In the process of living, attainment of a period of equilibrium is at the same time the initiation of a new relation to the environment, one that brings with it potency of new adjustments to be made through struggle. The time of consummation is also one of beginning anew.
— John Dewey (1934, 16)
If one can begin, ever, there is nothing against beginning often; I mean developing new and further conceptual patterns that are not logically derivative from the earlier concepts alone. But neither is it necessary to have sheer gaps which don’t enable one to think, except with either these or those concepts. The continuity between concepts is such, rather, that the new developments further inform and precision the earlier ones. Terms are definable and derivable in terms of each other.
— Gendlin (1998, note 15)
The Vico road goes round and round to meet where terms begin.
— Finnegans Wake 452
Vico was the 18th-century scholar whose theory of the origin of language fascinated James Joyce, and whose cyclic model of history became the framework of Finnegans Wake. And by the way, one of the Wake‘s recurring episodes is the discovery by a hen of a mysterious letter buried in a midden-heap, riddled with holes and stains. Five years after the death of Joyce, the letter was dug up yet again: the Nag Hammadi Library.
The names of things are fixed by custom, habit and history. But symbols are subversive as they turn, breaking what’s fixed and fixing what’s broken. Likewise the habit of living seems eternally intent on breaking and fixing itself.