Theses

Previously, to formulate a thesis meant to put forward a principal general proposition on which one could subsequently rely. Yet thinking always already takes place within certain boundaries. A formulated thesis is already local. A local proposition cannot yield a universal foundation. An axiom presupposes that such a thesis is no longer moved. But this locality becomes visible every time a thesis or axiom is put forward, and it is impossible to leave them immobile. What one wanted to fix was something general that could serve as a foundation. That is precisely what cannot be fixed. At this point the formulation came to a halt.

What is now fixed is not something that will be eternal, but the point at which thinking has stopped and from which thought can push off. A thesis is an intermediate link within this movement. The proposition has already been formulated and remains available for the next distinction.

A thesis records where reflection has arrived and does not prescribe where it must arrive next.

Thought pushes off from this point. It can be connected with other points, and one can examine what consequences arise from it. If distinction moves further, the thesis changes. The earlier formulation remains as a trace of the stopping point: one can see where thinking stood and where it subsequently took a different direction.

Thesis and Axiom

The breadth of a claim and the rigidity of its status are not the same. An axiom acquires rigidity through localization. First, a boundary of the system is drawn, and only within that system is a proposition fixed as a starting point.

Within this system, the proposition is accepted as a starting point. As long as reasoning remains within the system, one does not question anything beneath that point.

A thesis can hold a much broader relationship: not a rule of a particular formal system, but the structure of the meaningful as such. This breadth does not make it more rigid. Breadth does not take it beyond the boundaries within which it is stated: a thesis remains local. Previously, this locality brought writing to a halt because an eternal universal foundation could not be assembled from a local proposition. Now, within these boundaries, the stopping point of thinking is recorded. The thesis remains a distinction in motion and changes if the subsequent movement of thought requires it.

The scope of a claim is separated here from its logical force. Logical force measures which consequences can be derived from premises. A thesis and an axiom differ in their domain of operation and the mobility of their status.

An axiom is narrower but more rigid. A thesis is broader but more mobile.

A thesis does not occupy the place of a system’s foundation. An axiom sustains a system because, within it, one does not question anything beneath the accepted starting point. A thesis records the state of distinction.

Here is the point that distinction has reached. One may question what lies beneath it.

Generality does not require absoluteness. The habitual approach collapses fundamentality into immutability: the more fundamental a proposition, the more unchanging it supposedly must remain. Here, the architecture is different. Depth can make a thesis more general, but it does not turn it into an absolute construction independent of the subject. A very general assertion can remain a thesis.

Shifting a thesis continues the work. The previous formulation does not have to turn out to have been an error. It preserves a trace of how the next distinction emerged.

1. Everything that is meaningful is subjective in the sense of belonging to the subject.
2. The material embodiment of form does not make form objective. Artifacts fix the consequences of subjects’ actions within a form, but do not turn the distinctions that generated them into properties of reality.
3. Form appears external to the subject when the result of its reproduction conceals the subjects who created it and continue reproducing it.
4. An action does no more than it does.
5. The relationship between one thing and another creates a new difference. (In physics, this is often called a property.)
6. No proposition contains meaning within itself.
7. Normalization leads to an increase in falsehood. It is form. True falsehood is the space of meaning. Meaning is difference, not equality. We may have five propositions. Only one of them is true. Normalization makes all of them equal in standing. As a result, discovering the truth becomes difficult. One can add another million propositions: normalization makes them all equal in standing, and discovering the truth becomes even more difficult. But for truth to be discovered, it must initially carry greater weight than everything else. That is, normalization destroys this possibility.
8. If there is a thesis, one must try to find its antithesis. This follows from the struggle against absolutism. Have I stumbled into Hegel?
9. We should not search for the hidden leap made by the subject, but try to discover what makes the subject make that hidden leap. For example, the desire to close a question.
10. For the logic of opposing camps, the unknown is dangerous not because it is incomprehensible, but because it belongs to neither side.
11. One subject uses form to continue inquiry. Another uses the same form to terminate inquiry. One subject uses form to continue inquiry. Another uses the same form to terminate inquiry.
12. The form may be identical. The relationship differs. As a result, the very direction of activity differs.
13. A declared pursuit of truth and one’s actual relationship to the possibility of revising one’s own picture of the world turn out to be different things.
14. Closing the question turns out to be not a result of investigation, but a condition determining its direction.
15. Form can serve as the public language of justification, while the relationship participates in the very formation of the decision.
16. The stated basis of a decision may not coincide with the actual basis of the relationship.
17. The meaning of an action depends on the subject’s relationship to what they are doing: the same outward action can have different meanings. Research on the Subject’s Relationship to Their Own Activity.
18. No matter how external reality changes or what influence it exerts on the subject, the final word always remains with the subject. The subject can always say “no.” The subject is not a will-less toy in the hands of external reality.
19. The meaning lies in acquiring knowledge, not in knowledge itself. The meaning lies in creating form, not in the form itself. The fundamental distinction between directedness and its realization.
20. Mass consciousness can defend not what is taking place, nor even the truth about what is taking place, but the stability of an accepted thesis. Facts contradicting the thesis are perceived not as grounds for revising it, but as a threat that must be neutralized. (https://chatgpt.com/c/6adb46e0-1a8c-83ed-9c19-165b5b87ebdc)
21. One of the first fences that must be discarded is the division into Self/Other.
22. I have just realized that collective confirmation of distinctions allows a subject to avoid going insane. It is a condition for the existence of a community. But it is not a condition for cognition as such.
23. Every thesis has boundaries.
24. The only fundamental mechanism for improving society is increasing its capacity to distinguish reality. Not the victory of the correct form over the incorrect one, but the gradual uncovering of contradictions, their foundations, and the mechanisms of their reproduction. Replacing one form may become the result of this movement, but by itself it is not the mechanism of development. Society becomes better not because the “right” ones have won, but because it becomes harder to reproduce old contradictions without recognizing them.