… and then i was like ‘you know, B’s model could be used as a damn good analogy to account for and describe the history of philosophy.’ i suppose what had inspired me to do such a thing was my certainty that there is only one loosely defined ‘position’ that could be called ‘philosophical’; and that is nihilism. i set out not to say that philosophy wasn’t ‘real’, only that it couldn’t do what philosophers expected it to do. what they were expecting was a scientific understanding… but one that was unfortunately cloaked in what they liked to call ‘philosophy’… which they then set out to do by confusing methods without knowing it. they put empty philosophical concepts into logical form… followed the reasoning through to the conclusion-to-be, and then thought they had found and solved a real problem. but human beings didn’t just pop into existence from some primordial soup and start doing this nonsense. there’s a long story to this tragicomedy (being a nihilist - 'sup biggy nods - i simply adore the absurd, so this is why i call it a comedy) which i shall attempt to tell without reservation. it’s gonna move fast, so stay seated lest you fall off and eat the pavement.
to get a feel for where i’m coming from: this is a strongly (amateur, to be modest) wittgensteinian approach combined with some ideas put forth by a rather radical marxist/wittgensteinian Ph.D who claims… well, how could i capture such a leviathan of thought in a single post: anti-dialectics.co.uk/Rest_o … Twelve.htm
this characterizes the pre-enlightenment period (pre-baconian). distinctions between empirical and rational, a priori and a posteriori, inductive and deductive, analytic and synthetic, are not yet discovered. philosophy and mysticism are indistinguishable, aristotlean logic is thought to support and defend both western and eastern schools of thought. concepts are thought to be perfect representations of reality, mirroring it, and insofar as philosophical propositions retain logical coherency, philosophers believe their systems to be sensible. it is not yet known that these systems are ‘imposing’ concepts onto reality, not vice-versa, and therefore language is believed to give supra-sensible access to the nature of reality, to fixed ideas, which are there to be discovered by those with ‘special’ knowledge.
this characterizes the entrance into the ‘age of reason’, enlightenment, and science. distinctions are being developed between the categories described above, and philosophy becomes increasingly difficult in comparison to the former stage. the ‘sign’, which is here the philosophy-dogma that comes under the scrutiny of the new philosophical age, is now seen as so many systematic falsifications of truth. renewed skepticism, strengthening natural sciences, scientific method. a new problem evolves; philosophy loses credibility in describing nature, science takes over as a means of description, but cannot explain. a crisis; there must be a reality (obscure) that we are still unable to get at by either means.
enter age of post-structuralism. industrial revolution and commodification of ‘ideology’. second to last stage in philosophical timeline; stage one (philosophy-dogma) falls to the criticism of stage two (natural sciences)… stage two falls to the criticism of stage three (post-structuralism)… post-structuralism re-presents itself in commodified form as another ‘system’ of thought… the system of ‘no system’; an arbitrary image presented as a faithful copy of the progress made during the last two stages- philosophy as incredulous description, science as credible description without explanation. post-structuralism’s thesis; the explanation that there can be no explanation, or, several explanations that cannot be consolidated into one grand explanation. post-hoc digression back into pre-scientific stage; the obscure reality of nature which is inaccessible by both philosophy and science is now mirrored by artificially imposed concepts, this time taking the form of commodified symbols and monolithic copies of relic systems (‘neo’ philosophies). final movement of the third stage; positivism, ordinary language philosophy, deconstructionism. philosophical problems are thought to be ‘conceptual confusions’ that mirror the misuse of language rather than legitimate theoretical problems in understanding nature.
last development in intellectualism. neo-philosophies no longer need to pretend to be real because philosophers are so artificially confused they can no longer discern the difference between the copy they seek to reproduce and the original, empty form that copy will be a replication of. what is now real is the unreal… or the hyperreal; philosophy not as a disinterested examination of truth, but a reflection of the overwhelming linguistic and conceptual confusions of the individual thinker. modern philosophical activity becomes an unconscious attempt to model and copy the philosophical form while under the sublimating influence of a barrage of scattered ideas and nonsensical concepts, a residue left over, or rather created, by an almost infinite number of language game intersections that cannot be closed down or blocked by the real, because there is no real. the mapping now becomes the territory; philosophy as a hyperreal mirroring of itself as it maps itself mapping a territory that doesn’t exist.
imaginary conceptual problems philosophers grappled with nonetheless had an intense presence… which is to say, the state of perplexity was very real, even though the objects of this perplexity were not. if the state of confusion is real, it must necessarily represent a real problem, an this problem ‘gropes’ toward reality in the mind of the philosopher. couple this with my description of stage one above.
the dinstinctions between the scientific method and the philosophical method have dissolved (neither can both describe and explain). a third discipline emerges and is commodified, mass produced, ‘imitation philosophy’, a copy of a blend of both disciplines without specializing in either or recognizing where they are diametrically opposed.
this order characterizes what has happened after centuries of philosophical systems being ‘handled’ and ‘passed around’; none, which were obscure to begin with, retain any of their core confusions, so cannot be even apprehended as nonsense anymore (as was once possible in the second stage, the enlightenment, when science had not yet been stripped of its authority). now philosophers exist on a kind of plane of immanent confusion, which, paradoxically, presents everything as perfectly clear to the thinker precisely because there are no markers left to identify the real nature of it as nonsense.
final note: philosophy post-positivism is essentially metaphilosophy, which means it is not motivated by an earnest quest for truth, anymore. instead its activity involves the internal conflict the thinker experiences as the neurological ‘hardwiring’ for logic that his brain consists of, grapples with the inexplicably complex nature of language… a condition that has rapidly evolved over the last few thousand years. as a result, the metaprocess of philosophy is to reach a catharsis that consists of experiencing brief ‘certainty’ when the thinker’s faculties are able to streamline these conflicting neurological processes in his head so that they no longer conflict. for each thinker this state of ‘certainty’ is different; some can reach it even though the product of their thought is nonsense.
why philosophy still lives (as a ghost) is because, as explained before, there are no markers, no territories, for contrasting the map against the object the thinker believes he is mapping. one can no longer point and say ‘that is the wrong direction, the wrong way.’
instead, the thinker is mapping his mapping… and the consistency, coherency, of this mapping requires only that to the capacity of the thinker, he experiences no conflict between his rational faculties and his peculiar use of language.
shortly thereafter i was called upon by posterity to defend wittgenstein from russell:
that’s because he passed you, bert. he realized that philosophy can’t do what you’d like it to be able to do, and the fact that for you, philosophy has become a profession, makes you even less able to understand this. to admit that W was right, if you ever managed to understand how, would be like laying yourself off… and you wouldn’t dare do that.
now W isn’t saying to hell with philosophy, and you know this. he’s rather saying that your dream of a logically perfect language simply can’t be realized, and that what appear as the more important philosophical questions (ethical, political, metaphysical) only appear to be real questions because a confusion has resulted by a strange use of words. it is this confusion that creates the feeling that there is a ‘problem’, when there is not. there are no genuine philosophically ‘conceptual’ problems, only linguistic problems. philosophers that debate philosophical questions/answers aren’t in any real disagreement with each other on that account; they are instead involved in a closed off, internal dialogue with their own thinking, in which they take the interlocutor’s words, redefine them to fit into their own conceptual scheme, and then present an argument to that modified line of thinking. they simply take possession of the formerly confused and nonsensical philosophical statement, add their own unique confusion to it, and then provide a nonsensical response to the nonsensical content they’ve apprehended. the interlocutor then does the same, and process repeats.
see the ‘feeling’ of certainty, the feeling that a thought ‘makes sense’, doesn’t necessarily require that it be a statement that reflects or represents real states and events in the world. it can be induced by cognitive states, and these states are produced when a persons thinking processes do not conflict with themselves… which is to say, conceptualizations that have become partnered with certain words, and which do not produce any interference with the cohesion of these conceptualizations when grouped together, result in a feeling of correctness.
what prevents a philosopher from recognizing nonsense is this; he has already appropriated the statement by the time he comprehends it, and as such, fits it into his own cognitive structuring of sense. in this way, to say it again, he isn’t recognizing what the other had meant, but rather what he means once he’s taken possession of the statement. the ‘meaning’ i’m talking about when i just used the word ‘meant’, is that state of certainty… which is nothing more than what happens when there is nothing external to the thinker which can make certain the statement is indeed reflecting or representing anything about the world. ‘certainty’ is not the feeling of ‘knowing’ anything, but rather a peculiar state where one cannot know one is wrong because there is no way to check it outside of its being grammatically correct (its logical soundness and validity does not make it meaningful).
think of ‘words’ as being geometrical figures rather than containers of conceptual content… but first, think of conceptual content as being forms of ‘qualia’… not as sensations, but as (phenomenologically speaking) a recursive awareness of awareness of thinking. the inaudible sounds in your head. this stuff has no content in the way words have content and physical features. the ‘meaning’ of the word then does not exist in some cartesian space in your head which you can access at will. it exists in the physical consonant or dissonant feeling of certainty and ‘clarity’ produced when the neurological activity responsible for producing your thinking involves no ‘errors’ in its internal coding and decoding of meaningful content. for example, think of chomsky’s generative grammar theory stuff. rules of language encoded in the physiological structure of the brain so that basic elements of speech are intuitively recognized. now take a philosophical word like ‘mind’ and fit it into the category of things, of nouns. now even though a noun doesn’t have to be a physical person, place or thing, and can be a word that identifies one of these things… the word ‘mind’ can’t do the same, so a confusion results when talking about ‘mind’ in an unusual philosophical way. see ryle’s category mistake to understand this further… and anything you can find from peter hacker.
what i’m saying, and so many ordinary language philosophers before me as well, is that the bulk of philosophical language violates the rules of thinking, but also evades such rules by being so nonsensical as to be able to avoid detection; because it references nothing in the world, nothing in the world can therefore be used to ‘check’ it’s coherency and truthfulness, and it ‘glides across frictionless ice’, to not paraphrase W verbatim (i think).
“ah, i hadn’t thought of it like that. very wittgensteinean, dude.” - russell
of course, i’m straight gangsta, just like W.