Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
In trying to appreciate this work, among other ways, as a “philosophic work of art”, some things occur to me which may warrant more exploration later.
It seems that there are large swaths of discourse in philosophy which have little evident practical bearing outside of academia and aesthetics. Given that my autodidactic praxis takes as one of its fundamental principles the importance of funding practical application for the material one is engaging with, this quality of having little evident bearing outside of academic would seem to render such works of discourse unfavorable by such a praxis.
However, from a perspective of hermeneutic pluralism, there may yet be a way to fold the retention of such discourse into the ‘acumen bildung’ of the autodidact. In the case of the Tractatus, like several other dense works I have tried to penetrate, there seems to be a lot of effort required to connect its insights to one’s own field of practical application, unless one expounds the same area of discourse as a profession or hobby. Already, there are several ways I can connect core insights of the Tractatus to my everyday life and occupations, but this has mostly been owing to my already having thought through similar things, albeit in far less systematically rigorous fashion.
One of the ways this work is resonating with me, is as an example of discursive architecture, with form following function. That is, the tree-like form, containing child units of discourse named according to a bespoke system of unique identifiers, follows the function of needing to convey arrays of auxiliary caveats after almost every point, while still preserving the major thrust of the parent units. I would have used a different naming scheme, using decimal points between each tier’s identifier, as that would permit an unlimited child count without namespace collision, but thats neither here nor there.
Anyway, back to this notion of hermeneutic pluralism, it would seem to be an application of internal family systems to hermeneutics, or an exegetic application of schizoanalysis, wherein one contains a multitude of interpreters within oneself, whose modes of interpretation need not be reconciled with or justified by one another, but can instead coexist with whatever degree of dialogue one pleases. For example, in the case of the Tractatus, I have one ‘hermeneutic modality’ wherein I am seeking practical applications of these insights within the context of my work, life, or pursuits most broadly, and I have another modality geared more around ‘conceptual aesthetics’ and appreciating the beauty (qua immanent teleology, see Either/Or) of the Tractatus as a work of philosophical art.
