Sorry to have been out of the loop. I have been reading: more of the PI, but also Barrett's Illusion of Technique & the "Sketch of an Intellectual Biography" that fronts Glock's A Wittgenstein Dictionary. I'll be developing some of the things I've picked up in days to come, but would note for the moment that these two writers have fundamentally different views of W's "mysticism" in The Tractatus--Barrett sees it as the most valuable part of the book, these "last few pages," while noting that W's contributions to logic have been largely superceded; Glock, on the other hand, writes that mysticism "mars" The Tractatus. I also will go back & pick up on that stunning image of yours: Wittgenstein giving himself up to the process of falling through space. I had a dream about this a while back--did I write about that here? Anyway, I appreciate your last tow very detailed posts & regret that I have let my response go so long. Anon, anon.

"We think we are pointing to something outside of language that has stability because it is outside. We are really pointing to something created in language." Distinctions are linguistic. Your red hair, or the Santa suit, or the red lacquer on a Vietnamese goddess's draperies. Clear enough. But there remain mental states that put one in conflict with the (physical) world in ways that definitions of red do not approach. If I am drunk & believe that the oncoming bus can do me no harm--or even, more modestly, that I will get across the street before it hammers me into the pavement--I have been injured by a distinction of a different ontological order than questions having to do with the definition of red. And interestingly, states of mind that put the person at odds with reality--trance, hallucination, meditation, prayer, v.v.--have traditionally been respected, even by those who do not experience them. In Jerome Rothenberg's phrase, we appoint technicians of the sacred. Okay, tomorrow you have to come to my class & tell my students that I was doing philosophy last night when I should have been grading their tests. Grading their tests? Talk about trying to dominate reality!

"Differences arise in language, and not in relations to reality," you write. This is a powerful way of looking at the language / world "problem," I think. With my students in Imagining Science I've been working through a few of the problems associated with that other dualism, mind / body. Basically, I want to challenge their shallow & automatic acceptance of the cogito. My own way out of Descartes begins with seeing mind as extensive & socially constructed, which may be to say (I'm not sure) that mind is a function of language. But even this move runs up eventually against Dr. Johnson's refutation of Berkeley: Asked how he could refute Berkelian idealism, the good doctor replied, "I refute it thus!" & kicked a large stone lying in the street. However one defines mind, there will always be the conditions of existence, aka the stone in the street.

You've given me so much to think about I find myself replying to one sentence at a time. More anon.

Picking up a point, briefly: In my Imagining Science course we have been talking about simulations of reality. Artificial life, computer simulations of human behavior, v.v. . . Halfway through class the other day I asked, What is the difference between a simulation & reality? My assumption is that there is a fundamental ontological distinction between a simulation & reality. That is, Flatland gets its ironic twist from pretending that a simulation can be treated as a reality. Same goes for A.K. Dewdney's The Planiverse & other literary works of this sort. The fun of this book & of Flatterland, is that they wink at us concerning ontology.

I haven't named my laptop, though sometimes I call it fuckhead. (This is unfair of me--when I curse the machine I am almost always cursing the Microsoft software the machine is "running." The machine itself is just doing what it's told.) There is a lot in your post I want to respond to, but it's been a long day so I think I will take these points up in the morning. Nota: v.v. stands for van van in Vietnamese--it means & so on & so forth or etc.

Naming & making: Naming is simple-minded, but making is a complex activity in the world that manipulates names along with other things. Things. There is a materialization of language going on here. Despite modern linguistics, there remains a potent connection between a name & its thing: not arbitrary despite the fact that sign & signified bear no apparently necessary connection; names take on a numinous quality through long habit: forms of life. So the fact that I call one particular furry quadruped cat & another dog, does not require anything but an arbitrary connection between sign & signified--nevertheless, long habit produces overlapping webs of association & meaning surrounding these words. The connection between word & thing is not metaphysical, but that does not prevent it from being ontological. (Am I using these terms correctly?) Okay: the question, really, is: How do we get beyond naming & into thinking?

The first hundred pages of William Barrett's The Illusion of Technique provide a very useful background / introduction to Wittgenstein's intellectual culture & to the transition from the logical atomism of the Tractatus to the natural language philosophy of the Investigations. It is surprising that Barrett's book, published in 1967, does not find its way into the Bibliography of Ray Monk's biography. I would call Barrett an Existentialist, but his own philosophical point of view remains in the background, a framework, as he elucidates Wittgenstein. Briefly, Barrett sees the Tractatus as leading to a point of intellectual sterility, though it was a point to which W was bound to travel, beginning with the Principia. The error--the dead end--turns out to be taking mathematical logic as the structure of the world & of human language, rather than as the specialized tool that it is. Barrett argues that it is the last few pages of the Tractatus, where W claims that he is kicking away the ladder of logic, that the enduring value of the work is to be found.

Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.
[Yeats, "The Circus Animals Desertion"]

You write, "It seems that Wittgenstein is putting naming before us for a reason." When I read this earlier today, I had one of those "Well, duh!" moments. Of course he is, though I hadn't thought about it in this way. In fact, skimming back--if one ever skims Wittgenstein--over the remarks from 20 on, it's not as if W is being coy about "putting naming before us" & in fact he's quite clearly foregrounding this concept in order to call it into question. But W's style can throw one off--it seems so tentative; and I think it was put into tentative language naturally (as oppose to intentionally, which is a problematic notion with language). That is, Wittgenstein really is feeling his way along, though once we, in our privileged position as readers 51 years after W's death, work through the tentative working-out, there is a wonderful clarity about the notion of naming, about the activity of naming. Great philosophers struggle for the rest of us & leave a record of their struggle. Had Jesus written the Gospel himself, it would be something like the Philosophical Investigations.

"Naming would be different from one language game to the next." Yes, but somehow still recognizable as naming. I find your examples of the activity of naming in politics & natural science very much to the point & also agree with you that the metaphor of the mosaic needs to be softened or deepened . . . or something . . . in order to communicate the qualities of language games we are trying to delineate.

I've always been struck by the Irish-Catholic idea that one must "make one's soul." I'm thinking about poetry here & wondering what the relationship between naming & making might be. More on this tomorrow.

[27] Or naming is a language game that interpenetrates many language games. Probably it amounts to the same thing. In any case, naming is a kind of sub-routine in many language games & as Wittgenstein points out is often preparatory to other human activities using language. And then goes on to point out the inadequacy of naming as a model of language--either language acquisition or language use--in remark 28.