Culture, symbolic thought, and mind

Zerzan continues provocatively by stating that the problem with culture is culture itself, seeing the symptom in some of culture's most precious expressions - art: early on in civilisation there was a "dissatisfaction that motivated the artistic search for a 'fuller and deeper expression' as 'compensation for new deficiencies of life'. Cultural solutions, however, do not address the deeper dislocations that cultural 'solutions' are themselves part of." (p. 12) Later on he notes the fashionable stance that culture is natural, whereas, of course, he begs to differ.

He does bring evidence to the table - largely in the form of archeological musings about past civilisations. Hunter-gatherers are observed for their peaceful, non-domesticated way of life before civilisation touched them. The bushmen in South Africa are mentioned and Laurens van der Post's studies cited - apparently there was "complete trust, dependence and interdependence with nature". There are very few bushmen left in the Kalahari - they are all but extinct (in the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy a bushman is one of the main characters).

Many of the ideas seem to be in tune with what I anticipated - the time problem as central for instance ("the first separation seems to have been the sense of time which brings a loss of being present to ourselves" - p. 8) and the importance a period of timelessness prior to culture, because the wrong turn came with culture, and culture arose because of language, domestication, and division of labour to mention a few of the most important ideas.

All pretty wholesome stuff that's good for you. Our most important sense is the eye, largely because it distances. Smell and touch are far less important, yet they would be the most intimate forms of sensual knowledge. Because of culture we are no longer attuned through these senses - no argument there. I tried to see whether the mind can itself be conceived of as not being a Cartesian abstraction. That would at least give the mind a basis for existing.

So this is what I came up with. Zerzan quotes William Blake as saying that "if the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite." I proceed that perception of The Infinite is the mind sensing the universe directly, just like other senses may have unmediated perceptions that stimulate the brain (and I'm not talking of the frontal lobes). So the 6th sense is here, right behind our very eyes. Not in its symbolic interpretation of everything, but in its immediate perception of The Everything and The Infinite. Now if we move to the country of early 20th century thought we may surmise that Nothingness was an earlier attempt to describe this - but it was still too conceptual, too haunted by the advent of nihilism that Nietzsche already predicted towards the end of the 19th century. A conceptual conclusion rather than a perceptual energy. It then takes just a little leap of imagination to see that the mind wants to perceive, just like any other sense (for goodness sake, it cooks up dreams during REM sleep).

Which just goes to show that you can argue anything! G'night folks.