Cormac McCarthy on Ludwig Wittgenstein

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  • čas přidán 18. 06. 2023
  • Cormac McCarthy is a massive fan of Ludwig Wittgenstein. In this clip, Cormac talks about Wittgenstein's early days, his stylistic esotericism, and how to live the life of a philosopher!
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    📕 My favorite books on Cormac McCarthy 📘
    Cormac McCarthy in Context: amzn.to/46GsEw3
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    Cormac McCarthy, Philosophy and the Physics of the Damned - amzn.to/3Ryw2Vs
    Shreds of Matter: Cormac McCarthy and the Concept of Nature - amzn.to/3ZJL9gR

Komentáře • 140

  • @marclayne9261
    @marclayne9261 Před 2 měsíci +22

    I admire Wittgenstein as he was soldier in WW1.....Austrian Army artillery officer...I was a soldier in my youth, wounded in war, & 100% disabled....this gave me the money & time to read books for the rest of my life......I have over 6,000 books......

    • @Ellis_B
      @Ellis_B Před 2 měsíci +1

      Good work soldier

  • @davidmitnick868
    @davidmitnick868 Před 6 měsíci +49

    I always felt Wittgenstein was like Buddha, renouncing his princely background and pursing a life of asceticism in service to finding truth.

    • @brennenspice6098
      @brennenspice6098 Před 5 měsíci +1

      Dude I absolutely felt this way too! He embodied the same principle! This analogy in my heas kind of cemented him for me as probably the greatest and most "pure" philosopher

    • @liammcooper
      @liammcooper Před 4 měsíci +2

      Common misconception, he abused a developmentally disabled child while he was a school teacher in Austria. Not very buddhalike.

    • @rijzone
      @rijzone Před 4 měsíci +3

      Funny because Buddhist Philosophers like Nagarjuna are being studied today under the lens of Wittgenstein.

    • @toddtrimble2555
      @toddtrimble2555 Před 3 měsíci +2

      @@liammcooper He was also pretty awful to women. And generally peremptory and high-handed in his dealings with others.

    • @kf8113
      @kf8113 Před měsícem

      ​​@@liammcooperSounds like Bodhidharma then

  • @TheGoodMD
    @TheGoodMD Před 3 měsíci +9

    “Grinding out philosophy all day” may be the funniest sentence I’ve heard today.

  • @VardaTruffle
    @VardaTruffle Před 4 měsíci +6

    “I’m a big fan of his but I don’t agree with all he says” pretty much sums up modern philosophy’s relationship to Wittgenstein and current day writers’ relationship to McCarthy

  • @liammcooper
    @liammcooper Před 4 měsíci +12

    The Joyce anecdote is funny. McCarthy mentioned the Tractatus getting published in 1921, Ulysses was published the year before. Pretty solid year for reading.

  • @spotlightmind
    @spotlightmind Před 4 měsíci +7

    I’m so glad you shared this. I didn’t know Cormac had an interest in Ludwig. I love them both. Cheers!

  • @edmondthomas282
    @edmondthomas282 Před 5 měsíci +7

    Totally get what McCarthy is on about. A lot of Wittgenstein goes over my head but what I do understand blows my mind. Also, he is just such an interesting man, renouncing his fortune and living an ascetic life. Just as Keynes said, he was like an intellectual “God”. He appeared so far ahead of everyone that, depending on your viewpoint, he was either a genius or a charlatan/idiot.

  • @kurisensei
    @kurisensei Před 10 měsíci +10

    Hes totally right about the reason we find Wittgenstein fascinating

    • @rishabhaniket1952
      @rishabhaniket1952 Před 9 měsíci +4

      Same thing can be applied to people like Che Guevara, John Lennon, Steve Jobs. Their image sells.

    • @WriteConscious
      @WriteConscious  Před 6 měsíci

      Yes!

  • @thefallingstar7660
    @thefallingstar7660 Před 4 měsíci +2

    Wittgenstein say throughout his career basically “our beliefs we had in first the place is just okay and that is all to it.” “Philosophy leave everything just it is.”- Philosophical Investigation

  • @williammaccarthey3089
    @williammaccarthey3089 Před 5 měsíci +5

    I really love your analysis of Bertrand Russel as a great person to have discourse with. He really empowered himself and Wittgenstein by his amicability. I wrote every sentence in his tractatus and it really cemented it. Made the book really fun to revisit.

  • @locochingadero
    @locochingadero Před 5 měsíci +6

    Someone mentioned Ray Monk, the brilliant biographer of Wittgenstein in "The Duty of Genius". He was also Oppenheimer's biographer and spent time in New Mexico doing that work. It sounds like CM read Monk's biography, but I dont know if they ever met?

    • @WriteConscious
      @WriteConscious  Před 4 měsíci +1

      I don't know!

    • @sdemosi
      @sdemosi Před 2 měsíci

      Good call. Monk's biography of Witgenstein is one of the best of any intellectual figure. It assembled all the facts and perspectives you need, without pointless digression. It's also strong on technical aspects of his philosophical writings

  • @Chatetris
    @Chatetris Před 5 měsíci +3

    Nice, I finally found someone with same interests and actually being quite knowledgable. Fantastic.

  • @mikewhelan9561
    @mikewhelan9561 Před 5 měsíci +4

    I don't think he gave all his money away. He gave it to his sister.

  • @shortminute
    @shortminute Před 11 dny

    Between 2017 and 2019, I illustrated Witt’s TLP.

  • @peterwhite7428
    @peterwhite7428 Před 5 měsíci +4

    I took a course on Wittgenstein in college and because it was so mathematical I didn’t understand much. I’d like to go back and take another look

    • @WriteConscious
      @WriteConscious  Před 4 měsíci +1

      Me too, want to go back to multiple courses with my current state of mind.

    • @peterwhite7428
      @peterwhite7428 Před měsícem +1

      @@ser3791 well because I am a retired Prof I think I can use symbolic logic. Thanks

  • @marclayne9261
    @marclayne9261 Před 2 měsíci

    I have 11 books on Wittgenstein.....I read most of Russell when I was a teenager.& agreed with Russell.....but now in my 60s, Wittgenstein is a true philosopher....

  • @notexactlyrocketscience
    @notexactlyrocketscience Před 8 měsíci +7

    who is the other guy, he's a great interviewer and conversationalist

  • @daniel-zh4qc
    @daniel-zh4qc Před 8 měsíci +5

    Love this video on cuubmak macartheeii.... as a philosopher I wish there was more videos on mcarthy and philosophy.....the hippopotamus thing happened, but it was a pink elephant....
    Quick note- names matter, someone might be watching your videos and this is their first introduction to all this, and I'd say, following mcarthy, you have an ethical obligation given that you are making educational content to simply Google the names or watch a video before hand..... otherwise great video karl...

    • @WriteConscious
      @WriteConscious  Před 8 měsíci

      😂 It's an addiction brotha. Ever since I saw the faces of snoots at university when I mispronounced Goethe I've committed myself to this cause

  • @markdevine4888
    @markdevine4888 Před 5 měsíci +11

    I have read five of CM's novels and listened to his interviews. I am now doing research for a literary biography of Sylvia Plath. I view Cormack as a great writer. I view him as one of many exemplars in the West of the (now at least two century old) attempt to find meaning without a God who has spoken with moral authority and who promises an afterlife. He like others (including perhaps most significantly Nietzsche) settles for tying to let art or beauty serve as the best thing left once that God is gone or mainly gone. One result of this is that what were concrete and robust concepts and ways of living in Christianity get shrunken down to pitiful unrecognizable substitutes. Faith for example. Another consequence for many is that love understood and sacrificial is greatly compromised and thus the atheist/agnostic culture produces lots of people who live for themselves and cannot be counted on by other people (they should NEVER have children). Another problem is that the rate of suicide rates explode (see the radiating waves of suicide surrounding Plath and the earlier Bloomsbury group. Among those who try to let art serve us an a final kind of meaning, too many stare into the abyss that is left without God and decide to end their lives and sometimes others, like their children, looking to save the children from the meaninglessness. Other handle it better and don't commit suicide and settle for flashes of happiness in the little things like a cup of coffee or a flower or whatever. But in the end, without God everything is permitted (FN) and its every man for himself. Pretty nasty. The masses who have little capacity or interest in art of philosophy are shorn of religion, lose family life, still long to belong, and become fodder for, as Sylvia Plath called it once she saw that her "self" was barren, some cause with a capitol "C." The greatest poet of the 20th century T.S. Eliot, converted to Christianity, acknowledged the Scriptures as the authoritative word of God. He then became capable of sustained vow-shaped relationship--in marriage. He then had real faith, became much happier, and wrote less.

    • @WriteConscious
      @WriteConscious  Před 5 měsíci +3

      Yep, there is a slot in our brain for God and if it's missing it makes things much harder! Especially if you're uneducated and don't even realize it's missing.

    • @dandee1529
      @dandee1529 Před 5 měsíci

      Great analysis. Might be said that a wise approach of the era which offsets the extremes of both is the more shamanic (or at least nature centralising) approach of Ted Hughes. He has the unflinching Nietzschean hard edge and antipathy for dogma, while maintaining a vital reverence for religiosity, mysticism, the world and existence itself. You might find Anne Skeas writings on Hughes useful for your work; not just for the Plath connection. Search for “Ted Hughes: Shaman of the tribe?” As a good intro.

  • @mattheww797
    @mattheww797 Před 10 měsíci +1

    I'm not familiar with these philosophers. Do you have any recommendations of their important or interesting works to read?

    • @maxl.6231
      @maxl.6231 Před 10 měsíci +2

      Wittgenstein wrote 'Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus' and 'Philosophical Investigations'. His 'mentor' per se, Betrand Russell, has a whole bunch of books like 'Why I am not a Christian', 'History of Western Philosophy', and so on. Russell was also involved in analytical philosophy a lot more than continental, but a lot of his non-mathematical work can be found published by Routledge classics.

    • @mattheww797
      @mattheww797 Před 10 měsíci +1

      ​@@maxl.6231 thanks.

    • @WriteConscious
      @WriteConscious  Před 6 měsíci +2

      Reading Betrand's History of Western Philosophy is a good place to start if you aren't familiar with the lineage of western philosophy.

    • @fireball43
      @fireball43 Před 5 měsíci

      @@WriteConsciousFor any future people, read Sir Anthony Kenny’s A New History of Western Philosophy.

  • @rb5519
    @rb5519 Před 3 měsíci

    11:18
    You attained the "Tao of Ian" there. 😅

  • @eminem3000ish
    @eminem3000ish Před 4 měsíci

    i love that you love it

  • @gleeeshee
    @gleeeshee Před 11 měsíci +24

    its a little odd that people always concentrate on his tractatus which he later said was wrong and the investigations set out to show the errors of philosophy including the tractatus - which is his real legacy to the world - trouble is - it destroys idealism and materialism and metaphysics which is exactly the space that philosophy lives so they (philosophers) ignored it - philosophy (metaphysics) still lives on because of this - wittgenstein was doing metaphilosophy and no-one has come close to his critique - and philosophers rarely practice this.

    • @WriteConscious
      @WriteConscious  Před 11 měsíci +2

      Great insight! 100% agree, if idealism, materialism, and metaphysics is rejected we enter in a whole other space that requires you to engage with the new metaphilosophy. However, it isn't sexy, fun, and won't get you a tenured position lol.

    • @gleeeshee
      @gleeeshee Před 11 měsíci +2

      @@WriteConscious agreed = they gotta make a living i guess 😁

    • @szefszefow7562
      @szefszefow7562 Před 11 měsíci +2

      Well, its not like his arguments are undoubtably True when it comes to philosophical investigations, however it is the case that philosophers usually ignore the most important and unavoidable part of this book - which is the constatation that not only metaphysics but all of philosophy (yes even metaphilosophy) is nonsense. And by all I mean all, even those that claim to be beyond metaphysics. Instead of trying to discuss or deny wittgensteins position, they ignore him, or incorporate some of the views they think he held. Nonetheless i think that Tractatus is much more imortant historically, as well as it is extremely inspiring, and the best testiment to this claim is the rise of analytic philosophy. It is also wrong to say that he pronounced everything he said in the Tractatus as wrong - some views he held for all his life, or at least he didnt deny them

    • @jonbonhoagie5202
      @jonbonhoagie5202 Před 9 měsíci +1

      His later day works are far superior, blue book and after

    • @jackquinn9535
      @jackquinn9535 Před 6 měsíci +1

      @@WriteConscious Wrong. It is sexier and funner, it is called by many names and it might get you a life lol. Sometimes even Nobel.

  • @yggdrasil2
    @yggdrasil2 Před 4 dny

    Wittgenstein's life would be so funny if it was fictional. As it stands it's kinda bewildering and tragic lol

  • @bradslowgrove1128
    @bradslowgrove1128 Před 10 měsíci +5

    With Wittgenstein he made it originally as a philosopher because of Russell's patronage at Cambridge so he criticises the people around Russell without directly taking on Russell himself although he does not really agree with anything Russell says. As to the hippopotamus story read Paul Johnson it might be in the 'Intellectuals'' on Russell but may also be in another similar themed book. Johnson does not like Russell nor do I. Wittgenstein demonstrated that you should never redefine an unambiguous word otherwise you move from clarity to obscurity. Words have adjacency and are next to one another not above or below each other. To establish that there was no hippopotamus in the room Wittgenstein demanded that he and Russell look under every chair infuriating Russell. This established 0 probability where Russell would say it could never be certain until you defined first what a ''hippopotamus'' was.
    Wittgenstein dismissed set theory in mathematics but would never say why so it survives to this day. I suspect because he thought Russell's antimony '' R is the set of all sets that do not contain themselves.. Does R contain itself'' that has no true or false answer was just bad usage and axiomatic set theory is founded on bad usage and bad linguistics. People just do not talk like that. The same as '' this sentence' is false'' is both true and false but is really just devoid of context. That is why we have paragraphs.
    It is through the Philosophical Investigations not published until 1953 posthumously when he is free from Cambridge and Russell that he is at his best. The PI is shorn of Russell's logical atomism that he feels compelled to include in the Trachtus to get his Ph.D through Russell because the Trachtus fell short of the Cambridge minimum word limit. It is in the PI that he gives the philosophical paradigm and logical basis of context, meaning and usage that governs grammar to this day. He puts into perspective how language functions and develops taking it out of the subconscious and bare intuition of primordial responses that we do automatically and makes linguistic development intelligible to the conscious mind. He gave up his inheritance to his sisters not to charity so he always had an underlying safety net and my educated guess was that he believed correctly that large unearned inherited wealth can make you stupid because you lead an unchallenged life.

    • @WriteConscious
      @WriteConscious  Před 6 měsíci +1

      Great thoughts and summary!

    • @ser3791
      @ser3791 Před měsícem

      How come a guy like Russell can't be liked? Can you tell us some reasons?

  • @90000cg
    @90000cg Před 2 dny

    I think Frege is pronounced Fray Gah. At least that is how my professors pronounced it.

  • @sleepygrumpy
    @sleepygrumpy Před 2 měsíci +1

    I am not convinced McCarthy really understood the first or second iteration of Wittgenstein -- skipping around his work for things you agree with is a categorical mistake not a mistake of judgment or taste

  • @urabenowar2167
    @urabenowar2167 Před 9 měsíci +2

    His distinction between Heidegger being a party member and Ludwig not, is a grave solipsism.
    Wittgenstein's contribution to the SS in approximately 200 lbs of gold and five million US dollars is quite considerable for the 1930s.

    • @WriteConscious
      @WriteConscious  Před 9 měsíci

      Wait, do you have any sources that Wittgenstein made that contribution? Couldn't find anything?

    • @jackquinn9535
      @jackquinn9535 Před 6 měsíci +3

      @@WriteConscious Doesn't Ray Monk write something about it in his biography The Duty of a Genius... But the motivation for the 'transactions' was to save his family/siblings (of Jewish descent) from the grim grip of Nuremberg Laws. Heidegger's motivation to join the Nazi party was of course a completely different beast; thoroughly ideological if also opportunistic.

    • @locochingadero
      @locochingadero Před 5 měsíci

      Wittgenstein had no money then. His family had to surrender it's fortune because they had Jewish heritage, despite having lived as Christians for some generations. They bought a re-categorization to 'mixed blood' which saved them from the concentration camps. This type of blackmail is not usually characterized as a 'donation'.

    • @Lalala-xb1mk
      @Lalala-xb1mk Před 5 měsíci

      It wouldn't be surprising if the W family had to pay to keep the SS at bay. Also, didn't LW give most of his inheritance to his sister?

    • @jackquinn9535
      @jackquinn9535 Před 5 měsíci

      @@Lalala-xb1mk Yup. And didn't he give ALL his inheritance to his sisters?!

  • @jamorains
    @jamorains Před měsícem

    i read that the ancient Greek philosopher Crates gave away his fortune and became homeless....perhaps Wittgenstein was inspired by people like Diogenes and Crates.

  • @dieterkief8846
    @dieterkief8846 Před 4 měsíci +1

    see Thomas Rentsch's book: Heidegger and Wittgenstein - see also Thomas Rentsch: God!

  • @roberthockett270
    @roberthockett270 Před 4 měsíci +2

    Thanks for this. No biggie, but, FYI: (1) What led LW to Frege, then Russell, was NOT that 'he didn't know enough math.' Rather, in his aeronautical research he began to wonder why and how mathematics, which wasn't empirical, was so useful in understanding the empirical world. That was a philosophical query, which led him to the leading thinkers of the time where the 'foundations' of mathematics were concerned - Frege and Russell. He read their then-published works, then wrote to Frege requesting that they meet. Frege invited him to visit, then sent him on to Russell because Russell was still young and active while he, Frege, was nearing retirement. (2) LW wouldn't have been UNAWARE of quantum theory. Rather, in the early '20s he would simply have rejected it as nonsense, partly in owing to his commitment at that time to classical logic with its own commitment to bivalence and 'the law of excluded middle.' His later distancing of himself from formal logic might well have been partly rooted in precisely that logic's difficulties in handling more complex modes of understanding and meaning. (For an adaptation of classical logic suitab;e to handle quantum theory, see Hillary Putnam's work of the 1960s.) (3) Pronunciation-wise, you want to say 'FRAY-guh' in Gottlob Frege's case, and 'BER-trand' in Betrand Russell's case.

  • @Oldman808
    @Oldman808 Před rokem +3

    Curious how few women look like McCarthy’s books.

  • @evolute99
    @evolute99 Před 3 měsíci +1

    What is this channel and why am I just now seeing this?

    • @WriteConscious
      @WriteConscious  Před 3 měsíci

      the deepest BookTube channel around! About to go deep on 20 more authors during this year alone also

  • @seth956
    @seth956 Před 7 měsíci +2

    If you have no drive to find the truth then you wont. One cannot rely on the work of others to understand. Witt found something, but upon finding it simultaneously realized why it was hidden.Those who find the truth were prepared to find it. Those who stumble upon the truth will find nothing to talk about.

  • @TheGoodMD
    @TheGoodMD Před 3 měsíci

    8:10
    All us nerds just exploded in your presence.

  • @rolandnelson6722
    @rolandnelson6722 Před 4 měsíci

    If he thought there was a non zero chance of their being a rhinoceros in the room and there wasn’t one right there; he was never going to make it as a mathematician.

  • @joseskinner1912
    @joseskinner1912 Před 3 měsíci

    I love the transcription Free Gay for Frege. In fact, it was Wittgenstein who was gay!

  • @A_Lazy_Mutt
    @A_Lazy_Mutt Před 2 měsíci

    Wittgenstein and the Tractatus are truly fascinating even though like McCarthy I don't necessarily agree with everything he said. There are some of the things in that thesis that still give me pause.
    McCarthy is absolutely wrong about Heidegger though when he says the latter wasn't concerned with how one should live. Just look at the concept of Dasein. How is that not concerned with life and livelihood? How one should, or the best way of dealing with one's life (or "being") was a constant in Heidegger's body of work.

  • @szefszefow7562
    @szefszefow7562 Před 11 měsíci +6

    I never read anything by Cormac, but I dond think he understood much of Ludwigs work. And he certainly didn't understand anything that was written about Wittgenstein if he says that people are interested only in his character. But his philosophy was brilliant. Even in the Trctatus one can find an outstanding amount of philosophical insight. Of course his personality and ethics are important in uderstanding him, but he was primarily a philosopher of language

    • @WriteConscious
      @WriteConscious  Před 11 měsíci +11

      Lol, I think he understood his work just fine. Cormac wouldn't have parts of Wittgenstein memorized, talk about his works with the smartest people in the world, and read studied his work without understanding it.

    • @szefszefow7562
      @szefszefow7562 Před 11 měsíci +1

      @@WriteConscious I am not saying, that Cormac was in any way dumb, or undereducated, or didnt read Wittgensteins work carefully enough. It is rather a problem of Wittgensteins vague and short writing style. To say that someone doesnt understand Wittgenstein is not in any way underestimating their intelligence. There have been so many, so different interpretations of Wittgenstein, that by mere probability one is entitled to say that most of them are completely wrong. Many of the have so little in common, so we can say that at least some people (and there was a lot of wittgenstein scholars) didnt understand a word correctly. However, even interpretations which seem incorrect to me, also seem coherent with Wittgensteins work. In my opinion there is simply no way to prove which interpretation is true, because works of Wittgenstein available to us are too ambigous. Of course there are better and worse interpretations, but this was, is, and i guess will be a matter of discussion.

  • @WTHFX
    @WTHFX Před 5 měsíci +2

    Frege = "Fray-guh"

  • @addammadd
    @addammadd Před 5 měsíci +1

    4:32 I appreciate this insight because I’m at proposition 3 or so and it’s been apparent since proposition 2 that his argument fails in light of quantum theory… but considering his style as worth reading in its own right gives me a good reason to continue this text.
    What a conversation, thank you so much for this.

    • @WriteConscious
      @WriteConscious  Před 4 měsíci

      Thank you!

    • @thejimmymeister
      @thejimmymeister Před 3 měsíci

      Can you elaborate on why Wittgenstein's argument fails in light of quantum theory?

  • @AJPzaworld
    @AJPzaworld Před rokem +8

    Ludwig "I will beat you with a fire stoker and bang your wife, husband, and entire adult family tree" Wittgenstein. And yeah, he really did live the life of a philosopher. I've always tend to grow far more fond of the character of the philosopher rather than most of what they have to say in most of their stuff at times, unless they manage to be a mix of both horrid, preposterous, and trite in terms of all regards. Wittgenstein is always a fascinating character, especially with how he operates and presents himself often, and how he models so much of his philosophy, even if I don't agree with much of he has to say.
    Camus is hotter, tho.

    • @WriteConscious
      @WriteConscious  Před rokem +4

      Haha, that's great. I also care more about the stories of philosophers than slogging through their works.

    • @AJPzaworld
      @AJPzaworld Před rokem +2

      @@WriteConscious Doesn't help most of them can't write for the life of them, which is kind a necessity when it comes to, what is basically, essays on life itself. Whitehead, Hegel, Jorjani (literally the worst grammar from a supposed Ubermensch), and even Wittgenstein at times are quite atrocious at communicating their ideas because their prose is so utterly bogged down and distilled.

    • @DEBO5
      @DEBO5 Před 5 měsíci

      @@AJPzaworld Wittgenstein picture theory of language is not supposed to be easy to read it’s like programming in Assembly language

  • @derekruairc334
    @derekruairc334 Před 11 měsíci +4

    I began to enjoy reading Wittgenstein when my autistic partner engaged in reading him. Her imaginative interpretation opened up imaginatively Wittgenstein's work. Wittgenstein, i aver, was autistic.

    • @davidscher4303
      @davidscher4303 Před 11 měsíci +2

      Keep in mind the words of the brilliant psychiatrist Martin Wilner, “we are all on the spectrum”

    • @derekruairc334
      @derekruairc334 Před 11 měsíci +3

      @@davidscher4303 No, that is wrong. See "Forms of Life" by Chapman. Martin Wilner is cheapening the autistic experience.

    • @WriteConscious
      @WriteConscious  Před 11 měsíci +1

      onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/meta.12366

  • @murkartik
    @murkartik Před 4 měsíci +1

    COR-mac, not Cor-MACK. It's a troche. Great video .

  • @Omulosi
    @Omulosi Před 5 měsíci

    If “Nazi” is a political creed founded on biology of race Heidegger, whose Dasein is categorically non-biological, is logically anti-Nazi and was held in suspicion by them for that reason. His “antisemitism” is hugely overstated given that era. If there’s an abiding theme in his writings it’s in the other direction, the “destruktion” of the metaphysical schema underpinning any scientism, as furthered and surpassed by his progeny Derrida.

    • @WriteConscious
      @WriteConscious  Před 4 měsíci

      I would tend to agree, but his actions speak louder than his philosophy.

    • @Omulosi
      @Omulosi Před 4 měsíci

      @@WriteConscious Yes but really it’s the ‘actions’ I’m referring to: the philosophical writings of themselves couldn’t be ‘overstated’. One much published act is the ‘notorious’ refusal to endorse a colleague for a post on account of his ethnic heritage. But excluding people from employment on such grounds is official policy in Britain and US today. Indeed it offends fashionable opinion to dare even question the racial orthodoxy. Not only are there official quotas based purely on race but they have legal force.
      Today we’re bound to regard similar restrictions in 1930s Germany in light of future atrocities. If Britons were to be victims of ethnic violence, perhaps after a Muslim coup, as envisaged in the Michel Houllebecq novel Submission, future generations could similarly regard anti-British employment practices as complicit in events which retrospectively they seem to foreshadow, just as we now view 1930s Germany anti-Jewish strictures. Otherwise those complying with racial quotas today imagine themselves as simply following the rules, obeying orders.

  • @AttarProductions
    @AttarProductions Před 4 měsíci +1

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  • @jimmaguire3079
    @jimmaguire3079 Před 5 měsíci

    It's interesting to hear McCarthy talk about ethics and morality when his books seem to be devoid of both. To me his novels, especially the earlier ones, take place in an entirely Godless and meaningless universe. It did seem to change a bit with The Passenger and Stella Maris, not sure why but maybe it's just getting old. For whatever reason we don't seem to get more fearless as we age, which is strange because surely we have less to lose. Not sure the older McCarthy could have written a book like Blood Meridian, it really does stare into the abyss.

    • @WriteConscious
      @WriteConscious  Před 5 měsíci +1

      There is a deep sense of ethics in The Orchard Keeper, Suttree, and the Border Trilogy. The whole Border Trilogy is based on boys who take massive moral stances.

    • @horseaphoenix1016
      @horseaphoenix1016 Před 4 měsíci

      Blood Meridian is a caution, just as Thus Spoke Zarasthutra was. In the absence of God, something else will fill the void, and you can be convinced to throwaway your life to almost any devotion, if the messenger is convincing and powerful enough. Judge Holden is our will to power without the constraints of religious morals or God, living only to fulfill his rise to the top of the food chain. It shows what it takes for human beings to get to our ideal of a perfect man in the absence of God, we simply get consumed by our thirst to become a dominator of all things. Holden is incredibly similar to the Übermensch if you think about it, and both were warnings against a Godless world. Nietzsche was proven correct soon after his books, on how the Industrial Revolution and the weakening of the church will lead to millions to perish in Europe, I hope Cormac won’t be proved correct in the same way.

    • @jimmaguire3079
      @jimmaguire3079 Před 4 měsíci

      @@horseaphoenix1016 Not sure I would agree with your interpretation of Nietzsche as I don’t think the Judge actually meets Nietzsche’s definition of the Uber mensch. For me he is more like a physical manifestation of a malevolent destructive force. It’s difficult to know what McCarthy’s actual beliefs about all of this are, and in a interview he gave shortly after the publication of his last two novels he did come across as a bit of a moralist, which surprised me. He does however have Alicia in Stellar Maris say that she believed there was something malignant at the core of existence so he obviously had a fascination with this line of thought. Anyway it’s all interesting stuff to think about.

  • @willieluncheonette5843
    @willieluncheonette5843 Před 4 měsíci

    " This is for the real adepts in madness, who have gone beyond all psychiatry, psychoanalysis, who are unhelpable. This third book is again the work of a German, Ludwig Wittgenstein. Just listen to its title: TRACTATUS LOGICO PHILOSOPHICUS. We will just call it TRACTATUS. It is one of the most difficult books in existence. Even a man like G.E.Moore, a great English philosopher, and
    Bertrand Russell, another great philosopher - not only English but a philosopher of the whole world - both agreed that this man Wittgenstein was far superior to them both.
    Ludwig Wittgenstein was really a lovable man. I don't hate him, but I don't dislike him. I like him and I love him, but not his book. His book is only gymnastics. Only once in a while after pages and pages you may come across a sentence which is luminous. For example: That which cannot be spoken should not be spoken; one should be silent about it. Now this is a beautiful statement. Even saints, mystics, poets, can learn much from this sentence. That which cannot be spoken must not be spoken of.
    Wittgenstein writes in a mathematical way, small sentences, not even paragraphs - sutras. But for the very advanced insane man this book can be of immense help. It can hit him exactly in his soul, not only in the head. Just like a nail it can penetrate into his very being. That may wake him from his nightmare.
    Ludwig Wittgenstein was a lovable man. He was offered one of the most cherished chairs of philosophy at Oxford. He declined. That's what I love in him. He went to become a farmer and fisherman. This is lovable in the man. This is more existential than Jean-Paul Sartre, although Wittgenstein never talked of existentialism. Existentialism, by the way, cannot be talked about; you have to live it, there is no other way.
    This book was written when Wittgenstein was studying under G.E.Moore and Bertrand Russell.
    Two great philosophers of Britain, and a German... it was enough to create TRACTATUS LOGICO PHILOSOPHICUS. Translated it means Wittgenstein, Moore and Russell. I, on my part, would rather have seen Wittgenstein sitting at the feet of Gurdjieff than studying with Moore and Russell. That was the right place for him, but he missed. Perhaps next time, I mean next life... for him, not for me. For me this is enough, this is the last. But for him, at least once he needs to be in the company of a man like Gurdjieff or Chuang Tzu, Bodhidharma - but not Moore, Russell, not Whitehead. He was associating with these people, the wrong people. A right man in the company of wrong people, that's what destroyed him.
    My experience is, in the right company even a wrong person becomes right, and vice-versa: in a wrong company, even a right person becomes wrong. But this only applies to unenlightened men, right or wrong, both. An enlightened person cannot be influenced. He can associate with anyone - Jesus with Magdalena, a prostitute; Buddha with a murderer, a murderer who had killed nine hundred and ninety-nine people. He had taken a vow to kill one thousand people, and he was going to kill Buddha too; that's how he came into contact with Buddha.
    The murderer's name is not known. The name people gave to him was Angulimala, which means 'the man who wears a garland of fingers'. That was his way. He would kill a man, cut off his fingers and put them on his garland, just to keep count of the number of people he had killed. Only ten fingers were missing to make up the thousand; in other words only one man more.... Then Buddha appeared. He was just moving on that road from one village to another. Angulimala shouted, "Stop!"
    Buddha said, "Great. That's what I have been telling people: Stop! But, my friend, who listens?"
    Angulimala looked amazed: Is this man insane? And Buddha continued walking towards Angulimala. Angulimala again shouted, "Stop! It seems you don't know that I am a murderer,
    and I have taken a vow to kill one thousand people. Even my own mother has stopped seeing me, because only one person is missing.... I will kill you... but you look so beautiful that if you stop and turn back I may not kill you."
    Buddha said, "Forget about it. I have never turned back in my life, and as far as stopping is concerned, I stopped forty years ago; since then there is nobody left to move. And as far as killing me is concerned, you can do it anyway. Everything born is going to die."
    Angulimala saw the man, fell at his feet, and was transformed. Angulimala could not change Buddha, Buddha changed Angulimala. Magdalena the prostitute could not change Jesus, but Jesus changed the woman.
    So what I said is only applicable to so-called ordinary humanity, it is not applicable to those who are awakened. Wittgenstein can become awakened; he could have become awakened even in this life.
    Alas, he associated with wrong company. But his book can be of great help to those who are really third-degree insane. If they can make any sense out of it, they will come back to sanity."

  • @leemitchellmusic
    @leemitchellmusic Před 4 měsíci +2

    Language IS the border of consciousness. Try and focus on that and I believe that that is Wittgenstein's point. What ever is YOUR bordered intellect is the border of your ability to converse with whomever the intellect you are conversing with XXXX

    • @thejimmymeister
      @thejimmymeister Před 3 měsíci

      I disagree with this. Wittgenstein says in the preface of _Tractatus_ that he aims to draw the limit "not to thinking, but to the expression of thoughts; for, in order to draw a limit to thinking we should have to be able to think both sides of this limit (we should therefore have to be able to think what cannot be thought)." So, he thinks there is a difference between the expression of thoughts (language) and thinking (a conscious act).
      I also think that his main point relies on this distinction; unlike the positivists, he believed that we really can have some kind of ethical experience or intuition. These ethical things are inexpressible, but they are real, and we are conscious of them in some way. We comprehend ethical meaning.
      The "limits of my language" line is just about descriptions of phenomena. He means "the world" in a kind of Kantian or Schopenhauerian sense. I've always found it strange that so many people make so much of that sentence and its supposed profundity because it seems to me that it's about precisely what Wittgenstein considered least important. What we can say, what states of affairs exist, these are nothing compared to ethical matters.

    • @leemitchellmusic
      @leemitchellmusic Před 3 měsíci

      I disagree with what you state in your parenthesis...we cannot think what cannot be thought...that in itself is a contradiction in terms...language is the consequence of the thought ! Hang on. Am I just talkin' a lot o' bollocks ?? 🤣😆

    • @thejimmymeister
      @thejimmymeister Před 3 měsíci

      @leemitchellmusic A few points:
      1) That parenthetical is not me. That's Wittgenstein. It's a quote from the Preface of _TLP_ . You can disagree with it as a matter of philosophical opinion, but it's pretty authoritative as an interpretation of Wittgenstein's aims!
      2) That it is a contradiction is Wittgenstein's point.
      3) Because it would be contradictory to think what cannot be thought, we can't think both sides of the limit to thought and therefore can't draw the limit to thought. But Wittgenstein says that his aim is to draw the limit to _expression of thought_ and implies that this _is_ possible; therefore, we can conclude that *he doesn't believe that the expression of thought-i.e. language-is the same as thinking itself* . (Otherwise, they would have the same limits and being able to draw the limits to one would entail being able to draw the limits to the other.) Because we can think the inexpressible as well as the expressible (which is how we are able to draw the limit to the expression of thought), thinking extends past language (i.e. the expression of thought). Because consciousness includes the act of thinking as well as other mental acts (e.g. perceiving), consciousness extends past thinking. So, *consciousness extends way past language* . Its borders are far beyond language.
      4) Yes, language is the consequence of thought, but that doesn't make it identical with the borders of consciousness!

    • @leemitchellmusic
      @leemitchellmusic Před 3 měsíci

      Consciousness maybe independent of language. One can be conscious, however to report and verify we need a language for communication. Your turn to bat James...

    • @thejimmymeister
      @thejimmymeister Před 3 měsíci

      @@leemitchellmusic I don't think you threw a pitch to me...

  • @magnuskallas
    @magnuskallas Před 11 měsíci +4

    This is a shitcomment, but it reminded me of some historians stating history ended with the collapse of Soviet Union. Sorry, there sure is something to talk about.

  • @ktheodor3968
    @ktheodor3968 Před 5 měsíci

    So, where are the ethics in the Investigations? Yes, I can see the ethics in the Tractatus. And how could W have *any* ethics (in the Investigations), if there're only uses, particular uses, of language? If the world it is anything, it is a linguistic rendition by (wo)man the speaking being. I am sorry, but I can't help thinking that McCarthy is rather romancing about W. Certainly the later one. I wish people took philosophers warts and all, rather than picking and choosing the bits they like.

  • @DavidJonesy
    @DavidJonesy Před 5 měsíci +2

    Interesting to see McCarthy was as irritating, superficial, and narcissistic in life as his fiction.

  • @Lissentewmi
    @Lissentewmi Před 9 měsíci +2

    Why did McCarthy sound so pissed here? Maybe he wasn't in the mood to talk this day. Girl we know exactly what the hell Wittgenstein is talking about, he saw the human body as a part of nature and not some instrument of the ethereal mind thru which to observe and interact with the world.... half the people who tell you they love a philosopher don't understand what that person was writing, but they perfectly understand how their outlook on life and living was changed by encountering that person's work. I am SOOOOOO fed up with the idea of "the canon" lol. I'm going to burn my first book in a series of sheets of bark, fucking the printing press /s

  • @osoisko1933
    @osoisko1933 Před 29 dny

    "Who the fuck cares" 🤣

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    @reidmax1 Před 4 měsíci +1

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  • @StephenDoty84
    @StephenDoty84 Před 27 dny

    2:04 No, he wasn't interested in math per se but the philosophy of math and its logical foundations. That's why Frege referred him to Russell, who was NOT a mathematician or professor it by trade, nor did he teach it. He taught philosophy and used the logic of set theory to ground arithmetic, 1 = 1 =2, for example. Basic stuff that had nothing with propellers. There were plenty of people doing more sophisticated math in math and engineering departments then, if Wittgenstein were just interested in math as this uninformed bloviator says. Cormac is totally misrepresenting the truth in almost every line. Nothing more annoying than a fake expert. Even the line about the rhinoceros was botched; they didn't discuss that the first time they met. Russell had company in his office when Ludwig first met him; it was brief; he later sat in on Russell's class and they had that talk another day; Ludwig went to his office a lot. How can Cormac sit there and play the pedagogue when he knows so little of the details and just makes it up?

  • @ruvstof
    @ruvstof Před 3 měsíci

    The problem is that he does not understand much of Wittgenstein.

  • @StephenDoty84
    @StephenDoty84 Před 27 dny

    1:07 more baseless, false presumptions by Cormac. Outrageously sloppy of him and haughty!
    Where the hell is his evidence that Wittgenstein is "not aware" of quantum mechanics or the math surrounding it?
    I ask any fan of Cormac's to support that facile presumption. It's also haughty of Cormac as if he knows better and implies quantum mechanics was known to practically everyone then. Again, how does he know that? It's highly dubious.
    Cormac is putting on airs like he'd know more than Wittgenstein at the time. BS.
    Also, Bertrand Russell wrote the ABC's of Relativity, and we know Ludwig knew him and aware of his books and read some.

  • @michaelhenault1444
    @michaelhenault1444 Před 6 měsíci +2

    Ridiculous

  • @mikewhelan9561
    @mikewhelan9561 Před 4 měsíci +1

    and this, which i don't put much stock in en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jew_of_Linz but "Hitler and Wittgenstein did attend the same school at the same time, but there is little evidence that they knew each other."

  • @mikewhelan9561
    @mikewhelan9561 Před 4 měsíci +1

    Karl Popper 's Open Society Chapter 11 note 51 makes mincmeat out of Wittgenstein . Leading Wittgeinstein to attack Popper with a fireplace poker. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wittgenstein%27s_Poker

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