The Bottom Line

Issue date: 10/11/06 Section: No Gods, No Masters

Media Credit: Kaiti Robinson

In my last article it was important to rouse the reader to the power of language and how it results in very real casual effects on those people who share the meaning of it. No doubt some of the more critical sections of that article resulted in doubt, agreement, scorn, indifference and even anger.

I feel that these reactions to my commentary, as well as the efforts of myself and the Bottom Line staff, to make them accessible are further illustrations of the fundamental concepts built upon so far.

Not at all odd that we should open this week with a word about reactions, since really language is itself one of the more complex reactions occurring in nature. It seems that we build language as a way to organize the stream of sensory perception we experience during waking and sleeping. Specifically, organizing to make sense, or derive some abstract meaning, from those experiences we are involuntarily conscious of.

Involuntarily conscious of? Can we help but be aware of the environment we live in? Gradually we awaken to awareness of the world, particularly through the senses which are perceived, as A. F. Whitehead described, "as an entity which is the terminus of sense-awareness, something which for thought is beyond the fact of that sense awareness."

To span the gap between itself and other sentient beings the thing that thinks about the sense-awareness (a human being; me; you) has abstracted its collective experiences and organized them symbolically by a grammar. The grammar is basically just a rule book for ordering the expression of these thoughts, that is, the symbols for the thoughts.

Strangely, Foucault's chain begins to become apparent again. The natural world, that is the object that presents itself to us in the form of sense perception, becomes the resource by which the mind forms ideas and structures them so as to act.
When we talk about things we are presenting certain assumptions we carry and share about the way things are outside our perceptions, in the world. We make apparent certain value judgments and presuppositions about how to interact with the world, the people, and objects. Partly this is a result of having arranged our experiences into a contextual framework reflecting the way we perceive reality to be.

Continued...

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