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After Wittgenstein - In The Beginning Was The Deed

by  Zettel

Posted: Friday, October 4, 2013
Word Count: 502
Summary: Not sure if this will make much sense - experimental: to see whether there is any resonance for non-academic philosophers.




After Wittgenstein – In the Beginning Was the Deed

Words alone have no meaning no sense
so the proposition is meaningless too
Meaning is the act of making sense
meaning something in using words
Possibilities of meaning are my choice
through action of making sense with them
Action is use
I enter the world
through my acts of meaning,
the sense I create in my use of words
The limits of meaning are set
by the limits of actions through which
I can give them the sense that they might have

Action is meaning
Words represent possible actions not meanings
without action they are just marks on a page
The meaning of life – is life
To live is to act
to act is to mean
therefore to live is to mean
I cannot live without meaning
because I cannot live without acting
There are things I can mean in what I do
but there are possible meanings in what I do
I did not mean

The possibilities of meaning I can create in acting
are the possibilities of my acts being understood
by an other. Taking sense from
a shared form of life.
Language cannot start as private
nor, it now seems can an act.
My action with words can deceive
but to deceive you must believe that they’re true
You will only believe if you trust me
Our respect for the truth
confers the power to lie.
Our secrets can only be private
if what we hide can be known
otherwise why conceal it
to what point and from whom?
Privacy is a social conception


A proposition is an imagined act of meaning with no actor
therefore its sense is imaginary
Imagined actions do not enter the world
so do not have actual consequences
only imagined results
therefore they don’t have real meaning
only imagined sense
We can imagine any action we choose
but we cannot imagine real sense
for that we must act but
an act of the imagination
is a grammatical mistake
that generates philosophical confusion
An imagined act cannot be the same as a real act
A grammatical remark about acting not ‘acting’


The end of Philosophy is the end of Philosophy
the realisation we do not discover
meaning or sense in the world
we create it.
Philosophy cannot show us
how we enter the world, understand it
because we are born in the world
before we begin to philosophise
Being in the world
and sharing it with others
is how we begin all thought
including philosophical thought

In Philosophy we imagine imaginary acts
that create imaginary meaning, imaginary sense
Philosophy is imagined ‘til it enters the world
Only through the act can it enter the world
Philosophy isn’t the discovery of meaning
or of the sense of life
it is the realisation
that we already know it
To know the world is to be in it

“The resolution to the question – what is the meaning of life?
Is to stop asking the question.”

(Ludwig Wittgenstein)