Re: [xmca] More on Martin: Consciousness vs knowledge?

Exactly! But if this consciousness of the self is only about ME, there isn't much I can do with it. The point is that it comes about through taking the viewpoint of the OTHER. And that viewpoint turns out to be central, even to my view of myself.
   
  For both LSV and Bakhtin, one of the most important ways this happens is through the learning of foreign languages. LSV says that it is through the learning of foreign languages that we learn that concepts, which come into being and are shared through language, are at least partially independent of any one specific language, and that is what makes them scientific.Bakhtin says that it is really through the concatenation of other languages within one language (other viewpoints within a narrative viewpoint) that the novel is born.
   
  But LSV and Bakhtin are also distinct. For LSV, the important thing is the journeying forth to the viewpoint of the other; this is what makes it posible to understand one's own language not as synonymous with social reality but simply as one instance of human meaning-making. (Thinking and Speech, especially Chapter Five) For Bakhtin, the important thing is not so much the journeying forth to the viewpoint of the other, but the return to one's own point of view. Simply sharing the suffering of another is not enough; you must return to your own point of view and respond to that suffering as a man. (Art and Answerability)
   
  LSV has a parable (from Fet but also from other sources) about the soldier who is discussing the various words for "knife" (or water). He goes through a whole list: in Russian it's nozh, in French, couteau, in German, Messer, in English, a knife...but you and I know it's really a nozh, and this shows that Russian is the most correct language. To return to one's own point of view utterly is to have learnt nothing. (Thinking and Speech Chapter Seven)
   
  Mike and Karl Levitin have a marvelous article about the teaching of the blind and deaf in Russia. They argue that mediated and unmediated (less mediated) perceptions FAIL to coincide and we "notice the gap". We then fill it in with imagination.
   
  Of course, the same principle works with concepts as well, but here other languages are the mediators (it is no accident that scientific concepts in all languages are expressed in a foreign language, e.g. Latin in English, Chinese in Korean, English and Russian in Chinese, Hindi and Greek in Arabic.).
   
  When we compare other languages with our own, we notice the gap and fill it in with imagination; this creates a three dimensional perspective on the very stuff our self narratives are made of, namely our native language, which for obvious reasons cannot be conveyed by our own everyday word meanings alone.
   
  We MUST have the perspective of the other; more, we must have a gap between that perspective and our own sense of self. And once we have that understanding, we discover that the apparent means to that end, the foreign language, has become an end in its own right.
   
  In Tchaikovsky's final one-act opera, Iolantha, a beautiful princess is born blind and is kept in a secret garden by her father and surrounded by sycophants who are forbidden to speak of anything visual. She is rescued by an Arab necromancer and a handsome prince who use, of course, the mediation of language, to help her "see" her own blindness and in seeing it, to see beyond it at last.
   
  David Kellogg
  Seoul National University of Education

       
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Received on Mon Mar 10 23:37 PDT 2008