As said in the earlier piece
Doubt, Wittgenstein, a Refutation, doubt itself as an existential state is intrinsically dependent on language. It is an attempt of the mind to disconnect from reality by the only means available to effect such a disconnection, and that is by the means of language in such a way that this language violates its own nature; ie it transgresses itself and robs itself of its own significance. Madness is the state arising from this insane use of language pushed to its logical, or illogical, conclusion. Where language is used properly it posseses an intrinsic relationship to reality, thus allowing oneself to speak meaningfully, whereas in the case of the madman this relationship breaks down and his words are simply self-referential, or that his words simply refer to the illusion created by those very words. One’s language creates the edifice of one’s madness.
Madness in the ordinary personal sense is not caused outright by bad reasoning - its most likely source being some trauma or sequence of traumas from which the shocked mind uses language as the escape route to create an alternative reality into which this suffering mind chooses to dwell.
However, on the level of cultures - as opposed to individual lives - such madness is most likely to be caused precisely at source by this skewed reasoning, or use of language in which the intellectualising mind disconnects from reality and creates a false alternative of its own devising.
11 comments:
Sounds like something, if memory serves, that Wittengenstain said about private language.
Enjoying the blog, though I rarely get the chance to make a comment.
i know a chap who is i think on the edge of psychosis, who has always been drawn to idiolects. He sometimes swears so much all that is communicated is impotent rage, and his favourite books include Finnegans Wake and Burroughs' cut ups.
There is no analogy between individuals and cultures. Repeat. There is no analogy between individual people (and whatever madness they exhibit) and the madness or sanity of a culture, or nation, or any generality. (Though of course this analogy is the basis of entire (futile) intellectual labors.) Still, this analogy is itself insane. There is no analogy between personal history and world history, and furthermore, what Wittgenstein knew about language could be put in a nutshell.
Good to know you're there, Gearoid. I recently read an intro to Wittgenstein which, in his later stuff certainly, with which I'd have felt a stronf resonance.
Lloyd, I'm afraid the idea that there can be no analogy between individual humans and the culture that humans create doesn't make sense. That would involve a deeply schizophrenic and compartmentalised reality. How can they possibly not be connected?
To add, an individual philosopher like Hegel spews out his thought, which then becomes intimately entwined within culture as other minds react and these ideas become transmuted into historical events. All that is happening is one person's thought becomes believed by, or influences, lots of other people. It's the same thought, just on a larger scale. It is irrelevant whether the thought exists in the head of one person or lots of people; the identical situation exists in relation to its 'reality' or meaningfulness, and its impact on the person or body of people within which the thought exists.
Language and thoughts do seem to have viral properties. Muslims, for example, are like virus-carriers for Islam. This can be good or bad.
Sorry, Lloyd but stating that something isn't so doesn't make it not so. An analogy does not entail utter correspondence, it just means some things are similar enough for a man to see the similitude. Maybe. i'm not sure now. i'm going to hide!
Ok so we can say for mad individuals or mad cultures (i accept the analogy) that language has stopped corresponding to reality. But how do we know what reality is like, such as we can know that this is the case regarding the insane.
Who determines what reality is like, in other words? Reality itself, of course (I'd like to say).
But how do we know what this reality is, or what it's like? And if we can't know reality, how can we know if someone or some culture is insane (non-corresponding to reality) or not?
Noone determines what reality is as it isn't an intellectual framework to believe in, as you essentially say yourself; reality is reality. The idea that we can't know reality is itself a schizophrenic thought, a reality divided against itself. Once we start imagining we are separate from what is, then naturally all the confusion grows and grows, and from within the world of such thought nothing can be resolved.
Oh, when i said 'who determines reality?' i didnt mean who fashions it into what it is but who decides how it is to be known..what it is to be known as.
The either/or 'realist' or 'non-realist' debate is typically ludicrous. Reality can be known but not ultimatey for what it ultimately is. So we can have true, and yet provisional knowledge of reality. This knowledge is false from an absolute perspective (in that it is imperfect) and yet true from a relative one (its as good as it gets given our limitations)
Within the relative domain what claims to be relative knowledge can be either true or false depending on the empirical evidence , as well as the nature of the question asked (all knowledge wraps itself around questions, it seems to me).
As regards the invalidity of a bifurcation between perceiving subject and experienced object (science's deadening axiom) I couldn't agree more (if i grasp u aright).
We are that which we know.
Would you be culturally dismayed if I were to wish you a Merry Christmas?
I wouldn't be culturally dismayed at all! And a happy Christmas to you.
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