The Tractatus
Wittgenstein, Tolstoy and the Folly of Logical Positivism
Stuart Greenstreet explains how analytical philosophy got into a mess.
Here we go again: dasein.
What, did you think it skipped those like Wittgenstein altogether.
He walks into a small shop, buys the book and those who read The Tractatus today are reading a collaboration between him and Tolstoy. How would he have been different had he not walked into shop, hap he not bought it?
And how is that not true over and over and over again regarding many of your own experiences in life. It’s just that few think this through as I do. Why? Because, in my view, to do so can take you down the road to a fractured and fragmented “I” when the language that we come to use revolves around value judgments.
So, Wittgenstein’s close encounter with the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein brought Christianity itself into his life. But even here it is a Christianity derived from Tolstoy who derived his own understanding of it from dasein.
In any event, one thing does not change here: that the language we use in discussing the facts that intertwine Wittgenstein and Tolstoy and Christianity historically are very, very different from the language we use in discussing the authenticity of the actual existence of the Christian God. And the Christian rendition of the One True Path. Spiritual and otherwise.
The Tractatus
Wittgenstein, Tolstoy and the Folly of Logical Positivism
Stuart Greenstreet explains how analytical philosophy got into a mess.
Here we go again: dasein.
What, did you think it skipped those like Wittgenstein altogether.
He walks into a small shop, buys the book and those who read The Tractatus today are reading a collaboration between him and Tolstoy. How would he and the book have been different had he not walked into shop, had he not bought it?
And how is that not true over and over and over again regarding many of your own experiences in life. It’s just that few think this through as I do. Why? Because, in my view, to do so can take you down the road to a fractured and fragmented “I” when the language that we come to use revolves around value judgments.
So, Wittgenstein’s close encounter with the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein brought Christianity itself into his life. But even here it is a Christianity derived from Tolstoy who derived his own understanding of it from dasein.
In any event, one thing does not change here: that the language we use in discussing the facts that intertwine Wittgenstein and Tolstoy and Christianity historically are very, very different from the language we use in discussing the authenticity of the actual existence of the Christian God. And the Christian rendition of the One True Path. Spiritual and otherwise.
The Tractatus
Wittgenstein, Tolstoy and the Folly of Logical Positivism
Stuart Greenstreet explains how analytical philosophy got into a mess.
Next up: all of those particularly important the things that pop up on the news that language cannot picture. Those things Wittgenstein later suggested we remain silent regarding.
Unless, of course, as an moral objectivist you insist that not only can language paint a picture even pertaining to conflicting goods, but unless your picture is a reproduction of their picture, you will never be become a true artist. Let alone a true philosopher.
For example, when the moral objectivist asks you to picture “John eating the flesh of pigs” and then to picture in turn “John eating the flesh of pigs as evil”, to him they are no less equally a picture of reality itself. Perhaps even a priori?
In other words, unlike other philosophers, he elected to stay in the cave.
Ah, but then…
My own “game” focusing on human interactions at the existential intersection of identity, value judgments and political economy.
If largely in the is/ought world. Language in the either/or world is still considerably less…subjective?
The Tractatus
Wittgenstein, Tolstoy and the Folly of Logical Positivism
Stuart Greenstreet explains how analytical philosophy got into a mess.
And suppose Wittgenstein had been persuaded to attend? How might our understanding of Logical Positivism today have been much the same…or considerably different? But that’s how these things unfold: existentially. They unfold as they do and we get what we’ve got. But they might have unfolded in some other manner given the intertwining of all the individuals and variables involved. And we’d have something else. Well, assuming some measure of human autonomy of course.
Unfortunately [or, perhaps, for most, fortunately] the human brain is hard wired such that actual verification is never really necessary at all. Propositions relating to religion and spirituality and morality and politics are made all the time…and the only verification needed to confirm their truth is that you believe them.
Where would the objectivists among us be without that particular proposition itself. Whole “Coalitions of Truth” have been invented to sustain objective moralities of this sort. And of course, Gods and Goddesses.
Nonsense! Right, Mr. Objectivist? If the sentences you use to assert your own dogmatic/authoritarian moral and political agenda have been verified by you “in your head” as in fact true, then in fact they are.
The Tractatus
Wittgenstein, Tolstoy and the Folly of Logical Positivism
Stuart Greenstreet explains how analytical philosophy got into a mess.
Of course for me this pertains to my own distinction between I in the either/or world and “i” in the is/world. You might say something about yourself out in the world with others. Someone asks you to demonstrate why they should believe that what you say is true or not true. You either can or you cannot. On the other hand, it’s one thing to suggest that moral, political and spiritual value judgments are subjective, and another thing altogether to argue that they encompass meaningless nonsense.
After all, those in the Circle are no less entangled in the gap between what they think they know about “ethics, aesthetics, and religion” and all that can be – must be – known in order to definitively rule out what either can or cannot be demonstrated.
On the other hand, talk about metaphysical!!
Also, as soon as you choose to interact with others, ethics, aesthetics and religion are necessarily bursting at the seams with existential meaning.
Arrogant, even dogmatic. And the beauty of it all is that when you take this dogmatic arrogance up into the stratosphere of intellectual contraptions like these, no one is ever able to effectively rebut it. Except with their own arrogant even dogmatic intellectual contraptions.
Biggs check this out. The whole analytical movement in philosophy was a response to the nonsense produced by continental philosophy all the way back to Grease. The analytical guys were all terminators, you might say, sent from the future to kick some ass and take names.
Wittgenstein’s role… well what ended up being his role after the tractatus period, was to show that yes, so much philosophy was nonsense… but this does not mean we can’t speak meaningfully about subjects that fail the verifiability principle. Instead, we need only recognize what kind of language game we are playing… and not get this one mixed up with that one. For example, we can’t speak of values being true in the same way we speak of facts being true… but we can still speak of values!
It was the continentailist philosophers who tried to systematize ethics into objective forms of thought, and as a result, created all kinds of confusion. We are in fact still recovering from platonism… now in the form of modern Christianity, Judaism and Islam.
The Tractatus
Wittgenstein, Tolstoy and the Folly of Logical Positivism
Stuart Greenstreet explains how analytical philosophy got into a mess.
See, didn’t I tell you? His very own Song Be Syndrome.
You think one way. And you use language that, to the best of your ability, allows you to convey to others what you do think, what you do believe.
But then you have an extraordinary experience – and being in a war is certainly up near the top there – and you find yourself thinking something else, believing something else.
Then over time Wittgenstein began his own sojourn from I in the either/or world to “I” in the is/ought world. The extent to which the tools of philosophy themselves come to be thought of in a very different way.
Whatever that means. From my frame of mind this basically revolves around The Gap, Rummy’s Rule and dasein. Linked to however the relationship between genes and memes works insofar as human language can actually capture this. It just seems patently obvious that the ambiguities and uncertainties are most clearly seen in regard to value our judgments at the intersection of identity and political power.
Mystical in the sense of how exasperating it can become when that which seems utterly clear to us is completely mangled by others. Which, of course, happens all the time here. It’s as though there is something inexplicable in their brains that prevents them from doing the right thing: agreeing with us.
The Tractatus
Wittgenstein, Tolstoy and the Folly of Logical Positivism
Stuart Greenstreet explains how analytical philosophy got into a mess.
Your guess is as good as mind in regard to how this might be translated given the existential parameters of human value judgments in conflict out in the world as we all know it to be. Most here are familiar with my own attempt to connect the dots between language and values. So, naturally, I would be curious to explore how someone here who thinks he or she understands what Wittgenstein means above would translate it given a set of circumstances in which our values come into conflict.
How might Wittgenstein react to the points I raise in my signature threads? Any advocates of his philosophy care to take a crack at it?
How about this? What down here out of the ofttimes obtuse/abstruse intellectual clouds would you assess this to mean at the existential juncture of identity, value judgments and political economy?
Given a moral and political value judgment near and dear to you.
Especially one that, as an objectivist, you’d defend from the perspective of “one of us” vs. “one of them”.
Really, try to imagine Wittgenstein himself reacting to the Lyssa’s posts here!
With others on other threads, however, she actually does try to come off as a “serious philosopher”. It’s always up in the sky-high clouds, sure, but at least she doesn’t allow herself to be reduced down to the buffoon that I bring out in her.
On the other hand, she is only here during the festive holiday season. And this time she claims it’s her last. So, her humiliation at least has a light at the end of the tunnel.
Now, does the festive holiday season end on Christmas…or will she stretch the embarrassment out all the way to New Year’s Day?
She wants me gone…as soon as possible so she can return to undermining, dismissing, negating, rejecting…and leaving nothing behind.
She calls this “philosophy”.
Note to God
No, really…who’s responsible in a no-god, no free-will created universe?
Of course, here, she’s the one who insist that her own language in regard to determinism had better be your language because her language really does reflect the only rational manner in which to understand the manner in which lifeless matter “somehow” configured into autonomous living matter in the human brain.
She doesn’t quite have the science pinned down yet but, as with most other things of this nature with her, she just knows it.
Anyway, assuming the real deal free will, it does sound like she is hinting at staying here beyond our festive holiday season.
After all, this year, ILP really has turned into a No Moderation All The time slugfest for the pinheads, the Kids, and the fulminating fanatic objectivists.
And ILP has an enormously larger impact on world events than Know Thyself, right?
The Tractatus
Wittgenstein, Tolstoy and the Folly of Logical Positivism
Stuart Greenstreet explains how analytical philosophy got into a mess.
Not really. It’s merely to suggest that while, from the perspective of ethics, language does not seem able to encompass human interactions either logically or epistemologically, it is “logically” and “epistemologically” sound to suggest we have no choice but to pretend that it can. Much along the lines here of “if God did not exist, we would have to invent Him.”
We can’t differentiate right from wrong behaviors objectively without God, but with language we can create arguments that, in a world of words rooted to one or another objectivist font, assert that we can.
And here he is not alone. Any number of philosophers down through the ages recognized the need for the “transcendent” – God – in order to have that crucial foundation mere mortals can turn to. And precisely because neither science nor philosophy has yet to come up with the secular equivalent of God. Only countless [and hopelessly conflicting] political ideologies and Humanisms and those who cling to biological imperatives – Nature – that revolve entirely around the assumptions that they make about Good and Evil.
Right, and tell me how he demonstrates this other than by merely asserting it to be so. If free will didn’t exist Nature would be obligated to compel us to insist that it does. Down the rabbit-hole of sheer speculation…the human brain attempting to understand the human brain itself.
The Tractatus
Wittgenstein, Tolstoy and the Folly of Logical Positivism
Stuart Greenstreet explains how analytical philosophy got into a mess.
In other words, whatever that means. Really, in regards to your day to day life, what do you make of it? Or is it just something that a philosopher might think up…something that somehow allows us, perhaps, to go beyond our day to day interactions and grapple with something truly “profound” in regard to the “human condition”?
Instead, from my own frame of mind, there is what philosophers are able to elucidate in regard to the “rules of language”. There are things that make sense logically and things that do not. There are things we can know epistemologically and things that we can’t.
Given that we “elucidate” when we “make (something) clear; explain”, where does language meet its match “for all practical purposes” when we interact?
And yet many here become all but apoplectic when I keep insisting that we need a context. A set of circumstances in which we do explore “for all practical purposes” what the “limitations of language” might possibly be.
Manifest truths? Of course: that is precisely what the moral and political and spiritual objectivists among us insist that others ought to embrace in regard to their own value judgments.
Exactly! I merely root my own rendition of this in dasein, conflicting goods and political economy. My own unique take on the limitations of language…when exploring the existential parameters of moral and political value judgments.
Here however…
…this is no less ultimately just an assumption. It’s not like it can be proven by either philosophers or scientists that beyond all doubt there is no collection of words, no language, no argument able to establish an objective morality. That’s what the objectivists can always fall back on. They merely have to believe what they do to make it true.
The Tractatus
Wittgenstein, Tolstoy and the Folly of Logical Positivism
Stuart Greenstreet explains how analytical philosophy got into a mess.
Of course, as I often come back to, given “the gap” and “Rummy’s Rule”, even science itself is left sputtering in the dark when it goes far enough out on the limb encompassed by “The Really Big Questions”.
What for example is either metaphysical or not metaphysical when either scientists or philosophers set for themselves the task of determining why there is something instead of nothing? Or why there is this something and not something else? Or the God Question. Or fierce discussions and debates that revolves around everything from determinism to morality.
What is the limitations of human language when we don’t even know how to encompass the “human condition” itself in the staggering vastness of “all there is”.
Same thing basically. Where does science end and philosophy begin? Okay, so let’s narrow the discussion down to a context we are all familiar with and explore that. Clearly it would seem the laws of nature overlap with the rules of language. The laws of nature tell us about the interactions of matter and energy such that some things are true objectively for all of us. Same with language. Something is either logically true or it is not. Thus in discussions that do revolve around the either/or world both philosophers and scientists can concur regarding any number of things. And whether Wittgenstein is understood correctly by those in the Vienna Circle in regard to “metaphysics” doesn’t change that.
Instead, the “problems of life” are almost always in regard to how we ought to react to the world around us when the way things are are thought to be either a good thing or a bad thing.
So, to the extent that science helps to create a world that brings into existence such things as computers, the internet, nuclear bombs and mind-boggling communications technology, those philosophers we call “political scientists” or “ethicists”, along with sociologists and psychologists and others are always going to be around to weigh in on things.
So, sure, if there are secret messages in the Torah, then why not in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Only for me, of course, my interests is always the same: connecting the dots existentially between morality here and now and immortality there and then. And here the Torah is likely to be more applicable, right?
Wittgenstein’s “message” would seem more applicable to logic and epistemology. Where in regard to the either/or or the is/ought world what are the limitations of language when it all comes down to communicating in the most rational manner.
In regard to the things that “really matter”.
Numbers and words. Apples and oranges to some of us. Again, depending on the context. With numbers, as most use them, the is/ought world doesn’t go away. The numbers may correspond to actual objective facts, but the conflicting goods remain the same.
On the other hand, since none of this “philosophical analysis” here is brought down to earth by the author, I may well be missing the point altogether about words and numbers.
Anyone willing to correct or clarify my own thinking about them? This part for example:
What sign? What index? What in particular do our eyes see? Pertaining both to the either/or and the is/ought world.
