What was read this week: Jan 5–Jan 11…

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Traveling Abroad: The Universality of Culture and Isolation of Language

Traveling outside the States is always a mind-expanding experience.

Seeing other cultures with all their beauty and divinity and familiarness leaves one feeling like one’s both home and away. I remember being in Bangkok with this strange sensation that I was both a day ahead from home and thousands of miles away but that these locals hung around and gossiped, drinking tea and smoking exactly like back home.

There is a fundamental humanness despite the cultural differences, and yet one can feel completely isolated, especially linguistically.

I remember traveling with an old girlfriend through Mexico, trying to rent a car at a small airport in Ixtapa with a feeling of just bulldozing this rental agent with my American attitude and complete lack of Spanish.

I remember turning to my girlfriend, and she had this look on her face of nervous trepidation, and she had gone mute.

Later, she told me that she felt a complete sense of disconnection from the world because, for the first time in her life, she couldn’t understand a word being said.

She was completely alone, alien to a language.

For me, that linguistic isolation is something I find very refreshing and interesting. For her, it was a complete breakdown of everything she’d ever experienced.

Wittgenstein and Linguistic Isolation: Philosophy as a Foreign Land

When I came to revisit Tractatus after many years’ absence, I had that same experience of being in a foreign land in linguistic isolation. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s only published book in his lifetime, famous for its propositional structure as well as its complete disregard for anything resembling clarity, is one challenging read.

I don’t know if I can even come close to trying to elucidate his philosophical outlook in this work, but I can attempt something of trying to grasp it.

Language’s Perspective Shift: Lessons from Braiding Sweetgrass

This thinking along and around language(s), which started with Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass and led to the language games of Wittgenstein, has also been whispering to me that I need to expand my language(s).

I kept thinking of how Kimmerer was able to shift her perspective by switching her language, and this switch allowed her to experience the different depths of reality.

For instance, talking about the title of Sweetgrass, she switches between the scientific properties of the plant to the actual chemical composition which allows for photosynthesis, to that process on a molecular level with the exchange of electrons, and finally into the narratives and myths of Sweetgrass in her native culture.

Each level of depth reveals a totally different world full of its own worldness, for lack of a better word—complete in itself and yet not competing with or negating any other level.

It is something I wanted to cultivate more of in my life, especially from the scientific angle, as that is something I fundamentally lack being a humanities major.

Related Posts:

• What was read this week: Dec 29-Jan 4…
• The Chaos of Life: Why ‘God Doesn’t Build a Staircase to Nowhere’
• What was read this week: Jan 12-18
• What was read this week: Jan 19-25
• Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: A Mystical Path Through Logic’s Limits

Chemistry as Geography: Rethinking the Periodic Table

So in that effort, I picked up a work by P. W. Atkins which I’ve had for a number of years but have never gotten around to tackling despite its short length and popular appeal.

Atkins is an English chemist who has written a number of textbooks on chemistry, and this book, The Periodic Kingdom, is part of a larger series to present science to the masses.

The book is about the basic composition of our material world, the elements and the elemental table.

Now, if you’re anything like me, I learned the elemental table a long time ago, and it was something I promptly forgot.

However, he presents it as a landscape rather than a boring table, with each section of the book defining a specific way of examining the elemental table.

The book is broadly defined by geography, history, and government and institutions, which he uses to describe the physicality of the elements, the discovery and naming of them, as well as how their interactions together form the basic building blocks of everything material.

The Vastness of the Universe: Humbling the Human Perspective

Lastly, this week I read something a little longer with some more substance to it, to make up for my two slim volumes previously mentioned. Kenneth C. Davis is a historian who writes the widely popular “Don’t Know Much About…” series, and this week I read his book about the universe.

It contains a great historical overview of all the ideas, theories, and massive misconceptions about our universe from the beginning of civilization to the present.

Not only is there that historical perspective on how science viewed the stars above, but it also provides a sort of guided field trip through the whole place, with our little solar system here with our eight (or nine) planets to our galaxy, and finally to the thing which pushes so far into infinity we can’t even conceptualize it: the universe.

Ignorance and Ego: Why Our Certainties Are Often Wrong

The scientific revolutions which left the Euclidean world after a thousand years and then abandoned Newton after a few hundred and then Einstein in a few decades really moved me to actually contemplate how much of what I “know” to be true right now at the start of 2025 will turn out to be false in a decade, or even a few years.

Further, I could not even be privy to the recent development which undoes my “truth,” so I could be walking around deluded and ignorant to my own ignorance.

And perhaps that is the bigger lesson to take from these sundry explorations into popular science, something I already know I am wholly ignorant in.

To see how the smartest men in history turned out to be completely wrong in a few generations really makes me reflect on my own perceptions of the world.

Applying the Lessons: Embracing the Unknown in Everyday Life

Yes, I am talking about a scientific perspective because that is a very interesting lens to view the world.

But in a more practical sense, I am talking about the everyday.

These political factions of right and left, which have grown more stark over the last few years—how can we apply the lessons of our own ignorance to some of these issues that people will kill for?

Are you sure you’re really right in the way you view the economy?

Or our institutions? Or our history?

If half of my views of just the material reality that makes up our life turn out to be completely false in the next few years, can I really defend my views of how the world should be governed or some of these larger issues?

Or should I acknowledge my own ignorance by saying, “I think this is what’s right, but what do you think?”

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