what the sferics said to Mondaugen

[Paul Murphy]

Okay, so what does "the world is everything that is the case" mean in V.?
That slippery German word "Fall" is interesting; in Wittgenstein's meaning,
it refers to instance, matter, etc. ("it is the case that the cat is on the
mat"), but it also has the juridical overtone mentioned earlier, as well as
medical connotations like 'er ist ein Fall fuer den Psychiater', he's a
mental case. Like what my Irish forebears called a headcase.

My spin on this sentence always leads me back to the old analytic /
continental divide in 20th-century philosophy. Where Wittgenstein takes
this first statement (which functions like a first principle, an arche from
which all other philosophical investigation must proceed) is to assert that
language itself is contaminated by ambiguity, which must be purged by
rigorous logical analysis, in order to be able to 'picture' or 'mirror' the
ensemble of cases that constitute the world. So the upshot is the
development (post-Whitehead and Russell) of predicate logic, a purified
mathematic 'language' which structures ultimately all truth-claims about
the world. "The cat is on the mat" means nothing more nor less than that
there is an x, such that the x is on the y, instantiate your existential
quantifier, and all difficulties have been set aright.

The downside of such mathematical purism is that propostions about things
like freedom of the will, the existence of God, etc. become perniciously
meaningless. 'Metaphysics' (always said pejoratively, with a snicker) gets
tangled up in mass confusion because its logic is wonky (or 'wooly', as AJ
Ayer used to say). This is the old fact / value binary that has tenured
philosophers muttering into their beards for decades.

Marcuse's _One-Dimensional Man_ (written in English, when he was in La
Jolla, before the free-love-advocacy days) launches a ferocious assault on
this entire mode of philosophizing, precisely because it makes political /
ethical / meaning-of-life-type questions meaningless. This signifies (for
Marxian thinkers) the abdication of philosophy's proper function, which is
to envision revolution, change the world, etc. (cue the final Thesis on
Feuerbach). Call it the revenge of the humanities on the sciences, the
latter obstreperously insisting on the immutable factuality of the facts,
the unquestionable authority of scientific method, just what philosophy
(and its literary handmaidens) ought to call into question and decisively
rebuke as unexamined prejudice. (Hey, where's Sokal?)

Now, in the context of V., the sferics message is rather baleful; if the
world is everything that is the case, then the world can in principle not
be changed, since possibility has been evicted from the world by reason. In
other words, the genocide and debauchery upon which K. Mondaugen gazes is
the case, it has and will be the case, regardless of any intervention of
conscience or will or what have you. Entropy and thanatos rule absolutely.
This, I think, is one of TRP's central concerns in V., to present history
as this baleful death-march, this irreversible collapse into the inanimate,
in order to then call the positivist paradigm on the carpet and explode it
from within, using the weapons of language. Of course, this project also
informs GR. An oscillation between (infinite) resignation in the face of
the 'facts', and the 'leap of faith', the presentation of unactualized
possibility?

Just my two cents.
Cheers,
Paul