I think there has been some misunderstanding – I did not mean to imply that philosophy should be in the form of music or poetry – that’s just silly. Although, it could be.
Maybe my proposition is this - Life is not defined by logic and reason, but by joy and sadness.
I’m not looking for “flair” but ultimate causes.
And … it is worth noting that, in a journal entry of 1934, Wittgenstein wrote -
I think I summed up my position vis-à-vis philosophy when I said: philosophy should really be written only as one would write poetry.
And it should be read slowly, as he writes in Culture and Value -
Sometimes a sentence can be understood only if it is read at the right tempo.
My sentences are all to be read slowly. (CV 65)
Thoughts rise to the surface slowly, like bubbles. (CV 72)
How one should read poetry.
He wanted to produce certainty where there was uncertainty. Wittgenstein’s “Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough (1936), begins, “One must start out with error and convert it into truth,” and then contains the isolated lyric line, “I must plunge into the water of doubt again and again…”
For Wittgenstein, a command of the structural – i.e. words – how they are used - provided a kind of certainty. He wrote things like “Every word in the language signifies something” and “the meaning of a word is its use in the language.”
In several journal entries, over a period of months, he muses about the meaning of the word “happiness” – yet comes to no conclusion. Instead, he terms the word “happiness” transcendent, which is to say, indefinable. “What cannot be said, can be not said.”
Maybe poets can’t define happiness, neither.
Anyway, he really struggled with happiness.
All of this sent me to do some digging into Wittgenstein the man, and I found out that although he belonged to one of the richest families in Austria, his childhood was unhappy. Three of his older brothers committed suicide by 1918.
That called to mind something I wrote in an earlier post –
about analytical philosophy - it appears to be an attempt to take the complex chaos that is our existence, and make some sense of it - make it manageable - and in that way master or control it.
And I imagined the young man, serious, intellectual, and moody - desperate to make sense of his brothers’ deaths, and his own internal struggles – bring some logic to it – even though the chase for logic appears to have driven him half-mad - but ultimately finding some consolation in logical – ordered p’s and q’s - answers.
(If only life could be so meticulously ordered.)
As he said in a 1930 Lecture, “Philosophy is the attempt to be rid of a particular kind of puzzlement.”
Anyway, in the last few months of his life, he wrote, “My life consists in that there are certain things I am content to accept.”
Writing Philosophy as Poetry: Wittgenstein’s Literary Syntax
