The other thing to keep in mind is that the vernacular changes extremely fast. Print has slowed down the rate of change, but it's still changing every day. What doesn't change as quickly is the language of the educated: the hochsprache of each country. That's one reason why intellectuals might notice that language gets more out of touch with reality.
Dante actually argues this in De Vulgaria Eloquentia, when talking about the Tower of Babel.
Joanna
----- Original Message -----
On Sun, Jan 5, 2014 at 1:49 PM, JOANNA A. <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:
> He was a smart, well educated, insightful guy. Even though he says print and Plato in the same sentence, a lot of what he describes is true for post-writing culture.
>
> Joanna
^^^^^^ CB: uhhuh
Another thought: Engels suggests that Hegel's founding his dialectical logic in contradiction instead of the principle of identity or non-contradiction as in formal logic is an effort to reflect in language the change or fluidity of reality that Caudwell describes here.
Caudwell's formulation above is at the extreme of Heraclitus' 'No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.' Somewhere Hegel says formal logic is necessary as well or else we would never have any fixity or certainty.
Also, Caudwell says, " "Reality constitutes for us our environment.
and our environment ,
> which is chiefly social, ..." , Social reality is largely made up of symbols in language and the semiotics of culture, tradition, customs (see structural anthropology). Well , symbols are fixed, as he points out in the other part of what he says. So, much of our reality _is_ fixed, and not changing. My mother remains my mother, because "mother" is a symbolic representation. The law against speeding remains fixed pretty much. It's objective reality that changes , not social reality - the ultimate fixity in social reality being things like God , the Eternal Individual Soul or maybe Platonic Ideals. Social reality only changes with revolutions in the mode of production a la Marx *
Oh I just found this on the internet; Caudwell is an extraordinary Marxist philosopher:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/caudwell/1938/studies/index.htm
* In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter
into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely
relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the
development of their material forces of production. The totality of
these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of
society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political
superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social
consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the
general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not
the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their
social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain
stage of development, the material productive forces of society come
into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this
merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property
relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto.
>From forms of development of the productive forces these relations
turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The
changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the
transformation of the whole immense superstructure. " ( the legal,
political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short, ideological
forms) http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> "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_
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