D McEvoy, in continuing his pardonable sloppy use of the language, gives us an interesting case in point--
THE METAPYS. OF EXPERIENCE
This could be many things. Wittgenstein says, "Think of the word as a kind
of tool." He also says that every analysis ends/fails at the limits of our
language--und es ist gut so--because the limits of our language are the
limits of our world. Let me give an example, from Wittgenstein:
"If I have exhausted all the explanations, I have arrived at the hard rock, and my spade bends itself backwards. I am then tempted to say: 'This is just how I operate [_handle_*].'"
That little asterisk there, or rather, by that little asterisk, please imagine the beginning of a sort of wormhole, one I am jovially tempted, or rather, have recently been jovially tempted to label the "don't-get-me-started tour." It is slippery-slope; it is abyssal. To begin with: It is hard to get a handle on the meaning, sense or uses of the German verb "handeln," behave, act, treat, haggle ["erst handeln und dann reden"--act first and talk afterwards]. To continue with (down the rabbit hole, as if arbitrarily): What is the degree of coincidentiality (I am tempted to say--Wittgenstein's "ich bin dann geneigt zu sagen"--tipping, tipping--in Anlehnung an--leaning upon, following the example of--a recent hands-on experience of the Leaning Tower of Pisa) at work when, involved in the fact that when, in looking to make a better point of whatever it is I am trying to say, I look up the expression "to get a handle on," and find _eben_, exactly, just what Wittgenstein had been talking about in the first part of the example about the exhausting of explanations--Begründungen--grounds, reasons, causes: "to get a handle on," _colloq_ understand the basis of or reason for a situation, circumstance, etc.?
Think of the word as a kind of tool, say a spade. As long as the word's uses are reasonable, acceptable, make sense, that is, as long as its language game rules rule, or the rules of such a game encounter no obstacle of denied consent to such usage, the spade is working. The ground is pliable, gives way. The spade, in showing the kind of ground in which it can work effectively, in thus defining itself, in turn defines the ground in which it can work effectively. This kind of talk, by the way, is in no way unrelated to the Heraclitean doctrine of opposites suggested, at least to me, coincidentally, by the Greek-rooted wordlet "metapys.," potentially short for both metaphysics and metapsychology, which, in turn, when capitalized, by me, by accident, with its rho (P) and upsilon (U) recalls his "panta rhein" (everything is in flux) and my metaplatypus.
What I may be trying to say is that Donal's slips are revealing, even educating. Meta-anything is not going to be a tool that Wittgenstein is going to care about. Donal could just as well have said metaplatypus, as I suggest in my subject line. The metaplatypus--whatever that would be--is just as ineffectual a tool as the word metaphysics. Donal himself loves to have things "defined in terms," but he either disingenuously or mistakenly challenges Wittgenstein or Wittgensteinians to define "in terms" things that he/they have ruled out of bounds (that of which one must remain silent--not out of religious awe, or some mystical mumbo jumbo, but because that is not the world that is everything that is the case, the world about which we can gainfully speak).
Just think "Wittgenstein's Poker." Wittgenstein, coming from a family in the business of making the steel making up the poker, would be interested in knowing how we can define the poker "in terms," even to the extent of mathematic description of the molecular and atomic structure. He was not talking about the "metaphysics of experience," but about, if you will, the physics of life, which can be discovered just by chipping away the dead rot of nonsense, such as Donal's "for one, we do live to experience death," since to say so is to misuse both the word experience and the word death. It is to make each word do the work of its opposite--to make experience also mean "not experience" and to make death "no experiencing" susceptible of experience.
There is nothing metaphysical about it, especially about what one can or cannot say about "them" (why plural? metaphysic_s_? of experience/-nts? like the doctor's patience/-nts?). Have you ever wondered why they say that someone or other has had "a near-death experience," but not "a death experience"? If they lived to tell the tale, the tale they told was not _that_ tale, by definition. It's only logical, grammatical.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Donal McEvoy" <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Wednesday, September 09, 2009 3:01 AM Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Life leads to death
So, we judge retrospectively, but we do not call the dead happy; we say that their lives were or were not happy, and as Wittgenstein says, death is not an event in life; we do not live to experience death.
Maybe. But this is an interestg view of W's apercu: I had his thought was more general: for one, we do live to experience death (not it's after-affects, obv.). He didn't say "Being dead is not an event in life". He was talking about the metapys. of experience and what can or cannot be said about them.
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