[lit-ideas] Re: Ontilogical vs. Onticological
- From: dsavory@xxxxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 6 Jul 2004 10:42:56 -0700
Phil writes:
That thinking matters, that the distinction between ontic and
ontological matters, is not something that can be argued for or proven.
Either one cares or one doesn't.
This is surely the handiwork of wisdom. But I progress.
I care about this ?caring? business. I was lamenting to David Ritchie that
much of scholarship amounts to making pedestrian observations and recasting
those descriptions in a jargon peculiar to some worldview or other, usually
one whose total view of the truth is obscured by some monolithic concept like
power, colonialism, the patriarchy or SuperSizing.It?s fascinating to me to
learn how it is people commit to worldviews and ignore whatever lurks in the
shadow thrown by whatever monolith they orient to.
I began this message thinking I would say something about ontology and
epistemology, what there is and how we think about it, but instead I want to
present the following: ?in 1959, the Swedish film maker and painter Friedrich
Jurgenson played back tapes of birdcalls he had recorded in a Swedish forest.
To his astonishment, he heard what he believed to be his dead mother?s voice
on the tape!?
The real question here, the one I care about is, why would the spirit of a
woman manifest itself on an audiotape of all places, amid birds squabbling in
a Swedish forest? Was the spirit in the forest, in the tape or in the mind of
the Swedish filmmaker who wanted to find his mother?s voice, somewhere,
anywhere? In the end, is there any difference, as long as he cared to find her
and did? I?m given to believe (as per Shakespeare) that spirits are rationally
purposeful even if they?re frequently misguided and nasty; if this is the
case, why wouldn?t his mother appear in a vision and say plainly what she
means to say? Do these voices tell us more about the son than the mother?
David Savory
Vancouver
dsavory@xxxxxxxxx
dsavory@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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