Ernest Becker
The Birth and Death of Meaning
(1970)
[27]
Chapter Four
THE INNER WORLD
Introduction to the Birth of Tragedy
"The great fundamental . . . Doctrines . . . are . . . taught so early, under such circumstances, and in such close and vital association with whatever makes or marks reality for our infant minds, that the words ever after represent sensations, feelings, vital assurances, sense of reality—rather than thoughts, or any distinct conception. Associated, I had almost said identified, with the parental Voice, Look, Touch, with the living warmth and pressure of the Mother, on whose lap the Child is first made to kneel, within whose palms its little hands are folded, and the motion of whose eyes its eyes follow and imitate—(yea, what the blue sky is to the Mother, the Mother's upraised Eyes and Brow are to the Child, the Type and Symbol of an invisible Heaven!)—from within and without, these great First Truths, these good and gracious Tidings, these holy and humanizing Spells, in the preconformity to which our very humanity may be said to consist, are so infused, that it were but a tame and inadequate expression to say, we all take them for granted."
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(1825, p. 207)
...
[28]
...theoretically all objects in nature have some "interiority" even though we experience only their outside. Gustav Fechner...
wrote a widely read book on this topic a century ago, a book that influenced a thinker of the stature of William James. Fechner, in his scientific work, wanted to prove that there is an equal part of soul for every particle of matter—something today's laboratory psychologists conveniently forget about the great man. He said that all objects have interiority, even trees. Why not say that a tree leans on a fence because it feels weak, or soaks up water because it is thirsty; or that it grows crookedly because it is stretching toward the sun? ...
Indeed,
why not say
so? Apparently
there is not reason not to
:
mentalistic expressions from everyday language, such as thinking, knowing, believing, desiring, intending, and so on. How can we be sure that these terms are appropriate? Do they correspond to the actual intentional states held by others around us? ... According to Dennett (1983; 1987) we do not need to be sure. He argues that in order to understand phenomena in the world, one can adopt various strategies or “stances”, corresponding to different levels of theorising...
...“that fox digs a hole because it wants to build a nest” or “bird X believes that bird Y is hiding food”. Dennett argues that usage of everyday language is not problematic in such cases, as long as one keeps to the appropriate level of theorising. ... one can perfectly well make use of everyday mentalistic vocabulary as long as one is dealing with questions of some beings’ behaviour in their social environments, and not with the “lower level” mechanisms and physical processes underlying social living.
(Max van Duijn, The Lazy Mindreader, p. 35)
How very...dualistic!
