Wittgenstein "The World is a Totality of Facts Not of Things"

First Lines of The Tractatus 

My own understanding of the word Philosophy places it in opposition to the word Physics. The difference is between Life and Matter. This difference can be thought of as the difference between the experience of being life and the question:  What is it that's doing the experiencing? In the former, call it the experience of life, the tool of investigation is language. In the latter, call it physics, the tools of investigation are math and the many branches of science.

Wittgenstein, who in his more solitary moments, and there were many of them, saw himself as owning the responsibility of genius. He had something to offer the world. To concentrate his mind he gave up the fortune he was due to inherit and followed a heart that wanted to belong to something untouchable and golden. Imagine the challenges a disappointment netted him when at the end of an investigation he was forced to admit that he'd basically killed philosophy by concluding: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." He was Austrian, his English very precise, his famous statement liberally translates into: There was a limit to language as an exploratory tool, you could describe something, which would be true in a picture made with words so long as it was true in the real world and as a result of this tautology language was a pretty, bloody useless tool for accurate investigation into anything much beyond maybe Geography.

Was there a but?

There's always a but with Wittgenstein. In the First World War he volunteered for front line service in the Austrian Army, he got medals for courage, was taken prisoner by the Italians and while a prisoner he worked on his early reckoning with language, an account which is referred to as The Tractatus - posh for The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, a title that translates into spell-check friendly English as The Logical and Philosophical Treatise. 

Between the First World War and the Second World War, Wittgenstein finished his Tractatus, got himself into trouble for whipping one of his ten year old pupils while teaching primary school somewhere in the Austrian Alps, he spent time in Norway with a friend, he designed a huge house for his sister, worked as gardener, got himself a job as a lecturer at Cambridge University, where he focused on Ordinary Language, a subject that concentrates upon the everyday, man in the street confusions in language. In 1939 he became a Professor at Cambridge University. During the Second World War Wittgenstein  preferred to get a job as a porter in a London Hospital, and later he went North to work as a research technician in Newcastle. He was 62 when he died on April 29th 1951, ten months before I entered the world.  

Two years after his death, Wittgenstein's most influential book Philosophical Investigations was published. It revealed the details of his second theory of language, his Game Theory of Language which developed out of his early investigations into the Picture Theory of language. 

Let's put it this way: Following rules is a public practice, rules are learned from others, they are not internal subjective interpretations. Language has shared rules. The second point in Wittgenstein's Game Theory of Language reflects an idea that meaning is contextual, the meaning of a word depends on the context in which the word is uttered. Here, uttered means spoken, not written. The meaning of a word is always uncertain, until, not the rules of the game, but the context of a game is established. Contexts or games aren't static, they are not rules. Wittgenstein's second theory of language opened the gates his early theory had closed. The world wasn't a List of Facts, far from it, however, the danger for philosophy is misunderstandings from wandering contexts and the uncertainty of meaning contained in words. He suggested you can reasonably and necessarily discuss something like ethics where there are no facts, so long as you grasp that words, the tools of your trade, are fluid, constantly defining and redefining themselves. In short the language game you're engaged in isn't science and it's not logic in the traditional monolithic sense of logic, rather language has it's own kind of diverse, heterogeneous logic that can be frightfully useful in cutting the red tape and broadening the horizon of Facts but very difficult to trust with a mission to Mars.  

No More Grosvener Squares Please

Aragon's Cylonudista of 2001

In the 19th Century (that would be the 1800's) Liberal Christian movements, and especially one called the Social Gospel Movement, took a liking to a banner that offered "The Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man" as their bearded and definitely icky guiding light. This movement attempted to apply Christian Ethics to mounting social problems revealed by a rapidly industrializing world. Then came the lightening bolt of 20th Century (1900's) which defined supply and demand as in fundamental opposition the Spirit of Christmas with such guiding lights as "A flick and it's Lit," interspersed with "Free Nelson Mandela," "We got the meats," "Yankee Go Home," "The pause that refreshes," "Good to the last drop," "Melts in your mouth not in your hand," "Remember 1916," and may none forget Nietzsche's "Rinse and Repeat."

Now that the 21st Century (2000's) is a quarter of a century old it may be time to search for hope in newer and less imperial forms of International Expression which also manage to defy the ironic tendencies of the 19th and 20th Century. My own nomination would be a study of the developing costumary and cyclonudista traditions of free and independent citizens in war-torn Portland Oregon.

The first recorded cyclonudista was observed in June of 2001 in the Catalan area of Spain to promote a more humanocentric understanding of cities as places where people tried to live their lives, not cars or tourists in airbnbs. Since then the cyclonudista traditions have spread through Europe and across the Atlantic to the less constipated city dwelling human populations. Including Portland, Oregon.

Costume has always been an element of political engagement. You got the red beaky hat for the truly absurdists. This concept of recognizable uniform goes back a bit, suffragettes went for purple, white and green, they chose a style of dress that defined their idea of modern womanhood and did rather well as an inspiration for the fashion industry.

And yes, the citizens of Portland have introduced their own style to their displays of opposition to hastily raised, poorly trained masked thugs led by an ill-informed, corrupt leadership, dispatched by an often chaotic and despotic political class holding sway over a federal government. Portland has chosen to introduce the imagery of Disneyesque dancing creatures as a sort of evening entertainment. It's a classic and rather beautiful de-escalation technique that back in the medieval, a king's Jester and often his Bard learned to master. A mix of satire, wit, appeasement and humor which Plato and Socrates might have recognized as rhetoric.

Mathematicians, Poets, Time and Becoming.

Roger Penrose Oct 2011 at the Science Festival in Genoa Italy

Whitehead's Drops of Experience and Bergson's understanding of Duration are ideas in what's subtitled Process Philosophy. The world, the universe and consciousness isn't one great big lump, expanding or otherwise, it's a happenstance that should be grasped as a moment by moment. Each moment appears, becomes real and then is gone. For Whitehead, who was a mathematician, the gone becomes available data. For Bergson, who was a Frenchman with the heart of a poet, the gone goes to memory where it remains in the consciousness, what Bergson thought of as a thickening of duration. For both men, whether it was a Drop of Experience, or a Thickening, the moment of appearance as it becomes real, this moment of coming into existence, is for Bergson, a creative moment, hence the title of one of his books, Creative Evolution. For Whitehead, this moment of coming into existence was unique, if you prefer, for Whitehead, it was a new number never before seen and therefore wonderful in every way.  Both men saw the past as an information set available to the moment of making real, and by real nowhere is there a suggestion that real refers to anything outside the minds capacity to perceive and interpret the world and its universe. Why do we care? Because a mathematician called Penrose has played with the math in a circular understanding of the entropy, the order and disorder within our expanding universe, and has addressed the possibility that as total entropy becomes increasingly random, disordered, everything cools down, no mass, a few black holes dotted around, a moment when time herself will slow. The question: Does time stop? Not really. According to Penrose, a mathematician with the soul of a poet, who's not afraid to use the English Language, when time slows to a point the Universe forgets what it is and in that moment of forgetting it becomes the beginning of the next universe. 

Baxter Becomes a Radical Feminist

Fungi of Somekind

Critics have had an issue with Hannah Arendt's account of the Eichmann Trial. The issue can be summed up by examining this question: Is a legal proceeding - where a judge and a jury hears evidence and arguments to resolve a civil or criminal dispute - a trial of an individual or a trial of society? The answer would include a contemplation of the question: Can a person be tried for the injustices and crimes of the society he or she belongs to? Just in case Hannah Arendt's account of the Eichmann Trial is a mystery to you, Eichmann was a mover and shaker in the industrialized genocide of, by some estimates, 10 to 15 million passive men, women and children of many different belief systems, colors and nationalities from all across Europe, which in 1942 at a conference just outside Berlin, that Eichmann attended, was officially titled: the Final Solution to the Jewish Question. In March of 1960 Adolf Eichmann was kidnapped in Argentina, and in 1962 Adolf Eichmann was tried by a court in Jerusalem and hanged. Hannah Arendt's 1963 account of that trial is called: Eichmann in Jerusalem - A Report on the Banality of Evil. Hannah's critics, usually reluctant to dismiss Evil as Banal, can often assume the trial of one man can and should be a trial of the society the man on trial belongs to. Hannah's stand-alone point was that the apparatchiks gainfully engaged in the business of state do so unthinkingly. In other words Eichmann, in his trial, wasn't playing dumb, in obeying the edicts of his employer and his country he didn't think he was doing anything wrong. And if you're still interested I think you'd agree that the implications of Hannah's observations, if true, are intense. Society shapes people and the society we live in is our responsibility not theirs. Hannah's critics, it sometimes seems, would prefer to perceive evil as a universal enemy force hell bent on world domination. Those who have faith in the literal existence of evil can get sensitive when reluctantly returned to the embrace of Schopenhauer's restless, evil-free and irrational Will, where with no war to fight there's a sense of purposelessness or calm depending how close to death you are. Another, and rather crucial example of today's discussion with Baxter is a book by Ms Susan Brownmiller. Yes, it's her legal name, her birth name was Susan Warhaftig, which means truthful and honest and is of Yiddish origin, but she'd wanted a career in  acting  and Warhaftig didn't sound like a star of stage and screen this side of the Rhine Valley.  But for some reason the name Brownmiller did. Susan's book is called Against Our Will. Having lived in the wider world a good while the thesis she explores is that rape is not a crime of sex or lust, it's a conscious act of power and intimidation used by men to maintain social control of women. By social control, as opposed to control, Susan means those mechanisms within society that ensure individuals conform to norms that maintain order. These mechanisms have been tickling Baxter's fancy since we mentioned Dr. Marilynn Brewer's 'Choice Behavior in Social Dilemmas,' a subject matter that has persuaded Baxter to take a less active role in his relationship with our Spleen, he's agreed to nod politely instead of yelling and accusing our Spleen of suffering from an aggravated mythomaniacal pathology. Either way Brownmiller's most succinct remark on the issue that has so dramatically reawakened Baxter's interest in Brewer's 'Choice Behaviors' is this : "rape.... is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear." Granted Susan might not have shared Schopenhauer's understanding of Will, but her point was to reframe the understandings of rape so that they included the notion that the act of rape held within it the idea of a "brutal violation of female autonomy" about which, for the benefit of women in our society, Brownmiller insisted something had to be done and could be done, rather than being dismissed as a 'dear little thing.'  Many a personage fell to outrage at the sound of Brownmiller's words. They saw it as a radical critique of boys, men and grandfathers. They dismissed Brownmiller's history lesson as a long gone problem of the past, her detailed historical and cultural exploration of the legal understandings of rape through the centuries that saw rape as a crime against a man's property, even if it was ever true, now that men had walked on the moon couldn't possible still be true. Yes indeed, Brownmiller's challenge caused angst and upset in the ranks of the masculine as defined by a culture that also includes a washing powder which cleans the sheets, pillow cases and towels whiter than white. Radical which comes from the word root, contains the meaning fundamental or basic. Feminist which comes from the word feminine, with an -ist at the end, contains the meaning, practitioner of, expert in, advocate for, follower of.