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Bouvard on Anglo Linguistic Universalism and Cultural Presumption

Reddit · Sep 29, 2018 · 1 min read
reactionaryfuture

I can sense her exasperation with Anglo thinkers. This will be one of the major obstacles to discussion of our ideas because most in the Anglo world can fall back on a sort of general opinion and can dismiss it rhetorically. You can see that with the color discussion or the claim that the concept of a mountain is a "brute fact". To a normal person that seems reasonable, despite not being so.

Every language is like that, but what irritates her is, I think, the presumption of universality on the part of Anglos--it's one thing to assume your way of thinking is right, it's another to be unable to imagine there can be another way of thinking. She's a Polish immigrant to Australia, and occasionally she discloses little autobiographical details which illustrate the devastation of Anglo concepts on other ways of life, along with Anglo obliviousness. (E.g., a little anecdote, I forget in which book, of one of her children saying her (Wierzbicka's) decision was not "fair"--"fair" being one of those Anglo words that doesn't translate to any other language but is nevertheless assumed to be universal.) Ultimately she's a multiculturalist liberal herself, because she thinks undermining the hegemony of English opens up the possibilities for new cultural dialogues--which may be true, but those dialogues don't need to take place in liberal terms. You'll see that in Experience, Evidence and Sense, she pretty much shows that english speakers are really speaking "Lockean." (And elsewhere that German speakers are really speaking "Lutheran.")

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