Wittgenstein: Philosophy & Biography (Ray Monk)
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 31 ส.ค. 2023
- Ray Monk gives an introductory talk on Ludwig Wittgenstein and how understanding the man can help one to understand his thought. The talk was given at the University of Southampton a few years back as part of the Philosophy Café series. You may also be interested in his talk on the philosophy of mathematics: • Intro to the Philosoph...
#philosophy #wittgenstein
Here are a few key points about sphota and silent knowledge in Vedic traditions:
- Sphota refers to the instantaneous, non-sequential revelation of meaning that occurs when encountering a linguistic symbol, word or text.
- It is seen as the indivisible, total meaning that presents itself silently to intuitive cognition all at once, beyond analysis of parts.
- In the sphota view, language conveys knowledge not through a sequence of discrete sounds/letters but via this simultaneous, holistic flash of semantic significance.
- The experience of sphota is one that bypasses rational operations and occurs within the domain of silent, intuitive cognition/perception.
- It is compared to how a phrase or idea can be instantly grasped without having to slowly pronounce and assemble individual sounds/words.
- Works like the Upanishads and concepts like Brahman point to a deeper gnosis said to exist in the same mode of sphota - a silent cognition of integral,non-verbal Truth.
- Traditions like Yoga were seen as a means to cultivate faculties aligned with sphota by calming thought processes and accessing intuitive wisdom.
- The concept of sphota suggests language ultimately functions as a medium for imparting knowledge that transcends its physical forms and resides in a silent qualitative realm.
So in essence, sphota denotes revelation of indissoluble meaning through silent, intuitive channels beyond reason or serial processing.
Brilliant! Always fun to listen about Wittgenstein. :)
Revisiting 'Wittgenstein' (Derek Jarman, 1993) just now.
I sinned in 1993.
@@frederiquecouture3924 What do you mean?
1mpm mlh@@frederiquecouture3924
Great talk. Never heard Dr Monk before, thank you!🙂
Great talk.
Much appreciated.
Thank you I have learned alot x
Thank you.
love it!!
This is a good way of explaining that, contrary to a lot of exposition, the later Wittgenstein was not a behaviourist.
Sitting outside listening perfect company
I cannot even build or expand "have" without Germinal prior. ❤
Beautiful
The movie , The Big Lebowski by the Coen Brothers , is based on Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language although there is small nod toward in this movie to Nihilism as portrayed y a gang of Nihilists.
Ethan Coen ( writer, producer and director) wrote his senior thesis at Princeton about Wittgenstein. There are a startling amount of parallels between Wittgenstein’s work and the plot of this movie. There are also a few parallels between his life and the characters in this movie. And finally, it came out in 1998, when the concept of easy mass communication was first becoming a reality for the average person with the rise of 24-hour news networks and widespread internet access.
So it’s fair to say that Ethan Coen might have come to some of the same conclusions based on early internet culture and illustrated them in the The Big Lebowski.
The main point that I think applies to both is Wittgenstein’s concept of a “language-game” or what I want to call a “language puzzle.” He wrote a lot about how “philosophy is the battle against bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.”
8:22
A concrete example of silent knowledge and sphota: Mahasiddha Saraha used the following analogy to illustrate how to attain the cessation of conceptual thoughts. In the past. when merchants sailed far away land to conduct their business, they would take a crow to help them judge how far away they were from their destination. When they thought they would be near land, they would release the bird and wait and see if it returned to the ship or not. if it returned, they would know they were not yet near land, because the bird had not been found anywhere alight. INTENT INTENT OMENS AND PORTENTS
He was actually born in 1889 :)
I read Monk's biography of Russell, which is harsh at times, but I've heard he was more sympathetic towards Wittgenstein for some reason.
Because Russell was an atheist, Monk was up in arms against him. Wittgenstein was essentially a universal skeptic
@jamespower5165 Is Monk a theist? I never understood why he was so harsh with Russell, even mockingly so.
I've read both (I don't really care for "biography" as an historical genre, though find it immensely entertaining. It's simply not history. No individual is, save those that embody the world spirit, yeah? Napoleon and Caesar Augustus, perhaps). I believe Monk claimed that the more he learned of Russell, the less he liked him personally. What do you think? Lord Russell, born to one of the wealthiest aristocratic families in Britain (still, I believe) was nevertheless quite socialist in his outlook. A credit to him LOL!
@Khuno2 From what I remember, Monk was cavalier in passing judgment of Russell. Wittgenstein, in my mind, is less likable (he bullied children) but Monk overlooks that among other things.
@@CesarCloudsNot to mention he had no social conscience and himself admitted to being "incapable of affection" and even professionally, by not writing papers in the orthodox fashion, he paved the way for hus work to be greatly misunderstood
The Philosophy Department of University of Natal...1975-1984.
Is that fact that the Wittgensteins were Jewish have any bearings on his biography?
Language is not the totality of my world but it is my understanding of it that is. If I can't put something into words, it means I don't understand it (am baffled by it, that is its interaction with me and indeed the rest of the world: what does it mean? What does it do?).
Without understanding we are reduced to silence because we have no words to describe something or what it does, therefore we cannot talk to others about it or teach them what we know of the subject.
Think of a magic trick. Initially we are bamboozled by what we have experienced but the instant we learn the mechanics of the situation, it becomes obvious and we can discuss it with others (the 'emotionally' stunning effect is replaced with bored (intellectual) comprehension and the magic is lost).
Footnote: He,she, or it might be interested in using the 260 tzolkin calender and plugging in their galactic signature through the cosmic history chronicles and see who or what they have a karmic connection with past,present, and future...ray helped ludwig cross over the threshold from the living to the dead i.e. known in shamanic traditions as ancestral worship and/or veneration of the DEAD
6th fingers
"Rubbish" is a logical positivist category?
" This is for the real adepts in madness, who have gone beyond all psychiatry, psychoanalysis, who are unhelpable. This third book is again the work of a German, Ludwig Wittgenstein. Just listen to its title: TRACTATUS LOGICO PHILOSOPHICUS. We will just call it TRACTATUS. It is one of the most difficult books in existence. Even a man like G.E.Moore, a great English philosopher, and
Bertrand Russell, another great philosopher - not only English but a philosopher of the whole world - both agreed that this man Wittgenstein was far superior to them both.
Ludwig Wittgenstein was really a lovable man. I don't hate him, but I don't dislike him. I like him and I love him, but not his book. His book is only gymnastics. Only once in a while after pages and pages you may come across a sentence which is luminous. For example: That which cannot be spoken should not be spoken; one should be silent about it. Now this is a beautiful statement. Even saints, mystics, poets, can learn much from this sentence. That which cannot be spoken must not be spoken of.
Wittgenstein writes in a mathematical way, small sentences, not even paragraphs - sutras. But for the very advanced insane man this book can be of immense help. It can hit him exactly in his soul, not only in the head. Just like a nail it can penetrate into his very being. That may wake him from his nightmare.
Ludwig Wittgenstein was a lovable man. He was offered one of the most cherished chairs of philosophy at Oxford. He declined. That's what I love in him. He went to become a farmer and fisherman. This is lovable in the man. This is more existential than Jean-Paul Sartre, although Wittgenstein never talked of existentialism. Existentialism, by the way, cannot be talked about; you have to live it, there is no other way.
This book was written when Wittgenstein was studying under G.E.Moore and Bertrand Russell.
Two great philosophers of Britain, and a German... it was enough to create TRACTATUS LOGICO PHILOSOPHICUS. Translated it means Wittgenstein, Moore and Russell. I, on my part, would rather have seen Wittgenstein sitting at the feet of Gurdjieff than studying with Moore and Russell. That was the right place for him, but he missed. Perhaps next time, I mean next life... for him, not for me. For me this is enough, this is the last. But for him, at least once he needs to be in the company of a man like Gurdjieff or Chuang Tzu, Bodhidharma - but not Moore, Russell, not Whitehead. He was associating with these people, the wrong people. A right man in the company of wrong people, that's what destroyed him.
My experience is, in the right company even a wrong person becomes right, and vice-versa: in a wrong company, even a right person becomes wrong. But this only applies to unenlightened men, right or wrong, both. An enlightened person cannot be influenced. He can associate with anyone - Jesus with Magdalena, a prostitute; Buddha with a murderer, a murderer who had killed nine hundred and ninety-nine people. He had taken a vow to kill one thousand people, and he was going to kill Buddha too; that's how he came into contact with Buddha.
The murderer's name is not known. The name people gave to him was Angulimala, which means 'the man who wears a garland of fingers'. That was his way. He would kill a man, cut off his fingers and put them on his garland, just to keep count of the number of people he had killed. Only ten fingers were missing to make up the thousand; in other words only one man more.... Then Buddha appeared. He was just moving on that road from one village to another. Angulimala shouted, "Stop!"
Buddha said, "Great. That's what I have been telling people: Stop! But, my friend, who listens?"
Angulimala looked amazed: Is this man insane? And Buddha continued walking towards Angulimala. Angulimala again shouted, "Stop! It seems you don't know that I am a murderer,
and I have taken a vow to kill one thousand people. Even my own mother has stopped seeing me, because only one person is missing.... I will kill you... but you look so beautiful that if you stop and turn back I may not kill you."
Buddha said, "Forget about it. I have never turned back in my life, and as far as stopping is concerned, I stopped forty years ago; since then there is nobody left to move. And as far as killing me is concerned, you can do it anyway. Everything born is going to die."
Angulimala saw the man, fell at his feet, and was transformed. Angulimala could not change Buddha, Buddha changed Angulimala. Magdalena the prostitute could not change Jesus, but Jesus changed the woman.
So what I said is only applicable to so-called ordinary humanity, it is not applicable to those who are awakened. Wittgenstein can become awakened; he could have become awakened even in this life.
Alas, he associated with wrong company. But his book can be of great help to those who are really third-degree insane. If they can make any sense out of it, they will come back to sanity."
Did Wittgenstein really solve something, or more just show the limits of language and trying to construct truth that way ? As a more intuitive , artistic type I come at philosophy more as it’s an alien way of trying to understand reality vs via art and more intuitive expression so I find these “problems” to seem strange
9 minutes in, do not numbers, and their order, prove the existence of a creator?
Slow boy here, go easy.
It seems like the kind of thing that would exist anyway wouldn't it? I don't think it's been part of any theology that God made numbers.
It turns out though that the properties of numbers are hard to tease out. We don't know if they're definitely one way or the other. A lot of philosophers prefer to think of numbers as definite linguistic conventions with clear rules than actually existing things. But that's going beyond the discussion
Why would they? That’s a pretty extreme leap in logic.
@Ben-vt5vi The order of numbers, the order of the seasons, day following night etc, do these not show that there needs to be an intelligent designer?
Could a hurricane, tearing through a scrapyard, leave in its wake, an aeroplane, car, or some working mechanism?
@@tomasomaonaigh7659The problem is that if you say nature is too grand for there not to have been a creator, then a creator is much more far too grand not to have been created himself, and so on to infinity. So the argument trips itself up. On the other hand, if you are talking about the orderliness of nature, that is what you'd expect given no creator. A mechanical system has to follow some fixed logic. On the other hand, what would argue the existence of a creator is if nature was whimsical like a person's moods. If gravity decided to take a vacation once in a while and electric forces were sometimes weak and inattentive in the morning. But it never happens so. The mechanical nature of physical reality actually argues the absence of a sentient creator
@@jamespower5165god crates himself. The infinite regression you speak of is god himself.
What a fraud Monk is.
The guy rides on the waves of his superiors,but associates his name with theirs.
Monk has never achieved anything himself.