WelcomeK2 WDSG
"The meaning is the use" means at least two things: (1) What is the preformative objective of the production of the words? And: (2) What does, or better: What benefit can it lead to, or is it just a dead end?
When I first went to work for IBM in 1979, we were living off my paycheck and putting my wife's, who had a job in IBM at the same level as me inthe bank by direct EFT. I wa goin gto at lest temporarily bst my life-long debilitating melanome fears at les temporarily thru the IBM medical insurance. She could have said: "Wuit the goddamned job. You don't need to wate your life any more." Counterfactual.
Message I posted this day this day, +2023.07.11, to The Hudson Instantute website, as usual, tyopgraphical errors included:
You may find this email strange but so it is. Back in 1979, when I was young (b. 1946) and your organization was still in Croton on Hudson, for reasons I forget, I wrote to "you" complaining about my feelings that institutions such as yours treat insignificant persons like myself merely as audience. That is not exact but it's close enough. Amazingly, your director at the time responded and indicated he would talk with me. I was young and working in a job which discouraged me and I had been childreared and schooled to have no self-respect and very shamefully I did not take up his offer. I have regretted this now for over 40 years. I eventually went on to get a 2nd class doctorate (Ed.D.) with a dissertation essentially on this subject.
Fortune had it that I knew two people who in one case I again "blew it" and in the other I tried to help them do better. First, 1967, Yale philosophy professor John Wild. His philosophy can be summed up in one sentence: "We are a conversation." He liked me and I had too little sense of self-worth to try to "take advantage of it". He may even aven personally known the philosopher Edmund Husserl and apparently he wa a friend of Prof. Emmanuel Levinas. I blew it. The second person was in the other direction. A professor who was a close friend of Marshall McLuhan and had introduced McLuhan, one of the great communication scholars of all time, to American academia: Prof Louis Forsdale (Teachers College Columbia University). After he retired to Santa Fe New Mexico, I repeatedly encouraged him to contact The Santa Fe Institute but he was apparently too self-deprecating to to do this.
Please bear with me for one more story: At the time I failed "you" i succeeded in something else I tried. I had read Hermann Brosh's (d. 1954) novel "The Sleepwalkers" and was affected by it so stongly that I felt if I was who i wished I was I would have written parts of it myself. I wrote to the publisher to see if they still had anyone who knew him. No, but for whatever reason they sent me the names and addresses of to whom they paid royalties. Long story short, his only son became a peronal friend. We talked a lot about his father. So I actually one time did not fail in my struggles with myself and "the world" to not be nothing.
I do not know if this will accomplish anything but is has all been on my mind now for over 40 years. "If I could go back again" i would have replied to your director's invitation to speak with me. Who knows? Thank you for listening.
A road not taken. A possibility lost. If I had had supportive parents and a school that was committed to helping me become what and ho I could be not myopic [fill in the blank]s. If only. Counterfactual.
""They put me off a tthe wrong stop when i was born."" (Doug Schaff, another life wased by his social surround of origin)
