![]() Recall, if you will, that the necessity for work is one of the curses placed by God upon Adam and his descendants in consequence of Original Sin. When engaging in sacrifice, our forefathers began to act out what would be considered a proposition, if it were stated in words-that something better might be attained in the future by giving up something of value in the present. But we didn’t and still don’t understand what it all meant. In this manner, the information that was first only embedded in our behaviour became represented in our stories. We coded our observations of our own drama in these stories. We started acting out our own experiences. We started using our bodies as devices to represent their own actions. We were already doing, but we started noticing what we were doing. One day, however, not so long ago, we woke up. No one was formulating them explicitly (at least not in the dimmest reaches of the past), even though we’ve been telling each other how to act forever. They’ve evolved over great expanses of time. We’ve established predictable routines and patterns of behavior-but we don’t really understand them, or know where they originated. Our knowledge has been shaped by our interaction with others. ![]() We’re still chimps in a troupe, or wolves in a pack. We act them out and represent them in stories, but we’re not yet wise enough to formulate them explicitly. This is because they are in large part still implicit-manifest primarily in ritual and myth and, as of yet, incompletely articulated. Our ancestors worked out very sophisticated answers to such questions, but we still don’t understand them very well. The domain of the latter is "the world of value"-what is and what should be, from the perspective of emotion and action." The domain of the former is the "objective world"-what is, from the perspective of intersubjective perception. The two forms of representation have been unnecessarily set at odds, because we have not yet formed a clear picture of their respective domains. The techniques of narrative, however-myth, literature, and drama-portray the world as a forum for action. We describe the world as a place of things, using the formal methods of science. I wrote this a little later: it’s also relevant: "The world can be validly construed as a forum for action, as well as a place of things. Those who, by contrast, accept the scientific perspective-who assume that it is, or might become, complete-forget that an impassable gulf currently divides what is from what should be." Adherents of the mythological world-view tend to regard the statements of their creeds as indistinguishable from empirical "fact," even though such statements were generally formulated long before the notion of objective reality emerged. The fact that one mode is generally set at odds with the other means only that the nature of their respective domains remains insufficiently discriminated. No complete world-picture can be generated, without use of both modes of construal. Science allows for increasingly precise determination of the consensually-validatable properties of things, and for efficient utilization of precisely-determined things as tools (once the direction such use is to take has been determined, through application of more fundamental narrative processes). The latter manner of interpretation-the world as place of things-finds its formal expression in the methods and theories of science. This meaning, which is shaped as a consequence of social interaction, is implication for action, or-at a higher level of analysis-implication for the configuration of the interpretive schema that produces or guides action. The world as forum for action is a place of value, a place where all things have meaning. The former manner of interpretation-more primordial, and less clearly understood-finds its expression in the arts or humanities, in ritual, drama, literature, and mythology. This is from the first part of my book Maps of Meaning: "The world can be validly construed as forum for action, or as place of things.
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