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PARTICIPATORY_TRUTH

                                      September 11, 2006


      "Horatio percieved a new truth, that at first
      seemed to him melancholy, but then he saw that
      it was pleasant and gracious. It was that when
      his friends had been alive, even with the best
      will in the world, he could not submit to
      their thoughts and be simply moved by their
      wisdom; he had clung with desire and loyalty
      to their presence, but to their ideas he would
      set up a kind of dialectical opposition, as if
      to drive them to another formulation with
      which he could not help but agree.  (How could
      there be such a formulation if he would not
      listen quietly?)  He did take it enough for
      granted that each of his friends existed and
      maybe meant what he said.  But now when they
      spoke to him absent -- and no more change now
      in what they said, except the changes that he
      himself unconsciously introduced -- how wise,
      persuasive, well said and final were their
      sentences; how right their feelings were!  One
      could not help but agree, with a continual
      little participatory smile."

          -- p.264
          Section 1, Chapter 15, "Fires",
          Part III of Book 2: "The State of Nature"

          Paul Goodman
          EMPIRE_CITY


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