From: Maggie Hettinger (hettingr@iglou.com)
Date: Sun Mar 09 2003 - 20:30:13 GMT
Once I saw a video on TV explaining a teaching of Chomsky's that each
person knows thousands of complete dialects, and different social
situations call up responses within the appropriate dialect.
I've never found that in print, but it supports Pirsig and what you
said below.
maggie
On Sunday, March 9, 2003, at 02:51 PM, David Buchanan wrote:
> 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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