Yesterday my cousin Valentina texted me the following message(my English translation):
Living is the art of mediation with the others. I need to contradict myself to reach a compromise, thus achieving conciliation. Otherwise, it’s death and apathy.
Conflict is positive if obtained through mediation, which is not just yielding, but understanding the right mechanism.Without clash with the others we wouldn’t grow up.
Now, this is for sure a lesson of self development which should be posted in the appropriate page of this blog. But first, I would like to reflect on a couple of points not strictly related to the content of this message but to the reason of it.
Although she did not state the source at the end of it, I assumed that Hegel was the author of it (if not textually, in the substance), since she mentioned that she was revising him on Saturday in preparation to her test.
It’s not the first time she sends me passages by others of her beloved philosophers as a way to share her philosophical experience with me. However, this time she pointed out very clearly how much she hated Hegel for being so bold, obscure and wordy. In fact, she also complained the difficulty she was encountering in applying Hegel’s complex system to her life. This message confirmed that eventually she did manage to find a connection between the Hegelian investigation and her concrete life, through the *dialectical* nature of our (confronting) relationship. I was glad to be passively useful to her epistemological pathway and to hear that she comprehended, and appreciated, the "dynamic quality" of our arguments. According to Hegel in fact, “Contradiction and negation have a dynamic quality that at every point in each domain of reality -- consciousness, history, philosophy, art, nature, society -- leads to further development until a rational unity is reached that preserves the contradictions as phases and sub-parts of a larger, evolutionary whole”.*
Last consideration—Did she want to show me how wise she is even though she was born 10 years after me? Oh no, I will take it as a message of love; a step towards (our) unity.
* © Wikipedia
Thought of the Day
Monday, 12 December 2005
Unity through negation
Yesterday my cousin Valentina texted me the following message(my English translation):
Living is the art of mediation with the others. I need to contradict myself to reach a compromise, thus achieving conciliation. Otherwise, it’s death and apathy.
Conflict is positive if obtained through mediation, which is not just yielding, but understanding the right mechanism.Without clash with the others we wouldn’t grow up.
Now, this is for sure a lesson of self development which should be posted in the appropriate page of this blog. But first, I would like to reflect on a couple of points not strictly related to the content of this message but to the reason of it.
Although she did not state the source at the end of it, I assumed that Hegel was the author of it (if not textually, in the substance), since she mentioned that she was revising him on Saturday in preparation to her test.
It’s not the first time she sends me passages by others of her beloved philosophers as a way to share her philosophical experience with me. However, this time she pointed out very clearly how much she hated Hegel for being so bold, obscure and wordy. In fact, she also complained the difficulty she was encountering in applying Hegel’s complex system to her life. This message confirmed that eventually she did manage to find a connection between the Hegelian investigation and her concrete life, through the *dialectical* nature of our (confronting) relationship. I was glad to be passively useful to her epistemological pathway and to hear that she comprehended, and appreciated, the "dynamic quality" of our arguments. According to Hegel in fact, “Contradiction and negation have a dynamic quality that at every point in each domain of reality -- consciousness, history, philosophy, art, nature, society -- leads to further development until a rational unity is reached that preserves the contradictions as phases and sub-parts of a larger, evolutionary whole”.*
Last consideration—Did she want to show me how wise she is even though she was born 10 years after me? Oh no, I will take it as a message of love; a step towards (our) unity.
* © Wikipedia
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1 comment:
And most people just text each other junk like: where r u?
:)
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