http://john-jsm.wikidot.com/
08/11/2008
some notes on Ibsen and Strindberg
http://www.mith.demon.co.uk/Ibsen.html
http://www.mith.demon.co.uk/strindberg.html
Strindberg Notes
.
AC61, Strindberg, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, all stand for psychological truth, that has been deformed and tortured by rationalistic schemes. The will to power is the psychological theory that best explains this. People can live by other ideas, but that is like being oppressed by morality; it is to deny yourself insight.
Strindberg’s madness is profoundly logical. His suffering is necessary. It is realising the consequences of ideas like Ibsen’s without suppressing and mortifying the self.
AV
64 Went to see Strindberg’s The Father at the Etcetera Theatre in Camden Town above the Oxford Arms. G. thought Laura was monster and therefore unbelievable. She relates more to Medea. But she admits she often feels about me as Laura did about her husband.
194 England and its faults. The Oscar Levy essay. Its present faults and the faults that were. Strindberg’s description of a country entirely in the hands of women. That may appear to be the problem today. Then the empire offered opportunities for escape and adventure. We look back on faults and we see present faults The Germans see those same faults in different way And they had their own quite serious faults.
AW
72 Gary Lachman said Strindberg had a chip on his shoulder about his mother’s low origin. I found the idea a bit surprising. I would say it was not necessarily a chip.
The social putdown can be the most painful thing. To be despised by the stupid. But there is no right by which it is to opposed. Feeling yes. Truth perhaps.
AP
137& Strindberg the absinthe soaked contributing to the culture in a way that is not sick. That personal decadence need not matter as in quote from Human All Too Human about degeneration, or indeed Lombroso in Men of Genius, when he praises the effects of genius that is insane. Any form of decadence may be contemplated, attraction to which one is not to surrender.
Concentrate on Strindberg. That morally insane being. No reason for Nietzsche to reject him as a friend. A creative genius equal to his own, though to a degree insane. But his insights have substantiality and are not just the charismatic vision of a single person. Enlightenment offers Relationship rooted in psychological understanding, or more specifically resistance to distortion alternative views introduce ‘truth’ in inverted commas. From the conflict engendered by explicitly understood will to power comes rejection of the tyranny of the individual vision. Of pretended truths that are not truths at all, but moral ideas and dogmas.
One may share the ideal however sick. There may be motives so extreme. Not personal charisma vision or authority.
AQ
97 If Gissing and Lecky thought that the woman question could be solved by means of education, in places Nietzsche suggested that he might have agreed with this. Strindberg, who probably thought harder about it, would not have done so.
“a puritanical land delivered into the hands of women - which signifies the same thing as having fallen into a state of absolute decadence."
294 Ratchet effects. Equal rights reforms. Morality of the weak. Obviously to a certain extent one accepts the society one is born into.
All those people who want to reform it, change it. This equal rights pressure. That I should change, learn, adapt.
The most important philosophical point is that I should not change, learn, adapt. There is an idea that we should think of women as in all respects equal to men, as Strindberg said only the mentally retarded do. As if we could think like this. As if women poets, artists, philosophers, are as good as men. This insane rationalistic hypothesis. In its crude form it is absurd, but it is capable of ever more dialectical sophistication. The objection is immediate, and that is what is important.
GG
110& Today now that some of what Crowley said he wanted is finally coming to pass we can see that a solution has not really been found. This is not to call for a return to any previous order of things. Today's different atmosphere, may be equally oppressive and disturbing in its different way. Sexual freedom has given rise to new and still odious forms of moralism. Strindbergian and Munchian tensions must be widespread, even if the people can adapt themselves to any order.
That Crowley was actually far from naïve is evident from his often expressed views on women, which evoke all the battle of the sexes of a play by Ibsen or Strindberg. He was always conscious of the polarity between man and woman, the battle of wills, the essential conflict which some theories deny. Men and women have conflicting interests, conflicting power. This presents a challenge. For Crowley it was easy.
AT
125 Faithless, the latest Bergman film though directed by Liv Ullman. Bergman is obviously influenced by Strindberg, though he is different, and by no means a s good, probably because his characters are more repellent. David is a creep and Markus a monster. Marianne should meet another man who can take care of her But it is refreshing to see a film that is so un-American in its perspective.
PP
29 Artists have varying responses to the complexities of modern life. At best they have strong individualities, vigorous independent responses. Socialism somehow cuts away at all that vigorous independence. ‘Strindberg used to be a socialist, then he became a fascist’. The Norwegian academic I spoke to, it seemed he could understand fascism well enough and why many great writers were drawn to it, yet for him socialism was the great synthesis. In concentrating on distributing, socialism assumes the value of what is distributed. Yet this is what the greatest disputes are about.
Ibsen Notes
Al
206 Nordau on Ibsen I find quite sympathetic. Ibsen’s plots seem shallow, his feminism excessive and absurd. His views on marriage would make serious male work impossible. A surrender to the will of the female, as evident in much painting of the time.
ix
81 Returning I read some Peer Gynt. This is new identity for me, a splendid dramatic poem whose meaning is immediately evident to me. The criticism in the introduction is quite irrelevant to my present purposes. Peer Gynt is myself drunk or high, rejected by the creeps who surround me.
ac
61 Strindberg, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, all stand for psychological truth that has been deformed and tortured by rationalistic schemes. The will to power is the psychological theory that best explains this. People can live by other ideas, but that is like being oppressed by morality; it is to deny yourself insight.
Strindberg’s madness is profoundly logical. His suffering is necessary. It is realising the consequences of ideas like Ibsen’s without suppressing and mortifying the self.
au
6 Ghosts managed to stir up argument, even a row. Play of ideas, psychologically unreal. The social reform he seems to suggest, a reform that by now has obviously been achieved. But that does not mean human life is by now satisfactory. Supposed Lutheranism of the pastor, with his appeal to ‘duty’. With ideas of social reform, practical experiments are needed only for the stupid, thought experiments are enough to show the flaws. Strindberg saw right through Ibsenism.
Ibsen’s Ghosts, its harsh judgmental morality. Solutions not really solutions.
Moral prohibitions, judgements, condemnations. Living power of morality in the new order, supposed ideal of health. Look at the young woman and see the forbidden, the prohibitions. Imposition of guilt.
9& Shaw (The Quintesence of Ibsenism), at times so perspective a critic and at others so silly. His desire to establish an Ibsen theatre on a model of Wagner’s Bayreuth. That Ibsen has added ‘the discussion’ to the drama. That Strindberg would also be performed there, as Devil’s Advocate. But his very silly idea that The Dolls House is more relevant and important to us than Othello.
Ibsen very unsatisfactory because although he points out evils, the solutions he proposes seem to come as proposals for social reform. That is really unsatisfactory from an artist point of view. It doesn’t redeem anything. It is not tragedy such as Strindberg produced.
The solutions are not solutions. Invitations to join some cause is not a solution.
Real drama exposes the contradictions at the heart of reality, the tragedy. It concentrates on this and that is how it liberates and inspires. Reform may have its merits but really it means just a change of personnel in power.
Ghosts. Moral judgment. The anti tragic idea hat reconciliation is possible. The venom Ghosts aroused, so difficult to understand. If it does not work, if the reconciliation is impossible, then one is sick. And then perhaps one must affirm sickness.
The harsh agony aunt view of the world. Discard what doesn’t match up. Leave him.
Nordau on Ibsen His interpretation of Ghosts differs from Shaw’s.
‘Well but is it in Ibsen’s opinion permissible or not permissible to gratify carnal lust as soon as it is awakened?...or does the moral law hold for man only, and not for woman? (p369)
Similarity between Ibsen’s view and modern feminism. And also the feminist view derives from Ibsen. This view of ‘the moral law’ was also popular in the age of the suffragettes. It is a left wing idea. An idea of emotion not of reason.
Nordau says how many want Ibsen to be the new Voltaire or Goethe, source of all the ideas of modernity. He talks of the role of Brandes in promoting him. Also of the religious residue, original sin, confession and self sacrifice or redemption.
See how that went into psychoanalysis.
Always the promise of real satisfaction, as if the new ideas will bring a greater happiness. That is part of the dishonesty. How you may find something totally fulfilling. The illusory nature of the question and the promise. A kind of Rousseauite romanticism.
Loading on guilt. The furtherance of some particular order.
Guilt for man, freedom for women. And the idea that in this lies true happiness and liberation.
Idea that a change of doctrine brings greater fulfilment. This itself is a phoney idea. The doctrine is unimportant.
Ibsen’s modernity, that he heralds anew era of female power. His heroines, says Nordau, are like those of Sacher Masoch, only a little less crudely overt, and Ibsen is a masochist who enjoys reversing the normal relation between the sexes.
The ideal he projects is clearly that of female, or feminist power. Seducing maidservants is such a terrible crime because that is what wives do not like.
Of course there is inconsistency, that is hardly the point.
Female power. The pretence that this means honesty, freedom and happiness is in no way an argument. Drama as crude propaganda.. Why does Shaw go along with Ibsen’s ideas? Because he is all for modernity as well as being undersexed?
Origins of drama. Greek drama, Shakespearian drama. Religious origins. Propaganda to reinforce values. Shakespeare and Strindberg go way beyond that, dealing with some of the questions raised which run so much deeper.
Ibsen promotes discussion, argument.
Interesting suggestion that Brand was influenced by Kierkegaard
290 Went to see Ibsen’s Little Eyolf at the Rosemary Branch theatre. I was surprised to be so favourably impressed. It seemed deeper than most Ibsen I have seen.
Weininger writes of Rita as a creation of misogyny. Idea of a dysfunctional marriage’
In recent years Henrik Ibsen (in the character of Anitra, Rita and Irene) and August Strindberg have given utterance to this view (that women have no souls).
Of course that was not my interpretation. I would have thought Ibsen saw Rita as being in the right, with her demand for happiness, for coitus, and Allmers is at fault.. And with that goes a whole theory of human health and happiness. The idea that fulfilment through marriage is the whole aim and object of life. From it one can draw a deep pessimism.
Interesting how such ‘marital dysfunction’ can become interesting material for drama. Ibsen’s symbolist phase. Symbol and allegory. The rat wife.
Rita. Woman sexually rejected by her husband. Therefore idea of sex comes to assume vast importance and even a kind of threat. Idea of the task of man as first to deal with this then he can be free to do what he wants. Undealt with it assumes exaggerated importance and becomes something unpleasant.
So Weininger sees her as a monster and turns against sex altogether.
See how woman may seem to oppose man’s will. But of course it doesn’t have to be like that. He does not have to give in or submit himself only to tame and appease. In one review they wrote of ‘bad faith’ Allmers and his writing, his decision, his virtue.
Male weakness and evasiveness. Ibsen and the female demand for fulfilment. What must Allmers do to restore his male will? That is the interesting question and I does not mean yielding to all that the woman say he should do. But it does not mean rejecting her. It is his will, his book, his writing.
341& Sexual morality. Attack the female idea that gives so much power to women. Attack sexual morality, low class ideals of restraint. What women want ought not to be the standard of life accepted by mean.
Ibsen’s ideas are utter confusion, logically speaking. the claim to instinctual liberation is phoney. Women’s desires are clear enough, they are the guardians of morality. Morality comes to mean what they want. Even doing what you want comes to mean doing what they want you to do. Standards of morality get twisted into rules for so called fulfilment. These rules get asserted as so called psychological laws. Rather than ay superior truth or depth he just expresses what women want, their demands and desires.
Ibsen and the new age of female domination.
av
17 Went to see The Master Builder at the Albery theatre. Symbolist drama. Quite a bit to think about. Not a feminist work. Some psychological acumen. Differing male and female views on sex. Guilt. Robust conscience.
aw
208 Saw Peer Gynt at the Rosemary Branch. Guilt, paranoia, selfishness. Salvation through Solveig. A brilliant poem, brilliant and profound. Influences? Byron (Don Juan) fairy tales, Christianity. Selfishness and the guilt to which it gives rise. Egotism. Subject to negative judgements. The urgent need for redemption. Interesting how this comes in the form of a woman, a virgin who selflessly waits. Like Wagner’s redemption. The reality of this, which is not really Christian at all. Little touch of nudity. We see the bare arses of Peer and the troll princess.
ai
142 Went to see Ibsen’s play When we Dead Awaken at the Almeida theatre. What to make of Ibsen? As literature there are obvious flaws, great crudenesses, over heavy symbolism. But G. says that is the way women see men, psychic vampires.
I find Strindberg ever so much better. For Ibsen only gives one side of the story, one part of the argument. It needs to be completed. Ibsen is interesting, he does express ideas which have played an ever increasing part in western society. The attack on the idea of the artist, the man and his view of his destiny. Surely he could not be thinking of himself in the old sculptor, to portray himself as so dead. And a recovery from such death only in a brief moment of Nietzschean exhilaration at the top of a mountain.
Embodiment of the attack of the female upon the male.
147 Ibsen and the sex war. Female idea that the destiny of the male does not matter. Thus the female aspires to negate the will of the male while desiring to be overcome by it.
Source of mystery here.
In the great city subtleties abound. Complications. Simple answers seem far from obvious.
161 Consider Ibsen and the negative way in which his females present the male. Did his own wife perhaps describe him in such terms? An intelligence not directed at achievement within society, because it would aim to change the parameters on which society is constructed. Which is therefore condemned to poverty and uselessness.
‘Ibsen’s own circle of vision is that of the middle class in a great city of yesterday and today. His conflicts, which start from spiritual premises that did not exist till about 1850 and can hardly last beyond 1900, are neither those of the great world not those of the lower masses, still less those of the cites inhabited by non-European populations.
All these are local and temporary values – most of them indeed limited to the momentary ‘intelligentsia of cities of West –European type. World historical or eternal values they emphatically are not. Whatever the substantial importance of Ibsen’s and Nietzsche’s generation may be, it infringes the very meaning of the word ‘world-history’ which denotes the totality and not a selected part- to subordinate, to undervalue, or to ignore the factors which lie outside ‘modern’ interests. Yet in fact they are so undervalued or ignored to an amazing extent’ . (Spengler - Decline of the West vol 1 p24)
http://www.mith.demon.co.uk/philmythmag.htm
Wilhelm Reich admires Peer Gynt and there must be something very interesting in what he says although it is a little elusive. Perhaps he sees Peer Gynt as someone on a trip which at times threatens to become extremely bad. The great Boyg is a proponent of the dilemma. The button maker is a figurative representation of that Hell which is worse than death. something which has run itself into unresolvable dilemma. Ibsen does try to moralise, but Reich sees truth behind the moralism. Ibsen is hardly trying to condemn society for giving Peer a bad trip. Is the Great Boyg a moral figure, or simply a fiendish fact? It is an important thing about the trolls that they are not human, that it is impossible for a human to live like a troll without ultimate Hell. The difference between 'Man to thine own self be true' and 'Troll to thyself be enough', is the difference between open ended action, Tao te Ching like passivity where what ultimate meaning there is comes as an act of grace, and the diabolic hubris that prematurely lays down all its own values. As is well known, only God can do that, only He can be quite self sufficient. That's not to say that man can never become one with God, but that if he tries to build a tower of Babel up to Heaven his power of organisation as well as his strength is eventually going to break down, because the effort required is infinite. Reich is quite right when we come to ask why Peer Gynt went off on his bad trip. It seems to have had much to do with the people around him. However, Wilhelm Reich's materialism led him like Marx and Freud, to deny the validity of mysticism. Rejecting ordinary mysticism, he expounded a sexual mysticism of his own, as narrow in outlook as that of the orthodox Christian or Hindu.
08/03/2008
Book..
Just discovered a book that references me in the bibliography.
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&q=%22mith.demon.co.uk%22&um=1&sa=N&tab=wp
He gives the link to my Bulwer-Lytton paper:-
http://www.mith.demon.co.uk/Bulwer.htm
06/14/2008
01/15/2008
My homepage
John S Moore's Home Page
CONTENTS
selected papers
Nietzsche papers
Crowley paper
Aleister
Crowley as Guru
Bulwer-Lytton paper
Harold, (Everything is will)
selected poems
From
Poems A-Z
The
Smile
Passed On
other material
My
writing
Myself
links
email me at jsm@mith.demon.co.uk
11/27/2007
09/14/2007
philosophy notes
http://www.mith.demon.co.uk/philosophy%20notes.html
09/04/2007
state of philosophy
The State of Philosophy
and
Its Bearing upon Society
This picture of the progress of modern philosophy is presented in a necessarily simplified and sketchy form. Otherwise I would have not only to argue Wittgenstein against all sorts of apparent misinterpretations, but also against any number of supposed alternatives, for a particular interpretation of Nietzsche, which I have tried to do elsewhere[i].
The indecisiveness of philosophy’s conclusions has long created a philosophical problem of its own which has fed an anti-metaphysical impulse, a desire for final understanding. The tradition known as analytic philosophy had its origins in the 1890s, and was itself the heir of an older tradition that goes back at least as far as Hobbes. This is the tradition that led up to the later philosophy of Wittgenstein. We can trace it through Hobbes, Locke and Hume, even Kant, through Russell, early Wittgenstein and the logical positivists.
Wittgenstein claimed to have a method for dissolving philosophical problems . He was concerned to show how most of the problems of philosophy and therefore the proposed solutions, spring from an unjustifiable demand, or mistaken expectation, that some particular ‘language game’ conform to the rules of another. In the 1960s, a style of philosophy was in vogue which, whatever its shortcomings, attempted to build on the premise that the argument of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations was essentially right. In the 1970s philosophy moved away from Wittgenstein, not apparently because his arguments had been refuted, but as if they had never been put or could easily be ignored.
Did philosophy simply fragment into a number of unrelated practices or is Wittgenstein seriously considered to have been refuted? If so what is the argument? Apparently some were satisfied with Gellner's crude polemic in Word and Things [ii]. Herbert Marcuse refers to that book in his One Dimensional Man, with seeming approval[iii].. Then there was Kripke's creative misunderstanding[iv].
What would be involved in Wittgenstein being wrong? I am not saying he is not, only that it is far from clear how most analytical philosophers manage to think that he is. Once his argument has been understood. how can it be rejected? It is not fair to say that we have passed beyond Wittgenstein and his arguments.
According to Hacker[v], in the mid 1970s, partly for economic reasons, philosophy’s centre of gravity shifted from Britain to the US, where Wittgenstein’s influence had never been well rooted. There, under the influence of the growing prestige of certain exciting scientific and technological developments, like computers, neurophysiology and Chomskyan linguistics, Wittgenstein’s arguments against his original Tractatus position were disregarded in the face of a somewhat vulgarised revival of that very position[vi]. This now calls itself analytic philosophy, though writers such as Hacker dispute its right to that title.
Hacker supports the suspicion that Wittgenstein has not been refuted, just ignored, and that philosophy has thereby taken a backward step. I try to argue how genuine weaknesses in Wittgenstein's philosophy, which is itself more advanced than most of what currently passes for modern philosophy in British and American universities, can call on Nietzsche for their solution.
Can it be acceptable that philosophy should be subject to the vagaries of fashion, or to non rational paradigm shifts? The great virtue of Hegel as a historian of philosophy was his insistence that philosophy could only move on once it had absorbed and overcome the currently most advanced position. If we apply this approach to Wittgenstein, we should try to see if he falls under internal contradictions. Wittgenstein is good on paradoxes; in Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics he discusses Gödel whose paradox Russell believed to have undermined his whole project in Principia Mathematica. Might his own philosophy be vulnerable to some comparable paradox, constructed within his own principles and assumptions, theoretical and practical?
Potential difficulties may become clearer if rather than focusing on Oxford philosophy we look at the developments explored by the Rush Rhees/Peter Winch school, where this philosophy is applied particularly to ethics and forms of life.
One accusation that is levelled at Wittgenstein’s philosophy is of an implicit conservatism[vii]. It can seem that on his principles philosophical criticism of certain ways of talking may becomes more difficult. It is not that, for example, religious ways of talking have become legitimised, but as if an apparent way of delegitimising them has itself been delegitimised. So the effect of this philosophy may seem to be conservative and counter revolutionary, and Wittgenstein is rejected for this reason. But would not this objection only apply to illegitimate, or what we may call dishonest, efforts to rule out or delegitimise? Wittgenstein says he is only destroying houses of cards[viii]. So is the argument that all progress comes from philosophical error? Is philosophical error the engine of progress? One would not like it to be.
Whether or not the accusation of conservatism is a sensible objection, there is what appears to be a related problem that needs to be confronted. Applying Wittgensteinian philosophy there can be a difficulty in finding support for what one believes or wants to believe. There is a paralysis that can result from the countenancing of doctrines which deny whatever we stand for, and a willingness to look at such ideas in their own terms. As forms of life these may well be possible, though we want to dismiss them. We might be tempted to say they do not correspond with the facts. But we don’t want to introduce contentious theories of truth. Whether we should favour a correspondence over a coherence theory or vice versa is not a game we want or need to play
The demand to understand a language game as actually played is surely progress. A problem arises with self reflection. Practicing Wittgenstein’s philosophy one is involved in a language game. That will be opposed by people with different language games and motives for opposing it. How do you defend the activity you are involved in against another language game that holds it to be false or impossible? How is what you count as reason to be defended against an alternative form of reason which may be by your own standards irrational? These are familiar paradoxes of relativism, which may be more or less distressing depending on how seriously they are taken.
This paralysis relates closely to what Nietzsche called nihilism, one aspect of which is the demoralisation resulting from the idea that there is no truth. Among many Wittgensteinians there would be resistance to invoking Nietzsche, because Nietzsche’s will to power, like Hobbes’ psychological egoism, can appear as precisely the sort of reductionism the forms of life philosophy is concerned to combat. Rush Rhees, for example, does not come across as exactly hostile to Nietzsche, but interprets his transvaluation as something quite irrelevant to the usages of ethical language that he wishes to defend.
“What would an ethical problem look like in the system of evaluation Nietzsche advocates? In what ways would things look different? What would a bad conscience be like in these circumstances? Or conscientiousness generally? It would look different from what we often call conscientiousness partly because there is no element of humility involved in it. Can you be conscientious about showing bravado, about taking a devil-may-care attitude in what you’re doing?.....” [ix](p9)
I would say this passage is quite mistaken in its implication that traditional moral questions do not arise within a Nietzschean framework. For the moment, if we recognise that the paralysis really is a problem, it does not have to be one that compels us to go back and unthink all we have thought to get us so far. We are confronted with the problem of how to escape demoralising ideas which come in the form of viciously regressive paradoxes and dilemmas. For the solution we can turn to Nietzsche, but not Nietzsche as he is often understood these days, not the radical perspectivist who is implicated in the very problems just identified.
Both Winch’s way and the Marxist way, contain alternative methods for avoiding this paralysis and securing the priority of their own perspective. Marxism takes the way of what most would now call pseudo science, dogmatically appealing to the authority of its own alleged fact for securing the language game it is wished to play. Winch protects his position by restricting his focus to particular language games and refusing to play when tempted outside where paradox might result. There are obvious reasons why this is not a satisfactory solution. Rhees writes:-
“Nietzsche feels that he cannot accept Christian ethics. Similarly someone may feel that he cannot accept Nietzschean ethics”[x].
There is something almost solipsistic in this enclosure within the confines of particular language games. Nietzsche held that Christian ethics are not just something we may choose or reject on a basis of personal preference. Christian ethics as usually understood involve a dishonesty about motive that can be pointed out.
On the Nietzschean solution, a demoralising idea is viewed as a hostile threat to be countered by a perspective which claims to identify demonstrable falsification in the position of its opponents. Thus a viewpoint is possible which is not undermined by relativism. It may not be the viewpoint some people want to identify with. Presumably philosophers would have to abandon some of the moral games they may wish to play. An anti-Nietzschean position may offer a liveable language game and form of life, but, the argument goes, it is one which can be shown to involve falsification, however interesting it may be trying to understand it. It would seem to follow that Wittgenstein’s suggestion that we think of the ultimate as forms of life is in this respect unhelpful[xi]..
[i] See for example my God Unpicked:- in Nietzsche and Antiquity ed Paul Bishop Boydell and Brewer 2004
[ii] Gellner, Ernest. (1959) Words and Things. A critical account of linguistic philosophy and a study in ideology, etc. London. Victor Gollancz..
[iii] Remarking disparagingly on “Wittgenstein’s assurance that philosophy ‘leaves everything as it is’” he refers us to Gellner for “similar declarations”. Marcuse (1964) One Dimensional Man London Routledge and Kegan Paul
[iv] Kripke, Saul A. (1982) Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language : an elementary exposition . Oxford : Blackwell, .
[v] Hacker, P. M. S. (1996) Wittgenstein's Place in Twentieth-century Analytic Philosophy . Oxford : Blackwell, .
[vi] Hacker p272 “What from Wittgenstein’s perspective were diseases of the intellect, to many of which he had succumbed as a young man and which he had laboured long to extirpate, broke out afresh in mutated virulent forms.’
[vii] Marcuse, accuses it of providing “an intellectual justification for that which society has accomplished- namely the defamation of alternative modes of thought which contradict the established universe of discourse.” ibid p173
[viii] Philosophical Investigations §118
[x] Ibid p9.
[xi] “What has to be accepted, the given, is-so one could say-forms of life.” p 226 Wittgenstein ; (1958) Philosophical Investigations Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford : Blackwell,)
Recent Comments