Understanding Wittgenstein, Understanding Modernism 9781501302435, 9781501302466, 9781501302459

Table of contents :
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
List of Contributors
Abbreviations
Series Preface
Introduction: Giving the Viewer an Idea of the Landscape
Part 1 - Conceptualizing Wittgenstein
Chapter 1 Language, Expressibility and the Mystical
1 Mysticism: Philosophical and anti-philosophical
2 What can and cannot be said
3 Existence, safety and guilt
4 The ascetic ideal
5 Culture and civilization
6 Wittgenstein and modernism
Chapter 2 Modernism and Philosophical Language: Phenomenology, Wittgenstein and the Everyday
1 Phenomenology as modernism
2 The early Wittgenstein’s reconfiguration of philosophical language
3 The later Wittgenstein: Completing the departure
Chapter 3 Wittgenstein and ‘Ordinary Language Philosophy’
1 The early Wittgenstein and the linguistic turn
2 The turn towards actual linguistic practice
3 ‘Ordinary language philosophy’
4 Philosophy and ordinary language
5 Philosophy, logical analysis and formal logic
6 Philosophy and metaphysics
7 The nature of philosophy
8 Conclusion
Chapter 4 Wittgenstein’s Modernist Political Philosophy
1 Wittgenstein’s philosophy of meaning as the foundation of conservatism, socialism and liberalism
2 Wittgenstein’s anti-political absolute ethics
3 Particularism, therapeutic Wittgenstein and politics
4 Wittgenstein’s modernist transformation of the progressive project of enlightenment
Chapter 5 Too Cavellian a Wittgenstein: Wittgenstein’s Certainty, Cavell’s Scepticism
1 Tractarian language and silence
2 The estrangement of the ordinary
3 Language is in order as it is
4 The disappointment with criteria
5 Certainty versus sceptical acknowledgement
Part 2 - Wittgenstein and Aesthetics
Chapter 6 Wittgenstein, Musil and the Austrian Modernism
1 Wittgenstein and Austrian modernism
2 Historicism and avant-garde in Musil’s novel
3 Feeling alienated from modernism and modernity
4 The problem of culture
Chapter 7 ‘We Should be Seeing Life Itself’: Back to the Rough Ground of the Stage
1 The everyday on stage – Michael Fried’s interpretation
2 Dramatics of the language-game: The uses of the theatrical stage
Chapter 8 A Confluence of Modernisms: Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigation and Henry James’s Literary Language
1
2
3
4
5
Chapter 9 Modernism with Spirit: Wittgenstein and the Sense of the Whole
1 Wittgenstein’s double orientation in music
2 ‘What is modern?’ – An architectural question in Vienna between the two wars
3 Formalism and modernism: Eduard Hanslick’s ‘sound-forms in movement’
4 From sentimental feeling towards expressivity of meaning: A modern step
5 Wittgenstein’s ‘anti-modernist’ tone in 1930: The lack of ‘the sense of the whole’
6 Spirit in what sense? Life and language
7 ‘Musikalische Gedanke’: Wittgenstein and Schoenberg, a methodological affinity
8 A musical case of tension between outmoded style and modernism: Schoenberg’s Von Heute zu Morgen
9 Life versus Geist
Chapter 10 Wittgenstein and the Art of Defamiliarization
1 Sketches and journeyings
2 ‘An ancient city’
3 Defamiliarization: Russian Formalism
4 ‘Grammar tells what kind of object anything is’ (PI, §373)
Part 3 - Glossary
Logic
1 ‘Logic’ and ‘grammar’
2 Devices to avoid misunderstanding
3 Logical writing in the Tractatus and in the Investigations
Picture
Grammar
A last word
Use
Psychological Concepts
1 Wittgenstein confronts the origins of modern philosophy of mind
2 Conceptual duality as two uses of language
3 Psychopraxis
4 Psychopraxis as a shared psychological form of life
Ethics
1 Ethics and the early Wittgenstein
2 The Tractatus, ethics and modernism: Wittgenstein with Adorno
Art
1 The autonomy of the artwork
2 Form contra Ornament
3 The art of philosophy
Index

Citation preview

Understanding Wittgenstein, Understanding Modernism

Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism The aim of each volume in Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism is to understand a philosophical thinker more fully through literary and cultural modernism and, consequently to understand literary modernism better through a key philosophical figure. In this way, the series also rethinks the limits of modernism, calling attention to lacunae in modernist studies and sometimes in the philosophical work under examination. Series Editors: Paul Ardoin, S. E. Gontarski and Laci Mattison Volumes in the Series: Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism edited by Paul Ardoin, S. E. Gontarski and Laci Mattison Understanding Deleuze, Understanding Modernism edited by Paul Ardoin, S. E. Gontarski and Laci Mattison Understanding Wittgenstein, Understanding Modernism edited by Anat Matar Understanding Foucault, Understanding Modernism edited by David Scott Understanding Rancière, Understanding Modernism (forthcoming) edited by Patrick M. Bray Understanding James, Understanding Modernism (forthcoming) edited by David H. Evans Understanding Cavell, Understanding Modernism (forthcoming) edited by Paola Marrati Understanding Blanchot, Understanding Modernism (forthcoming) edited by Christopher Langlois Understanding Merleau-Ponty, Understanding Modernism (forthcoming) edited by Ariane Mildenberg Understanding Derrida, Understanding Modernism (forthcoming) edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté

Understanding Wittgenstein, Understanding Modernism Edited by Anat Matar

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

N E W YO R K • LO N D O N • OX F O R D • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway 50 Bedford Square New York London NY 10018 WC1B 3DP USA UK www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Anat Matar, 2017 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the editor. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Matar, Anat, 1956- editor. Title: Understanding Wittgenstein, understanding modernism / edited by Anat Matar. Description: New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. | Series: Understanding philosophy, understanding modernism | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016029682 (print) | LCCN 2016035444 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501302435 (hardback: alk. paper) | ISBN 9781501302442 (ePub) | ISBN 9781501302459 (ePDF) Subjects: LCSH: Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1889-1951. | Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1889-1951--Influence. | Modernism (Literature)--History and criticism. Classification: LCC B3376.W564 U53 2017 (print) | LCC B3376.W564 (ebook) | DDC 192--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016029682 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-0243-5  ePDF: 978-1-5013-0245-9 ePub: 978-1-5013-0244-2 Series: Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism Cover image © Getty Images/Jeff Hutchens Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

Contents List of Contributors Abbreviations Series Preface

vii xii xiv

Introduction: Giving the Viewer an Idea of the Landscape  Anat Matar 1 Part 1  Conceptualizing Wittgenstein 1 Language, Expressibility and the Mystical  John Skorupski 13 2 Modernism and Philosophical Language: Phenomenology, Wittgenstein and the Everyday  Oskari Kuusela 36 3 Wittgenstein and ‘Ordinary Language Philosophy’  Hans-Johann Glock and Javier Kalhat 55

4 Wittgenstein’s Modernist Political Philosophy  Thomas Wallgren 75 5 Too Cavellian a Wittgenstein: Wittgenstein’s Certainty, Cavell’s Scepticism  Danièle Moyal-Sharrock 92 Part 2  Wittgenstein and Aesthetics 6 Wittgenstein, Musil and the Austrian Modernism  Pierre Fasula 113 7 ‘We Should be Seeing Life Itself ’: Back to the Rough Ground of the Stage  Élise Marrou 126 8 A Confluence of Modernisms: Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigation and Henry James’s Literary Language  Garry L. Hagberg 143 9 Modernism with Spirit: Wittgenstein and the Sense of the Whole  Antonia Soulez 165

10 Wittgenstein and the Art of Defamiliarization  David Schalkwyk 182 Part 3  Glossary Logic  Sebastian Sunday Grève 205 Picture  Stefan Brandt 217 Grammar  Phil Hutchinson and Rupert Read 224

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Use  Harvey Cormier 233 Psychological Concepts  Yuval Lurie 239 Ethics  Ben Ware 250 Art  David Macarthur 258 Index

267

List of Contributors Stefan Brandt is assistant professor at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg. He works on the philosophies of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Wilfrid Sellars and on the philosophy of mind. Harvey Cormier is an associate professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. His writings include The Truth Is What Works (Rowman and Littlefield, 2000) and ‘James, Royce, and Logic’ in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 19, 4, 2005. Pierre Fasula is an associate researcher at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and co-organizer of the Wittgenstein Seminar there. He is the author of ‘Wittgenstein and Loos: le souci de la correction et la dégradation du style’ in Implications philosophiques, November 2011; ‘Musil et Wittgenstein rapportés à Kierkegaard’, in Implications philosophiques, December 2011; and ‘Musil et les philosophies de l’histoire’, Austriaca, 76/2014. Hans-Johann Glock is professor of philosophy at the University of Zurich. Among his publications are A Wittgenstein Dictionary (Wiley-Blackwell, 1996), Quine and Davidson (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and What Is Analytic Philosophy? (Cambridge University Press, 2008). Glock is co-editor (with John Hyman) of Wittgenstein and Analytic Philosophy: Essays for P. M. S. Hacker (Oxford University Press, 2009) and of The Blackwell Companion to Wittgenstein (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016). Sebastian Sunday Grève is reading for a DPhil in Philosophy at The Queen’s College, University of Oxford. He previously studied philosophy and German language/literature at the Universities of Göttingen, Bergen and London. His recent publications include ‘The Importance of Understanding Each Other in Philosophy’, Philosophy 90: 2 (2015). Grève is co-editor (with Jakub Mácha) of Wittgenstein and the Creativity of Language (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and (with James Conant) of Wittgenstein on Objectivity, Intuition, and Meaning (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). Garry L. Hagberg is the James H. Ottaway Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics at Bard College, and has in recent years also been Professor of Philosophy

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at the University of East Anglia. He is the author of numerous papers at the intersection of aesthetics and the philosophy of language, and his books include: Meaning and Interpretation: Wittgenstein, Henry James, and Literary Knowledge; Art as Language: Wittgenstein, Meaning, and Aesthetic Theory; and Describing Ourselves: Wittgenstein and Autobiographical Consciousness. He is editor of Art and Ethical Criticism, co-editor of A Companion to the Philosophy of Literature, and editor of the journal Philosophy and Literature. Phil Hutchinson is Senior Lecturer in Applied Philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan University. He is the author of Shame and Philosophy (Palgrave, 2008) and is currently working with clinicians and public health professionals in applying his philosophical work on shame to the problems of shame and stigma in the treatment of HIV. Phil has authored many articles on Wittgenstein and on the philosophy of emotion, in addition to co-authoring a book on the philosophy of social science (Ashgate 2008, with Rupert Read and Wes Sharrock). Phil is currently also working on the Philosophy of Placebo; policy decision-making; and the relationship between Wittgenstein’s work and cognitive linguistics/ metaphor theory. Phil is also a regular contributor to The Philosopher’s Magazine. Javier Kalhat is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Philosophy Department at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. He has published articles on various topics in metaphysics, the philosophy of language, the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and the history of analytic philosophy. Oskari Kuusela is Senior Lecturer of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia. He is the author of The Struggle Against Dogmatism: Wittgenstein and the Concept of Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 2008), Key Terms in Ethics (Continuum, 2010), and Logic as the Method of Philosophy: Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Logic in Relation to Frege, Russell, Carnap and Others (forthcoming). He is also the co-editor (with Edward Kanterian and Guy Kahane) of Wittgenstein and His Interpreters: Essays in Memory of Gordon Baker (Blackwell-Wiley, 2007), and (with Marie McGinn) of The Oxford Handbook of Wittgenstein (Oxford University Press, 2011). Yuval Lurie is Professor Emeritus in the department of philosophy at BGU in Israel. He has published articles on the philosophy of mind, culture and Wittgenstein’s philosophy, and books in Hebrew and English. Among his books are Cultural Beings: Reading the Philosophers of Genesis (Rodopi, 2000), Tracking the Meaning of Life: A Philosophical Journey (Missouri University press, 2006) and Wittgenstein on the Human Spirit (Rodopi, 2012).

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David Macarthur is an associate professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of Sydney. He works at the interface of contemporary pragmatism, Wittgenstein’s philosophy and philosophy of art. In addition to these topics, he has published articles on liberal naturalism, metaphysical quietism, scepticism, common sense, perception, language, philosophy of architecture and philosophy of photography and film. He has co-edited three collections of papers with Mario De Caro (Roma Tré): Naturalism in Question (Harvard, 2004); Naturalism and Normativity (Columbia, 2010); and Philosophy in an Age of Science: Physics, Mathematics and Skepticism (Harvard, 2012); and is currently editing Pragmatism as a Way of Life: Hilary and Ruth-Anna Putnam on the Lasting Legacy of James and Dewey (Harvard) and (with co-editor Stephen Hetherington) Living Skepticism (Brill). Élise Marrou is a Lecturer of Philosophy at Paris Sorbonne University and an associate researcher at the Husserl Archives of the École normale supérieure in Paris. Her PhD (from Paris I – Panthéon Sorbonne) focused on the issue of solipsism in the history of modern and contemporary philosophy. She is the author of an introduction to On Certainty, Ellipses, 2006, and the editor of the special issue of Les Études philosophiques devoted to Sellars’ myth of the given (2012/n°103). Marrou’s recent articles include ‘Solipsism from a logical point of view’, Mind, Language and Action, D. Moyal-Sharrock, V. Munz and A. Coliva (eds), de Gruyter, 2015; ‘De nobis ipsis silemus: Autoportrait de Blumenberg en thérapeute viennois’, La vocation thérapeutique de la philosophie, Wittgenstein – Blumenberg, Archives de philosophie, t. 79, janvier-mars 2016, and ‘Retour sur un dogmatisme peu ordinaire’, Scepticisme, pragmatisme et philosophie du langage ordinaire, 20, Raison publique, mars 2016. Anat Matar is Senior Lecturer of Philosophy at Tel Aviv University. She is the author of From Dummett’s Philosophical Perspective (de Gruyter, 1997) and Modernism and the Language of Philosophy (Routledge, 2006), and co-editor (with Anat Biletzki) of The Story of Analytic Philosophy: Plot and Heroes (Routledge, 1998) and (with Abeer Baker) of Threat: Palestinian Political Prisoners in Israel (Pluto, 2011). Her recent articles link reflections on Wittgenstein with postmodernist themes. Danièle Moyal-Sharrock is reader in philosophy at the University of Hertfordshire and President of the British Wittgenstein Society. She is the author of Understanding Wittgenstein’s On Certainty (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004/2007) and the editor of several volumes including The Third Wittgenstein (Ashgate,

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2004) and Perspicuous Presentations: Essays on Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Psychology (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). She has also edited and contributed to several journal special issues which include, more recently: Wittgenstein and Forms of Life (Nordic Wittgenstein Review, 2015), Hinge Epistemology (International Journal for the Study of Skepticism, 2016) and F. R. Leavis: Critic, Teacher, Philosopher (Philosophy & Literature, 2016). She has published articles in Philosophical Investigations, Philosophical Psychology, American Philosophical Quarterly, Philosophy and British Journal of Aesthetics. Rupert Read is a Reader in Philosophy at the University of East Anglia. A specialist in Wittgenstein, he has written a number of well-received books on the subject including Applying Wittgenstein (2007), A Wittgensteinian Way with Paradoxes (2012), and Wittgenstein Among the Sciences (2012). Aside from this, Rupert’s key research interests are in environmental philosophy, critiques of Rawlsian liberalism and philosophy of film. He chairs the UK-based postgrowth think tank Green House, and is a former Green Party of England & Wales councillor, spokesperson, European parliamentary candidate and national parliamentary candidate. David Schalkwyk is Director of Global Shakespeare at Queen Mary, University of London and the University of Warwick. He was Director of Research and the editor of Shakespeare Quarterly at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC until 2013 and before that Professor of English at the University of Cape Town. His published books include Speech and Performance in Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Plays (Cambridge, 2002), Literature and the Touch of the Real (Delaware, 2004), Shakespeare, Love and Service (Cambridge, 2008) and Hamlet’s Dreams (Bloomsbury, 2013). John Skorupski is Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of St. Andrews. He is the author of many books and articles, including EnglishLanguage Philosophy 1750–1945 (Oxford University Press, 1993), Ethical Explorations (Oxford University Press, 1999), The Domains of Reason (Oxford University Press, 2010) and ‘Analytic Philosophy, the Analytic School, and British Philosophy’ in Beaney M. (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Analytic Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2013). Antonia Soulez is Professor of Philosophy (emerita) at the University Paris-8 St. Denis. She is the Co-Founder of Cahiers de philosophie du langage (Harmattan, since 1994) and author of many books, including Grammaire philosophique

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chez Platon (PUF, 1991), Wittgenstein et le tournant grammatical (PUF, 2003), Comment écrivent les philosophes? (Kimè, 2003), Au fil du motif, autour de Wittgenstein et la musique (Delatour-France, 2012) and Détrôner l’Étre: Wittgenstein antiphilosophe? (Lambert-Lucas, 2016). Soulez is also a poet, and among her poetry books are Son-Couleurs and Qualia. She is writing on music and sound in the Review Poésie (M. Deguy, dir.) and has recently published music reviews in Musimediane and Filigrane. Thomas Wallgren is university lecturer of philosophy and director of the von Wright and Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Helsinki. He is the author of Transformative Philosophy: Socrates, Wittgenstein and the Democratic Spirit of Philosophy (Lexington, Lanham, MD, 2006). Wallgren is interested in the theory and practice of democracy, just transition, swaraj, buen vivir and sceptical enlightenment. Ben Ware is a Research Fellow at the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London and Kingston University. He is author of Dialectic of the Ladder: Wittgenstein, the ‘Tractatus’ and Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2015) and Living Wrong Life Rightly: Ethics, Modernism and the Political Imagination (Palgrave, 2016), as well as numerous articles for Critical Quarterly, Parallax, Textual Practice, Journal of the History of Ideas, Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism and College Literature.

Abbreviations AWL

Wittgenstein’s Lectures: Cambridge, 1932-1935, from the notes of A. Ambrose and M. MacDonald, ed. A. Ambrose. Oxford: Blackwell, 1979.

BB

The Blue and Brown Books, 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 1969.

BT

The Big Typescript: TS 213, ed. & trans. by C. Grant Luckhardt & Maximilian A.E. Aue. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005.

CE

‘Cause and Effect: Intuitive Awareness’ in Philosophical Occasions: 1912-1951, ed. J. C. Klagge and A. Nordman, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1993, 371–426.

CV

Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright in collaboration with H. Nyman, trans. P. Winch, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

EL

Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein, With a Memoir, by Paul Engelmann. Oxford: Blackwell, 1967.

LC

Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Beliefs, ed. C. Barrett, Oxford: Blackwell, 1970.

LE

‘A Lecture on Ethics’, The Philosophical Review, Vol. 74, pp. 3–12; reprinted in Philosophical Occasions: 1912-1951, ed. J. C. Klagge and A. Nordman, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1993, 37–44.

LPP

Wittgenstein’s Lectures on Philosophical Psychology 1946-47, notes by P. T. Geach, K. J. Shah and A. C. Jackson, ed. P. T. Geach. Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1988.

LW I

Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, vol I, ed. G. H. von Wright and H. Nyman, trans. C. G. Luckhardt and M. A. E. Aue. Oxford: Blackwell, 1982.

LW II

Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, vol II, ed. G. H. von Wright and H. Nyman, trans C. G. Luckhardt and M. A. E. Aue. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.

Abbreviations

xiii

LWL

Wittgenstein’s Lectures, Cambridge 1930-1932, from the notes of J. King and D. Lee, ed. Desmond Lee. Oxford: Blackwell, 1980.

NL

‘Notes on Logic’ in Notebooks 1914-16, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 1979, 93–107.

OC

On Certainty, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. D. Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe, amended 1st Edition. Oxford: Blackwell, 1977.

P

‘Philosophy’ (sections 86–93 of the Big Typescript) in Philosophical Occasions: 1912-1951, ed. J. C. Klagge and A. Nordman, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1993, 160–99.

PG

Philosophical Grammar, ed. R. Rhees, trans. A. Kenny. Oxford: Blackwell, 1974.

PI

Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997//or//trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker and J. Schulte (revised 4th ed.) Oxford: Blackwell, 2009.

PR

Philosophical Remarks, trans. Roger Hargreaves and Roger White. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975.

RPP I

Remarks on the Philosophy Of Psychology, vol. I, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, Oxford: Blackwell, 1980.

RPP II

Remarks on the Philosophy Of Psychology, vol. II, ed. G. H. von Wright and H. Nyman, trans. C. G. Luckhardt and M. A. E. Aue, Oxford: Blackwell, 1980.

TLP

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961//or//trans. C. K. Ogden, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951.

WVC

Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, shorthand notes recorded by F. Waismann, ed. B. F. McGuinness, Oxford: Blackwell, 1979.

Z

Zettel. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright (eds). Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970.

Series Preface Sometime in the late twentieth century, modernism, like philosophy itself, underwent something of an unmooring from (at least) linear literary history, in favour of the multi-perspectival history implicit in ‘new historicism’ or varieties of ‘presentism’, say. Amid current reassessments of modernism and modernity, critics have posited various ‘new’ or alternative modernisms – postcolonial, cosmopolitan, transatlantic, transnational, geomodernism or even ‘bad’ modernisms. In doing so, they have reassessed not only modernism as a category, but also, more broadly, they have rethought epistemology and ontology, aesthetics, metaphysics, materialism, history and being itself, opening possibilities of rethinking not only which texts we read as modernist, but also how we read those texts. Much of this new conversation constitutes something of a critique of the periodization of modernism or modernist studies in favour of modernism as mode (or mode of production) or concept. Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism situates itself amid the plurality of discourses, offering collections focused on single key philosophical thinkers influential both to the moment of modernism and to our current understanding of that moment’s geneology, archeology and becomings. Such critiques of modernism(s) and modernity afford opportunities to rethink and reassess the overlaps, folds, interrelationships, interleavings or cross pollinations of modernism and philosophy. Our goals in each volume of the series are to understand literary modernism better through philosophy as we also better understand a philosopher through literary modernism. The first two volumes of the series, those on Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze, have established a tripartite structure that serves to offer accessibility both to the philosopher’s principal texts and to current new research. Each volume opens with a section focused on ‘conceptualizing’ the philosopher through close readings of seminal texts in the thinker’s oeuvre. A second section, on aesthetics, maps connections between modernist works and the philosophical figure, often surveying key modernist trends and shedding new light on authors and texts. The final section of each volume serves as an extended glossary of principal terms in the philosopher’s work, each treated at length, allowing a fuller engagement

Series Preface

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with and examination of the many, sometimes contradictory, ways terms are deployed. The series is thus designed both to introduce philosophers and to rethink their relationship to modernist studies, revising our understandings of both modernism and philosophy, and offering resources that will be of use across disciplines, from philosophy, theory and literature, to religion, the visual and performing arts, and often to the sciences as well.

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Introduction: Giving the Viewer an Idea of the Landscape Anat Matar

My sentences are all supposed to be read slowly. (CV 57, 1947) Was Wittgenstein a modernist? In a sense, what the present book makes clear is that there’s something wrong with this question; or more accurately, not with the question itself but with our expectation to get a clear-cut and definitive answer to it. However, another insight that is clearly conveyed by this collection of essays is that such an easy dismissal of the question of Wittgenstein’s relation to modernism cannot be the end of the story, but rather its intriguing beginning – for one significant trait that is salient both in Wittgenstein’s oeuvre and in the modernist legacy is the notion that in philosophy, as well as the arts, understanding is not gained by straightforward answers. Genuine understanding needs time, hesitation, doubts, a variety of articulations, the refusal of tempting (positive or negative) solutions and, perhaps, even a sense of defeat. Approaching the question about Wittgenstein’s relation to modernism in this vein could enrich our understanding both of Wittgenstein – his thought, his way with words, his attitude towards philosophy, the arts, the world – and of modernism – that audacious artistic movement, a unique historical and philosophical moment. It is this vision that guides the present book. Understanding Wittgenstein yields an understanding of modernism – and vice versa – even if Wittgenstein is not classified as a modernist. Wittgenstein’s main oeuvre was written in Europe between the two world wars – the heyday of modernism – and no matter how one tends to interpret his remarks about ‘the darkness of this time’, his awareness of the historical moment he was active in is easily detected in his writings. A thinker of his magnitude, who grew up in the very centre of the cultural hub of Vienna at the turn of the nineteenth century, who was deeply interested in the arts and often purposefully appealed

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to his (and his readers’) sensitive ear and sensitive eye, cannot but express some of modernism’s gist. And it seems that modernist artists felt and reacted to this unique sensitivity. As Terry Eagleton rightly put it, ‘Wittgenstein is the philosopher of poets and composers, playwrights and novelists.’1 It is clear that Wittgenstein disliked at least some versions of modernist art, in particular modernist music. It is also clear that he admired and was directly influenced by several modernist artists (Rilke and Loos are obvious examples). Some of these predilections and resentments are thoroughly discussed in what follows – for example, in Antonia Soulez’s analysis of Wittgenstein’s attitude towards modernist music and in the comparison made by Pierre Fasula between Wittgenstein and Musil’s feelings of alienation from the new world. However, as virtually all the essays in this book show, the question of Wittgenstein and modernism stretches much beyond and much deeper than what particular biographical and historical details may betray. Thus, shedding light on Wittgenstein’s emphasis on the expressivity of meaning and his way of linking the notions of form and life, Soulez shows that Wittgenstein could be at the same time an inspiration for modernism and a critical interpreter of its analytical requirements. And Fasula’s paper broadens the scope of Wittgenstein and Musil’s particular hostilities towards the ‘new world’ and presents them in relation to the predicament of what he calls the problem of a non-culture. In sketching the landscape of this collection of essays, I have restricted myself to two major themes, both characterizing Wittgenstein’s thought as well as modernist art: first, a radical self-criticism, directed primarily to methodological issues, and second, an intense interest in language. These themes could serve as signposts for reading and reflecting upon the various philosophical analyses offered in this book and indicate a way in which the tensions among them – as well as the points where they converge – may yield a better understanding of Wittgenstein and of modernism. The first theme, as pertaining to modernism, was famously introduced and discussed by Clement Greenberg, in his classic ‘Modernist Painting’: I identify Modernism with the intensification, almost the exacerbation, of this self-critical tendency that began with the philosopher Kant. Because he was the first to criticize the means itself of criticism, I conceive Kant as the first real Modernist. 1

Terry Eagleton, ‘Introduction to Wittgenstein’, in Wittgenstein: The Terry Eagleton Script; The Derek Jarman Film, preface by Colin MacCabe (Worcester: The Trinity Press, 1993), 5.

Introduction

3

The essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself – not in order to subvert it, but to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence.2

Greenberg points out that this inclination found its expression ‘in areas that lay far from philosophy’, but it was certainly a decisive movement also (indeed, perhaps primarily) within philosophy itself – as we can learn, for example, from Oskari Kuusela’s article. Kuusela sketches the development of the kind of self-criticism Greenberg focuses on from Kant through Husserl and Heidegger until its articulation by Wittgenstein, first in the Tractatus and then in the later writings, where the idea of entrenching philosophy more firmly in its own language reaches its purest expression. Naturally, Wittgenstein’s attentiveness to the language of philosophy is alluded to, in one way or another, in each and every article in the present book. It is crucial to remember, though, that attention to the potency of language, as well as to its impotence, was as paramount in modernist art works as it was in Wittgenstein’s writings. This is, of course, trivial where poets, playwrights and writers are concerned (Valéry, Eliot, Stevens, Artaud, Woolf, Joyce are but a tiny reminder of a much longer list), but in a sense such attention also permeates the work of modernist painters and sculptors (think of Picasso, Chirico, Duchamp) and certainly that of musicians (not only Schoenberg!). A direct consequence of the kind of Kantian self-criticism in the arts is that each discipline, in its modernist phase, inquires into its own conditions of possibility, that is, into the means of expression – the ‘language’, so to speak – of that discipline. The result of such an inquiry is often expressed by the famous modernist principle, according to which form and content are tightly interwoven. Where language is concerned, this means that it is stripped off its traditional role of neutrally representing a firm reality, that is prior to and independent of the linguistic means of its expression. Once it is recognized that we may have no direct access to this allegedly prior sphere, without the mediation and intervention of language, language is revealed as immanently defective, on the one hand, but as creative rather than passive, on the other. It is used for fashioning new worlds and expressing novel ideas – and for this task, the various artistic media are treated by modernist artists as no less – indeed, much more – suitable than either philosophy or everyday language, traditionally conceived. 2

Clement Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’, reprinted in Modern Art and Modernism – A Critical Anthology, eds. F. Frascina and Ch. Harrison (London: Paul Chapman Publishing, 1982), 5.

4

Understanding Wittgenstein, Understanding Modernism

The traditional conception of philosophy and its language must therefore be replaced by a different approach. Throughout his life, Wittgenstein immersed himself in an attempt to solve ‘the problems of philosophy’ by pushing the so-called Linguistic Turn to its limit, through a radical investigation of language in general and the language of philosophy in particular. I believe that this much has been generally agreed upon by generations of Wittgenstein interpreters. What surface in the present book, more particularly, are the kind of interest in language that Wittgenstein manifested in his writings and the radicalism of its results. Here, the focus on the topic of modernism helps us to notice less familiar aspects of Wittgenstein’s interest in language. Garry Hagberg, for example, compares Wittgenstein’s interest in language as being written and read, to that of Henry James. He argues that Wittgenstein’s self-consciousness about the possibilities of small linguistic errors that quickly grow into large philosophical ones, and the impulses to miscast what we know and what we would say in the interest of prismatic theory, are what make Wittgenstein’s view of language modernist. David Schalkwyk maintains that Wittgenstein’s later writing exemplifies both the situatedness of the philosophical search for meaning and the uncanniness of language as home. Schalkwyk detects inner tensions in Wittgenstein’s famous remark, ‘I think I summed up my attitude to philosophy when I said: philosophy ought really to be written as a form of poetic composition’ (CV, 24) and argues that these tensions reveal Wittgenstein’s embeddedness in a modernist world itself beset with contractions. I believe that this insight is crucial for understanding both Wittgenstein and modernism. Specifically, I dare suggesting here that Wittgenstein’s work, in toto, is primarily about inner tension. The modernist angle brings us to realize what it was in Wittgenstein’s unique approach to language that could reveal unnoticed contradictions and lead to a novel attitude towards them. Consider the following paragraph from The Blue and Brown Books: What we call ‘understanding a sentence’ has, in many cases, a much greater similarity to understanding a musical theme than we might be inclined to think. But I don’t mean that understanding a musical theme is more like the picture which one tends to make oneself of understanding a sentence; but rather that this picture is wrong, and that understanding a sentence is much more like what really happens when we understand a tune than at first sight appears. For understanding a sentence, we say, points to a reality outside the sentence. Whereas one might say ‘Understanding a sentence means getting hold of its content; and the content of the sentence is in the sentence’. (BB, 167, §17)

Introduction

5

This is, of course, a paradigmatically modernist way of expressing the relation between content and form in language, and the same line is echoed, rephrased and also sublated – dialectically negated – in Philosophical Investigations: We speak of understanding a sentence in the sense in which it can be replaced by another which says the same; but also in the sense in which it cannot be replaced by any other. (Any more than one musical theme can be replaced by another.) In the one case the thought in the sentence is something common to different sentences; in the other, something that is expressed only by these words in these positions. (Understanding a poem.) Then has ‘understanding’ two different meanings here? – I would rather say that these kinds of use of ‘understanding’ make up its meaning, make up my concept of understanding. For I want to apply the word ‘understanding’ to all this. (PI, §§531–2)

Glock and Kalhat suggest in their article that Wittgenstein offers us what may be called a conceptual analysis of the concept of understanding, as established in everyday use. But this does not entail that there is, or can be, one simple and conclusive analysis. For both concepts – ‘concept’ (hence also ‘conceptual’) and ‘analysis’ – are immanently infused with tension, in their established everyday use, and Wittgenstein wants us to acknowledge this tension in understanding them, that is, in understanding the concept of ‘understanding’. From this, we should not hasten to conclude that Wittgenstein opts for a relativist conception of concept, of understanding, and, indeed, of thought and of philosophy. Most (or even all) the contributors to the present book seem to agree that this interpretive direction is futile. For relativism is a way of eradicating tension, rather than respecting it, understanding its workings, learning the right way to live with it. Thus, while Kuusela points at the non-empirical necessity and exceptionless generality of Wittgensteinian philosophical statements, Élise Marrou reminds us of the same theme through a discussion of a peculiar remark Wittgenstein made on the theatre, in Culture and Value: Suddenly we are observing a human being from outside in a way that ordinarily we can never observe ourselves; it would be like watching a chapter of biography with our own eyes. (CV, 4, 1930)

This passage starts with an anecdote Wittgenstein tells about a conversation he had with Paul Engelmann on the latter’s manuscripts. Marrou notes the

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Understanding Wittgenstein, Understanding Modernism

connection between this beginning, the theatre parable, the reflection on art that follows it and the ending of that passage: But it seems to me too that there is a way of capturing the world sub specie aeterni other than through the work of the artist. Thought has such a way – so I believe – it is as though it flies above the world and leaves it as it is – observing it from above, in flight. (CV, 5)

How are we to read this attitude towards thought ‘sub specie aeterni’ alongside Wittgenstein’s warning against ‘the contemptuous attitude towards the particular case’ (BB, 18)? How is it related to the tensions characteristic of the modernist spirit? Does this dialectic between particular and universal, between fragile and certain, have some kind of moral, existential or political impact? Different paths are available for us. John Skorupski forms a linkage between Wittgenstein’s ideas about language and logic and what he sees as his inclination towards mysticism, or asceticism, and his cultural alienation. The linkage is formed through the surprising idea that spiritual anxieties could somehow be alleviated or eased by close philosophical attention to language. Danièle Moyal-Sharrock, on the other hand, emphasizes Wittgenstein’s unique approach towards the concept of certainty and his dismissal of scepticism, which stems from his respect, rather than contempt, towards particularities. She opposes her reading to that of Stanley Cavell’s, whose modernist emphasis in reading Wittgenstein yields a philosophy that breeds disappointment, alienation and scepticism, whereas she finds Wittgenstein’s notion of certainty as reflecting a sense of community and enlightenment. An innovative interpretation of the notion of enlightenment is what drives Thomas Wallgren to read all of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy of logic, language, mind and related topics as always also a Socratic and modernist intervention in the imaginary of the political and of philosophy, within the discourse that links reason, progress and self-determination. At this point, I would like to dedicate a few words to the third part of the book, the Glossary. Each one of the Glossary’s entries, in presenting a key term in Wittgenstein’s body of work, advances an original argument, rather than reflecting common knowledge about it. These arguments are enriched by the notion of modernism, which sometimes only lies at the background and in other cases helps shaping the core of the argument. Thus, against received opinion, Sebastian Grève argues that logic was not forsaken by the later Wittgenstein and that his mature philosophy of logic and the kinds of constructive logical work that he was engaged in contain interesting thoughts and challenges that have gone widely unnoticed. Stefan Brandt appeals to the lesser known Philosophical

Introduction

7

Grammar in order to discuss Wittgenstein’s own objection to his Tractarian idea that we speak and think about the world by picturing it. Phil Hutchinson and Rupert Read point at the way Wittgenstein helps us to appreciate the works of the modernist literary masters, by helping us to appreciate their form as constituting so much of their content. They argue that once Wittgenstein is seen as a kind of post-literary modernist, it is easier to grasp his notion of grammar not as a prison, or something that can or should be policed, but rather as something we do when we speak. In a similar vein, Harvey Cormier explains the idea of meaning as use in the later Wittgenstein, by comparing it with the approach to concepts displayed by both William James in his pragmatist philosophy and Henry James in his realistic and modernistic fiction. Like Garry Hagberg, in his comparison between Wittgenstein and Henry James, Cormier emphasizes Wittgenstein and the Jameses’ openness to the ever-changing and diverse ways in which thoughts help us manage our ways or forms of life. Forms of life are the background of Yuval Lurie’s focus on the interconnectedness of first-and-third person ascriptions of psychological concepts. Lurie explains how Wittgenstein, in his conception of the subject, forsakes the Cartesian picture and replaces it by an appeal to a universally shared psychopraxis. Writing about what was perhaps closest to Wittgenstein’s heart – ethics – Ben Ware investigates a possible connection between the Tractatus, ethics and modernism, by focusing on the affinities between the Tractatus and Theodor Adorno’s idea of the autonomous, modernist work of art. And art itself is at the focus of David Macarthur’s investigation: his article wraps the book up by adhering to the idea of the work of art as seen sub specie aeternitatis. Analysing three aspects of art, seen this way, Macarthur concludes by pointing at the romantic and the modernist elements in Wittgenstein’s thought and by emphasizing that Wittgenstein cannot be comfortably assimilated to either movement. We have seen, then, that our two themes, those that characterize Wittgenstein’s thought as well as the gist of modernism, are intimately connected in Wittgenstein’s work. Wittgenstein’s radical self-criticism, which lays bare the foundations of the philosophical discipline, cannot be separated from his views of language, its logic, its use, its texture, its relation to thought, and also from the farther-reaching philosophical implications of these views. I have suggested that these links reflect aspects of Wittgenstein’s sensitivity to and respect for inner tension. One of the most salient manifestations of this attitude is Wittgenstein’s professed hostility towards dogmatism – a fault he had inspected in his own Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. In a conversation with Schlick and Waismann, Wittgenstein characterizes dogmatism (like the one that ‘pervades my whole

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Understanding Wittgenstein, Understanding Modernism

book’) as ‘the conception that there are questions the answers to which will be found at a later date’ (WVC, 182, the conversation is dated December 1931). A forced resolution of tensions, a determination that there must be a clear-cut, definitive answer – these are the philosophical inclinations he resisted. Here are two striking expressions of this resistance: I find it important in philosophizing to keep changing my posture, not to stand for too long on one leg, so as not to get stiff. (CV, 27, 1937)

And the following suggestive parenthetical note: (The philosopher is not a citizen of any community of ideas. That is what makes him into a philosopher.) (Z, §455)

A discussion of Wittgenstein in the context of modernism shows us, I believe, how hard – perhaps on the verge of impossibility – it is to adopt such an attitude. Modernists, one would naturally assume, are, almost by definition, citizens of a community of ideas. And a philosopher as stern as Wittgenstein is so thoroughly obligated to the truth he wishes to convey, that the image of him casually changing his posture, from time to time, must strike us as odd. Yet, there is a sense in which such a hostility towards dogmatism captures Wittgenstein’s spirit faithfully. It is easy to detect – in Wittgenstein as well as in the modernist movement – a strong resentment from a priori requirements and a deep commitment to a special kind of freedom, the one that is manifested, for example, in Wittgenstein’s treatment of rules and, hence, in his conception of language by and large. Coming to terms with the indispensability of inner tension helps us, I believe, to sustain the kind of anti-dogmatism Wittgenstein wants us to adopt. In the present collections of essays, I have tried to be faithful to this spirit. Most of the book’s readers are surely aware of the huge differences among the familiar interpretations of the early Wittgenstein, the later Wittgenstein, and the preliminary question about the very distinction between the early and later Wittgenstein. Debates about these disagreements have been passionate, and although there were some ‘changes of posture’, quite consistent ‘communities of ideas’ have been formed among Wittgenstein scholars. The community of Wittgensteinians forged in the present book offers an alternative, which I believe gives a better idea of the landscape Wittgenstein tries to sketch. Reading Glock and Kalhat’s convincing argument about conceptual analysis alongside the persuasive analysis of the notion of grammar offered by Hutchinson and Read, for example, may have the impact – albeit momentarily – of an epoché.

Introduction

9

It asks us to read Wittgenstein’s sentences slowly. And so it is with Schalkwyk versus Moyal-Sharrock, Brandt compared to Grève, etc. Experiencing a change of posture is a fine way of experiencing modernism, too, and thus understanding Wittgenstein is, indeed, understanding modernism. My thoughts soon grew feeble if I tried to force them along a single track against their natural inclination. – And this was, of course, connected with the very nature of the investigation. For it compels us to travel criss-cross in every direction over a wide field of thought. – The philosophical remarks in this book are, as it were, a number of sketches of landscapes which were made in the course of these long and meandering journeys. The same or almost the same points were always being approached afresh from different directions, and new sketches made. … [These] had to be arranged and often cut down, in order to give the viewer an idea of the landscape. So this book is really just an album. (PI, Preface)

10

Part One

Conceptualizing Wittgenstein

12

1

Language, Expressibility and the Mystical John Skorupski

In this chapter I discuss two elements in Wittgenstein’s thought: mysticism (or, more broadly, asceticism) and cultural alienation. Throughout his life, they interacted with his more purely philosophical ideas about language and logic – through the surprising idea that spiritual anxieties could somehow be alleviated or eased by close philosophical attention to language. This is Wittgenstein’s distinctive contribution to a main stream of modernist art and thinking; it developed, as we shall see, from the explicit mysticism of his earlier philosophy to the ascetic restraint and indirection of his later thought. It may be thought odd to treat mysticism and cultural alienation as characteristic elements of modernism. I do not think it is. Culture develops dialectically: an optimistic mood of collectivist technological progressivism is certainly one characteristic of modernism, a strong recoil against it is another. Carnap and the Vienna Circle are philosophers of modernism in that optimistic mood; W ­ ittgenstein and Heidegger are philosophers of modernism in the recoil against it. The mystical and ascetic elements in Wittgenstein’s thinking are, to be sure, by no means the only aspects of his modernism. They were not central to his general influence in philosophy. That influence arose from the great governing idea that the ‘philosophical’ concept of aprioricity has to be replaced by the linguistic concept of syntax or grammar – together with the conclusion drawn from this, that philosophy stands revealed as pseudo-problematic. This was the most salient contribution of ‘analytic’ philosophy to modernism, and Wittgenstein’s work was crucial to it.1 In the same period, Carnap developed closely related ideas that were equally crucial; Carnap’s focus, however, was always on formal languages rather than on actual 1

For a general account of analytic philosophy of language within modernism, see Anat Matar, Modernism and the Language of Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 2006).

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Understanding Wittgenstein, Understanding Modernism

language use. Connectedly, the spiritual significance these ideas about language had for Wittgenstein was very different to the scientific significance they had for Carnap. What makes Wittgenstein the pre-eminent philosophical modernist – as it seems to me – is the way he fused the ideas about the pseudo-problematic nature of philosophy with the distinctively ‘mystical’, ‘ethical’ and cultural interests that he shared more with Heidegger than with Carnap, and which connect his thinking and his attitudes to much modernism in the arts. These are the particular aspects of his thinking that I am concerned with here.2 The contrast between what can be said – and is only relatively important – and what can only be shown – and is absolutely important – remains with Wittgenstein throughout his life, even though the particular connection he tried to draw in the Tractatus between this contrast and his account of logic and reality does not. It is also true that that particular conception of importance has a vitality and a history in its own right, which it is important to have in mind before one considers how it shaped modernism in philosophy and the arts. I take it up in the next section, before turning to the development of Wittgenstein’s ideas concerning ‘unsayability’ in the following two sections, and their relation to modernism in the final three.

1  Mysticism: Philosophical and anti-philosophical Mystical elements are explicit in Wittgenstein’s earlier thought. In the Tractatus we have: 6.44 It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists. 6.45 To view the world sub specie aeterni is to view it as a whole – a limited whole. Feeling the world as a limited whole – it is this that is mystical. 6.522  There are indeed things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.3

2

3

I have discussed the analytic tradition as an aspect of modernism more generally in John Skorupski, English-Language Philosophy 1750-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) and John Skorupski, ‘Why did Language matter to Analytical Philosophy?’, Ratio IX (1996): 269−83 also in The Rise of Analytic Philosophy, ed. H-J. Glock (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 77−91. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuiness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961).

Language, Expressibility and the Mystical

15

The term ‘mystical’ (das Mystische) certainly appears – but does it connect Wittgenstein’s thoughts to ideas characteristically expressed in historical mystical writings? Those writings vary hugely, as one would expect given their ubiquity and how far back they go. Still, the most basic mystical idea expressed throughout is a contrast between the ordinary standpoint on the world, including the ordinary procedures of inquiry that are applied within this standpoint to achieve knowledge, and another standpoint: a standpoint that is taken to yield knowledge of the whole as it absolutely is. Call this the idea of two standpoints (A). Furthermore (B), whereas the ordinary standpoint is largely pre-reflective, and in a sense ‘natural’ to us – expressed in concepts that, however complicated and technical they become, are ‘easy’ in that they appear to be accessible, at least in principle, to common cognition – the mystical standpoint is, on the contrary, not ‘easy’. It is, indeed, in a very important way ‘simple’, but it is not expressible within the concepts of the ordinary standpoint; in fact, whether or not it is expressible in discursive concepts at all is contested. If it is not, then an important consequence is that it cannot be sought through the inherently discursive discipline of philosophy but only through a variety of ascetic or ecstatic techniques, or through meditation or religion or art. Another basic feature of historical mysticism (C) is that mystical knowledge is in some way insight into self-world identity: knowledge that I and the absolute One are one. It is this insight that is quite simple, yet not easy: inexpressible in the concepts of the ordinary standpoint or perhaps in any concepts. To be grasped, it must be experienced and lived. Finally, (D), only this knowledge, achieved in mystical insight, has absolute value. The knowledge that is proper to the ordinary standpoint has conditional or instrumental value only. From the absolute mystical standpoint, no such knowledge is any more or less valuable than any other such knowledge, because the everyday aims of the common understanding have no absolute value. Let us call the view that there is a mystical insight that cannot be expressed discursively anti-philosophical mysticism. There is also a philosophical mysticism. It agrees with (B) that mystical insight has to struggle against the natural attitude, and cannot be expressed in ordinary concepts. But it does not agree that it cannot be gained discursively. True, it cannot be gained through ordinary concepts, but that does not mean there is no discursive path, even if the path can be travelled only with great difficulty. Furthermore, as in (C) and (D),

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Understanding Wittgenstein, Understanding Modernism

the difficulty or uneasy simplicity of mystical insight lies in its content, and only this content has absolute value. At the beginnings of philosophy, the two standpoints are characterized by Parmenides as the path that is (and/or leads to what is), and the path that is not (and/or leads to what is not): the path of ‘steadfast and well-rounded truth’ and the path followed by ‘the opinions of mortal men’ – against which the Goddess strongly warns the young traveller.4 Coming closer to the period that interests us, we can turn to Hegel. Here the contrast is between Reason (Vernunft) and Understanding (Verstand). The terms are from Kant, and Understanding, as in Kant, is the capacity to apply concepts to the phenomena and reason about them in terms of the ordinary logic of the natural attitude. This is the way of seeming, the path to the phenomena. But whereas pure Reason in Kant can provide no route to knowledge of absolute reality (as against providing Ideas, regulative principles, the Moral Law), in Hegel, precisely on the contrary, it provides just that route, the way of truth – through the dialectical logic of the speculative method.5 Between the time of Parmenides and the time of Hegel, there were many mystical traditions, but I will take these two as paradigms of philosophical mysticism. Both hold that there is a philosophical path, a path of reason, to mystical knowledge. It can be travelled only with difficulty, because the way of seeming is so ingrained. Furthermore, since the mystical insight, for both of them in their different ways, is that ‘the World is One’, ‘the Truth is the Whole’, the normal logic of abstract identity does not apply. Nothing is not. The One has all determinations and is unconditioned; therefore it necessarily is as it absolutely is. The full nature of this truth cannot be expressed in the categories of the Understanding. Nonetheless, according to this philosophical mysticism, it can be discursively expressed, though only in radically innovative forms of language or thought, which may break the ordinary limits of language. In contrast, there are philosophical as well as non-philosophical views that hold that the mystical cannot be discursively expressed. Of course, one of these views says, quite simply, that that is because there is no such thing as mystical insight. If you can’t say it, you can’t whistle it either; or to give this comment Although she also gives a full account of that seeming path. For translations of these mysterious fragments, and discussion, see G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957) and Edward Hussey, The Pre-Socratics (London: Duckworth, 1972). Comparisons between Parmenides and the Tractatus have been drawn on the basis that they share the idea that one cannot talk or think of what is not. That seems right, and interesting, if hard to take further. However, my concern here is only with features (A)–(D). 5 See, for example, G. W. F. Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic, trans. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting and H. S. Harris (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1991), 133 (§82, Addition). 4

Language, Expressibility and the Mystical

17

a further twist, if you can’t discursively express it, you can’t manifest it or show it in music, or any kind of art, there being nothing to manifest or show. Against that stands the view that although the mystical cannot be discursively expressed, it can make itself known, through art, religion, etc. This is a common view in the modernist period. It, in turn, divides. It may be a strongly antiphilosophical mysticism, which says that philosophy can contribute nothing at all to the achievement of mystical insight. Or it may say that what philosophy can contribute is in a way negative, yet still distinctive and valuable – namely, not a discursive expression of mystical insight but a way of making a clearing in which insight becomes possible. Perhaps, even, only philosophy can do that. This last view is, I think, the distinctively modernist version of philosophical mysticism: call it anti-philosophical philosophical mysticism. Heidegger may be thought to belong here.6 At any rate, it is the form of Wittgenstein’s view, as stated in the Tractatus, though I will suggest that he held something like it throughout his life. However, let us turn first to the Tractatus.

2  What can and cannot be said In Wittgenstein’s hands, the idea I have labelled (A) becomes the contrast between what can be put into words and what can only be manifested. This is immediately followed by (B). As is familiar, at least at the stage of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein makes these points from within a general account of logic and meaning. The world is everything that is the case – the totality of facts – and a statement that has sense pictures a fact. A fact is the existence of objects in a combination; only a fact can picture a fact and a fact can only picture a fact. Of course, none of these (apparent) theses about facts and sense picture facts, and since none of them picture facts, they have no sense. Nonetheless, they manifest or show the essence and substance of the world. The presence of (C) is at best less clear. Yet, something like it makes itself felt in what Wittgenstein says about self and world. 5.6 The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. 5.63 I am my world. (The microcosm.) See John D. Caputo, ‘Meister Eckhart and the Later Heidegger: The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought, Part I’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 12 (1974): 479−94, and ‘Meister Eckhart and the Later Heidegger: The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought, Part II’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 13 (1975): 61−80.

6

18

Understanding Wittgenstein, Understanding Modernism 5.64 Solipsism, when its implications are followed out strictly, coincides with pure realism. 5.641 Thus there really is a sense in which philosophy can talk about the self in a non-psychological way. What brings the self into philosophy is the fact that ‘the world is my world’. The philosophical self is not the human being, not the human body, or the human soul, with which psychology deals, but rather the metaphysical subject, the limit of the world – not a part of it.

(D) is expressed in 6.4: All propositions are of equal value. Here Wittgenstein does not say that no proposition has any value, or that they all have at most instrumental value. However, 6.41 affirms that nothing in the world has value: The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no value exists – and if it did exist, it would have no value. If there is any value that does have value, it must lie outside the whole sphere of what happens and is the case. For all that happens and is the case is accidental. What makes it non-accidental cannot lie within the world, since if it did it would itself be accidental. It must lie outside the world.

Evidently, then, anything that has value must be non-accidental. Presumably, what is non-accidental is the presence of the world as a limited whole. Of course, it is not sayable that the world is a limited whole; it is shown in the general form of the proposition. God is the necessity that there are facts.7 This differs from the philosophical mysticism of Parmenides or Hegel, no doubt in various ways, but the one I want to highlight is that it denies that mystical insight can be discursively expressed. It is anti-philosophical mysticism – but it still gives a crucial role to philosophy. The results of philosophy, the analysis of logic and meaning, manifest the structure of the mystical, the essence of the world. Yet, it seems that we can still ask what is valuable about the world being a limited whole. Why call this God? This leads us to the LE of 1929. 7

Compare §6.432, and Eddy Zemach, ‘Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of the Mystical’, The Review of Metaphysics 18 (1964): 47: ‘God is the sense and the essence of the world. The essence of the world, i.e., the totality of facts, is the general form of the proposition. Thus the general form of the proposition is identical with the concept God.’

Language, Expressibility and the Mystical

19

3  Existence, safety and guilt In the Tractatus, ethics is dealt with in §§6.421–6.423. We are told that it cannot be put into words, is transcendental and is identical with aesthetics; also, that there is such a thing as ethical reward and punishment, but that it is not a matter of consequent events. In the LE, the word ‘mystical’ does not appear, but it is clearly what Wittgenstein has in mind as ‘the ethical’: Instead of saying ‘Ethics is the enquiry into what is good’ I could have said Ethics is the enquiry into what is valuable, or, into what is really important, or I could have said Ethics is the enquiry into the meaning of life, or into what makes life worth living, or into the right way of living. I believe if you look at all these phrases you will get a rough idea as to what it is that Ethics is concerned with. (LE, 4)

Certainly, one gets a rough idea of what Wittgenstein is concerned with: the meaning of life, rather than (say) whether it is permissible to eat meat or to break one’s promises. I think he might say that all such particular ethical statements about rightness and wrongness somehow hang for their significance on the meaning of life, perhaps because to grasp that meaning is to have the perspective of ethical reward and punishment. Wittgenstein also clarifies why there is no value in the world: Now what I wish to contend is that, although all judgments of relative value can be shown to be mere statement of facts, no statement of fact can ever be, or imply, a judgment of absolute value. Let me explain this: Suppose one of you were an omniscient person and therefore knew all the movements of all the bodies in the world dead or alive and that he also knew all the states of mind of all human beings that ever lived, and suppose this man wrote all he knew in a big book, then this book would contain the whole description of the world; and what I want to say is, that this book would contain nothing that we would call an ethical judgment or anything that would logically imply such a judgment. It would of course contain all relative judgments of value and all true scientific propositions and in fact all true propositions that can be made. But all the facts described would, as it were, stand on the same level and in the same way all propositions stand on the same level. There are no propositions which, in any absolute sense, are sublime, important, or trivial. (LE, 6)

As this brings out, Wittgenstein’s really basic conviction is that no statement about facts, about how things are, can be an ethical statement, a statement of

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absolute value. This is the truth Moore had sought to establish, a quarter of a century earlier, by diagnosing what he called the ‘naturalistic fallacy’. Since the end of the period of philosophical modernism that we are concerned with here, much philosophical effort has been devoted to trying to undermine it, whether naturalistically or metaphysically – I would say, unsuccessfully. But for the present purposes, the relevant point is that the thesis does not in itself show that no statement about absolute value has meaning. That requires a further move, a doctrine of meaning. Wittgenstein’s ideas were changing at this time, towards verificationism about meaning and a broadly syntactical rather than a narrowly tautological view of aprioricity. This newer view of meaning and aprioricity, like the Tractatus account, might still seem to put the ‘ethical’ beyond the bounds of sense. However, on closer inspection we see that what actually carries this consequence is the combination of two premises: that the purely normative is not factual and that all propositional content is factual. If either of these is rejected, the consequence fails. Of the two theses, the one to reject, I would argue, is that all propositional content is factual8; and while that thesis is central to the Tractarian conception of meaning, it is not obvious why it should be essential to his later thinking. Nonetheless, it seems that we can still attribute to Wittgenstein in this period an attitude that sweepingly dismisses as nonsense any pronouncement about absolute value whatsoever. Would that include pronouncements about the value of animal well-being, or the wrongness of breaking a promise, which seem quite obviously perfectly intelligible? These are absolute, not relative, in a sense that Kant had in mind when he distinguished between relative and absolute ends in the Groundwork.9 The latter, he said, give rise only to ‘hypothetical imperatives’. In more recent terminology, one might say that he took hypothetical imperatives to have purely empirical-factual truth conditions: they say what means are necessary relative to a merely posited end. In the passage just quoted, Wittgenstein seems to have this sense of ‘relative’ and ‘absolute’ in mind. Granting, then, that all properly ethical claims are about absolute value in that sense, we can see why Wittgenstein would dismiss all of them as nonsensical if he was working from a standpoint that combined verificationism with factualism in the way mentioned above. I argue this in detail in John Skorupski, The Domain of Reasons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), esp. Ch. 17. 9 I. Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997): §§4:427−8, 35−7. I should add, however, that what Kant says in that passage is not wholly clear. 8

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Yet, it is striking that while the contrast between the sayable and unimportant, and the unsayable and important, is the main feature of the LE, Wittgenstein does not underpin it solely or even mainly by a general doctrine of meaning. In fact, I want to suggest that the LE is a transitional stage in the development of Wittgenstein’s thinking. At the end of the development, he retains the idea that certain human experiences have an absolute value that can only be shown, but no longer bases it on any general theory of meaning, verificationist or other. Furthermore, ‘absolute’ value in this context is no longer contrasted to merely instrumental value, but, rather, refers to an ethical, aesthetic or mystical insight whose value cannot be expressed in the language of ordinary cognition. This is the idea of the two standpoints that in section 1 I labelled (A). The insights that can only be shown are very specific – in practice, Wittgenstein does not talk about ethical discourse in general, as a meta-ethicist might. His focus is on the meaning of life, what makes life worth living, our relation to existence. This is what cannot be put into words – and his reasons for thinking so, as he gives them in the LE, have nothing to do with any general doctrine of meaning. Instead, he gives three very interesting examples of experiences whose content cannot be put into words. He introduces the first two as follows: If I want to fix my mind on what I mean by absolute or ethical value … it always happens that the idea of one particular experience presents itself to me. … The best way of describing it is to say that when I have it I wonder at the existence of the world. And I am then inclined to use such phrases as ‘how extraordinary that anything should exist’ or ‘how extraordinary that the world should exist’. I will mention another experience straight away which I also know and which others of you might be acquainted with: it is, what one might call, the experience of feeling absolutely safe. I mean the state of mind in which one is inclined to say ‘I am safe, nothing can injure me whatever happens’. (8)

He continues: The first thing I have to say is, that the verbal expression which we give to these experiences is nonsense! If I say ‘I wonder at the existence of the world’ I am misusing language. (8)10

Why? I can properly be said, Wittgenstein replies, to wonder at something unexpected, unusual – the size of a dog, the unexpected survival of a house. ‘But 8. Compare: ‘Astonishment at the fact of the world. Every attempt to express it leads to nonsense’ (WVC, 93).

10

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it is nonsense to say that I wonder at the existence of the world, because I cannot imagine it not existing.’ The same applies to the experience of absolute safety: We all know what it means in ordinary life to be safe. I am safe in my room, when I cannot be run over by an omnibus. I am safe if I have had whooping cough and cannot therefore get it again. To be safe essentially means that it is physically impossible that certain things should happen to me and, therefore, it is nonsense to say that I am safe whatever happens. Again, this is a misuse of the word ‘safe’, as the other example was a misuse of the word ‘existence’ or ‘wondering’.

The third experience Wittgenstein mentions is that of feeling guilty. He says little about it other than that it has been ‘described by the phrase that God disapproves our conduct’ (10); it is not clear how he wants to treat it. He might mean that the proper object of guilt is invariably inexpressible because it is absolute wrongdoing, and absolute as against relative value is inexpressible. This would hark back to a general theory of meaning. Given the context, however, I read him as referring to a generalized or existential feeling of guilt – which again could be held to be unintelligible on the grounds that guilt is intelligible only if its object meets certain conditions (that what I did was wrong, that I could have refrained from doing it). Thus, in arguing that these experiences are inexpressible, Wittgenstein is not appealing to verificationism. The point is that what is in each case said to be the object of the respective experience conflicts with the normal requirements for something to be its object; he goes on to say a number of interesting things about the use of simile and analogy in ethical and religious language. The appeal to a general theory of meaning may seem to return in his conclusion: These nonsensical expressions were not nonsensical because I had not yet found the correct expressions, but … their nonsensicality was their very essence. For all I wanted to do with them was just to go beyond the world and that is to say beyond significant language. My whole tendency and, I believe, the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless. Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it. (11f.)

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But, in fact, the question Wittgenstein has discussed is not a general question about the meaningfulness of any ethical pronouncement – it is, rather, a problem about the expressibility, or more accurately, the intelligibility of the three experiences. They pose a question of intelligibility, yet they seem, nonetheless, Wittgenstein says, ‘to those who have experienced them, for instance to me, to have in some sense an intrinsic, absolute value’ (10). They have a seriousness or solemnity that arises from their objects: wonder at Existence or Being, feeling safe with Being, or feeling guilty (not safe) in its presence; or, feeling at one with the world (safe) or feeling out of kilter with the world, feeling that one’s very existence is somehow at odds with the world (guilty); or, again, feeling at one with God versus feeling at odds with, or isolated from, God. It seems impossible to explain how the object, Being as such, could be a reason for those feelings. Nonetheless, we feel that these experiences, or what they are experiences of, is something absolute, something important, that requires adequate understanding and expression. The same point appears in Wittgenstein’s conversations with members of the Vienna Circle: To be sure, I can imagine what Heidegger meant by being and anxiety. Man feels the urge to run up against the limits of language. Think for example of the astonishment that anything at all exists [das etwas existiert]. This astonishment cannot be expressed in the form of a question, and there is also no answer whatsoever. Anything we might say is a priori bound to be mere nonsense. Nevertheless we do run up against the limits of language. Kierkegaard too saw that there is this running up against something and he referred to it in a fairly similar way (as running up against paradox). This running up against the boundaries of language is ethics. I think it is definitely important to put an end to all the claptrap about ethics – whether intuitive knowledge exists, whether values exist, whether the good is definable. In ethics we are always making the attempt to say something that cannot be said, something that does not and never will touch the essence of the matter. It is a priori certain that whatever definition of the good may be given – it will always be merely a misunderstanding to say that the essential thing, that what is really meant, corresponds to what is expressed (Moore). But the inclination, the running up against something, indicates something. St Augustine knew that already when he said: ‘What, you swine, you want not to talk nonsense? Go ahead and talk nonsense – it does not matter!’ (WVC, 68–9).

Again, in this passage Wittgenstein mixes up the specific question of our attitude to being and anxiety with (wild) remarks about ethics in general. The connection,

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if any, remains unexplained. But the interesting question, and the one that is evidently deeply felt by Wittgenstein, is the one about our being and anxiety. By talking nonsense about it, we indicate something, and that something is what matters. Why does it matter? In what way is it important? The key, it seems to me at least, is that the importance of what is shown depends inseparably on the way in which it is shown. This in turn provides a clue to the way in which Wittgenstein’s thoughts are related to some forms of modernist art.

4  The ascetic ideal In the foreword to the Philosophical Remarks we find the following, written in November 1930: This book is written for such men as are in sympathy with its spirit. This spirit is different from the one which informs the vast stream of European and American civilization in which all of us stand. That spirit expresses itself in an onwards movement, in building ever larger and more complicated structures; the other in striving after clarity and perspicuity in no matter what structure. The first tries to grasp the world by way of its periphery – in its variety; the second at its centre – in its essence. And so the first adds one construction to another, moving on and up, as it were, from one stage to the next, while the other remains where it is and what it tries to grasp is always the same.

As in the LE, ‘das Mystische’ makes no appearance. Nonetheless, the contrast between the two spirits that Wittgenstein outlines is highly reminiscent of the mystical contrast between the way of seeming, which builds ‘ever larger and more complicated structures’, and the way of truth – the ‘other’ spirit, which seeks to grasp the world ‘at its centre – in its essence’. Some notes in Culture and Value, made in 1930 (and clearly connected with the longer draft of the foreword that I mention in the next section), provide support: I might say: if the place I want to reach could only be climbed up to by way of a ladder, I would give up trying to get there. For the place to which I really have to go is one that I must actually be at already. Anything that can be reached with a ladder does not interest me. One movement orders one thought to the others in a series, the other keeps aiming at the same place. One movement constructs & takes (in hand) one stone after another, the other keeps reaching for the same one (CV, 10e).

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The first remark is clearly aimed at the famous metaphor of the ladder in the Tractatus (6.54): My propositions serve as eludications in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical (unsinnig), when he has used them – as steps – to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.

That metaphor is now rejected. The reason, presumably, is that it suggested the existence of a route, passage or method of argument, leading – via some philosophical theses – from a starting point to a distinct and different end point. The route may have to be retrospectively cancelled but it has, nonetheless, led to a different place, a place that must be reached for insight to be achieved. In contrast, the spirit in which Wittgenstein now seeks to write ‘remains where it is and what it tries to grasp is always the same’. It ‘keeps aiming at the same place’. Insight is not achieved by means of a journey. In Wittgenstein’s later writing, of the period of Philosophical Investigations, general theories of meaning have completely dropped away. ‘Meaning as use’ is an anti-theory, not a theory. So, too, has the Tractarian vision of ‘the crystalline purity of logic’ (PI, §107). It was the centrepiece of Tractarian mysticism: on the one hand grounded in rigorous philosophical analysis, on the other hand, a seemingly discursive expression of the mystical, which was yet not discursive, because nonsensical. But now, the idea of an inner logical structure that is the immutable essence of the world is the very thing that Wittgenstein most emphatically rejects: The preconceived idea of crystalline purity can only be removed by turning our whole examination round. (One might say: the axis of reference of our examination must be rotated, but about the fixed point of our real need.) (PI, §108)

In the Tractatus, metaphysical preconceptions had obtruded on the simplicity of true insight. These preconceptions have gone; ‘the fixed point of our real need’, the need to ‘see the world aright’, remains. What remains after Wittgenstein has rotated the axis around our real need is the basic contrast of what can be shown but not said, together with the idea that showing what can only be shown requires a clarity that is quite different from the clarity of science.

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Nor has Wittgenstein abandoned the idea that that kind of clarity, the kind that shows what can only be shown, leaves everything as it is. He still retains the conception of philosophy’s task that he had already set out in the Tractatus: ‘Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts. … [It] is not a body of doctrine but an activity. … A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations’ (TLP, §4.112). But he now emphasizes that this activity is not a matter of climbing a ladder of theses, which are then thrown away as nonsensical. There quite simply are no such theses: philosophical clarity is not at all concerned with theses, even with theses that show themselves as unsayable. What, then, is achieved by philosophical activity? I think the answer is spiritual liberation, liberation as at-one-ness or reconciliation with the world. The aim is to see, in all simplicity, what is there for what it is, nothing else, nothing more, and to be at peace with it. This can be achieved in ‘no matter what structure’. Philosophy as conceived by the later Wittgenstein is the pursuit of an ascetic ideal. As such, it stands in a long and great tradition, whose resilient aim is personal peace and reconciliation, achieved by means of rigour, purity and cleanliness of life and thought. Mysticism is one leading expression of the ascetic spirit. But that does not mean that the emancipatory, true-seeing, relation between self and world that asceticism aims at has to be expressed in mystical terms. The more general aim is to clear away irrelevance, clutter, in order to see the world ‘sub specie aeterni’, as Wittgenstein puts it – where seeing it in that way is seeing it as a limited whole that is emphatically there. Metaphysics gets in the way of this seeing, so dissolving metaphysics is one kind of emancipating ascetic practice. Nothing is hidden.11 Note then the similarity, but also the difference, to Kant on Understanding and Reason. Like Kant, Wittgenstein sees metaphysics as an extravagant overreaching of ordinary thought, an overreaching that is somehow inescapable, and against which there has to be a constant battle. Metaphysics aims for ‘explanations’ that go beyond the proper sphere of the ‘understanding,’ yet can only be cut out of understanding’s cloth. However, in Kant, a kind of metaphysical explanation retains a place: the ‘causality of freedom’ that explains the possibility of freedom and knowledge. That human beings have this freedom, that their willing and thinking can be explained in terms of it, cannot be known.

11

Compare PI, §435.

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But neither is it something that can only be shown. Its possibility can be thought and said, and it can be, or must be, practically assumed. In Wittgenstein, the very notion of philosophical explanation is out of place. Explanation may be said to be in place in science, although even that is put in doubt in Tractatus §6.371: The whole modern conception of the world is founded on the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena.

The remark has a point, but I imagine that the more mature Wittgenstein would say that science is, to be sure, one context or language-game in which the word ‘explanation’ is used: the modern illusion is that this is, or should be, the only context, or again, that explanations as given in that context can be explanations in other contexts. It is in Wittgenstein’s later thought, par excellence, that philosophical activity is ascetically purified. The sole aim is to achieve freedom of the spirit. This freedom can only be a certain cleanness and overall transparency, not even in principle to be provided by a scaffolding of transcendental idealism, still less by the absolute knowledge that Hegel’s speculative logic aimed to provide – even though what Wittgenstein is concerned with is what they were concerned with. This is Wittgenstein’s modernist stance. The ascetic standpoint stands outside the way of seeming ‘which informs the vast stream of European and American civilization’. Metaphysics, the misbegotten search for explanations, is like a cloud of confusion that constantly rolls out over the path of truth from the path of seeming, settling on it heavily, preventing us from grasping what is, the everyday, as it simply is – from seeing it simply (humbly, non-manipulatively) as ‘the glory of God’ (PR, 7). Kant sees the critique of reason as making room for faith; so, in a way, does Wittgenstein.

5  Culture and civilization The foreword to the Philosophical Remarks has Wittgenstein’s considered words for publication; the longer draft of 1930 that appears in Culture and Value expresses what I called Wittgenstein’s ‘cultural alienation’ more fully.12 CV, 8−9e. Quotations in the next two paragraphs are from this draft.

12

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I don’t think the right word is cultural ‘pessimism’ – some of Wittgenstein’s ‘pessimistic’ remarks are simply realistic. So, for example, to talk in 1945 about the ‘poverty’ and ‘the darkness of this time’, as Wittgenstein does in the Preface to the Philosophical Investigations, is not in itself pessimistic. The year 1945 was a very dark time. Nor do any of Wittgenstein’s references to Spengler show that he thought the decline of the West to be inevitable. True, Wittgenstein was prone to anxieties about his own isolation, moral purity and the value of his work. He worried constantly about his own ‘decency’.13 None of that is cultural pessimism, however. It is the soul-searching Angst of an ascetic perfectionist – or a personal weakness that amounts to self-obsession – or both. What Wittgenstein clearly does think is that the civilization of the West, in the course of its material and social progress, has lost a culture without producing a new one. The result is ‘alien and uncongenial’ to him because it has no place for the higher. In the art and religion of the past, higher values found strong and stable forms of expression, but a ‘great work of culture’ requires a shared ‘great end’. In our civilization, no great ideal informs the spirit of the whole. The best pursue purely private ends. No expression of that which is higher is stably anchored in a common culture. Instead, new ways of expressing, or at least showing, the higher have to be constantly fought for, conquered in new ways again and again. The best philosophy can do is to clear a way, to find a space for the higher, and this, too, is a constant task. This, I believe, is how Wittgenstein always saw his own work. The point he repeatedly makes is about culture, not about value: ‘The disappearance of a culture does not signify the disappearance of human value but simply of certain means of expressing this value.’ Nor does the disappearance of a culture entail that a new culture cannot be rebuilt: Perhaps one day a culture will arise out of this civilization.

Then there will be a real history of the discoveries of the 18th, 19th, and 20th Centuries, which will be of profound interest. (CV, 73e.) It will only then be a real and deeply interesting history because only a living culture has the resources to grasp the cultural, spiritual or ethical significance of another, including the other’s discoveries. Interpretation of another culture must come from a culture; in its absence, one age misunderstands another; and a petty age misunderstands all the others in its own ugly way. (98e) See the biographies by McGuiness and Monk: Brian McGuiness, Wittgenstein A Life: Young Ludwig (1889-1921) (London: Duckworth, 1988); Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London: Jonathan Cape, 1990).

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Now this diagnosis of our predicament is, indeed, compelling, but it is by no means original. I note this not to denigrate, but to highlight the stream of thought to which Wittgenstein’s thinking belongs – its historical significance and its relationship to modernism. Of course, he does not flow passively with that stream. He gives it the force and the direction of his morally and aesthetically intense personality – a force and direction that is distinctively modernist, even though the culture Wittgenstein looks back to is that of the early nineteenth century.14 The ideas about culture and civilization that one finds in Culture and Value go back to early-nineteenth-century reactions (especially German reactions) against the enlightenment. The contrast between culture and civilization, as Wittgenstein deploys it, is itself part of that reaction. It is, further, a remote variation on the ancient contrast between the way of truth and the way of seeming, between insight and mere theoretical constructions. The enlightenment theorized effectively about the phenomena, but lost unity with the world. Estrangement from the world is latent in what Kant says about understanding and the limits of reason; it is this estrangement that German idealism then seeks to overcome. Two other closely related counter-enlightenment thoughts are vividly present in Culture and Value. The first is that the very success of modern civilization, in bringing control and prosperity, somehow detaches us from our humanity by detaching us from the higher: It is very remarkable that we should be inclined to think of civilization – houses, streets, cars, etc. – as separating man from his origin, from the lofty and eternal, etc. Our civilized environment, even its trees & plants, seems to us then cheap, wrapped in cellophane, & isolated from everything great, from God, as it were. It is a remarkable picture that forces itself on us here. (57e)15

The other thought is that a high culture requires a common end, whereas in our civilization, the best men pursue private ends. Wittgenstein makes the point rather neatly about architecture: Architecture immortalises and glorifies something. Hence there can be no architecture where there is nothing to glorify. (74e)

Of course, in addition to diagnosing these problems about enlightenment civilization, the nineteenth century sought to come up with answers. The biggest ‘I often wonder whether my cultural ideal is a new one, i.e. contemporary, or whether it comes from the time of Schumann. At least it strikes me as a continuation of that ideal, though not the continuation that actually followed it then. That is to say, the second half of the Nineteenth Century has been left out’ (4e). 15 Compare the remarks in the LE about science as destroying miracles: its prosaic spirit. 14

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presence here is Hegelianism, with its conception of ethical reconciliation in a modern communal life, and, beyond that, of a metaphysical or spiritual overcoming of the fracture between the way of truth and the way of seeming. But there was also the great ideal that animated, in different ways, both liberal and socialist culture: the realization of human powers, the fulfilment of an ‘aesthetic education’ for truly human beings. This, one might think, could be the basis of a post-enlightenment common culture of humanity, and this is what many people did think right through the nineteenth century into the period of modernism. But by that period, the liberal version, at least, was producing an intense recoil. The socialist version of the ideal is a more complicated story. On the one hand, regenerating a culture of higher values was not a priority for progressivists (not really); the priority was a fundamental reorganization of economy and society. On the other hand, to modernists for whom the purity of a society’s values was the thing that really mattered, the idea that the route to it would be through socialist reorganization either did not feature in their thinking at all or tended to produce scepticism at best. Wittgenstein’s modernism was of the latter kind. One might say that the two sides of modernism were epitomized by the Vienna Circle and Wittgenstein – in what they had in common as well as in how they differed. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the great period of modernism, common religious or spiritual vocabularies inherited from the past seemed irreparably broken, as did liberal-individualist attempts to maintain a Schillerian ideal. That was mostly common ground. But for the ascetic side of modernism, philosophy could do nothing on its own to put together what was broken. Politics, sunk in the trading and manipulation of interests, was the last place to look for help. In the absence of a shared great end, any attempt to express – show, manifest, render – the higher still had to go through art, an art, however, that could not rely on inherited traditions but required a more ascetic, marginal and heroic (non- or anti-political) work.

6  Wittgenstein and modernism This story of civilizational progress at the expense of cultural loss is the context for the embattled ascetic ideal that was so prominent in early modernist art, and so often took a specifically mystical form. In the arts, it is one of the lasting legacies of modernism. That is striking when one remembers that an asceticmystical ideal is far from being the only ideal that art can express, nor the only

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route to the higher. Great art can be inspired by any great ideal. Love of the manifest world in all its glory, the exploration of inner life, the exhilaration of sheer bodily agency, ecstasy, heroism, acceptance of fate, reverence, compassion, wisdom, agony, serenity – there is no end to what art can express. There are, however, limits to what it can effectively express at a given time and place, and these limits are shaped by other things. The presence of the ascetic-mystical ideal in the period we are concerned with, the earliest years of the twentieth century, is striking. True, it was already present in Germanic and Scandinavian art, where it can be linked to the northern romantic tradition,16 and, indeed, to nineteenth-century German philosophy. But its character and power at the end of the century changed and intensified. The forces at work were, on the one hand, existential anxiety, as in the expressionism of Munch or Kokoschka, or in Berg and Schoenberg (in his freely atonal period, and in his painting), and, on the other hand, the search for a way of showing or manifesting the spiritual unity of self and world. The link between this search and the breakthrough to abstraction is notable – as one sees in Kandinsky, Klee, Mondrian, Malevitch and, in a way, Webern. It is also possible to find the ascetic-mystical ideal in the modernist art of the Latin countries: in the intensified presence of everyday objects, whether a plate of apples, a sequence of haystacks or an arrangement of jugs, as in Cézanne, Monet or Morandi, or in the ‘metaphysical’ realism of de Chirico (rendering what is not ‘there’ through what is ‘there’). Another way to aim at spiritual unity is through asceticism of, concentration on, methods and materials – the ‘art’ object as its own content and presence, the intensification of its materiality, thereness as a route to the spiritual. This route recurs from cubism to, for example, Joseph Beuys. Another connection is with the interest in primitive art and primitive ways of living. However unsympathetic, on the whole, Wittgenstein was to modernist art, there is a clear affinity between his ascetic conception of philosophy’s role in making a clearing for the spiritual and some of these attempts by modernist artists to manifest or embody the absolute. On both sides, there is the background contrast between a simple but difficult path of truth and a vastly elaborate, pressing path of seeming. In both cases, there is an associated contrast between ‘showing’, making manifest, and ‘saying’ or in the case of the visual arts, naturalistically depicting. ‘Art does not represent the visible,’ said Klee; ‘rather, Robert Rosenblum, Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition, Friedrich to Rothko (London: Thames and Hudson, 1975).

16

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it makes visible.’17 It can do that, however, not only by abstraction, but also in a picture by Cézanne of some apples on a dish, or by Van Gogh of a pair of old boots.18 In all these varied cases, it seems to me, the guiding aim is to achieve spiritual liberation through true at-one-ness with the world. Characteristic, however, of the modernist ascetic-mystical ideal is the sense that finding a way to express the relation of self and world has become extraordinarily hard, and that any success is hard to sustain. The ground of being has to be constantly reconquered. The connections with being that in previous eras of art seemed to find stable expression have been lost. So, for example, the ease with which Renaissance art could express the glory of the world, the triumph of the human and the unity of humanity with the world, with Christ and his saints, has utterly gone. But then, so has the confidence of enlightenment art, its domestic parks and bowers, its men and women absorbed in their pursuits, its informal portraits of unaffected people comfortably disposed. I think one can say that an embattled, intransigent ascetic-mystical spirit is the most characteristic strand in modernism – in painting and related visual art especially, in architecture and music, to a lesser extent. This spirit is embattled and intransigent because it finds itself in a civilization where there are ever fewer ways in which at-one-ness with the world finds authentic expression. In Wittgenstein’s thinking, there is the same idea about philosophy: to achieve authenticity, it has to constantly defeat the metaphysical mystifications of language, perhaps especially, our modern language. Why? One could note that in the mediaeval and early modern periods, philosophy’s attitude was apologetic (in the Catholic sense) with respect to religion, and then facilitative with respect to the emergence of modern science. Only at the end of the enlightenment does philosophy emerge clearly as absolute free thinking, harnessed to no other aim. It is also at that point that the search for authentic forms of expressing the spiritual in philosophy becomes difficult. Wittgenstein’s conviction (as I have noted, not a new one) is that expression of the higher can come easily or ‘naturally’ only in a culture that has a common Paul Klee, Creative Credo, in Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics, ed. Herschel B. Chipp (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 182. Compare Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (New York: Dover Publications, 1977). On the theosophical influence in Kandinsky, Malevitch and Mondrian, see Hilton Kramer, ‘Mondrian and Mysticism: “My Long Search is Over”’, The New Criterion 14, no. 1 (1995): 4. 18 The old boots are, of course, Heidegger’s example; for discussion, see Flint Schier, ‘Van Gogh’s Boots: The Claims of Representation’, in Virtue and Taste, eds. D. Knowles and J. Skorupski (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1993), 176−99. 17

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spiritual or ethical ideal that allows its members to work in the spirit of the whole – whereas in our civilization, the best men pursue private ends. One might agree with the first part of that, but deny that the effect of free thinking is to destroy all common or public ends. Why should it? Does it not, on the contrary, establish humanity as the great end? Yet, nineteenth-century attempts to establish a common aim or a great ideal, on which a great art affirmative of common purpose could emerge, seemed (as seen at least by early modernism) to have collapsed. Neither conventional philosophy, nor liberal politics, nor an exhausted institutional religion could provide the common spirit that would dwell easily on higher ethical and spiritual ground. It all seemed bogus, hollow. Maybe the deepest problem lies with the ideal of humanity, which cuts off humanity from the world. These thoughts had already been forcefully presented by philosophical outsiders like Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard or Nietzsche (or Dosteoevsky). Not surprisingly, many modernists reached back to these thinkers, and to anyone else they could find who had a similar message. The various thought-elements in modernism retain their separate existence in the modernist configuration taken as a whole. It is not a question of reducing modernism to its philosophical ‘essence’, or of reducing the philosophical components of modernism to something non-philosophical. Nor does seeing the philosophical components in their place in the modernist configuration in any way undermine their claim to truth. Philosophy is at once a part of culture and a search for broadest truth: more accurately, it is culture in its vitalizing character of the search for broadest truth. In this perspective, analytic philosophy19 was as much a part of modernism as are other European philosophies of the twentieth century. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus or Carnap’s Aufbau are epitomes of modernism, as much as the architecture and design of the Bauhaus or Schoenberg’s serial technique – or Heidegger’s Being and Time. One might also say that the Tractatus and the Aufbau have the characteristic of quite a few modernist classics: the revolutionary new world to which they confidently point never happened. In their case, that was because they had deep purely philosophical flaws. They also contained ideas that remained as elements in the larger modernist context. The most general characterization of philosophical modernism of the analytic kind is philosophy I am thinking here of philosophical movements that had more or less run out of steam by the 1960s or 1970s. See John Skorupski, ‘Analytic Philosophy, the Analytic School, and British Philosophy’, in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Analytic Philosophy, ed. Michael Beaney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 298−317.

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as self-dissolution, a self-cleansing practice. That Wittgenstein shared with Carnap. But beyond that, they belong to very different strands of modernism. Carnap saw analysis as ridding the modern world of accumulated philosophical lumber, essentially to pursue a reinvigorated enlightenment ideal. This was a spirit of reconstruction and human progress. But Wittgenstein’s emotional sensibility, spiritual or ‘religious’ concern and philosophical aim puts him at one with the ascetic-mystical ideal that has been so strikingly important in ethical and aesthetic modernism. His contribution here – apart from his personal charisma – is in thinking this ideal through at the philosophical level. In his earlier work, he thinks that a definitive analysis of the relation between logic and world gives it, in effect, a philosophical rationale. Later, he gives up the idea that philosophy can do any such thing. Now he sees philosophy as a cleansing ascetic practice – not, like Carnap, however, for the pursuit of clearheaded humanitarian science but, rather, for the recovery of spiritual freedom as at-one-ness with the world, the overcoming of alienation. The anti-philosophical philosophical mysticism of his earlier work becomes the ascetic ideal of clarity in his later work. Modernism is now behind us, in the arts as well as in philosophy. That does not mean that the ascetic-mystical ideal is behind us – it is a permanent ideal, not something that disappears. But philosophy is pursuit of truth, and the truth is that the analytic-modernist project of dissolving philosophy through analysis of language failed. The a priori is not a matter of linguistic ‘grammar’ or ‘syntax’. Wittgenstein never did find a way of dissolving philosophical theses that did not itself rest on philosophic theses. Even though language is always important to philosophy, it does not have the kind of intrinsic importance for resolving philosophical questions that analytic modernists thought it had. Analytic philosophy did produce an explosion in the study of natural language and semantics, but this increasingly moves over to technical discussion in the empirical science of linguistics. Meanwhile, contemporary concerns in general philosophy are in many ways more continuous with the pre-modernist period. The fact is that after the modernist revolution in philosophy, there has been a counter-revolution. Counter-revolutions may, of course, be justified, in whole or in part. It is certainly possible to see philosophical modernism (whether analytic or phenomenological) as a dead end, from which the only way out is backwards. At any rate, the highly original conception of philosophical activity that was Wittgenstein’s contribution to the mystical-ascetic ideal has, for the moment at least, but little influence and power. That does not mean, to repeat, that the ideal

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itself has lost power. Nor does it mean that the problem of finding a culture that allows for the expression of spiritual value – the problem of which Wittgenstein was so intensely conscious, and which bothered him so much personally – has disappeared. Heroic early modernist attempts to find such a high culture have lost their potency; the problem itself remains.

2

Modernism and Philosophical Language: Phenomenology, Wittgenstein and the Everyday Oskari Kuusela

In this chapter I discuss certain transformations of philosophical thought connected with transformations of its language, with reference to Kant, Husserl, Heidegger and Wittgenstein. These transformations can be characterized in modernist terms as arising from the examination of the foundations of philosophical thought and its key concepts, ultimately leading philosophy out of  its traditional language of subject-predicate judgements and associated substance-attribute metaphysics. I describe these developments as culminating in the work of the later Wittgenstein in the overcoming of philosophical theses about abstract entities and structures, such as philosophers have typically thought of themselves as concerned with.

1  Phenomenology as modernism By modernism I understand the following outlook, as described by Clement Greenberg in his classic article ‘Modernism in Painting’: Western civilization is not the first civilization to turn around and question its own foundations, but it is the one that has gone furthest in doing so. I identify Modernism with the intensification, almost the exacerbation, of this selfcritical tendency that began with the philosopher Kant. Because he was the first to criticize the means itself of criticism, I conceive of Kant as the first real Modernist.

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The essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticise the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence.1

Relatedly, Greenberg characterizes modernism as engaged in immanent critique: ‘Modernism criticizes from the inside, through the procedures themselves of that which is being criticized’ (Ibid.). Now, regardless of whether the ‘Western civilization’ has gone furthest in questioning its own foundations, Greenberg’s description of modernism certainly fits Kant very well. Indeed, while Greenberg only mentions Kant’s theoretical philosophy, the same concern with foundations reaches through Kant’s whole philosophy, a threefold project of clarifying the foundations of thought in the domains of theoretical knowledge, morality and (what we now call) aesthetics. It is also noteworthy that, for Kant, not proceeding from the inside would be inherently problematic. An external criticism not based on the examination of the principles of reason would rely on commitments that those whose thought is subjected to it would not be already committed to, and it would count as dogmatic in a sense Kant wants to avoid. In order to respect the autonomy of those whose thought is targeted for examination, a Kantian critique must proceed from the inside.2 Similarly, Greenberg’s description of modernism applies notably well to Husserl who, with reference to Kant’s transcendental philosophy, describes phenomenology as an examination of the foundation of everyday experience in the intentional acts of consciousness, which he postulates as underlying and constituting everyday experience. More specifically, characteristic of everyday experience, according to Husserl, is what he calls ‘the natural attitude’, an occupation with the objects of the world qua objects, as opposed to the experiences themselves qua experiences. And, certainly, everyday experience does rely on an assumption of the existence of a world of objects, as illustrated by how we typically describe our experiences by describing their objects. However, making use of the method of phenomenological epoché, that is, the suspension of beliefs regarding the external world, Husserl focuses on analysing consciousness and its acts. His motive, as indicated, is the thought that it is through consciousness that the world is given to us, whereby Husserl regards consciousness, in a Kantian manner, as the condition for the possibility of all knowledge, both empirical

Clement Greenberg, ‘Modernism in Painting’, in Esthetics Contemporary, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Prometheus Books, 1978), 198. 2 See I. Kant, Kritik der Reinen Vernuft (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1990), A3/B7, B22−3. 1

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and a priori. In this sense, Husserl’s main occupation is with the foundations of our knowledge concerning the world, and only indirectly, qua our a priori mode of knowing them, with what consciousness is consciousness about. Nevertheless, clarifying the essence of the objects of consciousness constitutes a crucial part of what Husserl wants to achieve. Phenomenology is intended as a method for examining and establishing foundations for the factual, empirical sciences, which, according to him, operate on the basis of the natural attitude, as we do in everyday life. In this sense, the sciences assume rather than explicitly examine the constitution of the world as something objective and objectively knowable. Moreover, as Husserl emphasizes, the sciences also assume and rely on a distinction between what is essential, as opposed to accidental, to their objects of investigation, which provides them with criteria for the sameness of their objects of investigation. They therefore proceed from an understanding of the essence or identity of their objects, which Husserl believes phenomenology can clarify.3 However, given its aim of the clarification of essences and their constitution, Husserl’s phenomenology can also be understood as a philosophical critique of philosophy itself, as its goal is to clarify the source of knowledge of essences, which philosophers have traditionally claimed to possess or be able to deliver. It is in this sense, I take it, that Husserl characterizes phenomenology as a science of essences or as an eidetic science. Phenomenology aims to bring the philosophers’ occupation with essences into scientific maturity, and in so doing, also seeks to clarify the disputed relation between philosophy and the factual sciences, elucidating the role of philosophy as something distinct from them. With regard to this goal of explicating the nature of philosophy, it is then especially important that phenomenology takes as its theme the notion of an essence and the constitution of essences. For although philosophers have been occupied with essences since the conception of the discipline (or at least since Plato and Aristotle), from Husserl’s perspective, their self-understanding seems to be only tacit and at least partly defective, insofar as they have strived to grasp essences by contemplating the objects of reality. In this way, they have oriented themselves towards reality in a manner characteristic of the natural attitude, but within the natural attitude, the understanding of essences remains only in the fringes of experience. What philosophy (especially naturalistic philosophy) See E. Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (London: Georg Allen & Unwin, 1958), §§1−2, 7, 31−2.

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practised in this way fails to explicitly thematize, according to Husserl, is the constitution of essences in consciousness, which is his main concern.4 But despite his remarkable attempts to explicate the notion of an essence and the relation of this notion to empirical or factual knowledge, as well as his development of the phenomenological method to be employed in clarifying the essences of particular objects, Husserl remains, in certain respects, enclosed within the sphere of traditional ways of thinking about philosophy and its objects of investigation. In particular, not unlike Plato and Aristotle, Husserl still conceives of essences (more precisely, pure essences as given in consciousness) as objects of a peculiar kind, whereby their characteristics are intended to explain the exceptionless necessity and exceptionless generality (universality) connected with the notion of essence, which Husserl considers as something distinct from factual individual existence (cf. note 12). Husserl writes: ‘The essence (Eidos) is an object of a new type. Just as the datum of individual empirical intuition is an individual object so the datum of essential intuition is a pure essence.’5 This is a strikingly traditional conception in that, ultimately, it does not matter greatly how exactly the nature or status of such objects intended to account for necessity and universality is explained, that is, whether they are understood in a Platonist manner on the model of independently existing objects beyond the empirical realm, in an Aristotelian way on the model of non-accidental properties of empirically given objects, or in Kantian terms as transcendental structures of the mind or with reference to the constitutive acts of consciousness. The important thing is that in thinking of essences as objects, Husserl is still postulating a peculiar kind of entity as the philosophers’ object of investigation. Accordingly, as illustrated by the very notion of an eidetic science, just as the sciences generally, so too, Husserl’s eidetic science can be identified with reference to its objects of investigation. Thus, it seems that in the phenomenological tradition, we must wait until Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) where it is emphasized that an essence or an essential feature is not an object or entity, or a non-accidental property similar to what we understand by properties in everyday experience. Rather, according to Heidegger, an essence or an essential structure is something determined by the mode of being of the relevant entity – as illustrated by his account of the existential-ontological structure of being-in-the-world pertaining to Dasein’s See Husserl, Ideas, §§2−3. Husserl, Ideas, §3; original italics.

4 5

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mode of being (existence). Accordingly, Heidegger insists on a sharp separation of what he calls ‘ontological’ as opposed to ‘ontic’ factual questions. On his account, phenomenology is the science of the being of entities, and ontology in this sense, rather than a science of the essences envisaged as abstract entities or properties, on which account the difference of philosophy from the ontic sciences would remain unclear.6 Although Heidegger is undoubtedly indebted here to Husserl’s emphasis on the difference between factual questions connected with the natural attitude as opposed to questions concerning essences, his approach also radicalizes Husserlian phenomenology in important ways connected with the notion of being-in-the-world and his analysis of Dasein’s understanding of being in its everydayness. Heidegger breaks with the assumption shared equally by both Kant and Husserl that the clarification of the foundations of knowledge and our comprehension of what is essential should take the form of an analysis of the structures of the mind or consciousness. It is noteworthy how this shared assumption is apt to render seemingly unquestionable a related key presupposition that Heidegger questions, namely the assumption that both the everyday and scientific understandings of what there is consist in understanding something present to consciousness. Accordingly, from Heidegger’s perspective, Kant and Husserl’s analyses are problematic in that they attempt to analyse our comprehension of reality in the mode of ‘theoretical gazing’ as opposed to an interaction with, and manipulation of, objects, as exemplified by Heidegger’s notion of the mode of being (or in the older philosophical language, the category) of ready-to-hand. This critique has an intimate connection with issues relating to philosophical language in that ‘ready-to-hand’ cannot be understood in terms of subject-predicate judgements, that is, the attribution of some property, such as hammerhood, to an object. This is precisely what comprehending something ready to hand is not.7 Heidegger’s early phenomenological-existentialist approach, his aim of the destruction of the ontological tradition and the notions it relies on, as well as the new beginning he hopes to make in philosophy, can again be understood in modernist terms. A key motive for Being and Time is the aspiration to dig even deeper than Kant and Husserl into the constitution of knowledge, our comprehension of what there is, the foundations of philosophical thought See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 36−7. Heidegger, Being and Time, 95ff.

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and the notions philosophy employs, in Greenberg’s words, ‘ … in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence’. This, it seems fair to say, is Heidegger’s point in addressing the assumption that all being can be understood in the mode of presence of objects to consciousness, and in terms of subjectpredicate judgements. Indeed, the aspiration to dig deeper is also exhibited in/ by the structure or form of Heidegger’s book, which reflects his awareness of the difficulty of clarifying the meaning of being. This task requires us to radically rethink the Aristotelian question of being qua being, which then takes us into a deepening hermeneutic spiral of interpreting Dasein’s understanding of being.8 It is noteworthy how the inconclusiveness of such interpretations stands in contrast with the intended definiteness of Kant’s analysis of the structure of the faculty of understanding. Even though Husserl keeps making renewed attempts to begin anew in philosophy, and his works may eschew definiteness in this sense, his conception of the task of phenomenology as eidetic science signals that here, too, the goal is something definitive and conclusive. In this regard, although it may not yet be evident in the language of Being and Time, Heidegger is clearly heading towards a break with the traditional language of philosophy, with his emphasis that being is not an entity, and that the mode of being of all entities is not to be an object of consciousness and theoretical gaze. Accordingly, Heidegger’s subsequent development can be understood in terms of his getting further away from thinking of being as if it were an entity of any kind. Rather than continuing to discuss the development of phenomenological philosophy, however, let us now turn to Wittgenstein for whom the language of philosophy had become an explicit problem earlier. Drawn to philosophy by Frege and Russell and their attempts to develop a conception of philosophy as logical investigation, Wittgenstein remarks in a letter to Russell in 1912: ‘Logic must turn out to be a TOTALLY different kind than any other science.’9 As he spells out this view a few years later, philosophy as logical investigation is not a discipline that, like the sciences, puts forward substantial true/false theses about reality, including language, or about any objects, including logical ones. A key point here is that exceptionless necessities and generalities, like those that philosophers have been concerned with, cannot be satisfactorily captured in terms of true/false theoretical assertions (TLP, §6.112; I return to As Heidegger notes, the Dasein-analytic in Being and Time is merely provisional and preparatory, in need of being repeated at a higher and more authentically ontological basis (Heidegger, Being and Time, 17). 9 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein: Cambridge Letters, Correspondence with Russell, Keynes, Moore, Ramsey and Sraffa, eds. G. H. Von Wright and Brian McGuinness (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 15. 8

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this point shortly). In this regard, it is important that, despite the impressive achievements of Being and Time in examining the assumptions of traditional philosophy, Heidegger continues to envisage ontological structures as the object of philosophical assertions or theses and, in this sense, as philosophy’s object of investigation.10 From Wittgenstein’s perspective, Heidegger’s postulation of such a priori structures – for example, being-in-the-world and readiness-to-hand – as the object of philosophical theorizing is not fundamentally different from Husserl’s postulation of essences as objects, or from Frege and Russell’s postulation of logical objects. And even if the accuracy of such a description of Heidegger might – and perhaps ultimately must – be questioned from the point of view of his conception of Dasein-analytic or fundamental ontology as constituting a deepening spiral of interpretation, this point remains underdeveloped in Being and Time. Consequently, the extent to which Heidegger continues rather than breaks with the practice of postulating peculiar entities as philosophy’s object of investigation remains unclear in his early work.

2  The early Wittgenstein’s reconfiguration of philosophical language Although Wittgenstein’s Tractatus has often been read in metaphysical terms, that is, as committed to a metaphysics of reality and language whose possibility it at the same time excludes, a better reading can be offered. On the alternative interpretation to be outlined, the Tractatus is neither a bizarre metaphysical treatise that rejects its own possibility, nor a rejection of metaphysics that only aims to reveal its own nonsensicality, contrary to how a familiar alternative to the metaphysical reading describes it (see below). Rather, Wittgenstein’s book is, as he entitled it, a logical-philosophical treatise. In particular, what makes it philosophically interesting is the way it rejects traditional philosophical language and reinvents it for the purpose of philosophical clarification. Let me first point at problems with the two interpretational approaches just mentioned. On the one hand, the attribution of an unsayable metaphysics seems to leave traditional metaphysical interpretations stuck in a paradox In arguing against logical approaches in philosophy in 1928 that metaphysics rather than logic is philosophically fundamental, Heidegger does not consider the sort of account offered in the Tractatus whose key point is to distinguish logic from science. His argument, therefore, does not apply to Wittgenstein (see Martin Heidegger, Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logic (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2007), 128−32).

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arising from Wittgenstein’s description of the book as nonsensical (TLP, §6.53). Problematically, if the book is nonsense, it cannot contain a theory of the nature of linguistic representation, which then excludes the possibility of statements about exceptionless metaphysical necessities pertaining to language and reality. But if the book contains such a theory, it cannot be nonsense. In this way, the paradox attributed by the metaphysical readers to the Tractatus leads to a dead end. It is difficult, in other words, to see a way out of this paradox in terms of the metaphysical reading, which appears doomed to going around in loops of ascribing a metaphysical commitment to the Tractatus, and then denying that such a description can be given or attribution made. This taking back of the attribution as not-strictly-sayable is what Cora Diamond described as chickening out.11 But it does not seem that a solution to this predicament could be found by inventing novel categories of truth either, such as that of an ineffable truth that cannot be entertained, but can still somehow be recognized as true.12,13 On the other hand, it seems equally unsatisfactory to maintain, with certain opponents of the metaphysical reading, that all that the book aims to accomplish is the dissolution of metaphysics by revealing its own nonsensicality.14 For, although it is undeniable that a central aspiration of the Tractatus is to overcome metaphysical philosophy, that a book should reveal its own apparent metaphysics to be nonsense does not yet entail the impossibility of metaphysics. Without general lessons to be learnt from this, the result is merely the recognition of yet another book of philosophy as devoid of sense. But it seems that this reading lacks the resources needed to explain how any such more general insights could be learnt from the Tractatus.15 I would also agree with the book’s metaphysical readers that it is too high a cost for releasing the book from its alleged paradox to throw out any positive insights about logic that the book seems to contain.16 There would be little interest See Cora Diamond, ‘Throwing Away the Ladder: How to Read the Tractatus’, in The Realistic Spirit (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991). 12 See P. M. S. Hacker, ‘Was He Trying to Whistle It?’, in The New Wittgenstein, eds. Alice Crary and Rupert Read (London: Routledge, 2000). 13 Wittgenstein himself never describes the book as containing a paradox. Neither do his later criticisms fit such a paradoxical reading (see Section 3). This counts as external evidence against the traditional reading. 14 See Rupert Read and Rob Deans, ‘The Possibility of a Resolutely Resolute Reading of the Tractatus’, in Beyond the Tractatus Wars: The New Wittgenstein Debate, eds. Matt Lavery and Rupert Read (London: Routledge, 2011). 15 For a more detailed explanation of this criticism, see Oskari Kuusela, ‘The Dialectic of Interpretations: Reading Wittgenstein’s Tractatus’, in Beyond the Tractatus Wars: The New Wittgenstein Debate, eds. Matt Lavery and Rupert Read (London: Routledge, 2011). 16 See Hacker, ‘Was He Trying’, 2000 and Roger White, ‘Throwing the Baby Out with the Ladder: On “Therapeutic” Readings of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus’, in Beyond the Tractatus Wars: The New Wittgenstein Debate, eds. Matt Lavery and Rupert Read (London: Routledge, 2011). 11

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left in the Tractatus, if its critique of Frege’s and Russell’s accounts of logic as the most general but, nevertheless, substantial science and his alternative account of logic as a non-substantial clarificatory discipline are ignored as nonsense. Arguably, this also makes it impossible to recognize the continuity of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, that is, the way he corrects and builds on these Tractarian insights in his later work.17 As evident in the entanglement of the metaphysical interpretation in the paradox, however, such insights cannot be construed as expressed by means of nonsensical theses. In effect, this amounts to the same as throwing away those insights as mere nonsense. A different reading is therefore required. Although it is not possible to properly justify the proposed alternative interpretation here,18 arguably, the Tractatus is better read as an attempt to reconfigure philosophical language. (It is successful in this attempt within certain limits to be commented upon later.) On this interpretation, the book’s goal is to employ traditional metaphysical language in a novel way, for a purely methodological purpose. Contrary to appearances, therefore, the intended purpose of the Tractatus’ metaphysically looking sentences – such as those stating that the world consists of facts, that facts are concatenations of objects, that propositions are pictures that (re)present possible states of affairs by means of the concatenation of names in them, that all propositions possess a common general form, and so on (TLP, §§1, 2.01, 4.01, 4.031, 4.0311, 4.5)  – is not to advance metaphysical theses or theoretical assertions about either reality or language. Instead, Wittgenstein’s sentences serve the purpose of the introduction of the formal concepts and logical principles constitutive of a logical language (a Fregean–Russellian Begriffsschrift) that the book outlines, and which is intended to provide us with a framework for logical analysis.19 It is, See below, Oskari Kuusela, The Struggle against Dogmatism: Wittgenstein and the Concept of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), Chapter 3, and Oskari Kuusela, Logic as the Method of Philosophy: Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Logic in Relation to Frege, Russell, Carnap and Others, forthcoming. 18 For discussion and justification, see Kuusela, ‘The Dialectic of Interpretations’ (2011), Oskari Kuusela, ‘Carnap and the Tractatus’ Philosophy of Logic’, Journal for the History of Analytic Philosophy, 1, no. 3 (2012): 1−26, and Kuusela, Logic as the Method of Philosophy, Chapters 2−3. 19 As Frege describes it, such a language would amount to a Leibnizian characteristica universalis (Gottlob Frege, ‘On the Aim of the “Conceptual Notation”’, in Conceptual Notation and Related Articles, ed. T. W. Bynum (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972) A language of this kind is not only governed by the principles of logic – instead of accidental grammatical principles of contingent historical human languages – but also capable of expressing conceptual content in exact terms that do not possess the ambiguity and complexity of natural historically evolved concepts. However, Frege’s claim about the status of such a language as a universal language, which Wittgenstein accepts in conceiving his language as being capable of being used to analyse any sensible proposition, depends on the acceptability of his assumption about the universality of logic in Frege and Russell’s sense, that is, that there is a single set of logical principles that governs all thinking. The later Wittgenstein comes to reject this assumption. (See Kuusela, Logic as the Method of Philosophy, Chapter 5.) 17

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then, this logical language itself, rather than the Tractarian sentences used to introduce its principles (or anything that could be said in terms of this language), that constitutes the proper expression for the relevant kind of exceptionless necessities that Wittgenstein describes as being impossible to express in terms of true/false statements or theses. His logical language embodies relevant principles and necessities, and exhibits them in its design. This is illustrated by the impossibility of formulating any sentence in Wittgenstein’s logical language that would not possess what he takes to be the most general formal characteristic language, the general propositional form, and which according to him constitutes the essence of language. On the proposed reading there is, then, for example, no picture theory in the Tractatus in the sense of a thesis about the nature of language. Instead, the apparent account of propositions as pictures is how Wittgenstein proposes language should be analysed, whereby every complex sentence would be analysed into a truth-function of elementary propositions that (re)present possible states of affairs by means of how names are combined in them. The important point is that, arguably, Wittgenstein’s alternative way of thinking about logical necessity and possibility as not expressed in the form of statements but encoded in language itself can solve various problems with Frege’s and Russell’s accounts of logic relating to its foundations, that is, regarding the status of ‘logical truths’, their axiomatic accounts of logical inference and its justification, logical generality, the bindingness or normativity, the a priori status of logic, and so on. On this interpretation, the Tractatus, therefore, does indeed contain a positive and detailed philosophy of logic. Nevertheless, this philosophy of logic is not expressed in terms of (paradoxically nonsensical) theses. But, it is not possible, and would not serve the purpose of the present discussion, to go into the details of Wittgenstein’s alternative account of logic and how relevant problems are solved.20 Instead, I wish now to return to the theme of the question of modernism and philosophical language. The pattern discussed in the preceding section is readily detectable here. The early Wittgenstein is engaged in the examination of the foundations of philosophy, as conceived from the point of view of Frege’s and Russell’s philosophical approaches that regard logical methods as the way to secure philosophical progress. Although a firm supporter of the logical-philosophical approach broadly conceived, Wittgenstein seeks to critique Frege’s and Russell’s accounts of logic and to question their fundamental assumptions – most See Kuusela, Logic as the Method of Philosophy, Chapters 1−3.

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centrally, that the principles of logic state something true – in the hope of establishing a foundation for the discipline that avoids problems with Frege’s and Russell’s accounts. Thus, he too is engaged in the examination of foundations in the modernist vein, as exemplified by Kant and described by Greenberg. Note also that, on the proposed account, Wittgenstein is immanently critiquing his interlocutors, rather than doing so from the external point of view of his own metaphysical doctrines. Indeed, if the basis of his critique were the picture theory’s exclusion of the possibility of speaking about logic (qua theory), Frege and Russell would have no obvious reason to accept such an external, nonimmanent critique. (This is a further problem with the metaphysical readings.) Now, what makes the Tractatus particularly interesting in regard to questions concerning philosophical language is its attempt to elucidate the distinction between factual statements and the philosophical clarification of exceptionless necessities and generalities, connected with the notions of an essence and essential feature. For while the philosophical tradition, including Heidegger as described earlier, has treated essences as possible objects of true/false theoretical assertions or theses, this is precisely what Wittgenstein questions. His reasons can be explained as follows. When a relevant necessity is expressed in the form of a thesis (as when ascribing a property to an object, predicating something of a subject), the possibility seems always to be left open that the thesis might not hold, and that there might be exceptions. Moreover, even if the necessity did hold without exception, a thesis as its expression cannot exclude the possibility that the absence of exceptions might be merely accidental. A case in point is Wittgenstein’s account of the essence of propositions and language, the general propositional form. No assertion or thesis that there is such a form common to every possible proposition can express this necessity in a satisfactory way, that is, exclude the possibility of one wondering whether this necessity really holds, which indicates that the matter has not been completely cleared up. However, this problem can be solved by expressing the necessity as encoded in the structure of logical language expressive of a logically correct point of view, whereby it becomes evident that it is impossible to express a proposition without it possessing the general propositional form. This solution to the problem of the expression of exceptionless necessity then constitutes a core point of the Tractatus’ philosophy of logic (TLP, §4.0312). Accordingly, Wittgenstein introduces his logical language as the proper way to express this necessity. The same point applies to any other logical principle, and the expression of all exceptionless logical necessities as well as possibilities, as illustrated by

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the Tractatus’s view that the possibility of a state of affairs simply means its expressibility in (a logically perspicuous) language (cf. TLP, §3.02). By means of such a language, employed as an instrument of logical analysis, philosophers can then clarify what is possible and what is necessary, avoiding problems with the expression of possibility and necessity by means of theses. By contrast, expressed in the form of theses, clarifications of logical necessity and possibility (even the law of contradiction) will always seem possible to question in principle. In the Tractatus, the metaphysical language of theoretical assertion or theses is therefore only used for the purpose of setting up the logical language and introducing the reader to its principles. Wittgenstein, in other words, employs metaphysical language only in an approximate or transitional way.21 Having got hold of the principles of this language, the reader can then throw away Wittgenstein’s sentences (TLP, §6.54). On the proposed reading, this does not mean throwing away any logical or philosophical insights, however, since Wittgenstein’s sentences were never intended as their proper expression anyway. As explained, the proper expression of Wittgenstein’s logical-philosophical insights is the logical language into which they are encoded, and this language, of course, is not meant to be thrown away. Rather, it is intended to constitute the medium for our philosophizing, as we leave behind metaphysical philosophy that puts forward theses about possibilities and necessities, and move on to logical philosophy that clarifies what is possible and necessary by means of logical analyses. It is also worth observing that the basis for the reader’s acceptance of Wittgenstein’s approach and his account of logical necessity and possibility is meant to be the reader’s recognition of how theses fail as expressions of necessity and possibility, when this is pointed out to her. More specifically, the reader is expected to be able to recognize this on the basis of her pre-theoretical comprehension of the logic of language, which language users possess, and which is the basis for their ability to use language. Furthermore, this is also the basis for her acceptance of Wittgenstein’s logical language generally, whose

‘Transitional’ is intended here in Diamond’s 1991 sense. Despite my preceding objection to a particular version of the so-called resolute reading, the proposed interpretation belongs to the same group, albeit only in the original negative sense of this interpretation, whereby it constitutes an objection to chickening out or to the notions of ineffable truth or substantial conception of nonsense. (See Silver Bronzo and James Conant, ‘The Resolute Readings of the Tractatus’, in A Companion to Wittgenstein, eds. H-J Glock and J. Hyman (Oxford: Blackwell, forthcoming). With reference to the positive account it offers, the proposed reading could also be described as a methodological interpretation.

21

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justification therefore consists in the reader’s recognition of its principles as correctly capturing her pre-theoretical understanding of logic. Accordingly, any theoretical arguments or apparent claims by Wittgenstein are only elucidatory aids whose purpose is to lead the reader to the recognition of the correctness of his account. Likewise, the reader is expected to be convinced about problems with Frege’s and Russell’s logical languages on the basis of her recognition of how they give rise to anomalies, as exemplified by the regress problem pertaining to their axiomatic accounts of the justification of inferences22 Again, any arguments in the Tractatus are merely aids that help the reader to recognize these points. An example is Wittgenstein’s remarks on problems with Frege’s account of negation as a second-level function. (TLP, §§5.43–5.44) The Tractatus’s outlook can now be characterized by saying that it intends to replace metaphysics by logical analysis. Thus, logical methodology is how Wittgenstein intends to overcome the metaphysical tradition of philosophy, including its assertions about necessities and essences, which, due to their failure to give a perspicuous expression to exceptionless necessity and generality (universality), may be suspected, from Wittgenstein’s point of view, of having contributed to the failure of philosophy to make progress. With the correct methodology in place, however, the problems can be finally regarded as having been solved ‘in essentials’ as Wittgenstein says in the preface to his book. Or so it seemed to him. As Wittgenstein realized later, there is a metaphysical residue left in the Tractatus, due to its assumption that there is something like the correct method of philosophy or logical analysis. (This is connected with his acceptance of Frege’s and Russell’s universalism about logic. See note 19.) As Wittgenstein came to recognize, his supposedly non-metaphysical methodology itself embodied a metaphysical claim about the nature of language and reality. For, by assuming all sensible propositions to be analysable in terms of his logical language, Wittgenstein effectively made a claim about the nature of language and the reality of which it speaks, namely that all sensible language use consists in the true/false representation of possible states of affairs. Hence, although Wittgenstein’s methodology was intended to overcome metaphysics, it turned out to involve a tacit commitment to a metaphysics of reality and language, which enters the Tractatus through the backdoor, so to speak. That is, although logic was meant to be non-substantial, Wittgenstein’s account of it turned out See Kuusela, Logic as the Method of Philosophy, Chapter 2.

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to involve a substantial claim after all. In the Tractatus, metaphysics disguised itself as methodology, finding a last hiding place where there was supposed to be no room for it.23 Accordingly, the continuity of Wittgenstein’s philosophy can be seen in the way he later seeks to solve this problem. Proceeding from a partial acceptance of the Tractarian account of the expression of necessity and possibility, he tries to chase metaphysics out of its last hiding place.

3  The later Wittgenstein: Completing the departure The problem with the Tractatus’ account of philosophy can be described as pertaining to its language, and the presupposition and implications of the possibility of employing a logical language of this kind for philosophical clarification, as the early Wittgenstein understood these presuppositions and implications. In the following paragraphs, I focus on two issues: 1) the assumption that this language could accommodate all sensible language use or all judgementforms, that is, be used to analyse everything that can be sensibly said, or that a logical language of this kind could be taken to constitute characteristica universalis, a universal language in Leibniz’s sense (see note  19);  2) a misunderstanding relating to the notion of the ideal or the role that ideal notions play in philosophy and logic, connected with the habit of philosophers to postulate abstract entities as philosophy’s objects of investigation. Regarding the first issue, although the early Wittgenstein took Frege and Russell’s conceptions of logical analysis in terms of the notions of function and argument24 to mark a fundamental difference between their logic and Aristotelian logic, the later Wittgenstein is less impressed by this. In the case of functions with one argument place, at any rate, he suggests, this conception amounts to the same as thinking of judgements in terms of subject and predicate. Thinking about judgements in the latter terms is problematic, however, in that it makes the uses of language look more unified than they really are,25 as well See Kuusela, The Struggle against Dogmatism, 2008, 61ff. Although the conception of propositions as having a function-argument structure is not part of Russell’s or the early Wittgenstein’s accounts of propositions in the same way as it is part of Frege’s account of thought, Russell’s, and by extension Wittgenstein’s, notations, too, treat relevant expressions as analysable in terms of functions and arguments. 25 This is one sense in which Frege and Russell, according to Wittgenstein, are guilty of what he calls ‘the sublimation of logic’ (for this notion, see Ms113, 127r−v; PI §38, 89ff., Oskari Kuusela, ‘Logic and Ideality: Wittgenstein’s Way beyond Apriorism, Empiricism and Conventionalism in the Philosophy of Logic’, in The Textual Genesis of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, ed. Venturinha Nuno (New York: Routledge, 2013), and Kuusela, Logic as the Method of Philosophy, Chapter 4). 23 24

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as treating a certain historical characteristic of languages (or of a subset of them) as if it were part of the essence of thinking or language (see Ms113, 126r). Moreover, this brings into logical analysis certain presuppositions of Platonist and Aristotelian metaphysics, in that this mode of analysis envisages the criteria for the application of names and property-terms on the model of substances and universals or attributes, whereby they are regarded as possessing a particular definite identity or essence across their different instantiations. Something like this may be typical of the employment of person-names, as Wittgenstein points out, but hardly of all names, as for example, the notion of family-resemblance illustrates (Ms113,126r–v). In the case of family-resemblance concepts, the class of relevant cases cannot be defined in terms of a shared feature or features that fix the identity/essence of the objects across all instantiations (PI, §65ff.). The later Wittgenstein also discusses several other examples of linguistic expressions that do not fit into this model of logical analysis. One example is given by his account of the use of first-person expressions of sensations and feelings as manifestations of mental states rather than their descriptions (see PI, §244). Such a manifestative use does not consist in the predication of anything of a subject in the sense of a mental state being attributed to an ego, or a predicate such as ‘experiences pain’ or ‘feels fear’ being applied to an ego, whereby the ego sits in an argument-place with a function applied to it. Wittgenstein’s point is precisely that this is not the case when expressions such as ‘I’m so scared!’ are used manifestatively. Another example is Wittgenstein’s account of the use of such terms as ‘beautiful’ and ‘good’ (in a moral sense) as performing a modificatory function. Rather than indicating the presence of a certain quality across all cases, according to Wittgenstein, the function of the word ‘beautiful’, for example, is to modify the objects it is applied to, but without necessarily doing so in exactly the same way in each case. Examples of different cases are a beautiful face, landscape and song, whereby the arguably nonsensical character of comparisons such as ‘your face is more beautiful than this landscape, but the song is the most beautiful of them all’ can be taken to indicate that the word is not used in exactly the same meaning in each case. It is also noteworthy that in the context of this discussion, Wittgenstein explicitly contrasts his account with a view he attributes to Plato, according to which beauty is, as it were, an ingredient or a component of different beautiful things, in the same way that alcohol is an ingredient of beer, wine and whisky. Regardless of whether this is an accurate description of Plato, clearly Wittgenstein is aware of departing from the tradition at this point. The

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use of ‘good’ is to be understood analogously, for example, as modifying different actions in slightly different ways. This also puts us in a position to say that the goodness of character and an action, for instance, need not be understood in exactly the same way, or be explained reductively in terms of an overarching account of moral goodness that covers every possible case (AWL, §§31–2). Thus the later Wittgenstein questions and overcomes the traditional philosophical language of subject-predicate judgements, and the metaphysics connected with it, completing the attempted departure in the Tractatus and in the work of Frege and Russell. At this point, he also catches up with Heidegger whose notion of ready-to-hand similarly constitutes a rejection of the tradition of thinking exclusively in terms of subject-predicate judgements and presence to consciousness.26 Moreover, insofar as it is accepted that Frege’s, Russell’s and the early Wittgenstein’s methods of logical analysis cannot correctly account for the logical function of the expressions mentioned as examples, or for our understanding of being in relevant cases, it follows that a Fregean–Russellian– Wittgensteinian logical language does not constitute a Leibnizian characteristica universalis. Rather than providing us with the correct method of philosophy, logical analyses in terms of such a language constitute only a particular method among many others, according to the later Wittgenstein (cf. PI, §133). While this kind of method may be well suited for certain tasks, it would not be correct to assume that it can deal with all tasks of philosophical clarification. Accordingly, the later Wittgenstein introduces a number of novel logical methods, such as the method of language-games, designed to address the shortcomings of the Fregean–Russellian logical methodology.27 Let us now turn to the second issue flagged for discussion, relating to the notion of ideality and the postulation of abstract entities. From the later Wittgenstein’s perspective, the Tractatus was only halfsuccessful in its attempt not to think in terms of logical objects or to reject the Fregean–Russellian conception of logic as a substantial science. As explained at the end of the preceding section, in the Tractatus, metaphysics disguised itself as methodology, with Wittgenstein’s method of analysis involving a thesis about the nature of language and reality. As he explains the problem, the Tractatus projected a particular mode of representing – that is, analysing – the uses of The discussion of beauty and goodness dates from the academic year 1932−3; relevant passages in Ms113 are from May 1932, and thus not significantly later than Being and Time. 27 For Wittgenstein’s rejection of Frege and Russell’s universalist conception of logic and for his new methods, see Kuusela, Logic as the Method of Philosophy, Chapters 5−6. 26

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language onto language as its object of investigation. Wittgenstein thus ended up putting forward a thesis about language as a truth-functional calculus, even though the possibility of comparing language with a calculus – and of clarifying some of its uses by means of a truth-functional calculus – cannot licence any such claim. As he writes: ‘We predicate of the thing what lies in the mode of representing it. Impressed by the possibility of a comparison, we think we are perceiving a state of affairs of the highest generality’ (PI, §104).28 In effect, to envisage language as such a calculus is to regard language as an abstract ideal entity, whereby actual historical languages now emerge as its impure manifestations that all share a common underlying structure, which Wittgenstein’s logical language was meant to capture. Here impurity means, more specifically, the presence of various extra-logical features rooted in, for instance, the psychology of language users (cf. TLP, §4.002). Moreover, committed to the methodological idea that all language use can be analysed truth-functionally, Wittgenstein assumed that it should be possible to uncover, under the vague and fluctuating surface of language, propositions with a precise sense and a determinate truth-value. In this sense, the Tractatus’ account, then, involved the postulation of ideal linguistic structures beneath the surface of language, which would meet the requirements placed on language by his method of logical analysis. The later Wittgenstein, however, describes this postulation as involving a misunderstanding concerning the role of ideal notions as part of philosophical language (see PI, §§100–2). What ought to be recognized as a feature of the philosopher’s mode of representing her object of investigation (language) is treated here, problematically, as a feature of the philosopher’s object of investigation of which a claim is made that it must possess a relevant kind of ideal features. The solution offered to this problem by the later Wittgenstein is a novel account of exceptionless necessity and generality (universality), whereby they are understood as characteristics of the philosopher’s mode of representation, rather than as features of reality. Ultimately, this means the rejection of the philosophical practice of postulating peculiar philosophical objects, such as Platonic forms, Kantian transcendental structures, Husserlian pure essences or Heideggerian ontological structures that are considered as part of reality, and treated as objects of philosophical theses. Instead, abstract ideal entities of this Cf. 114; see Kuusela, The Struggle against Dogmatism, 2008, Chapter 3 and Kuusela, ‘Logic and Ideality’, 2013 for discussion.

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kind, or corresponding ideal notions, are regarded by Wittgenstein as devices employed by philosophers to represent reality. Hence, rather than making assertions about peculiar non-temporal objects, on Wittgenstein’s account, the philosopher is putting forward a certain kind of non-temporal statements about reality, that is, statements that involve no reference to any particular points in time or to any particular instances or actually existing individuals, and which in this sense express exceptionless generalities.29 Exceptionless necessity is to be comprehended similarly as a feature of the philosopher’s mode of representation. As far as such a mode of representation is concerned, it leaves no room for exceptions, as exemplified by how the Tractatus’ logical language represents every possible proposition as possessing the general propositional form (see Section 2). Where the Tractatus went wrong, however, was in assuming or claiming that actual language use would perfectly correspond to this mode of representation, that is, that any possible proposition could be analysed in terms of this logical language, and that the possibility of logical clarification requires such a correspondence. The later Wittgenstein, by contrast, avoids this problem by explicitly acknowledging such a calculus as one possible mode of representation among many that can be used to clarify particular philosophical problems, and by recognizing that it suffices for the purpose of philosophy that the mode of representation captures language use to the extent that is relevant for the clarification of particular problems. Thus, this mode of representing language is no longer assumed to be valid without exceptions about actual language use or to capture all possible uses of language. Rather, the generality of this mode of representation is a function of its successful employments in tasks of philosophical clarification. In this way the generality of this model of language, then, is separated from universality as an internal feature of the model, whereby the generality of the model’s application remains openended, leaving open the possibility of exceptions. As regards everyday experience, or the understanding of the being or essences that constitutes everyday experience, from Wittgenstein’s later point of view, everyday experience is no longer to be explained in terms of abstract ideal Similarly, for example, the statement ‘2 + 2 = 4’ involves no reference to any particular instances or particular points in time, but applies, to speak slightly misleadingly, always and everywhere. (See Kuusela, The Struggle against Dogmatism, 2008, Chapter 5.) Husserl’s clarification of the notion of essence in terms of universality as distinct from the instantiation of individuals corresponds to Wittgenstein’s later characterization of statements about essences as non-temporal. Husserl’s postulation of ideal objects (pure essences) is, nevertheless, problematic from Wittgenstein’s perspective in the same sense as the underlying logical structures postulated by the Tractatus.

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entities or structures. Consequently, we might say with reference to Husserl, that in the later Wittgenstein, any residues of the natural attitude in philosophy are left behind. As explained, while such ideal notions can, on Wittgenstein’s account, be employed to clarify features of everyday experience, ideal entities and structures are no longer considered as anything that actually exists in reality. Thus, Wittgenstein’s later outlook makes it possible to clarify features of everyday experience in ways that are more humble and down to earth than any traditional philosophical theses involving a reference to postulated ideal entities or structures. To conclude, although philosophical statements are considered by Wittgenstein as being not empirical or historical but non-temporal in the sense explained, they can now be comprehended as something put forward in specific historical contexts in response to particular philosophical questions and problems. Thus, although they are non-temporal in character, historicity is an in-built feature of philosophical statements. They involve a tacit historical qualification, so to speak, or are to be understood as historically indexed, that is, as made in response to problems and questions that arise in particular historical settings. In this way, Wittgenstein is then able to square the non-temporal character of philosophical statements, which explains their necessity and universality, with the historicity of philosophical understanding. Here connections with Heidegger, especially with his later notions of the history of being, and subsequently Ereignis, come to view again, but their discussion must be left to another occasion.30

Thanks to Anat Matar for her comments and suggestions.

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Wittgenstein and ‘Ordinary Language Philosophy’ Hans-Johann Glock and Javier Kalhat

Early historians and interpreters assigned the early Wittgenstein to ‘ideallanguage philosophy’ and the later Wittgenstein to ‘ordinary language philosophy’. Both classifications are problematic, but for different reasons. The Tractatus does not cast formal logic in the role of an ideal language that replaces natural languages, but in the role of an ideal notation that brings out the underlying logical structure natural languages possess all along. As regards the second classification, ‘ordinary language philosophy’ is potentially a misnomer, for its point of orientation is not ordinary as opposed to technical language, but established as opposed to deviant yet unexplained uses. Given that caveat, however, the later Wittgenstein is much closer to what one might more felicitously call conceptual analysis than recent revisionist interpreters have allowed. There have always been ‘irrationalist’ approaches to Wittgenstein.1 They portray him as more of a sage or guru than an analytic philosopher, as someone who was keen to dissolve the urge to engage in philosophy by way of therapy and conversion rather than by rational argument (at least as normally understood). Often it is part and parcel of such ‘irrationalist’ interpretations to distance Wittgenstein even from that branch of the analytic tradition with which he used to be aligned.2 At the same time, some revisionist commentators have presented both Wittgenstein and Austin – often regarded as the emblematic ordinary language philosopher – as remote from the

For a critical survey, see H.-J. Glock, ‘Perspectives on Wittgenstein: An Intermittently Opinionated Survey’, in Wittgenstein and His Interpreters: Essays in Memory of Gordon Baker, eds. G. Kahane, E. Kanterian and O. Kuusela (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2997), 37–65. 2 See, for example, Gordon Baker, Wittgenstein’s Method (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). 1

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analytic mainstream.3 By contrast to both variants of revisionism, we favour a more analytic perspective on Wittgenstein. Both his philosophical practice and his metaphilosophical views resemble those of ‘orthodox’ conceptual analysis in important respects. We support our case both by identifying actual lines of influence and, first and foremost, by discussing specific similarities and differences between the later Wittgenstein on the one hand, and Austin, Ryle, Grice and Strawson, on the other.4

1  The early Wittgenstein and the linguistic turn Wittgenstein’s Tractatus initiated the linguistic turn for which analytic philosophy remains famous – or notorious – in many quarters. Whereas his predecessors were largely inspired by Platonist ideas – in Russell’s case, combined with a hefty dose of empiricism – Wittgenstein pursued a Kantian project. Echoing Kant’s ambition to draw the bounds between possible knowledge and illegitimate speculation, the Tractatus aimed to ‘draw a limit to thought’ (Preface). At the same time, Wittgenstein gave a linguistic twist to the Kantian tale. Language is not just a secondary manifestation of something non-linguistic. For thoughts are neither mental processes nor abstract entities, but themselves propositions, sentences that have been projected onto reality. Thoughts can be completely expressed in language, and philosophy can establish the limits and preconditions of thought by establishing the limits and preconditions of the linguistic expression of thought. Indeed, these limits must be drawn in language. They cannot be drawn by propositions talking about both sides of the limit. By definition, such propositions would have to be about things that cannot be thought about and, thereby, transcend the limits of thought. These limits can only be drawn from the inside, namely by delineating the ‘rules of logical grammar’ or ‘logical syntax’ (TLP, §§ 3.32–3.325). These rules determine whether a combination of signs has sense, whether it is capable of expressing a thought and hence of representing reality either truly or falsely. What lie beyond these limits are not unknowable things in themselves, as in Kant, but only nonsensical combinations of signs, for example, ‘The concert-tone A is red’. See Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); Avner Baz, When Words Are Called For (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). 4 For Wittgenstein’s relation to other conceptual analysts such as Malcolm and Hart, see P. M. S. Hacker, Wittgenstein’s Place in Twentieth-Century Analytic Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), chapter 6. 3

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Many philosophers of the past have disparaged the theories of their predecessors as false, unfounded or pointless. But according to Wittgenstein, metaphysical theories suffer from a more basic defect, namely that of being ‘nonsensical’ in the sense of being meaningless or unintelligible. It is not just that they provide wrong answers, but that the questions they address are misguided questions to begin with (what the logical positivists later called ‘pseudoquestions’). They are based on a misunderstanding or distortion of the rules of logical syntax, and must hence be rejected. Legitimate philosophy is not a doctrine but an activity, namely a ‘critique of language’ to be pursued through logical analysis (see §§4.003f., 6.53). Without propounding any propositions of its own, it brings to light the logical form of meaningful propositions, which, according to the Tractatus, are confined to the propositions of empirical science. This positive task is complemented by the negative task of demonstrating that the statements of metaphysics are nonsensical, since they violate the rules of logical syntax.

2  The turn towards actual linguistic practice When Wittgenstein returned to philosophy in 1929, he subjected the Tractatus to withering criticism. The Tractatus went wrong in its dogmatic insistence that the grammatical surface of ordinary language disguises an elaborate system of logical forms. Ordinary language is not ‘a calculus according to definite rules’ (PI, §81), as the Tractatus had assumed. Its rules are more diverse, diffuse and subject to change than those of artificial calculi. The atomistic idea of unanalysable names and indecomposable objects is a chimera. The distinction between simple and complex is not absolute, but relative to one’s analytic tools and even to one’s philosophical purposes. The collapse of logical atomism also undermined the picture theory of the proposition. If there are no ultimate constituents of facts – objects – which are simple in an absolute metaphysical sense, then there are no corresponding constituents of propositions, which are simple in an absolute semantic sense. Moreover, the possibility of linguistic representation does not presuppose a oneto-one correlation between words and things. Fundamentally, Frege, Russell and the early Wittgenstein all shared a referential conception of meaning, according to which the meaning of an expression is an object for which it stands. This conception is doubly wrong. Not all meaningful words are names that refer to

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objects. The referential conception is modelled solely on proper names, mass nouns and sortal nouns. It ignores verbs, adjectives, adverbs, connectives, prepositions, indexicals, and exclamations (BB, 77; PI, §§1–27). Moreover, even in the case of referring expressions, their meaning is not the object they stand for. ‘When Mr. N.N. dies one says that the bearer of the name dies, not that the meaning dies’ (PI, §40). Wittgenstein also presented an alternative to the referential conception: the linguistic meaning of an expression is its ‘use in the language’. The meaning of a word is not an entity of any kind – whether physical, mental or abstract – but, rather, its use according to linguistic rules (see Section 4 below). The picture theory restricts meaningful propositions to statements of fact. Wittgenstein now rejects the idea, epitomized in the Tractatus notion of the general propositional form, that the sole function of language is to describe reality. In addition to statements of fact, there are not just questions and commands but ‘countless’ other ‘language-games’, linguistic activities such as telling jokes, thanking, cursing, greeting and praying. Furthermore, the logical and semantic rules that constitute a language – Wittgenstein calls them ‘grammatical rules’ – do not have to mirror the structure of reality, but are ‘autonomous’. They are not responsible either to physical reality or to a Platonic realm of ‘meanings’. Frege, Russell and the Tractatus notwithstanding, language is not a self-sufficient abstract system but, rather, a human practice, which in turn is embedded in a social ‘form of life’ (PI, §23). Wittgenstein still held that philosophical problems are rooted in misunderstandings of language. But he rejected logical analysis as a means of resolving these confusions. There are no logically independent elementary propositions or indefinable names for analysis to terminate with. Indeed, not all legitimate concepts can be sharply defined by reference to necessary and sufficient conditions for their application. Such analytic definitions are only one form of explanation, among others. Many philosophically contested concepts are united by ‘family-resemblances’, that is, overlapping similarities, rather than by a common characteristic mark. In particular, propositions do not share a common essence, the single propositional form detected by the Tractatus. Finally, the idea that analysis can make unexpected discoveries about what ordinary expressions really mean is misguided. The rules of language cannot be ‘hidden’ beneath the surface and await discovery by logicians and linguists. Rather, competent speakers must be capable of recognizing them, since they are the normative standards that guide their utterances. To fight the ‘bewitchment

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of our understanding through the means of our language’, we do not need to uncover the logical forms beneath the surface of ordinary language. Instead, we need a description of our public linguistic practices, which constitute a motley of language-games (PI, §§65–88, 23, 108).

3  ‘Ordinary language philosophy’ Wittgenstein’s new ideas had a profound impact on a movement that dominated British philosophy between the 1930s and the 1960s, and included G. Ryle, J. L. Austin, H. P. Grice, R. Hare, S. Hampshire, H. L. A. Hart, D. Pears, P. F. Strawson, S. Toulmin, J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock. Its opponents – for example, B. Russell, E. Gellner, G. Bergmann and W. V. O. Quine – called it ‘ordinary language philosophy’ or ‘Oxford philosophy’, since most of the members were based there. The precise origin of the label ‘ordinary language philosophy’ is not known. Hacker speculates that it may have arisen from, though not originated with, Norman Malcolm’s influential paper ‘Moore and Ordinary Language’.5 In any event, those to whom it was commonly applied preferred labels such as ‘conceptual analysis’ or ‘linguistic philosophy’. According to Grice, the term ‘ordinary language philosophy’ does not designate a movement or school in any doctrinal or topical sense: The only position which to my mind would have commanded universal assent was that a careful examination of the detailed features of ordinary discourse is required as a foundation for philosophical thinking; and even here the enthusiasm of the assent would have varied from person to person, as would the precise view taken (if any was taken) about the relationship between linguistic phenomena and philosophical theses.6

Grice is right to point out that there was considerable diversity and independence of thought among ordinary language philosophers – as is to be expected from such a roster of brilliant minds. But it is arguable that Grice underestimates the extent of agreement on metaphilosophical matters among members of the group. For a case can be made – and will be made here – that there was significant, Norman Malcolm, ‘Moore and Ordinary Language’, in The Philosophy of G.E. Moore, ed. P. A. Schilpp (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1942), 343–68. See Hacker, Wittgenstein’s Place, 307, n. 38. 6 P. Grice, ‘Reply to Richards’, in Philosophical Grounds of Rationality, eds. R. E. Grandy and R. Warner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 51. 5

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though by no means uniform, overlap in their views regarding not only the centrality of ordinary language to philosophy (Section 4), but also the scope and limits of logical analysis and formal methods in philosophy (Section 5), the rejection of traditional metaphysics (Section 6) and the nature of philosophy itself (Section 7). In all these issues, furthermore, ordinary language philosophers were largely in step with Wittgenstein, and were, indeed, influenced – directly or indirectly – by him.

4  Philosophy and ordinary language As we saw in Section 2, Wittgenstein’s philosophy took a turn from formal calculi towards linguistic practice after his return to Cambridge in 1929. Wittgenstein urges us to pay attention to how we actually use words, for in his view, philosophical problems arise ‘when language is, as it were, idling, not when it is doing work’ (PI, §132): When philosophers use a word – ‘knowledge’, ‘being’, ‘object’, ‘I’, ‘proposition/ sentence’, ‘name’ – and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language in which it is at home? What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use. (PI, §116)

Ordinary language philosophers are so called, of course, because they all took a similar turn towards actual linguistic practice. Austin, for example, justifies his choice of topic in ‘A Plea for Excuses’ by saying that ‘it is an attractive subject methodologically, at least if we are to proceed from “ordinary language,” that is, by examining what we should say when, and so why and what we should mean by it’.7 ‘Ordinary language’, he later adds, ‘is not the last word’ but ‘it is the first word’.8 Austin by all accounts disliked Wittgenstein.9 Grice once heard him say: ‘Some like Witters, but Moore’s my man.’10 He is also reported to have called Wittgenstein ‘a charlatan’. All the same, Wittgenstein’s Investigations were discussed in Austin’s legendary ‘Saturday Morning Meetings’, and he frequently J. L. Austin, ‘A Plea for Excuses’, reprinted in his Philosophical Papers, 2nd edn, eds. J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 181.  8 Austin, ‘Plea’, 185; see also I. Berlin, ‘Austin and the Early Beginnings of Oxford Philosophy’, in Essays on J.L. Austin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 13f.  9 Hacker, Wittgenstein’s Place, 308, n. 46. 10 Grice, ‘Reply’, 51.  7

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referred to Wittgenstein in discussion.11 More importantly, Austin justifies the appeal to ordinary language partly on the Wittgensteinian grounds that words are tools and that ‘as a minimum, we should use clean tools: we should know what we mean and what we do not, and we must forearm ourselves against the traps that language sets us’.12 Neither Wittgenstein nor ordinary language philosophers after him regarded ordinary language as sacrosanct. The quotation from Austin about ordinary language being the first but not the last word left out the middle part, where Austin says that ‘in principle [ordinary language] can everywhere be supplement and improved upon and superseded’.13 Still, we do well to pay attention to ordinary language, for our common stock of words embodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing, and the connexions they have found worth marking, in the lifetimes of many generations: these surely are likely to be more numerous, more sound, since they have stood up to the long test of the survival of the fittest, and more subtle, at least in all ordinary and reasonably practical matters, than any that you or I are likely to think up in our arm-chairs of an afternoon. (Austin, Plea, 182)

Pace Russell (1953), the turn towards ordinary language does not collapse philosophy into lexicography. In the Investigations, Wittgenstein writes: One ought to ask, not what images are or what happens when one imagines anything, but how the word ‘imagination’ is used. But that does not mean that I want to talk only about words. For the question of what the imagination essentially is, is as much about the word ‘imagination’ as my question. (PI, §370)

And Austin, whose ‘linguistic botanizing’14 often gave the impression of responding to an interest in the study of words for their own sake, says the same: When we examine what we should say when, what words we should use in what situations, we are looking again not merely at words (or ‘meanings’, whatever they may be) but also at the realities we use the words to talk about: we are using a sharpened awareness of words to sharpen our perception of, though not as the final arbiter of, the phenomena. (Austin, Plea, 182) G. J. Warnock, ‘Saturday Mornings’, in Essays on J.L. Austin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 36; G. Pitcher, ‘Austin: A Personal Memoir’, in Essays on J.L. Austin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 24. Austin, ‘Plea’, 181f.; see also Pitcher, Austin, 24 and PI, §23. 13 Austin, ‘Plea’, 185; see also PI, §18. 14 As Grice called it (‘Reply’, 57); see also G. Ryle, ‘Review of “Symposium on J.L. Austin,”’ reprinted in his Collected Papers, vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 2009), 284. 11

12

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Ryle, for his part, observed that when it is said that ordinary language philosophers are interested in the ordinary use of expressions, the emphasis should be on ‘use’, not on ‘expressions’. Expressions belong to English or German, etc., but the philosopher, unlike the lexicographer, is not interested in expressions qua English expressions or qua German expressions, etc. He is interested in what is done with those expressions, and with any other expressions with which the same thing can be done. ‘That is why it is so misleading to classify philosophical questions as linguistic questions.’15 Ordinary language philosophers talk of ‘the use of expressions’ where previous philosophers spoke of ‘ideas’ or ‘concepts’ that correspond to those expressions (319). Talk of ‘use’ is preferable, for it is not quite as susceptible to reification as is talk of ideas or concepts. Furthermore, ‘whereas it would sound unplausible to say that concepts … might be meaningless or absurd, there is no such unplausibility in asserting that someone might use a certain expression absurdly’ (320). Another misconception about ordinary language philosophers is that they regarded the use of technical jargon in philosophy as necessarily inappropriate. As Ryle pointed out, however, the term ‘ordinary’ in the phrase ‘ordinary language philosophy’ is intended to contrast with ‘non-standard’ rather than with ‘technical’ (315f.). Thus, the ordinary language philosopher appeals to the standard as opposed to the non-standard use of words, but the latter may be non-technical or technical, depending on the philosophical question at hand. The label ‘ordinary language philosophy’ is thus a misnomer if it is used, as it is often used by detractors, to mean that philosophy ought to concern itself only with everyday words and concepts. As for specifically philosophical terms of art, ordinary language philosophers did not object to their deployment as such, and even a cursory look at their writings shows that they themselves did not shy away from them (e.g. ‘languagegame’, ‘family-resemblance concept’, ‘ostensive definition’, ‘category mistake’, ‘performatives’, ‘constatives’).16 What they objected to, rather, was the use of technical terms without adequate explanation of their meaning. These explanations, furthermore, would perforce need to be couched in terms already understood, and ultimately in ordinary terms of a mother tongue.17 They also thought that philosophical terms of art – for example, the sense datum terminology – had a G. Ryle, ‘Ordinary Language’, reprinted in his Collected Papers, vol. 2 (London: Routledge, 2009), 318. P. Grice, ‘Postwar Oxford Philosophy’, reprinted in his Studies in the Way of Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 173; J. O. Urmson and G. K. Warnock, ‘Comments’, in Symposium on J.L. Austin, ed. K. T. Fann (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), 47. 17 P. F. Strawson, Analysis and Metaphysics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 10−16. 15

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tendency to mask important differences among uses of relevant expressions – for example, ‘appear’, ‘look’ and ‘seem’ – and so lead us astray.18 In ‘Ordinary Language’, Ryle also drew – or reminded us of – a distinction between ‘use’ and ‘usage’.19 A use is a way of operating with something – a technique, knack or method. A usage, on the other hand, is a custom, practice, fashion or vogue. Unlike a use, a usage cannot be correct or incorrect – there is no such thing as a ‘misusage’ or a ‘misvogue’ – though a usage can, of course, consist in the misuse of a thing. Where the thing used is a linguistic expression, learning its use inevitably involves learning something of its usage, since the aim of linguistic communication puts a premium on uniformity of use among speakers of a language. Ryle’s point, then, is that the ordinary language philosopher is concerned with use, not with usage, which is the concern of the lexicographer or the sociologist, instead. Thus, what is philosophically relevant is not the prevalence or otherwise of a usage – ‘what everyone says’ or ‘what no one says’ – but, rather, what we should say and what we should not say. ‘What is wanted’, says Ryle, is ‘the extraction of the logical rules implicitly governing a concept’ (324).20 Ryle would have viewed with horror the rise of so-called experimental philosophy, which polls people on their intuitions, including their linguistic intuitions, in order to settle philosophical problems.21

5  Philosophy, logical analysis and formal logic The early Wittgenstein likened Frege’s and Russell’s development of the predicate calculus to the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century.22 He followed Russell, furthermore, in identifying philosophy with the logical analysis of propositions.23 In his theory of definite descriptions (1905), Russell analysed J. L. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962); see also J. O. Urmson, ‘Austin’s Philosophy’, in Symposium on J.L. Austin, ed. K. T. Fann (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), 23f. 19 Ryle, ‘Ordinary Language’, 321–6. 20 The idea that use has an essential normative dimension has been contested by ‘unruly Wittgensteinians’, both as an interpretation and as a substantive claim about meaning. For a defence on both counts, see H.-J. Glock, ‘Does Language require Conventions?’, in Wittgenstein: Mind, Meaning and Metaphilosophy, eds. P. Frascolla, D. Marconi and A. Voltolini (London: Palgrave, 2010), 85–112. 21 See, for example, J. Alexander, Experimental Philosophy: An Introduction (Cambridge: Polity, 2012). 22 Ludwig Wittgenstein, ‘Review of Coffey, The Science of Logic’, The Cambridge Review 34 (1913): 351. Reprinted in Philosophical Occasions, eds. Klagge and A. Nordmann (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993). 23 TLP, §4.003f.; Bertrand Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World (1914), rev. edn (London: Routledge, 1993): Chapters II–III; Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic (London: Longmans, Green 1918), 108–9, 148–9. 18

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propositions involving definite descriptions, such as ‘The present king of France is bald’, not in terms of subject and predicate but rather as quantified conjunctions – in other words, ‘There is one and only one thing which is a present king of France, and everything which is a present king of France is bald.’ Ramsey regarded Russell’s analysis as a ‘paradigm of philosophy’ (1931, 263), and the early Wittgenstein would have agreed. Unlike Russell, however, the early Wittgenstein did not cast formal logic in the role of an ideal language that replaces natural languages, but rather in the role of an ideal notation that brings out the underlying logical structure natural languages possess all along. The later Wittgenstein, as we saw in Section 2, found the idea that languages have a hidden logical structure to be seriously confused. There are neither ‘surprises’ nor ‘discoveries’ in logic or grammar, for it makes no sense to attribute tacit knowledge of a complex calculus or arcane logical forms to competent speakers of a language (WVC, 77; LWL, 16–17; PG, 114–15; PI, §§126–9). A ‘correct logical point of view’ (TLP, §4.1213) is achieved not through a quasigeological excavation, but through a quasi-geographical overview, which displays features of our linguistic practice that lie open to view. In so far as it is legitimate, analysis amounts either to the description of grammar, or to the substitution of one kind of notation by another, less misleading one (PR, 51; WVC, 45–7; PI, §§90–2). Like the later Wittgenstein, ordinary language philosophers rejected any notion of philosophy as identical with the logical analysis of propositions, and had in general an ambivalent attitude towards the use of formal methods in philosophy. This may have been partly due to the fact that, unlike Wittgenstein, none of them had received much by way of formal training in logic in their formative years. Ryle, for example, recalls that during his early years at Oxford, logic was ‘in the doldrums’.24 He later studied ‘Russell the logician’, though ‘having no mathematical ability, equipment, or interest, I did not make myself even competent in the algebra of logic; nor did the problems of the foundations of mathematics become a question that burned in my belly’ (7). Familiarity with Frege’s work, despite Wittgenstein’s and Russell’s early patronage of him, came even later; it was, in fact, due to Austin’s own translation of Frege’s Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik in 1950 (which, nevertheless, appears not to have influenced Austin in any direct way). G. Ryle, ‘Autobiographical’, in Ryle, eds. O. P. Wood and G. Pitcher (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1970), 4.

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Ryle’s scathing critique of Carnap’s Meaning and Necessity (originally published in 1947) is perhaps an extreme example of ordinary language philosophy’s hostility towards the use of formal methods in philosophy.25 Ryle deplores the profusion of needlessly technical terms in the book and finds Carnap’s use of logical formulae gratuitous. ‘They do not function as a sieve against vagueness, ambiguity or sheer confusion, and they are not used for abbreviation or formalisation of proofs. Calculi without calculations seem to be gratuitous algebra’ (234). His only comment about Carnap’s account of modal concepts is that ‘he says nothing about most of our ordinary ways of using words like “may,” “cannot,” “possible” and “necessary.” He discusses the “mays,” “musts” and “need nots” of logic, but not those of legislation, technology, games, etiquette, ethics, grammar or pedagogy’ (234). Ryle takes Carnap’s book to be an unwelcome return ‘to the age that waxed with Mill and began to wane soon after [Russell’s] Principles of Mathematics’. And he is visibly worried about the impact on philosophy of Carnap’s views, which ‘are beginning to be regarded as authoritative’ (243). Strawson’s early work provides the most sustained critique of the scope and limits of formal logic in philosophy. He prosecuted this critique on two related fronts. First, he attacked the orthodoxies of logical analysis by invoking ordinary use. In his famous paper ‘On Referring’ (1950), Strawson attacks Russell’s theory of descriptions. According to Strawson, ‘The present king of France is bald’ presupposes rather than entails the existence of the present king of France; that is, his existence is a necessary precondition of the statement’s being either true or false. Since there is no present king of France, the statement is neither true nor false, rather than simply false. Strawson accuses Russell of confusing meaning, which is a feature of type-expressions, with reference and truth, which are features of the uses of expressions. ‘The present king of France is bald’ is meaningful, even though its present use fails to make a statement that is either true or false. In later writings, Strawson separated his diagnosis of truth-value gaps from his central idea, namely, that ‘identifying reference’ is essential to human speech. By trying to paraphrase away singular referring expressions of the form ‘the so-and-so’, Russell misconstrues their distinctive role, which is to single out a particular thing as a topic of speech. By the same token, Quine’s elimination of singular terms from his canonical notation in favour of quantifiers, variables G. Ryle, ‘Discussion of Rudolf Carnap: “Meaning and Necessity,”’ (1949), reprinted in his Collected Papers, vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 2009), 233–43.

25

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and predicates ignores the fact that the function of predicates can, in turn, be explained only by contrasting it with that of singular terms.26 Strawson explored further the scope and limitations of formal logic in his subsequent book, Introduction to Logical Theory (1952), in which he demonstrated that the predicate calculus – the weapon of choice for logical analysts – does not reveal the true structure of ordinary discourse. The gulf between the truth-functional connectives and the notions of ordinary discourse – notably between ‘⊃’ and ‘if … then …’ – is wider than commonly accepted. Natural languages are distorted by being forced into the Procrustean bed of the predicate calculus. More generally, formal logic is not a sufficient instrument for revealing all the structural (logical) features of natural languages, let alone of any conceivable language or of human thought.27 Strawson also provided the most cogent defence of the methodology of ordinary language philosophy against ideal-language philosophers like Frege, Russell, Carnap and Quine. Both ordinary and ideal-language philosophers agree that philosophical problems are rooted not so much in factual ignorance or error about the world as in confusions and paradoxes that arise out of the way we speak about or conceive of the world. But whereas ordinary language philosophers seek to resolve philosophical problems by clarifying our existing language through analysing or describing it, ideal-language philosophers seek to avoid them by reforming ordinary language. In the work of both Carnap and Quine, for example, logical analysis turns into logical explication. It replaces philosophically troublesome expressions or constructions through alternatives that serve the cognitive purposes of the original equally well while avoiding drawbacks such as obscurity and undesirable ontological commitments. For instance, talk about numbers can be replaced by talk about sets. Strawson argued that if philosophical problems originate in our actual linguistic framework – as ideal-language philosophers granted – the introduction of a novel framework will merely sweep these problems under the carpet unless its relation to the old framework is properly understood. Once we have elucidated ordinary language, Strawson went on to say, we no longer require an artificial one. For the problems arise not out of ordinary language as such, but out of its distortion and misunderstanding in philosophical theories.28 P. F. Strawson, Logico-Linguistic Papers (London: Methuen, 1971), chapters 1, 3–4. Strawson, Analysis and Metaphysics, ch. 8. 28 P.F. Strawson, ‘Carnap’s Views on Constructed Systems vs. Natural Languages in Analytic Philosophy’, in The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap, ed. P. Schilpp (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1963), 503–18; see also Strawson, Analysis and Metaphysics, 34f. 26 27

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Among the leading members of ordinary language philosophy, Grice is perhaps the only one to have shifted towards a more formal treatment of linguistic phenomena at one stage in his philosophical career, partly under the influence of Chomsky and Quine.29 ‘My philosophizing revealed a distinct tendency to appear in formal dress; indeed the need for greater contact with experts in logic and in linguistics than was then available in Oxford was one of my main professional reasons for moving to the United States [in 1968]’ (‘Reply to Richards’, 60). Grice’s ‘formalistic turn’ was aimed at showing that the grammar of ordinary discourse could be regarded as ‘a pretty good guide to logical form’, and ‘involved the construction, for a language which was a close relative of a central portion of English (including quantification), of a hand-in-hand syntax-cum-semantics which made minimal use of transformations’ (60). Grice’s foray into formalized philosophy did not, however, go beyond the suggestion of notational devices together with sketchy indications of the laws or principles to be looked for in a system incorporating these devices; the object of the exercise being to seek out hitherto unrecognized analogies and to attain new levels of generalities. (60)

The quest for generalities is alien to Wittgenstein. But as regards the search for analogies, Grice’s notational innovations bear a strong resemblance to what the later Wittgenstein called ‘objects of comparison’, parts of language or fictional language-games that are supposed to shed light on our actual language through similarities and divergences alike. In later work, in any event, Grice moved away from formal philosophy, not least because of a growing apprehension that philosophy is all too often being squeezed out of operation by technology; to borrow words from Ramsey, that apparatus which began life as a system of devices to combat woolliness has now become an instrument of scholasticism. (61)

The later Wittgenstein would have agreed wholeheartedly.

6  Philosophy and metaphysics In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein took all metaphysical pronouncements – including his own – to violate the rules of logical syntax, and hence to be nonsensical Grice, ‘Reply’, 59f.

29

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rather than merely false. The logical positivists recruited the Tractatus in their crusade against metaphysics. They wielded their verificationist criterion of meaningfulness, according to which a proposition is cognitively meaningful only if it is capable of being verified or falsified, to show that metaphysical pronouncements are meaningless. They do not make statements of fact that can ultimately be verified by sensory experience, but neither do they explicate the meaning of words or propositions. The logical positivists’ rejection of metaphysics was very influential among early ordinary language philosophers.30 The later Wittgenstein also rejected metaphysics, of course, but his position was more nuanced than that of the logical positivists in that he distinguished between metaphysical pronouncements that are straightforward nonsense and ought to be discarded (e.g. ‘Only the Absolute contains the truth as such’), and metaphysical pronouncements that are really disguised rules for the use of expressions, for example, ‘Nothing can be red and green all over.’ The latter appears to describe a necessary feature of colours, but its function is that of a rule for the correct use of colour words. As such, it is not so much descriptive as normative in nature. Its role is to establish internal relations between concepts (red and green), to licence inferences among empirical propositions (e.g. ‘the chair I’m currently sitting on is red all over’ to ‘the chair I’m currently sitting on is not green all over’), and ultimately to delineate what count as intelligible descriptions of reality (e.g. by ruling out propositions like ‘The chair I’m currently sitting on is simultaneously red and green all over’). Strawson’s rehabilitation of metaphysics in his landmark Individuals (1959) is no return to traditional metaphysics, and there are, indeed, interesting similarities to Wittgenstein’s sophisticated critique of metaphysics. Strawson distinguishes between ‘revisionary’ and ‘descriptive metaphysics’: ‘Descriptive metaphysics is content to describe the actual structure of our thought about the world, revisionary metaphysics is concerned to produce a better structure.’31 Strawson is interested in descriptive metaphysics, which differs from the kinds of enquiry pursued by the later Wittgenstein and ordinary language philosophers after him not in ‘kind of intention’ but in its greater ‘scope and generality’. It seeks to ‘lay bare the most general features of our conceptual structure’. The ‘close examination of the actual use of words’ may be the only ‘sure way in philosophy’, yet it is insufficient to reveal these ‘general elements’ and ‘structural connections’.

Ryle, ‘Autobiographical’, 10. P. F. Strawson, Individuals (London: Methuen, 1959), 9.

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For these are not visible in the motley of ordinary use, but lie ‘submerged’ beneath ‘the surface of language’ at ‘a deeper level’.32 The idea that descriptive metaphysics scrutinizes conceptual structures beneath the surface of language may suggest that it pursues aims similar to those of Moore, Russell, the early Wittgenstein and the logical positivists. Nothing could be further from the truth. Strawson later distinguished explicitly between ‘atomistic’, ‘reductive’ and ‘connective’ analysis.33 Atomistic analysis seeks to break down concepts and propositions into components that are absolutely simple. Strawson regards atomistic analysis as ‘distinctly implausible’.34 Reductive analysis tries to explain complex concepts in terms that are regarded as more perspicuous or less problematic from an empiricist or naturalistic perspective. Strawson resists this ambition on the grounds that the fundamental concepts with which descriptive metaphysics deals ‘remain obstinately irreducible, in the sense that they cannot be defined away, without remainder or circularity, in terms of other concepts’.35 He favours connective analysis and thereby abandons the idea that philosophical analysis decomposes or dismantles a complex phenomenon, displaying its simple elements and their mode of composition.36 Descriptive metaphysics seeks ‘to establish the connections between the major structural features or elements of our conceptual scheme – to exhibit it, not as a rigorous deductive system, but as a coherent whole whose parts are mutually supportive and mutually dependent, interlocking in an intelligible way’.37 Any conceptual explication or explanation of meaning will eventually move in a circle. But this does not entail that such explanations must all be trivial or pointless, for there are more or less illuminating circles.38

7  The nature of philosophy The pioneers of analytic philosophy, in particular Moore, Russell and Wittgenstein, were very conscious of the fact that they were breaking with Strawson, Individuals, 9f.; P. F. Strawson, ‘My Philosophy’, in The Philosophy of P.F. Strawson, eds. P. K. Sen and R. R. Verma (New Dehli: Indian Council of Philosophical Research,1995), 15. 33 Strawson, Analysis and Metaphysics, ch. 2. 34 Strawson, Analysis and Metaphysics, 20. 35 Strawson, ‘My Philosophy’, 16. 36 Strawson, Analysis and Metaphysics, 17–19; Strawson, ‘My Philosophy’, 15–17. 37 P. F. Strawson, Skepticism and Naturalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 22f. 38 For a discussion of the contrasts between Strawson’s and Wittgenstein’s views about the status of such explanations, see H.-J. Glock, ‘Strawson’s Descriptive Metaphysics’, in Categories of Being, eds. L. Haaparanta and H. Koskinen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 391–419. 32

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tradition and forging a new path for themselves. It is no coincidence, therefore, that reflections on matters metaphilosophical abound in their work. In the case of Wittgenstein, we have seen that he held throughout his life the belief that philosophical problems are rooted in misunderstandings of language. As such, philosophical problems are not genuine problems in need of solution (e.g. by way of theory or empirical discovery), but pseudo-problems in need of dissolution. Certain remarks of the later Wittgenstein – for example, ‘The philosopher treats a question; like an illness’ (PI, §255; see also §§254 and 233) – in fact suggest a ‘therapeutic’ conception of philosophy, according to which a philosopher in the grip of a philosophical problem is akin to a patient in the grip of a neurosis. The latter suffers from fantastical delusions that arise from a freewheeling mind that has lost touch with reality. The former suffers from conceptual muddles and confusions that arise when concepts become detached from their actual use and race idly through the mind. The therapist tries to undermine the grip of the delusions on the patient by reconnecting their mind to reality. Similarly, the philosopher tries to clear away the conceptual muddles and confusions by ‘assembling reminders’ about the actual use of words: ‘What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use’ (PI, §127). Both therapist and philosopher thus aim to cure a mental disorder of sorts. In the case of philosophy, ‘the real discovery is the one that enables me to break off philosophizing when I want to. The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself in question’ (PI, §133). Wittgenstein’s metaphilosophical views were very influential among ordinary language philosophers. According to Ryle, for example, ‘Wittgenstein has made our generation of philosophers self-conscious about philosophy itself.’39 At the same time, Ryle vehemently rejects the therapeutic conception of philosophy. He takes issue, in particular, with any suggestion that philosophy does not offer arguments, refutations, rectifications or even ‘theories’ (the latter not understood, however, as giving ‘new information’).40,41 Ryle picks up a different

G. Ryle, ‘Ludwig Wittgenstein’, reprinted in his Collected Papers, vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 2009), 266; see also Ryle’s ‘Introduction’, Collected Papers, vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 2009), 23. 40 G. Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 60th anniversary edition, ed. J. Tanney (London: Routledge, 2009), lix; G. Ryle, ‘Appendix: On Bouwsma’s Wittgenstein’, in his On Thinking, ed. K. Kolenda (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979), 131–2; see also G. Ryle, ‘Philosophical Arguments’, reprinted in his Collected Papers, vol. 2 (London: Routledge, 2009), 203–21. 41 Ryle also rejected the interpretation of Wittgenstein as propounding such a therapeutic conception, though he concedes that Wittgenstein ‘did at one stage ply this model’ (Ryle, ‘Appendix’, 131). 39

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analogy of Wittgenstein’s, namely that of the philosopher as cartographer. Wittgenstein writes: One difficulty with philosophy is that we lack a synoptic view. We encounter the kind of difficulty we should have with the geography of a country for which we had no map, or else a map of isolated bits. This country we are talking about is language and the geography is grammar. We can walk about the country quite well, but when forced to make a map, we go wrong. (AWL, 43; see also PI, §§122–3)

Ryle writes: Many people can talk sense with concepts but cannot talk sense about them; they know by practice how to operate with concepts, anyhow inside familiar fields, but they cannot state the logical regulations governing their use. They are like people who know their way about their own parish, but cannot construct or read a map of it, much less a map of the region or continent in which their parish lies.42

The task of the philosopher on this analogy is to chart the ‘logical geography’ of our concepts. To do so, says Ryle, is to reveal the logic of the propositions in which they are wielded, that is to say, to show with what other propositions they are consistent and inconsistent, what propositions follow from them and from what propositions they follow. The logical type or category to which a concept belongs is the set of ways in which it is logically legitimate to operate with it.43

Philosophical problems, according to Ryle, trade on ‘category mistakes’, that is, on treating concepts belonging to one logical type as if they belonged to a different logical type. The result is absurdity and paradox. The way to remove the absurdity and dissolve the paradox is to describe the logical type to which the concept, in fact, belongs. Ryle put his method to use in his celebrated The Concept of Mind (1949), where he charts the logical geography of our mental vocabulary, and persuasively argues that Cartesian dualism rests on a category mistake, namely that of treating the mind as if it were a substance of sorts, and hence as belonging to the same logical category as the body. Ryle, Concept of Mind, Lx; see also Ryle, ‘Philosophical Arguments’, 210f. Ryle, Concept of Mind, Lx.

42 43

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Like Ryle, Strawson also rejected the therapeutic conception of philosophy. While he agrees that there is much ‘absurdity and confusion’ in philosophy and that ‘the saving truth lies there, in the actual employment of concepts’, he ultimately rejects the therapeutic conception as ‘exaggerated and one-sided’, for it assigns to philosophy a purely negative, unsystematic and non-explanatory role.44 But Strawson also finds Ryle’s map analogy ‘uncomfortably metaphorical’. Stripped of its metaphorical elements, he says, what remains is ‘the notion of an abstract representation of certain relations between certain concepts made for a certain purpose. But what concepts, what relations, what purpose? All this is, so far, unspecified’ (3). Strawson’s complaint is unfair, since Ryle does specify the concepts, the relations and the purpose. The relevant concepts are those that give rise to philosophical puzzlement, for example, mental concepts. The relevant relations are logico-semantic ones, notably entailment, presupposition and exclusion. As for the purpose, Ryle says that ‘philosophy is the replacement of category-habits by category-disciplines’.45 Be that as it may, Strawson contrasts both Wittgenstein’s therapeutic analogy and Ryle’s map analogy with his own ‘grammatical analogy’. Just as the grammarian … labours to produce a systematic account of the structure of rules which we effortlessly observe in speaking grammatically, so the philosopher labours to produce a systematic account of the general conceptual structure of which our daily practice shows us to have a tacit and unconscious mastery.46

Like Ryle’s map analogy, Strawson’s grammar analogy can be traced back to the later Wittgenstein, who wrote in the Investigations: A main source of our failure to understand is that we don’t have an overview of the use of our words. – Our grammar is deficient in surveyability. A surveyable representation produces precisely that kind of understanding which consists in ‘seeing connections’. Hence the importance of finding and inventing intermediate links. The concept of a surveyable representation is of fundamental significance. It characterizes the way we represent things, how we look at matters. (Is this a ‘Weltanschauung’?) (PI, §122; italics in the original)

Strawson, Analysis and Metaphysics, 3, 9. Ryle, Concept of Mind, Lxi. 46 Strawson, Analysis and Metaphysics, 7. 44 45

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Among ordinary language philosophers, Austin sounds the most un-Wittgen­ steinian note on the issue of the nature of philosophy. Austin made a number of metaphilosophical remarks in his writings. In ‘A Plea for Excuses’, as we have seen, he characterizes the philosophical method of ‘ordinary language’ as that of ‘examining what we should say when, and so why and what we should mean by it’ (Plea, 181). But Austin explicitly says that he is only characterizing one method in philosophy, and there is no suggestion that the method is suited to all philosophical problems. In ‘Ifs and Cans’, Austin suggests that the philosophical enterprise he is concerned with may one day break off into a new ‘science of language’.47 But Austin stops short of suggesting that philosophy will eventually be replaced by science. Even if, and when, the philosophical enterprise he is concerned with is absorbed into a new science, there will still be plenty of philosophy left to keep philosophers busy.48 Austin’s metaphilosophical remarks notwithstanding, several commentators insist that it would be a mistake to attribute to him any developed views on the nature of philosophy or on philosophical methodology. In fact, he seems to have been dismissive of any such views. According to Warnock: Generalities about philosophy, large questions of method – what he once called ‘the cackle’ – were interesting enough in their way, but were little more really than gossipy distractions from the serious business.49

The ‘serious business’ was that of tackling specific philosophical problems and applying whatever method was most likely to produce results.

8 Conclusion It is fashionable these days to contrast the profound and ingenious Wittgenstein with the superficial and unoriginal ordinary language philosophers. This contrast is, however, deeply misguided. What we find, instead, are profound agreements as regards both the nature of language and the proper methods of philosophy, combined with interesting and important divergences. Nor is it simply a matter of the anti-Wittgensteinian Austin, the semi-Wittgensteinian J. L. Austin, ‘Ifs and Cans’, reprinted in his Philosophical Papers, 2nd edn, eds. J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 232. 48 Austin, ‘Ifs and Cans’, 232; see also Urmson and Warnock, ‘Comments’, 47. 49 G. J. Warnock, ‘John Langshaw Austin: A Biographical Sketch’, in Symposium on J.L. Austin, ed. K. T. Fann (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), 17; see also Urmson, ‘Austin’s Philosophy’, 24. 47

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Strawson and the Wittgensteinian Ryle. Instead, the similarities and differences cut across these figures. What we also find is a pronounced stylistic contrast between Wittgenstein’s aphorisms on the one hand, and the academic writings of Oxford conceptual analysts, on the other. But even as regards literary merit, this is not simply a contrast between better and worse. Ryle’s Concept of Mind is a contribution to English letters, just as the Philosophische Untersuchungen is to German letters.

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Wittgenstein’s Modernist Political Philosophy Thomas Wallgren

Wittgenstein did not write about the textbook problems of political philosophy. He did not participate in the work of the political parties or social movements of his time and he was certainly not a public intellectual. He lived in times of dramatic political upheavals but had very little to say about them. His sparse comments in notebooks, letters and conversations with friends on the political events of his times are often likely to strike his readers as superficial or repulsive or superficial and repulsive. (‘Russia: The passion is promising.’ ‘Europe needs not just one, but two big wars.’ ‘The bomb creates the prospect of the end, the destruction of a ghastly evil, of disgusting soapy water science and certainly that is not an unpleasant thought.’1) In light of all this, it is easy to conclude that Wittgenstein is irrelevant for political philosophy and for political debate. At most, we may think that what we can do is to make him relevant by using his ideas for our purposes in realms of philosophy and life that he did not address. There are many fine efforts of this kind. My main concern here is to present a case for thinking of Wittgenstein’s philosophy as having, at its very core, a vital and vibrant political dimension. The suggestion may strike my readers as a provocation. But that is not how it is meant. I would rather hope that it could be seen as a challenge whose critical edge is directed more to the modern imaginary of the political and of philosophy than to the imagery of Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein’s challenge moves, we might say, at a level of reflection not unlike what we find in the Nietzsche–Heidegger–Derrida tradition, but, I believe, with greater depth and precision. First quote from Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, Conversations Recorded by Friedrich Waisman, ed. Brian McGuinness (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979), 142; Second from personal communication with Georg Henrik von Wright, March 2003. See also ‘Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Personal Memoir’, in Wittgenstein, ed. G. H. von Wright (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982), 30; Third quote from CV, 56.

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I turn first to three creative trajectories in the discussion of the political dimension in Wittgenstein. I think they all miss part of the adventure, but in instructive ways. Having done with these, I submit some remarks suggesting how we may begin to re-examine the deep-seated links between Wittgenstein’s foundational work in the philosophy of logic and philosophy of language and the ideas of modern politics, autonomy and rational citizenship. Wittgenstein appears, in the end, as an exponent of a radically non-instrumental, presentist view of the relation between enlightenment and emancipation, similar more, perhaps, to that of Gandhi and Socrates than to that of Kant, Quine, Habermas or Foucault. His philosophy often lays bare how our words and the meaning they carry in our lives commit us in ways that are not always transparent to us. His investigations may change our understanding of our words and, hence, change us. As the words Wittgenstein investigates, and the many things we do with them, are important in our lives, his philosophy is a powerful intervention in the conditions for our self-understanding and culture.

1  Wittgenstein’s philosophy of meaning as the foundation of conservatism, socialism and liberalism The most popular way of constructing Wittgenstein as a key figure in political philosophy turns around a simple idea about links between political ideologies and Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language. The focus is on the notions of languagegames, form(s) of life and the connections between meaning and use of language in Wittgenstein’s later works. The interpretation given of Wittgenstein is that he relativizes standards of meaning and reason to the actual use of words in languagegames and the role they play in forms of life. David Bloor,2 following Anscombe, uses the term ‘linguistic idealism’ to capture the core idea. Other authors use the terms ‘contextualism’, ‘historicism’ and ‘relativism’. Relevant for us are two widely shared ideas: 1) Wittgenstein’s later philosophy of meaning is placed in relation to a large question about the possible objectivity of foundations and 2) Wittgenstein is read as arguing towards a non-objective, non-foundationalist, non-transcendental, ironic or ‘sceptical’ (in the negative, non-Pyrrhonian sense of scepticism) position or thesis on that question. Different writers draw rather different lessons for political philosophy from such readings. David Bloor, ‘The Question of Linguistic Idealism Revisited’, in The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein, eds. H. Sluga and David Stern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

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Nyiri is a well-known representative of the conservative variety of such readings. He notes, rightly, that some of Wittgenstein’s aesthetic preferences and attitudes to phenomena of his times are concomitant with conservatism on most definitions of that admittedly vague term. He moves on to claim ‘that he [Wittgenstein] was a conservative sans phrase’.3 Interesting for us is Nyiri’s insistence that Wittgenstein’s conservatism, or ‘traditionalism’ as Nyiri also calls it, derives from his philosophy. ‘The decisive element in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy’, Nyiri writes, ‘is his conception of meaning. By conceiving meaning in terms of use … he can escape philosophical individualism and thus stand in opposition to the modern age.’ Nyiri goes on to claim that Wittgenstein in his later philosophy set out to prove that ‘reason itself ’ is ‘grounded in traditions. … What has to be accepted, the given, is not explanations, but forms of life.’4 There are three interconnected points here. There is first the basic idea that only what is traditional can have meaning. The other is that it follows that there can be no legitimate criticism of linguistic traditions. The third point is that the two first points are made by Wittgenstein in his philosophy. My view is that Nyiri goes wrong on all three points because he operates with two obscure notions. One is the notion of (closed) traditions, which provide (acceptable) standards; the other is the notion of the new, which would have to be self-validating in order to have legitimacy, but cannot be so. But neither of these notions is clear enough to serve as a basis for our attitudes to ‘conservatism’ and traditions. I also think that Nyiri, and many others, go wrong when they seek to identify in Wittgenstein’s polyphonic text those statements that he endorsed and wanted his readers to sift out as the correct lessons. All efforts of that kind suffer, it seems to me, from a serious underestimation of the profundity of Wittgenstein’s transformative intervention in the Western discourse of philosophy. The idea that after a successful philosophical analysis, rational discussants will have arrived at truth and agreement, that they will see clearly, be liberated from illusion or that they will know how to go on has been important in Western philosophy. These ideas are shaken, I think, by the later Wittgenstein’s heteroglossic (or polyphonic) philosophy.5 J. C. Nyiri, Tradition and Individuality (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1992), 116. Quotes from Nyiri, Tradition and Individuality, 1992, 3 and 99. 5 See Alois Pichler, Wittgensteins Philosophische Untersuchungen: Vom Buch Zum Album (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004), David Stern, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Thomas Wallgren, Transformative Philosophy: Socrates, Wittgenstein and the Democratic Spirit of Philosophy (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2006); and ‘Queer Scepticism: Socrates, Sextus and Wittgenstein’, in Wittgenstein and the Sceptical Tradition, ed. Rui Romao (Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Bern, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Wien: Peter Lang, forthcoming). 3 4

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Ironically, Nyiri’s portrait of Wittgenstein as a conservative in matters political and cultural is based on essentially the same (mis)interpretation of Wittgenstein’s philosophy as the one shared by the many commentators who turn to Wittgenstein when they wish to vindicate their own anti-conservatism. Chantal Mouffe, whose self-appointed task is to renew the philosophical foundations of what she refers to as a ‘feminist’ politics of the ‘left’ and to promote ‘liberal socialism’, shares Nyiri’s basic idea of what we may learn from Wittgenstein.6 She writes: It is always possible to distinguish between the just and the unjust, the legitimate and the illegitimate, but this can only be done from within a given tradition, with the help of standards that this tradition provides.7

Nevertheless, while Mouffe agrees with Nyiri that Wittgenstein has explained why ‘there is no point of view external to all tradition’, her Wittgenstein transpires as a champion of left politics: Since for Wittgenstein language games are an indissoluble union between linguistic rules, objective situations and forms of life, tradition is the set of discourses and practices that form us as subjects. Thus we are able to think of politics as the pursuit of intimations, which in a Wittgensteinian perspective can be understood as the creation of new usages for key terms of a given tradition, and of their use in new language games that make new forms of life possible.8

Richard Rorty shares with Nyiri and Mouffe the two ideas that 1) Wittgenstein’s later philosophy shows that reason and meaning are relative to forms of life, traditions or language-games; and that 2) we can draw political lessons, for our purposes, from Wittgenstein’s discovery. Here is one example of how Rorty puts the basic point: The attempt to avoid relatedness, to think a single thought which is not simply a node in a web of other thoughts, to speak a word which has meaning even though it has no place in a social practice, is the urge to find a place which, if not above the heavens, is at least beyond chatter, beyond Geschwätz. But I think the later Wittgenstein concluded that there was no such place.9 Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political (London and New York: Verso, 2005, first edition 1993). Mouffe, Return, 15. 8 Ibid., and 17. 9 Richard Rorty, ‘Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the Reification of Language’, in Essays on Heidegger and Others, Philosophical Papers, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 65. 6 7

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One important difference between Rorty and Mouffe concerns political preferences. Rorty advocates a Deweyean pragmatism that is ‘downbeat, Alexandrian, social democrat’ ‘reformist’ and not utopian.10 Mouffe’s preferred political vocabulary is clearly upbeat. This difference has nothing to do with how Rorty and Mouffe understand Wittgenstein. There is, however, a philosophical issue involved in the political one. I think Rorty gets the point right: He notes, rightly, that there are many philosophers who think they represent the radical left who read the same master philosophers – Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, Derrida, Foucault and others – basically in the same way as Rorty does, as, let’s say, anti-foundationalists. But these radicals – Rorty calls them the school of resentment – hold ‘only in their meta-theory the Heidegger-Derrida view that the reality–appearance distinction is the archetypical “binary opposition” from whose clutches we must escape – in their theoretical practice they wallow in it’.11 Rorty notes that anti-essentialists of this kind often continue, paradoxically, to see ‘political theory and philosophy as foundational’.12 Rorty does not mention Mouffe. Nevertheless, the way in which Mouffe ends up admiring Carl Schmitt because we can get from him the guts to speak of ‘the political’, of ‘enemy and friend’ and of ‘the impossibility of a world without antagonism’, qualifies her eminently for the school of resentment rather than for the ironic political camp preferred by Rorty. In the latter camp, the first move is always ‘not to take philosophy as seriously as the Marxists or the Resenters take it’.13 Rorty’s irony has one clear advantage over Nyiri’s conservative and Mouffe’s socialist rendering of Wittgenstein. He avoids the blatant paradox that Nyiri and Mouffe get entangled in when they rely on their cultural relativist, antifoundationalist Wittgenstein as a foundation for the attitudes, views and programmes they cherish. But the price he pays for biting the bullet is high. In Rorty’s world of pragmatist irony, there is nothing we can be serious about insofar as we claim reason on our side. To many devout Wittgensteinians, the suggestion that Wittgenstein could have any affinity at all with a rejection of the seriousness of philosophy may seem absurd. But the serious question Rorty, hiding behind his frivolous mask, asks is this: How much and in what sense can 12 13 10 11

Richard Rorty, ‘Castoriadis, Unger, and the Romance of a National Future’ in Essays, 180. Rorty, ‘Castoriadis’, 185. Richard Rorty, ‘Philosophy as Science, as Metaphor, and as Politics’, in Essays, 25. Quotes from Mouffe, Return, 2 and 4; and Rorty, ’Castoriadis’, 186.

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reason claim authority as our guide in moral life? This question was, it seems to me, a serious one for Wittgenstein as well. I come back to this unpopular idea below. In the critical theory tradition, Karl-Otto Apel’s influential settling of the books with Wittgenstein remains, arguably, unsurpassed. The result is catastrophic: Apel rejects Wittgenstein and this rejection has made much of critical theory immune to a serious engagement with his later work ever since.14 Apel shares with the authors considered above the following basic ideas about how to place Wittgenstein in the context of political philosophy: 1) We can learn from him that only what is traditional can have meaning; 2) Because of (1), there can be no legitimate critical standards that surpass tradition; and 3) Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language and logic provides powerful arguments in favour of (1) and (2). Apel differs from Nyiri, Mouffe and Rorty not only in the richness of his exegetical and analytical footwork but also in taking clause 3 as a reason not to endorse Wittgenstein but to show him wrong. The result is Apel’s linguistic and pragmatist turn and his and Habermas’ work to construct the universally binding, transcendental ‘Letztbegründung’ (‘ultimate foundation’ – Apel) or quasi-transcendental foundation (Habermas) for a normatively powerful critical social, legal and political theory – a fine chapter in the history of critical theory. I will not dwell on it here. The point that is relevant for us is the core of Apel’s verdict about Wittgenstein. For him, Wittgenstein comes out as undermining the crucial Enlightenment idea that it is the task of philosophy to provide objective, rational grounds for critical discourse. (I will have reason to come back to another aspect of Habermas’s comments on Wittgenstein below.) Karl-Otto Apel, ‘Wittgenstein und Heidegger: Die Frage nach dem Sinn von Sein und die Sinnlosigkeisverdacht gegen alle Metaphysik’ in his Transformation der Philosophie, Band 1, Sprachananalytik, Semiotik, Hermeneutik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981, 1st edition 1973); ‘Wittgenstein und Heidegger: Kritische Wiederholung und Ergänzung eines Vergleichs’ in ‘Der Löwe spricht … und wir können ihn nicht verstehen’, eds. B. McGuinness et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991); ‘Zurück zur Normalität? – Oder könnten wir aus der nationalen Katastrophe etwas Besonderes gelernt haben? Das Problem des (welt-)geschichtlichen Übergangs zur postkonventionellen Moral in spezifisch deutscher Sicht’ in his Diskurs und Vertantwortung: Das Problem des Übergans zus postkonventionellen Moral (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988): 456. For Herbert Marcuse’s similar views on Wittgenstein, see his One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Aadvanced Industrial Society (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964). For Apel’s agreement with Marcuse, see p. 119 in Diskurs und Verantwortung. For Habermas’s agreement with Apel on Wittgenstein, see his ‘Gedanken bei der Vorbereitung einer Konferenz’ in ‘Der Löwe spricht …’, McGuiness et al. (eds). For disagreement from within the Frankfurt School with Apel, see Albrecht Wellmer, ‘Ludwig Wittgenstein: Über die Schwierigkeiten einer Rezeption seiner Philosophie und ihre Stellung zur Philosophie Adornos’ in ‘Der Löwe spricht …’, eds. McGuiness et al. For some discussion of Apel and Habermas’ Wittgenstein, see Wallgren, Transformative Philosophy, Ch. 5. In France, Lyotard interprets the later Wittgenstein as essentially an ‘empirical anthropologist’. See especially Le Différend (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1983). Lyotard does not, it seems to me, reach beyond the ‘form of life’ reading that we find in Nyiri, Mouffe and Rorty.

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2  Wittgenstein’s anti-political absolute ethics All authors considered so far are important for us in one respect: They have the right problem. It is in Wittgenstein’s work on the foundations of logic and meaning that his deepest relevance for political thinking can be found. But only if we improve on the reading of Wittgenstein as a licence for relativism. In Roy Holland’s and Raimond Gaita’s work, Wittgenstein appears as a major source of inspiration for a defence of the absolute nature of good and evil. The focus for both Holland and Gaita is a refutation of utilitarianism and consequentialism in ethics, but both consider political topics as well. Thus, they form a useful contrast to the authors considered so far. Holland relies not so much on the Philosophical Investigations, as on Wittgenstein’s ‘Lecture on Ethics’, to expound his views. He draws a distinction between people whose commitment to truthfulness is derived from a concern about upholding social order and others for whom the commitment not to falsify is a ‘spiritual demeanour’.15 The distinction is of fundamental importance for Holland and he draws a radical lesson for political philosophy from it. He writes: ‘To get the hang of this spiritual possibility’ of people who are in touch with the absolute, one must make connections of a special kind. They must ‘swing attention back from societal considerations to the orientation of individuals, that  is to say towards something that concerns each individual separately’.16 In politics, we are concerned with ‘societal considerations’. Hence, we can derive a simple lesson from Holland’s Wittgenstein: what is most important in moral life concerns absolute evil and goodness; these paramount concerns are absent from politics, and therefore, we should turn our backs on politics.17 Gaita follows Holland in emphasizing the fundamental importance for our thinking about ethics of the irreducibility of our separate individuality. In a discussion where the context is that ‘one is to be shot to “save” ten’ he writes: ‘Each one of us [who will be saved] must accept the fact that insofar as he was murdered for our sake, he died for each singly and undivided. Each of us, in his singularity, is implicated in the evil of his murder. There are ten of us but we do not make a “ten”. … Someone cannot die a little for one and a little for another.’18 But Gaita is less quick than Holland in dismissing politics as impossible. Leaning Roy Holland, ‘Is Goodness a Mystery?’, in Against Empiricism: On Education. Epistemology and Value (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), 107. Holland, ‘Is Goodness a Mystery?’, 108. 17 See also Holland’s essay ‘Absolute Ethics: Mathematics and the Impossibility of Politics’ in Against Empiricism. 18 Raimond Gaita, Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception, 2nd edn (London: Rouledge, 2004), 60. 15

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on Merleau-Ponty’s Humanisme et terreur: essai sur la problème communiste, Gaita has an interesting discussion of Brecht and Che Guevara. For them, doing evil became, according to Gaita, a thing a person must take on himself in his separate individuality.19 Gaita praises Brecht for giving good and evil their full weight on non-consequentialist terms.20 But he goes on to claim that, at the end of the day, Brecht goes wrong because he is still too close to the consequentialists in the following sense: the compassion that drove him had this quality that it ‘disguised the profound disrespect expressed in the way he looked upon those for whom he did evil’.21 In this way, for Gaita, too, Wittgenstein becomes a political philosopher who can teach us that political involvement is not possible for the good man: It is not possible because politics would inevitably involve its practitioners in some form of abstraction from the reality of the other as a moral subject and all such reasoning takes us away, absolutely, from the absolute good and evil that is the core of moral life. Gaita has an interesting discussion of the other side of the coin: the necessity of politics. He claims that it is ‘not accidental to politics’ that ‘a government constrained by the belief that it is better to suffer evil than to do it … will surrender its people as a hostage to the improbable good fortune that they will have no enemy sufficiently wicked or cunning to attack them in ways which leave them with only evil means of defence’.22 If Gaita’s verdict is correct, the situation of each of us involves a host of rather unpleasant challenges. Can we leave the unavoidable evil of politics to others? Would that be evil? Should everyone leave politics and society to others? Can we live outside society in such an absolute way that the necessary evil of society does not affect us? Rewarding clues to an investigation of these questions are, it seems to me, available in Gandhi’s proposal that those who are serious in political work don’t worry about being exterminated, in his vision of swaraj and in his elaboration of the idea that the power of non-violence and truth is greater than the power of violence.23 But I do not see that Gaita and the use he makes of Wittgenstein is helpful at this point. The great merit of the way Holland and Gaita place Wittgenstein in the context of political philosophy is that they call attention to the deep moral engagement that runs through everything he wrote. In his famous letter to Gaita, Good and Evil, 183. Ibid., 251. 21 Ibid., 71. 22 Ibid., 252 and 257. 23 Raghavan Iyer (ed.), The Moral and Political Writings of Mahatma Gandhi, 3 volumes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986 and 1987). 19 20

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Ficker, Wittgenstein wrote that ‘the point of the book [Tractatus] is ethical’.24 Similarly, it seems to me, Wittgenstein’s later work is through and through an ethical struggle. To give just one indication of what I mean by this, consider the first sentence of the second remark in the Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein writes (with reference to an idea of meaning that he suggests we find in St. Augustine): ‘That philosophical notion of meaning is at home in a primitive idea of the way language functions.’ The fact that Wittgenstein wanted to place this word ‘primitive’ here has rarely been given its full weight. With this word, Wittgenstein announces, it seems to me, what all is at stake in everything he subsequently writes about meaning and language. If our understanding of language is primitive and if Wittgenstein’s investigation searches for a more mature view, then it is an engagement that always also carries a moral value.25 I come back to this impossibly large topic briefly below.

3  Particularism, therapeutic Wittgenstein and politics A third way of relating Wittgenstein’s philosophy to thinking about politics comes from those who interpret Wittgenstein as a ‘therapeutic philosopher’26 and as a particularist about moral issues. I turn to an essay by James Tully as exemplary of the tendency I have in mind. Tully’s goal is to draw attention to, and so enable us to free ourselves from, a widespread but mistaken convention of contemporary political thought: that our way of life is free and rational only if it is founded on some form or other of critical reflection.27

Tully’s argument turns around a distinction between understanding and interpretation. He claims that ‘to interpret a sign is to take it as one expression Ludwig Wittgenstein, Briefe an Ludwig von Ficker (Salzburg: Otto Müller Verlag, 1969), 35. A lot here depends on what we make of the terms ethics, politics and moral. We can define ethical questions as questions that arise in people’s relations to people they know personally and political questions as questions that arise in people’s relations to people they do not know personally. We can also define moral questions as the sum of ethical and political questions. The demeanour of many modern liberals (and many modern philosophers are liberals) is infected, it appears to me, by an implicit, unthinking appeal to an understanding that the definitions I propose explicate and a likewise unthinking absorption of the idea that ethical questions have greater moral weight than political questions and constitute the proper core area of moral philosophy. 26 On the therapeutic (or ‘resolute’) interpretation of Wittgenstein, see, for instance, Cora Diamond, ‘Throwing Away the Ladder’, in her The Realistic Spirit, and James Conant, ‘The Method of the Tractatus’ in From Frege to Wittgenstein: Perspectives on Early Analytic Philosophy, ed. E. Reck (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 27 James Tully, ‘Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy: Understanding Practices of Critical Reflection’, in The Grammar or Politics: Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy, ed. Cressida J. Heyes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), pp. 17–42. 24 25

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rather than another. In contrast, to understand a sign is not to possess a sedimented opinion about it or to take it as something, but to be able to grasp it; that is, to act with it, using it in agreement and disagreement with customary ways.’28 Tully thinks we can infer from this that, ‘as Wittgenstein recommends’, we can ‘clarify the meaning and limits of interpretation’ by ‘carefully surveying and discriminating … between interpretation, deconstruction, evaluation, explanation, examination … and so on’. What we will then learn, Tully suggests, is that ‘no type of critical reflection can play the mythical role of founding patriarch of our political life … because any practice of critical reflection is itself already founded in the popular sovereignty of our multiplicity’.29 Tully’s rhetoric sounds rather like Mouffe’s and his philosophical use of Wittgenstein also has similarities with Nyiri’s and Rorty’s. Nevertheless, his framework is not defined by the foundation vs. no-foundation controversy. Tully does not say that Wittgenstein shows universals, absolutes and foundations to be impossible. His claim is rather that there is no question about such matters to be addressed. When Tully writes, as we saw, that he ‘draws attention to’ so-and-so and by doing so ‘frees’ us from a ‘mistaken convention’ by means of a survey, he may be rephrased, without loss of content or intention I think, in the idiom of the therapeutic tradition in the reception of Wittgenstein. We can then write: the conditions, or the prejudice, that makes us believe that ‘some form [of critical reflection] must be foundational’30 is the result of illusions that, even though they are upheld by convention, need to be dissolved.31 Now, I do not doubt that it may sometimes be virtuous to speak about ‘our multiplicity of humdrum ways of acting’ instead of submitting to just ‘one regime of critical reflection’.32 Wittgenstein certainly stressed the importance of being alert to differences in order to avoid illegitimate generalization. But it would be reductive to think of Wittgenstein as a programmatic particularist or therapist and we can hardly do justice to his effort to ‘sketch landscapes’ if we fetishize particularity and mystify multiplicity.33 In view of these remarks, my response to Tully’s stated goal that I quoted would start thus: It may be unclear what someone means when he says that political life Tully, ‘Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy’, p. 40. Ibid., p. 41. 30 Ibid., p. 17. 31 Cf. James Conant, ‘Method of the Tractatus’. 32 Tully, ‘Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy’, p. 41. 33 A first step to avoid fetishization can be taken by asking: Particular instances of what? Multiple humdrum of what? The quote is from the Preface to Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. 28 29

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is free and rational only if it is founded on some form or other of critical reflection, but it does not follow that the unclear notion is either false or nonsensical. More importantly, it does not follow that any progress has been made if we supplanted that thesis with an (apparently?) opposite thesis, for instance this: Our way of (political) life is free and rational only if it (completely?) gets rid of the idea that it needs to be founded on some form or other of critical reflection.

4  Wittgenstein’s modernist transformation of the progressive project of enlightenment Here is, first, a disclaimer: when I go on to explain in what way and what sense there is an important political dimension in everything Wittgenstein wrote, the claim is not that it was important to Wittgenstein that there is such a dimension. In particular, I think it would be wrong to say that Wittgenstein was motivated by a desire to effect philosophical, social, political or cultural change. Wittgenstein was, I believe, above all searching for clarity about his own thoughts, words and life and for enhanced responsibility for them. If this is true, we can say that Wittgenstein’s aim in philosophy was self-understanding and self-determination: a modern quest and also a Socratic one. How, then, was it political? Here is the skeleton of my answer in six steps.

Step 1 We distinguish between an everyday conception of politics, P(E) and the Socratic conception of real politics, P(R).34 According to P(E), politics is defined by subject matters, institutions, practices and the words we use to speak about these. On this P(E) conception, when we speak and philosophize about politics, we speak of power, the state, democracy, representation, oppression, inclusion, borders, war, etc. On the Socratic, P(R), conception, we speak about politics also when we speak about the habits of thought, the prejudice, the conventions and the preconceptions that define or circumscribe what is possible to say and think about the matters of P(E). With this first step towards giving content to the P(E)/P(R) distinction, we can observe an affinity between P(R) and what in some traditions is called Apology, 30e and 36c.

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knowledge/truth and in others, discursive power or ideology or, perhaps especially, in the case of Socrates and Wittgenstein, philosophy. We can, of course, declare that we reserve all the terms in the ‘politics family’ (the political, political philosophy, political theory) for P(E). If that is what we want to do, Wittgenstein’s philosophy is by stipulation not of political interest. But such stipulation will not help us understand the issues.

Step 2 Consider the propositions P1–P3: P1: Many people, including many philosophers, think that reason and science, and also philosophical theories and arguments, support the notion that it is intellectually responsible to be a ‘naturalist’ (and at least not an ‘animist’ or ‘vitalist’). Some of them think that it is part of being a naturalist that one endorses the notion that for the understanding of mental health, the study of the brain is paramount. Some of these people also think that neuroscience provides keys to the rational manipulation of the brain, for instance with psychiatric drugs, and thereby to the improvement of mental health. But now, some people claim that much suffering has been caused by an overdiagnosis of mental disorders in a way not supported by the scientific evidence and by an ensuing overprescription of psychiatric drugs.35 We may ask: What responsibility can and should philosophers take, if any, in the debates about the possible connections between the widespread acceptance of naturalism about the mind and the suffering that may be due to such overdiagnosis and overprescription? The question looms large, but this much seems clear: Wittgenstein’s philosophy contains rich resources for discussion of naturalism and, thereby, for debates that are of significance for health policies, resource allocation in research and social welfare and connected issues. P2: Many leading politicians, many citizens in Europe, many social scientists and many economists think that economics has a claim to exactness that is unique in social science, and that this claim to exactness gives us a good reason to give economists an authority, perhaps greater than that given to other social scientists, when discussing public policies. Some people think that this idea of a positive link between economics, exactness and rational and beneficial use of political power is, in view of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, based on

See, for example, Peter Gøtzche, Deadly Psychiatry and Organized Denial (Kindle, 2016); Robert Whitaker and Lisa Cosgrove, Psychiatry Under the Influence (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

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an inflated notion of exactness in mathematics as a privileged or foundational form of exactness. This notion is often linked to a likewise inflated idea of the rationality of science as a privileged form of rationality, and to an obscure and much overrated confidence in the idea that when there is what scientists think of as progress in science, good things will follow.36 P3: There are deep-seated links between the following: the evolution of game theory in the twentieth century, the idea that game theory can serve as a basis for a scientific theory of rational behaviour and the development of the military doctrines of the United States called Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) and Nuclear Utilization Targeting Selection (NUTS). We have reason to believe that Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mathematics provides powerful tools for a critical discussion, especially, of the second idea just mentioned.37

Step 3 Consider these questions: Q1:  What is the political significance of P1–P3? Q2: What is the significance for political philosophy of P1–P3 and of how we answer Q1?

Step 4 Here is one way of beginning a conversation on the basis of steps 1–3. As noted before, we can say, by way of stipulation, that P1–P3 are not political propositions. And we can say that, therefore, Wittgenstein is not important for political philosophy, no matter how important his philosophy may be for what we think about psychiatric drugs, nuclear war or about the right role of economists in public debate. But we can also say that such stipulation is not very interesting if our interest is in the life of the polis and our place in the polis.

Step 5 Question: Am I proposing that Wittgenstein’s philosophy is meta-politics? Or that it is meta-meta-politics? Here is a comment. When Wittgenstein writes ‘Stand roughly here’ (PI, §88), how much longer can we fail to see this as a political statement, critical of the political authority given today to economists? 37 I owe the idea suggested in P3 to S. M. Amadae, author of Prisoners of Reason: Game Theory and Neoliberal Political Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 36

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When some members of the Vienna Circle published their manifesto for a scientific world view, their purpose was progress, progress for mankind. Their conviction was that such across-the-board progress would be served by advancing a philosophy that provides scientific progress with its rational foundation. The Vienna Circle manifesto is a paradigmatic example of what we may call ‘philosophy as meta-politics’. Philosophers are rarely as explicit as the Vienna Circle was in the manifesto or as Carnap was in his preface to Der Logische Aufbau der Welt (1928). But much analytical philosophy, and much Marxist and phenomenological philosophy (obviously, not all), partakes in this same idea, according to which the worth of philosophy consists in this ‘metapolitical’ mission of providing its service to the progress of reason and science and, hence, to the good of all. The philosophy of Frankfurt School critical theory (and of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault and others) can now be seen as meta-meta-politics. It contributes to the progress of philosophy and when it does this, it shows that the progress of reason and science leads to catastrophe for mankind (Horkheimer and Adorno) or that only if scientific reason can be integrated into a comprehensive realization of reason will its progress contribute to the good (Habermas). Is Wittgenstein’s philosophy meta-meta-politics in the sense of the Frankfurt School? Earlier, I noted Habermas’s overall agreement with Apel on Wittgenstein’s role in the debate about the foundations of reason. Nevertheless, in Habermas’s comments on Wittgenstein, there is sometimes also a different tone. It comes out when Habermas portrays Wittgenstein as standing in continuity with a specifically German tradition in the philosophy of language originating from Hamann and reaching, via Humboldt, Nietzsche and Heidegger, to Adorno as well. The salient feature here is the concentration on the world-forming (‘weltbildende’), eye-opening (‘augenöffnende’) and simultaneously restricting (‘vorenthaltende’) function of language as the core of a philosophy, which resigns from its problem-solving (‘problemlösende’) tasks.38 As Habermas notes, this tradition has developed since Hamann’s criticism of Enlightenment in the context of an opposition to a rationalist notion of the tasks of philosophy. I agree with Habermas that the history of this German tradition and of the opposition to it is an important chapter in the modern history of philosophy. (It goes into the obscure but influential idea Habermas, ‘Gedanken bei der Vorbereitung einer Konferenz’ in Der Löwe spricht …, McGuiness et al. (eds), 26.

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of a ‘divide’ between continental and analytical philosophy.) The important thing about Wittgenstein that Habermas does not see is that he allows us to overcome the conflictual constellation. The trick resides, to take one example, in how Wittgenstein overcomes the intellectually and morally primitive, Augustinian, representationalist and (pseudo-)rationalistic idea of the way language functions. The how in Wittgenstein is unique in four respects: (1) Wittgenstein does not undermine the element of truth in the primitive idea. He wants to understand what that truth is, how far it reaches, and where it does not reach.39 (2) Wittgenstein does not undermine our confidence that it is by way of reason that we can bring clarity and enhanced self-determination into our understanding of meaning and language. But he transforms our notion of what it is to learn from an argument in two ways. (3) We learn that no matter what kind of issue we have at hand, it need not be a mark of failure of our arguments or of our reason if it does not bring conclusions or insights everyone who understands the argument will or ought to agree with. (4) We also learn that the transformation that Wittgenstein achieves in the Philosophical Investigations regarding what we may think reason is serves as an example of how philosophy can overcome the conflictual constellation that Habermas has brought attention to. The Philosophical Investigations has, it seems to me, the power to change our understanding of how to accomplish a satisfactory philosophy of meaning and language and of what a satisfactory achievement in these fields may be like. It would (pace Russell) be rather odd to say that Wittgenstein’s intervention is not ‘problem-solving’ or that it undermines philosophy or our trust in reason. It is more natural, and more accurate, to say, as many have argued, that we can learn from it. But Wittgenstein’s philosophy is also ‘eye-opening’. It has the power to change and enrich our Weltbild, thanks to its original, progressive, modernist employment of philosophical reason and argument. Do these aspects of Wittgenstein’s philosophy make him a political philosopher? Perhaps so, in the following way: Philosophy is an ambitious form of reasoning. Some, Plato and Aristotle for instance, have said that it is the most ambitious form of reasoning there is. For Aristotle, it was a matter of definition that any rational effort is worthy of the name philosophy only insofar as it realizes the most ambitious form of reasoning possible. Later, this definition has acquired normative weight. Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations is, like Descartes’s Discourse, and Kant’s First Critique, an intervention in the grammar See David Stern, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, chs. 1 and 4.

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of philosophy. It is an exemplar of what philosophy may become when it is taken to new heights. Is Wittgenstein’s intervention tantamount to an undermining of reason? Is this the case insofar as there is an intrinsic link between his philosophy and his negative views about modernity and scientific progress? I think not. Wittgenstein shows us that insofar as we see his philosophy as bringing new insights about the topics he discusses – such as what it is to say something, or what it is to follow a rule in basic arithmetic, or what the ‘crystalline purity’ of logic is like – and insofar as we see these insights as yielding surprising and perhaps disturbing insights about what reason and rationality are like, we also see him as transforming in unexpected ways our concepts of reason and rationality and of how they are connected to the idea of progress. Let us assume that Wittgenstein’s philosophy has this power, that it rationalizes reason, but in surprising ways. It is a rationalization that transforms our understanding of reason, philosophy and progress; of what they are like when they are at their best, or, if you prefer, taken to the extreme. (Wittgenstein: The Enlightenment Extremist.) Is this a modernist intervention? Yes, if we take modernism to consist only in the transgression of old norms. Yes also, if we take modernism as claiming to transgress in order to realize, to fulfil, what our predecessors were always searching for. But, then, modernism, even up to Nietzsche and Artaud, Adorno, Warhol and Deleuze, always proclaimed loyalty to an alternative project of emancipation. They promised service: that what they have discovered is liberating for others. But what about Wittgenstein’s transformation of the concept of reason? Is it an emancipatory transformation in this sense? Does his philosophy stand with freedom against unfreedom? With justice against injustice? With the good against evil? Or does Wittgenstein undermine our confidence that reason is a friend of the good and that enlightenment serves emancipation? The answer is, I think, the following: Wittgenstein himself was not an optimist about what his kind of philosophy might bring for himself and for others. It seems to me that he was, like Tolstoy, whose work he admired, a Christian thinker in that obvious and precise sense in which Plato’s Socrates was antithetical to Christianity. While Socrates insists that only the life spent examining self and others is worth living,40 Wittgenstein did, I think, always think that it is not up to us to tell whether this life or that life is worth living. Apology 38a. Emphasis added.

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Wittgenstein thought that the philosophical life he had lived had been a good life for him. But it also seems to me that Wittgenstein thought that there are worthwhile ways of living in which philosophical examination does not play a role, at least not an important one. Philosophy of the radically rationalized, extreme kind that Wittgenstein practised is an engagement with the bewitchment of our thinking and lives by unclear concepts and habits of thought. It has the power to transform concepts and, thereby, to transform us and our conditions of community, of conviviality. But the transformation it delivers does not come with a promise that from now on things will go well. Old confusions may go away, but perhaps new ones will arise. We might say: The price Wittgenstein requires us to pay, if we follow his path towards a transformative philosophy that overcomes the tension between world-disclosing philosophy and scientific rationalism, is that we can no longer afford to think that reason liberates us from the risks and danger that belong to changes in Weltbild.41

Step 6 On how Wittgenstein’s philosophy is a modernist political philosophy. If I have been on the right track, Wittgenstein’s philosophy is not a modernist political philosophy in the Jacobin or Marxist sense or in Quine’s sense: It does not come with a promise that the future will redeem those who employ it in their work for progress. It is, rather, a modernist political philosophy in the sense of Baudelaire and Gandhi, and perhaps of Derrida and Irigaray. When we engage in it, we reach now, in our unique position in history, for a friendly community with those who are in this moment willing to share with us the promises and risks of reasoned transgression that it may bring. If so, Wittgenstein transformed the (modern, progressivist) idea that reason is excused by what it does for the future and the (Socratic) idea that reasoning is the only excuse for being human into the idea that commitment to reason is one possible excuse for human beings to live now. Such was, as I submit, Wittgenstein’s queer intervention into the modern imaginary of the political and of the links between reason and progress. Is that intervention a political intervention? It seems to me proper to stop here, for the time being.

The discussion in Step 5 builds on Wallgren, Transformative and Wallgren, Sceptical Tradition.

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Too Cavellian a Wittgenstein: Wittgenstein’s Certainty, Cavell’s Scepticism1 Danièle Moyal-Sharrock

Modernism is notably difficult to circumscribe and, therefore, whether or not Wittgenstein is a modernist will be equally so. If modernism is broadly defined as a dissatisfaction with the past or present mostly due to a crisis of representation, a case can be made for Wittgenstein’s modernism. But modernism is more pointedly characterized as also including a distrust of language (its reliability or adequacy) along with the will, penetrated by a rejection of certainty, to overcome scepticism. These traits, for some commentators of Wittgenstein, notably Stanley Cavell, also characterize Wittgenstein’s philosophy. I will argue, mostly contra Cavell, that they do not. This would preclude Wittgenstein – both early and late – from being a modernist in any but a broad, vague sense. My aim in this chapter is to show that Cavell’s modernist Wittgenstein is too Cavellian. Wittgenstein’s philosophy is not – as Cavell claims it is – permeated with (1) a nostalgia for metaphysics; (2) a dissatisfaction with language and criteria; (3) an ineluctable scepticism; all prompting (4) Existential devastation and angst. I will not deal with these themes seriatim but, rather, allow them to occur naturally in the course of the argument. I will conclude that Cavell reads his own preoccupations into Wittgenstein and that this prevents him from seeing that Wittgenstein’s certainty logically dismisses scepticism. Cavell’s Wittgenstein is still a groundbreaking philosopher, but seen through Cavell’s modernist glass darkly, his philosophy breeds disappointment, alienation and scepticism where it, in fact, sows enlightenment, community and certainty.

I am indebted to Paul Standish for his invaluable comments on a previous draft of this chapter and to Anat Matar for her probing reading of the final draft and her helpful comments. My thanks also go to the Sorbonne Wittgenstein Seminar for an enlightening discussion.

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Before examining what Cavell has to say about the Wittgenstein of the Investigations, I will briefly argue that the early Wittgenstein’s view of language is not the bleak view it is often made out to be.

1  Tractarian language and silence Dissatisfaction with language is characteristic of modernism, something Ben Ware confirms in his recent book: Dialectic of the Ladder: Wittgenstein, the Tractatus and Modernism: Modernism’s deepest loneliness is rooted in its feeling of dissatisfaction with everyday or ordinary language. This dissatisfaction finds itself expressed in a number of different and often radically contradictory ways. On the one hand, we find a number of key modernist writers attempting to emancipate, to clarify, or to purify language, because, as they see it, language is being blocked, denatured or contaminated by the modern world. On the other hand, we find many writers preoccupied with the acute failure of language in the face of modern experience; and we thus see in their work a turning towards the themes of ineffability and science. Both of these trends … perceive everyday language to be fundamentally inadequate.2

Ware finds that ‘numerous attempts have been made to locate the Tractatus somewhere on this modernist-linguistic spectrum. In addition to the “limits of language” readings …, exegetes have interpreted the work as striving towards the ideal of “linguistic purity” or as attempting to express the “disenchantment of language, its systematic failure to put experience into words”’ (120). I agree with Anat Matar, our editor, that the Tractatus is expressive of the crisis of representation and the demise of eternal metaphysical and ethical truths,3 but I do not see it as revealing the depths of the hubris embedded in the Western conception of language in its affirmation that all philosophers can do is demonstrate the failure to formulate meaningful philosophical propositions. Somewhat related to this view is the reductively therapeutic (henceforth, referred to simply as ‘Therapeutic’) reading of Wittgenstein.4 Ben Ware, Dialectic of the Ladder: Wittgenstein, the Tractatus and Modernism (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 119f. Anat Matar, Modernism and the Language of Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2006), ch. 1. 4 This reductively Therapeutic vision of Wittgenstein was promoted by the New Wittgensteinians, thus called because of the publication of what might be called their manifesto volume, The New Wittgenstein (London: Routledge, 2000). Notable ‘New Wittgensteinians’ are Cora Diamond, James Conant, Alice Crary, Rupert Read. 2

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The upshot of the Therapeutic reading is that it leaves (and says Wittgenstein leaves) nothing positive in its wake – at least, nothing but dissolution: the dissolution of images or views. Granted, therapy aims to change our attitude – rightly curing philosophers from a metaphysico-scientific tendency to theorize and explain, leaving us with a relatively untendentious attitude to the world – but the last thing the Therapeutic philosopher hopes we get from this is a new view.5 As David Stern succinctly puts it: ‘On [the Cavell/Therapeutic] reading, the aim of Wittgenstein’s dialogues is not to lead his reader to any philosophical view, neither an idealised, frictionless theory of language, nor a pragmatic theory of ordinary language, but rather to help us through such ways of speaking and looking.’6 But the Therapeutic reading fails to grasp that there is a difference between a tendentious view and a perspicuous one, and that Wittgenstein does want to give us the latter. As Brian McGuinness writes: ‘The therapy is not just a catharsis: there is an element of seeing the world aright at the end.’7 It is a commonplace to think of the Tractatus as silencing us. Yet listen: ‘What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence’ (TLP, §7). Does ‘what we cannot speak about’ or ‘being passed over in silence’ mean not being susceptible of expression at all? Of course not. For, ‘speaking’ here has a specific, narrow definition that does not exclude other kinds of expression. What we can speak about, what can be said, Wittgenstein tells us, are the propositions of natural science (6.53). That is, what can be true or false; what is verifiable: empirical propositions. What, on the other hand, cannot be said is what can neither be confirmed nor refuted by experience. This is why the propositions of logic say nothing (5.43); and why the ethical and the aesthetic are not sayable (6.421). Our words will give us ‘facts, facts, and facts but no Ethics’ (LE, 40). The ‘mere description’ of the facts of a murder, in all its physical and psychological detail, ‘will contain nothing which we could call an ethical proposition. The murder will be on exactly the same level as any other event, for instance the falling of a stone’ (LE, 39). This is a version of the fact-value distinction. Value cannot be said because all that can be said is natural (or factual) meaning, and value For Hutchinson and Read, ‘Wittgenstein’s elucidations (and perspicuous presentations) throughout his career have to be recognized as of transitional, purpose-relative and “personal” use only.’ P. Hutchinson and R. Read, ‘An Elucidatory Interpretation of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: A Critique of Daniel D. Hutto’s and Marie McGinn’s Reading of Tractatus 6.54’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies 14, no. 1, 1–29 (2006): 3. 6 David Stern, ‘The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy’, in The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein, eds. H. Sluga and D. Stern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 444. 7 B. McGuinness, ‘Two Cheers for the “New” Wittgenstein?’, in Wittgenstein’s Early Philosophy, ed. J. Zalabardo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 267. 5

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is supernatural. This does not mean that value finds no expression; only that its expression is not, and should not be confused with, empirical or natural/ factual expression. The ethical value of the murder cannot be said for there are no ethical propositions; it can only show itself in what is said. In ‘On Heidegger on Being and Dread’, written in 1929 (same year as the Lecture on Ethics), Wittgenstein writes: Man feels the urge to run up against the limits of language. Think for example of the astonishment that anything at all exists. This astonishment cannot be expressed in the form of a question, and there is also no answer whatsoever. Anything we might say is a priori bound to be nonsense. Nevertheless we do run up against the limits of language. … This running-up against the limits of language is ethics. (WVC, 68)

Here again, the tendency is to think of the ‘limits of language’ as an ineptitude of language, and of nonsense as gibberish. The former is a misreading of Wittgenstein, and the latter a reductive reading. In this passage, the human urge to collide with the limits of language – that is with the ineffable and the nonsensical – is the urge, discouraged by Wittgenstein in the Tractatus, to say something where nothing can be said. But this, in keeping with earlier remarks in the book, should be taken to mean not to treat as an empirical proposition (to say) something that is not; as for instance, treating the astonishment that anything at all exists as an empirical proposition, as something that can be a claim (a question), rather than as something that underpins all questions and cannot itself be questioned. I do not hear, in the above passage, Wittgenstein expressing his frustration with the expressive or descriptive potential of language, but only his warning that a category mistake is being made in our urge to treat the logical as empirical, to mistake the unquestionable (of which the ethical and the logical are part) for empirical propositions. What is ineffable is of great value to Wittgenstein, from beginning to end. It is a mistake on the part of the Therapeutes to have sought to minimize its importance and to disparage so-called Ineffabilists – philosophers who, like Peter Hacker, see some nonsense as ‘illuminating’ – for ‘chickening out’, for not being ‘resolute’ enough to recognize that all nonsense is ‘plain nonsense’, that is, gibberish. And this, in spite of such passages in the Tractatus8 as the following:

As also Wittgenstein’s acknowledgement, in a letter to Ludwig Ficker, that the important part of the Tractatus was the silent part: ‘My work consists of two parts: the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important one.’

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Understanding Wittgenstein, Understanding Modernism There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical. (6.522) My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical. (6.54)

To read Wittgenstein here as rejecting his own philosophical remarks – treating them as gibberish – is not to see that there are multifarious ways for something to be nonsense, and that they are not all derogatory.9 Such a reductive interpretation is due to our default derogatory understanding of nonsense – an understanding singled out by the Therapeutic reading of nonsense as uniquely and necessarily gibberish, and of ineffability (and the related distinction between saying and showing) as something Wittgenstein is merely parodying. The latter in spite of such clear pronouncements by Wittgenstein as that ‘the unutterable will be – unutterably – contained in what has been uttered’ (EL, 7), and testimony by Engelmann that ‘Wittgenstein passionately believes that all that really matters in human life is precisely what, in his view, we must be silent about’10 (EL, 97). Language remains essential even where it only stages, rather than articulates, meaning – as in literature, where language is used to create the context necessary for the important unutterable to show itself.11 For Wittgenstein, silence is not always a muting of meaning but often a manifestation (showing) of meaning. The first Wittgenstein is not a sceptic about language. In seeking to explain what he means by absolute or ethical value, he says that the experience par excellence that would describe it is that of ‘wonder at the existence of the world’ – a wonder that cannot be said and is nonsensical because only empirical propositions have sense and can be said (TLP, §6.53): ‘It is nonsense to say that I wonder at the existence of the world, because I cannot imagine it not existing’ (LE, 41f.). There is no linguistic scepticism here. The sensicality of language is affirmed when it comes to empirical propositions; and when it comes to ethics, aesthetics, mysticism, their meaning cannot be said but can be shown in the use of language, as for example, in literature. For a reading of Tractarian nonsense as neither merely gibberish (as it is for Diamond) nor merely a violation of sense (as it is for Hacker), see D. Moyal-Sharrock, ‘The Good Sense of Nonsense: A Reading of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus as Non self-repudiating’, Philosophy 82, no. 1 (2007): 147–77. 10 This is a precursor to Wittgenstein’s notion that the non-scientific aspect of human life is not susceptible of exact statement or of evidence, but only of ‘imponderable evidence’. 11 Where literature is concerned, the important unutterable is mostly the ethical. For a discussion, see D. Moyal-Sharrock, ‘Wittgenstein and Leavis: Literature and the Enactment of the Ethical’, Philosophy and Literature 40, no. 1 (2016): 240–64.  9

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Wittgenstein came to add many tools to the linguistic toolbox, but I do not see him ever retracting his position on the ineffable nature of ethics, aesthetics and the mystical; and, indeed, he adds certainty to the list of the important ineffable.12 These are not instances of language going on holiday, but cases where language is wrongly taken to be empirically saying because ‘man feels the urge to run up against the limits of language’ – the urge, that is, to see truth and falsity in what are logico-grammatical limits, bounds of sense. There is, then, no dissatisfaction with language on the part of the early Wittgenstein, but only an attempt at a more perspicuous ordering, or presentation, of language. What about the later Wittgenstein?

2  The estrangement of the ordinary For Wittgenstein, ‘the method of philosophy’ is ‘the perspicuous presentation of grammatical/linguistic facts’ (P, 171); indeed, the ‘concept of a perspicuous presentation is of fundamental significance for us. It earmarks the form of account we give, the way we look at things’ (PI, §122). A ‘perspicuous presentation’ requires that the philosopher look with renewed attention at that which, in ordinary life, we no longer see for having it constantly before our eyes. The philosophical gaze at the ordinary must be sufficiently distanced or naive (rid of prejudice) so as to perceive the ordinary as unfamiliar or strange – that is estranged – and proceed to a more perspicuous vision and presentation of it. But, unlike Cavell, I do not see that Wittgenstein finds the ordinary uncanny or the sought-after strangeness worrisome.13 In a 2002 interview in French, Cavell says about the Freudian notion of ‘inquiétante étrangeté’ that it is ‘also present in Wittgenstein, slightly differently, but present’: What happens in Wittgenstein? In the activity of our life, we are in the middle of an activity of language: we speak, we buy, we do things, and all of a sudden we stop in order to realize that we do not understand what we are doing. And then, as we reflect on that, we do not understand what we are in the middle of See D. Moyal-Sharrock, Understanding Wittgenstein’s On Certainty (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004/2007), 94–7 on the ineffability of basic certainty. 13 Cavell speaks of ‘the uncanniness of the ordinary’ or ‘the extreme oddness of the everyday world’ (S. Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 105). In French translations of Cavell (which he approved), ‘uncanniness’ is translated as ‘inquiétante étrangeté’ (literally: ‘worrisome strangeness’), thereby stressing the ‘worrisome’ connotation in the notion of the uncanny. 12

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Understanding Wittgenstein, Understanding Modernism saying. And so it is in this series of stages that there is for me in Wittgenstein an experience very similar to that of the uncanny.14

I must say I have no idea where Cavell finds this problematization of the ordinary in Wittgenstein other than in the distantiation or estrangement that I spoke of just now and which is not at all worrying, but sought-after and positive. Cavell goes as far as to say that ‘the everyday is what we cannot but aspire to, since it appears to us as lost to us’,15 but this seems to me an exalted formulation of the fact that Wittgenstein sees the ordinary as rendered opaque by familiarity. Wittgenstein is merely saying that the quotidian loses its vitality and clarity because it is always in front of our eyes and we no longer pay attention to it. There is in Wittgenstein a sense in which the ordinary is lost and then recovered or rediscovered, but only in the banal sense of our having to recover, as adults – and more specifically as philosophers – the lost primitive or naive perception of reality we had as children. This does not imply that Wittgenstein perceives the ordinary as perpetually lost, as lost to scepticism, and us as consequently homeless. There is no sense, in Wittgenstein, of homelessness or exile from the world; no anguish, upon our return, at not finding the ordinary exactly as we left it, and so of our perceiving it as uncanny (Uncanniness, 100), as, upon each return, the ‘invasion of a familiar by another familiar’ (L’ordinaire et l’inquiétant). It seems to me that here Cavell has applied his modernist stamp on Wittgenstein. Granted, Wittgenstein wants to make the ordinary an object of reflection, but not because he finds it threatened by scepticism (Uncanniness, 114). Cavell is wrong to say that ‘the Investigations … is written in continuous response to the threat of scepticism’ (106) – even where he associates such scepticism with a distrust of language.

3  Language is in order as it is No doubt, Wittgenstein’s remark ‘Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language’ (PI, §109) contributed to Cavell finding

S. Cavell, ‘L’ordinaire et l’inquiétant’, Rue Descartes 39 (1/2003): 88–98, www.cairn.info/revue-ruedescartes-2003-1-page-88.htm. Excerpt of an interview for France-Culture, Paris, 22 November 2002. (My translation) 15 The Uncanniness of the Ordinary. The Tanner Lectures on Human Value. Delivered at Stanford University, 1986, http://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documents/a-to-z/c/cavell88.pdf: 107. 14

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in Philosophical Investigations a suspicion of language that would have led Wittgenstein to scepticism: It seems to me that the originality of the Investigations is a function of the originality of its response to skepticism, one that undertakes not to deny skepticism’s power (on the contrary) but to diagnose the source (or say the possibility) of that power, to ask … what it is about human language that allows us, even invites us, to repudiate its everyday functioning, to find it wanting. (Uncanniness, 106f.)

We will come back to scepticism; what I first want to question is the idea that Wittgenstein finds, or suggests we should find, ordinary language ‘wanting’. There is no question that Wittgenstein complains, throughout his work, about the potentially confusing nature of ordinary language: he notes its misleading uniformity in the Tractatus, where he thanks Russell for ‘showing that the apparent logical form of a proposition need not be its real one’ (TLP, §4.0031); remarks in the Blue Book on the confusion provoked by ‘the outward similarity between a metaphysical proposition and an experiential one’ (BB, 55f); and cautions us in the Investigations that we can be confused by ‘the uniform appearance of words when we hear them spoken or meet them in script and print. For their application is not presented to us so clearly’ (PI, §11). And finally in Remarks on Colour16 and On Certainty, he notes that it is easy to take a sentence that has only the form of an empirical proposition for an empirical proposition, while adding that in such cases we can always count on the function of the sentence to decide. Once we consider function, many sentences that resemble empirical propositions reveal themselves as rules of grammar.17 The outward similarity in language causes ‘deep disquietudes’ (PI, §111) in that a simile can be absorbed in the forms of our language and mislead us (PI, §112), but these disquietudes do not prompt in Wittgenstein the desire for a ‘There seem to be propositions that have the character of experiential propositions, but whose truth is for me unassailable. That is to say, if I assume that they are false, I must mistrust all my judgements’ (Remarks on Colour, trans. L. L. McAlister and M. Schätte (Oxford: Blackwell), III 348). ‘And don’t I have to admit that sentences are often used on the borderline between logic and the empirical, so that their meaning shifts back and forth and they are now expressions of norms, now treated as expressions of experience? For it is not the “thought” (an accompanying mental phenomenon) but its use (something that surrounds it), that distinguishes the logical proposition from the empirical one’ (Remarks on Colour, III, 19). 17 ‘I am inclined to believe that not everything that has the form of an empirical proposition is one’ (OC, §308); ‘But wouldn’t one have to say then, that there is no sharp boundary between propositions of logic and empirical propositions? The lack of sharpness is that of the boundary between rule and empirical proposition.’ (OC, §319); ‘I want to say: propositions of the form of empirical propositions, and not only propositions of logic, form the foundation of all operating with thoughts (with language)’ (OC, §401). 16

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more transparent language. He finds language perfectly in order as it is, and says so clearly in the Tractatus,18 as well as in the Investigations: On the one hand it is clear that every sentence in our language ‘is in order as it is’. That is to say, we are not striving after an ideal, as if our ordinary vague sentences had not yet got a quite unexceptionable sense, and a perfect language awaited construction by us. − On the other hand it seems clear that where there is sense there must be perfect order. − So there must be perfect order even in the vaguest sentence. (PI, §98).

In light of this, is Cavell entitled to say that the originality of the Investigations lies in its diagnosis of scepticism as an interrogation of what it is ‘about human language that allows us, even invites us, to repudiate its everyday functioning, to find it wanting’ (Uncanniness, 107)? I think not. The problem does not stem from language, but from our inattention to differences and our propensity to overextend our concepts.19 And correction is at the philosopher’s fingertips: all he or she needs to do is ‘not to be misled by the appearance of a sentence and to investigate its application in the language-game’ (Z, §247), thereby ‘clarify[ing] our use of language’ in order to avoid ‘the misleading analogies in our use of language’ (P, 163). It is, therefore, a problem that has its solution, and not a problem that leads to scepticism. The confusion produced by language is neither inevitable nor omnipresent, and the philosopher intervenes only where language seems to have gone on holiday: The confusions which occupy us arise when language is like an engine idling, not when it is doing work. (PI, §132) We are interested in language only insofar as it gives us trouble. I only describe the actual use of a word if this is necessary to remove some trouble we want to get rid of. Sometimes I describe its use if you have forgotten it. Sometimes I have to lay down new rules because new rules are less liable to produce confusion or because we have perhaps not thought of looking at the language we have in this light. (AWL, 97)

So the philosopher’s task is to ‘remind’ us of the grammar of our language, or, indeed, to create new rules of grammar. The latter would be propitious not only in the case of philosophers, but also in that of cognitive scientists, needing to be ‘In fact, all the propositions of our everyday language, just as they stand, are in perfect logical order’ (TLP, §5.5563). 19 ‘Philosophical troubles are caused by not using language practically but by extending it on looking at it. We form sentences and then wonder what they can mean. Once conscious of “time” as a substantive, we ask then about the creation of time’ (AWL, 15). 18

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weaned away from such misleading pictures or habits of thought as those that conflate mind and brain. A new grammatical rule here might be this: ‘The brain is not the mind.’ The philosopher’s task, then, is to put order in our concepts, to rearrange them: The philosophical problem is an awareness of disorder in our concepts, and can be solved by ordering them. (BT, 309)

I do not see Wittgenstein here finding in ordinary language a strangeness so worrisome that it leads him to scepticism.20 The solution to the disorder sometimes caused by language is, he insists, at the philosopher’s reach. Cavell well understands that ‘Wittgenstein’s motive … is to put the human animal back into language and therewith back into philosophy’, but he qualifies this by adding that Wittgenstein ‘never underestimated the power of the motive to reject the human: nothing could be more human’.21 The will to reject the human is what we might call the metaphysical impulse. Cavell is right to say that Wittgenstein does not underestimate its force, but he is less right to think that the Investigations captures the disappointment felt by humans in dropping from metaphysical heights to the inadequacy of all too human criteria. Cavell seems to succumb here to a nostalgia for the metaphysical, which leads him to scepticism, but he is wrong to believe that Wittgenstein shares both the nostalgia and the scepticism. Wittgenstein is not disappointed by ordinary language or its functioning; he does not hanker after the fixity of sense, as Cavell thinks he does, because he does not believe in the fixity of sense, and because for him sense is not lost for being dependent on use. On Cavell’s view, Wittgenstein sees the power of the metaphysical impulse to be such that it induces our exile from world and word, and this in perpetuity; whereas, in fact, Wittgenstein sees the metaphysical impulse as a corrigible straying, and the strayed metaphysician’s repatriation to the rough ground as possible and even possibly definitive in that it only requires the dismantling of the linguistic trap that led to the straying in the first place. For Wittgenstein, bringing ‘words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use’ (PI, §116) is, indeed, rediscovering criteria, but this does not lead, as it does for Cavell, to discovering the truth of scepticism. The ‘truth of scepticism’, according to Cavell, being ‘the standing threat to thought and communication, that they are only human’ (1979, 47). 21 S. Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 207. 20

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In hankering after a metaphysics he does not, in fact, believe in, Cavell resembles Nietzsche’s Gay Science nihilist who admonishes atheists (himself included) for having killed God. The fact that God never existed does not prevent or diminish his nostalgia, which is fuelled by the negativity of scepticism in a non-metaphysical world. For Cavell, falling from the metaphysical fixity of meaning to the rough ground where meaning depends on agreement or criteria leaves meaning open to the disagreement and instability that make scepticism ineluctable, for criteria are not ‘serious contenders in the battle to turn aside scepticism’ (Claim of Reason, 7). And to think that Wittgenstein believes otherwise is, says Cavell, to misunderstand him: If the fact that we share, or have established, criteria is the condition under which we can think and communicate in language, then scepticism is a natural possibility of that condition; it reveals most perfectly the standing threat to thought and communication, that they are only human, nothing more than natural to us. One misses the drive of Wittgenstein if one is not … sufficiently open to the threat of scepticism (i.e. to the skeptic in oneself); or if one takes Wittgenstein … to deny the truth of scepticism. (Claim of Reason, 47)

4  The disappointment with criteria Cavell insists on the disappointment that criteria cause us22 and denies that they can refute scepticism or that Wittgenstein thought they could (Claim of Reason, 329): The major claim I make in the Claim of Reason about Wittgenstein’s idea of a criterion, namely that while criteria provide conditions of (shared) speech they do not provide an answer to sceptical doubt. I express this by saying that criteria are disappointing, taking them to express, even to begin to account for, the human disappointment with human knowledge. (In Quest of the Ordinary, 87)

Cavell sees Wittgenstein’s notion of criteria as generative of scepticism towards language and knowledge. The natural or communitarian condition of language – the fact that meaning and knowledge are dependent on criteria – makes language Cavell: ‘In our desperation for closure or order or sublimity in our concepts – in our disappointment with our criteria for their application – we ask criteria to do something or to go somewhere that they are not fit to do or to go, and so we repudiate, as it were, their intelligence.’ S. Cavell, ‘Silences Noises Voices’, in Future Pasts: The Analytic Tradition in Twentieth-Century Philosophy, eds. J. Floyd and S. Shieh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 357.

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constitutionally open to the sceptical threat in that criteria are too weak to prevent imitation and deception, and therefore mistake. But this alarmist (to put it mildly) interpretation of the second Wittgenstein overlooks the explicit message of the third Wittgenstein – as much in the Writings and Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology as in On Certainty – which is that imitation and deception (and therefore the possibility of mistake) are only possible because deployed on a basis of certainty: ‘That an actor can represent grief shows the uncertainty of evidence, but that he can represent grief also shows the reality of evidence’ (LW II, 67). The very possibility of uncertainty or doubt depends on a backdrop of certainty: ‘Doubt itself rests only on what is beyond doubt’ (OC, §519), and so ‘the questions that we raise and our doubts depend on the fact that some propositions are exempt from doubt’ (OC, §341). Contra the sceptic, Wittgenstein maintains that we cannot always be deceived because deception or dissimulation is not always possible. To the question: ‘Is it thoughtlessness not to keep the possibility of pretence in mind?’ (RPP II, §591), Wittgenstein’s answer is clear: Dissimulation is nothing but a particular case; we can regard behaviour as dissimulation only under particular circumstances. (LW I, 252)

If deception is not a universal or systematic possibility, neither is doubt, and therefore scepticism is not sustainable. There are, on Wittgenstein’s view, cases where we cannot be mistaken for there is no logical place for mistake; and this is so even in cases of third-person psychological ‘judgments’: ‘Just try – in a real case – to doubt someone else’s fear or pain’ (PI, § 303). And he goes as far as to acknowledge that our certainty about some psychological behaviour is of a logical kind: There is an unmistakable expression of joy and its opposite. … There are cases where only a lunatic could take the expression of pain, for instance, as sham. (LW II, 32−33; emphasis in the original) It isn’t true that we are never certain about the mental processes in someone else. In countless cases we are.23 (LW II, 94)

Where Cavell (much like the sceptic) thinks that where there is agreement, disagreement is always possible, Wittgenstein affirms that, even in cases of third It would seem then, that at the close of his last writings on philosophical psychology – and we should note here that the passage is dated ‘April 15 1951’, and that the last dated passage of On Certainty is ‘27 April 1951’ – Wittgenstein is no longer saying that uncertainty is a constitutional or essential trait of our psychological ascriptions. He has come to see that, in some cases, we are as objectively certain about ‘He is in pain’ as about ‘I am in pain’.

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person psychological judgements, ‘discrepancy has its limits’ (LW II, 21)  – in some cases, disagreement can only be pathological. Though he acknowledges Wittgenstein’s affirmation that human beings agree in the language they use (PI, §241), Cavell thinks that this agreement is insufficient to ensure meaning or communication: We begin to feel, or ought to, that maybe language (and understanding, and knowledge) rests upon very shaky foundations – a thin net over an abyss. … Whether or not our words will go on meaning what they do depends upon whether other people find it worth their while to continue to understand us. (Claim of Reason, 178f.)

Cavell fears that the dependency of meaning on context, without the underpinning of rules or universals, makes projection and understanding terrifyingly precarious: We learn and we teach certain words in certain contexts, and then we are expected, and expect others, to be able to project them into further contexts. Nothing insures that this projection will take place (in particular, not the grasping of universals nor the grasping of books of rules), just as nothing insures that we will make, and understand, the same projections. That on the whole we do is a matter of our sharing routes of interest and feeling, modes of response, senses of humor and of significance and of fulfillment, of what is outrageous, of what is similar to what else, what a rebuke, what forgiveness, of when an utterance is an assertion, when an appeal, when an explanation − all the whirl of organism Wittgenstein calls ‘forms of life’. Human speech and activity, sanity and community, rest upon nothing more, but nothing less, than this. It is a vision as simple as it is difficult, and as difficult as it is (and because it is) terrifying.24,25

It is terrifying in that criteria are insufficient to guarantee meaning and ward off scepticism. But this is, I believe, to diminish the importance of language as mastery of a technique (PI, §199). On Wittgenstein’s view, we are able to project S. Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 52. See also Claim of Reason, 192. 25 See McDowell’s gloss here: ‘The terror of which Cavell writes at the end of this marvellous passage is a sort of vertigo, induced by the thought that there is nothing that keeps our practices in line except the reactions and responses we learn in learning them. The ground seems to have been removed from under our feet. In this mood, we are inclined to feel that the sort of thing Cavell describes is insufficient foundation for a conviction that some practice really is a case of going on in the same way. What Cavell offers looks, rather, like a congruence of subjectivities, not grounded as it would need to be to amount to the sort of objectivity we want if we are to be convinced that we are really going on in the same way.’ J. McDowell, ‘Non-cognitivism and Rule-Following’, in The New Wittgenstein eds. A. Crary and R. Read (London: Routledge, 2000), 43. 24

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our limited acquired knowledge of language to new situations and contexts precisely because the teaching of language is the transmission of a technique; this, by definition, does not aim for total regulation but for self-regulation and regulation by others. It is criteria that determine whether a speaker is using a word in accordance with the norm that is being inculcated. These criteria are public, not private; and although constraint is necessary, there is no exhaustive determination of use,26 which allows for and explains the creativity or productivity of language. This is where the teaching of a technique surpasses, say, ostensive definition. As Wittgenstein writes: Teaching which is not meant to apply to anything but the examples given is different from that which ‘points beyond’ them.27 (PI, §208)

To claim that without rules or universals, language is on shaky grounds is to play Chomsky’s game. Wittgenstein’s answer to Chomsky would be that technique suffices to regulate use: ‘Yes, there is the great thing about language – that we can do what we haven’t learnt’ (LPP, 28). Acquiring language is like learning to walk: the child is stepped into language by an initiator and, after much hesitation and repeated faltering, it disengages itself from its teacher’s hold and is able, as it were, to run with the language. Of course, acquisition and use of language involve some hesitation and uncertainty, but let us not confuse that with scepticism. It is Cavell’s vision of language as ‘a thin net over an abyss’ that makes the ‘flat repudiation’ of scepticism impossible (Claim of Reason, 192), but that is a vision which he should not attribute to Wittgenstein. Cavell has a profound mistrust of language, which he believes Wittgenstein shares. This is what he says in a 2012 conversation with Paul Standish: There is a dimension of anxiety, of threat, in human conversation and confrontation that the Investigations seems to me responsive to; … this couldn’t be so if the possibility of scepticism were not incessantly on its mind. … Wittgenstein gives a portrait of the modern subject that contains issues of diversity and anxiety and sickness and torment. Those are the things that I found ‘Just as in writing we learn a particular basic form of letters and then vary it later, so we learn first the stability of things as the norm, which is then subject to alterations’ (OC, §473; my emphasis). 27 Wittgenstein’s rule-following argument shows precisely that generating new sentences is nothing but an instance of knowing how to go on, ‘how to extend the speech that [we] have into new contexts’ (Jerome Bruner, Child’s Talk: Learning to Use Language (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1983), 39). As H.-J. Glock rightly notes, the early Wittgenstein’s was also concerned with what is now known as the problem of ‘the creativity of language’: the number of propositions being indefinite although the number of words is finite (NL 98; TLP §§4.02, 4.027 etc.) (H.-J. Glock, A Wittgenstein Dictionary (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996), 298). 26

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in the Investigations at the beginning that dissociated my responses from those of virtually all my friends who were reading the work. They took away the pain and solace from the book, which for me was exactly to miss its dark side – its treatment, its recognition of the possibility, even sometimes I say the necessity, of scepticism. I felt this to be … fundamental to meaning, to speech, to the inherent risk in speech.28

This vision of Philosophical Investigations seems to me, as it did to Cavell’s friends back then, foreign to Philosophical Investigations. It projects a sombre picture of devastation and alienation where I, and most readers, have found community, coherence, sharing, teaching and communication – with errors along the way, of course, but these are exceptions that confirm the rule; the rule being that accidents notwithstanding, traffic flows, and it does so fundamentally, ubiquitously: we can count on it. The Investigations have taught me that it is in language, coupled with behaviour, of course, and not ‘in the head’, that lies my cohesion to the human form of life; and I remain baffled by the idea that what struck Cavell about language in Philosophical Investigations are disappointment, distrust and even vacuity: The silence in which philosophy begins is the recognition of my lostness to myself, something Wittgenstein’s text figures as the emptiness of my words, my craving or insistence upon their emptiness, upon wanting them to do what human words cannot do. I read this disappointment with words as a function of the human wish to deny responsibility for speech. … (Wittgenstein describes the work of philosophy as having to turn our search around, as if reality is behind us), that I have said what there is for me to say, that this ground gained from discontent is all the ground I have, that I am exposed in my finitude, without justification. (‘Justifications come to an end’ is a way Wittgenstein says it.) (‘Silences Noises Voices’, 353)

5  Certainty versus sceptical acknowledgement I owe The Claim of Reason an initial phenomenological grasp of the Wittgensteinian revolution that no other commentator gave me, but its gloomy, modernist gloss of the Investigations is profoundly misleading. And once I had delved into On Certainty, I became convinced that Cavell had either forgotten S. Cavell and P. Standish, ‘Stanley Cavell in Conversation with Paul Standish’, Journal of Philosophy of Education 46, no. 2 (2012): 156.

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to read it29 or had misread it. For, to suggest that for Wittgenstein, the end of justification means the beginning of scepticism, is to understand the opposite of what Wittgenstein is saying in that work. For Wittgenstein, to be ‘without justification’ (as in when ‘justifications come to an end’) does not mean to be vulnerable, or exposed in our finitude, but, rather, to be invulnerable. When ‘justifications come to an end’, it is not that we are at our wits’ end but that we have reached the hard rock of certainty. And this, already in PI: ‘If I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned’ (PI, §217). Far from being an epistemic lack, failing or limitation – something that would allow the sceptic to triumph – the absence of justification or grounds (groundlessness) as depicted by Wittgenstein is descriptive of a certainty so robust, so anchored, so unquestionable that it is not built on the back of justification,30 but constitutes the logical (i.e. indubitable and necessary) base on which justification, as well as knowledge, must be hinged.31 Cavell is wrong to think that, for Wittgenstein, the end of justification produces the vertigo of scepticism – on the contrary, it signals the triumph of certainty.32 Cavell claims that ‘in Wittgenstein’s work, as in skepticism, the human disappointment with human knowledge seems to take over the whole subject’ (Claim of Reason, 44), but this is to misrepresent Wittgenstein’s view of knowledge. Wittgenstein is not ‘disappointed’ by knowledge; he wants to remind us of its rightful place in our epistemic practices. Throughout his work, he shows that we often say or think we know where we ought not to, as when our believing, acting or feeling is neither a justified true belief nor the result of one (e.g. ‘I know I’m in pain’). In On Certainty, he focuses on this problem, reminding us that knowledge is by definition grounded and that, therefore, when Moore speaks Of course, that is unlikely, even if the index in The Claim of Reason, whose subtitle includes ‘Wittgenstein’ and ‘Skepticism’, does not list On Certainty. 30 Pace Genia Schönbaumsfeld, the concept of groundlessness is needed in that it helpfully underlines the absence of reasoning or justification or grounds; its use by Wittgenstein need not imply that groundlessness is an absence where there ought to be a presence (i.e. grounds); it is simply a helpful contrast to cases of assurance, which are reliant on grounds (such as knowledge). See Genia Schönbaumsfeld, ‘“Hinge Propositions” and the “Logical” Exclusion of Doubt’, in Hinge Epistemology, Special issue of International Journal for the Study of Skepticism, eds. A. Coliva and D. Moyal-Sharrock 6, no. 2–3 (March 2016): 165–81. 31 Moreover, though groundlessness means absence of justification or reasoning, it does not mean detachment from reality: our hinges are conditioned by how the world is, by ‘very general facts of nature’; they are rooted, albeit not ratiocinatively, in our human form of life and in the various forms of human life. 32 Indeed, the images used by Wittgenstein are images of stability and fixity: the hard rock of the river is ‘subject to no alteration or only to an imperceptible one’ (OC, §99); the foundations (OC, §§ 167, 248, 411, 414, 558); les hinges that stay fixed so that the door can turn (OC, §343). Far from succumbing to the threat of sceptical vertigo, Wittgenstein repeats that certain things are solidly or unshakeably fixed for him and others (e.g., OC, §§ 112, 116, 144). 29

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of knowledge where there is no logical room for justification, he is making a category mistake (OC, §308): If Moore says he knows the earth existed etc., most of us will grant him that it has existed all that time, and also believe him when he says he is convinced of it. But has he also got the right ground for his conviction? For if not, then after all he doesn’t know. (OC, §91; see also 483−4)

The ungrounded nature of Moore’s certainty precludes it from being a knowing. This reminder does not smack of alarm or disappointment, but of precision. Wittgenstein is clarifying where knowledge has its place (as justified true belief) and where it does not (Moore-type conviction) and that what sometimes passes for knowledge should, instead, be classed as the most basic of our assurances, which he calls ‘certainty’.33 It is this precision that seems to elude Cavell: he does not see that Wittgenstein makes a categorial distinction between knowledge and certainty, and so Cavell conflates them. Not recognizing the place of certainty in Wittgenstein’s work, he thinks that in saying that Moore does not know what he asserts he knows, Wittgenstein is acquiescing to the truth of scepticism, which Cavell interprets thus: our relation to the existence of the world is not one of knowing with certainty but the deeper one of accepting or acknowledging: The answer [to skepticism] does not consist in denying the conclusion of skepticism but in reconceiving its truth. It is true that we do not know the existence of the world with certainty; our relation to its existence is deeper – one in which it is accepted, that is to say, received. My favorite way of putting this is to say that existence is to be acknowledged.34

It is clear from this passage that Cavell has not grasped the categorial difference Wittgenstein makes between knowledge and certainty, but there is something in what he says. It is true that, for Wittgenstein, our relation to the existence of the world is something deeper and more immediate than knowing, but is it of a nature similar to Cavell’s acknowledgement/acceptance? We think scepticism must mean that we cannot know the world exists, and hence that perhaps there isn’t one. … Whereas what scepticism suggests is that since we cannot know the world exists, its presentness to us cannot be a function of knowing. The world is to be accepted; as the presentness of other minds is not For an in-depth account of Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘certainty’, see Moyal-Sharrock, Understanding Wittgenstein’s On Certainty. 34 S. Cavell, The Senses of Walden (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981), 133, my emphasis. 33

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to be known, but acknowledged. But what is this ‘acceptance’, which caves in at a doubt? (Must We Mean, 324)

Cavell’s reconceiving the truth of scepticism amounts to replacing knowing with acknowledging/accepting; but, however deep and immediate, there is a fissure in Cavell’s acknowledgement/acceptance that distances it from Wittgenstein’s certainty: it is susceptible of avoidance – indeed, ‘it caves in at a doubt’ – and this is because its nature is psychological,35 unlike Wittgenstein’s certainty, which is logical: I should like to say: Moore does not know what he asserts he knows, but it stands fast for him, as also for me; regarding it as absolutely solid is part of our method of doubt and inquiry. (OC, §151)

In fact, the logical nature of Wittgenstein’s certainty is such that ‘if Moore were to pronounce the opposite of those propositions which he declares certain, we should not just not share his opinion: we should regard him as demented’ (OC, §155). Such certainties as the world or other minds existing are not merely acknowledged, to be later revisited by doubt; they are logical underpinnings of thought. It is such certainties that prevent scepticism from so much as getting off the ground. Cavell is right: it is a mistake to want to stave off scepticism with knowledge, but wrong to think that what replaces knowledge here is acknowledgement. Cavell’s misunderstanding of Wittgenstein’s certainty prevents him from seeing that it is categorially distinct from knowledge and that, with it, Wittgenstein unequivocally refutes scepticism. As Paul Standish rightly remarks: ‘Cavell does not accept the received view of Wittgenstein’s later work as providing a refutation of the sceptic. … In place of the epistemologist’s reading of the Philosophical Investigations as a refutation of scepticism, Cavell finds in this text a testament to the existential truth in scepticism.’36 That is, Cavell sees scepticism as a human condition: we must learn to live with the clash between our continual temptations to conquer scepticism and our awareness that it can never be conquered. ‘I live my scepticism,’ writes Cavell (Claim of Reason, 437), because dismissing it would be to dismiss the See, for example: ‘The fact that both skepticism and tragedy conclude with the condition of human separation, with a discovering that I am I; and the fact that the alternative to my acknowledgment of the other is not my ignorance of him but my avoidance of him call it my denial of him’ (Claim of Reason, 389). 36 P. Standish, ‘Education for Grown-ups, a Religion for Adults: Scepticism and Alterity in Cavell and Levinas’, Ethics and Education 2, no. 1 (2007), 76f. 35

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important existential consciousness of the precariousness of human knowledge, identity and communication. As I have tried to show, Cavell’s reading of Wittgenstein here is a misreading. For Wittgenstein, scepticism is not an important, ineluctable truth of the human condition; it is the product of a misunderstanding of our epistemic situation – a misunderstanding that is resolvable, once and for all. All that needs to be done is to recognize that scepticism is conceptually untenable: ‘If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty’ (OC, §115). For Wittgenstein, scepticism is the result of grammatical confusion, the confusion between knowing and certainty; once the confusion is clarified, scepticism dissolves. Cavell wants to make scepticism an existential condition and therefore remains caught in its net. The problem is that he also tries to entangle Wittgenstein in that net. But Cavell’s notion of scepticism is as foreign to Wittgenstein as the existential hell that he thinks also permeates his work: The human existence that is portrayed in Philosophical Investigations, as I see it, is one of continuous compromise with restlessness, disorientation, phantasms of loneliness and devastation, dotted with assertions of emptiness that defeat sociability as they seek it.37

I ask myself: What was Cavell reading? And the only answer I can come up with is that Cavell was reading Cavell into Wittgenstein.

S. Cavell, ‘Responses’, in Contending with Stanley Cavell., ed. R. B. Goodman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 161.

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6

Wittgenstein, Musil and the Austrian Modernism Pierre Fasula

In this chapter, I connect Wittgenstein’s attitude towards modernism and modernity to Musil’s description of modernism in his great novel The Man without Qualities. Wittgenstein’s and Musil’s respective positions are actually similar as regards not only modernism, but also its connection to modernity, and to the possible solution of the problem raised by this connection. Therefore, my aim is not to consider Wittgenstein and Musil themselves as representatives of modernism, but, rather, to explore their attitudes towards the modernism they were confronted with. In the first two sections, I present their respective relations to modernism. I then go on to point at what they have in common and examine their attitude towards modernism within a more general reaction to modernity.

1  Wittgenstein and Austrian modernism Ludwig Wittgenstein was obviously in an ideal position to be acquainted with modernism. He grew up in a family that not only attached importance to fine arts and literature but was also characterized by its nonconformist attitudes towards these domains. His father, Karl Wittgenstein, had adopted ‘in the most distinctive and spectacular way this role of protector and promoter of arts’, and showed a ‘fanaticism for art’, as Zweig called it, and ‘a passion for aesthetic innovations’.1 His sister too expressed such nonconformism; she attended avantgardist events and met Klimt, who painted her portrait.

Jacques Bouveresse, ‘Les derniers jours de l’humanité’, in Essais I (Marseille: Agone, 2000), 19.

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At the same time, as it is well known, Wittgenstein’s own attitude towards Austrian modernism was ambivalent. On the one hand, he seems to be part of it, not only with the Philosophical Investigations but already with the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, if one puts it into context, bringing it back to Karl Kraus’s influence. Janik and Toulmin defend such a thesis in Wittgenstein’s Vienna: This factor needs to be borne in mind when we discover that a whole range of intellectual and artistic creations, ranging from the music of Arnold Schönberg to the architecture of Adolf Loos – and including even, in its own way, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-philosophicus – were intimately and consciously related to, and even extensions of, the critique of language and society conducted by Karl Kraus. Each of these men acknowledged the inspiration of Kraus and could be said to be a Krausian; but the integrity of a Krausian demanded in each case that the struggle against moral and aesthetic corruption be carried on by a critique of that particular area of human experience in which the individual artist or writer was himself most at home. For Loos, this was architecture and design; for Schönberg, it was music; for Wittgenstein, philosophy.2

Presented in this way, Wittgenstein, Schönberg and Loos all belong to modernism, especially as regards two aspects. According to Bouveresse, quoting Janik and Toulmin, what these three have in common is, first, the idea of a ‘compulsion of an inexorable but unconscious logic in the harmonic construction’ – as Schoenberg called it in his Theory of Harmony,3 and, second, the idea of the separation between a superior and an inferior sphere. On the other hand, one has to point out the fact that they were all, each in his own way, critical of modernism. Schönberg did not consider himself a representative of the so-called ‘modern music’4 and Loos distanced himself from both art nouveau and Bauhaus as forms of ‘false modernism’. Wittgenstein not only shared this attitude but distanced himself also from Loos and, above all, Schönberg. The house he built reflects his own style and is perhaps less a modernist gesture than a reaction against both historicism and a certain kind of modernism, a reaction that could be qualified as ‘classical’,5 and he claimed not to understand the kind of music Schönberg invented. Moreover, if Loos and Schönberg were critical modernists, Wittgenstein was much more detached Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973), 93. Quoted in Bouveresse, ‘derniers jours’, 29. See Antonia Soulez’s chapter in this book. 5 Lothar Rentschler, ‘Das Wittgensteinhaus. Eine Morphologische Interpretation’, in WienKundmanngasse 19, eds. G. Gebauer, Gunter Grünenwald, Alexander Ohme, Rüdiger Rentschler, Lothar Sperling, Thomas Uhl and Ottokar (München: Wilhelm Fink, 1982), 138f. 2 3 4

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from modernism, behaving sometimes in a reactionary way. According to McGuiness, his relation to literature is an example of this attitude: Ludwig gave little sign at any period of interest in contemporary literature. Hofmannsthal was a distant family connexion and his idea of a return to the Baroque as a refuge from the decline of culture in his own day had some attraction. At any rate Ludwig liked to quote his saying One has to behave decently Some day, somehow, somewhere, it will pay off But on the whole he was a stranger to Young Vienna and he hardly knew the names of the writers Ficker selected for his benefaction in 1914: Musil, with whom he has often been compared, he probably never read: there could have been no question of that before 1906 in any case. The chief exception to this disregard for contemporary literature – an exception providing the rule – was his respect for Karl Kraus, one of the chief influences on his thought, he said in the 1930s, listing those influences in the order Boltzmann, Hertz, Russell, Kraus, Loos, Weininger, Spengler, Sraffa.6

Wittgenstein not only appreciated classical references such as Lessing, Goethe or Schiller, but also alluded to figures who were considered reactionary: Gottfried Keller and, above all, Franz Grillparzer, ‘a writer who personifies the refusal of modernism and the faith in the moral virtues of the most traditional Austria’.7 To conclude this point, there were several ways of being a modernist in the beginning of the twentieth century in Austria. One of them was to fully belong to the modernist movement, another consisted in a critical attitude towards it, as in the case of Loos and Wittgenstein. In this latter case, as we will see, something else is expressed: the feeling of alienation from the new forms of arts and literature, and more generally from this new world.

2  Historicism and avant-garde in Musil’s novel Let us now encounter the position towards modernism Musil describes in the Man without Qualities through the main character whose name is Ulrich. Brian McGuiness, Wittgenstein: a Life. Young Wittgenstein 1889-1921 (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: The University of California Press, 1988), 37. McGuiness leaves out the names of Schopenhauer and Frege, also included in Wittgenstein’s famous list. (Cf. CV, 19) 7 Jacques Bouveresse, ‘Ludwig Wittgenstein: un moderniste résigné?’ in Essais I (Marseille: Agone, 2000), 98. 6

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According to Walter H. Sokel, there is a tension in Musil’s novel between historicism and avant-garde.8 Indeed, in the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, Vienna’s architecture was characterized by its historicism, which found its inspiration in older styles (for instance, Greek and Roman classicism or baroque architecture),9 and sometimes combined them in an eclectic way. In the novel, this aspect of Vienna is mentioned from time to time, but is also symbolized in the house Ulrich chooses, at the beginning of the story, when he comes back to the capital, after being abroad: An old garden, still retaining some of its eighteenth- or even seventeenthcentury character, with wrought-iron railings through which one could glimpse, in passing, through the trees on a well-clipped lawn, a sort of little château with short wings, a hunting lodge or rococo love nest of times past. More specifically, it was basically seventeenth century, while the park and the upper story showed an eighteenth century influence and the façade had been restored and somewhat spoiled in the nineteenth century, so that the whole had something blurred about it, like a double-exposed photograph. But the general effect was such that people invariably stopped and said: ‘Oh!’10

This little castle is not exactly an instance of historicism, for its building really began in the seventeenth century, and is not a reconstruction of old styles. Yet, two facts in the description link the castle to historicism: the nineteenth-century restoration of the façade had spoiled it and a blurred aspect characterizes the whole. According to Walter H. Sokel, it symbolizes what the Ringstrasse in Vienna looks like with its neo-gothic town hall, the theatre’s Renaissance façade, etc. But the most important occurence of historicism lies elsewhere in Musil’s novel: In The Man without Qualities, historicism has two contradictory consequences. On the one hand it leads to modernism, i.e. to the focusing on the modern as a unique historical turning point, a new beginning in human history, an entirely new language, which has not yet been spoken in the past millennia. On the other hand The Man Without Qualities’ historicism leads to an idea close to Nietzsche’s, the return of the same.11 Walter H. Sokel, ‘Historismus und Avantgarde. Zur zwiespältigen Bewertung der Moderne’, in Mann ohne Eigenschaften, in Hommage à Musil eds. Bernard Böschenstein and Marie-Louise Roth (Bern: Peter Lang, 1995), 145–57.  9 On this point, see Carl Schorske’s classical study, Fin-de-siècle Vienna (New York: Knopf, 1979). 10 Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities, vol. I [here MWQ I] (New York: Knopf, 1995), 6. 11 Sokel, ‘Historismus und Avantgarde’, 148. My translation.  8

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Indeed, one finds in the novel a description of the birth of modernism in reaction to historicism, which is considered as a period of ‘stagnation’: The just-buried century in Austria could not be said to have covered itself with glory during its second half. It had been clever in technology, business, and science, but beyond these focal points of its energy it was stagnant and treacherous as a swamp. It had painted like the Old Masters, written like Goethe and Schiller, and built its houses in the style of the Gothic and the Renaissance. (MWQ I, §15, 52)

What is described here is the difference between the domain of art and literature and the domains of economy, technology and the sciences. Before modernism, the former domain was characterized by the reference to old masters or old styles, in opposition to invention and originality, and historicism has to be linked with this more general trend in art and literature. To build in a gothic or Renaissance style, at least in Austria, was just a part of a more general tendency in the second half of the nineteenth century. It is in this context that modernism appeared as a reaction to historicism: And each time it is like a miracle when after such a shallow, fading period all at once there comes a small upward surge. Suddenly, out of the becalmed mentality of the nineteenth century’s last two decades, an invigorating fever rose all over Europe. (53)

Musil describes here not only a particular phenomenon in the domain of art and literature, but a general movement that includes society, morality and politics as well, and which takes the form of a reaction to the period of stagnation. More precisely, what is described in the novel is a variety of reactions. The consequence is that in a way ‘no one knew exactly what was in the making; nobody could have said whether it was to be a new art, a new humanity, a new morality, or perhaps a reshuffling of society’ (53). But at the same time, all these various reactions shared the same origin: ‘These were certainly opposing and widely varying battle cries, but uttered in the same breath’ (53). This is an essential feature of modernism. It consists, indeed, in an abundance of inventions, sometimes moving in contradictory directions; what links all these war cries and what makes them modernist is this agonistic dimension.12 But on the other hand, the historicist point of view seems to affect every attempt to create something new, including modernism itself. In Musil’s novel, See Michael Fried, ‘Shape as Form: Franck Stella’s New Paintings’, in New York Painting and Sculpture 1940-1970, ed. H. Geldzahler (New York: Dutton, 1969).

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the idea and the feeling of the perpetual transformation in culture and history, which are characteristic of historicism, are presented as dominant in society.13 In other words, transformation is a permanent phenomenon. According to Sokel, it affects not only past centuries but also modernism. Sokel insists particularly on the fact that, as in every new movement, in modernism as well, the moment of creation was followed by a moment of trivialization. Thus, if before the First World War modernism went on expressing itself in a variety of forms, something changed after it: the impulse decreased. This is how Musil puts it: Could one not say, in fact, that things have got better since then? Men who once merely headed minor sects have become aged celebrities; publishers and art dealers have become rich; new movements are constantly being started; everybody attends both the academic and the avant-garde shows, and even the avant-garde of the avant-garde; the family magazines have bobbed their hair; politicians like to sound off on the cultural arts, and newspapers make literary history. So what has been lost? Something imponderable. An omen. An illusion. As when a magnet releases iron filings and they fall in confusion again. As when a ball of string comes undone. As when a tension slackens. As when an orchestra begins to play out of tune. (MWQ, §16, 56)

From Ulrich’s point of view, in a way nothing had changed and perhaps things got even better, because artists went on creating and the spirit of modernism became dominant (for instance in painting, with the role of the exhibitions). But in another way, modernism institutionalized itself: the leaders became old glories, visiting modernist exhibitions became a habit and it was felt that something had been lost. According to Ulrich, this feeling may have originated in the predicament of the eternal return. Modernism, and all the sub-movements that belonged to it, do not escape the recurrence of that known phenomenon: everything new eventually gets back to normalcy. This is the reason why Ulrich and his old friend Walter, an artist, distance themselves from this modernist movement of perpetual creation, each in his own different way. Walter becomes a bitter opponent of modernism; he prefers, for example, Richard Wagner over modern music, adopting a very conservative and pessimistic position. Ulrich, on the other hand, is not conservative but, rather, much more alienated from the alternative conservatism-modernism altogether. This implies that historicism could be defined in two ways: as a return to previous times and values in the domain of arts and literature, and as a peculiar point of view on history, which sees in it a perpetual transformation.

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3  Feeling alienated from modernism and modernity We can now justify the comparison between Wittgenstein and Musil, or indeed, Ulrich, Musil’s character, despite the differences between them. It seems to me that what they have in common is this feeling of alienation from modernism and, as I shall argue, even from modernity. As I explained above, although Wittgenstein can be considered as belonging to a kind of critical modernism, in the tradition of Karl Kraus, he also distanced himself from representatives of critical modernism, such as Loos and, above all, Schönberg. He did not see them as rivals but could not understand their work. Ulrich’s early involvement in modernism is the occasion to realize that ‘it is always the same story’: moments of creation, and then moments of decline. This leads him to feel withdrawn from the movement and the period. Thus, Wittgenstein’s and Ulrich’s reasons for feeling alienated are not exactly the same (an absence of understanding of the new language versus a feeling of vanity), but the consequences are similar, the same hostility towards modernism. Moreover, one finds both in Wittgenstein and in Ulrich the same extension of this feeling towards modernity and towards modern times. Indeed, a distinction must be made between these three phenomena: modernism, modernity and modern times. In Proust: Philosophy of the Novel, Vincent Descombes suggests such a distinction. First, ‘modern times’ has mainly a philosophical meaning: it refers to the alliance between natural sciences and human emancipation since the Enlightenment. ‘Modernity’ refers to a new form of life, characterized, for instance, by the way of living in huge cities, the means of transportation, the industry, the newspapers. Finally, ‘modernism’ refers, above all, to a radical change in the arts, which occurred at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century: ‘The modernist is the artist who feels compelled to overthrow the art forms handed down by tradition.’14 There is no definite modernist style but a perpetual invention in the battlefield of the arts. We saw that Wittgenstein and Ulrich felt alienated in their meeting with modernism; however, my contention is that this feeling was not limited to modernism but also affected their attitudes towards modernity and modern times. Indeed, in the well-known draft of the foreword to the Philosophical Remarks, printed in Culture and Value, Wittgenstein describes the emergence not of a new Vincent Descombes, ‘Notes on Concepts of Modernity’, in Proust. Philosophy of the Novel (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 135.

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culture but of a state of non-culture, and this description coheres with what is described in Musil’s novel and helps interpreting it. According to Wittgenstein, modernism has to be seen as a particular aspect of a more general transformation: This book is written for those who are in sympathy with the spirit in which it is written. This spirit is, I believe, different from that of the prevailing European and American Civilization. The spirit of this civilization the expression of which is the industry, architecture, music, of present day fascism and socialism, is a spirit that is alien and uncongenial to the author. This is not a value judgement. It is not as though I did not know that what today represents itself as architecture is not architecture and not as though he did not approach what is called modern music with the greatest mistrust (without understanding its language), but the disappearance of the arts does not justify a disparaging judgement on a whole segment of humanity. (CV, 8)

Wittgenstein links modernism and modernity here in order to refer to the new architecture and the new music, and to present them within a more general framework. Judgements about architecture and music are mixed with considerations about politics, society and economy, in order to embrace a whole culture or, better, a whole civilization. Criticism of what is characteristic of this civilization can be found in later sections of Culture and Value, namely the central role given to the idea of progress: Our civilization is characterized by the word progress. Progress is its form, it is not one of its properties that it makes progress. Typically it constructs. Its activity is to construct a more and more complicated structure. (CV, 9)

This idea must be applied to the different expressions and aspects of our civilization, that is to say, to economy, the sciences, and to the arts as well: Wittgenstein mentions architecture and music in the section quoted above. It could, therefore, be applied to modernism, even if this application is not really intelligible prima facie: the notion of progress in modernism could be more easily understood as a complication or a change of structure rather than a form of progress. Nevertheless, this civilization, characterized by progress, became ‘alien and uncongenial’ to Wittgenstein, just as progress became ‘alien’ – but not exactly ‘uncongenial’ – to Ulrich in The Man without Qualities. Indeed, the reality of progress in our time seems to him to be paradoxical: We’re undeniably making so much progress in the several branches of human capability that we actually feel we can’t keep up with it! Isn’t it possible that

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this can also make us feel that there is no progress? After all, progress is surely the product of all our joint efforts, so we can practically predict that any real progress is likely to be precisely what nobody wants. … It seems to me … that every step forward is also a step backward. Progress always exists in only one particular sense. And since there’s no sense in our life as a whole, neither is there such a thing as progress as a whole. (MWQ I, §102, 527–8)

Ulrich’s view of progress is based on the difference between overall progress and specific instances of progress. There can be improvements in various branches of human capabilities and spheres of knowledge, but we do not feel overall progress: perhaps there is no such thing as progress of a whole. This is the reason why modern improvements became alien to Ulrich: they do not produce a unified advance and they do not generate a sense of life. This may be how the following section of Wittgenstein’s foreword quoted above, which is explicitly devoted to the emergence of a non-culture, ought to be understood: For in these times genuine and strong characters simply turn away from the field of the arts and towards other things and somehow the value of the individual finds expression. Not, to be sure, in the way it would at a time of Great Culture. Culture is like a great organization which assigns to each of its members his place, at which he can work in the spirit of the whole, and his strength can with a certain justice be measured by his success as understood within that whole. In a time without culture, however, forces are fragmented and the strength of the individual is wasted through the overcoming of opposing forces and frictional resistances; it is not manifest in the distance travelled but rather perhaps in the heat generated through the overcoming of frictional resistances. But energy is still energy and even if the spectacle afforded by this age is not the coming into being of a great work of culture in which the best contribute to the same great end, so much as the unimposing spectacle of a crowd whose best members pursue purely private ends, still we must not forget that the spectacle is not what matters. (CV, 8f.)

In such a state of non-culture, or civilization, as Spengler would say, the efforts devoted to progress in each domain of life (science, technology, society, etc.) do not join into one direction. This section of Wittgenstein’s foreword helps us understand what is at stake in the situation of Ulrich and Walter mentioned earlier. They feel that they no longer live in a great culture, and that there is no ‘great organization’ indicating each and every one its own place. Such an organization would normally enable individuals to contribute to the whole.

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Ulrich and Walter conceive themselves as living in a context in which the artistic forces are conflicting and lack unity, and therefore lose their power because of their reciprocal resistances in artistic conflicts. The consequence is that they no longer believe in the potential of the arts, and this is what unites them, although the former is a conservative spirit and the latter an independent or ‘ahistorical’ one.

4  The problem of culture Let us now consider what Wittgenstein and Ulrich propose to do once faced with this state of non-culture. Reading Wittgenstein’s biography, one is not surprised that Wittgenstein finds such a civilization and the importance it gives to progress as ‘uncongenial’. But it is significant that he also says that it is ‘alien’ to him. Wittgenstein expressed the feeling that his cultural ideal was in a way connected to Austria’s past, the beginning of the nineteenth century, Schumann’s period: I often wonder whether my cultural ideal is a new one, i.e. contemporary, or whether it comes from the time of Schumann. At least it strikes me as a continuation of that ideal, though not the continuation that actually followed it then. That is to say, the second half of the 19th Century has been left out. This, I ought to say, has happened quite instinctively and was not the result of reflection. (CV, 4)

But nothing in Wittgenstein’s words implies or recommends a return to the past: he imagines his cultural ideal as a continuation of Schumann’s period, even if it didn’t become real. Therefore, he adopts a very peculiar attitude: a rejection of progress and of the way things are shaped in the present, but without any desire to go back to the past. This echoes the situation Ulrich discovers in the first part of The Man without Qualities. Ulrich is depicted as having retired from his course of life in order to determine the direction he would like to give it. His father worries about him and his career, and therefore asks him to take on a secretary’s role in the organization of the Jubilee celebrating the seventieth year of the reign of the emperor. In this organization, Ulrich is in charge of collecting people’s ideas regarding the celebration of the Empire, practical ideas for the event (a march, an exhibition?). But, at the same time, the chosen idea would have to glorify the

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Empire, to reveal its power and its nature, in order to give it a new direction. This experience eventually reveals the Empire’s incapacity to find such an idea that would give it a new impulsion for the future. Ulrich formulates then the more general problem of a culture with no direction, a problem that is similar to Wittgenstein’s. In a discussion with one of the organizers, Diotima, his cousin, he describes what he and the Count Leinsdorf, another organizer, found: He has only just come up with the discovery that in the history of mankind there is no turning back voluntarily. What makes it difficult is that going forward is not much use either. Permit me to say that we’re in a very peculiar situation, unable to move either forward or backward, while the present moment is felt to be unbearable too. (MWQ I, §66, 294)

Ulrich and Leinsdorf are, indeed, confronted with two kinds of ideas and desires. The one could be expressed by ‘back to …’ and the other by ‘forward to …’. But the desire to ‘go back to …’ previous periods of history raises a problem: ‘Things can never again be what they were, the way they were’ (MWQ I, §58, 294). The aim of going back into the past is necessarily modified by the particular present circumstances in which this return takes place. These circumstances give a specific shape to what has already happened, so that there is never a true return to older values, social structures, etc. As for the desire to go ‘forward to …’, the problem is precisely that people in the Empire do not agree on what their future could be. Therefore, the act of collecting such ideas, directed towards the past or the future, reveals and clarifies the disorientation of the people, who experience the present situation as senseless. According to Ulrich, this is the true problem of culture. To a certain extent, Wittgenstein’s remark in Culture and Value answers this predicament: Wittgenstein clearly refuses to choose between ‘forward to…’ and ‘back to…’, between progress and return to the past. What, then, does he propose, instead of these two options? The question is particularly problematic since his cultural ideal does not correspond to the situation in his present days either. On the one hand, Wittgenstein prefers leaving the world alone: There are problems I never tackle, which do not lie in my path or belong to my world. Problems of the intellectual world of the West which Beethoven (and perhaps Goethe to a certain extent) tackled and wrestled with but which no philosopher has ever confronted (perhaps Nietzsche passed close to them). And perhaps they are lost to western philosophy, that is there will

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be no one there who experiences and so can describe the development of this culture as an epic. … But I do not get to these problems at all. When I ‘have done with the world’ I have created an amorphous (transparent) mass and the world in all its variety is left on one side like an uninteresting lumber room. Or perhaps more precisely: the whole outcome of the entire work is for the world to be set on one side. (A throwing-into-the-lumber-room of the whole world) (CV, 11–12)

The problems Wittgenstein is not confronted with are the problems of the West, that is to say, the problems of that European and American culture that is alien and uncongenial to him. That is the reason why he claims that he never tackles this kind of problems; that they do not lie in his path or belong to his world, etc. And his way of working in philosophy makes this world and its problems much more alien to him: it becomes an ‘uninteresting lumber room’ or it is thrown into a lumber room. But on the other hand, another position – much less radical and much closer to Ulrich – can be found in some of the paragraphs collected in Culture and Value. At the end of the foreword mentioned above, Wittgenstein says that he does not want to build something new, new structures or constructions as in the European and American civilization, but to have ‘the foundations of possible buildings, transparently’ before him (CV, 9). This does not mean leaving the world alone, but seeing in the utmost clarity the foundations of the present cultures and of other real and possible cultures, that is, to ‘describe the “possibilities” of phenomena’ (PI, §90). Although there are obvious differences between him and Wittgenstein, Ulrich seems to adopt a similar attitude. He wants to achieve what he calls a ‘secretary for precision and soul’ that would be, in fact, an inventory of all human ideas and possibilities. This inventory is particularly crucial in his eyes, if one thinks about the difference between two general domains in human life: the domain of the sciences and the domain of feelings and thoughts (artistic) creations, and possibilities or potentials of life. The variety of ideas in the sciences and their proliferation in life and creation do not have the same destiny: He was on the verge of bringing up the neglected difference between the way in which various historical periods have developed the rational mind in their own fashion and the way they have kept the moral imagination static and closed off, also in their own fashion. He was on the verge of talking about this because it results in a line that rises, despite all scepticism, more or less steadily through all of history’s transformations, representing the rational mind and

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its patterns, and contrasting with a mound of broken shards of feelings, ideas, and potentials of life that were heaped up in layers just the way they were when they came into being, as eternal side issues, and that were always discarded. (MWQ II, §38, 1117)

The idea is that, among all the creations of the human spirit and human life, some contribute to progress, particularly in the sciences, but also in technology. But other creations, particularly artistic creations and creation of new possibilities of life, of ethics, are abandoned after they have been developed or lived. When we read the novel attentively, it seems that this problem has become more and more important since the rise of modernism and its many creations, reactions and the oppositions to it, oppositions to these oppositions, etc. The idea of a description and an inventory of all the human creations, the new artistic and ethical possibilities, is opposed to the rejection of the world as a lumber room: the human world with all its creations and possibilities does not have to be left aside, but is to be seen in its variety and in light of other possibilities. To conclude, we would say that Wittgenstein and Musil’s character, Ulrich, share a reaction to modernism that is particularly significant, in the sense that it expresses a common feeling of being a foreigner in this world, this culture, and in that it implies similar original answers: an attempt to describe and grasp the possibilities of this culture and other possibilities beyond it.

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‘We Should be Seeing Life Itself ’: Back to the Rough Ground of the Stage Élise Marrou

The human gaze has a power of conferring value on things; but it makes them cost more too.1 It is a fascinating and atypical remark in Wittgenstein’s work that will retain my attention in this contribution. It yields one of the keys to understanding the conditions under which Wittgenstein may legitimately be placed in the tradition of modernism,2 without overstating the case, or superimposing discussions foreign to his own concerns. It also constitutes a decisive step forward in the dialogue that Michael Fried has engaged with this tradition since Art and Objecthood.3 It is no accident, moreover, that the passage below dated 22 August 1930, excerpted from Culture and Value, stands out by its description of the everyday itself, in person, rather than some everyday uses. These two features, the contribution to Michael Fried’s discussion of Clement Greenberg’s theses and its most recent reverberations in his work on photography, on the one hand, and the central emphasis on the everyday, on the other, are even inseparable in the passage: Nothing could be more remarkable than seeing a man who thinks he is unobserved performing some quite simple everyday activity. Let us imagine a theatre: the curtain goes up and we see a man alone in a room, walking up and down, lighting a cigarette, sitting down etc. so that suddenly we are observing a human being from outside in a way that ordinarily we can never observe

CV 1 [Nachlass, MS 106 247: 1929]. For an illuminating discussion of this point, see Anat Matar, Modernism and The Language of Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2006). 3 Art and Objecthood (Chicago, Ill, London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998). 1 2

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ourselves; it would be like watching a chapter of biography with our own eyes, – surely this would be uncanny and wonderful [unheimlich und wunderbar] at the same time. We should be observing something more wonderful [wunderbarer] than anything a playwright could arrange to be acted or spoken on the stage: life itself. – But then we do see this every day without its making the slightest impression on us! True enough, but we do not see it from that point of view [in der Perspektive] – Well, when E. [Engelmann] looks at his writings and finds them marvellous (even though he would not care to publish any of the pieces individually), he is seeing his life as a work of art created by God, and, as such, it is certainly worth contemplating, as is every life and everything whatever. But only an artist can so represent an individual thing as to make it appear to us like a work of art; it is right that those manuscripts should lose their value when looked at singly and especially when regarded disinterestedly, i.e. by someone who doesn’t feel enthusiastic about them in advance. The work of art forces us – as one might say – to see it in the right perspective [zu der richtigen Perspektive], but, in the absence of art, the object is a fragment of nature like any other. (CV, 4f.)

Michael Fried’s proposed interpretation of this remark of Wittgenstein follows in the direct line of his work on photography and his reflection on why this art form appears today as the privileged medium for representing the everyday. It is, above all, a work by Jeff Wall – ‘Adrian Walker’4 – that Fried confronts with Wittgenstein’s narrative. His reading provides both a response to modernism as Clement Greenberg defines it in his rightly famous and provocative articles and an alternative theory of modernism.5 In a review of an exhibition by Edward Weston written in 1946, Greenberg argues that photography is the only art that can still afford to be naturalistic and, in fact, achieves its maximum effect through naturalism. Unlike painting and poetry, it can put all emphasis on an explicit subject, anecdote or message; the artist

More precisely, the complete title goes: ‘Adrian Walker, Artist, Drawing from a Specimen in a Laboratory in the Dept. of Anatomy of the University of British Columbia’, Vancouver, 1992. Michael Fried appeals to Wittgenstein’s remark in several essays, especially in ‘Jeff Wall, Wittgenstein and the Everyday’, Critical Inquiry, 33, Spring 2007, reprinted in Why Photography Matters as Art as Never before (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). In turn, when he was interviewed by Martin Schwander (1994), Jeff Wall characterized ‘Adrian Walker’ as ‘absorptive’, in reference to Fried’s Absorption and Theatricality, Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). 5 See Clement Greenberg’s influencial ‘Modernist Painting’, in The Collected Essays and Criticism, eds. C. Greenberg and O. Brian, vol. 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957-1969 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 4

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is permitted in what is still so relatively mechanical and neutral a medium to identify the ‘human interest’ of his subject as he cannot in any of the other arts without falling into banality. Therefore it would seem that photography today could take over the field that used to belong to genre and historical painting and that it does not have to follow painting into the areas into which the latter has been driven by the force of historical development.6

To borrow Thierry de Duve’s words, Greenberg claims here that ‘photography is released from any obligation to be modernist’.7 Fried has shown on the contrary why photography is an inherently modernist art. That is precisely where Wittgenstein’s remark comes into the picture: as an illustration of Fried’s description of the absorptive genre and criticism of theatricality. I must say first of all that I totally agree with Fried’s reading: after presenting its guiding lines (I. 1, 2), I even argue that the correspondence with Paul Engelmann gives full support to the claim that this remark offers a decisive contribution to our understanding of the portrait genre (I, 3). Nevertheless, in the name of demonstrating the thesis of the everyday aesthetic value, Michael Fried distances himself from the theatrical stage, properly speaking, in the name of valorizing the photographic medium instead. Indeed, he does not hesitate to write that he takes ‘Wittgenstein to be inviting one to imagine an artistic medium significantly different from anything available at that time. Obviously theatre couldn’t supply what was wanted.’8 And it is precisely this obviousness – the abandonment of one medium for another and the replacement of theatre by photography – that I would like to examine and call into question here. I am therefore asking whether the stage does not benefit from being envisioned in and for itself, and in so doing, if it does not teach us to read the critical relation of Wittgenstein’s work with itself in a different way. To put it in a nutshell, my aim is to show that Wittgenstein’s remark gives a vivid illustration of Fried’s notorious claim that ‘what lies between the arts is theatre’,9 taken, however, in a positive sense. Indeed, the theatrical stage can be seen as the proper model for the method of language-games. Or so shall I argue.

C. Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 2: Arrogant Purpose, 1945-1949 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). Thierry de Duve, ‘The Main Stream and the Crooked Path’, in Jeff Wall: The Complete Edition, eds. Th. de Duve, A. Pelenc, B. Groys, J.-F. Chevrier and M. Lewis (London: Phaidon, 2009), 29. 8 Fried, ‘Jeff Wall, Wittgenstein and the Everyday’, 522. 9 Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’, 142. 6

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1  The everyday on stage – Michael Fried’s interpretation Contrary to what a hasty first reading of the already quoted remark might lead one to think, Wittgenstein is not simply describing a scene from banal or trivial ordinary life, nor exactly a man in one of his most common activities. He is confronting us with an experience of the drama10 of the everyday, which is quite deliberately presented as a limit-case insofar as it puts an impossible scene literally before our eyes. More precisely, the very essence of this presentation is that it immanently denies its own theatricality: in it, the man is the actor and even the protagonist, ‘even though he thinks himself unobserved’. It is decisive that, in this freely imagined experiment of Wittgenstein, these two aspects coexist: all the theatrical elements are in place, as if we were watching a play (we are asked to imagine a theatre, the raising of the curtain, and to pay attention to what is happening on stage). And yet this show cannot take on the superlative value Wittgenstein gives it – that of representing life itself – except on the condition that it not be a representation, but pure and simple selfpresentation that remains unaware of itself. To put it in another way still, the principle on which the representation Wittgenstein is offering us rests is that the protagonist is so absorbed in his everyday activities that it is not his acting that we have before our eyes but, as Wittgenstein calls it, ‘life itself ’. This is the reason why the result would be at once both ‘uncanny’ and ‘wonderful’, ‘more wonderful than anything that a playwright could cause to be acted or spoken on the stage’. The man on the stage is not playing a role, not even his own. Here, the stage is not occupying the place of a space wherein the projection of speech is possible; it is, rather, above all and in conformity to its originary meaning, a place where action is represented: seeing a ‘human being from outside’ is not to see him in order to say anything about him (even if it is only to narrate his existence, to tell us for example why it is precisely now that he wants another cigarette), but to watch him in action. This scenic description – which might seem minimalist insofar as it is without speech and its action is unspectacular – reveals its intensity to be only all the greater, or even, if we refer to the root of

I am taking ‘drama’ here not in its most common sense, but, rather, in the ancient sense of δρᾶμα, of unfolding of action. More precisely, δρᾶμα means an action loaded with consequences, laying emphasis on the responsibility taken by the protagonist, rather than on the realization of the action considered in itself. In CV (10, 12, 41, 50), Wittgenstein refers repeatedly to its rather different, much more modern, sense.

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the two adjectives Wittgenstein uses in this remark, miraculous [wunderbar in German].11 Where, then, does the distinction Wittgenstein points out, between this thought experiment and the classic theatrical representation of a scene from ordinary life, lie? It is not simply that we are confronted with life itself without the slightest distance or the mediation of representation. It is, above all, that the thought experiment rests upon the wager that we are seeing a man in his most everyday activities ‘from outside’, but in a way that is more immediate and more certain than we could see ourselves. Thus, the startling exteriorization that the representation makes possible is a more direct means of access to the truth of life itself, of this life here that first-person knowledge can best offer. How are we to understand these different levels of intelligibility of the thought experiment and the relation it has with Paul Engelmann’s narration to Wittgenstein concerning his own autobiographical writings? In order to make the different levels of the narration explicit, we have to examine each step of Michael Fried’s interpretation in a more precise way and see how, according to him, each one justifies the privilege given to the photographic medium.

a.  Absorption and Theatricality First of all, it is clear that there is something disturbing to the author of Absorption and Theatricality12 here in the composition of this remark, exactly insofar as it seems to illustrate Michael Fried’s principal theses. Indeed, Wittgenstein asks us to imagine a man absorbed de facto in some of his most ordinary activities. Needless to say, one of the strongest themes of Michael Fried’s analyses of late-eighteenth-century French painting, and of paintings of the Chardin type in particular, is to be found in his reliance on the art criticism of Diderot. Indeed, the originality of Michael Fried’s interpretation lies in his understanding of this moment in French painting as one that was shot through with the problem of the definition of the relation between picture In this respect, it is crucial to note that the mode used by Wittgenstein to describe his thought experiment is the second subjunctive. In our analysis, this thought experiment could not be followed through to its conclusion. On the contrary it designates that towards which any representation claiming to access the sub specie aeterni aspect of artwork or thought tends. This we shall examine later. 12 Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality, A Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1980). 11

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and spectator, through the prism of theatricality and detheatralization. As a matter of fact, one of the paths taken by this struggle against the falseness of representation and the theatricality of figuration is that of a dramatic conception of painting that had recourse to every method of closing the picture off from the spectator.13 The realism here no longer consists in the quasi-photographic representation of the world, but, rather, in an extremely structured and paradoxical relation between the picture and the spectator: its success is tributary to the fiction of the non-existence of its addressee. The relation of the picture to the spectator holds only by virtue of a convincing representation of one or of several characters’ total absorption in diverse actions, activities or states of mind. In this way, what one must admire in the paintings of Chardin is the painter’s ability to suggest the real duration of these states and activities. Things are such that it is as though we did not perceive the stability and immutability of the painted image as a property of the canvass, but as a manifestation of states of absorption that come to pass only to endure and, so to speak, for the absorption of the image itself. To limit ourselves to two schematic examples, in The Soap Bubble (1734), the delicate and fragile sphere is literally trembling before our eyes; in The Card Castle (1734), the young man putting the cards in place seems to be on the verge of withdrawing his hand. Both paintings confront us not with images of lost time, but of full time. The singularity of Chardin’s representation of everyday or ordinary scenes is not, for Fried, due to the fact that the absorption is only an ordinary or everyday state, but to the very fact that the absorption is the condition sine qua non of the representation of the everyday as such. The very drama of painting, then, rests on the establishment of the fiction of the characters’ solitude, a solitude interpreted by Fried as a metaphysical aloneness.14 Now, here in the excerpt from Culture and Value, the thought experiment relies on this same mechanism: the fiction of the non-existence of the spectator. Michael Fried concludes therefore that ‘the thought experiment Wittgenstein proposes – imagining a man who thinks he is unobserved performing some

Michael Fried names the inverse operation the ‘pastoral’ conception, which absorbs the spectator in the picture by making them enter into it. On this distinction, see Fried, Absorption and Theatricality, 131f. 14 Interestingly, in ‘The Tractatus and the Limits of sense’, in The Oxford Handbook of Wittgenstein, eds. O. Kuusela and Marie McGinn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 257–8, Cora Diamond relies on Fried’s essay ‘Jeff Wall, Wittgenstein and the Everyday’, and goes a step further, arguing ‘that a philosophical work, on Wittgenstein’s view, can transform our perspective on the world and that it can do so through the presenting of senseful language “from the inside”’. 13

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quite simple everyday activity as if in a theatre – belongs to the cast of mind I have been calling antitheatrical’.15 For him, modernism arises, on the contrary, with Manet precisely insofar as this paradox of the fiction of the non-existence of the spectator is broken in favour of a ‘radical facingness’. On a deeper level, this turn marks the recognition of Manet’s will to ‘make the painting itself turn toward and face the beholder. … It is as though the frontality, the problematic spatial relationships and finally what has been seen as the flatness of Manet’s paintings are at bottom just the facingness, this turning-toward.’16

b.  The recovery of the natural To say that this state of mind is anti-theatrical is to assert, this time in a positive way according to Fried, that Wittgenstein is heir to the aesthetic tradition of Diderot, which values naturalness against the artificiality and artifices of representation. Indeed, in the thought experiment from Culture and Value, there is nothing artificial about the non-distance and immediateness of the theatrical representation. If we are so struck by the experience it induces, this is because the subject on stage is paradoxically not an actor, he is not playing his own role, he is just being himself. The insistence on naturalness is not ‘forced’ at all onto Wittgenstein’s text by Fried. Furthermore, Fried reminds us that Wittgenstein was extremely critical towards directors who, through the use of narrative editing that he found too subtle, cut off the spectators’ total immersion in the film. In a sense, Wittgenstein could have made his own this remark by Diderot: If you lose your feeling for the difference between the man who presents himself in society and a man engaged in an action, between the man who is alone and the man who is looked at, throw your brushes into the fire. You will academicize all your figures, you will make them stiff and unnatural.17

Fried, ‘Jeff Wall, Wittgenstein and the Everyday’, 519. Manet’s Modernism, Or The face of Painting in the 1860s (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 479. For a clarification of the different definitions of modernism itself, see the introduction, 13–19. 17 Diderot, Essais, Œuvres esthétiques, ed. Paul Vernière, 1966, 702, quoted by Michael Fried in Absorption and Theatricality, 100. See also the following passage in Entretiens sur le fils, Œuvres esthétiques, ed. Paul Vernière, 1966, 102, quoted by Fried, Absorption and Theatricality, 94: ‘In a dramatic representation, the beholder is no more to be taken into account than if he did not exist. Is there something addressed to him? The author has departed from his subject, the actor has been led away from his part. They both step down from the stage. I see them in the orchestra, and as long as the speech lasts, the action is suspended for me, and the stage remains empty.’ 15 16

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The picture, Fried comments, would then no longer be a public square, a temple; it would become a theatre, that is, an artificial construction where the desire to make an impression on the spectator and to solicit applause wrecks the elements of persuasion and hampers the illusion. We find here the heart of the actor’s paradox: it is by emphasizing the naturalness of the image of this man, seen from outside, that Wittgenstein transposes this pictorial aesthetics onto a dramaturgic setting, in a way that is perfectly faithful to Diderot’s dramaturgic aesthetics. As Fried has rightly understood, when Wittgenstein points out that we were observing something more magnificent than anything a poet might have played or said on stage, what we are seeing is life itself, and this, therefore, is the nec plus ultra of realism.18

c. The portrait genre re-examined in light of the correspondence with Paul Engelmann Fried’s reading of The Card Castle (1737) by Chardin seems all the more interesting in the context of our understanding of Wittgenstein’s remark, insofar as the role played by the drawer is crucial to the interpretation of this painting: By virtue of fronting the beholder and what is more opening toward him, the drawer serves to enforce a distinction between the beholder’s point of view and perception of the scene as a whole and the quite different point of view and limited, exclusive focus of the youth balancing the cards. There is even a sense in which the contrast between the two cards – one facing the beholder, the other blankly away from him – may be seen as an epitome of the contrast between the surface of the painting, which of course faces the beholder and the absorption of the youth in his delicate undertaking, a state of mind that is essentially inward, concentrated, closed.19

According to Fried, we can make out a contrast between the two cards – one of them is facing the spectator and the other has only its back to them – there is a contrast opposing the surface of the picture facing the spectator and the young boy’s absorption in his delicate undertaking. The adolescent’s state of mind is, indeed, essentially one of concentration, inwardness, closure. And yet, in the scene described by Wittgenstein – a man who is simply smoking, pacing up and down, absorbed in what is precisely the most everyday of the everyday and Fried, ‘Jeff Wall, Wittgenstein and the Everyday’, 519. Fried, Absorption and Theatricality, 48–9.

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who does not know that he is being observed – was itself contained in another narrative: Engelmann told me that when he rummages round at home in a drawer full of his own manuscripts, they strike him as so splendid that he thinks it would be worth making them available to other people. (He said it’s the same when he is reading through letters from his dead relations.) But when he imagines publishing a selection of them, the whole business loses its charm and value and becomes impossible. (CV, 4)

The idea here is not to compare what is incomparable, that is, the symbol of the drawer in Chardin’s painting and the role the drawer plays in Engelmann’s story, but rather to emphasize the fact that in Engelmann’s story, the drawer containing the manuscripts plays a similar mediating role: the drawer veils his writings, but without making them secret – simply hiding them from the public. Paul Engelmann’s judgement concerning his own writings is what elicits this story within a story and this transposition into the theatrical realm of a literary medium. The thought experiment has to allow us to imagine the relationship between Engelmann’s personal writings and the effect of their publication, or, more exactly, the gap separating the miracle of their presence insofar as they had remained lost in a messy drawer and the total loss of their value if they were to enter suddenly into the public realm. The connection between this story and the thought experiment is all the more significant if we recall the content of the recently republished correspondence between Paul Engelmann and Wittgenstein. The former, whom we know above all as an architect who had worked with Loos, was also a writer, close to Kraus. Indeed, the study of the correspondence between Paul Engelmann and Ludwig Wittgenstein established two points that are relevant for our arguments: 1. The first is that the question of the publication of personal manuscripts on the subject of Wittgenstein is a recurring theme of Paul Engelmann’s concerns. This is why he explains at length the reasons for which he had waited so long to publish his correspondence with Wittgenstein. Moreover, he sympathizes with Anscombe regarding this point: If by pressing a button it could have been secured that people would not concern themselves with his personal life, I should have pressed the button; but since it has not been possible and it is certain that much that is foolish will keep on being said, it seems to me reasonable that anyone who can write a truthful account of

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him should do so. On the other hand to write a satisfactory account would seem to need extraordinary talent. Further I must confess that I feel deeply suspicious of anyone’s claim to have understood Wittgenstein. That is perhaps because, although I had a very strong and deep affection for him, and, I suppose, knew him well, I am very sure that I did not understand him. It is difficult, I think, not to give a version of his attitudes, for example, which one can enter into oneself, and then the account is really on oneself: is for example infected with one’s own mediocrity or ordinariness or lack of complexity.20

2. The second is the genre to which these writings belong. Paul Engelmann is trying to create a ‘portrait’ of Wittgenstein. He writes that he was only able to ‘provide a totally subjective image [durchaus subjektiv], like the image a good portrait painter [ein gutter Porträtist] can give of an important person’.21 His ambition was to ‘capture him through me and not me through him and by saying what I have to say, I hope to be able to paint his portrait from a perspective which is not to be found in any other memory’ (14). Engelmann continues: ‘The value of my presentation, in fact, its whole reason for existence is due only to my ability to highlight him through me and not me through him’ (14). Concerning his own writings, he confided to Wittgenstein in a letter dated 28 May 1918 that it is very difficult for him to write anything at all about himself and that ‘most often on paper, it seems most often to depart from what I want to say’ (36). He ends by insisting on the fact that, without adopting a pose (Schmockerei) of any kind (55f.), he had begun to write a confession. There is then no doubt about the fact that this was, indeed, what Wittgenstein had in mind when he inserted the thought experiment about the stage-play into the story: the writings in question are, indeed, autobiographical writings whose value is derived from their ability to convert ‘a mosaic of banalities’ into a ‘portrait’. Michael Fried concludes from this that Wittgenstein’s intention is to place us in the realm of representation, and that representation alone (and not life) can produce the impression of life. On the condition that it have some depth to it, this point seems to be all the more accurate for the fact that the correspondence with Paul Engelmann is where Wittgenstein would say that ‘if one is not seeking to express the inexpressible, then nothing is lost. The inexpressible being inexpressibly contained in the expressed.’22 Engelmann, for his part, had written E. Anscombe quoted by Paul Engelmann: Wittgenstein – Engelmann, Briefe, Begegnungen, Erinnerungen, ed. Ilse Somavilla, with the collaboration of Brian McGuinness (Innsbruck: Haymon, 2006), 13–14. 21 Engelmann, Briefe, 14. 22 There are various translations of this remark dated 9 April 1917. 20

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to Wittgenstein (4 April 1917) on the topic of a poem by Uhland that ‘almost every other poem (including the good ones) tries to express the inexpressible, which is not what this one is seeking to do, and it is precisely for this reason that it succeeds’.23 What is important here for us is not to discuss the new readings of Wittgenstein, nor even the distinction between saying and showing, but to pay attention to the fact that the main point here has to do with the success of the expression. Indeed, Engelmann would write significantly on this subject: What is important in my interiority beyond and beneath the possibilities language offers can as little be reproduced [abgebildet] or represented [dargestellt] as that which allows the representation of reality by an image. Both must remain outside that which sentences can express: nothing is lost – it is shown. Art is what this showing is. This is the deepest explanation of Kraus’ theory of language.

Here we reach the heart of our argument. Indeed, the most interesting element in the thought experiment perhaps does not seem to depend on any superlative value being given to the everyday as an aesthetic category, as Michael Fried suggests in the articles cited above, and as the photographer Jeff Wall emphasizes: The everyday, or the commonplace, is the most basic and the richest artistic category. Although it seems familiar, it is always surprising and new. But at the same time, there is an openness that permits people to recognize what is there in the picture because they have already seen something like it somewhere. So the everyday is a space in which meanings accumulate, but it’s pictorial realization that carries the meanings into the realm of the pleasurable.24

Rather, the point is to understand the reasons themselves for this value being given to the everyday. It is not the everyday as empirical object that is being underlined, but the perspective, which allows us to see this scene as life itself. Perspective is constitutively ‘partial’, Wittgenstein writes. But one of Wittgenstein’s voices immediately objects: this is what we see every day and it does not leave the slightest impression on us. And the narrator immediately counters this objection by responding that the ordinary is not what has value in and of itself unless we understand ‘aesthetic category’ in the strong sense, not of a sample taken from a slice of life, but in the sense that Wittgenstein gave it elsewhere, that of the gaze giving things their value. What gives a work – even a work of art, or Briefe von Ludwig Wittgenstein, 16f. J. Wall, ‘The Hole Truth: Jan Tumlir Talks with Jeff Wall about the Flooded Grave’, Artforum 39 (2001): 116. On the aspects of the Baudelairean inheritance, see Jean-François Chevrier, ‘The Spectres of the Everyday’, in Jeff Wall: The Complete Edition, 64f. and de Duve, ‘The Main Stream and the Crooked Path’.

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the definitive formulation of a thought – its value is not the fact that it is made public. The human gaze alone is able to transform a fragment, ‘a piece of nature like any other’, into a work. The gaze is that which, in a completely Nietzschean accent, produces this slicing. Wittgenstein’s remark shows us that life in its most everyday ordinariness remains inaccessible to us. We think that this is what we have the easiest access to, but we are mistaken since art and thought alone can give us access to it. On the other hand, the artist manages to isolate, in an insipid slice of life, a detail (as opposed to an object), and thereby grants the evanescent everyday scene its truth. The scene does not only mediate our impression. It models it and through its modelling of it, it gives us its truth, or the thing sub specie aeterni. We recall that language-games are essentially cases of modelling, and they are that which fulfils the role of mediation and of clarifying operators via their (re)presentative power.

d.  The photographic medium This, I argue, is where the parallel Michael Fried established between Jeff Wall and Wittgenstein’s remark reaches its limits. For Wittgenstein, the drama of the everyday is modelled, but it is not recomposed, reconstituted or reassembled. In other words, Wall’s composition is distinguishable from Wittgenstein’s story by its constructed nature. According to Wittgenstein, art and also thought manage to allow us to grasp life itself, even in all its innocence, but this grasping is itself founded on just as partial or perspectival a modelling of the facts by the artist or the philosopher. It is then not in any way, we argue, the factual or documentary value of what is seen that interests Wittgenstein in this 1930 remark – as opposed to that which motivates Jeff Wall’s work, as the following excerpt testifies: The picture is factual. The man who is named in the title is in fact the person Adrian Walker; that is the corner of the anatomy lab where he worked. It’s all real. The Don Quixote just happened to be there. The picture involved a performance in that Adrian was working with me, but he didn’t do anything he didn’t normally do. I visited him occasionally during the time he was drawing there. He was a student of mine and wanted to be more involved with drawing the figure. He arranged with the department of anatomy that he could work there for an extended period. I might have moved the lamp over a little bit, but I didn’t change anything. The picture is an example of what I call ‘near documentary’.25 Robert Enright, ‘The Consolation of Plausibility’ (interview with Jeff Wall), Border Crossings 19 (February 2000), 50.

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In an interview with Jeff Wall, Arielle Pélenc pushes this point further by taking the child represented in ‘In the Public Garden’ as testimony. The child ‘looks like an automaton – in the garden but cut off from the outside world. There is a lot of automatic gesturing in your pictures, maybe because of their “cinematographic” character.’ ‘This automatism of the image’, says the interviewer, ‘is different from the distancing produced by theatre or painting.’26 And yet, it is the automatism of the image that creates the properly ‘cinematic’ nature of Wall’s photographs: In classical cinema, the hors-champs, the outside, is open and endless. But with modern cinema the hors-champs is transformed by the jump cut (faux raccord). It becomes like an irrational number not belonging to one or the other class or group it is separating. Your work presents these irrational cuts where the rupture with the outside world is visible inside the image, like in Dead Troops Talk, for example.27

Only, for Jeff Wall, there is nothing secondary about this cinematic aspect. It even takes as its very target a way of playing on ruptures and discontinuities that is, according to him, not radical enough, and of understanding the idea of critique and self-critique in a way that is distinct from a radically disruptive approach, and would be simply ironic and mannerist. This, moreover, is what Jeff Wall accuses modernism of: My work has been criticized for lacking interruption, for not displaying the fragmentation and ‘suturing’ which had become de rigueur for serious art, critical art since the 1960s. In your terms, it didn’t seem to have any jump cuts, which let in the outside and break up the seamlessness of the illusionism. But, already by the middle of the 1970s, I felt that the ‘Godardian’ look of this art had become so formulaic and institutionalized that it had completed its revolution, the plus was becoming a minus, and something new was emerging. I preferred Mouchette to Weekend and was interested in the preservation of the classical codes of cinema as was being done by Buñuel, Rohmer, Pasolini, Bergman, Fassbinder and Eustache, all of whom achieved very new things in what I would call a non-Godardian or even counter-Godardian way. Eustache’s La Maman et la Putain had a tremendous effect on me. I wish he hadn’t died. What I think these people were doing was transferring the energy of radical thinking away from any direct interrogation of the medium and toward de Duve, ‘The Main Stream and the Crooked Path’, 10. Ibid, 10.

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increasing the pressure or intensity they could bring to bear on the more or less normative, existing forms which seemed to epitomize the medium. They accepted, but in a radical way what the art form had become during its history. They accepted technique, generic structure, narrative codes, problematics of performance and so on, but they broke away from the decorum of the dominant institutions, like the production companies or, in Europe, the state filming agencies. In that process, they brought new stories and therefore new characters into the picture. Think of the couple in Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, or Mouchette herself, or the people in Persona or Winter Light.28

To my knowledge, Thierry de Duve is the only one to have shown that this refusal should not be taken at face value.29 Although Jeff Wall, indeed, insists on the continuity and the legislative action of the avant-garde, and he does not at all believe in the idea of Modernity as a crescendoing series of ruptures, this is because his work relies on a hybrid of two media, painting and photography. Indeed, as we have already seen, for Clement Greenberg, photography is the most transparent of mediums conceived of and discovered by humans. Thus, according to Greenberg, the photographer is exempt from historical necessity’s reflexive reduction to the nature of the medium. Yet, as de Duve has forcefully shown, ‘everything changes if in Wall’s works painting is the referent of his photographic practice’: If Wall copes with the paradox of being the painter of modern life by being a photographer, then the paradox closes in on him as a double bind, and he does not escape the ‘force of historical development’ which has compelled painting to take the route of Modernism. … Wall only really copes with being the painter of modern life by being at the same time a modernist photographer. In his use of the medium he reflects the medium’s immanent features. He does not presume the conventions of his practice to be transparent, natural or innocent; he makes them opaque.30

The double bind is inevitable because the transparency of the pictorial level is a convention that both painting and photography hold in common. This is the ‘crooked path’ on which this artist – who is excessively aware of the historical nature of our relation to natural beauty – treads. Ibid, 10f. As Thierry de Duve explains in ‘The Main Stream and the Crooked Path’, Wall simply does not adhere to the idea that the history of modernity is built on escalating rifts; he thinks the avant-garde has written as many new laws as it has broken old ones, thereby imitating the Constitution State. 30 de Duve, ‘The Main Stream and the Crooked Path’, 29. 28 29

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2  Dramatics of the language-game: The uses of the theatrical stage I would like, in this final step of my argument, to suggest that the model of the theatrical stage reconciles three essential resources of Wittgenstein’s thought. Strangely, the importance Wittgenstein gives to the dramaturgical model has been little remarked upon: 1. The stage model is first of all distinguished by the embodied presence of the actor. Indeed, there is no such thing as a stage without live actors. Thus the model of the stage presents us with a constitutive relationship between presence and corporeality. In Culture and Value, Wittgenstein frequently opposes ‘drama’ in which the characters ‘do not leave us indifferent’ and a type of theatre that would present abstract ideas. Indeed, the allegorical dimension of theatrical representation is not what holds his attention, but, rather, its tautegorical dimension.31 The artwork has only to transmit itself, and in this way the stage presents itself as a microcosm offering reduced models of human actions in their purest state. In the Poetics, Aristotle highlighted forcefully the fact that theatre imitates characters in action and identified the drama with the characters in their action: ‘Tragedy does not imitate men, but an action and life’ (Poetics 1450b,  3–4). Wittgenstein’s conception fits very clearly into this Aristotelian lineage. In theatrical representation, the ones who enter onto the stage represent characters – but they do so in the strong sense, in that they lend their being to the character. On the other hand, the ones who enter onto the stage and the ones who sit in the audience are contemporaries: they are living at the same time, albeit not in the same time. The play does not fulfil the role of a mediation or an intermediary between the lived or imagined action and the spectator. The staged scene can be the receptacle for every illusion except the illusion of presence.32 This double reference to the action and to the presence of the protagonist is what retains Wittgenstein (whereas the cinematographic medium allows us to entertain a more complex relationship with presence, which Wittgenstein analyses in terms of a dream-like presence). I refer to the ‘tautegorical principle’ formulated by Moritz and Coleridge in contrast to the allegory (in the context of their respective definitions of myth): while an allegory clarifies an abstract idea by means of a simile or metaphor borrowed from the sense experience, a ‘tautegory’ leads to a meaning in its own right and does not need to be rendered in other terms. See CV, 67: ‘The work of art does not seek to convey something else, just itself.’ 32 I borrow these formulae from Henri Gouhier, De l’essence du théâtre, Paris, 1968. 31

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2. Drama therefore appears to Wittgenstein to be the best illustration of his contextualism: The contexts in which a word appears are portrayed best in a play; therefore, the best example for a sentence with a certain meaning is a quote from a play. And who asks the character in a play what he experiences when he speaks?33

This passage shows the reasons for Wittgenstein’s appeal to the stage model. While, ‘for a large class of cases, although not for all’, the meaning of a term is its use in language,34 its contextualization in the dramatic action effectuates that which we ourselves have to do when we are tangled up in our rules and we no longer see the meaning of our words very clearly: putting them back in the context that gives them their meaning. Here, on the theatrical stage, the unfolding of the action, the succession of events provides a concrete model that is an extension of the determination of meaning as use. On the other hand, this model, by giving a very clear privilege to action, defuses any form of mentalism (we never ask ourselves what the character must be feeling when he or she says a line – on the contrary, we are taken up in the unfolding of the action). Above all, the action is not perceived as a pure and simple externalization of some feeling, and it is to this level that the dramaturgical model makes us attentive. 3. The stage model, finally, permits a better understanding of the relationship between the internal and the external. While the image of the curtain is used in a marginal way to emphasize the illusory nature of interiority,35 Wittgenstein refers more often to the theatrical stage in order to question the possibility of simulation, of the duplicity of the human being. This is like those characters who deliver asides on stage, who express what they are thinking but would not say in normal life.36 We might also ask whether the famous remark, ‘My own relation to my words is wholly different from other people’s … If I listened to the words of my mouth, I might say that someone else was speaking out of my mouth’37 might follow directly from this theatrical inspiration. LW II, 7e. MS 169, 1949. PI §43, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, Prentice Hall, 3rd edn. 35 ‘The inner is a delusion. That is the whole complex of ideas alluded to by this word is like a painted curtain drawn in front of the scene of the actual word use’ LW II, 84e. 36 ‘We could portray certain people on the stage and have them speak in monologues asides things that in real life they of course would not say out loud, but which would nevertheless correspond to their thoughts. But we couldn’t portray alien humans this way. Even if we could predict their behaviour, we couldn’t give them the appropriate asides. And yet there’s also something wrong with this way of looking at this. For someone might actually say something to himself while he was going about doing things, and this could, for example, be quite conventional.’ MS 173, 1950. 37 PI II, 192e. 33 34

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We have now measured the importance Wittgenstein attaches to the theatrical stage by presenting what it is about this art – understood classically as mimetic representation – that is properly idiosyncratic. We have also attempted to show how the theatre radicalizes the Wittgensteinian understanding of language. We might be tempted to leave it at that and to think of the stage as giving us a figure of a representation of an action in presence, of a strengthened contextualism, and of role-playing of what we manifest to others or keep to ourselves in thought. In the three directions indicated here, the theatrical stage provides a model for the staging of public speech, gives a new extension to the determination of context (Zusammenhang) and refines still more the logical relation between the inner and the outer in the last remarks on the philosophy of psychology. But Wittgenstein does not leave it there. Let us conclude then by citing one last use of the theatrical stage: Whatever I carry out [aufführe] in the theatre (Kierkegaard) of my soul does not render its state more beautiful but rather more loathsome. And yet it always seems to me that I render it beautiful anew by means of a beautiful scene played on the stage. For I am seated among the spectators instead of contemplating everything from outside. For I do not like to stay out in the cold, everyday, unfriendly street; I prefer to be warm, sitting inside in the pleasant theatre.38

The theatrical stage is internalized, having become an image of the soul. Perhaps Wittgenstein intends, here, to take one final step. If ‘there is a way of capturing the world sub specie aeterni other than the work of the artist’, and if ‘thought has such a way’, then thinking to oneself can deliver a better understanding of ‘observing it from above’: the genuine work of thought has nothing in common with an idealization, nor with a mere transcendent move beyond what is given to us ordinarily, but much more with an unusual way of looking at things and objects, not ‘from the midst of them’, but ‘in such a way that they have the whole world as background’. To be true to oneself and to see ‘all the interconnections’39 here might well not be so easily separable.40

Nachlass, MS 183, 102f. Wittgenstein refers here to the Supplements to Either/Or, Either/Or 2, 479f. CV, 14: ‘A thinker is very similar to a draughtsman. Who wants to represent all the interconnections’ MS 153a 90v1931. 40 I am extremely grateful to Anat Matar for her very helpful comments on an earlier draft of this contribution and for her patience. In addition, I would like to warmly thank Sandra Laugier, Danièle Moyal-Sharrock, Chon Tejedor, Yves Érard and Pierre Fasula for their reactions and comments when I presented the main lines of this chapter at the ‘Wittgenstein Seminar’ at Paris I PanthéonSorbonne University. 38 39

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A Confluence of Modernisms: Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigation and Henry James’s Literary Language Garry L. Hagberg

In the collection of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s remarks assembled as the volume Culture and Value, we find the claim that the fundamental data of philosophy are spoken words and sentences. It is, of course, widely appreciated that Wittgenstein and those working in a Wittgensteinian philosophical tradition closely attend to words and sentences, but the special form of attention Wittgenstein practices in his work is perhaps less widely appreciated. It is an attention not only to what we say and what we would say and so forth (i.e. what much of ordinarylanguage philosophy took his fundamental lesson in philosophical methodology to be); it is also an attention of a finely focused and intense kind on what we feel – in a given philosophical frame of mind or within the discussion of a given philosophical problem or puzzle – an impulse to say, what we feel motivated to say within a certain problem-field, what we feel are the next words to come given the presuppositions presently in play. It is an attention to what language itself seems to want to make us say. Wittgenstein’s special attention is especially vigilant: it monitors these inner impulses as we think our way into and around conceptual quandaries, maintaining a mindfulness about these impulse-born linguistic formulations by constantly considering whether they are necessary, whether they are uniquely suited to the case at hand, whether they are the only possible formulations, whether others might serve as well or better or differently in an instructive way, and whether the way of speaking encouraged by such impulses (often position-defining, often polemical, often dogmatic) is, indeed, necessary at all. One sees this self-awareness in his writings on meaning and naming, on introspection, on rule-following, on privacy, on psychological explanation, on visual perception and interpretation, on certainty, on culture and on other topics throughout his corpus.

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In the reflective distance one maintains from one’s own verbal expressions, in the self-directed vigilance that in a sense doubles or bifurcates the object of scrutiny – we attend at once to what we say, and to what we are inclined to say or what a circumstance makes us to a degree want to say – we see a sensibility in play of a distinctively modernist kind. And this is ushered in, in literary form as a signal development of early emergent modernism precisely at the point of transition from late Victorian culture, within the writings of Henry James. His authorial voice is one that not only attends to sentences and words as spoken (although, like Wittgenstein and his followers, it does that to a very high degree); he also maintains precisely this second kind of doubled or bifocal attention, constantly considering and reconsidering at the most acute level the significance of locutions, the meanings they convey and the possibilities of further exchanges, further formulations, that they both open and close. (As we will see, it is instructive that James does this within his fiction inside the speaking minds of his characters, above but within his fiction in the words and sentences of his narrators, and outside  his fiction, that is, he does this as author, in his often profound Introductions to his works for the New York Edition.) Although it would be wrong to argue for any direct influence in either direction between Wittgenstein and James, this chapter will explore the remarkable parallels in the emergence of a modernist sensibility in both philosophy and literature, particularly where the special character of each casts a distinctive kind of light on the other.

1 It may help to have one of the primary contrasts between modernism and its predecessors in focus; this would be with the romantic conception of artistic creativity. That conception posited a rigid distinction between content and expression, between the private, inward origin of the work and its public, outward manifestation in the materials of the given art form. It is perhaps the image of Wagner that constitutes one of the clearest expressions of this conceptual model: the Great Man is the possessor of poetically transcendent emotive and intellectual content and as creator (one can plausibly argue that this is developed on the model of a transcendent Creator) possesses the technique and matter-shaping skill to capture in external form this superior artistic meaning-content. Note that this corresponds directly to the familiar dualistic template often introduced in discussions of linguistic meaning: on this model, the inner mental content

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predates its expression through, or its manifestation in, spoken or written language, and so – perfectly parallel to the romantic conception of creativity – one sees a rigid distinction between content and expression. One important feature of this dualistic picture (in both art and language) is that, according to it, any question of meaning will be answered (or ideally should be answered) through reference to the determinate intentional contents of the mind of the artist or the speaker. And so we more thoroughly understand Wagner’s music by more thoroughly understanding Wagner; we more thoroughly understand (as this template suggests) a speaker by more thoroughly grasping, or working our way back to, the preverbal intentional content that allegedly both precedes and determines the meaning of the only contingently attached linguistic material – what we think to be, on this model, mere words – that carry the intellectual or intentional content of the utterance on their physical backs. On both sides of the parallel – art and language – we are placed at a mediated or inferential distance from the real content of the work or word: our critical task in determining meaning on this model is to infer mental content from material evidence. Wittgenstein, modernist artists across the board1 and, as we shall see, Henry James, in particular, exactingly and intricately excavated and subjected to scrutiny these parallel oversimplified and misleading dualistic pictures – pictures from which they laboured to earn an independence so that we could more rightly reposition and reconceptualize our relations to art, to language and – as we will see at the end of this chapter – to our understanding of the relations between them.

2 In Philosophical Investigations, §124,2 Wittgenstein writes the now-famous lines: Philosophy must not interfere in any way with the actual use of language, so in the end it can only describe it. For it cannot justify it either. It leaves everything as it is. For the kind of range I am alluding to here, and for an excellent treatment of the development of the very concept of modernism, see Michael Levenson, Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011); in connection with our present considerations, see, especially, Chapter 2: ‘Narrating Modernity: the Novel After Flaubert’, 55–105. See also the classic collection, Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890-1930, ed. Malcolm Bradbury and John McFarlane (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976). 2 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, rev. 4th ed., ed. P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). 1

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These lines, because they function as an encapsulated reminder of Wittgenstein’s approach to philosophical quandaries and they intimate a sense of how he conceives of philosophical progress, have been discussed at length.3 But here I want to position them into the question of the modernist approach to materials (be they artistic or verbal). First, what exactly is it that philosophy must not do? It must not ‘interfere with the actual use of language’. If we look back for just a moment, we can see what this methodological proscription might mean for us. If the inferential distance between meaning and hearer were always in place as a fact of language in general, then it would always be right to ask what inference we are making about the meaning of what someone is saying. Or, in parallel, it would always be right to ask what inference we are making about the meaning of a created work of art. And yet, where, in a way true to our practices and to the lived contexts of our discourse, do we ask questions concerning inferences? Often, in cases where the meaning of what lies before us is unclear, or where we have to puzzle out what the words or the works mean. Or, indeed, we discuss, and draw, inferences in those cases where we find ourselves at the end of a mediated chain of what we will actually call evidence. The dualistic picture would suggest that language is always like this; the truth is that, in some particular cases, it can be. So Wittgenstein is insisting, in the interests of conceptual clarity, that we let the linguistic practice come first, and not reorganize it to conform to a generic template-picture concerning meaning-content. And in the end, philosophy can only describe those actual usages. So if we want to get clear about what the very phrase in play here that invokes and superimposes this dualistic model – the phrase ‘an inferential distance’ – might itself mean, we should (rather than interfering with actual use) look into cases where we appeal to, and speak of, an inference, and then describe (on the level of what, as we shall see, we will call Jamesian detail) that case. In bringing what has here become a philosophical word (‘inference’) back to its ordinary use, we gain insight into what is actually an inference, and thus how sense-destroying, over-general, and conceptually disorienting it can be to theorize all speakers, and in parallel all artists, as inference-drawing assessors of evidence at a metaphysical distance from inward hidden content.4 For a particularly insightful discussion, see Jonathan Lear, ‘Leaving the World Alone’, The Journal of Philosophy 79, no. 7 (1982): 382–403. 4 For an extensive examination of this issue, see Norman Malcolm, Nothing is Hidden (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989). 3

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But Wittgenstein also said, ‘For it cannot justify it either’; which is to say, philosophy cannot be called in to provide a second-order justification of language on the first-order level of our usage. This is interestingly easy to misunderstand and still easier to insufficiently understand. Many philosophers before Wittgenstein attempted to give a general account of the nature of meaning, where this involved giving a general account of our relation to language in reductively unitary terms. Often, this proceeded in a fashion all too reminiscent of the dualistic picture where, again, inner content is presumed as preverbally primary, and the linking of that intentional content to contingent outward signs is then seen as a matter of the manipulation of otherwise inert external materials. (The analogy to artistic meaning is apparent.) With such a conceptual picture in place, the justification philosophy might then try to provide would be to claim that if the outward signs are utilized so that they successfully convey the inward content, and we work out the relations between inner content and external expression (one-to-one matching), then we would have a general theory-level justification of the actual particular usages. But – Wittgenstein’s point – if we now were to do with these central terms (‘inner content’, ‘pre-verbal content’, ‘signs’, ‘contingent outward linkages’ and, more broadly, ‘our relation to language’ and ‘the nature of linguistic meaning’) what we did with ‘inference’ and could do with ‘mediated’, we start to see that to make comprehensible sense of the words we are trying to use, we need to bring them to first-order usage. Or, to put the point more controversially (but then also in a way more directly engaged with the modernist themes I will pursue below), we are always already down in language and not at either a height or a distance from which we can gauge the (general) relation between words and the world or theoretically justify the way we speak on the first level by speaking of that first-level speech on the second level. The true nature of our relation to our language – like the true nature of the relation between the artist and his or her materials – is that we are inescapably in, and inextricably of, it. In PI, §656, Wittgenstein wrote: ‘Regard the language-game as the primary thing’ (where the language-game is ‘language and the actions into which it is woven’, PI, §7),5 and, of course, he appropriated Goethe’s ‘In the beginning was the deed’.6 This, I want to suggest, is essential to the modernist sensibility in literature and the arts, just as it is essential to Wittgenstein’s understanding of language.

I offer a full discussion in Meaning and Interpretation: Wittgenstein, Henry James, and Literary Knowledge (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), ch. 1: ‘Language-Games and Artistic Styles’, 9–44. 6 See the remark in OC, §402. 5

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If words are inseparably interwoven with what we do – words come with deeds (e.g. Samuel Johnson saying to the idealist-immaterialist Berkeley ‘I refute you thus!’ while kicking the stone), they in some cases are deeds (e.g. ‘I do’), they are understood in the contexts of human action and interaction and not purely in the realm of pure cognition (e.g. ‘Touchdown!’) – then meaning is interwoven in the same way. And, indeed, what we might actually think of as meaning-content on the level of pure cognition – Kasparov’s future-directed dazzlingly strategic seventh move in a game; Russell discovering his paradox – still never occurs within a realm of pure (whatever that might be) cognition: networks of practices (chess and set theory in these two examples) and histories of practices are inseparable from them and without which these words would be unintelligible. The arts and literature are inseparably interwoven in the same way, as we will consider shortly. But before turning to that, there are a few more observations from Wittgenstein’s reflections on language that we should bring into play. It has been attractive to some to think of designation as the essence, or fundamental and primary function of, language, upon which the rest of language is based. One can, for example, designate one’s own successor in the holding of an office; or a Governor of a state can designate an area as a financialinvestment target zone; or one can appeal to a designation in distinguishing two different groups of people easily run together, for example, explaining the difference between a psychologist and a psychiatrist. But the question concerns designation as a generalized model for giving a theoretical account of word meaning. Coming from the dualistic picture, this might seem possible: proceeding from the inside outward, we have inward states, and then we designate them. (And so in art, the artist would first identify the inward content and then designate an outward carrier of that content – the romantic model.) But in Zettel, §487, Wittgenstein, in replying to his imaginary interlocutor (itself a relation always already in language) who insists that ‘joy’ clearly designates an inward thing, writes (if rather bluntly): ‘No. “Joy” designates nothing at all. Neither any inward nor any outward thing.’ What Wittgenstein is insisting is not, of course, that joy does not exist in human life; he is not an anhedonic or anti-hedonic alien presence among us (and so his claim here, like that of Berkeley’s with Dr Johnson, is not actually so easily refuted). Rather, he is insisting that this would miscast the nature of our relation to the word ‘joy’, and that joy is not what this picture makes it sound like: an inert and isolated physical object with a name external to it. Designation is not the right model.

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Picasso, for example, produced his clever bull’s head sculpture out of the found elements of a bicycle’s handlebars and seat. One might say he contingently designated (broadly speaking) a bull’s head with those two materials – but they are and remain a seat and a handlebar in a way that they are not together a bull’s head. (Indeed, we do not appreciate the cleverness and acuity of his formal insight if we do not keep these names before us). And so the nature of the relation between each element and its name (its real name, we say) is not like the relation between the Governor and Binghamton when the designated city might have been Schenectady, or like the relation of the psychologist or psychiatrist to the name and title of his or her profession, or like the designator of a successor when it might have been Jones or numerous others and not (as we say) the named Smith. It will be important for us to get clear now on what conflation Wittgenstein is opposing here: if the relation between inward content and outward carrier of that content were correct as discussed above, then designation would, indeed, seem to be a universal linguistic concept. Instructively, it is not. Like ‘inference’, there are cases, such as the ones here, where we have occasion to use it, and very many where we do not. Joy, happily, exists, and is an experience for us. But it is not an inert breadbox-modelled object with a determinate boundedness that we demarcate inwardly and that we then, arbitrarily and contingently, designate with a word whose meaning is a matter of outward-to-inward reference. (We will see the deep importance of this in terms of the difference between (a) living in, and thinking within and seeing ranges of possibility within, a complex network of variously connected words and (b) merely using arbitrary signs, and we will see the importance of this difference for the understanding of Wittgensteinian language-based modernism below.) And so, consider Wittgenstein in PI, §537: It is possible to say ‘I read timidity in this face’, but at any rate, the timidity does not seem to be merely associated, outwardly connected, with the face; rather, fear is there, alive, in the features. If the features change slightly, we can speak of a corresponding change in the fear. If we were asked, ‘Can you think of this face as an expression of courage too?’ – we should, as it were, not know how to lodge courage in those features. Then perhaps I say, ‘I don’t know what it would mean if this is a courageous face’. But what would an answer to such a question be like? Perhaps one says: ‘Yes, now I understand: the face is, as it were, indifferent to the outer world.’ So we have somehow read courage into the face. Now once more, one might say, courage fits the face. But what fits what here?

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This is a profound passage of philosophy – and the challenges it presents are ones that are particularly meaningful for present considerations. Timidity does not seem merely associated: that is to say, it is not a case of taking one, independent, complete-unto-itself thing and making or stipulating an association to another independent, complete-unto-itself thing. There are cases like that; this, Wittgenstein is reminding us, is not one of them. The nature or character of the relation between the timidity and the face is not of that kind – it is, one might say, more natural, less conventional; or more intertwined, less juxtaposed; or more inseparable, less isolable. And the relation between the timidity and the face is more like our actual, non-philosophically-interfered-with relations to our words, our language, and less like the philosophical picture of that relation as pictured or modelled over-simply above. And so, the timidity does not, as Wittgenstein writes, seem to be ‘outwardly connected’; the link is not one of an arbitrary or stipulated kind that ties with a mental cord the inner content to its external manifestation, where each has a contained identity unto itself. Rather, fear is there, indeed, alive in the features; it is not there in the distanced, separated way a holder of an office designates his or her successor. Respecting what we say on the first-order level and thus not attempting to reshape or disregard what he called our actual linguistic practices, Wittgenstein observes next that if the features change slightly, then we can speak of a corresponding change in the fear. (‘In his first seminar I saw that he was too timid to speak – but then I saw a few fleeting moments when he looked up and clearly had something to say; I thought those moments almost lifted him out of his fear of speaking and I think they will in the future.’) But if the features do not change slightly, and yet we are asked if we can see that face as an expression of courage too, we do not know how to proceed – we do not know how to lodge courage in those features, and we say ‘I don’t know what it would mean’. Then – and here philosophy comes in to suddenly and severely distort how these concepts in play actually work within their language-games – when we reply ‘Now I understand: the face is indifferent …’, we are taking on the philosophical picture, the dichotomy between the inner and the outer, the idea of arbitrary connections between two isolable kinds of things. But these words as used under the influence of an imposed picture are predicated on an unspoken proviso: we are saying, ‘Yes, now I understand: we are now going to speak of the relation between the face and its expression as if they were separate entities and as if they are only contingently attached at a distance and as if I were able to separate them at will and reconnect other things to them.’

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Our use of, and the meaning of, the word ‘timidity’ is not separable from a range of cases like this one of facial expression. Seeing, investigating and newly articulating the true nature of these connections – while maintaining at all times a relentless self-consciousness about the possibilities of small linguistic errors that quickly grow into large philosophical ones, and the impulses to miscast what we know and what we would say in the interest of prismatic theory – is what makes Wittgenstein’s view of language modernist. And it is what provides the insight that is requisite for our understanding of the new sensibility concerning our placement within language (as the model for the placement of the artist within his materials) that emerges in the work of a number of early modernists: Picasso and Braque out of Cézanne; Stravinsky out of late romanticism; Loos against ornament; Wittgenstein himself in the Kundmanngasse house; and many others.7 But also, I want to suggest, we see this in the work of Henry James on the cusp between late Victorian and – because of a new and newly represented conception of our relation to, and our life in, and the power of, what Wittgenstein called actual language – early modernist.

3 I mentioned above that we see James’ emergent modernism both in his fiction and in his writing on his fiction. It is in his Preface to the New York Edition of The Spoils of Poynton8 (SP) that we find his famous remark about what he called the air-blown particle. He writes: It was years ago, I remember, one Christmas Eve when I was dining with friends: a lady beside me made in the course of talk one of those allusions that I have always found myself recognizing on the spot as ‘germs’. The germ, wherever gathered, has ever been for me the germ of a ‘story’, and most of the stories straining to shape under my hand have sprung from a single small seed, a seed as minute and wind-blown as that casual hint for The Spoils of Poynton dropped unwittingly by my neighbor, a mere floating particle in the stream of talk. (SP, xxxix)

For a helpful and culturally expansive discussion, see Daniel R. Schwarz, Reconfiguring Modernism: Explorations in the Relationship between Modern Art and Modern Literature (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997). 8 Henry James, The Spoils of Poynton, ed. Bernard Richards (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982) [here SP]. 7

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This is about the genesis of literature in James’ imagination, and as a selfobservation it profoundly challenges the romantic model. And it corresponds at a deep level to what we have seen Wittgenstein saying about his entire approach to language. James’ imagination, stimulated by this small linguistic seed, is the imagining of an intrinsically expanding language-game; already from its inception, a work of literature is not a matter of language as a mere externalization of prior content. The relationship to language is different – very different (as different as modernism is from romanticism – one could say that the Wagnerian image could not breathe modernist air, could not survive in a modernist atmosphere). From their originating ‘germs’, the stories in James’ sense strain to take shape under his hand; it is as though the language itself is a material with a special kind of self-generating life of its own.9 And it is, as James is making vividly clear, what he sees or in a sense hears in the potentially evolving word or words; it is not at all in the intentional content of the speaker, who sends out the air-blown particle unwittingly. James goes on to write of the ‘fruitful essence’ of the particle, adding: Such is the interesting truth about the stray suggestion, the wandering word, the vague echo, at the touch of which the novelist’s imagination winces as at the prick of some sharp point: its virtue is all in its needle-like quality, the power to penetrate as finely as possible. (SP, xxxix)

The interesting truth concerns the right characterization of our relation to the wandering word. And of this fine power, he writes, ‘This fineness it is that communicates the virus of suggestion’; thus, he is in a sense listening to, and responding to, what the language itself suggests, echoes, promise, and seems to want to unfold. He is imagining, vividly and powerfully, the contexts within which that germinal word will have its life, and within which it will open everfurther language-borne possibilities. Or: he is thinking his way – as would a philosopher of that kind – into, and then investigating the possibilities of, a Wittgensteinian language-game. And Wittgenstein, after all, used the phrase ‘a form of life’ a number of times in his thinking about the nature of language and our relations to it.10 In this connection, it is of interest that James originally conceived this work as a ten-thousand-word story; in the writing, it in a sense (i.e. in the sense of an evolving language-game to be discussed below) demanded to become a novel. See Michael Swan’s Introductory Note to Henry James, The Spoils of Poynton, with A London Life and The Chaperon (London: John Lehmann, 1947), v. 10 I offer a discussion of this concept in connection with aesthetic matters in Meaning and Interpretation, Chapter 2, ‘Forms of Life and Artistic Practices’, 45–83. 9

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But James captures still more of immediate relevance to our present concerns in his Introduction that as a reflection on his creative process has so quickly turned into a reflection on his relation to language and the way in which he in a sense listens to it and to what it suggests to him (rather than his selecting mere signs and using them as inert bearers of his precognized meaning). And at this point we arrive at a truly striking affinity between his creative labour – his interaction with language – and the spirit of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy of language. James writes: Artists need ask no wider range than the logic of the particular case. The particular case … forms in itself a little world of exercise and agitation. Let him hold himself perhaps supremely fortunate if he can meet half the questions with which that air alone may swarm. (SP, xl–xli)

This is interesting, dense, deep, and if there is something one might dubiously (because it is more likely a family-resemblance concept) call the essence of the modernist approach to, or relations to, the materials of the given art form, this is very probably it. First, to move beyond the range of the logic of the particular case would be the artistic analogue of establishing the context of a well-defined and precise conversation and then throwing random words from a wholly different context into it and then trying to make them fit. Such words are not within – do not have a natural home within – the conversation at hand and what it has dictated is and is not a possible part, or extension, or thematic development, or further unfolding, of it. Rather, by staying inside those ‘logical’ constraints, or inside the seemingly natural or organic limits as demarcated by the materials in play, cohesion or internally generated structural coherence will be preserved by finely acknowledging what those materials in that combination (as we revealingly say) call for. Second, the very idea of the logic of a particular case suggests that the artist will need to be sensitive, or in James’s sense, finely attuned, to the internal logic of the piece at hand: by using an analogy to actual logic, James is not thereby suggesting that the ‘logic’ of a work of art or literature is something that can be universalized and applied from without. Rather (and much more like Wittgenstein on mathematics), the logic of this kind is emergent from within the ‘language-game’ of the work. The particular case, as James says, forms in itself a little world, and its internal sense of what is and is not fitting, what is and is not justified, what is and is not contributing, what is and is not striking or clever, will be sui generis in nature. And again, the fact that this is emergent and not superimposed, and that the artist works with, and not only

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through, the materials, goes deeply against the Wagnerian image in the arts and the fallacious picture of language Wittgenstein is excavating and scrutinizing. Third, James describes that little world as one of exercise and agitation precisely because of the power of the artefact unto itself and within its own frame or logic. The sensitive, cultivated artist, interacting with and finely responsive to the ‘life’ of aesthetically charged materials, will feel called upon by the work-in-progress, will feel the weight of an obligation to get exactly right what, as we also say, the work wants. And, fourth, the deepest of James’ observations here, and the one most intricately connected to Wittgenstein’s capacious and irreducible vision of language, is this: because James sees that the artist who handles as many as half of what he calls the questions – the issues, the considerations, the possibilities, the openings, the interconnections, the internal dynamics, the structural pressures – is supremely fortunate, he sees that the combinatorial complexity emerging from materials interacting together constitutes a very dense conceptual atmosphere or ‘air’ even within the seemingly narrowly delimited scope of a given particular work. So the task of the artist here becomes one of intelligent selection out of the ‘swarm’ as much as of any form of ex nihilo creation. What we call the vision, or the attunement, or the sensitivity, or the cultivation, or the mastery or the sophistication of the artist can all be measured by the density, complexity and content of that artist’s ‘swarm’; the parallel truth holds for Wittgenstein’s mature vision of language, a vision that works against what in the Blue Book he called ‘the contemptuous attitude toward the particular case’ (BB, 18). Examples of modernist works that well illustrate what James has articulated here weave themselves throughout the arts: Schönberg’s serial or twelve-tone compositions establish an inner logic that places demands on the composer, and each of his pupil and successor Webern’s short pieces are tightly framed ‘particular cases’ where possibilities of sequential pitch arrangement are intelligently selected from a ‘swarm’ of internally generated options and attendant issues; the sculptor David Smith spoke of rarely working from what he called a ‘Grand Conception’ but, rather, finding himself in a sense dictated to, and finely responsive to, the materials as their coherence emerged and as the elements ‘spoke’ to each other; Francis Bacon’s pope paintings swirl within a distinctive and uniquely discernible ‘logic’ of containment; Joyce both represented and closely investigated the internal interconnectedness of one mind’s day in Dublin; Bartok produced his series of piano studies entitled Mikrokosmos (indeed, ‘little worlds’), each of which in a sense forms itself out of a thematic germ; the powerful calligraphic gestures in Franz Kline’s paintings seem to call for

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each other in order to fulfil the requirements that emerge and crystallize as the painting proceeds as a visual record of human movement. In all of these – taken together, plausibly definitive of modernism – there is, at the core of their aesthetic content, what James is describing (and as illuminated by Wittgenstein). James, on hearing at that dinner of ‘a good lady in the north, always well looked on, was at daggers drawn with her only son, ever hitherto exemplary, over the ownership of the valuable furniture of a fine old house just accruing to the young man by his father’s death’, reports that he ‘instantly became aware’ of ‘the whole of the virus, as I have called it, being infused by that single touch. There had been but ten words, yet I had recognized in them, as in a flash, all the possibilities of the little drama of my Spoils, which glimmered then and there into life’(SP, xli). This accords well with everything said so far, yet there is still another element in play. In a number of places, Wittgenstein writes of the somewhat special sense we have of meaning, or networks of meaning, that are not yet articulated. It can be, in language, that one senses a range of connections, a complex of connotations and associations, that we have not yet voiced, and – importantly – are often not yet ready or able to voice, while still sensing their presence.11 This is another defining aspect of the acute sensitivity to language as a ‘live’ medium unto itself that I am suggesting is what makes Wittgenstein modern and that as readers we witness in James’ approach to, and in his characters’ depiction and investigation of, language. About his sudden grasp of creative possibility on hearing those few words, James writes that, although he knew he had the germinal idea, he knew this ‘for reasons of which I could most probably have given at the moment no decent account’(SP, xlii). What he says next seems as if written to capture in one phrase both this present aspect of creative sensitivity to the presence of an unarticulated field of possibility as well as the phenomenological inaccuracy of the ‘prior-content’ model and its insufficient attendant conception of the ‘inert sign’ model of artistic materials. James continues, ‘Had I been asked why they were, in that stark nudity, to say nothing of that ugliness of attitude, “interesting,” I fear I could have said nothing more to the point, even to my own questioning spirit, than, “Well, you’ll see!” By which of course I should have meant “Well, I shall see”’ (SP, xlii). The stark nudity is, of course, characters stripped of their fuller context; like words, it is there that For exceptionally interesting discussions of this phenomenon as it pertains to and interweaves aesthetic experience, see Frank Cioffi, Wittgenstein on Freud and Frazer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). See especially Chapter 2: ‘Aesthetic Explanation and Aesthetic Perplexity’, 47–79.

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we see who they are, what they are and what they mean. But the deeper point here concerns the difference between ‘Well, you’ll see!’ and ‘Well, I shall see’: the former suggests, consistent with the romantic inner-content picture, that the artist fully and exactingly knows but is not yet saying; the latter, consistent with the modernist approach to materials as modelled by Wittgenstein’s conception of our relation to language, suggests that the artist has to work with the materials (in this case, the word-borne characters), to find out. And yet again, there is, nevertheless, a kind of promissory content there that the artist, James, receives ab initio. And so consider what James says next of his way of working – but at the same time consider seeing it as a description of the way Wittgenstein works with examples, with the particular case: The artist … can say to himself – what really more than anything else inflames and sustains him – that he alone has the secret of the particular case, he alone can measure the truth of the direction to be taken by his developed data. There can be for him, evidently, only one logic for these things; there can be for him only one truth and only one direction – the quarter in which his subject most completely expresses itself. The careful ascertainment of how it shall do so, and the art of guiding it with consequent authority – since this sense of ‘authority’ is for the master-builder the treasure of treasures, or at least the joy of joys – renews in the modern alchemist something like the old dream of the secret life. (SP, xlii)

The promise made by external materials – that they will with the right creative handling grow into a fulfilled and completed work in accordance with their own inner logic– is what both inflames and sustains: this is dialogical interaction; it is not the breathing of aesthetic life into external correspondences of pre-specified intentional content. And James refers to this productive engagement – like Wittgenstein’s work in and with language, and not merely about it – as the secret of the particular case, precisely because it is the promised or sensed associative content that requires articulation (‘secret’ may be a somewhat dramatic way of putting it, but it is as mentioned above a matter of finding out how the work wants to develop). And the particular case, in the hands of a master, develops along the trajectory guided by – not the prior and private immaterial expressive content – but by what the author sees most deeply in them, and he works in ‘the quarter in which his subject most completely expresses itself ’. ‘Most completely’: that is to say, as many as possible of the organically interconnected and justified ‘questions’ within the ‘swarm’ are brought out, articulated and thematically integrated. (One could think here of T. S. Eliot’s layered allusions that are still of the poem,

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and not in a cheaper sense merely superadded to it.) ‘Expresses itself ’: the truth in question here, along with the direction of development, the uncovering of and creative response to the forming work’s inner logic, in the hands of the authority of the master-builder, calls into question the very dichotomy rigidly dividing discovery from creation in modernist work. (One could think here of Stravinsky’s remark: ‘I am the vessel through which The Rite of Spring passed.’) And then – with and only with all this in mind – James refers to the artist (to himself) in the grip of this kind of interactive, hyper-attentive, dialogical, issuediscerning, potential-extracting, logic-discovering, direction-guiding creative heat as the modern analogue of nothing other than an alchemist: one who, by putting precisely the right elements together in precisely the right (and secret) way, creates life and other synthesized combinations that have magical powers. Wittgenstein, as we have seen, repeatedly found in his extensive investigations of philosophically potent particular cases of the ‘actual language’ considered above that the phrase ‘a form of life’ seemed to capture what any less evocative phrase might miss. But I said above that James, like Wittgenstein, was concerned to show as well as to say, so with all the foregoing themes in mind (and like moving from Wittgenstein’s remarks on philosophical method to his work on the gritty ground of particular cases), what are we now in a position to see in the story itself?

4 The members of the quartet of this narrative are already in tension at the moment of our arrival as readers into their world. They include Mrs Gereth, the mother of Owen; Owen, the recent sole inheritor (English law would remove the widow and give everything to the eldest son) of the exquisitely furnished estate called Poynton where Mrs Gereth and her deceased husband have lived for decades and devoted their lives to its aesthetic perfection; Mona Brigstock, the young woman engaged to be married to Owen; and Fleda Vetch, a young friend of the family and, increasingly, confidante of Mrs Gereth and possible secondary romantic interest for Owen. James throws us into a world of complex meaning and interpretation immediately: he writes that ‘Fleda was able to read the meaning of the exclamation in which Mrs Gereth had expressed her reserves on the subject of Miss Brigstock’s personality’ (SP, 5). That is, she had heard the exclamation previously, and had in a narrow sense understood it, but now was

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in a position to truly understand the meaning of that prior remark. What was it she saw that revealed the meaning of Mrs Gereth’s words? Miss Brigstock had been laughing and even romping, but the circumstance hadn’t contributed the ghost of an expression to her countenance. Tall, straight and fair, long-limbed and strangely festooned, she stood there without a look in her eye or any perceptible intention of any sort in any other feature. She belonged to the type in which speech is an unaided emission of sound, in which the secret of being is impenetrably and incorruptibly kept. Her expression would probably have been beautiful if she had had one, but whatever she communicated she communicated, in a manner best known to herself, without signs. (SP, 5)

That discloses the content of Mrs Gereth’s earlier heard and understood but not richly understood reservation concerning Brigstock’s personality; the words at work here are anything but inert signs carrying fixed or bounded meaningcontent. But equally important to present considerations is that what is hidden here, what is concealed, is not in a metaphysical sense private (recall Wittgenstein on the timidity in a face, above). Rather, we see her absent look, the absence of intentional content, the lack of an intelligent and engaged presence that would, if it were there, be shown by animate expressive features, and we discern the sense of impenetrable secrecy (but so blank a person that we doubt if there is a secret behind the blankness). James is showing us here, in microcosm, (a) how expressively descriptive language actually works (precisely like Wittgenstein’s non-intrusion into ‘actual’ language), (b) that we see this sense of absence or privacy in (and not inferentially or in a mediated sense behind) the ‘materials’ of a person, that is, the embodied analogues to artistic materials, and (c) precisely the kind of experiential content, described in language, that then allows us to say that we now understand a remark or exclamation or anything in language of the kind. (James, in introducing Owen next, shows us that Brigstock seems to have met her match: Owen is ‘robust and artless, … he looked pointlessly active and pleasantly dull’ (SP, 5).) James shows us, through a series of variations on the theme (each of which deepens for us the meaning of the word ‘sensibility’ as it applies to Mrs Gereth), that places other than Poynton that display varying lacks of taste or of aesthetically driven, stylistically coherent choice or of cultivated refinement in interiors, cause her almost destabilizing anguish. And the beauty, for Mrs Gereth and increasingly for her friend Fleda, is a beauty of organic interconnectedness, of pieces working together, of a work of art (she calls the house that), that is the result of creative interaction, a kind of dialogical engagement, a ‘logic’ of collection and presentation that has emerged

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by working across decades in and with the house and its space, and a sensitivity to what it seems to want, given the logic of the work-in-progress thus far. ‘There were places much grander and richer, but no such complete work of art, nothing that would appeal so to those really informed. In putting such elements into her hand destiny had given her an inestimable chance’ (SP, 7). Language, in a way definitively central to the modernist approach, can no longer be seen as a straightforward system of transparent representation or merely as a set of descriptions. James also shows how language can function as not only a tool for, but as, indeed, the very content of, deep intimacy: for James, understanding a person is often (for him, probably almost always) the deeper and more serious and more sophisticated and more cultivated understanding of their words.12 Of Fleda’s rapidly growing connection to Mrs Gereth, James writes: She had a sense partly exultant and partly alarmed of having quickly become necessary to her imperious friend, who indeed gave a reason quite sufficient for it in telling her there was nobody else who understood. From Mrs Gereth there was in these days an immense deal to understand, though it might freely be summed up in the circumstances that she was wretched. Fleda was thus assured she couldn’t completely know why till she should have seen the things at Poynton. She could perfectly grasp this connexion, which was exactly one of the matters that, in their inner mystery, were a blank to everybody else. (SP, 8–9)

Everyone understands (in terms of simple dictionary definitions) what ‘she was wretched’ means; and yet inside this context, no one but Fleda as participant inside this expanding language-game, knows (in terms of actual usage) what ‘she was wretched’ means. And James makes it clear: the understanding of meaning is not an ‘on’ or ‘off ’ matter, not the simple picture Wittgenstein worked through and forever left behind; it is in what Wittgenstein called the stream of life, or the whole hurly-burly, that we can place our degree of understanding along a continuum from absent, to minimal, to partial, to growing, to substantial, to complete (with many more stops along that way). And as James shows throughout this book, the criteria that emerge that determine the degree of understanding will vary with context – indeed, much like the site-specific internal ‘logics’ that I offer a fuller discussion of this particular point in ‘A Person’s Words: Literary Characters and Autobiographical Understanding’, in Philosophy and Autobiography, ed. Christopher Cowley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 39–71.

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emerge in the creation of a work. As with Wittgenstein, who also made this point in a number of ways, for James there is no such thing as a single litmus test for the depth or completeness of understanding. But inside the frames of particular cases, we can draw important distinctions: ‘Her [Fleda’s] sympathy was intelligent, for she read deep into the matter’ (SP, 9). Indeed, so much more is shown here: we see Fleda disconcerted at Mrs Gereth’s ‘smothered ferocity’(SP, 10), where that state, where the distinct meaning of that evocative phrase, is perceived in a way that makes language, countenance, action and background inseparable. We discern forms of insensitivity and callousness in James’ description of the sound of a voice in a phrase that Mrs Gereth imagines (itself a subtle and very human move in the language-game) Bridgestock would use in reply to any suggestion that Gereth take some things – ‘in the face of every argument … she would repeat … in that voice like the squeeze of a doll’s stomach, “It goes with the house – it goes with the house”’ (SP, 10–11). We see moves in the game made with facial gestures, not words – ‘Mrs Gereth hailed this question with a wan compassionate smile’ (SP, 11). But we also see, remarkably, James on occasion show what he knows about the issues concerning the ‘logic’ of the language-game – the sense of order, progression, dialogical unfolding, coherence and the expectations of the interlocutors. In writing ‘Fleda’s breath was sometimes taken away by the great fierce bounds and elisions which, on Mrs Gereth’s lips, the course of discussion could take’, he shows something about her state of mind, about Fleda’s perception of her state of mind, about their relationship based on a deeper comprehension that itself makes such elisions possible, about the stretching of the rules of a language-game without breaking them, about the imperious (as she is described at one point) and self-concerned tone Mrs Gereth can take, and about what one might call the rhetorical pressure that this circumstance has produced in Owen’s soon-to-be-displaced mother. This, in short, does not (to re-employ Wittgenstein’s full phrase here) interfere in any way with the actual uses of language; rather, it studies those uses with the heightened acuity and sensitivity to the materials of our meaningful linguistic interaction that is the hallmark of the modernist approach. And like Wittgenstein, James uses contrasts constantly and to high effect: on the continuum ranging from profound understanding on the level of refined sensibility on the one extreme, he marks the other pole with a description of Owen, ‘the happy youth had no more sense for a motive than a deaf man for a tune’ (SP, 12), and James once again – just as we have seen Wittgenstein so often does – employs our

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refined knowledge of facial expressivity to capture the most exactingly precise meaning: ‘His child’s eyes in his man’s face put it to her that … this really meant a good deal for him’ (SP, 13). And still more, we are shown how one can later come to see that what one understood before, although we believed at the time that it was full understanding, was in truth in need of deepening (‘she had understood but meagerly before’ (SP, 13)) and how important, personally, such retrospective realizations and corrections can be (‘the two women embraced with tears over the tightening of their bond’ (SP,  13)). These are linguistic matters, but in ways so enriched, so true to actual life, that one can feel that calling them ‘linguistic’ cheapens them or seems superficial – which in truth only shows how easy it is (as Wittgenstein’s entire mature work is dedicated to showing) to proceed from an anaemic conception of the meaning of ‘linguistic’. And then, we are also shown how the seeing of something very familiar to us (as we say) through new eyes changes, renews, revivifies, our own understanding and appreciation of that thing – to put it one way, we see the meaning of the name ‘Poynton’ enriched for Mrs Gereth by her seeing it anew through Fleda’s vision (‘made the place fresh to her again and more precious than ever’ (SP, 13)). Fleda suddenly realizes that ‘Poynton was the record of a life’, and that it ‘was written in great syllables of colour and form’ (SP, 14); this shows, brilliantly and in a single stroke, how the intricate composition and meaningful combination of materials can become autobiographical or personally revelatory – or how non-subservient or non-inert materials, in the hands of masterful arrangers, actually work in producing sui generis coherence that, while not compatible with the romantic model, is, nevertheless, personally expressive. But before returning to the importance of all of this for the understanding of a modernist sensibility, there are three other things shown by James that are particularly noteworthy for this purpose. First, James records a fact about aesthetic perception that has a direct ethical analogue, both of which directly connect to the issue of language as we actually use and understand it. Mona Brigstock’s ‘formula of admiration’ for aesthetic objects ‘jarred’ with Mrs Gareth, because Brigstock invariably described ‘anything she looked at as “in the style” of something else’, where ‘this was to show how much she had seen’ (SP, 17−18), that is, to put on display her aesthetic discernment. James shows that Mrs Gereth sees that this formula backfires: ‘But it only showed she had seen nothing; everything at Poynton was in the style of Poynton’ (SP, 18). There is a profound point here, and it interweaves art, morality and language: seeing the thing described above by both Wittgenstein and James

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as the particular case through the conceptual lens of a generic category blinds us to the very thing we think we are observing – we see the particular as a member of a general class, and fail to attend to its nuances accordingly. To attend to a person generically is not to attend to that person; to see or hear what a person says, particularly in a context of difficulty, as generic things people in such circumstances say is to not understand their language, their words.13 In art, ethics and language, viewing the particular generically is a licence for inattention and dismissal that is thinly masked (as James shows it here) behind a proud but selfdeceived self-presentation of perceptual acuity. Second, James repeatedly shows (as introduced above in the case of the conversational elisions14) his microscopically precise awareness of the emergent logic of language-games: Mrs Gereth in her imagination ‘could indeed hear with all vividness the probably pretty passages between the pair’ (SP, 19). That is, given that she has heard both the tone and the content of their verbal interactions, she is able to imaginatively but still broadly predictably continue the lines of unfolding language within the bounded frame of their improvisatory interaction. And further, James, in his descriptions of mental life throughout this novel, displays his own originality within thematic logic; his own finding, identifying the promise of, and responding to, material; and his putting that material together into a new coherent whole through the creative merger of language-games. Let one small example of the latter stand for many, where he describes the inspection-tour Mrs Gereth and Fleda take to a small house that she might occupy once she is removed from Poynton. James articulates her perceptions in this way: on approach they saw ‘four iron pots on pedestals, painted white and containing ugly geraniums, ranged on the edge of a gravel path and doing their best to give it the air of a terrace’; later, inside, we get ‘the room was practically a shallow box, with the junction of the walls and ceiling guiltless of curve or cornice’ (SP, 35). ‘Doing their best’, ‘guiltless’ – this is clearly the language of sentient intention drawn from persons, projected or transplanted onto inanimate decorative objects and architectural details, yielding through

James shows this particular failing well in his description of Owen’s conception of his mother: ‘The great wrong Owen had done her was not his “taking up” with Mona – that was disgusting, but it was a detail, an accidental form; it was his failure from the first to understand what it was to have a mother at all, to appreciate the beauty and sanctity of the character. She was just his mother as his nose was just his nose, and he had never had the least imagination or tenderness or gallantry about her’ (SP, 32). 14 This is a theme that is developed in fine – well, Jamesian – detail: see, for example, the passage leading to ‘Yet she made the strangest free reach over all such preliminaries’ (SP, 25). 13

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this creative merger a perfect representation of Mrs Gereth’s mind and, indeed, of her entire way of being-in-the-world.15 It would take a great deal more to capture James’ full achievement in this novel, but for now, the third final thing: attention has rightly been called to James’ double resolution. With her attempts to redirect Owen’s romantic attention to Fleda having been partially or episodically successful but ultimately a failure, Mrs Gereth moves to the smaller house, taking many major pieces with her. This is debated and reconsidered with full Jamesian complexity, and she returns them all. But not long after, she receives a letter from Owen (now abroad with Mona Brigstock on honeymoon) inviting her after all to take one major and most meaningful piece that would make her happy with her to her smaller house. That is resolution one – and what precisely it is, is the closure of an intricate, evolved, language-game that began in a single germ. But on the trip to Poynton to select her one most significant piece, she learns at the station of a fire, smells smoke, is told by the stationmaster that there has been a terrible fire and that Poynton has just burned to the ground, everything completely lost. ‘She heard herself repeating mechanically, yet as if asking it for the first time: “Poynton’s gone?”’ That is resolution two. It is, for her, the end of a form of life.

5 We started with the contrast, very briefly sketched, between the romantic and modernist conceptions of expressive content. All that we saw in Wittgenstein’s distinctive self-awareness concerning the medium itself – that is, language for him – weighed against the romantic picture of the ‘encoding’ or ‘signing’ relation between inner and outer content, and it set the stage for one way of understanding the emergence of a parallel modernist sensibility in literature. If words are not merely inert carriers of intentional content, then what is called for – and what Wittgenstein and Henry James in their respective domains each provide – is a close study of ‘actual language’, giving non-subservient priority to linguistic practice. We saw this capacious approach stand against the reductive

I should mention that James also shows the distance that can be created when two divergent language-games seem not to creatively merge or find a way of mutually intertwining. At one point, Mrs Gereth says, ‘No, Fleda, I don’t understand you, I don’t understand you at all,’ and James proceeds to describe not only the content of what she said after that, but the tone – indicating an unbridged gulf between language-games – in which she says it (SP, 153–4).

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impulses that would describe language as essentially descriptive or designative. That is, first seeing our relations to words, by contrast, in much richer ways by following Wittgenstein – for example, on the model of our natural recognition of facial expressivity (and the instructive way in which timidity was ‘nondetachable’) paved the way to a grasp of James’ depiction of our relation to language, our place in it, and his focus on its priority and internally dynamic power as an essentially modernist (and in his work, initially emergent) form of aesthetic acuity and attention. Indeed, James’ distinct responsiveness to the life of language itself (beginning with the air-blown particle) served as a model or archetype for the particular form of creative dialogical life-sensing interaction that winds its way through modernist art. Or we might say, the sense of interactive discovery, cast in terms of James’ interactive ‘alchemy’ (with Wittgenstein’s way of seeing language behind us and the corresponding way of seeing artistic materials now set out before us), becomes as central a concept as creation was for the romantic model. It is that sense (as we saw in the reading of The Spoils of Poynton) which guides and fuels the progression, the inner logic, of the language-game. To interweave Wittgenstein and James allows us to begin to see a complex confluence of philosophy of language and what, with James in mind, we might call philosophy in language. Together, in their shared mode and object of attention, they articulate a bracingly modernist sensibility.

9

Modernism with Spirit: Wittgenstein and the Sense of the Whole Antonia Soulez

1  Wittgenstein’s double orientation in music That Wittgenstein was a lover of romantic music, familiarized with tonal music, is not in contradiction with what he had to say in the field of music if viewed from a ‘modern’ perspective. He himself declared in 1929 that his Kulturideal derived from Schumann’s, although his continuation (Fortsetzung) of this ideal differed from the way it had actually been continued in the second half of the nineteenth century (after Schumann’s death). This remark shows that he was aware of the new trends in music in his time, the so-called ‘Vienna School’. He used to play the clarinet and take part in concerts on private occasions. In the 1920s, he was a close friend of Rudolf Koder’s, who, in the early part of the decade, introduced him to the blind pianist and organist Josef Labor. Labor had in the past followed Eduard Hanslick’s lectures in Vienna on the history of music.1 It is possible to show that, in spite of the musical milieu Wittgenstein belonged to through his family and his personal contacts with professional musicians, his conception of music extended beyond the classical repertoire, at least on a methodological level. There is, therefore, an intriguing double orientation: on the one hand, a strong awareness of his belonging to older cultural models in music, and on the other hand, on a methodological level, far-reaching views that place him ahead of his time. This double aspect helps to understand how Wittgenstein could be critical of modernism in the 1930s, and at the same time promote a certain ‘spirit’ of For the correspondence of Wittgenstein and R. Koder, see Wittgenstein und die Musik, with essays by Martin Alber (Innsbruck: Haymon, 2000). See also Wittgenstein, Ludwig: Denkbewegungen, Tagebücher 1930-32, 1936-1937, ed. Ilse Somavilla (Innsbruck: Haymon, 1997).

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modernity as regards his conception of philosophy based on the model of the arts, in reaction to the analytical philosophy his Tractatus had been first thought to represent. Wittgenstein’s view of music, indeed, shows this double aspect as regards modernity and confirms that ‘modernity’ runs along the centuries as a mobile entity, displacing itself along several lines. I will set forth the idea of the ‘Modern with spirit’ through his critique of the loss of the ‘sense of whole’, which takes some of his contemporary artists as a target. Yet, keeping in mind the crucial schema of the ‘Musical Idea’ mentioned in his earlier Tractatus, I will show that, although after the Tractatus, Wittgenstein had done with all spiritual entities of any sort – mind, interior processes, mentalism, intention as prior to action  – language as invested with a kind of inspiration still lies at the heart of his idea of modernism with a spiritual dimension. My interpretation is that, like Schoenberg who expressed the same feeling, Wittgenstein’s complaint about the loss of this ‘sense of the whole’ in the 1930s was still pervading his conception of philosophical activity in comparison to the arts. Readers usually agree that later on, philosophy breaks into fragmentary remarks that Wittgenstein himself confesses he is unable to gather in one unitary thought.2 To the question of whether this view is contradictory with the need for the missing sense of the whole advocated in the early 1930s, which presupposes a sub specie aeternitatis viewpoint, my answer is resolutely no!

2  ‘What is modern?’ – An architectural question in Vienna between the two wars ‘What is Modern?’3 (1930) is a famous article written by the architect Josef Frank, the brother of Philipp Frank who was a member of the Vienna Circle. Josef Frank, the future author of Architecture als Symbol (Vienna, 1931), was present at the first Congress of Modern Architecture in La Sarraz in 1928 (the CIAM). ‘Modern’ is an expression commonly used by Viennese architects having in common the practical aim of privileging human needs according to a conception of housing that was critical of the German Neue Sachlichkeit or Foreword to PI. In Die Form, n. 15. The expression ‘Modern architecture’ is also the title of Otto Wagner’s famous book, first published in 1896 by Verlag von Anton Schroll and Co., then with amendments in a 3rd ed. 1902, ed. Harry F. Malgrave, trans. W. Herrmann, 4th ed. 1914; last publication: 1988 by The Getty Centre.

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‘New Objectivity’. The controversies among architects and urbanists were of first importance in Austria between the two wars. It was the time for the ‘social reconstruction’ of the city and competing styles of housing (Siedlungen or Höfe) were at stake in the social-democratic municipality of ‘Red Vienna’. Josef Frank’s modernism shows affinities with the use of the ‘modern’ in the ‘Scientific Conception of the World’ advocated by the founders of logical empiricism. In their Manifesto,4 Otto Neurath is the leading voice in favour of ‘Sachlichkeit’ (Objectivity) in an Austrian sense, which is to be distinguished from the German movement of ‘New Objectivity’, because the latter’s conception of ‘rationality without life’,5 which favoured industrial production and the domination of the machine, ignored human aspirations. In the architectural programme as well as in philosophy, one could read a futurist programme of happiness, the rejection of superfluous entities through the application of Occam’s razor (in architecture, decoration and luxury; in philosophy, metaphysical abstractions), the sense of the real without the cult of functionalism, combined with the claim of clarity linked to use in life, and – against the German universalization of function – the importance of symbols in communication at the level of real life.6 All of these ‘modern’ requirements find their expression in the methodological claim of formalism looking for exactness and clarity. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus itself incarnates this strong affiliation of a logical work with an architectural building. Some interpreters suggested that this scaffolding looked like a ‘syntax of silence’ (G. Gebauer) interpreted into forms and stone. The house designed by Adolf Loos’s pupil Paul Engelmann along with Wittgenstein for the latter’s sister Margarethe Stonborough, in 1926, materializes this project. Externally ‘modern’, the house’s interior was obsessively adjusted to Margarethe’s needs in order to make it a ‘house embodied logic’.7 As regards architecture, Paul Engelmann certainly deserves more attention. He was the most attentive observer of Wittgenstein’s life and his artistic inclinations towards architecture, especially in connection with music.8 One interesting aspect that would be difficult to grasp without referring to Engelmann is Wittgenstein’s ‘The Scientific Conception of the World’, in Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung: Der Wiener Kreis, eds. F. Stadler and T. Uebel (Vienna: Springer, 2012). 5 See the appeal to life in the last sentence of The Scientific Conception of the World, 90: ‘The scientific world-conception serves life, and life embraces it.’ 6 See Alena Kubova, ‘Josef Frank: proposition d’une modernité’ in L’architecte et le Philosophe, ed. Antonia Soulez (Liège: Mardaga, 1993), 37. 7 Cf. Bernhard Leitner, ‘La maison de Wittgenstein’, in Vienne, l’Apocalypse, joyeuse, ed. Jean Clair (Paris: éditions du centre Pompidou, 1986), 536. 8 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Paul Engelmann, Briefe, Begegnungen, Erinnerungen, Ilse Somavilla in collaboration with Brian McGuinness (Innsbruck-Wien: Haymon, 2006). 4

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special approach to the connection between formalism, art and seeing the world sub specie aeterni. This triangular nexus furnishes Wittgenstein’s representation with a method for clarity. Such are the requirements for its ‘modernity’, especially modelled on the constructive arts as they were taught at the School of Applied Arts in the same years. It is not modernism in itself, nor achieved modernism in a historical sense, but modernism with a ‘spirit’, which, as I maintain, could only be compared with Schoenberg’s Musical Idea.

3  Formalism and modernism: Eduard Hanslick’s ‘sound-forms in movement’ Wittgenstein’s ‘modernism’, indeed, conveys a view ‘sub specie aeternitatis’ of the ‘centrality of language’, firstly based on the Abbildungs-model of music in the Tractatus, and then, in his later philosophy, on a model of understandingplaying music. A ‘modernist’ aspect of formalism in music is to be traced back to the historian of music Eduard Hanslick. Of course, in the mid-nineteenth century, ‘formalism’ could not have the same meaning as the analytical method of ‘New Logic’ that was imposing itself in 1920s Vienna. Yet, it is worth noting that Hanslick’s contribution to the history of music made room for a new claim in favour of formal aspects within the field of tonal music, in contrast with theories endorsing a sentimental conception of musical content as Affekt. For sure, such ‘modernism’ is to be understood as different from the Vienna School’s ‘modern music’ that was to come half a century later. One can understand the connection between forms and life only through movement, yet not in the sentimental sense of muovere, which was considered as a clue for grasping content in the earlier Affekttheorie of musical content. Wittgenstein’s apparent anti-sentimentalism is an aspect of this Hanslickian ‘modernist’ heritage. The question of musical ‘content’ in the mid-nineteenth century was a matter of violent controversy among the representatives of the so-called ‘Absolute Music’, opposing Wagner and Hanslick. Yet Hanslick’s formalist conception imposed itself only later. Music as language also calls for a study of the signified, as Hanslick pointed out: ‘The sound is a sign … a means to express a thing totally alien to the sign.’ The semiological potentiality of Hanslick’s conception of the autonomy of the musical as based on soundforms introduced musical meaning through the idea of a compositional whole according to which a language signifies itself.

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Hanslick’s formalism was motivated by a new conception of absolute music, turned against the opera and deeply anti-Wagnerian in spirit.9 The discarding of voice and libretto was part of the formalist strategy’s quest for meaning in music. His objection to the sentimental content of music foreshadows the later current of anti-psychologism that strongly inspired both Frege and Husserl’s respective conceptions of logic and objectivity of thought. In these respects, it is striking to realize how much of a pioneer Hanslick was. Preparing the field for musical meaning by distinguishing the expressivity of articulated musical expression from the expressivity of emotion, he paved the way towards ‘modernism’ methodologically conceived. The aesthetical source of Hanslick’s ‘forms in movement’ is a key to understanding the conception of ‘form as content’ and ‘content as form’, which first appeared in his argument against Wagner’s conception of ‘Absolute Music’. The interchange between content and form tends to blur the traditional opposition between the two. The fact that this opposition disappears makes us understand that expressing is not expressing something, transitively speaking. According to Hanslick, ‘moving sound-forms’10 – or, so to speak, formal content in music – are not reducible just to the ‘Form’ of empty sound-elements (Tönen), devoid of expression. This reduction would, rather, be the way his opponents presented his formalism. Form according to him means, on the contrary, an already full and active one, a kind of (music-) ‘specific’ force-form, exactly the opposite of an empty entity or a mould to be filled with content. Its expressiveness is that of the ‘Idea’ or ‘Musical Idea’ freed from sentimentality, closer to von Humboldt’s conception of Geist, which he knew and to a certain extent integrated.11

4  From sentimental feeling towards expressivity of meaning: A modern step Wittgenstein invented a special non-eliminativist strategy to deconstruct the expressivity of sentiment in order to reshape it to mean expressivity with the In a text mentioned further below, written in 1946, titled ‘New music …,’ Schoenberg is not so favourable vis-à-vis Hanslick, in whom he perhaps saw a strongly engaged anti-Wagnerian partisan. Hanslick’s attacks on Wagner’s conception of absolute music contributed to dividing musicians in the 1850s. 10 ‘Tönend bewegte Formen’. Cf. Vom musikalisch-Schönen (1854). This is in opposition to Daniel Schubart or Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, who at that time represented the current of aesthetics taking emotion as the true content of a musical idea. 11 As recalled by Carl Dahlhaus in his Aesthetics of Music, trans. William Austin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 52.  9

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means of grammatical analysis. It is the way Wittgenstein ‘depsychologizes psychology’.12 He thereby provides a condition of access to musical meaning by opening a way from the inducible Gefühl to expression proper. I take it as a ‘modernist’ turn to which grammar has contributed. Grammar provides a better reformulation of expressivity that is neither vitiated by an illusory picture of content nor entirely rejected on a logical basis. By dissolving the prejudice that music expresses a sentimental content, it shows that expressing is not a transitive operation. Only on the basis of this model could meaning in language be conceived without falling into the trap of the cliché of ineffability. As Moritz Schlick13 once wrote, if music dealt with the content of expression, no one could hear it. Yet, this does not amount to saying that music leaves the performer or the hearer emotionally indifferent, or that feeling is unimportant. It only confirms Hanslick’s point that emotion is not ‘specific’ to music.14 A good example of this grammatical strategy is offered by Tolstoy and the discussion of what Wittgenstein calls his ‘false theory’ of sentimental content,15 from which ‘there is a lot to learn’. Against Tolstoy’s conception that ‘the activity of art is based on man’s capacity of receiving through his senses of hearing or sight a feeling’, that is, ‘experiencing emotion’,16 Wittgenstein stresses the distinction between expression and feeling in a way that draws on an aspect of Hanslick’s formalist conception of the autonomy of the musical that has been recently emphasized in writings on the ‘inexpressivity’ of music.17 My first point is that the subtle interchange that Wittgenstein operates in the text between feeling and expression does not rule out feeling. In these lines, by writing ‘You Stanley Cavell’s expression in The Claim of Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). M. Schlick (1938), ‘Form and Content, an Introduction to Philosophical Thinking’, French trans. D. Chapuis, J-J. Rosat, in Gesammelte Aufsätze (Marseille: Agone, 2003), 151–249. 14 In contrast with Wagner’s ‘absoluteness’ of music, ‘specificity’ is, in fact, an important, rather polemical, expression in Hanslick’s writings on music and designates all the features that are important in music so that, as Schopenhauer himself thought, music steps out of all hierarchy between arts and, thereby, all classification in terms of degree. One could even consider Kant’s gradual scale of arts: having music at the top, instead of poetry, would be inadequate as a ranking. 15 CV, 58 (1947): ‘There is a lot to be learnt from Tolstoy’s bad theorizing about how a work of art conveys a “feeling”. – You really could call it, not exactly the expression of a feeling, but at least an expression of feeling, or a felt expression.’ See also Leo Tolstoy, What is Art? (1897–8), trans. Aylmer Maude (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962). In his Tolstoy’s Life, Romain Rolland stresses the Russian writer’s anti-modernism. The effect of music on Tolstoy was strange: he feared music as much as he liked it. For Tolstoy, music is a deregulated intense enjoyment that might lead to depravation. An exception for him was Beethoven, whom (as noted by Romain Rolland) he violently admired: ‘The art of the old deaf composer’ generated in him anger as well as worship. 16 From Tolstoy, ‘What is Art?’; quoted by Alan Tormey, The Concept of Expression (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 149. 17 For instance, by Santiago Espinoza and Clément Rosset, L’inexpressif musical (Encre marine, 2013). The expression is Stravinsky’s. Wittgenstein’s conception has been treated as marginal. 12 13

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really could call it not exactly the expression of a feeling (Ausdruck eines Gefühls) but at least an expression of feeling (Gefühlsausdruck), or a felt expression’ (Gefühltenausdruck), he shows that he is looking for a still better expression, more adjusted to what he means. The argument finally settles on a structural analogy with a ritual in which one responds to an invitation ‘in resonance’ (‘when I pay someone a visit’). Never does Wittgenstein explicitly criticize sentimental content as such. He only denies that it is describable in an intelligibly sharable manner, which is why he says, ‘Don’t look inside yourself ’ (CV, 1946), in the sense that ‘depths are not interesting’.18 This warning only means that one should not draw cognitive conclusions from consulting one’s interior forum. Instead of an essential definition in response to a question about ‘what content’ is expressed, he chooses a grammatical comparative study ‘sign to sign’ or a ‘structural description’ (Strukturbeschreibung). The method consists of looking for analogies (here ‘resonance’: zu ihm schwingen) between parallel cases in heterogeneous domains (here music and a ritual), and constructing other possible cases of comparison. It is only after such a process of depsychologization that the expression of feelings finds itself re-evaluated in comparative anthropological terms without being eliminated. From the semantic test of Tolstoy’s ‘false theory’, the reader draws an anti-sentimentalist lesson connected with the ‘centrality of language’, showing what musical meaning looks like in comparison with reactions in a ceremony. The grammatical analysis of Tolstoy’s ‘false theory’ shows that the problem is less the sentiment in itself, which is fully legitimate, than its privileging over intellectuality. Feeling is not to be discarded under the pretext that it cannot be a cognitive musical content. I just cannot show my feeling, only its signs: der Ausdruck.19 Paul Engelmann had a beautiful way of stressing the paradoxical importance of sentiment in a modernist conception of forms: one should save the need for a sentiment that makes understanding (intellect) possible.20 My second point is that the grammatical re-evaluation of the language of expression reinforces the formalist stance without corroborating the earlier analytical conception of understanding. The example of depsychologization we have just mentioned has shown the way towards a modernist view of expressivity ‘What it is it to follow a musical phrase with understanding, or to play it with understanding? Don’t look inside yourself. Consider rather what makes you say of someone else that this is what he is doing’ (CV, 51). Here, as indicated further below, Wittgenstein suggests taking into account how understanding is manifested, rather than what happens while one is experiencing a musical theme. 19 CV, 1946 à propos the statement, recalling J. Labor’s playing (according to J. Koder): ‘He is experiencing the theme intensely.’ 20 See Engelmann’s Letters quoted above. We will see below this opposition between heart and intellect, with Schoenberg and his own reply to the criticism of abstract intellectuality. 18

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in connection with grammar that proceeds like a comparative methodology of enquiry into meaning. It leaves far behind the Tractatus’s analytical conception of understanding based on the ‘paraphraseability principle’ that allows a replacement of equivalent phrases that have the same meaning, as well as the corresponding compositional conception of meaning according to which the meaning of an expression depends upon its components. It also displaces, rather than suppresses, the need for a kind of totality, as I will soon show. The anthropological shift of understanding has definitely put an end to analyticity in the modern sense. The musical model of understanding in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy confirms this renouncement. Does it, thereby, leave modernism behind?

5  Wittgenstein’s ‘anti-modernist’ tone in 1930: The lack of ‘the sense of the whole’ There are some obstacles regarding Wittgenstein’s attitude towards modernism. In the crucial period of ‘transition’, when modernism was at its peak, Wittgenstein declared that he was not in agreement with the new movement in music, architecture and arts. As we know from his correspondence with Paul Engelmann, he was even reserved about the project of a Kunstamt that Loos, Kraus and Schoenberg wanted to build in 1919.21 He mocked it and its Grossesprecherei. These lines from an early draft of the foreword to Philosophical Remarks – now a remark in Culture and Value22 – show how to his ears ‘modernism’ sounded as something infected with the American influence, putting private interests above the common goal of men. His appraisal is strange, as it mingles anti-democratic tones in the style of Nietzsche with a quasi-Marxist view of what should be looked for by workers working together in the same factory: working in view of a common goal requires an equal participation of workers, motivated by the ‘sense of the whole’ (im Sinne des Ganzes) that is to link them together. What he deplores is precisely the loss of that ‘sense’. Because this spirit is lacking, culture is, in fact, Unkultur. Its disintegration by the effects of individualistic work, when each one works for himself, amounts to wasting one’s own forces because of too many counteracting resistances. This process of fragmentation generates decay. The image of the forces spent in vain is inspired by the industrial machinery of production in a capitalistic world. The lacking ‘sense of the whole’ is due not To Paul Engelmann, on 25 September 1919 (vol. 8, Briefe, Suhrkamp, 1980). CV, 6f. (and footnote 1).

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so much to the eradication of any belief in a soul or a Geist making language a living symbolic activity, as to the absence of a collective impetus towards a common goal. The discontentment with the loss of this ‘sense of the totality’ echoes Schoenberg’s declarations in the same period, holding musical form as an organic whole. Wittgenstein also clearly has in mind the totality of form that makes a piece a real work of art. One could argue that, in reference to the emblematic Brahmsian (quartet, opus 60) conception of the dynamic structure of a composed piece, such an insight does not sound very ‘modern’. Yet, it was the model Schoenberg had in mind of the ‘Idea’ governing the relations between parts and whole, which is irreducible to a totality composed of parts.23 For Wittgenstein as well, Brahms was an important model because of his musical ‘thought’, whose unity constitutes its strength.24 Interestingly enough, a classical example such as Brahms could illustrate the ‘modern’ methodological requirement of Form as a coherent whole. That means that modernism does not lie in modernist music, but in the way the unity of thought is rendered even in a classical piece. The modernist aspect lies in understanding the Form as based on the same laws of comprehensibility (Fasslichkeit) and coherence (Zusammenhang) that, for Schoenberg, hold true for a language. The centrality of language to music as Schoenberg conceives it, as well as the above-mentioned requirements founded on constructed relations, are ‘modern’ in the good sense, which saves and serves the spirit of the whole.

6  Spirit in what sense? Life and language Of course, Wittgenstein was not a spiritualist and clearly refuted the thesis of a spirit animating language. There is neither soul nor intentions in words. His critique of mentalism, joined with the discussion about the ‘mythology of interiority’ (J. Bouveresse) that induces the philosopher to forge an internal space called ‘mind’ in which mental processes would take place, is well known. Neither does the ‘life’ of a symbolism come from an external incorporeal entity that would be added to it, for instance Frege’s Gedanke.25 We could then assert that, See his Gedanke Fragments, analysed by P. Carpenter and S. Neff, Schoenberg, The Musical Idea (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). ‘The strength of the thoughts in Brahms’ music’, in CV, 32 (1932–4). 25 See Wittgenstein’s critique of Frege’s conception of Thought as a condition for making a living use of signs in BB, 4. 23

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without being a philosopher of mind in the contemporary sense, Wittgenstein defended a conception of ‘intentionality without any content of representation, penetrated with spirit (or life) without reference to it’.26 Use makes signs ‘living’, like the walls of the house supporting the foundations. This view on the life of signs, of propositions, the growing importance of the life of forms in language as in the arts, show that Wittgenstein has indeed shifted from a logical conception of the ‘sense of the whole’ to a more cultural one – hence the recurring claim for ‘life’ in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, the life of propositions, then of symbolism against various mechanistic conceptions in mathematics, for example, in order to claim that philosophy is not ‘programme music’. Correspondingly, the meaning of the ‘whole’ has changed. It is no longer the whole world, nor the wholeness of an objective sort of totality. The unity of such a ‘world’ is a prejudice, as is the ‘modernist’ idea that philosophy deals with ‘objects’ that are objects of knowledge.27 Akin to culture, its integrity is that of a ‘system’ of forms of life in a liveable world. So, for Wittgenstein, the sense of the whole is connected now with life-activity, which means displaying human potentialities. In these respects, music, as an activity that achieves its full potential when expressively incarnated into a work, shows the way. An expressively complete (as opposed to logical-symbolically complete) work is one whose forms ‘witness their own life in movement’, as Henri Focillon28 puts it in relation to painting. When Wittgenstein says that language is to be a life-activity, the best example he gives is music, because playing or hearing music are living experiences of meaningfulness rather than experiences of life.29 The musicologist and writer Boris de Schloezer30 adopts a similar notion, through his devotion to music, though with no reference to Wittgenstein and in different terms. He writes that it is one thing to experience a ‘vécu’, another to live in the sense of expressing signs. It is clear that Husserl31 understands the experience of living a melody in the This is the title of my paper read in Tunis University, mid-April 2015, to be published in the Proceedings of the Colloquium, ed. Melika Ouelbani. See Philippe Descola, La composition des mondes: Entretiens avec Pierre Charbonnier (Paris: Éditions Flammarion, 2014). 28 See his Vie des formes (Paris: Vrin, 1943). Note that Focillon also forged the expression ‘contenu formel’, which I myself use to express the identity of form and content (see above à propos of Hanslick’s view). 29 Note that this reversal casts light on the now-accepted, if not current, expression ‘musical significance’, expressed in the arts. This way of seeing can be applied to other arts if considered in the same way. 30 In Comprendre la musique, articles 1921-1956 (Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2011). 31 For a Husserlian reader, the ‘symbol’ looks like something external, an empty linguistic and conventional sort of expression that should disappear for the benefit of the meaning-relation. 26

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first sense, whereas Wittgenstein rather asks us to live the activity of hearing and playing a musical piece, which is, in short, that of expressing signs. This is how I understand his aspiration to be ‘living a melody intensely’: as an interpreter, interiorizing the compositional process as is ‘manifested’ in the performance. Taking for granted that the so-called ‘later Wittgenstein’ is the philosopher of context par excellence, let me specify two crucial aspects that correct the common view. 1) Basing his conception of philosophical understanding on the model of music, Wittgenstein makes a certain case for dynamical aspects from the point of view of a grammatically orientated comparative analysis of expressivity. 2) By resisting its total reducibility to a mere contextual approach, it allows a view ‘sub specie aeterni’ in present time, despite the historical roots of what could count as new or obsolete. I take the ‘Musical Idea’ to contribute to stressing that kind of eternity.32 So far, as I said, Wittgenstein’s well-known remark against the ‘modern’ in 1930 does not make him a genuine ‘anti-modernist’ of the pessimistic sort. At that stage, Wittgenstein was no less modern than Schoenberg meant to be, in contrast with their contemporaries. That is also why one now needs to give more consistency to the ‘modern’ vocation of their conceptions of forms as regards language, independently of what was received as ‘Modern’. The ‘Modern’ as broadly admitted could, indeed, generate a decline of the modern or at least reveal a ‘malaise of modernity’ (Charles Taylor). In these respects, Schoenberg’s first dodecaphonist opera composed about the ‘modern’ throws light on what I would like to call the spiritual spell of the modern, without which the modern would fail to be interestingly modern.

7  ‘Musikalische Gedanke’33: Wittgenstein and Schoenberg, a methodological affinity Already in the Tractatus, one is struck by the role attributed to the Musical Idea. Whereas the reader could expect the Idea to be applied so as to be reified in the world, Wittgenstein mentions it as resulting from projection and, thereby, Already mentioned in 1915 in lines reminiscent of Tolstoy’s ‘mysticism’. See B. McGuinness’ reference to Notebooks 1914-1916, 25-5-1915 foreshadowing the Tractatus 6.52, in Approaches to Wittgenstein, Collected papers (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 140. 33 TLP 4.014. I prefer to use here Wittgenstein’s German expression rather than ‘Musical Idea’ as it was translated to English, since it meets Schoenberg’s own expression. See Schoenberg, The Musical Idea, especially 15: ‘Composing is thinking in tones and rhythms’; ‘all thinking consists essentially in bringing things (concepts, etc.) into relation’. Hence the importance of searching out ‘coherences’; here, an ‘Idea is a musical relation’… (Fragments on the Musical Idea). 32

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as being on the same footing as the score, the orchestral performance, the gramophone record or any other projected thing. This unexpectedly makes the Idea a constructed system of relations (as Schoenberg took it), obtained by top-down projection, rather than some superior essence of a Platonic sort, preexisting before its projection. Thus, even though Wittgenstein’s musical paradigm might well be classic or romantic, or non-modern, the Abbildungscharakter of music, so close to architecture, reveals a methodologically ‘modern’ conception that has affinities with Schoenberg’s theory of forms according to which ‘in music there is no form without logic, no logic without unity’.34 What is ‘unity’? It is a single thought emerging from the work as an organic whole. In spite of his personal allergy to modernism in the arts, Wittgenstein could be viewed, relatively speaking, as sympathetic to Schoenberg’s methodological conception of constructing musical phrases, shaping sense in quasi-architectural terms to build up the clear great Form. For both, ‘clarity’ meant the intelligibility of the great form at the end of the Klarwerden process. As J. K. Wright writes, the ‘centrality of language’ made Schoenberg a ‘modernist’ close to Wittgenstein and Kraus.35 As I see it, Aldo G. Gargani’s investigations into methodological affinities between Wittgenstein and Schoenberg36 have definitely invalidated all attempts, founded on Wittgenstein’s critical remark in 1930, to radically oppose the classical spirit of Wittgenstein’s conception of music to Schoenberg’s constructivist views. The key of Gargani’s comparative study is that in mathematics, a new vision of the logical forms emerges in contrast not only with the traditional deductive view, but also with a reductionist method. This vision is more suitable to inventing/ composing related sequences of forms on the basis of their formal structures, as they let themselves be constructed according to a technique that invention itself produces. In the Tractatus, we find the statement that ‘one can anticipate only what lets itself be constructed’. This echoes Schoenberg’s refusal to build musical phrases out of a tonal given, anchored in the nature of the sounds. Construction of an atonal grammar as an extension of tonal music shows that tonality itself is

A. Schoenberg, ‘Composition with Twelve Tones’ (1941), in Style and Idea ed. Leonard Stein (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1975), 220. 35 J. K. Wright, Schoenberg, Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), 67 and 185. 36 See Aldo G. Gargani, ‘Techniques descriptives et procédures constructives, SchoenbergWittgenstein’, Revue Sud, special issue on Wittgenstein, Marseille, 1986, 74. This comparative study relies on the role of the ‘mathematical action’ and ‘constructive procedures in mathematics’, stated by Herman Weyl, and also by Brouwer, as the source of the ‘formal technique of construction of a field of operational possibilities and variations’. 34

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the product of art, not of a natural system of sounds. An aspect of modernism is a distance from the centre of organization of chords as given-in-nature.37 In Wittgenstein’s approach, the same could apply to language. Atonality is achieved by constructing logical series of dissonant chords as far and as remotely as the composer is able to extend the harmonics beyond the conventional limits of the tonal system. Similarly, drawing new analogies by creating – rather than digging them out as already available in nature – family-resemblance predicates extends the possibilities of meaning far from a Fregean sort of referential nucleus of a conceptual content. Putting into question the existence of a nuclear content leads to blurring the limits of the area of a concept.38 The two are concomitant. From a reference quoted by Baker and Hacker in their commentary on PI, §§65−71,39 we learn that emerging aspects in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy suggest visualizing, in the absence of a Fregean conceptual content, interrelations or intermediate modal cases for which no class of abstraction could be constructed. It is like a composer constructing his logic of dissonances in the absence of a tonal centre, by using a procedure of extension of chords from heard and familiar harmonics to unheard and remote ones. In PI §6, Wittgenstein says that ‘uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination’. If we can compare the life of signs to the life of sound, it is not absurd to argue in favour of a thematic continuity from the life of propositions in the Blue Book to aspects as emerging qualia in the later philosophy.

8  A musical case of tension between outmoded style and modernism: Schoenberg’s Von Heute zu Morgen I take Schoenberg’s dodecaphonist opera in one act, opus 32, Von Heute zu Morgen (1928) as an illustration of Wittgenstein’s remark in Zettel: ‘I think of a quite short phrase, consisting of only two bars. You say “what a lot that’s got in it!” But it is only, so to speak, an optical illusion if you think that what is there goes on as we hear it. (“It all depends who says it.”) (Only in the stream of thought and life do words have meaning.) (Z, §173)’. What is denounced See our Du son à la musique, Helmholtz, Mach, Dahlhaus, with the collaboration of P. Bailhache and Céline Vautrin (Paris: Vrin, 2011). See PI, §69ff. where Wittgenstein, against Frege’s conception of concept (§71), builds up his conception of language-games. 39 In G. Baker and P. M. S. Hacker, Wittgenstein: Understanding and Meaning (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 325. 37

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here in terms of ‘illusion’ is the idea that a cultural motif is contained in a small musical phrase, that refers to it as if people shared something they express in common. Rather, culture is the effect of human manifestations of understanding forms within it. The relation is not of a transitive expression of the same content, but of an aspectual interaction allowing describable features of understanding. Yet, in such an aspectual interaction, there is a tension between life and spirit, as the essential expression of a double striving towards a modernism still to come. Schoenberg’s opera is an illustration of this tension between modern style and the Musical Idea. Modern style is what people say, which echoes a given culture. The Musical Idea is what, despite the context, the musician constructs in order to animate his piece with a sense of the whole without which the work would lack expressive completeness; it is its value. The year 1928 is the year in which, in his lecture in Breslau on Die Glückliche Hand, a Zeitoper, Schoenberg declares that he intends to make music using the means of the theatre stage. So conceived, the goal of this musical drama is to exemplify the ‘modern’ by displaying its banal forms, which every ordinary man in Vienna of the time could hear at home. This example, which deals with the banal, namely the ‘modern’ as it was admitted and lived in ordinary life, is also intended to demonstrate the validity of the dodecaphonist series,40 and hence of the Musical Idea. As it seems, Arnold Schoenberg’s text would, indeed, contribute to validating the dodecaphonist series, but in an easy-to-understand and, therefore, light form. Yet, against this apparent pretension, doubt arises regarding such a strategy in favour of easy understanding. One can indeed see, underlying the real ‘social engagement’, a political background that orientates the composer towards the opposite side, already making more understandable the criticisms the composer will later (1946) aim at himself regarding his preference for an easiness of understanding. Even though it is a music of ‘context’ entirely permeated with, so to speak, the motive of banality, there is a tension between the context of the Modern as it is restored in the libretto, rendered by the sound material illustrating the series, and the Musical Idea of the Modern inspiring the written score. The point is that it is, in the end, up to music to take charge of the mission of letting the distanced observation on modern culture be fully Or serialism (emerging in opus 23, the 5th piece, 1921, and also opus 24 and 25). At this period, the motive of twelve tones covers the whole chromatic scale. Such is the ‘series’ that designates the order of notes within the motif, ‘notes having only relations between them’. Thereby the motif turns its back to the melody.

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heard. The dilemma between the requirements of the Musical Idea and the mere context of banalization as the musical strategy of the composer can be discussed, but how could music express it in sounds? My question returns to my earlier remark about the feeling of the loss of spirit in terms of the sense of the whole. How can one make clearly audible the loss of what Wittgenstein calls the ‘sense of the whole’, a whole that is lacking in a fragmented society that has lost its soul, without relying on the force of the Musical Idea itself, for its capacity to restore that sense? At this point, Schoenberg refers to the composer’s will that makes the mastering role of the Musical Idea clear through its incorporation into the orientated sound material. This conflict between what it means presently to be ‘modern’ and what it must sound like, between the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’ of the Musical Idea, receives its solution in a section of Style and Idea (1946). Besides a mitigated appreciation of the so-called ‘new music’ at a given period of the history of music, or outmoded music, Schoenberg calls for the ‘Idea’ in the name of a totality, the totality of a musical piece. The ‘Idea’, he writes, never dies, whereas a style is bound to become outmoded. Hence, the Musical Idea survives by virtue of the tension between the style and the Idea. If the tension disappears, it means that the Idea has disappeared. It is interesting to see what Schoenberg gives as a definition of the ‘Idea’: each time you add a note to another note, you instil doubt as to what the first note meant. Several possibilities could appear after a first note like an ‘A’, depending on where you go on the harmonic scale, the direction of the sequence, which the composer’s will has determined. Note in passing that Schoenberg’s conception of orientated action on the sound material by virtue of the Musical Idea is exactly what Cage, the rebel pupil of the Austrian master, will object to in Schoenberg: the control of the will over the sound. Yet, for Schoenberg, this will (or desire, independent of a ‘natural order’) coincides with the Idea; it gives it its firmness in time, maintaining it as self-consistent through various sound-configurations that follow the first note, as he says. This example is very striking. That is in a way the ‘eternity’ of the Idea, the condition for the ‘internal tension’ that must remain such, yet not a Platonic Idea but a constructive system of chords. There were similar considerations already in the Treatise of Harmony (1911). In these respects, the ‘modern’ can be used and abused, but the Idea remains, not the Idea before the composer composes, but the Idea that the composer brings into existence in the form of a work that is, as he writes, the Idea out of which the musical tools have been forged.

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9  Life versus Geist To my argument of a life-orientated ‘function’ of forms, the reader could object that ‘Life’ and ‘Form’ are not made for each other. A logical matter might be quite opposed to a life-affair. That is Russell’s point of view. In Waismann’s notes, transcribing one of Wittgenstein’s dictations around 1931, the latter is said to vindicate the priority of ‘questions of life’ over ‘questions of logic’.41 The priority of questions of life for Wittgenstein would rather oppose him to Schoenberg, who was sometimes criticized as a rather intellectual composer, more concerned with an abstract notational formalism than with so-called emotional life. It seems as though, on the contrary, Wittgenstein would rather strive towards ‘questions of life’ even in much harder matters such as mathematics. As I said, Wittgenstein kept reproaching himself later for having missed the ‘living’ aspect of forms in his earlier writings.42 But what should we understand by ‘life’? Are ‘life of forms’ and ‘forms of life’ the same? Wittgenstein’s philosophical aspiration echoes the notion of ‘living a melody intensely’, a phrase that, applied to himself, is a confession, but is also a quotation of Jakob in the Die Arme Spielman (1848) that was written by the novelist Franz Grillparzer, so dear to Hanslick. Wittgenstein, too, liked Grillparzer. Paradoxically, it is the kind of phrase that is exposed to Wittgenstein’s critique of sentimental content. I take Wittgenstein to sometimes attack views he is himself tempted to advocate, exhibiting conflicting voices in himself when submitting his own passionate convictions to a cold grammatical critique. The demand for a colder approach (of a grammatical sort) is to him what he expected philosophy to be: an activity of interpretation comparable to the instrumentalist’s practice of performing a musical piece, let us say an art of understanding in this pragmatic sense. Music shows the way since, especially in music, there is a strong interdependence between performing (instrumental interpretation) and understanding the musical piece played.43 Notebook 1, about ‘Zusammengesetztheit’, F 71, F 38. I refer here to our Wittgenstein’s Dictations to Waismann and for Schlick in a French translation (Paris: Vrin, 2015). The English version is Gordon Baker (ed.), The Voices of Wittgenstein: The Vienna Circle (London: Routledge, 2003). 42 Namely TLP, §4.0311, in which the French expression ‘tableau vivant’ occurs. Note that ‘tableau vivant’ is an expression that originally designates a group of characters participating in a musical event such as singing together. 43 Wittgenstein often says that understanding a musical piece shows itself in the fact that you are able to sing the musical air you are listening to. They are one and the same gesture. Ryle’s ‘knowing how’ amounts to the same, and Paul Valéry holds a similar view. 41

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How can forms be said to be living? Are there really two meanings of ‘life’, everyday life and the autonomous life of higher forms, in music or in ethical forms of activity, dealing with ‘Thought’ (Gedanke) ‘flying above the world and leaving it as it is’ (CV, 1930)? Note that in the phrase just quoted, thought looks for eternity while leaving the world as it is, in its ordinary order. Both lives, the ordinary (the contingent world as it is) and the so-called eternal course of thought, find themselves in the same sentence. There is an aspect of how things appear to us as eternal from our lower point of view of earthly human beings, along our ordinary course of life. The eternal course of thought does not posit eternal things as if, seen from above us, they were installed in upper spheres. Here, there is nothing like Plato’s time, defined as ‘a moving image of eternity’. What is offered to us is a perspective from down here. That is important for solving our problem about the work of art sub specie aeternitatis and contingency. Contingency does not contradict eternity and can be looked at as being compatible with eternity as an aspect under which, down here, we see things-as. Thereby, the difficulty to articulate ethics and everyday life also dissolves. Under the guiding ‘Musical Idea’ (or Gedanke), only music is able to ascertain the survival of such a principle after the Tractatus, in the midst of contingency. In Wittgenstein’s vocabulary, the Musical Idea is the projected thought that is offered to our understanding. Understanding means interiorizing the forms of the work of art, which display themselves through gestures that we make our own (CV, 1948). The gestural factor shows how important is the ‘indwelling’ function of Life (des Lebens) which, in its infinite varieties, as Wittgenstein writes, penetrates ‘our life’, that is, our everyday life. Wittgenstein interweaves the two aspects of ‘life’. The transference of musical phrases or gestures into forms of life is mediated by my interiorizing attitude: ‘Ich mache sie mir zu eigen.’ Hence the emergence of ‘expressive movements’ that are signs of understanding (Ausdrucksbewegungen des Verstehenden) exhibited in response. ‘Appreciating music is a manifestation of the life of mankind’ only in this sense (CV, 151, 1948). Again, here a process of ‘intensified resonance’ is called for, which witnesses the life of language, as what Wittgenstein said when he was prisoner in Montecassino: ‘Die Sprache ist alles.’44,45 About Wittgenstein and the war, see Brian McGuinness, Wittgenstein, A Life (London: Duckworth, 1988), as well as ‘It will be terrible afterwards, whoever wins’, Chapter 5 of his Approaches to Wittgenstein. 45 I wish to thank Michal Sapir for the English revision of this text. 44

10

Wittgenstein and the Art of Defamiliarization David Schalkwyk

There are many ways of plotting the complex relation between Wittgenstein, modernism and literature. One might discuss the philosopher’s attitude to literary texts and the institution of literary criticism. But such an approach would be biographical rather than philosophical. It would rely on largely unconnected remarks in collections like Culture and Value,1 anecdotes such as Wittgenstein’s famous injunction to F. R. Leavis to ‘give up literary criticism’,2 and his controversial doubts about Shakespeare.3 One might discuss Wittgenstein’s reading, attempting, again from fragmentary sources, to say more about his engagement with authors like St. Augustine, Shakespeare, John Milton, George Fox, John Bunyan, Samuel Johnson, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Søren Kierkegaard, Charles Dickens, Henrik Ibsen, Rainer Maria Rilke and Rabindranath Tagore, than has already been said in memoirs and biographies. Wittgenstein famously arranged for grants to be given to modernist authors and artists, but he did so through third parties, leaving the choice of artists to others.4 There is thus little evidence of his personal views on the poets, authors or artists who benefitted from his munificence, even if the grant itself does indicate

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. Von Wright, trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 2 F. R. Leavis and Paul Dean, The Critic as Anti-Philosopher: Essays & Papers, ed. G. Singh (Chicago: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1998), 137. 3 For a discussion on Wittgenstein’s approach to literature, see Stanley Stewart, ‘Was Wittgenstein a Closet Literary Critic?’, New Literary History 34, no. 1 (2003): 43–57. 4 Wittgenstein asked Ludwig von Ficker to disburse 100,000 crowns to ‘Austrian artists who are without means’. They included Rilke, Georg Trakl, Carl Dallago, Karl Hauer, Oskar Kokoshka, Else Laskar Schüler, Adolf Loos, Theodor Haecker, Theodor Däubler, Ludwig Erik Tesar, Richard Weiss, Franz Krannewitter, Herman Wagner, Joseph Oberkofler, Karl Heinrich and Hugo Neugebauer. See Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London: Penguin, 1991), 108f. 1

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Wittgenstein’s support for artists and writers working in the early twentieth century, when modernism was at its peak. I approach the question from a perspective that centres on Wittgenstein’s published philosophical writings, which contain very few remarks on literature as such. My point of departure is Wittgenstein’s statement, ‘I think I summed up my attitude to philosophy when I said: philosophy ought really to be written as a form of poetic composition’ (CV, §24). This enigmatic remark is open to various interpretations, but I am going to take it at face value. Coupling it to another remark, ‘What I invent are new similes’ (CV, §19), I read Wittgenstein’s similes in the way that one would read metaphorical language in a literary text: not as mere ornamentation – as a manner of speaking – but, rather, by following their resonances and suggestiveness, even their contradictions, as a symptom of Wittgenstein’s historical embeddedness in a modernist world itself beset with tensions and contradictions.5 This, furthermore, takes seriously the modernist notion that form is as important as – indeed, possibly more important than – content.

1  Sketches and journeyings In her focus on modernism as a philosophical phenomenon rather than mainly a revolution in art and literature, Anat Matar argues that Wittgenstein’s early Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is the ‘epitome of modernism’ because it reveals that what philosophy aims at representing cannot be represented. Thus its first, defining step inevitably leads to its own necessary termination, to silence. Philosophy, then, is revealed as an impossible reflection, precisely because it is a meta-language that aims at depicting a whole, outside of which is nothing – yet it must place itself outside, in the void, at its alleged source. Philosophy’s task is to make propositions clear and to give them sharp boundaries (4.112), but in order to draw this sketch, the draughtsman himself is nowhere to be found.6 Cf. Stanley Cavell on the Investigations:  Something essential to the work’s fascination is missed if one seeks to keep the palpably philosophical sketches, concerned with the problems of meaning, reference, understanding, states of consciousness, language games, grammar, and so on free from the patently and unembarrassed literary response to itself, where we are asked to consider such matters as a fly trapped in a bottle, a beetle in a box, talk from a lion, the teeth of a rose. (Stanley Cavell, Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 193.) I would add that even notions like ‘language games’ and ‘grammar’ have the quality of similes. Badiou remarks that ‘Wittgenstein … is condemned to metaphor’ (Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, 80). 6 Anat Matar, Modernism and the Language of Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2006), 19 and 22. 5

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Matar takes the image of Wittgenstein as draughtsman from his later work, specifically from the Preface to the Philosophical Investigations in which he declares his remarks as no more than a series of ‘sketches of landscapes … made in the course of … long and involved journeyings’.7 The very nature of the investigations eschews the bird’s-eye view of language in its totality that is implied in the famous final metaphor of the Tractatus, which reveals the book as a ladder that the reader must discard after s/he has climbed it.8 The new investigation ‘compels us to travel over a wide field of thought criss-cross in every direction’ (PI, ix). Wittgenstein subsequently eschews the appropriateness of a ladder altogether: If the place I want to get to could only be reached by way of a ladder, I would give up trying to get there. For the place I really have to get to is a place I must already be at now. Anything I might reach by climbing a ladder does not interest me. (CV, 7)

If, as Matar claims, the draughtsman himself is nowhere to be found in the Tractatus, the person who produces the album of sketches in the Philosophical Investigations is, indeed, situated in a landscape that he needs to traverse repeatedly and tirelessly. This is because he needs to attend to the use of words in specific situations in order to see the connections that constitute his album as a collection of sketches. But the situationality in which the sketches are produced is bewildering for reasons beyond its vastness and complexity: it is a place in which it is easy to get lost – perhaps a place in which being lost is the default condition: Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by multiple new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses. (PI, §18)

At the same time, it must in some sense be a familiar place, one present to us, in which we are already embedded: The truth of the matter is that we have already got everything, and we have got it actually present; we need not wait for anything. We make our moves in the Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973), ix. 8 TLP, §6.54. 7

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realm of the grammar of our ordinary language, and this grammar is already there. (WVC, 182f.)

The problem is that we don’t have a clear view of the grammar that is present in both space and time precisely because of its constitutive closeness. We need to alienate ourselves to some degree from our intimacy; we need an overview. A central metaphor of the later work continues to speak of the need for a ‘perspicacious overview’ of the ‘use of our words’: ‘Our grammar is lacking in this sort of perspicuity. A perspicuous representation produces just that understanding which consists in “seeing connections” ’ (PI, §122). We are therefore stuck with a crucial conflict between two of the similes Wittgenstein uses in his later work to characterize the activity or practice of philosophy: one requires an overview of the uses of language from above – a ladder, in effect – so that appropriate connections may be mapped out; the other is a place where the draughtsman is already too caught up in the landscape he is trying to trace to get a clear view of it. This conflict is repeated in other metaphors: in an elaboration of language as an ‘ancient city’ and in a striking simile of language as two different kinds of landscape: It is very easy to imagine someone knowing his way about a city quite accurately, i.e. he finds the shortest way from one part of the city to another quite surely – and yet he should be perfectly incapable of drawing a map of the city. That is, as soon as he tries, he only produces something completely wrong.

The problem lies both in the desire to produce the picture in accordance with some system and in the inadequacy of any systematic representation itself: Above all, someone attempting the description lacks any system. The systems that occur to him are inadequate, and he seems suddenly to find himself in a wilderness instead of the well laid out garden that he knew so well. (RPP I, 555 and 557)

The bewilderment that arises from finding oneself lost in a wilderness rather than at home in a domestic garden arises from what the later Wittgenstein retains of the ‘inexpressible’ from the Tractatus – that which can only be shown, not said: ‘What is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to express), is the background against whatever I could express has its meaning’ (CV, 16). The immense complexity of this background escapes even the most comprehensive attempts to offer a philosophical Übersicht of the broader contexts that allow language to be what it is.

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Because meaning is possible only against, or within, this ‘inexpressible’ background, our accounts of language cannot be neatly trimmed into manageable, formal patterns or systems: they can neither be covered by a single, comprehensible theory, nor can all the ground be adequately covered in order to ‘represent all the interrelations between things’ (CV, 12). This background is not inexpressible in the Tractarian sense of being ‘the logical form of reality’ (TLP, §4.121). It expands the early, purely linguistic context of the proposition to the vast domain of ‘forms of life’ – the natural, cultural, social and discursive worlds implicit in everything that may be said in language. Unlike the logical form of the Tractatus, it does not even show itself in what can be said: it has to be traced along arduous and confusing paths and streets of a city in which one is simultaneously a stranger and at home. Wittgenstein’s parenthetical qualification ‘what I find mysterious and am not able to express’ does not assert any metaphysical inexpressibility. Rather, he registers a personal sense of bewilderment and limitation.9 Wittgenstein’s similes about language, place and perspective include an almost obsessive concern with ‘home’ as the proper place for language – that philosophy takes the form of the problem ‘I don’t know my way about’ and that philosophical problems occur when ‘language goes on holiday’ (PI, §38) and needs to be returned to ‘its original home’ (116). However, the place that the philosopher ‘must already be at now’ in his investigations can hardly be considered ‘home’, unless home is seen in the Freudian sense of what is heimlich, which is simultaneously unheimlich: uncanny, strange, a place in which one is in effect ‘lost’ and doesn’t know one’s way about.

2  ‘An ancient city’ Wittgenstein’s philosophical relation to modernism has been traced with great perspicuity by Matar, who emphasizes, like Alain Badiou and Jacques Lacan, not 9

It may be said that such bewilderment is a universal condition of philosophers. But many of the philosophers who regard themselves as Wittgenstein’s heirs feel little of his fundamental predicament. See, for example, John Searle’s statement in response to Jacques Derrida that ‘once one has a general theory of speech acts − one that Austin did not live long enough to develop himself − it is one of the relatively simpler problems to analyse the status of parasitic discourse’ (John Searle, ‘Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida’, Glyph 2 (1977): 205. For my commentary on this debate, see David Schalkwyk, Literature and the Touch of the Real (Newark: Delaware University Press, 2004)).

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only the self-reflexivity of his philosophical (or antiphilosophical) position, but also what she calls philosophy as an essentially vain enterprise: The vain language of philosophy is both empty (nonsensical) and arrogant. Vain language is stripped from its royal apparel and exposed as an imposture. It is a ghost language, a parasite upon ordinary language, but devoid of any genuine meaning. (Matar, 28)10

I want to move in a somewhat different direction by following Wittgenstein’s similes of place and displacement through a more sociological mapping of modernism. This sense is best expressed by Raymond Williams as a tectonic displacement towards (and within) the metropolis: Thus the key cultural factor of the modernist shift is the character of the metropolis: … decisively, in its direct effects on form. The most important general element of the innovations in form is the fact of immigration to the metropolis, and it cannot be too often emphasised how many of the major innovators were, in this precise sense, immigrants. At the level of theme, this underlies, in an obvious way, the elements of strangeness and distance, indeed of alienation, which so regularly form part of the repertory. Liberated or breaking away from their national or provincial cultures, placed in quite new relations to those other native languages or native visual traditions, encountering meanwhile a novel and dynamic common environment from which many of the older forms were obviously distant, the artists and writers of this phase found the only community available to them: the community of the medium; of their own practices.11

Wittgenstein doesn’t fit all of Williams’s categories – he moved from a metropolis, Vienna (in which the roots of modernism across architecture, music, pictorial art, poetry, prose and philosophy were set), to what might be considered a ‘provincial’ town, Cambridge. Nevertheless, the sense of alienation, displacement and discomfort with any single place – a strong sense of homelessness – beset him all his life. Inextricably situated within the process of exile brought about by both the opportunities for cultural and intellectual movement and the cataclysmic upheavals of war in early-twentieth-century Europe, Wittgenstein lived his life as a permanent refugee, whether it was from the luxury and decadence of Hapsburg Vienna to the Engineering Faculty at Manchester; from Manchester In the light of the Searle/Derrida debate on the status of the parasite cited in the previous footnote, we might note Matar’s somewhat uncritical use of the notion of a ‘parasitic’ language here. 11 Raymond Williams, ‘The Metropolis and the Emergence of Modernism’, in Modernism/ Postmodernism, ed. Peter Brooker (New York: Longman, 1992), 91−2. 10

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to the logical philosophy of Bertrand Russell at Cambridge; from the trenches of the Italian front to an isolated cottage in Norway; from the primary schools of Alpine villages to the Logical Positivist Circle of Vienna; from Vienna to Trinity College, Cambridge; and, finally, to a remote cottage in Western Ireland, before returning to die in Cambridge in 1951.12 For him, as for so many of the generation that we now equate with modernism, there was never a home, a Heimat: merely a ceaseless series of endless, criss-crossing journeyings, back and forth, over the same terrain, in search for the still point that would allow him to stop doing philosophy. His real quest was the antiphilosophical one of being able to stop doing philosophy: ‘The real discovery is the one that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy when I want to. – The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions that bring itself in question’ (PI, §133).13 Despite everything that Wittgenstein said and did, he never did manage to find a point of rest, when philosophical problems stopped troubling him, nor did he write very much after the mid-1930s in a form that was not the sketch or remark rather than the map or the essay. The fundamental point at which the Wittgensteinian spade ‘turns’ in the quest for description turns out not to be bedrock but, rather, a further kind of quicksand in the light of the modernist condition of strangeness, alienation, irony and exile. If the world is one of alienation and displacement, whose judgements are at work? And how are those judgements reached, if they underpin the possibility of language itself? In short, does modernity (and modernism as a response to modernity) render problematic the idea that human beings agree in the language they use because they agree in their ‘forms of life’? An answer of sorts is offered by Wittgenstein’s turn to practice rather than thought or logic – to the idea that ‘in the beginning was the deed’ (OC, §402). This is why Wittgenstein does not conform to the attitude towards language that Williams draws as the consequence of the actual dislocations of the modern condition: Thus language was perceived quite differently. It was no longer, in the old sense, customary and naturalised, but in many ways arbitrary and conventional. To the See Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein. This remark occurs in the context of Wittgenstein’s declaration, in the same paragraph, that ‘the clarity we are aiming at is indeed complete clarity’. Jacques Lacan is reported to have responded to the impossibility of this desire remark by posting on the wall of his consulting room: ‘Not just anyone can go mad who wants to.’ Bruno Bosteels, Translator’s Introduction to Alain Badiou, Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, 48.

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immigrants especially, with their new second common language, language was more evident as a medium – a medium that could be shaped and reshaped – than as social custom. (92)

Along with the linguists and philosophers, especially from the dislocated and displaced countries of Europe, Wittgenstein recognized the arbitrary and conventional nature of language. But he also insisted in the Tractatus that language cannot be arbitrary all the way down: ‘In our notation there is indeed something arbitrary, but this is not arbitrary, namely that If we have determined anything arbitrarily, then something else must be the case. (This results from the essence of the notation)’ (TLP, §3.342). He subsequently abandoned his Tractarian solution, but he continued to look for some kind of bedrock upon which what Lacan calls the ‘sliding of the signified under the signifier’ could be stopped. The solution offered in the later work is not the modernist removal of social custom to reveal language as a pure, manipulable form or medium, but, rather, a return to something like custom as an agreement, not in opinions, but in underlying judgements: ‘To obey a rule, to make a report, to give an order, to play a game of chess, are customs (uses, institutions)’ (PI, §199). But customs are specific – they belong to place, culture and time. They are contingent, not necessary (what ‘must be the case’). They, of all things, belong to the home. But what custom may be relied upon if the home is the place of the uncanny or strange, of exile or the alien – if it is defamiliarized? Wittgenstein could never achieve his antiphilosophical goal of gaining ‘complete clarity’ and therefore of being able to stop doing philosophy ‘when I want to’ precisely because of the uncanniness that he repeatedly uncovered at the heart of language as our home. The dream of a philosophical enquiry ‘no longer tormented by questions that bring itself in question’ was both the driving force of his anti-modernism and the quintessentially modernist lesson of his philosophical practice.

3  Defamiliarization: Russian Formalism At the time before and during the First World War that Wittgenstein was formulating his ideas about the isomorphic relation between the form of propositions and that of the world (themselves then paradoxically alienated as the nonsense about which we should not speak), Viktor Shklovsky and his colleagues in Russia were formulating a modernist theory of literature as the

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means by which form is employed to defamiliarize our habitual or customary ways of seeing the world. They also used the simile of the journey – the road to be travelled: ‘The crooked road, the road on which the foot senses the stones, the road which turns back on itself – this is the road of art.’14 Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war.  … And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important.15

There is a striking shift in the object of defamiliarization from the first to the second half of this passage. It begins with an observation that may be related to the Wittgensteinian analysis of aspect-perception (PI, Part II, section xi passim). Shklovsky is concerned with our habitual, unreflective ‘continuous aspect perception’ of the world, saturated with unreflective meaning and immediate experience. Such habitualization ‘devours’ the objects of our perception and experience, numbing the senses and reducing our intercourse with the objects of our daily lives to the humdrum familiarity of the merely seen but not properly ‘known’.16 In the early part of the passage, life is the object of habitual perception: clothes, furniture, one’s wife (sic). We pass over these objects without thought. On the straight road the stones go unheeded in our urgency to reach the destination. But we have art, Shklovsky tells us, ‘that one may recover the sensation of life’; that one may properly feel ‘things’; that the essence of the stone may be revealed. Art is there ‘to make the stone stony’. Reading no further than this, it seems that art cleanses the gates of our perception of the world, perhaps by inducing in us the involuntary cry of surprise V. Shklovsky, ‘The Resurrection of the Word’, in Russian Formalism: A Collection of Articles and Texts in Translation, ed. Stephen Bann and John E. Bowlt (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1973), 30. 15 V. Shklovsky, ‘Art as Technique’, in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 12. 16 If we are to pursue the comparison with Wittgenstein, we need to note a difference in terminology here: if, for Wittgenstein, one ‘knows’ that it is a rabbit, then it means that one is not seeing it spontaneously in the grip of a concept but, rather, effortfully reading such knowledge off as in the interpretation of a blueprint. For Shklovsky, on the other hand, what is ‘known’ is precisely what is not noticed, what does not require interpretive effort: it is what in Wittgenstein’s terms would be seen that is continuous aspect-perception. Nothing turns on these terminological differences. We should simply note them to avoid confusion. 14

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that marks the dawning of an aspect for the first time: ‘It’s a rabbit!’ Like the metaphor in which the retardation of the journey enforces the perhaps painful sensation of the stones underfoot, this account focuses to a surprising degree on the heightened sensation of material things in the world. The next sentence, however, moves from the claim that the technique of art serves to make objects unfamiliar, through the intermediate claim that art prolongs and intensifies perception or sensation as an end in itself, to the final claim that the object itself is irrelevant: art self-reflexively induces us to experience its own ‘artfulness’. Shklovsky thus slides uncertainly from referent, through signified, to signifier, leaving it uncertain as to which object of perception is renewed by artistic defamiliarization: the stone itself, the concept of a stone or the mere linguistic mark ‘stone’. The discussion of Tolstoy’s technique of ‘remov[ing] objects from the automatisation of perception’ that follows this passage is clearly concerned with the relationship between referent and concept. Tolstoy ‘makes the familiar seem strange’ by presenting objects and events under unusual concepts or descriptions. ‘The familiar act of flogging’, Shklovsky writes, ‘is made unfamiliar both by the description and by the proposal to change its form without changing its nature’ (Art as Technique, 13). Citing Merezhkovsky’s appraisal of Tolstoy as ‘that writer who … seems to present things as if he himself saw them, saw them in their entirety, and did not alter them’ (13), Shklovsky appears to be groping towards the paradox clarified in Wittgenstein’s analysis of aspect-perception, namely that in the change of an aspect, the object appears to change and yet remains the same. Wittgenstein resolves the paradox by attacking the philosophically naive idea of perception as the materialization or copy in the mind. Such a copy clearly cannot change. A change of aspect is, instead, an ‘echo of a thought in sight’ (PI, Part II, 212): the object is brought into relation with other objects through the application of a different concept. It is not the picture or object that holds us captive, but the habitual concept under which the object is unreflectively seen in continuous aspect-perception. To effect such a change, we cannot remain with mere signifiers or pictures; we have to deal with language-games – with words in use, and moreover, with technique as a way of being able to act in the world: ‘It is only if someone can do, has learnt, is master of, such-and-such, that it makes sense to say he has had this experience’ (PI, Part II, 209). The relationships among the literary device (which, by impeding perception, effects the making strange of the object), the tripartite concept of the sign and the object of perception in Shklovsky’s work are none too clear. If his two early

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seminal essays display the tendency always to move towards concept and referent, Shklovsky and his co-formalists subsequently define ‘literariness’ entirely in terms of its self-reflexive baring of its own devices – its orientation towards the medium, as Williams puts it – thereby enforcing a divorce between art and life that forms a major strand of modernism. Considered entirely in semiotic terms, this means that literary devices do not sharpen our perceptions of either linguistic or material reality, but, rather, of the material of language itself: the word, signifier or medium considered as material substance. It is in this sense that the language of poetry is supposed to be ‘a difficult, roughened, impeded language’ (Art as Technique, 22). This language is, in effect – in accordance with the manifesto of the Futurists, who wished to demolish all established or instituted meaning – ‘transrational’: it is stripped of its usual directedness towards meaning and the referent. Such immanence extends to the literary text as a whole, which uses the ‘material’ of events and objects merely as motivation for the innovative deployment of the devices of literary form: The work of art is perceived against the background of and through association with other works of art. Its form is determined by its relation to other forms that existed prior to it. … A new form appears not to express a new content but to replace an old form that has lost its artistic quality.17

Purely on the level of the Saussurean theory of the sign, this reduction is incoherent. For Saussure, the sign is not the matching of a material object to a mental phenomenon. The material of the word is necessarily reduced phenomenologically in order to make the sign itself perceptible as an instance of language: the signifier is, for Saussure, a psychological, not a material, entity: it is a ‘sound pattern’.18 Any reduction of the sign to its material aspect would destroy its character as language completely, leaving us with mere sound, light or ink. That it is possible to reduce the complex fusion of signifier and signified to the perception of the bare sound or mark bereft of meaning is confirmed by Wittgenstein’s remarks on the way in which we may induce the experience of meaninglessness by repeating a word over and over. Our habitual and unreflective perception of a word as always already saturated with meaning – the ‘being-heard’ of language as language – can be made strange so that all we perceive is the material husk of the word. But this is an exceptional process, Quoted in Peter Steiner, Russian Formalism: A Poetics (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1984), 56. 18 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (London: Duckworth, 2013). 17

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confined, in Wittgenstein’s experiments at least, to isolated words. It is less easy to see how this could happen to a whole sentence or, indeed, across a poem or a novel: we seem to be forced to see a duck-rabbit either as a duck or a rabbit and not as a mere conglomeration of lines. One could see a conglomeration of lines as a human face, but can one see a face as a conglomeration of lines? Wittgenstein’s analysis of seeing-as shows that our perceptions are in the grip of particular concepts that are part of the weave of human life, and a change of aspect is not so much the eradication of the concept as the replacement of one concept by another, which draws different internal relations between the object perceived and other objects. While Shklovsky raises an important question about the capacity for art to renew perception, he remains philosophically confused about not only the object of such perception, but also the imbrication of the conceptual and the referential, of thought and sight, in his theory of defamiliarization. The confusion arises from the Russian Formalists’ historical indebtedness to Saussurean linguistics, which not only divorces sign from referent, in a characteristic modernist way, but also treats the contextually bound utterance – language in use – as if it were no more than a sentence. The distinction between sentence and utterance arises from Saussure’s claim that linguistics should create its own object of study by excluding everything extraneous to the language system. Whereas the sentence studied by linguistics is a purely linguistic form, essentially and deliberately disconnected from any context of use, the utterance is always, as Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, M. M. Bakhtin and V. N. Voloshinov demonstrate, at work in the world, marked and informed by its situation, and, following the work of Formalism’s most perceptive critics, the evaluative intonation that accrues to it in social use.

4  ‘Grammar tells what kind of object anything is’ (PI, §373) If modernism reconceives any one of the obsessions of philosophy, it is the assumption that language offers no more than a relatively unproblematic medium to meaning, truth or the world. That language itself may be constitutive of any of these may be darkly hinted at in the method of Socratic conceptual analysis, or in Book III of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. But it took Frege to place language at the centre of philosophical understanding and/or obfuscation, and the early Wittgenstein showed that there is no way to

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view the relation between language and the world from outside language itself. The Saussurean trend in literary theory in the late twentieth century divorced language from referent altogether. Combining a Russian Formalist notion of the essentially defamiliarizing task of literary texts (in contrast to literary realism), followers of Saussure asserted that the arbitrariness of the sign means that a revolution in form (exemplified by modernist texts) can show the ideological constructiveness of all pretences to merely describe the world in a supposedly transparent language. Once words are divorced from the world through the theoretical eradication of the referent, literary defamiliarization merely turns back on its own procedures, with little purchase on the world in which political and social change was sought. Wittgenstein was never concerned with literary defamiliarization. But a combination of his concept of aspect-perception – which deals with the experience of a sudden change of perception as part of a process of being able to do things in the world – and his claim that ‘essence is expressed by grammar’ (371) may illuminate the quest, begun by the modernists, for a way of showing up our unreflecting place in the world and language as our home. First, Wittgenstein avoids the traditional conception of a relation between words and the world for which we need to seek a (philosophical) bridge by arguing that there is no gap between them. From his suggestion that the ‘samples’, taken from the world, like a colour patch, used to teach the use of words, become forms of representation and, therefore, part of the grammar of a language, through his discussion of the ways in which certain aspects the world may be set aside from empirical question or investigation to be entrenched as criteria, to his later investigations into the problem of certainty – whereby ‘a totality of judgements is made plausible to us’ (OC, §140) – Wittgenstein offers a picture of the interaction of language and world through human practice that makes no dogmatic distinction between fact and fiction. His distinction between using language to set up a game and using it in playing the game means that unlike John Searle, for example, in the latter’s polemic with Derrida, his work does not claim that fictional discourse is parasitical upon ordinary discourse.19 Indeed, he explicitly states that if we want to know the grammar of a word, it is to fiction that we should turn for our examples: ‘The contexts of a sentence are best portrayed in a play. Therefore the best example for a sentence with a particular meaning is an example from See Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 239: ‘The possibility of fiction cannot be derived.’ For Searle’s response, see J. R. Searle, ‘Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida’, Glyph 5 (1977): 204f.

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a play. And whoever asks a person in a play what he is experiencing when he is speaking?’ (RPP I, 38). Note the strength of this declaration: a play is not merely a legitimate source for the contexts of a sentence; it is the best source. And it is the best source in part because it reveals an uncanny truth about our habitual assumptions about the source or location of meaning. We tend to think in our habitual, unreflective way that meaning must be, as Hilary Putnam puts it, ‘in the head’,20 but the example of a sentence (Bakhtin would call it an utterance) in a play shows us that we have no greater difficulty understanding such fictional uses of language than any other, despite the fact that the actor is not animating them with any experience or intention that is internally related to their sense. We should, therefore, abandon our customary assumption that such sense must come from ‘inside’ the person speaking. This example demonstrates Wittgenstein’s reduction of a classic philosophical distinction, but also the fact that what is revealed in that demonstration is precisely not in line with our customary assumptions: both revelations are strange, uncanny and unsettling. This revelation of the uncanny at the heart of the ‘place [we] must already be at now’ is multiplied across Wittgenstein’s writing: in the notion that I cannot be said to know that I am in pain because I am incapable of doubting it; in the paradoxical idea that in following a rule a new decision is required at each step (PI, §186) and also that we obey a rule ‘blindly’ (219); that to believe something is neither to describe a mental state nor a feeling (RPP I, §§596, 832–6); that a concept is not necessarily held together by what is common to all instances of its application (67); or that it would be less misleading to say that we ‘think with a pencil and a piece of paper’ rather than in one’s head (BB, 67). When Wittgenstein claims that philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday (he writes too, of a wheel ‘idling’ in a machine (PI, §270)) and that the task of philosophy is to bring it back home where it can do its proper work, what he in effect reveals about that home is that it is not what we think it is – he reveals that the work that language does when it is at home actually takes unfamiliar forms. In one sense, this should not matter, since when we are not doing philosophy, we are simply at home, and we use language to do the multiple things we need Hilary Putnam, ‘The Meaning of Meaning’, Philosophical Papers: Volume 2, Mind, Language and Reality: Mind, Language and Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 227: ‘Meanings just ain’t in the head.’

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it for. Only philosophers are silly enough to scribble things on pieces of paper and then assume that they must be pictures of something (CV, 17). But the kinds of problems that the antiphilosopher wishes to dissolve by letting the fly out of the fly bottle infect a multitude of ways of thinking and speaking: problems of intentionality; responsibility and justice in law; issues of ethics in politics; distribution and justice in international relations; and the countless negotiations of emotion and feeling and their relation to rationality in general human relations. If a certain strand of modernism drew a problematic distinction between life and art, Wittgenstein tries to divorce philosophy from life by showing that philosophers distort the ordinary use of words in life: it is the job of the antiphilosopher (he does not use this term) to return them to their proper home where their philosophical alienation disappears and they may be restored to their proper status and work. But this is not easy. For, as I have suggested above, when Wittgenstein restores language to its homeland, he shows just how alien and alienated that homeland might be. In the light of this problem, let us return to Wittgenstein’s exasperation at his incapacity to give a systematic sketch of ‘the background against whatever I could express has its meaning’. Some have found the demand to give a full account of this background extravagant: We have all heard the wearying platitude that ‘you can’t separate’ a word from the entire context in which it occurs, including not only the actual linguistic context but also the aims, feelings, beliefs, and hopes of the speaker, the same for the listener and any bystanders, the social situation, the physical surroundings, the historical background, the rules of the game and so on ad infinitum. There is no doubt some truth in this, but I fail to see how it helps in an empirical investigation of language. At the very least provisional divisions of the subject have to be made somewhere.21

Mates’s complaint is levelled at an ordinary language contextualism that is clearly influenced by Wittgenstein. But it not only exaggerates what Wittgenstein would be looking for, more important, it misses the fact that Wittgenstein is not conducting an ‘empirical investigation of language’. The philosopher’s remarks that he is engaged in a kind of ‘natural history’ notwithstanding (PI, §415), the later Wittgenstein’s turning his early investigations in the Tractatus around by 180 degrees means that his quest remains a logical one, or, rather, a grammatical B. Mates, ‘On Verification of Statements about Ordinary Language’, in Ordinary Language: Essays in Philosophical Method, ed. V. C. Chappell (Princeton: Prentice-Hall, 1964), 71.

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one, to use his later formulation. In his view, essence is expressed by grammar (PI, §371); and when Wittgenstein writes of the inexpressible against which whatever one says gets its meaning, he is not talking about an infinitely extensive field of empirical research that includes the ‘aims, beliefs, feelings, and hopes’ of the speaker, listener or bystanders, or a historical investigation of what words meant, say, for Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Indeed, part of his uncanny investigations is aimed precisely at the commonsense contextualism that believes that one cannot understand an utterance if one doesn’t have access to such aims, beliefs, feelings or hopes in the interlocutors. A careful mapping of the grammar of concepts such as ‘intend’, ‘aim’, ‘imagine’, ‘believe’, ‘hope’ and ‘feel’ will show (often with the help of fictional examples) their radically different relation to each other and to what we call the meaning of a word or utterance. The mapping of such grammar is therefore not an empirical investigation even if it uses examples from language as it is used; nor is it, despite his famous dictum that the most useful way to find the meaning of a word is to look at its use, a form of contextualism that aims to examine the ‘total speech act in the total speech situation’ to understand the meaning or force of any particular utterance.22 Neither did Wittgenstein draw the distinction between ‘serious’ and ‘non-serious’ speech acts as a methodological prelude to his investigations, setting aside the latter from his enquiry, as J. L. Austin does. In the sense that he sought to describe not phenomena but, rather, the ‘possibilities of phenomena’ (PI, §90), Wittgenstein is not an ‘ordinary language philosopher’. Returning to the centrality of fiction to Wittgenstein’s journeys and the central modernist idea that it is the task of art to defamiliarize our perception, we may now bring together the two issues with which I opened: the displacement or alienation that marks Wittgenstein’s antiphilosophical method and his place within modernism. Wittgenstein’s method – so characteristic of modernism itself in its rejection of the philosophical quest for systematic answers to the large questions of truth or being – also effects in philosophical terms what we might call the existential condition of the modernist movement, namely its historical and sociological experience and responses to displacement and alienation. The longing or desire to return home finally reveals home as a place of the strange, the uncanny and the unexpected. Moreover, although Wittgenstein was only peripherally concerned with the implications of his J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words: Second Edition, 2nd edn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 148.

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investigations on art and literature, his demonstration that it is a mistake to speak of a relationship between words and the world – as misleading as the question ‘What is the meaning of a word?’ (BB, 1) – illuminates the Russian Formalist notion of the defamiliarization effected by the literary and offers its own kind of (Un)heimlichkeit. We have seen that when Shklovsky writes of literature taking us on an unfamiliar path on which is revealed the stoniness of the stone, it is unclear what such stoniness entails: a fresh aspect-perception of the word (signifier), concept (signified) or referent. If, as Wittgenstein argues, grammar tells us what kind of object anything is (PI, §373) and that essence is expressed by grammar, then literature provides a solution of sorts to his despair at ever expressing the inexpressible conditions that make meaning possible. Literature is constituted by the elaborate grammatical connections through which the world is taken up in language as part of its means of representation, and, furthermore, in the ways in which aspects of the world are mobilized as criteria. Following a strong modernist trend exemplified by the Russian Formalists that literature is an extended exploration of the ways in which we dwell in the doubleness of what is heimlich in its Wittgensteinian and Freudian senses, Wittgenstein’s later writing exemplifies both the situatedness of the philosophical search for meaning and the uncanniness of language as our home. Wittgenstein’s claim that philosophy should be written as a kind of poetry shows that his own philosophical activity marks one of the capacities of the ‘literary’ to expose the extraordinary in the ordinary, the uncanny in the homely, by exposing the grammar of our concepts through their situations of use.23 Macaulay gets into difficulties when he claims that ‘the art of fiction is an “imitative art” ’, for it commits him to an inadequate view of what that art can achieve: He wants to give a description: but any picture that suggests itself to him is inappropriate, however right it seems at first sight; and however queer it seems that one should be unable to describe what one so exactly understands. … The systems that occur to him are inadequate, and he seems suddenly to find himself in a wilderness instead of in a well laid out garden. (RPP I, 555 and 557) For a study that is closely related to my argument about Wittgenstein’s revelations of the strangeness of the ordinary, but which focuses on twentieth-century forms of poetry, see Marjorie Perloff, Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Perloff ’s emphasis on the constitutive nature of non-canonical poetic texts means that she is not concerned, as I am, with the affinity between literature as a whole and Wittgenstein’s ‘grammatical’ investigations, especially with regard to what kind of object anything is.

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The background conditions that enable everything one can express in language to have meaning cannot be captured by a philosophical Übersicht. Macaulay tries to offer a complete description of this background within the framework of a definition settled before the investigation, but the investigation itself, Wittgenstein shows in his ceaseless ‘journeyings’, cannot be entirely comprehended. The very habitual nature of our dwelling in language leads us to expect a well-laid-out garden: the ordered home, the entirely familiar. But systematic description reveals exception upon exception. The obstinate operations of the will to insist on order despite the actual linguistic wilderness shows why we continue to insist on the possibility of an ordered overview, a complete account of the conditions of meaning. This background that escapes an ordered philosophical account is, however, registered, not through the well-ordered description by which Macaulay seeks to control the literary, but in the multiple arts of literature. Wittgenstein’s poetic traversals of the maze of paths that constitutes our language as a plethora of practically grounded practices in the world does no more than merely indicate the uncanniness of our linguistic home. The vast historical resources of the literary can stage and embody across the broadest range of uses, our alternating perceptions of that wor(l)d, now as a ‘wilderness’, now as a ‘well laid out garden’. To sum up: Wittgenstein’s implicit engagement with what the Russian Formalists regarded as the defining quality of the literary – its capacity to defamiliarize the ordinary – shows that it highlights ‘the determination of concepts’ rather than the mere materiality of the pure signifier or the physical resistance of stone to the foot. It reveals the ways in which concepts are appropriated into language through and in the world as samples. All our uses of language depend on the empirical judgements that ‘lie apart from the route travelled by enquiry’. Literature invites or forces us down some of those unregarded paths. It calls upon us to ignore habitual signposts and strike out across country that may be as familiar as our own breathing, but which may be revealed to be unfamiliar and uncanny – a ‘wilderness’ rather than a ‘well laid out garden’ (OC, §88). Art effects a change of aspect that shows the degree to which what we are able to see is determined by instituted conceptual relations between the objects of our world. The defamiliarizing power of the literary, which Formalism correctly discerns as a core function of the literary, enables it to stage historically specific modes in which the world is appropriated and reappropriated as what Wittgenstein calls ‘essence’. For this revelation of the essentializing appropriation of the world through linguistic practice to be revealed or unmasked, world and

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word have to work together. They cannot be separated; nor can one be reduced to the other. The literary is thus a form of the grammatical investigation that Wittgenstein thought the only proper task of philosophy. It highlights the interweaving of language and the world, showing the ways in which our practices turn the objects of our world into essences through the ‘grammar’ of our language. Such grammatical relations are not the concrete particulars of history, but neither are they the pure universals of philosophy. They are ‘timeless’ in the sense that grammatical rules are timeless – but they do not stand outside history. Because the grammatical appropriations of the world occur institutionally and in time, their uncovering and production brings the historical moment of reception into productive contact with the historical process in which concepts are mobilized and used in the world. Wittgenstein shows how the world is always already in language, via the compulsion of a rule of representation, and so exposes the nature of such compulsion. It can free perception and experience, not from conceptual determination altogether, but to new ways of appropriating the world as ‘essence’ by revealing the process of such determination. Stanley Cavell argues that the search for criteria involves ‘claims to community’. Considering Wittgenstein’s claims that our uses of language depend upon our ‘agreement in judgments’, it should be clear that literature also has the capacity to explore and shake the deepest levels of agreement upon which our sense of ourselves and of the world we share, and over which we struggle, depend.24 The language-games in literature are tied up with the totality of judgements that we take on board when we learn any language – when we become part of a culture or community. Literature is the practice through which such implicit judgements and the inexpressible background ‘against whatever I could express has its meaning’ is enacted and renewed. The arch-modernist, Mallarmé, offers an enigmatic suggestion of the relation between signifier, signified and world with which the Russian Formalists were concerned: When I say: ‘a flower!’ then from that forgetfulness to which my voice consigns all floral form, something different from the usual calyces arises, something all music, essence, and softness: the flower which is absent from all bouquets.25 Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 20. Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘Crise de Vers’, in Selected Prose Poems, Essays, and Letters, ed. and trans. B. Cook (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), 1965.

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Mallarmé’s ‘flower which is absent from all bouquets’ does not invoke the flower as pure abstraction – as signifier purged of the worldliness of the word or signified as idea – but, rather, the flower as ‘pattern’ or ‘sample’. It is the flower repeatedly appropriated by grammar and staged by literature. In this grammatical guise, as worldly object turned into rule of representation, it is ‘all music, essence, and softness’. It is not reducible to any place in any actual bouquet since, as a rule of language, it can be reduced to no particular flower. But that does not mean that it is totally removed from the world. It is the flower seen as a constituent of grammar. If it can be found in no actual bouquet, it can, nevertheless, never shake off the traces of the real that constitute it as ‘all softness’. The most uncanny aspect of Wittgenstein as modernist is his counterintuitive revelation that it is precisely the fictional nature of literary texts that shows us most clearly the (shifting) connection between language and the world. For the ‘depth’ of literature is concerned not with the reflection or description of phenomena or the reduction of worldly phenomena to the perception of the signifier purged of the signified, but, rather, with bringing to view the ‘possibilities of phenomena’ (PI, 90).26 To have such possibilities revealed means to glimpse the nature of the Heimlich at the heart of language as our natural home.

See PI, §111:  The problems arising through the misinterpretation of our forms of language have the character of depth. They are deep disquietudes; their roots are as deep as the forms of our language and their significance is as great as the importance of our language – Let us ask ourselves: Why do we find a grammatical joke to be deep? (And that is what the depth of philosophy is.) 26

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Part Three

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Logic Sebastian Sunday Grève

In one of his final manuscripts, Wittgenstein notes somewhat abruptly: The question is: what is the logician to say here? (MS 174, 15v[2], trans. in OC, §68)

Logic played an important role in Wittgenstein’s work over the entire period of his philosophizing, from both the point of view of the philosopher of logic and that of the logician. Besides logical analysis, there is another kind of logical activity that characterizes Wittgenstein’s philosophical work after a certain point during his experience as a soldier and, later, as an officer in the First World War – if not earlier. This other kind of logical activity has to do with what appears to be the literary form of Wittgenstein’s philosophical prose, and it is likely to be seen as the most modernist feature of his preoccupation with logic.

1  ‘Logic’ and ‘grammar’ The following early remark, from the Tractatus (1922), gives expression to one of Wittgenstein’s most fundamental convictions concerning the relation between logic and philosophy: The object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a body of doctrine, but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. Philosophy does not result in ‘philosophical propositions’, but in the becoming-clear [Klarwerden] of propositions. (TLP, §4.1121)

For example, I might be inclined to say that ‘systems of formal logic describe the logic of language’. According to Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy, it would be wrong to think that uttering such a sentence, as such, would be the Translations of the Tractatus are taken from the Pears/McGuinness translation or the Ogden/ Ramsey one or both, without further indication. Translations have been emended where necessary, also without further indication. The same applies to the Bartlett translation of Frege’s ‘Über die wissenschaftliche Berechtigung einer Begriffsschrift’.

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result of philosophy (as it were, philosophical propositions). Rather, according to this conception, my utterance of this sentence marks the beginning of the real philosophical work that is needed. For what we, as philosophers, have to do now is to make clear – to ourselves as much as to whoever might care to find out – what exactly might be meant by the utterance of this sentence. This activity is what Wittgenstein calls the logical clarification of thoughts. Wittgenstein mainly uses the term ‘logic’ in two common ways: namely, either to speak about a system of formal logic such as Aristotle’s logic, Frege’s conceptscript or Russell’s Principia Mathematica (i.e. the method of investigation), or to speak of how language in general, one language in particular or specific expressions, propositions, words, concepts, etc. function (i.e. the object of investigation). Many important issues in the philosophy of logic can be framed with regard to possible, or perhaps merely supposed, relations between logic as the method of investigation and logic as the object of investigation. In what sense are systems of formal logic about the logic of language? Is there only one correct system of formal logic or are there many? Here is a relatively late remark, from 1948, in which Wittgenstein discusses a related kind of issue: Aristotelian logic brands a contradiction as a non-sentence, which is to be excluded from language. But this logic only deals with a very small part of the logic of our language. (It is as if the first geometrical system had been a trigonometry; and as if we now believed that trigonometry is the real basis for geometry, if not the whole of geometry.) (MS 137, 129–129v, trans. in LW I, §525)

According to Wittgenstein, there exists a general tendency to reify systems of logic or, what comes to the same, ‘to sublimate the logic of our language’, as he puts it in section 38 of Philosophical Investigations (cf. §§89, 94). In other words, what is at issue in the above passage is a tendency to misunderstand the normative character of formal logic in such a way, for instance, as to try to eliminate features of our ordinary language that do not accord with the rules of some system of formal logic – even though these features of our ordinary language might in fact fulfil genuine functions, which merely cannot be captured adequately by this particular set of rules. Against such reifying and sublimating attitudes, Wittgenstein reminds us that sometimes expressions such as ‘Yes and no’ fulfil a vital communicative function qua being contradictory, for example, in replying to the question ‘Do you love me?’, or ‘Are you a Marxist?’.2 It should be noted that such a reminder carries no particular commitment to logical pluralism.

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The following passage from the Preface of the Tractatus contains one of the most salient instances of one of the two main ways in which Wittgenstein uses the term ‘logic’: The book deals with the problems of philosophy, and shows – as I believe – that the posing [Fragestellung] of these problems stems from misunderstanding the logic of our language. (TLP, Preface)

Wittgenstein thinks that there is a characteristic dimension to philosophy that is displayed in a powerful, and dangerous, tendency to talk nonsense without being aware of it. In later writings, Wittgenstein speaks less frequently of the ‘logic’ of our language. Instead, he now often speaks of the grammar of our language. More frequently still, Wittgenstein now speaks of the ‘grammar’ of particular words and expressions.3 The shift towards greater attention to the specific features of particular words and expressions in the later period corresponds to, among other things, Wittgenstein’s growing appreciation of just how difficult a task it is to describe the logic of language at all clearly, even in what appear to be the simplest cases. Throughout this transition, Wittgenstein remains committed to the same basic principle, however: if we want to understand the logic (or grammar) of language, we have to look at how language is actually used in life. He writes: In philosophy the question, ‘What do we actually use this word, this sentence for?’ leads to valuable insights, time and time again. (TLP, §6.211)4

In the course of his steadily growing awareness of the difficulties one faces in trying to answer this kind of question and increasing focus on the contextualized particularity of individual cases of language use, the later Wittgenstein undertook a substantial elaboration of the methods of formal logic that he employed. In this connection it is also important to note how variously the later Wittgenstein In Philosophical Investigations, the only two instances of the ‘of our language’-variety of ‘logic’ occur in sections 38 and 93. The corresponding use of ‘grammar’ occurs in sections 29, 122, 295, 354, 371, 373, 497, 520 and 528, inter alia. However, see also e.g. MS 169, 72v, trans. in LW II, §44: ‘Bad influence of Aristotelian logic. The logic of language is immeasurably more complicated than it looks.’ For instances of ‘grammar’ of particular words and expressions, see e.g. PI, §§35 (‘to mean’, ‘imagine’), 150 (‘know’, ‘can’, ‘be able’, ‘understand’), 165 (‘a quite particular’), 182 (‘to fit’, ‘be able’, ‘understand’), 187 (‘know’, ‘to mean’), 199 (‘to follow a rule’), and also 257, 339, 492, 657, 660, 664 and 693. Cf. §345, for an equivalent use of ‘logic’. For more on grammar, see also Hutchinson and Read, this volume. 4 For a detailed discussion of the development of Wittgenstein’s attitude towards ‘ordinary language’, see Conant (manuscript), ‘Early and Later Wittgenstein on the Ordinary, on Language, and on Ordinary Language’. 3

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uses the attribute ‘grammatical’ in characterizing his philosophical methods. He speaks of grammatical perspective, analysis, sentences, structure, remarks, etc. Finally, like ‘logic’, he also sometimes uses ‘grammar’ in the sense of a technique or discipline that he engages in (see e.g. PI, §496).

2  Devices to avoid misunderstanding Frege had constructed his concept-script (Begriffsschrift) not as some kind of ideal that ordinary language would have to be brought in line with but as something in response to, as he writes, ‘the lack of a device to avoid misunderstanding in others as well as errors in one’s own thinking [that] makes itself so often felt in the more abstract scientific disciplines’.5 ‘May philosophers too, then, give some attention to the matter!’ he added (160 [56]). Wittgenstein certainly did. The signs, strings of signs or structures of signs in formal logic, which we manipulate according to the rules of the system, are significantly different from the sentences, or propositions, of our ordinary language. One essential difference can be seen as follows. If one wanted to conceive of formal strings of signs as something like logical sentences that could be true or false, then on closer inspection one would find that these ‘sentences’ can fulfil their function equally well when construed in the form of tautologies – that is, when construed in such a way that they cannot be false. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein writes6: 6.12 If propositions are to yield a tautology when they are combined in a certain way, they must have certain structural properties. So their yielding a tautology when combined in this way shows that they possess these structural properties. … 6.121 The sentences of logic demonstrate the logical properties of propositions by combining them so as to form sentences that say nothing.

The fact that so-called logical sentences can, apparently, not be false, has led many to think that ‘logical sentences’ must therefore be true, hence, that they are G. Frege, ‘Über die wissenschaftliche Berechtigung einer Begriffsschrift’, Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik 81 (1882), 48; trans. J. M. Bartlett, 1964, ‘On the Scientific Justification of a Concept-script’, Mind 73, no. 290 (1964), 155. 6 In addition to the passages that I have quoted, see also TLP, §§4.461, 6.1–6.111 and 6.1221. Russell expressed his agreement with this point in a letter to Wittgenstein dated 13 August 1919. For an example of the practical significance of this point, see V. Halbach, The Logic Manual (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 43ff. 5

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necessary truths. On the other hand, it might seem doubtful whether one should speak of logical ‘sentences’ at all. If logical sentences cannot be false, then can they be true? Perhaps it would be wiser to avoid this analogy between language and systems of formal logic.7 Wittgenstein continues: It follows from this that we can actually do without logical sentences; for in a suitable notation we can in fact recognize the formal properties of propositions by mere inspection. (TLP, §6.122)

The passage ends with an example of such a notation: ‘In cases where no generality-sign occurs,’ Wittgenstein explains, ‘one can employ the following illustrative method’. Namely, instead of writing ~(p.~q) and its truth table, for instance, we can draw the following diagram:

(TLP, §6.1203)

Let us suppose that this diagram represents a correct truth-functional analysis of what someone meant when they uttered the following words: ‘It is not true that Wittgenstein threatened and Popper did not provoke.’ The diagram now lets us see that what the person meant to say would be true even if it were actually true that Wittgenstein threatened, provided that it were also true that Popper provoked.8 So, perhaps, what the person meant to say could have been expressed more clearly by saying ‘Wittgenstein might have threatened, but Popper definitely provoked.’ For discussion of the scope of Wittgenstein’s later concern with philosophical issues arising from supposed analogies between language and systems of formal logic, see W. Kienzler and S. S. Grève, ‘Wittgenstein on Gödelian “Incompleteness,” Proofs and Mathematical Practice: Reading Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, Part I, Appendix III, Carefully’, in Wittgenstein and the Creativity of Language, eds. S. S. Grève and J. Mácha (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). 8 The corresponding reading of the lines of the diagram starts from the bottom and sees the following connections: T – T p – T q. 7

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Alternatively, using PM-notation, we can say that the person who uttered these words did not mean something of the form ~p.~q, for which their utterance could easily be mistaken. However, unlike PM-notation, the diagram illustrates the truth-functional structure of what was said without making use of anything that one might even be tempted to call logical ‘sentences’. In one sense, Wittgenstein’s diagrammatic notation simply follows Frege’s guideline for (two-dimensional) logical notations. Frege writes: [A well-constructed logical notation] will have to be entirely different from all word-languages in order to make full use of the specific advantages of visual signs. … Such brevity must thereby be striven for that the two-dimensionality of the writing surface can be well exploited for the perspicuity of the representation. (Frege, On Scientific Justification, 53, 55)9

Furthermore, the logician’s construction of suitable notations can itself be regarded as an act of philosophical clarification. As Wittgenstein writes ‘we have the right logical point of view once all is in order in our sign-language’ (TLP, §4.1213). After all, it is in virtue of the skill of the logician as a philosopher that the particular act of logical clarification can succeed without at the same time provoking a number of puzzling questions that would bring itself into question – for example, questions concerning the semantic or epistemic status of notational features. Are tautologies of classical logic, such as ~(p.~p), necessary truths about the world? Do elementary propositions (or atomic facts or possible worlds etc.) exist? The diagram fulfils its function not only without appearing to formulate logical ‘sentences’, but also without making any use of logical constants – such as, in PM-notation, v, É, ~, º, .) – whose nature has been the subject of endless controversies among philosophers of logic. In the diagram, there is just the line connecting various Ts and Fs. In this respect, Wittgenstein’s diagrammatic notation resembles the Sheffer Stroke and Wittgenstein’s own N-operator (see §5.131 and §§5.502, 5.51 and 6, respectively). In fact, the notational minimalism of the line seems to go beyond that of the other two notational devices.10 Someone might object to this as follows: ‘This diagrammatic notation is nothing but a crude equivalent to more elaborate logics. In particular, it fails to make explicit the system of rules according to which it operates.

In this respect, Frege’s notation is unrivalled by Russell’s. See also TLP, §5.4: ‘Here it becomes manifest that there are no “logical objects” or “logical constants” (in Frege’s and Russell’s sense)’.’ See further §§5.441, 5.53 and 5.531–5.5321, and the related proposal of a solution to Russell’s Paradox in §3.333.

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Principia Mathematica, for instance, does a much better job at formulating these “primitive propositions” of logic.’ However, is this not merely the call to construct yet another logical system, in order to model the one we already have? But to whose benefit? For, surely, to the extent that the diagram sufficiently clarified the relevant thought, the job of the logician has been done. Not every logician and philosopher has to be a meta-logician at the same time. Similarly, general worries over allegedly implicit rules in this diagrammatic analysis seem quite out of place. Compare the following passage from the Tractatus: If p follows from q, I can make an inference from q to p, deduce p from q. … ‘Laws of inference’, which are supposed to justify inferences, as in the works of Frege and Russell, have no sense, and would be superfluous. (TLP, §5.132)

In other words, once the philosopher of logic begins to question (formalize) the justification of inferences, the asking (formalizing) likely never ends. For, the asking might continue, ‘What, in turn, is the justification of this “law of inference”?’ etc. etc.11 Now, if constructing logical notations is itself an act of clarification – in that logical notation is supposed to help clarify problematic propositions while keeping philosophical contention, or the appearance of it, to a minimum – then, the logician or philosopher may ask, how might logical problems be solved without thereby engendering new ones? Arguably, the later Wittgenstein’s language-games are designed to do just that; thus, they constitute a logic for philosophy ‘so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself in question’ (PI, §133). Since ‘the very nature of the investigation … compels us to travel criss-cross in every direction over a wide field of thought,’ Wittgenstein writes in the Preface to the Investigations, ‘this book is really just an album.’ There is, therefore, more than one way of reading the text – there are, as it were, different ways of browsing the album.12 And one way of reading it sees Wittgenstein’s language-games as constituting a new kind of philosophical logic. The space constraints of the present text do not permit us to develop even the outlines of this, but trying to see the connections in what Wittgenstein writes in sections 5, 7, 81 and 130 of Philosophical Investigations might give the reader Cf. L. Carroll, ‘What the Tortoise Said to Achilles’, Mind 4, no. 14 (1895): 278–80. For a detailed discussion on the philosophical significance of the album structure of the Investigations, see Alois Pichler, ‘The Interpretation of the Philosophical Investigations: Style, Therapy, Nachlass’, in Wittgenstein and His Interpreters: Essays in Memory of Gordon Baker, eds. Kanterian Kahane and Oskari Kuusela (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007); Alois Pichler, ‘Wittgenstein and Us “Typical Western Scientists”’, in Wittgenstein and the Creativity of Language, eds. Sebastian Sunday Grève and Jakub Mácha (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

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some indication of what to look out for when next reading the book.13 Here it is furthermore noteworthy that Wittgenstein uses the term ‘language-game’, like ‘logic’ and ‘grammar’, not only to speak of a technical instrument of logical analysis but also to refer to our language as a whole or certain parts of it, thus stressing the interwovenness of language with life and, in particular, action – insights into which guided Wittgenstein’s development as a philosopher and as a logician.

3  Logical writing in the Tractatus and in the Investigations If we intend to take Wittgenstein at his word when he tells us at the end of the Tractatus that his sentences will be recognized, apparently without exception, as nonsense by those who understand him, then we face the difficulty of how to explain that at least some of those sentences, far from seeming to be nonsense, quite definitely have something important to tell us about logic. One possible explanation may be sought in connection with what might be described as the remarkable unity of logic, aesthetics and philosophy that can be found in the book. Let us begin by reminding ourselves of that notorious sentence towards the end of the book, where Wittgenstein writes: ‘My sentences serve as elucidations in the following way: whoever understands me, finally recognises them as nonsensical’ (TLP, §6.54). If the sentences are to serve as ‘elucidations’, then all the nonsense that makes up the bulk of the book must nevertheless fulfil some function. However, the author offers no explanation of how this might be. Yet, if we take the author of the Tractatus at his word – in particular, if we take him as trying to be clear and not to be needlessly enigmatic – then 6.54 will appear as neither obscure nor paradoxical (though nevertheless difficult to grasp). If we understand him, he says, we will recognize his sentences as nonsensical. It is not clear to what extent the converse conditional may also be true. However, in Wittgenstein’s absence, it seems promising to assume the following as our principle: if we see how all of the sentences of the Tractatus from 1 to 6.53, I discuss this topic in a larger manuscript from which the present text has been excerpted. See also O. Kuusela, ‘The Method of Language-Games as a Method of Logic’, Philosophical Topics 42, no. 2 (2014): 129–60; and Logic as the Method of Philosophy: Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Logic in Relation to Frege, Russell, Carnap and Others (manuscript).

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and possibly 7, can ‘simply be nonsense’ (Preface), then we will understand its author. Furthermore, someone who understands him in this way, the author of the book says, is someone for whom his sentences have acted as a one-way ‘ladder’ – someone, as he puts it, who ‘has climbed through them – on them – beyond them’ (§6.54). The climbing itself must be left to each individual reader, but the function that all this nonsense fulfils can be formulated as follows. The nonsense of which the author of the Tractatus speaks in 6.54 is one long series of examples of nonsense that ‘stems from misunderstanding the logic of our language’ (Preface). This is an apparently simple structure, but the amounts of ‘climbing’ that are actually necessary in order to understand its point have proved to be immense. One might think that the Tractatus begins with rather more patent nonsense – ‘The world is all that is the case’ (§1) and so on – and that it continues with nonsense that is increasingly latent, such as the so-called picture theory and the saying/showing distinction. However, according to the author of the book – especially what he writes in 6.54 and in the Preface – it is all one big bunch of nonsense that we need to recognize as such. Each and every sentence from 1 to 6.53, and possibly 7, is nonsense, the author tells us, because it is the nonsense of someone who was driven by his misunderstanding the logic of our language (namely the author himself). So, in his previous attempts to understand the logic of our language, his actually misunderstanding it made him develop inconsistent theories of the ‘sublime’ nature of logic, including a large number of apparent theorems concerning metaphysics, ethics, mathematics, the meaning of life and more besides. Reading ‘nonsense’ in 6.54 in this way does not imply that any particular sentence of the book, when considered in relative isolation, need be nonsense at all. In principle, they can all be made sense of. Having recognized how all sentences from 1 to 6.53, and possibly 7, are a big bunch of nonsense, one is free to do with the sentences of the Tractatus as one pleases – and ‘its purpose would be achieved if it gave pleasure to someone who read it with understanding,’ (Preface) – but, more importantly, we may also still use the sentences of the Tractatus to ascribe particular thoughts to its author about logic and all other subjects treated in the book. The final four paragraphs of the Preface clearly imply that the sentences of the book may be of some worth beyond their function as ‘elucidations’, that is, beyond their function as a bunch of nonsense. Beginning with the acknowledgement that ‘to the great works of Frege and the writings of my friend Mr Bertrand Russell

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I owe in large measure the stimulation of my thoughts’, Wittgenstein speaks of a plurality of thoughts (Gedanken). And he says that, while he is ‘conscious of having fallen a long way short of what is possible’ as regards the clarity of their expression, ‘the truth of the thoughts communicated’ seems to him ‘unassailable and definitive’. Thus, the author of the Tractatus wishes his work to be read twofold. On the one hand, he wishes his readers to see the sentences of the book as the expressions of his previous misunderstanding the logic of our language. On the other hand, he wishes his readers to see the true thoughts that he thinks his sentences may still communicate. So the book is composed in such a way that, in order to gain a comprehensive understanding of it, readers are required not merely to think through concisely stated views and arguments about logic and more or less related subjects but, at the same time, to engage in a good deal of actual logical clarification in order to sort out the author’s conflicted relation to the very sentences that are supposed to communicate his views and arguments. On his return to philosophy in 1929, Wittgenstein did exactly that. In fact, it is evident from historical sources, including correspondence that has recently been made available, that Wittgenstein had never really stopped taking an active interest in what, at one time or another, he believed the true thoughts in the Tractatus to be. Eventually, in the text of Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein’s continued work resulted in a written account of the kind of logic and philosophy of logic that his earlier self had only been able to gesture at. Reading the Investigations as teaching the technique of language-games as logic may generally not be the most obvious way of reading the book. One reason why this may be so is as follows. Insofar as it was Wittgenstein’s intention to develop a logic that could be maximally effective in solving philosophical problems while at the same time running a minimal risk of creating new ones (as briefly argued in the previous section), the teaching of this new logic equally had to involve no more than the absolute minimum of controversial elements and, in particular, no general principles or rules of application. In section 71, Wittgenstein says that ‘one might explain what a game is’ by giving various examples so that the other person may be able ‘to employ those examples in a particular way’. Then he adds: ‘Here giving examples is not an indirect way of explaining – in default of a better one’. I think that we should take this suggestion seriously with regard also to the way Wittgenstein explains what a language-game is, when the latter is understood as a logical device. Wittgenstein could not have explained the logic of language-games by means of

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general principles. For one thing, Wittgenstein did not formulate such general principles. Moreover, any attempt to teach this logic primarily by means of formulating general principles would arguably fail, because it really consists of a skill. And, given Wittgenstein’s outstanding mastery, for any ordinary human being acquiring this skill would appear to require a great deal of practice. In fact, unlike other logics the logic of language-games does not typically yield replicable results. Its general aim is, of course, always the same, namely the logical clarification of thoughts. However, the specific language-games (objects of comparison), which it provides to that end, will vary not only with regard to the minutest details of whatever we are investigating but also with regard to the person who is seeking clarification. For example, let us suppose that in a philosophical discussion about other minds, someone tells us ‘I know what pain is only from my own case’. Let us further suppose that we are unsure how exactly to understand this utterance and that our interlocutor finds it equally difficult to see how we could possibly fail to grasp what he or she is trying to say. Perhaps here we will remember Wittgenstein’s beetles, and quote as follows: Suppose that everyone had a box with something in it which we call a ‘beetle’. No one can ever look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle. (PI, §293)

Our interlocutor may find this revealing: ‘I see your point, if these people’s word “beetle” had a use nonetheless, it would not be as the name of a thing.’ Alternatively, our interlocutor may not find this revealing: ‘So what? In such a scenario it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in their box and hence, yes, they too would know what a “beetle” is only from their own case.’ We, again, in our attempt to understand the original utterance, may find either of these reactions useful, or we may not. If not, then we might try explaining our own view of how the language-game is supposed to work, or we might offer a different object of comparison altogether – perhaps the sensation diary of section 258, or one of our own inventions – and so on and so forth until, hopefully, all relevant propositions have become clear to us and we have, in this way, reached a better understanding with regard to both each other’s words and the things in question. To reiterate, the way in which such an improved understanding might be achieved will usually depend on very specific features concerning various parameters. There are at least the following parameters: the utterance or

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expression that we wish to clarify; the putatively expressed thought that we wish to grasp; the object that the thought is about, if there is any such object; and the subject who made use of the relevant expression in the first place. Ultimately, it is this kind of particularism, which in one form or another characterizes all his later philosophy, that made it practically impossible for Wittgenstein to teach the logic of language-games in any more ‘direct’ way than by examples.14 The text of the Investigations has often been criticized for being ‘erratic’, ‘pretentious’ or ‘oracular’. This seems wrong. Instead, we can appreciate the logical character of the text through which Wittgenstein had intended to present his new logic and his new philosophy. For the author of the Investigations, there was the difficulty of how to get his readers to pick up a certain logical activity from him without, as it were, telling them what it is – so as to prevent the activity, which was designed to solve problems, from creating new ones. Furthermore, as a consequence of the particularist character of that which he wanted to get his readers to do, there was the difficulty of how to demonstrate to them that it is a good method for them. This latter difficulty meant that Wittgenstein had to come up with some very powerful examples (language-games), that would fulfil their clarifying function more or less immediately for as many individual thinkers as possible. Arguably, the shopkeeper (§1) and the builders (§2) are indeed such powerful examples. Wittgenstein’s numerous variations of language-games serve this purpose too. Dialogues accompany most of the language-games in the Investigations, which offer discussions from different perspectives. Finally, Wittgenstein added a good number of reflections, analogies, metaphors, comparisons, etc. to further characterize the kinds of activity that he wants his readers to pick up from him. Wittgenstein’s composition of the text of Philosophical Investigations, including his employment of literary devices, constitutes an elaborate extended act of logical clarification, because it forms an essential part of the exposition of the logic of language-games.15

For more on the dialectic between objective and subjective moments of Wittgenstein’s philosophical method, see S. S. Grève, ‘The Importance of Understanding Each Other in Philosophy’, Philosophy 90, no. 2 (2015): 213–39. 15 I would like to thank Stefan Giesewetter, Wolfgang Kienzler, Oskari Kuusela, Anat Matar and Sarah Anna Szeltner for their comments on earlier drafts of this material. 14

Picture Stefan Brandt

In this entry I discuss Wittgenstein’s so-called ‘picture theory’ of the proposition as he developed it in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. After presenting the theory, I will briefly discuss two objections to it, which Wittgenstein himself raised after his return to philosophy in 1929, and which strike me as highly characteristic of the development his thought took after he abandoned the doctrines of the Tractatus. According to the Tractatus, we represent reality in thought and language by picturing it. Von Wright relates that Wittgenstein was inspired to this idea by a magazine article he had read about a lawsuit concerning a traffic accident in Paris.1 During the trial, miniature cars, houses and people were used to model the actual event, that is, the toy model served as a kind of picture of the accident. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein presents thought and language as picturing reality in a similar fashion. According to the Tractatus, the world consists of facts (TLP, §1.1) and a fact is ‘the existence of states of affairs’ (TLP, §2). States of affairs are possible combinations of objects (cf. TLP, §2.01). The objects constituting states of affairs are ontologically simple (cf. TLP, §§2.02, 2.021) and exist necessarily (cf. TLP, §§2.021, 2.024, 2.027–2.0271). Their combinatorial possibilities determine which states of affairs are possible (cf. TLP, §2.014). Hence, objects make up ‘the substance of the world’ (TLP, §2.021). The combinatorial possibilities of an object are its ‘logical form’ (cf. TLP, §§2.0141, 2.0233). Thus, the logical forms of the simple objects determine what can be the case. Their actual combination determines what is the case, that is, what facts obtain. We represent the world by picturing possible states of affairs (cf. TLP, §2.1). Pictures are themselves facts, that is, existing states of affairs. They consist of simple elements, which stand for the simple elements of the states of affairs they Cf. G. H. von Wright, ‘A Biographical Sketch’, in Ludwig Wittgenstein. A Memoir; 2nd edn, ed. N. Malcolm (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 8.

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represent. If the simple elements making up the depicted state of affairs stand in relations that correspond to the relations obtaining between the simple elements of the picture, the picture is a true representation of how things are, otherwise it is false. Wittgenstein claims that every picture must have something in common with what it depicts (cf. TLP, §2.161). This is its ‘pictorial form’ (cf. TLP, §2.17). The pictorial form of a picture is a function of the pictorial forms of its elements. It can consist in a multiplicity of features shared by the elements of the picture and the elements of the depicted state of affairs (cf. TLP, §2.171). For example, in the toy model of a traffic accident, the toy cars may have a variety of properties in common with the actual cars they stand for, such as colour, design and spatial relations. Minimally, Wittgenstein claims, the elements of the picture must share the ‘logical form’ of the elements of the depicted state of affairs. This means that the combinatorial possibilities of the former within pictures must correspond to the combinatorial possibilities of the latter within states of affairs. A picture that shares a logical form with the states of affairs it depicts is a ‘logical picture’ (TLP, §2.181). Since every picture shares at least a logical form with what it depicts ‘[every] picture is at the same time a logical one’ (TLP, §2.182, italics in the original). However, a shared logical form is not sufficient to make a picture into the picture of a specific state of affairs. For it is plausible to assume that the logical form of a pictorial element only suffices to specify a determinate object as its referent, if there is no more than one object with that form. Otherwise it would be unclear to which of the several objects sharing its form the pictorial element referred. So, if we wish to say that the pictorial forms of pictorial elements suffice to determine their referent, we must assume that there are never several objects with the same logical form. If we make the further plausible assumption that an object cannot normally occur simultaneously in all the states of affairs it can potentially occur in, then we must conclude that the occurrence of an object in one state of affairs excludes the possibility that certain other states of affairs obtain, in which this object could occur. That, however, is incompatible with a fundamental commitment of the Tractatus, namely the idea that states of affairs are independent of one another (cf. TLP, §§2.061–2.062). So, it seems that Wittgenstein assumed that there are normally several objects with the same logical form (cf. also TLP, §2.0233). And this implies that the logical forms of the elements of pictures alone cannot determine their referents. Wittgenstein therefore claims that a picture must also include a ‘pictorial relationship’

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(TLP,  §2.1513), which consists of correlations between the elements of the picture and the elements of the depicted state of affairs (cf. TLP, §2.1514). Only once these correlations are set up can the picture ‘[reach] right out to [reality]’ (TLP, §2.1511).2 In TLP, §3 Wittgenstein writes: ‘A logical picture of facts is a thought [Gedanke].’ ‘Gedanke’, just like the English ‘thought’, has a psychological and a semantic sense. In its psychological sense, it is used to refer to acts of thinking. In its semantic sense – in which Frege famously uses it – ‘Gedanke’ refers to the contents of such acts. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein uses it in its semantic sense. He says that all pictures are logical pictures (cf. TLP, §2.182); and when he says that a logical picture is a thought, he clearly does not wish to say that all pictures are mental acts of thinking. Thus, for Wittgenstein, a logical picture is a Fregean thought. But unlike Frege, who conceived of thoughts as abstract entities in a ‘third realm’ (cf. Frege 1997), Wittgenstein thinks of thoughts as types of pictures. A picture stands for a certain thought not by being related to an abstract entity but by being of a certain type, that is, by exhibiting a specific logical form and by standing in a specific pictorial relationship to a state of affairs. A central contention of the Tractatus is that one way in which a Fregean thought can be instantiated is in a proposition: ‘In a proposition a thought finds an expression that can be perceived by the senses’ (TLP, §3.1). This makes it possible for Wittgenstein to investigate the nature of all those phenomena that have a Fregean thought as their content by investigating the nature of propositions. He thereby realizes a strategy he announces in the preface to the Tractatus, namely to investigate the limits of thinking by investigating the limits of language (cf. TLP, 3f.). How can a thought be made perceivable to the senses in a proposition? First, it should be noted that, according to Wittgenstein, propositions of ordinary language do not wear their content on their sleeves. He writes: ‘Language disguises thought; so that from the outward form of the clothes one cannot infer the form of the thought beneath them’ (TLP, §4.002; my translation). So, The claim that in addition to being given a specific logical form, pictorial elements must be correlated with the objects they refer to has been disputed in P. Winch, ‘Language, Thought and World in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus’, in his Trying to Make Sense (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 3−18 and C. Diamond, ‘Peter Winch on the Tractatus and the Unity of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy’, in Wittgenstein: The Philosopher and His Works, eds. A. Pichler and S. Säätelä (Frankfurt: Ontos, 2002), 141−71. P. M. S. Hacker, in Wittgenstein: Connections and Controversies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), ch. 6 defends the interpretation given here against Diamond’s and Winch’s objections.

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in ordinary language, thoughts are not normally made perceivable to the senses. That is so because propositions of ordinary language usually do not appear in their true logical form, which is for Wittgenstein a major source of philosophical confusion (cf. TLP, §§4.002–4.0031). However, thoughts can be expressed in their true form by being expressed in a fully analysed proposition. A fully analysed proposition is a truth-function of elementary propositions (cf. TLP, §5). An elementary proposition is a concatenation of names (cf. TLP, §4.22). The names occurring in elementary propositions are the ‘elements’ of propositional pictures. They are indefinable ‘primitive signs’ (cf. TLP, §3.26), which stand for the simple objects that constitute simple states of affairs. A name shares the logical form of the object it stands for and the object is its meaning (cf. TLP, §3.203). Complex propositions represent via the names occurring in elementary propositions; for it is a ‘fundamental thought’ of the Tractatus that the logical constants occurring in these truth-functional complexes do not represent (cf. TLP, §4.0312). However, even in the case of fully analysed propositions, where the ‘elements of the propositional sign correspond to the objects of the thought’ (TLP, §3.2), Wittgenstein distinguishes between a proposition and a ‘propositional sign’ (cf. TLP, §3.12). A proposition is a propositional sign used as a ‘projection of a possible situation’ (TLP, §3.11). So, in order to understand how language can instantiate Fregean thoughts, we have to understand how fully analysed propositions are projected onto possible situations. It seems that Wittgenstein thought that two things were necessary for such a projection. First, the simple names have to be given a logical form. This is done by the use of the simple signs (cf. TLP, §3.327). Second, in order to establish the pictorial relationship between linguistic picture and pictured state of affairs, simple names have to be correlated with the simple objects that are their meaning. Wittgenstein does not explain how these correlations are set up but there are some hints that he assumed that this is done by a mental activity of connecting simple names with objects. In his Notes on Logic, he writes that the ‘correlation of name and meaning’ is ‘psychological’ (cf. NB, 104); in a letter to Russell, he claims that this correlation is ‘a matter of psychology’ (cf. NB, 130); and in TLP, §3.11 he writes that the method of projecting propositional signs onto reality is ‘to think of the sense of the proposition’. All this strongly suggests that Wittgenstein thought that using a propositional sign as a projection of a possible situation involves a mental activity of correlating signs and objects. Investigating the nature of this the

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mental activity, however, Wittgenstein rather puzzlingly claims, is not part of philosophy, but of psychology (cf. NB, 130). Although the idea that propositions are pictures may not be very intuitive, the picture theory does have undeniable philosophical appeal. First, it reduces the investigation of intentional phenomena quite generally to that of propositions. Second, it gives a nominalist account of Fregean thoughts, thus avoiding the epistemological and ontological problems of Frege’s own account of thoughts as abstract occupants of a ‘third realm’ of ideas. Third, it elegantly combines an account of what is sayable and thinkable with an account of what is possible. Since pictures are composed of simple elements, which share the logical forms of the simple elements making up the depicted states of affairs, every meaningful proposition corresponds to a state of affairs that is possible, while not necessarily actual. Finally, the picture theory provides a straightforward explanation of how a true proposition can, on the one hand, be internally related to the fact that makes it true, while, on the other, possess its sense independently of its truth. Through the correlations of simple names and simple objects, every proposition is constitutively related to the reality it depicts. However, since the simple objects can form a different state of affairs than the one depicted by the proposition, the sense of the proposition is still independent of its truth-value. Despite its philosophical appeal, Wittgenstein in his later work rejected the picture theory root and branch. To conclude this entry, I wish to highlight briefly two criticisms of that theory that can be found in his Philosophical Grammar and that are highly characteristic of the turn Wittgenstein’s thought took after he abandoned the doctrines of the Tractatus. First, Wittgenstein says that in the Tractatus, he was mistaken about the nature of analysis. He had thought that ‘logical analysis had to bring to light what was hidden’ (PG, 210), namely the true but usually disguised logical form of propositions. In PG, Wittgenstein considers this idea to be profoundly mistaken. He writes: Can a logical product be hidden in a proposition? And if so, how does one tell, and what methods do we have of bringing the hidden element of a proposition to light? If we haven’t yet got a method, then we can’t speak of something being hidden or possibly hidden. And if we do have a method of discovery then the only way in which something like a logical product can be hidden in a proposition is the way in which a quotient like 753/3 is hidden until the division has been carried out. (PG, 210)

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In this passage, Wittgenstein expresses two ideas that signal a profound change in his conception of the nature of analysis. First, if there is no established method for transforming a proposition into another proposition, we should not think of the latter as being, as it were, contained in the former. This implies that, contrary to what Wittgenstein assumed in the Tractatus, there is no such thing as the true form of a proposition of ordinary language. After all, there is no established method or rule for translating propositions of ordinary language into other propositions that reveal their true logical form. It is often assumed, for instance, that when we ‘formalize’ an ordinary proposition such as ‘John, Jane and Bob are accountants’ as the logical product ‘Fa & Fb & Fc’, we are revealing its true logical form. But this is a mistake. After all, there are no clear and established rules for such formalizations; the clear and well-defined rules of logic only come into play after a proposition has been formalized. Further, even if we have some established method or rule for transforming certain types of propositions into logically more perspicuous propositions, we should not think of this transformation as revealing something that was already there, for instance in the mind of the speaker, even before the transformation was actually carried out. Analysing a proposition is not a matter of expressing in its full analysis the thought obscurely expressed in the analysandum, as Wittgenstein thought in the Tractatus, but, rather, a matter of doing something with the analysandum. The fact that we can sometimes transform a proposition into a logically more perspicuous one does not imply that the latter is somehow already present before the transformation has actually been carried out. But Wittgenstein must have at least implicitly assumed this when writing the Tractatus. For he claimed that all propositions represent via the simple names occurring in their fully analysed form (cf. TLP, §§3.26–3.261). The second criticism of the Tractatus I wish to mention concerns the pictorial relationship. In PG, Wittgenstein suggests that in the Tractatus, he mistakenly thought of the ‘method of projection’ of a picture as ‘lines of projection’ between picture and pictured (cf. PG, 210–12). He illustrates the distinction with the example of a worker creating an artefact from a blueprint. The method of projection is ‘the way in which the workman turns such a drawing into an artefact’ (210). Lines of projection, on the other hand, are ‘lines which go from one figure to another’ (210), for example from parts of the blueprint to parts of the artefact. Thinking of the projection of a picture as lines, attaching parts of the picture to parts of reality, ‘makes it look as if what is depicted, even if it does not exist in fact, is determined by the picture and the projection lines in an

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ethereal manner’ (210). It is determined, as Wittgenstein puts it, ‘give or take a yes or no’ (210). This is, of course, exactly the view of the Tractatus, according to which a pictorial relationship between names and simple objects are part of every proposition (cf. TLP, §2.1513); the existence of simple objects is a precondition of sense and every proposition with a sense restricts reality to ‘two alternatives: yes or no’ (TLP, §4.023). In PG, Wittgenstein considers this view to be profoundly mistaken. The way we project a proposition or picture onto reality is not already part of it; it consists in what we do with it. Nor does a picture or proposition determine reality ‘give or take a yes or no’, for there are always many different possible ways of projecting it onto reality (cf. PG, 213). Wittgenstein’s criticisms of his former conception of analysis and of the pictorial relationship share a common theme: a turn away from complex, albeit ineffable, logical and metaphysical assumptions and a new focus on the kinds of things we actually do with language. In this respect, these criticisms are highly characteristic of the development of Wittgenstein’s thinking. For the later Wittgenstein, doing metaphysics is not anymore the mistaken attempt to say something that can only be shown. It consists, at best, in the mistaken reification of aspects of language use.

Grammar Phil Hutchinson and Rupert Read

‘We might feel that a complete logical analysis would give the complete ­grammar of a word. But there is no such thing as a completed grammar.’ (Emphasis ours) Wittgenstein, AWL, 21 If you are someone with a little familiarity with Wittgenstein’s philosophy, but no more, it might well be that you know him best through having heard of some of his famous ‘terms of art’: language-games, ‘private language’, family-resemblance concepts – and logical grammar. This article concerns the last of these. What does Wittgenstein mean when he talks of the task of the philosopher being in some way akin to the task of the grammarian? That is the focal concern of this article. We will reach that focus in an ‘indirect’ fashion, via thinking about the influences on Wittgenstein’s thought and the context of that thought in the cultural milieu of his time. When one delves into Wittgenstein’s biography and development as a thinker, one finds an ongoing engagement and dialogue with modernism, including with many of the forefathers and contemporary representatives of modernism. When one looks, for instance, at the significant influence of the Marxist economist Sraffa on the development of Wittgenstein’s later thought, or (still more obviously) at his interest in Adolf Loos and his own remarkable architectural work in Vienna,1 one is left in little doubt that Wittgenstein was a thinker whose thought should be, to a significant extent, understood as deeply engaged with modernism – albeit idiosyncratically and critically.2 On which, see, for example, Peter Galison, ‘Aufbau/Bauhaus: Logical Positivism and Architectural Modernism’, Critical Inquiry vol. 16, no. 4 (Summer, 1990): 709−52. For Wittgenstein, the elimination of pointless ornament and a constant striving for an honest, exact (and exacting) presentation of matters was a moral imperative – in architecture, in work on the self and in philosophical writing. As one can see, if one reads his Culture and Value, he saw all three of these, in fact, as – in their essentials – one. 2 In this latter connection, see, especially, the final footnote to this article. 1

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And then there is Freud. For, while it is true that Wittgenstein writes of Freud that he is emblematic of a decline in our culture3 and that psychoanalysis is a ‘powerful mythology’ that is likely to do harm (LC, 51f.), he also called himself nothing less than a disciple of Freud4 and incorporated central elements of the therapeutic method into his philosophical practice. Compare the following two quotes: Difficulty of Philosophy not the intellectual difficulty of the sciences, but the difficulty of a change of attitude. Resistances of the will must be overcome. … What makes a subject difficult to understand – if it is significant, important  – is not that some special instruction about abstruse things is necessary to understand it. Rather it is the contrast between the understanding of the subject and what most people want to see. Because of this the very things that are most obvious can become the most difficult to understand. What has to be overcome is not difficulty of the intellect but of the will. [Nicht eine Schwierigkeit des Verstandes, sondern des Willens ist zu überwinden.] (P, 161) The pathogenic idea which has ostensibly been forgotten is always lying ‘close at hand’ and can be reached by associations that are easily accessible. It is merely a question of getting some obstacle out of the way. This obstacle seems … to be the subject’s will. (Freud, ‘Psychotherapy of Hysteria’)5

So how should one understand Wittgenstein’s relationship to that high priest of modernism, Sigmund Freud? Did he accept Freud’s reduction of much in human life to sex? No, he thought it a crudification, a reductivism – and at the same time, an overcomplication: Wittgenstein remarks tellingly that Freud never talks about explicitly sexual dreams, which are as ‘common as rain’.6 Did he accept Freud’s theory of the mind? No; he thought it, too, a scientistic crudification. Overall, his verdict on Freud was harsh: he considered Freud a myth-maker masquerading as a scientist, and he thought the myths likely to harm those coming under their power. What then did Wittgenstein owe to Freud that justified so strong a term as ‘disciple’? Why did he famously speak (in PI, 133) of his method(s) in philosophy as ‘so to speak’ a therapy or therapies?

See M. O’C. Drury, ‘Conversations with Wittgenstein’, in Recollections of Wittgenstein, ed. Rush Rhees (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 112. 4 See Rhees’s comment, ibid., 41. 5 Z. Freud, The Complete Psychological Works (New York: Vintage, 2001), vol. 2, 271. 6 Freud, Complete Psychological Works, 47. 3

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Basically, because Wittgenstein owed a crucial aspect of his philosophical method to Freud. His actual approach to the doing of philosophy. Wittgenstein figured philosophy as akin in its practice to psychotherapy, to psychoanalysis. Where previous philosophers had mostly engaged in theorizing, Wittgenstein sought a kind of fluidity – a willingness to go wherever the prose needed, in pursuit of clarity and of the right level of depth – in his writing and his thinking and his interaction with others, a fluidity that was influenced by the dynamic practice of psychoanalysis, in particular, the idea that the acceptance by the ‘analysand’ of the analyst’s interpretations was a criterion for their correctness. There was/is no room in Wittgenstein for interpretations or descriptions being imposed onto others.7 In this way, Wittgenstein made philosophy – its practice (whether on another or on oneself), its writing, new. Modern, if you will. And, in his central insistence on writing effectively, on seeking ‘the liberating word’,8 the intervention that could help one to escape the prison of one’s dogmatic assumptions or one’s intuitive certainties or one’s theoretical leanings, he achieved a form of writing that had no direct precedent. Wittgenstein’s explicitly ‘methodological’ remarks show how this Freudian legacy should be taken9 and why ‘therapy’ and ‘liberation’ are apt terms via which to characterize Wittgenstein’s approach to philosophy. For example, consider the following remark: We can only convict another person of a mistake … if he (really) acknowledges this expression as the correct expression of his feeling.//For only if he acknowledges it as such, is it the correct expression. (Psychoanalysis)10

This is pretty unequivocal. It makes clear that the person in question is the ultimate authority for the successful resolution of the problem. Compare this remark with the following: And Wittgenstein thought that Freud himself violated this crucial point, when he (Freud) became scientistic. 8 See especially WVC, 77, for this key phrase. 9 See on this front the well-known PI passages; passages such as 133 (see in particular Read’s ‘The Real Philosophical Discovery’, Philosophical Investigations (1995): 130−2. See our ‘Towards a Perspicuous Presentation of “Perspicuous Presentation”’, Philosophical Investigations 31, no. 2 (2008): 108, 116 and 120. See also the chapters by each of the authors of the present chapter, in addition to our co-authored chapter, in Jolley (ed.), Wittgenstein: Key Concepts. 10 The Big Typescript, 410. For more detail on the parallel with psychoanalysis, see the relevant chapters of Baker’s Wittgenstein’s Method (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). One might also look at O. K. Bouwsma’s outlining of a person-specific Wittgensteinian therapy, modelled on psychoanalysis: see Bouwsma, ‘A Difference Between Wittgenstein and Ryle’, in Towards a New Sensibility, eds. J. L. Craft and R .E. Hustwit (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 17−32. 7

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It is a long superseded idea … that the patient suffers from a sort of ignorance, and that if one remove this ignorance by giving him information … he is bound to recover. The pathological factor is not his ignorance itself, but the root of this ignorance in his inner resistances; it was they that first called this ignorance into being, and they still maintain it now. The task of the treatment lies in combating these resistances. (Freud, Complete Works, vol. 11, 225)11

This, we are suggesting, is the very core of Wittgenstein’s promotion of the therapeutic analogy for philosophy. It is what makes Wittgenstein a successor to the Enlightenment project: Freedom is something that cannot be given to one. One must attain it for oneself. It is also precisely what makes Wittgenstein in this one key regard a true successor to Freud. Consider some further remarks of Wittgenstein’s: We do not call a ‘rule of grammar’ a law of nature to which the course of language conforms, but a rule which a speaker states as a rule of his language.12 (VoW, 103–5, our emphases) One can only determine the grammar of a language with the consent of a speaker, but not the orbit of the stars with the consent of the stars. The rule for a sign, then, is the rule which the speaker commits himself to.//This commitment to a rule is also the end of a philosophical investigation. For instance, if one has cleared away the scruples about the word ‘is’ by making two or three signs available to a person instead of the one, then everything would now depend on his commitment to this rule: ε is not to be replaced by =. (VoW, 105)13

Here then is the fullness of the difference between science and philosophy to which, we submit, Wittgenstein is committed. Our claim here draws upon what we have already suggested is the radically non-scientistic stance involved in Freud’s vision of psychoanalysis, before Freud himself corrupted and sought to effect a kind of re-scientizing of psychoanalysis. What is radical is the requirement of acknowledgement by the ‘therapee’ of the therapist’s interpretations, which is considered as a criterion for the truth of those interpretations.

Of course, this quotation is as yet not clear on whether the task of combatting resistances can be ‘farmed out’ to the analyst. This is why Wittgenstein said (LC, 42): ‘Sometimes [Freud] says that the right solution, or the right analysis, is the one which satisfies the patient. Sometimes he says that the doctor knows what the right solution or analysis of the dream is whereas the patient doesn’t’ – here, in the latter case, there is a danger of analysis becoming a kind of authoritarian cult. 12 Gordon Baker (ed.), Voices of Wittgenstein (London: Routledge, 2003). [Henceforth VoW] 13 See also, VoW, ‘On the Character of Disquiet’, 69−77; cf. also 233−7, 277−9, and 303−5. See also Baker, Wittgenstein’s Method, 55ff. 11

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One way of putting our central point is this: the gulf in purpose and methods between the natural sciences and philosophy that Wittgenstein over and over again wished his readers and students to understand has (nevertheless) not sufficiently been understood. As with so many of the differences that Wittgenstein meant to teach (between finite and infinite, mind and body, etc.), there has been a tendency to assimilate the two terms, to make one more akin to the other than they actually are. It can be tempting to read Wittgenstein’s appeals to ‘grammar’ as appeals to a set of externally imposed rules that one must robotically follow, and many (perhaps still in thrall to traditional modes of philosophizing) succumb to this very temptation. If one does so succumb, however, one has ignored Wittgenstein’s explicit cautionary remarks and misunderstood the relevant elements of therapeutic practice that Wittgenstein seeks to incorporate into the practice of philosophy. ‘Grammar’ marks the locus of the difficult work of aligning oneself with the language one inherits but in a way that is always open to disputation, clarification and innovation. Grammar is something we create as much as we discover it. Grammar is something we do. There is a scientistic desire that leads some14 to see grammar to be independent of consent, or to acknowledge the role of consent, but then to, in practice, ignore it. Succumbing to this desire would lead one to practice a kind of grammatical conventionalism and determinism: where grammatical rules are read off a stock of uses and these rules then determine meaning. Understood in this way, appeals to grammatical rules become akin to appeals to laws, which exist independently of those to whom they apply. The danger in treating grammar as if it were independent of consent comes from the extent to which the humanity or, indeed, ‘autonomy’ of language users comes to be downplayed, ignored or, indeed, occluded. We propose that one resist the temptation to conceptualize ‘grammar’ in such a way that its arbiters – people – lose their autonomy. Rather than making a claim – vouchsafing an opinion or thesis – that ‘Grammar is autonomous’, and so running the risk of seeing it as a kind of system within which individuals are powerless, one might seek a proper acknowledgement of human mental/linguistic autonomy and power as urging that one acknowledge the person- and occasionsensitive conception of grammar as philosophically crucial and invaluable. Including (we would suggest) even some well-known ‘Wittgensteinians’. We fill out this suggestion, and name names, in our forthcoming book, Liberatory Philosophy.

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In fact, when one reads the appeal to grammar in Wittgenstein adequately – as requiring the consent of the speaker – then one sees that the project of answering the question as to what meaning is cannot be something that Wittgenstein undertook. For what a word means, in a large class of cases, comes down to the use to which someone puts it when he or she uses the language (PI, §43). The use to which a speaker puts the word will be such that it can in principle be explained through appeal to ‘grammatical rules’ and the like. But, again: we recommend caution; it can seem natural to take this appeal to use or to rules in the wrong way. To help guard against this, consider the following remark of Wittgenstein’s that one might helpfully hear as sounding a cautionary note: What is it that is repulsive in the idea that we study the use of a word, point to mistakes in the description of this use and so on? First and foremost one asks oneself: How could that be so important to us? It depends on whether what one calls a ‘wrong description’ is a description which does not accord with established usage – or one which does not accord with the practice of the person giving the description. Only in the second case does a philosophical conflict arise. (RPP I, §549; our emphasis)

The descriptions, or uses or rules – the rules that proffer forth meaning – are not akin to, not shadows cast by, nor are they modelled on, the laws of nature; rather, they are the rules that a speaker states (or could state, or could assent to) as a rule of his language. (cf. VoW, 103–5). To emphasize this, to emphasize the practice of language, including its always being open to newness, to reconception by the speaker, is to leave behind the idea that the outsider-philosopher can usefully come in with a theory, or even a pre-established account, of the grammar of a term and trump the language user(s) in question. It is to begin the novel project of returning philosophical authority to the everyday. That is, of equalizing the dialectical situation existing between the philosopher and his or her ‘patient’,15 of giving up the pretension to have some superior place in a hierarchy of knowledge concerning (say) language use – and, rather, as we might put it, finding everyday language to be ‘its own master’, truly to take care of itself – ‘through’ us. Put another way, we might suggest that what concerns Wittgenstein is the logical consistency of philosophical practice. A philosopher does not need, is not required of necessity, to employ words in accordance with conventional usage on Thus the deepest affinity between Wittgensteinian philosophical therapy, on the one hand, and psychoanalysis, on the other, is arguably with the later Sandor Ferenczi, more than with Freud – with Ferenczi’s groundbreaking concept of ‘mutual therapy’/‘mutual analysis’. A latter-day inheritor of Ferenczi’s mantle here is the Co-Counselling movement.

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pain of lapsing into nonsense but, rather, needs to be logically consistent in his or her philosophical practice. Equivocating on ‘process’ when talking of mental processes, or finding oneself unwilling to commit to a rule for the use of the term process, in the phrase ‘mental process’, is to be, in practice, logically inconsistent. We are most definitely not proposing that this ought to be taken for a relativist thesis about language or meaning. Neither is it an intentionalist thesis, which claims meaning to be conveyed exclusively by or directly responsive only to the pre-existing intentions of the language user. Rather, we propose that this move is a radical reorientation of one’s centre of attention in philosophy, of one’s focus. For what we are saying includes that everything that we are saying (if we are, in fact, saying anything) is only true inasmuch as it is ultimately taken to be so by our interlocutor. The philosopher as would-be expert must stand aside, and let the enculturated individual who is using the term in question come to equilibrium concerning how he or she is willing to commit to a particular usage. The assistance offered in this process is akin to midwifery, not expertinstruction, nor dictation. This, we propose, is what it means to take the radical turn in philosophy’s evolution that Wittgenstein offered. In a way, it involves the dissolving16 of philosophy into the ongoing, always ethical practice of everyday living.17 In terms of exegesis, the point (if that is the right word) is about the status of the term ‘grammar’ in Wittgenstein’s writings: To what use does Wittgenstein put that term? The point is not to advance another account of meaning, or an a-contextual definition of the term ‘grammar’. Rather, the point is that if we are to know what the language user meant by their words, if we are to determine the grammar of their language, we can only do so ‘with the consent of a speaker. The rule for a sign, then, is the rule which the speaker commits himself to’ (VoW, 105). We need to gain the speaker’s consent regarding the grammar of the language they are using – the rules in accordance with which they are using their words. Cf. this, from that other prophet of Modernism, Karl Marx: ‘The philosophers have only to dissolve their language into the ordinary language, from which it is abstracted, in order to recognise it as the distorted language of the actual world, and to realise that neither thoughts nor language in themselves form a realm of their own, that they are only manifestations of actual life’ (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, in Collected Works, vol. 5 (New York: International Publishers, 1976), 447). This remark intriguingly anticipates Wittgenstein’s own emphasis on ‘the everyday’. See also on this https://libcom.org/library/when-language-goes-holiday-philosophy-antiphilosophy-marx-wittgenstein. 17 We do not, of course, mean by this that everyday life always involves ethical as opposed to unethical behaviour. Rather, we mean to index what the ethnomethodologists capture (and that was already an insight of Wittgenstein’s in TLP): the way in which ordinary life is saturated by ethics. The way that members-of-society’s practices can be seen as always having an accountable ethical aspect, even if it is often suppressed or taken for granted. 16

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We propose that ultimately one must take the language users as the final arbiters on the grammar of the terms they employ in philosophical discourse, principally because this needs to be the case for therapy to work. Why? Because, for hitherto-unconscious assumptions or ‘pictures’ of how things must be, to be brought to consciousness in such a manner that they lose their power over one, it must be the person suffering the ‘mental cramp’ that freely comes to acknowledge the picture. (Otherwise, whatever remains repressed – whatever in the resolution of the mental cramp is not acknowledged freely – will merely remain, and return.) Dialogue with that person presupposes much mutual understanding and what Wittgenstein calls (cf. PI, §§240–2) ‘agreement’, and it presupposes also a genuine commitment on the part of that person; but for it to be dialogue, as opposed to simply an impositional monologue coming from us, such freedom must be preserved.

A last word We have explicated Wittgenstein on grammar; we have shown how this usually misunderstood term in Wittgenstein’s lexicon actually takes one in the opposite direction from theory or from language-policing, and potentially into a fluid realm of ‘experimental’ forms of writing, in the service of a thinking that would liberate. What then of Wittgenstein applied specifically to thinking the writing of literary modernism? Here we find some of the most powerful writings to be those of a Wittgensteinian lettrist: James Guetti. It was Guetti’s contention that Wittgenstein did not provide anything so clunky as a literary theory. Rather, Wittgenstein provided what might be called a framework, to be judged primarily by its utility, for thinking about how literature works, and thus for seeing it (or, better, hearing it) as it is. Guetti’s Wittgensteinian presentations of authors such as Hemingway and Faulkner, Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens enabled literature to be fully present. Wittgenstein made aspects audible that were otherwise liable to be silenced (in part, by the very rush to Theory). Wittgenstein’s work on ‘seeing-as’ and ‘meaning-blindness’ was a key inspiration for Guetti.18 Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination19 – sometimes. Those See, especially, his ‘Idling Rules. The Importance of Part II of Philosophical Investigations’, Philosophical Investigations 16, no. 3 (July 1993): 179–97. 19 See PI, §7. 18

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occasions are occasions when a word is being heard for more than its practical use. Guetti sought to bring out the way in which words in literature are typically or even quintessentially words on display – showing, if you will, more than saying. That is, indeed, where (when) literature, in Guetti’s conception, begins. It is most certainly an important moment in literary modernism. In sum, then: One has to take responsibility for one’s words, and this is another way of putting the point about being committed to what one means, quoted from Wittgenstein above. A speaker is committed to what his or her words mean – and only this, and not a philosopher’s pet theory or reading of the language, tells us what we need to know about grammar, hereabouts – in ‘our (sense’ of the word) ‘grammar’. Wittgenstein helps us to appreciate the works of the modernist literary masters, by helping us to appreciate their sounds of – or at least as much as their senses, their form as constituting so much of their content. And when we appreciate Wittgenstein himself as a kind of post-literary modernist20 – as someone who chose carefully the placing of every single word, as someone who sought to radically modernize the practice of philosophy by figuring it as a process of therapy or liberation by means of the very thing that would enslave thought/us – language – then we are in a position to avoid misunderstanding any longer Wittgenstein’s use of the term ‘grammar’. Contrary to the widespread understanding of his work, grammar is not what one is imprisoned by, for Wittgenstein. Grammar is something we – we philosophers, and we ordinary members of society – do.

A category that has then nothing to do with ‘post-modernism’. Lest we be misunderstood by our favourable references to modernism in this article, we should also note here that there are also key aspects of Wittgenstein’s thought that are not only anti-post-modernist, but also anti-modernist. See, for example, Read’s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEPcQ6sIOTY; Read’s ‘On Philosophy’s (lack of) Progress: From Plato to Wittgenstein’, in Wittgenstein and Plato: Connections, Comparisons and Contrasts, eds. Luigi Perissinotto, Begoña Ramón Cámara (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); and the close of Cora Diamond’s ‘Ethics, Imagination and the Method of the Tractatus’, in The New Wittgenstein, eds. A. Crary and R. Read (London: Routledge, 2000).

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Western philosophers through history have tried to explain how thought works and what kind of world it works on. But Wittgenstein in the Tractatus does not set out to offer his own competing theory of these things. Instead, he tries to show that no such philosophical theory is possible. He does tell a story of the thought or meaning that is conveyed in language, and he describes how thought ‘pictures’ the ‘facts’ that make up the world; but he does not use the traditional stratagem of drawing conclusions from his story about what thought and the world it pictures must be like. Instead of having the epistemological tail wag the metaphysical dog, he ends by declaring his own story of thought and the world senseless or meaningless. According to that story, picturing cannot itself be pictured. Linguistic propositions picture by sharing logical form with the facts they picture, and picturing itself, the sharing of form, is not a fact that can be pictured or meaningfully represented. Therefore, philosophy cannot give us meaningful theories of what there is or how we manage to refer to it. All it can do is show us the limits of language, or the points we cannot pass without getting confused and starting to talk nonsense. However, stopping thinkers from talking nonsense and worrying about pseudo-problems is worthwhile, and it is arguably the basic project that Wittgenstein undertakes in not only his early work but his later philosophy as well. At Philosophical Investigations, §90, Wittgenstein says of his later ‘grammatical’ work that it clears away ‘misunderstandings concerning the use of words, caused  … by certain analogies between the forms of expression in different regions of language’. This passage would not have seemed out of place in the Tractatus. Still, something has changed by the time of the Investigations. Instead of a story of meanings as the logical form of propositions, we find that ‘for a large class of cases of the employment of the word “meaning” … it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language’. (PI, §43). Language, propositions, and thought in the Investigations no longer simply mirror, picture, or represent something exterior to them.

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The ‘use’ of a word, here, amounts to the role, or sometimes roles, of a word in our different ways of acting and ‘forms of life’. Wittgenstein criticizes his own early, more abstract thinking about meaning in favour of a story of language as a collection of tools – with the emphasis on collection. What the Tractatus got wrong was neither its epistemological tale of how thoughts match facts nor the metaphysics implicit in that tale; in the end Wittgenstein took all that stuff back anyway, kicking away the ladder after climbing it.1 The problem was, instead, that this was too general and abstract a story of language. It overlooked the observable manifold specifics of language use, and it therefore missed the real sources of our typical Western philosophical confusions. Words may sometimes have a mirroring function, but they do lots of other things too. A mirror is only one kind of tool that does one kind of thing, while language is like a big tool sack featuring a hammer, a screwdriver, a power drill, a tape measure, a saw, a paint brush, a glue gun, a bag of washers, a wrench, a pencil, eye protection, and a carpenter’s square. (And the kitchen sink.) The ‘functions of words are as diverse as the functions of these objects’ (PI, §11). Moreover, just as we keep inventing new tools like cell phones, broadband, laser levels, and GPS agricultural technology, we also continuously invent new words and concepts to cope with our changing lives, which we can expect to change yet again and to keep changing partly because of our new inventions and consequent new experiences. We cannot really grasp how language works if we think only of original functions or eternal generalities and overlook our own evolving uses of words – but we are inclined to do just this, ‘Especially when we are doing philosophy!’ (PI, §12). Wittgenstein’s later work exists to help us get past this inclination. The author of the Tractatus thought he had solved all philosophical problems and could thenceforth be silent, but the author of the Investigations looked and saw that as we, the world and the satisfactions we seek from language all change, the games we play with language are also subject to all kinds of changes: But how many kinds of sentence are there? Say assertion, question, and command? – There are countless kinds: countless different kinds of use of what we call ‘symbols’, ‘words’, ‘sentences’. And this multiplicity is not something fixed, given once for all; but new types of language, new language-games, as we may say, come into existence, and others become obsolete and get forgotten. (PI, §23) TLP, §6.54.

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This means that we – that is, ‘we’ human beings, at least as we have existed so far, with all our intellectual conflicts and in all our burgeoning individual and social diversity – have developed and will develop many different ‘forms of life’. As we try to use language across the different linguistic ‘regions’ created by these forms, we will have difficulties communicating with others – or, sometimes, even understanding ourselves, since one person can try to play more than one language-game at once and get confused about what move to make when. At these itchy moments, we will need to get help scratching from Wittgensteinian philosophers,2 who will function as translators among speakers of the same language. And those translators will explain meanings by pointing not only to logical form but also to an evolving variety of ways in which we use concepts and words in our changing lives. Those philosophical translators can be understood as practitioners of a (relatively) new kind of philosophical work, one that originates in the ‘modern’ era of both art and philosophy. Again, their project of eradicating nonsense and empty talk is continuous with the job the early Wittgenstein took on in the Tractatus, and that job, in turn, can be traced back through history to the beginning of modern philosophy. There, Descartes, Locke, Berkeley and Hume set out to discover which of our mental ‘ideas’ could actually represent anything and how they did so. Their efforts arguably culminated in Kant’s Copernican revolution, which metaphorically turned our attention from the motion of the sun to our own motions. That is, Kant directed us not to think empty thoughts of the world as it exists apart from our processes of knowledge; we were to consider, instead, our own epistemic processes and the only way those processes could possibly reveal the world to us, and we would thereby learn systematically about the only kind of world that could possibly be revealed by those processes. But while Wittgenstein’s later work was continuous with this modern selfscrutinizing project, it proceeded in a new way. One good word to describe this new way is ‘pragmatic’. William James also developed the idea that thought is a growing collection of miscellaneous tools that get used in sundry evolving activities. This is, in fact, the fundamental principle of James’s pragmatism.3 Evidently, Wittgenstein himself mistook pragmatism for an attempt to give a traditional, and highly dubious, definition of truth and meaning in terms of usefulness and practical value. ‘But you aren’t See CV, 86e−7e. See Harvey Cormier, The Truth Is What Works: William James, Pragmatism, and the Seed of Death (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), throughout, esp. ch. 1.

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a pragmatist?’ one of Wittgenstein’s imagined interlocutors asks him. ‘No. For I am not saying that a proposition is true if it is useful’ (RPP I, 266). However, James’s pragmatism provides no essentialist definitions of anything, and it, like the Investigations, exists mainly to stop people from talking nonsense and carrying on empty debates. It proceeds by directing us to look at the ways in which we individual thinkers devise particular thoughts and words as distinctive tools for dealing with individual experiences, where ‘dealing with’ especially involves avoiding bad experiences and gathering up good ones. We thinkers then share our experience-management tools with others in our society who can use those tools to manage similar experiences in their own lives. Thoughts turn out to be different tools for serving different purposes – or, if two concepts turn out to serve just the same purpose, then they are, in fact, the same concept. A conceptual difference that makes no difference, or no practical difference as we individuals use thought-tools to make our lives more satisfactory, is no difference at all.4 But despite the real-world, brass-tacks orientation of pragmatism, it can still be understood as part of the ‘modern’, inward-looking, self-scrutinizing movement in both philosophy and art. In fact, if we look, we can actually see something like a species of artistic modernism in both the later Wittgenstein and James’s pragmatism. This is the kind or part of modernism also known as realism – the realism that we can also see in the work of William James’s brother Henry.5 When Henry James came to understand his brother William’s philosophical position, he compared himself to the character M. Jourdain in Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, who was famously pleased to find that he had been writing ‘prose’ all his life; Henry was pleased to find that he had been ‘pragmatizing’ as he crafted his hard-to-plumb novels and tales.6 ‘The Master’ had displayed an obsessive concern with using language that described his characters and events best, even if that language was opaque and took a lot of work to penetrate. In fact, Henry James’s stories are designed to make us pay attention to language and its difficult workings just as much as to the fictional William James, Pragmatism and the Meaning of Truth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 30. Cora Diamond, The Realistic Spirit (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), esp. 39−72, develops the idea that Wittgenstein displays something like literary realism in his later work. 6 Richard A. Hocks, Henry James and Pragmatistic Thought (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1974), 23. 4

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events described in that language. A reader has to look at James’s prose as much as through it.7 This attempt to produce the best language, regardless of whether that language managed to represent even a fictional reality, resulted in the kind of reflexive, self-scrutinizing art that is characteristically ‘modern’. What is more, this effort to say the thing that works best can also be understood as consciously ‘pragmatic’ use of language, though, of course, Henry James did not apply that label to his work until he found out what his brother the philosopher was doing. Moreover, as James devised the best way to describe fictional interpersonal conflicts, he paid close attention to the changeable details of human cognition, perception and feeling. He made a point of leaving behind fantasy and romance in this work, depicting human thinking and perception as familiar, connected parts of our visible human life with all its diverse and evolving activities. To that extent, Henry’s studies of social life and its dramatic situations were as psychologically ‘realistic’ as William’s studies of the pragmatic distinctions to be drawn among thoughts. Nevertheless, even as they displayed this realism, both William and Henry focused in the ‘modern’ way on our human thoughts and the many different ways they were connected to other psychological and social phenomena. Neither William nor Henry had the Tractarian idea that thought worked only by representing real objects or facts beyond those thoughts. Instead, both Jameses displayed the kind of realism found in the work of Henry’s fellow literary realists – and in Wittgenstein’s Investigations.8 In a well-known passage from The Art of the Novel, Henry described the romanticism that he renounced in favour of his own realism: The only general attribute of projected romance that I can see … is the fact of the kind of experience with which it deals – experience liberated, so to speak; experience disengaged, disembroiled, disencumbered, exempt from the conditions that we usually know to attach to it and … drag upon it. … The balloon of experience is in fact of course tied to the earth, and … it is by the rope we know where we are. … The art of the romancer is, ‘for the fun of it’, insidiously to cut the cable, to cut it without our detecting him.9 Garry Hagberg, in his contribution to the present volume, is making a connected point about Henry James’s self-conscious use of language in his work. See Harvey Cormier, ‘Jamesian Pragmatism and Jamesian Realism’, The Henry James Review 18, no. 3 (1997): 288−96. 9 Henry James, The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces, ed. R. P. Blackmur (New York: Scribner’s, 1934), 33f.

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James avoided placing into his fictions ‘the disconnected and uncontrolled experience – uncontrolled by our general sense of “the way things happen” – which romance alone more or less successfully palms off on us’.10 He tries to be unromantic or realistic about the way things evidently happen every day in life, thus protecting the cable that keeps storytelling connected to life as we know and live it – and William’s philosophy likewise ties our meaningful and true thoughts to our different human lives of experience. It does this as it connects our ideas to our various developing kinds of activity in the face of that experience. Pragmatism says that we experience the consequences of our acts, store those practical experiences in concepts, share what we learn, and then have new experiences as a result of our new ideas and new actions. This pragmatic story parallels Wittgenstein’s story of thinking and talking in the Investigations, as, in both stories, we users of language devise conceptual tools to aid us in living our forms of life and in developing new and perhaps better forms. The Wittgensteinian philosopher will thus help us with our future confusions by indicating the practical or pragmatic meaning of our words or ideas. She or he will help us decide what words or concepts to hold on to by showing us how, or whether, those words or concepts help us do what we want to do. Like both William and Henry James, the later Wittgensteinian will do her or his particular kind of modern philosophical thinking about thought by ‘pragmatizing’.

James, Art of the Novel, 34.

10

Psychological Concepts Yuval Lurie

1  Wittgenstein confronts the origins of modern philosophy of mind Modern philosophy of mind begins with René Descartes’s discovery that he cannot doubt that he is thinking, which led him to conclude that he has certain knowledge about the existence of his soul as a metaphysical substance. At the same time, he claimed that he can cast doubt about the existence of other human souls. Although Descartes’ metaphysical claims were debated even in his time, and certainly after, they carried an important conceptual insight about our ascription of psychological concepts to ourselves and to others, suggesting that we do so in two different ways, manifesting different conceptual standpoints and ontological commitments. The modern discourse on the human mind in philosophy was thus launched, placing the concepts of consciousness and self-consciousness at its core, and with them the mind-body problem and the problem of other minds. In philosophical explanations based on this insight, we are supposed to have certain knowledge, through what Locke called ‘direct acquaintance’, of our own psychological features of life. In contrast, we have only conjectures and beliefs about those of others. This dual epistemic conception of psychological concepts eventually turned self-knowledge and behaviour into the philosophical odd couple dwelling at the foundation of modern philosophical conceptions of mind. One of those captivated by Descartes’ conceptual discovery was Ludwig Wittgenstein. His reflections on this conceptual duality comprised a major part of his philosophical investigations about the human mind after he returned to philosophy in 1929. He not only accepted the duality inherent in our use of psychological concepts, but also gave it an insightful, non-epistemic and non-metaphysical linguistic twist, which more often than not confounded

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Descartes’ complacent assumption about our having certain knowledge of our own mind: I can know what someone else is thinking, not what I am thinking. It is correct to say ‘I know what you are thinking’, and wrong to say ‘I know what I am thinking’. (A whole cloud of philosophy condensed into a drop of grammar.) (PI, II, xi, 222).

On my understanding of the philosophical insight from which this grammatical remark derives, it makes sense to say that I know that something is the case when it also makes sense to say that I don’t know that it is the case. When these assertions make sense, it also makes sense to assert that I have beliefs and doubts or that I am certain or uncertain about the case. But, as Descartes has shown, it makes no sense for me to assert that I don’t know that I am thinking or that I don’t believe that I am thinking or that I have doubts about it or that I am not certain about it. Therefore, it also does not make sense to assert that I know that I am thinking or that I am certain about it. So much for Descartes’ epistemic certainty about his own thinking! In the metaphilosophical view underlying this criticism of Descartes’ alleged epistemic discovery that purports to cast a new foundation for a metaphysics of the soul, the latter is nonsensical because it is detached from our use of concepts in everyday, artistic or scientific discourse. The remark I quoted above from Wittgenstein’s philosophical reflections clarifies the concept of knowing in the context of its use in psychological assertions made about ourselves and others. As such, it clarifies it in the context of its everyday linguistic employment in the stream of human life. This method of clarification is employed by him because according to the philosophical standpoint that underlies it, concepts are clarified by describing the everyday uses of words that express them. From this pragmatic linguistic philosophical point of view the ascription, to ourselves and others, of psychological concepts like thinking, feeling, wanting and intending manifests a cultured linguistic ability. In the case of ascribing these concepts to ourselves, it is based on the normative linguistic practice of awarding us an authoritative standpoint regarding ourselves, without basing it on self-knowledge gained by introspection. The ascription of these concepts to others may, indeed, be mistaken at times, although it is not conceptually problematic, or always conjectural. It may even express genuine knowledge about them. In this understanding of our use of psychological concepts, self-awareness derives from – rather than justifies – our

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initiation into the practice of ascribing psychological concepts to ourselves and to others. It emerges by acquiring the use of this dual unsymmetrical linguistic practice of ascribing concepts to ourselves and to others.1 Of course, all this is nowadays off the main road travelled by most philosophers, who wish to be affiliated with the attractive scientific project of explaining the ‘cognitive nature of the mind’. Many of them tend to disdain our everyday psychological concepts, relegating them to an outdated primitive ‘folk psychology’. Even those of us who have not been drawn into this Positivistic venture may still wonder about the value of conceptual clarifications of our everyday psychological assertions. To support this philosophical project, in the next sections I describe Wittgenstein’s philosophical reflections on the relationship between our use of everyday psychological concepts and the concept of a person.

2  Conceptual duality as two uses of language Wittgenstein’s philosophical discourse centres on the conceptual role of language in human life. In his later period, he described it by noting the multiplicity of ways language is used for many different purposes, such as: Giving orders, and obeying them – Describing the appearance of an object, or giving its measurements – Constructing an object from a description (a drawing) – Reporting an event – Speculating about an event – Forming and testing a hypothesis – Presenting the results of an experiment in tables and diagrams – Making up a story, and reading it – Play-acting – Singing catches – Guessing riddles – Making a joke, and telling it – Solving a problem in practical arithmetic – Translating from one language into another – Asking, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying. (PI, §23) For a comprehensive discussion of this topic, see William Child, ‘Wittgenstein on The First Person’, in The Oxford Handbook of Wittgenstein, eds. Oskari Kuusela and Marie McGinn (Oxford: Oxford university Press, 2011), 376−99.

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The listing of these different uses of language, he explains, is supposed to bring into prominence the fact that ‘the speaking of language is part of an activity, or a form of life’ (Ibid). This is in contrast to views that base our use of language on a special mental capacity, enabling us to understand the meaning of words. Although the listed examples of linguistic activities are not all social, they are all instances of shared cultural forms of life, which are common among human beings in all sorts of cultures. Among these is also the use of language by human beings to ascribe psychological features of life to themselves and to others. Note that this use of language may be non-communicative. For example, I can use the psychological concepts of anger and pain by ascribing them to myself or to others, with or without communicating with others or partaking in any social activity. It is both tempting and misleading to follow Descartes by supposing that because we may be misled in our ascription of psychological concepts to others in a way that we cannot be misled in ascribing them to ourselves, first-person use of these concepts is on more sturdy epistemic ground than third-person use, rendering self-consciousness into a metaphysical and epistemic foundation for the very emergence of psychological concepts. To break out of the metaphysical view Descartes thus formulated in connection with our use of psychological concepts, Wittgenstein describes how we both use and acquire psychological concepts through our initiation into shared uses of psychological language, a philosophical project of investigation and clarification that he calls ‘Philosophy of Psychology’. In pursuing it, he transformed the modern solitary, epistemic, metaphysical conception of mind that Descartes formulated into a pragmatic, social conception of the role of language in acquiring and using psychological concepts about ourselves and others. In doing so, he placed the acquisition of language and its practical use by human beings at the basis of psychological concepts and the role they play in the emergence of shared human cultural forms of life. He then described the use of everyday psychological concepts through the ‘grammatical’ insight that first-person use of psychological concepts in the present is predominantly expressive. Third-person use of psychological concepts in the present is predominantly descriptive: Psychological verbs characterized by the fact that the third person of the present is to be verified by observation, the first person not. Sentence in the third person of the present: information. In the first person: expression. ((Not quite right.)) The first person of the present akin to an expression. (Z, §472)

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The above remark about the different uses of psychological assertions in firstand third-person cases is conceptually insightful, although not completely accurate. When I tell the doctor that I have a splitting headache, I am not only expressing pain. I am also conveying information about what is bothering me by describing what kind of pain I am experiencing. When I beseech the doctor to help someone who is suffering pain, I am not only describing what that person is experiencing, conveying information and soliciting help. I am also expressing my psychological comprehension of the situation, compassion and sensibilities. As first-person use of psychological concepts is not divorced from third-person use, it is not merely an expressive utterance. It takes the linguistic form of an assertion that has a truth-value, making it possible not only to pretend to be in pain but also to lie about it. In a somewhat similar way, thirdperson use is not merely descriptive. It expresses our responsive perception of others, articulating the way in which we regard them from a psychological point of view. Moreover, not all psychological concepts are used in the first-person present tense in an expressive way. Lazy, humorous, clever, knowledgeable and absentminded are concepts that may describe my friend’s character and mental dispositions, as well as my own. In ascribing them to myself, I may not be expressing my lazy nature, humorous character, clever mentality or a tendency for absentmindedness. I may simply be engaged in honest self-reflection. So concepts that describe psychological traits, mental abilities and dispositions do not fall under the distinction Wittgenstein is formulating, as they are not limited only to a given moment in the present. Nonetheless, the expressive and descriptive uses of psychological concepts are basic points of entrance for our psychological discourse, and so they are the ability to ascribe them to ourselves and others. Given these two different uses of psychological concepts, two questions arise: how we learn these different uses, and what unites them into a single psychological concept. Wittgenstein posed the first question, and then indicated a possible answer: How does a human being learn the meaning of the names of sensations? – of the word ‘pain’ for example. Here is one possibility: words are connected with the primitive, the natural, expression of sensation and used in their place. A child has hurt himself and he cries; and then adults talk to him and teach him exclamations and, later, sentences. They teach the child new pain behavior. … The verbal expression of pain replaces crying and does not describe it. (PI, §244)

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In point of fact, there is less teaching and instructing and more nurturing and upbringing. But the important point is that we acquire the concept of pain by learning to replace a natural expression of pain by another – a shared, refined, linguistic expression of pain. In doing so, we are transformed into cultured beings. Just as in learning to eat in a refined manner by dining, we are transformed into cultured beings. Many kinds of cultural behaviour, whether linguistic practice, social custom or reasoning by the use of rules, are a by-product of such cultured transformation. Of course, this educational procedure alone will not suffice for acquiring the concept of pain. Given the duality inherent in our psychological concepts, to acquire them, children must also learn to ascribe them to others in a different way from that in which they ascribe them to themselves. To do so, they need to learn how to recognize that others are in pain, given both their behaviour and what they say about themselves. The appearance and behaviour of human beings (linguistic and otherwise) is closely linked to our use of psychological concepts. We learn to comprehend and see that others are experiencing pains and desires by learning to ascribe psychological concepts to others, and we do so against the background of human beings and their behaviour. Having done so, we then go on to other creatures, whose behaviour is similar in certain respects. When such similarities are missing, the ascription of the concept becomes a vacant linguistic move that is not expressive of any psychological attitude on our part. Look at a stone and imagine it having sensations. – One says to oneself: How could one so much as get the idea of ascribing a sensation to a thing? One might as well ascribe it to a number! – And now look at a wriggling fly and at once these difficulties vanish and pain seems able to get a foothold here, where before everything was, so to speak, too smooth for it. (PI, §284)

To see that a human being is experiencing pain is to see his or her behaviour in a psychologically meaningful way. It is to see him or her as a living creature who is suffering. We can imagine creatures that might lack this ability to grasp human beings as suffering when they are in pain. Norman Malcolm tells how Wittgenstein went about clarifying this matter: In lectures Wittgenstein imagined a tribe of people who had the idea that their slaves had no feelings, no souls – that they were automatons – despite the fact that the slaves had human bodies, behaved like their masters, and even spoke the same language. Wittgenstein undertook to try to give sense to that idea. When a slave injured himself or fell ill or complained of pains, his master would try to

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heal him. The master would let him rest when he was fatigued, feed him when he was hungry and thirsty, and so on. Furthermore, the masters would apply to the slaves our usual distinctions between genuine complaints and malingering. So what could it mean to say that they had the idea that the slaves were automatons? Well, they would look at the slaves in a peculiar way. They would observe and comment on their movements as if they were machines. (‘Notice how smoothly his limbs move.’) They would discard them when they were worn and useless, like machines. If a slave received a mortal injury and twisted and screamed in agony, no master would avert his gaze in horror or prevent his children from observing the scene, any more than he would if the ceiling fell on a printing press. Here is a difference in ‘attitude’ that is not a matter of believing or expecting different facts.2

In my reading of these remarks, the philosophical insight about psychological concepts that Wittgenstein is striving to bring out by stressing the role of attitudes in third-person assertions is that they are inherently bound with ways of seeing, regarding and responding to living creatures. The inability to relate to living creatures in these ways may be compared to the inability of our cats and dogs to recognize a human face in a picture. Another way of clarifying our attitude towards human beings as to living creatures, possessing, experiencing and expressing various psychological features of life is to describe various manifestations of it. For example, our perception of human beings as living creatures is expressed in the attitudes aroused in us towards them, such as concern, pity, anger, fear, caution, affection. It is manifested in the way we grasp their behaviour as actions that they perform: skillfully, forcefully, viciously, carefully, cautiously, cunningly and so on. Reflections of this sort lead Wittgenstein to remark that ‘only of a living human being and what resembles (behaves like) a living human being can one say: it has sensations; it sees; is blind; hears; is deaf; is conscious or unconscious’ (PI, §281).

3 Psychopraxis We now reach the second question raised above, about the unity of the dual use of psychological concepts. Like a pair of scissors, constructed by joining two opposing blades, so are these concepts. Despite the differences between Norman Malcolm, ‘Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations’, in The Philosophy of Mind, ed. V. C. Chappell (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1962), 91.

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them, in use and ways of acquisition, they have the same meaning. Moreover, to fully acquire psychological concepts, we must learn how to ascribe them both to ourselves and to others, and to do so in two different ways: to ourselves by purporting to express what we feel, want, believe and think, to others by describing what they feel, want, believe and think. From this perspective, the linguistic practice of using psychological concepts manifests cultivated psychological expressions and assertions, which are not reducible to mere propositions. According to Wittgenstein, this was G. E. Moore’s important philosophical discovery, when he noted that it makes sense for me to assert about someone ‘He believes that it is raining, although it is not raining’, while it does not make sense for me to assert ‘I believe that it is raining, although it is not raining’.3 Unlike Descartes’ conceptual discovery that led to a misuse of the concept of knowing, Moore’s conceptual discovery was both meaningful and insightful for a philosophical understanding of our practical use of psychological concepts. This insight demonstrates that psychological concepts such as believe, feel, want, intend and hope are inherently of a dual use in the first-and third-person cases. The last point also clarifies the practical use of our various personal pronouns in ascribing psychological concepts to ourselves and others. Pronouns used to refer to living beings are, of course, not names, as they are contextual referring terms. However, in this connection, the first-person pronoun has a completely different conceptual role from the second-and third-person pronouns. When I assert that I am in pain, I am not merely ascribing pain to myself, as I would when I ascribe pain to someone else. Nor am I merely referring to myself in doing so, as contrasted with my referring to others. I am expressing both myself and the pain that I am experiencing. If, instead of that, I ascribe pain to myself by using my name, exclaiming ‘Yuval Lurie is in pain’, I fail to express myself and the pain I am experiencing. Of course, the use of the pronoun ‘I’ is governed by the same pragmatic rules underlying the use of other pronouns. To be used in a conceptually meaningful way, it must be understood also when used by others when referring to themselves. To appreciate the philosophical significance of these linguistic insights about the use of words to our concept of a human mind, note that Wittgenstein refers to our shared linguistic use of concepts by what is often translated as ‘practice’. See Wittgenstein’s letter to Moore in Brian McGuiness and George Henrik von Wright (eds), Ludwig Wittgenstein Cambridge Letters (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 315−17. In subsequent philosophical discussions, Moore’s conceptual ‘discovery’ has been labelled ‘Moore’s Paradox’.

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Describing a primitive language used by a builder and his assistant, he notes how ‘in the practice of the use of language (2) one party calls out the words, the other acts on them’ (PI, §7). When discussing the way a language of colours is taught by pointing to samples of colours, he writes about ‘the practice of using the language’ of colours (PI, §51). Later, he writes about ‘the day-to-day practice of playing’ chess (PI, §197). Reflecting on the ‘paradox’ of how a rule can determine a course of action when ‘every course of action can be made to accord with a rule’, he notes that ‘“obeying a rule” is a practice. And to think one is obeying a rule is not to obey a rule’ (PI, §81). And so on. In German, the term he uses for what is usually translated in English as ‘practice’ is Praxis. Both terms imply practical knowledge, as contrasted with ideas and theory. But in its Marxist heritage, praxis also connotes a social practice that promotes a culturally shared way of doing things, which not only comes before theories and ideas, but also renders them meaningful and possible. In Marx’s conception of Historical Materialism, the metaphysical question about the essence of human reality is answered in terms of social praxis. Thus, to speak of praxis in modern times – as Wittgenstein does – is to adopt a highly charged philosophical concept. To the extent that in acquiring the concept of pain, adults ‘teach the child new pain behavior’ and that ‘the verbal expression of pain replaces crying and does not describe it’ (PI, §244), this is an educational undertaking of initiating someone into the shared cultivated praxis of using psychological language instead of natural pain expressions. It presupposes a linguistic community into which a child is affiliated by adopting its psychological praxis. As such, a linguistic praxis is a shared human form of life that embodies all sorts of shared ways of using language that both express and promote various shared concepts. In Wittgenstein’s use of the concept praxis, our ability to use concepts is a product of our shared rule-based linguistic cultural forms of life that he calls ‘language games’. For example, without understanding what an answer is, we do not yet understand what a question is, and vice versa. Both are a form of understanding that emerges from a shared and reciprocal way of doing things. The same holds for the emergence of psychological concepts both for expressing ourselves and for describing others. The two different uses of these concepts support each other by forming our shared psychopraxis. Wittgenstein believes that it is an inherent aspect of many psychological concepts that they are used differently when we ascribe them in the present tense to ourselves and to others. However, from their unity it does not follow that we

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are initiated into such concepts in a single move, learning both uses at once. To think that it must be so, as P. F. Strawson does, is to succumb to the hocus pocus of metaphysics – be it only ‘descriptive metaphysics’. Children may learn the use of such concepts in a piecemeal fashion, just as we might learn to refer to things by their names before acquiring the practice of giving names, or answer questions without knowing yet how to ask them, or vice versa. This may also be true of our ability to ascribe a psychological concept to ourselves and to others. Perhaps at first we only manage to use the concept of pain to express our pain, and only later ascribe it to others. Nonetheless, we would not have acquired an authoritative expressive use of the psychological concept of pain in our own case unless we had acquired both uses, and thus embraced its psychopraxis.

4  Psychopraxis as a shared psychological form of life Consider the possibility of disjoining the expressive and descriptive, first and third person, uses of psychological concepts from each other. A. J. Ayer suggested this possibility inadvertently, claiming that psychological language has different meanings in third-and first-person use. To see the inadequacy of this suggestion, imagine a culture in which people use different words for the ascription of psychological concepts to themselves and to others. Without being able to ascribe to others psychological features of life through the words we use to express ourselves, the latter would be mere personal exclamations, lacking any meaning and would not manifest sensations, feelings, desires, thoughts and so forth. At the same time, the ascription of psychological concepts to others would also lack any psychological meaning. They would be mere descriptions of behaviour and dispositions of the sort used to characterize the properties of solidity or fragility ascribed to material things. The inadequacy of this suggestion reveals the way in which the use of a language that enables us to refer to the same psychological features of life in first-and third-person assertions underlies psychological concepts. In contrast with this misleading conceptual scenario, acquisition of the dual use of our psychological language enables us to understand what it means to feel pain or believe that it will rain, both in our own case and the case of others. It provides us with both self-awareness and knowledge of what others are experiencing, enabling us to be kind and compassionate or callused and cruel, without indulging for this purpose in psychological introspection or

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psychological interpretation of others. In doing so, it also helps us recognize our affinity with other living creatures while allying us with other human beings in a deeper and more meaningful conceptual bond than that which results from noting that we are of the same natural kind or from adhering to the same conventions of dress or following the same traffic regulations when driving on the road. It joins us with them in a shared personally meaningful psychological human form of life, rendering us into social creatures through our very use of psychological concepts. For, as Stanley Cavell sought to explain, in expressing ourselves by means of a psychological language that is based on a dual usage of its concepts to ourselves and others, we acknowledge both the descriptive psychological meaning of what we feel, think, hope and intend and the expressive psychological meaning of what others feel, think, hope and intend. The conclusion from the last remarks about our use of psychological concepts is that the concept of a living person is inherently connected with our dual usage of psychological concepts. Persons are living creatures that have learnt to participate in the psychological praxis of ascribing psychological concepts to themselves and to others. As such, persons are not born. Human beings are transformed into persons by adopting a shared psychological human form of life manifested as our psychopraxis. Paraphrasing John Donne, it precludes each of us from being ‘an island entire of itself ’; making all of us ‘a piece of the continent, a part of the main’ – the ‘continent’ and ‘main’ consisting of a humanity that is joined together by sharing in common a personally meaningful psychological form of life manifested as our psychopraxis.4

I thank Arnon Cahen and Anat Matar for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this chapter.

4

Ethics Ben Ware

1  Ethics and the early Wittgenstein There is no doubt that Wittgenstein was concerned with ethical matters throughout his philosophical career. In his wartime notebooks, during and after June 1916, questions regarding good and evil, happiness, ‘the purpose of existence’, ‘the problem of life’, conscience, the nature of the will and the relation between ethics and aesthetics all begin to surface. As he observes in July 1916: ‘A man who is happy must have no fear. Not even in the face of death. Only a man who lives not in time but in the present is happy. … Fear in face of death is the best sign of a false, i.e. a bad, life. When my conscience upsets my equilibrium, then I am not in agreement with something. But what is this? Is it the world?’1 Several years later, when searching for a publisher for his manuscript ‘LogischPhilosophische Abhandlung’ (later to become Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus), Wittgenstein remarks to Ludwig von Ficker (editor of the modernist literary journal Der Brenner) that ‘the book’s point is an ethical one’.2 In the notorious closing pages of the Tractatus, we read, among other things, that ‘the world of the happy is quite another than that of the unhappy’ (T, §6.43); and that ‘the solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of [the] problem. (Is not this the reason why men to whom after long doubting the sense of life became clear, could not then say wherein this sense consisted?) (§6.521). Despite the obvious interest in ethical questions evidenced in his early work, Wittgenstein’s actual ethical views are far from straightforward. In the Tractatus, for example, the reader is presented not with a fully articulated ethical theory (such as one

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914-1916, 2nd ed., eds. G. H. von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 74−5. 2 Letter: Ludwig Wittgenstein to Ludwig von Ficker, cited by G. H. von Wright, ‘Historical Introduction: The Origin of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus’, in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Prototractatus, eds. B. F. McGuinness, T. Nyberg and G. H. von Wright, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), 16. 1

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finds in Aristotle, Hume or Kant), but, rather, with an ethico-philosophical puzzle: how to construe a set of philosophical, ethical and mystical remarks, which appear in the context of a book that declares its own propositions to be nonsense: My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as nonsense, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly. (§6.54)

Given that Wittgenstein tells Ficker to pay specific attention to the book’s conclusion and preface (‘because they contain the most direct expression of the point of the book’), it would appear that the book’s ethical point has less to do with what it says, ethically speaking, and more with what it gets the reader to do – that is, the activity of discarding (throwing away the ladder) that is encouraged at §6.54. We will turn, in greater detail, to the ethico-modernist dimensions of this activity in the second part of this essay. In his 1929 ‘Lecture on Ethics’, Wittgenstein takes a more conventional approach to the discussion of ethics, though one that is still consistent with the ideas of the Tractatus. In this lecture, delivered to the Heretics Society in Cambridge, he focuses his attention on two experiences that he takes to be paradigmatic of the ethico-mystical outlook: (i) ‘wonder[ing] at the existence of the world’; and (ii) ‘the experience of feeling absolutely safe’. Of the former experience, Wittgenstein comments: When I have [this experience] I am then inclined to use such phrases as ‘how extraordinary that anything should exist’ or ‘how extraordinary that the world should exist’. … The first thing I have to say is, that the verbal expression which we give to these experiences is nonsense! If I say ‘I wonder at the existence of the world’ I am misusing language. … It is nonsense to say that I wonder at the existence of the world, because I cannot imagine it not existing. (LE, 41f.)

These remarks, I would argue, explicitly say what a dialectical reading of the Tractatus (that is, one which takes as its point of departure Wittgenstein’s injunction at §6.54) brings us to see regarding the ethical and the mystical.3 The book’s ethico-mystical sentences serve as examples of the kinds of things For a detailed account of what a dialectical reading of the Tractatus entails, see Ben Ware, Dialectic of the Ladder: Wittgenstein, the ‘Tractatus’ and Modernism (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2015).

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we feel inclined to say (or to agree with) in certain philosophical moods. They are captivating; and all the more so because they appear to be communicating profound truths. Ultimately, however, we must come to recognize that remarks such as ‘the feeling of the world as a limited whole is the mystical feeling’ (§6.45) or ‘there is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical’ (§6.522), are nonsensical (§6.54); indeed, as Wittgenstein puts it (in the later lecture), ‘their nonsensicality [is] their very essence’ (LE, 44). And yet, in an important twist, Wittgenstein says that while any attempt to formulate a theory of ethics or to utter mystical statements will result in nonsense, such attempts also need to be recognized as documents of a ‘tendency in the human mind’ deserving of the utmost respect (LE, 44). This dual attitude towards the ethical is articulated again, in the early 1930s, in a conversation with members of the Vienna Circle: Man feels the urge to run up against the limits of language. … This running up against the limits of language is ethics. I think it is definitely important to put an end to all the claptrap about ethics – whether intuitive knowledge exists, whether values exist, whether the good is definable. In ethics we are always making the attempt to say something that cannot be said, something that does not and never will touch the essence of the matter. … But the inclination, the running up against something, indicates something. St. Augustine knew that already when he said: ‘What, you swine, you want not to talk nonsense! Go ahead and talk nonsense, it does not matter!’ (WVC, 68–9)

Here we can make two points. First, the idea of running up against the limits of language is best understood in relation to what Stanley Cavell calls ‘the human … craving for the metaphysical’4 or ‘the human drive to transcend itself ’.5 Second, to the extent that the metaphysical drive doesn’t have an end, the goal will not be to rid oneself of the temptation to make ethical pronouncements (‘to say only what can be said, i.e. the propositions of natural science’, as Tractatus §6.53 puts it), but, rather, to look more closely at what we do say in cases where we feel that ethical language is called for. To paraphrase a remark made by Wittgenstein in his notebooks of the 1940s: Don’t for heaven’s sake be afraid of talking ethical nonsense! Only don’t fail to pay attention to your nonsense.6

Stanley Cavell, ‘The Wittgensteinian Event’, in Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 195. Cf. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), 7 [A vii]. 5 Stanley Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures After Emerson After Wittgenstein (Albuquerque, NM: Living Batch Press, 1989), 57. 6 Cf. CV, 64. 4

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2 The Tractatus, ethics and modernism: Wittgenstein with Adorno Having provided a brief general survey of ethics and the early Wittgenstein, I want now to explore a possible connection between the Tractatus, ethics and modernism.7 My specific focus here will be the affinities between the Tractatus and Theodor Adorno’s idea of the autonomous modernist work of art sketched in his posthumously published Aesthetic Theory.8 For Adorno, modernism signals a new stage in art’s progressive separation from social life. Art’s original autonomy – its freedom from the constraints of church and court – ‘was nourished by the idea of humanity’9; in modernist art, however, this autonomy is ‘shattered’.10 As society becomes increasingly fragmented and dehumanized, the social element within art is eradicated and its detachment from other areas of life becomes total. It is then, as Adorno remarks, ‘self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore, not its inner life, not its relation to the world, not even its right to exist’.11 In Aesthetic Theory, modernist art’s autonomy has a ‘double character’,12 entailing both positive and On the relation between Wittgenstein’s later work (specifically Philosophical Investigations), ethics and modernism, see Ben Ware, ‘Find it New: Aspect-Perception and Modernist Ethics’, in Wittgenstein and the Creativity of Language, ed. Sebastian Sunday Grève and Jakub Mácha (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015), 238−63. In this essay, I examine Wittgenstein’s remarks on aspect-perception in Philosophical Investigations and suggest that what they invite is a re-visioning of language and the world. From this I extract the following ethico-modernist demand, which I argue can be attributed to the Investigations as a whole: ‘Find it new; see the everyday otherwise.’ By striving to see the everyday otherwise – a task that requires a mobilization of both the will and the imagination – we work against the routinization of thought and talk signalled by what Wittgenstein calls (in the Investigations’s preface) ‘the darkness of this time’. 8 At first blush, it might seem odd to suggest a comparison between Wittgenstein and Adorno, given that the latter is a notoriously unsympathetic reader of the former. In Hegel: Three Studies, for example, Adorno rounds upon the final sentence of the Tractatus (7), claiming:  Wittgenstein’s maxim, ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,’ in which the extreme of positivism spills over into the gesture of reverent authoritarian authenticity, and which for that reason exerts a kind of intellectual mass suggestion, is utterly antiphilosophical. If philosophy can be defined at all, it is an effort to express things one cannot speak about, to help express the nonidentical despite the fact that expressing it identifies it at the same time. (Theodor Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 101−2) The fact that the Tractatus remains something of a missed opportunity for Adorno only serves, however, to make the connections between Wittgenstein and Adorno all the more interesting and conceptually significant, especially when it comes to thinking about questions of modernism and ethics. 9 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 1. 10 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 1. 11 Ibid., 1. 12 Ibid., 227. 7

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negative aspects. While, on the one hand, modernist art risks becoming empty due to its isolation from practical life, on the other hand, its being without empirical purpose proves to be the very source of its power.13 In an administered society in which everything and everyone must have a social function, modernist art repels empirical reality through its pure functionlessness. Precisely by beingfor-themselves, modernist artworks are thus able to operate as flashpoints of resistance, as determinate negations of the rationalized (utilitarian) order from which they emerge: Art becomes social by its opposition to society, and it occupies this position only as autonomous art. By crystallizing in itself as something unique to itself, rather than complying with existing social norms and qualifying as ‘socially useful’, it criticizes society by merely existing, for which puritans of all stripes condemn it. There is nothing pure, nothing structured strictly according to its own immanent law, that does not implicitly criticize the debasement of a situation evolving in the direction of a total exchange society in which everything is heteronomously defined. Art’s asociality is the determinate negation of a determinate society.14

For Adorno, ‘what is social in [modernist] art is its immanent movement against society, not its manifest opinions’15; which is to say that what is emancipatory in modernism is the form, not the content, of individual works. This points to an important distinction in Adorno’s later thinking between ‘autonomous’ and ‘committed’ works of art. On Adorno’s view, committed works (those with an overt ethical and political message, such as the plays of Brecht or Sartre) are unable to offer a critique of instrumental reason because they themselves serve an instrumental purpose. Therefore, the task of social criticism falls to autonomous, modernist works – works that refuse all manifest social content and which, instead, raise their critique of the social to the level of form: Kafka’s prose and Beckett’s plays … have an effect in comparison to which official works of committed art look like children’s games. … In dismantling illusion they explode art from the inside, whereas proclaimed commitment only subjugates art from the outside, hence only illusorily. Their implacability compels the change in attitude that committed works only demand.16 Jay Bernstein, Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 7−8 and 9. 14 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 225−6. 15 Ibid., 227. 16 Ibid., 90. 13

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I want to suggest that what Adorno says about autonomous, modernist works is also applicable to the Tractatus. One way of beginning to make this connection will be to return to the important point that Wittgenstein makes in the Tractatus’s Preface, when he states that the book is ‘not a text-book’ [kein Lehrbuch] (TLP, §27). This suggests that in so far as the book is able to teach the reader anything, what it has to teach is not conventional philosophical doctrines. Rather, as Cora Diamond suggests, the Tractatus presents the reader with an ‘absence’ (there is ‘nothing philosophical in it’); and it is the process of responding to this absence that can allow one ‘to transform one’s conception of one’s philosophical difficulties’.17 This also extends to ethics: ‘The Tractatus can help one to understand the ethical only if one turns the absence of the ethical in it into something that transforms one’s understanding.’18 Like the autonomous, modernist work of art, then, the Tractatus does not communicate any kind of philosophical or ethical ‘message’. Instead, to paraphrase Adorno, it dismantles illusion by exploding traditional philosophy (including ethics) from the inside. The book’s ethical point is not, in this respect, contained in the book; it is not something that one might discover in its content. On the contrary, it inheres in the perspectival shift that comes about through engaging with the absence of ethics; and thus, paradoxically, in order to find the ethical in the Tractatus, one must first of all give up the very idea that the work provides any kind of ethical theory. To put the point in an Adornian register, we might say that the ethical ‘truthcontent’ of the Tractatus is to be found at the level of the work’s form, not its content, and that realizing this will require us to meet the work in the spirit that the author encourages at §6.54 (‘He who understands me [the author] finally recognizes them [the book’s “proposition”] as nonsense’). While the Tractatus functions as a kind of nonsense-producing machine (propositions commenting upon propositions in a seemingly endless series), it is through nonsense that it succeeds, finally, in placing meaning (sense) back on the agenda. In order to bring out the ethical dimension of this idea, we can draw a comparison with a point that Adorno makes about Samuel Beckett’s modernist play Endgame. In his essay ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’, Adorno remarks that ‘Beckett’s language [in Endgame] effects a healing disease in the sick person: the person Cora Diamond, ‘Introduction to “Having a Rough Story About What Moral Philosophy Is”’, in The Literary Wittgenstein, eds. John Gibson and Wolfgang Huemer (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 128−9. 18 Diamond, ‘Introduction’, 129. 17

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who listens to himself talk starts to worry that he sounds the same way’.19 For Adorno, Endgame thus works by shocking the reader (or viewer) into a wholesale reassessment of the kinds of language-games in which he or she participates. The point here is a distinctly perfectionist one: it is only by being brought to a new awareness of the emptiness of one’s words that one might finally find the courage to change one’s mode of talk and life. The Tractatus, we might argue, works in a similar way. In the book, Wittgenstein imagines himself into the position of someone who speaks nonsense and, in doing so, entices them to follow him. Having entered into the reader’s imagination, Wittgenstein’s method is then to round on her, ‘shocking [her],’ as Juliet Floyd puts it, ‘into a reassessment of the indefiniteness of [her] own thinking’.20 In this respect, Wittgenstein can be seen to act like a mirror in which the reader sees her own confusions reflected back. As he writes: ‘I must be nothing more than a mirror in which my reader sees [her] own thinking with all its deformities and with this assistance can set it in order’ (CV, 25). A second way of connecting Wittgenstein and Adorno in relation to modernism and ethics will be to turn to another remark from the Tractatus’s Preface: ‘The object of the work would be attained if there were one person who read it with understanding and to whom it afforded pleasure’ (TLP, 27). Here Wittgenstein’s linking of pleasure (Vergnügen) with understanding (Verständnis) suggests a connection with the modern (i.e. post-Renaissance) understanding of happiness, which sees it as ‘the state of pleasurable contentment of mind’.21 How, then, might this suggest a connection with Adorno? In Aesthetic Theory, we encounter Adorno’s dictum (borrowed from Stendhal) that art is ‘the promesse du bonheur’.22 At a basic (Weberian) level, art promises happiness, for Adorno, by drawing attention to itself as something that is valuable in and of itself, as something to be engaged with purely for its own sake. In this respect, as touched upon above, merely by existing, the artwork provides an implicit critique of societal rationalization and instrumental thinking. However, as Adorno also writes, ‘Because all happiness found in the status quo is ersatz and false, art must break its promise in order to keep it.’23 What it means, then, for art (and Theodor Adorno, ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’, in Notes to Literature, vol. 1, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 262. 20 Juliet Floyd, ‘The Uncaptive Eye: Solipsism in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus’, in Loneliness, ed. Leroy S. Rouner (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998), 87. 21 See the definition of the term ‘happiness’ on OED online: www.oed.com. 22 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 311. 23 Ibid. (translation slightly modified). 19

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specifically modernist art) to break its promise in order to keep it is for it to fail: ‘Art-works of the highest rank are distinguished from the others not through their success – for in what have they succeeded? – but through the manner of their failure.’24 By describing authentic modernist works as failures, Adorno does not mean that they simply fall flat, but, rather, that they withhold gratification, turn their backs upon the (false) ideal of organic wholeness and thwart the expectations of the reader, viewer or listener. Put simply, they are disobedient works that resist incorporation into traditional genres. The Tractatus promises happiness in both of these ways. First, there is an ethical and aesthetic delight in reading the work purely for its own sake – engaging and re-engaging with the austere brilliance of its form and the clipped poetry of its sentences. In this respect, the work points towards a world that it abstains from describing: a world beyond means-ends rationality in which aesthetic sensuousness and intellectual free-play have been recovered. At the same time, the Tractatus also refuses to be merely enjoyed, offering, instead, a kind of philosophical satisfaction that can only be achieved through the (possibly endless) process of labouring with the text. Such a process, as I have been suggesting, begins with an act of discarding (throwing away the ladder), an act that requires us to embrace difficulty and dissonance and to accept the somewhat disconcerting fact that, up until its conclusion, this is a work that has been reading us – not the other way round. The Tractatus thus breaks its promise of being a philosophical text that is open to straightforward conceptual explication. And yet, by giving up the very desire to master the work, we take the first step towards extracting from it the pleasure that its Preface promises.

Theodor Adorno, Beethoven: The Philosophy of Modern Music (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 99−100.

24

Art David Macarthur

Wittgenstein held a highly exalted view of art. For him, as for other intellectuals, musicians and artists of fin de siècle Vienna, ‘art became almost a religion, the source of meaning and the food of the soul’.1 Wittgenstein grew up in an atmosphere of reverence for artistic achievement at the very highest level. The Wittgenstein family were friends of the famous poet Franz Grillparzer, and adopted the violin virtuoso Joseph Joachim. Johannes Brahms, Josef Labor, Gustav Mahler and Bruno Walter were regular attenders of musical evenings held at the Wittgenstein house. Wittgenstein’s sister Margarete, a patient of Sigmund Freud, had her portrait painted by Gustav Klimt. And Wittgenstein was a friendly acquaintance of the modernist architect and cultural critic Adolf Loos. A key to understanding Wittgenstein’s attitude to art is understanding his strong reaction against the aesthetic tastes of his father Karl Wittgenstein who commissioned buildings and furniture designs from Josef Hoffman and funded the Vienna Secession building of 1897 designed by Joseph Olbrich. These architects were prominent members of the art nouveau (Jugendstil), an international art movement that reacted against the academic tradition of fine arts by developing a system of decorative forms abstracted from nature – especially plants, animals and wave-forms. Its aim was to incorporate art into a complete way of life by blurring the distinction between art and everyday artefacts. Art, architecture, interior design as well as the design of furniture and lighting, jewellery, eating utensils and clothes was incorporated into a distinctive ornamental aesthetic of applied decorative motifs that Adolf Loos disparagingly called ‘tattooing’.2 Let us consider two important ways in which Wittgenstein combatted this movement: 1) by advocating the autonomy of art from ordinary things; and 2) by renouncing ornament in favour of clarity of form.

Carl E. Schorske, Fin-De-Siècle Vienna (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980), 9. A. Loos, ‘Ornament and Crime’ [1908], in Programs and Manifestoes on 20th Century Architecture, ed. U. Conrads (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970), 19.

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1  The autonomy of the artwork In stark contrast to the Jugendstil artists, Wittgenstein defended the autonomy of art in relation to the things of everyday life. Seeing something as a work of art involves a transfiguration of some natural thing(s) into the artwork through the style of the artist and his or her genius in communicating ideas through the use of some artistic medium.3 Art, like action, is intended to have a point or purpose, which can typically be elicited by asking a why-question. When we ask, ‘Why is it like that?’ we expect a rational explanation.4 Wittgenstein explicitly acknowledges that there is thinking in painting, architecture and music.5 The better the artwork the more clearly its ideas are expressed in the chosen medium. Wittgenstein writes: The work of art compels us – as one might say – to see it in the right perspective, but without art the object is a piece of nature like any other. (CV, 6–7 [1930])

To see an artwork in the right perspective involves two distinct but related notions of autonomy: 1) separation of the meaningful artwork from the ‘meaningless’ facts studied by the sciences; and 2) separation of the artwork from the world itself in so far as an artwork is a timeless unity unto itself. Let us consider each of these notions in turn. For Wittgenstein, to say we experience art as distinct from the ordinary things of nature is to say that art is not to be understood as a physical object causally producing physiological and psychological effects on us. So, in particular, successful art is not understandable, in the manner of Hume, as a matter of objects with aesthetic features giving rise to feelings of pleasure.6 A psychologist who studies the causes of various sorts of pleasure or displeasure will have nothing to contribute to a study of art on Wittgenstein’s understanding of it.7 Wittgenstein also sees an analogy between the transfiguration of the everyday in a fairy tale and the solution of a philosophical problem: ‘Compare the solution of philosophical problems with the fairy tale gift that seems magical in the enchanted castle and if it is looked at in daylight is nothing but an ordinary bit of iron (or something of the sort)’ (CV, 14−15). 4 For the importance of the applicability of why-questions to intentional action, see G. E. M. Anscombe, Intention (Oxford: Blackwell, 1957). 5 For example, Wittgenstein speaks of ‘the strength of the musical thinking in Brahms’ (CV, 27). Emphasis added. 6 In Hume’s view, we are, through a naturally occurring ‘inner’ aesthetic sense, ‘fitted’ to respond to certain aesthetic features of artworks with pleasure: imitation in painting; verisimilitude in poetry; unity-of-action in drama, etc. See D. Hume, ‘On the Standard of Taste’ [1751], in Essays: Moral, Political and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (New York: Cosimo, 2006), 231–58. 7 ‘There does not seem to be any connection between what psychologists do and any judgment about a work of art’ (LC, 19). 3

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Relatedly, Wittgenstein takes it to be quite ‘absurd’ to suppose, with Tolstoy, that our interest in art is a matter of whether the feelings induced in us by the work are the same as those the artist had in making it (CV, 67).8 What the Humean and Tolstoyan views seem to forget is that our interest in art is an interest in the artworks themselves – what they communicate and the value of this manner of communication – not the causal effects they might induce in us. The enduring insight is that the content and value of art is neither merely subjective nor a factual matter that could be the subject matter of an empirical science. Regarding the ‘other-worldliness’ of art Wittgenstein remarks: The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis … The usual way of looking at things sees objects as it were from the midst of them, the view sub specie aeternitatis from outside.9

The conception of art expressed in these words gives a primary role to two striking features of artworks: 1) that they are unified, forming limited ‘worlds’ set apart from other things; and 2) that they are, in some sense, timeless, set apart from the things that change and pass away. In contemplating something as a work of art, we are seeing it as a unified but limited whole (i.e. a ‘world’) whose distinctness from the ordinary world is indicated, I suggest, by such devices as the frame of the canvas and the pedestal of the sculpture, not to mention the setapart viewing conditions within typical gallery spaces.10 Many of Wittgenstein’s scattered remarks about art and aesthetics can be understood by invoking a non-metaphysical understanding of a God’s-eye view to describe the character of our experience of art.11 To say we view art as if from the perspective of God can be understood as a metaphor used to draw attention to the way that we take in the ‘world’ of the artwork as a whole – in the case of visual art, at a glance12 or, in the case of music or film, in memory – so that, in this specific sense, we become God-like in our contemplation of art. As Adolf Loos, who shares this vision, puts it, art ‘make[s] us more and more like gods’.13 Leo Tolstoy, What is Art? [1896], trans. Aylmer Maud (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996). L. Wittgenstein, Notebooks: 1914–16, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1961), 83 [1916]. Cf. ‘To view the world sub specie aeterni is to view it as a whole – a limited whole’ (TLP, §6.45). 10 These are some of the very features of art that modern artists (e.g. Frank Stella, Donald Judd) disposed of in their attempt to bring the artwork ‘closer’ to us, into our realm of existence. 11 Curiously, and uncharacteristically, the ‘Lecture on Ethics’ seems to ascribe ‘supernatural’ (or ‘absolute’) value to artworks. 12 Michael Fried calls this the ‘instantaneousness’ of modern art. See his ‘Art and Objecthood’, in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: Dutton and Co., 1968). 13 A. Loos, ‘Architecture’ [1910], in Adolf Loos: On Architecture, eds. Daniel & Adolf Opel (Riverside: Ariadne Press, 2007), 83. 8 9

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Perhaps the most compelling justification for the art-as-world metaphor is the sense of the depth of the artwork – something that is most evident with great works, that is, masterpieces. To regard something as an artwork is to have a sense that there is more to say about it than anything already said (cf. LC, 17). As in Kant, this sets aesthetic matters, in general, apart from issues of mere liking or disliking. Wittgenstein remarks, ‘A great deal can be said about a subtle aesthetic difference – that is important’ (PI, Part 2, §297). To experience something as a work of art is, then, to experience it as a ‘world’ in the sense of something that has a richness of significance that one can endlessly explore and further elaborate upon. It is not beyond words in the sense of being inexpressible as the ‘Lecture on Ethics’ (a transitional work) suggests; it is beyond words in being something that is felt to be more significant or valuable than any finite articulation in words can express.14 It is on this basis that art, especially great art, has the power to hold our attention and interest over indefinitely long periods of time. If we consider, for example, the plays of Shakespeare, they have stood the test of time, as we say, by inspiring and bearing up under ever new and various interpretative questions and methods of approach – while all the while being experienced as inexhaustible. No theory or interpretation is felt to be fully adequate to our felt experience of the wholeness or totality of the work, its world. Great art – a condition to which all art aspires – is something as if beyond the realm of the contingent things of time that come into being, fade and pass away.15 But even if they are, in a sense, eternal, our interest in them waxes and wanes: ‘The works of the great masters are stars that rise and set around us’ (CV, 23).

2  Form contra Ornament Strictly following the anti-ornamental campaign of Adolf Loos who remarked that ‘the evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornament from objects of daily use’ (Loos, Ornament, 20), Wittgenstein adopted an antiornamental aesthetic, which is particularly evident in the house he co-designed

Wittgenstein speaks of ‘all the infinite complexity that is suggested in the external forms of [nonmusical] arts’ (CV, 11). 15 This conception is well expressed by the poet Ezra Pound: ‘A classic is classic not because it conforms to structural rules or fits certain definitions… It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.’ ABC of Reading [1934] (London: Routledge, 1961), 3−4. 14

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(with Paul Englemann) and built for his sister Margarete. The house is composed of unadorned white planes forming three interlocking rectangular structures with regular fenestration and an asymmetrical main entrance. The interior uniformly coloured off-white walls have no decorative elements (e.g. no cornices, architraves or skirting), which draws attention to their form: its symmetrical proportions and volume. But despite this strong emphasis on clarity of form, a modernist architectural trope, and the employment of modern building materials such as concrete, glass and steel, Wittgenstein is not, properly speaking, a modernist in architecture – or in his attitude to art generally. In rejecting modernist architecture, he is, in part, rejecting its utopian dream that advances in science, technology and industry would inevitably transform human life for the better. Whereas Loos sees advances in science and technology as marks of the progress of culture and civilization, Wittgenstein sees the times in which he is living as a ‘dark’ period, and the progressivism of technological society as a delusion.16 Regarding what he speaks of the ‘spirit … of the prevailing European and American civilization’, he adopts the Spenglerian thesis of the decline of culture: The spirit of this civilization the expression of which is the industry, architecture, music, of present day fascism & socialism, is a spirit that is alien & uncongenial to the author [LW]. This is not a value judgement. It is not as though I did not know that what today represents itself as architecture is not architecture & not as though he did not approach what is called modern music with the greatest mistrust (without understanding its language), but the disappearance of the arts does not justify a disparaging judgement on a whole segment of humanity. [sic] (CV, 8)

It is clear from this pronouncement that Wittgenstein rejects modernist architecture and modernist music as well as lamenting quite generally ‘the disappearance of the arts’ in the modern period. He may build in modern materials according to modern techniques of construction in a manner reminiscent of Loos’s domestic buildings, but what he produced is closer to Viennese neo-Renaissance palace architecture than modernist architecture.17 ‘Our civilization is characterized by the word progress. Progress is its form, it is not one of its properties that it makes progress’ (CV, 9). 17 This is largely a matter of the division of the interior spaces into separate rooms, their monumental scale and symmetry, as well as the grand entrance staircase. The connection between Wittgenstein’s house and Loos’s residential architecture is mainly established by way of a similar external form involving white, heavy-massed cubic structures. For further discussion, see D. Macarthur, ‘Working on Oneself in Philosophy and Architecture: A Perfectionist Reading of the Wittgenstein House’, Architectural Theory Review 19, no. 2 (2014): 124–40. 16

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Loos, unlike Wittgenstein, did not consider architecture to be one of the arts but a form of craft with utilitarian ends; but they both shared the view that modern architecture is not art. Wittgenstein regarded his house as ‘the product of a decidedly sensitive ear, good manners, the expression of great understanding (for a culture, etc.). But wild primordial life, wild life striving to erupt into the open – is lacking’ (CV, 43). Wild life is a characteristic feature of great art. Wittgenstein’s attitude to art has both romantic and modernist elements, but he is not comfortably assimilated to either movement.18 Given his strong antipathy to modernist architecture, visual art and music, it would be misleading to speak of him as any kind of modernist regarding the arts. As for romanticism, we have already discussed the themes of the other-worldliness and timelessness of the artwork and its inaccessibility by the methods of science. Wittgenstein also holds to the romantic cult of genius and judging art and philosophy in terms of their originality and greatness as measured against great works of the past. His extremely demanding conception of artistic and philosophical greatness gives rise to acute anxieties of influence, and fears of unoriginality and artistic failure; for example, he worries about being a merely reproductive mind and questions his talent for writing and his inability to present his thoughts in an ‘ordered sequence’ (CV, 33, 40, 60, 86).19 If he manages to overcome these doubts, it is by a conscious effort to be courageous, a trait more often associated with the revolutionary artist rather than the philosopher: ‘Courage is always original’ (CV, 42).20 Nonetheless, despite these romantic strains in his outlook, Wittgenstein is certainly no irrationalist and cannot be counted as one of the ‘Wiener Moderne’ such as Hermann Bahr, whose aim was a ‘nervous romanticism’ that cultivated a ‘narcissistic glorification of ephemeral psychic states’.21 For Wittgenstein, the appropriate understanding of art is intentional and rational, not causal. The reasons one appeals to in support of one’s aesthetic judgements ‘are of the nature of further descriptions’ (Notes, 19), which express an aesthetic vision of the work. Wittgenstein’s thought thereby makes room for notions of aesthetic judgement Indeed, any categorization of Wittgenstein in art or philosophy is inevitably misleading. He belongs to no well-defined style or school of ideas in either field. 19 His mode of expressing these anxieties in terms of his Jewishness is directly borrowed from Otto Weininger. 20 It is worth recalling Carnap’s remark: ‘His point of view and his attitude toward people and problems, even theoretical problems, were much more similar to those of a creative artist than to a scientist; one might almost say, similar to those of a religious prophet or seer.’ The Philosophy of Rudolph Carnap, ed. P. A. Schilpp (La Salle: Open Court, 1963), 24. 21 A. Janik, Wittgenstein’s Vienna Revisited (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2001), 20−1. 18

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and rationality. But, unlike the rationality of science or logic, agreement is not a test of aesthetic rationality. Here reasons are reasonably rejectable in a way without parallel in these more objective fields.22 Wittgenstein sees a kinship between a critical discussion about an artwork and the prosecution of a matter before a court of law: one is trying to present the work in the right light in order that the ‘judge’ can make a just determination of worth and originality in comparison with other relevant works. Finding the right comparisons and the pertinent artistic influences are central aspects of this critical activity. A key idea here is that criticism is a normative activity that aims to do justice to the work, and that art makes a demand upon us to come to judgement about its worth. For those with a sensitive ‘eye’ or ‘ear’ in the target audience of a successful artwork, Wittgenstein speaks of the work compelling a certain interpretation of it. Just as a person can be transparent or opaque to us, so, too, an artwork can ‘speak to us’ or be a blank (PI, Part 2, §325).

3  The art of philosophy Wittgenstein admits that ‘only conceptual & aesthetic questions … really grip me’ [sic] (CV, 91). And he often likens his work in philosophy to artistic work. Regarding the house he built for his sister Margarete, he reflects: Work on philosophy – like work in architecture in many respects – is really more work on oneself. On one’s own conception. On how one sees things. (And what one expects of them.) (CV, 24 [1931])

According to Wittgenstein’s conception, architecture is a personal (i.e. unique) expression of a way of seeing things. Work in both architecture and philosophy is a matter of clarity of form: spatial form and logical form, respectively.23 In both, one must work on oneself to overcome temptations to dogmatize: to impose a way of life on a client, or to impose a (perhaps disguised) metaphysics on the reader.24 In sharp contrast to Tolstoy’s universalist vision of art, according to which the best art is universally accessible, Wittgenstein is pessimistic whether Expressing a similar outlook, Stanley Cavell, in a discussion of ethics, talks about the possibility of ‘rational disagreement’: ‘The rationality of the antagonists is not dependent on an agreement emerging between them’. S. Cavell, The Claim of Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 254. 23 ‘For me … clarity, transparency, is an end in itself ’ (CV, 9). 24 See Macarthur, ‘Working’, for further discussion of this point and the connection between metaphysical dogmatism and architectural modernism. 22

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and how far art of any distinction can be expected to be understood by others.25 This problem is even more acutely felt with regard to the reception he expected from his philosophical work.26 A central aspect of Wittgenstein’s philosophical practice is to replace the demand for metaphysical explanations with various techniques for describing the ‘logic’ of natural language or what he calls its ‘grammar’. The difficulty of arriving at a philosophically fruitful description of the conceptual landscape – a matter of recalling or recounting ‘criteria’ for the application of concepts of ‘objects’ – is in some ways analogous to the difficulty of finding a just description of a work of art. In the one case, we ask what work a concept is doing for us in our form of social life; in the other, we ask what work is being done by an artwork, or what move it is making, in its cultural context. Both sorts of descriptions require selfreflection, comparison and attention to detail. Wittgenstein likens the difficulties involved in describing art to solving problems in mathematics.27 And he observes that ‘in art it is hard to say anything, that is as good as: saying nothing’ (CV, 26). Wittgenstein’s claim to being a modernist is strongest in the radical departure of his manner and style of philosophical writing – something he compares to making drawings of a landscape from various perspectives – to that found in traditional philosophy. His style of composition involves philosophical remarks ‘sometimes in longer chains about the same subject, sometimes jumping, in a sudden change, from one area to another’ (PI, §3) as well as a profusion of typographical devices (e.g. underlining, italics, dashes) to indicate tone, occasion, emphasis, suspicion, mode of address, etc. The writing is constantly attempting to slow the reader down in order to arrest a receptive or contemplative attitude to the text28; and to repeatedly jolt the reader, through various literary techniques, into active, prolonged, even painful, reflection.29 These include fragments, poetic allusions, gnomic sayings, aphorisms and metaphors of striking beauty, as well as an ethical and aesthetic demand to use only the familiar language of everyday life.30 ‘I think good Austrian work (Grillparzer, Lenau, Bruckner, Labor) is particularly hard to understand. There is a sense in which it is subtler than anything else and its truth never leans towards plausibility’ (CV, 5). 26 In the preface to Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein writes: ‘It is not impossible that it should fall to the lot of this work, in its poverty and in the darkness of this time, to bring light into one brain or another – but, of course, it is not likely’ (PI, 4). 27 See G. E. Moore, ‘Wittgenstein’s Lectures: 1930-33’, Mind 64, no. 253 (1955): 3. 28 ‘My sentences are all to be read slowly’ [sic] (CV, 65). 29 In a letter Wittgenstein writes, ‘You can’t think decently if you don’t want to hurt yourself.’ N. Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon, 2001): 35. 30 One may see in this morally oriented critique of language echoes of Karl Kraus’s punning aphoristic criticism of the language of politicians and bureaucrats. 25

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Understanding Wittgenstein, Understanding Modernism

Characteristic of Wittgenstein’s method is a constant effort to keep faith with a ‘realistic spirit’,31 which requires writing in the common language of ordinary people whose ‘workings’ all of us are in an equal position to acknowledge (§109). Seeing the common anew also makes available the shock of recognition characteristic of philosophical insight. However, given the strong appeal of metaphysical forms of explanation – such as the temptation to apply scientific models of knowing and understanding to all problems32 – whether one feels gripped by this anti-authoritarian method depends on something like a conversion experience. An aesthetic analogue might be coming to appreciate jazz. In contemplating Wittgenstein’s pictures of conceptual landscapes, a reader is capable of experiencing moments of release from conceptual confusion through ‘perspicuous presentations’ (PI, §122) akin to the sudden satisfaction and relief accompanying the sudden dawning of understanding of a previously inscrutable artwork. This intersection of the conceptual, ethical and aesthetic goes to the heart of the potential of these forms of expression of this way of seeing things to be a mirror in which the reader can see the deformities in his or her own thought – the fruits of which make available the possibility of self-transformation.33

See Cora Diamond, The Realistic Spirit (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). See BB, 17. 33 ‘I must be nothing more than the mirror in which my reader sees his own thinking with all its deformities & with this assistance can set it in order’ (CV, 25). 31 32

Index absolute value  20–1 Adorno, Theodor  7, 80 n.14, 88, 90, 253–7 Aesthetic Theory  253, 256 aesthetic education  30 Apel, Karl-Otto  80, 88 a priori  8, 13, 23, 34, 38, 42, 45, 95 Artaud, Antonin  3 ascetic/asceticism   6, 13, 15, 24, 26, 27, 28, 30, 31, 34 Austin, J. L.  56, 59, 193, 197 metaphilosophical remarks  73 Austrian modernism  113–15

scepticism as a human condition  109 The Senses of Walden  108 n.34 uncanniness of the ordinary  97 n.13 Wittgenstein’s language  98–102 Wittgenstein’s notion of criteria  102–6 Cézanne, Paul  31–2 Chardin, J. S.  130, 134 The Card Castle  131, 133 The Soap Bubble 131 Chirico, Giorgio de   3 Crane, Hart  231

Badiou, Alain  186 Bakhtin, M. M.  193 Beckett, Samuel  254 Endgame 255–6 being-in-the-world 40 Bergmann, Gustav  59 Beuys, Joseph  31 Bloor, David  76 Bouveresse, J.  173 Bunyan, John  182

Derrida, Jacques  79, 186 n.9, 194 Diamond, Cora  43, 47 n.21, 83 n.26, 93 n.4, 96 n.9, 131 n.14, 219 n.2, 232 n.20, 236 n.5, 255, 266 n.31 Dickens, Charles  182 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor  182 Duchamp, Marcel  3 Duve, Thierry de  128, 136 n.24, 138 n.26, 139

Carnap, R.  13–14, 33–4 Aufbau 33 Cavell, Stanley  6, 92, 97–110, 200 about language in Philosophical Investigations 105–6 The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy  101 n.21, 264 n.22 Future Pasts: The Analytic Tradition in Twentieth-Century Philosophy  102 n.22

‘L’ordinaire et l’inquiétant’  98 n.14

Must We Mean What We Say?  104 n.24 problematization of the ordinary in Wittgenstein 97–8 In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism  97 n.13

Eagleton, Terry  2 Eliot, T. S.  3, 156 Engelmann, Paul  5, 128, 167 ethics/ethical  7, 14, 19–21, 23, 28, 30, 33–4, 65, 81–3, 93–6, 125, 161–2, 181, 196, 213, 230, 250–7, 265–6 anti-political absolute  81–3 early Wittgenstein  250–2 in Lecture on Ethics  19 in Tractatus  7, 19, 253–7 Focillon, Henri  174 formalism 168–9 Russian  189–194, 198–9 Foucault, Michel  76, 79 Fox, George  182 Frank, Josef  166–7 Frankfurt School critical theory  88

268

Index

Frege, G.  41, 42, 44 n.19, 45–6, 48, 57, 58, 63, 64, 66, 169, 173, 193, 206, 208, 210, 211, 213, 219, 221 Freud, Sigmund  225, 227 Fried, Michael  126–8 Absorption and Theatricality  127 n.4, 130–2, 133 n.19 Art and Objecthood 126 performance of an actor  129–39 photographic medium  137–9 reading of The Card Castle 133 Gadamer, Hans-Georg   79 Gaita, Raimond  81–2 Gellner, E.  59 Greenberg, Clement  2–3, 41, 126–8, 139 description of modernism  36–7 ‘Modernism in Painting’  36–7 Grice, H. P.  56, 59–60 Grillparzer, Franz  115 Guetti, James  231–2 Habermas, Jürgen   76, 88–9 Hacker, Peter  43 n.12, 16, 56 n.4, 59, 60 n.9, 95, 96 n.9, 145 n.2, 177, 219 n.2 Hampshire, S.  59 Hanslick, Eduard  168–9 Hare, R.  59 Hart, H. L. A.  59 Hegel, G. W. F.  16, 18, 27, 30, 253 n.8 Heidegger, M.  3, 13–14, 23, 33, 36, 40, 46, 79 Being and Time 39–42 Holland, Roy  81 Husserl, E.  3, 36, 54, 169, 174 consciousness 37–8 eidetic science  39, 41 notion of essence  39 phenomenology 38–40 postulation of essences as objects  42, 53 n.29 Ibsen, Henrik  182 James, Henry  4, 145, 151–64, 236–7 life of language  163–4 logic of language-games  159–63 romanticism 237 The Spoils of Poynton 151–64

James, William  7, 235, 237 Janik, Allan  114 Wittgenstein’s Vienna 114 Wittgenstein’s Vienna Revisited 263 n.21 Johnson, Samuel  182 Joyce, James   3, 154 Kandinsky, W.  31 Kant, I.  2–3, 16, 20, 26, 36, 37, 40, 76 Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals 20 Keller, Gottfried  115 Kierkegaard, Søren  182 Klee, P.  31 Kokoschka, Oskar  31 Kraus, Karl  119 Lacan, Jacques  186 Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (Molière)  236 Leibnizian characteristica universalis 51 life, meaning of  21 linguistic idealism  76 linguistic scepticism  93–7 Loos, Adolf  114–15, 224 Macaulay, Thomas Babington   198–9 Malcolm, Norman  59 Malevitch, Kasimir  31 Mallarmé, S.  200–1 Matar, Anat  93, 183, 186 McGuinness, Brian  94, 115 metaphysics  18, 20, 30–31, 36, 50, 60, 92–93, 99, 101–102, 131, 158, 167, 186, 213, 223, 233 Descartes’s views  239–240, 242 ‘metaphysical’ realism  28, 31 mystifications of language  32 preconceptions in Tractatus 25–7, 42–9, 51, 57, 67–9, 234 Milton, John  182 Mondrian, Piet  31 Monet, Claude  31 Moore, G. E.  107–8, 246 Morandi, Giorgio  31 Mouffe, Chantal  78–9, 84 Munch, Edvard   31

Index Musil, Robert  2, 113 Man without Qualities  115–18, 120–1 tension between historicism and avant-garde 115–18 Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD)  87 mysticism  13–18, 25, 26, 34, 96, 175 n.32 naturalistic fallacy  20 New Objectivity movement  167 Nietzsche, Friedrich  79 Gay Science 102 Nuclear Utilization Targeting Selection (NUTS) 87 Nyiri, J. C.  77–80, 84 Occam’s razor  167 ordinary language philosophy  55, 59–63 Oxford philosophy. See ordinary language philosophy Parmenides  16, 18 Pears, D.  59 perspicuous presentation  97–8 Picasso, Pablo  3 pragmatism 235–8 Putnam, Hilary  195 Quine, W. V. O.  59, 65–7, 76, 91 resolute reading  43 n.14, 47 n.21, 83 n.26, 95 Rilke, Rainer Maria  182 Rorty, Richard  78–9, 84 Russell, B.  41, 45–6, 48, 57, 59 Ryle, G.  56, 59, 62 category mistakes  71 The Concept of Mind 71 map analogy  70–2 philosophical problems  71 Saussurean linguistics  193 Schlick, Moritz   7 Schloezer, Boris de  174 Schmitt, Carl  79 Schönberg  3, 114–15 Style and Idea  176 n.34, 179 Treatise of Harmony 179 Von Heute zu Morgen 177–9 Schumann, Robert  29, 122, 165

269

Searle, John  194 Shakespeare, W.  182 Shklovsky, Viktor  189–93, 198 Smith, David  154 Sokel, Walter H.  116 Solipsism 18 Sraffa, Piero  224 St. Augustine  182 Standish, Paul  109 Stevens, Wallace  3, 231 Strawson, P. F.  56, 59 Tagore, Rabindranath  182 theatrical stage. See also Wittgenstein’s attitude to art performance of an actor  129–39 stage model  140–2 Tolstoy, Leo  182 Toulmin, Stephen  59, 114 Wittgenstein’s Vienna 114 Tully, James  83 Urmson, J. O.  59 Valéry, Paul  3 Van Gogh, Vincent  32 Vienna Circle  13, 23, 30, 75 n.1, 88, 166, 176 n.35, 180 n.41, 252 Voloshinov, V. N.  193 Wagner, Richard  113 Waismann, Friedrich  7 Wall, Jeff  136–9 Ware, Benjamin Dialectic of the Ladder: Wittgenstein, the Tractatus and Modernism 93, 251 n.3 Warnock, G. J.  59 Webern, Anton  31 Williams, Raymond  187 Wittgenstein, Ludwig  36 Abbildungscharakter of music  175–7 approach towards certainty and dismissal of scepticism  6, 30, 76, 92, 96–110, 124, 143, 194, 240 attitude towards modernist music  2, 166, 168, 169, 170, 172, 173, 176, 178, 179

270

Index

Cavell’s reading of  97–110 comparison between Musil and  119–25 conception of intentionality  173–5 correspondence between Paul Engelmann and  133–7 cultural ideal  122–5 cultural ‘pessimism’  28 distinction between content and expression 144–5 embeddedness in a modernist world 4 expressivity of meaning  2 expressivity of sentiment  169–72 grammar  7–8, 13, 34, 56, 64–5, 67, 71–2, 89, 99–100, 170, 172, 176, 185, 193–201, 205–8, 212, 224–32, 265 Heidegger’s postulation of a priori structures 42 hostilities towards new world  2 language-games  27, 51, 58–9, 61, 67, 78, 100, 128, 137, 140–2, 147, 150, 152–3, 159–60, 162–4, 191, 200, 211–12, 214–15, 224, 234–5, 256 link of modernism and modernity 119–22 logic  48–9, 63–7, 99 n.16, 107, 153–4, 158–160, 162, 169, 174, 176–7, 186, 188, 205–23, 230, 233, 235 logical language  47–8, 51–3, 95–6 model of logical analysis  49–54 modern philosophy of mind  239–41 ‘modernist’ aspect of formalism in music 168–9 naturalism 83 ordinary language philosophy  55, 59–60 as a particularist about moral issues 83–5 perspicuous presentation  97–8 philosophical problems  60–3 philosophy as meta-politics  87–8 philosophy of mathematics  87 ‘picture theory’ of the proposition 217–23

problems of European and American culture 124 psychological concepts, dual use of 245–8 psychological features of life  248–9 referential conception of meaning 57–8 treatment of rules  8 uncanniness 98 understanding of dramaturgical model 140–2 view of knowledge  107–8 view of language modernist  3–4 vigilance 143–4 Wittgenstein’s attitude to art  258 anti-ornamental aesthetic  261–4 autonomy of artwork  259–61 Wittgenstein’s works The Blue and Brown Books  4, 99, 154, 177 Culture and Value  5, 24, 27, 29, 119–20, 123–4, 126, 131–2, 140, 143, 172, 182, 224 n.1 Lecture on Ethics  24, 81, 95, 251, 261 Notebooks 1914-1916  175 n.32, 250 n.1, 260 n.9 On certainty  99, 103, 106–10 Philosophical Grammar  6–7, 221 Philosophical Investigations  5, 25, 83, 89, 99, 106, 109, 114, 145–6, 184, 206, 233–6 Philosophical Remarks  24, 27, 119, 172 Remarks on Colour 99 Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology 103 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus  3, 7, 14, 17–20, 24–6, 27, 33, 42–4, 46–9, 51–3, 56–8, 83 n.24, 93–7, 99, 114, 167, 175, 183–5, 207, 213, 217–23, 233–5, 251, 253–7 Woolf, Virginia  3 Zemach, Eddy  18