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Words Defy the Confines of Space and Time
Words are words only because humans are able to equate the unequal. Now, if we equate the unequal, are the things equal or not?So, if mathematics is sometimes said to locate and deal with similarities between differences and with differences between similarities, where, then, is any number?
And through Burke The Lord spoke to Satan: "And in any case, you will agree that, even if their ideas of divine perfection were reducible to little more than a language-using animals' ultimate perception of its own linguistic forms, this could be a true inkling of the divine insofar as language itself happened to be made in the image of divinity." (The Rhetoric of Religion, 1970, p. 289-299).
Maurice Merleau-Ponty: "If we were to make completely explicit the architectonics of the human body, its ontological framework, and how it sees itself and hears itself, we would see that the structure of its mute world is such that all the possibilities of language are already given in it."(The Visible and the Invisible, Trans. A. Lingis. 1968, p. 155).
Mind is Between You and Others
Your mind is not in your head. It is between you and other people. This means that serious study is one of the best ways you can cultivate your mind, and this is why Cioran tells us, "The most important decision you ever make is who to have as parents." See Video
Have you read SELFHOOD AND AUTHENTICITY yet?
In this promotional video, Matthew Segall, a Utube friend, provides a nice informal introduction to some of the main ideas from my book Selfhood and Authenticity. He helps us to recognize the organic nature of speech and calls us to understand ourselves as places and moments of the Earth rather than things on it. If more people were to engage these ideas they might come to understand themselves periodic achievements of an Earth that can have itself only by occasionally losing itself in the dance of others-world-self. Read it today.
Who are Your Neighbors?
We perhaps could learn much from Epictetus, one of the great teachers of Stoicism and arguably the person who issued the Western world’s first cosmopolitanism. Once asked where he was from, he gave a reply that all of us might just as well say: “I am a citizen of the world.”
The Space and Time of Word UsersErving Goffman, in his book Strategic Interaction, writes, "Of all the things of this world, information is the hardest to guard, because it can be stolen without removing it." Words are not simply in space and time; they are not things in our environments. They are environments that we, word users, always already find ourselves within.
Might the Whole of You be Other than You Think?"What is continuous across the states of being awake, dreaming, and sleeping is not some inner self, nor some super-ordinary transcendental “I,” but the larger living event of which awakeness is the partial moment. Awake I am an individuated whole who is part of a whole, and yet, as someone who necessarily already has slept, I am only on the condition of having been indistinguishable from the whole. This is possible because the whole in question is that absolute whole of all wholes, that partless whole, the undifferentiated. To deny that I am part of that whole which nevertheless also is the whole of who I am is to deny the meaning of dreamless sleep," (Anton, 2006, p. 197).
Antiques, and ancient relics even more so, are things that represent worlds that have long since passed away, and it is this representing whereby things transcend their merely physical properties and become, at another level, surrogates or stand-ins for times now gone…even at the level of the not-words, we always already have introjections of inferential data. This means that items of the human world are not simply themselves. They inevitably get transformed into nonverbal metonymies in accordance with the situations in which they are embedded and in which they have participated.
Please see these suggested readings.
A multidisciplinary list of readings for basic orientations to communication theory. Sorry for so many omissions.
Against Forrest Gump
This movie took advantage of the most memorable moments from movies and provided a backdrop for a guy who basically has little idea of what is actually going on around him.
One of the main messages of this movie is that you are more likely to run disabled legs to health than you are to improve yourself intellectually.
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