[Wittrs] Re: Notes on Duncan Richter's essay 'Did Wittgenstein Disagree With Heidegger?'
- From: Sean Wilson <whoooo26505@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 19 Apr 2011 23:09:51 -0700 (PDT)
... I think the last premise Richter makes is the least convincing of an
otherwise very good read. I think he's actually wrong about that. If we imagine
one who held a claim to deep insight but could not see it as only a picture of
such, it would, of course, require therapy to help him see this. And this would
surely undercut the claim to "deep insight" -- for the whole point of being
"deep" is to both see the picture and appreciate what it is compared to others
that might be formed.
But, nonetheless, imagine if the picture did happen to be really, really deep.
What I have said here is that perhaps it is possible for the passionate to
reveal something unknown to the artist, though it may not be likely. I'm
thinking here of something that could be both crude and unaware in a sense, but
also brilliant at the same time. Something like, I don't know, Forrest Gump. Or
how about Gandalf being so impressed with hobbits. They could show him certain
beautiful things in their daily lives that they themselves could not see (as
such).
The only problem with the comparisons is that in each case the wonderment is
humble. But we could surely change this cinematic image, I think. What about
the
Wolverine or Clint Eastwood characters? Or what about what Jesus saw in Peter?
Now, this is digressing into character traits rather than claims to be deep
(philosophy). But I think it could translate. Surely there is an example of a
passionate individual who knew something others didn't without first knowing it
came only from a picture? In fact, I wonder if stories of faith don't purport
to
work exactly like that. Imagine one who never doubted her faith while lacking
perspective on the pictures of faith, but where, when doing so, she managed to
form a very intelligent vision for it. I wonder, is that possible?
No matter what the answer, I think this whole line of thought makes very clear
why even the Tractarian Wittgenstein found the Vienna Circle narrow, and why he
chose to read poetry to them with his back turned. Or why he scoffed at
analytics who thought science and logic to be the thing that produced the
greatest answers.
Regards and thanks.
Dr. Sean Wilson, Esq.
Assistant Professor
Wright State University
Personal Website: http://seanwilson.org
SSRN papers: http://ssrn.com/author=596860
Wittgenstein Discussion: http://seanwilson.org/wiki/doku.php?id=wittrs
----- Original Message ----
From: kirby urner <kirby.urner@xxxxxxxxx>
To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Tue, April 19, 2011 11:34:18 PM
Subject: [Wittrs] Notes on Duncan Richter's essay 'Did Wittgenstein Disagree
With Heidegger?'
This paragraph from Duncan Richter's 'Did Wittgenstein Disagree With
Heidegger?' got my attention:
"""
Joachim Schulte has written perceptively on Weininger’s reveling in
irony and paradox, but most readers seem to take him as quite in
earnest, and hence both reprehensible (because of his perceived sexism
and anti-Semitism) and negligible (because of his perceived
stupidity). Of course I cannot claim any authority on how Weininger
should be read, any more than he could on how dogs should be ‘read’,
or Heidegger could on how Being should be understood. All I can do
is quote such sentences as this: “The thought came to me (in the
spring of 1902) that the deep-sea must stand in a relationship to
crime, and I believe that in general I can still maintain that today”
(Weininger 2001, p. 97) and say that the sense of necessity and the
self-importance that apparently motivates the dating of the alleged
insight, combined with the surreal absurdity of the relationship
described, strike me not only as funny, but as funny enough that the
author could not plausibly have meant them wholly seriously. I cannot
prove that my reading is correct, and that is Wittgenstein’s point
about people who put forward similes about how the world is. Someone
so impressed by the “saintly” modesty of Kierkegaard and the
self-mockery of Weininger would hardly have been very sympathetic to
humorless and self-important claims to deep insight.
""" (pg 7)
The context here is Richter is assessing the respect various
philosophers have had for a straining in language, in a direction
somewhat orthogonal to sense-making, that nevertheless seems to do
work in an ethical dimension.
The suggestion is Wittgenstein need not be imagined as being
dismissive of such works as 'On Being and Time' simply for their being
metaphysical and difficult to make head or tale of. One could come in
and undermine the logic, if one determined the thinker was too much
under the illusion of elucidating factual content. But if said
thinker were humble enough to offer the same content as philosophy,
not obligated to be purely factual, then perhaps W would find it
meritorious -- although Duncan thinks only upon interview
(interrogation), because W really wanted to meet the actual person to
make whatever sense was to be made one-on-one (shades of Martin Buber,
as well as of psychotherapy).
Anyway, returning to the above paragraph, Richter has a hard time
attaching any meaning to this notion that "the deep-sea" and "crime" could
have some intrinsic relationship, one worthy of chronicling. Seems
like pure puffery, can't be serious.
However, lets model a strutting and straining philosopher, given an
hour upon the stage, striving to make sense, and seeming to, almost,
really do so. This guy Weininger is reaching into the depths of the
collective unconscious and coming up with: pirates, outlaws,
"buckaneers" (pun).
Shifting gears to a more recent work in the American Transcendentalist
tradition, lookie here:
"""
Gradually discovering that the networking abandonment of the voting
booth was the true cause of their claimed "overwhelming majority," the
incumbent administration, fearful of a potential rejective voting
tidal wave of the inter-networked world people, will probably try in
vain to block networking. Because networking is apolitical and
amorphous, it has no "cells" to be attacked, as did the communism of
former decades. The fearful sovereign nation politicos will find that
trying to arrest networking is like trying to arrest the waves of the
ocean.
"""
http://www.scribd.com/doc/29529182/Grunch-of-Giants-Buck-Minster-Fuller
Sounds subversive. Someone should do a word count on how many times
the word "ocean" appears (alone or with hyphen) in that little 1983-published
tome. Way high ratios, of water world to land, if that makes any sense.
Back to the Heideggerian imagery:
"""
Anyone who speaks of the opposition of being and the nothing, and of
the nothing as something primary in contrast to negation, has in mind,
I think, a picture of an island of being which is being washed by an
infinite ocean of the nothing. Whatever we throw into this ocean will
be dissolved in its water and annihilated. But the ocean itself is
endlessly restless like the waves on the sea. It exists, it is, and
we say: ‘it noths.’ In this sense even rest would be described as an
activity. But how is it possible to demonstrate to someone that this
simile is actually the correct one? This cannot be shown at all. But
if we free him from his confusion then we have accomplished what we
wanted to do for him.
"""
Is that W's voice? We're in the neighborhood: "The [preceding] is
from the relatively neglected set of remarks recorded by Schlick in
the early 1930s when he was taking dictation for a book to be
co-written by Wittgenstein and Waismann". (pg 4)
An island in a dissolving ocean, a restless sea. Vis-a-vis an
established System (allusions to Hegel, and Kierkegaard contra), the
deep-sea is negentropic. And yet is not the ocean an ecosystem in its
own right, another System? The yin and yang ring in a kind of
doubling, as we picture two countervailing principalities, a light and
dark, a white and black kingdom, like in chess, or in Go.
Where do we find such a simile most explicit? In the 'Omnidirectional
Halo' essays of R.B. Fuller, no question, especially in 'No More
Secondhand God'. The subject is introduced in terms of Descartes'
Deficit, the 720 missing degrees in any planetary body, any closed
system of self-reinforcing beliefs, any gnosis or gnu-sphere (how free
might it be?) or spell it noosphere. That missing 720 degrees is one
tetrahedron's worth, we're to notice, so in a sense we're back to the
two interpenetrating worlds of M.C. Escher. But those were
lithographs and no one treats them as "propositions" asserting matters
of fact. So perhaps Weininger’s insight, about an "other world"
(complementary to our own, but criminally different somehow, twisted,
weird), is not so off target after all.
http://britton.disted.camosun.bc.ca/escher/double_planetoid.jpg
There will be another arc to this telling, as we explore this Other
World motif, the one that subverts, that corrodes, that laps at our
Island. This Other World is likewise the world of the freak, of the
misfit, of the outcast-because-different. Shades of Octavia Butler,
and of the Church of the Subgenius (from the twisty pulpits of
which the "normals" are the demonized). This takes us to the
Alien, the cute-ugliness of ET (Spielberg). The Martian. This
also takes us to the circus, and into the world of the Geek.
Kirby
http://worldgame.blogspot.com/2007/11/about-branding.html
http://controlroom.blogspot.com/2011/03/wittgenstein-movie-review.html
(turns out my friend Trevor had already been in touch with Nabil
Shaban thanks to 'Skin Horse')
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0345935/
http://www.scribd.com/doc/21174398/Freakery-Cultural-Spectacles-of-the-Extraordinary-Body
"""
Loos famously associates ornament with crime. ‘If someone who is
tattooed dies at liberty,’ he writes, ‘it means he has died a few
years before committing a murder.’ (Loos 1975: 19)
"""
ibid. pg. 6 Forskarseminarium i filosofi 19.3 2007
Filosofiska institutionen
Åbo Akademi
http://www.flickr.com/photos/17157315@N00/5635666958/in/photostream
Free will for geeks! Support free software!
http://worldgame.blogspot.com/2007/06/nightmare-alley-movie-review.html
(re Geeks)
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