Culture and Value
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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“Anyone who listens to a child’s crying and understands what he hears will know that it harbours dormant psychic forces, terrible forces different from anything commonly assumed. Profound rage, pain and lust for destruction.”--Culture and Value (1970) by Wittgenstein See infant crying harbours profound rage, pain and lust for destruction |
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Crying, (also referred to as sobbing, weeping, bawling, or wailing) is shedding tears as a response to an emotional state in humans. One need only shed a single tear to be crying. The act of crying has been defined as "a complex secretomotor phenomenon characterized by the shedding of tears from the lacrimal apparatus, without any irritation of the ocular structures". A related medical term is lacrimation, which also refers to non-emotional shedding of tears.
A neuronal connection between the lacrimal gland (tear duct) and the areas of the human brain involved with emotion has been established. Some scientists believe that only humans produce tears in response to emotional states while others disagree. Charles Darwin wrote in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals that the keepers of Indian elephants in the London Zoo told him that their charges shed tears in sorrow.
Tears produced during emotional crying have a chemical composition which differs from other types of tears. They contain significantly greater quantities of the hormones prolactin, adrenocorticotropic hormone, Leu-enkephalin, and the elements potassium and manganese.
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Culture and Value is a selection from the personal notes of Ludwig Wittgenstein made by Georg Henrik von Wright. It was first published in English by Basil Blackwell, in German as Vermischte Bemerkungen in 1977 and the text has been emended in following editions. An English translation by Peter Winch was printed in 1980, and reprinted in 1984. Ten years later Alois Pichler revised the original edition, and the resulting version was published in 1998 with a new translation by Peter Winch.
The remarks are arranged in chronological order with an indication of their year of origin. Nearly half of them stem from the period after the completion (in 1945) of Part One of Philosophical Investigations.
At the end of the book appears a poem which was offered by Wittgenstein to the Hofrat Ludwig Hänsel, and it is assumed that he was its author.
Among the published notes particular attention has been bestowed on a passage where Wittgenstein enumerated people who, in his judgement, had influenced him: Boltzmann, Hertz, Schopenhauer, Frege, Russell, Kraus, Loos, Weininger, Spengler and Sraffa. Of note to literary scholars, the book also contains some of Wittgenstein's thoughts on Shakespeare, negatively comparing his depictions of character to those of Tolstoy.
A further note dating from the same year (1931) witnesses the first occurrence of the term 'family resemblance' in a discussion of Spengler's work.
