Orthography & Idolatry
Some people enjoy the footfalls of syllables and sounds of symbols thrown down the metered hallway of prose; others prefer the lyrical poesy of too many rules applied to too few utterances.
Some escape the swoon of the siren's call of their own voices or the voices of the author or the poet and find meaning. Or at least for value.
Yes, escape from the swoon, a sobering up from the narcotic bliss of Truth! by attaching one's self to the speaker, the writer, the lyricist. He speaks Truth! one may say, falling all over herself to get the sweet misery just right. And up on a pedestal the sayer goes, a ceremonious removal from regular society, from merely mortal minds. A tall and a narrow pedestal, so easy for others to knock over.
The words of the speaker wither whither? To thither, of course, shuttled off to an out-of-earshot echo chamber on a wave of irony, cleaved from the speaker by the sycophants.
It's the thing that probably kept Flaubert up at night for, the reason he was so hell-bent on the separation of Church of personality and State of art.
Today we are asked to accept the writer, the poet, the philosopher, the mathematician, the priest, the saint, the martyr, not on merit but on Tradition. We humans have produced a great many great thinkers, or at least we have noted them. Noted them and whisked them away from Time and Refutability of Person.
Aquinas did not have the option of feeling in his bones the possibility of absence of a god; Gödel did not have supercomputers available to him; Peirce did not have Watson & Crick to rely upon. We do have all those; we are future Kant's and Nietzche's and Tutu's and Ghandi's. I do not puff myself up and suppose I am such a great thinker as Gödel or Russell or Kant or Peirce or Hegel, but neither do I accept that I am ill-equipped to challenge what I think are their shortcomings.
And after all, the Greats did not stand in the shadows of the giants who preceded them, they instead climbed upon the shoulders of such, saw what others priorly did not have available to them, and expounded on the view with their vision.
Shouldn't we all be doing the same?
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Comments
Certainly. But, what is our mindset as we ascend the shoulder of Orpheus (so to speak, and I know I amy not choosing the best god to place my metaphor upon)? Are we in fact fully open-minded, or are we intent upon cleaving the shoulders we rest upon and see from? Keep in mind that the orthodox and liberal minds are equally guilty of attempting to slay the giants.
Posted by: hoody | October 26, 2005 04:33 AM
I think you're entirely missing the point.
And which orthodoxies again are the ones that seek to change the nature of truth through invention and discovery?
Posted by: GodOfBiscuits | October 26, 2005 07:58 AM
What point did I miss?
Substitute conservative for orthodox, if you like. My point was that regardless of orientation (maintain the status quo [orthodox] or turn everything over and begin again [liberal][and please be patient with these labels. I am using them loosely), we may conduct our inquiries with a pre-set notion that change WILL or WON'T happen depending upon our prior mindset.
When what I believe you are advocating is simply being open to whatever may come through inquiry based building upon previous discoveries. We need not say, "Things WILL stay the same" or "Things MUST change." Rather, "Things MAY have to change."
Posted by: hoody | October 26, 2005 08:11 AM