Tractatus Proposition 1

Part of multimedia project with computer artist Simon Poulter. Aim: to explore Wittgenstein's 7 basic propositions in sound and images. The music is improvised using the 7 basic diatonic scales (piano white notes only) or old 'church' modes, 7 prime numbers for rhythm (1/4, 3/4, 5/4, 7/4, 11/4, 13/4, 17/4) and 7 instrumental families (strings, woodwind, brass, keyboards, percussion, voice, noise) placed in a three-dimentional grid. The participant (live or on-line) manoeuvers randomly or not through the grid, and alters the music and images according to these choices, thus illustrating the arbitrariness of Wittgenstein's propositions, based on words that lose their definition, meaning, and use, when translated into any other language. And by allowing compounds (numbers, instruments, modes), the composer destroys any possibility that these propositions could ever be fixed. The start of anarchy?
Music and arrangements: Jean-Pierre Rasle
Images and Conception: Simon Poulter

Category:

Music

Tags:

• Wittgenstein
• drone
• modal
• music
• Jean-Pierre
• Rasle
• improvisation
• bagpipes
• Simon
• Poulter

[Ruben00021]

Tractatus - proposition1: Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist. Your translation is incorrect and you forgot the comma. Good thing those people passing by didn't know Wittgenstein too well or you'd have made a fool of yourself.

[dronemen]

You made my point exactly: how can Wittgenstein's propositions can ever be interpreted LOGICALLY when the vagaries of translation from one language to another make nonsense out of them!

How do YOU translate it in English and French?

I could only base my (intentinally anarchic) interpretations on the versions available in print.

[spotlightmind]

well done.

[MrDanielconley]

All of you do realize that the English translation of the Tracticus was written by Wittgenstein himself, right? He was a professor at Cambridge for more than a decade. So if Wittgenstein wants to eliminate the comma and state the first proposition this way, who are you to question his translation?

[DarkwingScooter]

@Ruben00021 That's funny. Babelfish, Pojman (The Classics of Philosophy) and my rudimentary German all seem to agree with his translation.

Care to enlighten us on an alternative reading?

[emblemOFbeing]

" The world is my idea" — this is a truth which holds good for everything that lives and knows, though man alone can bring it into reflective and abstract consciousness. If he really does this, he has attained to philosophical wisdom. [...]... what he knows is not a sun and an earth, but only an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels an earth; that the world which surrounds him is there only as idea, i.e., only in relation to something else, the consciousness, which is he.

-Schopenhauer

[gen6k]

kierkegaard theres only truth in actions.

[GordonMorrice]

"I am my world (the microcosm)," is such an amazing proposition.

[iamivantoo]

cool. The World is the totality of facts, not of things.