archive of concepts and ideas

Entry #001

By the mid seventies that was becoming a difficult position to hold. There was a sudden shift. They became the first people in the world to discover the Gulag. Along comes the invention of post-structuralism.

It’s not naturalistic to look for properties in the environment that would correspond to a container instead of being seen in the language faculty.

Houses, things in the environment. On one hand, it has the property of eliciting a point of view that says you’re an exterior surface and a distinguished interior with abstract properties. But it also has any other properties. You’re back to the question, why do I pick that set of properties.

If someone can make it coherent.. it’s obvious that your interpretation of a text depends on all sort of things that your brain or environment or history is bringing to it. Trying to find something non obvious–but maybe you’re lacking in something. If you pick up one of the articles, you might not understand it. But in the case of the review, if you made the effort you could get to understand it.

If you went to your friend in the physics department, and said it was gibberish, and asked for help, they could explain to you at your level of ignorance. That’s a radical difference, because you don’t know right now what process you can go through to get it to be something other than words spinning around on a page.

Maybe it’s a new level of intellectual achievement that goes beyond set theory.