The fragments made available on this website are what remains of a life’s work unfinished. When my father, Ralph Pred, suddenly and unexpectedly died in May of 2012, he left behind the manuscript for Syntax & Solidarity reproduced here.
Building on the phenomenology of consciousness established in Onflow, he continues his unique synthesis of Alfred North Whitehead and William James while incorporating ideas from anthropology, neurobiology, psychology, linguistics, and beyond to expose syntactic fault lines at the heart of consumer culture’s deepest issues.
The result is neither a Heideggerian call to recover some lost metaphysical Golden Age, nor simply a resurrection of the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis. Weaving disparate strands rigorously researched from seemingly splintered fields, Syntax & Solidarity points toward potentially radical conclusions.
Technology is known to have a recursive impact on culture, often leading to unanticipated runaway feedback effects. Language, as argued convincingly by Daniel Everett and other contemporary linguists, is a technology: a syntactic technology last significantly altered for us in the West way back in ancient Greece.
For millennia now, we’ve unwittingly embraced the underlying relational structures of our active voice syntax, with all its attendant runaway mechanisms – and take this to be the essential nature of things. And yet, given the incredible advances in philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience in recent decades, who’s to say our ancient syntactic technology isn’t overdue for an upgrade? Perhaps the chains of syntax have kept us bound in Plato’s cave all this time. Knowing what we do now, could it be possible to jailbreak our syntax with a better world in mind? Easier said than done, no doubt, but these are the ideas at the core of Syntax & Solidarity.
My father cared deeply about this world, and in spite of the continuing onslaught of ecological devastation, social disenfranchisement, and rampant inequality, he saw a higher potential in humanity. Rather than accept the tragedy of the commons as an inevitable quirk of human nature, to him it seemed a symptom of more severely entrenched issues. A firm believer in applied philosophy, he sought to offer his decades of independent scholarship and study to the advancement of a harmonious future for the planet.
Without the knowledge or credentials to complete the book myself, I’ve elected to post the unfinished work here under a Creative Commons attribution license. The goal is to set the ideas free.
What you’ll find in the Rounds (ostensibly, chapters) has been edited for formatting purposes. Totaling well over 200 pages, I’m aware that certain passages are duplicated, particularly in Rounds C & D. Inserted notes not necessarily integrated into the main body text are designated with a smaller typeface preceded by “Note(s):”. Currently, the site is best viewed in Firefox or Chrome.
If you choose to quote something in your work, please cite it as stated clearly in the footing of the text. If you’re inspired to further the work in some way or simply have a project that requires looking at alternate versions of the files, these can be made available upon request via the contact page. On the resources page, you’ll find downloadable databases of my father’s main library, and of the research articles he had on hand for Syntax & Solidarity – along with more articles and an abbreviation guide.
Whether the ideas convince you to dig deeper or simply provide a unique perspective, thank you for exploring this work.
Noah Pred
Berlin, Germany
November 2014