ONLY IN CONTINUOUS REFERENCE TO OTHERS…

We dwell in a prison of private subjectivity but are primed to develop self-awareness and find meaning embedded alongside others in a particular social and cultural niche. A human being becomes a person and, to a significant extent, only remains a person in continuous reference to others.

 

THE PRIMACY OF RECEIVED PREJUDICE…  

We belong to history. We find ourselves in a particular time and place and learn who we are directly and self-evidently in the context of family, community and society. Our received prejudices are more fundamental than subsequent self-examination, book learning or reasoned judgments.

We seem predisposed to emulate the ways modeled by our peers and our elders. For better or for worse, we learn what we need to learn in order to participate. Our hunter-gatherer brains may be wet-wired for the generic acquisition of language but an extended period of socially construed learning is the only way to receive a native tongue and the embedded cultural assumptions that come with it.

Despite all the collective human experience and accumulated wisdom that may have gone before, each child is a new beginning. Our first hand experiences are ours alone, but cognitively and linguistically we are not blank slates. Always immersed in the finitude of a cultural context, we do not encounter the exigencies of the human condition in isolation or need to rediscover all that we need to know from first principles.