[this is from a bit of a letter i wrote to a philosophy pal of mine, we’re considering doing a directed reading together for our theses. this letter is a kind of case being made for wittgenstein being so important to me.]

Justin,
Facebook chess has been absolutely amazing by the way, I know I’m shit at it, but it’s still a lot of fun. Otherwise, I hope you’re keeping well.

I’m pretty excited about potentially working on something with/along side you next year. It’s been a bit difficult being away from school, and it’s upsetting that even more of the people I know and enjoy will be gone next year! In regards to Wittgenstein, I have no issues with telling you that it’s probably just a bit of a philosophy crush. For whatever reason, Wittgenstein just sticks with me. Although his outlook is somewhat original, and his methods of presentation, and the overall lore surrounding him is novel and interesting (both in terms of his ‘cult’ following, and otherwise) the ultimate ideas he presents and put forward are not very new at all. I think Wittgenstein is instead important because of the way in which he comes across these ideas, the context in which he is looking at them, and why he remains so difficult to read given the countless veins of thought that call him their originator. To me, he’s a bit like an Abraham, if I can put it so dramatically (and almost comically).

The central idea, and criticism that Wittgenstein has is that the external/internal divide is a misguided one. When speaking, when thinking, in terms of morality or metaphysics, everything we ‘get’ comes from the same ‘place’. This, supplemented with some interesting insight into the sceptical nature of consciousness and a nice articulation of ‘meaning as use’ is why, I think, he’s so interesting.

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There isn’t any one decent way in to Wittgenstein. I took Dharamsi’s Analytic course, and for an entire term (when I would attend) I was EXTREMELY confused. It wasn’t until the second term when reading people like Robert Brandom [Articulating Reasons], or in Keenan’s Social and Political reading Charles Taylor [Malaise of Modernity] and Michael Sandel [Liberalism and the Limits of Justice], or Dharamsi’s Idealism class reading Hegel [Phenomenology of Spirit, Philosophy of Right] that things started finally adding up. I was able to pursue how this central idea of ‘Public Personhood’ (as I am only somewhat calling it right now) operates in the world, and how and why there is so much tension between the ideological camps of ‘right and left’.I’m sure that someone more meticulous than I am would be able to pick this through in a much more clear and concise way, and far too often I try to see how as a whole these ideas operate (furthermore, that meticulous person might very well find that this whole project is horseshit.)

My further reading has been T.H. Green’s Prolegomena to Ethics, Tom Rockmore’s Marx after Marxism, Collingwood’s Idea of History and the collection of papers ‘The New Wittgenstein’ ed. Alice Crary and Rupert Read. (above all else, I recommend reading along side of Wittgenstein after sinking your teeth in to Philosophical Investigations Book I, and the a bit of the Tractatus)

For me, Wittgenstein is like an idealist. In the same camp as Hegel and T.H. Green. But he is an idealist in such a way that he only opens up the world of ‘idealism’ to the analytic tradition at large, and doesn’t necessarily advance it. A way in which he is a peer of the analytic community, criticizing his own tradition for ‘getting it wrong’.

Sometimes I like to think that Frege sent Wittgenstein to England as a kind of anti-analytic plant, a malicious anti-representationalist trojan horse that would spring and corrupt all of Cambridge and thus, the analytic heart. But that’s just me wanting philosophy to be more dramatic than it is… wow i just realized that makes me look like a complete philosophy geek.

Okay! Hope your holidays went well, and I hope that this gives you some insight in to why I’m so interested in Wittgenstein. Either that, or you’re going to be entirely confused and scared off. Cheers!
/Aaron

My favourite line in the whole thing is when they speak to the fellow who is going to be interpreting their wedding, and in discussing the preferred volume of music for them to enjoy the vibrations, he says; “If I know the deaf, they’ll just be talking anyway”.

Not only is it interesting on a dramatic level that this couple is interested in having their baby be what would normally be thought of as ‘impaired’, but what it really makes clear is how a language, and a form of communication constitutes entirely ones life. It questions entirely what a language is, and what it means to have a culture, or a way of life.

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What are the reasons a person would want to be deaf, or want someone to be deaf? Keeping in mind this is a question posed by someone who is very partial to what little hearing he has let after years of playing guitar too loud. The deaf community, by both choice and social obstruction, is obviously a very isolated and strong community.

By isolated, I mean strongly defined. That there is an obvious split between hearing and non-hearing people, for both sides. I say this not with any indecency in mind. It is merely the case that hearing and non-hearing people are separated by a host of social issues related to communication. Here is a physical issue with a person that is not related to gender, class or race (though of course these things are a factor), but instead the treatment of ‘them’ as a cultures has more to do with the complex notion of what we view as disability in general. (We might also be able to relate this to blindness, or motor paralysis in the same way, but hearing-impaired is especially interesting as it is directly communication related, all other aspects being equal.)

Somehow this occurs between the greater issues of gender or race, but remains a strong subset of social distinction. Furthermore it seemingly reworks our idea of what a language is, and more interestingly what a culture is.What is entirely articulates is how different a person’s world is given their form of communication. Their interests in being comfortable in their own language, and with their ‘own people’ so to speak. People that understand their predicament and are able to articulate and relate to the problems.

Although different, isn’t it interesting to relate this to somewhere such as Japan, in terms of culture/ethnic stake? That Japanese are living a certain life because not only their history, geography, economy has dictated it, but their language and for what that means in terms of the rules and boundaries that sets on a consciousness?

I’d like to make the case that there is no real distinction between mind and body, mind and world, or any inside and outside dichotomy. In order to show this, it requires a great deal of work in regard to foundationalism, and epistemology. Epistemology is the study of the base forms of knowledge. It is the area of philosophy that deals with the question “What can we know?” In doing so, we are opened to the foundations of knowledge, and all of those things assumed as the first premises. The issue of course, being that these premises are up for grabs themselves.

In working toward an understanding of epistemological foundations, let’s look at the grand-daddy of them all, Rene Descartes and The Meditations. The central claim in the Second Meditation is “Cogito Ergo Sum”, or “I Think Therefore I Am”. Often touted as a kind of self-help mantra whereby your willing something to be the case makes it the case, this conception is entirely missing the substance of Cartesian epistemology.
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“I Think Therefore I Am” is the central building-block of what the west views as the human consciousness. Most all social and political philosophy is built upon this notion of individual thought. If not this particular notion of individual, than one that is similar to it. Descartes articulates is well, and this is why he is so important. Descartes sets out to find the primary germ of knowledge. That which cannot be doubted or questioned, where and how far does our consciousness go? By eliminating all forms of doubt about the world, that which cannot be doubted would be the basic form of knowledge.

I have convinced myself that there is absolutely nothing in the world, no sky, no earth, no minds, no bodies. Does it now follow that I too do not exist? No: if I convinced myself of something then I certainly existed. But there is a deceiver of supreme power and cunning who is deliberately and constantly deceiving me. In that case I too undoubtedly exist, if he is deceiving me; and let him deceive me as much as he can, he will never bring it about that I am nothing so long as I think that I am something. So after considering everything very thoroughly, I must finally conclude that this proposition, I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind. (Meditation 2, quote from Stanford Encyclopedia entry on Descartes’ Epistemology)

Regardless of everything that can be doubted, doubt is an action of the mind, a thought. Thinking is an action and such an action requires an actor. I am, therefore, that actor. This is the base form of what we are as conscious beings. That we think, allows us to exist. This establishes the connection of mind to the world.

However, the question is whether this is the actual foundation, or base form of knowledge. Indeed, the thought experiment works in the way it is set up. We doubt all things that are doubtable, but that we are engaging in the act of doubting must constitute something for us. (If you look back on the Schrödinger series, you might recognize this as similar to the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?“) That there is something concrete is not interesting in the end, this idea of ‘Something rather than nothing’ is not telling of anything more than what we commonly come to while brushing our teeth in the morning. instead what Descartes assumes is telling of the development of his epistemology.

Is Descartes truly at the furthest stretches of the mind? Is this act of doubt ridding all assumptions of the world and scientifically viewing the foundation of truth? Is he seeing where the software of the mind is written to the metal of the world’s hardware? Consider that by doubting all empirical aspects of the world, Descartes comes to the idea that the act of doubting constitutes our being a thing in the universe. Not only does this assume an object-oriented universe, but the assumption (even in the above quote) is still certain of a self, an actor separate yet connected to the world at large.

How is it that we go from the problem of consciousness, to the idea of something rather than nothing, to a split of mind and body? There is a lack of evidence if we are to take the Cartesian model.

To step back from the problem at hand, think about a language that is restricted to present tense, and what it would mean for a society to be without a sense of time. It is possible to imagine isn’t it? How does this limit/advance the world of these speakers? How is it augmented? The answer is; in more ways than we might know. In this same way that there are more possibilities of consciousness depending on our notion of present-tense, the issue of doubt, or distinctions and assumptions of mind and world might be problems of the language that we speak.

Returning to Cogito Ergo Sum, Descartes assumes there is a world separate from him, and is merely questioning his access to it. The act of doubting all empirical senses of the world has not dissolved the idea of there being a world separate from our minds. Furthermore, ‘Cogito Ergo Sum’ assumes an object oriented universe, and the thinker as an actor therein, that the world is separate from its experiencer.

The question then, in keeping with what we have been looking at so far in Mk I and Mk II is whether this notion of mind and body is a viable distinction. The case could be made that there is no such problem. For we are required to both doubt and assume to make any and all every day actions. Their solidity is a build up of habitual practises in that action-based histories. We cannot assume anything outside of what we know.

We don’t really need proof of an external world, because it’s not a problem that we actually have. There is no real reason to assume that the world is not out there and that our consciousness is connected to it. Every act is a processed act. Processed, in that it has been wrung out in the washing of assumption and speculation. Our knowledge all come from the same place, that’s why this text is understandable and why even if there is a hint of concern of the mind/body problem, we can still get up tomorrow morning, brush our teeth and go to work.

What is freedom really? What does a person mean when they say their freedom is impeded upon? What do we mean when we talk of government (the verb, not the noun)?

This of course relates to the most “Introductory” of “Intro” questions “Are we as human beings in control of our own will, or are we determined by our biologies, god or some other higher control?”. I would say that how you answer this question relates entirely to several issues we’ve touched on so far. Namely, the question of ’something rather than nothing’, and the majority of the ‘A Cat Named Schrodinger‘ series that looks at epistemological foundations.

A podcast I’ve been listening to for some time now is Philosophy Bites, which is a short philosophy podcast that is very well produced and well presented. As an aside, far too often ‘philosophy’ podcasts, blogs, etc. are too whimsical, mild and broad (the present company included!). Bites is a short and concise presentation of an idea or notion or thinker often by someone who has committed a great deal of their own work to the topic at hand. I highly recommend this as it stays true to the tradition and the academic pursuit itself, in the format of a kind of interview or seminar.

On a recent edition of Philosophy Bites was Quentin Skinner and his attempt to define the state by way of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan. The reason I bring this particular discussion up is not for any specific contention with Hobbes, or Skinner’s interpretation, but that it is all together a typical and well presented view of ‘the State’ and what we typically think it means ‘to be governed’ thereby making a case for how we typically view the notion of freedom, and freedom of will.

Hobbes is the grandfather of the liberal democracy, and furthermore this idea of Leviathan is the foundation of all social and political philosophy thereafter. Also, for the upcoming Letters to Nana I’ll be discussing the idea of ‘Social Contract‘ and ‘State of Nature‘ at length, and this might help with some clarification. (Although, saying that it is by no means required listening. These are very accessible ideas!)

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Essentially, Hobbes makes the case that we as human beings, at our most natural and uninterrupted stage, are ultimately free. That, before we lived in cities with families and governments, our purest selves were animalistic brutes, bent on only our own interests. With the incorporation of the state and our families and our social ties, we give up a kind of ‘right to everything’ in exchange for a kind of civilization. All the while, these brutish doppelgangers scheme inside of us.

This is why the prisoner’s dilemma is considered a given, why we think of breaking the law as the loss of one’s composure and why we continue to blindly economically support a system that assures us that blind support is a bad thing. (that was really meant to be an aside remark…) Freedom, in this case as we are discussing it, is the absence of impediments. It is a freedom from obstacle, or life of least resistance. This is how we typically think of being free, that we are ‘unchained’ from our problems that ‘tie us down’ etc.

It’s not surprising that at this point you might be asking why this is interesting at all, or how freedom could be anything but what we’ve outlined here. What of the ‘freedom’ of interest? In the Hobbes example of the ‘natural state’, we are entirely sure of our own interest and act upon them. How are we ‘free’ if we are merely slaves to our own biological functions?

Instead of maintaining that the external social ‘obstacles’ in our lives (government, taxes, family, obligation, etc.) are impediments, consider that these are the only aspects that constitute us. Consider a life without these things, are we able to maintain the same personality without these ‘obstacles’? Furthermore, without this social infrastructure, are we even people? This notion of freedom is entirely misplaced if it does not account for how our social ties are necessary for the development of our consciousness.

From Charles Taylor in What’s Wrong with Negative Liberty

“Freedom can’t just be the absence of external obstacles, for there may also be internal ones. And nor may the internal obstacles be just confined to those that the subject identifies as such, so that he is the final arbiter; for he may be profoundly mistaken about his purposes and about what he wants to repudiate. And if so, he is less capable of freedom in the meaningful sense of the word.”

The issue at hand is that this notion of freedom might in fact be unfounded, and impossible to actually achieve. Even though our consciousness depends on rules, and structures of information in order for there to be content of the mind, we consistently and ignorantly value an animalistic and self-centred existence masked as a supposed freedom.

All that we have are the rules and structures of social interaction; there is no prior to these institutions. For indeed, prior to these institutions, we are not even sentient, let alone sapient beings. It is not possible to discern which ‘feelings’ to follow, for how are we to know that they are actually what we really want if we are essentially bestial?

If our goal is a ’state of nature’, what would a state of nature, free of social bias, look like? The question is as valuable as asking “what does nothing look like,” in the same sense that we cannot see ‘nothing’ if ‘nothing’ is the absence of all things. We cannot tap in to this (seemingly) natural sense, for it is entirely unnatural and as artificial as the biased social life that we think we are living in.

I have always thought that philosophy was somehow worthwhile in of itself. Whereby studying great texts and engaging in discussions of great ideas, I was performing some sort of interesting and inherently important project for the world at large. After all, these writers are the people who have been in the business of making and breaking history. The leaders of revolution, the upheaval of cultural norms, the transformation of entire belief systems has occurred as a result of their ideas. The Enlightenment, the Da-Da movement, the Bolshevik revolution, the Protestant Reformation, these are all examples of tremendous social change resulting from philosophical practises.

I would argue that philosophy is the root of all of these things, and that any development on the theoretical side of a discipline such as political theory, literary theory or theology is philosophical. Furthermore, these instances are the very kind of act that philosophy is. I would say that Philosophy’s task, speaking in this grandiose and extravagant way, is the ideological development of humanity. The study of Philosophy, which we do here in the academy, is more on side of the development, maintenance and education of that ideological development; however, it is no more in control of it than the average hobo off the street.

This is not to say that philosophy is a project to be taken lightly nor is this an evolutionary account of ideas. The main purpose of Philosophy is the development of a better way of living. “Better” might be construed as more efficient, more profitable, more economically viable than previous periods of time history. Instead, I would want to make the case that ‘better’ ought to be for the development of a commonality among human beings, an organic and moral way of living together for a kind of humanitarian good.

The original notion presented of ‘government’, that ‘freedom’ is a freedom from is detrimental to the project of philosophy and above all, it encourages self-interested activity. It provides an unfounded excuse for the horrific things that we do for one another. It also breeds an ignorance to reasoning and justification in that it purports a kind of pre-self, or second self. In fact, it is awkward to even question the concept of freedom at all, for of course we act as though we’re freely in control of our lives as it is, regardless of whether it is the case or not.

Philosophy’s task is an active and ongoing one. It is at the head of all ideological revolution, political action, economic development, social relationships and self-reflection. Philosophy is entirely accessible to anyone at any time; in fact we do it every day.

Government, as in the verb, is not something we ought to be avoiding, but strongly developed. The human consciousness, as I intend to begin to make the case, is founded on rules and laws. The social system, and the government of that system on the human consciousness are one in the same thing. Our societies are us, and we are them.

Hobbes is only being used here as presenting the notion of a State of Nature, and the Social Contract. I have really not done justice to this idea. There are many versions of this argument, with many variations, and interpretations on those variations. This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what I’m trying to outline here. Whether or not Hobbes makes a case for freedom in the ‘positive’, or ‘negative’ way, I do not know. I have always read Hobbes in the negative light, but this might be a mistake.

Nonetheless, this has only been a suggestion that the way we typically think of ‘free will’ might be a misguided and ignorant view.

What does it mean to say that a thing is “Without Meaning”. It cannot be that the thing in question is a vessel which is empty of a kind of substance that we call meaning. As if it is a difference between there being the physical constructional attributes of a thing, and then the quality or function of it.

To talk about meaning as though it has an object and a content is to entirely miss the point about meaning. Is our language so exact and inflexible?

“Please, Mind your Step. When crossing … be careful of the footing sufficiently. Understood beforehand because the responsibility can not be assumed about the accident in case and so on.”

The meaning gets across, almost entirely to the same degree as it would in ‘proper’ English. It is the case that the linguistic structure fails, but this sentence is meaningful, is it not?

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We tend to forget that it is our practices and actions that define the terms, that how we use a thing is also how we describe it. Using a language is not like walking a tightrope. Even if there are mistakes; if my grammatical structure is incorrect, or if I miss out on particular words, spell them wrong, or mix in hand gestures, it is entirely possible to still convey meaning.

Furthermore, in reading this garbled English [above], we are not converting individual terms to proper English structures, making sense of it in its proper format and then responding. We read, do, make, say, think all together at all times, all at once. It is one motion, trial and error.

The ability of being able to utter the name of a thing suggests there is already an immense amount of meaningfulness going on about that thing. If were to be without meaning, it would not be recognizable. To be unrecognizable is to be meaningless, the things we can not talk about are the things that are without meaning. There are no examples of meaninglessness because it’s entirely superfluous to talk about the unimaginable.

What you might then further be concerned with is this notion of ‘nothing. One might turn to Leibnez’s question of “Why is there something rather than nothing?”. Even assumes that there is such a thing as a nothing, and that its competition or contrast is something. But if nothing is a something, than what are we worried about? We choose between a nothing-something and a something-something? There is no such thing as a ‘nothing’ really. To even utter that sentence gives it too much credit.

From T.H. Green’s Prolegomena to Ethics:

§70… The most primitive germ from which knowledge can be developed is already a perception of fact, which implies the action upon successive sensations of a consciousness which holds them in relation, and which therefore cannot itself be before or after them, or exist as a succession at all.

There is a universal bias to the viewing of any and all things. It is a bias that can be examined and discussed, but never lifted. For if you were to ‘lift the lens’ so-to-speak, you would not recognize what you were looking at. The recognition of a thing already carries a host of networked meanings. Neither before, or after the other aspects in the network, it is everything together, all at once.

‘a thing (an object in the world) is meaningless and is only invigorated with meaning by my viewing of it’

is entirely off track of how a thing has meaning, and about what meaning is entirely. there is no back and forth on meaninglessness. things that are without meaning are things that are unknowable, and really have no worth (or possibility) of explanation.

are the words on paper dead? no. entirely not. the point is that nothing is dead, if it enters in to your consciousness it is meaningful, it is something.

the recognition of an object suggests already that it has some kind of semantic weight. the spectrum of meaning is the spectrum of reality.

it depends on a kind of horizon of consciousness, not in ‘what you can see’ but in ‘what you can know’.

how does it come about that an arrow points?

with all this in mind, let us think then about perspective.

the issue at hand might only be problematic in our pre-conceptions of it. for example:

Mathematically, in space and time parallel lines will never meet. However, we assuming here in this mathematical proof that we can have such a thing as a ‘god’s eye view’ or an objective viewpoint. Although it is the case that on paper we can draw itand on the ground we can follow it, but doesn’t it say something that we can truly never see a straight line? Even from space, there is always a concave.

Perhaps the problems what we encounter in quantum physics and in theories of time and space (as they also apply to issues of morality, or social contract) is that we are looking at the world entirely in the wrong way, and assuming that we can look at it through a clean lense.

Wittgenstein has really made an impact on me, or more specifically, the experiences I’ve had in studying philosophy and the history of ideas has been expressed best by a Wittgensteinian view. I won’t lie to you, he’s kind of a hero of mine (see the title of this freakin’ website). However, the Wittgenstein I have a crush on might not be the Wittgenstein that so many others have had interest in…

The New Wittgenstein is a collection of papers and talks that are linked only in their interpretation of Wittgenstein as being alternative to any contemporary main-stream view. Perhaps I shouldn’t say “alternative”, the editor and author of the introduction describes it as “unorthodox”, and this is the very complex crux of what is “New” about this Wittgenstein.

It seems insanely difficult to explain such a complex problem such as this: that the ‘traditional’ Wittgensteinian view is incorrect, and the criticisms of that view are also incorrect, and the real goal of Wittgenstein’s writings are something different entirely from what has typically been thought.

Let’s back up for a moment and figure out that the hell that even means.

The traditional view of Wittgenstein is that there is a difference between early and late Wittgensteinian thought. Early Wittgenstein wrote the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as a soldier during the First World War, and published it soon after. The Tractatus, traditionally speaking, is seen as developing a perfectly logical language to perfectly represent the world around us. This follows that all languages are built atop a logical grammatical structure, and our goal as philosophers is to dissect and make efficient our terms and concepts.

The later Wittgenstein is represented best by the Philosophical Investigations which was published after his death. The Investigations are a collection of notes and lectures by Wittgenstein comprised of two parts. Part I being a completed work ready for publishing yet had never been published by Wittgenstein, and Part II being a series of notes compiled by other editors, people in control of his estate, students, etc. This work is seen as a departure of the early Wittgenstein, and has a variety of interpretations. The most common is that the late Wittgenstein becomes skeptical of the logical perfection of language, and makes a case that philosophy is a kind of anomaly of language, that we can never truly convey the full meanings of our words and concepts of “cat” or “slab”, let alone “free-will” or “truth”. Other interpretations suggest that Wittgenstein makes further his case for the logical perfection of language by furthering the notion of a ‘private language‘.

The framework that Wittgenstein provides in his life’s work and teaching is measured in century of philosophical work that has followed. Nearly every major thinking in the Western world ends up being influenced by Wittgenstein. Some take the original Tractatus view and apply it to the Investigations to produce something like a Jerry Fodor, or Noam Chomsky. Others take the ‘departure’ of the late Wittgenstein very seriously to the extent of socially constructed institutions of language that Richard Rorty would make a case for. The differences between the philosophers mentioned here, or those that exist on either ’side’ of the early/late distinction are far too great and it is difficult to plead all of their cases fairly here, but what is important to understand is that all of the philosophy being done, all the problems and the structures in the past eighty-or-so years have been directly influenced and articulated by the books that have come out of this one man’s brain. This framework, and the setup of the ealry/late dichotomy is what we term in relation to the new Wittgenstein, as the old Wittgenstein.

The new Wittgenstein has little difference between the dichotomy of early and late. Although there are differences between the Tractatus and the Investigations the New view tends to reconsider the Tractatus as purposing something much different than the logical positivist’s project. There is, however, a lack of consistency in the new position except to say that it questions the dichotomy of the ‘perfect language’ or early Wittgenstein, and the ’socially constructed language’ or late Wittgenstein.

“These papers claim that one of Wittgenstein’s main aims throughout his work is getting us to see that the idea of an external standpoint on language is thoroughly confused and that its abandonment is accordingly without consequences for our entitlement to our basic epistemic ideals. Our willingness to insist that abandoning the idea does have such consequences is, by the lights of these papers, a sign that we are still participating in the confusion Wittgenstein seeks to address. This understanding of Wittgenstein as trying to free us in a quite radical manner from the idea of an external standpoint is what licenses talk, in reference to the papers, of a therapeutic aspiration. It is in so far as the papers represent Wittgenstein’s philosophy as therapeutic in this sense - in a sense which, importantly, constitutes a divergence from standard interpretations of his work at both periods - that they suggest a fundamentally different kind of continuity in his thought and thus make a novel contribution to Wittgenstein scholarship.”

from page 4 of the Introduction to The New Wittgenstein by Alice Crary

The reoccurring theme in the new writers is that Wittgenstein’s project has been entirely misunderstood as positing a theory of the world. His work was to manage something entirely different than prescribing solutions to existing philosophical problems. Instead, philosophy’s project is therapeutic. Therapeutic whereby we are in constant question of our epistemic commitments and assumptions, and at all times willing to change them and give them up for new ones. It is, in some sense, a logical positivism and a perfection of linguistic structures, but in knowing that it can never be accomplished in the matter in which we’ve once thought.

The more I read, the more I wonder about how and why Wittgenstein was so misunderstood. Frege’s attempt to implant an idealist in to Russel’s positivist Britain? Russel’s attempt to quell a British idealist uprising? I don’t know about you, but I am fascinated with philosophical love triangles/conspiracies.

There is so much more work to be done with this…