The Hefty Section

Pleix -- Birds

The Fiery Furnaces -- Ex Guru

Shoparama Christmas Craft Fair

This continues to blow me away.

Future Primitive -- NYC

Excerpt from "The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal" by Matt McCormick

He Was Once

PART I

PART II

Intelligent Design

I have been reading Wittgenstein's On Certainty for the past week or two. He wrote the book (really a collection of notes, published posthumously) in response to two much earlier essays by the philosopher G.E. Moore, "Proof of the External World" and "Defence of Common Sense." The notes were made throughout the last two years of Wittgenstein's life, and the last set of entries is dated two days before his death, in April of 1951. Moore's essays, as perhaps you can deduce from their titles, contain realist arguments against skepticism and idealism. Wittgenstein's point of entry is Moore's amusing and celebrated proof of the existence of the "external" world: 'Here is one hand and here is another. There are at least two objects that exist in the world. Therefore the external world itself exists.' There's more to it than that, but that's the gist.

Wittgenstein's arguments about the nature of certainty are neither realistic nor skeptical in nature. He wants instead to describe the philosophical problem of epistemological certainty as essentially linguistic in nature. The nature of certainty, he argues, lies in our language games about belief, doubt, and knowledge. Here is a characteristic passage about the nature of knowledge and doubt and sensicality:

I know that a sick man is lying here? Nonsense! I am sitting at his bedside, I am looking attentively into his face. --So I don't know, then, that there is a sick man lying here? Neither the question nor the assertion makes sense.

The idea is that philosophers want the concepts of doubt and knowledge to extend indefinitely into intellectual space, but that it constitutes a misuse of our language to insist that they do. Wittgenstein is resolute that it simply does not make sense to ask, for instance, whether one's hand does or does not exist. To use a phrase from Philosophical Investigations, this is an instance of language "going on holiday."

I came across a comment in the middle of the book that made me think about the 'intelligent design' debate and the great confusion that surrounds it. At section 236, Wittgenstein says

"If someone said 'The earth has not long been ...' what would he be impugning? Do I know?

"Would it have to be what is called a scientific belief? Might it not be a mystical one? Is there any absolute necessity for him to be contradicting historical facts? or even geographical ones?"

The idea here is that words mean in a great variety of ways and that we are often in the dark about what even our own words mean. Do we really know, for instance, what creationists mean when they argue that the universe is not the result of random genetic mutation and natural selection? Or that there is something wrong with teaching evolution in public school? My feeling is that we do not. It seems only to go against the entire structure of our beliefs. To tear down the concept of evolution, it would seem, is to tear down a great part of the edifice of human knowledge. A feeling of incredulity takes over.

In a different volume, Wittgenstein remarks on his disappointment in reading Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough. (A book he had long wanted to read, apparently.) Frazer, he remarks, talks about a tribal rain-dance. This rain-dance is, for Frazer, an instance of an out-moded belief, the sort of thing science has rendered not only pointless, but wrong-headed. We've proven it incorrect. In his own notes, Wittgenstein thinks this argument is just the pits. Scientific proof, he suggests, isn't really the right model for consideration of the rain-dance. If I become very angry and beat a stick against the ground in frustration, he asks, do the people around me ask each other what I have against this stick? We always read words and behavior into a certain frame, a frame that is very often deaf to strange and variegated tones of meaning.

Of course, there is a corollary to all of these ideas, and that is that the concept of intelligent design, understood as a scientific theory, is absolute nonsense, and that proponents of teaching intelligent design in public schools, for instance, very often do not know what they themselves mean. You can sort of make this out if you listen to interviews with scientists who've put forward intelligent design as a scientific theory. They often sound confused -- certain that they are right, but worried that their words don't add up. Calling intelligent design a scientific theory is a category mistake. The concepts just don't match.

A Dance to the Music of Time

 

A few weeks ago, I finished Anthony Powell's novel sequence A Dance to the Music of Time. They are without question my favorite books. Their scope is sort of dizzying: the twelve novels are divided into four volumes of three books a piece, each suggesting a season of human life. (It constituted, for me, a full year of bedtime reading.) The novels are narrated in the first person, by a character named Nicholas Jenkins, and their plots cover sixty-five years. They contain hundreds of characters, many of whom reappear throughout, coming to the narrator's attention in one book and then dropping away only to appear again hundreds of pages down the line. It is a compendium of wonderful names -- Dicky Umfraville, Flavia Wisebite, X Trapnel, Scorpio Murtlock -- and the individual novels possess some of my favorite titles of all time -- Books Do Furnish a Room, A Buyer's Market, Casanova's Chinese Restaurant, The Acceptance World. (These last are not to even mention the fictitious titles of books within -- Profiles in String, Sweetskin, Unburnt Boats -- many of which would make me laugh out loud.)

While a few of its characters make almost book-to-book appearances, Jenkins pays most attention to a man named Kenneth Widmerpool, a former classmate in boarding school, later a presence at debutante balls, a high-ranking officer during the Second World War, and sad devotee of a hippie cult. This attention to Widmerpool is a unique feature of Powell's novels because Widmerpool comes to define their tragicomic tone. Jenkins does not like Widmerpool, but his curiosity is much stronger than his irritation, and this feeling gives breath to a civilized voice that is both sad and bemused. Another way of putting this is to say that Powell's novels do not read at all like those of his friend and contemporary Evelyn Waugh. They are taken too much from life. But their seriousness is like an expensive suit. Powell wears the style with pleasure and then changes out of it for the next event. The books are never pedantic or slight, just sweetly detached.

Anyway, this praise won't mean much if you don't experience the flavor of the narration, so here's a passage. It is an account of Jenkins meeting, for the first time, the rather eccentric X Trapnel:

"The impression made on myself was in principle an unfavourable one when he first entered the pub. A personal superstructure on human beings that seems exaggerated and disorganized threatens behaviour to match. That was the immediate response. Almost at once this turned out an incorrect as well as priggish judgment. There were no frills about Trapnel's conversation. When he began to talk, beard, clothes, stick, all took shape as necessary parts of him, barely esoteric, as soon as you were brought into relatively close touch with the personality. That personality, it was at once to be grasped, was quite tough. The fact that his demeanour stopped just short of being aggressive was no doubt in the main a form of self-protection, because a look of uncertainty, almost of fear, intermittently showed in his eyes, which were dark brown to black. They gave the clue to Trapnel having been through a hard time at some stage of his life, even when one was still unaware how dangerously -- anyway how uncomfortably -- he was inclined to live. His way of talking, not at all affected or artificial, had a deliberate roughness, its rasp no doubt regulated for pub interchances at all levels, to avoid any suggestion of intellectual or social pretension.

'Smart cane, Trappy,' said Bagshaw. 'Who's the type on the knob? Dr Goebbels? Yagoda? There's a look of both of them.'"

(from Books Do Furnish a Room)

Two by Corot

The Bridge at Nantes (1827)

Orpheus Leading Eurydice from the Underworld (1861)

Wittgenstein Online

Here's a preliminary list of Wittgenstein-themed blogging on the internet:

Wittgenstein Forum is written by a PhD studen whose proposed dissertation is a Wittgensteinian treatment of human facial expression.

The philosopher Colin McGinn maintains a blog here. He's written a book on cinema entitled The Power of Movies: How Screen and Mind Interact, which I would very much like to read.

Brain Scam is a very recently created blog about philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Its creator understands himself as working against the "insidious influence of the cognitive science viewpoint in our intellectual and cultural life." (!)

Finally, and from what I've read the most technical of the bunch, there is the appropriately titled Language Games.