KARL JASPERS FORUM

TA33 (Mancuso)

Commentary 3

ANCIENT ITALIAN WISDOM, JIM MANCUSO STYLE
by Michael Mahoney
5 February 2001, posted 13 February 2001

<1>
This new piece by Jim Mancuso is worth reading and re-reading. I'm sure I haven't mined it completely yet, and it is still yielding wonderful gems that keep leading to other rich veins. There are fortunes there, fortunately (and I shall here attempt to bridle my own glossophilia).

<2>
Psychollages. What a beautiful image or symbol. When I read an early version of this article, it was this construct that drew me. I was struck by its organic and protean possibilities. At the time, perhaps a month ago, I was reading Tom Kuhn's last essays and final interview (he died in 1996 but these papers were collected only in 2000). There was a resonance between what Tom Kuhn was saying (or what I was reading into him) and what I found myself experiencing as I read Jim's article. Language. Language Communities. Incommensurability. Kuhn wasn't just saying that paradigms can't talk to one another (and everyone "knows" that paradigms can't talk anyway, right?). Wasn't he saying that the real problem may be that people in different paradigms may think they are talking to one another when, in fact, they are experiencing and expressing from vastly different worlds. This goes on all the time and not just in science. Kuhn was not a linguist, but he immersed himself in the self-organization of language communities. He noticed that paradigm shifts ¯ "changes in meaning" as he put it once ¯ always are accompanied by language shifts (new words, words that were marginally useful before they suddenly become central, etc.). Moreover, these changes in the language ("meaning-making") community develop and are taught not by rote or authoritarian means, but by embodied "exemplars" ¯ "hands-on" (body involved) puzzles whose partial mastery builds a felt sense of meaning that contributes to (but cannot be captured in) words and their nets. In his late essay on "Possible Worlds in History of Science" Kuhn says flatly that he was, when he died, onto the vein of insight that it is "impossible to change the theory without changing the lexicon as well (2000, p. 19)."

<3>
When I first read Jim's piece I was also reminded of Vico's earlier (1710) book ON THE MOST ANCIENT WISDOM OF THE ITALIANS UNEARTHED FROM THE ORIGINS OF THE LATIN LANGUAGE. This piece has only been available in English since 1988, and L. M. Palmer introduces it with an appreciation for Vico's wisdom that resonates well with Jim's and with Jim's article.

<4>
I meant only to write a brief kudos here to Jim and the contribution he has made with this analysis of Vico, narration, and knowing. I find it ticklingly delightful that Vico was an inspired etymologist and that he saw that our words ¯ from their origins to the worlds they help us to create ¯ are keys to many of the doors that words themselves have created and closed.

<5>
I close with an appreciation for Jim Mancuso and his continuing brilliance as a living legend in constructivism. On a walk with a friend recently we were trading moments of excitement about discoveries we had made about word meanings and word origins. My friend (Brother David Steindl-Rast) shared something that is quite appropriate here. For most of my life I have assumed that the word "appreciate" refers to a mathematical value, as when investments or goods "appreciate" or "depreciate." That is the sense one gets in most dictionaries that offer a hint of etymology. Brother David encouraged me to look more deeply. "To appreciate", he said, is an act of movement: "ap" to move toward, and then "preciare," to make precious. To appreciate is to move toward the experiencing of preciousness.

<6>
It is in this sense that I APPRECIATE Jim Mancuso and his contribution to our PSYCHOLLAGE.

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Michael Mahoney