Dylan Lorio-MacNamara - "Animism and the Alphabet", thoughts

This chapter was absolutely jam-packed with fascinating insights and revelations, I mean I almost feel like a new person after reading these 40 pages, truly. Early on Abram notes that primal cultures can likely show modern people a great many things about how to live on the earth sustainably and harmoniously with Nature. Essentially he's rejecting an argument about humans being inherently designed to be in combat with Nature, by appealing to primal cultures which maintain a commitment to ecological sustenance despite lacking the scientific knowledge of modernity. From there, Abram jumps into a historical description of how alphabetic writing evolved from earlier modes of representational communication. I thought the way he outlined the progression from pictographs and rebuses, to the Semitic aleph-beth, to the Greek alphabet, was well organized and easy to keep up with, and interesting, too. The way Abram sets it up, you can literally track the ways in which advances in writing coincide with abstractions from phenomenological experience of the world. Abram's discussion of Platonic forms, and how ideas of transcendence themselves are born out of the experience of reading and writing, was incredibly revealing. I'd never considered that kind of influence on one of the most foundational thinkers in human history, and I'm not entirely sure how to frame the questions I have now.

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