An initial shocking transcendence is constitutive of all dialectical thinking

Evidence

There is a breathlessness about this shift from the normal object-oriented activity of the mind to such dialectical self-consciousness—something of the sickening shudder we feel in an elevator’s fall or in the sudden dip in an airliner. That recalls us to our bodies much as this recalls us to our mental positions as thinkers and observers. The shock indeed is basic, and constitutive of the dialectic as such: without this transformational moment, without this initial conscious transcendence of an older, more naïve position, there can be no question of any genuinely dialectical coming to consciousness. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 635 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

It is a matter of common observation among all scholars, from personal experience, that any new theory studied with “heroic fury” 469 (that is, studied not out of mere external curiosity but for reasons of deep interest) for a certain period, especially if one is young, attracts the student of its own accord and takes possession of his whole personality, only to be limited by the study of the next theory, until such a time as a critical equilibrium is created and one learns to study deeply but without succumbing to the fascination of the system and the author under study. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1360 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

For insofar as dialectical thinking is thought about thought, thought to the second power, concrete thought about an object, which at the same time remains aware of its own intellectual operations in the very act of thinking, such self-consciousness must be inscribed in the very sentence itself. And insofar as dialectical thinking characteristically involves a conjunction of opposites or at least conceptually disparate phenomena, it may truly be said of the dialectical sentence what the Surrealists said about the image, namely, that its strength increases proportionately as the realities linked are distant and distinct from each other. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 115 (#builds-on, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Dialectical thinking is thought to the second power inscribed in the sentence itself — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 115; Dialectical thought inverts Aristotle’s artisanal model of form as starting point — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 672; The shock of self-transcendence is constitutive of any genuinely dialectical consciousness — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 635 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• The shock of self-transcendence is constitutive of any genuinely dialectical consciousness #corroborates (1.00) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 635
• Deep intellectual study initially captivates the whole personality before critical equilibrium forms #exemplifies (0.75) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1360