Though I would not go so far as to suggest that those philosophers as I have mentioned would specify what we ought to do, beyond this, for that would be to extrapolate analytic robustness, and epistemological reserve, into a realm where action begins, and moralities make themselves evident. Which is, of course, what life consists of, but which marks the place, at least as far as Wittgenstein is concerned, where the philosopher stops talking.
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In other words, we must defamiliarize ourselves with reality, so that, at every moment, we are seeing the world with, as it were, new eyes, though not necessarily new wisdom.
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It is this unmediated sort of consciousness, which is so elemental in a child, that philosophers like Wittgenstein would have us, I think, retrieve (if the retrieving of it were possible), not so that we might plunge ourselves into an intellectual haze, where categorization fails, and a fluidity of value replaces the organizing principles by which we have learned to navigate reality (to survive, yes, but also to participate at a caliber that is befitting of such complex beings), but that we might integrate it with whatever functionality belongs to our mental apparatus now, so that the moral inertia and imaginative complacency that are the hazards of civilized life, once it becomes habitual, can be opposed, and brought to heel, by a naivety that is already in us, but that is no longer without the sophistication of experience.
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For there is, I think, to the psyche that has not yet been constrained by the intelligence with which an adult (from the necessity of survival) regulates the events of reality, a facticity to existence so staggering in its novelty, and in the continuity of its unfolding, that the possessor of that psyche must feel quite near to the divine namelessness of that part of the Godhead some refer to as the creator.
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I say “must seem,” rather than “does seem,” because, of course, I have forgotten what it feels like to be that age, and to experience this condition as I have described it. Though I think that we can glimpse, if we happen to observe such a little one during their modes of investigation, while crawling about, say, on the carpet of a living room, where they come across a toy, or a blanket, or the leg of a table that they do not recognize as such, as it rises up above them in relation to them alone, and to whatever flickering mindscape might be attached to their emerging sense of self (and for which, anyway, they would not have the word ‘table,’ or ‘leg’), an expression of such purity and astonishment that I’m certain we can intuit something of what they are experiencing.
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There is something to be said for the wisdom of the infant who, without language, and thus lacking names and categories for the phenomena they encounter, perceives the world with an immediacy and directness that must seem to them startling.
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Which echoes a line he had written in a notebook many years earlier, when he was a soldier during World War I, though the thought is there turned inward, toward himself. “What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world.”
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And yet, with Wittgenstein, one does not feel excluded, intellectually, from his conclusions, at least not always. Besides, this is the man who stated, in the preface to his Philosophical Investigations, published two years after his death, “I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking. But, if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own.”
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Or, I should say, that resist a rendering that would prove easy for a layperson to grasp, for in themselves they are always simple and beautiful, no matter their syntax. One can sense this just by looking at them, as they appear on the page, even if one can’t understand them.
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I cannot comprehend, for instance, much of the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who often depends, for his explications, on tropes of logic and mathematics that resist an easy rendering in language.
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Though it is true that some philosophical tracts might be so impenetrable that their meaning isn’t immediately clear, and avails itself not to the masses, but only to those who are accustomed to the jargon and terminology of their texts, or have been trained in the reading of them, and are familiar with their history, and the breadth of their references.
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And yet not so abstract that its meaning would detach itself from the medium of its expression, and float off into insensibility.
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A problem for the philosopher being, of course, that what they would express should be sufficiently abstract that it has some truth universally, and thus be relevant to the ‘business’ of all.
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And yet philosophy is for busybodies, for those who would make everything their business. Which I say with a bit of cheek, but also with some sincerity.
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Although another way of looking at it, I suppose, is that it’s none of my business.
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Such a conception of life would merely bore me to tears, were it not for the profundity of the consequences of its error.
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Because, of course, the very notion that sin has a reality has, for them, been extinguished, has been laughed off stage by the coterie of humanisms that, well-intended or not, would posit life as a purely natural affair — something in which ambition can exist, sure, but only insofar as it is bounded by the rational and the explicable, can be rendered in terms of utility, or purpose, and is approved by the conventions of the day.
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I have seen people deride, for the sake of fashion, such a thing as obedience, as it would exist in principle, as if they themselves are the only rebels, always involved in the subversion of those paradigms that are not large enough to contain the originality of their style, or the fullness of their personality, not once considering the possibility that the only measure of rebellion that finally matters is virtue, which is disobedience from the habit of sin.
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Which isn’t to say that the principle of order, among and between people, has no place in civilization, or that obedience, as a habit of mind, is to be abhorred. For, given the right context, these things are the means by which a soul will flourish, and come to maturity, and without which it will stagnate, and find no landmarks by which to orient itself, so that any direction such a soul would move would have nothing to vouch for it save the caprices or fancies that the person might associate with that direction, through natural affinity or subconscious allure, or, even worse, self-defeating spite.
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Though, of course, with regard to one another, humankind has no authority other than that which it claims for itself, by its own inauguration. For every person belongs to the realm of their own soul, and need answer to no one but their own conscience, though they might be told otherwise, and be brought to submission, or to the semblance of it, by physical and psychological violence.