The Ability to Tell
Astronomer Copernicus, or Conversations with God, by Jan Matejko
If there ever was a Copernican moment in the history of humankind, this was it.
Again from The Instruction of the Imagination:
Language began to develop the moment it was born, and it still does. But when the Rubicon was crossed, when interlocutors began to systematically construct bridges (always fragile and tentative) over the experiential gaps between them, a new era began in human life. The instruction of imagination changed everything. Individuals were still living in the here-and-now of private experiencing (we still do), but additional elements began to penetrate their worlds from the outside, things they did not experience but were told about. If there ever was a Copernican moment in the history of humankind, this was it: almost all animals experience; the apes know how to follow the experiences of the others in order to learn about the world; pre-linguistic humans learned how to direct the experiences of others, and let others direct theirs—but with language, humans could finally begin to experience for the others, and let the others experience for them. Individuals began to learn to imagine events that happened to others, and learn how to take them into account in their own decisions. Memories from the past gradually turned into new objects of communication. Active remembering-for-speaking—keeping an experience fresh in your mind until you tell the others—became a necessary capacity. Humans gradually learned all the different things they could do with the new technology: delve deeper and deeper into the others' minds, ask questions and receive answers, compare judgments about the world and argue about them, discuss the details of future plans, tell others what to do, tell others the truth or lie to them. In their proto-arguments, they gradually came to realize the extent to which they looked at the world in different ways. In their proto-dialogues, they made their first steps toward mutually identified descriptions of the world. We are still very much in the process.
