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Monday, July 7, 2008

Wittgenstein and the inescapable

Can one negate a picture? No. And in this lies the difference between picture and proposition. The picture can serve as a proposition. But in that case something gets added to it which brings it about that now it says something. In short: I can only deny that the picture is right, but the picture I cannot deny.

Wittgenstein Notebooks 1914-1916 p. 33e
Even the inescapable shouldn't necessarily be called true, "truth" is something we add to the picture. We have to come to grips with those things we cannot escape (e.g. a most skeletal common-sense realism, life's perspective, etc.), that coming-to-grips-with is unavoidable but the associated value judgment is quite avoidable. Here I embrace Wittgenstein and pass over Heidegger (i think).

Update 7/9: This is better said by Nietzsche,
But Heraclitus will remain eternally right with his assertion that being is an empty fiction. The "apparent" world is the only one: the "true" world is merely added by a lie.

Twilight of the Idols "Reason in Philosophy" #2
My note following that passage was "->phenomenology". I wonder when I wrote that, it probably had something to do with Husserl.