"Looking, really looking, at art (some might say seeing…feeling) is like this: It is like all the other really amazing things in life…You do it too much & you forget how good it can actually be…you become jaded. You don’t get enough & it is all you can think about—the good & the bad. Then, there is one photo…drawing…performance & you want to know all there is to know about it…It is a little bit like falling in love. It’s best, most exciting, when you don’t know why you like something…the thing you are looking at is something you might usually be inclined to dislike…But, with this, you cannot stop looking, cannot stop thinking. And so, in every other thing that you think about, talk about, read about, talk about, read about, you start to see it in all of those other things, whether or not they, directly, have anything to do with that thing you are suddenly, entirely, falling for…all of those other things have changed. And everything that you thought you knew is no longer the same."

"In this lecture, Borges famously declares that laziness kept him from writing novels. I wonder if this is the same “happy indolence” that Billy Collins has described as his modus operandi. Borges, like the ancients, defines the poet as “‘a maker’—not only as the utterer of those high lyric notes, but also as a teller of a tale."

"“Thought and Poetry” finds Borges asserting over and over again that metaphors should both resonate and unsettle."

"Borges’s humility should be admired but what must also be considered here is the incredible challenge—one may even describe it as a daunting, accusing mountain—that faces the writer. Those “tolerable” pages arrive from labored and conscientious output, through the uncertain process of trial and error, and through the making of, the awareness and recognition of, as well as the correction and ultimate learning from, mistakes."

"In “Philosophical Investigations,” Wittgenstein writes that what children and foreigners have in common is the absence of knowledge of language & a set of codified rules. This leads them—in the first instance—to learn through the senses and the body. To give the children more freedom to move around the school, the directors of the Fuji Kindergarten requested Tezuka to design spaces without furniture: no chairs, desks or lecterns. As a result, “Ring Around a Tree” offers an architecture where there are no measures taken to constrain space, in order to liberate the body.<br />
The space created by Tezuka seems to have just two floors, but for the children the building has 6 floors w/ volumes that are one meter high. The compressed spaces, which can only be reached by crawling, further the freedom of movement & ability to use the body as a means of learning."<br />
<br />
[Via: http://bobulate.com/post/7560943445 ]<br />
[More about Fuji Kindergarten: http://delicious.com/rgreco/fujikindergarten ]

Too much to quote…nice conversation about perception and reality through cartoons and storytelling…

"While you wring hands over what it all means, we are trying to change the world, build relationships and communities. Are we naive? Possibly. We prefer a world of naive dreamers to cynical observers. Keep your beloved “criticality.” Hold it close to your heart and tell us what you feel. We are friends, not “colleagues” and we choose to embrace humane values and each other. We offer a different vision. Against the professional hegemony of academic intellectualism we offer – trust, love, sentiment, passion, egalitarianism and sincerity…

We are gamblers, believing in the value of risking everything for the sake of our “foolish” dreams and schemes."

"Can you do that? Can you just plug in some made up thing and end up with solutions? Can you simply draw some imaginary lines and end up with a better map? You don’t expect to be acclaimed as a great scientist until you discover something, something big and useful, but shouldn’t this something have to be real? Let’s jump ahead 125 years. It’s 1922 and Ludwig Wittgenstein has just published his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus which insists, among other things, that the limits of my language mean the limits of my world. Or, put another way: how you say it is how you think it. And, more dramatically: if you can’t say it, you can’t think it. And, if you can’t think it, how can you solve it?" [via: http://jslr.tumblr.com/post/4061339301/can-you-do-that-can-you-just-plug-in-some-made-up ]

"How not to learn: Reflections on Wittgenstein and Learning"<br />
C.J.B. Macmillan

"The Significance of Learning in Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy"<br />
Merideth Williams

"The later Wittgenstein uses children in his philosophical arguments against the traditional views of language. Describing how they learn language is one of his philosophical methods for setting philosophers free from their views and enabling them to see the world in a different way. The purpose of this paper is to explore what features of children he takes advantage of in his arguments, and to show how we can read Wittgenstein in terms of education. … The two features show that teaching is unlike telling, an activity toward the other who does not understand our explanations. Since we might not understand learners because of otherness, the justification of teaching is a crucial problem that is not properly answered so long as otherness is unrecognized. As long as we ignore otherness, we would not be aware that we might mistreat learners."

"The theme of this semester’s course will be Ludwig Wittgenstein’s views on knowledge and language and their implications for teaching. Working from primary readings, as well as biographical texts and correspondence, we will place Wittgenstein’s views about pedagogy, and his own experiences as a teacher, against the background of his philosophical views.<br />
<br />
Relying mostly on primary texts, we will be exploring Wittgenstein not as a philosopher who provides a method for analyzing educational concepts but rather as one who approaches philosophical questions from a pedagogical point of view. We believe that the analytic impulse to want to extract a theory or method from Wittgenstein is wrong-headed. His styles are essentially pedagogical: he provides pictures, drawings, analogies, similes, jokes, equations, dialogues with himself, questions and wrong answers, experiments and so on, as a means to shift our thinking, to help us escape the picture that holds us captive.…"

"The temptation to characterize Wittgenstein’s philosophy according to the aphorisms derived from his style is powerful, but must be avoided where it obscures the approach to language he developed. The game metaphor served a specific purpose in Wittgenstein’s philosophy as an object of comparison — as a way of looking at language. The analogy allowed him to describe the implications of his early view that drew him toward a different perspective, and most importantly, it allowed him to articulate the features of his new philosophy. This is where the later approach connects with his style in writing philosophy. In saying “Don’t think, just look!”, Wittgenstein is referring to an approach to language and to an approach to  his language — and to his philosophy. Overcharacterization of Wittgenstein’s game metaphor steps into the very trap — the craving for generality — that the later period in his philosophy was conceived to avoid."

"[Regarding Vision, an optic topic]:<br />
[duck-rabbits breeding...]<br />
[... lineage, mutations, locations]<br />
[Duchamp's Large Glass corrected]"

"I took some apples out of a paper bag where they had been lying for a long time; I had to cut off and throw away half of many of them. Afterwards as I was copying out a sentence of mine the second half of which was bad, I at once saw it as a half-rotten apple. And that’s how it always is with me. Everything that comes my way becomes for me a picture of what I am thinking about."

"To put it differently, sculpture and architecture can both be meaningful, but they typically mean in different ways. Nicholas Bourriaud, in his more recent book Postproduction offers, "why wouldn't the meaning of a work have as much to do with the use one makes of it as with the artists intentions for it." Or, Bourriaud again, quoting Tiravanija, quoting Wittgenstein: "Don't look for the meaning, look for the use.""

"Leafing through some past issues of TICS (an activity that is always pleasurable and informative), I noticed a depiction of the famous "duck-rabbit" figure, described as an "illusion" and attributed to Wittgenstein (Malach, Levy, & Hasson, 2002).  <br />
Technically, the duck-rabbit figure is an ambiguous (or reversible, or bistable) figure, not an illusion (Peterson, Kihlstrom, Rose, & Glisky, 1992). The two classes of perceptual phenomena have quite different theoretical implications. From a constructivist point of view, many illusions illustrate the role of unconscious inferences in perception, while the ambiguous figures illustrate the role of expectations, world-knowledge, and the direction of attention (Long & Toppino, 2004). For example, children tested on Easter Sunday are more likely to see the figure as a rabbit; if tested on a Sunday in October, they tend to see it as a duck or similar bird (Brugger & Brugger, 1993)…"

"We should not think of the difficulty or resistance here as a psychological matter, as an individual’s  quirk.  Wittgenstein’s sights were broader, surveying (and diagnosing) his whole culture.  As he wrote in the Foreword to Philosophical Remarks:

"This book is written for such men as are in sympathy with its spirit. This spirit is different from the one which informs the vast stream of European and American civilization in which all of us stand. That spirit expresses itself in an onwards movement, in building ever larger and more complicated structures; the other in striving after clarity and perspicuity in no matter what structure."

In these matters the individual needs neither psychoanalysis nor shock therapy; it is philosophy that is required:  a philosophical striving after clarity and perspicuity, a philosophical straining (and training) to constantly conquer temptation anew and to see the sense visible amidst the nonsense and the nonsense clothed as sense."

"Some philosophers are such great writers and stylists that they are a pleasure to read — even in translation. Plato and Nietzsche are the most obvious examples, though I’d also include Spinoza, Hume, and Wittgenstein, at the very least, on my short list of great philosophical stylists. And the rhetorical effects of style are a big part of what attracts readers to such philosophers — Nietzsche, especially, seduces more on account of his style than on account of his actual arguments. This is not necessarily a bad thing; it’s a delusion, in any case, to think that you can separate logic from rhetoric, or content from style. Even mathematicians value “elegant” proofs. In things less cut and dried than mathematics — like metaphysics and ethics — style and rhetoric are even more important…"

"The Germans playing 4-2-4, Leibniz in goal, back four Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer and Schelling, front-runners Schlegel, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche and Heidegger, and the mid-field duo of Beckenbauer and Jaspers. Beckenbauer obviously a bit of a surprise there."

"I almost became a professional philosopher," Martin Seligman says. "I had a fellowship to Oxford. I turned it down."…<br />
<br />
"My education was Wittgensteinian," he continues. I’d heard this about Seligman too—how fascinated he was by Ludwig Wittgenstein, a famous depressive who nevertheless told his landlady as he was dying, Tell them it’s been wonderful. Seligman’s interested in many famous depressives—Lincoln, Oppenheimer. He identifies himself as a depressive, too. "But in retrospect," he continues, "I think Wittgenstein suborned three generations of philosophy, including mine, by telling us that what we wanted to do was puzzles and that somehow by solving puzzles, problems would get solved. I spent 40 years struggling out of that mode."<br />
<br />
Seligman spent almost as long struggling out of the mode of traditional psychology… It is Seligman’s contention that psychology’s emphasis on pathology has marginalized the study of well-being."

"Wittgenstein: Tortured Genius"

"To understand the fiction of David Foster Wallace, it helps to have a little Wittgenstein."<br />
<br />
"for someone as obsessed with isolation as Wallace, he was "obviously a social novelist, a novelist of noticed details, on a near-encyclopedic scale." Where other novelists dealing with solipsism, like Markson and Beckett, painted barren images with small compressed sentences, Costello observed, "Dave tackled the issue by massively overfilling his scenes and sentences to comic bursting"—indeed to the point of panicked overstimulation. There was a palpable strain for Wallace between engagement with the world, in all its overwhelming fullness, and withdrawal to one's own head, in all its loneliness. The world was too much, the mind alone too little. "You can't be anything but contemptible living for yourself," Costello said, summing up the dilemma. "But letting the world in—that sucks too."<br />
<br />
It's not exactly what you'd call an intellectual conundrum. But it was the lived one."

“Philosophy does not contribute to our knowledge of the world we live in after the manner of any of the natural sciences. You can ask any scientist to show you the achievements of science over the past millennium, and they have much to show: libraries full of well-established facts and well-confirmed theories. If you ask a philosopher to produce a handbook of well-established and unchallengeable philosophical truths, there’s nothing to show. I think that is because philosophy is not a quest for knowledge about the world, but rather a quest for understanding the conceptual scheme in terms of which we conceive of the knowledge we achieve about the world. One of the rewards of doing philosophy is a clearer understanding of the way we think about ourselves and about the world we live in, not fresh facts about reality." [via: http://ayjay.tumblr.com/post/1456008129/philosophy-does-not-contribute-to-our-knowledge-of]