My character has been lying down in his Captain’s Quarters bed and thinking many things:
“What if?”
“What’s next?”
“Why?”
“When?”
“Who?”
“Where?”
“How close?”
“How far?”…
and such questions.
Let me share something:
An excerpt about metaphysics from a history-archeology book:
Language is more than a mere vehicle of tradition. It
affects what is transmitted. The socially accepted meaning
of a word (or other symbol) is almost necessarily somewhat
abstract. The word ‘banana’ stands for a class of objects
having in common certain visible, tangible, odorous and
above all edible qualities. In using it we make abstraction
of, that is, we ignore as irrelevant, details - the number of
spots on its skin, its position on a tree or in a trap and so on
- that are qualities of any real individual banana. Every
word, however gross and material its meaning, possesses
something of this abstract character. By its very nature
language involves classification. On the practical side, by
example you learn to imitate accurately and in detail a
particular set of manipulative movements. By precept you
can be taught the sort of movements to perform, but you
are still left a little room for variation. In engineering the
contrast between apprenticeship and a university education
really goes back to this. Language makes tradition rational.
Reasoning has been defined as ‘the ability to solve pro-
blems without going through a physical process of trial and
error’. Instead of trying to do a thing with your hands and
perhaps burning your fingers, you do it in your head using
ideas - images or symbols of the actions ’ which would be
involved. Other animals than men certainly behave as if
they reasoned in this sense. Faced with a banana midway
up a tube, open at both ends but too long to reach up, a
chimpanzee discovered how to push the banana with a
stick from one end and then grab it from the other, without
going through a number of futile movements, by sitting and
‘reasoning’. The ape must have imagined the banana in
various non-existent positions before it hit upon the trick.
But it did not have to go very far from the concrete situation
with which it was actually confronted. What is distinctive of
human reasoning is that it can go immensely farther from
the actual present situation than any other animal’s reason-
ing ever seems to get it. In this distinctive advance language
has surely been a very great help.
Reasoning and all that we call thinking, including the
chimpanzee’s,. must involve mental operations with what
psychologists call images. A visual image, a mental picture of,
say, a banana, is always liable to be a picture of a particular
banana in a particular setting. A word on the contrary is, as
explained, more general and abstract, having eliminated
just those accidental features that give individuality to any
real banana. Mental images of words (pictures of the sound
or of the muscular movements entailed in uttering it) form
very convenient counters for thinking with. Thinking with
their aid necessarily possesses just that quality of abstract-
ness and generality that animal thinking seems to lack. Men
can think, as well as talk, about the class of objects called
‘bananas’: the chimpanzee never gets further than 'that
banana in that tube’. In this way the social instrument
termed language has contributed to what is grandilo-
quently described as ‘man’s emancipation from bondage to
the concrete’.
To reason is to operate with symbols ‘in the head’ and not
with things or actions in the external world. Conventional
words are symbols, though by no means the only kind. You
can put such symbols together and combine them in all
sorts of ways in your head without moving a muscle. The
term ‘idea’ is gencially used for what words and other
symbols denote, mean, or refer to. In a sense ‘banana’ does
not refer to anything you can see, touch, smell, or even eat,
but only to an idea - the ‘ideal banana’. Still this idea is
happily represented by plenty of substantial edible bananas,
even if none of them quite comes up to the standard of the
ideal banana. But in society men make names for and talk
about ideas which cannot in fact be seen, smelt, handled or
tasted like bananas - ideas such as two-headed eagle, mana,
electricity, cause. All these are social products, like the words
that express them. Societies behave as if they stood for real
things. In fact men seem to be impelled to far more strenu-
ous and sustained action by the idea of two-headed eagle,
immortality or freedom than by the most succulent
bananas!
- Gordon V. Childe, “What Happened In History” publication: 1923
Lesson: Evolve into a human, don’t stay a chimpanzee and don’t forget to daydream more often.
