alphabet and philosophy
Some of our biases are so engrained that it took us literally a few thousands years to unearth them.
Acquisition of a language involves a high dose of cognitive indoctrination. This indoctrination starts at a very early stage: During the internalization of the alphabet, our perception of reality becomes altered in subtle ways.
Writing creates an artificial memory, whereby humans can enlarge their experience beyond the limits of one generation or one way of life. At the same time it has allowed them to invent a world of abstract entities and mistake them for reality. The development of writing has enabled them to construct philosophies in which they no longer belong in the natural world.
The earliest forms of writing preserved many links with the natural world. The pictographs of Sumer were metaphors of sensuous realities. With the evolution of phonetic writing those links were severed. Writing no longer pointed outwards to a world human shared with other animals. Henceforth its signs pointed backwards to the human mouth, which soon became the source of all sense.
When twentieth-century philosophers such as Fritz Mauthner and Wittgenstein attacked the superstitious reverence for words they found in philosophers such as Plato they were criticising a by-product of phonetic writing. It is scarcely possible to imagine a philosophy such as Platonism emerging in an oral culture. It is equally difficult to imagine it in Sumeria. How could a world of bodiless Forms be represented in pictograms? How could abstract entities be represented as the ultimate realities in a mode of writing that still recalled the realm of the senses?
It is significant that nothing resembling Platonism arose in China. Classical Chinese script is not ideographic, as used to be thought; but because of what A.C. Graham terms its 'combination of graphic wealth with phonetic poverty' it did not encourage the kind of abstract thinking that produced Plato's philosophy. Plato was what historians of philosophy call a realist- he believed that abstract terms designated spiritual or intellectual entities. In contrast, throughout its long history, Chinese thought has been nominalist- it has understood that even the most abstract terms are only labels, names for the diversity of things in the world. As a result, Chinese thinkers have rarely mistaken ideas for facts.
John Gray - Straw Dogs (Pages 56-57)
- The core of Wittgenstein's picture theory of meaning rests on the trivial discovery that Latin alphabet is non-pictographic.
- As the Chinese characters have lost touch with their pictographical origins, has the Chinese people become more susceptible to Platonism?
See for instance the evolution of the character for "horse":
