So we're going to conclude our consideration of Emerson,

his anti-conformist thinking now,

what Stanley Cavell calls his aversive thinking,

that is against the grain, with just the end of the essay, Self Reliance,

where his injunction is,

his lesson if you will, was never imitate.

Now of course, as well we're imitating Emerson, but Emerson is well aware of that

and what he's trying to do is to break the cycle of imitation.

Towards the end of the essay he writes, we are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune,

afraid of death, and afraid of each other.

Our age yields no great and perfect persons.

Our age yields no great and perfect persons,

because he feels in America we have become a culture of conformity.

Even while we celebrate individualism,

we have this tendency to create a situation where

individualism results in everybody trying to be an individual in the same way.

And so even as we break towards individualism,

we create even more conditions for conformity and

standardized testing of individuals, you could put it that way.

Medicalization of individuals where you might see in your own time, and

what happens is that, to protect everybody's individual right,

we collapsed or constrained the borders of possible actions.

And our age yields no great and perfect persons.

Emerson is the enemy of conformity, he is the enemy of imitation,

imitation either of our past selves or of the people around us.

Insist on yourself, never imitate.

Towards the end of Self Reliance, insist on yourself.

And it doesn't mean that you insist on yourself as some great deed,

some heroic action, but

it could be in your every day ordinary life, finding

yourself through action rather than through a process that

aims to discover a foundation or some goal for your entire life.

You are free to recreate every day.

In fact, by recreating yourself every day you have this openness to experience

that it can be extraordinarily powerful and conform to no one else at all.

As a teacher and now as president, I have tried to hold on to my Wesleyan

student experience of what Emerson and Stanley have called aversive thinking.

Thinking that is estranged from conformity.

The beauty of this aversion, its promise,

as Stanley Cavell has shown, is that it doesn't have to lead us into solitude.

The rejection of conformity can actually be a pursuit of happiness

when it is bound up with conversation, with friendship, and with love.

Thoreau knew that in certain places and at certain times,

we can aspire to another kind of life, another kind of society.

Looking out at you today at commencement, I can believe that Wesleyan has been

that kind of place for you and that your sojourn here has opened vistas for

you that will allow you to aspire to better ways of living together.

The rejection of conformity can mean finding another way to build community and

civic education, as Mayor Hickenlooper has done in Denver.

The rejection of conformity can mean creating an environment for

learning that prizes inclusion and celebrates achievement,

while not caving into narrow professionalism,

the kind of environment that President Simmons has built at Brown.

The rejection of conformity can mean, as in the work of Richard Winslow,

an embrace of the sounds and the silences that have come to be valued by

people whose commonality with us must be discovered, not presumed.

The rejection of conformity can be, Cavell teaches,

a refounding of community that has a space for each of us to find our paths

to individual genius through conversation and moral intimacy with others.

So here's Emerson, this kind of well, he's a preacher, he's a lecturer.

He's an inspirational writer who's trying to get his priors not to follow him but

to follow ourselves.

This is really important about Emerson.

Now we're moving to Ludwig Wittgenstein who's a writer coming from Austria,

coming from the hothouse of Vienna at the turn of the century, who is

emerging from an extraordinarily wealthy, talented, and troubled family.

Three of his brothers actually commit suicide.

Wittgenstein was very troubled himself, and by

all accounts a man of genius and

commitment, and who came upon philosophy as

possibly a rigorous science, he thought, that

would lead through logic to understand the foundations of language and mathematics.

He went from Vienna where he grew up as I say,

in this extraordinarily fertile culture ground.

We don't have time to get into that, but turn of the century Vienna

in 1900 is a subject of great fascination for cultural historians.

And my teacher actually, when I was enrolled in,

of course a little bit like this actually many years ago, was Carl Schorske,

whose book Fin-de-Siecle Vienna, gives you a glimpse into some

of the great writers and musicians who were active

in this capital of culture in 1900.

Wittgenstein comes out of that, heads to England to work with Burch and Russell.

Because Russell is engaged in the investigation of the systematic

foundations for language, and mathematics, for philosophy, can get rid of,

pare away the nonsense and focus on what we could know.

And Russell sees in Wittgenstein an extraordinarily powerful mind,

someone who he admired greatly and who scared him as well,

with his intensity and commitment and

possibilities for intellectual domination, as he said.

>> He was queer and his notions seemed to be odd.

So that for a whole term,

I could not make up my mind whether he was a man of genius or merely an eccentric.

At the end of his first term at Cambridge, he came to me and said,

will you please tell me whether I am a complete idiot or not?

If I am a complete idiot, I shall become an aeronaut, but if not,

I shall become a philosopher.

I told him to write me something during the vacation on some philosophical

subject, and I would then tell him whether he was a complete idiot or not.

At the beginning of the following term,

he brought me the fulfillment of this suggestion.

After reading only one sentence, I said to him no,

you must not become an aeronaut, and he didn't.

>> Wittgenstein produced early in his life the Tractatus,

which is about 75 pages long.

Tried to show in detail what we can say sensibly,

what makes sense in language, and what we can't talk about sensibly.

Things about which,

as he put, we should be silent because we can't speak sensibly about them.

Really defining, he thought, the parameters of reasonable discourse.

But after that and the beginning of the First World War,

Wittgenstein leaves philosophy, leaves England.

Goes to devote himself to work in the world, either driving an ambulance or

eventually teaching elementary school, and

then comes back to England many years later to do philosophy again.

And this later part of Wittgenstein's work seems

quite different to many philosophers, where he has a much more general

investigation of how we do use language.

Not how language should be founded, not on how it's basic system works,

but on how we actually use language.

And so people who emphasized the early Wittgenstein, as it's often called,

are emphasizing the logical structure of what can be sensibly said.

The folks who emphasize the later Wittgenstein are emphasizing

his commitment to understanding ordinary language and how, in fact,

we talk to each other and what we can understand by paying attention to that.

There are also philosophers who deny the difference between the late and early and

try to think of them together.

That's not our issue in this course, and in fact,

we're really just skating on the surface of this enormously complex thinker,

Wittgenstein, to get a couple of key concepts in the reading today.

Some of you read the paragraphs from the text On Certainty

where Wittgenstein talks about how language really works when

someone's asking for objects during a construction project, as you recall.

And also how we learn languages.

Some of you read similar material from

selections from the Philosophical Investigations, where Wittgenstein

also looks at how to understand the ways in which our words get meaning.

And that's why we are looking at Wittgenstein.

In the On Certainty example, he's looking at G.E.

Moore's response to the skeptic who claims

to wonder whether the external world exists.

Moore does something like this, where he says well, here is one hand,

here's another, I know I have two hands.

I know, and if I do have two hands, Moore says,

if I do have two hands, there must be an external world.

That's where they are, these two hands, in the external world.

Wittgenstein is intrigued by this presentation

of Moore's so-called reputation of skepticism,

but what does it mean to say, I know I have a hand?

Is it really knowledge that I have when I look at my hand?

Is that knowledge?

And this leads Wittgenstein to a consideration of what

we mean by using certain words, words like the verb,

to know, and how does that verb acquire meaning in what particular context?

And in this word context, we see the most important thing for our

purposes about Wittgenstein's contribution to the modern and the post-modern.

I call your attention to paragraph two.

From its seeming to me, or to everyone, to be so, it doesn't follow that it is so.

What we can ask is whether it can make sense to doubt it.

That is, can we actually make sense of the claim that I doubt that I have hands?

Is that something that would mean anything outside of a philosophy class?

Is it a sensible thing to claim to try to understand?

Can I really make sense of the word, know, in a sentence?

I know that I am a human being.

Is that a question of knowledge, Wittgenstein is asking?

And he begins to impress on

what the verb, to know, means in these contexts and whether it actually

has something to do with how we use the word, to know, in ordinary context.

Let's say, outside of a philosophy class.

>> Listen to me.

We imagine the meaning of what we say is something queer, mysterious,

hidden from view, but nothing's hidden, everything is open to view.

It's philosophers who muddy the waters.

>> Professor Wittgenstein, you can't know this pain, only I can.

>> Are you sure you hurt?

You're dark, you had to pain yourself?

>> How could I?

>> If we can't speak of dark here we can't speak of knowledge either.

>> I don't follow >> It makes no sense to speak of

knowing something in a context where we could not possibly doubt it.

Therefore to say, I know I am in pain, is entirely senseless.

When you want to know the meaning of a word, don't look inside yourself,

look at the uses of the word in our way of life.

Look at how we behave.

>> And what he comes to, and you see this in paragraphs 45, and 46, and 47,

by looking at this is that we come to understand a word, let's say the word,

to know, by it's repetitive use in ordinary situations.

Just like we learn how to calculate in mathematics, not

by studying the meaning of calculation, but by practicing calculation.

You learn to add not by doing the philosophy of mathematics.

You learn to add by adding, by calculating.

The Postmodern Everyday III

The Modern and the Postmodern (Part 2)

Meet the Instructors