Language and Monotheism

[Pandora]

Monotheism has to be connected to development of written language. There are a few theories on how that might have happened. But one theory that I’m exploring advances the idea that it was particularly the adoption of phoenetic alphabet (Phoenician) which facilitated the creation of monotheism, in the Middle East.
But how does the process of converting sounds back and forth to symbols translate to monotheistic mindset? I can see superstitious type of logomamia (something like this happening even at the very creation of language, but to me, this behavior only leads to a type of witchcraft mindset and spell making. (It also reminds me of the Hebrew notion that the “real” name of god is not to be said out loud. Why so, I wonder? In the context of converting meaningless symbols to sounds it may hold a clue). Still, as I recall, Romans were also fond of writing down magical spells and they were not monotheistic, so to me, at best, phoenetic alphabet may lead to the creation of monotheism but does not necessitate it. There could be an extra element that I’m missing. Perhaps it is still within the audible process of symbol conversion (as Marshall McLuhan sees it), or it could be an external-to-language element, such as power struggle. (There is another theory in which the Hebrews chose to worship words (magical symbols?) over physical statues and monuments that were popular at the time). In any case, the consensus today seems to be that for a society to be monotheistic, it has to be literate first.
But also to note, monotheistic concepts can be created with geometric shapes, as well, like sphere and cube. It is believed by some Muslims, for example, that Kaaba cube represents the Truth because like the cube, the truth appears the same from all angles.

Added: https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet_effect
https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psycholinguistics

[Pandora]

An interesting historical account, and a theory, but he didn’t really explore the connection between development of Proto-Semitic language and the creation of monotheism, so I found the title of this paper a bit misleading. Other than that, it was an interesting historical theory read. I like the idea that it was possibly a created written vernacular language by bilingual “illiterate” peoples of the time.
http://www.scripta.kr/scripta_v0010/?mo ... af52f57754

[Pandora]

4. Alphabet, Deductive Logic, Duality and Reductionism

We would like to propose another effect of the alphabet in addition to the ones identified by McLuhan, M. and Logan (1977) [1] and McLuhan, M. and E. (1988) [2]. We suggest that another effect of the alphabet was to give rise to a form of duality, that is characteristic of Western alphabetic culture, namely constitutional duality.

Before establishing this connection, we need to differentiate between the different forms of duality. There is binary dualism such as distinguishing between being and non-being as in deductive logic, it is a duality which arises out of grammatical necessity. There is also a closely related duality, polarity duality, of opposites such up and down; left and right; forward and backward; hot and cold; good and evil; light and dark; and yin and yang. There is also constitutional dualism as (1) mind and body in the context of the philosophy of mind; (2) God and his creations or the physical universe; and (3) material reality and spiritual reality as described in many religions. Binary and constitutional duality are characteristic of Western alphabetic cultures. The third duality of polarity is found in all cultures. An example of polar dualities is the notion of yin and yang of Taoism found in many East Asian non-alphabetic cultures. Yin and yang are seemingly opposite but yet at the same time they are complementary, interconnected and interdependent. The very graphic design of yin and yang as represented in Taoism represents the intertwining of yin and yang as represented in this image: [insert image of yin/yang]

In Western binary and constitutional duality, the boundaries are impermeable and the two poles of the dual relationship are quite independent of each other unlike the relationship of yin and yang.

We believe that binary and compositional forms of Western dualism are interconnected and are the effect of alphabetic writing. Binary duality is an absolute presupposition of deductive logic and deductive logic is one of the effects of alphabetic writing as noted by McLuhan and Logan (1977) [1].

The connection between the alphabet, binary duality and constitutional duality is not a direct one but one that can be established if one first accepts that there is a connection between the alphabet and deductive logic as argued by McLuhan and Logan (1977) [1].

Alphabetic writing encouraged the development of deductive logic because the alphabet promotes representing spoken words with a linear combination of meaningless visual signs representing phonemes assembled in the correct order. Every spoken word is first analyzed into its constituent phonemes and then those phonemes are represented by the meaningless signs of the alphabet and arranged in a logical order. This created an environment in which arguments were assembled in a similar linear sequential logical order.

Rationality trumped poetics and so the arguments of the sophists were looked down on because they appealed to the emotions rather than the cold hard facts of a logical argument.

The pervasive use of uniform elements, the phonetic letters that the alphabet entailed, encouraged the additional visual matching of situational elements which formed the ground for Greek logic, geometry, and rationality. The idea of truth itself, the correspondence of thing and intellect, is based on matching…The Greek alphabet also provided both the model and the bias for classification, an essential development in Greek analytic thought during the period from 700 to 400 B.C.—especially for logic, science, and history. In addition to serving as a paradigm of abstraction and classification, the alphabet also served as a model for division and separatability. [1]

The Greeks applied the use of logic to create proofs of the geometric relationships that the Egyptians arrived at empirically. They were bedazzled with their new found technology of deductive logic to the point that a separation of rationality from common sense took place. [?!]

It started with Parmenides who used logic to argue that nothing changes because if A were to change into B, then A would not-be and since non-being cannot be (it is a logical contradiction) nothing changes. Parmenides argument used a form of duality that entails a binary either or division but then he uses deductive logic to conclude that nothing changes and hence laid the ground work for the emergence of substance/essence dualism, a form of constitutional dualism formulated by Plato.
The idea that nothing changes was clearly in contradiction to the common sense observation of the changes in one’s everyday experiences.

Plato found a way to resolve this apparent paradox and the solution was to invoke a form of substance/essence dualism and thereby created two worlds. There is the essence world of the Ideal Forms that are never changing as Parmenides required and the everyday substance world that one perceives in everyday life, which Plato likened to shadows on the wall of a cave cast by the fire burning within the cave and do change as common sense reveals and demands. Plato took his cue from Parmenides who wrote “Whence it follows that all things to which men attribute reality, generation and destruction, being and not-being, change of place, alteration of colour are no more than empty words (http://philoctetes.free.fr/parmenides.htm) [5]”.

Plato with help from Parmenides separates percepts from concepts and this dualism becomes enshrined in Western philosophical thought. Parmenides version of binary dualism and his use of deductive logic led to Plato’s constitutional dualism of the world of Ideal Forms and the everyday world of perceptions. These two domains are not opposites just as mind and body are not opposites in mind/body dualism. But what is being suggested here is that Plato’s constitutional dualism resolved the paradox that there is no change in Parmenides world whereas change is the pervasive property of the world of every day experience.

Parmenides and Plato’s dualities had the unfortunate effect of killing off the empirical spirit of the pre-Socratics like Anaxagoras, Anaximander and Heraclitus. Heraclitus proclaimed “The things of which there can be sight, hearing and learning—these are what I especially prized (the very opposite of Parmenides’ position). Men who love wisdom should acquaint themselves with a great many particulars. Seekers after gold dig up much earth and find little”.

Anaxagoras having observed that meteorites that came from heaven were made of rocks concluded that heavenly bodies were also composed of rocks. Anaximander on the basis of observing the gills on a miscarried human fetus argued for evolution more than 2000 years before Darwin. The empirical spirit of the pre-Socratics was undermined by the logical arguments of Parmenides and Plato. Even Aristotle contributed to the undermining of empiricism. He argued against inertia saying that an object dropped from the mast of a ship would fall behind the mast in the opposite direction of the ship’s motion. If he only had climbed to the top of a mast and performed the experiment or asked a mariner to do it he would have discovered that his argument was wrong. These were the roots of the duality that divided the world into two spheres, the one perceived and the one conceived.

The tradition of duality even survived the scientific revolution and empirical spirit of Galileo, Borelli, Brahe, Kepler and Newton. Descartes, himself a mathematician and scientist, whose development of analytic geometry led to Newton’s calculus, divided the world into two domains the material and the spiritual.

Cartesian duality paralleled Plato’s division of the two realms, the material world of every day experience and the realm of Ideal Forms. Like Parmenides who wanted to have an unchanging element in his worldview, Descartes divided the ever changing material world from the spiritual world of Mind, Soul and God and this contributed to the mind-body problem that persists to this day.

Another effect of alphabetic writing and deductive logic is the notion of the linear chain of cause and effect and hence reductionism, whereby all phenomena can be reduced to a simpler or more basic one implying that the whole is merely the sum of its parts just as the alphabet reduces all words to their basic phonemes.

http://www.mdpi.com/2409-9287/2/1/2/htm

(Apparently, invention of phonetic alphabet is also credited with creation of individuality, as well as patriarchy)

[Pandora]

Interesting symbology in Sikh monotheism:
https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ik_Onkar

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https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_(deity)
https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allah
Pagan Origins of Judaism
Christine Hayes on El

I was just thinking, could it be possible that the Muslims and Jews are worshipping essentially the same god? I don’t mean in a monotheistic-one-perfect-god sense, but in a sense that their god is a descendant of the same actual historical (abstracted) pagan diety, that at one point had a physical form and specific function.


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Christine Hayes also seems to be suggesting the idea of perfect god may have been adopted by Judaism from Western Greco-Roman Platonic philosophy. (Which would put it as late as 400 BC, or during Axial Age).

The eastern idea of Brahman, written down in Sanskrit, was also written down roughly around the time Platonic ideas were being formed in the West.

[Prismatic567]

Language facilitated but it is the background reason as for many other human developments.

The proximate cause is driven by the evolution of reason. This is driven from deeper by 'one-up' and 'leadership dependent' primal instinct within the majority's DNA e.g. mine better than yours - in the face of an existential crisis.

[Pandora]

Philo of Alexandria (20 BCE - 50 CE)
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... back to Christine Hayes - on duels among different interpretations of Divine Law (in 1st century CE) in an attempt to resolve cognitive dissonance.

[Pandora]

On Middle and Neo-Platonism (jumping around a bit here)



Well... I guess it’s like they say - where there’s a will, there is a way!

[Pandora]

Interesting facts from Plotinus’ bio, hinting at Eatern influences...

After spending the next eleven years in Alexandria, he then decided, at the age of around 38, to investigate the philosophical teachings of the Persian philosophers and the Indian philosophers.[6] In the pursuit of this endeavor he left Alexandria and joined the army of Gordian III as it marched on Persia...[~240 CE]

Plotinus

According to Porphyry, in 232, at the age of 28, Plotinus went to Alexandria to study philosophy:

“In his twenty-eighth year he [Plotinus] felt the impulse to study philosophy and was recommended to the teachers in Alexandria who then had the highest reputation; but he came away from their lectures so depressed and full of sadness that he told his trouble to one of his friends.

The friend, understanding the desire of his heart, sent him to Ammonius, whom he had not so far tried. He went and heard him, and said to his friend, "This is the man I was looking for."

From that day he stayed continually with Ammonius and acquired so complete a training in philosophy that he became eager to make acquaintance with the Persian philosophical discipline and that prevailing among the Indians”.[9]

Ammonius Saccas

(Alexandria must have been quite a place at its time)