The Rise of Mystery

I thought I would end this week of summarizing where this blog has gotten in six months by noting something of where we still have to go.

The period from about 500 thousand to 150 thousand years ago seems still rather mysterious, a great turning point of which we know almost nothing. At the end of that swerve stood Homo sapiens; genetically speaking, us. The difference between then and now is mostly cultural, the accumulation of habits and bits of lore that have been passed on.

We all know that the great difference between the way people think today and the way people thought and lived in 1507 is entirely cultural. If we could manage a swap across the reach of time, changing a baby of 1507 with one of 2007, the medieval child would manage fine in our world and the modern infant would fit comfortably into the time of the Reformation. What we don’t always grasp, but what seems to be true, is that if we reached back to 150,700 BC and made that same switch, the baby we swept across the chronometer would also grow up and prosper normally in our age.

Not so, however, if we reached still further and brought forward an infant from 500 thousand years ago. What would the difference be?

The use of fire may date to 500,000 years ago so we are not talking about idiots. By then too, I am reasonably sure, speech was well along. The brain was very large and Homo erectus had probably spent a million years speaking a kind of pidgin in which they could draw attention to an object or a motion. Erectus was replaced by another species, sometimes called archaic Homo sapiens or Homo heidelbergensis. I’m betting that this later species was where syntax appeared, enabling speakers to draw attention to an entire scene, figure and ground together. But there is more to speech than making coherent statements.

Consider these sentences:

1. The wind blew out the fire.
2. My childhood has gone with the wind.
3. The Holy Spirit came unto me like a great wind and my soul was transformed.

The first sentence is concrete and is likely to be within the capacity of anybody who can speak syntactical sentences. It would not surprise me at all if Homo of 750 thousand years ago could say that sentence.

The second sentence is more abstract. Childhood is phenomenological, not an object or physical presence. “The wind” in this sentence is something fleeting, not at all like the enduring wind of the first sentence. What I don’t know is whether anybody who can speak the first sentence can also speak the second one. It would not surprise me if the answer is no; to speak this way, we have to develop a new ability to think about phenomena (e.g., childhood) as though they were objects.

On the other hand, maybe speech is enough. If you can talk about objects, perhaps you can talk about phenomena too. After all, a sentence like, “He is a child,” is concrete and if the word child is available, how much brilliance does it take to come up with childish and childhood? But part of the difficulty in thinking about speech origins is the way we are unimpressed by very difficult things and overly impressed by easy things. We have a poor history of gauging what thought is easy and what hard. So, I’ll leave it at this uncertainty: although it seems sure that Homo, as a historical fact, said the first type of sentence before speaking the second, I don’t yet know whether the second sentence became possible because of cultural or biological history.

The third type of sentence is another matter altogether. Here we speak of something (the Holy Spirit) that does not exist in the material world and the result (soul transformed) is also part of some non-material world. It is very easy to imagine a species saying sentences 1 and 2 without ever speaking sentences of type 3.

For those of you who are feeling above sentence 3 yourself, let me offer some different versions:

3a. Gravity blows comets around the sun the way westerlies blow ships across the sea.

3b. My anger over Bush’s War has transformed my politics.

Gravity is a physics concept, but it is neither an object nor a phenomenon. Like the Holy Spirit, it is something whose existence we infer. My politics is neither an object nor a phenomenon either, and yet it is something essential to my nature. None of these sentences is the natural or inevitable evolution of sentences 1 and 2. It requires a capacity to think beyond objects and phenomena to causes (Holy spirit, gravity) and to essences (my soul, my politics).

It wasn’t until we could speak type 3 sentences that we became Homo sapiens. Locke and Bogin (abstract here) argue that the rise of H. sapiens also saw the introduction of the adolescent stage, the period during which people find their place in the culture around them. It may also be the time when type 3 sentences begin to make sense to them.

I have a terrible suspicion that the philosophy of the past, say, 150 years or so has been looking in the wrong direction, at symbols rather than attention. It is not too surprising: symbols are formal while attention is a property of perception, and western philosophy has not liked perception ever since Plato dismissed perceptions as shadows on the wall of the cave. Truth was said to lie elsewhere. So now we don’t really know much about what people pay attention to or how attention shifts over the course of childhood. Neither do we know about brain damage and the subtle changes it brings to our power of attention.

Anyway, one of the areas this blog has yet to penetrate is our transformation from a species that 500,000 years ago was able to make concrete, syntactically correct statements, to one that spoke of a mysterious world that is intelligible only in terms of ceremony and culture.

Put it this way: half a million years ago there were probably already many languages with the own vocabulary and syntax, but they were concrete enough for them to be readily translatable from one to the other. Four hundred thousand years later, culture and mystery had grown up to the point where the most important speech was only approximately translatable. What happened between those two points?

Comments

[Gwedd]

Interesting thoughts. Pardon the pun.

There may even be a 4th type of speech, and that may well be represented by English. English has streamlined the sentence and syntax to the point where we can differentiate differing meanings from a phonetically identical word, based upon it's use. English has three tenses.

Not only that, but complex thoughts and concepts can be relatively easily transmited from one to another to the extent that, based upon the structure or phrase used, an entire message may be understood before the sentence is even finished.

Compare that now to an ancient language like Finnish, or Suomi, where there are, I believe 27 tenses. Suomi is postulated to be the remains of the ancient indo-ugaritic languages that survived in Finland because of it's iso-lation.

Hmmm... just thinking out loud here. I'll have to spend some time and read through all your postings, as I am always interested in these concepts. Long winters in Maine, I suspect... :)

Nice work here. I'll be back.

Respects,