Are writing systems intelligently designed?
To appear in: Early Writing and Agency in Archaelogy, edited by Joshua Englehardt (U. Florida), under contract with University Press of Colorado. These English psychologists — what is it they want? We find them, voluntarily or involuntarily, ever engaged in the same work, – the work of pushing into the foreground the partie honteuse of our inner world and of seeking for the really operative, really imperative and decisive factor in history just there, where the intellectual pride of man would least wish to find it (for example, in the vis inertiae of custom or in forgetfulness or in some blind and accidental hooking-together and mechanism of ideas or in something purely-passive, automatic, reflex-motion-like, molecular and thoroughly stupid). (Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals.) This paper concerns the genealogy of writing systems, not of morals. But, like Nietzsche’s “English psychologists,” I am interested in the role of “blind and accidental hooking-together and mechan
