ilovefuzz.com

paging our resident philosophers like Wittgenstein & Invisible Man
if they know about that...

Curious to hear your take on it.

Wittgenstein had as little a sense of humor as any human being who has ever lived. He was comically serious and dour. He was painfully earnest and lacking in guile. There was an almost childlike quality and innocence to him, even though he could also inspire great terror in people with his brutally frank assessments of their philosophical incompetence (Russell was so shaken by his "disciple" Wittgenstein's critiques that he actually retired from serious philosophy). His students mostly lived in fear of him, with the exception of handsome young men, in whom Wittgenstein from time-to-time took a sort of virginal interest (and not for their talent in philosophy).

Back to jokes, in one of his notebooks he wrote:

"I could ask: why do I sense a grammatical joke as being in a certain sense deep? (And that of course is what the depth of philosophy is.)"

What he means by this becomes more clear in PI, where he says:

"The problems arising through a misinterpretation of our forms of language have the character of depth. They are deep disquietudes; they are as deeply rooted in us as the forms of our language, and their significance is as great as the importance of our language.---let's ask ourselves: why do we feel a grammatical joke to be deep? (and that is what the depth of philosopohy is.)"

QUICK FUZZ FORUM INTERPRETATION:

We mistake forms of language for existential realities. In philosophy, problems of language are taken for metaphysical and existential problems, when in fact they are neither, because language is merely a tool, and has no metaphysical relationship to reality, being, existence. So:

"a simile has been absorbed into the forms of our language produces a false appearance which disquiets us. 'But this isn't how it is!'--we say. 'Yet this is how it has to be!'"

"The general form of proposition is: this is how things are---that is the kind of proposition one repeats to onself countless times. One thinks that one is tracing nature over and over again, and one is merely tracing round the frame through which we look at it." V V

hah

nerd

and this one:


Humor is not a mood but a way of looking at the world.
So if it is correct to say that humor was stamped out in Nazi Germany,
that does not mean that people were not in good spirits, or anything of that sort,
but something much deeper and more important.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein -

I can get behind that

ProCarsteNation wrote:(without being facetious).”

That's the important point to note. Wittgenstein isn't making some flippant comment; he believes that the vast majority of problems in philosophy aren't actual problems at all, but grammatical tricks and holes in the relationship between our everyday use of language and our attempt to apply words from everyday use into a philosophical and in particular metaphysical contexts. Wittgenstein believed that a cogent analysis of philosophical problems would make them simply "disappear" as non-problems. For Wittgenstein, the deep error of philosophy is the implicit assumption that there's a metaphysical relationship between language (or "grammar" as he oddly likes to say) and reality.

ProCarsteNation wrote:
“It is worth noting that Wittgenstein once said that a serious and good philosophical work could be written
that would consist entirely of jokes (without being facetious).”

That I'd read!!!

That's basically how Parfit writes (if I'm remembering properly).

Good with the music.
Bad with Jews, women, money.
Good at hitting kids.

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Don't know of any funny passages or stuff about humor, sorry. Most of what I remember came from epic three hour lectures from a guy named Ken Dauber whose most recent book was kinda about Wittgenstein. But Dauber was a little nuts, kinda manic, and never once in the forty five fucking hours I spent listening to him stopped chomping on an unlit, soggy cigar stump. So I perhaps took less from those lectures than I might have.