1.22.2002

You write, concerning the example in the final short paragraph of 6, "The tendency is to say something more general about the relation of language to the mechanism, as if language is like this steam engine. To say this, however, implies an Archimedean position outside of language that enables us to see it as a whole -- in the same way we can see a steam engine as a whole," & this has wide resonance for me, both as a poet, realizing that every context is different, and as a philosophical pluralist, believing that no single, self-consistent description of the world can ever be a total & adequate description. Here we are back to Heisenberg. There is no Archimedean point, no fulcrum on which to get purchase. So now I (provisionally) understand 6 as using a shifting perspective to suggest that the model proposed by Augustine, being metaphysical & static, cannot even begin to describe human language.

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