Day 118
*continuation from Day 117*
... but our dear friend Wittgenstein would be ashamed for the second of my two lines of reasoning about understanding nature. While the man certainly was a realist, and was also (under my interpretation anyway) a believer that the natural world is in some sense nomological, we're making a grave error when we mix together understanding with communicative ability. That is, it is an easy but terrible mistake to say that if we understand something, we ought to be able to commuicate it. Perhaps, even, the other way around as well.
My hope was to excerpt a few parts from my Wittgenstein final essay, but unfortunately the computer lab uses a newer version of Word that doesn't translate into my version here at home, so the email attachment (where I save important documents, because I don't trust my own computer not to die spontaneously) will not open into anything other than illegible symbols and gobbely gook. How ironic.
I'll just write. Understanding, as Wittgenstein has it, is a particular state of mind that has an inherently subjective nature (read: of the subject, not for). As such, our scientific and philosophical work, inasmuch as it is analytic work with the idea of mapping and translating our perceptions into rules and structures of language, is fruitless when the attempt is made to hook the work up with what understanding is, or ought to be. "Every rule is an interpretation," he so boldly states in the latter pages of Philosophical Investigations. This pushes new and in my mind terrifying questions when it comes to satisfying our needs as human pattern seekers, and Wittgenstein gives only the answers that he feels he is able to give.
And yes, if anybody noticed a connection, Davidson was very much inspired by Wittgenstein, particularly in his later years.
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Shakespeare has an uncany ability to remain both beautiful and stunningly right throughout time. What I like to think of as good art, nay, great art, is that which persists in such a way that it captures truths of the conditions of humanity and aesthetic beauty in spite of the transience of culture. Traditional and even moral norms change, and with the extinction of the old we also lose most of the art, music, and literature of the time. Great art is immune to the zeitgeist, for it has, meaningfully, something irrevocably to do with equally immune aspects of its progenitor.
The shadow of this figure is marketing, which by very definition is then ugly; it is a parasitic creature that morphs as do the transient tastes of its hosts in order to survive. It is the antithesis of art.
"All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts..."
We do play our little roles. I often feel tremendously bound by the obligations imposed by the interplay of social relationships. The notion of political correctness means very little to me; all I hear when the phrase is used is an expression of cultural context, and constructed emotional paradigms.
We all have a few 'things' that we latch on to as causes, or proclivities, or primary concerns about the world. From there all kinds of collective cultural intentional states are built up (read: race, gender, class, nation, religion) that cannot for the life of us be questioned unless we strike at them with the right, or at least properly worded questions.
The wrong questions and statements are never taken seriously, because they do not fit into the established discourse of criticism, which in itself supports the very thing being criticized, much the same way a 'designated protest area' defeats the purpose of the protest. Do we, for example, really expect race to become a non-issue in the world when we use racial boundaries in discourse about the possibility of its dissolution? The humanists ask this question rhetorically.
And feminism responds rather un-rhetorically with a resounding yes! To deny race is to deny a harmful construct; true or not, it exists in certain relevent ways that must be recognized. But not only recognized, but celebrated! The construct of race has the capacity to empower, and it ought to be exploited very much to that end.
All while being an artifice.
This was my outward cry during my short stint in a class on feminism. No more than we can rely on our enemy's enemy as an ally, we cannot simply utilize a false construct to meet our ends. Suffering is often systematic, and yes, if the only way to end suffering is to end the system which produces it (which I believe to be a truism), then there will be residualities. To bolster the influence of the formerly oppressed race(s) and gender by pushing a reversed inequality of opportunity, we're only reinvigorating the system which caused the inequality in the first place.
As the fiery Christopher Hitchens notes: "falsity is a subdivision of perniciousness."
But my cry fell upon ears either deaf or beligerently offended. My alleged social role was used against me. "Well of course as a white male you'd believe that," I was told. The contradictory nature of the imposed discourse - the credulity of it all - churned deeply inside me like an unfamiliar and unforgiving meal. But we are fleshy creatures, and the barriers raised by the emotions and intellect are very near real as vertical steel bars.
Were the horizontal black stripes inmates once wore a symbol? Were they intended to push once and for all the idea that there is a fundamental contradiction between the man and the escape from prison into the outside world?
But then, I ask of anybody to tell me the difference between an inmate and a normal 9-5 menial labourer in middle age. The job is all they have short of the welfare net, so quitting isn't an option. It is too late to re-train, and times are always too tight to make any change in lifestyle other than downward. But more deeply, the labourer does not see the world as offering a set of options, because the comfort of habit has veiled so many opportunities in exchange for the warmth of 'the usual.' Adventures are, by the same token, often very cold and dissociative. The armchair, the good pillow, the favorite spoon; they push us away on occasion and we go, but we always want them back once we've been gone for long enough.
Is this not incarseration? Perhaps I am only grasping at straws; making the trivial point that we are bodily, mortal animals first and foremost.
But that's not what we fancy ourselves to be, and when we inculcate ourselves with fantastical notions of the spirit and of God we end up in a maze of mirrors even when the most clear aesthetic landscape makes itself apparent. That is my belief anyway.
I imagine hell to be a game of shapes, like child might play. I have many triangles and circles, but only square holes to occupy.
I cannot imagine heaven to be any different than earth, without also imagining humans to either be alone and infinitely separate from each other, or inhuman altogether.
... but our dear friend Wittgenstein would be ashamed for the second of my two lines of reasoning about understanding nature. While the man certainly was a realist, and was also (under my interpretation anyway) a believer that the natural world is in some sense nomological, we're making a grave error when we mix together understanding with communicative ability. That is, it is an easy but terrible mistake to say that if we understand something, we ought to be able to commuicate it. Perhaps, even, the other way around as well.
My hope was to excerpt a few parts from my Wittgenstein final essay, but unfortunately the computer lab uses a newer version of Word that doesn't translate into my version here at home, so the email attachment (where I save important documents, because I don't trust my own computer not to die spontaneously) will not open into anything other than illegible symbols and gobbely gook. How ironic.
I'll just write. Understanding, as Wittgenstein has it, is a particular state of mind that has an inherently subjective nature (read: of the subject, not for). As such, our scientific and philosophical work, inasmuch as it is analytic work with the idea of mapping and translating our perceptions into rules and structures of language, is fruitless when the attempt is made to hook the work up with what understanding is, or ought to be. "Every rule is an interpretation," he so boldly states in the latter pages of Philosophical Investigations. This pushes new and in my mind terrifying questions when it comes to satisfying our needs as human pattern seekers, and Wittgenstein gives only the answers that he feels he is able to give.
And yes, if anybody noticed a connection, Davidson was very much inspired by Wittgenstein, particularly in his later years.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Shakespeare has an uncany ability to remain both beautiful and stunningly right throughout time. What I like to think of as good art, nay, great art, is that which persists in such a way that it captures truths of the conditions of humanity and aesthetic beauty in spite of the transience of culture. Traditional and even moral norms change, and with the extinction of the old we also lose most of the art, music, and literature of the time. Great art is immune to the zeitgeist, for it has, meaningfully, something irrevocably to do with equally immune aspects of its progenitor.
The shadow of this figure is marketing, which by very definition is then ugly; it is a parasitic creature that morphs as do the transient tastes of its hosts in order to survive. It is the antithesis of art.
"All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts..."
We do play our little roles. I often feel tremendously bound by the obligations imposed by the interplay of social relationships. The notion of political correctness means very little to me; all I hear when the phrase is used is an expression of cultural context, and constructed emotional paradigms.
We all have a few 'things' that we latch on to as causes, or proclivities, or primary concerns about the world. From there all kinds of collective cultural intentional states are built up (read: race, gender, class, nation, religion) that cannot for the life of us be questioned unless we strike at them with the right, or at least properly worded questions.
The wrong questions and statements are never taken seriously, because they do not fit into the established discourse of criticism, which in itself supports the very thing being criticized, much the same way a 'designated protest area' defeats the purpose of the protest. Do we, for example, really expect race to become a non-issue in the world when we use racial boundaries in discourse about the possibility of its dissolution? The humanists ask this question rhetorically.
And feminism responds rather un-rhetorically with a resounding yes! To deny race is to deny a harmful construct; true or not, it exists in certain relevent ways that must be recognized. But not only recognized, but celebrated! The construct of race has the capacity to empower, and it ought to be exploited very much to that end.
All while being an artifice.
This was my outward cry during my short stint in a class on feminism. No more than we can rely on our enemy's enemy as an ally, we cannot simply utilize a false construct to meet our ends. Suffering is often systematic, and yes, if the only way to end suffering is to end the system which produces it (which I believe to be a truism), then there will be residualities. To bolster the influence of the formerly oppressed race(s) and gender by pushing a reversed inequality of opportunity, we're only reinvigorating the system which caused the inequality in the first place.
As the fiery Christopher Hitchens notes: "falsity is a subdivision of perniciousness."
But my cry fell upon ears either deaf or beligerently offended. My alleged social role was used against me. "Well of course as a white male you'd believe that," I was told. The contradictory nature of the imposed discourse - the credulity of it all - churned deeply inside me like an unfamiliar and unforgiving meal. But we are fleshy creatures, and the barriers raised by the emotions and intellect are very near real as vertical steel bars.
Were the horizontal black stripes inmates once wore a symbol? Were they intended to push once and for all the idea that there is a fundamental contradiction between the man and the escape from prison into the outside world?
But then, I ask of anybody to tell me the difference between an inmate and a normal 9-5 menial labourer in middle age. The job is all they have short of the welfare net, so quitting isn't an option. It is too late to re-train, and times are always too tight to make any change in lifestyle other than downward. But more deeply, the labourer does not see the world as offering a set of options, because the comfort of habit has veiled so many opportunities in exchange for the warmth of 'the usual.' Adventures are, by the same token, often very cold and dissociative. The armchair, the good pillow, the favorite spoon; they push us away on occasion and we go, but we always want them back once we've been gone for long enough.
Is this not incarseration? Perhaps I am only grasping at straws; making the trivial point that we are bodily, mortal animals first and foremost.
But that's not what we fancy ourselves to be, and when we inculcate ourselves with fantastical notions of the spirit and of God we end up in a maze of mirrors even when the most clear aesthetic landscape makes itself apparent. That is my belief anyway.
I imagine hell to be a game of shapes, like child might play. I have many triangles and circles, but only square holes to occupy.
I cannot imagine heaven to be any different than earth, without also imagining humans to either be alone and infinitely separate from each other, or inhuman altogether.
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