Turns out that graduate school is hard. Harder than all of predicate, ink.'s CFOs, CEOs, economical masterminds and board of trustees could have ever possibly calculated or projected. As a result, I have neglected this blog sorely. (And I never made it to the Babar show... shoot!)But to reassure you that I continue to have predicate-thoughts in my heart and on my mind as I trudge through the academic wilderness, I would like to share with you this peculiar and clearly unguarded moment I came across in Martin Heidegger's "The Origin of the Work of Art" when this author appears to have thrown all pretensions to writing serious philosophy to the wind and allows himself instead to float aimlessly down the (squiggly blobby) road of predicational ridiculousness. Heidegger:
"According to current opinion, this definition of the thingness of the thing as the substance with its accidents seems to correspond to our natural outlook on things. No wonder that the current attitude toward things--our way of addressing ourselves to things and speaking about them--has adapted itself to this common view of the thing. A simple propositional statement consists of the subject, which is the Latin translation, hence already a reinterpretation, of hupokeimenon and the predicate, in which the thing's traits are stated of it. Who would have the temerity to assail these simple fundamental relations between between thing and statement, between sentence structure and thing-structure? Nevertheless we must ask: Is the structure of a simple propositional statement (the combination of subject and predicate) the mirror image of the structure of the thing (of the union of substance with accidents)? Or could it be that even the structure of the thing as thus envisaged is a projection of the framework of the sentence?"
Why are you looking at me like that? I told you the internet is serious from the get-go.
I expect a well-polished, well-articulated 20-30 page response by Tuesday, kthx.
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2 comments:
Seems like an intelligent statement, but if you start questioning thing-ness and its relation to words, what will prevent falling to the hopeless level of "It depends what your definition of is is." I wonder if subject-predicate did not correspond 1:1 to ideas until we started questioning it. Once we did, we needed self-conscious-subject, and self-conscious-predicate, and self-conscious-words. That might be the etiology of the mess.
Yeah maybe i should have mentioned that Heidegger tosses out the whole line of thought about two sentences later as "seemingly critical yet actually rash and ill-considered."
i think the predicate animals might disagree however.
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