Picked up a copy of the Tractatus soon afterwards. Now I just can’t WAIT for Philosophy Uni-style.

I didn’t think it “important to distinguish religion-as-philosophical-theory from religion-as-form-of-life” since this is the philosophy section, and I was addressing a single philosophical theory a religious person might hold, not religion or the person more broadly.

That breakdown of beauty was a parenthesis within a personal aside, more about what I think of the things people use the word ‘beauty’ about. The point was the next bit: “the fact that something’s pretty means only that it’s pretty. Hang it on your wall, show it to people; don’t marry it or base your worldview on it”. I wasn’t trying to fix a broken word-game or reduce a concept to component parts, just explain how limited its significance is to me.

Your comment spent Christmas in moderation, unlike the rest of us. I think WordPress noticed that it was long and from someone new, and suspected foul play – or perhaps simply weeds out dissenting opinions.

‘It was basically this: words don’t mean things. They’re just sounds and shapes we use.’

You demonstrate an understanding of Wittgenstein that a lot of people, even his proponents, don’t seem to quite get. It’s not 100% accurate – Wittgenstein did talk about meaning, and the word meaning clearly has uses within language-games. But yeah, you’ve got the gist.

It’s a shame you then dropped the ball so freakin’ hard by applying that profound non-theory to your uber-theory of militant atheism. Wittgenstein had a big place in his life for religion, religious thought, and had a big interest in religious language-games. He saw militant atheism of the Bertrand Russell type as a massive misuse of language – people from outside of religious language games stumbling around religious language games going ‘what the hell is going on here then?’, abstracting the language away from its use, bringing it home to their own atheistic language-games, and then concluding ‘it just doesn’t fit’. Well duh. Militant atheism is philosophy. Religion can also be philosophy. But religion is first and foremost a bunch of forms of life, and it’s important to distinguish religion-as-philosophical-theory from religion-as-form-of-life (same goes for atheism). Wittgenstein attacks misuse of language – AKA philosophy. He does not attack forms of life, and religious language, in its home, is not broken or in need of a superior replacement. Same too for a lot of your other stuff – in another one of your posts you break down beauty into what you see to be its essential constitutents, all based around some sort of evolutionary theory of meaning – lust, aesthetics etc. But there’s no need. Most of our language games worked fine before the theory of evolution came about, and so it’s pointless philosophy to conduct an evolutionary critque of the meaning of ‘beauty’. Instead we should focus on actual usage of ‘beauty’ in language-games, and one of our first observations is bound to be that ‘beauty’ is used differently to all of these ‘essential’ components you break it down into – even if there are family resemblances. And so ‘beauty’ forms a different part of the background to our forms of life to these other things, and so is used to work our way around reality in a different manner.

I want to say something like ‘so it matches up with something different in reality’, but of course that would be a bit dumb of me. I think this is where his mysticism comes in.

Anyway, just a quick rambly point. Cool site. And Wittgenstein is definitely the end-of-game boss in a philosophy degree. I’ve never heard it put better.