From ‘Foreword’, in “The Sound of the One Hand”, by Ben-Ami Scharfstein

“analytic thought must, by its very definition, apply definite names, concepts, and values to our experience. All these are necessarily subjective because their are derived from particular and limited points of view, and all are necessarily too definite, because they are inadequate to the fluidity, to the ebb and flow of nature. All these are therefore necessarily distorting. They lead us […] to become entangled in contradictions. We should learn to relax our conceptual definiteness and our incessant distinguishing between one thing and another. Things merge no less than they separate. […] Opposites are in a sense the same, “the admissible is simultaneously the inadmissible”, and every definite thing, every “it”, as the translator puts Chuang-tzu’s word, is also the same as that which is other than itself. “What is ‘it'”, says Chuang-tzu, “is also ‘other’, what is ‘other’ is also ‘it’.. Are there really It and Other? Or really no It and Other?”

From ‘Foreword’, in “The Sound of the One Hand”, by Ben-Ami Scharfstein

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s