they are not restrained by
the
> clear knowledge "That can't happen" , they are able to find something that
> really never did happen but that today I simply cannot do without" .
>
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