[lit-ideas] Re: Wittgenstein and the Metaphysics of Experience

  • From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Tue, 10 Nov 2009 19:42:41 +0000 (GMT)

> > If utterer utters "I die" he is alive, i.e. he is expressing something
> > false.

No. If he is dead, and the dead cannot speak, then to say "I am dead" is to say 
something false (akin to saying "I am unable to speak"). But to say "I die", or 
better "I am dying", is not to say "I am dead" but rather that "I am now in the 
process of dying", usually with the implication that the completion of this 
process will occur in the foreseeable future. (Foreseeable future is open-ended 
enough. If someone with a year to live because of terminal illness says "I am 
dying" we don't say "Rubbish, you're only dying when you've a week or so to 
go"; and we do not say they spoke falsely even if they recover fully, for that 
recovery would not mean they were not dying merely that this process of dying 
can sometimes be abated, temporarily).  

> > Only "I will die" or "I shall die" (as Grice preferred) can express a > > 
> > true judgement.

Rubbish and Robert Paul is right to attack this stipulation, as follows

> And who is Grice (well, I actually know WHO he is) to tell
> ordinary people how they can or cannot speak? The argument
> here seems to be pretty much like Malcolm's, in Dreaming
> [1959], that one cannot truly, or meaningfully, say,
> 'I am asleep,' although Malcolm at least gives an argument,
> as opposed to merely stipulating how words are used: for
> that seems to be what's at issue here, the use of words, and
> not the possibility of experience.

the stipulation (still on computer without capital 't') also renders W's 
thought banal: i.e. it is wrong, W says merely, to speak as if you are dead 
when you are alive. 

Here's a suggestion for what "Death is not an event in life" might be, on a 
less banalising view, getting at:-

While death is a fact of which we have knowledge and experience [through 
witnessing others' death etc.], *our* death does not occur within our life but 
beyond our life. As the boundary of a visual field is not part of that field, 
death is not part of the field of life. the upshot is that the sense of our 
life is not given by death. In this sense, we do not live to experience death 
i.e. it is not the purpose of our life, or its 'sense', that we die, anymore 
than the purpose or sense of a visual field lies in its boundary. We can only 
make sensible statements about what is the case from within the field of life, 
and so our attitude to death must be that it is one of those things about which 
we must pass over in silence: there is no sensible point in philosophising 
about it, for to do so is to attempt to say something about something that lies 
beyond the conditions of sense.

Btw Wittgenstein made this very clear to me in a brief chat down the pub. 
Admittedly he didn't use the expression "metaphysics of experience". And, as he 
was somewhat shirty, I never raised the point.

Donal
Others may be glad that this computer also does not do italicising etc.
Loving the Beatles' remasters today





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