Language and Identity

Brian Vickers: Analogy versus Identity

The occult view is exceptional, the science is the rational view
Vickers enlists Aristotle, Plato, Locke against occultism toward scientific uses of language. words are arbitrary, their meanings can be assigned; its meme rather than physical; no relationship between physical and the words they reference. He cites Cassire that language has a sensuous form to it and intellectual content. He is against the Neoplatonists--the ones, who in several traditions believe that language is not arbitrary; that it embodies physical reality. So to them language is reality.

He references Jewish mysticism in which the role of language is creative. Vickers represents a Bacon-like view of language, siding with the notion that language is separate from reality and needs to reference it clearly in order to fulfill the Royal Society's mission. He is pre-Khun; without scientific knowledge as a social construction. There is the scientific and occult mentality. The scientific totally separate language and reality and the occult is the opposite.
Metaphor is a mental gap, he thinks, that ought to be banished once truth is observed. It is a deviation of language-- from the lingusitic norm of signifier and signfied, creating nuances that do not exist (116).
Metaphors are not epistemic; they are not constitutive;
pg. 109 Metaphor versus proof. Vickers argues that language cannot incarnate the essence of things...he rejects the idea and reiterates that Paltonic-Aristotelian concept of notions intermediate between words and things. Vickers position does not align with the Jewish mystical tradition, in which view words don't incarate things; they are things. sounds are physical reality.
He takes the mimesis view that sound mimics physical things and so are a forgery. Imitation, analogy. The Jewish see language as ontology

Vickers is an empiricist. He advocates objectivity for language to distance itself from its referent in order to be true (97).

He is dismissive of the biblical concept of the word becoming flesh, of bringing things into being
The truth is language does bring things into being
Rhetoric as the advocacy of realities--the different realities and the various levels.

The idea of steps and links in Kabbalah is Neoplatonic. The way of thinking of things to connect the divine with the physical or connecting the language with the referent is Neoplatonic.

The Tree of Life
Kabbala of Isaac Luria
Worlds within worlds; the idea that reality was multi-layered. Plato wasn't positing language or God in the phycial world. The different worlds--action, formation, creation, and emanation.
God inhabits infinity so how does he create the phyical world? Through Tzimtzum also known as the contraction. something went wrong in the process of creation hence the Hisdic Jews make it their mission to restore that which was lost...restoring sparks to the vessle.
pg.32 The Hebrwe Letters is the substance of the Jewish rhetoric

Mathematics and Kabbalah
The Torah was writteb before God spoke? The written/oral Torah?
Infinity is nothingness