Sombunall ⏳
Sombunall is a word coined by Robert Anton Wilson meaning some-but-not-all. As The five stages of perception have demonstrated, perception involves subtraction and addition—if we look at, say, an apple, we do not see “the apple” but only part of the surface of the apple—and our generalizations or reality tunnels are made up of coordinations or orchestrations of these abstractions. Thus we never know “all,” but at best, know sombunall.
Now, imagine a world in which the German did not contain the word “alles” or any of its derivatives, but did include some form of sombunall. Adolf Hitler would have never been able to say, or even think, most of his generalizations about the Jews. At most he would be talking or thinkning about sombunall Jews. Though this may have not prevented the Holocaust, Holocaust mentalities are encouraged by all-ness mentalities and are discouraged by sombunall statements.
If Arthur Schopenhauer had a form of sombunall instead of all in his vocabulary, he could have still generalized about sombunall women, but not all women; and a major source of literary misogony would have vanished from our culture. Imagine Feminists talking about sombunall men, but not all men. Imagine a debate about UFOs in which both sides could generalize as much as they wanted about sombunall sightings but there was no linguistic form to generalize about all sightings.
Imagine what would happen with, along with this semantic hygiene, the Aristotelean essentialist (essentialism) “is” was replaced with the neurologically accurate “seems to be.” “All modern music is junk” would become “Sombunall modern music seems like junk to me.” Other dogmatic statements would become “Sombunall scientists seem to be to be ignorant of art and culture,” “Sombunall artists seem to me to be ignorant of science,” “Sombunall English men seem to be a bit pompous,” “Sombunall Irish men seem to me to drink a lot.” Etc.
Any Idols would suddenly shrink back into models or reality tunnels; we would remember that we created them, or that our ancestors did. We might become startlingly sane.
References
- Wilson, A., Robert (1986). The New Inquisition Chapter 1 Models, Metaphors, and Idols (Page 41 · Location 756). Grand Junction, Colorado: Hilaritas Press
Metadata
Type:🔵 Tags: Psychology / Sociology / Linguistics / Semantics / Neuroscience / Philosophy / Epistemology Status:☀️