pieces of flair

I really don't know what to say when professors give a minimum word count, and then complain when you do not much exceed that word count. So I'll let Jennifer Aniston speak for me:



Well, it seems even she found it too much for words.

The Musical Form of Thinking [ii]

Far more than the "technique of finance and the technique of construction" lifted the formal and material limitations of architecture, the technique of digital representation lifts the material and formal constraints on music. One could compose music today by entering a series of hexadecimal characters. Or at least, so one might conclude from the fact that a digital recording of a musical performance is nothing else but a long, algorithmic concatenation of answers to positive yes-or-no questions (i.e., a series of 1's and 0's). If we can reproduce musical performances in this way, why not produce them digitally to begin with? (Here I'm not talking about "digital instruments" like the keyboard or the drumitar, with palpable spatio-temporal interfaces--just typing characters into a computer).

Shelley Freedman / CC BY 2.0

The temptation is to think that one only needs to accomplish a more complete synopsis of the possibilities of sound, and then freely achieve perfect forms of music without regard to any limitations. Well, why not? Is it so different from composing? Doesn't a composer put the tune he hears in his head down on paper according to a standard, completely interpretable notation?

Unlike a software engineer, a composer does not presuppose any algorithmic 'mode of projection' on the part of the executor of his notations. True: the musical notations do to some extent describe a series of sounds with a determinate pitch, volume, duration, and sequence. Yet such a series is not yet a tune. It is merely what the listener has to take no notice of in order to hear the tune. (As soon as you start focusing intently on the tones in a tune and trying to add up the positive features of sound, you stop hearing the tune.)

Kinds of imprecision

It is not enough to point out that Aristotle's thinking is not always systematic. For this observation to amount to anything would require an enumeration and clarification of the differences from systematicity in his writings, as well as a demonstration of the extent to which these characteristics of his writings are not merely the mode of presentation of a set of doctrines which is in itself systematic. (One way of reading the Nicomachean Ethics, once it has become obvious that the text cannot be a coherent set of asserted propositions, is to try to identify which of those propositions represent Aristotle's actual doctrine or "considered opinion," and which were only a imprecise scaffolding or dialectical counterpoint. This seems to me still to attribute too much systematicity to Aristotle.)

As Pseudonoma already pointed out, the first hold Aristotle gets on the good of human life in the Nicomachean Ethics is dialectical: there is no scientific grounding for the position that politics is a master art, or that it would belong to such an art to supply governing knowledge of the highest good, or that the ground of a city is higher than that of the individual. Furthermore, as I pointed out in answer, the entire passage bases its validity on the hypothesis that there is a highest human good at all, and it is only in the context of this hypothesis that it even makes sense to say what that highest good would be (whether scientifically or dialectically). This hypothesis is not a presupposition, but a consciously hazarded entrance into a question which it might do no good to pursue. The study of ethics cannot at its inception justify itself as something ethical--which puts the following limitation on the possible findings of ethics: if in the end ethics does some good, and if this is because it directs us to the highest good, then it follows that the good of human life must be accessible without the introduction of the certainty born of deliberation (which means, a fortiori, without ethics); or if ethics does no good, well, that has almost the same result.

But before I can explain my sense of the first book of the Ethics, there is still one more important imprecision to be enumerated...tomorrow.

Introduction to the identity of Platonic and Aristotelian theories of the good

One man, one art.

This rule is laid down in the Republic of Plato as indispensable to the true city. If we contextualize this principle, which in the course of the Republic comes to light as the definition of justice (viz., "One man, one art"), we see that Plato defines justice as the principle which ensures maximal flourishing (in the sense of completion of a work) of the whole in which it inheres. This definition is justified by the agreement that justice is the human good, combined with the understanding that humans are creatures whose good consists in the completion of some work.

Justice, if the earlier treatment of it in the Republic as one art alongside others retains its currency, turns out to be the art of success in arts. But this definition renders it impossible to apply. One would have to have two arts, the art of justice and the art whose success it is to ensure. But the former art would consist in having only one art, which would make it impossible to have a second art to which it could apply.

There can therefore be no art concerning the accomplishment of the human good, and that is just what Aristotle thinks.

essay on the essential mood of language

Wittgenstein's famous notion of a "family resemblance" is introduced obliquely in the opening discussion of language-games in the Philosophical Investigations. There, the question, "But how many kinds of sentence are there?" implies the eventual unstated answer, "Just look and see how they are related."

In order to bring this answer out implicitly, Wittgenstein 'tries' to reduce all utterance to the indicative mood by making explicit the framework of report which is supposed to insensibly accompany all utterances (i.e. "I want you to...," "I would like to know...," etc.). He rightly observes that this reduction does not help to "bring the different language-games together." The resemblance among them and their innate common referability to the indicative must be presupposed for them to serve as arguments of that frame made explicit.

The significance Wittgenstein sees in the possibility of reduction to the indicative (what solipsism means to say but can't) is doubtful. The analysis here of the common referability of different kinds of sentence completely ignores the findings of the previous sections. The test-cases of highly primitive languages make it more plausible that the common mood of utterance would be on a spectrum from invitatory to imperative. The teaching of solipsism itself could be expressed, "Invite this thought into your head: I am everything."

The above example shows that the correlative of invitation/command is not necessarily acceptance/obedience, at least insofar as the latter is taken to express a completely passive position. Acceptance/obedience must itself be reducible to invitation/command, not reciprocally doubling back on the speaker but experimentally or expectantly or hopefully transmitting the same mood or spectrum of moods forward into reality--urging it to respond to my will, soliciting its meaning, demanding its adherence to a physical model, expecting it to resonate with joyful surprise (as when I laugh at a joke)--and so on. The essence of language shows up clearly in the transmissions of its original mood in a way that renders not hopeless the project of scientifically comprehending the common aspect under which all appear (provided that science, too, can be reduced to the original mood).

Furthermore, the transitivity of acceptance/obedience can be transmitted back into the invitation/command, which itself must have listened to something more original.

Two clarifications: first, a 'spectrum' of mood does not repeat the problematic of an indeterminate diversity of functions. It is one mood with two poles--the orientation to one or the other of which is the whole field of ethics. Second: on this understanding, the equivalence of solipsism and realism (as treated in the TLP) has no place. The essence of language corresponds to a sol-"us"-ism, where the "us" is indeterminately defined but must include whatever is most original. The listener is as much the limit of the world as is the speaker. In the face of this contradiction of multiple limits, language ranges from a sociopathic campaign to regularize the conflict of limits according to my own, to a late, lyrical lament arising out of the pain of contradiction between world and self.

Blumenberg's theory of tradition

My first impression of Hans Blumenberg's The Legitimacy of the Modern Age is that it is an inconclusive, tangled mess of fairly interesting historical analysis. I'd leave it at that, but something makes me think (and this might just be the nagging awareness that there is an assigned essay to be written on the text) it would be worth working through it a little more carefully for the argument as it relates to tradition.

I don't have a grand unifying thesis on Blumenberg yet. For now I am just collecting extracts and trying to comment on them.

Within the overall framework of a response to the widely accepted secularization theory of the modern world definitively authored by Lowitz, Blumenberg argues that the underlying metaphor of an illegitimate transfer of property fails to register in the actual difference between the Christian age and the modern. The criteria which according to this metaphor which justifies the claim of secularization theory are "the identifiability of the expropriated property, the legitimacy of its initial ownership, and the unilateral nature of its removal" (23-4). The investigation of each of these criteria displays the temporality of tradition in the logic of its interruptions.

Under the heading of the "unilateralness of the removal" we find an account of the self-secularization of eschatology by the logic of its own annunciation, as the source of "worldliness:"

Franz Overbeck wrote that to the Church, the end of this world seemed near only so long as it had not yet conquered a piece of it. But this conquest came too late to repress 'immediate expectation,' to compensate for the great disappointment. It must have been the other way around: The energy of the eschatological 'state of emergency,' set free, pressed toward self-institutionalization in the world. But this does not falsify Overbeck's statement of symmetry: "As long as the Church possesses this piece, it will continue to be interested in the continued existence of the world; if the last piece is ever really endangered, then she will join her voice in the old cry again." (45)

The "property" in question here is eschatology, and according to the secularization theory the notion of progress appropriates this eschatology unilaterally.

introduction to the assertiveness of non-assertoric propositions

I would like to reach a decision on the question of whether any proposition can remain without a truth-value on account of its not being asserted. First of all, it seems reasonable to ask whether there is any such thing as a proposition which is not asserted. Perhaps the special content of a propositional question? The question demands and waits for answer: is this so, or not? It incorporates a proposition into the structure of a demand. It asks for a decision, and this decision has built into it the same special content as does the demand. Should I assert this, or not? I should, if I find it true. Then how does this finding happen? Do I examine the proposition as a neutral object and then measure my beliefs for agreement or disagreement? If so, in what does this measuring consist, and how is it commensurable with the proposition? i should be looking for a belief that looks like the proposition or like its negation. This means that I must already know what the proposition says, and what my beliefs say, so that I can see whether my beliefs and the proposition say the same thing. But an unasserted proposition:--what does it say? Nothing, but that its assertion would say something. It is this latter something which is to be measured against my beliefs. Therefore, to undertake this measuring, I must first posit the assertion of the proposition, since the unasserted proposition says something incommensurable with the beliefs which need to be checked in order to decide whether I should make it.

Then it is impossible to reach a decision about an unasserted proposition, as to whether it should be asserted, and we do not find any proposition prior to the assertion of it. The appearance that the assertion of a proposition may be suspended in a question arises from the fact that we sometimes find ourselves trying to reach a decision on some point or other (as even now I am trying to do). We think that, because we have externalized the assertion in a realm of possibility, there has been no actual assertion. But wherever (in whatever "realm of being") we put it, we still actually put it there, as an assertion, and so we put it there along with the truth-value which is supposed to be deferred.

KTL Overdose

More on Wittgenstein, continuing the line started last month. Read it if you're interested.

The account of propositions as a kind of expression repeats and deepens the lacuna in the picture theory (its omission of display and perception of logical pictures). The proposition is an expression of a thought, which is in turn a "logical picture" by which we "picture to ourselves" the facts which make up the world. First of all there is the fact, or, as far as thought with logical form is concerned, it might be better to say the elementary binary node of possibility. This node is what we picture to ourselves and determine positively or negatively. The binary node of possibility which is one point in the world appears to us in our picturing it to ourselves in logical space. The world is not a logical picture but finds expression in one, and this is what it means for a logical picture to be "of" facts.

Now the words "node," "point," "appears," "picturing," and "space" above all seem to be metaphors transferring the material of the senses into the structure of thinking. On the basis of this metaphoricity, it would be necessary to qualify also the statement that the world finds "expression" in thought (Such an analysis would be in accord with the traditional interpretation of intellectual perception as a metaphor). However, to posit a metaphysical rift between sense and thinking will make it impossible to explain how it is that the expression of a thought "can be perceived by the senses" in a proposition.

The thought may be a picture but does the thought then think itself? (Does a picture perceive itself and display itself?) We cannot neglect this question by chalking it up to the penumbras of the metaphoricity of "logical pictures," as though we were looking for a correlative in thinking to the production and reception of pictures only because we had been deceived by the metaphor into expecting everything to be the same "over there" in thinking as it is "over here" in sensing. Rather, it is the very gap in correspondence between sense and thinking which requires us to ask about the thinking of a thought. We can be satisfied, at first, with the substantial existence of sensible pictures. A thought, however, is not already "out there" but comes about simultaneously with the thinking of it. The phrase "picture...to ourselves" nicely reproduces the ambiguity of "machen uns Bilder," which in good usage means that we get an idea of something, but taken word for word also attributes the production of ideas to us as simultaneous with our receiving them. Wittgenstein's usage here points to a critical difference in the nature of a thought and the nature of a picture; the latter is produced and subsequently received, and stands in the meantime waiting in the world, ready to be seen.

The picture-theory of the Tractatus persistently treats the logical picture as though it were something substantial--that is, perduring in a meantime between production and perception, and says nothing about what it means to see a logical picture, or to display it. These, however, are the real moments of thinking, of which "the thought" is a fleeting shadow. What thinking is, then, remains fundamentally unclear in the Tractatus, and this leads to a deeper unclarity in what seems clearest: the senses. Here it must be admitted that we have no clear way of discerning whether the static interpretation of thought is responsible for the static interpretation of the proposition, or the other way around. At any rate, that an expression of a thought can be perceived by the senses proves that the senses no more receive a ready object than does thinking. Thinking must already somehow have a hand in saying and hearing for perception of a proposition to come about.

Have some more having

Here's what I hope to convince you of first: physical property is not the primary object of having.

I think the natural tendency in analyzing having would be to reduce it to an ever more physical grasp. When I say that I have a car, for instance, surely this is by extension from the fact that I can count on putting into my hands that part of the car which makes it useful as a car, namely, the key, which I have in my pocket. And by this I mean that at any time I could reach into my pocket and have it in my hand. Any closer to me and the key would be inside me, and my having it would fall prey to the fact that you can't have your key and eat it, too. A skilled and dexterous thief could perhaps extract the key from my hand, and if having it only meant being able to put it into one's grasp, he would have it more than I, even as I hold it in my hand.

Yet, perhaps the tendency to reduce having in this way to the physical grasp isn't so natural as it seemed. For what sort of nature would this course be innate? Not to the animal. Having in the hand is something no animal does except in the act of transforming this having into some use. Having a big stone means being able to take a crack at a palm nut. The stone is never simply grasped but already put to use as soon as the monkey's finger touches it. What the monkey has is not a stone but an ability to use the stone.

The above reduction of having to holding in the hand is in fact secretly guided by this fact, in conjunction with the prejudice that having means first of all having to oneself. Next, I hope to show the error of this prejudice.