Hey Ron,
Ron said:
The point you bring up about the development of the written
language is largely on the mark, but to be more precise,
about what brought about the particular Greek philospical
situation is the fact that they used a Semitic language and
not pictographic. This alone allowed for the creation of
abstract ideas that have no corresponding expereince.
Matt:
Well, if we're going to be precise, we needn't stop there. As
I understand the case Havelock presents, the Semitic script
was the first step on a different path than picto and
ideographic scripts, but the real power wasn't unleashed until
the Greek addition of vowels. What was at issue was an
transference between spoken and written word. The Semitic
script created a conceptual rift between a tree and the word
for tree, not by eliminating "the corresponding experience,"
but by transferring between one kind of correspondence to
another. Whereas the pictograph is supposed to depict what
it represents, the Semitic script corresponded to a _sound_,
thus expanding the distance between the script and the tree,
but closing the distance between the script language and the
spoken language. The introduction of the vowel, going from
"YHWH" to "Yahweh," proved decisive, we might say in
retrospect, in unleashing the power of abstract thought by
closing the loop tightly by binding _everyone together_ to
"hearing" the same words when reading them. As I remarked
before, the Pirsigian irony of the literate revolution is that it
made cultures more dynamic by making language more static.
But certainly the main point, no matter who or what we give
the biggest golden apple to, we agree on. What I like most
about your appreciation of the matter is that you consider
the Greek's fortune to be, cosmically speaking, "dumb luck,"
"random fortune," which I consider akin to pragmatist
emphases on the sheer contingency of life. Unlike the
Platonic instinct, the one that collapses Hume's is/ought,
which is to say the contingent/necessary, the one that tells
us that the way things are is the way things ought to be and
necessarily are, the Darwinian viewpoint that pragmatists
wanted to emphasize was that, yeah, this is how things might
have _been_, but we might _now_ change them for the
_future_.
We might make an analogy between biological evolution and
cultural--did our middle fingers evolve so that we could hit
the K and D keys, or so that we might express displeasure on
the highway? Likewise, pragmatists would like to suggest, so
the material of our thought--the metaphors upon which
abstraction dances upon--may have sprung from certain
earlier felt needs and natural associations (like association
between sight and knowing), but now may be cast aside in
favor of different, better metaphors designed for different
purposes.
For instance, the purpose of our middle fingers when we are
typing might seem quite, and most, naturally to be to hit the
K and D keys, but _that is only when we are typing_. The
larger purpose, we might say, for this smaller purpose is
_typing_, so I would expect that if a better way came along
(just as qwerty did) we would sacrifice the smaller purposes
on the altar of the larger good (more economical typing).
Or, in the case hand gestures, upon finding out that an
accidentally motioned backwards peace sign in England has a
very distinctive association (found in America on turnpikes
with middle fingers), we might, rather than changing our
cultural practices, just beware of the context we are in when
choosing the kinds of hand motions appropriate. And likewise
with philosophical problems and paradox, we might just ignore
them in commonsensical situations, as nobody gets hung up
on whether other minds exist when we hear, "Honey, I'm
ho-ome!"
Matt
p.s. Bo stated, in controversion to my story about literacy,
that Homer wrote the Illiad and Odessey. This, I'm fairly
certain, has been entirely abandoned by scholars. It is
generally agreed that the Illiad and Odessey are Greek oral
poems (i.e., poems that were created orally, without aid of
composition techniques supplied by script), and that they
were simply set down (the "Homer Question," at least one
of them, is whether or not one man named Homer recited
the poems to a dude who wrote them down, or whether
they were pieced together by a redactor from many
bards--which, if orality is taken seriously, seems a silly
question considering the idea of "authorship" is a
post-literate idea). Homer, on my reading, is the voice of
Pirsig's solo social stage _precisely because_ he was the last,
great oral composer.
Bo also stated that he didn't find anything that significant
about the difference between the written symbol and the
spoken. Neither did I until I read Walter Ong's Orality and
Literacy, an introduction to the matter. That book has had
the most significant, immediate effect on my thinking than
any other single book, bar none. When most people,
particularly Bo who loves the locution, say "you're mired in
X thinking and can't see Y because of it," it is difficult to
actually cash in the accusation (because doing so would
mean they weren't mired anymore) and so it just seems like
hot air. Ong's Orality and Literacy really shows you what
having scales over your eyes is like. Primary oral cultures
have entirely different thought patterns, but for far more
down-to-earth, easy to understand, brute material reasons
than many of the earlier writings on the subject (e.g.,
anthropologists who turned to the classics and classicists
who turned to anthropology developed some beautiful theory,
but were more poetic and hard to cash).
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