I was reading a few of Aldous Huxley's essays and found this one on Monday, after we discussed Rorty's theory of language, and I thought that there were some portions of Huxley's writing that might assist in getting one's mind more properly around Rorty's ideas.
(As an aside, I have no idea what mescaline.org is. They're just hosting the content I wanted to point to. I hope it's not some kind of cyber crack house.)
Some of the passages that I thought were enlightening:
"By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies - all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable."
This struck me as a bit Rortyian, or at least another way of explaining that the truth is not "out there" but is instead "inside" and that language is a system of symbols that do not exactly correspond to any external "truth."
"To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness [our conscious experience of the world we live in], man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born - the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things."
This, if I'm not tragically misunderstanding Rorty, is similar to his stance, minus all the "Mind at Large" drug-induced visions that Huxley then begins to describe. I don't know what it means that I find it easier to comprehend what Rorty is getting at via descriptions of consciousness-altering drugs.
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9 years ago
I would wager that mind altering drugs may have dramatic affect on a person's perception of truth. This might be beneficial or not, but for the sake of my point I will buy into the idea that the drugs open our senses to truths that we might not ordinarily detect. (Disclaimer: DRUGS ARE BAD! DO NOT USE DRUGS!) I think that this as a concept can mirror the use of radio antennas and receivers. If we do not have our radios tuned to the right frequency, we will not receive a particular signal. That signal is still traveling in the air, and that "truth" (the information in the signals) is out there. We were not able to know it until we alter the medium in which we receive the truth. This is the case whether that medium is radio or language.
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