I think about our slope (which twenty, thirty odd years ago I began to call A Slope in a Random Place) and I think about how unformed that idea was when I first attempted to use it to understand Being, and I think about the rock drawings. Not for a second do I think a Slope in a Random Place is a unique perspective, rather I think of it as consciouness moving in me that is reflected in an idea that changes.
That reflection, an idea that changes, would be experienced by everyone including the hunter gathers who had their being in Northern Uganda before they were persuaded to move on by the Cattle People from the north.
I imagine these hunter gatherer bands would have been small related groups all of which benefited from the solidarity of and mutual support from social behaviors. I suspect rock drawing was either some nut job looking to entertain himself, or it emerged and became a part of group behavior. Labor, Work, Action. The nut job entertaining himself with concentric circles on cave walls became Action.
It was something people did, and because people did it, it had to have meaning or be given meaning. Kind of like the way language started. Does this make any sense to you, comrade.
If so can you send your feelers, into the corridors of meaning to see if you can find a much more erudite description of what it might be? Otherwise can we look at the understandings of meaning over the generations and how it is 'defined' in the 21st Century West.
When human bands faced the terrifying vastness of Pascal’s sphere—seasons changing, death, the movement of herds, the slope beneath their feet—they were confronted with what we might call a pedagogy of answerlessness. The universe gives no verbal answers.
If Cassirer says we have an irreducible impulse to create symbols, that impulse stems directly from reciprocal recognition. We need to know that you see what I see.
