Okay. My sense is that Penner thinks Kierkegaard was correct as seeing them as within the Christian community, and therefore he does not see Kierkegaard as being "fooled." — Leontiskos

It is Penner who calls the "moderns" "pseudo-Christians." I take your point that my characterization of Penner's argument does not zero in on the difference between his view and Kierkegaard. So, I will try to speak strictly about that difference without impugning Penner's rhetoric.

When Kierkegaard speaks of 'Christendom', he refers to his congregation where they confess a faith that requires a life lived differently than the "worldliness" that most are comfortable with. Calling them "pseudo-Christians" would not capture how this dilemma is as old as Christianity itself. Francis of Assisi spoke in the same language. The City of God and the City of Men will always be different territories.

Christendom also cannot be dismissed as simply "fake" because it is through its survival that the conditions of 'worldliness' have changed. That is what I meant to emphasize in the passage from Works of Love, beginning with:

Even the one who is not ordinarily inclined to praise God and Christianity, nevertheless does so when he shudderingly contemplates the terrifying facts of how in paganism the discriminations of the earthly life, or how the caste system, inhumanly separate man from man; how this ungodly wickedness inhumanly teaches one man to disavow kinship with another; teaches him presumptuously and madly to say about another man that he does not exist, that he is "not born." Then even that man praises Christianity which has saved men from this evil by deeply and forever unforgettably emphasizing the kinship between man and man, because the kinship is assured by every individual's equal kinship with and his relation to God in Christ... — Works of Love, page 57

Life in Christendom is not complete but is an agent of change in the world. In this sense it is the source of the equality of individuals expressed through many works of the Enlightenment. They have value but are insufficient for the engagement Kierkegaard is calling for. The highest wisdom one can look for without that engagement is that of Socrates, whether one lives in Copenhagen or Athens. That is the crisis missing from Penner's depiction of the secular.

Yes. You don't have to be signed in to see it.

Sometimes it comes down to taste and aesthetics. I tried reading Derrida a couple of times and kept lapsing into a coma. I have no idea if I disagree with him or not.

I understand your reaction to drawing a line regarding what can be said. I am quoting Parmenides rather than defending him in a different place from his. I want to throw him back to you as your problem as much as it can be mine.

I did not mean to express a prohibition. The Goddess implores the visitor to not try to say what is not sayable. She also observes that many do. The emphasis I put on conditions is to note that making 'what is not being' an object of thought is to ignore that we can only compare alternatives between beings. Hypothesizing the existence of a 'non-being' would be a division of being. It is this division that Parmenides objects to.

Assuming thought only accessible through language of some type, I ask, "Was Parmenides a nominalist?" — ucarr

Not in the sense the word is used today. The Goddess does not permit utterance to be separated from thinking. The whole issue of whether universals have an existence beyond a grouping of particulars, as nominalists deny, requires division Parmenides says are strictly the business of mortality.

I meant to say that asking why something exists requires a determination that your use of "nothing" does not permit. The uncomfortable feeling engendered by Nietzsche's thought is the notion that everything has been determined already. Asking why something happens cannot operate in the infinitely determined or infinitely undetermined. The causes we deliberate upon cling to our mortality:

Thinking and the object of thought are the same. For you will not find thought apart from being, nor either of them apart from utterance. Indeed, there is not any at all apart from being, because Fate has bound it together so as to be whole and unmovable. Accordingly, all the usual notions that mortals accept and rely on as if true---coming-to-be and perishing, being and not-being, change of place and variegated shades of color---these are nothing more than names. — Parmenides, 8: 34-41, Wheelwright Edition

Another way to put it is through Spinoza saying that when try to imagine how the "undetermined" power of God thinks, we should not imagine it is how we deliberate to achieve our ends.

And there is, of course, that close student of Spinoza, Dirty Harry, who famously said: " A man has to know his limitations."

Heraclitus said that eternity stretches backward and forward. That pretty much frees up any need to explain why anything exists.

Causality needs the prospect of stuff not happening to get started. Nietzsche pointed out that if eternal recurrence is the case, everything that can happen already has done that. An interesting contrast to his efforts to provide causes for various predicaments.

Am I reading too much into a detail if I guess that he's suggesting that the concept of the self is at or near the centre of the network? — Ludwig V

What often strikes me in reading Blue Book is how different terms collide in ways that seem outside the progression of an ongoing explanation. I do think a concept of self is the concern but deliberately inverted at the same time. This example stands out in that regard:

For the ordinary use of the word “person” is what one might call a composite use suitable under the ordinary circumstances. If I assume, as I do, that these circumstances are changed, the application of the term “person” or “personality” has thereby changed, and if I wish to preserve this term and give it a use analogous to its former use, I am at liberty to choose between many uses, that is, between many different kinds of analogy. One might say in such a case that the term “personality” hasn’t got one legitimate heir only. (This kind of consideration is of importance in the philosophy of mathematics. Consider the use of the words “proof”, “formula”, and others. Consider the question: “Why should what we do here be called ‘philosophy’? Why should it be regarded as the only legitimate heir of the different activities which had this name in former times?”) — BB, lpage 94

The use of "philosophy" in this is almost an appeal to a commonly understood matter of fact like the others being used. Maybe this speaks to the reluctance of to endorse the thematic language here.

There is also something provocative to have all these discussions about how to recognize oneself and others just to end with:

The kernel of our proposition, that that which has pains or sees or thinks is of a mental nature, is only, that the word “I” in “I have pains” does not denote a particular body, for we can’t substitute for it a description of a body. — ibid. page 110

All that other stuff is implied to be properly located in this single sentence. Welcome to a particular notation party. BYOB.

That certainly puts what you have been saying in a different light. I need to think about it.

I appreciate you meeting my response so forthrightly.

who are you replying to?

I appreciate your careful reply and need to think about it in detail.

For now, I will only point out that Wittgenstein is claiming more for his method than:

I take it that ‘language games’ is just a way of referring to the imagined examples that he creates, but I don’t think they are just “rhetorical” though (there is a point). And, as I say above, ‘forms of life’ is just a way of pointing to our practices — Antony Nickles

The language of the Blue Book pits his view of how "meaning' happens against how others do it. I read that as him seeing himself in an actual conflict over how to understand the world as we experience it.

I am sorry to hear you put it that way.

I figured you were prompting a conversation that is usually covered up by other themes.

I don't want to stand against such analyses trying to map out the problems of the modern world. And I am troubled by the speed of many current changes.

Despite all that, I have to weigh all that against the release from the ties of my immediate ancestors. And my son who acts upon the same idea.

The democratic rub.

It's not 'modernity sucks, the ancient world was terrific!' The thread is about something quite specific. — Wayfarer

I was contesting:

cut them adrift from any shared sense of purpose. — Wayfarer

That being a different standard of measure from a golden age idea.

The funny thing about Descartes is that most of his actual science really sucked. The algebra stuff was good.

I recognize that a lot of modern things suck. But a lot of the received ideas and practices in the past also sucked.

This newfound autonomy freed individuals from dogmatic authority but also cut them adrift from any shared sense of purpose. — Wayfarer

Totally adrift? That freedom is what you are enjoying now if you are relatively free. There are many kinds of shared purpose in this modern world.

True, there is more going on than just looking at how the interlocutor (the skeptic) imagines their claims, and thus why they are making them, but I would argue that it is the primary thrust of the investigation, starting here in the Blue Book, but of course we all have different things that catch our eye/interests. — Antony Nickles

So far, you have not made that argument but taken for granted that it is true. You have provided a description of the text as meaning to say X but the singular purpose you assign it is not an argument for it over against any countervailing view.

If your thesis is correct, it would mean that all the apparent concern with other topics are rhetorical ploys put in place to distract the reader. The introduction of "language games" is not the challenge it seems to be given to his contemporaries but is really just a diagnosis of a particular set of personal problems.

Just that Socrates doesn’t hear anything as important unless it meets his criteria. Obviously a poor joke. — Antony Nickles

Are you saying that Wittgenstein was not bringing in that reference as an important background to think about generality?

A big topic.

As it is Plato presenting the options in his dialogues, there is a large gap between Parmenides grudgingly admitting Forms might explain continuity and the Sophist (the Eleatic Stranger, a student from the Parmenides school) where the separation of Being and Becoming is called into question.

I don't know what the gap means or if it is only an accident of missing text.

Plato has Socrates not joining the put downs on Parmenides that he did not resist in Theaetetus when discussing Heraclitus. If we are to accept the text we have to consider, Plato was of more than one mind on the issue.

How do you distinguish between generally received opinions from what has been justified by reason?

Efforts to make that distinction are a big part of why we talk about reason.

That is and will be a lot of work for all or any who attempt it.

I am trying to understand how Wittgenstein thought of his work as outside of the other projects. Not so much a solving of a puzzle but looking at how the pieces of it are laid out.

From that point of view, Bateson wants to establish a generality that Wittgenstein wants to interrogate.

[4] Insisting on an idea’s truth beyond the limits of its epistemic warrant is irrational. — Millard J Melnyk

I don't believe we have a clear enough understanding of the limits of "epistemic warrant" to use the idea as a given. Saying that is not a rejection of reason but a particular use of it.

The proposition that saying as much is itself a belief only leads to comparing beliefs.

And then you are back where you started.

To be clear, Bateson falls on the "psychology" side of what Wittgenstein is considering. And so does Chomsky. I don't mean to imply that their ideas are adequate responses to what Wittgenstein is trying to do.

First instance of man-listening. — Antony Nickles

Are you referring to Socrates or Wittgenstein? I am familiar with the phrase "man-splaining" but don't know how to hear "man-listening."

I don’t think philosophy is relegated to just responding to radical skepticism. — Antony Nickles

Neither do I. But I am not the one claiming that such is the primary goal of this or any other writing from Wittgenstein. Your map has no place for the arguments against Russel and Frege. They seem more like the adversaries to Wittgenstein's language game model than frightened skeptics asking for what will never be given.

Your reading is clearly a response to reading Cavell and Austin. Translating everything that is said by Wittgenstein into those terms is a reduction of the original text into another. For me on the outside, it sounds like a private language.

I agree that the different directions in academia do not seem to be gravitating towards a center.

I don't think Wittgenstein would have objected to Linguistics as Chomsky pursues it. I wonder if Wittgenstein talked about that somewhere.


Mention of Thompson reminds me of the interest in "forms of life" amongst "cybernetic" epistemologists.
Here is a passage from G Bateson that touches upon the Blue Book:

I have the use of the information that that which I see, the images, or that which I feel as pain, the prick of a pin, or the ache of a tired muscle—for these, too, are images created in their respective modes—that all this is neither objective truth nor is it all hallucination. There is a combining or marriage between an objectivity that is passive to the outside world and a creative subjectivity, neither pure solipsism nor its opposite.

Consider for a moment the phrase, the opposite of solipsism. In solipsism, you are ultimately isolated and alone, isolated by the premise "I make it all up." But at the other extreme, the opposite of solipsism, you would cease to exist, becoming nothing but a metaphoric feather blown by the winds of external "reality." (But in that region there are no metaphors!) Somewhere between these two is a region where you are partly blown by the winds of reality and partly an artist creating a composite out of the inner and outer events. — Gregory Bateson, afterword to John Brockman

I did not mean to bring up that element as a rebuttal to your thesis. But if the introduction of history is not germane to the argument, why not just stick with Kant where all of this is just the way it is?

Which does not require any material scaffolding, but does not contradict any material evidence. The culmination of the Cartesian ego cogito. — Pantagruel

That does not depict the role of history Hegel insisted upon.

How ever that is framed in the many interpretations, History is the criteria absent from the mythological as various attempts at representation.

I would not like to see people skate by a problem which Hegel intended to bust up the party.

How many philosophers have set out to deal with those annoying questions "once and for all"? None have succeeded. — Ludwig V

That is a fair question. The odd thing about Wittgenstein is that his "skeptical method" does not lead to a "once and for all" claim prominent in other theses. W's restrictions upon generalization do not permit saying things such as "causes are only a narrative provided by the imagination" or "I think therefore I am." He frequently describes what philosophy is like as an image of its limitation, but he keeps on doing his version of it anyway. Descartes takes one bath and surpasses the quandaries of past generations.

Whatever is the best way to read this work, what sticks out for me is when Wittgenstein complained that Socrates was being too complacent in his job of midwifery in the Theaetetus. Let's make finding out if an idea is alive harder....

You keep putting your situation in the context of your choices alone. Actual life involves the collision of your choices with others. You are not in a bunker weighing the outcome of choices. What you imagine as possible for yourself is what everyone else is doing at the same time.

When you describe how other people are dealing with trust and betrayal, it could be accurate or not by a selected criterion but you and I can never be the witness of that. The limits of our judgement should follow the limits of our perception.

Consider when people rely upon you. Sometimes that works out for them. Other times it does not.

Illusion, in that scenario, has to do with capability, but also bad faith versus sincere effort. It is something to sort out while weighing your intentions as much as those of others.

The second is their role in language-learning, working up from simple games to more complicated ones. How far the idea has taken off in empirical psychology, I could not say. But it seems a not implausible idea to me. — Ludwig V

I think Josh has been trying to talk about that. There are psychological models that develop some of those ideas about learning language. But the sharp put down of the scientific method as a part of what W is doing is an unconformity with adjacent layers, to borrow a phrase from geology.

I remember Chomsky saying something like, if W stays away from science, then science will have to return the favor.

Is the writing, Must We Mean What We Say, where Cavell introduces the central role of the skeptic in his reading of Wittgenstein? Or is that asserted somewhere else? I am getting curious about the man behind the curtain here.

If there must be a further explanation that all of us can give examples of what anyone would say when X, and the logic of that, then I’ll leave it to someone else: — Antony Nickles

Is that to say it is a sort of last word for you even if it does not satisfy others?

I heard Penner to be saying that Kierkegaard was not imagining that his rivals were outside the Christian community. So, if he did understand that they were outside, he would have responded differently. I will avoid such a bank shot and just look for what Kierkegaard has said about worldliness.

I don't think rights are a function of the Enlightenment. For example, Aristotelian approaches to justice involve rights (which are the correlative of duties), and they surely precede the Enlightenment. — Leontiskos

What one does see in the writings of the Enlightenment is an attempt to separate the "Natural" from what has been imposed upon it, whether through human or divine authority. I am not sure that would have even been an idea for Aristotle.

Kierkegaard claims that views of "nature" have been changed because of "Christianity." Such a view both affirms and questions the separations drawn in the City of God by Augustine.

I read that a long time ago. I remember an emphasis upon distinguishing creed, what a person believes, and generations of a community struggling with itself. That does suggest a classification of types applicable to other religions but won't capture the bitterness felt by Buber reading the Letter to the Hebrews.

As promised before, I will leave off from challenging the role you have assigned the skeptic. But I will point out that Wittgenstein is unambiguously "stepping into the ring" when advancing a method that does not accept many of the premises Kant was working with:

If we say thinking is essentially operating with signs, the first question you might ask is: “What are signs?” – Instead of giving any kind of general answer to this question, I shall propose to you to look closely at particular cases which we should call “operating with signs”. Let us look at a simple example of operating with words. I give someone the order: “fetch me six apples from the grocer”, and I will describe a way of making use of such an order: The words “six apples” are written on a bit of paper, the paper is handed to the grocer, the grocer compares the word “apple” with labels on different shelves. He finds it to agree with one of the labels, counts from 1 to the number written on the slip of paper, and for every number counted takes a fruit off the shelf and puts it in a bag. – And here you have one use of words. I shall in the future again and again draw your attention to what I shall call language games. These are processes of using signs simpler than those which usually occur in the use of our highly complicated everyday language. Language games are the forms of language with which a child begins to make use of words. The study of language-games is the study of primitive forms of language or primitive languages. If we want to study the problems of truth and falsehood, of the agreement and disagreement of propositions with reality, of the nature of assertion, assumption, and question, we shall with great advantage look at primitive forms of language in which these forms of thinking appear without the confusing background of highly complicated processes of thought. When we look at such simple forms of language, the mental mist which seems to enshroud our ordinary use of language disappears. We see activities, reactions, which are clear-cut and transparent. On the other hand we recognize in these simple processes forms of language not separated by a break from our more complicated ones. We see that we can build up the complicated forms from the primitive ones by gradually adding new forms.

Now what makes it difficult for us to take this line of investigation is our craving for generality. — BB, page 27

This has Wittgenstein looking like the skeptic, dissolving the verities of his opponents. That he separates his method from the scientific at page 29 demonstrates that he intends to maintain the distance from the "psychological" he established in the Tractatus. To go forward with his method, he has chosen to walk on a narrow tightrope.

I hadn't thought of it like that. On the other hand, once scepticism has become a dogma, it smothers everything in its path. It's a balance. — Ludwig V

As the Professor says:

This method of watching or even occasioning a contest between assertions, not in order to decide it to the advantage of one party or the other, but to investigate whether the object of the dispute is not perhaps a mere mirage at which each would snatch in vain without being able to gain anything even if he met with no resistance - this procedure, I say, can be called the skeptical method. It is entirely different from skepticism, a principle of artful and scientific ignorance that undermines the foundations of all cognition, in order, if possible, to leave no reliability or certainty anywhere. For the skeptical method aims at certainty, seeking to discover the point of misunderstanding in disputes that are honestly intended and conducted with intelligence by both sides, in order to do as wise legislators do when from the embarrassment of judges in cases of litigation they draw instruction concerning that which is defective and imprecisely determined in their laws. — CPR, B451

I guess I agree with Kant that the "skeptic" is not opinion but an energy that keeps us alive.
Otherwise, thinking merely mirrors a reflecting of thinking.

That difference is interesting to me as well. Will ponder.

I think there are other ways to look at the table of possibilities being presented here. I will be more cautious about talking about it in the future.

Your description does capture a number of ways the solipsist may be operating. The solipsist could be me, after all, and my M.O. could be one of those listed.

The peculiar way that W lays out the options does support a reading that an "imposition of logic" can make sense of what is happening. But W does not say it is the only sense possible. That recurrent theme is the soundtrack of this book if it were a movie.

I read Wayfarer to be saying that emergence of new life came from someplace rather than nothing. That demands a different response than the constant refresh of the world required for the opposing view counting upon an unknown agency.

Since we are poorly positioned as a species to sort this out as a matter of fact, the difference in question becomes a collapse into a tautology where the opposite ends fail to be a contrary for the other.

There are plenty of examples where Kierkegaard expresses dissatisfaction with fellow Christians. It is fair to say that his opposition to Hegel, for instance, is an objection to an expression of modernity. But a fair amount of that objection is based upon "rational" grounds as much as upon religious ones.

When discussing the psychological, Kierkegaard uses "modern" ideas of development. He argues that they become inadequate after a certain level of explanation.

Penner is basing his interpretation on this differential:

Some of Kierkegaard’s favorite targets, such as Descartes, Kant, and Hegel, attempt to rescue Christian theology rather than deny or destroy it, and Kierkegaard regularly assumes that the edifice he refers to as “modern speculation” understands itself to be explicitly “Christian.” — Penner, 380-1

That makes it sound like Kierkegaard was fooled by various apologetic speech. It seems fair to me to ask for evidence of that in Kierkegaard's actual writings rather than rely upon Penner's inference.

If we are going to speak of the Enlightenment, should that not also include the issue of rights as discussed by Rousseau, Hobbes, Locke, etcetera? The more "Christian" life Kierkegaard is calling for does not cancel the "individual" depicted in those places.