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Permalink Reply by Keith Saylor on 4th mo. 23, 2016 at 12:42pm

Hello Kirby,

He also writes in the same book:

"You get tragedy where the tree, instead of bending, breaks. Tragedy is something un-Jewish. Mendelssohn is, I suppose, the most untragic of composers."

I wonder whether his use of tragedy here sheds light on his use in your quote?

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Permalink Reply by Kirby Urner on 4th mo. 23, 2016 at 2:31pm

Yeah, throughout the book he seems to be humming this or that snippet from a well-known classic, exercising his Viennese imagination.  He sometimes even quotes a few bars of actual notes so we might hum along, presuming we're good at reading music. 

My problem is I'm relatively unable to dredge up these tunes (even Wagner's), so his nuanced allusions tend to go over my head. That's a deficiency on my part, not his.  Citing music, or quoting film, is often enlightening and expressive, assuming a likewise-informed audience.

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Permalink Reply by David McKay on 4th mo. 23, 2016 at 6:41pm

Occam's razor is, of course, not an arbitrary rule nor one justified by its practical success. It simply says that unnecessary elements in the symbolism mean nothing. Signs which serve one purpose are logically equivalent, signs which serve no purpose are logically meaningless. [Tractatus 5.47321]

Wittgenstein taught me that in some ways philosophy is less an academic discipline than it is a tone of voice. There is a delightful snarkiness to his work. And yet, what might it look like if we held ourselves accountable to a therapeutic paradigm of purging our language of redundancies and meaningless terms?

I suspect that many of us would no longer have anything left to say.

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Permalink Reply by Kirby Urner on 4th mo. 24, 2016 at 12:06am

I suspect you're right, and in a sense "bringing people to Silence" (and its wisdom) is what Quakerism is also about.

He was not the militant positivist some people at first made him out to be though.

I read him as an anthropologist seeking his own tribe, and hoping to communicate insights which cannot, because of their very nature, be given direct expression.  Language itself is the culprit, yet is not designed to confess its own feats of misdirection.

"Showing, where saying alone won't do the trick" is his modus operandi.

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Permalink Reply by Kirby Urner on 4th mo. 25, 2016 at 11:52am

Back to that quote, I'm thinking he shares a widespread sensibility that any nuclear war conflagration could be nothing but cheesy.  It'd be horribly tragic don't get me wrong, but also silly in that it didn't have to happen, we're just trying to steal God's thunder and make Judgement Day something uber dumbed down.

Are we were so keen to see some stupid Hollywood interpretation of "the Apocalypse" in our lifetimes that we stage this goofy Wagnerian "end of the world" extravaganza / spectacle? 

So wimpy, so whimpery, so more proof that God has yet to get to the 7th Day as Genesis is not over yet, is about a planet long ago and far away. 

Adam / Eve is yet to arrive on what we call Earth, some 2.0 of something. 

We're hominids yes, but no way "homo sapiens" (a misnomer, we got ahead of ourselves in the nomenclature).  Naw, we're just more subclasses of prehuman at this point, who think the Bible (which must've gotten here by UFO / Angel / whatever) has to all be about *us* har har.   That's all a nuclear war would prove.  We weren't cut out to survive, didn't fit.  Do the Darwinist Christians want to prove that?  Should we give them some award?

Vanity vanity all is vanity.  Happy Birthday to William Shakespeare.

Of course that's just a "musical" interpretation as in Wittgenstein's coordinate system, the plausibility of "nuclear war" was just coming over the horizon.  He was from Vienna Circle world, Freud's Era.  The literal reality of our ability to self inflict damage with atomic weapons, the ultimate in self flagellation, would come right around the time that he died.

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Permalink Reply by Kirby Urner on 4th mo. 27, 2016 at 9:50am

Some other quotes, giving more insight into Wittgenstein's attitudes. 

He's looking for an upside to building the atom bomb (this is pre anyone using it on cities).  He's hoping its existence will upset the status quo in science (physics), which he likens to dirty dishwater (my translation). 

Thanks to the bomb, people will know we're no longer in the world described by what today we call "classical mechanics".  Indeed.  Then what?

1946: The hysterical fear over the atom bomb now being experienced, or at any rate expressed, by the public almost suggests that at last something really salutary has been invented.  The fright at least gives the impression of a really effective bitter medicine. I can't help thinking:  if this didn't have something good about it the philistines wouldn't be making an outcry. But perhaps this too is a childish idea.  Because really all I can mean is that the bomb offers a prospect of the end, the destruction, of an evil, -- our disgusting soapy water science. And certainly that's not an unpleasant thought; but who can say what would come after this destruction? The people now making speeches against producing the bomb are undoubtedly the scum of the intellectuals, but even that does not prove beyond question that what they abominate is to be welcomed.

Related:

1947:  Science and industry, and their progress, might turn out to be the most enduring thing in the modern world. Perhaps any speculation about a coming collapse of science and industry is, for the present and for a long time to come, nothing but a dream; perhaps science and industry, having caused infinite misery in the process, will unite the world -- I mean condense it into a single unit, though one in which peace is the last thing that will find a home.

Because science and industry do decide wars, or so it seems.

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