Hello hello. First off: Writing this week has gone surprisingly well. It feels good to focus directly and deliberately on the work that I’m reading. Having a more concrete, or specific, target does make the whole process go a lot more smoothly. I have always known this, this is why people laud outlines, but I’m always rediscovering things. It would be good if I could find a topic to write about properly, but that will happen when it happens… I am in a searching for project phase, because most of them have fizzled out a bit.

My reading discipline has begun to unravel a little bit. I have started to spread myself out across a few too many things and am becoming unfocused.

I’ve mostly been reading more Wittgenstein related stuff, focusing on the literature around what’s generally considered his last work On Certainty. It’s a relatively short book, but it has some really compelling ideas in it. Those ideas have been picked up over the past two decades or so and systematised a little bit through an approach called ‘hinge epistemology’. This approach gets at something in Wittgenstein, but a lot of the work seems to go against the spirit of what he was doing. But then, the mark of a good philosopher seems to be how useful a misreading of their work is.

One area that I’m very interested in is how basic moral certainties might explain some features of our ethical practices that don’t seem rationally grounded. There’s a short paper by Nigel Pleasants, “Wittgenstein, Ethics, and Basic Moral Certainties”, that goes some way to explaining how it might be helpful. Pleasants glosses the notion of hinge certainties discussed by Wittgenstein as having “the form of ethical propositions but which cannot actually be treated as ethical propositions nor become ethical knowledge” because they do not admit of a truth value, and, as such, cannot be doubted (255). Pleasants’s contention is that much moral philosophy attempts to treat our basic moral certainties as propositions and hence fails. It attempts to explain and justify things that cannot be explained or justified. Of course, we do sometimes try to put these certainties into words. Wittgenstein treats this attempt as a matter of philosophy or madness. Pleasants regards the use of figurative language in moral philosophy to reflect this, we say that dying is like losing something, because we cannot frame our certainty as a true proposition (259-60). The recourse to this language is “woefully inadequate to the momentousness” (260) of our convictions, as we well know. It is the non-propositional and non-knowledge character of our basic certainties that explains why.

I’m not in full agreement with him, but it’s interesting stuff. I’ve also been reading up on my Marx. I’m ashamed to say that I’ve just finished reading the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte for the first time. It is very good. One interesting thing about Marx’s more concrete historical, political, and journalistic work is how focused it is on identifiable fractions of the bourgeoisie (or other classes). The sorts of abstract trends that he observes in his theoretical work (for example, the tendency towards the formation of two broad classes) are still there, but he’s interested in how these trends play out in specific circumstances.

It’s a bit of a depressing read, unfortunately. Lots of the dynamics that he describes are mirrored today. It helps to know that tomorrow will still come, but it’s painful to be even aware of the history and future of suffering.

Finally, I have started to read through Virginia Tufte’s Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style. It is also very good. It helps me to see some examples of good writing, explained clearly and exactly. I don’t think that I will ever make a particularly good writer, but this sort of work shows me where there is room for improvement.