Excellent topic! It's been at the back of my mind since college, 25+ years, when Antonin Scalia was visiting to do a Q+A and he said something to the tune of "Words have meaning. And their meaning doesn't change." This is an actual quote he's said since then. That stuck with me, because immediately I thought "Oh, really? I'm not so sure. How do you pick one out of several possible intended meanings of something written 200 years ago?"
As you point out, context is everything and the context always shifts. When the founding fathers say "well-regulated militia", they probably meant "the context of unimpeded firearm ownership is that we need people to fight wars", but then 200 years later, that context seems to be ignored.
Anyway, as a general thought, we sorely miss philosophy and writers like you in our political discourse and legal worlds and are suffering the consequences of top legal minds shifting and shaping the meanings and contexts of our foundational words into their personal ideologies.
P.S. I think when young people say "Bet" it's just short for "You can bet on it", as in "Yes, sure". I can't be 100% sure though!
Yes, I agree that the rigid, conservative interpretation of meaning is frustrating. The well-regulated militia could NEVER have meant AR-15s. Because the Founding Fathers were creating parameters based on current and past reality. They couldn’t see hundreds of years into the future and into future technology. How many centuries are we going to accept the prescriptions of people who have absolutely no idea what our present problems are?
It’s the same with the Bible. At the end of the day, it was written during a time in which they believed the heart organ was the center of the human reason and human emotion (rather than the brain). So clearly everything laid out in the Bible is going to be instructions from another era. And it needs an update.
(I’m not Christian, but my dad writes spiritual philosophy and he always takes outdated religious concepts and modernizes them for the new age).
Speaking of the Bible (or any religious text) and the meaning of words in context!
Taking 2000+ year old scrolls written in a dead language, translating that into a whole series of other dead languages, hundreds of years apart, copying the copies of copies of copies with mistakes at each step, going back and translating again, each time under different contexts and circumstances. Then taking the end product and trying to live by ideas and moral principles that may or not be there to begin with. It's just a natural outcome that every sect and every preacher put any ideology they like into whatever random bible passage they happened to see when they flipped that book open that morning.
It’s a millenias-old game of religious telephone. And what mythos is left truly can’t be trusted as the original mythos. In fact, I watched a documentary that talked about how there wasn’t any Christianity for about 100 years after Jesus died. (Which means the people who created Christianity had never even met him). Yikes.
It reminds me of why I rarely talk about Socrates - none of his writing survived. He conducted mostly lectures. And the dialogues Plato & Xenophone have of him are all we know of him.
But if you were a professor, would you want a student to write the definitive text of your ideas and biography? - and have that represent you for thousands of years?
I wouldn’t. I’d want my actual words to speak for me.
So I feel like Socrates - whoever he was - is just our myth of him. A nice myth, sure. But so many of these people we think we know are just the myths we’ve invented for them.
I'll just throw in that Christians say we should be moral because it says so in the bible. I think it's the other way round: we have a moral sense that is described in the bible.
To my mind you're describing a power game. One thing that can always be said of communication is that it can be systematically distorted by power (which is sometimes given as a definition of ideology).
It needn't be confined to language but extends to the valorisation of symbolic forms.
RE the bonus question: philosophy is the historiography of metaphilosophies. 🦉
The long and winding text of yours … yes, usually I dont follow a ”philosophical text” for so long, but I did and I must say it was both funny and spot on (even if ”spot on” probably is not the proper way of describing the text since it also went in many directions). But anyway, I wish you a productive new year (since saying ”happy” these days seems so out of touch with reality.
Excellent topic! It's been at the back of my mind since college, 25+ years, when Antonin Scalia was visiting to do a Q+A and he said something to the tune of "Words have meaning. And their meaning doesn't change." This is an actual quote he's said since then. That stuck with me, because immediately I thought "Oh, really? I'm not so sure. How do you pick one out of several possible intended meanings of something written 200 years ago?"
As you point out, context is everything and the context always shifts. When the founding fathers say "well-regulated militia", they probably meant "the context of unimpeded firearm ownership is that we need people to fight wars", but then 200 years later, that context seems to be ignored.
Anyway, as a general thought, we sorely miss philosophy and writers like you in our political discourse and legal worlds and are suffering the consequences of top legal minds shifting and shaping the meanings and contexts of our foundational words into their personal ideologies.
P.S. I think when young people say "Bet" it's just short for "You can bet on it", as in "Yes, sure". I can't be 100% sure though!
Ohhh "You can bet on it." An affirmation. That makes more sense.
Yes, I agree that the rigid, conservative interpretation of meaning is frustrating. The well-regulated militia could NEVER have meant AR-15s. Because the Founding Fathers were creating parameters based on current and past reality. They couldn’t see hundreds of years into the future and into future technology. How many centuries are we going to accept the prescriptions of people who have absolutely no idea what our present problems are?
It’s the same with the Bible. At the end of the day, it was written during a time in which they believed the heart organ was the center of the human reason and human emotion (rather than the brain). So clearly everything laid out in the Bible is going to be instructions from another era. And it needs an update.
(I’m not Christian, but my dad writes spiritual philosophy and he always takes outdated religious concepts and modernizes them for the new age).
Speaking of the Bible (or any religious text) and the meaning of words in context!
Taking 2000+ year old scrolls written in a dead language, translating that into a whole series of other dead languages, hundreds of years apart, copying the copies of copies of copies with mistakes at each step, going back and translating again, each time under different contexts and circumstances. Then taking the end product and trying to live by ideas and moral principles that may or not be there to begin with. It's just a natural outcome that every sect and every preacher put any ideology they like into whatever random bible passage they happened to see when they flipped that book open that morning.
lol. Yes!!!!
It’s a millenias-old game of religious telephone. And what mythos is left truly can’t be trusted as the original mythos. In fact, I watched a documentary that talked about how there wasn’t any Christianity for about 100 years after Jesus died. (Which means the people who created Christianity had never even met him). Yikes.
It reminds me of why I rarely talk about Socrates - none of his writing survived. He conducted mostly lectures. And the dialogues Plato & Xenophone have of him are all we know of him.
But if you were a professor, would you want a student to write the definitive text of your ideas and biography? - and have that represent you for thousands of years?
I wouldn’t. I’d want my actual words to speak for me.
So I feel like Socrates - whoever he was - is just our myth of him. A nice myth, sure. But so many of these people we think we know are just the myths we’ve invented for them.
I'll just throw in that Christians say we should be moral because it says so in the bible. I think it's the other way round: we have a moral sense that is described in the bible.
To my mind you're describing a power game. One thing that can always be said of communication is that it can be systematically distorted by power (which is sometimes given as a definition of ideology).
It needn't be confined to language but extends to the valorisation of symbolic forms.
RE the bonus question: philosophy is the historiography of metaphilosophies. 🦉
The long and winding text of yours … yes, usually I dont follow a ”philosophical text” for so long, but I did and I must say it was both funny and spot on (even if ”spot on” probably is not the proper way of describing the text since it also went in many directions). But anyway, I wish you a productive new year (since saying ”happy” these days seems so out of touch with reality.