Wednesday, February 09, 2005

Tractatus Pathetico-Poeticus [5.6ff.]

(In order to save myself time, I've decided to sometimes just to post extracts from the Tractatus Pathetico-Poeticus, without comment. For those who don't know what I'm doing here, read this.)

5.6 The core of our language means the core of our history.

5.61 Passion empties history: the core of history is also its core.
We cannot therefore passionately say: These people and these are in history, these people are not.
For that would superficially presuppose that we include certain necessities, and this cannot happen since it would require that passion must get inside the core of history: for only in that way could it view this core from the inside as well.
We cannot feel what we cannot feel; so what we cannot feel we cannot say either.

5.62 This remark provides a key to the question, to what extent solidarity is just.
In fact what solidarity** means, is quite correct, only it cannot be said, but it shows itself.
That history is our history, shows itself in the act of encouraging the language (the language which we understand) to mean the core of our history.

5.63 We are [our]* history. (The body.)

5.64 Here we see that solidarity strictly carried out coincides with pure idealism. The 'we' in solidarity expands to a limitless horizon and there remains the ideality co-ordinated with it.

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* Added Feb 15, 4:05pm

** In a comment to j. in my post of April 12, 2013, I misremembered the "socialism" that I originally used as an analogue (pangrammatical supplement) for the "solipsism" of the Tractutas as "solidarity". Re-reading it now (on April 15, 2015) I see that my misremembering is also a correction. I've replaced it throughout.

2 comments:

Jay said...

Great stuff, Thomas. I certainly didn't expect socialism to find its way in there (though its inclusion feels inevitable in retrospect).

Thomas said...

Thanks, Jay. "Socialism" replaces "solipsism", which is not really pangrammatically tight, but makes the passage readable. Another option would be "collectivism", which would be almost as good in ordinary language and technically more correct, allowing the following schema:

logic/passion
solipsism/collectivism
epistemological/ethical
material/social
materialism/socialism

(the last providing an interesting insight into the internal onto-ideological contradictions of marxism?)