Pyrrho:The Necessity of Everything

From dKosopedia

Category: DKos Diaries

I worry about the fundamentals of thing. These are the foundations on which ideals rest, the fundamental issues of ideas. These foundations are the atomic ideas of reason, the principles.

There is a good relativist and therefore progressive perspective on the world which accepts the necessity of everything in the past.

A Digression, Philosophy is as Language is

I was shocked to realize that language did not evolve the way we learned it. We learn language as though it's build up from atomic ideas. That is, letters form sylables which form words which form sentences which form paragraphs which form the language we understand.

But the history of language shows an opposite evolution. The concept of the paragraph is older than the sentence... the concept of the sentence is older than the word! My first hint about this was in Latin class. Original Latin from antiquity does not have spaces between the word nor punctuation between sentences or other phrases. It's just a runnon stream of letters. This itself was just a hint and not indicative.

But I became convinced of this in college while taking courses from Fritz Staall, philosopher and sanskrit scholar. He has a theory of language which argues basically that first there were long mantras without semantic meaning. These mantra did have strict grammar rules, even though many of the parts certainly had no semantic meaning as words. His theory is that meaning was added to this mathematic later. His theory is not proven or widely accepted, but the general fact does emerge... language evolved as evocation... it evolves from long calls from the heart, not unlike speaking in tongues. Doing this for ages, thousands of years, the patterns emerge, the stream is broken down into it's pieces, rules are abstracted and new statements can be made using these peices and the abstracted rules.

It is much the same, I believe with philosophy... we form philosophic systems whole but crude, we state and restate until the patterns become clearn, the weak pieces perish and the strong take on independent lives of their own. As progressive philosophers it is our role to break the concepts down to sizes small enough to reform as a progressive foundation. In language are the right pieces, but they are fixed in a dogmatic, non-progressive, construct. Our current language makes it difficult to speak relativistic, tollerant, truths with certainty and assertively. We have to use weak voices, such as the passive voice, or pepper our speech with redundant qualifiers ("it may be", "I think") which by right are a part of every idea uttered or not. To reform culture we need our progressive philosophers to resort this as a foundation for our so called real world positions, our practical plans.