ray monk ludwig wittgenstein the duty of genius

Sorry, went just a touch over the top above it's my nature when seriously engaged in a thing I can go too far. contaminates the process from the beginning, doesn't it? It inserts the end of the experiment in the procedure.' A great book from a fine mind. If one were a neurally integrated octopus, one's box would do the pondering perhaps, from the murky depths within! Using the mind to think about the mind. There I go thinking inside and outside 'the box' all at once again. I wouldn't otherwise have known that, for example, Wittgenstein spent many afternoons sitting in the very front row of the cinema watching westerns and sometimes eating fish and chips. I mean, it is human life that prints itself everywhere in it and that’s what we read when we’re really reading.” On this view, the literary theoreticians who viewed language as a structure that preceded, and even superseded, the individual subject, were getting it precisely backwards.Ī roundabout way of saying that no matter how elevated the subject of a biography, I always start with the index to find out who they were sleeping with and what they liked doing on their days off.

I follow the line taken by – among many others – the American poet Robert Duncan, who said, “I in no way believe that there is such a thing as ‘just language’, any more than there is ‘just footprints’.

This kind of reductive approach has had a good innings, but I have never subscribed to it.

Origin of Species is well worth the read, but no one can argue it isn’t more interesting in context, from Malthus and Lyell to Wallace to Spencer, as well as a consideration of the very good challenges to Darwin’s theory of natural selection thrown up by both exiled Russian biologists and amateur women naturalists in the United States.Īnd biographies remind us that works of ideas and works of art are made by actual individual human beings, rather than being an agglomeration of “texts”, with the human agency of their existence being disregarded as at best an irrelevance. Why read books about great thinkers? Why not try and read what these 'great thinkers' have written? Or maybe read both.?īecause a lot of times the context is just as interesting and sometimes more interesting than just the ideas standing alone.

Ray monk ludwig wittgenstein the duty of genius