How Wittgenstein Watched Movies | Hacker News Reader

How Wittgenstein Watched Movies

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62 pointskeiferski44 comments

I always felt like Wittgenstein deeply hated philosophy and all his work was aimed at showing its meaninglessness. That is why I felt that despite the theoretical opposition between his early and late work they are continuous. The proofs has changed but the claim remained the same. But his hatred was sourced in the fact that he couldn't stop himself from engaging into it and found this desire deeply stupid and despicable so again and again he had to show himself that this is futile but as it is with philosophy every time you think you made a point a new angle revels itself and you need to adjust the argument ad nausea. So in this sense I find his preference for stupid movies understandable. The ability to just stop thinking about what you consider irresolvable, meaningless problems is a blessing and dumb pop fiction is a safe space with no traps that would cause you to think anew some problems. Now, none of what I said is backed by any research really. I haven't read his biography and I might be projecting my own experience, but I feel like there are some experiences a prolonged engagement in philosophy causes and they are quite difficult to explain to people who have not went through them. Like, you can pick up St. Augustine or Kierkegaard and I feel that they want to scream their lungs out the exact same insight. Kierkegaard had similar relation to the theatre as far as I remember. Anyway, there is no clear point to my comment. I guess I am interested what others are thinking.

Nit: replace went with gone.

If we have this branch, also 'ad nauseam'. But let's face it, we do not have all the time in the world to polish what we are composing here, so there will be errors.

This one is funny since I deliberately checked how to write it correctly and I found the form 'ad nauseam' annnnd somehow left it in the incorrect form. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

huh, I thought this was a correct use. Thanks!

> I always felt like Wittgenstein deeply hated philosophy and all his work was aimed at showing its meaninglessness

Well, Wittgenstein was an Engineer - he started (then) leaning towards Aeronautics, which brought him to Mathematics, which brought him to Foundational Formal Logic, which brought him to Bertrand Russell (after Gottlob Frege), which brought him to Philosophy.

It is kind of normal for foundationalists and engineers to be "discriminating" towards "solidity".

But is effort was positive towards obtaining "discriminating logical engines".

The deeper your questions go, the less likely you will find answers for them. If you insist to find an answer, can't continue living without finding it, you're going to have a quite miserable life.

The mind is an incredible tool, but if you point it against yourself it can give you the worst suffering possible.

I find Wittgenstein's work in PI to be actually pretty therapeutic. He's not really insistent on finding the solution to a philosophical problem. His method is more about dissolving seemingly intractable philosophical problems by patient analysis of the assumptions hidden in our use of language. Seen in that way, his philosophical work is less focused on capital T truth, and more on clarification. We know for a fact though that he did struggle with coming up with his method, that it caused him something like mental anguish for his perfectionist mindset; but I don't think that reveals something inherent about the nature of philosophy. Instead, I think that reveals how terribly knotted our ways of thinking can get when we engage in language games that are seemingly intractable for 1000s of years.

His biography is actually incredible. I would recommend it; he lived through incredible disaster, tragedy, and triumph. He was an odd man to say the least, but he was also a brilliant philosopher, arguably the 20th century's most important.

Wittgenstein's anti-intellectualism was quite well-known and he voiced his displeasure towards intellectualism during his time.

Really, this is the root of a lot of his philosophy. It was to prove intellectuals wrong. For some of us, he was right. Reading any philosophy book, we joke that it takes a philosopher 20-some odd pages to get to the punchline. Why? No idea. Philosophers love to hear themselves talk and love to meander.

> ”You think philosophy is difficult enough but I can tell you it is nothing to the difficulty of being a good architect. When I was building the house for my sister in Vienna I was so completely exhausted at the end of the day that all I could do was go to a ‘flick’ every night.”

Go see the house if you have the opportunity and are interested in architecture. Very rarely have I seen something that feels so subtly but without doubt wrong in proportions. In the end his sister could not live there and the house was sold - it's now some exhibition centre I think.

As someone reasonably familiar with Wittgenstein's work, I was surprised by how much of his time was spent going to the movies. And not to see masterpieces, but mostly to see formulaic American Westerns. He was plagued by philosophical thoughts constantly and so a movie "without any artistic or intellectual pretensions" served as a kind of mind refresher for him.

Interestinigly he had a similar taste in books and consumed pulp crime fiction like they had an expiration date. You'd think this would indicate he was a lighthearted person outside of his work, but most accounts seem to have him down as an extremely intense personality. I think Wittgenstein is genuinely impossible to pin down both in terms of his work, and his life.

There is a line in Wittgenstein’s Vienna (by Janik and Toulmin) that links W’s love of westerns up with his philosophical work (esp the Tractatus), roughly “W liked westerns because they showed ethical principles vs trying to demonstrate them with philosophical arguments.” I’m not an expert but I think the book is a great intellectual biography not just of W but of the time and place in general.

Interesting, I will check out that biography for sure.

I wouldn't have thought that either the Tractatus or westerns have much to do with ethics but philosophy can make some strange connections and that book does sound interesting.

Love that analysis. Reminds me of some experiences on drugs where, if you empty your mind tabula rasa, movies look like compressed guides to emotions and relating in society. Hard to see normally because of how much experience and context we bring in.

There are also different lenses you can watch through.

The typical one is immersion - keeping track of the characters, feeling the tension as it ratchets up and down.

The two others I like are background - keeping track of the scenery as if it's a character, reading lighting and detail as its moods.

And naive sequential - treating each shot as if its a direct reply to the previous one.

There are some quotes in Malcolm's book about Wittgenstein's habit of reading detective stories, too. Related to the question raised in the article whether going to the movies was just leisure or also philosophial. Taken with a grain of salt I especially like this one:

"Your mags are wonderful. How people can read Mind if they could read Street & Smith beats me. If philosophy has anything to do with wisdom, there's certainly not a grain of that in Mind, & quite often a grain in the detective stories."

(p. 32 in the Clarendon Press, 2001 edition)

Yep, I remember reading an anecdote describing Wittgenstein's room as being entirely bare of books, except for some pulpy detective fiction novels.

The character of Agent Cooper in Twin Peaks is a nice personification of the “detective” aspect of the truth / knowledge seeking mechanism in our minds IMO.

McLuhan famously has this notion of cold and hot media. In the movie theater light shines at a screen and you see its reflection; on TV, and more so with phones, the light beams directly into your eyes. It makes a difference.

Even though his cold and hot is a bit strange, I am not sure it is related how light reflect is the key here. The key might be the way it is produced (but it blurs now as we saw movies made for tv, social media … and watch on tv), but the key is you go to a cinema and let yourselves immerse into it.

Language like evilness is built in with us. You cannot use language to escape language, at least no promise. Clarity is limited by language itself.

Similarly for evil, whilst most religion including non-religious thought like Buddhism (except Tien tai which Buddha has evil nature forever) are trying to single out evil, set a boundary and eliminate it and put all those have it into hell and let us ignore it.

It is the same issues. You cannot escape from it. You are it it at least part of you are it. Live with it.

Is the image on top of the article real? I've never seen it before.

Seems like the work of some AI tool to me.

The caption now says 'Image made with Midjourney'.

I wouldn't necessarily have thought it was AI-generated from the style although the fact he is apparently the only person in the auditorium hints that it isn't an actual photo of Wittgenstein at the movies. Unless he went to very unpopular films, that is.

I just created it in Midjourney.

If you ask me you should add some sort of caption.

Done

This made me think that we, as a society, ought to have some sort of convention to mark AI-generated images as such, like a small watermarked symbol in a corner.

Doesn't really seem necessary unless one is claiming that the image is real. For the image in this post, it seemed obviously fake to me, so I didn't feel the need to label it as AI-generated.

In a factual article, the default assumption is that the pictures are real. You should tag generated images.

It's also useful to give sources for pictures you didn't generate yourself.

Either because they are from a camera or from someone else.

(Just like it's useful to give sources for almost any other piece of media or factual claim or even exercise you are using.)

Whether it's obvious or not seems to depend on a lot of factors. For instance I've seen a lot of Wittgenstein so that made me think it's made up. Someone else might think it's real.

Anyway I think you did a great job with Midjourney. Even the coarse clothes correspond to clothes Wittgenstein wore. Would you like to share your prompt?

Thanks, sure the prompt was:

*Wittgenstein in the front row of a movie theatre, 8k, hyper realistic --q 2 --v 5 --s 750*

I had to do a few re-runs as it kept putting him in a suit and tie. In reality he rarely wore one.

This will solve literally nothing.

There's some kind of parallel here to the need for including </sarcasm> in internet comments. The lack of shared context makes it harder to assume something that "obviously" everyone knows.

Didn’t Wittgenstein beat children? What an inspirational thought leader…

This should absolutely not be downvoted. Wittgenstein's perjury in the court of law when in trial for beating Haidbauer touched all parts of his life, and it could be argued that this is why he hated the Tractatus, a body of work he once said was the last thing to say about all of philosophy. This is the kind of complex man he was, though. People read Tractatus and find problems with it. Well, yes, even Wittgenstein saw that it was misguided, which is why he wrote Philosophical Investigations. But lying in a court of law and getting away with it, and feeling disgusted in himself, tracks with how he saw himself and how disenchanted he was with the world.

That's a slightly more sophisticated take, compared to "ugh this person did something Very Bad (TM), let's disregard absolutely anything else that they did", isn't it?

sounds like he was trying to meditate

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