From: David MOREY (us@divadeus.freeserve.co.uk)
Date: Tue Sep 23 2003 - 21:00:49 BST
Matt
We're always on a new edge. What eludes us is
awesome and you can sometimes feel it passing by.
I even wonder if we have really got started yet
with metaphysics. Heidegger is serious when he
says truth is aletheia, or to cease forgetting. There
is a whole cosmic story to tell, from the One to the
many as they say. I just can't give up the metaphysics.
This is interesting:
http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/default.asp?channel_id=2188&editorial_id=13
668
regards
DM
DM
----- Original Message -----
From: "MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT" <mpkundert@students.wisc.edu>
To: <moq_discuss@moq.org>
Sent: Monday, September 22, 2003 10:14 PM
Subject: Re: MD A metaphysics
> Hi Sam,
>
> Matt said:
> Rortyans read Wittgenstein as not saying that the silence we reach says
there is a wall with something special on the other side, but that the
silence means "mu", it means we've asked a bad question, conducted a bad
line of inquiry.
>
> Sam said:
> This is something of a debated question in Wittgenstein studies, often
referred to by the comment, 'was he trying to whistle it?' - ie, that at the
end of the Tractatus, when he says we cannot speak about the mystical/value/
ethical realm, was he holding open the option of there being other ways to
express/access that realm?
>
> Some interpreters say that he was, some that he wasn't. I am firmly in the
former camp, largely on the basis of various other comments he made, and the
integrity between his pattern of life and his thinking. (The reason why I
have never felt bothered enough about Heidegger to explore him in depth).
>
> Of course the deep question is whether this attitude (whistling or not
whistling) carried through into his mature work. Again this is disputed, but
I would say that it was. In other words, that his later understanding of
language, although it was much richer than the picture theory of language,
was still governed by the inexpressibility of the mystical.
>
> To refer to the point about the wall, Wittgenstein comments that although
it is an urge to run up against the boundaries of language, he has a
profound respect for that urge. It is not at all that he thinks it
(necessarily) a waste of time.
>
> Matt:
> I have no doubt you know more about Wittgenstein then I and I take your
remarks seriously. If I'm correct, what you are refering to as the "no he
wasn't trying to whistle it" camp were the logical positivists, those who
loved the Tractatus, but had no idea what the Philosophical Investigations
was on about. These were the people who said that morality was emotivism,
that ethics had no cognitive value. This isn't what Rorty's saying. He's
saying something a little different than that.
>
> What he's saying is a little of both camps. Its weird, but I've been
trying to make sense of it myself with some recent comments by David Morey
and others about Rorty's love of science and lack of attention to poetry,
art, and beauty. I've been arguing that he doesn't leave such things, and
the distinction you make in interpreting Wittgenstein I think helps me see
how I should pull the two together.
>
> Rorty is saying that we _can_ whistle it and the urge is a poetic urge.
This is a good urge, but this isn't an alternate way of expressing or
accessing the ineffable. Rorty would definitely say that "access" is a
misleading way of explaining what both mystics and poets do. I think Rorty
would say that mystics and poets have basically the same function: they say
things that don't make sense. Rorty's idea of the poet is of a piece with
his Davidsonian distinction between metaphorical and literal, between what
is indecipherable and that which is not. On Davidson's view, a metaphor is
simply an indecipherable sound, scratch, or movement; a literal word is a
decipherable one, it is subsumable in a language game. Linking this with
Wittgenstein is very easy then. The wall we reach is the wall of our
language game, the end of literalness. Everything beyond that is metaphor,
stuff that doesn't make sense, and in a very important sense, whistling.
The Davidsonian view of meta
> phor says that there is no difference between whistling and saying
"garbackua". Neither makes sense, they are said for effect. When a
metaphor dies, when it becomes literal, the effect is to expand the language
game, push its boundaries.
>
> So what I see Rorty doing is trying to preserve parts of both
interpretations of Wittgenstein. Rorty is not saying that ethics is
emotivism, that morality has no cognitive function. He's saying that we
create the space where things function cognitively, so the great mystics,
poets, and moralists, in effect, pushed the logical space where moral
propositions existed back to accomadate the new moral proposition,
propositions like "Blacks are human" or "Animals should not be treated
inhumanely". Those propositions didn't make sense at first because the
language games we played in those days were such that they denied them.
They carried assumptions like "blacks are animals" and "animals are here to
be exploited" (hence slavery).
>
> So, I think it true that there is nothing special on the other side of the
wall. I think to say that there is is to hold onto discovery metaphors,
that to push back the wall is discover what was already there. I think we
should hand in our discovery metaphors and say that we create the space, we
don't access it. But (I think) should amend my, "the silence means mu"
statement. What the silence means is that we've reached the end of our
language game. There are two choices (not this again ;-): you can attempt
to continue to try and push the edges of the language game, or you can drop
that language game and begin another. In the case of metaphysics, we've
been pushing the edges of that language game for a while, pragmatists think
its time we laid it to rest.
>
> Matt
>
>
>
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