How the Present Determines the Past

Along with Julian Barnes memoir Nothing To Be Frightened Of, Jonathan Lear's Freud, and Nicholas Cook's Music: A Short Introduction, I am reading Daniel Kahneman's exciting Thinking, Fast and Slow. Not much time left for listening to music. I am exercised these days by understanding notions of understanding, by both understanding music and human understanding. Kahneman's book has made me mistrust philosophy. But this justified mistrust has led me back - once more! (philosophy is a sickness after all) - to Wittgenstein, who also mistrusted philosophy! Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations dances around the grammars of understanding and of understand quite a bit. This of course connects up with rule-following, which in turn connects up with meaning. He contrasts understanding pictures, music, and sentences. Saul A. Kripke in his Wittgenstein On Rules And Private Language connects Wittgenstein's views on these matters with those of David Hume and Nelson Goodman on meaning, induction, and skepticism. So one thing has led to many others.

   Kahneman's book has reminded me of how one can be misled by one's present beliefs in interpreting past events, how one's present self-consciousness determines what one believes about the past, and how 'memory' is tricked and tripped up by our present beliefs and concepts. The illusions of understanding work both ways: the past corrupts the present and the present corrupts the past. As I've noted before Schoenberg affects my hearing Mozart and Mozart affects my hearing Kagel. In what specific ways? I wonder.