[MD] Rorty's Relativism

gav gav_gc at yahoo.com.au
Sun Aug 16 17:55:29 PDT 2009


i may be off the mark here but....
does this disagreement hinge on the linguistic turn?
if so then maybe the problem is one of mythos v logos.

the reality creating aspect of language - eg in the beginning was the word - this is the mythos. in tarot 'the magician', or more accurately 'le bateleur', is the first card. he represents not god but the demiurge: the creative will of the godhead. he stands one arm up to heaven one arm down to earth. he is the conduit through which 'the word' or thought is made manifest as emotional/physical reality.

this process operates on all scales - the individual up to the tribe up to the nation up the species up to earth itself (and beyond). at the higher levels we are dealing with patterns that are very old and unconscious to the individual level. but when we get to the individual level we can see, in all of our lives, how our thoughts - conscious or habitual - affect our perception of reality, which is for all intents and purposes reality itself.

the mythos is the underlying, generally unconscious fecundating source. our collective cultural, species, biological and even inorganic memories that inform what we take to be real. the mythos *is* language creating reality. but the mythos creates reality based on the truth of mythopoetry. perhaps 'language' needs qualification here: archetypal language, symbolic language....the synthetic function of language. we are talking of value truths here not factual ones....the dreamtime of the aboriginal australians

dreamtime. the aboriginal australians also believe that there was a time when the power of dream and waking reality were not separate...a time when people could directly interact with and direct the creative force...

anyways....the logos is born of the mythos. in a way it still is the mythos. the logos is language used to break down reality - it is the analytic aspect of language. it 'stops' reality and maps it and then its mapping becomes part of the synthetic aspect  - the mythos - if it takes root, if it is good enough.

i guess what i am trying to get to here is some feeling that immediate experience is prior to *and* in some way created by language - it is both. 
generally we can make a division and say that the mythos is the creative aspect and that the logos is the post-immediate experience analytic aspect. but this dividing line is perhaps becoming fuzzy.

what i am getting at is maybe the same point i made above re: aboriginal australians. perhaps the basic reason for the evolution of (jaynesian) consciousness is to better weld the individual with the cosmic creative will, ie thought/word - the demiurge. in other words if the higher function of language is reality-creating then perhaps we are evolving - via the sophiscation of the intellectual faculty - to being a greater or more direct part of this process. 

i will try a bit more at getting this: the project pirsig and ourselves are party of is the 'expansion of rationality', to use DMBs words. we are trying to create a better map of reality - a better logos. is it possible that the culmination of this project is actually a unification of mythos and logos? if it is then perhaps it can be more clearly seen what i am getting at about being more directly part of the reality creating process.

anyway, just thoughts, (hmmmm maybe the word 'just' is unjust - i think so).




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