The Taoist practices I try to work at don't frame the quiet as substance or emptiness but as what happens when the chatter stops. My brief encounters with it have changed my expectations. There is a timing to reactions that shape events. I have no idea why. It is like a point of leverage to lighten the energy needed to move something.

So, in Zhuangzi, the problem is shown in our speech but not explained. Even saying that is too much.

Thank you.

A discouraging word in the hand is better than two birds in the bush.

I was excited and surprised that the text challenged my thoughts so directly five decades ago.

I took notes and annotated the text densely back then, noting connections as they appeared to me. I have a different point of view from those days but still receive the benefit of that work.

So, I suggest taking notes of your problems and impressions.

I see how Kierkegaard's argument is using the biblical accounts to build a sort of "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" model of an individual. But the emphasis upon the limits of psychology in the text place it very far from the theory of drives in Freud.

There is, in Kierkegaard, a move against the role of sex as a measure of sinfulness as depicted in the language of Paul.

I don't know what that emoticon means as a proposition. Or the absence of one.

They (GOP) said as much, many times.

The article speaks of husbands and bachelors but no bachelorettes. Nor of thoughtful philosophical wives.

Is that to say that women who partake in that 'over-abstractness' are 'men' by that measure?

There is an odd anti-feminist feel to this view of personal isolation. The space does not include much room for academicians like Nussbaum or Arendt, to mention two at the top of my head.

I agree completely about the English rendering. I have been wishing I could read Russian from the first chapter. It is difficult to access the purely objective descriptions but the dialogues, both inner and outer, are very stilted, like translating one generation's slang into another.

I didn’t know how to take it—were these in fact irruptions, or were they mere intensifications of an already unreal reality? — Jamal

I am still underway in the novel. I will think about that element before commenting.

I share your high regard for the Concept of Anxiety. The work is a part of K's conversation (and argument) with Hegel. As model of personal development, it focuses upon the crisis of adolescence and the perils of becoming a 'single individual'.

This is done in the context of establishing the religious as giving the possibility for the psychological. But it also gives an account of good parenting that speaks to the immediate circumstances of such development. That quality of observation makes me think of Ortega y Gasset saying:

Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia, y si no la salvo a ella no me salvo yo. — Meditations on Quixote

Trump goes after a Judge's family because he figures he can.
Not a good look if you care about appearances.

Trump attacks Biden over Easter coinciding with Transgender Day of Visibility

I gather from this that the Easter Bunny is not gay. But if I cannot even see the Bunny, the matter becomes more obscure.

Trump shares an image of Biden tied up like a hog in the back of a pickup truck.

Point well taken about argument under his terms. But it is presented as a limit to explanation rather than a resolution.

Isn't Wittgenstein's answer that it can only be shown, not argued about? — Wayfarer

W does not put it in those terms. What is shown is separated from what is explained. Is that the last word of what can be explained? Seems like a weird place to stop.

I was thinking of any creed in that a story is given to explain what is happening. How that story plays a part in any account is very various. Those various variations are not just playing out possible meanings within a framework but trying to look at explanation as explanation. That aspect plays an important role in many very different religious interpretations. Therefore, I question the acceptance of the 'religious' as a category that is self-explanatory. It never shows up alone.

Unamuno is interesting
— Paine

It is another important thinker regarding this issue, but Spanish philosophers are hardly known by people overall. It cheered me up you actually brought him to this topic. :smile: — javi2541997

I find Ortega y Gasset an important counterpoint to Unamuno. A struggle to understand experience.

As an "American", Octavio Paz hits me hard with many of the same questions.

One element I wonder about a lot is the importance of a creed, as a set of propositions, to establishing practice and ritual.

Unamuno is interesting in that regard because he is angry with the gap between what is most deeply desired and the place we have to look for it. For Kazantzakis, the Shekinah, or presence of God appears in the crucible of struggle. Israel is the one who wrestles with God. Those different expressions are bound up in propositions declaring the ultimate conditions.

But a person's life is a complex problem. The limits of explanation touch upon all who would explain. What do creeds or the rejection of them have to do with us?

It all ends soon enough.
If you have to check out early, I get that.
I had friends who chose that for themselves.
I do not know what you are saying about inability in the face of such competence.

I wonder if it would be possible to effect a fundamental break from outmoded traditional political categories in aid of an agenda of enlightened universal inclusion? — Pantagruel

Lenin argued that such a move required a vanguard who ruled as the dictatorship of the proletariat.
That approach has had outcomes few would count as an advance.

5.62 "The world is my world: this is manifest in the fact that the limits of language (of that language of which I alone understand) mean the limits of my world — RussellA

What you added by parenthesis is not in the text.

Edit to add:

It is in the text. My bad.

Trump sells signature Bibles.
Branding like it ought to be.

I think about it in Aristotelian terms. There are too many accidents to explain through necessity. But there are too many repetitions to blow off connections between actions.

Cognitive dissonance is usually presented as an obstacle to learning. The result is a decrease of stress.

Everything is okay. Never mind.

But it’s possible to skate through life being wrong about any number of such things, and if there is no karma-upance in a future existence, then - so what? — Wayfarer

Would you be okay with accepting a world of consequences without being able to find out what they will be?

A problem well exhibited in the Theaetetus. Should an idea survive? Is the test right or wrong?

As a tradesperson, I found out about my poor reasoning by losing control of what I was doing. The only way back was accepting the mistake. And if that idea of the mistake was a mistake, then what that revealed.

I don't have any of my sources written down, so you'll need to do your own research to verify. — Brendan Golledge

This is not the mark of those who try to engage with original texts or interested in those who do.

5.634 and 5.641 could refer to either Idealism or Realism. — RussellA

I don't see how saying: "no part of our experience is at the same time a priori" could be an expression of idealism.

The single mention of "pure realism' probably comes from it being a thought experiment appended to saying:

We cannot think what we cannot think; so what we cannot think we cannot say either.
5.62 This remark provides the key to the problem, how much truth there is in solipsism.
For what the solipsist means is quite correct; only it cannot be said, but makes itself manifest. — ibid

This difference between images built up through thoughts and words and what they show is evident throughout the book. There is a tension between what is sayable and a possibility of experience that messes with how we talk about representation. Wittgenstein places his enterprise in the center of that problem:

4.03 A proposition must use old expressions to communicate a new sense.
A proposition communicates a situation to us, and so it must be essentially connected with the situation.
And the connexion is precisely that it is its logical picture.
A proposition states something only in so far as it is a picture.
4.031 In a proposition a situation is, as it were, constructed by way of experiment.
Instead of, ‘This proposition has such and such a sense’, we can simply say, ‘This proposition represents such and such a situation’.
4.0311 One name stands for one thing, another for another thing, and they are combined with one another. In this way the whole group—like a tableau vivant—presents a state of affairs.
4.0312 The possibility of propositions is based on the principle that objects have signs as their representatives.
My fundamental idea is that the ‘logical constants’ are not representatives; that there can be no representatives of the logic of facts.
4.032 It is only in so far as a proposition is logically articulated that it is a picture of a situation. — ibid emphasis mine

These limits of what is said versus what is shown are a question for me in how this work is presented as solving particular issues for the future. But I think it puts 'idealism versus realism' into the diagram rejected in 5.6331.

He does engage with the issue:

5.634 This is connected with the fact that no part of our experience is at the same time a priori.
Everything we see could also be otherwise. Whatever we see could be other than it is.
Everything we describe at all could also be otherwise. Whatever we can describe at all could be other than it is.

5.64 Here it can be seen that solipsism, when its implications are followed out strictly, coincides with pure realism. The self of solipsism shrinks to a point without extension, and there remains the reality coordinated with it.

5.641 Thus there really is a sense in which philosophy can talk about the self in a non-psychological way.
What brings the self into philosophy is the fact that ‘the world is my world’.
The philosophical I is not the man, not the human body or the human soul of which psychology treats, but the metaphysical subject, the limit—not a part of the world. The philosophical self is not the human being, not the human body, or the human soul, with which psychology deals, but rather the metaphysical subject, the limit of the world—not a part of it. — ibid

The correlation you seek between the 'logical object' and natural phenomena does not approach the 'limit of the world' that Wittgenstein proposes.

Edit to add:

The viewpoint of the Philosophical Investigation does not lay this out as sharply but does say the following about the distinctions:

Whereas we are tempted to say that our way of speaking does not describe the facts as they really are. As if, for example the proposition "he has pains" could be false in some other way than by that man's not having pains. As if the form of expression were saying something false even when the proposition faute de mieux asserted something true. For this is what disputes between Idealists, Solipsists and Realists look like. The one party attack the normal form of expression as if they were attacking a statement; the others defend it, as if they were stating facts recognized by every reasonable human being. — PI. 402

His view of the condition of truth being found outside of what 'belonged' to oneself was brought together with needing to make decisions that shaped what life will be. Our ability is directly involved with those choices.

The order of the statements in the text begins with conceptions before introducing propositions. Is that order important to understanding what is presented?
— Paine

I don't believe so. I think that, perhaps, Wittgenstein started with what was most accessible to him during the war, namely his thoughts. So he begins by deconstruction thoughts in logical space before moving to propositions. — 013zen

I read the order to be important regarding what is intended.

It is interesting how much the meaning of text turns upon such readings.

Logic as the term is used in the Tractatus, is not primarily a human activity. Logic is not propositional. Propositions are logical. Logic deals with what is necessary rather than contingent. — Fooloso4

That is a pivotal matter in the question of how much this work presents an epistemology or not.

Re-reading The Doomed City by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.

I thought you were doing that by means of asserting Wittgenstein's project to be an alignment of some kind.

How does the equality of form relate to the reluctance on Wittgentein's part to assemble a world on that basis.

I am still having trouble completely seeing how this precludes the possibility of an isomorphism — 013zen

What do you make of:

4.12 Propositions can represent the whole of reality, but they cannot represent what they must have in common with reality in order to be able to represent it — Ibid.

Citing this is not an argument for 'precluding a possibility', as you put it. On the other hand, maybe this would be a good time for you to provide what supports your view of the text.

I think it can be seen in how the text uses the terms that it employs. I can see many places which seem to confirm this. — 013zen

I was thinking the following was an obstacle to 'equality of shape' or 'isomorphism':

2.0121 Just as we are quite unable to imagine spatial objects outside space or temporal objects outside time, so too there is no object that we can imagine excluded from the possibility of combining with others.

2.173 A picture represents its subject from a position outside it. (Its standpoint is its representational form.) That is why a picture represents its subject correctly or incorrectly.

4.0641 The negating proposition determines a logical place with the help of the logical place of the negated proposition. For it describes it as lying outside the latter’s logical place.

4.12 Propositions can represent the whole of reality, but they cannot represent what they must have in common with reality in order to be able to represent it—logical form.

4.121 Propositions cannot represent logical form: it is mirrored in them.

5.61 Logic pervades the world: the limits of the world are also its limits.
So we cannot say in logic, ‘The world has this in it, and this, but not that.’
For that would apparently presuppose that we exclude certain possibilities, and this cannot be the case since otherwise logic must get outside the limits of the world: that is, if it could consider these limits from the other side also. For that would appear to presuppose that we were excluding certain possibilities, and this cannot be the case, since it would require that logic should go beyond the limits of the world; for only in that way could it view those limits from the other side as well.
What we cannot think, that we cannot think: we cannot therefore say what we cannot think.
We cannot think what we cannot think; so what we cannot think we cannot say either. — Ibid.

The difference between what is said versus what is shown becomes a limit to what can be regarded as equal or the same. In that way, Wittgenstein is challenging what most have taken for granted.

Do you think of the "isomorphism' as a freedom to move forward or backwards in that regard?
— Paine

I'm sorry, I don't completely understand. Would you be able to phrase it differently? — 013zen

The order of the statements in the text begins with conceptions before introducing propositions. Is that order important to understanding what is presented?
.

It is a 1-to-1 correspondence which preserves the relevant form between structures. — 013zen

It seems there are a number of places in the text where we do not have a way to confirm or deny that. The passages move from thinking to language in a sequence. Do you think of the "isomorphism' as a freedom to move forward or backwards in that regard?

Honest self-appraisal is a painful process. It is oddly the most private and visible quality. The secrets I will die with are written upon what is shown.