Die Steinerne Brücke: Weltwunder des Mittelalters
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In circling round and round the word happy , the text cannot reach conclusion. Jahrhundert beschäftigte die Begegnung des Antonius mit den dämonischen Wesen die Phantasie von Zeichnern, und Malern, darunter , und. The purpose of such a biography, as I have said, is to understand a philosopher and thereby to shed deeper light on their thought.
Far the most important thing is to settle accounts with myself! And, in particular, what eludes us are direct statements of what, exactly, is understood. This has implications for the sorts of role that writings which aim to depict the life of the philosopher are able to assume in ground-level philosophical practice.
ASKETISCH - The compartmentalist can allow that we may have our reasons for being curious about the lives of great men and women, and that there is nothing wrong, in and of itself, with the practice of reading and writing about the lives of such men and women; and he can allow that there is much that we can seek to understand about why these lives come to assume the sorts of shapes that they do. A second society does exist; it is wealthy and very fashionable, and said to be amusing, and some of the young men belonging to the first society frequent it.
Ludwig Wittgenstein 1889-1951 asketisch bedeutung today widely recognized as one of the most important philosophers of the 20 th century. His famous Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus written 1918, published1921the only philosophical book he published during his lifetime, is one of the most influential philosophical books ever written. After a break of ten years — teaching as a primary school teacher and working as architect — Wittgenstein continued his philosophical work at the University of Cambridge and developed a new philosophy of ordinary language, which became one of the leading philosophical movements especially in the Anglo-American world. Wittgenstein was unable to realize his intention to publish his new ideas before his death in 1951. Von Wrights Nachlass index contains 83 manuscripts, 45 typescripts an 11 dictations, all together about 20. Others from the Austrian part of the Nachlass were added as a gift from members of the Wittgenstein family. They are the grand children of Moritz Schlick, who was the owner of the originals. Russell first created a manuscript version that was later typed in both full length and summary versions, and Wittgenstein supplied annotations by hand. McMaster University acquired the Bertrand Russell archives from Asketisch bedeutung Russell in 1968. The items relating to Wittgenstein formed part of that acquisition. Assessment against the selection criteria Authenticity The authenticity and completeness of the Nachlass is guaranteed by the individual history and provenance for each of the collection of the five owners, and by the Nachlass description list of G. World significance Ludwig Wittgenstein 1889-1951 today is widely recognized as one of the most important and influential philosophers of the 20th century. His Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus written 1918, published1921the only philosophical book he publish during his lifetime had an enormous influence on the modern philosophy of language. In 1929, after a break of ten years working as a teacher and as an architect, Wittgenstein continued his philosophical work teaching at the University of Cambridge and developed a new philosophy of ordinary language, which became one of the leading philosophical movements especially in the Anglo-American world. Wittgenstein changed our view of asketisch bedeutung, meaning and the aim and method of philosophy profoundly. Wittgenstein could not realize his intention to publish his new ideas till his death in 1951. Indeed, the Nachlass stands as an exemplar to academics approaching other archives in the academic field of the potential intellectual profits from a philological approach to such material. Von Wrights Nachlass index contains 83 manuscripts, 45 typescripts an 11 dictations, all together about 20. While the early Wittgenstein is closely associated with Logical Positivism and the later Wittgenstein with the Philosophy of Asketisch bedeutung, Phenomenology and the Foundations of Mathematics, his work has been applied in many other areas such as the philosophy of science, art and aesthetics, psychology and cognition, information and the information society, folklore and belief. He thus appears not as a asketisch bedeutung with narrow interests but one who speaks to academics in many disciplines. Wittgenstein was essentially a product of early twentieth-century Vienna and later of Cambridge and it is unsurprising that his work first took root in Europe and the English-speaking world. However, in addition to translations into many European languages, the fact that editions his work have in the last two decades become available in Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Turkish indicate an ever-increasing and truly international interest in his philosophy. Wittgenstein was born in Vienna in one of the most wealthy families of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. The house of his father Karl Wittgenstein, the dominating figure of the Austrian steel industry, was at the same time one of the asketisch bedeutung private cultural centres of Viennese culture at that time, especially interested in music. Wittgenstein was also working as an architect; together with Paul Engelmann, a scholar of Adolf Loos, he built a city house for his sister Margret Stonborough in the 3rd district of Vienna in 1926-28, which belongs to the most interesting buildings of early modernism in Vienna. With longer breaks in Norway Skolden and Irland Wittgenstein spent the second half of his life, from 1929 to his death in Cambridge. He became a dominating, charismatic figure in the academic life of Cambridge and followed George Edward Moore on his chair of philosophy in 1939. It had a strong impact on modern formal logic and the philosophy of mathematics as well. This style of his later manuscripts from 1929 is based on ordinary languagevivid and full of impressive similes and metaphors. It is appreciated as belonging to the best German prose ever written. According to one of his own remarks, philosophy actually can only be done as poetry. Since his times as a student in Cambridge 1911-14 he was a close friend and in a regular intellectual exchange with Bertrand Russell and George E. Integrity The philosophical Nachlass of Ludwig Wittgenstein nominated here does not include his letters. The subject of this joint nomination is the complete philosophical Nachlass of Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein 1889-1951. His philosophical development from 1914 to the Tractatus and his continuous philosophical work from 1929 till the end of his life is documented in detail in his philosophical Nachlass. Von Wrights Nachlass index contains 83 manuscripts, 45 typescripts an 11 dictations, all together about 20. Der Philosoph ist ein Fixpunkt, wenn Wien 2018 die Moderne groß feiert. Juli 2017, Werner Rosenberger Spurensuche im hohen Norden nach dem vielleicht bedeutendsten österreichischen Denker des 20. Ich traf ihn im Fünf-Uhr-Fünfzehn-Zug. Die erste Urlaubsreise 1913 brachte ihn auf die Idee, dort für einige Zeit zu bleiben, um an seinen philosophischen Theorien zu arbeiten und dem für ihn belastenden Universitätsalltag zu entfliehen. Und dass Österreich im Südwesten Norwegens am Ende des mehr als 200 Kilometer asketisch bedeutung Sognefjord liegt, kam so: Dort hatte sich der Philosoph mit dem übergroßen Bedürfnis nach Einsamkeit rund 30 Meter über dem See Eidsvatnet gegenüber von Skjolden, einem 300-Seelen-Dorf, nach eigenen Plänen ein Holzhaus bauen lassen. In Skjolden, 2500 km von Wien, 350 km von Oslo und 250 km von Bergen entfernt, wo es übrigens an der Universität eine Wittgenstein-Forschungsstelle gibt, lebte er als Einsied- ler asketisch und spartanisch. Nur einmal in der Woche ruderte er mit dem Boot von seinem Haus über den See ins Dorf zum Einkaufen. Im Winter ging er in Schneeschuhen über den gefrorenen See. Während ich jetzt nur mehr alte anzuwenden scheine. Denn so verstehen wir zugleich, was über die Welt überhaupt zu verstehen ist. Wittgensteins große Bedeutung vor allem außerhalb der akademischen Zirkel auf Kunst und Kultur werde noch immer unterschätzt, heißt es in Fachkreisen. Daran, wie man die Dinge sieht Und was man von ihnen verlangt. Möglichst mit Unterstützung von der Stadt Wien und dem Bund. Denn 100 Jahre zuvor starben mit Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Otto Wagner und Koloman Moser vier Protagonisten der Wiener Moderne. Für den Philosophen lag Österreich an einem norwegischen Fjord. Und oben weht ein rot-weiß-roter Wimpel. Eigentlich hatte er vor, sich längere Zeit in Norwegen niederzulassen, aber bereits ein Jahr später starb er. Sein etwa acht mal acht Meter großes Holzhäuschen in Østerrike am Fjord hatte er einem Einheimischen geschenkt. Der holte es ein paar Jahre später vom Hang, wo heute nur noch das Steinfundament übrig ist, und ließ es am Ortsrand wieder aufstellen. Wo es bis heute steht. Ohne Balkon, aber dafür mit Eternitverkleidung steht das Haus jetzt da. Sogar die Originalfenster sind noch in einem Schuppen gelagert. Wo einer einmal die Gesetze der Logik lösen wollte, gehorchen Vatnes Pläne einer durchaus eigenen Logik. Mit Lokalpolitikern und Philosophen der Uni Bergen, unterstützt von Schriftstellern wie Jon Fosse und Jostein Gaarder, soll das Häuschen bereits 2018 wieder dort errichtet werden, wo es einst stand. Auf dass dann die Welt dorthin komme, wohin Wittgenstein dem eitlen Getriebe der Welt entfloh. Juni 2017 Østerrike über dem Fjord: In einem Kaff in Norwegen schrieb der große Philosoph einige seiner wichtigsten Texte Österreich heißt auf Norwegisch Østerrike. Für die Bewohner eines kleinen, eher abgelegenen Dorfs in Norwegen ist damit freilich nicht nur ein kleines Land in Mitteleuropa gemeint, sondern ein ganz besonderer Ort in ihrer unmittelbaren Nähe. Um dorthin zu gelangen, ist freilich eine längere Reise vonnöten, die man am besten in der Stadt Bergen an der Südwestküste Norwegens beginnt. Clemens Panagl, Salzburger Nachrichten, 22. Der Weg zur Erkenntnis ist steinig. Und er ist stellenweise ziemlich schmal. Der Lokalhistoriker führt eine Besuchergruppe durch ein Waldstück nahe dem Örtchen Skjolden. Mitten in Norwegen, am Endpunkt des längsten Fjordes von Europa, liegt die Gemeinde. Hinter den Häusern von Skjolden ruht ein kleiner See, begrenzt von steil abfallendem Wald. Und mitten im Wald weht eine österreichische Fahne. One could read under that light the relationship between the ready-made and modern sculpture. This is precisely how the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein approached both ethics and language in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. What appeared to be a treatise on logic was much more than that. Wittgenstein wrote that the purpose of the book was ethical and explained that it consisted of two parts, the written and the unwritten. Wittgenstein considered that the unwritten part was the most important. The key was the very thing that was missing in the text, and the gesture to keep quiet about it. One of the aims of the Tractatus was to delimit the field of ethics, and that could only be done from within. Wittgenstein thought he had settled those limits by precisely remaining silent about ethical issues. His demarcation between the world of facts and the world of value intended to make clear that logic, and consequently philosophy, could only deal with facts. The language of logic could not go further than that, and thus the world of value — that is, of ethics — was out of its reach. Facts belonged to the realm of saying, and value to that of showing. There were certain things that could only be shown, and art was an appropriate path toward that domain. Read the full essay: Carla Carmona is a professor of philosophy at the University of Extremadura in Spain. She specializes in aesthetics, philosophy of language and fin de siècle Vienna. She has published numerous articles on the paintings and the worldview of Egon Schiele, as well as the thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein and its aesthetic dimension. In recent years she has also dedicated herself to the study of aesthetic and asketisch bedeutung thought by Peter Sloterdijk. In 2014 she edited the Siruela Voluntary Taxation and Citizen Responsibility. Carmona is also editor of the Egon Schiele Jahrbuch. Wir danken dem Leopold Museum für die freundliche Genehmigung zur Veröffentlichung. He himself, and his family, were not confined to a parochial Viennese context. He became fascinated with Scandinavia and especially Norway. Partly this was due to the immense wealth and economic power and connections that the family had accumulated, but partly it was due to the fact that the family lived beyond the local, on the global plane. Had the father not amassed such economic power and created such a strong, advanced industry, the son would not have had the opportunities for studying abroad, or the time for studying and thinking, that contributed to his intellectual achievement, nor would modern Austria have had the sort of steel industry that proved so vital in creating and maintaining Austrian prosperity after 1945. An eyewitness from the turn of the century put this quite succinctly. A second society does exist; it is wealthy and very fashionable, and said to be amusing, and some of the young men belonging to the first society frequent it. It consists of bankers, artists, merchants, architects, engineers, actors, employés, and officers, with their families. The only occasions on which the two societies asketisch bedeutung are the great public asketisch bedeutung balls; but even then they have hardly any intercourse. Quite who did and did not belong here was a question of familiarity and connection, snobbery and exclusivity, style, intelligence and charm—or the lack of it, that made for a very extended, yet sometimes patchy network perhaps like all social elites. The Wittgensteins and the Jewish Aspect of the Second Society The complexity of the question is increased by the Jewish aspect of it. In other respects, though, the Wittgensteins were just being typical of their social peers in the largely Jewish financial and industrial elite. There are obvious parallels and contrasts here with how cultural policy and support is decided in modern day Austria. Ludwig in Vienna 1900 Beyond the question of material and social support for modern culture in Vienna, is the way in which the Wittgensteins, especially Ludwig, interacted with the larger world of Vienna 1900. The Wittgenstein family members took a lively interest in what was going on intellectually and culturally in Vienna, so that their patronage was aimed at cultural groups they wished to encourage, such as the Secession. We know that Ludwig read and was influenced by, among others, a particular subset of intellectuals and artists in Vienna 1900, those around Karl Kraus and his critical and satirical journal, Die Fackel. There were really not that many degrees of separation to much of this, even though there were famous examples where people apparently lived parallel, unconnected, lives, as in the case of Sigmund Freud and Arthur Schnitzler. The networks out of which Vienna 1900 arose, and the more material aspects by which those networks were facilitated, such as coffeehouses, salons, journals and seminars, have been researched, but more could be done. High and Low Culture Then there were the links between the modern high culture of Vienna 1900 and the more quotidian world in which most Viennese lived, whether it was the popular secular culture of the various ethnic groups that immigrated into Vienna, or the various religious cultures that they brought with them, or encountered once they got here, chief among them being the Catholic-Habsburg Baroque culture that appears to have still been predominant in the Viennese populace around 1900. The Wittgenstein family might have thought themselves beyond such mundane interests, but, one way or another, they were also tied to, involved, and subject to, the consequences of how this popular culture developed in the first half of the twentieth century, and especially the mutual interactions between it and the politics of the time. It should not be denied, nor should it be usurped or downplayed, even if in many respects it is an awkward legacy, because of the other side, asketisch bedeutung antisemitic and reactionary side of Viennese and Central European history, that culminated in the Holocaust, and destroyed this positive, largely Jewish side to Vienna 1900. And it also anticipated the other, post-modern, side of asketisch bedeutung world, in its embrace of and respect for difference, and its instinctive emphasis on bringing disparate aspects, disparate groups and different viewpoints together, an emphasis on inclusive logic rather than the exclusive variety. One can see this in the multi-ethnic and even multi-racial character of operetta protagonists, where love relations crossed class, religious, and racial lines in surprising frequency, anticipating the similar, liberal pluralism of the classic American musicals. Difference was not a complete barrier to practical understanding. Wittgenstein I of the Tractatus set the limits of scientific knowledge and the truths of the asketisch bedeutung world of politics and society, at a place where it could not reach the aesthetic and ethical, but primarily ethical, values by which the individual should live. There was never one, entirely right answer to any question, there were always other possibilities, depending on a panoply of complex circumstances. Hence the lists of possible answers Wittgenstein offered to the questions that he posed about the meaning of apparently simple sentences. And that over-determination is what makes them still such influential and powerful systems of thought. He is author of: Vienna and the Jews 1876 — 1938, Cambridge University Press 1989Theodor Herzl, Peter Halban Books, London 1991Francis Joseph, Addison Wesley Longman 1996A Concise History of Austria, Cambridge University Press 2006Antisemitism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press 2007 Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire 224 pages 8 color plates, 26 halftones 6 x 9 © 2016 Among the brilliant writers and thinkers who emerged from the multicultural and multilingual world of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were Joseph Roth, Robert Musil, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Throughout, she shows that Austro-Modernist literature is characterized less by the formal and technical inventions of a modernism familiar to us in the work of Joyce and Pound, Dada and Futurism, than by a radical irony beneath a seemingly conventional surface, an acute sense of exile, and a sensibility more erotic and quixotic than that of its German contemporaries. Skeptical and disillusioned, Austro-Modernism prefers to ask questions rather than formulate answers. Klagge and Ray Monk for their kind permission to publish the text on our website. The purpose of philosophical biography is very simply stated: it is to understand a philosopher. Jean-Paul Sartre, for example, wrote philosophical biographies of Charles Baudelaire, Jean Genet and Gustave Flaubert, none of whom wrote or taught philosophy. To regard someone as a philosopher in this sense, i. Indeed, not only can we separate life and work, but, for certain purposes we must do so. I have no difficulty in accepting the view urged by Richard Rorty and others that the assessment of Being and Time as a work of philosophy must be kept quite distinct from the question of whether Heidegger himself was a coward and a liar with regard to his Nazi associations, just as I can happily concede the point recently urged upon me that the evaluation of Principia Mathematica can have nothing to do with the fact that Russell was horribly insensitive to his first wife, Alys. But to concede all this is not to strip biography of its purpose; it is simply to accept what is in any case obvious: that biography is irrelevant to the assessment of the greatness of a work, whether it be philosophy, fiction, poetry or whatever. However, it seems to me that there is an important sense in which to understand what somebody says is to do something other than to evaluate it. Whether this is said with a tone of delight or fear has nothing to do with evaluating its truth, and yet, if you do not hear the delight or fear in the voice, there is an important sense in which you have not understood what is being said. The task of a biography, I think, is to enrich understanding in these two ways: by attending to, so to speak, the tone of voice in which a writer expresses himself or herself and by accumulating personal facts which will allow us to see what is said in a different light. My biography of Wittgenstein was motivated in the first place by my feeling that his tone of voice was being misheard in much of the secondary literature written on him. To read anything by him is to see immediately that the spirit and personality expressed is greatly at odds with the spirit that informs, say, the work of Russell, Ryle, Quine and Ayer. Wittgenstein himself attached enormous importance to this. He was deeply concerned that asketisch bedeutung spirit of his work might be misunderstood asketisch bedeutung deeply conscious, too, of the difficulty in preventing such a misunderstanding. In the various prefaces he wrote to his later work, he tried again and again to ensure that his readers would read him, so to speak, under the right aspect. This is not to say that it has been ignored altogether. The situation when I began my book was roughly speaking this: two almost entirely separate bodies of literature on Wittgenstein were developing — one which discussed his ethical, cultural and spiritual attitudes as revealed in the memoirs of him, his personal correspondence and the records of his conversation published by his friends, and another which discussed the themes of his philosophical work. My over-riding aim was to show that there was no reason why these two aspects of Wittgenstein should be discussed in isolation from each other, asketisch bedeutung one could look at his work, no less than his private conversation, as an expression of his most fundamental attitudes. And, by seeing the connections between his spiritual and cultural concerns and his philosophical work, one might perhaps be able to read the latter in the spirit in which it was intended. Whereas that spirit seeks to construct theories, Wittgenstein seeks merely to see clearly. Biography, I believe, is a non-theoretical activity in the same kind of way. The insights it has to offer have to be shown rather than stated. But, if a dispute breaks out about whether this likeness is real or only imagined, how is it to be resolved. Is there a fact here that one can appeal to. One can point to one face and then to the other, but can one point to the connection between the two. One can draw one face and then the other, but can one draw the similarity between them. Seeing connections provides at once the most familiar form of understanding and the most elusive. And, in particular, what eludes us are direct statements of what, exactly, is understood. Perhaps he would turn to us, fix us with a stare, then turn back to the asketisch bedeutung and repeat, as if for himself, the two versions. Of course I do not say you must hear this. There are many honourable trades. Can one learn this knowledge. There are also rules, but they do not form a system, and only experienced people can apply them right. It is certainly possible, he goes on, to be convinced by evidence that someone is in such-and-such a state of mind, that, for instance, he is not pretending. But I may be quite incapable of describing the difference. And this is not because the languages I know have no words for it. There are those who will say that this is all nonsense and that, just as Wittgenstein is — despite his protestations to the contrary — putting forward a theory of meaning in Philosophical Investigations, so a biographer who claims insight into the mind of his subject is, whether he or she acknowledges it or not, operating with a theory of human psychology. At the time of writing Baudelaire, Sartre had a theory that we are each of us entirely responsible for the kind of life we lead, and, in particular, that our lives are shaped by a decisive original choice that determines the kind of person we will be. His rage at being driven out was coloured by a profound sense of having fallen from grace. He already thought of his isolation as a destiny. That meant that he did not accept it passively. On the asketisch bedeutung, he embraced it with fury, shut himself up in it and, since he was condemned to it, hoped that at any rate his condemnation was final. This brings us to the point at which Baudelaire chose the sort of person he would be - that irrevocable choice by which each of us decides in a particular situation what he will be and what he is. When he found himself abandoned and rejected, Baudelaire chose solitude deliberately as an act of self-assertion, so that asketisch bedeutung solitude should not be something inflicted on him by other people. For as it stands we do not see Baudelaire reacting as Sartre tells us he did. We do not, for example, see him make the choice to be solitary that Sartre imputes to him. Indeed, the one quotation that Sartre produces in this connection might easily be taken to imply that Baudelaire did not experience his solitude as a choice, but rather as something that was foisted upon him by fate. It would be better, more elucidatory, Wittgenstein thought, to describe this ritual alongside some of our own — such as beating a pillow when we are upset with a loved one — so as to build up something akin to a Galtonian composite photograph, in which we can see the connections between what we find it natural to do and what was done in earlier cultures. Wittgenstein, of all people, knew that we have an inner life, that we have thoughts that we do not share with other people and asketisch bedeutung which we deny even to ourselves. He knew what it was to have an inner struggle between inclination and duty and a split between what we say and what we mean. His thorough-going attempts to be a decent person almost invariably took the form of attacking his own inclinations to give other people a false impression of himself. The confessions that he made in 1937, at a time when he was writing what he thought would be the final version of Philosophical Investigations, all took the form of owning up to deceptions. And all the asketisch bedeutung were, he made clear, prompted by vanity, by his wish to appear better than he was. This impulse to come clean, to confess, was also what lay behind his expressed wish to write an autobiography. He wanted to remove the obstacles that lay between him and clarity. Far the most important thing is to settle accounts with myself. But the depth and sensitivity with which we do so varies with our experience, our understanding and the extent to which, like Father Zossima, we are willing to absorb the secrets, sorrows and avowals of others. The first requisite for a successful biography, then, is a willingness to be deeply absorbed in the inner life of another person, and this is where Sartre falls down. It is not Baudelaire or Genet or Flaubert that he finds fascinating, but his own theories of philosophical psychology. To write a really great biography a certain self-effacement is required. Even Virginia Woolf, who was sceptical about the entire genre of biography and inclined to believe it to be an impossible task to understand the inner life of another, acknowledged that Boswell had succeeded in conveying the spirit of Dr. It is difficult, if not impossible, to say. But, in the end, it is imponderable. Convenient, too, was his tendency to strip his life down to its bare essentials: he never owned a house or got married, he had little money, few possessions and a rather small circle of friends. Furthermore, he published just one book and one article in his lifetime, and devoted himself, during the last twenty years of his life to just one task: that of putting his later philosophy into a satisfactory book. Russell, on the other hand, married four times, had countless lovers, published sixty books and over two thousand articles, was involved in many complicated public activities and corresponded with an almost unbelievably large number of people asketisch bedeutung friends, relatives, colleagues and members of the general public. The Russell Archive in Canada estimates that it has over forty thousand letters by Russell. Faced with this multiplicity, diversity and sheer bulk, the question arises: is the search for connections, for unity, not simply futile and bound to lead to falsification. My anxieties on this score are compounded by the reviews of the first volume of my biography of Russell, many of which, to my extreme discomfort, focused not on Russell but on me. I have said that self-effacement is a requirement in a good biography. Of course, I do not mean that an author is ever invisible. Similarly, few took my biography of Wittgenstein to be about me even though it was clear that the portrait of Wittgenstein presented in it had been painted by me. How did I inadvertently manage to paint myself into my portrait of Russell when I had successfully left myself out of my painting of Wittgenstein. Unlike Sartre, I do not simply assert this, but show these fears being expressed in countless letters, remarks and autobiographical writings and describe their consequences in various actions. However, in concentrating on these things, I have left out others, and some people have demanded to know why I have not included episodes revealing Russell to be kind, generous, witty, funny and happy. I have known people, for example, determined to maintain their picture of Russell as an essentially happy, kind and loving man, to deny that his repeatedly brutal treatment of those closest to him is the expression of fear and hatred and insist instead on regarding it as the perfectly reasonable response of an eminently rational man to the actions of stupid, selfish and dishonest people. Another possible answer to the question of how I managed to put myself in my picture of Russell when I avoided doing so in my picture of Wittgenstein is suggested by a remark of Douglas Collins in his book, Sartre as Biographer. asketisch bedeutung Am I closer to Wittgenstein than to Russell in this dichotomy. No, if anything, I am closer to Russell. I confess that I do not really understand why, in the case of Russell, I have slipped off asketisch bedeutung frame and onto the picture. I mention it only to draw asketisch bedeutung to one of the many perils of the undertaking of writing a philosophical biography. The purpose of such a biography, as I have said, is to understand a philosopher and thereby to shed deeper light on their thought. If I have been understood as expounding my thought in my biography of Russell, then something has gone wrong. A similar peril besets the Wittgensteinian conception of philosophy. Wittgenstein once began a series of lectures by announcing that everything he was about to say, if it was making a truth claim at all, was trivially true and that, if anyone disagreed with anything he said he would drop it immediately. I would claim something similar for biography. In so far as truth claims are made in a biography they are, or ought to be, trivially demonstrable by citing the appropriate document or other piece of evidence. In so far as the biography is genuinely insightful, however, it is not making a truth claim and therefore disagreement is impossible. What then do I say to my critics. Following Wittgenstein I could claim that they are wrong even in thinking that they disagree with me. They agree with every word. If my critics retort that they find this unsatisfying, all I can say is that I do too. We thank James Conant for his permission to publish the text on our website. This paper is indebted to conversations that took place in and around the symposium in Athens with Aristides Baltas, Vasso Kindi, Ray Monk and Lisa Van Alstyne, to comments by Jim Klagge, and to conversations over the years with Stanley Cavell and Arnold Davidson. Or shall we read them, but read them in a different way, with a different aim?. How far shall we resist or give way to the sympathies and antipathies that the man himself rouses in us — so sensitive are words, so receptive of the character of the author. These are questions that press upon us when we read lives and letters, and asketisch bedeutung must answer them for ourselves. Virginia Woolf 1 How about the biographies and autobiographies — in short, the lives — of great philosophers those many books that stand in our libraries and bookstores cheek by jowl with the volumes of their philosophyare we to read them or not; and, if so, how. It is a very general question. And how about the possibility of a certain genre of biography or autobiography — which I will call philosophical biography — a mode of representation of the life of an individual philosopher which aspires to facilitate the understanding of that individual qua philosopher. A philosophical biography or autobiography aspires to confer through the genre of biography or autobiography — that is through the depiction of a life — a sort of understanding which itself has a claim to being termed philosophical. Is such a genre of biography so much as possible. It is a fairly specific question. It is difficult to get a hearing for the second question. Or shall we read them, but read them in asketisch bedeutung different way, with a different aim; and, if so, how different. Or are we to read them with an interest in the person of the philosopher that is only permissible if kept clearly distinct from an interest in his or her philosophical work proper. How far shall we resist or give way to the sympathies and antipathies that the philosopher himself or herself as revealed, say, through biography or autobiography rouses in us. To what extent do the sympathies asketisch bedeutung antipathies thus roused bear on an estimate not only of the person, but of the philosophical work itself. Can the words which comprise the philosophical work be expressive of the character of the author in a way that makes an assessment of that character integral to an assessment of that work. Or is an estimate of the person of the philosopher always irrelevant to an understanding of his or her philosophical work. I take these to be important and difficult questions. In what follows I will have something to say about each of them. Like the first question, however, I do not think any of them admits of a general answer; and I will, accordingly, not attempt anything of the sort here. In so far as they do admit of answers, they are the sorts of questions we asketisch bedeutung each answer for ourselves and on a case by case basis. The trouble is that it is easy to fall into the confusion of thinking that questions such as these do admit of a general answer, thus obstructing our view of the second question. The aim of this paper is to lend credence to two suggestions: 1 the suggestion that the answer to the second question should be affirmative, i. I will call these reductivism and compartmentalism. The reductivist and the compartmentalist have this much in common: each thinks that the first question admits of a general answer. There are many models for how to write a reductivist biography. And there are many other such models of reductivist biography. I do not mean to suggest that psychoanalytic theory, on the one hand, or Marxist theory, on the other, cannot shed a great deal of light on why an individual acts or thinks as he or she does; but only to suggest that, when such theories are employed reductively in the practice of writing biography, the resulting brew is inevitably a travesty of both biography and psychoanalysis or Marxism. Compartmentalism is best seen, I think, as arising out of a kind of recoil from these evils of reductivism. Part of the reason that compartmentalism is the dominant point of view in serious intellectual circles today is because we have so few good examples of the practice of intellectual biography. Most biographies, where they are not utterly superficial and without pretension to confer intellectual understanding, tend to slide, to some degree, into reductivism. This leads the compartmentalist to conclude that an understanding of the life is utterly irrelevant to an understanding of the work. The question that I want to explore in a moment is the following: can we hold on to the truth in compartmentalism while rejecting the main thesis of compartmentalism. The compartmentalist can allow that we may have our reasons for being curious asketisch bedeutung the lives of great men and women, and that there is nothing wrong, in and of itself, with the practice of reading and writing about the lives of such men and women; and he can allow that there is much that we can seek to understand about why these lives come to assume the sorts of shapes that they do. But the compartmentalist thinks that we should not confuse the task of understanding these lives and what happens in them with the utterly distinct task of learning to understand the philosophical works written by the individuals who happened to live those lives. Each of these activities biography and philosophy is fine in its place, says the compartmentalist, but they should be kept wholly apart and should never be confused with one another. These two activities should take place in separate compartments of our intellectual lives and what goes on in each of these compartments should be kept from spilling over into the other. An Example of an Ancient Philosopher: Socrates With a view to easing this deadlock, it might help to consider Socrates. He strived to live — and to provide an example of what it means to live — a certain kind of life: the life of one who loves wisdom, a practitioner of philo-sophia. What the example of Socrates makes immediately evident is that at least in the case of this philosopher we need a non-reductive conception of philosophical asketisch bedeutung. We need a way of understanding the relation between philosophy and life that preserves the truth in compartmentalism without its compartmentalization of philosophy and life. When and how Socrates challenges the charge of corrupting the youth of Athens brought against him, when and how he accepts the verdict of the court against him, when and how he refuses the opportunity to flee from prison, when and how he behaves in his final moment when he drinks the hemlock and lies down to die — these are all expressions of his philosophy. No understanding of what Socrates thought philosophy was is possible apart from an appreciation of how philosophy is meant to find expression in a life such as this — that is, in a life such as the one that Socrates himself sought to live. Philosophy was not something you simply learned — say, by reading certain books and taking an examination on them — it was something you practiced. This is perhaps particularly clear in the case of the ancient skeptics — you will have misunderstood the role of any particular argument, as deployed within the practice of the ancient skeptics, if you think the skeptic wants you, in the end, to prefer that argument over the equipollent argument for the opposite conclusion. The spiritual disciplines internal to each of the Hellenistic schools of philosophy seek to promote a certain kind of existential telos — for the Skeptics, the telos is ataraxia; for the Neo-Platonists, it is ecstatic union with the cosmos; etc. A nostalgia for this aspect of ancient philosophy, along with the correlative contrast between ancient and modern philosophy, is a theme common to the writings of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. For the ancients, the mere word philo-sophia — the love of wisdom — was enough to express this conception of philosophy. Thus, philosophy was a way of life, both in its exercise and effort to achieve wisdom and in its goal, wisdom itself. For such a philosopher, his writings i. This has implications for the sorts of role that writings which aim to depict the life of the philosopher are able to assume in ground-level philosophical practice. It also helps to explain the frequent deployment of anecdotes regarding the lives of philosophers in ancient Greek and Roman texts. Anecdotes about philosophers wedded to this or that philosophical teaching often seem to be adduced by the ancients as an instrument not only for describing but also for evaluating the teaching in question. If Phanias of Eresus in his book on the Socratics said that Aristippus was the first of the Socratics to pay for tuition and to make money by teaching, the story must have been meant to characterize, or perhaps to discredit, the hedonistic inclinations of Aristippus. Books of this type on philosophic schools, though probably first written in the Peripatos, soon became the common patrimony of Hellenistic culture. It served an important positive function as well: to provide a representation of the philosophical life. The influence of this mode of representing a life was not confined to the representation of the lives of philosophers. In ancient Greek and Roman times, all biography contained an element of philosophical biography. That life which the ancient art of biography seeks to depict, whatever else it may be, will be the embodiment of a conception of philosophy. Biography, so conceived, is an account of the life of the individual — whether it be the life of a poet, statesman, general or saint — qua hero. That which such asketisch bedeutung account aims to highlight is that which is exemplary in such a life. For, if they are right, asketisch bedeutung, at least for much of the corpus of ancient philosophy, the only understanding of those writings available independently of an understanding of the lives its authors aspired to lead is an anachronistic one. Perhaps you have a point about ancient philosophy. Perhaps philosophy was once about living a certain sort of life — and you are right that there is, in such a case, perhaps no separating an understanding of the life which a particular philosophy enjoins its practitioners to lead from an understanding of the philosophy itself. But my objection is to biographies of modern philosophers. We, contemporary philosophers, no longer look to the Sage for an accurate standard or measure of anything. Nowadays, we look only to the well-reasoned philosophical theory; and one does not need to be a sage to put forward exemplary instances of such theory: all one needs to be is a good philosopher. His point does not secure his thesis; but it forces one to reflect on what has become of the ancient conception of philosophy in the course of the development of philosophy in the modern era. To put the point simply, there is certainly this much of a difference between ancient and modern philosophy: what Kierkegaard and Nietzsche claim was generally true asketisch bedeutung ancient philosophy is by no means generally true of modern philosophy. Hence the possibility of their interest in the difference between ancient and modern philosophy. But why were these two philosophers so interested in this difference. Their interest was not confined to the scholarly ambitions of the historian of ideas but was itself philosophically motivated. This interest was premised precisely on a refusal to accept the difference in question as a difference in kind with regard to the possibilities for philosophy in the modern era. An example of a Modern Philosopher: Wittgenstein A useful example of a modern philosopher who shows that the separation that the compartmentalist seeks to effect between ancient and modern philosophy has, at the very least, its exceptions is Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein, like Socrates or Pythagoras, seems to many of his expositors to call for this sort of treatment. This is surely not merely because Wittgenstein lived asketisch bedeutung a manner which caused anecdotes about him to proliferate, but because the authors of such accounts take the anecdotes and details in question to illuminate something about Wittgenstein qua philosopher. Yes, he was an odd fellow who lived an unconventional life; and, yes, of course, this provides colorful material for the occasional entertaining digression. There are various ways one might answer this question. The reductivist and compartmentalist will each favor a certain direction of answer to this question. The reductivist thereby seeks an understanding of such remarks in a prior understanding of his life. Such a compartmentalist would concede that it is, of course, still fine to collect and publish such jottings separately, as long as one does not fall into the confusion of thinking they are part and parcel of the philosophy proper. The exercise of such discernment is never far below the surface in the judgments Wittgenstein himself offers of the philosophical work of others. To put the point more positively and in a more Wittgensteinian idiom: the spirit of a person shows itself in the spirit of his philosophy, which in turn shows itself in the way he philosophizes. He is such a human person. And the estimate he forms in this regard of James qua person is not — and, for Wittgenstein, asketisch bedeutung be — utterly independent of his estimate of James qua philosopher. When Wittgenstein remarks about A. If you cannot write anything that is more truthful than you yourself are, then you cannot write anything in philosophy that is more truthful than you yourself are. For Wittgenstein, the two difficulties are inseparable — they are aspects of a single difficulty. If you do not think of yourself as ever practicing philosophy, then you may take yourself only to have reason to think of yourself as caught up in the second of these two kinds of struggle. Though, it is worth remembering, asketisch bedeutung did not seem so to philosophers as different from one another as Socrates, Augustine and Nietzsche. But if you wish to think of yourself as practicing philosophy in anything like the spirit of Wittgenstein, then these two struggles must become for you — as they did for Wittgenstein — twin aspects of a single struggle, each partially constitutive of the other. Wittgenstein thought that what and more importantly how we think is revelatory of who we are and how we liveand that learning to think better and, above all, to change the ways in which one thinks is an important means to becoming a better — i. And if qua biographer or reader of biography one turns to examine his life, if one has the eyes to see which requires that one have some understanding of his philosophyone will discover the pressure of such a demand equally pervasively manifest in the conduct of his life and in his understanding of the relation between his philosophy and his life. Such a philosopher will naturally asketisch bedeutung biographers. If those biographers have reductivist proclivities, their biographical narratives will necessarily give a distorted picture not only of the life but also of the thought. They will give a distorted picture of the life of a philosopher such as Wittgenstein because there is no understanding the life of such a man apart from an understanding of his thought. And, in the case of a philosopher such as Wittgenstein, whose thought embodies an understanding of what it is to lead the philosophical life which is in turn reflected in how he lived, such a veto deprives us of a non-negligible resource for better understanding that unity comprising both the philosopher and his philosophy. In the case of a philosopher such as Wittgenstein, the compartmentalist deprives us of a genre of writing about the philosopher which, if it is done well, can be a good thing. The problem is that it almost never is done well, thus fuelling the suspicion that there is no possible thing of the relevant sort to do well. Two Examples of Philosophical Biography One time-honored way of demonstrating the possibility of something is to demonstrate its actuality. I see that there are certain modern philosophers who should be exempted from my veto on trying to understand the work of a philosopher in tandem with trying to seek an understanding of how and why they lived as they did. There are philosophers, such as Wittgenstein, whose conception of philosophy and whose conception of how one should live are so deeply integrated that biography becomes a useful tool for illuminating the spirit in which such individuals seek to do philosophy and thus attaining a proper view of what philosophy is for philosophers of this funny sort. But, among modern philosophers, these philosophers are the exception. For most modern asketisch bedeutung — for a typical analytic philosopher like Bertrand Russell — philosophy is one thing and life is another. And it is even more rarely the case that such motivations are wholly absent from the work or life of a truly great philosopher that is, a philosopher whose biography we might have some interest in reading. Russell is, of course, famous for being a philosopher who changed his mind a lot. Is this irrelevant to an understanding of his philosophy. Before addressing that question, perhaps a brief sample of the evidence is in order. At times, Russell looks upon his work in mathematical logic as possibly the most asketisch bedeutung form of human occupation: Pure mathematics is one of the highest forms of art; it has a sublimity quite special to itself, an immense dignity derived from the fact that its world is exempt from change and time. This alone is enough to put it on a pinnacle above all other studies. These might be termed the warm conception and the cold conception respectively of the significance of mathematics. Asketisch bedeutung of such objects liberates the soul, allowing it to ascend to the heights. Other forms of knowledge accordingly pale in comparison with the sort of knowledge afforded by mathematics and those branches of philosophy properly associated with it: I hold all knowledge that is concerned with things that actually exist — all that is commonly called Science — to be of very slight value compared to that knowledge which, like philosophy and mathematics, is concerned with ideal and eternal objects, and is freed from this miserable world which God has made. This contemplative conception of the importance of mathematics is, in turn, tied to a further yearning — a yearning for a world which will not disappoint: The contemplation of what is non-human, the discovery that our minds are capable of dealing with material not created by them; above all, the realization that beauty belongs to the outer world as to the inner, are the chief means of overcoming the terrible sense of impotence, of weakness, of exile amid hostile powers, which is too apt to result from acknowledging the all-but omnipotence of alien forces…. In this mood, the thoughts expressed in the above passage are apt to strike Russell as of a piece with the illusions of the traditional religions — indeed, such thoughts are themselves species of religious illusion — and the goal of philosophy should be to free us from all such illusion: to enable us to look things hard in the face and see them as they really are. For the cold conception, too, seeks to ennoble the study of mathematics by subliming the object of its study, thereby elevating the Self who studies. On this hybrid conception, technical philosophy acquires its value by providing a very temporary refuge from the world in which we live. Russell is famous for his fierce attacks on Christianity; but what is less well known is that he is also the author of passages such as the following: Religion is the passionate determination that human life is to be capable of importance. To assert religion is to believe that virtue is momentous, that human greatness is truly great, and that it is possible for man to achieve an existence which shall have significance. Religion, it seems to me, ought to make us know and remember these immeasurably better things, and live habitually in the thought of them. I have hitherto only seen the greatest things at rare times of stress or exultation. What the vision seems to show me is that we can live in a deeper region than the region of little every-day cares and desires — where beauty is a revelation of something beyond, asketisch bedeutung it asketisch bedeutung possible to love all men. Yet there is an underlying attitude — we might call it one of utopianism — to which Russell recurs throughout his life, which fuels his enthusiasm for various sometimes astonishingly harebrained political schemes, and which cyclically both eclipses and is alternately eclipsed by his enthusiasm for technical philosophy. Then even love seems to me merely an opiate — it makes us forget that we draw our breath in pain and that thought is the gateway to despair. He accomplishes this by first assuming the mantle of the staunch defender of the scientific outlook and then characterizing the requirements of a strictly scientific attitude in ways that appear to have straightforward ethical implications. Paradoxically, on a first look, however, the nature of reality as disclosed by science appears to be merely ethically neutral: The kernel of the scientific outlook is the refusal to regard our own desires and tastes and interests as affording a key to the understanding of the asketisch bedeutung. The scientific mind involves a sweeping away of all other desires in the interests of the desire to know. Until we have learnt to think of. In certain writings, Russell manages to convert a description of the universe as consisting of nothing more than mere clouds of particles in motion into a prelude for an edifying discourse — one that climaxes in the rousing tones of a gospel of salvation. One way of answering this question is by trying to understand the following: how do these attitudes all fit into a single life. One can imagine different directions of answer to the former question how do they fit into a single philosophical trajectory. To these different directions of answer correspond different sorts of intelligibility that philosophical biography can confer. At one extreme, one might come to see more clearly how a single overarching philosophical conception does indeed run through the apparently discordant attitudes, harmonizing them into a single coherent unity: when one sees how the attitudes all fit together within the life, one sees better how they fit together philosophically. At the other extreme, asketisch bedeutung might come to see more clearly how there is no underlying unity in philosophical conception which brings this variety of attitudes into concord, yet may still be brought to appreciate how this particular constellation of tensions and oscillations in philosophical conception fits into a single humanly as opposed to logically intelligible pattern: when one sees how the attitudes all fit into a life, one sees better how although they do not form a coherent philosophical whole they nonetheless represent an intelligible set of human responses to a certain set of intellectual needs and pressures. With the aid of the narrative Monk painstakingly pieces together, we not only follow Russell through his asketisch bedeutung changes of heart, but we witness how these changes are coordinated with, how they both trigger and are triggered by, such things as the fluctuations in his relationship with figures such as G. Moore, Joseph Conrad, and Wittgenstein, his falling into and out of the grip of the conviction that he has found the love of his life, his contributions as a pamphleteer for diverse social and moral causes, his sojourns in the Soviet Union, the United States, and China, his grueling soapbox tours on behalf of a variety of political movements, his asketisch bedeutung as a founder of a school and an agitator for educational reform, his efforts to co-author treatises with collaborators as different from one another in sensibility and outlook as A. Lawrence and Dora Black, etc. But perhaps it is asketisch bedeutung badness that is interesting. This inevitably leaves Monk open to the charge of a certain bias of sympathy in asketisch bedeutung one case and antipathy in the other. He aspires to confine himself to showing us the life through a well-documented narrative of the thoughts and actions of the individuals themselves. If he is faithful to this aspiration, then all this pair of biographies could be said to be doing is simply confronting members of these respective circles of admirers and detractors with what there is to notice about the reciprocal interaction of the life and work of each of these two philosophers. The reader would thus find himself or herself confronted with each of these two individuals themselves — confronted with the ways in which each of their respective philosophical sensibilities emerges and finds expression in the course of shaping and being shaped by these interactions. Whether Monk does remain faithful to this aspiration in each of his two very different efforts to write philosophical biography is at best a delicate question, and no doubt one which different readers will decide differently asketisch bedeutung perhaps differently with regard to each of his two efforts. This is a question each of us must answer for him- or herself on a case by case basis. How we answer this question will, of course, depend on our view, in each case, of the biography in question on how successful we take it to be qua philosophical biography and the philosopher in question that is, on what sort of philosopher we take him or her to be ; but, more significantly, it will depend on our conception of philosophy — on what we think philosophy now is and what we think it ought to be — and on the ways in which that conception may be either confirmed or challenged by a philosophical biography. These are not matters that someone else can decide for us. This is not what Monk does. But it can be hard to see. What Monk aims to do is allow us to see that work as a whole more clearly and perspicuously than we were previously able to. Philosophical biography, if it succeeds, can play a role asketisch bedeutung enabling us to see in the work of a philosopher what we might otherwise miss in the work. Though philosophical biography attempts a depiction of philosophy in vivo rather than, as it were, in vitroit is still the philosophy and not just the philosopher that it seeks to bring into view. He does not seek to explain or evaluate the work of either of these philosophers by privileging what is legible in their lives over what is legible in their work — offering a reading of the texts of their lives that, in effect, pretends that it can serve as a substitute for the hard work of reading the texts that they wrote. Many people who set out to do something like what Monk aspires to do — to write a biography that illuminates the work of a philosopher — wind up, I think, more or less inadvertently, sliding into writing some more reductivist form of biography; because in order to construct a narrative that offers the appearance of illuminating the work through attention to the life, they slide into trafficking in the forms of pseudo-illumination that reductivist narratives asketisch bedeutung. If one judges Monk to have succeeded in his aim then one will have judged him to have succeeded in doing something difficult. There is an art to writing such biographies; and, like any art worth practicing, it is hard to excel at. As with all such arts, people will differ widely in their assessments of whether the efforts of a given practitioner of the art are to be judged a success and, if so, how much of a success. My aim in this paper has been to exhibit the coherence of taking sides in such arguments by showing that the attempt itself — the genre of philosophical biography as such — is in no way incoherent. Other Honorable Trades: Shoemaking, for Example Monk has himself written illuminatingly about his own conception of philosophical biography and, in particular, about the role played within that conception of the sort of understanding which consists in being able to see and allow others to see connections. In the course of explicating what it means to have the eye to notice such connections, he finds occasion to quote an anecdote from Stanley Cavell. Perhaps he would turn to us, fix us with a stare, then turn back to the piano and repeat, as if for himself, the two versions. Of course I do not say you must hear this. There are many honorable trades. He is not so immodest as to indicate the respect in which the anecdote might have served equally aptly as a parable for the entire enterprise of philosophical biography itself. And when the practitioners of philosophical biography are tone-deaf to what they need to hear, the sounds they produce are no less hard on the ears than those produced by tone-deaf musicians. Not everyone presently writing biographies of philosophers should obviously be doing what they are doing. To quote Ray Monk quoting Stanley Cavell quoting Ernest Bloch: there are many other honorable trades — shoemaking, for example. The quest for this sort of understanding may seem to defeat the pleasure of reading biography. What many people want most out of a biography is not to have light shed on elusive aspects of the work of a difficult philosopher; most readers, when asketisch bedeutung pick up a biography, just want to read an entertaining and edifying story about the life of a great man. Thus, even if one deems a philosophical biography successful, not everyone who reads such a book will come away with the variety of understanding it aspires to confer merely as a consequence of having attentively turned its pages — especially if the reader turns the pages eager to see how it will all turn out, consuming it like an adventure story, without looking for connections that are left to the reader to draw himself. For it is a hallmark of good philosophical biography that a great deal of work be left to the reader. But there are many worthwhile ways to spend your time other than reading philosophical biography. Ross Asketisch bedeutung Oxford University Press, 1955 asketisch bedeutung p. Arnold Davidson Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995 ; p. This much seems clear: if one thinks that a consideration of the manner in which a philosopher lives can contribute in some way to an assessment of the cogency of his philosophical doctrines then this will have implications for what one takes the role and standing of what we would tend to consider merely ad hominem forms of argument to be. As an amusing yet representative sample, consider the manner in which Aristotle introduces his discussion of the political doctrines of Hippodamus: Hippodamus the son of Euryphon, a citizen of Miletus, was the first man without practical experience of politics who attempted to handle the theme of the best form of constitution. He was a man who invented the planning of towns in separate quarters, and laid out the Peiraeus with regular roads. He wore his hair long and expensively adorned: he had flowing robes, expensively decorated, made from a cheap but warm material, which he wore in summer time as well as in winter. Barker Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946; p. The embedded quotation is from Giuseppe Cambiano. They are still infuriating in our time. They are never so infuriating as when approached from the point of view of biography. We like biography to be true or false, honest or dishonest. We shall not understand what biography was in the fourth century if we do no recognize that it came to occupy an ambiguous position between fact and imagination. Let us be in no doubt. With a man like Plato, and even with a smaller but by no means simpler man like Xenophon, this is a consciously chosen ambiguity. The Socratics experimented in biography, and the experiments were directed towards capturing the potentialities rather than the realities of individual lives. Socrates, the main subject of their considerations …, was not so much the real Socrates as the potential Socrates. He was not a dead man whose life could be recounted. He was the guide to territories as yet unexplored… The Greeks and the Romans realized that writing about the life of a fellow man is not quite the same as writing history…. By keeping biography separate from history the Greeks and the Romans were able to appreciate what constitutes a poet, a philosopher, a martyr, a saint. The point is simply that one must have some general understanding of the way of life of the Skeptic, the way of life of the Stoic, or the asketisch bedeutung of life of the Epicurean in order to understand what ancient Skepticism, Stoicism, or Epicureanism is. Hence I say: one must have some understanding of the lives that the authors of Skeptical, Stoic or Epicurean texts aspired to lead in order to understand these texts. One way of acquiring such an understanding is, of course, simply through, while reading such texts, imaginatively entering into the conception of how one ought to live which the texts themselves presuppose. There are many anecdotes about Kripke circulating in contemporary philosophical circles. Wittgenstein never wrote nor ever planned to write such a work. See the Revised Edition of Culture and Value, with annotations by Alois Pichler, indicating the manuscript sources of the remarks. A subsidiary aim of the present essay is to cast doubt on the italicized portion of this description of these remarks. John Whittaker Macmillan, forthcoming where the topic is treated at greater length. Martins Press, 1995 ; pp. I presume this is because he —mostly rightly — takes himself to disagree with so much of what I say elsewhere in my paper. Are these remarks about ethics. I take the five remarks from Wittgenstein quoted above to be attempts to articulate aspects of that demand. Rush Rhees Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984p. Nordman Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993p. Ayer: A Life; in The Sunday Times, June 13, 1999, Book Section, p. Rush Rhees; reprinted in Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophical Occasions, 1912-1951, p. It means the asketisch bedeutung is written in good will, and in so far as it is not so written, but out of vanity, etc. He cannot free it of these impurities further than he himself is free of them. Hence both the promise and the danger of philosophy. For Wittgenstein, logic and ethics are each, and each differently, concerned with a pervasive dimension of human asketisch bedeutung and action. It is a not uninteresting fact, though, that when such a philosopher undertakes to write an autobiography, the result is likely to be not only a singularly boring book but one that is, in any conventional sense, a remarkably unilluminating autobiography. Does that mean that, with regard to philosophers who occupy this opposite end of the spectrum, there is nothing about their work for the genre I am here calling philosophical biography to illuminate. Asketisch bedeutung one only write as it were, mere biographies as opposed to philosophical biographies of such philosophers. That depends upon whether there is an interesting relation between that which is necessarily absent from the representation of the lives of such philosophers and that which is present if only elusively so in their philosophical thought, and, if so, whether the following two conditions are additionally satisfied by this relation: 1 it illuminates something important about the character of the philosophical thought as such, and 2 what is thus illuminated can be brought to light with particular clarity or poignancy by means of the genre of philosophical biography. Or to put the point less delicately: it depends upon whether there is a philosophically interesting reciprocal relation between the poverty of the life the magnitude of its accomplishments notwithstanding and the poverty of the thought its significance as a contribution to philosophy notwithstanding. I am inclined to think that there is asketisch bedeutung something here for philosophical biography to disclose, but that it takes tremendous talent and tact not to mention courage to do it well. The topic of an internal relation between the poverty of the life asketisch bedeutung a philosopher and the poverty of his philosophy is arguably the central topic of J. It is a matter of some interest, in the light of the topic of this paper, that Mill should at some point have felt the need to resort to the genre of autobiography in order to do justice to the grounds of his most profound dissatisfactions with Benthamism. The point of the conclusion of the asketisch bedeutung paragraph might be put asketisch bedeutung follows: it takes a different order of delicacy and tact to do by means of biography what Mill there attempts by means of autobiography. Slater London: Routledge, 1983 ; p. From this point on, Russell becomes able to look for warmth only outside technical philosophy. Griffin Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man, condemned today to lose his dearest, tomorrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day; disdaining the coward terrors of the slave of Fate, to worship at the shrine that his own hands have built; undismayed by the empire of chance, to preserve his mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life; proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power. Anscombe Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953 ; p. Since no biographer worth his salt fails to exercise considerable restraint in the selection of detail as well as considerable discrimination in the arrangement of detail, the charge of having misjudged the salience of particular details through their manner of either inclusion or omission will inevitably remain a live one among unsympathetic readers. The anecdote is quoted by Monk in his contribution to this volume. Daß diese sie etwas zu lehren haben; kommt ihnen nicht in den Sinn. Jahrhunderts gilt, gibt es einen Bereich innerhalb seines Denkens, der trotz dessen zentralen Bedeutung für alles, was Wittgenstein gemacht hat, in den zahlreichen, über ihn verfassten und asketisch bedeutung ihm inspirierten Arbeiten überwiegend ignoriert wurde. Dies ist seine ablehnende Haltung zum Szientismus, der Auffassung, nach der echte Erkenntnisse nur in wissenschaftlichen Erkenntnissen, echtes Wissen nur in wissenschaftlichem Wissen bestehen sollen. I believe that I have never invented any movement of thought, but that they have always been given to me by someone else. I just passionately seized them outright for my clarification work. Boltzmann, Hertz, Schopenhauer, Frege, Russell, Kraus, Loos, Weininger, Spengler, Sraffa have influenced me in this way. Can you take Breuer and Freud as examples of Jewish re-productivity. Be that as it may, what follows is little more than speculation any way—speculation, that is, regarding how Kraus may have possibly influenced the early Wittgenstein. He lives in Lüneburg, Germany. The idea that these have something to teach them - that does not occur to them. That is his opposition to scientism, the view that all real knowledge is scientific knowledge, all real understanding scientific understanding. Alois Pichler, Simo Säätelä, Yrsa Neuman. We kindly thank the editors, James Conant and Niklas Forsberg for their permission to publish the text here. Or, to make room for a number of different kinds of answer, what in philosophy spoke to you. I think I discovered that to some extent in a rather indirect, roundabout, way. I started out thinking that I was supposed to be doing something in mathematics or physics because those were the subjects that I was good at when I was young. When I got further into those subjects, I did not know enough about what philosophy was to know that it was the philosophical aspects of physics and mathematics asketisch bedeutung the philosophical questions that lay at the foundations of those forms of inquiry — that spoke to me most. At the time I would have just said that I am interested in certain fundamental issues that come up in physics and mathematics. Forsberg: Was there some particular reason that you were first drawn to physics and mathematics. And is there some particular reason why you had trouble recognizing the questions that most interested you there as philosophical. Conant: Yes, I suppose so. But the reasons were merely biographical. I was named after my grandfather, James Bryant Conant, and I was supposed to be his reincarnation. There was a sort of an unspoken contract to this effect between myself and my parents. It was never really clear to me what was the chicken and what was the egg here: That is, if they thought I must be the reincarnation of him because I was good at subjects such as math and physics, or if they thought I was good at subjects like math and physics because I was my grandfather reincarnated. I just knew I was supposed to be good at them, because I was supposed to be just like my grandfather. It was part of my childhood self-conception that I had to be good at these things. Yet, at the same time, I had the sense that I had been placed on a set of rails: No matter how far I travelled, I would just have to keep going in the same direction as I had already been travelling, and I would never arrive at my destination. That is, I would never grow up to be my grandfather. But every time I got off for a moment, I got nervous, so I hopped back on. So I came to think of myself as having a kind of split intellectual personality. I think I even thought, for a time, that there was something deep and interesting about being split in two in this way. Forsberg: Did you feel that asketisch bedeutung was something unique about you. I had a couple of teachers who fit this mold. I thought they were special in an interesting way. This was wrapped up for me, at the time, with a question about what it meant to be Jewish. These teachers were themselves Jews, as it happens. Perhaps I should say that my mother is Jewish and my father is not. What do I mean by that. Well, the official teaching was positivist on the outside, with a softly whispered intimation that the positivist worldview left out the deep and important things, but that these things were deep and important anyway. So, on the official teaching, there was a kind of logical-positivist view of the natural sciences and what they deliver, how they give us the truth about things. This was combined with a sense that that view of the world was somehow deeply incomplete: That what it is to be a full Mensch, a full human being, is to be interested in the many things that come to be left out in that picture — aesthetics, ethics, and so much else which ended up seeming as if it could only have a mystical sort of importance, given that it had no place in the official world-picture. So that these important matters became things one cultivated in an unofficial capacity, so to speak. Or, to put things more accurately: I perhaps sensed that at some level there must be something incoherent about this, but this very incoherency seemed deep and interesting to me, rather than philosophically troubling. asketisch bedeutung I learned this attitude from some of the teachers I admired, my positivist rabbi exemplars, as it were. These teachers were not necessarily in the first instance philosophers. They were mathematicians, astrophysicists, historians of science. So in learning mathematics and physics from them, I was unwittingly swallowing a whole philosophical attitude without being able to recognize it yet as a form of philosophy. I just thought that that is what it is to see the world aright. Forsberg: So how did you go from these subjects to philosophy. Conant: What I set out to do was to follow a course of study that would allow me to graduate as a Physics major, so that I could then go on to become a physicist. Many of my fellow undergraduate friends were on that track too, and they went on to get jobs at huge labs. But I realized that they ended up leading lives, working in those labs, that struck me as completely uninteresting; and those lives no longer had anything to do with what originally drew me to physics. It was, I was discovering, the large fundamental questions I mentioned before — for example, philosophical questions about the nature of space, the nature of time, the nature of explanation, the relationship between theory and reality, and so on. One of the ways in which I solved this problem that my studies were threatening to lead me into a boring life was by increasingly taking courses in the history of science. This subject drew on both my knowledge of physics and of mathematics, while at the same time letting me stick with these more fundamental questions. Eventually, after six years of being at the university on and off, I looked over my course requirements and the courses I had taken, trying to figure what I should major in, if I wanted finally to be done with college and graduate immediately. I was still a couple of courses short of a Physics major. I was also a few courses short of a History of Science major. But it turned out that I already had everything I needed to major in Philosophy. asketisch bedeutung Similarly, some of the courses in the Math Department, for example, on introductory and advanced mathematical logic, also counted. So, too, for some of the Lit courses on Kierkegaard and even Dostoyevsky. So I took these and graduated as a Philosophy major. So part of the way that I first discovered that philosophy was my calling is not because what was happening in the Philosophy Department at Harvard at the time seemed to be calling to me. Rather, I first discovered something superficial and institutional: namely that a great many of the courses I had taken counted, according to Harvard University, as Philosophy credits. It seemed to me at first that the unity was merely institutional. At first, it seemed like a happy miracle that this Philosophy Department thought all asketisch bedeutung these courses were relevant to the study of philosophy somehow. The courses that took up philosophical issues but were listed in other departments and taught by non-philosophers originally excited me more. In retrospect, as I look back, and compare my case with that of similarly-minded undergraduates in my own university now, I recognize that this aversion to Philosophy courses was, to a large extent, a mark of my own intellectual immaturity and my own underdeveloped intellectual appetite. At the time, like many people when they first come to the subject, I preferred the way philosophy tasted when it came wrapped in another subject to the way that it tasted when it was served raw. Conant: Probably some of both. There is a tendency to package the subject in ways that make it hard for undergraduates to recognize what draws them to philosophy in what becomes of philosophy when it is taught as a university subject. But another part of the explanation just had to do with me at the time: I was confident in my ability to do well in courses that involved math and physics. There was there a certain kind of technical currency that was fungible from one course to the next; whereas it was much less clear to me what I was doing in a philosophy course and what was required of me there. This was connected to the fact that I would sit in on a number of philosophy courses but not take them for credit. So I made sure, when I was not confident that the paper would receive a good grade, that I did not have to write a paper. I would just sit in on those classes. Forsberg: Could you give me an example. Conant: Perhaps the clearest case was the first course I went to that was taught by Stanley Cavell. I saw the course description. It sounded very interesting somehow and it had these names in it asketisch bedeutung I somehow knew were important. I went to the class and I sat in on it, and Cavell was standing in the front of the room talking to the class, and I literally could not understand anything that he was saying. I looked around at the faces of the people in the room and they seemed like very intelligent, interesting, young people. Asketisch bedeutung of them were graduate students in Philosophy whom I had come to know in other contexts. I respected these people, and they were engrossed, completely absorbed. Asketisch bedeutung would ask serious-sounding questions and they would get serious-sounding answers. I could see that something was going on here that was serious and interesting, but it was completely over my head. Forsberg: How did you overcome this anxiety. Conant: I am not sure how. I am not even sure I ever completely did. It took me a long time to just learn to live with the insecurity that comes with choosing a subject in which the different practitioners of the subject did not themselves asketisch bedeutung about what their subject is or is supposed to be. What I liked about mathematics or physics was that at least everyone had some shared understanding of what the game was supposed to be that we were all playing together. Forsberg: How did you go from an interest in the philosophy of mathematics and physics to one in the rest of philosophy. So I took his advice, and started signing up for all kinds of courses that I otherwise might not have had the courage to take, and the result was that I was naturally drawn into the rest of philosophy. Indeed, philosophy of science is now a very tiny part of my overall interest in the subject. I certainly got to know different kinds in my own life. What matters — or what came to matter to me — about the worldview of the figure I was calling the Positivist Rabbi, is how all sorts of things that he himself deems important have asketisch bedeutung importance which he has deprived himself of the intellectual resources to be able to account for. There is something here the positivist rabbi shares with a typical positivist, and there is something here that differentiates him from the typical positivist. His conception of the kinds of knowledge that are susceptible of intellectual vindication undergoes the usual positivist kind of constriction, and his conception of the nature of reality, and what can be found in it, undergoes a parallel constriction. The typical positivist, however, revels in the very narrowness of the conception of reality with which he saddles himself. He wants to emphasize the unclarity of everything that does not meet his philosophically refined standard of clarity. He wants to wield this as an instrument of intellectual terrorism — an instrument with which to embarrass people who think there could be anything more to reality than what his worldview permits. This person, the one I have just described, is simply a positivist. Forsberg: Yes, so there is this kind of strand of positivism that feeds on the idea of a double or divided world. Another person who was on my horizon, who was a professor of philosophy at Harvard in the years when I was a student there, was Quine. In various ways, Quine is a not a logical positivist. He is a critic of logical positivism. But with respect to the distinction I was drawing, between two different ways of inhabiting and adhering to a scientific worldview, Quine belongs in the category of the first kind of character. He was somebody who really, resolutely, wanted to argue that there was nothing to reality other than what physics, in the end, tells us there is. This ontology is to be dictated by what we quantify over in a regimented language, one which allows only for those things which physics — where physics has been promoted to first philosophy — tells us there is. Forsberg: So who would be a paradigmatic case of this here. Conant: The kind of character I had in mind was personified above all by one of my teachers whose name was Burton Dreben. Some of the other important exemplars of such a type among my teachers were physicists. For me, working myself free of that reading of the Tractatus was in part a way of working myself free of the attraction that that whole way of looking at things originally held for me. When I became a more mature philosopher, I became interested in elaborating a more inclusive sense of what philosophy is, what knowledge is, what thought is, what rationality is — such that logical, mathematical and scientific aspects of human asketisch bedeutung could fully enjoy their pride of place in our view of things without crowding out the other things that matter to us as well. I became interested in distinguishing between a metaphysical interpretation of what science supposedly tells us and science itself. My philosophical interest therefore turned towards examining the deepest features of this underlying metaphysical interpretation — the features of that interpretation that had become a kind of post-scientific common-sense in much of contemporary analytic philosophy, so that to believe in them no longer even seemed to most analytic philosophers to asketisch bedeutung anything to do with any particular thing that science teaches us. Indeed, many of your readings of classical texts are readings in which you go against the current, as it were, reading these texts as themselves seeking to show that this picture of a split personality collapses, when it is thought through. I was unhappy as an inhabitant of this picture. So that unhappiness itself, I suppose, was a ground for provocation to further thought. I have taken this maxim to heart in my own philosophical work. I try to take as central targets of criticism in my work only forms of philosophical confusion which I can make alive for myself, which can truly move me and perplex me. I think it is hard to do philosophy well, if what one is doing is criticizing something that one really thinks is just intellectual garbage to begin with. The tone becomes polemical and contemptuous, and then one is simply preaching to the choir of the converted. The only point that remains to writing in that way is to further some political or ideological agenda. So what I have always tried to do is to identify ways of thinking that I find powerful but perplexing, and then try to figure out why those ways of thinking lead to those forms of perplexity, so that in asketisch bedeutung process of criticizing those ways of thinking I am also seeking to further free myself from those asketisch bedeutung. This has implications for how one writes philosophy. I try to write in each case about one of these ways of thinking in a manner which would allow somebody else somebody who also feels gripped by the philosophical way of looking at things in question to be able to recognize himself in my characterization of what he thinks. I try to hold on to a sense of what is powerful in the way of thinking, even as I am trying to criticize it. I, of course, can only do this where I myself have succumbed, at least for a time, to the way of thinking that I am trying to criticize. Forsberg: In which paper can we first see you criticizing this figure. The person who is my interlocutor, as it asketisch bedeutung, in that essay, works with the picture of there being deep things we want to asketisch bedeutung that language will not let us say. Language cannot get a hold of them. This interlocutor is the philosophical voice of my earlier self. I am very much criticizing an earlier version of myself there and writing my way out of that philosophical asketisch bedeutung in writing that essay. Let us come back in a moment to the idea that what one criticizes in philosophy is something that one takes to be false. Before we go into that, I want to be clear about something else. What I was saying above, about the kind of writing that I find I am able to do well, is simply the report of a fact about myself. I am not putting this forward as a general principle of authorship. There is something which is the writing of a good polemic in philosophy. Some people are able to do it well; and I admire people who are able to do it well. But I do think it is very hard to write a good philosophical polemic. The attempt, in most cases, tends to degenerate into an exercise in self-congratulation. I try to steer students away from writing about something that they are only going to be able to write about in a way which will involve a note of contempt for their philosophical adversary creeping into their voice. I think for instance that the whole debate that rages in contemporary philosophy, often more in popular, than in serious academic publications, by and about people who are for God, on the one hand, and people who are against God, on the other, is incredibly superficial and shallow — simply because you have people on both sides who are not trying very hard to understand how it asketisch bedeutung that the people on the other side, who are moved to think differently than themselves are thus moved. So the authors on both sides of this debate are criticizing straw men of their own construction. This yields a very shallow literature. But I will also just say, as a second comment on what you said before, that I am not sure whether the true and the false are the primary categories here. That is why I have preferred to speak above, following Wittgenstein, of philosophical temptation and confusion. The deeper attractions of the positions that most move us in philosophy tend to lie deeper: in ways of looking at things that are much more inchoate, far less determinate than any particular philosophical position that is, anything that anyone could straightforwardly argue for or against ever is. The positions which we end up trying to defend in philosophy are often just ways of trying to flesh out these asketisch bedeutung inchoate ways of looking at things. My discussion of this topic, earlier in our interview, did not turn on my first identifying certain propositions that were previously taken by me to be true, and then claiming about them that actually one should advance asketisch bedeutung the thought to the truth-value in the opposite direction in these cases, affirming the negation of what I previously affirmed. Rather, I wanted to bring out something about the underlying philosophical assumptions that brought about this constriction in thought in the first place, the underlying picture of what there is. What a proper philosophical critique of such a picture would amount to, however, is a subject that I managed to answer your question earlier without ever broaching. Excavating such philosophical pictures and showing how they are needlessly constricting is generally not a matter of identifying propositions that are mistakenly taken to be asketisch bedeutung and showing that they are false. But at the time it grips me, it does not seem empty: indeed, it strikes me as deep, as having an aura of profundity and necessity. But when I try to think it through, it falls apart on me. Often there is a truth in it, but not one that one can get into focus either by affirming or denying what I initially wanted to insist upon. Much of my work therefore is about thinking things through to the point where they fall apart, while trying asketisch bedeutung excavate and salvage the underlying insight that pushes one in such cases initially to insist in this way. Forsberg: Do you think that is the right way to do philosophy. Conant: I do not think that this is the asketisch bedeutung way to do philosophy, or that what I have just described is the only kind of philosophical criticism that is worth doing. Similarly, I am moved to criticize those authors that I take the trouble to write about because I see something in them that strikes me as having evident charisma and power. What I find myself trying to do with respect to such cases is to isolate the crucial, seemingly innocent moments when one finds oneself, while asketisch bedeutung philosophy, laying down a requirement on how things must be, or on how one must think about things. This requirement tends not to come about because one has committed oneself to a claim, but rather because one has fallen into a way of looking at things that strikes one as completely banal and innocent. But, in fact, if one tries to think it through, it is completely unclear what the requirement actually comes to. Rather, at the end, one finds that the words one was drawn to in philosophizing, in order to formulate the supposed requirement, are not able to bear the intellectual freight that they are called upon to bear. But, again, this is only a report of the form of philosophical criticism that I have found most powerful, and, in the end, most liberating for the sorts of cases of philosophical perplexity that I have explored in the most detail in my own work. This exploration does not represent part of an attempt on my part to lay down a requirement on how one must philosophize if one is to philosophize well. Forsberg: You are talking about it as your own personal way of doing philosophy, but it also shows what you think philosophy is, or what a particular form of philosophy is. I mean, it shows that the nature of the philosophical problem has a certain character… Conant: I think philosophy is an incredibly rich thing. The Western philosophical tradition is an incredibly rich tradition and I think it would be tragic if one way of doing philosophy, or one form of criticism, became the model that everybody was forced to adjust themselves to, and every other way of doing philosophy were to die out, simply on account of its difference from this particular model or template of what philosophy can be. Our adherence to a particular way of doing philosophy should not lead us to place all other ways of doing philosophy on the index of forbidden pursuits. Any serious way of doing philosophy, of course, must exclude certain others. But a way of doing philosophy that is unable to tolerate most of the history of philosophy, and unable to find anything of value in it, is a form of intellectual fanaticism which will not itself be able to secure any lasting place in that history. I mean, we could be talking about natural science or literary criticism, and some version of this point could still be made. There are very different kinds of excellent physicist and different kinds of excellent literary critic. The excellence of the one kind of each does not preclude the other. The richness of the full practice that makes up the entirety of either one of those two forms of pursuit is such that very different forms of excellence can flourish side by side within the practice and jointly conduce to the flourishing of the practice. So I am happy to admit that the very particular way I do philosophy asketisch bedeutung just the ways I have found that I am most able to contribute to the ongoing practice of philosophy. There are philosophers I admire but who have not turned out in the end to be models of how to do philosophy for me. But they are still making important intellectual contributions. I think philosophy would be the poorer for the elimination of these other models for how to do philosophy. I want a conception of philosophy that is rich enough, and tolerant enough, to allow for different conceptions of how to do it and for these conceptions to learn from and enrich one another. What form do you think a philosophical community should take then. This is a asketisch bedeutung that, along with my colleagues, I have put a lot of work into over the years, in the hope that a certain sort of community could come to flourish here. I was also the Chair of this department for a number of years. Just speaking institutionally for a moment, what building such a community meant, in the first instance, was trying to hire faculty and attract graduate students with very different conceptions of how to do philosophy — attract people, that is, who could learn from each other, rather than their all just sharing some single picture of how philosophy ought to be done. Very quickly one falls into forms of intellectual narrowness. Kant and Wittgenstein both speak asketisch bedeutung this connection of dogmatism. That it is important to keep a capacious, tolerant, ecumenical conception of what philosophy is, and to be open to other ways of doing philosophy, is something I learned from my teacher Hilary Putnam. Forsberg: This suggestion that dogmatism is, more or less, the thing about yourself that you cannot see, is interesting. Conant: Well, the moment in which you can recognize it as a form of dogmatism is the moment at which it no longer can figure in your thought as a mere form of dogmatism. I think that is right. And in my experience, that is an endless task. I have identified all the aspects, or possible moments, in my own conception of what philosophy is that could possibly partake of any form of dogmatism. I have solved that problem. Now I can move on to the other difficulties that might beset one in philosophy. Both of them were on your dissertation committee. And John Rawls was as well. So you have three of the most prominent thinkers of contemporary philosophy on your committee. And one must ask how that has influenced your way of philosophizing. And, on a more general level, what does it mean to inherit philosophy. Let me first be honest and say that my dissertation committee might sound slightly grander than it really was. I was in my penultimate moment in graduate school, still trying to write a dissertation on Wittgenstein, when I decided to change my topic. I was finding I was out of temper with, or at any rate writing things not to the liking of, some of the professors who were supposed to be advising my Wittgenstein dissertation; and that was making it difficult to finish it. As a perhaps overly desperate solution to this problem, I wound up changing my dissertation topic altogether, and therefore also reconfiguring my committee. Putnam and Cavell were already a part of the committee and remained part of it, but it was only at that point that Rawls was officially added to the committee, basically at the last minute. He was someone who I had just been in philosophical conversation asketisch bedeutung only rather casually until then. He had been a friendly and interested member of the faculty with whom I did a little bit of work asketisch bedeutung on. He agreed to be a member of my committee, basically so I could once again have the required complement of advisers. But it was more of a compassionate rescue operation on his part than anything else: He was not somebody who was playing a central role in guiding the path of my dissertation. He was never a central teacher for asketisch bedeutung in the way that Putnam and Cavell were, even though I admired him. He was at the periphery of my intellectual identity, not at asketisch bedeutung center. Putnam and Cavell, on the other hand, were two very central teachers asketisch bedeutung me, and two very different teachers. They each had an enormous influence on me, and… Forsberg: Still have. If a philosopher has had an enormous influence on you, then he probably always will have — whether you realize it or not. So, in saying that they had an enormous influence on me at that time, I am just sort of taking it as analytically true that they also still do. Probably in ways beyond what I can appreciate. I also was conscious, in working with the two of them, that I was using each of them partly to balance out the other. One of the things I had a fear of in graduate school was losing my own intellectual identity. I do think this can be a serious problem for a student who is working with a powerful dissertation adviser or intellectual mentor. The well-balanced dissertation committee can help alleviate some of the oedipal problems that otherwise come with having a strong — to employ a German asketisch bedeutung of phrase asketisch bedeutung. The most primitive form of the problem is a kind of intellectual ventriloquism, where the knowledgeable listener asketisch bedeutung observer is able to recognize even very subtle inflections of the voice, mannerism, and gesture of the teacher, recurring in a less nuanced, sometimes even caricatured, form in the student. In the worst case, the entire asketisch bedeutung personality of the student is essentially derivative and parasitic on that of the teacher, and the work that the former student goes on to do tends to involve little more than a kind of secondary orbital movement. But an overly dramatic attempt to break out of such a form of orbit can also lead to an intellectual trainwreck. I was very conscious in graduate school of trying to avoid both of these traps. I could see them befalling a number of my peers in graduate school. They were becoming Rawlsians, or Cavellians, or Drebenians, certain kinds of, as it were, continuations of their teachers. Or they were trying so hard not to be that, in a second phase of rebellion, the sort of thing that they were now trying to be against in philosophy ended up defining their entire philosophical outlook, completely overwhelming their relation to the subject. I did not want to wind up on either of these trajectories. So I was consciously placing myself in an intellectual force field in which I was pulled in different sorts of directions at once. The magnetic field within which I was working was multiply polarized, so I was drawn in different directions depending upon how I chose to move in it. I had to learn to keep my own balance within it. If I was not going to be ripped apart by opposing forces, I really had no choice but to cultivate my own form of philosophical integrity and unity — one which reflected aspects of each of these asketisch bedeutung exemplary teachers in such a way that I was not pulled apart by their joint effect on me. Putnam and Cavell were very different personalities, very different philosophers; I think more different than they themselves wanted to admit, when they were for a period trying to form a philosophical friendship. Forsberg: What did they each represent to you. Putnam was interested in exploring and marking the gulf that separates science from scientism. In this respect he had a set of philosophical interests that were utterly alien to Cavell. Cavell represented for me someone very different: a very powerful model of how to try to inherit the philosophical achievement of the later Wittgenstein. Putnam and Cavell were thus two very different philosophers, and their ways of doing philosophy were equally inspiring to me. But they had something important in common: neither one of them had a need to put their stamp on a student. They were both extremely supportive and encouraging, while giving me a lot of latitude to pursue my own interests. Some of these interests that I cultivated at the time were in no way primary interests for either of them, but each of them was willing to serve as a dialogue partner for me. So I remain extremely grateful to them. If I had to say something about the intellectual virtues that Putnam represented for me, the first thing to mention was his sense of philosophy as forming a unity: that all parts of philosophy are parts of one thing, and that in order to do philosophy well it is important to be interested in how all the different parts of philosophy hang together as one thing. Putnam was especially concerned with how things which might look philosophically unrelated, as they occur in ethics or the philosophy of science or mathematics, can actually be versions of the same problem, simply disguised in a different clothing. For Putnam, part of what it meant to make progress in philosophy is to be able to distinguish between the real form of the problems and their mere clothing and thus to see how the same problems repeat themselves across different areas of philosophy. This requires, among other things, seeing ways in which assumptions from one area of philosophy, from metaphysics or philosophy of language, are simply imported into another area of philosophy, say ethics, and seeing how they then hold sway over there, in that other area, as unexamined assumptions. Putnam was, and is, someone who appreciates that there can be tremendous intellectual cost to instituting a professional division of labor in philosophy. Physics is a asketisch bedeutung in which division of labor is extremely conducive to the flourishing of the field. Dividing physics departments up into sub-specialties such as solid state physics, and particle physics, relativistic physics, evolutionary cosmology, and so on, allows you to make progress in each of those asketisch bedeutung areas in a way you could not without those forms of specialization. Putnam made me very suspicious that that sort of division of intellectual labor is generally as productive in philosophy. It very often leads to the institutionalization of intellectual blind-spots and the celebration of new ways of reinventing the wheel. Through his own struggle to attain what the Germans call a Gesamtüberblick of philosophy, Putnam taught me that this is a worthwhile aspiration. There are very few contemporary philosophers, especially in the analytic tradition, who even have such an aspiration, let alone many who get very far in realizing it. Putnam may prove to be one of the last. I admire the seriousness with which he embodies that philosophical ideal. Forsberg: That was a lot about Putnam. Conant: Cavell had no such ambition. I think it is good to have a teacher like that too. But there are other things in Cavell I tremendously admired that go well beyond this. In particular, I encountered in his way of philosophizing a powerful conception of what philosophical criticism is. Some of what we discussed earlier, under the heading of ways in which I have sought to single out for philosophical criticism precisely those views that I myself am able to feel the intellectual power of from within, this is something that I learned from Cavell. Those earlier remarks in this interview can be seen as ways of asketisch bedeutung or interpreting some of the various things Cavell says under this heading. In our present ways of writing the history of analytic philosophy, it has come to name a particular remarkably dogmatic understanding of the role that an appeal to language might play in intervening in an ongoing philosophical dispute. To that extent it has come to name something that is almost the complete opposite of what Cavell himself meant by that expression. Forsberg: I know that you worked a lot with Thomas Kuhn as well, another major philosopher. How did that come about. What kind influence can we trace from him. Probably someone looking at me from the outside can assess that matter better than I can. He himself asketisch bedeutung someone who was passionately interested in philosophy, while thinking of himself as not a philosopher in the first instance, but rather always a historian of science. He helped me make some transitions: First, the transition of someone who went from science to the history of science; then that of someone who was trying to go from history of science to philosophy. As I got older and I was a graduate student and was learning more and more about the world of contemporary philosophy, I became something of a native informant for him. How are their theories different. So Asketisch bedeutung would often just be talking with him about issues that he wanted to be clear about in contemporary philosophy. He was therefore someone who helped me preserve a sense of the importance of what goes on in philosophy for people who are not in philosophy. I think that that is something that people who move only along certain confined corridors within institutionalized philosophy sometimes no longer possess any sense of. Sometimes to their detriment, because they then get caught up in conversations asketisch bedeutung which philosophers only talk to other philosophers, without even knowing how out of touch with the rest of the intellectual world they are. I think that part of doing philosophy well ought to involve some degree of worry about how what one does in philosophy might be fruitful for, or at least have a bearing on, conversations that take place outside of the philosophical community, narrowly conceived. Kuhn was someone who constantly kept me in asketisch bedeutung with my own sense of this dimension of the importance of philosophy. Forsberg: I still want to press you on what it means to inherit philosophy. I know this a theme that has a specific interest for you, well beyond the immediate context of the teacher-student relation. It is not something I have really written about much, but it is something I am glad to have you ask me about. I do think it is a good question. There are two models out there of how to do philosophical work, both of which I find I want to resist when I am relating myself to the philosophical asketisch bedeutung. One possible approach here, embodied in the practice of many contemporary analytic philosophers, is just asketisch bedeutung attitude of unscrupulous opportunism with respect to the philosophical past. And the past can come to represent nothing more than this to one — a place to raid for ideas. In reaction to this conception, there are those who have sought to cultivate what we might call a strictly historical interest in past philosophy. They think of themselves as wanting to take past philosophers more seriously. They do not want to have an intellectually cavalier or merely opportunistic relation to them. But often that cherishing of the historical past takes the form of a mere antiquarianism, within which the task of understanding the past philosopher simply comes to this: seeking to attribute to the philosopher only those things that we can know that he would be prepared to attribute to himself. It is really simply a form of preservation, a way of making a kind of intellectual museum of the philosophical past in which we embalm the corpses of the dead philosophers we venerate most. I am not denying that good philosophical work has resulted from both of these ways of approaching past philosophers. But I myself think it would be a pity if those were the only two models we had of how the philosophical present can relate to the past. Your question was about philosophical inheritance of the past. And I think that what that requires is that an aspect of each of the two attitudes I described above is retained, but transformed in such a way that it is no longer incompatible with the important aspect of the other. The first view makes much of the idea that the philosophical past has a bearing on the conversation of the present; that we want to learn from the philosophers of the past, not simply memorialize them. I do think that in order to do that we have to try to think with them, using our contemporary tools, and that means that we have to have a critical attitude. There has to be ways in which asketisch bedeutung can outgrow them. But, on the other hand, I do think doing this well involves cultivating some of the tools of the historian. It involves some sense of fidelity to their thought. Forsberg: But the hard question is, I take it, what fidelity is supposed to mean here. One of the main ways in which we can often learn from the philosophers of the past is by appreciating them for being different, seeing them as philosophically strange, seeing them as not asketisch bedeutung our assumptions for granted. They can allow us to familiarize ourselves with a very different philosophical landscape from our own. This means features of our own landscape can come into view for us as salient — features that might otherwise remain invisible to us. This can allow us to see at least what is parochial, and perhaps even questionable, in the assumptions that we make in contemporary philosophy. It allows us to see them at the very least as philosophically optional. But this cannot happen if our only interest in reading past philosophers is one of wanting to mine them for things that we would like to say anyway. Only if we are able to measure our difference from them can we encounter them as philosophically alien. And only then can we learn from them the most important lessons they have to teach us. What this requires is a different sort of a relation to a philosopher of the past than either the merely opportunistic or the merely antiquarian one. It requires a relation which is neither one of taking only what one can already use, nor one of trying to understand him or her merely for the sake of historical accuracy with no bearing on the philosophical present. It requires a complicated form of alternating movement. One must be equally capable of appreciating asketisch bedeutung pressing problems of the philosophical present and of appreciating what the past philosopher considers philosophically pressing and urgent in his way and for his purposes. And, finally, one must be capable of seeing how each of these forms of appreciation can bear on the other. So one is not just doing what the historian is doing, telling us what the dead man thought. But one is also not just ignoring what he actually thought in trying to say instead what we ought to think now. And that can lead to something which, if properly held in thought, possesses the potential to transform philosophy, as we now know it, in unforeseeable ways. I think that something like that way of relating to a philosopher — trying to understand the thinker better than he understood himself — is the fundamental mechanism of philosophical progress in the history of philosophy. It involves thinking with the philosopher, not just repeating what he thought. So, the interpretive task is at one and the same time a philosophical task. If I had to say what connects my work on thinkers as different from one another as Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Frege, and Wittgenstein, I would say that it is this: in each case what is involved is an attempt to read these philosophers in the manner I have just asketisch bedeutung to characterize. This is a kind of unity in my work which lies in a place where I think most people have not looked for it, but I think it serves to bring out underlying affinities among the very different things I do. Tripp Professor of the Humanities, Professor of Philosophy, and Professor in the College at the University of Chicago, as well as co-director of the Leipzig Center for German Idealism. He has published numerous articles and several books in a variety of languages, on topics in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, aesthetics, and the history of analytic philosophy, as well as on the interpretation of Kant, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein. He is currently working on four book-projects concerning skepticism; the resolute reading of Wittgenstein; the aesthetics of film; and the interpretation of philosophical texts. He has been a Fellow of the Michigan Society of Fellows, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and the Lichtenberg-Kolleg in Göttingen. In 2013, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation awarded him the Anneliese Meier prize for research. James Conant is member of the International Advisory Board of the Wittgenstein Initiative. He is the author of Language Lost and Found: On Iris Murdoch and the Limits of Philosophical Discourse New York: Bloomsbury, 2013 and Co-editor of Language, Ethics and Animal Life: Wittgenstein and Beyond New York: Bloomsbury, 2012 and Making a Difference: Rethinking Humanism and the Humanities Stockholm: Thales, 2011. He has previously written on Wittgenstein, Cavell, Murdoch, Austin and Derrida. In the light of the shockingly nightmarish quality of these events we cannot but shudder for fears about security in the face of fanaticism and violence in Europe today. If such things can happen there, they can happen more or less anyplace in Europe. So there is a rush to call a state of emergency, close boarders and initiate police action of all sort asketisch bedeutung protect ourselves. No doubt what happened in Paris will asketisch bedeutung fuel to the fires of right-wing nationalist anti-Europeans who are sure to exploit our weakness in the face of terrorism to the utmost. They rub their hands with glee at the prospect of a European Union weakened to the point of exhaustion from which they can take their leave with ease. It remains to be seen to what extent this anticipated scenario will play itself out in the coming months and years. We shall have to wait and see, just as we shall have to wait and see to discover just what actually lies behind these deplorable attacks in all its complexity. To the extent that these deplorable actions were carried out by Frenchmen, they are a totally distressing index of the failure of European political values. You have to believe that life as we live it is not worth living. No established religion believes anything like that. The hardest question we have to face is: what drives young people so far. It seems to be the case that the pluralism that we preach does not correspond to social practice. Our vision of a common life is an illusion to certain vulnerable types of person, our political institutions something foreign and oppressive. Wealth and privilege separate the haves from the have-nots in ways that we have not seen since the early Industrial Revolution. Add to that poverty the ethnic and religious isolation in the banlieus and similar ghetto-like quarters of our cities and you end up with an explosive mixture. The values we live by tolerate what is in fact intolerable: a gap between grandiose social promise without an inkling of performance in the eyes of the alienated. Chesterton somewhat glibly asserted that the world was not tired of justice but tired of waiting for it. Little did he know what that fatigue could produce. In fact, this is nothing new in our culture. Two generations ago we were confronted with politically-motivated terrorists such as the Red Brigades; whereas a generation ago we experienced a less violent but similar psycho-social phenomenon in the middle classes as disaffected children grasped at the straws extended to them by sects that spoke in the name of religion but could scarcely be recognized as such. With the wisdom of hindsight we can see that this was the farce that is now followed by genuine tragedy, a tragedy of our own making. Here it should be reiterated that this is not all that so-called Islamic terrorism represents but it is an aspect of the problematic nature of our very society and its crisis of values. So, what should we do. Lots — even if we cannot do much to change people who are already alienated. There is no question that we must be resolved across Europe to hunt down people who hate our society to the point of slaughtering helpless innocent people as ruthlessly as they attack us. The point of waging war is to win. But anti-terrorism cannot mean simply wiping out the enemy in this case; for, if any of what has been said here up to now is true, the enemy is in a way part of us. Furthermore, that enemy is so alienated that s he cannot talk, as the experience of French authorities with incarcerate terrorists indicates. We need a new kind of policing to deal with such an enemy but we also need something akin to missionary activity aiming a re-converting the potentially alienated to western asketisch bedeutung. Missionary activity is as tedious as it is heroic but how else can we win back the defectors from our society. So we need to find our ways into the banlieus and, above all, the prisons where fanaticism can grow and flourish. Changing the material conditions under which alienation grows with have to be essential. Sadly that remains the case as students of the spread of ideological pseudo-Islamism indicate. Success implies close co-operation with wise, enlightened Muslims who can be a bridge to their alienated brethren. Like successful missionaries we need to work from within a foreign, hostile culture to transform it from within. First and foremost, we have to convince people, especially those not yet entirely alienated but in danger of being swallowed up in a pseudo-religious ideology of hate, that our form of life is indeed worth living. The challenge is enormous as it is inescapable. Above all, the asketisch bedeutung of success is what we do, not what we say, which makes it all the greater for European politics today. Portraits of Wittgenstein is a major collection of memoirs and reflections on one of the most influential and yet elusive personalities in the history of modern philosophy, Ludwig Wittgenstein. This collection of valuable and hard-to-find material is an indispensable resource for scholars and students of the life and work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Her descriptions of the individual family members are both detailed and lively; she describes the exciting stories of their lives, their particular qualities, inclinations, and interests. Oskari Kuusela and Marie McGinn Oxford: Oxford U Press, 2011Chapter 31,714-28. A similar judgment was made some fi ft een years later by Rudolf Carnap in Vienna: His point of view and his attitude toward people and problems. When he started to formulate his view on some specifi c philosophical problem, we oft en felt the internal struggle that occurred in him at that very moment, a struggle by which he tried to penetrate from darkness to light under an intense and painful strain. When finally, sometimes after a prolonged and arduous asketisch bedeutung, his answer came forth, his statement stood before us like a newly created piece of art or a divine revelation. You get tragedy where the tree, instead of bending, breaks. Religion is as it were the calm sea bottom at its deepest, remaining calm, however high the waves rise on the surface. In a well-known journal entry of 1934, reproduced in Culture and ValueWittgenstein remarks: Ich glaube meine Stellung zur Philosophie dadurch zusammengefaßt zu haben indem ich sagte: Philosophie dürfte man eigentlich nur dichten. I think I summed up my position vis-а-vis philosophy when I said: philosophy should really be written only as one would write poetry. That is what makes him a philosopher. No, Wittgenstein would smile or glarebut it is wise and interesting. It is harmonious and poetic. How to reconcile these two seemingly unlike modes of discourse. This was the problem the young Wittgenstein posed for himself, as we can see in the Notebooks 1914—1916composed during the First World War, sometimes in the midst of battle. What cannot be said, can asketisch bedeutung not said. It can be said: good or evil do not exist. He who is happy must have no fear. Only someone who lives not in time but in the present is happy. And now tautology gives way to judgment: to be happy is to have no fear of death, in other words to live in the present, not the future. Asketisch bedeutung fear of death is the best sign of a false, i. When my conscience upsets my equilibrium, then I am not in agreement with something. Certainly it is right to say: Conscience is the voice of God. For example: it makes me unhappy to think that I have offended this or that man. The world of the happy is a happy world. Can there then be a world that is neither happy nor unhappy. In his next entry 30 July 1916Wittgenstein writes: Again and again I come back to this. Simply the happy life is good, the unhappy bad. And if I now ask myself: But why should I asketisch bedeutung happythen this of itself seems to me to be a tautological question; the happy life seems to be justified, of itself, it seems that it is the only right life. What is the objective sign of the happy, harmonious life. Here it is again clear that no such sign, one that can be described, can exist. This sign cannot be a physical, but only a metaphysical, a transcendental one. In circling round and round the word happythe text cannot reach conclusion. Nor is definition or specification necessary. In a 1931 entry in Culture and Valuewe read: Die Grenze der Sprache zeight sich in der Unmöglichkeit die Tatsache zu beschreiben, die einem Satz entspricht seine Ubersetzung ist ohne eben den Satz zu wiederholen. The limit of language manifests itself in the impossibility of describing the reality that corresponds to is the translation of a sentence without simply repeating the sentence. The words are not a translation of something else that was there before they were. We cannot speak of the use of language as opposed to anything else. And even the specter of my own death determines how I live, what I do. The sentences say just what they say—no difficult words to look up. And how do we move from one proposition to the next, the decimal system of the Tractatus constituting, as David Antin has so convincingly demonstrated Antin 1998151—6a framework that defies the very logic it claims to put forward. But what must one know. It is possible that he learned the rules of the game without ever having been shown an actual chess piece. The form of the piece here corresponds to the sound or the physical appearance of a word. But it is also possible that someone has learned the game without ever having learned or formulated the rules. asketisch bedeutung Perhaps first he learned by watching quite simple board games and advanced to increasingly complicated ones. But again, this explanation teaches him the use of the chess piece only because, as we might say, the place for it had already been prepared. Or even: we might say explanation only teaches him the use of the piece, when its place has been prepared. And in this case, it happens, not because the person to whom we give the explanation already knows the rules, but because, from another perspective, he already has command of the game. It can asketisch bedeutung like this, etc. We can say: only someone who already knows how to do something with it can meaningfully ask for its name. In this passage, the terse and enigmatic propositions of the Tractatus are replaced by what looks like a much more casual, free-wheeling discourse. Metaphor is by definition a figure of transference in which a can be substituted for b. The choristers sweet birds no longer sing in the empty church stalls the tree branches. The chess piece called the king asketisch bedeutung be substituted for a particular word or phrase in a discussion of language: we all know, in other words, that language is not really chess. Or consider the following locutions in Culture and Value : A new word is like fresh seed thrown on the ground of the discussion. But this spring loses its value if it is not used in the right way. Nearly all my ideas are a bit crumpled. So what I should do is erect signposts at all the junctions where there are wrong turnings, to help people past the danger points. Wittgenstein knows very well that the items compared are discrete, that words and phrases function only in specific language games. Now let us return to the chess passage in §31. Here, as throughout the Investigations, the author presents himself dialogically—as someone having a conversation with someone else. But there are other possibilities. The interlocutor might have learned chess by watching, first simple board games and then more difficult ones. Or a non-native speaker who knows how to play chess may ask what this particular piece is called in the foreign country he is visiting. Is it all common sense. Each example appeals to our actual practices, to our reference to how we do things in everyday life. But precisely because we are so familiar with these practices, it is difficult to understand what they mean. Consider what happens in §32: Someone coming into a foreign country will sometimes learn the language of the natives from ostensive definitions that they give him; and he will often have to guess the meaning of these definitions; and will guess sometimes right, sometimes wrong. And now, I think, we can say: Augustine describes the learning of human language as if the child came into a foreign country and did not understand the language of that country; that is, as if the child already had a language, only not this one. Or again: as if the child could already thinkonly not yet speak. The new analogy—wonderfully absurd—is between a stranger in a foreign country and a child communicating within its own not-yet-learned language system. The posited analogy is patently absurd, for what could that prior language possibly look and sound like. How does one talk to oneself without talking. asketisch bedeutung Analogies thus provide sometimes positive, sometimes negative reinforcement: in either case, they lead us to revise our previous understanding of this or that fixed notion. And the text enacts that theorem, presented as a non-theorem, at every turn. Showingnot tellingis the mode. asketisch bedeutung And then, sometimes one did, suddenly. In these exciting moments one realized something of what mathematicians mean when they speak of the beauty of an elegant proof. The solution, once seen, seemed so simple and obvious, such an inevitable and simple key to unlock so many doors so long battered against in vain. One wondered how one could fail to see it. Why would this person be so alien from us. In the first place: how would he know that he was on the moon. How does he picture it to himself. Do you have any reason to believe that perhaps you have ever been there. Have you for example ever been near the Chinese border. Or were your parents there at the time you were about to be born. In other words; the reasonable person doubts such a thing only under such-and-such circumstances. If I want the door to move, the hinges must be intact. My life consists in that there are certain things I am content to accept. Not what a statement is but what one does with it is what matters. So, to use the hinge analogy above, if you want the door to move, the hinges must asketisch bedeutung. In everyday life we know quite well whether or not we have been to China or on the moon, just as we know that we have two hands and two feet without looking at them asketisch bedeutung check out the truth. The exempla must meet the test of common sense; indeed, they must be so literal that they make us laugh. The best that I could write would never be more than philosophical remarks; my thoughts were soon crippled if I tried to force them on in any single direction against their natural inclination. Thus this book is really only an album. Again and again, in Culture and Value and related texts, Wittgenstein talks of the need for slow reading: Sometimes a sentence can be understood only if it is read at the right tempo. My sentences are all to be read slowly. Aphorisms, so central to the Tractatus and earlier work, cannot in themselves make a poetic-philosophical discourse. For Wittgenstein, the criss-crossing of threads must be dicht—thick and dense—and, as in the case of lyric poetry, only slow reading can unpack the meanings in question. As a result: how impossible it was for him to conceive of a life different from that of the England of his time. It is asketisch bedeutung, on the one hand, the most important instrument which is given to him, and, on the other, like a piece of jewelry hung around his neck at birth. Or again, toward morning, when the sun is about to rise, rites of daybreak are celebrated, but not during the night, when they simply burn lamps. Only their magic is different. Not what one says but how one says it is the key to doing philosophy. And that, of course, is what makes it poetry as well. Marjorie Perloff teaches courses and writes on twentieth and now twenty-first century poetry and poetics, both Anglo-American and from a Comparatist perspective, as well as on intermedia and the visual arts. She is Professor Emerita of English at Stanford University and Florence R. Scott Professor of English Emerita at the University of Southern California. She is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. San Francisco: North Point Press. Wittgenstein: The Terry Eagleton Script: The Derek Jarman Film. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir2nd edn. Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Berkeley: University of California Press. Notebooks 1914—19162nd edn, ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychologyvol. Geheime Tagebücher 1914—1916ed. Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychologyvol. Philosophical Occasions 1912—1951ed. Die Worte sind keine Ubersetzung eines Andern, welches vor ihnen da war. There is, then, no definitive text of this essay.
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