Greetings and a happy new millennium to all,
I greatly enjoyed Jon's post in response to Struan and Struan's posts as
well. No doubt my enjoyment of Struan's posts relates to the fact of them
being directed elsewhere, though now that I've stuck my toe in the water, I
expect to receive insults as well. Ah well, if you can dish it out Struan,
I will be happy to take it and think about it. Perhaps I'll learn
something. Jon's thoughts dovetail nicely with a book I have been recently
reading, titled "Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century" written by
Neil Postman. In it, he attempts an attack on "postmodernist
deconstructionism".
The first order of business for an ignorant, poorly educated American like
me is to figure out what this is. Postman digs deeply into it's fascinating
implications, but in brief, it is the view that language is incapable of
representing reality - that it is under deep suspicion and is even thought
to be delusional. It's the idea that not only does language falsely
represent reality, but there is no reality to represent. Postman quotes
Edna St. Vincent Millay to clarify the problem
Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour,
Rains from the sky a meteoric shower
Of facts ... they lie unquestioned, uncombined.
Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill
Is daily spun; but there exists no loom
To weave it into fabric.
In our community, the loom, of course, is the MOQ. Struan, in a post of
12/21 posits that laughter is neither subject nor object. Following this
route one can only conclude that any action must necessarily fall outside
the SO bounds (Is driving a car a subject or an object?) But the point is
not that an action must be a subject or object, the point is that the
motivation for the action by the subject was caused by an object. Struan
himself sees this when answering the question "What is laughter". "It is
what people do when they find something funny". Ah ha! For the MOQ, then,
the relevant question is not "what is laughter", but rather "why are you
laughing?" In his book, Postman explains the invisible bias of language;
and, as I think you will see, in the process validates the SOM:
"...the 'invisible' bias of language concerns the use of the verb 'to
be' in English. When we say 'John is stupid' or 'Helen is smart,' we speak
as if stupidity and smartness are characteristics of John and Helen, when in
fact they are words we use to indicate our own feelings. The sentence 'John
is stupid' is a shorthand version of something like this: 'When I perceive
John's behavior in a variety of contexts, I am disappointed or
distressed...' We are talking about ourselves here more than about John.
But through a kind of grammatical alchemy the 'I' has disappeared. Our
grammar has forced us to 'objectify' our feelings, to project them onto
something outside of our skins. Stupidity, in other words, is a grammatical
category. It does not exist in 'nature.' Yet we imagine that it does
because our language has put it there. If there are languages (as there
are) that do not feature in their grammar the 'IS of projection,' this
mistake will not occur."
Hmmm. What he is saying then is that the feelings themselves are neither
subject nor object - do not exist in nature - but the motivation for having
them is. He does not attempt to explain where the feelings come from or
what they are (he can't since he is as thoroughly immersed in the SOM as
everyone else). He can only say that the action we took of deciding that
John was stupid was caused by our perception of the behavior of the 'object'
John. This is precisely what the MOQ asserts in stating that feelings,
morals, and values have no 'objective' validity in a world dominated as ours
is by subjects and objects. So, when Struan asks people on the street "What
is laughter" they cannot explain it other than in terms of subjects and
objects - which does not explain it at all. All together now, let's take it
from here. Repeat after me, laughter is an expression of our recognition of
Quality. It is our recognition of that cutting edge of reality that occurs
before we use the knife to cut our experience up into subjects and objects.
Quality and Values are real (do exist in nature) and have an existence which
can be verified - just not by SOM. OK, now that I have that out of my
system (big sheepish grin) I realize that I've not even begun to respond to
Jon's original post - which was what prompted me to begin writing in the
first place! But now I am mentally tired, so I shall go outside and play in
the snow.
Wishing you happiness,
Mary
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