The Origin

A noticeable theme in the readings this week was language and origin. As Derrida stated, "I have had to predetermine communication as the vehicle, transport, or site of passage of a meaning, and of a meaning that is one. If communication had several meanings, and if this plurality could not be reduced, then from the outset it would not be justified to define communication itself as the transmission of a meaning..."  Burke used terministic screens to explore how we interpret communication and language while may of the authors used symbols to show the interpretation of the truth into something that has ventured from the truth. This closely relates to the recently released movie Prometheus.  The movie shows explorers venturing to a foreign planet to discover the origin of the human race. "What does man actually know about himself? (Nietzche) Throughout the story the explorers discover that not only did their creator create the human race, they also created a number of terrible other beings. The closer they get to the truth of determining their origin, the more convoluted and distorted the truth becomes. In rhetoric, language is the convolution of the truth. As Kant says, "For we have seen that everything that the understanding draws from itself, rather than borrows from experience...Now, these rules of understanding not only are true a priori; but by containing the basis for the possibility of experience as the sum of all cognition wherein objects may be given to us, they are even the source of all truth, ie. the source of our cognition's agreement with objects. Yet having someone set forth to us what is true does not seem to us enough; rather, we want him to set forth what we desire to know."

Just as we are not sure of the truth through language, so is the crew of Prometheus not sure of the origin of man through the evidence they already have. And when they do discover it, based on their own ideas of how the truth would be presented, they cannot believe the story behind their creation; "we require that an abstract concept be made sensible, ie. that the object corresponding to it be displayed in intuition because otherwise the concept would remain (as we say) without sense, i.e. without signification." (Kant) Language is our signifier of what is represented, not the true object. As the authors of the readings today describe, we cannot determine truth without looking at the origin of our system of symbols and the 'construction of concepts.' (Burke,Nietzche) Much like readings from Plato and Aristotle, Nietzche states that memory plays a key role in discovering truth; "It is only by means of forgetfulness that man can ever reach the point of fancying himself to possess a "truth"..."  Burke describes relationships of humans to language and what that relationship means "Man's involvement in the natural order makes him in many respects analyzable in terms of sheer motion; but his powers or symbolicity give rise to kinds of symbolic action that, by the same token, make him susceptible to corresponding kinds of servitude...The world is doubtless infinitely dull of entities, relationships and developments, actual or potential, for which we do not have names, and never shall." In stating that the human race may never be able to define all terms and therefore not comprehend all origin, Burke's philosophy is close to  Plato's in his debate of existence and non-existence. By seeing things through screens, we are creating a barrier of existence which obstructs the truth. To refer back to Kant, we must forget these screens as it is merely our 'cognititions agreement with objects' that give us understanding, but if we are truly to understand truth we must forget the interpretations we have constructed in order to determine origin, just as the crew of Prometheus must forget all their prior conceptions of origin in order to see the morbid truth behind their discovery of their creation.  We must forget the connotations of the word and merely see the truth of the object behind that word.