June 13 - 14, 2006
06.13.06
P.I., §329-330: “When I think in language, there aren’t ‘meanings’ going through my mind in addition to the verbal expressions: the language is itself the vehicle of thought... Is thinking a kind of speaking? One would like to say it is what distinguishes speech with thought from talking without thinking. - And so it seems to be an accompaniment of speech. A process, which may accompany something else, or can go on by itself.
Say: “Yes, this pen is blunt. Oh well, it’ll do.” First, thinking it; then without thought; then just think the thought without the words. - Well, while doing some writing I might test the point of my pen, make a face - and then go on with a gesture of resignation. - I might also act in such a way while taking various measurements that an onlooker would say I had - without words - thought: If two magnitudes are equal to a third, they are equal to one another. - But what constitutes thought here is not some process which has to accompany the words if they are not to be spoken without thought.”
I am becoming more and more conviced that Heidegger and Wittgenstein were philosophically kindred spirits. They both saw the history of philosophy as something that is fundamentally flawed, although for different reasons. For Heidegger, the tragedy was that philosophers had lost or forgotten the language of the Ancient Greeks; for Wittgenstein, the problem was that they were still using that language. For Heidegger, all of the questions of philosophy could and should be boiled down to the fundamental question of Being, or of the Meaning of Being. For Wittgenstein, all of the problems of philosophy were mistakes (were the wrong questions to be asking) caused by the bewitchment of language.
In “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” Derrida writes, “Successively, and in a regulated fashion, the center receives different forms or names. The history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of these metaphors and metonymies.” (279) Let’s keep this in mind when we follow Wittgenstein in the above passage, as he deconstructs the word-concept “thinking.”
We ask ourselves, “What is thinking?” or “Is thinking a kind of speaking?” What Wittgenstein (under the influence of Moore) wants to remind us that when we ask such a question, we are allowing the structure of language to trick us (in a sense too rough) into believing that we are asking a question that is meaningful. Asking “What is thinking?” is alike to asking “What is a dog?” only in grammatical structure. What Derrida says is that when we ask such a philosophical question, we are taking part in the historical language-game that is Western Philosophy.
Derrida: “It would be easy enough to show that the concept of structure and even the word “structure” itself are as old as episteme - that is to say, as old as Western science and Western philosophy - and that their roots thrust deep into the soil of ordinary language, into whose deepest recesses the episteme plunges in order to gather them up and to make them part of itself in a metaphorical displacement.” (278)
“Can honour set-to a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honour hath not skill in surgery, then? No. What is honour? A word. What is in that word “honour”? What is that “honour”? Air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died o’Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. ‘Tis insensible then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I’ll none of it.” - Falstaff, 1 Henry IV, 5.1.130-38
- “I meant nothing by it.”
- “Don’t worry - he didn’t mean that.”
Does this imply when we speak kiddingly or when we are intended to not be ‘taken seriously’, are sentences are meaningless? No, of course not. But there are reasons why we use the same word in these different situations. The same piece, as it were, is making different moves in the game.
06.14.06
Traditionally, it is God who reveals signs to us, i.e., makes revelations. And, traditionally, it is up to us to interpret those signs, as Sartre points out.
But when I perceive, it is only on rare and special occassions when I also interpret.
Derrida speaks of Western Philosophy as a history of metaphors and metonymies. In section 32 of Being and Time, a section which I interpret as being one of the most pragmatic parts of Heidegger’s philosophy, Heidegger still makes the claim that “that which is designated is understood as that as which we are to take the thing in question. That which is disclosed in understanding - that which is understood - is already accessible in such a way that its ‘as which’ can be made to stand out explicitly. The ‘as’ makes up the structure of the explicitness of something that is understood. It constitutes the interpretation.” H149. In the following sentence, Heidegger says that “we ‘see’ it as a table, a door, a carriage, or a bridge...”
This pragmatic theory is never fully dropped by Heidegger even when he makes what I would describe as a ‘mystical’ turn in his later writings. He is set on the view that the acts of understanding, interpreting, and articulating on the part of Being take place in terms of a ‘totality of involvements.’ He says, “In interpreting, we do not, so to speak, throw a ‘signification’ over some naked thing which is present-at-hand, we do not stick a value on it; but when something within-the-world is encountered as such, the thing in question already has an involvement which is disclosed in our understanding of the world, and this involvement is one which gets laid out by the interpretation.” (H150, and hence the necessity for Heidegger’s concept of fore-conception.)
Heidegger seems to be revealing here the influence of Nietzsche upon him - that is, that when I name an object, I am not throwing some arbitrary significaion at it, in a very, very crude reading of logical positivism, but I am also betraying something about my own social, psychological, and physiological make-up. That is, when I say, “That’s a table” I am interpreting that (the only ‘true name’, in Russell’s sense) as a ‘table’ - I am giving a kind of consent to a social norm, I am agreeing to a custom, I am invoking a totality of involvements of which I am a part. This is a part of what it is to be Being-in-the-world.
Revenge of the Duck-Rabbit: But again, recalling Derrida, we would have to say that Heidegger, like Nietzsche before him, realizes that something like ‘interpretation’ or ‘perception’ is far more complicated than philosophers have traditionally believed, but that they are also still participating within the boundaries of the history of that philosophical language. And that means that they are still being bound by limits of certain philosophical concepts. [object=X]
Ask yourself: “When I am looking at a table, in what sense am I interpreting it as a table?”
P.I., §215-216: “But isn’t the same at least the same? We seem to have an infallible paradigm of identity in the identity of a thing with itself. I feel like saying: “Here at any rate there can’t be a variety of interpretations. If you are seeing a thing you are seeing identity too.” Then are two thing the same when they are what one thing is? And how am I to apply what the one thing shews me to the case of two things?... “A thing is identical with itself.” - There is no finer example of a useless proposition, which yet is connected with a certain play of the imagination. It is as if in imagination we put a thing into its own shape and saw that it fitted.” (Why Heidegger felt the necessity to have the concept of fore-conception.)
It seems to be a misapplication of the concept of interpretation to claim that the “development of the understanding we call “interpretation”.” (H148)
What is it to ‘mis-interpret’? To ‘misunderstand’? (To not get the meaning.)
The language that we use to describe our “private experiences” is a necessarily public language.
Metaphorically speaking, this language is subject to the laws of history.
P.I., §329-330: “When I think in language, there aren’t ‘meanings’ going through my mind in addition to the verbal expressions: the language is itself the vehicle of thought... Is thinking a kind of speaking? One would like to say it is what distinguishes speech with thought from talking without thinking. - And so it seems to be an accompaniment of speech. A process, which may accompany something else, or can go on by itself.
Say: “Yes, this pen is blunt. Oh well, it’ll do.” First, thinking it; then without thought; then just think the thought without the words. - Well, while doing some writing I might test the point of my pen, make a face - and then go on with a gesture of resignation. - I might also act in such a way while taking various measurements that an onlooker would say I had - without words - thought: If two magnitudes are equal to a third, they are equal to one another. - But what constitutes thought here is not some process which has to accompany the words if they are not to be spoken without thought.”
I am becoming more and more conviced that Heidegger and Wittgenstein were philosophically kindred spirits. They both saw the history of philosophy as something that is fundamentally flawed, although for different reasons. For Heidegger, the tragedy was that philosophers had lost or forgotten the language of the Ancient Greeks; for Wittgenstein, the problem was that they were still using that language. For Heidegger, all of the questions of philosophy could and should be boiled down to the fundamental question of Being, or of the Meaning of Being. For Wittgenstein, all of the problems of philosophy were mistakes (were the wrong questions to be asking) caused by the bewitchment of language.
In “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” Derrida writes, “Successively, and in a regulated fashion, the center receives different forms or names. The history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of these metaphors and metonymies.” (279) Let’s keep this in mind when we follow Wittgenstein in the above passage, as he deconstructs the word-concept “thinking.”
We ask ourselves, “What is thinking?” or “Is thinking a kind of speaking?” What Wittgenstein (under the influence of Moore) wants to remind us that when we ask such a question, we are allowing the structure of language to trick us (in a sense too rough) into believing that we are asking a question that is meaningful. Asking “What is thinking?” is alike to asking “What is a dog?” only in grammatical structure. What Derrida says is that when we ask such a philosophical question, we are taking part in the historical language-game that is Western Philosophy.
Derrida: “It would be easy enough to show that the concept of structure and even the word “structure” itself are as old as episteme - that is to say, as old as Western science and Western philosophy - and that their roots thrust deep into the soil of ordinary language, into whose deepest recesses the episteme plunges in order to gather them up and to make them part of itself in a metaphorical displacement.” (278)
“Can honour set-to a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honour hath not skill in surgery, then? No. What is honour? A word. What is in that word “honour”? What is that “honour”? Air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died o’Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. ‘Tis insensible then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I’ll none of it.” - Falstaff, 1 Henry IV, 5.1.130-38
- “I meant nothing by it.”
- “Don’t worry - he didn’t mean that.”
Does this imply when we speak kiddingly or when we are intended to not be ‘taken seriously’, are sentences are meaningless? No, of course not. But there are reasons why we use the same word in these different situations. The same piece, as it were, is making different moves in the game.
06.14.06
Traditionally, it is God who reveals signs to us, i.e., makes revelations. And, traditionally, it is up to us to interpret those signs, as Sartre points out.
But when I perceive, it is only on rare and special occassions when I also interpret.
Derrida speaks of Western Philosophy as a history of metaphors and metonymies. In section 32 of Being and Time, a section which I interpret as being one of the most pragmatic parts of Heidegger’s philosophy, Heidegger still makes the claim that “that which is designated is understood as that as which we are to take the thing in question. That which is disclosed in understanding - that which is understood - is already accessible in such a way that its ‘as which’ can be made to stand out explicitly. The ‘as’ makes up the structure of the explicitness of something that is understood. It constitutes the interpretation.” H149. In the following sentence, Heidegger says that “we ‘see’ it as a table, a door, a carriage, or a bridge...”
This pragmatic theory is never fully dropped by Heidegger even when he makes what I would describe as a ‘mystical’ turn in his later writings. He is set on the view that the acts of understanding, interpreting, and articulating on the part of Being take place in terms of a ‘totality of involvements.’ He says, “In interpreting, we do not, so to speak, throw a ‘signification’ over some naked thing which is present-at-hand, we do not stick a value on it; but when something within-the-world is encountered as such, the thing in question already has an involvement which is disclosed in our understanding of the world, and this involvement is one which gets laid out by the interpretation.” (H150, and hence the necessity for Heidegger’s concept of fore-conception.)
Heidegger seems to be revealing here the influence of Nietzsche upon him - that is, that when I name an object, I am not throwing some arbitrary significaion at it, in a very, very crude reading of logical positivism, but I am also betraying something about my own social, psychological, and physiological make-up. That is, when I say, “That’s a table” I am interpreting that (the only ‘true name’, in Russell’s sense) as a ‘table’ - I am giving a kind of consent to a social norm, I am agreeing to a custom, I am invoking a totality of involvements of which I am a part. This is a part of what it is to be Being-in-the-world.
Revenge of the Duck-Rabbit: But again, recalling Derrida, we would have to say that Heidegger, like Nietzsche before him, realizes that something like ‘interpretation’ or ‘perception’ is far more complicated than philosophers have traditionally believed, but that they are also still participating within the boundaries of the history of that philosophical language. And that means that they are still being bound by limits of certain philosophical concepts. [object=X]
Ask yourself: “When I am looking at a table, in what sense am I interpreting it as a table?”
P.I., §215-216: “But isn’t the same at least the same? We seem to have an infallible paradigm of identity in the identity of a thing with itself. I feel like saying: “Here at any rate there can’t be a variety of interpretations. If you are seeing a thing you are seeing identity too.” Then are two thing the same when they are what one thing is? And how am I to apply what the one thing shews me to the case of two things?... “A thing is identical with itself.” - There is no finer example of a useless proposition, which yet is connected with a certain play of the imagination. It is as if in imagination we put a thing into its own shape and saw that it fitted.” (Why Heidegger felt the necessity to have the concept of fore-conception.)
It seems to be a misapplication of the concept of interpretation to claim that the “development of the understanding we call “interpretation”.” (H148)
What is it to ‘mis-interpret’? To ‘misunderstand’? (To not get the meaning.)
The language that we use to describe our “private experiences” is a necessarily public language.
Metaphorically speaking, this language is subject to the laws of history.
posted by Joel | 4:58 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home