The shape of what lies underneath.

Shapes, behaviors, descriptions, collect around concepts and things according to the nature of what they are settling over.

I remember friends in McDowell High School in Millcreek, PA (1980-81) debating what the world would be like if the wheel had never been invented, or writing, or the telegraph.

It would certainly be different, but those things are inevitable developments within the physical environments they operate.

You can’t start an industrialized society without those things, and many more interlocking pieces.

In fact, you could say every piece - from atoms to galaxy clusters - are interlocking, and that to adjust one piece at one point in time would have a rippling effect on the whole, given enough time.

And so things like Werner’s Grammar (a prescriptive manual on English usage), are usually regarded as bad things or, at best, only momentarily useful, because they tell you how to do something rather than describing how something works.

You can’t tell language how to work any more than you can a dung beetle or a bolt of lightening.

But where I was headed in the first place: Can we ever know how something more esoteric, like like the Apostle’s Creed, came to be in its present form? It’s not in the bible, and no one person sat down and said “I’m going to summarize what it means to be a Christian.”

Like the wheel, like writing, like the telegraph, metaphysical constructs reveal the shape of what lies underneath.

 

c0

 

In other words, philosophies are descriptive, in the same way mutant monster movies captured  our collective fear of nuclear holocaust.

We often treat philosophies as prescriptive - as guidelines, rules - perhaps because it’s easier to (subconsciously) ensure that the underlying structure is preserved from one generation to the next.

[2013-12-06]

c0