Jeffery Sachs also talks about culture must be cultivated... He basically says Christian culture ended in the West 500 years ago and replaced with philosophies of machiavelli, Locke, Hobbes, Malthus etc
Thanks, I'll check it out. As you can see, he's basically talking about the Enlightenment. I argue that the breakdown began earlier as the the implications of Augustinian thought began to be worked out with ever more systematically radical conclusions. "The Renaissance" (Machiavelli), voluntarism, nominalism. That eventually led to the Protestant Revolution in the religious sphere, the implications of which were seized upon in the secular sphere by the evolution of the rising nation states into totalitarian monarchies with only a vestige of religious culture. The Enlightenment swept Christianity out of public culture.
He's talking about "virtue ethics." That rests upon the ability to discern nature, especially human nature, and to express the good of human nature using reason. That's the Aristotelian tradition. Inherent in Platonic thinking, which was mediated to the West by Augustine in a radical form, contains the seeds of a radical skepticism which radically undermines reason and therefore virtue ethics.
The process began much earlier than Sachs supposes--he's repeating a common view that it began with Machiavelli. It really begins in earnest already in the 14th century. It's not coincidental that Sachs begins the breakdown at 1500 and the Protestant Revolt begins in 1517, based on nominalist thinking. Note that all the later figures he mentions are anti-Christian, mostly from Anglophone countries, who were then greatly influential in Catholic France and Germany.
He also gets into "individualism", the foundation of modern Libertarianism. The dominance of the individual also rests upon the nominalist contention that there is no knowledge of reality, only of the mind, and was enshrined in Kantian thought that is the foundation for most moderrn ideologies. This swept away the Christian culture of the common good and legitimized the will to power (Sachs also gets into this). He traces this to wars of extermination. Competition v. cooperation as the underpinning of "society"--the destruction of culture.
I'll add this. The Protestant Revolt is profoundly a revolt against the Christian Faith's tradition of thought. Of course there were other things going on, the rise of nationalism, etc. However, the implication of Nominalism is the end of reasoned moral thinking and, logically, even of scientific inquiry. Luther was a nominalist professor and famously derided philosophy, which is a common trait of most Protestantism (there are exceptions--many of whom I cite regularly in my earlier posts--but they are not mainstream and are typically violently attacked by popular Protestants). For Protestantism, "faith" is no longer a product of reasoned belief based in history and insight into nature, as it is for Christians. It is transformed by Luther and other Protestants into a subjective certitude based on the will (voluntarism) and from reading a book. Modern Liberalism in the Western world is the product of Anglo-Protestant culture originating out of the breakdown of late medieval thought into nominalism. It is the end product of the Platonic tradition in Augustinian thought. It is no accident that Augustine is the great thinker in Protestant thought.
Q: is it possible that we (in the West) are no longer modern/post-modern? That we have explicitly rejected the modern (particularly those under 30 y/o) because it never delivered on its promises, and are rummaging through all the “philosophy” looking for answers for how to deal with a new paradigm? Is the door finally open to take what came before the moderns seriously again?
Mark: Just between us two Thomists, please consider the *formal* cause of these developments (no, not the "efficient" cause &c) -- as described by another (convert-as-) Thomist, Marshall McLuhan. The Enlightenment was caused by Print. The Post-modernists were caused by Television. But we are now Digital -- which causes something else that is no longer "modern." Thus Trump.
Yes, "philosophy" matters. Consider the implications of Romano Guardini's "The End of the Modern World" (1948) and his last word on the topic, "The Machine and Man" (1958, in his "Letters from Lake Como"). Let's turn our gaze toward the future -- dealing w/ today's "Artificial Humans" -- while avoiding McLuhan's "rear-view-mirror" . . . !!
These two Leviathan posts, and your own insights and longer term intellectual quest (staggering depth and implications - will for sure be chewing on that material for quite awhile) are examples of deep responsible thinking from duty.
Not something any of us can hear enough of, anymore - whether or not we agree with the direction and intentions (though here, even as an atheist, I am very much inclned toward your ideas, insofar as I understand them).
Hude in particular makes me feel like a children's author, all of a sudden - but if you have a bored moment sometime, and will allow that I am from the left, and still trying to frame my arguments to prise away some skeptics who linger that slow-group, as well as bring some younger readers along and make them feel welcome, I think you might get a chuckle from this recent foray.
Cultural integrity (and the obviously advanced dissolution of our own culture) is one of those huge themes that requires so much imagination principle and curiosity, we almost never 'go there' - leaving many youngsters who would like to think about and work on doing better, feeling anchorless and isolated.
Greatly appreciate that you have such a monumental grail quest, on top of (and no doubt at least in-part powering) your fascination with the fine detail of events.
Cheers, mate - I trust you'll do me the courtesy of translating the odd "Bourgeois" into "Libtard" (accurate) and as I say, get a chuckle or two.
"The social democratic pact has been broken by the globalization of the economy, and it is impossible to reestablish it or replace it with something else."
This is an exact example of what I was talking about in my previous post. What does he mean by "social democratic pact" and "globalization of the economy?" These are abstract nouns that can mean different things to different people. There's also no reason given to believe in a causal link between the two. He just states it as a fact then goes on to declare the impossibility of reestablishing or replacing it without telling us why.
The implication is that social democracy is desirable, and that globalization undermines it, but does that fit the observed facts? Globalization arguably is bad for western workers and good for western capitalists (who socialists define as a negative influence) but look at what globalization has done for China. A billion people have been lifted out of poverty to where they now have a stable society with most of the essentials we take for granted in the West. So if 350M people are inconvenienced while over 1 B have vastly benefited, how do we weight that in terms of social benefit? What criteria are we using to define what is or isn't bad about globalization? A parochial metric based on our own cultural preferences, or the material benefits as defined by the needs of the greatest number of people?
You've missed his point entirely. He's presenting the stock argument intended to explain the alienation of young people as a function of economics. He is concerned with culture and argues that young people are not at all alienated from the dominant culture.
I haven't addressed his point. I simply used his opening statement as an example of the problem of using abstract nouns and concepts without operationalizing them. I'm not picking on him in particular. Almost all social commentators do this, and the problem even extends to the hard sciences.
You begin with the premise "that philosophy matters—in the real world, in daily life." I agree with you. I'm trying to point out that just as philosophy matters, so do the words we use to describe our philosophies, and too often we assume that others share the same meaning or understanding as we do. Clearly not the case or you wouldn't have all these schisms in the great religions, for example, or so many divisions within the corpus of philosophy itself, to say nothing of the various divisions within modern socialism. It's a veritable Tower of Babel, and the root of the problem is more often the words we use to express the concepts than the actual concepts themselves.
Personally I prefer Epistemology to Philosophy as a foundation since it precedes philosophy in the sense that it attempts to define (operationalize) the source and structure of our thoughts and the means whereby we communicate them. Philosophy essentially rides on that foundation, often without acknowledging it. So it's basically a derivation of Epistemology without recognizing the problem introduced by the use of abstract nouns, which can have different meanings to different people in different contexts.
For me the starting point is not the classics but Alfred Korzybski's 1933 book "Science and Sanity" where he examines the underlying structure of the language we use to communicate. Korzybski is the guy who coined the term "Belief System" and the expression "the map is not the territory."
Stuart Chase, realizing the importance of K's work, attempted to summarize his main points in more accessible language. A good starting point for K's book which can be a difficult read.
According to K, all information about the world comes to us via our senses and is communicated to others via language, spoken or written, or by graphic depiction which is an extension of language, as is music and song. So understanding how our senses operate, including their limitations, and how we communicate our thoughts via language is a prerequisite to any philosophical discourse.
A simple analogy would be driving from San Francisco to New York. We can choose any number of routes to complete our journey, but they all depend on there being an existing road - the hidden ground as McLuhan would describe it. We take that part for granted until we come to a point where the road is washed out, or the route we took is a dead end, corresponding to a lack of words or concepts to frame and/or communicate our ideas, at which point we have to create new (shared) meaning via language to overcome the obstacle. In short we have to build a new road, or at least find a way back to where one exists.
A friend I worked with back in the 80's described it as building a ship at sea. We worked together on designing a computer game using this exact analogy, where you'd be driving down a highway (visuals inspired by the German Autobahn sign https://storage.googleapis.com/pod_public/1300/126901.jpg) and to accumulate points you'd have to take exits marked by cryptic symbols which would take you to puzzles that had to be solved to find your way back to the main road. Similar to dungeons and dragons, where you pick up weapons or keys to advance, only the objects accumulated were epistemological or philosophical concepts which could be applied to solve future puzzles at subsequent off-ramps. Basically a fun way to build a foundation for critical thinking and creative mentation. Unfortunately we ran out of money and the project was never completed.
Marshal McLuhan played a huge role in framing our views back then, as did Douglas Hofstadter. I just wish we'd known about Korzybski at the time because his work would have helped us enormously.
Maybe it is just me, but I always looked at Korzybski's "the map is not the territory" as a statement which clarifies the relationship between language and reality and does so at language's expense. Whereas certain "schools" of philosophy have always had a fundamental problem conflating language with reality, Korzybski did an end run around this problem by "demoting" the role of language to just being descriptive of (what he termed pointing toward) and an abstraction of reality rather than actually participating in reality. Language is thus neither purely empirically derived nor purely logically constructed.
As such, Korzybski's General Semantics and the idea of abstraction was an antidote to people like the Logical Positivists, whose epistemology insisted that if something could not be described it did not exist. Fairly quickly that approach led to the later Wittgenstein's mysticism. The conclusion I drew from Korzybski is that language is simply to be seen as a tool, a method, an artifice for communicating, rather than a basis for philosophical constructs.
You're the first person I've spoken to that's actually read Korzybski. That could just be a reflection of my own limited engagement with philosophers though. I've only ever met one who actually held a degree in the subject. Curiously he'd never read Hofstadter and had only breezed through McLuhan. We had some interesting conversations.
I pretty much agree with you up to your last statement: "...that language is simply to be seen as a tool, a method, an artifice for communicating, rather than a basis for philosophical constructs."
Not sure what the difference is. Language, spoken and written, is the basis for all communication so I see it as foundational. How else could we have a shared understanding of abstract ideas without first defining our terms, and how can we do that without a common language?
I apologize, ebear, for not stating that well. You are right of course that we need language and a shared understanding of it to describe abstract ideas or even objects in the world. The point I was trying to make is that philosophers can easily fall into viewing language itself as the "reality" as they devise their systems for dealing with philosophical questions. Rationalism is a good example. It is an easy trap for them to fall into because language is the only tool they have to formulate and share their views. If you have ever read Heidegger, for example, (or even Kant) they all develop their particular "language" to communicate their ideas.
It has been over 40 years since I studied Korzybski and read more widely in Philosophy - plus my mind and memory are not as good as they once were. So I am sure you have a more thorough and better understanding of General Semantics than I do at this point. I appreciate your thoughts and I give you a lot of credit for your interest in this area.
Thanks buddy. This confusion of words with the thing itself is an ancient theme. For example: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. John 1:1
It goes back much further than that of course, probably to the dawn of writing. Imagine the impact the Bible had on preliterate cultures. That you could actually derive meaning from words on paper had a huge impact on people whose only symbols up to that point were totemic, or simple tally sticks. Very easy to confuse the words with the thing itself, especially when the people presenting it held the same belief.
I study languages, and one of the things that is claimed about Hindi is that the writing system was made intentionally difficult to restrict its use to the priesthood and ruling class, and that commoners were not actually encouraged to be literate, in fact it was prohibited to teach a Dalit (untouchable) to read. This shows up even today in the number of mistakes you see on signage in small shops.
If you compare Gurmukhi script, the writing system of the Sikhs, it's a much simpler more economic form which was also intentional with the aim of making the Guru Granth Sahib, their holy book, readable by all.
Again, the Word predominates: One God, the Name is Truth.
I agree with you about the confusion :). In the case of John 1:1, it is worth noting that the term "Word" here is the English translation from the Greek "Logos," which has a somewhat different meaning than our generic "Word." There are a number of different words for "word" in Greek but I'll let you research that, if you have not already.
As I said before you have chosen a great area of study. Thanks for the reply!
I always try to qualify the things I say with 'personally I think X' or 'in my opinion such and such is Y' or words to that effect. That's my way of avoiding making categorical statements which tend to alienate people whose views may differ from mine.
I treat even my most strongly held beliefs in that way as I've had to revise enough of them in the course of my life to recognize the danger of being overly committed to any one particular point of view. I have far more questions than I have answers, and I have no expectation of that situation changing any time soon, even though I continue to search for answers, the pursuit of knowledge being its own reward.
Jeffery Sachs also talks about culture must be cultivated... He basically says Christian culture ended in the West 500 years ago and replaced with philosophies of machiavelli, Locke, Hobbes, Malthus etc
I think you'll find this interesting
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWFaKRS8iic
Thanks, I'll check it out. As you can see, he's basically talking about the Enlightenment. I argue that the breakdown began earlier as the the implications of Augustinian thought began to be worked out with ever more systematically radical conclusions. "The Renaissance" (Machiavelli), voluntarism, nominalism. That eventually led to the Protestant Revolution in the religious sphere, the implications of which were seized upon in the secular sphere by the evolution of the rising nation states into totalitarian monarchies with only a vestige of religious culture. The Enlightenment swept Christianity out of public culture.
He's talking about "virtue ethics." That rests upon the ability to discern nature, especially human nature, and to express the good of human nature using reason. That's the Aristotelian tradition. Inherent in Platonic thinking, which was mediated to the West by Augustine in a radical form, contains the seeds of a radical skepticism which radically undermines reason and therefore virtue ethics.
I wonder whether Sachs ever read Alasdair MacIntyre's works. Especially https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alasdair_MacIntyre#Three_Rival_Versions_of_Moral_Inquiry_(1990)
The process began much earlier than Sachs supposes--he's repeating a common view that it began with Machiavelli. It really begins in earnest already in the 14th century. It's not coincidental that Sachs begins the breakdown at 1500 and the Protestant Revolt begins in 1517, based on nominalist thinking. Note that all the later figures he mentions are anti-Christian, mostly from Anglophone countries, who were then greatly influential in Catholic France and Germany.
He also gets into "individualism", the foundation of modern Libertarianism. The dominance of the individual also rests upon the nominalist contention that there is no knowledge of reality, only of the mind, and was enshrined in Kantian thought that is the foundation for most moderrn ideologies. This swept away the Christian culture of the common good and legitimized the will to power (Sachs also gets into this). He traces this to wars of extermination. Competition v. cooperation as the underpinning of "society"--the destruction of culture.
Yeah, I like how he trashes Ayn Rand.
I'll add this. The Protestant Revolt is profoundly a revolt against the Christian Faith's tradition of thought. Of course there were other things going on, the rise of nationalism, etc. However, the implication of Nominalism is the end of reasoned moral thinking and, logically, even of scientific inquiry. Luther was a nominalist professor and famously derided philosophy, which is a common trait of most Protestantism (there are exceptions--many of whom I cite regularly in my earlier posts--but they are not mainstream and are typically violently attacked by popular Protestants). For Protestantism, "faith" is no longer a product of reasoned belief based in history and insight into nature, as it is for Christians. It is transformed by Luther and other Protestants into a subjective certitude based on the will (voluntarism) and from reading a book. Modern Liberalism in the Western world is the product of Anglo-Protestant culture originating out of the breakdown of late medieval thought into nominalism. It is the end product of the Platonic tradition in Augustinian thought. It is no accident that Augustine is the great thinker in Protestant thought.
Q: is it possible that we (in the West) are no longer modern/post-modern? That we have explicitly rejected the modern (particularly those under 30 y/o) because it never delivered on its promises, and are rummaging through all the “philosophy” looking for answers for how to deal with a new paradigm? Is the door finally open to take what came before the moderns seriously again?
Many twists and turns indeed!…some nuttiness but the “shift” or break has already happened…thus people lacking trust and asking questions in the West…
Have you considered the “causes” of the shift/present troubles?
Some argue that, but it's a long road with many twists and turns. Hope.
Mark: Just between us two Thomists, please consider the *formal* cause of these developments (no, not the "efficient" cause &c) -- as described by another (convert-as-) Thomist, Marshall McLuhan. The Enlightenment was caused by Print. The Post-modernists were caused by Television. But we are now Digital -- which causes something else that is no longer "modern." Thus Trump.
Yes, "philosophy" matters. Consider the implications of Romano Guardini's "The End of the Modern World" (1948) and his last word on the topic, "The Machine and Man" (1958, in his "Letters from Lake Como"). Let's turn our gaze toward the future -- dealing w/ today's "Artificial Humans" -- while avoiding McLuhan's "rear-view-mirror" . . . !!
“Absolutized individual freedom.”
Except when it goes against state sanctioned scientism, kick that can your in for a heck of a time.
Fabulous - many thanks Mark.
Striking and stimulating - thank you!
These two Leviathan posts, and your own insights and longer term intellectual quest (staggering depth and implications - will for sure be chewing on that material for quite awhile) are examples of deep responsible thinking from duty.
Not something any of us can hear enough of, anymore - whether or not we agree with the direction and intentions (though here, even as an atheist, I am very much inclned toward your ideas, insofar as I understand them).
Hude in particular makes me feel like a children's author, all of a sudden - but if you have a bored moment sometime, and will allow that I am from the left, and still trying to frame my arguments to prise away some skeptics who linger that slow-group, as well as bring some younger readers along and make them feel welcome, I think you might get a chuckle from this recent foray.
Cultural integrity (and the obviously advanced dissolution of our own culture) is one of those huge themes that requires so much imagination principle and curiosity, we almost never 'go there' - leaving many youngsters who would like to think about and work on doing better, feeling anchorless and isolated.
Greatly appreciate that you have such a monumental grail quest, on top of (and no doubt at least in-part powering) your fascination with the fine detail of events.
Cheers, mate - I trust you'll do me the courtesy of translating the odd "Bourgeois" into "Libtard" (accurate) and as I say, get a chuckle or two.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
https://paulsnyders.substack.com/p/simultaneously-evaporating-reciprocal
"The social democratic pact has been broken by the globalization of the economy, and it is impossible to reestablish it or replace it with something else."
This is an exact example of what I was talking about in my previous post. What does he mean by "social democratic pact" and "globalization of the economy?" These are abstract nouns that can mean different things to different people. There's also no reason given to believe in a causal link between the two. He just states it as a fact then goes on to declare the impossibility of reestablishing or replacing it without telling us why.
The implication is that social democracy is desirable, and that globalization undermines it, but does that fit the observed facts? Globalization arguably is bad for western workers and good for western capitalists (who socialists define as a negative influence) but look at what globalization has done for China. A billion people have been lifted out of poverty to where they now have a stable society with most of the essentials we take for granted in the West. So if 350M people are inconvenienced while over 1 B have vastly benefited, how do we weight that in terms of social benefit? What criteria are we using to define what is or isn't bad about globalization? A parochial metric based on our own cultural preferences, or the material benefits as defined by the needs of the greatest number of people?
You've missed his point entirely. He's presenting the stock argument intended to explain the alienation of young people as a function of economics. He is concerned with culture and argues that young people are not at all alienated from the dominant culture.
I haven't addressed his point. I simply used his opening statement as an example of the problem of using abstract nouns and concepts without operationalizing them. I'm not picking on him in particular. Almost all social commentators do this, and the problem even extends to the hard sciences.
You begin with the premise "that philosophy matters—in the real world, in daily life." I agree with you. I'm trying to point out that just as philosophy matters, so do the words we use to describe our philosophies, and too often we assume that others share the same meaning or understanding as we do. Clearly not the case or you wouldn't have all these schisms in the great religions, for example, or so many divisions within the corpus of philosophy itself, to say nothing of the various divisions within modern socialism. It's a veritable Tower of Babel, and the root of the problem is more often the words we use to express the concepts than the actual concepts themselves.
Personally I prefer Epistemology to Philosophy as a foundation since it precedes philosophy in the sense that it attempts to define (operationalize) the source and structure of our thoughts and the means whereby we communicate them. Philosophy essentially rides on that foundation, often without acknowledging it. So it's basically a derivation of Epistemology without recognizing the problem introduced by the use of abstract nouns, which can have different meanings to different people in different contexts.
For me the starting point is not the classics but Alfred Korzybski's 1933 book "Science and Sanity" where he examines the underlying structure of the language we use to communicate. Korzybski is the guy who coined the term "Belief System" and the expression "the map is not the territory."
https://oceanofpdf.com/?s=science+and+sanity
Stuart Chase, realizing the importance of K's work, attempted to summarize his main points in more accessible language. A good starting point for K's book which can be a difficult read.
https://oceanofpdf.com/?s=tyranny+of+words
According to K, all information about the world comes to us via our senses and is communicated to others via language, spoken or written, or by graphic depiction which is an extension of language, as is music and song. So understanding how our senses operate, including their limitations, and how we communicate our thoughts via language is a prerequisite to any philosophical discourse.
A simple analogy would be driving from San Francisco to New York. We can choose any number of routes to complete our journey, but they all depend on there being an existing road - the hidden ground as McLuhan would describe it. We take that part for granted until we come to a point where the road is washed out, or the route we took is a dead end, corresponding to a lack of words or concepts to frame and/or communicate our ideas, at which point we have to create new (shared) meaning via language to overcome the obstacle. In short we have to build a new road, or at least find a way back to where one exists.
A friend I worked with back in the 80's described it as building a ship at sea. We worked together on designing a computer game using this exact analogy, where you'd be driving down a highway (visuals inspired by the German Autobahn sign https://storage.googleapis.com/pod_public/1300/126901.jpg) and to accumulate points you'd have to take exits marked by cryptic symbols which would take you to puzzles that had to be solved to find your way back to the main road. Similar to dungeons and dragons, where you pick up weapons or keys to advance, only the objects accumulated were epistemological or philosophical concepts which could be applied to solve future puzzles at subsequent off-ramps. Basically a fun way to build a foundation for critical thinking and creative mentation. Unfortunately we ran out of money and the project was never completed.
Marshal McLuhan played a huge role in framing our views back then, as did Douglas Hofstadter. I just wish we'd known about Korzybski at the time because his work would have helped us enormously.
Maybe it is just me, but I always looked at Korzybski's "the map is not the territory" as a statement which clarifies the relationship between language and reality and does so at language's expense. Whereas certain "schools" of philosophy have always had a fundamental problem conflating language with reality, Korzybski did an end run around this problem by "demoting" the role of language to just being descriptive of (what he termed pointing toward) and an abstraction of reality rather than actually participating in reality. Language is thus neither purely empirically derived nor purely logically constructed.
As such, Korzybski's General Semantics and the idea of abstraction was an antidote to people like the Logical Positivists, whose epistemology insisted that if something could not be described it did not exist. Fairly quickly that approach led to the later Wittgenstein's mysticism. The conclusion I drew from Korzybski is that language is simply to be seen as a tool, a method, an artifice for communicating, rather than a basis for philosophical constructs.
You're the first person I've spoken to that's actually read Korzybski. That could just be a reflection of my own limited engagement with philosophers though. I've only ever met one who actually held a degree in the subject. Curiously he'd never read Hofstadter and had only breezed through McLuhan. We had some interesting conversations.
I pretty much agree with you up to your last statement: "...that language is simply to be seen as a tool, a method, an artifice for communicating, rather than a basis for philosophical constructs."
Not sure what the difference is. Language, spoken and written, is the basis for all communication so I see it as foundational. How else could we have a shared understanding of abstract ideas without first defining our terms, and how can we do that without a common language?
I apologize, ebear, for not stating that well. You are right of course that we need language and a shared understanding of it to describe abstract ideas or even objects in the world. The point I was trying to make is that philosophers can easily fall into viewing language itself as the "reality" as they devise their systems for dealing with philosophical questions. Rationalism is a good example. It is an easy trap for them to fall into because language is the only tool they have to formulate and share their views. If you have ever read Heidegger, for example, (or even Kant) they all develop their particular "language" to communicate their ideas.
It has been over 40 years since I studied Korzybski and read more widely in Philosophy - plus my mind and memory are not as good as they once were. So I am sure you have a more thorough and better understanding of General Semantics than I do at this point. I appreciate your thoughts and I give you a lot of credit for your interest in this area.
Thanks buddy. This confusion of words with the thing itself is an ancient theme. For example: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. John 1:1
It goes back much further than that of course, probably to the dawn of writing. Imagine the impact the Bible had on preliterate cultures. That you could actually derive meaning from words on paper had a huge impact on people whose only symbols up to that point were totemic, or simple tally sticks. Very easy to confuse the words with the thing itself, especially when the people presenting it held the same belief.
I study languages, and one of the things that is claimed about Hindi is that the writing system was made intentionally difficult to restrict its use to the priesthood and ruling class, and that commoners were not actually encouraged to be literate, in fact it was prohibited to teach a Dalit (untouchable) to read. This shows up even today in the number of mistakes you see on signage in small shops.
If you compare Gurmukhi script, the writing system of the Sikhs, it's a much simpler more economic form which was also intentional with the aim of making the Guru Granth Sahib, their holy book, readable by all.
Again, the Word predominates: One God, the Name is Truth.
I agree with you about the confusion :). In the case of John 1:1, it is worth noting that the term "Word" here is the English translation from the Greek "Logos," which has a somewhat different meaning than our generic "Word." There are a number of different words for "word" in Greek but I'll let you research that, if you have not already.
As I said before you have chosen a great area of study. Thanks for the reply!
It's telling that you begin with "Personally I prefer ..." That's the modern Kantian view that was prompted by Nominalist skepticism:
"Philosophy essentially rides on that foundation, often without acknowledging it."
For the correct view:
Thomist Realism and The Critique of Knowledge
https://www.amazon.com/Thomist-Realism-Critique-Knowledge-Etienne/dp/1586176854
I always try to qualify the things I say with 'personally I think X' or 'in my opinion such and such is Y' or words to that effect. That's my way of avoiding making categorical statements which tend to alienate people whose views may differ from mine.
I treat even my most strongly held beliefs in that way as I've had to revise enough of them in the course of my life to recognize the danger of being overly committed to any one particular point of view. I have far more questions than I have answers, and I have no expectation of that situation changing any time soon, even though I continue to search for answers, the pursuit of knowledge being its own reward.
Jerk free zone.