Light Motifs

Family resemblance.

Call for clarity. Clear call.

Philosophy as envisaged by the Tractatus is therefore a futile attempt to say what cannot be meaningfully said but which can only show itself. So, philosophy, insofar as it is possible at all, cannot be a body of doctrines. It must be an activity. It must aim not, like science, at truth and knowledge, but only at clarity and, with the achievement of that clarity, peace.

One difference from the earlier work is that the Philosophical Investigations gives us not a single ladder to climb. Instead it shows us the paths up a series of hills and promontories, from which we may gain different overviews of the landscape and, with luck, see the light gradually dawn.

From Ian Ground, The relentless honesty of Ludwig Wittgenstein

And so for day 2183
04.12.2012

Roughing It

Terry Eagleton. Saints and Scholars. A eureka moment for the character Wittgenstein. Notable for the physicality with which it is described.

Then one day a friend took his photograph on the steps of Senate House and Wittgenstein asked him where he was to stand. 'Oh, roughly there,' the friend replied, casually indicating a spot. Wittgenstein went back to his room, lay on the floor and writhed in excitement. Roughly there. The phrase had opened a world to him. Not 'two inches to the left of that stone,' but 'roughly there'. Human life was a matter of roughness, not of precise measurement. Why had he not understood this? He had tried to purge language of of its ambiguities, but this was like regarding the handle of a cup as a flaw in the pottery. Looseness and ambiguity were not imperfections, they were what made things work.

Eagleton goes on in a lovely fashion about ordinary people moving at ease in, through and around ambiguity. What for me is striking in this description is its connection to the act of producing a record. And then in the cogitation comes the sense that precision and use oppose each other. Yet the passage intimates that there are language games where precision matters. Knowing which is of course a matter of roughly knowing. In such cases the ambiguity maybe located at a metadiscursive level. The necessity of going meta is about coming to some agreement about the contours of the ambiguity.

Going meta: "To go meta is to query the products and experiences of textuality and virtuality. Going meta is a question-based activity." http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~lachance/ivt.htm

And so for day 1158
13.02.2010