"A dog may be expecting his master to come. Why can't he be expecting him to come next Wednesday?"
-Ludwig Wittgenstein
I wish to paint you a picture, but I feel my own words to be lacking at this time. Please forgive my quoting, but sometimes it is best to hear from the lion's mouth...
"If a lion could talk, we could not understand him." -lecture
"If Christianity is the truth then all the philosophy that is written about it is false." - quote
"Your religious ideas have always seemed to me more Greek than Biblical. Whereas my
thoughts are one hundred percent Hebraic." -quote
"The point of the [Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus] is ethical. I once wanted to give a few words in the foreword which now actually are not in it, which, however, I’ll write to you now because they might be a key for you: I wanted to write that my work consists of two parts: of the one which is here, and of everything which I have not written. And precisely this second part is the important one. For the Ethical is delimited from within, as it were, by my book; and I’m convinced that, strictly speaking, it can ONLY be delimited in this way. In brief, I think: All of that which many are babbling today, I have defined in my book by remaining silent about it." -letter
"Let me explain this: Suppose one of you were an omniscient person and therefore knew all the movements of all the bodies in the world dead or alive and that he also knew all the states of mind of all human beings that ever lived, and suppose this man wrote all he knew in a big book, then this book would contain the whole description of the world; and what I want to say is, that this book would contain nothing that we would call an ethical judgment or anything that would logically imply such a judgment. It would of course contain all relative judgments of value and all true scientific propositions and in fact all true propositions that can be made. But all the facts described would, as it were, stand on the same level and in the same way all propositions stand on the same level. There are no propositions which, in any absolute sense, are sublime, important, or trivial." -lecture
Feel free to read. For now I attempt to speak:
A tautology is the opposite of a contradiction. That is, whereas a contradiction is always false, a tautology is always true. A tautology is senseless; however, the negation of a tautology is a contradiction. So, while I should not express tautologies, denying them is not what should be expressed. Examples of tautologies include: it is what it is, existence exists, I AM THAT I AM, etc.
Thus, we have the essence of Wittgenstein's book of 7 propositions: "The world is everything that is the case, and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent."
Again, from the mouth of Wittgenstein:
"Now I am tempted to say that the right expression in language for the miracle of the existence of the world, though it is not any proposition in language, is the existence of language itself. But what then does it mean to be aware of this miracle at some times and not at other times? For all I have said by shifting the expression of the miraculous from an expression by means of language to the expression by the existence of language, all I have said is again that we cannot express what we want to express and that all we can say about the absolute miraculous remains nonsense.
Now the answer to all this will seem perfectly clear to many of you. You will say: Well, if certain experiences constantly tempt us to attribute a quality to them which we call absolute or ethical value and importance, this simply shows that by these words we don't mean nonsense, that after all what we mean by saying that an experience has absolute value is just a fact like other facts and that all it comes to is that we have not yet succeeded in finding the correct logical analysis of what we mean by our ethical and religious expressions. Now when this is urged against me I at once see clearly, as it were in a flash of light, not only that no description that I can think of would do to describe what I mean by absolute value, but that I would reject every significant description that anybody could possibly suggest, ab initio, on the ground of its significance.
That is to say: I see now that these nonsensical expressions were not nonsensical because I had not yet found the correct expressions, but that their nonsensicality was their very essence. For all I wanted to do with them was just to go beyond the world and that is to say beyond significant language. My whole tendency and, I believe, the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless. Ethics, so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it."
I guess this is where I say...
He lived a wonderful Life.
:amen
