يُروى أنَّ العربَ إذا عدّت للسحابِ مئة بَرقة (ويُقال سبعين، ويُقال أربعين) لَمْ تَشُكّ أنّها ماطرة، فتنتَجِعُها وتَذهَبُ إلى مكانِها بحثًا عن الماء.
One morning when Tommy arrived at Rosro, he heard Wittgenstein’s voice and, on entering the cottage, was surprised to find ‘the Professor’ alone. ‘I thought you had company’, he said. ‘I did’, Wittgenstein answered. ‘I was talking to a very dear friend of mine – myself.’ The remark is echoed in one of his notebooks of the period:
"Nearly all my writings are private conversations with myself. Things that I say to myself tête-à-tête."
- The Duty Of Genius (a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein)
"Nearly all my writings are private conversations with myself. Things that I say to myself tête-à-tête."
- The Duty Of Genius (a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein)
0/0
On Humor
Humour is not a mood but a way of looking at the world
- Culture and Value, by Ludwig Wittgenstein
- Culture and Value, by Ludwig Wittgenstein
Seeing aspects, understanding music, poetry, painting and humour, are reactions that belong to, and can only survive within, a culture, a form of life:
"What is it like for people not to have the same sense of humour? They do not react properly to each other. It’s as though there were a custom amongst certain people for one person to throw another a ball which he is supposed to catch and throw back; but some people, instead of throwing it back, put it in their pocket.¹"
¹ Culture And Value, by Ludwig Wittgenstein.
"What is it like for people not to have the same sense of humour? They do not react properly to each other. It’s as though there were a custom amongst certain people for one person to throw another a ball which he is supposed to catch and throw back; but some people, instead of throwing it back, put it in their pocket.¹"
¹ Culture And Value, by Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Or what is it like for someone to have no idea how to fathom another's taste?
I was talking about this a few days ago with a friend of mine:
If someone does not understand your sense of humor, it means they come from a different "culture" than yours, and their mental landscape is entirely different from yours. This also means that there are no common grounds on which you can communicate deeply.
This is simply because humor is a way of seeing & interpreting certain connections and patterns in the things around you, and then finding these patterns to be funny (you see an old man with big moustache on the street and it suddenly reminds you of all Stalin & Nietzsche jokes out there). If the other person sees the pattern but does not find it funny, that's regrettable. But if they don't even find the damn pattern, then that's straight-out depressing.
By the way, in this sense, every joke is an inside joke because every joke requires you to be inside a certain "culture" to understand the joke.
If someone does not understand your sense of humor, it means they come from a different "culture" than yours, and their mental landscape is entirely different from yours. This also means that there are no common grounds on which you can communicate deeply.
This is simply because humor is a way of seeing & interpreting certain connections and patterns in the things around you, and then finding these patterns to be funny (you see an old man with big moustache on the street and it suddenly reminds you of all Stalin & Nietzsche jokes out there). If the other person sees the pattern but does not find it funny, that's regrettable. But if they don't even find the damn pattern, then that's straight-out depressing.
By the way, in this sense, every joke is an inside joke because every joke requires you to be inside a certain "culture" to understand the joke.
المهم...
You should prefer to be friends with someone because you like the same memes more than because you like the same books, or songs, or whatever
You should prefer to be friends with someone because you like the same memes more than because you like the same books, or songs, or whatever
the greatness of what someone writes depends on everything else he writes & does.
Architecture glorifies something (because it endures). It glorifies its purpose.
Architecture immortalizes & glorifies something. Hence there can be no architecture where there is nothing (to immortalize &) glorify.
Architecture immortalizes & glorifies something. Hence there can be no architecture where there is nothing (to immortalize &) glorify.
You should let it into your heart. Nor should you be afraid of madness. It comes to you perhaps as a friend and not as an enemy, and the only thing that is bad is your resistance. Let grief into your heart. Don’t lock the door on it. Standing outside the door, in the mind, it is frightening, but in the heart it is not.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein's notebook
- Ludwig Wittgenstein's notebook
Once, when Wittgenstein and Drury were walking together in the west of Ireland, they came across a five-year-old girl sitting outside a cottage. ‘Drury, just look at the expression on that child’s face’, Wittgenstein implored, adding: ‘You don’t take enough notice of people’s faces; it is a fault you ought to try to correct.’ It is a piece of advice that is implicitly embodied in his philosophy of psychology: ‘An inner process stands in need of outward criteria.’ But those outward criteria stand in need of careful attention.
What is ‘internal’ is not hidden from us. To observe someone’s outward behaviour – if we understand them – is to observe their state of mind. The understanding required can be more or less refined. At a basic level: ‘If I see someone writhing in pain with evident cause I do not think: all the same, his feelings are hidden from me.’ But at a deeper level some people, and even whole cultures, will always be an enigma to us.
This is because the commonality of experience required to interpret the ‘imponderable evidence’, the ‘subtleties of glance, gesture and tone’, will be missing. This idea is summed up in one of Wittgenstein’s most striking aphorisms: ‘If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.’
- The Duty Of Genius (a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein)
What is ‘internal’ is not hidden from us. To observe someone’s outward behaviour – if we understand them – is to observe their state of mind. The understanding required can be more or less refined. At a basic level: ‘If I see someone writhing in pain with evident cause I do not think: all the same, his feelings are hidden from me.’ But at a deeper level some people, and even whole cultures, will always be an enigma to us.
This is because the commonality of experience required to interpret the ‘imponderable evidence’, the ‘subtleties of glance, gesture and tone’, will be missing. This idea is summed up in one of Wittgenstein’s most striking aphorisms: ‘If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.’
- The Duty Of Genius (a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein)
One evening, Bouwsma took Wittgenstein in his car up to the top of the hill overlooking the town. The moon was up. ‘If I had planned it’, said Wittgenstein, ‘I should never have made the sun at all’:
See! How beautiful! The sun is too bright and too hot … And if there were only the moon there would be no reading and writing.
See! How beautiful! The sun is too bright and too hot … And if there were only the moon there would be no reading and writing.