THE MEANINGLESSNESS OF OBJECTS

We can learn a lot about how the Greeks lived from the art and artefacts they left behind - their dress, their weaponry, the ships, ceramics, rituals, hunting methods, food, musical instruments - you name it. But however astonishing and vitally important these man-made objects are, they do not allow us to share the thought processes of Aristotle and what he thought about the generation of animals, or Plato's political ideas, or the nature of Socrates' half-hearted defence of his alleged misdoing at his trial etc.

     My own view is that words per se do not exist as meaningful symbols - it is the meaning-packing and meaning-extracting human wordifiers that actually exist.

    The point I am making about the words not existing as meaningful symbols refers to the ontological view that objects [the residue of dried ink marks in certain forms] have no meaning in themselves, but that the meaning which was attributed to them by the brain of the writer who generated them, is regenerated in the human brain of the reader.

     In a similar way, a child's toy wooden train does not exist as a child's toy wooden train, it exists as a certain combination of molecules which we call 'wood' shaped in a certain way to represent a larger similarly shaped object made of steel. It is the rest of humanity that attribute the meaning of 'train' to the carved block, with the exception perhaps of some child deep in the jungles of Amazonia who has never seen a train or a picture of one.

     When Aristotle's or Plato's [or their amanuensis' or copier's] meaningless Greek squiggles are translated and rendered into English or Italian, people read them and instantiate or recover their writer's meaning, by gaining diachronic proxy access to Aristotle's or Plato's thinking processes. The intentional human meaning of the ink symbols or the wooden toy train is by the visual contemplation of them. I suggest to you that when we read human words or observe any object created by man [including statuary, works of art, poetry, artefacts and music we are in fact retrieving information from a semiological storage device and ideationally restituting the creator's neurological activity concerning the meaning of that representation for its original creator.

    Traffic lights convey a public 'social [legal]meaning' by use of the colours they display, but like the written words of Aristotle, or the toy train, if the traffic lights from the centre of our village, together with the written words of Aristotle, and the toy train lay discarded in some dripping jungle clearing deep in the forests of Brazil then the natives of some isolated tribe would have no idea as to their significance, and assuming that they had some spiritual implication, might well erect the village traffic lights as a totem to worship, and assume that the ancient parchment rolls containing Aristotle's words were for wiping the body following defecation?

      The point I am making is that 'meaning' like any other abstraction, lies not in the human artefact itself - but in the eyes of the beholder, or listener, or toucher, or more specifically in the patterns of his or her neuronal configurations, for which the human sensorium acts as a provider of symbolically derived information.

      Fortunately, we do have the other important symbolic artefacts in addition to the various contemporary writings, which allow us further insights into the world in which the Greeks lived.

     Of course, the communicative codes [words] that we leave behind are very important as kinds of archaeological artefacts too - an excavated Egyptian artefact that semiotically tranfers hieroglyphic information as to what the picture means, who are the characters depicted, the date etc. - is to me much more interesting than an artefact bereft of word-symbols don't you agree?

   But what in my opinion sets humans apart from the animals is that we supplement the obvious utility and function of the objects we create, with oral or written accounts of their use and meaning in our world, whereas the beaver does not have the ability to describe his dam, nor the eagle the wit to explain why his sparse cuddle of twigs is the most sensible design for his version of a treetop or cliffside home.