At 5:43 PM -0500 11/18/02, Selma Singer wrote:
Wittgenstein had a great deal to say about getting out of that box.
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> Selma
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Hi Selma,
Wittgenstein's entire adult life was spent doing just as you
suggest above. The analogy he often used was:
To show the fly the way out of the fly bottle' (Philosophical Investigations # 309)
Ludwig
Wittgenstein spent the last 18 months of his life (he knew he was
dying of cancer) writing about what we can know for certain.
These writings were published after his death in the book_ On
Certainty_ Blackwell, 1969.
I would like to
quote a short portion that he wrote 3 days before his
death:
"Is it wrong for me to be guided in my actions by the propositions of
physics? Am I to say I have no good ground for doing so? Isn't this precisely what we call 'a good ground'?
Supposing we met people who did not regard that as a telling reason. Now, how do we imagine this? Instead of physics, they consult an oracle. (And for that we consider them primitive.). Is it wrong for them to consult an oracle and be guided by it?- If we call this "wrong" aren't we using our language game as a base from which to combat theirs?
And are we right or wrong to combat it? Of course there all all sorts of slogans which will be used to support our proceedings.
When two principles really do meet which cannot be reconciled with one another, each man declares the other a fool and a heretic.
I said I would 'combat' the other man,- but wouldn't I give him reasons? Certainly; but how far do they go? At the end of reasons comes persuasion. (Think what happens when missionaries convert natives.)."
It is interesting that he refers to 'natives' in the last
line.
I read this passage as describing two very different ways of
being in the world. Some people rely on science to show them the WAY;
others rely on dream and vision. An example of what happens to
language if dream and vision is the WAY follows:
Ruth Beebe Hill writing a novel about the Lakota (Sioux) alerts readers with this 'warning:
To the Reader
Admit, assume, because, believe, could, doubt, end, expect, faith, forget, forgive, guilt, how, it, mercy, pest, promise, should, sorry, storm, them, us, waste, weed- neither these words nor the conceptions for which they stand appear in this book; they are the whiteman's import to the New World, the newcomers contribution to the vocabulary of the man he called Indian. Truly the parent Indian families possessed neither these terms nor their equivalents". Ruth Beebe Hill, Hanta Yo, Warner Books, 1979 -
Obviously the world as described by western science would
make absolutely no sense to a people who live with such certainty.
Which of the above concepts would you have trouble 'living' (being?)
without? Amazing how concepts in-form us eh?
