(New readers will want to start with the first installment.)
Let us continue our beginning:
LoF p. 1
- We take as given the idea of distinction and the idea of indication, and that we cannot make an indication without drawing a distinction. We take, therefore, the form of distinction for the form.
If this doesn’t strike you as having a “mystical” flavor, then you are drinking the wrong concoction. I’m not going to try to explain this, but rather I’m going to try to re-frame it; you could say, in GSB-approved language, that I’m going to re-mark it. The important thing to note about this, the very first “official” sentence of the LoF, is that it is recursive. Let’s be clear: the Laws of Form (not the book, the LAWS) are only possible because of a recursion, a throwing back on itself of itself. But a throwing back of what onto itself?
Well, “nothing”, of course; but nothing understood as what everything would be if it were.
But of course nothing doesn’t remain nothing (well, it does, but it doesn’t), because here we are. The question GSB is really attempting to get at is the question: (more…)