I love this friendly jab at Flaubert from Nietzsche “On ne peut penser et écrire qu’assis - One cannot think and write except when seated (G. Flaubert).
There I have caught you, nihilist! The sedentary life is the very sin against the Holy Spirit. Only thoughts reached by walking have value.”
Let's imagine one note as a point on a plane, then an interval (2 notes) as a line connecting those notes. Next we have a chord (3 notes) and we get a triangle. By inverting the notes of the chord (135, 351 etc) we get a ring that representd different triangle shapes. Let's go into third dimension by adding one more note, thus a 4 chord can represent a pyramid.. you could also stay in 2D and represent a square etc.. by modulating and changing the tonal center you can move around the canvas or in space.. representing different data structures.. the horizontal movement would animate the structure as well!
"How to talk about books you haven't read" by Pierre Bayard is another interesting book on this subject.
I presume Derrida is not much liked around here but this excerpt is pure gold from the Derrida documentary https://youtu.be/tdumO88JMxw:
(Derrida shows his library to the interviewer)
"I haven't read all the books that are here"
"But you've read most of them?
"No, no ... three of four... but I've read those four really, really well."
related but off-topic:
Would it be nice if we could just go meta and share newsletters as "self-updating" bookmarks on something like pinboard(just a happy user here)? Next step - implementing machine-learning so that we have consistent static types. Tags are great but after a while I feel users forget them after a while and personally its a cognitive load on my side to make data structures of tags in my head. The second layer could be personal tags so that we have a more dynamic view. Is there something like this?
I remember hearing about starfighters.io sometime back and putting on my ever-growing tab of "Visit on freetime", but now it's--in all likelihood--gone forever.
There is a wonderfull joke in talmud when two rabbis argue about some problem. One says: Let's call Jehova and ask him directly! So Jehova comes but the other rabbi tells him: God go away, you did your thing now let us wise men discuss about this. God says oh my god you are right and he leaves.
German is very suitable for abstract thinking because you can form compound words with ease and put the function at the end of the sentence. These compound words are hard to translate (aufhebung - sublation is a famous example).
Hegel wrote about this in his Logic. German is like a different programming paradigm compared to English.
That is a very Whorfian view, but McWhorter, among others, would question whether it is at all plausible that these differences in what is little more than syntax can really make a profound difference in meaning. To put it another way, if these language features do make that much of a difference, then is there much more to these texts than a self-referential discussion of the meaning of the language used in these texts?
Your programming-paradigm analogy is perhaps unintentionally apt, as underneath their particular representations, they are all Turing-equivalent.
Program languages can be Turing equivalent however an alternative view of language is its like any other data encoding and via some kinds of Shannon's Law for human speech your language has to be able to achieve a certain SNR equivalent minimum to get an idea across in a small slice of a lifetime devoted to a book at a reasonably low enough error rate to claim a meeting of the minds on a topic. So you can write Kant in German and maybe its possible to understand an English translation of Kant with a bit more effort but there exists a hard lower SNR limit below which it doesnt work such that a Lojban translation of Kant is simply a fliba. Note that its difficult to find a Lojban-English dictionary that isn't also an English thesaurus in practice. There are indications Kant could be translated into Esperanto but nobodies tried in public, or maybe because its also quite impossible.
Now as a counter example (or is it?) see the whole concept of "a quran isn't a quran unless its written in arabic at which point its a real quran" vs the similar fun the pre-reformation christians had with the same belief WRT the new testament.
That is a very interesting point, but I wonder if Lojban's avoidance of ambiguity is the root of the translation difficulty - I doubt that Kant is unambiguous.
I think the quran and new testament issues arise from theology, not linguistics.
“This concern with aim or results, with differentiating and passing judgement on various thinkers is therefore an easier task than it might seem. For instead of getting involved in the real issue, this kind of activity is always away beyond it; instead of tarrying with it, and losing itself in it, “this kind of knowing is forever grasping at something new; it remains essentially preoccupied with itself instead of being preoccupied with the real issue and surrendering to it. To judge a thing that has substance and solid worth is quite easy, to comprehend it is much harder, and to blend judgement and comprehension in a definitive description is the hardest thing of all.”
Excerpt From: G. W. F. Hegel. “Phenomenology of Spirit.” Oxford University Press.
My best philosophy reads were almost always when I felt connected to the writer. They mostly all talk straight to the reader, but that doesn't mean I'm always feeling on the same level as them. But when I do it's like A close friend is telling me a story and I can understand their mind's machinations.
Hegels quote there is why I never spoke up in philosophy class. The other students would hear the tone of my voice or maybe the first 3 words out of my mouth and nothing else. They'd respond to fewer. It made me feel alienated.
As for why people should read philosophers: to learn. You can learn about wild individuality through Thoreau and Ed Abbey. Ethics from Kant, Aristotle, and many others. Life, death, and the meaning of both from many. We all have lives to lead and philosophers can help in the day to day and the big struggles.
I feel somewhat similar.. on a side note Hegel's way of thinking is very "algorhythmical". For example the art of the metaobject protocol explores common lisp in a similar way as Hegel explores the absolute spirit. Hegel is a macrologist par excellance!
