[Wittrs] Re: Stuart Mirsky's Review of McGuinness' Young Ludwig
- From: CJ <castalia@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 30 Sep 2009 16:17:35 -0400
On Sep 30, 2009, at 3:18 PM, Sean Wilson wrote:
.. You know, it's funny to hear how philosophy departments --
particularly those emphasizing analytic philosophy-- train their
students to understand Wittgenstein. What they do is invent an ISM
and throw Wittgenstein into this or that ISM. It seems to me that
Wittgenstein is the quintessential philosopher who could only
properly be understood by biography. And that one would never
subscribe to any theory about Wittgenstein without having a
scholarly account of two things: (1) his life; and (2) his ideas.
If there are two great deficiencies in people who claim to know
something about Wittgenstein, it most often is not knowing about his
life and not really "getting" his latter-day philosophy.
Absolutely, Sean.
It is astonishing to me how many teachers skip over the biography
with their students and then leave their students stranded "at sea"
trying to bridge the apparent 'gulf" between early and late
Wittgenstein.
Partly, they do this out of "fear" since to acknowledge the full force
of the "storm" within Wittgenstein which caused his turn from
Tractatus to Wittgenstein would be most threatening to the pompous and
for the most part useless "form of life' which they exemplify with
their own shoddy academic language game.
And partly, their reluctance to do is based on a kind of
"thoughtlessness" which is rampant today everywhere, insofar as they
simply cannot understand the extent and degree to commitment
dedication and due diligence which is required in any professional,
creative pursuit. In the precious environment of a philosophy, much
like a zoo whose residents are tame to the point of not having any
affinity for surviving in life outside their cages, the "teachers"
don't have or have lost that courage to live both their "ideas' and
their "lives' in tandem and certainly can't comprehend that
Wittgenstein did so. Does anyone ever hear the word "ethics"
mentioned as part of his evolution or as part of their vocubulary at
all.
Wittgenstein's "ideas" and the evolution of those ideas (nor really a
quantum revolutionary change) but a progressive emancipation over his
lifetime are understandable only as his seminars were, in terms of
dialogue mostly with himself and as his books are written, again based
on dialogue with himself. During his life, except for a brief period
in his youth, when he might have been thought impressionable and
looked to Frege and Russell, there was mostly no one for him to regard
as a peer, and so his ideas of necessity were simmered endlessly in
his own stew, and that bubbling was evident only in the context in his
biography, as that simmering bubbled over into his eccentric life
events.......
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