Six Rounds with Wittgenstein (Part 6)

Max Ernst, Compendium of the History
of the Universe (1953)

Whoops. I was having so much fun earning a wage and having a panic attack over a glitch in the cover text of The Reunion that went completely undetected for months that I forgot to post the final entry to this series. So: final comments on Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations (1953):

579. This feeling of confidence. How is this manifested in behavior?

How is it manifested otherwise? It's a safe bet that someone who spends most of his day lying in bed and staring at the wall wouldn't report feeling very confident.

Confidence is not a cause of behavior, but a product of it.

witch hazel & kigo

Outside the main entrance of the art museum I used to work at stands billowing shrub of vernal witch hazel (Hamamelis vernalis).¹ In the last days of February it wakes up with the snow drops and crocuses, putting out tasseled yellow flowers, coolly aromatic—"spicy" is the word typically used to describe its scent, but like most olfactory adjectives, it fails to communicate the particularity and subtleties of the witch hazel's suffusive fragrance. If you're positioned upwind from the the plant, the scent can find your nostrils from a fair distance.

Last year, when I still had the luxury of talking half-hour lunch breaks, and when it was still Shirley's job to stand outside the museum entrance, herding visiting school children and getting into fights with presumptuous motorists who dared to park in the bus lane, I often stepped outside to chat with her for a while. During the last week of February and the first week of March, I'd loiter outside a few minutes every afternoon, chatting with Shirley and whoever else might be around (usually a security guard, a member of the custodial staff, or someone from the education department) about this "coronavirus" thing and speculating as to what might come of it. My memories of my final days at the art museum are redolent with the aroma of witch hazel that attended these conversations.

Last week, when Shirley and I had coinciding days off from our new jobs, we took a walk past the museum and I made us take a detour to visit the witch hazel. After only one year, it became for me as much a signal pleasure of spring's approach as red buds at the tips of maple branches, robins marching in the grass, and the creaking voices of migrating grackles.

Six Rounds with Wittgenstein (Part 5) ... and also a review of the Valiant megaWAD

watch it—my gf is a drooling supermutant

Today we're going to continue leapfrogging across Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations (1953). We're also going to go off on a big tangent about video games that will eventually turn into a review of a Doom mod. Because we can, and that is the spirit and joy of blogging.

547. Negation: 'a mental activity'. Negate something and observe what you are doing.——Do you perhaps inwardly shake your head? And if you do——is this process more deserving of our interest than, say, that of writing a sign of negation in a sentence? Do you now know the essence of negation?

549. "How can the word 'not' negate?"——"That sign 'not' indicates that you are to take what follows negatively." We should like to say: The sign of negation is our occasion for doing something——possibly very complicated. It is as if the negation-sign occasioned our doing something. But what? That is not said. It is as if it only needed to be hinted at; as if we already knew. As if no explanation were needed, for we are in any case already acquainted with the matter.

551."Does the same negation occur in: 'Iron does not melt at a hundred degrees Centigrade' and 'Twice two is not five'?" Is this to be decided by introspection; by trying to see what we are thinking as we utter the two sentences? 

First: negation is a feat of the verbal animal.

Consider the pigeon trained to peck at a button when it's colored red and not to peck at it when it's colored blue—even this description is a reification. Properly speaking, what "not pecking" means is "doing something other than pecking, but we don't specify what it is." The omission is expedient insofar as this is one of many occasions where we are solely concerned with whether X is or isn't Y.

"No I didn't read the email you sent me last night" is a more useful answer than "last night I watched YouTube, ate dinner, clipped my toenails, took five pisses, got drunk, jacked off, licked every doorknob in the house..." and so on until every act is accounted for, leading the patient inquirer to finally concludes that "read your email" didn't occur.

In verbal constructions of logic, which are often concerned with the relational frames in which any given entities or events might be situated, X is not Y is what we're left when we're restricted from specifying any characteristics of X and Y beyond their identities with regard to each other.

To dredge up the old aphorism "nature abhors a vacuum," nonbeing means nothing outside the context of the verbal animal's repertoire. Skinner writes: