Wednesday, July 14, 2004
Wildean Dialectic posted by Richard Seymour
The way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test Reality we must see it on the tight-rope. When the Verities become acrobats we can judge them. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, page 41.
Yer man at Dialectical Confusions explains the title of his blog:
[I]t represents an ironic anticipatory defence of what will no doubt emerge as the inchoate nature of my politics ("no, you see, I'm not contradicting myself, I'm just being dialectical") and a genuine belief in the need to grasp the full, and often paradoxical, complexity of matters rather than any genuine commitment to systematically dialectical thought.
I thought he might be interested in a quote from Saint Oscar, Terry Eagleton's excellent, acerbic little play about the last days of Oscar Wilde (trial, prison, then Paris), which amply summarises the nature of dialectical thought as opposed to the stale, empiricist superstition of the English:
"We are, moreover, a people characterised by what I might venture to call a dialectical habit of thought - the unity of opposites. Unlike the English, we tend to believe that one thing is true, but also its antithesis. It is not that we are illogical, merely economical..." (Terry Eagleton, Saint Oscar, 2004, p 28).