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Artist's Talk by Susan Fielder: 4

Hans Teichen an abstract timeless structure. This duality was more or less accepted by enough philosophers at the time. The question they all trained their minds on was the understanding of what governed this oscillation between order and disorder.

This little old Dutchman, in his thin sharp voice, began to pick apart all the arguments of the preceding papers. He accused them all of idealism. Each one had relied in their arguments on some essential principle that binds the two moments together. I can remember he called them `cowardly'. With a broad sweep of his arm, he made the bold statement --and I found an old copy of the paper to quote from --

If I were to adjust my measure to the limits of current phenomenological thought, I would say that there was no philosophical link at all between order and disorder. It is not philosophy that stands at the gates which separate them. It is not philosophy with some godlike knowledge that governs the alternation between disintegration and restoration. We forget that god died sometime late in the nineteenth-century. So who stands at the gates? Well, nothing more or less than ourselves -- ordinary mortals, making decisions, procrastinating, misjudging. It's time to pronounce philosophy dead before rigor mortis sets in and we're left waiting for Godot.

I lost a page at this point. I remember, it was a real nightmare. At least I found the Teichen quote. I still get goosebumps reading it.

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