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CB: This is an elegant statement of the dialectic of this thread. Think I'll take this as a motto ( guide to action) with respect to art.
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CB: In response to a post by Carrol Cox below; and a second post by Carrol below.
After _Stone Age Economics_ by Marshall Sahlins, it may be a mistake to think that early humans' needs were not met readily and easily. Many or most of their lives may not have been nasty , brutish and short. So, I agree that it is true that many, many stone age people had plenty of fun, in the morning and in the evening, but it may have been premised upon their physiological needs being met.
Myself , I place language and generalized symboling or culture at the origin of humanity. There is evidence of symboling a million years ago among missing link species. With a materialist definition of symbolling , its origin is part of the definition of the species. Symbolling is the representation of something by something that it is not, by something that is not LIKE it, the socalled arbitrary relation between sign and signified. It is defined in opposition to imitating, which is to represent something by something that is like it. The contrast may be undestood by the difference between picture writing and alphabetic writing. Though picture writing is a symbol, alphabetic writing is more symbolic, because a picture imitates what it is symbolizing, whereas an alphabetic letter has nothing to do with what it is used to represent. An alphabetic letter is completely arbitrary.
Sure symbolling is thought, but Marxist materialism cognizes the relationship between thought and being as a fundamental contradiction of humanity, and that does not contradict the notion of thought and symbolling as part of the defintion of the species.
CB
>>> Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> 02/01/00 10:40PM >>>
Barbara Laurence wrote:
> It's a mistake to think that early humans first grubbed for food and
> shelter, then when they were fed and warm and dry made art. Or that
> so-called badic needs come first, desire second. Early humans danced while
> they stalked their prey; sang when they threshed grain; carved symbols on
> their hoes.
This is the point of departure for at least one theory of the origin of language -- language developed out of ritual. And since babbling is *known* to be central to an infant's learning to speak, I presume it was also part of the origin of language c. 100,000 years ago.
But *early* humans didn't sing when the threshed grain because by the time humans were threshing grain it was rather late in the day -- just a few minutes ago in human history.
>>> Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> 02/02/00 12:25PM >>>
rc-am wrote:
> Rob. . . replied with:
>
> >Language is a universal human attribute for me, yeah. I reckon a human
> >agent is one with the potential to participate in a speech community,
Those who want to identify humanity with language (as well as thought and human social relations with language) will have a tough time accounting for about one-third of human history if current estimates are even roughly accurate. Biologically modern humans go back about 150,000 years; language goes back about 100,000 years, perhaps less, perhaps much less in some parts of the world.
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CB: But there wouldn't be artifacts of speaking so the language could go back before 100,000 years. Sahlins says there was culture a million years ago, and culture is symboling. If you can symbol , you can speak. Language is a form of symbolling.
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Carrol:
(The evidence of this last is that for 10s of thousands of years homo sapiens and homo neanderthal coexisted in some parts of the world, and then very suddenly the latter disappeared, but not at the same rate every place. The hypothesis is that as humans achieved language they became more efficient destroyers of close cousins.)
CB: Neanderthals had bigger brains than modern humans. They could be symbolling and talking.
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Any how, were humans not human for 50 thousand years? This is a puzzle I shouod think for a number of schools of thought, but particularly for most versions of "humanism."
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CB: Even the australopithecines, had some symbolling. That is , missing links, might have had language. Homo sapiens are genus homo. We are hominids. Other members of our genus (but not our species) , other hominids, might have had language. But surely, homo sapiens had language from the beginning.
CB