[Wittrs] Re: Wittgenstein's meaning is use
- From: Rajasekhar Goteti <rgoteti@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 1 Oct 2009 10:55:41 +0530 (IST)
LW may be understood whoever have got understanding of grammar in depth.How we
acquired syllables and symbols and how we could utilize in response to what and
so on is forgotten and being carried away by words such as mind,consciousness
etc.Forgotten activity got high lightened by LW.thank you
sekhar
--- On Thu, 1/10/09, CJ <castalia@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
From: CJ <castalia@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [Wittrs] Re: Wittgenstein's meaning is use
To: wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Thursday, 1 October, 2009, 9:22 AM
n Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 6:49 PM, BruceD <blroadies@yahoo. com> wrote:
>
> --- In Wittrs@yahoogroups. com, CJ <wittrs@...> wrote:
>>
>> From Wittgenstein
>>
>> When I think in language, there aren't 'meanings' going through my
>> mind in addition to the verbal expressions: the language is itself the
>> vehicle of thought.
>
> Is this an empirical discovery? Is it a claim to knowledge? Can it be
> true or false? Perhaps it is true for some folks and not others, some
> cultures.... or is this statement of our esssence?
>
Bruce has raised a series of questions, and although several writers have
sought to "answer" his questions, I myself would like to look at the
"questions" that his asking of these questions raises, and perhaps my answer
will be consistent with some of those answers already presented.
Surely, we must start with the fact that the Investigations is written/put
together quite unlike any other printed matter to which any of us have ever
been exposed. Not only the "concepts" but the form of it, which mirrors to
some extent how I imaged Wittgenstein's legendary Cambridge seminars went...in
a dialogue between W and himself and sometimes including a third or fourth
person as well as the two W's. There was a purpose to all this...and it is not
just dismissible as an eccentricity of Wittgenstein's. And, importantly, the
lessons of these seminar dialogues were not over after one such seminar of such
"therapy"
I raise these points because I am curious, when Brian or others of us have read
the Investigations how much time did it take us to read it. Did we go through
it like a sci-fi paperback. How long did it take. In my opinion, if it took
less than a year, we didn't really READ it, or certainty we did not do what it
takes to learn its lessons. Why do I say this? Not simply because it's so
deep that it takes reading over and over to get it.
Wittgenstein's "technique" as it evolved over the first half of the 20th
century, paralleled in timing and in style the development of psychoanalytic
theory during those years. If W is doing anything with us in the
Investigations it is conducting "therapy" ...and many of us have noted that and
quoted that.....but the therapy that is being conducted is very much like
psychoanalysis, where people come in deal with specific episodes and
occurrences, only Wittgensteins gives us plenty of such episodes and
occurrences to get us started, and then the analysand goes home, lives life and
finds episodes and experiences in their daily lives which mirror and echo the
episodes which are opened up and elucidated in the course of the analysis. In
the Investigations W does a lot of the work for us by bringing up universal
experiences that we all can work through with him....but not for us to "read",
or speed read, but for us to 'work through" and ponder as he gives
them,and to consider between readings as other similar or resonant experiences
arise in our lives, and then to come back to the Investigations.
And various of his statements (such as the one quoted in Brendan's email are
akin to the occasional "interpretations" that the analyst will make after the
elucidation of experiences or to punctuate their presentation and these
statements are not meant to be scientific (empirical )assertions or
pronouncements of some ideology but "interpretations" which rephrase and
adumbrate the experiences the various forms of life or language games which W
and the reader have just gone through.
And then the "therapy" goes on, further highlighting of episodes we all know in
our lives..and THEN the reader taking home the work of those pages and doing
their own work in their daily lives, when similar or related episodes are now
recognized by the reader as arising and the regularity and frequency of such
episodes is noted. And then back to the book for more dialogue and occasional
"interpretation".
This is why that quote and other quotes from Wittgenstein have their "standing"
and their "merit". To look at them in isolation and to take them as empirical
or ideological or otherwise "provable" outside the life and the form of life to
which they refer is to miss the point, to miss everything.
The question is how do we have to "read" and take in the Investigations in
order to say that we have "read it" and how we have to do the 'work", the
interpretative ongoing work of dialogue with W and then dialogue with ourselves
as it occurs in our lives, between readings a few pages here and there. If we
do that, we cannot and will not ask those questions. And as W says elsewhere
(very roughly and, sorry, I cannot give you the page numbers), "the response to
those questions will not be an "answer" but the going away of the questions."
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