10.25.2002

"How fragile this adhesive holding language together really is!" Yes, all held together by human imagination.

A poem is a kind of game, but a game might also be a poem. Wittgenstein's great virtue in PI is that he makes it harder for us to get caught up in our own categories even while allowing as how those categories have a use, a function, in the world. Their use is nothing less than meaning, but of course the whole concept of meaning is altered if the philosopher comes to the poet's conclusion that the ambiguous can be true, or that more than one perspective can be valid.

What category do we put the DC snipers into, for instance? Are they "terrorists" because they terrorized a region? Or do we use the categories of medicine & seem them as mentally disturbed? Was the /meaning/ of their acts political or personal? It matters how we sort the answers to these questions out; it matters, that is, what meaning(s) we assign to the actions of these two men. What I'm suggesting is that we will almost certainly have to settle on a messy set of overlapping meanings. In this sense, simplicity is the enemy of clarity.

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