Adam’s Cookie Cutter

 

On Monday, the 5th of May in 3877 BC., central European time, according to Johannes Kepler’s calculations, God had “formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air,” and now “brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof” (Genesis 2;19). Jorge Luis Borges once observed that language is a system of Quotations. As far as we know, there is not a single person in the world who has learned how to speak without the example of the people living before him. Apparently there is a window for picking up language and it closes for good roughly about the age of fifteen. Once we’ve passed the critical years without being introduced to speaking we will never learn it. Emperor Frederick II (1194 – 1250) attempted to discover the language Adam may have spoken. He ordered to keep a number of infants isolated from every human contact, except for a nurse born mute. The experiment was not something new; Herodot has reported a similar attempt by some Greek tyrant from the 5th century BC. whose name I’ve forgotten, but the environment was contaminated and the babes picked up a couple of words from their Phrygian nurse. At least, that’s how Aristotle tried to explain away the – as he felt – embarrassing fact, that mankind’s first language was a barbaric tongue and not Greek. This time, the imperial scientist – his manual on falconry is still a classic – would cover all his bases. But legend has it, that despite good care the children died of emotional bereavement. So poor old Adam, as the first of men, was at a distinct disadvantage. Genesis doesn’t exactly depict God as a patient guy. Soon enough the Old Potter got fed up with Adam’s hemming and hawing. He disappeared in the depths of his workshop and after some vigorous rummaging he came back with a rusty cookie cutter from the kitchen cabinet of his ex-wife, Madame Asteroth, the queen of heaven. The idea was to jolt Adam’s fledgling imagination. It took some coaxing before Adam got the idea, a lot of coaxing, but then his eyes lit up.

One could speculate that our entire thought process is a product of how we communicate, but this is probably wrong. Our species had the potential to speak ages before the first human actually uttered a word. We know for a fact that there is a gene responsible for our capacity to speak, and that this gene was already around when the species was still lacking a voice box. Neanderthal man had the gene – it has been brought to light – but he certainly was not able to utter a single word. Not unlike the modern chimpanzee, a cast of a Neanderthal man’s throat produced a voice box only capable of high pitched screeching. What a relief. Adam was not a Neanderthal man. Even a seal is better equipped to imitate human speech than this ancient cousin of modern man. (I heard tape recordings.) Yet Neaderthal men did communicate. This, too, we know for sure; these people hunted big and dangerous game on close quarter, which required the hunting party to plan their strategies and coordinate their approach.

Since they didn’t speak, they must have used some sort of sign language. On the edges of an ancient glacier in Tyrol we’ve unearthed graves where these people had buried their loved ones covered with garlands of perfectly preserved flowers. Although not able to tell about it, Neanderthal man had turned his hopes to something that transcended his brutal life in the windswept tundras. In other words, the process is primarily cognitive and precedes the linguistics. At the critical stage the infants are beginning to scan their surrounding, they read the adults and the circumstances of the noises they hear them making.

I remember the son of my neighbor who was just about to acquire speech. His father was reading the newspaper and I was watching TV. Suddenly the little guy pointed to the TV set and said my name. His father paid no attention and I too pretended to ignore him. The boy seemed to consider for a while. Then he looked at me and said “Michael.” This time he got a response. Pavlov in action. On both ends, myself included.

So far, this was easy for Adam. But what use is his cookie cutter if he is required to find a name for something that is not furry and can’t be patted on the head?

Allow me to explain. In the 4th century people told stories of a traveler who’d lost his bearings in the distant reaches of the Theban desert. He was about to die of thirst when a satyr found him. It was a satyr of the goaty kind, walking on hooves, with pointy ears and hairy thighs and a sizable … you know what. The strange creature provided water and food and nursed the traveler back to life. The man was a Christian, to him a satyr belonged to the pagan world of deceiving demons, but he decided to confront his prejudice and to repay kindness with kindness. He asked this friendly descendant of Pan to be his guest in his home in Alexandria. The satyr accepted the invitation, but soon after his arrival he suddenly fell ill and died. Pickled in salt the corpse was sent to Antioch to be presented to the Emperor and was held on display there for many years. This was widely believed to be true. Even the eminent Jerome kept an open mind whether such creatures were merely deceptions of the devil or indeed existed somewhere in the remote reaches of the antipodes – the spherical shape of our planet was common knowledge since Aristotle had pointed out that only a spherical body can cast the kind of round shadow that from every position makes the moon appear as a crescent. Maybe the creatures living in this dark nether-region hung there upside down like bats in a cave? Whatever the case, Adam would have had a hard time to pull out of thin air a term for the intangible presence of something that made the satyr taking pity and the traveler extend his invitation in a token of gratitude. There is no shape even possible to symbolize “kindness” on a cookie cutter from aunty’s kitchen cabinet that we could recognize in an instant and purely as a matter of intuition. Not without being familiar with a convention or custom that teaches such terms. And yet instinctively we constantly itemize and pigeonhole whatever occurs out there and shift it about in a welter of changing contexts and frames of reference. Even the navel-gazing guru who prefers to lose himself in the holistic totality beyond the specifics would be dumbstruck and incapacitated to communicate his experience without referring to the individual matters that fill his mind.

And here is the question: are the categories we use so cleverly to group together things or tell them apart, an arbitrary concoction, mental chips we toss into the pot of our poker game, or is there something out there, invisible and intangible as it seems, that corresponds to the universals we are using? Are ideas real, or are they just disposable labels?

The question has occupied philosophers since Plato has debated whether names are merely propositional or actual. Aristotle tried to make a science of the problem, Porphyrius reformulated the question, Boethius and Abelard thought they knew the solution. We recognize it when we encounter kindness. So obviously there is something real, and even under a different name kindness touches the heart just as kindly. Jorge Luis Borges insists that these days everybody is a nominalist by default. For the nominalist only physical particulars in space and time are supposed to be real, and universals like “kindness,” “strength,” “humanity,” exist only post res, i.e. subsequent to particular things. I wonder. The value of the number “pi” is always pi, whether there are actual circles present or not. I think nominalism got it wrong. In my childhood they gave me to read an abridged version of Euclid’s Elements for youngsters. The illustrations of bare skinned Greeks, proudly displaying their tanned buttocks (but keeping the privates turned away) while stretching ropes, holding out plumb-lines and drawing circles under the glare of the Mediterranean Sun, imitated the style and depth of medieval woodcuts, which, within the space of a square inch, reproduce an entire landscape, populated with shepherds, sheep and distant towns, bridges and rivers and a hunter stepping out of the forest. It was the stuff of dreams, and some of the anecdotal diversions are still with me. The thing they later gave us in school was much harder to digest. The axioms, propositions and proofs conveyed to the young reader a sense for the purely intellectual sphere that underpins all things: unconcerned, transcendent, and resting secured in quiet eternity, whether there is a world to give it body or not.

© - 12/1/2009 - by michael sympson, 1,575 words, all rights reserved

Proprietary Notice: © – 04/10/2003 – by michael sympson. Text may be downloaded for personal use, provided all copies retain the copyright and proprietary notices. No material may be modified, edited or taken out of context. Any commercial use in advertising or publicity requires permission in writing by the author’s estate.