THE LOGISMS OF FINNO-UGRIC LANGUAGE SPEAKERS AND THEIR CHARACTERISTICS – BASES FOR THEIR PHILOSOPHICAL

THINKING VI. 1. 1. The logisms of Finno-Ugric language speakers

Every proposition of the philosophy of coordinating thinking is coordinating – says Sándor Karácsony, and he summarises these when speaking of the (1) legal, (2) linguistic (cognitive), (3) artistic (emotional), (4) volitional (social) and (5) creedal (religious) attuned relationships of a man thinking in terms coordination or juxtaposition:

“Every proposition is coordinating, built on the principle of one compared with the other, the relationship between them is asserted, not the one or the other.¹⁹⁰

1) The legal proposition can only stand (we /you and I/ are independent), if I am the guarantee of your independence, and you are the guarantee of my independence.”¹⁹¹

“According to the logic of the western world, the security of my independence is if the other depends on me, and is not capable or does not dare to act against me. For

190Here we can think, by way of a simple example, of Gallen-Kallela’s pictures presented above.

191Karácsony 2002 (1942). p. 30–31.

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coordinating (...) behaviour, the security of my independence is if the other party also feels dependent on me, therefore he does not need to fight against me, he had nothing to avenge.”¹⁹²

What Sándor Karácsony is thinking of when he speaks of the logic of the western world, we can easily understand from these lines by the Spanish philosopher Gasset:

“Life is a constant battle against the objective world, in which battle we have to be able to stay on our barricades. Ideas signify a battle plan, which we make in order to be able to repel the attacks of the objective world. (...) According to this approach, every single idea in terms of its content is in constant contact with life, and bears the opportunity for active action or passive endurance. To my knowledge, in the history of thought this concept has not yet been worded in this form, but I think that the development of philosophy which started with Kant will definitely lead to this result.

(...) Europe has dominated the world for three millennia, but at this moment no-one knows for sure whether she still dominates it, or whether this domination with continue.”¹⁹³

This attitude is therefore contrary to the Uralic. Much closer to the latter is the following maxim from a parable written down by Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi:

Confucius does not want to believe his eyes, when he sees that a man is capable of swimming in a river full of rapids, and he asks him about his knowledge:

“May I ask: you must be familiar with the law of eternal return, that you go about like this in the water?

The man replied thus:

– I have no kind of secret knowledge. (...) Where the whirlpool takes me, I submerge, and I come to the surfaceas the current throws me. I am just following the law of the water, I am not thinking about myself, and thus I can swim in it. (...) I grew up in the water, and I find a homein it. (...).” (emphasis Gy. K.)¹⁹⁴

In the Chinese example, therefore, the man does not want to overwhelm the world around him, but he is looking for a coordinating relationship with it. He accepts its autonomy and lives with it. In fact. He even yields completely: if necessary “he does not think of himself”, and even “disappears”. The Hungarian is not in a fight with ideas either: if he is thinking he says: HOWQGLN [‘he ponders’, but cf. HOWQLN, ‘he disappears’], i.e. he is not thinking of himself, his whole personality, his individual nature disappears.¹⁹⁵And thus he finds a home in the world. Because, as one of the Hungarian classical writers, Áron Tamási, has the hero of his novel say, “The reason we are in the world, is to be at home somewhere in it.”¹⁹⁶The intention of oppressing the world and the other person lies far from this mentality.

2) The linguistic proposition: I give a signal, so that you understand it, and once again, it is only valid, if in the depths of the subject-predicate relationship, I always

192Kövendi 2002. p. 403.

193Gasset 2003 XIV/2

194Csuang-Cë 2000 p. 29-30.

195/N¶VOHFWXUHV–2005

196Áron Tamási: Ábel (novel trilogy), and here it is worth remembering what was said about the family-like feeling of life (5.2).

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act relative to you. So I break up an undivided idea relative to my own knowledge, but always measured by the degree of how well you are informed. I will use juxtaposition, sentence form, predicate, verb, relationship, image, as long as my message is new for you, and I will express the signals of spatial and temporal inherence for as long as possible. As soon as you can understand what I want to say, however, I will rush to your aid linguistically too, so that the content unfolded in time for your imagination may amalgamate as the imagery of a single concept as quickly as possible, and become a valid ‘truth’ in the world of your mind. Because only thus can I validly make the proposition: you understand me.”¹⁹⁷

“In speech, what is actually undividedly one, splits into two for the sake of understanding. Therefore the one person correlates for the sake of the other. Yes indeed, but the other person only understands what is said to him, if he manages to restore the undivided unit once again from the two split parts. During speech, therefore, there is a constant tension between the two tendencies: the wishes to divide up and to unify ... .”¹⁹⁸There are therefore two forces affecting the formation of the speech: one on the speaker’s side, and he wants to unfold the blob of thought¹⁹⁹within him, the one whole image, the idea which can be portrayed with a single word; the other is on the listening party’s side, and this latter wants to recompress the speech components he has just heard split up into phrases, words and phonemes, into one image, one idea, because this is the only way he can store it away. Illustrated using /N¶VGLDJUDP

Western linguistics, including the modern linguistic sciences (for instance generative grammar, and even cognitive linguistics) to this very day has not dealt in any methodical way with the language-shaping role of the “other party”. In these communication theories, the sender is active and the listener just passive, “recipient”

or “addressee”:

197Karácsony 2002 (1942). p. 30–31.

198Karácsony 1947. p. 58-59. In: Mrs. Erzsébet Nagy Heltai 1985. p. 42.

199Finnish: , “miellemöykky”

200/N

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context

The Karácsony language theory is the first which has tried to design a grammar for which the theoretical starting point, as emerges from the above, is that it consistently considers the “other party” to a language-shaping force. Accordingly, concentrating on the “sender – addressee” relationship, Roman Jakobson’s (1896–1983) scheme is thus modified by Karácsony’s pupil Ferenc K. Fabricius (1919-1977):²⁰¹

SENDER RECEIVER

SENDER RECEIVER

Despite his intention, Fabricius can only demonstrate that both parties are active during natural conversation, and the exchange of roles is constant. In Karácsony’s theory, however, the emphasis is not placed on this, but on the fact that speech arises from the tension (conscious, in the state of consciousness) between the two parties, from the way they relate, so the roles really do change constantly. Fabricius’ diagram can thus be further refined:

In western philosophy, it was Husserl (1859–1938) and M. Merleau– Ponty (1908–

1961)²⁰², who, although only in a rudimentary way, recognised the significance of the

“Other” person in their works on linguistic philosophy. Gadamer goes somewhat further: “... speaking is a phenomenon not belonging to my sphere of action, but to ours ... the spiritual reality of language is the reality of the pneuma or the spirit, and the spirit unites the I and the you.”²⁰³However, for the time being western philosophy

201Fabricius 1972

202Merleau–Ponty 1945. (Introduction)

203Gadamer refers to Ferdinand Ebner’s work “Das Wort und die geistigen Realitäten.

Pneuamtologische Fragmente”. In: Gadamer 1966. p. 148-152.

SPEECH