Kevin Hill

Wittgenstein

November 2010

Mary Eng

major: none

On Truth

I don’t believe, that I of all purported people could write on behalf of of Wittgenstein, or

according to, or in accord with Wittgenstein, such that I might pretend to know what he means,

if he meant anything at all, which is quite a hefty presumption, in itself. Further, the distortion

of translation, adds obstacle. Likely to bump my shins on the distortions of language, I would be

more apt to return to the German, of which I am fond, if not adept.

Well, most certainly the Tractatus is not true, but how kind of you to ask! Depending on

who is writing this paper, one might say, not only is it not true, but more accurately it is not

truth-apt. Presuming a proposed non-cognitivist slant. In fact, non-cognitivism feels quite true,

and delightfully well-said unto itself. It, or the Tractatus, is not prone to having a property of

truth. It is the human mind which might be truth-apt. The human mind is prone to extrapolating

itself and a truthy divinity upon ideas and others, such that it thinks things are truthy. Or it is

powerful to at least pretend so. Emotively, truth at core might be an emotion, giving way to

justice, which might be had at a fair price. As if things were universalizable, objectifiable. It

comes from our social presumption, or the social aspect of memory. And where is not truth itself

a convenience of propagandas of fascism, or the overthrow thereof. Coups rooting themselves

in the willingness to believe, such that truth or none, there might be a desire for it, or some sort
of shared history, a myth, of shared facts, from which might arise the ineffable, a truth truer than

facts, provisionally.

Oh, veritas! Whether in scare quotes or not, the truth of the matter, is not bound in a

cliche, or an etymological regression. Easy it would be to venture back in time to “troeth” and

the “betrothed” the promised and the reckoned, back to the verbal sense of truth, which actively

asserts, knowledge, or belief, as if such things could be taken so lightly!

In a non-cognitivist hall of mirrors, even the proposition of words having common

meanings, even on a spectrum, is problemetized. Easy it would be to say, our words are unique

conglomerates of meaning specific to our unique life experiences which shape our perception of

nuance and tone.

All textual thought might be said to be metaphysical, so long as it can be divorced from its

material reminders, inks, printers, keyboards, human hands, digital equipments, papers. The

Tractarian semantic theory, leaves actual truth truth, in an ineffable place.

The truth arguments come from humans. Mathematics gives facts. Facts enough to send us

into the air, to escape a land of monoculture and one language. Math enough to justify fossil

fuels, as if the meanings behind the actual pollution in our lungs and words were not a narcotic

semantics of its own. Words give words. Tautology “substanceless center” (44). As though on a

planar diagram, contradiction becomes the outer limit of the impossible proposition. They locate

in symbolism, thusly the semantic nature of referents, with dubious “logical scaffolding,” Of

constructions and their opposites.

 On Happiness

Wittgenstein undoes the linguistic manufacture of consciousness through careful hammering

away with words as stones unto another, banging. His words sit in their German more

interesting to me than in their English translation. Such is my own non-cognitivism exacerbated

by tongues which have displayed themselves in chronic meaninglessness. In retreat to

other languages an innocence of possibility is returned to my consciousness, such that the

sachverhalt or the satz give something over, where otherwise there would be nothing for me

but pretty diagrams such as this. As though a Rorchach to my non-comprehension or thwarted

imagination, shackled by text, when better were it paint, collage, dance, or sing.

To entertain Wittgenstein, and why it is his text might lend itself towards our study, and

why eagerly of all my most irrelevant classes, this was for me most eagerly sought after, was

preponderant upon the taking of a red book, of Wittgenstein’s pithy truisms upon a night’s study,

long ago, in 1997. I remember the frustration of his hacking away at thought, as though clearing
away a forest, for the transmission of some actual information, perhaps the ineffable which

cannot be by mere words made.

Even the Tractatus, as it drags itself through thought, gives way to content and wherein we

give content, to words, or where Chomsky sits, to explain Wittgenstein, or where Wittgenstein

sat, to explain them to us, he was therein a distillation of all he read, all his contemporaries, all

the rejections of their doctrinal threads. He was writing and existing in a present tense, creating

an active text, ruled by the linguistic subject object verbal nature of our left right text phonemes,

against more accurate pictogramic truths, material designations, in ink, displaying form, telling

pictures as words.

To speak of logic, is to presume it exists, which I would not do, except to critique the

logicians, who make with logic a gold seal for their many doings, and mental calisthenics. As

logic, in its perfection arises from a harmony towards being, in which thoughts issue from them

selves and sit arraigned in theoretical elegance, so then they live on phoenetical lines. With

which we were to say what is, has becomes, springs forth, or shall. That writing might be a

therapy towards a less begrieved state, an obsessionality, which becomes a lust for life, therein

the servitude of the scribomaniac is the affiction of the happy, or the crying who write for joy or

despair, not mutually exclusive things.

In this hopeless hungry night I have no hope for anything but a participation in an economic

industrialized academic system, such that the production of “essay” becomes the manufacture or

counterfeiting of value, with which to have commerce buying “lecture” a more primary interest

of mine, coexistent with a desire for “money” of which Fannie Mae or Mac have cheap credit
for poor students. So unheimlich, the beggar manufacturing consent to a credit system for low

interest loans, under the pretense of concern for anything other than abatement of the chronic

poverty and suffering here described. A material analysis might then shine light on to the

mechanism of this nihilism, for which Wittgenstein provides scant relief.

And so if commerce were happiness, academia respect, and Wittgenstein has manufactured

a curiosity worth study or discussion, and a system still supports an academy of sorts, beyond

the blogosphere, it is with this kind of scribomania I write. And as the life of the author might

be possessed with ghosts and terrors, fantasies and joys, it is the pleasure of the text as wrote

Barthes, wherein the happiness occurs. And this of course is premised by the bare necessities

which helped perpetuate life: food, and shelter, and sadly, money, from who knows where. As

that might be a consolation of philosophy too: the beggar’s cup.

That as I might as with Beckett, fall in love with a minimalism, unpretentious, in itself, and

wonder after biography, because the last thing would I seek: truth or happiness, in a text of all

places, or prison writings, but them might realize, philosophy is contingent on human charisma,

the ineffable process of textual allure, and the poetics of language, such that a text divorced

of meaning, even in its unique properties exists as if, so to delight, enrapture, or enrage. The

pretense of logic!

And so too the life life of the artist, the scribe.

Cult of personality concurrent with joy of text.