Yo Michael! This one has been on top of my stack for two weeks now while
I rummaged for the time to reply. My notes are interleaved...
On Thu, 16 Mar 1995, Michael McMaster wrote:
> Replying to LO394 --
>
> Jim, thanks for the rich continuation of the "practices" conversation.
> I've borrowed this term from my limited understanding of Buddhist useage
> and find it very powerful.
>
> I want to deal with "naming" on a more extensive level. I used this term
> and approach many years ago but it somehow got replaced by other things.
> I intend to bring it back to use and see what it will give me in today's
> environment. (If you haven't seen it, the "Earth/Sea Trilogy" by Le Guin
> is a wonderful novel built around the power of "naming".)
>
Oop. Goosebumps. I read the whole trilogy to my then 10yearold daughter
almost twenty years ago. I read it again about every two years, both for
pleasure and for wisdom. She also has another short piece called "She
Unnames Them". It's a tour de force on this same topic, worthy of Borges.
I think you can find it in the collection called "Buffalo Gals".
In the past several years, for me, it seems as though some flood waters
have receded, leaving only a few fundamental activities to think about.
Two of the most basic are NAMING and REASONING. These two together are
what distinguishes us from the other animals. Whales swim, birds fly,
snakes crawl, humans talk. Reasoning is with names (i.e. concepts); names
tie reasoning to fact and action, but are not themselves rationally
determined. If I do not have the right names for things, no amount of
reasoning with my misnames can yield truth. If I have some true names and
some false ones in my vocabulary, it is conceivable that by some judicious
reasoning about my vocabulary itself I can discover and perhaps partially
remedy the situation. That's philosophy. But it's very risky.
One and the same english word may in the mouth of one person be a true
name and in another, false. Isn't that the case with words like
"motivate" (I agree with your analysis in earlier posts), "proactive", and
so on?
>
> > > In the "reverse", practices
> > > engender behavior habits which render naming unnecessary.
>
> I don't think the idea of naming becoming unnecessary is very spooky. I
> think its fairly ordinary. That which is included in the physical forms
> and the ingrained habits of our selves and our society we no longer bother
> to name. For instance, I don't name many of my regular health and
> well-being habits, I just do them. I suggest that habits are practices
> that have gone out of awareness in exactly this way.
Yeah. I was glad to see, for example, David Swenson's allusion, on LO595,
to martial arts activity as a metaphor for this same set of facts.
The paradox of language is in two propositions:
a) there is nothing that can't be talked about at one time or another
b) you can't talk about everything at once
[ .. the rest snipped for brevity. Apologies for having sat on it so long.]
Regards
jamzen@world.std.com
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. . . . . . . . . . Actions speak louder than words . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . but not as clearly . . . . . . . . . .