>> Look up Tran Duc Thao on the origins of language, Althusser's teacher - theorizes that language originated in gestural activities vis-a-vis the hunt.
Althusser was a suicidal depressive! > There are several contextualisations, specific criticsims of Thao's thought here: http://www.viet-studies.org/TDThao/TDThao_Baribeau.htm This is first page I hit. here's a sample: One problem with the first chapter is Thao's use of terms such as "flashes of consciousness" and "tendential images projected by internal gesture" (p. 25). Here Thao's attempt at a materialist analysis stumbles at the difficulty of translating concrete "experienced" aspects of representation and meaning into materialist neurophysiological terms. An example is this passage (p. 20): "In fact, the projection which constitutes this image starting from the outlined movements of the animal, is actually produced by the 'tendency' of these movements..., the psychic image has a tendential reality, so to speak,...it remains strictly nonmaterial." Though Thaos concept of the "tendential image" is elaborated from Spirkin's theory, he seems to overlook essential notions of Spirkin's theory based in the neurophysiology of the second signalling system. These notions are essential to understand fully the material neural basis of linguistic images and representation. Since the language of the neurophysiology of higher nervous processes provides alternative scientific formulations of greater clarity to refer respectively to "consolidations of incidental association" or to "inner speech" [5], one may wonder why Thao kept the ambiguous references to "tendential images" in his text. It must be that the author had some reservations in using purely neurophysiological terms. I suspect that such reservations, which are common to many philosophers dealing with the difficult definition of mental images, have something to do with the fear of biological reductionism, a fear which might be accentuated in Thao's case by his phenomenological background. Perhaps the apparent "idealism" involved to such analyses of the "tendential image", etc., Thao terminates this chapter by paying his dues to Lenin's materialist analysis of mental representations [6], and equating it to his own interpretation. please explain to me how Kripke said anything about the physical 'istoria' and its relation to individual agency.. I can't extract it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul_Kripke i think there might be a germ in this work i agree with upon the subject: Berofsky, Bernard. Liberation From Self: A Theory of Personal Autonomy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. Rather than abandon autonomy for agency, Bernard Berofsky redefines it: [A]utonomous agents are not individuals whose actions and decisions are self-directed (1), but rational beings who continually scrutinize others values and attitudes internalized since childhood (9). Liberation >From Self: A Theory of Personal Autonomy, anticipates, perhaps, the next revolution in self theory by, oddly enough, returning to Enlightenment themes. It is ones commitment to rationality, says Berofsky, that is the best overall means to secure ones objectives (9). In fact, though the self may be absorbed in and by the other there is nevertheless a potentiality for a form of delight unfettered by a fear of inauthenticity and enriched by a flow of activity that is both spontaneous, yet governed by its own internal logic (2). Especially if you use the example of Hitler. Check out the review of HITLERS VIENNA: A DICTATORS APPRENTICESHIP http://www.webster.edu/~corbetre/personal/reading/hamann-hitler.html it's widely known about the nordic/mystical aesthetic movements which formed part of nazi culture, but to say, that Hitler could have been a "Scheller" or "Koestler" I think undermines the entire field of psychology, of the force, the psychic morphology, the symptomatics of individuation. It denies the principle of LUCK, FATE, CHANCE, the iterative notion of "quality" or integer itself.. 230927034927307 is not 2076457927309573789888 .. Even Jarod Diamond's work pivots on this arbitrariness.. On Culture being a product of Geography and its dis(contents). though i find this both reductive and non-reductive.. But that kind of arbitrariness is the dialectical opposite to the concept of Linguistic arbitrariness, or is it.. http://www.hf.uib.no/i/Nordisk/ansatte/barddal/001.Introduction.final.doc There is an arbitrariness to the non-arbitrary nature of language itself. What we "get" from "language speaking the speaker" (ie the motivated sign) cannot be discerned from the study of language itself.. This much is true.. The life of life IS "a" life.. as frought with morphology and accident, turning points etc, as the individual.. macro/micro, the notion of recapitulation between levels, variorum.. At any rate it seems like this is an mutation of the free will idea in philosophy? http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/ But I can't change into a plant.. you know, or a centaur! or an "angel" with an organ of zero-energy potential which would allow me to take on any physical form I desired.. so I don't feel very "free".. too bad for me! so free will is pretty joe-schmo if you ask me..
