Why I Write Such Bad Posts

In my original notion of how the post would run, my "Kant and Monowittgensteinianism" post was going to take the fact that Hacker attributes transcendental idealism (or at least transcendentally ideal notions of time and space) to Early Wittgenstein to indicate that this was one of the Ineffable Doctrines the Standard Reading was committed to attributing to Early Wittgenstein. (John Holbo also suggests that Early Wittgenstein was a transcendental idealist/empirical realist in his "Prolegomena to a Reading of the Tractatus", which I quite liked; I am sure I am forgetting others who have suggested much the same.) I then planned to show (with the help of a passage from the Notebooks which, it turns out, doesn't exist) that Early Wittgenstein was not a transcendental idealist, and that what appeared to be an endorsement of TI in the Tractatus was merely one of the rungs to be overcome; one was to see the realism/idealism mess as so much metaphysical blather by seeing how TI collapsed. My thought was that if there was anything on Conant's "First List", any doctrine apparently endorsed by Early Wittgenstein which was actually held to be utter nonsense by him, then this was a big point for resolute readers. So, show how TI fit the bill, and, bang, suddenly the resolute readers have one of their biggest issues resolved in their favor. The fact that the Notebooks passage I was (in theory) relying on doesn't exist, and Hacker is just reading the Tractatus wrong when he attributes TI to Early Wittgenstein (even by Standard Reading lights) meant that the post should've been scrapped.

It was when I gave up on finding the passage in the Notebooks that I titled the post "Junk Draft". I figured that I liked having something that long on my front page (which I see every time I go to post something, since I only have the main page bookmarked), and nobody would see the unwieldy beast anyway since I hadn't posted the URL anywhere. I figured that once I'd scrapped the post, taken out anything salvageable, and found something suitable to do with it, I'd go ahead and try to attract some readers. That I had a reader before I had anything I'd consider a proper post was not as planned. (Wanting to keep being "secret" after being found out by one person was dumb, though. I don't know what I was thinking, there. If they'll read the bad posts, they will probably stick around in case there's good ones; if they hate the bad posts, then they might see enough potential to read new posts; if they hated the bad posts enough to not want to read anything else I write then I probably wasn't going to satisfy them in the end anyway. And as the saying goes, there's no such thing as bad publicity.)

In retrospect, I'm not entirely sure what most of the stuff about Kant in that post was there. I think I meant to show how TI collapses in Kant's system, and then point out something analogous happening (self-consciously) in the Notebooks. The problem here was twofold: One, that Notebooks passage still doesn't exist; Two, one can't just explain Kant's system of transcendental idealism offhand; that sucker will absolutely swallow up anything you try to put it next to by its sheer mass. The Kant material had no good reason for being in that post, though there's nothing in there that I should want to retract.

On the subject of posts going badly: The 4300-word post on Hegel seemed like a good idea at the time. I ran across the "In thought I am free, for I am not in an other" line and wanted to try to tease out what it meant in context, but I suspect I just ended up speaking Hegelese for seven pages. There's never any call for that. In my defense, I was running a low-grade fever at the time.

Some Remarks on Resolute Form

Taking N.N. up on his challenge, I decided I'd try to find a way to read "Some Remarks on Logical Form" resolutely. This also gave me a reason to get around to reading the paper; I'd not bothered with it previously, since I recall that Wittgenstein regretted publishing it. It was fairly easy to find via Google, happily.

My first impression was that N.N. was absolutely right, and that the only way for resolute readers to maintain that they have Early Wittgenstein right is by some sort of "Jekyl & Hyde" story: Early Wittgenstein wrote the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, while a befuddled logical atomist who happened to also be Wittgenstein wrote "Some Remarks on Logical Form." If anything is supposed to be utter nonsense by resolute lights, then "Every proposition has a content and a form. We get the picture of the pure form if we abstract from the meaning of the single words, or symbols"seems like it should be utter nonsense.

On reflection, I'm not sure the case is quite so bad for resolute readers as I first thought it was. Reading "Some Remarks" alongside the Tractatus (which we are clearly supposed to do, as Wittgenstein's paper is largely concerned with revising the Tractarian view on how properties which admit of gradation would be handled in our logically clean-cut symbolism), it seems plausible to treat "Some Remarks" as essentially a series of errata to 6.3751 (and any others of the relevant numbered propositions; a cursory glance didn't show any others). The the issue of reading "Some Remarks" resolutely is simply assimilated to the general issue of reading the Tractatus resolutely when it gives guidelines for how a logically perfect symbolism should run. And here, I think, the resolute answer may be workable. According to Conant's article, Early Wittgenstein's method of "therapy" was to show his reader how to use a certain sort of symbolism, into which said reader could translate all and only those sentences which were not nonsense (though it may take quite a bit of work to analyze/toy around with our ordinary sentences sufficiently to be able to get their logical-language translation written correctly). Once the logical script had been learned, it could then be seen that what purported to be metaphysical propositions (such as those pretending to speak of a soul or a world-whole) were simply nonsense (as they were impossible to translate into the logical script, rather than it just being difficult to get this done correctly). But also unable to be rendered in the logical script would be many of the sentences which lead us to understand how to use the logical script in the first place; the talk about simple objects, complexes, mirroring the world etc. were, so to speak, illustrations used to make learning the logical script less painful, and were not in themselves more than flowery prose. "Simple Object", "Word, "Sentence", "Form", "Content" are not terms which find any equivalent in the logical script; they were tools used (in ordinary-language sentences, such as those of the Tractatus) to get ordinary-language speakers accustomed to the use of the logical script. Once the logical script has been mastered, it can be seen that many of the numbered propositions in the Tractatus (which had appeared to assert something or other) could have been replaced with propositions which appeared to be their contraries without the book having been rendered less suitable for teaching the use of the logical script (so long as certain other propositions were also altered; which needed altering is a matter of the rhetorical structure of the book). It is then seen that Early Wittgenstein did not mean to be asserting theses with any of these sentences, since he could just as well have said the other sentences without having had to have changed his mind on anything other than the way he wanted his book to read. We can then understand Early Wittgenstein's purpose in writing the book (imparting to we readers the capacity to render those of our sentences which are not nonsense into a logically proper symbolism) by seeing that what appeared to be assertions of doctrines in the Tractatus were no such creature. "Some Remarks", then, was intended simply to show how a recalcitrant feature of our ordinary language might be rendered in logical script, noting that the Tractatus's supposed way to do this wouldn't work. Sentences like "We get the picture of the pure form if we abstract from the meaning of the single words, or symbols" are then seen as a less graceful way to lead the reader to an understanding of the logical script, or at least enough of a capacity with it to make some sense of what "Some Remarks" was correcting from the Tractatus. A sentence like "I maintain that... the relation of difference of degree is an internal relation and that it is therefore represented by an internal relation between the statements which attribute the different degrees" merely reminds us of the sort of work our logical script will have to be able to do if it is supposed to be able to speak of gradations, viz., that it should not be possible to write out that a space is both N units and also N+1 units in some particular method of measure. We cannot make sense of such a thing, and so our logical script should not allow it as a possibility.

An aside: In introductory logic courses, many times things such as "Logic is the study of the laws of thought" or "Logic is the study of the general relations which hold between sentences" or "Logic is the part of science which is universally valid" are used to give some idea of what is distinctive about logic as compared to other areas of study, as a propaedeutic to learning what constitutes a valid argument etc. They are supposed to get students in a particular frame of mind, unlike what they would have in a course on chemistry or natural history or British literature etc. I should think that they might serve this purpose even if they are false about what is distinctive about logic, even if they are riotously false; their end is to get students in the right frame of mind to learn various logical practices (truth tables and such). I can imagine that a student might learn the rudiments of logic while being told that logic is what is absolutely general, and then their progressing in logic to the point where they no longer view "absolute generality" as a helpful way to characterize logic. This would not make the original claim about generality less helpful than it was, at the time. This may or may not be something along the lines of what resolute readers hold Early Wittgenstein to have been doing. (This may or may not be related to the fact that when I took Logic as an undergrad truth-tables were said to be a sort of "machine", which strikes me as a terrible way to characterize them; the way the professor emphasized the importance of trusting the truth-tables rather than our immediate intuitions as to the truth of a sentence was to "Let the machinery do your work for you".)

As a cover-my-ass maneuver: Resolute readers still strike me as hard-pressed to find which supports their reading of Wittgenstein if 5.64 is bracketed out. When a single paragraph is having to do heavy hermeneutical lifting in texts in which it is not included, there seems good cause to be suspicious that we are forcing the texts to say something they don't.

In Which I Try To Understand Hegel By Writing About Him

This is a good post for trying out "jumps" on. Click on Tsukasa for an Holbonic post on Hegel.

From the Phenomenology of Spirit, paragraph 197, from "Stoicism, Skepticism, and the Unhappy Consciousness":

For the independent self-consciousness, it is only the pure abstraction of the 'I' that is its essential nature, and, when it does develop its own differences, this differentiation does not become a nature that is objective and intrinsic to it. Thus this self-consciousness does not become an 'I' that in its simplicity is genuinely self-differentiating, or that in its absolute differentiation remains identical with itself. On the other hand, the consciousness that is forced back onto itself becomes, in its formative activity, its own object in the form of the thing it has fashioned, and at the same time sees in the lord a consciousness that exists as a being-for-self. But for the subservient consciousness as such, these two moments -- itself as an independent object, and this object as a mode of consciousness, and hence its own essential nature -- fall apart. Since, however, the form and the being-for-self are for us, or in themselves, the same, and since in the Concept of independent consciousness the intrinsic being is consciousness, the moment of intrinsic being or thinghood which received its form in being fashioned is not other substance than consciousness. We are in the presence of self-consciousness in a new shape, a consciousness which, as the infinite of consciousness or as its own pure movement, is aware of itself as essential being, a being which thinks or is a free self-consciousness. For to think does not mean to be an abstract 'I', but an 'I' which has as at the same time the significance of intrinsic being, of having itself for object, or of relating itself to objective being in such a way that its significance is the being-for-self of the consciousness for which it is [an object]. For in thinking, the object does not present itself in picture-thoughts but in Concepts, i.e. in a distinct being-in-itself or intrinsic being, consciousness being immediately aware that this is not anything distinct from itself. What is pictured or figuratively conceived, what immediately is, has, as such, the form of being something other than consciousness; but a Concept is also something that immediately is, and this distinction, in so far as it is present in consciousness itself, is its determinate content; but since this content is at the same time a content grasped in thought, consciousness remains immediately aware of its unity with this determinate and distinct being, not, as in the case of a picture-thought, where consciousness has specially to bear in mind that this is my picture-thought; on the contrary, the Concept is for me straightaway my Concept. In thinking, I am free, for I am not in an other, but remain simply and solely in communion with myself, and the object, which is for me the essential being, is in undivided unity by being-for-myself; and my activity in conceptual thinking is a movement within myself. It is essential, however, in thus characterizing this shape of self-consciousness to bear firmly in mind that it is thinking consciousness in general, that its object is an immediate unity of being-in-itself and being-for-itself. The selfsame consciousness that repels itself from itself becomes aware of itself as the element of being-in-itself; but at first it knows itself to be this element only as a universal mode of being in general, not as it exists objectively in the development and process of its being. (I have changed "Notion" to "Concept" throughout, to bring Miller in line with more recent English work on Hegel.)

This passage is preceded by the chapter on "The Lord and The Bondsman", which is not nearly as great as Kojeve seemed to think it is. It is followed by a note that the "freedom of self-consciousness... appeared as a conscious manifestation in the history of Spirit" as Stoicism: "Its principle is that consciousness is a being that thinks, and that consciousness holds something to be essentially important, or true or good only in so far as it thinks it to be such."

At the end of the "Lord and Bondsman" chapter, the slave has come to be aware of itself as a being which can alter nature and so as not merely another element of a brute nature which is given to it. When satisfying its own (animal) desires, the slave did not arise to this awareness of itself, for its desires had no unity for it, nor was it aware of anything in its world save the givenness of nature, which either agreed with it and satisfied its desires or disagreed with it and refused them. The idea seems to be that once two such people come into conflict with each other they each wish for the other to be something which satisfies their desires, but since they desire different ends they come into conflict. The conflict either ends with one of the parties dying, in which case the other wasn't made agreeable (but merely removed as an obstacle), or with one party abandoning his desires to the desires of the other -- the one submits himself as a slave to the other. The lord then sits in oafish contentedness as its desires are gratified by the work of others; the lord has not changed by gaining a slave, but still remains a basically bestial character. The slave, on the other hand, is no longer living in a world where things either agree or disagree with his desires, desires which come and go as they please; he now also must become aware of whether or not things agree or disagree with his lord's desires, and so the slave must become able to make use of nature without regard to the slave's own desires: the slave simultaneously must comport himself with nature in a way independent of his own desires (for he must obey his lord whether he wishes to or not, owing to his fear of death if he tries to rebel against his lord), and becomes aware of his ability to mold nature in such a way as to make nature satisfy a variety of desires -- whereas when he was sunk in his own animal desires, there was no need for consideration of any desire except that which was currently being felt, and so with seeking out in nature a way to satisfy that desire, but with the bondage to his lord comes the necessity of seeing the world as able to satisfy any of a variety of desires, depending on what one does with it. It is due to this that Hegel speaks of the slave as being the originator of work, of the transformation of nature to what the slave has set for it to be (in obedience to his lord's command). Before the relationship of master and slave, neither was able to get a perspective on their own desires such as to allow them to arise to the reflective viewpoint needed for work; after the one takes the other as his slave, the master still remains in a world which is characterized merely by whether its elements agree or disagree with him, and so is unable to take the disinterested view of things necessary to view his struggles with nature as transformative of nature, rather than merely as further shifts in whether or not elements in the world agreed with him. Because the slave is forced to satisfy another's desires, it is forced to see the world apart from its agreement or disagreement with him; hence what for the master (or for either individual before the conflict of lord and bondsman) was mere instinctual stirring in a flux of elements which slaked his desire or confounded it becomes for the slave the ability to take nature and make of it something other than it was before, through the slave's own efforts and the power of his thoughtful consideration of nature. (1) The slave, then, is said to come to an awareness of itself as somehow independent of nature, in that it is possible for the nature which is given to it to be made by the slave into something which was not merely given to him. This awareness on the slave's part that it is not utterly subject to nature is, for Hegel, the beginnings of self-consciousness. Thus we reach the beginning of the paragraph I quoted above: The slave is an "independent self-consciousness."

For the independent self-consciousness, it is only the pure abstraction of the 'I' that is its essential nature, and, when it does develop its own differences, this differentiation does not become a nature that is objective and intrinsic to it. Thus this self-consciousness does not become an 'I' that in its simplicity is genuinely self-differentiating, or that in its absolute differentiation remains identical with itself. On the other hand, the consciousness that is forced back onto itself becomes, in its formative activity, its own object in the form of the thing it has fashioned, and at the same time sees in the lord a consciousness that exists as a being-for-self.

The slave has an awareness of itself as something independent of nature, since nature is seen as subject to the slave's skills; nature does not dominate the slave as it did the creature of mere instinct. But the slave's self-awareness stops at the mere fact that it is something which isn't just another part of the nature given to it; "it is only the pure abstraction of the 'I' that is its essential nature." When the slave does alter as part of his own working upon the Earth, this doesn't alter the slave's self-conception, but is merely noted as another factor which must be taken into consideration when molding the world to suit the will of his master. The slave is not yet a living spirit, that which has its identity and liveliness in its making of itself something other than it was in accordance with its own reasons -- that which "in its absolute differentiation remains identical with itself." The slave makes himself what he is, for he works upon nature and in so doing brings himself to have the form he comes to have, but this "form" is for the slave merely another external object fashioned in servitude to the master; the master, on the other hand, is seen by the slave to be something he in fact isn't: a being-for-itself, a being which makes its world (including itself) to exist in agreement with its own reasons. From the slave's point of view, the master controls the world, while the slave is merely a series of products and an abstract 'I'; from the master's point of view, the master does not control the world, for the master does not have the world in view at all in the way that the slave does, but merely feels desires as has them satisfied for him. (Hegel at one point says that the terminus of the master is boredom, whereas that of the slave is freedom.)

But for the subservient consciousness as such, these two moments -- itself as an independent object, and this object as a mode of consciousness, and hence its own essential nature -- fall apart. Since, however, the form and the being-for-self are for us, or in themselves, the same, and since in the Concept of independent consciousness the intrinsic being is consciousness, the moment of intrinsic being or thinghood which received its form in being fashioned is not other substance than consciousness. We are in the presence of self-consciousness in a new shape, a consciousness which, as the infinite of consciousness or as its own pure movement, is aware of itself as essential being, a being which thinks or is a free self-consciousness.

We (the readers of the Phenomenology) can see what neither the slave nor the master could: Both the 'I' which the slave knows itself to be (and which it takes the master to be -- the 'I' which is independent of nature, as nature serves it) and the slave which the slave produces are a single slave, a single man. We know this because we know that the slave just is constituted by the various shifts and adjustments the man makes as he gets along in the world; his "essential being" is that which he "truly is" in all its richness: the particular living man whom he happens to be. But for the slave, all that constitutes for us his "essential being" is mere accident which has come about as he serves his master; for the slave, his true being is the abstract 'I', that alone which is free (because abstracted away from everything else, it is independent of everything else). The being-for-self of the master which the slave senses is actually only the slave's being-for-self projected onto another (for the master as yet has no cause to become reflective); the slave knows itself as an 'I' and so starts to see others like himself as also 'I's. But then the slave knows itself as 'I' only as an abstract 'I', and so comes the notion that the master, too, is truly an item independent of the world, an abstract 'I'. The world which had been seen as shot through with the will of the master then becomes something independent both of master and of slave -- the Stoic's notion that the world is entirely determined, and freedom is to be found only in thought (and so one's outer circumstances mattered not a whit; the contrast of Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor, with Epictetus, Roman slave, as alike being Stoics is common here, and Hegel alludes to it in passing). With this abandonment of the world, however, comes a correlate: there is something other than the world, in which I am free (because not another brute element of nature): Thought, which knows itself to be other than the world, for the world is what is given to it. Thus with the slave-cum-Stoic we have the birth of a "free self-consciousness", of "thought."

For to think does not mean to be an abstract 'I', but an 'I' which has as at the same time the significance of intrinsic being, of having itself for object, or of relating itself to objective being in such a way that its significance is the being-for-self of the consciousness for which it is [an object]. For in thinking, the object does not present itself in picture-thoughts but in Concepts, i.e. in a distinct being-in-itself or intrinsic being, consciousness being immediately aware that this is not anything distinct from itself.

The slave takes himself to be an abstract 'I', but he truly has begun to think not because of the arrival of an "abstract 'I'" but because in his working on nature he becomes aware of his own life in the world (though as a Stoic and as a slave he is alienated from it). Though the slave is not aware that he is producing himself in his service of his master, he (his true 'I' so to speak) is in fact molding both himself and the world around him, and his awareness of the world as suitable for a variety of tasks, as possessing many sorts of things of various natures, including his knowledge of his own body as suitable for carrying out various tasks, is the thoughtful consideration of the world as it is "objectively" -- the way the world is independently of the slave's will, is the way the world is for the slave. Hegel then notes that the slave, in thinking, is not presented with pictures of the world, but with various concepts, various ways in which it can make sense of the world (as hot & dry, as wet & cold, as dangerous or harmless, of two items as looking similar or dissimilar to one another, etc.). The thinking slave is conscious of various "beings-in-themselves" (beings which are given to the slave, as a part of the nature which is in general given to him) through the exercise of various conceptual capacities, through his ability to distinguish fresh fruit from spoiled fruit, apples from oranges, hostility from friendliness, etc. and "consciousness is immediately aware that this is not anything distinct from itself": The beings-in-themselves are the beings-for-myself. I do not think in representations or images of objects; I think about objects as a way of comporting myself with them.

What is pictured or figuratively conceived, what immediately is, has, as such, the form of being something other than consciousness; but a Concept is also something that immediately is, and this distinction, in so far as it is present in consciousness itself, is its determinate content; but since this content is at the same time a content grasped in thought, consciousness remains immediately aware of its unity with this determinate and distinct being, not, as in the case of a picture-thought, where consciousness has specially to bear in mind that this is its picture-thought; on the contrary, the Concept is for me straightaway my Concept.

Here Hegel attempts to diagnose the cause of the confusion which leads people to think that thought consists in the manipulation of images, rather than interaction with objects. An imagined picture is immediately given to me, since nobody else had to do anything for me to imagine it; it "immediately is". But it is part of what it is to imagine something is that one is not at that point also conscious of it; I can now imagine that I am relaxing by a lake, but I cannot now imagine that I am typing this sentence. I cannot imagine what I am (at that moment) conscious of. If it turns out that I was in fact not conscious of what I thought I was (perhaps because I was mistaken about what was the case), then I may, in retrospect, judge that I was merely imagining that things were so. But if I really was conscious that things were thus-and-so, then I was not then imagining that they were thus-and-so. Because one is either conscious of something or merely imagining it, and because when one merely imagines that things are thus-and-so one's imaginary picture "immediately is", it is taken that what is immediately given is what is imagined, and thus what one is conscious of is not immediately given, and so must be mediated. But the truth of the matter is that via concepts, too, beings are immediately given, immediately are, and that the distinction between imagined pictures and events I am conscious of is not that one is immediate and one mediated, but merely that one is "identical to my consciousness" and one is not -- one is what I am really conscious of when things are thus and so, and the other is what I am (at most) apparently conscious of. As far as consciousness as such goes, that's all that's to be said of it, that's it's "determinate content" -- the consciousness that things are thus-and-so is what it's like when I'm not merely imagining that things are thus-and-so. Consciousness is only interesting, only has any point for us, because this is part of our more general capacity for thoughtfully getting around in the world; that I can make distinctions among items in the world generally is what allows for me to be able to make sense of what I am conscious of. To be conscious that things are thus-and-so is to be able to think that things are thus-and-so, and so to be able to conscious that some thing is such-and-so is to be "aware of one's unity with this determinate and distinct being" since in thought the being-in-itself is its being-for-myself; I am conscious of myself as party to the object I am conscious of. If I do not give any explicit consideration to the fact that I am in relation with the object, this does not diminish my immediate relation to it; it remains my object in that I think of it. Hegel contrasts this to what one merely imagines: If I imagine (perhaps at first that I am merely fantasizing) that there is a burglar in the house, then I may fall under the sway of the illusion and be forced to remind myself that This is all what I imagined, and so it is not what is truly the case -- if I do not keep in mind that the imagined picture is my imagined picture, that I was the one who dreamed it up, then I may lose track of the fact that it is an imagined picture at all. While quite the reverse holds with what I am conscious of, since I can forget myself, losing myself in my work, and still throughout be exercising my conceptual powers, thinking my thoughts.

In thinking, I am free, for I am not in an other, but remain simply and solely in communion with myself, and the object, which is for me the essential being, is in undivided unity by being-for-myself; and my activity in conceptual thinking is a movement within myself.

Here Hegel takes the "freedom" which the Stoic takes himself to have only in the thinkings of the abstract 'I', and points out that in my ordinary conceptual coping with the world I am already free, for I am acting as myself and not as an element in some other complex. The various objects which I encounter in my thoughtful activities are not something alien to me, but are my objects; they are what I am thinking of, what I am conscious of; what they are for me is not merely appearances or some momentary states, but I know them as they are essentially, for to be able to cope conceptually with them I must be able to notice more about the objects than that they are these objects here and now; if that were all I knew about them, then I would have no notion of whether or not the objects were or were not other objects, and they could be nothing for me, since I could not exclude from my notion of them anything which might be contrary to them, and so could not give any content to my notion of them at all. Thus they are for me as they are in themselves, and I am never struck with anything utterly alien to myself, for there can be no such thing; I am always at home with the others which are given to me, for their givenness is an element in my own life.

It is essential, however, in thus characterizing this shape of self-consciousness to bear firmly in mind that it is thinking consciousness in general, that its object is an immediate unity of being-in-itself and being-for-itself. The selfsame consciousness that repels itself from itself becomes aware of itself as the element of being-in-itself; but at first it knows itself to be this element only as a universal mode of being in general, not as it exists objectively in the development and process of its being.

And then Hegel backs up a bit, returning to the Stoics rather than his own account of thought; "this shape of self-consciousness" is the one which has newly arrived on the scene, that of the abstract 'I' and the world which is set to the side as independent of myself. The whole scene has a tenor of abstractness: The Stoic as abstract 'I' is aware of itself as thinking in general (not thinking that anything, but thinking in abstracta), and is aware therefore of the general identity in objects of their being-for-itself (what it thinks of) with their being-in-themselves, in that the Stoic knows himself to be himself in the sense of "I=I". But the Stoic does not know himself as a being-for-self as he is in himself; the Stoic identifies himself as the abstract 'I', and what he truly is in himself he regards as merely another object alien to him.

After this point, he starts having the Stoics run up against the Skeptics; it turns out that the abstract 'I' which floats free of everything isn't able to manage any thoughts with content when pressed to justify itself, and so the abstract 'I' of the Stoics ends up annulling the world and itself through sheer skeptical negativity; the false division we readers of the Phenomenology saw earlier ends up collapsing in on itself, and the two (apparently) divided poles are reunited (not that they ever were really apart). And in the process you get everything about Kantian ethics, the French Revolution, Protestantism, the Incarnation, the Trinity, fine art, etc. Dissolving dualisms is hard work, even for Absolute Spirit.

(1) Hegel at one point speaks of how it might seem miraculous that what we merely wish for might become reality through our willing it -- if I want to build a house, then the house itself "exists" only in my imagination, my hopes, dreams etc. before I build it, and reality contains only so many planks of wood, shingles, bits of wire and tubing etc. By comporting myself with these myriad items (none of which is a house, certainly not the one I dreamed of having) in accordance with my will, the house might be brought into being; it might then appear, on reflection, that my thoughts had some magical power which allowed them to make it so that things which weren't so come to be, or else how did the house which existed in my dream move to reality? Hegel's point is that thought does have this sort of power, but that when we understand the power correctly it no longer appears as anything miraculous or uncanny: we can do things that we want, some of the time, is all that it amounts to, and only one-sided reflection can make it seem like this is something mystical. The context for this claim is the identity of Absolute Spirit (and Absolute Knowledge) with a finite mind (and our run-of-the-mill knowledge); this identity only seems marvelous, or blasphemous, or supernal when it is not understood.

In Which I Say That I Like Things Which I Like

Some of the things I like about this thread over at The Valve:

1) The line "If that was Socratic, I can sympathize with the Athenians."
2) Duck posting post-length comments of a philosophical character
3) Zizek saying silly things about IP and candy
4) Another Kotsko/Holbo fight
5) Kotsko going "Wait a minute, forget Zizek; lemme hear about this Dennett guy"
6) Holbo admitting that his cute Socratic bit might've been a bad choice
7) My evening spent reading "Real Patterns" paid off
8) Someone else called Holbo on his uncharitable reading of Kotsko's comments, so I didn't have to
9) "Almost every hacker will tell you that other languages are better." Zizek interviews have never failed to amuse me. (Another interview had a line to the effect of "No, I am not seriously advocating a return to Stalin; sorry, I'm not that crazy, I lived under Soviet rule, I know what it was like." This made it easier to see why Kotsko got so riled up about Holbo's Trilling essay.)
10) The Dennett quotation from "Dennett & His Critics" was one of the two parts of that book I read. I like recognizing things! It is good times.

Kant and Monowittgensteinianism: A Junk Draft

I just finished Conant's "Moses and Monowittgensteinianism", which N. N. linked to a little while back. I'm just now at the "And suddenly our hero suspects there is something amiss with the colors red and green!" bit of P.M.S. Hacker's "Insight and Illusion", so it seemed apropos to try to write out some thoughts on the debate over the Tractatus (he said, as if there was a debate!).(1)

The debate between readings like Conants ("resolute" readers, AKA "The New Wittgensteinians") and more standard readings (of which Hacker's is certainly one of the better ones I've read, but also including folk like Anscombe and Hintikka) is over whether the Tractatus is supposed to be conveying "ineffable truths" (at least over things like reference, the logical form of our sentences, solipsism, idealism, the world-whole, the soul; possibly also ethics, aesthetics, religion, God, eternity, the afterlife etc., but I've not seen a standard reader try very hard to "eff" the ineffable truths in the later case, with the exception of Hintikka's hilariously implausible reading of Wittgenstein's ethical views as taken up wholesale from Moore), of if when Early Wittgenstein says that anyone who understands him sees the "propositions" of the Tractatus as nonsense, he means nonsense akin to "Iffly borgle prolf purple monkey dishwasher."

The way Conant spells out the resolute reading is via a series of lists: The First List is a list of doctrines which standard readings might attribute to Early Wittgenstein (because they think they see them conveyed, ineffably, in the Tractatus) which Early Wittgenstein actually regarded as nonsense, to be seen as nonsense via multiple readings of the Tractatus. The Second List is a list of doctrines which Early Wittgenstein really did hold, but unwittingly; Later Wittgenstein then pokes at "the author of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" because he can see that Early Wittgenstein had failed to achieve his goal of seeing nonsense for the nonsense it is. Both Early and Later Wittgenstein are devoted to the same goal, vis seeing nonsense for what it is rather than being befuddled by it ("befuddlement" being the beginning of metaphysics). The standard reading, as I understand it, agrees with Conant that this is the sort of thing Later Wittgenstein was concerned with, but claims that Early Wittgenstein was in a different business: He had seen The Truth, and knew it was Ineffable, and meant for us to also See The Truth by playing around with a logically precise notation -- if only we would spend some time tooling around with truth-tables and logically proper names we would see that there are sempiternal simple objects, indeed infinitely many such objects, that a name's meaning is an object, that "relations" and "properties" are themselves yet more simple objects, that these objects hang together in atomic facts as links in a chain, that these objects are determined by their possibilities for so linking up, that the relations which hold between elements in our logically-clean-cut formal script mirror the linking up of the simple objects, that everyday language has a "vital core" which is made clear by this formal script, that this will be shown by logical-philosophical analysis, that a thought is a picture of a possible fact, that nothing but sentences suited to natural science can possibly be analyzed so as to be rendered in this formal script, etc. etc. Standard Readers, then, claim that The First List contains a list of doctrines held by Early Wittgenstein; Resolute Readers claim that The First List contains a list of doctrines which Early Wittgenstein sees as nonsense. They are agreed that The Second List contains many doctrines which Later Wittgenstein sees as nonsense, but which Early Wittgenstein was befuddled by. So, if The First List really does contain (at least one) item which Early Wittgenstein meant to be viewed as "prorlu motyiv greakic" nonsense, then that is a problem for the Standard Readers.

Hacker claims that Early Wittgenstein held that time (and probably space) were transcendentally ideal(3), in addition to a quasi-Schopenhauerian commitment to the truth of solipsism (Insight & Illusion, p.99). 5.64 is taken to be a prooftext for Early Wittgenstein's transcendental idealism: "Here we see that solipsism strictly carried out coincides with pure realism. The I in solipsism shrinks to an extensionless point and there remains the reality co-ordinated with it." The idea is that from the transcendental/solipsistical point of view, time, space, and the world as a whole are part of my mind (which is the only mind, the unity of consciousness, the Will), while empirically there really are spatially and temporally extended objects and a world which is independent of the subject. This is supposed to be akin to Kant's notions of the relations between phenomena and noumena, especially as filtered through Schopenhauer. Since I suspect that Early Wittgenstein really did intend for "Solipsism (AKA subjective idealism) and Realism come to the same thing" to not end up saying that both idealism and realism are true, but in different ways, it seems like it might be helpful to give a serious look at what was involved in Kant's transcendental idealism, to see if the origins of transcendental idealism make it look any less likely that this was the sort of view Early Wittgenstein meant to ineffably communicate in the Tractatus.

I shall now digress for a bit on what exactly is involved in Kant's view, when it is poked at long enough: From an empirical point of view objects really do have temporal and spatial properties (most importantly, they stand in various causal relations to one another of the sort uncovered in physics), while as noumena ("objects of pure thought") all spatial and temporal properties (and with them the truths of all possible judgements we can form of said objects) do not adhere in the objects themselves, but are rather imputed to them by the manner in which we can intuit objects. For Kant, the "unity of consciousness" and "the transcendental unity of apperception" are requirements for the possibility of the formation of judgements -- if a being's conceptual faculties did not operate in tandem, then it would be impossible for that being to formulate any judgements, hence impossible for it to be capable of having judgements attributed to it, hence it could not be a subject; likewise if the subject was not self-conscious, it would be impossible for judgements to be attributed to it, as no one would bear the epistemic responsibility for making those judgements. The "schematism of the categories" is likewise a requirement for the formation of judgements -- for a subject to apply the logical forms of judgement to intuited objects requires that there be a middleman to "fit" the logical table of judgements (which is supposed to give all possible logical operations) to the forms of intuition of a given subject, as "intuitions without concepts are blind" and so provide no material which can be "fit into" the options provided by the logical table of judgements. The categories are supposed to be the guide to the use of all our understanding's concepts because the synthesis of intuitions in a concept is possible only by the use of said concept according to the categories of the understanding (a concept just is the role it plays in possible judgements (4) ). Hence if we can judge at all, we can judge only of spatio-temporal objects. (5) Now, this is not actually enough to entail transcendental idealism. The ideality of space and time is, for Kant, a matter which was settled by the Innagural Dissertation several years before his "Copernican turn"; much of Kant's notions of the interplay of intuition, concept, judgement, apperception etc. is novel with the first Critique, but the ideality of space and time is not. However, in his pre-critical writings Kant holds that pure knowledge of objects is possible (along basically Leibnizian-looking rationalist lines), and so there isn't the idea that our knowledge is restricted to spatio-temportal objects. Our (empirical) knowledge of physical laws is then genuine knowledge of how things are in themselves because we can move from our (ideal) knowledge of physical laws to the notion that these correspond to relations which obtain between monads (whose existence is established on a priori grounds), and this is enough to give our (ideal) knowledge of spatio-temporal happenings a role to play in our general theory of the universe. The argument for the ideality of space and of time, both in the dissertation and (in a more refined form) in the Transcendental Aesthetic runs through various possibilities for how we are able to intuit objects as extended in space and time, and (claims to) rule out all of them but the notion that space and time are forms enforced upon all matter given to us ab extra, and hence they do not apply to objects considered in themselves (as not necessarily intuited by us). I won't hash out the arguments of the Aesthetic here, since this post is already going to be plenty long, but a common objection to Kant's argument here is that he neglects an alternative: We are only able to intuit objects in space and time, and then only insofar as those objects are extended in space and time. (Kenneth Westphal's "Kant's Transcendental Proof of Realism" is the best treatment I've seen of the neglected alternative, and also works out the collapse of transcendental idealism in such a way as to keep admirably close to Kant's own texts, which also answers the question of why Kant never did write a book called "Metaphysics of Natural Science" like he'd planned to; the "Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science" doesn't do the work "Metaphysics of Natural Science" was supposed to do, and the Opus Postumum wasn't making much better progress when Kant died.) For Kant, then, transcendental idealism is only supposed to be true because of the ideality of space and time as the forms of our sensible intuition.

However, one of Kant's requirements for the possibility of judgement in his critical period (there are a lot, in case you haven't noticed) is the "transcendental affinity of the sensible manifold" -- for us to be able to judge anything, what is given to us as material to judge about has to have similarities/differences among it such that we can recognize some of these similarities and differences -- what is given to us can't be a "pure chaos" or "boomin' buzzin' confusion". However, this is a serious problem for Kant's transcendental idealism: If even the bare possibility of what we sense being intelligible is a matter of our mind imposing itself on what is given in sensation, then what is given to us in sensation doesn't matter at all epistemically: the mind will impose an order we can use on it, whatever it is. Hence if we are to hold that in sensation matter is given to us ab extra (that we do not bring into being the objects we think of by the act of thinking about them, and hence are able to be wrong about them in our judgements by failing to represent objects in our judgements the way they actually are presented), then the transcendental affinity of the sensible manifold can't be a matter of the mind imposing anything on what is given in sensation -- the variety sensed has to really be there in what is given to us for us to recognize, or we are unable to form any judgements at all -- owing to the utter lack of regularity (or patterned irregularity) in anything we come across, we are unable to so much as imagine whether or not particular similarities or differences in objects are being presented to us. Hence we must be able to sense some attributes of objects that are really there, if we are to be able to perceive objects at all. And if all our perception is spatiotemporal, then some objects must really be spatiotemporal. Hence the ideality of space and time is false -- space and time are not imposed by us on what is given to us, but is the form in which that which is given to us exists in itself. Much of the rest of Kant's system stays intact with the collapse on the ideality of space and time, however, or is at least salvageable; the relations between concept & intuition, the requirement that there be items in time and space which we are aware of for us to be self-conscious, the notion of a concept as simply being the role played in judgements etc. can be maintained, as can the "restriction thesis" in the narrow sense that our ordinary notions of substance, causation, duration etc. can only be applied to items within space and time and fall into abuse when we try to extend their use further than this. Transcendental idealism, the idea that the mind imposes on reality what is needed for us to have knowledge of it, can't do the work demanded of it. (6)

Now, practically nobody after Kant who calls themself a "transcendental idealist" has anything as worked-out in this in mind. Most of the time their idea of "transcendental idealism" is actually derived from Karl Reinhold's popularization of Kant's philosophy. (I was left quite convinced of this after reading Karl Ameriks' "The Fate of Autonomy: The Reception of Kant's Critical Philosophy.") Reinhold's argument for transcendental idealism is (by his own description) a "short argument": We have knowledge only of our representations, hence not of things as they are in themselves; but because we do have knowledge of representations, knowledge of representations counts for a lot. Hence our representations constitute the "phenomenal world" and there must be (unknowable) noumena because representations can't be things in themselves (because we just called them representations, see?). Our use of e.g. causation as applied to our representations is justified by the fact that that's the way in which we can represent things, and there can't be a question of whether our manner of representation "fits" the things themselves or not. Space and time are then ideal derivatively as being one of the ways in which we represent things. On Reinhold's view, we can know that the categories and the forms of space and time don't apply to things in themselves because these are merely the way in which we represent things; it makes no sense to speak of them outside of the domain of representations. We also know that there is a noumenal self, because a representation has to be someone's, and this someone can't be another representation on pain of vicious regress. (7) Schopenhauer, from what I know of him (which is not enough), argues for transcendental idealism along similar lines to Reinhold: The various forms of the principle of sufficient reason necessarily hold among phenomena, since they are knowable by us and we have no way of knowing without the principle of sufficient reason, but we can insure their knowability only by holding that they have no choice but to be submitted to the principle of sufficient reason, and this can only be done by holding that we force reasonableness upon an unknown, ineffable root (which must itself be independent of the principle of sufficient reason, as this can be merely the way in which we force phenomena to appear if we want to ensure that we are not mistaken about the principle itself). The self, on Schopenhauer's view, is as ineffable (and as independent of the principle of sufficient reason in all its forms) as any other noumena, and hence Schopenhauer has no use for Kant's practical writings, which were the reason folk like Reinhold got interested in Kant, and were of the highest importance for Fichte. Schopenhauer's ethics is based not on anything like Kant's duties, but upon a notion that the self is a non-thing (and so everyone is the same in their nothingness), and our apparent control of our "will" is mere appearance, and as subject to the principle of sufficient reason as any physical phenomena. "Ethics" is then the surrender of the desire to will for oneself (which is seen as a nonsensical end) and the end of desire itself (which is seen to be a mere shadow-play, whose end brings peace to we non-entities). Our knowledge of the self in the sense in which Schopenhauer's ethics cares about such a matter (the self as a non-thing, a nullity, lifeless striving towards nothing for no reason) is supposed to be something felt; all representations have nothing to do with ethics because of this, since ethics is what comes from spelling out the ramifications of the nullity of the self, which is not a representation but a consequence of the fact that there are representations (and nothing besides, with noumena being unthings and only mistakenly treated as being akin to objects like chairs or human bodies).

Early Wittgenstein has no use for Schopenhauer's idealism about the objects of the world: the various ways in which we can model objects do not tell us about the world, but that we sketch it out it this way rather than another if we model it in a certain way does tell us something about the world. Hence forcing our descriptions to, say, follow from Newton's axioms does not in any way limit the propositions of physics, and hence cannot be distorting the way things are in themselves. The thinking subject, when it finally comes up in the Notebooks, is said to be a superstition. But some of the Schopenhauerian ideas about the will stick around -- it is just no longer a will which is the subject of representations, but rather a "world soul" which is the soul of everyone, and through which alone everyone conceives of the souls of others. Wittgenstein pokes at Schopenhauer's suggested ethical doctrines (love of neighbor and the sole virtue being to not will), along with what he is himself inclined to say when he tries to come up with ethical propositions, and finds that they fall flat when you look at them hard enough: If I am supposed to not will, then neither can I will to love my neighbor; but if I do not love my neighbor, then this also appears to be a failure of the resolution of the will. I am supposed to be happy, but man cannot make himself happy without more ado, and the world is independent of my will. It is not clear why I am supposed to be happy, either; this seems to simply be something inexpressible: No statement along the lines of a statement of natural science says anything that inclines one to hold that happiness is good, nor does any incline one the contrary direction. "Ethics" vanishes into the realm of unintelligible mystery, where it used to be neighbors with noumena and a transcendental subject which was the witness of representations. So the (ethical) "truth" of solipsism hangs around, but sundered from Schopenhauer's "transcendental idealism." His idealism has no reason to keep up the idea of noumena once the idea that a thought is a mere representation (rather than a picture of how things are) falls away, and hence has no reason to claim that what is known is mere phenomena, and hence no reason to claim it's something other than simple realism: There is reality, and the "extensionless point" of the will coordinate with it. But this means that when "realism" takes itself to be somehow more than solipsism, it's simply not thinking about solipsism enough: The two collapse into each other. (If one failed to notice this, then there is the possibility of bothering about how we can know more than the solipsist claims to know. Which is of course responsible for a great deal of Cartesian-style metaphysics.)

Now, I am pretty sure I had a point at some point back in there: It seems more plausible to me to read 5.64 as being meant to dissolve possible worries about "veil of ideas"-style skepticism, and so as a candidate for membership on the (resolute) First List. I have no idea what the identification of realism and solipsism is supposed to be doing if it's expressing some ineffable insight; I can buy that the bits about the willing subject are supposed to be some sort of ineffable insight, and that paring down solipsism leads to realism, but I have no idea how the paring down of solipsism is supposed to be ineffable.

I will be honest: I reread the entire early Notebooks and a big chunk of the Tractatus to make this post, and now I am just muddled over what I was originally trying to say here; I'm really not sure what all that stuff about Kant in the middle is doing, except showing that I can get passive-aggressive over how many hours I wasted reading that stuff. But I wanted my blog to have some sort of content, and it's not like anyone will read this anyway. I suspect I am biting off more than I can chew at this point -- but I don't have any desire to take smaller bites, so to speak. Perhaps I shall either choke or starve.

1) An aside: I knew that reading "Moses and Monotheism" would pay off someday! I totally got the joke about the epigraph from Freud in Conant's piece. My original motive for reading that silly little essay was to put off the desire to read anything else from Freud; it served admirably at that task. (I've picked up some cheap paperbacks of several of his works, but they're just sitting on shelves for the foreseeable future.) As another aside: Why the hell does Peter Hacker sign his books with his initials? If he wants to set himself apart from other Peter Hackers, he could just use a middle name (which he apparently has two of). I suppose it does make his name more memorable....

2) At least, paying attention to the more interesting versions of the standard reading. The versions that just toss out the whole "There can be no theses in philosophy, for everyone would agree to them" bit think that the Later Wittgenstein has his own Standard First List of doctrines, which largely consist of taking the First List and adding negators. I admit I am more acquainted with secondary literature on the Tractatus than the Investigations, so I suppose resolute readers may be in a minority with their reading of the Investigations, too.

3) Attributing transcendental idealism to anyone is a problematic move, for if one can understand what one is doing thereby one must understand what it is for a view to constitute transcendental idealism. If transcendental idealism is actually an incoherent shuffling between "subjective idealism" (the "everything exists inside my mind" view) and realism sans modifier (the view that what exists is not dependent on what is "inside my mind"; Putnam calls it "natural realism," after James), then it is misleading to attribute transcendental idealism to anyone, since it is unintelligible. One would do better to point out the various incompatible views held by the thinker in question, such as "That things are thus and so is for that to be something I can think of, and so depends on my mind" and "The world is the way it is independent of whether or not I think about the way it happens to be, and so is independent of my mind". One may point out that the thinker views his notions as a sort of "transcendental idealism", but this is just a piece of trivia about how the thinker (falsely) views his own ideas, since there is no intelligible view such as "transcendental idealism" purports to be. If one thinks that there is a view that answers to transcendental idealism's self-description, then one (on Hegel's view, and my own) has simply not thought through the ramifications of the view enough: To truly understand transcendental idealism is to see that it is untenable. To be a "transcendental idealist" is merely to be confused about what one really believes about mind and world, taking a mere agglomeration of metaphysical confusions to be a system.

4) and any attempt to judge with the categories as applied to non-spatio-temporally-intuited objects (hypothetical entities such as God, the world-whole, and the soul) leads to contradictions, hence by modus tollens it is not possible to apply these categories to non-spatio-temporally-intuited objects.

5) Kant's "practical posits" of freedom, the immortality of the soul, and the existence of God and a final judgement are all "problematic judgements" in the sense that we don't have the slightest idea what any of them actually entail or "would be like if they were true"; we can licitly posit them because of the role they play in our use of practical reason, and when we do so all we can be understood as positing is that an object exists such that it fills thus-and-such a role that practical reason demands something play the role of. The various attributes of God -- His infinity, unity, eternity, omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence, offering of grace to radically evil beings, etc. are all justified as implicit in the need for a posit of "the existence of God" as an element in a subject's moral life, and not by anything which could warrant the theoretical judgement that there actually exists a Being with such properties, since we (spatio-temporal-forms-of-sensitive-intuition-having) beings cannot even understand whether or not such a Being's existence is possible. For it to make sense that such a Being's existence might be possible, though we can make no sense of the notion, Kant has to posit that there are other forms of intuition ("intellectual intuition") which allow that judgements which can only be problematic for us can be seen to be satisfied by what is intelligible to beings so minded as to have non-spatio-temporal forms of intuition, which may well include our "future selves" if we do have immortal souls. Hence what is incomprehensible for us, indeed what we cannot make the slightest headway in trying to understand, may be revealed to be true "in heaven." And this slim possibility for doing anything like thinking about what things would be like without space and time is enough to warrant the opinion that the demands of practical reason do not lead to contradiction, and this is to "make room for faith."

6) Hegel lays a good bit of the blame for this on Kant's table of categories, which he doesn't think is any more rigorous or complete than Aristotle's; the fact that Kant runs through the options he sees there and decides that e.g. space is merely phenomenal and non-mechanical causation unintelligible are blamed for Kant's overlooking possibilities such as that judgements about space are not judgements about some thing or other (and so the first antinomy rightly leads to contradictions, but not because "space is not a thing in itself" but because space is not a thing of which it makes sense to ask whether or not it is infinite in size), and there are many sorts of judgements which can be intelligibly viewed as related to causation, such that one hasn't exhausted the concept when one deals with physical-mechanical causation (and thus one doesn't need a story about the way noumena mysteriously affect the phenomenal world to go on describing behavior as being caused by desires, or by organic functions).

7) This sort of argument is also what's behind Fichte's idealism: in "The Vocation of Man" he practically argues for idealism by freaking out about Cartesian doubt about the external world, but tempering this with a practical demand to, you know, live, and thus claims that though all that we can know is our own thoughts, the fact that our consciousness of our duties demands we treat the objects we think we know about as objects that are leads us to posit the reality of the external world as we think we know of it; this is then called a form of transcendental idealism because we have "knowledge" of the world in one sense, while in another sense we don't know anything about how things stand among themselves.

A Monolingual Field Situation

This article in The New Yorker left me much amused.

Davidson was always quick to note that his "radical interpretation" was only meant as a sort of thought-experiment, aimed at wheedling out some of the requirements for the possibility of understanding another's mindful actions (primarily speech), but it does seem enlightening to note how translation of a language really functions when there is nothing like a shared language between two speakers beforehand. Note that progress was basically nil until the translators began to posit that the Pirahã simply hated anything foreign, or far-off, or old, or abstract. They live in a strikingly odd society, ignoring things like mathematics, art, and history which might've been taken to be universal among humanity. And so their language doesn't have ways to talk about things like calculation, individual colors, great spans of time, or perspectival orientation, because they have no interest in these things. (Note the look of "pitying contempt" when it is suggested that perhaps bugs might be swatted instead of tolerated. It is not that the Pirahã man has no idea of what the reporter is doing; he has enough of an idea to know that he hates the reporter for it, which involves knowing quite a bit more than nothing.)


The bit on Whorf was interesting, too. It's hypothesized that the Pirahã don't have terms for numbers larger than two, and that's why they have trouble with any but the simplest calculations. It's then suggested that this doesn't quite fit the phenomena; rather than being unable to count past two due to a lack of a word for "three" it's supposed that they aren't counting at all. They have some loose ways to organize quantities (little, more, lots), but have no proper "numbers" at all. Their meager mathematical skills are then part of their disinterest in things like math, and not an artifact of their limited vocabulary. This strikes me as a very nice way to appreciate Sapir (et al)'s point about the close connection of language with the rest of life without falling into the confusions that lead one to say things like "Thought is limited by one's vocabulary," which makes it mysterious how one's vocabulary changes, or "There are some thoughts which cannot be expressed in English," which then begs the question of which thoughts these are, and how we know enough about them to know we can't "express them in English."

I should probably write a post on "On The Very Idea Of A Conceptual Scheme" or somesuch, so that this blog isn't utterly impenetrable to anyone who hasn't read the guys I've read. (On the off chance that anyone ever reads this blog to begin with, of course.) I'll have to hunt around old comment threads in a bit and see if I've already written something useful for this purpose.

frist prost

The last time I made a comment longer than the post I was responding to, I thought "Hey, maybe I should make a blog. That way I could have my better comments all in one place." Then I put it off until I thought of a name I liked. "SOH-Dan" struck me as just terrible enough. To quote Wittgenstein*: "What! Speak nonsense, you fool! It makes no difference." And it doesn't make a difference what I name this blog!

Another random Wittgenstein quote, in response to a commenter who was trying to find le mot juste during a meeting of the Cambridge Moral Science Club: "No. Speak badly, and then we shall go on." Which is often good advice, since a clever listener can often figure out what was being grasped at, even if the point was put poorly (or even in a manner which is flat-out wrong) -- and if they can't, then often this isn't much of a loss, since perhaps they wouldn't have gotten the point even if it had been put well, or the point wasn't so important as to waste time trying to formulate it nicely.

*who claims to be quoting Augustine, though apparently no one's figured out what passage Wittgenstein was trying to quote; in that spirit, I won't bother hunting down a copy of that "Zu Heidegger" letter to see if I get the quoted quote right. As I recall, it's only reprinted in some obscure collection of essays on "Heidegger and Modern Thought" or somesuch; I got it via interlibrary loan a few years back. Had an interesting interview with Ryle in it, since Ryle wrote a favorable review of "Being & Time" when it came out. The interviewer asked Ryle if Heidegger had been an influence on Ryle's "Concept of Mind" etc. Ryle responded "Well, not consciously. I pretty much just read the book, wrote that review, put the book on the shelf, and then Heidegger never came up again. But who knows what sort of influence reading it had on me?" Damnit, now I want to hunt down a copy of that book... it had a nice essay on Gadamer's rehabilitation of "prejudgement" that was one of the first places I came across Gadamer.