Koalas and the Depressed Idols

I've been thinking lately that I'm need of new idols. Well... maybe not idols exactly, more like people that I find intriguing, and, to some extent, find myself identifying with. At the moment those are Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, and Walt Whitman—all white males who never married, who, with the exception of Whitman, were depressed throughout much of their lives.

At times when I find myself gravitating more towards pessimism than optimism, I think about that short list and wonder if it needs to change. Whitman, a more recent addition, would probably do me some good to stay. Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard, now that I'm growing more and more disinterested in academic philosophy, could be let go. But I'm not sure whom I should replace them with... Past teachers? Poets? Relative unknowns? Apparitions? Aspirations?

And koalas? Here's what that's about: They subsist on eucalyptus leaves--which are poor in nutrition and poisonous to most other animals. In a way, humans enjoy a similar relationship with modern industrial and post-industrial society. It's what sustains us, but also what drains us; hardly nutritive, hardly enlivening, but nonetheless the way we continue to subsist and live.

Plus, koalas are super cute.

Neopragmatist Poetics

Here is a recent essay that more or less sums up my current views on philosophy. I plan to do some heavy revising down the road, but I think it's still worth reading as is.

1. Redescribing Shelley's Defense of Poetry: Rorty, Rich, and the Making of a Neopragmatist Poetics

2. The Plaque Conspiracy with Continual Reference to Derrida (a humorous, misleading cover sheet and preface originally attached to the above essay)

Random jotted thoughts, aphorisms

Our words, our expressions, our analogies, are clothed in humanness--in our concrete everyday-ness, our veracities, our situations. And, it would seem, too, that our outgoing thoughts are clothed in our words.

Philosophy as an ultimatum is a denial of the right for future generations to want to say something profound about the world, to color it with their own experiences and judgments.


What do we get out of such a doctrine? An advancing culture that must continually reject all that comes before it. A generation that says something, and another that says, "You're wrong... but perhaps..." and yet another generation that rejoins "no."


It's my view that one should be skeptical of religious beliefs that establish human-to-human hierarchies. Divine-to-human seems perfectly fine; it's the others that are dangerous. Religion originates in the individual—"subjectivity is truth"; "the crowd is untruth"—in subjectivity's relationship to another.

Deterministic rules, etc. -- The question of what these rules are is scientific. The question of why there are rules is religious.

"Is the space pope reptilian?"

"Culture is an observance. Or at least it presupposes an observance." —LW

The essay at hand is almost subterranean. (Deep.)

Kierkegaard is one of the few thinkers I would describe as overwhelmingly intelligent.


If I don't find a motivation beyond the grade in the course of a class, I'm not going to go very far.

Listening to the new Mars Volta albums is like waiting for a bus. A few beautiful moments in a sea of overindulgence.

"Be one of those upon whom nothing is lost." —W. James

Think about the following: the mark of good writing is in the artistry, wisdom, or significance to be gleaned.

Cheese is one of humankind's greatest achievements.

A Wednesday in Spring

My first essay for my creative non-fiction writing class, pre-workshop:

1. A Wednesday in Spring

The specific song I was listening to on my iPod at the moment I wrote of was "Vacant Sky" by I'm Not a Gun. I'm pretty sure it was immediately followed by "As Far As Forever Goes."


3/7 update:

Here it is again, without all those blatant, embarrassing errors.
2. A Wednesday in Spring (First Revision)


3/24 update:

Actually, don't read either of these. I'll have a revised version up before long.

"..." 19

"Philosophy is the pedantry that ensues when language leads men astray."


2/15 update:

"Philosophers often behave like little children who scribble some marks on a piece of paper at random and then ask the grown-up 'What's that?' — It happened like this: the grown-up had drawn pictures for the child several times and said: 'this is a man', 'this is a house', etc. And then the child makes some marks too and asks: What's this then?"

—Wittgenstein

"..." 17

"The limit of language is shown by its being impossible to describe the fact which corresponds to (is the translation of) a sentence, without simply repeating the sentence."

—LW

"..." 14

"If people did not sometimes do stupid things, nothing intelligent would get done."

—Wittgenstein

Translation: If not for our failures, abuses, and misuses, we would have little need for "intelligent" endeavors. The problems that these endeavors are to solve are of our own creation.

Philosophy as such

¹

[Note: This entire post would be struck through (like this) if I didn't want it to remain readable. I now see some flaws, but I still think the overall argument is interesting enough that it should be preserved. So, here it is:]

---

"The real discovery is the one which enables me to stop doing philosophy when I want to. The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question."

. . .

Thesis 1: Without language there is no occasion for philosophical thought.

1a. Experience contains no paradoxes and no contradictions. These can only occur between statements and propositions—that is, in words. (The word 'contradiction' does well to emphasize my point: contra dicere would roughly translate as "to say against.") The quality of being "true" or "false," likewise, can only apply to propositions.

"The world is all that is the case."

"The logic of the world is prior to all truth and falsehood."

1b. It is possible to perceive problems in a variety of fields without a recourse to language.² You may be able to express or describe these problems in terms of language, but the language itself is not necessary in order to recognize and address them. In philosophy's case, however, language is the source of its problems and inquiries, and without language there are none.

"For philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday."

"Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language."

"People say again and again that philosophy doesn't really progress, that we are still occupied with the same philosophical problems as were the Greeks. But the people who say this don't understand why it has to be so. It is because our language has remained the same and keeps seducing us into asking the same questions."

1c. There's no such thing as a "philosophical problem" simply because there are no solutions to be found. All that is available is a dissolution of the problem through a more thorough understanding of what has gone awry.³

1d. The subject of a great deal of traditional philosophy is where concepts intersect with actuality. Actuality is a posteriori (phenomena); philosophy's treatment of it is a priori (in concepts, statements; descriptions and prescriptions).

"It follows from this separation of form and content that logic tells us nothing about the actual world."⁴

1e. The philosopher has two tools at his or her disposal: language and logic. The methods and results of logic are self-evident, but what language is conveying often isn't, e.g. "All physical objects are extended," "This sentence is false."

"Logic takes care of itself, all we have to do is to look and see how it does it."

1f. Language is essentially a means of description, prescription, or expression⁵. Individual words and concepts are components of a language-game aimed at any of these. (With regard to inferences, language is not a means of giving substance to or in some way constituting them, but only describing/expressing them.)

"For a large class of cases—though not for all—in which we employ the word 'meaning' it can be defined as thus: the meaning of a word is its use in language."

1g. Description presents no possibility of transcendence. (Creating a picture⁶ of something will not grant a greater insight into how it appears than what can already be seen.)

1h. Language can only describe experience through abstraction. It's not as though nouns are proxies for actual objects simply because the very concept of an "object" is itself an abstraction. The question of whether Theseus's ship will endure after exchanging all of its planks originated under ignorance of this process.

1i. It follows that a great many concepts are not referents to any particular aspect of reality. Some would try to transcend it or exist independently of it, but in doing so there is no possibility for mutual intelligibility or mutual understanding of what is meant beyond the intangible-abstract (as in, e.g., soul, Geist, the eternal, the Good). And while the construction of concepts through various component-abstractions is mutually intelligible (for instance, intuiting a centaur through the union of certain features of a horse and certain features of a human), it carries with it no necessity or non-conceptual "reality".



Thesis 2: "Knowledge" and metaphysics are incompatible.

2a. Metaphysics is absolute non-sense. (See 1g, 1i.)

"The essential thing about metaphysics: it obliterates the distinction between factual and conceptual investigations."

"Philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything. - Since Everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain. For what is hidden, for example, is of no use to us."

2b. Epistemically, the only incorrigible knowledge of "reality ⁷" that we have is of the here-and-now (i.e. immediate sense data, qualia).

"I want now to enlarge the point that the idea of 'foundations of knowledge' is a product of the choice of perceptual metaphors. To recapitulate, we can think of knowledge as a relation to propositions, and thus justification as a relation between the propositions in question and other propositions from which the former may be inferred. Or we may think of both knowledge and justification as privileged relations to the objects those propositions are about. If we think in the first way, we will see no need to end the potentially infinite regress of propositions-brought-forward-in-defense-of-other-propositions." —Rorty

2c. The ontological distinction between subject (-ivity) and object (-ivity) is untenable. The subject is at once an object, and the object is only experienced by means of the subject... the subject is at once itself and a feature of the world. It experiences the world by means of the world itself. (See the quote following 1f.)

2d. The mind-body distinction is purely the product of a language-game. It attempts, I suppose, to distinguish thinking from feeling, and internal states (i.e. subjectivity) from external states (objective reality), but the former is really a distinction between language and experience, and the latter is really between a subject's sense-experience and a mutual consensus (between persons) on sense-experience. Again, in metaphysical terms the mind/body distinction has no foundation—for we have no knowledge of this mutual consensus.

2e. Whatever the findings of the philosophy of mind, they will be of no practical or functional significance. There can be no a priori mutual consensus regarding internal states simply because there is no object or observable process.



Thesis 3: Certainty in the domain of philosophy is only possible insofar as it has no pertinence to the world.

3a. "Objectivity" in the domain of any given topic stands for little more than the possibility for universal agreement. This can only be achieved in a priori terms through prescription, and in a posteriori terms through the (accurate, scientific) description of the world. (The a priori sort can possess apodictic "objectivity", e.g. 1+1=2; the problem of induction prevents this in a posteriori cases.)

3b. Knowledge in practical terms (e.g. that there is gravity) isn't absolute, but it doesn't need to be in order to be of use. Mutual consensus is only beneficial insofar as it suits our practical interests. In this regard, we have no need for universal commensuration.

3c. It follows from philosophy's dependence on language that the only certainty it can proffer lies in matters that either have no pertinence to the world or that describe what is already known.

3d. Logic can inform us that, under certain rules and given certain rule-following components, one proposition will follow from another, but these rules cannot be constituted a priori without losing relevance to the world. Practical inquiries (ethics, social/political philosophy), conversely, can have relevance to the pre-existing ways we perceive and describe, but they are independent of certainty simply because philosophy is incapable of constructing a first principle that has a direct link to the world [as something independent of what is described].

3e. In this sense philosophy cannot say anything constructive. The above points illustrate the impossibility of system-building while maintaining relevance.

3f. Bertrand Russell once said:

"The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it."

While this may be a "traditional" conception of the footholds and aims of philosophical inquiries, it does not inform a philosophy that strives to be anything but impractical and esoteric.

Instead of having faith that our descriptions will transpose the world... instead of viewing "knowledge" as an ultimatum rather than a means to various ends, we should see philosophy for what it really is: the obvious or the dogmatic.

3g. Philosophy without certainty can, however, be productive in at least two areas: heuristics and hermeneutics. Heuristics embodies wisdom in the most conventional sense and hermeneutics represents an effort to deconstruct and interpret.

To this end, it is my hope that Russell's conception of philosophy is replaced by Wittgenstein's:

"Philosophy is not a theory but an activity."

---

¹ All too often works in philosophy are strictly reactionary, and interdependent on other works for their (often unstated) presuppositions. Frequently, too, they're written in such esoteric terms that their significance to the world is limited to the few that can actually understand them. I've made an effort to avoid partaking in either tradition.
What follows is not intended to provide an absolute answer to philosophy as a study, but rather an attempt to frame it in such a way that it is robbed of its incongruities. It is an attempt at stating my current views to the best of my ability, and, in my mind, is free of controversy.

² I've had some difficulty in finding an appropriate example to illustrate this. Let's suppose you are fixing something, thinking of ways to improve it, or identifying problems inherent in it. While language may assist you (as a heuristic device for instance), it is not necessary for you to carry on.

The idea that I'm trying to get across is that, when doing philosophy, language is not only removed from experience, but from other appropriate sources of reference (as in history, literature, mathematics). At this level the subject of inquiry becomes dubious.

³ This is a harsh way of saying that philosophical problems are completely artificial constructions. There may still be a "problem" so-to-speak, but it has no relevance to the world.

⁴ I admit that this quotation doesn't quite support my point, but I do feel it serves a purpose. As with all of the quotes, I am not trying to provide any interpretation of Wittgenstein, but rather show certain eloquent statements of his that are tied to my disposition.

⁵ This point is somewhat clumsy. Language can do a great variety of things, and it is in my opinion that these three encompass them, albeit if somewhat obscurely. The point is not to define three simple categories that neatly envelope all of its functions, but to give a basic idea of those functions.

⁶ A "picture" may tell you more about your frame of reference, but nothing further about what you are depicting.

⁷ The concept of "reality" is a troublesome. In practice, it describes a mutually perceived world (see 3a), but the idea that there is such a thing as "valid" and "invalid" experience doesn't make sense. Experiences are as they are, and short of some recourse to a higher being, we cannot say that one experience (experienced subjectively) is faulty while another is true.

Also, my use of the word "knowledge" shifts from meaning something like "absolute knowledge" to "corrigible" knowledge (e.g. experiences, available information, etc.) depending on the context of how it is used.

"Wittgenstein's speculative aesthetics"

I read this not long ago in Beyond Liberal Education: Essays in honor of Paul H. Hirst. It was, in my view, the best essay of the bunch... but it really had nothing to do with education. (Not until the last paragraph is anything even suggested about it, and then only minimally.)

Seeing that it was so out of place (if I was searching for such an essay it would be the last place I would've expected to find it) and not enough people read this blog for me to worry about any copyright issues, I figured I would post it.

Here it is:

"Wittgenstein" on film

So, I found these on YouTube just a bit ago. Apparently there was a screenplay-movie-thing made about Wittgenstein ("Wittgenstein") in 1993. It's pretty funny. Philosophical Investigations was published posthumously, by the way.

Wittgenstein's Lecture on Ethics

My subject, as you know, is Ethics and I will adopt the explanation of that term which Professor Moore has given in his book Principia Ethica. He says: "Ethics is the general enquiry into what is good." Now I am going to use the term Ethics in a slightly wider sense, in a sense in fact which includes what I believe to be the most essential part of what is generally called Aesthetics.

And to make you see as clearly as possible what I take to be the subject matter of Ethics I will put before you a number of more or less synonymous expressions each of which could be substituted for the above definition, and by enumerating them I want to produce the same sort of effect which Galton produced when he took a number of photos of different faces on the same photographic plate in order to get the picture of the typical features they all had in common. And as by showing to you such a collective photo I could make you see what is the typical—say—Chinese face; so if you look through the row of synonyms which I will put before you, you will, I hope, be able to see the characteristic features they all have in common and these are the characteristic features of Ethics.

Now instead of saying "Ethics is the enquiry into what is good" I could have said Ethics is the enquiry into what is valuable, or, into what is really important, or I could have said Ethics is the enquiry into the meaning of life, or into what makes life worth living, or into the right way of living. I believe if you look at all these phrases you will get a rough idea as to what it is that Ethics is concerned with.

Now the first thing that strikes one about all these expressions is that each of them is actually used in two very different senses. I will call them the trivial or relative sense on the one hand and the ethical or absolute sense on the other. If for instance I say that this is a good chair this means that the chair serves a certain predetermined purpose and the word good here has only meaning so far as this purpose has been previously fixed upon. In fact the word good in the relative sense simply means coming up to a certain predetermined standard. Thus when we say that this man is a good pianist we mean that he can play pieces of a certain degree of difficulty with a certain degree of dexterity. And similarly if I say that it is important for me not to catch cold I mean that catching a cold produces certain describable disturbances in my life and if I say that this is the right road I mean that it's the right road relative to a certain goal.

Used in this way these expressions don't present any difficult or deep problems. But this is not how Ethics uses them. Supposing that I could play tennis and one of you saw me playing and said "Well, you play pretty badly" and suppose I answered "I know, I'm playing pretty badly but I don't want to play any better," all the other man could say would be "Ah, then that's all right." But suppose I had told one of you a preposterous lie and he came up to me and said, "You're behaving like a beast" and then I were to say "I know I behave badly, but then I don't want to behave any better," could he then say "Ah, then that's all right"? Certainly not; he would say "Well, you ought to want to behave better." Here you have an absolute judgment of value, whereas the first instance was one of relative judgment.

The essence of this difference seems to be obviously this: Every judgment of relative value is a mere statement of facts and can therefore be put in such a form that it loses all the appearance of a judgment of value: Instead of saying "This is the right way to Granchester," I could equally well have said, "This is the right way you have to go if you want to get to Granchester in the shortest time"; "This man is a good runner" simply means that he runs a certain number of miles in a certain number of minutes, etc.

Now what I wish to contend is that, although all judgments of relative value can be shown to be mere statement of facts, no statement of fact can ever be, or imply, a judgment of absolute value.

Let me explain this: Suppose one of you were an omniscient person and therefore knew all the movements of all the bodies in the world dead or alive and that he also knew all the states of mind of all human beings that ever lived, and suppose this man wrote all he knew in a big book, then this book would contain the whole description of the world; and what I want to say is, that this book would contain nothing that we would call an ethical judgment or anything that would logically imply such a judgment. It would of course contain all relative judgments of value and all true scientific propositions and in fact all true propositions that can be made. But all the facts described would, as it were, stand on the same level and in the same way all propositions stand on the same level. There are no propositions which, in any absolute sense, are sublime, important, or trivial.

Now perhaps some of you will agree to that and be reminded of Hamlet's words: "Nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." But this again could lead to a misunderstanding. What Hamlet says seems to imply that good and bad, though not qualities of the world outside us, are attributes to our states of mind. But what I mean is that a state of mind, so far as we mean by that a fact which we can describe, is in no ethical sense good or bad.

If for instance in our world-book we read the description of a murder with all its details physical and psychological, the mere description of these facts will contain nothing which we could call an ethical proposition. The murder will be on exactly the same level as any other event, for instance the falling of a stone. Certainly the reading of description might cause us pain or rage or any other emotion, or we might read about the pain or rage caused by this murder in other people when they have heard of it, but there will simply be facts, facts, and facts but no Ethics.

And now I must say that if I contemplate what Ethics really would have to be if there were such a science, this result seems to me quite obvious. It seems to me obvious that nothing we could ever think or say should be the thing. That we cannot write a scientific book, the subject matter of which could be intrinsically sublime and above all other subject matters. I can only describe my feeling by the metaphor, that, if a man could write a book on Ethics which really was a book on Ethics, this book would, with an explosion, destroy all the other books in the world. Our words used as we use them in science, are vessels capable only of containing and conveying meaning and sense, natural meaning and sense. Ethics, if it is anything, is supernatural and our words will only express facts; as a teacup will only hold a teacup full of water and if I were to pour out a gallon over it.

I said that so far as facts and propositions are concerned there is only relative value and relative good, right, etc. And let me, before I go on, illustrate this by a rather obvious example. The right road is the road which leads to an arbitrarily predetermined end and it is quite clear to us all that there is no sense in talking about the right road apart from such a predetermined goal. Now let us see what we could possibly mean by the expression, 'the absolutely right road.' I think it would be the road which everybody on seeing it would, with logical necessity, have to go,or be ashamed for not going.

And similarly the absolute good, if it is a describable state of affairs, would be one which everybody, independent of his tastes and inclinations, would necessarily bring about or feel guilty for not bringing about. And I want to say that such a state of affairs is a chimera. No state of affairs has, in itself, what I would like to call the coercive power of an absolute judge.

Then what have all of us who, like myself, are still tempted to use such expressions as 'absolute good,' 'absolute value,' etc., what have we in mind and what do we try to express? Now whenever I try to make this clear to myself it is natural that I should recall cases in which I would certainly use these expressions and I am then in the situation in which you would be if, for instance, I were to give you a lecture on the psychology of pleasure. What you would do then would be to try and recall some typical situation in which you always felt pleasure. For, bearing this situation in mind, all I should say to you would become concrete and, as it were, controllable. One man would perhaps choose as stock example the sensation when taking a walk on a fine summer's day. Now in this situation I am, if I want to fix my mind on what I mean by absolute or ethical value.

And there, in my case, it always happens that the idea of one particular experience presents itself to me which therefore is, in a sense, my experience par excellence and this is the reason why, in talking to you now, I will use this experience as my first and foremost example. (As I have said before, this is an entirely personal matter and others would find other examples more striking.) I will describe this experience in order, if possible, to make you recall the same or similar experiences, so that we may have a common ground for our investigation.

I believe the best way of describing it is to say that when I have it I wonder at the existence of the world. And I am then inclined to use such phrases as 'how extraordinary that anything should exist' or 'how extraordinary that the world should exist.'

I will mention another experience straight away which I also know and which others of you might be acquainted with: it is, what one might call, the experience of feeling absolutely safe. I mean the state of mind in which one is inclined to say 'I am safe, nothing can injure me whatever happens.'

Now let me consider these experiences, for, I believe, they exhibit the very characteristics we try to get clear about. And there the first thing I have to say is, that the verbal expression which we give to these experiences is nonsense!

If I say 'I wonder at the existence of the world' I am misusing language. Let me explain this: It has a perfectly good and clear sense to say that I wonder at something being the case, we all understand what it means to say that I wonder at the size of a dog which is bigger than any one I have ever seen before or at any thing which, in the common sense of the word, is extraordinary. In every such case I wonder at something being the case which I could conceive not to be the case. I wonder at the size of this dog because I could conceive of a dog of another, namely the ordinary size, at which I should not wonder. To say 'I wonder at such and such being the case' has only sense if I can imagine it not to be the case.

In this sense one can wonder at the existence of, say, a house when one sees it and has not visited it for a long time and has imagined that it had been pulled down in the meantime. But it is nonsense to say that I wonder at the existence of the world, because I cannot imagine it not existing.

I could of course wonder at the world round me being as it is. If for instance I had this experience while looking into the blue sky, I could wonder at the sky being blue as opposed to the case when it's clouded. But that's not what I mean. I am wondering at the sky being whatever it is. One might be tempted to say that what I am wondering at is a tautology, namely at the sky being blue or not blue. But then it's just nonsense to say that one is wondering at a tautology.

Now the same applies to the other experience which I have mentioned, the experience of absolute safety. We all know what it means in ordinary life to be safe. I am safe in my room, when I cannot be run over by an omnibus. I am safe if I have had whooping cough and cannot therefore get it again. To be safe essentially means that it is physically impossible that certain things should happen to me and therefore it is nonsense to say that I am safe whatever happens. Again this is a misuse of the word 'safe' as the other example was of a misuse of the word 'existence' or 'wondering.'

Now I want to impress on you that a certain characteristic misuse of our language runs through all ethical and religious expressions. All these expressions seem, prima facie, to be just similes. Thus it seems that when we are using the word right in an ethical sense, although, what we mean, is not right in its trivial sense, it's something similar, and when we say 'This is a good fellow,' although the word good here doesn't mean what it means in the sentence 'This is a good football player' there seems to be some similarity. And when we say 'This man's life was valuable' we don't mean it in the same sense in which we would speak of some valuable jewelry but there seems to be some sort of analogy.

Now all religious terms seem in this sense to be used as similes or allegorically. For when we speak of God and that he sees everything and when we kneel and pray to him all our terms and actions seem to be parts of a great and elaborate allegory which represents him as a human being of great power whose grace we try to win etc.

But this allegory also describes the experience which I have just referred to. For the first of them is, I believe, exactly what people were referring to when they said that God had created the world; and the experience of absolute safety has been described by saying that we feel safe in the hands of God. Third experience of the same kind is that of feeling guilty and again this was described by the phrase that God disapproves of our conduct.

Thus in ethical and religious language we seem constantly to be using similes. But a simile must be the simile for something. And if I can describe a fact by means of a simile I must also be able to drop the simile and to describe the facts without it. Now in our case as soon as we try to drop the simile and simply to state the facts which stand behind it, we find that there are no such facts. And so, what at first appeared to be simile now seems to be mere nonsense.

Now the three experiences which I have mentioned to you (and I could have added others) seem to those who have experienced them, for instance to me, to have in some sense an intrinsic, absolute value. But when I say they are experiences, surely, they are facts; they have taken place then and there, lasted a certain definite time and consequently are describable. And so from what I have said some minutes ago I must admit it is nonsense to say that they have absolute value. And I will make my point still more acute by saying 'It is the paradox that an experience, a fact, should seem to have supernatural value.'

Now there is a way in which I would be tempted to meet this paradox. Let me first consider, again, our first experience of wondering at the existence of the world and let me describe it in a slightly different way; we all know the like of which we have never yet seen. Now suppose such an event happened. Take the case that one of you suddenly grew a lion's head and began to roar. Certainly that would be as extraordinary a thing as I can imagine. Now whenever we should have recovered from our surprise, what I would suggest would be to fetch a doctor and have the case scientifically investigated and if it were not for hurting him I would have him vivisected. And where would the miracle have got to?

For it is clear that when we look at it in this way everything miraculous has disappeared; unless what we mean by this term is merely that a fact has not yet been explained by science which again means that we have hitherto failed to group this fact with others in a scientific system. This shows that it is absurd to say 'Science has proved that there are no miracles.'

The truth is that the scientific way of looking at a fact is not the way to look at it as a miracle. For imagine whatever fact you may, it is not in itself miraculous in the absolute sense of that term. For we see now that we have been using it to describe the experience of wondering at the existence of the world by saying: it is the experience of seeing the world as a miracle.

Now I am tempted to say that the right expression in language for the miracle of the existence of the world, though it is not any proposition in language, is the existence of language itself. But what then does it mean to be aware of this miracle at some times and not at other times? For all I have said by shifting the expression of the miraculous from an expression by means of language to the expression by the existence of language, all I have said is again that we cannot express what we want to express and that all we can say about the absolute miraculous remains nonsense.

Now the answer to all this will seem perfectly clear to many of you. You will say: Well, if certain experiences constantly tempt us to attribute a quality to them which we call absolute or ethical value and importance, this simply shows that by these words we don't mean nonsense, that after all what we mean by saying that an experience has absolute value is just a fact like other facts and that all it comes to is that we have not yet succeeded in finding the correct logical analysis of what we mean by our ethical and religious expressions. Now when this is urged against me I at once see clearly, as it were in a flash of light, not only that no description that I can think of would do to describe what I mean by absolute value, but that I would reject every significant description that anybody could possibly suggest, ab initio, on the ground of its significance.

That is to say: I see now that these nonsensical expressions were not nonsensical because I had not yet found the correct expressions, but that their nonsensicality was their very essence. For all I wanted to do with them was just to go beyond the world and that is to say beyond significant language. My whole tendency and, I believe, the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language.

This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless. Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it.

Thoughts, aphorisms, fragments. (twice updated)

I scoured through a fair amount of notes and journal entries for random thoughts that I found interesting:


The moment should be more than a means to an end— it should be an end in itself.


Religion is a means of explaining and providing a reason for occurrences that defy any observable explanation. But when sciences, history, etc. are so vast the only thing that remains is being—such a thing becomes difficult to place in a narrative, as it seems itself to be a sort of singularity.

Or: Mysticism is a means to make clear what is problematic or unknowable in one's world. When everything in one's world is accounted for, all that is left is the world itself. When, for instance, this world lacks a clear telos, a concrete religious story becomes difficult to maintain.


It takes just as much faith to be atheistic as it takes to be religious, only less imagination. To believe that this is all there is is every bit as presumptuous as believing that there is something more that remains unseen. Agnosticism requires neither faith nor imagination—only an impassive acknowledgment of subjectivity.


The reason I got into English was because I am fascinated with the idea of representing the universal through particulars. (Cultural/historical + notions of life, death, god, love, etc.... but all so inseparably stirred and interwoven into the objects of everyday experience.) Philosophy tries to go the other route, or at least a lot of the more prominent and pretentious schools do... trying to represent the particulars through the universals.

If I manage to carry my study of philosophy to its end, what poetry would there be left? (Plenty: fragmented feelings and circumstances of individuals.)


If I don't consider the past or future, the world is a very depressing place. If I consider past without future, the world is motionless. If I consider future without past, there's nowhere to go.


So... take philosophy (narrow epistemology) and a sort of clarification of language to dispose of false presuppositions and put everything out in open--that is what is in need of scrutiny-- and beyond that apply pragmatism as a secondary standard of scrutiny. Thereafter, conjectures of the unknowable can be expressed in a latitudinarian fashion provided that they function within natural theology. These different forms of worship are thereafter culturally/anthropologically different takes on the same subject.


One never reads in the news recent developments or discoveries in philosophy; it is regarded as a sort of recreational or entertainment-like field, like poetry-- subject to no verifiable certainty and no transcendental meaning.

"[T]wo warring camps [of philosophers]: the tender-minded ones who thought philosophy should aim at Significance, and the tough-minded philosophers who thought that it should aim at Truth" -Rorty

The meaning of life is living.


The experience of life is a longing, not a gratification.

One should be occupied with the process and not the destination, for life's destination is death. Life's unfolding tells a more glamorous tale. It's beauty is in becoming.

"Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death." -LW

"[I]f life is to be appreciated as a process rather than an outcome, it is completely silly to consider end results of no great matter..."



sun/moon as a deity : sun/moon as time : time as a deity



I'd prefer confusion to boredom any day.


Isn't it interesting how riveting a biography can become when you sympathize with its subject?


There's an excitement and acute awareness that arises from viewing one's current circumstances as the products of a story. With this context in mind, one feels as if on stage--as a newfound teller of the story, as a descendant of history, and as a sculptor of the future. How glorious is life under this lens?


Seduced by the brilliant colors.. or words. [painting.. or poetry.]

Dichotomy between beauty, not beauty is unacceptable; |- dichotomy between good and evil? "Beyond good and evil," just as in aesthetics?

"You get tragedy where the tree, instead of bending, breaks." -LW

Being able to draw does not for one second make me an artist.

It's interesting to view actions under the context of motivation. When I write poetry, or draw, what I am really doing a lot of the time is sulking or concentrating on me. What I do when I play videogames is waste time and expose myself to a flurry of sense-data.

What is one's motivation in doing philosophy? In writing poetry? I've eliminated the notion of beauty— it's an intangible oversimplification... What? A flustered attempt at self-expression? An assertion of the rightness of one's view of the world?


Anima mundi---every part useful to the whole, perhaps not "useful" to other parts.

"At best it [life] is but a froward child, that must be played with and humored, to keep it quiet till it falls asleep, and then the care is over." -Frederick Locker Lampson

"The human body is the best picture of the human soul." -LW

"The Tractatus is like a clock that doesn't tell the right time." -LW

Still, that every person is made in God's image is a very profound statement--albeit dependent on your understanding of what God is. The profundity, for me, comes in viewing the statement in light of a God cast as a representation of the totality of things. That is, man is made in the image of the totality of existence.


Then again, if language is a means for abstract thought, then it may be required for truly "human" thinking. But in this case, what is abstract thought? That which has no corresponding empirical situation or contextual relation? Abstract thought is what I am engaged in at this moment......

"A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes." -LW

[Life as integrity.]


The essence of critical thinking is an awareness that not every thought that runs through your mind is precious.

Don't always expect complex answers to complex questions. ...Although at my present outlook, those questions that I am referring to are not complex, as much as they are weighty.

Although I can't quite find the right words for it, logic and philosophy say very little... it is humanity and experience that are important. Philosophy, for the most part, is usually a secondhand or after-the-fact means of sorting through what happens in experience.

"Nevertheless, if we look on man's whole mental life as it exists, on the life of men that lies in them apart from their learning and science, and that they inwardly and privately follow, we have to confess that the part of it of which rationalism can give an account is relatively superficial. It is the part that has the prestige undoubtedly, for it has the loquacity, it can challenge you for proofs, and chop logic, and put you down with words. But it will fail to convince or convert you all the same, if your dumb intuitions are opposed to its conclusions. If you have intuitions at all, they come from a deeper level of your nature than the loquacious level which rationalism inhabits." -James

"The truth is that in the metaphysical and religious sphere, articulate reasons are cogent for us only when our inarticulate feelings of reality have already been impressed in favor of the same conclusion." -James

It makes little sense to view us as categorically independent individuals.

One thing that I think is terribly important, as did Dewey, was to encourage critical thinking--to plant that seed in your mind that tells you to always ask yourself if something is being done the way it needs to be done. And as this awareness flowers, so does self-efficiency. If everyone put forth the effort to always ask the world of the themselves, one couldn't help but be optimistic.


Many philosophers use the historical, cultural, or genealogical development of their subject as their basis for its construction... with regard to morals, this is a reflection of their fundamentally arbitrary nature. (Arbitrary = aesthetics are neither absolute nor innate.)


Indeed, that's often how we understand life, as a story. One event happens, then another. And after that, another, inspired by the last. And then another that was completely unexpected. We understand our lives, our cultures, our societies as ongoing stories. I was born in a small Midwestern town, I grew up, I got a degree in..... I married, had kids, worked for so-and-so many years.... retired... passed away. All stories; all understood under the guise of progress and temporality.


When all is said and done, one cannot be austere.

Another passing thought: that if the music was in some way augmenting my mood, I could someday go without it. At the moment the songs are like training wheels that can later be discarded, and my optimism can continue without the aid of a soundtrack.

One last batch of Wittgenstein quotes

"The limits of my language means the limits of my world."

"If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world."

"Like everything metaphysical, the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language."

"The essential thing about metaphysics: it obliterates the distinction between factual and conceptual investigations."

"The logic of the world is prior to all truth and falsehood."

"Logic takes care of itself; all we have to do is to look and see how it does it."

"It is one of the chief skills of the philosopher not to occupy himself with questions which do not concern him."

"Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language."

"Philosophy is like trying to open a safe with a combination lock: each little adjustment of the dials seems to achieve nothing, only when everything is in place does the door open."

"The real discovery is the one which enables me to stop doing philosophy when I want to. The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question."

i. Quotes and aphorisms
ii. Random accumulated thoughts and quotations
iii. "..." 3
iv. "..." 2
v. What's left of metaphysics

Description and transcendence [draft]

Note: This was the start of two other (much longer) posts, Philosophy as such and The entertainment value of metaphysics. I was browsing through some old drafts, and thought this one was interesting enough in its own right to deserve being posted.

--

Last week I was browsing the Oxford University Press website to see if Jesse Prinz's The Emotional Construction of Morals was out yet in the U.S. (it isn't/wasn't) when I stumbled across a book with a most peculiar title: The Riddles of Existence by Earl Conee and Theodore Sider.
1. Oxford University Press: The Riddles of Existence

This really says it all (click for a larger view):



One thing that seemed particularly odd about this is that metaphysics is described as one of the deepest sorts of intellectual thought, yet "nothing is resolved." In lieu of any progress or conclusions from metaphysics, entertainment value is provided. There is supposedly "fun" in trying to indefinitively tackle the biggest of life's questions, these riddles of existence.

...

Again, I emphasize:

"Philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything.—Since Everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain. For what is hidden, for example, is of no use to us." —Ludwig Wittgenstein

Or more bluntly:

"PHILOSOPHY, n. A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing." —Ambrose Bierce

I'll carry this a few steps further:

1. Experience contains no paradoxes and no contradictions. These can only occur between statements and propositions—that is, in words. (The word 'contradiction' does well to emphasize my point: contra dicere would roughly translate to "to say against".)


2. There's no such thing as a philosophical problem outside of the bounds of artificial and non-representational constructions of language, nor does a "philosophical problem" or "riddle of existence" have any practical implications. [seducing]

Quotes and aphorisms

Some interesting quotes, thoughts, and aphorisms that have been filling up a text file on my desktop for the last several months:

"Some peacocks hide their peacock's tails from all eyes—and call that their pride." —Nietzsche

"The feeling of confidence. How is this manifested in behavior?" —Ludwig Wittgenstein (hereafter 'LW')

"...I told him I had reviewed a book by Dr. C. E. M. Joad called Teach Yourself Philosophy. Wittgenstein assumed it would have been a bad book and hoped I had not lost the opportunity of saying so. I said that I had said so; but that I had lent the book to a policeman of my acquaintance who had read it aloud to his wife cover to cover. They had both been greatly charmed: "It opened up a new world to me," the policeman said. This very much interested Wittgenstein and after a moment he said: "Yes, I understand how that is. Have you ever seen a child make a grotto with leaves and stones and candles--and then creep in out of the world into a world he has made for himself? It was the grotto that your policeman friend liked to creep into."
—Karl Britton, "Portrait of a Philosopher"

"A main cause of a philosophical disease--an unbalanced diet: one nourishes one's thinking with only one kind of example." —LW

"Language is an instrument. Its concepts are instruments." —LW

"People say again and again that philosophy doesn't really progress, that we are still occupied with the same philosophical problems as were the Greeks. But the people who say this don't understand why it has to be so. It is because our language has remained the same and keeps seducing us into asking the same questions." —LW

"Reading the Socratic dialogues one has the feeling: what a frightful waste of time! What's the point of these arguments that prove nothing and clarify nothing?" —LW

Philosophy hasn't made progress? — If somebody scratches the spot where he has an itch, do we have to see some progress? Isn't it genuine scratching otherwise, or genuine itching?" —LW

"If people did not sometimes do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done." —LW

"The more abstract the truth you wish to teach, the more you must still seduce the senses to it." —Nietzsche

"You must say what you really think as though no one, not even you, could overhear it." —LW

"Ambition is the death of thought." —LW

We are not analysing a phenomenon (e.g. thought) but a concept (e.g. that of thinking), and therefore the use of a word. So it may look as if what we were doing were Nominalism. Nominalists make the mistake of interpreting all words as names, and so of not really describing their use, but only, so to speak, giving a paper draft on such a description." —LW

"To say that men and women should not inject their "personal morality" into public-policy debates is a practical absurdity; our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition."
—Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope

"The running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless. Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it." —LW

"The meaning of life, i.e. the meaning of the world, we can call God… To pray is to think about the meaning of life…To believe in a God means to understand the question about the meaning of life… To believe in God means to see that life has a meaning." —LW

"Because it is in pain that we find the meaning of life..." (from Pan's Labyrinth)

"The human body is the best picture of the human soul."  —LW

Frustration may arise from one's actions from time to time, but it is better to struggle as you climb the ladder than to look down imperiously. As much as these moments may seem undesirable and elicit discomfort, it is better this way. One who looks down from ahigh has settled on what there is in the world, and is committing oneself to a particular hierarchy. But wouldn't things be better if one actively appended one's worldview so that the top was never reached? Or would most prefer that such things be reached and discarded rather than perpetually out of reach--would most prefer the outcome rather than the process?

One cannot live for outcomes. These have a superficial quality--and always the same too: anticipation and satisfaction. Instead, one should live for the process of becoming. This may seem hard to do, but it seems as though life is better structured for this.

"[The tolerance of Ambiguity is the cornerstone of adulthood.]"
(I haven't been able to find the actual quote. My poetry professor was quoting Jung, I think.)

"Aim at being loved without being admired." —LW

"Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness." —LW

"The way to solve the problem you see in life is to live in a way that will make what is problematic disappear." —LW

"Love's the breath a Life still lifts when Life is finally over with."

"Life's the death a Love still gets when Love is finally over with."

i. Random accumulated thoughts and quotations

"..." 3

A student in a mood of deep depression, for which he felt that Wittgenstein's philosophy was in some way responsible, went to Wittgenstein and explained: "Life seems to me pretty pointless and futile. In a few years I shall have ceased to exist. And it's no consolation that human life will go on. It may be millions of years yet, but in time the sun will cool down, life will become extinct, and it will all be as if life had never been." Wittgenstein replied: "Suppose you were sitting in a room, facing a door which is completely black, and saying to yourself sombrely over and over again, 'That door is black! That door is black!' After a bit you could easily begin to feel miserable about it, and to feel that it was the blackness of the door that was the melancholy fact which had produced your gloom."

—From "Wittgenstein as a Teacher" by D. A. T. Gasking and A. C. Jackson in Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Man and His Philosophy

2/16 update:

"Life is a message scribbled in the dark."

Random accumulated thoughts and quotations

Below are some thoughts and quotes that have accumulated in my sticky note widget over the last week or two... the newest are up top, so the order may be clearer if it is read from the bottom. The quotations that are not cited are taken out of context from Daniel Hutto's Wittgenstein and the End of Philosophy.

"Philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything. - Since Everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain. For what is hidden, for example, is of no use to us." -Ludwig Wittgenstein

"The first step is to free ourselves from philosophical myths, the second is not to create new ones."

"...the ultimate paradox of thought: to want to discover something that thought itself cannot think." -Johannes Climacus (one of Søren Kierkegaard's pseudonyms)

"For philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday." -Ludwig Wittgenstein

--In my view, a fair reason for rejecting purely secular humanistic ethical systems is that they are anthropocentric. A desire to transcend this (esp. the claim that value arises due to human need) and to value being in totality is what may lead one to search for God (i.e. a leap from subjectivity to objectivity), even if that is without the assurance of validation. --Epistemological barriers become irrelevant in such cases. That something cannot be known does not make the possibilites of that something irrelevant.

"When we do philosophy we are like savages, primitive people, who hear the expressions of civilized men, put a false interpretation on them, and then draw the queerest conclusions from it." -Ludwig Wittgenstein

"All theology is anthropology" -Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach

Objectivity and subjectivity: the world and the subject are both elements of the same narrative.

Action and inaction are equally active activities, inaction does not remove the aspect of participation.

"Philosophy can at best clarify and make perspicuous that which is already known to us."

Freedom only exists from an internal perspective–-from an external perspective a polyvalent web of propensities and circumstances ultimately determines the conduct of the individual; although from an internal perspective the individual is still responsible for decision-making (even if it is influenced by external phenomena).

"..." 2

"How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life!"

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value