Re: [Wittrs] Note on a recent reading ('On Wittgenstein' by Hintikka)
- From: kirby urner <kirby.urner@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: "Wittgenstein's Aftermath" <wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 7 May 2012 21:24:06 -0700
> From: Übersichtlichkeit <ubersicht@xxxxxxxxx>
> Date: Sun, May 6, 2012 at 8:12 AM
> Subject: Re: [Wittrs] Note on a recent reading ('On Wittgenstein' by Hintikka)
> To: kirby.urner@xxxxxxxxx
>
>
> Please forward to Wittrs, if you will...
>
> I want to suggest that Wittgenstein would have had a far more subtle
> view of happiness than the course, banal, self-satisfied enjoyment or
> contentment that passes for "happiness" in much popular discourse.
>
Having been listening to Sean's lectures recently, I'm inclined to
apply his Lego Theory of Meaning (LTM -- mocking the formalists,
toying with them,is recursively one of the Legos).
"Happiness" can have these bricks of "giddiness" or "frivolity", and
these may be seen as thin ice over a deeper despair or sorrow.
The picture is a dynamic one and the idea of an individual permanently
in one world or the other, frozen in eternal happiness or unhappiness,
as it were, comes across as a caricature, a mask. Real humans bounce
back and forth among states. To be frozen is to seem unreal.
"The world of the happy man" sounds like some kind of never-never
land, somewhere near Bhutan maybe. And that's how it *should* sound
-- somewhat how the Tractatus sounds as a whole: tautologous and
therefore empty of significance, less than full of it.
Let logic be what it wants to be, small and non-judgmental, like the
ticking of a clock, reliable and well wound.
Now, the reality is a mix which is to say the world is one of aspect
changes, aspect shifts, gestalt switches.
There's the fleeting sense in which "the I" dies a million times a
second, an esoteric teaching reaching towards "frequency" as a
concept.
> Recall Wittgenstein's deathbed remark that he had lived a wonderful
> life. Recall as well, "I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty
> sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves."
>
Back to the bricks: as Sean says, and as Hintakka confirms, Ludwig
was a serious man. Was he autistic. Was his dyslexia really bad?
There's the sense that someone that serious must have also been "lame"
in some way. There's another brick for us to play with.
The man who is chronically sad has "psychological problems".
In being so serious, we want our paradigm philosopher to not have
"mere" psychological problems (so shallow). He might have had some
genetic condition though.
Anyway, lots of bricks.
People are honestly unhappy and yet brave and ethically responsible,
noble, not legitimate targets for disrespect.
When we realize the world keeps shifting, and each one of us is both
the happy man and the sad one, we are less likely to judge.
> Living life with a sense of wonder and gratitude, with appreciation,
> even in the face of suffering and adversity, would - or so I take it -
> have far more to do with Wittgenstein's idea of happiness than the
> philistine view of simply having things go one's way. And one can
> surely see how keeping a sense of wonder and gratitude about the world
> would connect with morality, with happiness, and with the idea of
> inhabiting what is, in a real sense, a different world from one who is
> not appreciative.
>
Unhappy with no connotation of immoral, i.e. completely innocent
unhappiness, may be absent from some vocabularies.
Different ethnicities have their different topographies.
Kirby
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