i had an especially good teacher for intro to philosophy– tom polger, who was a graduate student at the time. i’m tempted to pick up his book, natural minds– even though i’m not sympathetic to identity theory, i’d like to give tom yet another chance to change my mind.

at the time, i was starting to wrap my head around ideas like non-euclidean geometry and the axiom of choice, and i was curious about how far people had gone in terms of exploring the limits of logic and language. figuring that no one takes things father than philosophers, i asked tom if anyone had ever tried to ‘axiomatize the world’, and he took me to his office and showed me his copy of wittgenstein’s tractatus logicio-philosophicus. the title is as long as the book is short– there are seven primary propositions, most of which have numbered subpropositions that are commentary on the primary propositions (this map shows the tree structure of the book).

i was thinking about the tractatus the other day– not so much as philosophy, but as a piece of literature. google searches for various combinations of “deconstruction”, “tractatus”, and “wittgenstein” didn’t turn up anything, which may just indicate that i don’t really get what deconstruction is all about. the brevity of the tractatus makes reading it feel like going through an advanced math proof, where enormous amounts of complex context and background information is referenced in passing. and yet, one of the primary arguments of the book is that philosophy is not like science or math, but rather that philosophical problems and questions are simple misuses of language, such that after you finish the book and understand it, you should throw it away because everything it says is nonsense. it seems like such an odd way to write a philosophy text that argues that philosophy is just a silly misunderstanding– i suppose the idea is that if you’re going to spew nonsense, it’s best to spew as little as possible.

i’ve been toying with the idea of doing a cover of some piece of writing using the literary style of the tractatus. sean suggested “there’s a monster at the end of this book”. right now, i’m thinking “animal farm” would make a good candidate. i’d also like to write up a qad rails app that would facilitate the reading and writing of tractatus-esque pieces of literature. right now, this is all brain crack. it would help if the next time we talk, you ask me about how this little project is going, and then berate me when i say that i haven’t really started it yet. and don’t let me off the hook when i try to claim that i’m busy with finals, that’s total bs.

Labels: math, literature, philosophy

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i spent the summer after my sophomore year in college working on a research project at carnegie mellon in pittsburgh. it was a powerful experience for me– both in terms of my evolution from a mathematician into an engineer (thank you matlab, for being such a beautiful language) and in terms of my emotional devolution from human being to multicellular automaton.

i was coming to pittsburgh from a pretty bad breakup, and as is usually the case in these situations, i kicked off a personal renaissance– devoting alot of time to good books and good music (this is about the time i really ‘heard’ radiohead for the first time, thanks to david and matt). one great source of (free) reading material i discovered was bibliomania, where i read of human bondage by w. somerset maugham.

(aside on language: i feel like you can tell good writing because it ’sounds right’ in your head. i’m sure everyone has a different preference for what sort of writing sounds best to them, but for me, the only person who has ever sounded better than w. somerset maugham is virginia woolf. even his name rolls off your tongue like buttercream.)

the book follows the life of a guy in britain who is born with a club foot as he grows up and makes his way in the world. much of the story focuses on his relationship with mildred, this generally horrible waitress who he is hopelessly in love with and how she almost destroys his life. well, i guess not ‘almost’– she does destroy his life, he just happens to recover.

the timeframe of the story is 1800s britain, and the ideas of the enlightenment and modernity have a strong influence on the main character– as a young adult, he commits himself to living his life by reason and rationality.  he fails miserably at this, as his passion for mildred generally overrides his better judgement.  he only really gets his life together when he recognizes that all of his decisions are driven by emotion and he stops denying their primacy.

i wrote most of this post before reading that piece on spinoza i linked to below.  i had originally planned to write a paragraph here on how attempting to live your life by reason and rationality is itself an emotionally-driven decision– it’s a decision that you make when you’re terrified of your emotions.  i referred to myself above as a multicellular automaton, implying that i somehow killed off my internal emotional life over the past couple of years in order to avoid pain.  but now i’m wondering if i didn’t just prefer the emotional experience derived from abstract thought to the emotional experience of human interaction.  this makes me feel better– the idea that i might not just have been running away in a blind panic, that there was a natural place for me to go and feel at home, even if i wasn’t consciously aware of it at the time.

Labels: literature, philosophy

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