Thursday, February 20, 2014

Manners and Causes

A few years ago I suggested that the pangrammatical analogue of "moral order" is "causal order". This would make pangrammatical complements of morality and causality, which sits uneasily with me. But perhaps etymology can help me rest easier. Our morality derives from our manners. It strikes me as plausible that causes are to knowledge what manners are to power. If the thought had occurred, be advised that reasons and causes are on the same side of the knowledge/power divide. So we have something like this:

knowledge/power
reason/passion
cause/manner
epistemology/ethics
______/morality

I've been toying with filling that space in with "verity", but the root meanings don't line up so well. I don't think etiology quite captures the spirit of the juxtaposition. But if it's true that etiology is the study of "origins", then maybe it's something like this:

origins/morals
originality/morality

Seems a bit like a grammatical joke, of course. But we're not above that here at the Pangrammaticon, neither as poets nor as philosophers.


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