Dear Etab,
Well, I don’t know if there is much to be gained by carrying this further but you can write me @gmail if you think so. I’ll just note for now (and once again) that we see things quite differently.
YOu write:
“After all, language and other symbolic notations are obviously a collective function but there is no ethical value to them.”
-I think if you ever become interested in the question of the origin of language, recognizing it as something qualitatively different from animal communications systems, and thus asking how it could have come into Being, you will have to entertain the possibility that, along with the religious ritual, language began not as a way of making unproblematic referential or declarative statements about the world, but as a way of modelling human reciprocity under a sacred order of Being. In the primitive world, signs and invocations are full of social or ethical/religious significance, and to a lesser degree they still carry that ostensive and imperative import today.
You are much in line with the Western metaphysical tradition which, from Plato to Wittgenstein, has founded itself on a refusal to question the origins of language, so as to assert an ideal use of declarative language as unproblematic or transparent; but philosophy is not anthropology. The latter requires of us an interest not merely in the content, but in the form, of language, something that cannot be “explained” by assuming language just “naturally” and silently evolved out of the animal world. The human really is a break in time and all language recapitulates that break by creating a time or space for “off-line” processing where the immediacy of our worldly rivalry for appetitive objects is deferred by sending us to dwell in a transcendent domain of representations.
“I think that ethics, as a conscious action, is a particular component of our species’ capacity for reason”
-Reason is not something universal, in the sense that people in different cultures “reason” differently. And the reason for that is that reason is secondary to the religious/sacred/ethical/revelatory foundations of any society. Reason is a way of working through the meaning of the sacred (ritualized) events which found a society and the paradoxes, inherent in the events, of how some kind of transcendent and re-membered meaning has emerged from the experience of life in “real time”.
“As for the Judeo-Christian ideology, the former is a tribal, no-growth ideology, focused around maintaining stability and peace within a collective. ALL no-growth societies will have that same ideology. The latter is a growth ideology, focused around enabling different tribes/peoples interact, trade and get along with each other.”
-Do you not think that there is something peculiar in this “tribe” whose religion/culture is mostly the product of a diaspora in which a shared Jewish identity was maintained across thousands of miles in many small communities, with little political power, that, at their most self-aware, constituted something like a global network? What’s tribal about that? To my mind, Jewishness is something quite different – a national high culture founded by a revelation into the universality of our shared human origins. What you see as “tribal” is merely the necessity that any revelation into what is universally human has a “privileged” discoverer and keeper, a firstness which those who come later to share in the revelation potentially resent.
And how do you explain the success of the Jews, as individuals, in the modern world if their culture is merely tribal, a modernity that has flummoxed and buried countless tribes and related forms of cognition? I think that when one turns from resentment of Jewish culture to admiration, it becomes possible to see that significant parts of the modern world entail a globalization of Jewishness (and Christianity in different respects). Many thinkers in early modern and modern European history have been aware of this. But I’m not going on at further length here about this; if anyone wants to consider the possibility with an open mind they can contact me at the above name@gmail.
