Context

I just finished writing this instead of doing my Latin homework. It meanders, and has no particular point. But I had fun writing it. So without further ado, here is Context or, Language, Reading, and Standing on the Shoulders of Giants:

I've attended a couple of lectures on philosophy, linguistic theory, and literary criticism over the past couple of days. I have very little experience in any of these areas, but I was glad to see a few conclusions that I had reached on my own validated by people who know exponentially more than I do in such fields.

For example, thoughts do not take on words as a way to be expressed in the world. Rather, words are the thoughts. Without the words, there would be no thoughts. If something cannot be expressed in words properly. Primordial thought, in which we leave the words behind and return to the basic ideas which the words represent, does not exist. Or perhaps does, but it is only as instinct, which cannot in any way differentiate us from animals.

Or the idea that the secrecy if an individual's thoughts, of the individual's self are required for a functioning society. If everyone knew what everyone else was thinking, society could not exist. This of course leads neatly into the whole idea of writing in general. Because writing is expressing one's self in words, and because words are thought, the only truly complete piece of writing is an entire transcript of every thought that one has ever had. But since this cannot be done, and even if it could be done it could most likely never be read and comprehended by anyone in a lifetime, there is a certain amount of (mis)interpretation that must occur when one reads another's writing. So can we ever know what the author actually intended?

Well, we can get a good idea. But there really isn't any way to know completely what the author was thinking. This is not only because the mind of the author is necessarily secret from the minds of the readers, except in the specific words that have been written (and even those may have different meanings for writer and reader), but also because the social and cultural context in which a text is read will be different after the text is published. So the things which the author intended to be understood a certain way based on the culture in which he or she was brought up may not be understood that way at a later date. Obviously any text that cannot be understood outside of its historical and cultural context is bad, and probably not worth reading even in its proper context.

So we may try to read texts in the context in which they were written, and some value may be gained from this. The intent of the author is a starting point for reading a text. But this reading is neither the only way in which one should read a text, nor is it necessarily better than any others. Reading a text from the vantage point of the current social and cultural situation may not be the way the author intended it to be read, but because the culture in which we now live was influenced by the text itself, this reading is by no means without merit. A text must be read from the vantage of the culture which it has wrought, as well as the culture which wrought it.

Anyway, these are all things I had thought before, though sometimes more crudely than I've written here. And starting this week, I had them confirmed, or at least re-stated, by philosophers and professors. But considering the very nature of the ideas that have been confirmed for me, it would be silly of me to pretend that I thought them originally. I can trace the generation of every idea that I had to something I had learned in school, or some conversation I had with friends. I may have a few particular insights that are unique to me, and maybe if I discover these and explicate them I could get something worthwhile published. But true and total originality seems to be impossible.

Something that has been pounded into my head again and again in college is that there has been no true break from "western tradition". Sure, it has been bent and bent again until we reach something far enough from the past way of things as to be unrecognizable, but in all areas of human endeavor in the west, there has been a continuous and unbroken stream of thought, always changing, but always mostly subsumed by the context of the past. Picasso did something new, but when you look at the art leading up to him, it's easy to see how it was heading in that direction. Derrida did something new, but once again, he made only a few small leaps from what philosophers before him had done. Joyce did something new, but only in form; in content nearly his entire body of work is made of direct references to historical and cultural facts. All of these three were followed by others who took their instances of newness and innovation even further, but these steps are still small. And you can trace back these steps that Derrida, Joyce, and Picasso have trodden. You can trace Picasso back to Michelangelo, from there back to ancient Greek sculpture, and from there back to cave drawings. (Or if you want to skip a few steps you can trace him back to African art, but that's neither here nor there.) Standing on the shoulders of giants never seemed more true.

There are so many metaphors to describe the "western tradition" which is so lauded at this school: standing on the shoulders of giants, a long journey of small steps, etc. I'm fascinated by it. Fascinated enough to make me angry that they don't offer a course on eastern culture. Not because I want to eschew my own culture, but because in comparing it to another I can achieve a fuller understanding of it, much like learning another language to better understand one's own. I want to understand how our culture changes, and how it stays the same. Maybe then I'd be able not only to understand the progression of our culture, but where it is going, and from whence it came...

Well, perhaps not. I got bit too big for my britches. I fell off the giant, if you will. Time for bed.