In his classic work on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Erik Stenius described Wittgenstein’s study as a critique of pure language, thus pointing to a connection between Wittgenstein’s philosophy and Kant’s critique of pure reason. Besides similarities, there also seems be important differences between the two philosophers. In Kant’s critique, one discerns a subject who does something, namely, constructs the world of experience, while Wittgenstein draws a picture in which neither an agent nor an act is visible. Like Kant and Wittgenstein, contemporary normative (...) theories of assertion are also interested in limits, although in limits set to assertions. They appear to pay special attention to the one who asserts and to the act of asserting. This paper is an effort to search for the traces of normative theories of assertion in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus by focusing on the one who uses language and on the limits of that use. It is shown that both in Wittgenstein and in normative theories of assertion, there is an important ethical dimension, which, however, plays different roles in the two approaches. It is argued that despite the differences in the ways of construing the limits of language, Tractatus and normative theories of assertion share similar ethical concerns. (shrink)

The limit of language is one of the most pervasive notions found in Wittgenstein's work, both in his early Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and his later writings. Moreover, the idea of a limit of language is intimately related to important scholarly debates on Wittgenstein's philosophy, such as the debate between the so-called traditional and resolute interpretations, Wittgenstein's stance on transcendental idealism, and the philosophical import of Wittgenstein's latest work On Certainty. This collection includes thirteen original essays that provide a comprehensive overview of (...) the various ways in which Wittgenstein appeals to the limit of language at different stages of his philosophical development. The essays connect the idea of a limit of language to the most important themes discussed by Wittgenstein--his conception of logic and grammar, the method of philosophy, the nature of the subject, and the foundations of knowledge--as well as his views on ethics, aesthetics, and religion. The essays also relate Wittgenstein's thought to his contemporaries, including Carnap, Frege, Heidegger, Levinas, and Moore. (shrink)

The paper interprets Wittgenstein’s famous call to silence at the end of his Tractatus – that “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” – as a critique of philosophy itself. Wittgenstein was concerned throughout his philosophical life with finding a way to delineate the limits of language. These limits, once we have them clearly in view, rob our attempts to put forth philosophical theories of their legitimacy. In order to give a critical assessment of this Wittgensteinian (...) critique of philosophy, the paper primarily focuses on the roots of that critique in Wittgenstein’s earliest writings – his notebooks, his 1913 “Notes on Logic,” the 1914 set of notes dictated to G. E. Moore, and the Tractatus itself. Wittgenstein’s influence by Fritz Mauthner and, mediated through Mauthner, by Kant receive special attention. The conclusion is that, far from Mauthner’s radical anti-philosophical bias, we can come to see a deep appreciation of the power, the draw, and the significance of philosophical problems in Wittgenstein’s writings. The text closes with a short look at how Wittgenstein’s thinking about the limits of language evolved later in his life. (shrink)

The article examines the correlation between the world and the word in two novels which engage with a post-apocalyptic scenario: David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Shifting the focus from the very event of catastrophe to the notion of survival through memory and storytelling, both novels problematize the strained relationship between language and reality in an increasingly diminished and dehumanized world. My aim is to investigate the limits of language as well as its capacity to withstand (...) the chaos, loss, trauma, and death that follow the apocalypse. The issues to be considered include the influence of external experience on forms of communication, the role of central metaphors and their relation to the form of both novels, as well as the word’s capacity to preserve human values and hopes. Both novels will be discussed as deconstructionist projects in which language becomes a habitat at once impossible and life-preserving: in Wittgenstein’s Mistress it plays the role of both home and prison, whereas in The Road it functions as messianic discourse which simultaneously carries, propels and extinguishes the human hope for a transcendental reality beyond the post-apocalyptic emptiness and doubt. (shrink)

Abstract:The commentaries of Wang Bi (226–249 c.e.), who coined a substantial part of the xuanxue 玄學 tradition, represent one of the most systematic attempts in early China to explore language as limited in its capabilities of expression and how language can be used to deal with issues beyond the reach of language itself. However, few studies on Wang Bi explore his philosophy of language. Therefore, the relationship between what can and cannot be expressed through language, and what lies beyond these (...) limits, is explored via a comparison with the early works of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who himself described this issue as "the cardinal problem of philosophy." I argue that Wang Bi and Wittgenstein share a similar hermeneutical approach, centered on the deficiency of language in mapping determinate sense beyond the manifest world. The factuality of the universe is therefore ineffable and "mystical," and silence becomes an indispensable means of expression. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: How to Read the Tractatus Recognizing Metaphysics as Senseless Logic as Mirror of the World The Self, the Subject, the I Ethics.

L’obiettivo di questo articolo è quello di esaminare le riflessioni dedicate da Wittgenstein al tema del giudizio di valore, al fine di rintracciare una linea di continuità tra le ricerche riguardanti i criteri per determinare la sensatezza degli enunciati – principale impegno del “primo” Wittgenstein – e la successiva filosofia dei giochi linguistici, presentata nelle Ricerche filosofiche. Secondo la teoria raffigurativa del linguaggio, così come viene formulata nel Tractatus logico-philosophicus, i giudizi di valore non rappresentano fatti del mondo e pertanto (...) sono senza senso. In questa prospettiva, il tentativo di esprimere esperienze di “valore assoluto”, come dice Wittgenstein nella Conferenza sull’etica (1929), è condannato al nonsenso, sebbene esso dia testimonianza di una tendenza tipicamente umana ad avventarsi contro i limiti del linguaggio. Circa dieci anni dopo, nelle Lezioni di estetica (1938) Wittgenstein analizza l’uso degli aggettivi estetici nei giudizi di valore e sottolinea la prossimità di queste espressioni al gesto, inteso come un modo di trasmettere il sentimento del parlante in reazione a una specifica esperienza. Nell’espressività del nonsenso è possibile intravedere in anticipo l’importanza della nozione di uso, centrale nella “seconda” filosofia di Wittgenstein; nell’analisi degli aggettivi estetici, usati in maniera simile a gesti, rimane un collegamento con le precedenti ricerche intorno ai limiti del linguaggio. Attraverso la riflessione su nonsenso e gesto Wittgenstein sviluppa un’idea non-comunicativa ed espressiva del linguaggio che possiamo rintracciare lungo l’intero sviluppo del suo lavoro. (shrink)

The first half of this article is critical: it develops an interpretation of Kant as trying, and failing, to limit our judgments to phenomena and abstain from making claims about noumena, and an interpretation of Wittgenstein as trying, and failing, to develop a theory of meaning that abstains from attempting to say the unsayable. On the reading offered, both Kant and Wittgenstein find themselves saying things that by their own lights cannot be said: in Kant’s case, claims about noumena, and (...) in Wittgenstein’s case, structural claims. While Kant attempts a solution of the problem which also fails, Wittgenstein bites the bullet and leaves his Tractatus, for the most part, void and meaningless. The suggested response is a dialetheic approach—either as an alternative or, potentially, as an amendment to a Kantian or Wittgensteinian theory. According to this approach, certain problems in philosophy arise from true contradictions and thus require a theory that makes sense of contradiction. A subgroup of these problems (among them the noumenal and structural issues in Kant and Wittgenstein) are about things that both are and are not ineffable. The second half of the paper develops a dialetheic account of ineffability and a concise formal theory to ensure that contradiction at the limits of language does not spread to other areas. (shrink)

Unfortunately, Wittgenstein has entered the philosophical canon , an entrance that has served to reify interpretations of his work. In this essay I refer to recent books by Richard Eldridge (1997) and Phillip Shields (1998) which allow us again to see The Philosophical Investigations as something more than a stultifying relic. Specifically, these authors, by reading Wittgenstein's work not merely as text but also as performance, allow us to enact our own liberating performances of that work. To engage in such (...) enactments of freedom is the essence of philosophical education in the sense established by extra-canonical writers such as Socrates and the Stoics, on the one hand, and Emerson and James, on the other. At least this is so if my use of the work of classicist Pierre Hadot, on the one hand, and brief reference to literary critic Richard Poirier, on the other, is at all successful in illuminating theses from Eldridge and Shields on the nature of Wittgensteinian philosophy. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to bring together two thinkers that are concerned with the limits of what can be said, Wittgenstein and Maimonides, and to explore the sense of the good life and of the mystical to which their therapeutic linguistic work gives rise. I argue that despite the similarities, two different senses of the "mystical" are brought to light and two different "forms of life" are explicated and recommended. The paper has three parts. In the first (...) part, I discuss certain key components in Wittgenstein’s early philosophy and the sense of the mystical to which they give rise. In the second part, I discuss Maimonides’ negative theology and its implications for his conception of the ’via mystica’. I end, with a discussion of the relation between the two ideals and its significance. (shrink)

The essays in this volume investigate the question of where, and in what sense, the bounds of intelligible thought, knowledge, and speech are to be drawn. Is there a way in which we are limited in what we think, know, and say? And if so, does this mean that we are constrained—that there is something beyond the ken of human intelligibility of which we fall short? Or is there another way to think about these limits of intelligibility—namely, as conditions (...) of our meaning and knowing anything, beyond which there is no specifiable thing we cannot do? -/- These issues feature prominently in the writings of Kant and Wittgenstein who each engaged with them in unique and striking ways. Their thoughts on the matter remain provocative and stimulating, and accordingly the contributions to this volume address the issues surrounding the limits of intelligibility both exegetically and systematically: they examine how they figure in Kant’s and Wittgenstein’s most significant works and put them in touch with contemporary debates that are shaped by their legacy. These debates concern, inter alia, logically and morally alien thought, the semantics and philosophy of negation, disjunctivism in philosophy of perception and ethics, paraconsistent approaches to contradiction, and the relation between art, literature, and philosophy. The book is divided into four parts: Part I gives a first assessment of the issues, Part II examines limits as they feature in Kant, Part III as they feature in Wittgenstein, and Part IV suggests some ways in which the questions at issue might be reconsidered, drawing upon ideas in phenomenology, dialetheism, metamathematics, and the works of other influential authors. -/- Limits of Intelligibility provides insight into a theme that is central to the thought of two of the most important figures in modern philosophy, as well as to recent metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of logic, epistemology, and ethics. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Abstract Introduction Anti ‐ Realism and Meaning Two Types of Anti ‐ Realism What Functions Are “Language ‐ Games” Supposed to Serve? Realism and (Dummett's) Anti ‐ Realism Resisting Transcendentalism Wittgensteinian Realism References.

A central theme in Wittgenstein’s post-Tractatus remarks on the limits of language is that we ‘cannot use language to get outside language’. One illustration of that idea is his comment that, once we have described the procedure of teaching and learning a rule, we have ‘said everything that can be said about acting correctly according to the rule’; ‘we can go no further’. That, it is argued, is an expression of anti-reductionism about meaning and rules. A framework is presented (...) for assessing the debate between reductionist and anti-reductionist readings of Wittgenstein’s views about meaning and use. It is argued that that debate cannot be settled merely by reference to Wittgenstein’s general opposition to reductionism. An important argument for anti-reductionism about rules and meaning, from Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, is discussed. Putative evidence of reductionism about meaning in the Brown Book is considered; an alternative reading is proposed. The nature of Wittgenstein’s anti-reductionism is examined. It is argued, first, that Wittgenstein accepts that semantic and normative facts supervene on non-semantic, non-normative facts and, second, that at many points his treatment of meaning and rules goes beyond the kind of pleonastic claim that is often taken to define non-reductionist, quietist, positions in philosophy. (shrink)

It is a remarkable fact about the early history of the analytic tradition that its three most important protagonists all held, at least during significant intervals of their respective careers, that there are entities that cannot be named. This shared commitment on the part of Frege, Russell and the early Wittgenstein is the topic of this thesis. I first clarify the particular form this commitment takes in the work of these three authors. I also illustrate a distinctive cluster of philosophical (...) difficulties attending the view that there are unnameable entities, and explore the relationship between unnameability and inexpressibility. I then investigate what grounds there are for countenancing the unnameable, focussing in particular on the thesis that concepts cannot be named. I give a detailed hearing to four arguments for the unnameability of concepts discernible in, or suggested by, early analytic writings. The first and second arguments (chapters 3 and 4) are distinguishable in the locus classicus, Frege's 'On Concept and Object'. The first concerns the relationship between co-reference and intersubstitutability; the second concerns the unity of thought. The third argument (chapter 4) appeals to the alleged impossibility of expressing identities between objects and concepts, while the fourth (chapter 5) draws on considerations pertaining to diagonalization and Russell's paradox. I make the case that all four arguments fail to provide grounds for accepting the unnameable, contending that each argument can and should be resisted in defence of singular reference to concepts. In doing so I develop a novel defence of the view that absolutely any entity can be referred to with a singular term. (shrink)

PORTUGUESE: A experiência conceptualizada colhe os seus critérios de dizibilidade pública no contexto da experiência sentida de pessoas, e a noção de prática marca o âmbito desses limites, em conexão tensa com a autonomia do simbolismo linguístico. Tal é a hipótese deste livro, que se junta assim a um debate sobre o sentido da objetividade. O livro articula uma leitura das Investigações filosóficas (1953) como uma expansão do espaço lógico de possibilidades de sentido ou do significado proposicional do Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (...) (1922) para considerar a lógica da experiência sentida do significado em geral. Essa lógica é então ainda pensada nas suas condições de possibilidade, mas vistas como “impuras”, ancoradas em gestos contingentes e contextuais, ou em acordos no nível de uma forma de vida, não apenas em regras de uso da linguagem. A tática dessa estratégia foi tomar um dito anotado nos Cadernos (1916), “A lógica deve cuidar de si própria”, e transformá-lo numa função, “x deve cuidar de si própria”, trocando x por linguagem nos anos 1930 e prática nos anos 1940. Assim buscou Wittgenstein “fazer justiça aos fatos” (Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough) da experiência sentida do significado, a um tempo ancorada na vida humana e ligada a relações modais. Não se trata aqui de um argumento propriamente dito mas, antes, do desenho de um pano de fundo para o exame de alguns dos conceitos operatórios do Wittgenstein tardio, tais como ‘relações intermediárias’, ‘regras/prática’, ‘espírito/objetividade’, ‘certeza/prática’, etc.; e também para o exame de perspectivas de leitura, tais como a dialógica e a do ‘álbum de família’. // ENGLISH: Conceptualized experience gathers its criteria for public meaning in the context of the felt experience of persons, and the notion of praxis marks the scope of these limits, in tense connection with the autonomy of linguistic symbolism. This is the hypothesis with which this book joins the debate on the meaning of objectivity. The book articulates a reading of the Philosophical Investigations (1953) as an expansion of the logical space of possibilities of sense or propositional meaning of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) to consider the logic of the felt experience of meaning in general. This logic is then still thought of in its conditions of possibility, but seen as “impure”, anchored in contingent and contextual gestures, or agreements at the level of a form of life, not just in rules of language usage. The tactic of this strategy was to take a saying from the Notebooks (1916), “Logic must take care of itself”, and turn it into a function, “x must take care of itself”, switching x for language in the 1930s and practice in the 1940s. Thus, Wittgenstein sought to “do justice to the facts” (Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough) of the felt experience of meaning, as this experience is at once grounded in human life and yet bound by modal relations. This is not intended as an argument per se but rather as a background against which to examine some of Wittgenstein's operative concepts (such as aspect, intermediate relations, rules/practice, spirit/objectivity, certainty/practice, etc.) and reading perspectives (such as the dialogical and “family album” readings). -/- . (shrink)

This study aims to corroborate Merleau-Ponty’s interpretations of fundamental ideas from Saussure’s linguistics by linking them to works that were independently elaborated by Jan Mukařovský, Czech structuralist aesthetician and literary theorist. I provide a comparative analysis of the two authors’ theories of language and their interpretations of thought as fundamentally determined by language. On this basis, I investigate how they conceive linguistic innovation and its translation into changes in the constituted language and other social codes and institutions. I explain how (...) they elaborate on Saussure’s idea of language as a system of oppositions by interpreting cultural innovation as a systematic variation of pre-established social norms and, similarly, linguistic innovation as gesturing within language. Connectedly, I show how Mukařovský’s works help clarify Merleau-Ponty’s focus on the gestural dimension of language. By discussing the two thinkers’ arguments in favour of linguistic innovation, I explore what could be called phenomenological limits of structuralism. (shrink)

Working through Balaska’s deeply perceptive, elegantly written, and profoundly honest book, Wittgenstein and Lacan at the Limit, a reader steeped in the recent academic literature about either or both of its main figures may come to feel herself placed at what is, itself, a certain kind of limit. The limit I mean is the limit of a familiar type of theoretical discourse about the constitution and structure of language and subjectivity as Wittgenstein and Lacan treat them: it includes the discourses (...) that seek, for instance, to articulate how language and sense are constituted in the Tractatus, and thus what is really meant by “logical form” and “nonsense” there; or those that aim to comprehend the true relationship of our biological nature to language, culture, and the advent of freedom in Lacan; or, again, those that try to find, in either thinker’s works, the precise location of the delicate logical buttonhole that would alone permit us entry, from within everyday language and life, to the absoluteness of an ineffable beyond. These discourses all treat of language and life, but handle these phenomena at arm’s length, theorizing the structure of each and the form of their relationship in such a way as to establish, ultimately, their mutual convertibility to one another, their mutual absorption into a third, more inclusive term, or adduce translations from the dense theoretical matrices of one thinker’s treatment of them to the other’s. Balaska’s book, doing none of these things, rather succeeds in bringing out how an interconnected reading of the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus and Lacan may speak to and inform our response to a certain kind of experience that is characteristic for both thinkers, and typical as well of those moments and occasions of our lives in which we may find ourselves drawn to reflect on what meaning is and how we relate to it. (shrink)

The two insights which Wittgenstein’s assertion provides and which I wish to suggest can make a fruitful contribution toward understanding art are, first, the world of art is an imposed world, and, second, artistic activity is related intrinsically or essentially to the world it imposes. If the limits of the language which I use does mean the limits of the world which I know, that language must impose itself upon this world. If the language which I use imposes (...) itself upon my world this imposition must contribute to, or participate in, this world which I know because of it. That is, it cannot merely point to it, but actually must bring it about. It brings about what was not, and what could not be without it. Different languages must mean different impositions and different impositions must mean different worlds. It is because we have this language that we come to have this world, not before or after we use the language, but with and while we use it. The imposition is logical, not chronological. To assert that the limits of my language mean the limits of my world is to assert that language is not a coat or map which we make to fit some previously established limit but that it is an activity which is bound up with the development of these limits themselves. (shrink)

In this paper, we will discuss solipsism and the limits of experience in the light of Wittgenstein’s TLP. One cannot draw the limits of experience without bringing in the notion of the experiencer. That is to say, the notion of self is very relevant to the discussion on the limits of experience. Solipsism means that ‘I’ is the only reality, and what I experience is all that I could know. We will focus on solipsism from two points (...) of view, the empirical point of view and the transcendental point of view. The empirical approach to solipsism makes the self as a matter of its experience. However, from the transcendental point of view, the transcendental or metaphysical self becomes the transcendental ground of our experiences. In the second section, we will discuss the relationship between solipsism and realism. Then how the self is related to the world will be discussed in the third section. For Wittgenstein, the self ‘I' is neither causally nor logically related to the world. This self is the metaphysical subject, and it is the limit of the world. In the fourth section, we will discuss the importance of the limit-self. The limit-self is not the matter or object of experience; rather, it is the ground of our world's experience. For Wittgenstein, it is not an item of the world; rather, it is the limit of the world. The limit-self cannot be described in language, and thus it is beyond our language. It is the limit of our language and also the limit of the world. Then, we will critically analyze the limit of experience, and the metaphysical self is placed on the limit of experience. This self is the non-solipsistic self. (shrink)

James Bogen - The Possibility of Language: Internal Tensions in Wittgenstein's Tractatus - Journal of the History of Philosophy 45:1 Journal of the History of Philosophy 45.1 167-169 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by James Bogen University of Pittsburgh María Cerezo. The Possibility of Language: Internal Tensions in Wittgenstein's Tractatus. CSLI Lecture Notes, 147. Stanford: CSLI, 2005. Pp. xiv + 321. Paper, $30.00. The Possibility of Language is a difficult, painstakingly detailed interpretation and evaluation of central doctrines of (...) the Tractatus. It is not easy reading, but most readers who soldier through it will find their prospects of coming to grips with the Tractatus significantly improved. Cerezo constrains her reading as tightly as she can by what she finds good textual and historical reasons to believe the early Wittgenstein was thinking about. She acknowledges and elaborates on what she takes to be serious internal tensions rather than forcing the Tractatus to make sense where she cannot find any. To avoid anachronism, she scrupulously refrains from trying to resolve difficulties by bringing the Tractatus into line with contemporary views. In keeping with her focus on Wittgenstein's text, she does not attempt to survey the extensive literature on the Tractatus. Instead, she limits herself to brief comments on.. (shrink)

What is creativity? It is clearly something we know by seeing it manifested in a multitude of different ways and contexts. It could perhaps stand as an emblematic example of the limitations of a general explanative account. In this anthology the editors have orchestrated an exceptionally inspiring collection of essays that explore the vast examples of creative language used in Wittgenstein's philosophical practice and the creative potentiality of language overall. The anthology consists of eleven essays divided into introduction, overture, and (...) three parts containing three essays each. The collection offers a wide scope, ranging from styles of writing and aesthetic forms of expression to ethical reflections and... (shrink)

A.W. Moore presents eighteen of his philosophical essays, written since 1986, on representing how things are. He sketches out the nature, scope, and limits of representation through language, and pays particular attention to linguistic representation, states of knowledge, the character of what is represented, and objective facts or truths.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Language, Limits, and Beyond: Early Wittgenstein and Rabindranath Tagore by Priyambada SarkarNirmalangshu Mukherji (bio)Language, Limits, and Beyond: Early Wittgenstein and Rabindranath Tagore. By Priyambada Sarkar. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. xxiii + 182. Hardcover $68.45, ISBN 978-0-19-012397-0.This intriguing and original work may be viewed as something like a conjoined study of certain obscure issues in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and some ideas and images in (...) Rabindranath Tagore’s literary pieces, especially his mystical poems and plays. As the title suggests, the work is pretty much restricted to just one lingering theme from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and the possibility of grasping this obscure theme in poetic terms of Tagore, rather than in terms of the standard discourse of analytic philosophy. The author deserves a round of applause for conceiving this work.The author embarks on the project by setting aside the so-called “resolute” reading of the Tractatus proposed by Cora Diamond and James Conant in the Realistic Spirit (MIT, 1991). According to Diamond and Conant, the enigmatic propositions of the Tractatus are to be viewed as a “therapy” against the human urge to philosophize. Without getting into the intricate, and often obscure, discussion that followed Diamond and Conant’s work, Sarkar simply adopts a non-resolute reading of the Tractatus under which the propositions of the Tractatus are metaphysically significant. Sarkar’s main evidence in favour of the non-resolute reading consists of a flurry of remarks from Wittgenstein himself on what he considered to be the significant aspect of the book (pp. 3-6). One is thus motivated to directly engage with the purported metaphysical significance of perhaps the most enigmatic theme in the Tractatus.The theme under study is Wittgenstein’s puzzling remark, “What we cannot talk about, we must pass over in silence.” Adopting a non-resolute understanding of the remark, the author suggests that Wittgenstein advocates a limit to what can be expressed in language. However, following the non-resolute reading, Wittgenstein cannot be viewed as advocating that whatever is thus passed over in silence lacks significance. In fact, citing Wittgenstein (pp. 6-7), Sarkar contends that drawing the limits of what can be expressed cannot indicate boundaries of thought because that will mean thinking the unthinkable. Once a limit is drawn, what falls on the unexpressed side of thought—the silent thought—necessarily becomes ineffable in the context of the language in use. One may then undertake an inquiry into the significance of the ineffable. [End Page 1]The work roughly divides into three parts. The first two chapters are devoted to Wittgenstein’s sketch of a factual language and its limits and how one may be led from the notion of limits to some notion of ineffability. As we will see, a non-resolute reading of the limits of factual language leads to two notions of language: language of facts and language of feelings. Chapters 3 and 4 illustrate different aspects of the language of feeling with individual studies of the domains of ethics, aesthetics and religion from the writings of Tagore and Wittgenstein. The concluding Chapter 5 may be viewed as a test case of how the scheme of explanation developed so far may be used to explain Wittgenstein’s abiding interest in Tagore’s mystical play The King of the Dark Chamber.To show the limits of a language, Wittgenstein develops a fragment of the familiar Principia-type logistic language to illustrate what may be said in a language. In this language, call it the “factual language” (FL), atomic propositions of FL state what is the case. A rigorous enumeration of all the propositions of FL thus constitutes what may be said in FL in terms of the truth conditions so obtained; for example, a proposition of the form not-p, where p is atomic, says what is not the case.However, there are two exceptions: propositions of the form p & not-p, a contradiction, and p v not-p, a tautology. Since tautologies are true of all facts and contradictions are true of none, the very form of these propositions suggest that they do not really amount to factual... (shrink)

Drawing on ten years of research on the unpublished Wittgenstein papers, Stern investigates what motivated Wittgenstein's philosophical writing and casts new light on the Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations. The book is an exposition of Wittgenstein's early conception of the nature of representation and how his later revision and criticism of that work led to a radically different way of looking at mind and language. It also explains how the unpublished manuscripts and typescripts were put together and why they often provide (...) better evidence of the development of his ideas than can be found in his published writing. In doing so, the book traces the development of a number of central themes in Wittgenstein's philosophy, including his conception of philosophical method, the picture theory of meaning, the limits of language, the application of language to experience, his treatment of private language, and what he called the "flow of life." Arguing that Wittgenstein's views are often much more simple (and more radical) than we have been led to believe, Wittgenstein on Mind and Language provides an overview of the development of Wittgenstein's philosophy and brings to light aspects of his philosophy that have been almost universally neglected. (shrink)

Gottlob Frege’s conception of works of art has received scant notice in the literature. This is a pity since, as this paper undertakes to reveal, his innovative philosophy of language motivated a theoretically and historically consequential, yet unaccountably marginalized Wittgenstinian line of inquiry in the domain of aesthetics. The element of Frege’s approach that most clearly inspired this development is the idea that only complete sentences articulate thoughts and that what sentences in works of drama and literary art express are (...) ‘mock thoughts’ (Schiengedanken). The early Wittgenstein closely followed Frege’s lead on this theme. One sees this, for example, in the Tractatus, where Wittgenstein announces that only sentential propositions model (‘picture’) states of affairs whereas works of art are objects we perceive sub specie aeternitatis (1961, 83). By the 1930s, however, Wittgenstein began to revise his view beyond his initial Frege-inspired standpoint. He came to insist that works of art can convey thoughts as well, but that thoughts do not model (picture) the world of facts and hence do not convey information about measurable objects and events. Rather, his contention was that aesthetically configured thoughts that artworks communicate impart information about our perspective on reality and reconfigure our view of life. To be more explicit, successful (gelungene) or ‘good’ works of art (ibid.), in Wittgenstein’s view, can supply aesthetically instructive ‘gestures’ that open to living experience promising new ways of being. It is in this respect, he held, that artists ‘have something to teach’ (1980, 36). (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein's interest in the writings of Rabindranath Tagore, is recognized among scholars worldwide though little has been written on his fascination with Tagore's poetry and symbolic plays. In Language, Limits, and Beyond, Priyambada Sarkar explores Tagore and Wittgenstein's philosophical arguments on the concept of 'threshold of language and meaning', highlighting the systematic connections between Tagore's canon and Wittgenstein's early works. Situatingher study in the early 1900s, when Tagore's poetry had just become available in Europe, Sarkar finds similarities between (...) Tagore's and Wittgenstein's exploration of the limits of language. She argues that Wittgenstein's early philosophy can be better understood when juxtaposed with Tagore.Drawing parallels between the worlds of philosophy and poetry, Sarkar identifies the point of convergence of their two philosophies in the realm of language, tracing how they reach surprisingly similar conclusions through entirely different paths of inquiry. Sarkar finally claims that such important points of contact will help one to arrange the pieces of the Tractarian jigsaw puzzle in a manner where all the pieces of logic, language, world, and the mystical will fall into place and form acoherent picture. (shrink)

Most commentators have underplayed the philosophical importance of Wittgenstein's multifarious remarks on music, which are scattered throughout his Nachlass. In this dissertation I spell out the extent and depth of Wittgenstein's engagement with certain problems that are regarded today as central to the field of the aesthetics of music, such as musical temporality, expression and understanding. By considering musical expression in its relation to aspect-perception, I argue that Wittgenstein understands music in terms of a highly evolved, vertically complex physiognomic language-game, (...) in which fine shades of behavior are logically (semantically) connected with the musical experiences themselves. A musical passage conjoins the multifarious language games that are presupposed in it and the emerging gesture that ultimately insinuates itself into our life. Wittgenstein conceives music as a mode of expression, a path leading from the world of our thoughts and feelings, which in itself is not yet music, toward a gesture which is no longer music, but which belongs to the world of thoughts and feelings. A melody can be located at this crossroads of music, language and the world, and is understood in reciprocal action with language. Musical gesture insinuates itself into our life, for, like a human face, it speaks of and reflects our "knowledge of mankind," and it is ultimately understood only against the background of "the bustle of life," as Wittgenstein calls it. I also argue that Wittgenstein's discussion of musical understanding suggests an important model, albeit not an exclusive one, for understanding language. The musicality of language points first and foremost at the way we use words in the vertically complex language game of expression, and at the intransitive understanding that goes with it. Throughout the dissertation I address a number of unique topics that have rarely, if ever, been investigated in this context. These include inter alia Wittgenstein's 1912-1913 experiments on the perception of rhythm, Oswald Spengler's influence on Wittgenstein's remarks on music, Wittgenstein's reaction to Heinrich Schenker's view of music, and the complex, elusive relation between Wittgenstein's later philosophical views and Arnold Schoenberg's dodecaphonic music. (shrink)

Gottlob Frege’s conception of works of art has received scant notice in the literature. This is a pity since, as this paper undertakes to reveal, his innovative philosophy of language motivated a theoretically and historically consequential, yet unaccountably marginalized Wittgenstinian line of inquiry in the domain of aesthetics. The element of Frege’s approach that most clearly inspired this development is the idea that only complete sentences articulate thoughts and that what sentences in works of drama and literary art express are (...) ‘mock thoughts’. The early Wittgenstein closely followed Frege’s lead on this theme. One sees this, for example, in the Tractatus, where Wittgenstein announces that only sentential propositions model states of affairs whereas works of art are objects we perceive sub specie aeternitatis. By the early 1930s, however, Wittgenstein began to revise his view beyond his initial Frege-inspired standpoint. He came to insist that works of art can convey thoughts as well, but that thoughts do not model the world of facts and hence do not convey information about measurable objects and events. Rather, his contention was that aesthetically configured thoughts that artworks communicate impart information about our perspective on reality and reconfigure our view of life. To be more explicit, successful or ‘good’ works of art, in Wittgenstein’s view, can supply aesthetically instructive ‘gestures’ that open to living experience promising new ways of being. It is in this respect, he held, that artists ‘have something to teach’. (shrink)

This is a philosophical investigation of the nature of the limits of thought. Drawing on recent developments in the field of logic, Graham Priest shows that the description of such limits leads to contradiction, and argues that these contradictions are in fact veridical. Beginning with an analysis of the way in which these limits arise in pre-Kantian philosophy, Priest goes on to illustrate how the nature of these limits was theorised by Kant and Hegel. He offers (...) new interpretations of Berkeley's master argument for idealism and Kant on the antimonies. He explores the paradoxes of self reference, and provides a unified account of the structure of such paradoxes. The book concludes by tracing the theme of the limits of thought in modern philosophy of language, including discussions of the ideas of Wittgenstein and Derrida. (shrink)

What is the nature of a conceptual scheme? Are there alternative conceptual schemes? If so, are some more justifiable or correct than others? The later Wittgenstein already addresses these fundamental philosophical questions under the general rubric of "grammar" and the question of its "arbitrariness"--and does so with great subtlety. This book explores Wittgenstein's views on these questions. Part I interprets his conception of grammar as a generalized version of Kant's transcendental idealist solution to a puzzle about necessity. It also seeks (...) to reconcile Wittgenstein's seemingly inconsistent answers to the question of whether or not grammar is arbitrary by showing that he believed grammar to be arbitrary in one sense and non-arbitrary in another. Part II focuses on an especially central and contested feature of Wittgenstein's account: a thesis of the diversity of grammars. The author discusses this thesis in connection with the nature of formal logic, the limits of language, and the conditions of semantic understanding or access. Strongly argued and cleary written, this book will appeal not only to philosophers but also to students of the human sciences, for whom Wittgenstein's work holds great relevance. (shrink)

The demand for 'criteria of correctness' to identify recurring particulars in Wittgenstein's private language argument favors an idealist interpretation of quantum phenomena.The indeterminacy principle in quantum physics and the logic of the private language argument share a common concern with the limitations by which microphysical or sensation particulars can be reidentified. Wittgenstein's criteria for reidentifying particular recurrent private sensations are so general as to apply with equal force to quantum particulars, and to support the idealist thesis that quantum phenomena are (...) themselves essentially mental or dependent on mental occurrences. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 127.2 (2006) 309-312 [Access article in PDF] Mark Buchan. The Limits of Heroism: Homer and the Ethics of Reading. The Body, In Theory: Histories of Cultural Materialism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. x + 282 pp. Cloth, $65. Buchan's introduction challenges the critical consensus on the Odyssey as both "too teleological" and "not teleological enough." The epic's partisan perspective on its hero, (...) with an ethical universe designed to exculpate his violence, has been too long taken for granted. Meanwhile, critics do not take seriously enough the epic's insistence that Odysseus' return to his home is not the end he longs for. Buchan thus raises the hope for a genuinely new reading of the Odyssey, and to a great degree, the book lives up to its promise with close textual studies framed by Lacanian theory on human desire. Buchan's opening gambit of defining his ideas against a consensus grows less appealing, however, when it becomes a trope that cites only two or so scholars on any issue. The gesture conforms to Buchan's method of textual analysis, which exploits the provocative detail or juxtaposition, and his approach suggests how fruitfully psychoanalytic readings can expose a text's unconscious universe. But the lure of the big picture—the telos of the epic—irresistibly draws Buchan onto less yielding interpretive ground. Still, his results are illuminating for Homer and instructive about the limits of psychoanalytic interpretation.Buchan studies the "dangers of certain fantasies of the self" exploited by Odysseus in his return home (4). The fantasies that define the Phaeacians and Cyclopes are exposed and ruined through their encounters with Odysseus, in part because these peoples arrive at a correct interpretation of themselves too late. Odysseus has already gotten what he needs and left his victims with rocks hanging over them and a new sense of identity wrought by loss. Buchan's view of Odysseus is unexpected and provocative; it rejects his ethics and reads him purely as the agent of trauma that introduces those he meets to the human condition of desire. This style of analysis yields its best results in the early chapters on the "victims" of the returning hero: the Cyclops, the Phaeacians, and, with Menelaus, the sea-god Proteus.Each of these chapters reveals an artifact of human culture that comes into being at a moment of loss and thus marks an awakening to self-consciousness. These artifacts represent for the newly acculturated their loss as a predication of their humanity. Polyphemus' blinding causes the Cyclops to name him for the [End Page 309] first time, creating social language as a symptom of his loss and a concomitant desire for the Father as authority. Competition with Odysseus is the beginning of a truly human culture for the Phaeacians, who were formerly self-sufficient, never doubting themselves as contestants or fathers. When Odysseus defeats their athletes, they learn that their "games-without-loss" culture is no longer a sustainable system. Buchan's perspective yields arresting insights on both episodes, including a suggestive dialectic among the images of stone imperiling the Phaeacians, from the discus throw that opens an insurmountable gap to a mountain hanging over them when they vanish from our view. But Buchan's insights come at a cost of readerly indulgence, because they depend on a decidedly selective treatment of the text. For instance, he insists on Polyphemus' namelessness before he meets Odysseus and the lack among the Cyclopes of a father as an authority figure. His discussion of the Phaeacians requires the assumption that they have never lost a competition, although they compel every visitor to participate (197 and n. 29).Buchan's final study of a victim of an heroic nostos best illustrates the gains and costs of his method. Menelaus tricks Proteus into human desire by disguising himself and three comrades as seals: the god is compelled to count himself, a deft double entendre (4.453) to make up the counting unit of five by which he keeps track of his seals Proteus thus confounds... (shrink)

In the Preface of the Tractatus Wittgenstein presents his proposal of “drawing limits” separating sense from nonsense as a way to get rid of philosophical problems caused by “misunderstandings of the logic of our language.” Such limits, we will later discover, will be drawn by means of a method which allows one to determine whether a given projection of a strings of signs was made in accordance with the rules of logical syntax, or else violated them, thus generating (...) metaphysical propositions. Notwithstanding its centrality for the Tractatus, the idea of drawing such limits seems to be in tension with Wittgenstein’s actual procedure in most of the book, which from its very first numbered proposition introduces “metaphysical” theses again and again in order to achieve the results programmatically indicated in the Preface—hence the need for the self-undoing message of 6.54, urging the reader to recognize those propositions “as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb up beyond them.” That tension creates some of the most challenging questions in the debate about how to read the Tractatus—questions such as: how are we supposed to use Wittgenstein’s propositions as “steps in a ladder”? What exactly does “throwing the ladder away” amount to? And what does it mean to “see the world aright” after “overcoming” those propositions? This paper attempts to answer those questions by means of a close reading of an exemplary set of propositions dealing with solipsism and the limits of language. Although limited in scope, the hope is that such reading might stand as a test case for parallel readings of other parts of the book. (shrink)

Following the initiative of Abū Hāshim al-Jubbā'ī, the Baṣran Mu'tazilites rejected the view of language, dominant till then in the Islamic milieu, according to which humanity had received it by way of divine revelation, and defended the position that language had arisen by means of a human convention. On the Baṣran understanding of this convention, the connection between words and things was effected by means of a momentous act of intention to assign a name, which was revealed to another through (...) a bodily gesture or act of pointing. In considering the signifying powers of this bodily manifestation of intention, I discuss two points of difficulty, one internal and one external (grounded in Wittgenstein's critical framework) which beset the Baṣran Mu'tazilite account. (shrink)

The later Wittgenstein famously holds that an understanding which tries to run up against the limits of language bumps itself and results in nothing but plain nonsense. Therefore, the task of philosophy cannot be to create an ‘ideal’ language so as to produce a ‘real’ understanding in the first place; its aim must be to remove particular misunderstandings by clarifying the use of our ordinary language. Accordingly, Wittgenstein opposes both the sublime terms of traditional philosophy and the formal frameworks (...) of modern logics---and adheres to a pointedly casual, colloquial style in his own philosophizing. However, there seems to lurk a certain inconsistency in Wittgenstein’s ordinary language approach: his philosophical remarks frequently remain enigmatic, and many of the terms Wittgenstein coins appear to be highly technical. Thus, one might wonder whether his verdicts on the limits of language and on philosophical jargons might not be turned against his own practice. The present essay probes the extent to which the contravening tendencies in Wittgenstein’s mature philosophy might be reconciled. Section 2 sketches Wittgenstein’s general approach to philosophy and tracks the special role that the language of everyday life occupies therein. Section 3 reconstructs Wittgenstein’s preferred method for philosophy, which he calls perspicuous representation, and argues that this method implements an aesthetic conception of philosophy and a poetic approach to philosophical language, in which philosophical insights are not explicitly stated, but mediated through well-worded and creatively composed descriptions. Section 4 discusses how Wittgenstein’s philosophical poetics relates to artificial terminologies and grammars in philosophy and science. (shrink)

continent. 2.2 (2012): 66–75 ~*~ We’re Doomed. Pessimism is the night-side of thought, a melodrama of the futility of the brain, a poetry written in the graveyard of philosophy. Pessimism is a lyrical failure of philosophical thinking, each attempt at clear and coherent thought, sullen and submerged in the hidden joy of its own futility. The closest pessimism comes to philosophical argument is the droll and laconic “We’ll never make it,” or simply: “We’re doomed.” Every effort doomed to failure, every (...) project doomed to incompletion, every life doomed to be unlived, every thought doomed to be unthought. Pessimism is the lowest form of philosophy, frequently disparaged and dismissed, merely the symptom of a bad attitude. No one ever needs pessimism, in the way that one needs optimism to inspire one to great heights and to pick oneself up, in the way one needs constructive criticism, advice and feedback, inspirational books or a pat on the back. No one needs pessimism, though I like to imagine the idea of a pessimist activism. No one needs pessimism, and yet everyone—without exception—has, at some point in their lives, had to confront pessimism, if not as a philosophy then as a grievance—against one’s self or others, against one’s surroundings or one’s life, against the state of things or the world in general. There is little redemption for pessimism, and no consolation prize. Ultimately, pessimism is weary of everything and of itself. Pessimism is the philosophical form of disenchantment—disenchantment as chanting, a chant, a mantra, a solitary, monophonic voice rendered insignificant by the intimate immensity surrounding it. In pessimism, the first axiom is a long, low, funereal sigh. ~*~ We’re Still Doomed. No one has time for pessimism. After all, there are only so many hours in a day. Whatever our temperament, happy or sad, engaged or disengaged, we know pessimism when we hear it. The pessimist is usually understood as the complainer, forever pointing out what is wrong with the world without ever once offering a solution. But more often than not pessimists are the quietest of philosophers, submerging their own sighs within the lethargy of discontent. What little sound it makes is of interest to no one—“I’ve heard it all before,” “tell me something I don’t know,” sound and fury, signifying nothing. In raising problems without solutions, in posing questions without answers, in retreating to the hermetic, cavernous abode of complaint, pessimism is guilty of that most inexcusable of Occidental crimes—the crime of not pretending it’s for real. Pessimism fails to live up to the most basic tenet of philosophy—the “as if.” Think as if it will be helpful, act as if it will make a difference, speak as if there is something to say, live as if you are not, in fact, being lived by some murmuring non-entity both shadowy and muddied. Had it more self-assurance and better social skills, pessimism would turn its disenchantment into a religion, possibly calling itself The Great Refusal. But there is a negation in pessimism that refuses even such a Refusal, an awareness that, from the start, it has already failed, and that the culmination of all that is, is that all is for naught. Pessimism tries very hard to present itself in the low, sustained tones of a Requiem Mass, or the tectonic rumbling of Tibetan chant. But it frequently lets loose dissonant notes at once plaintive and pathetic. Often, its voice cracks, its weighty words abruptly reduced to mere shards of guttural sound. ~*~ Maybe It’s Not So Bad, After All. If we know pessimism when we hear it, this is because we’ve heard it all before—and we didn’t need to hear it in the first place. Life is hard enough. What you need is a change of attitude, a new outlook, a shift in perspective... a cup of coffee. If we have no ears for pessimism, this is because it is always reducible to something as reliably mutable as a voice. If pessimism is so frequently disparaged, it is because it brings everyone down, determined as it is to view each day as a bad day, if only by virtue of the fact that it is not yet a bad day. For pessimism the world is brimming with negative possibility, the collision of a bad mood with an impassive world. In fact, pessimism is the result of a confusion between the world and a statement about the world, a confusion that also prevents it from fully entering the hallowed halls of philosophy. If pessimism is so often dismissed, this is because it is often impossible to separate a “bad mood” from a philosophical proposition (and do not all philosophies stem from a bad mood?) The very term “pessimism” suggests a school of thought, a movement, even a community. But pessimism always has a membership of one—maybe two. Ideally, of course, it would have a membership of none, with only a scribbled, illegible note left behind by someone long forgotten. But this seems unrealistic, though one can always hope. ~*~ Anatomy of Pessimism. Though it may locate itself at the margins of philosophy, pessimism is as much subject to philosophical analysis as any other form of thought. Pessimism’s lyricism of failure gives it the structure of music. What time is to the music of sorrow, reason is to a philosophy of the worst. Pessimism’s two major keys are moral and metaphysical pessimism, its subjective and objective poles, an attitude towards the world and a claim about the world. For moral pessimism, it is better not to have been born at all; for metaphysical pessimism, this is the worst of all possible worlds. For moral pessimism the problem is the solipsism of human beings, the world made in our own image, a world-for-us. For metaphysical pessimism, the problem is the solipsism of the world, objected and projected as a world-in-itself. Both moral and metaphysical pessimism are compromised philosophically; moral pessimism by its failure to locate the human within a larger context, and metaphysical pessimism by its failure to recognize the complicity in the very claim of realism. This is how pessimism makes its music of the worst, a generalized misanthropy without the anthropos . Pessimism crystallizes around this futility—it is its amor fati , rendered as musical form. ~*~ Melancholy of Anatomy. There is a logic of pessimism that is fundamental to its suspicion of philosophical system. Pessimism involves a statement about a condition . In pessimism each statement boils down to an affirmation or a negation, just as any condition boils down to the best or the worst. With Schopenhauer, that arch-pessimist, the thinker for whom the philosopher and the curmudgeon perfectly overlap, we see a no-saying to the worst, a no-saying that secretly covets a yes-saying (through asceticism, mysticism, quietism), even if this hidden yes-saying is a horizon at the limits of comprehension. With Nietzsche comes the pronouncement of a Dionysian pessimism, a pessimism of strength or joy, a yes-saying to the worst, a yes-saying to this world as it is. And with Cioran yet another variation, futile yet lyrical, a no-saying to the worst, and a further no-saying to the possibility of any other world, in here or out there. With Cioran one approaches, but never reaches, an absolute no-saying, a studied abandonment of pessimism itself. The logic of pessimism moves through three refusals: a no-saying to the worst (refusal of the world-for-us, or Schopenhauer’s tears); a yes-saying to the worst (refusal of the world-in-itself, or Nietzsche’s laughter); and a no-saying to the for-us and the in-itself (a double refusal, or Cioran’s sleep). Crying, laughing, sleeping—what other responses are adequate to a life that is so indifferent? ~*~ Cosmic Pessimism. Both moral and metaphysical pessimism point to another kind, a pessimism that is neither subjective nor objective, neither for-us nor in-itself, and instead a pessimism of the world-without-us. We could call this a cosmic pessimism ... but this sounds too majestic, too full of wonder, too much the bitter aftertaste of the Great Beyond. Words falter. And so do ideas. And so we have a cosmic pessimism, a pessimism that is first and last a pessimism about cosmos , about the necessity and possibility of order. The contours of cosmic pessimism are a drastic scaling-up or scaling-down of the human point of view, the unhuman orientation of deep space and deep time, and all of this shadowed by an impasse, a primordial insignificance, the impossibility of ever adequately accounting for one’s relationship to thought—all that remains of pessimism is the desiderata of affects—agonistic, impassive, defiant, reclusive, filled with sorrow and flailing at that architectonic chess match called philosophy, a flailing that pessimism tries to raise to the level of an art form (though what usually results is slapstick). ~*~ Song of Futility. An ethics of futility pervades pessimism. Futility, however, is different from fatality, and different again from simple failure (though failure is never simple). Failure is a breakage within the heart of relations, a fissure between cause and effect, a fissure hastily covered over by trying and trying again. With failure, there is always plenty of blame to go around; it’s not my fault, it’s a technical difficulty, it’s a miscommunication. For the pessimist, failure is a question of “when,” not “if”—failure as a metaphysical principle. Everything withers and passes into an obscurity blacker than night, everything from the melodramatic decline of a person’s life to the banal flickering moments that constitute each day. Everything that is done undone, everything said or known destined for a kind of stellar oblivion. When scaled up in this way, failure becomes fatality. Fatality is the hermeticism of cause and effect. In fatality, everything you do, whatever you do, always leads to a certain end, and ultimately to the end—though that end, or the means to that end, remain shrouded in obscurity. Nothing you do makes a difference because everything you do makes a difference. Hence the effects of your actions are hidden from you, even as you deceive yourself into thinking that, at last, this time you will outwit the order of things. By having a goal, planning ahead, and thinking things through carefully, we attempt, in a daily Prometheanism, to turn fatality to our advantage, to gain a glimpse of an order that seems buried deeper and deeper in the fabric of the universe. But even fatality has its comforts. The chain of cause and effect may be hidden from us, but that’s just because disorder is the order we don’t yet see; it’s just complex, distributed, and requires advanced mathematics. Fatality still clings to the sufficiency of everything that exists... When fatality relinquishes even this idea, it becomes futility. Futility arises out of the grim suspicion that, behind the shroud of causality we drape over the world, there is only the indifference of what exists or doesn’t exist; whatever you do ultimately leads to no end, an irrevocable chasm between thought and world. Futility transforms the act of thinking into a zero-sum game. ~*~ Song of the Worst. At the center of pessimism lies the term pessimus , “the worst,” a term as relative as it is absolute. The worst is about as bad as it gets, “the worst” as “the best” in disguise, shrouded by the passage of time or the twists and turns of fortune. For the pessimist, “the worst” is the propensity for suffering that gradually occludes each living moment, until it eclipses it entirely, overlapping perfectly in death... which, for the pessimist, is no longer “the worst.” Pessimism is marked by an unwillingness to move beyond “the worst,” something only partially attributable to a lack in motivation. In pessimism “the worst” is the ground that gives way beneath every existent—things could be worse, and , things could be better. “The worst” invariably implies a value judgment, one made based on scant evidence and little experience; in this way, pessimism’s greatest nemesis is its moral orientation. Pessimism’s propositions have all the gravitas of a bad joke. Perhaps this is why the true optimists are the most severe pessimists—they are optimists that have run out of options. They are almost ecstatically inundated by the worst. Such an optimism is the only possible outcome of a prolonged period of suffering, physical or metaphysical, intellectual or spiritual. But does this not also describe all the trials and tribulations of each day—in short, of “life?” It seems that sooner or later we are all doomed to become optimists of this sort (the most depressing of thoughts...) ~*~ Song of Doom. Rather than serving as a cause for despair, gloom and doom are the forms of consolation for any pessimist philosophy. Neither quite affects nor quite concepts, gloom and doom transform pessimism into a mortification of philosophy. Doom is not just the sense that all things will turn out badly, but that all things inevitably come to an end, irrespective of whether or not they really do come to an end. What emerges from doom is a sense of the unhuman as an attractor, a horizon towards which the human is fatally drawn. Doom is humanity given over to unhumanity in an act of crystalline self-abnegation. Gloom is not simply the anxiety that precedes doom. Gloom is literally atmospheric, climate as much as impression, and if people are also gloomy, this is simply the by-product of an anodyne atmosphere that only incidentally involves human beings. Gloom is more climatological than psychological, the stuff of dim, hazy, overcast skies, of ruins and overgrown tombs, of a misty, lethargic fog that moves with the same languorousness as our own crouched and sullen listening to a disinterested world. In a sense, gloom is the counterpoint to doom—what futility is to the former, fatality is to the latter. Doom is marked by temporality—all things precariously drawn to their end—whereas gloom is the austerity of stillness, all things sad, static, and suspended, a meandering smoke hovering over cold lichen stones and damp fir trees. If doom is the terror of temporality and death, then gloom is the horror of a hovering stasis that is life. At times I like to imagine that this realization alone is the thread that connects the charnel ground Aghori and the graveyard poets. ~*~ Song of Spite. There is an intolerance in pessimism that knows no bounds. In pessimism spite begins by fixing on a particular object of spite—someone one hardly knows, or someone one knows too well; a spite for this person or a spite for all of humanity; a spectacular or a banal spite; a spite for a noisy neighbor, a yapping dog, a battalion of strollers, the meandering idiot walking in front of you on their smart phone, large loud celebrations, traumatic injustices anywhere in the world regurgitated as media blitz, spite for the self-absorbed and overly performative people talking way too loud at the table next to you, technical difficulties and troubleshooting, the reduction of everything to branding, spite of the refusal to admit one’s own errors, of self-help books, of people who know absolutely everything and make sure to tell you, of all people, all living beings, all things, the world, the spiteful planet, the inanity of existence... Spite is the motor of pessimism because it is so egalitarian, so expansive, it runs amok, stumbling across intuitions that can only half-heartedly be called philosophical. Spite lacks the confidence and the clarity of hatred, but it also lacks the almost cordial judgment of dislike. For the pessimist, the smallest detail can be an indication of a metaphysical futility so vast and funereal that it eclipses pessimism itself—a spite that pessimism carefully places beyond the horizon of intelligibility, like the experience of dusk, or like the phrase, “it is raining jewels and daggers.” ~*~ Song of Sleep. A paraphrase of Schopenhauer: what death is for the organism, sleep is for the individual. Pessimists sleep not because they are depressed, but because for them sleep is a form of ascetic practice. Sleep is the askesis of pessimism. If, while sleeping, we have a bad dream, we abruptly wake up, and suddenly the horrors of the night vanish. There is no reason to think that the same does not happen with the bad dream we call “life.” ~*~ Song of Sorrow. Nietzsche, commenting on pessimism, once castigated Schopenhauer for taking things too lightly. He writes: ...Schopenhauer, though a pessimist, really —played the flute. Every day, after dinner: one should read his biography on that. And incidentally: a pessimist, one who denies God and the world but comes to a stop before morality—who affirms morality and plays the flute... what? Is that really—a pessimist? We know that Schopenhauer did possess a collection of instruments, and we also know that Nietzsche himself composed music. There is no reason to think that either of them would ever banish music from the Republic of philosophy. But Nietzsche’s jibes at Schopenhauer are as much about music as they are about pessimism. For the pessimist who says no to everything and yet finds comfort in music, the no-saying of pessimism can only be a weak way of saying yes—the weightiest statement undercut by the flightiest of replies. The least that Schopenhauer could’ve done is to play the bass. I’m not a big fan of the flute, or, for that matter, wind instruments generally. But what Nietzsche forgets is the role that the flute has historically played in Greek tragedy. In tragedy, the flute ( aulos ) is not an instrument of levity and joy, but of solitude and sorrow. The Greek aulos not only expresses the grief of tragic loss, but it does so in a way that renders weeping and singing inseparable from each other. The classicist Nicole Loraux calls this the mourning voice . Set apart from the more official civic rituals of funerary mourning, the mourning voice of Greek tragedy constantly threatens to dissolve song into wailing, music into moaning, and the voice into a primordial, disarticulate anti-music. The mourning voice delineates all the forms of suffering—tears, weeping, sobbing, wailing, moaning, and the convulsions of thought reduced to an elemental unintelligibility. In the collapsed space between the voice that speaks and the voice that sings, pessimism discovers its mourning voice. Pessimism: the failure of sound and sense, the disarticulation of phone and logos . Have we rescued Schopenhauer from Nietzsche? Probably not. Perhaps Schopenhauer played the flute to remind himself of the real function of the mourning voice—sorrow, sighs, and moaning rendered indistinguishable from music, the crumbling of the human into the unhuman. Failure par excellence of pessimism. ~*~ Song of Nothing. In Buddhist thought, the First Noble Truth of existence is encapsulated in the Pali term dukkha , conventionally translated as “suffering,” “sorrow,” or “misery.” The Buddhist teachings are clear, however, that this is an objective claim, and not simply one point of view among others. Existence is suffering and sorrow—and yet this is not, the teachings tell us, a pessimistic attitude. It is likely that Schopenhauer, reading the Buddhist texts available to him, recognized some filiation with the concept of dukkha . But dukkha is a multi-faceted term. There is, certainly, dukkha in the usual sense of the suffering, strife, and loss associated with living a life. But this is, in turn, dependent on the finitude and temporality of dukkha , existence as determined by impermanence and imperfection. And this ultimately points to the way in which both suffering and finitude are grounded by the paradoxical groundlessness of dukkha as a metaphysical principle—the insubstantiality and the emptiness of all that is. Beyond what is worse to me, beyond a world ordered for the worst, there is the emptiness of dukkha as an impersonal suffering... the tears of the cosmos. In this context, it is easy to see how Schopenhauer’s pessimism attempts to compress all the aspects of dukkha into a nothingness at the core of existence, a Willlessness coursing through the Will. Though one thing for certain is that with Schopenhauer we do not find the “ever-smiling” countenance of Buddhism—or do we? The texts of the Pali Canon also contain lists of the different types of happiness—including the happiness of renunciation and the strange happiness of detachment. But Buddhism considers even the different types of happiness as part of dukkha , in this final sense of nothingness or emptiness. Perhaps Schopenhauer understood Buddhism better than he is usually given credit for. Thus the experiment of Schopenhauer’s philosophy—the point at which a Western pessimus and an Eastern dukkha overlap or exchange glances. Empty sorrow, a lyricism of indifference. The result is a strange, and ultimately untenable, nocturnal form of Buddhism. ~*~ Cioran once called music a “physics of tears.” If this is true, then perhaps metaphysics is its commentary. Or its apology. ~*~ Pessimism would be more mystical were it not for its defeatism. Mysticism is much too proactive for the pessimist, and pessimism too impassive even for the mystic. At the same time, there is something enviable about mysticism—despite its sufferings. There is a sense in which pessimists are really failed mystics. ~*~ You, the Night, and the Music. In a suggestive passage, Schopenhauer once noted that, “music is the melody to which the world is the text." Given Schopenhauer’s view on life—that life is suffering, that human life is absurd, that the nothingness before my birth is equal to the nothingness after my death—given all this, one wonders what kind of music Schopenhauer had in mind when he described music as the melody to which the world is text—was it opera, a Requiem Mass, a madrigal, or perhaps a drinking song? Or something like Eine kleine Nachtmusik , a little night music for the twilight of thought, a sullen nocturne for the night-side of logic, an era of sad wings sung by a solitary banshee. Perhaps the music Schopenhauer had in mind is music eliminated to non-music. A whisper would suffice. Perhaps a sigh of fatigue or resignation, perhaps a moan of despair or sorrow. Perhaps a sound just articulate enough that it could be heard to dissipate. ~*~ Teach me to laugh through tears. ~*~ Pessimism always falls short of being philosophical. My back aches, my knees hurt, I couldn’t sleep last night, I’m stressed-out, and I think I’m finally coming down with something. Pessimism abjures all pretenses towards system—towards the purity of analysis and the dignity of critique. We didn’t really think we could figure it out, did we? It was just passing time, taking a piss, something to do, a bold gesture put forth in all its fragility, according to rules that we have agreed to forget that we made up in the first place. Every thought marked by a shadowy incomprehension that precedes it, and a futility that undermines it. That pessimism speaks, in whatever voice, is the singing testimony to this futility and this incomprehension—take a chance and step outside, lose some sleep and say you tried... ~*~ Is there a music of pessimism? And would such a music be audible? ~*~ The impact of music on a person compels them to put their experience into words. When this fails, the result is a faltering of thought and language that is itself a kind of music. Cioran writes: “Music is everything. God himself is nothing more than an acoustic hallucination.” ~*~ If a thinker like Schopenhauer has any redeeming qualities, it is that he identified the great lie of Western culture—the preference for existence over non-existence. As he notes: “If we knocked on the graves and asked the dead whether they would like to rise again, they would shake their heads.” In Western cultures it is commonly accepted that one celebrates birth and mourns death. But there must be a mistake here. Wouldn’t it make more sense to mourn birth and celebrate death? Strange though, because the mourning of birth would, presumably, last the entirety of that person’s life, so that mourning and living would the be same thing. ~*~ To the musical idea of the harmony of the universe corresponds the philosophical principle of sufficient reason. Like the music of mourning, pessimism gives voice to the inevitable breakdown of word and song. In this way, music is the overtone of thought. ~*~ The Patron Saints of Pessimism. The patron saints of pessimism watch over suffering. Laconic and sullen, the patron saints of pessimism never seem to do a good job at protecting, interceding, or advocating for those who suffer. Perhaps they need us more than we need them. Lest we forget, there do exist patron saints of philosophy, but their stories are not happy ones. There is, for instance, the fourth century Saint Catherine of Alexandria, or Catherine of the Wheel, named after the torture device used on her. A precocious fourteen year old scholar, Catherine was subject to continual persecution. After all forms of torture failed—including the “breaking wheel”—the emperor finally settled for her decapitation, a violent yet appropriate reminder of the protector of philosophers. There are also patron saints of music and musicians, but theirs too are sad stories. In the second century, Saint Cecilia was also subject to persecution and torture. As she knelt to receive the blade that would separate her head from her body, she ardently sang a song to God. It took three attempts before she was fully decapitated, all the while she continued, perhaps miraculously, to sing. Does pessimism not deserve its own patron saints, even if they are unworthy of martyrdom? But in our search, even the most ardent nay-sayers frequently lapse into brief moments of enthusiasm—Pascal’s love of solitude, Leopardi’s love of poetry, Schopenhauer’s love of music, Nietzsche’s love of Schopenhauer, and so on. Should one then focus on individual works of pessimism? We could include Kierkegaard’s trilogy of horror— Sickness Unto Death , The Concept of Dread , and Fear and Trembling —but all these are undermined by their fabricated and unreliable authors. Besides, how can one separate the pessimist from the optimist in works like Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life , Shestov’s Postetas Clavium , or Edgar Saltus’ under-read The Philosophy of Disenchantment ? Even in cases where the entire corpus of an author is pessimistic, the project always seems incomplete—witness Cioran’s trajectory, from his first book, On the Heights of Despair , to the last unpublished notebooks of acrid and taut aphorisms. And this is to say nothing of literary pessimism, from Goethe’s sorrowful Werther, to Dostoevsky’s underground man, to Pessoa’s disquiet scribbler; Baudelaire’s spleen and ennui, the mystical Satanism of Huysmans and Strindberg, the hauntologies of Mário de Sá-Carniero, Izumi Kyoka, H.P. Lovecraft, grumpy old Beckett... even the great pessimist comedians. All that remains are singular, perhaps anomalous statements of pessimism, a litany of quotes and citations crammed into fortune cookies. Patron saints are traditionally named after a locale, either a place of birth or of a mystical experience. Perhaps the better approach is to focus on the places where pessimists were forced to live out their pessimism—Schopenhauer facing an empty Berlin lecture hall, Nietzsche mute and convalescent at the home of his sister, Wittgenstein the relinquished professor and solitary gardener, Cioran grappling with Alzheimer’s in his tiny writing alcove in the Latin Quarter. ~*~ There’s a ghost that grows inside of me, damaged in the making, and there’s a hunt sprung from necessity, elliptical and drowned. Where the moving quiet of our insomnia offers up each thought, there’s a luminous field of grey inertia, and obsidian dreams burnt all the way down. ~*~ If pessimism has any pedagogical value, it is that the failure of pessimism as a philosophy is inextricably tied to the failure of pessimism as voice. I read the following, from Shestov’s The Apotheosis of Groundlessness : When a person is young he writes because it seems to him he has discovered a new almighty truth which he must make haste to impart to forlorn humankind. Later, becoming more modest, he begins to doubt his truths: and then he tries to convince himself. A few more years go by, and he knows he was mistaken all round, so there is no need to convince himself. Nevertheless he continues to write, because he is not fit for any other work, and to be accounted a superfluous person is so horrible. (shrink)