Activity

What could be more dangerous than “Symbolic Warfare”? Isn’t it the case that “Symbols” have already been weaponized and that instead of being used for truthful communication they are instead being turned on and against humanity or as Walker Percy calls us “symbol mongerers”. If anyone has the time and inclination a nice read on this is Linda Caroll’s dissertation Found in the Cosmos: Walker Percy’s Signs of Transcendence. From her abstract … “For Percy, the mysterious triadic event of semiotics, in which man as organism—by using the copula is—names and knows an Object, juxtaposes symbol-mongering and alienation, a phenomenon unique to humans. With language, H. loquens, man the talker, or H. symbolificus, man the symbol-monger, acquires consciousness, which stipulates a knowing with. Of particular interest to this study is how Percy demonstrates this epistemological event in his fiction”.
Could this be connected with the Sin of the Garden (eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil) and its consequences? And possibly still further connected with the idea that:
from Isaiah –
12How you have fallen from heaven,
O Morning Star, son of the dawn!
You have been cut down to the ground,
O destroyer of nations.
13You said in your heart:
“I will ascend to the heavens;
I will raise my throne
above the stars of God.
I will sit on the mount of assembly,
in the far reaches of the north.
14I will ascend above the tops of the clouds;
I will make myself like the Most High.”
There is at least one tradition of textual explication that the Sin of the Garden and the Removal of the Heavenly Rebels are connected. The connection is that in each case someone wishes to be like the most high. To be like the most high is to be able to have ultimate pronouncement (to name) what is Good and what is Evil.
Just a brief musement on possible connections between “raising one’s throne” and language and how the contents of press releases (words – certainly one kind of symbol) might be considered as weapons of war.