Sunday, April 02, 2006

Wittgenstein Again

I wrote a more comic book version of this, but let's try to be more serious. The work for which Ludwig Wittgenstein (LW) first became well known, as the miracle-spawn of Bertrand Russell, was the pretentiously titled Tractatus Logico Philosophicus (TLP). Except this wasn't so silly-sounding for that day, as Latin still connoted authority, as did the flat hats and gowns, all the gothic surroundings of a dark ages cathedral. So the TLP fit right in, as more organ music.

Over time, however, LW became disillusioned with his tone in the TLP. Yes, it was a lot of clever, glorified nonsense, which hooked the reader mainly on its aesthetic merits, but it was also too grandiose in retrospect, too full of the author's own vanity, perhaps for having mastered the logical crypticisms indulged in by the school masters of his day, and since superseded by electronified gate logic.

So the next generation philo (published posthumously as the PI) would be pretty much devoid of these crypticisms, even if the transition to patent nonsense was still a goal (same joke, just better told).

In calling both works "a joke" I'm not attempting to deride or dismiss them in any way, which is why I think the link to Japanese style Buddhism tends to work, in that the Zen koan is likewise a relic or spin-off from trying to say the unsayable i.e. trying to point to the inside of Plato's Cave (as if it were just another concept, with convex and concave features).

In Fuller's philo, we're connected by this Void to his ongoing definings within an eternally aconceptual nonsimultaneous and only partially-overlapping scenarios Universe (or call it a centers network, with local spacetime coordinates in the eye of the beholder).

You don't get to take the world's snap shot and have it remain faithful to the original for long, not even with a beautiful logic. We have to keep working at it, ever refining and polishing our communications to better fit them within the backdrop of our present day (or private sky).