The Philosophy Hole, born again

Well, shit. Looks like the haxxor didn't like our philosophical musings. No worry, we've got new content.

So, Max Cooper sent me an email about a new single, and I'll state it plainly: if you put Wittgenstein in the subject line of your email, you're either doing things very right, or very wrong. But at least you have my attention!

Where we left off, if I recall, I started by opening the discussion about the hedonistic tendencies of the hobby, and some of the implications of hedonism on evaluation and critique. I don't think we'd gotten to working towards understanding and discussion of the philosophical concept of dialectic, though, but my memory is likely fogged. Anywho! Lets take some hacking-lemons and make a cup of tea, or something.

So, for anyone who's not caught up on someone who I believe might be the most important philosopher of the 20th century, here's the wikipedia and all its inherent muck. Either way you feel about Wikipedia entries, LW is an interesting guy*.

Per LW, here's an interesting idea: Picture in your mind, a beetle in a box. Pretty simple. Now, tell me about your beetle in a box in your head.

Go on, tell me everything you know about the beetle in a box in your head. It's right there - you can picture it in your mind's eye, so tell me about it!

* – understatement.

 

Being a former student of philosophy, I found Wittgenstein to be a very fascinating guy to say the least. It's actually quite fitting and applicable that you would relate the concept of his language games to the evaluation and critique here on SBAF across many subjects that touch upon personal and experiential concepts, where our words cannot fully describe the details and nuances adequately or do its justice so to speak.

Instead of beetles, here it is sound. You have a certain sound in your amp but only you know what it is. And in my amp, it also has a certain sound, and only I know exactly what it is! I don't know your private language any more than you would mine.

I apologize as I'm just seeing your post, so I am unaware of what you feel are the implications of hedonism specifically on the art of critique. I can only assume that with the drive of a person to identify contextual language insofar to help them meet their goal of experiencing that pleasure/satisfying feeling - reviews and reviewers can pander to known concepts that appeal to the public. It's no more different than marketing and advertising. With language both visual and textual to help transform/distill that language into the formless feelings one possesses. Though again, I am assuming and perhaps too much.

 

You've pretty much got it. Distilling the anti-hedonistic critique of "An Audiophile Review of Audiophile Gear" is to simply state that a review which includes simple preference, i.e., "I like this" or "I don't like this," doesn't present any useful information to anyone, especially outside of the historical context of something like a public web forum like SBAF. Honest critical review is something different and more difficult. That's about as far as I recall I got in the last thread.

 

Love this thread having read both his Critiques and Tractatus. Just saw this and will contribute when the wifes not calling me to dinner. In the interim, let’s also remember the words of Immanuel Kant - ‘we can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals’.

 

LW’s idea of language games might be helpful for understanding the (perceived?) tension between SBAF and similar audio sites. We can think of each site as a cultural-linguistic system with its own way of speaking. Each site has an internal coherence in how we communicate both textually and visually. I wonder if part of the tension between sites is less about actual differences in taste and reviewer methodology and more about how we use language. I’m not saying that there aren’t genuine differences in taste, methodology, etc., but it can also be difficult to access other people’s language games when we don’t regularly participate in their community. If we’re not an active part of the community, then we haven’t been habituated into their ways of speaking. Translation from one site to another is always a fraught task, and meaning is often lost or misunderstood in translation.

In a sense, when we ask people to introduce themselves in the New Members thread and lurk around for a while to get a feel for our community, we’re asking them to take time to become habituated within our cultural-linguistic game. We’re training them in the language we use around here. To be clear, I’m not criticizing this. I’m just describing how we (and I think other sites) operate. We happen to state our expectation rather explicitly, whereas other sites are more implicit in expecting people to learn the local language.

I’m not addressing your question about hedonism, but that’s where my mind traveled when you mentioned LW.