Wittgenstein and Modernism 9780226420547

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Wittgenstein and Modernism

Wittgenstein and Modernism Edited by Michael LeMahieu and K a r e n Z u m h a g e n -Y e k p l é

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2017 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2017. Printed in the United States of America 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-42037-0 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-42040-0 (paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-42054-7 (e-book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226420547.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: LeMahieu, Michael, author, editor. | Zumhagen-Yekplé, Karen, author, editor. Title: Wittgenstein and modernism / edited by Michael LeMahieu and Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé. Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016017326 | ISBN 9780226420370 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226420400 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226420547 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1889–1951. | Modernism (Literature) Classification: LCC B3376.W564 W54325 2016 | DDC 192—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016017326 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: Wittgenstein, Modernism, and the Contradictions of Writing Philosophy as Poetry Michael LeMahieu and Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé

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P a r t 1 Wittgenstein’s Modernist Context Wittgenstein and Modernism in Literature: Between the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations Anthony J. Cascardi

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“To Become a Different Person”: Wittgenstein, Christianity, and the Modernist Ethos Marjorie Perloff

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The Concept of Expression in the Arts from a Wittgensteinian Perspective Charles Altieri

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4 Wittgenstein, Loos, and Critical Modernism: Style and Idea in Architecture and Philosophy Allan Janik

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P a r t 2 Wittgenstein’s Modernist Cultures 5

Loos, Musil, Wittgenstein, and the Recovery of Human Life Piergiorgio Donatelli

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6 Wittgenstein, Benjamin, and Pure Realism Eli Friedlander

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What Makes a Poem Philosophical? John Gibson

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P a r t 3 Wittgenstein and Literary Modernism 8 In the Condition of Modernism: Philosophy, Literature, and The Sacred Fount Kristin Boyce 9 The World as Bloom Found It: “Ithaca,” the Tractatus, and “Looking More than Once for the Solution of Difficult Problems in Imaginary or Real Life” Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé

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10 Lectures on Ethics: Wittgenstein and Kafka Yi-Ping Ong

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11 Bellow’s Private Language Michael LeMahieu

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Notes 255 List of Contributors 289 Index 293

Acknowledgments

We would like to express our deepest thanks to Elizabeth Branch Dyson, whose early commitment to this project saw it through to its completion. We also wish to thank the four anonymous referees whose careful reading of the proposal and the manuscript provided valuable guidance. We are grateful for the support of the School of Liberal Arts at Tulane University and the Department of English and the College of Architecture, Arts and Humanities at Clemson University.

Introduction

Wittgenstein, Modernism, and the Contradictions of Writing Philosophy as Poetry Michael LeMahieu and K a r e n Z u m h a g e n -Y e k p l é

How does the category of modernism inform our understanding of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, and how does Wittgenstein’s philosophy elucidate the category of modernism? The essays in this volume take up these questions as they consider how different aspects of Wittgenstein’s philosophy intersect with various uses of the term “modernism.” Wittgenstein’s philosophy enacts or embodies, alternately or simultaneously, modernism as a historical period, an aesthetic style, and a philosophical worldview. Yet even as the concept of modernism affords new understandings of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, Wittgenstein’s multifaceted thinking raises the vexing question of modernism itself. On the face of it, Wittgenstein appears to represent a modernist figure par excellence— the philosophical counterpart to poets, artists, and composers the likes of Stein, Picasso, and Schoenberg. Wittgenstein’s lifespan, 1889– 1951, coincides almost perfectly with modernism’s “core period of about 1890 to 1945.”1 The one major work he published in his lifetime, the Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus, appeared in its influential English translation in 1922, modernism’s annus mirabilis: the year of Eliot’s The Waste Land, Joyce’s Ulysses, and Woolf ’s Jacob’s Room.2 As those works revolutionized literature, the Tractatus revolutionized philosophy, advancing the most crystalline statement of the linguistic turn in twentieth-century thought.3 The Tractatus “secretly belongs,” Terry Eagleton suggests, to “the great wave of European modernism”: “For the true coordinates of that astonishing mystical text are surely not Russell or Frege, but Joyce, Schoenberg, Picasso, all those self-ironising avant-gardists who sought in their own fashion to represent and point to their representing at a stroke.”4 After abandoning and then returning to philosophy, Wittgenstein went on to revolutionize the field a second time. The posthumous publication of the Philosophical Investigations in 1953 set the stage for

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the appearance of ordinary language philosophy, which in the following decades achieved its fullest expression in the work of J. L. Austin and that of Stanley Cavell— work that has since inspired a wide array of publications in analytical and continental philosophy as well as literary and cultural theory. In each of his two major works, Wittgenstein developed a new style of writing that represented a new point of view from which to regard many of the same crises of language, faith, experience, self, and other that are the central issues of modernism. The prima facie case for considering Wittgenstein a philosophical modernist is thus immediately compelling. And yet, with the notable exceptions of Cavell and Eagleton, Wittgenstein has rarely been thought of as a modernist figure. As late as the 1990s, Michael Fischer could observe correctly that “discussions of modernism usually omit Wittgenstein, and discussions of Wittgenstein usually ignore modernism.”5 The reasons for this omission or evasion pertain to disciplinary configurations and intellectual history. The first is terminological and field specific: “modernism” is not a term of art in philosophy; it is, rather, a term of the arts. The designation “modern philosophy” continues to refer to the period stretching from Descartes to Kant, and as such it distinguishes that period from ancient or medieval philosophy. By these conventions, Wittgenstein is not a “modern” philosopher, and no philosophers are “modernists.” The second reason is more substantial: Wittgenstein and the Tractatus were for many years associated with the philosophy of logical positivism, which defined itself as antithetical to the arts and to history. Rudolf Carnap, the preeminent figure of the Vienna Circle of logical positivists, writes in the preface to his 1929 work, The Logical Structure of the World, that a successful scientific approach “will eliminate all speculative or poetic work from philosophy.”6 Carnap’s Berlin Circle counterpart, Hans Reichenbach, who coedited the positivist journal Erkenntnis with Carnap, opens his 1951 work, The Rise of Scientific Philosophy, by proudly pronouncing that “philosophy has proceeded from speculation to science” and concludes it by wryly remarking that, with regard to the history of philosophy, “one should always remember that it is history, and not philosophy.”7 Although Wittgenstein resisted the logical positivists’ reading and appropriation of his work, they were influential in establishing his reputation as a “scientific philosopher.”8 Anglo-American analytic philosophy would go on to solidify this reputation. From a different quarter, Theodor Adorno likewise characterized the Tractatus as a positivist text, though his evaluation of that fact differed decidedly from Carnap’s: “As long as philosophy is no more than the cult of ‘what is the case,’ in Wittgenstein’s formula, it enters into competition with the sciences to which in delusion it assimilates itself— and loses.”9 In its turn, Philosophical Investigations, all but ignored by Adorno, was criticized

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by Adorno’s Frankfurt School colleague Herbert Marcuse for its scientism and positivism: “Wittgenstein’s assurance that philosophy ‘leaves everything as it is’— such statements exhibit, to my mind, academic sado-masochism, self-humiliation, and self-denunciation of the intellectual whose labor does not issue in scientific, technical or like achievements.”10 Wittgenstein, both early and late, is thus alternately applauded or denigrated as a figure of what Marcuse calls “neo-positivism.” Either way, Wittgenstein’s philosophy was for many years associated with a techno-scientific worldview that was antithetical to both history and the arts even as the term “modernism” came to designate an aesthetic style and a period of cultural, literary, and art history. In this narrative of two cultures, with science and technology on one side and literature and the arts on the other, Wittgenstein is positioned squarely in the former camp. His philosophy helped create the disciplinary distinctions that rendered it illegible as modernist.11 But while this narrative of intellectual history accurately reflects the early reception of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, it distorts the nature of that philosophy and its later influence. Far from attempting to eliminate poetic elements from philosophy in the name of scientific strictness, Wittgenstein conceived of philosophy in poetic terms: “Philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition [dichten],” he writes in a 1934 notebook.12 While a 1937 review of Yeats’s The Vision refers to Wittgenstein as the “prince of Positivists,” Marjorie Perloff describes him as the “patron saint for poets and artists,” and Eagleton likewise describes him as “the philosopher of poets and composers, playwrights and novelists.”13 Perloff ’s Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary (1996) remains one of the most compelling statements of the affinities between Wittgenstein’s philosophy and literary modernism. In chapter 2 of this collection, Perloff focuses on another bête noire of logical positivism, not poetry but religion, showing how Wittgenstein’s contradictory but nevertheless insistent remarks about Christianity treat religion less as a matter of divine faith than as a set of practices within a form of life. Central to Perloff ’s examination of Wittgenstein’s “outsider” relationship to modernism is an attempt to answer the question of what it means to make self-transformation one’s central purpose in life. Her chapter accounts for ways in which such a desire for transformation informs Wittgenstein’s elaboration of a philosophy of everyday language and life in defiance of philosophical theories or systems. The centrality of transformative longing to both Wittgenstein’s philosophy and literary modernism is also a focus of chapter 9, by Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé, which reads the Tractatus alongside the “Ithaca” chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses. Zumhagen-Yekplé examines Wittgenstein’s antimetaphysical and antitheoretical philosophical aims in terms of the

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quests for the “right way of living” or “seeing the world aright” that exceed the ephemeral epiphanic moments that have become a critical mainstay of modernist studies. In chapter 5 of this volume, Piergiorgio Donatelli also discusses connections between Wittgenstein’s concerns with everyday life and its relationship to “the higher.” Donatelli suggests that Wittgenstein aims in the Tractatus to liberate us from desires of idealization that lead us to see “the higher” as something superluminescent in language rather than as something we find in what is absent from language. Like Perloff, Donatelli asks how a reading of Wittgenstein, situated within the development of Austrian modernism, can help us understand modernism’s concern for new forms of expression in the arts as a need for a radical reform of our lives. Among literary critics, Perloff ’s contribution to our understanding of Wittgenstein’s philosophy viewed within the context of studies in twentiethcentury literature is matched perhaps only by that of Charles Altieri, whose groundbreaking work on Wittgenstein goes back to Act and Quality: A Theory of Literary Meaning and Humanistic Understanding (1981), written during the height of American literary scholars’ enthrallment with continental philosophy. In chapter 2 and chapter 3, respectively, Perloff and Altieri adopt different methods to reach similar conclusions regarding Wittgenstein’s relation to modernism. Whereas Perloff takes a biographical approach to studying Wittgenstein’s attitude toward religion, Altieri offers a theoretical investigation into the expressivist values of modernist aesthetics— values occluded in contemporary literary criticism and aesthetic theory but legible in terms of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. Altieri notes that while “Wittgenstein did not have great sympathy with modernism,” he nevertheless “had a modernist distrust of the lyrical subject contemplating its inwardness” (57); Perloff notes that although Wittgenstein considered himself “a confirmed antimodernist,” he is nevertheless “a thorough if unwitting modernist” (41–42). Both Altieri and Perloff find evidence of Wittgenstein’s apparent antimodernism in his scattered aesthetic judgments— his preference for Schubert over Mahler, for example. But this propensity itself, this habit of propounding aesthetic judgments with little and sometimes no explanation, identifies Wittgenstein, Perloff suggests elsewhere, with the modernist milieu of late-Habsburg Vienna.14 Thus Wittgenstein simultaneously appears to be an unacknowledged modernist, an avowed antimodernist, and then again a modernist malgré lui. The apparent contradictions that arise in considering Wittgenstein’s philosophy result in part from the apparent contradictions within the idea of modernism itself, particularly the different valences of the terms “modernity” and “modernism.”15 The latter term, modernism, reflects the processes of social modernization and cultural modernity even as it signifies a critique of those processes.

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On this basis, Cavell distinguishes between “modernizers” and “modernists,” the former “bent merely on newness” and progress and the latter embroiled in a more complex relationship with both tradition and the present moment.16 By these lights, logical positivism is a modernizing philosophy insofar as it reflects a philosophical and scientific modernity— an underlying assumption of cultural, scientific, and technological progress based on logic, reason, and experiment rather than on faith, dogma, or revelation. Inasmuch as modernist art and literature share these qualities, they also reflect an underlying modernity; inasmuch as they criticize the very idea of progress or the sanctification of science, they simultaneously represent a reaction against modernity. Wittgenstein’s work reflects this doubled nature of the relationship between modernism and modernity. At first glance, the bulk of the Tractatus appears to embody the type of “scientific worldview” that the logical positivists espoused (and indeed articulated in large part based on their collective reading of Wittgenstein), but in its final moments, the text turns around to discuss questions of life, death, ethics, and mysticism— remarks the positivists ignored. Wittgenstein famously describes the Tractatus, in a letter to Ludwig von Ficker, as “strictly philosophical and, at the same time, literary.”17 As such, the text can be read “as a document of either philosophical modernity or literary modernism.”18 More generally, because it embodies elements of both scientific modernity and aesthetic modernism, the Tractatus could serve as the philosophical bible for the positivists even as Wittgenstein could become the patron saint of poets. Wittgenstein’s literary modernism advances an aesthetic critique of a scientific modernity that it appears to embody. While Perloff finds in Wittgenstein’s writing a negative capability that informs his modernism, in chapter 1 of this volume, Anthony Cascardi suggests that Wittgenstein’s writings, early and late, mark out “a negative ground” in which the limitations of modernity are revealed and the distinctions between philosophy and literature are troubled: Modernity is incomplete not because its ambitions never could be fully realized but rather because its limits were bound, in time, to be discovered and reflected back into that very project itself, providing ever new materials for critique. This self-reflective version of modernity is central to “modernism,” or so I would propose, and it is as part of this process that the various modern disciplines and artforms were transformed by an engagement with the limits of the very elements that are most essential to them and by a discovery of their surprisingly intimate connection to those things that might have appeared most alien (24).19

Cascardi sets Wittgenstein’s work in dialogue with a series of contemporary literary texts by Woolf, Stein, and Beckett (with reference to Kant and Nietz-

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sche and attention to aspects of the Romantic tradition that continue to inflect modernism). He suggests that the negative ground created by Wittgenstein’s successive redefinitions of the practice of philosophy in the ancillary Tractatus and propaedeutical Investigations brings clarity to the philosophical dimension of literary modernism that shows how “conventional distinctions between ‘literature’ and ‘philosophy’ may not hold.” “With regard to both these forms of writing,” Cascardi writes, “modernism is not just the place where the distinctions between them break down but rather the place where acknowledging something of value about the other is a crucial element in each one’s overcoming the grip of its own tradition” (25). In chapter 8, Kristin Boyce, building on the work of Cavell and Michael Fried, describes a similar state of affairs, one in which modernist philosophy exists in the condition of art and modernist art exists in the condition of philosophy.20 Boyce reads “condition” as a term signifying both a situation that is enabling (as in “conditions of possibility”) and as a state that one suffers (as in a “chronic condition”). Reading the relationship between modernist literature and philosophy along these lines, she suggests, reveals that “the relation between these two enterprises is both deeper and more difficult than has yet been appreciated” (155), a point Boyce illustrates through a reading of Henry James’s The Sacred Fount. Wittgenstein’s philosophical and simultaneously literary, or poetic, writing reveals these conditions, and the contradictions that characterize them, as exemplary of the modernist situation. Wittgenstein’s philosophy does not merely reflect the contradictions of modernity and modernism and of philosophy and literature; it also helps situate and describe those contradictions. While modernism’s historical transformations as a term of art have yielded shifting and at times competing definitions, Wittgenstein’s philosophy provides the conceptual apparatus— in its discussion of language games and family resemblances, for example— that allows one to understand these differences as exemplary rather than anomalous: “And the result of this examination is: we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail.”21 Such concepts do not resolve contradictions between this and that definition of modernism; rather, they situate those definitions within the linguistic practices and cultural formations in which they appear. If, as Cavell suggests, and as we discuss further below, the modernist situation arises when the very criteria for deciding whether or not a particular cultural production qualifies as art or as philosophy, when the very conditions for making art or doing philosophy are at stake in the effort to make or do, then it follows that definitions of the enterprise will contrast, compete, and even contradict. Wittgenstein’s philosophy enacts rather than

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resolves the contradictions of modernism in an effort to dissolve rather than solve the problems of modernity. Intellectual histories that place Wittgenstein exclusively in the analytic philosophical tradition of Frege and Russell occlude or suppress Wittgenstein’s connections to contemporary artists and the influence his philosophy subsequently exerts on the arts. In his book Signs of Sense (2001), Eli Friedlander sees the Tractatus as representing a bridge between the analytic and continental traditions in philosophy. He draws attention to the fate of Wittgenstein’s book as one “bound up with the fate of the divide between the two traditions of philosophy, the analytic or Anglo-American and the existentialphenomenological, or so-called Continental tradition.” Friedlander conceives of Wittgenstein’s work, both early and late, “as a possible mediation between those two directions of modern philosophy.”22 His contribution to this volume, chapter 6, enacts those claims by charting affinities between the work of Wittgenstein and that of Walter Benjamin. All of these texts paved the way for further work on Wittgenstein in relation to modernist literature, art, and culture. Wittgenstein’s writing became increasingly legible in a modernist context with the publication of his remarks on religion, ethics, and the arts from his Nachlass, compiled in volumes like Culture and Value, to which multiple contributors to this volume refer, as well as with the publication of notes on conversations with Wittgenstein recorded by Maurice Drury, Rush Rhees, and others; the publication of student notes on Wittgenstein’s Cambridge lectures; and with Ray Monk’s influential intellectual biography of Wittgenstein.23 More than forty years ago, Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin’s Wittgenstein’s Vienna persuasively offered an alternative— and distinctly modernist— intellectual and cultural context within with to situate Wittgenstein’s work, emphasizing the roots of the Tractatus in late-Habsburg Vienna, “one of the most fertile, original and creative periods in art and architecture, music, literature and psychology, as well as in philosophy.”24 Wittgenstein was a product of fin-de-siècle Vienna, what Janik and Toulmin describe in their groundbreaking book as “twentieth-century culture in its infancy; the ‘modernism’ of the early 1900s.”25 The decades preceding Wittgenstein’s birth in Vienna saw those of Sigmund Freud (1856– 1939), Theodor Herzl (1860– 1904), Gustav Klimt (1862– 1918), Adolf Loos (1870– 1933), Karl Kraus (1874– 1936), Arnold Schoenberg (1874– 1951), Robert Musil (1880– 1942), Otto Weininger (1880– 1903), and Stefan Zweig (1881– 1942). Janik and Toulmin demonstrate “the significance of links between Wittgenstein and the Viennese, German-language thought and art of his time that have been obscured as a result of his later association with the English-speaking philosophers of, for example, Cambridge and Cornell.”26 Wittgenstein’s Vienna, as relevant today as when it was first

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published, makes plain the modernist characteristics of Wittgenstein’s work by demonstrating how his work shares the preoccupations of a broader cultural modernism encompassing art, architecture, music, and philosophy. This volume similarly interprets modernism as referring more broadly to modernist cultural production, as evinced in Perloff ’s discussion of Wittgenstein and religion, Janik’s and Donatelli’s discussions of architecture, and Friedlander’s discussion of photography. As Wittgenstein’s Vienna makes clear, the tensions and contradictions between modernity and modernism— between the modern and the modernist— are nowhere more clearly evident than in fin-de-siècle Vienna. In chapter 4 of this volume, Janik demonstrates how Loos developed a “critical modernist approach to architecture and design” (88) that directly influenced Wittgenstein’s concept of philosophy and his way of building. Wittgenstein, who, along with Paul Engelmann (a student of Loos and secretary to Karl Kraus), designed a house for Wittgenstein’s sister Margaret Stonborough, acknowledged his affinities with Loos and listed him as an influence on his work. Wittgenstein’s intellectual affinities with Loos, Janik states, provide “deeper insight into Wittgenstein’s concept of philosophical analysis as craftsmanship and thus a key to understanding the philosophical significance of his style” (72). One need think only of the opening scenes of the Philosophical Investigations, with their shopkeepers, builders, and teachers, to see the intuitive appeal of this idea. Recall also that when Wittgenstein introduces the Philosophical Investigations as “a number of sketches of landscapes,” he describes himself as “a weak draughtsman” (PI ix). In their complementary attitudes toward questions of style, Wittgenstein and Loos, Janik demonstrates, “represent a highly peculiar form of Viennese modernism” (72). Donatelli’s essay likewise discusses how Loos and Wittgenstein share, along with their contemporary Robert Musil, “modernism’s concern for new forms of expression in the arts as a need for a radical reform of our lives” (91). Wittgenstein and Musil, Donatelli suggests, view the modernist situation as presenting “a new problem which requires an inventiveness, a turning around of our conceptions, a capacity to change our ways of seeing our life in its various moments and dimensions” (112). Their shared longing to clarify the relation between facts and values evinces a “modernist dissatisfaction with current creative forms of expressivity” (113). This alternate narrative of the origins and reception of Wittgenstein’s early philosophy— Wittgenstein’s Vienna focuses primarily on the Tractatus— a narrative that emphasizes Musil’s Kakania as much as Russell’s Cambridge, helps uncover an ongoing preoccupation with “the modern” throughout Wittgenstein’s career. Wittgenstein’s later writings evince a confrontational or antithetical attitude toward what he regarded as the spirit of the times.

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In his initial work after returning to Cambridge— the period in between his “early” and “late” philosophy— he repeatedly distinguishes his approach from the dominant trends of the time, which he characterizes as a modern preoccupation with scientific progress. In 1929, the same year that Carnap published The Logical Structure of the World, Wittgenstein delivered his “Lecture on Ethics” to the Heretics’ Society at Cambridge. In his opening remarks, he implicitly resists the very idea of a scientific philosophy, and of a scientific lecture, insisting to his audience that he would not be delivering “what’s called a popular-scientific lecture, that is a lecture intended to make you believe that you understand a thing which actually you don’t understand, and to gratify what I believe to be one of the lowest desires of modern people.”27 In chapter 10 of this volume, Yi-Ping Ong discusses this line in detail, comparing Wittgenstein’s use of the lecture form with Kafka’s fictional lecture in “A Report to an Academy.” In discussing the scene of instruction that the lecture form implies, Ong notes “a recurring concern of the lecturer with conditions of voice, a concern that anticipates an antagonistic relation between the desire of the speaking self to communicate and the conventions that shape the expectations of the audience” (210). Ong reads Wittgenstein’s lecture and Kafka’s story as modernist scenes of instruction that perform the incommensurability of the desires of the teacher and those of the audience and of the content to be expressed and the available forms of expression. Behind Wittgenstein’s ambivalence toward the lecture form lies a resistance to what he considers the modern desire for knowledge conceived of narrowly in scientific terms. In November 1930, Wittgenstein drafted a foreword to a volume that would never be completed and would only be published, under the title Philosophical Remarks, more than a decade after his death. In it, he defines his work in opposition to a modernity defined by its ideal of progress: 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 in 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.28

Wittgenstein defines the dominant spirit of the times as a constant striving for progress, for new “structures” that would eclipse the existing ones in scale

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and complexity. He then defines the philosophical spirit of his work as opposed to this spirit (he remarked years later that “the idea of great progress is a delusion” [CV 56]) and distinguishes his own aims in terms of perspicuity. That emphasis on perspicuity factors into Wittgenstein’s 1931 remarks on Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890– 1915), a text that Eliot drew on extensively in composing The Waste Land. In his treatment of Frazer, Wittgenstein develops similar criticisms of the idea of historical progress or cultural evolution and proposes in their place the concept of perspicuous representation. Wittgenstein suggests that the fallacy of historical progress lies in part in the logical necessity it presumes, as if history could not have unfolded any other way and as if a narrative of progress is the only way to account for differences in cultural practices among different places, times, and traditions: “The historical explanation,” Wittgenstein writes, “as an hypothesis of development, is only one way of assembling the data— of their synopsis. It is just as possible to see the data in their relation to one another and to embrace them in a general picture without putting it in the form of an hypothesis about temporal development.”29 Wittgenstein’s intervention goes beyond refuting a teleological notion of historical development by calling attention to the fact that such narratives of progress are ways of “assembling the data” or of seeing the evidence. Against such modernizing notions of progress— characterized by anachronism and anthropomorphism— Wittgenstein lists alternate ways of understanding, for example, a cultural law or taboo of the sort discussed by Frazer as “primitive”: “I can represent this law, this idea, by means of an evolutionary hypothesis, or also, analogously to the schema of a plant, by means of the schema of a religious ceremony, but also by means of its factual content alone, in a ‘perspicuous’ representation.”30 Wittgenstein calls attention to the contingency of evolutionary hypotheses as explanatory schemes, offers alternatives (the schema of a plant or that of a religious ceremony), and then alights upon his idea of perspicuous representation. These early statements contrasting progress with perspicuity anticipate one of the most telling formulations of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy: A main source of our failure to understand is that we do not command a clear view 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.” Hence the importance of finding intermediate cases. The concept of a perspicuous representation is of fundamental significance for us. It earmarks the form of account we give, the way we look at things. (Is this a ‘Weltanschauung’?). (PI §122)

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In his emphasis on aesthetic form (“the form of representation”) and a philosophical worldview (“the way we look at things . . . Weltanschauung”), Wittgenstein’s definition of perspicuous representation functions as a statement of aesthetic modernism, a way of presenting a picture of a phenomenon or practice that encourages a new way of seeing the world. In chapter 7 of this collection, John Gibson joins Boyce and Cascardi in formulating ways in which to see Wittgenstein’s modernism as staging a productive ground for addressing the relationship between philosophy and literature. Like Cascardi, Donatelli, and Zumhagen-Yekplé, Gibson highlights ways in which Wittgenstein’s works raise the same problems at issue in peculiarly difficult works of modernist literature composed with what he calls a “willed opacity” (134). He describes Wittgenstein’s concept of übersichliche Darstellung, that is, “synoptic” “surveyable,” or— in Anscombe’s most familiar English rendering— “perspicuous” representation, as simultaneously an aesthetic form and a philosophical approach: “This notion of a ‘perspicuous presentation’ is as close as we get in the later Wittgenstein to a statement of philosophical method. Note that perspicuous presentations are not representations of anything real at all . . . perspicuous presentations offer what an aesthetician would call an essentially imaginative experience, yielding typically artificial, fictionalized scenarios the appreciation of which helps us turn back to the real world and see it aright” (144). In addition to being an aesthetic form in the sense of providing a way of seeing or perceiving, Wittgenstein’s perspicuous representations are also poetic acts, as Friedlander emphasizes in his discussion of the analogous aesthetic strategies of Wittgenstein and Benjamin. The connections that perspicuous representations reveal, Friedlander suggests, are not found but made: “The connectedness of surroundings, the kind of continuity that characterizes not physical space but rather an environment of meaning, is not something given. It is not only the artist that has to make or construct something in order to compel us to see the world from this perspective, but thinking also must be constructive, not thereby creating something artificial or conventional, but precisely allowing us to occupy a more natural point of view” (121). It is in this sense of constructing a representation that is nevertheless more natural— Gibson and Friedlander both discuss an ideal of “pure realism”— that Wittgenstein states that philosophy ought to be written as a form of poetry (“Philosophie dürfte man eigentlich nur dichten”; CV 24). Janik reminds us that Dichtung means not lyric poetry per se but “the genus fiction of which lyric, drama, and epic are the species” (84); in writing philosophy as poetry, Wittgenstein draws on the resources of fiction in his “project of clarification” (CV 24). This crucial aspect of Wittgenstein’s thought finds its

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initial articulations in the context of a response to the modern worldview, a point Donatelli emphasizes in describing perspicuous representation as a form of Wittgenstein’s modernism: “[E]ven if Wittgenstein retains the sense that the currents of European civilization do not offer the conditions for finding new means of expressing values—new ordering concepts which allow for new forms of individual creativity—his entire later work is addressed to finding such ordering concepts, such surveyable representations, new ways of seeing things, new conceptions” (111). In Wittgenstein’s discussion of perspicuous representation, the truth and method of his later philosophy, one sees elements of modernism as a historical designation, an aesthetic style, and finally a worldview. Wittgenstein, as we have seen, initially appears antimodern in his resistance to what he perceives as the scientific spirit of the age. But his modernism emerges in his critique of evolutionary hypotheses of historical progress. Rather than emphasize progress, Wittgenstein presents a different way of viewing the world that yields an altogether different worldview— a worldview that is not, moreover, divorced from his style of writing but both the cause and effect of it. The modernist connections of this philosophical worldview and aesthetic form are clear, from Forster’s exhortation to “only connect” (which Cascardi uses as the epigraph to his essay) to Conrad’s definition of his task as “before all, to make you see.”31 Wittgenstein’s remark that philosophy ought to be written as a form of poetry is often evoked as evidence of his literary sympathies or aesthetic sensibilities, but less frequently quoted are the sentences that immediately follow the remark: “I think I summed up my attitude to philosophy when I said: philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition. It must, as it seems to me, be possible to gather from this how far my thinking belongs to the present, future or past. For I was thereby revealing myself as someone who cannot quite do what he would like to be able to do” (CV 24). To think that philosophy should be written as poetry, Wittgenstein implies, puts him at odds with the present, as someone “who cannot quite do what he would like to be able to do.” Wittgenstein once said to his former student Maurice Drury that his type of thinking was “not wanted in this present age.” “I have to swim so strongly against the tide,” he continued. “Perhaps in a hundred years people will really want what I am writing.”32 His work, therefore, might belong either to the past or to the future— or to neither. Thus if Wittgenstein’s life and work span the period of cultural modernism broadly conceived, he implies in this comment that he is at odds with the spirit of the modern age (what in the Tractatus he refers to as “the whole modern conception of the world”).33 And yet he is at odds with that modernity inasmuch as he thinks that philosophy ought to be written as a form of poetry— inasmuch, that is

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to say, as he appears much more of a modernist philosopher than his logical positivist contemporaries. Out of Wittgenstein’s antagonism toward modernity emerges a distinctly modernist philosophical style and worldview. One of the most prescient and longstanding articulations of the relationship between Wittgenstein’s later philosophy and cultural modernism can be found in the work of Stanley Cavell, particularly his first two books, Must We Mean What We Say? (1969) and The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (1979). Cavell’s discussions of Wittgenstein and his discussions of modernism often unfold independently but always resonate distinctly. “I have from the first time I undertook to teach Philosophical Investigations,” Cavell writes in his contribution to the volume The Literary Wittgenstein, “sought to articulate my sense of it as a work of modernity, one that perpetually questions its medium and its sense of a break with the past.”34 It is not simply the case, therefore, that Cavell is a philosopher who writes about (the later) Wittgenstein and who also happens to write about modernism; rather, Cavell is a philosopher whose lifelong consideration of Wittgenstein’s philosophy develops as an attempt to articulate its modernity: “Part of my sense of the Investigations as a modernist work is that its portrait of the human is recognizable as one of the modern self, or, as we are given to say, the modern subject.”35 In chapter 11 of this collection, Michael LeMahieu suggests that Wittgenstein’s private language argument— precisely inasmuch as it arises in response to a form of skepticism about the desire for a coherent self and the possibilities for attaining a social bond with others— helps us understand the modernist concerns and contradictions of Saul Bellow’s fiction. Bellow’s novels dramatize Wittgenstein’s imagined private language, which in turn offers both a description of Bellow’s characteristic mode of narration and a figure of the obstacle that those narratives must overcome. The problem faced by Bellow’s protagonists as they seek to recover experiences of shared humanity is precisely the one Wittgenstein addresses in his private language argument: how to refer to a private feeling experienced in the past and go on to use it as a standard applicable to future emotion and behavior. Cavell’s remarks about modernity and modernism— “the modern,” as he often puts it— are cogent but not contiguous. The essays that comprise Must We Mean What We Say?, essays that range from music to aesthetics to literary criticism to ordinary language philosophy, represent one of the most compelling arguments for Wittgenstein’s standing as a modernist philosopher.36 In his characterization of the Philosophical Investigations above, Cavell offers two basic features of his definition of modernism: a modernist work is one that breaks with the past and that questions its own medium. The foreword to Must We Mean What We Say? offers more nuanced guidance regarding

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Cavell’s use of the term: “The essential fact of (what I refer to as) the modern lies in the relation between the present practice of an enterprise and the history of that enterprise, in the fact that that this relationship has become problematic” (MWMS xxxiii). Such is the condition of art for Cavell when it is placed within “the modernist situation” or faces “the modernist difficulty.” More than simply the development of new techniques or practices, art in a condition of modernity reconsiders the relationship of the enterprise’s current state of affairs to its past, taking itself as its own subject matter and questioning the very definition of art: This is the beginning of what I have called the modern, characterizing it as a moment in which history and its conventions can no longer be taken for granted; the time in which music and painting and poetry (like nations) have to define themselves against their pasts; the beginning of the moment in which each of the arts becomes its own subject, as if its immediate artistic task is to establish its own existence. The new difficulty which comes to light in the modernist situation is that of maintaining one’s belief in one’s own enterprise, for the past and the present become problematic together. (MWMS xxxvi)

Cavell’s description of modernism as a self-conscious, self-referential consideration of its own status as an enterprise recalls discussions of modernism’s “aesthetic autonomy” in literature and the arts. Cavell refers to this defining feature of modern art as “modernism laying bare its art” (MWMS 220). But he understands autonomy to be a problem with which the modern artist struggles rather than a point from which the modern artist departs: “In modernist arts the achievement of autonomy of the object is a problem— the artistic problem. Autonomy is no longer provided by the conventions of an art, for the modernist artist has continuously to question the conventions upon which his art has depended” (MWMS 116). Autonomy is a problem in part because, with no given criteria governing what counts as a symphony, a painting, or a poem— let alone how to compose or paint or write— “the threat of fraudulence” is ever present and, for Cavell, “characteristic of the modern” (MWMS 229). Cavell does not claim, however, that modernism breaks entirely from the past in the interests of purity or autonomy; for Cavell, modernism is not a rejection of history but a problematization of history. It is on this basis that he distinguishes modernists from modernizers, who are “bent merely on newness, do not have history as a problem, that is, as a commitment” (MWMS xxxvi). Thus while Cavell does not deny the modernist desire to “make it new”— “the problem of modernism” he defines as “the attempt to do in every

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work what has never been done” (MWMS 195– 96)— he distinguishes genuine artistic innovation from “an obsession with new-ness” (MWMS 185). Rather than an outright rejection, the very idea of modernism implies a complex relationship to the past: “What looks like ‘breaking with tradition’ in the succession of art is not really that; or is that only after the fact, looking historically and critically; or is that only as a result and not as a motive: the unheard of appearance of the modern in art is an effort not to break, but to keep faith with tradition” (MWMS 206). Yet modernism’s peculiar way of keeping faith is to question constantly: “What the modern puts into question is not merely, so to speak, itself, but its tradition as a whole” (MWMS 222). Cavell’s remarks here resonate with Eliot’s understanding of the tradition of literature, of the ways in which individual talents issue out of and in turn inflect entire traditions. Cavell’s particular version of modernism’s relationship to its past, of enterprise and individual practice, takes the form of repudiation and acknowledgment: “Innovation in philosophy has characteristically gone together with a repudiation— a specifically cast repudiation— of most of the history of the subject” (MWMS xxxiii). Another way of putting the point would be to say that philosophical innovators, modernists, attempt to effect a paradigm shift in the field, part of which is a repudiation of the past. But Cavell doesn’t just say “a repudiation”; he points to “a specifically cast repudiation,” and that specific cast is not indifference, ignorance, or apathy but rather a form of Cavell’s touchstone term, “acknowledgment”: “In the later Wittgenstein (and, I would now add, in Heidegger’s Being and Time) the repudiation of the past has a transformed significance, as though containing the consciousness that history will not go away, except through our perfect acknowledgment of it (in particular, our acknowledgment that it is not past), and that one’s own practice and ambition can be identified only against the continuous experience of the past” (MWMS xxxiii). With Cavell’s views in mind, consider the difference between the respective openings of the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein expresses an indifference to his philosophical precursors in the preface to his first work— “I give no sources, because it is indifferent to me whether what I have thought has already been thought before me by another” (TLP 3)— and then goes on to define, unabashedly, “the world.” The later Wittgenstein of the Investigations, by contrast, begins with a long quotation from one of his philosophical precursors. And although Wittgenstein almost immediately repudiates the “Augustinian” view of language that he finds in the Confessions, that repudiation is also an acknowledgement of the continued (and often unacknowledged) presence of precisely that view. Unlike Heidegger, Wittgenstein was not particularly learned in the history

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of philosophy, but in this opening gambit, one sees a modernist philosophy defined through a simultaneous repudiation and acknowledgement of ancient philosophy. It is a testament to the courage and prescience of Cavell’s work that so early in his career, at a time when logical positivism still provided the terms of the dominant paradigm in Anglo-American philosophy, he did not view philosophy as immune from cultural and artistic developments: “The writing of philosophy is difficult in a new way. . . . I believe that philosophy shares the modernist difficulty now everywhere evident in the major arts, the difficulty of making one’s present effort become a part of the present history of the enterprise to which one has committed one’s mind” (MWMS xxxvi). And in this regard, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations is Cavell’s exemplary text of modernist difficulty: “The difficulty of philosophizing, and especially of fruitful criticism of philosophy, is one of Wittgenstein’s great themes” (MWMS 45). For Cavell, Wittgenstein’s work not only takes philosophy as its own subject matter but also teaches its readers to do the same: “Wittgenstein’s Investigations became for me not simply an object of interpretation but a means of interpretation.”37 Wittgenstein’s stylistic innovations and accomplishments also mark him as a modernist, and in this regard, too, Cavell has been Wittgenstein’s most innovative and accomplished reader: “The first thing to be said in accounting for his style is that he writes: he does not report, he does not write up results” (MWMS 70). Cavell’s distinction between writing and reporting bears consideration, for the difference between the two reflects a difference in understanding what constitutes philosophy for Wittgenstein. For the logical positivists, who conceived of philosophy on the model of the natural sciences, reporting results is the function of philosophical writing. Note the style of Carnap’s opening sentences in the first edition of The Logical Structure of the World: “What is the purpose of a scientific book? It is meant to convince the reader of the validity of the thoughts which it presents.”38 Now compare Wittgenstein’s first two sentences in the preface to the Tractatus: “Perhaps this book will be understood only by someone who has himself already had the thoughts that are expressed in it— or at least similar thoughts.— So it is not a textbook” (TLP 3). Despite the fact that Wittgenstein’s text was so influential for Carnap, and despite some surface similarities in the content of their respective opening sentences, the attitude toward their respective works and the implied relationship between writing and reading could not be more different. Whereas the goal of Carnap’s book is universal validity, the purpose of Wittgenstein’s book, he writes, “would be achieved if it gave pleasure to one person who read and understood it” (TLP 3). Now compare the first sen-

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tences of the opening two paragraphs of the preface to the Philosophical Investigations: “The thoughts which I publish in what follows are the precipitate of philosophical investigations which have occupied me for the last sixteen years. . . . After several unsuccessful attempts to weld my results together . . . I realized I should never succeed” (PI “Preface” xxix). Wittgenstein’s style, which cannot be separated from his method, enacts a philosophy aiming not for scientific progress or universal truth but instead for perspicuous representations of linguistic practices embedded in forms of life. Unlike Carnap’s examination of the ideal conditions of language, Wittgenstein examines ordinary language in “a number of sketches of landscapes” (PI “Preface” xxix). According to Cavell’s philosophical and cultural history, ordinary language philosophy, as augured in the work of Wittgenstein and as inaugurated in that of J. L. Austin, represents a modernist revolution in the field. The modernist situation in philosophy is one in which “normal” philosophy gives way to revolutionary approaches: Austin and Wittgenstein “thought of their work as revolutionary— not merely because what they did was new (something which can be overrated or overprized) but because they also thought it plain enough and immediately fruitful enough to establish a new common practice in thinking, and open to talent regardless of its standing within old intellectual orders. This is another guise of the issue of the modern” (MWMS xxxix). Ordinary language philosophy might seem an unlikely representative of philosophical modernism. With its emphasis on what we do and what we say, with an often assumed or unacknowledged notion of who “we” are, ordinary language philosophy seems to preserve, even revere, tradition and established practices rather than attempting to break with tradition and invent new practices. Two points are important in response to this implied objection: the first pertaining to the nature of modernism and the second to the project of ordinary language philosophy, particularly as practiced by Wittgenstein. From the first attempts to account for modernism, the phenomenon in question has been characterized by terms like “revolutionary.” To take just one example, Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, in their introductory essay to their influential textbook, define modernism in the opening paragraph as one of “those fundamental dislocations, those cataclysmic upheavals of culture, those fundamental convulsions of the creative human spirit that seem to topple even the most solid and substantial of our beliefs and assumptions.”39 The revolutions or dislocations effected by modernism are often accompanied by a sense of “shock,” another key term for modernists. In this regard, ordinary language philosophers seem to represent a reaction against modernism: a return to the given, the habitual, the established. And while the Tractatus might remain an exemplary modernist text, the Investigations might appear otherwise. As

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Lisi Schoenbach argues in Pragmatic Modernism, however, modernist philosophy and literature— from the poetry of Gertrude Stein to the novels of Marcel Proust to the profoundly influential but frequently overlooked work of John Dewey— maintained a persistent fascination with habit and convention, which are touchstones of Wittgenstein’s later work.40 Wittgenstein’s philosophy in particular, and more generally the ordinary language philosophy he inspired, marks, in addition to the “revolutionary” departure that Cavell describes, one of the most trenchant and sustained investigations not simply of our habits but also of those deeply ingrained assumptions about what we do when we say we’re doing philosophy, or making a promise, or writing a poem. The coexistence of the revolutionary jolts of modernism alongside the habitual practices of a given enterprise is a defining feature of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, and it is also crucial to understanding Cavell’s notion of the modern. Wittgenstein’s method of examining existing linguistic practices, as is clear in his concept of perspicuous representation, is profoundly aesthetic, a point Gibson makes in his discussion of Wittgenstein’s philosophy and Wallace Stevens’s poetry: “Wittgenstein’s ordinary language philosophy is not concerned with simply cataloguing actual instances of ‘what we say when,’ which would just be another way of privileging the empirical and thus of leading us back to the problems exposed in the Tractatus” (144). Rather, Wittgenstein’s perspicuous representations— as both aesthetic form and philosophical method— call into question the very criteria we use to determine what qualifies as a philosophical problem, to determine what counts as a poem. They exemplify, in other words, Cavell’s understanding of the modernist situation. Much has changed since Fischer’s claim that discussions of modernism omit Wittgenstein and discussions of Wittgenstein ignore modernism. For too long, Wittgenstein’s philosophy was read and understood outside of its historical and temporal context, but developments in both philosophy and literary studies afford new possibilities for understanding the modernist elements of philosophy and the philosophical elements of modernism. The decade following Fischer’s essay on Wittgenstein as a modernist philosopher saw the emergence of the “New Modernist Studies,” the birth of which Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz date to “on or about 1999.”41 The following year saw the publication of an influential volume of essays titled The New Wittgenstein.42 Claims of novelty are not, of course, new to discussions of modernism, but these developments respectively signaled an opening of the traditional modernist canon and a rethinking of received interpretations of Wittgenstein’s work. The New Wittgenstein includes essays by James Conant and Cora Diamond that represent what would come to be known as the “resolute reading” of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, a line of interpretation that

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informs Gibson’s, Donatelli’s, and Zumhagen-Yekplé’s contributions to this volume. As Zumhagen-Yekplé discusses in chapter 9, on Wittgenstein and Joyce, resolute readings locate the Tractatus’s pedagogical strength not in Wittgenstein’s attempt to put forth a metaphysical account of the connection between language and world but in his aim of effecting a dramatic shift not only in our understanding of philosophy and how it should be practiced but in our attitude toward the world and our place in it.43 Resolute readings take seriously Wittgenstein’s characterization of the book’s propositions as “nonsense” and argue that taking Wittgenstein at his word and recognizing those propositions as such makes perspicuous the therapeutic, ethical, and pedagogical import of the Tractatus. Such readings of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, Zumhagen-Yekplé suggests, offer “new dimensions for understanding his relationship to modernism that are otherwise unavailable through more traditional readings of the Tractatus. By attending to Wittgenstein’s literary sensibilities, emphasizing the relationship between the method he employs in the book and its ‘strange’ aesthetic form, and by highlighting the disjunction between the purported logical-philosophical treatise and its author’s conception of the book’s overall ethical aim, we come to see Wittgenstein’s 1921 work of philosophy as a complex modernist puzzle” (178). These developments in “The New Wittgenstein” were followed by a number of books on the literary or aesthetic elements of Wittgenstein’s philosophy— including such titles as The Literary Wittgenstein and Wittgenstein, Theory, and the Arts44— as well as a historical turn in analytic philosophy that introduced a broader cultural and intellectual context. This effort includes works such as The Story of Analytic Philosophy: Plots and Heroes, edited by Anat Biletzki and Anat Matar.45 Matar’s subsequent monograph, Modernism and the Language of Philosophy, demonstrates not only the modernist interest in philosophy but also the philosophical interest of modernism. That is to say, Matar not only identifies the Tractatus as “the pinnacle of modernism . . . a culmination of modern thought” but also focuses on “those philosophical assumptions underlying the modernist attitude towards philosophy, language, and especially philosophical language.”46 Cavell also sees the interest between philosophy and modernism, particularly with respect to Wittgenstein’s work, as a bidirectional relation: “The Investigations can be seen as a philosophy of culture, one that relates itself to its time as a time in which the continuation of philosophy is at stake.”47 The chapters in this volume form a kind of continuum with slight yet constantly varying thematic overlap as the volume progresses. Part I, “Wittgenstein’s Modernist Context,” presents Cascardi’s, Perloff ’s, Altieri’s, and Janik’s complementary discussions of Wittgenstein’s thought examined within the

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wider context of a temporal, aesthetic, cultural milieu defined by a general call for groundbreaking change in music, art, aesthetics, literature, theology, and philosophy. In Part II, “Wittgenstein’s Modernist Cultures,” Donatelli, Friedlander, and Gibson anchor their different discussions of the relationship between Wittgenstein and modernism in examinations of particular figures who altered the modernist architectural, poetic, photographic, and philosophical landscape. In Part III, “Wittgenstein and Literary Modernism,” Boyce, Zumhagen-Yekplé, Ong, and LeMahieu explore aspects of Wittgenstein’s philosophy with a focus on particular authors whose work has come to define high or late modernist literature. The essays collected here cover a lot of ground. They discuss Wittgenstein’s philosophy while touching upon a wide array of central concerns of modernism: representing the ordinary, transforming realism, making it new, making it difficult, making it clear, exploring the optics and poetics of impersonality or subjectivity, the temptations of solipsism and skepticism, ethical crises of self and other, language, faith, and understanding. They read Wittgenstein’s philosophy alongside the work of modernist figures such as Samuel Beckett, Saul Bellow, Walter Benjamin, Henry James, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Adolf Loos, Robert Musil, Wallace Stevens, and Virginia Woolf. And they expand upon Cavell’s insight, noting not simply that one can situate Wittgenstein’s philosophy within cultural modernism but also that Wittgenstein presents a modernist philosophy of culture. In so doing, they make clear a range of possible topics, thus augmenting our understanding of what can be included in the new modernist studies and also presenting new ways of understanding Wittgenstein’s modernist philosophy at a time in which the state of philosophy, literature, and the humanities writ large might still be said to exist in a modernist condition.

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Wittgenstein and Modernism in Literature: Between the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations Anthony J. Cascardi Only connect! — E . M . F o r s t e r , Howards End (1910)

Modernity/Modernism In a recent book, A Singular Modernity, Fredric Jameson suggests that modernity ought not to be thought of as a concept but rather should be understood as a category of narrative. Among the narrative frameworks under consideration (Jameson himself considers no fewer than fourteen), the strongest ones are organized around the theme of the “new” that the term “modern” so boldly announces (Ezra Pound: “Make It New”).1 This is hardly surprising. Jameson’s “singular” narrative of modernity is in fact the one that Hans Blumenberg characterized years ago as grounded in the power of “historical self-assertion.”2 Its success derives from the degree to which its own rhetorical force is transformed into a historical fact. And in this regard, Jameson is no doubt right: the “moderns” of any age tend not to establish themselves as such by conceptual argument, and the “moderns” do not necessarily share a set of common features across history, from the seventeenth century to the twentieth, that any concept might delineate; but they do all seem to engage in a rewriting of history that gives them power, and it is this rewriting that is said to mark modernity as a category of narrative. Similarly, Jameson contends that the narrative of modernity is designed to produce the effects appropriate to whatever new historical departure it claims to make, even where that shift involves overcoming earlier versions of itself: “The affirmation of the ‘modernity’ of this or that generally involves a rewriting of the narratives of modernity itself which are already in place and have become conventional wisdom. . . . All of the themes generally appealed to as ways of identifying the modern— self-consciousness or reflexivity, greater attention to language or representation, a materiality of the painted surface, and so on and so forth— all these features are mere pretexts for the rewriting operation and for secur-

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ing the effect of astonishment and conviction appropriate to the registering of a paradigm shift.”3 To see modernity in this way is nonetheless to subsume the ambitions at work behind the specific rewritings of the past that we find within its particular arts and social forms (literature, the visual arts, architecture, philosophy, etc.) under what might more properly be called a metanarrative construct. In fact, the sweeping power of a theory such as the one Jameson proposes risks reducing the project of modernity to the single trope of “rewriting” the past. (His own title does indeed underscore the singularity of modernity.) And yet, if the narrative of modernity involves an “overcoming,” one ought to be able to give some account of what is overcome and to explain how— historically or otherwise— this overcoming affects the borders of various disciplines, discourses, and social formations, not least of all because those borders may themselves be put in play as part of the many “rewritings” of the past that modernity may involve. Finally, any understanding of modernity ought not only acknowledge its will to rewrite the past, even where this might involve various particular pasts, but also see in its “rewriting” the traces of those things that are not overcome and thus to understand modernity as an “incomplete” project. Modernity is incomplete not because its ambitions never could be fully realized but rather because its limits were bound, in time, to be discovered and reflected back into that very project itself, providing ever new materials for critique. This self-reflective version of modernity is central to “modernism,” or so I would propose, and it is as part of this process that the various modern disciplines and art forms were transformed by an engagement with the limits of the very elements that are most essential to them and by a discovery of their surprisingly intimate connection to those things that might have appeared most alien. In what follows, my aim is to track the implications of these questions for literature and philosophy by setting the work of Wittgenstein in dialogue with a series of more or less contemporary literary texts by Woolf, Stein, and Beckett. I am not proposing that Wittgenstein’s writings are themselves literary, even though he himself argued that philosophy ought to be practiced only as a kind of “poetic writing” (dichten).4 Rather, I wish to suggest that in the process of giving a new definition to the form and aim of philosophy— and in doing so twice, first in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and again in the writings epitomized in the Philosophical Investigations— Wittgenstein also marked out an important “negative ground” against which the ambitions of philosophy were placed.5 This “negative ground” is the space outside of philosophy in terms of which it must come to understand its capacities and its limitations (e.g., what can and cannot be known, said) rather than any of

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the places it has drawn wrong conclusions. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus aims to overcome the confusions he diagnoses in our use of language and in our view of the world— to get us to “see the world aright.” How this is to happen is not something the book indicates explicitly; rather, it is to be constructed as the reader discovers the limitations of the book’s propositions, each one of which may nonetheless appear to make sense in itself. He indicates the problem (e.g., “The book deals with the problems of philosophy and shows . . . that the method of formulating these problems rests on the misunderstanding of the logic of our language”6) but gives us relatively little in the way of a positively stated solution or replicable method, leaving that to the reader to fathom by working his or her way through the text— climbing up the ladder of the book’s propositions and then, as it were, throwing those propositions away.7 The “negative ground” created by Wittgenstein’s successive redefinitions of the practice of philosophy in the Tractatus and the Investigations helps bring clarity to the philosophical dimension of at least two of the principal veins of modernism in literature. This matters not because we need Wittgenstein to reveal things about modernist literature that we already know to be true but precisely because his work helps show us some things about modernism’s relationship to philosophy that we may not have sufficiently realized. First, modernism explores the power of language to register the qualities of experience in consciousness, which Wittgenstein identified as standing outside of philosophy’s bounds in his early work, the Tractatus. The second is to make strange, so as to show anew, fundamental ideas about how we make meaning by stringing words and phrases together. This is not so far away from what the Investigations sought to do, albeit from a very different direction— namely, by attempting to quiet a persistent philosophical impulse. Here, as I will explain in the final section of this chapter, we are in a realm where the conventional distinctions between “literature” and “philosophy” may not hold. If Wittgenstein’s “modernism” asks philosophy to face and acknowledge its literary “outside,” then the same holds true, mutatis mutandis, for modernist literature. With regard to both these forms of writing, modernism is not just the place where the distinctions between them break down but rather the place where acknowledging something of value about the other is a crucial element in each one’s overcoming the grip of its own tradition. Wittgenstein (I): Tractatus The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) might seem like a strange place to begin a discussion of Wittgenstein as a modernist writer if one takes anything like Jameson’s narrative characterization of modernism seriously, for in pre-

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senting the Tractatus, Wittgenstein did not position himself as “rewriting” the past at all. On the contrary, he acknowledged his debts to Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell quite openly (“to the great works of Frege and the writing of my friend Bertrand Russell I owe in large measure the stimulation of my thoughts” [TLP, p. 28]). Beyond this, he said that he did not really care how new or original his ideas might be: “This book will perhaps only be understood by those who have already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it . . . what I have here written makes no claim to novelty in points of detail; and therefore I give no sources, because it is indifferent to me whether what I have thought has already been thought before me by another” (TLP, p. 27). Rather, his aim was to distinguish between what can and cannot be said clearly, and this, more than any historical achievement as such, is the singular importance he claims for the work: “I am . . . of the opinion that the [philosophical] problems have in essentials been finally resolved” (TLP, p. 28). To have fully resolved philosophy’s problems would, of course, constitute a remarkable accomplishment— implicitly a first, to be sure— and yet Wittgenstein did not stop there. The remark is not inconsistent with his view of some of the greatest philosophers of the past, as expressed in notes written some ten years later: “Reading the Socratic dialogues one has the feeling: what a frightful waste of time! What’s the point of these arguments that prove nothing and clarify nothing” (CV 14)? “Resolving” philosophy’s problems turns the Tractatus into a kind of vanishing act for anyone who would read it: “He who understands me understands [my propositions] as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them” (TLP 6.54). Wittgenstein’s word at the end of this phrase is überwinden (overcoming); indeed, the entire passage suggests a version of modernism that is not so much a historical overcoming as it is an internal overcoming, one that involves changing one’s relationship to particular habits of language and mind that, while inherited from the past, are very much a part of philosophy’s (and our) “present.” And while Wittgenstein hints that something quite new and different might follow from this work, he says precious little about what that might be (“the value of this work . . . consists in the fact that it shows how little has been done when these problems have been solved,” suggesting that some new or different kind of work must begin after the Tractatus concludes) (TLP, p. 29). The suggestion is that philosophy as the Tractatus imagines it may best serve as an ancilla— that is, in spite of its apparent “difficulty,” it aids us in approaching something more difficult still (e.g., the things that lie outside its bounds, toward which the book can point us but about which it cannot instruct us). This renders the Tractatus’s claims to have resolved philosophy’s problems considerably less definitive that they might otherwise seem.

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We can understand what the Tractatus attempts to do in two ways: one in relation to the explicit claims it makes (and these, in turn, in relation to its own claim that, once grasped, they become “senseless”8) and the other in relation to the prior history of continental philosophy, from which it turns away even more dramatically than Frege and Russell did. (This important turn was all the more consequential for Wittgenstein, whose own relationship to fin-de-siècle Viennese culture and to the writings of Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard is well known.) We can characterize this as a turning away from a philosophy concerned with the broad range of “experience” and especially from the Kantian and Romantic formulations of experience. Wittgenstein is explicit: internally, the Tractatus endeavors to explain the “world,” where “world” is understood strictly as “the totality of facts” (1.1). The particular argument Wittgenstein is working through here is that “facts” are states of affairs in the world and not “things”; “experience” is neither one. He explains further that “the facts in logical space are the world” (1.13). We can take this proposition as reversible, just as the Tractatus itself does in short order (“The world divides into facts” [1.2]). “Facts,” not values, are what matters (though what ultimately matters more is the recognition that propositions around “facts,” including as distinct from values, are “senseless”). This is a world in which all possibilities are the facts of logic; all the connections among them that might conceivably be articulated are picturable and logical (“The totality of true thoughts is a picture of the world” [3.01]). This picture is bound to be complex, since no object can be thought of apart from its (logical) connections: “Just as we cannot think of spatial objects at all apart from space, or temporal objects apart from time, so we cannot think of any object apart from its connexion with other things” (2.0121). And yet the fraught question of connection, so essential for experience and so important for modernism in literature, is never broached in the Tractatus from the perspective of consciousness.9 Indeed, it is not just experience but specifically any understanding of connected experience as it is rooted in “consciousness” that the Tractatus studiously avoids in its chiseled view of the world. “Experience” was of course a crucial term for Kantian philosophy as well as for a number of the Romantic authors who came after Kant and attempted to resolve the questions that his work left unsettled. As I will detail in the next section, “experience” continued to be central for modernist literature, though not entirely in the way Kant understood that term. For Kant, experience itself is a kind of cognition; it requires the use of our capacity of understanding, which has rules we must presuppose as already operative prior to our apprehension of the objects we may cognize.10 Experience is “knowledge by means of connected perceptions,” and the categories of space and time are “condi-

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tions of the possibility of experience” (CPR, B161, p. 171).11 To have “experience” for Kant requires, among other things, the power, through consciousness, to consolidate our many and varied representations of things: “The manifold representations, which are given in an intuition, would not be one and all my representations, if they did not all together belong to one self-consciousness. Even as my representations (even if I am not conscious of them as such) they must conform to the condition under which alone they can stand together in one universal self-consciousness, because otherwise they would not all without exception belong to me.”12 “Consciousness” (the quintessential “I think”) accompanies all our representations and is irreducible— it “cannot itself be accompanied by any further representation” (B132, 153). Contrast this with the Tractatus, where the language of “representation” is traded for “picture,” and where a picture gives us “the facts in logical space” (TLP 2.11). This is dramatically different from Kant’s understanding of the work of “representation,” where one of the greatest challenges is to align inner sense and outer sense. For Kant, “outer sense” is the means by which we represent things external to us; “inner sense” is the means by which the mind intuits its own inner state.13 But if representations are things we make, and make spontaneously, then how can we know that they correspond to the way things in the world really are? Kant’s answer revolves around the famous “Copernican turn” in his work; this is the line of argument according to which the categories for making judgments about things must correspond to the way things really are in the world, and vice versa.14 Wittgenstein’s Tractatus makes no distinction between inner and outer sense, hence it has no need to reconcile representations “in consciousness” with the way things are in the world. Neither does it take the question of “experience” on board. By contrast, the central difficulties of the Tractatus revolve around (1) the relationship between language and thought and (2) the limits of language— that is, the relationship between what can and cannot be said. As for the first of these, Wittgenstein is careful to distinguish between two kinds of form— between “language form” and “thought form.” When he says that language is articulate (3.141), he means that it makes sense in roughly the same way that a musical theme is articulate, whereas a random assemblage of notes is not. How language makes sense remains nonetheless unexplained. (The matter of “making sense” is a question that Wittgenstein puzzles over at length in the Philosophical Investigations and related writings, and one that I will address later in this chapter in connection with the work of Samuel Beckett.) Partly because of the fundamental difference in their form, the connection between language and thought is likewise never fundamentally explained: “Language disguises the thought; so that from the external form of the clothes one can-

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not infer the form of the thought they clothe, because the external form of the clothes is constructed with quite another object than to let the form of the body be recognized” (4.002). It would be all too easy to read these lines as simply stating the difference between language and thought rather than as suggesting that language stands outside thought and in some nontrivial respects sets a limit to it. As a book, the Tractatus embraces the project of limit-setting wholeheartedly: “The book will . . . draw a limit to thinking, or rather— not to thinking, but to the expression of thoughts; for, in order to draw a limit to thinking we should have to be able to think both sides of this limit (we should therefore have to be able to think what cannot be thought)” (p. 27). Second are the things the Tractatus marks out as either beyond philosophy or outside of what language itself can say. If the “world” is the connection of facts in logical space, then questions of the will and value lie outside it. Propositions themselves have no hierarchy of value and are themselves all of equal value (6.4): “In the world . . . there is no value— and if there were, it would be of no value. . . . Hence also there can be no ethical propositions” (6.41– 6.42). One of the great questions for post-Kantian continental philosophers was the status of the will, not least among figures like Schopenhauer, who found it to be a “transcendental” category that was given short shrift by Kant; Wittgenstein recognized it as lying outside of philosophical bounds (“The will as a phenomenon is only of interest to psychology” [6.423]). More precisely, the activity of the will (what he calls “good or bad willing” in the Tractatus [6.43]) can change the limits of the world, not the facts: “[The world] must so to speak wax or wane as a whole. The world of the happy is quite another than that of the unhappy” (6.43). Before turning to say how the delimitation of philosophy in the Tractatus marks off what I have characterized as a kind of “negative ground” for the questions of experience that modernist literature probed, albeit from very different directions, we ought to note one final thing about Wittgenstein’s notion of what lies “beyond” language. He characterizes this both as “the inexpressible” and as “the mystical” (6.522). I disagree with commentators who take Wittgenstein as meaning “mystical” in any conventional sense.15 Indeed, the sequence that includes this remark (6.4ff.) is engaged in a discussion of ethics and related matters.16 Unlike the phenomenon of the will, which is something for psychology to investigate, ethics is “transcendental” (6.421). I believe that Wittgenstein uses “mystical” in just the sense of something that exists outside the world (i.e., “world” as the Tractatus defines it)— and hence transcends the world— and that consequently cannot be explained from any standpoint within the world but can only be pointed to. This is consistent

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with what Wittgenstein says in contrasting the positions of “science” and “metaphysics”: “To say nothing except what can be said, i.e. the propositions of natural science, i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy: and then always, when someone wished to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had given no meaning to certain signs in his propositions. This method would be unsatisfying to the other— he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy— but it would be the only strictly correct method” (6.53). Wittgenstein places philosophy between science and metaphysics, yet there is a vast other territory— neither science nor metaphysics nor philosophy— that Wittgenstein quite intentionally does not identify here: this includes the terrain of experience, and it is a particular understanding of experience that some of the major modernist writers were committed to drawing out. Modernism (I): Experience While recognizing how fraught the terms “modernism” and “experience” both are, we can nonetheless say some things about how the group of modernist writers that includes Stein and Woolf focuses not on “facts” as the Tractatus does, nor on the representation of the places, people, and things that make up the world, as was the case in the realist literary tradition, but rather on a presentation of the world as it is experienced in consciousness. This involves a concentration on what Woolf also calls “life.” Indeed, Woolf regarded “life” and “experience” as essentially the same; they are surprisingly close to what Wittgenstein called the “mystical.” The difference, of course, is that Woolf aims to capture “experience” in prose. As she says in her essay “Modern Fiction,” “Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible?”17 To rise to this task, the modern writer of fiction ought not to record sensations but to register impressions made on consciousness: “Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small” (“Modern Fiction,” 160). “Consciousness” has an especially broad reach, and not only in orders of the large and the small referred to here. As Woolf writes of Joyce, he is “spiri-

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tual,” where “spirit” includes the power to imagine what cannot be seen. The imagination is part of experience: “[Joyce] is concerned at all costs to reveal the flickering of that innermost flame which flashes its messages through the brain, and in order to preserve it he disregards with complete courage whatever seems to him adventitious, whether it be probability, or coherence, or any other of these signposts which for generations have served to support the imagination of a reader when called upon to imagine what he can neither touch nor see” (“Modern Fiction,” 151). The difference between “experience” as it is incorporated into life and mere sensations is not simply that “experience” implies synthesis and continuity but that it implies value. What Woolf ’s kind of modernist prose offers is the perceived, imagined, experienced, world as it is lived in consciousness, but rendered in narrative such that it is presented as a general feature of the world. Each individual consciousness is not so much a perspective on the world as a limit of the world (“The thinking, presenting subject; there is no such thing. . . . The subject does not belong to the world but it is a limit of the world” [TLP 5.631– 5.632]).18 The difference between the “happy” person and the “unhappy” one reflects a difference in the limits of the world. Writing about To the Lighthouse, Eudora Welty comes close to this assessment in saying that the physical world of this novel— “so continuously before us in its changes, its weathers, its procession of day and night, so seducing in its beauty”— is not here “as itself.” Rather, she argues that the world of To the Lighthouse is as it is insofar as it is apparent to the characters (Mrs. Ramsay, Lily Briscoe, James, Andrew, et al.).19 This is true, yet if we look at what Woolf ’s narrator does, much of this is in fact generalized, rendered as the experience of human consciousness as such; its center of gravity may float between narrator and characters and is sometimes not attributed to any particular character at all: “There rose that half-hearted melody, that intermittent music which the ear half catches but lets fall; a bark, a bleat; irregular, intermittent, yet somehow related; which the ear strains to bring together and is always on the verge of harmonized, and at last, in the evening, one after another the sounds die out, and the harmony falters, and silence falls” (To the Lighthouse, 141). The value-laden quality of experience is determined neither by a hierarchy of sensations, nor by the authority of whoever they may belong to, nor even by whether it is actual or possible (where the possibilities of experience may become real when the “wheel of sensation” turns, as the passage excerpted below suggests) but rather by the power of the consciousness to which they are ascribed, to connect them, and additionally to lend them richness, intensity, and nuance— to lend them value. If Nietzsche drew our attention to the “appearing world,” Woolf ’s prose

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instead gives us the particular qualities of the consciousness to which that world appears. Woolf shows us many dimensions of that consciousness, including where it is infused with emotions and inflected by thoughts about things that may not yet exist. Here is Woolf writing about the very things about which Wittgenstein’s Tractatus would require philosophy to be silent: Since he belonged, even at the age of six, to that great clan which cannot keep this feeling separate from that, but must let future prospects, with their joys and sorrows, cloud what is actually at hand, since to such people even in earliest childhood any turn in the wheel of sensation has the power to crystallize and transfix the moment upon which its gloom of radiance rests, James Ramsay, sitting on the floor cutting out pictures from the illustrated Army and Navy Stores, endowed the picture of a refrigerator, as his mother spoke, with heavenly bliss. It was fringed with joy. The wheelbarrow, the lawnmower, the sound of poplar trees, leaves whitening before rain, rooks cawing, brooms knocking, dresses rustling— all these were so coloured and distinguished in his mind that he had already his private code, his secret language, though he appeared the image of stark and uncompromising severity. (To the Lighthouse, 3– 4)

In passages such as this one, what consciousness “represents” is rendered specific as the narrative details of the images of the wheelbarrow, lawnmower, poplar trees, and so on are particularized in the mind. In Woolf ’s prose, consciousness knits these images together but also adds value to the representations of these things, as the picture of a mere refrigerator is here endowed with “heavenly bliss.” In a time before Woolf ’s, it was thought that to see things from a god’s eye point of view, sub specie aeternitatis, would require standing in some vastly different place from the one we ordinarily occupy. What she shows (and in this, she is not unlike Wittgenstein) is that to see the world just as it is is to see it sub specie aeternitatis. (Wittgenstein believes that it does not require “art” to see the world this way [CV 5]). In spite of the differences between them, Woolf had learned many things about the nuances of consciousness from Henry James. But even more remarkable, perhaps, is her connection to an earlier version of the modernist project in prose fiction— namely, Flaubert’s wish to write a book “about nothing.”20 This would not, of course, be an empty book, or an endless meditation on the void, but rather a book where the preposition “about” would not accurately characterize its relationship to the world. We can say of Woolf what Hugh Kenner said of Beckett— that she does not attempt to write a paraphrase of the world.21 The “subject” of her writing might well be anything, since its subject “matter” lies as much in her style as in anything else. The term “style” can cover a lot of ground, to be sure. As these passages from Woolf suggest,

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style plays a crucial role in establishing consciousness and experience as in rather than of the world. Likewise, “experience” in Woolf conveys a form of value that does not lie outside the world, as one reading of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus would have it, but that is every bit as much within it as consciousness is. One of the aims of her prose is to bring experience (back) to consciousness. Flaubert gave us a view of what a valueless world would look like in the encyclopedic copying project of Bouvard et Pécuchet. It is not unlike the “book of facts” that Wittgenstein refers to in “A Lecture on Ethics”; that book, he says, “would contain the whole description of the world.”22 Yet it is through his own prose style, just as Woolf ’s, that a world of value in the form of experience is established above and beyond the world of facts. Wittgenstein (II): Philosophical Investigations One of the most notable features of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations is the pattern in which a question (typically presented in the form of a puzzle) is raised, then asked again in a slightly different context, followed eventually by some remark about how philosophy has tended to mislead both in producing the puzzles and in generating its odd answers to them. The process generates no direct answer to the initial question but is rather designed to quiet the impulse at work in asking it.23 A representative sequence will help illustrate: 262. It might be said: if you have given yourself a private definition of a word, then you must inwardly undertake to use the word in such-and-such a way. And how do you undertake that? Is it to be assumed that you invent the technique of using the word; or that you found it ready-made? 263. “But I can (inwardly) undertake to call THIS ‘pain’ in the future”— “But is it certain that you have undertaken it? Are you sure that it was enough for this purpose to concentrate your attention on your feeling?”— A queer question.

In assessing the ambitions of the Philosophical Investigations as a whole, it is common to quote those particular passages in the text where Wittgenstein seems to make some explicit statement about his philosophical aims. These statements generally present the goal of the work as putting an end to philosophy: ending its puzzles by showing how they are the artifacts of a particular way of doing philosophy (e.g., doing “metaphysics”). Wittgenstein aims at liberation from philosophy’s puzzles, not solutions to them. Among the more famous of these statements is the following: “What is your aim in philosophy?— To shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle” (§309). He aims

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for “complete clarity” in the Investigations, just as the Tractatus did, by making philosophical problems disappear (§133). This is not to say that philosophy’s work will ever conclude, since there will always be new versions of philosophy, and hence there will always be new problems from which to clear free. Moreover, these statements do not account for the process by which that aim can be reached, nor do they account for the persistence with which philosophical puzzles seem to return. Wittgenstein’s later philosophy has been characterized as a form of “therapy,” but equally remarkable is the degree to which the “philosophical repressed” toward which this therapy is directed seems to return. And yet, the quieting of philosophy does not in fact happen within the space of the Investigations; it is only pointed to there. Indeed, the settling of philosophical questions is something that lies outside the bounds of what the Investigations can itself do. If the Tractatus was an ancilla, the Investigations is a propaedeutic to a hypothetical world in which there would be no philosophical “itches” to scratch and in which everything within ordinary language would be in good order. But the “gap” between that hypothetical world— a world where everything said is clear— and the world of philosophical puzzles remains stubbornly in place. (Cf. Stanley Cavell: “Philosophy is what thought does to itself.”24) But here, I would propose, is where the Investigations and the Tractatus differ significantly. There is no “outside” of the Investigations in the way the Tractatus posits ethics and the “mystical” as outside its bounds, as the things that language cannot say. Rather, the Investigations is very much a text in which the pattern of relationships between “philosophical” puzzles and their answers or dissolutions is representative of a much broader, perhaps fundamental set of relationships between thought and practice. What is irrepressible in the Investigations is not just philosophy qua metaphysics but the particular kind of thinking that asks for explanations of those things that admit of no deeper account, and certainly no account as a kind of private mental process. These include such fundamental things as how language makes meaning at all. That question had been raised directly by Frege, who sought a nonmetaphorical explanation of “sense,” so it is not surprising that Wittgenstein would take it up. He does so explicitly at the beginning of the Blue Book: “What is the meaning of a word?”25 It is indeed tempting to associate questions of meaning with certain mental processes. One may well get the impression that “certain definite mental processes . . . of understanding and meaning” are necessary to the interpretation of what we say: “The signs of our language seem dead without these mental processes; and it might seem that the only function of the signs is to induce such processes, and that these are the things we ought really to be interested in.”26 It is often remarked that Wittgenstein engaged

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this and many similar questions in the Investigations by referring us to the notion of “language games,” in which each utterance makes sense not because of but by virtue of its position in a larger network of utterances. What cannot be explained more fundamentally, but can nonetheless be described, are the processes that compose language games (Wittgenstein sometimes calls them “moves”). Contrast this with Habermas, who posited that language games presuppose a set of “idealizations”: “Language games work only because they presuppose idealizations that transcend any particular language game; as a necessary condition of possibly reaching understanding, these idealizations give rise to the perspective of an agreement that I open to criticism on the basis of validity claims. . . . Everyday communicative practice, in which agents have to reach understanding about something in the world, stands under the need to prove its worth, and it is the idealizing suppositions that make such testing possible in the first place.”27 In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein was concerned with giving an account of the world as the “facts in logical space.” Logic is the ground of the connections among facts. In the Investigations, by contrast, Wittgenstein refers to “grammar.” The claim he makes is a strong one: “Grammar tells what kind of an object anything is” (§373). The kind of a thing that anything is is near to its “essence” (“Essence is expressed by grammar” [§371]; cf. the continuation of §373: “Theology as grammar”). The upshot is this: if we want to understand how the world hangs together (answering or replacing the Tractatus’s questions about the “logical structure of the world”28), we need only look to the grammatical relations of language. This means, furthermore, that language is not about the world but that it is the fabric of the world. This is in fact quite different from what the Tractatus proposed in stating the relationship between the limits of language and world (“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world” [5.6]). The Investigations is not so much interested in limits as in turning us away from a language and from thoughts that are nonsense, toward a world where things ordinarily make sense— that is, make sense in an ordinary way, as part of what we ordinarily say and do. Modernism (II): Beckett Notwithstanding their frequent gesturing toward metaphysical questions, the writings of Beckett are resistant to philosophy in ways that complement Wittgenstein’s work. In Very Little . . . Almost Nothing, Simon Critchley proposed that the peculiar resistance of Beckett to philosophy lies in the fact that his texts continuously “seem to pull the rug out from under the feet of the philosopher by showing themselves to be conscious of the possibility of [philosophical] in-

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terpretation . . . [and that] something essential to Beckett’s language is lost by overshooting the text and ascending into the stratosphere of metalanguage.”29 The idea of metaphysics as “overshooting” the meaning of a text echoes Stanley Cavell’s observation about how literary critics overshoot the mark in seeking things like an “aesthetic justification” for particular features of certain works— King Lear in his specific example. Meaning is something quite different, and hardly an inappropriate thing to seek: “Critics who have looked for a meaning in the blinding [of Gloucester] have been looking for the right thing. But they have been looking for an aesthetic meaning or justification; looking too high, as it were. It is aesthetically justified . . . just because it is morally, spiritually justified, in a way which directly relates the eyes to their power to see.”30 This readjustment of interpretive practice requires, among other things, paying attention to the sense of what the characters actually say, though reading “literally” in a way that discloses the full import of their words not just aesthetically but morally as well. It is a method consistent with Cavell’s approach to the “hidden literality” in Beckett’s works. In Beckett, he argues, “the words strew obscurities across our path and seem willfully to thwart comprehension; and then time after time we discover their meaning has been missed only because it was so utterly bare— totally, therefore unnoticeably, in view. Such a discovery has the effect of showing us that it is we who had been willfully uncomprehending” (MWMS 119). But how are we to draw connections across the lines that Beckett’s characters speak, especially in the many instances where something oddly seems to have been left out between them, or where one character’s response to another’s appears to be a nonsequitur? Sometimes Beckett’s characters themselves make the issue of continuity and connectedness all but explicit, as does Winnie in Happy Days: “No doubt the time will come when before I can utter a word I must make sure you heard the one that went before and then no doubt another come another time when I must learn to talk to myself a thing I could never bear to do such wilderness.”31 And yet these puzzling stretches of continuous/discontinuous speech are set within dialogues that are surprisingly mundane, perhaps to suggest that our mundane conversations are themselves assemblages of what might well be disconnected utterances. Where, after all, is the essential, underlying logic that connects them? Winnie talks about her toothpaste and her parasol. Hamm and Clov talk about everything from their aches and pains to the seeds that have been planted: HAMM: Did your seeds come up? CLOV: No. HAMM: Did you scratch round them to see if they had sprouted?

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CLOV: They haven’t sprouted. HAMM: Perhaps it’s too early. CLOV: If they were going to sprout they would have sprouted. (Violently.) They’ll never sprout! (Pause. Nagg takes biscuit in his hand.)32 Exchanges like these are, moreover, interspersed with fragments of “metaphysical” discourse that are in turn inflected by a reintroduction of the most ordinary, literal concerns. The process is quite like Wittgenstein’s attempt to settle metaphysical questions by referring us to the things we say in ordinary language. Here, the “metaphysical” turns out to be the “ordinary”: HAMM: Nature has forgotten us. CLOV: There’s no more nature. HAMM: No more nature! You exaggerate. CLOV: In the vicinity. HAMM: But we breathe, we change! We lose our hair, our teeth! Our bloom! Our ideals! CLOV: Then she hasn’t forgotten us. (p. 11) At the same time, there is a sense of something lying outside the text, which might lend it sense but cannot be seen, or has been lost, or is all but forgotten. In Happy Days, this is the nostalgia for Winnie’s “old song” and for “the old style” of speaking. (This is not unlike the nostalgia for the “old questions” that Hamm expresses in Endgame: “I love the old questions. . . . Ah, the old questions, the old answers, there’s nothing like them!” [38].) Whether by the “old style” Beckett means a world in which meanings once were clear and things clearly connected, or whether he is referring to an older (premodernist?) literary idiom, or both, is not entirely clear, though the text does contain echoes of Shakespeare, Milton, Yeats, Omar Khayyam, and others.33 But these echoes read like the surviving fragments of a language nearly lost rather than remembrances of the literary past. (Cf. Gertrude Stein: “One century has words, another century chooses words, another century uses words, and then another century using the words no longer has them.”34) One cannot sing just to please someone, however much one loves them, no, song must come from the heart, that is what I always say, pour out from the inmost, like a thrush. [Pause]. How often I have said, in evil hours, Sing

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now, Winnie, sing your song, there is nothing else for it, and did not. (Happy Days, 42) When I hear sounds. [Pause.] I used to think . . . [pause] . . . I say I used to think they were in my head. [Smile.] But no. [Smile broader.] No no. [Smile off.] That was just logic. [Pause.] Reason. [Pause.] I have lost my reason. [Pause.] Not yet. [Pause.] Not all [Pause.] Some remains. [Pause.] Sounds. [Pause.] (Happy Days, 59)

In Stein, questions about meaning within prose show up in the ways that the old forms of connection within language no longer seem to work and need to be replaced by new ones. Jameson characterized this quite aptly in his essay “Gertrude Stein and the Parts of Speech”: “The sentence itself belongs to the past, to the history of English literature: it will not be enough, in and of itself, to reconstruct a living (or to use her word, lively) language. But it would seem that we have run out of possibilities, having already run through all of them: first words (or nouns), then choices between words, then the words and meanings of the eighteenth century . . . and finally the nineteenth-century phrases. We cannot go back to any of these.”35 Stein does nonetheless establish the validity two elements: the “reconstructed sentence” and the “paragraph.” By Stein’s own account, sentences are not “emotional,” whereas paragraphs are.36 I take this to mean that the larger structure of associated sentences that forms a paragraph has the capacity to reach beyond the rhythm of each individual sentence to create a form that in the aggregate transmits something that each individual one could not. (Coincidentally or not, this is related to Frege’s semantic holism, which left a strong imprint on Wittgenstein.37) For Beckett, central to the question of meaning is the sense that there is some being or event— whether a Godot or some great catastrophe— that informs or inflects everything and yet cannot be seen. This has been hypothesized, in the case of Godot, as a kind of absent god, and in the case of the catastrophe outside the walled space of Endgame, as a nuclear disaster or atomic war.38 As Theodor Adorno wrote about Endgame, “The name of the catastrophe is to be spoken only in silence.”39 (There is a hint of Wittgenstein in Adorno’s remark. To say that something can be spoken only in silence is to identify the “negative ground” out of which meaning emerges. To imagine a dialogue between Adorno and Cavell on this subject would no doubt be revealing.) Whatever the reason, it is clear that no “external” anchors of meaning are available to these characters. Either God has not (not yet or not yet again) come to lend their world his support or some catastrophe has destroyed all the other possible supports on which meaning might draw. (To cite Adorno writing about Endgame again, “There is no longer any substantive,

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affirmative metaphysical meaning that could provide dramatic form with its law and its epiphany” [242].) The surprising thing, of course, is that Beckett’s characters do go on, that they make meaning against all odds. Indeed, Beckett seems to have found a way to invert the puzzling question of how language makes meaning— the kind of question that can seem mystifying— by demonstrating that language somehow cannot stop making meaning. Strangely, it seems that meaningfulness is an irreducible condition of language. For better or for worse, Beckett’s characters are condemned to it.40 So too for action in Beckett. Many of his characters are stuck or immobilized in one way or another. No critic has described this better than Hugh Kenner: “From the moment when we encounter Murphy upside down, naked beneath the rocking chair to which he is bound, crucified, in fact, on a piece of Victorian furniture, to the long blazing interval during which Winnie, buried first to the waist and then to the neck, discourses of Happy Days, Beckett’s wry adaptations of Christian iconography have immobilized the body of the sage better to set his mind free, or relatively free” (Flaubert, Joyce, and Beckett, 97). Nagg and Nell (Endgame) live stuck in garbage cans. Yet in spite of these and many other immobilizations, action can’t be eliminated altogether. Action in Beckett seems to be as irrepressible as meaning is in language. But what is it that these characters do? Certainly nothing as momentous as the characters in a Greek tragedy, or even as the more ordinary figures of ancient comedy did (though Beckett’s works are certainly inflected in equal measures by the tragic and the comic). One answer is that they talk. They tell stories. Another is that they perform the most mundane actions conceivable: looking out a window, scratching, being fed and eating, rummaging through a bag, and so on. If one of Beckett’s aims is to press the genre of drama into an encounter with its most fundamental elements, then what he finds in doing so is that, when taken down to the basics, those very elements provide some of literature’s most productive resources. But since the basic elements of drama— dialogue and action, above all— are presented in a context where “metaphysical” supports beyond them are no longer available and where they are themselves reduced to the barest essentials, there is little reason to describe these texts as “literary” as opposed to philosophical. That distinction, in this context, makes scant sense. HAMM: I’ll give you nothing more to eat. CLOV: Then we’ll die. HAMM: I’ll give you just enough to keep you from dying. You’ll be hungry all the time. CLOV: Then we won’t die. (5– 6)

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The Philosophical Investigations bears revisiting in this light. Because Wittgenstein remarked that philosophy ought to be done only as a kind of poetry, it is tempting to see the Investigations as a “poetic” form of philosophy or, at any rate, as a form of philosophy that approaches the form of literature (CV 24). The Investigations has been widely invoked in literary interpretation, but there are few sustained arguments that the Investigations itself is a form of literature. One such sustained argument is, however, put forward by the poet and critic David Antin in his essay “Wittgenstein among the Poets,” which contains a review of Marjorie Perloff ’s Wittgenstein’s Ladder.41 Antin argues that nearly all of Wittgenstein’s questions and analyses, from The Blue Book to the Philosophical Investigations, set in motion a process of narrativization. He likewise suggests that the examples of “language games” offered in the Philosophical Investigations are “small stories exhibiting hypothetical practices that seem to lend to distinct and exotic ways of learning the meaning of familiar words” (p. 156).42 But if the Investigations is a literary text of any kind, it is one in which philosophical examples contribute to a practice that is itself involved in undoing philosophy. Its narrative ingredients are at best fragmentary. Moreover, there is nothing like a narrative voice in Wittgenstein’s text to bind these fragments together. And while we might imagine narratives being constructed out of any number of its examples, they simply start and stop, with no sequential logic. Nor in its larger structure— as it moves from beginning to end, whether in each of its two parts or overall— is the Investigations a narrative; rather, it is a kind of writing that seems to have survived the pressure of the Tractatus to dispense with everything other than the facts in logical space. What lies outside the world of the Tractatus finds its way into the method of philosophy that the Investigations pursues rather than into any particular claim it makes. And this, in the end, is a reflection of one of the ways the Investigations makes a break within philosophy. It is also one of the ways it achieves, rather than simply claims, the status of a “modernist” text. It does so not, as Antin would have it, by becoming literature or, as Richard Rorty might say, by presenting itself simply as a “kind of writing,”43 but rather by placing us in a zone where the resources of literature (e.g., through the introduction of multiple perspectives, articulated through different voices, and by the invocation of fiction-like “what if ” scenarios) are as central to philosophy as the method of rational argument ever was and vice versa, where the interests of “philosophy,” so-called, are dissolved by the power of examples to help bring thinking back from the metaphysical “beyond” to its place within the practice of everyday life. It is this, rather than anything “new and extraordinarily” in the strictly historical sense, that marks the Investigations as a paradigmatic modernist text.

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“To Become a Different Person”: Wittgenstein, Christianity, and the Modernist Ethos Marjorie Perloff I am not a religious man but I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view. I don’t think I would get on with Hegel. Hegel seems to me to be always wanting to say that things which look different are really the same. Whereas my interest is in shewing that things which look the same are really different. I was thinking of using as a motto for my book a quotation from King Lear: “I’ll teach you differences.” . . . The remark “You’d be surprised” wouldn’t be a bad motto either. — W i t t g e n s t e i n in conversation with Maurice Drury1

Among philosophers, discussion of Wittgenstein’s writings on Christianity— fragmentary and sometimes contradictory as these are— has been bedeviled by the charge of fideism. As Stephen Mulhall explains in a recent essay, the “critical characterization of Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion as fideistic implies that it regards religious forms of life as founded on faith rather than reason, hence immune to any kind of rational criticism, because their intelligibility depends on criteria internal to those forms of life, and essentially distinct from those governing other modes of discourse.”2 The counterargument, first stated eloquently by Wittgenstein’s student Norman Malcolm, is that, to the contrary, Wittgenstein treats religious practice just as he does any other language game, which is to say as “a pattern of words and gestures that are interwoven in acts of worship, prayer, confession, absolution, thanksgiving.”3 Religious practice as language game: Malcolm is, I think, quite right in this formulation, but it is the “any other” that demands further probing, for while Wittgenstein seems quite comfortable with language games that deal with color theory or even with the pain calculus, his discussions of religious practice, especially Christian practice, as he experienced it in the Austro-Hungarian Empire of his youth and later at Cambridge, are curiously contradictory— even troubled— in a way that is quite representative of the period. For the philosopher who considered himself such a confirmed antimodernist, who often expressed the wish that modernism would just go away, pronouncing Mahler’s music to be worthless, Bloomsbury to be fatuous, and contemporary

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artists such as Picasso or Duchamp to be not even worthy of consideration, was himself a thorough if unwitting modernist— a writer much closer in spirit to the poets, novelists, and artists of his day than to the Cambridge philosophers who were his mentors and colleagues.4 In Terry Eagleton’s words on the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), The Tractatus  .  .  . is the first great work of philosophical modernism.  .  .  . Its true coordinates are not Frege or Russell or logical positivism but Joyce, Schoenberg, Picasso. Like many a modernist work of art, the Tractatus secretes a self-destruct device within itself. . . . absurdly, [it] strives to articulate what it itself has placed under the censorship of silence— the relation of language to the world. . . . Only if we use these impossible propositions like ladders, kicked away as soon as mounted, will we see the world aright; and in this sense the Tractatus cancels itself out in a gesture of modernist irony.5

In Wittgenstein’s case, the relation of life to work is especially elusive. “Nothing,” remarks Eagleton, “could provide a greater contrast with the open-ended, pluralistic, generously demotic investigations of [Wittgenstein’s] later period than the man himself; imperious, dogmatic, haughtily patrician, driven by a fatiguing zeal for moral perfection and well-practised in brusquely casting off any involvement which seemed to stand in its way” (7). But the imperious Wittgenstein persona described here is itself something of a construction: in his notebooks and journal entries, the philosopher is quite open in his selfreproaches and doubts. Complexity and contradiction: these inform Wittgenstein’s religious views even as they do his philosophical writings, where self-correction of earlier formulations is a central principle. But because religion is, for Wittgenstein, a much more private matter than philosophy, his personal writings must loom large in any consideration of their meaning. Like so many of his fellow modernists, Wittgenstein was both outsider and exile. He was, to begin with, only nominally Christian. Born in Vienna to a Jewish family that converted to Christianity as early as the 1830s when his grandfather Hermann Christian, a wool merchant in Leipzig, became a Lutheran, Wittgenstein was baptized and brought up as a Catholic in a home whose true religion, in keeping with the fin de siècle, was culture. The Palais Wittgenstein hosted such composers as Brahms and Mahler, and the philosopher’s father, Karl, who had amassed one of the largest fortunes in Austria, collected artwork including Rodin sculptures and Klimt paintings. The eight Wittgenstein children, of whom Ludwig was the youngest (the brother closest in age, Paul, became the well-known concert pianist who lost an arm in World War I but continued to perform), evidently did receive Catholic instruction at home, but questions of faith and dogma remained largely ex-

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ternal, not only throughout Wittgenstein’s childhood and adolescence, but also in his first Cambridge period before the war years, when the English philosophers tended to be atheists like Bertrand Russell or Kantian Idealists like G. E. Moore and F. H. Bradley.6 It was World War I that changed everything. In August 1914, Wittgenstein, who had recently returned to Vienna from a long stay in Norway, where he was working on the early drafts of the Tractatus, immediately enlisted as a volunteer. His was not a conventional patriotism; on the contrary, just a few months into the war, he wrote in his secret diary, “I feel . . . more than ever the tragedy of our— the German race’s situation! For that we cannot defeat England seems to me as good as certain. The English— the best race in the world— cannot lose! We, however, can lose and will lose, if not this year then the next! The thought that our race will be defeated depresses me terribly because I am German through and through!”7 The racial— we would now say racist— vocabulary of this diary entry reflects the peculiarly conflicted consciousness, not only of Wittgenstein himself, but of his moment: the philosopher who had been in self-exile in England since 1908, when he was not quite twenty, found himself (a “German through and through”) serving with soldiers, mostly recruited from the provinces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, who were not German at all but Poles, Slavs, or Magyars. Indeed, his real reason for enlisting was that, as his sister Hermine would put it, Wittgenstein had “an intense desire to take something difficult upon himself and to do something other than purely intellectual work.” What he most wanted, he insisted, was “to turn into a different person.”8 It was an ideal that never left him. “If you and I are to live religious lives,” he told his friend Drury more than two decades later, “it must not just be that we talk a lot about religion, but that in some way our lives are different” (Drury 109, italics mine). What does it mean to make self-transformation one’s central purpose in life? For Wittgenstein, like so many of the members of the Austrian upper bourgeoisie, especially those of Jewish extraction, the world of actual politics was little more than a sordid business— the subject, in Vienna, of countless exposés in the great feuilleton Die Fackel by Karl Kraus. If, in the wake of World War I, German intellectuals and artists were given to finding political “solutions,” whether Communist or Fascist, in post-Habsburg Austria, -isms were treated with greater skepticism. If the “nation,” as so many felt, was beyond repair, then everything depended on individual integrity, individual choice. Between 1916, when Wittgenstein was serving on the Russian Front, and 1918, when he was a prisoner of war in Italy, the Tractatus, originally conceived as a treatise on the nature of logic, written under the sign of Frege and Russell, was transformed into a strange amalgam, in which the philoso-

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pher’s mathematical examples and elucidation of the picture theory of language were followed by a quasi-mystical meditation on the meaning of life. The opening proposition— “The world is everything that is the case”— was to give way, unaccountably, to the Tractatus’s conclusion: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”9 The diary entries for this period reflect Wittgenstein’s reading of Kierkegaard, William James, Schopenhauer, Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, and especially Tolstoy’s Gospel in Brief, a book that Wittgenstein reread until he knew it by heart, carrying it around wherever he went so that he became known by his fellow soldiers as “the man with the gospels.”10 “Perhaps,” he wrote in his journal on May 29, 1916, “the nearness of death will bring me the light of life. May God enlighten me. I am a worm, but through God I become a man. God be with me. Amen” (Monk 138). Such prayers continued nightly for the next few months, culminating in a famous lyrical passage in Notebooks 1914– 1916: What do I know about God and the purpose of life? I know that this world exists. That I am placed in it like my eye in its visual field. That something about it is problematic, which we call its meaning. That this meaning does not lie in it but outside it. . . . The meaning of life, i.e., the meaning of the world, we can call God. . . . To believe in a God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter.11

A number of these propositions find their way into the Tractatus: 6.41 The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. 6.432 How the world is, is completely indifferent for what is higher. God does not reveal himself in the world.

But whereas the word “God” is repeated at least ten times in the Notebooks, the proposition just cited (6.432) contains the only reference to “God” in the Tractatus. “How things stand, is God,” we read in Wittgenstein’s notebook entry for 1.8.16. And set off in two further lines, as if in a poem, we read “God is, how things stand” and “Only from the consciousness of the uniqueness of my life arises religion— science— and art” (Notebooks 79). In the Tractatus, the assertive “How things stand, is God” is replaced by “Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is” (6.44). It seems that the author of the Tractatus has tempered his original notebook entries, has made them more oblique. And he no longer claims to understand the “how” of the world.

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To become a different person: Wittgenstein’s first practical decision after the war was to give away his entire inheritance. One of the wealthiest men in Vienna, he made his fortune over to his siblings, convinced as he was— and here he was still a Tolstoyan— that money was nothing but a burden, that it was, in other words, harder for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven— although this rich man didn’t really believe in heaven. A brief Tolstoyan stint as a gardener’s assistant in a Benedictine monastery (1920) was followed by the move to the village of Trattenbach, about one hundred kilometers south of Vienna, where Wittgenstein became an elementary school teacher, a role he hoped would transform the lives of the peasant children in his district. But as in the case of his war experience, Wittgenstein’s enchantment with village life soon gave way to disgust: “Trattenbach,” he wrote Russell in 1921 (sounding for all the world like the D. H. Lawrence of the travel books, whose adulation of the “noble” peasantry regularly turned sour), “is a particularly insignificant place in Austria and the Austrians have sunk so miserably low since the war that it’s too dismal to talk about” (Monk 201). And although he had a devoted following among some of the boys in his classes, he often lost his temper, boxed their ears, and pulled the girls’ hair. Matters came to a head in the autumn of 1925 when an eleven-year-old boy Wittgenstein struck on the head collapsed. It turned out the boy was suffering from leukemia, and it may not have been the blow that made him collapse, but the resulting uproar led to Wittgenstein’s immediate resignation and the end of his career as a primary school teacher. Christian humility had utterly failed him. He now turned to secular interests— first the architectural design of his sister’s house in Vienna and then the association with the Vienna Circle of Logical Positivists, who made much of the newly published Tractatus.12 In 1929, upon the invitation of John Maynard Keynes, he returned to Cambridge and his new life as philosophy don. What brought religion— and specifically Christianity— back into the picture was ironically the very politics from which he had tried so hard to distance himself: Hitler’s assumption of power in Germany in 1933, culminating in the Anschluss of Austria in 1938. Wittgenstein’s first reaction to Nazi politics was to become self-conscious about his own Jewishness in a curiously negative way. Like so many upper-class Viennese Jews whose parents and grandparents had taken so much trouble to assimilate, he had long harbored a latent anti-Semitic strain. In 1925, when his close friend Paul Engelmann became interested in Zionism and planned to emigrate to Palestine, Wittgenstein wrote, “This may be the right thing to do and may have a spiritual effect. I might want to join you. Would you take me with you?”13 But once settled

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in Cambridge, he oddly internalized the new Nazi propaganda by writing journal entries expressing doubt about the ability of a Jew like himself to be a genius or even to develop a mode of thinking that might be more than merely “reproductive.”14 It is as if, for the first time, he had to recognize that he was, after all, a Jew, at least according to Nazi definitions, and he began to worry whether such anti-Semitic prejudices, such as that Jews cared too much about money, might not be true (CV 18), or whether there weren’t in fact specific Jewish character traits such as secrecy or cunning— character traits he himself might share (CV 19). Wittgenstein has been much— and deservedly— criticized for these antiSemitic speculations15— speculations that came to an abrupt end as the events of the late 1930s overtook them. With Anschluss in 1938, Wittgenstein had to quickly obtain British citizenship so that he could reenter Austria without fearing arrest; it then became his mission to negotiate the transfer of huge sums of money to the Nazis in order to have his elderly sisters (who, like himself, had never regarded themselves as Jewish) declared Mischlinge (of mixed blood) and be permitted to remain in Vienna.16 But by this time, he had dropped the language of anti-Semitism and recognized that the racial strain of thinking to which he had given vent was a sign of his own vanity and weakness. He was to confess as much to his Cambridge friends, especially to his Russian tutor and great friend Fania Pascal, herself, in her own words, “a Jewish girl from the Ukraine . . . whose childhood was darkened, branded by the anti-Semitism of Tsarist Russia.”17 It was in 1937, on the eve of Anschluss and war— the “dark time” in which the Philosophical Investigations were conceived— that Wittgenstein returned to a reading of the New Testament. He had made his fateful journey to the Soviet Union in 1935 and realized that the collectivism he encountered there could never be an answer for him, even if the Russians had, as he originally hoped, permitted him to remain in the Soviet Union as an ordinary worker. By 1937, Wittgenstein’s key concepts— on meaning as context dependent (“The meaning of a word is its use in the language”18), on the rejection of “theory” and the need for metalanguage, on the insignificant role of the pronoun “I” in discourse— had been adumbrated, although these basic topoi were in need of constant revision and improvement. Now, in the midst of laying out a philosophy of everyday life, as free as possible from judgmental categories and imperatives, he reread the Gospels and the Pauline Epistles from a new perspective. The most remarkable of his journal commentaries— commentaries readers will no doubt be attempting to explicate for years to come— date from September to December 1937, when Wittgenstein was spending some solitary months in his cottage in Skjolden, Norway.19 The central thrust of this

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commentary, carried forward in six separate entries reprinted in Culture and Value, is that Christianity is not a doctrine but a description of an actual practice: “Christianity is not a doctrine, I mean, not a theory about what has happened & will happen to the human soul, but a description of an actual occurrence in human life. For the ‘recognition of sin’ is an actual occurrence & so is despair & so is redemption through faith. Those who speak of it (like Bunyan), are simply describing what has happened to them; whatever someone else may want to say about it!”20 The distinction made here between theory and practice (Gebrauch) will be familiar to those who have read Wittgenstein’s controversial “Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough” (1931), which argues that the great anthropologist’s discussion of the “primitivism” of ancient fertility rites condescendingly sidesteps the status of those rites as meaningful practices. In Frazer’s account, the elaborate prayers to rain gods found in early African cultures exemplify “primitive” and “savage” superstitions that attributed natural phenomena like rainfall or fire to some sort of divine intervention. But, Wittgenstein suggests, suppose we interpret the accounts of these rituals quite literally. If so, we notice a curious detail in Frazer’s account: the prayers to the “Kings of the Rain” take place not during the long dry season but, on the contrary, “when the rainy period comes.”21 “Surely,” writes Wittgenstein, “that means that they do not really believe that he [the god] can make it rain, otherwise they would do it in the dry period of the year.” Rather, he argues these are rituals performed as appropriate for the season, rather like our own knocking on wood to avoid an impending disaster (see PO 137). Are all religions then equally “true” or valuable? In the 1931 “Remarks,” Wittgenstein implies that they are: Frazer’s account of the magical and religious views of mankind is unsatisfactory: it makes these views look like errors. Was Augustine in error, then, when he called upon God on every page of the Confessions? But— one might say— if he was not in error, surely the Buddhist holy man was— or anyone else— whose religion gives expression to completely different views. But none of them was in error, except when he set forth a theory. (PO 119)

And the passage from Culture and Value cited above makes a similar case: Christians, like the John Bunyan of Pilgrim’s Progress, “are simply describing what has happened to them.” It is interesting that among the religions Wittgenstein discussed as practices, Judaism was not one. He evidently regarded Jewishness as a matter of race or ethnicity rather than religion, and the Old Testament, which he knew

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well, was read typologically as an anticipation of the New. If religion is, as Wittgenstein often posited, dependent on one’s time and place— one’s cultural moment, which dictates the form one’s prayers and rituals will take— then, for Wittgenstein, that religion could only be the Christianity in which he had been raised and that was the “official” religion of Europe. In the 1937 journal entries, accordingly, he drops the comparatist approach of “Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough,” and tries to characterize his own view of the Gospels: God has four people recount the life of the incarnate God, each one differently and contradicting one another— but can’t one say: It is important that this account should not have more than quite ordinary historical plausibility, so that it won’t be taken as the essential, definitive one. So that the letter would find no more credence than it deserves and the Spirit would remain true. I.e.: What you are supposed to see cannot be communicated even by the best, most accurate historian; therefore it suffices— yes, it is even preferable— to have a mediocre representation. . . . But what is essential— that is, essential for your life— is put by the Spirit into these words. (CV 36– 37)

This is an important formulation, suggesting that, for Wittgenstein, the message of the Gospels, a message that is so central for him, is enhanced by the very variability of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John— a variability that underscores the idea that truth can never be single or unitary. The four Gospels are taken as having what Wittgenstein calls, in his own philosophy, family resemblances; it is precisely because of their related differences that we recognize the “family” itself as an entity. It is a system of differences Wittgenstein contrasts to the more doctrinal thrust of Paul’s Epistles: The spring that flows calmly and clearly in the Gospels seems to build to a froth in the Epistles of Paul. Or that is how it seems to me. Perhaps it is just my own impurity that reads muddiness into it; for why shouldn’t this impurity be able to pollute what is clear? But I feel as if here I saw human passion, something like pride or anger, which doesn’t square with the humility of the Gospels. It’s as though he is really insisting here on his own person, & doing so moreover as a religious act, something which is foreign to the Gospel. I would like to ask— and I hope this isn’t blasphemous— : “What would Christ have said to Paul?” But one might rightly respond to this: What business is it of ours? See to it that you become a more decent person! In your present state, you are absolutely incapable of understanding what may be truth here. In the Gospels— so it strikes me— everything is less pretentious, humbler, simpler. There are huts— with Paul a Church. There all human beings are equal & God is himself a human being; with Paul there is already a hierarchy; rewards, and positions.— So at least my instinct tells me. (CV 35; 4.10.37)

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And again, “The doctrine of election by grace that we find in Paul, for example, is, from my perspective, ugly nonsense. So it is not meant for me since I can apply this picture to myself only falsely. If it is a pious and good picture, then it is so at quite a different level, where it must be applied quite differently from the way I could apply it.”22 The contrast of Jesus to Paul, coupled with the preference of the differential narrative of the Four Gospels to the didacticism of the Pauline Epistles, is a central motif for Wittgenstein and stands in direct opposition to the claims of recent philosophers such as Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, and Jakob Taubes, all of whom have reassessed Paul as the key figure responsible for a new political theology— the apostle, in Badiou’s terms, of a universalism that simultaneously shatters the strictures of Judaic law and the conventions of the Greek Logos.23 In an influential study of the 1990s, Jacob Taubes had argued that the Paul’s Epistle to the Romans should be read as a “political declaration of war on the Caesar.”24 Paul’s great contribution, according to this line of thought, was to disconnect the commandments to love God and love the neighbor. In Mark and Matthew, Jesus is represented as aligning love of God and love of neighbor as the “first” and “second” principles of the law, virtually fusing them into a single commandment. In Romans 13:8– 10, on the other hand, which begins with the admonishment, “Owe no man anything, but to love one another: for he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law,” Paul is directly challenging Jesus’s linkage of the two commandments. Jesus himself failed “to fully realize his own singular and necessary role in salvation, that is, to acknowledge that there is no way to the father except through the son.”25 Christianity can thus become the religion of the Son. The Father is no longer needed, and the way is open for the establishment of the Earthly City in the allegorical shadow of heaven. The aim, as Agamben puts it, is to “deactivate” a “sacred space” so as to “liberate” its potential usefulness as a neighborhood— a political community that can stand up to and overthrow the authority of the father, the old order— so as to make way for revolution.26 Had Wittgenstein been apprised of such arguments, he would no doubt have dismissed them as the purest nonsense (Unsinn), if not worse. From his perspective, such hermeneutic sophistry is the antithesis of the right way of regarding the writings of the New Testament— as containing, not a theory, but a set of significant practices. Then again, his own distinction between Jesus and Paul and his understanding of Paul’s emphasis on the institution of the church, anticipates the arguments of Agamben and the others. It was the authority of the church that Wittgenstein could never quite accept, even as he loved the precepts and practice put forward, especially in the Sermon on the Mount.

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In his Cambridge years (and in the Norwegian and Irish interludes), Wittgenstein by and large practiced what he preached: by all accounts, he lived the life of the monk in very simple and humble circumstances. And whereas Paul’s twenty-first-century “apostles” want to change the world, Wittgenstein, as we have seen, wanted only to change himself. “Christianity, I believe,” he wrote in his journal in 1946, “says among other things that sound doctrines are all useless. You have to change your life.” “Faith,” he adds, citing Kierkegaard, “is a passion” (CV 61). As in Trattenbach, however, such faith proved to be impossible to sustain: Wittgenstein may have chosen to live humbly, with a minimum of material comforts, but on intellectual and cultural matters, he could be arrogant and dismissive. We can see this especially clearly in the marvelous record Maurice Drury has left us in his “Conversations with Wittgenstein.”27 Born in Devon to Irish parents, Drury had come to Trinity College in 1929, shortly after Wittgenstein’s own return to Cambridge, and he proved to be an ardent— but also unusual— disciple. Drury’s plan, after completing his undergraduate degree, was to study theology and become ordained as an Anglican priest. He was thus the perfect interlocutor for Wittgenstein; indeed, his decision, after one year at a theological college at Cambridge (Westcott House), not to go on but rather to study medicine, later becoming a psychiatrist in Dublin, was surely prompted, in large part, by Wittgenstein’s critique of theology. When Wittgenstein and Drury first met in 1929, Drury informed the philosopher-tutor of his plan: WITTGENSTEIN: I don’t ridicule this. Anyone who ridicules these matters is a charlatan and worse. But I can’t approve, no I can’t approve. You have intelligence, it is not the most important thing, but you can’t neglect it. Just imagine trying to preach a sermon every Sunday, you couldn’t do it, you couldn’t possibly do it. I would be afraid that you would try and elaborate a philosophical interpretation or defense of the Christian religion. The symbolism of Christianity is wonderful beyond words, but when people try to make a philosophical system out of it I find it disgusting.28 Just a few pages earlier, Drury had remarked that “intellectual vanity, whether in himself or in others, was something that Wittgenstein detested” (92). It is true that Wittgenstein was harder on himself than on anyone else— extremely self-critical and constantly driven by the need for revision of his most basic concepts. Still, the outright dismissal of Christianity as a “philosophical system” and the firm conviction that Drury could not possibly want to be

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anything like an Anglican priest testifies to a stubborn self-confidence— one might say arrogance— that does not exactly accord with the Christian humility Wittgenstein longed to possess. Indeed, he kept hammering at this theme until Drury started to waver and decided to renounce his plan to be ordained in the Anglican Church. Toward the end of his life, Wittgenstein came to feel very guilty about having pushed Drury so hard. The World War II years changed both men a great deal: Wittgenstein, who volunteered during the war in a hospital dispensary, became almost deferential toward the Drury who had fought in Egypt and then participated in the invasion of Normandy. Wittgenstein was now reading the church fathers and taking a greater interest than he had in Roman Catholicism. In 1949, when Drury was working in a psychiatric hospital in Dublin and Wittgenstein was living close by, the following conversation took place: WITTGENSTEIN: “Drury, you have lived a most remarkable life. First those years in Cambridge studying philosophy; then as a medical student; then the war experiences— and now all this new work in psychiatry.” DRURY: “There is one thing about it that I feel is all wrong with me. I have not lived a religious life.” WITTGENSTEIN: “It has troubled me that, in some way I never intended, your getting to know me has made you less religious than you would have been had you never met me.” DRURY: “That thought has troubled me too.” WITTGENSTEIN: “I believe it is right to try experiments in religion. To find out, by trying, what helps one and what doesn’t. When I was a prisoner in Italy, I was very glad when we were compelled to attend Mass. Now why don’t you see if starting the day by going to Mass each morning doesn’t help you to begin the day in a good frame of mind. I don’t mean for one moment that you should become a Roman Catholic. I think that would be all wrong for you. It seems to me that your religion will always take the form of desiring something you haven’t yet found.” (179) This is a very telling exchange. Despite his expressed remorse— Wittgenstein had regularly rebuked the young Drury for such things as having a crucifix over his bed in the theological college or attending services in a church that had a piano instead of an organ— Wittgenstein still expected Drury to share his own “religious” sense, which is, here as before, the sense of the outsider attracted to the emotion and aestheticism of Christianity quite aside from the tenets of Christian doctrine. Attending Mass in the Italian prison camp was evidently a good thing; it was a ritualistic practice that made incarceration

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bearable. Truth is never at issue. And a moment later, when Drury suggests that, despite his own Anglicanism and preference for the English liturgy, “a child brought up in the colourful symbolism of the Roman Catholic liturgy would get a stronger and deeper impression of religious awe than one brought up in the plainer Protestant tradition” (179), Wittgenstein falls back on his old prejudices: I don’t agree with you at all. I would much prefer to see a child educated by a decent Protestant pastor than by a greasy Roman Catholic priest. When I look at the faces of the clergy here in Dublin, it seems to me that the Protestant ministers look less smug than the Roman priests. I suppose it is because they know they are such a small minority. (180) This is, of course, the old class-conscious and snobbish Wittgenstein speaking. Italian priests (during World War I) are evidently all right; Irish priests are “greasy,” smug, and low class. On the other hand, when the issue is textual rather than personal, it is Wittgenstein who takes the broader view. Consider this exchange on the Old Testament in the last year of Wittgenstein’s life (1951): DRURY: “There are some passages in the Old Testament that I find very offensive. For instance, the story where some children mock Elisha for his baldness. ‘Go up, thou bald head.’ And God sends bears out of the forest to eat them.” WITTGENSTEIN: (very sternly) “You mustn’t pick and choose just what you want in that way.” DRURY: “But I have never been able to do anything else.” WITTGENSTEIN: “Just remember what the Old Testament meant to a man like Kierkegaard. After all, children have been killed by bears.” DRURY: “Yes, but we ought to think that such a tragedy is a direct punishment from God for a particular act of wickedness. In the New Testament we are told the precise opposite— the men on whom the Tower of Siloam fell were not more wicked than anyone else.” WITTGENSTEIN: “That has nothing to do with what I am talking about. You don’t understand, you are quite out of your depth.” (183) This is the last recorded conversation before Wittgenstein’s final illness, and we might conclude that he was therefore not quite himself when he spoke so cuttingly to Drury. But in fact Wittgenstein’s words make sense. If religion

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is regarded as a practice and not a theory, the Old Testament cannot be read as a commonplace book, some of whose aphorisms we like, some not. On the contrary, it must be taken as a whole, and thus its individual narratives must be granted their donnée. “After all,” as Wittgenstein puts it, “children have been killed by bears.” Indeed, he had already made this case in 1943, in response to Drury’s reference to the “primitivism” of Egyptian religious rites he encountered during the war: DRURY: “One thing did surprise me and rather shocked me. On going into one of the temples there was on the wall a bas-relief of the god Horus with an erect phallus in the act of ejaculation and collecting the semen in a bowl!” WITTGENSTEIN: “Why in the world shouldn’t they have regarded with awe and reverence that act by which the human race is perpetuated. Not every religion has to have St. Augustine’s attitude to sex. Why even in our culture marriages are celebrated in a church, everyone present knows what is going to happen that night, but that doesn’t prevent it being a religious ceremony.” (162) Here, again as vis-à-vis Frazer, Wittgenstein is being commonsensical and trying to see each religious practice from its own perspective. What he rejected was never the practice but its institutionalization and codification. “Man can embody truth,” wrote Yeats shortly before his death, “but he cannot know it.”29 Wittgenstein, who never mentions Yeats, would have approved of this formulation, with its characteristically modernist repudiation of “scientific” knowledge. His last writings, collected in the book On Certainty, circle around and around the issue of knowledge, concluding much more confidently and serenely than in his earlier work that we “know” what we need to know for the purposes of everyday life and should accept the limits experience and language impose on us. “If,” as he puts it in §115, “you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.”30 What sort of certainty? Well, he says, “If a blind man were to ask me ‘Have you got two hands?’ I should not make sure by looking.” Or again: Why do I not satisfy myself that I have two feet when I want to get up from a chair? There is no way. I simply don’t. This is how I act. (§148) How does someone judge which is his right and which his left hand? How do I know that my judgment will agree with someone else’s? (§150)

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“I know that that’s a tree.” Why does it strike me as if I did not understand the sentence? Though it is after all an extremely simple sentence of the most ordinary kind? It is as I could not focus my mind on any meaning. Simply because I don’t look for the focus where the meaning is. As soon as I think of an everyday use of the sentence instead of a philosophical one, its meaning becomes clear and ordinary. (§147)

What such examples make clear, Wittgenstein suggests, is that explanation has to end somewhere: The questions that we raise and our doubts depend on the fact that some propositions are exempt from doubt, are as it were like hinges on which those turn. That is to say, it belongs to the logic of our scientific investigations that certain things are in deed not doubted. But it isn’t that the situation is like this: We just can’t investigate everything, and for that reason we are forced to rest content with assumption. If I want the door to turn, the hinges must stay put. My life consists in being content to accept many things. (§341– 44)

Doubt, in this scheme of things, becomes a valuable condition. As Wittgenstein had put it so many years earlier in the Tractatus, “Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is” (§6.44). But such a state of mind is opposed to notions of progress and revolution. The following note in Culture and Value is dated 7.1.1947: “The real apocalyptic view of the world is that things do not repeat themselves. It is for example, not absurd to believe that our scientific and technological age is the beginning of the end for mankind, that the idea of Great Progress is a fantasy, along with the ultimate knowledge of truth; that there is nothing good or desirable about scientific knowledge, & that, in seeking it, mankind is falling into a trap. It is certainly not clear that this is not how things are” (CV 64). How things are: here Wittgenstein sounds, for all the world, like the great modernist poets, from Yeats and Eliot to Stevens to the Beckett of How It Is. Unlike the Pauline philosophers of our own time, such as Alain Badiou, he did not believe that revolution could or would come, that there could be definable progress toward a better world. It is only one’s own life that one can change— and in the present, not the future. In his recent Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, Badiou, basing his argument on a reading of the Tractatus only and focusing on the famous conclusion “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,” suggests that what he calls Wittgenstein’s “mystical act” reduces logic to rhetoric, truth to an effect of language games, and philosophy to a series of esoteric aphorisms and meaningless propositions. Badiou’s treatment of Wittgenstein is curiously harsh: he remarks, for example, that despite all Wittgenstein’s resolve

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to change his life, in the end, what was he but a philosophy professor at Cambridge! As for the capacity to change one’s life, Badiou remarks, the insistence on that capacity assumes, in Pauline terms, that one has already been saved.31 But then, as Wittgenstein made clear in his notebooks commentaries of 1937 (see CV 37), he specifically rejected the Pauline “doctrine of election by grace” as “ugly nonsense” (ein hässlicher Unsinn). And what Badiou calls his “esoteric aphorisms” and “meaningless propositions” can be seen, from another angle, as precisely the stuff that poetry is made of. Indeed, although Wittgenstein never expressed an interest in— or even knowledge of— John Keats, his way of “doing” philosophy is finally not unlike Keats’s faith in “Negative Capability, that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”32 “The sense of the world,” as Wittgenstein put it famously in Tractatus 6.41— and there is no indication that he ever changed his mind— “must lie outside the world.” “What,” asks Badiou with a measure of exasperation, “can the word Christianity possibly mean to Wittgenstein? Certainly it does not refer to an established or institutional religion!” (25). True, but does the word then mean nothing? Wittgenstein never accepted church dogma: his love for the New Testament and his desire to live the Christian life were always contradicted by his inherent skepticism about language, his ironical stance toward the various worlds he lived in. Terry Eagleton has aptly called him an “arresting combination of monk, mystic and mechanic: a high European intellectual who yearned for Tolstoyan simplicitas, a philosophical giant with scant respect for philosophy, an irascible autocrat with a thirst for holiness” (7– 8). In The Philosophical Investigations and On Certainty, such a paradox is countered by Wittgenstein’s inherent pragmatism, the common sense that drives him to concentrate on the way a given practice actually works, whether that practice is a handshake or a game of chess. But although Wittgenstein insisted on viewing religion— and hence particular Christian precepts— as so many descriptions of actual practices, thus equating religion with philosophy, the two could never be quite comparable. On the contrary, as Wittgenstein found himself approaching death, the ironies, both real and textual, continued to multiply. Characteristically, for example, the philosopher whom Eagleton identifies as “suffering all his life from that curious mania known as Protestantism” (8) was to have a Catholic burial. The disciples who gathered around his deathbed remembered that Wittgenstein had once said he hoped his Catholic friends would pray for him, and so they called in a Dominican priest, who pronounced the final prayers. And Drury tells the following story:

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I remember that Wittgenstein once told me of an incident in Tolstoy’s life. When Tolstoy’s brother died, Tolstoy, who was then a stern critic of the Russian Orthodox Church, sent for the parish priest and had his brother interred accordingly to the Orthodox rite. “Now,” said Wittgenstein, “that is exactly what I would have done in a similar case.” When I mentioned this, everyone agreed that all the usual Roman Catholic prayers should be said by a priest at the graveside. This was done the next morning. But I have been troubled ever since as to whether what we did then was right. (184)

Right in whose eyes? For a believer like Drury, it was of course problematic. For Wittgenstein, it was a way of saying to Drury and his other friends that the pragmatic solution, given a particular context, was usually best. Since he didn’t believe in the afterlife (however much he may have wanted to), how could such a solution hurt him? Especially since, as his nurse Mrs. Bevan reports it, Wittgenstein’s last words— the words of a man who had suffered so much pain and had so often contemplated suicide— were “Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.”33

3

The Concept of Expression in the Arts from a Wittgensteinian Perspective C ha r l e s A lt i e r i

Modernist poetics and modernist aesthetics depend on the concept of expression— that is, they sharply oppose any mimetic ideal by which literature provides pictures of experience. And they insist on the palpable force of the artist’s making— not as in the Romantic’s presence of a lyrical ego seeking a place for subjective expression in an otherwise alien universe, but as a sheer constructive force capable of making manifest a power to fuse sensibility with this otherwise alien world without demanding that these shapings take what might be seen as characteristically humanizing modes of desire. Eliot’s “objective correlative,” Conrad’s “rendering,” Malevich’s bringing the force of nonbeing to being, and Picasso’s radical sense of art as construction define this distinctive orientation toward a dehumanized making. I will argue that contemporary aesthetics has lost the force of these expressivist values, typically settling instead for a common sense of understanding of “expression” and “expressiveness.” And perhaps the best available means of recovering that force in philosophically defensible terms can be found surprisingly in the framework provided by Wittgenstein’s late work. Wittgenstein did not have great sympathy with modernism, as evidenced by his love of Schubert and Mendelssohn as well as his admission that he did not understand Trakl. But he had a modernist distrust of the lyrical subject contemplating its inwardness. And he had corresponding leanness of style that relied on juxtaposition rather than continuous argument. This distance from ideals of representation was sufficient to lead him to the concept of expression as a means of modifying how subjects might make themselves visible by means of the models they build rather than the rhetoric by which they describe subjectivity. And that awareness helped him revive a Hegelian model of expression, although on grounds that deny Hegel’s idealist ontology. So I

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will elaborate his thinking on four aspects of the concept of expression that are largely ignored in contemporary aesthetics (and largely misappropriated in poststructuralist theory).1 First, we need to recover the possibility of art challenging Enlightenment traditions in philosophy, because the work expression does simply cannot be encompassed within any commitment to empiricist or commonsense realist version of knowledge. Second, the concept of expression can support such ambitious projections against Enlightenment versions of clarity because of its very different concept of creative agency. Expression theory calls attention to how art devoted to modernist ideals of presentation rather than to representation pursues a purposiveness that can best be attributed to the subjective intensities of a compositional act. Contemporary analytic aesthetics quite reasonably assumes that expression describes emotive personal utterances that derive the force of their expressiveness from the skills of the artist. But for the idealist traditions within which the concept of expression first took on imaginative life, expression is not quite of the person, but of the Spirit, seeking to reconcile its energies of self-consciousness with its entrapment in particular historical circumstances. The idea of Spirit allowed philosophers to treat expression as a mode of authorial agency that produced something different from standard assumptions about what people do when they express emotions. Because artists make objects, it is possible to imagine their work as composing sites where the position of the subject is also completely constructed and therefore without privacy and available to all sympathetic readers. This is how Eliot could imagine art as offering an “objective correlative” for emotional states. Third, this emphasis on the constructed position of the subject rather than the inwardness of unique subjects has significant implications for how we treat the object resulting from expressive acts. The theory of expression offers a way of correlating intensified self-consciousness as a feeling subject responsible for making the object with sharp awareness of objective conditions (which Hegel would call “substance”) because the expressive act does not represent the object but realizes it under certain conditions of self-reflection.2 This realized object offers a fusion of subject and object that will not fit within the typical frameworks of understanding that we adapt for practical life. Finally, if we can honor this constructed concreteness, we can establish an entire vocabulary for responsiveness to art that is now missing in academic discourse about the arts. We can treat responsiveness to this concreteness as a mode of participation in imaginative lives rather than emphasize efforts at interpretation that inevitably confirm the distance between self-consciousness and its objects, we can ground the need for activities of attunement capable of

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fleshing out what becomes present in these concrete imaginative structures, and we can speculate on the uses to which we put such concreteness by treating the works as potential exemplifications bridging what we construct in imagination with what might be possible in the domain of experience.3 We need a dense rendering of Hamlet in order to recognize the force of Prufrock’s “I am not Hamlet nor was meant to be.” This is what might be possible. Now I want to illustrate what I take to be prevailing attitudes toward the concept of expression in American aesthetic theorizing, because these attitudes block such possibilities. I confess to steering away from what I consider the best of this work, almost all about music, to concentrate on an essay by Jenefer Robinson, a thinker whose obsessive clarity prevents any trace of speculative intensity.4 Inasmuch as Robinson’s clarity is sorely limited in imaginative scope, it proves all too representative of the current state of her discipline. For example, her basic move reflects a common assumption that expression is far less important a concept than the expressiveness by which the art object gains its power: although both “expression and expressiveness have their home in ordinary life and then are extended to the arts” (19), expression covers only a limited range of personal emotional stances, while it is the expressiveness of the work that affords the possibility of cognition for an audience. In Robinson’s terms, expression is an author-centered rendering of a point of view (23); expressiveness is audience centered (19). Expression issues from somebody who is actually experiencing the emotion so that other people can perceive the emotion in their response to the work. But the rendering of emotion can only make an impact on an audience if the artist can endow the art object with expressiveness. When expressiveness is achieved, the art object can reveal something about the nature of the emotion and therefore serve cognitive functions: “If the expression is relatively expressive, we are also shown something about what it is like to be in that state” (30). For example, if the speaker calls someone a “slimy snake,” we get a better picture of how that person regards the person referred to (31). Ultimately, Robinson sees herself differing from other expression theorists because she argues that expressiveness does not need to be grounded in expression. Rather, expressiveness is the condition by which any work of art renders states of being visible for reflective consciousness (32).5 There are three basic problems with Robinson’s arguments: expressive activity need not be just the presentation of emotion; the expressive object is probably not so simply cognitive as to offer knowledge of what authors or characters feel or even how they feel; and the strong concept of expressiveness that Robinson advocates has to rely on a correspondingly weak concept

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of expression. Let me address each in turn. I think rooting the idea of expression in the picture of a person expressing particular emotions is a disastrous oversimplification of how the best art models agency, since most artists stage themselves as facing up to all sorts of existential pressures that complicate what can be expressed. It is the rare artist who is unaware of how expression takes a double genitive: it can involve a subjective genitive proclaiming what the subject can make of emotion and an objective genitive indicating all the forces that can come into play that qualify the emotion. An expression of anger can be a triumph of regulated fury or a betrayal of what one wants to keep secret. More important, the best work (considered in terms of what rises to canonical status) does not quite express recognizable and nameable emotions. It composes a world in which affective intensities of all kinds interact in order to make present distinctive and complex states of mind so that the work can entice levels of participation not called upon in standard versions of cognition. To ignore this complexity and this potential density at the expressive pole is necessarily to develop strikingly thin concepts of expressiveness in which the role of art is to let us know what someone is feeling in ordinary life. On this view, then, the cognition that becomes possible through art is indistinguishable from the kind of cognition a coffee klatch might provide. Such poverty of vision is most disturbing in Robinson’s image of what the audience seeks from the artwork. For her, the audience seems like an eager group of naïve philosophy students seeking knowledge of how speakers reveal the nature of typical emotions one also finds in ordinary life (27). There is no sense given, in Robinson’s depiction, of an audience eager to attain the sort of complex state of mind that they do not find in “ordinary life” but that they might discover if their imaginations were actually modified by exposure to something they encounter as continuous with that life. How different it once was. Charles Taylor makes a compelling case that in Germany during the 1770s (because of Herder), and then again in the 1790s (because of idealist philosophy), a coherent worldview developed around the differences between representing the world as Enlightenment philosophy imagined it, on the one hand, and basing thinking about how worlds are produced within the expressive activity of Spirit trying to make its selfconsciousness external, and thus an object of knowledge, on the other.6 Standard Lockean views of cognition became the enemy because they sanitized desire and separated the objects of knowing from the modes of experience that contextualize these objects. Such contexts display the objects of cognition in terms of relational structures that our cognitive apparatus forces us to ignore. For these goals, Hegel can be a very instructive guide, even when we bracket his claims as describing the actual nature of experience and the paths

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by which Spirit comes to self-knowledge. For Hegel, the expressive subject is emphatically not just an agent who offers up his or her emotional response to some phenomenon. This sense of agency is most powerfully developed toward the end of his Phenomenology of Spirit, beginning with his mapping of what the religious spirit can entail for artists’ understanding of what their work can become.7 Hegel’s central task here is to create a plausible sense of how Substance can be “charged as Subject with the at first only inward necessity of setting forth within itself what it is in itself, of exhibiting itself as spirit” (PS ¶802; see also PS ¶757). This statement might at first boggle the mind. But it is fairly easy to unpack once one recognizes that for Hegel there are two fundamental aspects of Spirit that must eventually recognize as fully as possible the implications of their own interdependency. Expression is the basic vehicle for such recognition. One aspect of Spirit is the life of self-consciousness striving to expand an initial inner sense that life takes on meaning as the “here” of self-consciousness seems to take on scope and power. But this “here” has to engage something that is not directly within these states of self-consciousness if will is to be complemented by knowledge and desire is to be complemented by the kind of recognitions that anchor social life. Yet this other must be intimately connected to self if this knowledge is not to be merely the distanced observation of Enlightenment science. So Hegel treats the forces that confront self-consciousness as another aspect of Spirit and hence of the self. Substance is that aspect of our existence through which we encounter forces from nature and from society that seem to determine our lives and yet which have not been made explicit for self-consciousness. Substance is for human life everything that an ideal science might point out as necessities that resist the senses of power and possibility that characterize the stances taken by self-consciousness. Then Hegel can argue that expression is the effort on the part of self-consciousness to possess this otherness by turning what is inchoate into conditions for which self-consciousness can provide forms of recognition. The more densely this self-consciousness can abide within its emerging sense of substance, the more richly it can offer a theater in which Spirit produces forms for itself. We can purge much of the idealism here if we flesh out three central figures that are crucial in Hegel’s discussion of art. First, there is the figure of picture thinking, which for Hegel, and for the later Wittgenstein, proves an inadequate model of what constitutes objects for self-consciousness because it offers only objects apart from the experiencing of them or the rendering of them in language games. Picture thinking must be superseded by modes of awareness of the forces that underlie pictures and sustain relationships rather

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than images. This is why for Hegel the most sophisticated art, romantic art, has its grounds not in observation but in the inner life, which serves as its substance, making demands on self-consciousness. The limitations of picture thinking then provide the grounds for a second figure, which tries to capture the nature of the kind of relationships that can realize aspects of substance. This is the figure of the variable copula. Picture thinking might be content to represent in an image the relations among people making the Tennis Court Oath. This image gives the agents a distinct identity and so affords them a copulative verb: these are those who formally stood in opposition to Louis XVI for the first time. But the image does not adequately render the substance of what the members of the National Assembly accomplished in signing in this oath. Picture thinking must ignore the relational forces that are a basic feature of our experience of substance. A historian might flesh out the copula that names the agents of the oath by indicating the social pressures on the agents and the consequences of their actions. The historian here offers an expression of what takes a much stronger copulative verb because she brings self-consciousness to a different and more complex sense of the substance involved in this public action.8 Now think of what the situation would be if the agents themselves were to participate in the historian’s knowledge. We would then be in a position to develop a third figure. Were this condition of agency to find expression, it would establish what it can be like to have self-consciousness align with substance as each displayed its own sense of the fullness of its being. For Hegel, this sense of equivalence transforms the quality of the copulative verb. Now “I am I” or “‘I’ = ‘I’” asserts a dynamic synthesis between what happens in selfconsciousness and what happens to the sense of substance constituting the grounds of that mode of awareness: “Only after it has externalized this individuality in the sphere of culture, thereby giving it existence, and establishing it through the whole of existence . . . only then does it turn the thought of its inmost depths outward and enunciate essence as ‘I’ = ‘I’. . . . In other words, the I is not merely the Self but the identity of the self with itself; but this identity is complete and immediate oneness with Self, or this Subject is just as much Substance” (PS ¶803). The goal of expression is to bring to full selfconsciousness what one comes to know and so to feel about one’s mode of material existence as one takes responsibility for it. Self-consciousness attunes more richly to what it inhabits because it makes articulate how substance can bear language and carry the affective charge of what recognition involves. There emerges a dynamic equivalence between what one thinks one knows about the self and how the self is actually positioned as a given historical entity: “Each meaning therefore completes itself in the other” (PS ¶782). And

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this sense of completion is not just cognitive. This degree of identification must be accompanied by the will’s affirmation of responsibility for what consciousness undergoes.9 How one feels is one aspect of that self-consciousness. But if one stresses only feeling, one would relegate self-consciousness to a version of picture thinking about the self— hence the ease with which statements of feeling induce banal cognitive claims. Finally, we cannot leave Hegel without noting his sense of the eventfulness of such expressions.10 This kind of awareness by self-consciousness does not emerge in propositional knowledge. The manifestation of Spirit produces a display of relatedness for which no concepts can prove adequate.11 Expression is realization through and through because it cannot be characterized except as an activity by which subject and substance engage in a process of completing one another. Taylor adds that because expression foregrounds the activity of the agent in a way that fuses its agency with what elicits that agency, feelings become not facts about persons but aspects of the person’s engaging with the world (23). Expression not only refers to certain properties; it possesses them. An expression of sadness, or of power, makes visible at the level of the medium the force by which the mind has engaged a substance with which it can identify. That is, expression is a particular kind of event that is capable of transforming how we respond to subjective power because of what gets transferred to objective status.12 Even though he was not at all influenced by Hegelian philosophy, Wittgenstein proves a fitting heir to Hegel on the concept of expression. Wittgenstein’s approach to philosophy provides a mode of thinking capable of fostering much of what is most forceful in Hegel’s account of expression while at the same time freeing expression from both idealist metaphysics and the sense that one needs to attend to the depths of the psyche in order to appreciate what it can compose. Whereas Hegel concentrates on the content of expressive activity, Wittgenstein attends to expression’s place in human experience so that readers might recognize our capacity to participate in this distinctive grammatical arena. Like Hegel, Wittgenstein makes clear distinctions between an entire realm of expressive activity and what can be negotiated within Enlightenment understandings of philosophy. And he creates a framework in which expression in art continues and elaborates the expressive activity in ordinary life. That activity, let me add, is not limited to the enactment of emotions but extends to everything involved in the dawning of aspects and how those aspects complicate our understanding of what Hegel would call substance.13 Now we must work in the opposite direction from what we were doing with Hegel. I was continually paring Hegel down in order to minimize the

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idealist implications of his account of the relations between Spirit and Substance. Now we have to continually build Wittgenstein up by adding a speculative dimension to his minimalist reticence and suspicion of all conceptual work not grounded in philosophical grammar. Eventually we will be using Wittgenstein rather than commenting on him. The first and most important Wittgensteinian parallel with Hegel’s view of expression is to be found in Wittgenstein’s insistence that expression and expressive behavior occupy a distinctive realm in human life that is not accessible to Enlightenment models of philosophical practice. This sense of the limits of representation pervades Wittgenstein’s accounts of practical life. Think, for example, of how Wittgenstein characterizes facial expressions: “‘We see emotion.’ As opposed to what?— We do not see facial contortions and make inferences from them (like a doctor framing a diagnosis) to joy, grief, boredom. We describe a face immediately as sad, radiant, bored, even when we are unable to give any other description of the features.— Grief, one would like to say, is personified in the face. This belongs to the concept of emotion” (Z §225). Expression is typically concrete and immediate: we do not interpret emotion but recognize it, and we do not derive the emotion by generalizing from particulars. We thicken the world we inhabit by engaging the modes of expression that come to define it. The emotion is not added to the face. Instead, it is an aspect of how the face manifests itself in the world (PI §536).14 The face literally possesses the emotional attribute it signifies. The case gets more abstract when Wittgenstein turns to art, because he wants systematically to bring out the kinds of features that elude epistemic analyses based on ideals of representation. For example, Philosophical Investigations poses the classical question of imitation in the arts this way: “And mustn’t someone who is painting be painting something— and someone who is painting something be painting something real?— Well, tell me what the object of painting is: the picture of the man (for example), or the man whom the picture portrays?” (PI §518). The image of the man whom the picture portrays would involve the artist in a two-place predicate. The reference an image makes would have to be checkable from information that the painting itself provides. This is the route of realism. The “picture of the man,” on the other hand, treats the painting as a one-place predicate: it does not refer to the actual person but uses the actual person as the possibility for making something that can be significant in its own right. (Because the painting constitutes what it refers to, it is technically autonomous. Nelson Goodman contrasts these two senses of picturing by noting the difference between a picture of Pickwick and a Pickwick picture.15) So the work of art can have its own reality, very much like the emotion on the face does not refer to emotion

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but exhibits it: “‘A picture tells me itself ’ is what I would like to say. That is, its telling me something consists in its own structure, in its own forms and colors” (PI §523).16 Finally, Wittgenstein uses his remarks on expression to offer an elaborate critique of how Enlightenment epistemic ideals of representation fail to provide adequate models for understanding and responding to human actions. We have to realize how dependent we are for many features of life on the conceptual tool of visual display, rather than on descriptions that can resolve doubts and therefore claim to provide knowledge.17 For example, the principle of display plays two significant roles in Wittgenstein’s critique of G. E. Moore’s realist claim that his directly knowing he has two hands is sufficient for rejecting skepticism. First, Wittgenstein points out that, in normal circumstances, one does not “know” one has two hands because knowledge involves the overcoming of doubt. And one would not doubt one has two hands. Having two hands is not something we know but something we rely on for all sorts of actions that are basic to life as we recognize it. Certainty is not a matter of proof but rather a matter of forms of life that establish what we have to take as given.18 Then display enters again when one notices how Moore’s assertive confidence actually undermines his entire attitude toward philosophy. The more he angrily asserts his position against the skeptic, the more he reveals the ways in which empiricism simply cannot cogently address the entire issue of foundations and certainty. His blind insistence betrays anxieties about stable reference that deconstruction would soon exploit. It is relatively easy to identify the role expression as display occupies in Wittgenstein’s later work. The difficulty lies in pursuing the consequences of what philosophers like Moore reveal about what occurs when one tries to do philosophy without this conceptual tool. Wittgenstein faces this challenge by elaborating three specific modes of display. The first is obvious: Wittgenstein developed the concept of avowal in order to demonstrate where the domain of the personal (so troubling to the positivist spirit) becomes central in our language games. It is crucial for the theory of expression that for Wittgenstein the “I” is not a person— not something referred to by cries of pain or assertions about expectations. A person is something knowable and describable. The “I” cannot be described because it is only present within the avowal as a condition that makes the avowal itself the manifestation of its presence (and not just of its emotions): “For the main point is: I don’t point to a person who is in pain, but ‘I am . . .’. Now, in saying this, I don’t name any person. Just as I don’t name anyone when I groan with pain. Though someone else sees who is in pain from the groaning” (PI §404).19 We do not interpret the avowal; we adjust to it because its mode of appearance simply emerges within the lan-

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guage. Here the “I” does not refer to a person because it is not a matter of describing the pain— that is, the grammar of “‘I’ am in pain” does not just shift from third-person reference, which is a description of his pain, to first-person reference. The first person does not refer to pain but expresses it or avows it. Now there is no expectation that we can just locate where it hurts: “The verbal expression of pain replaces crying, it does not describe it” (PI §244). Similarly “I hope” does not picture a hope but positions the speaker as avowing it— so the hope is not hidden in the psyche but manifest in how the speaker chooses and values words (PI §582; PPF 294). This is not simply an observation of how different subject positions work in our grammar. Avowals invite attunement, not description, because “one does not comfort the hand” that is in pain but one comforts “the sufferer: one looks into his eyes” (PI §286). Because the expression is a concrete appeal for recognition, its audience is typically expected to follow up on this concreteness rather than rest in the protective distance of description. Description locks one into the role of observer. And then it is difficult not to assume that one can also describe what underlies and causes the behavior— so there is no reason to attend to the specifics of the expression.20 Most commentary on Wittgenstein and expression links avowals to the direct statement of states of feeling, such as “I am in pain” or “I expect him to come.” In both cases, display replaces interpretation and description. But Wittgenstein also develops a second feature of expression that goes well beyond how the subject manifests emotional states. His fascination with grammar leads him to see that both exclamation and the dawning of aspects share the same basic immediacy and invite a version of the same basic responsiveness. And they take us well beyond the direct expression of emotion, because the focus is less on the speaker than on what emerges that elicits the speaker’s involvement. Exclamations and aspect seeing involve our turning from avowal to how objects and states emerge for various shareable states of subjectivity. We only need to identify with the exclamatory force of “now” or “here” that marks the dawning of an aspect. The subject position is still the locus of feeling, but the feeling is based on how the “I” can adapt itself to change and transformation. And when we attune ourselves to those states, we make it possible to dwell fully in the kind of experiences that testify to their own particularity. We put ourselves in a position to dwell in language games involving states like participation, expectation, surprise, realization, fit, and sympathy. Consider the difference between “Red.” and “Red!” (PPF 71).21 The exclamation “Red!” brings emotion to bear on description. And the exclamation seems inseparable from surprise at the self as well as at the moment, as if one suddenly discovered one’s own powers to offer affirmation and not rest content with observing the world. The key here is the grammar of “now,” because

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it explains the force of the exclamation.22 An observer then might highlight two features of this grammar. The dawning of an aspect occurs to a subject, but it is not about the subject; it is not necessarily the expression of emotion but a focusing of interest in a possible new sense of the world beyond the self. And the dawning of an aspect modifies our sense of what goes with what and therefore has the capacity to constitute a new picture of what is available in experience (PPF 220, 247). But this new picture remains dependent on how the subject sees, so what constitutes its novelty at least is not subject to objective description. Suppose, then, that the subject wants to clarify what occurs as “now” lights up an aspect (PPF 207, 209) for a situated subjectivity and therefore changes the framework for dealing with what is seen.23 We have to introduce our third aspect of Wittgenstein’s thinking. He suggests that the person would have to make a model of what emerges as he changes aspects: “If I know the schematic cube has various aspects, and I want to find out what someone else sees, I can get him to make a model of what he sees in addition to a copy, or to show such a model. . . . What before perhaps seemed, or even was a useless specification once there was a copy, now becomes the only possible expression of the experience” (PPF 135). This passage has several implications for recuperating much that is stressed in idealist views of expression, but now in muted grammatical terms framing possible conditions of engagement. First the model contrasts with a copy because the model has to deal with what cannot be described. The model clarifies an orientation; it does not offer a more general concept by which one can explain that orientation. And the model functions as a particular kind of example— not an example of a rule but an example determined by a particular decision. In such a case, the speaker can use the model to elaborate further the fit between the aspect and the forms of life in which it participates. Wittgenstein is much clearer than I can be because he keeps the case concrete: “When do we say: ‘the line intimates to me like a rule always the same’? And, on the other hand, ‘It keeps on intimating to me what I have to do— it is not a rule’” (Z §279). A gesture has been made available for other possible contexts (Z §158). Imagine noticing how an author’s or painter’s style has distinctive elements that one then can see in other works. Then these works in turn flesh out the possible significance of that trait: “Doesn’t the theme point to anything outside itself? Yes, it does! But that means:— it makes an impression on me which is connected with things in its surroundings— e.g. with our language and its intonations, and hence with the whole field of our language games” (Z §175). The concept of the model then is crucial for an account of expression in two ways. It provides something like a grammatical function for

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art because it casts the work as mediating between the actual dawning of an aspect and how an audience might imagine situating that dawning in relation to other experiences that provide an evocative context. We treat the example not as an instance of a concept or a rule but as itself a concrete vehicle for extending the dawning of the aspect. Speculating on the possibility that there could be color samples that serve the same “peculiar role” that the one-meter standard kept in Paris does, Wittgenstein argues that “the sample is an instrument of the language by means of which we make color statements. In this game it is not something that is represented, but is a means of representation. . . . What looks as if it had to exist is part of the language . . . something with which comparisons are made” (PI §50). Such a possibility for comparison is how agents “learn to get an eye for something” (PPF 361; see also PPF 360).24 Let me summarize by listing some ways in which we might imagine attending to expression as a distinctive feature of our practices for responding to works of art: 1. Because expression resists the authority of description and representation, it can sponsor claims about features of art that are continuous with how we engage in interpersonal situations. Aesthetic features highlight various dimensions of these situations, but we need not assume any formal vocabulary to attribute imaginative force to the aesthetic properties. Wittgenstein shows how expression in art becomes a domain in which we stress the imaginative engagement with familiar states in our experience. The only major difference is that when we consider the work as exemplary, we treat it as possessing the properties to which it refers: sadness becomes not a description of the world represented so much as an embodied characteristic of the situation art allows us to experience. 2. Because expression is opposed to description, it sponsors versions of subjectivity very different from anything that might serve cognitive ends. Avowals are the primary analogs for expressive acts. But avowals are firstperson utterances that can be drawn from subjects without their understanding or mastering what is expressed. The subject need only commit to making present some interplay between self-consciousness and the world it is trying to negotiate. One might say that “as-ness” or qualifying contexts are deeply built into how we process the expressiveness deriving from expressive behavior. Correspondingly, expression solicits all sorts of responding attitudes in an audience, all feasibly valid so long as they can stay involved in the concrete particulars that the expression comes to possess (and not just refer to).25 I stress attunement as a mode of response more capacious and emotionally engaged than any set of cognitive pursuits, but one could evoke other models covering what is possible and plausible

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within the dynamics of exchange among human beings— from empathetic response to deep suspicion. 3. Because expression invites talk of exemplification that solicits treating the work as the complex articulation of labels, Wittgenstein provides a rich and subtle model of how art can be remembered and discussed without turning it into concepts. Wittgenstein’s model of uptake for expression invites careful attention to the particular and then, in the place of interpretation and explanation, the building up of the possibility of treating the work as exemplary in its elaborated concreteness. Wittgenstein may be too harsh in his suspicion of all attempts at interpretation that seek explanation in art, but he offers powerful models for confining interpretation to the elaboration of particulars and their ways of fitting with one another. This, of course, means that he cannot show how an audience might elaborate that concreteness on a Hegelian stage. But he does help us see how this attention to particulars can establish the power of the work and define how that concreteness can be put to work in relation to future experience. We need not claim that the work refers to any existing conditions, but instead we can show how its particular relations make it possible to see in the world that which we had been blind to. My formula is that if we adapt Richard Wollheim’s idea of learning to see into the work, we develop possibilities of subsequently treating how the intelligence of the work sorts experience so that we can eventually see pieces of the world as the text sees them.26 4. Wittgenstein’s concept of expression extends from faces to works of art, but always with a sense of concrete activities that sponsor suspicion of large-scale Hegelian models of how meaning occurs. Yet his engagement with art opens up possibilities for adapting ideas of expression to aspects of subjective expression that go beyond an interpretation of the force of the particular work. Wittgenstein develops concepts of style and of confession that have the same basic role of building models to unfold the significance of how aspects dawn on agents— but with a greater sense of scope. I think Wittgenstein thought of style as a way of building a model of the person’s sense of self on levels where self is not a person. His clearest statement on this topic, which seems to have fascinated him, contrasts “Le style c’est l’homme” with “Le style c’est l’homme même”: “The first expression has cheap epigrammatic brevity. The second, correct version opens up quite a different perspective. It says that a man’s style is a picture of him” (CV 78). But this is a self-reflexive picture— not an image but a way of composing what will give a sense of individuation to the world. Style makes visible how a person can make investments in the world as he or she comes to experience it.27 And confession ultimately makes visible how the world can become possible for an agent trying to take responsibility for a life. The idea of

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confession for Wittgenstein has its roots in his sense that intention is not a state we can refer to but a construction, “because I want to tell him something about myself, which goes beyond what happened at that time” (PI §659). This desire aims not at truth, which involves reference, but at truthfulness, by which the person stakes an identity on clarifying how he or she is modified by the experience and redirected toward other features that might be internally related to this new way of seeing. Then confession is the ultimate clarifying of intentions by a commitment to displaying what in life has mattered most for the self: “The criteria for the truth of the confession that I thought such-and-such are not the criteria for a true description of a process. And the importance of the true confession does not reside in its being a true and certain report of some process. It resides, rather, in the special consequences which can be drawn from a confession whose truth is guaranteed by the special criteria of truthfulness” (PPF 319). Concepts will not afford this mode of responsibility because they generalize and because they tempt one to idealize the particulars so that the action involved will seem worthy of the generalization, even a negative generalization. If “‘You can’t hear God speak to someone else, you can hear him only if you are being addressed’ . . . is a grammatical remark” (Z §717), then one needs the grammar provided by the special criteria of truthfulness. The confessional text, which Wittgenstein could never write but perhaps Hegel did, would be a model made in order to share how that life could be lived in full self-consciousness of one’s own substance.28 5. Stanley Cavell and then Ralph Berry on Stanley Cavell have pointed out that modernist art gains a great deal of its scope, power, and intensity from the fact that an audience always has to be worried about the artwork being a fraud, for if the work claims to reject tradition and set its own terms for being valued, how can we trust those claims when by definition we do not have any categories or criteria by which to assess them?29 In effect, one crucial task of the art object is gradually to dispel this fear by providing the relevant terms for new ways of valuing how art stages its relation to the world. I think this observation makes clear how Wittgenstein’s account of expression ultimately elaborates the logic underlying the basic social position modernist art occupies, just because that position is so wound up in expressionist ideals. One of the most powerful pleasures for audiences of this art is their continual sense that they are exploring possibilities for which there are no criteria, just because the work takes on the responsibility of saying itself and so pushing past what might be predicted by traditional concepts of art. We are asked to take responsibility for how we see the work taking of responsibility, and we thereby allow the world to take on new possibilities for displaying what it can become for consciousness. Expression ties expressiveness to questions of origins and ends, demanding discourses both of force and of power.

4

Wittgenstein, Loos, and Critical Modernism: Style and Idea in Architecture and Philosophy All an Janik — To the late Carl E. Schorske, from whose works I have learned

A philosophical style like Wittgenstein’s, which eschews formal arguments, employing in their place aphorisms, thought experiments, unanswered questions, and so on, with its own peculiar kind of beauty, is rare among philosophers generally and unique to him among analytic philosophers— so much so that both friends and foes confusedly refused to recognize that he was a radical reformer of that project rather than an outright enemy such as, say, Martin Heidegger. Like analytic philosophers, Wittgenstein was convinced that the problems of philosophy could only be coped with on the basis of a deep understanding of language. However, his concern was with how language actually works rather than with analyzing it on the basis of formal logic with a view to eliminating confusing metaphysical expressions. Understanding how language actually is constituted in behavior, as we are trained from earliest childhood to interweave words (sign, symbols, sentences) and actions, determined his unmistakably distinctive style of writing, which, in turn, was determined by his conviction that philosophy does not solve problems but dissolves the very temptation to pose metaphysical and epistemological questions in the first place. Wittgenstein’s emphasis upon dissolving rather than solving problems in philosophy is as absolutely central to his conception of the subject as it is easy to miss. Indeed, failing to grasp that he wanted to eliminate our very desire to pose problems about, say, meaning, intention, or certainty, has been the source of many misconceptions about his philosophy— including the failure to appreciate the philosophical dimension of his very style. Moreover, Wittgenstein’s intense preoccupation with aesthetic matters, along with his assertion that ethics and aesthetics are one, as well as the striking house he built for his sister, seem to imply that his deepest intellectual commitments lay outside philosophy in a religiously inspired concept of art

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that replaced philosophy for him. While there is a certain truth in this view, it is far from being the whole story. It was not art but skill that was central to both Wittgenstein’s philosophical and architectural projects— the craft of showing us what we fail to see, although it’s before our very eyes. Examining his intellectual relationship to Adolf Loos is one way of gaining deeper insight into Wittgenstein’s concept of philosophical analysis as craftsmanship and thus a key to understanding the philosophical significance of his style. Moreover, what unites Wittgenstein and Loos intellectually and morally fits into early twentieth-century Viennese culture in a very special way. So explaining how their views about style represent a highly peculiar form of Viennese modernism is an essential aspect of our story. As a result, we need to begin by establishing some preliminaries about his relationship to Loos. Wittgenstein himself insisted that Adolf Loos was one of ten figures who decidedly influenced his philosophical work of clarification. Thus he would write, “I think there is some truth in the idea that I think only reproductively. I don’t believe that I have ever invented a line of thinking, I have always taken one over from someone else. I have simply seized upon it straightaway with enthusiasm for my work of clarification. That is how Boltzmann, Hertz, Schopenhauer, Frege, Russell, Kraus, Loos, Weininger, Spengler, Sraffa have influenced me.”1 Like so much that Wittgenstein wrote, this is a strange, paradoxical text (which I have analyzed at length elsewhere).2 It is, for example, particularly noteworthy that many thinkers whom Wittgenstein is known to have admired enormously, such as Sören Kierkegaard, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Leo Tolstoy, are not mentioned here at all. But the oddities hardly cease there. For example, before Wittgenstein is finished, he will end up declaring that his particular mode of thinking reproductively is precisely what enables him to see more in the work of the geniuses who influenced him than they could themselves. In any case, there is lots more here than meets the eye. Scholars are indebted to Alois Pichler for pointing out that Wittgenstein originally wrote only the names of Frege, Russell, Spengler, and Sraffa and only added the other six in the process of revision. All knowledgeable scholars agree that the list is meant to be chronological. This would seem to indicate that the latter four were somehow the primary sources of his thought but that Boltzmann, Hertz, and Schopenhauer conditioned his reception of Frege in ways that he could not ignore. Kraus, Loos, and Weininger, for their part, showed him how to appropriate what he learned from Frege and Russell and paved the way to his reception of Spengler and Sraffa. Another oddity of the text is that Wittgenstein certainly knew, say, Kraus and Weininger long before they came to “influence” him. The point is that they became important for his concept of philosophical analysis, what he calls his “work of clarification,” at

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a very particular moment in his development. For all that, he said precious little about how any of those figures had an impact on him. In the case of Loos, we know even less than in the others (only the influence of Piero Sraffa is more mysterious). So what we need to do is to reconstruct Loos’s views on architecture and taste closely with a view to extrapolating how he might have been able to teach Wittgenstein something about philosophy— to be sure a risky undertaking but by no means a pointless one. We must begin with an account of Loos’s social criticism; proceed to his view of architecture as a craft, including his view of what architectural education is all about; and close with an account of his notion of the relationship between architecture and art. With that behind us, we can then consider how such ideas made an impact on the author of the Philosophical Investigations. The first point to be made about Loos is that his architecture was deeply rooted in a comprehensive critique of Viennese culture circa 1900. So we shall have to begin with a sketch of the salient aspect of the culture that he criticized to be able to appreciate what Loos was getting at. Just as Karl Kraus savagely, but brilliantly, attacked all forms corruption and hypocrisy in public life, Loos polemicized against the stodginess and flippancy linked to all matters connected with style in Old Vienna, be it dress, furnishings, or manners, as well as architecture and design.3 Thus Kraus would write of their common concerns: “Adolf Loos and I— he literally and I grammatically— have done nothing else than to show that there is a distinction between and urn and a chamber pot and that it is this distinction above all which provides culture with elbow room. The others, who fail to make this distinction, are divided into those who use the urn as a chamber pot and those who use the chamber pot as urn.”4 In 1903, the Anglophile Loos edited a periodical, Das Andere (The Other), which was dedicated to “the introduction of Western culture into Austria.” His campaign was two-pronged. First, it was a reaction to Viennese liberals’ post-1848 efforts to legitimate their social and political aspirations vis-à-vis the aristocracy on the basis of imitating classical style in all matters of taste. Second, it was a also reaction to a younger generation’s rejection of their fathers’ historicist values, which took the form of a search for a style that would be authentically their own and not mere imitation of faded past glories. They were fervently attached to everything new and desperately seeking a comprehensive style to mark their avant-gardism. Ultimately, they took their clues from their French and Belgian contemporaries and latched on to art nouveau with a passion.5 Thus art nouveau’s Viennese form came to be known as “the style of youth,” or Jugendstil in German. New art in Vienna was personified by Gustav Klimt, who led the younger generation of painters in their rebellion

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against historicism, and Josef Hoffmann, who founded the Wiener Werkstätte with a view to elevating the handicrafts to the status of high art in order to grace ornamentally what had hitherto been banal objects of everyday life such as chairs, drinking glasses, lamps, and ashtrays. The former was epitomized in the Secession, the building that housed Klimt’s movement, from which it took its name; the latter in the Cabaret Fledermaus, which was itself a Gesamtkunstwerk. Together they were the very embodiment of Viennese modernism, which was a decidedly new variation on an established theme. These were Loos’s bêtes noires. Modernism in Germany was a very different thing than its Viennese counterpart. Since that difference accounts for considerable confusion in superficial treatments of the fin de siècle, we shall do well to characterize it briefly. German modernism was principally a literary movement with a powerful social conscience itself inspired by the naturalist social criticism of the French writer Émile Zola. Its style was naturalism, which recounted the everyday lives of “ordinary” people on the basis of minute descriptions of outer and inner experiences with a view to awakening and sharpening the reader’s sense of social justice and, on that basis, initiating social change. The social criticism in Theodor Fontane’s novel Effi Briest is among the most powerful examples of German modernism. It is precisely what Viennese modernism rejected. Hermann Bahr, modernism’s spiritus rector in Vienna, proclaimed it to be “Romanticism of nerves,” a celebration of subjective emotions that was nothing less than a matter of “conquering naturalism” and ignoring issues of social reform.6 What Bahr preached (a not untoward expression in this context), the enormous narcissism that the movement incorporated, can be summed up in his proclamation, “For me it is not what is true that counts but what I need and the sun rises the earth is real and I am I.”7 In response to these developments, Loos ironically turned Secession’s motto “To the epoch its art; to art its freedom” against Viennese modernism (die Wiener Moderne) itself with a vengeance. The critical modernism of Loos— like that of Kraus and Wittgenstein— was a profound critique of die Wiener Moderne in both theory (i.e., polemical writings) and practice (i.e., the very buildings and interiors that he created). Critical modernism (my term, not theirs) in all its manifestations posed Ibsen’s question, “How great is The Great?” to Klimt, Hoffmann, and company. The Secession’s motto suggests a certain historicism, which is, indeed, related to for a sense of style appropriate to the life of modern people. Nowhere was this more evident than in architecture. To reiterate, the rebellion of the sons of the entrepreneurs who industrialized the dual monarchy took an aesthetic rather than a political form. Their fathers had endeavored to legitimate their vision of a liberal

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society on the basis of an eclectic, historicist, “representative” architecture. Their buildings symbolized their relationship to a past more imaginary than real, as Carl Schorske has pointed out in his brilliant essay on Ringstrasse architecture.8 Thus the Burgtheater was built in a neo-Renaissance style to commemorate the first mingling of the bourgeoisie in the theater at that time, the city hall was a neo-Gothic building that celebrated the spirit of the medieval burgesses, the parliament was a Greek temple commemorating the ancient origins of modern liberalism, and so on. To the next generation, people born around 1880 and coming to maturity just after the turn of the century, eclectic historicism seemed to be fragmentary, with no style at all. What was lacking was a sense of totality in art, a Gesamtkunstwerk. The search for a truly modern style thus originated in a rejection of eclectic historicism (and, indeed, history itself, according to Schorske) as irrelevant to the conditions of modern life and, above all, to its nervous energy. Part of its histrionics was a desperate search for a coherent way of building. Loos found this whole project nonsensical for two reasons: first, because the highly ornate Jugendstil, which allegedly filled the stylistic gap, completely subordinated functionality to ornamentation; second, because the modernists’ very fascination with everything new caused them to lose sight of a genuinely indigenous, harmonious Austrian style— the Biedermeier, from which there was much to be learned. Biedermeier art and design was based on an ideal of simplicity that developed in the first half of the nineteenth century in contrast to the courtly or imperial style. Courtly style, and its upper-middle-class imitations, stately or “representative” art, aimed at glorifying “majesty” on the basis of monumental historicist idealization replete with classical symbolic ornamentation. The impetus behind Biedermeier design, on the contrary, has been characterized as a striving less for beauty itself, as did stately art, than for a revitalization of the cultural life of ordinary citizens as opposed to a hereditary elite. Instead of focusing on the accomplishments of an aristocratic patron by glorifying his “nobility,” the Biedermeier focused more modestly on producing truly useful objects to enhance everyday life based on solid but elegant design. Briefly, it was firmly rooted in paying homage to the integrity of objects of production and a fortiori that of the craftsmen and their skill. In music, Schubert’s songs epitomize Biedermeier taste in their simple elegance; in design, Ludwig Lobmayer’s superb drinking glasses, which are still available from the firm that bears his name today. The classicism-writ-small of the Apotheke zum weissen Storch, which still can be seen on the Tuchlauben in the center of Vienna today, was a model for Loos’s controversial masterpiece the Haus am Michaelerplatz. Be that as it may, Loos believed that the Biedermeier’s potential for ful-

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filling what was not mere fantasy in the dream of a truly modern style was anything but exhausted: The second half of the 19th century was filled by the cry of cultureless people: “We don’t have a building style!” How wrong, how incorrect. Precisely this era had a more strongly accentuated, more differentiated style than any previous epoch. It was a vicissitude without precedent in cultural history. However, since false prophets only recognize a product on the basis of variously composed ornaments, ornamentation became a fetish for them. They foisted this, the enchanted child of our times, upon us by calling it style. We had already had true style but we did not possess ornament. If I could knock all of the ornaments off our old and new buildings such that only naked walls would remain, it would certainly be difficult to distinguish a 15th century building from a 17th century building. However, the buildings of the 19th century could be identified by a layman at a glance. We did not have ornamentation and they complained that we did not have a style. Then they copied past ornamentation until they themselves found it ridiculous and when that could go no further they invented new ornaments, which means they had sunk as deep as they could culturally. Then they rejoiced that they had found a style for the 20th century.9

Loos characterized his version of critical modernism as showing Vienna how to distinguish genuine historicism from its counterfeit. That entailed a massive polemic against the role of ornamentation in Jugendstil art and everything that Josef Hoffmann and the Wiener Werkstätte represented. This in itself is paradoxical because in his student days, he had considered Hoffmann the most gifted of their common teacher Otto Wagner’s pupils.10 But his project was yet bigger than that. It involved producing buildings that embodied that difference. This was the very core of his project, as Christopher Long has convincingly argued in his superb study of Loos’s Haus am Michaelerplatz:11 the better part of Loos’s polemics are a defense and a further articulation, if you will, of the meaning of what he constructed there. In any case, the façades of the private dwellings that he built were ugly by conventional standards precisely because they were built from the inside out with undecorated façades. Thus those façades were in fact a by-product of their complex interior structures. That complexity in turn was the result of maximizing utilizable space as well as creating a variety of differentiated living spaces for different domestic activities on the basis interlocking levels, which were so essentially three-dimensional that they could not be accurately photographed. In fact, Loos, like Karl Kraus, campaigned to restore a lost (some commentators might prefer to say missing) integrity to Austrian public life.12 For Loos, the introduction into Vienna of a truly modern, truly functional architecture demanded a rigorous critique of every aspect of Viennese “good taste”

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starting with such simple matters as table manners and fashion, subjects that he taught at the first girls’ Gymnasium in Vienna, which had been founded by the progressive Eugenie Schwarzwald. It was to this end that he produced the aforementioned periodical, The Other, whose purpose was to remind the Austrian public that the first quality of good design, and indeed good taste, is its unobtrusive character: it makes life simpler, not more complicated; more fulfilling, not more elaborate. Loos fought desperately to demonstrate that there is a fundamental distinction between art and utility, between functionality and fantasy— a distinction that we ignore at the price of our incapacity to understand anything at all except superficially. Viennese aestheticism, in its fascination with decoration, was on the verge of criminality in its disavowal of fundamental values and, in the end, rationality and objectivity itself. Thus Loos insisted, “Cultural evolution is equivalent to the removal of ornament from articles in daily use.”13 In his writing, as in his building, Loos demanded that scrupulous attention be paid to precisely that craftsmanship that conventional Viennese “good taste” tended to ignore. The dazzling character of Loos’s provocative essay “Ornament and Crime,” which most architectural historians consider an unreliable guide to Loos’s architecture for the way it tends to focus attention away from how Loos actually built— he was in fact less concerned with abolishing ornament than with employing it sensibly and naturally— has tended to obscure his emphasis on the paramount role of craftsmanship in building.14 He summarized his views succinctly in a manifesto— originally published in the Jahrbuch der Schwarzwald’schen Schulanstalten in Vienna and later reprinted by Ludwig von Ficker in Der Brenner in Innsbruck— that is brief enough to be cited here in its entirety: Rules for Building in the Mountains Don’t build “colourfully.” Leave that to the walls, the mountains and the sun. The guy who dresses “colourfully” isn’t colorful but simply a clown. Build as well as you can. Not better. Don’t be presumptuous. Not worse either. Don’t express yourself intentionally at a lower level than the one your birth and education entitle you to. That applies to your mountain walks as well. Talk to the peasants in your own language. The Viennese lawyer who speaks to peasants in bumpkin stage dialect has to be eliminated.15 Pay attention to the forms that peasants employ when building. For their content runs replete with ancestral wisdom. But seek out the reason for the form. If technical progress has made it possible to improve on the form, this improvement should always be employed. The thrashing flail is replaced by the threshing machine. Plains require structuring buildings vertically; mountains horizontally. The

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work of man should not compete with the work of God. Habsburg watch towers disturb the chain of the Vienna Woods, but the Hussars’ Temple [a towering monumental neoclassical temple built as in the Vienna Woods in 1810] melts harmoniously into them. Don’t think of the roof, rather think of the rain and the snow. That’s how the peasant thinks and thus he builds the flattest roof that his technical expertise permits in the mountains. In the mountains the snow should not slide off when it wants to, but rather when the peasant wants it to. For that reason he has to be able to climb up onto the roof in order to remove the snow. So we too have to produce the flattest roof that our technical expertise allows. Be true! Nature only suffers truth. Iron reinforced bridges fit well into Her, but She rejects Gothic arches with ramparts and firing slits. Don’t be afraid of being chided as unmodern. Radical departures from the old ways of building are only allowed if they clearly mean improvement. Otherwise stick with the old ways. For truth, even if it is hundreds of years old has a more immediate relationship to us than the lie that strides alongside us.16

This text is of particular interest for the remarkable way it presents all the themes near and dear to Loos’s heart in an extraordinarily succinct, entirely concrete way: the rejection of useless decoration; the decisive role of the use of architectural elements in determining their form; the importance of the immediate environment in building; a respect for nature in the judicious employment of technical innovations, especially those emphasizing the aesthetic qualities of steel; and good manners. Above all, it is a clear statement of Loos’s fundamental belief that practice as incorporated in living tradition is the only reliable guide to constructing a genuinely modern building. His own architectural principles, he insisted, were Roman rather than Greek. What impressed him was the fact that the Romans, unlike the Greeks, constructed buildings from the inside out: It is no accident that the Romans were not able to invent a new order of columns, a new ornament. They had progressed too far for that. They took everything that they could from the Greeks and adapted it to their own purposes. The Greeks were individualists. Each building has to have its own profile, its own ornamentation. The Romans thought socially. The Greeks were hardly in a position to govern their cities, the Romans could govern the entire earth. The Greeks wasted their powers of invention in the orders of columns; the Romans concentrated them on the floor plan. And those who can solve the problem of the large-scale floor plan do not have to think about new profiles.17

A leading authority on Central European architecture of the period, Ákos Moravánsky, comments succinctly on what Loos learned from the Romans’ atrium principle with respect to the infamous Haus am Michaelerplatz:

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The interior of the department store in the Looshaus was developed around the spatial cage of the stairs. Loos’s idea, the Raumplan, the interlacing, continuous structure of interior space, is the important result of his critical attack against surface decoration. The destruction of the traditional tectonics of the house, replaced by an isomorphous spatial grid or by cubist folded forms was a process in which all the major Central European architects of early modernism participated, but others did not make its spatial results a conceptual goal. Loos was proud that photographs could not capture his interiors, that he destroyed the “picture” character of the home.18

The idea that interior space is continuous and can be interlaced across the stories of a building, then, is the fundamental principle of Loosian architecture. It explains how Loos could claim that he was building the house from the inside out, and at the same time it explains his aversion to decorated façades, for the very act of decorating requires structuring the building from the outside and ultimately subordinating function to ornament. In his view, the façade is more or less irrelevant to the structure of the building. In all this, it is important to point out that the very building whose unadorned simplicity so scandalized the old emperor, the Haus am Michaelerplatz, opposite the city entrance to the imperial palace, was entirely traditional inasmuch as it strictly separated public, business space from private living space, even with respect to its façade.19 Moreover, the ideal of building the house from the inside out is entirely reminiscent of Wittgenstein’s insistence that his way of determining the limits of language from within in the Tractatus was the only strict way of doing so.20 In both cases, the stress is on the ethical dimension of respect for the integrity of the object of the task at hand— the primary concern of craftsmanship. Is this why Loos could say “you are me” to Wittgenstein at their first meeting in 1914? Perhaps. But that is to run ahead. In describing how the Adolf Loos Bauschule functioned, Loos gives us further important clues about the distinguishing features of his way of building. The three principles around which he oriented the education of his students were style, form, and material. So his pupils studied interior consolidation, art history, and what we would today call materials science. Moreover, their education was oriented around project work so that they might learn from one another how to grapple with the problems presented by the challenge of building from the inside outward. Learning to build that way meant considering the floor plan of a house as a three dimensional cube, whose distribution of axes— that is, floors and ceilings— presented the young would-be architect with no small difficulty. The overall aim, however, was to capture a particular mood— that is, an atmosphere for living that was part and parcel of the environment to be created. Here again there is a striking parallel to Wittgenstein’s notion that

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to define a form of life is to describe the whole of a culture, which in this view is objectively impossible but nevertheless graspable to the extent that you can learn to appreciate its taste, to learn what a culture finds pleasing and therefore determine its mood. In Loos’s view, capturing that mood is only possible on the basis of a knowledge of traditional forms of building practice— that is, a knowledge of those who were previously successful in creating the desired mood. Tradition should be a continual source of inspiration for architects— at once a source of ideas and a kind of limit within which truly functional architecture must move. (This emphasis on tradition is an important point that distinguishes Loos from Bauhaus, with which he is perennially confused; their emphases on the idea of functionality and on flat, unadorned surfaces, respectively, imply a superficial similarity between the two.) Thus tradition can mean many things. For Loos, it was clear that architecture went wrong when architects ceased to pay attention to craftsmen and began to put their trust in books.21 Then drawing ceased to be a mere means to an end. The result was that the architect lost his relation to the practice of building and ultimately became an artist. There is a noteworthy affinity with Arnold Schoenberg’s concluding remark to the first chapter of his 1914 Theory of Harmony: “I would be proud, if I could say I have taken a bad aesthetics away from students of composition and given them a solid set of teachings about skill.”22 It could well have been written by Loos— or, indeed, Wittgenstein. To be sure, the idea of becoming degraded to the status of an artist echoes a theme in Weininger in a text that Schoenberg— and Wittgenstein— certainly knew well. Moreover, it appears in a passage in which Weininger excoriates what he dismissively refers to as the “coitus culture of the Viennese coffeehouse”: “Lately a new element has been added to that earlier obsequiousness [the then fashionable hero worship]. The light footed dancing legs of Zarathustra ideals, the cool gracefulness of the south German waltz, of mindless student song and artsy-craftsy armchair effusion had to come together in order to evoke and posit it in the face of all German and Scandinavian seriousness. I mean the lie of the ‘stylized life’ of great men, which degrades those people to artists” (ÜLD 25). The last remark is itself a clear, and clearly ironic, reference to Nietzsche’s deep skepticism with respect to “artists”: “Virtuosos through and through, with uncanny approaches to everything that seduces, tempts, compels, upsets, born enemies of logic and everything straightforward, covetous of the foreign, the exotic, the colossal, all opiates of the senses and reason. . . . But sick.”23 In his confrontation with the ultimate artist of the future, Richard Wagner, Nietzsche identifies modernity with this form of art and goes so far as to term this sort of modernism as decadence. It’s little wonder that Loos would have a similar view of what is modern in Vienna.

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Loos’s task was to fight tooth and nail what he considered decadent in everything bearing upon design. It was not that there was merely a single error at work— instead, a whole constellation of values that had come to be identified as “modern” were at stake in the issue of the relationship between art and architecture. The focus of the debate for Loos was the private house: The house has to please everybody. In contrast to the work of art that does not have to please anybody. The work of art is the artist’s private affair. The work of art is put into the world without any necessity. The house is the response to necessity. The work of art is not responsible to anybody, the house to everybody. The work of art aims at wrenching people out of their ease. The house serves the purpose of making them comfortable. The work of art is revolutionary, the house conservative. The work of art shows humanity new paths and thinks towards the future. The house thinks in the present. People love everything that serves their comfort. They hate everything that wrenches them from the secure position they have won for themselves. Thus people love houses and hate art. So has the house nothing whatsoever to do with art and is architecture not to be considered an art? That’s the way it is. Only a small part of architecture belongs to art: the tombstone and the monument. Everything else that belongs to the sphere of the purposeful should be excluded from that of art.24

Art is a matter of individual creative intelligence, and building is a social affair, a utilitarian task of an entirely different order. So it is a corollary of Loos’s view that the architect is fundamentally a craftsman that architecture is not art. These spheres retain their integrity only as long as long as they are rigorously separated.25 Ornamented façades are masks that paradoxically conceal the identity of the folks who live in such houses from everybody, including themselves, and the architects who construct them. Thus there is powerful Socratic thrust in Loos’s insistence that architecture and art have to be kept apart. How can all this help us understand Wittgenstein’s mature concept of philosophical analysis? It’s not an easy question to answer. In order to venture a response, let us begin by considering Wittgenstein’s views about architecture and philosophy, then proceed to examine his own contribution to architecture in this light, and finally conclude with some reflections on the role of art and craftsmanship in his understanding of what philosophy is all about. In Culture and Value, Wittgenstein writes in a Socratic vein that is not entirely foreign to Loos: “Working in philosophy— like work in architecture in many respects— is really more a working on oneself. On one’s own conceptions of things. On one’s way of seeing things. (And of what one expects of them)” (CV 24). Wittgenstein agrees with Loos that the period in which he

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works, however, drastically limits an architect’s ability— and a fortiori a philosopher’s— to do good work by continually tempting him to seek inferior solutions to his problems.26 The architect— and presumably the philosopher— is at the mercy of the predominant values of his epoch (a notion we also find in Spengler, who seems to have been a profound influence on Loos in his discussions of architecture). He must be continually on guard to defend the integrity of his subject, which, for that reason, condemns him to be a polemicist. The self-critical activity of the architect was nothing less than an exercise in clarification of what building is all about— one that, for precisely that reason, runs exactly parallel to philosophical analysis. So there can be little doubt that Wittgenstein saw a parallel between philosophy and architecture as an activity of clarification— that is, a fundamentally self-critical analytic activity. Paul Wijdeveld’s trenchant analysis of Wittgenstein’s achievement in the construction of the house for his sister provides a clear example of how Wittgenstein understood clarification in architecture. That example can further help us grasp what Wittgenstein was getting at in drawing the parallel between working in architecture and working in philosophy. Wijdeveld relates how Loos’s student Paul Engelmann, who made the original drawings for Gretl Stonborough, was principally acting as a draftsman rather than a full-fledged architect; Mrs. Stonborough systematically frustrated Engelmann by strictly ruling out a house designed around the Loosian conception of functionality (the so-called Raumplan). Instead, she wanted to have an entirely traditional semiaristocratic city mansion. When Wittgenstein joined the project in late summer 1926, he was able to realize her wishes to build a traditional house in a modern way. (It has become increasingly clear that her wishes were the decisive factor in determining the nature of the house.)27 So it never could have been a Loos house in the first place. Moravánsky contrasts Loos and Wittgenstein as follows: “As a consequence of the Raumplan principle, the interior spaces of Loos strike the visitor as negative volumes, carved out of a building mass. Their nichelike enclosedness, emphasized by lower ceilings, contributed to the intimacy of house as ‘home.’ The interior of the Wittgenstein house appears more generous and transparent because it is not compartmentalized. The structural columns are always freestanding, while Loos always ties them to a parapet, a stair or built-in furniture, to underline the direction of spatial movement.”28 Only the smooth, unadorned façade of the Palais Stonborough is modern. The classical progression of the windows, for example, betrays the architect’s traditionalism. As for the interior, Wijdeveld suggests that it is an effort to purify, to clarify, the essence of classical monumental architecture. So Wittgenstein would employ the stucco lustro, the favored material for churches

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and palaces since the baroque. The stone slabs of the floor, the unadorned pillars, the naked light bulbs, and the two winged doors all reflect what we might consider Wittgenstein’s alternative realization of the traditional city mansion reflected in the concerns of an engineer and ultimately a craftsman: “The lack of ornamentation and the austerity of exterior and interior did not result from the need to create a new architectural aesthetic form from the technical and constructional developments in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but from the wish to clarify the roots of traditional monumental architecture as exemplified by the work of Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach [the most prominent of Austria’s Baroque architects, creator of the superb Karlskirche in Vienna], whom he greatly admired.”29 In effect, Wijdeveld has shown how Wittgenstein, despite working in a different architectural idiom from Loos— as we have seen, something to which his classical Palladian fenestration and freestanding columns attest— was nevertheless entirely consistent with Loos’s demand to “knock all of the ornaments off our old and new buildings such that only naked walls would remain” (see above). His design for the Kundmanngasse house, for all its un-Loosian character, bears that out. However, his efforts to make visible the house’s structure run exactly parallel to the philosophical aims he sketches, for example, in a draft of a foreword to the Philosophical Remarks printed in Culture and Value. There he says, “I am not interested in constructing a building, so much as having a synoptic view of the foundations of possible buildings” (CV 7). Thus, for Wittgenstein, making the foundations of existing houses (the Palais Schey in the Ringstrasse was his favorite, as Wijdevelt indicates) and of real things visible to us— rather than constructing them as, say, Rudolf Carnap aspired to do— was what distinguished him from modern scientists (and a fortiori scientific philosophers of his day— that is, the Vienna Circle). The foundations that analytical philosophers seek to develop with their theories have, in Wittgenstein’s view, always been there in practice; what Wittgenstein sought were techniques that could make those analytical philosophers aware of how superfluous their logical analyses actually were by reminding them of the aspects of language that are completely obvious and therefore seem trivial because they are always in front of us. Yet, like Loos and unlike so many opponents of “scientific” philosophy in the so-called Continental tradition, from Nietzsche through Heidegger to Derrida, his alternative was not an “artistic” mode of philosophical theorizing— or antitheorizing, as he emphasized: “All that philosophy can do is to destroy idols. And that means not making any new ones . . . say out of the ‘absence of idols.’ ”30 Wittgenstein considered that his philosophizing had a definite relationship to art as a parallel way of conceiving the world around us as a source

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of wonder and awe, but philosophy was, nevertheless, to be distinguished from art. In 1930, Wittgenstein wrote, “Now it seems to me that there is another way of capturing the world sub specie aeterni apart from the work of the artist. . . . Thought . . . can fly over the world as it were and the leaves it as it is— observing it from above in flight” (CV 7). In his wartime Notebooks, he had already insisted that art presented its objects not from the perspective of their being in the world around us but with the whole world as their background, whereas philosophy aimed at the virtually impossible task of getting outside of the world so that it could be seen as a whole.31 Philosophy is not art, but it has to take crucial clues from art in order to clarify the natural history of human thinking. Thus it might even have a certain “poetic” character without being poetry. This assertion might seem to fly in the face of Wittgenstein’s aphorism “Philosophie dürfte man eigentlich nur dichten” (“One should really write philosophy as poetry”), but only if one mistranslates Dichtung as lyric poetry (as opposed simply to the genus fiction of which lyric, drama, and epic are the species, according to traditional German classification) (CV 28).32 One crucial aspect of his mature philosophizing involved focusing our attention away from the unusual philosophical perspective that epistemology has on knowing, derived from reflections on science, and bringing us back to what knowing means in everyday life. That is where fiction entered into his project of clarification. However, that is no simple matter, because we are strongly tempted to look in the wrong place for our answer. He has to redirect our attention to what is “normal,” something that turns out to be very difficult to do. So he needs to find and invent more appropriate examples of how meaning originates in our myriad ways of interweaving words and actions. In fact, the vast majority of his examples of language games are invented rather than discovered. He was not doing sociology or anthropology, despite appearances to the contrary sometimes, but carrying on philosophical investigations. The act of inventing fictive language games is precisely where fiction enters into his philosophizing. There is nothing even remotely lyrical about the first part of the Philosophical Investigations, which, as the prominent German Wittgenstein scholar Eike von Sayigny has continually and forcefully reminded us over several decades, is the only authoritative text that we have from the later Wittgenstein’s pen. This is also consistent with his assertion that his philosophy should be businesslike; it should get a job done.33 The results of his philosophizing were there not to be “beautiful” in the way that poetry is but to get a job done. Their very genuine “beauty” is only secondary and per analogiam. Thus Wittgenstein strove to present a synoptic view (his preferred English expression) of the workings of language to dissolve the conundrums that have tormented philosophers. In

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the manner of a craftsman, he sought to develop a set of philosophical techniques for reminding us of things about language that the very simplicity and familiarity (PI §129) of our everyday practices prevent us from seeing. These techniques— that is, the method of language games— amounted to a curious way of writing fiction in the form of thought experiments that reminds us of obvious facts that the surface grammar of language seduces us into passing over when we philosophize. His philosophy must incorporate a sort of analysis of how language actually functions in human life, an analytic venture, without being what is normally understood as “analytic” philosophy. Arguments are of no use if the goal is to show us something trivial that we all know but nevertheless are strongly inclined to forget when we theorize. We need, as it were, to be slowed down from the hectic pace of everyday life so that we can take a second look at the way language normally functions in everyday life— a view of it from above, as it were— and that goal requires highly clever persuasive linguistic strategies for cajoling us into grasping what is easily grasped but equally easily overlooked. Inventing such techniques for slowing us down has to involve skill and elegance. The result is, indeed, a work of great beauty, beauty that can only be grasped with considerable intellectual effort but is the beauty of craftwork, not art: the beauty of a well-made wooden rocking chair, not that of a Rilke poem. We can bring this preoccupation with handwork yet more clearly in to focus if we return to Wittgenstein’s work in architecture for a moment. Wittgenstein’s own concern for craftsmanship is most clearly evident in the cast metal doors and door handles as well as the window latches that have to be operated with deliberate effort. They reflect the skills and concerns of the mechanical engineer that Wittgenstein was. In short, the “beauty” in Wittgenstein’s architecture is the result of a craftsman’s concern for detail. It has rightly been compared with the kind of simple, elegant beauty produced by American Shaker furniture makers, whose objects were constructed with consummate respect for the materials they employed for use in daily life.34 Wittgenstein’s doors and windows are dramatic examples of the way his own aesthetic values are determined on the basis of craftsmanship rather than art.35 The same holds true of his “philosophical work of clarification.” Brian McGuinness, arguably the most knowledgeable scholar working on Wittgenstein’s life and oeuvre, whose views of the matter we have already anticipated, has put the point succinctly: “[Philosophy for Wittgenstein] was a craft, a discipline . . . and its value consisted in its being well done. So one should do it well and not preach about it: . . . showing not saying was important. Like all crafts, its exercise at its highest produces beauty, a beauty which requires an intellectual effort to grasp.”36 As such, both Wittgenstein’s concept of philos-

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ophy and his way of building are continuous with the work of Loos both as architect and as cultural critic. By the time Loos had become important for him (recall the chronological order in his list of “influences”), Wittgenstein had already learned from Russell that the surface grammar of language can tempt even the most insightful philosopher to pose loaded questions to himself, questions whose answers provoke us into formulating covertly nonsensical propositions as the answer to profoundly puzzling questions. Summarizing, we can say Russell argued that what seemed to be one proposition was in fact implicitly three: two existential statements and a predicative assertion. Thus he analyzed “The King of France is bald” into the following: 1. There is at least one current King of France. 2. There is at most one current King of France. 3. That person is bald.

Russell’s achievement consisted first in recognizing the pitfalls that awaited the unwary in dealing with propositions whose subjects were definite descriptions and second in providing a technique for representing such propositions in a way that would cease to confuse us. As one of the great triumphs of early analytical philosophy in its pursuit of crystalline clarity in thinking, Russell’s move served as a model for what philosophy should become. Like Russell, the critic of metaphysics has to be armed with a technique for showing how we have smuggled confusion into our own thinking by formulating our questions about the nature of thinking or the essence of language in philosophy. The most fruitful application of this approach to philosophical problems in the Tractatus was the invention of truth tables, which enabled Wittgenstein to solve Frege’s problems about the nature, number, and properties of logical axioms on the basis of a mechanical technique that he ironically developed out of a suggestion in Frege’s own work.37 Truth tables are a technique for showing with absolute clarity which propositions are tautologies belonging to logic and thereby distinguishing them from impossible propositions (i.e., contradictions) and empirical propositions. That mode of representation made the whole debate over axioms superfluous— and obviously so in logic. Russell’s theory of descriptions provided Wittgenstein with a paradigm for showing how philosophical conundrums can be dissolved on the basis of a rigorously developed technique for clarifying the confusions that arise from the complexity of ordinary language; Loos showed him how that technique involved developing a craft that enabled him to convey his insight in such a striking way that our attention is refocused away from those aspects of language that led us into confusion in the first place.

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In Wittgenstein’s mature philosophy, no single technique is sufficient for disabusing us of our tendency to ask for the meaning independently of considering how terms are used in language. As practice develops into myriad ways for interweaving words and actions, our possibilities for confusing ourselves about the nature of objective reality multiply as well. Even in his early years, he was convinced that language was as complex as the human organism. Now that insight came home to roost with a vengeance. Coping philosophically with the resultant complexity demands not simply mechanical techniques for disabusing us of the confusions that ensue from taking the surface grammar for the depth grammar of language but also the artful use of techniques (which turns out to be identical to the “language games” method of analyzing practice) to wean us away from the seductive powers of external linguistic forms. Enter the philosophical craftsman. His function is to assemble reminders of what we actually do with words such that our tendencies to pose metaphysical questions about practice would disappear. So Wittgenstein collected notes on the natural history of an animal that speaks— and even makes fictive forays into natural history 38— to show us “what would be different if. . . .” These exercises are not thought experiments (i.e., heuristics) as they are conventionally conceived in science but are techniques for disabusing ourselves of the desire to ask oversimplified questions, employ misleading examples, and form crude judgments on the basis of misconstruing the logic of language. They are hermeneutic tools for showing what it is superfluous to say. These techniques include examples, which are mostly fictive; aphorisms; and, above all, questions, some answered, most not, and several falsely answered on purpose. A very strange philosophical tool kit indeed! In toto, they hardly resemble traditional post-Cartesian scientific philosophy at all. But why should they? Wittgenstein aimed, as he put it himself, at putting the troubled philosophical mind to rest once and for all. That was a matter of showing traditional philosophers that their very questions rested upon misunderstanding the logic of language. In an early version of section 106 of part I of the Investigations, Wittgenstein writes in a vein that Hegel could approve of:39 “One of our most important tasks is to express all false thought processes so characteristically that the other says: yes, that’s just the way I meant it.”40 He has to be put into a position where his difficulties simply dissolve in an insight into practice and he finally attains peace of mind. The first step toward doing so is to get the views of those he would criticize straight; only then would he be in a position to show that those views were incoherent, such as the idea of a private language, or that the question posed was in fact a loaded question: “What is the essence of thought?” This was one reason why he was

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almost never content with his own results as a writer. Wittgenstein’s philosophical task was to develop intellectual techniques for doing so. His questions, examples, and aphorisms aim at introducing new comparisons and, in so doing, enabling philosophers to overcome their fixation on the idea that the essence of language is representation (or, for that matter, anything else). His intellectual craftsmanship is eminently literary because it has to be if misunderstanding the logic of language is the source of all our problems, but that is, nevertheless, not art. It is significant that in the preface to the Investigations, when explaining its album-like character, he would compare himself to a draftsman rather than a painter. Moreover, it was precisely the craftsman’s approach to philosophy that enabled a “merely reproductive” thinker like him to understand the work of others, including Hertz, Frege, and Kraus, better than they did themselves (CV 17). Finally, dissatisfaction with his intellectual craftsmanship, rather than an inherent inability to put what he wanted to say into words, as is sometimes alleged, led him to disparage being able to write a good book in the preface to the Philosophical Investigations— a matter of finding the mot juste rather than despair at being able to express himself at all, as many commentators seem to think. This too was part of a philosophical craft whose immense intellectual efforts did indeed produce a work of great beauty. Wittgenstein’s philosophical style was first, last, and always subordinated to his striving for clarity with respect to the issues that were central to the project of analytical philosophy— that is, understanding perplexing notions like meaning, intention, experience, and certainty on the basis of the logic of human action (i.e., practice). However, practice is not something that permits description. It can only be grasped reflectively. The problem is that we are profoundly disinclined to reflect upon precisely what is most necessary to grasp. The challenge was to redirect our attention graphically in such a way that we could see what he saw for ourselves. Intellectually, it was a challenge to his (and our) imagination; stylistically, it was a matter of using all the creative resources of language to persuade us to do something intellectually that we were profoundly disinclined to do. Wittgenstein approached that challenge with the ingenuity of an engineer, not that of a poet. Little wonder that the resulting art of persuasion that essentially rested upon elegance of expression could be mistaken for art, which it is— but only in a secondary and analogical sense. If we fail to see that, we put the cart before the horse. Adolf Loos’s critical modernist approach to architecture and design helped Wittgenstein get clear about the nature of his own activity and thereby made a crucial contribution to that “work of clarification” that transformed twentieth-century philosophy as none other.

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Loos, Musil, Wittgenstein, and the Recovery of Human Life P i e r g i o r g i o D o n at e l l i

Introduction: Forms of Life and Spiritual Values How does modernism help us understand Wittgenstein’s philosophy, with its interest in language as a way of elaborating a preoccupation with forms of life, and how can a reading of Wittgenstein, situated within the development of Austrian modernism, help us understand modernism’s concern for new forms of expression in the arts as a need for a radical reform of our lives? These questions have to do with the relation between human forms of expression— and the place of the arts within them— and forms of life, individual and social. I will try to approach these questions by bringing into focus the work of two influential figures in Austrian culture: Adolf Loos and Robert Musil. They share a concern for the arts and, more generally, for the linguistic expression of the spiritual needs of human beings, which points to a larger preoccupation with how we live, with our socially and conceptually shaped forms of life, with our Kultur. This preoccupation is not entirely new, of course. In fact, it has its roots in the Romantic line in modernity that expressed a wish— against Hegel, who had declared its end— to find in the sphere of the arts a solution to dissatisfaction with modern ways of living.1 But it also belongs to the more circumscribed story of the Habsburg Austrian Empire at the turn of the century, described by many and made especially clear by Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Carl Schorske, and Aldo Giorgio Gargani, among others.2 Loos and Musil show how the social and political history of the empire, with its emphasis on the arts, made the question of artistic expression not just a problem in itself but both the symptom of and the means to finding a solution to much larger problems relating to social forms of life. I wish to draw attention to the very particular picture of the problem offered by these two Austrian authors and the significant connection that can be made between their views and the work of Wittgenstein. I believe we can find

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here a distinctive line of thinking compared to other modernist treatments of the same question. Loos and Musil assume that it is only by getting command of the language and culture that respond to our ordinary needs that higher kinds of needs become visible to us as sharply separated from what belongs to our common life, yet also as what is opened up to us by the fact that we share such a life and are confident and clear about its goals and articulation. In Wittgenstein, too, the question of the higher sphere of values is treated as internal to the problem of recovering, or finding in a new way, a fully human confidence with language and with the common world. In the works of all these authors, a problem with a command of the language that shapes our lives also shows forth in the problems we have with the sphere of the higher, the aesthetic, and the ethical. Loos and Musil are concerned with the higher values of life, the aesthetic, the creative and the spiritual, as well as with the ethical, for what Musil calls the “other condition,” the personal realm of values and relationships.3 He sets this against the ordinary condition to which we hold fast in life.4 Loos speaks of art as a private matter and of the artist as someone disconnected from the social needs of people: “A work of art is brought into the world without there being a need for it, a building meets a need. A work of art has no responsibility to anyone, a building to everyone. The aim of a work of art is to make us feel uncomfortable, a building is there for our comfort.”5 Because of its deeply personal nature, art can open new venues; it is revolutionary, it points higher, closer to God (“Architecture” 82– 83). Loos and Musil indicate a condition of crisis in which art is no longer a proper means of expressing the sphere of the aesthetic, just as common and shared morality fails to express the ethical life of the individual. They diagnose the entire culture as lacking the capacity to allow individuals to express themselves in creative and personal ways. They argue that what their societies call morality and art are actually falsifications of the higher sphere of values. In their view, however, these problems of artistic expression, of the arts, of literature, of religion, and of personal relations indicate a larger and different question concerning the lives of people and societies: that of the disintegration of a framework that gives people an appropriate place in which to lead their lives and pursue their various activities. The bonds of a civilization that shapes lives have fallen apart. But without these bonds, the personal and the subjective have no way of being pursued. As Musil writes, “Principles, guidelines, models, and limitations are storehouses of energy. . . . Even our feelings [as in love] form like fluids in containers that generations have formed, and these containers receive our shapelessness” (GS 175). Loos and Musil share an interest in the falsifying of the arts in aestheticism— where

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matters of style applied to the common objects of life deform the concern for art as a need for what shakes people out of their condition, for what points higher. They also share an interest in the moralization of life, where respect for rules, codes, and manners is in the service of hiding what is most needed by the human soul; it destroys the possibility of an authentic experience of— among other things— love and humility, thus bringing about the loss of a personal encounter with the world.6 But these deep concerns of theirs are formulated in such a way as to lead back to the problem of the social forms of life. It is because we lack a proper reflective arrangement of the forms of life— social, institutional, and political, but also very practical, in relation, for example, to how we design ordinary objects like kitchen tools or to how we plan cities, construct buildings, and so on— that we register a loss in our experience of the various spheres tied to the higher, the creative, and the personal. The solution they offer is that of establishing a contrast between the higher sphere and the ordinary condition. Very roughly, and before trying to present a more precise picture, we can say that Loos and Musil thought that by elucidating the character of the higher sphere, by working on that, we can find a solution to the problems in our ordinary lives. To this end, they establish a sharp contrast between ordinary life and the sphere of higher values; they detach what is higher from the entire interrelated nest of connections that makes up a reflective form of life in a society; they sharply separate the life of a civilization (Kultur) from the life of spiritual values. This involves, on the one hand, showing what ordered forms of life consist in, and which needs they provide an answer to (needs of living, eating, moving around, having fun, knowing how things are in our world, etc.), and, on the other hand, showing how the life of a Kultur so described leaves out the sphere of the personal and the higher, which may then find its space of expression, precisely because it has not been corrupted by the needs and interests of common life. It is only by sharply separating off the order and articulation of how a Kultur responds to our ordinary needs that we can see other sorts of needs that inhabit a different dimension and that are now made visible by the fact of our having made sense of, and thus limited, the needs of, for example, crafts, architecture, and politics. In limiting these spheres to what is their business, we leave a space open for the higher and the spiritual. This is very schematic, and it needs to be dealt with in detail. I will do this by commenting first on the work of Loos then on that of Musil. Our problem in the next sections will be that of understanding how detaching the “other condition”— and placing it out of the reach of the reflective forms of life that shape our needs and activities— can offer a solution to the problem of the

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social forms of living, the problems with our Kultur. Later, we will see how this is precisely Wittgenstein’s problem, starting from the Tractatus: that of separating sense (language that permeates our ordinary activities) from nonsense and, in so doing, offering tools with which to bring order into language and hence opening the space for the expression of the higher. Adolf Loos: Kultur and Art Loos argues that the search for the artistic has invaded activities centering on ordinary life, such as architecture and crafts. His polemic against this invasion, against the British arts and crafts movement and its influence in Europe but also against the Austrian Secession and its search for a peculiarly modern style, and his polemic against ornament in all dominions of practical life, all this is offered as a diagnosis of a healthy Kultur. In a healthy culture, the production of objects of all sorts is directed at goals that express our needs in a condition in which they are not disguised. We see culture in the multiple ways in which we take care of our common needs, in our furniture, in how we dress, in how we build houses, in how craftsmen work. As he writes, We have our culture, we have the forms in which our lives take place and the utensils that make those lives possible. No individual, nor any organization, created our cupboards for us, our cigarette cases, our jewelry. Time created them for us, and they change from year to year, from day to day, from hour to hour. From hour to hour we change too, our opinions, our habits; and that leads to changes in our culture. . . . We do not sit in a particular way because a cabinetmaker has made a chair in this or that way, the cabinetmaker makes the chair in a particular way because that is the way we want to sit.7

Loos offers a way of considering the language of our ordinary life, the language that expresses our needs and goals— for example, what sitting is for us and hence what is a comfortable chair, what techniques and expertise are needed to make it— as tied together in a form of life. A form of life, a form of civilization (what he calls a Kultur), is the whole framework of needs and activities that shape our lives. If we interrogate ourselves about how to make a chair, we should interrogate the forms of life where sitting and making a chair have a place that is tied to our needs, to our way of behaving. This interrogation involves the possibility of change— of activities, languages, and patterns of behavior that need to be changed or renewed or else abandoned as the remains of a previous arrangement of life that no longer corresponds to our present ways of living. What is clear here (and what we will find elaborated along different paths by the later Wittgenstein) is that this interrogation of our

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activities, both intellectual and practical, should be formulated in terms of the acquisition of a clear view of the forms of life that make the activity we are questioning what it is for us. For example, questioning the choice of a chair for our kitchen should be brought back to what a chair is for us and, therefore, to what sitting is for us and how sitting is woven into the needs and meanings that connect it to a whole family of human activities, which in turn makes sense of why chairs are made a certain way. According to Loos (and we will find a similar critical attitude in Musil and in Wittgenstein), we have lost the confidence to refer to the Kultur that makes sense of our activities and in which we can reflectively engage with our interrogations, doubts, and desires for change. Aestheticism— that is, the search for a style in the making of objects tied to ordinary life, above all conceiving architecture as one of the arts— is taken by Loos as a most significant sign of a crisis in culture, of our having lost the language of our needs. The need to aestheticize the ordinary is a sign of such a loss precisely because it breaks our confidence with our forms of life, with what sitting, living in a house, dressing, and many other sorts of activities are, and it directs our attention to their significance and beauty as things detached from their use and function. Applied arts and the search for a style for the needs of ordinary living corrupt the confidence we have with our forms of life, because they are a way to deform and sublimate use and activities as matters of style and ornament. For Loos, what is called art in Austrian society has nothing to do with the aesthetic. We are rather using the appearance of art, the evocation of its power, in order to regain confidence with ordinary objects. But art gets in the way of our wish to acquire confidence with ordinary life by disguising it in aesthetic form, which is not really aesthetic at all but its deformation in the ornament, a thing that is lifeless. As Loos writes, “As there is no longer any organic connection between ornament and our culture, ornament is no longer an expression of our culture. The ornament being created now bears no relationship to us, nor to any human being, or to a system governing the world today. It has no potential for development.”8 On the contrary, it is an incrustation that corrupts our capacity to be in contact with our forms of life— that is, with ourselves and our needs. At the same time, the wish to aestheticize ordinary life is a form of corruption of art. This is because humanity no longer knows what art is and its role in elevating and shaking people out of their comfort, out of their activities and their social life, and this is why they can exchange the goals of crafts for those of art. This way, on the one hand, art loses its proper character and the respect it should inspire and, on the other, crafts are oppressed by the idealization imposed on them by the search for a style, and they lose their

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organic tie with forms of life. As Loos writes, “To anyone who knows that art is there to lead mankind on and on, higher and higher, to make us more and more like gods, combining art with a material function is a profanation of the great goddess. People do not leave the artist free to do as he thinks fit because they are not in awe of him, and craftwork cannot develop freely because of the weight of aesthetic expectations we place on it” (“Architecture” 83). By sharply separating Kultur from the arts, Loos wishes to find a proper space of expression for the sphere of the aesthetic. This sphere is to be regained through the work indicated by the two lines of criticism put forward above: the character of art is regained as a result of its liberation from falsification in the form of the aestheticization of ordinary life activities such as crafts and, at the same time, the sphere of the aesthetic is reopened as a result of having achieved renewed confidence with our Kultur— that is, with our needs and their language, a condition in which we are not inclined to sublimate such needs and embroil them with the artistic and the creative. These two lines are precisely those found in Wittgenstein’s contribution to this problematic. He is also engaged, starting from his early work in the Tractatus, with the two interrelated aims of leading us to a command of language as the place where our needs find their expression by clearing away the pressures we put on language that idealize and sublimate our forms of expressions, and hence opening a space for the higher. Robert Musil and the Mechanization of Life Musil is also interested in diagnosing a crisis in culture, in the forms of life, and he does this by signaling the difficulties in the realm of self-expression, in the sphere of higher values or of the “other condition.” His perspective is different, however, from that of Loos. Though only a decade apart, there is nonetheless a great distance between them. Loos writes in response to the various moments of reaction in the arts against the liberal-rational perspective of the Austrian bourgeoisie, which finally found a significant role in Habsburg politics in 1857 with the constitutionalization of the absolutist monarchy. This perspective was most paradigmatically expressed in the expansion of Vienna with the construction of the Ringstrasse and everything that meant: new sites for the parliament, the university, the museum, and wide-open spaces for strolling around.9 Above all, it found expression in the importance attributed to art, with the opera and the theater, and in the actual design of the buildings themselves, governed as it was by the search for a modern style that would embody the new values of law, commerce, and science as well as the new role of individuality. Loos was responding to various moments of reaction against

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the liberal rational culture, starting with the Secession and with the invention of Jugendstil— with Klimt at the center, seeking a symbolic language of inner life where “art should provide asylum for modern man, asylum from the pressure of modern life” (Schorske 217). Loos’s functionalism, also conceived as a kind of salvation from modern life but at the same time as its celebration, is a response to (and reaction against) the search for ornament in the arts and crafts movements and Jugendstil. His view is thoroughly critical as well as progressive. He thought architecture had been infected whereas many other parts of ordinary life were in good shape (like suits, boots, shoes, luggage, cigarette cases, watches, walking sticks, umbrellas, cars, and calling cards!)10 As he writes, “Humanity as a whole is healthy, only a few are sick. But these few tyrannize the worker, who is so healthy he is incapable of inventing ornaments.”11 His criticism is actually addressed to those intellectuals, mainly architects, who corrupt what he considers a healthy Kultur. Loos perceives himself, until his later writings, as part of the complex movement that started with the liberal and rational culture of the Ringstrasse and continued with the various reactions against it, all wishing to find an answer to the modern needs of individuals.12 Conversely, Musil writes with a sense that all this belongs to the past; in fact, he considers this period with detachment, also noticing its qualities. “It was a time of great ethical and aesthetic activity,” he writes. “People believed in the future, in a social future, in a new art. Of course people often gave this belief the appearance of morbidity and decadence, but both these negative determinations were only accidental expressions for the will to be different and do things differently from the way people had done them in the past”— an expression of a modernist sensibility of which Musil approves (GS 152, 170). But he contrasts this with the present (1922– 23) “lack of faith” (GS 186), a timidity “in matters of straightforward judgment and the shaping of reality” (HE 127), and a “spiritual despair” (GS 158). He places himself after the days when “something went through . . . a spirit of heresy and reform, the blessed sense of an arising and going forth, a mini-renaissance and -reformation, such as only the best of times experience; whoever entered the world then felt, at the first corner, the breath of this spirit on his cheek.”13 He now records a different time, when the spirit of heresy and reform is gone, and he can thus see the needs expressed in those terms from a detached perspective as symptoms of problems that lay in the social forms of life. The structure of his criticism is similar to that advanced by Loos. He diagnoses a loss in the possibility of self-expression, or a deformation of it, and he finds a solution in the recovery of reflective forms of life. We have in Musil a separation of what is ordinary and functional to life from what is creative and

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spiritual, as in Loos, and this contrast is put forward both as a way of recovering the healthy ordinary condition and as a way of opening up possibilities for the expression of what is personal and deep. Let us see briefly how Musil elaborates the opposition between the two spheres: the ordinary and the “other” condition. Musil characterizes the other condition as “the area of the individual’s reactivity to the world and other individuals, the realm of values and valuations, of ethical and aesthetic relationships, the realm of the idea” (SWK 63). But what these terms suggest are not areas that can be “unambiguously described and communicated”— for example, the area of morality, to which one holds fast in order to be able to make the innumerable moral decisions one is faced with daily (SWK 62). On the contrary, the ethical experience referred to here, be it “love, introspection, or humility, is, even where it is of a social nature, something difficult to transmit, something quite personal and almost antisocial” (HE 132). And so with the perception of reality, when we get into the area of the personal denoted by the “other” condition, reality is seen as one possibility, along with others, tied to the kind of weight, significance, and radiance that comes with perceiving possibilities as a transformation of what is real: seeing what is real “as a project, something yet to be invented” (MWQ 11). This experience is here brought into a region in which it makes a total contrast with ordinary experience: “The distinction is such a polar one that it calls for a complete reversal of attitude.” While in the ordinary condition, experience is shaped by rule, with exceptions, here we deal with exceptions that resist rules, a region of experience where “events do not repeat themselves but are infinitely variable and individual” (SWK 63). The crucial point for our purposes is that this area of experience requires a framework of social life in order to be expressed, in the form of a deviation from it (GS 165), as a limit point of what we do in ordinary activities (TNA 202) or as “quickly dissolving islands of a second state of consciousness that is sometimes interpolated into the ordinary one” inhabiting “a hazy medium of mist, fantasy, daydreams, and the subjunctive mood,” which can be elucidated and experienced against the background of the firm sense of reality and of the common course of things that shape ordinary life (MWQ 119, 111). The problem, then, is with ordinary life, as it is for Loos. Loos also thought that once we recover the language and the experience of our needs and normal activities, we reopen the possibility for the creative and the higher. But he did not treat this issue as problematic. On the contrary, this is Musil’s problem, and here we enter an area that can also be fruitfully connected to Wittgenstein. The problem is that of considering how reflective forms of life can be hospitable to the expression of the personal sphere. According to Musil, the

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problem with the present form of civilization is the mechanization of human activities, which appears in many different ways and is especially tied to the common appeal to scientific causal laws and to the bureaucratic and capitalistic organization of life. It is important here to see that Musil is not attacking science or politics or business as such but rather the lack of an appropriate reflective life with these activities, of what— wishing to avoid the lexical dichotomy between Kultur and Zivilisation— he calls an “ideology.”14 In his view, the crisis of his times is due to a lack of a modern “ideology.” It is a lack in the reflective instruments through which an age can understand itself, which in turn shape an age entirely. We can see here the difference with Loos. Loos thinks that there is a healthy modern Kultur infected in various places by a deformed intellectual culture relating to the arts. Musil thinks that the modern forms of life lack a proper reflective understanding and thus that the crisis runs deep in the forms of life. At the same time, Musil shares Loos’s notion that if the solution is one that responds to the needs of our modern lives, then it will be found by getting an overview of the modern forms of life. At present, there is a sense of “the impossibility of achieving an overview” (ME 137): “The life that surrounds us is devoid of ordering concepts”; we lack “the conceptual tools for ordering life” (HE 126). But this must be seen as “a new problem that does not yet have a solution” (GS 176). Wittgenstein also shares this predicament. He diagnoses a condition of spiritual despair that requires a new way of seeing: the seeing “the world rightly” of the Tractatus (6.54), which becomes in his later thought the various ways of seeing things that offer us ordering views, or “surveyable representations.”15 These, in turn, help us realize how various activities are connected: how what we do and think and how we react hang together in human life. Musil is also aware that there is a problem with what an overview of our forms of life is, with what an ideology (in his terms) is, with how ordering concepts shape social forms of life: he is aware that we have a critical problem, if we wish to call it that: “The age believes only in facts: its conception of reality recognizes only what is, as it were, really real. An unofficial ideology that has taken place” (GS 176). This unofficial ideology believes only in facts in the various fields, in science, technology, and business. Its character is that of objectivity, by which Musil means the detachment of an activity from its human and personal connections (HE 131). Forms of life are held together, on the contrary, by human bonds made of faith, imagination, acceptance, and certainty (GS 174). As he writes in The Man without Qualities, “In love as in business, in science as in the long jump, one has to believe before one can win and score, so how can it be otherwise for life as a whole? However well founded an order may be, it always rests in part on a voluntary faith in it, a

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faith that, in fact, always marks the spot where the new growth begins, as in a plant; once this unaccountable and uninsurable faith is used up, the collapse soon follows; epochs and empires crumble no differently from business concerns when they lose their credit” (MWQ 575). Likewise, an ideology is the “intellectual ordering of the feelings; an objective connection among them that makes the subjective connection easier” (GS 174). So Musil’s criticism is not raised against the great currents of his time per se, like science and capitalism, but against the lack of an appropriate awareness of their human significance, the awareness that their order and solidity are based on human cohesion. The criticism therefore is not against science but against taking the kind of objectivity that science pursues— and that is earned precisely by excluding significant moments of our self from thought and action— as the only possible notion of order, whereas this sort of “objectivity cannot create a human order, but only a factual, impersonal one.” If we take the model of scientific objectivity, which “circumvents our self— as it connect thought with thought, fact with fact”— we won’t get clear about what holds together our forms of life (HE 131). We won’t even understand science itself, which, as an activity, is the result of a training of the self, a “spiritual hardship” that drives human interests and passions for precision and truth (MWQ 43). The fact that this model is taken as the unofficial ideology explains why there is no ideology of the present age. Cohesion in forms of life is not a matter of the objective hanging together of facts under a law; it is, on the contrary, an “unlawful necessity” that holds together countless contingencies, “where one thing leads to another not by accident, but in a sequential concatenation not governed by any particular law” (HE 122). A contingency or a fact here indicates the kind of event that a law would categorize under the title of “accidents.”16 The explanation of simple, everyday things eschews scientific explanation according to laws. The perspective of scientific objectivity is thus an obstacle to the forming of an appropriate overview of how forms of life are woven together. It does not point to the right kind of cohesion among facts, nor does it select the appropriate facts; it doesn’t look at the myriad little facts that make up the physiognomy of a form of life, nor does it acknowledge the human character of this cohesion. In this situation, “the concept of the value of a truth has degenerated and become almost incomprehensible,” and the need for a rational ordering of our activities as ways of being human “is incomprehensible today even as a need” (RSMM 22). A similar kind of argument is offered for capitalism, as moneygetting pursuits lack any awareness of their human physiognomy, disguised under the notion of money as the unambiguous measure of all things. But here again a spiritual basis is unacknowledged: the businessman is a man of

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facts, “a clean-cut type” with “complete self-reliance, the firm hand, sculpting in solid stone, the independence of the individual as he stands” (GS 184). And then there is the politician who takes “as real only the base side of human nature, believing it to be all that can be counted on” (HE 125). These activities are pursued without any reflective awareness of their connection with their human bases; they are not seen as ways of being human, nor are they seen as interconnected through a whole culture that is made invisible by what is taken as the “objectivity” of the search for scientific laws, the search for money, and the games of Realpolitik nurtured by the dominant conception of specialization by experts who deal with science, technology, the mechanisms of the market, and the machinery of the state. In this way, the separation between such activities and their human physiognomy is reaffirmed, and the connection between them— which would make it possible to form an overview of society and of the spiritual condition of the age— is denied (HE 128– 29). One possible consequence of this mechanization of the various spheres of human life is the disappearance of the self, which gives the title to Musil’s unfinished masterpiece, The Man without Qualities. As he writes, Probably the dissolution of the anthropocentric point of view, which for such a long time considered man to be at the center of the universe but which has been fading away for centuries, has finally arrived at the “I” itself, for the belief that the most important thing about experience is the experiencing, or of action the doing, is beginning to strike most people as naïve. There are probably people who still lead personal lives, who say “We saw the So-and-sos yesterday” or “We’ll do this or that today” and enjoy it without its needing to have any content or significance. They like everything that comes in contact with their fingers, and are purely private persons insofar as this is at all possible. In contact with such people, the world becomes a private world and shines like a rainbow. They may be very happy, but this kind of people usually seems absurd to the others, although it is still not at all clear why. (159)

It is not yet clear because the age lacks the appropriate reflective awareness of its ways of living. It doesn’t realize that the possibility of being “purely private persons” (GS 187), the possibility of experiencing the world as a deep personal matter, as enhancement or diminution— a picture Musil uses that echoes the description in the Tractatus of the world seen from the ethical point of view, the world that “must so to speak wax or wane as a whole”— is dramatically endangered by the mechanization of human life.17 This condition leads to the criticism of the present age as an age of Zivilisation, which Musil characterizes as the lack of an overview of the ordering concepts that shape our lives. But what is offered as a true Kultur by oppo-

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nents of the false Zivilisation is “the familiar fetishes of epoch, nation, race, Catholicism, the intuitive men— all of which share, negatively, a predilection for sentimental carping at the intellect and, positively, a need to seek a foothold, to find gigantic skeletons, however ethereal, on which to hang the impressions that constituted our one remaining bit of substance” (HE 127). On the other side, the notion of Zivilisation, as it is used in a derogatory sense, indicates the mechanization of life, where once again the problem should not be collapsed into that of science and technology or into that of capitalism and bureaucracy in themselves but should be seen in the way in which these are conceived as self-enclosed and objective spheres that thus confront individuals with questions they cannot understand (HE 130). Musil thus puts aside the contrast between Kultur and Zivilisation as itself a symptom of the crisis of the age, torn between nostalgia for the gigantic skeletons of tradition and an unacknowledged modernity. Musil poses this as the problem of his age: the elaboration of an ideology, the reflective grasp of the existential bases of modern social forms of life consisting of human bonds, faith, and acceptance. His thesis is that such a reflective conception of forms of life creates the conditions for the expression of inner experience, for ethics and aesthetics as dimensions of the self. It does so because those moments of deep personal experience that leave us wordless are only possible against the background of a form of life, as Musil describes it, as an existential fitting together of elements (TNA 199). It is against the background of the ordinary condition, possessed as a fully human condition, that we can experience the inexpressible. Musil explains why this is so. The “other condition” is a situation in which the relationship between the world and the self changes (see GS 186 and TNA 205, 207– 8). But in order to see this as a possibility, to be equipped with the reflective awareness of this side of experience, we need to see that the ordinary condition is a condition of human activities involved with the self, of ways of being human. From the point of view of the ordinary condition of life, regained as fully human and liberated from its falsifications, we are equipped to acknowledge the “other condition” as a limiting point of the ordinary condition, a limiting condition of the relation between the self and the world, a condition in which experience is no longer the experience of the world but experience per se, a world in itself, or as Musil otherwise puts it, as a condition in which “the world flows into the self ” (TNA 202, 205; GS 186). But it is important to see that this is a limiting condition, a kind of intensification of life (“a unique excitement about life”) that presupposes ordinary experience with life (TNA 207). It is “a deeper embedding of thought in the emotional sphere, a more personal relation to the experiencing subject” that

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is made available by a notion of the soul and the intellect liberated from the various falsifications of human life (HE 132). It is the lack of such a reflective conception of human life, of an organizing overview of the complex civilization in the first decades of the new century, that explains the deformation that Musil denounces in the search for glorification and for “the superluminescent sphere of language” and in the fascination for the pathos, the greatness and sublimity of feelings (SWK 65; GS 170). As he writes, “Nothing . . . is more pernicious than to demand more feeling from our rational age, for this would involve feelings that have long been left undeveloped and unarticulated” (RSMM 23). Elsewhere (writing in 1925), recalling the path that led from German Romanticism to Emerson and on to expressionism, he admits that “it was a reaction against the increasing mechanization of existence,” though it expressed a need for the “other condition” that, lacking the proper reflective bases in the forms of life, “breaks into our existence with tremendous power, but has become completely confused and corrupt” (TNA 200). As we have seen, in The Man without Qualities he envisages the next stage of this deformation in the condition of the final loss of the personal and of its dissolution in a condition of experiential qualities with no selves who experience them. The sharp contrast Loos draws between Kultur and Kunst is retained and yet deeply rethought. We may understand the sphere of the personal and the creative through the contrast with the ordinary condition. But here we have an articulation of how this is so. The higher sphere is a possibility opened to us as the limit case, or the intensification, of the ordinary condition. But we need a certain kind of conception of the ordinary condition to make this visible. We need to reclaim the human in the forms of life in order to gain this further possibility. Or we could say— inverting the terms— that the possibility for self-expression, the possibility of being a person with qualities, is shown in our having recovered the fully human physiognomy of ordinary language and life. Wittgenstein, Language, and Absence I now wish to connect Wittgenstein to the analyses offered by Loos and Musil. I will start with the Tractatus. In their classic book, Wittgenstein’s Vienna, Janik and Toulmin have done a wonderful job in elaborating the various connections between this work and Viennese culture of the period, from which I have isolated Loos and Musil, among other significant figures. They argue that Wittgenstein’s cast of mind was formed in Habsburg Viennese culture before its collapse and that his further elaborations did not sever him from this context. Like Janik and Toulmin, I find it crucial to recognize that the Tractatus

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offers a kind of problematic that is structurally similar to the one faced by Loos and Kraus (among others). Wittgenstein addresses the confusions and deformations of our lives, which show in our language and touch what is most important and precious to us. The confusions he addresses are involved with what he calls “the problem of life” (TLP 6.521) and with “the higher” (TLP 6.432), the sphere of ethics and aesthetics. According to his understanding of such notions, the solution he offers is that of setting the condition of fully grasping our language— the language that shapes our lives and our needs— against the sphere of the higher, of ethics and aesthetics. As he writes, “The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value— and if there were, it would be of no value” (TLP 6.41). He continues: “Propositions cannot express anything higher” (TLP 6.42). Also, he states that “it is clear that ethics cannot be expressed. Ethics is transcendental. (Ethics and aesthetics are one)” (TLP 6.421). A problem with our language shows in confusions that call into question the deepest and most personal problems of life; on the other hand, the condition of confidence with language opens the space for the higher. The way the Tractatus elaborates this contrast follows the two lines of criticism we have seen operating in Loos, as I briefly remarked above. On the one hand, the sphere of the higher comes into view as the result of having cleared away the confusions and deformations of what we took to be the higher spheres of life. This is achieved through the realization that what we took to be the problematic expression of the ethical and the aesthetic was no expression at all; it was mere nonsense. In being able to make sense of our experience— to say something about it— we relate it to something that belongs to the world, whereas it is in our rejecting any formulation of our experience as the expression of what impresses us that a moment in our lives is signaled as pertaining to the higher. So any formulation we might come up with is actually found to be nonsensical as an expression of what touches us deeply, and if we were satisfied with it, if it made sense to us, the experience of the higher would be lost.18 On the other hand, we can register that the higher appears as a possibility opened by the condition of reflectively (linguistically) grasping our lives. The very fact of having a language that works and responds to our needs shows the possibility of the ethical as what is absent.19 What we signal as the moment of the ethical, the aesthetic, and the higher is that which is opened to us once we get clear that our wish to express how a circumstance impresses us is, as such, frustrated. That is to say, once we take this frustration as the character of our experience, we thus liberate language from this falsifying pressure. The wish to find in language our sense of the higher is akin, in Loos’s view, to the wish to find in the language of architecture the artistic. We

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need to be liberated from this wish, a wish for what is sublime and superluminescent in language, in order to find a space for the higher as what is absent from language, liberated from such desires of sublimation and idealization. The connection between Loos and Wittgenstein on this issue was established by Paul Engelmann, and it is part of a larger argument worked out by Janik and Toulmin in their book. But we need to go into some detail to see how Wittgenstein elaborated the contrast between language and the inexpressible, and this in turn helps us go back to Loos and Musil and to their way of establishing the contrast between culture and the higher sphere of values. Engelmann points to a connection between Loos and Wittgenstein and argues that their main goal (along with Kraus) was to sharply separate the higher from the ordinary sphere, thus saving what is genuine in experience from sentimentality and pretense.20 As Engelmann writes in his memoir, “What Wittgenstein forbids has been more than sufficiently understood. Yet no one is ready to appreciate that, unlike the positivists who so reverently misunderstand him, Wittgenstein has also allowed something— something, indeed, that had so far escaped the notice of philosophers— and that in this second act his true achievement lies. For the prohibitions are only meant to clear a path hitherto blocked: the path to that which is not stated in a proposition but is manifest in it” (Engelmann 88). Janik and Toulmin argue that this work of separation is in the service of protecting the sphere of the higher from common language. In this view, Wittgenstein’s conception of language in the Tractatus offers the means to place the higher outside of the world and thus to withdraw it from circulation in common language and reflection. As they write, “Given life as it was lived in the Vienna of the early 1900s, no recognized public forum of opportunities existed for the sincere and serious-minded discussion of ethics and aesthetics. The man who truly understood the deeper character of value judgments could, thus, find room for them only in the private world of his own personal life” (WV 237). Janik and Toulmin are very helpful in highlighting the criticism of the forms of expression dominating Austrian culture that is shared by Wittgenstein, Loos, and Musil. Yet we should be careful in drawing the conclusion that this sort of criticism leads to the discovery of a personal sphere that needs to be sorted out and protected from the vulgar realm of common language and affairs. The authors are right in saying that Wittgenstein in the Tractatus wishes to recover a capacity for expressing the personal (in its various dimensions mentioned in the book), but they do not stress enough the fact that the personal is a sphere that needs to be achieved, attained through a work of which the understanding of the Tractatus itself is a model.21 The Tractatus invites us precisely not to consider the dimension of the higher as a

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given sphere of experience to be treated simply through the gesture of placing it outside the realm of common language and affairs. On the contrary, in his book, Wittgenstein shows how only the recovery of a fully human confidence with language, language lived as unsere Sprache, can open the possibility for a genuine expression of the higher. The prohibitions in the Tractatus (“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” [TLP 7]) are part of the process of realizing that what cannot be spoken does not indicate a failure of language (our own failure as speakers) but is the sign of a dimension of experience that is revealed precisely in what is absent in a proposition. According to the Tractatus, the way of finding one’s road to the personal and the higher is that of recovering a fully human grasp of common language and thus not by pushing common language aside, with all its corruption and vulgarity, in order to find a safe place for the higher sphere of values. In recovering a command with what we can say, “a path hitherto blocked” is opened— that of expressing a dimension of life through its absence in language. I consider the Tractatus to be addressing the issue of the recovery of a fully human response to life shown through a command of language as shaping our life entirely.22 The journey described by the Tractatus from confusion to clarity— the becoming clear (Klarwerden) of propositions, which is the result of the activity of philosophy (TLP 4.112)— appeals to a human sense of language and of its possibilities that include both the sorts of confusions and deformations from which the author of the book wishes to liberate his reader and the sense of language’s depth, the sense of what language does silently through what it opens to us in its absences. The Tractatus, in my view, addresses a departmentalized view of language: language sorted out into specialized stocks of discourses. We have seen how Musil also diagnoses— in the perspective of the specialists— the reason that makes it impossible to discern a human physiognomy, a human cohesion, in the various activities of society. According to Wittgenstein, from the perspective of a departmentalized view, a sense of confusion, of being blocked and trapped in our own words, is treated as a problem that requires a certain knowledge; it is a problem that falls into a certain department. Problems with language seem to require logic conceived as the doctrine of the general laws of thought; likewise, a moral or aesthetic problem appears to require similar departments and doctrines. The model is that of the sciences, which have their own specialized language and contents. But from the point of view of the Tractatus, there are many sorts of discourses that have a content of their own, their own subject matter. Thus not only the various sciences but also morality and aesthetics are here conceived as stocks of discourses that are used in life meaningfully— for example,

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“morality” to which we hold fast in life as part of our “ordinary condition” (in Musil’s terms). This consideration is advanced explicitly in “A Lecture on Ethics” through the distinction between absolute and relative value.23 Now, in a spirit that is much closer to that expressed by Musil, the Tractatus does not wish to deny the existence of these various departments. The point of the Tractatus is to show that we cannot get a sense of what it is to be a human (linguistic) being if we take any of these stocks of discourses, any of these departments, as models (in and of themselves alone) of what it is to have a full command of language, to respond to the world in a fully human way. Speaking a language as something that shapes our life entirely cannot be described as the operation of a certain doctrine (Lehre). It is not a question of consulting and applying a doctrine to a case; rather, it is something that brings in an unspecialized competence. But this is rendered invisible by a conception of language as a kind of talk with its own subject matter. In a fully human response to the world, language shapes our sayings and doings entirely. It thus registers all sorts of moments, including the sort of (philosophic) confusion in which what gets us stuck is not a problem that can be formulated (a problem for a certain stock of discourse) but a pressure that we put on words that resists any formulation. These confusions and deformations cannot be captured by a conception of language as a series of specialized enterprises. What is instead required is a notion of language as something that can become obscure to itself (we become obscure to ourselves in language). Similarly, there is a sense of an ethical and aesthetic response to the world in which the self and the world are attuned in a way in which (once again, in a spirit so well described by Musil) words fail, and the failure of words to articulate experience is precisely the mark of this sort of experience. Here again a conception of language as a specialized enterprise leaves this moment in our lives unseen. The goal of the Tractatus is thus that of acquiring, through its rich variety of methods, a fully human command of language, a fully human linguistic response to the world, which can participate in these various moments of the life of linguistic beings. By a fully human response, I mean a response to circumstances and experience that is not shaped and limited by a theory that tells us in advance what is significant and important but that relies, on the contrary, on one’s capacity to do something with what one reads, experiences, and encounters in life: a transformative capacity that Wittgenstein spells out in terms of having a language, being linguistic creatures, making sense of things. It is such a responsiveness that the Tractatus addresses in asking the reader to go through the Tractatus and to understand what its author is doing; it is addressing a ca-

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pacity for reading and understanding that is not the capacity gained through the learning of doctrines concerning logic or any other field of study but the linguistic capacity that the reader already possesses as an ordinary individual whose life is shaped by language, for whom language articulates life and cannot be taken to cover one particular area or another. It is from the perspective of such a fully human response, from such a human unspecialized linguistic response to things and people, that the Tractatus establishes the contrast between what can be said and the inexpressible. What can be said— language in its various specializations in stocks of discourses— is what shapes our intellectual and practical activities in various fields. Seen from the point of view of a fully human, unspecialized competence with the world, with language and with what can be said, is what Loos calls a Kultur— it articulates our needs and shapes our lives— but it can also be seen in what it leaves out, which is also part of one’s fully human possession of language. It is part of such a fully human responsiveness that the multitude of circumstances of our lives are grasped and expressed in language, yet they can strike us as strange, marvelous, or sinister through a range of reactions that elude any formulation of them. When Engelmann speaks of a “path to what is not stated in a proposition but is manifest in it,” he indicates that something’s being so and so can be seen as the stating of a certain fact. But Engelmann can also be taken to emphasize all that such a statement leaves out; it thus also gestures at a certain kind of absence. Wittgenstein elaborates the space of the personal, the creative, and the higher as this sort of absence, as what can be read as an absence from what is said in a circumstance of life. In this paragraph, I have glossed this capacity for reading what is left out of language, what is absent in what is said, as the very fact of having a language, of having a fully human linguistic responsiveness to things. A fully human responsiveness is seen in the fact that language articulates our various interests and needs and also in the fact that such linguistic usages leave out the significance of things, which can be read as an absence. Loos was seeking this kind of openness to the higher, made possible by what he considered a healthy Kultur, just as in Wittgenstein a regained confidence with language, a fully human responsiveness, is also a responsiveness to the dimension of the higher. A quotation from Loos nicely illustrates the point: “If we were to come across a mound in the woods, six foot long by three foot wide, with the soil piled up in a pyramid, a somber mood would come over us and a voice inside us would say, ‘There is someone buried here.’ That is architecture” (“Architecture” 84). From the point of view of a healthy culture that has a clear command of what architecture is, of its language, the recogni-

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tion of an architectural object, like a mound, implies the possibility of recognizing what is not said by the language of architecture but which is opened by it. The space of elaboration of the experience of seriousness and solemnity before a burial site is made possible by the language of architecture, by the fact that we possess as a civilization the notion of burying the dead and building a tomb and that these activities are tied to a host of things like the fact of dying, the importance of the memory of individual people, and so on. Therefore, the fact of commanding the activity of erecting a mound, of possessing this concept as part of what shapes death for us, allows for the expression of the depth and meaning of death and of mortality.24 Significance here (the sphere of the higher) is made possible by the fact that we possess a certain activity; we possess the complex interrelated conceptual life tied to death. Loos and Wittgenstein argue that such a significance would be lost if it were sought out for its own sake, separated from the form of life that expresses it. We are coming back here to the point made before in connection to the reading of Wittgenstein, according to which his concern for the higher requires that we save it as a private world of personal vision separated from the larger forms of a civilization. Conversely, in Loos’s example, the capacity to recognize an artifact like a mound as part of our Kultur opens the possibility for a seriousness and spirit that tells us something about the higher. The higher is signaled here in the absence of its declaration. So it isn’t that there are significances and values that we place in the box of the unsayable because we have lost the proper language to express them (as Janik and Toulmin seem to suggest); on the contrary, the fact of having lost a fully human command of language deprives us of the possibility of working out what is deep and significant. The loss of a fully human command of language is also the loss of the sense of the higher and the deeper. Crisis as Creativity The condition of crisis diagnosed by Wittgenstein, and by Loos and Musil, lies at the heart of their respective elaborations of a modernist criticism of culture. Their diagnoses take different forms. Loos thinks this crisis concerns certain expressive forms (people are healthy; architects are corrupted), whereas Musil thinks it is a crisis that goes deep into the texture of the civilization. Wittgenstein also writes with the awareness that our problems concern the entire course of a civilization and cannot be restricted to a few areas nor to the reflective level. As he puts it in a text from 1930, intended to be the preface for a book he was preparing, “This book is written for those who are in sympathy with the spirit in which it is written. This spirit is, I believe, different

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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.”25 In order to explain what is wrong with this spirit, he offers a description we have already found in Musil, who also considers that “we are faced with an enormous organizational problem,” that of the reflective ordering of those modern social forms of life that lack any awareness of their character (HE 131). Wittgenstein writes in a very similar vein: “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” (CV 8– 9) In such conditions, according to Musil, “that the individual reacts in a completely pathological fashion is only natural” (HE 130). In these conditions, Wittgenstein argues, there is no place for the elaboration of the personal sphere. The diagnosis is that a shared framework that enables individuals to express themselves is lost. One reaction, registered by Musil, is conservative: “Generally speaking, the cure is sought regressively. (Nation, virtue, religion, antagonism to science). Only very rarely is it made explicit that a new problem has been posed here, that its solution has not yet been found” (GS 154). An echo of this conservative reaction can be heard in Wittgenstein, in his sense of despair for his times (the “poverty and . . . the darkness of this time”), in the sense that his times do not really offer the conditions for a change, for a transformation (PI “Preface” p. 4). As he writes in the 1930 preface quoted above, “The fact remains that I contemplate the current of European civilization without sympathy, without understanding its aims, if any. So I am really writing for friends who are scattered throughout the corners of the globe” (CV 9). It is important to consider that the conservative side that can be found in Wittgenstein does not lie in his criticism of the concept of progress, because here his diagnosis is like that of Musil. In Wittgenstein’s understanding, the concept of progress is tied to a constructive attitude that does not see that the problem is one of finding ordering concepts through which to gain a reflective command of our forms of life, an overview of the new sources of our forms of life and of the powerful currents that magnetize individual energies: “Our civilization is characterized by the word progress. Progress is its form. . . . Typically it constructs. Its activity is to construct a more and more complicated structure. And even clarity is only a means to this end and not an end in itself. For me on the contrary clarity, transparency,

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is an end in itself ” (CV 9). The problem we have is that of achieving clarity— a new reflective ordering of our experience where we can find our place. The attitude of progress instead does not see that we have a problem with what is presupposed by progress— that is, with the very conditions of civilization, from which we can judge what is helpful, important, or improving or what deserves to be constructed. The present epoch, according to both Wittgenstein and Musil, lacks precisely this kind of knowledge, and “concepts like reason, progress, humanity, and necessity [hold] ghostly sway over our view of life . . . : a veneer of order covering chaos” (HE 126). What Wittgenstein, in particular, wishes to achieve through his later philosophical work is a kind of clarification that eschews the idealization of our reflective powers under the form of “reason,” “scientific laws,” “progress,” and so on, notions that hide from view the sources of our problems, which lie in human interests, needs, and attitudes. True progress for Wittgenstein is achieved, on the contrary, through a criticism of the idealized order of things, conceived as unclouded by empirical uncertainty, like a pure crystal, and by going back to the rough ground of our lives (PI §97, §107). Therefore, the echo of conservatism that can be found in Wittgenstein lies not so much in his criticism of progress but in his despairing that the new conditions of life will allow for a new order and a new clarity— the preconditions for the growth of spiritual life— to be found. To go back to the 1930 preface and restore the passage quoted above to its context, here Wittgenstein writes that the waste of individual energy in a time without culture is, on the other hand, the sign of the vibration of energy: 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. Even if it is clear to me then that the disappearance of a culture does not signify the disappearance of human value but simply of certain means of expressing this value, still the fact remains that I contemplate the current of European civilization without sympathy, without understanding its aims if any. (CV 9)

It is my contention that even if Wittgenstein retains the sense that the currents of European civilization do not offer the conditions for finding new means of expressing values— new ordering concepts that allow for new forms of individual creativity— his entire later work is addressed to finding such ordering concepts, such surveyable representations, new ways of seeing things, new conceptions, a clarity gained piecemeal in response to the many problems we

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face, which once again opens possibilities for individual life.26 The Tractatus is already an example of a work of this kind, one written with an eye to bringing its reader into contact with language, which prompts her to overcome a situation of disorder and confusion so that she may ultimately find herself at home in both word and world. But it is through the movements and stages in his later work that we find in Wittgenstein the aim of individuating the various and innumerable moments in which one’s sense of disorientation and blockage can be overcome so that our notions of things can be rearranged, opening up the possibility of individual movement.27 This philosophic work actually takes the form Musil suggests of getting back to the ordinary, to the humble, to “simple everyday things,” to circumstances and contingencies that lie at the “periphery,” not at what we suppose is the center of a social organization, of a civilization, against the temptation to idealize what counts as a solution and progress (RSMM 24; HE 121– 22). This fact sheds its own peculiar light on the problem of the crisis and the inhospitable conditions of “the prevailing European and American civilization” (CV 8). The condition of crisis, the sense of chaos and disorder— especially if seen through the lens of the Philosophical Investigations and of the later work, in which it is elaborated in terms of the innumerable moments of blockage and suffocation in our lives— is also the condition that requires a capacity for mobility, for seeing things from various perspectives, for changing our ways of seeing and being.28 Wittgenstein offers many examples of human creativity in all sorts of areas, in mathematics, the mind, and language: situations in which we can see things differently, in which our way of seeing and our conduct can be turned around, in which our experiences can be transformed, in which life is changed. Yet the conditions for this immense sense of mobility and creativity are precisely the conditions of crisis in the forms of life, the lack of a cohesive social ordering. Wittgenstein’s attitude (with Musil) is that of taking the present condition of his times as a new problem that requires an inventiveness, a turning around of our conceptions, a capacity to change our ways of seeing life in its various moments and dimensions— the life of the mind, of sentiments, and of inner expression, as well as the life of the great currents of the present civilization, the constructive and progressive (in Musil’s and Wittgenstein’s understanding of the term) attitude in industry, architecture, politics, and so on. Thus, on the one hand, the condition of crisis is diagnosed by both Musil and Wittgenstein as the lack of an ordering conception of what holds together the social forms of life in which one can find one’s own place (personal and impersonal). On the other, this is taken as a new problem that requires a new answer, to be found precisely in seeing how the mechanization and objectivation of life cannot be

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the basis of a human world, and that compels us to see our present activities as human enterprises shaped by human bonds of certainty, faith, acceptance, and imagination. What keeps a cultural framework together is the fittingness of our collective response. We have seen how this is Musil’s conception. Wittgenstein’s elaboration of a similar conception is aimed at showing how even what is perceived as most mechanical and impersonal (following an arithmetical series, for example) relies on human responses, certainty, and interpersonal bonds. In On Certainty, Wittgenstein writes, “And here the strange thing is that when I am quite certain of how the words are used, have no doubt about it, I can still give no grounds for my way of going on. If I tried I could give a thousand, but none as certain as the very thing they were supposed to be grounds for.”29 The intellectual grounds given in the form of theories, of doctrines, of the sort of intellectual constructive activity given prominence in the present time, fall short of the kind of certainty and human bonds that make the use of language what it is for us. The certainty and the agreement we seek are given in the forms of life (PI §241). Thus the situation of crisis and fragmentation, along with the mechanistic notions that purport to explain this chaos, constitute the conditions that will allow us to discover anew the human bonds that shape social forms of life. In Musil’s terminology, the solution to the new problem will come by applying the intellect to the regions of the human and the personal: “We do not have too much intellect and too little soul, but too little intellect in matters of the soul” (HE 131). I have argued that Loos, Musil, and Wittgenstein all develop (in distinctive ways) a modernist awareness of how art, morality, and the region of values falsify spiritual needs under the form of grandeur, sentimentality, moralism, ornament, and pretense. The aesthetic and the region of the higher are falsified because their current expressions sublimate ordinary activities and needs as matters of style and ornament. So a criticism of the inauthentic in art and the spiritual is also a criticism raised against the lack of a proper command of our human forms of life. In Loos’s example, the full command of the language of architecture is shown in the building of a burial site, as well as in the capacity of response to a burial site, with solemnity and a sense of the significance of life and death. With its concern for authenticity and sincerity, this modernist dissatisfaction with current creative forms of expressivity brings the problem of art and of forms of expressivity to bear on what human forms of life are, prompting us to rediscover the human bonds that shape social forms of living with their immense mobility and creativity.

6

Wittgenstein, Benjamin, and Pure Realism Eli Friedlander I will write a Laocoon for photographers. — L u d w i g W i t t g e n s t e i n , Letter to Ludwig Hänsel1

Wittgenstein’s modern sensibility is informed by a naturalism that has one of its sources in Goethe’s scientific method. The method of ordering and presenting natural phenomena that Goethe develops in his investigations of, say, the plant world is explicitly taken up and translated by Wittgenstein into central moments of his own mode of investigating language.2 Goethe’s model serves Wittgenstein by giving him the tools with which to articulate what it takes to present life in meaningful language, or to show that language depends on a form of life, its ground revealing a dimension of nature at the heart of human conventions. Walter Benjamin shared this deep appreciation for Goethe’s achievement, and he put it to work in different contexts, most notably in his investigation of nineteenth-century Paris in his Passagenwerk, but also in his writings on photography.3 In the present chapter, I will explore this convergence of sensibilities between Wittgenstein and Benjamin. After first developing what I call the naturalistic standpoint through some of Wittgenstein’s early writings, I detail a parallel development in relation to Benjamin’s discussion of the photography of types. Wittgenstein and the Theater of the Ordinary I begin my exploration of Wittgenstein’s naturalism from a central moment of his Tractatus: his discussion of the truth in solipsism. Solipsism is a problematic, metaphysical attempt to mirror the conviction in the uniqueness of the self (myself ) in the very nature of experience. As a metaphysical position, one would expect Wittgenstein to criticize and dismiss it. Yet Wittgenstein finds that there is truth in solipsism; indeed, he writes, “What the solipsist means is quite correct; only it cannot be said, but makes itself manifest.”4 Wittgenstein’s

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account leads to the claim that “solipsism, when its implications are followed out strictly, coincides with pure realism” (TLP 5.64). Rather than taking Wittgenstein’s claim to amount to a reductio ad absurdum of solipsism (by showing it to be identical to its opposite), I want to ask instead just what pure realism comes to. In other words, I want to focus on Wittgenstein’s recognition of the identity, expressed in the sentence “The world is my world” (TLP 5.62), as a recognition that helps us see how the unique experience sought by the solipsist (i.e., the experience of “my world”) is one that arises precisely when one adopts the most neutral and realistic stance toward “the world.” It is important to note that Wittgenstein’s statement of the identity of solipsism and realism in the Tractatus is followed immediately by his expression of a striking realization of the possibility of unique individuation in the affirmation of the world: “There is after all,” he writes, “a way to speak of the subject” (TLP 5.631). In the Notebooks, he puts this point even more strongly: “So there really is a way in which there can and must be mention of the I in a nonpsychological sense in philosophy.”5 According to the solipsistic position, my entire relation to the world is essentially a relation I have to myself, to the contents of my own consciousness. I am, in that sense, in all experiences of the world. Yet experience as such does not bear any recognizable mark of its being uniquely mine. So as to retain a hold on my sense of uniqueness, “I” (the solipsist) need to anchor this allencompassing consciousness in a specific, distinguishable part of the world that is privileged over others. My body would be the best candidate for such a place in which I would, so to speak, uniquely identify myself as the locus of that consciousness that also fills the whole field of experience. The problem of the solipsist, the inherent tension in the position that Wittgenstein diagnoses, is that he cannot make these two perspectives meet. The imagined book The World as I Found It would allegorize the problem of finding the subject from the all-encompassing position of the solipsist. It brings out the inherent difficulty the solipsist would have in finding a place in the world in which to identify himself as that unique subject of experience as a whole: There is no such thing as the subject that thinks or entertains ideas. If I wrote a book called The World as I Found It, I should have to include a report on my body, and should have to say which parts were subordinate to my will, and which were not, etc., this being a method of isolating the subject, or rather of showing that in an important sense there is no subject; for it alone could not be mentioned in that book. (TLP 5.631)

If the solipsist tried, for instance, to account for what he would like to call “my act of will” by listing the parts of the body that are moved by the will, the

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procedure would not single out a willing subject in the sense sought (that is, in a way that would satisfy the essential unity of a subject). It would, at most, form an external, inessential delimitation of certain kinds of facts in the field of experience. Starting from the solipsist’s relation to experience as a whole, there would be no way to “reconnect” the subject of such experience to a specific part of the world. It is not possible to discover a part of the world as “mine” metaphysically speaking. Wittgenstein expands upon this point in the Notebooks: “The human body, however, my body in particular, is a part of the world among others, among beasts, plants, stones, etc., etc. . . . Whoever realizes this will not want to procure a preeminent place for his own body or for the human body. He will regard humans and beasts quite naïvely as objects which are similar and which belong together” (N 82). I note Wittgenstein’s use of the term “naïve.” We can take the word to mean “unsophisticated” or to refer to an ordinary view of things. It also carries another association, however, which I assume was known to Wittgenstein, and one which Schiller offers in his own elaboration of the concept: the naïve is a feeling of admiration or respect to nature “simply because it is nature.”6 Importantly, in Schiller’s elaboration of the concept of naïve poetry, there is a strong emphasis on the avoidance of the subjective dimension or the expression of subjective states. It is a poetry that will have a certain objective detachment to it and would be devoid of the turmoil characteristic of the complications of the inner life, or of the knots of psychology. Taking the occlusion of the subjective in experience to be characteristic of the naïve standpoint, we might then identify it with what Wittgenstein calls “pure realism,” or the condition of seeing the world without having a place for the subject in it. It is not being “realistic” to say that I am just a small part in the world, that there is a world before me, as history teaches me, and that there will still be a world even when I am gone. Indeed, this is just as problematic a way of speaking as the solipsist’s attempt to identify the subject as a specific part of the world.7 The more natural perspective on being in the world is freed from pictures of the localization of the mind or soul (whether mine or that of others). But, and this is equally important, it is a recognition that the uniqueness that the solipsist tries to account for subjectively is correlative with having a world altogether.8 The pure realism that results from the shrinking of the subject to an extensionless point leaves us with the world pure and simple. “Pure realism” means that “at last I see that I too belong with the rest of the world, and so on the one side nothing is left over, and on the other side, as unique (als unik), the world” (N 85). The world is experienced not as a medley of facts but rather as unique. So the sense of uniqueness the

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solipsist attempted problematically to capture (by localizing it in a mere part of the world) is instead transposed onto the world as such. This consciousness of uniqueness is not the sense of how different I am from others. Rather, such uniqueness emerges precisely when no essential division can be established within the field of experience. Earlier in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein casts doubt on the concept of the soul that is given to us in psychology: “There is no such thing as the soul— the subject, etc.— as it is conceived in superficial psychology. A composite soul would not be a soul any longer” (TLP 5.5421). The truth of solipsism that emerges when solipsism is taken to an extreme is tantamount to the recognition that soulfulness equally belongs to the world and that there is no way to single out a preeminent place for the subject in the world. The achievement of such a form of significance depends essentially on relinquishing our hold on whatever gives preeminence to a part of the world (which I identify with what belongs to me) and seeing it as equivalent to everything else. One might say that the only hold on value and on individuation is by way of the unity of a world. This is what is expressed by the world being “my world.” Put slightly differently, this means that such sense of significance cannot be parceled; it cannot be found in the world, in one thing rather than another. When something is seen in or within the world, there is a contrast between it and other things or facts in the world, whereas the kind of value that is at issue, in Wittgenstein’s elucidation, is not contrastive. It is not of the form this is valuable rather than that. In other words, we seek a dimension of meaning that is not partitioning the world into contentful possibilities that are deemed significant and other equally present contentful possibilities that are rejected as insignificant. Significance equally affects one’s space of experience. This does not preclude finding significance in an individual thing. But in such a case, that thing, the individual (das Einzelne), has the character of equal significance and uniqueness of a world: “As a thing among things, each thing is equally insignificant; as a world each one equally significant” (N 83). To dramatize or allegorize this possibility of finding significance in what, among other things, may appear trivial, Wittgenstein writes, “If I have been contemplating the stove, and then am told: but now all you know is the stove, my result does indeed seem trivial. For this represents the matter as if I had studied the stove as one among the many things in the world. But if I was contemplating the stove it was my world, and everything else colourless by contrast with it” (N 83). Such a monadic understanding of the relation of thing and world is further expressed in the Notebooks by way of the idea of seeing the thing “sub specie aeternitatis”: “The usual way of looking at things sees objects as it were

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from the midst of them, the view sub specie aeternitatis, from outside. In such a way that they have the whole world as background. . . . The thing seen sub specie aeternitatis is the thing seen together with the whole logical space” (N 83). If, as a world, each thing is equally significant, we cannot point to a feature that would single out more important matters from the rest. Yet, from the impossibility of giving a mark of what is worth attending to, it does not follow that one can just arbitrarily choose to focus on anything one wishes and block out all the rest. There is no choice, whether reasoned or arbitrary, involved in being in significance, for choice always picks one thing in the space in which there are others. That significance constitutes a world means there is no simple way to enter it.

* In order to further establish the relevance of these considerations to Wittgenstein’s conception of the work of art, I would like to turn now to a passage from his diaries:9 Engelmann told me that when he rummages round at home in a drawer full of his own manuscripts, they strike him as so glorious [wunderschön] that he thinks they would be worth presenting to other people. (He said it’s the same when he is reading through letters from his dead relations.) But when he imagines a selection of them published he said the whole business loses its charm and value [Wert] and becomes impossible. I said this case was like the following one: Nothing could be more remarkable than seeing someone who thinks himself unobserved engaged in some quite simple everyday activity. Let’s imagine a theatre, the curtain goes up and we see someone alone in his room walking up and down, lighting a cigarette, seating himself etc. so that suddenly we are observing a human being from outside in a way that ordinarily we can never observe ourselves; as if we were watching a chapter from a biography with our own eyes,— surely this would be at once uncanny and wonderful [wunderbar]. More wonderful than anything a playwright could cause to be acted or spoken on the stage. We should be seeing life itself.— But then we do see this every day and it makes no the slightest impression on us! True enough, but we do not see it from that point of view.— Similarly when E. looks at his writings and finds them wonderful [wunderbar] (even though he would not care to publish any of the pieces individually), he is seeing his life as God’s work of art, and as such it is certainly worth contemplating, as is every life and everything whatever. But only the artist can represent the individual thing [das Einzelne] so that it appears to us as a work of art; those manuscripts rightly lose their value if we contemplate them singly and in any case without prejudice, i.e without being enthusiastic about them in advance.

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The work of art compels us— as one might say— to see it in the right perspective, but without art, the object [der Gegenstand] is a piece of nature like any other and the fact that we may exalt it through our enthusiasm does not give anyone the right to display it to us. (I am always reminded of one of those insipid photographs of a piece of scenery which is interesting to the person who took it because he was there himself, experienced something, but which a third party looks at with justifiable coldness; insofar as it is ever justifiable to look at something with coldness). But now it seems to me too that besides the work of the artist there is another through which the world may be captured sub specie aeterni. It is— as I believe— the way of thought which as it were flies above the world and leaves it the way it is, contemplating it from above in its flight.10

Wittgenstein distinguishes in this passage between two ways in which things acquire value. The first occurs through the individual’s involvement with them, or in his words, when “we exalt [things] through our enthusiasm” (as would be the case in the “insipid photographs of a piece of scenery which is interesting to the person who took it because he was there himself, experiencing something.”). In contrast, however, we also have the remarkable value of things as they appear precisely from a detached point of view, when things are seen “without prejudice, i.e. without being enthusiastic about them in advance.” This latter standpoint is also described by Wittgenstein as a way of seeing an object as unique rather than considering it as one thing (a piece of nature) among others. If we put together the two characteristics, then we can say that we have in this standpoint a uniqueness that cannot be traced back to something being singled out or chosen as more important for the subject than other things. This standpoint is clearly similar to the detachment and the peculiar sense of uniqueness developed in Wittgenstein’s treatment of solipsism in the Tractatus and the Notebooks. To further draw the connection between the two contexts, consider that the passage from the diaries starts from a reflection on an experience of seeing oneself, so to speak, from “outside.” Engelmann rummages through his old manuscripts (that is, writing that is his own but with which he is not involved in the present, or toward which he has something of an external standpoint). This point is emphasized also in the initial description of the theater of the ordinary; as Wittgenstein writes, “We see someone alone in his room walking up and down, lighting a cigarette, seating himself.” Wittgenstein (through his German usage, sich setzen) puts the emphasis on the reflexive form of “seating himself,” as though it brings out what is peculiar in this contemplation of the scene. When I seat myself, I do not observe myself

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seating myself. I am in my action, and habitually my action is inconspicuous to me. Thus it is precisely that involved standpoint that can be contemplated from the outside, as though watching a scene in the theater. It is also crucial that Wittgenstein stresses not only the perspective one can adopt with regard to someone else’s life but that gaining such a perspective presents us with something we ordinarily cannot do with our own life, and this is what is so striking about it: “Suddenly we are observing a human being from outside in a way that ordinarily we can never observe ourselves; as if we were watching a chapter from a biography with our own eyes.” A biography of someone else is naturally told in the third person. But what is truly striking is the possibility of seeing oneself from that standpoint— that is, as a third person. It would be, as with The World as I Found It, a curious cross between a biography and an autobiography in which I am not given any privileged status in the world. One could speak here of a “sideways on” perspective on my involvement in the world, looking at that living involvement, looking at the world we are engaged in from outside. To use a figure that is important to Benjamin, it would be, so to speak, turning the world inside out. I want to argue, then, that the estrangement evoked in this passage of Culture and Value parallels the naïve point of view that Wittgenstein calls “pure realism” in the Tractatus. There, Wittgenstein stresses that such a position offers a kind of model for what it would be like to see the world without giving oneself a preeminent position in the world. That experience is identified with the truth of solipsism, with seeing the uniqueness not of the self but of the world. Insofar as one could speak here of the uniqueness of the person, it would be insofar as that person is seen to take part in the uniqueness of the world. (This would not make that person merely one among many others in the world but would, as it were, show how it partakes of the unique.) Wittgenstein is well aware that, usually and for the most part, the ordinary has no such effect on us (“The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity”).11 And it is not reflection, or a subjective effort to consciously change our “focus,” that can lead us to that standpoint in which we are struck by the ordinary. Indeed, the issue is not the state of consciousness we find ourselves in. It is important, I take it, not to think here of the issue in terms of a well-known paradox of phenomenological inquiry (namely, how can I attentively investigate such states that are precisely a matter of habit and are, as it were, performed in distraction?).12 The issue has nothing to do with fine-tuning one’s consciousness to be at the same time involved and detached. It is a certain consistency of experience that corresponds to the detached standpoint. What Wittgenstein brings out, in his remarks about the work of art, is that it is the constructed or made object that

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compels you to see things in that way. It is only a certain kind of work that forces us to adopt the standpoint of pure realism. Occupying this position is not a matter of altering one’s subjective state of mind, or “switching off ” one’s interests. (I take it that even in Kant’s idea of disinterestedness in judging the beauty of the work of art, this is not what is at issue.) Even if the latter were, in some sense, possible, it would defeat the possibility of surveying from above precisely the world of our involvements (the significance of the world in the involvement with it). It is the oneness of the work that precludes my finding in it a foothold for my interests rather than the switching off of my interests that allows me to sense the quality of the work. At issue is not how to detach oneself but rather what it is to construct something that compels us to see the world this way (or makes that perspective compelling).

* One of the most interesting ideas that comes up in the passage from Culture and Value concerns the way in which thought or philosophy has the same possibility opened to it as the work of art, to fly above the world and contemplate the world, as it were, from above in its flight: “But now it seems to me too that besides the work of the artist there is another through which the world may be captured sub specie aeterni. It is— as I believe— the way of thought which as it were flies above the world and leaves it the way it is, contemplating it from above in its flight” (CV 5).13 One way to take this figure of flight above the world would be to relate it to Wittgenstein’s idea of a perspicuous presentation [Übersichtliches Darstellung]. It is indeed an übersicht, an overview. But here, too, the idea of leaving things as they are might tempt us to conceive the matter too subjectively, as though thought must make an effort to remain neutral. It is a matter not so much of distancing oneself but rather of constructing something that allows the overseeing. The figure of the flight above the world assumes that one has surroundings to survey. But our existence in meaning is, for the most part, not such as to have a picture of our surroundings. It is sufficient to think of Wittgenstein’s characterization of the philosophical problem as having the form “I don’t know my way about” to realize that the construction of such surroundings is the result of work. The connectedness of surroundings, the kind of continuity that characterizes not physical space but rather an environment of meaning, is not something given. It is not only the artist who has to make or construct something in order to compel us to see the world from this perspective, but thinking also must be constructive, not thereby creating something artificial or conventional, but precisely allowing us to occupy a more natural point of view.

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Put differently, we should be careful not to form too stark a contrast between detachment that is manifest in leaving the world the way it is (call this the purely descriptive) and the constructive. Much work is necessary to leave the world the way it is. One’s setting out just to describe the world might well result only in the presentation of a medley of cases. But these things must be brought together, related, or ordered in such a way that we might recognize in the continuity thus obtained the character of surroundings. Such ordering, as the famous remark in Philosophical Investigations makes clear, involves the construction of intermediate steps. The purely descriptive is to be distinguished from a simplistic empiricism, which would merely move from particular facts to their ordering in contingent generalizations. Importantly, this purely descriptive construction of surroundings is something that Wittgenstein traces on several occasions back to Goethe’s scientific practice. Goethe’s construction of the primal phenomenon out of disparate phenomena, in his studies of the morphology of plants or in his theory of colors, is the closest parallel that Wittgenstein finds to his own procedure. What we are doing here runs parallel to some extent with Goethe’s ideas about the metamorphosis of plants. . . . From Goethe stems the conception of the “primal plant”; yet surely he saw in it only an idea, not something real. But what then is the problem solved by this idea? The problem of synoptic presentation [Das Problem der übersichtlichen Darstellung]. Goethe’s aphorism “All the organs of plants are leaves transformed” gives us a schema by which we group the organs of plants according to their degree of similarity, as it were around a central case. . . . We see the leaf as it were, in its natural surroundings of forms. In this sense we don’t see the primal plant, but rather what one might call evidence for the primal plant or evidence for a developmental hypothesis. And this is exactly what we are doing: we situate a linguistic form in its surrounding, we see the grammar of our language against a background of similar and related games, and that banishes disquiet.14

For Goethe, similarity is based on the idea of a space of variations ruled by metamorphosis. Such a space of similarity would be characterized as the variation of a primal type that is not itself given in experience. Thus, insofar as two cases can be placed in the space of variations necessary to present the primal type, one could speak of an affinity between them by way of the relation of each to the archetype without referring to any shared phenomenal properties. With Goethe, we have then an understanding of similarity that assumes no presentable common element but relies on the unity of surroundings of living forms. Echoing this method in Wittgenstein affords an understanding of what I would call the constructive conception of family resemblance. Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblance is often taken to be only a tool

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to criticize essentialist positions that assume that there must be something common to all the cases of the use of a certain term. Wittgenstein is taken to argue that there is no more than a similarity or partial overlap between all cases falling under a concept. The emphasis in what I call the constructive understanding of family resemblance is different. Here, what is essential is the task of producing intermediate links and a continuity of transitions that presents surroundings of meaning, not that this constructive practice gives up all critical ambitions. Here too, ultimately, we might say, the aim is to get rid of certain fixations on how things must be, but this would be because the continuity dissolves the uniqueness that comes with a picture of necessity, of the way things must be. The power of the unique is lost as it is placed in an environment, as “we situate a linguistic form in its surrounding.” But such an environment is not given: it must be constructed. It would be an arranging and ordering of linguistic phenomena in order to get rid of the “salience” of a certain picture. That is, the sense of false necessities is intimately tied with a sense of the preeminence of certain phenomena over others. To work against this pathos of uniqueness is to provide a place for what we feel must be the case in an environment of closely related cases. Just as Goethe argued in his Theory of Color against giving too much significance to Newton’s prism experiment, so in philosophy, one might say, there is no experimentum crucis. The constructive understanding of family resemblance leads to the idea of a natural surrounding of forms. No phenomenon can have an essentially higher status than another, but the ordering of phenomena through similarity is the presentation of such surroundings that Goethe calls the primal phenomenon and Wittgenstein the perspicuous overview. Before moving to the discussion of Benjamin in the second part of this chapter, I want briefly to suggest a consequence of our Goethean inflection of Wittgenstein’s idea of family resemblance to photography. Wittgenstein’s relation to photographic practice is often discussed by turning to his use of the figure of Galtonian photography. Galton attempted to create portraits of types of human beings by availing himself of the new photographic technique. By juxtaposing on the same plate photographic impressions of different individuals belonging to one predetermined category, he created a composite portrait of the type. Galton’s method might be called “visual averaging.” It produces the “normal idea” of a given species. As opposed to a caricature that brings out the type by an excessive emphasis on a specific trait, thus creating something of a lively, comic, or grotesque expressivity, with Galton, typicality feels melancholic or spectral, as though drained of expression or of life. The idea of typifying by way of visual overlap is one that importantly depends on similarity being understood in terms of shared features. Even if

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not all individuals of a certain type have all their features in common, there will be, with respect to every feature, a critical mass of cases that determines whether or not it belongs to the typical or becomes visible in the superposition of the different impressions. In the Blue Book, Galtonian photography therefore features as an illustration of our problematic craving for generality: “We are inclined to think that the general idea of a leaf is something like a visual image, but one which only contains what is common to all leaves. (Galtonian composite photograph.)”15 The choice of the example of the concept of “leaf,” used to make the point against a Galtonian model of concrete generality in the type, might not be arbitrary. Indeed, Wittgenstein might have in mind here a contrast to the understanding of affinity or resemblance that is brought out in Goethe’s conception of the primal plant and the idea of metamorphosis of plants expressed in Goethe’s aphorism “All the organs of plants are leaves transformed.” In order to further bring out the relevance of the Goethean model to photography, I turn now to Benjamin. Benjamin and Comparative Photography Let me start the second part of this chapter, devoted to bringing Benjamin and photography into the nexus of terms— detachment, uniqueness, and similarity— formed in considering Wittgenstein and Goethe, by returning to the uncanny situation that Wittgenstein describes in his theater of the ordinary. Taking seriously Wittgenstein’s suggestion of this being something like a theater implies that we must be able to speak here of a person “playing himself.” But while we might tell someone “Just be yourself ” when, say, he is acting nervous before an interview, we would hardly find the occasion to tell someone “Play yourself.” One of the themes of Benjamin’s “Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” is the possibility opened up by the new media of photography and film for people to play themselves. This is often merely taken to suggest the possibility of having people who are not professional actors take part in movies and, so to speak, represent their own type (as in Italian neorealism). But this does not bring out clearly enough the involvement of the camera in the possibility of estrangement, which makes sense of the idea of someone playing himself. Benjamin notes that “the invention of motion pictures and the phonograph came in an age of maximum alienation of men from one another, of unpredictably intervening relationships which have become their only ones. Experiments have proved that a man does not recognize his own gait on film or his own voice on the phonograph.”16 Far from taking this to be only the ex-

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pression of alienation, Benjamin would argue that photographic technology precisely opens up enough of a space between man and his image to be able to make sense of someone “playing himself.” The theater of the past, the stage theater, often involves representative figures invested with symbolic roles and engaged in acting on the stage of history. In some forms of theater, playing oneself might have meant stepping out of one’s role and making manifest the presence of the actor apart from that of the character he plays. But the involvement of the camera allows the opening up of a space or the duplication of one’s own presence as a role that one can now study. Ordinary existence itself can take the form of a role revealed by its gestures. We no longer require extraordinary material to produce that unity of experience that we expect from a significant work of art. It is no longer necessary to play parts or roles in order to generate the unified space of significance of the work of art. The ordinary itself can become a scene of significance. This turn to the ordinary might sound surprising given that often Benjamin’s account of photography is said to revolve around his concept of the optical unconscious. Thus one might think that it is not the ordinary but the surreal that is the best manifestation of the power of photography.17 The pairing of Benjamin’s account of photography with his account of the modern prevalence of shock in experience would seem to further distance his view from the affirmation of the ordinary. But when one considers the examples that Benjamin provides of the optical unconscious, these are clearly drawn out of one’s ordinary existence (as is reference to the psychoanalytic notion of the unconscious in Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life): “Whereas it is a commonplace that, for example, we have some idea what is involved in the act of walking (if only in general terms), we have no idea at all what happens during the split second when a person actually takes a step. We are familiar with the movement of picking up a cigarette lighter or a spoon, but know almost nothing of what really goes on between hand and metal, and still less how this varies with different moods. This is where the camera comes into play.” (The similarity to the examples in Wittgenstein’s description is striking— “takes a step” vs. “walking up and down,” “picking up a cigarette lighter” vs. “lighting a cigarette.”)18 An optical unconscious is precisely correlative with the possibility of investigating our everyday environment. The automatism of photography reveals something that has a relation to the realm of everyday meaning yet is at the same time separated or dissociated from our conscious relation to objects. The use of photographic technology is not important for art by allowing us to discover new features of reality. The way in which we discover the molecular

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structure of skin with the help of a microscope might be fascinating, but it does not touch upon the meaning that skin has for us. Stop-motion photography can resolve the question of whether a trotting horse raises all four legs at the same time, but for it to open a visual unconscious, it must illuminate the meaning of walking— what walking is for a human being. Put slightly differently, the photographic technology does not automatically open a new field of action for human beings. It is one thing for the technology to make visible what can hardly be captured with the naked eye and another to understand what it is to be at home in it or, to mention a term that Benjamin uses in a different context, what it is to befriend the field opened by technology. The photographic technology by itself can give us sensational sights, like a microscope or a telescope would, but it is the task of art to make this into an environment that is habitable— that concentrates human significance. It is only in this latter condition that we can truly speak of the opening of an optical unconscious. This capacity of photography to open the familiar itself to itself, or this illumination of the familiar, is evident in a further description of what photography can do to the surroundings of existence: On the one hand, film furthers insight into the necessities governing our lives by its use of close-ups, by its accentuation of hidden details in familiar objects, and by its exploration of commonplace milieux through the ingenious guidance of the camera; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of a vast and unsuspected field of play [Spielraum; translation modified]. Our bars and city streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories seemed to close relentlessly around us. Then came film and exploded this prison-world with the dynamite of the split second, so that now we can set off calmly on journeys of adventure among its far-flung debris.19

Indeed, Benjamin speaks of the possibility of “calmly setting off on journeys of adventures.” This relaxed and highly conscious investigative position is to be set in contrast to the tendency to speak of the photography after Benjamin as containing the striking or even traumatic potential to unsettle our habits.20 At issue is the way we can explore and investigate in photography the everyday or the habitual as something that is natural to us, or as the natural dimension of the human form of life. Benjamin refers to this place opened up by photographic or cinematic technique as a “natural preserve.” Or, to use another figure of his, it would be the blue flower in the land of technology. That is, he suggests precisely that film may allow a renewed opening of nature, precisely through the utmost involvement of the technological apparatus. It is this con-

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vergence on a new mode of investigating the natural in human forms of life that Benjamin, just like Wittgenstein, traces to Goethe’s scientific method.

* The possibility of the transformation of art by the involvement of the camera can be brought closer to Wittgenstein’s account of pure realism, or to the purely descriptive, by considering further Benjamin’s characterization of the kind of “new objectivity” of photography. As an artistic movement, “New Objectivity” (Neue Sachlichkeit) has been identified with photographers such as August Sander, Karl Blossfeldt, and Albert Renger-Patzsch. Yet there is a marked contrast between the admiration Benjamin evinces for the achievement of Blossfeldt and Sander and his criticism of the kind of wide-eyed enchantment at reality found, for instance, in Renger-Patzsch’s book from the same period, titled The World Is Beautiful: “In it is unmasked the posture of a photography that can endow any soup can with cosmic significance.”21 Renger-Patzsch understands that the neutrality of the camera allows us to bring out the unique in the bare presence of the object, or to equate photographic beauty with the intense awareness of factical existence. His utterly precise and detailed close-ups bring out the singularly resilient and utterly concrete thingness of things. This discovery of the concrete supposedly replaces the need to be “creative” to produce something beautiful. In his 1928 essay “Joy Before the Object,” Renger-Patzsch writes, “Nature, after all, is not so poor that she requires constant improvement.”22 But does nature really manifest itself naturally? Can the compelling uniqueness of art be relegated to the precision with which the given is captured? Or is constructive work demanded to let nature appear? In order to clarify what such constructive naturalism comes to, consider, in contrast to Renger-Patzsch’s practice, Benjamin’s account of the serial photography of August Sander. Benjamin develops the underlying logic of serial photography in relation to Goethe’s scientific method: “The photographer did not approach this enormous undertaking as a scholar, or with the advice of ethnographers and sociologists, but as the publisher says, ‘from direct observation.’ It was assuredly a very impartial, indeed bold sort of observation, but delicate too, very much in the spirit of Goethe’s remark: ‘There is a delicate empiricism which so intimately involves itself with the object that it becomes true theory.’ ”23 In Goethe’s “delicate empiricism,” the ordering and descriptive articulation of phenomenal material bears the weight of theory. “This ‘empiricism,’ ” Benjamin writes in another context, “grasps what is essential in the object itself; therefore, Goethe says: ‘The highest thing would be to under-

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stand that everything factual is already theory. The blue of the sky reveals to us the fundamental laws of chromatics. One must not look for anything behind the phenomena; they are themselves the doctrine.’ ”24 Goethe does not give up on the essential like a positivistic empiricism would but finds intelligence— one might even say necessity— in the object itself. Reason in phenomena is not to be viewed in terms of reductive or abstract lawful regularities. Nor do experiments function as confirmation of theoretical hypotheses. Rather, Goethe understands experiments as providing experiential, intermediary steps in the ordering of phenomena, forming an experiential continuity that allows us to recognize phenomena as belonging together— that is, as taking part in the presentation of a higher essential unity, which Goethe calls the archetype, or Ur-phaenomen. In this state, phenomena would be rescued from their contingency by partaking in the space of presentation of an archetype that is at the origin of their relatedness. This all-too-brief exposition suggests, I hope, that there is a strong constructive element in Goethe’s naturalism. While Goethe is committed to presenting truth in material content, he does not assume that nature manifests itself naturally, so to speak. It is necessary to gather into a new order the disparate phenomena, to construct out of phenomena a higher, more natural unity. The construction is essential to presenting the deepest elements of life naturalistically— that is, construction establishes the experiential continuity that makes present archetypes lying dormant in nature. The translation of Goethe’s method to Sander’s photography means that the realism of photography is not to be judged in terms of any notion of the detailed resemblance of the single photograph to the person in reality.25 This is taken care of automatically, so to speak. Nor is its meaning to be found in a particular expressivity of the human countenance. We are not to look at the single photograph in isolation and seek in it the key to its effect on us. Rather, this new objectivity is understood in terms of the constructive method of comparative photography. It is as an album of types that photographic experimentation proved essential to the most fundamental naturalism. This point is expressed in a passage of Alfred Döblin’s introduction to Sander’s gallery of types, which Benjamin quotes approvingly: “Just as there is comparative anatomy which helps us understand the nature and history of organs, so this photographer is doing comparative photography, adopting a scientific standpoint superior to that of the photographer of detail.”26 The contrast this last claim implies is that between, on the one hand, the presentation of a type whose characteristic meaning emerges in being compared or placed in an order with others and, on the other, one whose meaning emerges through attention to the unique or singular details in the one photograph.

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Or, put differently, we recognize the meaning of a certain photograph only when it is seen in its place in the ordering of other photographs that articulate experience as knowledge of an archetype. In that condition, experience and knowledge of experience come together, and the blue of the sky is itself doctrine. Plurality is encompassed insofar as the meaning of the single photograph appears against the background of related photographs, of similar cases, in an attempt to form the continuity of meaning in the presentation of an archetype. Such a comparative practice can be both scientific inquiry and aesthetic judgment.27

7

What Makes a Poem Philosophical? John Gibson

Introduction In The Gay Science, Nietzsche tells us, “Mystical explanations are considered deep; the truth is, they are not even shallow.”1 The line acts as a humorous reminder of a risk we run when making ambitious claims of any sort— mystical, metaphysical, aesthetic, or otherwise. The risk is that of producing an explanation that claims for itself depth yet is not even trivial— that is, the risk of offering an explanation that in fact says nothing and so not only fails the test of profundity but fails to register any insight at all. Wittgenstein’s work on nonsense is one such way of exposing how endemic this risk is to philosophy, though Wittgenstein would add that under the heading of “mystical explanations” we must place much of what Nietzsche himself, an ethicist and aesthetician at heart, liked to talk about.2 This might seem an insult to those of us who work in ethics and the philosophy of art, but for Wittgenstein, it implies no slight to our objects of interest. Ethics and aesthetics are the areas of philosophy charged with exploring the nature of the two most basic kinds of human value, and while much of what we know of Wittgenstein reveals that he was committed to both the ethical life and the place of art in it, he thought that philosophy could say little of importance about their nature and the great significance they hold for us. If “ethics and aesthetics are one and the same,” as Wittgenstein claims in the Tractatus, it is in part because he thought both areas of philosophy are bound to fail even the test of shallowness when they attempt to justify in the space of a theory the items we place in the realm of value.3 The failure to be even shallow is a risk one particularly runs when trying to find a way to explain what might make a poem— or any form of art, for that matter— philosophical. It is very easy to churn out claims of apparent depth but equally easy to say almost nothing— at any rate, nothing more than

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statements that ideas and concerns familiar to the philosopher can inform a poet’s work, or that poems can inspire philosophizing, and this is hardly news. But what else might we mean when we call a poet or her poems “philosophical”? It may be the case that describing poems as “philosophical” can at times seem a natural way of explaining the experience of depth and insight they can provoke in us. But exactly why does it strike us as interesting or apt to describe this experience in these terms? When considering artistic modernity and all those fabled difficult poems it produces— poems that often strive to unburden language of its usual representational and sense-producing responsibilities— we can feel ourselves ever more drawn to attributing to a poem a clandestine intellectual project, an implicit critique, or a heady stock of unspoken points, just so we can state that thing of cognitive value we think we find hiding beneath a poem’s opaque surface. But when is it reasonable to call these projects or points “philosophical,” and why should we think that in doing so we say something illuminating or flattering about a poet’s labor? I will use a discussion of Wittgenstein to stage an exploration of the idea of a philosophical poem. While Wittgenstein would not approve of such an endeavor, I trust that the wholly skeptical conclusions I will draw about its existence will be in line with the spirit of his thought, both early and late. I will not be taking the standard approach, at least in professional philosophy, of considering positive arguments in favor of the idea I wish to challenge and then attacking them one by one. Rather, I want to explore what happens to the idea of a philosophical poem if considered in the context of studying the work of an author who forces one to think about it in an unorthodox yet, one hopes, productive and generalizable manner. What Wittgenstein has to offer this discussion is a vantage point from which the issue appears both important and misguided: important because we should wish to explain the encounter with depth and insight that the often apparently “meaningless” modern poem gives us, and misguided because it offers entirely the wrong framework for making sense of the encounter. And while I shall focus on just one kind of modernist poem, what I say about it will imply something damning about the urge to conceive of poetry of nearly any sort as philosophical. If my reflections on Wittgenstein will necessarily fall short of saying all that can be said about, or on behalf of, the idea of a philosophical poem, they will perhaps suffice to fashion a sense of the oddness of the desire to conceive of the poetry we wish to celebrate as a form of philosophy-by-othermeans. My discussion will help clarify, in a small way, something else: what it means to describe Wittgenstein as a kind of philosophical modernist. It will turn out that the particular sense in which Wittgenstein’s philosophy can be

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called “modernist” implies a unique view concerning the relationship between the two parties to the ancient feud between the philosophers and the poets. Wittgenstein’s modernism is of a surprisingly antiphilosophical sort, and to this extent, it offers at best cynicism with respect to the grand philosophical claims modernist criticism sometimes makes on behalf of poetry since Yeats, especially, though not exclusively, in the lineage that runs, in one way or another, from Eliot through Stevens to Ashbery. Seeing this will provide purchase on the kind of philosophical modernism one can get away with ascribing to Wittgenstein. The modernism we discover in Wittgenstein will be a modernism that is, in Richard Gaskin’s words, “not an outright rejection of realism, but an attempt to achieve it in purer form.”4 It is the strangeness of what Wittgenstein offers us by way of a sense of what this “purer realism” looks like that makes his modernism, such as it is, of novel and of potentially wider interest to philosophy and poetics.5 A Problem of Worldliness I will pursue my point about the “purer realism” of Wittgenstein’s modernism with constant reference to Wallace Stevens. If Stevens has become something of a darling to philosophers with an interest in poetry, one hopes it isn’t simply because his poetry is brimming with lines about “the magnificent cause of being” or that proclaim that “things merely are.”6 More charitably, it is because Stevens’s late Romantic entanglements with modernity seem so often to be an entanglement with the same problem that is at the heart of a good stretch of philosophy from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. The problem is what one might floridly, but accurately, call “the modern problem of worldliness.” Let me explain. Strictly speaking, philosophy has always concerned itself with what amounts to the problem of worldliness, and the endless debates on realism, idealism, constructivism, relativism, and the like each offer distinct accounts of how thought, language, and culture succeed or fail to connect us to something beyond ourselves. This “beyond” might be reality, truth, other humans, our pasts, or what’s happening in Cleveland right now— those bits of the world to which we wish to be brought closer, whatever they may be. What must we do if we are to vindicate our sense that the world, and the various features of it that we wish to know, are in fact real, are there, and are more or less as we take them to be? There isn’t a philosophical tradition that fails to address the problem of the relation between the world and the subject, thought, or language, which is the most basic form the problem of worldliness takes. But a good amount of modern philosophy since Schopenhauer explores a

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sense not merely of the separateness between self and world but also of rupture, a distancing of the real that registers as loss. How one conceives of this rupture, and feels cynicism about the chances that we can repair it, mark one way of distinguishing many of the philosophical and aesthetic stances that have developed since Romanticism.7 What is distinctive about many of these stances is that the work of art is given an almost sacred role in confronting this sense of rupture: art comes to be seen as a site of renewal or, failing that, of escape. It is called on either to restore us to our prelapsarian glory, if only partially and in the imagination, or to create, as Adorno would insist, a realm of freedom, of autonomy, inside of which we can avoid a lot of the junk the Romantics were right to tell us we should despise.8 The kind of modernist stance I am concerned with here inherits the problem of worldliness at roughly the same moment that much of art loses faith in representation and the broadly mimetic powers of art. This itself is not quite news, but it becomes interesting when we add to it an urge still to hold on to a kind of realism.9 In a poet or philosopher who has such a desire, we find a struggle to understand how language or thought might nonetheless place us in contact with something worldly enough, with something that suffices to present a sense of engagement with the real, even, or especially, in the face of the anxieties and doubts that animate the very sense of rupture the problem of worldliness inspires in us. In both Stevens and Wittgenstein, for instance, this struggle will at times consist in exploring how certain forms of essentially imaginative experience allows us to encounter an elusive and often extraordinary everyday world (more on this below). To a certain kind of philosopher, Stevens is philosophical because his poetry seems to speak so directly to the problem of worldliness, and he does so in a way that many readers of Wittgenstein— those who are called, perhaps unfortunately, “New Wittgensteinians”— will at moments recognize as intensely familiar. As Wittgenstein said, “Philosophy really ought to be written as a kind of poetry,” and to some, Stevens seems like the poet who is best able to write philosophy as a form of poetry in this way.10 There are two broad ways in which Stevens can be made to seem like a kind of Wittgensteinian poet, and these correspond very neatly to two broad respects in which Wittgenstein has been of interest to scholars concerned with art. The two approaches divide along the lines scholars have traditionally used to distinguish the early from the later Wittgenstein: the difference one finds when one moves from the apparent positivist who wrote the Tractatus to the ordinary language philosopher who wrote Philosophical Investigations. The first approach grows out of a reading of nonsense in the Tractatus; the second, from the Investigations’ conception of philosophy— that, once re-

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formed, will have the capacity to lead “words back from their metaphysical to their everyday uses.”11 Both approaches seem to provide a promising foundation on which to construct an account of the philosophical significance of poetry in general and of Stevens in particular. In both cases, something that can fairly be called the modern problem of worldliness serves as the guiding concern.12 My strategy will be one of feigned charity. I will first attempt to make each of these approaches seem reasonable, and then I will produce a knife. I discuss each approach in turn. Tractarian Nonsense and Poetic Opacity It comes as little surprise that scholars interested in poetic modernism and the avant-garde would take interest in the Tractatus’s insistence that all of its lines are nonsensical, and that the work makes the point it does precisely on account of the nonsensicality of its lines. I will explain what I take this point to be in a moment, but the allure of such a work is obvious: it promises to offer a way of explaining exactly how we experience depth of insight in the intentional opacity of much modernist poetry. It is true that there are many forms of modernism, and it would be irresponsible to claim that intense opacity is the fiber that runs through all these forms. But the charitable reader will grant that any story we tell of the cultural and philosophical significance of poetic modernism must reckon with the radical and willed opacity characteristic of many of its brightest achievements. Whatever else this opacity consists in, it can be explained, in good part, in terms of the opacity of poetic language: its refusal easily to be made sense of, its semantic and syntactic promiscuity, and all the respects in which we are made to feel utterly naïve if we set out to “precisify” its various lines, as a philosopher of language might put it. This opacity can place great pressure on us to explain how these poems can offer an encounter with meaning at all, so much so that it often shakes our confidence in thinking that “meaning” is an apt term for describing what poems function to produce. We know that there are powerful aesthetic, cultural, and political reasons poets might pursue such opacity— think of Paul Celan writing poetry in German in the wake of the Shoah— but the philosopher of literature must explain just how such poems can show us something, anything, when it is none too clear what they are even saying. The Tractarian use of nonsense can seem to turn the ostensible meaningless of the difficult modern poem into a quick virtue, revealing a way to acknowledge both the absence of sense and the presence of insight in a poem. The question, for our purposes, is this: when is it reasonable to use the notion of Tractarian non-

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sense to explain what a poet is attempting to achieve and whether this can tell us anything of interest about how a poem might be philosophical? First, what is the Tractarian notion of nonsense? The Tractatus itself is a series of highly condensed propositions that cumulatively offer an account of the relationship between language (and so thought) and reality. The text offers a theory of meaning, and meaning is made to be a matter of how sentences, as vehicles of propositions, can have cognitive content, which is to say how they can be genuinely revelatory of the extralinguistic world we presumably use language to navigate. This, in turn, is explicated in terms of how the logical structure of well-formed empirical sentences enables language to mirror the structure of reality, and it is for this reason often called a “picture theory” of meaning. However pithy this account is, one can see the problem. If the theory lays out the conditions under which an employment of language can be meaningful, and if meaningful language use is said to consist in the ways in which a sentence, by virtue of expressing a proposition, pictures reality, the work that states this theory will fail to satisfy the very conditions of meaningfulness the theory articulates. It is language about language, a second-order description of what must be the case rather than a first-order description of what actually is the case, and only the latter use of language can satisfy the conditions of meaningfulness the Tractatus defends. The propositions of the text, then, literally say nothing. The theory it constructs implies that they are, in effect, dummy propositions: they are empty, contentless. To this extent, if Wittgenstein’s theory is sound, then the very attempt to offer a philosophical statement of it becomes a kind of performative contradiction. Wittgenstein, of course, sees this and concludes the Tractatus with what are likely the most famous last words in modern philosophy: My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, 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. What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence. (6.54– 57)

This makes it clear that even if the “propositions” of the Tractatus are nonsensical, the work cannot be regarded as a mad, ludic exercise, producing jabberwocky simply to shame the reader who thought it had something to teach her. Wittgenstein tells the reader that it is a work of nonsense and that this nonsense can get one to see the world aright— that it elucidates something

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about our relationship to reality and, in doing so, prompts a form of understanding. This is all serious business. The question for the reader is just how the Tractatus’s use of nonsense can be so productive: what, exactly, does it show us, and how? One cannot excise the final passage from the text and take the work to offer a theory that, while implying something unflattering about the possibility of stating how language can bind itself to the world, more or less tries to get away with doing precisely that. The final passage contaminates all the prior propositions with nonsense, and it is according to the very letter of the theory that this is so. Almost all contemporary commentators agree on this point, and they divide according to how they fill out the story of the manner in which Tractarian nonsense is productive. What is often called the “irresolute” or “ineffabilist” reading takes this nonsense to be philosophically productive: it is nonsense of a technical sort that functions to show— to make manifest— what one necessarily cannot say. This special sort of nonsense prompts a positive philosophical insight into the relationship among language, meaning, and reality— an insight presumably along the lines of, though obviously not identical to, the theory the text itself appears to elaborate. There are serious problems with this reading, and criticisms of it tend to be much more sophisticated ways of putting Frank Ramsey’s well-known riposte: “But what we can’t say, we can’t say; and we can’t whistle it either.”13 The so-called resolute reading takes points like Ramsey’s seriously and Wittgenstein’s final words literally: the propositions of the Tractatus are nonsense, and nonsense is just that; it neither says nor shows anything positive about its great topic. According to the resolute reading, the Tractatus leaves us with the everyday notion of nonsense, of words that idle and statements that produce no cognitive content at all. If the irresolute reading argues that the Tractatus uses nonsense to establish its apparent thesis obliquely, the resolute reading urges that the confession of nonsense reveals its apparent thesis to be nonsense, too. We can take from the work no theory at all, whistled or otherwise. Since the irresolute conception of nonsense is very likely incoherent (if not obviously as an interpretation of Wittgenstein, then as an independent philosophical position), I will focus on the resolute reading, which has the virtue of making sense. But the resolute reading does present a very obvious problem, and it is worth pointing out how one might handle it, since resolving that problem will eventually lead us to something interesting about poetry. The resolute reading needs to explain exactly what kind of understanding, what form of insight, nonsense (resolutely interpreted) can yield. It must explain why Wittgenstein would put so much work into writing a masterfully argued theoretical treatise, ultimately only to pull the rug out from

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underneath the entire enterprise. What could remain of value in a work that so condemns itself to simple nonsense? A possible answer to this question begins to appear if we ask not what the text shows us but how Wittgenstein intends it to work on the desires and expectations that a certain kind of reader is likely to bring to it. This reader will be, of course, a philosopher who desires to have the relationship among language, meaning, and reality explained to her in logical, metaphysical terms. Thus, the confession of nonsense at the conclusion of the work functions to disenchant the reader burdened with such expectations and desires. It must be granted that the Tractatus does a remarkable job of enticing this reader. Wittgenstein produces an apparent theory that is of sufficient brilliance and clarity that it can be expected to strike its implied audience as coming very close to fulfilling its promise to explain how language achieves its connection to the world beyond it. That is, what sets the stage for the confession of nonsense is the production of what very much looks like a solution to a set of issues that have animated philosophy since Plato and that were at the heart of the positivist movement of Wittgenstein’s time. This is no mean feat. If one asks, “Why bother with the Tractatus if it all turns out to be nonsense?” the most plausible response one could give would be to say that Wittgenstein wishes to show this entire metaphysical enterprise to be nonsense. Nonsense of this sort is still immensely productive, but it would appear to be productive in a way more emancipatory than philosophical. Nonsense so conceived tries to emancipate us from the desire to offer— though the trick is to discern just which of these, exactly— metaphysical theories, philosophical justifications, an account of how language and thought acquire worldly content. That is, nonsense so conceived tries to get us to think about our cognitive and linguistic predicament in a certain way— namely, in a way that would lead one to do in earnest what the Tractatus, read naïvely, appears to be doing.14 If this is so, then it is wrongheaded to see Tractarian nonsense as philosophically productive, since its very function is to free us from the urge to do philosophy, surely in the form of which positivism is emblematic, but perhaps even philosophy tout court.15 As Michael Kremer puts it, “Here is the ultimate solution to the ‘problems of philosophy’ promised in the Preface. There are no such problems, and coming to realize this frees us from the burden of feeling that we must solve them.”16 In releasing us from this burden, the Tractatus presumably also helps us return to the rough ground of ordinary language and the orientation to the world offered there, a theme that will become central to the later Wittgenstein. Tractarian nonsense, then, does not offer a roundabout way of doing philosophy, except of a wholly negative, destructive sort. This helps explain what Wittgenstein meant when, in a private letter,

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he insisted that ethical value is the only value the Tractatus really bears.17 It is ethical because it frees us to achieve a sense of being right with the world in thought and language in a way that our erstwhile search for philosophical explanations made impossible. It is easy to see how a resolute reading of Tractarian nonsense might open up interesting ways of speaking of the project of the difficult modern poem. It is a vision of nonsense as productive in a way that is strikingly similar to ways in which philosophers and literary theorists have at times described the cognitive gains of modern art and the manner in which it is most apt to engage our worldly interests. Consider, for instance, Bernard Harrison’s theory of “dangerous knowledge.” The language of literature, he argues, helps us achieve a clearer view of our epistemic and ethical condition not by adding to our store of worldly knowledge but by disrupting the “knowledge” on which we conventionally rely, shaking the self ’s confidence in “its natural but mistaken conviction that the terms in which it habitually construes the world are the only terms in which the world is capable of being construed.”18 This is a kind of cognitive insight, even a form of knowledge, and its liberatory potential is obvious enough. Tractarian nonsense— from this point on, I shall use “nonsense” only in its resolute sense— might be seen as a philosophical extension of not-uncommon ways of explaining how literature tends to confront the problem of worldliness, but now in a way that is especially well suited for the poetry that emerges in the wake of modernism. In other words, Tractarian nonsense might seem to offer us a framework for explaining how opacity and apparent meaningless might be productive— that is, how they might offer insights, even a kind of understanding. My double repetition of “might” in the last sentence betrays my hesitancy to endorse any of this, but I want to follow this Tractarian possibility a bit further. Rupert Read is an example of a philosopher who explicitly uses Tractarian nonsense to argue for poetry’s philosophical significance, and he does so with Wallace Stevens as his guide. We should consider where it leads him. His argument unfolds in a book with sections that bear titles such as “Wittgensteinian Poetry,” “Wallace Stevens as ‘Wittgensteinian,’ ” and “Invitations to Nonsense: Poetry Considered as a Therapeutic Tool,” and so the connection to our problem is obvious. For Read, poems such as Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” and “Anecdote of the Jar” use the appearance of sense only to play a Tractarian trick on the reader, to lead her to endless impasses in her attempts to render meaningful what is said in these poems. Stevens’s poetry offers an example, in Read’s words, of “literary philosophizing,” an “educative poetry of the absurd” that “encourages us to form a kind of belief about what we can succeed in imagining, and then facilitates our learn-

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ing from the collapse of that belief under its own weight.”19 Read, like most New Wittgensteinians, highlights the therapeutic value of such an encounter with self-annihilating language: it points us back to the limits of language and thought and thereby allows us to feel a sense of release in knowing where those limits are. To see what this amounts to as a way of reading Stevens, consider the stanzas of “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” to which Read primarily attends: IV A man and a woman Are one. A man and a woman and a blackbird Are one. XIII It was evening all afternoon It was snowing And it was going to snow The black-bird sat in the cedar-limbs20

Read works through lines such as these in order to show that the imagination is inevitably defeated as long as it attempts to cull from them a coherent image or a determinate meaning. Note that even an innocent-seeming line such as “It was evening all afternoon” will defy any such attempt, embodying, as it does, a category violation. If it strikes us as mere figuration for a dark afternoon, one should recall that the philosophical problem is to explain how the line can yield this impression in terms of a theory of meaning, and if we consider the early Wittgenstein, we must then grant Read that it cannot.21 But it is not just the content of individual lines that raises the specter of nonsense in this poem. It is a matter of the connection between lines and the manner in which thought progresses through them. It would seem utterly amiss to try to understand the logical contribution of each line to the proposition they jointly express or to ask what cognitive content the lines, singly or conjunctively, generate. For Read, Stevens’s syntax ultimately should not be seen as distributing anything that can be called “meaning” across phrase, line, sentence, and stanza. We are called upon to work through Stevens’s language, but Read claims that what we find at the end of our struggles is that all Stevens’s dazzling lines, even those that bear a façade of sense, draw us in only to lead us to a place of darkness, a place in which no coherent image, idea, or claim is made visible. Stevens’s language turns out to say nothing at all, since on inspection it subverts the very representational and imaginative

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instructions it issues to the reader. If the poem draws us in with a familiar neo-Romantic promise to offer us a vision of a bit of great nature, it intentionally refuses to deliver on its promise. Thus, for Read, there is nothing that could constitute understanding these lines. What we learn from Stevens, we learn only contrastively: his poetry “discloses the sensical through violating the limits of language.”22 Exulting in language that violates our sense of sense, as it were, instills in the reader an awareness of the limits of sense— indeed, of the human imagination and understanding. I find all this interesting, and I endorse wholeheartedly the dull point that in Stevens— and in much poetry besides— thought and feeling unfold in a manner that defies common logical or “rational” expectations of continuation. But Read falls short of providing us with a reason to believe in the existence of the philosophical poem, and Read’s shortfall leads us to our first point of general interest. We know that Wittgenstein demanded sensitivity to linguistic context and to the varieties of language use in a form of life (this may be the implied point of the Tractatus; it is the explicit point of all his later writings.) And Read’s handling of Stevens should strike one as failing to take this demand into account with respect to poetry. There is something very odd about how Read reads Stevens. He goes through the various lines and asks what they mean. And in doing so, he treats the language of the poem as one would treat any chain of descriptive sentences whose business it is to describe some real or imaginary state of affairs. For Stevens’s verse to work its Tractarian magic, we must, as Read does, approach each line in an incredibly literal manner and then find it surprising that each line falls apart if so approached. Few informed readers of poetry written at this stage in modernism’s development would be inclined to approach a poem of any cultural or artistic significance in the manner that Read does. “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” was written in 1917, some sixty years after Les fleurs du mal was published and the French symbolists first sent the poem down the path of great modernist abstraction; and by the time poetry reaches Stevens’s generation, no au courant reader could be expected to work through a lyric that promises originality in such a way. The sort of audience on whom Read’s Tractarian trick might work would not have been reading Stevens in this way, nor would Stevens have expected them to. Stevens himself tells us that this poem “is not meant to be a collection of epigrams or of ideas but of sensations.” Whatever else this statement means, Stevens makes it clear here that we should not read his poem discursively, as an attempt to produce meaning as, say, a work on ornithology would in order to inform readers of what a real blackbird looks like.23 That Read does see the significance of Stevens’s painterly abstractions and interest in imagistic

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and associative modes of presentation is presumably why he places so much emphasis on whether we can imagine or visualize what the poem seems to be saying. But we would not call a work of cubism nonsense just because we cannot form a clear concept or a distinct image of its subject— take, for example, the poet in Picasso’s The Poet. We should be similarly reluctant to attribute nonsense to abstraction when we approach what is effectively just another kind of abstract art. It is naïve to assume that since a poem, unlike a painting, is a linguistic creature, then it must in some way be constitutionally open to the evaluations of sense and nonsense. Surely the question that lyric poems like Stevens’s raise is whether the linguistic register of poetic modernism uses language in such a way as to make such an evaluative mode appropriate. Read’s argument works, in effect, only on the assumption that it should be surprising to find that we cannot elicit from Stevens’s language the precision of a proposition, and that is a very peculiar way to approach a poem of this sort. As an interpretation of the point of Stevens’s poetic project, as a way of approaching poetic language in the context of high modernism, Read’s argument is unconvincing. This leads to another serious general point. It is a confusion of terms to label poetry “nonsense” just because its language refuses to terminate in a clear proposition or a coherent declaration. This is not to say that poetry can never produce nonsense— after all, we do have nonsense poetry— but it is to say that the grounds for claiming that a poem is nonsensical cannot merely be that its language behaves as Read claims Stevens’s language does. The Tractatus is entitled to call its propositions nonsensical precisely because it presents them as propositions, conveyed by sentences that are assertive, that have a definable logical function, and that are taken to delineate the boundaries of an “idea”— a concept, a claim, a philosophical point. The notion of Tractarian nonsense applies to a use of language charged with the task of making of a precise sort: whatever form of sense-making is demanded when one is attempting to articulate a theory. The resolute reading requires that we see in the language of Wittgenstein’s work both a promise of meaning and the want of conditions that could produce this meaning. Absent this promise, absent this kind of language use, it is unclear what would even invite the notion of nonsense. Tractarian nonsense is intelligible as nonsense against a certain backdrop: language produced in a metaphysical register. This is why the nonsense it produces can be said to offer a despairing insight into the nature and limits of philosophy itself. If the language of a poem is in no obvious way produced in this register, we are being very liberal with our analogies and are likely guilty of the sin of ambiguity in applying the concept of nonsense to it (especially in a way that makes us think that it is a philosophically significant

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use of nonsense, as Read’s “literary nonsense” clearly intends). This is not to claim that one must be doing philosophy to produce nonsense; surely this is not the case. But Stevens’s task as a poet is partly to create new conditions for the poetic employment of language, and Read fails to offer a reason to think that the sense/nonsense distinction is an appropriate framework for making aesthetic sense of these new conditions. As Wittgenstein writes in Zettel, “Do not forget that a poem, even though it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information.”24 We might take issue with the anticognitivist implications of Wittgenstein’s view of poetry, but it does make clear that he would find it astonishing to approach Stevens— or any poet, for that matter— as Read does. The Tractatus does open up a very interesting way of thinking about the relationship between poetry and philosophy, though it is very unlike Read’s “educative poetry of the absurd.”25 The Tractatus critiques a specific way of confronting what we are calling the problem of worldliness. It does not conclude by delivering us to a form of skepticism or antirealism. It speaks assuredly in its final passage about the prospect of being right with the world in thought and language, and it takes itself to have shown us that metaphysics, logic, and perhaps philosophy itself are not where this rightness will be achieved. The final passage, in other words, holds out the possibility of alternative routes to this desired destination. The reader concerned with poetry’s way with worldliness should take from this passage a call to see poetry, at least on occasion, as delivering what philosophy, because of its particular way with language and thought, cannot. Even if one is not sold on a resolute reading of nonsense and its apparent antiphilosophical point, the possibility that such a reading opens up for thinking about poetry is intriguing and independent of scholarly quarrels about the Tractatus. Nonphilosophical employments of language— especially, perhaps, the poetic— might provide the site for a distinct kind of engagement with the issue of worldliness. I will return to this idea. Poetry as the Perfection of Philosophy There is a way of stating the project of Wittgenstein’s later writings that is very useful for thinking about why a poetic, rather than a philosophical, employment of language stands the best chance of overcoming— note that I do not say “solving”— the problem of worldliness. Assuming either a resolute or irresolute reading of the Tractatus, philosophy of the traditional metaphysical variety looks to be an odd affair, defying in its very attempts at philosophical

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self-expression the possibility of expressing anything at all. In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein sees this problem as arising from the fact that philosophy of the traditional sort is usually radically unaware of the nature of its own activity. He argues that most philosophical problems— problems concerning the nature of mind, the self, language, reality, and truth— are not, as it were, discovered by philosophers but made by them. These “problems” turn out to be generated by the very machinery of thought and language that is engaged to resolve them. There are many reasons for this, but chief among them is that, for Wittgenstein, philosophical language abandons the everyday contexts of speech, and so also the common criteria for meaningful language use that ordinary language alone can provide.26 When we abandon these contexts, as Wittgenstein thinks philosophy often does, language “goes on holiday,” ripping words from their everyday contexts and placing them in a space in which they are bound to baffle, inspiring a sense of conceptual queerness or a sense of something standing in need of a philosophical explanation. For Wittgenstein, the way to rid oneself of a philosophical problem is to find an employment of language that dispels the very sense of wonder that rouses the philosopher to offer a metaphysical theory in the first place. In respect to the problem of worldliness, this would be to find an employment of language that somehow quells the sense of rupture toward which we tend, one that would dispel, rather than answer, the worries that give rise to our sense of the problem of worldliness as a uniquely philosophical problem. For Wittgenstein, philosophy, once properly reformed, must shun metaphysical theses and refuse to invoke anything theoretically occult, anything “hidden,” when attempting to bring clarity to those features of the epistemic, linguistic, and psychological situation with which philosophy tends to be concerned. In fact, philosophy, when done properly, explains nothing: “Philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything.— Since everything lies open to view, there is nothing to explain. For what is hidden, for example, is of no interest to us.”27 The question then becomes, how do we identify those features of our worldly condition that are open to view but that philosophy (again, of a traditional, metaphysical sort) occludes? How do we make manifest what the naïve mind thinks we need a metaphysical thesis to identify and explain— the world and our place in it, for example? Wittgenstein puts it in the following way: “A main source of our failure to understand is that we do not command a clear view of the use of our words.— Our grammar is lacking in this sort of perspicuity. A perspicuous presentation produces just that understanding which consists in ‘seeing connections.’ Hence the importance of finding and

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inventing intermediate cases . . . . The concept of a perspicuous representation is of fundamental importance for us. It earmarks the forms of the account we give, the way we look at things.”28 This notion of a “perspicuous presentation” is as close as we get in the later Wittgenstein to a statement of philosophical method. Note that perspicuous presentations are not representations of anything real at all, and it is striking that Wittgenstein’s most famous examples concern pictures of steaming teapots (§297), a shopkeeper who enlists color charts and counting methods when asked for five red apples (§1), workers whose language consists of just five masonry terms (§2– 21), and an odd thing called a beetle box (§293). To this extent, perspicuous presentations offer what an aesthetician would call an essentially imaginative experience, yielding typically artificial, fictionalized scenarios the appreciation of which helps us turn back to the real world and see it aright. In other words, Wittgenstein’s ordinary language philosophy is not concerned with simply cataloging actual instances of “what we say when,” which would just be another way of privileging the empirical and thus of leading us back to the problems exposed in the Tractatus. Rather, perspicuous presentations act as “intermediate cases” in the sense that in them we see presented a picture of what once seemed problematic, only now without the attendant sense of wonder, without the sense that something stands in need of explanation. We thus see suggested in a perspicuous presentation a possibility for achieving the kind of rightness with the world in thought and language that the Tractatus promises. Though more needs to be said about Wittgenstein to get this view on its feet, I hope one can detect how it opens up a very interesting role for poetry. Unlike the Tractatus, the Investigations allows us to identify points of continuity with certain late Romantic sensibilities, more or less of just the sort we find in Stevens. The residue of Romanticism we can detect in Stevens’s poetry is the sense of somehow achieving alignment with the world in lines that, much like Wittgenstein’s perspicuous presentations, proudly bear their abstraction and artificiality. While the suggestive strangeness of Wittgenstein’s perspicuous presentations can call to mind Kafka or Beckett, they also offer, as Stevens’s poetry does, a promise of a kind of return to a state of naturalness in thought and language that speaks to what remains of the Romantic impulse in modernism. And this promise presents us with a very interesting possibility. To one concerned with the relationship between poetry and philosophy, the Investigations can seem to invite us to see certain poems as prompting forms of imaginative experience that effectively act as perspicuous presentations, creating environments of thought and feeling that offer us the sense of now seeing the world aright. More generally, the possibility this opens up for us

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is that of seeing poems, on rare but wondrous occasions, as offering a way of arriving at the destination philosophy sets for itself but unhindered by the limitations Wittgenstein claims make philosophy incapable of actually getting there. In other words, a poem, rather than a philosophical work, will be the most likely place to find the most perfect testament to how one who feels the problem of worldliness can overcome what ails her: a sense of how words, perceptions, and feelings might succeed in reaching out to a common world. That is, it provides a sense of how these might succeed in placing us in contact with something beyond ourselves— perhaps not Reality but, again, something at least worldly enough. There is a great temptation to hear in Stevens echoes of an essentially later-Wittgensteinian project. One certainly hears such echoes in lines such as these, from “Repetitions of a Young Captain”: If these were only words that I am speaking Indifferent sounds and not the heraldic-ho Of the clear sovereign that is reality Of the clearest reality that is sovereign How should I repeat them, keep repeating them

These lines resolve later in the poem to the following plea: Secrete us in reality. It is there My orator. Let this giantness fall down And come to nothing. Let the rainy arcs And pathetic magnificence dry in the sky. Secrete us in reality.29

Again, for the later Wittgenstein, there is no privileging of literal or propositional employments of language, so there is no need to worry about the abstraction and figuration of Stevens’s language, nor of the great importance of its “materiality” in effecting its particular enchantment. What does matter is the practical sense that Stevens’s poems can create: of inhabiting a space in which what we wish to possess feels as if it is brought nearer and that it is a poem, and not a kind of theory, that makes this feeling possible. The sense of arrival offered by a poem that “secretes us into reality” is not the sort we get when we find a solution to a theoretical problem. It is the sort we get when we find that somewhere under the sun there is a string of words that can give us this experience— a poem, for example, that seems to deliver us, to secrete us, into a world. We hear the world, or at any rate the “sea,” in “secretion” (the sea is one of Stevens’s tropes of the real). And then we note the lovely ambiguity,

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that “see-cre-ted” is just a vowel away from “secret-ed,” as if to tell us that explanations that seek conceptual clarity shall die upon the experience of sheer worldliness his poems can seem to offer: that it is, for one who hopes for a metaphysical grasp of this matter, bound to remain a secret. Consider now a very early poem, “Fabliau of Florida,” and note, for want of a better phrase, the perceptual and affective attention of the speaker: Barque of Phosphor On the palmy beach, Move outward into heaven, Into the alabasters And night blues Foam and cloud are one Sultry sea-monsters Are dissolving. Fill your black hull With white moonlight There will never be an end To this droning of the surf 30

The poem is an early example of the Stevens who was at times interested not in “ideas about things but the thing itself.” And it strikes the reader, at least one sort of reader, as celebrating a powerful, though perhaps ultimately inscrutable, way of talking about a stretch of sea on a particular evening. The poem is expressive of the rather remarkable way in which such a seascape might register to one beholding it: as an expanse of water receding into something like a felt expanse of eternity and achieving a kind of nocturnal, untroubled unity with it (“foam and cloud are one”), though whereas putting it this way might make the experience seem silly, in the poem is it is not silly at all. There is a sense of the objects one witnesses as illuminated, and so touched, by something like the world beyond us (“Fill your black hull / With white moonlight”), a thought that would have been deeply felt by Stevens, who spent much of his poetic life wondering, in one form or another, whether the poetic imagination constituted reality or revealed it as a poetic expression of what philosophers would describe as the tension between constructivism and a kind of realism. The sound of the surf is described as a “drone” to which “there will never be an end.” Positioned as it is at the end of the poem, however, what is expressed in that line seems reassuring rather than plaintive, and the reader is made to feel as though the great world can at moments present

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itself, even in Florida. Stevens, certainly at this early point in his career, is a kind poet of the everyday.31 He takes solace in the repetitions of the world around him, its “droning” as a kind of insistence of presence. Now what, precisely, is the point to be drawn about the potential relationship between poetry and philosophy, these Stevensonian encounters with worldliness, and this reformed later Wittgenstein? Before answering, let me add a few words about Simon Critchley’s remarkable discussion of Stevens, since it amplifies features of my line of argument here. Critchley takes seriously and literally what I said above about the possibility of seeing poetry of a certain stripe as the perfection of philosophy’s own project. What makes Critchley’s account of Stevens so elegant is how well he tells the story, from Kant to Heidegger, of what I have been calling the modern problem of worldliness. He makes a powerful case for seeing Stevens’s struggles to understand the imagination and its relation to the real as placing him squarely in this philosophical tradition, adding that his poems almost succeed— “almost,” because poets can fail, too— in making available the kind of experience of the world that the great phenomenological traditions urge as a response to the problem of worldliness. This experience of the world is one that is material, concrete, object-oriented, and in the grand Heideggerian sense, one of athomeness in it. For Critchley, “Stevens is philosophically significant because his verse recasts the basic problem of epistemology in a way that perhaps allows the problem to be cast away,” for Stevens shows us that the world “is phenomenologically disclosed or reflectively transfigured as a world not in philosophy but through the poetic act.”32 Critchley offers an interesting account of the philosophical provenance of Stevens’s poetry, and it strikes me as very helpful in showing us how certain concerns that animate philosophy also animate Stevens. And I find at least instructive, if bombastic, Critchley’s claim that Stevens’s poetry allows us nearly to overcome the problem of worldliness because Stevens is a poet and not a philosopher. The issue I wish to raise is whether this story should lead us to conclude that Stevens is philosophically significant, that his poetry is, as Critchley leads us to believe, a kind of perfection of philosophy’s labor. We may feel inspired to pay Stevens this compliment. But I think we need to be careful here, or we will find that in doing so, we risk asserting the very ground of the ancient quarrel: the privileging of philosophy over poetry. Critchley correctly sees that the poet and the philosopher can be concerned with the same material, the same issues, and that the difference is really just a matter of whether one opts to give philosophical or poetic form to the this basic, common content (I use the word “content,” however ugly, because it is sufficiently neutral). But what should we call this common con-

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tent? Critchley asks us to think of it as essentially philosophical. He then sets himself the task of showing that Stevens makes this content his own, that he is a poet who has skin in a game that really belongs to philosophy. Critchley thus interprets the sense of philosophical liberation Stevens sometimes offers to be a liberation of philosophical thought, of the ability to think freely and successfully about the philosophical problem of worldliness. The position my discussion of Wittgenstein and Stevens leads us to is a very different one. It implies that we should characterize this sense of liberation as not of but from philosophical thought and that the compliment to be paid to Stevens is not that he has perfected the philosopher’s labor but rather that he shows us how to avoid engaging in it ourselves. In other words, if we wish to praise poetry’s accomplishments with respect to the problem of worldliness, we do so most accurately by asserting its autonomy from philosophy. There is a perversion in calling this common content “philosophical” and in thinking of a poet as “philosophical” because of her interest in such content. Calling the common content “philosophical,” again, just affirms the ground of the quarrel. This is not to say it should be called “poetic,” which would be to take cards from philosophy just to stack them in favor of poetry. It is much more sensible to think of this content— the content that gets interpreted as the modern problem of worldliness— as a kind of common cultural property that belongs to neither the poet nor the philosopher, as a shared sense of worries, wonders, anxieties, and puzzles. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche suggests that it is a great, and disastrous, accident of history that what we call philosophy became associated with the labor of Socrates rather than Sophocles— that it was the logician, rather than the tragedian, who got charged with the production of sophia. Whatever one may think of this as a historical claim, it should give us pause when calling that with which Stevens and the philosopher are equally concerned “philosophical” and attempting to establish a lineage between it and what gets taught, say, in a history of modern philosophy course. To put it in a point, we should be skeptical about calling a poem “philosophical,” because that label can profoundly misconstrue the poet’s relationship to the mass of common cultural material that informs her work— material that may also inform the work of the philosopher, the musician, the theologian, the novelist, and many others besides. Even if we grant that calling a poem “philosophical” is just a way to ascribe a significant degree of substance or profundity to it, this line of argument should make us very reluctant to indulge this habit uncritically. If we take seriously Wittgenstein’s reformed vision of philosophy, it would seem that the compliment to be paid to poetry is that it can perfect philosophy’s project in the limited but still significant sense that it can help us see

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that there are other routes to worldliness than the search for philosophical explanations and theories makes possible. To call Stevens a poet who repays our philosophical interests is, according to this picture, to praise the power of his verse— not in allowing us to hear the problem of worldliness as a theoretical problem but in allowing it to register otherwise, perhaps as poetic problem, which then calls for the tools of art and not theory to be analyzed. Like Tractarian nonsense, the reputedly “philosophical poem” is not actually  philosophically productive. It is productive, but not of a point, claim, or insight that would feel at home in a traditional philosophical work. In this Wittgensteinian sense, Stevens’s importance to philosophy would be to remind us that there is an alternative to philosophy itself, another way of working through the same cultural material. If we wish to lodge a claim on behalf of Stevens’s success, it would be that the experience of worldliness that his poetry provides is exemplary in a very precise way: it permits us, at least for a few moments, to think that no other employment of thought and language than his could so fully present to us that to which we wish to be brought nearer. It is perhaps also to say that a theory could never produce such an experience, and this shouldn’t come as a surprise. One will have noted how little I have actually taken from Stevens and how far my general remarks have fallen from establishing that his poems offer anything like an insight into how we might become right with the world. In an important sense, either you feel the poems succeed in presenting an encounter with the real, in overstepping for a moment the space between mind and world, or you do not. And if you do not, there is no independent reason I can possibly offer that will convince you. But Wittgenstein helps us see that it is utterly silly to hear this as a limitation, as a confession that poetry can justify nothing, that the form of imaginative experience of the real it offers is incapable of demonstrating something about the world. To feel anything of this sort is silly because it reveals the foolishness of taking a philosophical stance toward a poem, as though we expect a poem to provide us with that elusive premise that will finally show the world and our connection to it to take this form or that. What Wittgenstein provides is a vantage point from which we see that none of this is a limitation, but is in fact a potential form of cognitive liberation. To repeat an obvious point, this is not to say that poets cannot aspire to illuminate, or even in some manner to constitute, reality: consider Stevens’s desire to create a “supreme fiction.” The point I am making is that, should a poet achieve this, the terms with which we specify the accomplishment should be poetic. At any rate, for a Wittgensteinian, we should neither expect nor desire the terms to be in any interesting sense “philosophical.” All I have done here is show what follows if we look at Stevens on world-

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liness through the lens of Wittgenstein. Such a narrow field of analysis is ill-suited for yielding general conclusions. But if I have not shown that it is always a category error to call a poem “philosophical,” I hope that I have motivated a sense in which, even when the concerns of a poet and a philosopher intersect, we should wish to emphasize the distinctiveness of the approach of each. That is, we should expect that it is by insisting on the space between poetry and philosophy that we will find the proper terms for acknowledging what the poet contributes to our capacity to think and feel about the world— and perhaps for acknowledging what the philosopher contributes, too. If one does not share Wittgenstein’s unflattering view of traditional philosophy, the basic point still stands. Even if Wittgenstein leads us to skepticism with respect to the idea of the philosophical poem, it does no disservice to the poet. The terms his work offers for discussing the issue allow us to praise the poet in ways that are impossible if we are held captive by the image of poetry, at least on occasion, as a rather artistic and figurative way of doing philosophy. And it should not be a surprise that Wittgenstein offers productive grounds on which to address some of the challenges of the opaque modern poem. It should not surprise, because Wittgenstein’s great works raise the very same problems many of the “difficult” works of poetic modernism do. If there is a great question about just what the point, the insight, the meaning of these poems is, it is precisely the same question the Tractatus raises in regard to the propositions that constitute it. And like the opaque works of poetic modernism, we know that whatever the Tractatus’s secret is, it is likely a secret worth knowing. It is not a joke or an empty promise but an achievement of insight that we are perhaps too crude or too beholden to unreformed habits of appreciation to grasp fully. If in modernist poetry of the sort typified by Stevens the world is made present though never really shown, delivered but never quite represented, the Investigations and its perspicuous presentations do essentially the same. And perhaps this is the most we can mean when speaking of Wittgenstein’s work as implying a kind of philosophical modernism. His is a modernism of the real, but of an elusive real, and of a merely implied everyday as its home. The “purer” realism, again in Gaskin’s words, is what reality looks like when both the poet and the philosopher come to believe that it can no longer be represented, either artistically or theoretically, and thus demands the forms of abstraction Stevens and Wittgenstein, each in their own way, perfected.

8

In the Condition of Modernism: Philosophy, Literature, and The Sacred Fount Kristin B oyce

In The World Viewed, Stanley Cavell describes modernist art as art that “exists in the condition of philosophy.”1 This phrase glosses a conception of modernism that Cavell and Michael Fried developed in response to the work of Clement Greenberg and in light of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, especially his remarks on criteria in the Foundations of Mathematics. For convenience, I’m going to call Cavell’s and Fried’s shared conception of modernism “MCF.” In this chapter, I argue that the distinctiveness and power of MCF has not been fully appreciated. According to MCF, “modernism” is not a term that picks out works that were made in a particular time period, nor does it pick out all and only works that share some particular feature or group of features— for example, that of being difficult or self-reflexive or formally experimental. According to MCF, to say of a work that it is “modernist” is, instead, first and foremost, to say that it stands in a particular relation to its own past. “Modernist” picks out a condition that an art form enters when the “present practice” of that art and its history have become problematic: when the conventions that could be relied upon in order to produce work that could matter in the way that great painting (or sculpture, or dance) has mattered can no longer be so relied upon. For example, a novelist such as Henry James finds that he can no longer rely on the convention of telling his story— a convention so basic that it might have seemed a necessary condition for something being a novel— and that doing so has started to register as the assertion of a kind of “god’s eye perspective” that intrudes on the freedom of reader and character. Or, to take an example that is of special importance to Cavell and Fried, a sculptor like Anthony Caro might discover that he can no longer rely on the convention of sculpting or “working” his material. Such a novelist or sculptor is in a difficult

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position. As Fried puts it, he needs to discover “what at the present moment is capable of convincing him that it can stand comparison with [sculpture or literature] of the modernist and premodernist past whose quality seems to him beyond question.”2 For Caro, this involves making “sculpture” by placing his materials in relation to each other instead of “working on” them (carving, chipping, polishing, etc.). In other words, he makes work that prior to his achievement would not have been recognizable as sculpture. The fact that we are, as Cavell puts it, “stuck with the knowledge” that it is sculpture requires rethinking what sculpture itself is, why we “call any object, [even] the most central or traditional, a piece of sculpture.”3 Such work represents not a simple break with tradition but rather a continuation of it that involves rethinking that tradition in fundamental ways. In seeking to clarify what is distinctive about MCF, my principle aim will be to do fuller justice to the power it has to illuminate the relation between philosophy and literature. From its inception, MCF has given rise to and sustained a renewed interest in the relation between philosophy and literature. According to MCF, modernism is a condition that is not limited to literature or other art forms; it is one that philosophy, too, may find itself in. Wittgenstein is the paradigmatic instance of philosophy in the condition of modernism. Like Caro (or James), Wittgenstein finds himself unable to rely on the conventions that might have seemed necessary conditions for something’s being philosophy. Just as Caro makes something that we know to be sculpture, even though he hasn’t worked his material, Wittgenstein makes work that we know to be philosophy, even though it contains nothing recognizable as a view or an argument but is instead organized into remarks and incorporates different literary voices. When Wittgenstein himself characterizes his method and writing, he often does so in terms that are borrowed from the arts. MCF takes this very seriously.4 It draws attention to those features of Wittgenstein’s work that are the most “literary” and makes it clear that one cannot meet the demands of his modernist philosophy without taking those features adequately into account. For this reason, MCF has been of special interest to those philosophers who are concerned with the relation between the philosophical significance of a work and the literary features of it, such as form and style.5 MCF has made available a richer set of terms for articulating that relation, regardless of whether the work in question is one of literary art or a text that is considered to be uncontroversially philosophical. This has been very important, especially within the analytic tradition, where the prevailing tendency has been to assume that the literary features of a work are philosophically irrelevant. But what interests me in this chapter is a different relation between the “literary”

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and the “philosophical”— not the relation between literary features of a work and its philosophical power but rather that between philosophy and literature as enterprises. It is this relation, I will argue, that MCF has the power to illuminate in ways that have not been sufficiently explored. With a better grasp of MCF, it becomes possible to see that the relation between these two enterprises is both deeper and more difficult than has yet been appreciated. I make this argument by paying careful attention to what it means to say that modernist art “exists in the condition of philosophy.” I argue that the specificity and power of MCF is a function of two interrelated regions of the concept of a “condition”: a region that is registered in phrases like “enabling condition” or “condition for the possibility” and one that is registered in phrases such as “suffering a condition” or a “chronic condition.” Cavell speaks often of the human condition. And when he remarks, for example, that “there are those for whom the denial of the human [condition] is the human,” he evokes both regions of meaning and displays a surprising relation between them.6 It is a condition of the possibility of leading a human life, he suggests, that one’s life sometimes appears to one as a condition suffered, a condition to be overcome or recovered from. I show that a version of this thought applies to the claim that modernist art, particularly modernist literary art, exists in the “condition of philosophy.” In the condition of modernism, I argue, literature and philosophy exist in a reciprocal relation of mutual dependence— each serving as an enabling condition that helps the other continue to stand comparison with great work of the modernist and premodernist past. But this in turn involves clarifying a sense in which each also constitutes for the other a condition suffered, one from which recovery is needed. In other words, it involves acknowledging that tensions between philosophy and literature are deep and ongoing, that they cannot be easily, if ever, resolved. Readers of Wittgenstein are not likely to be surprised by the claim that philosophy can degenerate into something from which literature or even philosophy itself needs to recover. For those philosophers who seek to counter the tendency within the analytic tradition to underestimate the philosophical power of literature, this claim has been especially compelling and important. It has, though, been too easy to assume too quickly that any tension that surfaces between a literary project like James’s and a philosophical one like Wittgenstein’s is a function of a historically specific and unnecessarily impoverished conception of what philosophy itself is. I do not deny that analytic philosophy has often been compromised by impoverished self-conceptions. But I will argue that there are deep and abiding tensions between philosophy and literature that do not dissolve, even when a more robust and flexible philosophical self-conception is in place.

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My argument proceeds in two stages. In the first, I carefully unpack what it means to say of an art that it “exists in the condition of philosophy.” My aim is to recover the specificity of the conception of modernism that this phrase is meant to capture as well as the complexity of the relation between philosophy and literature that follows from that conception. In the second stage, I test the fruitfulness of this unpacking by analyzing the relation between philosophy and literature in a reading of Henry James’s novella The Sacred Fount. The Sacred Fount is one of James’s most problematic works. It has been of interest to critics of modernism because it is arguably both one of his most extended exercises in self-reflection and one of his most radical experiments with form. But James chose to leave it out of the New York Edition, and many other critics have followed suit by ignoring it or treating it as a minor and slightly embarrassing failed experiment. I will argue, by contrast, that The Sacred Fount has a uniquely important place within the trajectory of James’s literary project, and that we can see this more readily once we recognize how powerfully it registers both the depth of the connections between philosophy and literature and, at the same time, abiding tensions that remain unresolved. James’s ambivalence to philosophy is no secret. T. S. Eliot elegantly acknowledged it in his famous description of James as a writer with a “mind so fine that no idea could violate it.”7 But philosophers of literature (myself included) have been too quick to assume that the kind of resistance to philosophy that Eliot diagnoses would dissolve if only we could arrive at a better understanding of philosophy than the one at work in Eliot’s quip. In this chapter, I argue that the quarrel between this particular poet and the philosophers cannot be so quickly and completely resolved. MCF We can begin to get a handle on what is distinctive about MCF, the shared aspects of Cavell’s and Fried’s conception of modernism, if we consider how it develops in response to both the work of Clement Greenberg and that of Wittgenstein. Greenberg contextualizes modernism in relation to the Enlightenment. In the wake of newly developed scientific methods, the arts (along with religion and philosophy) were denied the kind of seriousness they had traditionally been taken to have— seriousness as sources of knowledge. They were therefore faced with a newly pressing need to demonstrate their necessity, to show that they afforded a kind of experience that was “valuable in its own right and not to be obtained from any other form of activity.”8 As Greenberg understands it, this involved each art turning inward, using its own procedures, in order to (1) produce the kind of experience or effect that

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it alone could produce and (2) show that it alone could produce that experience or effect by demonstrating that the conditions for its possibility were the possibilities unique to its medium. So understood, modernist art is art that seeks to uncover its own conditions of possibility. Consider, for example, how Greenberg explains the turn to abstraction in painting that is, in his view, “modernist.” He argues that this turn is a function of the effort to produce an experience that depends only on that possibility unique to the medium of painting— namely, the flatness of the painted surface. Producing such an experience turns out to require an effort to eliminate any effect borrowed from sculpture, the art form to which Western painting owes its greatest debt. And it is in order to eliminate such effects that painting has to abandon “the representation of recognizable objects”: “All recognizable entities . . . exist in three-dimensional space, and the barest suggestion of a recognizable entity suffices to call up associations of that kind of space . . . and by doing so alienate pictorial space from the literal two-dimensionality which is the guarantee of painting’s independence as an art” (Greenberg 88). In other words, painting turns to abstraction in order to preserve, to remain true to, that which has always been most distinctive about good painting— those effects that follow from the two-dimensionality of the canvas. Once we see this, we not only understand modernist painting better; we also have a deeper understanding of the power and distinctiveness of traditional painting. Cavell and Fried take their orientation from this Greenbergian conception of modernism. But guided by Wittgenstein’s remarks on criteria, they conceive the “possibilities of an artistic medium” differently from Greenberg.9 In their view, the “possibilities of an artistic medium” are not given in advance; they arise as, and insofar as, an artist discovers how to give artistic significance to what Cavell calls the “actualities” of a procedure. Cavell first makes this point in his discussion of film in The World Viewed. In and of themselves, he argues, procedures such as cutting, editing, and taking shots from different angles do not constitute possibilities of the artistic medium of film; they are, rather, “mere actualities of film mechanics” that every home movie and news reel makes use of just as surely as do narrative movies and others forms of art in celluloid (WV 31). It is only in their application— that is, insofar as someone figures out how to use the techniques of cutting, editing, and so on in order to make artistic sense— that these mechanical actualities become aesthetic possibilities of the medium of film. So conceived, aesthetic possibilities are not simply a given, because what sense someone can make with actualities like cutting and editing cannot be given in advance. It is, rather, “a matter of the relation of an artist to his art, each discovering the other” (WV 32). According to MCF, an art enters the condition of modernism when es-

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tablished ways of using a mechanical actuality to make artistic sense lose their authority— when, that is, they can no longer be relied upon to produce work that, as Fried puts it, is capable of compelling “the conviction that [it] can stand comparison with painting [or dance, or film, or sculpture] of the past whose quality seems beyond question” (Fried 17). Some such established ways of making sense might have seemed so fundamental as to constitute a necessary condition for a particular art. Recall the example of Caro’s modernist sculpture. As Cavell puts it, “I had— I take it everyone had— thought (assumed? imagined? . . .) that a piece of sculpture was something worked (carved, chipped, polished, etc.)” (MWMS 216). Caro’s achievement was to find a way of making sense with his materials (by “placing them”) that was such a departure from how sculptors of the past made sense with theirs that it was not immediately recognizable as a way of making sculpture at all. But the sense he succeeds in making is such that, as Cavell puts it, we are “stuck with the knowledge” that it is sculpture. To respond adequately to this knowledge requires finding the terms with which to account for it. And that requires a willingness to reconsider why we call “any object, even the most central or traditional, a piece of sculpture” (MWMS 218). From this first gloss of MCF, we can already begin to see something of what distinguishes it from other, more standard conceptions of modernism. For one thing, like Greenberg, Cavell and Fried refuse the standard assumption that modernist art simply rejects or breaks with tradition. Modernist art’s problematic relation to its own past, they argue, is a function of its deep commitment to inheriting and continuing that past. For another, MCF refuses exclusive pride of place to concepts that call to mind an especially high level of activity and agency— for example, rebellion, experimentation, and innovation. By characterizing modernism as a condition, by contrast, MCF draws attention to a distinctive kind of passivity at the heart of modernist art. A condition, like a state, is something that one is in, something that one suffers or succumbs to. The artist who finds that conventional ways of making artistic meaning have lost their authority has not done or chosen something. Rather, something has happened to her, to her art, something to which she is compelled to respond (if her art form is to continue and she is to continue as an artist).10 Given this initial gloss, it might seem doubtful— at least, there is no obvious reason to suspect— that MCF has the power to illuminate the relation between philosophy and literature (or art more generally) in an especially powerful way. Certainly, one could extrapolate from MCF, as I have described it thus far, important insights into the relation between modernist art and philosophy. For by the lights of MCF, a certain type of investigation— one

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that is considered to be uncontroversially philosophical— looks to be a condition for the possibility of the continued existence of an art form that has entered the condition of modernism: investigation into what, under present conditions, makes painting (or sculpture, or dance . . .) possible. But the same is true of Greenberg’s own account, as well as of other conceptions of modernism that derive from his in a more straightforward way. These accounts, too, draw attention to ways that modernist art engages in certain projects that are considered to be uncontroversially philosophical. Admittedly, they conceive of the relevant project somewhat differently— as a more traditional investigation into “timeless” necessary and sufficient conditions.11 And admittedly, more standard accounts also conceive the necessity that drives art toward such a “philosophical” project differently from MCF.12 But these differences between MCF and a more standard view might seem to be pretty small ones if we are primarily concerned with clarifying the relation between philosophy and literature. For MCF appears to share with a more standard approach a basic picture of art as related to philosophy insofar as it takes on a well-defined philosophical project of some sort.13 In fact, I will argue, it is this basic picture that MCF, properly understood, undermines and makes it possible to move beyond. In order to see this, though, it is necessary to turn from a consideration of the general shape of MCF to a detailed consideration of one of the most important readings of a particular modernist work with which it is associated— namely, Cavell’s reading of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. It is in Cavell’s interpretation of Wittgenstein’s philosophical enterprise as a modernist one that MCF’s distinctive power to illuminate the relation between philosophy and literature becomes more readily apparent. According to Cavell, Wittgenstein writes in a form and style that is so unusual, especially for philosophy, because he finds himself unable to rely on the conventions that might have seemed necessary conditions for something’s being philosophy— namely, those of constructing views and arguments. We can imagine Cavell saying, as he did with respect to Caro, “I had— I take it everyone had— thought (assumed? imagined? . . .) that philosophy, at least analytic philosophy, is a matter of advancing arguments.” But then Wittgenstein makes philosophy that doesn’t advance arguments, and yet “we are stuck with the knowledge” that it is philosophy. In other words, Wittgenstein discovers a way of making philosophy that, prior to his achievement, would not have been recognizable as philosophy. In order to do justice to that achievement, it is necessary to rethink what philosophy is, and just why we think it apt to call even the most central and traditional works “philosophy.” The burden of Cavell’s reading, in other words, is to show how Wittgenstein’s way of doing philosophy continues to

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shed new light on what is most powerful in the tradition of philosophy, much of which does take the form of expressing views and advancing arguments. One way to get clear about how Cavell understands Wittgenstein’s achievement is to look closely at how he seeks to inherit Wittgenstein’s way of doing philosophy. One especially fruitful place to look is to Cavell’s intervention in the debate about skepticism in “Knowing and Acknowledging.” In this early article, Cavell criticizes what he takes to be a common way that ordinary language philosophers have responded to skepticism, by presenting what they take to be a decisive counterargument to the skeptic’s “view” that we cannot know another’s pain: the fact that it is natural in certain contexts to say things like “I know you are in pain.” Cavell criticizes this response because, in his view, the “counterargument” advanced is compromised by confusion. The problem is not that it involves some logical mistake or inconsistency. It is rather that advancing it is inconsistent with one of the ordinary language philosopher’s own most fundamental methodological commitments: that of “grant[ing] full title to others as a source of data about what is said when” (MWMS 239). Given this commitment, Cavell argues, the ordinary language philosopher is obligated to grant that the skeptic, just as surely as any other competent speaker, will know that his words fly in the face of what fluent speakers of a given language would ordinarily say. If the ordinary language philosopher does grant this authority to the skeptic, she will recognize that it is beside the philosophical point to impress upon him that his words fly in the face of what “we” ordinarily say. Instead, she will concentrate on the philosophically more salient questions: Why, nevertheless, would the skeptic hold on to these words? What is attracting him to them? What problem is he seeking, perhaps inadequately, to draw attention to? In failing to ask these kinds of questions, the ordinary language philosopher shows herself to be, by her own lights, confused. Cavell’s response to her is directed to the purpose of clearing up that confusion by getting her to recognize it. Cavell’s own investigation of these questions leads him to diagnose the skeptic as simultaneously registering and obscuring an important insight into a region of the concept of knowledge: that region that pertains to our knowledge of other people. He argues that the skeptic starts with the “decisively important facts” that “I may be suffering when no one else is, and that no one (else) may know (or care?); and that others may be suffering and I not know, which is equally appalling” (MWMS 247). What he (the skeptic) sees is that there are “special problems about our knowledge of another” that are not a function of the “absence of something” (a “piece of ignorance”) but rather a function of the “presence of something” that suppresses our responsiveness to

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the other: “a confusion, an indifference, a callousness, an exhaustion, a coldness” (MWMS 263– 64). What the skeptic demonstrates, then, is a sense in which the concept of knowing another is “bound up” with our “metaphysical finitude,” with “the concept of my freedom, an independence from the other, from all others— that I may or may not act upon.” But in giving voice to this insight, he twists and obscures it by assimilating the special region of the concept of knowledge to familiar regions of it that revolve around questions of “certainty”: “metaphysical finitude” (i.e., my separateness from others and theirs from me) presents itself as “intellectual lack” (the absence of certainty about whether another is in pain) (MWMS 263). To merely contradict the skeptic’s “claim” by insisting that of course we can be certain that another is in pain accomplishes nothing except to “further deflect” attention from the truth “to which [the skeptic] is responding” by reinforcing the focus on certainty (MWMS 262). This is the tack taken by ordinary language critics, as Cavell understands them. Taking Cavell’s tack, by contrast, involves allowing the skeptic’s words to make a claim on us: the claim that should we be willing to know ourselves well enough, we’ll find in ourselves both the responsiveness to the separateness of others that animates the skeptic’s words and the vulnerability to twisting that responsiveness in which he is enmeshed. In this sense, clarifying the skeptic’s insight requires coming to know ourselves better. How does Cavell’s way of doing philosophy in the wake of Wittgenstein’s philosophical achievement shed light on the sense in which that achievement is a distinctively modernist one? Perhaps most importantly, it sheds light on the sense in which Wittgensteinian methods of clarification can be understood to inherit and continue what is best in the tradition of philosophy— much of which takes the form of advancing views and arguments— instead of flying in the face of that tradition. Cavell does not criticize the ordinary language philosopher’s counterargument because it is an argument. He criticizes it because in this case, the convention of advancing arguments has become unmoored from any philosophical end that would give those arguments a point. We might put this another way by saying that the ordinary language philosopher has confused a traditionally powerful means of doing philosophy— that of advancing views and arguments— with a kind of philosophical end-in-itself. But absent any relation to a genuinely compelling philosophical end, the conventions of advancing views and arguments lose their authority. Finding a new way to meet such a genuinely compelling philosophical end helps us gain clarity about why so many compelling philosophical arguments struck us as philosophy in the first place: not because they were arguments but because they

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were advanced in the service of clarifying an important philosophical insight. In other words, by finding new ways of making philosophical progress— ways that would not have so much as registered as ways of doing philosophy prior to his achievement— Wittgenstein makes it possible to get clearer about why we call anything at all philosophy, even the most traditional philosophical arguments. In light of Cavell’s interpretation of Wittgenstein’s writings as modernist, we can begin to take a more accurate measure of the power MCF has to illuminate the relation between the enterprises of philosophy and literature. For one thing, it becomes clearer how deeply philosophy (as well as our understanding of it) may change. This suggests that what it means for art to “enter the condition of philosophy”— the sense in which philosophy might figure as an enabling condition— may be correspondingly dynamic (rather than fixed, as it appears to be in the standard case). But more important, Cavell’s reading of Wittgenstein makes evident a sense in which literature may serve as a condition of philosophy’s possibility even as, and as much as, philosophy serves as such a condition for literature. In other words, Cavell’s reading clarifies how philosophy and literature in the condition of modernism exist in a reciprocal relation of mutual dependence. This becomes most explicit in “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy.” In this essay, Cavell makes clear the connection between philosophy (as Wittgenstein practices it and as Cavell himself seeks to practice it) and art. So practiced, he argues, philosophy’s claims are much closer to those advanced by the art critic than by the empirical scientist. As he puts it, “Kant’s ‘universal voice’ is, with perhaps a slight shift of accent, what we hear recorded in the philosopher’s claims about ‘what we say’: such claims are at least as close to what Kant calls aesthetical judgments as they are to ordinary empirical hypotheses” (MWMS 94). For me to judge that something is beautiful is to make a claim on others, on how they feel— a claim that others should recognize themselves in my response to the work. The art critic’s task is therefore to mediate our encounter with the work in such a way as to bring us to experience its beauty and respond to it. In a similar way, Cavell seeks to mediate our encounter with the skeptic. It is by means of leading us to appreciate from the inside both what is compelling and what unsatisfying about the skeptic’s formulations that he seeks to clarify the concept of knowledge. For analytic philosophers who seek to do justice to an experience of literature as philosophically powerful, there is special poetic justice to the suggestion that philosophy cannot maintain continuity with that which is most powerful in its own tradition without acknowledging its proximity to art. From the inception of the analytic tradition, philosophers have been preoccu-

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pied with the worry that philosophy might lose its vitality— that it is vulnerable to lapsing into degenerate or diseased versions of itself that require special vigilance. Gottlob Frege, for instance, treats the psychologism with which he is persistently preoccupied not as a false position that some may mistakenly espouse but as a kind of infection that philosophical thinking is particularly liable to succumb to, as James Conant and others have convincingly argued.14 But Frege’s favored term for the diseased state to which philosophers might succumb, that of “wandering into fiction,” makes it clear that in his view, the best way to inoculate oneself against that condition is to keep clearly in view the distance between methods and aims of philosophy and those of the arts. This part of Frege’s thinking was further elaborated by Rudolf Carnap. According to Carnap, “philosophers” who have lapsed into this condition take themselves to have engaged in genuine philosophy by constructing a theory— that is, by producing “a system of statements” that “relate as premises and conclusions.”15 But in reality, their sentences function only psychologically, agitating the feelings and imagination and thereby lapsing into what is in fact a poor, degenerate form of art: “Metaphysicians are musicians without musical ability. Instead they have a strong inclination to work within the medium of the theoretical, to connect concepts and thoughts. Now, instead of activating, on the one hand, this inclination in the domain of science, and satisfying, on the other hand, the need for expression in art, the metaphysician confuses the two and produces a structure which achieves nothing for knowledge and something inadequate for the expression of attitude” (Carnap 80).16 The conception of philosophy that guides Carnap has struck many as depleted. Those who remain compelled by an experience of literature as philosophically powerful have been especially sensitive to the ongoing legacy of logical positivism and well acquainted with a narrative according to which a misguided valorization of science led to this reduced conception from which the analytic tradition still struggles to recover itself.17 Since this self-inflicted violence manifested itself in a denial of any proximity to literature, there is poetic justice in the thought that recovering from such violence involves finding a way adequately to acknowledge that proximity. But it can seem a very small step to the further thought that any apparent tension between philosophy and literature is merely a function of this reduced conception of philosophy and will be resolved if that conception is replaced by a more adequate one. One reason to worry about taking this further step is that it dismisses too quickly the concerns that Carnap voices about the relation between the enterprise of philosophy and that of art. His thinking about art does not approach the insight of Plato’s, but his concerns unmistakably echo the ideas that Plato voices about the poets in book 10 of The Republic. Like Plato, Carnap is con-

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cerned about the possibility that philosophy might degenerate into something that is indistinguishable from rhetoric, something like art that functions by working on the emotions instead of appealing to reason. Carnap’s concern is more difficult to write off as simply the result of a particular inadequate understanding of philosophy if we see it in the context of this ancient quarrel. There is a second reason to think carefully before assuming that any tension between the enterprises of philosophy and literature will dissolve if we can arrive at a better understanding of what philosophy itself is. By making such an assumption, we risk obscuring what is most distinctive and powerful about MCF, for if part of what makes MCF so important is its capacity to illuminate how deep the relation between philosophy and literature can sometimes be; its real value lies in its unique capacity to register, at one and the same time, an abiding tension between them that remains unresolved. To see this, it will help to return to the resonances between the “condition of philosophy” and the “human condition” to which I have already drawn attention. As we saw, Cavell’s remark in The Claim of Reason draws attention to a sense in which efforts to overcome the human condition are internal to it. That one’s life might appear under the aspect of a condition suffered isn’t a mistake that results from, and can be corrected by, a change that enriches one’s view of life. It is part of what it is to have such a life— part of the grammar of human life. Neither is the appearance to oneself of one’s life as a condition suffered something that one can, or should, simply resign oneself to. Struggling with that condition— at times attempting to overcome it, at times attempting to overcome the appearance of one’s (human) condition as something to be overcome— is also part of what it is to have such a life. There is, I would argue, a version of this thought that can be applied to the “condition of philosophy.” In order to do justice to the sense in which philosophy figures as a “condition” for literary art, it is necessary to in effect hold these two “aspects” in view simultaneously, giving equal weight to both the sense in which philosophy figures as a condition for the possibility of modernist art and the sense in which it figures for modernist art as a condition from which it must recover itself in order to establish its (continued) existence. In the next section, I elaborate and test the fruitfulness of this reading of MCF by looking in some detail at a particular case study: Henry James’s protomodern but thoroughly modernist novella The Sacred Fount. The Sacred Fount and the Condition of Philosophy The Sacred Fount is usually classified as the last work of James’s “awkward” stage— the period that follows his crushing failure as a playwright and pre-

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cedes his triumphant return in “the major phase.” It is often understood to be the work that most fully anticipates literary modernism for a couple of different reasons. First, it is arguably his most persistently self-reflexive work. Starting with Wilson Follett, many critics have acknowledged the prominent points of contact between Fount’s narrator and the Jamesian artist. Perhaps most important, James and Fount’s narrator appear to share the same theory of the novel, which, as Follett observes, is “put for emphasis and clarity into terms of fantastic exaggeration”: “Life gives the novelist a chance hint, a clue, a germ, a suggestive situation,” he writes, “something expansible to order, to meaning, and hence to beauty. . . . It is for the novelist to seize upon this promising fragment and, in the secrecy of his own understanding, work out the terms in which it can be made most perfectly and completely to fulfill itself.”18 For the narrator, this germ consists in several observations that, as Michael Wood points out, are among the few “facts” in the novel that the reader is at liberty to accept without question, because they are confirmed by the perceptions of other characters.19 These observations pertain to changes in the appearance of several characters that the reader comes to believe require explanation: first, Grace Brissenden looks fantastic— younger, more beautiful, more brimming with life than she used to look; second, her husband, Guy, looks worse— older, worn out, used up; finally, Gilbert Long, a bachelor who had always come across as deadly dull, is noticeably sharper and more interesting. The narrator “plays” with these “facts,” extrapolating from “the delicate phenomena” to “a law that would strike me as governing them.”20 Various couples, he postulates, are involved in a kind of vampiristic intimacy. One member of the couple “extracts” from the other “new blood,” an “extra allowance of time and bloom” (SF 19). In order to “supply” this extra allowance, the other member of the couple must tap “the sacred fount”— his or her own source of life and vitality— thereby leaving that half of the couple drained and depleted. The narrator sets out to confirm his theory by finding Long’s source (SF 24). He is convinced that he has found her in May Server, who more than one fellow investigator observes to be noticeably apprehensive and “all over the place” (SF 39, 45, and 50). Rival theories emerge, though, which seem to have equal power to explain what he observes. Most notably, Lady John, whom he has taken into his confidence, points out that the same facts could be explained by an affair between Grace and Gilbert. By the story’s end, his theory has yet to be confirmed by anyone else, and he is unable to quiet his doubts about his own sanity. A second reason that critics of modernism have been especially interested in Fount is because it has been understood to be one of his most radical experiments with form, pushing to the furthest limit his innovations with re-

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spect to “point of view.” Wood makes this point particularly clearly and teases out its implications. There are some “facts,” he argues, that the reader can accept without question— that is, as not simply a function of a particular and fallible “point of view.” If we do not accept the existence of the party guests at New March and their dialogues or the accuracy of the “data” that the narrator seeks to explain, for instance, “there would be nothing interesting for [the narrator] to have a theory about” (Wood 258). But beyond this “very slender quota,” everything is filtered through the narrator’s perspective, and this means that the reader has no way to figure out what is really going on, no way, as Sharon Cameron puts it, “to assess the difference between what the narrative mind thinks and whatever objective truth there may be to what the mind thinks.”21 As Wood points out, the narrator himself seems to have deeply internalized this lesson, acknowledging in the elaborate, tortured way that he formulates his thoughts that he only knows how things seem from his own perspective. One example that Wood dwells on to particular effect is the narrator’s observation that “I made an effort that I believe was not unsuccessful to recover my good humor” (SF 46). As Wood glosses it, “He hopes he has recovered his good humor but isn’t sure. If he doesn’t know, who would? This is a chronic and almost comic commitment to the notion that perspective is everything. Maybe someone else will see what I am calling my good humor differently— as a poorly disguised continuing fit of ill humor, say” (Wood 257). In this way, formal experimentation taken to its limit leads to the abyss of radical uncertainty, and both Cameron and Wood take the opening of this abyss to be the central problem with which the novel is concerned. It would be hard to find a novel in which self-reflection and formal experimentation feel more like a condition that needs to be recovered from. The claustrophobic experience of being trapped in the narrator’s narrow, repetitive ruminations affords even less easily accessible reading pleasure than most of James’s later works, which even their most ardent defenders admit are an acquired taste. But in what sense might Wittgenstein’s modernist philosophy provide a means by which the vitality and life of James’s literary project might be recovered? The key, I would argue, is Cavell’s reinterpretation of skepticism in terms of acknowledgement rather than certainty. What Cavell’s response to the skeptic draws to our attention is the possibility that interpretations like those of Cameron and Wood are in danger of conflating the point of view of the novel with that of the narrator in a way that has been difficult to notice. What Cavell’s response makes it easier to see is that these interpretations take over from the narrator the terms in which he conceives his central problem— those of “certainty.” Just as the problem that organizes the narrator’s activity

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is what Wood calls his “genuine doubt”— whether doubt about what he is experiencing or doubt about the theory that he’s formulated— so the problem that organizes the novel itself (according to readings such as Cameron’s and Wood’s) is, to recall Cameron’s formulation, that “there is no way to tell the difference between what the narrative mind thinks and whatever objective truth there may be to what the narrative mind thinks” (Cameron 160– 61; Wood 258). The worry that arises is that by reinforcing the narrator’s focus on certainty, these kinds of interpretations, like the skeptic’s response to the ordinary language philosopher, “further deflect” an insight that the narrator presents (even if in a partial and compromised way). It is one thing to suggest that part of the reading experience to which James seeks to direct our attention is that of being limited to or trapped within the narrator’s perspective. It is another, though, to assume that the conceptual resources the reader has for articulating and reflecting on that experience are limited to those that are available to the narrator. The problem at issue is a familiar one: how can we do justice to the differences between the interpretive activity of James’s central character and the activity that he seeks to facilitate in his reader? This is a problem that takes on a special intensity in James’s later works— The Beast in the Jungle is perhaps the most explicit and extreme example— where the central characters are so often ever more self-conscious and single-minded interpreters. In the final paragraphs of The Beast in the Jungle, the protagonist, John Marcher, has a moment of insight in which he produces an interpretation of his own story: that he has failed in an astonishingly thorough way to appreciate his other, May Bartram, “for herself ” and, in so doing, has failed to have a life. It has been difficult for interpreters to dispute this conclusion— it seems so blindingly obvious— and many have followed Marcher in reading the tale as a kind of Kantian mediation on the consequences of treating others merely as means and not as ends-in-themselves. But this interpretation doesn’t just seem unavoidable; it has struck many as compulsory, confining, sterilizing.22 It threatens to reduce Beast to a clichéd morality tale. Difficult as the reading is to dispute, it threatens to render the power of the tale unintelligible, even to dull and deaden it. It is not clear whether the interpretive task at hand is to show how the tale in some way brings this cliché back to life— to mediate its truth for readers who have become dulled to it— or to find a way to interrupt that reading and, in so doing, to recover the life of the tale from its dead weight. But the need for some sort of intervention is acutely felt. As I have described them, tales like Beast and Fount elevate to the level of form a preoccupation that had been with James since Portrait of a Lady. Richard Poirier identifies an early version of this preoccupation in his analysis of

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the abstract and general language that James uses to describe his protagonist, Isabel Archer. Poirier argues that James uses such abstract language to protect Isabel from the intrusive aggressions of his readers, who he anticipates will be too quick to assume that they know all about Isabel. Such readers are all too primed to bring to bear on James’s character the “convenient typologies of literary and social convention,” in effect “deadening” Isabel’s life with suffocatingly conventional interpretation.23 By employing language to describe Isabel that is “general to the point of being abstract,” James intervenes on her behalf, undermining the authority of such clichéd interpretations of her that the reader is likely to have ready to hand (Poirier 237).24 By the time of Beast and Fount, however, James is producing works that generate interpretations of themselves. These interpretations, articulated by James’s central characters, threaten to drain these tales of their lifeblood. Such tales transfer to the reader the burden of the work that James himself does in Portrait: the work of driving a wedge between the “life” of the tale and the suffocating interpretation that it has generated. Given the particular nature of the deadening interpretation that Fount both generates and suffers from, Cavell’s response to the skeptic looks to be a valuable wedge. The possibility it raises is that of a reading that puts the narrator’s focus on certainty into perspective rather than reinforcing it. Such a reading comes more fully into view if we return to, and think more carefully through, the narrator as a “portrait” of James himself. If Fount provides, as Follett suggests, James’s most extended and explicit self-portrait, it is also arguably his most bizarrely, almost gratuitously, unflattering one. With the possible exception of Beast’s Marcher, the narrator of Fount is perhaps James’s most thoroughly unpleasant “protagonist,” so much so that Wood finds it necessary to remind critics that a character “doesn’t have to be wrong all the time, just because he is often disagreeable and occasionally hysterical” (Wood 260). Eliot observed that James’s later works tended to excite the kind of admiration “usually accorded to some useless, ugly, and ingenious piece of carving which has taken a very long time to make.”25 The question arises: Why, to what possible end, would James make (and make available to his reader) this apparently useless, exceptionally ugly, yet ingeniously carved likeness of himself? One answer, I would argue, is that creating such a likeness allows James to clarify the grammar of his own authorship by distinguishing that authorship from one of the forms of degeneration to which it is most vulnerable. In order to begin to understand the distinction he is making, it is necessary to register not just the points of contact between James and the narrator but the significant ways in which they differ from each other as well. I have already drawn

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attention to one of the most telling points of contact between James as an author and Fount’s “often disagreeable and occasionally hysterical” narrator: they appear to share remarkably similar theories of fiction. Like James, the narrator seizes upon a chance “hint,” elaborating it in his imagination until he arrives at a law that “fits” the “delicate phenomena” that are open to view. But it is not just this process of elaboration that they share; the content that this process of elaboration brings into view is common to both as well. Recall the shocking hypothesis to which the narrator’s ruminations lead: there is a vampiristic principle of “intimacy” at work at New March. One member of a pair “extracts” from the other “new blood,” an “extra allowance of life and bloom,” which the other supplies by tapping the “sacred fount” of their energy and vitality, thereby leaving themselves depleted. Compare, for example, the way James characterizes Kate Croy’s relation to her sister, Marian, at the beginning of The Wings of the Dove: “She was face to face with it now, with the bond of blood; the consciousness of it was what she seemed most clearly to have ‘come into’ by the death of her mother . . . her life reduced to mere inexhaustible sisterhood. She existed in that view wholly for the small house in Chelsea; the moral of which moreover, of course, was that the more you gave yourself the less of you was left.”26 In the preface to The Wings of the Dove, James characterizes the reader’s relationship to Kate in similar terms— as taking not the blood from her body but the very breath from her lungs: “We surrender again to our major convenience, as it happens to be at the time, that of our drawing breath through the young woman’s lungs” (WD 14). The point of recognizing that Fount’s narrator works on the same content as does the Jamesian author is that it then becomes possible to see with greater clarity how differently they work on that content. Notice what kind of work the narrator takes his content to require. As he understands it, the task at hand is that of finding evidence that will support his theory. This is no easy task, and the difficulty, he postulates, is in no small part due to the fact that both victims and victimizers have a vested interest in concealing the very evidence he needs— victimizers because they want to hide their guilt and protect their advantage and victims because they desperately need to hide their vulnerability. The creative work the narrator undertakes, then, is that of arranging things so that his subjects will betray themselves, displaying in their behavior unmistakable signs of their participation in the economy of the Sacred Fount. The imaginative work that is required of the Jamesian author could not be more different. It is not the work of getting us to betray in our behavior as readers something that he can read as unmistakable evidence. It is rather the work of getting us to know ourselves better. If his words have authority for

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us, it is not because they communicate important information of which we would otherwise be ignorant. Instead, it’s because of the power they have to draw our attention in a new way to a fact of life with which we are all already familiar: the fact that human intimacy involves risk, that it can degenerate into a dynamic in which someone is “taking” and someone is “giving” more. If his words do powerful work, it is the work of touching on this difficult, painful possibility in a way that elicits from us a greater willingness to recognize, in however fleeting and partial a way, our vulnerability to it. Recognizing the application of this possibility to our own lives requires acknowledging, if only to ourselves, something of the particular pain, guilt, anger, grief, and so on that is, for each of us, bound up with it. I have been arguing that Cavell’s elucidation of the skeptic— a piece of modernist philosophy that he takes to be occasioned by Wittgenstein’s— can be a powerful means of recovering The Sacred Fount from an interpretation that it both generates and suffers from. With the benefit of Cavell’s careful distinction between those problems that are a function of certainty and those that are a function of acknowledgment, we are less likely to frame the problem of the novella in terms provided by the narrator and more likely to register the powerful implications of the comparison it invites between the activity of its narrator and that of the Jamesian author in full possession of his power. But from the vantage point of that comparison, we are now in a position to see not only how modernist philosophy serves as an enabling condition for Fount but also how the novella itself might serve as a means of recovering philosophy from a reduced conception of itself that threatens to drain it of its life. In the first section of this chapter, I drew attention to those aspects of Cavell’s reading of Wittgenstein that most directly suggest that philosophy, which enters the condition of modernism, enters the condition of art. As we saw, discovering how to continue making philosophical progress turns out to require the philosopher to carefully distinguish the logical form of her own claims from those of the empirical scientist and to acknowledge the proximity of those claims to aesthetic judgments. But what has emerged from the comparison between Fount’s narrator and James as an author is how deeply Fount is preoccupied with measuring the differences between the aims and methods of the novelist and those of the scientist. Wood points out that the narrator is so irritating in part because he so freely invokes and unceremoniously drops a whole range of metaphors. (“The value of a theory,” Wood reminds us, “is not to be judged by the rather ragged metaphors . . . in which it may be expressed” [259].) When it comes to describing his own activity, though, the narrator is surprisingly consistent. Not only does he return with almost mind-numbing consistency to the language of “theory” (which occurs at

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least twenty-six times), “doubt” (at least twenty-six), and “evidence” (at least eighteen). He also has recourse to a whole raft of related concepts, including “proof ” (which occurs at least sixteen times), “observation” (eighteen), “discovery” (ten), “law” (six), “system” (five), and “induction” (three), along with “method,” “hypothesis,” “confirmation,” and “warrant” (all of which occur at least twice).27 Fount’s aim, as I’ve interpreted it, is not to undermine the authority of science. Nor is it that the narrator is a bad scientist— as though his problem is just that he generalizes too quickly from too small a data set or formulates a theory that is not falsifiable. In fact, Wood draws attention to how much caution is reflected in the very grammar of the narrator’s sentences— how much genuine doubt he expresses— and suggests that this should lead us to trust him more than we do.28 We could restate Wood’s point by saying that the narrator is actually a better scientist than he has been taken to be. Fount’s lesson is that this does not make the narrator a better novelist.29 It is not difficult to see how this minute and anxious scrutiny of the differences between the scientist and the artist might be of help to the modernist philosopher of a Wittgensteinian stripe. Think, for example, about the opening paragraphs of the Investigations. One primary purpose of these remarks has often been understood to be to criticize a correspondence theory of meaning that Wittgenstein himself espoused in his earlier work. The builder’s language game, for instance, is interpreted as fitting the letter of this theory in such a way as to clarify what is inadequate about it. Even for many of those interpreters who are sensitive to the importance of Wittgenstein’s unusual form and style, it has seemed obvious that the ultimate point of this criticism must be to construct a new, more adequate theory.30 Given how closely philosophy has been identified with argument, it might be difficult to see any genuine alternative. In this context, it has been easy to confuse the distinction between theorizing and doing something else (describing) with the distinction between doing something (theory construction) and doing nothing at all (quietism). In light of the comparison that unfolds between the Jamesian author of a work such as The Wings of the Dove and his degenerate Doppelgänger, it becomes easier to see some alternative to theorizing that involves genuine work, albeit a very different sort of work than that involved in constructing a theory. The suggestion is not that one could transfer wholesale to Wittgenstein the particular distinction that James is elaborating between theorizing and the work that is constitutive of his literary project. It is rather that trying that distinction on— seeing where it fits and where it doesn’t— can be illuminating. At the very least, it can facilitate a capacity to imagine alternatives to theorizing in a context in which that has been very difficult to do.

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It is here that, if care is not taken, it is easy to arrive at a simple inversion of Carnap’s point— by conflating philosophy with art instead of science and glossing any apparent tension between philosophy and literature as a function of an impoverished conception of philosophy. Carnap, as we saw, is concerned with separating mock philosophers from genuine ones. To this end, he seeks to distinguish those who merely take themselves to be constructing theories (but who are in fact doing nothing but producing a poor excuse for art) from those who really are producing theories. In his view, the former are “musicians without musical ability” who “achieve nothing for knowledge and something inadequate” for art (Carnap 147). As I have interpreted him, James, too, is worried about those who merely take themselves to be constructing theories, but his worry is about mock artists, not mock philosophers. He seeks to separate such mock artists, who (merely) take themselves to be involved in theory construction, not from those who really are constructing theories but from those who are really doing something else— that is, what artists do. Adapting Carnap’s point, we might say that in James’s view, such apparent “artists” are like scientists without scientific ability who achieve nothing for art and something inadequate for science. I have argued that this extended Jamesian exercise in distinguishing mock artists from genuine artists can be a useful object of comparison for the modernist philosopher who seeks to clarify the differences between her own activity and that of theory construction and to take the measure of a newly appreciated proximity between the kind of response her “claims” require and that elicited by a literary masterpiece like James’s Wings of the Dove. But we misuse that object of comparison if we take it to license a simple equation of philosophy with literature and in this way use it to avoid the difficult work of taking the measure of genuine differences that remain. It is clear, I think, that James himself would most strenuously have resisted being misused in this way. I’ve already drawn attention to his ambivalence toward philosophy, which Eliot captures in his description of James as a writer with a “mind so fine that no idea could violate it” (OHJ 110– 11). This ambivalence is reflected in what one does not find in the novels and tales— one would never be affronted by anything so crude as a philosophical debate of the kind so common in Dostoevsky or the philosophical digressions that punctuate the works of novelists such as Broch and Kundera. In other words, James clearly has no time for a certain explicit form of “argument,” and insofar as philosophy is conceived as coextensive with such argument, he clearly has no time for it either. And insofar as one concentrates on what one does not find, it can seem tempting to explain away any apparent tension between

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James’s literary project and philosophy as a function of just the kind of impoverished conception of philosophy that I have been discussing. But James’s ambivalence about philosophy is registered not only in what one does not find but also in what one does: minute and anxious scrutiny of the possibilities and limits of “the examined life,” especially an acute appreciation for how easily such a life can degenerate into a form of self-attack. In Portrait of a Lady, Ralph Touchett likens Isabel Archer’s unremitting selfexamination to the effort to “pull open a tight, tender rose.”31 “Take things more easily,” he cautions her. “Don’t ask yourself so much whether this or that is good for you. Don’t question your conscience so much— it will get out of tune like a strummed piano. . . . You’ve too much power of thought. . . . Put back your watch” (PL 319). By the time John Marcher invites May Bartram to join him on his “watch,” in The Beast in the Jungle, James has created a character whose single-minded preoccupation with the “special truth” about himself takes the injunction to self-knowledge to such a parodic extreme that it “voids” not only his own life but May’s as well.32 If we concentrate on what we do find, in other words, James’s ambivalence toward philosophy looks to be first and foremost ambivalence not toward philosophy conceived narrowly, as a matter of views and arguments, but rather toward philosophy conceived more capaciously as a matter of self-knowledge. Not only does philosophy so conceived trace its roots as far back as Plato’s dialogues, but it is clearly suited to the conception of what makes anything— even the most traditional philosophical “argument”— philosophical, which, as we saw, Cavell articulates in light of Wittgenstein’s modernist philosophy. In part, the ambivalence is directed toward debased forms of the examined life, which are closely related to the debased form of authorship that I’ve argued the narrator represents. Marcher, for instance, treats the task of self-knowledge as that of acquiring a missing piece of information about himself. His “intimate community” with May is disrupted when he becomes convinced that she has gained a piece of knowledge about him that she hasn’t shared, an “idea within her that she [doesn’t] dare to express” (BJ 517). Tortured by the fear that she might die before disclosing this knowledge, he determines to elicit it from her. But the harder he tries, the more reticent and withdrawn she becomes, until in one climactic moment of the story, he tries to read what she refuses to say by the “light of her wasted face” (BJ 532). Marcher, in other words, takes the problem presented by self-knowledge to be a matter of “the absence of something” (a piece of ignorance) rather than the presence of something in himself (a resistance, a callousness). There is perhaps no more reason to think that a criticism of this version of the examined

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life applies more generally to the examined life than there is to think that a criticism of the debased form of authorship, which Fount’s narrator instantiates, has a more general application. But not all forms of the examined life that worry James take the shape that Marcher’s does. Whatever the problem is with Isabel’s constant efforts at self-assessment— which Ralph criticizes as a kind of persistent, intrusive selfinterruption— she doesn’t appear to be involved in compulsively seeking out missing information about herself. Nor does Fount’s narrator, even though there is clearly something troubling about the excruciating self-doubt that tortures and disrupts the very grammar of his sentences. One problem, which stands out as common to these different forms of the examined life, is how easily self-examination— whatever form it takes— becomes chronic, an allencompassing preoccupation that drains the vitality of those who are caught up in it. Marcher, for instance, clearly has this problem. At the beginning of the tale, May recalls to Marcher an understanding of himself that he once shared with her— the understanding of himself as singled out for a “special fate,” which he figures to himself as the “spring” of a “crouching beast” (BJ 508). Marcher doesn’t remember having shared this secret truth with May and is slow to acknowledge that he has. But once he does, a relationship between them springs into being— the only one that either of them has and one that is constituted entirely of rehearsing and elaborating the special truth about him that they share. Marcher’s complete absorption in this form of self-reflection is figured at the tale’s end as a kind of burial. After May dies, he haunts her grave, gazing into the inscription on her tomb and hoping to glimpse there again the “the truth of his life” that he used to see reflected in her eyes (BJ 537). As Cavell and others have pointed out, the familiar Jamesian preoccupation with the relation between the reader and the literary work is registered here in a comparison that is invited between Marcher’s absorption in the “open page” of May’s tomb (the letters of her epitaph figured as her eyes, which “never ceased to follow him” and his “still unwavering gaze”) and the reader’s absorption in the open page of James’s tale.33 Will the reader who is drawn into the text (and thereby, I have argued, into a form of self-reflection) bury herself in it, as Marcher has buried himself in May? It is now possible to return with further insight to the question posed above: Why, to what possible end, would James make such an exceptionally ugly and unappealing likeness of himself? My suggestion here is that the ugliness, the grotesqueness of this likeness, is part of its point, part of James’s strategy for defeating the possibility that self-reflection will become the kind of chronic condition, the living death, that it becomes for Marcher. If literature must, in effect, gaze at its own reflection to investigate what, under pres-

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ent conditions, will make its continued existence possible, its continued existence depends equally on finding a way to protect against the danger that it will become absorbed, Narcissus-like, in that reflection. What could be more to the purpose than a reflection that we cannot help but look at but that, at the same time, we cannot bear to look at for long? The Sacred Fount, I have argued, represents a stage of James’s literary project in which it can only continue if what that project is becomes part of the subject matter of the project itself. At the same time, the text also reflects James’s cognizance of another and equally important condition on the continuation of his project: that a way must be found to protect against the tendency for what is properly a developmental stage to become a chronic condition.

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The World as Bloom Found It: “Ithaca,” the Tractatus, and Looking “More than Once for the Solution of Difficult Problems in Imaginary or Real Life” K a r e n Z u m h a g e n -Y e k p l é At first I thought the questions pointless and irrelevant. I felt . . . I would find all the answers. But the questions repeated themselves over and again, demanding answers with more and more urgency. They fell like full stops, always on the same spot, uniting in one large black spot. — L e o T o l s t o y, A Confession1 He reflected on the pleasures derived from literature of instruction rather than amusement as he himself had applied to the works of William Shakespeare more than once for the solution of difficult problems in imaginary or real life. Had he found their solution? In spite of careful and repeated reading of certain classical passages, aided by a glossary, he had derived imperfect conviction from the text, the answers not bearing on all points. — J a m e s J o y c e , Ulysses2 We feel that even if all possible scientific questions are answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. Of course there is then no question left, and this is just the answer. The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem. (Is not this the reason why men to whom after long doubting the sense of life became clear, could not say wherein this sense consisted?) — L u d w i g W i t t g e n s t e i n , Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus3

A worthy point of departure for any attempt to account for Wittgenstein’s relationship to modernism and modernity is to be found in the various remarks he made during his lifetime expressing his antipathy toward what he calls at Tractatus 6.371 “the whole modern conception of the world” (die ganze moderne Weltanschauung). In an early draft of the foreword for Philosophical Remarks, Wittgenstein writes that the spirit of his age, characterized by an idolatry of progress, the pursuit of scientific advancement, and scientistic explanation, is “alien” and “uncongenial” to his own ways of thinking.4 He has no sympathy for the prevailing current of European civilization, he writes, and does not understand its goals: “My type of thinking is not wanted in

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this present age,” he once said to Maurice Drury. “I have to swim so strongly against the tide. Perhaps in a hundred years people will really want what I am writing.”5 In the intervening decades since he made that remark, a diverse set of philosophers, intellectual historians, and literary critics have attended to Wittgenstein’s aversion to the spirit of his times while nevertheless offering a variety of compelling accounts of his works that place them firmly in the canon of modernist cultural productions that exemplify the predominant aesthetic movement of the twentieth century.6 In my own efforts in this chapter to recast understandings of Wittgenstein’s significance for studies in modernism, I examine the Tractatus alongside the “Ithaca” chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses. To be precise, I turn to Ulysses’s penultimate chapter in a reading of the Tractatus that I offer as a literarycritical contribution to the program of Wittgenstein interpretation that has developed from the “resolute” or New Wittgensteinian reading first put forth by Cora Diamond and James Conant, among others.7 But why read the Tractatus in relation to Ulysses (and why the “Ithaca” chapter in particular)? After all, these two texts would seem to be rather strange bedfellows— the one a solemn aphoristic philosophical meditation on language and world, the other a tongue-in-cheek catechism that unfolds in a single episode in a novel with epic ambitions. Furthermore, just what do we stand to gain in our efforts to account for the relevance of Wittgenstein’s philosophy to scholarship in literary modernism by developing readings of the Tractatus that run counter to more standard appraisals of the text, rather than adhering to those traditional readings? Just what does a resolute interpretive program entail, and how does it help us to recognize the Tractatus as a valuable intertext for our reading of works of high modernist literature like Joyce’s? My attempts to respond to the second question will lead me back to a consideration of the first. Resolute interpretive approaches, which I describe more fully in the second section of this chapter, diverge from more standard ways of reading the Tractatus by seeing the book not as putting forth a theory (be it of meaning, logic, or ethics or indeed any other subject) but as representing a mock doctrine made up of straightforwardly nonsensical sentences. The instructive force of the Tractatus lies not in Wittgenstein’s attempt to put forth a metaphysical account of the way language hooks onto the world but in its aim of effecting a dramatic shift not only in our understanding of philosophy and how it should be practiced but in our attitude toward the world and our place in it. The book seeks to lead readers to adopt a philosophical attitude that will help us to be at home in our language and world. The transformative shift the book strives to get its readers to achieve is one that changes the character of

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our relationship to our questions by broadening our notion of the kinds of answers that can count as satisfying responses to them. The text of the Tractatus functions as a kind of aesthetic medium for its author’s unorthodox way of teaching us about ethics by teaching us about its essential relatedness with logic. Readers are told at the end of the book that its seventy dense pages of spare numbered propositions amount to mere nonsense, indistinguishable from gibberish, and unable to convey any illuminating ethical (but ineffable) insights.8 They are to be thrown away— like the proverbial ladder Wittgenstein famously invokes in the penultimate proposition— once they have served what he claims is their “elucidatory” transformative purpose of leading us out of our philosophical and personal confusion and toward a clearer vision of things. If we take Wittgenstein at his word here, we must try to understand not the book’s nonsensical propositions but their author, who speaks nonsense as part of a method of engaging readers in a philosophical activity that will bring about a change in the way we approach life and the search for meaning. The formidable exegetical challenge it poses plays an important role in Wittgenstein’s project of engaging readers in the therapeutic and transformative activity of elucidation he saw as the true work of philosophy. I contend here that looking at Wittgenstein in this way offers new dimensions for understanding his relationship to modernism that are otherwise unavailable through more traditional readings of the Tractatus. By attending to Wittgenstein’s literary sensibilities, emphasizing the relationship between the method he employs in the book and its “strange” aesthetic form, and by highlighting the disjunction between the purported logical-philosophical treatise and its author’s conception of the book’s overall ethical aim, we come to see Wittgenstein’s 1921 work of philosophy as a complex modernist puzzle, a puzzle every bit as revolutionary in its formal ambition and experimentalism as Joyce’s 1922 novel. The Tractatus is a modernist puzzle text concerned with getting its readers to figure out how the activity of philosophy can help us handle the most difficult questions of life, the search for their solutions, and the longing for transformative insights. Seeing it this way allows us to recognize Wittgenstein’s investment in a set of interrelated issues I take to be among the fundamental concerns of the group of deliberately wrought monuments of modernist thought and literature that Michael André Bernstein has called the “modernist masterpiece,” a genre of which Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and Joyce’s Ulysses (in their different ways— and according to different critical and historical criteria) have become recognized exemplars.9 These issues come into sharper relief in the passages from Tolstoy, Wittgenstein, and Joyce that serve as open-

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ing epigraphs above (and to which I will return and discuss in closer detail in this chapter’s second section). They are: textual and existential difficulty; ethical instruction and the work of self-improvement; a striving for personal transformation or conversion; a longing for revelations about, and a deeper understanding of (or even deliverance from), the weighty problems of life, the search for its meaning and for solutions that often prove intangible or inadequate. In the end, the only answer these excerpts arrive at is that the answers they canvass do not bear entirely on the questions they pose. My goal in reading the Tractatus and “Ithaca” alongside one another here is to point to the relevance of Wittgenstein’s philosophy to scholarship in modernist literature while casting certain features of Joyce’s project in a new philosophical light, which also grants us insights into literary modernism more broadly. Having accounted for some of the compelling ways in which the Tractatus can be read as a peculiarly modernist puzzle text, however, I must now return to the second question I posed above (What makes Joyce a worthy interlocutor for Wittgenstein?) as well as to its correlate (Why examine the Tractatus alongside the “Ithaca” chapter in particular?). Taking a characteristically Ithacan inventory of the concerns common to the Tractatus and Ulysses’s penultimate chapter can help us understand what looking at them together has to tell us about each of these texts and their modernist context. To begin, then, we might ask, in an Ithacan vein, What parallel courses do Wittgenstein and Joyce follow? What points of contact exist between them (U 666, 689)? Both are dedicated to exploring the questions and quests associated with what Joyce calls a “different order of difficulty” through the mundanely difficult “propositions of natural science” (TLP 6.53). Both rely (Joyce’s chapter to a more “jocoserious” degree) on (pseudo-)scientific precision in their treatments of matters of the soul— treatments intimately related to both the search for the meaning of life and a striving to make the decisive shift in ethical attitude that will lead to living it in the best way (TLP 6.521; U 677). In spite of their apparent exclusivity, both challenging texts reflect their authors’ shared aspirations for a qualified universality. Each makes performative or parodic use of dogmatic, didactic, and prophetic tones and echoes the language of scripture alongside that of science and logic. Wittgenstein and Joyce both treat with suspicion the notion that systematic solutions can ever adequately put to rest the questions that they deal with in the predominantly cold prose of their texts. Both implicitly challenge readers to figure out their respective authorial (and deauthorizing) strategies as well as the puzzling relationship of their differently constructed faux doctrines to the literary, ethical, and philosophical aims of their works. Both texts are structured in the form of a

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catalog of ordered assertions, questions, and answers that gives the appearance of progressing toward a final conclusion that is ultimately withheld by the author. Reading “Ithaca” with Wittgenstein in mind gives us an interdisciplinary modernist context in which to account for Joyce’s choice to give the chapter its catechetical structure. “Ithaca” conveys the affective aspects of Leopold Bloom’s homecoming at the end of the male narrative of Joyce’s modern quest epic through the medium of the coolly rational exchange (one that also acts as a send-up of a coolly rational exchange) afforded by the extended questionand-answer technique Joyce described as a “mathematical,” “impersonal catechism.”10 While the author of “Ithaca” does not leave readers with the final bombshell of declaring its constitutive sentences nonsensical, he does nonetheless give us a surprise ending that similarly flouts our longing for closure. The long series of questions and answers in “Ithaca”— which consider an array of domestic, scientific, and spiritual problems; “difficulties of interpretation”; “hypothetical solutions”; and possible futures— comes to an exaggerated and abrupt full stop at the end of the chapter as Bloom falls into the sleep and dreams that give him temporary relief from the questions and quests that have occupied him throughout the course of the novel (U 676, 686). As the epigrammatic passages above attest, Joyce’s and Wittgenstein’s texts explore a longing for answers, solutions, or transformative insights. Yet it is important to note from the outset that whatever revelation their texts seek to leave us with, it is not an epiphanic one. One of my central claims here is that Wittgenstein’s and Joyce’s different modernist treatments of searches for answers both turn on their use of counterepiphanic aesthetic strategies that run against much received wisdom about modernism and both authors’ relationship to it. What’s more, Joyce’s move away from the attention he paid to the figure of the epiphany in his earlier writing and toward an exploration in Ulysses of searches for the lasting understanding and sense of being at home in one’s language and world runs parallel to the transition that occurs between Wittgenstein’s early and later work in the philosophical method with which he approaches the search for clarity. I trace the shared aspects of Wittgenstein’s and Joyce’s counterepiphanic aesthetic practices here with an eye to attending, toward this chapter’s conclusion, to the important differences between their respective projects. In propositions that attest to the influence of Tolstoy’s Gospel in Brief and A Confession on his thinking, Wittgenstein writes in the Tractatus and the notebooks he kept between 1914 and 1917 of a Weltanschauung he calls “happy.” Such an attitude involves a kind of willing that “changes the world” (TLP 6.43). What Wittgenstein says about the “happy” is deeply connected to his notion of “see-

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ing the world in the right way” (TLP 6.54) and to his enigmatic statement that the solution to the problem of life is to be seen in its vanishing. At the end of this chapter, I explore ways in which Bloom, Joyce’s own long-doubting, questioning and questing modern “Everyman or Noman,” becomes an unexpected literary exemplar of a person who looks upon the world and its problems with this “happy” attitude (U 727). I argue that the differences between Joyce’s and Wittgenstein’s divergent treatments of what Wittgenstein describes in the Tractatus as “seeing the world in the right way” not only shed light on the continuity of Wittgenstein’s “early” and “late” philosophy; they also give us new purchase on the evolution of Wittgenstein’s philosophical method from the Tractatus to the Philosophical Investigations. Precision and Soul in the “Modernist Masterpiece” In 1922, modernism’s much-touted miracle year in which the Tractatus and Ulysses first appeared in book form, Wittgenstein’s and Joyce’s Austrian contemporary Robert Musil lamented what he called “an abiding miscommunication between the intellect [Verstand] and the soul [Seele]” that typified the modern age. “We don’t have too much intellect and too little soul,” he continued, “but too little intellect in matters of the soul.”11 Wittgenstein’s own modern cultural critique— internal to what he declared was the ethical point of the Tractatus— is rooted in related complaints he issues throughout his manuscripts that “the whole modern conception of the world” is driven by a misplaced faith in the power of causal-scientific explanation that numbs the sense of the “wonder” he would have us reawaken in ourselves.12 Allan Janik, Stephen Toulmin, and Bernstein, among others, have likened Musil’s philosophical commitments to Wittgenstein’s in a variety of ways.13 Like Wittgenstein, Bernstein emphasizes, Musil began his career in the sciences and consistently sought to distinguish his own brand of modernist writing by making a conscious effort “to combine a commitment to the most stringent principles of mathematical logic with a mystical yearning for a new, less alienated way of living,” one that would integrate spiritual feeling and idea.14 Musil drew on his technical, scientific, and mathematical training, as well as his literary imagination, to construct an ethical framework within which to grapple with the difficult questions associated with the search for an elusive understanding that would bring about what he speaks of in his complex unfinished novel, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, as “Das rechte Leben,” the right way of living.15 Wittgenstein, for his part, sought to lead readers of his own logical-

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philosophical treatise to overcome philosophical confusion through an activity of clarification aimed at getting them to see “die Welt richtig”— “the world in the right way” (TLP 6.54). In “Ithaca,” Joyce offers another response to Musil’s call to combine precision and soul in modern letters. In that chapter, Bloom’s and Stephen’s thoughts, actions, and interactions are all rendered, as Joyce puts it, in their “cosmic physical, psychical . . . equivalent . . . so that . . . the reader [will] know everything and know it in the baldest, coldest way.”16 In the interrogative mode of the Q&A in “Ithaca,” Joyce finds a meditative narrative technique that offers a poignant (and at times hilarious) depiction of Bloom’s wanderings through an everyday fraught with questions big and small in his search for conclusive solutions that will put his all-too-human problems (of life and love, past and future) to rest. Musil’s call for a balanced relationship between the vague opposing nodes of “intellect” and “soul,” along with the attention he pays in his writing not only to the inspiration of the epiphany (that mainstay of critical modernism) but also to the more arduous and lasting quests for the right way of living that must go beyond such ephemeral moments, testify together to what I see as an axial concern of the European high-modernist canon in which the Tractatus and Ulysses have come to figure so prominently: an investment in making certain conversional shifts in the way one sees and lives in the world, to rise to demands like the one articulated in the (deceptively straightforward) command Rilke issues in his Archäischer Torso Apollos: “Du mußt dein Leben ändern.” You must change your life.17 Because this concern with transformation is especially pressing in a work like the Tractatus, which seeks to engage readers in the demanding and transformative personal and philosophical work that will ultimately allow them to see “rightly” the world in which they live (to put it— Wittgenstein’s grand gesture, his vague directive— in a similar likewise deceptively straightforward way), it is important to attend to it in our efforts to account for Wittgenstein’s kinship with modernist literature. Far from expressing just one man’s idiosyncratic concern, then, Musil’s postwar maxim points to a central preoccupation of a whole class of texts— Joyce’s Ulysses and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus chief among them— that Bernstein has identified as a distinct literary subgenre and historically circumscribed form unto itself: the self-consciously crafted “modernist masterpiece.”18 In his attempt to articulate the stakes of the so-called modernist masterpiece as genre and goal, Bernstein isolates three imperatives to which representative works are answerable. The ambition (indeed, the claim) to satisfy these imperatives, taken together with the inexorable failure ultimately to do so, are definitive of the sort of works that fall under this category. Paying respect to the form of Wallace Stevens’s Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, Bernstein

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adds to the unofficial injunction that works of high-modernist experimentation, in T. S. Eliot’s words, “must be difficult” the further requirements that the modernist masterpiece “Must Seem Universal” and, finally, also “Must Be Redemptive.”19 In spite of their apparent exclusivity, both Wittgenstein’s and Joyce’s challenging texts are crafted to reflect their authors’ shared aspirations for achieving a qualified universality— “qualified” because the availability of both texts is decidedly not immediate. For it turns on the rather arduous demands they place on their readers, who must grapple with the different levels of difficulty active within them if they are ever to grasp successfully the insights their authors aim to convey and get readers to put into play in their lives. By beginning with attention to the first of these “musts”— difficulty— in all its complexity, the interdependent relationship among these three requirements (and in turn their relationship to a Musilian call for sufficiently intellectual precision in matters of the soul) becomes clearest, for we see high modernism’s trademark “requisite” difficulty— and Wittgenstein’s unique deployment of it in the Tractatus— at its most acute and challenging when we examine the way it functions within narratives of universal human yearning (and attendant search) for meaning, enlightenment, and redemption.20 I want to argue here that the searches for revelation or redemption that animate the works Bernstein designates as decidedly modernist masterpieces are carried out with the premonition that the revelation or redemption sought is hardly imminent: The clarity about, or deliverance from, the age-old problems of life that such works offer will likely bear little resemblance to the goal conceived at the outset. The sense of a foregone inconclusiveness (deriving more from a worldly pragmatism than from either a true pessimism or optimism) that haunts these texts, I suggest, is a definitive aspect of their modernism. An important part of our understanding of the project of modernist masterpiece-making as one that conforms to the last of Bernstein’s “musts,” then, lies in our ability to see that whatever redemptive power a representative work can be said to possess is itself predicated on the ancillary demand that it must demonstrate a longing for redemption or improved understanding. It is this sense of longing, I claim, rather than its elusive object, that catalyzes the searches that proliferate in the “big” works of high modernism, especially Joyce’s and Wittgenstein’s. This longing for the peace and repletion that is redemption’s promise is one that persists even in the face of redemption’s possibly infinite deferral. The “difficult problems in imaginary or real life” so central to Joyce’s and Wittgenstein’s texts give rise to the kind of questions Maria DiBattista has called the “perennial questions” of “errant, questing beings.” They are the

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questions that haunt the modernist novel and leave intact the enigmas on which it turns. They are urgent, repetitive questions that “recur without respite . . . preoccupy and often confound us because we can neither answer nor refrain from asking them.”21 Cora Diamond has called such questions the “great riddles.”22 I want to suggest here that we look at Wittgenstein’s and Joyce’s shared attraction to such questions (and the sense of possibility and failure attendant to them) in the larger context of modernism’s investment in what Diamond describes as “a kind of groping search” for answers. Such a search involves, she writes in “Riddles and Anselm’s Riddle,” seeking for something not specifiable in advance, and which perhaps is not for anything that can be intelligibly described at all, [it] includes searching for an answer to “the riddle of life in space and time,” “the riddle ‘par excellence’” as Wittgenstein called it, and which he said was not a question. It includes seeking God, as Anselm described it— what we look for we do not know, and what we find is not what we looked for. The discussion of riddles is thus meant to bear on the great riddles, and on the notions of ignorance and mistake with which they are correlative. And so also on the related idea in such contexts of the hidden: the hiddenness of God is akin to the hiddenness of the solution to a riddle.23

Diamond’s discussion of the relationship among mathematical questions, literary riddles, and the “great” riddles of mythological and religious traditions (all of which, because they prove resistant to established methods of solution, demand innovative responses on our part— along with a willingness to err and to revise), offers us a thought-provoking means of examining Wittgenstein’s and Joyce’s shared concern with presenting in their works a desire for (unforeseen) solutions to the formulations of the riddles that appear within them. Both “Ithaca” and the Tractatus suggest that if answers to life’s perennial questions did not exist, we would have to invent them. Diamond’s point that mathematical problems and literary riddles alike bear on the great riddles she points to provides us with an approach to understanding the different ways the Tractatus and “Ithaca” endeavor to explore the relationship among mathematical, scientific, and even simple, everyday problems and the great, timeless riddles of life that she invokes. “Theolologicophilolological” Commitments Joyce’s and Wittgenstein’s engagement with the pressing problems of life in their respective texts is further complicated by the combination of irony and sincerity that arises from their shared ability to see such age-old prob-

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lems from the perspective Wittgenstein described as a “religious point of view” in spite of the fact that neither was, as he says, “a religious man.”24 As Cranly observes of Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce’s mind was “supersaturated with the religion in which [he claimed to] disbelieve.”25 Indeed, in spite of their shared commitment to a human investment in the spiritual aspects of life, both Joyce and Wittgenstein are, in Ithacan terms, “indurated by . . . an inherited tenacity of heterodox resistance”; “profess[ing] . . . disbelief in many orthodox religious . . . ethical doctrines” (U 554).26 Joyce’s portmanteau “theolologicophilolological” offers an apt description of the secular-spiritual investments Joyce and Wittgenstein share (U 205). “Ithaca” and the Tractatus seek in their different ways not only to combine the theological with the philosophical and the logical (to speak not at all of the philological!) but also— and perhaps more important— to infuse their secular explorations of the concrete everyday with attention to wonder and a yearning for truth, meaning, and transcendence. In doing so, both aim to open readers to everyday experience— as it is revealed through ordinary language— by leading us beyond the dichotomies of the earthbound and spiritual and toward a recognition of the possibility of seeing our ordinary dealings with the world as endowed with significance.27 “Ithaca” and the Tractatus are both enlivened by a secular engagement with traces of narrative traditions of spiritual instruction and quests for enlightenment to which their authors adhere in spite of their eschewal of institutional religious commitment. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein adopts the prophetic tone of a spiritual guide or teacher who would lead his pupils to overcome illusion. His pedagogy relies on his use of the scriptural image of a ladder; he engages in a mode of oblique instruction verging on the parabolic; he speaks of God, “the higher,” “the mystical,” and “the unsayable” and of solving the riddle of the meaning of life. Themes of pedagogical training also permeate Ulysses’s penultimate chapter. Through the catechetical interrogations in “Ithaca,” structured around the figurae of St. Paul, Dante, and the Bible (as well as Hamlet and the Odyssey), Bloom becomes both an “advertising Elijah, restorer of the church in Zion” and the “traditional figure of hypostasis” delivering prophetic “light to the gentiles” (U 676, 689, 476).28 Bloom’s attraction (both scientific and spiritual) to all that is higher, along with his concomitant sense of the contrasting absurdity of the human condition, is evident throughout the “Ithaca” chapter in his consistent interest in constellations and stargazing.29 In “Ithaca,” even acts as banal as shaving are interrupted by the “thought of aught” Bloom seeks “though fraught with naught” (U 674). His medita-

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tions touch intermittently on questions about life and death, “ipsorelative” and “aliorelative” existence, “the irreparability of the past,” and “the imprevidibility of the future,” as well as the absurdity of the human condition in the “cold of interstellar space” (U 708, 667, 696, 704, 734). Bloom contemplates the mundane against the backdrop of the firmament of stars, “evermoving from immeasurably remote eons to infinitely remote futures in comparison with which the years, threescore and ten, of allotted human life formed a parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity” (U 698). His thoughts on man’s fascination with space are conflated with the question of moral redemption: Did he find the problem of the inhabitability of the planets and their satellites by a race, given in species, and of the possible social and moral redemption of said race by a redeemer, easier of solution? Of a different order of difficulty. Conscious that the human organism, normally capable of sustaining an atmospheric pressure of 19 tons, when elevated to a considerable altitude in the terrestrial atmosphere suffered with arithmetical progression of intensity, according as the line of demarcation between troposphere and stratosphere was approximated, from nasal hemorrhage, impeded respiration and vertigo, when proposing this problem for solution he had conjectured as a working hypothesis which could not be proved impossible that a more adaptable and differently anatomically constructed race of beings might subsist otherwise under Martian, Mercurial, Venerial, Jovian, Saturnian, Neptunian or Uranian sufficient and equivalent conditions, though an apogean humanity of beings created in varying forms with finite differences resulting similar to the whole and to one another would probably there as here remain inalterably and inalienably attached to vanities, to vanities of vanities and all that is vanity. And the problem of possible redemption? The major was proved by the minor. (U 699– 700)

Bloom’s experience of his earthbound everyday is fraught with a yearning to take flight, to seek a better understanding of a “higher reality” that he already knows he will never grasp— at least not in any way he might have envisioned in advance. One of the things that “Ithaca” conveys to us is that a longing for answers to life’s eternal questions is part and parcel of our experience of the everyday. A corollary to that lesson is that when it comes to arriving at satisfying answers to the questions about meaning toward which the catechism gestures, in Diamond’s words, “what we look for we do not know, and what we find is not what we looked for.” We can regard Wittgenstein’s own famous claim that although he was not a religious man, he could not help seeing every problem from a religious point of view not only in terms of what it can tell us about his own way of

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thinking and approaching problems (of both philosophical and everyday varieties) but also as providing an apt description of many avowedly atheistic modern writers (Woolf, Kafka, and Rilke are notable examples) whose works are underwritten by the seemingly incongruous outlook of spiritual yearning that shows forth within them. As I have already begun to indicate, the role of this attraction to the weighty questions of existence that becomes so pressing in early twentieth-century thought and literature comes into better view if we examine it in the context of its relationship to modernism’s well-known obsession with difficulty, for the puzzles, riddles, and unanswered questions and quests for their solutions on which the signature texts of high modernism are so fixated function not only to hone the reader’s intellect but also to call for intelligent work on what Musil calls the soul. Wittgenstein, Modernism, and a Different Order of Difficulty The philosophical commitments Wittgenstein shares with literary modernists show themselves in the passages that serve as opening epigraphs for this chapter. Those quoted passages take up several issues that I claim lie at the heart of the monuments of modernist thought and literature that establish Bernstein’s subgenre of the “modernist masterpiece”: difficulty, ethical instruction, questions and quests for elusive answers, and a yearning for transformation or conversion. The urgent, unanswered questions that arise from the crisis of faith and reason Tolstoy describes in the excerpt from his Confession that serves as the first of the opening epigraphs to this chapter (“what am I? . . . why do I live? . . . what must I do?”) are first met only with what he describes in the epigraph as an accumulation of periods forming one large, black spot.30 As we have seen, it is with this same graphic image of an outsized full stop that Joyce ends his own questioning chapter, punctuating his novel with a huge, black dot that represents an aperture into an unknown future possibility as much as it offers an improvised closure to the story of Bloom’s question, quest, and homecoming.31 The attitude of clarity Wittgenstein describes enigmatically as related to seeing the solution of the problem of life in its vanishing is also nascent in the counterepiphanic realizations conveyed in “Ithaca” through such questions as the following: “What selfevident enigma pondered with desultory constancy during 30 years did Bloom now having effected natural obscurity by the extinction of artificial light, silently suddenly comprehend?” The catechetical rejoinder?: “Where was Moses when the candle went out?” (U 729). The answer called for by the second question (itself positioned as a catechetical response

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to the first) is the punchline that is never explicitly given in the text: that like Moses, that biblical “seeker of pure truth,” Bloom must quest in darkness both literal and figurative. The variety and superabundance of the information that enriches the thoughts and conversations of “Ithaca” does not succeed in showing Bloom the way out of “the incertitude of the void.” Nor does it help him find a path from the “known to the unknown” or from the “unknown to the known” (U 697, 676, 689, 701, 697). The “literature of instruction or amusement” alluded to throughout “Ithaca” fails to provide answers that would belie the words of Solomon in Ecclesiastes that occur to Bloom in the chapter as they do to Tolstoy at the height of the existential crisis he describes in A Confession: that “all is vanity” (U 700). There is nothing new under the sun.32 The opening epigraphs thus offer an indication of the unique ways in which Wittgenstein’s and Joyce’s different texts both turn upon an exploitation of modernism’s trademark difficulty. They also reveal the shared commitment to exploring the yearning for answers that plays such a crucial role in their attempts to speak to the modern human condition. Observations about modernism’s fascination with difficulty have become a sort of a critical commonplace. I contend here, however, that modernism’s investment in and deployment of difficulty merits closer scrutiny if we are to understand the quality of the difficulty at stake in Wittgenstein’s gnomic Tractatus and the book’s place among the literary and cultural productions that have come to define the predominant artistic movement of the twentieth century. The passages that serve as epigraphs point to two main levels of difficulty at work in notoriously demanding texts like Wittgenstein’s and Joyce’s. At issue first of all is the more straightforward kind of difficulty related to the pursuit of knowledge through attentive study of literary and philosophical texts and commentaries, “scientific questions,” and the “literature of instruction rather than amusement.” But the excerpts with which this chapter opens also point to a second, more complicated and less easily resolved sort of difficulty. They remind us that modernism’s trademark difficulty (whether it is thematized within a given text or activated through the overall demands it makes of its readers) is at its most difficult when it is rooted in searches for answers to the “difficult questions in imaginary or real life” pondered in them. The passages gesture at the most universal and least resolvable questions of existence at issue in the works of which they are fragments (the ageold questions of the meaning of life, problems of identity and alterity, the possibility of redemptive change, the contrast between how things are in the world and their significance from the point of view of the “higher”).33 As we have seen, they are thus also expressive of struggles with the kind of problems

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that Joyce’s narrative arranger has his central character, Leopold Bloom (contemplating the search for truth, the enigmas of life, and the possibilities of “social and moral redemption” in the early hours of June 17, 1904), refer to as problems “of a different order of difficulty” (U, 687, 729, 700, 699). Problems of this order, as Wittgenstein suggests in a notebook entry about Tolstoy, engage our attention at the level of the will rather than just the intellect.34 The gauntlet they throw down amounts to more than the multiple calls for erudition that works like Joyce’s and Wittgenstein’s also famously entail. If such works testify to the accuracy of Joyce’s own glib declaration that all the “enigmas and puzzles” he had put in it would “keep the professors busy for centuries”35 and to James Conant’s and Michael Kremer’s apt portrayals of the plight faced by first-time readers of the Tractatus, it is because the puzzles they present to us both include and exceed the kind of reader-be-damned conundrums we can turn to commentaries and concordances to solve.36 Wittgenstein’s and Joyce’s different treatments of problems of a different order of difficulty in their respective texts turn on their adherence to Wittgenstein’s credo “anything your reader can do for himself, leave to him” and his view that the true difficulty of philosophy lies not in the difficulty posed by doctrines or theories that provide us with systematic answers but in the ethical difficulty of working to bring about a change of (spiritual and philosophical) attitude characterized by a certain clarity of outlook that gives us peace from our questions and allows us to approach life with courage and wonder and without resignation (CV 77). The different order of difficulty that animates “Ithaca” and the Tractatus has to do with the ethical significance of a yearning for— and self-perfecting work toward— an ever-elusive transformation to an unspecified personal and philosophical clarity that would, ideally, culminate in our “seeing the world in the right way,” or living “happily” in Wittgenstein’s sense. I said above that resolute readings of the Tractatus offer us important ways of seeing Wittgenstein’s affinity with some of the central concerns of literary modernism that might be otherwise lost on us were we to pursue more standard readings of that book. First of all, reading the Tractatus resolutely keeps us attuned to the “different order of difficulty” at issue in the (already intellectually challenging) book. It helps us account for Wittgenstein’s kinship with modernism by prompting us to relate the puzzling project he famously described as “strictly philosophical and at the same time literary” to his modernist literary contemporaries’ own notorious experimentation with difficulties of various stripes.37 The Tractatus is a book that looks difficult; it looks difficult in the way we might expect a logical-philosophical treatise to look. But the trick is that the real difficulty of the text lies in the deep, person-

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ally transformative work it demands of readers, work that begins only after we have figured out that the logical theory we thought made the book hard going was really not its true difficulty at all. Nor was it its point. Wittgenstein tells us in the preface that the Tractatus is kein Lehrbuch— it is not a textbook, not a work of doctrine. In the letter he wrote in 1919 to Ludwig von Ficker, publisher of the Austrian literary and cultural journal Der Brenner, Wittgenstein famously declares the aim of his book to be an ethical one. The work consists of two parts, he tells von Ficker; the first is presented in the book’s content, while the second part, the “important” one, he says, is the one he has not written down but has instead remained silent about.38 The assurance Wittgenstein gives von Ficker in the letter— that the book has much “in” it that a philosophical layperson would want to say himself, if only he could recognize it within the form of the “strange” or foreign-seeming ( fremd) text— has led Diamond to suggest that Wittgenstein means to address the Tractatus to the ordinary person’s understanding rather than to her ignorance.39 His efforts to do so, I would argue here, hinge upon the work he does to draw his readers’ attention not only to the differences between “regular” and “different” orders of difficulty but also to the complicated interaction between them, for both play a role in the peculiar method of ethical instruction he employs in his book. Understanding that method means following Wittgenstein’s advice to von Ficker and looking first to what Diamond has called the “frame” of the Tractatus: its preface and conclusion. In the preface, Wittgenstein says that the book’s purpose would be met if it gave pleasure to the person who read it “with understanding.” Later in the preface, Wittgenstein declares “the truth of the thoughts communicated in the book . . . unassailable and definitive.” He believes he has found “the final solution of the problems.” The boldness of this statement is quickly undermined, however, by the addendum he makes shortly thereafter: “And if I am not mistaken in this belief, then the second thing in which the value of this work consists is it shows how little has been done when these problems are solved” (TLP, pp. 3– 5). In proposition 6.521, Wittgenstein asserts that even if we were to find solutions to all scientific questions, the problems of life’s meaning would remain untouched. The only answer, he says there, is that there is no question left; the solution to the problem of life is to be found in its vanishing (“Is this not the reason,” he asks parenthetically, “why those who have found, after a long period of doubt, that the sense of life became clear to them have been unable to say what constituted that sense?”).40 On the final page of the Tractatus, at proposition 6.54, Wittgenstein tells readers that all the constituent propositions of his purported treatise are “simply nonsense.” Understanding him, the author— and the philosophical

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labor in which he is engaged (and seeks to engage readers) depends on their recognizing this.41 He describes the book’s nonsensical propositions as “elucidations.” We are to throw them away, along with the proverbial ladder he famously invokes, once they have served their pedagogical purpose of helping us attain the clarity the book aspires to bestow on us. The reader who approaches the book with the understanding Wittgenstein solicits at the outset “must overcome [überwinden] these propositions; then he will see the world in the right way” (6.54). In the closing proposition 7, Wittgenstein repeats the assertion he first makes in the preface: “What we cannot speak about we must be silent about.” The work of philosophy, for Wittgenstein, is an activity of clarification. As such, it consists not in the construction and deployment of new theories destined to solve fundamental dilemmas about how we ought to live and think, but in the work of striving to gain clarity about our relationship to the life we already lead and the language we have already mastered.42 Reading the Tractatus with the understanding Wittgenstein calls for in the preface means attending to both of the “parts” he mentions in his letter to von Ficker: the part presented in the body of the work and the more important part to be found in the absence of what it says. In the first, Wittgenstein offers up an apparent metaphysical theory in order to display to readers our tendency to succumb to an attraction to the nonsense from which he would deliver us. He contrives a work of logico-philosophical nonsense and uses it as a metaphysical lure. He first draws readers temporarily into taking seriously the illusion that what he is saying makes sense, only then to explode this illusion from within by showing us that the sentences that have seduced us into thinking that they made sense are simply meaningless.43 We reach the end of the book not by getting to the last page but by arriving at a point in Wittgenstein’s philosophical activity at which the elucidation has served its purpose.44 Paying attention to the second, “important” part of the book, then, means paying attention to its transformative ethical aim. This, in turn, depends on what Diamond calls entering imaginatively into the project of trying to understand the author, the self-conscious utterer of nonsense, and attending to what we can learn from his silence.45 As Diamond writes, “The Tractatus can help one to understand the ethical only if one oneself turns the absence of the ethical in it into something that transforms one’s understanding.”46 The change the book aspires to bring about in its readers’ ethical outlook shows forth not in new doctrinal knowledge but in the character of the readers’ relationship to the questions of life. Those who would read the Tractatus with the understanding Wittgenstein seeks likely begin by wrestling with the apparent difficulty at issue on the

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bottom rung of his ladder (from which point the Tractatus appears to be advancing a set of theories about logical form and the relationship between language and world). Readers start off worrying about the difficult challenge of trying to figure out the theses the Tractatus purportedly presents and how they hang together logically. But the more arduous challenge the Tractatus puts to its readers involves getting them first to overcome their confused attraction to what the book’s propositions have to tell them. Wittgenstein aims to lead readers to recognize that the sentences of the book— and the (pseudo-)doctrine they amount to— are nothing more than the nonsense he says they are. Thus, at some point in the philosophical development Wittgenstein induces them to undertake, readers must relinquish the call of the first-order difficulty at play in his book in favor of seeing it as a component part of the complex overall method of philosophical instruction he employs in the project as a whole.47 They must divert their primary attentions and energies away from this firstorder difficulty if they are ever successfully to climb Wittgenstein’s ladder to face (and, ideally, ultimately surmount) the deeper order of difficulty (of coming to see things with a certain clarity of vision) that will allow them ultimately to throw that ladder, now a superannuated crutch, away. Just what such an enlightened position (or the world seen from it) would look like from a practical standpoint, however, remains rather mysterious. And Wittgenstein, who consistently eschewed explanation, gives us none. Joyce and Wittgenstein attend in their separate works to the human striving for resolution of the ongoing questions that Tolstoy thematizes in his Confession. Yet their more modernist formal and pedagogical commitments render the conclusions they offer in “Ithaca” and the Tractatus (the abrupt closure of the first in a larger-than-life full stop; the illuminating self-destruction of the second and its announcement that the propositions we have struggled to make sense of come to nothing more than nonsense we are to overcome) far more immediately baffling. Wittgenstein and Joyce both leave to engaged readers the ongoing interpretive work of trying to figure out the stakes of the endings of their respective texts well beyond their final pages. As such, neither Wittgenstein’s overall project nor Joyce’s is, strictly speaking, conclusive. Their shared commitment to leaving readers with such endings is something we can view in the wider context of modernist authors working under the influence of what Virginia Woolf called the “inconclusiveness of the Russian mind”— the sense she finds conveyed in the works of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov “that there is no answer, that . . . life presents question after question which must be left to sound on and on after the story is over in hopeless interrogation that fills us with a deep, and finally it may be with a resentful, despair.”48 If Joyce’s and Wittgenstein’s projects leave us with questions that resound

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in the wake of their books’ culminating points, it is because they depend, each in their different ways, on defying (and thereby revising) their readers’ expectations about the sort of answer (or nonanswer) able to grant them relief from the search for satisfying resolutions to the significant problems of life. Although the epigrammatic passages from Joyce and Wittgenstein express a failure to find, or an inability to put into meaningful words, any clear-cut answers to the questions they pose about life’s meaning, they speak as strongly to a sense of satisfaction in the yearning they convey as they do to any despair at its lack of fulfillment. Internal to Wittgenstein’s remarks and those from the “Ithaca” chapter’s catechetical Q&A is the suggestion that it is possible to arrive at a certain kind of peace either with or from the kind of difficult questions at issue in these two texts and to come to take an attitude of acceptance in the face of these recurring questions and the kind of answers one does find (even when such answers only consist in the disappearance of the question or appear at the moment the quest is relinquished, and are somehow seemingly ineffable). Books of Facts and Ethics In his “Lecture on Ethics,” Wittgenstein describes two “fantastic or impossible books.” The Tractatus, Eli Friedlander observes, strives to incorporate aspects of both. The first, a book of ethics, deals with pure transcendence. The second “presents us with the world as the sum total of facts, letting us survey or contemplate all that is the case extensively or exhaustively.”49 Wittgenstein describes it as follows: Suppose one of you were an omniscient person and . . . 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. There will simply be facts, facts, and facts but no Ethics. . . . It seems to me obvious that nothing we could ever think or say should be the thing. . . . Our words used as we use them in science, are vessels capable of containing and conveying meaning and sense, natural meaning and sense. Ethics, if it is anything, is supernatural and our words will only express facts; as a teacup will only hold a teacup full of water even if I were to pour out a gallon over it.50

Joyce’s encyclopedic modernist “big book,” Ulysses, aspires to the comprehensiveness and omniscience exemplified in Wittgenstein’s imagined book of

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facts. The “Ithaca” episode provides us with a “description of the world” (in “the character of a proposition of natural science” [TLP 6.111]). Like the Tractatus, “Ithaca” positions itself between the extremes of the exhaustive book of facts and the apocalyptic book of transcendence by exploring the middle ground of our yearning to grasp life’s significance within everyday experience.51 Joyce’s authorial tactics in “Ithaca” are similar to Wittgenstein’s in the Tractatus not only because he tells his story in the guise of a pseudodoctrine, uttering a litany of “facts, facts, and facts . . . capable of containing and conveying meaning and sense” and leaving it to the reader to figure out for herself the relationship between the episode’s peculiar form and the way it engages ethical questions. Joyce also puts his citational use of logical-scientific language to work in support of the view he shares with his philosophical contemporary: that the “ethical spirit” that pervades everyday life is something that defies systematic scientistic explanation. Rather than being a subject that can be summed up in a doctrine or taught directly, this spirit shows forth in everyday language and is best conveyed by aesthetic means. In a discussion of the kind of instruction we can hope to find “in” a book of nonsense, whose most important “part” is not to be found among its pages, Diamond turns to yet another of the imaginary books that figure into Wittgenstein’s philosophical lessons. Wittgenstein’s fictive text, The World as I Found It, provides her with a point of departure for her exploration of the way the Tractatus works to change our conception of what (and how) a book of philosophy can teach us (TLP 5.631). Diamond’s reading of Wittgenstein, and the relation of his thought to literature, is informed by Iris Murdoch’s understanding of moral philosophy as reflecting the idea that the world is not fundamentally comprehensible but ultimately mysterious.52 For Diamond, what links the Tractatus with the works of literature Wittgenstein admired is that those works explore our ethical sense of life’s mysteriousness by treating it not as something to be explicitly narrated and explained but, as Wittgenstein once wrote, as “unutterably contain[ed] in what is uttered” in the work.53 Works of literature that deal with the ethical in this way, Diamond points out, place on readers demands similar to those Wittgenstein makes of readers of the Tractatus. They must “respond to what is not there by making of the book something that can be significant in the spirit in which they meet what happens, what needs to be done, and what has to be suffered.”54 In spite of all it has to say about the world of 1904 Dublin, there is nothing in Ulysses that can provide Bloom, or the reader, with definitive answers to the problems of life. Joyce’s book, like Wittgenstein’s, prompts us to transform our desires for certain kinds of answers and to reassess our conception of the

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ways in which works of literature or philosophy are able provide them. As we have seen, Joyce constructs “Ithaca” in such a way that “what happens, what needs to be done and what has to be suffered” by Bloom and Stephen is all rendered in the chapter’s impersonal catechism in its “cosmic physical, psychical . . . equivalent . . . so that . . . the reader [will] know everything and know it in the baldest, coldest way.”55 Despite Joyce’s claims about the chapter’s stark transmission to the reader of “everything” in its most crystalline form, “Ithaca” nonetheless demands that we pay attention to ways in which he, too, “writes absences” into the excess of diverse bits of information delivered in the questions and answers of his chapter.56 Readers get a first hint of the absences within the volley of facts in “Ithaca” in their initial contact with the episode’s structure. The impersonal catechetical form of “Ithaca” keeps readers at a critical and affective distance from which to observe all that transpires in the quizzical episode and interpretively assess its meaning and retrospective illumination of the larger novel. In “Ithaca,” Bloom explores a wide range of issues of popular science and culture, history, linguistics, and mathematics. The scientific and historical data that enriches “Ithaca” confers meaning on Bloom and Stephen’s interaction by providing them with access to creative and informed explanations for a such things as “the generic conditions imposed by natural, as distinct from human law”; the progression of Darwinian evolution; the development of the “guttural sounds, diacritic aspirations, epenthetic and servile letters” of different languages; the properties of a molecule of water; and the “various features of the constellations” (U 697, 671, 700). In his canvassing of ways to “elucidate the mystery,” Bloom broaches questions about such topics as the multisecular and mystical properties of water, the secular problem of the quadrature of the circle, the ineffability of the tetragrammaton, and the possibility of redemption (702, 671, 699, 724, 700). Throughout his musings on these diverse bits of practical, theological, and theoretical knowledge, he also reflects on more poignant topics of “interindividual relations” (U 668). Before him lies a present haunted by an “accumulation of the past” that includes the premature death of his son and the suicide of his father. Also before him is the “predestination of the future” shaped by the anticipation of his impending old age, his daughter’s immanent adulthood and departure, and the question of how to proceed in the wake of his wife Molly’s adultery (689)— for it is this last looming domestic problem that, “as much as, if not more than, any other most frequently engage[s] his mind: What to do with our wives?” (685) But despite the fact that “Ithaca” touches on such socially and politically charged issues as race and religion and such personally charged issues as

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marital infidelity, jealousy, and mourning, due to its style, “Ithaca” is more successful at disrupting the reader’s emotional connection with the characters and their story than any other chapter in Ulysses. Bloom and Stephen’s long-awaited interaction at 7 Eccles St. is often represented in “Ithaca” with the same rigorous impersonality that characterizes their parting handshake. Here Joyce withholds the external trappings of an affecting farewell, describing their departure from one another with geometrical precision: “How did they take leave, one of the other, in separation?” The response provided is the following: “Standing perpendicular at the same door and on different sides of its base, the lines of their valedictory arms, meeting at any point and forming any angle less than the sum of two right angles” (U 73– 74). Like Bloom and Stephen, the readers of “Ithaca” are “competent keyless citizen[s]” who must enter imaginatively into the catechism and engage in a certain unaccustomed kind of interpretive work if they are to attend to all that is said in the chapter in relation to all that goes unsaid there (U 697).57 Joyce echoes Wittgenstein’s caveat to von Ficker about the Tractatus when he warns that his chapter is “strange,” a “great piece of nonsense.”58 Although he never goes so far as to advise readers to toss aside his book once they have finished it, the candor of Joyce’s description of his authorial technique in “Ithaca” (i.e., as one enabling the transparent delivery of total knowledge) appears questionable to readers who have put in the work of following the challenging text only to be frustrated by its ultimate denial of the dramatic resolution we have been craving. Rather than tell us what will become of his characters at the end of the episode, Joyce leaves us staring at a big punctuation mark and a wealth of possible outcomes and unresolved questions. Seeking a final answer to the final question of the catechism of “Ithaca,” “Where?” (which might seem to be pointing us toward somewhere in Stephen, Bloom, and Molly’s future), the response we find in the place of a narrative ending is an outsized period that puts a full stop to the chapter’s questions and answers. The final sentence of the episode points to a where of which it does not speak, but is instead silent about: Womb? Weary? He rests. He has travelled. With? Sinbad the Sailor and Tinbad the Tailor and Jinbad the Jailer and Whinbad the Whaler and Ninbad the Nailer and Finbad the Failer and Binbad the Bailer and Pinbad the Pailer and Minbad the Mailer and Hinbad the Hailer and Rin-

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bad the Railer and Dinbad the Kailer and Vinbad the Quailer and Linbad the Yailer and Xinbad the Phthailer. When? Going to a dark bed there was a square round Sinbad the Sailor roc’s auk’s egg in the night of the bed of all the auks of the rocs of Darkinbad the Brightdayler. Where?

•

(U 737)

As DiBattista points out, the catechism is “the anti-narrative form par excellence.” The form is therefore uniquely suited to a counterepiphanic aesthetic strategy. By adopting it in “Ithaca,” Joyce engages parodically in a pedagogical method widely employed in religious and secular education from the late eighteenth century. Involving rote memorization and recitation, the catechism is a discursive practice based on the form of a dialogue but expressive of the monologic voice of the institutionalized dogma it is meant to teach. It is a mode of questioning that serves a fixed pedagogical purpose. It not only provides pupils with systematic training; it offers proof of their mastery of a given doctrine through their ability to respond to each of its questions with the definite answer the form requires. As such, the catechism intrinsically “foreclose[s] all possibilities of error and improvisation.”59 It is a mode of questioning that in many ways brooks no interrogation. Joyce works throughout Ulysses to subvert totalizing ideologies through his changing styles and multivocalism. One of his aims in adopting the style of an impersonal catechism in “Ithaca” is to call into question our reliance on closed epistemological systems. By appropriating the catechism’s pseudodialogical form, Joyce adopts an antitheoretical stance akin to Wittgenstein’s. The form enables Joyce to issue, in imitation of a voice of totalizing authority (or at least of a mischievous altar boy making fun of such a voice), a humorous critique of the institutional claims to complete knowledge that the rote exchange represents. His loose imitation of methods of drilling dogma into young minds seeks to undermine our faith in systematic questions and the answers they provide. Even the pretense of complete and thorough encyclopedic knowledge still leaves us longing for elusive solutions. More important, by casting Bloom and Stephen’s conversations, thoughts, and hopes in an impersonal catechism that attests to a craving for (and urge to manufacture) answers to every imaginable question, Joyce also brings us closer to our own longing for answers. This longing is expressive of a desire

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not for knowledge but for redemptive answers to the recurring, irresolvable questions of existence DiBattista calls the “perennial questions” and Diamond calls the “great riddles.” Such questions present us with a mode in which to address (ethically and aesthetically) a world that is, in Diamond’s and Murdoch’s sense, fundamentally incomprehensible yet all too familiar. The “perennial questions” at issue in “Ithaca” and the Tractatus, DiBattista points out, “never admit to definitive answers but encourage us to devise solutions that answer to our own specific needs and ends.”60 The catechism in “Ithaca” provides Bloom with a mode of devising unforeseen solutions to the “difficult problems of imaginary or real life” in the chapter. Recall that in “Ithaca,” Bloom finds the answers to his search “not bearing on all points.” Wittgenstein speaks in the Tractatus of problems resolving only in their vanishing. He declares that the value of his book consists first in its treatment of the final solution of the problems it deals with and second in its demonstration of how little is accomplished by this solution. Both Joyce’s and Wittgenstein’s texts defy conclusive readings and exceed the reader’s attempts to grasp and sum them up in any neat fashion. In his depiction of Bloom’s and Stephen’s interrogations of the world in “Ithaca,” Joyce, like Wittgenstein, is far more interested in displaying the ways people struggle to order their lives than he is in giving us decisive answers to the questions they pose. Through the ordered series of questions and answers in “Ithaca,” Joyce conveys the chaotic and unfinished nature of life. He pays homage, if not to truth itself, then to our yearning to search for it. Instead of giving us a straightforward account of the final “truth” about what will happen to Bloom and Molly and Stephen, Joyce offers us a representation of the many ways the subject of truth and ethics and the meaning of life can be discussed, deferred, avoided, or (both literally and figuratively) put to rest. Joyce’s narrative (which he claimed is meant to render the myth of Odysseus sub specie temporis nostri), like Musil’s unfinished novel, then, is to some degree an essay in Möglichkeitssinn, a sense of possibility, a life lived, if not sub specie aeternis, in Wittgenstein’s epiphanic sense, then sub specie possibilitatis.61 For Joyce is more concerned with refining readers’ interpretive skills by confronting them with a wealth of possibilities than he is with giving definitive answers. “The World of the Happy Is Different from That of the Unhappy” Tolstoy’s narration of his own crisis of meaning and his chronicle of his attendant quest for answers in A Confession ultimately resolve in his reaching a point of peace and acceptance through his reverence for (and eventual attun-

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ement to) the outlook of faith and simplicity that marks the life of the common Russian peasant community he aspires to inhabit. However inconclusive their endings, Wittgenstein’s and Joyce’s texts, underwritten as they are by narratives of quest and conversion, also strive toward such a sense of understanding, clarity, and at-home-ness in everyday language and world. This sense of understanding, both suggest, is intimately related to a striving for the Nostos Joyce revives in the final chapters of Ulysses. It is imbued with a sense of longing to be at home (again) in the language and world we already know.62 The attitude of harmony Tolstoy achieves at the end of his confession becomes a source of the outlook Wittgenstein calls “the happy” in the Tractatus and the notebooks he kept from 1914 to 1917. At Tractatus 6.43, Wittgenstein describes, in characteristically compressed fashion, this ethico-spiritual attitude: “Good or bad willing changes . . . the limits of the world,” he writes, “not the facts, not the things that can be expressed in language. . . . The world of the happy is a different one from that of the unhappy.” In the notebooks, Wittgenstein describes the “happy” person as one who lives with purpose, in agreement and harmony with the world.63 He lives not in time but in an eternal present, without hope or fear, even in the face of inevitable death (N 74– 76). For such a person, “wanting does not stand in any logical connection with its own fulfillment.” Living “happily” means recognizing that the world is independent of the will; one is powerless to bend its happenings to meet one’s desires (N 73). This attitude plays a fundamental role in the outlook of philosophical clarity that Wittgenstein promises will be available to readers once they have grappled with the dialectical task he presents them in the Tractatus and have mounted the elucidating rungs of his figurative ladder. The “happy” worldview Wittgenstein tersely describes there, I claim, also informs the fallible grace that characterizes Bloom’s attitude of acquiescent self-possession at the end of “Ithaca.” Bloom is an unexpected literary exemplar of a person living with a Wittgensteinian “happy” outlook. He faces his cuckolded situation with “more abnegation than jealousy, less envy than equanimity” (U 733). In spite of his inability to reach an understanding about human existence, and despite his dejection about its imperfections, Bloom takes an attitude of humor, curiosity, and ultimately peace and humility. He faces the world with the knowledge that he is powerless to bend its happenings to meet his will. Bloom’s clarity in “Ithaca” is paradoxically reflected in the sense of purpose he achieves by navigating the “void incertitude” with a sense of wonder expressed in the continual questions he poses about everyday life as it passes

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inexorably “slowly, quickly, evenly, round and round and round the rim of a round precipitous globe” (U 681). He finds satisfaction in the world despite the “apathy of the stars”: His mood? He had not risked, he did not expect, he had not been disappointed, he was satisfied. What satisfied him? To have sustained no positive loss. To have brought a positive gain to others. Light to the gentiles. (U 676, 734)

In the wake of Bloom’s thoughts about the “many social conditions, the product of inequality and avarice and international animosity” he desires to amend, the catechism continues: He believed then that human life was infinitely perfectible, eliminating these conditions? There remained the generic conditions imposed by natural, as distinct from human law, as integral parts of the human whole: the necessity of destruction to procure alimentary sustenance: the painful character of the ultimate functions of separate existence, the agonies of birth and death: the monotonous menstruation of simian and (particularly) human females extending from age of puberty to the menopause: inevitable accidents at sea, in mines and factories: certain very painful maladies and their resultant surgical operations, innate lunacy and congenital criminality, decimating epidemics: catastrophic cataclysms which make terror the basis of human mentality: seismic upheavals the epicentres of which are located in densely populated regions: the fact of vital growth, through convulsions of metamorphosis from infancy through maturity to decay. Why did he desist from speculation? Because it was a task for a superior intelligence to substitute other more acceptable phenomena in place of less acceptable phenomena to be removed. (U 697)

Bloom finds comfort in his misapprehension of Stephen’s affirmation of his own syllogistic movement from the known to the unknown, realizing that “as a competent keyless citizen he had proceeded energetically from the unknown to the known through the incertitude of the void” (U 697). Joyce’s early interest in epiphanies gives way in “Ithaca” to ruminations

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that grant Bloom a certain peace, short of renunciation, and a new depth of understanding that allows him to go on, though his problems remain unresolved. It is worth noting here that if Ulysses is marked by the absence of epiphany, it is also marked by the absence of any dramatic shift or transformation in outlook on Bloom’s part. It is as if Bloom possesses a “happy” outlook from the very beginning of the episode, if not the book itself. His is a conversion that is, in some sense, not one. In the progress of his “meditations of involution,” he finds only that “nought nowhere was never reached” (U 699). The closest thing to a transformative turning point for Bloom comes when he finds implicit resolution (notably in yet another question positioned as a catechetical answer) to the “selfevident” last of his three enigmas. There his exploration of his problems finally coalesces in the strangely sudden silent, post- or even antiepiphanic realization that, like Moses when his candle went out, he too is fumbling in the dark. Bloom’s moment of enlightenment toward the end of his daylong odyssey is thus not the sudden unaccountably transformative illumination experienced by the allegorical blind man who gains sight in Tolstoy’s reworking of the Gospels (inspiring Wittgenstein’s parenthetical question at the end of the Tractatus 6.521) and is able to “see the world in the right way.” It is instead something more like a deferred (and unstated) sort of ironic clarity on the part of the blind man’s more cynical (yet still reservedly optimistic) opposite, reached in the course of his wanderings through the everyday comedy of human life and realizing philosophically that the cosmic joke is somehow on him. What Joyce’s Bloom sees in “Ithaca” is also something akin to what Cavell takes Socrates (with all the “faded irony” or “stuffy humility” of his own wisdom) to have seen in his discovery of philosophy as “the effort to find answers and permit questions, which nobody knows the way to nor the answer to any better than yourself.” What Socrates sees, Cavell writes in an almost Ithacan vein, is “that, about the questions which were causing him wonder and hope and confusion and pain, he knew that he did not know what no man can know, and that any man could learn what he wanted to learn.”64 At the end of the catechetical engagement with the “difficult problems of imaginary or real life” in “Ithaca,” the phenomenon of the sudden revelation of epiphanic insight gives way to a depiction of a more muted, measured, and protracted postepiphanic understanding, a secular modernist kind of grace (bestowed not from without by an external divine but from within, through Bloom’s work of questing and questioning and revising his various searches until he arrives at an imperfect but satisfactory peace, clarity, and acceptance of life lived in the present), one that gives Bloom rest from— or simply puts an almost arbitrary Ithacan full stop to— his unresolved questions, even if

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that profane state of grace provides only temporary respite. Though a “conscious reactor against the void incertitude,” by the end of the chapter, Bloom is nonetheless able to find qualified peace with his problems (“He rests. He has traveled”), if only for a night (U 737). “The Place I Have to Get to Is a Place I Must Already Be at Now” The shift Joyce makes from attention to epiphany in his earlier works to Ulysses’s treatment of a quest for understanding that would confer a sense of being at home in one’s language and world runs parallel to the transition that occurs between Wittgenstein’s early and later work in the philosophical method with which he approaches the search for clarity. Although in his later work, Wittgenstein continues to pursue the therapeutic goal of achieving a change in his readers’ self-understanding through an improved relationship with language, he comes to see his mode of philosophical presentation in the Tractatus as flawed due to its overly dogmatic assertions. Conant contrasts Wittgenstein’s early and later philosophical methods by calling attention to his endeavors in his later work to use frequent exchanges with his interlocutor in order to maintain closer contact with his reader and his ongoing, evolving problems. In the Investigations, Wittgenstein relinquishes the Kierkegaardian strategy of “deceiving the reader into the truth” that he uses in the Tractatus. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein’s method entails “leading his interlocutor through an elaborate structure of apparent claims in order finally to round on him,” disabusing him all at once of the mistaken impression that what he was following all along was a progressive chain of arguments. The method he adopts in the Investigations, on the other hand, “is to round on his interlocutor at every point, to press at every juncture.”65 Caleb Thompson offers insights about the evolution of Wittgenstein’s philosophical method from his early to his later writings that shed light on the fate of the Joycean epiphany in Ulysses. The difference between Wittgenstein’s earlier and later methods comes to a difference between a conception of philosophical activity as one that seeks to bring about a linear ascent to perfect clarity on the one hand and one that sees it as an ongoing struggle against a persistent temptation to give into illusion on the other. The distinction is visible in the difference between two remarks, one from the Tractatus and another from a 1930s manuscript. At Tractatus 6.54, Wittgenstein writes that his reader must throw away the ladder of his elucidatory nonsensical sentences once he has overcome his need for it. Returning to philosophy some years later, Wittgenstein again speaks of ladders, this time treating the image quite differently: “I might say:

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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). In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein expresses the impulse to transcend his fallible human condition. In the later passage, he is accepting of that condition, as Bloom is of his in Ulysses. In the Tractatus, he talks of climbing to the heights atop a ladder, from which to survey the world “in the right way.” In the second, he goes (back) to “the place [he] must already be at now,” committed to exploring the lay of the land as it is. Kremer supplements Wittgenstein’s Tractarian ladder metaphor with his later call for more grounded, localized investigation: The “ladder” of the Tractatus leads us not higher and higher above the world but out of the pit and into the world, in which we are now free to live.66 In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein seeks to engage the reader in a philosophical activity of clarification. He aims to lead the reader to a point where he can live comfortably in his own linguistic world— in part by dispelling the illusion of having transcended that world. But by holding onto the idea that perfect clarity is attainable (in complete analysis, a single system of all genuine propositions), Wittgenstein clings, in spite of himself, to the notion that there is something higher than the “colloquial language [that] is part of the human organism and is not less complicated than it,” thereby betraying the goals he set with that book (TLP 4.002). The metaphysical viewpoint of which the Tractatus aims to cure us still haunts the book and its method. Kevin Cahill, who sees the Tractatus as meant to render a cultural critique of the “entire modern worldview,” points out the irony of Wittgenstein’s effort to engage readers in a search for something like a final vision, thereby succumbing to one of modernity’s greatest traps.67 In the Investigations, Wittgenstein no longer organizes his propositions hierarchically to form a linear argument. He no longer imagines the possibility of completely overcoming philosophical problems. Instead, he searches for clarity in particular cases, using particular methods suited to those cases. He no longer holds out for a grand sort of revelatory discovery but engages in a project of getting readers to see more clearly what they already know. In a remark from the 1940s, Wittgenstein again speaks of ladders, this time in an attempt to disabuse his readers of the illusion of ascent. He says of writing about the self, “You write about yourself from your own height. You don’t stand on stilts or a ladder, but on your bare feet” (CV 33). By the time Wittgenstein writes the Investigations, his earlier talk of the solution of the problem lying in the vanishing of the problem is given a new formulation in the context of a different conception of philosophical method. In Investiga-

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tions §133, Wittgenstein writes, “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.— Instead, we now demonstrate a method, by examples; and the series of examples can be broken off.— Problems are solved (difficulties eliminated), not a single problem. There is not a philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, like different therapies.”68 Here, Wittgenstein no longer entertains a fantasy of ascent, a one-time mystical overcoming. He has relinquished what Terry Eagleton has called the distinctively high-modernist gesture of irony with which the Tractatus cancels itself in favor of “the openended, pluralistic, generously demotic investigations of his later period.”69 In the Investigations, he no longer imagines that there will be a single solution to a single problem. Instead, there are multiple methods, multiple ways of approaching the unending problems with which we are presented every day. Particular problems are resolved, and so disappear, and so one can stop doing philosophy for a time, until the next problem presents itself and calls for a different therapy. This, I want to say, is the kind of peace that Bloom finds by the end of the long exchange of questions and answers in “Ithaca.” If Bloom’s outlook enables him to see the world clearly, it is not because it is part of any narrative of ascent we might attribute to the Tractatus. Bloom looks upon the world not from atop a ladder. As Franco Moretti indicates, he gazes at the spectacle of the “heaventree of stars” above him with his feet planted firmly on the ground.70 He concludes logically that the constellation hung with humid nightblue fruit is but a utopia, there being “no known method from the known to the unknown” (U 698– 701). Bloom strives not to transcend the ordinary to attain a higher perfection. He achieves clarity through acceptance of his life in all its imperfections. The problems and questions that the catechism tackles randomly on a piecemeal basis are not overcome all at once at the end of the chapter. Nor will they be. What Conant says about the later Wittgenstein also applies to Joyce’s treatment of Bloom’s predicament at the end of his Odyssean quest: the business of moral or religious life is never finished for him.71 Bloom conducts an investigation of “the place he is already at now.” His “long and involved journeyings” compel him “to travel over a wide field of thought criss-cross in every direction” and finally lead him home, to “stop doing philosophy” at least until morning (PI xxix). The last page of “Ithaca” finds Bloom and Molly “at rest relatively to themselves and to each other . . . each and both carried westward, forward and rereward respectively, by the proper perpetual motion of the earth through everchanging tracks of neverchanging space” (U 737).

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The kind of peace from quest and question that Bloom finds at the end of the long catechism in “Ithaca” can be understood in relation to a remark Wittgenstein made in a 1930 notebook entry: If someone believes himself to have discovered the solution to the problem of life . . . then in order to refute himself he need only reflect that there was a time when this “solution” had not been discovered; but it must have been possible to live then too. . . . And that is the position in which we find ourselves in logic. If there comes to seem to be a “solution” to logical (philosophical) problems. We should need only to caution ourselves that there was a time when they had not been solved (and even at that time people must have been able to live and think). (CV 4)

There is a sense in which, for Bloom, as for Wittgenstein, the solution to the problem of life is indeed seen in the vanishing of the problem, if only because he allows (or the catechism’s abrupt conclusion obliges) his problems to dissolve (and as water in the episode, to “hold in solution all soluble substances” [U 700]) at the end of the day into the dreams of “sound repose” just before the chapter ends, facing a multitude of unresolved questions with an oversized Punkt. In silence.

10

Lectures on Ethics: Wittgenstein and Kafka Yi-Ping Ong

Wittgenstein’s “A Lecture on Ethics” (1929) and Kafka’s “Ein Bericht für eine Akademie” (“A Report for an Academy,” 1917) present occasions of instruction. The lecturer speaks, addressing his audience with words that mix flattery and admonition. As his text unfolds, the audience members become aware that this is no usual lesson: time and again, they arrive at the limits of what cannot be taught. Yet the lecturer presses on, proceeding in his task by informing against the very possibility of his feat. Just as he arrives at what appears to be a conclusion, he absconds altogether from the position of instructor. The pedagogical situation here is troubled by a kind of paradox, or rather by the wish to instruct and be instructed in what lies beyond the scope of instruction.1 “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,” confesses Wittgenstein in “A Lecture on Ethics”— “to go beyond the world  .  .  . beyond significant language.”2 Written and published only twelve years prior to Wittgenstein’s lecture, and performed at Kafka’s request as a Lektüre (a reading or lecture) by Elsa Brod in 1917, “A Report for an Academy” takes up a similar attempt to remain within the bounds of “significant language,” a language that cannot state what matters most. In both of these dense and intricate texts, the form of the first-person lecture is no mere inert background convention but rather emerges as an intentional strategy of voice. The possibility or impossibility of lecturing, teaching, documenting, and establishing something seem to bear a deep relation both to the form the work takes and to the question it raises: what is at stake in one’s desire to speak about what Wittgenstein calls early on in his lecture “the meaning of life” (5)? A choreography of and at the limits of language unfurls throughout these texts, imparting the sense that one moves through a space whose bounds are

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assailed and constructed at once by one’s very movements.3 The cage, the limit, the boundary— all are invoked to indicate Wittgenstein’s and Kafka’s concern with what it means to accept or to reject a certain restraint. Contra attempts to locate both of these figures in the wake of issues raised by an Austrian fin-de-siècle Sprachkrise, then, I shall argue that the central aim of these texts is not to lay bare the problematic nature of language itself (hence the limited fruitfulness of interpreting them through the terms of a “language skepticism” associated with heirs of Hofmannsthal and Mauthner) but rather to focus our attention on the difficulties of recognizing our own position within a form of life. The very difficulty of interpreting the performative impulse underlying what Wittgenstein calls “this running against the walls of our cage,” and what Kafka’s ape exhibits as a drama of cagedness, provides the conditions for confronting the simultaneous impossibility and temptation of ethical knowledge (12). Consider the extraordinary scene of instruction described by Wittgenstein in Culture and Value below. What is being taught cannot really be taught. What is being learned is not a particular domain of knowledge or truth but rather the meaning of life itself: Instruction in a religious faith, therefore, would have to take the form of a portrayal, a description, of that system of reference, while at the same time being an appeal to conscience. And this combination would have to result in the pupil himself, of his own accord, passionately taking hold of the system of reference. It would be as though someone were first to let me see the hopelessness of my situation and then show me the means of rescue until, of my own accord, or not at any rate led to it by my instructor, I ran to it and grasped it.4

Wittgenstein’s closing image resonates uncannily with the scene of learning that is related in Kafka’s “A Report for an Academy.” Red Peter, an ape, tells of his awakening in a cage of the steerage of the Hagenbeck steamer, where he gradually discovers what, borrowing Wittgenstein’s words, he might well call the “hopelessness of my situation”: “For the first time in my life, I had no way out; at least I could not move forward; right in front of me was the crate, board joined solidly to board. . . . Dull sobbing, painful flea-picking, tired licking of a coconut, banging my skull against the crate wall . . . in all those things, all I felt was: no way out. . . . I had no way out, but I had to find one, for I could not live without it.”5 Red Peter discovers the only “way out” of his situation by (once again, Wittgenstein’s words) “of his own accord, passionately taking hold of the system of reference” he sees enacted before him, for the impassive sailors, placid in their leisure, make lackadaisical instructors. As they drink away their hours off duty, they poke at him, spit on him, gaze

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curiously at him. Only the sheer intensity of Red Peter’s need to join in their untrammeled movement transfigures this everyday behavior into models of a new way of life to be learned: “He would slowly uncork the bottle and then peer at me as if checking whether I had understood; I confess that I always watched him with wild, with rash vigilance; no human teacher would find such a human student anywhere on earth” (289). Yet even if the sailors aboard the Hagenbeck steamer were to adhere to the task of teaching Red Peter with one tenth of the impassioned zeal he evinces in his study of them, it would make no difference. The kind of case that concerns Wittgenstein and Kafka is one in which the crucial moment of conversion rests on the subject’s decision to take up a form of life as her own. It is possible to view Wittgenstein’s “Lecture” and Kafka’s “Report” as replacement texts, then, but not only in the sense that they demand from the outset to be understood as substitutes for a form of authoritative instruction or knowledge desired by the audience (a knowledge that is, from the point of view of the speaker, impossible to give)— and not only because they offer an alternative to the compulsion to move in ways that are, as Wittgenstein puts it, “perfectly, absolutely hopeless” and that Kafka’s Red Peter describes plainly as suicidal (12). They are replacements in the deeper sense that they seek to re-place certain assumptions concerning the nature of knowledge and instruction, thereby reorienting their audiences to the embeddedness of the self within the world that is the condition of meaning. What remains is to understand how they accomplish this. Although a full explication of the comparison exceeds the scope of this chapter, I should note that I am influenced in this reading by J. M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals (1999), in which the imbrication of the lecture form and the problem of ethical understanding are unmistakable. Lives embeds several intense allusions to Kafka’s “Report” within the text of a lecture by a fictional novelist on ethical issues and embeds that lecture, in turn, within the text of a story delivered as a lecture by Coetzee at the Tanner Lectures on Human Value. The strategy of this narrative form implicates voice, authority, audience, instruction, and surrender to the contingency of the speaking “I” in ways that bear deeply upon this reading. In treating the conventions of the lecture genre— monologic, scripted, academic, informational, authoritative— as crucial to an interpretation of these texts, I shall thus show that the form of the “Lecture on Ethics” illuminates its meaning in ways that have not generally been considered. Indeed, there has been a tendency in the criticism to treat “A Lecture on Ethics” as a presentation, in rather straightforward analytic terms, of the significance of the fact-value distinction to ethics, established first by Hume in the eighteenth century and revised by G. E. Moore in his 1903 Principia Ethica.6 Joachim Schulte summa-

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rizes the prevailing consensus well in the following claim: “The ‘Lecture on Ethics’ is not an original contribution to ethics as a philosophical discipline; it is a thoroughly characteristic document of Wittgenstein’s personality. The fact/value distinction is stressed just as much as it was in the Tractatus.”7 Yet this view overlooks the extent to which Wittgenstein, in and through the very form of his talk, raises significant philosophical questions about whether ethics is teachable, what it would mean to profoundly change one’s form of life, and how to live with others when we do not (always) share the same world.8 Wittgenstein, not unlike Kafka, frames his entire argument according to an ironic subversion of these conventions, rendering the relationship of authority and passivity between lecturer and audience, text and subject, immediately relevant to his philosophical claim. The import of Wittgenstein’s engagement with pedagogical form emerges more starkly when juxtaposed with the canny contrivances of Kafka’s story. “A Report” amplifies key dynamics that appear in “A Lecture on Ethics”: the confusion of entertainment with knowledge in modernity; the attempt to escape encagedness, which figures as a form of silence, hiddenness, and paralysis; and the related conditions of possibility for denying or withdrawing from various sorts of confrontations, reversals, and recognitions. Wittgenstein’s “A Lecture on Ethics” In November 1929, Wittgenstein was invited by C. K. Ogden to give a lecture to the Heretics’ Society at Cambridge University. The society was originally founded as a nonconformist group dedicated to questioning dogmatic authority, especially religious authority. The text that eventually came to be known as “A Lecture on Ethics,” published in The Philosophical Review in 1965, was thus not a lecture delivered as part of an academic philosophy course but rather a self-contained paper of an hour’s length intended for a public audience. Wittgenstein himself draws attention to this context and to the way it inflects his choice of subject matter in the opening remarks of his lecture: When your former secretary honoured me by asking me to read a paper to your society, my first thought was that I would certainly do it and my second thought was that if I was to have the opportunity to speak to you I should speak about something which I am keen on communicating to you and that I should not misuse this opportunity to give you a lecture about, say, logic. I call this a misuse, for to explain a scientific matter to you it would need a course of lectures and not an hour’s paper. Another alternative would have been to give you what’s called a popular-scientific lecture, that is a lecture intended to make you believe that you understand a thing which actually you

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don’t understand, and to gratify what I believe to be one of the lowest desires of modern people, namely the superficial curiosity about the latest discoveries of science. (3– 4)

The tone of these remarks is difficult to interpret. On the one hand, Wittgenstein acknowledges the conventions of academic civility: he declares himself “honoured” by the request and flatters his audience by mentioning his enthusiasm at the prospect of addressing them. On the other hand, however, Wittgenstein subtly undercuts the ostensible purpose of such forums, suggesting that they are often intended to satisfy the “superficial” desire to believe that one has understood something after hearing someone speak about it for a mere hour. His ascription of “the lowest desires of modern people” to the implied audience highlights the special consequences and problems of modernity for the genre of the lecture.9 That science has— or rather, must— become “popular” to be announced in this venue suggests that the lecture has metamorphosed into a kind of theater in which the relationship between entertainment and knowledge is deliberately blurred. Why frame his subject— ethics— in such an oblique manner? Why disclose his scorn toward the conventions surrounding his lecture? Wittgenstein at first appears to draw a contrast between the subject of science and the subject of ethics. A scientific matter is something that would require much time to explain; only a shallow understanding of such a matter could be reached in an hour’s time. In contrast, Wittgenstein appears to imply that an hour is sufficient time in which to speak about ethics and “help to clear up your thoughts about this subject” (4). Yet this statement is, in turn, puzzling. If lecturing on facts would “make you believe that you understand a thing which actually you don’t understand,” how could a one-hour lecture on the nature of ethics possibly “clear up” any misunderstandings about such a vast and complex subject? The oddity of this claim highlights the extent to which the apparent contrast between science and ethics is, in fact, misleading. Although it seems as if “science” and “ethics” are being positioned as two opposing types of subjects, the real opposition is between the desires of the implied audience and those of the actual speaker. Whereas members of the implied audience wish to hear about a subject that interests them in order to gratify their “curiosity about the latest discoveries of science,” Wittgenstein declares that he will speak on “something which I am keen on communicating to you” (4). The opening thereby highlights a recurring concern of the lecturer with the conditions of voice, a concern that anticipates an antagonistic relation between the desire of the speaking self to communicate and the conventions that shape the expectations of the audience. The decision to cast the dramatic

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narrative of his lecture in these terms is both deliberate and intimately related to a strain of frustration that builds throughout the lecture, reaching its resolution only at the end: “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” (11– 12). This is a lecture not “on ethics” but rather on “the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk Ethics or Religion”: the tendency and, indeed, the desire to run up against the limits of what we can meaningfully say. Here, as elsewhere, we may construe the import of the claim in one of (at least) two ways. The first turns upon a view of language and its relation to reality: insofar as ethics involves the aspiration to speak about matters of absolute value by using a language of facts, it insists on using language in an impossible way. Such an interpretation, however, consigns the “Lecture” to a conventional restatement of the fact-value distinction. In contrast, we may hear Wittgenstein differently by attending to the avowal and position of the speaker himself.10 Eschewing the detached view of a spectator and shifting to a distinctly confessional register— “My whole tendency and I believe the tendency of all men” (my emphasis)— Wittgenstein locates the impetus of the argument within the sphere of his own desire, his own interests, and his own tendencies, simultaneously identifying these as human desires and interests. Heard in this way, the introduction to the lecture suggests that what it means to inform another of that which we are most keen on communicating— or, as Wittgenstein puts it later on, the “meaning of life”— depends not on settling an argument but rather on first finding, or refinding, the place from which any expression on such matters can occur. The split between the implied audience and the speaker at the beginning of the lecture hence emerges as a split that is inherent to our practice of speaking ethically. As the audience, we wish to “add to our knowledge”; as the speaker, we wish to speak of something meaningful that goes beyond mere scientific facts. The attempt to satisfy our desires by making claims about the ultimate good or right ends in hopelessness and captivity— “running against the walls of our cage,” as Wittgenstein so memorably puts it. (Once again, it is significant that he refers to our cage as opposed to the cage; whereas the definite article might suggest some objectively existent limit beyond us, in the very “nature” of language, the use of the possessive signals instead that what we are contending with is a confinement born of our own determination and perhaps even of our own design and construction.) The only resolution to

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this frustration, Wittgenstein implies, lies in understanding and accepting the implications of our desire to speak about ethics in a certain way. He does not, therefore, conclude with a summary about what ethics can (not) say but rather goes on to make the following statement: “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” (12). Here— without need of further reasoning, analysis, or preparation— the preceding avowal of the site of our responsibility, our predicament, gives rise with sudden and utter clarity to a first-person declaration of deep respect. Moreover, the total existential weight of this personal attitude is stressed in phrases that suggest an organic relation between the declaration and the conditions of life themselves (“cannot help . . . for my life”). Both the substance of the turn and its arresting immediacy signal the possibility of regarding the preceding difficulties as ones less in need of a solution than of some form of resolution. Let us return later on to this crucial move. For now, I wish to take up another striking aspect of this final statement, which to my knowledge has not been addressed in prior criticism. If ethics is not science— “does not add to our knowledge in any sense”— then what are we to make of the claim that ethics is “a document of a tendency in the human mind”? The phrase resonates eerily with a claim that Primo Levi makes in the preface to If This Is a Man: “As an account of atrocities, therefore, this book of mine adds nothing to what is already known to readers throughout the world on the disturbing question of the death camps. It has not been written in order to formulate new accusations; it should be able, rather, to furnish documentation for a quiet study of certain aspects of the human mind.”11 For both Wittgenstein and Levi, a paradox attends the idea that writing or talking about matters of ethical importance should provide a documentation of a tendency in the human mind.12 The word “document” suggests a written text or record that provides information about some subject; to “document” something is hence to make it objectively available to others, to render it evident. If a document exists, its existence surely belongs to the realm of facts. Yet this cannot be the sense in which Wittgenstein and Levi mean to use the term; for Wittgenstein, ethical language is not and cannot be about facts. But isn’t Levi’s text supposed to provide facts or evidence of a certain kind? Levi writes at the end of the preface, “It seems to me unnecessary to add that none of the facts have been invented” (16).13 One sense in which we might understand the claim as “unnecessary” follows from the definition of “fact.” Facts by definition are not invented, and hence the statement at the end of the preface is in some sense tautological. Yet this is not the sense in which Levi uses “unnecessary,” for although the statement may be unnecessary in its

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logical sense, its apparent superfluity is immediately undercut by the fact that Levi nevertheless is compelled to state it despite how it seems to him. Evidently, he states it not for the sake of argument but rather to make a rhetorical point about the particular nature of his audience’s skepticism concerning the facts. Thus Levi’s statement encapsulates, in miniature, the entire hellishness of his experience: living in the death camps and attempting to give a survivor’s testimony of this ordeal, he realizes that the ones who subjected him to it did not deny the “facts” in any straightforward sense. What they denied was the ethical significance of these facts. To give voice to the unnecessary claim as necessary is to acknowledge something about our practice of ethics: all attempts to speak ethically confront the painful possibility of the other’s disbelief, a disbelief that cuts at the very reality of one’s world. Levi’s statement is closely linked to the way in which we are to understand the appeal to “documentation” for both Levi and Wittgenstein. As Levi’s text reveals, the pain of not being believed or understood is most acute not when one is speaking of facts but when one is attempting to express something of ethical significance. On the one hand, we know that the meaning we try to communicate in our ethical claims depends on the way these claims go beyond the description of mere facts. On the other hand, we realize that accepting this aspect of ethical claims means that the question of whether people ought to “believe” them cannot be definitively settled in the same way that factual questions of belief can be settled. (Belief in such claims must be attested, manifested, or repudiated in altogether different ways.) The allusion to ethical language as a kind of “document” captures the ambivalence underlying our longing to make ethical disbelief impossible. Levi’s explanation of why he feels compelled to tell his story suggests that this ambivalence has its source in the fragility of our agreements in forms of life: “The need to tell our story to ‘the rest’, to make ‘the rest’ participate in it, had taken on for us, before our liberation and after, the character of an immediate and violent impulse, to the point of competing with our other elementary needs” (15).14 Insofar as any single human being feels compelled to speak of ethics despite the fact that such talk refers to nothing in the world, he or she declares membership in a form of life shared by others who care deeply about (1) making others “participate” in their stories and (2) being able to do so in a way that does not depend simply on facts about the world. The horror of not being able to guarantee in advance such participation by “the rest,” Levi reminds us, cannot be construed as an abstract horror. It is of the same magnitude as the horror of starvation, or death. That documentation is somehow related to the need “to make ‘the rest’ participate” in one’s story is also suggested by the etymology of the word

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“document” in the Latin docere, to teach.15 A document is a lesson: it is intended to instruct. Here again the ambiguous relationship of documentation in relation to ethics surfaces, for the greatest teachers of ethics— Socrates, Jesus, the Buddha— left no written texts and purported not to teach yet were all immensely talented storytellers. What are the myths that Socrates effortlessly spins when he reaches an impasse of discussion if not efforts to tell a story of origin that makes his listeners feel part of some larger genealogy of being? What are myths if not documents that cannot be established? Midway through the lecture, Wittgenstein asks us to imagine a book written by an omniscient person and comprising a description of the whole world: 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. (6)

Comprehensive, enumerative, neutral: in this book, every fact would stand on an equal footing with every other fact. “If for instance,” Wittgenstein argues, “in our world-book we read the description of a murder with all its details physical and psychological, the mere description of these facts 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” (6). As with many passages from the “Lecture on Ethics,” what he says here has the initial appearance of a claim that is straightforward, easy to clarify. We are once again faced with the temptation to interpret the equivalence of murder and of the falling of a stone within this “world-book” as an expression of a basic is-ought distinction: facts do not and cannot lead us to values. But is it not possible to read this passage as impressing upon us, in rather vivid terms, a far more complex question about the nature of ethics? For what Wittgenstein asks us to imagine is a perspective from which a murder is to be contemplated as an event as accidental and contingent as the falling of a stone, no more or less significant. Moreover, we are to imagine that this perspective belongs to a “man”— and by this, I take him to mean that the author of the “world-book” is a person whose omniscience exceeds our limited and partial view of reality but that, apart from the extent and scope of his knowledge, the quality of his perception, does not differ so markedly from us as to be called inhuman. The matter-of-factness with which he renders murder alongside

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the falling of a stone within his “world-book” would seem to leave open the nature of his account of his world. To bring out this problem further, let me juxtapose the passage above with an analysis of historical discourse by the contemporary historian Saul Friedlander (I quote at length because the examples he cites are crucial to understanding the issue): Take several phrases from this text: “. . . (A) The Jews of some transports . . . were not assigned to the local ghettos or camps. . . . (B) These Jews were shot upon arrival . . .” “. . . (A) At about the same time, the ‘Langue Special Commando’ arrived in Chelmno and (B) proceeded to construct temporary extermination facilities . . .” “. . . (A) The ghetto should be cleared of those unable to work (above all, women and children), (B) who would be brought to Chelmno for gassing.” Here the unreality springs from an absolute disparity between the two halves of the phrases: The first half implies an ordinary administrative measure, and is put in totally normal speech; the second half accounts for the natural consequence, except that here, suddenly, the second half describes murder. The style doesn’t change. It cannot change. It is in the nature of things that the second half of the text can only carry on the bureaucratic and detached tone of the first.14

How is it possible to account for the difference between what passes in (A) and what passes in (B)? Here, two points are relevant: first, that Friedlander refers to the rupture as an “absolute disparity” and not a relative one that can be clarified by way of comparing certain aspects of them according to given metrics; second, that the only way that Friedlander can evoke “the absolute disparity” between the states of affairs described by (A) and those described by (B) is to say that “unreality springs from” it. It is almost as if what we perceive in the possibility of narrating (A) and (B) in a “style [that] doesn’t change,” of thereby placing “murder” on the same level with “an ordinary administrative measure,” is the annihilation of a sense of the existence of the world as a whole. Or perhaps, if not its annihilation, then its state of having become fantastic and dreamlike. In If This Is a Man, Primo Levi tells of a recurring dream that he had after returning from Auschwitz: This is my sister here, with some unidentifiable friend and many other people. They are all listening to me and it is this very story that I am telling: . . . I also speak diffusely of our hunger and the lice-check, and of the Kapo who hit me on the nose and then sent me to wash myself as I was bleeding. It is an intense pleasure, physical, inexpressible, to be at home, among friendly people, and to have so many things to recount: but I cannot help noticing that my listeners to do not follow me. In fact, they are completely indifferent; they speak

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confusedly of other things among themselves, as if I were not there. My sister looks at me, gets up, and goes away without a word. A desolating grief is now born in me, like certain barely remembered pains of one’s early infancy . . . and it is better to swim up to the surface, but this time I deliberately open my eyes to have in front of me a guarantee of being effectively awake. (66)

The account of this dream is embedded within a factual account of what happens. Yet if the fantasy that we can completely convey our experience to others— or perhaps the fantasy that we desire or need this— persists even in the midst of our giving an account of the experience, this suggests that we do not understand what representation is in part because we do not understand how our way of being in the world would change if our confused notion of the ideal representation were to somehow magically become realizable. Or perhaps we know, and we fear the knowledge: the knowledge that nothing, really, would change. Another way of reading the horror of the dream is that even the most perfect and compelling account of the world would leave everything as it is. In Levi’s text, the interruption of the actual account by the dream of its recounting draws attention to an intricate layering of voice and fact. If giving voice to something involves the act of deciding what it means to oneself— an act that must also, by the very nature of language, lay claim to what it means to others— then the dream rehearses the possibility that one gives voice to the meaning of one’s life to others who understand the facts conveyed but refuse to take up the meaning in their own lives. The nature of giving voice as an action that aims at being heard means that one is completely responsible for initiating it, yet completely dependent on others for achieving it.17 The “barely remembered pains of . . . early infancy” that color Levi’s dream convey this utter helplessness, the vulnerability of voice— its insurmountable need for acknowledgment. The recognition that such a need cannot be overcome by the fantasy of metaphysical or logical necessity lies at the heart of both Wittgenstein’s argument and his method in “A Lecture on Ethics.” Before turning once again to a final consideration of the “Lecture,” however, I wish to first highlight what is at stake for both Levi and Friedlander: the notion that what it means for us to understand the ethical significance of something exceeds the mere awareness of facts, requiring something like the attribution of a voice and hence the avowal of our own. Friedlander stops short of saying that the nature of the style in which the statements he quotes are rendered implies or establishes a congruency between descriptions of administrative operations and descriptions of murder; he argues instead that the continuity of style between (A) and (B) “neutralizes the whole discussion and sud-

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denly places each one of us, before we have had time to take hold of ourselves, in a situation not unrelated to the detached position of an administrator of extermination: Interest is fixed on an administrative process, an activity of building and transportation, words used for record-keeping. And that’s all” (91). Placed in view of facts, facts, and only facts, we abruptly find ourselves aligned with the perspective of the murderers: the ones who find murder to be “on exactly the same level as any other event, for instance the falling of a stone.” But what other alternative is there for the historian who seeks to describe the full horror of the Holocaust? “There should be no misunderstanding about what I am trying to say,” continues Friedlander, in words that echo those of Wittgenstein’s “Lecture”: “The historian cannot work in any other way. . . . We have reached the limit of our means of expression. Others we do not possess” (92). Various difficulties that we cannot now address arise from the effect of a discourse that “neutralizes the whole discussion.” What is clear is that some other desire pushes against the neutralization of discussion, against “the limit of our means of expression.” This desire is itself natural and cannot be neutralized, for in the process of hearing the voice of another (as Friedlander’s case brings out), a decision about the meaning of what we hear must be made. The decision involves an attribution of sense and significance, a discernment of what the person who wishes to communicate to us is doing when she says what she says in the way that she says it. To disclose the other person’s meaning, her intention, we must take action, and this action makes known our own intention and position vis-à-vis the other. These basic strictures condition the many possibilities of ignoring, hearing, being ignored, being heard, being in ignorance of what we are hearing, and so on that unfurl through the heart of our language. Submitting to its use, we expose ourselves and the limits of our worlds. (Is one of the things we learn from Wittgenstein’s world-book example, then, that only an omniscient man, one whose point of view upon reality is by definition unbounded and unmarked, may escape such implicating exposure?) In a later statement to Friedrich Waismann, recorded in Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle (1979), Wittgenstein explains, “At the end of my lecture on ethics, I spoke in the first person. I think that is something very essential. Here there is nothing to be stated any more; all I can do is to step forth as an individual and speak in the first person.”18 The claim that “all I can do is step forth as an individual and speak in the first person” could be understood as a retreat from the presumption to instruct, to teach something scientific or factual, to establish the sorts of generally available principles or knowledge that might guide another person’s life. You have come to gratify your curiosity about the latest developments in knowledge, Wittgenstein seems to say, but

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there is really nothing to teach you about what you most want to learn. Indeed, Wittgenstein speaks in the first person not only at the end of his lecture but throughout the entire text— a point never fully brought out in prior criticism (emphasis mine): “what I believe to be . . .” (4) “what I believe to be . . .” (repeated in following paragraph, 4) “what I take to be the subject matter of Ethics . . .” (4) “I believe if you look . . .” (5) “Now what I wish to contend is that . . .” (6) “and what I want to say is . . .” (6) “And now I must say that . . .” (7) “I can only describe my feeling by the metaphor . . .” (7) “And I want to say that . . .” (7) “what I would like to call . . .” (7) “I believe the best way of describing it is to say that . . .” (8) “And I am then inclined to use such phrases as . . .” (8) “Now let me consider these experiences, for, I believe, they exhibit . . .” (8) “I will mention another experience . . . which I also know . . .” (8) “And there the first thing I have to say is . . .” (8) “Now I want to impress on you . . .” (9) “For the first of them is, I believe, exactly what . . .” (10) “And I will now describe . . .” (11) “Now I am tempted to say that . . .” (11) “Now when this is urged against me I at once see clearly . . .” (11) “For all I wanted to do with them . . .” (11) “My whole tendency and I believe the tendency of all men . . .” (12)

The perpetual reorientation of his audience’s attention to the desires, inclinations, beliefs, wishes, and needs of the speaking “I” at every turn cannot be explained by calling it a mere rhetorical flourish (if it would even make sense in this context to speak of mere rhetoric). The persistence and repetition of these phrases, even to the point of awkwardness, suggest instead a deliberate approach to the expression of the subject. It is essential to note what the use of the first person here does not mean: the invocation of ethics as grounded in an incommunicable subjective experience, doomed to remain singular and unshared. For Wittgenstein addresses his audience in the passage above, making an explicit plea to them to “get at my meaning” and thereby acknowledging that the audience will play a role in actively construing and possessing whatever “meaning” the “I” has to share. This approach is also evident in the opening declaration that frames the re-

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mainder of his lecture, in which Wittgenstein remarks on the difficulty of expressing his thoughts in a language that he says “is not my native tongue”: I feel I shall have great difficulties in communicating my thoughts to you and I think some of them may be diminished by mentioning them to you beforehand. The first one, which almost I need not mention, is that English is not my native tongue and my expression therefore often lacks that precision and subtlety which would be desirable if one talks about a difficult subject. All I can do is to ask you to make my task easier by trying to get at my meaning in spite of the faults which I will constantly be committing against the English grammar. (3)

To begin by giving expression to a fear of inexpressibility, and by pointing to the obstacles to communicating one’s thoughts, is to locate the origin of the ensuing voice in the finite situation of the human being in ordinary language. The language of his argument, Wittgenstein begins by saying— almost as if he cannot begin without somehow saying— is not a language designed for locating universal and abstract truths but rather a historically and culturally specific entity. One has been born into it or not born into it; one must learn it, acquire facility with it, use it with certain situations, and use it well or badly. There are, then, at least two ways of making out his remark to Waismann: first, as a renunciation of all shared and shareable human grounds of value, a consequent flinging of the self into a void of nihilistic choice— nothing can be established, so we must choose, and choose upon nothing (this and other false readings of existentialism are always open to us); or second, as attempting to lay emphasis on the word “here”: here nothing can be established. Where? At the end of the lecture, Wittgenstein stands before the audience simply as himself. Here, the relevant question is not about what is “known” or “not known” (in the sense of facts about the matter) but about what the “I” avows and in turn what the others recognize the “I” to avow. Crucially, what the “I” avows here— at this particular juncture of Wittgenstein’s lecture— is the desire to go beyond the bounds of significant language. Registering the force of this avowal enables us to better place Wittgenstein’s closing declaration of his deep respect for attempts toward ethical expression, for this is one of the most enigmatic gestures in the entire lecture, following so closely as it does on Wittgenstein’s apparent dismissal of all ethical expressions as nonsensical. It is too strong a claim to say that because all attempts to express ethics in language are necessarily nonsensical, it is possible for one to respect them, for if it is possible to respect them, it is also possible not to respect them. Nevertheless, making sense of this gesture requires, at

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minimum, the recognition of two related claims: first, the avowal as an avowal of respect— as an attempt to ward off fraudulent readings or misunderstandings of the nonsensicality of ethical utterance, especially interpretations veering toward nihilism. Interpreting Wittgenstein’s declaration of respect in this way requires us to acknowledge, in turn, what it would seem to warn against or ward off: the desire to debase the ethical impulse once it has been severed from the possibility of ethically meaningful claims. The violence of that impulse is comprehensible only as a reaction to being disarmed, as if all explanations and justifications for the objective existence of some “absolute value” that all must necessarily recognize were essentially protecting us from a revelation that we wished to avoid. Second, the avowal is to be recognized as an enactment of the implied but not stated consequences of Wittgenstein’s view of ethics, as a declaration that reveals him as a speaking individual, in need of all the forms of acknowledgment this entails. This self-revelation provides an occasion for bringing the lecture to a close precisely because it releases his audience from a passive, spectatorial relationship to him as the lecturer. If the illusion Wittgenstein exposes in his lecture is precisely that of wanting ethics to speak with an unquestioned, absolute authority, then it is the temptation to this very illusion that is aroused by the invitation to take up the position of an audience member at a lecture on ethics. Kafka’s “A Report for an Academy” The monologic voice of “A Report” emerges as if from nowhere, sounding a note of piercing immediacy that shatters older forms and conventions of narration. Indeed, Kafka abandons no less than three earlier attempts at the story of Red Peter, all in more conventional narrative forms.19 One unfinished version is a third-person narrative of the encounter between a visitor who seeks the personal acquaintance of the ape and the trainer of Red Peter, “an honorary doctor of great universities” (259). The scene is focalized through the visitor, to whom the trainer delivers a vivid sketch of Red Peter’s daily habits; Red Peter himself never appears. A second fragment is cast as an ambiguous dialogue, alternating between the voices of Red Peter and a visitor. Although the pair address one another directly as “I,” “you,” “sir,” and “Rotpeter,” no quotation marks or other identifying markers distinguish the speaking voices. The fragment breaks off just as Red Peter has begun to recount the tale of his capture and imprisonment. A third attempt, too brief to have been republished in the collected stories even as a fragment, is composed as a letter to Red Peter from an audience member who has ostensibly just heard his lecturecum-performance. Kafka thus arrives at the final form of “A Report” by excis-

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ing the distanced view of the spectator— visitor, trainer, admirer— altogether. The momentum of writing seems only to have been fully accessible once he arrives at the decision to restrict the scope of the text to his subject’s manner of self-representation. The absence of any kind of framing perspective, no matter how attenuated, is vital to his desired narrative effect. Neither indirectly focalized through the appraising view of a knowledgeable eyewitness nor placed in discrete relation to the localized voice of another via dialogue or epistle, the sole task of the first-person voice in “A Report” is to become answerable to itself. The task is fraught with ambiguities. The inquiry of the “I” into its origin and conditions darkens rather than illuminates. The voice simultaneously enjoins its possible reader to the experience of the speaking subject and renders her an accomplice to the gentlemen of the academy. Poised with keen equivocality between eyewitness reportage and confession wrung by torture, Red Peter’s retrospective account of his passage between ape-existence and human-existence emerges as both a vehicle of release from and a potential agent of complicity to the encagement of its speaker. Here is the critical turning point of the account, which coincides with the ape’s first spoken word in human language: “And then what a victory it was both for him and for me when one evening in front of a large group of spectators . . . I curtly exclaimed ‘Hey!’ breaking out in human sounds, plunging into human society with that cry, and feeling its echo, ‘Listen, he’s talking!’ like a kiss over my entire sweatsoaked body” (291). The abrupt kinetic pull of the metaphors in contradictory directions heightens the intense irony of this event: “breaking out,” Red Peter breaches boundaries, escaping with effort from captivity; “plunging in,” he is thrust with even greater commitment into treacherous, unseen depths. The odd simile of the kiss subverts the notion that physical embrace functions as recognition of kinship, suggesting that for Red Peter the verbal acknowledgement of his speech is experienced as a total embrace of his physical being. The felt response of his entire body registers the mutual contact between the “I” and the onlookers that ushers him out of the anguishing isolation of his cage and entangles him ever more intimately with the agents of his confinement. Kafka granted permission to Elsa Brod, wife of Max Brod, to perform “A Report” at the first literary evening of a Jewish women’s club on December 19, 1917. Her memory of the experience is utterly carnal: “daß ich dabei buchstäblich affenmäßig fühle, ich rieche Affenschweiß und ströme ihn aus, natürlich nur während dieser Lektüre” (when reading it I literally feel ape-like, I smell apesweat and ape-sweat flows from me— of course only during the reading).20 To speak as Red Peter is to enter into consciousness-as-ape-body, a body marked everywhere by signs of mutilation and conquest. The pleasurable “kiss” of

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human response is an uncanny double to the shot wounds he incurs during his capture: They fired; I was the only one hit; I got two wounds. One in the cheek; it was light, but left a large, red, naked scar, which has earned me the repulsive, thoroughly inappropriate name— which only an ape could have come up with— of Red Peter, as if the red spot on my cheek were all that distinguished me from that locally popular trained ape-animal Peter, who recently died. . . . The second bullet lodged below my hip. . . . I— I have the right to take down my trousers in front of anyone I care to; people will find nothing there but a well-groomed fur and the scar left— to avoid any misunderstanding, let us choose a specific word for a specific purpose— the scar left by a heinous shot. (283)

Red Peter’s narrative of wounding assimilates and reverses the logic of the famous Odyssean homecoming episode. Upon returning home, Odysseus, disguised by a beggar, allows his old servant Eurykleia to wash his feet. She discovers Odysseus’s scar and cries out in a moment of anagnorisis, recognition. The full unfolding of anagnorisis is delayed, however— interrupted by a lengthy excursus on the origin of the hero’s name and identifying mark. The bard relates how a young Odysseus, hunting with his grandfather Autolykos, sustains a near-mortal wound when “the boar drove / over the knee, and with his tusk gashed much of the flesh.”21 Odysseus polytropos courageously evades this near-castration and kills the wild boar, winning fame and fulfilling the promise of the name Autolykos bestowed upon him (Odysseus— the one who will suffer or cause pain).22 This is the rule of epic: heroic identity and eternal fame are won at the sacrifice of organic life. Like the cunning and long-suffering Odysseus, Red Peter could be said to achieve his name and fame through wounding. But there is one crucial difference: his fate is that of the hunted beast, not the hunter. By the scar on his body and his fame, he is named and rendered recognizable. Yet “the repulsive, thoroughly inappropriate” moniker remains a constant reminder that he is indistinguishable from other apes to the human eye. By the scar at his groin, he earns celebrity— the right to expose himself on public stage in castrated and mutilated form. Destined to an ambiguous exile beyond all hope of nostos, kleos, and anagnorisis, Red Peter does not sing but rather delivers his “Report” (an antiepic to his antihero) in the dry, matter-of-fact tone of a correspondent. In his description of the horrific circumstances of his capture, imprisonment, and eventual “education” in human customs, he refrains at nearly every turn from explicit moral commentary or reaction. Recounting the impossibility

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of sitting or standing fully in his crate, Red Peter observes, “People see an advantage in keeping wild beasts like that during their early confinement, and today, after my own experience, I cannot deny that this is truly the case from a human point of view” (284). Describing his experience of being trained to drink liquor for the sailors’ entertainment, he states, “But to my teacher’s credit: he was never angry at me; granted, he sometimes put the burning pipe to my fur until some area that I could barely reach began to smolder; but then he would put it out himself with his own kind, gigantic hand; he was never angry at me; he realized that the two of us were on the same side, fighting against my apish nature, and that mine was the harder task” (290). Coolly abstaining from blatant rebuke of these practices, Red Peter frames his own pain in terms that appear— however ironically— to affirm or avow human practices and forms of evaluation. Crucially, what Red Peter enacts at each significant juncture of his story is an entrance not into human “personhood” but into human society as only he can submit to it. The unanswered and unanswerable first-person voice allows Kafka to steer clear of the dreary matter of how Red Peter is to be regarded, as person or beast, subject or object. I do not claim that such matters are irrelevant to Red Peter’s existence. But the futility of reading “A Report” as evidence for one or the other conclusion suggests that, for Kafka, such issues become ridiculous and empty when argued in abstract terms. The focalization of the text through a speaking “I” effectively draws one’s attention away from metaphysical debates on the criteria for personhood, directing it toward the process by which Red Peter comes to claim a voice among his addressees. The authority of this speaking “I” functions at every turn as both a claim to community and a testament to the constraints of the individual, compelled by the claims of the social order. Recall Red Peter’s preface to his account: “Yet I could not articulate even the following insignificant information if I were not utterly sure of myself and if my position were not consolidated and unshakeable on all the major vaudeville stages of the civilized world” (282). Conviction in self, the power of the articulate beast, and the security of presence on the stage of the world are inextricably bound together in the text, as if the very narrative act of the “I” is constantly bringing into being and sustaining its own existential context. Red Peter begins his lecture performance by enacting a sequence of gestures that are strikingly similar to the ones that open Wittgenstein’s “A Lecture on Ethics.” “Honored Gentlemen of the Academy,” he declares, “You have accorded me the honor of asking me to submit to the Academy a report on my previous apish life. Unfortunately, I am unable to comply with the terms of your request” (281). Like Wittgenstein, Red Peter begins by acknowledging

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the context and constraints of his speech situation, stating that he has been summoned to speak on a subject that he now finds impossible to take up. His use of the honorific “hohe Herren” literally suggests the height at which these members of the academy are positioned in relation to himself as speaker. This implicit analogy between spatial, social, and interspecies hierarchies is sustained throughout his explanation of why he cannot fully comply with the terms of the performance dictated by the academy: Almost five years separate me from apehood . . . infinitely long when one gallops through it, as I have done, accompanied for stretches by excellent people, advice, applause and orchestral music, yet basically alone, for in order to remain in the picture, anyone accompanying me kept far away from the barrier. My achievement would have been impossible had I wished to cling obstinately to my origin, to the memories of my youth. Indeed, renouncing all obstinacy was the supreme commandment that I imposed on myself; I, a free ape, knuckled under to this yoke. As a result, however, my memories were closed off more and more. While initially I had the choice, should people have wanted it, of returning freely through the full gateway that the sky forms over the earth, that selfsame gateway, as my development was whipped forward, simultaneously became ever lower and narrower; I felt more comfortable and more thoroughly included in the human world; the storm that blew after me from my past calmed down; today it is merely a draft that cools my heels; and the distant aperture through which it passes and through which I once passed has grown so small that even if I had sufficient strength and desire to run back that far, I would have to flay the very hide from my body to squeeze through. (281– 82)

This opening passage of the story raises two central issues. The first is that of enclosure, or cagedness, which attains throughout Kafka’s narrative the status of an almost ontological category: a designation of Red Peter’s Beingin-the-world. To fit in— to belong to— the human world, Red Peter continually suggests, is to be caged, inside the barrier separating him from the audience of his vaudeville acts and closed off from the ever-shrinking opening into his former free life. The issue of cagedness is first raised within the story in a form that suggests not only a literal cage but also a metaphorical cage. Both the Neugroschel translation, which renders the German “for in order to remain in the picture, anyone accompanying me kept away from the barrier,” and the Muir translation, which reads, “since all my escorters, to keep the image, kept well off the course,” slightly obscure this point.23 As Kafka’s original text— “denn alle Begleitung hielt sich, um im Bilde zu bleiben, weit von der Barriere”— reveals, Red Peter refers ambiguously to the “image” or “picture” as not only one maintained by his spectators but also a metaphor ironically deployed by Red Peter himself to subtly voice his scorn toward the

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“excellent people” and “advisors” by relegating them to the role of spectators who watch the show from by a barrier. Indeed, a little further down in the same paragraph, he refers to “Bilder” as metaphors of speech again when he says, “much as I like to use images for these things” (so gerne ich auch Bilder wähle für diese Dinge; 282). To read “Bild” as an image or metaphor purposefully used by Red Peter is to understand his words as the means by which he acknowledges his own cagedness and, in acknowledging it, turns it back upon his listeners— trapping them. For to inhabit the role of the speaker is, in a sense, to be a captive— expected to perform, entertain, and enlighten, to answer to the expectations of the audience. (Notably, his description of his cage on board the Hagenbeck steamer marries the discourse and situation of theatrical performance with that of captivity: it “did not have four sides . . . and was attached to crate, which formed the fourth wall . . . [that] I kept facing” [284].) But in refusing to tell the story of his former apish life and substituting instead the story of how he came to inhabit the “human” world, Red Peter also compels his audience to recognize themselves and their form of life as the subjects of his address, thereby reversing the roles of captive and captor thrust upon him by the lecture situation. We thus arrive at the second and related point raised by Red Peter’s introductory remarks. In order to open a space for the story he himself is keen to tell, Red Peter must first subvert the idle curiosity of the audience by denying them the knowledge they claim to want. Like Wittgenstein, he begins by evoking his audience’s confusion between the desire for knowledge and the desire for entertainment. The implied audience expects nothing less than a scientific spectacle— a “freak show,” an exotic introduction to a form of life that they can keep far behind the barrier, distant and separate, remote from any form of moral acknowledgment. Instead, as Red Peter unfolds his horrific tale of all that he has endured and suffered to attain “the average education of a European,” his audience will be compelled to realize what it means to be human or, rather, to become human— a process that Red Peter reveals as indelibly marked by force, violence, abhorrence, imprisonment, and despair (292). The narrative of Red Peter’s capture, imprisonment, and eventual training is divided into two parts. Of the first part, which describes his capture and wounding (the “heinous shot”) Red Peter declares, “I must rely on reports by others” (283). Of the second part, which details his imprisonment and training, Red Peter says, “After those shots, I awoke— and this is where my own recollection gradually begins— inside a cage in the steerage of the Hagenbeck steamer” (284). The origin of a conscious experience that he is able to narrate

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and communicate to his audience is concurrent with the beginning of his life in a cage.24 Thus, although he repeatedly emphasizes his ability to speak openly about his experiences (“frankly [offen gesproschen],” he declares in his opening remarks; and again, “a handshake attests to frankness; although now that I am at the very peak of my career, I hope to add frankness in words to the frankness of that first handshake [Handschlag bezeigt Offenheit; mag nun heute, wo ich auf dem Höhepunkte meiner Laufbahn stehe zu jenem ersten Handschlag auch das offene Wort hinzukommen]”), such statements only serve to raise the further question of what it could possibly mean to speak openly in captivity (282). By virtue of the necessity of keeping to the boundaries of a human language and its accompanying form of life, Red Peter seems to run up against the walls of his cage in a perfectly and absolutely hopeless way. To be human is to be spectatorial: this is the position from which Red Peter takes up his remarks before the gentlemen of the scientific academy who compose his audience. What seems extraordinary to them is that he— an ape captured from the Gold Coast some five years ago— should stand before them, dressed in trousers and speaking German, and not that he should belong to a group of creatures whom it is (morally) acceptable for them to capture, imprison, and train for the purposes of their own entertainment. Red Peter is thus placed in the strange situation of having to acknowledge this audience as scientific, as seekers of knowledge, and in this acknowledgment, to affirm tacitly the pretense that they wish to learn from him. Thus confined by the conventions of the lecture, he assumes the humiliating task of putting his suffering on display for their enlightenment. The implied reader, positioned as the audience to these remarks, is rendered immediately complicit with the members of the academy. The narrative situation of “A Report for an Academy” thereby foregrounds the problem of complicity from the beginning; both speaker and implied audience are trapped, morally implicated, by the invisible cage of the lecture-theater. In Red Peter’s opening remarks, then, we hear an echo of the note of irony and defiance in Wittgenstein’s address to his audience. He seems to say, You want knowledge in the form of entertainment— you have come to see an ape perform his apish life. But instead of pleasing you and gratifying your curiosity about the latest advances in human knowledge of apehood, I will show you instead the latest advances in my apish knowledge of humanity. This abrupt and uncanny reversal not only allows him to escape the humiliation of being made into a spectacle, of being forced to show or unveil himself for the entertainment of the other, but also simultaneously “captures” his audience, forcing them to confront something about themselves and their form of life that

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they would rather not face: namely, that this form of life is one that they share with a wounded and caged animal. Aristotle argues in his account of tragedy that the most powerful forms of anagnorisis (recognition) are accompanied by peripeteia (reversal).25 But within the frame of Kafka’s story, the audience occupies the place of an obscenity. They must undergo their tragic reversal and recognition offstage, unseen and unheard. “For in order to remain in the picture, anyone accompanying me kept away from the barrier” (Denn alle Begleitung, hielt sich um im Bilde zu bleiben, weit von der Barriere)— only a few pages after we are given this stunning image of the correspondence between the position of spectatorship and what it means to have a human status, Red Peter describes how he has come to read about himself in the newspaper: “In a recent essay by one of the ten thousand newshounds that carry on about me in newspapers, I read that my ape nature is not yet fully suppressed” (283). Recasting a third-person account of his behavior in the first-person perspective, Red Peter attempts to overcome the uniform leveling of information and relevance that Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Cavell all attribute to this organ of mass media. But this attempt throws us back upon the problem raised by the narrative situation: is Red Peter here to “entertain” or “give knowledge” (in which case, both tasks would be bound up with the acceptance and projection of a third-person perspective on his own monstrosity) or can he simply, as it were, address the audience as a speaking “I”? The relevant question is not “What it is that Red Peter is not able to openly say in his narrative?” but rather “What (or who) is it that Red Peter is not able to communicate to— in the sense of sharing with— his audience?” The whole difficulty of the text, and indeed the whole difficulty of Red Peter, is that although Red Peter speaks as an “I,” the question of whether or not he is to be acknowledged as an “I” remains open. If the “Honored Gentlemen of the Academy” and the newspapers are to be the relevant audience, then the answer turns on some information about his condition that will inevitably be cast in third-person forms. Red Peter both is and is not able to take up a firstperson perspective in relation to his audience, and it is this contradiction that lies at the heart of the ethical scandal of Kafka’s text. I suggested earlier that we might consider this text as an instance of the genre of “lectures on ethics.” But why? Is it because Red Peter speaks of the conditions under which we would imprison a creature, about the proper understanding of freedom and the notions of freedom worth sacrificing for, about reasons for action? These and other notions, falling under a broadly Kantian conception of ethics, are dismissed or at least sidelined by Red Peter’s account:

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I fear that people may not understand exactly what I mean by “a way out.” I am using the term in its fullest and most widespread sense. I am deliberately avoiding the word “freedom.” . . . Incidentally: human beings all too often deceive themselves about freedom. And just as freedom is considered one of the most sublime feelings, so the corresponding disillusion is likewise one of the most sublime. Often, while waiting to go on for a vaudeville performance, I have watched some pair of acrobats fiddling about on trapezes under the ceiling. They swung, they rocked, they leaped, they floated into each other’s arms, one carried the other by clenching his hair in his teeth. “This too is human freedom,” I thought, “high-handed motion!” (285– 86)

The “most sublime feeling” (a phrase that recalls the awe Kant reportedly experienced from meditating upon the “moral law within”) is rejected as a source of betrayal and disillusionment; with bitter irony, Red Peter recalls his fellow performers swinging freely above the earthbound spectators below yet nevertheless only managing unwittingly to mimic the actions of the apes they believe themselves to transcend. It is a marvelous image of the noumenal realm of Kantian autonomy, free-floating above the empirical laws of necessity, embodied here in the theater of a circus acrobat performance. Similarly, when Red Peter invokes Enlightenment tropes of progress, illumination, and liberation, he does so only in order to cautiously categorize them as means to achieving a “human way out”: That progress! That penetration of my awakening brain by rays of knowledge from all sides! I do not deny it made me happy. But I also admit that I did not overestimate it, certainly not back then, and how much less today. By dint of a strenuous effort, which has never been repeated on this earth, I have achieved the average education of a European. This may be nothing in itself, but it is something inasmuch as it helped me out of the cage, opening up this special way out, this human way out. . . . There was no other way, so long as I could not choose freedom. (292)

Acknowledging the criteria derived from a notion of ethics as the study of freedom, rights, and self-cultivation, while nevertheless withdrawing from any attempt to deploy conclusively such criteria or to contradict them, Red Peter positions himself as a speaking “I” who relinquishes the form of moral authority or judgment implied by the lecture. He goes so far as to declare, in closing his remarks, that he is “not intent on any human verdict” but “only want[s] to spread knowledge”: “I only report [berichte]; for you too, honored gentlemen of the Academy, I have only reported [berichtet]” (293). The repeated emphasis on the nature of his text and performance as “only” a “report” suggests the retreat of the speaker from a position of direct con-

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frontation and didacticism toward the neutrality and mediation of facts. And yet for the implied audience, to accept the speaking performance as a “report” is to make a monstrosity of the speaker. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the closing lines of Red Peter’s lecture: In surveying my development and what I have achieved so far, I neither complain nor am satisfied. With my hands in my trouser pockets, my bottle of wine on the table, I half lie, half sit in the rocking chair and gaze out the window. . . . I perform almost every evening, and my triumphs could hardly be greater. When I come home late at night from banquets, from scientific societies, from social get-togethers, a small, half-trained female chimpanzee is waiting for me, and I have a good time with her in apish fashion. By day, I do not want to see her; for she has the madness of the confused trained beast in her eyes; I alone recognize it and I cannot endure it. (292– 93)

Red Peter suddenly moves to the first-person present tense in this account of his daily life so that the scene he depicts is no longer even closed off by time but unfolding in a hellish and endless present. The present is now, here— we are present at the scene of the very performance he piercingly describes as one of “my triumphs.” The “madness of the confused trained beast” stares back at us from the eyes of the speaker, willing us to avoid it and to “recognize” it at once. Red Peter declares himself before us: he is trapped, he is crazed, within the cage of an intolerable loneliness. Any attempt to muffle the selfconfrontation and recognition that Red Peter enacts here by regarding it as a mere “report” is tantamount to the denial of Red Peter as a speaking “I,” as an “I” for whom every word of this avowal is both wound and stab at once. If this “report” is to be counted as a “lecture on ethics,” then, it is because it enacts in its very form the negative mimesis of a lecture, refusing to enter into instructive theories and principles and enacting instead a form of self-revelation that challenges the position of the audience as spectators to a dispassionate and enlightening vision. It thus repeatedly raises the problems expressed in the form of Wittgenstein’s lecture: the problem of the relation between third-person knowledge of the self and first-person avowal, the problem of the relation between fact or documentation and judgment, the problem of what it means to take someone else’s suffering as an object of one’s own knowledge or to treat another’s horrific suffering as ordinary. Toward the end, Red Peter announces, “I am not intent on any human verdict; I only want to spread knowledge” (293). If the question is not one of judgment, then it is one of consent— consent to being a recipient of the knowledge the ape has conveyed. If we do not consent, we declare ourselves entertained by his captivity, suffering, madness. If we consent, we must imagine our voices forced into

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complicity with the most unbearable bounds of social and political repression, our minds distorted daily by the attempt to inflict and bear the weight of a horrible injustice. Here, we are reminded that Red Peter speaks repeatedly of “a way out [Ausweg],” a term he claims to use “in its fullest and most widespread sense”; the German word Kafka uses here, gewöhnlichsten, can also be translated as “most ordinary,” suggesting once again that the knowledge we most desire, that which would allow us to find a way out from our cage, is a sense of the ordinary (285). Let us set aside for the moment the fact that Red Peter draws, toward the end of his lecture, the same conclusion that Cavell discovers in Rousseau and Thoreau: namely, that he is (and we are) obedient in and complicit with his own captivity and hence crazed.26 If we are to feel pity and fear at his words, at his repeated and hopeless attempts to run up against his cage, one of the most difficult problems the form of the text raises is toward whom that pity or fear is to be directed— toward Red Peter, whose every word reminds us that the conditions of its intelligibility lie in the cagedness of the speaker, or toward the implied audience, for whom the possibility of understanding him is conditioned on the slowly dawning awareness that they hear him from within the selfsame cage? Where does this knowledge of the tragedy of others come from? The ethical question Kafka’s text brings us to at the end, in short, is whether or not we can distinguish ourselves from the “I” of the text— a crazed, caged ape— and whether or not we can distinguish what he calls “the influence of my milieu [Umgebung]” from our own environment or surrounding (288). It does not answer that question. It only tells us that the form that answer could take cannot be conveyed in a lecture, such as the one that Red Peter has just given.

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Bellow’s Private Language Michael LeMahieu A human being can encourage himself, give himself orders, obey, blame and punish himself; he can ask himself a question and answer it. We could even imagine human beings who spoke only in monologue; who accompanied their activities by talking to themselves. . . . But is it also conceivable that there be a language in which a person could write down or give voice to his inner experiences— his feelings, moods, and so on— for his own use?— Well can’t we do so in our ordinary language?— But that is not what I mean. The words of this language are to refer to what only the speaker can know— to his immediate private sensations. — L u d w i g W i t t g e n s t e i n , Philosophical Investigations (1953)1 Every other man spoke a language entirely his own, which he had figured out by private thinking; he had his own ideas and peculiar ways. — S a u l B e l l o w, Seize the Day (1956)2

Saul Bellow’s novels make it easy for us to comply with Wittgenstein’s request to imagine “human beings who spoke only in monologue, who accompanied their activities by talking to themselves.”3 Bellow’s isolated and alienated protagonists order themselves, encourage themselves, and then, failing as they often do, blame and punish themselves. They ask themselves questions and give themselves answers: “Was it only pleasure?” Artur Sammler asks himself in Mr. Sammler’s Planet; “Was it true?” Moses Herzog asks himself in Herzog; “Does truth come in blows?” Eugene Henderson asks himself in Henderson the Rain King; “What did it come to?” Seize the Day’s Tommy Wilhelm asks himself; “What was the reason; what inspired it?” The Victim’s Asa Leventhal asks himself; “I am forced to pass judgment on myself,” Dangling Man’s Joseph writes— to and about himself— “and to ask questions I would far rather not ask: ‘What is this for?’ and ‘What am I for?’ and ‘Am I made for this?’”4 Wittgenstein asks us to consider not simply a language that only one person understands as a matter of fact but rather a language that only one person can understand by definition. Such a language is not a personal code or a shorthand script, then, nor simply an internal monologue in which a person speaks ordinarily to oneself, whether silently or aloud. Wittgenstein asks us to imagine instead a language that would be logically impossible for another person to

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understand, one in which each individual word corresponds to a fundamentally private sensation or inner experience— a mental tickle or tingle— that remains epistemically inaccessible to any second person. This conception of language inverts the Philosophical Investigations’ opening image of a “particular picture of the essence of human language” (§1) that Wittgenstein finds in Augustine’s Confessions. That picture locates the meaning of a word in the objects to which it refers, whereas in a private language, a word gains meaning by virtue of its corresponding mental content. While the first picture directs our attention outward to the objective world, the second points inward to the subjective self. The idea of a language “figured out by private thinking,” as Wilhelm puts it to himself in Seize the Day, also serves both as a description of Bellow’s characteristic mode of narration and as a figure of the obstacle that those narratives must overcome. Bellow’s novels— his narratives and his narrators— confront the reader with the spectacle of an individual consciousness, or mind, as it confronts the social reality that surrounds him, invariably him. One can read Mr. Sammler’s Planet, for example, as Bellow’s attempt to unfold the thoughts of a single consciousness that must overcome itself: “Sammler, from keeping his own counsel for so long, from seven decades of internal consultation, had his own views on most matters.”5 Those internal consultations make up the primary content of the novel even as they become the main obstacle that Sammler must surmount in order to realize the vision of a social contract that concludes the narrative. Sammler begins the novel in, and later retreats to, “the privacy of his own room,” or “the privacy of his bed” (134, 141), where along the cracks in the plaster of the walls “he had mentally inscribed certain propositions,” one of which holds that “he, personally, stood apart from all developments” (136). Sammler’s private language parallels his isolated physical condition. This situation is common to Bellow’s protagonists, and in this respect, perhaps only in this respect, Sammler is not alone. Joseph, Bellow’s first protagonist, testifies: “In a city where one has lived nearly all his life, it is not likely that he will ever be solitary; and yet, in a very real sense, I am just that. I am alone ten hours a day in a single room.”6 This physical isolation is both a cause and a correlative of Joseph’s metaphysical alienation, his inability to recover his earlier feeling of “common humanity” (25). The monologism of Bellow’s works threatens to become a form of solipsism, as the reality of each novel is constantly channeled through the perception of the protagonist, even when the narrator— by turns indistinguishable and then clearly distinct from the protagonist— relates those events through a third-person point of view. And yet Bellow’s protagonists insist on a belief in, and persist in their search for, a common bond with other people on which to base a social contract. Joseph’s search for a “common humanity” is echoed by

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almost all of his fictional successors in Bellow’s oeuvre. Wilhelm, for example, undergoes an epiphany in which he feels a connection to his fellow man based on what he refers to as “the real soul.”7 It is often the case that the feeling of connectedness that Bellow’s characters seek arises in an affective, as opposed to a cognitive, register, and it does so unexpectedly, fleetingly, contingently— “in a flash,” as Wittgenstein says in the “Lecture on Ethics.”8 The problem those characters typically face is how to recall that feeling, which resides somewhere between their thoughts and their language, and how to articulate a worldview based on it. Wilhelm’s problem is how to recover his feeling of connectedness when he is not experiencing it and, most of all, how to employ it as an ideal for his ethical relation to other human beings. The problem, in other words, is precisely the one Wittgenstein addresses in the Investigations’ discussion of rule-following and the subsequent private language argument: how to refer to a private feeling one has experienced in the past; how to use it as a standard that could be applied to future iterations, emotions, and behaviors; and how to communicate it in a language that is shared and public. Bellow’s fiction and Wittgenstein’s philosophy are mutually illuminating. At stake in the articulation of and response to their shared concerns are the coherence of the modern subject and the task of the modern artist. Wittgenstein ultimately rejects the concept of a private language as a fundamentally incoherent response to an implicitly incoherent question about the relation of self, language, and world. The appeal of a private language, Stanley Cavell suggests, arises in response to the threat of skepticism.9 As evinced in pieces such as “Skepticism and the Depth of Life,” Bellow, too, registered the threat of skepticism, particularly concerning the nature of the self and the role of art.10 But while his novels verge on Wittgenstein’s eliminative conclusions, they swerve away from them at the moment of narrative closure. Bellow’s refusal to deny the reality of a private language, or more strongly, his stipulation of and insistence upon its reality, results directly from his conception of the novel: the philosopher’s illusory private language becomes the novelist’s requirement in the face of what Cavell describes as the modernist difficulty, or the modernist situation, wherein “the relation between the present practice of an enterprise and the history of that enterprise” becomes problematic, forcing the novelist and the philosopher alike to address the conditions of possibility for their work even as they perform it.11 Of the multiple ways to conceive how Bellow’s fiction relates to Wittgenstein’s philosophy and how both relate to modernism, two emerge as particularly compelling because they are diametrically opposed. The first begins in 1953, a year that saw the publication of two pivotal works

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that, despite their obvious generic differences, exhibit some striking similarities. With the posthumous publication of the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein revolutionized, for the second time, twentieth-century philosophy of language; with The Adventures of Augie March, Bellow unveiled a new novelistic style and won the first of his unprecedented three National Book Awards. The impact of the late Wittgenstein and the early Bellow, as they converge in 1953, gains its force in large part from analogous stylistic innovations. Both texts break with their respective authors’ earlier publications, which in retrospect take on the appearance of apprentice work: Bellow frequently referred to his first two novels, Dangling Man (1944) and The Victim (1947), as his MA and his PhD, and Wittgenstein literally submitted the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) as his doctoral thesis upon his return to Cambridge in 1929. Both texts also break with the prevailing modernist tendency in philosophy and literature by employing a more vernacular, demotic voice. Wittgenstein’s Investigations flies in the face of logical positivism, which found the warrant for many of its doctrines in the Tractatus and subsequently became the predominant force in postwar Anglo-American philosophy. Rather than investigating the conditions for a logically ideal language, as the positivists interpreted the Tractatus to do, the Wittgenstein of the Investigations exhorts his readers not to think of ideal constructions but rather to look at linguistic practices, which the Investigations depicts in a series of “sketches of landscapes which were made in the course of long and involved journeyings” (ix), a sort of philosophical picaresque. The landscapes that Bellow sketches over the course of Augie’s picaresque adventures— ones that range from the Midwest to Mexico, from Arkansas to the Atlantic, from New York to Rome, on the road and out to sea— also represent a break from modernist practice. Unlike Dangling Man and The Victim, both of which manifest an obvious indebtedness to modernist aesthetic strategies, in particular to those of Kafka, Augie March famously declares its independence from such estimable ancestors: “I am an American,” Augie proclaims, “Chicago born— Chicago, that somber city— and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.” Augie’s self-taught and independent “free-style” knows no excess because it practices no restraint: “Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing you hold down the adjoining.”12 And Bellow holds nothing back in Augie March; his lack of restraint explicitly breaks from the “Flaubertian standard” that he claimed to have followed in writing and revising his first two novels.13 Just as Wittgenstein found that the formal conventions of philosophical argument hampered his thoughts, so too Bellow’s “free-style” sheds the pressures of modernist form.

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If salient stylistic properties of both Wittgenstein’s and Bellow’s work bear multiple similarities, however, their styles bear very different relationships to the method and content of their respective works. A second account of the modernist relation between Bellow and Wittgenstein, therefore, emphasizes how they ultimately diverge from a shared point of departure. Wittgenstein employs a style that anticipates his conclusions. His text gives voice to an interlocutor who questions, challenges, even chastises the author. As many commentators have noted— one of the first among them, Cavell— the interlocutor plays a crucial, albeit ambiguous, role in the text.14 It is not merely the content of the interlocutor’s objections, moreover, but the figure of the interlocutor itself— a figure that enacts Wittgenstein’s argument that language acquires meaning within the forms of life and language games in which it is used, forms of life that presuppose a social situation and thus preclude the possibility of a private language. The presence of the “you” in the Investigations marks the use of the “I” as always already presupposing the existence of a “we.” The interruptions of the predominant voice are also interpellations of it. Since its appearance, Augie March has been heralded as analogously advancing a new novelistic style. Critics and novelists have routinely celebrated the unfettered voice that emerges in the opening paragraphs of Augie March as marking a turning point in American literary history and as a bedrock of Bellow’s new style: “The first two hundred pages of Augie March,” Louis Menand writes, “are the best writing Bellow ever did. He created an idiolect that had no model.”15 Such praise would establish Bellow as a modernist innovator: “In Augie March,” writes Philip Roth of Bellow’s “unbridled” style, “a very grand, assertive, freewheeling conception of both the novel and the world the novel represents breaks loose from all sorts of self-imposed strictures, the beginner’s principles of composition are subverted.”16 Anticipating these and echoing similar encomiums, luminaries such as Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie bestow on Augie March the title of the Great American Novel. In overcoming his own apprentice work, Bellow revolutionized American fiction. These claims about the innovations of Augie March, indebted as they are to the optimism and panache of the protagonist, overlook the hesitation, inhibition, and vacillation that consistently trouble Bellow’s other protagonists. These features, moreover, do not represent a “minor literature” within Bellow’s larger corpus, for, even more than Augie’s rambunctiousness, they exemplify Bellow’s fiction. Augie is more the exception than the rule: his freedom, movement, and self-fashioning contrast sharply with the angst, alienation, and suffering of his counterparts. And if Augie gives voice to a newfound American optimism in the postwar period, characters such as Dangling

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Man’s Joseph, The Victim’s Asa Leventhal, and Seize the Day’s Tommy Wilhelm are hard-pressed to represent their own feelings, let alone the spirit of a nation. Consider Wilhelm, who is described throughout the novella in terms that are far from rambunctious: he is alternately “all balled up” (22), “congested” (40, 92), in “a clutch” (40), strangling (45), suffocating (45), tight (47), “choked up and congested” (49), “tied tight within his chest” (49), “tightly tied with ropes” (52), and “choked and strangled” (71). Unbridled, he is not. Rather, one might say, reading the word in the title intransitively, he is seized. This tight, congested quality of Bellow’s fiction allows for an alternate narrative of its relation to Wittgenstein’s philosophy. That story reveals Bellow’s and Wittgenstein’s initially shared but ultimately diverging responses to the idea of a private language as a response to the modernist situation. The idea of a language that refers “to what can only be known to the person speaking,” cited above, and Wittgenstein’s ultimate rejection of such an idea, functions as a nodal point in the Investigations. The very notion of a “private language argument,” however, is something of a misnomer. As in the rest of the Investigations, Wittgenstein discusses the idea of a private language in the context of remarks on related topics, thus offering no clearly delineated argument. Also as in the rest of the Investigations, Wittgenstein voices the claims, questions, and objections of an interlocutor in ways that render the status of any given sentence ambiguous, a quality that leads Cavell to claim that pivotal remarks about private language are stated “largely in half-voice.”17 Nevertheless, the basic point is clear. Wittgenstein asks his readers to imagine a language in which individual words or signs would correspond to fundamentally private sensations: feelings of pain, for example, or visual impressions of a particular color. As a result, this language would, by definition, be understandable only to the person with whom it originates, only to the person who suffers this particular pain or experiences that particular impression. Based in large part on his refusal to grant that mental associations— between a sensation and a sign, for example— can establish or qualify as linguistic definitions, Wittgenstein concludes that the concept of a private language is incoherent and meaningless. He denies, furthermore, the often unspoken but nevertheless pervasive idea that such fundamentally private sensations play a meaningful role in our ordinary language. Hence the “private language argument” is not an argument establishing something called a private language but instead one that mines and examines the assumptions that give rise to the illusion of a private language. In the “beetle in the box” thought experiment, Wittgenstein illustrates the nature of that illusion, succinctly expressing what the protagonist of Bellow’s first novel describes initially as an elusive quality but ultimately as an illusory one:

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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.— Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing.— But what if these people’s word “beetle” had a use nonetheless?— If so, it would not be as the name of a thing. The thing in the box doesn’t belong to the language-game at all; not even as a Something: for the box might even be empty.— No, one can “divide through” by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is [es hebt sich weg, was immer es ist]. (§293)

The thing in the box “cancels out”: it plays no determining role in the workings of the language, but its prominence in the description of the imagined society and its linguistic practices, Wittgenstein implies, corresponds to the ways philosophers have treated the relation between interior states, or private sensations, and linguistic acts. The private language argument demonstrates how something, which is not really anything at all, exerts an unacknowledged and pervasive force on our thinking. It is in this sense that the private language argument proves illuminating in the context of Bellow’s fiction: not primarily as a technical point in the philosophy of language but rather as a crystallization of an intellectual tendency that responds to a cultural anxiety. The problem of a private language, therefore, is not one that troubles exclusively philosophers. Bellow’s fiction takes as a central analytical problem the referential relation between private states of mind and public states of affairs, a relation Bellow often construes as one of individual souls and social contracts. In the opening pages of his debut performance, one finds the first articulation of a problem that would continue to serve as the source of both his inspiration and his vexation— as well as those of his characters— over the course of his career. And while very few readers reckon Dangling Man as one of Bellow’s best works, it offers one of the clearest statements of the contradictions that attend that problem. Set in 1942, the book’s title describes the suspended condition of its protagonist, who has registered with the selective service but has yet to be summoned. The novel begins with an opposition between private life and public performance that takes the form of a divorce between, on the one side, the protagonist’s feelings and emotions, and on the other, the codes of conduct and rules of expression by which he would give voice to them: There was a time when people were in the habit of addressing themselves frequently and felt no shame at making a record of their inward transactions. But to keep a journal nowadays is considered a kind of self-indulgence, a weakness, and in poor taste. Today, the code of the athlete, of the tough boy— an American inheritance, I believe, from the English gentlemen— that curious mixture of striving, asceticism, and rigor, the origins of which some trace back

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to Alexander the Great— is stronger than ever. Do you have feelings? There are correct and incorrect ways of indicating them. Do you have an inner life? It is nobody’s business but your own. Do you have emotions? Strangle them. To a degree, everyone obeys this code. And it does admit of a limited kind of candor, a closemouthed straightforwardness. But on the truest candor, it has an inhibitory effect. Most serious matters are closed to the hard-boiled. They are unpracticed in introspection, and therefore badly equipped to deal with opponents whom they cannot shoot like big game or outdo in daring. If you have difficulties, grapple with them silently, goes one of their commandments. To hell with that! I intend to talk about mine, and if I had as many mouths as Siva has arms and kept them going all the time, I still could not do myself justice. In my present state of demoralization, it has become necessary for me to keep a journal— that is, to talk to myself— and I do not feel guilty of self-indulgence in the least. The hard-boiled are compensated for their silence; they fly planes or fight bulls or catch tarpon, whereas I rarely leave my room. (9– 10)

Unlike Augie March, Bellow’s first protagonist neither knocks nor enters; Joseph rarely leaves his room. Bellow adopts an oppositional tone in this passage in order to distance his work from his (Anglo-American) modernist precursors. As the references to the “code” of the hard-boiled and the mentions of big game and bullfights make clear, Bellow targets Hemingway, in whose shadow he would write for much of his career and whose mantle, many critics claimed, he took up. He hunts big game after all. Against the sensibility of the athlete, tough boy, and gentleman, Joseph points to the significance of introspection, not as “a kind of self-indulgence, a weakness, and in poor taste,” but as a way to make public his private thoughts. Bellow thus announces his contrasting approach to writing fiction— readers of Virginia Woolf, for example, might question how new it actually is— and already in the first lines of his first novel, one sees the contradictory relation between his fictional approach and his fictional problem. For if Bellow’s novel, qua Joseph’s journal, is to take the form of “a record of inward transactions,” it is nevertheless a public act.18 At the very moment that Bellow attempts to distance himself from his modernist precursors, he embodies a more encompassing concept of modernism, one Cavell describes as follows: This is the beginning of what I have called the modern, characterizing it as a moment in which history and its conventions can no longer be taken for granted; the time in which music and painting and poetry (like nations) have to define themselves against their pasts; the beginning of the moment in which each of the arts becomes its own subject, as if its immediate artistic task is to establish its own existence. The new difficulty which comes to light in the

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modernist situation is that of maintaining one’s belief in one’s own enterprise, for the past and the present become problematic together.19

Bellow’s explicit break from Hemingway’s style announces Bellow’s own modernist commitments, according to the terms of Cavell’s description of the modernist difficulty, or the modernist situation. In this opening gambit, Bellow seems to insist, even belligerently, that he does not believe in his own enterprise, even if prevailing tastes and trends run contrary. But neither is Bellow’s a complete break with tradition; rather, he contrasts a past “time” in which one could address oneself with the present situation— “nowadays,” “today”— characterized by a closemouthed, hard-boiled reticence and a turn away from introspection. The idea of keeping a journal and talking to oneself marks Bellow’s modernism not simply as a form of writing— although Joseph’s remarks about his journal clearly double as Bellow’s remarks about his novel— but also as a concern with the modern subject, a preoccupation that Cavell finds characteristic of Wittgenstein’s philosophy: “Part of my sense of the Investigations as a modernist work,” Cavell writes, “is that its portrait of the human is recognizable as one of the modern self, or, as we are given to say, the modern subject.”20 In Bellow and in Wittgenstein, a focus on writing or language mediates competing conceptions of insides and outsides, of souls and the societies they comprise. And both of their works exemplify the sense of the modern that Cavell articulates— one characterized by doubt, skepticism, and the constant threat of fraudulence.21 The intrusion of the public sphere into private life, or the expression of private life in the public sphere: Bellow’s novels inscribe this dialectic both as the productive tension that evokes a novelistic response and as the narrative conflict that the novel must overcome. Although Joseph’s journal affords him an arena where he can practice introspection, he opposes this practice to that of remaining silent. He conceives of his journal, then, as a form of public expression that allows him to “do [himself ] justice.” Bellow’s use of “transaction” in the opening sentence of the novel and “compensation” at the end of the passage— metaphors whose socioeconomic resonance anticipates what Wilhelm will describe as a “reckoning” and Sammler as a “contract”— contains in itself this tension. Who interacts with and compensates whom? The public or social act of writing an implied journal betrays a fantasy of a coherent self. Whereas Joseph pits his subjective state in opposition to public codes, his very sense of that self derives from a more elementary sense of human connectedness. In this regard, his physical isolation is both a contributing factor to and an objective correlative of his metaphysical alienation.

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Indeed, Joseph’s “present state of demoralization” results from nostalgia for a feeling of connectedness that he cannot recover. One of Joseph’s few ventures out of his room finds him looking out of his in-laws’ third-floor apartment, a perspective that affords him a view of the expanse of the Chicago cityscape: It was my painful obligation to look and to submit to myself the invariable question: Where was there a particle of what, elsewhere, or in the past, had spoken in man’s favor? There could be no doubt that these billboards, streets, tracks, houses, ugly and blind, were related to interior life. And yet, I told myself, there had to be doubt. There were human lives organized around these ways and houses, and that they, the houses, were the analogue, that what men created they also were, through some transcendental means, I could not bring myself to concede. There must be a difference, a quality that eluded me, somehow, a difference between things and person and even between acts and persons. Otherwise the people who lived here were actually a reflection of the things they lived among. I had always striven to avoid blaming them. Was that not in effect behind my daily reading of the paper? In their businesses and politics, their taverns, movies, assaults, divorces, murders, I tried continually to find clear signs of their common humanity. (24– 25)

Joseph speculates that there must, by necessity, be a relationship between physical reality and “interior life,” an organizational principle that would link creator and creation. The logical and temporal priority of this relation shifts, however, in Bellow’s syntax: “What men created they also were . . . the people who lived here were actually a reflection of the things they lived among.” Bellow’s prose leaves it underdetermined whether people are what they are before they create what they create or, on the other hand, if they only become what they are as a result of what they create. Are selves reflections of their physical environments, or are physical environments reflections of the subjects that inhabit them? Like the relationship between introspection and transaction— one speaks to oneself and with someone else— so too Joseph’s reflection imbricates public and private, like the tiles on the rooftops that he observes. He asserts that there “could be no doubt” and that there “had to be doubt” concerning the relationship between the one and the other. His doubt concerns the difference between agent and act, creator and creation, which he describes as a “quality” that eludes him. This elusive quality, moreover, is key to his search for “clear signs” of a “common humanity.” That which defines a particular individual as an individual also serves as an abstract quality that constitutes membership in a larger class of individuals.22 The search for that elusive quality that serves as a clear sign of interior identity and common humanity, a search that anticipates Wilhelm’s quest to recover a feeling of connection, drives Dangling Man’s plot, such as it is. Jo-

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seph recognizes that there is a degree of self-interest in this search for “signs” of a “common humanity” (25), a self-interest that relates to his feeling of social connectedness: “It was undeniably in my interest to do this. Because I was involved with them; because, whether I liked it or not, they were my generation, my society, my world. We were figures in the same plot, eternally fixed together” (25). This belief rests on the further premise that Joseph expresses later in the passage: “In all principal ways the human spirit must have been the same” through various ages and epochs (25). Joseph comes close here to voicing a key aspect of Wittgenstein’s remarks on the impossibility of a private language. Readers of Wittgenstein have asked why, if the philosopher feels that the very idea of a private language lacks coherence and is ultimately nonsensical, he devotes so much space to it. Why exert so much effort to imagine a language that, by definition, cannot coherently be called a language? Because, Wittgenstein suggests, the illusion of a private language is the byproduct of the desire for and reification of what Joseph describes as an elusive quality. In asserting “the publicness of language” and “the depth to which language is agreed in,” Wittgenstein’s private language argument, Cavell writes, releases “the fantasy expressed in the denial that language is something essentially shared.”23 The idea that language is essentially shared and deeply public preserves the sense of a “common humanity,” but it does away with the idea of an “elusive quality” that defines the individual human subject and upon which a common humanity is indeed common, shared; it matters not whether a beetle is in the box. What Cavell describes as the “fantasy” expressed in denying the publicness of language is the fantasy that such an elusive quality indeed exists. Because the assumption of that elusive quality is so deeply entrenched in established ways of thinking about the soul and society, Cavell writes, Wittgenstein’s remarks on private language “are peculiarly colored by the tone of someone allowing a fantasy to be voiced.”24 That tone of an unwillingness to relinquish adherence to a fantasy is captured in the interlocutor’s sometimes breezy, sometimes defiant insistence: Well, can’t we do so . . . (§243) Yes, but all the same . . . (§246) But all the same . . . (§258) “Surely I can . . .” (§263) “But surely I can . . .” (§265) surely that makes sense! (§278) But surely I can’t be mistaken here . . . (§288) Well, everyone tells me that he knows . . . (§293) “But you will surely admit . . .” (§304) “But you surely can’t deny . . .” (§305)

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Although these remarks always remain somewhat ambiguous in terms of whether they are spoken in the voice of the author, in the voice of the interlocutor, or in a “half-voice”— and although Wittgenstein’s idiosyncratic punctuation offsets some of them in quotation marks, some with dashes, and some with both— the persistence of such assertions and exclamations throughout this section of the text creates a frustrated and even at times desperate tone that insists upon or asserts that which cannot be established or demonstrated, of treating as certain that which is precisely in doubt: stipulation as a response to skepticism, insistent belief in the face of modernist doubt. Joseph similarly attempts to impute not simply reality but necessity to that which he questions. Bellow voices Joseph’s expression of a fantasy of necessity through means similar to Wittgenstein’s interlocutor: “undeniably,” “whether I liked it or not,” “eternally fixed,” “all principal ways,” “the human spirit must have been the same” (25). And yet the logical compulsion of the “must,” the necessary belief that there is a common underlying spirit that serves as the basis, or sign, for a “common humanity,” is a compulsion to which Joseph cannot fully bring himself to submit. The problem with attempting to stipulate away doubt is that the same person is doing both the doubting and the stipulating: I have spoken of an “invariable question.” But the fact is that it had for many months been not in the least invariable. These were things I would have thought last winter, and now, in their troubled density, they served only to remind me of the sort of person I had been. For a long time “common humanity” and “bring myself to concede” had been completely absent from my mind. And all at once I saw how I had lapsed from that older self to whom they had been so natural. (26)

The compulsion that Joseph’s earlier self expresses with words such as “must” and “invariable” appears to his present self as a desire for necessity more than the force of necessity itself, a desire that does not agree with “the fact” that his feeling of a common humanity had for many months been absent. The change in Joseph’s social outlook is so extreme that he thinks of his earlier self, the one who could speak of an “invariable question” and a “common humanity,” as an entirely different person. His journal entries register this transformation as a shift in narrative perspective. Immediately after confessing his inability to recover his past feelings of a necessary connection between individual subjects and admitting his “lapse” from that older self, Joseph’s journal entries draw a distinction between the written “Joseph,” “that older self,” and the writing “I,” who is “wearing his [Joseph’s] cast-off clothes”: “For legal purposes, I am that older

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self, and if a question of my identity were to arise I could do nothing but point to my attributes of yesterday. I have not tried to bring myself up to date, either from indifference or from fear. Very little about the Joseph of a year ago pleases me. I cannot help laughing at him, at some of his traits and sayings” (26). The objective description of himself indicates his alienation from himself. In this passage, the metaphysical subject does not become the substance to which personal attributes adhere, and thus it does not afford consistency through time. And if for “legal purposes” Joseph can point to his “attributes of yesterday” when questions of identity arise, that very act of pointing itself raises a question of identity; namely, if Joseph points to his attributes of yesterday, who’s doing the pointing? Joseph makes no effort to bring his current self “up to date”— an ambiguous expression given the divided self under consideration: would bringing himself up to date require that his present self embody, rather than point to, the attributes of the older self or, to the contrary, would it require that he develop a new set of attributes that reflect his current distance from that self?25 Immediately after this passage, the journal entry continues to offer a third-person description of Joseph’s attributes: his age (twenty-seven), his education (University of Wisconsin), his occupation (Inter-American Travel Bureau), and his various “peculiarities.” The split between the current and the past Josephs, the writing and the written self, functions as one narrative device that allows Bellow to introduce dialogue into this monologic text. In this respect, it anticipates another such device, the introduction of Joseph’s alter ego, neither clearly wedded to the journal writer nor completely divorced, a creation of his consciousness that nevertheless serves as its counter, a second person who appears under various names: “The Spirit of Alternatives,” “On the Other Hand,” and “Tu As Raison Aussi.” Consider a typical stretch of dialogue: “Listen, Tu As Raison Aussi. We abuse the present too much, don’t you think so?” “You’re not so fond of it.” “Fond! What a word!” “Alienated, then.” “That’s bad, too.” “It’s popular.” “There’s a lot of talk about alienation. It’s a fool’s plea.” “Is it?”

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“You can divorce your wife or abandon your child, but what can you do with yourself?” “You can’t banish the world by decree if it’s in you. Is that it, Joseph?” “How can you? You have gone to its schools and seen its movies, listened to its radios, read its magazines. What if you declare you are alienated, you say you reject the Hollywood dream, the soap opera, the cheap thriller? The very denial implicates you.” (136– 37)

The form of the dialogue parallels the content of the conversation. Joseph invents an alter ego with whom he converses about the impossibility of alienation. He thus talks to his alienated self about the impossibility of that self. Here is Joseph’s dilemma, one in which he can deny that he follows the codes of society— whether those of a Hemingway novel or a cheap thriller— but the very denial implicates him. That is, his repeated attempts to express the feelings of an isolated subject situate that subject in a larger social framework, not one based on an ideal vision of a “common humanity,” but one more along the lines of Althusser’s apparatuses, which interpellate the subject even as they implicate the subject in the workings of that interpellation.26 The very conception of a discrete subject with personal feelings and a private language to express them presupposes a broader social field.27 The inability to separate public from private becomes not only indeterminable in Dangling Man but incomprehensible, as becomes apparent in the continuation of Joseph’s dialogue with the Spirit of Alternatives: “If you’re not alienated, why do you quarrel with so many people? I know you’re not a misanthrope. Is it because they force you to recognize that you belong to their world?” “I was wrong, or else put it badly. I didn’t say there was no feeling of alienation, but that we should not make a doctrine of our feeling.” “Is that a public or a private belief?” “I don’t understand you.” (138)

The relationship between having a feeling and making a doctrine of that feeling will emerge in Seize the Day as a central problematic in the form of Wilhelm’s attempt to “go back” to his feeling of a common humanity and an underlying order of things. The belief that one should, or should not, elevate a private feeling to the status of a public doctrine— an affective imperative, as it were— splits the difference between public and private realms. Or rather, it

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renders the distinction between public and private incomprehensible. Part of the reason Joseph fails to understand Tu As Raison Aussi is his inability to distinguish clearly between the private self and public life in the first place; he is aware, or is forced to recognize, as his alter ego reminds him, that he belongs to the very world he quarrels with. His very denial implicates him. If alienation should not, or cannot, be elevated to the status of a public doctrine or ideal, Joseph still faces the challenge of how the private subject confronts and relates to public life. His answer, to which his alter ego responds, is that one must submit to “a plan, a program, perhaps an obsession”: “An ideal construction.” “A German phrase. And you with a French name.” “I have to be above such prejudices.” “Well, it’s a lovely phrase. An ideal construction, an obsessive device. There have been innumerable varieties: for study, for wisdom, bravery, war, the benefits of cruelty, for art; the God-man of ancient cultures, the Humanistic full man, the courtly lover, the knight, the ecclesiastic, the despot, the ascetic, the millionaire, the manager. I could name hundreds of these ideal constructions, each with its assertions and symbols, each finding— in conduct, in God, in art, in money— its particular answer and each proclaiming: ‘This is the only possible way to meet chaos.’ ” . . . “Do you want one of those constructions, Joseph?” “Doesn’t it seem that we need them?” (140)

If one cannot meet chaos by projecting one’s private feelings— whether of social connectedness or social alienation— into the public sphere, then one must meet chaos, it would seem, with an “ideal construction.” What’s more, these ideal constructions are not, according to Joseph, a matter of choice but instead one of necessity. Or so it would seem. Joseph’s question can be read as either genuine or rhetorical, and Bellow thus leaves room for interpretation. It is no more clear as to what form these constructions take, although the necessity of form, of constructing a social reality or confronting a social reality through constructions, is one that will persist in Bellow’s work: “But what of the gap between the ideal construction and the real world, the truth? . . . How are they related?” (141). When his interlocutor becomes reticent on this question, Joseph flies into a rage and forces him to leave. But the question lingers.28 Joseph never manages to resolve this question in his journals, and the

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novel ends with him opting for social regulation, a decision that takes the form of a choice that he may or may not make out of necessity. Before he does so, he offers one final suggestion concerning ideal constructions: “If I had Tu As Raison Aussi with me today, I could tell him that the highest ‘ideal construction’ is the one that unlocks the imprisoning self ” (153). Note that it is not the imprisoned self that needs to be unfettered but “the imprisoning self.” Just as “Joseph” is both the writing self and the written self in his journal, so too his self is both jailer and convict. The fiction of an unfettered self, one independent of society and free to choose whether or not to join it, becomes the trap that at once reveals the social determination of the self and thus exposes the fantasy of the metaphysical self. That self must suppress its social origins in order to present a version of society that it can control, even if that version is only a fiction that ignores the gap between ideal construction and the real world or the truth. It is the constant torment of Bellow’s first protagonist that he can never completely act “as if ” that fiction were reality, that he always finds himself inhabiting and inhibited by the gap between construction and reality, which, in the end, proves more exhausting than even bullfighting or big-game hunting. Exhausted and exasperated, Joseph volunteers for immediate duty, and his request is granted. “I must give myself up,” he writes in a telling expression. Before leaving, he visits his childhood bedroom, where he begins, he tells himself, “to grasp the meaning of irretrievable” (190). Joseph considers that his room, which did not exist a mere thirty years ago and likely will not exist, he suspects, a mere fifty years hence, represents a kind of “reality” that is “very dangerous, very treacherous”: It should not be trusted. And I rose rather unsteadily from the rocker, feeling that there was an element of treason to common sense in the very objects of common sense. Or that there was no trusting them, save through wide agreement, and that my separation from such agreement had brought me perilously far from the necessary trust, auxiliary to all sanity. I had not done well alone. I doubted whether anyone could. To be pushed upon oneself entirely put the very facts of simple existence in doubt. Perhaps the war would teach me, by violence, what I had been unable to learn during those months in the room. Perhaps I could sound creation through other means. Perhaps. But things were now out of my hands. The next move was the world’s. I could not bring myself to regret it. (190– 91)

The treasonous relation that the objects of common sense bear to common sense itself parallels what one might call the treasonous relation that the self bears to the act of self-reflection. Having been “pushed upon” himself, Joseph

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doubts “the very facts of simple existence,” a skepticism that recalls his earlier claim that there could not be doubt and that there must be doubt. Joseph’s wavering recalls Cavell’s claim in “Declining Decline” that “the effort to deny skepticism is itself an expression of skepticism.” In that same essay, Cavell allows that “philosophy has no monopoly on responses to the threat of skepticism.”29 In his essay “Skepticism and the Depth of Life,” Bellow identifies a broadly construed cultural skepticism as the defining attitude of modern society: “We long for enchantment but our skepticism is too great. It is hard for modern readers to believe in an added dimension or quality of existence.” Such doubt, Bellow continues in a way that aligns him with contemporaries such as Flannery O’Connor, challenges the modern writer: “It is with this skepticism that the writer today has to deal.” Bellow describes this skepticism as an inheritance of modernism: “Since the First World War we have seen these traditional ideas subverted by any number of artists. . . . The skepticism I have spoken of assumes that it can ‘see through things.’ It seems to feel, unhappily, that things are shallow enough to be ‘seen through.’ In other words, it feels that ‘the depth of life’ is gone.”30 Bellow’s fiction seeks to uncover, or to recover, signs of the depth that has gone missing, a depth in life that Bellow constantly construes as an inner life. Yet a pervasive skepticism qualifies Bellow’s modernist responses to this modernist situation, in which the presence of doubt and the threat of fraudulence are ever present. Despite his success in Augie March in forging a new style, Bellow’s follow-up effort, Seize the Day, returns to the preoccupations of Dangling Man. Consider poor Tommy Wilhelm’s plight. As if he didn’t have enough troubles— an estranged wife, an apathetic father, and a financial advisor who bases his guidance on Wilhelm Reich’s orgonomics rather than Wall Street economics— even the language in which he would lodge his complaints conspires against him: Every other man spoke a language entirely his own, which he had figured out by private thinking; he had his own ideas and peculiar ways. If you wanted to talk about a glass of water, you had to start back with God creating the heavens and earth; the apple; Abraham, Moses and Jesus; Rome; the Middle Ages; gunpowder; the Revolution; back to Newton; up to Einstein; then war and Lenin and Hitler. After reviewing this and getting it all straight again you could proceed to talk about a glass of water. “I’m fainting, please get me a little water.” You were lucky even then to make yourself understood. And this happened over and over and over with everyone you met. You had to translate and translate, explain and explain, back and forth, and it was the punishment of hell itself not to understand or be understood, not to know the crazy from the sane, the wise from the fools, the young from the old or the sick from the well.

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The fathers were no fathers and the sons were no sons. You had to talk with yourself in the daytime and reason with yourself at night. Who else was there to talk to in a city like New York? (79– 80)

Wilhelm envisions a situation in which the idiosyncratic state of each person’s thinking determines a corresponding language. Between these languages, he claims, one must translate and explain. To succeed in such an effort, one must cover human history from the creation of the heavens to the destruction of the Jews. The individual translator, it would seem, must have access not only to “each man’s” head in order to glean his private thoughts and mental processes but also to the causal chain of human civilization that connects the meaning of the phrase “a glass of water” to antediluvian history. In this regard, the well-remarked water imagery in Seize the Day takes on an additional resonance, suggesting a return to the scene of what Saul Kripke refers to as the “initial baptism,” the primal scene of naming.31 Under such conditions of indefinite regress, Wilhelm laments, it is impossible to ask a neighbor for help. As a result, Wilhelm, like his predecessor Joseph, talks with himself. Despite his sense of separation from the multitudes that surround him and his difficulty with even something so simple as asking for a glass of water, Wilhelm nevertheless feels a sense of “social connectedness” to his fellow man, discussing “a larger body” from which one “cannot be separated.” In this region, “the real soul says plain and understandable things to everyone. There sons and fathers are themselves, . . . So what did it matter how many languages there were, or how hard it was to describe a glass of water?” (80– 81). The problems of historical transmission and intentional translation, in the end, are merely surface phenomena. Underneath, Wilhelm believes, there is a permanent order of things that occasionally emerges from the confusion and insanity of everyday life. The trouble is how to enact the transition from the one to the other, to move from what Wilhelm describes as “simple a and simple b to the great x and y” (80). This moment of transition or transcendence often occurs in Bellow’s novels as an affective rather than a cognitive event: He was going through an underground corridor, a place he had always hated and hated more than ever now. On the walls between the advertisements were words in chalk: “Sin No More,” and “Do Not Eat Pig,” he had particularly noticed. And in the dark tunnel, in the haste, heat, and darkness which disfigure and make freaks and fragments of nose and eyes and teeth, all of a sudden, unsought, a general love for all these imperfect and lurid-looking people burst out in Wilhelm’s breast. He loved them. One and all, he passionately loved them. They were his brothers and sisters. He was imperfect and disfigured

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himself, but what difference did that make if he was united with them by this blaze of love? (80– 81)

Note that this love “burst out in Wilhelm’s breast,” thus temporarily overcoming the choked, strangled, balled-up feeling that characterizes him throughout most of the novel. It is important to note, also, that this feeling of connectedness Wilhelm experiences does not take the form of a utopian possibility, does not augur human perfectibility; rather, it occurs in contexts of disfigured bodies and damaged souls. The prohibitions written on the wall— representing commandment and sin— recall the fact that Wittgenstein’s initial statement of the private language argument contains particular speech acts: giving orders, obeying, and blaming. Stephen Mulhall notes the connection that such speech acts have to Wittgenstein’s primary example throughout: the experience of pain, the expression of that experience, and the recognition and acknowledgement of that experience in others. These aspects of the problem immediately relate to Wilhelm’s suffering as well.32 Bellow gives particular force and emphasis to the problem of a private language in this example, when the nature of the particular sensation is one of connectedness to one’s fellow human beings despite a larger sense of isolation and alienation. In the private language argument, Wittgenstein suggests the necessity of the social for any coherent conception of language, the role of language and context in the expression of private sensations. The social contract, Bellow implies, is founded on the idea of such a feeling, but Wilhelm struggles to articulate it. His problem will be how to return to it, and in this sense that problem parallels Wittgenstein’s discussion of rulefollowing, which, as Kripke was one of the first to note, bears many structural similarities to and shares many philosophical implications with the private language argument:33 On that very same afternoon he didn’t hold so high an opinion of this same onrush of loving kindness. What did it come to? As they had the capacity and must use it once in a while, people were bound to have such involuntary feelings. It was only another one of those subway things. Like having a hardon at random. But today, his day of reckoning, he consulted his memory and thought, I must go back to that. That’s the right clue and may do me the most good. Something very big. Truth, like. (81)

Wilhelm’s flash of insight into the truth, which he experiences as a “feeling,” is just that: a fleeting moment of recognition that disappears as quickly as it arises and thus can only be comprehended retrospectively, after it has gone. His attempt to recover his lost feeling of connectedness, to reckon with his affective connection to other people, presents a referential problem beyond

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the fact that his gendered language belies the universality to which he aspires. He must “get back to that” but knows not how to recover a feeling that is lost and that was, in the first place, “involuntary.” Wilhelm seeks a mode of reference that will, as Bruno Latour remarks, call back or recapture something that has been lost: “We always forget that the word ‘reference’ comes from the Latin referre, ‘to bring back.’ Is the referent what I point to with my finger outside of discourse, or is it what I bring back inside discourse?”34 Whereas the issue at stake primarily in the private language argument is how to refer to a private sensation, something constitutionally particular and nondiscursive, one of the overlapping considerations of Wittgenstein’s discussion of rule-following has to do with memory and consistency. How does one know when observing or even engaging in a particular action that the criterion governing that action has remained constant? What if a different rule is being followed, or a different criterion is being observed, with identical results? Or how does one know that a rule that has governed a successful action in one instance will perform the same function in the same way in future instances or iterations? For Wilhelm, the issue is how to “go back to that.” On the one hand, private sensations— what Bellow refers to as “involuntary feelings”— are distinctly individual. And yet, on the other hand, Bellow implies, they are also that which creates affective ties to the social fabric, bonds to the body politic. Without such affective experiences, he implies further, there are only abstractions or “ideal constructions” and, as a result, alienation and isolation. Such is the problem of private language for Bellow’s characters and also for Bellow the novelist. The private language argument, as Wittgenstein lays it out, doubles as a description of novelistic form and of the challenges and promise of novelistic discourse— of writing and reading novels. Throughout the Investigations, there are various mentor or teacher figures— for example, the “elders” in the opening passage from Augustine— who prove instrumental in the child’s acquisition of language.35 In Seize the Day, there are various elders who fail to instruct Wilhelm: his father first and foremost, but also the old man Rappaport, the Holocaust survivor and commodities investor, and particularly Dr. Tamkin, the “psychological poet” and confidence man who strips Wilhelm of his last remaining funds. At a relatively late point in the narrative, Tamkin asks Wilhelm, “You love your old man?”: “Wilhelm grasped at this. ‘Of course, of course I love him. My father. My mother— ’ As he said this there was a great pull at the very center of his soul. When a fish strikes the line you feel the live force in your hand. A mysterious being beneath the water, driven by hunger, has taken the hook and rushes away and fights, writhing. Wilhelm never identified what struck within him. It did not reveal itself. It got away” (89). Here’s another scene in which Bellow dramatizes the problem

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of private language. Wilhelm’s initial response to Tamkin’s question about whether he loves his father reads like a description of the use of the word “love” in the language game of family relations: “Of course, of course I love him.” The assumption behind this sentence is that circumstances would need to be extraordinary to think that he didn’t. But as he continues, “My father. My mother— ” something private and inaccessible happens, something that Wilhelm might use the word “love” to describe but is much more granular yet nonetheless inarticulate, immediate yet elusive. This is the kind of private sensation that Wittgenstein refers to. Can one imagine a person developing a language that would refer to these sensations, which only the person experiencing them can access and begin to understand? Bellow does not show Wilhelm attempting to name or refer to this sensation. The em dash marks an occurrence and an absence, an event and an incompleteness. At this moment, Bellow’s narrator takes on an unfamiliar voice and Bellow’s prose what one might call a more Jamesian style. Throughout the novella, and particularly in this scene, the narration moves between logistics— setting the scene, moving a character from here to there— and free indirect discourse. There is little third-person philosophical abstraction and a sentence beginning, abruptly, with a phrase such as “When a fish strikes the line you.” The “you” here is particularly interesting, as it substitutes for the impersonal “one” and creates the impression that the narrator is directly addressing the reader, in something of an aside, while Wilhelm remains frozen in the here-and-now, paralyzed by a feeling with which he cannot come to terms. The narrator uses the analogy of that “live force” that connects fish to human in a relationship of hunger, fighting, writhing, killing, and dying. Wilhelm never comes to grips with the “live force” that he feels, the love that connects him to his father and to his mother, who is long dead. “It” does not reveal itself. “It” gets away. The search for that “it”— alternately conceived of as an elusive quality, an involuntary feeling, or, most commonly, the real soul— constitutes the abiding preoccupation of Bellow’s novels. But the novels themselves are simultaneously attuned to that which is public, physical, and external to the self. Indeed, Bellow’s brilliance often resides in this element not only in Augie March but also in all the works. His narratives often seem to refuse brilliantly that which they search for relentlessly. Yet the novelist can never quite relinquish the search or let go of the belief in that elusive something, that beetle in the box. Bellow’s novels often conclude with an assertion or stipulation or insistence on precisely that which they are never quite able to identify. Thus Henderson the Rain King, perhaps Bellow’s most relentlessly physicalist novel, as Robert Chodat has argued, nevertheless ends with a moment of mystical insight and human connection.36 Seize the Day likewise concludes

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with an affirmation of that which the preceding narrative has ruthlessly denied. Searching in the street for Tamkin, Wilhelm unintentionally enters the funeral service of a man he does not know. Wilhelm stands transfixed by the sight of the corpse: “Standing a little apart, Wilhelm began to cry. He cried at first softly and from sentiment, but soon from deeper feeling. He sobbed loudly and his face grew distorted and hot, and the tears stung his skin. A man— another human creature. . . . Soon he was past words, past reason, coherence” (113). The passage crystallizes the concerns that have driven the narrative leading up to it: Wilhelm experiences a “deeper feeling” that binds him to “another human creature,” an experience that is “past words, past reason.” Bellow’s characters struggle and suffer, and sometimes stomp and rage, throughout the lion’s share of most of his novels, and yet moments like this one— a passage that, Bellow’s biographer James Atlas notes, might very well have been rewritten in light of the tragic death of Bellow’s childhood friend, Isaac Rosenfeld, at the age of thirty-eight in 1956— are not uncommon in Bellow’s work.37 Wilhelm’s moment of epiphany while viewing a corpse prefigures the closing scene of Mr. Sammler’s Planet, a novel for which Seize the Day reads like a study in more than one respect. Standing over the corpse of his uncle, friend, and benefactor, Elya Gruner, Sammler prays in a “mental whisper”— a concept not entirely coherent but nevertheless telling (as if one can speak silently to oneself at different volumes)— realizing, or at least insisting, that “in his inmost heart, each man knows” the terms of the contract: “For that is the truth of it— that we all know, God, that we know, that we know, we know, we know” (313). At the moment of closure, the individual soul is bound to all others through a form of divine knowledge. Seize the Day likewise concludes with Wilhelm, funeral music playing in the background, sinking toward “the consummation of his heart’s ultimate need” (114). In its dramatization of how the idea of a private language seduces or captivates our thought, Wittgenstein’s philosophy illuminates the workings of Bellow’s novels, of how and why Bellow ultimately insists upon that which eludes his protagonists: to record inward transactions, to capture elusive qualities, to affirm a common humanity. The possibility of a private language is a seductive and threatening prospect for Bellow the novelist as well as for his protagonists. For all his preoccupation with a private language, Bellow was equally anxious about the reading public. And yet he also seems to share— perhaps, given his ambitions, needs to share— with J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello the sense that the publicness of language diminishes the genius of the novelist. “But you must surely concede,” Costello’s son John insists, “that at a certain level we speak, and therefore write, like everyone else. Otherwise we would all be speaking and writing private languages.” Costello must con-

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cede but cannot help but lament the truth of the claim, thinking of “all the effort I put into not writing like anyone else.”38 The impossibility of a private language threatens the particularity of the individual, the true soul, and therefore the genius of the author. In its representations of the threat and the seductiveness of the idea of a private language, Bellow’s fiction helps situate Wittgenstein’s philosophy in the broader context of cultural modernism. Mark Greif has described the period between 1933 and 1975, in which Wittgenstein’s later work was written and Bellow’s best work appeared, as the age of “the crisis of man.”39 For Greif, Bellow’s early work, specifically Dangling Man, exemplifies this crisis, which Cavell likewise finds exemplary of Wittgenstein’s modernism: “The Investigations exhibits, as purely as any work of philosophy as I know, philosophizing as a spiritual struggle, specifically as a struggle with the contrary depths of oneself, which in the modern world will presents themselves in touches of madness.”40 Wittgenstein struggles against the seductiveness of the idea of a private language as a means to ward off that madness; it is an illusion that Bellow ultimately cannot resist.

Notes

Introduction 1. Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, “The New Modernist Studies,” PMLA (2008), 738. 2. See Michael North, Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). The Tractatus was published initially in 1921 under the title LogischPhilosophische Abhandlung in the journal Annalen der Naturphilosophie. 3. “Wittgenstein developed a picture of language that radically broke with tradition and revolutionized the way philosophers approached the topic in the twentieth century.” Wolfgang Huemer, “Wittgenstein, Language, and Philosophy of Literature,” in The Literary Wittgenstein, ed. John Gibson and Wolfgang Huemer (London: Routledge, 2004), 1. 4. Terry Eagleton, “My Wittgenstein,” Common Knowledge 3.1 (Spring 1994), 152. 5. Michael Fischer, “Wittgenstein as a Modernist Philosopher,” Philosophy and Literature 17.2 (1993), 279. One exception to Fischer’s claim is Jorn K. Bramann’s Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and the Modern Arts (Rochester, NY: Adler, 1985). One exemplification of Fischer’s claim is Peter Gay’s Modernism: The Lure of Heresy (New York: Norton, 2008), which makes no mention of Wittgenstein. 6. Rudolf Carnap, The Logical Structure of the World and Pseudoproblems in Philosophy, 2nd ed., trans. Rolf A. George (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), xvii. Although Carnap strictly policed the boundaries of philosophy, he did feel that modern developments in philosophy complemented those of other cultural spheres: “We feel that there is an inner kinship between the attitude on which our philosophical work is founded and the intellectual attitude which presently manifests itself in entirely different walks of life; we feel this orientation in artistic movements, especially in architecture” (xviii). 7. Hans Reichenbach, The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), vii, 325. 8. “I see myself as drawn against my will into what is called ‘the Vienna Circle,’ ” Wittgenstein wrote in 1932 to Moritz Schlick, founder of the group. Quoted in David G. Stern, “Wittgenstein, the Vienna Circle, and Physicalism: A Reassessment,” in The Cambridge Companion to Logical Empiricism, ed. Alan Richardson and Thomas Uebel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 321. 9. Theodor W. Adorno, Against Epistemology: A Metacritique, trans. Willis Domingo (1956; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 42.

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10. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon, 1964), 173. 11. “After 1920 the Tractatus itself became a foundation stone of the new ‘professionalized’ philosophy. Within the resulting discipline, the attempt was made to separate ‘technical’ issues of philosophy from their larger cultural matrix and to set these theoretical analyses on an independent basis, as free from extraneous commitments as the problems and theorems of, say, pure mathematics.” Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973), 27. 12. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. Von Wright and Heikki Nyman, trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 24. Hereinafter cited parenthetically and abbreviated as CV. 13. Cecil French Salkeld, “Mummy Is Become Merchandise,” Ireland To-day 2.11 (1937), 77– 79; Marjorie Perloff, Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 3; Eagleton, “My Wittgenstein,” 153– 54. 14. “The almost comic vehemence of these extreme aesthetic judgments is a function of what we might call le côté Viennoise of Wittgenstein— the social code of his time whereby those who are gebildet (cultured, well educated) took it to be incumbent upon them to pronounce on the given art work or performance or concert as großartig or schrecklich, and so on. In this respect, as in his actual tastes for classical music and literature, Wittgenstein was very much of his time and place.” Marjorie Perloff, “‘But isn’t the same at least the same?’ Wittgenstein and the Question of Poetic Translatability,” in The Literary Wittgenstein, 39. 15. Susan Stanford Friedman catalogs the competing and contradictory definitions of the terms modern, modernism, and modernity in “Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/ Modernity/ Modernism,” Modernism/modernity 8.3 (September 2001), 493– 513. 16. Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? (1969; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), xxxvi. Hereinafter cited parenthetically and abbreviated as MWMS. 17. C. G. Luckhardt, ed., Wittgenstein: Sources and Perspectives (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), 94. 18. Michael LeMahieu, “Nonsense Modernism: The Limits of Modernity and the Feelings of Philosophy in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus,” in Bad Modernisms, ed. Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 70. 19. Allan Janik similarly notes that “Wittgenstein’s efforts to get straight about the limits of thought and language in all of the stages of his development and thus to be fair to science, religion, and art account for his place of honor among critical modernists.” Wittgenstein’s Vienna Revisited (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2001), x. 20. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, revised ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 14. 21. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd ed., trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001), §66. Hereinafter cited parenthetically and abbreviated as PI. 22. Eli Friedlander, Signs of Sense: Reading Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), xix. 23. See, along with CV, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Occasions, 1912– 1951, ed. James Klagge and Alfred Nordmann (Indianapolis IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1993); Ludwig Wittgenstein, Public and Private Occasions, ed. James Klagge and Alfred Nordmann (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003); Rush Rhees, ed., Recollections of Wittgenstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984); Ludwig Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein’s Lectures, Cambridge, 1932– 1935, from

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the notes of Alice Ambrose and Margaret MacDonald, ed. Alice Ambrose (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1979); Ray Monk, Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: Free Press, 1990). 24. Janik and Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna, 9. 25. Ibid., 13. 26. Ibid., 9. 27. Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Lecture on Ethics,” in Philosophical Occasions, 37. 28. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Remarks, ed. Rush Rhees (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 7. 29. Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough,” in Philosophical Occasions, 131. 30. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Occasions, 133. 31. Joseph Conrad, preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus (New York: Doubleday, 1914), 14; E. M. Forster, Howard’s End (New York: Vintage, 1989), 195. 32. M. O’C. Drury, “Some Notes on Conversations with Wittgenstein,” in Recollections of Wittgenstein, 94. 33. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge, 1961), 6.371. Hereinafter cited parenthetically and abbreviated as TLP. 34. Stanley Cavell, “Introductory Note to ‘The Investigations’ Everyday Aesthetics of Itself,’ ” in The Literary Wittgenstein, 19. 35. Stanley Cavell, “The Investigations’ Everyday Aesthetics of Itself,” in The Literary Wittgenstein, 25. 36. R. M. Berry refers to Must We Mean What We Say? as a “work on modernism and philosophy.” R. M. Berry, “‘Is “Us” Me?’: Cultural Studies and the Universality of Aesthetic Judgments,” in Stanley Cavell and Literary Studies: Consequences of Skepticism, ed. Richard Eldridge and Bernard Rhie (New York: Continuum, 2011), 31. 37. Cavell, “Introductory Note,” 18. 38. Carnap, The Logical Structure of the World, xv. 39. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, “The Name and Nature of Modernism,” in Modernism: A Guide to European Literature, 1890– 1930 (London: Penguin, 1991), 19. 40. Lisi Schoenbach, Pragmatic Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). See also Liesl Olson, Modernism and the Ordinary (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 41. Mao and Walkowitz, “The New Modernist Studies,” 737. 42. Alice Crary and Rupert Read, eds., The New Wittgenstein (London: Routledge, 2000). 43. For key contributions to the resolute reading of Wittgenstein, see Cora Diamond, The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991) and “Ethics, Imagination and the Method of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus,” in The New Wittgenstein, 149– 73; James Conant, “The Method of the Tractatus,” in From Frege to Wittgenstein: Perspectives on Early Analytic Philosophy, ed. E. H. Reck (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) and “Elucidation and Nonsense in Frege and early Wittgenstein,” in The New Wittgenstein, 174– 217. For a resolute reading of the Tractatus, see also Michael Kremer, “The Purpose of Tractarian Nonsense,” NOÛS 35.1 (March 2001), 39– 73; for a resolute reading of the Philosophical Investigations, see Stephen Mulhall, Wittgenstein’s Private Language: Grammar, Nonsense, and Imagination in Philosophical Investigations, §§243– 315 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 44. Gibson and Huemer, eds., The Literary Wittgenstein; Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey, eds., Wittgenstein, Theory, and the Arts (London: Routledge, 2001).

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45. Anat Biletzki and Anat Matar, The Story of Analytic Philosophy: Plots and Heroes (New York: Routledge, 1998). See also Michael Dummett, Origins of Analytical Philosophy (London: Duckworth, 1993); Erich H. Reck, ed., The Historical Turn in Analytic Philosophy (New York: Palgrave, 2013). 46. Anat Matar, Modernism and the Language of Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2006), 8, 7. See also Megan Quigley, Modernist Fiction and Vagueness: Philosophy, Form, and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Ben Ware, The Dialectic of the Ladder: Wittgenstein, the Tractatus and Modernism (London: Bloomsbury, 2015); Rebecca Schuman, Wittgenstein and Kafka (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015). 47. Stanley Cavell, “Declining Decline: Wittgenstein as a Philosopher of Culture,” in This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures after Emerson after Wittgenstein (Albuquerque, NM: Living Batch Press, 1989), 72. Chapter One 1. This is the title of Pound’s 1934 collection (London: Faber & Faber). 2. Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983). 3. Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity (London: Verso, 2012), 35– 36. Jameson presents this work as the “theoretical” section of a multivolume project titled The Poetics of Social Forms. 4. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman, trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 24. Hereinafter cited parenthetically and abbreviated CV. 5. This phrase, contrastive with “positive ground,” has many uses in the visual arts, psychology, literary criticism, and philosophy. One of the most important philosophical accounts of the relationship between the two is in G. W. F. Hegel’s Science of Logic, trans. George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 11.326, 422. 6. Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Preface,” in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C. K. Ogden (London: Routledge, 1981), 27. Hereinafter cited parenthetically and abbreviated as TLP. 7. See James Conant, “Throwing Away the Top of the Ladder,” The Yale Review 79 (1991), 328– 64. 8. This is Wittgenstein’s phrase in the Tractatus 6.54. The issue raises the question of the difference between a “resolute” reading of the Tractatus and a reading that takes each of its propositions at face value. The “resolute” reading is strict in regarding all the book’s explicit claims as (ultimately) nonsense. See John Koethe, “On the ‘Resolute’ Reading of the Tractatus,” Philosophical Investigations 26 (2003), 187– 204. 9. Michael LeMahieu discusses Wittgenstein’s critique of psychologism in “Nonsense Modernism: The Limits of Modernity and the Feelings of Philosophy in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus,” in Bad Modernisms, ed. Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 68– 93. 10. Emmanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1929), Bxvii, 23. Hereinafter abbreviated as CPR. 11. On Kant’s concept of experience and (late) modernism, see Jay M. Bernstein, Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 4– 6. Richard Eldridge takes “experience” in both Kant and Wittgenstein as going well beyond our cognition of the world and indeed as including who we ourselves are as persons

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(personhood). Eldridge, “Rotating the Axis of Our Investigation: Wittgensteinian Investigations and Hölderlin’s Poetology,” in The Literary Wittgenstein, ed. John Gibson and Wolfgang Huemer (London: Routledge, 2004), 211– 27. 12. While consciousness is the bedrock of experience, experience itself involves determinations (judgments) of a synthetic sort. Kant distinguishes famously between analytic judgments (e.g., “All bodies in space are extended”— an analytic judgment, since “body” is by definition extended substance) and synthetic judgments (e.g., “All bodies are heavy”— a synthetic judgment, since the predicate “heavy” adds something not necessarily contained in “body”), Kant, CPR, B11, 48– 49. 13. See Kant, CPR, B37, 67. Also, “the representation of myself, as the thinking subject, belongs to inner sense only,” while, by contrast, “the representations which mark extended beings belong also to outer sense” (A371, 347). 14. Eldridge presents a very useful account of this question in “Rotating the Axis,” 214– 15. 15. See, for example, Peter Tyler, The Return to the Mystical: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Teresa of Avila and the Christian Mystical Tradition (New York: Continuum, 2011); Brian McGuinness, “The Mysticism of the Tractatus,” Philosophical Review 75 (1966), 305– 28; Michael Morris and Julian Dodd, “Mysticism and Nonsense on the Tractatus,” European Journal of Philosophy 15 (2007), 1– 30. 16. Among them is the “non-accidental.” 17. Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction,” in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, volume 4: 1925– 1928, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth Press, 1984), 160. 18. On the related issue of “experience without a subject” in Heidegger and Benjamin, see Martin Jay, Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 129. 19. Eudora Welty, introduction to To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf (New York: Harcourt, 1927), vii– viii. 20. Gustave Flaubert to Louise Colet, June 25, 1853, in The Letters of Gustave Flaubert, 1830– 1857, trans. Francis Steegmuller (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1979), 189. 21. Kenner, Flaubert, Joyce, and Beckett: The Stoic Comedians (London: Dalkey Archive Press, 1962), 84. 22. Ludwig Wittgenstein, “A Lecture on Ethics,” Philosophical Review 74 (1965), 6. 23. Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé’s essay on Kafka and Wittgenstein deals centrally with reading the Tractatus and Kafka’s particular way of resisting philosophical interpretation. See “The Everyday’s Fabulous Beyond: Nonsense, Parable, and the Ethics of the Literary in Kafka and Wittgenstein,” Comparative Literature 64.4 (Fall 2012), 429– 45. 24. Stanley Cavell, “Ending the Waiting Game,” in Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 126. Hereinafter cited parenthetically and abbreviated as MWMS. 25. Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books, 2nd ed., ed. Rush Rhees (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969), 1. 26. Ibid., 3. I owe this reference to the illuminating essay by Joachim Schulte, “The Life of the Sign: Wittgenstein on Reading a Poem,” in The Literary Wittgenstein, 147. 27. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 199. 28. This was also the title of a work by Rudolph Carnap, Der Logische Aufbau der Welt (1928). 29. Simon Critchley, Very Little . . . Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature (London:

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Routledge, 1997), 141. See also Jay M. Bernstein, “Philosophy’s Refuge: Adorno in Beckett,” in Philosophers’ Poets, ed. D. Wood (London: Routledge, 1990), 183– 85. 30. Cavell, “The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear,” in his MWMS, 275. 31. Samuel Beckett, Happy Days (New York: Grove Press, 1961), 29. 32. Samuel Beckett, Endgame (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 13. 33. Hugh Kenner details the specific phrases and their sources in Flaubert, Joyce, and Beckett, 98– 100. 34. Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America (1935; Boston: Beacon, 1985), 27. 35. In The Modernist Papers (London: Verso, 2007), 354. 36. Stein, Lectures, 223. 37. In the Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik (1884), Frege espoused his famous context principle: “Never ask for the meaning of a word in isolation, but only in the context of a proposition.” Gottlob Frege, The Foundations of Arithmetic, trans. J. L. Austin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1950), x. 38. Cavell makes this suggestion in “Ending the Waiting Game,” in MWMS, 136– 37. 39. Theodor W. Adorno, “Trying to Understand Endgame,” in Notes to Literature I, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 249. 40. See Cavell, “Ending the Waiting Game,” in MWMS, 117, 132. 41. In Modernism/modernity 5 (1998), 149– 66. 42. These stories are instances of the metaphor of teaching as drawing energetic connections (“creating an electrical connection between a switch and a light bulb,” 156). 43. Richard Rorty, “Philosophy as a Kind of Writing,” New Literary History 39 (2008), 101– 19. Chapter Two In shorter and extensively revised form, given its very different context, this chapter appears as the coda of my Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 1. M. O’C. Drury, “Some Notes on Conversations with Wittgenstein,” in Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections, ed. Rush Rhees (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1981), 94, 171. Hereinafter cited parenthetically as Drury. 2. Stephen Mulhall, “Wittgenstein on Religious Belief,” in The Oxford Handbook of Wittgenstein, ed. Oskari Kuusela and Marie McGinn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 760. The issue of fideism was first raised by Kai Nielsen, “Wittgensteinian Fideism,” Philosophy 42 (1967), 191– 209. Mulhall’s essay provides a rejoinder to Nielsen, citing especially Cora Diamond, The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991). 3. Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein: A Religious Point of View? (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 85. 4. I discuss various aspects of this question in Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 1– 23; 38– 48; “The Poetics of Description: Wittgenstein on the Aesthetic,” in Ordinary Language Criticism: Literary Thinking after Cavell after Wittgenstein, ed. Kenneth Dauber and Walter Jost (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 231– 44; and “‘But isn’t the same at least the same?’: Wittgenstein on Translation,” in Differentials (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), 60– 81. 5. Terry Eagleton, Wittgenstein: The Terry Eagleton Script, the Derek Jarman Film (London: British Film Institute, 1933), 6.

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6. See Brian McGuinness, Wittgenstein: A Life, Volume 1: Young Ludwig 1889– 1921 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 24– 33. 7. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Geheime Tagebücher 1914– 1916, ed. Wilhelm Baum (Wien: Turia & Kant, 1991), 33; my translation. For the original German, see my Wittgenstein’s Ladder, 248n4. 8. Hermine Wittgenstein, “My Brother Ludwig,” in Rush Rhees, ed., Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections, 1– 13: see p. 3; Ray Monk, Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: Free Press, 1990), 111. 9. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C. K. Ogden, with an introduction by Bertrand Russell (1922; London: Routledge, 1988). References are to proposition numbers. 10. See Monk, Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, 116. Wittgenstein was fascinated by the character of Alyosha in The Brothers, but later remarked, in conversation with Drury in 1930, “What would really have interested me would be to have seen how a character like Smerdyakov [the half-wit servant who murders Karamazov] could have been saved rather than Alyosha” (see Drury, 123). For a good account of the Tolstoy connection, see Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973), 161– 64; Bill Schardt and David Large, “Wittgenstein, Tolstoy, and the Gospel in Brief,” The Philosopher 89 (Spring 2001). 11. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914– 1916, 2nd ed., ed. G. H. von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979), 72– 74. 12. See Janik and Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna, chapter 5 passim, 120– 66. 13. Ludwig Wittgenstein to Paul Engelmann, May 15, 1925, cited in Monk, Wittgenstein, 229. 14. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman, revised ed. Alois Pichler, trans. Peter Winch (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 16. Hereinafter cited parenthetically and abbreviated as CV. 15. Critics have been especially severe about Wittgenstein’s stated admiration for the overtly anti-Semitic and misogynist Otto Weininger: for a fair-minded discussion of the relationship, see Monk, 309– 27. 16. See Monk, 385– 400; Alec Waugh, The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 201– 19. 17. Fania Pascal, “Wittgenstein: A Personal Memoir,” in Rhees, ed., Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections, 26– 62; see also 49. 18. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1953), §43. Hereinafter cited parenthetically and abbreviated as PI. 19. Part of the time, his young protégée and lover Francis Skinner, with whom he had gone to Russia, was with him in Norway. 20. In the case of these long extracts, I have made some adjustments to the Peter Winch translations, which are often somewhat stilted. 21. Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough,” in Philosophical Occasions 1912– 1951, ed. James Klagge and Alfred Nordmann (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1993), 118– 55; see p. 137. Hereinafter cited parenthetically and abbreviated as PO. For Frazer’s own discussion here referred to, see James George Frazer, The Golden Bough, A Study in Magic and Religion, 3rd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1917), 2:2. 22. CV 37. In the later 1940s, however, so Drury reports Wittgenstein softened his stance, noting that he had been wrong to discriminate so fully between the Gospels and Paul and that “it was the same religion in each” (105). And in 1949, “At one time I thought that the epistles

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of St.  Paul were a different religion to that of the Gospels. But now I see clearly that I was wrong” (178). 23. Alain Badiou, Saint-Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). Badiou claims that the Paul of the Epistles provides a paradigm of the subject that still harbors a genuinely revolutionary potential: the subject is that which refuses to submit to the order of the world as we know it and struggles for a new one instead. 24. Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, trans. Dana Hollander (1993; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 16– 17. 25. Ibid. 26. See Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter of the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), passim; and Giorgio Agamben, Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort (2005; New York: Zone Books, 2007), 77– 78. See also Slavoj Žižek, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard, The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 27. Rush Rhees’s collection contains two essays by Drury. The first and shorter one (91– 111) appeared in a volume of Essays in Honour of G. H. von Wright; the offprint reached Drury two days before his death on Christmas Day 1976. The second and longer one (112– 89) is a draft prepared in 1974; some of the items in this draft were revised for the published essay. But here I refer to both as Drury by the page numbers in Rhees’s collection. 28. Drury, 101, my italics. The dialogue is repeated, in fuller form, in the longer form of the “Conversations”: see 116– 17. On Catholicism as a philosophical system, compare the following remark (1930) to Drury: “It is a dogma of the Roman Church that the existence of God can be proved by natural reason. Now this dogma would make it impossible for me to be a Roman Catholic. If I thought of God as another being like myself, outside myself, only infinitely more powerful, then I would regard it as my duty to defy him” (123). 29. W. B. Yeats to Elizabeth Pelham, January 4, 1939, in Collected Letters, ed. Allen Wade (New York: Macmillan, 1955), 922. 30. Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 18. 31. See Alain Badiou, The Antiphilosophy of Wittgenstein, trans. Bruno Bosteels (2009; London: Verso, 2011). Compare Badiou’s earlier Saint Paul. La Fondation de l’universalisme (Paris: University Press of France, 1997). 32. John Keats to George and Tom Keats, December 21, 1817, in Selections from Keats’s Letters (1817), http://www.poetryfoundation.org /learning /essay/237836?page=2/. 33. Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir with a Biographical Sketch by G. H. von Wright and Wittgenstein’s Letters to Malcolm (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 81. Chapter Three 1. Actually, I have little to say about poststructuralist theory beyond noting my respect for the force given the concept of expression in thinkers like Deleuze and Rancière and indirectly in Badiou (since it is something like expressive power that introduces a new regime). My complaint here is that poststructuralist thinkers do not anchor the concept of expression sufficiently in standard human practices so that it always constitutes the exception to ordinary life rather than its extension. Yet Deleuze is very good on features of expression such as its existence as an intensifier so that it cannot be explicated without loss and, more generally, his sense of how the

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expression takes the world into itself, where it can be made to shine. See Simon Duffy, The Logic of Expression: Quality, Quantity and Intensity in Spinoza, Hegel, and Deleuze (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2006). Jonathan Culler discusses the importance of Rancière in “Introduction: Critical Paradigms,” PMLA 125.4 (October 2010), 905– 15. 2. Paul Cézanne best describes this ideal: “I am able to describe to you again . . . the obstinacy with which I pursue the realization of that part of nature, which, coming into our line of vision, gives the picture. Now the theme to develop is that— whatever our temperament or power in the presence of nature might be— we must render the image of what we see, forgetting everything that existed before us. Which, I believe, must permit the artist to give his entire personality whether great or small.” Paul Cézanne to Emile Bernard, October 23, 1905, in Paul Cezanne: Letters, ed. John Rewald (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 1996), 251– 52. 3. I need two quick clarifications here. I use the term “presence” with no metaphysical pretensions. “Presence” is simply what is established phenomenologically by the imagination’s participation in the work. And the concept of exemplification requires distinguishing between examples of some known entity and examples as some particular state that we encounter and preserve its particularity as we look for similarities and differences in our own experience. 4. Jenefer Robinson, “Expression and Expressiveness in Art,” Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics 4 (August 2007), 19– 41. Hereinafter cited parenthetically. 5. Perhaps because of the limitations on this cognitive view of the relationship of expressiveness to ordinary life, it becomes possible for philosophy to reach new levels of bathos: “The richest and most archetypal works of expression . . . offer genuine emotion genuinely expressed in a genuinely expressive way” (37). 6. Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 1– 36. I should note there that Anthony Rudd, in Expressing the World: Skepticism, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger (Chicago: Open Court, 2003), has followed Taylor’s work with a very interesting book on how the expressivism pursued by idealist and Romantic thinkers has possibilities of offering very useful responses to skepticism about other minds and about the existence of an external world. I love his idea that Wittgenstein bases his response to skepticism on making the second person the focal point of philosophy so that he can avoid otherwise intransigent oppositions between first- and third-person perspectives (138). But Rudd’s concerns differ from mine in several ways: he mentions Hegel but is not concerned with his particular formulations; he is concerned not with art but with traditional philosophical questions framed by skepticism; and he, like his Wittgenstein, is concerned primarily with the addressee of expressive behavior rather than the firstperson purposiveness that fascinates me. 7. See G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). Henceforth cited parenthetically in the text with the abbreviation PS and numbered paragraph. 8. “The whole is only complete when the two propositions are made together, and when the first is asserted and maintained, it must be countered by clinging to the other with invincible stubbornness. Since both are equally right, they are both equally wrong, and the mistake consists in taking such abstract forms as ‘the same’ and ‘not the same’ ‘identity and non-identity,’ to be something true, fixed, and actual, and in resting on them. Neither the one nor the other has truth; the truth is just their movement” (PS ¶780). 9. The logic here is a variant of how the Holy Spirit is formed as the active willing of the power of the Father mediated through the love of the Son whose love is simply the realization of the goodness of that power. Hegel shares with this theological account, and perhaps with Witt-

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genstein, the notion that the will is not a separate aspect of agency but shaped by the intensity and intimacy of how one comes to know Substance. 10. Two Hegelian statements will indicate the basis for my generalizations: “The distinct content, as determinate, is in relation, is not in itself; it is its own restless process of superceding itself. . . . Spirit, therefore, having won the Notion, displays its existence and movement in this ether of its life” (PS ¶805); and “Nature, the externalized Spirit, is in its existence nothing but this eternal externalization of its continuing existence and the movement which reinstates the Subject” (PS ¶807). The ellipses in the first quotation are in service of sanitizing Hegel’s idealism for my purposes. 11. This ontology has led to the development of three basic concepts central in the history of how modernist artists adapt these expressivist ideals. First, they replace any talk of mimesis or copying or picturing the details linking work and world with the figure of realization as cited from Cézanne. Second, we can access this process of realization because we can participate in its unfolding. The concept of participation again frees art from models of copy and truth by enabling talk of intensifying our capacities to engage in how the works unfold as coherent worlds. Subject and substance gain their identities through each other in that process of unfolding. Finally, we need an account of “example as” (not example of ) in order to make the experience of participation useful for cognitive activity without bringing in epistemic protocols. 12. Perhaps the ultimate irony here is that music, now the discipline that theorists contort in order to have something concrete to express, such as persons or passions, has the most to gain from equating expression with emotion because it is capable of creating the richest tensions between self-consciousness and what can express a difference from self-consciousness as the bodily substance established by rhythms and by harmonic intensities. 13. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), §§158, 67. Hereinafter cited parenthetically and abbreviated as Z. 14. Bernie Rhie has written an excellent essay on how the face for Wittgenstein offers immediate expression in a way that is not thinkable within Cartesian separations of subject from object. See “Wittgenstein on the Face of a Work of Art,” nonsite.org 3 (October 14, 2011). See also Garry Hagberg’s powerful elaboration of what Rhie is arguing: “Wittgenstein, the Human Face, and the Expressive Content of Poetry: On Bernard Rhie and Magdalena Ostas,” nonsite.org (December 1, 2011). They both make a strong case for Wittgenstein’s giving a primary role to the first two kinds of expression. Richard Eldridge, in Leading a Human Life: Wittgenstein, Intentionality, and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), makes a fascinating case for Wittgenstein’s acceptance of a personal version of Hegelian ideals on this third front by showing brilliantly how Wittgenstein realizes a mode of ethical heroism sponsored by Hegel and the Romantics. See especially pp. 117 and 277– 78 for the core of the argument and the terrific use of the concept of exemplarity basic to that argument. I am indebted to Eldridge for years of discussion on the topic of expression. 15. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs Merrill, 1968), 21– 22. 16. These observations about art lead Wittgenstein to a key expressivist principle— that the work of art aims not to give fresh information so much as to involve the audience differently in its attitude toward information: “Don’t take it as a matter of course, but as a remarkable fact, that pictures and fictitious narratives give us pleasure, absorb us.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1953), §524. Art invites participation, and participation colors how we process information (see PI §543). And

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then “meaning” completely shifts valences to emphasize what is displayed in the expression: “If the feeling gives the word its meaning [in this case ‘hope’], then here ‘meaning’ amounts to that which matters” (PI §545). 17. PI part II, p. 345. For the fourth edition of the Investigations, Hacker and Schulte decided to rename what has been commonly known as part II of the Philosophical Investigations, calling it instead Philosophy of Psychology— A Fragment. I will hereinafter cite Wittgenstein’s remarks from the second part of the Investigations (pp. 182– 243) with the abbreviation PPF. 18. Let me use three statements to illustrate how Wittgenstein develops the connection between the role logic plays as displaying foundations and the role forms of life and language games play in establishing conditions for certainty in his later work. The language game “is not reasonable or unreasonable. It is there— like our life.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (London: Blackwell, 1969), §599; Hereinafter cited parenthetically and abbreviate as OC. See also OC §162. “Everything descriptive of a language game is part of logic” (OC §56). “Am I not getting closer and closer to saying that in the end logic cannot be described. You must look at the practice of language, then you will see it” (OC §501). In stressing these remarks, I am indebted to Danielle Moyal-Sharrock’s argument that On Certainty returns to the Tractarian idea that logic can only be displayed and not argued for, but now as the means to understand the ontological status of forms of life. See Danielle MoyalSharrock, “Introduction: The Third Wittgenstein Conference,” Philosophia 37.4 (December 2009), 557– 62. On the basis of her arguments, I suggest that we can envision a master category of display, which includes the domain where expressions flesh out the meaningfulness within forms of life that cannot be framed as objects of description. And we can locate this category in the Investigations as well as in On Certainty. 19. “‘I’ doesn’t name a person, nor ‘here’ a place, and ‘this’ is not a name. But they are connected with names. Names are explained by means of them. It is also true that it is a characteristic of physics not to use these words” (OC §410). 20. If we treat display as indicating what is performed by the agent’s language, we can draw a connection to how the Hegelian subject expresses self-consciousness by performing its relation to substance. It is not the substance but the relation to the substance that is expressed. 21. See my essay “Wonder in The Winter’s Tale: A Cautionary Account of Epistemic Criticism,” in A Sense of the World: Essays on Fiction, Narrative, and Knowledge, ed. John Gibson, Wolfgang Huemer, and Luca Pocci (London: Routledge, 2007), 266– 86. 22. For the purposes of this chapter, I completely accept the argument of Frank Verdi, in Fat Wednesday: Wittgenstein on Aspects (Philadelphia, PA: Paul Dry Books, 2009), that there is a powerful account of art embedded in Wittgenstein’s notion of aspect seeing and the limitations of aspect blindness. This is Wittgenstein: “The concept of an aspect is related to the concept of imagination. In other words, the concept ‘Now I see it as . . .’ is related to ‘now I am imagining that.’ Doesn’t it take imagination to hear something as a variation on a particular theme? And yet one does perceive something in so hearing it” (PI §254). 23. “A man can see what he has but not what he is. . . . And the greatness, or triviality, of a piece of work depends on where the man who made it was standing.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman, revised ed. Alois Pichler, trans. Peter Winch (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 49. Hereinafter cited parenthetically and abbreviated as CV. 24. Nelson Goodman develops Wittgenstein’s contrast between the example as a picture and

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the example as a label to suggest two routes of reference for those examples. One can imagine using the example to see if the color matches the color of something else in the world. Or one can use it to sort through a set of instances to pick those that match it or approximate it. Because the expression resists being summarized as a description or instance of a concept, it orients the full work of imagination toward this second role of exemplification. There we might even justify a work’s leading us to contemplate particular ways that agents might take responsibility for what they imagine is the historical situation they face. See my “Exemplification and Expression,” in A Companion to the Philosophy of Literature, ed. Garry Hagberg and Walter Jost (Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2010), 491– 506. 25. Wittgenstein liked to remind his readers that the one attitude barred from our grammar of art is the idea that if this piece does not establish the desired emotion, we can just turn to another that might offer the satisfaction we seek. 26. Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987). 27. For a reading of what the self-reflexive operator suggests about style as a model for selfpossession, see my “Style,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, ed. Richard Eldridge (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 420– 41. It is also worth noting that Wittgenstein separates style from rhetorical purpose, in accord, I suspect, with a prevailing modernist attitude. 28. Wittgenstein’s perhaps most interesting comment on God draws an analogy with color. Just as we “cannot explain what ‘colour’ is, what the word colour means, except with the help of a colour sample,” there cannot be a description of “what it would be like if there were such a thing as God!” But we can say a good deal about God “and perhaps in time assemble a sort of collection of examples” (CV 82). 29. Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?, revised ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); R. M. Berry, “‘Is “Us” Me?’: Cultural Studies and the Universality of Aesthetic Judgments,” in Stanley Cavell and Literary Studies: Consequences of Scepticism, ed. Richard Eldridge and Bernie Rhie (New York: Continuum, 2011), 30– 46. Chapter Four 1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman, revised ed. Alois Pichler, trans. Peter Winch (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 16. Translation occasionally modified. Hereinafter cited parenthetically and abbreviated as CV. 2. I have discussed the figures who influenced, as well as exactly what Wittgenstein understood as the idea of influence, in my book Assembling Reminders (Stockholm: Santérus Academic Publishers, 2006), which includes an earlier version of this chapter. 3. The most important studies of Loos to date are Anders V. Munch, Den stilløse Stil— Adolf Loos (København: Kunstakademiets Arkitektskoles Forlag, 2002) and Christopher Long, The Looshaus (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012). At the time of writing this chapter, I was lamentably— indeed, embarrassingly— unaware of Marco Pogacnik’s superb study of the Loos Haus am Michaelerplatz, Adolf Loos und Wien (Salzburg: Müry Salzmann Verlag, 2011), which supersedes all other studies of this controversial building in richness of detail and historical nuance. 4. Kraus, Nachts, in Schriften [erste Abteilung] Bd. 8, ed. Christian Wagenknecht (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986), 341. 5. For a useful overview, see Peter Vergo, Art in Vienna 1898– 1914 (Oxford: Phaidon, 1975),

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and, of course, Carl E. Schorske’s classic study Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Random House, 1981). 6. See Bahr’s various contributions in Die Wiener Moderne, ed. Gotthart Wunberg (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1981), 189– 287. 7. See his contribution to Bertha Zuckerkandl, “Literature und Philosophie: Hermann Bahr, Ernst Mach und Emil Zuckerkandl im Gespräch, Wien 1908,” in Die Wiener Moderne, 171ff. 8. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 24– 115. 9. Loos, “Architektur,” in Sämtliche Schriften (Vienna: Herold, 1962), 1:102. 10. I owe this point to Gregor Schmoll. 11. Here again, see Christopher Long, The Looshaus. 12. On Loos, see Ludwig Munz and Gustav Künstler, Adolf Loos: Pioneer of Modern Architecture (New York: Praeger, 1966). 13. Adolf Loos, “Ornament und Verbrechen,” Sämtliche Schriften, 1:277. 14. Stanford Anderson of MIT and Anders Munch of Aarhus University are two cases in point. I have profited from discussions of Loos with them. 15. Literally “Steinklopferhans dialect.” The reference is to a bumpkin in Ludwig Anzengruber’s play Der Kreuzelschreiber. It is, in fact, this character who utters the phrase that so deeply struck Wittgenstein that he would mention it centrally in is his famous “A Lecture on Ethics” in 1929: “Nix kann dir geschen,” “nothin’ kin happen ta ya.” See Allan Janik and Hans Veigl, Wittgenstein in Wien (Vienna: Springer, 1998), 164. 16. Adolf Loos, “Regeln für den, der in den Gebirgen baut,” Der Brenner 4.1 (October 1, 1913), 40– 41. My translation. 17. Loos, “Architektur,” 110n2. 18. Ákos Moravánsky, Competing Visions: Aesthetic Invention and Social Imagination in Central European Architecture 1867– 1918 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 314– 16. 19. Edward Timms, Karl Kraus, Apocalyptic Satirist: Culture and Catastrophe in Habsburg Vienna (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 124ff. See also the account in Long, The Looshaus. 20. Ludwig Wittgenstein to Ficker, after October 19, 1919, in Ludwig (von) Ficker-Ludwig Witgenstein, Briefwechsel, 1914– 1920, ed. Annette Steinsiek and Anton Unterkircher (Innsbruck, Austria: Innsbruck University Press, 2014). 21. Loos, “Architektur,” 97ff. 22. “. . . ich wäre stolz, wenn ich . . . sagen dürfte: ‘Ich habe den Kompositionsschülern eine schlechte Ästhetik genommen, ihnen dafür aber eine gute Handwerkslehre gegeben.’ ” Arnold Schoenberg, Harmonielehre (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1911), viii. 23. Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, “Wohin Wagner gehört,” in Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Massimo Monitnari (Munich: DTV, 1980). The translation is my own. 24. Loos, “Architektur,” 107. 25. See Paul Engelmann, Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein with a Memoir, ed. B. F. McGuinness, trans. L. Furtmüller (London: Blackwell, 1967), 131ff. 26. Loos, “Architektur,” 96ff. and 8– 9. 27. See Ursula Prokop, Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein: Bauherrin, Intellektuelle, Mäzenin (Wien: Böhlau, 2003). 28. Moravánsky, Competing Visions, 329– 30.

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29. Paul Wijdeveld, “Engelmann and Wittgenstein: The Relevance of the Palais Stonborough to Contemporary Architectural Discussion,” in Architecture, Language, Critique: Around Paul Engelmann, ed. J. Bakacsy, A. V. Munch, and A. L. Sommer (“Studien zur österreichischen Philosophie 31”; Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 112. 30. Wittgenstein, MS 213, 413 (The Big Typescript), quote by Anthony Kenny, “Wittgenstein on the Nature of Philosophy,” in Wittgenstein and His Times, ed. Brian McGuinness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 5. 31. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914– 1916, ed. G. H. von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1961), 83. 32. I am grateful to Nuno Venturina for provoking these remarks and to Sylvain Schröder for helping me clarify the point in the course of discussions. 33. See the contribution of M. O’C. Drury to “Wittgenstein: A Symposium,” in Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Man and His Philosophy, ed. K. T. Fann (New York: Dell, 1967), 69. 34. Elisabeth Veit, La Maison de Wittgenstein. Unpublished Dissertation (“Unité Pédagogique d’Architecture nr. 6”; Paris, 1984), 335– 40. 35. See Paul Wijdeveld, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Architekt, trans. Ulrike Kremsmair and Heigelmaier (Basel, Switzerland: Wiese Verlag, 1994) and “Engelmann and Wittgenstein,” 105– 13. 36. Brian McGuinness, Wittgenstein, a Life: Young Ludwig (London: Duckworth, 1989), 77. 37. See my discussion of Frege in Assembling Reminders. 38. On this important point, see Lars Herzberg, “Language, Philosophy and Natural History,” in his The Limits of Experience (Hensinki: Societas Philosophical Fennica, 1994). 39. G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomemologie des Geistes (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973), Vorrede, 27f. 40. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen: Frühversion 1937– 1938, ed. G. H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman (Helsinki: privately printed, 1979), 1:106. Chapter Five I wish to thank the editors of this volume for their precious and insightful comments on an earlier version of this chapter. 1. Musil refers to such a wider context in his writings: see, e.g., Robert Musil, “Toward a New Aesthetic,” in his Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses, ed. and trans. Burton Pike and David S. Luft (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 200. Hereinafter cited parenthetically and abbreviated as TNA. A significant figure in this story is also Nietzsche. His work offers various independent elaborations and solutions to this problem, which I will not go into here. 2. Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973); hereinafter cited parenthetically and abbreviated as WV; C. E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980); A. G. Gargani, Il coraggio di essere. Saggio sulla cultura mitteleuropea (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1992) and Wittgenstein. Musica, parola, gesto (Milano: Raffaelo Cortina, 2008). 3. Robert Musil, “Sketch of What the Writer Knows,” in Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses, 63. Hereinafter cited parenthetically and abbreviated as SWK. 4. Robert Musil, “The German as Symptom,” in Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses, 185. Hereinafter cited parenthetically and abbreviated as GS. 5. Adolf Loos, “Architecture,” in On Architecture, ed. A. and D. Opel, trans. M. Mitchell (Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press, 2002), 82. Hereinafter cited parenthetically and abbreviated as “Architecture.”

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6. Robert Musil, “Helpless Europe,” in Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses, 132. Hereinafter cited parenthetically and abbreviated as HE. 7. Adolf Loos, “Cultural Degeneration,” in his Ornament and Crime: Selected Essays, ed. A. Opel, trans. M. Mitchell (Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press, 1998), 163. 8. Adolf Loos, “Ornament and Crime,” in his Ornament and Crime: Selected Essays, 171. 9. See Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, especially chapter 2, “The Ringstrasse, Its Critics, and the Birth of Urban Modernism.” 10. Adolf Loos, “Hands Off!,” in his Ornament and Crime: Selected Essays, 179– 80. 11. Adolf Loos, “Ornament and Crime,” 172. 12. See, e.g., Adolf Loos, “Ornament and Education” (1924). 13. Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities, trans. S. Wilkins and B. Pike (London: Picador, 1995), 54. Hereinafter cited parenthetically and abbreviated as MWQ. 14. Robert Musil, “Mind and Experience,” in his Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses, 137. Hereinafter cited parenthetically and abbreviated as ME. 15. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, ed. P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte (Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2009), §122. Hereinafter cited parenthetically and abbreviated as PI. 16. Robert Musil, “The Religious Spirit, Modernism, and Metaphysics,” in his Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses, 24. Hereinafter cited parenthetically and abbreviated as RSMM. 17. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C. K. Ogden (London: Routledge, 1981), 6.43. Hereinafter cited as TLP followed by the number of the proposition. 18. I am here in agreement with what is known as the “resolute reading” of the Tractatus. See (among the many contributions) Cora Diamond, The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991) and “Ethics, Imagination and the Method of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus,” in The New Wittgenstein, ed. Alice Crary and Rupert Read (London: Routledge, 2000); James Conant, “The Method of the Tractatus,” in From Frege to Wittgenstein: Perspectives on Early Analytic Philosophy, ed. E. H. Reck (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). See also Piergiorgio Donatelli, Wittgenstein e l’etica (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1998) and “The Problem of ‘the Higher’ in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus,” in Religion and Wittgenstein’s Legacy, ed. D. Z. Phillips and Mario von der Ruhr (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005). 19. Here and in what follows, I am echoing Cora Diamond’s use of the expression “a reading for absences”: the reading of what is not in the language and that elaborates a sense of depth and significance. See Cora Diamond, “Introduction to ‘Having a Rough Story about What Moral Philosophy Is,’ ” in The Literary Wittgenstein, ed. John Gibson and Wolfgang Huemer (London: Routledge, 2004), 131. 20. Paul Engelmann, Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein with a Memoir, ed. B. F. McGuinness, trans. L. Furtmüller (London: Blackwell, 1967), 114. 21. On this parallel, see James Conant, “What ‘Ethics’ in the Tractatus Is Not,” in Religion and Wittgenstein’s Legacy. 22. In what follows, I rely mainly on my “Reshaping Ethics after Wittgenstein,” Wittgenstein Studien 4 (2013). 23. Ludwig Wittgenstein, “A Lecture on Ethics,” in Philosophical Occasions 1912– 1951, ed. James Klagge and Alfred Nordmann (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1993). 24. In the same spirit, Karl Kraus famously said that the only thing at which Loos and he were aiming was to make clear the difference between an urn and a chamber pot. See Die Fackel 389– 390 (December 15, 1913), 37.

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25. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman, revised ed. Alois Pichler, trans. Peter Winch (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 8. Hereinafter cited parenthetically and abbreviated as CV. 26. On these notions, see Gordon Baker, Wittgenstein’s Method: Neglected Aspects, ed. Katherine Morris (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). See also Piergiorgio Donatelli, “Wittgenstein: Pictures, Concepts, and Moral Thought,” Picturing Life: Wittgenstein’s Visual Ethics, ed. Ronja Tripp and Karsten Schöllner (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann), 2016. 27. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §133; Cora Diamond, “Criss-cross Philosophy,” in Wittgenstein at Work. Method in the Philosophical Investigations, ed. Erich Ammereller and Eugen Fischer (London: Routledge, 2004). 28. See Stanley Cavell, “The Investigations’ Everyday Aesthetics of Itself,” Wittgenstein in America, ed. Timothy G. McCarthy and Sean C. Stidd (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001). 29. Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. D. Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974), §307. Chapter Six 1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Public and Private Occasions, ed. James C. Klagge and Alfred Nordmann (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 313. 2. The attempt to inherit Goethe and incorporate his method into philosophy and the logic of cultural entities is found in many central thinkers of the early twentieth century. One might point here to the importance of Goethe to the Viennese art historian Alois Riegl’s investigation of the vegetal motif in ornament, or to Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. But insofar as Wittgenstein is concerned, the primary link would be with Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West. Spengler traces his views to Goethe: “The philosophy of this book I owe to the philosophy of Goethe, which is practically unknown today.” Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 38. 3. In convolute N of the Arcades Project, Benjamin relates his work explicitly to Goethe’s understanding of truth and seeks that “form of the historical object which satisfies Goethe’s requirement for the object of analysis: to exhibit a genuine synthesis. It is the primal phenomenon of history.” Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), 474. 4. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961), 5.62. Hereinafter cited parenthetically and abbreviated as TLP. 5. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914– 1916, ed. G. H. von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 80. Hereinafter cited parenthetically and abbreviated as N. 6. See Friedrich Schiller, “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry” and “On the Sublime”: Two Essays, trans. J. Elias (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1967). Schiller argues that what moves us in such natural beings, which he calls “naïve,” is the way they seem to be eternally one with themselves. Schiller finds in this self-sameness a symbol of the ideal to which humanity strives, of a second nature as a harmonious unity of the moral and natural orders. This self-enclosedness contrasts with the Kantian vision of our present state as one of endless conflict, of the inner duality of the human being, not only having dual citizenship, in the sensuous and intelligible worlds, but thereby feeling expelled or not at home in either world.

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7. This is why Wittgenstein states emphatically in the Notebooks, “What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I found the world. What others in the world have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience of the world. I have to judge the world, to measure things” (82). 8. In the Notebooks, Wittgenstein formulates the remark that, as he puts it, “gives the key for deciding the way in which solipsism is a truth” as follows: “There really is one world soul, which I for preference call my soul and as which alone I conceive what I call the souls of others” (49). 9. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman, trans. Peter Winch (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 6, emphasis in the original, translation amended. The importance of this passage to the articulation of the ambitions of photography has been underscored in Michael Fried’s powerful extension of his account of modernism into photography, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). It is of particular interest to me that this passage has served Fried in his investigation of Wall’s photography in his chapter titled “Jeff Wall, Wittgenstein and the Everyday.” In the present chapter, I make a case for also relating that same passage, through Benjamin, to the problem of the photography of types. Comparative photography and the problem of types is addressed by Fried in relation to Wittgenstein in chapter 10 of his book. 10. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 4– 5, translation amended. Hereinafter cited parenthetically and abbreviated as CV. 11. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1953), §129. 12. See, for example, Gaston Bachelard’s claim in The Poetics of Reverie: “By following ‘the path of reverie’— a constantly downhill path— consciousness relaxes and wanders— and consequently becomes clouded. So it is never the right time, when one is dreaming, to ‘do phenomenology.’ ” Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie (Boston: Beacon, 1960), 5. 13. For an insightful characterization of Goethe’s use of the figure of overseeing the world from above it, see Pierre Hadot, N’oublie pas de Vivre: Goethe et la Traditions des Excercises spirituels (Paris: Albin Michel, 2008). 14. Ludwig Wittgenstein and Friedrich Waismann, The Voices of Wittgenstein, ed. Gordon Baker, trans. Gordon Baker, Michael Mackett, John Connolly and Visilis Politis (London: Routledge, 2003), 311. 15. Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books: Preliminary Studies for the Philosophical Investigations (London: Basil Blackwell, 1958), 18. 16. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927– 34 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), 814. 17. See in particular the use of Benjamin’s account of photography in Rosalind Kraus and Yve-Alain Bois, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997). 18. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938– 1940 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006), 266. 19. Selected Writings, 4:265. I take it that the prison world Benjamin refers to in this passage is the incarceration in consciousness, or in our conscious responses. One of the characteristics of modern surroundings, such as those of city life, is, according to him, the predominance of its intrusive or striking manifestations. The response to that intrusion is an increased involvement of consciousness in the constitution of experience. Consciousness acts as a defense by isolating and segregating experience, hence the transformation Benjamin diagnoses of significant experience [Erfahrung] into discrete impressions [Erlebnis]. The sensationalism we are craving would

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be the fantasized overcoming of the constant presence of the conscious that constitutes the closing up of our surroundings, their suffocating nearness, in the condition of constant reactions that allows no opening of space for play. There seem to be, then, two ways open to conceiving how photography explodes this prison world of consciousness. The more common interpretation of Benjamin assumes that the power of the photograph lies in its relation to the shocks that escape the defensive involvement of consciousness. On this view, to look at a successful photograph is to seek experience in its unparried, searing, traumatizing detail. The power of photography is conceived as its ability to work against the familiar. But there is another possible reading of Benjamin’s elaboration of our use of photography to bypass the directed consciousness. On this interpretation, what is not the object of consciousness is precisely the nonintentional everyday— that is, the optical unconscious entails those meaningful surroundings that, because they are surroundings of our involvements, cannot be the object of directed consciousness. Such surroundings properly conceived are not external to the space of meaning but rather constitute its underlying conditions. They can be explored, not by way of our intentional vision, but in and through the nonintentional involvement of the photographic apparatus itself. With photography, the nonintentional character of the camera (its automatic nature) can serve to explore the nonintentional character of our everyday surroundings. 20. Consider in this context Rosalind Krauss’s criticism of Benjamin’s understanding of the optical unconscious: “What can we speak of in the visual field that will be an analogue of the ‘unconscious’ itself, a structure that presupposes first a sentient being within which it operates, and second a structure that only makes sense insofar as it is in conflict with that being’s consciousness? Can the optical field— the world of visual phenomena: clouds, sea, sky, forest— have an unconscious? . . . Freud . . . is also clear that the world over which technical devices extend their power is not one that could itself, have an unconscious. It may have a microstructure that lies beyond the range of the naked eye, but that structure is neither conscious/unconscious, nor can it be in conflict with consciousness.” Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 178. 21. Selected Writings 2:526. See also the essay “The Author as Producer,” in which Benjamin criticizes the New Objectivity’s slide toward a beautification or aestheticization of anything whatsoever: “Needless to say, photography is unable to convey anything about a power station or a cable factory other than, ‘What a beautiful world!’” Selected Writings 2:775. 22. Albert Renger Patzsch, “Joy Before the Object,” in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 647. 23. Selected Writings 2:520. 24. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913– 26 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006), 192. 25. For Benjamin, this new naturalism in photography also has political significance: “Work like Sander’s could overnight assume unlooked-for topicality. Sudden shifts of power such as are now overdue in our society can make the ability to read facial types a matter of vital importance. Whether one is of the Left or the Right, one will have to get used to being looked at in terms of one’s provenance. And one will have to look at others the same way” (Selected Writings, 2:520). This remark, like many of the remarks Benjamin makes concerning the relation of photography to the political (say in the “Work of Art” essay) is difficult to interpret. It should be understood in the context of the problem of establishing in society a space in

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which recognition or acknowledgment can be given in “an age of maximum alienation of men from one another, of unpredictably intervening relationship which have become their only ones” (Selected Writings 2:814). Toward the end of his essay “A Little History of Photography,” following a critique of the value of creativity in photography, Benjamin quotes, in opposition to it, Brecht’s trenchant diagnosis of the necessity for a methodical construction of the truth of social reality: “Less than ever does the mere reflection of reality reveal anything about reality. A photograph of the Krupp works or the AEG tells us next to nothing about these institutions. Actual reality has slipped into the functional. The reification of human relations— the factory, say, means that they are no longer explicit. So something must in fact be built up, something artificial posed” (Selected Writings, 2:526). Brecht would contrast the appearance given to us by the photograph with the artificial construction and estrangement necessary to present the conditions of society (say, in the construction out of gestures in his own epic theater). Benjamin, commenting on Brecht’s claim, provides photography itself with the possibility of producing such estrangement, thus with the constructive task of truthfully revealing social life. He adds that this is possible only when “photography sets out not to charm or persuade, but to experiment and instruct” (Selected Writings, 2:526). In an “age of maximum alienation of men from one another, of unpredictably intervening relationships which have become their only one” (Selected Writings, 2:814), when “actual reality has slipped into the functional,” it becomes more and more necessary to judge according to types. This means that one cannot assume that society will provide the conditions for adequately judging the here and now, face to face, or I to thou encounter with another. But this is precisely why it becomes crucial to introduce discrimination and nuance into our discourse about the typical— that is, to open a space for the investigation of the typical. 26. Selected Writings 2:520. 27. As Benjamin puts it in the essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” “Demonstrating that the artistic uses of photography are identical to its scientific uses— these two dimensions having usually been separated until now— will be one of the revolutionary functions of film” (Selected Writings, 4:265). Chapter Seven For comments on earlier drafts of this chapter, I thank Richard Eldridge, V. Joshua Adams, Bernard Harrison, Susan Jarosi, Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé, and Michael LeMahieu. 1. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, ed. Bernard Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), §126. 2. The primary argument for this is given in 6.4– 6.421 of the Tractatus: “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. . . . So too it is impossible for there to be propositions of ethics. . . . Ethics is transcendental. (Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same.)” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, ed. David Pears and Brian. McGuinness (London: Routledge, 2001), 6.4– 6.421. Hereinafter cited parenthetically with reference to the proposition number. 3. See Wittgenstein’s discussions of ethics, art, and religious belief in Ludwig Wittgenstein and Cyril Barrett, Lectures & Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966) and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H.

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von Wright, trans. Peter Winch (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980). Hereinafter cited parenthetically as CV. 4. Richard Gaskin, Language, Truth, and Literature: A Defence of Literary Humanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 12. 5. For a different discussion of Wittgenstein’s relation to modernism, see Marjorie Perloff, Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). For further discussion of how literature is a source of understanding and insight into the human condition, see my Fiction and the Weave of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 6. From, respectively, “Another Weeping Woman” and “The Plain Sense of Things,” in Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 25, 502. 7. For the excellent philosophical studies of Romanticism to which I am indebted here, see Frederick Beiser, The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early German Romanticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003) and, especially, Richard Eldridge, The Persistence of Romanticism: Essays in Philosophy and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 8. See, for example, Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London: Continuum, 2004); and the discussions of Adorno’s aesthetics in Brian O’Connor, Adorno (New York: Routledge, 2013); and Lambert Zuidervaart, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991). 9. Here and elsewhere, “realism” is used in a philosophical rather than a literary sense. To put it perhaps too romantically, it indicates a kind of metaphysical longing for the real and obviously not a commitment to verisimilitude and the like. 10. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. Von Wright, trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 24. Henceforth cited parenthetically and abbreviated as CV. 11. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1953), §116. 12. I hope this manner of framing the discussion makes it clear that my interest in Stevens extends well beyond his late poems, which critics at times lament as compromised precisely on account of their apparent philosophical heavy-handedness. These poems play no privileged role in most of the accounts of Stevens’s philosophical significance with which I am concerned here (indeed, his earlier poetry is often preferred in these accounts). For an excellent study, and partial defense, of Stevens on this matter, see Joshua Kotin, “Wallace Stevens’s Point of View,” PMLA 130.1 (2015), 54– 68. 13. Frank P. Ramsey, The Foundations of Mathematics and Other Essays (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1931), 238. 14. Zumhagen-Yekplé argues, with Diamond, that the Tractatus is a text whose philosophical and ethical points are made through what is not said in it. It is a text “marked by absence” that leaves “it up to their readers to figure out how to learn something from those absences (of answers, explanations, resolution, or straightforward teaching) by turning it into something that transforms our understanding of the problems and mysteries of language and life.” Karen ZumhagenYekplé, “The Everyday’s Fabulous Beyond: Nonsense, Parable, and the Ethics of the Literary in Kafka and Wittgenstein,” Comparative Literature 64.4 (Fall 2012), 429– 45. See also Cora Diamond, “Introduction to ‘Having a Rough Story about What Moral Philosophy Is,’ ” in The Literary Wittgenstein, ed. John Gibson and Wolfgang Huemer (London: Routledge, 2004), 127– 33.

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15. If it seems unlikely that Wittgenstein could harbor views so hostile to philosophy, note that Wittgenstein’s relationship to philosophy was conflicted and ambiguous, abandoning it as he did for long stretches of time and turning much of it into an object of ridicule in so many of his writings. A recurring theme of the Philosophical Investigations is that philosophy creates the very conceptual messes it prides itself on cleaning up and that this is because misuse of language is endemic to the abstractions of philosophy. In other words, the resolute reading attributes views to Wittgenstein that we have independent evidence he held— independent, that is, of the final lines of the Tractatus. I acknowledge that what I say in this chapter falls short of demonstrating the adequacy of the resolute reading over the irresolute. Proper defenses of it can be found in James Conant, “Elucidation and Nonsense in Frege and the Early Wittgenstein,” in The New Wittgenstein, ed. Alice Crary and Rupert Read (London: Routledge, 2000), 174– 217; Cora Diamond, “Ethics, Imagination and the Method of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus,” in The New Wittgenstein, 149– 73; Michael Kremer, “The Purpose of Tractarian Nonsense,” NOÛS 35.1 (March 2001), 39– 73. 16. Kremer, “The Purpose of Tractarian Nonsense,” 56. 17. In a letter to Ludwig von Ficker, for example, Wittgenstein urges that the Tractatus “consists of two parts: the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely the second part that is the important one. My book draws the limits of the ethical only from the inside as were, and I am convinced that this is the ONLY rigorous way of drawing those limits . . . I have managed to in my book to put everything firmly into place by being silent about it.” As quoted in Zumhagen-Yekplé, “The Everyday’s Fabulous Beyond,” 430. For a reading of Tractarian nonsense that offers an account of the ethical significance of the production of nonsense resolutely interpreted, see Eli Friedlander, Signs of Sense: Reading Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). 18. Bernard Harrison, Inconvenient Fictions: Literature and the Limits of Theory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 50. 19. The quotations are found in Rupert Read, Applying Wittgenstein, ed. Laura Cook (London: Continuum, 2007), 42, 47, and 44, respectively. 20. Wallace Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, 92– 94. 21. I thank V. Joshua Adams for pointing out the need for this qualification. 22. Read, Applying Wittgenstein, 44. 23. Wallace Stevens, Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), 47. 24. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), §160. 25. Read, Applying Wittgenstein, 27. 26. For example, see the series of remarks in the Philosophical Investigations running from §106 to §133. 27. Philosophical Investigations, §126. 28. Ibid., §122. 29. Wallace Stevens, “Repetitions of a Young Captain,” in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, 306– 10. 30. Wallace Stevens, “Fabliau of Florida,” in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, 23. 31. For an excellent study of Stevens’s poetics of the everyday, see Siobhan Phillips, The Poetics of the Everyday: Creative Repetition in Modern American Verse (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).

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32. Simon Critchley, Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens (London: Routledge, 2005), 30. Chapter Eight I am grateful to Vicky Albritton, Michael Fried, Michael LeMahieu, Leonardo Lisi, and Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé for helpful comments on an earlier draft. This research was assisted by a New Faculty Fellows award from the American Council for Learned Societies, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. 1. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed (New York: Viking, 1971), 14. Hereinafter cited parenthetically and abbreviated as WV. 2. Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 99. 3. Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 216. Hereinafter cited parenthetically and abbreviated as MWMS. 4. Think, for instance, of Wittgenstein’s description of his remarks as “sketches of a landscape” in Philosophical Investigations, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe, Rush Rhees, and G. H. von Wright, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (London: Blackwell, 1958), vii. 5. Daniel Brudney, Martha Nussbaum, and Robert Pippin, for instance, all make explicit reference to the early writings of Cavell and Fried. See especially Daniel Brudney, “Knowledge and Silence: The Golden Bowl and Moral Inquiry,” Critical Inquiry 16 (1990), 397– 437; Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); Robert Pippin, Henry James and Modern Moral Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 6. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 493. 7. T. S. Eliot, “On Henry James,” in The Question of Henry James, ed. F. W. Dupee (New York: Henry Holt, 1945), 110– 11. Hereinafter cited parenthetically and abbreviated as OHJ. 8. Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism: Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957– 1969 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 86. 9. Fried makes explicit the connection between his and Cavell’s conception of modernism and Wittgenstein’s writings on criteria in the introduction to Art and Objecthood. 10. By the lights of a more standard conception of modernism, it is traditional art, if any, that registers as passive. After all, it is traditional art that relies unreflectively on received convention. The defining feature of modernism is its refusal of such dependence, its insistence upon autonomy and self-reliance. MCF complicates this familiar picture. 11. For a particularly explicit instance of this kind of view, see Noël Carroll, “The Philosophy of Art History, Dance and the 1960s,” in Reinventing Dance in the 1960s: Everything Was Possible, ed. S. Banes (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 81– 97. 12. For Cavell and Fried, the necessity at issue is not external— that is, it is not a matter of showing, in the face of suspicion to the contrary, that a given artform provides a unique and valuable form of experience. Instead, it is internal: an art form reaches a point in its historical development such that in order to remain art— that is, in order to continue to matter the way great art of the past has mattered— it is necessary for it to engage in critical reflection upon its own conditions of possibility. 13. I argue that even these “small” differences make more difference than is at first apparent

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in Kristin Boyce, “The Thinking Body: Philosophy, Dance and Modernism,” in Thinking Through Dance, ed. J. Bunker, A. Pakes and B. Crowell (London: Dance Books, 2013), 37– 51. 14. See especially James Conant, “The Search for Logically Alien Thought: Descartes, Kant, Frege, and the Tractatus,” Philosophical Topics 20.1 (1991), 117– 80. 15. Rudolph Carnap, “The Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language,” in Logical Positivism, ed. A. J. Ayer (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1959), 79. Hereinafter cited parenthetically. 16. There are competing senses in which analytic philosophy might be understood to enter the condition of modernism. At moments like this, Carnap betrays a way of thinking that, from the vantage point of a critic like Greenberg, emerges as almost virulently modernist: all resources are trained on the task of eliminating from philosophy any “effects” that have been borrowed from other mediums and clarifying the unique possibilities that are distinctive of the procedures of philosophy. This takes the form of recovering philosophy from a tendency to lapse into psychologism— that is, to lapse into a confused attempt to do philosophical work by means of a capacity to affect the psychological faculties, a capacity that is conceived as the proper province not of philosophy but of art. 17. For a particularly clear and powerful articulation of this point of view, see Michael Warner, “Literature, Truth and Logic,” Philosophy 74 (1999), 29– 54. 18. Wilson Follett, “Henry James’s ‘Portrait of Henry James,’ ” New York Times Book Review, August 23, 1936, 16. 19. Michael Wood, “The Museum of What Happens,” The Henry James Review 26.3 (2005), 256– 64. 20. Henry James, The Sacred Fount (London: Penguin, 1994), 15. Hereinafter cited parenthetically and abbreviated as SF. 21. Sharon Cameron, Thinking in Henry James (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 161. 22. See especially Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “The Beast in the Closet: James and the Writing of Homosexual Panic,” in her The Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 23. Richard Poirier, The Comic Sense of Henry James: A Study of the Early Novels (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), 237– 38. 24. I discuss this at greater length in Kristin Boyce, “What Did James Show His Readers in The Wings of the Dove?,” The Henry James Review 35.1 (2014). I show how James’s exploration of this problematic deepens and darkens in later works, especially The Wings of the Dove. In these works, I argue, James explores, although he also eventually rejects, the possibility that language itself is deadening— that any way of bringing words to bear compromises or even precludes the possibility of genuine knowledge of ourselves or others. 25. T. S. Eliot, “An Appreciation,” in Henry James: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Leon Edel (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963), 55. 26. Henry James, The Wings of the Dove (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909), 39. 27. My calculations here are based on the Hyper-Concordance made available by the Victorian Literary Studies Archive at http://victorian.lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/concordance /james/. 28. Wood would be right if the relevant standards of assessment were those of the empirical scientist. 29. Tractatus 6.52 is especially relevant here: “We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge, 2000), 187.

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30. For an especially compelling recent example, see Meredith Williams, “Master and Novice in Wittgenstein’s Later Work,” American Philosophical Quarterly 48.2 (April 2011), and “Method and Metaphilosophy,” in Wittgenstein: Minds, Meaning and Metaphilosophy, ed. Pasquale Frascolla, Diego Marconi, and Alberto Ololini (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 31. Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908), 319. Hereinafter cited parenthetically and abbreviated as PL. 32. Henry James, Complete Stories 1898– 1910 (New York: Library of America, 1996), 539. Hereinafter cited parenthetically and abbreviated as BJ. If, as Leo Bersani has argued, the governess in The Turn of the Screw is one Jamesian character “idealized to the point of parable,” surely Marcher and May are others. See Leo Bersani, A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970). 33. Stanley Cavell, Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2004), 404. Chapter Nine I wish to thank Lanier Anderson, Ann Banfield, John Bishop, Kevin Cahill, Rita Felski, Michael LeMahieu, Joseph Nugent, Allison Schachter, and the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in the Humanities and the Center for the Study of the Novel at Stanford University for helpful comments on earlier versions of this chapter. 1. Leo Tolstoy, A Confession (London: Penguin, 1998), 29. 2. James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1934), 677. Hereinafter cited parenthetically and abbreviated as U. 3. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961), 6.52, 6.521. Hereinafter cited parenthetically and abbreviated as TLP. 4. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman, revised ed. Alois Pichler, trans. Peter Winch (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 8. Hereinafter cited parenthetically and abbreviated as CV. 5. M. O’C. Drury, “Some Notes on Conversations with Wittgenstein,” in Recollections of Wittgenstein, ed. Rush Rhees (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 94. 6. For notable discussions about Wittgenstein and modernism, see Stanley Cavell, “The Investigations’ Everyday Aesthetics of Itself,” in The Literary Wittgenstein, ed. John Gibson and Wolfgang Huemer (London: Routledge, 2004) and “Declining Decline: Wittgenstein as a Philosopher of Culture,” in This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures after Emerson after Wittgenstein (Albuquerque, NM: Living Batch Press, 1989), 59; Marjorie Perloff, Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Michael North, “Translation, Mistranslation and the Tractatus,” in Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 31– 64; Michael LeMahieu, “Nonsense Modernism: The Limits of Modernity and the Feelings of Philosophy in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus,” in Bad Modernisms, ed. Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 68– 89; Michael Fischer, “Wittgenstein as a Modernist Philosopher,” Philosophy and Literature 17.2 (1993); John Gibson and Wolfgang Huemer, eds., The Literary Wittgenstein (London: Routledge, 2004); Ben Ware, “Ethics and the Literary in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,” Journal of the History of Ideas 72.4 (October 2011), 595– 611; Charles Altieri, Reckoning with the Imagination: Wittgenstein and the Aesthet-

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ics of Literary Experience (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015); R. M. Berry, “Wittgenstein and Modernism,” Symploke 13.1– 2 (2005); Martin Puchner, “Doing Logic with a Hammer: Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and the Polemics of Logical Positivism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 66.2 (2005); Megan Quigley, Modernist Fiction and Vagueness: Philosophy, Form, and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Terry Eagleton, “My Wittgenstein,” Common Knowledge 3.1 (Spring 1994), 152– 57. 7. For major “resolute” readings, see especially Cora Diamond, The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991); “Introduction to ‘Having a Rough Story about What Moral Philosophy Is,’ ” in The Literary Wittgenstein; James Conant, “Must We Show What We Cannot Say?” in The Senses of Stanley Cavell, ed. R. Fleming and M. Payne (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1989); “Throwing Away the Top of the Ladder,” The Yale Review 79.3 (1991); “The Method of the Tractatus,” in From Frege to Wittgenstein: Perspectives on Early Analytic Philosophy, ed. Erich H. Reck (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); and “Mild Mono-Wittgensteinianism,” in Wittgenstein and the Moral Life; Essays in Honor of Cora Diamond, ed. Alice Crary (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007); Michael Kremer, “The Purpose of Tractarian Nonsense,” NOÛS 35.1 (March 2001); Alice Crary and Rupert Read, eds., The Literary Wittgenstein (London: Routledge, 2004); Eli Friedlander, Signs of Sense: Reading Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); James Conant and Cora Diamond, “On Reading the Tractatus Resolutely: Reply to Meredith Williams and Peter Sullivan,” in Wittgenstein’s Lasting Significance, ed. Max Kölbel and Bernhard Weiss (London: Routledge, 2004). 8. The standard readings of the Tractatus to which Diamond and Conant refer are associated especially with the “ineffabilist” approaches of Elizabeth Anscombe and P. M. S. Hacker. See especially G. E. M. Anscombe, An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus” (London: Hutchinson, 1963); P. M. S. Hacker, Insight and Illusion: Themes in the Philosophy of Wittgenstein (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1997) and “Was He Trying to Whistle It?,” in The New Wittgenstein, ed. Alice Crary and Rupert Read (London: Routledge, 2000). 9. See Michael André Bernstein, Five Portraits: Modernity and the Imagination in TwentiethCentury German Writing (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2000). 10. Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 501. 11. “Wir haben nicht zuviel Verstand und zuwenig Seele, sondern wir haben zuwenig Verstand in den Fragen der Seele.” Robert Musil, “Helpless Europe,” in Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses, ed. and trans. Burton Pike and David S. Luft (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 131. 12. For further discussion of Wittgenstein’s critique of modernity, see Kevin Cahill, The Fate of Wonder (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). 13. See Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna (New York: Ivan R. Dee, 1996). 14. Bernstein, Five Portraits, 36– 37. 15. Robert Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (Frankfurt: Rohwohlt Verlag, 1957). 16. Ellmann, James Joyce, 501. 17. As Perloff points out in her contribution to this volume, Wittgenstein reformulates Rilke’s famous line in a 1946 notebook: “Christianity, I believe, says among other things that sound doctrines are all useless. You have to change your life” (CV 61). Perloff also points to the reflection of Wittgenstein’s sister, Hermine, that what Wittgenstein insisted he most wanted himself was “to turn into a different person.” Hermine Wittgenstein, “My Brother Ludwig,” in Rhees, ed.,

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Recollections of Wittgenstein, 1– 13: see p. 3; Ray Monk, Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: Free Press, 1990), 111. 18. Bernstein, Five Portraits, 1– 10. Bernstein’s catalog of authors who strive in their works to attain the ambitious status he outlines includes the five writers (Rilke, Musil, Heidegger, Benjamin, and Celan) with whom his book is explicitly concerned. He also gestures at such usual suspects of modernist masterpiece-making as Mallarmé, Yeats, Proust, Freud, Faulkner, and Stein, as well as Joyce and Wittgenstein. 19. Eliot’s oft-quoted claim states, “It appears likely that poets of our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results.” T. S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot (New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1975), 65. First published in Times Literary Supplement, October 20, 1921, 669– 70. 20. The kind of modernist yearning and quest for answers or solutions to difficult questions that I am pointing to here shows itself variously in the work of Wittgenstein, Joyce, and their contemporaries (among them Woolf, Eliot, Proust, Kafka, Rilke, Borges, Heidegger, Mallarmé, and Mann, writers whose attention to the importance of revelatory moments of being is well known) as the desire to grasp the meaning of life and human existence; grapple with the absence of God; solve and resolve puzzles; to find one’s way in a labyrinth; to throw away the ladder; to approach difficult problems “with understanding”; to dispel illusion; to gain the personal and philosophical clarity of vision needed to “see the world in the right way”; to see the world without a self; to achieve a unity of multiple selves across time and gender; to hold time in stillness; to see the world sub specie aeternitatis, in a moment of being or a moment of Truth; to “read the sacred inscriptions” of the other; to outline a logically perfect language or meditate on a “supreme” language; to opt for silence or nonsense; to have one’s vision; to net the wild goose or the fin in a waste of waters; to complete the circle; to live life as a parable; to live in the eternal present; to live outside of time; to regain time; to achieve the peace which passeth understanding; and to return home again to a mythical Ithaca, just to gesture at but a few of the more recognizable versions of what I am arguing is the modernist masterpiece’s pervasive obsession with the agnostic mystical quest. 21. Maria DiBattista, “Ulysses’s Unanswered Questions,” Modernism/modernity 15.2 (April 2008), 271. 22. Cora Diamond, “Riddles and Anselm’s Riddle,” The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 268. 23. Diamond, “Riddles and Anselm’s Riddle,” 268. 24. “I am not a religious man, but I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view.” M. O’C. Drury, “Some Notes on Conversations with Wittgenstein,” in Recollections of Wittgenstein, 79. 25. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Viking, 1964), 227. 26. Caleb Thompson and Peter Winch have both suggested that we can best understand Wittgenstein’s statement about his “religious point of view” in relation to a claim he made elsewhere about his conception of philosophy as an activity of clarification— namely, that “work on philosophy is . . . actually more of a kind of work on oneself. On one’s conception. On the way one sees things (And what one demands of them.)” (CV 16). For further discussion of the issue, see Caleb Thompson, “Wittgenstein, Augustine and the Fantasy of Assent,” Philosophical Investigations 25.2 (2002), 153; Peter Winch, “Discussion of Malcolm’s Essay,” in Norman Mal-

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colm, Wittgenstein: A Religious Point of View?, ed. Peter Winch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 131. For Wittgenstein, religion is concerned not with the manipulation of the world or adherence to doctrine but with the state of a person’s soul and ongoing progress toward selfperfection. He was deeply invested in the possibility of personal transformation and the power of religious experience— and the literature of religious experience— to bring it about. He himself turned (like Bloom, more than once) to the literature of instruction in search of solutions to the difficult problems of life. Wittgenstein read James’s Varieties of Religious Experience with great interest, telling Russell, “This book does me a lot of good.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Letters to Russell, Keynes and Moore, ed. G. H. von Wright and B. F. McGuinness (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974), 10. He found solace during the war in Tolstoy’s Confession and Gospel in Brief and was an avid reader of Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. He was later to read Augustine’s Confessions, calling it “the most serious book ever written.” See Drury, “Some Notes on Conversations with Wittgenstein,” 79. As Pericles Lewis points out, Joyce was as shaped by his religious training as he was hostile toward organized religion. Though he fell away from the Catholicism of his upbringing, he nonetheless had a sacramental conception of his art, regarding it as a kind of alternative priesthood. In Portrait, Stephen Dedalus sets himself up as a “priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life” (221). “What most inspires Joyce,” Lewis observes, “is the power of the priest to transform the everyday into the eternal by performing the sacraments, rather than the power of God that lies behind those sacraments.” Pericles Lewis, Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 179. 27. This formulation of the stakes of both texts builds upon the writing of Eli Friedlander, who argues that the aim of the Tractatus is to open its readers to the significance of experience. The book is stretched between the temptations of facticity and transcendence and seeks to go beyond that dichotomy. See Friedlander, Signs of Sense, 17. See also my discussion of this issue in Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé, “The Everyday’s Fabulous Beyond: Nonsense, Parable, and the Ethics of the Literary in Kafka and Wittgenstein,” Comparative Literature 64.4 (Fall 2012), 429–45. 28. For further discussions of the patterns of figural visions of Dante and St. Paul in Ulysses, and in “Ithaca” particularly, see Stephen Sicari, Joyce’s Modernist Allegory: Ulysses and the History of the Novel (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001) and Pericles Lewis, “The Burial of the Dead,” in Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel, 170– 92. 29. For a discussion of astrological symbolism in “Ithaca,” see David Chinitz, “All the Dishevelled Wandering Stars: Astrological Symbolism in ‘Ithaca,’ ” Twentieth Century Literature 37 (1991), 432– 41. 30. Tolstoy, A Confession, 36. 31. It was important to Joyce that the dot be a large one. The Rosenbach Manuscript clearly shows Joyce’s marginal note that “La réponse à la dernière question est un point” and his directions indicating that “le point doit être plus visible.” See Austin Briggs, “The Full Stop at the End of ‘Ithaca’: Thirteen Ways— and Then Some— of Looking at a Black Dot,” Joyce Studies Annual 7 (Summer 1996). The coincidence between Tolstoy’s comment and Joyce’s full stop is entirely accidental, though it seems worth noting that Joyce shared Wittgenstein’s view that Tolstoy’s “How Much Land Does a Man Need” was the “greatest story that the literature of the world knows.” See George R. Clay, “Tolstoy in the Twentieth Century,” in Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy, ed. Donna Tussing Orwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 209. 32. Tolstoy, A Confession, 41.

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33. I discuss this at greater length in “Our Toil Respite Only: Woolf, Diamond, and the Difficulty of Reality,” MLN: Modern Language Notes 130.5 (December 2015), 1100–29. 34. Wittgenstein writes in a 1931 Notebook, “Tolstoy: a thing’s significance (importance) lies in its being something everyone can understand.–That is both true and false. What makes a subject hard to understand— if it’s something significant and important— is not that before you can understand it you need to be specially trained in abstruse matters, but the contrast between understanding the subject and what most people want to see. Because of this the very things which are most obvious may become the hardest of all to understand. What has to be overcome is a difficulty having to do with the will, rather than with the intellect” (CV 17). 35. Ellmann, James Joyce, 555. 36. See Conant, “Must We Show What We Cannot Say?,” 242– 83; and Michael Kremer, “The Purpose of Tractarian Nonsense.” Kremer writes, “The typical reader of the Tractatus . . . will begin by supposing herself to be reading a book of philosophy, intended as a straightforward communication of intelligible thought. This thought may appear difficult and its expression highly compressed; the reader may struggle to come to an understanding of the author’s point of view; but if the reader persists and makes it to the end of the book, it may surprise her to learn that she is to dismiss as nonsense what she had taken herself to understand. She may infer that she has understood nothing at all, and throw the book away— yet not in the way seemingly intended by Wittgenstein’s image of the ladder which one throws away after climbing it— for this reader will not have been transformed in any interesting way by the experience, except perhaps in acquiring a distaste for certain kinds of philosophy” (39). 37. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Briefe an Ludwig von Ficker, ed. G. H. von Wright (Salzburg: Otto Müller Verlag, 1969), 33. 38. Wittgenstein writes to von Ficker, “You won’t— I really believe— get too much out of reading it. Because you won’t understand it; the content will be strange to you. In reality, it isn’t strange to you, for the point of the book is ethical. I once wanted to give a few words in the preface which are actually not in it, but which I’ll write to you now because they might be a key for you: I wanted to write that 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. My book draws limits to this sphere of the ethical only from inside as it were, and I am convinced that this is the ONLY rigorous way of drawing those limits. In short, I believe that where many others today are just babbling, I have managed in my book to put everything firmly into place by being silent about it.” Ludwig Wittgenstein to Ludwig von Ficker, December 6, 1919, cited in G. H. von Wright, “Historical Introduction: The Origin of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus,” in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Prototractatus, ed. B. F. McGuinness, T. Nyberg, and G. H. von Wright, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), 15– 16. 39. Cora Diamond, “Ethics, Imagination and the Method of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus,” in The New Wittgenstein, 149. 40. Wittgenstein’s claim here, with its final question, has its roots in Tolstoy’s Gospel in Brief. There, Tolstoy writes the following: “The blind man whose sight has been restored remaining the same man he was, can only say that he was blind but now sees. And one who formerly did not understand the meaning of life but now does understand it, can only say the same, and nothing else. Such a man can only say that formerly he did not know the true good in life but now he knows it. A blind man whose sight has been restored . . . can only reply . . . I only know that whereas I was blind, now I see. . . . Formerly I did not see the meaning of life, but now I see it and that is all I know” (281).

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41. See Diamond, “Ethics, Imagination and the Method of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus,” in The New Wittgenstein, 155; James Conant, “What ‘Ethics’ in the Tractatus Is Not,” in Religion and Wittgenstein’s Legacy, ed. D. Z. Phillips and Mario von der Ruhr (London: Ashgate, 2005), 53. 42. Wittgenstein’s stance against theory and explanation is evident throughout his lifetime. As he once said in a conversation with Friedrich Waismann of the Vienna Circle, if anyone were to put forth to him an explanation of the nature of value, he would summarily reject it “not because the explanation was false,” he tells Waismann, “but because it was an explanation.” He continues to express his own mistrust of theory by making a statement in the first person: “If I were told anything that was a theory, I would say, No, no! That does not interest me. Even if this theory were true, it would not interest me— it would not be the exact thing I was looking for. What is ethical cannot be taught. If I could explain the essence of the ethical only by means of a theory, then what is ethical would be of no value at whatsoever . . . For me a theory is without value. A theory gives me nothing.” Friedrich Waismann, Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 1979), 116– 17. In a frequently cited passage from the Blue Book, Wittgenstein writes, “Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books, 2nd ed., ed. Rush Rhees (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969), 18. 43. James Conant, “Throwing Away the Top of the Ladder,” 346, and “Putting Two and Two Together: Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein and the Point of View for Their Work as Authors,” in Philosophy and the Grammar of Religious Belief, ed. Timothy Tessin and Mario von der Ruhr (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 249. 44. Conant, “What ‘Ethics’ in the Tractatus Is Not,” 53. 45. See Diamond, “Ethics, Imagination and the Method of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus,” in The New Wittgenstein. 46. Diamond, “Introduction to Having a Rough Story,” 129. 47. It is important to distinguish the hard work of self-improvement Wittgenstein seeks his readers to undertake from the task of constructing or following already established scientific theories in pursuit of “the idea of Great Progress” he sees (along with Tolstoy) as the grand delusion of modern culture in the age of science and technology. For Wittgenstein, the labor of philosophy is not one of constructing of new truths and progressively more advanced technology but one of elucidation of the things we already know. In a 1930 notebook, Wittgenstein points to the notion of progress as representative of the spirit of the modern age to which (he repeatedly claims) his own work runs contrary. He writes, “Our civilization is characterized by the word ‘progress’ . . . Typically it constructs. It is occupied with building an ever more complicated structure. And even clarity is sought only as a means to this end, not as an end in itself. For me on the contrary, clarity, perspicuity are valuable in themselves. I am not interested in constructing a building, so much as in having a perspicuous view of the foundation of possible buildings. So I am not aiming at the same target as the scientists and my way of thinking is different from theirs” (CV 7). 48. Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction,” in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume 4: 1925 to 1928, ed. Andrew McNeille (London: Hogarth Press, 1984), 163. 49. Friedlander, Signs of Sense, 12. 50. Ludwig Wittgenstein, “A Lecture on Ethics,” Philosophical Occasions, 1912– 1951, ed. James Klagge and Alfred Nordmann (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 39– 40. 51. See Friedlander, Signs of Sense, 12– 17.

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52. Diamond, “Introduction to Having a Rough Story,” 131; Iris Murdoch, “Vision and Choice in Morality,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 30 (1956), 32– 58. 53. Ludwig Wittgenstein to Paul Engelmann, in Paul Engelmann, Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein with a Memoir (New York: Horizon Press, 1968), 7. 54. Diamond “Introduction to Having a Rough Story,” 130. 55. Ellmann, James Joyce, 501. 56. Diamond, “Introduction to Having a Rough Story,” 131. 57. See Diamond, “Ethics, Imagination and the Method of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus,” in The New Wittgenstein, 156– 65. 58. Quoted in Richard E. Madtes, The “Ithaca” Chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1983), 65. 59. DiBattista, “Ulysses’s Unanswered Questions,” 268. 60. Ibid., 271. 61. Richard Ellmann, ed., Selected Letters of James Joyce (New York: Viking, 1975), 270. 62. “All I give you is a method,” Wittgenstein writes. “I cannot teach you any new truths.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein’s Lectures, Cambridge, 1932– 1935: From the Notes of Alice Ambrose and Margaret MacDonald, ed. Alice Ambrose (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 97. 63. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914– 1916, ed. G. H. von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 59. Hereinafter cited parenthetically and abbreviated as N. 64. Stanley Cavell, “Foreword,” Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), xxviii. 65. Conant, “Putting Two and Two Together,” 302– 3. 66. Kremer, “The Purpose of Tractarian Nonsense,” 60; see Thompson, “Wittgenstein, Augustine and the Fantasy of Assent,” 170. 67. Cahill, The Fate of Wonder, 98. 68. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1953), §133. 69. Terry Eagleton, Wittgenstein: The Terry Eagleton Script, the Derek Jarman Film (London: British Film Institute, 1933), 6– 7. 70. Franco Moretti, Modern Epic: The World-System from Goethe to García Márquez, trans. Quintin Hoare (London: Verso, 1996), 149–81. 71. Conant, “Putting Two and Two Together,” 303. Chapter Ten I would like to thank Toril Moi, Michael Fried, Sharon Cameron, Oskari Kuusela, Mark Thompson, Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé, Michael LeMahieu, and members of the conference on Stanley Cavell’s Aesthetics at the University of Chicago for helpful comments on earlier versions of this chapter. 1. For a discussion of the ethical significance of paradox in Kafka and Wittgenstein, see Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé, “The Everyday’s Fabulous Beyond: Nonsense, Parable, and the Ethics of the Literary in Kafka and Wittgenstein,” Comparative Literature 64.4 (Fall 2012), 429– 45. 2. Ludwig Wittgenstein, “A Lecture on Ethics,” Philosophical Review 74 (1965), 11– 12. Hereinafter cited parenthetically. 3. Several recent philosophical and literary studies reveal a growing critical interest in the

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points of connection between these thinkers, especially with regard to their use of gnomic style and metaphor to explore matters as diverse as the limits of language, the familiarity and uncanniness of ordinary life, and the relation between the corporeal and the spiritual. See especially Stephen Mulhall, Wittgenstein’s Private Language: Grammar, Nonsense, and Imagination in Philosophical Investigations, §§243– 315 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 118– 28; Henry Sussman, Afterimages of Modernity: Structure and Indifference in Twentieth-Century Literature (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 50– 59; Rebecca Schuman, “Kafka’s Verwandlung, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, and the Limits of Metaphorical Language,” Modern Austrian Literature 44 (2011), 19– 32. 4. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. Von Wright, trans. Peter Winch (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), 64. Hereinafter cited parenthetically. 5. Franz Kafka, “A Report for an Academy,” in The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and Other Stories, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), 284– 85. Hereinafter cited parenthetically. 6. Due to considerations of space, I will not be taking up here the very interesting issue of how this reading might bear on further interpretation of the remarks on ethics in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921). However one reads the relation between the form and meaning of a book such as the Tractatus, though, it would be bizarre to assume that an author capable of such writing were to suddenly abandon a serious concern with the form of expressions— especially those concerning the problems of ethical expression— on any occasion. For a discussion of the relation between ethics, logic, and world in the Tractatus (with reference to “A Lecture on Ethics”), see Eli Friedlander, Signs of Sense: Reading Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). 7. Joachim Schulte, Wittgenstein: An Introduction (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 71. 8. I am indebted to Toril Moi for this clarification of the argument. 9. Wittgenstein’s focus on the “popular-scientific lecture” here resonates with remarks in Culture and Value, in which he considers the illusion that superficial scientific explanations are adequate for understanding the world: “Man has to awaken to wonder— and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again” (5). See also 71 and 79 on the abuse of scientific explanation in modernity. 10. For an extended discussion of the ability to avow one’s belief as a matter of a person’s commitment to herself and not as a matter of a person’s analysis of data or evidence about herself, see Richard Moran, “The Authority of Self-Consciousness,” in Authority and Estrangement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 100– 151. 11. Primo Levi, If This Is a Man, trans. Stuart Woolf (London: Abacus, 1979), 15. Hereinafter cited parenthetically. 12. Wittgenstein wrote the text for “A Lecture on Ethics” in English. The English word “documentation” in Levi’s text is a straightforward translation of the Italian word “documenti” in Se questo è un uomo: “Esso non è stato scritto allo scopo di formulare nuovi capi di accusa; potrà piuttosto fornire documenti per uno studio pacato di alcuni aspetti dell’animo umano.” 13. I am indebted to Michel LeMahieu for the reminder that this is a common convention of slave narratives. For an extended account of the uncanny parallels between the general features of the slave narrative and Kafka’s “A Report for an Academy,” see Mark Thompson’s Kafka’s Blues: Figurations of Racial Blackness in the Construction of an Aesthetic (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016).

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14. This appeal to the meaning of Levi’s use of the term “document” in the context of his situation shares Cora Diamond’s approach to understanding Primo Levi’s appeal to the value of “truth” in The Periodic Table. See Diamond, “Truth: Defenders, Debunkers, Despisers,” in Commitment in Reflection: Essays in Literature and Moral Philosophy, ed. Leona Toker (New York: Garland, 1994), 195– 221. I am indebted to Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé for this observation. 15. Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd ed., s.v. “Document.” 16. Saul Friedlander, Reflections on Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death, trans. Thomas Weyr (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 90– 91. Hereinafter cited parenthetically. 17. In The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), Stanley Cavell describes this as “the impotence of voice,” saying “To speak for yourself then means risking the rebuff— on some occasion, perhaps once for all— of those for whom you claimed to be speaking; and it means risking having to rebuff— on some occasion, perhaps once for all— of those who claimed to be speaking for you” (27). Nowhere does Cavell give anything like an analytic definition of the concept of voice, although arguably the whole of this book provides a study of its procedures. See also Timothy Gould, Hearing Things: Voice and Method in the Writing of Stanley Cavell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 18. Brian McGuiness, ed., Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle: Conversations Recorded by Friedrich Waismann, trans. Joachim Schulte and Brian McGuiness (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1979), 117. 19. See “A Report to an Academy: Two Fragments,” in Franz Kafka, The Complete Short Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (London: Vintage Books, 2005), 259– 62. 20. Max Brod, Max Brod, Franz Kafka, eine Freundschaft (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1989), 216. 21. Richard Lattimore, trans., The Odyssey of Homer (New York: Harper, 2007), 293. 22. See G. E. Dimock, “The Name of Odysseus,” Hudson Review 9 (1956), 52– 70. 23. Franz Kafka, “A Report to an Academy,” in Selected Short Stories of Franz Kafka, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Modern Library, 1952), 168. 24. This moment is significant in the life cycle of several of Kafka’s characters; as George Szanto argues in Narrative Consciousness: Structure and Perception in the Fiction of Kafka, Beckett, and Robbe-Grillet (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1972), “The ritual of life, according to Kafka, begins with the sudden awakening, with a complete realization that everything is different from what it was in the previous instant. Kafka often identifies waking in the morning with coming to consciousness” (20). 25. Aristotle, Poetics, ed. F. H. Warmington, trans. W. Hamilton Fyfe, Loeb Classical Library 23 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 41. 26. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 465– 66. Chapter Eleven 1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, revised 4th ed., ed. P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), §243. Hereinafter cited parenthetically. 2. Saul Bellow, Seize the Day (1956; New York: Penguin, 1996), 79. 3. Gloria L. Cronin describes Bellow’s protagonists as “monologists.” Cronin, A Room of His Own: In Search of the Feminine in the Novels of Saul Bellow (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2001), 11. 4. Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970; New York: Penguin, 1996), 140; Herzog (New

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York: Viking, 1964), 4; Henderson the Rain King (1959; New York: Penguin, 1996), 23; Seize the Day, 81; The Victim (1947; New York: Penguin, 1996), 71; and Dangling Man (1944; New York: Penguin, 1996), 123. 5. Bellow, Mr. Sammler’s Planet, 144. Hereinafter cited parenthetically. 6. Bellow, Dangling Man, 10. Hereinafter cited parenthetically. 7. Bellow, Seize the Day, 80. Hereinafter cited parenthetically. 8. Ludwig Wittgenstein, “A Lecture on Ethics,” in Philosophical Occasions, 1912– 1951, ed. James Klagge and Alfred Nordmann (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1993), 44. 9. “The wish underlying this fantasy,” Cavell writes in his discussion of the private language argument, “covers a wish that underlies skepticism, a wish for the connection between my claims of knowledge and the objects upon which the claims are to fall to occur without my intervention, apart from my agreements. As the wish stands, it is unappeasable. In the case of my knowing myself, such self-defeat would be doubly exquisite: I must disappear in order that the search for myself be successful.” Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (1979; New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 351– 52. 10. Saul Bellow, “Skepticism and the Depth of Life,” in There Is Simply Too Much to Think About: Collected Nonfiction, ed. Benjamin Taylor (New York: Viking, 2015), 237– 39. 11. Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? (1969; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), xxxiii. 12. Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March (1953; New York: Penguin, 1996), 3. 13. Quoted in Gordon Lloyd Harper, “The Art of Fiction: Saul Bellow” (1966), in Conversations with Saul Bellow, ed. Gloria L. Cronin and Ben Siegel (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), 58– 76. Bellow goes on to relate the limitations of this standard: “My first two books are well made. I wrote the first quickly but took great pains with it. I labored with the second and tried to make it letter-perfect. In writing The Victim I accepted a Flaubertian standard. Not a bad standard, to be sure, but one which, in the end, I found repressive” (“The Art of Fiction,” 63). 14. Cavell suggests that there are good reasons for thinking there are multiple interlocutors: “It is a mistake, I believe, to say that there are just two essential tones of voice in the Investigations, the interlocutor’s and Wittgenstein’s proper voice. First, there is no reason to think that there is just one interlocutor throughout the book; and second, and obviously, Wittgenstein’s own speech ranges from the full-throated to the supercilious to the meditative and bemused.” Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 345. 15. Louis Menand, “Young Saul: The Subject of Bellow’s Fiction,” The New Yorker, May 11, 2015, 74. 16. Philip Roth, “Re-Reading Saul Bellow,” The New Yorker, October 9, 2000, 82. 17. Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 344. 18. The trope of “inward transactions” recalls a memorable moment in the private language argument where Wittgenstein asks, “Why can’t my right hand give my left hand money?” (§268). 19. Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?, xxxvi. 20. Stanley Cavell, “Introductory Note to ‘The Investigations’ Everyday Aesthetics of Itself,’ ” in The Literary Wittgenstein, ed. John Gibson and Wolfgang Huemer (New York: Routledge, 2004), 19. 21. Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?, 229. 22. A similar set of assumptions about the nature of the self and its relation to society underwrites the appeal to a private language in the Philosophical Investigations, as Cavell suggests: “the correct relation between the inner and the outer, between the soul and its society, is the theme of the Investigations as a whole.” Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 329.

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23. Ibid., 344. 24. Ibid. 25. Joseph’s failure, or refusal, to bring himself “up to date” takes on added interest in light of John Barth’s later criticism of Bellow as an “out of date” writer “who for better or for worse writes[s] not as if the twentieth century didn’t exist, but as if the great writers of the last sixty years or so hadn’t existed.” Barth, “The Literature of Exhaustion” (1967), in Postmodernism and the Contemporary Novel, ed. Brian Nicol (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), 140. 26. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 174. 27. Meredith Williams argues for an analogous understanding of a social conception of mind in Wittgenstein’s philosophy. See Wittgenstein, Mind, and Meaning: Toward a Social Conception of Mind (New York: Routledge, 2002). 28. “Ideal constructions” approximate social and psychological “types,” a feature of Bellow’s fiction that forms the flip side of its lexicon of spiritualism, of the heart and the soul. In this respect, The Victim’s representations of anti-Semitism complement Dangling Man’s reflections on a common humanity. The focus on types and stereotypes persists in Bellow’s later fiction, notably in Seize the Day, where Tamkin classifies people according to psychological types, and Henderson the Rain King, where King Dahfu makes “a thorough study of the types, resulting in an entire classification system” (217). “Personality is unsafe,” Augie March claims. “It’s the types that are safe” (403). 29. Stanley Cavell, “Declining Decline: Wittgenstein as a Philosopher of Culture,” in This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures after Emerson after Wittgenstein (Albuquerque, NM: Living Batch Press, 1989), 38, 57. 30. Saul Bellow, “Skepticism and the Depth of Life,” 237– 39. 31. Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 96. See Clinton W. Trowbridge, “Water Imagery in Seize the Day,” in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 9.3 (1967), 62– 73. 32. Stephen Mulhall, Wittgenstein’s Private Language: Grammar, Nonsense, and Imagination in Philosophical Investigations, §§243– 315 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 26– 27. 33. Saul Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language: An Elementary Exposition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). 34. Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 32. 35. See Timothy Yu, “Wittgenstein, Pedagogy, and Literary Criticism,” New Literary History 44.3 (2013), 361– 78. 36. Robert Chodat, Worldly Acts and Sentient Things: The Persistence of Agency from Stein to DeLillo (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008). I discuss narrative closure in Henderson the Rain King at greater length in Fictions of Fact and Value: The Erasure of Logical Positivism in American Literature, 1945– 1975 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 148– 54. 37. James Atlas, Bellow: A Biography (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 239. 38. J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello (New York: Viking, 2003), 8. 39. Mark Greif, The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933– 1975 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015). 40. Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America, 37.

Contributors

C h a r l e s A l t i e r i is Rachel Stageberg Anderson Chair in the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of many books on aesthetics and twentieth-century poetics, most recently, of Reckoning with the Imagination: Wittgenstein and the Aesthetics of Literary Experience (Cornell, 2015); The Art of Twentieth-Century American Poetry: Modernism and After (Blackwell, 2009); and The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects (Cornell, 2003). He is beginning a book on the role of grammar in modernist poetry as a supplement for the limitations of Imagist epiphanic poetry. K r i s t i n B o y c e is assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy and a faculty fellow in the Shackouls Honors College at Mississippi State University. She earned a PhD in philosophy from the University of Chicago. Her awards include an ACLS New Faculty Fellowship, a postdoctoral fellowship from Stanford University, and a Josephine De Karman Fellowship. She specializes in aesthetics, the history of early analytic philosophy, and Wittgenstein. A n t h o n y J . C a s c a r d i is dean of arts and humanities at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also professor in the Departments of Comparative Literature, Rhetoric, and Spanish. He is former director of the Townsend Center for the Humanities and of the Arts Research Center. Cascardi’s research includes the relations between literature and philosophy; aesthetic theory; the novel; modernism; and early-modern European literature. His recent publications include the two edited volumes— Art and Aesthetics after Adorno and Poiēsis and Modernity (Fordham, 2013)— and the books Cervantes, Literature, and the Discourse of Politics (Toronto, 2011) and The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Philosophy (2014). P i e r g i o r g i o D o n a t e l l i teaches philosophy at the University of Roma, La Sapienza. He is the author of La vita umana in prima persona (Laterza, 2012), Intro-

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contributors

duzione a Mill (Laterza, 2007), Wittgenstein e la etica (Laterza, 1998), and La filosofia morale (Laterza, 2001); he is the editor of James Conant and Cora Diamond’s Rileggere Wittgenstein (Carocci, 2010); and he has written numerous articles on Wittgenstein and moral philosophy. E l i F r i e d l a n d e r is professor of philosophy at Tel Aviv University. Among his publications are Signs of Sense: Reading Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (Harvard, 2001), J. J. Rousseau: An Afterlife of Words (Harvard, 2005), Walter Benjamin: A Philosophical Portrait (Harvard, 2011), and Expressions of Judgment: An Essay on Kant’s Aesthetics (Harvard, 2015). His current research is devoted to Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project. J o h n G i b s o n is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Louisville. His research focuses on the philosophy of literature and its connections to the philosophy of language and of the self. He is the author of Fiction and the Weave of Life (Oxford, 2007) and coeditor of The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Literature (2015), Narrative, Emotion and Insight (Penn State, 2011), A Sense of the World (Routledge, 2007), and The Literary Wittgenstein (Routledge, 2004). He is currently completing a manuscript titled Metaphor, Poetry and Nonsense. A l l a n J a n i k , philosopher and historian of ideas, studied at St. Anselm College (AB), Villanova University (MA), and Brandeis University (PhD). He was research fellow of the Brenner Archives and professor of philosophy at the University Innsbruck until his retirement in 2006. He is honorary professor of philosophy at the University of Vienna. His books include Wittgenstein’s Vienna, The Concept of Knowledge in Practical Philosophy (in Swedish), Style, Politics and the Future of Philosophy, Wittgenstein’s Vienna Revisited, Assembling Reminders, Towards a New Public Philosophy for the European Union, and several others. M i c h a e l L e M a h i e u is associate professor of English at Clemson University. He is the author of Fictions of Fact and Value: The Erasure of Logical Positivism in American Literature, 1945– 1975 (Oxford, 2013). LeMahieu is coeditor of the journal Contemporary Literature. Y i - P i n g O n g is assistant professor in the Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins University. She received her PhD from the Department of English at Harvard University, where she also completed an MA in philosophy. Her current research focuses on questions at the intersection of literature and philosophy, reflecting interests in the history and theory of the novel, modernism, existentialism, and issues of justice and ethics in contemporary literature. Ong is completing a pair of book manuscripts on how the genre of the realist novel transforms philosophical expression in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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291

M a r j o r i e P e r l o f f is professor emerita of English at Stanford University and Florence R. Scott Professor Emerita of English at the University of Southern California. She is the author of many books on twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry and poetics, including Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary (Chicago, 1996). Her most recent book is Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire (Chicago, 2016). K a r e n Z u m h a g e n - Y e k p l é is assistant professor of English at Tulane University, where she is affiliated faculty in the Stone Center for Latin American Studies and the Programs for Gender Studies and Film Studies. She was a fellow in English in the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in the Humanities at Stanford University and in Comparative Literature at Harvard University and holds a PhD in comparative literature from the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently completing a book on modes of difficulty and transformative yearning in modernist and contemporary literature read after Wittgenstein and is working on a project on grace and disgrace in twentieth-century literature and philosophy.

Index

absence, 103, 106; of epiphany, 201; and ethical teaching, 191, 195, 269n19; of framing perspective, 221; of God, 290n20; and higher sphere of value, 108– 9; of idols, 63; and poetic opacity, 134; of sense, 134; and skepticism, 160, 174, 251 acceptance: attitude of Joyce to, 201, 204; attitude of Musil to, 99, 110; attitude of Tolstoy to, 196, 198; attitude of Wittgenstein to, 113, 193, 203– 4, 207, 212, 213; and faith, imagination, and certainty as human bonds, 99, 102, 113; of limits of certainty, 53– 54; of narrative point of view, 165– 66, 227. See also clarity, project of clarification; “happy” (attitude, outlook); peace; “seeing the world in the right way”; understanding acknowledgement, 15– 16, 166, 249, 273n24. See Cavell, Stanley Adorno, Theodor: on aesthetic autonomy, 133; on Beckett’s Endgame, 38; on Tractatus as positivist text, 2– 3 aesthetic, aesthetics, aestheticism: autonomy and, 14; Benjamin on, 272n20; Cavell on, 13, 36, 158, 162, 170; Christianity and, 51; counterepiphanic strategies and, 180; ethics and, 71, 80, 92, 97, 102, 104, 106– 7, 130, 273n2; expression, expressivism, and, 57– 58, 68; film and, 158; higher sphere of values and, 92– 93, 95– 96, 102, 104, 108, 113; justification, 36; Kantian, 162; Loos on the sphere of, 95– 96; modernist style and, 1, 3– 4, 11– 12, 20, 57– 58, 134, 177; Musil on, 97– 98, 102; “New Wittgensteinian” attention to, 19; of ordinary life, 94– 95; perspicuous representation and, 11, 18, 114; Romanticism and, 133; scientific inquiry and, 129; Tractatus and, 5, 19, 178, 194, 234; Wiener Moderne architecture and, 74, 77– 78, 83, 85, 95. See also style

Agamben, Giorgio, 49, 57 Altieri, Charles, 4, 19 analytic (Anglo-American) philosophical tradition: aesthetics and, 58; argument and, 159; Cavell and, 159, 286n15; clarity as concern of, 86, 88; vs. continental tradition, 7, 71; fact-value distinction in, 285n6; historical context of, 19; the literary and, 154– 55, 162– 63; modernism and, 277n16; ordinary language philosophy and, 2, 83, 85; private language and, 237; scientific philosophy and, 83; Wittgenstein’s place in, 7, 19, 71 83 ancient quarrel (philosophy vs. poetry), 132, 147, 164 Antin, David, 40 anti-Semitism, 45– 47, 261n15, 288n28 architecture, 7– 8, 24; art and, 81, 92; Art nouveau, 73; Bauhaus, 80; Biedermeier, 75; Carnap on, 255n6; clarification and, 82, 88; Gesamtkunstwerk, 75; higher sphere of values and, 92, 109; Jugendstil, 73, 75, 76, 97; Kultur and, 93, 108– 10; Loos’s views on, 73– 75, 77– 78, 80– 82, 94– 97, 104, 108– 9; Moravánsky on, 78; ordinary life and, 97; ornament in, 77; Ringstrasse, 75, 83, 96, 97, 269n9; Secession and, 75; spirit of the age and, 110; Wiener Moderne and, 75; Wiener Werkstätte, 74, 76; Wittgenstein’s philosophy and, 82, 85, 88, 92– 97, 104, 108– 10, 112– 13; Wittgenstein’s work in, 85. See also aesthetic, aesthetics, aestheticism; Loos, Adolf Ashbery, John, 132 aspect seeing, 66– 67, 69, 83, 164, 265n22 Atlas, James, 252 Augustine, Saint, 15, 47, 53, 232, 250, 281n25 Austin, J. L., 2, 17

294 Austro-Hungarian (Habsburg) Empire, 4, 41, 43, 91, 96, 103 avant-garde, 1, 73, 134 Badiou, Alain, 49, 54– 55, 262n23 Bahr, Hermann, 74 Beckett, Samuel, 5, 20, 24, 28, 32, 35– 36, 144; Cavell on, 38, 39; Endgame, 36, 39; Happy Days, 36, 39; How It Is, 54; meaning-making in, 39; Waiting for Godot, 38 beetle in a box, 144, 236– 37, 241, 251 Bellow, Saul, 13, 20, 231– 53; The Adventures of Augie March, 234– 35, 238, 247; common humanity in, 232, 237, 239, 242, 249– 52; Dangling Man, 231, 234, 237– 47, 253; Henderson the Rain King, 231, 251; Herzog, 231; modernist precursors and, 238; Mr. Sammler’s Planet, 231– 32, 247, 252; private language and self in, 231, 249, 250, 253; Seize the Day, 231– 32, 236, 247– 52; skepticism, treatment of, 233, 239, 247; solipsism, treatment of, 232; transcendence in, 248; The Victim, 231, 234, 246 Benjamin, Walter, 7, 11, 20; on alienation, 273n24; on Brecht, 273n24; on the everyday, 272n19; on experience, 125; Fried, Michael, and, 271n9; Goethe and, 114, 120, 127, 270n3; “A Little History of Photography,” 273n24; on naturalism, 272n24; on the “New Objectivity” (Neue Sachlichkeit), 127, 272n20; on the optical unconscious, 272n19; Passagenwerk (Arcades Project), 114; on photography, 114, 124– 28; on shocks, 272n19; “Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” 124 Bernstein, Michael André, 176, 181, 182, 183, 187, 279n18 Berry, R. M., 70, 257n36, 266n29, 278n6 Biletzky, Anat, 19, 258n45 Bloomsbury group, 41 Blossfeldt, Karl, 127 Blumenberg, Hans, 23 Boltzmann, Ludwig, 72 Borges, Jorge Luis, 280n20 Boyce, Kristin, 6, 11, 20 Bradbury, Malcolm, and James McFarlane (Modernism: A Guide to European Literature, 1890– 1930), 17 Bradley, F. H., 42 Brahms, Johannes, 42 Brecht, Bertolt, 273n24 Brenner, Der, 77, 190. See Ficker, Ludwig von Broch, Hermann, 172 Buddha, 214 Bunyan, John, 47 Cameron, Sharon, 166– 67 capitalism, 100, 102

index Carnap, Rudolf, 2, 9, 16– 17, 83, 163– 64, 172, 255n6, 277n16. See also logical positivism; Vienna Circle Caro, Anthony, 153, 154, 158, 159 Cascardi, Anthony J., 5, 6, 11, 12, 19 Cavell, Stanley, 2, 12, 20, 34, 164, 227, 230; on Beckett, 36, 38, 259n25, 260n39, 260n41; Fried, Greenberg, and, 6, 153– 59; on King Lear, 36, 260n31; on modernism, modernist art, modernity, 2, 5– 6, 13– 15, 18– 19, 70, 153, 154, 156, 162, 170, 173, 238– 39, 239, 253; on modernist difficulty, 14, 16, 22, 233, 239; on private language, 241, 287n9; on repudiation, 15– 16, 50; on voice, 286n15, 287n14; on Wittgenstein’s interlocutors, 235– 36, 287n14. See also acknowledgement; skepticism Celan, Paul, 134 Cézanne, Paul, 263n2, 264n11 change: of attitude (ethical outlook, life), 8, 50, 54– 55, 112, 178, 182, 189, 191; in Beckett, 37; Cavell on modernism and, 162, 164; clarity and, 189; cultural shift of modernism, 17, 26, 75, 94– 95; “happy” (attitude, outlook) and, 189, 199; instruction and, 194; Musil on, 112; the ordinary and, 120; vs. progress, 54, 110; redemption and, 188; search for meaning and, 178; seeing aspects and, 67; of the self in relation to the world, 66, 102, 202; social justice and, 74, 242; “the spirit of the age” and, 95, 110; the will and, 29; 50, 199. See also conversion; transformation Chekhov, Anton, 192 Chodat, Robert, 251 civilization, 9, 12, 92– 94, 99, 101– 2, 109– 12, 176, 248, 279– 80n19, 283n46 clarity, project of clarification, 6, 9, 11, 25– 26, 34, 84– 85, 88, 110– 11, 143, 182– 83, 283n46; Cavell on, 161– 63; in early analytic philosophy, 86; expression and, 58, 70; fact-value distinction and, 8; the first-person and, 211; the “happy” (attitude, outlook) and, 189; in Henry James, 169, 172; in Joyce’s Ulysses, 199, 201; in Loos’s architecture, 72, 82– 83; and modernist literature, 183, 281n20; and nonsense, 191– 92; and the self, 280– 81n25; and solution to the problem of the meaning of life, 187; in Stevens’s poetry, 146; in the Tractatus vs. the Philosophical Investigations, 202– 4. See elucidation; see also perspicuous [synoptic, surveyable] representation Coetzee, J. M.: Elizabeth Costello, 252; The Lives of Animals, 208 Conant, James, 18, 163, 177, 189, 202, 204. See also “The New Wittgenstein”; resolute interpretation of Wittgenstein confession, 41, 69– 70, 136– 37, 149, 211, 220 Conrad, Joseph, 12, 57

index consciousness: and commitment to self, 232, 285n8; and expressivism, 59– 60, 69; Hegel on, 58, 61– 63, 70, 265n20; of history, 15; Kant on, 28, 259n12; and modernist reflexivity, 23, 25, 30– 33; of the other, 221; and photography, 272n18; and realism, 120– 21; and religion, 44; and solipsism, 115, 117. See experience continental tradition in philosophy, 2, 4, 7, 27, 29, 83, 147, 227 conversion, 179, 182, 197, 199, 208. See also change; transformation Critchley, Simon, 35, 147– 48, 260n30, 276n32 Deleuze, Gilles, 262– 63n1 Derrida, Jacques, 83 Descartes, René, 2 description, 119, 125– 26, 224, 266n14; conditions of meaning and, 135; ethical claims and, 213– 14, 216, 222; expression and, 68; of face, 64; the first-person and, 66– 67; instruction and, 207; knowledge and, 65; naturalism and, 74; objective, 243; of practice, 47, 55, 88; private language and, 250; Russell’s theory of, 86; “of the whole world” (“Lecture on Ethics”), 33, 193– 94, 214 Diamond, Cora, 18, 177; on the difficulty of the Tractatus, 190; on the imagination, 191; on instruction in Wittgenstein, 191, 194; on reading for absences, 269n19, 274n14; on riddles, 184, 186, 198; on truth, 285n12. See also “The New Wittgenstein”; resolute interpretation of Wittgenstein DiBattista, Maria, 183, 197, 198, 209, 258, 282n35 difficulty, 6, 20, 65, 87, 153, 180, 183, 188, 207, 279n19; Cavell on, 14, 16, 233, 239; cultural crisis and, 96; different order of, 179, 186– 87, 189– 90, 192; existential, 179; of perennial questions, 198, 201, 207; of poetry, 131, 134, 138, 150; quest for understanding and, 43, 84, 181, 187, 190, 280n20, 281– 82n33; of relationship between philosophy and literature, 155; resolution of, 193, 201, 204; of self and self-expression, 96, 98, 218, 227, 229, 248; of solipsism, 115; textual, 169, 179; of Tractaus, 26, 28, 134, 150, 179, 182, 189, 282n35; willed opacity, 11. See also puzzle; riddle Döblin, Alfred, 128 Donatelli, Piergiorgio, 4, 8, 11– 12, 19, 20 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 44, 72, 172, 192; Brothers Karamazov, 44, 261n9, 280– 81n25 Drury, Maurice, 7, 12, 41, 43, 50– 53, 55– 56, 177, 261n9, 262n22, 262nn27– 28 Duchamp, Marcel, 42 Eagleton, Terry, 1, 2, 3, 42, 55, 204 Ecclesiastes, 188

295 Eldridge, Richard, 259n11, 264n14, 266n27 Eliot, T. S., 54, 132; Frazer’s Golden Bough and, 10; on Henry James, 156, 168, 172; on modernist difficulty, 183, 280n19; modernist quest in, 280n20; objective correlative, 57– 58; “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 15; The Wasteland, 1 elucidation, 44, 117, 135, 170, 178, 191, 202, 283n46. See clarity, project of clarification Engelmann, Paul, 8, 45, 82, 105, 108, 118– 19 Enlightenment, 58, 60– 61, 63– 65, 183, 228 epiphany, counterepiphany, 4, 39, 180– 82, 187, 197– 98, 200, 201, 202– 4 233, 252 ethics, ethical, 20, 228; absence of, 191, 274n14; aesthetics and, 71, 92, 97– 98, 102, 104– 5, 130; difficulty and, 179; first-person and, 217; “happy” (attitude, outlook) and, 101, 189, 199; higher sphere of value and, 92; instruction and, 179, 187, 190, 283n41; Kantian, 29, 227– 28; language, 213, 218– 20; “Lecture on Ethics,” 9, 33, 107, 193, 206, 209, 211, 214, 216, 233, 285n6; limits of language and world and, 29, 79, 275n17, 282n37, 285n6; meaning and, 179, 187; the mystical and, 29, 34; no propositions of, 29, 214; the self and, 102, 229– 30; not specific subject matter, 177, 185, 210, 212; in the Tractatus, 5, 19, 138, 178, 181, 190– 91, 273n2; transcendence and, 185, 193– 94, 281n26; transformation and, 179, 189; the will and, 29; Wittgenstein’s remarks on, 7 everyday: and clarification, 84– 85, 199, 201; and experience, 53; and Gospels, 46; and the higher sphere of value, 4, 186, 281n25; language and life, 3, 35, 40, 74, 143, 248, 272n18; vs. metaphysical use of language, 134; and nonsense, 136; objects, 74– 75, 112; and photography, 125– 26; and poetics, 147; progress, 112; and quest, 182, 185, 187, 201; and reality, 125, 150; vs. scientific objectivity, 100; and theater of the ordinary, 118; vs. theory or system, 3, 54, 112; and wonder, 118, 133, 185, 194. See ordinary experience: and aesthetic judgment, 129; and clarity, 88, 111; crises of, 2; and forms of life, 97– 98, 102; Goethe on, 122; Hegel on, 60– 63; of the higher, 104; and imagination, 11, 59; Kantian and Romantic formulations of, 27– 28, 259nn11– 12; and modernism, 29– 33, 57; and ordinary language, 106– 7; and photography, 272n18; and presence, 263n3; and realism, 116; religious, 280n25; and seeing aspects, 67– 68; of shared humanity vs. private, 11, 13, 74, 233, 236, 249– 52; and solipsism, 114– 15, 120, 271n7; and the subject, 66, 103, 116– 17; and theater of the ordinary, 125; and transformation, 281n25; of the world, 271n7. See also consciousness

296 explanation: and nonsense, 130; profundity and, 130; scientific objectivity and, 100, 194– 95, 285n7; thinking that demands, 10, 34, 138, 143– 34, 149; Wittgenstein’s eschewal of, 4, 54, 69, 192, 274n14, 282– 83n41. See also theory expression in the arts, concept of expression, expressivism, 4, 8, 57– 60, 62– 70, 262– 63n1, 263nn3– 4, 264n12, 264n14, 264– 65n6, 265n18, 266n24 expressionism, 103 faith, 2, 3, 5, 15, 20, 41– 42, 47, 50, 97, 99, 100, 102, 113, 181, 187 199, 207. See also acceptance; religion Ficker, Ludwig von, 5, 77, 190– 91, 196, 267n20, 275n17, 282nn26– 27. See Der Brenner film, 124, 126, 157– 58, 273n25 first-person expression, 66, 68, 206, 211, 219– 20, 223, 227– 29 Fischer, Michael, 2, 18 Fischer von Erlach, Johann Bernhard, 83 Flaubert, Gustave, 32, 234, 287n13; Bouvard et Pécuchet, 33 Follett, Wilson, 165, 168 Fontaine, Theodor (Effi Briest), 74 Forster, E. M., 12, 23 Frankfurt School, 3 Frazer, Sir James, 10, 47– 48, 53, 261– 62n21 Frege, Gottlob, 1, 7, 26, 27, 34, 38, 42– 43, 72, 86, 88, 163, 260n38 Freud, Sigmund, 7, 272n19, 279n18; notion of the unconscious in Psychopathology of Everyday Life, 125 Fried, Michael, 6, 18, 153– 54, 156– 58, 271n9, 276n9, 276n11 Friedlander, Eli, 8, 11, 20, 193; Signs of Sense 7, 275n17, 281n26 Friedlander, Saul, 215– 17 Galton, Francis, 123– 24 Gargani, Aldo Giorgio, 91 Gaskin, Richard, 132 Gibson, John, 11, 18, 19, 20; and Wolfgang Huemer (The Literary Wittgenstein), 11, 19. See Huemer, Wolfgang God, gods, 32, 38, 44, 47– 49, 52– 53, 70, 78, 92, 96, 118, 184, 185, 245, 247, 252, 262n28, 266n28, 280n20, 281n15. See also faith; religion Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 114, 122– 25, 127– 28, 270n2, 271n13 Goodman, Nelson, 64, 266n24 Gospels: New Testament, 46, 48– 49, 262n22; Tolstoy’s Gospel in Brief, 44, 180, 201, 261, 281n25 grace, 49, 55, 199, 201– 2 grammar, 18, 43, 72, 74– 75, 78, 93– 95, 130, 151, 177, 179, 182, 226, 266n25

index Greenberg, Clement, 153, 156, 158, 159, 277n16 Greif, Mark, 253 Habermas, Jürgen, 35, 260n28 Hagberg, Garry, 264n14 “happy” (attitude, outlook), 29, 31, 180– 81, 189, 198– 99, 201, 247. See also acceptance; clarity, project of clarification; peace; “seeing the world in the right way”; understanding Harrison, Bernard, 138, 273 Hegel, G. W. F., 41, 57– 58, 60– 64, 69– 70, 87, 91, 258n5, 263n6, 263n8, 264n10, 264n14, 265n20 Heidegger, Martin, 15, 71, 279n18, 259n19, 280n20 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 60 Hertz, Heinrich Rudolf, 72, 88 Herzl, Theodor, 7 higher sphere of value, “the higher,” 4, 44, 92– 94, 96, 98, 103– 6, 108– 9, 113, 185– 86, 188, 203– 4. See also ethics, ethical Hoffmann, Josef, 74, 76 Hofmannsthal, Hugo, 207 Huemer, Wolfgang, and John Gibson (The Literary Wittgenstein), 13, 19. See Gibson, John human condition, 102, 155, 164, 184, 188, 203, 214n5 Ibsen, Henrik, 74 imagination, 31, 59– 60, 88, 99, 113, 133, 140, 146– 47, 169, 181, 263n3, 255n22, 266n24 irony, 42, 184, 201, 203– 4, 221, 226– 27 James, Henry, 20, 32, 153– 54, 155; The Beast in the Jungle, 167– 68, 173– 74; Portrait of a Lady, 167, 172– 74; The Sacred Fount, 6, 20, 156, 164– 75; Wings of the Dove, 169, 171 James, William, 44 Jameson, Fredric, 23– 24, 25, 38, 258n3 Janik, Allan, 8, 11, 19; and Stephen Toulmin (Wittgenstein’s Vienna), 7– 8, 91, 103, 105, 109, 113, 181. See Toulmin, Stephen, and Allan Janik (Wittgenstein’s Vienna) Jesus, 49, 214, 247 Joyce, James, 1, 3, 19, 20, 30– 31, 42, 177– 89, 192– 202, 204, 205, 280n20, 280– 81n25 Kafka, Franz, 9, 20, 144, 187, 206– 9, 220– 21, 223– 27, 230, 242, 259n24, 280n20, 284n1, 286n22 Kant, Immanuel, 2, 5, 27, 28, 29, 147, 167, 228, 270– 71n6; on aesthetic judgments, 164; on beauty and disinterestedness, 121; on ethics, 167, 227; on experience, 27– 28, 259n11; on the will, 29 Kayyam, Omar, 37 Keats, John, 5, 55. See negative capability Kenner, Hugh, 32, 39 Keynes, John Maynard, 45 Kierkegaard Søren, 27, 52, 72, 202, 227 Klimt, Gustav, 7, 42, 73, 74, 97

index Kraus, Karl, 7– 8, 43, 72, 73, 74, 76, 88, 104, 105, 270n24 Kremer, Michael, 137, 189, 203 Kripke, Saul, 248– 49 Kultur, 91, 93– 97, 99, 101– 2, 109. See also Zivilisation Kundera, Milan, 172 language games, 6, 35, 40, 41, 54, 61, 65– 67, 84– 85, 87, 122, 235, 265n18 Latour, Bruno, 250 Lawrence, D. H., 45 LeMahieu, Michael, 13, 20, 258n9, 278n6 Levi, Primo, 212– 13, 215, 218, 285n10, 285n12 limits of language, 28, 35, 79, 139– 40, 206, 284n3. See also nonsense Lobmayer, Ludwig, 75 Locke, John, 60 logical positivism, 2, 3, 5, 13, 16, 42, 65, 105, 128, 133, 137, 163, 234. See also Carnap; Schlick; Vienna Circle; Waismann Long, Christopher, 76 Loos, Adolf, 7– 8, 20, 72– 83, 86, 88, 91– 99, 101, 104– 5, 108– 9, 113, 266n3, 267n12, 270n14 Mahler, Gustav, 4, 41– 42 Malcolm, Norman, 41 Malevich, Kazimir, 57 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 280n20 Mao, Douglas, and Rebecca Walkowitz (“The New Modernist Studies”), 18, 255n1, 257n41. See also Walkowitz, Rebecca, and Douglas Mao (“The New Modernist Studies”) Marcuse, Herbert, 3 Matar, Anat, 1, 19 Mauthner, Fritz, 207 McGuinness, Brian, 85 Menand, Louis, 235 Mendelssohn, Felix, 57 Milton, John, 37 mimesis, 229, 264 modernism, modernist: aesthetics, 57– 58, 70; analytic-continental divide in philosophy and, 7; annus mirabilis of (1922), 1, 181; architecture, 8, 11, 72– 88, 92; autonomy and, 276n10; Cavell on, 13– 15, 238; contradictions of, 1– 8; in condition of philosophy, 6, 277n16; critical, 71, 75, 88, 182; cultural production, 8; decadence and, 80; difficulty and, 11, 134, 183– 84, 187– 89; epiphany and, 182; experience and, 30– 33; expression in the arts and, 57– 70, 91, 113; German, 74; important figures of, 1– 8, 31– 33, 35, 44, 54, 80; literary, 5– 6, 24– 27, 29; MCF (Cavell’s and Fried’s shared conception of ), 153– 59, 162, 164– 65, 271n9; vs. modernity, 5, 8, 23– 27, 256n16; music, 7– 8, 20, 41, 75, 110, 238, 256n15; “the mystical”

297 and, 29; ordinary language philosophy and, 17; philosophical, 2, 131– 32, 150; poetic, 134, 140; pragmatism and, 18; realism and, 20, 150; religion and, 41– 56, 92, 97; repudiation of scientific knowledge in, 53; resolute interpretations of Wittgenstein and, 19; Romanticism and, 1– 3, 6, 144; skepticism and, 247; transformative yearning in, 3– 4, 43, 45, 179, 182; variability of the term, 1– 2; Viennese, 4, 7– 8, 42– 43, 74, 91; Wittgenstein’s critique of, 4, 12, 41, 109, 132, 176; Wittgenstein’s place in, 1– 5, 12, 42, 132, 177– 79 modernity, 4– 20, 12– 14, 23– 24, 80, 91, 102, 131, 132, 175, 203, 209– 10, 256n16 Monk, Ray, 7 Moore, G. E., 43, 65, 285n6 Moravánsky, Ákos, 78, 82 Moretti, Franco, 204 Moyal-Sharrock, Daniele, 265n18 Mulhall, Stephen, 41, 249 music, 7– 8, 13– 14, 20, 28, 31, 41, 59, 75, 110, 163, 172, 223, 238, 252, 256n15, 264n12 Musil, Robert, 7– 8, 20, 91– 113, 181– 83, 287, 198, 268n1 mysticism, mystical, 5, 29, 34, 39, 44, 54, 55, 130, 181, 185, 195, 204, 251, 280n20 naturalism, 74, 114, 127, 128, 272– 73n24 negative capability, 5, 55. See Keats, John negative ground, 5– 6, 24– 25, 29, 38, 258n5 “New Modernist Studies,” 18, 20, 255n1, 257n41 New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit), 127 Newton, Isaac, 123, 247 “New Wittgenstein, The” 18– 19, 177, 257n42, 269n18, 283n15, 279n8. See resolute interpretation of Wittgenstein Nietzsche, Friedrich, 5– 6, 31, 80, 83, 130, 148, 267n23, 268n1, 273n1 nonsense, 19, 35, 49, 55, 104, 130, 133– 35, 136– 39, 141– 42, 149, 178, 190– 92, 194, 196, 275n17, 280n20, 282n35. See also ethics, ethical; limits of language objectivity, 77, 99– 101, 127– 28 O’Connor, Flannery, 247 Ogden, C. K., 209 Ong, Yi-Ping, 9, 20 ordinary, 20, 35; and architecture, 75, 92– 93, 113; complexity of, 86; and consciousness, 120; and extraordinary, 133; vs. higher condition, 93, 98, 102, 103, 105, 107, 204; language, 94, 108, 137, 143– 44, 185, 218, 231, 236; life, 59– 60, 63, 92, 95– 97, 284n3, 263n1; vs. metaphysical discourse, 37; vs. metaphysical use, 54; and naturalism, 74; and “pure realism,” 116; as scene of significance, 125; simplicity of, 112; suffering treated as, 229; theater of, 114, 119. See everyday

298 ordinary language philosophy, 2, 13, 17, 18, 133, 144, 160– 61, 167 ornament, 74– 79, 81, 83, 94– 95, 97, 113, 270n2. See also architecture Pascal, Fania, 46 Paul of Tarsus, Saint, 46, 48– 50, 54– 55, 185, 262n22, 281n27 peace, 87, 183; “happy” (attitude, outlook) and, 201; in Joyce’s Ulysses, 199, 201; which “passeth understanding” in Eliot’s Wasteland, 280n20; and Philosophical Investigations §133, 203– 4; from questions, 189, 193; and solutions, 202, 204– 5; in Tolstoy, 198. See also acceptance; faith; understanding Perloff, Marjorie, 3, 4, 5, 8, 19, 40, 279n17, 274n5 perspicuous [synoptic, surveyable] representation [übersichtliche Darstellung], 10, 12, 17, 18, 19, 83– 84, 99, 111, 121– 23, 143– 44, 150, 283n46. See also clarity, project of clarification; elucidation photography, photograph, 8, 20, 76, 79, 114, 119, 123– 29, 272n18; of types, 114, 123, 128, 271n9, 272n24, 273n24 Picasso, Pablo, 1, 42, 57, 141 Pichler, Alois, 72 picture, “picture theory,” picture thinking, Bild, 10, 11, 27– 28, 32, 44, 49, 57, 59– 67, 69, 79, 116, 121, 123, 135, 144, 159, 224– 26, 232, 255n3, 365n16, 266n24 Plato, 137, 163, 173 Poirier, Richard, 167 Pound, Ezra, 23; “make it new” 14– 15 private language argument, 13, 32, 34, 87, 109, 231– 53, 287n9. See also skepticism problem: of aesthetics, 92, 104, 106, 113; of the age, 102, 109, 112; clarification of, 111; “of a different order of difficulty,” 189; of ethical understanding, 92, 104, 208; of forms of life, 97– 99, 110; higher sphere of value and, 92, 104, 188; of instruction, 227, 229; of language, 88, 92, 104, 106– 7, 143, 277n14; of life, 44, 104, 176, 179, 181– 84, 190, 193– 94, 274n14, 277n29; mathematical, 256; of modernism, 7– 8, 11, 14, 150, 209, 280n20; of perspicuous representation, 144; of philosophy, 18, 25– 26, 34, 86, 121, 137, 139, 143; of photographic types, 271; of private language, 233, 37– 39, 242, 249– 50; from religious point of view, 41, 280n24; resolution of, 71, 82, 91– 99, 186– 87, 190, 198, 201, 204– 5; as riddle, 184; self-knowledge and, 174; of sense and nonsense, 94; of skepticism, 16– 61; of solipsism, 114– 17; of uncertainty, 166– 68; vanishing of, 198, 202– 5; of worldliness, 132– 34, 138, 142– 43, 145, 147– 49

index progress, 5, 9, 10, 12, 17, 54, 110– 12, 162, 170, 176, 228, 280n25, 283n46 Proust, Marcel, 280n20 psychology, 7, 29, 116– 17 puzzle, 19, 33, 148, 178– 79, 187, 189, 280n20. See also difficulty; riddle Ramsey, Frank, 136 Rancière, Jacques, 262n1 Read, Rupert, 138– 42 realism, anti-, 142; in film, 124; and modernism, 20, 132– 33; in painting, 64– 65; philosophical vs. literary, 274n9; in photography, 128, 132, 133, 142; in poetry, 146; “pure,” 11, 115– 16, 120– 21, 127 Reichenbach, Hans, 2, 3, 255n7 religion, 4, 7– 8, 43, 44, 47, 55, 92, 110, 156, 195, 262n22; Christianity, 41– 42, 45– 46, 48– 51; fideism and, 41; instruction in, 197, 206– 7; Judaism, 42, 49; as language game, 41; the limits of language and, 209– 10; as practice vs. theory, 3– 4, 41, 52– 53; “religious point of view” and, 185– 86, 280– 81n25; ritual in Frazer and, 10, 48. See also faith; God; Gospels Renger-Patzsch, Albert, 127 resolute interpretation of Wittgenstein, 3, 18– 19, 136, 138, 141– 42, 177, 189, 257n43, 257– 58n43, 258n8, 269n18, 275n15, 275n17, 278– 79n7, 257– 58n43, 269n18, 275n15, 278– 79n7. See “New Wittgenstein, The” Rhees, Rush, 7, 257n24, 257n32, 262n27, 278n5, 280– 81n25 Rhie, Bernard, 264n14 riddle, 184– 85, 187, 198. See also difficulty; puzzle Rilke, Rainer Maria, 85, 182, 187, 279n17, 280n20 Robinson, Jenefer, 59– 60 Rodin, Auguste, 42 Romanticism, 6, 27, 57, 62, 74, 91, 103, 132– 33, 140, 144, 263n6, 264n14, 274n7 Rorty, Richard, 40, 260n44 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 230 Rudd, Anthony, 263n6 rule-following, 27, 67– 68, 98, 233, 249– 50 Russell, Bertrand, 1, 7, 26, 27, 86. See also description Sander, August, 127– 28, 272n24 Sayigny, Eike von, 84 Schiller, Friedrich, 116, 270n6 Schlick, Moritz, 255 Schoenbach, Lisi, 18 Schoenberg, Arnold, 1, 7, 42, 80, 267n22 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 27, 29, 44, 72, 132 Schorske, Carl, 71, 75, 91, 97 Schubert, Franz, 4, 57, 75

index Schwarzwald, Eugenie, 77 Secession, 74, 94, 97 “seeing the world in the right way,” 4, 11, 25, 42, 49, 99, 135, 144, 181– 82, 189, 191, 201, 203, 280n20. See also acceptance; clarity, project of clarification; “happy” (attitude, outlook); peace; understanding self, 2, 20, 43, 138, 233, 243, 251; alienated, 243– 44; avowal of, 66, 220; communication of, 9, 96, 143, 210, 228; consciousness, 61, 63, 173– 74, 202; existential context of, 223; and experience, 28; and expression, 58, 60– 71; Hegel on, 60– 63; improvement, 179, 283n46; metaphysical, 246; modern, 13, 239; Musil on, 100– 3, 107; private, 25, 232, 245; and theater of the ordinary, 114– 21, 124– 25; and value, 220; and world, 12– 13, 18, 66– 67, 69– 70, 101– 2, 107, 112, 114– 15, 118– 21, 133, 138, 208. See also first-person expression; solipsism; subject, subjectivity Shakespeare, William, 37, 176 silence, 32, 38, 42, 44, 64, 106, 135, 187, 190– 91, 196, 201, 205, 209, 231, 238, 239, 252, 275n17, 280n20, 282n37 skepticism, 13, 20, 43, 55, 65, 80, 142, 150, 160, 166, 207, 213, 233, 242, 247, 287n9 Socrates, Socratic, 26, 81, 148, 201, 214 solipsism, 20, 114– 15, 117, 119, 120, 271n8 solution, resolution, 25, 33– 34, 43, 56, 91, 97, 99, 104, 110, 112– 13, 127, 145, 176, 178– 82, 184, 186– 87, 190, 192– 93, 196– 98, 201, 203– 5, 211– 12, 268n1, 274n14, 280n20 Sophocles, 148 soul, 47, 93 280n25; Bellow on, 233, 237, 239, 248– 53; Cavell on, 241, 287n22; Musil on, 103, 113, 179, 181– 83, 187; Wittgenstein on, 24, 116– 17, 239, 271n8, 280 Spengler, Oswald, 72, 82, 270n2 spirit, spirituality, 27, 30– 31, 36, 48, 61, 91– 93, 97– 100, 107, 110– 11, 113, 180, 181, 185, 187, 189, 194, 199, 241– 43, 284– 85n3, 288n28; in Hegel, 58, 60– 61, 63, 264nn9– 10 “spirit of the age,” 8, 9, 10, 12, 101, 110, 176– 77, 283n46 Sprachkrise, 207 Sraffa, Piero, 72– 73 Stanford Friedman, Susan, 255n16 Stein, Gertrude, 1, 18, 23, 30, 37, 38, 160n35 Stevens, Wallace, 18, 20, 54; “Anecdote of the Jar,” 138; and the everyday, 147; “Fabliau of Florida,” 146; and language, 138– 42, 145; and nonsense, 138; Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, 182; and poetry as philosophy, 133– 34, 138, 147, 149; “Repetitions of a Young Captain,” 145; and Romanticism, 132, 144; “Thirteen Ways of

299 Looking at a Blackbird,” 138– 40; and worldliness, 132– 33, 147– 48, 150 Stonborough, Margaret (Gretl), née Wittgenstein, 8, 82, 268n27 style: modernist, 32– 33, 57, 67, 69, 71– 79, 93– 96, 113, 154, 196– 97, 215– 16, 234– 35, 239, 247, 251; Wittgenstein’s, 1– 3, 8, 12– 13, 16– 17, 88, 159, 171, 235, 266n27, 284n3. See also aesthetic, aesthetics, aestheticism subject, subjectivity, 4, 20, 31, 66– 69, 208, 223, 232, 240– 42; and affect, 74, 100, 102; and expression, 57– 58, 60, 218, 220, 225; Hegel on, 61– 64, 264n10, 265n20; metaphysical, 243; modern, 13, 239; Musil on, 92; and private language, 244– 45; and realism, 115; and solipsism, 116– 17, 119– 21. See also first-person expression; self; solipsism sub specie aeternitatis, view of the world, 32, 84, 101, 117, 119, 121, 198, 280n20 Taubes, Jakob, 49 Taylor, Charles, 60, 63 technology, mechanization, 3, 5, 14, 33, 54, 64, 77, 78, 83, 85, 87, 88, 94, 96, 99, 101– 3, 112, 123– 26, 136, 182, 256n11, 272n19, 283n46 theory: anti-theoretical method of Tractatus, 136– 37, 139, 141, 143; Carnap on, 163; Christianity as practice and not, 49, 52; of critical modernism, 74, 80; of colors (Goethe), 122– 23, 127– 28; of descriptions (Russell), 86; of expression, 58– 59, 65; of the novel (Henry James), 165– 67, 169, 171, 172; “picture,” 135; poststructuralist, 58, 262n1; and Stevens poetry, 145, 149; Wittgenstein’s suspicion of, 46– 47, 107, 130, 136, 149, 177, 190– 91, 282– 83n41 Thompson, Caleb, 202, 280n25 Thoreau, Henry David, 230 Tolstoy, Leo, 45, 55, 56; A Confession, 176, 180, 187, 198– 99, 280– 81n25; Gospel in Brief, 44, 52, 180, 201, 209, 280– 81n25, 282n39 Toulmin, Stephen, and Allan Janik (Wittgenstein’s Vienna), 7– 8, 91, 103, 105, 109, 113, 181. See Janik, Allan Trakl, Georg, 57 transformation: in Bellow, 242; modernist yearning for, 179, 182; Musil on, 98; vs. progress, 110; and religious experience, 280n25; of the self, 3, 43, 66. See also change; conversion understanding, 20; and communicative practice, 35; constructive conception of family resemblance and, 122– 24; crisis in modern forms of life and, 99; of experience, 30; expressive act and, 57– 58, 65; Gospels vs. Pauline epistles and, 48– 49; Hegelian subjective agency and,

300 understanding (continued) 61; higher sphere of value and, 104, 186; inadequacy of scientific explanations for, 285n7; lecture form and, 208– 11; limits of sense and, 138, 140; literature as source of, 274n5; longing for, 183; method of the Tractatus and, 190– 91; perspicuous representation and, 143; of what philosophy itself is, 156, 164; of problems of life, 179; quest for, 201– 2; right way of living and, 181– 82; sense of at-homeness in language, world and, 180, 199; sub specie aeternitatis and, 117; Tractatus readers’ work toward, 107, 190, 282n35. See also acceptance; peace Vienna Circle (Wiener Kreis), 2, 45, 83, 217, 255n8, 282n41. See also logical positivism Wagner, Otto, 76 Wagner, Richard, 80 Waismann, Friedrich, 217, 219, 282– 83n41 Walkowitz, Rebecca, and Douglas Mao (“The New Modernist Studies”), 18, 255n1, 257n41. See Mao, Douglas Weininger, Otto, 7, 72, 80, 281n15 Welty, Eudora, 3 Wiener Moderne, 74, 76 Wijdeveld, Paul, 82– 83 will, 29, 61, 63, 97, 115– 16, 180, 189, 199, 253, 264n9, 281– 82n33 Wittgenstein, Hermine 43, 279n17 Wittgenstein, Karl, 42 Wittgenstein, Ludwig: — Blue Book, 34, 40, 124, 53, 283n41 — Culture and Value, 7, 47, 54, 81, 83, 121, 207; philosophy written as poetry and, 3, 11– 12, 24, 40, 55, 84, 130– 33, 141– 42, 149– 50. See also “spirit of the age” — “Lecture on Ethics,” 9, 33, 107, 193, 206, 208– 9, 214, 216, 233, 285n6 — Notebooks, 44, 55, 84, 115– 17, 119, 180, 199 — On Certainty, 55, 113, 161, 167, 168, 265n18 — Philosophical Investigations, 1, 231; and architecture, 73; Augustinian view of language in, 15, 232, 250; builders in, 171; Cavell on, 13, 16, 19; craftsmanship and, 8; description and, 122; everyday vs. metaphysical use, 133; family resemblance, 6, 48, 122, 123; form(s) of life, 3, 17, 41, 65, 67, 80, 91, 93– 100, 102– 3, 109– 10, 112– 14, 126– 27, 140, 207, 208, 213, 225, 226, 235, 265n18; and linguistic practices, 234; Marcuse on, 2; method of, 202– 4; on misuse of language, 275n15; as modernist, 239; negative ground in, 24– 25; as propaedeutic, 6; puzzles in, 33– 35; and Romanticism, 144; style of, 88; pain in, 33, 65– 66, 153, 157– 61, 170, 236, 249; worldliness, 143. See also beetle-in-a-

index box; clarification; grammar; language games; ordinary language philosophy; perspicuous representation; private language argument; rule-following — Philosophical Remarks, 9, 83, 176 — “Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough,” 47– 48, 53, 261– 62n21 — Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: and absence, 103, 106, 191, 274n14; and analytic (AngloAmerican) and continental traditions in philosophy, 7; as ancilla, 34; anti-metaphysical and theoretical aims, 3, 24, 134, 177, 203; and architecture, 7– 8, 94, 96, 104, 112; difficulty of, 134, 150, 179, 182, 189, 282n35; epiphany and counterepiphany in, 180, 187, 197, 201, 202– 4; and ethics, 5, 19, 29, 34, 104– 5, 130, 137– 38, 178, 273n2; and fact-value distinction, 285n6; and God, 44, 184– 85, 281n25; and Gospel in Brief, 44, 180, 201, 281n25; and Kierkegaardian strategy, 202; and the literary, 5– 6, 25; and logical positivism, 2, 45, 133; method of, 25, 179; as modernist, 1, 5– 6, 17, 42, 179, 182, 188; and the mystical, 1, 5, 20, 30, 34, 44, 54– 55, 130, 181, 185, 204; and ordinary language, 86– 87, 96, 106– 7, 112, 234; and overcoming [überwinden], 26, 191; and poetry, 18, 133– 38, 140, 150; and “problem of life,” 104, 176, 181, 187, 204; question and quest in, 3, 33– 35, 87, 198, 201, 204; and realism, 11, 29, 116– 17, 119, 129; and religion, 3, 8, 42– 45, 55, 185, 281n25; and Romanticism, 144; and Russell and Frege, 7, 26– 27, 42– 43, 86, 163; and silence, 44, 54, 135, 191; solipsism, 114, 115, 117, 119– 20; solution to (vanishing of ) philosophical problems, 15– 26, 34, 86, 104, 142– 44, 179, 192, 198; and techno-scientific world view, 3, 5, 8, 12, 16– 17, 30, 54, 87, 96, 99, 101, 107, 176, 179, 181, 184, 190, 194, 256n11; and transformative aim, 3, 107, 177– 80, 182, 190, 191, 201; and truth tables, 86; Viennese context of, 2, 7– 8, 96, 103, 105; The World as I Found It, 115, 120, 194. See also clarity, project of clarification; elucidation; ethics, ethical; “happy” (attitude, outlook); higher sphere of value; limits of language; “The New Wittgenstein”; perspicuous [synoptic, surveyable] representation; picture, “picture theory,” picture thinking, Bild; resolute reading of Wittgenstein; riddle; “seeing the world in the right way”; sub specie aeternitatis; will; wonder — Zettel, 142 Wittgenstein, Paul, 42 Wollheim, Richard, 69 Wood, Michael, 165– 68, 170 Woolf, Virginia, 1, 5, 20, 24, 30, 187, 238; and experience and consciousness, 30– 33; Jacob’s Room, 1; “Modern Fiction,” 30, 31, 192, 259n18,

index 283n47; To the Lighthouse, 31, 32; and yearning for answers, 192, 280n20. See Bloomsbury group wonder, 84, 118, 143– 44, 148, 181, 185, 189, 199, 285n7 World War I, 42, 43, 45, 46, 52, 247, 281n25 World War II, 51, 53 worldliness, 132– 34, 138, 142– 43, 145– 49

301 Yeats, W. B., 3, 37, 53, 54, 132, 262n29, 279n18 Zivilisation, 99, 101– 2. See also Kultur Zola, Emile, 74 Zumhagen-Yekplé, Karen, 3, 11, 19, 20, 259n24, 274n14, 284n1, 285n12 Zweig, Stefan, 7