kelley wrote:
>
> your
> disrespect for the hard work people put into this stuff is unconscionable.
> you accuse me of not being serious,
Kelley, the most important part of this whole thread, as far as I am concerned, lies in the negation of this assertion. I understand that in legal journals it is legitimate to quote by citation. In other words, one need not quote a text to have it part of one's own text but merely cite it. I am going to adopt that procedure here. I was only semi-serious in my citations of Korzybski and Ogden and Richards, but I am deadly serious in my next citation: V.I. Lenin, CW, Vols. 1-15; Vol. 16, pp. 1-214; Vol. 22, pp. 103-319; Vol. 38. Having read them, you will have an inkling of what I mean by (a) agitation and (b) the necessity of spontaneity. (Those who have only read Lenin through anti-Leninist spectacles are under the strange delusion that to say "X is insufficient" is to say "X is unneeded," though actually it is a way of saying that "X is absolutely essential." X (Spontaneity) is where politics start. The whole of Lenin is one great study of how marxists should respond to, merge with, aid, this essential spontaneity of the working class.
Now probably you are not going to read those works before you write your next post. And in fact there is no reason you should. You have your own matrix within which you make your judgnments of what books not to read. (It is obscurantist to speak of choosing what books _to read_; you only begin to understand my position when you see that every decision to read X is, really, a decistion not to read several thousand books that are not X, and not to read several million more books and articles and commercials and stray notes that you will (quite properly) never even have heard of, yet by reading this post (if you are, and you have no obligation to read it) you are deciding not to read a magazine which you might discover by going to the nearest drugstore and browsing its magazine shelves. How do you know that the current issue of _Self_ (I think there's a magazine with that title) might not contain something that would change your life. You can't know unless you read it. (I take it for granted that since you cite the _Theses on Feuerbach_ you are intimately familiar with every page of _Poverty of Philosophy_, since the former is meaningless except in the context of the latter.)
No act is symbolic in and of itself. It takes first a second act of conscious reflection and then further activity of various kinds (mental and physical) to give the first act symbolic content. I'm really not going to waste my time on any argument that "communicative action" can be other than either (a) a mere commonplace of no intellectual interest or (b) a first step in generating a world view in which only facts, not relations, exist. I am as sure of that, at this moment, as you are sure that the current issue of _Self_ will not change your life. I can't predict the future, of course, and I may yet . . . .who knows?
Carrol