[MD] Food for Thought

[Ham Priday]

Greetings Craig, Case, Laramie; also Platt, Marsha and other artists --

I trust you've all enjoyed the pleasures of Christmas Day.  I come bearing a
belated gift that seems to fall under the category of "Food for Thought".

Tsion Avital is an internationally known art critic who teaches at the Holon
Academic Institute of Technology in Tel Aviv and who, besides having
published a book titled "Art versus Nonart, Art Out of Mind" [Cambridge
University Press, 2003], is a major contributor to a nouveau art website
called Mindprints 3 which, suprisingly, contains some superbly written
essays on philosophical topics.  (In fact, there is considerably more
information on philosophy here than on art.)

You may wonder why a non-artist like me should want to direct your attention
to a source of this kind.  Perhaps I can whet your appetite by mentioning
that the term "mindprints" -- at least as used by the contributors to this
site -- means "constructive patterns", and that, according to a Cambridge
book reviewer, Avital's book "proposes a new way to define art, anchoring
the nature of art in the nature of the mind, solving a major problem of art
and aesthetics for which no solution has yet been provided."

I have no reason to read Avital's art book.  But in "Mindprints: The
Structural Shadows of Mind-Reality" some fundamental topics we've discussed
here -- including Recursiveness (Nesting), Heirarchy-Randomness,
Symmetry-Asymmetry, Complementarity-Mutual Exclusiveness, and
Determinism-Indeterminism (Probability, Selection, Choice) -- are actual
subtitles of his essay and well worth reading if only for his development of
the subject matter.  As a sample, here is Avital talking about
Negation-Affirmation (Double Negation), an essentialist concept I've
struggled for months to explain to this group, starting with a definitive
introduction:

"The first obvious characteristic of the mindprints is that almost all of
them are in a sense paradoxical concepts, or oxymorons. That is, they
indicate a thing and its opposite at one and the same time. This fact makes
them particularly difficult both to discover and to understand, since in the
Western world we are all still enslaved by the logic of the Greeks, the
fundamental law of which is the law of contradiction. ..."

"Negation-Affirmation (or double negation) would appear to be the most basic
mindprint, since negation is immanent in every mindprint in the sense that
it is the necessary condition for the generation of complementarity in all
mindprints. In other words, negation is what creates otherness, and in this
case the reciprocal connection and opposition between the poles that form
each of the mindprints. From a psychological viewpoint, we tend to think
that affirmation is more basic than negation. But from a logical point of
view, negation is more primary, for negation cannot be derived from
affirmation, whereas affirmation can be derived from negation by means of
double negation. At the same time, affirmation has no meaning without
negation, and not the contrary, for the one always assumes the other and
they are therefore complementary. ..."

"The wonder of Creation is perhaps the wonder of the creation of negation.
Everything else is derived from it. The first verses of Genesis describe the
first distinctions that God made, which are also the creation of the first
complementary pairs: heaven-earth, light-darkness, etc., but no distinction
is possible without negation, and negation and double negation therefore
preceded all distinctions that followed. For the same reason complementarity
too, which was generated by negation, preceded the complementary pairs that
were created. Actually, the first Asymmetry, which according to the Big Bang
theory is the moment of creation, could not be without negation. In a
humorous vein, one might suggest a different opening for the first chapter
of the Bible: In the beginning God was very bored amidst Perfect Symmetry,
in which absolutely nothing happened. Then accidentally He sighed, "Oh No!"
This created the first Asymmetry, which brought into being the other
mindprints... and the rest is History. In other words, there is no symmetry
without asymmetry, and there is no asymmetry without negation; therefore
negation is a precondition for Symmetry-Asymmetry, and the same can be shown
with regard to all the other mindprints. In a final regression, the negation
of negation is perhaps what created Being, and this is perhaps the
significance of the proposition that Being was created from nothingness.
There is nothing new about this, since the idea already arose in the
creation myths and in philosophy, in Western and Eastern cultures, and also
in modern physics."   [The author is too modest.  I would remove all three
"perhaps" from this inspired paragraph.]

Apparently there is more to the philosophy of art than I'd imagined.
Clearly there is a treasury of food for thought in this analysis -- 
certainly enough to take us into the new year.  Avital's essay can be
accessed at http://www.mi.sanu.ac.yu/ .

"Perhaps" some of you will find this as fascinating as I do.  In any case,
I'd like to get your opinion as to whether these ideas have any relevance to
the MoQ.  (I'm already incorporating some of the above in one of my Values
Page articles.)

Sorry to interrupt your holiday, but I get excited when I discover a writer
from another field expressing my own concepts with such clarity.

Essentially yours,
Ham