RE: <nettime> Disordered thinking through the origin oflanguage

[John Young <jya@pipeline.com>]

Words, coherent language, came from god, and if that anti-scientific premise
is offensive, recall that the earliest philosophers, Thales et al in western
canonicism, others earlier in Asia and Africa, argued that coherent 
language came from a humiliating sense of wonder, wonder at astonishing 
events which could not be explained by simple survival needs.

Posting god as a devious humanizing of the sense of wonder for propounding
manipulative religion, should not preclude non-deist apprehension of
coherent language deriving from origins not easily explained with the narrow
conceits of everyday-everyman science, the simplistic, again deviously 
anthropocentricizing pseudo-science, call that the humanities unable to 
bear absolute uncertainty and doubt about the human as the center of
existence, much less the humiliation of nature indifferent to humanoids.

Language is a cry for significance, whether sung or spoken, that the
poets got right and the philosophers must forever question "what's the
point," Thales' ur-query "why," the least animal concern.

Fear, terror, anxiety about death, grief, loss, and ecstacy about love, 
beauty, courage, surely, as noted earlier, well up in the chest, and
become bleats, hollers, and wails of recognition and affirmation or
denial. Animals emit some of those oral superfluities, as well as dance
and play.

It is the superfluity of language, its overflow beyond what is needed to
survive that points to an origin in imagination.

Sartre and others have argued that imagination is what uniquely identifies
the human but that it is also what condemns the human to eternal
prison of its own making: the desire to be god.

Would god have invented such a being, you bet if god is posited by
a human seeking escape from "mortality," ano imaginary concocted
for aesthetic diversion.

Thinking is another inexplicable human devousness.





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