willow: "Which is to say I want to have my cake and eat it too, and disagree with Geuss here. I think W is most generatively interpreted as speaking to a distinct context from adorno with his conception of innocence in the everyday. www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1Ay..."

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willowNov 28, 2024

one of the many reasons i enjoy wittgenstein is that he articulates one elaboration of hegel's dictum: "philosophy arises when life has lost its unity" www.marxists.org/reference/ar...

willowNov 28, 2024

among others, marx, nietzche, and dewey also traverse this path to some extent, with dewey being highly relevant for W in my mind. i wouldn't go as far as to say that "our language is in order as it is", but for the problematic situation W found himself in, i think it's an apt response.

willow @dreary.dev

Which is to say I want to have my cake and eat it too, and disagree with Geuss here. I think W is most generatively interpreted as speaking to a distinct context from adorno with his conception of innocence in the everyday. www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1Ay...

Raymond Geuss, Utopian Thought Between Words and Action

But you are also right that I tend to be on one side rather than the other of the great philosophical divide about everyday life and common language. Which is, there’s, roughly speaking, the late Wittgenstein and there is, roughly speaking, Adorno. The late Wittgenstein says (it’s a bit of exaggeration, but he says): philosophy changes nothing, it leaves everything as it was, everyday language is fine the way it is, it only becomes toxic when we begin to reflect and make these philosophical constructs; philosophy is just therapy, getting rid of these things, and then everything will be fine. My association with that is that Wittgenstein has this idea that there is this Heile Welt, the healthy world, ‘zdravi svet’, the romantic notion – the Heile Welt is everyday language. The other side is Adorno, which is that if societies really are totalities, and if there is something deeply wrong with our society – he thinks that what’s deeply wrong is something about the dis-relation between the possibilities that we have and what we make of these possibilities. For Adorno, the main instance of the evil of the world is the phenomenon of California. California shows why the world is evil, because it has wonderful possibilities and has been made into an inferno by human use of these possibilities. There is nothing wrong with starving in the Middle Ages, because, to some extent, you couldn’t do anything about it. But there’s a lot wrong with starving in the modern world, because we could do something about it and we don’t. So it’s that dis- crepancy between wollen and können. And if you think that societies are totalities, then that evil permeates the whole of the world, there is no innocent thing. Even everyday interactions are the reverse of innocent. And I must say that you can’t hold those two views at the same time, they are just not compatible. I just think Adorno is more likely to be right about that, and that we mus…

November 28, 2024 at 2:25 PM

willowNov 28, 2024

(W definitely oversteps, but if anyone can, adorno ought to be able to appreciate the value of exaggeration in philosophizing)

willowNov 28, 2024

for the uninitiated: "Dewey held that serious thought is relative to a concrete problematic situation. If the situation is not problematic, inquiry is otiose. Much of traditional philosophy, he thought, consisted in the generation of pseudo-questions which arose because of

willowNov 28, 2024

an inadequate appreciation of the way in which terms, concepts, and theories were related to the concrete situations in which they originated" - Raymond Geuss, History and Illusion in Politics, pg 158.

willowNov 28, 2024

one aspect of all of those that attempt such strategies is that they are reflexive theories, trying to give an account of what philosophy is doing and how their philosophizing fits into that picture

willowNov 28, 2024

also i could certainly see a rejoinder that the context is already circumscribed here such that the dichotomization is appropriate, to which i'd basically accept, but at that point we aren't really disagreeing anymore.

willowNov 28, 2024

basically i want to ascribe a negative thesis to wittgenstein, where he says to his philosopher-peers: "don't think about it that way, you're confusing yourself", that the scope of his notion of philosophy is tied to his historical context, and that he has ~nothing to say about other philosophies