Wittgenstein (I can't get this out of my head)

I can't remember if this was mentioned in class - it may have been. But I've been thinking of this quote/dialog between Wittgenstein and another person lately. And to look at anything this way might be helpful. Language? Free Will? God? Religion? Science? Anything.

Again, I can't remember, was this discussed in class? (I feel it may have been) If not, it fits perfectly with so much of what we are/were discussing.

Wittgenstein was speaking with a colleague and asked: "Tell me, why do people always say it was natural for men to assume that the sun went round the earth, rather than that the earth was rotating?" His friend replied, "Well, obviously, because it just looks as if the sun is going round the earth." To which Wittgenstein replied, "Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as if the earth was rotating?"

Consider the Lobster

I really don't intend to harp on this whole animal/language thing for much longer, but I just re-read this brilliant piece by the late David Foster Wallace (if you haven't read anything by him, might I suggest his collection of essays "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again". Hilarious and heartbreaking, but I digress...) called "Consider the Lobster". I again am faced with 2 opposing arguments, both with which I agree: namely, that we can never know an animal's experience (or another human's for that matter, hence this damned mind/body problem we keep encountering) and so language and emotion I THINK (as in, logic/science, etc.) are imbued upon the object, and so I can't claim that an animal feels pain, at least not in the way I feel pain. However, I also FEEL (as in, an emotional/spiritual/psychological response) that animals do feel pain and do suffer in ways that are like mine (if not ours).

The discussion of Alex's work in class today taught me that these language games, the distinctions I want to make among types of understanding, simultaneously blend and bleed all over each other, into one another. But they also wall themselves off from one another, keeping my scientific understanding distant from my religious beliefs (a little Wittgenstein, no?) and that for me, the interesting study of language doesn't happen within the walls, but rather in those bloody areas in between.

I highly recommend Wallace's essay. It is a bit long (and I suggest printing the whole essay and reading the footnotes as you go along, as that's often where the story lies with Wallace) but tragic and exciting and beautiful.

Consider the Lobster