[MD] subject/object: pragmatism

[David M]

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" <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com>
To: <moq_discuss at moqtalk.org>
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.








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