September 5, 2012

You create your reality?

I found interesting the point that Herrick makes about Mikhail Bakhtin makes about reality. He says that "Language is not reflective of a materialistic world". Bakhtin believes that our language and our words create our reality. this resides with me very well. I have always wondered to myself why a chair is called a chair and a door is called a door and who put a name to all of these tangible objects that we see and use on a daily basis. This brought me back to some movies about quantum physics. Some scientists say that you can in fact shape your reality. They did an experiment where kittens who were born were placed into an environment where there were only horizontal lines. They were raised having never seen a vertical line. When the kittens were placed into the real world, they made no response to the any type of vertical lines. For instance, the legs of a chair, which they ran right into as if they could not even see them at all. Do things exist in our reality that we do not see because language has shaped us as we grew to see only the things that others believed to have existed? who came up with the original names for all of the items that our universes possesses.

This also brings me to the concept that in fact, could it be true that nothing is truly original. Burke says that all ideas are a collaboration of ideas, words and concepts that they learned in the past by someone else from other experiences in life or readings that they have done. If we are composing all of our writings with words, those words are not our own. Someone, in the past chose to make up that word and give it a meaning. This puts a whole new perspective on original thought. Is there a such thing?

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I have to agree with you on this one. I feel that language has placed us in this box of reality. It's what has caused us to act, or respond to a certain person and/or situation. You can also go to the fact of is the reality that we are setting for ourselves natural or are we really setting it for ourselves. This kind of plays into the realm of stereotypes. The people that we see on a regular basis, do we think of them from the interaction with them or from the label, or stereotype that we as society has placed on them. If we grew up from our original neighborhoods and communities, would we prejudge people on site, and will we give people chances that we usually wouldn't. Language shapes not only our reality but our personality as well.

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.