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In May 1913 Bertrand Russell was working on a manuscript called Theory of Knowledge. The project was abandoned in June when Russell decided that he could go no further. His theory was at a dead-end and he couldn't back out and start over. It was because of Wittgenstein's criticism in conversations with Russell that the manuscript was abandoned and Russell never attempted to publish his "theory." This history is recounted in Russell and Wittgenstein on the Nature of Judgement by Rosalind Carey (Continuum, 2007, 150pp., $110.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780826488114. [That is right; $110 for 150 pages]). The technical reasons for Russell's failure are accounted for in this very expensive book. (Such books are produced for libraries and then mostly cordoned off from the general public on the shelves of security-guarded university establishments; establishments; which are, by the way, supported in one way or another at the public expense. Such is the state of knowledge in the corporate state. For the most part the general public does not feel the loss because these expensive published theses of 150 pages are mostly nests made by the academic squirrels. The historical nut-gathering that these nests are made to hold is often badly written, though sometimes interesting. But the academics themselves are not really to blame since they are fulfilling an institutional imperative -- publish or perish. Publication seems to be the university's way of accounting for the productivity of their professorial employees, like the aggregation of standardized tests are supposed to measure the health of our elementary schools. Call this the "Fordism" of the educational factories.) For biographical, historical, and philosophical reasons I am interested in Russell and Wittgenstein in 1913 and thus this book would be interesting to me. But how am I to get hold of such an outlandishly priced piece of work unless I gather some friends to storm the Columbia Library while decommissioning the security guards in the process? So I must make do with book reviews and with my own knowledge, when discussing Carey's book. Some squirrels do interesting things, and this book is a case in point. I think that someone should write a piece of fiction focusing on the lives of Russell and Wittgenstein from May to June 1913, the period of the writing and abandonment of Russell's Theory of Knowledge, and bringing into the novel the events of the subsequent six years, as if in a dream of history. Within six years of the Russell and Wittgenstein conversations both were imprisoned; Russell for his opposition and protest against World War I and Wittgenstein as an Austrian prisoner-of-war in Como and Cassino. While Russell was in prison in 1918, he returned to philosophy after a long time writing only social and political works, and wrote Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, and began the book The Analysis of Mind, which was partially a tactical retreat from his attempt to create "a theory of knowledge." While Wittgenstein was a prisoner-of-war in Italy in 1918-19 he rewrote and rethought some of the portions of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which he had finished during his course of military service. (Someone should compile a list of the great men and women who were imprisoned during the period of the First World War. Russell, Eugene Debs, and Rosa Luxembourg come to mind immediately, but the list could be extended to hundreds of names. Does anyone know of a good book that gives a global history of resistance to World War I? If it hasn't already been written it should be written.) The countries that Russell and Wittgenstein called home were fighting a war against each other and still, in the early part of the war at least, the two managed to exchange letters and post-cards. In February 1919 Wittgenstein wrote to Russell, I am prisoner in Italy since November, and hope I may communicate with you after a three-year interruption. I have done lots of logical work which I am dying to let you know before publishing it. How did such posts get through the lines of war? Did they go by way of neutral countries? According to Ray Monk this post-card found Russell at Lady Ottoline Morrell's country house, Garsington Manor. A postman delivered the card to a place where Russell was not listed. Perhaps the British postal services favored the ruling classes because it beats me how a card gets from an Italian prisoner-of-war camp to a person of no certain address, unless that person got special attention paid to him by the postal services. But in the Spring of 1913 all of this was in their future. Wittgenstein had not even published a major work when he froze Russell into place on his theory of knowledge. In fact Wittgenstein was in effect Russell's student, not a fellow teacher, and yet his influence, his ability to paralyze thought, was infamous. This shows one of the great missions of Wittgenstein. In spite of the philosophers, because of the philosophers, Wittgenstein's mission was basically an anti-philosophical practice. He endeavored to get philosophers to shut up -- or at least to stop publishing so much of what they write on the "deep" philosophical subjects. He was against proclamations of philosophical "knowledge" and the propounding of philosophical theories. He was engaged in a philosophical practice that would in effect limit the very notions of what we call knowledge. Wittgenstein's only published major work, the Tractatus, was anti-theoretical to the core. It did not present "a theory" of logic and its relation to language, or a "theory" of propositions. What it set out to do is to clarify certain aspects of language use and misuse from within a philosophical frame. The Tractatus attempted to set the limits of what any philosophical theory could accomplish. It did this by attempting to show that the capacity of language could only express through propositions what can be thought, and that there is much else that cannot be thought through propositions but can only be shown. On the level of propositions the Tractatus itself does not present a theory, but rather makes clarifications about the possibility of philosophical theories given the limits of language use. But on the level of "showing" the Tractatus as a whole is emblematic of a kind of anti-philosophy: we are shown the limits of human thought and knowledge. The limits of knowledge that can be made from propositions "show" from the book as a whole. There are only a few philosophers who agree with this interpretation of the Tractatus, and fewer still who agree with the interpretation of Wittgenstein's work which would turn the work as a whole into an anti-philosophical practice. The underpinnings of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, his clarification of language use as putting limits on what we can call thought or knowledge, is itself an anti-philosophical practice to the core. Personally, I think that Wittgenstein is correct, when he insisted that nobody understood the Tractatus, when it was written, and few understand it now. It is because very few people can accept a work that is a set of propositions that say one thing and a book as a whole that illustrates what the set of propositions says cannot be theorized or philosophized by pointing the way to silence. The book is a form of practice. It practices what it preaches. If most philosophers set out to accept the anti-philosophical practice of the Tractatus, they could not write the articles and books, which are their bids for job security in the current academic system. So Wittgenstein while writing from the prison camp in Italy continually complained, perhaps even whined, that Russell would never understand the Tractatus. Russell wrote back: Throughout the war I did not think about philosophy, until, last summer. I found myself in prison, and beguiled my leisure by writing a popular text-book, which was all I could do under the circumstances. Now I am back at philosophy, and more in the mood to understand…. Don't be discouraged, you will be understood in the end. (p. 162) I think in the matter of understanding both men were wrong about the other. Wittgenstein has yet to be understood because philosophers have a hard time understanding books that are also practices. (Perhaps poets best understand such philosophical works.) And Russell understood Wittgenstein on an intuitive level that has never been acknowledged. Back in June 1913, because of Wittgenstein's anti-philosophical criticism, Russell quit his Theory of Knowledge. And for the first time Russell himself began to think about the limits of knowledge and the limits of theory. Theory, after all, can only confront and provide knowledge of a very small part of the world. More than thirty years later Russell came out with a book called Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits. It is my contention that this book is a strange bastard child of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. In 1913 Wittgenstein planted the seeds of "theory-skepticism" into Russell's thinking and over the course of Russell's long life that skepticism grew. Unlike our modern skeptics, the likes of Dawkins and Hitchens, Russell's skepticism constantly turned around on itself and embraced nationalism, the social system of classes, philosophy and even science. Russell's skepticism did not limit itself to skepticism about religion. There came a time at the end of his life that he began to look at his own intellectual pretentions as also a form of superstition. Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits is not a "theory of knowledge" but an attempt to describe knowledge and how we come to know. In short, Russell's book is an anti-theory. It is not an anti-theory in the multiple ways that the Tractatus is an anti-philosophy -- propounding, illustrating, and practicing anti-philosophy all at once -- but an anti-theory in a much more everyday way. The goals of Russell's long book were modest, unlike the immodest idol-smashing goals of Wittgenstein's short book; one of the limits of human knowledge is that there can be no grand theory of knowledge, and no metaphysical ground to knowledge, but only local descriptions of how in a common sense way we as individuals, with these brains, can come to know limited parts of the world through specific theories. As Russell himself wrote at the beginning of Human Knowledge: To scientific common sense (which I accept) it is plain that only an infinitesimal part of the universe is known, that there were countless ages during which there was no knowledge, and that there probably will be countless ages without knowledge in the future. Cosmically and causally, knowledge is an unimportant feature of the universe; a science which omitted to mention its occurrence might from an impersonal point of view, suffer only from a very trivial imperfection.
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At ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) anti_philosophy ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) yofaceizscrumpy comments on the whole idea of the anti-philosophical project:
self -contradiction
yofaceizscrumpy
2006-10-15 08:57 pm
Sorry for interrupting you this evening, but it seems like your community is a walking contradiction.
As any sophistica can see from dictionary.com, "the rational investigation of the truths and principles of being, knowledge, or conduct" is the definition of philosophy. To be anti-philosophy is a totality that claims truth.
I kindly request that you disband your entire community this instant.
Anti-philosophy is simply an attitude or approach of skepticism to the possibility of most or all philosophical projects as philosophers themselves define their projects.
There is a simple reason to take an attitude of "anti-philosophy." All great philosophers, from the very beginning of the conversation that we call "philosophy", have been in some sense anti-philosophers, rejecting the very idea that any kind of philosophy is possible or that all previous "philosophy" was philosophy at all. Whether Plato or Rousseau or Nietzsche or Wittgenstein, or even such an infamia as Heidegger, (and many more) the first original steps in their philosophical work was to question whether philosophy, or at least systematic knowledge as assumed by philosophy, is possible at all. Is it possible to "know" (or describe or find a method to produce) the structure of "reality," the conditions of knowledge, the foundation of "being" or "thought," or the grand historical movements of "spirit" or the inherent logics of "Mind", in the way that philosophers claim, or are the very claims a form of self-deception?
Further, any advance in "knowledge" (science, theoretical thinking, mathematics) has represented both a break from philosophical rumination and a crisis of philosophy. Every scientific advance has represented a reconception of philosophy because previous philosophy is found to be limited and unfounded... And yet rarely do the professional advocates of the philosophical project look at itself with humility. The whole dung-shifting machine just rolls along as if all previous speculation had not been thrown onto the heap. All philosophy, like all religion, becomes an illustration of shifting into the "holes" left by science and literature, a "God" of the gaps approach... where there is no "science" it is there philosophy shall fill in the gaps. And finally any "advance" in "experiential understanding" has been pre-philosophical and has largely involved the kind of experience we get from the visual arts, poetry, drama, novels, etc. In fact, basically, what we call philosophy has nothing to do with wisdom or knowledge... Philosophical practice is basically a parasite on the arts, out of which the discipline of philosophy grew, during the historical period when arts separated from religious ritual... And philosophical practice is also parasitic on science, from which philosophy reacts by constantly redacting itself and reforming itself as commentary on scientific practice.
To the extent that you can say that an "attitude" or "approach" is philosophical, only to that extent can you say that "anti-philosophy" is a philosophy, and thus represents a contradiction, or perhaps a systematic paradox. But this in-itself represents the kind of imperialism of knowledge that philosophy has been accused of by every great philosopher who started his/her philosophical career as an anti-philosopher. Philosophy seeks to dominate all forms of knowledge, seeks to be a term that is everywhere and nowhere. In this way it is a lot like the word "language" or "ideology". Everything becomes a "language" and thus every aspect of mind or communicative experience is filed under the category of language, thus we get "the language of music" and "the language of architecture", etc., etc. The same occurs with the term ideology.... Among some "thinkers", even some anti-philosophers, all thought becomes an example of ideology and thought-itself is not possible without "ideology". You can parade out as many dictionary definitions of philosophy that you like to prove that an "anti-philosophical" attitude is self-contradictory, but it doesn't negate the fact that the definitions themselves are self-contradictory, assuming that all thought is philosophical and that philosophy is both everything and nothing.
This is the way that many use the term "philosophy". Philosophy is not only some kind of "systematic thought" obtaining to wisdom, knowledge, and understanding of the world, but also something that we "have" implicitly, simply because we think at all. Thus it is impossible to be an anti-philosopher because by definition all systematic thought of any sort is philosophical, and if the thought is not systematic, then the implications of thinking, is itself philosophical. Thus the reasoning goes, "To think 'anti-philosophically' is an example of philosophical thinking." But this is like the Cretan who says all "Cretans are liars", the very fact of making the statement I am "anti-philosophical" is either paradox or contradiction. Well the former rather than the latter. Yet the possibility exists that it is neither. It is simply a double-bind statement created by the systematic gossip of philosophers themselves, those engaged in the intellectual circulation of gossip to the extent that they have imposed a dictionary definition that is totalistic and intellectually imperialistic. But let me suggest that like most double bind situations, this situation was produced by a category mistake or a problem of logical typing. It is possible to be "anti-thinking" in certain situations. If I am a baseball batter, I am not thinking at every moment about how to swing the bat. If my baseball coach tells me that you have to get "beyond thought" and "just swing" wjem you are in the batter's box, I know that he is saying that "conscious" thinking is harmful to my batting average in this situation. But to define his "anti-thinking" statement as also a "thought" and thus self-contradictory is a form of sophistry, the same kind of sophistry that practically all philosophers engage in at one time or another. They, the self-described lovers of wisdom, the philosophers, have propounded their definitions through intellectual gossip, so that you are a philosopher whether you know it or not and no matter what you do or think getting beyond philosophy is impossible.
But lets be real. A "Philosopher" is a professional category in our modern society. Propounding philosophy is what those rarefied "professionals" do. But before "philosophy" was a profession it was a denotation of a systematic orientation to life that was "positioned" outside of organized (western) religion. Philosophers were not so much anti-religious as un-religious. Philosophy had an historical beginning and it has historical limitations. It was born when literature began to separate itself from religion and it began to attenuate when science began to separate itself from both religion and philosophy. Philosophy as an historical practice has always shaded into literature and myth on one side and science and mathematics on the other. Philosophy is not "strictly" bounded or limited by these other experiential practices and ways of producing understanding, but philosophical practitioners have always ignored the fact that they are simply continuers of these other projects. At its best philosophical practice provides abstraction and meta-comment on literature and science. At its worse philosophical practioners pimp off of literature and science while at the same time pretending to dominate both of those practices and proclaiming the originality of their discipline. An anti-philosophical point-of-view is simply a point-of-view that recognizes the historical limitations of philosophy and hopes for the further attenuation of philosophy in the future. But let me emphasize, that It is only the arrogant imperialism of some philosophers that necessitate anti-philosophy. To the extent that any other field -- religion or even physics or biology -- exhibits this sort of arrogant yearning to dominate other fields, then they too should be called to task.
Then what is left of philosophy? Mostly gossip. The true subject of philosophy has always been gossip in one form or another. It is gossip taken to a higher level -- the gossip of complex society commenting on the fact that face-to-face society, where gossip truly matters, is no longer possible. Philosophy is essentially meta-gossip, on the form and function of complex structures of growing human society.
There is no "contradiction" in being an anti-philosophy philosopher: if you believe that philosophy is parasitic meta-gossip, then your function is to reveal how philosophy works as a form of meta-gossip. Yet we assume that this practice of critique of philosophy that I am calling "anti-philosophy", is also a form of meta-gossip. The snake eats its tail.
Jerry Monaco
New York City
27 May 2007
(reedited 28 May 2007)
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Wittgenstein's Fright at Cultish Mathematicians:
An Incident in the History of the Philosophy of Mathematics or
What did Wittgenstein mean by Cantor's theories being a "cancerous growth" on mathematics?
A question asked;
When commenting on Cantor's ideas of uncountable sets and different levels of infinity, Wittgenstein called it a "cancerous growth on the body of mathematics". Cantor's (and others such as Dedekind) ideas have since provided the basis for much of the development of mathematics thereafter. What could have led Wittgenstein to make such a remark? What did he mean by it?
The hard part in answering this question is trying to explain the pure mathematics in everyday language so that a common reader will know what was at issue between Wittgenstein and those, such as Bertrand Russell, who thought that Cantor, Weirstrass and Dedekind provided a solution to metaphysical problems of the foundations of mathematics. If I get the basic statement of the background wrong please correct me. Still I think it is necessary to state the problem in everyday language because one must have a clear view of how much Cantor's discovery went against common sense. If the reader can understand this she will also be able to understand why so many philosophers and mathematicians thought that Cantor's theories of the infinite did not say anything that made sense. But more important for this note the reader will be able to see how Wittgenstein's view differed from the other condemnations of Cantor's line of thinking.
Cantor considered the problems of infinite sets. The common logic since Aristotle had been that the infinite was not actual but only potential.. But against common logic Cantor showed that there are sets larger than the infinite sets of natural numbers. He showed specifically that no infinite set could have as many elements as all possible subsets of that infinite set. This led to a revolution in how we conceived of set theory and of the infinite. The infinite could no longer be considered an anomaly. In other words their were different "kinds" of infinite sets. (Oh mathematicians forgive my simplicity!) What Cantor was able to show was that infinity was "actual" not just an unimaginably large number, not just "potential". He showed there are infintie sets that are larger than other sets that are also infinite. The best example is the set of all natural numbers versus the set of all irrational numbers. Both sets are infinite sets. But the set of all irrational numbers is "larger," or contains more members, than the set of all natural numbers. (Forgive me. I have merely stated the same notion in a number of ways while avoiding technical language. I did this in the hopes that non-mathematical readers will get my drift. Possibly I'm just furthering your confusion. Also for those of you who may belong to the school of mathematical realists forgive me for stating all of this as if it were just another kind of reality.)
When a mathematician comes to such conclusions philosophers sneeze. Why? Because to decide that the infinite set of irrational numbers is larger than the infinite set of natural numbers is to indirectly decide questions posed at the origins of Aristotle's metaphysics, i.e. the metaphysical status of the infinite. Philosophers of Mathematics recognized this if no one else did. Russell accepted the mathematics but spent much time trying to ground the insight into his own formal logic.
Wittgenstein rejected Cantor but he was not the only one.. Ponicare said, "There is no actual infinity; Cantorians forgot that and fell into contradictions. Later generations will regard Mengenlehre as a disease from which one has recovered " Brouwer said that: Cantor's theory was "a pathological incident in the history of mathematics from which future generations will be horrified." Another quote in my notebook is from Wittgenstein. "Cantor's argument has no deductive content at all.' Yet I would distinguish this reaction from Ponicare and Brouwer. I take Wittgenstein to mean that he would not argue with the mathematics but would just proclaim it all irrelevant to any philosophical or logical view.
I think most of these reactions were simply a matter of an inability to reconceive ancient notions. But many mathematicians seized on Cantor's theory. Some philosophers were horrified. It didn't seem gentlemanly that these theories were being used as solutions to ancient problems philosophy. Also, the mathematicians who ceased on Cantor's theories treated them as if they were the second coming of the Pythagorean theorem or a new discovery of Pi. Cantor's theories made much of what was said previously in the philosophy of mathematics hard to justify. There were philosophers who were simply exasperated. Why don't mathematicians stop this nonsense, leave us alone, and get back to their equations? What I wonder is, if there were many mathematicians with a philosophical bent who were discouraged by the narrowness of the philosophers. This is an historical determination that is hard to make. No one can ever know what was lost by way of dogmatism.
Wittgenstein was one of those who looked at all of this as an attempt to establish a New Pythagorean Cult around pure mathematics and formal logic. But even though I reject his view I think it should be fully understood. At base Wittgenstein had interesting reasons, that I think can't be easily countered, unless one is a thorrough going rationalist or believes in a pragmatic realism that states in the long run we just work and see what works. (I am somewhere within those choices.)
Wittgenstein's view of mathematics was unique and I doubt one could find more than two people who would have agreed with him in 1932. But I don't think he cared much about who agreed with him, except for Turing. When he was giving a course on these subjects it seems that the only person he cared to 'make see' his point of view was Turing, who would argue with W all the way. Wittgenstein thought that "belief" in mathematics was a kind of religion among intellectuals. He would throw out what must have seemed like Delphic statements at the time such as:
"There is no religious denomination in which the misuse of metaphysical expressions has been responsible for so much sin as it has in mathematics."
"I shall try again and again to show that what is called a mathematical discovery had much better be called a mathematical invention."
The quote about "cancerous growth" is not referring directly to Cantor but rather to Russell's discussion of Cantor, Weirstrass and Dedekind.. Russell believed that pure mathematics had laid the foundations which could ground mathematics in formal logic. For Wittgenstein, these mathematicians' solutions to problems of the infinitesimal, the infinite and continuity and Russell's acceptance of these solutions as great achievements of mathematical logic had "deformed the thinking of mathematicians and philosophers." But Wittgenstein's position was not the same as other philosophers and mathematicians who criticized Cantor, et. al. He did not question the mathematics of the solutions or criticize their premises, he questioned whether these solutions were solutions to mathematical problems at all. More precisely he re-categorized the solutions to another context outside of mathematics and tried to demonstrate that the new context where these solutions must be discussed could be either accepted or rejected without effecting mathematics or logic at all.
Wittgenstein's reference to the 'cancerous growth' on mathematics encapsulates two related notions: In his view mathematicians had grafted onto mathematics the following: (1) the idea that mathematics somehow gave answers to what Wittgenstein believed were metaphysical questions and (2) the idea that when doing certain kinds of 'pure mathematics' what you were doing had some connection to that other kind of game called 'formal logic.'
It was these metaphysical 'answers' and the development of a formal logic that were the 'cancerous growth'. Cantor (and the way others developed Cantor) was just an example of this 'cancerous growth.' To the extent that I understand the issues here I think that Wittgenstein was being dogmatic. To the extent that I understand W'ittgenstein's concern I think he was trying to get the best mathematicians (mainly Turing, who he much admired) to see how both mathematics and formal logic had no real 'foundation' but could be restated in ways that were not 'elegant'. These 'non-elegant' restatements would be equally 'true' in that they would come to the same conclusion without flaws but would seem absurd. I think Wittgenstein was saying that sometimes the elegance of the solution tricks us into accepting it as fundamental or correct.
If I remember, correctly some of what Wittgenstein wrote in his notebooks on these subjects was recently published (4 years ago?). It seems to me that much of Wittgenstein's rhetoric seems to come from the fact that he simply could not get Turing to see that his (Wittgenstein's) picture of mathematics was one possible view of the cathedral. He just thought that all mathematicians were misled on the "reality" of Cantor's proofs and then compounded it all by developing false notions about proclaiming that here - at last -- was the foundation of mathematics.
Of course I may be too hard on Wittgenstein here. There was something in his whole notion about how the "game" of mathematics should be played in order to make sense in the world that also led him to reject Godel's theorem. Who knows maybe in the end we will find that the way Wittgenstein viewed the "game" of mathematics was a sort of anti-foundational foundationalism. I trust I am being appropriately obscure!
Again these are very complicated questions and unfortunately unlike during the 80 years between 1860 and 1940 we don't seem to have great mathematicians who are interesting philosophers and great philosophers who are good mathematicians. The other possibility is that I don't know what I am talking about. It has been a long time since I studied these topics, a long time since those courses where very smart and inarticulate professors tried to explain to me (a very dumb but articulate student) the elegance of pure math. At the time I agreed with Wittgenstein on at least one point. The elegance seemed purely imaginary.
Jerry Monaco
New York City
9 March 2006 (originally written - 5 Feb 2005)
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The Strange Persistence of the "Mind/Body Problem" and the "Folk Psychology" of the Philosophers as an Example of the Social Networks of Gossip:
In one of these posts I made the mistake of ironically using the term 'folk psychology' to describe the persistence of the 'mind-body' problem among philosophers. The absurdity of that persistence I take as a given. What is taken as the "mind-body" problem – i.e. the inability to account for the 'qualia' of experience on a pre-determined physicalist basis or the impossibility of giving a physicalist account of "what it is like to be a bat," for example – is the same problem that is encountered in all areas of scientific inquiry, including the hard physical sciences.
Two quotes I am fond of will illustrate this thesis.
The question of what kind of a world [quantum mechanics] describes, however, is controversial; there is very little agreement, among physicists and among philosophers, about what the world is like according to quantum mechanics. Minimally interpreted, the theory describes a set of facts about the way the microscopic world impinges on the macroscopic one, how it affects our measuring instruments, described in everyday language or the language of classical mechanics. Disagreement centers on the question of what a microscopic world, which affects our apparatuses in the prescribed manner, is, or even could be, like intrinsically; or how those apparatuses could themselves be built out of microscopic parts of the sort the theory describes. See http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm/
"It is not to be supposed, in any case that 'perceiving' an object involves knowing what it is like. That is quite another matter. We shall see later that certain inferences, of a highly abstract character, can be drawn for our perceptions to the objects perceived; but these inferences are at once difficult and not quite certain. The idea that perception, in itself, reveals the character of objects, is a fond delusion, and one, moreover, which it is very necessary to overcome if our philosophy is to be anything more than a pleasant fairy-tale."
Bertrand Russell An Outline of Philosophy .
The first quote is from a standard account of the human problems encountered by common understanding when trying to explain the implications of quantum mechanics. The second quote is from Bertrand Russell's lead up to his philosophy of knowledge. These quotes should be taken together, but with the following addenda – perception-itself is also part of that intrinsic physical world that is intrinsically unknown – except that we do know what it is like to experience our own perception. On the other hand a scientific theory, even one that is primarily mathematical, is simply a "non-common sense" way of perceiving the world, or the relations of the world that we take for "objects." Further, all of these perceptions of the world can be conceived of as "appearances," but not as " mere appearances," i.e. it is not as if the appearance itself was somehow unreal or not a part of the world that we investigate, when we investigate the nature of what is real.
Galen Strawson put this best, in describing some ideas that he partially derived from Russell:
In having Experience in the way we do, we are directly acquainted with certain features of the ultimate nature of reality, as Russell and others have remarked – whether or not we just put what we known into words in any theoretically tractable way. And this is so whatever it is best to say about any non-Experiential ( e.g. dispositional) aspects of the mental that there may be. We may certainly hope to develop our understanding of the nature of the Experiential, but we can do this only by adding to what we already know of it by direct acquaintance.
…
[H]ow things appear or seem is how they really are, the reality that is at present in question just is the appearing of seeming. In the case of any experiential episode E, there may be something X of which it is true to say that in undergoing E, we only have access to an appearance of X, and not to how X is in itself. But serious materialists must hold that E itself, the event of being-appeared-to, with all the qualitative character that it has, is itself part of physical reality. They cannot say that it too is just an appearance, and not part of how things are, on the pain of infinite regress. They must grant that it is itself as reality, and a reality with which we must, in plausibility, be allowed to have some sort of direct acquaintance. As Russell says, we must 'treat "seeming" with respect". Real Materialism by Galen Stawson in Chomsky and His Critics, edited by Norbert Hornstein and Louis Anthony at p. 67, quoting B. Russell in An Outline of Philosophy , p. 101.
The basic mistake of those philosophers who persist in referring to the mind/body problem is an inability to break out of there own common sense notions of what science does and does not teach us. The same is true with the philosophers who refer to the problem of the "mental" or of "qualia." The problems they refer to are not unique to a naturalistic study of the world of the mental or of experience. It is rather an aspect of the limits of all theoretical study. These limits have been expressed in various ways since Newton's theoretical revolution in science. Empiricists, idealists and materialists alike have expressed them. What has not been recognized is the reason that they exist whenever we think the world through theoretical science. In effect, the special kind of thinking that is represented by a descriptive and explanatory theoretical model, a theory that is pragmatically testable, with tests that are repeatable, is very narrow in its representations of reality. In many ways these theories are simply other ways of "perceiving" the world. This means that the problems of perception and "seeming", the problems of making sure of reality, which we have in everyday life, do not disappear when we use a theoretical construct to refine our perceptions. The problems of appearance, of knowing what things are like, do not disappear in the physical sciences, as they don't disappear in the sciences that deal with the mental, they are only given sharp relief. They are made deeper.
I think it will be helpful here to quote the whole passage that Strawson refers to above. Russsell first points out that some of the problem that philosophers have is that they don't ask themselves 'what is meant by "seeming".'
If a dream or a table 'seems' to be one sort of thing, while it is 'really' another we shall have to admit that it really seems, and that what it seems to be has a reality of its own. Nay, more, we only arrive at what it 'really' is by an inference, valid or invalid, from what it seems to be. If we are wrong about the seeming, we must be doubly wrong about the reality, since the sole ground for asserting the table composed of electrons and protons is the table that we see, i.e. the 'seeming' table. We must therefore treat 'seeming' with some respect. Bertrand Russell An Outline of Philosophy , p. 101.
For years Noam Chomsky has pointed out that the mind/body problem is not only wrong it is simply not even comprehensible. This is not because we know so little about "minds" or "perception" or "experience" but just the opposite; what we don't know about is what the physical really is. A "body", in the way that the Cartesians stated the mind/body problem, is a concept that has been shown to be unsustainable, since Newton elucidated his theories. Every fifty years or so physics comes along with another refinement of what the 'physical' really is. It turns out that just possibly the physical is just as well conceived of as little bits of information. Strawson points out that Russell once remarked "that the reason that physics is mathematical is not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little." (Strawson, op.cit. p.61) (Note, if Engels insisted upon calling his materialism "dialectical" it is because he had some intuition of the truth of how little we know about the physical. In other words "dialectical materialism" as originally propounded was a primitive insight into our lack of knowledge. The idea of the physical was meant to be a provisional and unstable concept, a constantly moving target. The fact that Engels had this insight, even though he was a very bad scientist only means that he was trying to understand the crisis of materialism after Newton and Darwin. There is no reason to bow down to an idea of philosophy that was meant to make up for our lack of knowledge of the physical, when we now have much greater insight into the reason why such concept as "materialism" or the "physical" don't stay pinned to the mat.)
The confusion comes with most philosophers because they think we know through science what the physical and is, and the real problem is to try to explain the mental or the qualia of experience. The opposite is true in a really interesting way. We know our own minds and experiences intimately. We experience the qualia of experience and thus this seems to us to be what needs to be explained or accounted for. Mental experience "seems" so florescent and effervescent to us, so unsettled. Non-mental objects on the other hand "seem" so solid and relatively easy to define, mainly because we are programmed to handle them, touch them, taste and smell them. They seem stable and there is reality in the "seeming", but what our theoretical evaluations show us is that we know so little about the physical. We simply don't know what it is. The "seeming" of our experience is what we really know. To quote Russell again:
"The essence of matter appears to be this: We can distinguish series of events in space-time which have a certain kind of close resemblance to each other, such that common sense regards them as manifestations of one 'thing'. But when we look closely at the question, it turns out that what physics offers is something more abstract than this. Take, e.g. the continued existence of a certain electron. This means to say that events in a certain neighborhood will be such as can be calculated on the assumption that there is an electric charge of a certain standard magnitude, in the middle of that neighborhood; and that the neighborhoods of which this is true form a tube in space-time.
So long as we stick to the standpoint of pure physics there is a certain air of taking in each other's washing about the whole business. Events in empty space are only known in regards their abstract mathematical characteristics; matter is only an abstract mathematical characteristic of events in empty space. This seems rather a cold world. But as a matter of fact we know some things are a little more concrete. We know, e.g. what it feels like when we see things. 116 (Emphasis mine.)
Yes, this is exactly the way it should be described. What we know is what it "feels like": to perceive. We know the perception of "things" from the "inside" of our own experienced reality. Since we know this experienced-reality intimately, the illusion arises with most philosophers, -- i.e. the philosophers who set goals for how explanations must be given if we are to explain the qualia of experience in a naturalistic way, -- that it is somehow these experiences that must be explained intrinsically, and "reduced" to the "physical", if mental experience is to be explained at all. But it is precisely our knowledge of the physical that cannot be apprehended through anything but a mathematical abstract except by way of the seeming of experience. The problem of intrinsic knowledge of the physical is as great, if not greater, than the problem of qualia.
Once again Russell says it much better than I can.
It used to be thought 'mysterious' that purely physical phenomena should end in something mental. That was because people thought that they knew a lot about physical phenomena, and were sure they differed in quality from mental phenomena. We now realise that we know nothing of the intrinsic quality of physical phenomena except when they happen to be sensations, and that therefore there is no reason to be surprised that some are sensations, or to suppose that the others are totally unlike sensations. The gap between mind and matter has been filled in, partly by new views on mind, but much more by the realisation that physics tells us nothing as to the intrinsic character of matter. 117 (emphasis mine).
My supplement to this is that the optimistic connotation of this paragraph ("It used to be thought… We now realise … no reason to be surprised… the realisation that…") has been undercut by subsequent history. And this is what I find curious. What was true then in 1927 about what physics told us that we don't know about the physical is even truer now after almost eighty years of further discoveries of the strangeness of the physical. Yet philosophers persist in not hearing the news.
How to explain this?
Well philosophers seem to have an explanation of the way they think only they apply this explanation to others in an inside-out fashion. What I am saying is that they project and externalize their notions into a theory that they call "folk psychology" and then attribute the workings of the theory onto the common people. Ian Ravenscroft at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/folkpsych-theory/ explains one version of "folk psychology" in the following manner…
[F]olk psychology is a theory of mind implicit in our everyday talk about mental states. In the everyday traffic of our lives we make remarks linking sensory experiences to mental states; mental states to other mental states; and mental states to behavior. Thus we remark that the smell of freshly baked bread made Sally feel hungry; that Sally wanted to go on a diet because she thought that she was overweight; and that Sally went to the fridge because she desired a piece of chocolate cake. According to some philosophers, remarks such as these (or suitable generalisations of remarks such as these) function as a term-introducing theory which implicitly defines terms such as "believe", "want" and "desire".
Ravenscroft, then quotes David Lewis instructing us to do the following in order to build a model of a "folk psychology":
Collect all the platitudes … regarding the causal relations of mental states, sensory stimuli, and motor responses. … Add also all the platitudes to the effect that one mental state falls under another … Perhaps there are platitudes of other forms as well. Include only the platitudes which are common knowledge amongst us: everyone knows them, everyone knows that everyone else knows them, and so on. Lewis, D. (1972): "Psychophysical and Theoretical Identifications". Australasian Journal of Philosophy 50: 249-58.
My contention is that the only folk that such a model would be applicable to are members of the caste we call the intelligentsia, and that in particular such a model would be instructive only when constructed from the "platitudes which are common knowledge" among philosophers. In such a case, we would call the results of this model an "ideology". We know that the intellectual caste is more susceptible to ideology than most and we won't be surprised by what we see from the results of the collection of such platitudes.
The transmission of these platitudes we will call "gossip", because as should be clear all philosophy is basically transmitted through gossip and is often nothing more than gossip itself. When common people and "housewives" (sic) engage in gossip it is called by its true name. When intellectuals engage in gossip it is often called "philosophy."
In The Sociology of Philosophy: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change, Randall Collins states:
In the case of the ideas we are concerned with…, the ideas that matter historically, it is possible to demonstrate that the individuals who bring forward such ideas are located in typical social patterns: intellectual groups, networks, rivalries.
The history of philosophy is to a considerable extent the history of groups. Nothing abstract is meant here – nothing but groups of friends, discussion partners, close-knit circles that often have the characteristics of social movements.
Well how much such ideas "matter historically" is a matter of empirical demonstration. I do agree that these ideas are transmitted through "social networks" that "have the characteristics of social movements." But I do think that what really matters are actual social movements, like the one that ended slavery, or the movement that brought us the realization that women should be full and equal members of our society. What philosophers are engaged in is "gossip". This is not to devalue gossip. I believe that gossip is important to any culture, though when gossip becomes a mass media commodity it is greatly deformed. But I also think that we should call what most philosophers do when they transmit their ideas by its correct name, i.e. gossip.
Why insist on calling certain aspects of the transmission of philosophy a form of gossip? Isn't this abusive to philosophers? Yes, I am afraid that professionally trained philosophers will not even understand the basic point of my insistence that what they do is a form of gossip. I want to persist in a view that all human beings are philosophers and that philosophy must become a democratic and cooperative activity. Calling the transmission of philosophy a form of gossip illustrates the fact that doing philosophy is an activity of everyday life and it is not like science a technical specialty that needs long years of training. The same is true of literary criticism, cultural analysis, political analysis and participation, foreign policy, singing songs, telling stories, etc. Philosophy, as something 'technical' and separate from what the rest of us do is the product of a self-consciously anti-democratic movement, an aristocratic reaction to the threat of democratic decision making in Greek city-states. In other words, it was a semi-secular invention of a defensive intelligentsia. Such discussions that take place in philosophy and literary criticism, in the non-academic sense of these words, belongs to us all and can be understood by us all, or else they have failed in their main job, the shaping of open dialogue.
Now, as far as the conception of folk psychology is concerned, and its transmission through the hierarchical social network established through gossip, I think what it can be used for is explaining the persistence of the platitude called 'the mind/body problem.'
When I originally called the mind/body problem part of the 'folk psychology of philosophers' my correspondent did not understand the irony. He thought that both the mind/body problem and folk psychology were meant to be taken seriously as products of philosophy instead of as the transmission of gossip by other means, i.e. through the formation of an ideological world view appropriate to philosophers.
Let me say finally that folk psychology is a fine illustration of retail bullshit in its relation to gossip. The notion of folk psychology seems to me the academic homologue to the idea of the 'folk tale' among the nineteenth century philologists. It is also similar to the notion of 'folk music' among the Bohemians. Such notions arise when a social group that wishes to understand "the masses" posits a notion of a "primitive-authentic" and projects this authenticity upon others. The term "folk psychology" is a term of art which derives from the intellectual elitism of the academic (mis)conceptions of everybody else. The only people that the notions of 'folk psychology' actually describes are the philosophers who use it and who persist in such pre-Newtonian notions as 'the mind/body problem.' It is the equivalent of many other insular and parochial notions that are raised to pseudo-theory.
Intellectuals may exhibit a 'folk psychology'. Everybody else can make do with old fashion common sense – which is sometimes right and sometimes wrong. As Bertolt Brecht said, in a much different context, people have no desire to become folk.
Jerry Monaco
New York City
9 January 2006
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Jerry Monaco's Philosophy, Politics, Culture Weblog is
Shandean Postscripts to Politics, Philosophy, and Culture
http://www.livejournal.com/users/monacojerry/
His fiction, poetry, weblog is
Hopeful Monsters: Fiction, Poetry, Memories
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Notes, Quotes, Images - From some of my reading and browsing
http://www.livejournal.com/community/jerry_quotes/
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On Ideology: More Preliminary Remarks
There is no science of ideology.
Ideology is a very loose term meant to refer to the constraints on thinkable thoughts within institutions and society. Any ideology will place constraints on the questions that can/should be asked and properly answered, and rules of 'correct' or 'proper' ways of acting and speaking in any given institutional or societal context.
There can be no exact definition of a concept such as ideology. We should not expect to give an exact definition of ideology, as if we were attempting to define a theoretical concept such as "species" in evolutionary biology (itself not easy to define) or a concept such as "entropy." Theoretically developed sciences attempt to define basic concepts within the theory or model of the science with Freagean exactitude. This attempt is never completely successful - or if it were to succeed the science at hand, or that portion of the science, would be complete. Even in the most exact of sciences their is a certain looseness in the definitions of theoretical concepts. The looseness of any particular definition may not be revealed until practical scientific problems that implicate previous definitions show that there was something wrong or incomplete, in part or as a whole, in the theoretical model of the science undergoing change. Contra-Althusser, we can never approach such exact definitions of what we call ideology. If we ever do so we will find that we are no longer discussing 'ideology' but rather something like the computational values of syntactical transformations, or some other theory that has not yet been invented. (Just like in physics there is no longer a "problem of motion," in the Aristotelian sense, because physics has realized that the problem of motion is simply not a scientific problem. Perhaps it is a problem of the "limits of theoretical knowledge.")
It is necessary to begin a discussion of ideology by reflecting on how its study cannot be a science and on reflecting on how science itself works. I contend that in order to understand ideology we must be able to separate it from knowledge. I maintain that there is a border between what Althusser called "theoretical ideologies" (the dogmas and doctrines abstracted from such practical ideologies such as religion. mythology, economism, humanism, legalism, etc.) and theoretical knowledge (science) and even what I shall call non-theoretical knowledge. If there is no part of human endeavor that we can call "knowledge", then quite simply I will give up the fight to the defeatists among the post-moderns who believe that all organization of theoretical thought is simply another kind of ideology. Here, I stand on the same ground with a diverse group - John Dewey, Bertrand Russell, Louis Althusser, Stephen Jay Gould, E. O. Wilson, Noam Chomsky, a set of people who might not have a single other thing in common and certainly would not ever consider themselves as part of the same party - that one of the functions of the good "philosopher" and historian of science is to separate ideology from what we know, to draw a line between the ideological and the scientific, to understand that the development of theoretical knowledge is a practical work that is an aid to human liberation and ideology is an instrumental development of rule and cohesion.
The undefinable aspect of the notion of "ideology" is in fact one aspect of the underdetermination of "meaning" in language, or if you prefer "indeterminacy" in the "semantic field of values" of all concepts and words. I prefer the former to the latter because I think it approaches closer to what we know about the nonrational pragmatics of syntax in language use. Just to make clear we must accept the fact that in a natural language there are no exact definitions. Dictionaries assume "knowledge" of the definitions of words, they assume the connotations in their denotations.
From these reflections I am ready to state some theses about "ideology" and how it works. (Note these theses are not "proven" and cannot be proven in a scientific sense, but they remain to be "illustrated" and argued.)
1) Particular words have larger meanings (connotations, penumbras) and dictionaries assume these meanings they don't "give" them. "Doctrines" of ideology seek to limit the meaning of words and concepts to particularly denoted assumptions.
2) Unlike in a dictionary, the denoted assumptions of a doctrine of ideology, are not explicit, but implicit. Through repetition and context-limits the denoted assumption of an ideological concept are meant to be heard, as if the dogmatic denotation was the complete connotation of the concept.
3) A more general thesis: All ideological concepts (all ideology) is overdetermined - unlike what we call "meaning" in language, which is underdetermined.
The "trick" or task of ideology is to transform dogmatic speech of ideology. This is done by making the explicitly denoted definitions of the dogma into implicitly accepted notions, ideas, connotations. How this occurs is through repetition, indoctrination, the presentment of artificial double-binds, or seeming paradoxes, and the suppression of underlying assumptions. Thus a concept, word, or notion that is bound by the dogmatic definition of ideological production in time comes to assume the whole "meaning" of the word. The explicit denotational aspect of the concept, word or notion, takes on the aspect of implicit connotation. The funny thing about this is that in many cases, perhaps in most cases the effacing of the original implicit connotation with an explicit denotation that assumes the aspect of an implicit connotation is itself an implicit process.
But here the life of natural languages and the daily struggle of real people contribute to the instability of ideology and the process of dogmatic substitution. If a word or a concept receives a dogmatic defintion, and that dogmatic definition subsequently subsumes the connotation of the world, then it is always possible that, in the course of individual or class struggle, the definition will be "flipped" or another word will be "invented" to refer to what is beyond the limits of the dogmatic definition. (The above paragraph is a general statement and does not necessarily apply to the particular processes in specific institutions - say legal institutions. Further, I am talking about a process that in modern societies often fails, because all modern societies are diverse, not homogeneous, etc.)
Note: I want to make explicit an assumption underlying the above remarks: Language itself is not socially constructed. What the theory of universal grammar calls the "language faculty" is a biological construct. We don't know anything that can reach the level of theoretical knowledge about "meaning" or "texts" and other aspects of language use. Thus my underlying assumption is the distinction drawn by many linguists and philosophers of language between language and language-use.
When we discuss ideology we must distinguish several variations and side-issues. In other words we must discuss distinctions.
A) Matters of ideology as a whole: i.e. how ideology is produced and works in and through social institutions and how certain "world views" are formed, that become 'second nature.'
B) Matters of conscious doctrines and dogmas that are abstracted from ideology.
C) Matters of religion and the institutions of religion.
D) Matters of institutions in general (legal, educational, business, etc.) and the particular "world-views" produced by those institutions.
E) Matters of mythology, story-telling, narrative that may be foundational, or may guide, or may derive from ideological thought.
F) Matters of illusion and delusion.
G) Matters of pattern-making and perception, which can only be thought of as biologically based, but maybe "culturally" shaped.
(Note as to (E): Great and strong myths and narratives always transcend ideology because they provide a larger experience of the world that cannot be simply contained by limited doctrines. This is to a certain extent as true in certain narratives contained in religious thinking as it is of the great "individual" and personal works of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Shelley, Tolstoy, Kafka, Joyce, Nabokov, Borges. To a smaller extent this observation can also apply to such "literary philosophers" as Plato, Nietzsche, Freud. The ability of all kinds of art to transcend all ideological categories, while to a certain extent remaining within them, is simply one of those human faculties that we know about but cannot theoretically explain.)
These matters may be interconnected but they are not the same.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
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Jerry Monaco's Philosophy, Politics, Culture Weblog is
Shandean Postscripts to Politics, Philosophy, and Culture
http://www.livejournal.com/users/monacojerry/
His fiction, poetry, weblog is
Hopeful Monsters: Fiction, Poetry, Memories
http://www.livejournal.com/users/jerrymonaco/
Notes, Quotes, Images - From some of my reading and browsing
http://www.livejournal.com/community/jerry_quotes/
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Wittgenstein & Hemingway, #2 Limitationism, Philosophy, and Illustration through Fiction
(Part One can be found at Hemingway & Wittgenstein #1 The Wound and the Bow, Absence and Insight)
The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus famously ends
6.54 My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them -- as steps -- to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)
He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.
'7 What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.'
In the preface of the Tractatus, written long after the main text was finished, Wittgenstein emphasizes the importance of his ending to his whole work.
The whole sense of the book might be summed up in the following words: what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.
Thus the aim of the books is to draw a limit to thought, or rather -- not to thought, but the expression of thoughts: for in order to be able to draw a limit to thought, who should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought).
It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be drawn and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be non-sense.
Thus in the Tractatus there is a sense, in which the work begins and ends at the same place.
There is every indication that Wittgenstein himself gave a 'mystical' interpretation to these words, or, to put it in another way, what was beyond the limit of expression of thought could be 'felt' or 'experienced' but not expressed in language. Wittgenstein believed that there might be something 'beyond' the limit of thought, but he also thought that he could show that in order to define the limit of anything, (i.e. what is beyond the bounds of any system of expression) you would have to get to the 'other side' of those boundaries, which is impossible when the boundaries themselves cannot be thought from within the system of expression.
This mode of argument is actually easily understood by reference to a popular book often given to young math students. I am thinking of Edwin Abbott's Flatland: A Romance in Many Dimensions (Read Flatland at this link). In that wonderful geometrical satire the narrator is a two-dimensional square who is unable to think or understand the third dimension. In fact Square is unable to even perceive three-dimensional objects. Three-dimensional objects are like gods to him. Square is able to have un-expressible experiences of what is beyond his normal two dimensions but those experiences can not be translated into thoughts expressible in either formal or the everday language of the Flatlanders. Of particular interest here is Chapter 16, How the Stranger Vainly Endeavoured To Reveal to Me in Words the Mysteries of Spaceland. In this chapter a Sphere 'enters' Flatland and tries to explain the world of Spaceland to the two-dimensional Square. The notions that the Sphere tries to explain to the Square are of course incomprehensible to the Square. But in the very next chapter the Square is able to experience Spaceland, without comprehending it, or being able to explain it adequately to himself or as it turns out to his fellow citizens of Flatland. One of the problems that all of Wittgenstein's philosophy is trying to put into rigorous form are the same notions that Edwin Abbott is trying to illustrate through narrative in Flatland. (The difference between illustration and a more or less formal system of expression is important, thus I wish the reader to keep in mind the fact that I am using Flatland as illustration and not as formal expression of the limitationist claim.)
Given that human thought is limited, and given that we can only think from within these limits, there is no way that we can think both sides of the limit. Readers of this web log will recognize this as another expression of the limitationist thesis of human knowledge. But they may also recognize another theme that has been a constant in my journals, the theme of the paradox of boundaries that haunt all aspects of human thought, for example as expressed in my little note The Edge of the Universe: Lucretius, Einstein, the Limits of Knowledge. (Also see Evolution, 'Self-Transcendent Belief Systems' where I give Chomsky's definition of the limitationist claim. It is important to note how often these paradoxes repeat in the history of human thought. A partial list would include variations on 'the Liars Paradox,' paradoxes of human choice, and of notions of intentionality and reference. The more important examples I think come fromt the history of mathematics and science. Russell's Paradox in set theory, the notion of limit in calculus, the use of the idea of 'absolute space' in physics, etc.) Part of my proposition is that much of what we call 'modernism' and 'post-modernism' in philosophy, literature, and criticism is simply a more or less self-conscious probing of these paradoxes of boundaries and limits. It is also my thesis that these paradoxes are not in fact 'unexplainable' it is just that from within whatever system we meet up with these paradoxes they can't be explained with the tools of that system. Sometimes there is simply a limit that we reach which is the boundary of expressible thought of the system. The problem comes when that system is human thought itself.
Human thought is expressible in many forms, natural language, formal systems of logic and mathematics, or various kinds of artistic expression. The boundaries of the expression of thought in language and mathematics are simply the limits of those systems. Knowledge is one form of experience but it is not the only form of experience. (Not all experience is knowledge but all knowledge is a form of experience.) To put it simplistically, knowledge is a limited form of experience, which is distinguishable from other forms of experience because it is expressible in a more or less formal system. In this case I am using the term 'formal system' very loosely. When compared with most expressions in the world of mammals (for instance cries of alarm like the signals for 'snake' and 'hawk' among some primates) human natural language is a formal system. But a natural language is not as rigorous as mathematics or Fregean systems of formal language or attempts at rigor within physics, which to some extent, tend toward the definitional quality of a formal language. But something more complicated happens in literature and art because the boundaries of the work of art must be evaluated in several ways. For my purposes in these philosophical reflections the two most important ways to evaluate a work of art are the 'frame' of the work given to it by the artist and the 'experience' of the work by the viewer or reader.
The great narrators of the modernist tradition such as Hemingway in his short stories and Nabokov in his great works, Lolita, Pale Fire, and, Ada, or Ardor : A Family Chronicle often reveal the frame while hiding the frame's intricacies. There is the obvious frame of the novel itself but there is also the frame that is delimited from within. In effect what we see as readers of these works is the two-dimensional frame but not the three and four-dimensional frame that the author constructed in the story. The frame becomes an absence within the work that the good reader can only experience, yet is unable to define by remaining within the limits of the whole of the work of art. Writers such as Nabokov deliberately constructed their novels so that the reader could experience the internal frame without seeing it, unless the novel was reassembled from without after many re-readings. In many ways Nabokov's strictly philosophical reasons for doing this was to put both the characters he invented and the reader that pays good attention to the novel in the same position that Wittgenstein believed that human beings were in relation to human thought. (For a good attempt at an explanation of how Nabokov's fiction work I would suggest Nabokov's Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery by Brian Boyd. I only wish that Mr. Boyd would write a short essay on what Nabokov was trying to do in Pale Fire, In the end, we don't know how works of art 'work' as experience, how they give us a new sense of 'experience,' but what I take as the most important aspect of art is this experiential side to the work, that the work gives us that is beyond what can be formally expressed.
What Wittgenstein was trying to do through out his philosophical career is show the limits of language or, what in his later philosophy he called more broadly, language-games. He concentrated on the thinkable aspects of 'propositions about the world' (in the early philosophy) and language-games (in the late philosophy). He was not trying to show the limits of what could be 'experienced' as a whole. Thinking is only a small portion of 'experience as a whole.' What he was trying to show was the limits of what was 'thinkable' from within a system,. He was not trying to show the limits of what could be experienced as a human being. In respect to what may be called Wittgenstein's 'art' he in fact trying to illustrate something very similar to what both Nabokov and Hemingway were trying to illustrate -- he was illustrating what could not be expressed.
Wittgenstein himself tried to show this to his first readers: I quote his letter to a friend and potential publisher of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus written in November 1919, not long after Wittgenstein's return from a prisoner of war camp.
"In reality... the point of the book is ethical. I once wanted to give a few words in the forward which now actually are not in it, which, however, I'll write to you now because they might be a key for you: I wanted to write that my work consists of two parts: of the one which is here, and of everything which I have not written. And precisely this second part is the important one. For the Ethical is delimited from within, as it were, by my book; and I'm convinced that, strictly speaking, it can ONLY be delimited in this way. In brief, I think: All of that which many are bubbling today, I have defined in my book by remaining silent about it." (Quoted in Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius by Ray Monk p. 178.
From what I said above, the reader may guess that I believe that the best illustration of Wittgenstein's way of 'delimiting from within' among modern novelists can be found in the works of Vladimir Nabokov. But Nabokov is as intricate and as complicated as Wittgenstein himself, more so in fact. Thus by way of illustration I prefer to use first Edwin Abbott but more prominently Ernest Hemingway. I also think that there is something psychologically similar between the nortoriously introverted Wittgenstein and the raucously extroverted Hemingway. The psychological similarity between the two, I hope, will point the way toward how we can think historically about the ideas and the wounds that provided the historical experience which made the ideas accessible as a certain tendency of thought among writers, both novelists and philosophers.
For now I would like to leave the reader with two quotes from Hemingway and a final note on 'the dangers of illustration.'
In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway outlined his "theory of omission"." He states:
"If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of the iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. The writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing."
In A Farewell to Arms Hemingway writes of his character's relation to language and specifically of his relation to certain hollow words.
I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene besides the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates. Gino was a patriot, so he said things that separated us sometimes, but he was also a fine boy and I understood his being a patriot. He was born one. He left with Peduzzi in the car to go back to Gorizia.
Finally, by using Hemingway, Nabokov and Abbott in reference to Wittgenstein, I am simply trying to illustrate something about the 'limitationist' thesis of human knowledge, that I will try to define more rigorously later. But when ever illustrating something or drawing a picture of something we both produce a deficit and a surplus. Bertrand Russell, when writing about the structure of the atom and the theories upon which atomic structure is based said something that we should keep in mind.
"The theory of atomic structure... like everything else in theoretical physics, is capable of expression in mathematical formulae; but like many things in theoretical physics it is also capable of expression in the form of an imaginative picture.... When we consider the nature of the evidence upon which the above theory of the atom is based, we can see that the attempt to make a picture of what goes on has led us to be far more concrete than we have any right to be. If we want to assert only what we have good reason to believe, we shall have to abandon the attempt to be concrete..." (In Bertrand Russell, An Outline of Philosophy p. 83.)
What we run up against, once again, when we try to provide an illustration for something, which can only be said with utmost accuracy more formally, is the difference between knowledge as a limited experience, and all that we are able to experience beyond our more or less formal systems of knowledge. It is the same limitation that Abbott's Square runs up against in the difference between the attempt to understand, in formal language, the difference between the two dimensional world and the three dimensional world. The Square in Flatland has three possibilities: He can experience the three dimensional world or describe it accurately in the formal language of his two-dimensional concepts. The other alternative is to try to draw a picture or make an illustration of the three dimensional world with his two dimensional tools. This will end up being an attempt to bring his experience of three dimensional Spaceworld into the two dimensional world of Flatland. But in making this attempt the illustration will loose something in preciseness and accuracy and also loose something of the Square's original experience of Spaceworld. On the other hand the mere attempt to make an illustration will also gain something for the world of Flatland. The 'stronger' the artisitic attempt the more the more the potential surplus of experiential gain will be through the use of the imagination. The Square's attempt to make an illustration will itself become an experience with its own rules and imaginative possibilities, an experience that was not there in the first place, an experience not only for the Square, but also for others in Flatland.
Jerry Monaco
New York
23 March 2005
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Mar. 23rd, 2005 @ 11:42 am
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| » Hemingway & Wittgenstein #1 The Wound and the Bow, Absence and Insight |
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Hemingway & Wittgenstein #1 The Wound and the Bow, Absence and Insight
It is possible to use Wittgenstein to understand Hemingway. It is also possible to use a close reading of Hemingway's short stories to reveal a way to read Wittgenstein.
I am not making a claim that there is a 'theory' of Hemingway's short stories and that theory is revealed by Wittgenstein's early notions in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus of how the world is delimited. Nor am I am making a claim that using Hemingway's fiction provides special insight into Wittgenstein's early thought or his later thought on language games. But I do think that there is a confluence between the two that has not been noticed. There is a certain symetry in how they conceived their disparate work. That symetry is probably psychological and trivial in a personal sense but is less trivial when considered historically, as part of the philosophical and literary consequences of World War I and the modernist revolution. The symetry may also be able to give students a better view of both Wittgenstein and Hemingway. I claim that my rather odd reading of both of them together can show how they used language and narrative to reveal certain boundaries of human knowledge and language. Specifically, both tried to show what could not be told within the frame of reference of a story or the frame of reference of a 'language game' or in the early Wittgenstein the frame of reference of propositions about the world. Both came to understand their very different kinds of practices (story telling and philosophizing) as developing techniques to show the places of omission and absence in narrative or in our understanding of the world of philosophy.
I have several main points. First, my intention is to say something about the psychological reasons why these two different personalities developed their techniques in the context of each practice. I will do so by pointing out how the historical wounds, both psychological and in the world-view of the writers led to deep insight into certain absences in how we view the 'world'. I would like to do this using the insights of Edmund Wilson's The Wound and the Bow. Both Hemingway and Wittgenstein were engaging in a psychological project of reparation of a missing world. The strange psychological confluence between the two is a merely tenth order concern for both Wittgenstein's philosophical conclusions and Hemingway's aesthetic accomplishment, but I think that it may help the reader of both to understand how historical and psychological contingencies give us insight into the world we wish to write about.
Second, I would like to show how the experience of narrative can give us insight into philosophical concerns that may at first seem remote from the specific narrative, and especially how that experience can give us insight into all the parts of the world that are currently beyond our theories or beyond the possibility of human knowledge.
Third, I want to show that it is impossible to ignore the experiential side of any philosophy, whether that experiential side is in the actual writing or saying of the philosophical work or practice, or whether that experiential side is in the world-view that we derive from the philosophical work or practice. (I would like to make a narrow exception for formal logic but only to the extent that the person following a formal system does not derive a world-view from the system. To an uncertain extent the person using a formal system does derive a world-view from that system, but it is to a smaller extent than most post-structuralists believe. I think formal systems are mostly delimiting. They show us where we have run into contradiction and paradox. When the map of the limited formal system is made into a map of the whole world beyond the formal system then the experiential side of the formal system becomes relevant to the derivation of a world-view. I am using the term 'world-view' very loosely at the moment, similar to the way Engels used it at the end of the 19th century to distinguish ideological doctrine from something more amorphous.)
Fourth, in analyzing these two writers, who do not have much in common on the surface, I would like to illustrate certain notions about the 'limitationist' thesis of human knowledge -- i.e. the thesis that since we are biological systems there must be preset biological limits to what we can know.
Jerry Monaco
20 March 2005
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Mar. 20th, 2005 @ 06:12 pm
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| » Academic Reproduction of Hierarchy: Continental & Anglo-American Philosophy; Politics of Division |
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A question asked at real_philosophy by fortunate_son
There was a question posed about analytical and continental philosophy and someone asked "does it have to be either or?". I found this funny because in the philosophy club that we have at my school, we were discussing the similarities and differences as well as pros and cons between the two. However, I didn't think about the either/or question until now. So before I go into what I think, what does everyone else think? Can you have your cake and eat it too? Can you do both continental and analytic philosophy
I would like to point you to two specific books. The first is by Gregory McCulloch who wrote a book explaining Sartre's early phenomenological philosophy in terms of analytic philosophy. It is a book that throws light on the notions of phenomenology and the notions of analytic philosophy, showing how they can 'understand' each other and how they can each compliment each other, perhaps showing the weaknesses in each 'world view.' The book is Using Sartre: An Analytical Introduction to Early Sartrean Themes by Gregory McCulloch and is well worth looking at as an answer to your question. The second book is by Arthur C. Danto and is called Nietzsche as Philosopher. Among other things, this book argues, that Nietzsche can be interpreted as an original analytic thinker in his attempts to understand 'meaning' and 'language'. Danto points out that many of Nietzsche's notion on language prefigure Wittgenstein and Austin. At some future point I intend to give detailed reviews of both these books.
I always thought that the division between 'continental' and analytic philosophy was a product of academic positioning and the reproduction of hierarchy within university 'departments.' I also think that insisting upon these divisions within philosophy is a little like insisting that you can't be a mathematician and a poet at the same time. Of course you can. The hard question in this case would be is there a poetics of mathematics? (We do know that there is a sort of mathematics of poetry as there is a sort of mathematics of music.) Of course nobody would insist that mathematicians and poets exist in the same academic department. But also nobody would insist that those who study romanitic poetry should reside in separate departments from those who study metaphysical poetry. Unfortunately this is the situation with many philosophy departments.
In many old U.S. philosophy departments if one wanted to do 'phenomenology' one could only do work in the humanities department or in a divinity school connected to the university. If one wanted to do analytic philosophy one could go to select schools whose philosophy departments mostly specialized in analytic philosophy or if one wanted to study pragmatism or if your philosophy derived from Kantian notions then you would have to select a certain university's philosophy department where those particular philosophies were studied. Most of this is simply a matter of the politics of academic hierarchy and has nothing to do with 'learning' or 'creativity' or contributing new ideas. The fact is that there are very few standards outside of science and mathematics with which to judge academic work. Thus the standards we use in areas such as literature and philosophy are either absurdly quantitative (the "publish or perish" standard, the "citation-count" standard) or completely a matter of personal relations, connections, or the circulation of good and bad 'gossip', especially such notions as 'fame,' 'celebration,' and 'renown.' Thus professors within academic departments must try to reproduce themselves and their ideas in order to make their way up the academic hierarchy. The ideal here is to create a graduate student who will promote and extend your own ideas giving you as much credit as possible. From the graduate student's point of view the ideal is to win over her advisor or other professors without becoming a clone of anyone of those professors. The tug of war in such cases tends to produce, within the humanities, certain well defined 'schools', 'departments', and world-views that look completely artificial to those of us outside the territorial fights that have produced these schools. Often those schools are 'defined' or recognized by such notions as 'style' of thought or collegiality that are purely 'cultural' and not at all philosophical. Of course these are all only general tendencies that are structured into the university system in much the same way that 'rate of profit' is structured into the corporate system. Each individual will have his or her own more or less alienated experience of these tendencies.
One may object that this answer to your question is going off onto a personal theme that is not what your question is about. I accept that. But my answer to your question is, "Yes, it would be very worth while and easy to combine many of the themes of 'analytical philosophy' and 'phenomenology' (just to name the main contenders in the 'continental' and 'Anglo-American' split)." The immediate question is then, why does the split exist in the first place and why was the split so obvious in the United States through most of the 1970's -1990's? The split was obvious in the fact that practically all 'continental philosophy' was done outside of philosophy departments through most of the 80's. This was harmful to philosophy in general because many themes of cross fertilization were missed. It was harmful to the literature departments in particular where continental philosophy found refuge because it led to a decline in the actual appreciation of good literature and the rise of impossible literary 'theories.' Yet, in spite of the intellectual harm the split continued for a long period of time. Why? A lot of the explanation has to do with history and the two events of European nation-state sponsored mass slaughter that we call World Wars One and Two. But I think the other explanation has to do with the politics of philosophical gossip and hierarchy that I mention here.
One may also object that my example of a mathematician who is also a poet is not an apt analogy. A rigorous analytic philosopher may think that the best analogy would be between an astrophysicist and an astrologer because these two fields are mutually exclusive. A good phenomenologist may think that a better analogy is between a physicist who only studies one small aspect of electro-magnetism all his life and a physicist who studies among other things cosmology and the origins and basis of the universe. I think that both analogies would be wrong and mine is the more correct one. The fact is that the phenomenologist is usually only writing about things that we can only speculate about and he is writing almost in the style of a novelist. To the extent that my representative phenomenologist plays fast and loose with history or ignores the latest discoveries in science that may refute his speculations then the phenomenologist is acting in the way of an astrologer, but other wise he may provide insight that is a bit more than intuitive. On the other hand it is simply untrue that 'anglo-american' philosophy in general and analytical philosophy in particular is very narrow and does not deal with everyday experience. What is the base in the mutual misperceptions between the Anglo-American philosophers and the continentals is actually a misconception of the range of philosophy. It has only been very recently that philosophy has separated from science on one hand and literature on the other. In fact philosophy must be the blend between the two and sometimes the dividing line between the two. But those philosophers who bend toward the natural sciences, mathematics and logic tend to be of one kind and school and those who bend toward literature tend to be of another kind and school. Personally what I care about is clear writing, the fire of ideas expressed creatively, and rational thinking that can account for the non-rational and sometimes even the irrational.
The idea of 'translating' continental philosophy into themes and ideas that at first sight do not seem compatible is a very good one. For example I have always thought that the notion of 'dialectics' in Hegel's "Science of Logic" is a groping idea for computational notions of 'recursiveness' and positive and negative feedback. A cautious approach of rewriting some of Hegel's ideas into terms familiar to cognitive science, would seem to me something that might be interesting. Something very similar might be done with Husserl. Also, another example, might be how Wittgenstein's notion of 'language games' is very similar to many notions derived from post-structuralism (though I find most pomo thinking an exercise in obscure and bad writing). Another example is Lewis' notions of 'counterfactuals' and how they dovetail with some continental contrasts between 'nomos' and 'narrative', even though the former is supposed to be a structural explanation of 'reality' and the latter is more a psychological explanation of how we see and develop the world. I am not saying that these ideas are the same but rather that they contribute to and help complete each other in ways that might be insightful if pursued with a bit of humility and without any notion that there can be a 'theory' that offers both description and explanation of phenomena in any deep sense as in the natural sciences.
To this end I think the line of thinking that your question suggests may produce fruitful results.
Jerry Monaco
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Mar. 17th, 2005 @ 09:03 am
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| » The Edge of the Universe: Lucretius, Einstein, the Limits of Knowledge |
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The Edge of the Universe: Lucretius, Einstein, the Limits of Knowledge:
by Jerry Monaco
A Reader Asks
suppose you were to travel to the end of the universe, the very edge
of it. Would you emerge from the other side?
Lucretius' Question
Lucretius famously posed the following thought experiment, If there is a boundary to the universe imagine tossing a spear at it. What would happen? (See Lucretius, De Rerum Natura.) Lucretius said that there were two possible answers to this question: (1) The spear would strike the edge of the universe as a spear would strike a wall and bounce back, or (2) The spear would go through the boundary of the universe and emerge into some kind of 'other side.' If the spear bounced back then one could conclude that the universe is bounded by a wall. A wall must exist in space. A wall that is in space implies that, whatever is beyond the surface of the wall is beyond what we have been calling the universe. Therefore the boundary of the universe is bounded by another 'space' that is 'beyond' the boundary. In other words there must be something beyond the surface of the wall and outside of the wall. On the other hand, if the spear went through the boundary of the universe then one could assume that this boundary is only illusory and that as far as we can tell the universe is infinite. Either way it would prove that there was something beyond what we call the universe and therefore 'space' could be thought of as infinite. I think there are significant ways in which your question can be interpreted as a repetition of Lucretius' thought experiment.
From Lucretius' point of view your question is a philosophical question and not simply a question that can be shown either empirically or theoretically. The basic question is about how we conceive of boundaries within a finite system of any kind and how we conceive of 'beyond' boundaries and 'infinity' from within a bounded system. Both Kant (Critique of Pure Reason) and Hegel (Science of Logic) pondered these questions in their obscure ways. Some say that they can derive 'answers' to these questions from Cantor and Godel, but if so those answers do not settle well with our everyday common sense. But neither do the answers of our current theories of the physical universe conform to common sense.
In this respect your question is also very similar to questions such as 'what was before the universe began?' and 'what will be after the universe ends?' and 'why is there a universe instead of nothing at all?'
There is a sense in which all of these questions are unanswerable. But I think more importantly all such questions point to the limits of our ways of understanding 'the world.' My basic belief is that such questions, taken seriously, do not say much about the limits or boundaries of the universe but rather about the limits and boundaries of human knowledge as determined by human evolution. These questions are potentially un-answerable for the same reason why a rat will never be able to understand a prime-number maze.
Sense and nonsense
To the extent that your question is answerable you would have to have an ideal all-knowing physicist say exactly what 'the universe' means. Unfortunately such a physicist does not exist. I hope that it will become clear that this is not merely a semantic question. It seems to me that 'universe' in some respects has become a natural-kind concept meaning 'everything there is.' Similarly, to the extent that 'space' cannot be defined by equations it is also a natural-kind concept meaning 'all that' everything exists 'within'. If we take 'the universe' to mean all 'reality' or all 'physical reality' then 'the universe' is un-definable and what is beyond it is inconceivable. If some interpretations of quantum mechanics and string theory are correct, then there are an infinite number of parallel 'universes.' The question now becomes, 'what universe are you talking about when you ask about the 'edge' of the universe?' The answer to this might simply be that 'there are universes all the way down and I want to know what is beyond "all that".' So then the question would be, 'Is there an edge to all of these 'universes' that we can go beyond? Let's, for the sake of argument, assume that this interpretation of string theory is true. Are all the universes taken together 'the universe-as-a-whole' or the 'world-as-a-whole'? Then the next question follows: Is only 'the universe' of our existence the universe as a whole and can we some how get beyond our 10 or more dimensions?. This way of framing the question shows that it is very similar to the thought experiment as framed by Lucretius. It is a question about the limits of the universe in the context of how we think of boundaries and infinity.
Again, I don't think that the problem is empirical but rather a problem about how we can or cannot conceive of 'beyond' and 'beyond the infinite.'
In my view this is what the analytical philosophers would call a 'nonsense question.' I think they are wrong, in doing so, for the following reasons. The answers to the question are conceivable if you define 'universe' as what I am calling the 'universe of our existence.' But if you define the universe as all 'potential' universes then there are no answers to the question. Let us suppose we define the universe in the second manner, then can we conclude that the question is a 'nonsense question' along the lines of the question 'Why is there something and not nothing'? No. Because even if the question is unanswerable I believe that the question points to something about the possible limits of human ways of understanding and human knowledge. Therefore, even in a form where the question is unanswerable by physics, the question still makes sense. You can conceive of the question as a question about time or a question about space or a question about beyond whatever is beyond all of that, it does not matter, these questions mainly makes sense as pointing to our limited conceptions of all of these 'realities'.
If I understand correctly, Einstein once gave an answer to this question within the limits of Relativity theory. He believed that if one could travel the whole universe, then at the edge of the universe, because of the curvature of space-time, you would simply follow the curvature of the universe, without noticing there is an 'edge' and 'eventually' come back to where you started. This of course assumes that you can travel for long enough and you could complete the whole circuit before the universe expands into icy death.
Einstein was saying that the universe for us, is simply a form of non-Euclidean geometry. Thus a 'straight' line drawn on a globe, with the surface of the globe assumed to be 'all dimensions of space-time', will simply return the straight line to its beginning. We are in the position of the straight line. From the point of view of the straight line, 'Where is the edge of the globe?' and 'What is beyond the globe?'. The answer is, from the 'point of view' of the 'straight' line there is no edge to the globe. According to Einstein, the position of the straight line in relation to the globe is analogous to our position in relation to the universe as a whole. Einstein made the point that even though this may be the 'non-Euclidean' answer to the question it is not satisfying to our Euclidean common-sense.
This final comment of Einstein's brings us once again back to Lucretius and his thought experiment. Lucretius' thought experiment is 'very' Euclidean in its assumptions. It shows that within our Euclidean common sense it is hard to imagine even the simplest common notions of Relativity Theory, much less the seemingly paradoxical worlds of quantum mechanics and string theory.
I will give you one more question, which is possible to answer, but still points by way of another direction of why the original question both makes sense but is impossible to conceive as having a definite answer. 'Where did the Big Bang take place given that there is some time-certain that one can say that the Big Bang took place anywhere?' The proper answer to this question is that the Big Bang took place 'here,' wherever you are in our 'universe'. It is impossible for us to imagine that there was no space or time in any sense in the first micro-seconds of the Big Bang but that is what the mathematics tells us and who are we to argue? The point here is that our 'everyday' notions of space are inadequate for comprehending even the best answers, which we already 'know' are correct. These are answers to some of the most basic questions, answers with definite conclusions, and answers although provided by science reach the edge of what we can comprehend outside of using the mathematics. When it comes to questions that both seem paradoxical and for which we have no mathematical analogue to apply we are somewhere in the realm of 'the beyond.'
In the above ways I disagree with the commentators who say that the limits to answering to these questions are merely those of 'language' and not those of the human mind. Framing, the question in one way makes it answerable to a small degree assuming that we gain the theoretical knowledge. But framing the question, as one of limits, boundaries, and 'a beyond of all boundaries and limits' will make the question unanswerable. Framing the question as part of any possible experiential universe, taking this to include our experiences through mathematics and physics makes the question possibly answerable through theoretical knowledge. But framing the question as one about all possible infinity of universes (even within the context of interpretations of string theory) frames the question in such a way as to make it mpossible to find the correct answer.
Jerry Monaco
New York
25 Feb. 2005
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Feb. 25th, 2005 @ 11:23 am
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| » Philosophy Without Gossip: A counter-factual on the disappearance of philosophy |
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Philosophy Without Gossip: A counter-factual Philosophy is Gossip #3
By Jerry Monaco
Let us imagine a different philosophical world.
The imagined world of anonymous philosophy
In my imagined world all philosophical works are anonymous. We know nothing of a particular philosophical worker's personal life. Every piece of writing, whether a book or a paper is not identified by authorship or by philosophical school. This would mean that there would be no indication whether the writer of paper P is the same or different as the writer of book B. All stylistic identification which may identify a writer of B as the same or as different from the writer of P would have to be stripped from the work -- perhaps by computer 'translation' or the secret censor. We will know not a thing about a philosopher's personal life. We will know nothing at all about philosophers only the written works. Further more in this imagined world identification with philosophical 'schools' or 'movements' will not be allowed except to the extent that a philosophical work identifies with a particular argument. To take this to an extreme a philosophical work would not be able to identify the particular historical and cultural context out of which it came. The author must assume the context but the reader will not be able to identify the actual 'location' of the assumptions. To the extent possible philosophical works will have to describe their assumptions through argument.
By necessity this world can only be a world of written philosophy. This will mean that the philosophical practice of oral argument that most human beings participate in will not count as philosophy. And in fact most philosophers today do 'value' the kind of philosophy they do in writing higher than oral communications, not to mention oral communications between 'non'-philosophers.
Now let us imagine two variations of this fictional world. In one of these worlds oral philosophy in any organized sense will not take place at all.
In the second variation oral philosophy will take place but without connection to written philosophy. This would mean that people taking part in any philosophical discussion would not be allowed to identify themselves as authors of book B or paper P.
I will further assume that in such a world or 'culture' there is free access to all philosophical works and in theory 'instant' communication between all who desire. This means that for all who care to read philosophical works there are no transaction costs in the reception of those works and the 'time costs' in 'reading' of those works are reduced to a minimum. Some limit must be established, so I will assume that every human being can read a maximum of the equivalent of 1000 pages per day from age 13 on-wards and this will take four hours. No minimum is set, so some human beings may read nothing at all if they so choose to ignore the luxury of philosophy. Also some selection by sorting must be achieved so our secret censor, the computer, will have selected lists of arguments that readers can choose from. But these lists are to a certain extent arbitrary so that a writer can not 'choose' his 'school' by writing towards the secret censor's list. Further more I assume that 'readers' rate their best reading experiences so that the best of philosophical writings filter to the top in one way or another. The ratings will be automatic and will depend on the 'best' argument.
I invite the reader to consider why most philosophy would disappear in such a world. It would disappear because most philosophers will no longer have anything to say or anyone to contend with. Most philosophical arguments are simply unrecognized stylized repetitions of past arguments. Nothing new is added. There is no progress in philosophy only disappearance of an argument or repetition. I also contend, that this is not true of science and that under the same conditions what we call science would not disappear. In fact given my conditions of no transaction and time costs in communications science would probably thrive.
I realize that such worlds are impossible and undesirable if they were possible.
Friends, Enemies, Gossip, and the Oscillation of Philosophical Arguments
My larger point is that most philosophy would not exist, in such a world. In effect very few things outside of a select area could actually be transmitted. Most philosophers would not find any reason to write.
Outside of the world of friendship and the assumed structure of 'the enemy', outside in depth social relations, and contemporary and historical gossip that transmits and transmutes all of what is called philosophy, there is very little reason for philosophical writing. The arguments of philosophy matter, but they only matter as set against each other in social and historical context. The problem with philosophical writing is that philosophy essentially says the same thing over and over again, or else it is banished from the field and then it sets itself to analyze the field from which it has been banished. Written philosophy is a continuous oscillation between one antinomy of an argument and another until the social or practical conditions that established those antinomies no longer exist. At which point such philosophical discussions around those old antinomies are (1) forgotten, or (2) looked upon condescendingly, (how could anyone ever believe that) or (3) transmuted into similar terms while the practical relations of denotation and connotation of the old terms are conveniently suppressed or (4) suffer diminution to the point that a field such as physics is no longer philosophy but instead we have a 'philosophy of physics.'
From this point of view, philosophy only exists by posing insoluble questions. Once those questions are solved philosophy as such disappears or moves on to other grounds.
It is my contention that those insoluble questions are valued and revalued, made 'alive', only through the philosophical practice of making 'friends,' 'enemies' and the transmission and production of friends enemies and philosophies. It is through what I wish to vulgarly call gossip that this transmission takes place. It is also my contention that the relations between friends and enemies and the transmission of gossip will often condition the very structure of arguments.
Postscript on the provocation of the 'gendered' term 'gossip'
I realize that in this historical view of philosophy I am using the 'dirty' word 'gossip' provocatively. For me the word 'gossip' is not a dirty word but simply one way people talk about themselves and others, talk about relationships. Sometimes gossip is good, sometimes it is bad. The word 'gossip' often has had a connotation that is 'feminine' in gender. My wish to incorporate it into philosophical fields that have had a connotation that are masculine in gender is a provocation. One further note. In most cases gossip is called 'gossip' when referring to communications about relationships between women. When similar communications between men refer to political or business friends or enemies then such communications are called 'news.'
Personal Postscript on my world-view
I do not have a feminist or pomo world view for treating philosophy as I do. My world view is historical, derivative of the enlightenment, and in the political tradition of left libertarian socialism and anarcho-syndicalism. What has influenced me most in my philosophical life is a combination of intellectual skepticism with the experience of meeting illiterate El Salvadoran peasants who were better thinkers than most people I met in universities.
Jerry Monaco
8 Feb. 2005
New York City
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Feb. 9th, 2005 @ 11:56 am
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| » Philosophy is Gossip Beneath the Rose #2 |
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Gossip that dares not speak its name: Gossip in the transmission and production of philosophy
by Jerry Monaco
My correspondent writes: '[G]ood philosophers are machine-like in their ability to arrange and illustrate arguments in a thorough, logical progression.'
We, who read philosophers, are talking to the dead in order to discredit their ideas. It is as if we need to kill the dead all over again so that our own ideas can live and shine new. But this is a useless task. The dead will stay dead. They can only die once. What the living philosopher desires to kill is the living ideas of the dead philosopher. A bit macabre, yes? I believe in the Oedipus Complex to the extent that I believe in the 'Lucifer Complex' (via Milton) or the 'Prometheus Complex' (via Shelley) or the 'Galileo Complex' (via Brecht), but one can't help but see that there is something Oedipal in all of this.
How can I express my shock and amusement at such notions about the 'machine-like' logical progression of philosophical arguments? This reminds me of the Olympian way in which judges talk of the law. The law is inviolable. And so is this kind of philosophy. If you think that philosophy is only about good arguments you haven't dipped into the professional journals of late. Or perhaps you are too close to the academy to see that such statements as the above are a product of unself-conscious ideology.
(It is not ideology I am afraid of, it is unself-conscious ideology.I know the word 'ideology' in our culture is a term of abuse, but we are all ideological in one way or another, it is just that the best philosophers make their ideology as explicit as possible. See Balibar's Spinoza and Politics. This parenthetical remark is only here so that readers may realize I am not using the word 'ideology' to abuse anyone as most United Statsians would assume. I am using the word to try to 'turn you around', to remove your eyes from the shadows on the cave wall, so you can see how deep your ideology goes. So deep that it is part of your very self. This is where 'Plato's Problem' merges with 'Orwell's Problem.' See Socrates method in the first book of Plato's Republic.)
I should like to expand this line of thought, not let it go. So I will state the various aspects of my thesis with less prettiness.
Gossip is essential to the transmission and production of philosophy. Philosophical relationships, and the gossip that surrounds them, among contemporaries and across the generations, should be essential to our historical understanding of how philosophical ideas differentiate. Philosophers come to understand philosophy not only as a collection of ideas and positions but as a form of gossip about relationships between philosophers. Out of this we should be able to develop an historical view of the displacement of gossip within philosophy. This will lead me to a speculative philosophy of gossip. I do not believe that this is a great undertaking but it might actually say more about history and philosophy than, say, a philosophy of humor.
The overdetermining work of gossip is not only true of the homosocial tug-of-war, between Wittgenstein and Turing, but I do think the relationship between W and T is emblematic of how the gossip of philosophy mutates into an unconscious philosophy of gossip. I have read a dozen or more commentaries on Wittgenstein's weird, but not-easily dismissed notions about the relation between 'pure mathematics' to 'mathematics,' and every single one has at least mentioned the Turing/Wittgenstein entanglement. Why? The answer is that the commentators, without willing to admit it, think that this gossip is important, somehow or someway. This is simply gossip that dares not speak its name. I think that this gossip is not only important but is essential to the production and transmission of philosophical thought and practice. (At the moment, I do not wish to psychoanalyze the reactions of philosophers but they often react to such notions as if the thought is not merely ridiculous, but somehow frightening.)
Our own creation of arguments and our own understanding of philosophy cannot be separated from gossip about relationships. This process has only been increased and intensified by the professionalization of philosophy by the corporate university system. This is because among professional philosophers it would be embarrassing to display 'gossip' as part of their practice of philosophy. So they don't refer to it, even, when it is obvious, such as in the relationship between Athenian democracy and philosophy. If Athens is not an example of the production and transmission of philosophy through gossip I don't know what is. Other intellectual cultures where the transmission and production of philosophy through gossip should be obvious are late Enlightenment France, the Wiemar Republic and the former Hapsburg states between the WWI and WWII, and post-war France (1945-1975).
I could go into a detailed analysis of each of these periods - Socrates and Athens; Rousseau, Voltaire, and Diderot in the Late Enlightenment; Sartre and Camus, etc. But for a moment think of those logical 'machines' who deployed arguments as if unfolding mathematical proofs, the men of the 'Vienna Circle'.
It is impossible to understand the origins of their arguments and not know that they were motivated not only by the arguments themselves but by the intensely felt absence from the circle of Wittgenstein and the willful expulsion from their minds of both Freud and radical Social Democracy. A list of Vienna Circle preoccupations will do for now: These include, the circulation of gossip about Wittgenstein, Freud, and various social democrats on the fringes of the Vienna Circle; the drive to turn thought into a burning flame of fame where each in competition with the other could make his name (just like bad boy Freud); the combination of a fervent smashing of metaphysical idols (esp. Heidegger) with obvious petty bourgeois resentment; the attraction to and repulsion from Nietzsche. This list will do for now. The fact is that Gossip, to some extent drove them to produce and differentiate their thought. This is not a judgment on the Vienna Circle's arguments, only an observation of their history. Why resist?
The very fact that gossip is now underground among the professional philosophers makes gossip insidious instead of at times delightful and at other times infuriating. Philosophy is just a small town. That small town existed on and off for 2300 years across history and within a few limited geographic areas. To ignore gossip in a small town is to ignore a good part of how the town thinks about itself.
Admittedly, the mode and means of gossip has changed in the last 200 years and now we must contend with the fact of the star-system, and celebrity culture, along with its oppressive elitism. In my mind the fact of the star-system within philosophy is all the more reason to move from the gossip of philosophy to the philosophy of gossip.
The historical fact is that 'gossip,' can be seen as the unabashed immutable background 'noise' to philosophical thinking and writing. I say 'unabashed' because philosophers did not even see the need to hide their use of gossip and their delight in gossip from the time of Plato until the rise of German Idealism. The personal relationships from which gossip emerged, and the role of gossip in the transmission and production of philosophy was probably so obvious to such writers that no one would consider it as a separate social phenomena that needed to be noted.
It was only with the rise of German Idealism, and the professionalization of philosophy in the university system, that gossip became a dirty little secret, as if gossip was the equivalent of sexual relations among the Victorians, something that must be kept hidden. Coincidentally, it was also soon after this period that philosophers on the edges of the Academy -- Nietzsche, Kierkegaard -- developed what might be seen as a philosophy of gossip. I simply seek to make this philosophy of gossip explicit. If you wish to ignore these obvious points in the history of philosophy you will miss much of what philosophy is about. And you will also miss a good bit of the entertainment of philosophy.
(For instance, there is nothing more amusing than Nietzsche writing about Socrates' ugliness. Nietzsche, of course, develops philosophical points about Socrates from his ugliness. But you might ask yourself, how and why did we know about Socrates' ugliness in the first place. Once you follow that question where it will take you, you will see that Nietzsche was not anomolous in using this little bit of gossip as part of philosophical speculation. In fact Nietzsche was just turning the fact of Socrates ugliness around upon all the philosophers who thought that was a point in Socrates favor. But what is this but a form of gossip? Or think of the Oedipal interpretations of the relationships between Socrates, Plato, Aristotle. What is this but gossip parading as insight. Maybe it is also insight. I don't know. You tell me. By the way, you shouldn't be such a stick-in-the mud about these things.)
Many philosophers and writers have written implicitly about what I am explicitly calling gossip. One cannot read Plato and Aristotle without realizing how much they were influenced by low down and dirty gossip, and how much they transformed this gossip into the content of their philosophy. Their views on friendship and on ethics in general, are partially a reaction to an atmosphere of philosophical gossip. (Another example is Cicero. I do not think of Cicero as much of a philosopher, and I think any decent populare should best oppose him as a politician, but one cannot read his essay on friendship, and all the commentaries to this essay on friendship, without realizing how much of all of this was the epitome of gossip. In this case, philosophy is gossip by other means and gossip is simply politics.)
Of course the importance of gossip is easier to see in philosophies that emerge out of the intense intellectual cultures of the city-state. Like the Greek city-state, the philosophers historically located in the Northern Italian city-states (Beccaria, Machiavelli, etc.) are also easily read through the eyeglases of gossip and their reaction to gossip old and new.
This phenomena of the relationship between intellectual production, gossip and the city-state should be looked into with a better historical and philosophical eye than my limited resources are able to bring to the subject. A major part of what later came to be known as humanism was simply a collection of gossip about the Greeks and Romans and the circulation of gossip about other collectors of gossip. Only those who felt Christian pangs of guilt were embarrassed about this obsession. 'Antiquarians' of all sorts were largely responsible for the collection and transmission of ancient philosophy to modern times. One of the major interests of many of those antiquarian collectors was little tid-bits of gossip.
It is only with the professionalization of philosophy that gossip became a guilty secret, something hidden in the articles, and whispered in the backrooms of the little boys that do philosophy. One of the nicer things, about recent times is that more and more women also do philosophy, and perhaps everyday experiences such as how gossip is central to philosophy will come to the fore in the near future. The feminization of philosophy on this level will be welcome. But unfortunately I think that the material culture of professionalism will in the long run defeat this breath of fresh air in philosophy.
Now days, it might be 'cute' and pomo for a philosopher to be obsessed with the actors and actresses on Buffy the Vampire Slayer or with Martha Stewart, but no one, absolutely no one, should admit, that such interests may actually be expressive of the line of their arguments and the direction of their thoughts. And if you, philosopher, happen to admit to your guilty secret of an obsession with Martha Stewart, how impolite would it be to admit that your interest in the Sartre/Camus dispute may not be much different and in fact that the substance and gossip surrounding this dispute are not just entangled with each other, but are displaced overdeterminations of how the dispute developed in history and of our changing views of the dispute. Of course the same can be said for Plato's obsession with and invention of Socrates for that matter.
Philosophers are not supposed to care about the star-system and celebrity culture and get all excited about meeting 'famous' people, at least not in relation to their professional lives. And if they do care about the star-culture they are not supposed to care about the circulation of gossip and how that influences the production of philosophy. But the star-system and celebrity culture are now more influential on philosophy than ever before, simply because it has become an essential part of the structure of wages in and out of the academy. This means more than ever before gossip has become an adjunct to the commodity of the philosopher's labor-power.
I could bring it up to date with Rorty and Stanley Fish if you wish, or Quine and Dennett but I suppose that would be impolite. It is not nice to analyze living or recently dead people as if they had been dead for 200 or 2,000 years.
Yes, I would like to blur the distinctions between philosophy and all other arts, crafts and disciplines. The idea that 'philosophy' is somehow a separate discipline apart from fiction and poetry on the one hand and science and mathematics on the other is simply an unabashed display of the current stupidity of philosophy that thinks its main products are meant for professional journals. The idea that philosophy -- even the most abstract philosophy, even philosophy that is a little too wise -- is something that is academic and professional, unfleshed and unbloodied, lacking sweat and tears, lust and friendship, and lacking all the gossip that adheres to all thought, this view of philosophy is what engaged philosophers must fight against.
I have met people who I would consider good philosophers among illiterate peasants in El Salvador and among teacher-organizers in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. These people I would call philosophers and they would not be shocked by my view that philosophy and gossip are intimates. There were many, also, many famous philosophers who have been explicit about the relationship between gossip and philosophy -- Augustine, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard -- but it is only because these philosophers (though I disagree with their views) were at least honest enough with themselves that they did not scare at the shadows of the 'baser' interests that motivate philosophy.
Jerry Monaco
New York
7 Feb 2005
(note: This was originally a repsonse to a comment on my post from 6 Feb. 2005. I will append the comment to the comment fields of this post.)
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Feb. 8th, 2005 @ 12:36 pm
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Wittgenstein's Fright at Cultish Mathematicians:
An Incident in the History of the Philosophy of Mathematics or
What did Wittgenstein mean by Cantor's theories being a "cancerous growth" on mathematics?
A question asked;
When commenting on Cantor's ideas of uncountable sets and different levels of infinity, Wittgenstein called it a "cancerous growth on the body of mathematics". Cantor's (and others such as Dedekind) ideas have since provided the basis for much of the development of mathematics thereafter. What could have led Wittgenstein to make such a remark? What did he mean by it?
The hard part in answering this question is trying to explain the pure mathematics in everyday language so that a common reader will know what was at issue between Wittgenstein and those, such as Bertrand Russell, who thought that Cantor, Weirstrass and Dedekind provided a solution to metaphysical problems of the foundations of mathematics. If I get the basic statement of the background wrong please correct me. Still I think it is necessary to state the problem in everyday language because one must have a clear view of how much Cantor's discovery went against common sense. If the reader can understand this she will also be able to understand why so many philosophers and mathematicians thought that Cantor's theories of the infinite did not say anything that made sense. But more important for this note the reader will be able to see how Wittgenstein's view differed from the other condemnations of Cantor's line of thinking.
Cantor considered the problems of infinite sets. The common logic since Aristotle had been that the infinite was not actual but only potential.. But against common logic Cantor showed that there are sets larger than the infinite sets of natural numbers. He showed specifically that no infinite set could have as many elements as all possible subsets of that infinite set. This led to a revolution in how we conceived of set theory and of the infinite. The infinite could no longer be considered an anomaly. In other words their were different "kinds" of infinite sets. (Oh mathematicians forgive my simplicity!) What Cantor was able to show was that infinity was "actual" not just an unimaginably large number, not just "potential". He showed there are infintie sets that are larger than other sets that are also infinite. The best example is the set of all natural numbers versus the set of all irrational numbers. Both sets are infinite sets. But the set of all irrational numbers is "larger," or contains more members, than the set of all natural numbers. (Forgive me. I have merely stated the same notion in a number of ways while avoiding technical language. I did this in the hopes that non-mathematical readers will get my drift. Possibly I'm just furthering your confusion. Also for those of you who may belong to the school of mathematical realists forgive me for stating all of this as if it were just another kind of reality.)
When a mathematician comes to such conclusions philosophers sneeze. Why? Because to decide that the infinite set of irrational numbers is larger than the infinite set of natural numbers is to indirectly decide questions posed at the origins of Aristotle's metaphysics, i.e. the metaphysical status of the infinite. Philosophers of Mathematics recognized this if no one else did. Russell accepted the mathematics but spent much time trying to ground the insight into his own formal logic.
Wittgenstein rejected Cantor but he was not the only one.. Ponicare said, "There is no actual infinity; Cantorians forgot that and fell into contradictions. Later generations will regard Mengenlehre as a disease from which one has recovered " Brouwer said that: Cantor's theory was "a pathological incident in the history of mathematics from which future generations will be horrified." Another quote in my notebook is from Wittgenstein. "Cantor's argument has no deductive content at all.' Yet I would distinguish this reaction from Ponicare and Brouwer. I take Wittgenstein to mean that he would not argue with the mathematics but would just proclaim it all irrelevant to any philosophical or logical view.
I think most of these reactions were simply a matter of an inability to reconceive ancient notions. But many mathematicians seized on Cantor's theory. Some philosophers were horrified. It didn't seem gentlemanly that these theories were being used as solutions to ancient problems philosophy. Also, the mathematicians who ceased on Cantor's theories treated them as if they were the second coming of the Pythagorean theorem or a new discovery of Pi. Cantor's theories made much of what was said previously in the philosophy of mathematics hard to justify. There were philosophers who were simply exasperated. Why don't mathematicians stop this nonsense, leave us alone, and get back to their equations? What I wonder is, if there were many mathematicians with a philosophical bent who were discouraged by the narrowness of the philosophers. This is an historical determination that is hard to make. No one can ever know what was lost by way of dogmatism.
Wittgenstein was one of those who looked at all of this as an attempt to establish a New Pythagorean Cult around pure mathematics and formal logic. But even though I reject his view I think it should be fully understood. At base Wittgenstein had interesting reasons, that I think can't be easily countered, unless one is a thorrough going rationalist or believes in a pragmatic realism that states in the long run we just work and see what works. (I am somewhere within those choices.)
Wittgenstein's view of mathematics was unique and I doubt one could find more than two people who would have agreed with him in 1932. But I don't think he cared much about who agreed with him, except for Turing. When he was giving a course on these subjects it seems that the only person he cared to 'make see' his point of view was Turing, who would argue with W all the way. Wittgenstein thought that "belief" in mathematics was a kind of religion among intellectuals. He would throw out what must have seemed like Delphic statements at the time such as:
"There is no religious denomination in which the misuse of metaphysical expressions has been responsible for so much sin as it has in mathematics."
"I shall try again and again to show that what is called a mathematical discovery had much better be called a mathematical invention."
The quote about "cancerous growth" is not referring directly to Cantor but rather to Russell's discussion of Cantor, Weirstrass and Dedekind.. Russell believed that pure mathematics had laid the foundations which could ground mathematics in formal logic. For Wittgenstein, these mathematicians solutions to problems of the infinitesimal, the infinite and continuity and Russell's acceptance of these solutions as great achievements of mathematical logic had "deformed the thinking of mathematicians and philosophers." But Wittgenstein's position was not the same as other philosophers and mathematicians who criticized Cantor, et. al. He did not question the mathematics of the solutions or criticize their premises, he questioned whether these solutions were solutions to mathematical problems at all. More precisely he re-categorized the solutions to another context outside of mathematics and tried to demonstrate that the new context where these solutions must be discussed could be either accepted or rejected without effecting mathematics or logic at all.
Wittgenstein's reference to the 'cancerous growth' on mathematics encapsulates two related notions: In his view mathematicians had grafted onto mathematics the following: (1) the idea that mathematics somehow gave answers to what Wittgenstein believed were metaphysical questions and (2) the idea that when doing certain kinds of 'pure mathematics' what you were doing had some connection to that other kind of game called 'formal logic.'
It was these metaphysical 'answers' and the development of a formal logic that were the 'cancerous growth'. Cantor (and the way others developed Cantor) was just an example of this 'cancerous growth.' To the extent that I understand the issues here I think that Wittgenstein was being dogmatic. To the extent that I understand W'ittgenstein's concern I think he was trying to get the best mathematicians (mainly Turing, who he much admired) to see how both mathematics and formal logic had no real 'foundation' but could be restated in ways that were not 'elegant'. These 'non-elegant' restatements would be equally 'true' in that they would come to the same conclusion without flaws but would seem absurd. I think Wittgenstein was saying that sometimes the elegance of the solution tricks us into accepting it as fundamental or correct.
If I remember, correctly some of what Wittgenstein wrote in his notebooks on these subjects was recently published (4 years ago?). It seems to me that much of Wittgenstein's rhetoric seems to come from the fact that he simply could not get Turing to see that his (Wittgenstein's) picture of mathematics was one possible view of the cathedral. He just thought that all mathematicians were misled on the "reality" of Cantor's proofs and then compounded it all by developing false notions about proclaiming that here - at last -- was the foundation of mathematics.
Of course I may be too hard on Wittgenstein here. There was something in his whole notion about how the "game" of mathematics should be played in order to make sense in the world that also led him to reject Godel's theorem. Who knows maybe in the end we will find that the way Wittgenstein viewed the "game" of mathematics was a sort of anti-foundational foundationalism. I trust I am being appropriately obscure!
Again these are very complicated questions and unfortunately unlike during the 80 years between 1860 and 1940 we don't seem to have great mathematicians who are interesting philosophers and great philosophers who are good mathematicians. The other possibility is that I don't know what I am talking about. It has been a long time since I studied these topics, a long time since those courses where very smart and inarticulate professors tried to explain to me (a very dumb but articulate student) the elegance of pure math. At the time I agreed with Wittgenstein on at least one point. The elegance seemed purely imaginary.
Jerry Monaco
New York City
5 Feb 2005
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Feb. 5th, 2005 @ 04:53 pm
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