336
J.
M. E.
MORAVCSIK
life is not a very good way of understanding what's wrong with that
life.
The experience of Meggysey and Bouton does prove that thought–
ful and sensitive people aren't apt to be very happy as professional
athletes, though no doubt it helps if one is superlatively skilled and
plays for a winning team. But for the onlookers, this too is an element
in the imaginative meaning of sport. What the players do
should
have
little relation to thought and sensitivity as we know and value them
outside sport - it feels simpler and mysteriously better than that.
If
this is pastoral fantasy, with its intimations of inexpressible virtue in
the physical life, of persisting connections with childhood innocence, of
a "democratic" transcendence of the social and cultural self-definitions
that ordinarily separate us from "other kinds" of people, it's still a
necessary and beneficent mode of self-imagining, whose fantasies are
at least less harmful than some of the things sport can be confused
with. Neither Bouton's scoffing, Meggysey's moral outrage nor Agnew's
bland benedictions help me very much to think about sport, which
can't tell us much about the present state of society but can help a
little in understanding and better respecting our own desires.
Thomas R. Edwards
IN THE MI NO
NOAM CHOMSKY. By John Lyons. (Modern Masters Series. ed. Frank
Kermode.) Viking. $5.75.
The claim that the study of language leads to self-knowledge
is as old as Socrates. Its revival in our age, which is so obsessed with
psychoanalysis and other nonrational means to the discovery of the self,
should make for a more balanced conception of human nature and a
better understanding of the relation between the scientific and human–
istic approaches to the study of the human mind. In stimulating this
revival, Noam Chomsky has made a major contribution
to
contem–
porary thought. He offers a new conception of the structure of lan–
guage and its relation to the organization of the mind, and he proposes
a revolutionary reassessment of what the social sciences are and should
be. While John Lyons's recent book, the middle chapters of which are
a sound introduction to technical detail, is useful in enabling the lay–
man to understand Chomksy's views on Ianguage, mind and the social
sciences, more needs to be said about the larger implications of Chom–
sky's work and about the connections between his technical work and
his desire to redefine the tasks of the humanities and the social sciences.
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