This film is the most surprising film you can expect from a deeply impressionistic film maker. Philosophy is by definition not impressionistic since it has to be logical and perfectly well organized in a rational way. Yet Derek Jarman dares to make a film on a philosopher, and actually more on philosophy because the man himself seems to be in a way made secondary.
Wittgenstein was obsessed with language, but not as a tool to express some thoughts or concepts that was able to build itself and its own architecture along with the mind and the mind's architecture that carried language, both through the very use of language and the mind themselves. Language is not seen as self-made and self-making expressive tool used by discourse to enable human thought to emerge, to build itself by expressing itself in communication.
Language for him is a limitation.
He considers logic is the acme of human intelligence, not language and language does not contain the whole logic of the human mind, even if it can express it. In fact he is a visual mind and he tries to express with words a logic he can represent in his mind's eye visually. He does not see that without language logic would never have been constituted. He ignores the fact that time, space and logic are human inventions for the cosmic duration, distance and orientation, and dependent origination (as the Buddhist would say for the last dimension) and are nothing but models of what the human brain and mind can observe in the outside world.
Wuttgenstein was a friend of Bertrand Russell but apparently he did not integrate Russell's lectures on logic delivered in the USA in the 1920s. Russell spent a tremendous amount of energy to demonstrate that what we get from the outside world is nothing but sensations and that these sensations are nothing if they are not interpreted in a way or another by the brain-mind into perceptions. Russell could not know how the brain and mind did it but he knew that these perceptions in their turn should not be considered as the outside world. They were only humanly interpreted representations of the outside world and all our mental work is using these representations and not the real world.
This means that these representations are models and models are nothing but metaphors: they are or are behaving like the outside world, more or less, never entirely. And this is only possible because we have words, and syntax and sentences and discourse to express these models that could not have been built or abstracted from the magma of our sensations without words, sentences, syntax and discourse.
He sees that a dog is what a certain culture calls a dog, more or less I will add. But he misses the other side of the word dog. It is a concept that is produced by man's power to conceptualize that is developing with age and training and that is deposited in our mind, itself developing from brain work as some kind of virtual abstract complex totally human conceptualizing machine.
But in Wittgenstein's vision language becomes a cage, a prison in a way and our mind is like a parrot in a cage itself inside the cage in which we are imprisoned. Derek Jarman is quite right when he reduces Wittgenstein's thought to this image, metaphor, set of metaphors. And it is cruelly but realistically reducing Wittgenstein's thought to nothing but a set of words repeated without them being understood by the repeater. That is very sad.
Hence Wittgenstein reduced intelligence to logic and then life to direct experience of the dirt, dust and mud of the path. There is no way to articulate the real world onto the conceptualizing power of the brain- mind. Then logic is not in anyway helping us to understand man's intelligence or man's consciousness. Logic becomes an escape from real dirty and muddy life and a straight jacket, an escape into the straightjacket of what is socially acceptable and nothing else with a very limited lee way for those who are philosophers supposedly over and higher than normal simple ordinary people.
He missed Russell's basic principle that life is life (the evidence of the pudding is in me being able to eat it) and logic is a conceptualized abstraction of a model from what we capture of the world through our senses for that to be interpreted and architecturally modelized by the brain-mind.
Descartes was seeing our existence in the fact that we were able to think. Wittgenstein went further in a way in identifying language but he did not see that we are not our language. Our language is produced by us in a social context and it may appear as a limitation (grammar is fascist as is well known since 1968) though it is a tremendous power, the power of abstraction and conceptualization that makes man the only being on earth able to create models of the outside reality that give him some power over this reality. The mind is not the parrot in a cage, itself in a cage in which man is imprisoned and reduced to repeating words he has learned by heart. There is no parrot. There is no first cage. There is no second cage. There is self-creating mind in each man whose experience determines what his mind is going to be or rather to become forever because its becoming will never stop, just like the linguistic tool it uses.
A beautiful attempt at making a film on such a subject, but it remains dry and rather cold. Even the personal life of the philosopher is reduced to very little.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
Wittgenstein was obsessed with language, but not as a tool to express some thoughts or concepts that was able to build itself and its own architecture along with the mind and the mind's architecture that carried language, both through the very use of language and the mind themselves. Language is not seen as self-made and self-making expressive tool used by discourse to enable human thought to emerge, to build itself by expressing itself in communication.
Language for him is a limitation.
He considers logic is the acme of human intelligence, not language and language does not contain the whole logic of the human mind, even if it can express it. In fact he is a visual mind and he tries to express with words a logic he can represent in his mind's eye visually. He does not see that without language logic would never have been constituted. He ignores the fact that time, space and logic are human inventions for the cosmic duration, distance and orientation, and dependent origination (as the Buddhist would say for the last dimension) and are nothing but models of what the human brain and mind can observe in the outside world.
Wuttgenstein was a friend of Bertrand Russell but apparently he did not integrate Russell's lectures on logic delivered in the USA in the 1920s. Russell spent a tremendous amount of energy to demonstrate that what we get from the outside world is nothing but sensations and that these sensations are nothing if they are not interpreted in a way or another by the brain-mind into perceptions. Russell could not know how the brain and mind did it but he knew that these perceptions in their turn should not be considered as the outside world. They were only humanly interpreted representations of the outside world and all our mental work is using these representations and not the real world.
This means that these representations are models and models are nothing but metaphors: they are or are behaving like the outside world, more or less, never entirely. And this is only possible because we have words, and syntax and sentences and discourse to express these models that could not have been built or abstracted from the magma of our sensations without words, sentences, syntax and discourse.
He sees that a dog is what a certain culture calls a dog, more or less I will add. But he misses the other side of the word dog. It is a concept that is produced by man's power to conceptualize that is developing with age and training and that is deposited in our mind, itself developing from brain work as some kind of virtual abstract complex totally human conceptualizing machine.
But in Wittgenstein's vision language becomes a cage, a prison in a way and our mind is like a parrot in a cage itself inside the cage in which we are imprisoned. Derek Jarman is quite right when he reduces Wittgenstein's thought to this image, metaphor, set of metaphors. And it is cruelly but realistically reducing Wittgenstein's thought to nothing but a set of words repeated without them being understood by the repeater. That is very sad.
Hence Wittgenstein reduced intelligence to logic and then life to direct experience of the dirt, dust and mud of the path. There is no way to articulate the real world onto the conceptualizing power of the brain- mind. Then logic is not in anyway helping us to understand man's intelligence or man's consciousness. Logic becomes an escape from real dirty and muddy life and a straight jacket, an escape into the straightjacket of what is socially acceptable and nothing else with a very limited lee way for those who are philosophers supposedly over and higher than normal simple ordinary people.
He missed Russell's basic principle that life is life (the evidence of the pudding is in me being able to eat it) and logic is a conceptualized abstraction of a model from what we capture of the world through our senses for that to be interpreted and architecturally modelized by the brain-mind.
Descartes was seeing our existence in the fact that we were able to think. Wittgenstein went further in a way in identifying language but he did not see that we are not our language. Our language is produced by us in a social context and it may appear as a limitation (grammar is fascist as is well known since 1968) though it is a tremendous power, the power of abstraction and conceptualization that makes man the only being on earth able to create models of the outside reality that give him some power over this reality. The mind is not the parrot in a cage, itself in a cage in which man is imprisoned and reduced to repeating words he has learned by heart. There is no parrot. There is no first cage. There is no second cage. There is self-creating mind in each man whose experience determines what his mind is going to be or rather to become forever because its becoming will never stop, just like the linguistic tool it uses.
A beautiful attempt at making a film on such a subject, but it remains dry and rather cold. Even the personal life of the philosopher is reduced to very little.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU