>>>
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>
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> 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."
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> ^^^^^
> 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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