[MD] Food for Thought

[MarshaV]

Greetings Ham,

I have just ordered Tsion Avital's book through Interlibrary 
loan.  It sounds mind boggling, but I'm curious.  Is it something I 
need to understand?

Marsha


At 02:45 AM 12/26/2006, Ham wrote:

>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
>
>
>moq_discuss mailing list
>Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc.
>http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org
>Archives:
>http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/
>http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/