Sunday, January 16, 2011
We may be exercising the faculty for judgment even when we imagine we have no such inclination. The taste for entertainments of all kinds represents an opinion about the allure, or relative lack of it, in our daily lives. Firework displays, temporary funfairs, the arrival in town of the circus, not to mention the seductive influences of modern entertainment and communications media, attest to the inadequate paucity of the rest of life. Even where they seem tawdry, or wholly predictable, such diversions mark a welcome suspension of the common round, and thus a judgment upon it.
Wednesday, January 05, 2011
The world is 'everything that is the case,' says Wittgenstein. But might it be otherwise? Does this 'everything' include the possible other ways it might be? Or even just the existence of those other possibilities in the minds of individuals?
The whole must be the true, Hegel asserts. If we can grasp the whole picture, we will have grasped the truth. But in what sense is this 'whole' a normative concept? Is truth then no more than a fully comprehensive understanding of what already is? If so, in what sense does it differ from science? Opening our eyes on another pallidly unsatisfying day, are we to find comfort in the explanations of molecular biology and psychoanalysis? But this world goes on, and exceeds our understanding as it does so, and we turn inwards as before to find the reasons for our sense of lack.
The whole must be the true, Hegel asserts. If we can grasp the whole picture, we will have grasped the truth. But in what sense is this 'whole' a normative concept? Is truth then no more than a fully comprehensive understanding of what already is? If so, in what sense does it differ from science? Opening our eyes on another pallidly unsatisfying day, are we to find comfort in the explanations of molecular biology and psychoanalysis? But this world goes on, and exceeds our understanding as it does so, and we turn inwards as before to find the reasons for our sense of lack.
Tuesday, January 04, 2011
There is a world. We live in it, we see it, we feel its impact, but we do not know it in the sense of understanding it.
We know what it appears to expect of us, and this we do, more or less imperfectly, impatiently. For the rest, there is only the feeling of dead time slipping along, a time whose deadness appears to be generated from within in that, for others, time isn't so dead.
The most fundamental step we might make - might make - is to decide what we think about this world, whether we should or can have an opinion about it, or whether opinions are a matter of supreme indifference to it, another of the legion of mere things it contains indifferently, like expanses of grass, precipitous cliff-edges or unhappiness.
We know what it appears to expect of us, and this we do, more or less imperfectly, impatiently. For the rest, there is only the feeling of dead time slipping along, a time whose deadness appears to be generated from within in that, for others, time isn't so dead.
The most fundamental step we might make - might make - is to decide what we think about this world, whether we should or can have an opinion about it, or whether opinions are a matter of supreme indifference to it, another of the legion of mere things it contains indifferently, like expanses of grass, precipitous cliff-edges or unhappiness.
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