Conceptual tools that can be used to refer to the human being in
its syncretic condition exist only to the degree to which we
identify them in language. In every system we know of, variety
and precision are complementary. Indeed, whether human beings
hunt or present personal experiences to others, they attempt to
optimize their efforts. Too many details affect efficiency;
insufficient detail affects the outcome. There seems to be a
structural relation of the nature of one to many, between our
what and our how. This relation is scrutinized in the pragmatic
context where efficiency considerations finally make us choose
from among many possibilities. The optimum chosen indicates
what, from the possibilities humans are aware of, is most
suitable for reaching the goal pursued. Moreover, such an
optimum is characteristic of the pragmatics of the particular
context. For example, hunting could be performed alone or in
groups, by throwing stones or hurling spears, by shooting
arrows, or by setting traps.
The syncretic primitive being was (and still is, in existing
primitive cultures) involved in a practical experience in its
wholeness: through that being's biological endowment, relation
to the environment, acquired skills and understanding, emotions
(such as fear, joy, sorrow). The specialized individual
constitutes himself in experiences progressively more and more
partial. Nevertheless, the two have a natural condition in
common. What distinguishes them is a strategy for survival and
preservation that progressively departs from immediate needs and
direct action to humanized needs and mediated action. This means
a departure from a very limited set of options ("When hungry,
search for food," for example), to multiplying the options, and
thus establishing for the human being an innate heuristic
condition. This means that Homo Sapiens looks for options.
Humans are creative and efficient.
My line of reasoning argues that, while verbal language may be
innate (as Chomsky's theory advances), the heuristic dimension
characteristic of human self- constitution certainly is. In
hunting, for instance, the choice of means (defining the how)
reflects the goal (to get meat) and also the awareness of what is
possible, as well as the effort to expand the realm of the
possible. The major effort is not to keep things the way they
are, but to multiply the realm of possibilities to ensure more
than mere survival. This is known as progress.
The same heuristic strategy can be applied to the development of
literacy. Before the Western alphabet was established, a number
of less optimal writing systems (cuneiform, hieroglyphics, etc.)
were employed. The very concrete nature of such languages is
reflected in the limited expressive power they had. Current
Chinese and Japanese writing are examples of this phenomenon
today. In comparison to the 24-28 letters of Western alphabets,
command of a minimum of 3,000 ideographic signs represents the
entry level in Chinese and Japanese; command of 50,000
ideographic signs would correspond to the Western ideal of
literacy. Behind the letters and characters of the various
language alphabets, there is a history of optimization in which
work influenced expression, expression constituted new frames for
work, and together, generative and explanatory models of the
world were established. The what and the how of language were
initially on an order of complexity similar to that
characteristic of actions. Over time, actions became simpler
while languages acquired the complexity of the heuristic
experience.
The what and the how of mediation tools of a higher order of
abstraction than language, achieved even higher complexities.
Such complexities were reflected in the difference in the order
of magnitude between human work and outcome, especially the
choices generated. Parallel to the loss of the syncretic nature
of the human being at the level of the individual, we notice the
composite syncretism of the community. Individual, relatively
stable, wholeness was replaced by a faster and faster changing
community- related wholeness. Language experiences were part of
this shift. Self-constituted in the practical use of language,
the human being realized its social dimension, itself an example
of the acquired multiplication of choice.
Indeed, within the very small scale of incipient humanity
corresponding to the stage of self-ascertainment (when signs
were used and elements of language appeared), population and
food supply were locked in the natural equation best reflected
in the structural circularity of existence and survival. It is at
this juncture that the heuristic condition applies: the more
animals prey on a certain group, this group will either find
survival strategies (adaptive or other kinds), or indeed cease to
be available as food for others. But once the human being was
ascertained, evidence shows that instead of focusing on one or
few ways to get at its food sources, it actually diversified the
practical experience of self-constitution and survival,
proceeding from one, or few, to many resources. Homo Habilis was
past the scavenging stage and well into foraging, hunting, and
fishing during the pre-agricultural pragmatic frame. What for
other species became only a limited food supply, and resulted in
mechanisms of drastic growth control (through famine,
cannibalism, and means of destroying life), in the human species
resulted in a broadening of resources. In this process, the human
being became a working being, and work an identifier of the
species.
Language acquisition and the transition from the natural
experience of self- constitution in survival to the practical
experience of work are co-genetic. With each new scale that
became possible, sequences of work marked a further departure
from the universe of action-reaction. The observation to be
made, without repeating information given in other chapters, is
that from signs to incipient language, and from incipient
language to stabilized means of expression, the scale of
humankind changed and an underlying structure of practical
experiences based on sequentiality, linearity, determinism (of
one kind or another), and centralism established a new pragmatic
framework. Individual syncretism was replaced by the syncretism
of communities in which individuals are identified through their
work.
Writing was a relatively late acquisition and occurred as part of
the broader process of labor division. This process was itself
correlated to the diversification of resources and types of
practical experiences preserving syncretism at the community
level. Not everyone wrote, not everybody read. The pragmatic
framework suggested necessitated elements of order, ways of
assigning and keeping track of assignments, a certain
centralism, and, last but not least, organizational forms, which
religion and governing bodies took care of. Under these
circumstances, work was everything that allowed for the
constitution, survival, change, and advancement of the human
species. It was expressed in language to the degree such
expression was necessary. In other words, language is another
asset or means of diversifying choices and resources.
Over time, limited mediation through language and literacy became
necessary in order to optimize the effort of matching needs with
availabilities. This mediation was itself a form of work:
questions asked, questions answered, commitments made,
equivalencies determined. All these defined an activity related
to using available resources, or finding new ones. When
productivity increased, and language could not keep up with the
complexities of higher production, variety, and the need for
planning, a new semiosis, characteristic of this different
pragmatic level, became necessary. Money, for example,
introduced the next level of mediation, more abstract, that
translated immediate, vital needs into a comparative scale of
means to fulfill them. The context of exchange generated money,
which eventually became itself a resource, a high level
commodity. It also entailed a language of its own, as does each
mediation. With the advent of means of exchange as universal as
language, the what and how of human activity grew even more
distant. Direct trade became indirect. People making up the
market no longer randomly matched needs and availability. Their
market praxis resulted in an organizing device, and used
language to further diversify the resources people needed for
their lives. This language was still rudimentary, direct, oral,
captive to immediacy, and often consumed together with the
resource or choice exhausted (when no alternative was
generated). This happens even in our day.
In its later constitution in practical activity, language was
used for records and transactions, for plans and new
experiences. The logic of this language was an extension and
instantiation of the logic of human activity. It complemented the
heuristic, innate propensity for seeking new choices. Influenced
by human interaction in the market, and subjected to the
expectation of progressively higher efficiency, human activity
became increasingly mediated. A proliferation of tools allowed
for increased productivity in those remote times of the
inception of language. Eventually tools, and other artifacts,
became themselves an object of the market, in addition to
supporting self-constitutive practical experiences of the humans
interacting with them. As a mediating element between the
processor and what is processed, the tool was a means of work
and a goal: better tools require instructed users. If they use
tools properly, they increase the efficiency of activity and
make the results more marketable. Tools supported the effort of
diversification of practical experiences, as well as the effort
of expanding the subsistence base. The means for creating tools
and other artifacts fostered other languages, such as the
language of drawing, on which early engineering also relied.
Here, an important point should be made. No tool is merely used.
In using it, the user adapts to the tool, becoming to some
extent, the used, the tool of the tool. The same is true of
language, writing, and literacy. They were developed by humans
seeking to optimize their activity. But humans have adapted
themselves to the constraints of their own inventions.
At the inception of writing, the tension between an imposed
written precision (as relative as this might appear from our
perspective today)-keeping language close to the object,
allowing into the language only objects that pictograms could
represent- and a rather diverse, however very unfocused, oral
language resulted in conflicts between the proponents of writing
and the guardians of orality (as documented in ancient Greek
philosophy). The written needed to be freed from the object as
much as the human being from a particular source of protein, or
a particular food source. It had to support a more general
expression (referring to what would become families, types,
classes of objects, etc.), and thus to support practical efforts
to diversify the ways of survival and continuous growth in
number. The oral had to be tamed and united with the written.
Taming could, and did, take place only through and in work, and
in socially related interaction. The practical effort to embody
knowledge resulting from many practical experiences of survival
into all kinds of artifacts (for measuring, orientation,
navigation, etc.) testifies to this. Phonetic writing, the
development of the effort to optimize writing, better imitated
oral language. Personal characteristics, making the oral
expressive, and social characteristics, endowing the written with
the hints that bring it close to speech, are supported in the
phonetic system. The theocratic system of pictographs and what
others call the democratic language of phonetic writing deserve
their names only if we understand that languages are both
constitutive and representative of human experience.
Undifferentiated labor is theocratic. Its rules are imposed by
the object of the practical experience. Divided labor, while
affecting the integrity of those becoming only an instance of
the work process, is participatory, in the sense that its
results are related to the performance of each participant in the
process. Practical experience of language and experience of
divided labor are intrinsically related and correspond to the
pragmatic framework of this particular human scale. Labor
division and the association of very abstract phonetic entities
to very concrete language instantiations of human experience are
interdependent.