Are we becoming too literal?

[Whateverist]

Two discrete ideas reached out to me:



To me, this is the major shortcoming of online communications, this inability to read the body language of the person you're talking with. The little things we try to do to make up for this lack, when the person or the subject is important enough to want to make that effort, and how they still fall short, and sometimes make things worse.



TikTok is a train wreck, feeding narcissism and locking kids into a virtual world they seem happy to be locked into. Where are their parents? Too many of them are on Facebook, or instagram, or YouTube. I've seen kids switch to their practiced insta face when posing for a photo, and then the instant gratification of seeing the result and being either satisfied or disappointed. The impoverishment is real.

I see it in my niece and nephew who are in high school. My brother has real dialogue with both of them and he is their only involved parent but he likes his computer games and accepts their immersion on their phones the way my parents did our immersion in television as kids in the 60's. I don't think he can see it but I also know he is stretched thin, having gotten a raw deal in a marriage to a woman too young and uneducated to know her mind. It is tough times and unlike the past we don't know how it will turn out.

Thank you for the poem. I'll spend more time with it. The poet I've spent the most time with is E.E. Cummings. There are many of his poems which frequently come to mind. The one you shared makes me think of from his work is this one:


I thank You God for most this amazing day
For the leaping greenly spirits of trees
And a blue true dream of sky
And for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes
I who have died am alive again today
And this is the sun's birthday
This is the birth day of life and of love and wings
And of the gay great happening illimitably earth
How should tasting, touching, hearing, seeing, breathing any
Lifted from the no of all nothing
Human merely being doubt unimaginable You?
Now the ears of my ears awake
And now the eyes of my eyes are opened


But another I like a little more is this one:

One's not half two. It's two are halves of one.​

one's not half two. It's two are halves of one:
which halves reintegrating,shall occur
no death and any quantity;but than
all numerable mosts the actual more

minds ignorant of stern miraculous
this every truth-beware of heartless them
(given the scalpel,they dissect a kiss;
or,sold the reason,they undream a dream)

one is the song which fiends and angels sing:
all murdering lies by mortals told make two.
Let liars wilt,repaying life they're loaned;
we(by a gift called dying born)must grow

deep in dark least ourselves remembering
love only rides his year.
All lose,whole find


From his Six Nonlectures I really like what he says about what a home is or should be. Apparently his family were friends with a number of interesting folks from the times including William James. His father was was a Harvard professor who became known as the minister of South Congregational Church (Unitarian) in Boston. Must have had an interesting life. I like what he has to say about religion and wonder how much he was influenced by William James.

 

[anna.]

I see it in my niece and nephew who are in high school. My brother has real dialogue with both of them and he is their only involved parent but he likes his computer games and accepts their immersion on their phones the way my parents did our immersion in television as kids in the 60's. I don't think he can see it but I also know he is stretched thin, having gotten a raw deal in a marriage to a woman too young and uneducated to know her mind. It is tough times and unlike the past we don't know how it will turn out.

Thank you for the poem. I'll spend more time with it. The poet I've spent the most time with is E.E. Cummings. There are many of his poems which frequently come to mind. The one you shared makes me think of from his work is this one:


I thank You God for most this amazing day
For the leaping greenly spirits of trees
And a blue true dream of sky
And for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes
I who have died am alive again today
And this is the sun's birthday
This is the birth day of life and of love and wings
And of the gay great happening illimitably earth
How should tasting, touching, hearing, seeing, breathing any
Lifted from the no of all nothing
Human merely being doubt unimaginable You?
Now the ears of my ears awake
And now the eyes of my eyes are opened


But another I like a little more is this one:

One's not half two. It's two are halves of one.​

one's not half two. It's two are halves of one:
which halves reintegrating,shall occur
no death and any quantity;but than
all numerable mosts the actual more

minds ignorant of stern miraculous
this every truth-beware of heartless them
(given the scalpel,they dissect a kiss;
or,sold the reason,they undream a dream)

one is the song which fiends and angels sing:
all murdering lies by mortals told make two.
Let liars wilt,repaying life they're loaned;
we(by a gift called dying born)must grow

deep in dark least ourselves remembering
love only rides his year.
All lose,whole find


From his Six Nonlectures I really like what he says about what a home is or should be. Apparently his family were friends with a number of interesting folks from the times including William James. His father was was a Harvard professor who became known as the minister of South Congregational Church (Unitarian) in Boston. Must have had an interesting life. I like what he has to say about religion and wonder how much he was influenced by William James.

What an amazing thing to have been in William James’ circle of friends!

Lovely poems, thank you.

 

[vulcanlogician]

If we are posting poems as responses to OP, may I submit a lil' Kahlil Gibran. He wrote this in Biblical free verse, which is a form of poetry that tries to emulate the style and cadence of the Bible. (Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra is another example of Biblical free verse poetry.

Anyway, here is a couple lines from the book, The Prophet.

***

"If these be vague words, then seek not to clear them. Vague and nebulous is the beginning of all things, but not their end, And I fain would have you remember me as a beginning. Life, and all that lives, is conceived in the mist and not in the crystal. And who knows but a crystal is mist in decay?"

***

Metaphors aid us in understanding those "vague and nebulous" things that occupy most of our lives. We can see many things with crystal clarity. But there is much that we need metaphor to help us understand. Things are blurry, and metaphor is a pair of glasses that we put on to make those blurry things come into focus.

"Argument from metaphor" is a logical fallacy, and is to be avoided in all cases. Metaphors can help us see vague things more clearly, but they can't be used as premises for logical conclusions.

 

[vulcanlogician]

I really dug the article, too.

 

[IndigoChild5559]

“The philosopher C Thi Nguyen puts it this way: “The aims of communication are complex and many. Some of us want to transmit information or to persuade; some of us want friendship. Some of us want to join together in the pursuit of truth and understanding . . . Twitter invites us to shift our values along its prefabricated lines. We start to chase higher likes and retweets and follower counts — and those are very different targets.” He calls it the “gamification of discourse”.”

From ..

This complex, nuanced world has a right-hemisphere problem

We are living through an increasingly context-blind, literalist age. Cancellation, the assault on history, political polarisation, the deficit of irony and nuance, particularly in the online world: all seem to conform to this pattern

www.thetimes.co.uk

I hesitated to put this here because I don’t personally do debate that being a form of communication I find a bit too gamified. But I’ll put it here anyway and please feel free to communicate in whatever way you feel moved to about this article. For me I do wish more nuanced thought was more plentiful so I agree with Syed that we are losing that for a myriad of reasons.

I agree that we live in a literalist age, and this is distressing to me -- as a retired teacher, trying to teach my students context was a very important part of good reading comprehension.

It is not just the religious who are overly literal. I've noticed that virtually all the atheist objections to the Bible are based on a similarly literal interpretation.

 

[Whateverist]

It is not just the religious who are overly literal. I've noticed that virtually all the atheist objections to the Bible are based on a similarly literal interpretation.

True. Obviously God, whatever that may be, is not a thing to be studied with dispassion. If it can be known at all would require a very open ended investigation on many levels and that which we would seek to know must consent to being known as well. It obviously isn't an empirical matter. I think many religious start out assuming too much as revealed. But as you say, so too do too many areligious assume standard investigative procedures must prevail and lack of evidence must be construed as evidence of non-existence.

 

[Whateverist]

If we are posting poems as responses to OP, may I submit a lil' Kahlil Gibran. He wrote this in Biblical free verse, which is a form of poetry that tries to emulate the style and cadence of the Bible. (Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra is another example of Biblical free verse poetry.

Cool, I did not know that.

"If these be vague words, then seek not to clear them. Vague and nebulous is the beginning of all things, but not their end, And I fain would have you remember me as a beginning. Life, and all that lives, is conceived in the mist and not in the crystal. And who knows but a crystal is mist in decay?"

Eerily like what I'm reading now from that same author about how the investigation into the nature of matter by physics at the highest level is resulting in reports of finding no way forward which doesn't find the mental in the physical. Still taking that in but I'll try to post something if I ever get a handle on it or if some helpful article should appear by a decent writer like this article's author.

Metaphors aid us in understanding those "vague and nebulous" things that occupy most of our lives. We can see many things with crystal clarity. But there is much that we need metaphor to help us understand. Things are blurry, and metaphor is a pair of glasses that we put on to make those blurry things come into focus.

Understanding is not the same thing as mastering something in order to put it to use. Beyond understanding, we should expect nothing more in these matters. So the methods of science will not prevail and unless we want to wager on a set of premises, we must take what is given. The mystery will not be taken against her will.

"Argument from metaphor" is a logical fallacy, and is to be avoided in all cases. Metaphors can help us see vague things more clearly, but they can't be used as premises for logical conclusions.

Yeah arguments are beside the point. If anyone gets a clue, he will walk away with no stone tablets. Once his torch is lit all he can do is offer it to those who would catch a spark in theirs.

 

[vulcanlogician]

Yeah arguments are beside the point.

I disagree. You really can't make a point at all without resorting to argument.

 

[Whateverist]

I disagree. You really can't make a point at all without resorting to argument.

I’ve read many good novels and poems which made excellent points which seeped into consciousness implicitly whole rather than skinned and prepped for arguments. Implicit knowledge is take it or leave it same as the punchline to a joke. If you need it explained you’ll lose the opportunity to appreciate the humor.

 

[vulcanlogician]

Okay. Fair enough. Arguments aren't the only way to make points. But when you want to be sure arguments are quite useful. Otherwise, anything goes. And "anything goes" works excellently in poetry. In fact, it may be a necessary component to any good poem. But when you want to make certain inquiries about nature, certain disciplines are obviously more useful than others.

Are any of these the "one and only paradigm"? No. Neruda said something about tomatoes that biologists cannot. But that goes both ways.

 

[Whateverist]

Okay. Fair enough. Arguments aren't the only way to make points. But when you want to be sure arguments are quite useful. Otherwise, anything goes. And "anything goes" works excellently in poetry. In fact, it may be a necessary component to any good poem. But when you want to make certain inquiries about nature, certain disciplines are obviously more useful than others.

Are any of these the "one and only paradigm"? No. Neruda said something about tomatoes that biologists cannot. But that goes both ways.

More about the adequacy of discursive language to contain let alone make arguments about the nature of reality or our direct experience of that. From the end of the 25th chapter of The Matter With Things (on which the above cited article was based).

CAN WE TALK ABOUT THE TOPIC AT ALL?
I am aware that talk about consciousness and its relation to reality is foolhardy. The topic defies language. However, for that very reason, it is not irrational to push the bounds of language and thought..
I do not claim to know what experience is any more than anyone else, except that it is the condition on which I know anything at all. And yet we all understand it directly. It is what we know (kennen) better than anything at all, and yet know (wissen) least of all about. It is therefore difficult to discuss, since neither language nor reason are well adapted to it. Language is already at a remove from direct experience. Bryan Magee captures the difficulties: this direct experience which is never adequately communicable in words is the only knowledge we ever fully have. That is our one and only true, unadulterated, direct and immediate form of knowledge of the world, wholly possessed, uniquely ours. People who are rich in that are rich in lived life. But the very putting of it into words translates it into something of the second order, something derived, watered down, abstracted, generalised, publicly shareable. People who live most of their outer or inner lives in terms that are expressible in language – for example, people who live at the level of concepts, or in a world of ideas – are living a life in which everything is simplified and reduced, emptied of what makes it lived, purged of what makes it unique and theirs.372

And then more to the point of the adequacy of language.

Language is no match for the topic. And reason cannot reach the depths of experience, either. ‘We have to confess’, writes James,

that the part of [mental life] of which rationalism can give an account is relatively superficial. It is the part that has the prestige undoubtedly, for it has the loquacity, it can challenge you for proofs, and chop logic and put you down with words. But it will fail to convince or convert you all the same ... if you have intuitions at all, they come from a deeper level of your nature than the loquacious level which rationalism inhabits.375​

Strawson would probably agree: ‘discursive thought is not adequate to the nature of reality: we can see that it doesn’t get things right although we can’t help persisting with it ... the nature of reality is in fundamental respects beyond discursive grasp.’376 Marcelo Gleiser puts it with panache: ‘Unless you are intellectually numb, you can’t escape the awe-inspiring feeling that the essence of reality is unknowable.’377

Rather famously the psychologist Stuart Sutherland wrote in the International Dictionary of Psychology: ‘Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon; it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written on it.’ I cannot hope to have been an exception to this rule.

 

[Whateverist]

I think the gentleman who wrote this article should absolutely read "Spell of the Sensuous" because it directly relates to what he's observing.

The short of it is the invention of alphabetic language fundamentally changed how human cultures operate. Instead of finding meaning in a world populated with other-than-human persons in an inexorably sensual world, alphabetic cultures focused all that into abstract glyphs that are disconnected from the actual experiences of life and living. And when too much focused is put on these glyphs, these word things, this literacy? The wind falls silent. The hills no longer speak. Humans grow deaf to the experience of life and the colors of senses and sensuality. They loose what some would call "spiritual" connection to something greater.

Was just rereading the responses in this thread and the original article. This time I put the Spell of the Sensuous on hold. Only 2nd in queue. Thanks.

 

[PureX]

At risk of sounding like a grumpy elder person, ( a title I have not yet earned )...

Back when I was in school, in english class we learned poetry and read literature and talked about metaphor, and language, postulated the author's intentions. Every year, year after year, starting in 7th grade I think. Going through 12th grade. It was required. Poetry and stories were also written and discussed.

My kids are telling me this isn't taught in their english classes. They are learning persuasion, and reading news articles. The curriculum is less english as an art, it's more like a science.

Just my own experience in one small community in PacNw America. Hopefully other places are different.

The wealthy elites that now own and control everything don’t need artists and free thinkers. They need productive workers to exploit for their own benefit. Schools used to be intended to educate human beings and citizens. Now they are job training centers. All in the name and worship of “science” And to the exclusion of art and philosophy and civics (humanities). But actually it’s all for the purpose of economic exploitation. Nuanced thinking just clutters up the minds of the intended obedient servants and makes them less effective (less profitable). So we don’t encourage that sort of thing in our educational system anymore. It’s just numbers and facts and laws, now.

 

[Whateverist]

The wealthy elites that now own and control everything don’t need artists and free thinkers. They need productive workers to exploit for their own benefit. Schools used to be intended to educate human beings and citizens. Now they are job training centers. All in the name and worship of “science” And to the exclusion of art and philosophy and civics (humanities). But actually it’s all for the purpose of economic exploitation. Nuanced thinking just clutters up the minds of the intended obedient servants and makes them less effective (less profitable). So we don’t encourage that sort of thing in our educational system anymore. It’s just numbers and facts and laws, now.

Some of my thoughtful and interesting Christian friends say that all through the presidential race fellow church members were challenging their minister that the what Jesus taught doesn't work anymore. They think they are too savvy now for the sermon on the mount. And like their new savior, they don't turn the cheek, they just hit back harder.

 

[Evangelicalhumanist]

View attachment 82087

What, are you suggesting that there are many reasons to communicate, and many ways to do it? Well who the heck knew?!?

 

[granpa]

At risk of sounding like a grumpy elder person, ( a title I have not yet earned )...

Back when I was in school, in english class we learned poetry and read literature and talked about metaphor, and language, postulated the author's intentions. Every year, year after year, starting in 7th grade I think. Going through 12th grade. It was required. Poetry and stories were also written and discussed.

My kids are telling me this isn't taught in their english classes. They are learning persuasion, and reading news articles. The curriculum is less english as an art, it's more like a science.

Just my own experience in one small community in PacNw America. Hopefully other places are different.

yes, and everything must look good on TV. People are living their lives as though they were on television 24/7.

 

[dybmh]

yes, and everything must look good on TV. People are living their lives as though they were on television 24/7.

in their own little world which lives in between their ears.... addicted to cotton-candy-knowledge: fluffy, produced by hot air, and curated to pacify a child's self-centered desires.

 

[PureX]

Some of my thoughtful and interesting Christian friends say that all through the presidential race fellow church members were challenging their minister that the what Jesus taught doesn't work anymore. They think they are too savvy now for the sermon on the mount. And like their new savior, they don't turn the cheek, they just hit back harder.

They are the new warriors for the rich. They have no interest in squishy emotional idealism: you know … that weak human stuff. They are all about money and technology; power and control. The mechanical righteousness of big science.

 

[Whateverist]

They are the new warriors for the rich. They have no interest in squishy emotional idealism: you know … that weak human stuff. They are all about money and technology; power and control. The mechanical righteousness of big science.

I suspect you are better read in this area than I since I have never had much interest in economics. But not long ago I watched this video and reach similar conclusions to your own.