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Sobre Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein was hostile to modern philosophy as he found it. He thought it the product of a culture that had come to model everything that matters about our lives on scientific explanation. In its ever-extending observance of the idea that knowledge, not wisdom, is our goal, that what matters is information rather than insight, and that we best address the problems that beset us, not with changes in our heart and spirit but with more data and better theories, our culture is pretty much exactly as Wittgenstein feared it would become. He sought to uncover the deep undercurrents of thought that had produced this attitude. He feared it would lead not to a better world but the demise of our civilization. That perhaps explains his deep unpopularity today. It is for the same reason that Ludwig Wittgenstein is the most important philosopher of modern times. — The relentless honesty of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ian Ground

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Um dos motivos para escrever, sobretudo ficção, e uma das dimensões políticas da escrita. 

"But most of the writers I talk to desire not to escape the world but to enlarge it, by extending the possibilities of language. I think Amy Tan put it best: “The feeling I’m talking about stems from the sense that we can never fully share the truth of who we are,” she told me. “When I was six or seven, I used to read a thesaurus searching for the words that meant exactly what I felt. And I could never find them … When I had a feeling like sadness, I couldn’t find a word that meant everything that I felt inside of me. I always felt that words were inadequate, that I’d never been able to express myself—ever. Even now, it’s so hard to express what I think and feel, the totality of what I’ve seen. But this loneliness is the impetus for writing.”

In other words: articulating these universal experiences is a way of combatting existential loneliness, for both the writer and the reader. Anyone who’s truly loved a book knows how it can shrink the numbing distance between us. But it’s more than that. The attempt to speak where there’d been silence, or name a thing that had no name, is inherently political—is revolutionary—because, in very real ways, it expands boundaries: first of what can be said, and then of what can be done, and finally of what is possible." — Why Write Fiction in 2017?, Joe Fassler

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Sobre a afirmação de Leibniz de que este é o melhor dos mundos possíveis, a origem da palavra otimismo e humor judeu.

“Leibniz invented the term “theodicy” [em Essays in Theodicy on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil, 1710] [...] to mean the justification of God’s ways to man – or, as an unbeliever might put it, the art of making excuses on behalf of God. Among other things, Leibniz tried to show that God had created what is, all things considered, ‘the best [optimum] among all possible worlds.’ It is only our imperfect understanding of the universe, Leibniz argued, which prevents us from appreciating this fact, and from seeing that God is therefore innocent of the charge of making a world that is worse than it needs to be. A review of Leibniz’s Theodicy in a French Jesuit journal coined the term optimisme to discribe its striking doctrine that this world is the best that could have been created. Voltaire’s tale [Candide, or Optimism, 1759] than popularised the term.

The philosophical “optimism” is more extreme than what is now ordinarily meant by the word. Nowadays an optimist is merely one who believes that the world is on balance more good than bad, or that it is in the process of improving – not, as Leibniz argued, that it could not possibly be any better. There is also a weaker form of optimism which is more of an attitude or temperament than a belief, and is exemplified in Pollyanna, an American children’s book from the early twentieth century. Pollyana liked to play the ‘just being glad’ game, the aim of which was to ‘find something about everything to be glad about.’ In theory, someone might be rather pessimistic yet also be a Pollyana. One might believe that the world is mostly bad, or that things are getting steadily worse, but still be inclined to play the ‘just being glad’ game, in order to make life more bearable. Jewish humour can have a strain of pessimistic Pollyannaism. – The Dream of Enlightenment, p.184, Anthony Gottlieb

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Sobre o trabalho.

[…] Though work has often entailed subjugation, obedience and hierarchy, it’s also where many of us, probably most of us, have consistently expressed our deepest human desire, to be free of externally imposed authority or obligation, to be self-sufficient. We have defined ourselves for centuries by what we do, by what we produce.

But by now we must know that this definition of ourselves entails the principle of productivity – from each according to his abilities, to each according to his creation of real value through work – and commits us to the inane idea that we’re worth only as much as the labour market can register, as a price.[…]

[…] So the impending end of work raises the most fundamental questions about what it means to be human. — What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?, James Livingston

"Say for example you’re a soldier walking home from the war. Or the maiden working in your stepmother’s garden. Or the miller with a cart and a broken axel. A wild-haired woman will stop and, in her kindness, give you a gift of great power and significance. A jewelry box, for example, that can summon three dogs of great, greater, and greatest size. Or a letter from that old love you try never to think of. Maybe a bag that can hold everything up to you, including death itself. And now your ordinary life of meandering pleasures is jacked up with purpose and an unwieldy power that may be a help to you but may also rear its head back and bite a curse on your nose. I want to give you such an invention, even if you are not a soldier or a miller, and all I have done is leave you unexpectedly teary in the break room while waiting for the microwave to ding." — The Inventions of Witches, Kathryn Nuernberger

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Sobre como a linguagem e as diversas camadas que nos constituem modificam a percepção da música.

"In languages such as English, the pitch at which a word is pronounced doesn’t influence its dictionary meaning. Motorcycle means a two-wheeled vehicle with an engine whether I say it in a really high or really low voice. But other languages, such as Mandarin Chinese and Thai, are tone languages: when Chinese speakers say ma with a high, stable pitch it means ‘mother’, but if they say it with a pitch that starts high, declines, then goes back up again, it means ‘horse’. The centrality of pitch to basic definitional content in these languages means that tone-language speakers produce and attend to pitch differently than non-tone-language speakers, day in and day out over the course of years. This cumulative sonic environment tunes the auditory system in ways that alter basic aspects of music perception. Speakers of tone languages, for example, detect and repeat musical melodies and pitch relationships more accurately than non-tone language speakers.

The psychologist Diana Deutsch at the University of California, San Diego concocted tritones (two pitches separated by half an octave) using digitally manipulated tones of ambiguous pitch height. People heard these tritones as ascending or descending (the first note lower or higher than the second) depending on the linguistic background in which they had been raised. Speakers of English who grew up in California tended to hear a particular tritone as ascending, but English speakers raised in the south of England tended to hear it as descending. Chinese listeners raised in villages with different dialects showed similar differences. A striking characteristic of this ‘tritone paradox’ is that listeners who hear the interval as ascending generally experience this upward motion as part of the perception, and have trouble imagining what it would be like to experience it the other way, and vice versa for listeners who hear it as descending. The effect influences what feels like the raw perception of the sound, not some interpretation layered on later. Culture and experience can change how music is heard, not just how people derive meaning from it.

[…] Music cannot be conceptualised as a straightforwardly acoustic phenomenon. It is a deeply culturally embedded, multimodal experience. At a moment in history when neuroscience enjoys almost magical authority, it is instructive to be reminded that the path from sound to perception weaves through imagery, memories, stories, movement and words." — Music is not for ears, Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis

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W.G. Sebald (1944 – 2001), em entrevista:

"[...] em conjunto, visto de longe como um fenômeno evolutivo, dá a impressão de que o modo como evoluímos é uma grande aberração. Uma espécie de erro de cálculo da matriz da evolução. E, claro, somos cada vez mais conscientes disso. Os grandes incêndios da Segunda Guerra Mundial foram apenas os precursores dos fogos que ardem na atualidade.

Pode parecer uma perspectiva quase amoral se se pensar nas cidades e nos cadáveres em chamas da década de 1940 e então os associar, como faço freqüentemente, às imagens das florestas em chamas de Bornéu ou da Amazônia. Seria hipócrita olhar para trás, para os anos 1940-1945, e dizer que foi uma época terrível. Creio que ainda estamos plenamente nessa época."