Is Wolfram Quotes

What will limit us is not the possible evolution of technology, but the evolution of human purposes.

We never let our people just go. (Joe) What are you? Wolfram and Hart? (Steele) Oh, no, sweetie, they just take your soul for service. We intend to take even more than that. (Tee)

It's always seemed like a big mystery how nature, seemingly so effortlessly, manages to produce so much that seems to us so complex. Well, I think we found its secret. It's just sampling what's out there in the computational universe.

While not all elements in the Periodic Table are represented by letters of the alphabet, some in this book (Magical Elements of the Periodic Table Presented Alphabetically by the Metal Horn Unicorns), are introduced by alternate designations. For instance, Tungsten is also known as Wolfram so “W” is used as the entry for that alphabetical letter in this book. The letter “W” is also used as the atomic symbol for Tungsten in all periodic tables.

While researching this answer, I managed to lock up my copy of Mathematica several times on balloon-related differential equations, and subsequently got my IP address banned from Wolfram|Alpha for making too many requests. The ban-appeal form asked me to explain what task I was performing that necessitated so many queries. I wrote, “Calculating how many rental helium tanks you’d have to carry with you in order to inflate a balloon large enough to act as a parachute and slow your fall from a jet aircraft.” Sorry, Wolfram.

…you know, sometimes an electric lightbulb goes out all of a sudden. Fizzles, you say. And this burned-out bulb, if you shake it, it flashes again and it’ll burn a little longer. Inside the bulb it’s a disaster. The wolfram filaments are breaking up, and when the fragments touch, life returns to the bulb. A brief, unnatural, undeniably doomed life—a fever, a too-bright incandescence, a flash. The comes the darkness, life never returns, and in the darkness the dead, incinerated filaments are just going to rattle around. Are you following me? But the brief flash is magnificent! “I want to shake… “I want to shake the heart of a fizzled era. The lightbulb of the heart, so that the broken pieces touch… “…and produce a beautiful, momentary flash…

And Wolfram knows about cellular automata?” “Oh, my goodness, yes,” said Anna. “He wrote a book you could kill a man with—twelve hundred pages—called A New Kind of Science. It’s all about them.” “We should totally ask him what he thinks!” Caitlin said.

Funny thing about straddling fences, though: eventually you end up with a pain in the butt and not much ground covered in any direction.

Then the King of Arragon pushed old Utepandragun over his horse’s tail down on to the meadow – the King of Britain! – where he lay in a bed of flowers!

Von Neumann was in many ways a traditional mathematician, who (like Turing) believed he needed to turn to partial differential equations in describing natural systems.

Let mercy keep company with courage. Follow my advice in this: if in battle you win a man’s surrender, then unless he has done you such grievance as amounts to heart’s sorrow, accept his oath, and let him live.

It is perhaps a little humbling to discover that we as humans are in effect computationally no more capable than cellular automata with very simple rules. But the Principle of Computational Equivalence also implies that the same is ultimately true of our whole universe. So while science has often made it seem that we as humans are somehow insignificant compared to the universe, the Principle of Computational Equivalence now shows that in a certain sense we are at the same level as it is. For the principle implies that what goes on inside us can ultimately achieve just the same level of computational sophistication as our whole universe.

Like large areas of analytic philosophy today, scholasticism, too, preferred to busy itself with the fetishization of fine distinctions on an apparently secure investigative foundation, rather than engaging in the adventure of providing a relevant contribution to the understanding of its own age, with its shifting foundational structures.

Wolfram,” Dan mused, a far-off look in his eye. “I’ve heard of that from somewhere.” Amy was skeptical. “Are you sure you’re not thinking of Wolfgang?

If you’re having trouble with a math problem, plug the equation into WolframAlpha.com and it will solve it for you.

I'm committed to seeing this project done. To see if within this decade we can finally hold in our hands the rule for our universe, and know where our universe lies in the space of all possible universes.

If doubt is near neighbor to the heart, that may turn sour on the soul. There is both scorning and adorning when a man’s undaunted mind turns pied like the magpie’s hue. Yet he may still enjoy bliss, for both have a share in him, Heaven and Hell. Inconstancy’s companion holds entirely to the black colour and will, indeed, take on darkness’s hue, while he who is constant in his thoughts will hold to the white.

There are whole villages in Extremadura in Spain that are built of rock that has very high grade wolfram ore and the stone fences of the peasant’s field are all made of this ore. Yet the peasants are very poor. At this time it was so valuable that we were using DC-2’s, transport planes such as fly from here to Miami, to fly it over from a field at Nam Yung in Free China to Kai Tak airport at Kowloon. From there it was shipped to the States. It was considered very scarce and of vital importance in our preparations for war

So when I hear this snarky question (and I hear it everywhere): Are librarians obsolete in the Age of Google? all I can say is, are you kidding? Librarians are more important than ever. Google and Yahoo! and Bing and WolframAlpha can help you find answers to your questions, sometimes brilliantly; but if you don't know how to phrase those questions, no search engine can help provide the answers.

Sir, if you are otherwise discreet, you will consider that you have gone far enough. At my brother's request I am treating you no less kindly than Ampflise treated my uncle Gahmuret, without going to bed together. My kindness would in the long run outweigh hers, if anyone were to weigh us properly. And besides, Sir, I don't know who you are, and yet in such a short space of time you want to have my love.

Mainittakoon lyhyesti, että kiroilussa suomalainen on tasapainon vaalija, siis keskitien kulkija. Sillä siinä missä romaanisten kielten puhuja keskittyy toisia tai itseään häväistääkseen genitaalialueeseen ja germaani pysyttelee tiukasti anaalilinjalla, suomlainen hallitsee sekä uloste- että genitaalirekisterin ja rikastaa sadatteluaan vielä perkeleen tai itsensä saatanan kaltaisella demonikuvastolla. Tämän herkän kielen rumin ilmaus on naisen sukuelintä tarkoittava diabolinen manaus.

There was much more she would have liked to tell her brother. But within a few months, she would be able to tell him in person. When he learned of the attack on the airship, nothing would stop Archimedes and his wife from coming. But at least they would fly to the Red City instead of Krakentown, where he might be recognized as the smuggler Wolfram Gunther-Baptiste. One day, she might write a story inspired by that part of his career. She would call it The Idiot Smuggler Who Destroyed the Horde Rebellion’s War Machines and Changed His Name to Avoid the Rebel Assassins. Zenobia would take pity on the idiot’s sister and leave her out of the tale. She

Wolfram, one of the most innovative thinkers in scientific computing and in the theory of complex systems, has been best known for the development of Mathematica, a computer program/system that allows a range of calculations not accessible before. After ten years of virtual silence, Wolfram is about to emerge with a provocative book that makes the bold claim that he can replace the basic infrastructure of science. In a world used to more than three hundred years of science being dominated by mathematical equations as the basic building blocks of models for nature, Wolfram proposes simple computer programs instead. He suggests that nature's main secret is the use of simple programs to generate complexity.

Die Frage, wie ein Wesen, das nur ein paar Weltzeitsekunden existiert, dazu bewegt werden soll, sein Verhalten nach Zeiträumen auszurichten, die es sich gar nicht vorstellen kann, bleibt ohne Antwort. Was könnte dieses Wesen dazu bringen, weniger rücksichtslos und stattdessen achtsamer zu sein, weniger zu konsumieren und wegzuschmeißen, weniger Nachkommen zu zeugen und die Erde nicht als Wegwerfartikel, sondern als Leihgabe, als Teil des eigenen Körpers zu begreifen? So wie es steht, wird dieses Wesen in seiner weltzeitlichen Sekundenexistenz aus eigenem Antrieb oder eigener Einsicht wohl niemals aufhören, die wundersame Kugel, auf der und von der er lebt, ungebremst und erbarmungslos auszuweiden und zuzumüllen.

But if you inflated the balloons quickly, possibly by connecting many canisters to it at once, you’d be able to slow your fall. Just don’t use too much helium, or you’ll end up floating at 16,000 feet like Larry Walters. While researching this answer, I managed to lock up my copy of Mathematica several times on balloon-related differential equations, and subsequently got my IP address banned from Wolfram|Alpha for making too many requests. The ban-appeal form asked me to explain what task I was performing that necessitated so many queries. I wrote, “Calculating how many rental helium tanks you’d have to carry with you in order to inflate a balloon large enough to act as a parachute and slow your fall from a jet aircraft.” Sorry, Wolfram. 1 While researching impact speeds for this answer, I came across a discussion on the Straight Dope Message Board about survivable fall heights. One poster

hardening steel, yet anyone could go out and dig up as much of it in the hills of the New Territories as he or she could carry on a flat basket balanced on the head to the big shed where it was bought clandestinely. I found this out when I was hunting wood pigeons and I brought it to the attention of people purchasing wolfram in the interior. No one was very interested and I kept bringing it to the attention of people of higher rank until one day a very high officer who was not at all interested that wolfram was there free to be dug up in the New Territories said to me, ‘But after all, old boy, the Nam Yung set-up is functioning you know.’ But when we shot in the evenings outside the women’s prison and would see an old Douglas twin-motor plane come in over the hills and slide down toward the airfield, and you knew it was loaded with sacked wolfram and had just flown over the Jap lines, it was strange to know that many of the women in the women’s prison were there for having been caught digging wolfram illicitly.

If only to give all the forces and trends involved in this event a vision of their own limitations, and also of the connection among the different disciplines in the concert of the great whole. Without clues to define unity, especially in its more dynamic eras, the polyphony of disciplines threatened to descend into cacophony. And all participants suffer from that in the end.

The Monday meetings were in a sense a tug-of-war, in which the Schlick faction—supposedly in the name of his mentors, Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell—sought to drag their master over the demarcation line of the “verification criterion” (Schlick: “The meaning of an assertion lies in the method of its verification”), while a famously indefatigable Wittgenstein held his ground at the other end of the rope with Schopenhauer, Tolstoy, and Kierkegaard, waiting for the whole positivist troop to collapse.

As if he wanted to give the Vienna Circle one last fatal blow, Wittgenstein announced on the occasion of another session: I can imagine what Heidegger means by being and anxiety. Man feels the urge to run up against the limits of language. Think for example of the amazement that something exists. Astonishment cannot be expressed in the form of a question, and there is no answer. All that we can say can a priori only be nonsense. Still we run up against the limits of language.8

This project required that Heidegger either entirely avoid the ubiquitous but fundamentally false concepts used to describe the modern state of the world (subject, object, reality, individuality, value, life, matter, thing) in his own philosophy or replace them with new creations (Dasein, environment, being-in-the-world, each-one-ness [Jemeinigkeit], concern [Sorge], equipment [Zeug]). There can be no right speaking in the false, so Heidegger brought a new kind of speaking into the world.

Those who are absorbed entirely in their own world ask neither the question about the sense of Being nor the question about the Being of their own lives. It is only the concrete experience of a loss of meaning and therefore, in whatever form, a disturbed relationship with the world that raises the question for the concerned Dasein of the sense of Being and the sense of its own existence: What is it all for? Why am I here?

AS WE HAVE SEEN, the two questions “What can I know?” and “How should I live?” are for philosophers inseparable. This

Roles change. Phases of life pass. Jobs shift. Children grow up. Parents die. And if who we are is wrapped up in the people or the things that surround us, we love sight of ourselves and subsequently how to follow Christ fully. Everything may change around us, but the way God sees us never does.

Will ich Vertrauen finden, da, wo es zu verschwinden weiß wie Feuer in den Brunnenquellen und der Tau an der Sonne?

His ways were a refuge from falsity.

some of the original authors like Hartman von Aue or Wolfram von Eschenbach.

also do this for sequences of words, or indeed whole blocks of text.

The power held by corporate giants was terrifying even before the CEO decided to leverage that power for their own murderous ends. A supply shortage. A profit-driven business decision. Cost cuts or poorly thought-out policies that reduced safety margins, forced people into unemployment, or added more pressure to frontline workers already stretched thin. A price hike of an essential medicine. (Wolfram hadn’t forged new ground there.) These things, especially in the health and medical industry, routinely killed far more people than the average serial killer could ever aspire to. And yet so few of them resulted in criminal charges. Indirect manslaughter for profit was far more societally acceptable than one person purposefully ending lives on a smaller scale.

characteristics distinguishing human behavior from that of all other animals; we alone have developed the ability to satisfy our needs and wants through the peaceful exchange of value for

They appear to think that the cell phones they use, food they eat, hotels and tents they stay in, their sleeping bags and clothes, the cars they drive and the fuel that powers them and all the goods and services they consume every day would exist under a different system, perhaps in more abundance.

West gradually developed the economic system of market capitalism and a compatible political system.

Capitalism is not a collusion between big business and big government to advance the interests of stockholders and management at the expense of workers

Societies that do not have market economies have been forced to concede that only free markets are capable of producing on a scale that affords even the poorest person a standard of living well above what would have been unthinkable just a few hundred years ago.

Let’s suppose for now that the money is divided among the ten students who did not ride the bus. This would compensate them for their misfortune and might seem like the right thing to do. Another obvious question: What does one do about those students who forgot to bring their money?

But it may be that some students would be willing to loan their money only if compensated by receiving interest,

In a market economy people act to improve their well-being, not necessarily their wealth or number of possessions.

and students can express their intensity of preference by the amount they are willing to pay to get back on the bus.

Imagine the dawn of man, clans of hunter-gatherers following the

Even at this primitive stage, other members of the clan would have specialized in the making of tools or the tanning of hides, activities

Those earning a greater share of the bounty would exchange some of their perishable surplus for a straighter spear or warmer clothing

fall of 2011 with the Occupy Wall Street protest. Interviews with these anticapitalism protesters reminded me of a scene in the 1979 Monty Python film Life of Brian

rural India live like refugees is not that they don’t work as hard as we do, or are not as smart as we are, but that they live in an economic system that doesn’t allow them to be productive. The basis of our economic prosperity is market capitalism, individual liberty and responsibility, and limited government.

Yet Wyatt Earp, who is an adult when he participates in the gunfight at the OK Corral, sees the movement from four-wheeled carts to the Model T.

is rather a system of voluntary exchange based on private property rights, limited government, and individual freedom.

Voluntary exchange ensures that only businesses that provide what consumers want at the right price will survive, fostering continuous innovation.

One becomes wealthy in a market system by pleasing others, and the more individuals you please the wealthier you become.

Each day we go about our business in complete confidence that the rest of society will provide for our basic needs. Typically, we do not stop to wonder how food gets to our table, clothes into our closet, or how our

We do not take the time to consider that millions of people will awake in our largest cities tomorrow and there will be the right amount of coffee, dental floss, toilet paper, and an astonishing array of other goods and services sold during the day. Yet if we do stop to think about it, it is a miracle.

A solution that came immediately to my colleague and me was to have everyone exit the bus and then buy their way back on.

This is because we will always pay less for a mere chance than for the object itself.3 In either case, free market exchange allows everyone the opportunity to improve his or her position.

Frédéric Bastiat noted, it is not possible to develop a science of politics without understanding how the economic system works. Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek refined this idea by offering that if people do not understand and believe in market capitalism, they will ask their government to undertake actions that in the end will make us less wealthy and free. This

In other words, the good economist can imagine the unintended consequences of a policy action. The goal of this book is to make you a good economist.

One solution is an impromptu capital market where people can borrow from each other. Some students will give up some of their current purchasing power in order to receive the money at a later date. Being friends, and supposing that they will all be back at their dorms later to settle their accounts, the students might simply loan the money to one another at no cost.

Nonetheless, some may be bothered by the fact that the wealthier students have a better chance of remaining on the bus.

This illustrates that in the market process, exchange will occur whenever two people value a good differently and when both will benefit from the exchange.

much like for humans, if you tell it something bizarre and unexpected that completely doesn’t fit into the framework it knows, it doesn’t seem like it’ll successfully be able to “integrate” this. It can “integrate” it only if it’s basically riding in a fairly simple way on top of the framework it already has.

He broke fresh ground—because, and only because, he had the courage to go ahead without asking whether others were following or even understood. He had no need for the divided responsibility in which others seek to be safe from ridicule, because he had been granted a faith which required no confirmation—a contact with reality, light and intense like the touch of a loved hand: a union in self-surrender without self-destruction, where his heart was lucid and his mind was loving.16 The crux of the story of Parzival and his quest for the Grail is suggested in his first encounter in the Grail castle. After various adventures, Parzival has sort of stumbled into the Grail castle. This is the wisdom of innocence. The purity of the simple fellow gets him into the Grail castle. In the castle lives a king who is sorely wounded. The king’s illness has brought devastation to the kingdom—it has become the Wasteland. The theme of the Grail is the bringing of life into what is known as ‘the wasteland.’ The wasteland is the preliminary theme to which the Grail is the answer…It’s the world of people living inauthentic lives—doing what they are supposed to do. Joseph Campbell Parzival can redeem the king and kingdom by asking a simple question. The wounded king is brought before him, and Parzival wants to ask, “What ails thee, brother?” But he has been told good knights don’t ask a lot of questions. The decisive moment for him is the choice between acting spontaneously from his heart or conventionally from his role as a knight. He fails; innocence is not enough, for he has already been socially indoctrinated. It has caused him to doubt the promptings of his heart, and as Wolfram says in the very first line of his Parzival, “If vacillation dwell with the heart the soul will rue it.”17 Life’s most urgent question is, what are you doing for others? Martin Luther King, Jr.

In the context of physics, 137 is equal to the integer part of the inverse of the fine structure constant ... The fine structure constant α is the key to the physicist’s quest for a Grand Unified Theory ... The number 137 has intrigued numerous prominent theoretical physicists ... All told, we believe that it is much easier, and more motivating, to remember a number that has deep significance in numerous disciplines, ... with the following terse ode to 137: Bethe was mischievous with 137 Bohr was intrigued by 137 Born was mystified by 137 Fermi was frisky with 137 Feynman was mesmerized by 137 Heisenberg was fascinated by 137 Lederman was enchanted by 137 Pauli was consumed by 137 Turing was matched by 137

between 1195 and 1220, Wolfram composed his epic romance Parzival, he conferred on the Templars a most exalted status.

Ulkomaalaispöydässä istunut Mike oli juhlien kestäessä väittänyt taas kerran vakavissaan, että suomalaiset ovat tosiasiassa ulkoavaruudesta kotoisin tai että se ainakin on uskottavin selitys tämän kansan olemassaololle. Ja maassa joka puolella näkyvien vesitornien hän selitti olevan lähtöramppeja, joista suomalaiset jonakin päivänä starttaavat palatessaan taas kaukaiselle kotiplaneetalleen.

Wolfram,

Someone pumps sentences into my brain, long-forgotten images from childhood; meaningless objects and conversations peel layers from my heart. I am again a river faun, paralyzed by longing for a river nymph. I walk through wolframic space, my mouth and nose threaded with wire, and whenever I deviate from my course, I feel a sharp pain in my jaws.

how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is.

open up a horizon of potential perfection. They guide us in our efforts to bring as much as possible into experience (cognition), to act with as much freedom and self-determination as possible (ethics), to prove as worthy as possible of possible immortality (religion). In this context Kant speaks of a regulative or a leading function of metaphysical inquiry.

The philosopher Max Scheler—the author of The Human Place in the Cosmos (1928)—captured this sense of crisis in one of his last lectures: “In the roughly ten thousand years of history, ours is the first period when man has become completely and totally problematical to himself, when he no longer knows what he is, but at the same time knows that he knows nothing.”10

If we look more closely, Wittgenstein’s entire philosophical oeuvre, and especially his later work, is run through with metaphors and allegories of liberation, of exits and escapes. Not just his famous answer to the question “What is your aim in philosophy?” “To shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle!

repeatedly attempted to divert back to the path not taken and establish a career within the academy, not least because of the realization of how difficult it would be for someone who lived as he did to continue on his present course. In those years, being Benjamin was a costly business. Along with his insatiable appetite for restaurants, nightclubs, casinos, and houses of pleasure, he developed a passion for collecting curiosities, such as antique children’s books, which he tracked down all over Europe and bought almost compulsively.

The chronic irresolution, extreme variety, and reality-saturated contradiction of Benjamin’s writing was, he recognized, the only way to achieve knowledge of the world and therefore of himself. In the convoluted words of the preface to The Origin of German Tragic Drama: Anyone who philosophizes must be concerned with allowing “the configurations of the idea to emerge—the sum total of all juxtapositions of such opposites—from the remotest extremes, the apparent excesses of the process of development.” But for Benjamin the representation of an idea “cannot under any circumstances be considered successful unless the full range of extremes that it contains has been virtually explored.”12

In this sense, the events of spring 1929 represent the heightening of an arrangement that had already defined Benjamin’s life for the previous ten years.13 He was torn between at least two women (Dora and Asja), two cities (Berlin and Moscow), two professions (journalist and philosopher), two intimate friends (the Judaic scholar Gershom Scholem and Bertolt Brecht), two major endeavors (the founding of the magazine and the start of a new major work of his own, which would later become The Arcades Project), as well as working off debts of all kinds. There can be few intellectuals whose biographies exemplify and encapsulate the tensions of the countries of their birth more than Walter Benjamin in the spring of 1929. He was a one-man Weimar, by his own account incapable of “making a cup of tea” (for which he naturally blamed his mother).

In May 1929 a concerned Dora Benjamin wrote to Gershom (Gerhard) Scholem: Walter is in a very bad way, dear Gerhard, I can’t tell you more than that because it is crushing my heart. He is entirely under Asja’s influence and doing things that the pen resists writing, and which prevent me from exchanging even a word with him. He now exists only as a head and genitals, and as you know, or can imagine, in such cases the head is quickly overcome. It was always a great danger, and who can say what will happen. . . . Walter has sued me for my debt, as the first divorce proceedings failed to resolve this question—he wants neither to return the money borrowed from his inheritance (120,000 marks; my mother is seriously ill) nor to pay anything for Stefan. . . . I gave him all the books, and the next day he also demanded the collection of children’s books. In the winter he lived with me for months without paying. . . . After we gave each other every freedom for eight years . . . he is suing me; now the German laws he despised are suddenly good enough for him.

self-consciousness. We all have this special ability. It consists of referring to one’s own thoughts with one’s own thoughts.

Held back for the first few years by a heart condition (self-diagnosis: “too much sport in my youth”), Heidegger had served as a meteorologist with the frontline weather service number 414 from August until November 1918.

BUT HEIDEGGER’S IDEA OF THE LEAP—a core concept in the religious philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard—already suggests that this redemptive alternative is not a purely logical, argumentative, or even only rationally motivated choice. Instead it is more a decision, and thus demands something more and something different. Something that is in fact based primarily not on reasons, but on will and courage, and above all on concrete personal experience, comparable to that of religious transformation: a vocation.

by Wittgenstein in the 1920s.

So much that it seems consistent only for porosity37—seen as a kind of productive fragility that overcomes rigid dualisms—to be the key concept by which the nature of the city is revealed and interpreted in all its profundity. Porosity is the principle of the true life of Naples: At the base of the cliff itself, where it touches the shore, caves have been hewn. As in the paintings of hermits from the Trecento, a door appears here and there in the cliffs. If it is open, one looks into large cellars that are at once sleeping places and storerooms. Steps also lead to the sea, to fishermen’s taverns that have been installed in natural grottoes. Faint light and thin music rise up from there in the evening. As porous as those stones is the architecture. Buildings and action merge in courtyards, arcades, and staircases. The space is preserved to act as a stage for new and unforeseen configurations. What is avoided is the definitive, the fully formed. No situation appears as it is, intended forever, no form asserts its “thus and not otherwise.” . . . Because nothing is finished and concluded. Porosity results not only from the indolence of the southern craftsman but above all from the passion for improvisation. For that space and opportunity must be preserved at all costs. Buildings are used as a popular stage. They are divided into innumerable theaters, animated simultaneously. All share innumerable stages, brought to life simultaneously. Balcony, forecourt, window, gateway, staircase, roof are at once stage and theater box. Even the most miserable wretch is sovereign in his dim, twofold awareness of contributing, however deprived he may be, to one of the images of the Neapolitan street that will never return and, in his poverty, the leisure of enjoying the grand panorama. What is played out on the stairs is the highest school in theatrical direction. The stairs, never entirely revealed, but closed off in the dull northern house-

origins” (Ur-Sprünge, literally “primal leaps”), as described in The Origin of German Tragic Drama: The term origin [Ursprung] is not intended to describe the process by which the existent came into being, but rather to describe that which emerges from the process of becoming and disappearance. Origin is an eddy in the stream of becoming, and in its current it swallows the material involved in the process of genesis [Enstehung].10

Russell states that this barber cuts the hair of all those, and only those, people in Chiswick who do not cut their own hair. Who, if anyone, cuts the barber’s hair? The question cannot be answered without contradiction. If the barber does not cut his own hair, he is by definition part of the set of people whose hair he cuts. But if he cuts his own hair, he contradicts the set definition, “cuts the hair of all of those, and only those, people in Chiswick who do not cut their own hair.” The suggestion that the barber is bald is a good joke, but it does not rid us of the set-theoretical contradictions that have arisen.

Or to put it another way: when that which the proposition asserts is also the case. According to the first two propositions of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: 1 The world is all that is the case. 1:1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things. THE BARBER AND WHAT IS WRONG with a proposition like “There are three dots in the world”? Russell may have asked in that hotel room, waving the sheet of paper in his hand. Well, as proposition 1:1 of the book establishes, “the world” (as a whole) is not itself a fact but only “the totality of facts.” One chief reason that Wittgenstein denied that propositions about the world could be meaningful lies in the following logic: If the world were itself a fact, it would—as only one fact among others—effectively include itself as a fact. It would be, as a world, on the one hand defined as a set of certain elements (here: the totality of facts) and at the same time an element of that set (hence: a fact). But a logical formalism that allows a set to contain itself as an element, leads—as none other than Russell himself had proved, Wittgenstein believed—to infernal logical complexities and, finally, to uncontrollable contradictions.

exploitation. Benjamin was a few years older than Scholem, which gave him a certain advantage in terms of maturity and knowledge from the outset. This, too, is typical, for Benjamin preferred to maintain in his friendships a mutually acknowledged hierarchy of knowledge.

For Heidegger, anxiety is the model for the experience of a comprehensive loss of meaning, which in the resulting emptiness and disconnectedness lays bare the true foundations of each Dasein. And lays it bare in such a way

The presence and concern of other people were no help in that respect. Heidegger’s appeal to authenticity and hence to self-discovery is thus based on a pervasive asociality of Dasein. It is only as something fully uncoupled, unique, and thus isolated that we attain insight into our true possibilities.

On the very first pages of his book, Cassirer thus expressly turns against a characteristic assumption of Heidegger’s analysis of the fall in particular. It might be called the assumption of “an overestimation of the civilizing power of philosophy.”42 Anyone who seeks the supposed origins of an age, and particularly the modern age, in philosophy alone, will get to neither the peculiarities of the age nor its philosophy. In his analysis of the Renaissance, Cassirer sees philosophy more as one innovative voice among many, and one with the function of connecting different disciplines. It is precisely this understanding that guides his philosophy of symbolic forms throughout the rapid artistic, scientific, and technical innovations of the 1920s. That decade rightly saw itself as a time of unprecedented, world-changing innovations, above all of a technical kind. The automobile, now mass-produced, began to determine the shape of cities; radio became a global medium of communication in the public sphere, the telephone in the private; cinema became an art form; the first commercial airlines were launched; now not only steamships but soon also zeppelins and even airplanes crossed the oceans, with Charles Lindbergh paving the way. The twenties witnessed the birth of an age of global communication facilitated by and in turn facilitating leaps in technical innovation. It persists into our own time. No individual and no individual discipline could keep interpretative pace. Not even philosophy. Precisely in the German-speaking world it saw itself as being propelled forward

The skepticism with which too many Germans regarded the Weimar Republic wasn’t primarily the result of its questionable efficacy. By August 1928, less than ten years after it had come into existence, it had gone through no fewer than ten chancellors, yes. But over the past two to three years it had undoubtedly made economic advances. The resentment of the great nations defeated in the First World War lay not in the realm of finance but in cultural memory: the republic itself, with its democratic form of government, was held in the dominant narrative to be foreign, imported from the histories of the victorious nations of the United States (Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights), France (French Revolution), and, with a great deal of historical benevolence, England (Magna Carta). Even Switzerland had its Pledge of Allegiance to the Confederation, but in terms of democratic creation myths, on the other hand, Germany pretty much drew a blank. From this point of view the Weimar Constitution was not a gift but an accident of the country’s own history, a kind of permanent collateral damage from the outcome of the war, along with the reparations imposed at Versailles, and not much easier to bear. For this reason a truly self-defined Germany would—on the basis of its own history—be many

THE TRANSITORY, THE FLEETING, THE CONTINGENT,” which Baudelaire had identified as the central properties of the modern age,

Now a member of the National Socialist Party, he addressed the German student body in a newspaper article accompanying his appointment: “Let not theoretical principles and ‘ideas’ be the rules of your Being. The Führer himself and he alone is the German reality and its law today and in the future.”1

In January 1930 he was to begin teaching a course at Cambridge. Shortly before he set off for the holidays he was asked by one of his colleagues there what title his course should be given on the lecture list.Wittgenstein thought for a while. Finally he replied: “‘Philosophy.’ What else?”2

But what kinds of experiences are those? According to Heidegger, they are, once again, radical and existential experiences of groundlessness or even of the abyss. Near-death experiences in particular, or experiences of anxiety, or the tug of conscience.

Anyone who philosophizes, of course, inevitably—and Heidegger would have been the first to admit this—“runs up against the limits of language.” However, it is in precisely this way that Dasein produces what is commonly called meaning: as the experience of a full, freely self-grounding, deciding life.

Everyone in the auditorium knows Heidegger’s reply to that: The inner structure of Dasein is radically finite, and its possibilities are determined from within by temporality. That is the core of Being and Time.

Left-wing parties had performed very strongly in the Reichstag elections of May 1928, while the National Socialist Party had dropped to a 2.59 percent share of the vote. Something was under way here, as the communist camp—essentially living in a state of revolutionary eschatological expectation—clearly thought it discerned.