At 8:36 PM +0000 2002/02/14, Keith Hudson wrote:
My take is that life is more important than homo sapiens, but as we're the
most advanced specimen of life so far on earth, then we should look after
our own long-term survival as best we can, even if it means colonising
other places at some future time to escape a super-volcano which might
destroy most species as well as ourselves.
Hi Keith,
Literally, without language there is no world. I am not trying to
be clever; I'm using language to describe how I understand what
language is and what it does. The paradoxical nature of this task is
obvious. Wittgenstein said "the limits of our language means the
limits of our world". Think of your awareness of the world at age
six months, two years old, twenty years old, fifty years old, ninety
years old... Human consciousness brought language into being thus it
brought the big bang into being (for some of us). As I mentioned in an
earlier email, the big bang theory is only one of several 'origin of
the universe' theories currently espoused by leading scientists. And
what about other cultures whose understandings of things are utterly
other than western science's understanding? For example the
Dakota:
To the
Reader
Admit, assume,
because, believe, could, doubt, end, expect, faith, forget, forgive,
guilt, how, it, mercy, pest, promise, should, sorry, storm, them, us,
waste, weed- Neither these words nor the conceptions for which they
stand appear in this book; they are the whiteman's import to the New
World, the newcomers contribution to the vocabulary of the man he
called Indian. Truly the parent Indian families possessed
neither these terms nor their equivalents". Ruth Beebe Hill,
Hanta Yo, Warner Books, 1979 --
**************************************************
Imagine not possessing (being possessed by?!) the concepts:
believe, doubt, faith, because. I marvel at their certainty which I'm
told came from their close association with the spirit world. Their
ways of knowing stemmed from vision quest, dreams, 'listening to' and
learning from all of what we call nature.
Take care
Brian McAndrews
ps language has become profoundly mysterious to me and these
words don't in any way capture that mystery. How does the fly get out
of the fly bottle? Are fish aware of water? How come some people can
be so certain that scepticism is at the heart of western
science?
