Re: Explaining the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
Posted: Tue May 12, 2020 9:57 am
Read it. Terrific. Clear. Useful!Sam26 wrote
A Summary of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
Hope you are still there Sam26. I have in my thoughts often been puzzled and inspired by the Tractatus, and perhaps you can help me get a little clarity.
This work is supposed to be a way out for philosophy as it struggles with insoluble metaphysical problems. W notoriously talks about what cannot be talked about in order to show the way out of talking about these things. It is interesting what post Heideggerian philosophy has made of this, if you will, and I don't think W will go along, "threshold": W. like Kant, who seems to only speak grudgingly about the unspeakable, insists it is nonsense to speak of "the world," ethics (metaethics, metavalue), absolutes, yet he is not talking about nothing at all; if that were the case, it would truly be nonsense, it would be a concept without an even imaginable referent. But there he is, putting explicitly in plain sight: logic is transcendental, ethics is transcendental (value is "outside the world). Post Heideggerians, who construct their thinking out of Being and time, like Levinas, Michel Henry, Jean luc Nancy and others, take this transcendence as a theme for phenomenological investigation into human religiosity.
I would be interested in your thoughts: There must be something in the world to warrant such terms being meaningful; after all, it's not as like saying Grumblbursmacher, not a world at all and truly with no referent. W is talking about SOMETHING, which is the point these post Heideggerians trying to make. How did W get around this? It is a puzzle to me since I rely on works like the tractatus (and his Lecture on Ethics) to bring clarity to definition of this jumping off place TO where things stop making sense, FROM where things do make sense. (Eugene Fink gives a spectacular description of what is it is approach transcendence at the threshold of the epoche.)
Any thoughts?