| Morlock Elloi on Mon, 31 Dec 2018 19:14:26 +0100 (CET) |
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| <nettime> Letter to a young philosopher |
Letter to a young philosopher December 31, 2018 Winfried Degen Well-intentioned advice for the study of philosophy to prevent the worstIn times when the shortage of good professionals, especially in the STEM subjects, is increasingly hampering the development of the German economy, any talented young person turning to any orchid subject rather than studying science or engineering is harder Loss for our country. The author had such a case in the family and, to prevent the worst, he wrote a letter to a young philosopher.
Dear S.,I learned from your mother that you have decided to study philosophy in B. That bothers me a lot and I write you this letter to move you, but still let go of this useless company.
This is not my first concern for your economic future. You know yourself how many Doctores Philosophiae ultimately deserve their bread as taxi drivers. No, taxi drivers are an honorable profession, and those who practice this profession do a more useful service to society than most philosophers. That's not what I'm concerned about.
I would rather ask you to seriously and honestly examine your motives for this decision. You told me that science and technology are not 'your thing'. Your mathematics at school were seldom better than adequate. All this does not interest you. I also know you as a young man, who thinks a lot, many questions remain unanswered. I know your commitment to justice, your support of the weaker ones. display
All of this honors you, and I am far from dismissing this as a crush of youth that will settle with age. But believe me, to find out what justice is, what you should do, what the world is made of, what you can recognize, and how you yourself are in this world, how you can find yourself You little help studying philosophy. If you believe that, you are making the same mistake as those who believe that you can bend your messed-up soul back with a degree in psychology.
Why does it have to be a study? Why do not you want to learn a respectable craft? A carpenter who creates useful things with his hands, a gardener who brings the beauty of nature to life, or a cook who pleases his guests with his palate art - all of which can proudly point out at the end of the day that they are the world, everyone in his place, have done a little better. You say you have two left hands, and crafting is not for you. Do I hear an undertone of arrogance? display
Now I have told you earlier that everyone should study that to which his whole interest applies. Only then will one achieve the greatest success and be able to live a contented life. And you tell me now, you just have a great desire to become wise. Oh, you lover of wisdom, you do not know that Mrs. Sofie spares her affection sparingly. How many who lie at the feet of this lady are ultimately just a fool. But let it be, I suspect you do not want to change your mind. Then at least I want to give you some well-intentioned advice.
Si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses (Oh philosopher, if you had kept quiet!)Not only do you have two left hands, but, I believe, two left hemispheres, or at least one hypertrophied linguistic center. You like to talk and, as I have to admit, complacent. Then it seems you heard yourself talking. And when you take a break, you seem to think, "Oops, what did I say smart again?" This is Kleist's method 1 , in which one starts talking, in the hope that the thought will come to an end. This method may be allowed to the poets but not to the philosophers. Excuse my frankness, I call the chatter.
The philosophers are unanimous in no way and at the same time they are as right with nothing as with the assumption that most of their guild are only babblers, respectively. To give you just one example, I quote Mr. GWF Hegel 2 :
There is, however, another manner in which criticism is to be adhered to,
namely, that which purports to be in the possession of philosophy, that usesand expresses much of the forms and words in which great philosophical systems
express themselves an empty word vapor without inner content is. Suchchattering without the idea of ​​philosophy acquires some sort of authority by
its expansiveness and own presumption, partly because it seems almost unbelievable that so much shell should be without kernel, partly becausevoidness has some sort of general intelligibility. Since there is nothing more
disgusting than this transformation of the seriousness of philosophy into
flatness, criticism has everything to offer to avert this misfortune.
Hegel
One who felt himself kicked, then called the professor:
"... a disgusting, mindless charlatan and an unprecedented nonsense
smoker
(who) ... showed the greatest impudence in nicking nonsense, in the greasingtogether of meaningless, furious phrases of words, such as had previously only
been heard in madhouses".
Arthur Schopenhauer
Nice this openness, which is unfortunately rare today. To show what
Schopenhauer could have meant by meaningless verbiage of the above
professor,
here the professor's findings on electricity 3 :Electricity is the pure purpose of the figure who liberates himself from it; the figure that begins to negate its indifference, for electricity is the
immediate emergence, or not yet of the form, or conditioned by it, or the
dissolution of the form itself, but the superficial process in which the
differences take their form leave, but they have to their condition and are
not yet independent of them.
Hegel
Oh, I forgot electricity does not interest you. Hegel and Schopenhauer,
they were both right. But they both had their blind spot: their own
talkativeness.
But how to avoid philosophical chatter. This is obviously a difficult question. But this is the central question of philosophy. I want to give you some pointers:
The safest way is to be silent. Of course I know that this is difficult
for you.
Think of everything before you speak publicly or publish a text. Of
course
you can take notes for intermediate steps. But these are not public.
Speak easy and clear. Simplex sigillum verum (Simplicity is a sign of
truth). "Everything that can be pronounced, can be made clear." 4
Be brief. Even great truths can be expressed in a few sentences. If a
philosophical treatise comprises more than, say, a hundred pages, then it
either contains too many thoughts at a time, which should then be better
portrayed separately, or there is acute suspected fraud.
Do not express yourself to everything and everyone. Every
philosopher has
his theme, and moreover he should not talk. History of Philosophy: Just say no [Gilbert Harman]Do not waste your time reading the ancient philosophers. What would you think of a medical study in which until the Physikum only the writings of Hippocrates, Galen, Celus, Orebasius, Avicenna, Rhazes are read, possibly even to give some modern authors a chance, Hildegard von Bingen and Theophrastus Bombastus from Hohenheim. Would you call that science? Would you let yourself be treated by a trained doctor?
No, the old people were wrong in too much. I do not want to blame them for that. After all, thanks to the work of generations, we are today in possession of knowledge and methods that the ancients have not yet imagined. But that ignorance was not our fault, does not oblige us to take their work seriously.
In addition, many of her tracts have gone through an unbearable amount of speculation about God, angels and other spirits. This is, of course, because philosophy was for a long time the pastime of unsatisfied monks and clerics, and that theology was seen as a science. If one almighty God, to whom everything is possible, even the impossible, as a principle in the science introduces, then one must not be surprised that with this paradoxical construct everything and nothing can be proved.
Even such a sober philosopher like John Locke, after all one of the fathers of empiricism, speculated in detail in his "Attempt on the Human Mind" about the substance, tightness and extent of finite spirits. And Leibniz, after all, one of the fathers of calculus, has assisted him, he could prove that these spirits must have an organic body. 5
Okay, it may not have been decided yet, if such finite ghosts are up to mischief in some remote English country homes. In any case, this haunting has no business in a science. Unfortunately, it took far too long for philosophy to abandon its blinders of dogma and religion.
You will argue that the ancients have also found some truths. But that's the worst thing: a mélange of truths, truisms and nonsense. If they had written only the wrong, they would at least be reliable, and one could derive the right thing from it.
You will argue that the study regulations require you to read the ancient philosophers. You would have to prove your compulsory modules, and without the knowledge of the ancients you would not receive any of the necessary notes in the seminars. Oh, but if you do not want to stay a 'sham' philosopher, then restrict your reading to at least the bare essentials. If, at some point after your retirement, you have too much time and your creativity is gone, you can still find out about the history of philosophy. The adult education centers offer nice courses that are perfectly adequate.
Learn philosophy like a craftEvery craft apprentice knows that he first has to know and master his tools and the material he wants to work on. And he knows that mastering his art requires a lot of practice. Only philosophers often believe that all of this is inherent.
The tools the philosopher works with are his brain and his senses. You will have noticed that I have not spoken only of reason, intellect or intellect. Of the reason, the ancients have often speculated. In doing so, they usually thought of what most consciously takes place in our inner dialogue. The self-talk in which we develop our thoughts in language. But this is only the least part of our thinking.
Who do you think it is who, when you speak, puts the words in your mouth? The conscious mind? Then you would speak like the beginner in a foreign language: First, he feels what he wants to express. Then he looks for the right vocabulary. Then he tries to find the syntactically correct sentence and to form the correct conjugated or declined forms for the vocabulary. Finally, he is still looking for the right pronunciation. All this he does largely mind-controlled and aware. He must not be surprised if these first sentences are only stammering over his lips.
When you talk, everything runs subconsciously. Your answers are shot like a gun. It's talking to you. And sometimes it also shoots beyond the target. Then you say, "Sorry, I did not mean to say that." But who wanted it then? Who colors your sentences with emotions? Who gives you what you want to say? Your reason? (Please do not answer these questions with "I". "I" is a personal pronoun whose use in the Basic Philosophy is strictly prohibited.)
You see, your tool is much more than that thin crust of conscious mind. And if you want to get to know this tool, it is easiest, you sit down in a basic lecture in psychology and a lecture in neurology. Not that you should become a psychologist or neurologist. But you have to know the scientific concepts of these disciplines if you want to judge people and yourself correctly. Especially in the field of neurology, insights are to be expected in the future that will also influence philosophical anthropology. If you can not understand and classify them because of a lack of understanding, you run the risk of continuing to chatter.
A few more hints to our senses. Certain schools of philosophy liked to make disparaging remarks about our senses. They claimed they were fooling us and unreliable. What a nonsense. The eye sees what it sees (namely electromagnetic waves with wavelengths between about 680 and 400 nm), and the ear hears what it hears (namely periodic pressure fluctuations of the air with frequencies between about 30 Hz and 16000 Hz).
The eye sees no table and the ear hears no words. When you see a table, the part of your brain that is responsible for processing the retinal nerve impulses begins to work. And after filtering, compressing, correlating and reconciling this data with your memory in an extremely complex and ingenious process, he hands over an initial interpretation of this sensory data to the consciousness: "Attention, there might be a table."
It then remains the task of the consciousness to verify this hypothesis and to place it in a context. It could just be a mirror image or the projected image of a table on a screen. If errors occur in the first interpretation, then it is seldom the senses that deceive us, 6 but it is usually the apparatus that processes the sensory data that is misguided.
Incidentally, this apparatus, which works completely unconsciously, is sensationally fast, effective and reliable in detecting the patterns that are important to us. He is also the one who first invented concepts so important to philosophers, such as 'things', 'properties and constancy of things', 'movement' and 'space', long before evolution left us that bit Mind lent. If you find time to do your lectures in psychology and neurology, you should definitely inform yourself about sensory physiology and cognitive neurology.
You may now scold me for a naive realist. I'm a long way from that. Even the carpenter who made the table knows that there is not a 'thing', an instance of the class of tables, but something compound. He sees four, hopefully the same length, table legs, he sees, even if they are covered, the boards of the table frame, which intervene with dovetail connectors in the legs. He sees the tabletop, made of another wood, the polished precious wood veneer, the glaze that protects the table.
As a chemist I see the cells of the wood, their cell walls of cellulose and lignin. I see that the cellulose chains are composed of glucose units, the lignin mass of substituted phenols. I see that the table is just an ordered structure of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms.
As a physicist, I see that these atoms are composed of the electron shell and the atomic nuclei. I see how the electrons interact with the light. I see the neutrons and protons of the atomic nuclei. I see that these 'particles' occupy only a small part of the space, so that the table is mostly empty space. I see that these particles have nothing in common with the particles I know from the macroscopic world. So the electrons z. B. indivisible, have no front or back, no left or right half but a space-oriented spin. They are located at 'their' atomic nucleus and at the same time in the whole space. I see that these elementary particles are really nothing but the carriers of forces and interactions. I see that the elementary particles of my table interact with all the other elementary particles of the universe, so that I can only separate the table from them as a thing in an arbitrary approximation. I see that my table really extends to the edge of the world.
If you ask, "How can you see atoms, like elementary particles?", You have not understood anything yet. Vision is the sensory data that interprets impulses from the retina. And of course, this interpretation depends on your experience and your knowledge. If z. For example, if from a certain perspective only three legs of the table are visible, you will see it as a table. Your experience tells you that this table must have four legs, and so you see a table with four legs.
Incidentally, I get guests tonight. And then I renounce the complex interpretation of my table and interpret it merely as a useful object under which I can put my legs, and which serves as a support for plates, cutlery and glasses.
Misstraue of languageLanguage is both a tool and a material for the philosopher. So it is important that the philosopher masters the language and that it is not the language that dominates the philosopher.
You say that language is your talent and that you naturally master it. What a mistake.Language has emerged as a means of communication. A chat between neighbors brings them closer. Singing together creates a connection. Ranting and arguing may replace physical arguments.
The language is also used to exchange simple information, such as: For example, that it is raining or that the train is late. It gives the individual the opportunity to tell what he wants from another person, how he feels, what he thinks and thinks.
But even the inner dialogue, the soliloquy, was not in the sense of the inventor. The everyday language is also not designed to formulate, deduce and prove complex facts and eternal truths. The sciences use their own scientific languages, which are characterized
That modal phrases (you can, you must, you should, you may, etc.) are
usually not used. The mode of science is the indicative.
The scientific proposition generally states that "something" generally
behaves this way and that. "Something" is a space in which general terms
(terms) are to be inserted. Sentences about singular terms are less
interesting to science. "Behaves so and so," is a blank place, in which a
predicate is to use.
Good science (there are of course a lot of bad ones) is
characterized by
the fact that terms and predicates are well-defined as specialist
terminology.
This is in contrast to the colloquial language, in which concepts and predicates often have multiple definitions, that is, are ambiguous (soul as the immortal immaterial core of man, as inner conductor of a coaxial cable, and as Upper Swabian breakfast pastry.) Fritz has Franz glued, does not mean Franz now sticks, etc.). Ambiguity has no place in science.It is clear that the language of science can only say a part of it and wants what the natural language can say. What we want, what we should do, what we fear, what we hope for, what might be, what we feel is good - that's not what science is talking about. Science only says what is the case, and its criterion is that of truth. But what she says she says very precisely at best.
Philosophy can also talk about areas that are not occupied by the sciences. However, when she talks about what is the case and claims the truth of her sentences, she competes with the sciences. She then has to be measured against this.
Right from the beginning of the philosophical discourse, it had become clear that language is an unreliable person. By the side of the rhetoricians, and we can add the polite speakers, the politicians, the demagogues, and all the other dumb babblers, she cared little for the truth. And when the sophists stated that they were capable of proving every statement and its opposite, they endeavored to shackle that commercial person. These fetters are called logic.
Therefore I advise you also "first collegium logicum" in the modern calculus-based form (formal logic). If the lecturer in your faculty of philosophy talks too much about Aristotle and his syllogisms, then switch to a lecture of computer scientists or mathematicians. More important than z. For example, the realization that "if all Serbs are Slavs and no Spaniard is Serb, then some non-Spaniards are Slavs" and such empty sentences, is the insight that logic is only a calculus with man-made rules and axioms.
Logic is not given to us by God, not by nature and also not a priori by "reason". Logic is a matter of agreement. So we could also agree that every statement is not either 'right' or 'wrong', but the third thing that can be 'undecidable' (ternary logic). Or we think the statements are more or less likely (fuzzy logic, threshold logic). The truths of logic are therefore nothing but what we have put into them as agreements, or as Wittgenstein pointedly says: "All the propositions of logic say the same thing: namely nothing" [Tractatus 5:43]. It is important for the discourse, however, to tell what logic we use, and that we then abide by the rules of the game.
Now is the right time to learn a formal language or a programming language. Of course PROLOG offers itself here, even if you can not push colorful windows across the screen.
At this point you may have realized with some fright that logic is a discipline of mathematics, and you actually wanted to escape the math in your field of study. But there you have to go through, if your speech should not be on the level of chatter. I would like to recommend you two introductions (Propaedeutics). These are the "Logical Propaedeutics, Preschool of Reasonable Speech" (1967) by Wilhelm Kamlah and Paul Lorenzen, and the "Logical-Semantic Propaedeutic" (1983) by Ernst Tugendhat and Ursula Wolf. You should work through these two cheap tapes thoroughly (better three times than twice read).
Unfortunately, the hope that logic prevents chatter has only partially been fulfilled. If all the clubs are traps and not a pips club, then some non-pipes are traps. This sentence is logically completely true. 7 But he is without meaning. So much for the overestimation of the category of logical truth. This also shows that a trivalent logic with the truth values ​​- 'true', 'false' and 'undecidable' = def 'nonsensical' - would be more appropriate for chatter than the dual logic.
Unfortunately, logic does not care enough about the elementary sentences and their elements, the words. Yet in them lies the actual content of science, such as philosophy. And here we come to the actual language criticism, that is, the analysis of their weaknesses, which almost inevitably mislead us. I would like to illustrate this with the help of a well-known theorem of one of our greatest contemporary German philosophers:
"The ball is round." (Josef Herberger 8 )I assume that you believe you have understood the meaning of this simple sentence and that you can agree with it. But first of all, what you see on paper in front of you, of course, is not the sentence, the sound sequence, which Herberger has pronounced. It's just a transcription, an interpretation of it. On the paper you can see 14 letters, a punctuation mark and three spaces (spaces).
What sense do the individual signs have, what meaning does z. B. the second character 'l'. Apparently none for themselves. But they contribute to the meaning of the sentence in different ways. The most important sign in this sentence is the point. The meaning of the point is: "I, Josef Herberger maintain that ...". Of course, Herberger did not say that explicitly. Only the sentence melody, which we can not portray on paper, tells us that this sentence was not meant to be a question.
Important signs are also the three empty spaces, which break the sentence into words. Herberger did not pause between the words, but pronounced the sentence in one breath. We interpret the cuts in this movement because we are familiar with the sounds 'ball', 'is' and 'round'. If we were familiar with the Kazakh footballer Derbal Istrund, we could have cut the sound sequence of the movement: 'Derbal is round' or 'Derbal Istrund'. Again, it is only indicated by the emphasis which words he might have meant. Suppose, then, that we had listened carefully, and that our interpretation corresponds in a first approximation to what Herberger meant. We have now arrived at the words that can be carriers of their own meaning.
First we divorce the article "der" and the verb "ist". They have no independent meaning, just a grammatical function. Articles are something like the bad habit of German nouns. In our example, the article has the function to point out that Herberger meant not a special ball, but all balls, the ball as a term. But that's not sure. He could have pointed to a ball on the table and said: "The (emphasized) ball is round."
We owe the verb 'is' to the habit that the full German sentence must have a verb as a grammatical predicate, even if, as in the example, we do not want to say that the subject is doing something or something is happening to him. So 'is' is not an 'action word' here, and so clever people call it the copula, but that does not hide the fact that it does not contribute to the meaning of the sentence. When a toddler proudly holds his ball and says, "ball round," we understand the meaning of the sentence. This sentence is rid of everything superfluous, and only pedantic German teachers would insist that it is grammatically incorrect.
Now there is the property word 'round' and the word word 'ball' and their meanings. These word classes verbalize our concepts of things and their properties. These general concepts themselves are pre-linguistic. They are constructed by the image processing and pattern recognition programs of our visual sense and other senses. Therefore, I may assume that your intuitive idea of ​​things and their properties are consistent with my imagination, at least as long as we do not reason with them. It is perhaps comparable to the upright gait. He is, even if we have to practice him as a toddler, given to us by nature. But if we try to control our walking through reason, we will inevitably stumble.
As for the meaning of the word ball, one might try to define it by its properties (intensional definition):
Ball = def Ding (a1 and a2 ... and <not b1> and <not b2> ...).These are the ai properties that the 'Ding Ball' must have and the bi are qualities that a ball may not have to distinguish it from other 'things'. If 'round' were one of those defining necessary properties, our proposition would only be a reminder, ie a tautology. However, it is unlikely that all German-speaking people would agree on the same set of defining characteristics. And yet I do not even think that we use the word ball also a dance pleasure, or that we apply the word analogous to 'non-balls' (eg the globe). Also, the other method of stating what 'ball' means is purely fictitious. Here you imagine the balls of the world in a heap, points to them and says: "These are all balls, what is not there, is not a ball" (extensional definition).
In reality, we learn the meaning of the word 'ball' by playing some different balls in childhood. Our ingenious visual cortex recognizes a pattern in the different balls. This pattern forms a first concept. We are told that these are balls, and we connect that word with our pre-verbal concept. A term arises. Now we also learn that round objects of different color or size can be called ball. Then we get glass marbles and hear that these are not called 'ball'. Just as little are balloons, eggs, dumplings or onions called 'ball', although they have many characteristics in common with balls. Our concept of 'ball' differentiates. Later we see football footballs, basketballs, tennis balls on television. Our term is expanding. Given such a random genesis of the term, it would be surprising if two individuals had exactly the same idea of ​ ​'ball'.
We tried to define the ball by its characteristics. Qualities that he must or may not have to distinguish him from other things.
It is important to know what a property is.Property words are useful general terms only if you can attribute them to several things to compare, categorize, or define those things, knowing that there are no two comparable things. 'Round' is one such property. We could try to define what is around. We can z. For example, a closed geometric surface may say that it is round if it is continuous at each point and the first and second partial derivatives there are also continuous (curvature continuity).
This definition is completely useless, since no real body has these ideal properties. We have already seen that no body possesses a natural surface, that it rather acts far into the space, that is, really. We do not even have to point out that every single ball, viewed under a microscope, appears rough, fissured and porous, not round. Anyone who wants can now claim that there are no real round things, but the idea of ​​roundness in some higher sphere. If this 'insight' stimulates the production of its hormones of happiness, who would begrudge him that?
In reality, when we have seen things like balls, eggs, glass marbles, etc., we feel the 'round' quality, feel their surface, take it in the hollow of the hand. We see these things rolling in a similar way on the table. From all these sensory impressions our pattern recognition algorithms construct the property 'round'. For us all these things then have this general property, although not two things have comparable 'roundness' down to the microscopic level. Again, I must remind you that it would be surprising if two individuals had exactly the same idea of ​​'round'.
Now we are faced with the strange situation that we have a concept 'ball' and a general property 'round' that we both can not exactly define and from which each speaker presumably has a slightly different idea. How nice that at least our language lulls us to safety. If we have words like 'ball' and 'round' then there must be something as general as the term 'ball', the 'ball' and its 'roundness'.
Mauthner calls this attitude 'verbal belief'. 9 terms, that is, general terms like 'the ball', 'roundness' do not exist. It's just human constructs that allow us to speak. 'Out there' only each incomparable 'single things', which we could name individually. But apart from the fact that we soon ran out of words in the large number of individual things, we could not say anything if we had only singular terms.
If you want to get closer to the term 'ball', then it does not help to put such an inflated leather blister under the microscope. Then you have to put yourself in a fMRI or a PET, as crude as these instruments are today. Then you have to try to keep track of what's going on in your brain when you see a ball, when you hear the word ball, when you imagine a ball.
That generalized concepts (concepts or categories) are vorverbal, can be seen from the fact that the speechless animals know such ideas: I play with my dog ​​in the garden. I throw a small red ball and ask him: "Find the ball". He starts immediately and retrieves the ball and not the stick we played yesterday. But sometimes he also finds the blue ball my children used to play the day before. Then he brings me this. After all, he has already generalized the concept 'ball'.
Presumably, this dog concept of a ball will be different from ours. For him, a ball may have the property that you can bite into him, that he has a specific ball smell, etc. And because my dog ​​is a philosophical dog, he has already associated with his ball concept, a sound, namely the word "balls". Of course, only the diminutive form. A little distance to Homo sapiens has to stay.
I may have been a bit too elaborate on the last considerations, and I can sympathize with you if you've been overflowing these lines impatiently. But I still have to enlighten you about other inflated empty cases, which are unfortunately found in abundance in our language. They owe their existence to the ease with which verbs, nouns and adjectives can be translated into each other (examples: running ← running in passing, room ← spacious, beauty ← beautiful beautiful).
We have become accustomed to this flexibility of language, which spares us some clauses (we have become accustomed to being able to speak flexibly ...). We forget the dangers that this word travesty entails. The worst thing to do with verbs and adjectives, which are inflated to nouns. You recognize them z. Often it is enough to put verbs or adjectives in front of an article like a nobility predicate. And then it will be the modest auxiliary word, his excellency 'being'. From the old verb 'beings' (have been compared) is 'the essence'. The simple verb 'pose' rises to 'shape'.
The examples of these word transvestites are Legion. They prefer to drive around in the study rooms of certain philosophers, where they spread their peculiar musty odor. To banish this muff, there is a simple procedure: replace the noun with the original verb or adjective.
In this feedback, we need the things that are attributed to property in substantiated property words. In the case of substantivized verbs, we need a subject, and in the case of transitive verbs, we also need the subject. If these are not clearly out of context, then delete the abstract:
Electricity is the pure purpose of the figure ...The one, the electric what? (unclear charge, field, voltage, current, power ...?) is the one that (unclear who or what?) aims 10 (unclear who or what?), and the one that (unclear who or what?) puts (unclear whom or what?) ...
It remains: the? is it pure? the ? ...But not only verbs and adjectives are affected by the nasty habit of substantiation. Even before pronouns and other particles you do not stop. How should one reduce 'the ego', the 'it' to a responsible usage of language?
But a special highlight of philosophical nouns is 'nothingness', which was raised from the negative particle 'not' over the already obscure indefinite pronoun 'nothing' to the nobility to 'nothingness'. And because a nothing, so alone, may be boring, one quickly invents a verb to it: do not be / do not do. And then one writes over the centuries whole libraries about whether 'nothingness' is not 'something' and whether 'nothingness is not'. Frankly, how do you decide that, if you have not clarified beforehand, if 'und undet' and / or 'or or' are.
Such abstracts are at best convenient abbreviations. As such, they can be used in colloquial language, in feature articles, and anywhere that does not really matter. They have nothing in common with our concrete terms. They can not be seen or understood. They do not point to anything concrete, so they have no concrete meaning. A philosopher must therefore avoid such abstraction as much as the devil avoids holy water.
Dear S., If you have read this letter so far, then I must praise you for your patience. And perhaps you will now, out of sheer politeness, agree: "All right, the statement 'The ball is round' is right, but not very interesting for a philosopher." Unfortunately, I have to disappoint you again. The sentence "The ball is round" is neither true nor false because it is not a statement. This sentence is a rule that only comes in the form of a statement.
The language deceives us again by not clearly distinguishing between statement and rule. A rule can be recognized by the fact that the subject of the sentence is a general term, a concept. A rule may or may not be true, but not true or false. From a statement one must demand that a procedure has been agreed, with which the truth content can be checked. So you can z. For example, check the FIFA roundness of a football with an agreed measuring device and an agreed measuring procedure . Understandably, only single footballs, but not the term 'ball', can be included in this gauge. As a result, one can only say from each individual ball whether it is round in the eye of FIFA or not.
You can translate a rule into a statement by replacing the general term with a singular term: "This ball is round." But you can also come to a statement by binding the general term by a 'quantifier':
All balls are round. Some balls are round. There is at least one round ball. No ball is round.If one uses rules such as statements in colloquial language, one usually has a generalization in mind. "Women are bad drivers," says Mann, referring to 'all women' or at least the 'most women'. If he had formulated a statement: "All women are bad motorists", of course, would have noticed immediately that man talks nonsense. That's why people like to generalize their prejudices in the form of a rule. In any case, since rules are neither true nor false, they can not be refuted.
You will easily find philosophical tracts in which such a rule disguised as a statement joins the next without the author noticing that he is not saying anything at all.
Generalizations are also problematic for another reason. They are often not provable. If you had z. For example, if the term 'ball' is an exact definition, and if this definition were a necessary and sufficient criterion for a ball to be round in order to be understood as a ball, then the proof would be possible, but the rule itself would be a tautology. Tautologies are, as already shown, all logical truths and beyond all analytic truths. If you only have an extensional definition of the term, then to prove the general theorem, you have to show that: (Ball1 is round) and (Ball2 is round) and (Ball3 is round) ... and (Balln is round). If we were done with Balln, Adidas would have produced thousands of new balls and we would not have finished our proof.
For terms with a large and / or extendable scope, such proof can not be obtained. What is possible, however, is to refute generalization (principle of falsifiability). All you have to do is present a single ball that is not round (eg a shuttlecock). The same applies to the negated generalization. For example, Milka has refuted the sentence: "No cow is purple" by a single copy of the "Purple Cow". Such propositions, which are not provable but refutable, should not be called propositions, but hypotheses. Hypotheses are the most common sentences in the empirical sciences.
Now you may think that if Josef Herberger was a great philosopher, he did not want to say anything about real balls. He must have understood this sentence as a parable, a metaphor. Perhaps he wanted to point to "the delusion of all human existence into the contingency of a blind fatsum." As a poem from the Thirty Years' War 11 says:
luck is not too good for a man, it is, say, round like a ball.But I have to contradict it now. Good philosophers avoid metaphors wherever they can. The terms are already blurred enough. It also does not get any better if you try to illustrate them through comparisons that always have to lag (excuse the failed metaphor, but I'm not a philosopher after all). You can talk in parables if you intend to found a religion or establish a philosophical illusion. With that you can perhaps set a flock of exegetes into wages and bread. But if you want to speak clearly, avoid metaphors.
But now Mauthner has shown that most words of the language are already metaphors. When we are looking for a word for a new concept, we prefer to broaden the meaning of a known word rather than inventing a new word. We then use the words analogously or in figurative meaning. As a rule we only increase their ambiguity.
In the rarest cases, the metaphor has succeeded, such. For example, the word 'essence'. Originally, the word is the substantiation of the Latin verb esse = its. 'Essence' is then the nobler twin brother of 'being'. Now, many philosophers believe that one comes to 'being', to the 'essence' of things or concepts, if one abstracts enough often, of whatever. Analogously, the alchemists thought that one would come to the essence of the substances, if one just enough often purifies or distills. Thus, after repeated distillation, one would find the 'quintessence', that is, the essence of the substances.
Modern chemistry knows today that after repeated distillation of any substance mixture as 'essence' only 'Schlunz' remains. Analogously, this knowledge can also be applied to the process of abstraction. If one abstracts only enough often, only mental 'Schlunz' remains at the end. Today, the proud word 'Essenz' in Germany is only used for the vinegar essence and for the French 'essence' is just another fuel for gasoline engines, which is what we also call 'Sprit' in German. But here will not be further explained what 'spirit' and 'spirit' has to do with gasoline.
You will probably ask what Josef Herberger wanted to tell us, if he did not want to make a statement, and did not want to give us a parable. I think Herberger wanted to put a ball of offense in our field, a stumbling block that we have to stumble over, then to raise ourselves again, that is, by our own thinking. A philosophical text can not have a better purpose.
I have now tried to show you how language can lead us to talk nonsense through ambiguous terms and metaphors, through careless interchanging of the parts of speech and through insufficient differentiation of types of sentences. The examples were easy to multiply. These deficiencies are more or less inherent in all natural languages. All approaches to construct an artificial language of logic (Leibnitz, Frege ...), but so far have not come to the implementation. It remains the math or the reduced computer languages.
But who would come up with the idea of ​​translating a poem by Heine, a novel by Hesse into algebra or PROLOGUE? We can not do without the beauty, wealth and complexity of our mother tongues even if we only wanted to share a simple thought.
But to avoid the traps of languages, we have to take more care of them. If Wittgenstein says, "All philosophy is linguistic criticism" (Tractatus 4.0031), I would like to add: "Speech criticism is the best philosophy." And there is nothing better than to take up the introductory lecture 'Linguistics' as a student of philosophy. In addition, one should learn foreign languages. It makes no sense to learn a language from the Indo-European language family. These are too closely related and consequently all make similar mistakes. I would recommend you: Learn Chinese. Then at least your study of philosophy has a useful and utilizable aspect.
With this I have completed my recommendations for a basic philosophy and want to recapitulate them here:
Formal logic (Ausagelogik, first-order logic) preferably at the mathematical faculty.
Learning a modern programming language (prefers PROLOG)
Introduction to modern psychology
Introduction to Neurology (Cognitive Neurology)
Lecture on sensory physiology (eg about the neuronal processes of
vision)
Introduction to linguistics
Learning a foreign language that is not from the Indo-European
circle (eg
Chinese)If you take this curriculum seriously, you will find little opportunity to waste your time in philosophical lectures. By the way, now is the time to look for a passenger ticket. He will be very useful to you throughout your life as a philosopher. For there is scarcely a profession of bread in which one has so much time to speculate and philosophize, and therefore is as suitable and attractive to all philosophers as the taxi driver.
And if you later chauffeur a Chinese passenger through B., where your education undoubtedly offers you an advantage over your non-philosophizing colleagues, this passenger will be amazed to register the extremely thorough training of German taxi drivers.
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