I've been mired in work. I've got your email highlighted and the next chance I get, i will xerox my diss and send it to you.
What's your mailing address?
Joanna
Charles Brown wrote:
>
>
> No, it wasn't that simple. The ideal of purity for normal language was
> derived from the worship of "stable" (dead) classical languages. And
> there were those who argued that such purity had the "truth" of a
> stopped clock.
>
> If you're interested in the subject, read Cassirer "The Individual and
> the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy" or try my diss, which is
> microfiched by U of Minnesota(?)
>
> Artists most definitely did not buy the division between the "truth" of
> science and of art.
>
> Joanna
>
> ^^^^^
>
>
> Thanks. Is it possible to get a copy of your diss from you ?
>
> I see what you say. I still subscribe to a notion of the conscious and
> unconscious minds and motives (smile).
>
> Cassirer is a biggy in promoting the concept of "culture". I've been
> into "culture" lots since my undergrad and grad anthro years. A key
> thing the Leslie A. White school of anthro contributes to the culture
> concept is the central role of the symbol ( "sign" in French). The
> symbol is representing something by something that it is not,
> fundamental to language as well, of course - the arbitrary or
> conventional relationship between signifier and signified.
>
> As far as stability of language, seems to me the interesting question
> for radicals is how language changes, the sort of dialectical question.
> We intellectuals interested in changing the world and its structures,
> linguistic and cultural ( changing structures like structural racism),
> look for ways to destabilize, rock and roll. I suspect that the
> intellectuals interested in enshrining dead language were serving the
> classes who wanted to bring back Greek and Roman imperialist ideals to
> graft them onto the new capitalist mode to rationalize the new
> colonialism and slavery. Colonialism and slavery didn't really follow
> logically from the new doubly free, wage-labor structural cell of
> capitalism, expounded on in _Capital_. The bourgeoisie had to take a
> giant step backward at one level of cultural structure to rationalize
> colonialism and slavery, and counterbalance the step forward that doubly
> free labor implied over feudal labor structure.
>
> It is at points of revolution like this that social being determines
> social consciousness, as they say; and as you say, it's not simple,
> social consciousness reflects social being in a complex way.
>
>
> -------------- Original message ----------------------
> From: "Charles Brown" <charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us>
>
>>
>>
>>
>>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>> Joanna:
>> why it was that in the seventeenth century, people started talking
>> about there being one truth for science and another for art, a
>> subsidiary assertion being that normal language was degraded, but
>>
> that
>
>> the language of science (mathematics) was pure....and that
>>
> therefore,
>
>> science was by definition "true."
>>
>> ^^^^^
>> CB: I'm guessing it was the scientist-mathematicians and artists who
>> started saying that math and art language was "pure" and "true" and
>> normal language degraded ?
>>
>>
>>
>>
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