As I’d stated in my previous post, I am reading Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (the 3rd edition), and it seems to me that he continued to ask the same question over and over and over: how to define the meaning of meaning. He obsessively approaches his attack from all possible angles and even tries to invent new ones, but they are all the same in my view. I mean the man and his memory no disservice, but I do wonder if he had been plagued with a form of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD).
Having said that, he does take on a point of view that I am describing as a foundation to the Human Zen of Communication: yes, the definition of meaning. For some Power either separate or very much a part of us surely had to define the subatomic building blocks of how “all this” most surely should operate: when any one of the corporeal world is to utter a “thing”…how do other members of said corporeal existence relate to and address said “thing.” And further, exactly what is a “thing”?
But to me, he did that in the initial pages of his 250-page treatise. I am only to page 46e, Section 108, and it is an utterly exhausting rehash of the first section or three. And the fact that his brilliant mind had not discerned that is bothersome and therefore warrants my earlier conviction: philosophical OCD.
On the other hand, I could very well see that what this book is a compilation of, is, that these are simply on-the-fly (if you will) notes where Wittgenstein is trying oh-so-desparately to firmly define exactly what it is he is trying to say about “meaning.” And by this I mean (pardon the pun) that they were never all meant to be included in the same binding. That they were meant to be read, distilled, then reframed into the most specific form of corporeal definition and what it is to do when we utter a “thing” between one or more of us in our corporeal existence.
To put it another way: it is like a writer who jots notes to him/herself as they go about their living. They then take their notes, meditate upon their storyline, their accumulation of “meanings”…then distill their multiple accumulations into one coherent and arranged story. All of their notes were never meant to be included “as-is,” but are meant to be assimilated into the end product.
But in Wittgenstein’s case this is not what I’m seeing, and since the book was published after his lifetime, this very well could have been his intent. So, to have included all of this constantly rehashed minutiae clearly must have been the publisher’s intent…and furthermore…his specific intention to allow all his specific ruminations to remain “as-is” to further “advance” his attempts in defining “meaning.” Since the content was in book form during Wittgenstein’s life, it would seem that this was also his intent to some degree. I mean, once you’ve said it…you really do defeat its purpose by continually restating it. It goes fantastically beyond the case of implying the reader is stupid and cannot grasp what has already been said and (and as I do here) into the realm of a philosophical OCD. It is truly stunning to me the utterly repetitive nature of his dissertation. It is exactly like Kierkegaard’s graphomania, where he (Kierkegaard) had an OCD of having to write to the extreme’s of all else in his life, including the ditching of his upcoming marriage to a woman he loved and who loved him and his own mental and physical well-being, dying at the age of 42.
But even having stated all this, I can also understand the questioning mind wanting—oh, so desperately needing—to utterly quantify and categorize what it is to communicate, in such a way that it, on the most primordial level, it is clearly laid out for the philosophical scientist, so that somewhere it is documented the specifics of “meaning,” just like physical scientists define and categorize Life. The lay person does not need to know its minuitea to operate within its corporeal confines, but it is withing the very nature of the Zen of Humankind to understand it’s origins so as to benefit its existence in Space and Time.
To put it basely, it is the nature of the beast to understand itself.
And I submit…that this, in turn does benefit the race as a whole in incorporeal ways as I’d previously discussed in my first post. No action, no thought is ever wasted, though we may never see that from our corporeal point of view. Everything we do has an equal an opposite reaction, as it were. Even the more basest and “evil” of actions help define us in a way that it helps us better understand what not to do…and which, therefore, further advances the Zen of Life. On the one hand it is sad to inflict such evil, but on the other hand, if it so inflicted, it must therefore “need” to be inflicted so that we, as a race, properly learn what not to do. I’m somewhat straying from the main point of this post, but I look at it this way: actors who take less-savory roles state that it expands their knowledge of themselves and Humankind on-the-whole in ways that could never have done by just reading about it. That such roles end of changing them to some (and one would hope…) good degrees in ways I’m not going to get into now, because that would be an entirely new and lengthy post. But at the very least, it clarifies the so-called “Yin and Yang” of life.
Again, as I have stated, I am nowhere near complete with this work, and again I refer to Kierkegaard (I do so because I have a slight affinity for him, having studied him in college in a “Philosophy of Religion” course with Professor Nietmann), as he states that life can only be understood “backward” yet must be lived “forward”…so I cannot truly define my thoughts on Wittgenstein’s work without having completed reading it…but these are my thoughts as I forge my way through it (though an “informed implication” of his work can well be made based on having read “so much” of what I have already read…I am giving him the benefit of the doubt). I just wish Wittgenstein had used less words (as others might also wish of me at this point!)…but in truth then it would not have been Wittgenstein.
So, that is where I currently am with Philosophical Investigations (3rd Ed.).
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Philosophical Investigations, 3rd Ed. — Ludwig Wittgenstein
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