Philosophy

Ours in a high and lonely destiny

What am I doing, blogging? After about 180 entries, this question nags. It's tempting to answer it casually: "just fooling around with ideas." And maybe, given the amount of pretense in academic writing, that's the best answer. But I think it is a little better to say: "I am doing approximately what Wittgenstein was doing in Philosophical Investigations, and I am respecting an ideal of intellectual efficiency that also informs that work.

In Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein pulls together remarks from many independent trains of thought into a very loose work. The remarks are provocative and short, and he has usually moved on to substantially new material within a page. The short pieces are self-contained, can be read individually with profit; they also contribute to a big project.

Wittgenstein's way of working preserves a lot of his basic material. What one remembers from the Investigations are the examples and metaphors. "If a lion could talk, we wouldn't understand it." "A wheel that turns, although nothing else turns with it, is not part of the mechanism." One turns that sort of thing up, all the time, in reflection, and a more normal way of working is to publish only that stuff that one can integrate into a long, carefully developed essay. That means that lots of material gets left behind and also that the material one uses gets locked into a particular use, a particular interpretation. That "locking in" is perfectly appropriate sometimes, but other times, the metaphor or example is at the heart of what one is thinking, and one's development of it secondary.

Wittgenstein has preserved a great mass of philosophic material with a pretty light apparatus around it. Those who read his work can easily turn the material to their own purposes.

When one only has 70-90 years, this is a pretty smart use of time and intellectual energy.

Viva la blog!