How To Use Your Philosophy Degree

Note on Constucting a Gay Science

2008-05-23T14:34:00.000-07:00

"Suffering and humans go hand in hand. Look at comedy. It's dominated by black people and Jewish people. That is American comedy. And if blacks and Jews didn't do comedy, we'd be relying on the Irish. 'Cause they were the next funniest thing. . . ." - Dave Chappelle

05.20.08

2008-05-20T12:05:00.001-07:00

Why is it important to investigate the genealogical origins of these concepts? What is it that we are hoping to gleam from them through this kind of critical analysis? By analyzing the origins of logic, Nietzsche is hoping to dispel some of our common (mis)conceptions about its purpose and “meaning”, where here meanings is meant in the terms of intention and use, but also something metaphysical. That is, that we come to false conclusions about the ontological status of logic.

So when Nietzsche says that “the origins of logic are surely the illogical,” he is gesturing towards his related statement that “the origins and the purpose of a concept ought to fall out separately.” That is, that the purpose of systemic concept such as logic cannot tell us anything about its origins. (This line of thinking is the same method that he uses for “ethics,” “truth,” “justice,” etc.) Because we mistakenly make inferences about the Being-meaning of logic based on its use-meaning, we construct falsehoods (myths) that affect other areas of our lives.

05.16.08

2008-05-15T22:56:00.000-07:00

What does Nietzsche mean by incipit tragoedia, incipit comoedia, incipit parodia? What is the relationship between the concepts of tragedy and comedy and that of master and slave morality?Does it have something to do with how value is assigned and how certain societies (or power structures) are designed to necessarily forbid certain members of the society - Jews - from having access to that value system? Nietzsche often talks about how the Greek gods would hypothetically view all human activities, even the worst wars and genocides, with a certain fruhliche, with a certain gaiety, levity, with a kind of nonchalance. Why? Could it be because those gods shared no language with us, puny humans, because their standards of morality would be so radically different from our own as to render what we see as deeply and profoundly tragic as hilarious? (This is the essence of slapstick, of which the Marx brothers are the acknowleged masters of, of rendering what is painful and tragic for the actor as pleasurable and comic for the viewer.) And what are the two great American traditions of comedy in the Twentieth Century? Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, Mel Brooks, Richard Pyror, Gene Wilder, Eddie Murphy, Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, Jon Stewart [born Jonathan Leibowitz], Dave Chappelle...

[It is your moral duty to kill a cop.]

05.10.08

2008-05-12T11:41:00.000-07:00

05.10.08

I'm not sure what it would be to have a conversation with someone who really believed that there was no such thing as the Soul. (The Self with a capital "S", the Transcendental Ego, the Cogito, etc.) This is what Kierkegaard means when he says that God and I have no common language.

Because I can say - honestly - that I don't believe in the Soul, in free will, in a part of myself that is not subject to the totality of physical laws exerting themselves upon my body, but this is different from believing it. This is different from acting as if it were true that were no ghost in my body, as if there were no autonomous mind that considers and reflects, as if I could not be held responsible for my actions because there was no such thing as an "I" that could be held responsible! What would that sort of human being look like? Is such a creature even possible? (Kant, clearly, would say no human could be.)

Related to this is the inability to conceive of the natural world as being anything other than one governed by natural laws, laws that are constant, can be predicted, and can be understood (articulated) to humans. (I am thinking specifically here of Newton's Three Laws of Motion, but this applies equally to the laws of gravity, of causality, of velocity, or of any other kind of mechanism that explains.) I can say that all of these laws are human fabrications, that they are inherently inaccurate anthropomorphisms - metaphors that say that something is precisely what it is not - but then I could not make sense any longer of my own activity, of my doings, my comings and goings. (Doesn't my waiting for the bus at 8:51 am show my belief in the objectivity of time? Don't I show my faith in buoyancy when I do not doubt how that yacht can glide across Lake Michigan? Don't I place my plants by the windowsill because I understand the natural phenomenon of photosynthesis?)

05.11.08

"So what you're saying is that the Universe is essentially chaotic, that humans are constantly deceiving themselves by ascribing to it rules and laws that it naturally abhors. Nature - you claim - is mere anarchy." No, not at all. "Then you're saying that what count as 'truths' - even truths as hard as scientific ones - are nothing more than what the community agrees to call true, that the Universe, so to speak, is more democracy than dictatorship." No, of course not. You can see the world as just, or you can see the world as unjust. Or you can see the world as nothing at all. (And therein lies the difficulty.)

Teaching Nietzsche II

2008-04-27T17:08:00.000-07:00

In 1879, Nietzsche officially "retired" from his post at the University of Basel, at the age of 35. He would never work again, and would spend the rest of his life living off of the meager stipend that the University provided for him. 1879 also saw the publication of the second volume of Nietzsche's second book, Human, All-too-Human, the first volume having been published the previous year. This book signaled not only Nietzsche's turn away from the aesthetics and the philosophical pessimism of The Birth of Tragedy, but also his break with the art and the philosophy of Wagner. As a result, Nietzsche also lost one of his few friends and allies.

Following his retirement, Nietzsche spent the next several years traveling across southern Europe, searching for warm and mild climates that might be hospitable to his poor health. Between 1879 and 1887, he either visited or lived in Venice, Genoa, St. Moritz, Sils-Maria, Rome, Sorento, Nice, and Turin. (Meaning that he spent most of his time between France, Italy, and Switzerland. He would occasionally visit friends or family in Germany, but not very often.)

It was also during this time that Nietzsche would meet two of his closest friends, the German author Paul Rée and the Russian-emigré philosopher Lou Andreas-Salomé. These would prove to be very productive years for Nietzsche: in 1882 he published The Gay Science, in which he first proposes the concept of fashioning a "cheerful... philosophy of the morning" and in which some of his most famous (or infamous) ideas make their first appearances: the will to power, the übermensch, and the eternal return of the same. In 1883 Nietzsche wrote Thus Spake Zarathustra, the more literary complementary work to The Gay Science, much of which was written in the span of only ten days.

The end of this "middle period" of Nietzsche's career can be marked by the death of Wagner, in February of 1883, and his break from Rée and Salomé in October of that year, after Salome repeatedly rejected Nietzsche's (probably frightening) marriage proposals. Both of these events took a toll on Nietzsche's psyche. These breaks also forced him to associate more with Ernst Schmeitzer, his editor and publisher, and his sister Elisabeth.

In 1886, Nietzsche broke with Schmeitzer because of the latter's anti-Semitism and over control of the editing of Thus Spake Zarathustra. Therefore, Nietzsche decided to publish his next book, On the Genealogy of Morality, entirely on his own, burdening all of the costs of production personally. Although friendless and penniless, Nietzsche seemed encouraged by rumors of a growing readership across Europe. Over the next three years, he would write The Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, and the autobiographical Ecce Homo. Nietzsche's good spirits were encouraged by his correspondence with Georg Brandes, a Danish professor and Kierkegaard scholar. It was Brandes who introduced Nietzsche to the writings of Dostoyevsky and suggested that he read Kierkegaard, although it is doubtful as to whether Nietzsche ever got around to that. In 1888, Brandes delivered what was probably the first ever lecture on Nietzsche's philosophy in Copenhagen.

However, soon after this brief flurry of writing, Nietzsche suffered a major mental breakdown. Again, quoting from Wikipedia:

On January 3, 1889, Nietzsche exhibited signs of what was perceived as a serious mental illness. Two policemen approached him after he caused a public disturbance in the streets of Turin. What actually happened remains unknown, but the often-repeated tale states that Nietzsche witnessed the whipping of a horse at the other end of the Piazza Carlo Alberto, ran to the horse, threw his arms up around the horse’s neck to protect it, and collapsed to the ground. The first dream-sequence from Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment (Part 1, Chapter 5) has just such a scene in which Raskolnikov witnesses the whipping of a horse around the eyes.^[11] Incidentally, Nietzsche called Dostoevsky "the only psychologist from whom I have anything to learn."^[12]

A week after his collapse, Nietzsche was moved to a psychiatric hospital in Basel. What followed was a long and protracted battle between Nietzsche's mother, his sister, and his former colleagues over control of the editing and publishing of his later works. Twilight of the Idols was published in January, 1889, but The Antichrist and Ecce Homo were withheld because of their controversial content. After serious and controversial editing, The Antichrist was published in 1895. During this time, Nietzsche wrote several barely coherent letters to some of his acquaintances, in which he ordered Bismarck to be "abolished" and commanded that the German Emperor travel to Rome to be shot.
^{In 1893, Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche returned to Germany from an Aryan colony in Paraguay and began to take control of his estate. Upon the death of their mother in 1897, Elisabeth had her brother moved to Weimar, where she openly invited other philosophers and intellectuals of the day to come and observe him.

Nietzsche died of a stroke on August 25, 1900, at the age of 55. It is generally agreed that his long-term madness and degenerative psychological state was caused by syphilis. After his death, Elisabeth collected and edited his notes and published them as The Will to Power in 1901. She also edited Ecce Homo and had it published in 1908. It is generally agreed that Elisabeth's influence here would ensure the initial reception of Nietzsche's thought as being - ironically - Nationalistic and anti-Semitic.}

Happy Wittgenstein Day!

2008-04-26T18:16:00.000-07:00

On April 26th, 1889, Wittgenstein was born in Vienna. Until today becomes a nationally recognized holiday, you can celebrate on your own in one or more of the following ways:

- Emit an inarticulate sound, and then describe the language-game in which it has a meaning.
- Threaten a philosophical rival with a fire poker.
- Recognize all propositions of philosophy as senseless, transcend them, and then see the world aright.
- Physically and emotionally abuse Austrian schoolchildren.
- Seduce a student of the same sex. Weep when s/he leaves you and/or dies tragically young.
- Go to your friend's house in the middle of the night, wake him up, and make him repeat his philosophy lecture to you.
- Eat Duck-Rabbit.
- Solve all problems of philosophy twice.

Teaching Nietzsche I

2008-04-23T11:11:00.000-07:00

Friedrich Nietzsche was born on October 15, 1844, near Leipzig in Prussia., the eldest of three children. His father was a Lutheran pastor and his mother, Franziska, was 18 at his birth. Nietzsche would be three years old at the publication of the Communist Manifesto and the subsequent Revolutions of 1848 in France, Germany, and Hungary. In Germany, these struggles would lead to a political backlash of nationalism.

Nietzsche was something of a child prodigy, especially in music and language. He began attending the University of Bonn in 1864, where he first read Schopenhauer, and began to question his own faith. While he was a student, Prussia waged successful wars against Denmark and Austria. He graduated in 1868, the first year he met Richard Wagner.

After his graduation, Nietzsche was immediately offered a post as a professor of philology at the University of Basil. Two years earlier, Otto von Bismarck had become the Chancellor of the North German Federation; as soon as Nietzsche reached Basil, he renounced his Prussian citizenship. From Wikipedia:

Nevertheless, he served on the Prussian side during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 to 1871 as a medical orderly. In his short time in the military he experienced much, and witnessed the traumatic effects of battle. He also contracted diphtheria and dysentery. Walter Kaufmann speculates that he might also have contracted syphilis along with his other infections at this time and some biographers speculate that syphilis caused his eventual madness, though there is some dispute on this matter.^[5] On returning to Basel in 1870, Nietzsche observed the establishment of the German Empire and the following era of Otto von Bismarck as an outsider and with a degree of skepticism regarding its genuineness.

This makes Nietzsche one in a long line of Philosopher-Veterans that includes Socrates, Descartes, and Wittgenstein. However, the war exposed Nietzsche's weak physique; he would be plagued by health problems - some of them crippling - for the rest of his life. These included severe migraines, stomach cramps, intense and long-term bouts of nausea, and temporary blindness.

While at Basel, Nietzsche became closer to Richard Wagner and his wife, Cosima. He would often be found at the Wagner's house, and he became something of a "court philosopher" for them and their many guests. Nietzsche even presented Cosima a draft of his book, the pro-Wagner The Birth of Tragedy as a birthday gift in 1870.

Nietzsche formally published The Birth of Tragedy in 1872, a year after the formation of the new German Empire (Reich) was declared at Versailles and the same year that Bismarck ordered all Jesuits expelled from Germany. The book was met with almost unanimous scorn and ridicule. It was seen as an example of poor scholarship, subjective history, and questionable ethics. One of its few supporters was Richard Wagner; however, this was unsurprising as much of the book was dedicated to praising Wagner's genius. Wikipedia quotes Marianne Cowan:

The Birth of Tragedy presented a view of the Greeks so alien to the spirit of the time and to the ideals of its scholarship that it blighted Nietzsche's entire academic career. It provoked pamphlets and counter-pamphlets attacking him on the grounds of common sense, scholarship and sanity. For a time, Nietzsche, then a professor of classical philology at the University of Basel, had no students in his field. His lectures were sabotaged by German philosophy professors who advised their students not to show up for Nietzsche's courses.

In 1879, due to constant criticism, poor health, and a lack of student interest, Nietzsche lost his job at Basel. He would never work in academia again.

Next Episode: Friedrich abandons his philosophical pessimism and gets the hell out of Germany!

Undergraduate Philosophy Majors

2008-04-07T12:19:00.000-07:00

Apparently, today is official Philosophy Day for the New York Times.

Stanley Is Not A Fish

2008-04-07T07:23:00.000-07:00

French Theory In America - Stanley Fish

This is Interesting

2008-03-28T12:53:00.000-07:00

1o Things Christians and Atheists can Agree On

I don't agree with it 100%, but I find it quite interesting.

Something About the Meaning of the Word "Could"

2008-03-26T21:22:00.000-07:00

I'm not quite sure about the philosophical implications here, if there are any, but here goes.

Take the following two sentences:

(1) "Gov. Spitzer could have been more honest with the people of New York."

(2) "Gov. Spitzer could have been a potato."

The interesting thing about these two sentences is that the word "could" is being used in a very different way in both of them. I am not quite sure if I can say why succinctly, but I'll try. Basically, in one sense they are both true. But in another sense (1) is obviously true but (2) is obviously false.

So Wittgenstein talks a lot in both the Tractatus and the Investigations about how we, as speakers, can be misled by the grammar of our language into believing that we are saying something different than what we are really saying. I think that these two sentences are an example of this. But I think that (a) it's a problem specific to English, in that the use of cases in languages like French and Latin avoid it, and (b) it's only a problem for analytic philosophy, in that only some philosophers would see these two sentences and conclude that there is a possible world where Gov. Spitzer is more honest and that there is a possible world where Gov. Spitzer is a potato.

The mistake is to think that what I am talking about is something about the essence of what constitutes being Gov. Spitzer, and not about how the English language works.

Consider:

"I could have gone to work today."

"I could have gone to work today, but I didn't."

"I could have gone to work today, and I did."

"I went to work today."

"I could go to work tomorrow."

"I could have died at birth."

"I could have been born a girl."

"I could have been a six-footer."

"I could still turn out to be a six-footer."

"I could be a six-footer."

"If it hadn't had been for the oxygen deprivation, Lisa could have grown up to be a strong and healthy woman."

"Tiny Tim could wake up tomorrow and be the healthiest boy in London." (With God, all things are possible.)

"I could be more honest with myself."

"I could be stronger, if I worked out more." ("I would be stronger, if I worked out more.")

"I could be the President of the United States of America."

"I could be the King of France."

"I could be a potato."

"I could be a butterfly, dreaming it was a... dude."

I have to go to bed now. But this has something to do with a question of ethics:

"Gov. Spitzer should have been more honest with the people of New York."

"Gov. Spitzer should be a potato."

Something About the Meaning of the Word "Will"

2008-03-19T17:42:00.000-07:00

Question: Do human beings have a soul, are they able to assert their will against the predetermining laws of force and causality, or are they merely subject to the same principles of nature as the tides and falling rocks? Ought one to be a behaviorist or an anti-behaviorist? A monist or a dualist?

Answer: I had spent all day in front of my computer, working on my Wittgenstein paper. My girlfriend came home from work, and she made us a couple of martinis, and we sat in the kitchen eating chips and salsa. It was nice to give my eyes and my mind a break, to relax and think about nothing in particular for a while. But the night was getting late, and I still needed a good four or five more pages before morning. So - in an act of pure will - I got up from the table and went back to typing on my computer.

Something About the Meaning of the Word, "Chance"

2008-03-18T10:53:00.001-07:00

Question: Is the world pre-determined, does it operate in accord with a set of universal laws, or is it random and chaotic, and subject only to randomness and chance?

Answer: I'm sitting in class, and my cell phone starts quietly beeping at me. It's battery is low. I thought [had believed] that I had put it on silent, but it was on "loud". I take it out of my pocket and start fiddling with it under the table, trying to get it to shut up. Just after I get it to "vibrate", it rings; some number I don't recognize is trying to call me. So my phone makes a little noise, but at least it doesn't start loudly playing "Flight of the Valkyries" for everyone to hear. If the person on the other line had happened to call one minute earlier, or if my phone hadn't been low on batteries, then I would have been responsible for interrupting class with my anti-Semitic phone ring, and that would have been very, very embarrassing. "Phew," I think to myself, "That was lucky."

History- Part I

2008-03-05T06:55:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I read in the Chicago Tribune that there is only one (1) living World War One veteran in America. There is also one Canadian, and two British veterans still alive, as well as several Frenchmen. He doesn't mention Russians, Germans, Austrians, Hungarians, Italians, Serbs, Turks, etc. The author - Cory Franklin - is mainly arguing that the United States is neglecting its duty to history and our veterans by failing to educate its youth properly. He says:

And yet, how much do we teach our citizens about World War I today? My son's high school American History textbook covers American involvement in the war in less than two pages, roughly the same amount of coverage it gives to the Reagan Iran-contra affair. Dismissed in a single sentence are 50,000 combat deaths the United States suffered in less than a year and a half, more than 10 times the number of Iraq War casualties to date. The 650,000 civilians who died of influenza at the end of the war, a pandemic spread by closely quartered Army troops, are not mentioned in the book at all.

And as bad as we are with our own history, we know even less of the experience of other countries at war. America, of course, was relatively lucky in World War I; Europe and Russia lost nearly 20 million soldiers and civilians. The history textbook doesn't even mention them.

Franklin's right, of course, but what's between the lines is this: That World War I is not an American war - it is a European one. The war's narrative is a complicated one; it involves European nationalism, the effects of rapid industrialization, the simultaneous rise of Western Democracy and the European bourgeoisie, and their threat the the aristocracy and the thousand-year-old empires. These are difficult concepts for an American student to grasp. (Just as it is difficult for us to understand why the Kurds don't want to live with the Shiites, or the Albanians don't want to live withe Serbs.)

The American Narrative - like American literature - is simple compared to the European's. (

03.04.08

2008-03-04T13:09:00.000-08:00

Because words are not signs, godammit! And a language is not a system of signs - they behave in completely different ways.

The thought runs as follows: There must be something arbitrary about a word, because it is always possible for us to decide to use a different word than the one that we are using merely conventionally. For example, the English "dog", the French "chien', and the German "Hund" all signify the same thing!
Therefore, the sign is an object of convention. It is inessential - only the thought that is being expressed is necessary.

But this is a gross abuse of the meaning of the word, "arbitrary"! I use the word "dog" here because the conventions within which I was raised, because of my forms of life, because if I want to make myself understood to myself and to others, I must use the word "dog"! And this means that I do not use it arbitrarily! Furthermore, it is a mistake - that is, it leads to certain philosophical confusions - to say that the word "dog" signifies either the object or the concept "dog". (Depending on who you ask and when.)

But it is still true that the relationship between the sign, er, sorry 'word' "dog" and the object that it signifies is not a necessary one. I agree with you that the sign only has a sense insofar as it has a use within a system of signs, but this is importantly different from it having a necessary, non-contingent relationship. The word can only say how things stand, not that they stand.

I don't understand this use of 'arbitrary' of which you speak. If you want to claim that there is one kind of relationships that are arbitrary, and then there is this other kind of relationships that are 'true in every possible world', then you are already speaking nonsense to me! What could possibly fulfill this latter criteria of being necessarily true, true a priori, or true in every possible world?

Only the truths as shown by the propositions of logic.

But the propositions of logic don't actually say anything! They're senseless!

Or nonsense.

So the disagreement rests on what kind of relationship - if any - exists between language and the world. And whether or not we can ever do anything more than just gesture at the world through our language.

02.27.08

2008-02-27T12:24:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-25T21:52:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-18T10:04:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-15T22:32:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-14T14:45:00.000-08:00

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?

2008-02-07T12:26:00.000-08:00

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]

Philosophy Blogs

2007-12-07T12:38:00.000-08:00

http://tar.weatherson.org

http://leiterreports.typepad.com/

Kripkenstein Attacks!

2007-10-31T23:06:00.001-07:00

The last post was referring to Saul Kripke's book, "Wittgenstein: On Rules and Private Language". The first half of this book is Kirpke's attempt to reconstruct Wittgenstein's "argument" against the traditional view that meaning comes from a referent, either mental or physical, and that one can show that one understands something, say, for example, the concept of addition, through the appeal to or interpretation of or application of some kind of general or universal 'rule'. The question is how can I justify my belief that I am 'using the same rule of addition' when I add the two numbers before me right now that I used yesterday when I was adding two different numbers. If I have never before added numbers larger than 57, but I have successfully added smaller numbers in the past, how can I tell that I am applying the same rule? What if 'addition' meant that for every number smaller than 57, proceed in such-and-such a way, but if you ever try to add numbers larger than 57, remember that the answer is always going to be 5? This sounds crazy, I know, and I am probably retelling it wrong, but I think that the important point is that we cannot point to any facts about our previous behavior or our previous 'mental states' to prove that we know when we are 'acting in accord with such-and-such rule'. We can't appeal to our previous behavior because part of the idea of a rule is that it can apply to an infinite number of possibilities, whereas we have only encountered a finite number, and we cannot appeal to the 'mental picture' of the rule (in this case, the rule of addition) because then we would need some other 'mental rule-concept' to appeal in order to be sure that we were interpreting the previous rule-concept correctly. [ex: "How do you know you're reading this map right?" Because I can use this legend that I have here. "But how do you know that you're reading that legend right?"] Kripke says, "Each new application we make is a leap in the dark; any present intention could be interpreted so as to accord with anything we may choose to do." Kripke's answer to this 'skeptical paradox' is through appealing to the fact that we are always engaged in a community of speakers who teach us these concepts and correct us when we use them incorrectly, which is true and good I think, but also I think that there is something to the fact that there is not one way to add, that we use this concept in many different ways in many different parts of our lives, and that mathematics as a whole ought to be viewed not as a set of universal truisms but as an evolving network of tools that we have invented and that we use on a daily basis to help build houses and roads and cakes and to explain the behavior of atomic particles and the populations of fruitflies. But I'm not sure, lots of people tell me that I'm wrong here.

On a personal note: I had a meeting with Prof. James Conant yesterday to talk about my Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein paper. The entire 50 minutes were spent having him list essays and books that I needed to read if I wanted to this paper right. So at the end of the day, there is always something I should be reading.

Notes on the Function of Addition

2007-10-26T09:50:00.000-07:00

The Function of Addition - symbolized by the '+' - is used in many different ways. (We could say that the relationship between '+' and the concept of addition have roughly the same relationship as a word and a concept, except that '+' is a sign, not a word.) It is misleading to think only of cases such as "57+68=125". What about the following (which ones qualify as instances of addition?)
(1) 68+(-57) =11
(2) 68-57=11
(3) 57+(-68) = -11
(4) 4+4=8
(5) 4*2=8
(6) 4+4+4+4=16
(7) 4^2=16
(8) No one can know the sum of all positive integers.
(9) Everyone knows that the sum of all positive integers and all negative integers is 0.
(10) Next, add the two tablespoons of sugar to the cup of flour.

Serious Philosophizing

2007-10-24T22:17:00.000-07:00

How does one perceive things? We're not interested in the mere scientific question of optics, but the far more fundamental philosophical question of how one's mind accesses the world. For the sake of clarity, let us replace the word 'things' with the word 'material objects'. What is a material object? Well, an object capable of being perceived, such as a chair, which is a good example as it is sturdy, and made of wood, and is roughly man sized and gives off no odor and tends not to make much noise of its own volition, and, along with tables and desks and lamps and books and pens and cigarettes and bottles of beer, tends to be around when serious philosophizing is being done.

10.20.07

2007-10-20T23:49:00.000-07:00

We recently read the essay “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” by W.V. Quine, and a response to it, “In Defense of a Dogma”, by Grice and Strawson, for my Meaning and Skepticism class. In the handout, the professor enumerated some criticisms and clarifications for Quine's paper, and one of these criticisms was the following:
“Quine's attack on analyticity amounts to an attack on the very idea that a sentence could have a meaning. If it makes sense to ask “what does it mean?” of a sentence, then we can get a notion of sentence synonym:two statements are synonymous if and only if any true answer to the question “what does it mean?” asked of one of them is also a true answer to the same question asked of the other.”
And the next point reads:
“Quine moves from “we have not made satisfactory sense of x” to “x does not make sense.”

These criticisms express an old way of thinking about meaning, that is, assuming that a meaning is something that is unified, fixed, and stable. But what are we asking for when as for the meaning of a sentence? Here's an example lifted from John Searle's essay “What is a Speech Act?”, where Searle argues that intention alone cannot account for meaning: “Suppose I'm a US Soldier in WWII, and I'm captured by Italian troops. I want to get them to believe I'm a German officer and so release me, but I know very little German. All I remember is the following sentence: “Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühen?” which I know utter as if to tell them I'm a German officer.”

“What does 'Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühen' mean?” seems to have a specific meaning because it has a normal and recognizable use; asking for a translation. But is this question synonymous with either of these two: “What does he mean by 'Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühen' ?” or, “What does 'Do you know the land where the lemon trees bloom' mean?”

Examples like these live along the border lines of concepts, and considering them forces us to rethink the meaning of this word or that word, but not of language as a whole. The very acts of doubting and considering are contingent upon us already knowing the meanings of our words and sentences.

A²+B²=C² is not true. (But 3²+4²=5² is true.) That is to say, that it cannot be either true or false because what it is doing is not 'making a claim' but 'stating a rule'. Once we have decided upon this rule, we can use it as a measuring stick to aid us in deciding what is true and what is false. (Yes, this is very radical, and maybe not right.)

In one sense, what we call 'analytic statements' can never be true or false. The classical philosophical way to describe this is to say that certain statements are 'logically true', 'analytically true', or 'true in every possible world'. But if a statement cannot possibly be false, then it cannot either be considered a 'fact'. That is, the sentence “A bachelor is an unmarried male.” is not a fact. It is not true. It is what we mean by the word, 'bachelor'.

But can this also be said of the sentence, “An unmarried male is an unmarried male.”? Does “A bachelor is an unmarried male.” = “An unmarried male is an unmarried male.”? Under what possible circumstances would I possible need or want to say the sentence “An unmarried male is an unmarried male.”?

Something about the meaning of the word 'meaning': The sentence, “A squared plus B squared means C squared.” doesn't sound right. And neither does the sentence, “Bachelor equals unmarried male.”

But of course the Pythagorean Theorem is true! It's never been proved to be not true! But it's true in a different way. I mean, the sentences, “One foot is the same as twelve inches.”, and “One foot equals twelve inches.” are also both true.

In trying to posit a Theory of Meaning, if I believe that what I am trying to do is locate and identify the meaning of my words, my project will be doomed from the start.

There is no such thing as meaning, just as there is no such thing as language. If that's what you mean by meaning. What is the criteria for meaning? For meaning is not a quality of a sentence, like its grammar can be.

Notes from This Last Week in October

2007-10-18T21:50:00.000-07:00

These last few posts, as well as the majority of the posts over the next month or two, are all notes for a paper that I am planning for my MA Thesis. The title is going to be "Something About the Meaning of the Word 'Believe'." The idea at this point is to distinguish and define at three different types of belief: (1) The ordinary language use of "belief", (2) The analytic philosophical use of "belief", and (3) Søren Kierkegaard's concept of belief from "Fear and Trembling". Obviously, (or hopefully obviously) these three uses are very different from one another, and so force the question: Why use the same word in all three cases?
Silentio distinguishes between “conceptualizing” and “comprehending.” Maybe these two words are not synonyms, but they are very similar, even etymologically. (And I suspect that that similarity is even stronger in both Danish and German.) But I think that it is revealing to note that part of understanding the concept “faith” is to realize that one cannot understand faith, that it is part of the definition of “faith” that it is outside of the realm of Logos. (Lacan, the Logos speaks, Logos as God as Logos.) This positing of faith places it in the same family of concepts as “God” and “infinity,” a family that could be described as mystical. So I'll use this as a place-holder for Kierkegaard/ Silentio's concept of faith: Mystical Faith. (The capital letters signify that this is a technical term, and so is not, strictly speaking, the same as mystical faith.)
One of my main points is that Mystical Faith is divorced from belief, or from the act of believing (psychologically speaking), or from [my] understanding of the word-concept “believe.” This is Wittgenstein's point, but it is Kierkegaard's also.
Mystical Faith is unjustified and unjustifiable. (It transcends justice, it negates ethics.) “If faith cannot make it into a holy deed to murder one's own son, then let the judgement fall on Abraham as on anyone else.” (Hannay, 60) But doesn't this concept of faith, contrary to how it appears on the surface, actually in synch with our common understanding of faith? Faith is a kind of belief without justification. The common understanding of belief – what I tenatively label as Ordinary Belief – is related to the following word-concepts: “doubt”, “evidence”, “reason”. And these are anathema to Mystical Faith.

October 18, 2007

2007-10-18T14:58:00.001-07:00

October 18, 2007: There is actually a very pragmatic reason for why people believe in God. P.I. §472-474: “The character of the belief in the uniformity of nature can be seen most clearly in the case in which we fear what we expect. Nothing could induce me to put my hand into a flame – although after all it is only in the past that I have burnt myself. The belief that fire will burn me is of the same kind as the fear that it will burn me. I shall get burnt if I put my hand in the fire: that is certainty. That is to say: here we see the meaning of certainty. (What it amounts to, not just the meaning of the word “certainty”.)”

It is, in a way, very reasonable to behave in such a way in order to avoid pain. I know what it feels like to be burned, and I am willing to perform some set of actions over and over again (i.e., rituals) in order to avoid being burned. But this is not Mystical Faith. It is its opposite. This is performance, something that sounds akin to the Roman conception of religion. And this does not describe how faith, belief, and religion function today. (Not speaking historically.)

What I am looking for would be something more like a “way of life”. Wittgenstein’s wrong (gasp!) when he says that “nothing could induce me to put my hand into a flame.” Because I would do so if I had been raised to do so. (Sparta)

But this still is not getting close to what I want to know, which is why people feel the need to give reasons for, or to justify, their religious beliefs. And it has something to do with the statement, “The belief that fire will burn me is of the same kind as the fear that it will burn me.” But this does not explain religious belief or faith.

§485: “Justification by experience comes to an end. If it did not it would not be justification.”

What role does doubt play in the sketching out of the structure of these interrelated concepts?

Notes on Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein

2007-10-03T11:22:00.000-07:00

Here it is in German, with an alternate English translation: "Was Tarquinius Superbus in seinem Garten mit den Mohnkopfen sprach, verstand der Sohn, aber nicht der Bote."

"What Tarquinius Superbus said in the garden by means of the poppies, the son understood but the messenger did not."

And here is Wittgenstein from Lectures on Religious Belief: "Suppose someone were a believer and said: "I believe in a Last Judgement," and I said: "Well, I'm not so sure. Possibly." You would say that there is an enormous gulf between us. If he said "There is a German aeroplane overhead," and I said "Possibly I'm not so sure," you'd say we were fairly near." (53)

As I have said before, what I am doing here is looking at the many different ways that the word-concept "believe" can move within varying language-games, and how these movements relate to one another, and what the consequences of misuse and misidentifications of these movments are. Fear and Trembling can be used to show the fissure between at least two different language-games that make a different use of the word-concept "believe" and that may, according to Johannes de Silentio, be so radically different that it is utterly impossible for one use to be understandable to another. In a way, it is as if two mutually exclusive concepts are being invoked by the same 'arbitrary sign'. But, pragmatically speaking, this is not true.

On the other hand, I hope to show through Fear and Trembling that ordinary people in ordinary language-games (i.e., not philosophers) are constantly misusing the word-concept "believe". They think that they're talking about that is or at least resembles faith, but they're behaving as if they're talking about whether or not it is raining outside, or whether or not they believe that Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo. Or, to use Wittgenstein's example, they're talking about the Last Judgment as if it were a German plane overhead. (I need to resist saying, "They treat it as if it were a fact in the world.")

From Hong and Hong's translation: "Abraham remains silent - but he cannot
speak. Therein lies the distress and anxiety. Even though I go on nightb and day without interruption, if I cannot make myself understood when I speak, than I am not speaking." (113)

[Working definition: A word-concept is an application of a concept within a particular language-game or a set of language-games.]

Fear and Trembling

2007-10-03T08:11:00.000-07:00

"What Tarquin the proud said in his garden with the poppy blooms was understood by the son but not by the messenger." - Hamann

Immediately, Kierkegaard, and I am of as now unsure about how I will distinguish between Kierkegaard and Johannes de Silentio, is stating the major themes of Fear and Trembling: 1) That faith has he understands it is a kind of language, a very unique and peculiar kind of language. 2) That this language exists not merely in words, that it is communicated (performed) through particular kinds of actions. 3) That this language can either be understood or mis-understood, and that the nature of this understanding is of fatal importance.

Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations, p. 53: Wittgenstein describes this issue of understanding as a kind of gulf that exists between the believer and the non-believer, a gulf which cannot be breached, or at least not in any ordinary way.

Philosophical Catfight!

2007-06-30T17:07:00.000-07:00

Here is an interesting/ ridiculous/ hilarious correspondance between Daniel Dennett and John Searle that took place in the pages of the New York Review of Books in December, 1995, entitled (ironically, I wish) "The Mystery of Consciousness". The main point that seems to be under debate here is whether or not consciousness exists, with a secondary topic being the abilty for science to reach a level of objectivity. Dennett doesn't actually get a chance to lay out his position here, as he instead submits a short, angry rant against Searle. However, the most interesting part of this debate, for me, is that it shows how, even today, philosophers are still depending upon a very old, inadequate language and a system of imaginary oppositions. (i.e., appearance/ reality, subjective/ objective, mind/ body, etc.) Searle even studied under J.L. Austin at Oxford in the 50's, but "seems" (as I am unsure, because I'm not a Searle scholar) to have latched onto to Austin's theory of Speech Acts, and to have missed Austin's broader point about the myriad uses of language.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1680

re: The Prince

2007-06-25T00:02:00.000-07:00

I guess that my criticism of the medical profession stems from the presumption that it is free from interpretation. A lot of this probably has to do with the impact of certain legal issues upon the practice of medicine, but I think that it is also related to the belief and the desire for medicine to be a hard science - that is, for it to rest upon some foundation that is steadier than the social sciences, for it to be more objective, to be free from interpretation, which, it is assumed, is an expression of some kind of fallible subjectivity. [That somehow medicine is more real than law.] But I see medicine as first and foremost a social science, as a purely human activity that is primarily concerned with humans interacting with other humans. But this is totally understandable - Don't we want nothing more than to believe that we are dealing with a kind of certainty when our health and our lives are at stake? And aren't most people more than willing to engage in a quite a lot of self-deception in order to maintain that belief?

"There are instances where you have a faith - where you say "I believe" - and on the other hand this belief does not rest on the fact on which our ordinary everyday beliefs normally do rest." - Wittgenstein, Lectures on Religious Belief, p. 54.

At its simplest, this sentence is saying that we have different reasons for believing the things that we believe. [His belief in evolution has nothing to do with his belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ, nor in his belief that it is raining outside.] But if we look closer, we might find that we have some peculiar reasons and/or explanations for our beliefs. For example, my belief that the antibiotics will kill my infection may have less to do with my knowledge of biology and chemistry and more to do with my desire for my doctors to be a part of a strange and mysterious system that has the power and the will to salvage my health. This could be called faith. And somewhere I hear Nietzsche lobbying in favor of the conclusion that our scientific beliefs are really just disguised leaps of faith. But I don't think this is quite right.

One Year Older

2007-06-21T02:02:00.000-07:00

06.20.07 - So on what occasions, then, is perception in need of interpretation? On only a very few, I suppose. And those occasions would be incredibly particular; something along the lines of seeing a blurry dot upon the horizon and not knowing whether it is [to call it] a deer or an elk. And here we have a clear example of something we could call “misinterpretation” and mean it as a synonym for “mistake”. However, under what I would want to call normal circumstances, that particular function that we call perception has no need for that particular function we call interpretation. In other words, we don't interpret when we perceive. (I have P.I. §330 in mind here.) Now, of course these few and rather specialized instances of interpretation during otherwise normal perception ought to be investigated further, but the next question needs to be whether or not language, in particular the specific acts of labeling and remembering, requires in any way an act of interpreting. My instinct is telling me no, but in order to show this we're going to need to not only deconstruct but most likely dynamite certain preconceived notions of knowledge, interpretation and recollection, certain epistemological stalking-horses that, for centuries, have made us believe that we're more removed from reality than we really are. (And I dare you to count how many metaphysical-linguistic assumptions are being made in that last sentence.)
What use then, to us, is interpretation? My hunch is that the fields of science and medicine grossly under-use the concept of interpretation.
P.I. §333: “ 'Only someone who is convinced can say that.' - How does the conviction help him when he says it? - Is it somewhere at hand by the side of the spoken expression? (Or is it masked by it, as a soft sound by a loud one, so that it can, as it were, no longer be heard when one expresses it out loud?) What if someone were to say “In order to be able to sing a tune from memory one has to hear it in one's mind and sing from that?'” And this stabs at the heart of the matter, that when I recognize A as A, there is no process accompanying that act – that is to say, that there is no shadow A that follows and precedes A and allows me to fit A into a shape that is A-shaped.

Language and Time

2006-06-19T11:34:00.000-07:00

sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2006/615/2

By Greg Miller
ScienceNOW Daily News
15 June 2006
Every language has metaphors that express time in terms of space. An English speaker, for instance, might look forward to a date next week or look back on last year's office party with embarrassment and regret. But now, researchers report the first known example of a language that puts the past ahead and the future behind.

In Aymara, a tongue spoken by about 2 million indigenous people of the same name in the Andean highlands of Bolivia, Peru, and Chile, the word "nayra" can refer both to objects that are physically in front of the speaker and to events in the past. "Nayra mara,” for example, means "last year,” explains Rafael Núñez, a cognitive scientist at the University of California (UC), San Diego. "Qhipa mara," on the other hand, indicates "next year." "Qhipa" means back or behind and is incorporated into other future-oriented expressions such as "qhipüru" (a future day) and "akata qhiparu" (from now on).

This concept of time extends to gestures as well as words. Speakers point backward or wave over their shoulders when talking about a future event and extend their hands and arms forward to indicate a past event--reaching farther out for events that happened long ago. The past-is-forward concept is most ingrained in older individuals: Younger Aymara with more formal education often use expressions and gestures that put the future in front, especially when talking with outsiders, Núñez says.

Núñez first noticed peculiarities in spoken Aymara when backpacking through the Andes as an undergraduate student in the 1980s. He eventually returned and collected 20 hours of videotaped conversation with 30 Aymara volunteers and presents an analysis of the tapes with UC Berkeley linguist Eve Sweetser in the current issue of Cognitive Science.

The work has fascinating implications for understanding how the Aymara conceptualize time, says David McNeill, a linguist at the University of Chicago in Illinois. "The Aymara seem to equate time with sources of knowledge," he says. For the Aymara, the forward direction is the source of what's known: what's seen by the eyes, what's happened in the past. Behind, where they can't see, lies the future.

A Translation Issue from Anya

2006-06-19T11:27:00.000-07:00

First: Was it you that was involved in the discussion of whether one can lie unintentionally?

Secondly: In the development of "doubting things" of an individual (assuming it can be broken down into stages of different 'stuff' that can be doubted (stuff because that seems more general thatn thing/concept/idea/person) what does a developing consciousness doubt before the other: a) the truthfulness (certainty) of themselves to themself or b) the meaning of things (direct symbolism)? (maybe doubt isn't the best word, maybe question, maybe wonder, maybe just perception, or perception altered by doubt....erghhhhh)

Thirdly: I have come to the conclusion that you are my worst enemy or at least to what I want to do in life--that is translate-harness language (s). As if it wasn't enough that there is never a one-to-one correspondent between two words in two languages (slippery synonyms at best) There you reappear with your "meaning" crap. So since I take this as a personal attack on my translating peace of mind, From now on I will send you really itrritating word questions so they can distract you from your theoretical task at hand.

So here is one I have just encountered.

Russian book title: "School for Fools."
problem word: Fools (archaic, devoid of meaning)
In the Russian the word for "fool" is used frequently and casually, still carries all the levels of meaning that can be found for the English word in the dictionary (e.g. a dupe, a jester. particularly: mentally deficient, retarted) So the title is literally "School for Retards" but that can't be the title (Sounds adolescent and too pejorative/joking).
Use: The narrator is a schizophrenic kid who goes to a "specialED" school for all sorts of mentally deficient kids who have learning disabilities/crazy (ironically he is no fool).

(As I was writing this I cam up with a really good solution, but I'm not going to tell you so you can at least waste five minutes of your time thinking about this. Thank you for indirectly aiding already)

4. Hope you are enjoying yourself. Congratulations for finding a good use for your education (As you can see by the time I have to write your this impolitely long message, I haven't. To defend my self worth, this is the only one I have written to date so I haven't sunk into that sort of muck just yet)
Enough.
Thank you, Sincerely, Yours Truly,
~A

P.S.-nya

June 15, 2006

2006-06-15T16:59:00.000-07:00

06.15.06

How can anyone claim to have a theory of meaning when the word “meaning” has so many meanings?

For example: “The game tomorrow has no meaning.” - Which means that it has no (practical) purposes. And when I say something like, “Life has no meaning,” then the meaning of the word “meaning” is different, albeit related. Again, it is as if the same piece is making a different move in the game, or a hammer is being used to remove a nail where before we were pounding the nail into the ground.

On occassion, we make the mistake of believing that a sentence states a physical or metaphysial law or truth when in fact we are merely stating a grammatical rule. (We believe that because the hammer was used once to hammer the nail, that therefore that is its only possible function.) This, I think, is a big part of what Austin is trying to say.

For example: “One cannot perceive the same object from two places at the same time.” But what if I am in a room with a table and a mirror? In what situations - in what kind of language-game - do these kinds of sentences make sense? (Have meaning?) And how am I to know the criteria to use in order to establish this?

Something about this discussion makes me feel like I am stretching the rules of grammar to fit my needs. They are elastic.

June 13 - 14, 2006

2006-06-15T16:58:00.000-07:00

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.

June 8 - 9, 2006

2006-06-15T16:57:00.000-07:00

06.08.06

What happens when we begin to regard mathematics as a kind of language? Does one ‘read’ numbers in any way similar to how one ‘reads’ words? Are numbers in need of interpretation? Why is it that a system of mathematics seems somehow more certain than a language? (Compare playing sudoku to filling in a crossword puzzle. At what point does one “know how to go on”?)

What Wittgenstein is trying to get us to realize is that when we read a passage we are not always nor necessarily “interpreting” the words in front of us. These are two different, although related proccesses and concepts. Compare how we use the phrases, “She read the poem (passage, letter, etc.)” and “She interpreted the poem...”

I will soon be ready to return to Heidegger’s concepts of understanding and interpretation.

In Section 32 of Being and Time, Heidegger seems to be saying that when we Articulate, we are expressing our understanding of ‘something as something’, and that understanding and interpretation precede phenomenologically articulation. I believe that this follows Kant’s move when he says that we must conceptualize an object as an object, or as a variable (‘X’). Yet it seems to me that this articulation of either our understanding or our interpretation (I am still unclear as to Heidegger’s distinction here) is redundant.

What needs to be clarified here is how terms such as ‘thing’ and ‘object’ are used. What I see is (A) these terms are used as variables or place-holders. They do not behave in any way as ‘signs’ that signify something - “This sign signifies something.” tells me nothing about the possible function of the sign, that is, its meaning. (B) To say “I see something as something,” or perhaps “I see something as itself,” again gives no useful information . In ordinary language, we would say “I see something,” or, more precisely, “I see a dog, car, tree, etc.”

What is the difference between a description and an explanation?

If we replace the sentence, “I see something as something,” with “I see the dog as a dog,” the absurdity of speaking this way becomes more apparent.

“The chalkboard appears green to me.” What do you mean? The chalkboard is green. (There is no pragmatic use for this sentence. Unless, of course, I am having an eye exam.)

06.09.06

The point is this: That word “meaning” is being used in a different way when we speak of “the meaning of a word,” as compared to when we are speaking of “the meaning of a sign.” And that means that the word “meaning” itself takes on a multiplicity of meanings. (But this does not mean that a word changes meanings like an actor changes costumes.)

But this is not enough; the differences in these meanings must be described.

“The Sunkist name signifies superior quality and good taste.” Notice how this sentence makes sense, even though philosophically speaking it is not true. The Sunkist name signifies more than the company that is named Sunkist. This leads me to ask whether “The Sunkist name signifies the company named Sunkist.” is even an appropriate use of the word.

Because this sentence tells me nothing new. (It is, absent the word ‘company’, tautological.)

For isn’t it also true to say, “The Sunkist name signifies the thing that is named Sunkist.” ?

It seems to me that if it can be proved that a system of signs derives its meaning from being contingent upon a pre-existing natural language, than it could be proved that a sign has meaning through its ‘pointing to something outside of itself’, whereas this is not necessarily true (or at least not true in the same sense) of words.

“She wore black as a sign of her mourning.” In order to understand this sign, one must have access to a pre-existing culture, one that is comprised of an infinite amount of organic language-games.

But from whence, then, do words get their meaning? Free yourself from the dichotomy of word/world.

Well, do trees have meaning? Do insects, do days and nights, mangos? What about pizzas and cars? (These are not yes or no questions. Remember that in every situation, it is still we who are speaking.)

June 4 - 7, 2006

2006-06-15T16:56:00.000-07:00

06.04.06

When do I feel the need to ask for the meaning of... ? Because words do not have a monopoly on meaning, by which I mean (or, “in other words” or “I could also say this in the following way”) that we speak of paintings, gestures, military tactics, historical events, etc. as all ‘having meaning’.

For example: “What is the meaning of that tribal dance?” And here there seems to be a connection between the concept of meaning and the concepts of purpose and intention. But I could also say “Why are they dancing that dance?” Now, would we say that this sentence has the same meaning as the first sentence? What would the criteria be for determining this?

Perhaps we are misled by a handful of unique cases, i.e., “& means ‘and’”, “% means ‘percentage’”, etc. But in these cases we are still speaking of signs, and their meaning comes from being and being able to be translated into words. It is pointless, albeit true, to say “’And’ means ‘and’.”

06.05.06

In some situations, it may be helpful to think of mathematics as a kind of language. But this would be useful only as a kind of analogy.

Both mathematics and language, we would want to say, are governed by a system of rules, of logic or of grammar, and once we understand the rules, we “know how to proceed.” That is to say, that the rest will fall into place before our eyes.

But, upon closer inspection, we find that this is not the case, or, at least, not necessarily the case. (P.I., section X, p. 190)

P.I., p.191: “You can measure to test the ruler.”

This is one of the reasons why I want to be talking about “criteria” rather than rules. Although, on the other hand, we could be talking about rules as long as we always keep in the back of our minds the fact that the rules for the games are always changing.

Some different uses of the word ‘means’ in the English language:
1) “Red means stop.”
2) “ ‘Hund’ means ‘dog’.”
3) “When she asks, “Shouldn’t you be cleaning your room?”, she means, “Clean your room.”
4) “Professor Jones means to embarrass you in class today.”
5) “The artist means to show the horrors of war in his latest exhibition.”

To me, in (1), meaning means something akin to interpretation. (2) is an example of translation. (3) I would probably describe as explanation, while (4) and (5) both seem like examples of intention, although very different kinds of intention.

06.06.06

What is important for us to remember is that a system of signs requires interpretation - a sign points to something outside of itself, and this something is language. In other words, a system of signs is contingent upon a pre-existing language. The sign depends upon the word for its meaning. The inverse of that sentence is not true; the word is self-sufficing.

What is possible is to have a private system of signs.

06.07.06

Are Roman numerals somehow less arbitrary than Arabic numerals? Is “II” somehow closer or more representative of the idea of the number two than “2” is?

Perhaps there is no strict essential structure to language, for language is merely a social construct. But mathematics does have a central structure around which the whole system revolves, and that structure is provided by the laws of logic. “Even in Chaos World, A=A.” (But I do not begin to prove to you that I know mathematics by assuring you that “A=A.”)

Say that we create a sports league with ten teams, labeled A through J. When making the schedule, we match team (1) A against B, (2) J against C, (3) I against D, (4) H against E, and (5) G against F, and then rotate for the next set of matches, so that the schedule looks like this:
I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX

A 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
B 1 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5
C 2 1 5 4 4 4 4 4 4
D 3 2 1 5 4 3 3 3 3
E 4 3 2 1 5 4 3 2 2
F 5 4 3 2 1 5 4 3 2
G 5 5 4 3 2 1 5 4 3
H 4 4 4 4 3 2 1 5 4
I 3 3 3 3 3 3 2 1 5
J 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 1

(P.I., p. 94)

June 1, 2006

2006-06-15T16:55:00.000-07:00

06.01.06

Being and Time, H43: “In determining itself as an entity, Dasein always does so in the light of a possibility which it is itself and which, in its very Being, it somehow understands. This is the formal meaning of Dasein’s existential constitution. But this tells us that if we are to interpret this entity ontologically, the problematic of its Being must be developed from the existentiality of its existence. This cannot mean, however, that “Dasein” is to be construed in terms of some concrete possible idea of existence.” [bedeutung, sinn, meinen, heißen, besagen, sagen]

Does this puzzle concerning the meaning of meaning exist only in English?

What is worth noting is that, in English, the same word - meaning - is being employed in two different ways when Heidegger speaks of the “formal meaning of Dasein’s existential constitution” as opposed to “this cannot mean... that ‘Dasein’ is to be construed in terms of some concrete possible idea of existence.”

The related German terms that I listed above suggests that, in German, there is a relationship between speaking, naming, signifying, and meaning. I believe that these relationships are also present in English. But what are these relationships?

Heraclitus says: “The lord whose oracle is in Delphi neither speaks nor conceals but gives a sign.”

A word is not a sign. When I speak of a word having meaning or being meaningful, I mean something different from when I speak of a sign having meaning or being meaningful.

It seems to me that a key difference is that a sign is in need of interpretation, whereas a word is not. (As long I am fluent in the language that is being spoken.)

What is a sign? When I think of signs, I think of stop signs, traffic signals, advertisements, sign language, gestures, arrows, anthropology, rituals, etc. A sing can be something given, like by Oracle of Delphi or by God (re: Levinas, “The Trace of the Other”) and is often something that is in need of interpretation. A sign points to something else, in other words, a sign signifies the signified.

The use and interpretation of signs is dependant upon a pre-existing language. A system signs has structure - it derives its meaning - from something outside of itself, and that something is language. But language is self-sufficing; there is no meta-language that gives language its meaning.

Morse Code, sign language, and analog are all examples of systems of signs. English and German are languages. (But then what of Latin or Greek? There is a reason why we call them dead languages.)

A language cannot be fabricated. It is organic.

May 10 - 28, 2006

2006-06-15T16:54:00.001-07:00

05.10.06

When we speak of the meaning of a word, we are using the word “meaning” in a very different way than we speak of the meaning of a sign. That is to say, that the word “meaning” has a different meaning in these different contexts.

This, I believe, is what easily and so often misleads we ‘philosophers’ when we philosophize. For example, compare the statements: “What is the meaning of life?”, “What is the meaning of a word?”, “What is the meaning of the word ‘meaning’?”, “What is the meaning of the word, ‘bedeutung’?”.

Hypothesis: I do not believe that which I know, because I know it, I do not believe it.

05.27.06

What has become obvious, for me at least, is that we do not have a very clear understanding of the meaning of the word, ‘meaning’. This demands an investigation - How do we use the word ‘meaning’?

Webster’s Dictionary: meaning n. 1. what is meant; what is intended to be, or in fact is, signified, indicated, referred to, or understood; signification, purport, import, sense, or significance [the meaning of a word.1 ] 2. [Archaic] intention; purpose adj. 1. that has meaning; significant; expressive 2. intending, having purpose - meaningly adv.

So the verbal definition, in a sense, gets us no further.

Wonderful! Here I have been provided with an entire host of related word-concepts: meaning, intention, signification, indication, reference, understanding, purpose, sense, significance. What then, are the relations between these different word-concepts?

What I am asking is “How is the word “meaning” used?”, or, more precisely, “What are some ways in which the word “meaning” is used?” I do not want to propose any theory of meaning, let alone a philosophical theory of meaning. I do not put forward a positive definition of “meaning”; I only show some examples of what I consider appropriate uses of the word and comment upon them, in the hopes of achieving a slightly better understanding of the concept “meaning.”

05.28.06

On the other hand, I am still not sure that appropriateness is the proper criterion for use.

May 4, 2006

2006-06-15T16:54:00.000-07:00

05.04.06

The mistake here is to believe that the meaning of a sentence exists outside of the sentence.

When we ask, “What is the meaning of the sentence, “I believe it is raining outside?”, it is tempting to assert that what we are asking for is something other than the sentence itself. We are led into believing this when we think of a few, particular phrases that are used in English, such “I said it, but I didn’t mean it,” “That’s not what I meant to say,” or “You’re not getting my meaning.” It seems obvious, when we look at these sentences, that there is what is said, on the one hand, and there is what is meant on the other.

I have been led to believe that what I know, I also believe.

There seems to be a relationship between Wittgenstein’s ostensive definition and the semiotics, in so far as the assumed relationship between a word and an object is the same as the assumed relationship between the sign and the signified - that relationship being, of course, meaning.

But thinking in this way eventually leads to certain irreconcilable philosophical problems.

Ask yourself: When, or on what grounds, is language in need of interpretation?

April 28, 2006

2006-06-15T16:53:00.000-07:00

04.28.06

What do I mean when I say, “I believe X?” This is a misleading question for many reasons, not least of all because one hardly ever actually says, “I believe X.” What I want to say here is something like “The sentence “I believe X” is meaningless because it has no use in our language.” (Compare it with the sentence, “I believe in the existence of certain material objects.”)

Very well then - What is the meaning of the sentence, “I believe it is raining outside?”

April 26, 2006

2006-06-15T16:51:00.000-07:00

04.26.06

I know what ‘thinking’ is because I know how to use it (the word).

My belief is not a sign of my belief, in a way that is similar to the fact that my uttering, “I believe X,” is not referring to my belief, nor is it referring to the fact that I believe X (or that the subject “I” stands in the relation of “belief” with the object “X.”)

Words are not signs. We speakers use words in a very different manner from how we use signs.

When I tell you (in English), “I believe it is raining outside,” you do not have to decode or interpret my words in order to understand what I am saying. (Assuming that you, too, are fluent in English.)

This demands an investigation into the meaning of the word “fluent.”

The sentence, “I know it is raining outside.” is usually redundant. The sentence, “I believe it is raining outside,” however, is not.

It is a mistake to say that language is a system of signs that correspond to a set of signifieds. This is not how language functions.

But when I tell you, “I believe it is raining outside,” I am using the word “believe” very differently than when I tell you, “I believe in God.” Likewise, when I tell you, “I believe in God,” I am using the word “believe” in a very different way than when I tell you, “I believe in the Divinity of Jesus Christ.”

We should ask oursevles what it means to understand a word, and what it means to understand a sign. In other words, we need to investigate the meaning of the word, “understand.”