Comments on: Enemy of Nature http://www.feralscholar.org/blog/index.php/2005/02/16/enemy-of-nature/ Making the Connections Wed, 08 Feb 2012 08:10:46 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 By: Stan http://www.feralscholar.org/blog/index.php/2005/02/16/enemy-of-nature/#comment-55 Stan Sat, 19 Feb 2005 02:40:17 +0000 /?p=32#comment-55 Hi Charles. You know I was smiling when I saw your name. Hi Charles. You know I was smiling when I saw your name.

]]> By: Charles Brown http://www.feralscholar.org/blog/index.php/2005/02/16/enemy-of-nature/#comment-49 Charles Brown Fri, 18 Feb 2005 20:07:05 +0000 /?p=32#comment-49 "Of special importance was the emergence of language as the specific human mode of communicating and representing the world. This involved ‘hard wiring’ of the evolving brain, coordination with the evolving speech apparatus, and, decisively, integration with evolving forms of sociality, the result being that the powers of individuals could be combined." Yes, the main importance of language is that is increases our species-sociality, even making a socio-historic link between present and past generations or as you say "Human sociality implies society, as a kind of super-body, with a culture, transmissible through generations as a shared system of meanings." However, in the following you move back toward a Robinsonade. You would be more consistent if you consider that it is _language_ you discuss as making a unique subjective interior. Yet, earlier we established that the specialness of language is its sociality , not its individuality or selfness. It is its usness that's special, including usness with dead generations. So, the uniqueness of the human subject is the degree to which it communes with other subjects, its intersubjectivity, the degree to which it, the subject, really _is_ its intersubjectivity, when it is the brain of only _one_ body. "Human being entails a new order of subjectivity. All beings, we have observed, possess a potential interiority implied by their difference from other beings – the fact that they are some-thing and not others. Human nature appears as that development within which this interiority acquires internal structure through the particular forms taken by our consciousness under the influence of language. All creatures are present to each other. Language involves re-presentation: a sphere of interiority arises what is presented is presented back – re-presented – owing to its signification with language. Hence the real is, so to speak, doubled. The re-presenting is formative of the imaginative space of subjectivity. The imagined world is just a much a part of human ecology as are chemical messengers for dog ecology or moth ecology. As this space of interior representation attains identity, it becomes a self. Its form is given by a degree of consciousness of itself, clothed by language with the words ‘I’ (as the subject phrase) and ‘me’ (as the object phrase). The radically augmented poweer of the human species is generated here, in the space where the world is created within the self, which then defines a social collectivity that acts upon the world. “Of special importance was the emergence of language as the specific human mode of communicating and representing the world. This involved ‘hard wiring’ of the evolving brain, coordination with the evolving speech apparatus, and, decisively, integration with evolving forms of sociality, the result being that the powers of individuals could be combined.”

Yes, the main importance of language is that is increases our species-sociality, even making a socio-historic link between present and past generations or as you say

“Human sociality implies society, as a kind of super-body, with a culture, transmissible through generations as a shared system of meanings.”
However, in the following you move back toward a Robinsonade. You would be more consistent if you consider that it is _language_ you discuss as making a unique subjective interior. Yet, earlier we established that the specialness of language is its sociality , not its individuality or selfness. It is its usness that’s special, including usness with dead generations. So, the uniqueness of the human subject is the degree to which it communes with other subjects, its intersubjectivity, the degree to which it, the subject, really _is_ its intersubjectivity, when it is the brain of only _one_ body.

“Human being entails a new order of subjectivity. All beings, we have observed, possess a potential interiority implied by their difference from other beings – the fact that they are some-thing and not others. Human nature appears as that development within which this interiority acquires internal structure through the particular forms taken by our consciousness under the influence of language. All creatures are present to each other. Language involves re-presentation: a sphere of interiority arises what is presented is presented back – re-presented – owing to its signification with language. Hence the real is, so to speak, doubled. The re-presenting is formative of the imaginative space of subjectivity. The imagined world is just a much a part of human ecology as are chemical messengers for dog ecology or moth ecology.

As this space of interior representation attains identity, it becomes a self. Its form is given by a degree of consciousness of itself, clothed by language with the words ‘I’ (as the subject phrase) and ‘me’ (as the object phrase). The radically augmented poweer of the human species is generated here, in the space where the world is created within the self, which then defines a social collectivity that acts upon the world.

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