The above "Take This Waltz" review is dated July 5, 2012.
Related material from posts of July 5, 2012 —
The above "Take This Waltz" review is dated July 5, 2012.
Related material from posts of July 5, 2012 —
From this journal on December 7th, the first night of Hannukah 2023 —
Other "Styx"-related material posted here earlier today . . .
Note that the above Styx communications protocol should not be "Right through hell there is a path . . . ." — Malcolm Lowry |
From zdnet.com two days earlier —
Linus Torvalds on the state of Linux today
" Looking ahead, Hohndel said, we must talk about
Torvalds — "We actually need autocorrects on steroids. — zdnet.com, |
Midrash —
Overlook/Duckworth, pp.48, £9.99
* "Language animal" is a phrase apparently
invented by Steiner in 1969 that he later
attributed vaguely to the ancient Greeks.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/dia- —
"… before vowels, di-, word-forming element meaning
'through, in different directions, between,' also often
merely intensive, 'thoroughly, entirely,' from Greek
dia 'through; throughout,' probably cognate with bi-
and related to duo 'two' (from PIE root *dwo- 'two')
with a base sense of 'twice.' "
A midrash for Heidegger —
Here "PIE" does not refer to food. It is an acronym
for "Proto-Indo-European."
See as well "Language Animal" in this journal.
George Steiner's phrase "the language animal" as examined by
Charles Taylor —
Steiner attributes his "language animal" phrase, in the transliterated
form "zoon phonanta," to the ancient Greeks. This attribution
is apparently bogus. See Steiner on Language (March 30, 2012).*
It is highly relevant that Taylor is a Catholic and Steiner is a secular Jew.
* More generally — See Steiner + Language + Animal in this journal.
See Steiner's phrase "Language Animal" in this journal
and the corresponding authentic phrase from a webpage
by a Benedictine monk —
See pato.jpg and Venn's Cuernavaca.
* A reference to the British publishing company
in the previous post.
Background— George Steiner in this journal
and elsewhere—
"An intensity of outward attention —
interest, curiosity, healthy obsession —
was Steiner’s version of God’s grace."
— Lee Siegel in The New York Times ,
March 12, 2009
(See also Aesthetics of Matter in this journal on that date.)
Steiner in 1969 defined man as "a language animal."
Here is Steiner in 1974 on another definition—
Related material—
Also related — Kantor in 1981 on "exquisite finite geometries," and The Galois Tesseract.
March 28 review in the Times Literary Supplement of
George Steiner's new book The Poetry of Thought—
"If this new book opens with the concession that
language has neither the performative power of music
nor the elegant precision of mathematics,
it is language, for Steiner, that defines the human.
The survey accordingly begins from the ancient Greek
view of man as the 'language-animal.'"
A check of this phrase yields, in a 1969 Steiner essay,
"The Language Animal," a Greek form of the phrase—
In short, the least inadequate definition we can arrive at
of the genus homo , the definition that fully distinguishes
him from all neighbouring life-forms, is this:
man is a zoon phonanta , a language-animal.
— p. 10 in Encounter , August 1969 (essay on pp. 7-23)
After introducing "language-animal" as a translation of "zoon phonanta " in 1969,
Steiner in later writing went on to attribute this phrase to the ancient Greeks.
"The inception of critical thought, of a philosophic anthropology,
is contained in the archaic Greek definition of man as a
'language-animal'…."
— George Steiner, Real Presences , U. of Chicago Press, 1991, p. 89
"… the 'language-animal' we have been since ancient Greece
so designated us…. "
— George Steiner, Grammars of Creation , Yale U. Press, 2002, p. 265
Despite this, there seems to be no evidence for use of this phrase
by the ancient Greeks.
A Google search today for zoon phonanta (ζῷον φωνᾶντα)—
There are also no results from searches for the similar phrases
"ζωον φωναντα," "ζωον φωνᾶντα," and "ζῷον φωναντα."
Force Field of Dreams
Metaphysics and chess in today’s New York Times Magazine:
Joss Whedon, creator of a new TV series —
“I’m a very hard-line, angry atheist” and
“I want to invade people’s dreams.”
Garry Kasparov on chess —
“When the computer sees forced lines,
it plays like God.”
Putting these quotations together, one is tempted to imagine God having a little game of chess with Whedon, along the lines suggested by C. S. Lewis:
As Lewis tells it the time had come for his “Adversary [as he was wont to speak of the God he had so earnestly sought to avoid] to make His final moves.” (C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, Harcourt, Brace, and World, Inc., 1955, p. 216) Lewis called them “moves” because his life seemed like a chess match in which his pieces were spread all over the board in the most disadvantageous positions. The board was set for a checkmate….
For those who would like to imagine such a game (God vs. Whedon), the following may be helpful.
George Steiner has observed that
The common bond between chess, music, and mathematics may, finally, be the absence of language.
This quotation is apparently from
Fields of Force:
Fischer and Spassky at Reykjavik. by George Steiner, Viking hardcover, June 1974.
George Steiner as quoted in a review of his book Grammars of Creation:
“I put forward the intuition, provisional and qualified, that the ‘language-animal’ we have been since ancient Greece so designated us, is undergoing mutation.”
The phrase “language-animal” is telling. A Google search reveals that it is by no means a common phrase, and that Steiner may have taken it from Heidegger. From another review, by Roger Kimball:
In ”Grammars of Creation,” for example, he tells us that ”the classical and Judaic ideal of man as ‘language animal,’ as uniquely defined by the dignity of speech . . . came to an end in the antilanguage of the death camps.”
This use of the Holocaust not only gives the appearance of establishing one’s credentials as a person of great moral gravity; it also stymies criticism. Who wants to risk the charge of insensitivity by objecting that the Holocaust had nothing to do with the ”ideal of man as ‘language animal’ ”?
Steiner has about as clear an idea of the difference between “classical” and “Judaic” ideals of man as did Michael Dukakis. (See my notes of September 9, 2002.)
Clearly what music, mathematics, and chess have in common is that they are activities based on pure form, not on language. Steiner is correct to that extent. The Greeks had, of course, an extremely strong sense of form, and, indeed, the foremost philosopher of the West, Plato, based his teachings on the notion of Forms. Jews, on the other hand, have based their culture mainly on stories… that is, on language rather than on form. The phrase “language-animal” sounds much more Jewish than Greek. Steiner is himself rather adept at the manipulation of language (and of people by means of language), but, while admiring form-based disciplines, is not particularly adept at them.
I would argue that developing a strong sense of form — of the sort required to, as Lewis would have it, play chess with God — does not require any “mutation,” but merely learning two very powerful non-Jewish approaches to thought and life: the Forms of Plato and the “archetypes” of Jung as exemplified by the 64 hexagrams of the 3,000-year-old Chinese classic, the I Ching.
For a picture of how these 64 Forms, or Hexagrams, might function as a chessboard,
Other relevant links:
“As you read, watch for patterns. Pay special attention to imagery that is geometric…”
and
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