February 18, 2011 at 3:16 P.M. A hyphen was removed from this text since my previous review of the work. Spacing between paragraphs was altered, again, then corrected. I cannot say how many other works have been violated overnight. Computer wars continue. ("New Jersey Supreme Court's Implosion" and "New Jersey's Feces-Covered Supreme Court.")
April 3, 2010 at 12:42 P.M. A letter was deleted from a word since my previous review. I have now corrected that inserted "error." Yesterday, I was prevented from accessing the Internet as my mechanism for counting hits at these blogs briefly registered every reader. Unfortunately, that mechanism is frozen again today. During the time when access to the Internet was denied to me and copyright for these writings was violated, publicly, "errors" were inserted in a large number of essays. This is typical of the war that I wage, every day, to write my essays and produce other writings.
I will spend the next few weeks and months struggling to correct these inserted "errors" in my writings. For a summary of the protocol informing these criminal psychological tortures and censorship by American courts, see "Roberto Unger's Revolutionary Legal Theory." I will respond with essays focusing on allegations that prominent lesbians, like Sybil R. Moses, were (allegedly) involved in orgies with very young women in Trenton. How fortunate for them. You decide whether New Jersey is a tempting place to live because the institutions of society are models of ethics in government. Sadly, more of this may be expected. ("Deborah T. Poritz and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey" and "Trenton's Nasty Lesbian Love-Fest!" then "Jennifer Velez is a 'Dyke Magnet!'")
November 22, 2009 at 2:31 P.M. "Error" inserted and corrected, again.
Jim Holt, "Suicide Squad," The New York Times, Book Review, March 1, 2009, at p. 8. (A history of the Wittgenstein family. Did "Mr. Holt" plagiarize me on "philosophical detectives"? Is "Jim Holt" also "Jennifer Shuessler"?)
Alexander Waugh, The House of Wittgenstein (New York: Doubleday, 2009).
Terry Eagleton, Wittgenstein: The Terry Eagleton Script of the Derek Jarman Film (London: British Film Institute, 1993).
P.M.S. Hacker, "Wittgenstein," in F. Raphael & R. Monk, eds., The Great Philosophers (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 331-368.
Justus Hartnack, Wittgenstein and Modern Philosophy (Indiana: Notre Dame, 1986).
Anthony Kenny, Wittgenstein (London: Pelican, 1973).
One of my essays has been republished or linked, I believe, presumably with minor editorial revisions: Juan Galis-Menendez, "Experience and Expression: Wittgenstein's Philosophy of Psychology," April 19, 2007, Applied Epistemology, http://www.appliedepistemology.com/shop.php?c=bks&n=15811711&1=0198242557&a=buy&mAll&p=1&x=...
Jim Holt reviews a new history of the Wittgensteins in this week's Book Review. Holt's interesting comments are marred by what I interpret to be an unfortunate editorial insertion of a screed towards the end of the piece that suggests a regrettable ignorance of Wittgenstein's opus on the part of the editor, if not by Mr. Holt. This is the sort of editorial comment worthy of Manhola Dargis.
I wonder whether Mr. Holt writes under other names? Daniel Mendelsohn, perhaps? ("'Brideshead Revisited': A Movie Review" and "What is it like to be plagiarized?")
We are told of the Wittgensteins' mercurial and authoritarian father -- a wealthy Austrian-Jewish industrialist -- several talented and brilliant family members, some of whom committed suicide, together with Ludwig's adventures in philosophy. There is Wittgenstein's famous concert pianist brother, of course, who lost an arm in the First World War and rescued his musical career by commissioning concertos from several composers writing for the left hand. I infer that it was the right hand which was lost in the war.
This history of the Wittgensteins is written by a member of the Waugh family. The Waughs are not exactly strangers to eccentricity. In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that my own family was not without its eccentrics and intellectuals as well as artists. Of course, I embody normality. One of my uncles was fond of bringing home skeletons from the University Medical School and placing them in the beds of various family members, even as famous writers and artists drifted through the rambling family house in Havana, where no one had any idea of how many persons would be sitting at the dinner table or, indeed, who these dinner guests might be, or which of several languages would be spoken during intense conversations with these mysterious guests. Examples of persons with whom members of my family were acquainted include, I am told, Herman Hesse (encountered in New York, I believe), Ernest Hemingway (who was a friend of my father's youth), Fidel Castro (as an intense young university student), Noel Coward along with other interesting English persons, and several movie actors from the forties and fifties. The following remarks appear in Mr. Holt's review:
"My only serious complaint about the book concerns Waugh's glancing treatment of Ludwig's philosophical work. He dismisses it as 'incomprehensible'" -- convoluted gibberish, perhaps? -- "and attributes Wittgenstein's influence to his 'striking looks, manner and extraordinarily persuasive personality.' His view of Wittgenstein is substantially the same as one taken in Derek Jarman's 1993 film, 'Wittgenstein,' to which Terry Eagleton contributed the script. In both cases, Wittgenstein is depicted as a guru-like source of gnomic utterances. Jarman's attitude towards his caricature is solemnly reverential, whereas Waugh's is mocking and somewhat philistine. But Ludwig Wittgenstein was not a guru; he was a supremely rigorous thinker who, by paying minute attention to the structure of language, sought to clear away the conceptual confusions that plague philosophy."
Well, Jim ... yes-and-no.
This is a somewhat accurate view of the young Wittgenstein who was responsible for the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. I doubt that even the young Wittgenstein may be captured in this caricature by Jim Holt. However, in his later -- and, I believe, much more important work -- Wittgenstein sought to accomplish the exact opposite of what Mr. Holt, assuming it is Jim Holt who wrote these words, believes to be Wittgenstein's achievement.
Wittgenstein did not, in fact, believe that philosophy had much to do with rigor. Ben-Ami Scharfstein writes:
"Wittgenstein's approach to philosophical problems was aesthetic in the widest sense. To him, 'philosophy should really be expressed in poetry.' While working on Philosophical Investigations, he commented, 'It is impossible for me to say one word in my book about all that music has meant in my life; how then can I possibly make myself understood?' ... Wittgenstein said that beauty like religion was beyond explanation. ... We express the beautiful and the good with literally nonsensical and yet impressive language. Perhaps this was the reason that he preoccupied himself with the nature and limits of language and with, as he saw it, the related problem of solipsism (and Idealism)."
The Philosophers and the Nature of Their Thought (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 327.
Wittgenstein famously said: "Even if all possible scientific questions are answered, our [philosophical] problem is still not touched at all." (Scharfstein, p. 324.)
It is no accident that Wittgenstein's first book was drafted in the closing days of the First World War and completed shortly after the war ended nor that the title of the work, deliberately, alludes to Baruch Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus.
According to Ray Monk's biography and exposition of Wittgenstein's ideas, the Critique of Pure Reason was among the contents of Ludwig's backpack, read by the young man in the trenches of World War I, before completing the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
Wittgenstein's Jewishness and homosexuality were, perhaps, Doctor Phil-like "issues" shared with his seventeenth century predecessor. Naturally, Wittgenstein's book could not be published and was rejected, initially, by publishers in their flawless wisdom, most of whom had no idea of what the work was about. ("How Censorship Works in America" and "Censorship and Cruelty in New Jersey.")
Spinoza's sexuality remains a matter of mystery. I believe that Spinoza's "furtiveness" indicates a forbidden love, probably of a Christian woman who may have been illiterate or otherwise "unsuitable." There were reports of Spinoza's fondness for a woman in the household of his landlord whom he taught to read. This gift of literacy to a woman is a radical action for the time. There were also reports that Spinoza was gay. No one knows much about Spinoza's private life. Theories come and go. Spinoza may not have had much of a sexual life. We do not have enough information to speculate upon or answer this question. There are always very stupid men who believe that a male who does not exploit every opportunity for sex with a willing woman is, therefore, gay as opposed to being a moral person.
Wittgenstein's late project was to suggest, among other things, that the sort of goal set by the logical-positivists and his early philosophical persona -- along with Jim Holt's presumed stance on foundations -- is an impossible one. The epistemological "picture" (the "picture theory of language") provided by logical positivism is inaccurate and unlivable.
Science has made this rejection of logical positivism and classical materialism more and not less attractive -- to the extent that science is relevant at all in these matters. My reasons for saying this should become clear during the course of my discussion. For example, A.J. Ayer makes the point that Wittgenstein regarded behaviorism (like Gilbert Ryle's philosophy) as absurd and did not believe that consciousness was reducible to the brain.
"Neither does Wittgenstein suggest that a man's sensations or feelings, let alone his thoughts and images, are identical with physical events."
"The Later Wittgenstein," in Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (New York: Vintage, 1984), p. 150.
Terry Eagleton notes that the behaviorist attempt to appropriate Wittgenstein is ludicrous:
"This is really to travesty the work of a man who knew, if anyone did, all about 'inner experience'; but it is a symptom of the political prejudice of a rampantly individualistic society that the later Wittgenstein's emphasis on the public nature of our most apparently private terms should have been resisted in this way. He lived a secret sexual life, but insisted that nothing was hidden; he appealed to the constitutive role of convention in all that we say and do, and had all the insouciant disdain for convention of the aristocrat." (Eagleton, p. 10.)
During debates at MSN groups (which I can no longer access) with my self-proclaimed "intellectual superiors" -- many of whom had not read the philosophers they quoted to me -- my positions were dismissed as "pseudo-intellectual" and "convoluted gibberish."
I have yet to see on what rational basis this conclusion was arrived at other than a familiar ethnic prejudice that is routine in New Jersey's legal circles. I have not yet found reason to alter my views concerning this philosopher.
Silencing me (or preventing me from creating another blog at this location) will not alter the outcome of the debate between us at "The Philosophy Cafe" nor will this form of censorship improve the writings of Mr. Mendelshon under whatever name he chooses to publish them.
Idiotic prejudice at the Times is very similar to the manner in which the American government approaches the opinions and views of "little brown people" in the world. I continue to experience content-based censorship emanating from New Jersey's legal circles which is unconstitutional and criminal under American law. The authorities are aware of these crimes but do nothing to prevent them or to apprehend those responsible for them. Perhaps these hackers are "friends" of Deborah T. Poritz. ("Maurice J. Gallipoli and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey.")
Wittgenstein's inner journey and corresponding transformations of his philosophical project are brilliantly captured in Mr. Jarman's film and Professor Eagleton's script, both of which are superior to what Mr. Holt has written about Wittgenstein, and (probably) better than Alexander Waugh's popular treatment of this material.
Mr Holt seems sympathetic to the analytical and positivist philosophy that he curiously associates with Wittgenstein. Mr. Holt has studied philosophy at Columbia University. Or was it at Yale, like Mark Leyner? Jeff Greenfield? Making a little money on the side, boys? A little payola from judges and politicians and you'll write stuff for them, eh? ("Incoherence in 'The New York Times.'")
From the ethical and dualistic early philosophy with its picture theory of language Wittgenstein will evolve a "game theory" of language, shifting his concern from the foundations of logic to the metaphysics of language in order to construct a theory of philosophy as therapy. This project comes perilously close to Michel Foucault's late work and to the explorations of Jacques Derrida. Wittgenstein is a combination of those two French thinkers. ("Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Missing Author" and "Jacques Derrida's Philosophy as Jazz.")
What was Wittgenstein's life-journey about? What discoveries did he make? How were these discoveries transformed into philosophy? Why does Wittgenstein's philosophy matter today?
I suggest that you turn to one of the best biographies and discussions of Wittgenstein's life and work, Ray Monk's Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: Free Press, 1990).
I will first say a word or two about Wittgenstein's thinking and why it is important to me. Wittgenstein discovered that his most crucial sentence in the Tractatus is the final sentence: "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence."
This sentence should be substituted for the ambiguous first sentence: "The world is everything that is the case." The first sentence of this fascinating book is really the last; the last sentence is really the first. This cold and, by reputation, dry or so-called "positivist" treatment of logic and epistemology is a hermeneutic circle. Think carefully about what Wittgenstein means by "the world." The Tractatus opens on to Wittgenstein's later metaphysical and religious explorations. Furthermore, at a subconscious level, I am confident that this was always Wittgenstein's intention.
The Tractatus is a long introduction to Ludwig's Philosophical Investigations.
To suggest that "what we cannot speak about" (referring to everything that is not amenable to precise and "minute" logical or linguistic analysis in terms of facts), "we must pass over in silence" (that this unspeakable or imprecise stuff of life about which we must be silent does not exist or is unimportant), is incorrect.
For Wittgenstein -- under the spell of Schopenhauer -- whom he read in his father's library and probably associated with the "old man," the matters as to which scientific clarity and precision are unavailable are the most important things in life. They are meaning, goodness, truth, beauty and perhaps, most importantly for himself, Wittgenstein's forbidden homosexual yearnings that were a source of torment and self-destructive doubts.
Wittgenstein's attempt to escape universals was doomed, in my opinion, and may have been an example of his own bewitchment by language. (See my forthcoming review of "Alice.")
At a crucial moment in Jarman's film, Wittgenstein exclaims: "Philosophy is a search for the essence of meaning -- and there is no such thing!" Of course, had this been Wittgenstein's mature or final view, the film would have ended at that point. It did not end on that bleak note because Wittgenstein discovered that such a conclusion ("there is no essence of meaning") is an answer concerning the essence of meaning and that meanings arise from certain "games" that persons play, which cannot be confined or limited to the factual or sayable. Furthermore, persons must play these language games as a matter of being human.
The analogy to the Kantian division between noumenal (unspeakable) and phenomenal (speakable) reality should be obvious. Unlike Wittgenstein, I have chosen to "speak" my loves and accept whatever consequences this may bring. ("Schopenhauer's Metaphysics of Art" and "G.E. Moore's Critique of Idealism.")
It will not do to lie about one's heterosexuality, not even in New York. Straight persons everywhere must come out of the closet. ("Is there a gay marriage right?")
The tensions over inheritance in the Wittgenstein family resulted in Ludwig giving away his share of the family fortune when he received it. Spinoza -- the penultimate rebel Jew (Marx?) -- litigated against a sister who tried to steal his inheritance, won his suit, then gave her the money. Reports in Spinoza's lifetime of the seventeenth century philosopher's wonderful skills as a painter, comparable to some of the great artists of the Dutch school, have led many scholars to search for these canvases, possibly attributed (mistakenly) to well-known painters of the period.
"Among the painters Massaniello inspired was Baruch de Spinoza. ... That the philosopher should have taken up painting as a passtime is perhaps not so surprising. The Dutch, after all, were in the throes of their art madness, and in the final fourteen years of his life Spinoza lodged with two artists -- Daniel Tydeman in Voorburg and Hendrik van der Spyck in the Hague. His biographer Colerus, who had the opportunity to view a portfolio of charcoal and ink sketches left with van der Spyck, avowed that Spinoza was a fine draftsman. Most of his drawings [and paintings] were portraits of individuals, presumably his friends, who included many prominent personages of The Hague."
Mathew Stewart, "The Hero of the People," in The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibnitz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World (London & New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), pp. 96-97. Compare Margaret Gullan-Whur, Within Reason: A Life of Spinoza (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 1992) with one of my favorite novels by Rebecca Goldstein, The Late Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1984).
On the philosophical and hermeneutic issues concerning paradoxes of "representation" (prominent in both Wittgenstein and Spinoza), please see John Badham's Incognito (Warner Brothers, 1997). Irene Jacob is in that movie. A dramatization of the aesthetic-religious encounter is Harold Pinter's brilliant "glass bead" game in Sleuth (Sony Pictures, 2007), posing riddles of identity, erotic and otherwise, language (the house in this movie is the English language), cinematic trickery, reader-viewer response theory and much more. Yes, Andrew Wiles fans may think of so-called "elliptic equations" at this juncture. My theory is that every woman is an "elliptic equation" with possibly infinite and insoluble "permutations." ("'Inception': A Movie Review.")
Wittgenstein was not a logical-positivist. Wittgenstein was a mystic. Wittgenstein was the last of the German Romantics -- with the possible exception of Heidegger and Gadamer. The most important philosophical predecessors to understand Wittgenstein are Schopenhauer and Kant.
"Popper is a reconstructed Kantian, but with much more originality than that description implies. He often remarked to me: 'It was through Schopenhauer that I understood Kant.' Since it was also through Shopenhauer that Wittgenstein understood Kant, this means that Schopenhauer has been one of the most important influences on twentieth-century philosophy, while himself languishing unread by most professional philosophers."
Bryan Magee, Confessions of a Philosopher: A Journey Through Western Philosophy (New York: Random House, 1997), p. 159n, et seq.
As I write this comment on Mr. Holt's confused review, I cannot be certain of whether I will be able to post my essay since New Jersey's criminal cyberharassment deprives me of the opportunity to reach my MSN group, Critique.
My work continues to be subjected to suppression and attacks, defacements and alterations together with plagiarism, of course. My struggle against state censorship in a society that claims to prohibit censorship and cybercrime continues on a daily basis. ("The Long Goodbye" and, again, "What is it like to be plagiarized?")
I cannot say what damage has been done to my writings at Critique. Traditionally, the best way of enhancing the effects of forbidden opinions is by suppressing and censoring their proponents' efforts to communicate those opinions and ideas. Ideas are not subject to physical violence. You only hurt persons -- not philosophies -- by means of torture, rape, suppressions of speech or art works, destruction of relationships, or denials of necessary communicative efforts of any kind by any person. I will continue to write. ("The Torture of Persons" and "What is it like to be tortured?")
My philosophical opinions are suppressed because they may indicate greater learning and interpretational skill than is displayed by favored members of America's political class who are permitted to publish in so-called "elite" publications. ("'Ex Machina': A Movie Review.")
This attitude will not encourage creative and free philosophical or scientific speculation and scholarship among young, mostly disadvantaged, minority males. Most of the articles in America's elite publications these days are "forgettable," to put it kindly. Insights may be found where you least expect them. Plagiarism is also frowned upon in writerly circles. ("David Denby is Not Amused" and "'Inception': A Movie Review.")
This unfortunate review by Mr. Holt may be an example of the sort of forgettable text which appears in today's American periodicals: safe, dull, neat and (often) wrong. The review of Jonathan Little's novel in last Sunday's "Book Review" was, obviously, the reaction of a person who had not read the book being reviewed. This obvious lack of familiarity with books being reviewed is far from unusual in newspapers and magazines today. ("Bernard Williams and Identity.")
I will trace Wittgenstein's journey, briefly, then comment on his doctrine of "family resemblances" in language and wonder whether, by his own metaphor and concern with metaphor, Wittgenstein managed to "show the fly the way out of the fly bottle."
This is Wittgenstein's therapeutic approach to philosophy. Science simply has no answers for this sort of effort. At a minimum, for Wittgenstein, science may help with establishing the limits of inquiry. Do you see any "family resemblances" between these philosophers and a few bizarre contemporaries? More importantly, do you detect "family resemblances" between philosophies?
"A name means an object. The object is its meaning. I can only speak about names. I cannot put them into words. But to live your whole life with a meaning that is not of your own choosing would seem to me to be quite unbearable."
Philip Kerr, A Philosophical Investigation (London: Plume, 1994), p. 106. (Paraphrasing Wittgenstein.)
Mathew Stewart summarizes the early Wittgenstein's logic by noting that he begins with and elaborates upon the implications of Hume's fork: " ... the distinction between 'reason' (or 'logic') and 'fact.' ..." The Truth About Everything: An Irreverent History of Philosophy (New York: Prometheus, 1997), p. 409.
Reacting AGAINST Russell's logical atomism and analytic method, Wittgenstein develops his picture theory of language:
"Meaningful propositions represent possible facts. They do so by providing a 'picture' of things (i.e., a state of affairs). The picture exhibits the relationships among a set of objects. The relationships in the picture represent the fact. The symbols that make up the proposition also stand in a certain relationship to each other. Indeed, the crux of Wittgenstein's [early] theory is this: It is only because of the fact of the relationships among symbols in a proposition that the proposition can represent a fact. To put it cryptically: Only facts can represent facts. Logic is the form of the relationships expressed in a proposition. Logic is to the proposition as pictorial form is to the picture. That is, logic is in some way built into our propositions, but is not something which is directly represented in those propositions. It can be shown but not said." (Stewart, p. 410.)
The difficulty that develops as Wittgenstein moves from this logic-centered to a metaphysics- or ontology-centered stance on foundations -- directed at what we may call, "God" -- is the realization that this logic built into our propositions is not only real, but the most real aspect of human knowing. Hence, the ultimate source of all knowing cannot itself be known scientifically, but you can feel or infer its existence based on your ability to know anything at all. ("Is it rational to believe in God?") Thomas Nagel, "The Facts Fetish," in The New Republic, November 11, 2010, at p. 30. (Reviewing Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (New York: Free Press, 2010), 291 pages.)
The denuded conception of a stark world of atomic facts united in relations made possible by propositions fails to account adequately for the distinctions between sentences and their propositional content. Wittgenstein fails to explain the "logic" underlying our words and sentences that makes the creation or existence of "worlds" possible through "representation." ("Consciousness and Computers" and "Mind and Machine.")
Noam Chomsky's rationalistic linguistics is a continuation, in some important ways, of Wittgenstein's later work. Chomsky also progresses beyond Wittgenstein. Derrida picks up where Chomsky leaves off.
I have just found it necessary to correct an "error" inserted in the foregoing sentence which is not found in previous versions of this essay. Attacks on this work will continue. I suspect that this is because it is envied as superior to the review which appeared in the New York Times. ("Have you no shame, Mr. Rabner?")
" ... [Wittgenstein] reflects that good and evil are connected with the meaning of the world, which may be called God." (Scharfstein, p. 324.)
To "show" something is to "say" that something. "Don't tell me that you love me," women say with their curious logic, "show me." To show her that you love her is to communicate your love. This is also to speak of what is meant by language. The nature of language and its functions as well as our communicative capacities will bring us in due course to Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. ("Donald Davidson's Anomalous Monism.")
We may be able to locate and hold on to our recorded sentences in the so-called "real world of empirical facts," but where do we find the propositional contents of sentences or the deep structure of our speech or consciousness, or reason, that mysteriously shapes our languages and propositions into "pictures" of the world? Form? Symbol? Chomsky's syntactical form? When and how do we escape the picture to inhabit the reality, apart from the picture? Is the reality "pictured" not altered or created in the very picturing or selecting of items for representation? And how do we do that representing or selecting? With what "tools"? What is it that we are really depicting at the bottom of our languages where we discover the connective power of speech? What is the human ability to make "worlds" out of ESSENCES "conveyed" (represented?) by our sentences?
A short word may do the trick. Wittgenstein's concern with "transcendence" is not the only problem with his attempt to escape essences. Wittgenstein's destructive project is designed to allow philosophers to experience what they cannot say.
Wittgenstein hopes to provide "therapeutic" release for puzzled thinkers, so they can feel.
I am suggesting that we cannot avoid resorting to abstractions such as "the typical male psyche." However, we must define our terms carefuly when we make use of such concepts and understand that they are theoretical or philosophical "constructs" and not names for empirical "facts." ("Richard A. Posner on Voluntary Actions and Criminal Responsibility.")
What is "the" world? Does it include this ultimate fundamental ur-stuff or reason that shapes our propositions and ends? Is the young Wittgenstein using the word "world" for what he will later call "God"? How do we step out of our propositions to contemplate the facts if the facts are defined by what is sayable?
"The limits of my language" become "the limits of my world."
But then, what if the limits of my language -- unlike my limits -- are infinite? ("Jacques Derrida's Philosophy as Jazz.")
Do you see the importance of education and the harm done to persons denied education as well as aesthetic experiences? What are the limits not of my personal use of language, but of language itself? Are there any limits? Or does the linguistic faculty become infinite and impossible to confine by providing a protean form to this beguiling reality that -- like a mirror in a fun house -- shifts and changes with the perceiver, delighting and baffling our friend Ludwig with "her" charming unpredictablity? Now you see me, now you don't. ("Metaphor is Mystery" and "Brian Greene and the Science of Memory.")
"Wherever there are two speaking my name, there am I." (Gospels)
If language is as mysterious and seductive as a beautiful woman then language becomes a suitable metaphor or vessel for God. ("Faust in Manhattan" and "Pieta.")
Wittgenstein's late work leads straight to Derrida:
"If a lion should learn to speak," Wittgenstein sighs, "we should not understand him." For a lion's world and, therefore, the form of his propositional content, would be shaped by a perspective not available to us. The lion sees the world so differently than any human does or can. Then is it all relative? No, for that underlying logic of our propositions refuses to go away. What does it mean to represent? Ludwig is "representing." ("Hilary Putnam is Keeping it Real.")
If you think of the intellectual project of the West as a conversation or dialectic that begins with the pre-Socratics and leads to, say, Derrida, then engaging with any of these thinkers is to become a part of this conversation. When doing philosophy we join hands with the 15 to 20 great thinkers in our history whose narrative thread through the centuries is focused on only a few discreet issues -- like love. ("The Allegory of the Cave.")
Logic or reason transforms "herself." In the morning, she wears a business suit and Nike sneakers; in the evening, she wears a gown and string of pearls; Sunday, she is in jeans and a baseball cap, playing softball with the children. She is very puzzling this logic and reason that are at the base of languages (plural), that is foundational to our universal linguistic capacities. Boethius calls her "Sophia." ("Is it rational to believe in God?" and "Is this Atheism's Moment?")
The lion capable of speech must become a person. Yes, I suspect a relationship between the writings of C.S., Lewis (Aslan) and Wittgenstein's metaphors. Lewis was a debating partner of Elizabeth Anscombe, a favored student of Wittgenstein's at Cambridge.
The world must be more than the sum of all atomic empirical facts "connected" by means of propositions.
Where is this "connecting power" to be seen? If it is supplied by us, are we not in the world? How do we do that supplying? If it is supplied or contained in language, is language not in the world? Does empirical reality establish the boundaries of what may be said meaningfully? Or do we determine the boundaries of reality(ies) by what may be said? What is saying? Don't tell me, show me. I suggest a careful reading of Michael Frayn's novel, A Landing on the Sun.
The word "thing" is a simple word. Where is "thing" as opposed to objects that may be called "things"? Where is the word "the"? What is "the"? Are we confident concerning the boundaries between ostensive and essential definition? If we are not, then will we find ourselves fashioning an analytical "hermeneutics of freedom"? Is "the" kind of like the concept of "now"? What is eternity? You will find eternity in any encounter with a complex work of art or the simplest person that you know. Roy E. Peacock, A Brief History of Eternity: A Considered Response to Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time (Sussex: Monarch, 1989), p. 116 ("God controls the singularities.")
Ostensive definition is simply pointing at examples or "instantiations" of a concept (i.e., red things); essential definition is an abstract substantive encapsulation in language of an "essence" or universal ("redness" or "the typical male psyche"). The denial of essences is, of course, an essentialist claim which is self-refuting. (Jacques Derrida)
Naturally, the claim that there are "essences" is equally problematic for Derrida's so-called "white writing" in Of Grammatology.
All universals are a psychological-cultural Switzerland, neutral turf, where persons meet to work out identities. ("What is Law?") But then, what is this neutral turf? Is it so neutral? Why was Wittgenstein unable to do without terms like "language games"? What is masculinity? Femininity? American? Race? (Again: "Richard A. Posner on Voluntary Actions and Criminal Responsibility" and "Is Western Philosophy Racist?")
"What lies beyond the limits of language is not pure nonsense, but the totality of things." (Mathew Stewart, quoting Wittgenstein p. 412.)
What is the "totality of things," speakable and unspeakable, the symbols and master-form that contains and makes all "things" possible, including languages? Take your time answering that question:
" ... It is easy to sketch out that, while the motivating insight of Wittgenstein's early work is essentially Humean, his solutions follow a more obviously Kantian pattern. Like Kant, [Wittgenstein] rescues a certain kind of unconditioned knowledge for philosophy by pushing to its extreme the Humean insight that all knowledge is conditioned. To put the matter in more logical terms, he locates the limits of possibility in possibility itself, i.e., he circumscribes what is necessary in the possibility of possibility. In Aristotelean [Thomistic] terms, he finds an actuality at the bottom of ... potentiality. ... Wittgenstein did read Schopenhauer, but not (much) Kant. ..." (Stewart, p. 415.)
Get this:
"These descriptions and associated explanations of MEANING are not a philosophy, but a methodology. [Methodological idealism?] According to Wittgenstein what is distinctively philosophical is the purpose which they serve. Describing the use of words is a method for disentangling conceptual confusions -- confusions that arise through the misuse of words. It serves to resolve or dissolve philosophical problems. An approximation to sense, unlike an approximation to TRUTH such as occurs in science, is one form or another of nonsense." (Hacker, p. 337.)
Wittgenstein accepts the reality of truth. Wittgenstein also finds that there is meaning. How would it be possible to misuse words if words could not be used correctly? Nonsense implies the genuine "existence" of sense -- whether knowable or sayable sense is immaterial to the possible achievement of sense experience or meaningful utterance. ("Metaphor is Mystery.")
What does any physical gesture "mean," Ludwig? Answer: Whatever you want it to mean. What are the limits of the linguistic power. Answer: There are none. ("A Review of the t.v. Show 'Alice.'")
If the limits of possibility are in possibility itself, within what it is "possible" to think or say or "be," then are there any limits to human potentiality in fusion with this truest and most dynamic nature in us? Think of this essentially human communicative capacity as a connective power? What is the ultimate connection between people? Love? Perhaps we are a kind of "freedom that becomes love"? (Spinoza)
Next thing you know Witgenstein will speak of "family resemblances" between words that represent things, ranges of human experience and their representations, leading to a kind of "intellectual love of God." (Spinoza)
This thinking is easily connected to Hebrew mysticism in Kaballah. Spinoza, Marx, Wittgenstein and (maybe) Freud may be thought of as modern Jewish prophets. These men are only the latest in a long tradition of "messengers" from divinity delivering wisdom to Israel and all of us. The circle is completed by the greatest thinker of the twentieth century and beyond, Mr. Woody Allan.
A person riding a bicycle gave Ludwig the finger as he was crossing the street when not looking in the right direction. This message provoked a philosophical crisis for Ludwig. For the up-lifted finger was both communication and a unique linguistic experience -- symbolic, not verbal -- apparently describing an actual state of affairs ("Ludwig is a distracted asshole!"), yet mysteriously not amenable to reduction to an atomistic factual representation of a static empirical reality of objects and relationships in logical space.
Persons are more baffling than numbers, Ludwig. Women are most baffling of all.
Yes, I know, you think that I am just like Ludwig, an "asshole"? Fine. Pay attention to the philosophy:
"The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said, i.e., propositions of natural science -- i.e., something that has nothing to do with philosophy --"
This would "kill" all previous philosophers, Ludwig! You'll love Philip Kerr's A Philosophical Investigation.
" -- and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions. ..."
What if Kant gives you the finger, Ludwig? What does it mean when a woman places her hands at her hips? (This is probably the right moment to insert another "error" if you're from New Jersey.)
"My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them -- as steps -- to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)"
"He must TRANSCEND [Say what?] these propositions, and then he will see the world aright."
"What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence."
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness, 6.53-7. ("Out of the Past.")
Let us ponder this word "transcendence." Yet another inserted "error." Thank you. ("Faust in Manhattan" and "Why Philosophy is for Everybody.")
Language cannot be what pictures an external reality that is independent of words and grammar. The words and grammar construct the realities that we perceive. We live in language-created worlds, empirical and non-empirical, true and fictional, or arbitrary ("I am British," spoken by Wittgenstein). The ontology of the universe is made infinite by the impossibility of containing exploding meanings within languages used for different purposes in variable ways. (See again: "Metaphor is Mystery" and "Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Missing Author.")
Languages use us. Languages shape our subjectivities (Jacques Derrida) in mysterious and comical ways. F.H. Bradley was more contemporary than Wittgenstein. Bradley would be far more at home among this week's "Master Thinkers" in the Left Bank cafes of Paris:
"There is a great deal more in the mind than can ever be before it."
Phillip Ferreira, Bradley and the Structure of Knowledge (New York: SUNY, 1999), p. 66.
To explain why Bradley's point is accurate Wittgenstein suggests that we may think of language as a set of "games."
Moving from the idea of picturing the world of bare facts -- excluding everything contaminated by human values, wishing, desires and hopes -- to a realization that our knowledge must live within our "pictures" of reality (Stephen Hawking, Brian Greene, Jacob Bronowski), Wittgenstein develops a game theory of language that sees words as "tools," like paintbrushes and canvas, that we use for different purposes in order to accomplish multiple goals.
Somebody gives you the finger not to express an abstract mathematical proposition, but in order to convey an emotional reaction to an "experience" of you. Yes, you are more than welcome to do as much when you see me. I am certainly well described as an "experience." So are you. I appreciate that Mr. Holt is embarrassed by what he or she has seen fit to publish in the Times, but this is no excuse to insert "errors" in my writings through corrupt relationships in New Jersey's legal circles. Shame on you, Mr. Rabner. ("No More Cover-Ups and Lies, Chief Justice Rabner!")
Words may serve different purposes, performing a variety of tasks in many settings. Representing reality may (or must) involve both constructing and perceiving. The trouble arises when our "language goes on holiday." In other words, when our representations falter due "to the bewitchment of the intelligence by language," it may be necessary to perform a "curative" or therapeutic function by cleansing the language of dross, imprecision, obscurity -- for Wittgenstein, this is only to allow the poetry of philosophy to emerge as an experience of God. God is Being. God is "logos," the word.
Whether you like it or not, when you cleanse the language of dross what you discover -- thank you, Herr Professor Heidegger -- is "Being." God? Are you sure that you wish to rely on Wittgenstein if you are a positivist behaviorist science-worshipper or atheist? You are better off inserting "errors" in my essays. ("Mind and Machine.")
One of the truly bizarre contemporary American ideologies is a mythical notion of a pristine "real world" that is distinct from our descriptions and perceptual faculties. The "bottom line" of reality existing "out there" that corrects our concepts and terms or theories. It is our often objective and true terms and theories that determine what we experience as real or how we experience anything. Again: this is not to deny truth or "reality." I know this may be difficult. Please read Kant. ("Why I am not an ethical relativist" and "John Finnis and Ethical Cognitivism.")
Lao Tzu teaches: "The way to do is to be." Lao Tzu also says: "The way to be is to do."
Freeing the mind from the pains of confusion -- as suffered by Jim Holt, perhaps -- "is to show the fly the way out of the fly bottle."
A trap for flies in Vienna was made by placing honey at the bottom of a bottle, then closing the bottle when flies flew into it. American law enforcement is fond of similar tactics in prosecuting cybercriminals.
"It was true to say that our considerations could not be scientific ones. ... The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known. Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language."
Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, I, sec. 109. (Metaphor? Philosophy is a "war on terror.")
The labyrinth created by Lewis Carroll in the Alice books is due to the layering of themes linked by a parody of logic: political allegory, roman a clef, philosophical puzzle palace, identities and disguises, theological purposes and ambitions -- not lust for young girls -- "playing" with images that were not yet within the reach of the author's primitive cameras.
Wasn't Lewis Carroll a "pervert"? No, he was only an Oxford Don. True, these are not mutually exclusive categories.
Interpretations provide new information about the world. Example a tribunal's conclusion that: "This event is a crime." This legal-interpretive conclusion changes the status of persons into criminals and victims. This is to alter "meanings." This is to reinvent the world. "I now pronounce you man and wife." Words have given us new information about the world. Idealism? Phenomenology-hermeneutics? (See John Austin's "How to Do Things With Words.") Then,
"Here the term 'language game' is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or a form of life."
Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, I. sec. 23. ("Stuart Hamphsire and Iris Murdoch On Freedom of Mind" then "Metaphor is Mystery.")
Notice the distinction between signs and understandings that will become "fruitful" (important word) in the discipline of semiotics. ("'Diamonds Are Forever': A Movie Review.")
"We are tempted to say that the action of language consists of two parts; an inorganic part, the handling of signs, [semiotics] and an organic part, which we may call understanding these signs, meaning them, interpreting them, thinking ... [Hermeneutics.]"
Blue and Brown Notebooks, pp. 3, 5 (On Certainty).
Therefore:
"Every sign by itself seems dead. What gives it life? -- In use it is alive. Is life breathed into it there? -- Or is the use its life?"
Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, I, sec. 432. ("Robert Brandom's 'Reason in Philosophy.'")
It is at this point that Wittgenstein discovers the escape route for the trapped "fly" -- the philosophical questioner -- in use. Like a pawn in chess whose meaning is the use to which the piece is put in terms of the larger "game," our philosopher's "use" or purpose is to be free from confusions produced by the misuse of language.
In order to "be," we must exist in a use for which we are fitted. The common human use is this quest for "freedom from muddle" (Iris Murdoch) which leads us to others, with love. We are freedoms that become love. (Professor McTaggart)
Wittgenstein's reluctant conclusion is that we are (and must be) philosophers ("lovers of wisdom"), despite his disdain for and murder of philosophy as an academic subject. ("Antonio Gramsci and Hegemony.")
Notice that the way we become philosophers, according to Wittgenstein, is not to do philosophy (that would be too easy for Ludwig), but it is to "be." We abandon explicit philosophical efforts in order to embrace life: "Philosophy leaves everything as it is." We become one with God. We must leave Cambridge University and take up auto mechanics. Painting? Photographing young girls and writing children's stories in the case of Lewis Carroll?
To deny speech and communication -- to censor and destroy the "fruits" of any human being's spirit -- is not only wrong or illegal, it is evil. Silencing is to deny humanity to a person through destruction of his or her expressions and capacity for expression in the worst cases.
When it comes to a person with a calling to creativity and thought, as well as to the expression of these qualities and capacities, the injury done through the suppression of expressions of any kind is potentially lethal for the victim as well as possible recipients of these communications.
Silencing and control is the essence of totalitarianism.
Do you speak to me of "ethics," Ms. Milgram? Is illegal censorship "ethical"? Psychological torture is not therapy. (Once more: "What is it like to be tortured?" and "What is it like to be plagiarized?")
See, Leszek Kolakowski, "Totalitarianism and the Virtue of the Lie," in Irving Howe, ed., 1984 Revisited: Totalitarianism in Our Century (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), pp. 122-136 and Leszek Kolakowski, "Epilogue: Education to Hatred, Education to Dignity," in Modernity on Endless Trial (Chicago & London: University of Chicago, 1990), pp. 255-261. (Look at the final paragraph of that epilogue.) Please see also, e.g., Stuart Sim, Derrida and the End of History (London & New York: Icon Books, 1999), pp. 26-27 ("What Lyotard pictures ...") and Karl Simms, Paul Ricoeur (New York & London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 31-79 ("Hermeneutics, Psychoanalysis, Metaphor").
Sadists always rationalize what they do with political rhetoric. However, "the purpose of torture is torture." (George Orwell)
Consider Lyotard's postmodern challenge developing Wittgenstein's insight: "Is a computer in any way here and now? Can anything happen with it? Can anything happen to it?" Compare also James F. Peterman, Philosophy as Therapy: An Interpretation and Defense of Wittgenstein's Later Philosophical Project (New York: SUNY, 1992), pp. 39-52 ("Confession and Dialogue") with John M. Heaton, Wittgenstein and Psychoanalysis (New York & London: Icon, 2000), p. 18. ("Tell me how you are searching and I will tell you what you are searching for.")
Do you recall Wittgenstein's use of the word "transcendence"? Suppose you are missing someone you love, you search for her everywhere and cannot find her. You decide that by remaining "in" your love -- through becoming that love -- as a kind of struggle, Agon, you have a better chance of finding her. This is to be transformed into a philosophical Jihadist. Norman Mailer speaks of the "philosophical psychopath." By loving her, consciously, you hang on to something of her essence as you pursue this struggle in the world. "Struggle" is a way of overcoming philosophical slavery. ("America's Holocaust.")
I would much prefer the angry and wounded masses of the world to share this project -- moral struggle -- with me that requires only a commitment to abandon all violence in order to participate in reasoned discussion without constraints or censorship. I fully understand hatred, revulsion, passionate struggle against those who commit crimes against us, stealing from us, enslaving us, raping and slandering us to friends and family members. I do not understand and will not descend to their intellectual level in order to become what they are. I will not do to them what they have done to me, even if I am prepared for a very "feisty" debate at all times, together with the never-ending struggle against suppressions of speech. It is always therapeutic to confront power with truth.
Any more "errors" to be inserted in my writings, Ms. Milgram? How do you live with yourself, Anne? Mr. Rabner? Hypocrisy? ("What is it like to be censored in America?" and "How Censorship Works in America.")
For the benefit of those who have sought to silence me -- possibly as a way of denying what is left of my humanity -- I will refer to Thomas Merton's similar journey. Like Wittgenstein, Merton discovered the way out of the fly bottle through love as a kind of struggle that could only be won by surrendering to the object of love, kenosis:
"In an age when totalitarianism has striven, in every way, to devalue and degrade the human person, we hope it is right to demand a hearing for any and every sane reaction in the favor of man's inalienable solitude and his interior freedom. The murderous din of our materialism cannot be allowed to silence the independent voices which will never cease to speak: whether they will be the voices of Christian Saints, or the voices of Oriental sages like Lao-Tse or the Zen Masters, or the voices of men like Thoreau or Martin Buber, or Max Picard. It is all very well to insist that man is a 'social animal' -- the fact is obvious enough. But that is no justification for making him a mere cog in a totalitarian machine [Capitalism? Communism? Behaviorism?] -- or in a religious one for that matter."
Thoughts in Solitude (Boston: Shambala, 1993), pp. ix-x (emphasis added).
Wittgenstein's work provides a religious analogy and brings us to the point at which Wittgenstein's philosophy meets the writings of Kierkegaard (Christian) and Simone Weil (Jewish-Christian). This insight concerning transcendence also offers a political analogy to the writings of Malcolm X (Islam), Dr. King (Christian), Che Guevara (Marxist), and many others depending on your political beliefs. Transcendence may equal: Revolution? Salvific Mission? Pick your poison. (Compare "Fidel Castro's 'History Will Absolve Me'" with "Roberto Unger's Revolutionary Legal Theory.")
"It seems to us that there are certain definite mental processes bound up with the workings of language," Wittgenstein writes, "understanding and meaning. The signs of our language seem dead without these mental processes. And it seems these can bring about effects no material mechanism could, for example, a thought could agree or disagree with reality, I can think of someone who isn't present, I can imagine him, mean him in a remark which I make about him [God?] if he's thousands of miles away or dead." ("Marriage and Time.")
Blue and Brown Notebooks, quoted with analysis in Michael Weston, "Derrida, Wittgenstein, and the Question of Grounds," in Kierkegaard and Modern Continental Philosophy (New York & London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 123-130. Please see also: John Russon, "Others," in Philosophy, Neurosis, and the Elements of Everyday Life (New York: SUNY, 2003), p. 55. (" ... the authority of the intersubjective domain ... of the Other as the determining source of value.")
The authority of the other and her call upon me is another way of describing socialism. ("The Galatea Scenario and the Mind/Body Problem.")
Pope John Paul II said: "The answer is love." You may arrive at this answer through the labyrinths of philosophy, physics, mathematics, art, politics, law or healing and scientific work. The result will always be exactly the same. Compare "George Santayana and the Mysteries of Quantum Mechanics" with Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics (New York: Bantam, 1984) and Ernst Bloch, On Karl Marx (New York: Herder & Herder, 1971), pp. 106-118 ("Dialectics of Idealism"), then Richard Wollheim, The Thread of Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 226-257 (Transcendence).
Wittgenstein learned that what was known emotionally (or felt) could not necessarily be expressed in logical propositions and (much less) scientifically. Human "life-meanings" (Derrida) are not reducible to the contents of a test tube.
Only the material and empirical conditions of life may be known in laboratories, never the meanings which we must create and live, meanings also create and live us.
You will not alter these truths by hurting me more than I have been hurt in my life nor by further damaging these essays. Not even murdering me will alter the truth found in these statements.
"Wittgenstein decided that the unique fact of existence and the sense of wonder it aroused could not be expressed or justified logically or scientifically. Like the will and values of his father, those of the world, though they determined life and death, could not be understood. To understand or react to them relevantly he had no choice, he believed, but to turn to art, ethics, [politics?] and religion, all equally indescribable" -- but livable! -- "and to the sincerity that might penetrate them by its moral vision. [ ... through love?]" (Scharfstein, pp. 333-334, emphasis added.)
