From: "henry sholar" <H_SHOLAR-AT-marta.uncg.edu>
Date:          Thu, 14 May 1998 6:56:54 EST
Subject:       Re: Language?


robert,
i think the first thing that fundamentalists do is demonize the other--
that which is not according to their fundamentalist tenet.  then,
whether it is music, books, or other cultural practices, they find 
out what they can to argue the thing as evil.  in many ways org'd
christianity was founded on this process of demonization.
check out elaine pagels' _the origin of satan_.  it coherently
describes the christian message as one of both love... & hate.

plato would have poetry banned from the republic.  he, too, wasn't into
this "getting carried away" crap.

heidegger, i think, probably had a pedantic quality about his
appreciation of poetry and art, tho not as crude as fundamentalists
i'm sure.  but i think his point is that the "truth" comes from a
vast infinite (as far as we can tell) source of continuous uncovering
and opening up and gathering into the open and etc.  such a move just
naturally seems to make langauge flow from poetry and not vice versa.

whereas we with our tinier and tinier tunnel-techno vision keep thinking
that the further we strip away, quantify and calculate, the closer to the truth
we get.  because, lets face it, we do think of language as asystematic symbology
of signs.  and computers can "think."

heh, heh, heh,
hen



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