Random thoughts when fleeing from "cable news"...

TUESDAY, AUGUST 29, 2023

...and from our modern discourse: We're pleased to report that Kevin Drum got thinking the other day about—

Well, we'll let him tell it himself:

A couple of days ago I was thinking, as one does, about the equivalence of gravitational mass and inertial mass. For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, all mass has two properties:

All mass has two properties? To learn what they are, just click here.

With Labor Day approaching, we had considered the possibility of spending a week on the opening passages of Philosophical Investigations. 

How would you introduce "the most important philosophy text of the last century" to a bunch of first-time readers? Every now and them, we dream of spending time on explorations of that type.

Along the way, along came a New York Times review of Nikhil Krishnan's new book. Headline included, Jennifer Szalai starts her review like this:

The Philosophers Who Used Word Puzzles to Understand the World

When setting out to write “A Terribly Serious Adventure: Philosophy and War at Oxford, 1900-1960,” Nikhil Krishnan certainly had his work cut out for him. How to generate excitement for a “much-maligned” philosophical tradition that hinges on finicky distinctions in language? Whose main figures were mostly well-to-do white men, routinely caricatured—and not always unfairly—for being suspicious of foreign ideas and imperiously, insufferably smug?

Krishnan, a philosopher at Cambridge, confesses up front that he, too, felt frustrated and resentful when he first encountered “linguistic” or “analytic” philosophy as a student at Oxford. He had wanted to study philosophy because he associated it with mysterious qualities like “depth” and “vision.” He consequently assumed that philosophical writing had to be densely “allusive”; after all, it was getting at something “ineffable.” But his undergraduate tutor, responding to Krishnan’s muddled excuse for some muddled writing, would have none of it. “On the contrary, these sorts of things are entirely and eminently effable,” the tutor said. “And I should be very grateful if you’d try to eff a few of them for your essay next week.”

“A Terribly Serious Adventure” is lively storytelling as sly “redescription”: an attempt to recast the history of philosophy at Oxford in the mid-20th century by conveying not only what made it influential in its time but also what might make it vital in ours...

In Szalai's rendering, the "philosophical tradition" which Krishnan explores is much-maligned but potentially vital in our age. For ourselves, a question about Wittgenstein comes to mind, though it's also applicable to the contemporaries under review in this book:

If Wittgenstein was the most significant philosopher of the last century, why is it that neither you nor anyone else can give even the slightest thumbnail description of what he "said" or wrote about?

God is dead, Nietzsche is said to have said. In the short essay from Professor Horwich which we've often cited, Wittgenstein is said to have said or implied something similar about the set of linguistic muddles known as traditional philosophy.

For what it's worth, here's the puzzling way Philosophical Investigations begins: 

1. "When they (my elders) named some object, and accordingly moved towards something, I saw this and I grasped that the thing was called by the sound they uttered when they meant to point it out. Their intention was shewn by their bodily movements, as it were the natural language of all peoples: the expression of the face, the play of the eyes, the movement of other parts of the body, and the tone of voice which expresses our state of mind in seeking, having, rejecting, or avoiding something. Thus, as I heard words repeatedly used in their proper places in various sentences, I gradually learnt to understand what objects they signified; and after I had trained my mouth to form these signs, I used them to express my own desires." (Augustine, Confessions, I. 8.)

These words, it seems to me, give us a particular picture of the essence of human language. It is this: the individual words in language name objects—sentences are combinations of such names.——In this picture of language we find the roots of the following idea: Every word has a meaning. This meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word stands.

Now think of the following use of language: I send someone shopping. I give him a slip marked "five red apples". He takes the slip to the shopkeeper, who opens the drawer marked "apples"; then he looks up the word "red" in a table and finds a colour sample opposite it; then he says the series of cardinal numbers—I assume that he knows them by heart—up to the word "five" and for each number he takes an apple of the same colour as the sample out of the drawer.——It is in this and similar ways that one operates with words.——"But how does he know where and how he is to look up the word 'red' and what he is to do with the word 'five'?"——Well, I assume that he acts as I have described. Explanations come to an end somewhere.—But what is the meaning of the word "five"?—No such thing was in question here, only how the word "five" is used.

So begins the book which was chosen as the most important philosophy text of the last century. Questions may come to mind:

What in the world was Wittgenstein talking or thinking about? Where did he go from there?

Is there any chance that this most important text actually had something of value to offer? Why is it that no one has the slightest idea what that supposedly is or was?

Our contemporary public discourse turns on nonsense and trivia. It's piddle and trivia all the way down, over and over again.

Could we ever turn to loftier thoughts? As Hemingway once so thoughtfully wrote, "Isn't it pretty to think so?"