Indeterminacy Quotes

“This passage from the indeterminate to the determinate, this continuous taking up again of its own history in the unity of a new sense, is thought itself.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception

“The fanatic loathes an open-ended situation. Perhaps he does not acknowledge such situation. He always has an urgent need to know what the 'bottom line' is, what the inevitable conclusion is, when we will finally 'come full circle.' Yet history, including the private history of each of us, is usually not a circle but a line: a winding line with retreats and bends, which sometimes changes course and intersects with itself and occasionally draws loops, but nevertheless, a line and not a circle. Being immune to fanaticism entails, among other things, a willingness to exist inside open-ended situations that do not come full circle and cannot be unequivocally settled. A readiness to live with questions and choices whose resolutions hide far beyond the hazy horizon.”
― Amos Oz, שלום לקנאים

“Nature is at all times unequivocal; its secrets, so difficult to decode, lay open to the eye. It is otherwise with the fullness of being of the soul. It never exhausts itself as having come into existence; rather, it passes through this level of determination and exhaustion only to return again to a process of becoming, to a living actuality. From an unfathomable primordial source, interior being [innern], the soul's difficult-to-comprehend forms climb into the light of consciousness where they dissolve again like all genuine creations of the night. The soul is at all times ambiguous; before every attempt to unravel its secrets, it retreats back to the depths.”
― Helmuth Plessner, Grenzen der Gemeinschaft

“Recognize that you don't know where you stand, and you will begin to watch where you put your feet. That's when a path appears.”
― Kay Larson

“Her playing which had been superb became merely correct. It was necessary to suggest a certain sloppiness, the playing of something that hadn't been written. Computer-made music-synthesized Blue Moon- presented same problem. Random elements introduced.”
― John Cage, A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings