Posted on 11/28/2001 4:13:52 AM PST by shrinkermd
What I am to myself is much more than what I am able to articulate. On that we agree. But socially, what I am as others may know me, is limited by what they see me do and hear me say. That's what I meant, even if I didn't articulate it very clearly.
The rationalist project was built on this very assumption. Read the first sentence of Descarte's Mediations and you'll get a paraphrase. Read Hume's Inquiry in Human Understanding , he's on the same boat. What was Kant's program but to boil down the entire complex of human thought to find the essential and basic conditions for rational thought. And then the fatal mistake: (which, I remind you, post-modernism has pilloried) once the circle of reason was drawn, the circle of mankind's identity was drawn. Lo and behold, this too can be found way back in time, but not with a sophist, in Aristotle's Ethics : what is man but what he can think!
And then the author above gives us this:
Deconstructionism "love to pounce on other thinkers and say, "Aha! There you have an Enlightenment Assumption," meaning a dubious idea from the eighteenth century. But the Enlightenment was 200 years ago, and I have yet to see any dubious idea thus pilloried that people actually believe today, except for those that are baldly true.Well, for all that, I too love to pounce on the Enlightenment assumption. And if we don't all become post-modern soon, we will destroy ourselves. I'll pillory the ascendancy of reason because that is the one that is especially "badly true."
So true. And, may I say, so rare.
PHew! This is an interrogation! I stated the fatal mistake: It was drawing the circle of reason and then identifying it with the identity of mankid: we are our consciousness and that's it. We are what we think.
What is the Enlightenment? I quote a favorite author of mine:
"The Age of Reason has received its name, not because it was particularly reasonable, but because the thinkers of the eighteenth century believed to have found in Reason, capitalized, the substitute for divine order." --Eric Voegelin (from the thread An answer to the question "What is Enlightenment"A synthesis of post-modernism? Or do you want a summary? A synthesis implies a conflux of two or more strains. The fact that we are now in a post-modern age (everything after Hegel)need not imply there is any synthesis. Old views die hard: witness the influence of the middle ages in Europe (they have the monolithic witness of castles that will not go away). A summary? That it has given up the ghost on the Enlightenment project.
that we forgive seventy times seven.
Right on Mom!
You strike the belly of the beast. The positivist believes the thing itself exhausts its own meaning. With regard to language, it claims that words signify (mean) nothing more than what they say. With regard to human beings, they are no more than their own highest faculty.
Brilliantly done, logos. You take the "vapors" of speculation and make them "actual" in a way that many thoughtful people can relate to, because they've experienced what you're talking about. But then maybe they couldn't "put it into so many words," as you have done.
Hey, when someone's stealing your language -- as the deconstructionists plainly are trying to do -- how much value will a word have as a carrier of objective meaning before too long?
And, absent words that have clear meanings -- because they signify actual phenomena in the reality of human experience -- what does "communication" mean? Communication can only take place by means of words, the stability of whose meanings depends on clear references to real objects.
When language can be detached from real objects, Presto-Changeo-ed! at will, then there is no longer a stable system of symbols by means of which human beings can communicate with, and be understood by, each other.
Then take it to the next level: If communication is destroyed -- then don't we ALL become mere "monads?" That is, totally detached subjective consciousnesses, removed from the stream of Reality, spiritual, natural, and social? And if that were the case, could we still describe ourselves as "human?"
Oh, forgive me -- I forgot: "Human" is just another contentless word under the deconstructionist dispensation. The phrase "interchangeable cog in the universal machine" would do just as well.
And BTW, you can kiss freedom goodbye at that point: mere utilitarian (and more-or-less interchangeable) parts of the Machine don't need freedom: They just need regular maintenance.... And the best part is, once they've been fully "depreciated," you can always sell them for scrap.
Still, I stand by my guns here, logos: This "pneumatopathology business" pretty much accounts for the antirationalism and even anti-Life posture of these ideologues who cannot abide the natural order -- because they know, deep-down, that it is God's order. And they hate God, beecause they think He is illegitimately infringing on the scope they need to manifest their "personal possibilities." (Your typical "monad" doesn't give a good d*mn about anything that isn't "personal" -- and that includes the real well-being of himself, his neighbor, his society, or his civilizational order.)
In short, IMHO you are absolutely right: The deconstructionists and positivists have "retranslated" personal responsibility and accountability as the mandate of "self-actualization." Thank the Comtes, Derridas, and Foucaults of this world, and their seemingly limitless epigones for this miracle of mass insanity....
So you are right, IMHO, to find the culprits of this devastatingly destructive deed, this "overcoming of the tyranny of human language" (my conceit), in people who work full-time in the Ivory Towers of Academe, with highly rumunerative compensation packages. They play into the echo chamber of the mass media, and so-called "elite" (read: cocktail party) opinion. This constitutes the Zeitgeist in which humanity is now committing mass suicide....
I would like to tell these people: Please, please: Just get a life.
They would think, perhaps, that I was speaking "figuratively." (What else is there but the "figurative," if language itself is "relativistic?") Little do they know, my intended meaning is quite literal, indeed.
But since these folks "don't live in the same world I do" -- since they think that language is malleable, pliant and susceptible to the vagaries of human will alone; that is, that it does not refer to real, objective things -- they'd find a way to evade my clear and quite pointed meaning, I'm sure.
What a world we live in. God bless you, logos, and all the rest of us. And may He help us, too. (We need it, right about now.) -- bb.
But language is malleable, and it is susceptible to the vagaries of human will (and what else?). And it does refer to real objective thing (although there is variation here) the critique of language has come out of the bankruptcy of rationalism that thought that the language could exhaust the thing: but it can't, and therefore its reference to things is somewhat ambivalent.
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