[lit-ideas] Re: Seeing What Cannot Be Spoken - The Dish | By Andrew Sullivan - The Daily Beast
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 3 Sep 2012 11:55:14 +0100 (BST)
________________________________
From: John McCreery <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
>Thought some here might find this interesting.
http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/09/seeing-what-cannot-be-spoken.html>
Thanks to John. In a previous post I mentioned that my 'key tenet' view is
compatible with Monk, who in the url above is quoted:-
"It was fundamental to Wittgenstein’s thinking – both in his early work
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and in his later work Philosophical
Investigations – that not everything we can see and therefore not everything we
can mentally grasp can be put into words. In the Tractatus, this appears as the
distinction between what can be said and what has
to be shown. “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,”
runs the famed last sentence of the book but, as Wittgenstein made clear in
private conversation and correspondence, he believed those things
about which we have to be silent to be the most important. (Compare this with
the logical positivist Otto Neurath, who, echoing Wittgenstein,
declared: “We must indeed be silent – but not about anything.”)
To grasp these important things, we need not to reason verbally, but
rather to look more attentively at what lies before us. “Don’t think,
look!” Wittgenstein urges in Philosophical Investigations.
Philosophical confusion, he maintained, had its roots not in the
relatively superficial thinking expressed by words but in that deeper
territory studied by Freud, the pictorial thinking that lies in our
unconscious and is expressed only involuntarily in, for example, our
dreams, our doodles and in our “Freudian slips”. “A picture held us
captive,” Wittgenstein says in the Investigations, and it is,
he thinks, his job as a philosopher not to argue for or against the
truth of this or that proposition but rather to delve deeper and
substitute one picture for another. In other words, he conceived it as
his task to make us, or at least to enable us, to see things
differently."
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>
>(for some reason my comments are now coming in italics and my attempts to
>change that haven't worked):
>
>
>Though compatible with the 'key tenet' view, what this stops short of is
>making absolutely clear that the later philosophy, like the earlier, is about
>what can only be shown not said. In previous posts I have quoted from Monk,
>particularly excerpts from his "The Duty of Genuius" biography which indicate
>how seriously the 'later' W still took the idea of showing not saying - to the
>point that W modified the Tractatus approach [of saying explicit propositions
>that say nothing with sense but which nevertheless show the truth] for an
>approach in Investigations of saying various things that do not explicitly say
>but implicitly show that the sense of language is never said by language but
>can only be shown.
>
>
>
>It is against this background that we must consider the job of the philosopher
>as W sees it. It is not to captivate us with another picture such as the one
>that holds us captive but to free us from the captivity of some particular
>"picture" of the sense of language [which may lead us astray as to the actual
>sense of language] by showing how the sense of whatever is in question can be
>understood better or alternatively to one suggested by a given "picture".
>
>
>
>As the sense of language is never said in language, for W there is no
>"picture" of how language has sense that can be said in language: and W shows
>this first in relation to St.Augustine's object-name "picture" of language,
>which W shows does not say and cannotsay the sense of language, even where
>language is being used to name objects - for that 'name-object sense' always
>depends on much more than what is said when we use language in the sense of
>naming objects, it depends on matters that can only be shown. Later and
>likewise, W shows that the "picture" of language having sense through
>rule-following does not say and cannot say the sense of language, even where a
>rule is being followed:- for no 'rule' ever says its own sense - its sense can
>only be shown not said. This is the point of W's lengthy discussion of
>teaching someone the sense of a formula, one that might appear cast-iron its
>is 'rule-likeness', such as 'Continually add 2 to the sequence'; -
and W makes the same point or a similar point, as he describes it in the
Preface, in relation to the sequence of numbers of zero to ten: for this
sequence also does not say its own sense, as becomes clear when we envisage
teaching someone the sequence who does not grasp the sequence as we do - the
most we can do is try to show them the sense we have in mind, but that sense is
never said in anything we may say. Otherwise the sense of something like
'Continually add 2' or '1,2,3,4...etc.' - were it said in its own statement -
could never be variously understood or misunderstood, for anyone who understood
what was said would ipso facto understand its sense. W shows this is not the
case: knowing that 'xyz' has been said is not the same as knowing the sense of
'xyz'. And showing this is part of W showing, not saying, that the sense of
language is never said in language but can only be shown - part of W's lifelong
focus on understanding the "logic of our
language" when considered in terms of the "limits of language".
>
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>But of course my saying this just shows how predictable my posts are.
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>Donal
>Awaiting Tempest
>Sunny London
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