My concern is to voice a reminder about the independence of social content and the curious active/passive process it exists within.

Different theories in the family I am allying with offer different accounts of just how the process of creating social meaning and grammar combines receptivity and initiative. The dispute has extremes at, roughly speaking, Hegel and Nietzsche.

Is the social content due at bottom to some necessary conceptual structures coming into self-consciousness, or is the content due to forces expressing themselves creatively?

It is better to refuse both extremes, for we are always both constituted and constituting in the reception of contents that exceed our grasp, but which can be changed, often forcefully, in a process that we can come some distance towards understanding.

Index
place making outline
Gateway

(c) David Kolb, 1 August 2001