[MD] Language

[david buchanan]

John said:
In my Q'm" system, the only patterns that can be disharmonius with reality or nature are intellectual patterns.


Arlo replied:
So inorganic, biological and social patterns are never able to be disharmonious with nature?



dmb says:

There is that bit about being an enemy of nature rather than a part of it so I think John has a point. On the other hand it's pretty clear that social level values impose a certain discipline upon the demands of our biological instincts and appetites toward sex and aggression. This sets up a situation where we have to fight against our own nature or at least redirect its energy into socially acceptable channels. This sort of leads to the intellectual forms of alienation from ourselves, particularly the way SOM tells us that there is no way to bridge the gap between objective reality and our subjective understanding of it. 

Maybe it would be useful to think about this in terms of our evolutionary development. As I see it, our distant primate ancestors lived and evolved over hundreds of thousands of years and really our biological evolution goes all the way back to the begging of life. The creatures that we would someday become were able to function successfully without the benefit of social or intellectual patterns, without the benefit of anything like self-consciousness or deliberation. In a sense, we all have a billion years of experience at operating in the world. These highly developed instincts are a kind of world wisdom built right into the body. Even in the case of language, it's easy to imagine how it evolved without any deliberate effort on the part of language users and how it might have grown out of gestures and bird-song type vocalizations. Then, once self-consciousness and deliberate, rational thought comes along, we believe this is the way we operate in the world. We see this attitude especially in the social level doctrine of original sin and in intellectual level Freudian doctrine that we are primarily driven by the dark instincts toward sex and aggression. These bookends both tell us that our instincts are not to be trusted, deserve to be suppressed and despised. But this is also a way of dismissing a billion years of progress, a billion years of success and a billion years worth of intelligence. All that still operates and yet it is either ignored or demonized. This is almost literally a case of being cut off from yourself, alienated from yourself, not in harmony with yourself. 

That's how I like to frame the Pirsigian-Jamesian desire to reintegrate the affective domain into our forms of rationality. Maybe that period of alienation was a necessary stepping stone and so it's not just a dumb mistake. But I think they're saying it would be a mistake to continue with that split in ourselves and that the time has arrived to be whole again. 





    		 	   		  
_________________________________________________________________
Hotmail: Free, trusted and rich email service.
http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/201469228/direct/01/