``If you're talking about Carnap's attack on What Is Metaphysics?, it is a perfect example of missing the point. When a smart guy like Carnap is this dumb, it's gotta be willful.
Not that What Is Metaphysics? isn't Heidegger's worst essay, which it is...'' Chris Doss
``I got into Carnap's attack on Heidegger and his praise for Nietzsche in this post:
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2006/2006-May/009360.html
It is also interesting to note that while Carnap let loose on Heidegger in `The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language,' he had nothing but praise for Nietzsche...He admired the "empirical content" of Nietzsche's work, including especially its "historical analyses of specific artistic phenomena, or a historical-psychological analysis of morals...and praised Nietzsche for having chosen the medium of poetry in such works...
...For Carnap, language had a variety of functions to perform. One of those is the making cognitively meaningful statements. Other functions include the making of what Carnap described as emotive statements...'' James Farmelant
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Yep. that's the Carnap essay that Michael Friedman footnotes in his introduction to his Davos book.
Remember, Friedman isn't advocating anybody's side in this. He is trying to characterize the ideas, good, bad, and otherwise between the three: Carnap, Heidegger and Cassirer in a not very well remembered and minor event in 1929.
So I am going to pretend I am one of Cassirer's students and explain what I think is going on.
Chris Doss is right. Carnap is tone-deaf as are most of the analytic school of philosophy to whole dimensions of human thoughts, creative productions, activities, etc, etc. The traditional analytic school literally had no formal means to examine any of these human dimensions since it restricted itself to only one dimension of language, its Aristotelian forms. This is precisely why Cassirer went immediately, as in the very first chapter of Substance and Function, to deconstruct the Aristotelian world foundation that underlies logic, set theory and mathematical foundations. He intuitively zeroed in on this form of language probably from a German romantic sensibility, very similar to Heidegger's. This is why he and Heidegger seem much closer to each other that it might appear on the surface. They shared the same intuitive sense or grasp of the ontic source of probably all human worlds: metaphysics, mythological thinking, the arts, and most of the rest of human culture and consciousness, and saw that this ontic realm was where the human world's primordial foundation reside.
There are utterly fabulous passages from Thomas Mann's Joseph and His Brothers very early on, where Mann is using something like Rilke's root-word idea to find the source foundation of man in the well of words, the well of being. I can't find the passage and it's very long. The narrative takes the reader into this well of meaning, which is also within the mind of the ancient ur-ancestor of Joseph. So the well is all together time, space, thought and meaning arising of itself... Really beautiful stuff.
The point to bringing the literary reference up is to show something of the supreme plasticity of language and its capacities and scope of comprehension. When it is handled with great craft it can be made to do just about anything we can imagine. And in fact it can be made to things we can not imagine, and we suddenly learn something new or make a new form, new meaning, new dimension to existing meanings....
We can make it look like math and meet the analytic school restriction. We can make look like poetry in the Mann and Rilke examples. We can make it look like empirical science, of the kind that Chompsky prefers. This plasticity and extension is what makes language the supreme symbolic forms for cultural construction, production, and expression.
In other modes, say those found in texts of recent theory which are claimed to be unintelligible, I think there are a variety of things going on, depending on the author. Let's not forget humor, wit, and play. In play, you play with an idea to approximate its potential formulation, like you are sketching its outside contour to find the best curve fit. The gracefulness, the proportion, the sense of form and space are probably all off. Think of it as a life drawing class exercise. This goes to Voyou's point somewhere about the first few attempts on a concept seem to use poor syntax, grammar and vocabulary---or words to that effect.
And here is Les Schaffer using the tremendously fun metaphoric synthesis world Guattari's language to map it back into the analytic realm. You have to go to the link and read the whole post. I am sorry I missed it:
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20080602/009464.html
In some ancient Bad Subjects series of posts between me, Kathern, Kelley and I think Jonathan, I went off on a topological space model for one of Guttari's passages. The trouble was I was no where near as mathematically and physical science compendent as Les. So it was probably unintelligible gibberish. It was just that I could see Guttari trying to use topological ideas to creat a word space for his thoughts. It was certainly a recognizable impulse to me who used to study geometries, abstract algebras, sets and topology to find abstract space ideas to do as art.
Shifting gears back to the plasticity of language... In the conceptual ideal of linguistic theory we may even be able to find out how to make language accountable for its own origins. I seriously doubt this teleological project will succeed because mathematics has never been able to do the same with itself. It has resorted to meta-theories that ironically go back to language-games for sources.
The intuitive impulse Cassirer had about attempts to find the ontological origins of language within language was what lead him to propose the origin of human culture was found in what I called the emotive-feeling affect of the mind. To compress Cassirer's idea...the perhaps biologically given affects of the human mind ARE the organs of thought.
Shifting immediately here, I want to say examining the emotive affect and its physiological-genetic basis is what the socio-biologists are trying to do. The problem is they are also extraordinarily tone-deaf to the very experiences they are trying to construct in an empirical model. Related efforts by the neuro-sciences are confronting a similar problem in their theory of knowledge.
But I have a solution. They need more postmodern sexual deviants, poets, hippy cults, recovering drug addicts, free thinking radical marxists, a few Iranian terrorists, certainly more women and other Other, like the line of homeless on Ellis into Glide Memorial to inject through their own thought-action-being trajectories into these fields---that is to say some fucking life into...
I would also make the same sort of objection to the lit-critters. You need to get out more. Get some drop-out physics majors, math-nerds, chemistry wing-nuts, comp-sci misfits, even video-game addicts (Hi Dennis R) in there. They got things to say, insights to make and it will most certainly take a mythic collective consciousness to synethize it all.
Geeze it can't be all about whether queer academic women are more radical than other academic women called feminists---or can it? Get a grip ladies...
Try turning your computer-nerd boyfriend into a lesbian sex slave and see what happens in that alternate universe. Does the Oedipus, or Antigone model exhaust the categories? I think not. But you gotta try it, not just read about it. Didn't they teach you anything in Chem Lab or Drama class?
Seth Ackerman asked in all sincerity. ``What's the anti-feminism in queer theory?''
My ontic twelve-year-old answers in spontaneous emissions:
``They are all ladies with beards. But you have to lift their tails and sniff to tell the difference.
Some are and some aren't. Know what I mean?''
This is what peer review is supposed to do in socio-biology and the new neurosciences, but these guys have the wrong peer group sniffing and voting on (in what Kelley called the bloodless Habarmasian model)---ahem, yes, well, on the findings.
Feyerband and hopefully Feyerabend's ghost would be more than be happy to tell them, they need more theories, not less.
God I wish I had had the guts, the imaginative spirit and chance thought to bring my feverish reflections on Carpenter's lectures to tell Feyerabend.
Old man regrets...
Instead I bored him with Sartre. ``Not another system!'', he yelled.
CG
ps. This counts toward the proposed connections I promised to make between my apparently irrelevant Cassirer posts and Butler.
And spinning on another event. I just saw a great documentary on LA Art scene with Ed Irwin, Larry Bell, Ken Price, Ed Ruscha, Ed Keinholtz, Baldassari, Altoon, Plegans, Sonia whats-her-name... all of them. The whole era I went to art school.
God I don't know how many times I tried to find that god damned hole in the wall gallery, Ferrus. It was on some dead end beach front street in Venice and I never could figure out how to get there the same way twice. Forget parking. They would finally drag the shit over to LACMA and then smaller works to Northridge in a year or two after the opening, then I could see it...
What cracks me up about the so-called postmodern writers is, well I am not sure how to even begin. Jesus Christ, boys and girls we already lived that shit as teenagers, in LA. Be generous, I remind myself, be generous.