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by her own weight, or watery Amphitrite stretching out her arms
along the vast shores of the world. Though there was land and sea
and air, it was unstable land, unswimmable water, air needing light.
Nothing retained its shape, one thing obstructed another, because in
the one body, cold fought with heat, moist with dry, soft with hard,
and weight with weightless things. (Ovid 2000. I.1-20.)
“Nature appeared the same”-as the poet says. One-faced, or faceless,
without character or distinction: a “raw confused mass”. In this
we see a single-faced Hegelian world. At the same time, we must
be fair to Hegel. The path he shows not only must be walked by
cognition, but also forms the basis of any interpretation on the
basis of common sense. It must be the starting point, especially for
judgment-formation. To understand the issue of mediation, you
need to look more closely at the mechanism of judgment-forma¬
tion, because no matter what we do in this world, we are constantly
making judgments: this is a table, not a chair; this is an honest
person, that one is a liar, etc. However, if I do not test this in the
crucible of experience (in other words, if I do not actually deter¬
mine whether the person is honest or a liar), then my judgment is
only preconception, which is without experience. In pre-conception
(Vor-urteil) the prefix refers to the lack of experience. In other
words, I am judging in a way that has no empirical basis. For
example, anti-Semitism is a preconception, and it is telling that
it is well-documented even in places where there have never been
Jews. Experience does not make much of a difference here. Allport
writes quite a lot about this (Allport 1979., Katz 1991.).
13 The Primal Chaos