From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Sun Mar 09 2003 - 19:51:37 GMT
Sam, Wim and y'all:
Let me try another angle of approach. I want to broaden the discussion, but
only to shed light on the specific question, which concerns the nature of
ritual. Ritual is a key feature of the social level, but obviously the
social level is bigger and broader than just ritual. Language is another key
feature of this too and I'd like to bring this into the discussion for a
moment. But first, take another look at the now-famous quote from Pirsig...
Pirsig says:
"If ritual ALWAYS comes FIRST, and intellectual principles ALWAYS COME
LATER, then ritual cannot ALWAYS be a decadent corruption of intellect.
Their sequence in history suggests that PRINCIPLES EMERGE FROM RITUAL, not
the other way around. That is, we don't perform religious rituals because we
believe in God. We believe in God because we perform religious ritual."
I think the last two lines are extremely interesting. We don't perform
ritual because we believe, we believe because we perform rituals. It is the
rituals that "cause" or "create" the beliefs. This is probably the opposite
of what most people think, but it is consistent with this cautionary remark.
"...real ritual had to grow out of your own nature. It isn't something that
can be intellectualized and patched on."
And it goes along with this quote too.
"Philosophers usually present their ideas as sprung from 'nature' or
sometimes from 'God,' but phaedrus thought neither of these was completely
accurate. The logical order of things which philosophers study is DERIVED
from the 'mythos'. The mythos is the social culture and the rhetoric which
the culture must invent before philosophy becomes possible. Most of this old
religious talk is nonsense, of course, but nonsense or not it is the PARENT
of our modern scientific talk."
This passages are not new to either of you, but they don't seem to be as
clear or effective as I would have hoped and so I turn once again to my
trusty Oxford Companion. This time it is from a section on Wittgenstein.
Hopefully a brief description of his thoughts about language, which I think
are consistent with Pirisg in a very interesting way, will help push the
conversation forward.
"Contrary to the dominant tradition, Wittgenstein argued that language is
misrepresented as a vehicle for the communication of language-independent
thoughts. Speaking is not a matter of translating wordless thoughts into
language, and understanding is not a matter of interpreting - transforming
dead signs into living thoughts. The limits of thought are determined by the
limits of the expression of thoughts. ... It is not thought that breathes
life into the signs of a language, but the use of signs in the stream of
human life."
This is all quite consistent with the idea that all our intellectual
descriptions are culturally derived. It fits with the idea that Descarte
could only think because French culture existed first and with everything
else I can think of.
You see, the usual way of looking at these things would lead us to think
that believers invent rituals and thinking beings invent language, but it
seems clear to me that the opposite is true. Rituals invent believers and
language invents thinkers. As two key features of the social level, this
take on the nature of ritual and language sheds light on the nature of the
social level itself, as well as its child, which is the intellectual level.
Does that help? I hope so.
Thanks for your time.
DMB
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