by Demosophist » Wed Jan 17, 2024 6:55 am
Roy wrote: ↑Tue Jan 09, 2024 12:07 am
I don’t exactly understand the argument. Because scientists learn to read, they turn off their analytical abilities? The physicist Alvarez investigated Iridium anomalies in the K-T boundary. Follow-on work resulted in the Chicxulub crater discovery, putting paid to uniformitarianism.
“The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane. Today’s scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality.” - Nikola Tesla, (1934)
A phonetic script turns the eyes into ears and immerses all of the senses in a visual universe. The letters have no metaphorical meaning, thus nothing graspable intuitively. This is why if you ask someone in a Western country to describe the color red they'll first try to describe color as a wavelength of light and then narrow that to a specific range of wavelengths, or some other austere and non-intuitive breakdown. The big thing is composed of smaller things, which are composed of things smaller still, and so on... and this is considered an sufficient and accurate description. This became the dominant cultural mentality when phonetic text was industrialized in the 15th century. One of the first things that happened as a result was nationalism, so that learning was taught in national languages whereas before it had always been taught in Latin no matter what the national language happened to be. This was a first level fragmentation that became the dominant way of seeing things: a way that as Kant unwittingly demonstrated, didn't actually make sense. The visual world was composed of figures in which wrestle with one another for dominance in the phonetic mentality. There is no room for a ground. Even space itself is conceived of as an enveloping figure.
A Chinese person, having been raised in the context of an ideographic text in which the sigla actually have metaphorical meaning, and are not just stand-ins for sounds, never experienced this turning the eyes into ears. If you ask them to describe the color red they'll show you a red rose, an apple, and perhaps a raspberry... and let it go at that.
Or to put it another way that's closer to Tesla's description, print produces angelism: a kind of fortress illusion of detachment. Any move in the direction of the audile or tactile is "seen" as a threat.
[quote=Roy post_id=9637 time=1704758875 user_id=6501]
I don’t exactly understand the argument. Because scientists learn to read, they turn off their analytical abilities? The physicist Alvarez investigated Iridium anomalies in the K-T boundary. Follow-on work resulted in the Chicxulub crater discovery, putting paid to uniformitarianism.
“The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane. Today’s scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality.” - Nikola Tesla, (1934)
[/quote]
A phonetic script turns the eyes into ears and immerses all of the senses in a visual universe. The letters have no metaphorical meaning, thus nothing graspable intuitively. This is why if you ask someone in a Western country to describe the color red they'll first try to describe color as a wavelength of light and then narrow that to a specific range of wavelengths, or some other austere and non-intuitive breakdown. The big thing is composed of smaller things, which are composed of things smaller still, and so on... and this is considered an sufficient and accurate description. This became the dominant cultural mentality when phonetic text was industrialized in the 15th century. One of the first things that happened as a result was nationalism, so that learning was taught in national languages whereas before it had always been taught in Latin no matter what the national language happened to be. This was a first level fragmentation that became the dominant way of seeing things: a way that as Kant unwittingly demonstrated, didn't actually make sense. The visual world was composed of figures in which wrestle with one another for dominance in the phonetic mentality. There is no room for a ground. Even space itself is conceived of as an enveloping figure.
A Chinese person, having been raised in the context of an ideographic text in which the sigla actually have metaphorical meaning, and are not just stand-ins for sounds, never experienced this turning the eyes into ears. If you ask them to describe the color red they'll show you a red rose, an apple, and perhaps a raspberry... and let it go at that.
Or to put it another way that's closer to Tesla's description, print produces angelism: a kind of fortress illusion of detachment. Any move in the direction of the audile or tactile is "seen" as a threat.