Latest news with #Wittgenstein
Indian Express
4 days ago
- General
- Indian Express
Pets as part of the family. Australian law confirms it
Ludwig Wittgenstein, the man who all but broke Philosophy, would likely have appreciated Australia's Family Law Amendment Act that comes into force next week. A singular mind, Wittgenstein showed how many of the most intractable problems of metaphysics — and life, really — are rooted in misunderstandings of language. For example, the questions 'who gets the house' and 'who gets the dog' follow the same syntax. But that doesn't mean they should be addressed in the same way. Fortunately, in Australia at least, the law will no longer treat the family dog like any other piece of property. After a breakup or divorce, the best interests of the pet and who the primary caregiver is, among other considerations, will determine custody — not an archaic idea of 'ownership'. To be fair, the idea of pets as 'fur babies' — especially in urban and well-to-do households — is relatively recent. Animals have been domesticated for three purposes: Food, transport and labour, and as companions for hunting, guarding and pest control. But some animals, even when they are working, are a part of the family. A dog feels, even when she guards and a cat has moods, even when she catches mice. They have an inner life, likes and dislikes. Dogs, especially, need care, and give it back in return and, unlike children, are always grateful for a meal, a hug and a walk. Australia's law is, then, both a correction and an admission. It ensures the well-being of an animal, emotional and physical, as it would of a dependent. It also acknowledges that the anthropocentric view of ethical and legal systems leaves out some of the most important members of a family, that when a home is broken, the pet isn't just a part of the furniture. Hopefully, lawmakers in the rest of the world will take a leaf out of Australia's book.
Yahoo
5 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
How Wittgenstein Can Make You Happier
Want to stay current with Arthur's writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out. My preoccupation with writing about meaning, love, and happiness derives from my desire to understand these parts of life more deeply, and impart to others whatever understanding I can glean. I will confess that this can be a frustrating task at times because I feel as though I can never get to the essence of these sublimities; words always feel inadequate. For a long time, I believed that at some point—maybe after writing a million more words—I would finally arrive at the ability to adequately express what it is that I'm seeking. The philosopher Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein, who died in 1951, probably would have told me I was barking up the wrong tree. The writer and fellow philosopher Bertrand Russell called Wittgenstein's work 'perhaps the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense and dominating,' yet Wittgenstein did not leave us much of it. He published only one book of philosophy in his life, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which itself is only about 75 pages long. In it, Wittgenstein explained that language can never convey the fullest understanding of life. 'The limits of my language,' he wrote, 'mean the limits of my world.' Wittgenstein was no doubt conscious of the irony of making this argument through language. But in so doing, he offered a path to getting beyond words and to apprehend, after all, the ineffable essence of what we seek. Arthur C. Brooks: The ultimate German philosophy for a happier life Human communication is rife with misunderstanding, as social scientists have long observed. Researchers writing in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology in 2011 showed that people misunderstand the intended meaning of what others say, especially among close acquaintances such as family and friends. The scholars found that those who spoke with strangers communicated more clearly than with close associates, believing—incorrectly—that the latter would understand ambiguous phrases by virtue of their intimate affiliation. So what are the odds that you'll grasp correctly the next thing your spouse tells you? Digital communication makes the situation worse because it eliminates nonverbal cues. One explanation psychologists offer as a common cause of misunderstanding is motivated reasoning, in which our own desires and beliefs determine what we perceive to be true, rather than what someone else is telling us. For example, when your partner innocently asks what you've been up to today, you might incorrectly apprehend this as an expression of suspicion, because, in fact, you've been up to something they wouldn't approve of. Whereas psychologists see the problem as one of unreliable narrators and inattentive listeners, Wittgenstein, as a philosopher, saw the very medium of language itself as inherently flawed. Words, he believed, were inadequate to the task of conveying subtle truths, metaphysical ideas, or any subjective experience. This was because language is nothing more than a crude model of the world—a jumble of sounds or symbols that represents the underlying reality of existence about as accurately as a map on your phone represents a forest you're walking through. The sight of tall trees, the smell of pine needles, the solitude you sought have virtually nothing to do with the squiggle on the screen that crudely marks the trail. Wittgenstein never knew our modern technologies of communication, but he would surely see that they make his point times 10. Consider how much a text-message abbreviation and an emoji really tell you about what is in your beloved's heart. LOL, not much, right? Wittgenstein's proposition has significant implications for happiness, because misunderstanding lowers our well-being. For example, experiments show how failing to be understood by others reduces the satisfaction that participants report in subsequent activities. Even more profound, his conclusion about the inadequacy of language suggests that we will never comprehend the true meaning of our lives by reading or talking about it. How are we to escape this thicket of muddle and misunderstanding? To find meaning without words suggests that we need to seek a particular kind of transcendence. [Arthur C. Brooks: The key to critical self-awareness] Wittgenstein's contention resembles Saint Augustine of Hippo's argument that God is what we want, but God's nature also evades human expression—in fact, merely to talk about the divine is to trivialize him. But Augustine did not think that we should therefore abandon the whole project. The trick is to see language as only the beginning of a spiritual journey, not the end. He suggested that we use just one word—Deus (Latin for 'God')—as an audible departure point into the realm of the inexpressible. 'When that sound reaches' your ears,' he wrote, 'think of a nature supreme in excellence and eternal in existence.' This is, I believe, very close to what Wittgenstein suggested as well. I would recommend a couple of signposts to guide you on your journey beyond words. 1. Think; don't talk. Many religious and wisdom traditions recommend meditative contemplation on a single concept. Tibetan Buddhists call it 'analytical meditation,' a practice with which the Dalai Lama starts his morning, as he told me, and to which he devotes at least an hour every day. This mode of meditation involves a focused reflection on a scriptural phrase to inspire insight into what it signifies. (The Augustinian version of this practice was, in effect, to make Deus his word to meditate upon.) If I'm doing this, I might use the phrase 'I love my wife' as my starting point. Then I'd try to engage the right hemisphere of my brain, the region that processes meaningful associations and concepts, in contrast with the left hemisphere's logical problem-solving ability. The idea is to liberate my cognition from the limits of my vocabulary and linguistic ability—easier said than done, but it can be enough to just sit in silence with my phrase or allow my mind to roam on a forest walk. 2. Seek understanding, not answers. The second step—which is allied with disengaging our habitual left-brain dominance—is to stop looking for exact answers to difficult questions. The purpose of analytical meditation is not to generate a clean explanation for why I love my wife. Nor is it to compose a precise but prosaic argument for why I do so. That would be to go in the wrong direction, according to Wittgenstein and Augustine, only committing me more to the poverty of language and taking me further from the underlying truth. As soon as one tries to verbalize an answer to explain this love—'Because she is good to me'—one has belittled the concept and literally understated its truth. Consider how even the greatest love poetry—such as these lines from Elizabeth Barrett Browning: 'I love thee with the breath, / Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose, / I shall but love thee better after death'—essentially restates the Augustinian verity that this deeply complex experience defies utterance. The goal is to gain an understanding of this love, not an answer that's like the solution to a mathematical equation. [Arthur C. Brooks: The bliss of a quieter ego] What would Wittgenstein have us do about our ultimate problem of meaning in life? 'Whereof one cannot speak,' he offered as the last proposition in Tractatus, 'thereof one must be silent.' By all means, talk about trivial things, he seems to be saying, but don't waste your time trying to express life's profundities, because you will only fool others and frustrate yourself; better to keep your counsel. This injunction has generally been understood as a nihilistic statement of the impossibility of expression, and therefore of knowledge. I believe it is nothing of the sort. Being silent is the beginning of a different sort of cognition, a meditational path that does not seek straightforward answers. Allow yourself this silence, and the understanding you gain will be your ineffable reward. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
5 days ago
- General
- Atlantic
How Wittgenstein Can Make You Happier
Want to stay current with Arthur's writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out. My preoccupation with writing about meaning, love, and happiness derives from my desire to understand these parts of life more deeply, and impart to others whatever understanding I can glean. I will confess that this can be a frustrating task at times because I feel as though I can never get to the essence of these sublimities; words always feel inadequate. For a long time, I believed that at some point —maybe after writing a million more words—I would finally arrive at the ability to adequately express what it is that I'm seeking. The philosopher Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein, who died in 1951, probably would have told me I was barking up the wrong tree. The writer and fellow philosopher Bertrand Russell called Wittgenstein's work 'perhaps the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense and dominating,' yet Wittgenstein did not leave us much of it. He published only one book of philosophy in his life, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which itself is only about 75 pages long. In it, Wittgenstein explained that language can never convey the fullest understanding of life. ' The limits of my language,' he wrote, 'mean the limits of my world.' Wittgenstein was no doubt conscious of the irony of making this argument through language. But in so doing, he offered a path to getting beyond words and to apprehend, after all, the ineffable essence of what we seek. Arthur C. Brooks: The ultimate German philosophy for a happier life Human communication is rife with misunderstanding, as social scientists have long observed. Researchers writing in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology in 2011 showed that people misunderstand the intended meaning of what others say, especially among close acquaintances such as family and friends. The scholars found that those who spoke with strangers communicated more clearly than with close associates, believing—incorrectly—that the latter would understand ambiguous phrases by virtue of their intimate affiliation. So what are the odds that you'll grasp correctly the next thing your spouse tells you? Digital communication makes the situation worse because it eliminates nonverbal cues. One explanation psychologists offer as a common cause of misunderstanding is motivated reasoning, in which our own desires and beliefs determine what we perceive to be true, rather than what someone else is telling us. For example, when your partner innocently asks what you've been up to today, you might incorrectly apprehend this as an expression of suspicion, because, in fact, you've been up to something they wouldn't approve of. Whereas psychologists see the problem as one of unreliable narrators and inattentive listeners, Wittgenstein, as a philosopher, saw the very medium of language itself as inherently flawed. Words, he believed, were inadequate to the task of conveying subtle truths, metaphysical ideas, or any subjective experience. This was because language is nothing more than a crude model of the world—a jumble of sounds or symbols that represents the underlying reality of existence about as accurately as a map on your phone represents a forest you're walking through. The sight of tall trees, the smell of pine needles, the solitude you sought have virtually nothing to do with the squiggle on the screen that crudely marks the trail. Wittgenstein never knew our modern technologies of communication, but he would surely see that they make his point times 10. Consider how much a text-message abbreviation and an emoji really tell you about what is in your beloved's heart. LOL, not much, right? Wittgenstein's proposition has significant implications for happiness, because misunderstanding lowers our well-being. For example, experiments show how failing to be understood by others reduces the satisfaction that participants report in subsequent activities. Even more profound, his conclusion about the inadequacy of language suggests that we will never comprehend the true meaning of our lives by reading or talking about it. How are we to escape this thicket of muddle and misunderstanding? To find meaning without words suggests that we need to seek a particular kind of transcendence. Arthur C. Brooks: The key to critical self-awareness Wittgenstein's contention resembles Saint Augustine of Hippo's argument that God is what we want, but God's nature also evades human expression—in fact, merely to talk about the divine is to trivialize him. But Augustine did not think that we should therefore abandon the whole project. The trick is to see language as only the beginning of a spiritual journey, not the end. He suggested that we use just one word— Deus (Latin for 'God')—as an audible departure point into the realm of the inexpressible. 'When that sound reaches' your ears,' he wrote, 'think of a nature supreme in excellence and eternal in existence.' This is, I believe, very close to what Wittgenstein suggested as well. I would recommend a couple of signposts to guide you on your journey beyond words. 1. Think; don't talk. Many religious and wisdom traditions recommend meditative contemplation on a single concept. Tibetan Buddhists call it 'analytical meditation,' a practice with which the Dalai Lama starts his morning, as he told me, and to which he devotes at least an hour every day. This mode of meditation involves a focused reflection on a scriptural phrase to inspire insight into what it signifies. (The Augustinian version of this practice was, in effect, to make Deus his word to meditate upon.) If I'm doing this, I might use the phrase 'I love my wife' as my starting point. Then I'd try to engage the right hemisphere of my brain, the region that processes meaningful associations and concepts, in contrast with the left hemisphere's logical problem-solving ability. The idea is to liberate my cognition from the limits of my vocabulary and linguistic ability—easier said than done, but it can be enough to just sit in silence with my phrase or allow my mind to roam on a forest walk. 2. Seek understanding, not answers. The second step—which is allied with dis engaging our habitual left-brain dominance—is to stop looking for exact answers to difficult questions. The purpose of analytical meditation is not to generate a clean explanation for why I love my wife. Nor is it to compose a precise but prosaic argument for why I do so. That would be to go in the wrong direction, according to Wittgenstein and Augustine, only committing me more to the poverty of language and taking me further from the underlying truth. As soon as one tries to verbalize an answer to explain this love—'Because she is good to me'—one has belittled the concept and literally understated its truth. Consider how even the greatest love poetry —such as these lines from Elizabeth Barrett Browning: 'I love thee with the breath, / Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose, / I shall but love thee better after death'—essentially restates the Augustinian verity that this deeply complex experience defies utterance. The goal is to gain an understanding of this love, not an answer that's like the solution to a mathematical equation. Arthur C. Brooks: The bliss of a quieter ego What would Wittgenstein have us do about our ultimate problem of meaning in life? 'Whereof one cannot speak,' he offered as the last proposition in Tractatus, 'thereof one must be silent.' By all means, talk about trivial things, he seems to be saying, but don't waste your time trying to express life's profundities, because you will only fool others and frustrate yourself; better to keep your counsel. This injunction has generally been understood as a nihilistic statement of the impossibility of expression, and therefore of knowledge. I believe it is nothing of the sort. Being silent is the beginning of a different sort of cognition, a meditational path that does not seek straightforward answers. Allow yourself this silence, and the understanding you gain will be your ineffable reward.
Arab News
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Arab News
A new artistic epoch or the collapse of meaning?
Some revolutions begin with a manifesto. Ours began with a shark in sneakers, a gorilla made of bananas, and a bomber jacket-clad crocodile. No, not a metaphor. Not a symbol. Just a digitally generated image of a shark wearing crisp blue Nikes, jogging through a neon jungle with a caption that read: 'Monday is a concept, Kevin.' Not a painting, not a sculpture, but a digitally rendered, golden-hued banana gorilla — smiling, no less — circulating wildly on social media. One minute, you are scrolling past wedding photos and baby updates; the next, you are face to face with a crocodile in a bomber jacket sipping tea at a Parisian cafe. Welcome to the new Renaissance, apparently. Only this time, the artists have silicon brains, limitless imaginations, and no regard for the difference between Salvador Dali and a children's cereal ad. The rise of AI-generated images has become the latest absurdity in our ongoing tango with ethical reason. Are we witnessing the dawn of a new artistic epoch — or the collapse of meaning as we know it? Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once said: 'If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.' One wonders what Wittgenstein would say about a lion generated by MidJourney, wearing glasses and riding a unicycle through Times Square while quoting Plato. Is this communication, parody, prophecy — or simply pixels gone wild? Let us not pretend we have not seen this before. The memeification of art has been underway for some time, from deepfakes to NFT apes. But this new wave, this deluge of digitally conjured, hyper-real absurdity, invites more than idle chuckles. It raises deeply confusing and slightly horrifying ethical questions. Who owns an image that no human created? Who is responsible for its message — or its misunderstanding? And just like that, the age of AI image-generation brain rot was born. This term, now lovingly and ironically adopted by digital natives and reluctantly Googled by digital immigrants — describes the mental state induced by consuming endless streams of surreal, absurd, contextless AI-generated content. You know the kind: a goose in a business suit negotiating peace between planets; a Victorian child made of waffles; a platypus holding a sign that says: 'Capitalism is soup and I am a fork.' And yet we keep scrolling. We are enchanted. Philosopher Theodor Adorno once said: 'Art is the social antithesis of society.' In Techville, AI generated imagery is the social antithesis of logic. It is the philosophical equivalent of an espresso martini at 4 a.m. — confusing, unwise, but oddly invigorating. Let us take a moment to consider the rise of AI-generated nonsense. These are not merely strange pictures. They are surreal flashes of algorithmic creativity, trained on the deepest layers of the internet's subconscious. And they come with short, cryptic phrases like: 'Let the ducks speak.' 'Reality is just poorly rendered soup.' 'He who controls the cheese, controls the skies.' Somewhere, Franz Kafka is either applauding or suing. A generation raised on surreal, algorithmic absurdity risks losing its appetite for clarity, coherence, or even causality. Rafael Hernandez de Santiago We are not just talking about art. We are talking about a cultural shift — where traditional storytelling collapses under the weight of its own earnestness and is replaced by AI-generated absurdity that says nothing and yet, somehow, feels like it says everything. But what does this mean ethically? Who is responsible when an image of a bishop made entirely of spaghetti holding a flamingo whispering 'Free me, Deborah' goes viral and is mistaken for a political statement? And more urgently: if the shark in sneakers gets invited to the Venice Biennale before any human artist from an emerging country, what does that say about the role of merit, meaning, and memory in the digital age? Let us not pretend we are above it. Even the most hardened ethicist has giggled at the image of a courtroom filled with sentient toasters. There is something irresistibly clever about the stupidity of it all. But cleverness is not meaning. And meaning, in this age, is in short supply. Wittgenstein warned: 'Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.' But in the AI era, silence is drowned out by a relentless stream of images of owls wearing Beats headphones, standing on Mars, yelling: 'I miss the smell of Tuesdays.' One might ask: is this art? Or is it something else entirely — a kind of digital dreaming, outsourced to machines, shared by humans, and celebrated not for depth but for derangement? The concern is not the images themselves. It is the passivity they invite. A generation raised on surreal, algorithmic absurdity risks losing its appetite for clarity, coherence, or even causality. Why analyze the 'Iliad' when you can generate an image of Achilles as a grumpy cat in a trench coat yelling at a holographic Helen? And yet — ironically, tragically, wonderfully — some of these AI creations do resonate. Like dreams or parables, they bypass logic and tap into something weirder and older: our deep love of surprise, of nonsense, of fractured truth. Kierkegaard, of all people, might understand. He once wrote: 'The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly the one you'll never have.' Maybe that is what the AI duck in a spaceship is trying to tell us. But we must not look away. Because behind every absurd AI image is a real question: who shapes our imagination? Who owns our attention? And what happens to a society that forgets how to ask why, as long as it keeps saying 'wow'? It is tempting to laugh and move on. To repost the image of a minotaur doing taxes under a disco ball with the caption: 'He files, therefore he is.' But we are in dangerous waters. Or worse, dangerous milk. Because the cow now has laser eyes and speaks French. And it is trending. In conclusion, though in this genre, conclusions are entirely optional, the AI brain-rot phenomenon is not just a meme. It is a mirror. A funhouse mirror, yes, one cracked and sprayed with digital nonsense, but a mirror nonetheless. We must reflect, not only on the images but on ourselves. Why do we laugh at a shark in sneakers? Why does it stay with us? Why does it feel truer than the news? Maybe that is the real concern. That meaning has been replaced by mood. That critique has been swallowed by consumption. That we are all just raccoons in suits, holding signs that read: 'Context is cancelled.' • Rafael Hernandez de Santiago, viscount of Espes, is a Spanish national residing in Saudi Arabia and working at the Gulf Research Center.
The Herald Scotland
26-04-2025
- Climate
- The Herald Scotland
Scots Word of the Week: Wheech (be quick or it will be gone)
In January 1948, the Forfar Dispatch used the term to depict the aftermath of fierce winds: 'The Granny [chimney cowl] on the lum-heid [on top of the chimney] gaed wheekin up ee air afore it fell throwe the sky-licht ee washin-hoose'. The vagaries of the Scots' spelling dilemma are illustrated by Sheena Blackhall in Wittgenstein's Web (1996): 'I dinna recollect ae relation, stoppin mid-ben a spikk an wheekin oot a dictionar tae see gin a wird wis richt standart Scots or nae!'. In 2000, the term appeared in Davie Kerr's A Puckle Poems: 'As the tourists wheech thro', they wad gey aften fail ti appreciate, caa'in it 'Sweet' Armadale.' Of course, such a handy term remains in widespread use in the 21st century. Take this example from the Dundee Courier in December 2022 which perfectly captures the spirit of the post-Christmas period: 'Notes carefully written to thank absent, distant relatives for their kindness. Videos and photos taken to capture moments that would otherwise wheech past in the blink of an eye'. Scots Word of the Week comes from Dictionaries of the Scots Language. Visit DSL Online at
