AW: pynchon-l-digest V2 #4120

[Sascha Pöhlmann]

> Date: Mon, 18 Oct 2004 13:46:13 -0400
> From: "davemarc" <davemarc at panix.com>
> Subject: Re: Pynchon and postmodernism
>
> From: jbor <jbor at bigpond.com>
> >
> > With Wittgenstein you have continually tried to gloss over the fact that
> the
> > Tractatus did, and was always meant to, pave the way for the
> Investigations.
> >
> This might give subscribers the impression that Wittgenstein wrote the
> Tractatus expecting to follow it with the Investigations. As far
> as I know,
> Wittgenstein did not do so. After the Tractatus was published in the early
> 1920s, he considered reactions to it, devoted more of his own
> thoughts to a
> variety of philosophical issues, and came up with the observations
> posthumously published as Philosophical Investigations in the 1950s.
>
> Looking back, he likened the Tractatus to a ladder he could kick away,
> having used it to reach the level of thought represented by Philosophical
> Investigations. I believe he was surprised by the realization. I'd be
> interested in seeing documentation that suggests otherwise.
>
> d.

In the preface to the Tractatus, Wittgenstein claims nothing less than "die
Probleme im Wesentlichen endgültig gelöst zu haben", having mainly solved
the problems once and for all. He adds that the second value of this work is
to show how little has been achieved by having solved the problems. He
apparently was so convinced of having solved the problems of philosophy by
relating them to misunderstandings of the logic of language that he withdrew
from Cambridge and taught at a primary school in a small town in the Alps in
Austria. Something must have kept him thinking there, though, and it must
have been one of the funniest moments in the history of philosophy when he
finally realized that he had NOT said all there was to be said, and actually
was quite wrong: [LW slapping his forehead in class, dropping the grammar
book] "Shit. Kids, gotta split." Then he headed back to Cambridge and
started what was to become the PI...
(sorry about simplifying his biography here, but it's just to support
davemarc's case)

Back into the shadows of p-list, back to lurking...