Erin,
I just what to first say that I appreciate your comments and questions.
(If you've been reading the posts between Platt and I, I didn't want you to
get the impression that I liked his and not yours ;-)
You said last time:
>What you said about articulating the subject/object until we began to talk
>this way is getting at what I am having trouble with---
>You don't really start thinking about this until adolescence
>and onwards.
>At what age did YOU really start to think about "subjects" and
>"objects".
See, this is the thing. What I'm trying to describe is that I didn't start
thinking about subjects and objects until I read Pirsig. It wasn't until I
was introduced to the concepts that I was able to articulate any problem
with them, as such. The fact that people identify with the distinction as
a problem (as in some people's reaction to Pirsig's books, "YES, Pirsig's
saying what I've been feeling for a long time!") is testimony to there
being an implied assumption in our thinking. After having identified this
assumption explicitly, we can now root out the ways in which we talk and
speak this way and so, hopefully, clearing ourselves of the problem. When
we look back at history, then, we can see how people were led to speak this
way. This is part of the Oedipal cycle of history. We are trying to
overcome our past.
So, when you say:
>It also doesn't surprise Homer doesn't use these words...like I said
>most fictional work today doesn't either.
>I guess what I am having trouble with is that an 8 yr old TODAY and
>an 8 year old in Homer's time wouldn't have discussed subject and
>objects.
>It seems to be a developmental or schooling not just a historical aspect.
>There is some research showing that without a certain level of
>education, particularly math that adults today do not develop
>full abstract abilities.
I completely agree. However, people who are not familiar with the
distinction (as in the case of the past and the young and the culturally
Other) and do not voice the distinction (as in the case with poets and
other writers) ARE working with the underlying, implied distinction WHEN
THEY ARE. I want to emphasize that I do not think the subject/object
distinction (as subject/object THINKING which is concurrent with the
so-called SOM, rather than simple linguistic nuts-and-bolts) is a result of
a shared, universal human nature. So when, having identified the
subject/object problem (whatever that problem may be), we go to the past
and other cultures to try and find where they do the same thing, we may
come up with nothing. It is an empirical question whether cultures have
this problem as an underlying assumption. Presumably, if we moved into a
post-subject/object culture we would not have the assumption. We would be
able to socialize our children into never starting to think and speak this way.
Matt
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