Wednesday 1 June 2011

Derek Jarman's Wittgenstein

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WzqyO-wIMI
Found Derek Jarman's Wittgenstein on the web, I'm framing the Buddha box/Zen garden as an investigation into the limits of symbolic logic, carefully (and slowly!) reading the The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus ("Logical-Philosophical Treatise"). Section 4 is the tricky one:

4.1 Propositions represent the existence and non-existence of states of affairs.
4.11 The totality of true propositions is the whole of natural science (or the whole corpus of the natural sciences).
4.111 Philosophy is not one of the natural sciences. (The word "philosophy" must mean something whose place is above or below the natural sciences, not beside them.)
4.112 Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. Philosophy does not result in "philosophical propositions", but rather in the clarification of propositions. Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries.
4.113 Philosophy sets limits to the much disputed sphere of natural science.
4.114 It must set limits to what can be thought; and, in doing so, to what cannot be thought. It must set limits to what cannot be thought by working outwards through what can be thought.
4.115 It will signify what cannot be said, by presenting clearly what can be said.

With the Buddha Box you can never see directly in it, only via a camera, and then only when Brainwave states are those synonymous with 'higher consciousness'.

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