Brian McAndrews wrote:
>
> Wittgenstein's Ladder:
> Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary
> Marjorie Perloff
>
> "My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me
> finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through
> them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder,
> after he has climbed up on it.)"
> Austere and uncompromising, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein had no
> use for the avant-garde art works of his own time. He refused to
> formulate an aesthetic
[snip]
I find this disingenuous. Wittgenstein and his sisters were
as I understand it, the richest people in 1930 Austria (albeit
LW ceded all his inheritance to his sisters so he wouldn't
have to think about money).
When the sisters were almost finished building their new
modern-architecture house
in Vienna, LW decided to make a few detail changes which
resulted in large expenditures and refinement on detail that
Mies van der Rohe could probably only have had fantasies of.
The Wittgenstein house is one of the great
individual works of modern
domestic architecture of the 20th century, maybe "up there"
with Bijouet and Charrot's (sp?) "Maison de Verre"???
This, of course, does not imply that LW had any "aesthetic"
theory.... And he never again ventured into architecture,
to the best of my [lack of] knowledge. (Are there some
fragmentary analogies perhaps between LW and Musil's "The Man
Without Qualities"???)
> Advance Praise for Wittgenstein's Ladder:
>
> "Wittgenstein proposed to use ordinary language for philosophy,
> Gertrude Stein used ordinary language for poetry.
[snip]
I have never heard anyone argue that Gertrude Stein
used ordinary language *for* poetry. On the other
hand, a bit like the Dadaists, she did indeed use ordinary
language *in* poetry (like the bricks in Wittgenstein's
language games???).
I fail to see where either Wittgenstein or Stein offers
any hope for the First World alienated workers of 2002,
much less for the alienated middle class youth of
the Middle East. Both seem to me to have
gotten off on semiotic selfr-gratification.
Can anyone show me that I have
missed something here? Please! We need all
the help we can get!
\brad mccormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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