Two Forms of Inside Baseball

Wittgenstein thought that his influence as a teacher was, on the whole, harmful to the development of independent minds in his disciples. I am afraid that he was right. And I believe that I can partly understand why it should be so. Because of the depth and originality of his thinking, it is very difficult to understand Wittgenstein's ideas and even more difficult to incorporate them into one's own thinking. At the same time the magic of his personality and style was most inviting and persuasive. To learn from Wittgenstein without coming to adopt his forms of expression and catchwords and even to imitate his tone of voice, his mien and gestures was almost impossible. - G. H. von Wright

Am I the only one who cannot found a school or can a philosopher never do this? I cannot found a school because I do not really want to be imitated. Not at any rate by those who publish articles in philosophy journals. (CV, ?) Working in philosophy - like work in architecture in many respects - is really more a working on oneself. On one's own interpretation. On one's way of seeing things. (And what one expects of them.) (CV, 16)

The solution of philosophical problems can be compared with a gift in a fairy tale: in the magic castle it appears enchanted and if you look at it outside in the daylight it is nothing but an ordinary bit of iron (or something of the sort). (CV, p. 11)

Two Forms of Inside Baseball • The Philosophical Subject-Matter: • Fregean-Russellian ‘logicist’ program; • Frege’s conceptual realism; • Russell’s logical atomism; logical positivism. • Wittgenstein’s Duty of Genius: • Genius or talent; • art and ethics; • romanticism and modernism.

Socrates is mortal • Bruce Wayne is Batman • The present King of France is bald. • (For all x there is some x)(x is KF)(x is bald) • 1 + 1 = 2 • (read the first 200 pages of Principia Mathematica)

Important Tractarian notions: • Isomorphism of thought-language-world. • The need for ‘simples’. • Language already in order as it is.

This sort of thinking is often thought to be reductive – positivistic! (And it is.) “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Nope. “There are fewer things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your non-philosophy.”

“The world is all that is the case.” (1) • “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.” (7) • the notorious say/show distinction. If any philosophy is going to work, rationally, it’s going to be Frege-Russell style philosophy. From the fact that Frege-Russell style analysis is rather sterile and deflationary in spirit, we deduce that, at best, philosophy isn’t worth much. (But we can’t say that, strictly.)

“And now I must say that if I contemplate what Ethics really wouldhave to be if there were such a science, this result seems to mequite obvious. It seem to me obvious that nothing we could everthink or say should be the thing. That we cannot write a scientificbook, the subject matter of which could be intrinsically sublime andabove all other subject matters. I can only describe my feeling bythe metaphor, that, if a man could write a book on Ethics whichreally was a book on Ethics, this book would, with an explosion,destroy all the other books in the world.” (PO, p. 40)

Later Wittgenstein (non-technical; holistic; pluralistic) • Language-games. • Meaning as ‘use’. • Rule-following considerations If any philosophy is going to work, it’s going to be Frege-Russell style analytic philosophy. From the fact that it doesn’t work, we learn that you can’t really do philosophy. Philosophy consists of showing how philosophy always fails.

The problems arising through a misinterpretation of our forms of language have the character of depth. They are deep disquietudes; their roots are as deep in us as the forms of our language and their significance is as great as the importance of our language. - Let us ask ourselves: why do we feel a grammatical joke to be deep? (And that is the depth of philosophy). (PI, §111)

The effect of making men think in accordance with dogmas, perhaps in the form of certain graphic propositions, will be very peculiar: I am not thinking of these dogmas as determining men's opinions but rather as completely controlling the expression of all opinions. People will live under an absolute, palpable tyranny, though without being able to say they are not free. I think the Catholic Church does something rather like this. For dogma is expressed in the form of an assertion, and is unshakable, but at the same time any practical opinion can be made to harmonize with it; admittedly more easily in some cases than in others. It is not a wall setting limits to what can be believed, but more like a brake which, however, practically serves the same purpose; it's almost as though someone were to attach a weight to your foot to restrict your freedom of movement. This is how dogma becomes irrefutable and beyond the reach of attack. (CV, p. 28)

(TractatusLogico-Philosophicus, 4.5.): "The general form of propositions is: This is how things are." – That is the kind of proposition that one repeats to oneself countless times. One thinks that one is tracing the outline of the thing's nature over and over again, and one is merely tracing round the frame through which we look at it. (PI, §114)

Philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything. - Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain. For what is hidden, for example, is of no interest to us. One might also give the name "philosophy" to what is possible before all new discoveries and inventions. (PI, §126)

“The earlier Wittgenstein, whom I knew intimately, was a man addicted to passionately intense thinking, profoundly aware of difficult problems of which I, like him, felt the importance, and possessed (or at least so I thought) of true philosophical genius. The later Wittgenstein, on the contrary, seems to have grown tired of serious thinking and to have invented a doctrine which would make such an activity unnecessary. I do not for one moment believe that the doctrine which has these lazy consequences is true. I realise, however, that I have an overpoweringly strong bias against it, for, if it is true, philosophy is, at best, a slight help to lexicographers, and, at worst, an idle tea-table amusement.” - Russell

“Some philosophers (or whatever you like to call them) suffer from what may be called ‘loss of problems’. Then everything seems quite simple to them, no deep problems seem to exist any more, the world becomes broad and flat and loses all depth, and what they write becomes immeasurably shallow and trivial. Russell and H. G. Wells suffer from this.” (Z, §456)

I think I summed up my attitude to philosophy when I said: philosophy really ought to be written only as a poetic composition. It must, as it seems to me, be possible to gather from this how far my thinking belongs to the present, future, or past. For I was thereby revealing myself as someone who cannot quite do what he would like to be able to do. (CV, 24)

I will describe this experience [of ethics] in order, if possible, to make you recall the same or similar experiences, so that we may have a common ground for our investigation. I believe the best way of describing it is to say that when I have it I wonder at the existence of the world. And I am then inclined to use such phrases as "how extraordinary that anything should exist" or "how extraordinary that the world should exist." (PO, p. 41)

“Die Welt istalles, was der Fall ist.” (TLP, 1) [The world is all that is the case.] “thehighly syncopated pipings of Herr Wittgenstein's flute.” – C.D. Broad What can’t be said, can’t be said, and it can’t be whistled either.

“You are ME!” – Adolf Loos, to Wittgenstein “Whoever goes to the Ninth Symphony and then sits down to design a wallpaper pattern is either a rogue or a degenerate.” – Adolf Loos, “Ornament and Crime”

"His assistants cluster about him. He is severe with them, demanding, punctilious, but this is for their own ultimate benefit. He devises hideously difficult problems, or complicates their work with sudden oblique comments that open whole new areas of investigation - yawning chasms under their feet. It is as if he wishes to place them in situations where only failure is possible. But failure, too, is a part of mental life. "I will make you failure-proof," he says jokingly. His assistants pale.

Is it true, as Valéry said, that every man of genius contains within himself a false man of genius?” - Donald Barthelme, “The Genius”

The Attraction of Imperfection. Here I see a poet who, like many a human being, is more attractive by virtue of his imperfections than he is by all the things that grow to completion and perfection under his hands. Indeed, he owes his advantages and fame much more to his ultimate incapacity than to his ample strength. His works never wholly express what he would like to express and what he would like to have seen: It seems as if he had had the foretaste of a vision and never the vision itself; but a tremendous lust for this vision remains in his soul, and it is from this that he derives his equally tremendous eloquence of desire and craving …

By virtue of this lust he lifts his listeners above his word and all mere "works" and lends them wings to soar as high as listeners had never soared. Then, having themselves been transformed into poets and seers, they lavish admiration upon the creator of their happiness, as if he had led them immediately to the vision of what was for him the holiest and ultimate - as if he had attained his goal and had really seen and communicated his vision. His fame benefits from the fact that he never reached his goal. - Nietzsche

Two Forms of Inside Baseball