[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by Glice

!"£$% - do you still not get Wittgenstein? I find that incredibly odd. I tend to find there's always things that people intuitively have blind-spots for, but Wittgenstein is a really odd blind-spot to have. Unless you mean early Wittgenstein, but I doubt that's the case.

i get explanations, summaries and accounts of wittgenstein, i even enjoyed (twice) that derek jarman movie about him; dealing with his prose translated into english is another story.

i own a copy of philosophical investigations, it's sitting on a shelf waiting for the time when i can really strangle myself with it. there's some propositional logic shit in it that completely goes over my head. i did get a bit of that ages ago, truth tables & what not, but his shit reads more like quantum physics equations and i am woefully inadequate to comprehend-- or am i mixing it up with something else? probably. i need the book in front o me and it's 200 miles + 6 years away. *

the tractatus i don't get completely but there are some wonderful would-be aphorisms in it and while i don't own a copy it's available online. check it: http://www.kfs.org/~jonathan/witt/ten.html

it's a similar case with hegel-- the whole language of german idealism as a matter of fact, and the reason reading 2 pages of adorno's asthetics is harder for me than reading 2 pages of finnegan's wake-- i don't know the jargon and the meaning it carries, so i get the accounts, summaries, interpretations and cliff notes, but it's a different story when i sit in front of the actual phenomenology of the spirit and try to plow through it. this has caused me problems when reading nietzsche, who criticizes that tradition, but i've had help and/or dictionaries to cope.

so for now i have plato's dialogues and aristotle's extant works next to my bed, and i read them when i get a chance or find something that interests me. my plato translation seems to be a bad one, christian-oriented (the word "God" appears frequently in the Apologia), even though it's in the Bollingen series, which was/should have been more serious. it pisses me off when people "update" ancient texts like that.

anyway, i have other stuff waiting to be read like that wittgenstein volume: spinoza's ethics (not sure i'll ever get to it), habermas's theory of communicative action, and other random stuff.

meanwhile, the online tractatus i just found is proving very enthralling. abstruse most of the time, and requiring of some auxiliary texts, but still, awesome. gotta go butt my head against it....

-----

* now that i think of it, this might have been kripke, not poor ludwig w. but anyway, i didn't understand him at the time, possibly due to fatigue and suicidal impulses.