Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> Linguistic change and "being in touch with reality" are rather distinct
> concerns. Worse, the phrase "being in touch with reality" belongs in nursery
> babble rather than serious conversation among adults (educated or
> uneducated).
>
> Carrol
^^^^^^ CB: The idea that the phrase "being in touch with reality" would occur in nursery babble is a bit out of touch with the reality of nursery babble.
Then there's the recently reported case of the preacher recently reported on facebook. He tried to walk on water and drowned in front of his congregation. Or the Senator candidate in Missouri in 2012 who thought that women have a way of shutting down impregnation when they are raped.
Materialism is the belief in the existence of objective reality , as Lenin put it.
Here's Caudwell's formulation again and the next paragraph: 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. 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 its 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 is 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 has 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 the laws of logic, and these are nothing to do with the process of reality, but represent the nature of the symbolic process itself.
The artist experiences this discrepancy between language and reality as follows: he has had an intense experience of a rose and wishes to communicate his experience to his fellows in words. He wishes to say, ‘I saw a rose’. But ‘rose’ has a definite social meaning, or group of meanings, and we are to suppose that he has had an experience with the rose which does not correspond to any of society’s previous experiences of roses, embodied in the word and its history. His experience of the rose is therefore the negation of the word ‘rose’ it is ‘not-rose’ – all that in his experience which is not expressed in the current social meaning of the word rose He therefore says – ‘I saw a rose like’ – and there follows a metaphor, or there is an adjective – ‘a heavenly rose’, or a euphemism – ‘I saw a flowery blush’ and in each case there is a synthesis, for his new experience has become socially fused into society’s old experiences and both have been changed in the process. His own experience has taken colour from all past meanings of the word ‘rose’ for these will be present in men’s minds when they read his poem, and the word ‘rose’ will have taken colour from his individual experience, for his poem will in future be in men’s minds when they encounter the word ‘rose’.