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Following on from our mutual swapping of stupid stones, I return to the topic. And again, I quote from Bruce Holbrook, The Stone Monkey, Morrow Quill Paperbacks pp374:
Again, there are three basic features of the Absolute-Fragmental paradim: its basic concepts, and, therefore, all its derived ones, are Absolutes, so its perspective is Fragmental (one-sided, partial), and its attidude is socially sterile, involving a dwarfed image of human beings and a disdain for the ordinary. In contrast, the three basic features of the Polar-Complete world view are non-Absolute concepts, an all-sided, wholistic, balanced perspective, and, most important, a consummately Humanistic attitude, wherein humanity is central.
India has produced a magnificent, plural worldview and world in which parallels with the traditional Chinese scientific paradim as well as classical Grek, Absolute-Fragmental view can be found. However, as a whole, the Hindu paridim is western, Absolut-Fragmental. Indeed, India is the mother, via western diffusion, of much that is basic to the Western worldview, Such as tehEuropean languages, their grammatical reflections of time, person, and sex. and the European writing system, whic are based on the choice to represent sound, as opposed to meaning as in the Chinese, Egyptian, and Central American Indian systems. These Indic-European cultural traits are classically Absolute -Fragmental, and, since they concern the word )of which mathematics is a variety), have fundamentally influenced all Western thought.
To illustrate the Indic-European trait of grammatical inflection, the English verb 'to walk' has one form, 'am walking, 'when the subject is 'I', and another form, 'am walking,' when the subject is 'you'. It has one form, 'am walking,' when time is present, and another form, 'will walk ___,' when the time is future. When an object belongs to a male, we use the form 'his'; when it belongs to a female, we use the form 'hers.' In this way, our language marks, forces us to remark, the differences 'I' and 'you', 'present' and 'future,' 'male and 'female.' Chinese is free of such formal obligations. The verb for for 'walk' does not change from one tense to another and does not change according to the p[erson of the subject; the pronoun forms do not change according to the persons sex. This relative formality of our languages has three distinct Absolute-Fragmenta effects. One is that we are conditioned to obey many more rules when we speek than are the Chinese, and, by extension, we are conditioned to obey many rules, to be subordinate to an abstract system. (Our languages, of course, are but one aspect of a greater Western cultural pattern.) The western mind is not as free to express itself as is the Chinese one: the abstract language system takes up human space, diminishes, and restricts the expressive spirit of the speaker. This is consistent with the basic feature of our Absolute-Fragmenta worldview, in which humanity is subordinate to God or The Environment, to an abstract system of "Divine Will," "Evolutionary Law."
Another effect of the original Indian formality of our languages is, simply, the tendancy to be preoccupied with form as opposed to content, with words and speaking, more than with what words and speach refer to-the human and natural concerns and realities that are the reason for speaking in the first place. Our highly formal languages obstruct perception, are a film between us and what we are talking about. )Before we can refer to a person by other than his or her name we mustcompute the form for sex: 'he/she'; and so on). This preoccupation with form, this abstract perspective, is consistent with Idealism and with the more general detachment from human realit that is true of both sides of the Binary Con. (The freedom from such formal constraints is one of the reasons that Chinese poetry strikes Westerners who can read it as relatively pure, natural, directly reflective of nature and human feeling.)
A third effect is that our basic Indic languages encourage us to emphasise differences-among present, past and future, among I you and third persons, among male, female, and neuter (and thus, not only between sexes, but between animate and inanimate.) Emphasising differences, obliged by grammar to do so, one is inclined to think in Absolute_Fragmental terms: time is not a continuum; you and I are Absolutely different, are totally separate; the sexes are Absolutely different, opposed; Spirit (life) and Matter (the inanimate) are Absolutely different, discrete, if intermixed things.
The difference in the effects of writing based on sound and writing based on meaning is more straightforward. The Western writing system represents only the sound part of words, in no way represents the meaning of words, So, every thing that is written in the past is in no way insured against being interprited in the present differently from what its writer originally intended. Accordingly, words in our language are relatively free to, and do, change their meaning over time. Westerm meaning is entropic. A science entirely based on 'guessing', from overall contexts, what these changes have been, historical linguistica, has arisen to attempt to remedy this problem. In short, our originally Indic sound-based writing system-and it may be added that Arabic and Hebrew are also sound based-disengages present from past knowledge and consciousness, separates the successive generations one from the other, makes consciousness and knowledge unstable over time, and minimises the chances of knowledge accumulating-a Fragmental effect.
In contrast, the Chinese, meaning-based writing system, basically a system of idea-pictures, helps us to preserve original meanings and thus maximises the accumulation of knowledge, overlapping the prsent generation with all the preceding ones.-a Complete effect. Second, the sound-based system fails to provide a common medium for people whose languages 'sound' different and are mutually unintellegable, and thus minimises communication among human groups and societie and encourages each to distinguish itself from each other on the basis of its language. Accordingly (but, not only for this reason), India, the Middle East, and Europe are loosely associated aggregates of little provinces, each of which is fiercely chauvanistic; to America is chiefly extended the English/French?Spanish division. India has about two hundred different languages with separate groups attached to them, is the social-cultural archetype of this Fragmentation. In contrast, the meaning-based system does provide a common medium of communication for peoples whoes languages sound different, and accordingly (but, of course, not only for this reason), China is a huge socially-culturally united whole despite the many mutually unintelligible spoken languages and dialects of its people.
At the level of world view itself, all of the Hindu variants, which are arranged on a continuum from folk religion to sublime and brilliant esoteric philosophy, have the Idealistic, "other-worldly" penchant. It is this central charectaristic which makes the correlation between the Chinese paradim and Hinduism's highest variant, Advaita Vedanta, misleading when taken alone. For example, according to Advainta Vedanta all dualities are ultimately identical pairs, which is an aspect of the Polar feature of the Chinese system, grounded in serious scientific empiricism. But according to Advainta Vedanta, Matter is mental: The Idealistic side of each pair is given primacy, and the standard, Idealistic belief that the "world of senses" is an illusion is firmly set forth. Like its purely-Absolute Western religious correlates, at its peak the Hindu world view is a vehicle for the savant's escape and absconding from responsibility for human reality-the living social body is cut into writhing casts; and Hindu mystics, their backs to it, gaze through the sun.
The penchant is dramatically realised in extreme Absolute-Fragmental form. All Hinduism has, in one form or another, the objective of "getting off the wheel of life"
to become one with God (Brahman)
........................and it goes on. Even Buddha gets a mention. And this is only the appendix. (I'm sick of typing this stuff in. Buy the book, and read it yourself, if it hasn't been ethnically cleansed by the Ministry for Silly Talks).
The author even hates Mao Tse Dung, a STALINIST mass murderer.
Volodya987
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