interpretation and overinterpretation

[Karen Newcombe <kln@staralliance.com>]

This whole discussion has been truly fascinating.  Brian's long post
yesterday reminded me of something I picked up in a Renaissance Iconography
class many long years ago . . .

Our culture (Western in general) has been undergoing a big shift in the
past few hundred years.  If we go way way back and look for the source of
our cultural tendency to pigeonhole things, classify things, look at life
in a black-or-white kind of way, we run into Aristotle.  For a few thousand
years this man's ideas (or derivatives of them)held sway over the thoughts
and culture of the entire Western world.  Through Platonism, Aristotle's
basic concepts were mixed with Christianity and became an intrinsic, though
introduced, part of that philosophy, and spread throughout Europe and the
Americas.  Society was a tightly controlled, rigid, inflexible structure,
and individuality was a threat to the order it maintained.

Slowly, over the past few hundred years, and rapidly since WWI, the
Aristotelian base of our thinking has shifted.  As the individual person
has obtained more recognition, rights, wealth, free time, education, and
freedom of movement, our world view has loosened.  The tendency today is
towards recognizing a myriad of interpretations, rather than one single
correct one.  This tendency may hold for some time, as populations migrate
around the world bringing different views with them, as our society
continues to become more individualistic, and as our distance from
Aristotle grows greater.

Just a passing thought for Tuesday morning.

Karen  kln@staralliance.com