The Absurdity of Philosophy

The Absurdity Of

Philosophy

Jeff Smith-Luedke

Lulu, Inc. Morrisville, NC

Preface

The Absurdity of Philosophy

The Absurdity of Philosophy 1

2 The Absurdity of Philosophy

1 Nietzsche, Friedrich. Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist. London, UK: Penguin

Books. 2003. Page 45.

2 This opening paragraph is an allusion to the opening paragraph of “The Myth of

Sisyphus.” Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus. New York, NY: Vintage International. 1991. Page 119.

3 Plato. The Republic. PLATO: The Collected Dialogues Including the Letters.

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2002. Pages 747-752.

4 Nietzsche, Friedrich. Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist. London, UK: Penguin

Books. 2003. Pages 52-65.

5 Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. New York, NY: Vintage Books. 1974.

§125.

6 Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power. New York, NY: Barnes & Noble

Publishing, Inc. 2006. §585.

7 Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus. New York, NY: Vintage International. 1991.

8 "To be delivered from the sickness of death is an impossibility, for the sickness and

its torment - and death - consist in not being able to die." Kierkegaard, Søren, Bretall, Robert, ed. "Sickness Unto Death." A Kierkegaard Anthology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 1973. Page 344.

9 "[Abraham] did it for God's sake because God required this proof of his faith." Ibid. “Fear and Trembling.” Page 133.

10 “Instead of the objective uncertainty, there is a certainty, namely, that objectively it

is absurd and that is absurdity, held fast in the passion of inwardness, is faith. The Socratic ignorance is like a witty jest in comparison with the earnestness of facing the absurd; and the Socratic existential inwardness is like the Greek light-mindedness in comparison with the grave strenuosity of faith." Ibid. “Postscript.” Page 220.

11 “Conversely, the compulsion to prolong life from day to day, anxiously consulting

doctors and accepting the most painful, humiliating conditions, without the strength to come nearer the actual goal of one’s life: this is far less worthy of respect. Religions provide abundant excuses to escape the need to kill oneself: this is how they insinuate themselves with those who are in love with life.” Nietzsche, Friedrich. Human, All Too Human. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. 1996. §80.

12 Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus. New York, NY: Vintage International.

1991. Page 123.

13 Descartes, René. Discourse on Method; New York, NY: Barnes & Noble

Publishing, Inc. 2004. Page 84.

14 “We make to ourselves pictures of facts. The picture presents the facts in logical

space, the existence and non-existence of atomic facts. The picture is a model of reality. To the objects correspond in the picture the elements of the picture. The elements of the picture stand, in the picture, for the objects.” Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. New York, NY: Barnes & Noble Publishing, Inc. 1927. Page 15, §§ 2.1 – 2.131.

15 Russell, Bertrand. "Is There a God?" 1952. Evan's Experientialism. <http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/russell10.htm>.

16 Gödel, Kurt. "On Formally Undecidable Propositions in Principia Mathematica and

Related Systems." IBM Research. 1931. <http://www.research.ibm.com/people/h/hirzel/papers/canon00-goedel.pdf>.

17 Popper, Karl. The Logic of Scientific Discovery. London, UK: Routledge. 2000.

18 Morningstar, Chip. "How To Deconstruct Almost Anything: My Postmodern

Adventure." 1993. <http://www.fudco.com/chip/deconstr.html>.

19 Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins

University Press. 1997.

20 “There is no outside-text.” Ibid. Page 158.

21 Waylessness; being perpetually lost with no sense of direction. 22 Derrida, Jacques. Acts of Religion. New York, NY: Routledge. 2002.

23 This sentence was first used by William J. Rapaport in Linguist List, 1972. Using

the place of Buffalo (e.g., NY), buffalo the animal, and buffalo the verb, this sentence reads something like, “The bison from New York that other bison from New York push around, themselves push around other New York bison.”

24 Goldberg, Dr. Bruce. University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Philosophy of Mind coursework lecture notes of S. Mazzoni. Fall term, 1993.

25 Diamond, Cora, ed. Wittgenstein’s Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics,

Cambridge 1939. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 1976. Page 19.

26 Everett, Daniel. “Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã,”

Current Anthropology, Volume 46, Number 4, August-October 2005. PNG Language Resources. Summer Institute of Linguistics. <http://www.pnglanguages.org/americas/brasil/PUBLCNS/ANTHRO/PHGrCult.pdf>.

27 Pinker, Steven. The Stuff of Thought. New York, NY: Viking Penguin. 2007.

28 Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Albany, NY: State University of New York

Press. 1996. Page 67.

29 Suter, Ronald. Interpreting Wittgenstein: A Cloud of Philosophy, A Drop of

Grammar. Philadelphia, PA: Temple university Press. 1989. 30 Staten, Henry. Wittgenstein and Derrida. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska

Press. 1984. This is the argument that Henry Staten put forward and Derrida called “a big step forward in the field.”

31 Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 1997.

32 These three propositions summarize the thesis of Gorgias’s On Nature or the Non-

Existent, discussed by Sextus Empiricus in Against the Professors, and in various other works of antiquity on rhetoric. The book itself has unfortunately been lost to posterity.

33 Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Malden, MA: Blackwell

Publishing. 2001. §454.

34 “Think of the tools in a tool-box: there is a hammer, pliers, a saw, a screw-driver, a

rule, a glue-pot, glue, nails and screws. –The functions of words are as diverse as the functions of these objects. (And in both cases there are similarities.)” Ibid. §11.

35 “In the practice of the use of language one party calls out the words, the other acts

on them. In instruction in the language the following process will occur: the learner names the objects; that is, he utters the word when the teacher points to the stone. - And there will be this still simpler exercise: the pupil repeats the words after the teacher - both of these being processes resembling language… I will call these games ‘language-games’ and will sometimes speak of a primitive language as a language-game.” Ibid. §7.

36 “If you say he sees a private picture before him, which he is describing, you have

still made an assumption about what he has before him… If you admit that you haven’t any notion what kind of thing it might be that he has before him – then what leads you into saying, in spite of that, that he has something before him? Isn’t it as if I were to say of someone: ‘He has something. But I don’t know whether it is money, or debts, or an empty till.’” Ibid. §294.

37 Wittgenstein, Ludwig. The Blue and Brown Books. New York, NY: Harper

Torchbooks. 1965. Page 4.

38 "For a large class of cases - though not for all - in which we employ the word

‘meaning’ it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language" Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. 2001. §43.

39 Witmer, D. Gene. “Atheism, Reason, and Morality: Responding to Some Popular

Christian Apologetics.” 2006. Gator Freethought. <http://grove.ufl.edu/~aasa/witmer%20talk%201.pdf>.

40 “It is not enough for a man to speak or write; he must also be listened to or read. It

is no mean thing to have a person’s attention, to have a wide audience, to be allowed to speak under certain circumstances, in certain gatherings, in certain circles. We must not forget that by listening to someone we display a willingness to eventually accept his point of view… Frivolous discussions that are lacking in apparent interest are not always entirely unimportant, inasmuch as they contribute to the smooth working of an indispensable social mechanism.” Perelman, Chaim, and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca. The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. 1969. Page 17.

43 “Uncritical semantics is the myth of a museum in which the exhibits are meanings

and the words are labels. To switch languages is to switch labels.” Quine, Willard Van Orman. Ontological Relativity & Other Essays. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. 1969. Page 27.

See also: “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” From a Logical Point of View. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1980.

44 Popper, Karl. The Logic of Scientific Discovery. London, UK: Routledge. 2000.

45 Ronald Suter called this ‘criteriology’ in his Understanding Wittgenstein: A Cloud of

Philosophy, A Drop of Grammar (1989), and makes the argument, among others, that this is a more proper understanding of Wittgenstein’s philosophy of psychology and distinguishes Wittgenstein’s approach from the behaviorist approach.

46 “We had been picturing the rejection of the law of excluded middle, ‘p or ~p’, mainly

as a rejection of classical negation. I have now directed the intuitionist’s case rather at the alteration. Actually the distinction is unreal; once you upset the interrelations of the logical operators, you may be said to have revised any or all. Anyway, the intuitionist’s negation is deviant also on its own account: the law of double negation lapses… The intuitionist should not be viewed as controverting us as to the true laws of certain fixed logical operations, namely, negation and alternation. He should be viewed rather as opposing our negation and alternation as unscientific ideas, and propounding certain other ideas, somewhat analogous, of his own.” Quine, Willard Van Orman. Philosophy of Logic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1986. Page 87.

47 Carroll, Lewis, with an introduction and notes by Martin Gardner. The Annotated

Alice. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company. 2000. Page 213.

48 McWhorter, John. Your Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Why We

Should, Like, Care. New York, NY: Gotham Books. 2003. Page 17. For anyone interested in grammar and other peculiarities of language, I highly recommend McWhorter’s Word on the Street: Debunking the Myth of "Pure" Standard English and Language Myths, edited by Laurie Bauer and Peter Trudgill.

49 “This was our paradox: no course of action could be determined by a rule, because

every course of action can be made out to accord with the rule. The answer was: if everything can be made out to accord with the rule, then it can also be made out to conflict with it. And so there would be neither accord nor conflict.” Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. 2001. §201.

50 “To acquire language, a child must devise a hypothesis compatible with presented

data – he must select from the store of potential grammars a specific one that is appropriate to the data available to him. It is logically possible that the data might be sufficiently rich and the class of potential grammars sufficiently limited so that no more that a single permitted grammar will be compatible with the available data at the moment of successful language acquisition, in our idealized ‘instantaneous’ model. In this case, no evaluation procedure will be necessary as a part of linguistic theory – that is, as an innate property of an organism or a device capable of language acquisition.” Chomsky, Noam. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 1965. Pages 36-37.

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51 “Thinking of language as an instinct inverts the popular wisdom, especially as it has

been passed down in the canon of the humanities and social sciences. Language is no more a cultural invention than is upright posture. It is not a manifestation of a general capacity to use symbols: a three-year-old… is a grammatical genius, but is quite incompetent at the visual arts, religious iconography, traffic signs, and the other staples of the semiotics curriculum.” Pinker, Steven. The Language Instinct. New York, NY: Harper Perennial Modern Classics. 2007. Page 5.

bax � y

52 Everett, Daniel. “Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã,”

Current Anthropology, Volume 46, Number 4, August-October 2005. PNG Language Resources. Summer Institute of Linguistics. <http://www.pnglanguages.org/americas/brasil/PUBLCNS/ANTHRO/PHGrCult.pdf>.

53 Quine, Willard Van Orman. “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” From a Logical Point of

View. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1980.

54 “It can be seen that there is a misunderstanding here from the mere fact that in the

course of our argument we give one interpretation after another; as if each one contented us at least for a moment, until we thought of yet another standing behind it. What this shews [sic] is that there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which is exhibited in what we call ‘obeying the rule’ and ‘going against it’ in actual cases.” Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. 2001. §201.

55 “In my view, the real ‘private language argument’ is to be found in the sections

preceding §243. Indeed, in §202 the conclusion is already stated explicitly: ‘Hence it is not possible to obey a rule ‘privately’: otherwise thinking one was obeying a rule would be the same thing as obeying it.’ I do not think that Wittgenstein here thought of himself as anticipating an argument he was to give in greater detail later. On the contrary, the crucial considerations are all contained in the discussion leading up to the conclusion stated in §202.” Kripke, Saul. Wittgenstein: On Rules and Private Language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1982. Page 3.

56 Kripke, Saul. Wittgenstein: On Rules and Private Language. Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press. 1982. Pages 56-57. 57 Suter, Ronald. Interpreting Wittgenstein: A Cloud of Philosophy, A Drop of

Grammar. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. 1989. Suter explains the criteriologist position at length in order to show in just what ways Wittgenstein was not a behaviorist.

58 Martin, Robert M. The Meaning of Language. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

1987. Page 29.

60 Actually, this part of the story confuses me. Some versions have the little pigs

being eaten one-by-one and other versions have the pigs rushing off to the next pig’s house. In consideration for my younger readers, I will bypass the pornographic violence and use the latter version of the story.

61 Twain, Mark. “My First Lie, And How I Got Out Of It.” The Complete Works of

Mark Twain. 1900. <http://www.mtwain.com/My_First_Lie,_And_How_I_Got_Out_Of_It/0.html>.

62 And if you do, there is no way to equate what you find to what I find. There is no

public exchange, no language game. See Ludwig Wittgenstein’s private language argument as it regards beetles in boxes in §293 of Philosophical Investigations.

Publishing. 2001. Page 190.

64 Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. New York, NY: Vintage Books. 1974.

65 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, and Kenny Anthony ed. “Lecture on Ethics,” The

Wittgenstein Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. 1994.

66 “For years, political people and lawyers - who, by the way, are the worst

communicators - used the phrase ‘estate tax.’ And for years they couldn't eliminate it. The public wouldn't support it because the word "estate" sounds wealthy. Someone like me comes around and realizes that it's not an estate tax, it's a death tax, because you're taxed at death. And suddenly something that isn't viable achieves the support of 75 percent of the American people. It's the same tax, but nobody really knows what an estate is. But they certainly know what it means to be taxed when you die. I argue that is a clarification; that's not an obfuscation.” Luntz, Frank. "Interview with Frank Luntz." Frontline: The Persuaders 15 Dec 2003.

<http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/persuaders/interviews/luntz.html>.

Wittgenstein Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. 1994. Page 291.

Wittgenstein Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. 1994. Page 294.

69 Camus, Albert. “Create Dangerously,” Resistance, Rebellion, and Death. New

York, NY: Vintage International. 1988. Page 253.

110 70

70 A philosophical tool I developed in my first book, The Perpetual Wound (2006), for

extrapolating a deeper sense of emotion from a text.

71 Andersen, Hans Christian. “The Emperor's New Clothes.” Wikisource. 1872.

Wikipedia. <http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Emperor's_New_Clothes>.

72 116

72 Smith-Luedke, Jeff. “Will to Pride.” 2007.

73 Camus, Albert. Notebooks 1935-1942. New York, NY: The Modern Library.

1965. Page 10.

74 Twain, Mark. Letters From the Earth. New York, NY: Perennial Classics. 2004.

Bibliography

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