The Rules of the Game

95. The propositions describing this world-picture might be part of a kind of mythology. And their role is like that of rules of a a game;

What if the player acts to directly oppose the rules? It is the same for the one who plays obediently. At some point, the losses will necessitate either a return to the game or a position of abjection.

467. I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again "I know that that's a tree, pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: "This fellow isn't insane. We are only doing philosophy.

In the position of the abject, that is to say, in philosophy, anything is possible, even if most things are extremely unlikely.


How do we get from the ordinary sensory data to objects, and how then from objects to belief? Wittgenstein would say that a belief in ordinary objects is not so different from a belief in God.


144. The child learns to believe a host of things. I.e. it learns to act according to these beliefs. Bit by bit there forms a system of what is believed, and in that system some things stand unshakably fast and some are more or less liable to shift. What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it.

203. If everything speaks for an hypothesis and nothing against it , is it objectively certain? One can call it that. But does it necessarily agree with the world of facts? At the very best it shows us what "agreement" means. We find it difficult to imagine it to be false, but also difficult to make use of it.

Slipping

“Virtual existence is the condition of possibility for the return of the soul to the divine.” Amy Hollywood on Meister Eckhart


“If I were so rational that there were present in my reason all the images that all human beings had ever received, and those that are present in God himself, and if I could be without possessiveness in their regard, so that I had not seized possessively upon any on of them, not in what I did, or what I left undone, not looking to any past or to future, but I stood in this present moment free and empty according to God’s dearest will, performing it without ceasing, then truly I should be a virgin, as truly unimpeded by any images as was when I was not.“

“So let us therefore pray to God that we may be free of God, and that we may apprehend and rejoice in that everlasting truth in which the highest angel and the fly and the soul are equal.”

Another great read from Professor Amy Hollywood. The Soul as Virgin Wife.

I am interested in the multiplication of images. I go to Google and type "soul" and "fly" and "angel" and these three appear among thousands, millions. I choose the first three that suit my purpose. Eckhart associates the will with the desire for certain images. I think that is why I want to use everyday images in the novel. Identity and particularity coemerge. Self-portrait as collection. My cup has a crack in it. I have blond hair. The table is sticky with jam. I am a woman. And if we could rid ourselves of the images we use to represent ourselves, would we annihilate ourselves? What if we choose infinite images instead of these few, in other words, God? In other words, nothing?

In so far as we are exist in a physical world (embodied), there are limits. The limits of imagination (image making) are grounded in the body. What does God look like in the world? What does infinite look like incarnated? Obviously within a Christian tradition, it looks like Christ. With world as frame, Christ is God in the world, and acts that are Christlike are called just. Eckhart is very keen on this concept of justice. I think this is because justice is part of the world as such and nowhere else.

The world is all that is the case. Tractatus 1

Wittgenstein said that the Tractatus was an ethical document.

Wittgenstein Brown Book, Part II

"Do we have a feeling of familiarity whenever we look at familiar objects? Or do we have it usually? When do we actually have it? It helps to ask: What do we contrast the feeling of familiarity with? One thing we contrast it with is surprise.
One cold say: unfamiliarity is much more of an experience than familiarity."

..."What makes us use the expression 'seeking in our memory?' when we try to remember a word?

Let us ask the question: 'What is the similarity between looking for a word in your memory and looking for my friend in the park?"





The sensation of looking at trees: driving past them, I realize that there is nothing to see. A familiar feeling that is nothing but a body looking at trees. I extract the sensation and try to project it, so that looking becomes a kind of worshiping. I wonder: if I could nail it down would the tree become another me and I be emptied of every tree?





jeffwaa (2 years ago)
Nice video and lovely music. Sorry about the two-star rating, my finger slipped. I wish I could take it back.