There are other things to language as well, that is a kind of "logic of practice" as i Bourdieu. I came to a similar conclusion myself after reading such tests as the Nag Hammadi-library, The Upanishads, Sepher Yetzira et cetera. As an example: the Lord of Bonds, is the god of dawn and dusk, binding day and night. His symbol is a ring, which is a kind of bond. When marrying, to people are bound together, and thus they put rings on their fingers. I've invented such a ritual of my own. I only cut my hair once a year, during the last week of February. Where I live, that's when the rays of the sun starts warming again and nature slowly begins to grow again. That's my personal "new year" and by cutting my hair, letting it grow again, I reform myself just as nature does. There is also the logic of poetics, which some semiotic texts consider. In poetics you associate words by similar pronunciation or spelling, sometimes by alliteration, sometimes by rhyme, sometimes just by stress and so on. In that sense the Greek god Chronos/Chronus (time) became Kronos/Cronus (the son of Ouranos/Uranus), even though the name Kronos originally had no etymological relationship to Chronos (time). Once the connecting is established, however, you can't really dissociate them.
Labeling things could be useful, as long are you're conscious of the fact that the labels are superimposed and mostly arbitrarily chosen, or chosen for a specific purpose. That's why I prefer looking at such labeling or categorizations as sets in a set theoretic sense. And then, of course, it becomes the same as the referents in classic semantics. I don't know if you've heard about the concept of "memes" being "intellectual genes" of a culture? Perhaps most of them are, just as much of the genome, superfluous, but you can't really abandon it. I guess it would be the same as Pirsig's "mythos". I know that leaders of Falun Gong have said that the voice of the intellect, the Freudian superego, is really alien spirits, trying to capture the mind of human beings to make them produce and serve machines. I wouldn't really like to take such an anti-intellectual stance. One thing which I liked with Zen or the art of motorcycle maintenance, was that Pirsig, even when criticizing modern society, didn't propose the abandonment of intellect or technology. Rather, we said, we should just try to take conscious intellectual control and direct it towards dynamical progress (which we by definition can't know what it is), rather than some laissez fair or Marxist attitude (which would be each other's opposites). I agree with that. /A -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of 118 Sent: den 25 oktober 2010 00:06 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [MD] The Dynamics of Value Hi A, I like your approaches, they are similar to mine, although different. Indeed a systems approach is useful. Yes, language does not reflect ones thoughts, in fact they are a vast simplification of an overall awareness. But they are the primary tool for communication of the intellect. As you say, ones concept of a word is subjective and words therefore have limits. I believe due to the high indoctrination (school and such) that words are provided high importance, to the point where some believe that they think in words. I believe that this is at the root of Subject Object Metaphysics. Imagine that one day as a boy you wake up and decide to go through the woods to a creak nearby. You have been trained, so you take along your sticky notepad and begin pasting over everything you see a name. So all the trees, rocks, grasses, ivy, etc all have these little square notes on them, all the way down to the creak. A few days later after having learned some more at school, you go down again to the creak. This time you can add sub-classifications to the notes you had posted, such as what kind of tree, etc. After a year, the whole walk to the creak will be just one big mass of yellow note pads. You would not be able to see the trees or plants anymore because they are all covered up. Yet you would think that you are seeing them because you see the names. This is just a metaphor for the impact of labels which describe objects on our views. Yes, knowledge transfer, learn from your elders. I do not think the brain is any more advanced now (biologically) than it was say 20,000 years ago. However, the complexity of thought is, because we have to learn so many facts. It is still the same brain, with the same emotions, but layered with a bunch of sticky notes. We call this advance, but I believe it simply covers the subjective with the objective. We look for solutions without rather than within. I read once that for every psychological word in English, there are ten in German, and one hundred in sanskrit. I believe that back many many years, people had a much better appreciation for the subjective. Now we watch TV. Thanks, Mark 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/md/archives.html
