Abstract
The language in which to articulate specific attitudes at various levels seems to be neglected in the study of law and meaning. When we talk about our self or the human I, our Body or our Mind, we need more complex expressions. We should talk of a YouI or a ThouI, also about an IThou, a MindBody that differs from a BodyMind, not to mention the diversity of expressions pertaining to the Brain and the Mind! Narrativity unfolds as if one particular occurrence in history of the cosmos initiated our meaning concept along the lines of what is called in the book the “master—master discourse”.
This sixth chapter researches that idea in the perspectives of name giving. It studies the differences between the Creation Story and the Paradise story as narrated in the Torah. It also observes that the Fall has been understood as a single partition, even a Great Partition, which became infinitely mirrored in the many stories of various cultures. But any “meaning in a new key” acknowledges that the latter is not a brute fact, not a point of logic to find an explanation of meaning, not—as already mentioned in the first chapter—a definitive breach of silence. While reaching beyond the particle story of Occidental culture, one understands meaning in a new key: as a linguistic articulation anchored in dimensions of human narrativity.
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Notes
- 1.
Michio Kaku: The Future of the Mind, New York 2014, Op. Cit., p. 20.
- 2.
An inside-out ordering seems characteristic for the development of the (human) cerebral cortex. The layered structure of the mature cerebral cortex is formed during development. The first pyramidal neurons migrate out of the ventricular zone from the preplate. Next, a cohort of neurons migrating into the middle of the latter divides this layer into the layered one of the mature neocortex and the cortical plate. Later-developed neurons migrate into the cortical plate past the deep layer neurons, and become the upper layers. (See Wikipedia: Cerebral Cortex).
- 3.
See E. Husserl on Self-reflection, as mentioned in Chap. 2, and the varieties of Self according to a specific attitude, and the meaning of a Self as a result.
- 4.
In particular written language, which goes back some 4000–5000 years.
- 5.
S. Freud : Der Mann Moses und die Monotheistische Religion, 1939, Gesammelte Weerke Vol. XVI: Imago Publ. Co. London/ S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt/M. [Moses and Monotheism], New York 1939 (Katherine Jones, Transl.) p. 162.
- 6.
M. Kaku: The Future of the Mind, Op. Cit., p. 18.
- 7.
The latter go back perhaps 2 million years, with changes that enabled the brain to process that language more and more effectively.
- 8.
- 9.
The steps are, as mentioned in this book on every page, from the naïve-natural to the non-naïve natural levels and culminate in the experience of their unification in the BoMBr.
- 10.
Rashi is an acronym for the medieval French rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki (1040–1105): his Torah commentaries have been honored worldwide since the mid 1500s.
- 11.
Rabbi Yisrael Isser Zvi Herczeg: The Torah: with Rashi’s Commentary Translated, Annotated and Elucidated. The Art-Scroll Series/The Sapirstein Edition, Vol. I, New York 1997, p. 2.
- 12.
Numbers pertaining to the age of Creation stories or the age of mankind are related to the great diversity of culture(s). David A Leening: Creation Myths of he World, ABC-CLIO, LLC, 2010, (www.abc-clio.com) distinguishes 5 Types of Creation Myths and some 220 Creation Myths. Concrete dates vary immensely: Zoroastrianism has a number of 12,000 year in its cosmogony, Egyptian Culture mentions around 250,000 years, Chinese sources 30,000 years BC. The parallel between the developing of the neocortical brain area and the Torah’s Creation narration is remarkable.
- 13.
Meaning also: “astonishment and bafflement”; “baffled over the void within”.
- 14.
Rabbi Yisrael Isser Zvi Herczeg : The Torah: with Rashi’s Commentary Translated, Annotated and Elucidated. Op. Cit.,, p. 5.
- 15.
D.A. Miller: Narrative and its Discontents. Princeton UP, 1981 p. 3 ff. One could furthermore, on the basis of these observations, draw an extremely speculative conclusion. The unfolding of the neocortex in the human brain, which became manifest in forms of linguistic articulation some 4000 years ago, would sustain the often mentioned master—master discourse and its particle story since those days, as the Torah’s Creation narrative seems to illustrate. It would furthermore be one step to declare the very same discourse as belonging to human nature—a formulation based on cortical brain research . That conclusion would destroy the thesis on meaning defended in this book: meaning relates to the various levels of layered language structures and is never a one-to-one relationship, not even if our neocortical brain area as a physical entity is involved, because that area is in terms of meaning not solely and uniquely physical.
- 16.
M. Foucault: “Truth and Power”, in: Power: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984. J.D. Faubion (Ed.) New York 2000, Vol. 3, p. 114. See also: Giorgio Agamben: Signatura Rerum: Sul Metodo [The Signature of All Things], New York 2009. p. 81 ff.
- 17.
W. Benjamin: “Uber Sprache überhaupt und über Sprache des Menschen”, in: Gesammelte Schriften, (GS) Band II, 1. Suhrkamp Frankfurt/M 1977; Engl. Ed.: Selected Writings, (SW) Vol. 1, Bullock & Jennings, (Eds) Harvard 1996. p. 63 ff.
- 18.
See Chap. 3: Word – Benjamin’s Word (The Word of God).
- 19.
Philip T. Grier observed (personal communication): “The significance of naming as a fundamental act has been more clearly exemplified in the recent explorations of the solar system than at any time perhaps since the Age of Exploration in the early modern period. Whenever close-up imagery of rocky planets or moons with solid surfaces has become available for the first time, naming of the fixed, visible features is one of the first activities to be carried out. The recent acquisition of imagery of Pluto from the New Horizons mission is the latest, and a particularly spectacular example. Its scientists have been preoccupied with giving preliminary names to each of the features of the dwarf planet as they came into view. The care and deliberation with which the naming has been carried out is indicative of many things: first of all, it illustrates that merely seeing a new feature is insufficient to incorporate it fully into the human cosmos. For that to occur, each has first to be named. Only then does each become a “known” aspect of the existing cosmos. (In the case of extra-terrestrial bodies, of course, the act of naming can be finalized only by action of the International Astronomical Union). See the August 3, 2015 announcement by the New Horizons team for the complete map of preliminary names for Pluto and its moon Charon .”
- 20.
See for example the Chinese Creation myths at: http://www.crystalinks.com/chinacreation.html or the website of the Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_creation_myth; the latter mentions six important cosmogonic mythologies and two Creation mythologies.
- 21.
See Genesis 2:11.
- 22.
Gen. 2: 19–21.
- 23.
Gen. 3: 6.
- 24.
W. Benjamin: Selected Writings, (SW) Op. Cit., Vol. 1, Bullock & Jennings, (Eds) Harvard 1996.
- 25.
This change ignites various questions at the level of facts. (See Gen. 3: 7, 21) It appears that after the act of disobedience, a new self-awareness was awakened. How did this awareness emerge? After that same act, words hitherto not spoken were articulated. Who taught that new idiom? Whence did it emerge? In the new dialogic mood, signs and symbols were included (for instance nakedness), which were actively answered (the leaves, later the garments of skin). How did the new language bring those acts to the fore?
- 26.
Its political implications are manifold. See: The Invisible Committee: To Our Friends, Semiotext(e), Intervention Series No. 18, 2014, Engl. Ed.: MIT Press, Cambridge/London 2015, p. 46: “For moderns, there is the World on one side, themselves on the other, and language to bridge the gulf. A truth, we are taught, is a solid point above the abyss—a statement that adequately describes the World. We’ve conveniently forgotten the slow apprenticeship during which we acquired, together with language, a relationship with the world. Far from serving to describe the world, language helps us rather to construct a world. Ethical truths are thus not truths about the world, but truths on the basis of which we dwell therein.”
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Broekman, J.M. (2016). Meaning in a New Key. In: Meaning, Narrativity, and the Real. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28175-9_6
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