Contents of spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/Lyotard.and.Language.txt
From hughbone@worldnet.att.net Mon Jan 13 09:04:00 1997
Date: Thu, 09 Jan 1997 08:47:47 -0800
From: hugh bone
To: spoons@jefferson.village.virginia.edu
Subject: Lyotard and Language
Attachment is copy of a letter inspired by Tom Wolfe article on the death
of the soul in Forbes ASAP.
[ Part 2: "Attached Text" ]
Hugh Bone
127B Cove Road
Oyster Bay, New York
11771
January 8, 1997
Dear Mr. Barrett,
Don't know if you are the author of "Death of the
Soul" and other books of a philosophical nature,
but if so you are the person most likely to
understand what I am trying to say.
Don't think we are ready to lose our souls quite
yet.
God didn't truly live until the priests put him far
beyond idols and rituals by making him invisible,
hence indestructible, in the interior universe of
each believer.
By so doing they obtained control of the value
systems of their flocks. No matter what happened
to Cain, Noah, Job, and other victims of wretched
circumstance, the people did not destroy idols and
priests together; the priests merely went back to
the source, and got a new reading. The unfortunate
continued their belief. The priests continued
their priesthood.
Nietzsche said God was dead; after years of silence
a voice said: "Nietzsche is dead", perhaps the
voice of God using a believer as
instrument.
In my view the brain makes language; language makes
us human. We make "reality" by what we say and do.
Objective and subjective reality are always being
re-defined.
Lyotard probes language as the essence of
rule-making and values, and also finds mystery in
something called "obligation". Rules and values
create symbolic universes. For one individual, one
consciousness, the content of consciousness and
memory might be described as his/her personal
symbolic universe.
Inquiry into these matters is getting more and more
attention in recent years. Such inquiry is part of
the basics; such as why is there something rather
than nothing? What is a human to scientists, to
philosophers, and especially to him/her self and
significant others. What can be thought? What can
be said? What can be done?
How can philosophers be persuaded to think about
the present and the future of whatever they think
we humans are, and to share their thoughts with us
rather than spend the best years of their lives
attending to the language of persons long dead?
The cult of "man the measure of all things" was
perhaps inevitable once God was declared dead.
But in pursuing unbiased but elusive "truth", man
was constituting himself a new divinity usurping
the old.
Nature, to this new divinity, might be Gods'
creation, or post-mortem, God's creator. Either
way, man, the new divinity, was Nature's child; his
human "being" and intelligence a slight, but to
him, significant, deviance from the being of
Nature's other children.
So man as a maker of gods, (and god-making in
whatever form seems typical of all tribes, all
nations, in all millennia) is also a maker of
"souls", spirits, the essence of being, of
consciousness and conscience.
A "self", centered in subjective reality, is a
"soul" so long as it lives and breathes, a flesh
and bone inhabitant of a body, and individual
being, and normally, a social being.
Phenomena the scientific community discovers and
analyzes by employing instruments of their various
disciplines and technologies, becomes an object of
scientific dialogue, and, once accepted as "true",
becomes part of our modern definition of
"reality".
This can only happen through mediation of the most
unique instrument we know, the human brain.
Because this reality is directed to objects we tend
to think of it as "objective reality".
Each individual, however, enjoys, is imprisoned by,
cannot escape from a personal symbolic universe or
subjective reality.
By an act of faith one bridges a gap to objective
reality, the world of science.
But how can science deal with the inside of
consciousness, for example... the content of a
word? A word, such as "mother", as perceived by
an orphan, or as perceived by an orphaned adult
female who is childless.
With or without science (i.e. essentially during
all of human history) the brain has been the
instrument for relating to the animate and
inanimate environment. Human being is the only
being each person can know; one being, one
consciousness, one subjective reality.
Religion, art, and aesthetics deal with the this
reality, and provide first-hand reports on the
singular content(s) of the consciousness of one
species-individual.
This is also the conduit through which scientific
(objective) "truths" must pass from scientist "a"
to scientist "b". One living brain can proclaim
truth, but in the absence of dialogue, acceptance,
consensus, a truth cannot become "science".
Speech, writing, body language, and the audio and
visual languages of the arts, are attempts to
communicate the reality of being, of being human,
of being situated in the environment which science
describes, and which most people accept as
"objective" reality.
Other species, other brains, might know other
realities.
Language, especially verbal language, is, like
genes, in a sense immortal; and, like genes,
transcends the life of the species-individual.
Deconstructionist writers and others have brought
this to our attention with observations about the
nature of texts. These marks on paper are only
artifacts, but they re-create reality in living
brains.
Language emphasis in philosophy has historically
been concerned with logic and efficiency of the
thinking process, including refinement of
definitions of such human-created abstractions as
"meaning" and "truth". Think Wittgenstein,
Russell, Ayer,et.al.
To reason in a series of steps, to avoid incorrect
assumptions, mis-steps, errors, and thereby arrive
at "correct" conclusions. In Lyotard's "Le Differend",
he describes how values are structured by speech
and rules in dialogue, and in dialogue plus third-party
judgments.
Through speech (phrases) an interior self is
defined for the new-human. What is permitted and
what is forbidden. The good, the bad, the moral,
the immoral.
And apparently, watching Nature movies, other
creatures, particularly mammals, like us, use vocal
sounds and body language to teach their young the
behaviour appropriate for their survival.
For the human animal the process begins with first
words, a couple of decades before what might be
called mental maturity. This process builds
subjective reality for each species-individual and
is the basis for re-defining subjective reality for
a post-maturation life time.
I could not talk to myself had others not talked to
me. Feral children without human language thus
experience human form, human senses, and human
perception, but not the subjective reality of a
human being.
While neurobiologists seek objective truth; while
genetic scientists consign free will and our very
souls to oblivion; other seekers of truth such as
philosophers, historians, artists and writers,
will explore subjective reality through analysis of
what really happens when we "talk" to ourselves
and others.
Although competent scientists, quite reasonably,
avoid questions for which the they cannot
anticipate objective answers, philosophers,
artists, writers and such, can hardly indulge this
option. Consciousness nudges and insists.
Sincerely,
Hugh Bone
Enclosure:
N I G H T R A G E
we tenants on God's earth
we self-entombed cynics
spinning decades
of our lives
shall we, in prayer, avow
our weakness, ignorance,
a fear we cannot name
expatiate meaninglessness
elaborate, articulate,
our grief, our guilt,
our shame
reality oppresses
dreams not fulfilled
adults, failed children
condemned to wrestle terror
in deep night's space and time
constrained by manacles we forged
now our world, becoming
shapeless, senseless
falls to pieces
shall we
submit our selves to expert
care while hordes of experts wait
shall we
state edicts
publish propaganda
agitate resentments
evoke incessant protest
eliciting violent reaction
man is the hairless ape who walks
erect mid modern Munichs every day
ascending, descending
rituals of truth
orgies of shame
shall we have recourse to the shrink
or compromise in
user-friendly cemeteries
by light of burned-out stars
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