| May
16th 2009

The English thinker Gilbert Ryle might have enjoyed
reading Nietzsche. I can imagine his face twisting into a hollow
smile, as his mind flirted with the idea that Europeans were hopelessly
romantic.
He might too have wondered what it was in the
English Channel that separated his island so completely from the European
world. His answer might have referenced the effects of different
language groups on internal phenomenological trends. He might have
considered creating a language through which to channel those internal
trends toward a more perfect future place.
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Then sometime in the 1960's he would have still been
alive to see rock and roll. And he might have begun to think of rock
and roll as a foreign language. He might have wondered whether it
might actually be possible to develop a language that could be leveled upon
society providing first there was sufficient enthusiasm for it.
If he did arrive at this conclusion, and here I think
it most unlikely, I suggest he would be thinking more like Heidegger, the European, than Wittgenstein, the
anglophile.
Fortunately he died before the Queen of England knighted a Beatle.

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