On Sun, Jan 5, 2014 at 1:44 PM, Charles Brown <cb31450 at gmail.com> wrote:
> "Reality constitutes for us our environment. and our environment ,
> which is chiefly social, alters continuously -sometimes barely
> perceptibly, sometimes at dizzy speeds. The socially accepted pictures
> we make in words of reality cannot change as if they were reflections
> in a mirror. An object is reflected in a mirror. An object is
> reflected in a mirror. If the object moves the reflection moves. But
> in language reality is symbolised in unchanging words which give a
> false stability and permanence to the object they represent. Thus they
> instantaneously photograph reality rather than reflect it. This frigid
> character of language is regrettable but it has utilitarian purposes .
> It is probably the only way in which man, with his linear
> consciousness, can get a grip of fluid reality. Language, as it
> develops, shows more and more of this false permanence, till we arrive
> at the Platonic Ideas, Eternal and Perfect Words. Their eternity and
> perfection are simply the permanence of print and paper. If you coin a
> word or write a symbol to describe an entity or event, the word will
> remain 'eternally' unchanged even while the entity has changed and the
> event is no longer present. This permanence is part of the inescapable
> nature of symbolism, which is expressed in the rules of logic. It is
> one of the strange freaks of the human mind that it is supposed that
> reality must obey the rules of logic, whereas the correct view is that
> symbolism by its very nature has certain rules, expressed in laws of
> logic,and these are nothing to do with the process of reality, but
> represent the nature of the symbolic process itself." - Christopher
> Caudwell from "A Study of the Bourgeois Artist" in _Studies in s
> Dying Culture_