5 ms·

How Wittgenstein Watched Movies

62 points by keiferski 3y ago

keiferski 3y ago
As someone reasonably familiar with Wittgenstein's work, I was surprised by how much of his time was spent going to the movies. And not to see masterpieces, but mostly to see formulaic American Westerns. He was plagued by philosophical thoughts constantly and so a movie "without any artistic or intellectual pretensions" served as a kind of mind refresher for him.
- benrutter 3y ago
  Interestinigly he had a similar taste in books and consumed pulp crime fiction like they had an expiration date. You'd think this would indicate he was a lighthearted person outside of his work, but most accounts seem to have him down as an extremely intense personality. I think Wittgenstein is genuinely impossible to pin down both in terms of his work, and his life.
- lukeasrodgers 3y ago
  There is a line in Wittgenstein’s Vienna (by Janik and Toulmin) that links W’s love of westerns up with his philosophical work (esp the Tractatus), roughly “W liked westerns because they showed ethical principles vs trying to demonstrate them with philosophical arguments.” I’m not an expert but I think the book is a great intellectual biography not just of W but of the time and place in general.
  - keiferski 3y ago
    Interesting, I will check out that biography for sure.
  - bloak 3y ago
    I wouldn't have thought that either the Tractatus or westerns have much to do with ethics but philosophy can make some strange connections and that book does sound interesting.
  - sdwr 3y ago
    Love that analysis. Reminds me of some experiences on drugs where, if you empty your mind tabula rasa, movies look like compressed guides to emotions and relating in society. Hard to see normally because of how much experience and context we bring in. There are also different lenses you can watch through. The typical one is immersion - keeping track of the characters, feeling the tension as it ratchets up and down. The two others I like are background - keeping track of the scenery as if it's a character, reading lighting and detail as its moods. And naive sequential - treating each shot as if its a direct reply to the previous one.
ofrzeta 3y ago
Is the image on top of the article real? I've never seen it before.
- endorphine 3y ago
  Seems like the work of some AI tool to me.
  - KineticLensman 3y ago
    The caption now says 'Image made with Midjourney'. I wouldn't necessarily have thought it was AI-generated from the style although the fact he is apparently the only person in the auditorium hints that it isn't an actual photo of Wittgenstein at the movies. Unless he went to very unpopular films, that is.
- keiferski 3y ago
  I just created it in Midjourney.
  - ofrzeta 3y ago
    If you ask me you should add some sort of caption.
    - keiferski 3y ago
      Done
    - dennis_moore 3y ago
      This made me think that we, as a society, ought to have some sort of convention to mark AI-generated images as such, like a small watermarked symbol in a corner.
      - bheadmaster 3y ago
        [flagged]
ofrzeta 3y ago
There are some quotes in Malcolm's book about Wittgenstein's habit of reading detective stories, too. Related to the question raised in the article whether going to the movies was just leisure or also philosophial. Taken with a grain of salt I especially like this one: "Your mags are wonderful. How people can read Mind if they could read Street & Smith beats me. If philosophy has anything to do with wisdom, there's certainly not a grain of that in Mind, & quite often a grain in the detective stories." (p. 32 in the Clarendon Press, 2001 edition)
- keiferski 3y ago
  Yep, I remember reading an anecdote describing Wittgenstein's room as being entirely bare of books, except for some pulpy detective fiction novels.
  - rgrieselhuber 3y ago
    The character of Agent Cooper in Twin Peaks is a nice personification of the “detective” aspect of the truth / knowledge seeking mechanism in our minds IMO.
tpm 3y ago
> ”You think philosophy is difficult enough but I can tell you it is nothing to the difficulty of being a good architect. When I was building the house for my sister in Vienna I was so completely exhausted at the end of the day that all I could do was go to a ‘flick’ every night.” Go see the house if you have the opportunity and are interested in architecture. Very rarely have I seen something that feels so subtly but without doubt wrong in proportions. In the end his sister could not live there and the house was sold - it's now some exhibition centre I think.
Errancer 3y ago
I always felt like Wittgenstein deeply hated philosophy and all his work was aimed at showing its meaninglessness. That is why I felt that despite the theoretical opposition between his early and late work they are continuous. The proofs has changed but the claim remained the same. But his hatred was sourced in the fact that he couldn't stop himself from engaging into it and found this desire deeply stupid and despicable so again and again he had to show himself that this is futile but as it is with philosophy every time you think you made a point a new angle revels itself and you need to adjust the argument ad nausea. So in this sense I find his preference for stupid movies understandable. The ability to just stop thinking about what you consider irresolvable, meaningless problems is a blessing and dumb pop fiction is a safe space with no traps that would cause you to think anew some problems. Now, none of what I said is backed by any research really. I haven't read his biography and I might be projecting my own experience, but I feel like there are some experiences a prolonged engagement in philosophy causes and they are quite difficult to explain to people who have not went through them. Like, you can pick up St. Augustine or Kierkegaard and I feel that they want to scream their lungs out the exact same insight. Kierkegaard had similar relation to the theatre as far as I remember. Anyway, there is no clear point to my comment. I guess I am interested what others are thinking.
- programmer_dude 3y ago
  Nit: replace went with gone.
  - mdp2021 3y ago
    If we have this branch, also 'ad nauseam'. But let's face it, we do not have all the time in the world to polish what we are composing here, so there will be errors.
    - Errancer 3y ago
      This one is funny since I deliberately checked how to write it correctly and I found the form 'ad nauseam' annnnd somehow left it in the incorrect form. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
syntaxfree 3y ago
McLuhan famously has this notion of cold and hot media. In the movie theater light shines at a screen and you see its reflection; on TV, and more so with phones, the light beams directly into your eyes. It makes a difference.
- ngcc_hk 3y ago
  Even though his cold and hot is a bit strange, I am not sure it is related how light reflect is the key here. The key might be the way it is produced (but it blurs now as we saw movies made for tv, social media … and watch on tv), but the key is you go to a cinema and let yourselves immerse into it.
druidish 3y ago
Didn’t Wittgenstein beat children? What an inspirational thought leader…
- kafkaesque 3y ago
  This should absolutely not be downvoted. Wittgenstein's perjury in the court of law when in trial for beating Haidbauer touched all parts of his life, and it could be argued that this is why he hated the Tractatus, a body of work he once said was the last thing to say about all of philosophy. This is the kind of complex man he was, though. People read Tractatus and find problems with it. Well, yes, even Wittgenstein saw that it was misguided, which is why he wrote Philosophical Investigations. But lying in a court of law and getting away with it, and feeling disgusted in himself, tracks with how he saw himself and how disenchanted he was with the world.
  - gattilorenz 3y ago
    That's a slightly more sophisticated take, compared to "ugh this person did something Very Bad (TM), let's disregard absolutely anything else that they did", isn't it?
perfmode 3y ago
sounds like he was trying to meditate
ngcc_hk 3y ago
Language like evilness is built in with us. You cannot use language to escape language, at least no promise. Clarity is limited by language itself. Similarly for evil, whilst most religion including non-religious thought like Buddhism (except Tien tai which Buddha has evil nature forever) are trying to single out evil, set a boundary and eliminate it and put all those have it into hell and let us ignore it. It is the same issues. You cannot escape from it. You are it it at least part of you are it. Live with it.

62 points by keiferski 3y ago

As someone reasonably familiar with Wittgenstein's work, I was surprised by how much of his time was spent going to the movies. And not to see masterpieces, but mostly to see formulaic American Westerns. He was plagued by philosophical thoughts constantly and so a movie "without any artistic or intellectual pretensions" served as a kind of mind refresher for him.

benrutter 3y ago
Interestinigly he had a similar taste in books and consumed pulp crime fiction like they had an expiration date. You'd think this would indicate he was a lighthearted person outside of his work, but most accounts seem to have him down as an extremely intense personality. I think Wittgenstein is genuinely impossible to pin down both in terms of his work, and his life.
lukeasrodgers 3y ago
There is a line in Wittgenstein’s Vienna (by Janik and Toulmin) that links W’s love of westerns up with his philosophical work (esp the Tractatus), roughly “W liked westerns because they showed ethical principles vs trying to demonstrate them with philosophical arguments.” I’m not an expert but I think the book is a great intellectual biography not just of W but of the time and place in general.
- keiferski 3y ago
  Interesting, I will check out that biography for sure.
- bloak 3y ago
  I wouldn't have thought that either the Tractatus or westerns have much to do with ethics but philosophy can make some strange connections and that book does sound interesting.
- sdwr 3y ago
  Love that analysis. Reminds me of some experiences on drugs where, if you empty your mind tabula rasa, movies look like compressed guides to emotions and relating in society. Hard to see normally because of how much experience and context we bring in. There are also different lenses you can watch through. The typical one is immersion - keeping track of the characters, feeling the tension as it ratchets up and down. The two others I like are background - keeping track of the scenery as if it's a character, reading lighting and detail as its moods. And naive sequential - treating each shot as if its a direct reply to the previous one.

ofrzeta 3y ago

Is the image on top of the article real? I've never seen it before.

endorphine 3y ago
Seems like the work of some AI tool to me.
- KineticLensman 3y ago
  The caption now says 'Image made with Midjourney'. I wouldn't necessarily have thought it was AI-generated from the style although the fact he is apparently the only person in the auditorium hints that it isn't an actual photo of Wittgenstein at the movies. Unless he went to very unpopular films, that is.
keiferski 3y ago
I just created it in Midjourney.
- ofrzeta 3y ago
  If you ask me you should add some sort of caption.
  - keiferski 3y ago
    Done
  - dennis_moore 3y ago
    This made me think that we, as a society, ought to have some sort of convention to mark AI-generated images as such, like a small watermarked symbol in a corner.
    - bheadmaster 3y ago
      [flagged]

ofrzeta 3y ago

There are some quotes in Malcolm's book about Wittgenstein's habit of reading detective stories, too. Related to the question raised in the article whether going to the movies was just leisure or also philosophial. Taken with a grain of salt I especially like this one: "Your mags are wonderful. How people can read Mind if they could read Street & Smith beats me. If philosophy has anything to do with wisdom, there's certainly not a grain of that in Mind, & quite often a grain in the detective stories." (p. 32 in the Clarendon Press, 2001 edition)

keiferski 3y ago
Yep, I remember reading an anecdote describing Wittgenstein's room as being entirely bare of books, except for some pulpy detective fiction novels.
- rgrieselhuber 3y ago
  The character of Agent Cooper in Twin Peaks is a nice personification of the “detective” aspect of the truth / knowledge seeking mechanism in our minds IMO.

tpm 3y ago

> ”You think philosophy is difficult enough but I can tell you it is nothing to the difficulty of being a good architect. When I was building the house for my sister in Vienna I was so completely exhausted at the end of the day that all I could do was go to a ‘flick’ every night.” Go see the house if you have the opportunity and are interested in architecture. Very rarely have I seen something that feels so subtly but without doubt wrong in proportions. In the end his sister could not live there and the house was sold - it's now some exhibition centre I think.

Errancer 3y ago

I always felt like Wittgenstein deeply hated philosophy and all his work was aimed at showing its meaninglessness. That is why I felt that despite the theoretical opposition between his early and late work they are continuous. The proofs has changed but the claim remained the same. But his hatred was sourced in the fact that he couldn't stop himself from engaging into it and found this desire deeply stupid and despicable so again and again he had to show himself that this is futile but as it is with philosophy every time you think you made a point a new angle revels itself and you need to adjust the argument ad nausea. So in this sense I find his preference for stupid movies understandable. The ability to just stop thinking about what you consider irresolvable, meaningless problems is a blessing and dumb pop fiction is a safe space with no traps that would cause you to think anew some problems. Now, none of what I said is backed by any research really. I haven't read his biography and I might be projecting my own experience, but I feel like there are some experiences a prolonged engagement in philosophy causes and they are quite difficult to explain to people who have not went through them. Like, you can pick up St. Augustine or Kierkegaard and I feel that they want to scream their lungs out the exact same insight. Kierkegaard had similar relation to the theatre as far as I remember. Anyway, there is no clear point to my comment. I guess I am interested what others are thinking.

programmer_dude 3y ago
Nit: replace went with gone.
- mdp2021 3y ago
  If we have this branch, also 'ad nauseam'. But let's face it, we do not have all the time in the world to polish what we are composing here, so there will be errors.
  - Errancer 3y ago
    This one is funny since I deliberately checked how to write it correctly and I found the form 'ad nauseam' annnnd somehow left it in the incorrect form. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

syntaxfree 3y ago

McLuhan famously has this notion of cold and hot media. In the movie theater light shines at a screen and you see its reflection; on TV, and more so with phones, the light beams directly into your eyes. It makes a difference.

ngcc_hk 3y ago
Even though his cold and hot is a bit strange, I am not sure it is related how light reflect is the key here. The key might be the way it is produced (but it blurs now as we saw movies made for tv, social media … and watch on tv), but the key is you go to a cinema and let yourselves immerse into it.

druidish 3y ago

Didn’t Wittgenstein beat children? What an inspirational thought leader…

kafkaesque 3y ago
This should absolutely not be downvoted. Wittgenstein's perjury in the court of law when in trial for beating Haidbauer touched all parts of his life, and it could be argued that this is why he hated the Tractatus, a body of work he once said was the last thing to say about all of philosophy. This is the kind of complex man he was, though. People read Tractatus and find problems with it. Well, yes, even Wittgenstein saw that it was misguided, which is why he wrote Philosophical Investigations. But lying in a court of law and getting away with it, and feeling disgusted in himself, tracks with how he saw himself and how disenchanted he was with the world.
- gattilorenz 3y ago
  That's a slightly more sophisticated take, compared to "ugh this person did something Very Bad (TM), let's disregard absolutely anything else that they did", isn't it?

perfmode 3y ago

sounds like he was trying to meditate

ngcc_hk 3y ago

Language like evilness is built in with us. You cannot use language to escape language, at least no promise. Clarity is limited by language itself. Similarly for evil, whilst most religion including non-religious thought like Buddhism (except Tien tai which Buddha has evil nature forever) are trying to single out evil, set a boundary and eliminate it and put all those have it into hell and let us ignore it. It is the same issues. You cannot escape from it. You are it it at least part of you are it. Live with it.