[MD] Sympathy for the Devil

[Ian Glendinning]

Jeez, Arlo, WTF?

On Mon, Feb 11, 2013 at 3:16 PM, ARLO JAMES BENSINGER JR <ajb102 at psu.edu> wrote:
> [Ian]
> Just to be clear, before I respond to the rest of that long para ... I don't have a problem, and I don't see those things (words or static patterns) as limiting - UNLESS we allow ourselves to be limited by them (which I don't).
>
> [Arlo]
> I'm saying we don't have a choice, those things are both enabling and constraining, they both sent boundaries (limits) and enable us to act within those limits.
>
> Consider  the oft-quoted passage from LILA: Descartes' "I think therefore I am" was a historically shattering declaration of independence of the intellectual level of evolution from the social level of evolution, but would he have said it if he had been a seventeenth century Chinese philosopher? If he had been, would anyone in seventeenth century China have listened to him and called him a brilliant thinker and recorded his name in history? If Descartes had said, "The seventeenth century French culture exists, therefore I think, therefore I am," he would have been correct.
>
> But, of course, some "menus" are better than others, some menus allow us greater agency, some expand the lines of constraint, and this is because "menus" aren't just abstractions that happen in a realm separate from 'lived real life', but- just like inorganic, biological and social patterns- are a part of lived real life, and have effects on both agency and structure, on both ability and limit.
>
> And, of course, the levels themselves are evolutionary ways to expand agency and overcome lower-level "limits", and the next evolutionary step in levels will no doubt help us overcome the innate limits of the intellectual level- but even this level will impose its own set of limits just as it affords expanded agency.
>
>
> TL/DR; you are limited by language, but you are also enabled, nature of the beast.
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