[lit-ideas] Re: The Order of Aurality
- From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2012 16:04:42 -0700
Mike Geary wrote
Oh I see how it is. Now we have to make our comments pertinent to the
discussion at hand. Very well, then, I'll try. The question as I
took it to be -- at least partially is whether or not language is a
sine qua non of what it means to be human. Certainly other animal
species have vocal signals and use them to great advantage, but I've
never seen nor heard a chimpanze challenge another about the
ramifications of language. Show me the cat Barthes. But my niece, it
seems to me,screams out (impossible to understand her though) that
language is us and we are language. Profoundly death since 6 months
old -- she has no concept of spoken language, she sees lips moving,
but it has no meaning to her. And yet she "speaks" and she "hears" in
her dreams. Since she cannot hear her own self, she cannot report to
us what her dream language sounds like. That fascinates me. Language
is so much a part of us that we create a language when we must. And
of course the incidents of ideosympathic languages of some twins,
speaks to us -- perhaps -- of the failure of language to encompass all
things, all thoughts, all experence. OK, I've run out of words.
I'm not clear about what your niece does. When you say that she "speaks"
and "hears" in her dreams, how are you able to find this out? She cannot
tell you that
she 'speaks' and 'hears' in her dreams; she cannot 'report to [you] what
her dream language sounds like.' So, I don't understand how you know
this happens. (I've
probably missed something.)
'...we create a language when we must.' Children enter a world in which
language is already going on. They don't 'create' a language'; they
learn the language
they're surrounded by. I don't think that is creating a language: they
do the best they can with what they've got.
In /Investigations/ §342, Wittgenstein says something about a case that
in some ways resembles that of your niece.
William James, in order to show that thought is possible without speech,
quotes the reminiscences of a deaf-mute, Mr Ballard, who wrote that in
his early
youth, even before he could speak, he had had thoughts about God and the
world.---What could this mean!?---Ballard writes: "it was during those
delightful
rides, some two or three years before my initiation into the rudiments
of written language, that I began to ask myself the question: how came
the world
into being?" ---Are you sure---one would like to ask---that this is the
correct translation of your wordless thoughts into words? And why does this
question---which otherwise seems not to exist---arise here? Do I want to
say that the writer's memory deceives him?---I don't even know if I'd
say /that/.
These recollections are a strange memory phenomenon---and I don't know
what conclusions one can draw from them about the narrator's past.
------------------------------------------------------------------
Robert Paul,
confused as ever
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