subintelligitur

I've been subscribing to Anu Garg's word of the day for a couple of years now, mostly for the quotes at the bottom of the email. But sometimes a new word jumps out at me, and its etymology suggests to me patterns in the evolution of our culture.

today's word of the day: subintelligitur. Meaning: something that is not made explicit, but is nonetheless understood.

The quote used to illustrate:
"We pray to God as a Person, as a larger self; but there must always be a subintelligitur that He is not a Person. Our forms of worship, public and private, imply some interference with the course of nature."
Benjamin Jowett; Life & Letters; 1886.

This reminds me of my many (mostly imagined) arguments with religious types about how god should not be anthropomorphised this way. And this reminds me of the dozens of other philosophical conversations railing against the representation of some cultural norm or value as a simple, well-contained entity (because they are in fact ambiguous, abstract, and evolving).

The reason for these conversations, and many others like them, is essentially to bring out into the open the underlying assumptions and understandings of our society, culture, and race. It is to make explicit those subintelligitur supports for our culture which buoy it up over the chaos of the animal world. It is to cut the earth and stone away from another, deeper level of the girders of social agreements that guide our collective behaviors.

Once we free the structure of our society from the darkness of the unconscious, it is no longer held static by our genetic predispositions which evolve at a glacial pace. Once we can see and analyze the assumptions and preconceptions which define our culture, we can begin to fix them where they are broken or where technology has shifted our needs away from our evolved social tools. Or we can take the pieces and build something altogether new.