On Sun, 25 May 1997, [email protected] (John King) wrote:
>Not having a philosophical background, I'm not at all sure what you mean or
>how J fits in. I wonder if you might care to elaborate as EJ is not someone
>who traditionally inhabits the orbits of people like Wittgenstein for
>instance. If anything, do not EJ's view on authorship, on writing, on
>reading the world (and not just in the "writing" of the pen and the press)
>in the form of the infinite play of forms within morphological regularities
>(Linneus' classification of nature as a form of metaphysical encoding of
>Platonic certainties is very important to EJ's later world view) stand in
>some contrast to Wittgenstein who (in my very primitive understanding)
>places the divine and the metaphysical outside the sphere of language? And
>indeed reduces language from something revelatory to various games played by
>their own rules...
>
>JK
It was just a marginal note about EJ's texts cited in the discussion
here.
Desinvolture is a Latin word that makes me recall Ryle's famous 'clever
clown' argument. What makes a clown's performance clever? The cleverness of the
clown's performance is a characteristic of the performance, not of the clown's
mind. Similarly, desinvolture is a a feature of actions, not of inner states.
As for Wittgenstein, a mystic thinker, his philosophical views on
language are, of course, very far from those of EJ, though he was an attentive
reader of Heidegger.
Larbaud Jr.
