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Dialectical Cycle

Every idea casts a shadow that returns to haunt it, claiming its moment on the stage of history, which therefore breathes, as it were, through a dialectic of opposites. This is because the propositional nature of thought guarantees a complement to any assertion, another side of the coin, which is a proposition in its own right, an anti-thesis. Any idea or scheme, no matter how clever or complete, omits something that could be perilous to ignore. But the very nature of the Ideal is to assume that thought can be complete and mind should have its own way, without the niggling interference of details. Nevertheless, we are real embodied creatures, not simply minds. We live in the complex world of matter and energy, not in the oversimplified storybook world of thought, where anything goes simply because it has been said or conceived.

RELATED TAGS: [history as dialectic (of history), shadow of thought, return of the repressed, propositional thought, embodiment, dialectical cycle]