And how a locomotive has a "pee-pee maker" and a chair does not?
A locomotive has active processes and generates waste products; a chair just is. I have *no* idea if that has anything to do with what the author intended, but that's where my brain went with that one.
An abstract non-structural non-genetic "plane of Nature" that is not natural.
Well, yeah. Nature doesn't need to think about itself, it just does what it does. Nature contains no abstract ideals of fox or tree or stone, with all the characterisics and symbolism we lay on them. Abstractions and theory and discourse are human constructions as we try to explain the universe and ourselves to ourselves.
The jargon here is driving me nuts, but it also feels like there's a vocabulary of symbols the authors are assuming the reader knows. (And this is how grad students become drawn into the endless cycle of reading older and older sources and references and literature and ...)
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regna
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-29 04:59 am (UTC)A locomotive has active processes and generates waste products; a chair just is. I have *no* idea if that has anything to do with what the author intended, but that's where my brain went with that one.
An abstract non-structural non-genetic "plane of Nature" that is not natural.
Well, yeah. Nature doesn't need to think about itself, it just does what it does. Nature contains no abstract ideals of fox or tree or stone, with all the characterisics and symbolism we lay on them. Abstractions and theory and discourse are human constructions as we try to explain the universe and ourselves to ourselves.
The jargon here is driving me nuts, but it also feels like there's a vocabulary of symbols the authors are assuming the reader knows. (And this is how grad students become drawn into the endless cycle of reading older and older sources and references and literature and ...)