Before we begin, I'll admit it: I just added "sexy" to the title to get you to read this.
But, if you think about it, philosophical thought is a lot like sex. The process is stimulating if done alone, but always better with a partner. By that I mean that you can think and think and formulate ideas all day long, but without others, this fun can only go so far. The best new ideas are created as a synthesis of more than one idea. From two minds new thoughts can be born. Your mind can also become contaminated if you are exposed to dangerous ideas, e.g. propaganda, etc. Hitler convincing the majority of non-Jewish Germans in the '30s and '40s was sort of like giving them all philosophical AIDS. It spreads and causes destruction as it does so.
Not a bad analogy, huh? I'm not sure what's wrong with me, but that's actually the second analogy I've pondered concerning AIDS today. At lunch with Ben I mentioned that I was in such a good mood that I thought it might be a nice idea to go out and hug people, hoping that this happiness would spread via physical contact. Always critical of my ideas, Ben's response to this was, "it's a good mood, not AIDS." I said, "You're right, but if a good mood can't be spread through touch, isn't it more similar to AIDS?" AIDS is only transmitted through sex (or sharing needles, but forget about that for now), and I think that most people would likewise "contract" a good mood from sex. Just a thought.
The cause for my good mood is the rapidity with which my brain is working today. I feel intuitive, creative, original, perceptive, contemplative, and most of all: ALIVE. There are a few separate ideas that I've come up with since I woke up almost twelve hours ago. Addressing them could take a while, but I think I have the energy.
Today was the second or third day in a row in my grammar and structure class that we have spent talking about verbs and verb tenses. No conversation, no vocabulary that did not come from an exercise involving grammar and making a decision about which verb tense to use. Language has a whole slew of verb tenses, i.e. simple present, simple past, simple future, present perfect, past perfect, future perfect, present continuous, past continuous, future continuous, all those perfect tenses in the continuous form, and not to mention conditionals and all those other sub-tenses. As a native speaker, I never thought about all this until I became a teacher. Not all languages are the same. This is something I never really realized or thought about because I took Spanish in high school and college and the grammar and tense schemes are very similar to those of English. Other languages, however, do not have all of these tenses. Both Korean and Arabic, for example, only have the simple present, past, and future. Thai and Chinese only have one tense. This just blows my mind.
Over the last few days I've been obsessed with the idea of synthesizing linguistics with philosophy and sociology. Does the way with which we express ourselves linguistically have an effect on the way we perceive our culture and the rest of the world (or God, or others, or the self, or existence or a myriad of other subjects)? Or do our perspectives on these influence the formation of our languages? I'd like to learn more about linguistics in order to ask people from various cultures, who speak different languages questions about their perspectives on many things and see if I can find any correlation between the two ideas.
Another aspect of language that astonishes me is the absence of the word "be" in Arabic. Several students have told me about this. Initially I was obsessed with relating this to the difficulties that many of my Arabic students have with the verb "to be." Since English is such a "be"-reliant language, it's hard for me to even imagine expressing any sort of idea without it. Today I started to expand on this idea. How, for instance, does one connect the essence of something with the actual thing without "be"? How does one define anything? Maybe I'm looking at it wrong, maybe by saying "I am happy," versus "I happy," actually emphasizes the idea of being happy by placing "I" and "happy" directly beside each other. Hmm.
But nevermind that, how would you perceive the concept of existence without the word "be"? The definition of existence is the act and/or idea of BEING. There are some cultural and religious ideas relating to the absence of "be" in Arabic that I want to explore but it's way too much to write at this moment. This might get it's own entry. My biggest problem in exploring my ideas is formulating the proper question with which to ask them about their views of existence and how they think it effects, or is effected by their language. I have plenty of people I could ask, after all the Saudi population at my school is increasing steadily, I just don't know how to formulate my question properly without first implanting my ideas in their heads and then possibly skewing their answers to conform to my idea. It's tough.
I think in order to really understand all this I would need to actually study linguistics in detail. It's making it's way to the top of my list of things I want to know more about. There are hundreds of languages throughout the world, and many more that no longer are used but have influenced modern languages. I want to know about all of them and compare the cultures of the language-speakers with possible patterns within language patterns. A huge task, but I want to do it. I guess I've felt greedy for knowledge lately. It could stem from my impending birthday. Every year the thought that I am one day closer to death and therefore have fewer hours with which to experience, see, do, learn, and understand. I want to know about everything, I want to go everywhere, I want to see everything, try everything, but this is simply impossible. But it never hurts to try.
It's sounds crazy, but if I won the lottery today, I would do nothing but travel, read, and take classes. Yes, I just said that, I'd go to school willingly if I had the resources. I don't think I'd ever stop. I'm just too curious...about EVERYTHING. Perhaps I'm setting my goals a little high, but whatever.
Other thoughts I've had today:
Origins of our thinking process; thought, story-telling, etc is all expressed in a linear manner (first this happened, then that, then this, then something else; cause - effect - cause - effect, and so on and so forth). Is it possible to think differently?
The limitations of understanding that stem from our inherent sense of self, which leads us to perceive our surroundings in one limited, narrow way. Is it possible to have multiple senses of perception, empathetically, I guess (?) at the same time?
Any sort of insight or contribution to these ideas would be great. I love having my ideas challenged or contributed to. Also, any bi- or multi-lingual persons reading this are more than welcome to share their opinions about this linguistic philosophy I've written about.
No comments:
Post a Comment