[xmca] Edward sapir

[Larry Purss <lpscholar2@gmail.com>]

David, I am venturing into topics that I am very tentative and unsure of
when having a conversation with scholars who have thought deeply about these
topics. However your comments on Edward Sapir are circling around topics I
am struggling to understand.

{I also want to respond to Monica's reply to my earlier thoughts on
"reflection" and also reply to Gregory's reply to my thoughts on
 "recognition" but have been busy and so many conversations happen at warp
speed so my current thoughts also have them as conversants}

David, you wrote:
In the sphere of instinctive consciousness, in which rules perception and
passion, only infection and contagion is possible, not understanding and
social contact in the true sense of the word. Edward Sapir has wonderfully
explained this in his work on the psychology of speech. Elements of
language,” he says must be connected to an entire group, to a defined class
of our experience. “The world of our experiences must be enormously
simplified and generalized before it is possible to make a symbolic
inventory of all our experiences of things and relations; and this inventory
is imperative before we can convey ideas. The elements of language, the
symbols that ticket off experience, must therefore be associated with whole
groups, delimited classes, of experience rather than with the single
experiences themselves. Only so is communication possible, for the single
experience lodges in an individual consciousness and is, strictly speaking,
incommunicable.
 To be communicated it needs to be referred to a class which is tacitly
accepted by the community as an identity.” For this reason Sapir considers
the value of a word not as a symbol of an isolated perception, but as the
symbol of a concept."

If Sapir  is CORRECT about the elements of language and speech that must be
GENERALIZED BEFORE BECOMING SYMBOLIC he then makes a presupposition that the
person must FIRST gather together the INDIVIDUAL IST PERSON experiences
BEFORE they can be EXPRESSED in the 3RD PERSON rhetorical format that is
linquistic and SELF-REFERENTIAL.  Terms such as "reflection" and
"recognition" are often assumed to also be self-referential 3RD person
REFERENTIAL narrative constructions thatt are CONSTITUTED within linquistic
processes.

I want to "tentatively" propose [expecting a ton of feathers to descend on
my head] that there may be a THIRD way of "communicating" experiences that
is NOT 1st person phenomenological nor 3rd person referential [observing
spectator]   This is the 2ND person "We consciousness" of being
"seen" [GAZE OF THE OTHER while OTHER is RECOGNIZED by self.]  The term
"recognized" may not be the best term to use because it points to
"cognition" as PRIMARY.  But the distinction between "cognition" "awareness"
"attunement" etc may not be "cognitive" in the way analytical philosophy
describes cognition.  The intersubjective process of  RE-cognition therefore
may be confused with 3rd person perspectives.  The 2ND PERSON "perception" I
am postulating may not have the same quality as 3rd person referential
recognition [reflection]

[Rod's posts on mother-infant 2nd person attunement captures the sense of
what I'm attempting to express]

Historically, Edward Sapir was profoundly influenced by G.H. Mead.
 Harry Stack Sullivan [who founded the interpersonal school of
psychoanalysis] was profoundly indebted to both G.H. Mead and Edward Sapir.
Today, "relational & intersubjective psychoanalysis view Harry Stack
Sullivan as one of their  ancestors.  Intersubjective psychoanalysis
suggests that it is the INDIVIDUAL EXPERIENCE expressed by a person that is
WITNESSED by the other [in an I-THOU 2ND PERSON relation] that is the
transformative experience which THEN the two persons LIVING THROUGH  the
experience [as given] search to put in to referential 3rd person rhetorical
structures.

I want to say more but that will be for another day

Larry
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