josh blog
Ordinary language is all right.
One could divide humanity into two classes:
those who master a metaphor, and those who hold by a formula.
Those with a bent for both are too few, they do not comprise a class.
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'… it begins to look as though these investigations are essentially unbookable…'
Neighborhood child, Fourth of July, yelling: 'That's illegal!! That's illegal!!'.
('Do the terms really matter, then, as long as I'm feeling it? As long as I put myself into it somehow?' —As if any word could serve at any time to express whatever calls for expression!)
(Or: can you really think through something essentially expressive without drawing on your capacity for expressiveness? Could you possibly suppress it, or treat it as separable, partitionable, as if one could allow oneself expressiveness when out in the world and require of oneself inexpressiveness when trying to be serious in the study?)
(The effort to find satisfactory terms, to find the right words, is part of philosophy.)
(Note ca. p. 12: if we're essentially expressive in our words, our behavior, our responses, our lives, is there a special difficulty with giving expression to the inexpressive, i.e. with instantiating for reflection occasions on which we fall short of our full capacity for expressiveness, i.e., with giving and using examples of ourselves at our most inexpressive? —The imaginative, the figurative, as stable embodiments of the expressiveness only variably manifested, sustained, throughout our day-to-day lives, throughout what we do (for example, in philosophizing).)
'It is typical of my procedures in The World Viewed to invite words or concepts which are common, all but unavoidable, in speaking about film, and then try to discover what there is in these words and in my my experience of these objects that they should go together. This means I must often say things that will sound more or less familiar.'
In ordinary cases, we project words on our own authority. Artworks quiet us; we do not always know what to say, but may feel compelled by something over which we would normally retain our authority (in the form of power) to speak.