December 2014
off-color
11 December 2014, around 8.32.
Notes on Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Colour:
- Wittgenstein muddles his thinking about color – visualizing rather than looking: the dullness of phenomenology.
- The removal of colors from context, which changes the ‘meaning’ – what is at once ‘reddish green’ might, in other settings, be called ‘brown’.
- ‘I took a green painted lead cupola to be translucent greenish glass without knowing at the time about the special distribution of colours that produced this appearance’ (§139).
- ‘That which I am writing about so tediously may be obvious to someone whose mind is less decrepit’ (§295) – a nasty trick.
accordance
15 December 2014, around 9.25.
Although he never lose his heart exclusively to one philosophical sect and was also an eclectic, Horace’s sharply critical mind, with a subtle sense of humor on the surface and a tempered pessimism deeper down, was far more inclined towards the doctrines of Aristippus, Epicurus and Lucretius than towards the Stoa which he often mentions with sympathy, but to which he was not really prepared to accord more than a smile
pseudaphoristica (18)
21 December 2014, around 9.26.
One ought not to mistake the grinding of axes and the rattling of hobbyhorses for the murmur of conversation.
a mere habit
24 December 2014, around 11.56.
It is snowing outside and there is nothing to do save sit in front of the fire and read. Indeed, there is nothing one would rather be doing.
Did she distrust all figurative language because she was sharply aware of the aptitude of the most languid figurative expressions for persisting as a mere habit of speech, after they have lost even the feeble life they had for the imagination?—a not unreasonable distrust, so large is the element of figurative idiom in our tongue. And was she further aware that, since such language commonly carries in the first using some emotional suggestion, it cannot fossilize without turning into a lie? Even if this should seem a rashly conjectural explanation of her apparent distrust of all figures of speech, her evident dislike of all that are ready made, it is certainly worth while to notice her quick ear for all those ready-made phrases, whether figurative or no, which creep so insidiously into our habitual speech.
wide of the mark
31 December 2014, around 5.29.
I suppose after all that no one whose mind was not, to put it mildly, abnormal, ever yet aimed very high out of pure malice aforethought. I once saw a fly alight on a cup of hot coffee on which the milk had formed a thin skin; he perceived his extreme danger, and I noted with what ample strides and almost supermuscan effort he struck across the treacherous surface and made for the edge of the cup—for the ground was not solid enough to let him raise himself from it by his wings. As I watched him I fancied that so supreme a moment of difficulty and danger might leave him with an increase of moral and physical power which might even descend in some measure to his offspring. But surely he would not have got the increased moral power if he could have helped it, and he will not knowingly alight upon another cup of hot coffee.