The Embodied Origin of Language

Thank you. I enjoy reading the stuff you write-----this thread being a good example. It has caused me to go back and re-examine things from a different angle---an area where I think we both were looking at the same kind of thing, but your different approach shed new light on it.

Everytime I set a philosopher down, I think I have to go back and redo remedial research again. But I think a really good place to start is 'Irrational Man' by William Barrett, if you haven't read that. The book is mainly about the existentialists, but he covers much of Western philosophy dealing with the Judeo-Christian influence, and Ancient Greece. Then he leaves you with groundwork that moves forward, after existentialism, and the fact that we have yet to solve the problems existentialism raised. A reference book could be 'Socrates to Sartre' by Samuel Stumpf. You could probably get both books at a good used book store for under $6 - 8.

'Martin Heidegger's Basic Writings,' has a collection of his stuff. Being and Time is his main piece. But there is a collection of essays called, Poetry, Language, Thought, which has some interesting stuff, but you might find his essays on line, such as Building, Dwelling, and Thinking, The Thing, and Language. I read him from the perspective that he is living in the Godless world recognized by Nietzsche, but coming from a peasant farmer background, he still hears the moan of the ancient spirits. (He was briefly caught up in the Nazi Movement---1 month to be exact---and I think he was seduced by the old Germanic spiritualism embedded in Nazi motifs and ideas. History has been harsh on him since). But in that Godless world, he was trying to make sense of 'being' and if by chance, the gods return, he would have forged the path for philosophy to return to their province. If not, at least it would give maning to our lives.

Do continue to share the insights you gain from the depths of being you touch in this way.

Ah yes---the teeth, the roof of the mouth, they are all part of it too.

Before I started working on my book---which became three books----I had come home from Asia, flat broke, beaten down, and ready to attack all the values I had been raised with or that evolved from my own explorations. The first snowfall, put me back into this philosophical mood that I had not had for years. After a lot of self-reflection, and a week tucked in up at my parent's condo in wintery Breckenridge, I started writing what I thought would be my book---I was going to call it, "To Touch the Universe" and your last paragraph pretty much sums it up. I wanted to attack science, religious values, and all other areas of objectivistic thought. My point was that we had lost the value of experience, and that was what it was all about---aesthetics, pain, love---sounds, flavors, aromas, sensations, art, poetry... Through writing the book, I thought it would provide my own spiritual reawakening, or at least define what I believed and knew to be my philosophy.

As I researched and wrote, the book evolved and turned into a quest to get back to the roots of the human spiritual problem--and I latched onto the trail that created what is my first book. My stepson destroyed the book at one point by ruining my computer. So I gave up for a bit, but I couldn't stop writing. When I tried to recreate what had been lost, I realized that I was writing three books, and it was too much to put it all in one. The kernel of that first book that I started to write--those ideas--will still be found in the second book-----and the third book in the sense that it ties everything together.

 

animal speak to,but in a language a lot of humans choose to not understand,because they feel superiour.