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Human Thinking Before Language -- Cormac McCarthy
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- Опубліковано 19 кві 2021
- In this ineffable video, ironically, not as many visuals -- just some talking about language and thought after re-reading Cormac McCarthy's "Kekule Problem" essay... here's a link to the original essay:
nautil.us/issu...
I've always found this to be a stimulating locus for meditation -- the origin of language, what it has to do with the self, and being human, etc.
Patreon: / godward
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"By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp"
I love this quote. It's really simple, but immediately puts an image in your head, that tells you just how desolate and hopeless the world in this book is.
just found your channel bingeing on mccarthy videos even though ive never read him. fascinated by the 2 million year old unconscious thought vs 100k year old language idea and the imagery of cormac's books. really insightful points you brought up
Thanks, man! - lots of stuff about consciousness/mind/language in my archive. Thanks for checking it out. 👍🏻
Never read the essay and quite possibly could be interesting. perhaps it's the way it's described there are too many errors to start to list them
Please do an episode on Blood Meridian. I think the philosophy of the Judge comes from McCarthy's ideas of the unconscious: "Before Man was, War waited for him."
That book is SO heavy. I'll do one eventually, but I need to re-read it, cuz it's been a few years. Thanks for listening -- check out my episode on Thucydides maybe (ep. 2 I think)
We were already whistling and singing bird songs. We were arlready mimicking animal sounds while hunting we were using sign language while hunting. When we didn’t have clear field of view we had sounds to substitute for the handle signal. Then the first true word and conceptual object was the object of prey
Having just read The Passenger, I definitely see The Kid as something like an interpreter for Alicia's unconscious. He talks a lot, so he defies the no-language aspect, but the more abstract the language the more his talk becomes "gibberish," and he's always trying to *show* her things.
Just coming back to let you know how important this episode is. What a way to think about thinking... I love it
If you google "Kekule problem" and "Cormac McCarthy," you can read the essay for yourself -- it really is worth going over... takes about half an hour. Talk to you Friday, I hope!
@@GodwardPodcast good man! I've been in Dunedin the university/art town of NZ making a waves these last two weeks in some sort of scene I'm associated with. There was little chance last time, therefore. But I'm back to the farm today so every chance for this Saturday at 1pm (before both of our daylight savings it was 3pm here). Looking forward to talking soon
Pretty valiant stuff man - I enjoyed it; I'll re-read his essay again on the back of this vid - might end up being the last thing published from him in his own lifetime,
Really hoping The Passenger is released post-humously and that *I'm* still around to read it - I was lucky enough to read a couple of paragraphs and it looked to have the potential to something truly special.
Thanks for listening! -- Yeah, can't wait for The Passenger.
The audiobook narration is incredible
This is brilliant sir, thank you
Thanks for watching!
brilliant and very enjoyable. thank you!
Brilliant, loved this, thanks.
The Road was a great read and I thank Godward for recommending it.
In the world of the "Road" not all men are humans they have given in to the dire circumstances and have resolved to do anything to survive. True humans have limits on what they will do. The willingness to be limited is call character. You are not born human you become human and if you are not careful, If you do not feed and nurture your humanity you will loose it and be just another animal.
Analogy. images = thought
Linguistic brain dissolves whilst fishing
Fishing is the best.
send out the horses and send in the clowns.
Yes! Try reading a technical manual on how to do a basic technique (driving a car, using a tool) vs. being shown how to do these things. Two images come to my mind, two opposite ends of the spectrum: on one end when two people "get" each other and can complete each others' sentences or don't even need to speak them in the first place (love, joy, life itself) and, on the other end, when you're talking with someone who very obviously does not get it and they keep asking questions that just show more and more how little they are even capable of getting it (despair, awkward social gatherings with co-workers or something).
Ha! Grim second scenario but of course yes
My summary of The Road: when I read it I had a 10 yo son, and I cried for three hours after finishing it
I haven’t read it since my son was born. Even remembering it is crushing.
Re handedness: i know personally i was forced to use my right hand in school and learned to write that way from pretty much the very beginning. It was learned, not natural, I definitely fought it but, sadly, lost.
Interesting! My wife is a lefty, and my son showed strong lefty inclinations - so I just let him do it.
Good golly miss godford, this Cormac is brilliant
Santa Fe, Arizona!
Language can b used as a weapon, it can hurt & even destroy people. I also think sometimes, if everyone loved each other, love would not b a word, & "I love you" would not b a phrase, for we would not have to tell ppl or explain or announce to ppl that we love them, because it would just b understood. We would not have to display love even, as in a hug or any other expression. Nor hate. These things I contemplate.
Herman Melville, in a letter to Hawthorne:
We incline to think that the Problem of the Universe is like the Freemason's mighty secret, so terrible to all children. It turns out, at last, to consist in a triangle, a mallet, and an apron, -- nothing more! We incline to think that God cannot explain His own secrets, and that He would like a little information upon certain points Himself. We mortals astonish Him as much as He us. But it is this Being of the matter; there lies the knot with which we choke ourselves. As soon as you say Me, a God, a Nature, so soon you jump off from your stool and hang from the beam. Yes, that word is the hangman. Take God out of the dictionary, and you would have Him in the street.
The thinking happens before language.
It’s easy to imagine how language emerged
It is? Maybe I overcomplicate it. Hard for me. Why doesn’t it happen in other animals?
great episode
Awsome enlightening
Thanks, man -- Cormac works a lot of this essay material on the unconscious and language into his new book, Stella Maris. Check it out. I posted a review a few days ago.
The unconscious is just thoughts and other neurological processes that you are unaware of.
Yes I, also, have considered the dominant-handedness, & why it is a thing at all. And if there is evolution, why did we evolve to have a dominant hand at all, what would've propel this adaptation. Which would possibly explain why the majority are right-handed.
Thank you for this!
Oh, thanks for listening!
'My wife calls it sending out divorces..?'
“Sending out the horses.” Lol, sorry
I found the video. Have read everything he has written and am half through The Passenger. Good stuff.
It's pretty good, right? Depends on what you're looking for, maybe -- I actually love Suttree. The Passenger is actually much easier reading. I'm really looking forward to Stella Maris to see if he brings together some dangling loose ends, or if loose-ends is the way he wants to leave things. Cheers!
UA-cam is a poor loom for a lusty weaver to thread love, says Bottom to Godward in A Midsummer's Night's Venery.
Is there a word to describe the physiological feeling after finishing a Cormac McCarthy novel?
And what is the next action you take afterwards? Washing the dishes so you can simmer in the afterglow?
So far, I’ve been thankful that there are other McCarthy books to look to next… but for me all I have left is the border triology now. The end of The Road, and the end of Child of God… both took my scalp off.
There is no unconscious mind. Read more at The Enkrypted Press on Patreon. www.patreon.com/posts/63414084 www.patreon.com/theenkryptedpress
I've heard that left handedness is statistically on the rise, if so this would be interesting
verbal language as a virus makes sense because there are no partial languages in human population (it swept through population) and that it pushed aside or dominated communication techniques, skills and strategies over other mammalian communication process
Making an attempt to organize comments around the things you bring on concerning language and thinking, I'll try to make a beginning. It would be practically impossible for me to articulate a train of thought like you do here, without first having spent, who knows how much time pre-organizing it in written form, assuming that then I perhaps would be able to come out as you do, without reading it. To me you sound like thinking out loud in front of the lens and microphone, but totally coherent and organized. Language is proposed in the earliest self -conscious attemps at explaining it, like in school at late High School or early college, as the tool for thinking. All the coherence, fluency and articulateness of "the word", (small w),through 'the word" or by means of "the word" is what is called thinking. But "the word" in its raw form, gross, so to speak is not enough, for at its most basic, would stay on naming things.It requires further elaboration through a lot of crafting to develop logic, in turn undistinguishable in practice from 'reason', mode of expression, rules of grammar, tone of voice and so on to make it an efficient tool for communication, social communication, with 'others like yourself, at least theoretically. In other words political correctness at its most basic level. The reality before or below the superimposition of the word, reason, logic is dis-acknowledged, if such term exists, banned, censonred, condemned or pretended it ain't there, in practice as if it did not exist. It might get assigned to a propper place, or occasion. In the particular trnaslation of the Bible I got at a certain moment, God creates the world, goes on into Adam and Eve and then leaves it to Adam to put the names on all the things within the contraption. As if it were none of his businees, in a manner of a so to speak. A kind of Walt Disney giving Mickey Mouse a life of his own, with a will of his own, freedom of choice and so on? Perhaps. And God has no name, and the real thing(The Tao) that has a name is not the real thing. The image and imagery is a toddling that relies on not being so much of an atheist, or so deep into believing, that would render the images and imagery useless for the practical purposes we are trying to put it to use here.
Then we come to Cormac McCathy, who is an artist, and the art of music, that is before of below ,spoken and written language. In the dwellings discovered of the very, very, really old, old guys and gals who roamed aroung this earth, there have been found flutes that are 35.000 years old. To me the process that leads to coming up with something like a flute is an unbelievable feat of engineering. The guy on whose property were discovered tha Altamira Caves with the drawings from ancinet man, ended up and died in total disgrace, ridiculed, banned from scientific society as a fraud, forgerer and you name it, for it was impossible that 'those people' to put it in terms that now apply to the "there goes the neighborhood"crowd, could have produced such art. His daughter witnessed and suffered the injustce until after his death, and she was who had discovered the caves by total chance at a very young age. The Japanese guy creator of the Suzuki Method of music Instruction, started on his voyage of discovery when he made the shocking discovery that all japanese children spoke japanese without anyone having asked them if they wanted to , liked it or were interested. To put it short, in his method, originally the mother has to be present in the claas always, now it can be anyone of the parents. A friend of mine, medical doctor who did not and does not know anything about music, had her first child learnng piano through the Suzuki method. At that time she was preganant with her second child. When that second child was already in elementary school, she went to pick him up at school but could not find him anywhere. That child had not taken anykind of music instruction. When she made inquiries she was told that he was in the music room playing piano. 'He doesn't know how to play the piano" When she found him he was playing the Suzuki method tunes his brother was learning when he was still in womb. The music of traditional societies, old, or coming from those societies is taught intuitively, which is the term that should be used for 'ear learning' I know from Puerto Rico in the Caribbena,and Cuba and the Dominican Republic, that in defense from the demeaning attitude of formal music, learning ihtuitevely has acquired self conscious ideological overtones. " You have to sink the patterns into your heart by repetition and listening or you are not going anywhere". That goes for Flamenco and French Gypsy music from what I have heard. I understand this points support what McCarthy brings on and I wonder if he has taken a look at music and what he would say about this. Thanks for your sharing, very stimulatiing.
What a great comment!! Very interesting stuff. Many thanks.
@@GodwardPodcast Thank you, a lot! You are not only gifted with the capacity for provocative communication, and on top very matter of fact, but also very generous. You hit a soft spot of mine.
Interesting video. The way I see it, non-verbal thinking reaches for depth or profundity and verbal thinking takes the non-verbal results and strings them together for the purpose of communication.
Verbal subtests correlate more strongly with the g factor than non-verbal and in general any other subtest on common IQ tests. This means that at some point of human history, intelligence was selected verbally. But I don't know when this could have started.
Other than that, I've had a hypothesis that if IQ could be given fixed units the way length does like meters or feet, then either the verbal units would be larger than non-verbal units (if both are set to 100 units each for an IQ of 100), or if both kinds of intelligences are given the same units then a 100 verbal IQ would have more units than a 100 non-verbal IQ.
Now for the 'out there' part of this comment: maybe a non-physical agent or agents had an influence over humanity to bring about this change. Maybe this was not a good influence.
Spooky at the end!
How much of so-called reason is done by non-lingual thought? Such as genius? Or the penumbra of rights in the Constitution?
Interesting topic. Noam Chomsky argued that language is innate, and theorized idea of a universal grammar. We dream in language that we know. A sign of mastery of another language or immersion is ability to dream in that language. But does language (some active and some more passive) signify the genetic predispositions of the groups who formed them? I think Chomsky also put forth idea that language primary purpose is higher cognition, NOT communication. I find Chomsky's work on linguistics his real contribution that let him ride for rest of his life on radical politics. Another question. I read Blood Meridian, enjoyed it, although find it unrelatable not just in the tale but in the cold distant prose. I liked No Country for Old Men the film. Do you think the filmmakers captured the essence of the book? Bishop Baron had a good review of it. I'm a big fan of his pop culture reviews/insights. Wonder what you think of his review. I also recommend his video on Old Testament violence, specifically 'the ban' passages found in Deutoronomy that seem to interest you.
One of the points McCarthy makes in that article is something I always thought rendered Chomsky’s UG stuff sort of null, and that is, language must describe the world - there’s nothing else for it to describe. So the “universal” elements of grammar are really just reflections of reality, which seems to be composed of subjects and objects, verbs, adjectives, etc. It does seem like a language could sort of reflect a group’s culture - or that the culture is a reflection of local circumstances, etc. Maybe. But at the same time, babies don’t seem to show a predisposition for any particular language and can learn one as well as another, regardless of their race or ethnicity. I have read No Country - only seen the movie. Blood Meridian is not my favorite, but I do like the setting and sometimes the language works well for me. I’ll check Barron’s. Thanks!
Daniel Everett, a linguist, strongly disagreed with Chomsky and rather than debate Everett, Chomsky threw his rattle out of the pram in defence of his precious theory, calling Everett a charlatan. He stopped short of calling him an anti-semite though, so he was being quite measured, lol. I forget Everett's argument now, but I thought his first book, "Don't Sleep There Are Snakes", was fascinating and highly recommend it as great read.
@@gurnstein thanks. My impression in English departments was that linguists venerated Chomsky’s take a little too much - like, it wasn’t questionable, had become an orthodoxy. But I will say, I’m not sure I understand the stakes very well.
Santa Fe, TX
Language is a clumsy tool for communicating thought from one human mind to another.
Agree -- but also, better than telekinesis, in a pinch! :)
@@GodwardPodcast the Holy Spirit communicates by pure thought, if one believes in that kind of thing.
@@oldsachem One does!
I would think language would emerge during group hunts
But the weird thing is that you'd need two guys to "get it" -- it has to connect, right. Which means you have one guy ready to speak (to speak what? to whom? what noises will he choose?) AND (amazingly) another guy who, just at that moment, though it's never been done before, AS THE OTHER GUY DOES IT, is ready to *understand* what the other guy is doing (again: even though this thing has never been done before in the entire animal kingdom).
@@GodwardPodcast I feel you overcomplicate it. We have fingers and eyes. Most likely would of started from men pointing towards a animal, a rock, a hill and saying something. The others would of just picked it up from their mimetically.
Fantaatic stuff. Btw for that brain-hemisphere stuff, check Dr.Iain McGilchrist. Nice1
Julian Jaynes bi-cameral theory is fascinating to me. I think your personality type is INFP. You should check out Socionics, it’s much more comprehensive and reliable than Myers-briggs.
Will check it out. I’ve taken that Myers Briggs rest probably four times and it’s always something different. I like to think I’m close to 50/50 on all of those types… but maybe I’m just erratic. 🤪
Maybe not pre-human, - bur pre-adamic. The white man didn't arrive until the neo-lithic, - and immediately the stone age ended.
Why is it so hard for commenters to accept that language is a God given gift? Why is it so hard for people to accept that God exists?
Why is it so hard for you to accept he doesn’t?
The problem of evil (which is very satisfyingly resolved by gnosticism... but you wouldn't like that)
Sniffles are a bit off-putting!
Indeed! - it’s not like this in my other 100 vids, sorry!
Whales talk