The “inarticulate” image from last night’s
“Raid on the Inarticulate” —
This is, in a sense, an island of nothing in a sea of being.
Contrast with an opposite image in Wittgenstein’s “Diktat für Schlick”:
From The Voices of Wittgenstein: The Vienna Circle ,
ed. by Gordon Baker, first published by Routledge
in 2003. From Ch. 1, “Dictation for Schlick” —
p. 69 —
“Our method resembles psychoanalysis in a certain sense.
To use its way of putting things, we could say that a
simile at work in the unconscious is made harmless by
being articulated. And this comparison with analysis
p.71 —
can be developed even further. (And this analogy is
certainly no coincidence.)
Anyone who speaks of the opposition of being and
the nothing, and of the nothing as something primary
in contrast to negation, has in mind, I think, a
picture of an island of being which is being washed
by an infinite ocean of the nothing. Whatever we throw
into this ocean will be dissolved in its water and
annihilated. But the ocean itself is endlessly restless
like the waves on the sea. It exists, it is, and we say
‘It noths’. But how is it possible to demonstrate to
someone that this simile is actually the correct one?
This cannot be shown at all. But if we free him from his
confusion then we have accomplished what we wanted to
do for him.” |
“Ripples spread from castle rock ….” — “Endgame,” 1986