[Wittrs] more re Otto Weininger

kirby urner <kirby.urner@xxxxxxxxx> · Sat, 14 Jul 2012 18:04:03 -0700

Referring back to an older thread:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/WittrsEX/message/4753

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Weininger

> ** there's some thought Hermine Wittgenstein was at Otto's funeral and
> might have taken her younger brother.  In any case, it's known that
> they corresponded about his writings.  I've come to see him as a young
> "shock jock".  Today, Otto might have had his own radio program.
>

I've been thinking more about Wittgenstein's appreciation for
Otto Weininger.  If you've attuned yourself to Youtube culture,
you know of the "Fail" genre, wherein collectors show attempts
at fame and glory gone wrong (that's a subgenre actually, as we
fail in so many many ways).

http://youtu.be/rKq8-vyJqZg  (random example)

I think Wittgenstein admired Otto for a tremendous fail, a wipe out.

In today's world, Wittgenstein might've had similarly amused
appreciation for say, Charlie Sheen:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QS0q3mGPGg  (you Go guy)

Wittgenstein could appreciate, empathized with, the sense of
some crystal core in language, the formal system.  We have a
kind of hunger for those, and posit their existence at the basis
of our institutions.  We want them to be there.

Am I right in connecting the linguistic turn to Nietzsche's turning
on language?  We might stand to gain by not believing what we
think so much, by creating, then critiquing, "the ego" or "cogito"
(Descartes' was an early model, not as many bells and whistles,
stripped down to bare bones).

Freud and friends gave us a whole medical / clinical sounding
way to talk about what was not getting talked about.  The ego is
repressing.  What is it repressing?  I'm so glad you asked.

To be self critical is like having a built in parity check, to where
now we've even gotten comfortable with the idea of language as
a tool, less a "vehicle for truth" or whatever the ancestors thought
they knew.  Yet there's still something to truth in the sense of
consistency, fewer / smaller holes in the stories -- tighter
storytelling basically?

More meanderings on that, against a contemporary backdrop:

http://mybizmo.blogspot.com/2012/07/to-tell-truth.html (re Nietzsche
and 'real politik')

Some similar themes:

http://worldgame.blogspot.com/2012/01/lights-camera-action.html  (see
Paragraph 2)

Kirby

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[Wittrs] more re Otto Weininger

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