Monday, June 17, 2019

"The world is everything that is the case," said Wittgenstein. Later on, he thought it might have been better to start with a lamp or a tree. Perhaps a red wheelbarrow would have done the trick? We make ourselves pictures of such facts, he said. Indeed, much depends on them, said Williams. "Without imagination life cannot go on, for we are left staring at the empty casings where truth lived yesterday* while the creature itself has escaped behind us." The world is made of facts, not things. Or things, but glazed with rain.

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*These should remind us of the "nonsensical" propositions of philosophers, or the rungs of Wittgenstein's ladder. "The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem" (T6.521). We were never supposed to transcend them, we were supposed to inhabit them. The immanence of imagination. This lamp. That tree.