Topic: | Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:history and future history: Wittgenstein as influence - |
Posted by: | John Schertzer |
Date/Time: | 01/04/2003 21:24:29 |
>it is difficult for me to appreciate how Wittgenstein in his studies of language could be somehow working out of the non-dominant hemisphere - perhaps you could elaborate on how you perceive this< John, My assumption is based on Wit's flavor of argument, which often seems wild and dreamlike, rather than those of a linguist of the academy. His writing too, which you describe as vague, often seems more poetic than scientific. He argues more by analogy and by attending to difference than by syllogism. My example from an earlier post, about whose pain in whose tooth I am feeling, is one that leads me toward that thought. Obscurity itself is telltale that the argument derives more from unconscious processing than conscious -- the dominant hemisphere demands clarity; contemporary poets consider Wit to be one of their own kind; his writing wreaks of a kind of pseudo-religiosity -- he is more mythic than positivist or rationalist, to my understanding: these are unfounded and grossly unsupported reasons why I think of unconscious, hence subdominant, processing when I think of him. I would take him away from the philosophy departments and assign him a place in literature, and though literature as an artform is underrated by science, I think it's at least its equal. best, JS |