Bedtime reading · 2 February 2009

159. As children we learn facts; e.g., that every human being has a brain, and we take them on trust. I believe that there is an island, Australia, of such-and–such a shape, and so on and so on….

160. The child learns by believing the adult. Doubt comes after belief.

161. I learned an enormous amount and accepted it on human authority, and then I found some things confirmed or disconfirmed by my own experience.

162. In general I take as true what is found in text-books, of geography for example. Why? I say: All these facts have been confirmed a hundred times over. But how do I know that? What is my evidence for it? I have a world-picture. Is it true or false? Above all it is the substratum of all my enquiring and asserting. The propositions describing it are not all equally subject to testing.

163. … [W]henever we test anything, we are already presupposing something that is not tested….

164. Doesn’t testing come to an end?

165. One child might say to another: “I know that the earth is already hundreds of years old” and that would mean: I have learnt it.

166. The difficulty is to realize the groundlessness of our believing.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty pp. 23-4

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1. Love it.

   The ground of being.
   The groundlessness of believing.

   Good morning!

   Posted by: karen · Feb 3, 04:02 AM · #

2. Good morning. (This is crazy.)

   Posted by: (0v0) · Feb 3, 04:10 AM · #

3. Two skeptics walk into a bar…..

   Or DO they??? :)

   Posted by: patrick · Feb 3, 05:42 AM · #

4. You’re over my head again…..

   Posted by: LI Ashtangini · Feb 3, 07:08 AM · #

5. Mine too. My bedtime reading is “Simpsons Comics Winter Wingding #3”

   :)

   Nice kapo video!!

   Posted by: cody · Feb 3, 10:30 AM · #

6. Sometimes I read your posts, Owl, and think, “I get it!” and then I read it again and I think, “wait, what?”, and then I get it again and then I don’t. But whatever- I always enjoy it and even if what I get out of it was not your point, I still get something out of it.
   “The groundlessness of believing”- now that I get!
   Patrick, you’re funny.

   Posted by: Liz · Feb 3, 10:57 AM · #

7. Shouldn’t we immediately be skeptical of anyone who writes his thoughts as enumerated aphorisms?

   Posted by: Carl · Feb 3, 04:04 PM · #

8. 1. Carl, no. It is the best way.

   2. Patrick, I feel that LW was a mystic rationalist.

   3.Grim, yes. V. good description of it. That discussion is actually a reference to the logical positivist G.E. Moore’s here is a hand argument, which LW, characteristically, thought was stupid.

   4. Ok, okay OKAY. What Ovid should I read? I went from Ron Currie (are you mad at me that you read that?) to LW to Calvino’s Baron in the Trees. I keep moving east and backwards in time so…

   Posted by: (0v0) · Feb 3, 04:10 PM · #

9. 4:10 is the new 4:20

   Posted by: (0v0) · Feb 3, 04:11 PM · #

10. Oh my, I read “Calvino’s Bacon in the Trees” and felt frightened for a moment there.

    Posted by: karen · Feb 3, 05:49 PM · #

11. For bedtime reading, Amores!

    I had a front-toothless South American professor—Mohica—the semester I read Ovid. I still remember his tongue darting all over the place while he read the XI elegy of Amores. “So I can’t live without you or with you!” ;)

    Posted by: joy · Feb 4, 01:11 AM · #

12. Wittgenstein as bedtime reading. Yet another reminder that this blog is way out of my league.
    But I like what W writes, so maybe I should catch up on my Wittgenstein and then reread some of your posts ;-)

    Posted by: Fatou · Feb 4, 07:13 AM · #

13. Calvino:
    Cosmicomics:
    Distance to the moon
    (a long time ago when the moon was close enough to the earth you could take a boat out with a ladder and sort of somersault up, and collect the milk…)
    i luv that

    Posted by: Gregor · Feb 4, 10:46 AM · #

14. hi (0v0)
    i think the profoundness here is in the conclusion, “the difficulty is to realize the groundlessness of our believing.” i like that statement. it resonates with Pema Chodron’s writing in “when things fall apart”. i believe her gist might have been that you are happier and more at ease if you’re not always expecting that there is a ground under you and that people who expect that ground to be there are deluded.
    hugs,
    Arturo

    Posted by: arturo · Feb 4, 08:19 PM · #

15. Yes.

    I get wordier as my brain tires, and probably shouldn’t comment, but my god! Cosmicomics and Mohica and Bacon in the Trees? Better than tonight’s bedtime reading, articles from the Socialist Worker and American Journal of Sociology. Bah.

    Fatou! Good to see you and don’t worry about LW. He was off-putting with all the numbered propositions and constant changing of his arguments, but that and his rude character were just meant to hide a modest but oddly analytical mysticism. Or so I wish to believe. :-) On Certainty is the easiest.

    Joy, Mohica sounds kind of scary? But still I am leaning over to this Ovid fellow.

    I read Malouf’s An Imaginary Life and love the line where the feral boy with whom Ovid is exiled mistakes himself for the environment. When it rains, the boy thinks, “I am raining.”

    On which note: my god, in this new record The Crying Light, Antony is singing about his sad feelings about environmental degradation. Who can get away with that level of sincerity and simple emotion? He’s amazing.

    Posted by: (0v0) · Feb 4, 08:37 PM · #

16. Oh, Roberto Calasso. Has anyone read Ka, his irreverant but beautiful rendering of Indian myths? True classics people around here might despise it, but it’s lovely.

    Fried owl. Off to the late shift.

    Posted by: (0v0) · Feb 4, 08:40 PM · #

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