The Subjective

By Jaakko Saaristo

The Subjective is an existential linguistic study that aims to clarify the meaning of the subjective and objective domains of life and to ultimately understand why our world tends to disdain human subjectivity and remains fixated on the objective. It builds upon the work of Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard, highly original and subjective thinkers th

• Language: English
• Publisher: Catsoft Ltd
• Release date: Jan 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9781916334007

Jaakko Saaristo

Jaakko Saaristo is a philosophy hobbyist. He got his MSc in computer science from University of Helsinki in 2008 while teaching part-time on programming and scientific writing courses and attending minor studies in theoretical philosophy. He has had a career as a freelance software expert for around 15 years at private business clients such as banks, government ministries and mobile technology. He finds philosophy of language a core fundament in computer science that on a practical level builds upon abstract languages and symbolism.

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Preface

I will describe the background and circumstances that led to this book.

After my master’s thesis, I went to study Wittgenstein abroad, as recommended by every Wittgenstein expert I approached at my home university, where they in fact store some of Wittgenstein’s estate, such as his walking stick, as it is also the home university of G. H. von Wright who was close to Wittgenstein and succeeded his tenure in Cambridge. They instructed me to gain better expertise on my matters of interest abroad. So, I went abroad, and abroad they pointed out to me that people like me have no future in academia. I think they were right; it turned out I’ve been mostly doing something else since then. Unofficially, I got the most contradictory feedback; that academia is in deep crisis and needs people like me who can criticize it outside its own functions. I think they were maybe right about that, too, because they don’t seem to be doing so well; I think the institution is mostly battling for survival and many people today believe philosophy is dead and surpassed by modern ways that involve both science and technology. How wrong they are. Anyway, I forgave my personal disappointments but nevertheless felt that I have an increasing number of things to say that are just waiting to find the correct medium. To write a book was an obvious choice; this just unfortunately meant steering off the academic path, but the question for me was this: How much respect does a PhD in philosophy command these days? My main motive for leaving was that philosophy is the highest intellectual work, but academia today isn’t an environment to support this kind of work. Philosophy requires freedom and leisure, and real philosophers, the ones in our past, were not productive researchers, but rather working at their time of productivity and often suffering long periods of unproductivity in between, and this was understood as a part of the business of philosophy. I also believe that philosophy, rather than being a professional discipline for some people, should be something every intelligent person and professional should cultivate in themselves, both as means of elevating themselves and nourishing their spirits and souls, and as a test of their level of understanding and civilization to avoid being absorbed into grandiose thoughts while reaching for the mastery of their chosen profession. In this respect I feel the same about both philosophy and art.

Around midway through my writing, I asked if my book had any chance of becoming a PhD thesis. I received flattering comments on my style of writing, but also that I am not allowed to write like this in a philosophical PhD thesis but only after having produced one. I understood that it was somehow unexpected or shocking that I have read the originals and not secondary Wittgenstein... the truth is I haven’t learned a thing from secondary literature, and philosophy is not an exercise where I would write thoughts about what somebody might have meant. I have my own interpretations of Wittgenstein, as anybody should, and these opinions translate to politics; trying to defend them will create a political struggle within an institution that is doing all it can to create customs that convey a sense of objectivity. Academia has taken a path where lines of study in philosophical topics ritualize into academic discussions (this is a derogatory term outside academia) and lose their original motivation, and therefore philosophy hasn’t produced much of value in decades. It is an unspoken but accepted truth that academics write to each other, not unlike art circles where artists put on exhibitions mostly visited by fellow artists as an exchange of favours. This unproductivity has not passed without notice, so now in modern cost-effective times these artists are losing all their funding, which is a shame but also the right thing to do to encourage change where passion for the subject matter has been replaced by a desperate search for the fortification of one’s position. Philosophy is not science, and all the secondary literature, written for academics to understand Wittgenstein, has already proven a wasted effort, because Wittgenstein is mostly forgotten today. If the literature was valuable, people would read it and love Wittgenstein more. But they don’t read it, and I don’t blame them, as I never read it either to learn something; just read this and that as a part of the ritual of showing academic competence. This is what I was taught to do but I didn’t learn anything from it, which makes sense as these are rituals that derive their function from maintaining an institution, as any ritual will. And now I am told that PhD theses are also such exercises … and this is not true; they should produce new research or whatever the product is considered to be in philosophy. I will not write another ritual study that nobody will read just to justify the existence of an institution that is not doing its job. Even when some academic writers do find interesting or apt perspectives to the work of real philosophers, they leave their work unfinished and communicate the perspective. To formulate this more clearly, they say: "As a philosopher-scientist, I don’t care if what I am saying is true or not, but this is how this stuff could be argued to be"—a hypothetical explanation of someone’s thoughts that are considered so valuable they require explanation. If Wittgenstein’s work will find rejuvenation after this era of ignorance, it will be done using the originals. I consider Wittgenstein the greatest philosopher, but have never recommended his work to anybody because he is too difficult. If you think this is an arrogant thing to say, just remember that Wittgenstein considered Kierkegaard too difficult: arguably the greatest philosopher of the 20th century considered the man he found the greatest philosopher of the previous century too difficult to read; the best in his class couldn’t figure out the works of the best in his class a century before. If this is the case, how do you think you can build an academic discipline on something so recondite? It is no wonder philosophy has been unsuccessful wherever it has tried to be a systematic team effort, and the systematic approach carries with the discomfort of a long-standing but so far unsuccessful investigation where the new joiners are forced to inherit the mistaken presuppositions of their predecessors to avoid humiliating them with a successful new idea. The original effort transforms into a bureaucracy where the main everyday effort is in politics and in not exposing oneself by stepping over boundaries; keeping the boat running and keeping yourself and your close partners on the boat. I trust all readers are acquainted with an example of this type of organization.

I’m not sure if this book is academic or non-academic philosophy as I’m not satisfied living in a world where these words mean something. I tried to write to normal readers as much as possible, but these days philosophy is an expert topic and these matters are very rarely seriously discussed outside the communications of people who are somehow personally drawn to them. I believe we should rather live in a world where these considerations are a matter of honour to all capable and intellectual people instead of intelligence reducing to memorizing a few smart quotes to use at social occasions and the professional discipline not producing anything new that’s worthy of such quotes. I remember myself having been interested in exactly these questions as long as I can remember, and just happened to find myself having reached enough clarity to write about them. Due to these controversies I’m not good at saying what kind of people would like to read this book; I think it might intrigue those who have a personal wish to struggle for philosophical clarity and are willing to dedicate due effort to it without this activity having any immediate rewards in terms of, say, money or social respect. My only hope is that I won’t severely disappoint precisely those readers.

The Author

London, January 2020

Introduction

This book contrasts with modern philosophy, as it would have contrasted with the mainstream of the philosophy of, say, 100 or 200 years ago. I consider it existentialism, by which I mean something laid down by Kierkegaard, and it involves a complete and intellectually grounded rejection of the effort to describe the world as a conceptual system (such as a philosophical or scientific system). Kierkegaard saw his works, such as the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, as being about how to become religious, and he saw that the most difficult things are to be communicated most indirectly. He saw that the point of his book was to lead the reader towards something that cannot be taught directly. I would liken this communicative goal to what a priest would like to achieve with his symbolical sermon. This approach was adopted also by Socrates and later Wittgenstein, both of whom didn’t publish at all. The early Wittgenstein had similar mystical goals in mind in Tractatus; he saw, among other things, that any relevant things are such that they cannot be expressed in words, and that the reader must throw away the ladder after reading him, because meaning is actually outside the world. These goals are something quite opposite to what most people are trying to achieve with communication, be it spoken or written. But these authors have their similarities in emphasizing the everyday aspect of philosophy as an activity in which one exists in thought, and being logical, rational, opinionated, critical and judgemental as personalities to the extreme of abandoning social norms, often to their own disadvantage. I’d like to say they were ‘keeping it real’ in philosophy where others would lose their way. I think in philosophy we combine intellectual logic with actual personal life, and produce value by becoming capable of clear logic, after which we can provide critical value by pointing out critical weaknesses (critical, as in potentially causing crisis) in, say, the functions of our civil systems and institutions. In a democracy, who do you think will do this if not philosophers? The institution of philosophy must also be its own critic. We are not trying to tell people how to think and what is the correct system one should adopt. One is free, and doomed, to think in any way one wants; we will only be interested in pointing out the problems that thinking in a certain way produces and trying to assist in solving them. My own thought is peculiar in a way, and I see many admirable people thinking differently from the way I think. There is this huge illusion that a person’s quality is produced by his brain, which can be somehow observed and analysed to be normal or abnormal, or right or wrong; in reality, all people are unique individuals and they think in various unique ways, and there are differences in our values and moral constitution. Other contrasting differences in this existentialist method are the dismissal of the hypothetical scientific method in questions that are essentially critical, and the acknowledgment of subjective morality as an inherent feature in all thought: the act of looking at things from a particular perspective is an ethical deed, and clarity is achieved only by making a clear distinction in both language and action between what is accessible to everybody and what is accessible to the private subject only.

The central themes of this book are, first,

a clarification of the subjective and the objective as grammatically defined by their criterion, and their roles in constituting linguistic meaning,

and second,

a revitalization of subjectivity essentially as the home of both truth and morality.

I have drawn my thought mainly from Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard, the great critics of their respective times and, in my view, kindred spirits: the Wittgensteinian method of linguistic analytics combines with Kierkegaard’s subjective-objective distinction and promotion of subjectivity. Science is an effort towards full objectivity and spirituality an effort towards full subjectivity, and the correct place for philosophy is outside both, providing a critical perspective to both directions. This much should be self-evident, considering the full history of philosophy. Yet this is not the practice in philosophy. The book aims to explain linguistic meaning using notions and methodologies inspired by the said authors, and to apply this to a great multitude of real-life problem areas within society and modern science. It aims to unveil certain persistent controversies as Wittgensteinian linguistic misunderstandings, but also aims to explain this method and to bind it to the realm of subjectivity extensively explored by Kierkegaard but methodologically left untouched by Wittgenstein. The book also touches political issues as they directly exist in the subjective realm. The book seeks to cover quite a lot of philosophical ground—everything—and doesn’t fit into any contemporary model of academic work where one is to restrict one’s scrutiny to a certain topic and to provide a historical dissection of what others have previously said about that topic as a frame of reference and evaluation. I could well do that, but it would be another kind of work for another kind of purpose; in my understanding good philosophical work is something in which the author reflects his thought on relevant topics. In this work I am writing about my own findings that, in my thought, relate to all traditional topics of philosophy and that I wish to be understandable and original, but not in the scientific or academic sense; rather in the sense that philosophy shares with art and craft: some will relate, understand and recognize value, and some will not, as the capability to understand such things is a subjective skill that relates to talent and experience in the related art, which few have but most don’t. To be able to judge whether my subjective findings are enlightening or just complete gibberish should require some familiarity on these topics from your part. I see that our entire world is on the wrong path; what philosophy can do is to point a finger to the exact problem points that exist in virtually every field and following the same pattern, and I have chosen dismissal of the subjective in favour of the objective as the main motif. There are only a few academic references. Preliminary reading of Wittgenstein will probably help in efforts to overcome the philosophical foundations, as the later Wittgensteinian linguistic approach, which is a monumental piece of Western philosophy, is in this book not reiterated but briefly explained and heavily built upon. The parts of the book concerning meaning and sensibility will likely be unintelligible to those who hold the common worldview that words denote objects—for a Wittgensteinian they don’t, and as a reader you’ll need to set yourself into these shoes the best you can. Then again, being a Wittgenstein expert won’t guarantee any success, as he is a controversial author and you might well disagree with my interpretation of him; I suspect that marrying a woman opposite to your own personality and field is easier than marrying somebody from your own field but with whom you disagree. I try my best to explain the foundations of linguistic analysis in non-Wittgensteinian terms; Wittgenstein left a bunch of concepts so baffling that they have given birth to new interpretations. I try my best not to be Wittgensteinian by building upon his specialized terminology; rather I try to explain things from varying viewpoints because Wittgenstein’s concept of language-games is just his approach of describing something that is an actual thing and that we can describe using any literary devices. I read Philosophical Investigations several times before it gave me anything other than disgust and a headache, and I did this because of his fame and my anger at my inability to make sense of him (I will also admit I am a rather poor reader). He was the first author I ever read who I could see was striving to explain a point with clear language and examples, but I, so proud of my smarts, was too stupid to understand it. Following this personal experience, I understand well those who give up on him. But as this book deals with distinct real-life philosophical problems both in individual life and in society (instead of trying to build a system) it might contain parts that are an interesting read even to the many who face challenges in reading Wittgenstein.

Now, the word ‘philosophy’ is a mixed bag, and I will explain my understanding of the correct philosophical method. There are two things: language and the subject (human) that uses it as a natural trait. Whereas classically in philosophy the philosopher might for example ask: What is goodness? and start his scrutiny from the object of the question—in this case ‘goodness’—, in the philosophy of both Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard this question most essentially also involves the question of the subject performing the actual question or uttering the word ‘goodness’ as a part of the activities of his life. To try to search for ‘goodness’ through grasping its idea or essence would be the Platonic way, which is the path our Western science has taken as a general guideline. In the Wittgensteinian approach the problem regarding a concept includes not only the object of the question but rather how the word is used and what can be learned about the human in relation to his use of language, and in this sense, I often consider it ‘second order’ philosophy; it is an approach that takes a look at approaches; takes a look at how you are trying to do what you are trying to do. The problem involves not only what is said, but also how it is said and that it is said. This approach involves a perspective on language that emphasizes its connection to human thought and understanding in a totally different sense than in a clinical scientific model, which in a contemporary setting mostly disregards the subjective individuality of humans when they first learn a language in a certain environment and as a result to a certain extent existentially become extensions of those cultural linguistic traditions. Methodologically, the inherent second perspective calls for a separation of the two perspectives—that of the subject uttering and that of the philosopher analysing—since the analysing philosopher is not necessarily the subject making the utterances his scrutiny targets but rather is more of an observing anthropologist. After the great Kierkegaard, I will generally use the term ‘the subject’ to refer to the human in a unique sense, which, used this way, will rule out any possibilities to imply or assume anything about him that is not, human as we are, evident through our shared natural language, and which will include everything related to whatever we can, through natural language, understand every human to be affiliated with in his life, such as his ethical choices, his responsibilities, his emotions and his spiritual life. Instead of ‘the subject’ I considered using ‘He’, but that would carry a mystifying sense that I am trying to avoid. ‘The subject’ does not refer to a test subject in an experiment; it refers to both subjectivity, as explained later in this book, and the grammatical subject. It is a psycho-socially observable fact that humans are spiritually connected, not to other humans, but to other subjects, and this connection, through shared human psycho-social trends, is also unique, which is related to the subject’s own unique nature: essentially the human relation to another is coloured by how he sees him, or as we might say, what he represents to him. What we speak of as God, spirits or suchlike, are subjects yet not humans, and in this role integral in our spiritual life. And by this I am not saying anything about the existence of any spirit or making any form of religious or spiritual commitment but simply mean to include the hidden psychological and spiritual human life in its full depth and complexity in philosophical scrutiny, which itself is an external viewpoint to the subject’s behaviour. I find spiritual and religious life particularly interesting, but as a philosopher I will only look at them from the analytical perspective of what religious life and language are. The philosopher is not a theologian, but in order to write about humans he needs to honour and address spirituality, an inherent human disposition, or he had better not write anything at all. Personally, I don’t consider such a writer a philosopher if he, firstly, doesn’t address full humanity including human subjectivity (but instead rules out some human features as pointless or uninteresting), and secondly, doesn’t mean his text to be ethical; something to guide towards a correct way to relate to facts. Due to modern academia ruling out the subjective and ethical perspective in favour of scientific objectivity, I generally consider academic philosophy as a set of academic exercises related to philosophers who are already dead; either analysing the work of those philosophers, or taking the concepts developed by those philosophers and extending them beyond their original context. Being ethical (or moral) is behaviour where something is chosen for a subjective reason and shown to others by the example of one’s action; not by trying to prove one’s perspective via scientific facts or by reference to other texts bearing the academic seal of approval. Something is supposed to be right and true because it is the strongest argued, and argument is something that takes a courageous individual who believes in his thought, is ready to present it and to have it challenged to see if it is indeed true or not. Many people are drawn to philosophy, but to be a philosopher is a considerably more difficult task than, say, to be a scientist, since it requires self-scrutiny of one’s own thought, and to be any good at it, it requires absolute intellectual honesty and the related ethical self-criticism, which causes personal suffering of the most severe kind, dismantling one’s most fundamental beliefs acquired in childhood. And, unlike with a scientist, a philosopher publishing something half-baked will publish simply junk, since the thought being half-baked means that the philosopher himself is half-baked and not yet ready, and because he is in this state something he discovers the next day might lead him to renounce everything he ever said before. As a rule of thumb, those who don’t clearly know what to do can’t lead by example, and those who do seem to know and to take the initiative, can only be admired and only partially understood by others.

Regarding language, it is as Wittgenstein would write: philosophy may not interfere with the actual use of language—such as by trying to formulate rules of how to use it correctly—but must leave everything as it is.¹ This means that the philosopher simply performs analysis; he might succeed or not succeed in his analysis, depending on how good he is at it. The analysing philosopher can never take the path of trying to correct language in terms of portraying the existent language as inadequate, such as by requiring the introduction of new terminology, but his analysis may imply that the already existent language is being incorrectly used on some occasion.² Only this can make the philosopher valuable: he needs to be able to display what others fail to see because it is inherent in the language we use. Also, a philosopher doesn’t preach, moralize or politicize, but through his persona simply provides a perspective to human facts everybody can verify and understand, and whether this perspective is good or not—exactly like whether a piece of art is any good or not—is not determined by the author but is left for others to determine. For example, regarding religion, whenever I would write ‘God’, I would actively mean whatever the subject might mean when uttering ‘God’, having myself witnessed and thus being able to imagine such linguistic events. I hold no opinion about these matters apart from my personal perspective of seeing this as somehow philosophically relevant, and the validity of this follows from the fact that uttering the word in practice is a philosophically interesting feature of human life. The whole question of if God exists seems completely pointless to me; I think people who are haunted by this question have some other (subjective) issues but are instead addressing the question as if it was an objective question to debate. The real question open for investigation is a linguistic one: What does it mean to speak about God? It seems natural for certain forms of human behaviour to attribute subjective qualities to objects of interaction in a particular manner—one that is completely different from our interaction with objects that we use, for example as tools. Examples of such activities targeting non-humans are nurturing pets and dolls, shadowboxing against a sack, talking to oneself, playing chess against computer software, prayer and confession (personally, I remember once confessing to our pet cat as a child). As such, one’s subjective relation aligns with one’s inclination to use the grammatical subject. Now, the subject himself, by definition, cannot be scientifically studied, as the objective methodology of science will only see the objective realm and whatever is not unique but uniformly repeating over individuals. Scientific information produced by behavioural and social sciences and theology (wherever theology studies the divine, it effectively studies the subject’s relation to what the subject treats as a divinity) produces objective information about humans, but not the unique subject, as the science can only express what can be shared in the language and methodology of the scientific discipline at hand. The fundamental trap most Western philosophy walks straight into is not understanding the logical difference between the subjective and the objective and thus to try and talk or write about the subjective—the unique and hidden—in objective terms that are shared and public. If someone tries to express something that by its nature (the meaning of its associated word) only he himself can see, but using a language that implies objective criteria, he will either not be understood at all or will be misunderstood. This activity of expressing the subjective is the fundamental target in artistic expression, and the responsible artist is aware of the impossibility of expressing his subjective existence (the way the world appears just to him, being who he is). The main effort of his artistic work is to bridge his subjectivity to a medium and audience that represents an objective (shared) reality and history. Also, for this reason the established forms of artistic expression are different from the forms of language we use when discussing things. Art is always meant to be taken as art, and furthermore, if what the artist expresses through his art could be expressed also with words with the same effect, the artist wouldn’t feel the need to express himself through art.

Another paradigm I adhere to and want to be clear about is the requirement for natural language in philosophy. Academic philosophy has effectively hogged and academized every possible natural language concept that is philosophically interesting and created special definitions connected with trails of debate and will feel justified in snubbing anyone using those concepts with an expectation of enlightenment regarding those definitions and debates. This process has nothing to do with philosophy, philosophical interest, the principle of charity, or collaboration on the level of society, but is the result of violent elitism within academia and the intelligentsia, doing to language what the white man did to the lands he conquered, proclaiming in the name of his deity that the land belonged to him, and giving the natives permission to step on his lands only under the name and blessing of his deity. Whether or not crusades yield favourable political effects is a question I am unable to answer (in the old days this was determined through which side of the battle Gods chose to favour), but it is certain that they don’t serve the scholarly function that philosophy as an organ of society has been established to serve. Therefore let it be said that anyone who understands the word ‘conscious’ as used in e.g. Henry was conscious of Martin’s attempted provocation but chose not to respond or what the word ‘consciousness’ means as used in e.g. Peter slowly regained consciousness, A suspicion of planned treachery entered his consciousness or We must bring these facts into common consciousness, is justified in using the word ‘consciousness’, provided that—and this is a requirement for any argument—he is ready to further explain his meaning if necessary using natural language through e.g. examples, metaphors or any other natural means of explanation people generally use when talking about things. An academized definition of a concept should be considered specialized expert terminology—on the basis that the meaning of the word is verified against that definition—and therefore meaning something different from the original meaning of how the word is originally used in language. I try to write simply and to avoid philosophical jargon and scientific text as much as possible; I feel that if I have grasped something, I can also express it in various ways, and simple language is the best choice. Populist natural scientists act as obscurant religious interpreters of the modern age and they use their professional authority to preach politics, but they do it not as social commentary but by attaching their professional authority to the picture. Sadly, in the current academic crisis modern academic philosophers have either joined a freshly emergent neo-naturalist bandwagon or accepted a politically insignificant role within academia with no higher wish than to be able to practise their beloved profession for their own personal sake, having found no means to attack modern computerized natural science. As such, it is my opinion that academic philosophy serves little function in society and should be revisited, revitalized or reinvented, in a manner similar to the way in IT technological debt is something that accumulates over old codebases and should be methodologically cleaned out via refactoring and a revisit of the meanings and purposes of individual system pieces. This would bring philosophy back from where it has no place but has become entangled—back on the streets, back to common people and to any free spirit with a heart and mind, back where it is beautiful due to its ethical nature. Perhaps, as of writing this book, this development has already taken place and philosophy has lost all its funding.

I find myself unable to determine in how much depth I should explain different topics and will try to apply a method of minimal explanation in favour of simply accurate terminology. The points I present are ones that I have found relevant, both in terms of history of philosophy and in terms of modern needs, and I will try my best to be honest and not venture to cover any more ground than what is directly available to me: that information is available to the distinguished reader from other sources. By this, I hope to distance myself from the dishonest philosopher, who describes his best understanding or most plausible theory about the nature of things, and in fear of his own doubt covers this by stating This is how it must be instead of an honest This is how I hope it is. The expectation of intellectual honesty between the author and his readers is the same as the trust between an employee and his employer or a party member and his party; the philosopher is an expert suggesting a perspective, and in this work it is as easy as in any other work to appear better than you actually are by painting your suggestion with more confidence than you actually have in your sayings yourself, thus creating a psychological effect on your readers. This honesty is a subjective quality, and in any area of life, the more we give importance to the objective, measurable end-product and disregard the producer as a person, the more likely the product will be somehow flawed in subjective terms. Let it be reminded that these subjective qualities of work (sincerity, authenticity, accuracy, relevance…) do matter to us gravely despite we don’t pay attention to them too much these days, as we don’t have tools to measure them.

I use the word ‘phenomenon’ as freely as ‘cause’ and ‘effect’ are used in natural language. The word can refer to anything and doesn’t have any logical boundaries, but I use it in cases where I am unable to find any established terminology for whatever I need to refer to. Thus, I wish to distinguish my use of the word ‘phenomenon’ from e.g. Kant or Leibniz, who had self-defined meanings for the word (and thus were writing about something totally different from whatever the world so far had meant by such a word). By ‘faith’ I mean the quality signified by acceptance and unquestioning but that is also accompanied by the disposition that the target of the belief is ethically right, signified by ethical duty: "It must be like this".³ This is distinct from the use of ‘believe’ in other senses, such as I believe 1+2=3, which is void of any ethical component, or I believe we are all going to die tomorrow, which doesn’t signify faith but is an expression of the lack of it, as one will hardly find it right for all to die tomorrow. Faith, in this sense, is the same type as often described as religious faith, but a religion need not be involved—an example of this would be a father’s belief that his daughter is beautiful, which could be said to transcend physical beauty, as the father will also feel that in his role it is his duty to tell his daughter she is beautiful. I use the concept of idealism in terms of referring to an ideal, and not relating to philosophical traditions.

I might provide references at times but due to the rainbow of existing Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard interpretations there’s simply no point in trying to argue for the correct interpretation—I am convinced of mine and if someone wants to know more about their work, I recommend going out and reading the originals. Then again, I am not in the business of exegesis; all I care is that I have learned from these authors—there has been a process of revelation, insight and humiliation, followed by admiration and gratitude—and I like to be very clear about whose ideas I am presenting, to myself just as much as to my readers. The risk is that I might have learned wrong lessons from these authors, in which case I am sure these mistakes will be reflected in my own thought and work, and this risk I am very willing to take. I expect experts to find me guilty of misinterpretation, having themselves published books containing contradicting interpretations that constitute the basis of their professional positions within academia—positions they have originally also sought via means of conducting alternative and new interpretations in the name of science. They will feel that they have well earned their academic positions and have a responsibility to defend their position. Because of this political setting I will not utter a single word to try and argue back. Also, readers may find that the things I write about have already been said before. This argument is a misguided application of the rules of science to philosophy, which is not science. First, the things I’m saying haven’t been said before, because, unlike hypothetical scientific results, I am unique, and, I believe (this can be contested), have lived only this one time. Second, whether or not something I write about has been said before, makes no difference, as declaring those things is something that supports and completes my philosophical thought. If it was any other way, I could just write about a restricted topic and dismiss everything else, and my readers would have no clue what kind of a person I am, which is exactly what they need to judge in order for them to tell if my writings are worth reading or not. The only type of authors who will benefit from this are the ones who will not care if their readers know them or not. Furthermore, with said argument, This has been said before, one could dismiss most philosophy after the ancient Greeks. The ideas I present here are my own ideas, unless otherwise referenced, and whether I am successful or an utter failure in my work, this is the right way of doing philosophy, and the way they do it in academia these days is the wrong way. Readers will find me unsystematic and obscure; they would prefer to see one subject exhausted from the perspective of comparing different hypothetical perspectives to the subject matter, as things are presented in philosophical textbooks. They will feel my carefully chosen examples fail to elucidate by being far-fetched or even deliberately outrageous or provocative. To this accusation I reply that I am simply trying to be evocative, but I hope that I am never guilty of being provocative, which implies an effort to provoke a reaction by saying things that one doesn’t mean or even fully understand. Some readers will feel it was the custom of earlier times to write obscurely, that modern philosophy is systematic and organized as a science, and that my way of writing is an easy escape from the modern requirements of scientific rigour. Anyway, no matter what I did, I expect that the text would not satisfy most academic readers, or, to be honest, readers of any kind. Moreover, as we live an era in which anything considered worth publishing needs to be built on top of our extant scientific discourse, I am quite positive that my interest in dealing with spiritual and existential matters, and my willingness to disregard and disrespect the authority of the scientific institution, will have me academically categorized in the same bracket as the mad. But mostly I believe I will be dismissed because we live in a time in which we don’t really have an institution for philosophy, and the pervasive scientism takes care of guiding people’s attention to scientific news instead of the subjective. Luckily for myself I don’t care because I don’t need to share their bread and table. I am writing about things that the reader will not understand if he doesn’t himself have the will to (yet even having the will won’t guarantee understanding) and presenting the work in the form of a systematic study would be totally unnecessary and off track. If somebody found me more credible if I did that, and not simply credible because of what he can interpret of my character through my text as I now very particularly choose to write it, he obviously wouldn’t be looking to find something in what I am writing about as a philosopher and a human being, but rather to find support for his already established beliefs. Such a reader should read no further and spare himself from trouble and possible offence by dismissing this book in favour of other books, and should those books by any chance be found in the library section containing philosophy, he should choose authoritative books the reading of which is expected to grant his beliefs social support, and not observably unsystematic and obscure books like mine. Furthermore, being able to technically apply a formal system of logic through its comprehension has absolutely nothing to do with where the roots of logic (and ‘logos’) and every common use of the term ‘logic’ are and have been before a school of thinkers of a particular kind gave it a branch of formalist meanings: being logical in terms of not contradicting one’s beliefs in one’s existence. Thus, the point of the book is to display my own subjective philosophical thought—not by presenting individual opinions on questions, but rather by applying these opinions to all the relevant topics, so that experts (if there are any, please step forward) can judge whether I am making sense and being consistent. To be inconsistent would mean that my work is ultimately incomplete; that I have thought about matters from one side and a bit from the other side, too, but due to ignoring and escaping the difficult problems on the other side, there is a tension left inside that is bound to crack and demolish the whole perspective. To point me out as inconsistent, or otherwise in error, is not a technical procedure, and one can only do that in the realm of philosophy, where one would take the trouble of addressing the meaning of what I am saying instead of its external formal expression. This is philosophy, not science, and my results are not scientifically debatable. Furthermore, I find science a poor proof for matters of reason. My observations, I hope, are such that anyone can agree with, but my results are related to my subjective perspective, which can be valuable only in ethical implications and is something one should never try and objectively justify but only appreciate or leave without appreciation. Having extensively discussed different artists and works of art with different people—including highly intelligent academic people—it has become clear to me how even those aesthetic qualities, that to me seem to signify values of the very basic and elementary kind, can be completely and blindly disregarded by people that I otherwise might respect and value in social life. People of intelligence can show extreme variations in their moral constitutions. In this kind of work, where one writes extensively about many topics from the same existential human perspective, it is not enough to be strong at one or many things: it is most essentially required not to have any weaknesses, as in all combat and warfare where one is only as strong as one’s weakest point—this weak point being any topic the philosopher is unwilling to address in a satisfying manner. You can think of logical inconsistency this way: the philosopher is trying to create a picture out of a puzzle where the pieces fit together, and he starts his work from what some authors have written that he agrees with. This way he can finish half of the picture by putting together some pieces he is able to join. But after that he will try to come up with the other half and he notices that starting from what other authors have written that he agrees with, the size, shape and the theme of the pieces is different. So, he continues using those pieces, arrives at the middle, and notices that the two halves are built with completely different sizes, shapes and themes, and that even the idea of unifying them into a complete work is utterly hopeless and to a large degree ridiculous because he is essentially trying to build one picture out of two distinct puzzle sets; two different branches of language he has originally learned and taken for granted, but not paid attention and seriousness to the inconsistency between them to the extent of rebuilding the other half, which is a painfully necessary act unavoidably required. He feels appalled; he feels like a failure and a fraud, and wishes for nothing apart from mommy’s arms and the peace of a mental asylum. But in our modern system his work is rewarded: he has done his duty—created something. Work was done; something was produced with the expected size and shape; time and money were spent on a good purpose. Compare this to software development; this is like a multi-sourcing development hub where software modules come in from vendors that come and present plans of a module in a brief description to get the go-ahead and funding from the project management. Only in this hub there is no architect to initially specify what kind of modules are needed in the first place, to specify the modules or to check the modules against the original specification. Thus, all they can do is to check plans and finished deliverables by their formal qualities (such as word count, number of references, font, grammar...), but not remotely from the perspective of whether they are useful or doing what they are supposed to do, or if the management are getting their money’s worth.

Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard are my only philosophical teachers, and they, without challenge, stand out as bright beacons in the history of what we call philosophy—men who were anything but grey officials but as the main ingredient in their genius first and foremost radical freedom fighters and ethical human beings with love and passion to give up everything for the sake of their mission purported to ultimately serve mankind. The purpose of this book is to convey an ethical message; one that cannot be said with words. Trying to utter it would destroy it, and this destruction would not occur in a great flash but timelessly, like in a psychological thriller where two opposite realities can seamlessly alternate—the very act of trying merely constitutes the proof of its failure. It is so because, firstly, finding a person uttering nonsense is a very valid reason for, instead of trying to understand him, showing him he is not making sense, and secondly, in order to train a beginner to play badminton, it is senseless to bring him on the court and to tell him to drop if he doesn’t know what the word ‘drop’ means, and furthermore senseless to keep telling him to drop if one can see him executing the stroke incorrectly—in a way that will not make him a good badminton player. That’s what bad teachers do. But also, it is not correct to present what I write as a theory, because theories in this sense don’t have means of validation or invalidation. The only sense in which you could call it theory would be to consider it a hypothetical opinion; somebody could consider it a hypothetical possibility for himself to adopt my position … but this is not how opinions go; opinions involve ethics and faith, and one cannot, by choice, make oneself believe—rather, the truth is revealed, not chosen. So, it is not a theory at all and moreover strictly not a theory in a scientific sense; for me these things are not assumptions or hypotheses but something I believe, and the reason to believe them is not a rational choice for anybody but perhaps it is for somebody with similar motivations as I have. If you’re just looking to make it through life and fit in, why do you care whether some word is subjective or objective? You can just deny the whole sense of the dichotomy and justify this by saying that everything subjective is undefinable. You can say the subjective doesn’t interest you and ignore the fact that all discovery is by nature inspirational; it involves a highly subjective individual breaking the rules, discovering something new and then inspiring those around him. Only if what I am saying was a scientific theory would we have objective grounds for debate and you could approach me with your better knowledge, but this is not the case. And only if you were motivated as I am, to go in search of ultimate understanding and not just a justified position, would you have a motive to expose your subjective self in a dialogue where you can also be outright wrong and not just justifiable from various angles. I am very capable of presenting theories and my knowledge is based on many very useful scientific theories, but regarding philosophy I see the approach of theory as fundamentally misguided and think that the vast majority of people simply do not understand why it is so, which I very much link to our understanding of the basis of our own knowledge, which in itself is something specifically to be developed via the means of philosophy. Consider Peter seeing the dog on the yard and saying: My dog is out in the yard, which Sarah immediately translates as Peter presented a theory that his dog is out in the yard. Is this valid; is it valid to say that Peter presented a theory? No. It is valid to say that Sarah is presenting a theory that Peter’s dog is out on the yard (as she is unsure whether this is the case, Peter is not), and her evidence is Peter’s testimonial.

I wanted so much to write this book in a different way. I even considered writing it in two parts: the first part without nonsense and the second part only nonsense.⁴ And, by doing that I might win some readers who would be impressed by my character. But I cannot lead them anywhere! A display of achievement is worthless: for the viewer it is either entertainment or it will lead him on the ultimately wrong track of mimicking somebody else instead of discovering himself. Writing a book that way would be so easy. But what would be even easier would be to write a speculative book, a book about how things must be; to boldly, for the sake of mankind, say I don’t have the slightest idea without admitting it to myself but by asking the forgiveness of others. That is the easiest thing to do: the only thing one needs to do is to know how to write, and that can be learned by repetitive practice, if one has the talent. It’s like a singer who has trained her voice but has no idea what to sing about or who to sing to. The audience would see the whole room radiate when she produces her act, but fail to pay attention to how she uses her voice, who she chooses to perform with and what songs she chooses to sing: that in reality she is asking somebody else to decide all those questions for her, and she is doing the best she can to produce how a vocalist in her role is expected to behave; that in reality she is fooling everybody, by selling them an image that touches their dreams, but hiding how it is built in reality. To produce that, all that is needed is some luck to have the talent, mindlessly following an experienced teacher, and the disconnection from one’s own emotions to force one’s face into an expression without emotion, like a beauty queen. No, as a philosopher I can’t be the leader or the actress. What am I, then? I suppose I am the terrifying memory, if anything. You might want to read something in which the author is taking you somewhere, or where the author compels you with his prowess; this is what you might think is good philosophy. Trust me, it is not. Philosophy exists to make you realize things; bad philosophy is something that has the external image of being profound but that disguises its moral emptiness behind its intelligence. It invites you to mimic and repeat it and implies you’re a no-good moron unless you agree with it. It is charming and seductive; it invites and coerces from an intelligent higher status, like a beautiful woman who invites you to sit next to her but makes it clear that unless you do what she expects you to do she will dump you with a snap of her fingers. You might even be unworthy to read such a work in the first place. There’s thought that actively tries to reduce its readers to a like-minded group; ask a stupid question and you’ll be told you don’t have the merit to question it. Anyway, my failure might lie in attempting to write about ethics against the example of my idols who either saw the study of ethics as something that had no value, or something only expressible via action and linguistically expressible only through humour. Because of this my text will appear arrogant and pretentious. Moral argument is easily attacked by trying to show that the actions of the speaker contradict his values. This is the attack I anticipate on myself, because it is the attack with the most power against somebody who speaks for morality; to work to show his immorality. This attack will be made by those who wish to deny moral argument in general. But this is my choice between being a philosopher and human; as an analytic philosopher I feel compelled to make ethical statements about groups or types of people that immediately place me under judgement for expressing such things, and I used to hate myself for such attitudes; for wishing to wield the right to judge men. But I have grown to accept weakness in myself. It is a most reassuring thought that transcending this human nature and constant fear is an act not done by any man.

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1 The same ideal is interestingly expressed in the Buddhist concept of sunyata (‘emptiness’ or ‘void’), which, in its simplicity, means detachment and freedom from dharmas that in turn are phenomenological constituents of human experience. It seems to me that Buddhist dharma finds its Western equivalent in conceptual framework, which for us constitutes how we experience things—our linguistic viewpoint on matters at hand. To be empty, as an ideal, means not to assume; not to be bound by any framework; not to be bewitched by language. This neutrality, I believe, is an absolute requirement for any successful analyst.

2 The willingness to control speech is a phenomenon has sadly (again) gained popularity in contemporary West under a trend called political correctness, and could be briefly described as a tendency to condemn public speakers and to try and control what they are allowed to say by calling it e.g. wrong, unscientific or hate speech. This kind of a dark world of rule by moral institution is, of course, pretty far from the spirit of democracy or science, and, rather, what science originally effectively saved us from.

3 The idea that ‘must’ is a give-away word, betraying the a priori character of thought, is from Lars Hertzberg in ‘The importance of being thoughtful’ in D. Moyal-Sharrock (ed.), Perspicuous Presentations: Essays on Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Psychology, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

4 Wittgenstein says in his preface of Tractatus that the book consists of two parts: the one that he wrote and the other that he left out. I sympathize. The way I think about my own text is that the things that I write are the things I 1) find relevant and 2) believe to be true strongly enough to write them down. A person believing in science will find no glory in writing about his beliefs. He has yet to assess his conceptions of truth and knowledge.

PART I. The Basis of Thought

In this part of the book I aim to bring together the various domains of thought that any person’s thought process will comprise and that include both rational capabilities and morality. The target of scrutiny is linguistic meaning, which is the key philosophical subject matter that acts as the medium between our external world, our thought and our communication with other people. If you are not acquainted with Wittgensteinian philosophy, you are likely coming from a background where you don’t place much importance on grammar when asking about the nature of things, and regarding philosophical questions you might be asking "What is this? instead of What does this mean? You’ll likely feel that the way a thing is expressed grammatically is of little importance, as it is rather the point or idea that matters more. Also, you might not have been getting very concrete answers to your questions, and you might think that the sort of answers philosophy altogether provides are of the vague type of It could be like this, or it could be another way also, depending on how you want to look at it". If this is the case, I’d like to urge you not to settle with a resolution that essentially doesn’t provide you with any real answers but only hypothetical ones; the questions a person asks in philosophy are subjective and personal, and they should be approached subjectively and personally and not academically and hypothetically. Then again, I am not the one to argue that the things that I am explaining here are the correct way for you to look at things. I am saying that in order to get different answers you should read different philosophy, as the things I am writing about here are my own personal findings that don’t bear the insignia of the related institution to help you distinguish them from dangerous quackery. If you are on a quest for getting real answers to the questions that disturb you, you should not read my words as a final explanation of anything but just the thoughts of somebody who has been on a similar quest for a long time and has found clarity at least to the level of wanting to share them after having passed rigorous personal critique. Regarding any such subject matter you should be careful and ask any related questions about the character of the person who is offering such thoughts as wisdom.

I-1. Existence and Subjectivity

I consider myself existentialist, and I will explain here what I mean by the word. I use the word ‘existentialism’ in reference to an anti-theoretic philosophical method that Kierkegaard started, and I can see existentialism as having certain features that distinguish it from, say, mainstream philosophy. Existentialism can most concisely be described as an effort to combine logic, the intellectual rational effort, with the moral aspect of one’s personal life. It is an effort to live and exist without contradiction. This is not simple to describe in a concrete manner, but I will try to give some highlights. An existentialist is interested in the subjective, but not the subjective experience, which is the realm of phenomenology. I want to stress that the subjective experience is a completely fruitless topic, and existentialism and real philosophy should be completely distinguished from the doings of writers who discuss it. The existentialist is interested in both morality and logic, which comes down to the basic questions of right, wrong, true and false, the follow-up question of what the correct action is, and the question of the correct way of conducting one’s life. The subjective experience, by contrast, is a domain for all the various types of escapists, not for serious thinkers. As a philosopher, everything always looks like something or feels like something. So what? It is a misconception to think that others could share that experience, and moreover, following Wittgenstein’s beetle analogy, people’s private experience of something (the beetle) might be changing all the time without you even knowing it. Personally, I find it arrogant, and a definitive feature of contemporary cultural narcissism, to consider one’s personal experience important when dealing with matters that touch everybody. I also find it both irrational (as opposed to rational) and feminine, as the female sex is more famous for basing decisions on subjective feelings instead of reasonable argument. No, if you want to dwell in feeling or act based on feeling, which I highly recommend to everybody, you should keep your pen in the drawer, since the willingness to announce one’s love and passion should be considered a sign of lack of reason just as love is known to be blind, divine madness, a chariot of both noble and wild horses pulling in different directions, only to be guided by the charioteer—intellect and reason with the motivation towards truth. You should live like that but not write like that; best is to hang the pen in a decorated box on the wall, with the inscription: To be used when the head is cool, and reason is in charge. In philosophy, which is an intellectual and rational discipline, the whole subjective experience needs to be clinically and dispassionately reduced out. But this does not mean that the word ‘subjective’ is useless—on