Sunday, January 23, 2011

Motion and grasp

It seems to me that the potter at her wheel is an ideogram of composure. The plate emerges from our grasp of the material in motion.

An analogue of this motion is experienced immediately in our institutions, just as an analogue our grasp is experienced in our intuitions. We see immediately that the plate is round, we get it. And we throw the clay onto the motion of the wheel.

From this motion and this grasp we derive our emotions and our concepts.

While the immediacies (intuitions, institutions) are of course available in separate moments (seeing, doing), their integration in the potter at her wheel shows that there can ultimately be no intuition without institution, no institution without intuition. In fact, there can be neither institution nor intuition, no experience, without their integration—composure.

And this is the theme of all "crisis".

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