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willow
(also, it may not be a solution at all. i could simply say “that’s the wrong question, but i don’t have a right one for you”)
willow
raymond geuss, changing the subject 268-269 the mental cramp). Once you understand where the terms used to formulate the question really belong, you see that they have no application in the purported 'philosophical' examples, and the question or problem disappears. The philosopher as therapist causes these problems to dissolve by pointing out their origin in a misapplication of terms in a context that is inappropriate for them. He or she does this on a case-by-case basis; there would be no other way, given the nature of the difficulties he or she is trying to treat. Each case may be slightly different. The 'album' which Wittgenstein presents may be a kind of dossier of previous cures: perhaps one can learn from studying it, but that learning does not consist in general-ising because each case in the album is different. So on this second view about philosophy, the goal is not to get an 'image' (Bild) of the landscape but to learn to get around in (a variety of) landscapes. The model of a 'solution' is (S$153ff.) 'Jetzt 268 WITTGENSTEIN weiß ich weiter-Now I know how to go on-which, despite the use of the apparently cognitivist term 'know', actually means not that I have a theory but merely that I can confidently and successfully go on; I know how-to-do it. To do this might require any number of things, some of them being connected with having the right kind of theory but others being of a different status altogether, such as learning to attend to certain features of the world. Being musical does not mean knowing which keys have three flats, but is chiefly a question of being able to hear when the singer is flat, the rhythm is off, and the players are not quite together, and perhaps being able to sing on key and in time oneself, and that is a question of complicated forms of attention, discrimination, and cultivated talent, not of conceptual mastery of a theory.
willow
adorno, 167-168, problems of moral philosophy differently phrased.' On the question of whether moral philosophy is possible today, the only thing I would be able to say is that essentially it would consist in the attempt to make conscious the critique of moral philosophy, the critique of its options and an awareness of its antinomies. In these lectures I have tried to provide you with something like a model with which to do this. More than this, I believe, cannot in all decency be promised. Above all, no one can promise that the reflections that can be entertained in the realm of moral philosophy can be used to establish a canonical plan for the good life because life itself is so deformed and distorted that no one is able to live the good life in it or to fulfil his destiny as a human being. Indeed, I would almost go so far as to say that, given the way the world is organized, even the simplest demand for integrity and decency must necessarily lead almost everyone to protest. I believe that only by making this situation a matter of consciousness - rather than covering it up with sticking plaster - will it be possible to create the conditions in which we can properly formulate questions about how we should lead our lives today. The only thing that can perhaps be said is that the good lite today would consist in resistance to the forms 168 of the bad life that have been seen through and critically dissected by the most progressive minds. Other than this negative prescription no guidance can really be envisaged. I may add that, negative though this assertion is, it can hardly be much more formal than the Kantian injunction that we have been discussing during this semester. So what I have in mind is the determinate negation of everything that has been seen through, and thus the ability to focus upon the power of resistance to all the things imposed on us, to everything the world has made of us, and intends to make of us to a vastly greater degree. Little else remains …