chaz wyman wrote:.
Wittgenstein is wrong for the same reason aphilosophy is unthinkable and undoable.
It is true that there is more the thinking than language, and there is more to Being that having a language. Ask any higher mammal whose life and being far exceed the extreme limits of their language. It is the example of the priveledge of human intelligence to proclaim what Being or lanaguage is for another animal. This statement can only be applied in reference to the presumtiveness that is human perception: that humans are a 'higher' species, and this means that our consciousness has, likwise as our 'higherness that other animals' or any hierachry of animals, progressed with reference to what we may come upon in the evidence of our history and history in general.
But this means that to do aphilosphy one has to act and think like an animal, and that can never the the goal or achievement of any human. I am not totally following your reasoning in this paragraph here.
Indeed there may be more to Being than
having a lanaguage. But we do
have lanaguage, as you have said before I think, we would not be human without it. So it seems nonsequiter to suggest that Being is somehow 'larger' or 'greater' of 'more than' language. To be human is exactly to have this particular human-ability we call lanaguage -- it is difficult even to express the inherent relation.
This is what I mean when I have said that people tend to move into an arguement as it suits thier purpose and then to pull back as it suit what they want to argue, all under a guise of consistency of argument. One cannot say that the object is the the sublination of the Notion of the subject, argue that there is not progress of consciousness, and then rely upon some higher and lower creatures as if to draw a picture of some larger reality that language does not encompass. This last you are saying as much as Typist, but you argue against what he says.
There is a hint of inconsistency in such proposals taken together, and against this kind of inconsistency, one that hides behind a viel of consistency, that causes me to appreciate the consistency of Bill and Typist's inconsistency, because these two at least are coming to us 'whole' in thier assertions.
This former consistency, that is inconsistent in its nature, paints for me a picture; it evidences an individual who knows particularized arguments to make on cues, who knows, say, which moves to make given the situation of the game board, an individual who is merely playing with argument, who really has no consistent understanding but knows how to divert attention from his subject, and in this method lay his consistency. But he is inconsistent within himself.
He is like a classically trained muscian; one can easily tell this person when one hears him or her. He can play written music beautifully, knows which vibrato to use according to the nationality of the composer, knows how to shape the contours of crecendo and decrecendo and phrasing due to the number of pieces he has played and the direction he has been placed under. He knows how to play the music the way it was meant by the composer and knows how he should sound if he is to be considered a virtuoso. He also has become so adept that he can take liberties within the music; he can use French vibrato with Hayden, an Austrian composer. He can chop phrasings or string them out; he can use staccato where legato was written. This he calls improvisation, and it can be beautiful to hear, but it is really a gestalt of learned methods, devied up and reassembled. His consistency is that he has no real ability to improvise, to draw out of himself the music of his soul, for his soul has been compromised my the lesson he was taught, and so eagerly learned such that he might one day find himself in the music. He is Salieri.
But this virtuoso has been decieved, and he feels it, he knows it too late. So he draws the veil of his learning about him so that no one may see his fraud; his deception that he was trained to procure.
This is contrasted to the true improvisationalist, and this musician was a natural. His learning coincided with his training, such that his art was merely blossoming as he attended his lessons. He is Mozart. He writes music that imitates his mentors but never repeats them. He plays when inspires him before he was taught what should be played, and then becomes the opus of a style, as his interpretation did not repeat nor derive. But his derivations were his own; everyone can hear this in his music.
He is consistent in that he is true to himself as he was not tought through the examples of other's triuphs and mistakes, such that he learned how to construct the argument, but the arguments were apparent to him. Thus he is honest, and his exposure is his wholeness.
If there is a Being that is something of language but is also something other than lanaguage, the only way we might know this is through the language itself. Even if I might think in myself that I have some aspect of myself that is not language then it is merely a feeling, and this feeling, though it may be human of itself, it does nothing within the human being (within myself) to situate it (me) as human except as much as such a feeling finds language. I cannot hold an idea that there is something other than lanaguage to situate myself, to allow me to BE, without relying upon language itself. I cannot determine that there may be lower ot higher animals in thier Being except through human language.
the significance of these postures, the consistent and inconsistent, is that one cannot be nailed down against the particular other, and that the arguement to what may be refered is always in question. Only Mozart knows he is Mozart, everyone else just knows what they hear. Salieri likewise reflects upon himself such that
there is Mozart, and so he feels his Salieri, and asserts and asserts. Yet the veil is also hideen from view, such that only those who know, see.
So it is that I do not follow your reasoning: that Wittgestien is wrong in the same way Typist is wrong.
