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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16 Mar '13 10:29:38 PM

Cover from torrents; reach out and touch.

16 Mar '13 07:35:31 AM

'The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves, but providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people from expressing themselves, but rather, force them to express themselves. What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, or ever rarer, the thing that might be worth saying.'

16 Mar '13 06:50:54 AM

It's as if there's a wish to be able to say: this is all that need be said about life.

16 Mar '13 06:03:33 AM

The weirdest thing about the Tractatus isn't the logic or the ethics or the nonsense or the being silent or whatever—it's the sudden appearance of life in the book. 'The world and life are one'—where the fuck did that come from?!

15 Mar '13 08:28:27 AM

In the end, in the 'Lecture on Ethics', the existence of language itself is what Wittgenstein wishes to say expresses what he seeks to express by describing the various experiences he puts forward in his examples (wonder at the existence of the world or the miraculous, a feeling of absolute safety, a feeling of guilt).

15 Mar '13 06:05:02 AM

The ground cleared in Investigations §118, when everything interesting (great, important, as it were buildings) is seemingly destroyed, is 'the ground of language'.

14 Mar '13 11:08:46 PM

Wittgenstein is already speaking as a 'we' in the second paragraph of the Investigations; and acknowledging his position relative to it ('so it seems to me'). And he does it in order to read a passage in a book whose author speaks as an 'I'.

13 Mar '13 10:14:32 PM

'Stop! You're making me tired! Experiment, don't signify and interpret! Find your own places, territorialities, deterritorializations, regime, lines of flight! Semiotize yourself instead of rooting around in your prefab childhood and Western semiology.'

13 Mar '13 03:51:53 AM

I'm always convinced that Descartes betrays himself by the sublimity of his examples: who distinguishes 'the sky, the earth, the seas' from one another? Who does it on the basis of anything?