Anchor for this item posted by Bernard (ben) Tremblay at Sunday, May 12, 2002; Sunday, May 12, 2002

The epistemological basis of history has to be clear: no description is empty of anticipated consequences, and especially not those written subsequent to them. The dualism that immediately comes to play, either in anticipation of consequences or subsequently, is what distorts and perversifies the situation; absent that distortion, "things unfold as they should" with their inherent workability unobstructed. But partial depictions, contrived in anticapation either keenly lustful or aversive, entail the imposition of constructs and those in their turn require conceptualizations for their defense. A simple water glass can be at once half full and half empty, but the verbalization of its perception as though commands attendance to a paradoxical problematic where there is, in fact and actually, only a simple glass of water. What lives through communication is human experience, and no product of mechanistic reductionism can do better than come down hard and squarely on one side of a matter that, actually and really, like the fullness of the glass, has either none or innumerably many. To describe an entity is necessarily to at least imply, if not mention, the anticipated consequences of its being as described. And to describe it is also, to a greater or lesser degree, to describe its environment. But to provide such a description to an entity or event or situation is never other than to tell a tale of human experience and endeavor ... experiencing the object of the description and the endeavor of describing. What is communicated without distortion is that humanity; reduced and restricted, descriptions are shallow lies better conveyed after being further reduced to machine data, so that there would be less danger of their being confounded with the stuff of human activity. While it is not possible to be exhaustive in our descriptions, it is always easy enough to lie by omission. Narrative under the grand title of history only deceives the worse.
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