Hi DMB Funny how after the Greeks we get the Romans and than Roman Catholicism as a very organised religion stepping in where the Roman empire had fallen apart. And Nietzsche, of course, suggests that the death of god was inevitable given the assumptions and outlook of Christianity. Seems like evolution likes to go backwards before it can move forwards again.
David M ----- Original Message ----- From: "david buchanan" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Wednesday, November 14, 2007 7:06 AM Subject: Re: [MD] subject/object: pragmatism Matt said: My problem is that I don't think SOM was anything but a set of metaphors (which is what I think everything linguistic is), and I balk at the distinction between cultural and intellectual. The notion that logic and reason suddenly appeared on the playing field of humanity around the time of Greece, or around any time for that matter, is a myth, created in the West to make the West look cooler. Cultures do it all the time to make their innovations look like the culmination of humanity. dmb says: Yea, sure. The West uses reason and science and technology and wealth and very big guns to bolster its self-image. But cultures of all kinds use whatever they can to bolster their self-images too. Everybody has to be god's chosen and all that. I get that point and agree with it as far as it goes. But I don't think the social-intellectual distinction is "eviscerated" by this. If the historians and anthropologists can be trusted at all, I think we'd have to admit that the shift away from hunter-gatherer culture, which had been more or less the same since we were apes, is bound to create new forms of consciousness. Life in the city was so very different in both material conditions and social relations. Certain adjustments would be needed. New pick-up lines, for example. Things suddenly got a lot more complicated, and that called for a higher level of abstraction. Later, as the number and variety of city-states increased, some developed steady interactions with city-states unlike their own, with different gods, ways of life, and hotter chicks. Now the civilized world is getting complicated enough to do something like a cross-cultural analysis. This sort of thing will call for further adjustments in terms of the capacity for abstraction. I suppose at first this is done for the sake of war, trade, and nookie but a new capacity is developed thereby. And, as the story goes, the Greek philosophers we among the first to doubt the existence of their own gods, not just the other guy's. (Or so we can believe until older "intellectual" writings are discovered) I mean, intellect didn't suddenly appear so much as it rapidly developed as a response to radically new human conditions. This same capacity developed around the same time in the East and I suppose that's simply because the same changes went in that direction too. Mess-o-potamia is another word for in the middle and all that. I was just reading Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil) and saw that he makes the same point about SOM being based Western grammer. You know, the simple way we say "I think" or "it rained" is workable in ordinary workaday situations. But then the philosophers come along and start asking metaphysical questions about the "it" that does the raining and the "I" that does the thinking, as if there was something above and beyond the thinking and the raining. Apparently, a very large number of silly questions can be produced by assuming that language is rational or "correctly" structured. But hey, I'm talking about a capacity that was just born yesterday. Just two hundred generations ago we were practically cavemen. _________________________________________________________________ Climb to the top of the charts! Play Star Shuffle: the word scramble challenge with star power. http://club.live.com/star_shuffle.aspx?icid=starshuffle_wlmailtextlink_oct Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/ Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
