02.27.08

My first hesitation here is that it sounds like you are playing with the sign/word distinction. For me, a sign signifies because it is a symbol, and a sign is a symbol because it is representing something outside of itself. Wittgenstein here makes a distinction that I don't follow. He says in the Tractatus that a sign is the perceivable aspect of the symbol. So for him, both '&' and 'and' are signs of the logical symbol that is what is presented (not re-presented!) by not only the signs '&' and 'and' but also 'et', 'und', '+' 'conjunction', and so on. The thing for him is that no one can ever say what the symbol is, but everyone can know it from it showing itself through signs.

But I'm not sure that I buy this. (Assuming, of course, that I'm reading him right.) I would say that a sign represents, but that a word doesn't. For me, the difference hinges on the matter of interpretation; I don't think that a word stands in need of interpretation, but a sign does. To put it differently: A system of signs is contingent upon a pre-existing language; a language is not. (Bertrand Russell thought that there might be a hierarchy of languages, each one providing meaning for the one below it.) Folks like Sausseure and Frege thought that a word has meaning because it signifies either an idea in my head or an object in the world. So when I say "The cat is on the mat," my words have meaning because of their relationship with the world, i.e., that there is an object called "cat" and an object called "mat" and there is the relation of "being on top of." (For them, even a false sentence has its meaning based on its relationship (T or F) with the world.) But this picture of language, of course, is wrong.

Speaking of philosophical grammar: They even invented a logical notation to try and show this relationship. So the sentence "The cat is on the mat." becomes: (Ex)(Ey)(If [Cx & My] then [xRy]) (This is read as: "There exists such an x and such a y so that if x has the property of being a cat [C] and y has the property of being a mat [M], then x stands in the relation [R] of being on top of y." Much simpler, no?)

I bring this all up because when you say that "re-presentation is the attempt at communication", it sounds like what you're saying is that there is this living thing that is communication, and that all that we have are these dead signs that are flailing about trying to communicate something alive. Is it right to say that an analogy could be something like, "A word is to its meaning as a body is to its soul." ? [A means for conveyance. To "express" is to press the essence out of the body.] This was a major preoccupation of Wittgenstein's. Philosophical Investigations §454: "How does it come about that this arrow ====> points? Doesn't it seem to carry in it something besides itself? - "No, not the dead line on paper; only the psychical thing, the meaning, can do that." - That is both true and false. The arrow points only in the application that a living being makes of it. This pointing is not a hocus-pocus which can be performed only by the soul."

I think it would be a mistake to say something like real communication is impossible. Because it's not; we successfully communicate all of the time. (Communicate: Latin communicatus, past participle of communicare to impart, participate, from communis common.)

In On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense, Nietzsche privileges metaphor in the formation of words and concepts in human language. There is a running theme through his writing and through the writing of a lot of post-Enlightenment German philosophers and philologists about the "value" of words, their "exchange value", how a coin is to a word as a piece of metal is to an idea, or how a coin is to a word as the value of a coin is to an idea (depending on who you ask.) To coin a term. Nietzsche thinks that language comes about through the forming of new metaphors, and as a metaphor becomes accepted by the speaking community and becomes introduced into the "market of ideas", so to speak, and it slowly loses its metaphorical quality as it is used or exchanged over and over and over again. (Or, more accurately, we forget that it was a metaphor in the first place, thus mistaking a falsehood for a truth.)

But this doesn't mean that a word loses some kind of inherit value as begins to get used by a community. Unless, of course, there is some kind of inherit value in novelty.

(Everything in quotes in this passage is a metaphor) Which is a big "part" of art, maybe? (And not merely visual art, but in the "way" that an object can be "viewed" as a "text".) That art is the process of creating new metaphors that allow us to "see" old concepts in a new "light". This is "sounding really broad" to me right now; and I am not sure if I am "connecting" with your original concern. My "thought bank" is running "empty" now.

One more thing: There is some kind of relationship between metaphors and mythologies. Wittgenstein was always saying that all Freud was doing was coming up with new similes to describe phenomena that lots of people had long since recognized. And Freud was aware of this, too. This next sentence is wrong, but I think there is something to it: To share an ideology with another person is to share a set of metaphors by which you describe the world.

02.25.08

This thought-half-thought came to me while I was in the shower, so now I am typing in my living room dripping all over the keyboard with soap in my eyes.
But before I showered, I was working on my Kierkegaard paper, and I was about to write something like, "And so, for the man of faith, faith is that foundational concept that justifies the use and determines the meaning of all subsequent words, concepts, and actions." (Let's leave aside for now my problem about whether or not that sentence even is coherent.) I have been working for a while with the conscious thought that what faith is for Johannes de Silentio (and, I believe, Kierkegaard) logic is for the author of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and language or language-games are for the author of Philosophical Investigations and On Certainty.
But then I got in the shower and I said to myself, "But faith is inarticulable." And I realized that that is what the Lacanian Master Signifier is. (I do what the Big Penis tells me to do.) (Wittgenstein greatly admired Freud, and saw what Freud was doing in psychoanalysis as the parallel for what he was doing in philosophy, namely, therapy.) There is a particular concept that is fundamental in determining my identity and my life-view, and all of my other words get their meaning from my relationship with that particular concept.
But now I feel myself beginning to float, because this is still all dealing in the currency of metaphor.

Later that day: There are several different metaphors that are used in order to describe this concept. In the Tractatus, logic is the outer boundaries of our thought - it provides the scaffolding or the architecture or the form for our thinking, which is the content that fills the form and provides Sinn. Contrastingly, Zizek in The Sublime Object of Ideology talks about the "traumatic kernel" that simultaneously resists/rejects signification and provides the system of signification as a whole with sense. In On Certainty, the metaphors used are those of bedrock, foundation, or the river banks that are more solid than the fluid concepts to which they give shape (meaning) but are in turn slowly eroded by that liquid. All of these meaning-giving concepts have the privilege of not being subject to the same 'rules' of meaning because they provide those rules, those justifications. [The normative sense.]
So in what sense could there possible be any kind of disagreement among these different pictures of meaning?

Later, later that day: What I was trying - and failing - to express was the thought that even though all of these philosophies claim that there is something that gives my life and my language meaning, it is not necessary to posit that something outside of life or language. (And I'm not sure that any of them do or claim to do.... except for the author of the Tractatus. He definitely does.) However, they all resort to metaphors to describe that Big Something. Scaffolding, phallus, kernel, bedrock. It would be wrong to claim that these are all different names for the same concept, and it would be wrong to say that there is something that is ineffable that they are trying to grasp at, and they cannot do it directly so they use metaphor instead.
So if I want to define the Master Signifier (I don't know if I am abusing Lacan here - I'm not meaning to) as "that concept that justifies the use and determines the meaning of all subsequent words, concepts, and actions," then I would have to admit that that Master Signifier is social in nature, and that it is possible (and true) that different cultures and different languages have different meaning-giving concepts, and then I would have to admit that it is possible (and true) for a single culture to have its Master Signifier shift over time as the use of words shift, or for a single culture to have more than one Master Signifier at a time. And if all these things are true, if you have replaced your deity with a pantheon, then doesn't the meaning - by which I mean the use and the purpose - of the word-concept "Master Signifier" kind of evaporate? (That is the aim of Wittgenstein's later philosophy, and what he shares with Nietzsche and Derrida.) (Of course, if all this is right, if even these super-concepts are social and contingent, then Abraham is lost.)

I feel like there is a big logical gap here on paper that is all filled up in my head.

02.18.08

I don't need to two extend two lines for infinity in order to know that they are parallel to one another. Even if that is entailed by the word-concept of "parallel". [what "parallel" means.]

This is how deeply ingrained in our language our "transcendent concept of spirit" is.

Myshkin and I have been discussing a lot lately about the extension of metaphors in our language, of how metaphors become extended and embedded into our language. My personal favorite examples include the family of words that descend (descendre) from the Latin spirare, to breathe:

conspire
Function: verb
Etymology: Middle English, from Anglo-French conspirer, from Latin conspirare to be in harmony, conspire, from com- + spirare to breathe
Date: 14th century
transitive verb : plot, contrive
intransitive verb
1 a: to join in a secret agreement to do an unlawful or wrongful act or an act which becomes unlawful as a result of the secret agreement "accused of conspiring to overthrow the government" b: scheme
2: to act in harmony toward a common end "circumstances conspired to defeat his efforts"

aspire
Function: intransitive verb
Etymology: Middle English, from Middle French or Latin; Middle French aspirer, from Latin aspirare, literally, to breathe upon, from ad- + spirare to breathe
Date: 14th century
1 : to seek to attain or accomplish a particular goal "aspired to a career in medicine"
2 : ascend, soar

inspire
Main Entry: in·spire
Function: verb
Etymology: Middle English, from Anglo-French & Latin; Anglo-French inspirer, from Latin inspirare, from in- + spirare to breathe
Date:14th century
transitive verb
1 a: to influence, move, or guide by divine or supernatural inspiration b: to exert an animating, enlivening, or exalting influence on "was particularly inspired by the Romanticists" c: to spur on : impel, motivate "threats don't necessarily inspire people to work" d: affect "seeing the old room again inspired him with nostalgia"
2 aarchaic : to breathe or blow into or upon barchaic : to infuse (as life) by breathing
3 a: to communicate to an agent supernaturally b: to draw forth or bring out "thoughts inspired by a visit to the cathedral"
4: inhale 1
5 a: bring about, occasion "the book was inspired by his travels in the Far East" b: incite
6: to spread (rumor) by indirect means or through the agency of another
intransitive verb
: inhale

expire
Function: verb
Etymology: Middle English, from Middle French or Latin; Anglo-French espirer to breathe out, from Latin exspirare, from ex- + spirare to breathe
Date: 15th century
intransitive verb
1: to breathe one's last breath : die
2: to come to an end
3: to emit the breath
transitive verb
1obsolete : conclude
2: to breathe out from or as if from the lungs
3archaic : emit

All of these words - conspire, aspire, inspire, expire - necessarily carry with them the concept of breath. So to be inspired, say, by the Muse, means to have the breath breathed into you. To expire is to breathe your last, to have your breath leave you. And to conspire is to breathe together, as one. What I think is common to all of these words is that they present the concept of spirit as it is a cornerstone of our own culture, that culture being the West, all of those nations who trace their genealogies back to the Ancient Greeks - by whom I mean Plato - by way of Rome. So I cannot talk about "being inspired" or of "aspiring for success" without also simultaneously invoking (invocation, definition 1b: "a calling upon for authority or justification" from the latin invocare, a calling together. Who are we calling, Mr. Heidegger?) the concept of my having a soul. And if you're a modern English speaker, really you ought to be blaming William the Conqueror for all of this.

So my question is something like, "To what extent am I always speaking in terms of metaphor?" I have written about this before, but I want to do it now in terms of Nietzsche and the 18th century philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder, and maybe a little Rousseau in there for background purposes. The answer to this question is going to be something like, "Sometimes, not always," because claiming that I am always speaking in metaphors negates the concept of metaphor itself. Still, if you want to understand how your language works, you need to understand how its "inventor tore ideas out of one type of feeling and borrowed them from another!; how he borrowed most in the case of the heaviest, coldest, distinctest senses!; how everything had to become feeling and sound in order to become expression! Hence the strong, bold metaphors in the roots of the words! Hence the metaphorical transferences from the one type of feeling to another, so that the meanings of a stem-word, and still most of its derivatives, set in contrast with one another, turn into the most motley picture." (Herder, Treatise on the Origin of Language, 113) I think Nietzsche says it better in Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense, but I don't have that here right now.

Of course, where I really want to go with this line of thought is to the word-concept "law". When is it being used metaphorically and when is it not? There is a law that prohibits copyright infringement, and there is a law that prohibits the spontaneous stopping of a body in motion in a vacuum. Why the same word here? And what I am really concerned with is the idea that there is a law that prohibits the human mind from perceiving an object outside of space and time, or that "Clearly the laws of logic cannot in their turn be subject to laws of logic." (§6.123)

Main Entry: an·i·mate
Pronunciation: \ˈa-nə-mət\
Function: adjective
Etymology: Middle English, from Latin animatus, past participle of animare to give life to, from anima breath, soul; akin to Old English ōthian to breathe, Latin animus spirit, Greek anemos wind, Sanskrit aniti he breathes
Date: 15th century
1 : possessing or characterized by life : alive
2 : full of life : animated
3 : of or relating to animal life as opposed to plant life
4 : referring to a living thing "an animate noun"
— an·i·mate·ly adverb
— an·i·mate·ness noun

02.15.08

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, §6.234 - §6.24: "Mathematics is a method of logic. It is the essential characteristic of mathematical method that it employs equations. For it is because of this method that every proposition of mathematics must go without saying. The method by which mathematics arrives at its equations is the method of substitution. For equations express the substitutability of two expressions and, starting from a number of equations, we advance to new equations by substituting different expressions in accordance with the equations."

On Certainty, §1: "If you do know that here is one hand, we'll grant you all the rest."

In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein is inheriting from Russell the desire to base an entire system of knowledge on a single, indubitable principle - one that is not subject to the same laws of doubt and verification that the rest of our lives seem controlled by. Of course (and please forgive my gross generalizations) this idea doesn't come merely from Russell - it is at the heart of a lot if not all of Western Philosophy. I first encountered a form of this thought in an essay by Richard Rorty that I read a while back. It seems as if what is in the world is not enough, that there must be something outside of the world that anchors everything in the world, that determines it, that gives it meaning. So Plato gives us his Forms, the Idea of the world against which this world is judged/ measured/ evaluated. And Kant makes this move twice - he gives us Categories (pure a priori concepts, not corrupted by the sensible) that give meaningful form to the unintelligent content of our perceptions, and then again he gives us the Ultimate, Unknowable Noumenal that necessarily exists and gives rise to the merely phenomenal. So for Kant, the world requires two structures to prop it up - on the one hand Noumena that are not themselves perceivable but mysteriously generate perceivable phenomena, appearances, and on the other hand the Categories of the Mind, without which the world of appearances is dumb (unarticulated). (I'm picturing here a sheet (I Heart Huckabee's) that is pinned to the wall at two corners but sags in the middle. Or maybe it would be more apt to have two people holding up either side of the sheet between them?) In the Tractatus, this function of determination is played by Logic: §3.42: "The logical scaffolding surrounding a picture determines logical space. The force of a proposition reaches through the whole of logical space." §4.023: "A proposition constructs a world with the help of a logical scaffolding, so that one can actually see from the proposition how everything stands logically if it is true." §6.124: "The propositions of logic describe the scaffolding of the world, or rather they represent it. They have no 'subject-matter'. They presuppose that names have meaning and elementary propositions sense; and that is their connexion with the world." (The Ogden translation reads: "The logical propositions describe the scaffolding of the world, or rather they present it. They "treat" of nothing." This is important - the German reads: "Die logischen Sätze beschreiben das Gerüst der Welt, oder vielmehr, sie stellen es dar. Sie >>handeln<< von nichts." This is fucking crazy! - My German isn't perfect, but I do believe that 'stellung' is definitely a presentation, not a representation, which is 'darstellung' or 'vorstellung'. I would translate the passage like: "Logical sentences describe the scaffolding of the world, or rather, they present it. They don't "handle" anything." The theme of presentation versus representation is so important; remind me to get back to it.)

I forgot what I was talking about. Something about Idolatry.

For all of those philosophers of action, Something About the Meaning of the Words 'Explanation' and 'Motivation':

"Mr. Grady said that Mr. Kazmierczak did not leave a note or any other explanation, and police do not understand his motivation. There did not appear to be a connection between the shooter and his victims, police said." - New York Times

The difficulty for the author of the Tractatus is finding that first logical proposition from which all other logical propositions are derived. (I wanted to say "can be derived", but that would not be correct.) And when we formulate the problem in that way, then it becomes apparent that the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus has a mystical soul. Russell's best answer for the question of what this proposition is is the Law of Identity, that a=a, or "A thing is identical with itself." But Wittgenstein realizes that that proposition - and all propositions of logic - doesn't say anything. (He and Russell fought over this a lot.) To put it in Kantian terms, all propositions of logic are forms without content. They don't say anything.

But the Idol still stands. - And that is because the entire project of Analytic Philosophy (and philosophy as a whole) is misguided. The instinct is to search for that first cause, that a priori concept, that fundamental truth that determines every following truth, etc. But this is putting the cart before the horse. Take the Categories of the Mind, for example. The thought is that every intuition that I have must conform to the forms imposed on it by the Categories. Every thought I have has to filed by the four schema: quality (reality, negation, or limitation), quantity (unity, plurality, or totality), modality (possibility-impossibility, existence-non-existence, or necessity-contingency), and relation (substance and accident, cause and effect, or reciprocity). No intuition can make any sense whatsoever without these pure concepts of understanding. The teleology here says that judgments can't happen without the pure concepts. So it might seem like these Categories exist independently of our experiences, hence the term a priori. And if you follow this thought through, then it becomes obvious that the Categories must be of a fundamentally different nature than the physical world of substance and appearance, including our own bodies and brains - to work the way that they do, they have to be exempt from the laws of the ever-shifting sensible muchness - the Categories have to be solid, immutable. Wittgenstein inherits this dichotomy from Kant, only he applies it to propositions. So instead of having the Pure Concepts of Understanding shape our judgments and make them intelligible, we have the Logical Propositions that shape our empirical propositions and give them meaning. But this is not a necessary step to take. If you look at the whole problem Pragmatically, you can just as easily say, "No. The a priori concepts of cause and effect or necessity and contingency are not Universal Laws that we have been given. They're tools that we - we dumb animals - made in order to help make sense of the world around us, and probably to help us not get eaten by saber-toothed tigers. There is nothing necessary about them. (That word-concept doesn't actually make sense here, anyways.) And the same applies for the rules of Logic." [Wittgenstein v. Turing] And the author of the Tractatus is painfully aware of this possibility, and he struggles with it mightily. He says things like, "in real life a mathematical proposition is never what we want. Rather, we make use of mathematical propositions only in inferences from propositions that do not belong to mathematics to others that likewise do not belong to mathematics." (§6.211) But by the time that he writes On Certainty, the idea that logical-mathematical propositions are anything but tools, anything but servants to our practical needs and uses, has long since been abandoned.

02.14.08

A thought that occurred to me on the way to work, that actually has been germinating in my mind for a while now, was that every single proposition from Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is a tautology. Take, for example, 2.171: "A picture can depict any reality whose form it has. A spatial picture can depict anything spatial, a colored one anything colored, etc." I remember reading this passage the first time, three years ago, and it making me very angry. "Well, of course! That's what it means to be a spatial picture!" Or 2.0233: "If two objects have the same logical form, the only distinction between them, apart from their external properties, is that they are different." Again, all Wittgenstein is doing here is providing definitions. There is no content to his sentences. He could rephrase this proposition into something like, "The definition of 'same logical form' is the property of two objects having all properties in common except for being different objects." And once the equivalence of a definition has been established, then, ideally, you no longer need both of the terms. You can apply Occam's Razor and get rid of one of the terms.

Logic deals entirely with deductive reasoning, which is the substituting of one logically equivalent proposition for another. But here's the rub: The Rule of Conjunction Introduction says that you can infer from "A" and from "B" that "A and B". What I think Wittgenstein is trying to say is that this ought to be apparent a priori. In fact, it so obvious that it is pointless/senseless/useless to even make the step. Nothing is being said - the movement is without content. So get rid of one of the statements. Take another case: The Rule of Disjunction Introduction says that, if you know that it is not true that neither A nor B are true, then you can infer that either A or B are true. This represented as something like: "If ~(~a & ~b) then (a v b)." But again, this is a tautology - it shows its truth immediately and a priori. Furthermore, Occam's Razor, which is not nearly as bad-ass as Joel's Chainsaw, says that you should do away with the disjunction symbol, because everything that it says can also (and is already [?]) said (or shown?) by the negation and the conjunction symbols. And as you continue along this path, so the thought half-thought goes, you can eliminate one proposition after another, over and over again, until you are left with nothing but a set of simple names for objects and two logical relations: "and" and "not". But in doing so you have gotten rid of everything that is literally worth saying.

So how does this apply to the propositions in the Tractatus itself? According to this, by the rules of logic, the propositions of logic cannibalize themselves. And for the author of the Tractatus, philosophy is nothing more than logic. It's not that he doesn't believe in or necessarily disagree with the projects of other areas such as ethics, aesthetics, theology, psychology, epistemology, etc. - it's just that he doesn't see them as being a part of philosophy proper (logic) and he thinks that confusion arises when we try to treat them as if they were. But, if this is the case, then philosophy self-immolates, it vanishes by the force of its own doing. And if this is true, and if it's right that all of the propositions of the Tractatus are either definitions or tautologies, and that definitions of logic are tautologies, then the whole book evaporates itself in writing itself. [The book has no duration] (It reminds me of a Douglass Adams joke, where the man proves the existence of God via the Babel fish, and therefore disproves the existence of God, because He is nothing without faith, and, having accomplished that, he goes on to prove that black is really white and gets killed in the next zebra crossing.)

Moving on, America...

As of now, I am planning on dividing my Kierkegaard paper into three sections. The first is going to describe Johannes de Silentio's formulation of the paradox of faith, and the subsequent paradox of the challenge the reader faces in trying to make sense of Johannes de Silentio's claim that faith is unintelligible. There are two distinct yet related concerns here - the first is that the concept of faith is unintelligible, and the second is that Fear and Trembling as a text is unintelligible.

The second is going to give two 'traditional' readings of Fear and Trembling, one by Kjell Johansen and the other by Stephen Mulhall. I'm going to say that Johansen's reading fails because he does not heed de Silentio's warnings about the incomprehensibility of faith seriously, and that Mulhall's avoids the paradoxes all together by challenging de Silentio's reliability which, in my opinion, takes the teeth out of the book, and the terror out of the paradox. It's very important for me to stress that neither of these readers take the text seriously - they're both, in very different ways, looking for the easy way out.

The third part is going to propose a new reading of F & T based on Wittgenstein's later philosophy and the idea that as language-games change, so too do the meanings of our word-concepts change. I believe that I can give a reading of F & T that respects what Kierkegaard/ de Silentio says about faith, while still looking at it in a way that makes it possible for us to co-exist, in a manner of speaking, with the paradox of faith.

(Paradoxes are not supposed to be solved. They are like warning flares that alert us that something has gone wrong with our thinking, that our language is broken here.)

Notes from the Underground or Letters from my Basement?

The following are notes on Fear and Trembling that I have been collecting for a while now in preparation for writing my MA Thesis. They're all far from final form, even though some are already in a second draft. There is going to be a lot of repetition here, understandably, and also a lot of dead-end thoughts. Some of these thoughts I don't even hold anymore, and some I hold in an amended form. I'm posting them now so that I'll be forced to go back through them and extract some Thought from out of a lot of rambling and meandering. I'm afraid that it might not make much sense to someone who is not already familiar with Fear and Trembling, as well as with Kierkegaard's broader philosophy, or even for someone who is. But hopefully the main threads of Faith, Justification, and Communication will come out in the end and I'll be able to weave them into a tolerable essay.

12.11.07

Abraham cannot speak in any language that I can understand. Johannes de Silentio says that he aspires to be Abraham's poet, his voice. But even Abraham's poet must remain silent, in so far as he cannot/ does not say anything that I can understand.

But then why [write] the book? Kierkegaard is putting these words down on paper and then immediately retracting them, emptying them of any meaning that I can understand. He wants to perform something like a Derridean defacement: "Abraham had faith." (and the word faith in that sentence is crossed out but still legible.) - So that only the trace, the hollow shell of the word, remains.

It would be a mistake to equate this with the Tractarian notion showing-not-saying.

Kierkegaard is always writing to his "one true reader". Maybe this is because his reader needs to remove herself from her context - her forms of life - in order for her to be able to understand what Kierkegaard is saying. Or what he is saying about certain word-concepts used in a transcendent sense: Belief, faith, silence, communication, authority, etc.

But even this "special"/ qualitatively different use requires/ assumes the ordinary everyday use!

12.12.07

By what right does Johannes de Silentio speak? ("To speak without justification is not to speak without right.") Because he does speak, contradicting his name. But then you get the meaninglessness of the text.

"Language as Means of Political Subversion in Fear and Trembling"

12.13.07

Part of Abraham's sacrifice (in submitting to God's will) is giving up his right to speak. To be understood.
What is ethics? [to behave in an ethical fashion, according to certain (Kantian) rules that everyone can understand]
"Is God bound by our language?"
On Certainty, #166: "The difficulty is to realize the groundlessness of our believing."

12.18.07

Belief as the foundation for knowledge...
In On Certainty, Wittgenstein is looking into this issue - In dem Anfang war die Tat -
For Kierkegaard, the knight of faith behave exactly like all the other petit-bourgeoises.
Except that he's a fool.
It still all boils down to the fact that Abraham has no justification for his action.

Faith as a task for a whole life-time.

On Certainty #446: "Doesn't the whole language-game rest on this kind of certainty?" For the knight of faith, faith is the foundation (or the basis) - the foundational layer that, first of all, pre-empts all action/ activity and, second (and correspondingly) gives reasons or meaning or justification for all following actions.

In this way then, Fear and Trembling mirrors L.W. in so far as it locates the limits of thought in faith. But of course it is not the Tractarian logical limits that are here being demarcated -

12.21.07

What is foundational for our language is also that which is foundational to our myriad forms of life. For Abraham, this foundation (this bedrock) is God, or is Abraham's faith (in God).
What Johannes de Silentio might be trying to describe, then, is a way of life (form of existence) which is completely alien ([w]hol[l]y Other)to our activity. (Ref. Quine's concerns regarding radical translation? No - too, tangential.) The main issue is that Abraham's act of submission to God necessarily exiles him from any conceivable (possible) community of speakers.
- This is a different topic than the one that discusses how the concept of faith gets polluted by its use in ordinary language.

12.27.07

The relationship between silence (choosing not to speak) and Silence (being unable to speak). Abraham is Silent because his justifications do not count as evidence within [our] community. He is not Silent because he does not speak, he is Silent because he speaks but we cannot understand him.
In what could this understanding consist? What happens when I understand what someone else is saying? And I don't mean how to do I understand English or French or Spanish (an interesting question in its own right) but rather how do I come to understand the reasons for another human being's actions? And what happens when someone "cannot" give reason or justification for what they do? Then their action is of the type that do not demand reasons, but rather they provide them.
Maybe Johannes de Silentio is saying that the reason that faith is so hard to understand is because it is not like other concepts. It is a fundamental concept - like language - that has this trait resembling 'sui generis' (sui genesis?) - in so far as it is not dependent on a prior concept that provides it with justification.

01.07.08

"Authority, Justification, and Intelligibility in Fear and Trembling"

These three concepts are very closely related - you need justification in order to have authority, and you need to make yourself intelligible in order to express your justifications. But to whom?

There is this terrifying moment when de Silentio comprehends the possibility that he is alone in not understanding faith. Abraham is radically and frightfully alone. The fear comes from the idea of being severed from the world so that no one will ever be able to understand you again. But the authentic knight of faith has no worry (Sorgen) for this - he speaks as if he can be understood by others, as if his justifications for his (absurd) actions are out in the open for all to see - He acts as if nothing is hidden, and this makes him incomprehensible. (no)

De Silentio speaks often of needing courage in order to have faith. but here he may be mistaken. The knight of faith makes the movement of faith naturally, without any hesitation or second thought.

Fear and Trembling makes some pretty tough demands on the reader. Its effect is essentially isolating. Its question is: Can you still maintain that you have faith after all of these "support mechanisms" (i.e., community, ethics, language - which all belong to the social realm, along with concepts such as evidence and justification) have been pulled out from beneath you?

JUST LIKE SOCRATES - Certain kinds of investigations, investigations that try to isolate the essence of this or that concept, can only end in meaninglessness.

Where does my right to speak come from?

01.08.08

For the knight of faith, the concept of faith takes on a different meaning than it does for either the knight of resignation or the petty bourgeois.

No, not takes on - it is different, it always has been different. Johannes de Silentio cannot understand Abraham because he takes Abraham to be speaking a totally alien language because of his faith.

The book wants you to have these problems.

Wittgenstein returns again and again to the image of bedrock, of solid ground giving shape to our more fluid concepts. This might be because of [their relative ineffability].

How and when does Kierkegaard "turn his back on the reader" in Fear and Trembling? For if I am right and if faith is fundamentally bedrock as it is described in On Certainty, then it is also something that cannot be doubted, cannot be called into question. The book wants you to have these problems. It turns its back on the reader because it leaves the question of authority unanswered. It laves me drowning because there is either an (inauthentic) justification or no justification at all. (Or an absurd one.)

Like a Chinese Puzzle-Box.

One must climb (not up) but into Fear and Trembling and then throw it away, to come out the other side transformed.
(There's the movement/moment when you give it and the movement/moment when you take it away.)




Perhaps faith eludes conceptual grasping because of its character of extreme subjectivity.

01.09.08

Driving a wedge between de Silentio and Kierkegaard, while still saving what is important from F&T. And this has something to with the relationship between F&T's form and its content. The entire text moves (unknown to de Silentio) on an assumption of what faith is. In other words, the reason why de Silentio concludes that faith is a paradox beyond the expressible/ ethical (and I'm not saying that he's wrong about that) is because... For the knight of faith, faith is the structure that gives form to the rest of thought. It is the scaffolding that is antecedent to (what Wittgenstein would describe as) empirical propositions about the world. Faith, therefore, is a kind of logic.

A parallel might be: It is a different matter to ask the bourgeois to doubt the existence (or will) of God than it is to ask the knight of faith to doubt so. You might as well ask him to doubt the existence of the hand before his face, etc. There are some things (defaced, followed by "propositions") that are beyond doubt (and testing). They exist in order to give shape to the process of doubting.

I would cite in support of this, de Silentio's constant scorn for different manifestations of 'calculation'.

F&T ought to leave the reader deeply disturbed. One (less obvious) reason for this is in the way that its content and its form push against one another.

01.11.08

In this paper, I will give a new reading of Fear and Trembling, namely (and this is important) my own.
My primary question and concern will be locating (deciding? pointing to?) Abraham's justification for the murder (or sacrifice) of Isaac, as told by Johannes de Silentio. (And this, too, is an important note. What the text tells us the most about is the psychology of de Silentio and his untenable relationship towards faith.)

Another way to state this paper's primary aim is to ask: What right does Abraham have to act the way that he does? [There is no answer to this question] But what it shows is these different possible attitudes (or relationships) towards faith.


[To Be Continued]