Wittgenstein the Tartar (Hardcover)

Philosophy, like all learned disciplines, is deeply influenced by a human subjectivity in the context of evolutionary time. The attribute of consciousness is inseparable from the being of all else from which humanity has evolved in time. If, as the opening premise of Wittgenstein's Tractatus puts it: The world is everything that is the case , then the unconscious presence of that everything in the material ground we stand in with our bodies provides the context for all acts of cognition, irrespective of the method of verification called scientific . What is true is discovered consensually through time; a continuing evolutionary process, for only the human species is equipped to perceive and articulate both the specificity of particular circumstance and the context of the whole which it limits spatio-temporally to make the things we call real . Were it not for conceptual activity under those human conditions, the unitary reality would subsume all specific identities together in the unconsciousness to which all other species are subject. As far as subjectivity is concerned, were thoughts - as the drift of contemporary positivist philosophies maintains - the causal product of brain-chemistry and not the intuitive grasping, in an individualized consciousness, of unitary being in its differentiated forms, then neither consciousness nor knowledge at all would be possible. Here, the given and logical order of that dispensation is perceived in terms of both the Greek logos and a physics of the material ground it orders. So it is that the drift of Wittgenstein the Tartar is brought into sharp focus by the texts which most conspicuously oppose the notion of metaphysical being; in particular, The Immortalization Commission: the Strange Quest to Cheat Death by John Gray, whose natural attachment to his human condition nevertheless finds him telling us that our modern myths are further from reality than any that can be found among traditional peoples, while the absurdities of faith are less offensive to reason than the claims made on behalf of science. The resurrection of the dead at the end of time is not as incredible as the idea that humanity, equipped with growing knowledge, is marching towards a better world . The Tartar invades whenever a complacent sedentarism threatens the perspective of an enduring reality whose future is the evolutionary responsibility of humanity. To make that point clear, the epistemological works of Rudolf Steiner underwrite our interpretation of Wittgenstein's Tractatus.