Thanks for this—interesting & quite useful. It reminded me of some similar observations:
George Orwell recommended somewhere that, when writing, you should try to visualize what you want to say for a while (i.e. non-propositionally) before making any attempt to put it into words, so as to be concrete rather than abstract/dry and falling back on cliches etc. that may not express it adequately.
At the end of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus—the gist of which is that any meaningful statement can be expressed as logical propositions—he hints enigmatically that this isn’t quite the be-all and end-all, as some things that can’t be said can still be ‘shown’. I assume meaning, gestured towards non-propositionally. An example he gives elsewhere, maybe along these lines, is that you can know how a clarinet sounds, but not state it.
The typical reader needs to meet the idea repeatedly, from different angles, to start to realize it.
Cf in Philosophical Investigations, W. makes various points repeatedly in different ways via different examples, and justifies this by saying it’s like repeatedly traversing a landscape which you need to view from different angles before you can understand the whole.
(Contrast the Tractatus, where IIRC in the intro he says maybe the book can only be understood by people who’ve already had the same thoughts. Maybe, in line with the whole book, on the grounds that if you can’t understand propositions, he can’t help you further (via non-propositions).)
Thanks for this—interesting & quite useful. It reminded me of some similar observations:
George Orwell recommended somewhere that, when writing, you should try to visualize what you want to say for a while (i.e. non-propositionally) before making any attempt to put it into words, so as to be concrete rather than abstract/dry and falling back on cliches etc. that may not express it adequately.
At the end of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus—the gist of which is that any meaningful statement can be expressed as logical propositions—he hints enigmatically that this isn’t quite the be-all and end-all, as some things that can’t be said can still be ‘shown’. I assume meaning, gestured towards non-propositionally. An example he gives elsewhere, maybe along these lines, is that you can know how a clarinet sounds, but not state it.
Cf in Philosophical Investigations, W. makes various points repeatedly in different ways via different examples, and justifies this by saying it’s like repeatedly traversing a landscape which you need to view from different angles before you can understand the whole.
(Contrast the Tractatus, where IIRC in the intro he says maybe the book can only be understood by people who’ve already had the same thoughts. Maybe, in line with the whole book, on the grounds that if you can’t understand propositions, he can’t help you further (via non-propositions).)