General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: How is the current cover of Vanity Fair any different than the swimsuit edition of SI? [View all]Warren DeMontague
(80,708 posts)And it ties into both the concept of objectification AND the Western Monotheistic prohibition on graven images, which I've had kicking in my head for the past few hours-
the specific thing I feel Magritte was going for, there, was the idea that our semantic representation of things are not the things themselves, right? The menu is not the meal, the map is not the territory.
I do think that the early monotheists were groping around for this message too, but in typical human religious fashion, they took a fairly decent piece of advice intended to enlighten and turned it into a "no hats on the beds" cultural OCD prohibition.
The idea that a word or image for "God" necessarily diminishes the actual, infinite, ineffable God or at least our understanding of it... this is, in many ways, similar to the idea that a sexy picture of a woman (or a man) reduces or diminishes our understanding of women (or men) in general.
I think this sells the human animal, and our capacity not just for symbolic logic but for meta-understanding of our own symbolic logic processes, short.