josh blog
Ordinary language is all right.
One could divide humanity into two classes:
those who master a metaphor, and those who hold by a formula.
Those with a bent for both are too few, they do not comprise a class.
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Refusal, or something akin to it, less defiant, more matter-of-fact, a simple nope, appears relatively late in the Investigations, for a book so conspicuously interested in the idea of people giving each other orders. And it enters not as a rejection of authority to command, not as refusal to do, out of disagreement, or disinclination, but in a way centered on the means of work: nope, tool's broken. As in earlier passages, like §20, the variation and sophistication in orders seems to derive not so much from more cultivated people—though there is 'hand me' and 'bring me' and 'get' and so on—but from the more seemingly basic fact already highlighted in language (2): there are different kinds of thing. As if the things tell us when or how we can or can't say no; as if they would provide us with reasons for saying no.
Rather: There's nothing else to it. A satisfied feeling, but just as well, sometimes, an anxious one: That's all?!
A 'primitiviren Sprache, als der unsern'; 'primitive Formen der Sprache' employed by 'das Kind, wenn es sprechen lernt'; 'eines jener Spiele… mittels welcher Kinder ihre Muttersprache erlernen'. A feeling: I stand over these, above these. Anyone can see what's involved. Or another: Play with this. Imagine you are…
—And so the emotions have to do with what? In Wittgenstein's case, say: what sorts of feelings are caught up with your language, your relation to it? With its not just being yours, but still: being yours?
It would be wrong to suppose that what stops you would always, at bottom, be you—at least, you alone, unrelated to others. Even with their 'I's, books pertain not just to you, or you and the author, but to others. A book is, as it were, an instrument for relating differently to others. For relating readers to others. And really, what doesn't stop us from relating differently to others? Us, them, the books, our reading. Whichever, failure is the rule. Still, a book promises that: connection, new relation—offers a chance. A complex opportunity which awaits realization.
What takes work is realizing what you've read. Or seeing why you haven't; won't. What stops you.
As if about that work, emotional work, PI §26, slightly modified, would say: 'One can call this a preparation for the uses of words. But what is it a preparation for?' Reading as readying yourself.