Wittgenstein Reading 9783110294699, 9783110294620

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Wittgenstein Reading

On Wittgenstein

Edited on behalf of the Internationale Ludwig Wittgenstein Gesellschaft e.V. by James Conant, Wolfgang Kienzler, Stefan Majetschak, Volker Munz, Josef G. F. Rothhaupt, David Stern and Wilhelm Vossenkuhl

Volume 2

Wittgenstein Reading Edited by Sascha Bru, Wolfgang Huemer, and Daniel Steuer

ISBN 978-3-11-029462-0 e-ISBN 978-3-11-029469-9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2013 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Typesetting: Johanna Boy, Brennberg Printing and Binding: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Table of Contents List of Abbreviations 

 VII

Daniel Steuer, Sascha Bru, Wolfgang Huemer  1 Introduction  Steven G. Affeldt Being Lost and Finding Home: Philosophy, Confession, Recollection, and Conversion in Augustine’s Confessions and Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations   5 Wolfgang Huemer The Character of a Name: Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Shakespeare 

 23

William Day To Not Understand, but Not Misunderstand: Wittgenstein on Shakespeare   39 Julian Lamb Sense and Sententiousness: Wittgenstein, Milton, Shakespeare 

 55

K. L. Evans Why the Tractatus, like the Old Testament, is “Nothing but a Book” 

 75

Elisabeth Van Dam Wittgenstein Lights Lichtenberg’s Candle: Flashlights of Enlightenment in Wittgenstein’s Thought   103 Daniel Steuer Wittgenstein and Goethe: Getting Rid of “Sorge” 

 115

Andrew Barker Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Conservative Legacy of Johann Nepomuk Nestroy   137 Steven Burns Best Readings: Wittgenstein and Grillparzer 

 153

VI 

 Table of Contents

Béla Szabados Wittgenstein’s Reception of Wagner: Language, Music, and Culture 

 171

Josef G. F. Rothhaupt Ludwig Wittgenstein and Wilhelm Busch: “Humour is not a mood, but a ‘Weltanschauung’”   197 Brian McGuinness Wittgenstein and Dostoevsky  Garry L. Hagberg Wittgenstein Re-Reading 

 227

 243

Ilse Somavilla The Significance of Dostoevsky (and Ludwig Anzengruber) for Wittgenstein   263 Paul Davies A Remarkable Fact: Wittgenstein Reading Tolstoy 

 289

David LaRocca Note to Self: Learn to Write Autobiographical Remarks from Wittgenstein   319 Wolfgang Kienzler Wittgenstein Reads Kürnberger 

 335

Charles Altieri, Sascha Bru Trakl’s Tone: Mood and the Distinctive Speech Act of the Demonstrative  António Sousa Ribeiro The Chimera of Language? Karl Kraus and Ludwig Wittgenstein  Helen Thaventhiran Well-Versed: Wittgenstein and Leavis Read Empson 

The contributors of the volume  Index of Names 

 409

 403

 389

 373

 355

List of Abbreviations BBB 1958 / BBB 1964 – Preliminary Studies for the “Philosophical Investigations”. Generally Known as The Blue and Brown Books. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. BEE – Wittgenstein’s Nachlass. The Bergen Electronic Edition (1998–2000). [MSS 101–183, TSS 201–233, 235–245, MS 301, TSS 302–306, 309–310] BT 2005 – The Big Typeskript: TS 213. Ed. and translated by C. Grant Luckhardt and Maximilian A. E. Aue. Malden/MA, Oxford, Carlton/VIC: Blackwell. CB 1980 – Briefe. Ed. by B.F. McGuinness and G.H. von Wright, translated by J. Schulte. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. CCO 1973 – Letters to C.K. Ogden. Edited with an Introduction by G.H. von Wright and an Appendix of Letters by Frank Plumpton Ramsey. Oxford: Basil Blackwell and London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. CLF 1969 – Briefe an Ludwig von Ficker. Ed. by Georg Henrik von Wright in collaboration with Walter Methlagl. Brenner Studien 1. Salzburg: Otto Müller. CPE 2006 – Wittgenstein – Engelmann: Briefe, Begegnungen, Erinnerungen. Ed. by Ilse Somavilla in collaboration with Brian McGuinness. Innsbruck, Vienna: Haymon. DB 1997a – Denkbewegungen. Tagebücher 1930–1932, 1936–1937 (MS 183). Ed. by Ilse Somavilla. Part 1: “Normalisierte Fassung”. Innsbruck: Haymon. DB 1997b – Denkbewegungen. Tagebücher 1930–1932, 1936–1937 (MS 183). Ed. by Ilse Somavilla. Part 2: “Diplomatische Fassung”. Innsbruck: Haymon. DB 2003 – “Movements of Thought: Diaries, 1930–1932, 1936–1937”. In: Ludwig Wittgenstein. Public and Private Occasions, p. 3–255. Ed. by James C. Klagge and Alfred Nordmann. Lanham, Boulder, New York, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield. GB 1979a – Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough / Bemerkungen über Frazers Golden Bough. Ed. by Rush Rhees, translated by A.C. Miles and Rush Rhees. Doncaster: The Brynmill Press. GB 1993 – “Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough / Bemerkungen über Frazers Golden Bough”. In: Ludwig Wittgenstein. Philosophical Occasions 1912–1951, p. 115–155. Ed. and with an introduction by James C. Klagge and Alfred Nordmann. Indianapolis and Cambridge, USA: Hackett. GT 1991a – Geheime Tagebücher. Ed. by Wilhelm Baum. Vienna: Turia & Kant. GT 1991b – Geheime Tagebücher. Ed. by Wilhelm Baum. Second edition. Vienna: Turia and Kant. LA 1966 – Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief. Ed. by Cyril Barrett. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. LE 1965 – “A Lecture on Ethics”. In: “Wittgenstein’s Lecture on Ethics”. In: The Philosophical Review 74, p. 3–12. LE 1989 – “Vortrag über Ethik”. In: Vortrag über Ethik, p. 9–19. Ed. and translated by Joachim Schulte. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. LE 1993 – “A Lecture on Ethics”. In: Ludwig Wittgenstein. Philosophical Occasions 1912–1951, p. 36–44. Ed. and with an introduction by James C. Klagge and Alfred Nordmann. Indianapolis and Cambridge, USA: Hackett. LW 1982 – Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology / Letzte Schriften über die Philosophie der Psychologie. Vol. 1. Ed. by G.H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman, translated by C.G. Luckhardt and Maximilian A.E. Aue. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. OC 1969 – On Certainty / Über Gewißheit. Ed. by G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright, translated by Denis Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

VIII 

 List of Abbreviations

PG 1974 – Philosophical Grammar. Ed. by Rush Rhees, translated by Anthony Kenny. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. PH 1993 – “Philosophie” / “Philosophy”. In: Ludwig Wittgenstein. Philosophical Occasions 1912–1951, p. 158–199. Ed. and with an introduction by James C. Klagge and Alfred Nordmann. Indianapolis and Cambridge, USA: Hackett. PI 1953 – Philosophical Investigations / Philosophische Untersuchungen. Ed. by G.E.M. Anscombe and R. Rhees, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. PI 1958 – Philosophical Investigations. Ed. by G.E.M. Anscombe and R. Rhees, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. Second Edition. New York: Macmillan. PI 1967 – Philosophical Investigations / Philosophische Untersuchungen. Ed. by G.E.M. Anscombe and R. Rhees, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. Reprint of the second edition with an index. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. PI 1968 – Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. New York: Macmillan. PI 1978 / PI 2000 / PI 2001 – Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell. PI 2009 – Philosophical Investigations / Philosophische Untersuchungen. Ed. by P.M.S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte. Malden/MA, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. PT 1971 – Prototractatus. An early version of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Edited by B.F. McGuinness, T. Nyberg and G.H. von Wright, with a translation by D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness, an historical introduction by G.H. von Wright and a facsimile of the author’s manuscript. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. PU 2001 – Philosophische Untersuchungen. Kritisch-genetische Edition. Ed. by Joachim Schulte in collaboration with Heikki Nyman, Eike von Savigny, and Georg Henrik von Wright. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. RFM 1998 – Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics. Ed. by G. H. von Wright, R. Rhees, and G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell. ROC 1977 – Remarks on Colour / Bemerkungen über die Farben. Ed. by G.E.M. Anscombe, translated by Linda L. McAlister and Margarete Schättle. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. RPP 1980a – Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology / Bemerkungen über die Philosophie der Psychologie. Vol. 1. Ed. by G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. RPP 1980b – Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology / Bemerkungen über die Philosophie der Psychologie. Vol. 2. Ed. by G.H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman, translated by C.G. Luckhardt and Maximilian A.E. Aue. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. TB 1961 – “Notebooks 1914–1916”. In: Notebooks 1914–1916, p.2–91. Ed. by G.H. von Wright and G.E.M. Anscombe, trans. by G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. TLP 1922 – Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Ed. by C.K. Ogden, translated by C.K. Ogden and F.P. Ramsey. International Library of Psychology, Philosophy and Scientific Method. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner. TLP 1933 – Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Ed. by C.K. Ogden, translated by C.K. Ogden and F.P. Ramsey. Reprinted with a few corrections. International Library of Psychology, Philosophy and Scientific Method. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. TLP 1955 – Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Ed. by C.K. Ogden, translated by C.K. Ogden and F.P. Ramsey. International Library of Psychology, Philosophy and Scientific Method. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

List of Abbreviations 

 IX

TLP 1961 – Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness. International Library of Philosophy and Scientific Method. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. TLP 1963 – Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness. International Library of Philosophy and Scientific Method. Second impression, with a few corrections. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. TLP 1972 – Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness. Reprinted with corrections in the light of the publication of Wittgenstein’s correspondence with C.K. Ogden about the first translation. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. TLP 1974 – Tractatus logico-philosophicus. Translated by B.F. McGuinness and D.F. Pears. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. TLP 1981 – Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by C.K. Ogden. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. TLP 1999 – Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by C. K. Ogden, Mineola. New York: Dover TLP 2002 – Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London: Routledge. TLP 2003 – Tractatus logico-philosophicus. Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. TLP 2004 – Ludwig Wittgensteins “Logisch Philosophische Abhandlung”. Entstehungsgeschichte und Herausgabe der Typoskripte und Korrekturexemplare. Ed. by Gerd Graßhoff and Timm Lampert. Vienna, New York: Springer. UW 1993 – “Ursache und Wirkung: Intuitives Erfassen / Cause and Effect: Intuitive Awareness”. In: Ludwig Wittgenstein. Philosophical Occasions 1912–1951, p. 370–426. Ed. and with an introduction by James C. Klagge and Alfred Nordmann. Indianapolis and Cambridge, USA: Hackett. VB 1977 – Culture and Value / Vermischte Bemerkungen. Ed. by G. H. von Wright, translated by Peter Winch. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. VB 1980a – Culture and Value / Vermischte Bemerkungen. Ed. by G.H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman, translated by Peter Winch. Amended second edition. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. VB 1980b / VB 1984 – Culture and Value / Vermischte Bemerkungen. Ed. by G. H. von Wright, translated by Peter Winch. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. VB 1998 – Ludwig Wittgenstein Vermischte Bemerkungen. Eine Auswahl aus dem Nachlaß / Culture and Value. A Selection from the Posthumous Remains. Ed. by Georg Henrik von Wright and Heikki Nyman. Revised edition of the text by Alois Pichler. Translated by Peter Winch. Revised second edition. Oxford: Blackwell. WC 2008 – Wittgenstein in Cambridge. Letters and Documents, 1911–1951. Ed. by Brian McGuinness. Malden, MA: Blackwell 2008. Z 1967 – Zettel / Zettel. Ed. by G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Z 1981 – Zettel. Ed. by G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. Second edition. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Daniel Steuer, Sascha Bru, Wolfgang Huemer

Introduction In 1982, on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Goethe’s death, Thomas Bernhard published a piece of short prose titled “Goethe schtirbt” (“Goethe doying” – “schtirbt” transcribes the Hessian pronunciation of “dying”).¹ In this text, which one may characterise as the opening gambit to the short-lived genre of Austrian magic realism, Goethe’s last wish on his deathbed is to see Wittgenstein who, in 1832, was already in Cambridge  – or Oxford, which of the two doesn’t really matter to Goethe. Kräuter is sent to fetch him; but, alas, he arrives too late, Wittgenstein has just died. And Goethe dies soon after.² Thus, the two never quite meet. Maybe this can serve as a model for both the relationship between Wittgenstein’s writing and literature – desiring, aspiring to become literature, but never quite getting there (cf. VB 1998, p. 28e) – and for the relationship between literature and philosophy in general. For this volume, in speaking to the question of one philosopher’s relationship with literature, cannot but also pronounce on the relationship between literature and philosophy as such. That most of the contributions do so indirectly, we consider to be an advantage. And, if we are allowed a personal judgement, in following the Investigations’ plural understanding of “understanding” (PI 2009, § 531–532) – that is, by practicing poetical literalness (only these words in this sequence) as well as the possibility of abstraction opened up by paraphrase – they create the intellectual space in which literature and philosophy can meet, or miss, each other. Wittgenstein was a life-long, avid reader of literature, and his own thought is reflected in, and was formed by, his reading and reception of other authors. He took literature very seriously and did not consider it to be of secondary importance compared to philosophy. Thus, from a variety of angles, many of the contributions approach the role of literature as a vehicle of self-reflection for Wittgenstein. If he once remarked that his own writing should act as a mirror in which his reader can see the “deformities” of her own thinking (VB 1998, p. 25e), then it is tempting to say that he treated other authors as just such mirrors. For example, what sounds, on the surface, like criticism (e.g. of Shakespeare) can equally be understood as a simple registration of Wittgenstein’s own reaction,

1 Thomas Bernhard (2003). The text was first published in the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit (19.3.1982). 2 We also learn from Kräuter’s account that Goethe’s last words were not “Mehr Licht” (“More light”), but “Mehr nicht” (“No more”, or “That is all”).

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 Daniel Steuer, Sascha Bru, Wolfgang Huemer

hence a piece of self-diagnosis or self-analysis. Therefore, this volume covers a double relationship: we learn on the one hand what Wittgenstein has to tell us about particular authors, and on the other what, in turn, this tells us about Wittgenstein. “The danger in a long foreword, Wittgenstein reminded us, “is that the spirit of a book has to be evident in the book itself & cannot be described” (VB 1998, p. 10e). The same goes for this preface and the individual chapters it introduces. They best speak for themselves. Instead of providing you, the reader, with a Baedecker for them (see VB 1998, p. 46e), we want to make some brief general observations not on the individual buildings, but on the impression we got of the town to which they belong. It has striking features. What emerges, perhaps with more clarity than in other areas of research on Wittgenstein, is the deep ethical impulse which runs through his movements of thought. We know this from his diaries, and it comes to the fore in almost all of the contributions. Related to this is another central aspect, namely his understanding of philosophy as inseparable from biography. It has been quoted many times that “the difficulty of philosophy” is “not the intellectual difficulty of the sciences, but the difficulty of a change of attitude”, that “resistances of the will must be overcome”, and that “work on philosophy is … actually more of a//a kind of//work on oneself” (PH, p. 161). This does not make philosophy an exercise in biography, but it links it inextricably to a dimension of (social and individual) experience and of language that cannot be adequately addressed in purely abstract terms. (Does that make philosophy more literary? It certainly points to the fact that philosophy’s dependence on its medium, language, has a different quality to the dependence on language of other disciplines.) Finally, according to Drury’s report, Wittgenstein did not see himself as a “religious person”, but said he could not help “seeing every problem from a religious point of view” (O’Connor Drury, p. 94; see also Malcolm 1993). This threshold dimension – between, say, the secular and the transcendent – also becomes apparent in many of the contributions in this volume. Again, this does not necessarily make philosophy, or literature, metaphysical. Rather, it indicates that personal, social, and political negotiations which include questions of value cannot operate with narrow conceptions of rationality or reason, and cannot limit themselves to a correspondingly formulaic and formal language. With this in mind, Wittgenstein’s famous remark that philosophy should really be written “only as one writes a poem” (VB 1998, p. 28e; “Philosophie dürfte man eigentlich nur dichten”) invites us to take a double perspective: to see (some, not all) literature and poetry as philosophically significant, and (some, not all) philosophy as depending on the “poetic” dimension in language, without, however, confusing, or conflating, the two sides. Contrary to his self-judgment, according to which he was not quite able to practice what he preached, Wittgen-

Introduction 

 3

stein’s writing often takes its fascination from its use of a literary sensitivity for the purpose of clarification. The chapters of this volume bring out in various ways that this is a practice worth continuing. Crucially, all of the essays that make up the volume take as their starting point authors and texts Wittgenstein knew. They are not concerned with whatever interesting connections there might be between literature as such and his work, or with the equally interesting question how he influenced artists and writers, but with beginning to reconstruct his library from what we know about his actual reading, and to evaluate in detail its significance for his philosophical work. All contributors were asked to focus on one literary author and his³ role in Wittgenstein’s work and life. We also recommended, without insisting on it, that papers should be based on a close discussion of a particular quotation or passage from Wittgenstein, and address wider issues from there. While some of the contributions follow this format more closely than others, all enter into a close and detailed engagement with texts. The list of chosen authors – we sometimes made suggestions, but were never prescriptive  – ranges from Augustine, Milton, and Shakespeare to Busch, Kraus, and Empson. It nicely combines the “usual” with some not so usual “suspects”. Some authors are represented more than once, and some more obvious clusters emerge: there is the “Russian connection” (Dostoevsky, Tolstoy), a solid selection from the staple diet of Austrian literature (Grillparzer, Nestroy, Kürnberger, Kraus, Trakl), and a Shakespearian presence which is in inverse relationship with the amount Wittgenstein ever said about him. But more interesting than this is the fact that the themes upon which these essays touch (without knowing of each other) congeal into what is best described as a version of the Investigations’ artichoke (PI 2009, § 164); or, if you prefer, they can be arranged along lines of family resemblance, forming a thread of intertwining fibres, without one fibre necessarily running through all of them (PI 2009, § 67). Needless to say, we may just have overlooked that one fibre, but in any case the reader has no right to complain if, having read all of the chapters, she couldn’t find the artichoke. Wandering through the landscape of Wittgenstein’s literary culture, the contributions to follow come across themes such as “reading(s)”, “re-reading”,

3 There happen to be no female authors in the list that emerged. But we felt it would have been artificial to commission a “token paper” on a female author. It is hoped that this lacuna will be filled by future work. While there is clearly a strong preponderance of male authors in Wittgenstein’s literary diet, he certainly read, and thought about, female authors as well. His remarks on a poem by Frieda Schanz (VB 1998, p. 14e) and on Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (Rhees 1981, p. 206–207) are cases in point.

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“conversion”, “the Tractatus as a primer”, “superstition”, “satire”, “drama”, “the dialogic principle”, “humour”, “music”, and  – as with the examples for what a “game” is – the list could go on. As editors, we have played with the idea to arrange this material according to “author clusters” or “thematic clusters”, but decided in the end that it was most important not to create a false sense of systematicity, and not to preclude which family resemblances are actually to be found between the pieces. The reader should lay his own tracks through the fields, and not be spared the pleasure of finding resonances between the contributions. We have therefore, in the end, decided in favour of a purely external criterion, that of chronology, for ordering them. It would also not have been feasible to aim at comprehensiveness regarding the literary authors Wittgenstein knew. However, we believe that “Wittgenstein Reading” succeeds, to an unprecedented degree, in establishing the importance of literature for Wittgenstein, as well as the diverse roles which literature played in his life. The editors would like to thank all contributors for their inspiring work, and for making this project possible. Daniel Steuer would like to thank the Institute Vienna Circle (Universität Wien), especially Sabine Koch and Robert Kaller, for the IT and other logistic support, kindly granted in August 2012, without which the project would have been further delayed. And last not least, we would like to thank our publisher for their patience in allowing the project to come to completion.

Bibliography Bernhard, Thomas (2003): “Goethe schtirbt”. In: Werke 14. Erzählungen, Kurzprosa. Hans Höller/Martin Huber/Manfred Mittermayer (Eds). Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, p. 398–413. Malcolm, Norman (1993): Wittgenstein. A Religious Point of View? London: Routledge. O’Connor Drury, Maurice (1981): “Some Notes on Conversations with Wittgenstein”. In: Rush Rhees (Ed.): Ludwig Wittgenstein. Personal Recollections. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, p. 76–96. Rhees, Rush (1981): “Postscript”. In: Rush Rhees (Ed.): Ludwig Wittgenstein. Personal Recollections. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, p. 190–231.

Steven G. Affeldt

Being Lost and Finding Home: Philosophy, Confession, Recollection, and Conversion in Augustine’s Confessions and Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations You stir man to take pleasure in praising you, because you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you. (Augustine 1991, p. 3) 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 which bring itself in question. (PI 1968, § 133)

1. Introduction Among works that we know Wittgenstein read and admired, Augustine’s Confessions might well be thought to enjoy a certain pride of place. He once described the Confessions as “possibly ‘the most serious book ever written’” and the ways in which he invoked it in conversation reflect an impressive intimacy with the text (Rhees 1984, p. 89–90). Furthermore, unlike other works we know Wittgenstein treasured  – works by Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, or Emerson, for example – the Confessions figures explicitly within Philosophical Investigations, the major work of his later philosophy. Indeed, in a text notable for the all but complete absence of other thinkers, no figure appears more frequently than Augustine and only Frege and William James are mentioned as often. But the most obvious reason for thinking that the Confessions enjoys a special status is the fact that the Investigations, famously, opens with an extended passage from the work, a passage in which Augustine recounts how he (must have) learned to speak and in which Wittgenstein claims to find a “particular picture of the essence of human language” that a large part of the Investigations is devoted to examining and contesting (PI 1968, § 1). Even so, Wittgenstein’s relation to Augustine has received relatively scant attention. There has, of course, been a great deal of attention devoted to Wittgenstein’s critique of the so-called “Augustinian picture of language.” But little of this attention has actually been devoted to Augustine or to any broader bearing

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of his work on Wittgenstein’s. Indeed, the manner in which most commentators have attended to the “Augustinian picture” involves treating the opening passage from Augustine as a self-contained document that is neatly severable from any surrounding narrative and the significance of which is wholly exhausted by the gloss that Wittgenstein provides. In effect, this approach implicitly denies that Wittgenstein’s invocation of Augustine could reflect any more systematic influence of, or engagement with, his work while also blinding itself to potential evidence for any such influence or engagement by dismissing Augustine’s text. These attitudes and practices cannot simply be dismissed. After all, Wittgenstein’s explicit invocations of Augustine are few, brief, and largely linked to his discussion of the “Augustinian picture.” It is also not immediately clear how the Investigations could be more systematically engaged with the Confessions. At least on the surface, Augustine’s spiritual autobiography and theological reflections have little connection to a work whose “subjects” Wittgenstein identifies as “the concepts of meaning, of understanding, of a proposition, of logic, the foundations of mathematics, states of consciousness, and other things” (PI 1968, p. ix). Furthermore, Norman Malcolm has offered an explanation for Wittgenstein’s opening quotation that seems to authorize the idea that Augustine’s relevance is restricted to his problematic “picture” of human language. Wittgenstein decided to use a quotation from the Confessions, Malcolm reports, “not because he could not find the conception expressed in that quotation stated as well by other philosophers, but because the conception must be important if so great a mind held it” (Malcolm 1980, p. 71). The burden of justification, then, falls upon those who claim to discern a broader and more systematic influence. It is incumbent upon them to make the case for Augustine’s influence – to show, that is, how our reading of Wittgenstein is deepened, enriched, or transformed by seeking to discern and trace the impact of his reading of Augustine. That is my aim in the present essay. I want to suggest that Wittgenstein’s reading of the Confessions played a critical role in shaping the fundamental conception of, and practice of, philosophy developed in Philosophical Investigations – that it systematically informs Wittgenstein’s vision of what philosophy is, what motivates it, what kinds of difficulty it involves, and what ends or goals it is directed toward.¹

1 In pursuing this aim I am, in part, making explicit thoughts about the influence of Augustine on Philosophical Investigations that were left largely implicit in Affeldt (1999) and (2010). My thinking about relationships between Augustine and Wittgenstein is especially indebted to: Cavell’s “The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy” (Cavell 1976c); Cavell’s “Notes

Being Lost and Finding Home 

 7

2. Philosophy and Representative Confession In his monumental history of modern identity, Sources of the Self, Charles Taylor argues that Augustine’s decisive philosophical importance lies in developing and “bequeath[ing] to the Western tradition of thought” a new form of inwardness (Taylor 1989, p. 131). This form of inwardness, which Taylor calls the “inwardness of radical reflexivity,” consists in making my experience itself the object of my experience; in directing my attention, that is, not simply at other objects of my attention but toward the character of my experience itself. If one embraces a view of Wittgenstein as challenging notions of the inner or private and as assigning ultimate primacy to public practices and outward criteria, this Augustinian emphasis on inwardness will seem to mark a decisive difference between the two. However, as I read Wittgenstein, the centrality of inwardness actually represents a deep point of commonality with Augustine and a place from which a rich set of connections begins to unfold. Wittgenstein is likely surpassed only by Augustine in the intensity of his attention to his own experience – to his “inner states” – and in his insistence upon revealing his temptations, desires, cravings. Philosophical Investigations is replete with notations of the writer’s straits of mind and feeling – with remarks such as: “I want to say…”, “I feel like saying…”, “I feel as though…”, “I am tempted…”, or “Here the urge is strong…”, and the like. It is critical to recognize that this is not simply an idiosyncratic mannerism but, on the contrary, a deeply important manifestation of Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy. In the first instance, it expresses Wittgenstein’s view that philosophy involves “long and involved journeying” in which the movements of thought and the paths that it follows are as important as any conclusions it may reach (PI 1968, p. ix). But Wittgenstein’s attention to and recording of his experience equally express his conviction – and his desire to remind us – that philosophy is a human practice. It is undertaken by incarnate human beings and, as such, it is necessarily and ineradicably shaped by, and revelatory of, the full range of human desires, fears, drives, aspirations, temptations, and so on. Indeed, it is the centrality and significance of this feature of Wittgenstein’s writing that lies behind Stanley Cavell’s early observation that the Investigations participates in the genre of confession (Cavell 1976c, p. 71). If, following Cavell, we think of Wittgenstein’s registrations of his experience as confessional gestures, a striking feature of these gestures immediately presents itself; namely, that they are very often expressed in the second-person

and Afterthoughts on the Opening of Wittgenstein’s Investigations” (in Cavell 1995); Eldridge 1996; Eldridge 1997; Mulhall 2005; Warner 2011; and Wetzel 2010.

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plural – “We want to say …”, “We feel as though …”, “We are tempted …”, and the like. This type of gesture is also present, albeit often less explicitly, in Augustine’s Confessions. The famous sentences of the opening paragraph, for example, include several of the text’s most important instances: “Man, a little piece of your creation, desires to praise you. ... Nevertheless, to praise you is the desire of man. … You stir man to take pleasure in praising you, because you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you” (Augustine 1991, p. 3). It can be easy to miss the deep significance of this type of gesture in both Augustine and Wittgenstein. In Augustine, we miss its significance by imagining that the generality of his claims, his speaking for “us,” is grounded in a philosophical anthropology or a theological doctrine of the nature of man as created by God and as a part of God. However, rather than resting on any antecedently given theory, Augustine’s confessional interrogations of his own experience precede and are the source of any theory he may develop. In Wittgenstein too, we miss the significance of these gestures by imagining that they rest upon some antecedently given ground and we do this by eliding the distinction between an (Austinian) claim to voice what we ordinarily say and a (Wittgensteinian) confession of our common secrets. This needs a bit of explanation. In his groundbreaking essay “Must We Mean What We Say?,” Stanley Cavell argued that the procedures of ordinary language philosophy rest upon the fact that speakers of their native tongue are, generally, fully competent to express what “we” say or to declare what “we” mean by what we say. Possessing this ability is part of what it means to be a native speaker, a master of your own language, and this is why, as Cavell argued against Benson Mates, claims to express what “we” say do not require grounding in empirical research or data. “To answer some kinds of specific questions,” Cavell allows, “we will have to engage in that ‘laborious questioning’ Mates insists upon, and count noses.” However, he continues, “… in general … the native speaker can rely on his own nose; if not, there would be nothing to count” (Cavell 1976a, p.  4). But it is vital to recognize this type of account does not apply to (much of) Wittgenstein’s practice. It does not apply for the simple, but very important, reason that his plural confessional gestures are not (Austinian) examples of what we ordinarily say. As Cavell has emphasized, Wittgenstein’s “sampling [of] what we say goes beyond the mere occurrence of words in ways that make him unlike other philosophers who proceed from ordinary language.” “He proposes words,” Cavell continues, “that he says force themselves upon us in certain contexts, or words that we wish or would like or are tempted to say, and he cites words that he says we do not mean or have only the illusion of meaning” (Cavell 1979, p. 20). Although this distinction has, so far as I am aware, received no attention or comment, it is absolutely critical. It means that the basis for Wittgenstein’s

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claims to speak for “us” is not simply his possessing the mastery shared by all native speakers of the language. Accordingly, the nature of his claim to speak for “us” in these instances stands to be explained as does his remarkable success in doing so. As Cavell puts it: [H]ow can he so much as have the idea that these fleets of his own consciousness, which is obviously all he’s got to go on, are accurate wakes of our own? But the fact is, he does have the idea…. And the fact is, so much of what he shows to be true of his own consciousness is true of ours (of mine). This is perhaps the fact of his writing to be most impressed by; it may be the fact that he is most impressed by – that what he does can be done at all (Cavell 1979, p. 20).

And “what” Wittgenstein does, like Augustine before him, is engage in a form of confession. They each, that is, assiduously search their own experience, burrow into their own inwardness, and unflinchingly announce what they find. Critically, however, they each present their confession as representative. To borrow Cavell’s words in speaking of Wittgenstein, they “undertake to voice our secrets, secrets we did not know were known, or did not know were shared” (Cavell 1979, p. 20). In Augustine the claim to representativeness is housed in the narrative of a life in which common structures of human longing, folly, blindness, misdirection, pride, and the like emerge. (We may not all have stolen pears, but we have all wished to appear Godlike – above the law because the source of law – before companions.) For Wittgenstein, the claim to representativeness is housed in forms that appear to be more restricted, in vignettes of often specialized philosophy. This should not suggest, however, that Wittgenstein is simply concerned to address a restricted class of professional philosophers. On the contrary, Wittgenstein shared Augustine’s ambition to reveal the human, to reveal “us,” but he sought to do so within these scenes of philosophy. Indeed, part of Wittgenstein’s genius was to recognize and to show that our thoughts and attitudes about meaning, understanding, propositions, and the like are as expressive of fundamental human drives as any of Augustine’s tales. My discussion to this point has begun to suggest that for Wittgenstein (inspired by and following Augustine), philosophy is essentially confessional in the following senses. First, it is (and records) a human journey that is shaped by and reveals human drives, fears, temptations, and the like. Second, the drives that motivate and shape the journey are as important as any destination reached and so philosophy must seek to discover and record them. Third, while it proceeds through an examination of individual experience, it looks to what is representative in that experience and uses it as the basis for a claim to speak for “us.” And fourth, since philosophy’s claim to speak for us rests on the interrogation of individual experience, those claims can only be assessed and measured by our

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own confession – by, as Cavell puts it, “look[ing] to ourselves to find whether we share another’s secret consciousness” (Cavell 1979, p. 20). Directly or indirectly, each of these points highlights connections between confession and self-revelation, albeit the revelation of oneself as representative. This is important; confession does, after all, essentially involve self-revelation. However, neither Augustine nor Wittgenstein conceives of confession as merely self-revelation and the propriety of linking them as confessional writers cannot rest on this alone. Rather, for both Augustine and Wittgenstein confession is a practice of representative self-revelation that acknowledges that you are lost and suffering, that seeks to uncover the causes of your being lost and the sources of your suffering, and in which the revelation of these causes and sources is part of a process of conversion and recovery from being lost.² It is, in fact, in his embrace of this rich sense of the practice of confession that the impact of Wittgenstein’s reading of Augustine is deepest. Indeed, if we recognize that the Investigations as a whole is composed as representative confession, then we can also see that the drive of that confession – like that of Augustine’s Confessions – is precisely to show us that “we” are lost and in torment, to trace how and why we get lost, and to reveal and exemplify the process and practice of conversion through which we are found.³

3. Being Lost: Odysseys of the Tormented Soul It could not be clearer that Augustine regarded himself, and us in so far as he speaks for us, as lost and in torment – whether we recognize this as our condition or not. We are turned away from God, the sole source of rest and peace, and Augustine tells us that “wherever the human soul turns itself that is not to [God], it is fixed in sorrows” (Augustine 1991, p. 61). Speaking to this soul that is turned from God (his and ours), Augustine asks:

2 Furthermore, for both Augustine and Wittgenstein confession is shaped by the fact that it is directed toward an audience/auditor that, in some sense, already knows what is confessed. This is a very important matter that I cannot discuss in the present essay. 3 It is, I think, this kind of confessional drive that underlies Wittgenstein’s remarks about “therapy” and gives them their depth. As I’ve argued elsewhere (Affeldt 2010), very little of this depth is captured in the so-called “therapeutic reading” of Wittgenstein on offer in Crary and Read (2000).

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With what end in view do you walk along difficult and laborious paths? There is no rest where you seek it. Seek for what you seek, but it is not where you are looking for it. You seek the happy life in the region of death; it is not there. How can there be a happy life where there is not even life. (Augustine 1991, p. 64)

Hence the Confessions teems with remarks of the form “I was dust going to dust” or “I became to myself a region of destitution” (Augustine 1991, p. 16 and 34). However, as Augustine’s remark about seeking happiness in the region of death makes clear, we mostly do not recognize that we are lost. Indeed, a great deal of what is most powerful in the Confessions lies in revealing that we are lost, separated from God, and the misery inherent in this separation even when we neither recognize that we are lost nor experience the misery of separation. Hence, for example, Augustine castigates his youthful delight in weeping over tales from Virgil, confessing that “In reading this, O God my life, I myself was meanwhile dying by my alienation from you, and my miserable condition in that respect brought no tear to my eyes” (Augustine 1991, p. 15). Or, reflecting on the desolation he felt as a young man at the death of a dear friend, Augustine confesses: I was in misery, and misery is the state of every soul overcome by friendship with mortal things and lacerated when they are lost. Then the soul becomes aware of the misery which is its actual condition even before it loses them (Augustine 1991, p. 58, my emphasis).

The Investigations too contains memorable depictions of derangement and anguish, as when, to offer only a couple of examples, Wittgenstein’s undermining of a picture of “complete” explanation provokes an interlocutor to cry: “so I still don’t understand what he means, and never shall!” (PI 1968, §  87) or when his unraveling of the picture of pain as a private mental object leads someone to “strike himself on the breast and say: ‘But surely another person can’t have THIS pain!’” (PI 1968, §  253). What is important, however, is that Wittgenstein regards these types of moments as possessing the same kind of existential importance and spiritual depth as the more obviously freighted moments in Augustine. This begins to emerge if we unpack one of his more famous epigrammatic descriptions of philosophy: “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about [Ich kenne mich nicht aus]’” (PI 1968, § 123). Notice three things about this remark. First, it is not a generalization but a grammatical remark. Rather than describing something found to be true of (many/most) problems that we antecedently think of as philosophical, it tells us that we may identify a problem as philosophical based, in part, on its form. That is, a criterion for a problem counting as philosophical is that it has a particular

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form. Second, part of that form is that a philosophical problem is ineluctably first personal. There is only a philosophical problem (for me) if it is my problem. This registers Wittgenstein’s view that, as confessional, philosophy cannot be approached as a spectator, a detached theorist, or merely out of “interest” or “curiosity.”⁴ Third, when I have a philosophical problem, the condition in which I find myself is that I don’t know my way about, that I am lost. But being lost is not the same as lacking identifiable information, being uncertain about a particular point or conclusion, being confused about nameable alternatives, or the like. To be lost is to be without orientation. It is not only to be ignorant of the direction to one’s goal (and so unable to determine whether a given path leads toward or away from that goal) it is to lack a clear and stable sense of a goal. Further, to be without orientation in this sense is often to be, or to feel oneself to be, cut off, isolated, and alone. If we bear in mind this sense of utter lack of orientation and of isolation, we can appreciate Wittgenstein’s remark that “[n]o greater torment can be experienced than one human being can experience. For if a man feels lost, that is the ultimate torment” (VB 1984, p. 46). But it may seem arch or melodramatic to associate this “ultimate torment” or the kinds of torment that Augustine recounts with the types of (philosophical) grief that Wittgenstein reveals in Philosophical Investigations. However, while it’s true that many of the figures whose straits of mind are confessed in the Investigations are not presented as suffering torment, this just means that for Wittgenstein, as for Augustine, there are stages in recognizing that one is lost and one’s experience changes as one moves through them. Consider, for example, Augustine’s recently cited remarks about the death of his friend. In his love for his friend, Augustine sought the kind of completion and satisfaction that, he comes to realize, can only be found in God. Throughout his friendship, then, he was lost and his “actual condition” was misery. However, he did not recognize himself to be lost or experience any misery. On the contrary, he experienced delight in what he took to be the satisfaction of his desires. It was only the death of his friend that revealed what, as Augustine comes to see it, had always been the truth of his condition. This example is typical and reveals the underlying dynamic that structures much of the Confessions. At each stage of Augustine’s odyssey prior to his finding rest in God, he believes himself to have found the satisfaction that he seeks. It is, in fact, his effort to fully enjoy this

4 This was a main reason for Wittgenstein’s suspicion of academic philosophy and for his aggressive efforts to drive his students toward other pursuits. For a rich discussion of the idea that philosophy is ineluctably first personal, see Cavell’s “An Audience for Philosophy” (Cavell 1976b).

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satisfaction that fuels his movement to another stage, for it unravels all illusory satisfactions and shows his actual condition to be that of misery. While the movements of the Investigations are not driven by any single dynamic, this same structure at work in the Confessions is very frequently in play: while lost, we only realize this fact and experience its torments when we press for the satisfaction that seems to lie within our grasp.  This dynamic underlies many of the most significant sections of the Investigations, but it can be seen with special clarity in Wittgenstein’s critique of the vision of language and logic developed in the Tractatus. Like Augustine, Wittgenstein insists that, initially, the one who is lost does not experience himself as such. In fact, as the Investigations presents this particular odyssey of the tormented soul, the protagonist feels as though he was lost but has now, finally, found the home he seeks. The author of the Tractatus had been swamped, the possibility of determinate sense and meaningful communication had come to seem a mystery, the proposition a queer thing. He felt tormented by this condition, but then “discovered” that “logic presents an order, in fact the a priori order of the world: that is, the order of possibilities, which must be common to both world and thought” (PI 1968, §  97). With this “discovery,” his torment vanishes and he feels himself to be found. From the standpoint of the Investigations, of course, the protagonist is still lost, but his being lost expresses itself as certainty, conviction, or the assurance that he is found. As Wittgenstein puts it, the crystalline purity of logic “does not appear as an abstraction; but as something concrete, indeed, as the most concrete” (PI 1968, § 97). In fact, part of the force of the protagonist’s conviction that he is found lies in his sense that the crystalline purity of logic is not a matter of (mere) belief. On the contrary, he sees it. “We think [the ideal] must be in reality; for we think we already see it there” (PI 1968, § 101). However, not only is the protagonist still lost, his finding certainty and release from torment mean that he is more deeply and dangerously lost since the tension that fuels change has been removed. At this stage of being lost, he is fixed in the rigid blindness of conviction. But in his blindness, he thinks that he looks closely and sees clearly. He does not regard himself as opposing “an examination of details in philosophy.” Rather, being “convinced,” there seems nothing to examine and any further investigation seems “superfluous” (PI 1968, § 52). Accordingly, if this lost soul is to be found he must discover that he is still lost and, as in Augustine, this discovery comes in trying to enjoy the satisfaction it takes itself to have found. Wittgenstein depicts one central element of the unraveling of this particular illusory satisfaction this way: you are convinced that the possibility of determinate sense depends upon the crystalline purity of logic and that “every sentence of our language ‘is in order as it is’;” that “our ordinary

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vague sentences ... [have] … got a quite unexceptionable sense” (PI 1968, § 98). Whatever prima facie tension there may be among these convictions, it seems, can be dissolved with the thought that “there must be perfect order even in the vaguest sentence” (PI 1968, § 98). This thought, after all, expresses the reality that you already “saw.” However, as you endeavor to demonstrate this truth so as to fully celebrate the triumph of logic, problems begin to appear. “The more narrowly we examine actual language, the sharper becomes the conflict between it and our requirement [of the crystalline purity of logic]” (PI 1968, § 107). Eventually, “the conflict becomes intolerable; the requirement is now in danger of becoming empty” (PI 1968, § 107). Of course, as Wittgenstein’s further development of this particular odyssey reveals, the protagonist may clutch at various stratagems to try to preserve his view. However, his position of certainty and conviction has been broken. While he may continue to flee the recognition, he knows himself to be lost and feels the torments of his condition. Importantly, as Wittgenstein depicts them, they are torments of impotence. On the one hand, the protagonist suffers a kind of impotence in being unable to do something that he feels, rightly or wrongly, he should be able to do. Hence, for example, Wittgenstein speaks of being unable to describe extreme subtleties – “as if we had to repair a torn spider’s web with our fingers” (PI 1968, §  106). This, then, is exactly the type of impotence the protagonist thought his “discovery” of a perfect logical order had allowed him to escape. However, the fact that this impotence has returned produces a second, more painful, sense of impotence. Confronted with the fact that his escape had been illusory, the protagonist now realizes that he cannot trust himself. He feels powerless to judge his own problems or to determine whether he has found genuine satisfaction. Hence, the protagonist knows a new depth of torment; such peace as he may now find is shadowed and infected by corrosive doubt. He knows himself to be lost and despairs of both his ability to find himself and to judge whether he is found. This escalation of torment mirrors the progress of Augustine’s Confessions and Wittgenstein expresses its anguish by voicing a desperate longing for the “real discovery” that will “give philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself in question” (PI 1968, §  133). With this desperation, the protagonist is ripe for conversion.

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4. Finding Home: Recollection and the Work of Conversion Philosophical Investigations matches the Confessions not only in revealing the tormented human soul, but also in insisting that these torments are self-inflicted and in the urgency of its call for conversion. In fact, largely inspired by the work of Stanley Cavell, many readers of Wittgenstein have argued that the Investigations is infused throughout with a deep moral purpose that is intimately linked to a call for some type of conversion or redemptive transformation. Indeed, Richard Eldridge has argued powerfully that Wittgenstein’s engagement with Augustine is driven primarily by his attraction to Augustine’s picture of conversion. He not only emphasizes that Augustine’s “picture of conversion is enormously attractive to Wittgenstein” (Eldridge 1997, p. 125), but goes on to argue that [i]t is the presence within language learning of an active power of thinking that is itself latently an active power of conversion that attracts Wittgenstein’s interest, and it is Augustine’s sense of the presence of this power, and his account of its subsequent flowering into conversion, that makes his mind, to Wittgenstein, great. (Eldridge 1997, p. 127)

However, even those readers who see deep connections between Augustine’s and Wittgenstein’s confessional depictions of the human as lost and their shared longing for transformative conversion, generally see the two as decisively parting company with regard to the nature (and possibility) of conversion itself.⁵ This, I have come to think, is a serious mistake that is rooted, at least in part, in an inaccurate view of Augustine’s conversion as a wholly miraculous, irrational “moment” that we are asked to believe effected at a stroke a wholesale change in his character. However, a richer understanding of the Confessions’ view of conversion allows us to see that this is, in fact, an area in which Augustine’s text exercised a deeply important influence on Wittgenstein. In order to move beyond a simplistic picture of Augustine’s conversion, we do not need to deny the importance of the moment. The conversion scene in Book Eight is justly celebrated for its vivid depiction of a mounting crisis leading to a climactic moment that produces a decisive change. Augustine tells us that, even though he implored himself to “[l]et it be now, let it be now,” the “nearer approached the moment of time when [he] would become different, the greater

5 This view of Wittgenstein as having a bifurcated relation to Augustine is expressed, in different forms and for different reasons, in Affeldt (1999), Eldridge (1996 and 1997), and Mulhall (2005).

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the horror of it struck [him].” Hence, he “hesitated to make the leap to where [he] was being called.” However, when the sound of children chanting in play prompts him to read a short passage from Romans, “at once … it was as if a light of relief from all anxiety flooded into [his] heart. All the shadows of doubt were dispelled” (Augustine 1991, p.  150–153). The moment, then, is clearly critical. However, in order to appreciate the richness of Augustine’s view and its impact on Wittgenstein, we must properly understand what does, and does not, happen in this moment and we must understand that, while Augustine thinks conversion requires a decisive moment, he does not regard conversion itself as that moment or, indeed, as momentary. On the contrary, much of Augustine’s depth lies in illustrating that conversion is a practice; a practice of turning, or returning, to a forsaken source that begins with a moment but must unfold and develop over the course of your life. In fact, the Confessions shows that, for Augustine, living a Christian life essentially involves the ongoing practice of conversion understood as unfolding and fulfilling the insight granted in the moment of conversion. The decisive feature of Augustine’s moment of conversion stands out most clearly against the background of his life as disclosed in the first seven books of the Confessions. There we see that, whether engaged in demonstrations of childish bravado, winning academic acclaim, seducing lovers, cultivating friendships, or studying philosophy, Augustine’s life is structured by a drive to discover something that will quiet his existential restlessness, and his actions embody the conviction that he can, and must, solve the riddle of his life. Indeed, he is, in a sense, heroic in his tireless persistence and in his faith, despite all, in the sufficiency of his own powers. Most of Book Eight demonstrates this same misplaced faith. Augustine’s friends are sharing inspiring tales of conversion and he is determined that he too will, finally, give himself to God. Hence, he takes himself in hand and tries desperately to will his own conversion. Augustine spares no effort: “With what verbal rods did I not scourge my soul so that it would follow me in my attempt to go after you!” And yet his “soul hung back” (Augustine 1991, p.  146). In order to avoid having anyone “interfere with [his] burning struggle with [himself],” Augustine moves outside to the garden in which, ultimately, his famous “moment” of conversion occurs (Augustine 1991, p. 146). Against this background of heroic struggle, the moment of conversion can seem a disappointing anti-climax. Augustine does not win his battle with himself. He does not succeed in forcing himself, or shaming himself, or arguing himself into wholehearted submission to God. He does not make himself convert. Instead, in the moment of conversion he stops struggling and does nothing. Famously, Augustine’s attention is drawn to the sound of children in play. And without disputing his claim that their chant of “pick up and read” is an inspired utterance, its crucial feature is that it does precisely what Augustine had moved to the garden

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to avoid; it breaks into and interrupts his battle with himself. For a moment the din of Augustine’s own inner voices falls silent and his battle armor is dropped. This is a moment of receptive openness, and it is this attitude that allows Augustine’s conversion to happen (or, rather, to begin).⁶ In this condition of receptivity the short passage he reads from Romans has the power to open a new perspective on his life, a perspective in which, rather than struggling to embrace God, he recognizes himself as always already within the embrace of God.⁷ This does not mean that all of Augustine’s problems are solved and all his struggles ended. In fact, his problems persist and what I called Augustine’s practice of conversion is devoted to maintaining, deepening, and coming to inhabit his new perspective. What the perspective of his conversion does, however, is transform Augustine’s relation to his problems and his understanding of how they may be solved. While I will say more about Augustine’s practice of conversion shortly, enough of the initial structure of his view is in place to begin tracing connections with Wittgenstein and the work of conversion in Philosophical Investigations. The basic structure of conversion in Philosophical Investigations is identical to that in the Confessions; it involves relinquishing a fantasy of self-sufficiency and recognizing dependence upon a supporting and sustaining ground. There is an obvious, and obviously critical, substantive difference in that for Augustine the sustaining ground is God and for Wittgenstein it is the rough ground of our ordinary language and the forms of life held in language. But this does not alter the structural parallel. For Wittgenstein, too, our human propensity for becoming lost means that we deny or cut ourselves off from the ground of meaning and orientation. In this condition we are swamped by a sense that the most basic phenomena have become problematic. It seems utterly mysterious how one might,

6 My focus on Augustine (momentarily) stopping his struggle is meant to elaborate his emphasis on weakness. Given his view of pride as the besetting human sin, the achievement of weakness is central to Augustine’s Christology and to his conception of redemption. In becoming human and submitting to death, Augustine maintains, Christ taught his followers that “[t]hey are no longer to place confidence in themselves, but to become weak.” “In their weariness,” he continues, they are to “fall prostrate before this divine weakness which rises and lifts them up” (Augustine 1991, p. 128). 7 The fact that Augustine’s conversion centrally involves a moment of reading is extremely important. On the one hand, it reflects and intensifies Augustine’s attention to issues of reading throughout the text, issues that include what kinds of texts he takes pleasure in reading, the power of allegorical reading to illuminate portions of the Bible, and his concern with how his own text will be, and should be, read. More generally, however, this fact points to Augustine’s conviction in the power of inspired reading to help produce conversion and this is a conviction that Wittgenstein clearly shared. While I cannot develop this connection here, I am grateful to William Day for showing me that it should at least be noted as a site for further work.

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for example, give or understand an ostensive definition, mean Mr. N.N., point to a shape, express pain, or know that another is in pain. And Wittgenstein, too, shows us heroically and tragically struggling to solve these problems while repudiating our sustaining ground. Hence, for example, we invent a super-order among super-concepts, or create special concepts that have no employment other than in “solving” our problem, or attribute fabulous powers to our minds and “discover” all manner of processes in this endlessly malleable medium (PI 1968, § 97 and § 308). These efforts are no more successful than Augustine’s and, as Wittgenstein suggests, amount to trying to find home by “building houses of cards” (PI 1968, § 118). It is here that the discovery of impotence that I noted earlier plays a crucial role. Like the chanting children in Augustine, it interrupts our misdirected efforts, ruptures our faith in our procedures, and brings us to a (momentary) stop. We are then receptive to the idea that “the axis of reference of our examination must be rotated” and are open to gaining a new perspective that allows us to recognize and draw upon the ground that we require (PI 1968, § 108). Wittgenstein has no more expectation than Augustine that this change of perspective will eliminate all of our problems at a stroke or end our propensity to create them. However, he follows Augustine in showing that this changed perspective of conversion fundamentally alters our understanding of our problems and our sense of how they may be treated. In fact, Wittgenstein’s “post-conversion” view of how our problems may be treated reveals another level of his inheritance from Augustine. As I’ve emphasized throughout, for Wittgenstein, philosophical problems are human problems; they express and reveal the kinds of drives, temptations, fantasies, and the like that structure our human nature. This is why he does not expect that the change of perspective brought by conversion will wash these problems away. However, when we recognize our ordinary language and the forms of life held within that language as our sustaining ground, we see that everything that is required to treat our problems “lies open to view” and must, in fact, be simple and familiar (PI 1968, § 126 and § 129). Hence, in contrast to our pre-conversion view of ourselves (philosophers) as heroically self-sufficient discoverers or creators, we instead see that the “work of the philosopher consists in assembling reminders for a particular purpose” (PI 1968, §  127). Treating our problems, that is, involves a kind of work of recollection. Indeed, Wittgenstein once remarked that “Learning philosophy is really recollecting. We remember that we really used words in this way” (PH1993, p. 179).⁸

8 Here is one place to pick up the issue of reading mentioned in note 7; for while “assembling reminders” speaks most directly to Wittgenstein’s practice of writing, “remembering” or “recollecting” what “lies open to view” suggests tasks of reading.

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But to say that everything lies open to view and that philosophy consists in recollecting and assembling reminders of what must be simple and familiar is not to say that it is easy. (Hence Wittgenstein, like Augustine, shatters the fantasy that even a life-changing conversion makes life easy.) Instead, the difficulties of philosophy are the difficulties of fruitful recollection, and it is in just this connection that one of Wittgenstein’s pivotal, explicit citations from Augustine occurs. In Investigations § 89, Wittgenstein says this: Augustine says in the Confessions “quid est ergo tempo? si nemo ex me quaerat scio; si quaerenti explicate velim, nescio”.⁹ – This could not be said about a question of natural science (“What is the specific gravity of hydrogen?” for instance). Something that we know when no one asks us, but do not know when we are supposed to give an account of it, is something that we need to remind ourselves of. (And it is obviously something of which for some reason it is difficult to remind oneself.) (PI 1968, § 89)

Although he emphasizes a difficulty about reminding ourselves, initially Wittgenstein can seem to suggest that it is easy to meet. “We remind ourselves,” he says, “of the kind of statement that we make about phenomena.” “Thus,” he continues, “Augustine recalls to mind the different statements that are made about the duration, past present or future, of events” (PI 1968, § 90). However, Wittgenstein is quite aware of the difficulties of fruitful recollection and tends to present them as falling into two broad categories (both of which bear on this case from Augustine): difficulties of collecting the material needed to address our problems and difficulties of effectively assembling or arranging that material. The difficulty of collecting material doesn’t lie in recalling the kinds of statements that we make per se. It lies in overcoming the kinds of fixations, convictions, certainties, and the like that direct our recollection along narrowly restricted paths and in becoming willing to imagine that some kinds of statements may be relevant. This is why, in good Augustinian fashion, Wittgenstein insists that “the edifice of your pride has to be dismantled” and why he remarks that, in order to understand something “significant and important,” “what has to be overcome is a difficulty having to do with the will, rather than with the intellect” (VB 1984, p. 26e and p. 17e). The difficulties of arranging are also connected with the will in at least the following sense. Since philosophical problems express positions, pictures, ways of looking at things, in which we are invested, freeing us from the grip of these investments requires more than simply reminding us

9 “What then is time? Provided that no one asks me, I know. If I want to explain it to an inquirer, I do not know” (Augustine 1991, p. 230).

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of relevant information. The reminders must be crafted and assembled so as to loosen our attachment to our investments and allow us to recognize that they do not meet our “real needs” (PI 1968, § 108). They must, as Wittgenstein puts it, “strive to find the liberating word” (PH, p. 165). Important as these points are, I think the pertinence of Wittgenstein’s invocation of this passage from Augustine is broader and deeper than these methodological affinities.¹⁰ To see how, consider that Augustine’s philosophical reflections on time are intimately bound up with the nature and possibility of recollection, and recollection is at the heart of the project of the Confessions as a whole. Here it is critical to realize that, in a very real sense, the conversion that Augustine describes in Book Eight is, in fact, the inaugurating event of the text and systematically determines its nature and structure. The biographical books of the Confessions do not, that is, simply narrate the events of Augustine’s life that lead to a culminating conversion. Rather, they represent Augustine’s effort to recollect and present his life from the perspective offered in his conversion. That is, Augustine works to recollect his life in a way that demonstrates his realization that he has always been within God’s sustaining presence and that he “would have no being if [he] were not in [God] ‘of whom are all things, through whom are all things, and in whom are all things’ (Rom. 11:36)” (Augustine 1991, p. 4). This is why I claim that the Confessions illustrate conversion as an ongoing practice; for Augustine’s practice of recollecting and telling his life is shaped by the imperative to continuously rediscover and ratify the perspective opened in the moment of conversion. Further, for Augustine, this practice of conversion is, at the same time, a practice of praise since it recalls and celebrates God’s power and goodness. Thus, when Augustine tells us in the opening paragraphs of his text that “In seeking [God people] find him, and in finding him they will praise him,” he isn’t simply predicting that those who seek and find God will be moved to the further act of praise (Augustine 1991, p. 4). That is likely to be true. But the Confessions shows that recounting your efforts to seek and find God is to praise him. I want to suggest that Wittgenstein’s own practice of recollection inherits these Augustinian depths and dimensions. In particular, we’ve seen that Wittgenstein’s efforts to resolve philosophical problems turn on recalling our words to their “original homes” by leading them “back from their metaphysical to their everyday use” (PI 1968, § 116). However, these efforts of recollection are not simply

10 These affinities seem to be what von Wright had in mind in observing that “the philosophical sections of St. Augustine’s Confessions show a striking resemblance to Wittgenstein’s own way of doing philosophy” (Malcolm 1980, p. 21).

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directed at resolving problems. Rather, as in Augustine, each effort of recollection essentially involves rediscovering and ratifying the always astonishing and persistently rejected recognition at the heart of Wittgensteinian conversion – the recognition that our ordinary language and the forms of life held in language are our sustaining ground. This means that for Wittgenstein, too, conversion is an ongoing practice. It is not completed in the moment of conversion but is repeated or re-enacted in each treatment of philosophical disorder. But this, in turn, means that for Wittgenstein philosophy is essentially this very practice of conversion. We have now arrived at a point from which we can return, briefly and by way of conclusions, to Wittgenstein’s expression of longing for the “real discovery” that “gives philosophy peace.” It’s important to recognize that this longing is not satisfied and that the perspective opened by Wittgensteinian conversion is not the “real discovery.” In fact, Wittgenstein explicitly takes some distance from this longing and follows its expression with: “Instead, we now demonstrate a method, by examples; and the series of examples can be broken off” (PI 1968, § 133, my emphasis). Part of Wittgenstein’s point in distancing himself from the fantasy of any final peace is that, as in Augustine, conversion is never the end of the story. As the Investigations shows, the perspective conversion opens is subject to perpetual repudiation and so, as I’ve argued, conversion must become an ongoing process. Accordingly, the fact that the Investigations do not break off quickly but consider an extensive series of examples can be understood as demonstrating this need for continual conversion. This seems right.¹¹ However, reading Wittgenstein with Augustine suggests a motive for the ongoing practice of philosophical conversion that is not simply corrective and directed toward providing measures of respite from our capacity to subject ourselves to torment or from our endless “drive to misunderstand” (PI 1968, §  109). The motive I have in mind is an analogue of Augustinian praise; namely, delight and joy. The philosophical practice of recollection and assembling reminders does resolve our problems. But it also discovers and reveals the all but unimaginable richness, texture, flexibility, and power of our ordinary language and forms of life. It allows us, that is, to appreciate our home, the ground on which we walk, as marvelous and invites us to “awaken to wonder” (VB 1984, p. 5e). To adapt a remark of Wittgenstein’s: “The delight [we] take in [our] thoughts is delight in [our] own strange life. Is this joy of living?” (VB 1984, p. 22e).

11 See (Affeldt 1999 p. 260–261).

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Bibliography Affeldt, Steven (1999): “Captivating Pictures and Liberating Language: Freedom as the Achievement of Speech in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations”. In: Philosophical Topics 27, p. 255–285. Affeldt, Steven (2010): “On the Difficulty of Seeing-Aspects and the ‘Therapeutic’ Reading of Wittgenstein”. In: William Day/Victor Krebs (Eds): Seeing Wittgenstein Anew. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 268–290. Augustine, Saint (1991): Confessions (translated by Henry Chadwick). Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. Burnyeat, Miles (1987): “Wittgenstein and Augustine De magistro”. In: Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 61, p. 1–24. Cavell, Stanley (1976a): “Must We Mean What We Say?” In: Stanley Cavell: Must We Mean What We Say? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 1–43. Cavell, Stanley (1976b): “Foreword: An Audience for Philosophy”. In: Stanley Cavell: Must We Mean What We Say? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. xvii–xxix. Cavell, Stanley (1976c): “The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy”. In: Stanley Cavell: Must We Mean What We Say? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 44–72. Cavell, Stanley (1979): The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. Cavell, Stanley (1995): “Notes and Afterthoughts on the Opening of Wittgenstein’s Investigations”. In: Stanley Cavell: Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derrida. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, p. 125–186. Crary, Alice/Read, Rupert (Eds) (2000): The New Wittgenstein. London: Routledge. Eldridge, Richard (1996): “Wittgenstein, Augustine, Mind, and Morality”. In: K.S. Johannessen/T. Nordenstam (Eds): Wittgenstein and the Philosophy of Culture. Vienna: Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, p. 96–112. Eldridge, Richard (1997): Leading a Human Life: Wittgenstein, Intentionality, and Romanticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Malcolm, Norman (1980): Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. Mulhall, Stephen (2005): Philosophical Myths of the Fall. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rhees, Rush (Ed.) (1984): Recollections of Wittgenstein. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. Taylor, Charles (1989): Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Warner, William Eaton (2011): And now, I think we can say: A conversation about Wittgenstein and the comfort of our life in language. Unpublished manuscript. Wetzel, James (2010): “Wittgenstein’s Augustine”. In: Phillip Cary/John Doody/Kim Paffenroth/ Johannes Brachtendorf (Eds): Augustine and Philosophy. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, p. 219–242.

Wolfgang Huemer

The Character of a Name: Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Shakespeare I do not think Shakespeare could have reflected on the “lot of the poet”. Neither could he regard himself as a prophet or teacher of humanity. People regard him with amazement almost as a spectacle of nature. They do not have the feeling that this brings them into contact with a great human being. Rather with a phenomenon. I think that, in order to enjoy a poet, you have to like the culture to which he belongs as well. If you are indifferent to this or repelled by it, your admiration cools off. (VB 1998, p. 96)

In Wittgenstein’s Nachlass we find altogether seven remarks in which he mentions the name of Shakespeare, most of which were composed quite late.¹ All of them have been included by the editors of the posthumously compiled volume Culture and Value. Wittgenstein does not leave many doubts concerning his judgment on the bard. While he seems to have liked some performances of Shakespeare’s plays² and even considered using a quote from King Lear as a motto for the Philosophical Investigations³, the tone of the remarks is rather negative: “Shakespeare’s similes are, in the ordinary sense, bad” (VB 1998, p. 56), he shows us human passions “in a dance, not naturalistically” (VB 1998, p. 42), he “is not true to life [naturwahr]” (VB 1998, p. 95), and “high-handed” (VB 1998, p. 56)⁴; “I understand how someone may admire this & call it supreme art, but I don’t

1 One dates from 1939, two from 1946, one from 1949, and 3 from 1950. There are other places where he quotes from, or alludes to, texts by Shakespeare (for a detailed list, cf. Biesenbach 2011, p. 351–357), and in letters or conversations Wittgenstein occasionally comments on performances of plays he has seen. In all the places I know, he does not discuss the quality of Shakespeare’s texts, though. I will come back to this point below. 2 John King recalls to have talked with Wittgenstein in the early 1930s about a performance of King Lear at the Marlowe Society (1984, p. 73), probably the same of which Wittgenstein says in conversation with Drury, dated “1930(?)”, that it was a “most moving experience” (1984, p. 117). O.K. Bouwsma reports a conversation of some twenty years later, in September 1950, where Wittgenstein speaks about a “performance of Lear put on by students in Cambridge – the best Shakespeare he ever saw” (Bouwsma, 1986, p. 65). In March 1917, he mentions a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a letter to Engelmann. And in June 1950, he writes about another performance of the same play in a letter to Koder, complaining that it was ruined by the director. 3 Cf. Drury (1984, p. 157). 4 In the German original, Wittgenstein speaks of his “Selbstherrlichkeit,” which in Winch’s translation of VB is rendered as “arbitrariness.” It seems to me, however, that “high-handedness” is more truthful to the German text.

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like it.” (VB 1998, p. 98). Wittgenstein seems to find Shakespeare cold, distant, and detached: “‘Beethoven’s great heart’ – no one could say ‘Shakespeare’s great heart’” (VB 1998, p. 96); “I could only stare in wonder at Shakespeare; never do anything with him” (VB 1998, p. 95); “someone who admires him as one admires Beethoven, say, seems to me to misunderstand Shakespeare” (VB 1998, p. 98). And accordingly Wittgenstein is also ill at ease with those who like Shakespeare’s work: “I am deeply suspicious of most of Shakespeare’s admirers” (VB 1998, p. 95). Wittgenstein’s harsh judgment on Shakespeare has been quite surprising and disturbing to many. George Steiner, for example, wrote an article a few years after the publication of Culture and Value, where he suggests that “Wittgenstein misreads Shakespeare” (Steiner 1995, p. 128), and comes to the conclusion that a “great logician and epistemologist can be a blind reader of literature” (Steiner 1995, p. 127).⁵ Even scholars more familiar with Wittgenstein’s work seem to be puzzled by the remarks, many of Wittgenstein’s biographers hardly mention them, and when Brian McGuinness briefly characterizes Wittgenstein’s view of Shakespeare, he chooses very selectively from the passages of the Nachlass in a way that can make the reader believe that Wittgenstein thought highly of Shakespeare.⁶ Wittgenstein’s literary taste is often described as traditional. Hence, it does not come as a complete surprise that his claims about Shakespeare have bewildered many scholars. He liked to read the German, Austrian, and Russian classics, so why should he dismiss the poet who is considered the point of reference of the English literary tradition, i.e., the tradition of the country where he chose to live? There must have been some reason why Wittgenstein wrote these remarks, a reason which would explain his judgment. But, I want to suggest, we will not find it in the remarks themselves. In order to gain a better understanding, we should rather analyze them in the broader context of his overall Nachlass. In this article I aim to show that Wittgenstein’s remarks on Shakespeare can give us an important key for reading the occasional references to poets, composers, and other exponents of Western culture which we find in his Nachlass. Wittgenstein, I will argue, often uses the names of these individuals to stake out his own cultural background, to show the reader something about himself, as it were, as if

5 For a more detailed discussion of Steiner’s critique cf. Huemer (2012). 6 Cf. McGuinness (1988, p. 36): Shakespeare was “a unique figure in Western culture, he [Wittgenstein] thought, like nature or a landscape, a creator rather than a poet perhaps because he was not a moral teacher.”

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he wanted to sketch a portrait of (some aspects of) himself. My reading is inspired by the following remark: It’s as if the word that I understand had a definite slight aroma that corresponds to my understanding of it. As if two familiar words were distinguished for me not merely by their sound or their appearance, but by an atmosphere as well, even when I don’t imagine anything in connexion with them. – But remember how the names of famous poets and composers seem to have taken up a peculiar meaning into themselves. So that one can say: the names “Beethoven” and “Mozart” don’t merely sound different; no, they are also accompanied by a different character. (RPP 1980a, § 243)

Wittgenstein, I want to suggest, often uses the names of poets and composers not primarily to refer to the actual persons, but rather to evoke in the informed reader a certain aroma or atmosphere that allows her to better grasp Wittgenstein’s cultural background and, in consequence, his philosophy. This is not to deny, of course, that there are places where he shows interest in a concrete artist or in discussing her work (as many contributions to the present volume show). In many remarks, however, Wittgenstein just mentions names without further explanation – like in the ones on Shakespeare; it is particularly in these passages, I want to suggest, that Wittgenstein tries to exploit the “character” of the names mentioned in order to make himself understood or to say something about himself.⁷ Of course, the

7 Wittgenstein uses this strategy not only in his remarks on Shakespeare, though; we find enigmatic references throughout his work. Take, for example, the remark: “I think good Austrian work (Grillparzer, Lenau, Bruckner, Labor) is particularly hard to understand. There is a sense in which it is subtler than anything else and its truth never leans towards possibility” (VB 1998, p. 5). Not only is it quite enigmatic (“hard to understand”) what Wittgenstein wants to say, he also does not explain what the four poets and composers have in common and why he mentions them and not others. Moreover, Wittgenstein’s strategy is not limited to composers and poets; I think that it is also at work in the often-quoted passage where he lists the persons who have most influenced him: I think there is some truth in my idea that I am really only reproductive in my thinking. I think I have never invented a line of thinking but that it was always provided for me by someone else & I have done no more than passionately take it up for my work of clarification. That is how Boltzmann Hertz Schopenhauer Frege, Russell, Kraus, Loos Weininger Spengler, Sraffa have influenced me. Can one take Breuer and Freud as an example of Jewish reproductive thinking? – What I invent are new comparisons. (VB 1998, p. 16) This remark is but a name-dropping that only sets some landmarks, but does not explain at all how Wittgenstein was influenced by the persons mentioned: it is illuminating only for those who are able to grasp the “character” of the names. This seems to be particularly true when Wittgenstein mentions “Breuer” and “Freud” at the end of this remark. In doing so he seems to succeed in making clearer where he actually wants to arrive at in this remark.

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two aspects – referring to a person and exploiting the character of this person’s name – do not exclude one another; the latter aspect does become more obvious when the reference to the actual person does not seem to play an important role.⁸

1. Some Characteristics of Wittgenstein’s Remarks It might be useful to begin the discussion with highlighting some characteristics of Wittgenstein’s remarks on Shakespeare. In particular, I think the following points are worth noting: 1.1. Wittgenstein does not discuss a single work of Shakespeare, he does not mention concrete stylistic characteristics, nor does he support his claims with examples or quotations. Given the confident tone of Wittgenstein’s critique, it is quite remarkable that he does not even mention, let alone discuss, any of the poet’s works – his critique rather concerns Shakespeare’s style in general. Most of the remarks are quite enigmatic and short; Wittgenstein does not even try to explain his judgment or to illustrate it with quotations. Moreover, he does not make any effort to show textual knowledge, which he undoubtedly had.⁹ Rather than specific works he seems to have in mind the “phenomenon” Shakespeare: at several places he criticizes that from Shakespeare’s work there does not emerge a concrete or admirable personality, it does not bring the reader “into contact with a great human being” (VB 1998, p. 96). He does praise Shakespeare’s “supple hand” (VB 1998, p. 96) which, as he hastens to add, does not allow the reader to come into contact with the poet, though, but rather leaves them speechless. “I could only stare in wonder at Shakespeare, but never do anything with him” (VB 1998, p. 95). In short, it is the poet Shakespeare, but not Shakespeare’s poetry that Wittgenstein is talking about.

8 I want to thank Daniel Steuer for helping me to clarify this point. 9 Wittgenstein talks about particular plays only in letters and conversations with friends, typically when speaking about performances of Shakespeare’s plays he had attended (cf. fn. 2 above). On such occasions, his remarks on Shakespeare also have a negative ring. Bouwsma, for example, recalls him saying that “for Shakespeare he hasn’t much use. Some for Lear” (Bouwsma 1986, p. 47). There are some hints that in conversations he occasionally discussed formal aspects of Shakespeare’s plays (cf., for example, Drury 1984, p. 132), but we do not have a detailed record of these conversations.

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1.2. More than in Shakespeare himself, Wittgenstein seems to be interested in the reaction that Shakespeare’s work causes in the audience or reader. In six of the seven remarks¹⁰, Wittgenstein discusses explicitly how people react to Shakespeare and wonders what would have to be the case in order for someone to be able to admire his work. At several places Wittgenstein insinuates that a lot of the admiration for Shakespeare is not the result of a genuine enthusiasm brought about by an actual encounter with the texts, but rather of a widespread convention that has become entrenched in a specific culture. In one place he connects this point with an attack on academic literary criticism: “But of course I don’t mean to deny by this that an enormous amount of praise has been & still is lavished on Shakespeare without understanding & for specious reasons by a thousand professors of literature” (VB 1998, p. 55). Wittgenstein talks about his being “deeply suspicious of most of Shakespeare’s admirers” (VB 1998, p. 95) and plays with the thought “that praising him has been a matter of convention, even though I have to tell myself that this is not the case” (VB 1998, p. 55). Even in a remark where Wittgenstein shows understanding for the motives of those who admire Shakespeare’s work “and call it supreme art,” he does so only to confront their reaction with his own by adding the words: “but I don’t like it” (VB 1998, p. 98). In short, Wittgenstein is interested in Shakespeare as a cultural or social phenomenon and in the way people react to this phenomenon, and not in Shakespeare as a concrete person or poet. 1.3. When discussing the quality of Shakespeare’s work, Wittgenstein almost always does so in the conditional mode. Wittgenstein never formulates an outright judgment on Shakespeare’s works, but rather reports his own reaction to it; at some places he hypothetically assumes that Shakespeare is great, very often in the attempt to understand those who admire his works. This seems to suggest that Wittgenstein is not primarily interested in the (objective) aesthetic and literary qualities of Shakespeare’s work, but rather in the reaction it provokes and to confront the reaction of those who admire Shakespeare with his own.¹¹ 1.4. Wittgenstein never compares the work of Shakespeare with that of another poet. Wittgenstein limits himself to stating where, in his view, Shakespeare has got

10 The only exception is the first remark, where Wittgenstein elaborates an idea he attributes to Paul Engelmann. 11 Wittgenstein’s remarks on Shakespeare show clearly, as Jonathan Pugh highlights in his (2012, p. 246), that for Wittgenstein “the aesthetic reactions we have and the causal explanations we assign them are quite different from one another.”

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things wrong, but he does not explain this failure by contrasting him with a poet who succeeded where – according to Wittgenstein – Shakespeare has failed.¹² The only positive counter-example Wittgenstein mentions is Beethoven, whom he presents as the prototype of an artist one can actually get in touch with, and for whom one can find genuine enthusiasm: “someone who admires him as one admires Beethoven, say, seems to me to misunderstand Shakespeare” (VB 1998, p. 98). It is quite telling that for Wittgenstein it is a composer who succeeds where the poet fails. I will briefly come back to this point below.

2. The Remarks and their Context: Wittgenstein’s Literary Style These four points clearly show that Wittgenstein does not aim at contributing to a discussion on the aesthetic or literary qualities of Shakespeare’s work. We could even go so far as to state that in a sense Wittgenstein’s remarks on Shakespeare are not about Shakespeare, nor are they about his work: Wittgenstein focuses on reactions – his own and that of others – to the poet. He does not try to justify his views, nor does he make any attempt to prove their adequacy or to convince the reader of their correctness. When reporting his reaction to Shakespeare and his admirers, Wittgenstein shares something about himself with the reader. In a way, Wittgenstein seems to be more interested in writing about himself than in discussing Shakespeare or his works. It seems significant (though not untypical) that Wittgenstein does not systematically elaborate his views on Shakespeare, but exposes them occasionally like short observations scattered in the body of his (later) notebooks – just like someone who, in many discussions with a good friend, occasionally comes back to remark on a specific topic. This, of course, does not make these remarks stand out from the body of Wittgenstein’s later work, which is composed entirely of short remarks. Many of these remarks remind us of a dialogue, but, unlike the interlocutors in, say, Plato’s dialogues, Wittgenstein does not introduce a concrete person, he never uses a name to address his interlocutor, nor do the remarks allow us to recognize a concrete personality with clearly defined views.

12 The only other poet he mentions in these remarks is Milton, but only to say that he considers him to be an incorruptible authority, and therefore takes his judgment on Shakespeare to be sincere.

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Wittgenstein rather seems to allow us to witness an inner dialogue or invite the reader to identify with the interlocutor. In short: this stylistic aspect of Wittgenstein’s later writings allows the reader to feel a certain degree of familiarity with the philosopher.¹³ Wittgenstein, as is well known, has adopted an aphoristic style from early on, choosing concise statements over long-winded explanations or argumentations, which can make his writings seem arcane. Moreover, during various periods of his work, he states explicitly that he does not aim at convincing the reader of his philosophical position, but rather at presenting his thoughts and making them accessible to the sympathetic reader who is likely to share them. Already in the first paragraph of the introduction to his first published book, the Tractatus logico-philosophicus, for example, he states: 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. – Its purpose would be achieved if it gave pleasure to one person who read and understood it. (TLP 1961, p. 3)

The goal of the book, if we can believe Wittgenstein’s own words, is not to argue a philosophical position, but rather to afford pleasure to those who read it with understanding and who have already had the thoughts expressed in the book. This is a quite unusual goal for a philosophical book, the main purpose of which typically is not to afford pleasure, but to contribute to a scientific, or rational, debate, to add to the readers’ knowledge by offering new thoughts, i.e., thoughts they have not yet had, and which are justified with elaborate arguments that often are difficult to grasp. Literary texts are typically thought to be more likely to afford pleasure to the reader than philosophical ones. In later periods of his life Wittgenstein is also quite explicit about the fact that he does not want to teach or indoctrinate; he does not want “to spare other people the trouble of thinking. But, if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own” (PI 1967, p. x), a goal which may explain the lack of explicit arguments. Elaborating an argument explicitly and step by step, however, serves not only to justify one’s claim, but can also provide a key for the reader (who has not yet had the thoughts in question) to better understand the position presented, i.e., to individuate the motives that have led to its formulation, to grasp its significance, and to assess the consequences it entails, etc.

13 I discuss this aspect in more detail in my (2013).

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Wittgenstein does not seem to care very much about any of these aspects. He rather accepts that his texts will be difficult to follow. In a draft for a preface that he wrote in 1930/31 and that was included in VB 1998 he states explicitly: “This book is written for those who are in sympathy with the spirit in which it is written” (VB 1998, p. 8). Wittgenstein does not seem to mind that this might be a small group only, nor does he seem to make any attempts at enlarging it; he seems deliberately to exclude all those who do not belong to this group. Wittgenstein writes: For if a book has been written for only a few readers that will be clear just from the fact that only a few understand it. The book must automatically separate those who understand it & those who do not. (VB 1998, p. 10)

This should not make us believe that Wittgenstein is about to form an esoteric circle to which only a handful of illuminated can find access. He rather means to set apart the spirit, in which the book was written, from “that of the prevailing European and American civilization,” i.e., a civilization that “is characterized by the word progress. Progress is its form, it is not one of its properties that it makes progress” (VB 1998, p. 8f). Wittgenstein feels deeply alienated from this civilization. He describes himself as someone who does not partake in it and can look at it only from outside: 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. (VB 1998, p. 9)

Wittgenstein, thus, suggests that he does not write primarily to promote his views, nor to attract the attention of a broader audience, but rather to share his thoughts with those who, like himself, feel alienated from our current civilization that is characterized by progress, and who do not aim to “order one thought to the others in a series” but rather keep “aiming at the same place” (VB 1998, p. 10). Wittgenstein does not feel at home in this civilization and seems to look for an exchange with those who also feel foreign to it. The oppositional pair home/ foreign becomes quite important only a few pages later, where Wittgenstein tries to better characterize the group of people he is writing for: If I say that my book is meant for only a small circle of people (if that can be called a circle) I do not mean to say that this circle is in my view the élite of mankind but it is the circle to which I turn (not because they are better or worse than the others but) because they form my cultural circle, as it were my fellow countrymen in contrast to the others who are foreign to me. (VB 1998, p. 12–13)

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Whether or not one will find access to Wittgenstein’s texts depends, in other words, on whether or not one is one of his fellow countrymen.¹⁴ It might surprise that Wittgenstein uses the word “countrymen” – in the original German he uses the expression “Menschen meines Vaterlandes” – for it seems quite obvious that he does not intend to say that only Austrians will understand him. Moreover, there are no indications whatsoever that Wittgenstein uses the term “Vaterland” with the purpose to exploit the political connotations with which it was often used at the time. It is worth noting that in all his Nachlass he uses this expression in only one other place, where he suggests that one cannot chose one’s “Vaterland.”¹⁵ In this passage, the expression “fellow countrymen,” thus, seems to refer to people who have been born and acculturated in the same country as oneself, who speak the same language and partake in the same set of social and cultural practices. One cannot choose one’s fatherland as one cannot choose one’s first language; it is not a culture that one chooses among many, but into which one grows over time. We should keep in mind, however, that once grown up, i.e., once acculturated and in possession of a first language, one can choose to learn a second language and move to another country. An Austrian who moves to England will remain Austrian in the sense that he will continue to understand German and retain traits of the culture in which he grew up, but he will also learn to understand and express himself in English, to decipher characteristic cultural references, to adopt customs and partake in practices that are typical for the new culture, and get to know opinions that are widely accepted there. All this will broaden, but not replace, his original cultural background. This is not to suggest, of course,

14 Wittgenstein’s feeling of being alien is most interestingly discussed by James C. Klagge in his (2011), which I could access only when the work on this article was nearly finished. In the present article I am interested in showing how Wittgenstein’s feeling of being alien is mirrored in the style of his writing, but also in emphasizing that his feeling of being an outsider also comes with the feeling of belonging to a small group of people who find themselves in a similar situation: Wittgenstein is “exiled from his home culture and alienated from his civilizational surrounding” (Klagge 2011, p. 167), but he also feels at home in a “small circle of people” (VB 1998, p. 12) and he tries to delineate this circle with his references to poets and composers, etc.; especially with those references where he mainly exploits the aroma or character associated with the names; for they show his own location in and his perspective on a particular cultural landscape. 15 “‘Fatherlandless rabble’ (applied to the Jews) is on the same level as ‘crook-nosed rabble,’ for giving yourself a fatherland is just as little in your power, as it is to give yourself a particular nose” (Wittgenstein 2003, p. 125). The remark was written on November 2, 1931. I am following the translation proposed by David Stern in his (2001, p. 261) who translates “Vaterland” with “fatherland” rather than “country.”

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that there is one homogeneous British culture, nor that one needs to emigrate to broaden one’s cultural background: whenever, in the exchange with other persons, one gets to know a new perspective or a different point of view, one comes to have a choice between adopting this new perspective or continuing to see the world the way one used to. So while it is true that one is borne into a specific fatherland, it is also true that – within certain limits – one is free to enlarge its borders, as it were, by broadening one’s cultural background in a certain direction and to develop in ways that one is free to choose. Depending on one’s starting point, these choices will determine the cultural circle to which one belongs, i.e., the group of people with whom one shares a relevant number of cultural references, views, and practices; they become, to use Wittgenstein’s metaphor, fellow countrymen. And while for some people geographic vicinity might be the most important criterion to consider another person as a fellow countryman, others might have more complex criteria, in these case their circle will likely be composed of “friends who are scattered throughout the corners of the globe” (VB 1998, p. 9). How can one identify a fellow countryman, how does one recognize that another person belongs to one’s own cultural circle? Typically this is not an overly complicated task; in general, one does so as soon as one hears them speak one’s own language, dialect, or sociolect. Whether or not a person belongs to one’s cultural circle will become evident by his or her references to a shared cultural framework. It suffices, in short, to listen to the person, to hear how she speaks and what she says, to understand whether she is “one of us” – without there being a need for a specific key, a secret code word, or anything similar. Wittgenstein explicitly discusses – and refutes – the idea of a specific key that allows only a certain group of people to approach the work: If you do not want certain people to get into a room, put a lock on it for which they do not have a key. But it is senseless to talk with them about it, unless you want them all the same to admire the room from outside! The decent thing to do is: put a lock on the doors that attracts only those who are able to open it & is not noticed by the rest. (VB 1998, p. 10)

Those of Wittgenstein’s remarks which contain references to poets, composers, architects, and other creative artists, and in which he only hints at what he thinks of their achievements, might just be so many locks that Wittgenstein has installed – and that can be recognized only by those who are able to open them. It seems to me that in these remarks Wittgenstein often uses the “character” of the names mentioned, the “aroma” and “atmosphere”¹⁶ they evoke, to draw a detailed map of a rich cultural landscape that allows him to locate himself as well as to display

16 Cf. RPP 1980a, § 243; quoted above.

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the perspective and the standpoint he adopts when looking at it. It is likely that only persons who belong to Wittgenstein’s cultural circle are able to decipher the character and the specific aroma of the respective names. It seems to me that the finely articulated web of the many cultural references in which Wittgenstein does not further elaborate his take on the poet or composer in question, also serves the purpose of letting an elaborate self-portrait emerge, and at the same time, of providing a key for those readers who are able to recognize the lock. Wittgenstein’s remarks on Shakespeare in particular, I want to suggest, serve precisely this purpose.

3. Shakespeare as a Phenomenon of a Foreign Culture In the quotation with which I opened the present article, Wittgenstein explicitly connects his reaction to Shakespeare to the culture to which the latter belongs: “I think that, in order to enjoy a poet, you have to like the culture to which he belongs as well” (VB 1998, p. 96). Accordingly, when Wittgenstein admits that he does not like Shakespeare, he also intends to say that he does not like the culture to which the latter belongs. With this I do not, of course, want to suggest that his remarks on Shakespeare are a secret message with which Wittgenstein wanted to give expression to his aversion to British culture. Even though von Wright recalls that “in general he [Wittgenstein] was not fond of the English way of life and disliked the academic atmosphere in Cambridge” (von Wright, 2001, p. 16), I think that these problems do not concern specific aspects of the national culture of the UK (as opposed to, say, Austrian, Russian, or French culture), but rather – as the second part of the quotation confirms – a very specific cultural group in which certain forms of behavior are common. Members of this group can be found in different countries and, very likely, in academic circles.¹⁷ After all, Wittgenstein chose to live (and die) in England, and even though he occasionally played with the idea of moving to another country, he always returned there.¹⁸

17 Here it might be interesting to recall that Wittgenstein was particularly harsh on the academic reception of Shakespeare, on professors who “without understanding & for specious reasons” (VB 1998, p. 55). Wittgenstein expresses a similar judgment also in conversation with Bouwsma; cf. (Bouwsma 1986, p. 72). 18 For these reasons, I think it is wrong (or at least greatly exaggerated and misleading) to attribute Wittgenstein’s views on Shakespeare to his “alienated position as a German-speaking Viennese Jew living in Britain,” as Terrence Hawkes suggests (1988, p. 60). If Wittgenstein felt

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I think that with his remarks on Shakespeare, Wittgenstein rather wanted to dissociate himself in particular from the circle of people who admire Shakespeare, who regard him with amazement like a spectacle of nature. They may have lived in the same country and spoken the same language, but their cultural landscapes, their perspectives and their backgrounds were so different that communication or genuine exchange with members of this group became impossible: Wittgenstein, as he repeatedly tells us, simply did not understand them – as he did not understand Shakespeare’s works that create “their own language & world” (VB 1998 p. 89). It is as if – unlike other poets – Shakespeare (and with him his admirers) would speak a different language; one that has its own rules, and a “law of its own” (VB 1998, p. 89); a language that is so foreign to Wittgenstein that he could only hear the sounds , but not penetrate their meaning – as we can hear the songs of birds, but not understand what (if anything) they want to communicate with their singing: “The poet cannot really say of himself ‘I sing as the bird sings’ – but perhaps S. [Shakespeare] could have said it of himself” (VB 1998, p. 96). The fact that Wittgenstein used the name “Shakespeare” and not, say, “Goethe” to make his point – after all, he must have noticed that Goethe is also admired by many who do not understand him, and he surely would have agreed that Goethe, too, is praised by cohorts of professors of literature for specious reasons – shows something about his upbringing and his Austrian background. This background not only means that he was more familiar with the works of Grillparzer, Nestroy, and Goethe than with those of Shakespeare, it also means that he adopted a different historical perspective which made it more difficult for Wittgenstein to open up to the works of Shakespeare. As Marjorie Perloff points out, Wittgenstein’s mistrust was a function of his peculiar Germanic modernity, his lack of understanding for anything as remote as the English Renaissance, which had taken place four centuries earlier. … If the Golden Age for a Modernist English critic was – and probably remains – the “Renaissance,” for a German contemporary of Wittgenstein’s it would no doubt have been the Age of Goethe (Perloff 2012)

In addition, Wittgenstein’s mistrust was definitely also a reaction to “the nineteenth-century German cult of Shakespeare as natural genius, a mysterious and anonymous creator, above and beyond the characters he had invented”

alienated, this was not due to the fact that when living in Britain he did not live in a Germanspeaking, Viennese, or Jewish environment. Wittgenstein rather felt at home, as I try to show in this article, in the small circle of people who shared some of his views, or ways of seeing things, and who were scattered all over the globe.

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(Perloff 2012); a cult that was alien to him. Thus, the worth of Wittgenstein’s remarks on Shakespeare lies in their showing Wittgenstein’s perspective and standpoint and, in consequence, his cultural circle. In this context it might be interesting to recall once again that Wittgenstein does not confront Shakespeare with another poet, but with Beethoven who, as he suggests, is admired by the right kind of persons for the right reasons. Beethoven has a “great heart” (VB 1998, p. 96), through his music one can get in touch with a real human being. And in RPP §243 (quoted above), when talking about the “names of famous poets and composers,” he also mentions the names “Mozart” and “Beethoven” as examples. We will never know whether it is intentional, or purely fortuitous, that he does not provide the name of a poet as an example, but it clearly suggest that music is more present in Wittgenstein’s cultural horizon than literature.¹⁹ It is also worth noting that when Wittgenstein expresses his distance to the circle to which Shakespeare and his admirers belong, he does not express a judgment on the latter, nor does he want to show that his own cultural circle is superior. He merely registers the differences between the two and reports his being suspicious and feeling alien. He does remark that it must be possible to say about this culture that in it “Everything is wrong, things aren’t like that” – when seen from his perspective, applying the criteria familiar to him. But this assertion is biased and cannot have an objective validity because, as he hastens to add, “it is all the same completely right according to a law of its own” (VB 1998, p. 89). Wittgenstein, it seems, is trying to avoid the mistake of describing a foreign culture as hanging on to erroneous views or superstitions; a mistake, that is, that he finds and criticizes in the work of Frazer.²⁰ Of course, Shakespeare’s admirers are not a foreign tribe; after all, they speak – or, at least, seem to speak – the same language, i.e., English. But then, Wittgenstein keeps reminding us that we can make sense of their behavior only by taking into account that they follow rules different from the ones “we,” i.e., all those who partake in Wittgenstein’s cultural

19 The importance of music for Wittgenstein clearly emerges from the numerous references to composers throughout his writings. Moreover, in conversation with Drury he clearly suggests that remarks on music can perform an explanatory function: “It is impossible for me to say in my book [i.e., in the Philosophical Investigations] one word about all that music has meant in my life. How can I hope to be understood?” (Drury 1984, p. 160). Incidentally, right before this quotation Wittgenstein talks about his being foreign: “My way of thinking is not wanted in the present age, I have to swim strongly against the tide.” 20 Take, for example, Wittgenstein’s affirmation on the first page of his Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough: “Frazer’s account of the magical and religious views of mankind is unsatisfactory: it makes these views look like errors” (Wittgenstein 1993, p. 119)

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circle, follow. By distancing himself from their views, Wittgenstein finds a way of showing ex negativo something about himself and the rules that are in place in the circle where he feels at home. If the considerations I have presented in the last few pages are correct, Wittgenstein’s remarks on Shakespeare are not primarily about Shakespeare, his works or his admirers. When analyzing them in the broader context of his overall Nachlass, we can come to appreciate that they are but a stone in a large mosaic of cultural references that often just play with the “aroma” or “character” that accompanies the names mentioned. This mosaic provides a key for those who recognize the lock and allows them to get a better and more comprehensive picture of Wittgenstein’s cultural background, his mentality, and his intellectual personality. Reconstructing Wittgenstein’s library, in consequence, might provide us a key for a better understanding of the philosopher and his work.

Bibliography Biesenbach, Hans (2011): Anspielungen und Zitate im Werk Ludwig Wittgensteins. Bergen: The Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen (WAB). Bouwsma, O.K. (1986): Wittgenstein: Conversations, 1949–1951. J.L. Craft/Ronald E. Hustwit (Eds). Indianapolis: Hackett. Drury, Maurice O’C. (1984): “Conversations with Wittgenstein”. In: Rush Rhees (Ed.): Recollections of Wittgenstein. 2nd, revised edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 97–171. Hawkes, Terrence (1988): “Wittgenstein’s Shakespeare”. In: Maurice Charney (Ed.): “Bad” Shakespeare: Revolutions of the Shakespearean Canon. London, Toronto: Associated University Presses. Huemer, Wolfgang (2012): “Misreadings: Steiner and Lewis on Wittgenstein on Shakespeare”. In: Philosophy and Literature 36, p. 229–237. Huemer, Wolfgang (2013): “Wittgenstein e la letteratura”. In: Gabriele Tomasi/Elisa Caldarola/ D. Quattrocchi (Eds): Wittgenstein, l’estetica e le arti. Rome: Carocci, p. 227–241. King, John (1984): “Recollections of Wittgenstein”. In: Rush Rhees (Ed.): Recollections of Wittgenstein. 2nd, revised edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 68–75. Klagge, James C. (2011): Wittgenstein in Exile. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lewis, Peter B. (2005): “Wittgenstein, Tolstoy, and Shakespeare”. In: Philosophy and Literature 28, p. 241–55. McGuinness, Brian (1988): Wittgenstein: A Life. Young Ludwig, 1889–1921. London: Duckworth. Perloff, Marjorie (2012) “Wittgenstein’s Shakespeare”. Manuscript, to appear in: Wittgenstein Studien 5, no. 4 (2013). Pugh, Jonathan (2012): “Wittgenstein, Shakespeare and Metaphysical Wit”. In: Philosophy and Literature 36, p. 238–248. Steiner, George (1996): “A Reading Against Shakespeare”. In: George Steiner: No Passion Spent. Essays 1970–1995. London: Faber and Faber, p. 108–128.

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Stern, David (2001): “Was Wittgenstein a Jew?”. In: James C. Klagge (Ed.): Wittgenstein: Biography and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 237–272. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1993): Philosophical Occasions 1912–1951. James C. Klagge/Alfred Nordmann (Eds). Indianapolis, Cambridge: Hackett. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (2003): Public and Private Occasions. James C. Klagge/Alfred Nordmann (Eds). Boulder, New York, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield. Wright, G.H. von (2001): Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

William Day

To Not Understand, but Not Misunderstand: Wittgenstein on Shakespeare The reason I cannot understand Shakespeare is that I want to find symmetry in all this asymmetry. It seems to me as though his pieces are, as it were, enormous sketches, not paintings; as though they were dashed off by someone who could permit himself anything, so to speak. And I understand how someone may admire this & call it supreme art, but I don’t like it. – So I can understand someone who stands before those pieces speechless; but someone who admires him as one admires Beethoven, say, seems to me to misunderstand Shakespeare. (VB 1998, p. 98a–b¹)

1. The entire corpus of Wittgenstein on Shakespeare, located mostly across two stretches of the remarks collected under the title Vermischte Bemerkungen (Culture and Value), amounts to no more than a handful of pages. One is thus able to read everything Wittgenstein wrote on Shakespeare in about five minutes. Even so, and even though this is Wittgenstein, I will begin by condensing his remarks. That what Wittgenstein says about Shakespeare can be condensed, summarized, is perhaps the first remarkable fact about his writings on Shakespeare. Think of how very little of the later writings of Wittgenstein  – notably his Philosophical Investigations – yields itself to condensation or summary. It suggests that these remarks, besides being mildly repetitious, are drawn out of him somehow differently from the remarks in the Investigations. They represent an engagement with language (specifically with Shakespeare’s language) that calls for a response different in kind from his interlocutory windings through philosophical temptations and their diagnoses that are the work of the Investigations. If anything in Wittgenstein’s corpus prepares us for this sort of engagement with someone else’s words, it would be his remarks on Frazer’s The Golden Bough, or on Freud, or some of the late remarks in Part II of the Investigations from roughly the same period as the bulk of his remarks on Shakespeare (that is, after 1945). But I find that even

1 References to remarks in VB are given by page number followed by a letter indicating the position of the remark on that page – for example, “98a” for the first remark on page 98, “98b” for the second remark, etc.

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these stretches of Wittgenstein’s prose are not nearly as easy to summarize as what he has to say about Shakespeare’s writing. Consider, then, the following one-paragraph condensation of Wittgenstein on Shakespeare, which I cast in the first person: “Shakespeare is overpraised. He may deserve high praise, but much of the praise he receives is made without understanding and for the wrong reasons (VB 1998, p. 55b, 95h, 98b). What one can say is that Shakespeare is not like any other poet (VB 1998, p. 95f, 95h, 96c). But this singularity is a two-edged sword. On the one hand: he is akin to a natural phenomenon, singing as the birds sing – that is, a creator of language, of new natural linguistic forms in the face of which one is left only to stare in wonder, speechless (VB 1998, p. 56d–e, 89b, 95f, 95g, 96b, 96c, 96f, 98a–b). That is why his greatness is displayed only in the whole corpus of his plays; what justifies him is the style of his whole work, whose ease and authority one just has to accept if one is to admire him properly (VB 1998, p. 56d–e, 89b). On the other hand: because he is like a creator of language with a law of his own, he is not naturalistic, is in fact completely unrealistic, his language and world like the language and world of a dream (VB 1998, p. 42f, 89b, 96a). That doesn’t mean that his characters are not worth looking at; but they’re not true to life (VB 1998, p. 96a). Hence to say that Shakespeare stands by himself means that he does not stand by or for us – at least, he could not regard himself as a prophet or teacher of mankind, would not be able to reflect even on ‘the lot of the poet’, cannot be said to have a ‘great heart’ (as one might say of Beethoven), and doesn’t leave us feeling that we have come into contact with a great human being (VB 1998, p. 96b, 96e, 96f). Rather, his greatness is such that he can permit himself anything; his works are not the product of a struggle but more like something dashed off, like enormous sketches rather than paintings. Call it supreme art if you wish, but ich mag es nicht – I don’t like it (VB 1998, p. 98a).” I want this summary of Wittgenstein’s remarks on Shakespeare to accomplish two things. First, it should help us recover or recognize, if only for a moment, the full force of their outrageousness, which one risks losing sight of the more time one spends with them. Reading across the published discussions of Wittgenstein’s remarks on Shakespeare since Culture and Value appeared over three decades ago, one senses an interest to explain away or otherwise soften the impact of their brashness. I do not say that Wittgenstein’s remarks are indefensible as a thesis – say especially the thesis that what is most singular in Shakespeare’s language, what Western culture loves most about Shakespeare in its centuries-long embrace of him, is what is most unlovable about him. But Wittgenstein’s remarks are not part of a thesis. He does not do more with them, and their aim is not to present a conclusion of criticism but to articulate a feeling or intuition. The most obvious evidence for this is that nowhere in his published

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notebooks does Wittgenstein quote a passage from one of the plays or so much as make reference to a particular play or sonnet – a sort of stark and perverse instantiation of his insistence that Shakespeare’s greatness could lie only in the entire achievement.² This brings us to the second thing I want my summary to suggest or prepare. To understand Wittgenstein’s remarks it is not sufficient to hold them up to Shakespeare (however revelatory of his achievement they prove to be) or to Wittgenstein (however inspired by his vision of language they prove to be). What one must do is find how they hold up on their own, or what holds them up. That is, one must ask – and undoubtedly one wants to know – what the uneasiness they express over Shakespeare betokens. It may be an uneasiness with which we’re not entirely unfamiliar; on the contrary, we who read Shakespeare may be like blind men grabbling in a room where Wittgenstein alone has his hands on the jaws of the beast. My guiding thought is that Wittgenstein’s misgivings about Shakespeare spring not from a philosophical disagreement with him – let alone from a sense that Shakespeare lacks philosophical weight – but from a difference in philosophical temperament, the nature of which marks two distinct options in one’s response to the threat of skepticism and to the naturalness and inevitability of tragedy.

2. George Steiner’s 1986 lecture “A Reading against Shakespeare” – still one of the longest consecutive discussions of Wittgenstein’s remarks on Shakespeare  – is not shy in acknowledging the apparent craziness of Wittgenstein’s assertions. The claim that Shakespeare stands alone is said to be “surely ... exaggerated in a manner characteristically Germanic” (Steiner 1996, p. 119). Wittgenstein’s denial that Shakespeare is true to life is “very difficult to place, let alone take seriously” (Steiner 1996, p. 120). Yet, and to his credit, Steiner goes on to take these remarks seriously in the very sense he says it is difficult to do. Steiner argues that Wittgenstein perceives an absence of the religious and explicitly ethical in Shakespeare that he located more easily not only in obvious places like Dante and Tolstoy (and, one should add, Dickens) but also in Goethe, Kafka, and Thomas Mann. The crux of Steiner’s argument takes off from Wittgenstein’s question, “Was he [Shakespeare] perhaps a creator of language rather than a poet?” (VB 1998, p. 95f).

2 The absence, in Wittgenstein’s remarks, of a thesis about Shakespeare or of passages quoted from his plays has been observed most recently by Wolfgang Huemer (2012).

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Steiner underscores the distinction between a Sprachschöpfer – a wordsmith or a crafter of words, even one such as Shakespeare who, as Steiner puts it, “has made the world at home in the word” (Steiner 1996, p. 123) – and the Dichter or true poet, whose talent is not a knowingness or craft-knowledge, but an ethical insight or willingness to bear witness, a compassion for others expressed as a desire to save them from emptiness and death, the communication (as in Heidegger) of the mystery of being. It is, for Steiner, this German aesthetic understanding of the Dichter’s calling that is at work in Wittgenstein’s remark, and Steiner thinks Wittgenstein is on to something when he withholds from Shakespeare this higher appellation. Similarly, Peter Hughes, in an essay published two years later, reads this same remark as faulting Shakespeare for his assault on philosophy  – not (negatively) for his lacking the ethical insight of a Dichter but (positively) for his ease at language creation. Shakespeare’s singular way with words threatens philosophy by undermining the necessary commonality of language, by forcing words to turn on something private or personal, and so to turn in ways Wittgenstein explicitly warns philosophy against in certain well-known sections of the Investigations (Hughes 1988, p.  381). For both Steiner and Hughes, then, Wittgenstein’s critique of Shakespeare acknowledges that Shakespeare can do with the English language virtually anything he pleases, while at the same time it raises a question about the worth of this skill or freedom. For Hughes, the question is: Is doing whatever you please with language desirable? For Steiner, the question is: Is doing whatever you please with language enough?  – a question Steiner seems to welcome from philosophy in the name of Shakespearean criticism. I don’t doubt that the question “Is linguistic mastery enough?” can prove fruitful for readers of Shakespeare. But I don’t think Wittgenstein is raising either question, for two reasons: I think he denies of Shakespeare a not unimportant component of linguistic mastery, and I think he does not deny of Shakespeare a certain philosophical or ethical seriousness (though he may not explicitly confirm it, either). Let us take these in turn. A key element of Wittgenstein’s critique of Shakespeare appears at the beginning of a remark from 1946. He says that “Shakespeare’s similes are, in the ordinary sense, bad” (VB 1998, p. 56d; emphasis in original). Hughes passes over the remark entirely, and while Steiner quotes much of it he is silent about this first sentence. Perhaps it is too straightforward a criticism for a literary critic. But in point of fact it is the only sentence in his notebooks where Wittgenstein specifically refers to the language that Shakespeare “creates.” (I don’t mean that similes, metaphors, and the like are the only sort of linguistic creation that Wittgenstein has in mind in calling Shakespeare “a creator of language.” Surely the Dichter creates these, too, and surely Wittgenstein has in mind the world-cre-

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ating power of a Hamlet or Macbeth no less than the specific rhetorical figures they employ. But it seems silly to imagine, as Hughes seems to imagine, that by calling Shakespeare “a creator of language” Wittgenstein is accusing him of creating, if not a private language, then “a unique and alien world” populated by people “whose outer reveals no inner” (Hughes 1988, p. 381) – especially since, as Hughes knows, Wittgenstein creates such worlds himself, a fact to which I return below.) Why does Wittgenstein single out Shakespeare’s use of similes, and what makes them bad “in the ordinary sense,” so that they could only be good if one takes them in some extraordinary sense – that is, as part of a singular language?³ Here it is important to recognize something of Wittgenstein’s own powers of language, in particular his remarkable talent for similes and, more broadly, figures of comparison – by which I mean to include everything from analogies to what Wittgenstein called, in characterizing his philosophical method, the invention of “intermediate cases,” instances of which direct us towards “that understanding which consists in ‘seeing connexions’,” itself the goal of what he meant by a “perspicuous representation” or “overview” (Übersichtlichkeit) (PI 1958, §122). Given the importance of figures of comparison to Wittgenstein’s way of doing philosophy, it shouldn’t surprise that he was good at it, and knew that he was good at it, referring to himself half-deprecatingly but still seriously as a crafter of beautiful similes (Monk 1990, p. 363). Here is one example, drawn from a remark he thought to include in the Foreword to the Investigations: “Only every so often does one of the sentences I am writing here make a step forward; the rest are like the snipping of the barber’s scissors, which he has to keep in motion so as to be able to make a cut with them at the right moment” (VB 1998, p. 76a). Compare this striking image  – revelatory both of its author and of the process of writing, so often felt as a movement without forward motion – to a metaphor from Richard II that Wittgenstein once mentioned in conversation, and a likely instance of the sort of “bad” Shakespearean figure he had in mind (Monk 1990, p.  568). Mowbray there says, “Within my mouth you have engaol’d my tongue / Doubly portcullis’d with my teeth and lips” (Shakespeare 1876, 1.3.166–167).⁴

3 Jonathan Pugh argues that what Wittgenstein found “bad” (yet interesting) in Shakespeare’s similes was their employment of “metaphysical wit,” a way of writing “characterized by extreme and extended juxtapositions of unnaturally coupled similes” (Pugh 2012, p. 238–239). While Pugh’s thesis is instructive, it proceeds without the support of a single Shakespearean turn of phrase that Wittgenstein actually critiques. Nor does Pugh consider that Wittgenstein’s criticism of Shakespeare’s similes is born from Wittgenstein’s own experience with and talent for making similes. I correct both of these faults in the reading presented here. 4 References are to act, scene, and line.

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No doubt the figurative possibilities of a portcullis, the iron or wooden gate to a castle that can be raised and lowered, appeared more naturally to an Elizabethan poet than it does to us. But that seems to be no part of Wittgenstein’s critique. (And his choice of example ought to lead us to dismiss the suggestion, made by Steiner (Steiner 1996, p. 117) and indirectly by F. R. Leavis (Leavis 1984, p. 59), that Wittgenstein’s difficulty with Shakespeare stems from the antiquity of Shakespeare’s English and the non-standardness or non-nativeness of Wittgenstein’s English. If one is tempted by this hypothesis, one should remember that the authority Wittgenstein acknowledges as reminding him of the greatness of Shakespeare is, after all, Milton, and that Wittgenstein’s sense of Milton’s English is adequate enough that he can say, “I take it for granted that he [Milton] was incorruptible” (VB 1998, p. 55b).) What does seem part of Wittgenstein’s critique of Shakespeare’s figures is the obviousness of such an image as the teeth and lips as a gate for the tongue, even when one acknowledges that here it is closed to keep something in rather than to keep something out. What should one conclude from the comparison of this metaphor to Wittgenstein’s simile of the barber’s scissors? I don’t claim that Wittgenstein’s figure is plainly better, nor am I suggesting that as familiar a Shakespearean alternative as “Juliet is the sun” couldn’t compete with it. It is enough for my present purpose if we can agree that, in this instance at least, Wittgenstein could hold his own with Shakespeare. One might even consider whether Shakespeare’s portcullis’d tongue is as striking as the similative tongue in the following, from Wittgenstein’s so-called Big Typescript: “The philosopher strives to find the liberating word, and that is the word that finally permits us to grasp what until then had constantly and intangibly weighed on our consciousness. (It’s like having a hair on one’s tongue; one feels it, but can’t get hold of it, and therefore can’t get rid of it.)” (BT 2005, p. 302). But the point I mean to make plausible is that, when Wittgenstein speaks of Shakespeare’s singularity and raises the possibility that he was a creator of language who could say of himself “I sing as the birds sing,” Wittgenstein is not asserting the admiring commonplace that Shakespeare’s writing exhibits his linguistic mastery. Wittgenstein does not misunderstand Shakespeare. He does not mistake Shakespeare for a mere wordsmith and then fault him for not being more than that, as Steiner and Peter B. Lewis would have it (Lewis 2005, p. 251). When Wittgenstein raises the possibility (he does not assert it, as Steiner all but assumes) that Shakespeare is a Sprachschöpfer, a language-maker, he sees himself as speaking neither from understanding nor from misunderstanding, but from that particular poverty of one who wants to articulate the cause of an absence in himself, specifically the absence of a (or the right) critical response to a body of work generally praised as the best of its kind. To that extent his uneasiness is familiar enough; it is the only honest response to

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something whose importance we acknowledge but whose greatness we find we do not and cannot “get.” (There may be countless ways to appreciate something and countless ways to despise it, but there seems to be only one way to not get it.) And I will add, in anticipation of the next section, that Wittgenstein’s remarks on Shakespeare’s way with words are compatible with my earlier suggestion that his uneasiness springs from a difference in philosophical temperament, here expressed as an anxiety or fear that the language of Shakespeare’s plays stirs up in him.

3. Perhaps the best evidence that Wittgenstein’s remarks on Shakespeare are guided by an anxiety or fear engendered by Shakespeare’s writing occurs in a pair of consecutive remarks about the dream-work and dreams from Wittgenstein’s 1949 notebooks. In the later of the two remarks, Wittgenstein explicitly identifies the field of Shakespeare’s impressiveness with the field of dreams. Both can seem “all wrong,” even “absurd,” and yet also impress us as “completely right” (VB 1998, p. 89b). In the earlier remark, where Wittgenstein speaks only of dreams (that is, just before the connection to Shakespeare occurs to him, or is called up from him), the question of the cause of our recollections of dreams, with their peculiar patchwork quality, gets raised (VB 1998, p. 88h–89a). And while, here as elsewhere, Wittgenstein is intent to show that the demand for causes may be misplaced, a demand for the wrong thing, he entertains Freud’s answer long enough to supplement it with his own. He agrees, following Freud, that our thoughts associated with dreams may relate to our daily life and to our wishes, but he adds his belief that they can relate to our fears as well. If one follows this suggestion, as one can imagine Wittgenstein found himself doing in his subsequent remark, how should one further specify the recollections or associations that Shakespeare’s plays engender in him? Does it matter whether they arise from daily life (which Wittgenstein denies: “things aren’t like that” (VB 1998, p. 89b)), or from wishes, or from fears? But that amounts to asking, what stands in the way of Wittgenstein’s understanding Shakespeare? (We have said his problem is not one of misunderstanding – that is, it’s not a matter of seeing the wrong Shakespeare.) In a remark from 1946  – concluding his disparaging of Shakespeare’s similes  – Wittgenstein suggests a possible answer to himself: “That I do not understand him [Shakespeare] could then be explained by the fact that I cannot read him with ease. Not, that is, as one views a splendid piece of scenery” (VB

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1998, p. 56e). The concept of an inability to read easily, as in seeing the splendidness of a splendid scene, is related to the general concept that occupies Wittgenstein throughout his later career – the concept of seeing an aspect – and that receives its most concentrated exposition in the pages of Part II, section 11 of the Investigations.⁵ The emblem, not to say the icon, of these pages is the figure known as Jastrow’s duck-rabbit, a line drawing that is intentionally ambiguous between being that of a duck and that of a rabbit (PI 1958, p. 194b); and a feature of this figure that Wittgenstein highlights is the ease with which we can effect the gestalt-switch from one to the other. This easy ability is generalized, or I might rather say particularized, over dozens of similar but distinct examples, including, among others, our relation to schematic drawings (PI 1958, p. 193f, 200c, 203a), to puzzle-pictures (PI 1958, p. 196b, 199b), to full-fledged pictures (PI 1958, p. 201e, 202e, 203b), to everyday objects (PI 1958, p. 206e), to musical tempi and aesthetic experience broadly conceived (PI 1958, p. 202h, 206i), to words (PI 1958, p. 202g, 214d ff.), and (by implication but also explicitly) to other people (PI 1958, p.193a, 197g). Wittgenstein does not imagine, of course, that we all share an ease in effecting a change in aspect in all of these cases. He says, in speaking of the more complicated instances of aspect-seeing: “‘Now he’s seeing it like this’, ‘now like that’ would only be said of someone capable of making certain applications of the figure quite freely” (PI 1958, p.  208d). To someone incapable, for whatever reason, of exercising this freedom or ease in reading the aspects of the world, Wittgenstein gives the name “aspect-blind.” And a characteristic of the aspectblind is the inability to see how something (a figure, an object, a stretch of music) invites the seeing (or hearing) of different aspects (PI 1958, p. 213f–214a). If one reads Wittgenstein’s remark about his inability to read Shakespeare “with ease,” “as one views a splendid piece of scenery,” in light of his contemporaneous invention of and interest in the concepts of aspect-seeing and aspectblindness, one is likely to notice that Wittgenstein is describing his difficulty with Shakespeare’s words in the language of a condition, albeit an ambiguous one (aspect-blindness)⁶, rather than describing it as a temporary aesthetic difficulty. These are  – particularly in Wittgenstein’s thinking  – two distinct and separate options. Were it an aesthetic difficulty, it would find its solution the way any

5 References to remarks in Part II are given by page number followed by a letter indicating the position of the remark on that page – for example, “193a” for the first remark on page 193, “193b” for the second remark, etc. 6 As I argue elsewhere (Day 2010, p. 206), Wittgenstein intends us to notice our ambivalent reaction to the possibility of aspect-blindness: it is a condition we can neither fully imagine nor fail to find familiar.

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temporary failure to aspect-see, or to see the point of something, does. Here is Wittgenstein noting the difference between his failing and then coming to see pictures or hear music that once puzzled him: I could say of one of Picasso’s pictures that I don’t see it as human. Or of many another picture that for a long time I wasn’t able to see what it was representing, but now I do. Isn’t this similar to: for a long time I couldn’t hear this as of a piece, but now I hear it that way. Before it sounded like so many little bits, which were always stopping short – now I hear it as an organic whole. (Bruckner.) (LW 1982, §677)

One might come to see the human in one of Picasso’s pictures, for example, by letting one’s eye roam “so that you no longer see it as one picture, in the normal sense of the word, but as several pictures, each of which has its own application” (LW 1982, §805). But Wittgenstein imagines his difficulty with Shakespeare’s words differently. He imagines it as akin to the difficulty he mentions late in the aspect-seeing section of the Investigations, where he notes the “important” fact that “one human being can be a complete enigma to another” (PI 1958, p. 223f). Or think of his difficulty with the splendid landscape of Shakespeare’s prose by contrasting that difficulty with our ordinary relation to a picture of a landscape: “I might get an important message to someone by sending him the picture of a landscape. Does he read it like a blueprint? That is, does he decipher it? [No.] He looks at it and acts accordingly. He sees rocks, trees, a house, etc. in it” (RPP 1980b, §447). To read a picture like a blueprint (cf. PI 1958, p. 204i) would be, at best, to merely know what it is about without seeing it. That seems to be how Wittgenstein understands his condition as a reader of Shakespeare, unable to “accept him as he is in the way you accept nature, a piece of scenery e.g.” (VB 1998, p. 56d). While Wittgenstein professes aversion to other writers and composers, his most concentrated articulation of a failure to understand another’s writing is reserved for Shakespeare. And yet, by describing his relation to Shakespeare’s words in terms reminiscent of a condition he invents, his “fictitious natural history” (PI 1958, p. 230a) of aspect-blindness, Wittgenstein is being disingenuous. Casting himself as suffering from a condition (an inability to read with ease, a blindness), he avoids coming to terms with what lies behind his “condition” (something he sees, an aspect of Shakespeare’s words that is blocking understanding). Wittgenstein says “I do not understand him [Shakespeare]” – a self-description that, as noted above, he associates with dream-like recollections of an indeterminate cause – not because he suffers from a condition of blindness but because he is seeing an aspect of Shakespeare’s words that hides or camouflages them, as the duck-aspect of the duck-rabbit hides the rabbit-aspect.

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There is a strong and serious candidate for what lies behind Wittgenstein’s singular uneasiness over Shakespeare. Coming to see it depends upon recognizing that both Wittgenstein and Shakespeare can be read as responding to the human threat of skepticism, just as Descartes can be read as skirting or cheating that threat. The argument for Shakespeare is made in Stanley Cavell’s readings of (most famously) Lear’s avoidance of Cordelia’s love, Othello’s doubt of Desdemona’s transparent faithfulness, and Leontes’ male suspicions about whether and what he has fathered.⁷ These readings are offered alongside Cavell’s understanding of the Investigations as Wittgenstein’s diagnosis and treatment of modernity’s obsession to turn our relation to the world and to others into matters of knowing, and so into matters of doubt. Here is how Cavell sets up the trials of skepticism in his reading of Othello: [In Othello] we have the logic, the emotion, and the scene of skepticism epitomized. The logic: ‘My life upon her faith’ (I, iii, 294) and ‘... when I love thee not / Chaos is come again’ (III, iii, 91–92) set up the stake necessary to best cases; the sense I expressed by the imaginary major premiss, ‘If I know anything, I know this’. ... The emotion: Here I mean not Othello’s emotion toward Desdemona, call it jealousy; but the structure of his emotion as he is hauled back and forth across the keel of his love. Othello’s enactment, or sufferance, of that torture is the most extraordinary representation known to me of the ‘astonishment’ in skeptical doubt. ... The scene: Here I have in mind the pervasive air of the language and the action of this play as one in which Othello’s mind continuously outstrips reality, dissolves it in trance or dream or in the beauty or ugliness of his incantatory imagination; in which he visualizes possibilities that reason, unaided, cannot rule out. (Cavell 1979, p. 483–484)

In this same close reading of Othello Cavell provides the following, more general enunciation of tragedy’s revelation of skepticism: But then this is what I have throughout kept arriving at as the cause of skepticism – the attempt to convert the human condition, the condition of humanity, into an intellectual difficulty, a riddle. ... Tragedy is the place we are not allowed to escape the consequences, or price, of this cover. (Cavell 1979, p. 493)

Wittgenstein’s interest throughout the Investigations in skepticism, though widely recognized because of his repeated questioning of “what we go on” in carrying out a task (for example, in continuing a series of numbers), is often misread as his attempt to refute skepticism. But a Wittgensteinian criterion

7 For King Lear, see Cavell 1969, p. 267–353. For Othello, see Cavell 1979, p. 481–496; a version of these pages appears in Cavell 1987a, p.  125–142. For The Winter’s Tale, see Cavell 1987b, p. 193–221.

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does not negate the concluding thesis of skepticism, that we do not know with certainty of the existence of the external world (or of other minds). On the contrary, Wittgenstein, as I read him, rather affirms that thesis, or rather takes it as undeniable, and so shifts its weight. What the thesis now means is something like: Our relation to the world as a whole, or to others in general, is not one of knowing, where knowing construes itself as being certain. (Cavell 1979, p. 45)

If one grants the connections, no more than sketched here, between Shakespeare and Wittgenstein – not only that both treat the human impulse toward skepticism thematically (each in his way) but that both diagnose skepticism as the attempt to interpret “a metaphysical finitude as an intellectual lack” (Cavell 1979, p. 493) – the wonder becomes how Wittgenstein could have failed to see in Shakespeare’s tragedies, as he saw in Augustine’s Confessions, a working out of his own most pressing concerns (however different in form from his own writing).⁸ But we need not imagine that he missed it; not completely. In truth, no serious reader can miss Shakespeare’s interest in the practical consequences of skepticism (our failure to acknowledge others) except insofar as one can miss the obvious (cf. Cavell 1969, p. 310). But that is not to say the obvious isn’t easy to miss. What we can say is this: to miss the extent to which our failed relations with others mirror philosophy’s skepticism of the existence of others, and that Shakespearean tragedy trades in the extreme consequences of these failed relations, would be to simply misunderstand Shakespeare. Such a reader would be left to praise Shakespeare for all the wrong reasons (for example, for his linguistic mastery). Wittgenstein is not such a reader. Rather than missing Shakespeare’s shared concerns completely, Wittgenstein is merely covering his ears to the sound of them, or to the way Shakespeare gives voice (voices) to them.⁹

8 For a superb account of what Wittgenstein saw in Augustine, see Steven Affeldt’s essay in this volume. 9 Even if it is only in some sense that Wittgenstein is not missing these shared concerns, that would be enough to counter George Steiner’s claim that Wittgenstein sees Shakespeare as lacking ethical seriousness, and also Peter Hughes’s claim that Shakespeare and Wittgenstein operate from conflicting notions of philosophical seriousness.

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4. For fear of what, or in anxiety over what, does Wittgenstein cover his ears? Consider once more the charges leveled by Wittgenstein against Shakespeare’s language: its unnaturalness; its being a law to itself (and so appearing as lawlessness); its dream-like strangeness yet also its dream-like coherence; the characterizations of its createdness as something primal or prehuman, only in that sense natural; and especially, its disturbing asymmetry and spontaneity, the sense that Shakespeare’s next words are not controlled by the words that preceded them, that anything is permitted. This is a picture of the natural world, and of our relation to it, as seen from the side of chaos, or in which chaos and madness threaten to break out at any moment (as they eventually do in Hamlet, in King Lear, in Othello, and even in the late-Shakespeare romance The Winter’s Tale).¹⁰ If it is right to say that Wittgenstein does not miss the skeptical problematic running through Shakespeare, then what he closes his ears to, the cause of his running from Shakespeare, is the sound of the raw motives to skepticism, and of language gone wild, absent their philosophical elaborations and filigrees – the latter being expressions of skepticism that help to preserve Wittgenstein even as he does battle with them. Earlier I had occasion to note Wittgenstein’s remarking that “one human being can be a complete enigma to another” (PI 1958, p. 223f). But in that section of the Investigations his expressions of mystification (“We do not understand the people”; “We cannot find our feet with them”) are meant, understandably, to counter a false impression: the impression that his success at dissolving the picture of “the inner” – the picture that what another is thinking and feeling is hidden from us – has equally defeated the fact of our metaphysical separateness. Wittgenstein does not feel that it has, or should, and a more nuanced view of how matters stand appears in the subsequent remark: “‘I cannot know what is going on in him’ is above all a picture. It is the convincing expression of a conviction. It does not give the reasons for the conviction. They are not readily accessible” (PI

10 A criticism of this reading might be that I keep referring, unremittingly if not exclusively, to Shakespeare’s tragedies, not to “the whole corpus of his plays” (VB 1998, p. 89b). But that criticism misreads Wittgenstein’s appeal to “the whole corpus” as an appeal to something he understands and is theorizing about, when what he says is that he does not understand the whole corpus, but that it must be what those who find Shakespeare great are referring to. That Wittgenstein is thinking, unremittingly if not exclusively, about Shakespeare’s tragedies is what my reading provides evidence for if it is convincing. At the least, we know Wittgenstein is not not thinking about the tragedies, given the anecdotes of his seeing, discussing, and even borrowing a motto from King Lear (Rhees 1984, p. 73, 118, 157).

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1958, p. 223g). Wittgenstein is not here dismissing as simply false what this picture expresses – as if I could know what is going on in him if I just looked again, or the right way, or allowed the other to state more fully how things are with him. Perhaps if I or he were to make these efforts I would indeed find my feet with him; but that is not guaranteed. What I wish to underscore is that it is not part of Wittgenstein’s understanding of grammar, or the systematization of language, that my failure to find my feet with him can in all cases be overcome by some further philosophical therapy. Wittgenstein seems to assert, on the contrary, that on some occasions, the enigma of others is perpetual and unending. But it is not, so far, tragic. While these later pages of Part II of the Investigations give expression to a natural and irreparable schism between (some) human others, no one is responsible for this schism. (That is all my use of “natural” here is meant to convey.) To get closer to tragedy and the tragic expression of skepticism in the later Wittgenstein, one needs to turn to a late manuscript remark – one of the last collected in Culture and Value – that follows closely upon Wittgenstein’s final explicit remark on Shakespeare. It is not difficult to imagine Wittgenstein writing this with Hamlet, or with something close to Hamlet, in mind: Look at human beings: one is poison to the other. A mother to her son, and vice versa, etc. But the mother is blind and so is her son. Perhaps they have guilty consciences, but what good does that do them? The child is wicked, but nobody teaches it to be any different and its parents spoil it with their stupid affection; and how are they supposed to understand this and how is their child supposed to understand it? It’s as though they were all wicked and all innocent. (VB 1998, p. 98e)

“All wicked and all innocent”: unlike the earlier image from the Investigations of one person being an enigma to another, this is a vision of the human condition as both noxious and incoherent. As before, all parties are innocent; but this time there is chaos, and the chaos is of their own making. It is some such tragic expression of skepticism, a skepticism untamable by the methods of grammatical investigation, that Wittgenstein has in mind when he declares: “The reason I cannot understand Shakespeare is that I want to find symmetry in all this asymmetry” (VB 1998, p.  98a). It is not atypical to read Wittgenstein’s appeal to Shakespeare’s “asymmetry” as referring to the “sprawling” nature of Shakespeare’s plots and subplots (Lewis 2005, p. 249). But beyond noting that this is at most a difference of degree, not of kind, from the fictional writing of such heroes to Wittgenstein as Tolstoy and Dickens, one must ask whether his apparent fastidiousness with regard to formal design doesn’t betoken in this case (as it does in others) a wish to repudiate what the unbridled unfolding of events, of turns of mind that lead to turns of fate, itself betokens. And that would be, in Shakespeare’s tragedies and tragicomedies, something

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Cavell means by the truth of skepticism: that humans naturally desire, not only an end to the nonsense and to the bumps that the understanding gets by running its head up against the limits of language (PI 1958, §119), but an end to the consequences of speaking (the consequences of expression, the consequences of acknowledging others) altogether. What Wittgenstein covers his ears to may be just this silence, this nothing, that the Shakespearean tragic hero craves. But if it is, then what is revealed in Wittgenstein’s dislike for the “creator of language” who “could permit himself anything, so to speak” (VB 1998, p. 98b) is the anxiety or fear that (as in King Lear) something will come of this nothing.¹¹

Bibliography Cavell, Stanley (1969): “The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear.” In: Stanley Cavell: Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 267–353. Cavell, Stanley (1979): “Between Acknowledgment and Avoidance.” In: Stanley Cavell: The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 329–496. Cavell, Stanley (1987a): “Othello and the Stake of the Other.” In: Stanley Cavell: Disowning Knowledge: In Six Plays of Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 125–142. Cavell, Stanley (1987b): “Recounting Gains, Showing Losses: Reading The Winter’s Tale.” In: Stanley Cavell: Disowning Knowledge: In Six Plays of Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 193–221. Day, William (2010): “Wanting to Say Something: Aspect-Blindness and Language.” In: William Day/Victor J. Krebs (Eds): Seeing Wittgenstein Anew. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 204–224. Huemer, Wolfgang (2012): “Misreadings: Steiner and Lewis on Wittgenstein and Shakespeare.” In: Philosophy and Literature 36, p. 229–237. Hughes, Peter (1988): “Painting the Ghost: Wittgenstein, Shakespeare, and Textual Representation.” In: New Literary History 19, Wittgenstein and Literary Theory, p. 371–84. Leavis, F. R. (1984): “Memories of Wittgenstein.” In: Rush Rhees (Ed.): Recollections of Wittgenstein. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. Lewis, Peter B. (2005): “Wittgenstein, Tolstoy, and Shakespeare.” In: Philosophy and Literature 29, p. 241–255. Monk, Ray (1990): Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. New York: Free Press.

11 This essay began in Budapest in 2004, at a conference organized by Géza Kállay titled “Shakespeare and Philosophy in a Multicultural World.” I wish to express my thanks to the participants at that delightful conference, and in particular to Stanley Cavell for his encouragement, and to Géza Kállay for his skepticism.

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Pugh, Jonathan (2012): “Wittgenstein, Shakespeare, and Metaphysical Wit.” In: Philosophy and Literature 36, p. 238–248. Rhees, Rush (Ed.) (1984): Recollections of Wittgenstein. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. Shakespeare, William (1876): “Richard II”. In: The Works of Shakespeare, Complete and Unabridged. Vol. 6. A. J. Valpy (Ed.). Philadelphia: Gebbie & Barrie. Steiner, George (1996): “A Reading against Shakespeare.” In: George Steiner: No Passion Spent: Essays 1978–1995. New Haven, London: Yale University Press, p. 108–128.

Julian Lamb

Sense and Sententiousness: Wittgenstein, Milton, Shakespeare 1. Sketches It is remarkable how hard we find it to believe something that we do not see the truth of for ourselves. When, for instance, I hear expressions of admiration for Shakespeare by distinguished men in the course of several centuries, I can never rid myself of the suspicion that praising him has been the conventional thing to do; though I have to tell myself that this is not how it is. It takes the authority of a Milton really to convince me. I take it for granted that he was incorruptible. – But I don’t of course mean by this that I don’t believe an enormous amount of praise to have been, and still to be, lavished on Shakespeare without understanding and for the wrong reasons by a thousand professors of literature (Wittgenstein VB 1998, p. 55).

This remark from 1946 is one of the first recorded remarks Wittgenstein made about Shakespeare, and in the movement of its thought enacts an ambivalence which becomes more condensed in the highly enigmatic observations he later made. On a cursory reading, this ambivalence may be obscured by what appears merely to be a familiar disagreement between Wittgenstein, the stridently unconventional thinker, and those bastions of blindly conventional wisdom, “the distinguished men of past centuries.” However, the observation with which the passage begins – that it is difficult to believe that which one does not find self-evident  – only has traction in the context of an unspoken aspiration to believe, and one which is powerful enough to counteract the cynicism which says that praise of Shakespeare is merely convention (“I have to tell myself that this is not how it is”). In other words, Wittgenstein’s non-belief in Shakespeare’s greatness is brought into being by a strident effort to believe. We are then told that this effort is a consequence of Wittgenstein’s having been convinced of Shakespeare’s greatness by Milton (or, more particularly, his “authority”). Milton – who cannot be discounted as a mere siphon of convention  – is that firm fulcrum around which Wittgenstein’s ambivalence pivots. But to be convinced of something is not necessarily to believe it. The passage thus ends with Wittgenstein rearticulating his suspicion of praise “lavished on Shakespeare without understanding and for the wrong reasons.” There is a presiding sense in this final sentence – not least of all in the way it brusquely cuts short Wittgenstein’s effort to believe that which Milton convinces him of – that the vast majority of existing praise has rendered

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belief in Shakespeare’s greatness very difficult. The passage thus raises a tantalising question: has such an atmosphere of excessive praise rendered belief in Shakespeare’s greatness impossible, even if one is convinced of it? I would like to argue that Wittgenstein’s remarks on Shakespeare do not answer this question; rather, they dramatize the peculiar and paradoxical consequences of its unanswerability. A prudent way of addressing this question would be to clarify what Wittgenstein meant by “believe” (glauben) and “convince” (überzeugen), perhaps in relation to his remarks on religious belief.¹ Though this line of inquiry may yet prove fruitful, I have chosen to perform a different kind of analysis, one which clarifies Wittgenstein’s ambivalence by presenting an account of the occurrence of similar forms of ambivalence in a variety of other texts.² I will thus proceed by offering short, discrete sections whose connections will either be self-evident, suggested by the writing, or left to the reader to discover. (And since Wittgenstein mentions Milton, I will begin by considering two poems by Milton that may have convinced Wittgenstein of Shakespeare’s greatness.) This analysis will be necessarily piecemeal, and its overall effect may be to show that Wittgenstein’s remarks are less unusual than they might initially seem. In defence of my approach, I can only rearticulate Wittgenstein’s defence of his own analytical procedures in the Preface to the Philosophical Investigations. The sections which follow do not, as one might wish, proceed in an orderly fashion “from one subject to another in a natural order and without breaks.” Rather, they comprise “a number of sketches

1 For instance, one might consider the ways in which belief in Shakespeare’s greatness is morally inflected, not dissimilar to the way Wittgenstein characterises belief in God: “If the question arises as to the existence of a god or God, it plays an entirely different role to that of the existence of any person or object I ever heard of. One said, had to say, that one believed in the existence, and if one did not believe, this was regarded as something bad. Normally if I did not believe in the existence of something no one would think there was anything wrong in this” (Wittgenstein 2001, p. 59). 2 It is, indeed, striking that Wittgenstein should treat Shakespeare’s greatness as a question of belief, rather than (for instance) literary critical assessment. F.R. Leavis, whose “Memories of Wittgenstein” depicts encounters between them which were both respectful and rivalrous, was much engaged with the task of evaluating English literature. Ironically enough, his Revaluation: Tradition and Development in English Poetry followed T.S. Eliot’s lead in arguing that Milton had done enormous damage to English poetic language. Pope, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Tennyson are but four poets to have inherited from Milton a poetic diction more concerned with valuing its own words rather than doing anything with them (cf. Leavis 1994, p. 53). It is difficult to say how well Wittgenstein knew Eliot and Leavis’ hostility toward Milton. That Wittgenstein’s critique of Shakespeare shares much in common with it deserves more consideration that I can give it here (see n. 4).

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of landscapes” which, in the end, form something of an album. The crucial thing about these sketches is that, in them, the “same or almost the same points were always being approached afresh from different directions, and new sketches made” (PI 2000, Preface). Each of the sections attempts to grasp completely (although within its limited perspective) what I take to be the central issue, though I make no claim that the issue exists independently of the perspectives we might have on it. However, I am aware that such sketches may not only appear as unsubstantiated impressions, but also raise in the reader the suspicion that an analysis of their family resemblances legitimates the most superficial of comparisons, comparisons which themselves can be rendered significant merely through the nonchalant ease with which they are drawn. I intimate this criticism on the basis of Wittgenstein’s discomfort with Shakespeare: “[Shakespeare’s] pieces give me an impression as of enormous sketches rather than of paintings; as though they had been dashed off by someone who can permit himself anything, so to speak” (Wittgenstein VB 1998, p. 86). Both Shakespeare’s sketches and Wittgenstein’s give the impression of being preparatory studies of a landscape which will eventually receive full representation in a painting. But where Wittgenstein’s recourse to Landschaftsskizzen is set against the hopeless aspiration for a “good book” – one which would progress “in a natural order without breaks” – Shakespeare’s Skizzen merely exploit their own meagreness: they exude a care-free dynamism under the aegis of which anything goes. This is a criticism that might equally be levelled against my own analysis. So, whilst this article attempts to achieve coherence by arranging its material into clarifying relationships, I remain troubled that it has, in fact, achieved the kind of coherence that Wittgenstein dislikes in Shakespeare: a coherence which I can only describe as being characterised by an inward turning, a circularity, a self-enclosure. This is not perspicuity, but a type of coherence-effect which is unable to teach anything substantive, and merely generates examples which, in the context of the article, give the impression of being irrefutable, unquestionably right. Rather than simply consoling myself with the fantasy that this paper fails in the same way that Wittgenstein said that Shakespeare did, it may be of benefit to observe in passing of how easily Wittgenstein’s critique of Shakespeare can be levelled against those of us who try to employ Wittgenstein’s investigative procedures for our own ends.

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2. Staring in Wonder In manuscript notes dated 12 April, 1950, Wittgenstein wrote: I do not think Shakespeare can be set alongside any other poet. Was he perhaps not a creator of language rather than a poet? I could only ever stare in wonder at Shakespeare; never do anything with him. I am deeply suspicious of most of Shakespeare’s admirers. I think the trouble is that, in western culture at least, he stands alone, & so, one can only place him by placing him wrongly. (Wittgenstein VB 1998, p. 95)

These remarks depict Shakespeare’s isolation not only from other poets, but also his readers. As a “creator of language,” Shakespeare has produced a corpus of plays and poems which seem so much a law unto themselves that we can always only look upon them as if from the outside: “I could only ever stare in wonder at Shakespeare; never do anything with him.” Although Wittgenstein would appear here to be describing his own experience of reading Shakespeare, he is also rehearsing one of the characteristic ways in which Shakespeare is praised. He does this in order to bring to light its unforseen implications: if one is to judge a poet to be great, he must be compared alongside other poets; but if western culture has rendered Shakespeare incomparable, and upon whom we can only ever stare in wonder, then the very terms of our praise prevent us from ever saying that he is great. We are thus left saying that Shakespeare is great only according to criteria which he defines in his isolation. To stare in wonder, unable to actively engage with Shakespeare, is to be paralysed in paroxysms of praise for a corpus of work whose very un-assessability we take as the mark of its greatness. Milton’s poem, “On Shakespeare,” depicts admirers crowded around Shakespeare’s corpus, stultified by their own wonder and praise. Without either assuming or arguing that Wittgenstein read this poem, I want to suggest that it exemplifies and critiques the kind of praise he targets, and is inevitably motivated by a similar ambivalence. Milton’s poem was first published in 1623, anonymously, as one of the prefatory poems in the Second Folio of Shakespeare’s plays. It is the last of four poems in which Shakespeare is variously praised, and in many of these the folio itself is figured as a monument more durable than one of brass or marble. The most famous of these poems is “To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author Mr William Shakespeare” in which Ben Jonson isolates Shakespeare’s apparently unlearned, natural ability (his “small Latine, and lesse Greeke”) as the source of his genius (Shakespeare 1623, p.  A4r). This assessment is in tune with much of the other prefatory material, most notably the Preface written by the editors John Hemminges and Henry Condell: “And what he thought, he uttered

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with that easinesse, that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers” (Shakespeare 1623, p.  A3r). In this context of passionate praise, Milton’s poem appears as something of an anomaly: in it, Milton both assumes the position of the genuflecting admirer, and also vividly shows the paralysing effects of his own admiration. The poem begins by asking rhetorically what need Shakespeare has for a monument of “piled stones,” or a “stary-pointing pyramid.” Such objects are useless because Thou in our wonder and astonishment Hast built thyself a live-long monument. For whilst to shame of slow-endeavouring art, Thy easy numbers flow, and that each heart Hath from the leaves of thy unvalued book, Those Delphic lines with deep impression took, Then thou our fancy of itself bereaving, Dost make us marble with too much conceiving; And so sepulchred in such pomp dost lie, That kings for such a tomb would wish to die. (7–16)

The easy indifference with which Shakespeare produces his “numbers” is contrasted with the frozen amazement of his admirers who are turned to marble as a result of “too much conceiving.” This quintessentially Shakespearean effect is, paradoxically, one in which the fancy of the admirer bereaves (dispossesses, robs, or strips) itself; that is, the fancy deprives itself of its own cognitive power by being consumed in an excess of cognitive activity. The following line develops the paradox in the ambiguity surrounding the agency of “dost make”: is it Shakespeare (“thou”), or “our [own] fancy” that makes us marble? Does the “too much conceiving” refer to the mental activities of Shakespeare’s admirers, or an excess of conception in Shakespeare’s plays themselves? This is no mere pedantic hair-splitting for it gives rise to two quite different readings. The first reading locates the agency for the excess in the admirers themselves. Their conceiving – which is also their praise – is “too much” insofar as it leaves these admirers paralysed, unable to engage with the object of their amazement, and becoming increasingly enraptured in their own rapture. The second reading, however, locates the excess of conception in Shakespeare’s work itself, and says that its admirers are stultified into wide-eyed amazement by such meaningful super-abundance. Shakespeare’s meanings thus overflow our capacity to comprehend them, and we are left not only praising something we cannot fully comprehend, but praising it because we cannot fully comprehend it. Different as they are, these readings are in fact mirror images of each other: in the first, Shakespeare’s works have the paradoxical effect of isolating us from them as

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we become increasingly enraptured in our own excessive amazement; in the second, they have the equally paradoxical effect of presenting such an excess of meaningful material that they become isolated from us by far exceeding our capacity to understand them. In its paradoxes and subtle ambiguities, Milton’s poem dramatizes the implications of the kind of praise characteristic of much of the prefatory material which accompanied it in the second folio. Given this, its final image is especially striking: “And so sepulchred in such pomp dost lie” (Milton 1971, p. 15). “Pomp” suggests overly elaborate and ornamented ceremony. This praise is pompous not only because it is excessive, but because, within its own terms, it cannot comprehend the object it is praising.

3. “I sing as the bird sings” In Milton’s poem, Shakespeare is said to put “slow-endeavouring art” (Milton 1971, p.  9) to shame. An endeavour is a strenuous effort toward some specific predetermined goal. “Art” could either designate the product of such endeavours, or the equally unnatural, contrived, and deliberate way in which works of art are produced. By contrast, Shakespeare’s are “easy numbers” (Milton 1971, p. 10), and they “flow” from him with the unencumbered rapidity of a natural phenomenon. Unlike “endeavouring,” “flow” evokes a movement that does not presuppose a destination, or purpose; nor is something which flows likely to be especially mindful of eventually assuming a final, fixed state. Rather, “flow” asserts an origin, an ongoing and continuous impulsion into being, whether from a bubbling spring, or a mysterious genius. But Milton’s poem is tantalisingly silent about where exactly these numbers flow from; they just flow. And so, like Shakespeare’s language, the word “flow” itself promises an origin which remains elusive and unspecified. Admirers of Shakespeare are thus held in thrall to a source – or the idea of a source – which always escapes them, but which is brought irresistibly into being by the ease with which Shakespeare’s numbers apparently flow from it. Shakespeare makes a brief appearance in a slightly later poem of Milton’s, “L’Allegro,” in which his natural ease is praised once again. “L’Allegro” and its companion poem, “Il Penseroso,” are poeticised versions of an argument in utramque partem in which Milton first considers the benefits of a life given to merriment, light pleasures, and joyfulness, and then considers the attractions of a pensive, meditative, and introspective life. Shakespeare appears in “L’Allegro” when, after a day of country jollities, the speaker makes his way into town to enjoy the delights of the theatre.

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Then to the well-trod stage anon, If Jonson’s learned sock be on, Or sweetest Shakespeare fancy’s child, Warble his native wood-notes wild, And ever against eating cares, Lap me in soft Lydian airs, Married to immortal verse, Such as the meeting soul may pierce In notes, with many a winding bout Of linked sweetness long drawn out, With wanton heed, and giddy cunning, The melting voice through mazes running; Untwisting all the chains that tie The hidden soul of harmony. (131–144)

Shakespeare is presented as the ubiquitous warbling bird, and his language becomes a natural, musical phenomenon: birdsong. Thus figured, Shakespeare’s musical language bears similarities with the “soft Lydian airs / Married to immortal verse” whose effects are described in the lines which follow. Although these Lydian songs constitute a separate amusement to those of the “well-trod stage,” the fact that the sentence moves seamlessly to a description of their effects from the image of Shakespeare as warbling bird actively invites comparison.³ One of the striking features of this sentence (especially ll.135–44) is the way it piles clauses on top of each other, giving the impression of a poetry that is both polyphonic and contrapuntal, at one with a movement toward dazzling super-abundance, engulfing the reader in an experience of language akin to the experience the speaker is experiencing from music. And in this description, music is praised as having a seminal power to enter the soul of the listener; sung language can “pierce / In notes.” As if to counterpoint the image of piercing, the listener, increasingly enraptured by the music, finds himself in winding arias, and maze-like musical arrangements – a dizzying aural architecture into which he is drawn, and out of which he is led by the singing voice. The oxymoronic phrases “wanton heed” and “giddy cunning” attempt to capture the condition of a music which seems both careless and deliberate, one which would allow itself anything, and yet always give the impression it was operating under the agency of an undisclosed artfulness.

3 John Carey (Milton 1971, p.  139) reminds us that the Lydian was that mode of tonal arrangement which Plato in the Republic took special care to banish since, he argued, under its influence guardians would become “drunk and soft and idle” (Plato 1993, 398e). Plato later draws special attention to the musical attributes of poetry, claiming that they entrance superficial listeners, and assert themselves over the knowledge which they do not (but ought to) communicate (cf. Plato 1993, 601a–b).

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By virtue of its naturalness (“native wood-notes wild” (l.134)), Shakespeare’s language would appear to attain the condition of this music. The inverse might equally be asserted: that the naturalness of his language is also brought forth by its musicality; as music, it asserts its own easeful verbal performance over its referential subject. And our experience of it takes on the characteristics of Milton’s description of the Lydian airs: an internally coherent arrangement of “linked sweetness” whose “wanton heed” and “giddy cunning” force upon the listener the impression of an order he can neither name nor describe. In remarks which continue on from the ones I discussed in the last section, Wittgenstein utilises metaphors from music and visual art to account for Shakespeare’s birdsong. It is not as though S. portrayed human types well & were in that respect true to life. He is not true to life. But he has such a supple hand & such individual brush strokes that each of his characters looks significant, worth looking at. “Beethoven’s great heart”  – no one could say “Shakespeare’s great heart”. ‘The supple hand that created new natural forms of language’ would seem to me nearer the mark. The poet cannot really say of himself “I sing as the bird sings” – but perhaps S. could have said it of himself. (Wittgenstein VB 1998, p. 96)

Shakespeare’s implausible “human types” nevertheless announce themselves as “significant, worth looking at” because they are painted with such dexterity and spontaneity. We cannot help but stare in wonder at a virtuosic performance of such individual brushstrokes. Shakespeare’s language is thus tightly imbricated within the techniques of its own creation, and viewers become transfixed with its efficient cause. That is, our inveiglement does not locate a “great heart,” but releases a “supple hand,” one which releases words that neither articulate a mind, nor communicate any meaning. When reading or listening to Shakespeare, we seem thus to be brought into contact not with a human, but a virtuoso performance of language use so distinctly different to our own that we would seem to peer in on the language of another species. Wittgenstein is led to that observation through a comparison with Beethoven, a comparison which is striking as much for the similarity it implies as for the difference it states explicitly. Unable to place Shakespeare alongside any other poet, Wittgenstein has had to place him alongside a composer. That Beethoven’s music is everywhere infused with the moral imperative to (misquoting Milton) justify the ways of man to man, and Shakespeare’s clearly is not, is subtended by the implied similarity that Shakespeare, like Beethoven, produces a kind of music.⁴ But where Beethoven addresses humanity, Shake-

4 I am indebted here to George Steiner’s extended gloss on the word “Dichter,” of which this sentence is exemplary: “The full range of these several uses – the exaltations of the Dichter’s

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speare merely produces words, words, words which are, like birdsong, indifferent to humanity. It is this indifference which sparks our praise.⁵ But why does Shakespeare in particular have such an effect? As a response to this question, the sections which follow attempt to isolate a particular verbal phenomenon, but they will also make every effort to avoid presupposing that any such phenomenon can unambiguously stand as an answer to the question. After all, Shakespeare is not the only writer in whose work this phenomenon appears. But more importantly, the implications of praise which leave Shakespeare without peer, or which sees him as the source of a unique language which flows from him as naturally and easefully as a song from a bird, or which gestures toward its maze-like coherence as the reason for our rapt, paralysed wonder – the implication of all this is that our praise of Shakespeare cannot be reduced to something that resides in him. These forms of praise identify his distance from us (and all other poets), as well as his isolation within a

calling, the ethical, salvational function of the true Dichter, together with the key inference of a prophetic-didactic explicitness – underlies and animates Wittgenstein’s diacritical resort to the term in dissent from Shakespeare.” (Steiner 1996, p. 123). Given Beethoven’s preference for the term “Tondichter,” the contrast with Shakespeare becomes starker still. However, I disagree with Steiner that the comparison underlying the one between Beethoven and Shakespeare reveals that, for Wittgenstein, “music came to be a more trustworthy, a more intimate companion than even the best of literature” (Steiner 1996, p. 125). Wittgenstein draws a sharp distinction between poetry and music only insofar as he sees Shakespeare as one who has transgressed it. This is the occasion for the comparison with Beethoven. It is, moreover, an ongoing preoccupation of Wittgenstein’s to think of Shakespeare’s language in terms of its sound. I have already considered the image of the singing bird. But there is also this: “Shakespeare’s similes are, in the ordinary sense, bad. So if they are nevertheless good – & I don’t know whether they are or not – they must be a law unto themselves. Perhaps e.g. their ring makes them convincing and gives them their truth” (Wittgenstein VB 1998, p. 56). The association Wittgenstein maintains between Shakespeare and music stands in stark contrast to Leavis and Eliot’s assessment which criticises Milton, as opposed to Shakespeare, for being too easily enraptured by the aural properties of his words. “[Milton’s] syntax is determined by the musical significance, by the auditory imagination, rather than by the attempt to follow actual speech or thought. It is at least more nearly possible to distinguish the pleasure which arises from the noise, from the pleasure due to other elements, than with the verse of Shakespeare, in which the auditory imagination and the imagination of the other senses are more nearly fused, and fused together with the thought” (Eliot 1975, p. 262). 5 Wittgenstein’s comparison between Beethoven and Shakespeare can be superimposed onto that between Milton and Shakespeare. After all, Milton is English literature’s quintessential Dichter. Eliot and Leavis are critical of the way Milton’s heightened self-awareness of his role as teacher of humanity makes it impossible to separate the poet from his poetry (cf. Leavis 1994, p. 54–55). I assume that this is what makes him for Wittgenstein such a trustworthy, “incorruptible” advocate of Shakespeare’s greatness.

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language of his own invention. The phenomenon that I would like to consider is one through which we might come to understand why we praise Shakespeare as a result of not exactly knowing what it is we are praising. I will begin by looking at the smallest increment this verbal phenomenon can take – the sentence  – and then consider its manifestation in increasingly larger units: a short speech, a sonnet, a sonnet sequence, Shakespeare’s whole corpus, a language, human language per se. My reason for arranging these observations according to these increments is that, in the end, I want to argue that this phenomenon has the powerful effect of incrementalising: of constituting language in different sized pieces.

4. Sententious Figures In its time, Puttenham’s Art of English Poesy (1589) was the most extensive treatise on English poetry, and Shakespeare would likely have been aware of it. Perhaps more than any other early modern writer on the art of poetry, Puttenham is aware of the aural arrangements words can assume in order to achieve certain kinds of music. Puttenham divides his extensive list of poetic figures into three sections: sensable figures  – those figures such as metaphor and allegory which appeal to the mind because they cause alterations in the meanings of words; sensible figures – those figures which appeal only to the ear; and sententious figures – those figures which appeal to the ear and mind simultaneously (Puttenham 2007, p. 281). Outlining the particular virtue of sententious figures, Puttenham reminds us that the poet who seeks to “vanquish […] the mind of man” must do so through “sensible approaches”: “the well-tuning of your words and clauses to the delight of the ear maketh your information no less plausible to the mind then to the ear – no, though you fill them with never so much sense and sententiousness” (Puttenham 2007, p. 281). Puttenham then begins his list of sententious figures with those figures which involve the repetition of one word or clause. Let us take an example: ploche. Yet have ye one sort of repetition which we call the doubler, and is as the next before, a speedy iteration of one word, but with some little intermission, by inserting one or two words between. As, in a most excellent ditty written by Sir Walter Raleigh, these two closing verses: Yet when I saw my self to you was true, I loved my self, because my self loved you. (Puttenham, 2007, p. 285)

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There are several words here in this example which are repeated  – my, self, loved, you. The figure does not enlarge, or equivocate upon the meanings of the words it repeats. (This is the domain of sensible figures.) Rather, its repetitions give the impression of profound meaning, or sententiousness.⁶ It seems, then, that Puttenham’s sententious figures do not make meaning, but meaningfulness; that is, they vanquish the mind of man by making sentences seem aphoristic and wise, by casting an aura of profundity over them. The word “sententious” is the adjectival form of “sentence,” and this gives us one clue as to how to account for the effects they produce: these figures so forcefully establish the sentence as a self-enclosed increment of language that it gives the impression that an abundance of meaning is bound up within it. I have argued elsewhere that Puttenham’s emphasis on the power of poetry to carry out tasks (to build cities, to make and establish laws, to reveal the mysteries of the gods), leads him to conceive of poetic language as always motivated; as, in fact, the inherence of motivation in language. Puttenham’s understanding that poetic figures are deployed for specific purposes frequently leads him to conceive of poetic language in affective terms.⁷ Further to this I would like tentatively to suggest that sententiousness is Puttenham’s attempt to consider meaning as a motivated and purpose driven affect. I am tentative in suggesting this partly because I am tentatively working under the assumption that “meaning” (in this context) is semantic content, or subject matter; and that the operations performed by sententious figures are categorically different from those performed by sensable figures. But I am tentative more because the relationship between meaning and meaningfulness is peculiar and counter-intuitive: the presence of one does not mean the presence of the other. In fact, meaningfulness sometimes seems to require meaning to be withheld, or not fully present; something might look meaningful precisely because we do not know what it means.

5. “a foolish figure” Puttenham describes sententious figures as “brave,” by which he means showy, resplendent. It is we, and not him, who are aware of those pejorative meanings of “sententiousness”: pomposity, affectation. Shakespeare was quite aware both

6 The word “sententious” clearly had a particular importance for Puttenham, and of the 15 times he uses it throughout the Art, he uses it 6 times in his introduction to these figures. 7 Cf. Lamb (2009).

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of the rhetorical means of achieving sententious pomposity, and its tendency to retard the transmission of sense. Indeed, it is out of annoyance with Polonius’ inability to say anything plainly that Gertrude curtly demands: “More matter with less art.” Undeterred and unaware, Polonius continues: Madam, I swear I use no art at all, That he is mad ’tis true; ’tis true ’tis pity; And pity ’tis ’tis true. A foolish figure – But farewell it, for I will use no art. Mad let us grant him then. And now remains That we find out the cause of this effect, Or rather say the cause of his defect, For this effect defective comes by cause. Thus it remains; and the remainder thus. (2.II; 96–104)

Most striking here is Polonius’ inability to wrest himself from this foolish figure; he fails to practise the artfulness that hides his art. But sententious figures are brave, and hard to hide. Indeed, in such instances as this, they perform a troubling congealment of language whereby, in a sense, we are forced to look at the words rather than through them. Although Shakespeare uses these figures to dramatize the failure of language (or its speaker) to communicate meaning effectively, he has done so through the over-deployment of figures which do in fact succeed in generating sententiousness. The speech is funny because the words promise far more meaning than they actually deliver; the aura of profundity shimmers round a void. There is a fine line between an utterance which radiates meaningfulness in this way, and one that (in so doing) shows itself to be incapable of effectively transmitting the meaning it promised; a fine line, that is, between the aura of profundity and folly. With such a devastating disregard for communicating anything other than their own impressiveness, Polonius’ words present themselves as a self-contained unit of language hermetically sealed off from anything we might call dialogue.

6. “my own worth do define”: Sonnet 62 Although sententious figures can be deployed in the context of any topic, there are some which encourage it more than others. In the lines from Raleigh that Puttenham uses as an example of ploche, the repetition of personal pronouns – “I,” “my,” and “you” – as well as “self” and “loved” arise by virtue of a conceit in which the speaker loves himself for loving his lady. A similar conceit is operative in Shakespeare’s sonnet 62, in which the basis of the speaker’s rampant self-love

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is his love for the youth, whose features he vicariously assumes. The result is a virtuosic performance of iterative wordplay. (I have italicised the repeated words.) Sin of self-love possesseth all mine eye, And all my soul, and all my every part; And for this sin there is no remedy, It is so grounded inward in my heart. Methinks no face so gracious is as mine, No shape so true, no truth of such account, And for myself my own worth do define As I all other in all worths surmount. But when my glass shows me myself indeed, Beated and chopped with tanned antiquity, Mine own self-love quite contrary I read; Self, so self-loving, were iniquity; ’Tis thee (myself ) that for myself I praise, Painting my age with beauty of thy days. (Shakespeare 2002)

As in the 2 lines from Raleigh, so in these 14 lines the repetition causes no alteration in the meanings of the repeated words. Rather, the variety of pulsating iterations produces the effect of a persuasive and almost unrelenting coherence. Consider, for instance, “Methinks no face so gracious is as mine, / No shape so true, no truth of such account”: the “no … so” repetition as well as the “so true, no truth” repetition give the impression of logical, even syllogistic argument, of steps in a dialectic which seem to have the very ring of truth. The sense of coherence is not a formal quality of the sonnet, nor something that can be abstracted from its verbal performance.⁸ Nor does it have anything to do with the meanings of its words. Coherence here is an affect, an aura, the impression that the repetitions give of a plausible, even an inexorable unravelling.

7. “having traffic with thyself alone” One way of describing the comedic effect of Polonius’ speech is to say that his sententious language values itself too highly; its pomposity is that it remains so

8 The full force of the repetitions can perhaps best be gauged in line 10, the only line to contain no repeated words. As the speaker reconsiders his self-love by considering his true reflection in the glass, we experience a slackening in the energy and impetus of the sonnet, its coherence momentarily broken.

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enamoured of its own worth that it fails to communicate its subject effectively. Sonnet 62, whose sententious figures fill its language with a sense of its own worth, is a poem all about self-worth, and the insurmountable value the poet puts upon his own image. We see him gazing admiringly upon an internal reflection of himself, an unmistakable allusion to Narcissus. In both sonnet 62 and the lines from Raleigh, personal pronouns – “I,” “my,” “you” – as well as the word “self” come to the fore, as if their very repetition were performing the act of narcissistic absorption and self-enclosure. It is certainly tempting to use the imagery of narcissism when describing the operation of these figures of repetition. By them, a poem seems to gaze longingly upon its own words, self-absorbed, palindromic, as if generating from out of itself a sense of its own profundity. For purely statistical reasons, it is perhaps unsurprising that personal pronouns would commonly be those words selected for repetition to achieve sententious affects, and Shakespeare does seem to use this kind of repetition when dealing with narcissism. Examples can be found in the first 17 sonnets which famously figure the youth as narcissistic. Sonnet 4: “For having traffic with thyself alone, / Thou of thyself thy sweet self dost deceive” (4; 9–10). (This is itself an echo of a line in sonnet 1: “Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel” (1; 8).) Although it may well be impossible to tell whether narcissism engenders the figure, or whether the figure engenders the narcissism, we are nevertheless led to the following question: does Shakespeare here formulate and perform a rhetoric of narcissism in which sententious figures constitute the verbal performance of a narcissistic self? Although Shakespeare’s sonnets have long been recognised as narcissistic, Jane Hedley is one of the few critics to have identified in them a rhetoric of narcissism, one which, she claims, is characterised by semantic instability and equivocation which is “at odds with language-as-communication and which blurs the boundaries language establishes between self and not-self, past and present, ‘mine’ and ‘thine’” (Hedley 1994, p. 1–30). I have found Hedley’s article very helpful because it is an illuminating and scholarly example of the kind of analysis that I do not wish to perform. And it is for this reason that I want to give it voice. According to Hedley, sonnet 62 calls attention to the intrapsychic status of the mirror relation. What the couplet thus confesses is that selflove has been rekindled in the experience of loving another: the “ideal ego” is lost but then found again in the “ego ideal” that mirrors it back ... Sonnet 62 calls attention to the strange economy of this transaction – whereby, as Freud explains, “the subject seems to yield up his whole personality in favour of an object-cathexis” (Hedley 1994).

This is not the first time that such a reading has been performed on one of Shakespeare’s sonnets. In fact, anyone would be hard pressed to argue that sonnet 62

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is not narcissistic. The problem I have with this reading has less to do with it, than with the sonnet itself. I do not feel, when reading sonnet 62, that it brings me into contact with a psyche. I do not feel that it seeks to represent a mind, or to communicate thought. As we saw, Puttenham describes sententious figures as “brave,” by which he means, “splendid, gorgeously apparelled, showy.” We saw also the degree to which Polonius’s addiction to sententious repetition made it impossible for him to produce language containing, in Gertrude’s words, “More matter with less art.” Figures of repetition produce meaningfulness by drawing attention to themselves, and not their subject matter. After all, as Puttenham says, to “vanquish the mind of man” the poet must use “sensible approaches,” and sententious figures are unique in that they appeal to the ear and mind simultaneously. The language of sonnet 62 shows us the degree to which the speaker’s voice is manipulated, even determined by the aural materiality of language, reminding us that the communication of thought and the representation of a mind is bound by, if not born of, “sensible approaches.” In this, it tends towards the condition of music. As a consequence, I would like to conjecture, sonnet 62 gives the impression of not being spoken by anyone. Amidst the copious torrent of verbal iteration, we are brought into contact not with a self, but – intimating Wittgenstein – a phenomenon of language.

8. “the aura of coherence” “And nothing gainst time’s scythe can make defence / Save breed to brave him when he takes thee hence” (12; 13–14). This is the closing couplet to sonnet 12, a sonnet which describes the destructive powers of time, and which, in these final two lines, offers its addressee, the youth, a solution. Stephen Booth, arguably the most influential contemporary critic of the sonnets, provides an extensive phonetic analysis of the relationship between this couplet and the rest of the sonnet, concluding: “The sounds of the couplet ... grow from the lines that precede it and give an extra-logical sound of truth, sense of propriety, inevitability, and completeness to the sonnet” (Booth 1969, p. 78). Booth’s account of this “extralogical sound of truth” is an attempt to isolate the verbal arrangements which produce sententiousness, or (at least) what I take to be its attendant affects: coherence, plausibility, profundity. But where Puttenham observes and describes sententious iteration as it occurs in single sentences, Booth’s description of the experience of reading Shakespeare’s sonnets offers the possibility that forms of repetition, including phonetic iteration, can create a sententious effect over the course of an entire sonnet sequence:

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[T]he great number of different kinds of phonetic and substantial connections made among the sonnets by repetition of the various ideas that can be expressed by bear and bare, and by repetition of all the various forms and senses of the words themselves, gives the whole sequence an illogically powerful aura of coherence. (Booth 1969, p. 14)

In the absence of a “constantly dominant organizing principle”  – a clear narrative, an orderly transition from one theme to the next – the sonnets rely on a variety of iterative techniques to produce the aura of coherence (Booth 1969, p. 12). As in sonnet 62, coherence is not a formal attribute, but a powerful affect which inveigles the mind, making utterances seem meaningful without altering their meaning. In Booth’s analysis, this aura of coherence is the effect of a certain unfulfilled promise of a final and complete meaning. “[We feel that] Shakespeare is saying something in the collection as a whole that the reader can almost but never quite hear, and that in a moment more or with a moment’s more attention he will hear it, and that it will be a simple and satisfying sound” (Booth 1969, p. 2). But the simple sound never comes. The sonnets leave us on the cusp of an event which never happens. According to Booth, this does not leave us unsatisfied. In fact, quite the opposite is true. At the moment of unparticularized perception the mind is unlimited. It seems capable of grasping and about to grasp a coherence beyond its capacity. As he reads through the 1609 sequence, a reader’s mind is constantly poised on just such a threshold to comprehension. (Booth 1969, p. 14)

The reader’s mind perceives coherence before it perceives the particular nature of that coherence. Although the reader is strenuously invited to comprehend this coherence, he remains poised on the threshold. For there his entry is halted. The promise which is never fulfilled but whose fulfilment is always expected; the simple and satisfying sound that we know is there, but remains just out of earshot: these are other metaphors which depict a reader poised on a threshold. Perhaps unwittingly, Booth’s description raises the unnerving possibility that the reader’s entry is halted because he has nothing to enter into; that Shakespeare’s sonnets are all threshold and no house. What interests me more, however, is the way the sonnets produce this feeling in the reader of being drawn in, but kept on some kind of outside. This, I suggest, is the result of the coherence affects the sonnets produce; affects which simultaneously invite comprehension, and yet comprise such an irresistible aura of internal coherence as to render the sonnets impenetrable.

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9. Shakespeare and the Dream Attempting, once more, to describe the experience of reading a Shakespeare sonnet, Booth compares it to “a dream where one accepts improbable transformations without hesitation and where on slips imperceptibly form one frame of reference to another.” Like a dream, the sonnets exude an aura of coherence which compels us to accept their implausible unrealism. Booth’s An Essay on Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and his monumental edition, are both exercises in close reading which do not lead to readings. Though its effects are meticulously described, the dream remains uninterpreted; its haunting efficacy does not have a final explanation. Wittgenstein too comments on this same dream-like quality: Shakespeare & the dream. A dream is all wrong, absurd, composite, & yet completely right: in this strange concoction it makes an impression. Why? I don’t know. And if Shakespeare is great, as he is said to be, then we must be able to say of him: Everything is wrong, things aren’t like that – & is all the same completely right according to a law of his own. It could be put like this too: If Shakespeare is great, then he can be so only in the whole corpus of his plays, which create their own language & world. So he is completely unrealistic. (Like the dream.) (Wittgenstein VB 1998, p. 89e)

The “strange concoction” of implausibility and irresistible coherence that Shakespeare achieves establishes his corpus as an alternative, dream-like reality sealed off from our own. We are, once more, looking in, halted upon a threshold. I ought to mention here my indebtedness to Peter Hughes’ two outstanding articles which situate Wittgenstein’s trouble with Shakespeare within his disagreement with Freud. Wittgenstein recognises that Freud’s explanation of dreams as wish-fulfilment has the same “marked attraction” that “mythological explanations have, explanations which say that this is all a repetition of something that has happened before” (Wittgenstein 2001, p. 43). And Hughes works to demonstrate that the force of such explanation comes not from scientific evidence, but the complexity and scope of the language-game Freud had used to construct it. Yet it also comes from the nature of the dream images themselves which seem to demand explanation. It is characteristic of dreams that often they seem to the dreamer to call for an interpretation. One is hardly ever inclined to write down a day dream, or recount it to someone else, or to ask, “What does it mean?” But dreams do seem to have something puzzling and in a special way interesting about them – so that we want an interpretation of them. (They were often regarded as messages.) There seems to be something in dream images that has a certain resemblance to the signs of a language. As a series of marks on paper or on sand might have. There might be

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no mark which we recognized as a conventional sign in any alphabet we knew, and yet we might have a strong feeling that they must be a language of some sort: that they mean something. There is a cathedral in Moscow with five spires. On each of these there is a different sort of curving configuration. One gets the strong impression that these different shapes and arrangements must mean something. (Wittgenstein 2001, p. 45)

The Shakespearean corpus, like the signs of an unknown language, would seem to have this dream-like quality of being “all wrong, absurd,” whilst also appearing to be overwhelmingly meaningful, requiring of an explanation. We register Shakespeare’s work not in terms of specific, clarified meanings, but, like the five spires on the Moscow cathedral, as a powerful meaningfulness whose actual significance remains undisclosed to us. We stand in awe of it – vanquished, proclaiming its greatness, demanding explanations – because we do not understand it, even though it looks coherent unto itself, as if it must mean something. We ought, above all, to be attentive to the way Wittgenstein uses the comparison between Shakespeare and the dream to show that if we want to maintain that Shakespeare is great, we must be able to say that he is great “according to a law of his own.” To the literary critic, this is a tantalising invitation. Erroneously thinking that Wittgenstein asserts that there is a discernable law which we can abstract from the Shakespeare universe, Jonathan Bate has gone digging for it. He unearths not one, but two. The first law is that “truth is not singular,” and the second is that “being and acting are indivisible” (Bate 1997, p.  327, 332). These are both interesting, and may even be incisive. But in missing the point Wittgenstein is trying to make – that Shakespeare’s corpus, like the dream, gives off the seductive impression of operating to undisclosed rules – Bate has fallen prey to its barbed criticism. He becomes Wittgenstein’s quintessential Bardolator, inveigled, and digging for an explanation for creations that nobody knows the meaning of. He plays Freud to Shakespeare’s dream. In the end, explaining the Shakespearean dream is about as hopeless as translating birdsong into human language. (With or without speech, Wittgenstein’s lion will always remain not understood.) But in recognising that we cannot understand, we nevertheless also recognise that there is something in Shakespeare to be understood. We experience something similar when looking at the alphabet of an unknown language whose deliberate strokes give the impression of signification. It is an experience we might also ascribe to that of the dog when, knowing some commands, she is spoken to in words or sounds she does not recognise: she stares at you intently, and will cock her head, as if concentrating, trying to understand. Without wanting to anthropomorphise the dog into a literary critic, I am tempted to interpret her head-cocking as a recognition that there were sounds to be understood (even though she did not understand them), rather than merely

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inarticulate noise. I suspect that there is more than merely a paradoxical elegance in the observation that the greatest writer in English has been able to give us an experience of human language commensurate to that of an animal. It is to Wittgenstein’s credit to have given us a way of cocking our heads.

Bibliography Bate, Jonathan (1997): The Genius of Shakespeare. London: Picador. Booth, Stephen (1969): An Essay on Shakespeare’s Sonnets. New Haven: Yale University Press. Eliot, T.S. (1975): “Milton I”. In: Frank Kermode (Ed.): Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot. London: Harcourt Brace. Hedley, Jane (1994): “Since First Your Eye I Eyed: Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the Poetics of Narcissism”. In: Style 28. No. 1, p. 1–30. Hughes, Peter (1988): “Painting the Ghost: Wittgenstein, Shakespeare, and Textual Representation”. In: New Literary History 19. No. 2, p. 371–84. Hughes, Peter (1992): “Performing Theory: Wittgenstein and the Trouble with Shakespeare”. In: Comparative Criticism 14, p. 71–86. Lamb, Julian (2009): “A Defence of Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie”. In: English Literary Renaissance 39. No. 1, p. 24–46. Leavis, F.R. (1994): Revaluation: Tradition and Development in English Poetry. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Milton, John (1971): Complete Shorter Poems. John Carey (Ed.). London: Longman. Plato (1993): Republic. Robin Waterfield (Ed. and trans.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Puttenham, George (2007): The Art of English Poesy (1589). Frank Whigham/Wayne A. Rebhorn (Eds). Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Shakespeare, William (1623): Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. John Hemminges/Henry Condell (Eds). London. Shakespeare, William (2002): Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Ed.). London: Thomson Learning. Shakespeare, William (2008): Hamlet. G.R. Hibberd (Ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Steiner, George (1996): “A Reading Against Shakespeare”. In: George Steiner: No Passion Spent: Essays 1978–1995. New Haven: Yale University Press, p. 108–128. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (2001): Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief. Cyril Barrett (Ed.). Oxford: Blackwell.

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Why the Tractatus, like the Old Testament, is “Nothing but a Book” 1. “I have been reading Lessing (on the Bible)” Wittgenstein notes in 1930 (VB 1980b, p. 8). He then cites some lines from The Education of the Human Race in which G. E. Lessing describes what he calls the “style” of the books of the Old Testament, which is sometimes plain and simple, sometimes poetical, throughout full of tautologies, but of such a kind as practiced sagacity, since they sometimes appear to be saying something else, and yet the same thing; sometimes the same thing over again, and yet to signify or to be capable of signifying at the bottom, something else. (Lessing 1872, p. 42)

The Old Testament’s many tautologies are for Lessing what supply its “negative perfection”, the essential quality that comes from “not throwing difficulties or hindrances in the way to a suppressed truth”. The tautologies have rhetorical purpose since in addition to what Lessing calls the Old Testament’s “positive perfection”, what “hints” and “allusions” it manages to throw off, they are what give it “all the properties of excellence which belong to a Primer”.¹ A Primer must excite curiosity and occasion questions, through its poetical parts, but Lessing insists it cannot mislead, which is why it is full of tautologies – formulas that are true whatever the truth or falsity of their basic components. The most distinctive characteristic of a Primer, Lessing notes, the identifying feature it shares with the Old Testament, is that in it what can be said is said clearly and what cannot be said is passed over in silence: A Primer for children may fairly pass over in silence this or that important piece of knowledge or art which it expounds, respecting which the Teacher judged, that it is not yet fitted for the capacities of the children for whom he was writing. But it must contain absolutely nothing which blocks up the way towards the knowledge which is held back, or misleads the children from it. Rather, all the approaches towards it must be carefully left open; and

1 “By a ‘hint’ I mean that which already contains any germ, out of which the, as yet, held back truth allows itself to be developed”, Lessing writes. “By allusion I mean that which was intended only to excite curiosity and to occasion questions. As, for instance, the oft-recurring mode of expression, describing death by ‘he was gathered to his fathers.’” (Lessing 1872, p. 41)

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to lead them away from even one of these approaches, or to cause them to enter it later than they need, would alone be enough to change the mere imperfection of such a Primer into an actual fault. (Lessing 1872, p. 21f.)

No wonder Lessing made good reading for the author of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the most important part of which lies in what had not been written.² Wittgenstein took note of Lessing’s remarks on the Old Testament because he too had finished a book designed above all to educate – or as Lessing puts it, “begin from the beginning” with a select, benighted audience. And by not blocking the way toward it, he too had taken care to leave open the path to a held-back truth. The chosen audience for the book Wittgenstein had written consisted of philosophers who misunderstood the logic of language. As Wittgenstein hints in his Preface to the Tractatus, this misunderstanding has to do with the question of “what can be said” in our language. In principle, what makes it possible for an indicative or declarative sentence to “say something” is the sentence’s propositional content (or proposition, as philosophers use the term): “what is asserted” when a declarative sentence is used to say something true or false. However the essential character of propositional signs is in the Tractatus the subject of debate, since the philosophers who Wittgenstein charges with misunderstanding the logic of language think of propositional signs in terms of their propositional content, their capacity for saying something, and Wittgenstein, in contrast, thinks that the interesting thing about propositional signs is how many of them do not “say” anything at all. For Wittgenstein, what needs to be shown is shown by a propositional sign, but not because a speaker has used it to settle something about the world – used it to say something false or true. Thus of particular significance to Wittgenstein, I would like to suggest, was the implication throughout Lessing’s work that the Old Testament’s many tautologies “say” nothing, but even so are intellectually indispensable  – instructive, illuminating – to an audience who grasps them rightly. What Lessing says about the Old Testament’s tautologies corresponds to Wittgenstein’s own directive near the end of the Tractatus that readers who understand him do so despite the fact that the seven separate sentences (einzelnen Sätze) on which his book is built

2 Wittgenstein offers this description of the Tractatus in a letter to Ludwig von Ficker, wherein he explains that his 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…. In short, I believe that where many others today are just gassing, I have managed in my book to put everything firmly into place by being silent about it” (Engelmann 1967, p. 143f.).

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say nothing.³ Reading the Tractatus with understanding means acknowledging that these sentences have no way of referring to anything in the world (so are in this way “senseless”) and that their careful arrangement affords readers a perspicuous view: Meine Sätze are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount diese Sätze; then he sees the world rightly.⁴ (TLP 1999/1922, 6.54)

Since the lesson that declarative sentences can be both senseless and elucidatory is not, on the whole, in keeping with the kind of instruction most readers expect to find in works of philosophy, readers of the Tractatus are reminded by it of Wittgenstein’s promise that his first book of philosophy offers an instance of writing that is “strictly philosophical and at the same time literary”, or that the book he has written is “not a textbook”⁵ – a promise generations of Wittgenstein’s readers have struggled to fully understand. But before seeing how Wittgenstein’s remarks on Lessing illuminate what kind of book the Tractatus is, it is useful to get a handle on what Lessing actually says. Of particular interest to Wittgenstein in The Education of the Human Race is Lessing’s idea that rather than demonstrate His Mightiness to a people whom He wished to educate, God provides them with a special kind of book, a Primer, one fitted for the capacities of those for whom he was writing. Only by these means could he offer an education suitable to the “future Teachers of the human race”, since only “a people so brought up” could become teachers themselves.⁶ At the

3 We can say that the Tractatus is built on these seven separate sentences because as Wittgenstein points out, n1, n2, etc., are comments on no. n; n.m1, n.m2, etc., are comments on no. n.m; and so on. 4 In this essay I intentionally rely on the translation by Ogden (assisted by Frank P. Ramsey) as opposed to the more recent translation by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness. However, since both Ogden and Pears and McGuiness translate Wittgenstein’s Sätze as “propositions”, and it seems to me that discovering how to think of Wittgenstein’s Sätze comprises the central work of reading the Tractatus, I have kept this term in the original German. 5 Wittgenstein’s description of his writing as literary is found in his account of the work to a prospective publisher, Ludwig von Ficker. Quoted in von Wright (1982, p. 81). The promise that the Tractatus is not a textbook appears in Wittgenstein’s preface to the work. 6 After introducing the idea that God wished to educate the Hebrew people, “a race of slaves … not permitted to take part in the worship of the Egyptians”, and not simply reveal Himself to them, Lessing writes: “But, it will be asked, to what purpose was this education of so rude a people, a people with whom God had to begin so entirely from the beginning? I reply, in order

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heart of Lessing’s conception of the Old Testament as a Primer is his suggestion that this work doesn’t verify but acts as a substitute for “the miracles which [God] performed for the Jews, the prophecies which He caused to be recorded”. Such proofs as engendered confidence in Him were not adequate to educate a whole people, Lessing writes, who would “not for a long time elevate themselves” (Lessing 1872, p. 9) to a true conception and who were thus offered in place of confirmation of God’s Divinity the means by which to develop their faculties for thinking.⁷ Only by thinking through philosophically troublesome concepts could members of the nation become teachers, but this exercising of the mind Lessing associates with the “child-like education” made possible through obedience and the searching examination of an astute introductory text; with the work of reading, not the use of reason: Even if the first man were furnished at once with a conception of the One God; yet it was not possible that this conception, imparted, and not gained by thought, should subsist long in its clearness. As soon as the Human Reason, left to itself, began to elaborate it, it broke up the one Immeasurable into many Measurables, and gave a note or sign of mark to every one of these parts. Hence naturally arose polytheism and idolatry. And who can say how many millions of years human reason would have been bewildered in these errors, even though in all places and times there were individual men who recognized them as errors, had it not pleased God to afford it a better direction by means of a new Impulse? (Lessing 1872, p. 5)

Reading confronts us as a task or activity, an effort of understanding we feel ourselves required to make. With the advent of the Old Testament, then, man’s natural tendencies – to measure, to determine, to evaluate, usually in relation to a standard he has himself introduced – are thus obstructed by a book: the kind of book, moreover, that doesn’t record history or describe reality so much as ask readers to reposition themselves in order to actively extend their understanding. We are in the habit of calling books that require understanding “literature”, although calling the Old Testament a work of literature needn’t exclude the possibility that its author is God. It is the case, however, that works of liter-

that in the process of time He might employ particular members of this nation as the Teachers of other people. He was bringing up in them the future Teachers of the human race. It was the Jews who became their teachers, none but the Jews; only men out of a people so brought up, could be their teachers” (Lessing 1872, p. 13). 7 “The miracles which He performed for the Jews”, writes Lessing, “the prophecies which He caused to be recorded through them, were surely not for the few mortal Jews, in whose time they had happened and been recorded: He had His intentions therein in reference to the whole Jewish people, to the entire Human Race, which, perhaps, is destined to remain on earth forever, though every individual Jew and every individual man die forever” (Lessing 1872, p. 17).

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ature make use of expressions that are misread if taken literally. Literary books cannot be confused with those books “treating of actual men and events”, as Herman Melville has written, since literary taste is that which “less heeds the thing conveyed than the vehicle” (Melville 1962, p. 62). A literary work’s value is determined by the fact that the writing has been authored and is therefore to be looked at, if something is to be understood, and not through, as if to a pre-existing reality the writing simply reflects. As Plato first pointed out, the techne required to formulate accurate descriptions of reality belongs to the scientist, not the writer – which is why literature is used wrongly when we fail to see that the form of a literary work (and through it an author’s formulation of a particular experience; a subject as it is seen) is of greater import than what it reveals or discloses about the world, what Melville calls the “thing conveyed”. Wittgenstein, like Lessing before him, is clearly attracted to the idea that the form of the Bible has everything to do with the reason for which it has been made. This theme also animates much of the work of O. K. Bouwsma, Wittgenstein’s colleague and friend, who as his editors note is sensitive to the power of Scripture to redirect a reader’s energies, to offer “reminders for orienting one’s intelligence when it is confused by the philosophically troublesome concepts of faith, belief, proof, and evidence” (Bouwsma 1984, p.  ix). As J. L. Craft and Ronald Hustwit observe: God is a writer or consignor of writers, and now there is a book that is a collection of stories, history, songs, poems, parables, laws, eyewitness accounts, teachings, proverbs, prophesies, and letters. What is the reader to do with this book? What is its purpose? How do its various forms of literature and concepts relate to the realization of that purpose? How is a reader to find out? (Bouwsma 1984, p. viii).

Drawing Wittgenstein to Lessing is the latter’s preoccupation with the remarkableness of the book God has sent to mankind; the kind of book that teaches man what literature, rather than history or science, teaches him; the sort of resource for thinking that Wittgenstein himself hoped to generate. To put Lessing’s interest in the Old Testament differently, and to tie it to a strain of philosophy interested in literature’s practical use, we might say that reading an authored work, as opposed to one that is merely descriptive or explanatory, that only exists in the context of a priority to which it must always refer, blocks a reader’s desire to see through the text to the matter being discussed and instead encourages her to attend more readily or with more understanding to a view that would not have been possible within her own limited horizon. When a reader struggles to understand what an author says, she understands not his person, his “psychology”, nor simply his view; rather she tries to discover the relation in which he stands to his subject. She can then consider whether this way of looking at a subject has some soundness

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or validity for her, too. The power of an authored work is thus “coterminous with its power” to call into question a reader’s habitual, settled ways of thinking, as Bernard Harrison explains is true of all literature: to invite the reader to look again at the practices and associated presumptions that we ordinarily take for granted, as unalterably inseparable from the living of whatever version of human life it is that we happen to lead, in whatever human world we happen to inhabit, under the strange, oblique, uncanny light that a powerful contrary imagination can cast upon them.⁸

It isn’t familiarity with new subjects that a proper use of literature encourages so much as the possibility of a new self, which is why we read literature not to escape from the world but in order to learn how to act properly in it. The idea that readers of an authored or literary work must move themselves around in order to understand it (and that the Old Testament was in this way the first of its kind) unites the interests of literature and philosophy, much as it unites the interests of Wittgenstein and Lessing. For Wittgenstein as for Lessing, the Old Testament’s importance has to do with the education it offers readers, not what it “says” about reality, or what, in the way of the propositions of natural science, its declarative sentences are able to convey. This is what Wittgenstein can be seen to have grasped when, after reading Lessing, he wrote in his diary: “With the Bible I have nothing but a book in front of me. But why do I say ‘nothing but a book’? I have a book in front of me, a document which, if it remains alone, cannot have greater value than any other document. (This is what Lessing meant.)” (Wittgenstein, 2003, p. 157) When Wittgenstein calls the Bible “nothing but a book” he is not declaring, as might be supposed, against this book’s Divine origin. Rather he is agreeing with Lessing that the books of the Old Testament neither transmit knowledge nor offer any argument that serves to establish the truth of something. Even the Old Testament does not offer proof of God’s divinity, for example; what is more, the idea of verifying belief is wholly foreign to it. What doctrines contained therein, like the doctrine of the Unity of God, which as Lessing says “in a way is found, and in a way is not found, in the books of the Old Testament”, teach man “nothing which he might not educe out of himself, only quickly and more easily”⁹ (Lessing 1872, p. 15–16). The philosophical activity or education the Old

8 The lines of Bernard Harrison’s are from his new as yet unpublished work What Is Fiction For? Literary Humanism Restored forthcoming from Indiana University Press. 9 Wittgenstein glosses this notion when, after reading Lessing, he writes in his diary: “The sermon can be the precondition of belief, but in itself it cannot aim to impel belief. (If these

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Testament elicits from its readers thus contrasts with the philosophical work conventionally associated with it – that of presenting the reader with a doctrine. Lessing’s suggestion that, as Wittgenstein puts it, the Old Testament is “nothing but a book”, develops from his original insight that the tautological propositions that fill its pages will be construed wrongly if the reader thinks her task is to determine their truth value because they form the basis of a belief or theory. To fully appreciate the service tautologies perform in the Old Testament, it is useful to turn to the moment in the Tractatus when, as part of his discussion of the truth and falsity conditions for declarative sentences, Wittgenstein introduces two “extreme cases:” tautology and contradiction. At 4.461 Wittgenstein writes: The tautology has no truth-conditions, for it is unconditionally true; and the contradiction is on no condition true. Tautology and contradiction are without sense (sinnlos). (Like the point from which two arrows go out in opposite directions.) (I know, e.g. nothing about the weather, when I know that it rains or does not rain.)

Wittgenstein then clarifies the particular way in which tautology and contradiction “lack sense” when he comments at 4.611 that, Tautology and contradiction are, however, not nonsensical (unsinnig); they are part of the symbolism, in the same way that “0” is part of the symbolism of Arithmetic.

As Wittgenstein explains, tautologies can’t be used or are “senseless” with the connotation of useless (sinnlos) because they cannot say anything about the actual world. Because they cannot say anything they are as Kant has promised empty, void of consequence, “of no avail or use”. As in Wittgenstein’s example, the tautological proposition that it rains or does not rain says nothing about the weather.¹⁰ Nevertheless, tautologies do play a role in meaningful discourse, as they number among the (ever-expanding) well-formed sentences that make up language. Tautologies do not “say anything”, but as well-formed propositional signs they contribute, the way “0” contributes to Arithmetic, to language’s expressive possibilities.

words could attach one to belief, other words could also attach one to belief.) Believing begins with Believing” (Wittgenstein 2003, p. 159). 10 Wittgenstein’s remarks at 4.462 further support the opening claim of 4.461 that tautology and contradiction show that they say nothing, or do not stand in a “presenting relation” to the actual world: “Tautology and contradiction are not pictures of the reality (der Wirklichkeit)” he writes. “They present no possible state of affairs. For the one allows every possible state of affairs, the other none”.

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Like Wittgenstein, Lessing has a special interest in the identifying properties of tautological propositions, namely, that they can be recognized by their form alone (as Wittgenstein notes at 6.127, “Every tautology itself shows that it is a tautology”), and that the unconditional truths they reveal do not have anything to do with experience. Tautologies have attracted Lessing’s attention because he understands that if the propositions of the Old Testament are tautological, they are also purely logical. What conclusions they offer are reached through calculation, not experiment. The propositions of the Old Testament are in other words not like the propositions of natural science but like the propositions of mathematics – which, precisely because what they shed light on can’t be confirmed by experience any more than it can be refuted by it, are better described as equations. Lessing’s rather astonishing insight seems to be that the Old Testament is not full of arguments or attempts to persuade but equations. Equations are operations intended to show up the substitutability of different expressions (for example 2 x 2 on the one side of the = sign, 4 on the other) without changing their truth-value and without making any other kind of assertion. Because the results of equations are self-evident or do not require explanation or proof, it is understood that equations do not “say anything” or convey any information about reality. Thus the crucial point of Lessing’s view that the Old Testament is “throughout full of tautologies” is this: when Lessing suggests that the Old Testament’s propositions are tautological or function like equations, he is saying that these propositions lack what philosophers call “assertoric force” or “propositional content”. They do not stand in what Wittgenstein calls a “presenting relation” to actual reality. Because they function like equations, the tautological propositions of the Old Testament are pseudo-propositions.¹¹ On the other hand, although tautological propositions present no possible state of affairs, it is possible by means of these operations involving no more than interchanges of expressions to reveal a pattern of meaningful relationships or enable meaningful propositions to be stated. That is what Wittgenstein’s friend Paul Engelmann argues when he compares tautologies to mathematical equations. “A tautology is not a meaningful proposition (i.e. one with a content)”, writes Engelmann, “yet it can be an indispensable intellectual device, an instrument that can help us – if used correctly in grasping reality, that is in grasping facts – to arrive at insights difficult or impossible to attain by other means”. As Engelmann explains,

11 See the Tractatus, 4.462: “In the tautology the conditions of agreement with the world – the presenting relations – cancel one another, so that it stands in no presenting relation to reality” and 6.2: “The propositions of mathematics are equations, and therefore pseudo-propositions”.

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Mathematics, according to Wittgenstein, is a method of logic, and – like all logical propositions – its expressions are tautologies. Logic enables meaningful propositions to be stated, but there are no meaningful propositions of logic itself. Mathematics constitutes a method that does not teach us anything new about the content of propositions. What it does teach us is to manipulate expressions by substitution in such a way as to throw their structure into relief and to cast it in the desired form, which was latent in the original meaningful proposition … It is possible, then, by means of these operations, involving no more than such interchanges of expressions, to arrive at final forms of expressions which are psychologically more effective than the original expressions in revealing a pattern of relationships. This is precisely what constitutes the value of mathematics to science. (Engelmann 1967, p. 105– 106)

As we might also say, pseudo-propositions or propositions that function as equations are valuable components of language.¹² Like equations, we use them to reveal patterns of relationships, which they do without our having to know or say about the sentence what is a representation of what – without, in other words, our having to analyze the sentence. Of course it is also the case that pseudo-propositions or equations are only valuable if we do not conceive of them as propositions that “say something”. Perhaps only Wittgenstein could have seen so immediately that for Lessing, the propositions of the Old Testament work the way equations do. If the tautological propositions in this book, like the equations in mathematics, are pseudo-propositions, then they don’t teach readers anything that has to do with what we might call the “content” of the proposition, anything that has to do with whether what actually happens is this or that. What they do teach us is to “imagine expressions by substitution in such a way as to throw their structure into relief”, as Engelmann explains. We see, for example, the way in which “God is the maker of all things” has the same structure as 2 x 2 = 4, and so why the unconditional truth this equation offers is not accessible to investigation through the senses. Consider the kind of proposition one does not find in the Old Testament, the proposition that has a content or says something or is either true or false: “There is a God”. Lessing’s assessment of the Old Testament turns on the difference between a proposition like this one, a proposition that says something, i.e., the kind of proposition found in the natural sciences, and a proposition that says nothing, the kind of tautological proposition of which the Old Testament is

12 I am indebted to the philosopher David Charles McCarty and Yeshiva University undergraduate honors student Leah Goldberg for helping me to understand the ways in which tautologies have the qualities of equations p (q) but do not have an entirely symmetrical relationship with equations (p = q) as I mistakenly assumed in an early draft of this paper.

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full. Tautological or pseudo-propositions like “God is the maker of all things” say nothing because the sentence isn’t sustained by the way its terms pick out existing entities but, as it were, by the force of its own style. As a result we say that the pseudo-propositions of the Old Testament are content-less or void of consequence; there is no thing or referent that they denote. And yet as separate or individual declarative sentences they can be effectual at revealing patterns. They have what Lessing calls a “negative perfection”, or do nothing to block the path to truth. Because they are not a means by which a person offers or obtains information about the world, it is fair to call these pseudo-propositions “senseless” – but we must remember that all that really means is that what lessons one draws from the propositional sign are not related to the way the sign’s terms pick out existing entities but the way its predicate modifies its subject. Readers of the pseudo-proposition “God is the maker of all things” are not asked, and do not need to answer, what God is; rather they are thrust into relationship with “God” (as the maker of all things) the way they are thrust into relationship with “4” (as what has the same value as 2 x 2). The way each expression, “God”, and “the maker of all things”, throws the other into relief is what allows the proposition to contribute to thought. The lesson Wittgenstein draws from this insight is that the tautological propositions that fill the pages of the Old Testament are not propositions proper. Where, in the Old Testament, readers expect to find sentences that contain assertions (e.g. “There is a God”), they in fact find sentences designed to be elucidatory without saying anything about the nature of the subjects that figure in them (e.g., “God is the maker of all things”). And perhaps Wittgenstein sees, too, why this discovery ought to come as a relief to readers of every religious persuasion. As Lessing says, the absence in the Old Testament of a body of ideas taught to people as truthful or correct needn’t make the Old Testament any less true – “notwithstanding the absence of these doctrines”, notes Lessing, “the account of miracles and prophecies may be perfectly true”  – but it does make it unconditionally true, and in that way, “nothing but a book”. Each so-called proposition in the Old Testament invites thinking only when readers use it to understand “what is the case” in the picture (the thought) the proposition has – logically – constructed; that is, when readers recognize it for a pseudo or logical proposition. As Wittgenstein writes in a comment that gives many logicians pause, “to understand a proposition means to know what is the case, if it is true. (One can therefore understand it without knowing whether it is true or not.)” (TLP 1999, 4.024) Thus to call the Old Testament “nothing but a book” isn’t to reduce it. It is only to insist that the education it provides is made possible by the logical form of its propositional signs – that the pseudo-propositions of the Old Testament are not the significant propositions of natural science but the logical propositions

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of mathematics. And because logical (what Wittgenstein calls “philosophical”), they are not literal. Propositional signs that do not stick to the facts or adhere strictly to what can be shown to exist or to have happened must be read with what Wittgenstein calls “understanding”. They are the kinds of propositional signs that fill the pages of books. Hence my suggestion in what follows that the Tractatus’ literary quality is not simply the result of its austere poetic style¹³, but derives from its most singular feature: the way Wittgenstein makes clear in this work that a propositional sign is a “picture”, by which he means that a propositional sign is a logical portrayal of its meaning. When Wittgenstein demonstrates how the whole propositional sign, “like a living picture”, presents what he calls the “atomic fact” or un-analyzable state of affairs, he calls attention to the momentous realization that the way the propositional sign shows its meaning or puts forward for consideration what it pictures is internal, or located within the sign (TLP 1999, 4.031–4.032). This certainty about propositional signs changes what Wittgenstein calls “the task of philosophy”, since the effort of understanding we feel ourselves required to make can no longer involve the most taxing aspect of analyzing propositions: settling the way a referent is referred to in an expression (TB 1961, p. 2). Wittgenstein’s great insight was to see that the propositional signs of our language are able to bring something to mind without saying what is a representation of what. Thinking about the Tractatus in company with what Lessing says about the Old Testament has an immediate result, then, particularly when large numbers of Wittgenstein’s readers continue to think of his first book not as literary or educative but as an explanatory text. When these readers mistakenly argue, what is more, that Wittgenstein went about systematically trying to draw conclusions from the basic premises he introduced until, cornered by his own logic, he no longer could  – until he was forced to “abandon his own theory of meaning”, to admit defeat (on the matter of having solved the problems he had chosen to consider), to change his mind, etc., and to take up, in place of the “attractive but ultimately unsatisfactory” conviction that “propositions were pictures of reality”, the “critique of language” for which he has become so well known.¹⁴

13 Regarding Wittgenstein’s poetic style we might say, for example, that the density and cadence of his remarks both encourage a reader’s feeling of having grasped his meaning and make holding on to that feeling impossible. 14 This view of the Tractatus is relatively widespread, though in order to represent the position I have here selected phrases from David Pears’ Paradox and Platitude in Wittgenstein’s Philosophy (Pears 2006, p.  1–2, and p.  x). The description of Wittgenstein’s “attractive but ultimately unsatisfactory” view that “propositions were pictures of reality” is from the back

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In the following remarks I entertain the very different view that Wittgenstein never held that the world was the dominant partner in its relations with language, and so had no need to fundamentally change his impression of the logic of our language. I show how he too writes a book designed to educate, particularly those philosophers who he thought had failed to grasp the nature of propositional signs and thus the function and structure of language. And I suggest that the Tractatus is best understood when it is read as a Primer, a consciously crafted learning text, whose purpose is to encourage readers to think for themselves and provide them (by way of its sentences, what Wittgenstein calls “the data of philosophy”) with the means to do so.

2. Wittgenstein’s feeling that the nature of propositional signs (and thus the logic of language) has been misunderstood is triggered by one of his own characteristically reorienting questions: why, he wonders, should “what is said” by a proposition be of interest to philosophers? For Wittgenstein, the failure to consider that question results in a glaring omission in the writing of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, the logicians with whom Wittgenstein, in the Tractatus, felt himself in conversation. Wittgenstein was stimulated to write the Tractatus by his study of the works of Frege and Russell, as he writes in his Preface, and thinking of Wittgenstein’s first book of logic as beginning from a formally conceived response from a keenly perceptive student to his admired teachers is useful to the work of reading it, since as Paul Engelmann notes, Wittgenstein “carefully refrained in the Tractatus from referring directly to the history of philosophy; he even avoided, for the same reasons, any explicit mention of the traditional problems in philosophy” and in the work “confined himself  – rightly in view of its form  – to giving answers to questions on what he had to communicate” (Engelmann 1967, p. 106 and p. 115). What Wittgenstein felt he had to communicate was this: when propositional signs are conceived of in terms of what they say, the complete analysis of propositions has as a necessary precondition an investigation into the relationship between signs (the thoughts, words, or sentences of a language) and things (that which they refer to or represent). That is, the way the referent is referred to in the

cover of D. F. Pears’ and B. F. McGuinness’ translation of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1961/1974).

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expression feels like something the logician has to explain. However, Wittgenstein argues, this work is in excess of what is needed, or constitutes activity that goes beyond the scope of logic. Doing work in excess of what’s needed has serious consequences in logic since it introduces problems or difficulties to the matter being considered. As Wittgenstein notes, “if logic can be completed without answering certain questions, then it must be completed without answering them” (TB 1961, p. 3). Consequently, and with some finality, Wittgenstein puts the matter this way: if the rules which govern expression in language can operate at all, if we can have correctly formed sentences that operate according to the rules or accepted structures of syntax, then any question about the way the referent is referred to in the expression – or in other words the “whole theory of things, properties, etc.”, on which Frege and particularly Russell had been at work – is as Wittgenstein says, “superfluous” (TB 1961, p. 2). Wittgenstein frees philosophy from theorizing about things simply by pointing out that a sentence is a logical portrayal of its meaning, and only a logical portrayal of it (TB 1961, p. 5–6). In the Notebooks 1914–1916, Wittgenstein assesses critically his teachers’ interest in what Russell, in his introduction to the Tractatus, calls “the relations which are necessary between words and things in any language”. Frege had given legs to the logical investigation of the relation between signs and things when in an 1892 paper he distinguished between an expression’s “sense” and its “reference” – standard translations of Frege’s terms Sinn and Bedeutung. If the “reference” of an expression is the entity it stands for, its “sense” is the way the reference is referred to in the expression; the term “Sinn” or “sense” was initially introduced by Frege in order to solve the puzzle of identity. However the strongest of what Wittgenstein evidently thought were corrections to errors made by his teachers had to do with an insight he knew had not entered either Frege’s Grundgesetze or Russell’s Principia Mathematica: what one wishes to express can be expressed simply by putting it in subject-predicate form. What Wittgenstein points out is that the effort to offer a complete analysis of certain expressions has neglected to account for the fact that “logic must take care of itself”, as he says, or that a propositional sign is a logical portrayal of its meaning.¹⁵ This, the leitmotiv of the Tractatus and its accompanying Notebooks, means that we are able to grasp what is the case in an expression on the basis

15 “Logic must take care of itself” is the first line of the Notebooks and appears in the Tractatus at 5.473. The insight that a proposition shows what it pictures before the speakers of a language subject it to any kind of assessment is as Patricia Hanna and Bernard Harrison (2004, p. 2f.) suggest, the “leitmotiv” of the Tractatus and its accompanying volume, Notebooks 1914–1916.

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of what Wittgenstein calls its internal agreement. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein shows why an expression’s internal agreement  – not the relationship between signs and things, but the one between signs and things signified – is what should interest philosophers. What ought to be of interest is “how propositions hang together internally. How the propositional bond comes into existence” (TB 1961, p.  5). Wittgenstein points out that investigating the relationship between signs and things cannot help the logician answer the question he is obliged to answer: namely, “What is the ground of our – certainly well founded – confidence that we shall be able to express any sense we like in our two-dimensional script?” the kind of “old, old” question about the possibility of discourse with which philosophy began and from which, Wittgenstein evidently believed, it could ill-afford to disentangle itself (TB 1961, p. 5). Insisting that a propositional sign is a logical portrayal of its meaning is only to say that what holds it together is an internal agreement between subject and predicate. Since what we are able to express can be expressed simply by putting it in subject-predicate form, what ought to concern the logician is not how to use sentences so as to convey truth rather than falsehood, but how sentences are capable of truth. According to Wittgenstein, a proposition may be true or not, but “in order for a proposition to be true it must first and foremost be capable of truth, and this is all that concerns logic” (TB 1961, p. 20). The fact is, we can express ourselves in two-dimensional script (i.e. on the page, or without worldly referent) and Wittgenstein thinks the logician ought to be able to say how we can do this.¹⁶ As Wittgenstein shows in the Tractatus and the accompanying Notebooks, understanding how we can express any sense we like, even when our expressions are sinnlos or lack the means of referring to referents, amounts to understanding the logic of our language. It means grasping, firstly, that the ability to express oneself doesn’t depend on an external agreement between signs and things, but an internal agreement between signs and things signified. Secondly, that in an expression, “sign” and “thing signified” are logically identical.¹⁷ And thirdly, that the fact that sign and thing signified are identical in respect to their total logical content is the reason logic lies “at the

16 “Logic takes care of itself; all we have to do is to look and see how it does it.” Notebooks, 13.10.14, Cf Tractatus, 5.473. 17 As Wittgenstein writes in the Notebooks, “the logical identity between sign and thing signified consists in its not being permissible to recognize more or less in the sign than in what it signifies” (4.9.14). Or, since a sign is only a sign if it has sense, a sign and the situation it purports to represent – how things stand if the sign has sense – must be indistinguishable in respect to their total logical content.

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bottom of all the sciences” as Wittgenstein writes in his Philosophical Investigations, or why there is nothing more fundamental than logic.¹⁸ These circumstances, combined, lead Wittgenstein to his most startling conclusion: that “in the proposition a world is as it were put together experimentally” (TB 1961, p.  7).¹⁹ What allows the propositional sign to picture a state of affairs doesn’t depend on the way some parts of it refer to things outside of the sentence, things that exist in the world, as it were, but the way the parts of the sentences (parts to which we have given meaning, and in this way made representative) combine. If it seems like there are some exceptions to this principle, for example those sentences Wittgenstein calls the “sentences of natural science” (Sätze der Naturwissenschaft), sentences like “this chair is brown”, or “there is a God”, it is because these sentences are not truly propositional signs, that is, sentences whose subjects and predicates are combined in such a way so as to form a definite picture. To put it bluntly, the sentences of natural science are not properly part of what we call “language”, since it is impossible to discover the ground of our confidence that in such cases we have expressed ourselves in the sense we mean.²⁰ Wittgenstein reminds us that,

18 Philosophical Investigations, §  89. That logic lies at the bottom of all the sciences is also what Wittgenstein means to indicate when he writes in the Tractatus that language itself prevents any logical mistake. “That logic is apriori consists in the fact that we cannot think illogically” (5.4731). 19 Notebooks, 29.9.14: “In the proposition a world is as it were put together experimentally”. Cf. Tractatus, 4.031: “In the proposition a state of affairs is, as it were, put together for the sake of experiment”. If this idea is as essential to the work of the Tractatus as I believe it to be, we ought to give serious consideration to what is misleading about the way Pears and McGuinness translate this line: “In a proposition a situation is, as it were, constructed by way of experiment”. The strangeness of this translation has to do with the way Wittgenstein’s remark has been put in the service of empiricism. One does not construct a proposition by experiment, or by way of worldly trials. Rather, and as Wittgenstein’s says, a proposition is put together experimentally, which is to say it is put together without checking it against reality. We can assume Wittgenstein employed this non-empirical use of “experiment” because it was the version he learned from Claude Bernard, whose Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine Wittgenstein considered required reading for students of logic. “In teaching man” writes the great 19th century physiologist, “experimental science results in lessening his pride more and more by proving to him every day that primary causes, like the objective reality of things, will be hidden from him forever and that he can only know relations. Here is, indeed, the one goal of all the sciences” (1957, p.28). 20 That the signs of our language do indeed have definite meanings is, Wittgenstein insists, perhaps their most interesting feature. Moreover the scandal that the sentences of natural science should be so unclear in this regard  – a critical point Wittgenstein learned from

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A proposition like “this chair is brown” seems to say something enormously complicated, for if we wanted to express this proposition in such a way that nobody could raise objections to it on grounds of ambiguity, it would have to be infinitely long. (TB 1961, p. 5)

As a result, such sentences are, as Wittgenstein notes, of no interest to philosophy (Wittgenstein, 1999, 6.53). In other words, the sentences that have traditionally held the most interest for philosophers, those in which the eligible noun phrases have a certain semantic function, namely, that of referring to something, Wittgenstein disqualifies on the grounds that they have no grounds, no foundation, in logic.²¹ What Wittgenstein tries to interest philosophers in instead is the grammar of the subject-predicate form. Grammatically, a subject-predicate sentence consists of any noun phrase and verb phrase in combination, the constraints on the combination being syntactic rather than semantic. As Wittgenstein is able to show in the Tractatus, the internal agreement of the subject-predicate form is what allows the proposition to be expressive  – what gives the whole proposition the feeling of an assertion. But as Wittgenstein carefully explains, “The proposition only asserts something, in so far as it is a picture” (TLP 1999, 4.03). As a result, instead of saying “This proposition has such and such sense”, we should say, “This proposition represents such and such state of affairs” (TLP 1999, 4.031). Understanding Wittgenstein’s claim that a proposition is a picture means understanding that in remarks like these, the phrase “state of affairs” describes the situation that comprises the picture, not a situation in the world – what is commonly conceived of as what is pictured. That is what Wittgenstein means when he says that “The proposition is a picture of its state of affairs, only in so far as it is logically articulated” (TLP 1999, 4.032). In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein shows what is fundamentally misguided about trying to analyze a propositional sign with a view to determining what each of its parts correspond to. There is no point in trying to discover the way a referent is referred to in an expression since, as we have already said, “if everything that needs to be shown is shown by the existence of subject-predicate sentences”, or “if syntactical rules for functions can be set up at all”, then “the whole theory of things, properties, etc, is superfluous”, and “the task of philosophy” is not what

Frege – is what ought to make them utterly uninteresting to philosophers. Though it is clearly mischievous to say that the sentences of natural science are not properly part of what we call “language”, I mean here to indicate that a scientist’s view of language is – in broad strokes – a view according to which the central business of language is to make true or false assertions. 21 To be fair, it was from Frege that Wittgenstein first learned to distinguish propositions proper (the “sentences of natural science”) from elucidations; it was Frege who taught Wittgenstein to think about sentences.

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Wittgenstein’s principal teachers had supposed. So it is by this considered step that Wittgenstein begins his campaign against “the whole theory of things”, or launches a study of signs that spells out, unassailably and definitively, the end of semantics. What Russell calls “the relations which are necessary between words and things in any language” is precisely what Wittgenstein, in the Tractatus, is determined to be quiet about. As might be expected, Wittgenstein’s decision to remain silent on a subject that proved so troublesome to his teachers  – the attempt to put forward a complete analysis of a propositional sign – has become the subject of increasingly confused inquiry. Though as I see it, Wittgenstein’s “silence” is not one of his book’s mysteries, but the result of his straightforward or business-like approach to solving problems, even, or especially, when solving philosophy’s problems. After stating with some precision his book’s raison d’être in the opening lines of his Preface²², Wittgenstein offers a brief explanation of its overall conclusion: “What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.” Regrettably, a few readers are so gripped by this hint and what they take to be the inexplicable curiosity of the phrase that they forget it appears as a gloss on what it means to misunderstand the nature of propositional signs. The “misunderstanding of the logic of our language” to which Wittgenstein obliquely refers in his Preface involves thinking that propositional signs stand in need of complete analysis, and consequently that the logician’s task is to explain the way the referent is referred to in the expression. Not only is this task quite hopeless, as Wittgenstein points out, since in order to analyze the proposition “in such a way that nobody could raise objections to it on grounds of ambiguity”, the analysis “would have to be infinitely long”; it is also misconceived, given that the real question is how propositions hang together internally. Accordingly, performing a complete analysis of propositional signs is what Wittgenstein will not do; what, as he says, he will be “silent” about where others are “just gassing”. Philosophers’ general inability to know what to do with this, the most famous of Wittgenstein’s hints, is regrettable, as I’ve suggested, for the reason that not understanding that the Tractatus is strictly a “study of sign-language”, as Wittgenstein puts it (TLP 1999, 4.1121), an investigation of the logical identity of sign and thing signified, makes it possible to believe with Bertrand Russell that Wittgenstein is interested in “the relations which are necessary between words and things”, as Russell writes in his misleading introduction to Wittgenstein’s book, and thus to misunderstand this book completely.

22 “This book deals with the problems of philosophy and shows, as I believe, that the method of formulating these problems rests on the misunderstanding of the logic of our language.”

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Though the feeling of having misunderstood the Tractatus can seem either incidental or inevitable, for Wittgenstein, not understanding his book is synonymous with not reading it. More exactly, the possibility of understanding his book is the purpose for which it was written. In this way, Wittgenstein’s opening note that his book’s “object would be attained if it afforded pleasure to one who read it with understanding” prefigures his promise to von Ficker that his first book of logic offers an instance of writing that is “strictly philosophical and at the same time literary”. Wittgenstein’s account of the purpose of his work suggests that the reason he has authored a book was not to “spare other people the trouble of thinking”, as he writes in the Preface to the Philosophical Investigations, but to offer someone the opportunity of making understanding the object of their reflection.²³ Reading with understanding precludes complacency, passivity, and self-satisfaction since it requires that one struggle to understand an author – the great value of books being that they have not made themselves. Though Wittgenstein did hold this view of books’ practical use, many of the philosophers with whom he wished to speak did not, with the result that few of Wittgenstein’s contemporary readers understood that his book was designed to cultivate and educate, rather than simply inform, or that its desired effect wasn’t to add to philosophers’ stockpile of information about the world. What I mean to suggest is that Wittgenstein had some experience with writing’s too heavy responsibility, the burden of authorship. “It is VERY hard not to be understood by a single soul!” Wittgenstein tells Bertrand Russell, when none of the people he admired understood a word of his Tractatus. Of course Russell also failed to read the Tractatus with understanding, and although Wittgenstein could not publish his book without it, he hated Russell’s introduction: “There’s so much of it that I’m not in agreement with”, Wittgenstein tells Russell, “both where you’re critical of me and also where you’re simply trying to elucidate my point of view” (Monk 2005, p. 32–33). It was precisely this kind of failure to know or be able to explain the nature of his work that goads Wittgenstein to remark that his book’s object would be attained if it afforded pleasure to one who read it with understanding. The opening note of Wittgenstein’s book consequently sounds a warning not present in the

23 In his Preface to the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein writes: “I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking. But, if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own”. What should be clear to readers is the trouble Wittgenstein took, in both his books, to demonstrate the way in which understanding is itself an educative or corrective practice  – that the event of understanding is not only something that philosophy needs to defend, but is itself a way of doing philosophy.

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Old Testament, since it reminds readers that in every book after the first Book the question of an author’s readership has itself become a kind of problem, the object of an intense concern.²⁴ “Reading” the Old Testament means undergoing its lessons, becoming drawn into it as an event. (The first of the Old Testament’s lessons, for example, is that what makes coming to an understanding possible is language: that language is the medium where understanding takes place.) But because they wrongly conceive of language as the business of making true or false statements, Wittgenstein’s audience is divided, unhearing. The people he writes to, those who understand him, are not those he writes for or hopes to educate: those who misunderstand the logic of our language. In no way obedient to his writing (“hearing” and “obeying” being the same word in many languages) Wittgenstein’s audience is thus free to ascribe to him, for example, the view that propositions were pictures of reality, or turn his carefully wrought sentences into the sentences of natural science; sentences that aim to accurately describe the way things are; sentences with which Wittgenstein felt he had nothing to do.

3. Logic, as Wittgenstein’s teachers practiced it, had undergone a marked change from the depth-grammatical investigation Plato undertook into a study of certain features of the natural world. But when Wittgenstein insists that “logic must take care of itself”  – the basis of his discovery that a proposition is a picture  – he reverses this trend. Wittgenstein’s way of working in philosophy is thus not in keeping with that of the new logicians, which is what Wittgenstein makes clear when, in his first book of logic, he refuses to maintain his teachers’ distinction between written or spoken sentences and the special kind of sentences philosophers like to call “propositions”. A common view in philosophy is that a proposition is neither just what is specified by “sentence” and nothing more, nor some entity other than a sentence. A proposition is a certain sort of sentence used in a certain sort of way. In fact some modern logicians argue that we needn’t be concerned with the sentence, a mere linguistic entity, but with the proposition, since the proposition is that part of a sentence that says something. The proposition is the propositional sign or

24 For more explicit discussion of the burden of authorship, see Kenneth Dauber’s (1990) brilliant analysis of American writing from its beginnings to the civil war, The Idea of Authorship in America: Democratic Poetics from Franklin to Melville.

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sentence in its projective relation to the world (TLP 1999, 3.12). However a sentence that is also a proposition, a sentence conceived of in terms of what it says, is a sentence thought to “contain its sense”, as Wittgenstein notes critically in the Tractatus. Wittgenstein has to insist that a proposition is a picture because, as it turns out, a proposition contains only the form of its sense – it cannot contain its sense (TLP 1999, 3.12–3.14). Of course, a sentence that contains its sense is exactly what Russell means by a “proposition”. In order to distance himself from this view of propositional signs, Wittgenstein does something ingenious: he begins the Tractatus with a sentence. He begins the Tractatus with a propositional sign that is not, as philosophers conceive it, a proposition. He begins the Tractatus by saying “The world is everything that is the case” – knowing, as he later says, that this is a proposition that says nothing. He uses the occasion of his first sentence to show what he cannot say. As Lessing’s remarks on the Old Testament help us to see, Wittgenstein begins his Tractatus with a tautology, a pseudo-proposition. In this way Wittgenstein makes visible or brings into view what kind of book he has not written – namely, a comprehensive treatment of a subject or basis for study that starts, as Russell suggests, “from the principles of Symbolism and the relations which are necessary between words and things in any language” in order to show how “traditional philosophy and traditional solutions arise out of ignorance of the principles of Symbolism and out of misuse of language”.²⁵ In contrast to Russell’s expectations, Wittgenstein’s writing highlights how mistaken is the notion that words and things are necessarily related, and relies on his own study of language – the language we habitually employ; the language we do not as Russell says “misuse” but as Wittgenstein says “misunderstand” – to prove why. Wittgenstein’s decision to write the kind of book which affords pleasure to those who “read it with understanding” is made clear by his aggressive opening sentence, one that shows what it cannot say and so can’t be what philosophers often take it to be: a proposition in the conventional sense, used to prove other propositions put forward in support of a particular point of view. In the Monist lectures, Russell gives an account of the way he begins work in philosophy – and so, presumably, how he thinks philosophical work ought to begin: “I propose … always to begin any argument that I have to make by appealing to data which will be quite ludicrously obvious” (Russell 1986, p. 163).²⁶ Russell

25 Bertrand Russell, “Introduction” to the Tractatus, p. 7, trans., Ogden. 26 Also quoted in Hanna and Harrison (2004, p. 74). Wittgenstein’s remarks in the Notebooks suggest that he was both amused and dismayed by Russell’s sense of what was self-evident or what “goes without saying” (TB 1961, p. 3).

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is predisposed to imagine that Wittgenstein also begins the Tractatus with what he thinks is a truism, a truth “so obvious that it is almost laughable to mention” (Russell 1986, p. 163), as he says – or that Wittgenstein’s claim that “the world is everything that is the case” is axiomatic, the basis of the philosophical thinking to come. Certainly, if Wittgenstein thought his first proposition was self-evidently true, the Tractatus would indeed begin the way a textbook does, at the point from which the study of a subject begins. If a textbook, its excellence would be measured by such criteria as the relevance of evidence, the force and coherence of reasons and argument, and the probity and soundness of justification – or both the work and its appraisal would reveal what Walter Okshevsky (borrowing an expression from Richard Rorty who borrows it from Heidegger) calls an “‘epistemologically-centered’ prejudice” (Okshevsky, 1992). If Wittgenstein believed his first proposition was axiomatic, then philosophers would be right to think of the work as a treatise, the kind of systematic treatment of a subject that erects itself on the basis of its first proposition or uses as the means of proving subsequent propositions the self-evidence of its earliest and most elementary propositions. In this way a treatise garners support for its conclusions from an initial or original appeal to “ludicrously obvious” data, or demonstrates the flawless efficiency that allows it to be systematic. It turns an arbitrary commencement (undertaken midstream, as it were, since based upon what Frege calls the philosopher’s “mere moral conviction, supported by a mass of successful applications”) into the specific point at which an argument is thought to begin (Frege 1980, p.1). A philosophical treatise, as a result, often contributes to the confusion it was manufactured to settle. In order to avoid this problem, Wittgenstein begins the Tractatus with an insight he felt readers had to work toward, not an idea that at the outset could be easily accepted. We suspect this because the terms Wittgenstein uses to make his claim, as Michael Morris nicely points out, are terms readers have no notion of, prior to achieving some grasp of all the rest of what he says (Morris 2008, p. 22). Saying that Wittgenstein doesn’t begin his work in logic the way Russell would begin it, however, isn’t to say that the Tractatus offers no argument, or that it embodies a rejection of a way of working in philosophy in which views are expressed, sometimes most vehemently. On the contrary, Wittgenstein’s first book of logic “builds up like Euclid”, as the critic William Empson has written, about another book that contains an argument some critics seem unable to feel, even when the author tells them he is making one. His remarks are epigrammatic, or demonstrate what Lessing would call both a positive and negative perfection (in that they contain hints out of which the, as yet, held back truth allows itself to be developed, and do not say anything that would get in the way of that truth).

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However, as Morris writes, “Wittgenstein continually presents some epigrammatic claims as being logically dependent on others. If there is a logical dependence, there ought to be some argument which makes that dependence clear” (Morris 2008, p. 11). No doubt the feeling that Wittgenstein is building a case is what gives the Tractatus its radiance. Nevertheless, not thinking of Wittgenstein’s first remark as the first remark in a treatise restores to this remark its natural tension, its air of having illuminated what cannot be asserted – snuffed out when what is proposed is thought laughably straightforward. If “the world is everything that is the case” isn’t something Wittgenstein considers self-evidently true or easily apparent but a kind of tautology, a way of grasping facts, then rather than prop up the rest of the work this remark becomes an indispensable intellectual device. Something is shown in the propositional sign even though nothing is said in it. Propositional signs that are also tautologies – and all of Wittgenstein’s “propositions” 1–7 are tautologies – show something but say nothing.²⁷ There is therefore something remarkably knowing about the way Wittgenstein begins the logical-philosophical investigation he calls his study of sign-language. Any reader able to advance from the propositional sign 1 to 1.1 will have conceded not what a world is but what a propositional sign is. Conceded, that is, and simply by knowing how to read it, that the constraints on sense in a propositional sign are syntactic, not semantic: that signs have signification without anything like reference to or acquaintance with things. Even before we can assess what is said in the first sentence in Wittgenstein’s book we verify, by showing we can read the sentence, the internal agreement on which its meaning depends – the agreement or conformity, not between what is asserted in the propositional sign and how things stand in the world, but between the propositional sign and what it signifies, where “what it signifies” suggests what is expressed by a sign. The logical identity of sign and thing signified is what being able to read the proposition confirms.

27 The propositions/tautologies of the Tractatus are as follows: 1. The world is all that is the case. 2. What is the case – a fact – is the existence of states of affairs. 3. A logical picture of facts is a thought. 4. A thought is a proposition with a sense. 5. A proposition is a truth-function of elementary propositions. (An elementary proposition is a truth-function of itself.) 6. The general form of a truth-function is [p, ξ, N(ξ)]. $$$please check$$$ This is the general — — form of a proposition. No, there need to be a line over the symbols: [, ξ , N(ξ )] 7. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

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This new way of reading (which is also the “old, old” way) is what Wittgenstein sets in motion when he begins his book of logic with the kind of sentence we have come to expect from works of literature; the kind of sentence, that is, that one can grasp without knowing whether it is false or true, since understanding what it expresses only means knowing “what is the case” if it is true. Naturally, the kind of sentence readers can understand without considering what is empirically the case is exactly the kind of sentence that most interested Lessing – for example, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth”. The declarative sentence with which Genesis begins is evidently able to bring something to mind before readers affirm or deny, on the basis of whether what actually happened was this or that, what this sentence says. What makes this propositional sign capable of signifying has nothing to do with what actually happens because our ability to know “what is the case” in the proposition if it is true, to grasp what it expresses, is decided before the question of whether what the proposition says is true can arise. It is clear, therefore, that this sentence derives its ability to bring something to mind not from the way its terms pick out existing entities, but from the way its predicate modifies its subject. The proposition’s power to bring something to mind depends on the arrangement of its noun and verb phrases, not the way its meaning-bearing elements represent corresponding elements in the world – whatever is meant by “God”, or “the heavens” or “the earth”. Readers of Genesis’ first sentence are unable to understand it when they think it contains its meaning; when rather than think of it as a sentence (which, like any other sentence, circles round and round on imaginary axes) they think of it as a proposition, and thus either false or true. They become equally unreceptive to Wittgenstein’s first sentence when they believe it to be axiomatic rather than tautological. What these readers have failed to notice is that knowing how to use the noun phrase “the world” in the Tractatus’ opening line no more hinges on our ability to correlate it to an existing entity than does “God” in the sentence “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth”. The fantasy that there are certain kinds of sentences that do more than other sentences is what from its very first line the Tractatus puts an end to.

4. Reading Lessing on the Bible crystallizes for Wittgenstein an idea he had, in the Tractatus, struggled to shape. When Lessing points out that the Old Testament is full of tautologies, propositions that, like all logical propositions, are properly understood only when thought of as expressions that do not say anything about

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reality – when he shows that the declarative sentences of the Old Testament are in fact silent about what cannot be said clearly – he in effect argues that even the most assertive or commanding of books is not made up of what philosophers call “propositions” but what they call “mere sentences”. Having now considered the difference between propositions (the “special kinds of sentences” that fill textbooks; the sentences of natural science) and the sentences of which books are made, it is worth noting that philosophers’ habit of referring to Wittgenstein’s “propositions” more often than his “sentences” has greatly contributed to their inability to hear his essential idea that propositional signs do not acquire their expressive possibilities through what they are able to assert. Simply because propositions have in philosophy traditionally been thought of as vehicles for saying things, and so feel more like vehicles for saying things, continuing to name Wittgenstein’s Sätze “propositions” turns Wittgenstein’s innovation  – his single but fundamental modification to the work of his teachers – on its head. “Sätze”, in any case, the word conventionally translated in the English version of the Tractatus as “proposition”, is the word Wittgenstein uses to describe a well-formed sentence; a sentence in which a thought finds an expression; that is, what speakers of English generally call “a sentence”. As the philosopher David Charles McCarty has pointed out, in the Tractatus, “‘Satz’ may mean no more than ‘sentence’” (McCarty 1993, p. 172–176). Admittedly this is not the usual way of understanding Wittgenstein’s early writing. Perhaps that is because it forces a view of the Tractatus that disassociates it from the tradition (one that emerges in the writing of Locke, Hume, or Russell) of using “a critique of language” as an instrument of analysis. Here I have tried to show how Wittgenstein’s work in logic involves a study of language that is not, in the usual sense, a critique of language. For although Wittgenstein famously says that “all philosophy is ‘Critique of language’” (Alle Philosphie ist “Sprachkritik”) he puts the expression “critique of language” in quotations, and follows this now backhanded remark with the parenthetical comment, “though not at all in Mauthner’s sense” (TLP 1999, 4.0031). Mauthner, as Rudolph Haller has shown, never tired of pointing out that language must be subjected to a critique, because language is a “contingent phenomenon”, subject to the “chimeras and self-deceptions” that arise when we project our “all-too-human concepts and categories upon nature” (Haller 1988, p. 57–73). In Mauthner’s sense, then, and in the mainly empiricist, science-oriented tradition from which he hails, a “critique of language” presupposes the need for a criterion for meaningfulness that requires a non-analytic, meaningful sentence to be empirically viable. Such a critique, consequently, makes the words of our language “mere memory-tags for the sensations given by our senses” (Haller 1988, p.60). This should give pause to those who are convinced that what

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Wittgenstein offers in the Tractatus is a “critique of language” as philosophers have come to employ the term. As an instrument of philosophical analysis, a “critique of language” presumes that language is “unfit for knowledge of the world” because its use rests on experience (Haller 1988, p. 59). A critique of language is in a broad sense a critique of knowledge derived from the senses. But if the use of language does not rest on “some kind of experience”, as Wittgenstein says, but on the logic of our language (since “the ‘experience’ we need in order to understand logic is not that something or other is the state of things, but that something is: that, however, is not an experience”) then philosophy has lost the grounds for this kind of critical assessment (TLP 1999, 5.552). Philosophers who continue to employ the phrase in Mauthner’s sense extend the kind of theorizing about things the Tractatus (indeed, all of literature) has shown to be superfluous. They continue to misunderstand why logic takes care of itself, or why the signifying ability of propositional signs has nothing to do with the relationship between meaning-bearing elements of a language and some class of entities envisaged as corresponding elements in the world.²⁸ And they fail to grasp how, in his first book of logic, Wittgenstein revolutionizes the study of language by redirecting it from its home in the sciences to its future in the humanities – which was, of course, also its birthplace. Wittgenstein’s most decisive answer to the question of what literature has to teach philosophy is found where philosophers least expect it, and thus where they have in the main failed to discover it. This is not an answer that appears in the Tractatus (for where in a book is such an answer to be found?) but one that the whole of the book, the book itself, supplies. It follows that learning to see the Tractatus as “nothing but a book” – for what its sentences are able to bring to mind, not for what they assert – right away yields the extent to which Wittgenstein’s first book of logic is an instance, as Wittgenstein has promised, of writing that is “strictly philosophical and at the same time literary”. If the Tractatus was really a textbook, then its value would depend on the way it meets with the current norms in the field of logic as currently defined – or perhaps, as a work of historical interest, the way it contributed to those norms. But since the Tractatus is a book, like many other books designed to encourage readers to restate their problems and redirect their energies, then its value depends on the fact that “in it thoughts are expressed”, as Wittgenstein writes in his preface, “and this value will be the greater the better the thoughts are expressed”.

28 This way of describing the relationship that does not interest Wittgenstein is borrowed from Hanna and Harrison (2004, p. 3).

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From the first, the style of Wittgenstein’s sentences  – sentences that are tautological where we expect them to be axiomatic, that show what they cannot say – lead readers toward the conclusion that there are no propositions of logic or that propositional signs are of benefit only when surmounted.²⁹ When at the end of the Tractatus Wittgenstein says that readers who understand him will “surmount” his individual sentences, he means that his book will be read with pleasure and understanding when his own propositional signs are used in a way that gets beyond the new logicians’ way of using them as assertions  – that is, when his propositional signs are allowed to be nothing but sentences, together constituting nothing but a book. What Wittgenstein intuits, of course, is that propositional signs or sentences that are not “more” than sentences – the “propositions” of the Tractatus and of logic and of mathematics – achieve more than the sentences of natural science because readers have to move themselves around in order to understand them. That is what Wittgenstein promises when he says that readers who surmount his propositions will see the world “aright”, as Pears and McGuinness aptly translate Wittgenstein’s “richtig”.³⁰ (Though this must remain the subject of another essay, chief among the insights revealed by surmounting Wittgenstein’s Sätze  – that is, reading them as signs, the sentences of logic, and not the propositions of science – is the clear perception that the world we live in is the world raised to a kind of ideal of itself. Seeing, as Wittgenstein will write in the Philosophical Investigations, that the world has logic at its foundation, or that logic lies beneath all the sciences, is the upshot of understanding the logic of language.) Propositions surmounted, Wittgenstein has cause to expect, become instruments that can help readers arrive at insights difficult or impossible to attain by other means. That the pseudo propositions of logic are also, and for the reason that they do not contain the means of referring to a referent, like the sentences of literature is an insight Wittgenstein has yet to be credited for. The Tractatus is literature and shows what literature is. Where else but in a book one must read or look at would we find an author’s promise that his readers must surmount or prevail over (überwinden) his sentences if we are to understand him? Rather than saying something, sentences surmounted – climbed on or climbed over – offer perspicuous views.

29 The idea that there are no propositions of logic is Paul Engelmann’s summary of a point Wittgenstein repeatedly made when he verbally walked Engelmann through his work in the Tractatus (Engelmann 1967, p. 102). 30 TLP 1961/1974, 6.54).

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Bibliography Bernard, Claude (1957): An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine. New York: Dover. Bouwsma, O. K. (1984): Without Proof or Evidence. J. L.Craft/Ronald E. Hustwit (Eds). Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press. Dauber, Kenneth (1990): The Idea of Authorship in America: Democratic Poetics from Franklin to Melville. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press Engelmann, Paul (1967): Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein with a Memoir. Translated by B. F. McGuinness. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Frege, Gottlob (1980): The Foundations of Arithmetic. Second, revised edition. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Haller, Rudolph (1988): “Philosophy and the Critique of Language: Wittgenstein and Mauthner”. In: Rudolph Haller: Questions on Wittgenstein. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Hanna, Patricia/Harrison, Bernhard (2004): Word and World: Practice and the Foundations of Language. New York: Cambridge University Press. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim (1872): The Education of The Human Race. Translated by F. W. Robertson. London: Henry S. King & Co. McCarty, David Charles (1993): “Undoubted truth”. In: Hanan Alexander (Ed.): Philosophy of Education: Proceedings of the 48th Meeting of the Philosophy of Education Society. Urbana, IL: Philosophy of Education Society. Melville, Herman (1962): Billy Budd, Sailor: An Inside Narrative. Harrison Hayford/Merton M. Sealts Jr. (Eds). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Monk, Ray (2005): How To Read Wittgenstein. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Morris, Michael (2008): Wittgenstein and the Tractatus. New York: Routledge. Okshevsky, Walter C. (1992): “Wittgenstein on Agency and Ability: Consequences for Rationality and Criticalness”. In: Hanan Alexander (Ed.): Philosophy of Education: Proceedings of the 48th Meeting of the Philosophy of Education Society. Urbana, IL: Philosophy of Education Society. Pears, David (2006): Paradox and Platitude in Wittgenstein’s Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rorty, Richard (1980): Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Russell, Bertrand (1986): The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell: The Philosophy of Logical Atomism and Other Essays, 1914–19. London: George Allen & Unwin. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (2003): Public and Private Occasions. James C. Klagge/Alfred Nordmann (Eds). Boulder, New York, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield. Von Wright, G. H. (1982): Wittgenstein. Oxford: Blackwell.

Elisabeth Van Dam

Wittgenstein Lights Lichtenberg’s Candle: Flashlights of Enlightenment in Wittgenstein’s Thought A good expression is worth as much as a good thought, because it is almost impossible to express oneself well without showing what is expressed in a good light. (Lichtenberg, Sudelbücher) The light shed by work is a beautiful light, but it only shines with real beauty if it is illuminated by yet another light. (Wittgenstein VB 1998, p. 30)

On October 31, 1931, Wittgenstein penned down a remark in one of his diaries that echoed his German-language cultural background: “I believe that my sentences are mostly descriptions of visual images that occur to me. Lichtenberg’s wit is the flame that can burn on a pure candle only” (Wittgenstein 2003, p. 123). A rather obscure contemporary of Kant, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) was an eccentric delegate of the late eighteenth-century Republic of Letters, being an experimental physicist, astronomer, philosopher, Menschenbeobachter¹, pietist mystic, and blessed writer in one. He was professor at the University of Göttingen, but most of all he was a true child of the Enlightenment, enchanted by its multilayered colours, dreams, experiments, and schemes. His correspondence reveals just how versatile he was. He corresponded with his friend King George III of Great-Britain and Ireland, and Elector of Hannover. He exchanged epistles with book printer and soul-mate Dieterich on Baskerville’s refined glazed paper or on Hogarth’s copperplates, while at times complaining about his health.² He was

1 “Observer of human affairs”. 2 Lichtenberg was generally known (by his contemporaries, who often made jokes about it) to be a cripple and asthmatic, probably caused by an inner disease, at this distance in time hard to diagnose. One early critic described Lichtenberg as “the Columbus of hypochondria”: next to his (corpo)real maladies Lichtenberg also suffered from his imagination, cultivated and sprouted in his wretched body, displaying “[the loss of] all standards for judging his own state”, allowing “the very conceptions of sickness and health to become dependent upon his moods” (Stern 1959, p. 64–66). Being a hypochondriac makes Lichtenberg look very much like Kant, who suffered from it too. It also had similarities with Wittgenstein’s continuous fear of death, and his ideas of being destined to die early, as well as with the Viennese’s heavily distressed, fragile and sensitive body. The sensitivity of the sick and strained body is likely to

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in dialogue with famous talents like Kant, Goethe and Forster, and wrote short, witty notes to maidens, students and cousins, or letters to his wife, to a priest, to British noblemen, and fellow professors. Unsurprisingly, his readership was equally extravagant. Schopenhauer cited him as a philosophical authority on a par with Theophrastus, Gracián, Montaigne, and La Rochefoucauld. Freud regarded him as his predecessor for his reflection on the unconscious and dreams. Nietzsche dreamed along with him and honoured him for his pointed style, bearing him in mind when describing his own method for tackling philosophical problems in his book The Gay Science (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, 1882). Kierkegaard cited him frequently and in fact prefaced his book Stages on Life’s Way (Stadier På Livets Vej, 1845) with an adapted version of one of Lichtenberg’s most famous aphorisms. Like many before him, Wittgenstein, too, was familiar with Lichtenberg’s work and he was a big fan of it. The fact that Lichtenberg’s mountains of aphorisms and ‘waste notes’ is appreciated in the English-speaking world at all is due to Georg Henrik von Wright, one of Wittgenstein’s students and a sometimesfriend, who published Georg Christoph Lichtenberg als Philosoph and wrote the “Lichtenberg” entry for the Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. Wittgenstein was clearly indebted to Lichtenberg’s work. He recommended it to colleagues, giving an anthology of Lichtenberg’s notes to Bertrand Russell in 1913, for instance.³ Yet, one thing above all unites Lichtenberg and Wittgenstein, relating them both to the Enlightenment, or, more specifically, to the later German Aufklärung, and that is their concern with the dynamic of language, and, in particular, with the interplay and intervals language invokes between the particular and universal, between the idiosyncratic and the communal, between a self-thinking subject and its participation in the culture and public sphere of reason. In this respect, the gnomic form of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations owes a great deal to Lichtenberg’s so-called Sudelbücher.⁴ Both texts display an

have been the primary source for reflections on reality in all three philosophers’ thought and clearly has shaped their critical, dynamic attentiveness towards the shivering borders constituting life, language, science and reason. 3 Cf. (CB 1980, p. 32). 4 Lichtenberg obtained his literary fame primarily from his so-called Sudelbücher (‘rough drafts’, Waste books). These bizarre, bulky books  – an “intellectual clearinghouse” or an “omnibus repository”  – entail a gigantic collection of brilliantly formulated ideas, drafts, extracts, recipes, jottings, witticisms, platitudes, calculations, quotations, illuminations, observations, and reflections as well as polished aphorisms on “petty” matters, generally considered “waste” and irrelevant, and thereby gladly overlooked by the genius-heads of his age. According to the OED, the 18th century mercantile term “waste book” designates “a rough

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awareness of the power and potential dangers of language as a means of communication. Like Kant, Lichtenberg considered the interplay between representations and their objects a dynamic and internal relation: how things appear to us is structured by how we think, speak and are psychologically formed (consciously as well as unconsciously). Things are never sufficient “in themselves”. What appears to us has an equal share in what we ourselves make of it: both object and subject approach and advance or collide and refrain. Each is a sensor or feeler⁵, a touchstone for the other, allowing the other to come into being. Stable language, subjects and objects rise only through this “touch”: in a culture or practice, in a critical “thinking for oneself” together with others, that is, in a vulnerable and agonistic sphere of social interaction where people reason, speak, argue or fail publicly. All these ideas, which, as I will show, also clearly shimmer through in Wittgenstein, are deeply connected to debates on the nature, practice and aims of the Enlightenment in late eighteenth-century Germany. In this context, it is also worth recalling that there is little evidence that Wittgenstein closely studied the philosophical work of Kant, but there can be no doubt about his adoption of the critical attitude and scope of Kant’s project which took place partly via Lichtenberg and his so-called enlightened critique of language, inspired by reason’s trial as a critique within itself, initiated and demonstrated by Kant’s three Critiques.⁶ For all these reasons, it is worth pondering first the particularly German context in which Kant’s and Lichtenberg’s enlightened thought took shape.

account-book (…) in which entries are made of all transactions (purchases, sales, receipts, payments, etc.) at the time of their occurrence, to be ‘posted’ afterwards into the more formal books”. Lichtenberg worked with his Sudelbücher and gave meaning to their functioning from this “account-book” perspective. His “merchandise” of thoughts was temporally developed from the present tense or mood of immediacy, in line with the unpredictable quality of life: flashlights (Lichtenberg’s notorious Blitze) of insights and visions, the result of the occurrence of a sudden moment of thought, an “enlightened” instant of illumination, spatially ordered in the haphazard, criss-cross form of the “note”, free from structure or any specific system with a fixed end and purpose. The material of Lichtenberg’s notebooks amounts to nine volumes. Two of them went lost in the nineteenth century, along with portions of two others. Lichtenberg started keeping these scribbles in his student days in the mid-1760s and kept on producing them until a few days before his death in 1799, at the age of fifty-seven. He partly created his own booklets for them, marking them on their covers with capitals in alphabetic order (such as A, B, C up to L – fittingly  – at his death). 5 The word ‘feelers’ (Fühler) is also used by Wittgenstein in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, that is, in proposition 2.1515, designating the correlating ‘touch’ between the elements of language-pictures and the elements of reality. 6 Respectively: Critique of Pure Reason (1781 and 1787), Critique of Practical Reason (1788), Critique of Judgment (1790).

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A significant forum for the enlightened public debates that flourished in late eighteenth-century Germany were the various secret societies whose members often held important positions in the Prussian administration.⁷ These societies were secret because their members had to strike the balance between their responsibility towards the political establishment and their duties towards the council of humanity, which by way of public criticism had to be led towards progress and emancipation. The articles and contributions to the Berlinische Monatsschrift, a journal of the Berlin Society of Friends of Enlightenment  – also known as the Wednesday Society – exemplify the preferred kinds of topics and reflections of these “sensible professional men” (Deligiogri 2005, p. 41). Kant as well as Lichtenberg regularly provided the journal with essays and participated in the freedom claimed for the “real” public sphere of reason. Their writings also reflected the particular context in which the German Aufklärung took shape. For, since Prussia was ruled by the enlightened despot Frederick II, the very constraints for emancipation set by this ruler’s power provided the conditions for a sustained reflection on the nature and practices of the Enlightenment itself. This did not only turn into a pursuit of a critique of reason, it evolved into a true critique of Enlightenment, persistently questioning the authority and responsibility to which one appeals and is accountable when voicing one’s opinions in public. The fragile space of freedom between who is speaking and addressing the public and who is being addressed or criticized by the public, was a continuous target of justification and discussion. Kant’s argument for Enlightenment in his famous essay Beantwortung der Frage: was ist Afklärung? of 1784 focused on the legitimacy of public criticism in a dialectic sphere of freedom and restraint, where one seems to have rights in one domain but none in the other. His motto sapere aude, “have the courage to use your own understanding!”, shifted the general enlightened device from the search for knowledge towards the search for intellectual independence. Even if a ruler doesn’t allow you your freedom as his servant, you always have your freedom as a member of the public sphere of reason. Frederick at least allowed this ambivalence. Kant argued that “self-incurred immaturity”, the mark of being unenlightened, could be overthrown, if only you saw the yoke of power and the weight of others’ opinions not as a constraint but as a possibility to form your own voice. You are not surpassed by others if you speak and discuss with them, as a free member of humanity, in a publicly conducted argument in which everyone can participate. This public activity is not ruled by an authoritarian instance, judging what is right or not. It is a self-regulating field of forces and takes each participant to be the touchstone or judge of each other. Communi-

7 See (Deligiorgi 2005, p. 41).

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cation in this respect is dynamic and open-ended. Reason and argument never end. This was Kant’s great contribution to the debates on the Enlightenment’s function: its scope, practice and horizon do not concern a specific content to be attained (that is, types or items of knowledge, skills, etc.) but a form, an attitude, a style, a critical mode of thinking. Critical thinking and a critical life never finish, they are an incessant task and a duty towards humanity. Lichtenberg adhered to this principle as well. Like Kant, he denied that there can be any single person or individual who ascertains the truth, philosophically, scientifically or linguistically. For, no one owns language’s ultimate meaning. Moreover, language’s senses only start working in a space where it can be tested, against a background of nonsense, difference, constraints, failures or objections provided by others. Once this test finds some rest, understanding and meaning can emerge from negotiations. Negotiating, in turn, always repeats itself to lead to ever new forms of stability in communication and debate. Lichtenberg thus was an exemplary brother of Kant, an advocate of self-thinking, considering a respectful and enlightened way of forming one’s own life in line with its constraints and possibilities – individually, socially, as well as artistically, aesthetically, ethically and politically (in short, Bildung)  – not as a doctrine but as a responsibility towards oneself. Needless to say, Wittgenstein’s thought, methods and forms of expression clearly evince a similar concern. Just how similar, becomes clear when we look at certain passages from Lichtenberg from up-close. In order to seduce a public to think for itself, Lichtenberg’s writing employed a series of philosophical and literary tools. His work is generally characterized as a bunch of quotes, clusters of remarks, ideas or Einfälle; in short, an unsystematic collection of aphorisms. Lichtenberg himself admittedly sometimes referred to his writings as Pfennigs-Wahrheiten (penny-truths), hastily and “wastily” jotted down on the whirling pages of his Klitterbücher (another name he gave to his Waste Books). However, he also sporadically described them in more appreciative terms, calling them scattered seeds which, “if they fall on the right soil, may grow into chapters and even whole dissertations”.⁸ This remark, wittily formulated and injected with the power of metaphorical imagery, recalls another of Lichtenberg’s little gems, highlighted (underlined) by Wittgenstein in the anthology of Lichtenberg’s work

8 See: (Stern 1959, p. xiii) for his interesting comparison between Lichtenberg’s “seeds” and those of Leibniz (“where he only wished to cast seeds from which plants might grow in other people’s gardens …” as quoted in Stern (1959, p.  xiii)). Wittgenstein voices a double echo of both Germans, betting on the metaphor of the seeds once more: “My originality (if that is the right word) is, I believe, an originality that belongs to the soil, not the seeds. (Perhaps I have no seeds of my own.) Sow a seed on my soil, & it will grow differently than it would in any other soil” (VB 1998, p. 42).

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he handed over to Russell, perhaps to facilitate Russell’s enjoyment in reading the unfamiliar German or to convey him something about how to usefully teach philosophy: “The question ‘Should one philosophize for oneself?’ is like the question, ‘Should one shave oneself?’ the answer is, Yes, if one can do it well” (Lichtenberg 1990, p. 44). What is special about an isolated remark like this one (deliberately made a free-standing sentence by Wittgenstein) is that it doesn’t exhaust itself in its punch line.⁹ J. P. Stern calls the process at work here a “double look” (Stern 1959, p.  200–217): a brief, seemingly unfinished, remark posits an analogy without argument, thus initiating an open-ended reflection that brings along associations and self-generated conclusions about the analogy. The reader is seduced and allowed freedom to think for himself. Lichtenberg, risking failure and the rejection of the analogy by his readers, is not trying to impose on us his opinion but simply aspires to elicit a movement of thought. He thus opens that Kantian, enlightened space of freedom for argument, difference, exchange, experiment and debate between people, or, more philosophically, between himself and the other, and, more Lichtenbergian, between himself and the dynamic of language. His readers are stimulated to think as mature beings, if they “can do it well”. So, what are we to make of this quote? It certainly is as ambiguous as it is hyperbolic: it invites us to reflect upon the possibility to enlighten ourselves, and it demands a performance of maturity and self-thinking in actu, since it activates an open-ended process of questioning merely by its specific expressive form. As such, this quote is in fact the expression of a method, a literary style, a model for trying to generate a way of thinking through seduction, hint and provocation, that is, through an appeal to complete a ‘mere’ fragment of thought. It thereby opens up a critical process of continuous self-questioning, stimulating dialogue, a sustained effort of thought or a sort of Durcharbeitung [working through]. The aphoristic form – the note – is also the record, the frozen memory, of a sudden appearance of an idea in language, named Einfall in German and Blitz by Lichtenberg.¹⁰

9 Cf. (Nordmann 2005, p. 105). 10 Regarding the flashlight metaphor, or his many allusions to the illuminating Blitz, there is at least one of Lichtenberg’s remarks which should be noted (and is most famous): “ES DENKT sollte man sagen, so wie man sagt ES BLITZT”. The remark could be considered an anticipation on the Freudian idea of the unconscious and Lacan’s famous critique of Descartes’ cogito with his witticism “ça parle” (“it speaks”). Thinking just happens, independently from our consciousness, without us being fully aware of its total act all the time. A Blitz also just happens. It’s streak crashes unexpectedly from heaven and is uncontrollable or even dangerous. So, the Blitz is a metaphor for those flashlights of insight that suddenly light up some hints of

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With Karl Kraus, the Viennese master of snappy aphorisms who was highly admired by his contemporary Wittgenstein, we have to be aware of the fact that Einfälle are not to be mistaken for opinions or beliefs, steadily based in the presupposed author’s system of thought.¹¹ Instead, it is language itself that masters, lights up, and articulates what the author (unconsciously) was occupied with or meant to express. When this expression is uttered towards a public, the help and investment of the other, the reader or addressed person, creates a space of negotiation and context, allowing for the stabilization of meaning. Language and others are the touchstone for the author, while the words and utterances of the author in turn become a touchstone for the reader, who might identify with “foreign” words when they represent or symbolize his subjectivity. However, Lichtenberg goes one step further in his Sudel-quote: he takes risks. For what he possibly tried to convey with his note also is that philosophizing for oneself could be dangerous when done badly. As such, it is perhaps better that self-thinking (or reading this very note of Lichtenberg) isn’t done at all; just as someone who shaves badly better shouldn’t shave himself in order not to get seriously wounded. So, thinking for oneself is not advised, unless some Kantian courage (sapere aude!) is performed. And yet, even with the help of the required courage, its activity demands persistence, practice, and engagement, since it involves the sharp tools of criticism and analysis to scrutinize tradition, pride, and prejudice.¹² As another rather hot-tempered remark of Lichtenberg states, “it is nearly impossible to carry the torch of truth through a crowd without someone’s beard getting singed” (Lichtenberg 1968/1992, G13).¹³ Facing the heat of critique and rejection, then, also requires that we never think alone when we think for ourselves. “Doing it well” involves a will to fail, test and experiment publicly, an open attitude towards what comes to

what was at work in the dark all the time. Unfortunately, the immediate occurrence of the Blitz might blind us with its unforeseen flash, flickering bright but escaping us completely, leaving us again without speech in the dark. The whole quote in English betrays some Kantian influence: “We become conscious of certain representations that are not dependent upon us; others believe that at least we are dependent upon ourselves; where is the border line? We know only the existence of our sensations, representations and thoughts. One should say, it thinks, just as one says, it lightens. It is already saying too much to say cogito, as soon as one translates it as I think. To assume the I, to postulate it, is a practical requirement”. (Lichtenberg 1968/1992, K 76, p. 412). I owe the English translation to Günter Zöller, who proposed it in his elaborate article (1992). 11 Cf. (Nordmann 2005, p. 105). 12 See (Nordmann 2005, p. 105). 13 As quoted in Nordmann (2005, p. 105, n. 27). The original quote in German reads: “Es ist fast unmöglich, die Fackel der Wahrheit durch ein Gedränge zu tragen, ohne jemandem den Bart zu sengen.”

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expressed and uttered by a self-thinking subject in the space of the other. Probing our thoughts in debate and in a dynamic of exchange and difference is perhaps the only way towards successful communication and expression. To facilitate the probing, a culture and practice, a public and context, are required which are in line with the ideals formulated in Kant’s answer to the question “What is Enlightenment?” Wittgenstein unmistakably integrated this form of thinking in his work. His Tractatus has a resolute tone already visible in the brisk words of its Vorwort: “If this work has a value it consists in two things. First that in it thoughts are expressed, and this value will be the greater the better the thoughts are expressed. The more the nail has been hit on the head” (TLP 1922, p.  23). Hitting the nail on its head is like finding the right words for the Blitze of thought that occur in our mind, or that occurred in Wittgenstein. How can the philosopher activate in others the same process of thinking and reasoning he arrived at on his own? This seems to have been Wittgenstein’s deep concern. He wanted to hit the nail on its head but also his readers’ heads. Wittgenstein definitely addressed others as people worth talking to, as people who might want to do something with his thoughts, as members of the public sphere of reason. He didn’t think alone but always with them. If not, he wouldn’t even have had the courage to utter his mind in such a serious manner. So, Wittgenstein dared to think for himself and took up the challenge to express his thoughts. Paradoxically, there were few who understood what he said. And today still, the sense or nonsense attributed to the different compositions of his propositions continues to be food for dispute. Could this be the stamp of success or the stigma of failure? Is this the true consequence of the critical, open-ended but fragile form of thinking and communicating, instigated by Kant’s idea of Enlightenment, or is this the painful result of its radical movement, an implosion, at work in all texts that want to say what they cannot say, risking to fail in the attempt to communicate meaning to the other? Perhaps we should pick neither the first nor the second of these possible conclusions. In the end, there are beautiful and fertile soils gained through negotiations and discussions between philosophers and readers that could be used as an interpretative sowing field for Wittgenstein’s scattered seeds of thought. Moreover, we mustn’t forget that Wittgenstein certainly was a seducer. He learned it from Kant, or better, from Lichtenberg who agreed with Kant. Not only did Wittgenstein display enlightened courage, he also demanded it of his readers. Wittgenstein’s quote on Lichtenberg needs but be recalled in this context, as it lights Lichtenberg’s candle and brings his wit back to life and discussion: “I believe that my sentences are mostly descriptions of visual images that occur to me. Lichtenberg’s wit is the flame that can burn on a pure candle only” (Wittgenstein 2003, p. 123). The first sentence here says something about how Wittgen-

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stein dealt with his own Einfälle. They were ‘visual images’ occurring to him and they had to be described, made clear. The interval or leap between the Einfall and its uttered Klärung seems the difficulty in this process and it instilled fear in Wittgenstein. This is the reason why he admiringly stated that “Lichtenberg’s wit is the flame that can burn on a pure candle only”. Lichtenberg was able to make his point, and to point further into an open space that was to be worked upon or completed by an ideal critical public of self-thinkers. Lichtenberg’s “point” was performed because his Einfälle did not come out distorted by language’s obfuscating effects. Wittgenstein was afraid of that  – he called language “bewitching” (PI 1953, § 109), provoking him to fight against its fog with the tools of philosophy. Lichtenberg’s Blitze, by contrast, appeared in words as genuine moments of clarity. What popped up in Lichtenberg’s mind lighted up, or was being highlighted, in a bright, precise, accurate and faithful form for its further unfolding. His ideas were transformed into sincere expression, like a sudden flame that articulates and illuminates consciously what, unconsciously, was at work in the dark. Lichtenberg’s wit was not blurred but pure. However, it also demanded a pure candle (or torch), capable of carrying the flame in his words through a crowd that can stand the heat of it. Hence, in addition, Lichtenberg’s wit was honest. It was equally directed to an honest crowd, to a mature public that might see his enlightening insights clearly, and literally be inflamed to use them, complete them, work or think freely with them. Wittgenstein honoured that honesty and strived for it, too. He had a desire for thoughts like Lichtenberg’s that could be expressed as they popped up in his mind. In part, this was what led to his characteristic style of doing philosophy, that is, his tendency to practice the procedure of aphoristic thinking through critique, discussion and ‘games’ with the possibilities of language (literal language-games). This thinking is a method of showing with literary means, rather than one of telling with an argumentative logic, that the deliverances of genius  – Wittgenstein’s Einfälle – are to be read as recordings, perceptions or thought-experiments, open for dialogue and opposition. Well considered, Wittgenstein’s books could be explored as “albums” or “landscape sketches”¹⁴ (as he himself calls them in the Preface to his Philosophical Investigations), to be compared with Lichtenberg’s Sudelbücher, composed of short paragraphs and remarks, ordered in groups of connected domains or placed criss-cross as boundary posts, marking quick alterations between different fields. They invite us to travel, no doubt because they are also rather peculiar and unique within the rich tradition of philosophical writing. M. W. Rowe compared Wittgenstein’s philosophical activity with Goethe’s

14 See (PI 1953, p. vii).

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conception of science, especially as it is given shape in his famous book Theory of Colours (Zur Farbenlehre, 1810). Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations has its pendant in this contested treatise, since both propose a large number of experiments and questions to the reader who has to think them over, answer them, or, really, do them. Both authors thereby produced writings that look more like text- or workbooks in mathematics with exercises rather than introductions to an architectonics of thought providing answers.¹⁵ Goethe and Wittgenstein posed questions that invite readers to adopt an attitude of questioning. There is no new information conveyed about the world but some critical attention is attracted to a topic or subject that needs more light. This method is beautiful and most stimulating – illuminating – but also frustrating and very difficult for the author. Like Lichtenberg, Wittgenstein always left empty spaces and open places in his inductions to be completed by the creativity and courage of his readers. There never was certainty about whether he would succeed in his attempt at stimulating his readers to think, or fail because he could not make his point clear, language, as always, being the obstacle. Yet much like Lichtenberg and Kant, Wittgenstein kept at it and performed a movement of enlightenment, at work between the opposing poles of constraint and coordination, between his voice and other voices, sense and nonsense, words and silence, Einfälle and Klärung, subjectivity and objectivity. From there, a dynamic of life and language was set in motion, a culture and practice of maturity were formed, and a way for morality and beauty was cleared. It is perhaps no coincidence that near the end of the Preface of his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein applied the metaphor of light, where he so compellingly resembles Kant, promoting the enlightened device of self-thinking: “It is not impossible that it should fall to the lot of this work, in its poverty and in the darkness of this time, to bring light into one brain or another – but, of course, it is not likely. I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking. But, if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own.” (PI 1953, p. viii).

Bibliography Deligiorgi, Katerina (2005): Kant and the Culture of Enlightenment. Albany: State University of New York Press. Kant, Immanuel (1974): “Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?” In: Erhard Bahr (Ed.): Was ist Aufklärung? Thesen und Definitionen. Stuttgart: Reclam, p. 9–17.

15 See (Rowe 1991, p. 298).

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Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph (1968/1992): Schriften und Briefe. Wolfgang Promies (Ed.). 4 volumes with accompanying commentary (2 volumes). Munich: Hanser. Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph (1990): Aphorisms. R. J. Hollingdale (Ed.). Harmondsworth: Penguin. Lichtenberg Georg Christoph (2005): Gekleurde Schaduwen. Brieven 1770–1799. Cyrille Offermans (Ed.). Translated by Marion Offermans. Amsterdam: De Arbeiderspers. Nordmann, Alfred (2005): Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rowe, Mark (1991): “Goethe and Wittgenstein”. In: Philosophy 66, p. 283–303. Stern, Joseph Peter (1959): Lichtenberg: A Doctrine of Scattered Occasions. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (2003): Public and Private Occasions. James C. Klagge/Alfred Nordmann (Eds). Boulder, New York, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Zöller, Günter (1992): “Lichtenberg and Kant on the Subject of Thinking”. In: Journal of the History of Philosophy 30, p. 417–441.

Daniel Steuer

Wittgenstein and Goethe: Getting Rid of “Sorge” Der Aberglaube gehört zum Wesen des Menschen und flüchtet sich, wenn man ihn ganz und gar zu verdrängen denkt, in die wunderlichsten Ecken und Winkel, von wo er auf einmal, wenn er einigermaßen sicher zu sein glaubt, wieder hervortritt. (Goethe 1986b, p. 494)¹

On 22 June 1912, Wittgenstein wrote to Russell: Whenever I have time I now read James’s “Varieties of religious exp[erience]”. This book does me a lot of good. I don’t mean to say that I will be a saint soon, but I am not sure that it does not improve me a little in a way in which I would like to improve very much: namely I think that it helps me to get rid of the Sorge (in the sense in which Goethe used the word in the 2nd part of Faust). (WC 2008, p. 30)

If, as McGuinness puts it, “[t]o say what Ludwig admired in Goethe would almost be to say what he found remarkable or worthwhile in life, so many are the themes and attitudes from Goethe that recur in his thought” (McGuinness 1988, p. 34–35), then this remark of the 23-year-old Wittgenstein provides us with a focal point under which to approach Goethe’s multifarious influence on him.² “Sorge”, in the context of Faust II usually rendered as “Care”, is one of those words that are notoriously difficult to translate.³ But that is not the only reason why Wittgenstein retains the German; he also speaks of a specific sense in which Goethe uses the term. Taken in this specific sense – I shall argue – it remained a central aim of Wittgenstein’s philosophico-autobiographical work to get rid of it, so that we can see the “struggle against the bewitchment of our understanding by the resources of our language” (PI 2009, § 109) in which the Investigations are

1 “Superstition is a part of humanity; and when we fancy that we are banishing it altogether, it takes refuge in the strangest nooks and corners, and then suddenly comes forth again, as soon as it believes itself at all safe.” (Goethe 1906, p. 67) 2 Since Schulte (1990; first published in 1984 in Grazer Philosophische Studien, p. 1–32, and in Italian in 1982: Intersezioni, p. 99–124 ), Monk (1990) and Rowe (1991, 1994), Goethe’s influence has been recognised in the literature. See also Steuer (1999), McGuinness (2002), Breithaupt, Raatzsch, Kremberg (2003). 3 In other contexts, the word can rarely be translated with “care”, whether as a noun or verbal phrase, e.g.: “Meine Sorge ist …” = “my concern/worry is …”; “sich sorgen”, “besorgt sein” etc. = “to be worried”, “to be concerned”, or even “to be anxious”.

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engaged as just the most mature expression of that wish. In fact, Goethe’s use of the figure of “Sorge” in the final act of Faust II will reveal connections with two of Wittgenstein’s fundamental concerns: on the one hand the theme of magic and superstition, and on the other that of doubt. And these, in turn, are associated with points at which Wittgenstein explicitly refers to Goethe, i.e. his invocation of Goethe’s morphological method in the remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, and his repeated quotation of the famous line from Faust I: “Und schreibe getrost: Im Anfang war die Tat.” (Goethe 1986a, l. 1237)⁴ Neither point is an end-point; rather, both must be seen as methodological tools which allow us to regain the ground under our feet when “Sorge” makes us doubt the reliable foundations of our practices (our form of life), and to do so without taking flight to some illusionary metaphysical certainties that would compensate us for the loss of our trust in the ordinary. The sensitivity that is needed for the successful use of these tools – I shall suggest – is one cultivated at least as much in literature as in philosophy. And to the extent that Wittgenstein was right and we nowadays cannot see that poets and musicians have as much to teach us as scientists (cf. VB 1998, p. 42e), it will be difficult to understand not only the answers Wittgenstein offers, but also the problems to which they are the answers. They are the problems of someone who saw himself as belonging to a past cultural formation which ended, roughly, with the death of Schumann in 1856 (cf. VB 1998, p. 4e; 10.10.1929), as opposed to the modern era which felt alien to him; the problems of someone who saw himself as, and was, an exile not only geographically (and, for some time, politically), but in cultural-historical terms as well.⁵

“Sorge” in Faust II In the 5th and final act of Faust II, we find Faust unable to enjoy either the coastal land bestowed upon him by the emperor, or any of the worldly goods brought to him from around the globe, as long as he is aware of the little hut of Philemon and Baucis and the small chapel on a hill behind him. Even the ringing of the bells announcing the arrival of new ships reminds him of church bells, and hence his own mortality (cf. l. 11 151 – 11 154). He complains to Mephistopheles:

4 “And write with confidence: ‘In the beginning was the Deed!’” All English translations of Faust passages are taken from Goethe (2005). 5 See Klagge (2011).

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Die Alten droben sollten weichen, Die Linden wünscht’ ich mir zum Sitz Die wenig Bäume, nicht mein eigen, Verderben mir den Weltbesitz. … So sind am härtsten wir gequält, Im Reichtum fühlend, was uns fehlt. Des Glöckchens Klang, der Linden Duft Umfängt mich wie in Kirch’ und Gruft. (l. 11 239 – 11 254)⁶

And he can be sure of the devil’s sympathy  – “Jedem edlen Ohr/ Kommt das Geklingel widrig vor” (l. 12 261 – 12 262)⁷ – as well as his “moral” support: “Was willst du dich denn hier genieren?/ Mußt du nicht längst kolonisieren?” (l. 11 273 – 11 274).⁸ Egged on in this way, he orders Mephistopheles to relocate the old couple to a small estate he has already ear-marked for them. However, Mephistopheles and the “drei gewaltigen Gesellen” end up burning down the place instead. They kill the wanderer who is trying to defend Philemon and Baucis, who die in the flames. “Sorge” is one of the “four grey women” who now appear out of the smoke caused by the fire, the other three being Want [Mangel], Guilt [Schuld], and Need [Not]. At this point, one might expect Faust to be most susceptible to Guilt (he regrets what has happened, and what he has caused against his will: the death of the old couple; cf. l. 11 370 – 11 373), but it is “Sorge” who alone can enter his palace. Faust sees the four figures arrive, but only three disappear; and he vaguely hears the three parting sisters talk about “Not” and their brother “Tod” [death]. This triggers the famous monologue in which he wishes to remove magic altogether from his path, and to return to the simple state of a human being confronting nature: Könnt’ ich Magie von meinem Pfad entfernen, Die Zaubersprüche ganz und gar verlernen, Stünd’ ich, Natur, vor dir ein Mann allein, Da wär’s der Mühe wert, ein Mensch zu sein. Das war ich sonst, eh’ ich’s im Düstern suchte (l. 11 406 – 11 407)⁹

6 “The old people over there must move,/ I want their limes for my demesne./ Though I own the world, that little grove/ Cankers the lot, not being mine. […] So mine is the harshest torment,/ Feeling in wealth what we still want./ The tinkling bell, the scent of limes/ Beset me as would church and tombs.” 7 “the tinkling’s more/ Than any sensitive ear can bear.” 8 “Why all the fuss? What’s stopping you?/ Colonization’s overdue.” 9 “Oh, if only/ I could clear necromancy from my way,/ Wholly unlearn the magic formulae/ And face you, Nature, as a man alone/ Then being human would be worth the pain.// I was that

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But at the same time he recognises the ubiquity of superstition: Von Aberglauben früh und spat umgarnt: Es eignet sich, es zeigt sich an, es warnt. Und so verschüchtert, stehen wir allein. Die Pforte knarrt, und niemand kommt herein. (l. 11 416 – 11 419)¹⁰

Let us take note of two things: (1) Magic and superstition, in the context of Faust, are not something primitive that is overcome by a more rational attitude. Rather, they emerge out of the dissatisfaction with the limits of knowledge on the one hand, and the wish to take possession and control of the world in its empirical vastness on the other. It is this twin dissatisfaction with knowledge and power that made Faust enter into the pact with Mephistopheles in the first place. (2) Now, towards the end of the play, Faust knows this, but is driven into a false choice between: either remaining entangled in the “phantom shapes” [Spuk] (l. 11 410) with which the air is filled, or extricating himself entirely from them and confronting nature in isolation (as “ein Mann allein”). The disaster he has just caused may have made him sceptical of magic and superstition, but not of his cultivating and civilising project based on the rational control, exerted by autonomous subjects, over natural forces to the benefit of mankind. The means he wishes to employ have changed, but not his goal. Faust’s dilemma shows in his ambivalence towards “Sorge” and, by implication, superstition. When he hears the door creak, he shudders – it is a physical reaction belying his diatribe against superstition – and he cannot stop himself calling into empty space: “Is there anyone there?” “Sorge” does not just reply in the affirmative, but that the very question requires the answer “Yes”. (l. 11 419f.) It is Faust’s wish to deny his own superstitious nature that sustains the existence of superstition and allows “Sorge” to enter his palace. (And it is this moment of denial, and the blindness that goes with it, which, as we shall see, Faust shares with Frazer.)¹¹

man before I searched in darkness.” 10 “Snared early and late in superstitions,/ Signs and warnings and premonitions/ Intimidate us. We are all alone./ The door creaks. Who enters? No one.” 11 “Nothing”, Wittgenstein writes, “shows our kinship to those savages better than the fact that Frazer has on hand a word as familiar to himself and to us as ‘ghost’ or ‘shade’ in order to describe the views of these people”. And not just those: “much too little is made of the fact that we count the words ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’ as part of our educated vocabulary. Compared with this, the fact that we do not believe that our soul eats and drinks is a trifling matter.” (GB 1993, p. 133) Frazer’s “modern” blindness, his unquestioned belief in rational explanation and

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In the ensuing conversation, “Sorge” gives a truthful characterisation of her own paralysing effect on humans which leaves them hesitant and indecisive, unable to act, and half dead, half alive, half breathing, half suffocating (“Atemholend und erstickend;/ Nicht erstickt und ohne Leben”; l. 11 478  – 11 479). Faust’s reactions remain ambivalent: He counts her among the “unselige Gespenster” (l. 11 487; “wretched spectres”), and even acknowledges that the strict spiritual bond with such demons cannot easily be severed (“das geistigstrenge Band ist nicht zu trennen”; l. 11 492). Nevertheless, he ends with a vow of independence: Doch deine Macht, o Sorge, schleichend groß, Ich werde sie nicht anerkennen. (l. 11 493 – 11 494)¹²

Thereupon, “Sorge” blinds Faust by breathing in his face, without Faust actually realising this. In the following scene, he will mistake the digging of his own grave for the digging of the drainage canals designed to dry out the swamp and gain new land for a proud, free people – his great project. What then is “the sense” in which, according to Wittgenstein, Goethe uses the term “Sorge”? An obvious answer could draw on the figure’s characterisation of herself as a force that stands in the way of acting freely in life, a force that hinders self-realisation and self-expression. And this is certainly part of what Wittgenstein had in mind. However, what triggers his remark in the letter to Russell is his reading of William James’s Gifford Lectures of 1901–1902 on The Varieties of Religious Experience. In these lectures, James wants to consider religious phenomena purely from the “experiential point of view” ( James 1929, p. 34), and limits his topic further by only looking at the individual aspect, not the institutional aspect or questions of “ecclesiastical organization” ( James 1929, p. 29). He can thus define “religion” for his purposes as “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider divine” ( James 1929, p.  31). James’s church is indeed not only a broad, it is also a heterogeneous one: As there thus seems to be no one elementary religious emotion, but only a common storehouse of emotions upon which religious objects may draw, so there might conceivably also prove to be no one specific and essential kind of religious object, and no one specific and essential kind of religious act. ( James 1929, p. 28)

the superiority of his own times as an epistemological vantage point, makes him ignore the cultural dimension of the customs he has so diligently collected (see below). 12 “But your insidious empire, Care/ I will never acknowledge it.”

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Despite this declared commitment to an anti-essentialist approach to subjective religious experience as well as to the objects and acts of religious behaviour (reminiscent of Wittgensteinian “family resemblance”), James sees it as important to postulate a differentia specifica which singles out the religious, in particular against purely “moral” phenomena. He finds it in “solemnity”: There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we denominate religious. If glad, it must not grin or snicker; if sad, it must not scream or curse. … The divine shall mean for us only such a primal reality as the individual feels impelled to respond to solemnly and gravely, and neither by a curse nor a jest. ( James 1929, p. 38)¹³

We may use James’s approach to religion in identifying a further dimension of “Sorge” in Faust II. Faust, we may say, remains at the level of morality. If there is one adjective that does not fit him, then it is solemnity. He curses, while Mephistopheles, when he is not cursing, jests. Both fail. Faust does not live to see the completion of his cultivation project; Mephistopheles, distracted from his firm commitment to nothingness, by some attractive male angels, misses his catch: the immortal part of Faust. “Sorge” as a paralysing force leads to endless doubt, a possibility Wittgenstein will deal with most explicitly in On Certainty (but implicitly throughout his later work). Faust’s denial of “Sorge” – and that entails the wish to radically abolish all magic and superstition in favour of a purely rational self – leads to a kind of dogmatic self-assertiveness, the illusion of an absolute certainty in and about one’s actions. That kind of denial is as superstitious as the superstition it wants to leave behind. Wittgenstein, we may assume, knew both of these possible effects of “Sorge”, and fought them both. Faust discards the first, but falls prey to the second and, as a result, can no longer tell the reality of the actions he orders. There is a radical gap between his will and the execution of his will through others.¹⁴ It is his radical denial of “Sorge” that blinds him to this fact, and makes him her victim.

13 James is quick, in the following sentence, to reaffirm the diversity of the phenomena by pointing out that solemnity and gravity come in “various shades”, and that we are dealing with a “field of experience where there is not a single conception that can be sharply drawn”. Where James differs from Wittgenstein is in the importance and priority he attributes to extreme cases, whereas the Wittgenstein of the Investigations will balance ordinary cases against extreme ones. 14 Such a gap may, of course, just as well exist between an individual’s will and her own actions, but this would be more difficult to present on stage. In any case, Mephistopheles (and his entourage) can be read as alter egos to Faust.

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In order to get rid of “Sorge”, we may conclude, one should neither curse her, nor jest about her, nor let oneself be paralysed by her. Rather, as finite beings, tied to a temporal world, we should learn to accept her inevitability, and learn to withstand the temptation to draw radical consequences from the fact of her existence. By implication, an enlightened attitude to so-called magic and superstition does not aim to eradicate these phenomena from human life altogether, but to change our attitude towards them.¹⁵ Such a change in attitude is played out in Wittgenstein’s remarks on Frazer to which I shall now turn.

Superstitious Minds: From the Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough to the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein’s remarks on Frazer fall into two sets and reflect two different phases in his thinking. The first set was written around 1931, and the second, according to Rhees, “not earlier than 1936 and probably after 1948” (GB 1993, p. 115). The earlier set offers a critique of Frazer’s perspective on magic as erroneous science, and an alternative perspective which applies Goethe’s morphological method to human customs and rituals. The second set homes in on an aspect which was mentioned, but not fully developed, in the first: how come that Frazer has words, like “ghost”, ready at hand which he can use – without further ado – to describe magical practices and beliefs? The answer, given in the first set  – “An entire mythology is stored within our language” (GB 1993, p.  133)  – is now gradually developed into a psychological as well as linguistic insight: the terror we perceive in some of the customs, and the feeling that there is something “deep” about them, result from the fact that they remind us of something we know from ourselves and from other people. In other words, we are faced with a case of the uncanny. The first set introduces all the elements which characterise the comparative method deployed in the Investigations, and uses them against Frazer’s attempts at explaining, when all we can do is “describe and say: this is what human life is like” (GB 1993, p. 121).¹⁶ In Wittgenstein’s view, religious or magical customs are

15 From the fact that pictures can hold us captive (cf. PI 2009, § 115), it does not follow that we should try to destroy all pictures, but that we should try and see them for what they are. 16 Cf. Wittgenstein (1984), § 559: “Du mußt bedenken, daß das Sprachspiel sozusagen etwas Unvorhersehbares ist. Ich meine: Es ist nicht begründet. Nicht vernünftig (oder unvernünftig)./ Es steht da – wie unser Leben.” – OC 1969, § 559: “You must bear in mind that the language-game is so to say something unpredictable. I mean it is not based on grounds. It is not reasonable (or unreasonable)./ It is there – like our life.”

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not based on erroneous beliefs, except where they postulate a theory. Thus, a rain dance should not be seen as a failed attempt at engineering rain, or certain rituals performed on sick people as failed medical therapy: “Rather, the characteristic feature of ritualistic action is not at all a view, an opinion, whether true or false, although an opinion – a belief – can itself be ritualistic or part of a rite.” (GB 1993, p. 129)¹⁷ Frazer, in contrast, is convinced that he himself acts (and judges) on the basis of well-founded opinions, and his inclination to read the practices and customs he has collected as based on false reasoning results from the fact that he takes his own form of life for granted and, unquestionably, as an advance over previous, more “primitive” forms. Wittgenstein’s diagnosis of Frazer – “It never occurs to a man [i.e. Frazer] what the foundations are on which his investigation really rests – unless perhaps this occurred to him. (Frazer &c., &c.).” (GB 1979a, p. 6e) – will later be applied by Wittgenstein to forms of life as such.¹⁸ While primitive man, for Wittgenstein, acts out of a sense of wonderment, Frazer acts out of unquestioned beliefs (pictures of which he is not aware) while thinking that he acts purely on the basis of rational opinions. This makes him, like Faust, the one who is deluded.¹⁹ Wittgenstein, early in the first set of remarks, assumes that “one must only correctly piece together [zusammenstellen] what one knows, without adding anything, and the satisfaction being sought through the explanation follows of itself” (GB 1993, p. 121). Later he adds that the arrangement of the known data

17 In these early remarks, Wittgenstein still finds it difficult, at times, to distance himself from Frazer’s position. Thus, he argues e.g. that if someone who does not believe in “gods” says: “‘I fear the wrath of the gods’, then this shows that with these words I can mean something or express a feeling that need not be connected with that belief.” (8e) But, strictly speaking, the “primitives” don’t erroneously believe in the existence of such gods either (to assume so would be to make Frazer’s mistake): rather they express similar feelings, and mean similar things, to those for which Wittgenstein may use the words. This position, which removes the “developmental distance” between the “primitive people” and us, is the starting point in the second set of remarks. 18 “The real foundations of their inquiry do not strike people at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck them.  – And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful.” (PI 2009, § 129) 19 Wonderment is one of the sources of rituals and customs. They are non-instrumental forms of action, precisely not aimed at manipulating nature, but at making what cannot be changed bearable. Hence, an early remark from the second set reads: “As simple as it sounds: the distinction between magic and science can be expressed by saying that in science there is progress, but in magic there isn’t. Magic has no tendency within itself to develop.” (GB 1993, p. 141)

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need not be seen as representing either a historical developmental, or a causal connection between them, and not even a schema to which all phenomena must conform.²⁰ Rather, a synopsis may serve no other purpose but “to sharpen our eye for a formal connection”, to make us “see the connections” (GB 1993, p. 133). This is Wittgenstein’s preferred option, and the one he will adopt in the Investigations. It corresponds to the mature stage in Goethe’s understanding of an Urphänomen: as corresponding neither to any phenomenon as it is simply found in nature, nor to a constructed type or schema, but to a specific phenomenon as the summary of the relationships within a class of phenomena that is constituted through the investigator’s acts of comparing and ordering.²¹ The Urphänomen does not represent an explanation, but presents a space of possibilities: the logic of a certain field of phenomena. Thus, just as Goethe believed that he could “invent” possible plants, Wittgenstein claims that we can invent “primitive practices”, which is another argument against (causal) explanation: “One sees how misleading Frazer’s explanations are  – I believe  – by noting that one could very easily invent primitive practices oneself, and it would be pure chance [ein Zufall] if they were not actually found somewhere.” (GB 1993, p.  127; transl. mod.)²² What emerges here is the idea of a grammar of human practices which is not dependent on facts, and not open to causal explanation, though it is not free of general principles: “That is, the principle according to which these practices are arranged [geordnet] is a much more general one than in Frazer’s explanation and it is present in our own minds, so that we ourselves could think up all the possibilities.” (GB 1993, p. 127; emphasis added) Already in this early formulation, the arrangement, or order, in question hovers between subject (investigator) and object (practices). In the fully developed later method (of both Goethe and Wittgenstein), the aim is not to find abstract and general rules under which all forms must fall. The

20 “‘And so the chorus points to a secret law’ one feels like saying to Frazer’s collection of facts. I can represent this law, this idea [Idee] by means of an evolutionary hypothesis, or also, analogously to the schema of a plant, by means of a schema of a religious ceremony, but also by means of the arrangement of its factual content alone, in a ‘perspicuous’ representation.” (GB 1993, p. 133; Wittgenstein quotes from Goethe’s poem The Metamorphosis of Plants.) 21 This understanding of the Urphänomen is close to, but not identical with, Agamben’s notion of a paradigm (see Agamben 2009, esp.  p.  28–32). Agamben, in a final Heideggerian turn, assigns the paradigm an “ontological character”; it is said to refer not to “the cognitive relation between subject and object but to being” (p. 32). I discuss this in Steuer (2011). 22 “that one could very easily invent” translates the German “daß man primitive Gebräuche sehr wohl selbst erdichten könnte”, which puts the remark close to his admission in 1933–4 that philosophy should be written “as one writes a poem” [Philosophie dürfte man eigentlich nur dichten] (VB 1998, p. 28e [28]).

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method does not derive individual cases from a general law, but establishes the family resemblances between related cases, and thus allows for the creation of further variations that can be incorporated into the established order.²³ The act of comparing and ordering natural phenomena leads, by itself, to the possibility of inventing further phenomena.²⁴ In the later set of remarks on Frazer, Wittgenstein no longer needs to free himself of the compulsion to read the material according to a historical narrative, and he is no longer tempted to look for causal explanations based on facts (as he still was at times in the earlier remarks). He turns the question around, asking “how do we know that a practice/custom [Gebrauch] is age-old?”, and in answering it applies a version of the “principle of actuality”: this knowledge does not derive from any historical facts or evidence we may have established, because even if all this evidence turned out to be false (or not to exist), the impression would still be that of an old custom. In other words, the archaic is here, in the present. Wittgenstein’s perspective is now entirely “synchronic”: “The deep, the sinister, do not depend on the history of the practice having been like this, … but rather on that which gives me grounds for assuming this.” (GB 1993, p. 147) – i.e., in this case, to assume that what looks like the drawing of a lot once formed part of selecting someone for human sacrifice. – “No, the deep and the sinister do not become apparent merely by our coming to know the history of the external action, rather it is we who ascribe them from an inner experience.” (GB 1993, p. 147) Can the horror, then, be in the pure thought? And do we, erroneously, react “like a backwards-looking Clever Elsie”?: “‘Why make what is so uncertain [i.e. the actual history of a practice] into something to worry about?’” (GB 1993, p. 145) “But”, Wittgenstein continues, “it is not that kind of worry” (GB 1993, p. 145–147; [Solche Sorgen sind es nicht; p. 144.]).²⁵ The “Sorge” involved in our feelings when reading about, or coming across, such practices does not concern the past, but the

23 In the earlier remarks, Wittgenstein still asked himself according to what principle we invent certain customs, e.g. those that have to do with the dangers of eating and drinking, and answers that we do so according to the principle that corresponds to the simple forms to which all these dangers can be reduced. This corresponds to Goethe’s early view of the primordial plant as a type, while the latter fully developed method corresponds to the Urphänomen of the theory of colour. 24 Thus, Wittgenstein will finally be able to say: “we are not doing natural science; nor yet natural history – since we can also invent fictitious natural history for our purpose” (PI 2009, p. 241e). Note that the only reason the Investigations are not natural history is that they are not limited to the actual, but open to the possible; like literature. 25 The reference is to one of the Grimms’ fairy tales, Die kluge Else, who predicts, not yet being married, a fatal accident in which her child from the future marriage will one day die.

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present. It is a form of the uncanny. However, nothing “comes back”; the return of the repressed is always the return of something that is already, or maybe still, here, something “acquired through the evidence, including such evidence as does not appear to be directly connected with them [i.e. stories about old customs], – through the thoughts of man and his past, through all the strange things I see, and have seen and heard about, in myself and others” (GB 1993, p. 151) – things, in any case, that are still with us, here. It is against this background that Wittgenstein becomes interested in the “surroundings of a way of acting” (GB 1993, p. 147). In a certain sense, ways of acting must carry these surroundings with them. (Rules, as the Blue Book tells us, as far as they are relevant to Wittgenstein’s concerns, don’t act at a distance, an idea that pervades the Investigations as well.)²⁶ Griesecke has nicely summed up the challenge which lies in this movement of thought. If Goethe brought the apes rather too close to humans by showing that humans also possess an os intermaxillare, Wittgenstein brings allegedly archaic thinking and culture too close to the allegedly enlightened present civilization: With the help of a minute little bone, Goethe, …, has brought the apes too close for comfort to his contemporaries who reacted grudgingly to the suggestion of such a connection. And just in the same way, Wittgenstein, in his response to Frazer’s all-too simple historical “explanations” (which turn out to be, at the same time, cultural immunisations), has brought regicide, tree spirits and corn-wolves closer and closer to us, and for the taste of some rather too close. (Griesecke 2001, p. 130; my translation)

The Urphänomen of Superstition: Philosophical Investigations, § 110 Wittgenstein’s interest in superstition did not begin with his reading of Frazer. In the Tractatus, we already find the short but concise formulation: “Superstition is nothing but belief in the causal nexus.” (TLP 2002, 5.1361) This rather monolithic account of superstition  – the definite article must be understood as indicating that all its forms ultimately rest on belief in causality – gives way in the Investigations to a family resemblance approach.²⁷ However, I would like to suggest that

26 “Teaching as the hypothetical history of our subsequent actions (understanding, obeying, estimating a length, etc.) drops out of our considerations. The rule which has been taught and is subsequently applied interests us only so far as it is involved in the application. A rule, so far as it interests us, does not act at a distance.” (BBB 1958, p. 14) 27 Cf. “Glaube und Aberglaube” in Schulte (1990), p. 43–58.

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one particular paragraph presents us with what can be taken as the Urphänomen of superstition: “Language (or thinking) is something unique”  – this proves to be a superstition (not a mistake! [Irrtum]), itself produced by grammatical illusions [Täuschungen]. And now the impressiveness [das Pathos] retreats to these illusions, to the problems. (PI 2009, § 110)

Reading Frazer led Wittgenstein to assume that “magic is always based on the idea of symbolism and language” (GB 1993, p. 125), and that all of language needs to be “ploughed through” (GB 1993, p.  131) in order to uncover the mythology laid down in it (GB 1993, p.  133). §  110 of the Investigations indicates the point he reached at the end of this “field-work”, and from here, as Goethe says of the Urphänomen in his Theory of Colour (§ 175), we can descend to the “most common cases of ordinary experience” [dem gemeinsten Falle der täglichen Erfahrung].²⁸ The sections following this remark, up to § 133, are usually seen as an articulation of Wittgenstein’s idea of philosophy, or philosophical practice; but they can, with equal plausibility, be read as an unfolding of the attitude that is meant to avoid the superstition that is introduced in § 110 as the Urphänomen of superstition. It is a form of philosophical idealism which holds that “meaning”, “understanding”, “interpreting”, but also “exactness”, “rules”, “certainty” etc. all involve something unique. This uniqueness rests on words (or signs) as being sui generis, something special and apart from all other phenomena we experience. They perform their functions by virtue of some ethereal quality which is assumed either to inhere in them, or to which they are assumed to be related in some mysterious way, rather than by virtue of their actual role in human practices as they lie open in view. The entire text of the Investigations aims to bring about a certain conversion in the reader by getting her off the hook of countless preconceptions, or prejudices, that are associated with this sui generis-idea. These (philosophical) prejudices are nothing but so many smaller and larger superstitions, even if the term itself occurs only rarely. An example would be one of Wittgenstein’s early targets (GB

28 Goethe (1986c), my translation.  – And just as Goethe came to see the Urphänomen as resulting from, and therefore inextricably bound up with, the investigator’s work of comparing and ordering, Wittgenstein does not claim to establish the order of language, but an order within our use of language: “We want to establish an order in our knowledge of the use of language: an order for a particular purpose, one out of many possible orders, not the order.” (PI 2009, p. 56e) That purpose is to make visible where language does not do any work, and is merely “idling”; in other words: to make visible where we expect it to perform magical work.

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1993, p. 22e; boxed remark following § 35), the idea that “meaning something” in such and such a way is some mental (“geistige”) activity that bestows a specific meaning on signs. Wittgenstein compares “That is ‘blue’” (as an explanation of “blue”) and “That is blue” (as the description of an object’s colour). As a result of abstracting from the concrete circumstances of use that constitute these two different possibilities to operate with the same signs, the prejudice arises that there must be some non-physical, mental efficacy which bestows, or creates meaning.

Natural History and Analogical Reasoning Wittgenstein’s antidote to superstition, or the prejudice of the magical working of language, is what could be termed a “natural history perspective” in which linguistic practices are re-contextualised into human practice as such.²⁹ At the same time, the borders of what counts as “language”, and what not, become fluid. The established continuity does not mean that all difference between the human and the non-human world disappears; on the contrary, the specificity of the human life form appears more sharply in contrast to its surroundings: It is sometimes said: animals do not talk because they lack the mental abilities. And this means: “They do not think, and that is why they do not talk.” But  – they simply do not talk. Or better: they do not use language – if we disregard the most primitive forms of language. – Giving orders, asking questions, telling stories, having a chat, are as much part of our natural history as walking, eating, drinking, playing. (PI 2009, § 25)

Not only are those practices that involve language “as much” part of our natural history as those that do not; there is also no clear demarcation between them. Operating with words and with objects, as well as interacting with others, are at no point separate.³⁰ Thus the use of language is partly learned through

29 On 21 February 1937, he wrote: “I believe that I should not be superstitious, that is, that I should not perform magic on myself with words I may be reading, that is, that I should & must not talk myself into a sort of faith, a sort of unreason.” (DB 2003, p. 203; diary p. 194; coded remark) Here, too, in relation to one’s own actions, magic is not defined by any content – e.g. whether someone is a theist or an atheist – but by the consistency, or not, of a practice, i.e. by the coherence between words and deeds. 30 “What about the colour samples that A shows to B: are they part of the language? Well, it is as you please. They do not belong to spoken language; yet when I say to someone, ‘Pronounce the word “the”’, you will also count the second ‘the’ as part of the sentence. Yet it has a role

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“speech-like processes” [sprachähnliche Vorgänge] (PI 2009, §  7) such as the simple imitation of sounds: “the pupil repeats the word after the teacher” (PI 2009, §  7). At the most primitive level, the teaching of language “is not explaining, but training [kein Erklären, sondern ein Abrichten]” (PI 2009, §  5). The German term “Abrichten” is only used for the training of animals, and could also be translated as “conditioning”. Wittgenstein emphasises its applicability in the human context in order to disperse the “haze” that surrounds language as a consequence of the “general concept of meaning” (PI 2009, §  5). Conditioning, if successful, “causes” a certain kind of behaviour, but it obviously does not involve giving reasons or justifications, which are applicable only at a later stage. Hence, Wittgenstein generalises: “The basis of each explanation is training. (Educator should keep this in mind.)” (MS 136, 135b, 20 January 1948; quoted after Huemer 2006, p. 211)³¹ It is in this context that Wittgenstein’s references to Goethe’s “Und schreibe getrost: Im Anfang war die Tat” (Goethe 1986a, l. 1237) should be seen. However, Wittgenstein’s point is not to lower the importance of giving reasons etc. He writes: The origin and the primitive form of the language game is a reaction; only from this can more complicated forms develop. Language – I want to say – is a refinement. “In the beginning was the deed.”

But he crucially continues:

just like that of a colour sample in language-game (8); that is, it is a sample of what the other is meant to say.” (PI 2009, § 16) 31 Huemer’s translation. The German reads: “Die Grundlage jeder Erklärung ist Abrichtung. (Das sollten Erzieher bedenken.)” (The passage can also be found in Zettel [Z 1981], § 419.) – Huemer’s article discusses the relationship between causes and norms (of justification etc.), and argues that the absence in Wittgenstein of any hint as to how we might get from the former to the latter should not be seen as a fault. Rather, Huemer suggests, Wittgenstein simply wanted to remind his readers “that in order to achieve a deeper understanding of ourselves we must first acknowledge that we live in a world and in a community that are regulated by causes and norms” (Huemer 2006, p. 223–224). This may not satisfy all philosophers, but it is consistent with Wittgenstein’s insistence on ending all attempts at comprehensive explanation (from an outside perspective) in favour of description (from an inside perspective). I would add, however, that causes and reasons, on Wittgenstein’s account, never exist in isolation: no conditioning without customs, no inheritance of customs without conditioning. Thus, Wittgenstein’s (alleged) “quietism” only applies to theoretical fundamentalisms. It does not want to stop us from asking questions about, e.g., meaning and understanding; rather, as McDowell writes, his intention is “to remind us that the natural phenomenon that is normal human life is itself already shaped by meaning and understanding” (McDowell 1998, p. 277).

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First there must be a firm, hard stone for building, and the blocks are laid rough-hewn one on another. Afterwards it’s certainly important that the stone can be trimmed, that it’s not too hard. (UW 1993, p. 395, 397; 21.10. 1937)

Even though the primitive reaction, like primitive conditioning, precedes more complicated practices, this is not associated with an evaluative judgment, and could not be.³² Rather, the distinction is a warning not to look for reasons where the game being played is about causes, or for causes where the game is about reasons. In both cases, we would commit the mistake of looking for further explanations “where we ought to regard the facts as ‘proto-phenomena’ [‘Urphänomene’]. That is, where we ought to say: this is the language-game that is being played”, be it one with reasons or with causes. (PI 2009, § 654) Another reference to the line from Faust can be found in On Certainty (§ 402). Here, the context is the discussion of sentences that have the form of empirical sentences [Form der Erfahrungssätze], that, as Wittgenstein clarifies further, make assertions about objects and do not function like hypotheses. While hypotheses, if found to be wrong, are replaced by others, these sentences, one might say, are irreplaceable. Such sentences Wittgenstein associates with “in the beginning was the deed”. But what deed? If we go back to the source in Faust I, we find that the line ends Faust’s reflections on a translation problem – but not necessarily because he has found the right word. (Rather, he is interrupted by the howling of the poodle-Mephistopheles). The other candidates for the right word were the actual beginning of St John, “Wort” (word), then “Sinn” (sense), and “Kraft” (force). What we are offered is a number of interrelated concepts: Ich muß es anders übersetzen, Wenn ich vom Geiste recht erleuchtet bin. Geschrieben steht: Im Anfang war der Sinn. … Ist es der Sinn, der alles wirkt und schafft? Es sollte stehn: Im Anfang war die Kraft! Doch auch indem ich dieses niederschreibe,

32 If conditioning were intended by Wittgenstein as an end-point, he would indeed be a kind of behaviourist. But he wants to be neither that nor a Cartesian. (Cf. Hagberg 2003, p.  111) Conditioning plays an important role in language learning, but the Investigations demonstrate that even at this primitive stage a range of different possibilities exist. The individual to be conditioned may react as anticipated, or not. And if the latter, she may deviate from what is being taught in random, or in systematic fashion etc.

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Schon warnt mich was, daß ich dabei nicht bleibe. Mir hilft der Geist! Auf einmal seh’ ich Rat Und schreibe getrost: Im Anfang war die Tat! (l. 1228 – 1237)³³

Taken as a whole, the passage points to the “geistige Band” (l. 1939), the mentalspiritual bond introduced by Goethe in the Collegium Logicum passage (l. 1910ff.) which ends with Mephistopheles’s ironic advice to the pupil: “Im ganzen – haltet Euch an Worte!/ Dann geht Ihr durch die sichre Pforte/ Zum Tempel der Gewißheit ein” (l. 1990 – 1992).³⁴ Neither words, nor sense, force, or deeds provide ultimate end-points, much less explanations. If there is a “deed” Goethe had in mind, it is the act of comparing, in itself complex. What the practice of comparing  – natural phenomena in the case of Goethe, language-games (instances of language use) in the case of Wittgenstein – establishes is a network of relationships which remains fluid and does not have a fixed centre. Thus, both attempted an answer to the problem of origin which envisages “ways in which we make comparisons and in which we act” (RFM 1998, p. 387)³⁵ as the end-point of reflections on possible forms of knowledge. It is this primordial relationality which makes it difficult “to know what the sensible person knows”.³⁶ It is far easier to go shopping for the comfortable certainty of some theory or abstract proposition that promises to hold true under each and every circumstance. In contrast, what Goethe and Wittgenstein share is a commitment to a process of continuing critique and revision which takes place by tracing family

33 “I must translate it differently./ Enlightened by the spirit I see written/ ‘In the beginning there was Thought.’ … Is thought the maker and the doer?/ ‘In the beginning’ – so it ought to read – ‘was Power.’/ I write this down, but even as I do/ I hear a warning that I cannot leave it so./ The spirit helps. Now I decide/ And write with confidence: ‘In the beginning was the Deed’!” 34 “Stick – all in all – to words. Then through/ The safest gate you’ll pass into/ The Temple of Certainty.” 35 Ways of comparing and acting provide the limits of the empirical, and the latter are also equated with “concept-formation” (RFM 1998, p. 237). Hence, we may conclude, it is by ways of comparing and acting that we constitute our concepts. 36 A line from Zahme Xenien VI, quoted by Wittgenstein: “‘What a sensible man knows is hard to know’. Does Goethe’s contempt for laboratory experiment and his exhortation to go out into uncontrolled nature [freie Natur] & learn from that, does this have some connection with the idea that a hypothesis (wrongly conceived) is already a falsification of the truth? And with the beginning I am now thinking of for my book which might consist of a description of nature?” (CV, p. 20e; 2.7.1931) A hypothesis, wrongly conceived, appears as a model to which all phenomena must conform, rather than an “object of comparison” (PI 2009, § 131).

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resemblances between the phenomena. Philosophical Investigations, § 71 offers us the Urphänomen of the analogical logic of words thus established. The paragraph asks how we explain to someone what a “game” is: One gives examples and intends them to be taken in a particular way. – I do not mean by this expression, however, that he is supposed to see in those examples that common feature which I – for some reason – was unable to formulate, but that he is now to employ [verwenden] those examples in a particular way. Here giving examples is not an indirect way of explaining – in default of a better one. For any general explanation may be misunderstood too. This, after all, is how we play the game. (I mean the language-game with the word “game”.) (PI 2009, p. 38e)

The position that Wittgenstein explicitly criticises in this passage is Frege’s claim that a concept with blurred boundaries is not a concept at all. But he does more than just show that such concepts can do certain work perfectly well, and even better than sharply defined ones. He introduces a method of analogical reasoning which allows us to move from case to case without asking for the one general feature, or criterion, which would guarantee the coherence of this way of proceeding. There is nothing but the network of similarities and the possibility of finding, or inventing, intermediary cases if necessary. It is the same analogical logic which informs Wittgenstein’s philosophical treatment of illnesses of the understanding: The real discovery is the one that enables me to break off philosophizing when I want to. – The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself in question.  – Instead, a method is now demonstrated by examples, and the series of examples can be broken off. – Problems are solved (difficulties eliminated), not a single problem. (PI 2009, p. 57e)

These somewhat opaque sentences (we are not being told what the discovery is, but only of its effect) must be seen in connection with the “turning of the inquiry [Betrachtung] on the pivot of our real need” (PI 2009, p. 51e). The philosopher’s work is to effect such a turning in himself as well as others, and, consequently, he will no longer look for absolute certainties, or any kind of meta-explanation that would ground the analogical procession of thought. Nor does he, as we shall see, entirely rule out the existence of pictures, or points of reference, that are, as a matter of fact, fixed for us.³⁷ To the extent that the temptation to

37 Such fixed pictures have no ontological status, however. That marks the difference between Wittgenstein’s and Heidegger’s notion of “Sorge” (see below), as well as the difference between the former and Agamben’s notion of a paradigm (see Agamben 2009, esp. p. 31–32).

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search for metaphysical certainties, meta-explanations etc. may never cease altogether, getting rid of “Sorge” is not an act that is achieved once and for all. The real discovery is the one that acknowledges the existence of “Sorge” without becoming her victim.

“Sorge” Crosses the River: Telling Stories Beyond Superstition Goethe, as Hans Blumenberg has reminded us (in an essay on Heidegger), took the figure of “Sorge” from Herder’s poem “Das Kind der Sorge” which, in turn, is based on Hyginus’s fable Cura: Once when “Care” was crossing a river, she saw some clay. Thoughtfully, she took up a piece and began to shape it. While she was meditating on what she had made, Jupiter came by. “Care” asked him to give it spirit, and this he gladly granted. But when she wanted her name to be bestowed upon it, he forbade this, and demanded that it be given his name instead. As they were arguing, Earth arose and requested that her name be conferred on the creature, since she had given it a part of her body. They asked Saturn to be the judge, and he made the seemingly just decision: “Since you, Jupiter, gave it spirit, you shall have that spirit at its death. Since you, Earth, gave it the gift of a body, you shall receive its body. But since “Care” first shaped this creature, she shall possess it as long as it lives. But since there is a dispute among you about its name, let it be called “homo”, for it is made of humus (earth). (Heidegger 1985, p. 302–303)³⁸

Blumenberg offers a very suggestive reading of the fable, beginning with what he calls the “gaps” in the story: Why does “Sorge” have to cross a river? Why does she actually begin to shape the clay, and what kind of figure is she actually shaping? His answer: There must be a river because it is actually her own reflection which triggers her artistic career. And this means that she actually took her own image as the model for what she shaped. This answer relates the figure of “Sorge” to the theme of narcissism and vanity, as well as to that of reflection. “Reflections”, Blumenberg writes, “belong to Gnosticism’s mythic foundations. They take the place of the Platonic element according to which the demiurge looks towards the ideas in order to be moved to

38 This, very readable, translation is taken from Heidegger’s (handwritten) lectures on History and the Concept of Time. No translator is mentioned. The connection Hyginus  – Herder  – Goethe was first pointed out by Konrad Burdach (1923).

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create a world, and at the same time to learn what this world should look like” (Blumenberg 1987, p. 199; my translation). Now it is well known how troubled Wittgenstein was by his own vanity, personal and intellectual. Vanity wishes to preserve the fleeting and give it more importance than it actually has. (It is, according to Wittgenstein, images that hold us captive.) Could we say then, that “Sorge” – in wanting to give the clay image of her present self her name – wanted to gain a metaphysical self that would be excluded from the temporal, empirical play of reflections, of the formation and transformations of images? While in Gnosticism such vanity leads to a disastrous series of replications, both the mature Goethe and Wittgenstein use the theme of reflection in its anti-Platonic dimension. The plurality of forms takes precedence over the vain conception of a static primordial image. In the variations of our linguistic usage do we have the logic of our language (Wittgenstein), and in coloured reflection do we have life (Goethe). It is this commonality that led Wittgenstein, as we saw, to use the Goethean term Urphänomen to name the point at which the philosopher should resign herself to simply accepting that such and such a language-game is being played (PI 2009, §  654), and it is the vanity of finite beings who wish to catch a glimpse of eternity that stands in the way of such resignation. When Wittgenstein, in his diaries, battles with what he takes to be his vanity, this is therefore by no means irrelevant to his philosophical thought. (Cf. e.g. DB 2003, p. 93; diary, p. 85: “Soiling everything with my vanity.”) “Sorge”, Blumenberg concludes, is given life-long possession of the human being not because she is the creator, “but because the human being was created according to her image, her nature” (Blumenberg 1987, p. 199; my translation). The necessary, inescapable aspect of “Sorge” and vanity leads straight to the theme of temptation – the question of what we are tempted to say, time and again, due to the incessant lure of the image, and the desire to arrest what can only have meaning in the flow of life.³⁹ In the end, Wittgenstein accepts both, the fact that,

39 It would be tempting to compare Heidegger and Wittgenstein on “Sorge” in all detail, but to avoid undue distraction, a short sketch must suffice: For Heidegger, the fable of Cura is a “self-interpretation of Dasein”, if a “naïve” one (Heidegger 1985, p. 302–303). It is an a priori structure of Dasein: “Dasein’s being-ahead-of itself in its always already being involved in something” (Heidegger 1985, p.  294). The former relates to Dasein’s propensity [Hang], the latter to its urge [Drang]. There is a parallel to this structure in Wittgenstein in so far as past uses of language (in which we are “always already involved”) determine the space of possible future uses. Rentsch, however, is right to point out that Wittgenstein’s notion of a “form of life”, though hinting at a totality, is “only effective in so far as he describes fictional mini-situations” (Rentsch, 217; my translation). Heidegger wants to go further than this, turning “Sorge” into an

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across time, there are no absolute foundations, and the fact that we act, at the given moment, on the basis of some firm foundation: A picture that is firmly rooted in us may indeed be compared to superstition, but it may be said too that we always have to reach some sort of firm ground, be it a picture, or not, so that a picture at the root of all our thinking is to be respected & not treated as superstition. (VB 1998, p. 95e, 20.5.1949)⁴⁰

Here we find a perspective on the fixed points of our practices which aims beyond the dichotomy between necessity and contingency. If we do not mistake our certainties for absolute truths what opens up is a space in which we may find out to what extent, as Cavell might put it, we are in community with each other, i.e. to what extent our experiences resonate and speak to each other, and to what extent we actually use words with the same, or similar, meanings.⁴¹ Such negotiations are closer to story-telling (the way Benjamin characterises it)⁴² than they are to formal arguments. While Faust, in his megalomania and his quest for unconditional autonomy, loses the capacity to tell his true story, Wittgenstein managed, at least partially, to escape the grave he had dug himself in the Tractatus, and to acknowledge the need to tell his story. The Tractatus had only one voice; it is, at heart, a monologue presenting a self-defeating representationalism – a picture-theory of meaning; a

immutable structure, while in Wittgenstein it is the name for the desire to arrest the movement between the facticity of the established individual case (which we know, have, and live) and an anticipated totality (that will forever remain virtual). To get rid of “Sorge”, for Wittgenstein, meant not to suffer from the resulting tension, but to accept it. What distinguishes Wittgenstein’s method from Heidegger’s analysis is that there can be no self-same “Existenzial” called “Sorge” of which there are then plural ontic manifestations. Individual language-games are not such manifestations against the backdrop of the “Existenzial” form-of-life. (cf. Rentsch, p. 351) For Wittgenstein, “Sorge” is not a fundamental formal structure, but an ever-present possibility arising out of the human temptation to misunderstand the workings of one’s own doing. One might even say that the assumption of a fundamental ontological structure constitutes “Sorge” in the first place. 40 Goethe, in his notes to the West-Östlicher Divan, speaks of “the first and necessary primordial tropes” which are so close to practical life that they should not even be considered tropes: “Diesen allerersten Natur- und Lebensausdruck dürfen wir nicht einmal tropisch nennen.” (Goethe, 1986d, p. 179; my translation) See Steuer (1999, p. 247–256.) 41 Cf. e.g. Cavell 1999, p. 20–28. 42 Here is what Benjamin says about Hebel as an example of a story-teller: He “is a casuist. He will not for anything take a stand with any principle, but he does not reject it either, for any principle can at some time become the instrument of the righteous man.” (Benjamin 1999, p. 105)

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monologue, moreover, that frankly admits its limited capacity to communicate at the very beginning: “Perhaps this book will be understood only by someone who has himself had the thoughts that are expressed in it  – or at least similar thoughts.” (TLP 2002, Preface, p. 3) The Philosophical Investigations, in contrast, have a plurality of voices, voices that are in constant dialogue with each other as well as with the reader. This change in form is at least as important as any changes in the detail of philosophical argument, and it brings philosophy close to literature. Literature, as one form of artistic expression, is always an experimental investigation into the degrees of freedom that are built into current practices, into the current language-games, the current form of life. No ontological, or normative, structure could be, or should be, excluded from these investigations and allowed to limit these degrees of freedom. But given that the temptation to establish such structures may well be with us for a long time to come, the dialogue between what we call “literature” and what we call “philosophy” may also have a bright future. And if superstition is the poetry of life, it certainly belongs to philosophy as much as it does to literature.⁴³

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio (2009): “What is a Paradigm?” In: Giorgio Agamben: The Signature of All Things. On Method. New York: Zone Books, p. 9–32. Benjamin, Walter (1999): “The Storyteller”. In: Walter Benjamin: Illuminations. Hannah Arendt (Ed.). London: Pimlico, p. 83–107. Blumenberg, Hans (1987): Die Sorge geht über den Fluß. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Breithaupt, Fritz/Raatzsch, Richard/Kremberg, Bettina (Eds) (2003): Goethe and Wittgenstein. Seeing the World’s Unity in its Variety. (Wittgenstein-Studien 5) Frankfurt/M.: Peter Lang. Burdach, Konrad (1923): “Faust und die Sorge”. In: Vierteljahresschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 1, p. 1–60. Cavell, Stanley (1999): The Claim of Reason. Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy. (New Edition) Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang (1906): The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe (translated by Bailey Saunders). London: Macmillan. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang (1986a): “Faust. Eine Tragödie”. In: Hamburger Ausgabe. Vol. 3. Erich Trunz (Ed.). Munich: C. H. Beck, p. 7–364. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang (1986b): “Maximen und Reflektionen”. In: Hamburger Ausgabe. Vol. 12. Erich Trunz (Ed.). Munich: C. H. Beck, p. 365–547.

43 “Der Aberglaube ist die Poesie des Lebens; deswegen schadet’s dem Dichter nicht, abergläubisch zu sein.” (Goethe 1986b, p. 494) – “Superstition is the poetry of life, and so it does not hurt the poet to be superstitious.” (Goethe 1906, p. 156)

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Goethe, Johann Wolfgang (1986c): “Zur Farbenlehre. Didaktischer Teil”. In: Hamburger Ausgabe. Vol. 13. Erich Trunz (Ed.). Munich: C. H. Beck, p. 314–523. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang (1986d): “Noten und Abhandlungen zum besseren Verständnis des West-östlichen Divans”. In: Hamburger Ausgabe. Vol. 2. Erich Trunz (Ed.). Munich: C. H. Beck, p. 126–267. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang (2005): Faust I (translated by David Constantine). London: Penguin. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang (2009): Faust II (translated by David Constantine). London: Penguin. Griesecke, Birgit (2001): “Zwischenglieder (er-)finden: Wittgenstein mit Geertz und Goethe”. In: Wilhelm Lütterfelds/Djavid Salehi (Eds): Wir können uns nicht in sie finden: Probleme interkultureller Verständigung und Kooperation. (Wittgenstein-Studien 3) Frankfurt/M.: Peter Lang, p. 123–146. Hagberg, Garry (2003): “The Mind Shown. Wittgenstein, Goethe, and the Question of Person-Perception”. In: Fritz Breithaupt/Richard Raatzsch/Bettina Kremberg (Eds): Goethe and Wittgenstein. Seeing the World’s Unity in its Variety. (Wittgenstein-Studien 5) Frankfurt/M.: Peter Lang, p. 111–126. Heidegger, Martin (1985): History of the Concept of Time. Prolegomena (Ed. by Petra Jaeger; 1st Midland Book ed. 1992). Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Huemer, Wolfgang (2006): “The Transition from Causes to Norms: Wittgenstein on Training”. In: Grazer Philosophische Studien 71, p. 205–225. James, William (1929): The Varieties of Religious Experience. A Study in Human Nature (37th impression). London, New York, Toronto: Longman’s, Green and Co. McDowell, John (1998): “Meaning and Intentionality in Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy”. In: John McDowell: Mind, Value, and Reality. Cambridge/MA, London: Harvard University Press, p. 263–278. McGuinness, Brian (1988): Wittgenstein. A Life. – Young Ludwig (1889–1921). London: Duckworth. McGuinness, Brian (2002): “In the Shadow of Goethe: Wittgenstein’s Intellectual Project”. In: European Review 10 (4), p. 447–457. Monk, Ray (1990): Ludwig Wittgenstein. The Duty of Genius. London: Jonathan Cape. Rentsch, Thomas (2003): Heidegger und Wittgenstein. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. Rowe, M. W. (1991): “Goethe and Wittgenstein”. In: Philosophy 66. No 257, p. 283–303. Rowe, M. W. (1994): “Wittgenstein’s Romantic Inheritance”. In: Philosophy 69. No. 269, p. 327–351. Schulte, Joachim (1990): Chor und Gesetz. Wittgenstein im Kontext. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Steuer, Daniel (1999): Die stillen Grenzen der Theorie. Übergänge zwischen Sprache und Erfahrung bei Goethe und Wittgenstein. Köln, Weimar, Vienna: Böhlau. Steuer, Daniel (2011): “Sketches of Landscapes: Wittgenstein after Wittgenstein”. In: Béla Szabados/Christina Sojanova (Eds): Wittgenstein at the Movies. Cinematic Investigations. Lanham, Boulder, New York, Oxford: Lexington Books, p. 49–77. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1984): “Über Gewißheit”. In: Werkausgabe (Vol. 8). G. E. M. Anscombe/G. H. von Wright (Eds). Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, p. 113–257.

Andrew Barker

Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Conservative Legacy of Johann Nepomuk Nestroy Thanks to his ties to England in general and Cambridge in particular, Ludwig Wittgenstein is often regarded as an Anglo-Saxon philosopher who just happened to hail from continental Europe. Since the ground-breaking work of Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin in the 1970s, however, it is no longer admissible to abstract the “English” Wittgenstein from his social and artistic conditioning in Austria during the dying decades of the Habsburg Empire.¹ Expanding upon my earlier work², this essay will demonstrate that Wittgenstein’s origins in the multi-facetted culture of late-Habsburg Vienna remained a formative aspect of his thinking to the very end of his career. Indeed it would be surprising if they had not, given Vienna’s central role in the anti-Semitic, National Socialist ideology that de facto condemned him to exile in Britain after the Anschluss in March 1938. As is widely known, Wittgenstein’s preference for the hair shirt over the high table reflected an almost ostentatious rejection of the opulence he was born into, the fruits of his family’s success in the belated industrial blooming of the Habsburg Empire during the latter part of the nineteenth century. What the philosopher could not slough off was the rich legacy of an immensely privileged upbringing in which the arts played a dominant role. Not every Viennese lad found himself dandled on the knee of Johannes Brahms, a man who exemplified the cultural pluralism of Vienna at its best, equally at home in the company of the industrialist Hermann Wittgenstein and the surgeon Theodor Billroth. The “two cultures” of C.P. Snow’s Cambridge, something Wittgenstein presumably experienced first hand, must have been utterly foreign and probably repugnant to him.³ The inter-connectedness of all intellectual endeavour would have been as self-evident to Wittgenstein as it was to his great Austrian contemporary and fellow-exile Robert Musil (1880–1942), also an engineer, mathematician and philosopher, whose concluding masterpiece, the novel Der Mann ohne Eigen-

1 Janik/Toulmin (1973). 2 Barker (1986). See also Stern (2002). I am indebted to this essay for its many practical insights into the ramifications of Wittgenstein’s choice of the Nestroy motto to the Philosophical Investigations. 3 On 7 May 1959 C.P. Snow delivered his celebrated Lecture at Cambridge University entitled “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution” in which he deplored the dangerous chasm that had opened up between natural science and the arts and humanities.

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schaften [The Man without Qualities, 1943], like Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, was destined to remain unfinished. That Wittgenstein, for so long domiciled in the English fens, should choose as the motto to his Philosophical Investigations words from the most Austrian of all writers, the Viennese farceur, song-writer, parodist, and satirist Johann Nepomuk Nestroy (1801–1862), confirms how closely the ailing philosopher’s mindset remained attuned to the culture of his native land. Equally importantly, the motto provides a direct clue to the reader about the context in which Wittgenstein wanted his work to be read. Sadly, for all that Nestroy was the greatest comic genius ever to write in German (albeit in a thoroughly Viennese form of the language, sometimes impenetrable even to other native speakers) few people even in Cambridge, never mind Britain, would have heard of him. To this day, Nestroy enjoys huge popularity among Austrians, who regard him as their Shakespeare. Like Shakespeare, Nestroy was a prolific actor-dramatist who revelled in puns and double-entendres and thought nothing of lifting his plots from whatever source presented itself. Not least because of the relentless wordplay that can present insuperable problems for the translator, few of his plays have been rendered into English, and only one has become even tolerably well-known. This is the farce Einen Jux will er sich machen (1842), adapted by Nestroy from John Oxenford’s one-acter A Day Well Spent (1835). Thornton Wilder reworked Nestroy’s play in 1938 as The Merchant of Yonkers, and this eventually was turned into the musical Hello, Dolly! in 1964. Most recently, Einen Jux will er sich machen was translated by Stephen Plaice as On the Razzle and has enjoyed enduring success since the adaptation made by Tom Stoppard was first performed at the Royal National Theatre in London in 1981. The high esteem in which Wittgenstein held Nestroy was widely shared in Vienna in the early years of the twentieth century. The farceur was not only the favourite writer of Sigmund Freud⁴, he loomed very large in the affections of the satirist Karl Kraus (1874–1936), the scourge of Austrian veniality to whom Wittgenstein remained attached and indebted throughout his life.⁵ Like Wittgenstein, Kraus was also the offspring of a successful Jewish entrepreneur. Unlike Wittgenstein, he did not divest himself of his inherited wealth, using it instead to

4 See Lensing (2006). 5 Wittgenstein was happy to acknowledge Kraus among those figures who had made an impact upon his thought: “I think there is some truth in the idea that I am really only reproductive in my thinking. I think I have never invented a line of thinking but that it was always provided for me by someone else & I have done no more than passionately take it up for my work of clarification. That is how Boltzmann, Hertz, Schopenhauer, Frege, Russell, Kraus, Loos, Weininger, Spengler, Sraffa have influenced me.” (VB 1998, p. 16).

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underpin his writing and publishing activities. The founder/author/proprietor of the long-running journal Die Fackel [The Torch, 1899–1936], Kraus was a satirist cut from a different cloth than the superficially more genial Nestroy. He was, however, second to none in his admiration of his Viennese forebear. As Edward Timms points out, T.W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Elias Canetti, Franz Kafka, and Arnold Schoenberg were all creative spirits whose minds “had been shaped by their reading of Die Fackel” (Timms 2005, p. 546).⁶ Like Nestroy, the subtleties and complexities of Kraus’s language make him also singularly difficult to translate, so his work too remains mostly closed to readers without access to German. A prescient critic of the power of the popular press to shape and pervert public opinion (hence still very much a satirist for our own age), Kraus was categorised by Allan Janik as an adherent of what he dubs “critical modernism”. This is defined as: the reaction of a small but intense group of intellectuals revolving around the axis Karl Kraus, Adolf Loos and Otto Weininger and extending to Hermann Broch, Arnold Schoenberg, Georg Trakl, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and, in his last work, Egon Schiele. ... The critical modernists aimed at exposing the double standard of Catholic morality, the corruption of politicians, the press and big business ... Critical modernism in the arts could be summed up in Wittgenstein’s phrase “ethics and aesthetics are one” (TLP, 6.421) ( Janik 2001, p. 208– 209)

So important was Die Fackel to Wittgenstein that he took it with him when in October 1913 he abandoned Cambridge’s stifling intellectualism to go and live in Skjolden, a coastal village not far from Bergen in western Norway. Although he had returned to Vienna by June 1914, Wittgenstein noted in 1931 that the time in Norway had “given birth to new movements of thought” (VB 1980a, p. 17). It is not fanciful to suggest that during this period Wittgenstein would also have had time to digest one of Kraus’s most significant recent essays, published in Die Fackel to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Johann Nestroy’s death. On the first page of “Nestroy und die Nachwelt” [Nestroy and Posterity, 1912] Kraus bemoans the marginalisation of genius and laments the absence of real progress in the modern world. Kraus compares the lot of the genius to the once common practice of letting poverty-stricken workers live for nothing, or at much reduced rents, in the damp new buildings that they had often helped to erect. This “Trockenwohnen” [drying through dwelling] facilitated the completion of the property before it was let out at a more economic rent and served as a means of reducing indigence amongst the rapidly growing proletariat. Along the way it also wrecked the health of these

6 The name of the composer Alban Berg could also be added to the list.

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miserable “Trockenwohner”, who every few months were forced to move on from one dripping tenement to the next: Seitdem es Genies gibt, wurden sie als Trockenwohner in die Zeit gesetzt; sie zogen aus und die Menschheit hatte es wärmer. Seitdem es aber Ingenieure gibt, wird das Haus unwohnlicher. Gott erbarme sich der Entwicklung!⁷ (Kraus 1912, p. 1)

For readers of Wittgenstein, who may or may not have considered himself a genius⁸, the final sentiments that Kraus expresses in this extract from the essay on Nestroy will sound familiar since they bear an obvious family relationship to the words by Nestroy which Wittgenstein later came to adopt as the motto to his Philosophical Investigations: “Überhaupt hat der Fortschritt das an sich, daß er viel größer ausschaut als er wirklich ist”. The source of this quotation is Act 4, Scene 10 of Der Schützling [The Protégé, 1847], a rather grim satire on the questionable benefits of material progress in a newly industrialised society.⁹ In the memoir of his teacher that he published in 1958, Norman Malcolm nevertheless suggests that the significance of the motto relates primarily to Wittgenstein’s modest self-understanding of his own work: He certainly believed, most of the time, that he had produced an important advance in philosophy. Yet I think that he was inclined to feel that the importance of this advance might be

7 “For as long as geniuses have been around, they have lived as eternal ‘Trockenwohner’; they moved out, and human kind had a warmer time of it. For as long as there have been engineers, the buildings have become less habitable. God have pity on progress!” All translations of original texts are by the author. 8 Wittgenstein reveals his indebtedness to the thought of Otto Weininger (1880–1903) when he admits: “Das jüdische ‘Genie’ ist nur ein Heiliger. Der größte jüdische Denker ist nur ein Talent. (Ich z.B.) [The Jewish ‘genius’ is merely a saint. The greatest Jewish thinker is merely a talent. (Myself for instance)]” (VB 1980a, p. 16; see also p. 15–19). This is my translation as I believe the published version fails to capture the tone or spirit of the original. A misogynistic antisemitic Viennese Jew much admired by Kraus, Weininger, author of the succès de scandale Geschlecht und Charakter [Sex and Character, 1903], committed suicide at the age of twenty-three in the house where Beethoven had died. For more on the relationship between Wittgenstein and Weininger, see: Stern/Szabados (2004) and Janik (1985). 9 Nestroy (1926, p. 216). All further citations from the text will refer to this edition, since it is the one to which Wittgenstein himself would most likely have had access. The most recent scholarly edition of Der Schützling is: Johann Nestroy, Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, Stücke 24/ II. Edited by John R.P. McKenzie (Vienna: Deuticke, 2000). Prior to selecting the motto to the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein had (mis)quoted Nestroy’s words from memory in a letter he wrote to the philosopher Moritz Schlick on 18 September 1930. There he described them as “herrlich” [magnificent]. See Stern (2002, p. 428).

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exaggerated by those who were close to it. This feeling is probably reflected in his choice of Nestroy’s remarks for the motto of the investigations.

Malcolm then goes on to quote “Nestroy’s remarks”, translating them as: “It is in the nature of every advance, that it appears much greater than it actually is” (Malcom 1958, p. 60). The term “Fortschritt”, introduced into German by Immanuel Kant in 1754¹⁰, is more usually rendered in English as “progress”, and has been a loaded one since the Enlightenment’s contention that the tide of humanity was irresistibly flowing towards an ever more perfect future. Indeed, as early as 1774 Johann Gottfried Herder¹¹ published a critique of Enlightenment progressivism, whose sunny, if not downright glib, vision of human potential was summed up in the German coinage “Fortschrittsoptimismus”. During the nineteenth century in particular, this term came to reflect confidence in the benefits that advances in science, technology, medicine, and education would bestow upon mankind. Hardly surprisingly, during the course of the twentieth century the concept of “progress” came under intense scrutiny as it grew ever clearer that science was not foolproof, and that mankind was not morally equipped to deal with the fruits of its technological advancement. This became quite spectacularly obvious after 1945, as the implications of the Jewish and nuclear holocausts sank in. According to Brian McGuiness, it was “probably around 1945” that Wittgenstein chose the motto to the Philosophical Investigations which, as McGuiness notes, “is also expressive of distrust in progress” (1982, 39).¹² By now even philosophers in the Marxist tradition recognised there was no steadily upward progression within human society. As Adorno and Horkheimer admit in Dialektik der Aufklärung [Dialectics of Enlightenment, 1944], the very nature of the Enlightenment is itself contradictory. Long before that, however, for many non-Marxists any lingering belief in progress had yielded to bleak cultural despair (“Kulturpessimismus”). Thus for Malcolm to equate “der Fortschritt” with “every advance” betokens a peculiar (and very un-Wittgensteinian) lack of sensitivity both to the German language and its philosophical traditions.

10 See Häusler (1989, p. 422). 11 Johann Gottfried Herder, Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit (1774). 12 After examination of the typescripts, however, David G. Stern, dates the choice of the motto to 1947. See: Stern (2002, p. 427).

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Putting a kinder gloss on matters, one might suggest that, through ignorance, Malcolm had simply taken Nestroy’s words out of context. After all, at the time when Malcolm was writing, Wittgenstein was still understood primarily in the context of his relationship to logicians like Frege and Russell, and not as a philosopher steeped in the culture of his native Vienna. Yet even as late as 1980, Hacker and Baker had no qualms in claiming that it remains “unclear what Nestroy’s remark is intended to convey as a motto for PI” (Baker/Hacker 1980, p.  4). However, as David G. Stern rightly observes, we ignore the motto “at our peril”, since it “sets the stage” for all that is to follow (2002, p. 429). In the course of this essay, by contextualising the motto, it should become clearer that Wittgenstein’s choice of Nestroy to preface his final work has connotations which go considerably beyond a purely “werkimmanent” interpretation of the Philosophical Investigations. Krausian to the core, Wittgenstein did not use (or cite) words lightly, and we must assume that the quotation from Nestroy at the head of his manuscript was no random act. We must also assume that, unless he had perfect recall of a play which he might have seen performed in Vienna, Wittgenstein had access to an edition of Nestroy’s works in Cambridge.¹³ It would nevertheless be many years before Wittgenstein scholarship accorded to the motto the attention it calls for. The dual-language version of the Philosophical Investigations at least respects the integrity of Wittgenstein’s text by reproducing the motto, but it does not deign to provide a translation for non-German speakers. In a spectacularly high-handed fashion, the most readily available English-only version of the Philosophical Investigations, first published in 1967 and repeatedly reprinted since then, simply dispenses with the motto altogether. Yet as Stern points out, the very first word to appear in the final typescript of the Philosophical Investigations, preceding the quotation from Nestroy, is the word “Motto”. Nevertheless, until Joachim Schulte’s critical-generic edition appeared in 2001 this was not to be found in any printed edition of the text.¹⁴ By 1977, positivistic Wittgenstein scholarship had advanced sufficiently for Garth Hallett to pinpoint the source of the motto as the fourth act of the farce Der Schützling, Nestroy’s final full-length play before the upheavals of the March 1848 Revolution (Hallett 1977, p. 61). First produced in Vienna in Spring 1847, a time of widespread deprivation and suffering following a string of poor harvests, Der

13 See fn 11. 14 Stern (2002, p. 425).

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Schützling is not one of Nestroy’s frothiest pieces.¹⁵ Despite its superficially happy ending, the play is steeped in the gloom emanating from the plight of the main character, Gottlieb Herb, described by the great Nestroy scholar Otto Rommel as “ein moderner Faust aus dem Volke, der seinen volkstümlichen Mephisto in sich selbst herumträgt” (1926, p. 380).¹⁶ Nestroy initially created the role of Herb for himself, but critical opinion suggests that Herb’s predicament simply puts too great a strain upon the fabric of farce.¹⁷ The play opens on Herb living in a small whitewashed room with just a hard bed and rough table in it – lodgings as spartan as any Wittgenstein might have wished for himself. Herb has recently given up his job as a village school teacher “denn er fühlt, er ist zu was Höherem geboren”¹⁸ (Nestroy 1926, p.  110). The immediate and obvious parallel here is with Wittgenstein in the 1920s, whose idealism had brought him to work as a primary school teacher in Puchberg am Schneeberg, a little town tucked away in the alpine corner of Lower Austria. Biographical criticism claims few fans among today’s literary scholars, yet in any examination of Wittgenstein’s attraction to Nestroy’s Der Schützling the links between the philosopher’s life and attitudes and the contents of the play are so striking as to render it perverse to overlook or ignore them. Although the words Wittgenstein chose as his motto were quite well known independently of the play itself – they were apparently a particular favourite of Karl Kraus¹⁹ – there can be little doubt that the philosopher would have known the drama as a whole, and found the biographical parallels inescapable. By selecting words from Der Schützling as the motto to the Philosophical Investigations, wasn’t Wittgenstein in effect inviting the more curious among his readers to refer to a play in which he must have seen so much of himself reflected? When Gottlieb Herb vents frustration at his inability to educate his pupils to his own satisfaction, this must have struck a chord with Wittgenstein, whose rough methods when dealing with his rustic charges had caused equally strong dismay in the children’s parents.²⁰ Herb laments: “Ich hab’ zu viel Erwachsene kennen gelernt, als daß ich je mehr gegen die Kinder streng sein könnt”²¹ (Nestroy 1926, p. 115).

15 See: Yates (1993, p.  110–125). A synopsis of the play in English appears at: http://www. movingtheatre.com/site/nestroy/57_schutzling.html 16 “A modern Faust from the people who carries around his own folksy Mephisto within him”. 17 See Basil (1967, p. 113–114); Mautner (1974, p. 275–278). 18 “because he feels he has been born to higher things”. 19 Stern (2002, p. 432). 20 See: Bartley (1974, p. 73). 21 “I’ve known too many adults for me to keep on being strict with the kids”.

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In a further biographical parallel, the play presents Herb not just as a frustrated dominie, but also as a writer considered by his friends, and indeed by himself, to be a genius. The times are not, however, propitious for such a man, and Herb is not slow to bemoan his lot: “Es ist eine desolate Idee, Genie werden zu wollen, gerade in der Periode, wo das Genie seine Privilegien verloren hat”²² (Nestroy 1926, p.  110). Once again, the similarities between Herb’s sentiments and those expressed on the opening page of Kraus’s essay on Nestroy are strikingly obvious (“Seitdem es Genies gibt, wurden sie als Trockenwohner in die Zeit gesetzt”). In Der Schützling Nestroy presents Herb as a highly principled man of conventional ambition who wishes to succeed on his own merits rather than rely upon a “protector”, as was so often the case in real-life Austrian society. The play’s action reveals how the ascetic Herb – “herb” means austere in German, and is thus a typical example of Nestroy’s use of “speaking names” – achieves success, but ironically, and unbeknown to him, through the agencies of a hidden protector whose “Schützling” he unwittingly becomes. In short, the ascetic Herb, a passionate man who wants to banish passion from his life, an unbending idealist, a disappointed educationalist, a man aspiring to independent achievement, is a character who may well have seemed very familiar indeed to Wittgenstein. As if all this were not enough, as the play progresses yet further striking biographical parallels emerge: the area in which Herb finally makes good is none other than iron and steel technology, the very sector where the Wittgenstein family had first made its untold fortune. That the social tensions arising in the wake of this process of rapid industrialisation did not escape artistic reflection at the time emerges from the poem “Arbeitergruß” [Worker’s Greeting] by the depressive erstwhile army officer Ferdinand von Saar (1833–1906), a younger Viennese contemporary of Nestroy whose work bears some similarities to that of the Naturalists. In this powerful poem, a servile, resentful foundry worker confronts the oncoming poet with virtually revolutionary menace as he follows a path through the meadow on his way home from the steel works: Vom nahen Eisenwerke, berußt, mit schwerem Gang, kommt mir ein Mann entgegen, den Wiesenpfad entlang. Mit trotzig finstrer Miene, wie mit sich selbst im Streit,

22 “It’s a terrible idea wanting to be a genius, especially at a time when genius has lost its privileges”.

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greift er an seine Mütze – Gewohnheit alter Zeit. Es blickt dabei sein Auge mir musternd auf den Rock, und dann beim Weiterschreiten schwingt er den Knotenstock. …²³

Act 3 of Der Schützling is set on the shop-floor of an iron foundry; Act 4, wherein Wittgenstein found the motto to the Investigations in Scene 10, is set between the two poles of Herb’s experience, taking place in a rustic valley onto which, as in Saar’s poem, the foundry has encroached. The uneasy juxtaposition of industry and nature, found both in Saar’s poem and in Act 4 of Nestroy’s play, is reflected in Herb’s views on the meaning of “Fortschritt”. Even though Herb is himself anything but a revolutionary character, this speech, culminating in the lines that Wittgenstein picked as his motto for the Philosophical Investigations, clearly reflects the mood of pre-revolutionary Austria in 1847. When placed into the context of Europe immediately after the downfall of the Third Reich, the resonance of his words is overwhelming: Es gibt so viele Ausrottungs- und Vertilgungsmittel, und doch ist noch so wenig Übles ausgerottet, so wenig Böses vertilgt auf dieser Welt, daß man deutlich sieht, sie erfinden eine Menge, aber doch’s Rechte nicht. Und wir leben doch in der Zeit des Fortschrittes. Der Fortschritt ist halt wie ein neuentdecktes Land; ein blühendes Kolonialsystem an der Küste, das Innere noch Wildnis, Steppe, Prärie. Überhaupt hat der Fortschritt das an sich, daß er viel größer ausschaut, als er wirklich ist.²⁴ (Nestroy 1926, p. 216)

In the scheme of Der Schützling as whole, it is clear that the notion of “Fortschritt” over which Herb agonizes refers to the technological progress of mankind, the sort of progress epitomised by the steel works threatening the natural world. It is the sort of progress that is not accompanied by any corresponding moral

23 Ferdinand von Saar, “Arbeitergruß”. See: http://www.gedichte.xbib.de/Saar_gedicht_ Arbeitergru%DF..htm, accessed 20.02.2012: “Along the track through the meadow a man approaches me from the nearby foundry, heavy footed and covered in soot. With a darkly defiant look, as though grappling with himself, he touches his cap – a habit from days gone by. He casts an appraising eye over my coat and then, as he strides on, he brandishes his walking stick.” 24 “There are so many means to exterminate and destroy, but so little evil has been exterminated, so little wickedness destroyed in this world, that it’s easy to see that they invent lots of things, but not the right ones. And still we live in an age of progress. You see, progress is like a newly discovered country; a thriving colonial system at the coast, the interior still wilderness, steppe, prairie. The main thing about progress is that it appears much greater than it really is.”

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advancement. If this had been an issue for Nestroy in 1847, then how much more of a problem must it have appeared to Wittgenstein in post-1945 Europe? (In the preface to the Philosophical Investigations, dated January 1945, Wittgenstein refers to the “Finsternis dieser Zeit” [darkness of these times].)²⁵ Within the drama, Herb, a figure torn between a fascination with technological progress and a deep-seated ambivalence about its effects on people’s lives, now breaks out into a mournful song, a number that proved an instant hit with the Viennese public in 1847. In the ditty Herb lists levels of “progress” in medicine, post and telegraphy, photography, the railways, industry, and modern weaponry. He even ponders over “better” ways of committing suicide. For anyone still sceptical about the affinities between Wittgenstein and Nestroy’s character, it is surely hard to overlook Herb’s preoccupation with suicide, given that Wittgenstein himself, three of whose brothers killed themselves, also toyed constantly with putting an end to his own life. Pondering gloomily on whether the wonders of the modern age have really made humankind any happier, Herb concludes: “Drum, ich schau mir den Fortschritt ruhig an/ Und find’, ’s ist gar nicht so viel dran” (Nestroy 1926, p. 216–224).²⁶ Regarding Der Schützling as a whole, it is easy to discern the play’s critical stance regarding the dubious benefits of capitalism for the people at large – and in this it embodies certain pre-revolutionary qualities of the “Vormärz” – but it is also easy to see that Nestroy was far from promoting socialism in Der Schützling. Gottlieb Herb wishes to see the lot of the proletariat improve, but he despises its Luddite tendencies. Moreover, he is very keen to make his own mark upon, and be accepted by, the Establishment. In other words, he is no hard-line socialist, but a character who would have appealed to the Wittgenstein who voted Labour in the 1945 British general election. As Karl Mannheim has demonstrated, hostility towards capitalism is, in fact, a marker of conservative thinking throughout the nineteenth century, so that Herb’s disparagement of “progress” may actually be regarded as typical of a “conservative style” of thought in its opposition to a world dominated by the material consequences of rationalist thinking.²⁷

25 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen, (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1967), n.p. Earlier, as already noted, Wittgenstein mentions Herb’s speech when writing to the philosopher Moritz Schlick in a letter dated 18 September 1930, referring there to Nestroy’s “magnificent words” (“das herrliche Wort Nestroys”) about progress. As Stern points out, this supports the supposition that Wittgenstein’s choice of the motto for the Investigations was far from casual (2002, 427–428). 26 “So I take a cool look at progress/ And find there’s very little to shout about”. 27 Mannheim (1953, p.  90). Resistance to the notion of Wittgenstein as a “conservative” thinker is understandable, given the vague and often contradictory concepts of conservatism.

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Gottlieb Herb is out of step with his times, and there is evidence that Wittgenstein also felt he lived in a “hostile intellectual environment”.²⁸ Thus Der Schützling may well have spoken directly to the conservative thinker in Wittgenstein, a point made by J.C. Nyíri when considering the significance of the Nestroy motto as long ago as 1976.²⁹ Nyríri contends that the choice of motto supports those commentators seeking confirmation of the philosopher’s scepticism in respect of man’s so-called historical progress. Moreover, Nyíri locates the motto in the context of Wittgenstein’s pre-war work, specifically the foreword of the Philosophische Bemerkungen [Philosophical Remarks, 1964] dated 6 November 1930. This was written very shortly after Wittgenstein had left Austria for Cambridge in order to resume philosophy, and just shortly before his election to a Research Fellowship at Trinity College. In that same year, 1930, he wrote that his work was not in keeping with the spirit of the “main current of European and American civilisation” (VB 1980a, p. 6). If it is possible to generalise here at all, one might hazard that this particular civilisation has been characterised by its positivist emphasis on natural science, theory-building and causal explanation. Wittgenstein’s later work on the other hand, for example on language games, celebrates the complex, irrational, cultural basis of all our knowledge. What must be taken as given, he insists, are “Lebensformen” [forms of life]. This standpoint is essentially relativist in that it denies the existence of any absolute standards by which degrees of progress might be measured.³⁰ Above all, because of its anti-scientific tendencies, Wittgenstein’s work was out of step with the scientific and technological aspects of both his time in general and his family background in particular. Like Oswald Spengler, author of Der Untergang des Abendlandes [The Decline of the West, 1918–1923], a work with pervasive influence in Central Europe in the aftermath of the Austro-German defeat in World War One, Wittgenstein perceived a profound cultural malaise. As Allan Janik has noted, “the degree to which his world view was moulded by the

Needless to say, Mannheim’s use of the term “conservative” cannot be directly equated with the Anglo-American socio-economic or political understanding of the term as generally understood since the 1980s. See Demeter (2004). 28 See Forman (1971). 29 Nyíri (1976, p. 503). The contentious notion of Wittgenstein as a thinker in the conservative tradition, first proposed by Nyíri, is defended and expanded in Bloor (2004). I wish to record here my thanks to David Bloor for his many constructive suggestions and corrections after reading an earlier draft of this essay. 30 See Bloor (1983). See further Garver (2004, p.  151–152). Garver notes the “deep conservatism” which links Wittgenstein with T.S. Eliot: “In the case of both Eliot and Wittgenstein the rejection of (Bertrand) Russell takes as one of its prominent forms rejection of progress” (152).

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pessimism of Weininger and, in particular, by Spengler’s Untergang des Abendlandes will certainly come as a surprise, if not outright shock, to the majority of his readers, who by and large have regarded Spengler’s murky metaphysics as the complete antithesis of everything Wittgenstein stood for.”³¹ Instead of our having a culture, Wittgenstein suggests that we possess nothing more than a superficial attachment to what passes as “progress”.³² In Culture and Value he notes that “our civilisation is characterised by the word ‘progress’. Progress is its form rather than making progress being one of its features” (VB 1980a, p. 6). In 1947, precisely one hundred years after the appearance of Nestroy’s Der Schützling, Wittgenstein noted: It isn’t absurd, e.g. to believe the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity; that the idea of great progress is a delusion, along with the idea that the truth will ultimately be known; that there is nothing good or desirable about scientific knowledge and that mankind, in seeking it, is falling into a trap. It is by no means obvious that this is not how things are. (VB 1980a, p. 56)

Echoing the conservative sentiments of Nestroy’s Gottlieb Herb, Wittgenstein’s thoughts here are recognisably in keeping with a major aspect of the Austrian literary/cultural tradition as a whole. A similar vision of the world can be found in the works of Nestroy’s greatest Austrian contemporaries, the novelist, painter and educationalist Adalbert Stifter and the dramatist-cum-burocrat Franz Grillparzer, who lamented: Nur weiter geht ihr tolles Treiben, Von vorwärts! Vorwärts! erschallt das Land: Ich möchte, wär’s möglich, stehenbleiben, Wo Schiller und Goethe stand.³³

A similarly nostalgic tone recurs in later Austrian writers as seemingly divergent as Karl Kraus and Hugo von Hofmannsthal and in twentieth century novelists as diverse as Robert Musil, Joseph Roth, and Heimito von Doderer.

31 Janik (1980, p.  132). Karl Kraus’s memorable definition of the political adherents of Spengler – he had the Nazis in mind – was “Untergangster”. See: Timms (2005, p. 518). For a discussion of Wittgenstein and Spengler see: Bloor (1983, p. 162–165). 32 For a thorough and differentiated review of Wittgenstein’s position on “progress” in all its guises, see: Cahill (2006). 33 Cited in Häusler (1989, p. 445): “Ever onwards their insane activity goes,/ The country rings to the sound of Forward! Forward!:/ Were it possible, I’d gladly stay standing on the spot,/ Where Goethe and Schiller stood.”

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If the motto to the Philosophical Investigations is placed in the context of Wittgenstein’s scepticism about the benefits to mankind of science and technology, it is evident, pace Malcolm, that the citation from Der Schützling is considerably more than merely a symptom of Wittgenstein’s modesty regarding the magnitude of his contribution to philosophy. Examining the motto in its wider literary and biographical contexts reveals clearly how deeply rooted the Philosophical Investigations are in Wittgenstein’s awareness of his position in the Austrian, rather than the Anglo-American, cultural tradition. Quite feasibly, it is an invitation for the reader to consider the Austrian cultural tradition informing the actual content of the Philosophical Investigations as a whole and into which “Wittgenstein’s conservatism can be placed plausibly and organically” (Demeter, 2004, p. 6). In a broader context, Wittgenstein’s choice of motto also points to his affinity with the thinking of pre-war figures such as Spengler and Mannheim, drawing attention to a conservative tradition which informs not just the Philosophical Investigations, but all of Wittgenstein’s later writings from 1929 onwards. As David Bloor observes (pers. comm.), they reject rationalistic schemes of explanation and insist on respect for what is empirically real and historically given. These feature centrally in what is, surely, Wittgenstein’s most celebrated argument: his rejection of a rationalistic account of following rules. The examples Wittgenstein uses are the simple rules of arithmetic, such as that for producing the infinite sequence 2, 4, 6, 8, etc. For the Enlightenment rationalist, the abstract statement of the rule itself is assumed to provide a sufficient explanation of the behaviour of a successful rule follower, i.e. the accurate production of the sequence. The behaviour is said to be guided or compelled by the meaning of the rule, and it takes place because that is what that meaning requires. But what is it, asks Wittgenstein, for a rule to require something? We must put aside rationalistic myths and look at the facts. He insists that any proper analysis should be grounded in the customs, institutions, and practices of following the rule. It is the practice that creates the meaning, and not the meaning that creates the practice. In developing this argument, Wittgenstein effectively reclaims rule following for the conservative tradition.³⁴ The analysis of rules embodies his systematic preference, evident throughout the later work, for the concrete over the abstract, for practice over theory, for life over thought, and chooses as its vehicle an example drawn from mathematics, the most confident and progressive of all the products of reason. In so doing, like Nestroy did in Der Schüzling a century earlier, but under radically different circumstances, Wittgenstein voices his unease about “the values of an

34 See Bloor (1997).

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increasingly secular, commercialised and individualistic society operating under the self-confident banner of ‘progress’” (Bloor 2004, p. 112).

Postscript: A Brief Note on Translating the Motto The original impetus for this essay stemmed from a sense of dissatisfaction not just with the flagrant way the motto had been marginalised by Wittgenstein scholarship  – some critics even denied that it should be regarded as an integral part of the Philosophical Investigations – but with its various renditions into English by those commentators who at least recognised its significance in the economy of the text as a whole. Translation is often a process of accretion, and Wittgenstein’s work proves no exception, as can be seen in the two very contrasting English versions of the Tractatus. Since I presented my own version of the motto in 1986, which I have now been persuaded to modify, the whole issue of its proper translation has been thoroughly discussed by David G. Stern (2002). He finds shortcomings in all the previous renditions, either on grounds of style, tone or indeed accuracy. On the basis of his discussions with native speakers of German, and further contextualisation of the motto, Stern proposes that “Überhaupt hat der Fortschritt an sich, daß er viel größer ausschaut, als er wirklich ist” should be translated thus: “Anyway, the thing about progress is that it looks much greater than it really is” (Stern 2002, p. 427). My own preferred option is now: “The main thing about progress is that it appears much greater than it really is”.

Bibliography Baker, Gordon P./Hacker, Peter M. S. (1980): An Analytical Commentary on Wittgenstein’s “Philosophical Investigations”. Vol. 1. Oxford: Blackwell. Barker, Andrew W. (1986): “Nestroy and Wittgenstein. Some thoughts on the motto to the Philosophical Investigations”. In: German Life & Letters 39, p. 161–167. Bartley, William Warren (1974): Wittgenstein. London: Quartet Books. Basil, Otto (1967): Johann Nestroy. Reinbek: Rowohlt. Bloor, David (1983): Wittgenstein. A Social Theory of Knowledge. London, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Bloor, David (1997): Wittgenstein, Rules and Institutions. London: Routledge. Bloor, David (2004): “Ludwig Wittgenstein and Edmund Burke”. In: Tamás Demeter (Ed.): Essays on Wittgenstein and Austrian Philosophy. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, p. 109–136. Cahill, Kevin (2006): “The concept of progress in Wittgenstein’s thought”. In: The Review of Metaphysics 60, p. 71–100.

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Demeter, Tamás (2004): “The Many Faces of Sociological Interpretation. The Unity of Nyíri’s Thought”. In: Tamás Demeter (Ed.): Essays on Wittgenstein and Austrian Philosophy. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, p. 5–13. Forman, Paul (1971): “Weimar Culture, Causality and Quantum Theory, 1918–1927: Adaptation by German Physicists and Mathematicians to a Hostile Intellectual Environment”. In: Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 3, p. 1–115. Garver, Newton (2004): “Beginning at the Beginning”. In: Demeter Tamás (Ed.): Essays on Wittgenstein and Austrian Philosophy. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, p. 137–154. Hallett, Garth (1977): A Companion to Wittgenstein’s “Philosophical Investigations”. Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press. Häusler, Wolfgang (1989): “‘Überhaupt hat der Fortschritt das an sich, daß er viel größer ausschaut, als er wirklich ist.’ Stichworte für den Historiker aus Johann N. Nestroys vorrevolutionärer Posse ‘Der Schützling’ (1847)”. In: Römische Historische Mitteilungen 31, p. 419–451. Janik Allan/Toulmin, Stephen (1973): Wittgenstein’s Vienna. New York: Simon & Schuster. Janik, Allan (1980): “Review of Vermischte Bemerkungen (= Culture and Value)”. In: Modern Austrian Literature 13, p. 132. Janik, Allan (1985): Essays on Wittgenstein and Weininger. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Janik, Allan (2001): Wittgenstein’s Vienna revisited. New Brunswick/NJ, London: Transaction. Lensing, Leo A. (2006): “Sensational. Repressed Memories of Freud”. In: The Times Literary Supplement 5379, 5 May, p. 4–6. Kraus, Karl (1912): “Nestroy und die Nachwelt”. In: Die Fackel 349/350, p. 1–23. Malcolm, Norman (1958): Ludwig Wittgenstein. A Memoir. London, New York: Oxford University Press. Mannheim, Karl (1953): “Conservative Thought”. In: Karl Mannheim: Essays on Sociology and Social Psychology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, p. 74–164. McGuiness, Brian (1982): “Freud and Wittgenstein”. In: Brian McGuiness (Ed.): Wittgenstein and his Times. Oxford: Blackwell, p. 27–43. Mautner, Franz (1974): Nestroy. Heidelberg: L. Stiehm. Nyíri, J.C. (1976): “Wittgenstein’s New Traditionalism”. In: Essays on Wittgenstein in Honour of G.H. von Wright. (Acta Philosophica Fennica 28), p. 503–512. Nestroy, Johann (1926): Sämtliche Werke. Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe. Vol. 7. Fritz Brukner/Otto Rommel (Eds). Vienna: Schroll. Stern, David G. (2002): “Nestroy, Augustine, and the Opening of the Philosophical Investigations”. In: Rudolf Haller/Klaus Puhl (Eds): Wittgenstein und die Zukunft der Philosophie. Eine Neubewertung nach 50 Jahren. Vienna: öbv & hpt, p. 425–445. Stern, David G./Szabados, Béla (Eds) (2004): Wittgenstein reads Weininger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Timms, Edward (2005): Karl Kraus, Apocalyptic Satirist: The Post-War Crisis and the Rise of the Swastika. New Haven, London: Yale University Press. Wright, G.H. von (1969): The Wittgenstein Papers. Oxford: Blackwell. Yates, W.E. (1993): “Nestroy in 1847. Der Schützling and the Decline of Viennese Popular Theatre”. In: The Modern Language Review 88, p. 110–125.

Steven Burns

Best Readings: Wittgenstein and Grillparzer¹ “Grillparzer: ‘Wie leicht bewegt man sich im Großen & im Fernen, wie schwer faßt sich, was nah & einzeln an…’” (Quoted by Ludwig Wittgenstein in 1931, in Culture and Value (VB, p. 13/15).² [“How easy it is to move about in broad distant regions, how hard to grasp what is individual & near at hand…” (VB, p.–/15e).]

Franz Grillparzer, the pre-eminent Austrian dramatist, is a neglected figure in the intellectual history of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein recognizes in him a fellow Austrian with conservative roots in European culture. Grillparzer withdrew from his successful career in theatre when his political plays were subjected to political censorship, and when his one comedy, Weh, dem der Lügt, was misunderstood. The latter’s protagonist tells truth to power, but is taken for a harmless fabulist. He achieves success because others assume that his truths are false. Wittgenstein, no stranger to the Liar Paradox himself, also sees his conservative standards lead him to radical critique of traditional as well as some contemporary philosophy. In Part I, I shall attempt to show that Wittgenstein’s reading of plays and aphorisms by Grillparzer influences some of his own writing and his self-analysis. I discuss several of Grillparzer’s dramas as evidence of influence and significant coincidence. In each case I attempt to show that some readings are better than others. I discuss Wittgenstein’s claim that Grillparzer did “good Austrian work” (VB, p. 3/5), and his disagreement with one of Grillparzer’s claims about Mozart (VB, p. 55/63). In Part II, I shall take issue with a commonplace of some current views of “reading”, that the richer a work of art or literature the more readings or interpretations it will sustain. On the contrary, I argue that the richer a work the more likely that it will support a “best reading”. I shall attempt this second task by constructing a debate between a giant of literary theory (Roland Barthes) and a follower of Wittgenstein (Anthony Savile), and then supporting my conclusions by invoking a set of central aphorisms from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Rather than agreeing that there are no best readings and that interpretation

1 I dedicate this essay to D.V.M. with gratitude and affection. 2 I shall refer to Culture and Value (VB) with double page numbers, the first referring to the more accessible first edition (1980/84), and the second to the very scholarly revision of 1998, both with an English translation by Peter Winch.

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is without limit, he shows that “[Interpretations] come to an end somewhere” (conflation of PI 1953, §§1 and 201). I append a brief selection of Grillparzer’s aphorisms as evidence of stylistic influence.

I. Grillparzer Wittgenstein read Grillparzer as a matter of course. It was not, so to speak, an elected affinity, and he did not list the 19th-century playwright as one of his main influences (VB, p.  19/16). Nonetheless, Grillparzer was part of his education, a present force in the makeup of his mind, a stylistic influence, and the subject of some very telling references. Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872) belongs a full century before Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951). His theatre career flourished in the Vormärz (the period between the 1815 settlement which followed the Napoleonic wars, and March 1848 when the repression of what had become Metternich’s police state was countered by armed revolutions in Vienna, and elsewhere). In fact Grillparzer withdrew from the public stage in 1838. He continued to write, however, until his death. He had studied Law, and kept up his career as a civil servant in the Finance Department, and later as Chief Archivist, throughout. He became politically more conservative after 1848. We should remember that contemporary Austria bears little resemblance to the Austro-Hungarian Empire in which both Grillparzer and Wittgenstein were formed. Vienna was the capital city of an empire of more than 50 million, but after the first World War the country was reduced to about 8 million; Vienna, too, shrank considerably. The old empire was an extraordinary complex of peoples, languages, religions, cultures, and so on (see Beller 2006, p. 88–124). When Pope Clement XIV dissolved the Jesuit Order (1773), Maria Theresa confiscated Jesuit property and used the proceeds to establish a universal system of education. She also began agrarian reform, favouring the peasants over the landed aristocracy. Her son, Joseph II, who had helped to convince her to abolish torture from the legal system in 1776, continued such Enlightenment reforms after his accession in 1780. Censorship was liberalized and literature flourished. Edicts of Toleration gave much greater religious freedom to Protestants and Orthodox Christians, and to a lesser extent to Jews. The Royal parks in Vienna were “dedicated to the People” (Beller 2006, p. 94). More than 700 monasteries were dissolved, and the funds diverted to secular projects. The famous Vienna General Hospital opened in 1784. New Civil and Criminal Codes “proclaimed equality before the law  – for noble

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and commoner alike” (Beller 2006, p. 98). Peasants were freed from bondage to their lords, and were allowed to own or rent land. In these reforms Joseph had the important support of Enlightenment organizations like the Freemasons. Mozart, who had moved to Vienna in 1781, used his opera, The Magic Flute, to portray a kind of autocratic Masonic Enlightenment, in which the wisdom of Sarastro defeats the plots of the dictatorial Queen of the Night. The French Revolution of 1789 threw a spanner in the works, for however enlightened, Joseph took his absolute authority seriously; he worked for a more educated, rational and productive citizenry, but he was not a democrat. He now found himself obliged to strengthen the system of censorship and the secret police in order to defend his reforms against both conservative backlash and progressive revolutionaries. “Josephism” as this now relatively static mixture of reform and repression is known, was to influence Viennese culture for decades after Joseph II’s death in 1790.³ Grillparzer grew up in it, and has been accused of sharing it. Rudolf Haller writes that Wittgenstein’s theory of truth promotes a certain quietism, and “people have thought that a trace of Austrian Josephism, like that of Grillparzer, can be detected in it” (Haller 1986, p. 54, my translation.). Although Haller tries to defend Wittgenstein against this charge, that philosophy cannot change the world, the charge does stick to Grillparzer. His hopes for the theatre as an instrument of enlightened reform led to a career which flourished from 1817 to 1838; then the discouragement of repeated censorship drove him to abandon the public stage. In 1848 he voiced the complaint that despotism had destroyed his life, at least his literary life. In his final decades he wrote only in private. One of Wittgenstein’s biographers, Ray Monk, informs us that Grillparzer was a friend of the Figdor family, who were “known to the artists of Austria as enthusiastic and discriminating collectors” (Monk 1991, p.  5). Ludwig Wittgenstein’s paternal grandmother was Fanny Figdor. To turn to his immediate family, Ludwig’s sister Hermine once compared him in detail to the title character of Libussa, and his father to Primislaus, another character from the same play (H. Wittgenstein 2006, p.  85).⁴ Grillparzer was common currency in their family. Moreover, his work was inescapable in Austria. Not only was it a fixture in school

3 Beller notes that part of the legacy continues to the present: “This sense of the authorities and the state as a positive agent of change and as a bulwark of popular welfare became very deeply ingrained. The reliance on the welfare state is still particularly strong in Austrian political culture” (Beller 2006, p. 103). 4 I am indebted for this reference, and for other generous assistance, to Professor Ludwig Nagl of the University of Vienna.

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curricula and at the Burgtheater, but a famous passage from King Ottocar: his rise and fall was often memorized, and recited on national holidays. Finally, Grillparzer was a noted aphorist; Wittgenstein aspired to be one as well. Probably he knew the aphorisms in my Appendix. In any case, some of his own remarks are reminiscent of some of Grillparzer’s. Those indications of general influence can be supplemented by specific remarks about particular plays. Although Die Ahnfrau was his first produced work (in the Theater an der Wien, 1817), it was Sappho that was his first great popular success (at the Burgtheater in 1818). He began the work by translating Sappho’s greatest extant love poem, later incorporating it in the text. We may expect a lesbian character, but it is a male lover, Phaon, whom Sappho brings from Athens back to Lesbos. In the end, he falls for a younger woman, and Sappho flings herself from a cliff. So we may try to read it as a broken-hearted lover story. But both Phaon and Sappho eventually recognize that theirs is not really a love story. A better reading of the play than either of those would recognize that Sappho sees that her immortality as a poet is of a transcendent order. In Act V she achieves the equanimity required to set Phaon and his young lover free, and to commit herself to the gods by leaping into the sea. Sappho’s story is of the tension between the temptations of ordinary life and the life of the artist. This tension between poetic creativity and mortal love plagued Grillparzer’s own life. In 1818 he began a three-year affair with Charlotte Jetzer. She had recently married a cousin of Grillparzer’s, and it was clear that her being married made it “safe” for him to indulge his passion. But increasingly he became “concerned to preserve the independence and solitude which he felt he needed in order to achieve a state of inspiration and creative concentration” (Yates 1972, p. 7). It is not much of a stretch to see a similar tension in Wittgenstein’s life. Though less indulgent of his sexual emotions, he, too, felt called to a higher duty, and was concerned to preserve his independence and solitude. The best indication of this is reported by G. H. von Wright: “In an isolated place near Skjolden (Norway, in 1913–14) he built himself a hut, where he could live in complete seclusion” (in Malcolm 1966, p. 6). I imagine him right away seeing the real shape of Sappho, and recognizing an aspect of himself in the heroine. The Jewess of Toledo was found in Grillparzer’s Nachlass, and produced in the year of his death (1872). There are passages commending the humanity of the Jewish characters, against the background of local anti-Semitism. But it would be a mistake to read the play as a version of Lessing’s Nathan der Weise. King Alfonso abandons his wife, Eleanor of England, in favour of the charming and spontaneous Rachel. Given what Eleanor says about sex, it is little wonder that he was charmed by the younger woman.

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Is wedlock not the holiest estate Since it exalts as right things else forbidden, And what each normal person feels a horror It takes within the realm of pious duty? (Grillparzer 1953b, The Jewess of Toledo, Act IV, p. 66)

It is clear that Rachel, the Jewess, did not consider sexual relations a horrible duty. Otto Weininger, whom Wittgenstein read with close attention, fits Rachel into his very odd theory of gender. She symbolizes his claim that the Jewish woman better represents his archetype of pure Female, because the Christian woman tends to demand metaphysical commitment from her Male partner (Weininger 2005, p. 289). Metaphysical commitment is a virtue of the Male, in Weininger’s theory. But this reading of the play seems to me to involve special pleading; it is twisted by Weininger’s theorizing. What I think that Wittgenstein would have seen as central is Alfonso’s abandoning of his higher duty, his duty to lead his kingdom in a war. After Rachel is murdered, he does return to his civic duty, but it is too late. He abdicates in favour of his son and goes to fight on the front lines, leaving the duty of leadership to others. Rachel’s sister, Esther, predicts that his impurity of intention will lead to his destruction: “Then think upon the Jewess of Toledo” (Grillparzer 1953b, p.  97). Wittgenstein was haunted by the fear of impurity of intention in himself (Cf. GT 1991). King Ottocar II of Moravia, one of the last of the Premyslid dynasty centred in Prague, died at the battle of Marchfeld in 1278 while trying to maintain control of Austrian territory. He had been defeated by Rudolph, who thus consolidated his position as the first Hapsburg monarch of Austria, founding a dynasty that lasted into the 20th century. Grillparzer considered Ottocar a case of overweening ambition. Right in the middle of his King Ottocar: his rise and fall (1823) is a lengthy speech by a liegeman from Horneck, who addresses Rudolph in praise of Austria. He praises first the goodly land, “with meadows shining green and grain like gold, / Held in the Danube’s silvery embrace!” Then he turns to the Austrian himself, who is “free and frank”. Perhaps in Saxony or on the Rhine, There may be folk more versed in bookish lore; But in what counts before the sight of God; An open eye, straightforward common sense; In these the Austrian outstrips his brothers, Thinks his own thoughts and leaves the talk to others. (Grillparzer 1962, King Ottocar, Act III, p. 93)

Often memorized by school children, this self-description finds an echo in generations of Austrians. And there is perhaps an echo in Wittgenstein, who thinks his

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own thoughts, and does not expect them to fit into the academic journalese of his Cambridge milieu. He cannot be said, however, to have left the talk to others. He did give serious thought to “Austrianness”. Austrian writers, musicians, and philosophers were constant touchstones in his thinking. In 1929 he wrote: “I think good Austrian work (Grillparzer, Lenau, Bruckner, Labor) is particularly hard to understand. There is a sense in which it is subtler than anything else and the truth it expresses never leans towards plausibility” (VB, p. 3/5). This assessment also fits his own Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. One should note that later in his life he would warn Norman Malcolm against such thoughts: in 1939 Malcolm had spoken of the British “national character”. Wittgenstein was angered, considered the remark to be “a great stupidity” and an indication that Malcolm was not learning from his studies with him (Malcolm 1966, p. 32). Libussa is another play from Grillparzer’s Nachlass. A plowman, Primislaus, becomes the founder of the city of Prague and of the Premysl dynasty. As the play opens, he has rescued from danger, and fallen in love with, a young woman. She turns out to be Libussa, daughter of the dying Duke, and she is soon to be governess of the Duchy. She turns from her otherworldly interests and tries to govern with wisdom and compassion. Primislaus is disgusted by her social standing, and unimpressed by her methods of governance. He will not respond to her appeal for his love until she completely subjugates her will to his. He goes on to govern as her consort, with practical reason, and public discipline. Libussa eventually is disenchanted, and leaves to rejoin her otherworldly sisters. When we read Hermine’s comparison of Ludwig to Libussa, we are first struck by her being a female character. We may think that this fits Wittgenstein’s own self-assessment as a “reproductive” thinker (VB, p. 18ff./16ff. Cf. Burns 1981). “I believe that my originality… is an originality belonging to the soil rather than to the seed (Perhaps I have no seed of my own.)” (VB, p. 36/42). But that reading is perhaps overly indebted to Weininger, and in any case does not seem to expose the heart of the difficulty of the son’s winning his father’s love. As a boy, Ludwig had sought approval “through his willingness to oblige” (Monk 1991, p. 14), and received the approval of his father because of his interest in engineering. As a man, Ludwig was the last person to allow his will to be subjugated to anyone else’s. Although he attended his father’s death, like his brothers he rebelled, did not remain an engineer, did not take over his father’s business interests but gave away his share of the family fortune. And he turned to philosophy. Wittgenstein was not uncritical of Grillparzer. He would have known, and probably concurred with, Weininger’s reservation. Weininger argued that one mark of greatness in an artist is the greatness of the questions which he asks. Of Wagner, for instance, he says: “The problems that he has chosen as his subject are the most enormous that any artist has chosen …” (Weininger 2001, p. 75). In his

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posthumously published essay, “Science and Culture”, he discusses this criterion, and writes: “If one started to apply such a measure seriously, the number of great names in world literature would shrink considerably.” Grillparzer is among those who would have to “climb down” (Weininger 2001, p. 132). His themes of love, ambition, and duty were apparently not enormous enough. Wittgenstein also was critical of Grillparzer for saying that Mozart countenanced only what is ‘beautiful’ in music. He discusses charitably what Grillparzer might have meant by this, but then writes: “it is still a prejudice on Grillparzer’s part to think that by rights it ought not to be otherwise” (VB, p. 55/63). Both Mozart and Beethoven extended the range of musical language, so that Grillparzer’s judgement seems ungrateful for the new “non-beautiful” in music  – or for the new uses of “beautiful” in the changing musical context. Wittgenstein concludes: “The concept of ‘the beautiful’ has done a lot of mischief in this connection too” (VB, p. 55/63). Clearly he is seeking what I have called a “better reading” of Mozart than Grillparzer managed. I have sought to find parallels and influences running from Grillparzer to Wittgenstein. My examples have depended on finding some readings of the plays that are better than others, at least for present purposes. I now turn to a general argument about whether the existence of better readings implies the possibility of a best reading. I derive this argument from Wittgenstein.

II. Unity and Multiplicity It is a commonplace in discussions of art and literature to claim that the greater a piece of writing, the richer a work is, the more interpretations it will sustain. I think that there is something wrong with this idea. Here is an argument: Consider the duck/rabbit, which Wittgenstein discusses (for different purposes, I should admit) in Section xi of what used to be called Part II of the Philosophical Investigations.⁵ It is a little work of art that sustains two interpretations. There is no more reason to believe that the protrusions are rabbit ears than that they are a duck bill. Either explanation is as well-supported as the other. But that only works because the drawing is so over-simplified, so schematic. If we add feathers or fur to the drawing we make it richer. But at the same time we reduce the ambiguity of its meaning. So it goes with greater art. The richer and more

5 In the latest revised edition, it is re-titled “Philosophy of Psychology – A Fragment” (PI 2009, p. 182).

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detailed a work, the less likely it is to sustain ambiguity, and the more likely it is that a unified interpretation will prove to be the best one. That is a quite sketchy argument, so I shall have to bolster it before long. But let this Unity Thesis stand for a moment. Why is there, then, so much support for the multiplicity thesis? The tendency to privilege multiplicity is of course important. It has emphasized for us openness to others, to other points-of-view, to classes alienated through class struggle, to cultures once suppressed by the hegemony of colonial power structures, and so on. These are, of course, important gains. Its opposite, the tendency to privilege unity, has thus been associated with intolerance, with totalitarianism, with absolutist theocracies and other fundamentalisms, with racism and sexism, and with oppression in general. It is not my intention, need I insist, to defend those vices. I shall not in fact defend the opposite of the multiplicity thesis: that unity is primary and difference secondary. I shall instead work on Plato’s principle (best articulated in The Sophist) that both sameness and difference are among the greatest Forms, and are equally important. But sameness or unity has been neglected in the case of interpretation, so I shall emphasize it. I shall further claim that at least sometimes unity of interpretation is more important than différance. In our actual circumstances we may be hard-pressed to pick a single best account. And in the interests of open-mindedness, and with due modesty about our fallibility, it may be not only normal, but also wisest, to continue to entertain the several contenders for Best Interpretation. Indeed, why not simply expect that there will be three or four “bests”?⁶ However wise this may be, what guides our debates in such a case is the attempt to show or to see why one of the contenders is better than the others. But I need a better argument for this conclusion. A more complex argument for favouring unity of interpretation is found in a 1968 paper by Anthony Savile, in which he offers an account of best explanation in aesthetics. His main aim is to explain the place of the artist’s intention in appreciating a work of art. His conclusion is that when we set out to determine the correct reading of a text, the artist does not have the last word, but only has the first word. That is because the artist may be wrong; critics, audience, other readers may come to understand the work better than the artist does, and the search for the “correct” interpretation can then leave the artist behind. The idea that there is a “correct reading” of a work of art is of course controversial. It is contrary to the view which I mentioned first, namely that a great work sustains many interpretations. But Savile thinks that invariably some readings are better

6 I owe this provocative question to Warren Heiti, of the University of King’s College. I also owe him thanks for helpful discussion of several other points in the essay.

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than others, and typically one is better than all the others. We can call it the best available reading, and use this as a gloss on “correct”. The view that the artist does not have the last word about what is the correct understanding of his or her work, requires Savile to provide an account of how such a judgement is to be justified. His idea, borrowed from Wittgenstein, is that judgements in a court of law can provide a useful model (Moore 1993, p.  315). When a sentence in a contract needs to be interpreted by a court, the signatories’ intentions are not decisive; they are what is at issue. What the court tries to determine is what the sentence in its contractual context means, what the correct reading of it is. Here Savile writes: The closest I have been able to come to finding an account which meets these various demands is to say that the objective meaning of a string of words uttered in a given context is given by that reading of those words which (a) accounts for the presence in that string of as many relevant features of that string as possible and in the best of cases accounts for all of them; (b) which is as simple as any other equally complete reading; (c) which gives as unitary an account as possible of that string; and (d) which makes the production of the string appropriate in the intersubjectively identifiable circumstances of its utterance. (Savile 1972, p. 169–70)

By “string of words” Savile means any series of words. It could be a single sentence, being interpreted within the context of a whole contract. It could be the whole contract. Savile goes on to compare this account of how to interpret a contract in a legal context to the matter of interpreting a work of art. If the law court analogy can be maintained, then the correct reading of a work of art is the one that accounts for the greatest number of relevant features of the work, while being as simple and unitary and appropriate as the competing readings. Let that stand, for the moment, as my ramified unity thesis.⁷ Now I shall say something in defense of the multiplicity thesis. I think that the notion, so far as aesthetic judgement is concerned, gained some momentum from French Existentialism. But it was long after Existentialism that it was made compelling in the remarkable 1967 text of Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author”. Barthes claims that the very idea of the individual human person is “the epitome and culmination of capitalist ideology” (Barthes 1982, p.  143). It is not even self-constructed, it is other-constructed. And as a construction it can be deconstructed. The ideology of individualism, he maintains, is central to

7 Warren Heiti posed at this point the objection that there might yet be more than one interpretation which satisfied these criteria equally. One interpretation might be simpler and the other more unitary, for instance, while both equally satisfy (a) and (d). Savile might have to prioritize his criteria to evade this possibility.

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just one of the possible perspectives on metaphysics and the human condition. The individual perpetuates a kind of “tyranny”. This is most obvious in the case of the author, who, conceived as the individual originator of a work of art or a text, releases “a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God)” (Barthes 1982, p. 146). Now I do not want to defend this form of capitalist individualism, nor the idea that the author and her intentions are divine. Nor do I think that the author’s intentions are the “last word” in the determining of the meaning of a text. But that should already be clear from what I have said about Anthony Savile’s argument. He claimed that the author should have only the first word about what the text means. Normally an artist makes a work, and the artist’s understanding of what he or she is doing is important to understanding what it is that she does. There is, even with Barthes, a text. And there is a reader. Barthes does not throw everything away. But he does go much further than Savile; he does not want to give the author even the first word, he wants to dismiss the authority of the author entirely. What does he mean by the “death of the author”? “To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing” (Barthes 1982, p. 147). To get rid of the author, then, is to make clear that a text is unlimited, does not have a final signification, remains unclosed. Some of that makes sense to me. Some of it does not. It does impose a limit on the text to take the author as the last word in what is to count as the text. It closes the work. But does it close the signification? That is a much stronger claim, and I do not think that it follows. If Savile is right that the author only has the first word in assessing the signification of the text, then Barthes has run together Savile’s two claims. He has constructed a grand dualism: author / no author. His author is God and responsible for everything about the creation. But of course that is not how we think it is. Savile’s claim that the author has the first but not the last word about interpretation is considerably more plausible. The author is not done away with, but neither is the author the only key to the correct deciphering of the text. The author does not impose closure. Others, other readers, may come and understand the text better. But Barthes has other claims to challenge me with. He says, for instance: “We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning” (Barthes 1982, p. 146). A line of words releasing a single meaning sounds exactly like what Anthony Savile is thinking when he offers a theory about “the objective meaning of a string of words”. What does Barthes think is the alternative that we now know is a better way to think of a text? It is a “multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture” (Barthes 1982, p.  146). That opens up wonderful vistas. And it makes one’s head swim.

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Take his phrase “none of them original”. What this plausibly means is that none of the words in the string is being used for the first time. All are drawn, and draw their meanings, from their place in the web of language, and from their previous uses and our very incomplete memories of those uses. Any text presumes the existence of the language used to create it. We must agree about that. But does that mean that an Alice Munro short story cannot be original? That she cannot have written something that does not exist elsewhere in English? Of course not. And does Barthes mean that there are no “strings of words”? Of course not. There are “a variety of writings [which] blend and clash”. So there are strings of words, and they must have some standing if they can clash.⁸ Now consider the sentence, “Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile” (Barthes 1982, p.  147). This surely goes directly against what Savile is proposing to do. It claims that it is futile to try to give the best explanation of a string of words. There are two things that need saying about that claim. First, Barthes cannot mean it to be taken literally. If it is futile to try to find meaning in any text, any utterance, any string of words, then of course I have said nothing, you have read nothing, and meaning is a chimera. And so, of course, is his own text. But that is not what he means. Second, Savile does not mean what Barthes takes to be the only alternative to this futility. He does not think that a line of words releases a single ‘theological’ meaning. He says, “the objective meaning of a string of words uttered in a given context” (my emphasis). That phrase introduces two constraints. “Uttered” means that some person has said or written the sentence, and it makes a difference that it was one person rather than another; while “in a particular context” means that it makes a difference to the meaning where, when, and why it was said or written. If those conditions make for differences, then it is not the string of words itself that has a unique meaning. It is the use of them in a context that has a particular meaning. When I presented this argument at the Wittgenstein Reading conference on which the present volume is based, I met with some skepticism. I was informed, for instance, that I had presented an unfamiliar Barthes, that he was widely understood by his contemporary readers in France to be speaking not in universal terms, but about specific authors and movements. These were authors who

8 Here is another piece of exegesis: Consider the sentence, “The text is a tissue of quotations” (Barthes 1988, p. 146). We can think of a meaning for this. Each word, probably each phrase and even most sentences have been used before. And those previous uses contribute to the meaning which is put to use in the text in question. So there is a sense in which earlier uses are being indirectly referred to. But are they being ‘quoted’? Surely only in a metaphorical sense which is distinct from the usual meaning of the term. They are not in quotation marks, the author has not deliberately lifted them from another text, and so on.

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rebelled against the Romantic paradigm by deliberately withholding their claims to authority over their texts (André Breton’s automatisme is a classic example). It is worth pausing at this point. Was I meant to acknowledge that this was another valid way to read Barthes? Or that I had misunderstood and misrepresented him? I think the latter. And I am happy to stand corrected. But this is, of course, an illustration of the main point that I am trying to make. The rival interpretation of the Barthes text has greater purchase in the context in which it was offered, let us say, and it explains the text in more satisfying detail. Accordingly, what I have articulated in the argument with Savile is an inadequate way to read Barthes. On the other hand, if the text were best understood to be making universal philosophical claims instead of local, critical ones, then it would be vulnerable to the arguments that I derived from Savile. And if I now acknowledge that one should not read him that way, this leaves no one standing to defend the multiplicity thesis. I do not think, therefore, that my search for a best interpretation of a text is as directly contradicted by Barthes as his text may make it seem. Unity can co-exist with multiplicity.

Closure If we take seriously the idea that unity is as important a concept as multiplicity, do we not invite that ignominious result known as “closure”? Closure is a term of abuse in some critical circles. And see Barthes’ warning, above (“To give a text an Author is … to close the writing” (Barthes 1982, p. 147)) It suggests that discussion of a work of art might come to an end, that the last word might be spoken about it, that a definitive account of it might be achieved, that the imagination of readers might no longer need to be invoked, and so on.⁹ Consider the use of “closure” in psychology, where it refers to a point of emotional equilibrium after a struggle with some trauma or other. Some people are more inclined to seek such closure than others. Those who do are often considered unimaginative, those who do not are considered more tolerant of ambiguity and more likely to be creative. No

9 “Closure” has a long history as a technical term, in Mathematics, Law, Business, Poetry, Psychology, Analytic Epistemology, and so on. The term was adopted by computer science in the 1960s. “In computer science, a closure is a first-class function with free variables that are bound in the lexical environment. Such a function is said to be “closed over” its free variables.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closure(computer_science), consulted 15/01/2011) I am reminded of a slogan left behind on a logic class blackboard at University College London in 1968: “Free bound variables now!”

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wonder that on this model, closure in aesthetic judgement should be considered a negative term. But Wittgenstein’s remarks about reason-giving in aesthetics suggest the opposite. “What Aesthetics does is ‘to draw your attention to a thing’, to ‘place things side by side’. He said that if, by giving ‘reasons’ of this sort, you make another person ‘see what you see’ but it still doesn’t appeal to him’, that is ‘an end’ of the discussion…” (Moore 1993, p.  106). An end of the discussion! That would count as some sort of closure. Wittgenstein uses a law court analogy in this discussion. When a judge renders a verdict, a court case is closed. So too an interpretive debate in aesthetics. We imagine perhaps that all the relevant evidence has been presented. And now whether the judge sees it your way or not may not be a matter of whim or irrationality; reasonable people can disagree, too. Now of course there are recourses to appeal procedures in the law example. And discussions can also be re-opened in aesthetic matters. But that does not permit the conclusion that there is no such thing as closure, nor that it is always a regrettable thing when it does occur. I have not proposed an absolutist account, of course. But there can be reasonable closure, and for all we know it may last a very long time. Now consider three key quotations from Philosophical Investigations. First let us take the wonderful remark from §  29: “Do not say: ‘There isn’t a “last” definition’. That is just as if you chose to say: ‘There isn’t a last house in this road; one can always build an additional one’.” Obviously there is no problem in our ordinary language with referring to the last house on a particular road. My analogy is that we should not conceive it problematic to refer to the last word on a particular subject. This is so, even if we could always go on to say something further. Until we actually do, however, “the last word” is a clear and accurate phrase. Wittgenstein is discussing definition in this passage, and has claimed that “an ostensive definition can be variously interpreted in every case” (PI 1953, § 28). And because misunderstandings are possible we may think that terms just need careful defining “by means of other words” (PI 1953, § 29). The spectre of infinite regress lurks here, but Wittgenstein explicitly endorses the alternative: there is a last definition. But it, too, seems problematic, as my focal quotation shows, because it remains undefined. Like house-building, definition of terms comes to an end somewhere, at least for the time being. The success of the procedure of giving definitions is judged pragmatically rather than theoretically: whether the other person correctly understands the definition “is seen in the use that he makes of the word defined” (PI 1953, § 29). A similar result is achieved in the case of my second quotation: “[I]n the course of our argument we give one interpretation after another; as if each one contented us at least for a moment, until we thought of yet another standing

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behind it. What this shows is that there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation…” (PI 1953, § 201). This is a different topic: interpretation. And interpretation is being explored in connection with rule-following. An action is an interpretation of a rule, he suggests. But we had found a paradox, namely that “every course of action can be made out to accord with the rule”, and thus can be made out to be in conflict with it. “And so there would be neither accord nor conflict here” (PI 1953, § 201). The fact that we do give interpretations, one after the other, is evidence against the skepticism implied by the paradox. What is thus shown is that, rather than there being neither accord nor conflict here, “there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation”. I.e., there are actions which precede rule-following, and which are the conditions which make interpretation possible.¹⁰ Interpretation comes to an end, too. Here is another kind of closure in a context that started out looking like an infinite possibility of further interpretations. Finally, I note that § 1 of the Investigations is where this sequence of closure thoughts has its beginning: “Explanations come to an end somewhere.” This is offered in connection with the case of the person sent shopping with a list: “five red apples”. Here the point is that each word requires a different explanation: unlike the single explanation offered in the opening quotation from Augustine. The shopkeeper has been trained to count, and on reading “five” he does not think of an object (the meaning of the word), but acts in a certain way. How the word is used is what is at issue. “Explanations come to an end somewhere.” I have called attention to these familiar passages because, though they differ significantly from each other, they belong to a close family. They take seriously the idea that definitions and interpretations and explanations all come to an end somewhere. (Of course there is no one place at which they all come to an end.) But they come to an end in different sorts of action, or lack of action. Closure, while not of course absolute or eternal, is real and significant. And if Savile is defensible closure should have a place of honour among the various things one wants to say about the reading and interpretation of works of art or literature, including those of Grillparzer, and Wittgenstein’s reading of them.

10 From this remarkable things follow: e.g., that it is not possible to obey a rule ‘privately’.

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Appendix Wittgenstein quotes one of Grillparzer’s aphorisms, as discussed above. And he mentions another in Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology vol. II (RPP 1980b, p. 48). I would like to suggest that he was influenced in his own aphoristic style by Grillparzer’s many aphorisms. Some of these are lines from his plays and poems, which have been excerpted and circulated separately. But at the end of his collected works, a set of 55 aphorisms is presented (Grillparzer 1903, p. 330–36).¹¹ The essential spirit of creative writing needs image and metaphor as well as idea, claims Grillparzer in his diaries; and it combines “the profundity of the philosopher and a child’s delight at colourful pictures” (Yates 1972, p.  45). Wittgenstein often writes his philosophy in colourful similes. Some of Grillparzer’s aphorisms are the length of Philosophical Investigations paragraphs, others have the pithy brevity of Tractatus remarks. No doubt Wittgenstein would have disagreed with many of the sentiments they express, but many have a Wittgensteinian feel. I append here a few of them (in my own translation and in the editor, Necker’s order), in hopes that this will serve as an illustration that will obviate further argument: (1819)

The human mind and the course of the world are under all conditions and at all times so well matched that there will seldom be a true idea that is wholly new, or a new idea that is wholly true. (1820) How great are the forward strides of humankind, when we look at the point from which they began; and how small, when we consider the point to which they want to go. (1817) Why does the past appear so charming to us? For the same reason that a grassy meadow with flowers looks from a distance like a flowerbed. (1808) Morality a muzzle for the will, logic a stirrup for the mind. (1822) The health of the soul (morality) is like that of the body. Without both an excellent life is not conceivable. To make the two of them the end of life, however, is as preposterous for the one as it is for the other. They stand uppermost among the means. (1811) To know oneself is not as difficult as some people say, even for a mediocre intelligence; but to behave in life according to what one has recognized

11 I have not found the set translated into English, though there is a website (http:// poemhunter.com/quotations/famous.asp?people=Franz%20Grillparzer [accessed on 17 April 2012]) on which translations of 25 pages of short aphorisms can be found. Only a dozen of them come from this set, however.

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(1834)

(1838)

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about oneself is just as difficult as practice is in all things when compared to theory. The defects in others of which we are most intolerant are those which are caricatures of our own. One is never more jealous than when love begins to go cold. One no longer trusts the beloved, because one dimly feels how little one is now to be trusted oneself. There is one thing of which the so-called educated people normally have no conception: that someone could have make his way through the compounded and artificial condition that they call education, and that really is education, and have come out the other side into simplicity and naturalness again. To them everything simple appears to be: uncultured. The uneducated have the misfortune not to understand what is difficult, in contrast the educated often do not understand what is easy, which is a much greater misfortune. The uneducated person sees particular cases everywhere, the half-educated sees the [general] rule, the educated sees the exception. The piety of one subset of upper-class women flows from the same source as the flirtation of the other subset: idleness and boredom. They fritter away the day dressing their spirits, as the others do their bodies. The priest-confessor is their fashion merchant, the confessional their dressing-mirror, attending church is their rendezvous, hating and persecuting people who think differently are their jealousies and love spats. In church, the ones who always sing the loudest are the ones who sing off-key. All these islands in the broad ocean, how small their surfaces and how immeasurable their solid ground from the surface of the water down to the bottom of the sea! Vast countries and regions, in what immeasurable flat and crooked surfaces, in what manifold formations, do they extend themselves beneath the ocean! Humans, however, only call that land which appears to them as visible and inhabitable, above the surface. These summit-lands that reach above the sea appear to me like time in contrast to veiled and immeasurable eternity. When one sees so much water on the map, the idea obtrudes that the land lies in water; but at bottom it is all land, except that water covers the low parts. O you poor countries in the depths of the water, may God grant that some time the joyful sun will also shine on you; O you people flooded over with unhappiness, may God grant you a joyful day!

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Bibliography Barthes, Roland (1982): “The Death of the Author”. In: Roland Barthes: Image, Music, Text, translated by Stephen Heath. Glasgow: Fontana, p. 142–48. Beller, Steven (2006): A Concise History of Austria. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burns, Steven (1981): “Was Wittgenstein a Genius?”. In: Edgar Morscher/Rudolf Stranzinger (Eds): Ethics: Foundations, Problems, Applications. Vienna: Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, p. 315–318. Grillparzer, Franz (1903): ‘Aphorismen’ In: Grillparzer’s sämtliche Werke. Complete edition in 16 volumes. Vol. 16. Moritz Necker (Ed.). Leipzig: Hesse & Becker, p. 330–336. Grillparzer, Franz (1953a): Sappho, translated by Arthur Burkhard. Yarmouth Port, MA: The Register Press. Grillparzer, Franz (1953b): The Jewess of Toledo, translated by Arthur Burkhard. Yarmouth Port, MA: The Register Press. Grillparzer, Franz (1962): King Ottocar, his rise and fall, translated by Arthur Burkhard. Yarmouth Port, MA: The Register Press. Grillparzer, Franz (1987a): “Libussa”. In: Franz Grillparzer Werke in 6 volumes. Vol. 3. Helmut Bachmaier (Ed.). Frankfurt/M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, p. 275–371. Grillparzer, Franz (1987b): “Weh dem, der lügt!”. In: Franz Grillparzer Werke in 6 volumes. Vol. 3. Helmut Bachmaier (Ed.). Frankfurt/M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, p. 195–273. Haller, Rudolf (1986): Fragen zu Wittgenstein und Aufsätze zur österreichischen Philosophie. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Malcolm, Norman (1966): Ludwig Wittgenstein: a memoir. London: Oxford University Press (first edition 1958). Monk, Ray (1991): Ludwig Wittgenstein: the duty of genius. London: Vintage Edition. Moore, G. E. (1993): “Wittgenstein’s Lectures in 1930–33”. In: James C.Klagge/Alfred Nordmann (Eds): Philosophical Occasions 1912–1951. Indianapolis: Hackett, p. 46–114. Savile, Anthony (1972): “The Place of Intention in the Concept of Art”. In: Harold Osborne (Ed.): Aesthetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 158–176. [Originally published in: Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society LXIX, n.s.] Weininger, Otto (2001): On Last Things, translated by Steven Burns. Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press. Weininger, Otto (2005): Sex and Character: An Investigation of Fundamental Principles, translated by Ladislaus Löb. Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Wittgenstein, Hermine (2006): ´Ludwig sagt...´. Die Aufzeichnungen der Hermine Wittgenstein. Mathias Iven (Ed.). Berlin: Parerga. Yates, W. E. (1972): Grillparzer: a critical introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Béla Szabados

Wittgenstein’s Reception of Wagner: Language, Music, and Culture 1. Introduction Writing about the influences on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s work, Georg Henrik von Wright remarks that Wittgenstein received deeper impressions from some writers in the borderlands between philosophy, religion, and poetry than from professional philosophers (von Wright 1982, p.  33). Surprisingly, von Wright makes no mention of composers of music despite the fact that Wittgenstein also crisscrossed the borderlands between music and philosophy and received nourishing ideas for his line of thinking from composers among whom we need to list Richard Wagner. In this paper I claim that Wittgenstein read and engaged Wagner’s writings on music and culture, thereby developing in some measure his own habits of cultural criticism. In particular, I argue that traces of Wagner’s cultural critique are evident in Wittgenstein’s practice of music criticism, especially in his remarks about Felix Mendelssohn and Gustav Mahler. Moreover, Wittgenstein not only read Wagner but listened to and made remarks about Wagner’s music and, as he considered such specific topics as melody, motif and irony, he provided a series of remarks towards a critique of Wagner himself. Also, I contend that Wittgenstein’s analogy between music and language, one of the main axes of the Philosophical Investigations, relates to the interplay between language and music in Wagner. Finally, I take up the question of “internal critique” and suggest that, if philosophical confusion owes its existence to language being turned/turning against itself, Wittgenstein finds a similar inclination to turn against oneself in Wagner. However, by the time Wittgenstein gets through with Wagner, what is of value is made anew, and a trenchant critique of Wagner himself – Wagner turned against Wagner – emerges.

2. Not Only Science, also Art Teaches: Wittgenstein as Tone Poet Even though Wittgenstein’s love of music and his admiration for composers in the classical European tradition are well-known, the question about how this might connect with his philosophical perspective does not typically arise for

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Wittgenstein scholars. One reason for this may be that philosophers in general do not think biographical matters have any bearing on the practice of philosophy. If a philosopher is passionate about music, that’s simply a biographical fact about them that has little or no relevance to the practice of philosophy. Another philosopher’s predilection may be for backgammon, chess or sport, and surely these have no bearing on philosophy. Why, one might ask, would a philosopher bother with composers and tone poets? There is, however, textual evidence that Wittgenstein’s attitude was different. “Reading,” Wittgenstein remarked, “numbs my soul” (Wittgenstein 2003, p.  75e), while imagining, playing or listening to music enlivened him  – put a spring in his step  – inspired and enabled him to compose philosophy. Since none of this need involve any sort of propositional acquisition, only a “knowing how” that is surely not exclusively for philosophical consumption, then music’s special value to Wittgenstein’s philosophical activity is still to be unearthed. While working on the book that eventually became known as the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein wondered how people could possibly understand him [i.e. his work] when they have no idea what music meant in his life. (Drury 1984, p. 173) He continued this line of thinking when he reflected on his own style of doing philosophy and complained that it is like “bad musical composition” (VB 1998, p. 45e). Notice his complaint is not that his style is like musical composition, but that it is like “bad musical composition.” These remarks puzzle modern philosophers who ask what music has to do with philosophy. Hence the question “Why would a philosopher bother with composers and tone poets?” is reinstated. The conventional reaction to linking music and philosophy assumes a division of labor in the modern culture of the West: scientists instruct us and artists entertain us. This assumption is a prominent feature of our scientistic culture that developed in the second half of the nineteenth century, became pervasive in the twentieth century and is now part of the prevailing cultural ideology. Wittgenstein rejected this complacent dichotomy between scientists and artists: “People nowadays think, scientists are there to instruct them, poets, musicians etc. to entertain them. That the latter have something to teach them; that never occurs to them.” (VB 1998, p. 42e) It might be said that there is a simple knock-down objection to the above way of taking up the question of music’s relation to philosophy internal to Wittgenstein’s philosophy, namely, the say/ show distinction. Wittgenstein himself discouraged this sort of direction for investigation when he said that he could not say anything about what music meant to him because writing about music would violate one of the central propositions of the Tractatus: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one should be silent.” (TLP 1963, 7) What music has to teach us would have to be stated propositionally, and

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this is not possible, for the value music has to offer cannot be sensibly said but only shown. Anyone who contravenes the above bid to silence not only talks pernicious nonsense but succumbs to the “great temptation to want to make the spirit [den Geist] explicit” (VB 1998, p. 11e). This interpretation seems plausible if we have the Tractatus in front and at the center of our attention, focusing on its assertion to talk about nothing but the propositions of natural science. Such strictures, however, do not hamper the later philosophy and the interpretation rings hollow if we look at the remarks on music in the Nachlass, many of which are printed in Culture and Value and Public and Private Occasions. There we see that Wittgenstein wrote many remarks about music and composers in notebook entries that range from the late 1920s to the late 1940s. If these remarks do not add up to a sustained meditation on the Austrian-German classical tradition in music, then they do constitute an attempt toward it. Although scattered, when gathered and arranged, the remarks display much of the character and approach of the remarks in the Philosophical Investigations. The allusions to music and composers have implications for Wittgenstein’s philosophical perspective and style – how to do and write philosophy: I believe I summed up where I stand in relation to philosophy when I said: really one should write philosophy only as one writes a poem. That, it seems to me, must reveal how far my thinking belongs to the present, the future, or the past. For I was acknowledging myself, with these words, to be someone who cannot do what he would really like to be able to do. (VB 1998, p. 28e)

By putting music and philosophy side by side, we can see affinities between them. Both identify and unearth tensions and problems, with the aim to resolve/ dissolve them. Like a composer who scores tensions and then resolves them, so Wittgenstein identifies and dissolves the tensions in philosophy. As philosophical tone poet, Wittgenstein attends to troublesome concepts, sketches tones of everyday life and language games, aims at clarity of expression, and thus dissolves problems: In this world (mine) there is no tragedy & with that all the endlessness that gives rise to tragedy (as its result) is lacking. It is as though everything were soluble in ether. There is no hardness. This means that hardness & conflict do not become something splendid but a defect. Conflict is dissipated in much the same way as is the tension of a spring in a mechanism that would melt (or dissolve in nitric acid). In this solution tensions no longer exist. (VB 1998, p. 12e)

One year after his return to Cambridge in 1929, Wittgenstein’s notebook entries indicate a close identification with composers, including Wagner. Consider:

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I feel well only when I am enthusiastic. Then again I fear the collapse of this enthusiasm. Today Mrs. Moore showed me a stupid review of a performance of Bruckner’s 4th symphony where the reviewer complains about Bruckner & also talks disrespectfully of Brahms & Wagner. At first it didn’t make an impression on me since it is natural that everything – great and small – is barked at by dogs. Then it pained me after all. In a certain sense I feel touched (strangely) when I think that the mind [der Geist] is never understood. (Wittgenstein 2003, p. 19e)

Two things stand out in this passage: One is the intensity of identification with the composers Brahms, Bruckner, and Wagner. The other is the sharp contrast to modern philosophy’s attitude to enthusiasm: Wittgenstein endorses its value for his happiness and work despite the traditional distrust of the passions. What is more, he embraced enthusiasm and spirit as sources of vitality and creativity: “The best state of mind for me is the state of enthusiasm [Begeisterung] because it consumes the ridiculous thoughts at least partially & renders them useless.” (Wittgenstein 2003, p. 23e) Next day’s entry reveals he is still outraged about the critic’s tirade against the composers: On the matter of mind [Zu dem Geistigen]: did these great ones suffer so unspeakably so that some buttface can come today & deliver his opinion about them. This thought fills me with a sort of hopelessness. – Yesterday I sat for a while in the garden at Trinity & there I thought, strange how the well-developed physique of all these people goes together with complete unspiritedness (I don’t mean lack of intellect.) And how on the other hand a theme by Brahms is full of vigor, grace, & drive & he himself had a potbelly. In contrast the spirit of our contemporaries has no springs under its feet. (Wittgenstein 2003, p. 19e–21e; transl. mod.)

Since Wittgenstein rarely invoked a vulgarity to express how he felt about an issue, the fact that he does so in this context by calling shallow critics “buttfaces” [Arschgesichter] indicates intense moral indignation. But not only that; palpable is the thought: If Brahms, Bruckner and Wagner are spoken of disrespectfully and rejected, how can Wittgenstein hope to be understood?

3. Wittgenstein as Mastersinger Looking at the available biographical detail, we can identify an early and a later attitude to Wagner. The early attitude is one of enthusiastic admiration for and absorption in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Wittgenstein is reported to have said that he watched thirty performances of the opera over one and half years during his days as an engineering student in Berlin. (McGuinness 1988, p. 55) About a decade on, when on leave in Olmütz, Moravia, during the

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First World War, he enjoyed musical soirées in the company of Jewish friends including the architect Paul Engelmann and the pianist/organist Fritz Zweig who eventually became the first conductor at the Berlin State Opera House. “In our conversations,” recalls Engelmann, “we execrated Richard Wagner, that destroyer of music and culture, who at the time was still considered the pope of music and above all criticism. Wittgenstein did not join in these execrations, but he did not much object either” (Engelmann 1967, p. 64). The fact that Wittgenstein “did not much object either” implies that he did take exception to the execrations but muted his objections out of friendship, or better still, he distinguished between Wagner’s music and Wagner the unpleasant person as he did later in a conversation with Drury. What is so striking about Wagner’s Mastersinger that explains Wittgenstein attending thirty of its performances in the course of a year and a half? Even if he exaggerated, the question stands: What did he see or hear in The Mastersinger that his intense interest, by ordinary standards, bordered on an obsession? Amongst other possible reasons, McGuinness points to the fact that The Mastersinger “was a treatment of problems of music and life at the same time – and its solution lay in the need for rules that can be discovered even within spontaneity but only when a note of reverence has been introduced” (McGuinness 1988, p. 55). At this point a set of reminders about what Wagner does in The Mastersinger is helpful. Against the then current operatic vogue and conventions, he propounds the thesis that works of art need to engage important human problems, takes up the issue of the role individual artists should play in their community, and shows how creation works and to what purpose. As mentioned, the solution lies in the need for rules and tradition, but without rule worship since it leads to mechanical reactions and a lack of spontaneity. By helping the Knight Walther to write his prize winning song, Hans Sachs, through socially responsible artistic innovation, renews a community facing decadence. Steering the “vain deceits” and unacknowledged illusions of his community into socially positive as well as artistically creative achievements, Walther uses the power of artistic illusion to create in human hearts the experience of order and meaning. Elaborating the theme of illusion (Wahn) in his opera, Wagner turns on its head Schopenhauer’s negative evaluation as Sachs transfigures the creation of illusions into positive value. In his humble role as village shoemaker, Sachs embodies the metaphor of the “craftsman” in his approach to art and society: He invokes the accepted standards of composition that inform his tradition and urges others to understand their own traditions and use them to create something new. In this process the distinction between illusion and delusion emerges: illusions are constructive in that they enhance society, delusions are socially harmful and destructive.

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If the young Wittgenstein was a Wagnerite, what does that have to do with his philosophical/aesthetic practice and perspective? How did the impressions and concerns of the Mastersinger spill over, if at all, into the early work of the Tractatus and the later work of the Investigations? Addressing these questions requires some stage setting; namely, sketching the Romantic conception of how music and culture are related. This Romantic background, shared by Wagner and Wittgenstein, regards a musical tradition as a cultural achievement developed organically by joint human effort. (Lurie 1992, p.  193–195) This includes past practices of expression connecting us with human beings before us. It is a living reminder of the spiritual bond with them and of our nature as cultural beings. In music you can still hear the primitive, the organic, the longing for the eternal or inexpressible, what cannot be said but must be shown. Music shows us our shared forms of life, the grounds and origins of associated language games which are their refinement: musical gestures of dirge, of mourning, of prayer, of celebration, of violence and war, of coronation, of contemplation and so on, are expressive of basic central moments of our lives as human beings. These tend to disappear in much of “modern music” where there is only a fading resonance with shared forms of life: we can no longer hear the primitive, the organic, the longing for the eternal, for what is “otherwise inexpressible.” Its “inexpressive,” cosmopolitan “modern tongue” erodes the connection with life-forms, obliterates background and spirit, precisely those elements that make for the possibility of meaning. Wittgenstein had a deep aversion to “modern music,” did not understand its language, and argued against it several times in debates when at Cambridge. What he meant by ‘modern music’ is not clear, but probably the music of Mahler and Strauss in whom he discerned the incipient undercutting of tonality, the baseline which makes musical meaning possible, a tendency that later emerged as principle in Arnold Schönberg and in Béla Bartók. I propose we look at Wagner’s musical and Wittgenstein’s philosophical concerns and put them side by side with their Romantic inheritance as backdrop. A central feature of Wagner’s destructive critique of conventional opera is that its language lost connection with important human problems and concerns; its rules of composition have become mechanical. Hence, opera, he concluded, is a dead genre. Wagner supported this thesis in his critical review of the history of opera (18th and early 19th century) with particular reference to Italian and French opera. The latter he saw as an “excuse” for conviviality and conversation among the audience with the occasional aria thrown in to provide pause and relief. In the former he saw the tyranny of melody:

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As Metternich … could not conceive the state under any form but that of absolute monarchy, so Rossini, with no less force of argument, could not conceive the opera under any other form than that of absolute melody. Both men said: Do you ask for opera and state? Here you have them – there are no others! (Wagner 1964, p. 106)

“Grand opera,” exemplified in the works of Meyerbeer, receives some of Wagner’s bitterest polemic: Meyerbeer’s operas are primarily concerned with “effect”  – “a working without a cause”. He severed the operatic text from the music, “having razed the poet to the ground, and upon the ruins of poetry the musician was crowned the only authentic poet.” If we reduce “life-portraying poetry… to meaningless wretched rubbish,” the only thing that could give the musical expression “its being, warranty, and measure, the musical expression itself becomes void of any real expression” (Wagner 1964, p.  118–119). It might be thought that Wagner’s aim is to re-conceive opera, but that is not so since he regards opera at an end. Wagner wants to create something new that he calls “music drama,” and the name is intended to mark a discontinuity from opera as well as forge a musical form that restores “life-portraying” poetry to its proper place and connects the music with life and its problems – so that it is not mere idle entertainment but existentially instructive. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, like Wagner’s essays on opera, mounts a destructive critique of the western philosophical tradition and re-conceives the task of philosophy. Traditional philosophy  – the idling, decadent “nonsense,” “language gone on holiday” as he later described it  – fails to engage genuine human problems and thus is to be thrown overboard; its problems to be dissolved through the logical analysis of language: through unearthing the depth grammar behind the veneer of deceptive surface grammar. As Wagner conceives something new in his music dramas, so Wittgenstein re-conceives philosophical activity in the Tractatus: “For God’s sake,” he said to students, “don’t do that [philosophy in the traditional style]; do something different.” To call what he was doing ‘philosophy’ is all right as long as we realize that “it was not the same kind of thing as Plato or Berkeley had done, but that we may feel that what he was doing ‘takes the place’ of what Plato and Berkeley did, but that it is really a different kind of thing” (Moore 1993, p.  96). What he did was something different from what used to be called philosophy, but related to it by family resemblance, and hence a legitimate heir. Since traditional philosophy and opera lost touch with human problems and instincts, they were both at an end and in need of foundational critique to be born again. There is, however, another dominant theme in both Wagner and Wittgenstein – the theme of the propositionally inexpressible: what “cannot be said with sense” by means of language, something that, to adopt and invert Ramsey’s vocabulary, you can perhaps whistle but cannot say. Wagner speaks of the necessity in

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music for a clear and accurate expression of the “otherwise unspeakable” (Wagner 1964, p. 217–218). Notice that music’s expression of the otherwise inexpressible is not to be thought of as second best or murky, but as “clear and accurate.” What we have here is the striking idea of music as philosophy’s other, as expressing the transcendent in its own sui generis way, and at the same time reminding philosophy of its limits. (Goehr 1998, p.  6–47) The early Wittgenstein puts the lumber-house of the world – the realm of empirical fact and science – in its place and delineates from the inside the domain of what can be said. This leaves the realm of value in a special sphere of its own, of which we must be silent. What can be said is circumscribed by a rule for meaningful propositions, and the limits of language, hence the limits of meaningfulness, is delineated precisely from the inside. This leaves the “inexpressible”, the transcendent, i.e. value and spirit, in a totally different realm. [Absolute] value can be musically expressed, artistically performed or ethically enacted, but cannot be linguistically captured. Wagner’s Mastersinger was an important work for several reasons: not only because it presented a whole world and an aesthetic perspective on life, but more importantly because it was iconic of the how and what of creative artistic endeavour. The Mastersinger proposes that creativity must emerge from traditional practices, and this resonates both with the Tractatus and the Investigations. Trying to do more with less, the Tractatus is a modernist work with a craftsman-as-poet-like approach to philosophy. Having laid down a rule for what counts as a meaningful proposition, Wittgenstein argued that the philosophical tradition is defunct, since its assertions lack sense. Wittgenstein throws away the ladder and puts an end to philosophy. What remains is an activity of clarification with formal logic as a critical tool for the detection and exposure of “plain nonsense.” However, the “important nonsense” we employ in our attempts to transcend our linguistic cage is nevertheless shown. So, there is good nonsense and bad nonsense. (Stern 1995, p. 70) The good “nonsense” is unspeakable, yet Wittgenstein cannot but respect it deeply for it points to insights that cannot be propositionally articulated. It is the mystical whose expression may be found in artistic/musical and ethical gestures. For Wagner too, “music was demoniacal, a mystically exalted enormity: everything concerned with rules seemed only to distance it” (Goehr 1998, p. 39). There is, then, in Wagner an attack on formalism and abstraction  – witness the Mastersinger’s mocking Beckmesser’s obsession with rules. Wagner rejects formalist attempts to create or capture musical meaning via formulating or following explicit rules, since such attempts always leave out something essential. Similarly, the later Wittgenstein rejects a formalist approach in the philosophy of language: formalist attempts to grasp the meaning of words and propositions fail, for a rule requires interpretation. The attempt to capture meaning through a rule is reminiscent of Beckmesserish behaviour. An obsessive

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preoccupation with rules not only fails to do justice to the musical tradition but leads to lifeless, mechanical repetition, making a mockery of music and composition. This resonates with the “conventionalism” of the Investigations that the norms and rules are contingent and are implicit in our practices. Their apparent necessity corresponds to our deep need for convention. But how does this explain the sharp difference between the approach to philosophy in the Tractatus and the Investigations? If the Tractarian distinction between the sayable and the unsayable goes by the board as a piece of untenable metaphysics, then music as philosophy’s other, as expressing what cannot be propositionally expressed, does not survive in the later work either. I contend that it does survive, but with a difference: in the early work the unsayable is the domain of the transcendent, and in the later work what is unsayable is the background of practices. “The inexpressible (what I find enigmatic & cannot express) perhaps provides the background, against which whatever I was able to express acquires meaning.” (VB 1998, p.  23e) So, Wittgenstein’s critical modernism shows one face in the Tractatus: metaphysics is replaced by science – by what can be said – and ethics, aesthetics and the mystical are relegated to the realm of the inexpressible, what has to be shown. The domain of the unsayable is really a strategy of resistance to scientism and the modernist tendency to level and reduce, to eliminate spirit. The face of the later philosophy is different since the transcendent is incarnated in the immanent and meaning is explored through the various language games we play. “But if we had to name anything which is the life of the sign, we should have to say that it was its use.” (Wittgenstein BBB 1964, p. 4)

4. Wittgenstein Turning: Emerging Differences A remark, in early 1930, from a conversation with his Cambridge student and friend Maurice Drury, in which Wittgenstein calls Wagner “the first of the great composers who had an unpleasant character” (Rhees 1984, p.  126), indicates his changing attitude to Wagner. This assessment did not blind him to a fact no serious musician or music lover can sensibly deny, namely, Wagner’s greatness as a composer. The acknowledgement, however, is followed by a critique of Wagner and this signals a shift in Wittgenstein’s attitude from youthful and enthusiastic admiration to mature and balanced critical appreciation. The particular texts where he later engages themes from Wagner support this claim and provide us with materials for a better understanding of Wittgenstein’s musical aesthetics and cultural perspective. There are more than seven explicit entries about Wagner

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in the Nachlass. Of particular significance are the remarks on Wagner’s ways of composing: his motifs and melodies, his phrasing and dramatic texts, and the relation in his operas between words and music. I propose to tease out of each what can shed light on Wittgenstein’s philosophical and aesthetic concerns. One theme is about the relationship between content and form: Strange to see how a material resists a form. How the material of the Nibelung-legends resists dramatic form. It does not want to become drama & won’t become one & it surrenders only where the poet or composer decides to treat it epically. Thus the only lasting & authentic passages of the Ring are the epic ones in which text or music narrate. And therefore the most impressive words of the Ring are the stage directions. (Wittgenstein 2003, p. 109)

How are we to read these trenchant remarks? Is to say that the stage directions are the most impressive words of the Ring to belittle the text of the Ring Cycle? Rather than that, which would really trivialize and thus sabotage Wagner’s perspective on the relation between text and music, a more appreciative way of looking at the remark would be as drawing attention to the importance of stage directions for ways of world-making providing the setting and scenario for action. While tragedy makes use of actors, the epic narrates, it tells a story; tragedy is poetry, while the epic is prose; tragedy is Greek, where a highborn person, within an established community, meets a terrible end; the epic deals with a hero who founds a nation or a community. Thus the lasting and authentic passages of the Ring are those which have the features of the epic. Wagner himself is inauthentic insofar as he tries to force his epic/mythical material into the tragic mode of the Greeks. The music dramas of the Ring Cycle are less like classic Greek tragedy and more like epic Homer. So, Wagner is rather misguided, for although he is doing something different, he does not know it. The theme of a failure of self-understanding raises its ugly head and casts a slight shadow on Wagner’s greatness. Wittgenstein makes astute, albeit plaintive, observations, about form, style, and expression in Wagner: Wagner’s motifs might be called musical prose sentences. And just as there is such a thing as ‘rhyming prose’, so too these motifs can certainly be put together into melodic form, but without their constituting one melody. Wagnerian drama too is not drama, but a stringing together of situations as if on a thread, which for its part is only cleverly spun but not, like the motifs & situations, inspired. (VB 1998, p. 47)

If the melodic form and the drama are merely cleverly spun together, then they are exercises of mere skill. This is evident, we are told, in the Overture to the Mastersinger: “Where genius wears thin, skill may show through.” (VB 1998, p. 49e) There is no essence that unifies the Wagnerian motifs into an identifiable melody, as there is no essence to meaning or language in Wittgenstein’s later

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philosophy. What we have here is the important theme of anti-essentialism being struck.

5. Cultural Criticism: Was Wagner Wittgenstein’s Hearing Aid? So far I have eavesdropped on Wittgenstein listening to Wagner’s musical compositions. However, Wittgenstein’s remarks on other composers and their music also show earmarks of the vocabulary and perspective Wagner used in his writings on music and culture. Wagner’s essays have sometimes been regarded as futile reflections or special pleadings which were for him necessary to get down to his real work. The impression we are given is that Wagner had to clear his mind of rubbish, before turning to what was really important, namely, his compositions. The strategy is to rescue Wagner from Wagner, his “beautiful” music from the “ugly” man. The influential essay Judaism in Music, in this context, is as contentious as it is informative. Wagner constructs a conception of the Jewish artist as deficient in originality, lacking primordial force and instinctive expression, and speaking the musical idiom with a distracting foreign accent. There is, he averred, an intimate connection between speech/language and music; song, he held, is not only speech intensified to the level of passion, but the prototype of music. To compose poetry or music, one needs to have a native speaker’s knowledge of the language in which one composes. (Wagner 1964, p. 51–52) Language, with its modes of expression and development, is not the work of scattered individuals, but the joint emanation of an ancient community, and only he, Wagner asserted, whose life has been fostered in that community can expect fully to participate in its creations. To express something positive requires that the artist draw his inspiration from the loving contemplation of that instinctive life to be found among the community within which he dwells. Jews, declared Wagner, were aliens to European culture, and therefore, lacked the required instinct and passion for fluent expression and pure creative work – they were onlookers who merely echo and imitate. As Jewish composers approached the community looking for creative nourishment, everything appeared “strange and unintelligible” (Wagner 1964, p.  54). Therefore, what they had to say could only be superficial and trivial, dealing with questions of ‘how to speak’ rather than with ‘what to say’. (Wagner 1964, p.  53, 54.) This conception of Jewishness was then applied by Wagner to the history of European music, singling out Felix Mendelssohn – as an obvious counter-example to his generalization – for criticism: “whom Nature had endowed with

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specific musical gifts as very few before him … who had the amplest score of specific talents, the finest and most varied culture … the highest sense of honour, yet he was incapable of calling forth in us that deep, heart searching effect which we await from art. …” Nor could this help him “to develop further the things which had sprung from our soil” (Wagner 1964, p. 57). Mendelssohn, according to Wagner, was incapable of the musical expression of deep, powerful, instinctive emotions; his music is akin to a kaleidoscope, presenting us with pleasing figures through lenses coloured by diverse, polite moods; he is derivative, appropriating any individual feature which he could gather from his predecessors. Mendelssohn poaches from Bach as he imitates Bach’s speech, and is chiefly concerned with good manners, about being as agreeable as possible, about the ‘how’ rather than about the ‘what’. (Wagner 1964, p.  58) Wagner contrasts Mendelssohn with Beethoven. Whereas Beethoven’s musical language is anchored in instinct and passion, marked by “a clear and accurate expression of the otherwise unspeakable,” Mendelssohn, dwindles these trophies, reducing their effect to dissolving views and fantastic shadow pictures. “Mendelssohn is credible only when giving expression to a soft melancholy resignation, making a confession of his own impotence. This would be tragic, were it not for the fact that Mendelssohn is incapable of the strong feelings required by tragedy.” (Wagner 1910, p. 38–39) Between 1930 and 1950 Wittgenstein made a series of remarks about composers, especially about Mendelssohn and Mahler, which repeatedly resonate with Wagner’s musical/cultural criticism, in particular with his essay on Judaism in Music. The connection with Wagner seems supported by Wittgenstein’s allusion to Mendelssohn’s Jewishness and gathers density and momentum as Wittgenstein continues to use Wagner’s anti-Semitic cultural vocabulary to characterize works of art, but with a difference: in his sense works of Gentiles as well as Jews may be “Jewish,” judging by the remark “There is something Jewish about Rousseau’s character” (VB 1998, p. 17e). Consider then Wittgenstein’s apparent complaints about Mendelssohn: “[He] is perhaps the most untragic of composers” (VB 1998, p. 3e) conforming to his surroundings; (VB 1998, p. 4e) he is deficient in musical thought, since he does not tackle significant human problems, nor does he engage, or pose a challenge to the understanding; again, even though one expects rigour from Mendelssohn’s short imaginative, ornamental melodies, he is only half-rigorous, while Brahms is consistently rigorous; (VB 1998, p. 18e), and he neither confronts life’s dark side, nor does he look death in the face. It is almost as if for a time Wagner was Wittgenstein’s hearing aid, especially since Wittgenstein adopts and puts to use Wagner’s vocabulary of Jewishness as a cultural category. The above remarks on Mendelssohn seem to have an anti-modern gist with a conservative if not a fascist upshot. To boot, in another characteristic passage

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Mendelssohn is described as a reproductive rather than an original artist; he ornaments other people’s ideas: Within all great art there is a WILD animal: tamed. Not, e.g., in Mendelssohn. All great art has primitive human drives as its ground bass. They are not the melody (as they are, perhaps, in Wagner), but they are what gives the melody its depth & power. In this sense one may call Mendelssohn a ‘reproductive’ artist. – In the same sense: my house for Gretl is the product of a decidedly sensitive ear, good manners, the expression of great understanding (for a culture etc.). But primordial life, wild life striving to erupt into the open – is lacking. And so you might say, health is lacking. (Kierkegaard). (Hothouse plant.) (VB 1998, p. 43e)

There are several interesting points here: Wagner is credited with melody, but more importantly, the motif of “taming instincts” Wittgenstein ascribed to “all great art” does not coincide with Wagner’s idea of the culture-specific sensitivity of the artist; as well, and between the lines, Mendelssohn’s music is great but in a different sense than “taming the wild beast within.” To elaborate the second point: Wagner is linking musical production to specific cultural forms of life, while Wittgenstein links it to “the taming of universal human instincts.” This suggests that music for Wittgenstein is broadly connected to the human form of life while for Wagner it is connected to specific cultural modes. The distinction allows Wittgenstein to escape from the ugly nationalist/racist aspects of Wagner’s music criticism and makes room for an appreciation of Mendelssohn for what he is/what his music is. Mendelssohn is concerned with human identity, while Wagner is concerned with national/cultural identity. Mendelssohn is civil and civilizing, concerned with “Let’s be human,” while Wagner is concerned almost exclusively with German identity. This distinction cannot however be a sharp dichotomy, since the culture-specific comes into play on the level of available means of expression used to “tame primitive human drives” – the wild animal. So, Wittgenstein’s approach offers a kind of balance between two extremes: Mendelssohn’s melodies are rendered universally accessible as he transforms, through skill and style, the culture-specific. Mendelssohn accepts the given forms of life while Wagner is attempting to break through to new forms. Two different senses of greatness: one tries to work within a musical tradition, speak its language but in a way suitable to the times, while the other rejects it and struggles to give birth to new forms. If this is right then Wittgenstein’s remarks are not updated echoes of Wagner’s sentiments, but rather, as I argue, they have an anti-modern gist with critical, rather than conservative (or worse), potential. The Wagnerian resonance, however, seems reinforced by Wittgenstein’s surprising comments in which he speaks of his older Viennese contemporary Gustav Mahler, his music and style as self-deceived and inauthentic, lacking in

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courage and originality. Mahler’s ways of incorporating his predecessors’ themes or melodies “seem especially unbearable to [him]… I always want to say then: but you have only heard this from the others, that isn’t (really) yours” (Wittgenstein 2003, p. 93e). We are given the impression that Mahler’s lack of originality borders on being a copy-cat or a mere improviser. But since the other composers in the tradition do the same sort of thing, why are they not thieves as well? Why is it that they can express allegiance or piety to “the ancestral mother” (Wittgenstein 2003, p. 93), while Mahler cannot? Wittgenstein hints at Mahler’s abuse of the expressive phrases and devices that he borrows from the tradition. Repetitions of a musical phrase or theme need not offend, but do so when they pretend to an emotional punch that they no longer have – when we have the impression the composer is simply pushing our emotional buttons. Through such use of derivative expressive devices Mahler, so it seems to Wittgenstein, makes complacent compositional gestures. These are the ways Wittgenstein hears Mahler as deceiving himself: “Deceiving oneself about oneself, deceiving oneself about one’s own inauthenticity, must have a bad effect on one’s style; for the consequence will be that one is unable to distinguish what is authentic and what is false. This is how the inauthenticity of Mahler’s style may be explained and I am in the same danger. If one is acting a part to oneself, this must express itself in the style. The style cannot be one’s own. Whoever is unwilling to know himself is writing a kind of deceit.” (Rhees 1984, p.193) This passage links Mahler the self-deceptive person to Mahler’s musical self-deception: he is composing a kind of deceit. But the deeper trouble with Mahler, as it seems to Wittgenstein, is that he is not only un-Socratic like the rest of us in that he is prone to self-deception, but that his music invites self-deception and escape from the human condition, thus failing to connect with music’s capacity to instruct and cultivate our humanity. “Those sweet Ländler melodies, those distant trumpets and faux-naïf effects: do they not invite us into self-deceived and unsubstantiated dreams?” (Scruton 2004, p. 7) Again, the collapse into comforting popular melodies and children’s lullabies in his symphonies at crucial junctures shows Mahler’s difficulty in resolving conflict; for instance, “Frêre Jacques” arranged as a Funeral March in Mahler’s First Symphony. Thus Mahler is heard by Wittgenstein as an aid to self-deception and wishful thinking, to futile longing and transcendence – think of the effective use of the Adagio from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony in Luchino Visconti’s film adaptation of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. Mahler, according to Wittgenstein, falls short of the integrity and discipline of aesthetic greatness, since he undercuts the Socratic feature of the dialogue between music and philosophy in the great European tradition from Bach, through Mozart, to Beethoven and Brahms  – which aims at truth, clarity of expression and self-understanding. If it sounds strange to attribute such a critical vocabulary to Wittgenstein, recall

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what he says of Beethoven: “Beethoven is a realist through & through; I mean his music is totally true, I want to say: he sees life totally as it is & then exalts it.” (Wittgenstein 2003, p. 81) To regard such assessments as two sides of the same prejudice, namely, that music has a fixed referential nature – say, late Beethoven reflects, while Mahler covers up the fractured nature of bourgeois life – seems not only too narrow a reading but is at odds with the character and drift of Wittgenstein’s many other remarks about music. Striking and characteristic is the following: “Does the theme point to nothing beyond itself?” asks Wittgenstein’s plaintive conversation partner, as if the absence of fixed external reference robs the theme of significance. Oh, yes! But that means: The impression it makes on me is connected with things in its surroundings – e.g. with the existence of the German language & its intonation, but that means with the whole field of our language games. If I say e.g.: it’s as if here a conclusion were being drawn, or, as if here something were being confirmed, or, as if this were a reply to what came earlier,-then the way I understand it clearly presupposes familiarity with conclusions, confirmations, replies, etc. (VB 1998, p. 59)

Again: “If you ask: how I experienced the theme, I shall perhaps say ‘As a question’ or something of the sort, or I shall whistle it with expression etc.” (VB 1998, p. 59) Albeit the theme does not have a fixed reference to a slice of reality, it still has meaning for us in that it resonates with the multiplicity of our language games, ways of life and social practices, as well as the conventions and history of music itself. So perhaps it is better to see the comparative assessments of Beethoven and Mahler as attempts at appreciation from different angles – juxtaposing the composition with the composer, his musical predecessors and his time.

6. A Different Reading: Wittgenstein’s Self-Understanding as Music Critic So far, to bring out Wagner’s influence on Wittgenstein, I have mostly emphasized the affinities between them. Now I will point to crucial differences and propose a different reading sensitive to Wittgenstein’s self-identification, more attentive to context and taking into consideration other related textual evidence. One important thing to notice about Wittgenstein’s remarks on Mendelssohn and Mahler is the background: it is taken for granted that both Mendelssohn and Mahler are great musical figures and he identifies with them “as a Jewish thinker” (VB 1998, p. 16e). After describing Mendelssohn as “perhaps the most untragic of

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composers” (VB 1998, p. 3e), Wittgenstein immediately identifies with him: “Tragically holding on, defiantly holding on to a tragic situation in love always seems to me quite alien to my [cultural] ideal. Does that mean that my ideal is feeble? … I believe that fundamentally I have a gentle & calm ideal. But may God protect my ideal from feebleness & mawkishness.” (VB 1998, p. 3e–4e) And when he speaks of Mendelssohn being dependent on his surroundings and not being “self-sufficient like a tree that stands firmly in its place,” he immediately associates himself with Mendelssohn: “I too am like that & tend to be so.” (VB 1998, p. 4e) Again, when he says that in a sense Mendelssohn is a reproductive artist, he recognizes and embraces this feature in both his artistic and philosophical works: “In the same sense: my house for Gretel [his sister] is the product of a decidedly sensitive ear, good manners, the expression of a great understanding (for a culture, etc.).” (VB 1998, p.  43e) These are prized qualities in any artist or philosopher, even though, unlike Wagner, Mendelssohn and Wittgenstein are not disposed to walk on the Wild Side. Again, Mendelssohn’s great achievement is acknowledged: “[his] Violin Concerto is remarkable in being the last great concerto for the violin written. There is a passage in the second movement which is one of the great moments in music.” (Rhees 1984, p. 127) But what about the apparent objection that Mendelssohn’s music is not deep enough and hence does not challenge our understanding? This sounds like a devastating criticism if looked at in isolation. However, a completely different light is thrown on the remark if read in the larger context of Wittgenstein’s cultural perspective. Consider what he says when he reflects on Tolstoy’s connecting the importance of the work of art with what everyone can understand. Tolstoy: the meaning (importance) of something lies in its being something everyone can understand. That’s both true & false. What makes the object hard to understand  –if it’s significant, important-is not that you have to be instructed in abstruse matters in order to understand it, but the antithesis between understanding the object & what most people want to see. Because of this precisely what is most obvious may be what is most difficult to understand. It is not a difficulty for the intellect but one for the will that has to be overcome. (VB 1998, p. 25e; 1931)

If this is so, then the fact that there is no music by Mendelssohn that is hard to understand  – in the sense that it requires technical musical training or places intellectual demands on the listener – is a positive remark, and the idea is that Mendelssohn’s music attends to the significance of the ordinary. Thus, what formerly sounded like a criticism turns out to be a recommendation about how to appreciate Mendelssohn and an indirect refutation of Wagner and like-minded critics. And the same approach, with qualifications, may be usefully adopted to better understand Wittgenstein’s remarks on Mahler.

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A careful reading shows Wittgenstein also identifying with Mahler. What sounds like devastating criticism of Mahler is actually of a piece with Wittgenstein’s attitude to philosophy as an exercise in avoiding self-misunderstanding/ misunderstanding one’s cultural historical moment and what it allows one to do. Consider: But what seems most dangerous is to put your work into this position of being compared, first by yourself & then by others, with the great works of former times. You shouldn’t entertain such a comparison at all. For if today’s circumstances are so different, from what they once were, that you cannot compare your work with earlier works with respect of its genre, then you equally cannot compare its value with that of the earlier work. I myself am constantly making the mistake under discussion. Incorruptibility is everything. (VB 1998, p. 77e)

In this passage Wittgenstein reduces to absurdity his previous rationale for assessing Mahler’s music as worthless, since past paradigms and norms can no longer be legitimately invoked to support such evaluations. If a Mahler symphony is a work of art “it is one of a totally different sort compared to a symphony from the heroic period” (VB 1998, p.  17e). Similarly, Wittgenstein’s philosophy is “a different kind of thing from what Plato and Berkeley did.” (Moore in: Wittgenstein 1993, p. 96) His philosophy is in a way like Mahler’s music: while Mahler improvises on borrowed themes and melodies, Wittgenstein issues reminders, observations and critical clarifications on traditional theories. There is also a parallel Wittgenstein draws between his own teaching activities and Mahler’s training musicians: A teacher who can show good, or indeed astounding results while he is teaching, is still not on that account a good teacher, for it may be that, while his pupils are under his immediate influence, he raises them to a level which is not natural to them, without developing their capacities for work at this level, so that they immediately decline again once the teacher leaves the schoolroom. Perhaps this holds for me; I have thought about this. When Mahler was himself conducting, his training performances were excellent; the orchestra seemed to collapse at once if he was not conducting himself. (VB 1998, p. 43e)

Another significant difference from Wagner lies in the way Wittgenstein handles the distinction between what is said and how it is said – between substance versus skill or style. Wittgenstein was disposed to praise an author for having something to say or dismiss them as having nothing to say – so this distinction mattered. Yet unlike Wagner’s narrow emphasis on the “what” in his comments about Mendelssohn’s music, Wittgenstein was insistent on both the “what” and the “how”  – how we say things and in what context. This naturally leads to Wittgenstein’s and Wagner’s different attitudes to originality. As we have seen, Wagner takes origi-

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nality to be mostly originality of content  – a possession some artists have and others don’t – and using this alleged deficiency as a weapon to clobber Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn  – composers whom he took to be un-rooted in German soil. On the other hand, the mature Wittgenstein, when discussing originality, makes relevant distinctions, since criticism, aesthetic or moral is importantly about making distinctions. One may be derivative in content yet original in the formulation of that content, or have an original style of presentation. “It is possible,” he remarks, “to write in a style that is unoriginal in form – like mine – but with well chosen words; or on the other hand in one that is original in form, freshly grown from within oneself. (And also of course in one which is botched together just anyhow out of old furnishings.)” (VB 1998, p. 60e) Then Wittgenstein marks off taste from originality: “[Taste] cannot create a new organism, only rectify what is already there; it loosens screws & tightens screws, it doesn’t create a new original work. Taste rectifies, it doesn’t give birth.” The most refined taste has nothing to do with creative power. Hence, “a great creator needs no taste: the child is born into the world well formed” (VB 1998, p. 68e). Taste Wittgenstein characterizes as a refinement of sensibility that does not act but merely assimilates. Then the remarks take a Socratic turn as he wonders if he has only taste or originality as well. He sees clearly that he has taste, since we can see what we have, but not what we are. Originality is not a possession: we are or are not original. And then he makes the striking remark relating originality to self-expression: “Someone who does not lie is original enough…. In fact it is already a seed of good originality not to want to be what you are not.” (VB 1998, p. 68e) This may relate to his complaints about Mahler and, to a lesser extent, Mendelssohn. The former he sees as wanting to be what he is not; the latter as being too polite, as not having sufficient courage for genuine self-expression. How does this discussion connect with Wittgenstein’s philosophical practice? If “a philosopher is not a citizen of a community of ideas” (Z 1967, § 455), then the question of originality of content does not arise. Indeed, the emphasis is on skillful philosophers who are engaged in a struggle with language that in some way or another is misused in philosophical theorizing. Through returning language to its everyday uses and contexts, Wittgenstein sets everyday language against the language of theory and thus resolves the “problems that trouble us” (PI 2001, p. 197e). The philosopher’s aim is not the construction of new or original theories: there are enough of those already. They are not interested in erecting a building or in the construction of new theories, but “in having the foundations of possible buildings transparently before [them]” (VB 1998, p. 9e). Does this leave no room for creativity in philosophy? In a sense it does and does not. Philosophy, in the Tractatus as well as in the Investigations, is not continuous with, nor on the same level as, science, but is an under-laborer or an overseer of science; it

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does not give us new information, nor does it provide new hypotheses, theories or explanations, but aims at clarification. “And we must not advance any kind of theory. There must not be anything hypothetical in our considerations. We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place. And this description gets its light, that is to say, it purpose, from the philosophical problems.” (PI 2001, § 109) Nevertheless, there is creativity in philosophy as well, and here Wittgenstein turns Plato’s attack on poetry in the Republic on its head. Like Wagner with music, he connects philosophy with “life-giving poetry.” The poet-philosopher provides fresh similes and metaphors, different ways of seeing, and thereby unearths and removes problems brought about by the stranglehold conventional grammatical analogies exercise on our thinking. Remember that a “simile that has been absorbed into the forms of our language produces a false appearance, and this disquiets us. ‘But this isn’t how it is!’ – we say. ‘Yet this is how it has to be!’” (PI 2001, §112) Such a simile conjures up a “picture that holds us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably” (PI 2001, § 115). It is in this sense that “[a] preference for certain similes underlies far more disagreements than we might think… and that a good simile refreshes the intellect” (VB 1998, p. 17e–18e). To identify a philosophical error, we point to a false analogy that has been taken up into language and shaped our conception but which we did not recognize as an analogy. (PH, p. 163) Its effect is a constant battle and uneasiness – a constant stimulus. So, the raw material of philosophy is second-hand consisting of hand-medowns: the cluster of misleading similes and grammatical analogies in our language that theories feed on. Philosophy partly involves sorting through the Sally Ann stores of culture and science as it were, picking and choosing with a view to use and function. If philosophy is in this sense second-hand, then the philosopher is like an immigrant coming into a new country and learning its language. In § 32 of the Investigations Wittgenstein suggests this kind of analogy when he considers Augustine’s picture of language learning: And now, I think, we can say: Augustine describes the learning of human language as if the child came into a strange county and did not understand the language of the country; that is, as if it already had a language, only not this one. Or again: as if the child could already think, only not yet speak. And ‘think’ here would mean something like ‘talk to itself’.

Perhaps an immigrant is a better fit with this picture than a child. And if “learning philosophy is really recollecting, remembering that we really used words in this way” (PH, p.  179), then philosophy as “second-hand” is a compelling analogy. Philosophers, like strangers, may notice some things that natives do not, precisely because natives take the most important things for granted. Here Wittgenstein’s

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distinction between ‘learning’ and ‘training’ may be instructive. Since both already have a language, Augustine’s child is more like an immigrant who is learning English as a second language and thus they contrast with children who are trained (Abrichtung) in the linguistic practices of their mother tongue. Perhaps this difference is an inadvertent affinity to Wagner’s point that in an important sense a cultural idiom cannot be learned through explanation but only through training. Ironically enough, Wagner makes room for the talents of Jewish philosophers: “The Jew’s greatest contribution is in intellectual life since he depends on his understanding of his adopted community and other people for his survival.” (Wagner 1964, p. 18; 53) Since in a sense all of us are so dependent, according to this line of thinking, Wagner’s “Jew” is best seen as a figure for the philosopher in all of us. Not so, however, with the composer, since the original composer, for “authentic creative” musical communication and expression, needs to be grounded in the cultural ways of life of his community. It appears then that philosophical creativity, for Wagner, is an oxymoron. There is a residual whiff of this Wagnerian attitude in Wittgenstein. Consider: I often think that the highest I wish to achieve would be to compose a melody. Or it mystifies me that in the desire for this, none ever occurred to me. But then I must tell myself that it’s quite impossible that one will occur to me, because for that I am missing something essential or the essential. That is why I am thinking of it as such a high ideal because I could then in a way sum up my life; and set it down crystallized. And even if it were but a small, shabby crystal, yet a crystal. (Wittgenstein 2003, p. 17e–19e)

Another important difference between Wagner and Wittgenstein is about the way they see the prototype. Wagner treats the prototype as the standard to which everything must conform. In this respect there is, as Thomas Mann remarked, a lot of Hitler in Wagner. (Williams 2006, p. 88) Anything that does not fit Wagner’s “Idea” is found-as we have seen in his music criticism-intolerable, and extruded out of existence. Polyphony, a different voice, is anathema to him. This is in sharp contrast with one of the leitmotifs of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, namely, the emphasis on various voices present in the conversations and arguments of the Investigations. For a time he even contemplated “Let me teach you differences” as a motto for his Investigations. As Wittgenstein pulls up the philosophical roots of dogmatism and prejudice in Wagner’s conceptual ‘hearing aid’ – the essentialist prototype is recognized as a symptom of our craving for generality. Wagner is contemptuous of, while Wittgenstein is attentive to, the particular case, taking composers one by one and then making comparisons and highlighting contrasts between them. Wittgenstein and Wagner also disagree about their conception of the work of art. Wagner had a theory of art  – the total-work-of-art  – for which

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he argued in his essays and which he endeavoured to instantiate in his musicdramas. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, declined “the artwork of the future” as an aesthetic monstrosity in which identity and commonality are essential features erasing differences among the forms of music. On the basis of his treatment of Mendelssohn, Mahler and other composers, what can we say as to the sort of music critic Wittgenstein was? We might try to bypass this question by dismissing it as presumptuous, since it rules out the possibility that Wittgenstein could hold, with Tolstoy, that there is no need for critics and criticism, for in genuine art there is nothing to explain. (Tolstoy 1995, p. 94–95) We are reminded of the measure of truth in this objection by Wittgenstein himself who remarked: “In art it is hard to say anything that is as good as: saying nothing.” (VB 1998, p. 26e) However, such abolitionist stance toward criticism is unsatisfactory, since it does not square with Wittgenstein’s practice, even though the abolitionist’s conception of the critic as providing explanations chimes with Wittgenstein’s aversion to causal and theoretical explanation in philosophy, and may put Wittgenstein’s conception of the task of the critic closer to Clive Bell’s: “The function of the critic is to make us see; to be continually pointing out those parts [of the work] whose combination produce significant form.” (Bell 1931, p. 4) The Formalist approach, according to which the job of the critic is to scrutinize the work, is more promising in that it captures part of Wittgenstein’s practice of bringing attention to aesthetically relevant features of the musical work. However, the Formalist critic excludes anything considered external to the work, such as the cultural, biographical, or social context, and Wittgenstein’s practice often includes these as well. To describe music as self-deceptive and lacking authenticity involves abandoning a strictly Formalist approach to music criticism, since it presupposes a sense of the history of the western musical tradition and an understanding of the culture in which the music is embedded. Nor does Wittgenstein think, like Beardsley and Wimsatt (1946), that the composer’s intentions are irrelevant to the evaluation of the piece of music. So, it cannot be correctly claimed that he falls into the class of Formalist critics who assert that all critical consideration of the music (or work of art) has to be internal to the work. Given his remarks on Mendelssohn and Mahler, he does not fall into this school of criticism, since he brings historical, cultural, biographical and ethical factors to bear on a piece of music, including such issues as authenticity and alienation. Could he then be a historicist critic who conceives of his job as concerned with revisioning the work, with how to make it relevant to our times? Well, sometimes he does that-for instance, he did say that to give the same deep effect, Brahms has to be played differently in our times than he was played in his own times. But again, this is not only too narrow a conception, but neglects the task of understanding the work the way the artist intended that we understand

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it, as well as attempting to understand it the way it would have been understood in its time. Perhaps Wittgenstein comes closest to the view of criticism as retrieval where the critic reconstructs the creative process which terminates in and illuminates the work of music under consideration. This view allows a composer’s intentions, as well as cultural, biographical and social context to play a role in critical inquiry, with the work of music remaining the primary focus of interest, rather than getting lost in the morass of detail. (Wollheim 1980, p.  185–204) However, even this comprehensive approach does not do justice to Wittgenstein’s practice of music criticism, since for him musical works and artistic products in general are embedded in a culture and express that culture’s spirit and values. Hence they wear a face and have a certain physiognomy. Thus Mendelssohn’s music wears Mendelssohn’s face and is expressive of the European-Jewish spirit. Music is not cut off from the culture but is intimately connected with its language games and associated forms of life. Thus, understanding music, like understanding speech/language, provides an answer as to why Wittgenstein bothers with music: for its own sake, to be sure, because he loves it; but also because as a cultural barometer, it sheds light on the ebb and tide of the culture, its language games and the human forms of life. It seems then that Wittgenstein’s practice of music criticism is too complex to fit the neat and tidy conventional classificatory schemes. The advice to critics from Wittgenstein, if they are to avoid being a buttface is: “Don’t apologize for anything, don’t obscure anything, look & say how it really is – but you must see something that sheds a new light on the facts.” (VB 1998, p. 45e)

7. Music and Language: Why Was Wagner Absent from the Silents? One way to shed light on works of art is by a method of juxtaposition. “All that aesthetics does,” Wittgenstein said, is “to draw your attention to a thing, to place things side by side.” If by giving “reasons” of this sort you make another person “see what you see” but it still does not appeal to him,” that is “an end” of the discussion. (Moore 1954, p. 106) There is a fragment from 1934 mentioning Wagner’s music which suggests an application of Wittgenstein’s method of juxtaposition to achieve or enhance musical understanding. In this fragment Wittgenstein compares the music of several composers and speculates how our understanding of their music would fare with this method of juxtaposition. The idea is to see how a scene from a film without words might throw light on the music accompanying it:

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In the days of silent films all the classics were played with the films, except Brahms & Wagner. Not Brahms because he is too abstract. I can imagine an exciting scene in a film accompanied with music by Beethoven or Schubert & might gain some sort of understanding of the music from the film. But not an understanding of music by Brahms. Bruckner on the other hand goes with a film. (VB 1998, p. 29e)

Several questions arise here. If a scene in a film cannot aid us in understanding Brahms because Brahms is too abstract, is this also the reason why Wagner cannot be understood this way? Wittgenstein leaves mute the reasons why Wagner is not played with silent films. Is Wagner too abstract too? Being too abstract, Brahms presumably cannot be visually represented either through the depiction of a scene from nature or through human actions. By contrast, perhaps Beethoven, Schubert and Bruckner can be so visualized. In Brahms, there is the strength and rigour of musical thought, which requires propositions and argument for understanding. I do not see how this could hold for Wagner unless we stress the role of narrative and language in Wagner. To express what Wagner expresses stories must be told-words must be used. So the idea is to put silent film and music side by side, and see whether a scene from a film can contribute to our musical understanding. What we need to notice is that Wittgenstein talks of silent films. What happens when the word comes into the picture, as it were? The big theme of philosophical interest here may be expressed this way: Can a picture, an image or visual representation in film – for that is what the silents were all about – throw light on music  – on a language without content, without representation? Can these two be matched up for reciprocal illumination? Apparently, Brahms and Wagner, for different reasons, cannot be juxtaposed this way. I tried to suggest an answer to the ‘Why not?’ about Wagner. Did Wagner have to wait for the ‘talkies’ to have his music illuminated by word and action in films? Consider the scene from Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now where, like birds of prey, helicopters are swooping down to napalm a Vietnamese village and its inhabitants to the tune of Wagner’s Valkyries. The violence of the music, its funky notes signaling death and destruction from above, when juxtaposed with the scene does increase our understanding of horror of mythical proportions. And when Duval, playing the character of the American officer in charge of the mission, surveys the corpses and intones “I love the smell of napalm on Sunday morning” – we realize that what was once the spiritual ritual of the Sabbath, gesturing toward “the one thing higher than nature” (VB 1998, p. 3e) – has been reduced to an orgiastic ritual of violence and destruction. Did the Valkyries of Wagner have to wait for the existence of Francis Ford Coppola and military helicopters to receive cinematographic illumination? Perhaps the genre of moving pictures ended with the eclipse of the silents, and something different, a successor with sound, speech and new technology took

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its place, much like what happened to opera after Wagner or philosophy after Wittgenstein. If you cite the recent silent film The Artist as a counter-example, think again, since it feeds off the resources of the talkies as well.

8. Concluding Remarks Reading in general may have numbed Wittgenstein’s soul, but as I argued, he not only listened to and commented on Wagner’s music, but read Wagner’s essays and adapted some of Wagner’s ideas for his own purposes. On a conventional reading, Wittgenstein is a Wagnerian throughout his life and his music/cultural criticism suffers from Wagner’s ‘ugly’ flaws. I offered a different reading on which we can describe Wittgenstein’s development as an emancipation from the ‘ugly’ Wagner towards the mature Wittgenstein as a philosopher of culture. And this points to a new appreciation of Wittgenstein’s own remarks on Mendelssohn and Mahler as older brothers, as it were, with whom he shares a cultural ideal and from whom he learns about himself and his work as he discerns family resemblances and differences.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor (1981): In Search of Wagner. London: NLB. Bell, Clive (1931): Art. London: Chatto and Windus. Engelmann, Paul (1967): Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein with a Memoir. Oxford: Blackwell. Goehr, Lydia (1998): The Quest for Voice: Music, Politics, and the Limits of Philosophy. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gorlée, Dinda (2008): “Wittgenstein as Mastersinger”. In: Semiotica 172, p. 97–150. Lurie, Yuval (1992): “Culture as a Human Form of Life: A Romantic Reading of Wittgenstein”. In: International Philosophical Quarterly 32, p. 193–204. McGuinness, Brian (1988): Wittgenstein: A Life. Young Ludwig. Berkeley: University of California Press. McGuinness, Brian (2002): Approaches to Wittgenstein. London, New York: Routledge. Moore, G.E. (1993): “Wittgenstein’s Lectures in 1930–1933”. In: Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophical Occasions 1912–1951. James C. Klagge/Alfred Nordmann (Eds). Indianapolis, Cambridge: Hackett, p. 46–114. Pinsent, David (1990): A Portrait of Wittgenstein as a Young Man. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Rhees, Rush (1984): Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scruton, Roger (2004): “Wittgenstein and the Understanding of Music”. In: British Journal for Aesthetics 44, p. 1–9.

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Stern, David G. (1995): Wittgenstein on Mind and Language. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Szabados, Béla (1999): “Was Wittgenstein an Anti-Semite? The Significance of Anti-Semitism for Wittgenstein’s Philosophy”. In: Canadian Journal of Philosophy 29, p. 1–28. Tanner, Michael (1995): Wagner. Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press. Tolstoy, Leo (1995): What is Art? London: Penguin Classics. Von Wright, G.H. (1982): Wittgenstein. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Wagner, Richard (1964): Wagner on Music and Drama. Selected and arranged with an introduction by Albert Goldman and Evert Sprinchorn. Translated by H. Ashton Ellis. New York: E. P. Dutton. Wagner, Richard (1910): Judaism in Music. Translated by Edwin Evans. London: W. Reeves. Williams, Bernard (2006): On Opera. New Haven, London: Yale University Press. Wimsatt,W.K./Beardsley, M.C. (1946): ‘The Intentional Fallacy’. In: Sewanee Review 54, p. 468–88. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1993): Philosophical Occasions 1912–1951. James C. Klagge/Alfred Nordmann (Eds). Indianapolis, Cambridge: Hackett. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (2003): Public and Private Occasions. James C. Klagge/Alfred Nordmann (Eds). Boulder, New York, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield.

Josef G. F. Rothhaupt¹

Ludwig Wittgenstein and Wilhelm Busch: “Humour is not a mood, but a ‘Weltanschauung’” Strangely enough, Busch’s drawings may often be termed “metaphysical”. Thus, there is a way of drawing which is metaphysical.² – One might say, “This is seen against the background of the eternal”. This, however, is something those strokes can mean only in a whole language. And it is a language without a grammar; one could not specify its rules.³

I. Afterwards For an adequate understanding of this remark, that Wittgenstein wrote on 4 November 1948 in MS 137, 88b,⁴ it is necessary to be familiar with Wilhelm Busch’s drawings. We know that Wittgenstein had at least one original drawing by Busch in his possession.⁵ On this pen-and-ink-drawing one can see a man sitting at his desk. He is writing, thinking  – maybe philosophizing. An insect, most likely a wasp, is hovering above his head, apparently going to sting the man’s head which

1 Many thanks to Wolfgang Huemer and Daniel Steuer. Both have read this article carefully and have made helpful comments. Wolfgang Huemer and Daniel Steuer furthermore have extensively and circumspectly improved my drafted translation into English. 2 Perhaps this should in effect read: “Does this mean that there is a metaphysical way of drawing?” (Schulte 2007, p. 168, fn. 24) 3 “Es ist merkwürdig, daß man die Zeichnungen von Busch oft ‘metaphysisch’ nennen kann. So gibt es also eine Zeichenweise, die metaphysisch ist.  – ‘Gesehen, mit dem Ewigen als Hintergrund’ könnte man sagen. Aber doch bedeuten diese Striche das nur in einer ganzen Sprache. Und es ist eine Sprache ohne Grammatik, man könnte ihre Regeln nicht angeben.” The translation was carried out by Joachim Schulte (2007, p.  161). In Culture and Value this remark has been translated by Peter Winch as follows: “It is queer that Busch’s drawings can often be called ‘metaphysical’. Is there such a thing as a metaphysical style of drawing then? – ‘Seen against the background of the eternal’, you might say. However, these strokes have such a meaning only within a whole language. And it is a language without grammar; you couldn’t say what its rules are.” (VB 1980b, p. 75 and p. 75e) 4 All citations of remarks from Wittgenstein’s manuscripts and typescripts are from Wittgenstein 2000 (BEE). 5 See Nedo (2012, p. 345, No. 425).

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is bald. Having been stung by the wasp, will that man stop writing, thinking, philosophizing?

When Wittgenstein remarked that “Busch’s drawings may often be termed ‘metaphysical’”, he had in mind especially the drawings from Busch’s Hernach (Afterwards). It can be shown in Wittgenstein’s Nachlaß, that in his manuscripts of the years 1946 to 1949, during the time when he was writing his remarks on the philosophy of psychology, he is referring to Wilhelm Busch, especially the publication Hernach (1908a).⁶ During his lifetime, Wilhelm Busch prepared a special selection from his drawings and verses and left instructions that this exclusive collection should be published after his death. Hence, the book’s title: “Hernach” – “Afterwards”. Wittgenstein owned a copy of it, and he considered it to be a profound publication and valued it very highly. In his will Wittgenstein bequeathed this copy specifically to his close friend Ben Richards: I make the following gifts of specific articles or chattels namely: – To Dr. Benedict Richards my French Travelling Clock my Fur Coat my complete Edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales and my book “Hernach” by W. Busch To Dr. Ludwig Hänsel in Austria my volume of Lessing’s Religious Writings To Mr. R. Rhees the rest of my books and what I call my Collection of Nonsense which will be found in a file To Miss Anscombe all my furniture.⁷

An example from Hernach can help explain what Wittgenstein may have had in mind when he claimed Busch’s drawings were often “metaphysical”. (And in this particular context, “metaphysical” is clearly meant as a positive attribute.) The last drawing in Hernach wears the title “Insouciance” (“Sorglos”).⁸ It shows a

6 See i.e. MS 131, 12; MS 136, 60a; MS 137, 16b; MS 137, 88b; MS 168, 3r. 7 The author of this article got a copy of Wittgenstein’s will in the year 1990 from Georg Henrik von Wright. 8 For an interrelation between “Sorglos” (“Insouciance”) and “Sorge” (“Worry”) by Wittgenstein see the article “Wittgenstein and Goethe: Getting Rid of ‘Sorge’” by Daniel Steuer in this volume.

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human skull lying on a closed book and a raven, sitting on the skull – answering the call of nature. The drawing is accompanied by a verse in four lines. Insouciance⁹ An empty cranial cage Might leave a sage Awed and dispirited. – The raven is quite uninhibited.

Another example from Hernach can demonstrate that Wittgenstein was inspired to do philosophy by looking at drawings and reading verses and texts from Wilhelm Busch. In manuscript MS 137, 16b (9 February 1948), Wittgenstein wrote the following remark: A smug smiling pig by Busch (“Hernach”). I wouldn’t exclaim “That’s exactly how pigs behave!” In the case of other pictures I would say just that.¹⁰

In Busch’s Hernach there are altogether seven different drawings of pigs or with pigs. Especially the following three of them are relevant for Wittgenstein’s expression “a smug smiling pig”: Potato-idyll / Kartoffelidyll

9 Translated by Walter Arndt (1982, p.  185). (“Sorglos: Selbst mancher Weise / Besieht ein leeres Denkgehäuse / Mit Ernst und Bangen. – / Der Rabe ist ganz unbefangen.”) 10 My translation. (“Ein selbstgefällig lächelndes Schwein bei Busch (‘Hernach’). Ich würde nicht ausrufen ‘Genauso macht’s ein Schwein!’ Bei andern Bildern aber gerade das.”)

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Come, come! / Komm, komm!

Inner Value / Innerer Wert

For a better understanding and a genuine comprehension of Wittgenstein’s remark about “a smug smiling pig” it is necessary to know these three pictures by Busch. In the drawing “Potato-idyll” as well as in “Come, come!” we are, for sure, faced with “a smug smiling pig”; but also in “Inner Value”? And why can the other four drawings of a pig in Hernach surely not be meant? In using Busch’s drawings and verses, Wittgenstein goes – so to speak – philosophically in medias res. Wittgenstein, incidentally, was also well aware of the very high quality of Busch’s drawings, especially of those in Hernach. The style of drawing, the “stroke” as Wittgenstein himself called it, in many pen-and-ink-drawings of Busch (predominantly the late ones) is comparable in quality to drawings by

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Rembrandt.¹¹ And Wittgenstein had a sharp, educated taste and an impressive knowledge of the arts – not only of music, architecture, and literature, but also of painting and drawing. His acquaintance with Busch’s œuvre is remarkable, but has so far not been adequately acknowledged.¹²

II. Painter Squirtle, Ker and Plunk, Instructions for the Painting of Historical Portraits Wilhelm Busch’s Hernach is not the only work Wittgenstein knew well. He was also familiar, for example, with: Painter Squirtle (Maler Klecksel; 1884)¹³, Ker and Plunk (Plisch und Plum; 1882)¹⁴, Instructions for the Painting of Historical Portraits (Anleitung zu historischen Portraits; 1874)¹⁵, and Schnurrdiburr or The Bees (Schnurrdiburr oder Die Bienen; 1869).¹⁶ There is one particular reference in Wittgenstein’s Nachlaß which shows to what great extent the œuvre of Busch resonates with Wittgenstein’s philosophy; how Wittgenstein, using pictures, examples, and metaphors from Busch, was

11 See Engelmann (2006, p. 162). 12 In a letter to his sister Hermine Wittgenstein, in the family called “Mining”, on 18 November 1929 Ludwig Wittgenstein writes explicitly on Busch’s style of drawing, his “Strich” (stroke) and compares it with his sister’s way of drawing. Namely: “Liebe Mining! Danke für Deinen Brief & das Blatt. Ich glaube daß in dieser Zeichnung Deine besten malerischen Qualitäten nicht zum Ausdruck gekommen sind & zwar vielleicht darum, weil hier ‘Strich’ nötig wäre, wie vielleicht überall, wo etwas nur angedeutet ist. Wenn der Busch z. B. einen Mist auf dem Boden zeichnet, so drückt sein Strich Mist aus & man fragt sich nicht lange: sind das Strohhalme oder alte Fetzen? Deine Blumen auf dem Grab aber sind, wenn ich mich nicht irre, weder wirkliche Blumen, noch ein Symbol für solche, sondern nur ungenau gezeichnete Blumen, Bänder etc., & der Schatten wo er in größeren Flächen auftritt, wirkt durch die gleichmäßige Schraffierung tot; er ist glaube ich auch nur ein ungenau gezeichneter Schatten, in dem man sich nicht auskennt. Nun freut mich aber das Blatt trotzdem & sogar trotz der Schrift, die ich abominable finde. Wessen Schrift ist das, & warum hast Du nicht Deine eigene dazu genommen, die vielleicht die einzige gewesen wäre, die zu dem übrigen gepaßt hätte? Ich habe sofort das weiße rund um die Zeichnung weggeschnitten & sie auf ein braunes Packpapier gelegt & so hat sie einen gewissen Reiz für mich; & darum nochmals vielen Dank!” Wittgenstein’s complete correspondence is cited from Wittgenstein 2004. 13 See MS 150, 59; MS 152, 31; MS 140, 37 → D 308, 51; D 310 → MS 115II, 275; MS 134, 178 → TS 229 §1650 / TS 245 §1650. 14 See MS 107, 249. 15 See MS 148, 15v and MS 136, 60a → TS 232 §218. 16 See MS 111, 2f → TS 211, 9 → TS 233B, 20.

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inspired and influenced by him. In manuscript MS 152, 31 (see also MS 150, 59) of Wittgenstein’s Nachlaß we find an implicit reference to Painter Squirtle (Maler Klecksel). Later, Wittgenstein transferred this remark not only to his very important, but so far mostly underestimated, book MS 114 (I) + MS 115 (I) + MS 140 (I) – originally titled “Philosophische Bemerkungen” (“Philosophical Remarks”), but posthumously published under the title Philosophische Grammatik (Philosophical Grammar) – (precisely: into the revision of this book in MS140 (I), 37) but also to his revision of the Brown Book in German in MS 115 (II). In Philosophical Grammar, this remark reads: ... If I am now asked if I think that there’s no such thing as understanding but only manifestations of understanding, I must answer that this question is as senseless as the question whether there is a number three. I can only describe piecemeal the grammar of the word “understand” and point out that it differs from what one is inclined to portray without looking closely. We are like little painter Klecksel [painter Squirtle] who drew two eyes in a man’s profile, since he knew that human beings have two eyes.¹⁷

If we look up the actual text and the drawings in Busch’s Painter Squirtle (Maler Klecksel), we find the following, very amusing and nevertheless very deep, ‘story’ in the second chapter: Painter Squirtle¹⁸ He gains much weight and grows apace In bodily and mental grace, And evidences from the start A striking aptitude for Art.

With slate and stylus, he is deft At drawing faces looking left; Both eyes are always plain in view: He knows that people come with two.

17 PG 1974, Part I, No. III, § 38, p. 80. Translated by Antony Kenny. For interesting details in the manuscripts MS 150, 59 and MS 152, 31 see the facsimiles and Biesenbach (2011, p. 50). 18 Maler Klecksel. Translated by Walter Arndt (1982, p. 160–174; here p. 161–162).

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Experience instructs his pen: Soon he can do entire men; And with especial skill and pleasure He draws a gentleman of leisure; And not alone his outer shell: He shows the inner works as well, Revealing for our introspection A longitudinal cross-section. This man is sitting on his seat, Consuming, say, some cream of wheat. Observe the spoon bring up its catch; It spills and slithers down the hatch, And further down the wholesome ration Accumulates in tidy fashion. Thus we are granted, phase by phase, Rare insight into Nature’s ways.

On 20 January 1930 Wittgenstein wrote the following remark (MS 107, 249): The expectation says so to speak “It’s lovely there, as like as not, And I am here, no matter what!” And with the telescope of expectation we look into the future.¹⁹

It is crucial for an adequate understanding of Wittgenstein’s philosophical remark (as well as of Busch’s humour, here invoked by Wittgenstein) to have seen and read the sequence in the “conclusion” after chapter 27 in Wilhelm Busch’s Ker and Plunk (Plisch und Plum). Ker and Plunk was published seventeen years after the publication of Max and Moritz (Max und Moritz): It is conceivable that, since Max and Moritz, the most successful of his works in terms of continuing total sales, had been built around a mischievous or unruly pair, Busch may have been set out to double the dose – two pairs, one of boys [Peter and Paul] and their dogs [Plisch and Plum] are not made to suffer grim ends. Instead  – but that is all told in the picture story itself ...²⁰

19 My translation; with the quotation of Busch translated by H. Arthur Klein. (“Die Erwartung sagt gleichsam ‘schön ist es auch anderswo & hier bin ich sowieso’. Und mit dem Perspektiv der Erwartung schauen wir in die Zukunft.”) 20 Klein 1962, p. 210–211.

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Here is the sequence in Ker and Plunk to which Wittgenstein is referring in his extensive context: Ker and Plunk²¹ Travelling in this neighborhood, A chap whose wealth is more than good – In his hands, a telescope, Comes this Mister, known as “Hope.” “Why not,” – and here it’s Hope who’s talking – “Watch distant things, the while I’m walking – It’s lovely there, as like as not, And I am here, no matter what!”

And, saying so, he somehow stumbles And straight into the pond he tumbles. “My dear boys Paul and Peter, say, Where is that Mister, anyway?”

So asks Herr Field, who here is seen Strolling for pleasure where it’s green. But Papa scarce need ask his dears; The Mister presently appears –

21 Plisch und Plum. Translated by H. Arthur Klein (1962, p. 58–117; here p. 110–113). “Plisch! ... Plum! The double splashing sound, equivalent to English kerplunk or kersplash! The German form provided the names for the two dogs, and the same principle has been followed in providing the English names.” (Klein 1962, p. 211)

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Minus telescope and hat, Hope emerges, just like that ...

“Go fetch, now – Ker and Plunk – to hand!” So sounds out the boys’ command.

Well trained to fetch and carry too, The dogs dive, and are lost to view, But they’ll succeed, you must believe; They’re quite accustomed to retrieve.

See – Plunk brings back the telescope, And Ker – the hat of Mister Hope. Now Hope remarks, “It’s clear – oh, quite! – These dogs are bits of old all right!”

It is clearly necessary for an adequate understanding of Wittgenstein’s remark to know the wider context of the picture-verse-story of Ker and Plunk from which the quoted sentence is taken. Notebook MS 148 consists mainly of Wittgenstein’s notes for his lectures in Cambridge. On p. 15v we find the following text, together with a drawing, here in facsimile and transcription:

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“If you draw the diagonals in P you get p.” “If you do this & this & this & this you get Napoleon.”

This drawing is a direct reference to Busch’s publication Dideldum! (the second part of the Instructions for the Paining of Historical Portraits) which goes as follows: Mach still und froh

Mal so

und so,

Gleich steht er do

bei Austerlitz

und Waterloo.

In Wittgenstein’s Cambridge Lectures 1932–1935²², the notes taken by Alice Ambrose and Margaret Macdonald from Wittgenstein’s lectures 1934–35, we find the same theme again, represented in the following way: Consider the following: “If you draw the diagonals of a pentagon you get a pentagram”, and “if you do this and this … you get Napoleon.”

And again this is followed by a drawing of Napoleon Bonaparte:

This drawing is very different from the one in Wittgenstein’s notebook MS 148, 15v, however, which shows that either Wittgenstein did not explain in detail

22 Ambrose 1982, p. 179.

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Busch’s second part of the Instructions for the Paining of Historical Portraits in his lecture, or that his pupils did not grasp and really understand the point Busch had made. The translation of Busch’s text, which in the original German is rhymed, reads approximately: “Draw silent and happy: First this / than this. / Just he is standing so, / at Austerlitz / and Waterloo.” Wittgenstein, thus, in his own drawing in manuscript MS 148, 15v refers to Napoleon’s facial expression at Waterloo, not at Austerlitz. In an entry in his manuscript MS 136, 60a, dated 4 January 1948, Wittgenstein himself made a drawing of a portrait in profile. Namely:

Drawing by Ludwig Wittgenstein

Drawing by Wilhelm Busch

This sketch has a great similarity with Busch’s portrait of Friedrich II, the King of Prussia, named “Old Fritz”. The first part of the Instructions for the Painting of Historical Portraits from Busch is exactly a humoristic guide for drawing the portrait of this person. Zum Beispiel machen wir zum Spaß Mal erstens das!

Hieraus noch viertens mit Pläsier Gelangen wir zu diesem hier

Dann zweitens zur Erheiterung Kommt dieses als Erweiterung

Zum Schluß noch dieses!– Ei Potzblitz! So haben wir den Alten Fritz. Zum dritten wie auch zum Vergnügen Ist folgendes hinzuzufügen.

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One month later, on 9 February 1948, in manuscript MS 137, 16b there is another reference to Busch – which, most likely, refers to his Instructions for the Paining of Historical Portraits: What is the criterion that for someone the face in a picture is a picture-face; that, for him, it has lost any close connection with a real face? (I am thinking of Busch’s drawings, made with only a few dots and strokes.)²³

III. Loose Sheets / Munich Illustrated Broadsheets Wittgenstein was familiar with the Fliegende Blätter (Loose Sheets), a humoristic and extensively illustrated weekly paper in which famous artists’ texts and drawings were published during the years 1845 to 1944. And he was also familiar with the Münchner Bilderbogen (Munich Illustrated Broadsheets), a series of one-leave-picture prints published fortnightly from 1848 to 1898. Wilhelm Busch had illustrations in both publications. A clear piece of evidence for the fact that Wittgenstein was very well informed about Fliegende Blätter and Münchner Bilderbogen can be found in manuscript MS183, 89, Wittgenstein’s diaries 1930–1932 and 1936–1937, published and known under the title Movement of Thought (Denkbewegungen): The photographs of my brother Rudi have something of Oberländer, or more correctly something of the style of the good illustrators of the old ‘Fliegende Blätter’.²⁴

Ilse Somavilla comments on this remark of 1931 as follows: “Adolf Oberländer was a caricaturist for the Fliegende Blätter, an illustrated humorous magazine [...]. Famous contributors of texts and drawings include Wilhelm Busch, Moritz von Schwind, Carl Spitzweg, Felix Dahn, Ferdinand Freiligrath, Emanuel Geibel, and Joseph Victor von Scheffel. Their humor typically targeted the forms of conduct of the German bourgeoisie.”²⁵ Two examples, with striking family resemblances to aspects of Wittgenstein’s philosophy will be presented here – Firm Faith and A Conspicuous Resemblance.

23 My translation. (“Was ist das Kriterium dafür, daß für einen das Gesicht im Bild Bildgesicht ist, mit einem wirklichen den engen Zusammenhang verloren hat? (Ich denke an Busch’sche Zeichnungen mit wenigen Punkten & Strichen.)”) 24 “Die Photographien meines Bruders Rudi haben etwas Oberländerisches oder richtiger etwas vom Stil der guten Zeichner der alten ‘Fliegenden Blätter’.” (DB 2003, p. 97) 25 Somavilla in DB 2003, p. 96 and p. 97, fn. f.

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Firm Faith “is a sample of a single-panel humorous drawing, such as Busch occasionally produced for Fliegende Blätter during the period 1859–1871”.²⁶ Firm Faith²⁷

Professor: “... and now I want to prove this theorem.” Pupil: “Why bother to prove it, teacher? I take your word for it.”

Of course, Wittgenstein has written (so-called) remarks on the foundations of mathematics. On 14 May 1932 he makes an entry in manuscript MS 113, 108r, first to be found in notebook MS 154, 45v. The remark, which later will be transferred first into typescript TS 211, 682, then into typescript TS 212, 1651, and finally into the so-called Big Typescript (BT 2005), namely typescript TS 213, 662, reads as follows: (Philosophy doesn’t examine the calculi of mathematics, but only what mathematicians say about these calculi.)²⁸

In manuscript MS137, 70b we also find a remark, written on 7 July 1948, with the title “Der feste Glaube” (“Firm Faith” or “Unshakable Faith”):

26 Klein 1962, p. 215. 27 Translated by H. Arthur Klein (1962, p.  180). (“Fester Glaube: Professor: ‘… Und nun will ich Ihnen diesen Lehrsatz jetzt auch beweisen.’ / Junge: ‘Wozu beweisen, Herr Professor? Ich glaub’ es Ihnen so.’) Fliegende Blätter, 1863. Klein (1962, p. 215). 28 BT 2005, p.  444 and p.  444e. (“Die Philosophie prüft nicht die Kalküle der Mathematik, sondern nur, was die Mathematiker über diese Kalküle sagen.”)

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Unshakable faith. (E.g. in a promise.) Is it less certain than being convinced of a mathematical truth? – (But does that make the language games any more alike!)²⁹

It is very likely that Wittgenstein knew Busch’s caricature Firm Faith. But we can certainly say that the combination of Busch’s caricature and Wittgenstein’s remarks creates a deeper sense and allows for a new perspective on the matter as well as on Wittgenstein’s remarks on the foundations of mathematics. Although we cannot be definitively sure that Wittgenstein has seen and read the next example, it can in a humoristic way shed light on Wittgenstein’s philosophical concept of family resemblance. A Conspicuous Resemblance³⁰

Student: “But upon my soul, uncle, I find a remarkable resemblance between you and this well here.” Uncle: “Ah! And why would you say that, you rascal?” Student: “Because, one has to work it for heaven knows how long before one gets anything out of it.”

29 Translated by Peter Winch (VB 1980b, p.  73 and p.  73e).(“Der feste Glaube. (An eine Verheißung z.B.) Ist er weniger sicher als die Überzeugung von einer mathematischen Wahrheit? – Aber werden dadurch die Sprachspiele ähnlicher!”) 30 My translation. Fliegende Blätter und Münchner Bilderbogen 1859 – 1864. In: Busch 2002, vol. I, p. 630.(“Eine auffallende Ähnlichkeit: Student: ‘Aber tausendsapperlot, Onkel, ich finde eine auffallende Ähnlichkeit zwischen dir und dem Brunnen da.’ / Onkel: ‘Ah! Wieso denn, du Schlingel?’ / Student: ‘Weil man auch, weiß der Himmel wie lang, pumpen muß, bis mal was ‘rauskommt.’”)

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IV. Edward’s Dream But Wittgenstein was not only familiar with drawings, comics, picture-and-versestories, he was also familiar with Busch’s texts – short novels, essays, a collection of fairytales and sagas, letters. He rated them very highly, read them often and recommended them to friends and pupils. There are various and important influences of these texts on Wittgenstein’s philosophizing and on Wittgenstein’s philosophy. Two short novels – Edward’s Dream (Eduards Traum; 1891) and The Butterfly (Der Schmetterling; 1895) – are especially important for him. In 1919, Wittgenstein was already familiar with Eduard’s Dream; he had read it together with his friend Ludwig Hänsel in the First World War prison camp at Monte Cassino in Italy.³¹ In 1927, Rudolf Carnap made a note in his diary (dated 4 July), saying that he had had conversations with Ludwig Wittgenstein and Moritz Schlick once more on Esperanto, then on intuitivism, and that finally Wittgenstein read some Wilhelm Busch to them – most likely from Edward’s Dream.³² His friends Paul Engelmann, Ludwig Hänsel, and Rudolf Koder tell us that Wittgenstein loved this short novel particularly – “Eduards Traum is very ‘deep’” he said to them.³³ Unfortunately, so far there is no complete translation of Edward’s Dream available in English. But fortunately in 1909, one year after Wilhelm Busch’s death, Paul Carus made a free translation of the main ideas of this little book, selecting passages that appeared noteworthy to him and published them under the title Edward’s Dream. The Philosophy of a Humorist together with his excellent introduction “A German Humorist”. Carus’ reflections on humour are not only in themselves extraordinary, they also provide an important hint why humour may be of philosophical relevance, something that both Busch and Wittgenstein were certainly very aware of. We cannot know for sure, but it is certainly possible that Wittgenstein came across this edition of Edward’s Dream and read the introduction of Paul Carus. And there is every reason to believe that his introduction would have made, or has made, a very positive impression on Wittgenstein. In “A German Humorist” Carus for example says:

31 Somavilla 2012, p. 50 and p. 145–146. 32 Carnap made an excerpt from his diaries with the title “Über Wittgenstein, aus meinem Tagebuch” (“On Wittgenstein, from my diary”). This document  – written in shorthand  – is preserved in the Rudolf Carnap papers in Pittsburgh. 33 Hänsel 1994, p. 245. Somavilla 2006, p. 121–122, fn. 24 and p. 160–163. Rudolph Koder to Allan Janik in 1968 (personal communication).

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The more we investigate the nature of humor, the more shall we understand that this its substratum – we may call it the philosophy of humor, or if you prefer the religion of humor, or the serious background which unnoticeably gives humor its setting – is an indispensable part of it. Without it humor would be stale and unprofitable; it would fall flat, be like a joke that has no point, it would be trite like words without meaning, like a game without a purpose; it would merely be nonsense. ... Humor has a great task to perform, for to humor we owe the silver linings of the clouds of life. ... But in order to be effective humor should be the expression of a conviction; it ought to reflect the world-conception of a thinker, it must be backed by moral purpose. This serious element of humor need not, nay it should not, be in ostentatious evidence, but it can not be missing; I would even go so far as to insist that no humorist has ever been successful unless he was at the same time consciously or unconsciously a philosopher. ... Humor is the reward of a philosophical attitude in life. ...³⁴

Wittgenstein himself made an important and impressive statement that can be seen as related to this point (28 December 1948; manuscript MS 137, 135a): Humour is not a mood but a way of looking at the world [eine Weltanschauung]. So if it is correct to say that humour was stamped out in Nazi Germany, that does not mean that people were not in good spirits, or anything of that sort, but something much deeper and more important.³⁵

In 1909 – one year after Busch’s death and three years before Wittgenstein came to Cambridge for the first time to study philosophy  – Paul Carus said about Wilhelm Busch that he is “the greatest humorist of modern Germany” and about the little book Edward’s Dream he gave the following advice: “The book is worth having in one’s library and its place is among the philosophers.” This short story is a dream, and in this dream Busch “presents to the reader a number of philosophical problems which he either solves in an aphoristic way, or, only touching upon them, passes on to other problems”.³⁶ The first edition of Eduards Traum was available in April 1891. Busch himself wrote on 29 April 1891 in a letter to his friend Franz Lenbach, the famous painter in Munich: “Many thanks also for your kind words about my little chitchat on printing paper [Eduards Traum]. There won’t be many whose intuitive perception

34 Carus 1909, p. 13–15. 35 Translated by Peter Winch. VB 1980b, p. 78 and p. 78e. (“Humor ist keine Stimmung, sondern eine Weltanschauung. Und darum, wenn es richtig ist, zu sagen, im Nazi-Deutschland sei der Humor vertilgt worden, so heißt das nicht etwas wie, man sei nicht guter Laune gewesen, sondern etwas viel Tieferes und Wichtigeres.“ 36 Carus 1909, p. 16, p. 18–19, p. 19.

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is keen enough (like yours) so that a slight whisper of the problems is sufficient for their thoughtful amusement.”³⁷ Here is the opening passage of Edward’s Dream: Edward’s Dream³⁸ It is bedtime. Edward is still up. His little boy, Emil, is in bed. Elise, his wife, bids him goodnight and retires. But Edward, in complacent rumination, still loiters on the limits of the inconceivable. He yawns, throws away the stump of his cigar, takes the last swallow of his evening drink ... and decides to retire too. Having stared awhile into the light of the candle he blows it out and goes to bed. Before his eyes the image of the flame still remains, and he begins to contemplate it attentively. Then he experienced a feeling as if his spirit, his soul, or whatever you may call it, began to shrink. His ego became smaller and smaller; first like a potato, then like a pill, then like a pin’s head, then still smaller, and at last it was a point. But he was a thinking point and active he was too, moving about in all directions, manufacturing his demand of time and space quite “en passant” as a by-product. In this shape he makes several excursions.

An implicit reference to this beginning of Edward’s Dream is Wittgenstein’s remark of 28 January 1932 (MS 183, 142): There is a space for thought in which, when falling asleep, one can sojourn further or not so far & when awakening there is a return from a greater or lesser distance.³⁹

Edward, shrunk to a point, makes long and eventful journeys into the land of mathematics, the land of the atoms, the land of geometry, the land of the pure forms, to the community of heads, to a farm house, into the temple of science, to the world of politics, visiting a philanthropist, into vacuity, into a philosopher’s study, and into the domain of moral aspiration.⁴⁰ Only sometimes the dreamer’s

37 “Besten Dank ferner für die freundlichen Worte über meinen kleinen Schnickschnack auf Druckpapier. Viel werden’s ihrer nicht sein, denen wie dir in angestammter Hellhörigkeit schon ein leichtes Säuseln der Probleme genügend ist, um sich selbstdenkend zu belustigen.” Busch 1982, vol. I, p. 331, letter no. 813. Busch 1943, vol. VII, p. 234, letter no. 196. Busch 1935, p. 169, letter no. 218. The English translation cited here is from Galway 2001, p. 89. 38 Busch 1909 (translated by Paul Carus). Quotations from p. 23–24, p. 53–55, p. 58–59, p. 74. 39 “Es gibt einen Gedankenraum in dem/den man beim Einschlafen weiter oder weniger weit reisen kann & beim Erwachen gibt es eine Rückkunft aus größerer oder geringerer Entfernung/ Weite.” (DB 2003, p. 150 and p. 151) 40 There is an allegoric passage nearly by the end of the novel Edward’s Dream which has great similarity to John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, Bunyan’s “Vanity Fair” in it. Wittgenstein was familiar with The Pilgrim’s Progress, he got a copy in 1937 from his friend Gilbert Pattisson. In Wittgenstein’s Nachlaß there are some remarks with reference to Bunyan’s book: MS 118, 56r; MS 137, 52b → TS 232 §612; MS 137, 130b.

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journey will be shortly interrupted by the voice of Elise, Edward’s wife, saying: “Edward, do not snore.” One example in Edward’s Dream with direct relevance to Wittgenstein’s philosophy and his critique of Western culture, his critique “of the spirit of the main current of European and American civilization” (MS 109, 211 on 8 November 1930),⁴¹ namely Edward’s experience in the temple of science, is worth citing in full: After some other excursions, Edward visited the temple of science. There he saw the highminded investigators sitting among their microscopes, retorts, and guinea-pigs. Considering the use, the enhancement, and all the other advantages which mankind owes them, and also their own well-deserved pride, he left their sanctum with suppressed reverence. But he overheard a critic  – for flies are everywhere  – say to another critic who passed him: “There are numbers in their head, and bacilli in their hearts. They grind everything to powder – God, spirit, and Shakespeare⁴², and then the broom-guard, those sages who sweep together the offal from the back-doors of centuries:”  – Here the critic interrupted himself and exclaimed: “Do you see that milk-cart? The billy-goat that draws it looks as proud as if he produced the milk himself.”

Another passage from Edward’s Dream is highly interesting and amusing, especially in the context of the present theme “Wittgenstein reads Wilhelm Busch”, namely Edward’s visit to a philosopher’s study. Edward entered the philosopher’s study and was courteously received. Three parrots were swinging on perches. ... The philosopher now took an insignificant looking utensil from his cabinet. It was a blowing-mill. He dusted it and said with importance: “This, my friend, is the thing-in-itself which before me no one has understood.” He pressed a button and the mill began to fan, producing upon Edward a pleasant feeling as if someone was tickling him behind the ears. The philosopher pressed the button a second time and a palatable dinner appeared. He pressed the button a third time and an agreeable odor arose. He pressed the button a fourth time and fine music was heard; a fifth time and fire-work began to play. “Thus,” the polite host explained, “everything that happens between us and the things is nothing but motion, now quicker now slower, now in a medium of ether, now of air which may be thicker or thinner.” “But how is it with thoughts?” Edward asked the master. “It is the same with thoughts,” replied he. “You will see at once.” He put his blowing-mill away and handed Edward a wind-mill. It was small and built after the pattern of those little instruments which are fastened to cherry-trees to keep the sparrows away  – only smaller and with wings of paper. Placing this mill before Edward he said: “Well, my friend, now think

41 VB 1980b, p. 6e. 42 In the German original this passage reads: “Gott, Geist, Goethe”.

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deftly.” Edward began to think and thought as much as he could, and the more sturdily he thought the brisker the paper wings of the mill turned round and they clattered so that even an old experienced sparrow would not have dared to approach. “The more wind the more noise,” said the sage in explanation. ... “Honored sir,” Edward said, “may I ask another little question?” The philosopher nodded kindly. “What do you think of ethics? What must man do so that he may prosper once for all?” Without hesitation the sage opened a drawer, took out a flute, put it to his nose, closed his mouth, and, blowing up his cheeks, began to play as adroitly as a skilled canary-bird, that had received the first prize at the World’s Fair. “Understand me? Are you convinced?” he asked when stopping. “Not quite,” Edward said. Then the philosopher began to sing: “Upon the man who does refuse, Tweedle dee! Our logic, and rejects our views, Tweedle dee! We turn our backs to slink away, And mind not what he think or say, Tweedle dee!” When he had finished his song, he blew the flute again, turning his head complacently now to this side and now to that. At last he stopped abruptly, replaced the flute in the drawer, and turned his back upon Edward. Without taking further notice of his visitor, the philosopher wrapped his gown tightly around him, whereupon, crouching down on the floor, he crowed like an old Cochin-China rooster, and disappeared in the next room. The parrots crowed also. Edward for a moment stood aghast and then left the philosopher’s study in great haste.

The end of Edward’s Dream was also very impressive and important for Wittgenstein. Edward is finishing the story of his dream with these words: The morning was dawning. There were pictures on the walls which were not very faithful portrayals of what they represented. The hand of the clock pointed to half-past six. The room was not yet put in order. An odor of coffee came to me. I went downstairs and opened the door – there was a dimly lighted reception room with red curtains. Upon a little golden throne sat the most beautiful of women, a portrait of my wife, Elise. She smiled, opened her lips, and said: “Edward get up; coffee is ready.” I awoke. My good Elise, with our little Emil in her arms, stood before my bed. I had recovered my heart and that of Elise, and that of our little Emil, too. All jesting aside, my friends, if one only has a heart he will feel and confess from the bottom of his heart that ‘he is no good’. All else will take care of itself.

Wittgenstein often cited and praised to his friends these final two sentences: “All jesting aside, my friends, if one only has a heart he will feel and confess from the bottom of his heart that ‘he is no good’. All else will take care of itself.” On 6 April 1937 Wittgenstein makes an explicit reference to the end auf Edward’s Dream in his diary (MS 183, 233):

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An exegesis of the Christian teaching: Wake up completely! When you do that you recognize that you are no good; ... – But this life is love, human love, of the perfect one. And this love is faith. ‘Everything else works itself out.’⁴³

And in notebook MS 154, 17v (1931), we find the sentence “(Doesn’t he look as proud as though he had produced the milk himself?)” which is an explicit reference to Edward’s visit to the temple of science, namely to: “Do you see that milk-cart? The billy-goat that draws it looks as proud as if he produced the milk himself.” However, Wittgenstein here puts this statement in a very different and very specific context: It might be said (rightly or wrongly) that the Jewish mind does not have the power to produce even the tiniest flower or blade of grass; its way is rather to make a drawing of the flower or blade of grass that has grown in the soil of another’s mind and to put it into a comprehensive picture. We aren’t pointing to a fault when we say this and everything is all right as long as what is being done is quite clear. It is only when the nature of a Jewish work is confused with that of a non-Jewish work that there is any danger, especially when the author of the Jewish work falls into the confusion himself, as he so easily may. (Doesn’t he look as proud as though he had produced the milk himself?) It is typical for a Jewish mind to understand someone else’s work better than he understands it himself.⁴⁴

According to Ralf Schnell “Eduards Traum represented Busch’s ambition ‘to represent the vastness of a whole world in the confined space of short prose and express its inner state appropriately’”.⁴⁵ Busch focuses on human life and on our reflections on human life, on living authentically, on the one hand, and on the tricky role philosophy plays in human life on the other hand. Thus, the narrator in Edward’s Dream comments on thinking and reflecting as follows: Isn’t that the way with all things that we examine closely, that just then when we want to seize them with the most tender astuteness, they withdraw insidiously into the hideout of incomprehensibility, to disappear without a trace, like the enchanted rabbit that the hunter can never hit.⁴⁶

43 “Eine Auslegung der Christlichen Lehre: Wach vollkommen auf! Wenn Du das tust, erkennst Du, daß Du nicht taugst; ...  – Dieses Leben aber ist die Liebe, die menschliche Liebe, zum Vollkommenen. Und diese ist der Glaube. ‘Alles andere findet sich.’” (DB 2003, p. 240 and p. 241) 44 VB 1980b, p. 19e. 45 Translated by Carol Galway (2001, p. 16). (“auf dem engen Raum der Kurzprosa die Weite einer ganzen Welt zur Darstellung zu bringen und deren innerem Zustand angemessenen Ausdruck zu verleihen.”) See Schnell (1988, p. 53). 46 Galway 2001, p. 115. (“Geht’s uns nicht so mit allen Dingen, denen wir gründlich zu Leibe

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Already a decade before Busch had written and published Eduard’s Dream (1891) he had given expression to the inscrutability of the meaning of human life. In a letter of 10 April 1882 Busch wrote to Henriette Eller in a wonderfully ironic and humoristic way about “Aunt Philosophy”: That’s how she happens to be, our Aunt Philosophy, the beautiful owner of the airy mansion on the sand hill of hypothesis. She is always present when we are doing well, organizes the bits and pieces, puts new clothes on old dolls, even talks intelligently about this and that and comforts us affectionately over the awkward Maybes. But if the awkward Truth [Wirklichkeit] breaks out in the house – gone is the aunt; – and we are well served if the door softly opens and in comes – well, Who? – At the coast the Baedeker ends. It sways and creaks, and Night falls as well. Where is the Pole Star?⁴⁷

“At the coast the Baedeker ends.” – This sentence needs a precise and prudent interpretation; that presupposes familiarity with German-speaking culture and literature. Moreover, this sentence points precisely to the centre of Wittgenstein’s philosophical interests. And Wittgenstein, who had known and valued the writings of Busch intensively, was well aware of the meaning of this sentence. There is no explicit evidence, but it is most likely that Wittgenstein has read the letters of Wilhelm Busch.⁴⁸ If so, it is clear that here he saw, or would have seen (and would have appreciated), the connections between this aphorism and the precisely placed quotation  – in a philosophical context  – by Wilhelm Busch. “Baedeker” is the name of a written guide for tourists. The first guide was the journey along the Rhine in Germany from Mainz to Köln. The project, initiated by Karl Baedeker, of producing pocket-sized travel-guides was so successful that the term “Baedeker” soon became a terminus technicus in tourism. These

rücken, daß sie grad dann, wenn wir sie mit dem zärtlichsten Scharfsinn erfassen möchten, sich heimtückisch zurückziehen in den Schlupfwinkel der Unbegreiflichkeit, um spurlos zu verschwinden, wie der bezauberte [verzauberte?] Hase, den der Jäger nie treffen kann.”) 47 “So ist sie nun mal, unsere Tante Philosophie, die schöne Besitzerin der luftigen Villa auf dem Sandhügel der Hypothese. Stets ist sie da, wenn es uns gut geht, bringt das Krimskrams in Ordnung, zieht die alten Puppen neu an, redt gar gescheit über dies und das und tröstet uns lieblich über die peinlichen Vielleichts. Bricht aber die peinliche Wirklichkeit im Haus aus – weg ist die Tante; – und wohl uns, wenn sich leise die Türe auftut und herein tritt – nun, Wer? – An der See hört der Bädeker auf. Das schwankt und knackt, und Nacht wird’s auch. Wo steht der Polarstern?” [Busch 1982, vol. I, p. 228, letter no. 546. Busch 1943, vol. VII, p. 183, letter no. 138] Galway 2001, p. 115. Translated by Carol Galway. Unfortunately the translation does not give the whole text – three sentences – “At the coast ... the Pole Star.” (my translation) – are missing in Galway’s quotation. But these provide informative, interesting, and inspiring information for an understanding of the letter. 48 Busch 1908b; Busch 1934; Busch 1943, vol. VII.

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guide-books became so famous because they gave very precise information and allowed tourists to become independent of local guides. This is why in Jacques Offenbach’s operetta La vie parisienne we find the trenchant sentence: “Kings and governments may err, but never Mr. Baedeker.” Wittgenstein himself wrote an interesting remark on 3 Juny 1941 in MS 124, 93 that also refers to the “Baedeker”, namely: People who are constantly asking ‘why’ are like tourists who stand in front of a building reading Baedeker and are so busy reading the history of its construction, etc., that they are prevented from seeing the building.⁴⁹

IV. The Butterfly Four years after Edward’s Dream, Busch published a second short story with the title The Butterfly (Der Schmetterling). In this text Busch implemented 21 drawings; drawings which are more than just illustrations of the story, but rather open up a further dimension of meaning and are, in that sense, “metaphysical”. A person, Peter, leaves his home, the village of Geckelbeck, in order to hunt and to catch butterflies. During his long journey through the world, he makes different experiences – most of them unpleasant and negative: he loses one of his legs, for example. But at last, Peter returns home to Geckelbeck and settles down. This story has of course also a metaphorical dimension: hunting for things and ideas in human life and leaving things and ideas aside in human life. Unfortunately, we have no complete English translation of The Butterfly. But Walter Arndt prepared a translation of the central portion of the story (about half of it, together with a summary of the rest) for the anthology The Genius of Wilhelm Busch. Comedy of Frustration (1982).⁵⁰ The Butterfly⁵¹ ... My name is Peter. ... When summer came and the world grew dense with foliage and blossom, I made a net and went hunting for butterflies. ...

49 “Die Menschen die immerfort ‘warum’ fragen, sind wie die Touristen, die, im Bädeker [sic!] lesend, vor einem Gebäude stehen & durch das Lesen der Entstehungsgeschichte etc etc gehindert werden, das Gebäude zu sehen.” VB 1980b, p. 40 and p. 40e. I’m very grateful to Daniel Steuer who reminded me of this remark in Wittgenstein’s Nachlaß, which is illuminating especially in the present context. 50 Arndt 1982, p. 190–200. This edition unfortunately does not reproduce the 21 drawings. 51 Arndt 1982, p. 190, p. 197, p. 198–199, p. 199–200.

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In an access of darling I seized the wagging tail in a quick grasp and swung myself right foot forward onto the running board. I might just as soon have jumped on the stovelid of hell’s kitchen when it is busy cooking the banquet for grandmother’s birthday. There was a gale of laughter from Lucinda as if someone was tickling her; a yell on my part as if I were being run onto a spit; a backward somersault; and then I lay full-length on the roadway, in the unfortunate position of a cockchafer which has landed on its back. ... “Is there a risk to my life?” I inquired timidly. “Why not?” retorted the doctor. “But don’t lose heart; should anything go wrong, the world, at a pinch, will get along without you. ... With this he pressed me back into a comfortable easy chair, strapped me down, took hold of the saw without much ado and threw himself into his work. At every cut a short groaning ha! was squeezed from him. First it went gnauch! gnauch! Then it went tseek! tsawk! At last it went bump. There my foot was rid of me. ...

Since no community could seem to see me as a productive fellow citizen – and who could blame them – each hastened to deport me with a minimum of formality into the next, until, by the nature of the case, the last of them very smoothly deposited me onto the familiar territory of the town Geckelbeck, where the future was generously left entirely to my own discretion. The wind was northerly and the snow whirling merrily when in the evening I made my weary entry, on two crutches and one leg, at the paternal farmstead I had left so easily on the legs long ago.

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I first peeped shyly through the window. In the easy chair sat Gottlieb, looking considerably more sedate than formerly; between his knees stood a boy of three or four, for whom he was making a whip. Near the tile stove stood a cradle, and next to it sat Katharina, nursing a chubby infant at her buxom breast. The maid was setting the table. Father was missing. Something had gone wrong with my breathing as I took this in. I almost turned back; but the cruel weather prompted me to enter and ask for a night’s shelter. The unknown stranger’s request was granted without much ado and with the greatest good nature. “Or,” Gottfried asked the boy, “should we chase him out again into wind and weather? What do you think, Peter?” “No, No!” cried the softhearted boy. “Poor man, stay here; eat lots of sausage, make leg grow back!” ... I was urged to stay a few more days. The days turned into weeks, the weeks have become years. Rich experience increased my skill not merely in the restoration of the worn and derelict; I even started creating new things on my own without stint. The fame of my art penetrated into Geckelbeck ... . And so I have kept on living here as a quiet, patient, useful domestic animal. I pay no more attention to butterflies. ...

Wittgenstein was familiar also with this story of Busch’s. On 6 November 1947, he wrote to Georg Henrik von Wright: “Der Schmetterling” I don’t like as much as “Eduards Traum”, but it’s wonderful in parts. Especially the homecoming. You are quite right, I found the book by an extraordinary chance in a shop in Vienna.⁵²

Wittgenstein gave von Wright a copy of Der Schmetterling as a present. And six weeks later, on 22 Dezember 1947, he wrote once more to von Wright about this short story: “Der Schmetterling” is, in part, marvelous e. g. the end when he comes home – “Es war ein lustiges Schneegestöber bei nördlichem Winde ...” [“The wind was northerly and the snow whirling merrily …”].⁵³

Thus, it seems that Wittgenstein, as in the case of Edward’s Dream, appreciated in particular the end of The Butterfly. There is another document, a letter of 24 September 1938 from Wittgenstein’s friend James Taylor to Wittgenstein, which contains further – very interesting – information:

52 Wittgenstein 2004. 53 Wittgenstein 2004. The translation from Arndt is added here.

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I read “Der Schmetterling” twice. The sketches are as good as you said they were. I didn’t like some of the sourness of the face the author pulls, he’s not as hard boiled as he thinks he is, a tougher person wouldn’t have needed to be sour about some things. (After I’ve written the sentence above I see I’ve put it in a way like the way you once put a comment on Kaffka [sic!] to me.) But I liked the book.

This letter shows not only that Wittgenstein appreciated The Butterfly (although not as much as Edward’s Dream), but also that Wittgenstein was familiar with the work of Franz “Kaffka” [sic!].⁵⁴

V. Ut ôler Welt: The Smith and the Parson In the so called Big Typescript TS 213, 640 Wittgenstein illustrates a remark on trigonometry with a reference to “Busch, Volksmärchen”, i.e. to Wilhelm Busch’s collection of fairy tales, sagas, and folksongs with the name Ut ôler Welt.⁵⁵ More precisely, he is referring to the fairy tale The Smith and the Parson (Der Schmied und der Pfaffe)⁵⁶: A schoolboy who had at his disposal the toolbox of elementary trigonometry and was told to verify the equation sin x = x – x3 / 3! .... just wouldn’t find in it what he needs to come to grips with this problem. Not only couldn’t he answer the question – he couldn’t understand it, either. (It would be like the task the prince sets the smith in the fairy tale: to bring him a “hubbub”. Busch, Volksmärchen.) (BT, p. 431e)

For an adequate understanding it is once more necessary to know this fairy tale, collected and written down by Wilhelm Busch. Within Wittgenstein’s Nachlaß this remark has a long transfer history. Originally it was written in 1929 in manuscript MS 105, 30+34; then, in 1930, it was transferred to typescript TS 208, 54+55 and later to typescript TS 209, 74. From TS 208 it was transferred, on 14 May 1932, (in a transformed version) to manuscript MS 113, 113v; and then transferred to typescript TS 211, 690 and typescript TS 212, 1602. At last, in 1933, it ended up in the Big Typescript TS 213, 640.⁵⁷

54 To my knowledge, there is no reliable information available as to which of Kafka’s works Wittgenstein knew. 55 The title is Low German: “From Old Times.” 56 Busch 1910b, p.74–76, No. 29. 57 It is noteworthy that in MS 105, 30+34; TS 208, 54+55; TS 209, 74; MS 113, 113v the original word for “hubbub” is “Klamauk”; but in TS 211, 690; TS 212, 1602; TS 213, 640 the original word

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VI. Wilhelm Busch to Maria Anderson. 70 Letters On 22 January 1949, Wittgenstein sent a letter to Rush Rhees in which he says: The Busch is second hand & nasty, but I thought I was lucky to find it at all. The letters are rather difficult to understand, I imagine, because he uses quaint & odd expressions (but they are wonderful). He has the real philosophical urge.

“He has the real philosophical urge.”– This is Wittgenstein’s résumé on Wilhelm Busch. This statement also allows us to draw a conclusion as to the way Wittgenstein intended philosophy to be. The volume Wittgenstein is referring to is Wilhelm Busch an Maria Anderson. 70 Briefe (Wilhelm Busch to Maria Anderson. 70 Letters) which was published 1908 immediately after Busch’s death. Wittgenstein found and bought a copy 1949 in a bookshop in London. To his sister Margarete Stonborough he wrote in a letter (September 1949): – Shortly before I traveled to America I found in a bookshop in London [the] letters of Busch [to] Mrs. Anderson. I read a little & had the old impression!⁵⁸

It can be shown that Wittgenstein originally became familiar with this publication of letters from Busch in 1925, when he got a copy from his friend Ludwig Hänsel as a present and wrote back to Hänsel: “I read Busch’s letters with great pleasure. A very good present.”⁵⁹ Before Wittgenstein gave a copy of the book as a Christmas present to Rush Rhees, he had borrowed it to Georg Henrik von Wright to whom he wrote on 1 January 1950: The main reason I’m writing is this: I have an idea that last summer, before leaving for America, I gave you a book to read, the letters of Wilhelm Busch to a Frau Marie Anderson. I wanted to lend you the book & to give it as a Christmas present to Rhees. I forgot to ask you about it before I left. Please, if you can, look for it in your room, etc, & if you find it, please send it to Rhees with a note. If you still have some Christmas paper around I’d be grateful if you rapped it in that. I’m sorry to trouble you with it.

for “hubbub” is “Klamank”. “Klamauk” is the right word which exists in German language and means “Lärm” (nois) or “Aufsehen” (fuss). “Klamank” has the mistake that the letter “u” was falsely transcribed as “n”; the word doesn’t exist in German language, but as nonsense it makes also perfect sense in this context. 58 “– Kurz ehe ich nach Amerika fuhr, fand ich in einer Buchhandlung in London [die] Briefe von Busch [an] Frau Anderson. Ich laß ein wenig darin & mit dem alten Eindruck!” (Wittgenstein 2004) 59 My translation. (“Die Buschbriefe lese ich mit viel Vergnügen. Ein sehr gutes Geschenk!”)

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There is unfortunately no English translation of Busch’s letters available so far. However, a knowledge of these letters is indispensable for grasping what Wittgenstein exactly meant when he wrote to his friend, the philosopher Rush Rhees: “He [Busch] has the real philosophical urge.” It is helpful, necessary, joyful and humorous to look at and read in the œuvre of Wilhelm Busch. And it helps us improve our understanding of Wittgenstein’s philosophy; or rather: our understanding of Wittgenstein’s way of doing philosophy, his conception of the world, his “Weltanschauung”, and his own “real philosophical urge”.

VII. Self-Critique / Finche & Frog Let me finish with two further examples from the œuvre of Wilhelm Busch, which Ludwig Wittgenstein of course had known, namely: Self-Critique and Finche & Frog. Self-Critique⁶⁰ Much may be said for self-critique Say I point out where I am weak, And right away I earn the credit For modesty at having said it. Next, people note what is so true: This man is honest through and through. Thirdly, I snatch a tasty morsel From critics by my first endorsal. Fourth, I may hope the accusation Will spur a welcome refutation. The final verdict: all in all, There’s nothing wrong with me at all.

60 Arndt 1982, p. 189.

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Finch & Frog⁶¹ The finch trills in the apple tree His: Tiriliree! A frog climbs slowly up to him, Up to the treetop’s leafy rim And puffs right up and croaks: “Hallooo, Ol’ chum: see, I c’n do it too!” And as the bird his song of spring So sweetly to the world doth sing, The frog chimes in with sassy tones And interjects his bassy drones. The finch exclaims: “O Joy, hurray! I’ll fly away!” And springs into the azure sky.

“Hah!” cries the frog, “Well so kin I!” He makes a most ungainly bound And splats onto the bare hard ground. He’s pancake flat, and that’s no joke: He’s croaked his very final croak.

If someone climbs laboriously Into the branches of a tree And thinks himself a bird to be: Wrong is he.

61 Tanslated by Dave Fogg. See http://www.rivertext.com/frog.html (1991). Finch & Fog is also in Busch’s Hernach, but only the three drawings together with the last four lines of the text. See also Arndt 1982, p. 183–185.

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Bibliography Ambrose, Alice (Ed.) (1982): Wittgenstein’s Cambridge Lectures 1932–1935. From the Notes of Alice Ambrose and Margaret Macdonald. Oxford: Blackwell. Arndt, Walter (Ed.) (1982): The Genius of Wilhelm Busch. Comedy of Frustration. An English Anthology. Edited and translated by Walter Arndt. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. Biesenbach, Hans (2011): Anspielungen und Zitate im Werk Ludwig Wittgensteins. Bergen: Wittgenstein Archives. Busch, Wilhelm (1922): Eduards Traum. Munich: Fr. Bassermann. [Also available on: http:// sammelpunkt.philo.at:8080/431/1/23-2-94.TXT, accessed 23 September 2011.] Busch, Wilhelm (1909): Edward’s Dream. The Philosophy of a Humorist. Translated and edited by Paul Carus. Chicago: Open Court. Busch, Wilhelm (1908a): Hernach. Munich: Lothar Joachim. Busch, Wilhelm (1908b): Wilhelm Busch an Maria Anderson. 70 Briefe. Rostock: J. Volckmann Nachf. [Also available on: http://sammelpunkt.philo.at:8080/432/1/24-2-94.TXT, accessed 23 September 2011.] Busch, Wilhelm (1910a): Ut ôler Welt. Volksmärchen, Sagen, Volkslieder und Reime. Collected by Wilhelm Busch. Munich: Lothar Joachim. Busch, Wilhelm (1910b): “Der Schmied und der Pfaffe”. In: Busch (1910a), p. 74–76. [Also available on: http://sammelpunkt.philo.at:8080/430/1/22-2-94.TXT, accessed 23 September 2011.] Busch, Wilhelm (1935): Ist mir mein Leben geträumt? Briefe eines Einsiedlers. Collected and edited by Otto Nöldeke. Leipzig: Gustav Weise. Busch, Wilhelm (1943): Sämtliche Werke. Volume I–VIII. Munich: Braun & Schneider. Busch, Wilhelm (1962): Max and Moritz. With many more mischief makers more or less human or approximately animal. From the pen of Wilhelm Busch. Edited and annotated by H. Arthur Klein. New York: Dover. Busch, Wilhelm (1982): Sämtliche Briefe. Kommentierte Ausgabe in zwei Bänden. Hannover: Schlütersche Verlagsanstalt. Busch, Wilhelm (2002): Gesammelte Werke. Berlin: Directmedia. Digitale Bibliothek, volume 74 (CD-ROM). Carus, Paul (1909): “A German Humorist.” In: Wilhelm Busch: Edward’s Dream. The Philosophy of a Humorist. Translated and edited by Paul Carus. Chicago: Open Court, p. 5–19. Engelmann, Paul (2006): “W. Busch / Zu Wilhelm Busch / ‘Zu guter Letzt’ W. Busch als Zeichner”. In: Ilse Somavilla (Ed.): Wittgenstein – Engelmann. Briefe, Begegnungen, Erinnerungen. Innsbruck: Haymon, p. 160–163. Galway, Carol (2001): Wilhelm Busch – Cryptic Enigma. Ontario: University of Waterloo. Hänsel, Ludwig (1994): “Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)”. In: Ilse Somavolla/Anton Unterkircher/Christian Paul Berger (Eds): Ludwig Wittgenstein – Ludwig Hänsel. Eine Freundschaft. Briefe, Aufsätze, Kommentare. Innsbruck: Haymon, p. 242–247. Klein, H. Arthur (1962): “Afterword.” In: Busch (1962), p. 205–216. Lotze, Dieter P. (1979): Wilhelm Busch. Boston: Twayne. Morris, Angelika (1981): Manifestations of Wilhelm Busch’s Aesthetics in “Eduards Traum”. Ottawa: University of Ottawa. Nedo, Michael (Ed.) (2012): Ludwig Wittgenstein. Ein biographisches Album. Munich: C. H. Beck.

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Rothhaupt, Josef G. F. (1994): “Vorbemerkungen zu den Texten von Wilhelm Busch”. In: Wittgenstein Studies 2, file 21-2-94. [Also available on: http://sammelpunkt.philo. at:8080/429/1/21-2-94.TXT, accessed 23 September 2011.] Rothhaupt, Josef G. F. (2010): “Ludwig Wittgenstein über Wilhelm Busch – ‘He has the REAL philosophical urge.’” In: Volker Munz/Klaus Puhl/Joseph Wang (Eds): Lanuage and World. Part Two: Signs, Minds and Actions. Proceedings of the 32nd International Ludwig Wittgenstein-Symposium in Kirchberg, 2009. Frankfurt/M.: Ontos, p. 297–315. Schnell, Ralf (1988): “Kulturpessimismus und Ironie. Wilhelm Buschs Erzählung ‘Eduards Traum’”. In: Michael Vogt (Ed.): Die boshafte Heiterkeit des Wilhelm Busch. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, p. 50–78. Schulte, Joachim (2007): “Ways of Reading Wittgenstein: Observations on Certain Uses of the Word ‘Metaphysics’.” In: Guy Kahane/Edward Kanterian/Oskari Kuusela (Eds): Wittgenstein and His Interpreters. Essays in Memory of Gordon Baker. Oxford: Blackwell, p. 145–168. Somavilla, Ilse (Ed.) (2006): Wittgenstein – Engelmann. Briefe, Begegnungen, Erinnerungen. Innsbruck: Haymon. Somavilla, Ilse (Ed.) (2012): Begegnungen mit Wittgenstein. Ludwig Hänsels Tagebücher 1918/1919 und 1921/1922. Innsbruck: Haymon. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (2000): Wittgenstein’s Nachlaß. The Bergen Electronic Edition, Oxford: OUP. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (2004): Gesamtbriefwechsel / Complete Correspondence, Charlottesville: Intelex (CD-ROM).

Brian McGuinness

Wittgenstein and Dostoevsky Meeting Wittgenstein after the war Russell was amazed by his conversion to mysticism and passion for the writings of Dostoevsky, evidence enough that this author had not played much part in their discussions before the war, though these often touched on books that inspired either of them. Many reasons combine to make it natural that Wittgenstein came to know Dostoevsky’s works in these years. A translation of all of them, many for the first time, or for the first time unabbreviated, was being completed (1906–1920) by E. K. Rahsin (Elisabeth Kaerrick) much at the same time and with the same enthusiasm as Constance Garnett was at work in England (1910–1920). The approach and arrival of a war precisely with Russia made the sombre themes and seriousness of these works noticed in the few circles in or near Austria-Hungary that Wittgenstein could respect. Thus in 1914 in Der Brenner (a journal he read) there were extracts from Dostoevsky’s journals (the essay on suicide and the moving letters to his brother) alongside an article by Hermann Oberhummer (1914) claiming that Dostoevsky had introduced a new mysticism that went into and issued from the depths of the human soul, even, or above all, of a criminal. His was a mysticism beyond good and evil but with an outcome totally opposed to that of Nietzsche. Karl Kraus too spoke frequently of Dostoevsky in Die Fackel, always with awe, placing him alongside his idols such as Tolstoy, Ibsen, and, above all, Kierkegaard, to whom we shall return. Kraus gave free publicity to the Piper edition, already mentioned, and, a characteristic choice, reprinted Dostoevsky’s self-defence against the charge of hostility to Jews. It was just at this time (1916) that we have the first mention in a letter of the degree of interest in Dostoevsky in the Wittgenstein family. Reading was a serious matter in that family and a shared matter. They would gather to read a classical German play or Shakespeare, dividing the parts. Or one would read to the others, or to another, Homer or, now, Dostoevsky. And what they were now reading, with reminiscence of what they had read together, would be the theme of letters. Thus his sister Hermine writes to Ludwig at the Front: When are the two of us going to be able to talk through the night again?! Much though I’d like to read The Brothers Karamazov, partly I really haven’t the time and partly I can’t read it the way you do, because you read with the soul, while my reading is more aesthetic and focussed on truth to life.¹

1 “Wann werden wir zwei wieder bis zum Morgen reden?! So gerne möchte ich die Brüder Karamasoff lesen, aber teils habe ich wirklich keine Zeit, teils kann ich es nicht so lesen

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Mit der Seele lesen – to read it in the right spirit – was essential. Twenty years later Francis Skinner writes: I have been reading a few sentences most days from the Brothers Karamazov, the Notes on the life of Father Zosima, in Russian. It does me good, particularly to read it in Russian. Since seeing Drury, I have felt I can read it in the right spirit. (Francis Skinner to L. W. 27.4 1937)

It was a shared spiritual experience, that, no doubt, is why it helped to have met Drury. For Drury too had read Dostoevsky and this book in particular, guided by Wittgenstein. Indeed a number of friends, disciples in some cases, speak of Dostoevsky in their letters, so Max Bieler (a wartime comrade), Koder, Ramsey. With Engelmann and Hänsel this was of course common territory. In his first posting as a schoolmaster Wittgenstein read Raskolnikoff (Crime and Punishment) to Koder and The Brothers Karamazov (hereafter BK) to the village priest. What then was the right spirit for reading Dostoevsky? It implied reliving the lives of the characters and enacting what they went through, dwelling on the more surprising utterances of the Elder Zosima and the cries of despair mingled with elation of Ivan or Raskolnikoff. The thoughts of totally different characters are taken (not altogether unjustly) as expressing lessons or admonitions that Dostoevsky is addressing to the reader. These are easier to accept from Dostoevsky because he and his characters present themselves as sinners. With Kierkegaard, der Reine (the pure in heart), it is otherwise: he makes an actual incision, where Dostoevsky only prods.² These novels met Wittgenstein’s need alles tragisch zu nehmen (to take a tragic view of everything), which his sister saw in him (H. W. to L. W.). Not that they were his preferred reading throughout his life. By temperament, he said, he wanted a fairy-tale, a happy ending, as in most of his films or detective stories. In a tragic film he wanted to comfort the hero: not to accept the tragedy as such.³ But

wie Du, denn Du liesest mit der Seele u ich mehr ästhetisch u. auf Lebenswahrheit hin.” (Hermine Wittgenstein to L. W. 20.7.1916.) References to The Brothers Karamazov are frequent in her letters. Two wartime letters also discuss Memoirs from the House of the Dead. Tolstoy, Kierkegaard and Ibsen are other authors touched on. All letters to and from Wittgenstein are quoted from or can be seen online in Pastmasters, InteLex, Wittgenstein Gesamtbriefwechsel. 2 “Der eine druckt noch, während der andere schon schneidet.” Coded entry for 24 February 1937 in the highly confessional Norwegian Notebook (MS 183, p. 204/Wittgenstein 2003, p. 212–213). 3 Uncoded entry for 6 May 1931 in the Norwegian Notebook (MS 183, p. 89/Wittgenstein 2003, p. 96–97).

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he knew he couldn’t read only detective stories and the special similarities to his own situation and unhappiness in Dostoevsky moved him particularly. Indeed it is impossible not to be reminded of Wittgenstein when reading Freud’s well-known analysis of Dostoevsky⁴: a man of the greatest need and capacity for love possessed by destructive tendencies directed chiefly (but not only) against himself, full of feelings of guilt, writing about great sinners and presenting himself as one of them, given to attacks of illness, constantly speculating on the possibility of an early death, his greatest wish to die in an inspired moment, such as, in Dostoevsky’s case, often preceded his epileptic attacks (now thought to have been of neurotic origin). Again and again in his life Wittgenstein echoes lines or situations in this author so important for him, and his family or close friends reply in the same spirit. His first reaction to the life among common soldiers that he had chosen was the confession that he failed to see the human being in them (den Menschen im Menschen)⁵, the first aim of Dostoevsky. Remember how both the Elder Zosima and the impassioned Dmitri are deterred in a headlong course when they realize that the servants they have struck are fellow men. Of course for Dostoevsky it turned out that this could only be maintained by seeing the divine in the other. Some of Wittgenstein’s most desperate prayers in the war come near this thought. (“I am a worm but through God I’ll become a man”⁶) and Engelmann tells us: And often he quoted, full of enthusiasm, the words spoken by the convicted officer and libertine Dmitri Karamazov in full awareness of his guilt: ‘Hail to the Highest – also within me!’ (Engelmann 1967, p. 80)⁷

Wittgenstein’s enthusiasm was for the acknowledgement of sin, the only route to self-knowledge, as we shall see again. As often, he is developing Dostoevsky’s thought in a direction of his own. Sometimes it is doubtful whether the thought expressed really is Dostoevsky’s. In the credo that Wittgenstein confided to his Notebooks in July 1916, he wrote, speaking of what happens when life acquires a meaning (and the world becomes wholly different):

4 Freud (1929), Freud (1962). Even those who point to Freud’s limited biographical knowledge and a certain lack of scruple in enhancing it admit the value of his insights. See e.g. Joseph Frank: “Freud’s article contains some shrewd and penetrating remarks about Dostoevsky’s masochistic and guilt-ridden personality” (1979, p. 12). 5 Wartime Coded Diary 21.8.1914, MS 101 7r. 6 Wartime Coded Diary 4.5.1916, MS 103 9v. 7 BK III iii, spoken actually before the crime of which Dmitry was, unjustly, convicted, but the violence of his character was known from the start.

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And to this extent perhaps Dostoevsky is right too, when he says that a man who is happy is fulfilling the purpose of existence. (TB 1961, 6.VII.16)

Such a man is (or would be) content. Life is no longer problematic for him because he is already living in eternity not in time. The reference seems to be to a saying of the Grand Inquisitor: The secret of human life doesn’t reside in mere existence but in the purpose of life. Without a fixed idea what he should live for, man will never consent to live. (BK V v)

We might say, though, that Wittgenstein is making the opposite point: a man does not need a fixed goal to be happy but only (though it is no easy task) to be in agreement with the world, the given. To be sure it is the Grand Inquisitor that Wittgenstein dissents from: perhaps he believed that the general drift of Dostoevsky’s thought (what Ivan was meant to show) went in the direction he himself indicates. But the implication of the 1916 remarks excerpted above, that a man must not look for anything beyond the present life, cannot be reconciled with Dostoevsky’s belief in the immortality of the soul, made explicit in the essay on suicide already mentioned. A key to Wittgenstein’s attitude to Dostoevsky must surely lie in his shyness, coyness almost, where religion or the supernatural were concerned. He wanted the doctrines or the application to life without the dogma. Engelmann would ask whether his friend had (or still had) faith. Perhaps he had had it at Olmütz (in 1916) – and we may say from his wartime notebooks he surely had it in his first Tolstoyan days in Galicia. But did he still have faith? He was to struggle with this Gretchenfrage, this existential question, throughout his life. His chief opponent was Kierkegaard, with whom he wrestled like some Jacob, but Dostoevsky might be seen as a sort of sparring partner. The advantage was that Dostoevsky in the novels was bound to show his principles or principals at grips with real life; and that concreteness was what Wittgenstein required. He wanted a religion or a way of life that could be lived without extraneous equipment.⁸ Tolstoy’s Gospel had saved his life, like the Bible pressed into Dostoevsky’s hands on his way to prison. But Tolstoy deliberately did not rely on or even allow for the divinity of Christ, the idea of an afterlife, or the working of miracles. It was a period when the very historicity of Jesus was questioned and Wittgenstein allowed himself the speculation

8 Read an almost jansenist letter written to Smythies (one of his closest friends) when the latter converted to Catholicism. (Letter of 7.4.1944/McGuinness 2012, p. 363)

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that the power of the New Testament would remain even if all that is related in it were demonstrably false from an historical point of view (cf. VB 1998, p. 37–38). This attitude affected what he welcomed in Dostoevsky. Alyosha understands the Miracle of the Wedding Feast at Cana “in the right spirit” (Wittgenstein uses these words)⁹ because he sees it as a symbol, a gesture showing God’s wish to bring joy (Freude) to men. Alyosha hears the account of it read out while the Elder lies in state and then, in a dream, is told by the Elder to go out into the world (not the monastery!) to carry thither that joy: which he immediately does, not without a mystical experience akin to Wittgenstein’s wonder at the existence of the world.¹⁰ As in the gospel, so in Dostoevsky’s narrative, several supernatural elements are necessary for the message to be given. Wittgenstein holds himself aloof from these: enough to say, like the defenders of improbable saints’ lives, non sine fructu narrantur – their telling may bear good fruit. He doesn’t say yes or no to miracles, but only that if we are to see them as Dostoevsky does, then we must see that the whole point of them is their symbolic value.¹¹ He distances himself again, but note that it is not the reader he is cheating – this is a private diary, a casting of accounts with himself, in which we find him fleeing his own shadow. There is an implicit quotation of Dostoevsky in a well-known passage, where Wittgenstein sums up the conclusions to be drawn from the reflections on the meaning of life that he began in June 1916. On 17 January 1917 he wrote: “If suicide is allowed, then everything is allowed” (TB 1961, p. 91e). He must be alluding to a recurrent theme in BK, often quoted in the form “If God does not exist, everything is permitted”. This is actually used against an unbeliever by Dmitry awaiting trial (BK XI iv) but he has heard it discussed in the audience with the Elder (BK II vi) and attributed to Ivan, only in the equivalent form: “Without immortality, everything is permitted.” Suicide, Wittgenstein’s example, is only the most striking instance of what would then be admissible. Which way Ivan means (or Dostoevsky means Ivan to mean) his various discourses to be taken is notoriously left unclear but Wittgenstein out of this complex of themes – death, freedom, and immortality  – drew, characteristically, the most spiritually taxing conclusion,

9 Norwegian Notebook MS 183 p. 84. Movements of Thought, p. 92–93. (“Ich muß das ganze schon in dem richtigen Geiste lesen, um das Wunder darin zu empfinden.”) 10 See (LE 1965). 11 This is how he introduces the subject in the Norwegian Notebook: (Wittgenstein 2003, p. 90–91). (“Wenn man Wunder Christi etwa das Wunder auf der Hochzeit zu Kana so verstehn will wie Dostojewski es getan hat, dann muß man sie als Symbole auffassen.”)

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that he must live always with a thought to the Last Judgement, without the consolations of religion.¹² The closest link with Dostoevsky, and with characters created or (as the author often insists) depicted by Dostoevsky, was in their sense of guilt and need for confession. It is as if the highest could only be achieved by passing through the depths. This was the experience of Dmitry and the reason why the Elder, foreseeing the younger man’s fate (haud vatum ignarus), bowed down before him. We realize only later why. The clearest case of this descent into the depths, and the one Wittgenstein dwelt on immediately after the war, was that of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. Wittgenstein himself faced a new life, which he could only do by acknowledgement of his own worthlessness.¹³ When he said “Eine Beichte muß ein Teil des neuen Lebens sein”¹⁴ he did not mean the banality that a confession was worth something only if it led to a new life, but that if there is to be a new life this can only be in the light of the self-knowledge and self-humiliation of the sinner. The confession in a sense mattered more than, gave sense to, the subsequent life.¹⁵ And Wittgenstein’s confessions were fierce indeed, parcelled out usually between various people to whom he had in different ways lied (as he saw it) or given too high an idea of himself. “Now I’ve made one confession”, he wrote in November 1936, “it’s as if I can’t any longer keep the whole edifice of lies standing, as if it’s got to undergo a total collapse. If only that had already happened! So that there would be grass and the rubble for the sun to shine on” (Wittgenstein 2003, p. 151).¹⁶ He is as exigent with himself as Sonia with Raskolnikov. Needless to say, his confessions, when directed to real friends could be counter-effective: some thought better of him or professed to like him more. Of course, Wittgenstein did not learn the tragic view of life from Dostoevsky, but that view was fed by his reading, which also gave him figures of reference

12 “‘When we meet again at the last judgement’ was a recurrent phrase with him. … He would pronounce the words with an indescribably inward-gazing look in his eyes, his head bowed, the picture of a man stirred to his depths.” (Engelmann 1967, p. 77–78.) 13 I tried to convey Wittgenstein’s state of soul at this period in my Young Ludwig (2005, p. 291–295), henceforth quoted as YL. 14 In a pocket size memo-book (MS 154 1r) probably of 1931. It is the opening remark, almost a motto. We might translate, “The new life must have a confession as part of it.” 15 St Augustine’s Confessions glorify God precisely by being an account of his sins and resurrection. Bekenntnis, a word sometimes used by Wittgenstein, perhaps catches both senses. 16 Dr Daniel Steuer points out to me the parallel with PI, §118, where Luftgebäude – houses of cards or perhaps Potemkin houses – are destroyed to free the ground on which we stand. The parallel is the more striking in that both passages first occur in the same 1936 notebook and illustrate Wittgenstein’s tendency to see in the same terms his problems in life and in philosophy. (On this parallel see also YL.)

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to measure himself and others against. He saw his privileged family  – like the Karamazovy, though he does not explicitly draw the parallel – as subject to “a terrible illness in the attempt to escape from which contrasting tendencies can easily make their appearance. Paul and I, for example.”¹⁷ His sister Hermine likened him to Alyosha, as did Ludwig von Ficker, and certainly he went about from one tormented or confused member of his family or circle to another, observing and warning. But there was also something of Ivan in him, as we have seen. He himself at one point cried out, “I am Smerdyakov, I am Dr Mabuse!”. What he meant we can hardly know, but it may be that he thought his failure to play a more determinant role with family and friends and lovers led to disaster. He seems to have held something like this against his mother. (In the parallel world, however, Ivan is the passive one.) But the chief point is that he wanted to identify with the worst of sinners. Thus in another context he speculated that it would have been a greater achievement if the Elder had managed to save Smerdyakov.¹⁸ There must be no depths down to which the redeemer will not descend: Judas too could be saved. The unwillingness to permit ultimate perseverance in sin is akin to unwillingness to accept the tragic as such, noted above as a defect that Wittgenstein found in himself and called soft-heartedness (Schwächlichkeit). It is important for Dostoevsky that the possibility for man of diabolic or Iago-like evil be admitted, to which suicide would seem to be the correlate.¹⁹ There are occasions when Wittgenstein notes particular moral or psychological aperçus as owed to or suggested by Dostoevsky, sometimes this note vanishes (almost on principle) from the version intended for publication. Of course other debts to this author may have gone unsignalled and undetected. He uses the narrative of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy to show how we can be told what a man’s intentions were without hearing the words “He had such and such an intention”. It is the action of the novel that shows this to be so – we may even

17 “Wenn in einem Haushalt alles in Ordnung ist, so sitzen die Familienmitglieder alle zugleich beim Frühstück, haben ähnliche Gepflogenheiten etc. Herrscht aber eine furchtbare Krankheit im Haus, dann denkt jeder auf einem andern Ausweg um Hilfe zu schaffen und es zeigen sich leicht ganz entgegengesetzte Bestrebungen. Paul und ich.” From MS 157a f.25v, written between 1934 and 1937. The remark is particularly appropriate when one thinks of the suicides of his other brothers. The remark is also reminiscent of the opening of Anna Karenina. (Tolstoy too was a model in Wittgenstein’s family, where the nephews and nieces of the 1930s generation were called Pierre, Andreas, Anna and Katherine.) 18 Reported by Drury (1984, p.108). 19 By a refinement of evil the suicide of Smerdyakov also calculated, since it serves to prevent Ivan’s story, which would have exonerated Dmitry, from being tested.

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say, that constitutes its being so.²⁰ At any rate the story of the novelist is complete without the explanatory vocabulary of the philosopher or amateur psychologist. On another occasion he thinks of Dostoevsky when pointing out how imprecise is the idea that the physical effects of terror (Angst) are themselves frightful. They may even serve to alleviate the terror. The parallel, most probably, is the unconsolable mother, whom the Elder finally tells that her tears will be good tears.²¹ Many of the references to Dostoevsky in Wittgenstein’s musings have more relevance to his examination of conscience than to his philosophy. Thus two of them concern the effects of humiliation. Once he seems to have in mind Dmitry’s shame at being made to undress when arrested (BK IX vi). Another time he quotes Dostoevsky (actually Alyosha addressing Kolya) as saying that the devil nowadays has taken on the form of fear of ridicule (BK X vi). Both times Wittgenstein notes that this is, indeed, his own greatest fear.²² That it was his greatest fear is a manner of speaking. It was a fear he was much ashamed of. But he dreaded more a dissolution of his whole personality, such as might come with the loss of loved ones. When he sees that he will lose Marguerite, he foresees a tragedy but wonders whether he is really enough of a hero (the tragic hero being one for or in whom the bough does not bend but breaks). It has been well said that life is a series of partings – and Wittgenstein’s was marked by the deaths of his closest friends – David, Frank, Francis – which prostrated him. True, he thought death should be welcomed but only for the one who died. He felt that the better part of his life, the good spirit in him, had been taken from him. And if it weren’t for the memory of their simplicity and goodness (echoes here of Alyosha’s speech at the stone)²³, “[t]he devil might have the rest!”²⁴ The phrase was not lightly used, for he had much to fear in his bösen

20 MS 129, 136, TS 228, 83 (1944–1945). See (Z 1981, §499). 21 TS 233b 26 (1.1.1946), reference to Dostoevsky added in MS to this TS slip only. Cf (Z 1981, §499). In BK II vi, to be sure, the narrator at first speaks of “keening that soothes only by lacerating the heart still more” [(thus keeping the wound open)] and the Elder tells her that she should go on weeping, but the weeping will at the end be turned into quiet joy. Book II of BK is the source of many of Wittgenstein’s allusions. 22 MS 143, 27 from 1936 (from Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough) and MS 183, 114, the confessional diary. (Wittgenstein 2003 p. 122–123). 23 BK Epilogue iii. 24 “Täglich denke ich an Pinsent. Er hat mein halbes Leben mit sich genommen. Die andere Hälfte wird der Teufel holen.” (Letter to Russell 6.8.1920) For echoes of Alyosha see Goodstein’s letter of 20.10.1941: “What Francis’ family perhaps don’t realise is that his chief work was his life and now that we have lost him the most precious thing that is left is the memory of that life, not something that can be dressed in words for a philosophical article. You say that they don’t seem to realise what it is they have lost, but perhaps it is that they lost him already years ago.”

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Geistern – his evil spirit or spirits – which led him to outbursts that he should have controlled.²⁵ They were the counterpart, of course, of the Tolstoyan spirit (der Geist) that he prayed to have with him in battle in the war.²⁶ The besy or devils of Dostoevsky, despite a similarity of sound, are not an exact parallel. These literally bedevilled a whole generation, so Dostoevsky thought. The real parallel to them in the thirties was the infection associated with Communism, which led four Cambridge men, all known to Wittgenstein, honourably to their deaths in the Spanish Civil War and at least four, who perhaps eschewed the concept ‘honour’, to espionage. Wittgenstein’s friends Dobb, Sraffa, Alister, Watson came under suspicion. Wittgenstein was politically in sympathy with the Party line and as late as 1940 supported the Students’ Convention (an anti-war movement of Party inspiration). Of his interest in the Soviet Union we will speak later. But we have no evidence that he saw what Dostoevsky foresaw. The Possessed did not seem to speak to him. For Wittgenstein’s activity was not on the political but on the human level: this itself, would count as idealism for Party officials. He acquired in succession more and more young friends, who were in effect disciples. His advice was often to take up some manual or charitable work, at any rate not to think of teaching or academic life. It was a pattern applied to his own nephews and protégés of the family – Arvid and Marguerite for example – not with much success but with a felt effect on their lives. Of the Cambridge men – I think of Lee, Drury, Skinner himself, Rhees, Hutt and Smythies – some resisted from the start, others reverted to type later, some almost went under. But all of these, and students with whom he had more fleeting contact, realized that they had been exposed to an ethical demand of authenticity, like that which Alyosha expounds to Kolya.²⁷ Kolya learns by precept but also by example (Alyosha too blushes) not to be ashamed of being ridiculous. In a similar scene, a pupil, coming to see whether he was suitable for admission to Wittgenstein’s classes would end up with the professor in tears over his own sins. Alyosha urges Kolya, whatever it costs, to continue in his determination not to be like the others. He foresaw (here seeing ahead like the Elder) that this would mean being very unhappy in life but “[O]n the whole you will bless life all the same” – Alyosha’s words came true for Wittgenstein and were in fact the last ones he uttered: “Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life!”

25 Letter to Hermine W. 20.10.1908. 26 Coded diary 7.10.1914 and passim. Cf. later “the struggle of the good against the bad within me.” ([der] Kampf des Guten mit dem Schlechten in mir) MS 183 192 21.2.1937 (Wittgenstein 2003, p. 200–201). 27 BK X vi.

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Allusions and parallels to the moral, religious, and psychological themes in Dostoevsky’s works abound in what is reported of Wittgenstein’s life and in his letters and works. In the last of these there has even been noted a similarity in form to Dostoevsky, with interesting implications for the content. This is the polyphonic character of the narrative in one case and of the argument in the other. This property was first identified by Vyatcheslav Ivanov²⁸ and was largely developed by Mikhail Bakhtin (1984). It led Ivanov to see the novels as tragedies and to note their symphonic character. They are essentially dialogic in that each character is independent and develops his own position. We are not in the hands of an omnipotent monologic author. The recitals of the characters have also the quality that they too take us by the throat (as Wittgenstein seemed to do in real life)²⁹ because, like Dostoevsky himself, they need to affirm someone else’s “I” not as an object but as another subject – this is the principle governing Dostoevky’s world-view. To affirm someone else’ s “I” –“thou art” – is a task that, according to Ivanov, Dostoevsky’s characters must successfully accomplish if they are to … transform the other person from a shadow into an authentic reality.³⁰

Even in a soliloquy (how many there are in Dostoevsky!) the same will apply A dialogic relationship to one’s own self defines the genre of the soliloquy. It is a discussion with oneself. … At the heart of this genre lies the discovery of the inner man – “one’s own self,” accessible not to passive self-observation, but only through an active dialogic approach to one’s own self, destroying the naïve wholeness of one’s notions about the self.³¹

A question much discussed is how close this is to the procedure of Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigation, with which there are many other points of resemblance in the thought of Bakhtin and students of his work. The dialogic character of that text is clear enough, so are the implications that language is to be understood not as a system (the system of the Tractatus) but as an activity of communication. But Wittgenstein could have come to these points of view on his own,

28 Freedom and the Tragic Life, Oxford, 1952 (translation of the author’s German collection (1932) of articles published in Russian before 1924). It is available also in French (2000) and Russian (1997). 29 So Iris Murdoch described to me her impression of meeting him. 30 Frank (1986), quoting both Bakhtin and Ivanov. 31 M. Bakhtin (1984, p. 120). Mr Manu Shetty drew my attention to this passage, which he uses in his unpublished doctoral dissertation. Dr Daniel Steuer has pointed out the Wittgenstein parallel: “Almost the whole time I am writing conversations with myself. Things I say to myself tête-à-tête.” (VB 1998, p. 88e)

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assisted and encouraged by Dostoevsky, as he was in his reflections on man and God. He may even, consciously or unconsciously, have reproduced some of the style of this author. But need he have read Ivanov or Bakhtin? In fact, however, we know that, if he did not read them, he did at least enjoy a friendship and intense intellectual interchange (conducted in Russian) with Nicholas Bachtin, the brother of Mikhail and a great admirer of Ivanov, whom he cites repeatedly in his lecture notes.³² Nicholas can hardly have been regularly in touch with his brother³³ but is said to have found a copy of the book on Dostoevsky (the Russian original) in a Paris bookshop in 1931. The extreme hypothesis that Wittgenstein’s Wende (his retreat from dogmatism) was owed to these Russian thinkers and that he went to Russia more than once, in order to see Bakhtin is defended with spirit by Fedajewa but, in my opinion, belongs to possible world studies.³⁴ There can only have been one visit to Russia and a visit to Bakhtin is not compatible with what we know of that, unless it was elaborately and pointlessly concealed, as Wittgenstein’s other contacts were not.³⁵ The Wende is attributed by Wittgenstein himself to other influences, in fact to Sraffa and Spengler (twice indicated as decisive influences and both times coupled)³⁶ and anyway dates from before his intimacy with Nicholas Bachtin. It is clearly expressed in a letter to Schlick of 20.11.1931 where he explains that he has abandoned the view of the Tractatus and now seeks an übersichtliche Darstellung (perhaps “a comprehensive overview”) of the grammatical use of words, so that everything dogmatic that he has said about “objects”, “elementary propositions” etc. collapses. To understand the word “object” one must look at how it is actually used. Wittgenstein probably met Nicholas (as he had best be called here) at one of the breakfasts that Raymond Priestley gave for graduate students arrived

32 Consulted by the present writer in Birmingham University Library, Box 5 of the Bachtin Deposit. 33 Mikhail was deep in the provinces, but in any case Nicholas, with his background as a White Russsian officer, would have been too dangerous a contact, even though he had come round to a Stalinist position. But see Tihanov (2002). 34 Cf. Fedajewa (2000). It contains many interesting facts and reports a wealth of Russian discussion of these matters. 35 Bakhtin is not among the contacts listed in Wittgenstein’s pocket diary, now absorbed into the Wittgenstein Archive, present seat uncertain. A curiosity is that someone wrote Vygotsky’s name in Russsian characters in this diary, presumably recommending the psychologist’s work (he had died in the previous year). 36 MSS 154 16r (1931?) and 157b 5r-v (1937). The former (=VB 1998, p.16) lists these two as the most recent of the great influences recognized. The latter note explains how their ideas struck at the roots of Wittgenstein’s former philosophy. See my (2008).

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from abroad, perhaps in 1932, but it looks as if the friendship ripened only in 1935.³⁷ Late in 1933 or in 1934 Wittgenstein (whose fellowship was to expire at the end of 1935, and who was beginning to feel discontent with his work) began to prepare for a new phase in his life, nothing less than a move to the Soviet Union with his friend Skinner. For this purpose the two took up the study of Russian with Fania Pascal, a friend of Nicholas.³⁸ Wittgenstein was well acquainted also with George and Katharine Thomson³⁹, who together with Roy Pascal, formed a decidedly left-wing group⁴⁰, which reconstituted itself later in Birmingham, where Thomson taught Greek, Pascal German, and Nicholas Modern Greek (later Linguistics). Wittgenstein often visited them there as, earlier, in Cambridge. They were glad to leave for the spiritually healthier atmosphere of a town based on manual work, though it might be thought that they took much of Cambridge with them. Katharine conducted a people’s choir and was active in the performance of Mozart in English and of his masonic music, for that too had its origin in manual work. George insisted that students of Ancient Greek should learn the language of the people of the present day, agreeing with Nicholas that only a living community could make it possible to understand a language. George himself had devoted several years of his life (and had considered devoting all of it) to the attempt to restore an Irish-speaking community, which would have some of the qualities of the pre-industrial community that he had joined (at its last gasp) in the Blasket Islands. Now, with considerable but, some thought, misapplied scholarship, he was developing a Marxist account of Greek tragedy and philosophy and language itself, grounding them in the economic conditions of the common life of the people of those ages. Nicholas, for his part, insisted that Tolstoy’s stories depended on the language of the Russian people, the speech of the Russian peasantry. Of the group Nicholas was the nearest to Wittgenstein (if we except the musical affinity with Katharine Thomson). A true Russian he lived and brooded

37 Both suggestions inferred from a letter from Priestley of 26.3.1935 (McGuinness 2012, p. 239.) For Bachtin see his posthumous Lectures and Essays (Duncan-Jones, 1963) with a sketch of his life written largely by Francesca M. Wilson. 38 Pascal (1984) (much to be recommended). Wittgenstein evidently did not tell her that he already knew some Russian. A prisoner of war who was his servant in the First War wrote to him in that language. 39 On George Thomson see Seaford (2004) and Kanigel (2012). 40 Pascal recruited George into the CPGB, where he remained a stalwart, voting only against the abandonment of the aim of fomenting world revolution, when such was mooted. He did leave eventually, not over Hungary or Czechoslovakia, but over the split with the People’s Republic of China.

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over his literature, and accepted the Russian formula that art must teach us how to live: “Pushkin is the very air we breathe.” He thought that found characters were better than invented ones: the author should not impose his own ideas.⁴¹ Above all he worked on the problem of language. Could it be trusted? There are four or five boxes of notes on Plato’s Cratylus, a work not only not completed but predestined never to be completed. In a general notebook he answers: Some distrust nouns, some verbs, but you cannot distrust language, put yourself outside language. … Truth does not concern the mode of triangulation but a question arises within the system. … Pseudo-problems.

Later (23.7.1943) he comments: Logic sets out to codify the cognitive validity of statements by proudly ignoring the shifting multiplicity of real language.⁴²

Both remarks are reminiscent of Wittgenstein – the former more of the Tractatus, the latter of the Philosophical Investigations, which was even then in an advanced stage of gestation, but both betray Nicholas’s turn of phrase. Perhaps the two talked like this to one another. For there was much discussion. We know that when Wittgenstein went to Norway to think (literally) about “logic and his sins”, exactly as he had said to Russell before the First War⁴³, he had formed the plan of sending what he wrote back to Nicholas for translation into English, and evidently at least once did so, since he is anxious in February 1937 lest what he is now producing could seem to Bachtin worse than what he had already given him. (He is ashamed of the stupidity and lack of seriousness in this thought.)⁴⁴ It looks as if the radically new version of his work begun in November 1936 was to be produced in tandem (an unequal tandem, no doubt) with Nicholas, as the Brown Book and revisions of it had been with Francis Skinner. Further it seems possible that the friend with whom Wittgenstein discussed the Tractatus (when he came

41 Remarks collected from his Boxes 7 and 8 of the Bachtin Deposit already referred to. Siegbert Prawer, now sadly missed, was a contemporary: he told me that Nicholas gave general lectures on literary topics to which colleagues and students flocked. There was a certain Pnin-like quality in his English, which added to his charm. “The rivers in Russia are full of rabbits.” It was some time before hearers realized that “rapids” were meant. 42 Both quotations from Box 5 of the Bachtin Deposit. 43 Russell (1968, p. 99). 44 Confessional Notebook MS 183 162 7.2.1937. (Wittgenstein 2003, p. 170–171). No doubt he had sent to Nicholas some of the typing done at Christmas 1936.

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to the conclusion that it ought to be published alongside his new work) was also Nicholas and that this occurred in 1943.⁴⁵ Why the translation was never completed or never published we do not know. Perhaps it was not judged satisfactory by Cambridge University Press. Nicholas’s written English slipped occasionally into quaintness, though it served well enough to translate poems of Seferis into English. A colloquial translation it will not have been, but its being entrusted to Nicholas gives some indication that he was intimately involved in the composition of the work itself – at least until 1944. What the whole story shows is that Wittgenstein was exposed to Russian and Marxist ways of thinking while he was composing his great work. It is a more complicated matter than one of influence or priority. For example, he was already exposed to a form of Marxism in his conversations (not technically philosophical) with Sraffa, who took over as the equal discussion partner on the death of Ramsey. Perhaps Nicholas followed Sraffa in this role after one of the many breaks in that partnership. The new version begun in 1936 was a replacement of a revision or re-working (Umarbeitung) of the Brown Book.⁴⁶ Wittgenstein rejected that attempt as worthless, but like many of his rejected drafts it has been printed, as Eine Philosophische Betrachtung. It sets out to build up language in all its complexity by presenting a succession of ever more complicated language-games. The effort peters out at number 140. This can fairly be seen as the last in Wittgenstein’s attempts (described in the 1945 Preface to Philosophical Investigations) “to force [his thoughts] along a single track against their natural inclination”.⁴⁷ He therefore allowed his thoughts to meander, approaching the same points afresh from different directions. The result is more like a Dostoevskian novel with its short time-frame and interlaced plot-lines than a picaresque and episodic one. A novel [normally] follows the stream of time, said Nicholas (Box 7), a tragedy brings all together. The contact with Nicholas and with Thomson illuminates also the fascination that Russia had for Wittgenstein. Like them he was in search of something other than the world of Western civilization, where none of three felt at home. Wittgenstein’s escapes to Norway or finally the west of Ireland were parallel to Thomson’s brilliant but perverse efforts to identify with a dying world in Ireland and then with an ideal society, destined never to be born but in the meantime exacting a

45 Monk (1991, p.  457). I have argued against this date but Manu Shetty tells me that the informant was Katharine Thomson. 46 See Schulte (2001, p. 17ff). 47 To be sure, there were later (post-Preface) thoughts of possible re-arrangements.

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dreadful toll, in the Soviet Union or in China. The hatred of the West was strong in him, perhaps in Wittgenstein too. In this the latter was nearer to Tolstoy than to the essentially urban and Christian Dostoevsky. But he did bring with him, to the dismay of Soviet hosts or patrons, an aura of what they called ‘idealism’ that tinged his chastely concrete analysis of language in a way we have yet to define adequately.

Bibliography Bakhtin, Mikhail (1984): Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. C. Emerson (Ed. and Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Drury, Maurice O’C. (1984): “Conversations with Wittgenstein”. In: Rush Rhees (Ed.): Recollections of Wittgenstein. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 97–171. Duncan-Jones, A. E. (Ed.) (1963): Nicholas Bachtin Lectures and Essays. Birmingham: University of Birmingham Press. Engelmann, Paul (1967): Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Fedajewa, Tatjana (2000): “Wittgenstein und Rußland”. In: Grazer Philosophische Studien 58/59, p. 365–417. Frank, Joseph (1986): “The Voices of Mikhail Bakhtin”. In: New York Review of Books October 23, 1986, p. 56–60. Frank, Josef (1979): Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt. Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press. Freud, Sigmund (1929): “Dostojewski und die Vatertötung”. In: Gesammelte Werke 14. Frankfurt/M.: Fischer, p. 397–418. Freud, Sigmund (1962): “Dostoevsky and Parricide”. In: René Wellek (Ed.): Dostoevsky: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ.: Prentice-Hall, p. 98–111. Ivanov, Vyatcheslav (1952): Freedom and the Tragic Life. Oxford: Longwood. Robert Kanigel (2012): From an Irish Island. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. McGuinness, Brian (2005): Young Ludwig. Oxford: Clarendon Press. McGuinness, Brian (2008): “What Wittgenstein owed to Sraffa”. In: G. Chiodi/L. Ditta (Eds): Sraffa or an Alternative Economics.. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, p. 227–235. McGuinness, Brian (Ed.) (2012): Wittgenstein in Cambridge. Malden, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Monk, Ray (1991): Ludwig Wittgenstein. The Duty of Genius. London: Vintage. Oberhummer, Hermann (1914): “Dostojewski”. In: Der Brenner 12, p. 556–559. Pascal, Fania (1984): “A Personal Memoir”. In: Rush Rhees (Ed.): Recollections of Wittgenstein. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p.12–49 Russell, Bertrand (1968): The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell. Vol. II. London: Allen and Unwin. Schulte, Joachim (2001): “Einleitung”. In: Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophische Untersuchungen. Kritisch-genetische Edition. J. Schulte (Ed.). Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, p. 12–47. Seaford, R. A. S. (2004) “Thomson, George Derwent (1903–1987)”. In: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/ article/61301, accessed 27 November 2012) Tihanov, Galin (2002): “Misha and Kolia: Thinking the [Br]other”. In: B. Żylko (Ed.): Bakhtin & His Intellectual Ambience. Gdansk: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego.

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Wittgenstein, Ludwig (2003): Public and Private Occasions. James C. Klagge/Alfred Nordmann (Eds). Boulder, New York, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (2011): Wittgenstein Gesamtbriefwechsel / Innsbrucker elektronische Ausgabe. 2nd Release. Allan Janik/Brian McGuinness/Michael Schorner/Joseph Wang (Eds). InteLex.

Garry L. Hagberg

Wittgenstein Re-Reading Why would we ever read anything again? There is the obvious answer: to remind ourselves of what we may have forgotten. But that is nowhere near the most interesting reason. David Hume, in his classic essay “Of the Standard of Taste”, writes that “At twenty, Ovid may be the favorite author; Horace at forty; and perhaps Tacitus at fifty” (Hume 1757/1995, p. 266). Reading Ovid, Horace, Tacitus – and any other literary author – will not be the same at twenty, forty, and fifty. Yet the words are obviously the same. So if we subtract the word-meanings that remain the same across these temporally and experientially disparate readings, what is the remainder? What makes them different? And what of the presupposition buried within the formulation of this question: that is, should we assume that there is such a thing as word-meaning that remains invariant beneath the differences? There are, of course, countless cases throughout the practical affairs of life that seem to leave word-meaning intact and untouched by context, by the experiential backlog in play, by the resonances chiming throughout that backlog, by the ever-more-cultivated sensibility of the reader in question. A detective, on finding the perpetrator’s name inscribed on a carpet in blood by the victim, does not go back to re-read repeatedly to see if it now names another name or if it says the same as before. The Master of Ceremonies in an awards ceremony does not continually re-read the name of the winner on the card just opened from the sealed envelope, and so forth. And beyond names (which, as I’ll return to below, initially at least appear to stack the deck in favor of an anti-Heraclitean fixity of meaning), we do not re-read instruction manuals or furniture-assembly pamphlets to gain insight into the vicissitudes of our souls. But Hume knew that literary meaning is not like those cases; as T. S. Eliot said, “words will not sit still”.¹ The words – meaning here the printed letters – of Ovid’s Metamorphosis do not change. If their senses were fixed unambiguously, by extension there would be determinate fixity of the entire work, and its interpretation would be a matter of correctly matching, to the point of completion, the exacting description of that meaning-content with the words that together comprise the work. Yet at

1 Eliot (1943/1988) in Burnt Norton, sec. V: “Words strain,/ Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, / Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,/ Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,/ Will not stay still.” I offer a discussion of some of the philosophical significance of Eliot’s passages from this work in my (2010).

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twenty (or younger), one may be fascinated by the wondrously inventive transformations of one entity into another. But at thirty, or forty, one may know that to see a person, or oneself, change from one kind of person into another, or to see a person or oneself reveal an ethical reality previously hidden beneath a very different appearance, can be other than entertainingly fascinating. Similarly, at fifty, seeing, through literature-induced reflection, that oneself has changed through a gradual transmutation into a person one at twenty (i.e. on first reading) one did not want to be², is also far from frivolous imaginative diversion. For such individuals, the content of the very concept of metamorphosis has changed; the significance of the fiction is no longer hermetically contained within that fictional world. Speaker’s intention, narrowly defined, didn’t change it; experience did. Hume is speaking primarily about aesthetic preference, but his observation brings the just-mentioned point concerning one of the functions of re-reading into sharper focus: character changes, or the erosion of ideals, or the abandoning of aspirations, often take place incrementally over an extended duration. Similarly, on the positive side, the achievement of those aspirations, the holding true to those ideals, the deepening and improving of character, the sharpening of discernment, also often take place across broad expanses of time. Revisiting a literary text that we knew well at an earlier time but that we have not seen for many years can serve to demarcate an earlier point of selfhood – a stabilized moment of time in the progressive Heraclitean flux – against which we can measure the degree of change, for good, for ill, or for both in distinct respects. Re-reading, in this particular sense, becomes an instrument of self-knowledge; it gives content to what we call the sense of self. That is to say: One can see what it was we used to see in Ivan Karamazov, what we did not see in Dmitri, what we perhaps naively saw in Alyosha, all of which informs what we now see in ourselves. The wisdom of Tacitus, the recognition of the depth of his understanding of the ways of the world, informs us at one remove³ about what we ourselves inwardly possess as an experientially earned capacity to recognize and to fathom such wisdom when we see it placed before us. But to put the question here again in subtractive terms: if we read Tacitus or Dostoevsky at twenty, unproblematically know the meanings of all the words in both books, and subtract that earlier reading from our reading at fifty, what is, and what precisely accounts for, the remainder?

2 This phenomenon, as one might expect, is of considerable moral-philosophical interest. See (Rhees 1971, p. 25) and (Cioffi 1998, p. 144–147). 3 I offer one way of describing this process as it unfolds within the reader’s imaginative world in my (2007a).

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Recall what Wittgenstein wrote about the misleading image – a compelling one that can be difficult to dislodge – of the fixity of meaning in PI 2009, § 426: A picture is conjured up which seems to fix the sense unambiguously. The actual use, compared with that traced out by the picture, seems like something muddied. Here again, what is going on is the same as in set theory: the form of expression seems to have been tailored for a god, who knows what we cannot know; he sees all of those infinite series, and he sees into the consciousness of human beings. For us, however, these forms of expression are like vestments, which we may put on, but cannot do much with, since we lack the effective power that would give them a point and purpose. In the actual use of these expressions we, as it were, make detours, go by the side roads. We see the straight highway before us, but of course cannot use it, because it is permanently closed.

Now, the picture, Wittgenstein here suggests, offers the false but compelling image of the hermetic fixity of the words that make up The Brothers Karamazov; a god’s view – here also then setting in place, on this model, a conception of the ideal critic – would be a full and exacting encompassing knowledge of the determinate meaning of each word, and hence each sentence, as contained within the frame of the work. And so, against this picture, our actual usages of such words and sentences seem muddied. But that comparison, Wittgenstein is implying (and perhaps should have said here more directly), is itself a false one: the seeming muddiness is only a secondary illusion born of the prior illusion of the dreamedof-fixity. We, down here on the ground of actual usage, rely on the contextually seated nuances that together give our words and sentences point, power, and purpose. And closely examining the using of words, the using of sentences, shows us precisely their point, power, and purpose that, in truth, clarify rather than muddy. In PI 2009, § 432, Wittgenstein writes: “Every sign by itself seems dead. What gives it life? – In use, it lives. Is it there that it has living breath within it? – Or is the use its breath?” “Or is the use its breath?” Well, indeed. But how do we get this to help us with our problem concerning re-reading, with the interpretive deepening, with the fifty-minus-twenty remainder? Literary language is, after all, one kind of use of our language. But it is dangerously easy to picture literary language as a kind of sub-division of the larger Venn diagram, where all uses within that set are in essence of the kind seen in the card identifying the winner; a name read by the Master of Ceremonies. It may, we might think, be much more complex, but – says the picture – it will, by virtue of being language, by virtue of being within the Venn diagram where inclusion is determined by the presence of that essence, invariably be built upon that foundation. And in this (alleged essence-revealing) case the meaning is wholly fixed by the writer, and wholly and exhaustively received by the reader (in

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this case the M.C.). If all language were in essence like that, then this would be nothing less than the straight highway before us, and all linguistic inquiry could proceed on that foundation. But it is perhaps literary language that shows us more forcefully than anywhere else, that this dreamed-of highway is permanently closed. The reason Wittgenstein re-read, as repeatedly reported to his friends⁴, The Brothers Karamazov many times over many years, is that he was endlessly exploring the side-roads, the adventurous detours. And what he found there was not predictable from his earlier travels. It would be strange – to the point of unimaginability – to suggest that persons should be entities with a demarcated fixity of content, so that the understanding of a person could be final, complete, and exhaustive in the way we too easily picture the (ideal) understanding of a word. No sentient being could be like that – indeed the very act of suggesting such stasis would invoke sudden and radical change in the way the suggester is perceived (if it could be taken seriously, which I think we instructively doubt). Stanley Cavell has drawn special attention, in his discussion of Wittgenstein on seeing-as, to the way in which our relations to our words stand as allegories of our relations to others. They, and our relations to them, are – often of wondrous complexity – in constant flux; we encounter them, like their and our words, within (and never prior to or separate from) what Wittgenstein called the stream of life. Cavell writes of the duck-rabbit figure that “the beauty of the thing lies, first, in the fact that the figure is so patently all in front of your eyes” (Cavell 1979, p. 354)⁵, and this, I want to suggest, is directly parallel to the fact that all of the words of Ovid, of Horace, of Tacitus, and of Dostoevsky are before our eyes at twenty, forty, and fifty. But Cavell calls attention to a facet of this perceptual-interpretive phenomenon that is most salient for present considerations: “you can see, as patently as you can see the figure itself, that the flip from one reading to another is due solely to you, the change is in you” (Cavell, 1979, p. 354). It would be easy – as indeed it has been for many theorists of interpretation – to say that this shows that the difference between the reading at twenty and the re-reading at fifty is wholly in us, wholly a subjective matter of what we bring to an inert text. But here ordinary language is – as it so often is on close inspection – subtle: we speak of what we now, later in life, see in Tacitus, see in Dostoevsky – and not of what we layer over it. This drop of grammar⁶ is not, I think, insignificant. Cavell calls attention to the intrinsic complexity of the phenomenon in question here: aspect-seeing invites into play “an unexpected range of concepts” that “can

4 See Rhees (1984, p. xvi, 4, 44, 72, 85–87, 102, 107–108). 5 See also (Cavell (2010, p. 85). 6 See Wittgenstein, (PI 2009, II, sec. xi, p. 233, § 315).

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be given application and in which one is brought to sense the complexity of their crossing – e.g. imagination, interpretation, experience, impression, expression, seeing, knowing, mere knowing, meaning, figurative meaning” (Cavell, 1979, p. 354–355). It is, I believe, precisely this complexity that one has to preserve in order to gain clarity about the perceptual-interpretive process here that will help answer our question concerning the content of the re-reading “remainder”. It has been attractive to many to attempt to reduce this kind of perception-interpretation to only one of the concepts on Cavell’s list (and thus to analyze down, here again, to an alleged essence.) Some argue that imagination is basic or foundational here, so for us the personal or idiosyncratic imaginative content on the part of the re-reader would fully account for the remainder – which is then regarded as not really in or of the text. On this view, we really saw all there was to see at twenty (and here one will use phrases such as “strictly speaking”). Some will focus on the interpretation, where this is informed by the cognitive stock of the re-reader (e.g. the Marxist will see class struggle, the Freudian will see psychodynamics, the semiotician will see signs in interactive play, etc.), so we use the text as a set of illustrations of front-loaded stock, where the change of stock accounts for the change in re-reading. Some will make expression central, so that the expressive content believed to have been “sent” by e.g. Dostoevsky becomes the criterion for correct criticism, so a change in the act of re-reading is thought to be a function of a change in our beliefs concerning intended expressive content. Some will focus on the gap between plain or direct meaning (which we got at twenty because we knew the meanings of the words) and figurative or indirect meaning, where the change in re-reading is accounted for in terms of seeing events described in the text as metaphors, drawn from narrated particulars within the text, for universal life-events beyond the literal reach of those particular narratives. And we could say similar things for the other concepts on Cavell’s list: experience, impression, seeing, knowing, and mere knowing. But again, what one needs for conceptual clarity – as Wittgenstein shows in his extensive remarks on aspect-seeing – is to preserve the complexity and to allow the interaction of these concepts to take place as they may in particular cases. To reduce them all to one template of generic aspect-perception is only to dream of the straight highway. But the closed highway, and Wittgenstein’s open side-roads and detours, concerned linguistic meaning, not visual perception. So what, more precisely, is the connection between them? Cavell continues, now discussing the phenomenon of aspect-blindness, saying: He [Wittgenstein] immediately introduces his term “noticing an aspect”. … I point to two late junctures in the progress of this notion of an “aspect”: “The aspect presents a physi-

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ognomy which then passes away”(p.210); and “The importance of this concept [of aspect blindness] lies in the connection between the concepts of “seeing an aspect” and “experiencing the meaning of a word” (p.214). (Cavell, 1979, p. 355)

It will become important for us below to note: the analogy that both Wittgenstein and Cavell are identifying as centrally important  – between aspect-perception and the experience of word-meaning  – carries with it the corollary analogy between not being able to see an aspect and not being able to fathom the fuller significance of a word or sentence. But Cavell continues: Putting together the ideas that noticing an aspect is being stuck by a physiognomy; that words present familiar physiognomies; that they can be thought of as pictures of their meaning; that words have a life and can be dead for us; that “experiencing a word” is meant to call attention to our relation to our words; that our relation to pictures is in some respects like our relation to what they are pictures of; I would like to say that the topic of our attachment to our words is allegorical of our attachments to ourselves and to other persons. (Cavell, 1979, p. 355)

Our relation to our words is no more simple, nor any more reducible to any one explanatory template, than is aspect perception; the relation of the person who knows the name of the winner, types it on a card, seals it, and then hands it to the M.C. is not the essence upon which later complexity is layered. He knows the name of the winner, that his name stands for, goes proxy for, refers to that person, and that the M.C. will, on reading the card, recognize the name and the person to whom that name refers. But as will be evident, acting on, living by, so impoverished a model of word-meaning would ridiculously, or tragically, leave us utterly bereft of any human interaction or human understanding. The model, applied to literary meaning, would do equal damage. Thus Cavell, I think, might have gone further: It is true that our (irreducibly complex) attachment to our words is allegorical of our attachments to ourselves and to other persons, but it is not only that: the words to which we are attached are, in very many cases, the vehicles or the very means of, indeed the content of, our attachments to others. The connection is at once allegorical and more than allegorical. But then Cavell does in a sense see this, if he does not quite say it. He writes: My words are my expressions of my life; I respond to the words of others as their expressions, i.e. respond not merely to what their words mean but equally to their meaning of them. … (Cavell, 1979, p. 355)

One might say here – indeed I for one want to say here – that to understand a human being does not mean to know, in any reduced or minimally basic way, the meanings of their words. The phrase “If you see what I mean” is very rarely, if ever,

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reducible to, or restated as, “If you know the meanings of the words I am using”. Similarly, getting one to see the point – the point, purpose, or power – of what one is saying very rarely comes down to a matter of definition. Cavell points to the kind of thing that is required by saying “to imagine an expression (experience the meaning of a word) is to imagine it as giving expression to a soul”. He adds “(The examples used in ordinary language philosophy are in this sense imagined)”; I want to add that the literary words we re-read, the literary characters with whom we engage and to whom we extend, work out, rehearse, and prepare our human understanding, are precisely in this sense imagined. And the words in them  – like the words of persons – solicit our engagement⁷ because they, in their way, give expression to a soul. But how close is the connection, how tight is the link, between the two sides of Cavell’s allegory? Cavell writes: The idea of the allegory of words is that human expressions, the human figure, to be grasped, must be read. To know another mind is to interpret a physiognomy, and the message of this region of the Investigations is that this is not a matter of “mere knowing.” I have to read the physiognomy, and see the creature according to my reading, and treat it according to my seeing. The human body is the best picture of the human soul – not, I feel like adding, primarily because it represents the soul but because it expresses it. The body is the field of expression of the soul. The body is of the soul; it is the soul’s; … (Cavell, 1979, p. 356)

The physiognomy, the figure that is expressive of the soul, must be read to be grasped. “Mere knowing is weak, anemic, insufficient to the task”: fathoming another human soul will never be reduced to this – just as the complexly intertwined perceptual-interpretive acts of aspect-seeing will never be reduced to a single essence-capturing template. These Cavellian reflections  – reading a person, attending to difference, fathoming a soul (often in, with, and through words)  – taken together, can remind us of the true complexity of the form of attention⁸ required to genuinely understand another’s words, sentences, and expressions as actually used  – in short, their linguistic life. And, rather than “merely knowing” anything, we continually re-read, by side-roads and adventurous detours, persons, aspects, and (literary) words.

7 For an extraordinarily helpful discussion of such solicitation of our engagement, our human interest, see Cohen (2008, ch. 4, p. 29–51). 8 This form of attention is called, in Wittgenstein’s shorthand for it, “An attitude towards a soul”. Like most concepts involved in human understanding, it is not easy to encapsulate – and for instructive reasons. This special attitude (if we want to cautiously call it that) can, I think, be made more visible by comparison to cases where it is absent; I offer a reading of Don Giovanni in just these terms in my (2005).

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One might think it strange, or perhaps naïve in a particularly academic or unworldly way, that Wittgenstein thought seriously of moving to, and settling in, Russia.⁹ And it has been said that the deep impression that Dostoevsky’s insights made on him in large part motivated this desire, this dream. But if the words we and others use are constitutive of, definitive of, life in the way Cavell has articulated, and if the insights voiced in the language of a great Russian author come from imagined (in Cavell’s Wittgensteinian sense) Russian character, then the dream begins to seem less naïve and perhaps more deeply aware of the linguistic constituents of the world that the person initially perceiving only naïve daydreaming realizes. (Indeed one could say that if there is a naïve element in play here, it will be shifted more onto that person, once the depth of these linguistic issues is glimpsed). There is more ground to dig before we bring all of this fully to the surface, but given the conception of words taking shape here, it is also becoming clearer why Wittgenstein said to his friend Maurice Drury, “When I was a village schoolmaster in Austria after the war I read The Brothers Karamazov over and over again. I read it out loud to the village priest. You know there really have been people like the elder Zosima who could see into people’s hearts and direct them”.¹⁰ Reading out loud is physiognomic. And there are indeed real people whose deepest characteristics, their uncanny abilities in human understanding, are represented by (because they can see like, and speak with a power like) Zosima. We, and they, understand better and more richly through the comparison of life to literature and literature to life. Of Wittgenstein’s insistence that all his considerable financial holdings be given, irrevocably, to his siblings, his sister said: Anyone who knows Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov will remember the point when it is said that the thrifty and careful Ivan could well find himself in a precarious situation one day but that his brother Alesha [formally Alexey, informally also called Alyosha], who has no idea about money and possesses none, would certainly never starve, since everyone would be glad to share what they had with him and he would accept it without any reservations. I knew all this for certain, and did everything to fulfill Ludwig’s wishes down to the last detail. (King 1984, p. 72)

The constitutive, or self-compositional, words that Wittgenstein found in literature were not restricted to, nor contained within, that imaginary realm.

9 See Malcolm (1984, p. xviii) and Pascal (1984, p. 44–45). 10 Quoted in Drury (1984, p. 86).

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When Wittgenstein’s friend John King mentioned that he had read The Brothers Karamazov some years earlier, Wittgenstein immediately “questioned [King] searchingly about this” (King 1984, p. 72), exploring what King did and did not see in the book (King launched a close re-reading of it not long after this exchange). And later in that conversation with King, while discussing a performance of King Lear that they had each seen at separate times, “Wittgenstein said that he had been astonished that so young a man could play an old man’s part to such perfection. He thought he [the young actor] playing the elderly Lear had made only one mistake. In answer to Cordelia’s ‘Nothing’, Lear replies, ‘Nothing will come of nothing.’ Wittgenstein spoke these words as he thought they should be spoken, in hollow tones and clutching his diaphragm, as they came from the very heart of his being” (King 1972, p. 73). To question searchingly, to intimate what more there is to see, to see that words voiced with a certain physiognomy is to better and more fully express the state of a soul – these are forms of human understanding that are manifest in, and conducted through, our words. And they are depths of meaning that are not fathomable from any simple concept or template of atomistically-contained word-meaning. It is not, and could not be, a matter of what Cavell calls in this context “mere knowledge”. We might ask, or be asked, the question: “What do you see in the exchange with the Grand Inquisitor?” Wittgenstein writes, “‘Seeing as …’ is not a part of perception. And therefore it is like seeing, and again not like seeing” (PI 2009, II, Sec. xi, p. 207). The words “Like seeing” suggest that it is not just imaginative projection, not just a subjectivist, arbitrary, or viewer-idiosyncratic superimposition. Yet the contrast, “not like seeing”, suggests that aspect perception, the seeing of X as Y, or in the light of Y, or in the connotative web of Y, is not going to be confirmed or disconfirmed in the way that the presence of an ambiguous line drawing before us (recall Cavell’s “we see all of it, so the change is in us”) will or can be, or in the way that the simple referent of a name (as in the M. C.’s envelope) will definitively give that name’s meaning (but more below on this). This, as Wittgenstein untangles the matter, is a false dichotomy – we don’t have to choose. But we don’t have to choose between what, precisely? We easily think that at least the simple cases are just that: simple, uniform, straightforward, where both sides of this perception/projection dichotomy are clearly demarcated. But do we even really have simplicity and uniformity in linguistic usage and meaning here? Wittgenstein writes: I look at an animal; someone asks me: “What do you see?” I answer: “A rabbit.” – I see a landscape; suddenly a rabbit runs past. I exclaim: “A rabbit!”

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Both things, both the report and the exclamation, are expressions of perception and of visual experience. But the exclamation is so in a different sense from the report: it is forced from us. – It stands to the experience somewhat as a cry to pain. (PI 2009, II, Sec. xi, p. 207)¹¹

Here one wants (impelled by the picture of the straight highway) to say: Well, say what you will, but in both cases the words are exactly the same, so the simple, straightforward meaning is – must be – the same, period. But that misses considerably more of the human element in this seemingly most-simple case than it captures  – the report (one has to extend the example somewhat to make full sense of this as a report, e.g. is this some kind of eye exam, or a question to a child learning language, or …?; but let us proceed with Wittgenstein’s term), is a different kind of utterance from the exclamation. And the difference in kind is made not by the words spoken (although they are, importantly, spoken, enunciated, differently – recall Wittgenstein’s Lear above), because they are (on

11 It would require a separate paper to discuss this fully, but Wittgenstein’s example here, brief as it is, seems to weigh against the plausibility of any minimal semantics, where what are identified as the same propositions are so identified because of sameness of wording. (Then the debate concerning contextualist semantics begins from there, arguing that propositional content is in part constituted by relational, external, or contextual features that differentiate content within sameness of wording.) The radical point contained in this example – one easy to miss with an image of “the straight highway” in mind – is that we should look to the most minute distinctions of usage within context, so that the telling differences are brought out in such high relief that we keep in the forefront of our minds a sense of how we, in Cavell’s sense, actually use language (to a degree where we arrive at a question concerning what we so much as meant by the phrase “the same proposition”, and indeed whether what we have in play here is a proposition.) Or to put it another way: to say (insensitive to meaning-determining nuance and to who is speaking) that a given combination of words will make up the same proposition does not leave us with sufficient means to distinguish between a person speaking and a parrot “speaking”. (As Cavell reminds us, we respond to the words persons say and that it is they who are saying it equally.) Or still another way: minimal propositional content alone would fail to distinguish between what persons do in exchanging ideas and what computers do in (what we may misleadingly call) “exchanging” content in the form of words, i.e. they can transmit data back and forth; they do not exchange ideas. Wittgenstein’s example, seemingly most simple (“a rabbit”), starts from the ground of embodied linguistic practice, not from embedded preconceptions concerning simplifying models; one could argue that one’s model is, and another’s is not, able to accommodate Wittgenstein’s subtle difference here. But the point is whether one needs to, or ever would, arrive at any such model with a vast array of such details (the side-roads, the detours) in clear view. That is what makes the position deeply radical, it is what makes it an alternative to theory-formulation, and it is what makes it so easy to miss (i.e. to see it as an isolated case-based observation that is prefatory to theory-formulation) in the context of the contemporary debate.

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the level of machine-like word-identification) the same. The difference is made by the difference in our relations to our words, by the differences to which Cavell was pointing, the differences that, I am suggesting, make them what they are. Who is speaking, in what state of being and state of mind, to whom, for what purpose, to what point, and with what power? Sensitivity to these kinds of questions is the sensitivity we bring with greater experience and greater cultivation to the words of others, to our own words, and to the words of others as we hear them with imagined physiognomies in literary texts. Words as apparently simple as “A rabbit” are not, on closer inspection, the same, so the model at one end of our polarized dichotomy, the model or picture of simply putting into words a brute-simple perception, is already oversimplified. And what if (as Wittgenstein next discusses) we look for some time directly at a face across a room and then suddenly see that it is the face of a friend whom we have not seen for many years – we now “see” the younger face within, or beneath, the older present face that we see, and we suddenly cry out “Jones!” (This is much like the experience of hearing a melody and recognizing its coherence as a melody but not recognizing it as a variation on an earlier theme, and then suddenly recognizing it as, hearing it as, one.) This is both, in Wittgenstein’s previous terms, report and exclamation – so even this dichotomy is over-simple, even it will not stay still.¹² Recall Cavell’s list of concepts that can come into play in such cases; the question here becomes which elements of this complexity we want to bring out in higher relief, for what presently-emergent purposes. If just the ocular, we speak of just what we see. If the recognition of Jones’s face within the older to-that-point unrecognized face, we will speak of sudden recognition. If we wish to emphasize the special way Jones raises one eyebrow as the trigger of our sudden recognition, we will emphasize facial expression. If we emphasize what Jones meant to us at an earlier point in life, the rush of thoughts and emotions triggered by seeing the younger Jones “behind” this face now, we will speak of imaginative memory. And so forth. The irreducible complexity, the variance in emphasis given our present interests, given who is speaking, given what we know of the character and past experience of the person speaking, how what we are seeing and hearing resonates with our own character and past experience; all of this, and much more, contributes to the “unexpected range of concepts.” Wittgenstein, in the middle of his examination of aspect-seeing, stopped to stand back and observe: “Here there is an enormous number of interrelated phenomena and possible concepts” (PI 2009, II, Sec. xi, p.  209, §  155). What we may initially have taken to be the simple, straightforward perceptual side of the dichotomy itself dissolves into ever-more-subtle

12 See Wittgenstein (PI 2009, II, Sec. xi, p. 208, § 145).

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complexity. This is why such cases are usually the more absorbing the more one looks (the more one re-reads). And what of the other side, the other polemical extreme of the perception/ projection dichotomy? It does exactly the same. The reader of Dante’s Divine Comedy who has a detailed knowledge of Virgil’s Aeneid and Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey sees connections, influences, precedents, thematic developments, allusion, references, intertwined variations, and subtle similarities and differences in modes of speech and expression that the reader coming to the work “cold”, as we say, cannot. Similarly, the expert in Florentine politics sees a network of connections, references, allusions, score-settlings, and so forth that the “cold” reader does not see at all. And both the literary and political readers will see lines of influence stemming from Dante’s work that are there but that Dante of course could not have seen. Literary imagination and historical-political imagination are contributing here, but in ways that we would describe as enabling the readers to see what is in the work. Or actually: what is in the words. We are able to make ever finer, ever more subtle distinctions between those readings that are enlivened and deepened by literary and historical/political imagination and those readings that are prismatically distorted by preconception – but these, like the other pole, will without exception be context-specific; no formula or generalized interpretive manifesto will help us here, precisely because any such generalized manifesto will fail to capture the meaning-determinative nuances that make the words what they are. And if the imaginative enrichment of the re-read text is from lived experience rather than literary or political scholarship, we may speak more of what we see in the text, but we still make fine distinctions that show which of many possible concepts of reading are in play or are brought out in higher relief. To put it paradoxically: on this score, all generalizations are false. Wittgenstein provides a telling example that can itself be seen in the light of the present discussion. He writes: Hold the drawing of a face upside down and you can’t recognize the expression of the face. Perhaps you can see that it is smiling, but not exactly what kind of smile it is. You cannot imitate the smile or describe its character more exactly. And yet the picture which you have turned round may be a most exact representation of a person’s face. (PI 2009, II, Sec. xi, p. 208, § 150)

Upside down, we can see that the face is smiling. But we cannot imitate it or describe its character. Words themselves, Cavell said, exhibit a physiognomy, and we have to look closely at them, and – as we might now say – right-side-up (i.e. not as mere illustration of a preconception concerning brute perception or over-imaginative projection), to see what kind of “smile” they have. Like a facial expression, they will have it in that moment, from that speaker, to that hearer,

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for that purpose, as that response, provocation, invitation, etc., and with that power. Is then anything in language simple? To go back for a moment to our starting point, what about, after all, a simple name? Does it, can it, operate beneath, or outside of, the complexity of which Cavell and Wittgenstein speak, complexity that, the closer we look, seems linguistically omnipresent? Consider, in the light of all of the foregoing (should this phrase, as we say, go without saying for all linguistic usage?), this passage from The Brothers Karamazov; it is Alyosha knocking on a door, entering, and saying his name (how much simpler, we might ask, could things be?): “Who’s there?” shouted a man in a loud and angry voice. Alysoha opened the door and crossed the threshold. He found himself in a regular peasant’s room. It was large and cluttered with belongings of all sorts. There were several people in it. On the left was a large Russian stove. From the stove to a window was a string with rags hanging on it. There was a bed against the wall on each side, right and left, covered with knitted quilts. On the one to the left was a pyramid of four print-covered pillows, each smaller than the one beneath. On the other bed there was only one very small pillow. The opposite corner of the room was screened off by a curtain or sheet hung on a string. Behind this curtain could be seen bedding made up on a bench and a chair. A rough square table of plain wood stood in front of the middle window. The three windows, each of four tiny greenish mildewy panes were shut, so that the room was not very light and rather stuffy. On the table was a frying pan with the remains of some fried eggs, a half-eaten piece of bread, and a small bottle with a few drops of vodka. A woman of refined appearance, wearing a cotton dress, was sitting on a chair by the bed on the left. Her face was thin and yellow and her sunken cheeks betrayed at the first glance that she was ill. But what struck Alyosha most was the expression in the poor woman’s eyes – a look of surprised inquiry and yet of haughty pride. While he was talking to her husband, her big brown eyes moved from one speaker to the other with the same proud and questioning expression. Beside her at the window stood a young girl, rather plain, with scanty reddish hair, poorly but very neatly dressed. She looked disdainfully at Alyosha as he came in. Beside the other bed sat another female figure. She was a very sad sight, a young girl of about twenty, but hunchback and crippled “with withered legs,” as Alyosha was told afterwards. Her crutches stood in the corner. The strikingly beautiful and gentle eyes of this poor girl looked with mild serenity at Alyosha. A man of forty-five was sitting at the table, finishing the fried eggs. He was small and weakly built. He had reddish hair and a scanty light-colored beard, very much like a wisp of tow (this comparison and the phrase “a wisp of tow” flashed at once into Alyosha’s mind). It was obviously this man who had shouted to him when he knocked on the door. Seeing Alyosha, the man got up from the bench on which he was sitting, and wiping his mouth with a ragged napkin, came up to him. “It’s a monk come to beg for the monastery. A nice place to come to!” the girl standing in the left corner said aloud. The man looked toward her and answered in an excited and breaking voice, “No, Varvara, you are wrong. Allow me to ask,” he turned again to Alyosha, “what has brought you to – our retreat?”

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Alyosha looked at him. There was something angular, flurried and irritable about him. Though he had obviously just been drinking, he was not drunk. There was extraordinary impudence in his expression, and yet, strange to say, at the same time there was fear. He looked like a man who had long been kept in subjection and had submitted to it, and now had suddenly turned and was trying to assert himself. Or, better still, like a man who wants to hit you but is horribly afraid you will hit him. In his words and in the intonation of his shrill voice there was a sort of crazy humor, at times spiteful and at times cringing, and continually shifting from one tone to another. The question about “our retreat” he had asked as it were quivering all over, rolling his eyes, and coming up so close to Alyosha that Alyosha instinctively drew back a step. He was dressed in a very shabby dark cotton coat, patched and spotted. He wore checked trousers of a light color, long out of fashion, and of very thin material. They were so wrinkled and so short that he looked as though he had grown out of them like a boy. “I am Alexey Karamazov”, Alysoha began. (Dostoevsky 1957, p. 184–185)

“I am Alexey Karamazov.” What do we see in this name? One could say that the meaning of the name, technically, is nothing but the existent particular that is its referent (in this case a living human being). That would be the dreamed-of straight highway. But the question of meaning that is relevant to the question of re-reading is: What does it mean to us? What does the name mean to the real users of it? What will it mean when we hear it? Well, we might say: A person who begins by seeing the size of a room and people in it, who then sees the placement of things – appliances, beds, chairs, etc. in it, but as he does he takes in still more informative details  – the distribution of pillows, the quality of the fabric and its meaning for who these people are. He sees the texture of the table, the un-cleaned windows, the quality of light, the atmosphere, and traces of some recent activities (eating and drinking) within the room. Then: he sees the aspect of a refined appearance over the look of sunkencheeked illness, but with the expressive power of the eyes coming out for him in highest relief. And he sees the oscillating attention in these eyes, with their physiognomy of a proud, haughty, and questioning look. He sees the dignity of neat dress extracted from poor materials, he sees disdain in a glance, he sees striking beauty and gentleness radiating from the eyes of the physically unfortunate girl; he sees, and quantifies, serenity. He is aware of phrases flashing into his own mind (phrase-born suddenly dawning aspects), and the interaction of these phrases with his perception. He sees himself misperceived; he sees angularity of character; he sees the unexpected and unusual admixture of impudence and fear in the same bearing and countenance, unpredictably together in the same expression at the same time. He saw the look of recently emerging assertion; in a flash he saw this description as one improved by, revised by, the look of one who wants to hit you but is constrained by fear. He knows what it is to see a divided person before him; he knows when he sees a person barely overpowering his

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own impulses. He hears the meaning-determining power of intonation; he hears shifting tones that sound deranged; he reads persons and the words of persons. He sees how words spoken were said (as if quivering); he sees his own instinctive, immediate, and embodied back-stepping, self-protective physical reactions and draws reflective conclusions from them. All of this inflects the content of his name for us as readers – we see a whole world of sensibility in that name when he pronounces it; it is, in Cavell’s sense, his name as he is speaking it. And of course, at a “meta” level, we see what we see in observing that distinctive sensibility (one reminiscent of Henry James’s phrase, “a person on whom nothing is lost”), and we see in his act of knocking on a door and stepping into a room what it is to be awake to, alive to, a rich environment in which rapid-fire perceptions and reflections interact, intertwine, and bring the words we use to life. Is all of that in the name? Yes. Is it content we can miss, in whole or in part? Yes. Is it the kind of thing we see more fully, and more deeply, on re-reading and from a position of more cultivated literary sensitivity and more life experience? Yes. And is it the kind of thing that can refine our descriptions, refine our perceptions (recall Alyosha’s quick re-description where the recast formulation occasions the dawning of a new aspect over the surface, as it were, of the previous one), and cast light, through words, on our own experience? Certainly. “I am Alexey Karamazov”? We have here only one relatively brief passage prefacing his uttering of his name, and yet no-one would describe what we have here as a simple ostensive referent, simple meaning content. But the truth is far more complex still: by the end of the book we have hundreds of such character-revealing, mind-revealing, sensibility-revealing passages, and all of that – far too complex in content to reiterate in one descriptive list, far too complex to imaginatively encompass at one moment, is in his name. (With Cavell’s remarks in mind: not in the name Alexey, but in his name Alexey – like the real names of persons that we use.) It is content that is assembled across, distributed across, repeated readings. It did not take Wittgenstein long to realize that an atomistic conception of word-meaning, a picture of unitary, precise, bounded, and invariant linguistic content – however initially attractive is the image of the straight highway – was destined to miss, in terms of what language actually is, far more than it captured, and destined to obscure (despite its false initial promise) far more than it clarifies. Given the frequency and emphatic delivery to friends across his life of his recommendation to read and re-read The Brothers Karamazov, and given the fit between what Dostoevsky’s texts show and the philosophical issues he addresses, it is perhaps not overly fanciful to suggest that the close and absorbed reading and re-reading of the literary works he found most compelling was itself part of his philosophical work. It certainly showed him the side-roads and their unpredictable interweavings.

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But let us come back then directly to the problem of characterizing the difference between the reading at twenty and the reading at fifty. Frank Cioffi (1998, p.  128–129) has called attention to the criticism Wittgensteinian philosophical work has received from some quarters for its criticism of, or even denigration of, empirical explanation. This is an easy matter to misunderstand, and getting clear on it – as Cioffi’s work significantly helps us achieve – helps to describe, in fairly brief scope, the difference between the two readings (and thus the reason for, and the value of, re-reading). Wittgenstein’s hostility to the very idea of empirical or cause-and-effect explanation in aesthetics¹³ is particularly well known, and goes to the heart of the matter here. Cioffi writes: In the course of his apparent derogation of empirical knowledge, Wittgenstein employs two sets of contrasts. One, most generically stated, is between explaining something in the way an event is explained and attaining to a more explicit understanding of what makes it that particular something. (Cioffi 1998, p. 128)

This distinction, then, is between (1) explaining something on the model of causeand-effect event explanations (the airplane crashed because it ran out of fuel; the fire started from a frayed extension cord under a carpet; the airplane has lift because the shape of the wing creates lower pressure above the wing than below it, etc.), and (2) working one’s way into a more fully explicit, more fully articulated comprehension of the features, characteristics, connotations, aspects, relational interconnections, and so forth that make the thing or experience what it is. This latter form of comprehension is not reducible to, nor does it conform to, generic explanatory templates (unlike the preceding cause-and-effect examples). Contrast what is needed to explain the physics and optics of pigment saturation with what is needed to ever more exactingly and deeply capture in words what makes an expanse of focused time spent with a set of Rembrandt self portraits so absorbing. To put the matter in the briefest scope: the latter is the kind of reflection re-reading occasions. Cioffi continues: Less generically, it is between explaining an event and coming to understand what the feelings and thoughts are which give it depth. (Cioffi 1998, p. 128)

This kind of understanding will come, usually piecemeal and as the result of absorbed reflection, in linguistic form, where the words we use in connection with (or as we saw above in Wittgenstein’s remarks, in multi-concept interwoven interaction with) our experience are, in Cavell’s sense, our words; in Wittgen-

13 See LA 1966, Hagberg (2007b), Scruton (2011).

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stein’s sense, they are complex, invariably contextually inflected ones. It is, as Wittgenstein insists, here that they come to life, and it is here, as Cavell suggests, that they can have life. To use these words as if they are uniform instruments with pre-specified determinate content and pre-conceived uses is – here is the reason for Wittgenstein’s impatience with the empirical model  – to use the proverbial jackhammer to attempt to repair a Swiss watch or (to use Wittgenstein’s image) to attempt to repair a spider web with one’s fingers. If our words were much simpler than they are, and if our usages of them were circumscribed causes aiming at pre-determined effects, the only difference between the reading at fifty would be that many more irrelevant associations or connotations are brought by the reader’s mind to project over, and thus only obscure, the evident and plain meaning on the page of which the twenty-year-old would then have the clearer, less obstructed view. But that is only philosophical mythology, one of the misdirections given by the atomistic picture. The reason we know that the range of legitimate interpretation of The Brothers Karamazov is not demarcated by the collection of dictionary definitions of all the words contained within it is that we know that real words – live words, our words – do not work like that.¹⁴ It is a happy fact that they do not sit still. As we have seen throughout this paper, one way to describe the endlessly complex and inventive ways our words, our sentences, open on to each other is to speak of side-roads and detours. But another way to speak of the ranges of meanings a re-reader can explore when our words are at work  – in life and in literature (biographers and autobiographers are, in the sense developed in this paper, re-readers of life) – is to speak of the field of a word. Wittgenstein writes: A great deal can be said about a subtle aesthetic difference – that is important. – The first remark may, of course, be: “This word fits, that doesn’t” – or something of the kind. But then all of the widespread ramifications effected by each of the words can still be discussed. That first judgment is not the end of the matter, for it is the field of a word that is decisive. (PI 2009, II, Sec. xi, p. 230, § 297)

The fact that a great deal can be said is, Wittgenstein insists, important. It shows, against the atomistic picture, how words open up, expand, reach out, connect. That is what we explore in finding articulations of experiential content in life,

14 It is perhaps here worth noting: No-one ever thought of this as a reasonable way of proceeding to demarcate the bounds of legitimate criticism, but if the atomistic picture were true, and if we speaking humans actually spoke in accordance with this picture (in which case it is not clear we could recognize ourselves as humans), everyone would find this suggestion readily plausible.

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and it is what we do in finding articulations of significance, of a range of implications, of meaning-determining connections, of symbolically powerful relations in literature. Alyosha saw that the second formulation fit better than the first; it awakened a new aspect that proved more exacting. “The widespread ramifications effected by each of the words” – that is to articulate the significance of the articulation itself, of the verbal formulation. And it is the field the re-reader explores, always by side-roads where (linguistic) life is lived, where there are tales to tell. We began with Hume and the subtractive problem: what is the content of the difference in readings that we all know is there, but that we may find difficult to describe (beyond simply saying that we now see more in it, which only restates the question.) There is a picture, we saw, of fixed meaning lurking in the conceptual sub-terrain, and that picture would suggest that all of the difference must come from projections over the primary textual content by the re-reader. But once excavated and examined, that picture of determinate fixity of word-meaning did not survive scrutiny, or at least is anything but self-evidently correct. This led to our look into aspect-seeing, what it is to see one thing in the light of another, the way this works with words as well as with visual perception, and the need to preserve, rather than reduce, for the sake of clarity and accuracy, the complexity and multiplicity of the concepts that can come into play here to describe what we are seeing, or what we are seeing-in. Experiencing the meaning of a word was then seen to be a far more interesting and variegated nest of phenomena than the naming-model, or the atomistic model, could predict, and this brought us to the allegorical (and more) relation between our attachments and connections to our words and our attachments to ourselves and others. The question of understanding the words of others, of ourselves – our words, thus became as humanly interesting and intricate matter as the question of deeply or thoroughly understanding a person; the contrast here is: do we want to see a word as standing in a naming relation to a physical referent, or as, in Cavell’s phrase, expressing a soul? Human beings, or the complexities of human character, are themselves both in a sense read and re-read; both words and persons exhibit physiognomies. Wittgenstein’s Lear showed this in microcosm. What we actually mean by what, on first glance, we take to be the simplest words turns out, within the contexts that give them life, to be not so simple.¹⁵

15 A close reading of Wittgenstein (PI 2009, § 257) provides an inoculation (against precisely this oversimplification) that is as powerful as it is succinct; the concept of naming an object, or naming a sensation, is already within language and thus cannot be understood as an act of christening prior to language that can then explain how, in essence, language functions.

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Nor is seeing the younger face we knew suddenly emerge from the face we did not immediately recognize  – on the level of brute-sensation, nothing has changed; yet on the level of human recognition, everything has. But in this case as discussed, the recognition is correct: it is not merely a whimsical projection, and yet it is thought-dependent. And this stood directly, immediately, parallel to the re-reading of Dante in the light of Virgil. Similarly, what we cannot see in a drawing of a face held up-side down is parallel to what we cannot see in a bare name: “Alyosha” before witnessing his sensibility in action, and “Alyosha” after – once again, on the level of meaning and comprehension, nothing, and yet everything, has changed. Reformulations of descriptive phrases cast new light, awaken new aspects, and reveal, or forge¹⁶, new connections – this is the substance of re-reading in life and in literature, aiming at progress toward greater, deeper, more precise understanding that is distributed across time, across Wittgenstein’s repeated re-readings. This is a kind of knowledge, an ever-growing recognition of meaning, that is not the summative result of accumulated empirical causal explanations; it is the kind of knowledge, as I suggested at the outset of this paper, that gives content to our sense of selfhood, the sense of internally contained but externally intertwined personal sensibility. So my initial question, framed in subtractive terms and asking for a characterization of the remainder, may have been based on a too-simple – and still fairly common, despite the work of Wittgenstein, Austin, Wisdom, Cavell, McDowell, and others in this tradition  – conception of word-meaning. The thought was, if the words themselves remained constant across re-readings, wherein lay the difference? But words, rightly understood, are vastly more sophisticated, vastly more complex, and very much more ours than that starting simplistic template could so much as intimate, much less accommodate. The simple, invariant, or trans-contextual meanings were never really there to begin with. Indeed, with our relations to our words  – and all that this entails, as we have surveyed the matter here – in clearer view, I should perhaps now ask how one could think that there could ever be a re-reading without a very considerable difference. So what then, is Wittgenstein – what are we – pursuing in re-reading? Nothing less than the comprehension of a form of life¹⁷ – the life of our words – that constitutes the

(Explanans, explanandum.) I offer a detailed discussion of the notion of a “language game” (as designed to therapeutically loosen the grip of the picture of simple ostensive naming as the essence or foundation of language) in connection with artistic meaning in my (1994, p. 9–44). 16 I offer a discussion of the problem concerning the very distinction between finding connections and making them, in my (2008, p. 154–184 and 202–222). 17 An attempt to decompress this phrase and show its significance for aesthetic experience can be found in my (1994, p. 45–83).

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irreducible content of humane understanding. But this sentence – like Alyosha Karamazov saying his name – can only be understood in light of everything that has preceded it.

Bibliography Cavell, Stanley (1979): The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cavell, Stanley (2010): “The Touch of Words”. In: William Day/Victor J. Krebs (Eds): Seeing Wittgenstein Anew. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 81–98. Cioffi, Frank (1998): “Explanation, Self-Clarification, and Solace”. In: Wittgenstein on Freud and Frazer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 128–154. Cohen, Ted (2008): Thinking of Others: On the Talent for Metaphor. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Dostoevsky, Fyodor (1957): The Brothers Karamazov, translated by Constance Garnett. Manuel Komroff (Ed.). New York: Signet. Drury, Maurice O’C. (1984): “Some Notes on Conversations with Wittgenstein”. In: Rhees (1984), p. 76–96. Eliot, T. S. (1943/1988): Four Quartets. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. Hagberg, Garry L. (1994): Meaning and Interpretation: Wittgenstein, Henry James, and Literary Knowledge. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Hagberg, Garry L. (2005): “Leporello’s Question: Don Giovanni as a Tragedy of the Unexamined Life”. In: Philosophy and Literature 29, p. 180–199. Hagberg, Garry L. (2007a): “Imagined Identities: Autobiography at One Remove”. In: New Literary History 38, p. 163–181. Hagberg, Garry L. (2007b): “Wittgenstein’s Aesthetics”. In: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Palo Alto: Stanford University. Hagberg, Garry L. (2008): Describing Ourselves: Wittgenstein and Autobiographical Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hagberg, Garry L. (2010): “Self-Defining Reading: Literature and the Constitution of Personhood”. In: Garry L.Hagberg/Walter Jost (Eds): A Companion to the Philosophy of Literature. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, p. 120–158. Hume, David (1757/1995): “Of the Standard of Taste”. In: Alex Neill/Aaron Ridley (Eds): The Philosophy of Art: Readings Ancient and Modern. New York: McGraw-Hill, p. 255–268. King, John (1984): “Recollections of Wittgenstein”. In: Rhees (1984), p. 68–75. Malcolm, Norman (1984): “Introduction”. In Rhees (1984), p. xiii-xix. Pascal, Fania (1984): “A Personal Memoir”. In: Rhees (1984), p. 12–49. Rhees, Rush (1971): “The Tree of Nebuchadnezzar”. In: The Human World 4, p. 23–26. Rhees, Rush (Ed.) (1984): Recollections of Wittgenstein. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scruton, Roger (2011): “A Bit of Help from Wittgenstein”. In: British Journal of Aesthetics 51, p. 309–319.

Ilse Somavilla

The Significance of Dostoevsky (and Ludwig Anzengruber) for Wittgenstein And in this sense Dostoevsky is right when he says that the man who is happy is fulfilling the purpose of existence. (TB 1961, 6th July 1916)

Although Dostoevksy and Ludwig Anzengruber are quite different authors who do not seem to have much in common, they both played a decisive role in Wittgenstein’s attitude towards ethics and religion – as can be seen in his personal and philosophical reflections and remarks. At about the age of 21, Wittgenstein attended the play Die Kreuzelschreiber by the Austrian author Ludwig Anzengruber and was deeply moved by a scene in which the protagonist, surrounded by nature, has the mystical experience of feeling absolutely safe in the hands of God. From this time onwards, Wittgenstein came to understand what religion could mean to man, as he later reported to Norman Malcolm (Malcolm 1984, p. 58). In 1929, in his Lecture on Ethics, Wittgenstein explicitly refers to this experience of absolute safety, along with two other examples he regards as decisive for his personal understanding of ethics – the topic he refused to treat in his philosophy. For Wittgenstein, both ethical and religious matters cannot be verbalized or explained by science, but would prove to be nonsensical; therefore any attempt to grasp these topics is doomed to fail. Instead of a rational and scientific approach, Wittgenstein pleads for other means of understanding – forms of “showing” instead of “saying” – forms he found in literature, art and music. And he considered Dostoevsky and Tolstoy the only two authors in recent times “who really had something important to say about religion”, as they did not theorize about it (Drury 1981, p. 101). Throughout his life Wittgenstein valued the works of Dostoevsky very highly in several respects: in respect to his presentation of ethical and religious matters, especially the problem of human guilt and redemption, but also his notion of a happy life to which Wittgenstein refers in his wartime diaries. – It is the aim of my paper to ask what Wittgenstein and Dostoevsky might have understood by a “happy life” as the ultimate purpose of existence. But first, I will discuss the role of Anzengruber for Wittgenstein, which can also be seen in the context of the happy life.

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I. Wittgenstein’s (Mystical) Attitude Towards Ethics and Religion: Parallels Between the Influence of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Anzengruber As mentioned above, Anzengrubers’s play Die Kreuzelschreiber evoked a striking change in Wittgenstein’s attitude toward religion. Even though he was a baptized Catholic, Wittgenstein did not care at all about religion in the years before attending the play. However, the mystical experience of the protagonist, the “Steinklopferhanns”, impressed him in such a way that from then onwards he came to appreciate the power of religion for man.¹ As can be seen in the Notebooks, the Tractatus and in the Lecture on Ethics, the aspect of the mystical played a decisive role in Wittgenstein’s approach toward God and religion. Particularly in the Notebooks 1914–1916 one can observe mystic-pantheistic tendencies in Wittgenstein’s apprehension of the world. At that time the influence of Schopenhauer also plays a decisive role. Gradually, however, Wittgenstein’s notion of an “alien will” turns into the idea of a personal God, his mystical attitude into what one could term a religious one.² The same applies to the Tractatus, where Wittgenstein, one could say, summarized his philosophical reflections from the preliminary notebooks. However, even in 6.44, the mystical plays a decisive role, concluding in the famous remark “Not how the world is, is

1 In the Third Act, First Scene of Anzengruber’s play the Steinklopferhanns tells how lost and sick he was. Thus he decided to die outside in the surroundings of nature. After having lain there for a long time, admiring the mountains and the sky above him, he feels refreshed and suddenly completely happy in the feeling that nothing can happen to him, that he belongs to everything around him and everything around belongs to him. (Cf. Anzengruber (1872), p. 278f.) 2 Cf. TB 1961, 11th June 1916, where Wittgenstein reflects about God and the purpose of life, concluding that “the meaning of life, i.e. the meaning of the world, we can call God”. And on 8th July 1916 he continues writing about this topic and contends that to “believe in a God means to understand the question about the meaning of life”. However, he identifies God with fate, “the world” or “that alien will” upon which he seems to depend. Later, on 15th October, his thoughts still resemble Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of the will, arguing that the spirit of the snake (and other animals) is his spirit so that one could speak of “a will that is common to the whole world” (October 17th 1916). Thus one could speak of a wavering between pantheistic and monotheistic reflections in Wittgenstein’s philosophical Notebooks, whereas his coded remarks of that time reveal what one could term a religious-Christian attitude in the sense of Tolstoy.

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the mystical, but that it is.” And in 6.522 the inexplicable is identified with the mystical – in the sense of what can only be shown. We may conclude that Wittgenstein’s inclination towards the mystical, discernible in the Notebooks and in the Tractatus, seems to have been evoked by Anzengruber’s play to such an extent that it can still be found in his Lecture on Ethics held in 1929. However, the role of the mystical cannot be reduced to a mystical approach toward the world in the sense of a union with nature, but now includes an understanding of ethics and religion. It is likely that the religious component was intensified by the reading of Tolstoy’s Gospel in Brief which Wittgenstein had come across during the First World War, and which played a decisive role in the heightened significance of religion for him. I will discuss later in how far parallels with Dostoevsky are also evident in his ideas of an ethical and religious life. Apart from the connection between ethics and religion apparent in the Lecture on Ethics, the three examples given there for ethical values  – wonder at the existence of the world, the feeling of absolute safety and the feeling of guilt  – are linked to one another in several ways. For example, the dimension of wonder  – mentioned as his first and foremost example, his “experience par excellence” (LE 1989, p. 14) – ought to be seen in connection with the feeling of absolute safety, not only because both aspects represent examples for his understanding of ethics, but also insofar as the mystical experience of feeling calm and safe in the surroundings of nature incorporates wonder at the existence of the cosmos as something miraculous. The connection to the feeling of guilt lies in the ethical and religious content inherent in the two other examples. Presumably in 1920, Hermine writes to Ludwig about the sense for the good (Gefühl für das Gute) and the lack of sense for a God (Nicht-Gefühl für Gott), i.e. the lack of religion, and she refers to Tolstoy before and after his conversion.³ Hermine adds that Ludwig was right when he said that the sense for a God and being touched by heavenly powers was essential, while leaving behind the secular was merely the consequence of this touch and heavenly longing. Whereas the words of the farmer “one has to live for God” did not impress Tolstoy before, he now became aware of its meaning so that all his previous yearnings became alive and he “felt God”. This moment evoked a great change within him viz. from the person he used to be, as now he “had religion”. This letter by Hermine, in response to Wittgenstein’s views about the subject matter, can be seen in one line with Wittgenstein’s personal experience of, and reaction to, Anzengruber’s play. Just like Tolstoy, at the particular moment of watching the play, he realized the significance of religion.

3 Cf. Hermine’s letter to Wittgenstein in McGuinness (1996, p. 206–207).

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In Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, the Elder Zossima, the spiritual father and symbol for mystical reunion with God and the world, also speaks of the “contact with other worlds”, using the same wording when hinting at a “higher heavenly world” hidden from us, but for which “we have been given a precious mystic sense of our living bond with the other world”. And Zossima emphasizes the importance of that feeling for a contact with those other mysterious worlds, as without this contact man would become “indifferent to life and even grow to hate it” (Dostoevksy 2009, p. 356f.). This “feeling for other worlds” is expressed in the Tractatus as the feeling for the mystical. (See 6. 432, 6.44, 6.45, 6.522) As I am going to discuss, not only the mystical aspect in the Lecture on Ethics – as explicitly illustrated in the experience of absolute safety and implicitly in the experience of wonder at the existence of the world – but also the feeling of guilt can be seen in connection with Dostoevsky’s significance for Wittgenstein – not least with regard to the emphasis on striving after a happy life.

II. The Significance of Dostoevsky for Wittgenstein Wittgenstein’s acquaintance with Dostoevsky can be traced back to his upbringing in a family that was well-read in all of the important literary works of the time. While Ludwig was very selective and critical towards literature and art in general, Dostoevsky was one of his favourite authors whose works – especially The Brothers Karamazov –, he held in high esteem and frequently recommended to friends of his.⁴ There were several aspects that must have impressed Wittgenstein deeply: the serious and truthful preoccupation with life, in its positive as well as its negative aspects; and the acute awareness of personal guilt together with desperate

4 Drury reports that Wittgenstein, while working as a village schoolteacher in Austria after the war, again and again read The Brothers Karamazov, and he read it out loud to the village priest Alois Neururer. (Cf. Drury 1981, p. 101.) Fania Pascal writes that Wittgenstein’s favourite work of Dostoevsky was Crime and Punishment and John King remembers how in conversations with Wittgenstein about The Brothers Karamazov, he was questioned searchingly about this novel, the impression Father Zossima and the legend of the Grand Inquisitor had made on him. (Cf. Fania Pascal in Rhees 1981, p. 34 and John King in Rhees 1981, p. 87). Franz Parak, who shared war imprisonment with Wittgenstein, reports that Wittgenstein highly esteemed The Brothers Karamazov and also Crime and Punishment (Parak 1991, p. 146ff.).

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attempts at coming to terms with one’s sins and striving after a happy life. All of these aspects are dealt with in a manner which is philosophical, though not abstract. Dostoevsky and Wittgenstein obviously shared an obsession with the search for ultimate truth and a lifelong preoccupation, in a non-theoretical way, with moral and religious questions. Moreover, they both made similar experiences in their lives: Initially not interested in religion, they came to appreciate the Gospels and to realize the significance of a religious belief through their experience of war and imprisonment. Wittgenstein read Dostoevsky during his time as a prisoner of war near Montecassino⁵, and soon after having returned to Vienna, he asked his friend Ludwig Hänsel for Dostoevsky’s Memoirs from the House of the Dead, the novel in which Dostoevsky gives a vivid picture of life in a Siberian prison camp.⁶

The Significance of a Happy Life The passage quoted as a motto for this paper touches upon several important aspects of Wittgenstein’s philosophical reflections in the Notebooks 1914–1916 – on time, God, and above all, on the happy life as depending on an ethical and religious way of leading it. Moreover, it incorporates both the mystical aspect and the experience of wonder as later discussed in his Lecture on Ethics. The following points are worth taking note of: a) the mystical refers to a happy life in agreement with an “alien will” or God; a life, thus, in harmony with the world (Cf. TB 1961, 8th July 1916); b) the happy person feels safe and protected in the hands of God (as discussed with reference to Anzengruber); c) Wittgenstein, in 1916, thought about a life devoted to the present in connection with the question of what constitutes the happy life. Such a life would demonstrate the dimension of wonder in the sense of being both totally absorbed in admiration of one’s surroundings as well as feeling safe in the hands of God, and thus free from any fears of what the future might bring. To live in the present, not in time, guarantees a life in eternity  – meaning non-temporality, not endless duration. It corresponds to Augustine’s

5 In his Montecassino notebooks, Hänsel writes that Wittgenstein read The Brothers Karamazov and Memoirs from the House of the Dead. From the latter, he read out loud two chapters to Hänsel and to his fellow-prisoners. See: Somavilla (2012, p. 53). 6 Cf. Wittgenstein’s letter to Ludwig Hänsel on 7th of June, 1921 in: Somavilla, Unterkircher, Berger (1994, p. 52).

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description of “qualitative time” as opposed to “quantitative time”. It is one of the characteristics of a happy life which differs entirely from the life of the unhappy; d) the happy life is a life devoted to the spiritual; it is not to be understood as a life of wealth, enjoying secular goods, but as an ethical life, a life of knowledge, a life that can renounce the “amenities of the world” (TB 1961, 13th August 1916): “Even if everything that we want were to happen”, Wittgenstein writes, “this would still only be, so to speak, a grace of fate, for what would guarantee it is not any logical connexion between will and world, and we could not in turn will the supposed physical connexion” (TB 1961, 5th July 1916; see also TLP 1981, 6.374). Good or evil willing can only affect the “boundaries of the world, not the facts”; not that what can be expressed by language (cf. TB 1961, 5th July 1916 and TLP 1981, 6.43). Having suggested that the solution of the problem of life can be seen in the disappearance of this problem, Wittgenstein then poses the question whether life ceases to be problematic if one lives in eternity, and not in time (TB 1961, 6th July 1916). It is in this context – his reflections, in the Notebooks, on the importance, even necessity, of striving after a happy life – that Wittgenstein hints at Dostoevsky, approving his emphasis on the happy life and concluding that to be happy is fulfilling “the purpose of existence” (TB 1961, 6th July 1916) – despite the “misery of the world” (TB 1961, 13th August 1916). As ethics does not belong to the world, but  – like the meaning of the world – lies outside the realm of mere facts, it only enters the world through the subject which is a boundary of the world and the “bearer of ethics” (cf. TB 1961, 5th August 1916). Therefore, good and evil enters through the subject’s wanting or not wanting. Not wanting stands for the good and means to be happy. Thus life devoted to the spiritual guarantees a happy life even if the subject has to suffer. As I will discuss later in connection with the Brothers Karamazov, it is precisely the aspect of suffering that leads to the awareness of the preciousness of life. Consequently, Wittgenstein maintains that the happy life is good, the unhappy bad. Thus the question why he should live happily seems to him to be a tautological question, as the happy life seems to be justified by itself. The happy life is a necessity so to speak, as “it is the only right life” (TB 1961, 30th July 1916). The world of the happy is a different world from that of the unhappy (cf. TB 1961, 29th July 1916 and TLP 1981, 6.43). The question (reminiscent of Schopenhauer) whether only he who does not will is happy, Wittgenstein answers by saying that in a certain sense it seems that not wanting is the only good (TB 1961, 29th July 1916).

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It is the spiritual and the beautiful that make happy. In his coded diaries of the First World War, Wittgenstein writes about the necessity of living “in the good and in the beautiful until life ends itself” in order not to fail in that moment (MS 101, p. 35v, 7th October 1914). In this remark we can see the influence of Schopenhauer, who spoke about aesthetic contemplation as one of the two possible paths towards freedom from the tortures of the will and thus freedom from the misery of the world. One could further refer to the passage in the philosophical Notebooks where Wittgenstein writes about the connection between art and ethics – demonstrated by the view sub specie aeternitatis (TB 1961, 7th October 1916). The ethical component inherent in aesthetic contemplation is a preliminary step towards an ethical way of life, dominated by the spiritual as well as by transgressing time and space. Consequently, when reflecting on the objective signs of a happy life, Wittgenstein maintains that there cannot be such a sign that could be described, and concludes that the sign of a happy life “cannot be a physical one but only a metaphysical one, a transcendental one” (TB 1961, 30th July 1916). “Live happy!”; “Live happily!” [“Be good!” Sei gut!]  – this piece of advice Wittgenstein gave in his philosophical notebooks (TB 1961, 8th July 1916 and 29th July 1916) and also to his friends.⁷ To live happily thus is tightly connected with being good, with leading an ethical way of life. Further, an ethical way of life is connected with a religious way of life, as Wittgenstein emphasizes several times: “What is Good is Divine too. That, strangely enough sums up my ethics” (VB 1998, p. 5e). This remark – written in 1929, shortly before his Lecture on Ethics, and thus presumably in the course of preparing his manuscript for the lecture – finds its full explication in the lecture where it can be applied to all three of Wittgenstein’s examples for his understanding of ethics. However, his conviction of the connection between ethics and religion can be traced back to 1917 (and presumably even earlier), when his sister Hermine noted in her diary: “Ludwig says: ‘ethics and religion belong absolutely together’” (Iven 2006, p. 70). In Dostoevsky’s works, too, a close connection between an ethical way of life and religiosity can be seen. The way in which he portrays the protagonists of his novels shows the emphasis on ethical values and the importance of a religious conduct of life. Frequently, it is through the experience of suffering and guilt that Dostoevsky’s characters come to realize the significance of religion and change their way of life. Such a process of catharsis can also be observed in Wittgenstein’s personal diaries where we find an incessant preoccupation with his faults and,

7 Cf., e.g. his letters to Rudolf Koder in 1930 in: Alber (2000, p. 31 and p. 35).

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as a consequence, the search for salvation which he hopes to find in a “change of life”, to be brought about by confession. The aspects of change and movement which Wittgenstein saw as characteristic of a religious way of life, he also considered to be important in his philosophical work: Christianity says: Here (in this world) – so to speak – you should not be sitting but going. … The question is: How do you go through this life? – (Or: Let this be your question!) – Since my work, for example, is only a sitting in the world, after all. But I am supposed to go & not just sit. (DB 1997a, p. 208f.)

It seems contradictory that on the one hand Wittgenstein emphasizes movement and change, on the other, as mentioned above, devotion to the present. However, to live in the present does not imply stagnation. On the contrary: being entirely in the present means to discover the great variety of perspectives inherent in the objects of one’s attention. Such philosophizing implies a preparedness to carefully reflect one’s ideas and actions, and consequently change one’s views.

Activity and Change as Characteristics of an Ethical Way of Life Wittgenstein’s ceaseless revisions in his writings reveal the importance he attached to action – an active doing which he saw as required for an ethical way of life. For him, neither theories nor moral rules offered solutions for human problems; such a solution could only lie in a way of life that shows “ethical values” in being lived. Only by a change of one’s life could the problem of life be made to disappear. On 27th August 1937, he writes: The solution of the problem you see in life is a way of living which makes what is problematic disappear. The fact that life is problematic means that your life does not fit life’s shape. So you must change your life, & and once it fits the shape, what is problematic will disappear. ...⁸

8 VB 1998, 31e. The idea of the disappearance of the problem of life Wittgenstein expressed as early as 6th July 1916 in the Notebooks, and later in the Tractatus, 6.521: “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 then say wherein this sense consisted?)”

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And in 1946: “Amongst other things Christianity says, I believe, that sound doctrines are all useless. That you have to change your life. (Or the direction of your life.)” (VB 1998, p. 61e) The change required for the solution of personal problems is decisive in philosophy, too: Grasping the difficulty in its depth is what is hard. For if you interpret it in a shallow way the difficulty just remains. It has to be pulled out by the root; & that means, you have to start thinking about these things in a new way. The change is as decisive e.g. as that from the alchemical to the chemical way of thinking. – The new way of thinking is what is so hard to establish. [...] (VB 1998, p. 55e)

Wittgenstein’s striving for action and change both in philosophy and in one’s life can be seen as early as 1914 (in the Notebooks), and in the Tractatus where he defined philosophy as an activity not a theory (TLP 1981, 4.112). This involves a never-ending process of asking questions regarding philosophical problems, of closely examining every formulation, and at the same time, similar to an artist, working on oneself. It requires openness and flexibility, the readiness to change one’s views: “Work on philosophy – like work in architecture in many respects – is really more work on oneself. On one’s own conception. On how one sees things. (And what one expects of them.)” (VB 1998, p. 24e) Dostoevksy’s presentation of characters by letting them speak and act corresponds to Wittgenstein’s way of presenting philosophical problems by showing, acting, by mimicry and gestures – in contrast to the formulation of theories. As Ludwig Hänsel noted in his diaries, Wittgenstein admired Dostoevsky’s narrative art because it showed no sign of the intention to create art. Dostoevsky was able to produce tension with simple means, like those found in fairy-tales (Somavilla 2012, p. 90). In The Brothers Karamazov, but also in various of his other writings, there is an abundance of deep and serious thoughts about Christian belief, reflections on crime and remorse, on suffering and mercy, on love, forgiveness and reconciliation. However, these questions are not treated in the form of theories, but by describing people in concrete situations, by describing their feelings and actions. The primacy of action as opposed to theory in Wittgenstein’s understanding of philosophy is obvious not only in the Tractatus, but also in later years when the aspect of describing instead of explaining begins to play a decisive role. Wittgenstein, when philosophizing about concepts like “anticipation” or “expectation”, refers to Dostoevsky who conveys the feelings of persons who have a certain intention, even though he does not use the words “expectation” or “intention” (Cf. Ms 129, p. 135f.). Thus, the concept of “expectation” is embedded in a situation from which it arises. Dostoevsky’s ability to convey conceptual

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phenomena like “expectation/anticipation” by vividly describing a specific situation, without actually using the concept itself is very similar to Wittgenstein’s method of representing philosophical problems by embedding them in a specific context. Thus, the emphasis on “showing” instead of “saying” which Wittgenstein was concerned with already at the beginning of his philosophizing can still be observed in his philosophical investigations of the later period, even though on a different level. Above all, as concerns ethical and moral problems, Wittgenstein again and again emphasizes the significance of action rather than theories which to his mind are bound to fail in the context of these issues. It is only by describing certain situations (as he did, for example, in the Lecture on Ethics, by means of giving examples of his personal experience), by showing instead of saying or striving after rational explanation that these problems can be grasped. Any attempt at verbalizing, say ethical or religious matters, is doomed to fail, as it would transgress the limits of meaningful language and thus end in nonsense.

The Awareness of Guilt and the Striving for Redemption by Changing One’s Life As Dostoevsky shows in the portrayal of many of his protagonists, like Mitya Karamazov or Raskolnikov, even a life of guilt can turn into a meaningful and thus happy life. Moreover, Dostoevsky hints at the good and noble within man, often lying hidden at the bottom of a passionate and wild nature; those characters are torn between their sensual drives and a longing for the spiritual, the better and the higher, a striving for change evoked by the awareness of sin. This phenomenon is particularly well illustrated with Mitya Karamazov: after having been suspected of the murder of his father and thus been arrested and put to prison, he gradually comes to realize ideas in himself he had not been aware of before – philosophical reflections on life, ethics, God. At the same time he discovers a deep source of strength within him so that he is prepared to endure even extreme suffering. In a conversation with his beloved brother Alyoscha – his “Cherub” – he tries to describe his inner change from a violently sensual person to a thoughtful religious one who is convinced of the help God offers in deep human despair. He is almost looking forward to singing a glorious hymn to God from beneath the earth when working in the mines of Siberia to pay off his guilt.⁹

9 See Dostoevsky 2009, p. 668: “And then we men underground will sing from the bowels of the earth a glorious hymn to God, with Whom is joy. Hail to God and His joy! I love Him!”

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God gives joy, Mitya says, and therefore he would find joy and happiness even as a prisoner and regard life worth living. It is the “new man” risen up in him (Dostoevsky 2009, p. 667f.), the man resurrected who will fill him with such power and happiness that he would fear nothing  – similar to the Steinklopferhanns in Anzengruber’s play who felt completely safe and protected in the hands of God and thus lost any fear. The happy man, as Wittgenstein notes (in connection with living in the present), has no fear of the future, no fear of death. Fear of death would be the “best sign of a false, i.e. a bad life” (TB 1961, 8th July 1916). A happy life, thus, requires a “pure conscience”. Dmitri Karamazov is aware that in utmost suffering we desperately need God, in fact, we could not bear such situations without him.¹⁰ He emphasizes that God wants to give joy to man and that life is everything. Even when condemned to work in the dark underground, he would experience life in its fullness. The very knowledge of the existence of the sun – even without seeing it – would mean the whole of life for him (cf. Dostoevsky 2009, p. 668). As can be seen in Mitya’s reflections, it is precisely in borderline situations that man becomes acutely aware of the preciousness of life – its uniqueness.¹¹ It is then that he actually comes to love life with an intensity that can only be compared to moments of creative inspiration an artist might experience  – in other words, and to say it with Schopenhauer, to the pure subject of knowledge in aesthetic contemplation. As in such extreme situations man is aware of the “ciphers of transcendence” ( Jaspers), he approaches God, without whom he would not be able to endure his pain and be totally lost. In this connection one ought to see Tolstoy’s words: Life is everything. Life is God. Everything changes and moves and that movement is God. And while there is life there is joy in consciousness of the divine. To love life is to love God. Harder and more blessed than all else is to love this life in one’s sufferings, in innocent sufferings. (Tolstoy 2009)

Similarly, it is in the very consciousness of his weak nature, his sins that Mitya Karamazov finds strength in God and thus joy in his life, as he knows that God

10 Wittgenstein came to the same realisation during the First World War, as his passionate prayers in his coded diaries reveal. Dostoevsky, similarly, turned to a religious belief while imprisoned in Siberia. 11 In this connection I refer to Wittgenstein’s experience of war: when confronted with the nearness of death, he noted : “Perhaps the nearness of death will bring me the light of life!” (MS 103, p. 8v, 4th May 1916).

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would love him despite his failure. The very feeling that he is his son makes him happy. He begins his confession to Alyoscha by quoting Schiller’s Hymn to Joy. Whenever he sinks into the “vilest degradation”, he reads that poem about Ceres and man. The hymn expresses all his longings, his despair about his shame and dissipation, but also about humiliated man in general, the paradox of life, with all its suffering and hardship man has to endure, on the one hand, but also with the paradox of its beauty that equally remains an unsolvable riddle and the source of unhappiness for Mitya, on the other (Dostoevsky 2009, p. 114f.). And Mitya, the wild and sensual man, reflects on all these questions like a philosopher, even though not in an abstract, rational way, but out of his passionate heart.¹² “What is ethics?” he asks and admits that he cannot deal with ethics as if it were a science. This is precisely Wittgenstein’s way of treating the problematic topic of ethics. Moreover, Mitya is fully aware of his mean nature and hates the “disorder of his life”, but he feels that there is something noble in him as well: “Glory to God in the world, Glory to God in me…”¹³, he exclaims several times – once during his confession to Alyoscha (Dostoevsky 2009, p. 109), another time to Pyotr Ilyitch: “Glory be to God in Heaven / Glory be to God in me…” That verse, he says, came from his heart once, but “it’s not a verse, but a tear” (Dostoevsky 2009, p. 454). Mitya is tortured by the thought that he is a scoundrel, and yet satisfied with himself. In his depravity and consequent desperate calls to God, he blesses God and his Creation and begs God not to condemn him, for he loves him and will love him for ever and ever (cf. Dostoevsky 2009, p. 463). Only Alyoscha understands Mitya because he sees other men with loving compassion, as he was taught by his spiritual teacher Zossima. Alyoscha’s confidence in his brother and his conviction that he did not murder their father “resurrects” Mitya (Dostoevsky 2009, p. 674). Mitya also reflects about moral values in a Wittgensteinian manner and contends that without God there would be no ethics, as everything would be allowed.¹⁴ The voice of conscience would cease – a thought Wittgenstein addresses in his early Notebooks: “Conscience is the voice of God” (TB 1961, 8th July 1916.)

12 Cf. Dostoevsky, p. 663. And Mitya adds: “The Karamazovs are all philosophers; for all true Russians are philosophers. However, Rakitin, who has studied, is not a philosopher.” What Rakitin told him, makes him “lose God”, as this new “science” appears like “chemistry” to him (Dostoevsky 2009, p. 664f.). 13 According to Paul Engelmann, Wittgenstein often enthusiastically quoted these words of Mitya Karamazov. (Somavilla 2006, p. 99) 14 This thought Dostoevsky treats in other passages (and other novels), as well (in a conversation between Ivan and Smerdyakov, and between Ivan and Alyoscha: “everything is lawful in the Karamazovian way”. (Dostoevsky 2009, p. 289)

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And on 13th August 1916 he remarks: “The good conscience is the happiness that the life of knowledge preserves.” Later, in the 1930s, Wittgenstein is still preoccupied with the importance of conscience. On 27th January 1937, he writes: “My conscience plagues me & won’t let me work.” The reason for that lies in his reading Kierkegaard, whose exhortations cut him, as he is not willing to suffer, to renounce “any conveniences” or any pleasure (cf. DB 1997, p. 166). He considers conscience a decisive factor in religious belief, i.e. whereas no rules or orders given by the Church could help him to believe in God, it is only his conscience that “could command” him “to believe in resurrection, judgement etc.” (DB 1997, p. 149) – like Mitya. “Believing begins with belief. One must begin with belief; from words no belief follows”, he remarks (DB 1997, p. 151) – an aspect that can be seen in parallel to Ivan Karamazov’s legend of the Grand Inquisitor which I am going to discuss later. The decisive role of the aspect of conscience stands for the tight connection between morality and religion in both Dostoevsky’s and Wittgenstein’s thought. To have a good conscience is an essential prerequisite for being happy, whereas a bad conscience leads to unhappiness and despair. In the figure of Mihail, the “Mysterious Stranger”, Dostoevsky describes how a bad conscience can bring a man to utmost despair, even to the verge of madness. Therefore, Father Zossima urgently advises the stranger to confess his sin whatever might be the consequences. After wrestling with himself, the man finally confesses and it is only then that he finds inner peace again  – after having been tortured by painful self-reproaches for 14 years (Dostoevsky 2009, p. 334). Mitya Karamazov, who is confronted with the option of either spending his prison sentence in Siberia or fleeing to America, ponders what might be the preferable option. First he thinks that his escape would be a running away from suffering, the rejection of a “sign” that came to him in order to find salvation, and therefore be against his voice of conscience (Dostoevsky 2009, p.  672). However, as Alyoscha later comes to think, Mitya’s refusal to be punished for a deed he did not commit would only make him feel an even greater duty and thus evoke feelings of revolt in him. Thus, in spite of the fact that fleeing would be in contradiction to fulfilling the legal duty of punishment, his self-reproaches would in this case even be greater, as he would never get rid of the feeling to have avoided punishment and thus it would do more to make a new man of him in exile. (Cf. Dostoevsky 2009, p. 863) Hence, fleeing would involve a higher form of atonement, and thus correspond to a higher ethical standard. Reading Wittgenstein’s reflections on moral problems, one can observe equally high ethical standards. Throughout his life he was tortured by pangs of bad conscience, due to scrupulous self-examination. When thinking about a

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confession he had had in mind, he doubts its moral value, as he fears it would have been done without love and thus been merely done “as it were like an artful ethical trick”.¹⁵

Truthfulness, Love and Passion for a Religious (and Happy) Life A life of guilt and despair can turn into a happy life of meaning and value by a change to the spiritual. As Dostoevsky shows in his novels, the way from evil to happiness is a process from sin to its recognition and remorse, a process of catharsis that finally reaches a peaceful state of mind. A person who suffers from his sins but devoutly admits his sins was what Wittgenstein took to be an authentic and truly religious person  – illustrated for example in Tolstoy’s folk tales, i.e. in the tale of the two old pilgrims to Jerusalem. When one of them snuffed, his answer to the exhortation of his fellow-pilgrim was: “The sin has overwhelmed me. What can I do?” (Tolstoy 1995, p. 77) This avowal of his weakness and sinning without trying to excuse himself, was exactly what Wittgenstein valued highly and saw as a sign of genuine religiosity. (Cf. Somavilla 2006, p. 99) Similarly, he appreciated another folk tale of Tolstoy’s – his “favourite story” – namely that of the three hermits who could only pray: “You are three we are three have mercy upon us.” (Drury 1981, p. 101) The characters of Dostoevsky, like Mitya Karamazov, convey the same idea in the sense of being conscious of their weak nature and hoping to find mercy in God’s love. They are desperately longing for a “new person” within them, a “resurrection” (Dostoevsky 2009, p. 596). It was the merit of Dostoevsky to convey genuine religiosity in Wittgenstein’s sense, i.e. authentic persons who act out of love, passion and mercy instead of following dogmatic rules. Sonia, the female protagonist in Crime and Punishment, is another example of true Christianity: being innocent at heart like a saint, she works as a prostitute in order to save her family from starving.¹⁶ Wittgenstein’s enthusiasm for Tolstoy’s and Dostoevsky’s stories arose from their simple presentation of human failure, its consequences and final liberation from a sinful life. There are no rules or recommendations, i.e. no theories about an ethical conduct of life, but both authors had the gift to render moral problems

15 Cf. DB 1997, p.  124. However, he adds that this was not the only reason why he did not confess, he was also too cowardly for it. 16 According to Franz Parak, Wittgenstein’s answer to the question why he appreciated Dostoevsky was his “religious attitude”. (Parak 1991, p. 146)

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and religious questions in a truthful way and it was exactly this true portrayal of life and the truthfulness of the author which for Wittgenstein was the sign of genius. As he wrote to Ludwig von Ficker after having read the poems of Georg Trakl: “Thank you for sending me the poems of Georg Trakl. I don’t understand them but their tone fills me with happiness. It is the tone of truly genial people.”¹⁷ The preoccupation with the dark and gloomy sides of life without any attempt at embellishment was what Wittgenstein took to be a poet’s or composer’s truthfulness, his seeing the world right, accepting its negative and desperate sides – or, to put it with Spinoza, seeing it sub specie aeternitatis. This is a question not only of an ethical, but of a religious approach towards the world, an attitude Wittgenstein sensed in the music of Beethoven, as well: Beethoven is a realist through & through; I mean his music is totally true, I want to say. He sees life totally as it is & then he exalts it. It is totally religion & not at all religious poetry. That’s why he can console in real pain while the others fail & make one say to oneself: but this is not how it is. He doesn’t lull one into a beautiful dream but redeems the world by viewing it like a hero, as it is. (DB 1997, p. 72)

Both Dostoevsky and Wittgenstein were concerned about the “problems of life” – the paradoxical in life. These problems are not to be solved by answering “all possible scientific questions” (TLP 1981, 6.52). Rather, one has to go down to the very bottom, to grasp them at the roots, to uncover the deepest abyss of human nature – men’s passions, cruelties, even his demonic features. Similarly, Wittgenstein, in his moral, religious and philosophical reflections endeavoured to go down to the roots even when he was torturing his mind up to the verge of madness, as his diary-entries reveal. The genuine search for truth is only possible with high ethical standards, utmost honesty (even if painful), authenticity, and a truthfulness resulting from personal failure and the consequent suffering, all of which Dostoevsky describes in the portrayal of his characters who have to go through sin, guilt, remorse and redemption. In his works, the way from ethical problems to religiosity takes a course that is similar to the one that can be observed in Wittgenstein’s coded remarks in his wartime diaries. The awareness of personal moral failure leads to a feeling of being mean, indecent, and to a longing for the spiritual in order to fight the sensual drives. It is no accident that Wittgenstein often makes use of the metaphor of “light” in describing his painful search in order to get from either moral darkness or philosophical confusion to clarification in his mind, his spirit, to achieve “lucidity”, “transparency”. (Cf. Somavilla 2004b, p. 361–385)

17 Wittgenstein to Ludwig von Ficker (Poststempel 28.11.1914). In: Von Wright 1969, p. 22.

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His resentment of scientific explanation where the realm of the ineffable and inexpressible is concerned, and his inclination towards an intuitive approach in the sense of heart versus head, seem to arise from a passionate heart which Georg Henrik von Wright noticed as characteristic of Wittgenstein’s seriousness, and which he saw in connection with his religious attitude. (Von Wright 1982, p. 32) Paul Engelmann, too, once wrote that Wittgenstein was the most passionate person he ever met, and that through his acquaintance with him he came to experience the words of Bettina von Arnim, “passion is the only key to the world” (Somavilla, p. 150f.). In his memoirs of his time as prisoner of war near Monte Cassino, Ludwig Hänsel reports a discussion he had with Wittgenstein on Plato and Dostoevsky. Wittgenstein said that Dostoevsky had “a lot in common with ancient thinkers” and he added: “The man of significance has what life offers to consume it, to live on it, in order to get free for his own aim.” (Somavilla 2012, p. 90f.) Despite their emphasis on a spiritual life, Plato, Dostoevsky and Wittgenstein obviously did not neglect the passions of the heart – and this precisely in connection with religiosity, as can be seen again and again in their works. Only those of a passionate heart seem to achieve religious belief in its proper sense, a belief arising from humility in the awareness of their failures and sins, as passion, love and failure are on the same level and indispensable for religious belief. Wittgenstein was acutely aware of this fact. In contrast to intellectual calculation he explicitly favoured intuitive passions of the heart: But if I am to be REALLY redeemed, – I need certainty – not wisdom, dreams, speculation – and this certainty is faith. And faith is faith in what my heart, my soul, needs, not my speculative intellect. For my soul, with its passions, as it were with its flesh & blood, must be redeemed, not my abstract mind. Perhaps one may say: Only love can believe the Resurrection. (1937, VB 1998, p. 38e)

This passage reads like a commentary on Mitya’s situation – his passionate nature and his strong belief in resurrection because God will have mercy on him. The paradox and thus difficulty in Christian belief – discussed exhaustively by Kierkegaard in Fear and Trembling  – can only be overcome by an unquestionable and unshakeable trust in God’s love and mercy, as Alyoscha tries to explain to his brother Ivan. Similarly, Wittgenstein pleads for love in order to remove the paradox caused by intellectual reasoning and scepticism:¹⁸

18 It is noteworthy to state that Wittgenstein’s emphasis on the passions of the heart and scepticism against intellectual powers determine above all his personal diary-like entries,

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I believe: the word “believing” has wrought horrible havoc in religion. All the knotty thoughts about the “paradox” of the eternal meaning of a historical fact and the like. But if instead of “belief in Christ” you would say: “love of Christ,” the paradox vanishes, that is, the irritation of the intellect. What does religion have to do with such a tickling of the intellect. (For someone or another this too may belong to their religion.) It is not that now one could say: Yes, finally everything is simple – or intelligible. Nothing at all is intelligible, it is just not unintelligible. – (DB 1997, p. 238f.)

And on 9th April 1937 – in an allusion to the New Testament (Matthew 22:37, Luke: 10.27, and Mark 12.30), he states: “‘You must love the perfect one more than anything else, then you are blessed.’ This seems to me the sum of the Christian doctrine.” (DB 1997, p. 234) Wittgenstein’s and Dostoevsky’s attitudes toward ethics and religion reveal striking parallels. In The Grand Inquisitor philosophical aspects concerning God, freedom of the will, and ethical and moral values are presented in what could be called a “Wittgensteinian spirit”. Ivan Karamazov, who invented the story of the Grand Inquisitor, wants to formulate an abuse of Christ, instead, however, the legend turns out to be a praise of Christ. To me, this is the inevitable result of Ivan’s tormented soul, i.e. his ambivalent attitude towards religious belief – Ivan, whose “atheism was so perfect that it was only a step that separated him from perfect belief”¹⁹ – and it may well be that Wittgenstein might have identified with Ivan’s situation. In the legend of the Grand Inquisitor, the concept of happiness is presented from different viewpoints: Happiness symbolized by bread, thus standing for material happiness, and happiness symbolized by the word, thus standing for spiritual happiness. Whereas the Inquisitor is intent on “bread” for man, Jesus is intent on freedom achieved by simply following his word, which means leading a spiritual life, quite independent of the provision of “bread”, i.e. of physical and material satisfaction or the working of miracles that would bring about the belief in him; Jesus wants to be followed without using such means, on the ground of love and genuine belief only. In fact, miracles would serve as a kind of extortion, and thus would take away the freedom of belief.

whereas in his philosophical discussions his “tone” is quite different – detached, sober and often appearing like the voice of a non-believer. 19 Cf. Watzlawick, Paul: Wie wirklich ist die Wirklichkeit? Quoted after http://de.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Der Großinquisitor. Cf. Tichon’s words in Dostoevsky’s Demons: “An atheist is on the step before the last to the most perfect belief (whether he reaches it or not), the indifferent person, though, has no belief, but only miserable fear and even that only rarely, if he is a sensual man.” (Dostoevsky 1922, p. 511)

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The story brilliantly illustrates the problem of the freedom of will by contrasting the ideas of Jesus Christ and the Cardinal as well as their behaviour. In the figure of the Cardinal, the Grand Inquisitor, Dostoevsky indirectly attacks the Catholic Church, in particularly the Jesuits. Whereas the Cardinal incessantly speaks in order to further his cause, Jesus remains silent and only glances at his opponent with a compassionate and gentle smile, thus standing for religion in the proper sense – love and mercy, not submission to words in the sense of dogmatic rules and theories as presented by the Church. In contrast to the Cardinal, his aim is to be followed by men out of their own free will, out of genuine belief, and not to coerce them by means of deception, i.e. impressing them through miracles or imposing ethical rules on them, thus taking away the need for them to make free decisions. As making decisions is likely to cause unsolvable problems within man, they usually prefer to leave the decision to others – thus, e.g. they leave it to the Church to decide what is good and evil. In line with this, the Cardinal aims to transfer the task of formulating ethical rules and values to the Church in order to free man from the need to make decisions and judgments (and at the same time exercise his power over them), and this is exactly what both Wittgenstein and Dostoevsky were opposed to. As can be seen in numerous examples of Wittgenstein’s reflection on ethics, he was decidedly against any dogmatic rules, thus against any theories imposed on man, but pleaded for the individual’s pursuance of an ethical way of life guided by his very conscience. Insofar he was an advocate of human freedom of the will, if, however, only in a restricted sense because human freedom finds its limits in God’s orders.²⁰ In this respect one could speak of a religious determinism in Wittgenstein’s thought, not unlike that of Spinoza. However, freedom lies in the very recognition of the necessity and thus acceptance of God’s will in every respect. In fact, any refusal to obey God’s command would lead to unhappiness, to being totally lost. Still, Wittgenstein, several times, revolts against total submission to God, e.g. one time saying that his knees are too stiff to kneel in order to pray (MS 133, p.  42r), or he expresses a “storm of outrage” (DB 1997, p. 213) against God. Similarly, Ivan Karamazov speaks of rebellion in view of man’s hardships, and of not being able to comprehend God’s plans. His intellect refuses to see something good, or a so-called underlying harmony, in the world in spite of its misery, nor is he able to grasp logically the mystery of God, i.e. of religious belief, as he only relies on facts.

20 Cf., e.g., Wittgenstein’s view on which understanding of the good in theological ethics is the more profound one (McGuinness 1979, p. 115). Cf., too, his diaries of the 1930s where he feels compelled by God to carry out his orders in every respect. (DB 1997, p.  177ff.) Cf. also Wittgenstein’s “nightly (dream-)experience” in: Somavilla 2004a, p. 7–22.

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In an extensive conversation with Alyoscha – a conversation circling around the problem of theodicy  –, Ivan describes the cruelties, especially those caused to innocent children: “The absurd is only too necessary on earth. The world stands on absurdities, and perhaps nothing would have come to pass in it without them. […]”, he tells Alyoscha. (Dostoevsky 2009, p. 267). Ivan is unable to solve the problem of understanding God. Long since he has decided not to try to comprehend, but to trust only facts (Dostoevsky 2009, p. 396) – a decision reminiscent of Wittgenstein. Ivan accepts God, but not the world created by God, and therefore respectfully returns the “admission ticket” to God (Dostoevsky 2009, p. 269). However, Ivan wants to live, to “live in spite of logic” (Dostoevsky 2009, p. 252f.). His thirst for life – a feature of the Karamazovs – is impossible to conquer, even while he is in the greatest despair. Just like his brothers – and Wittgenstein – he passionately loves life (e.g. “the sticky leaves in spring and the blue sky”), despite its bitterness.²¹ And Alyoscha enthusiastically agrees to love life with all of his being, to love life “apart from all logic”. (Cf. Dostoevsky 2009, p. 252f.) He emphasizes the importance of loving life more than the importance of understanding the meaning of life, as only on condition of loving it is it possible to understand its meaning.²² It is life, human life that leads to understanding, not abstract theories or logic. In contrast to Ivan’s doubts and fury over the misery of the world, Alyoscha sees in Christ the personification of God’s compassion and mercy. Therefore, Alyoscha, so to speak, excuses the gloomy side of the world. In other words, his personal solution to the problem of theodicy lies in the fact that God sacrificed his son for mankind, which proves that he is all-forgiving. Dostoevsky’s view of Christianity parallels Wittgenstein’s idea of it  – not only in content, but also in the way he presents his ideas, i.e. not as theories, but by describing the inner state of men who sin and suffer through their outward actions and behaviour.²³ He also manages to address the great differences

21 All of them come to realize the paradox of the world’s cruelties and beauties due to their acute awareness – their awakening in the sense of Georg Trakl’s words: “Gefühl in den Augenblicken totenähnlichen Seins: Alle Menschen sind der Liebe wert. Erwachend fühlst du die Bitternis der Welt; darin ist alle deine ungelöste Schuld; dein Gedicht eine unvollkommene Sühne.” (Aphorismus 2 in: Trakl 1985, p. 255) 22 See Wittgenstein’s letter to Bertrand Russell (presumably written around Christmas 1913): “[…] but how can I be a logician if I am not a human being!” (McGuinness et. al, p. 65f.) 23 Cf. Wittgenstein on this topic: “Christianity is not a doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has happened & will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life. For ‘recognition of sin’ is an actual occurrence & so is despair & so is redemption through faith. Those who speak of it (like Bunyan) are simply

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between, i.e. the manifold meanings of, ethical and religious values by vividly illustrating them through the portrayal of his protagonists, as can be seen in the Brothers Karamazov. Even though they are brothers, they differ significantly in character and, consequently, in their outlook on life, ethics and religion. Thus, Ivan e.g. is the intellectual sceptic, and Alyoscha is the gentle, good-hearted and unshakeable believer, who cannot love passively, but only love actively in the sense of acting in order to help others.²⁴ Despite their great differences, though, all three have something in common – they are all “Karamazovs”, as they emphasise repeatedly. They share a passionate nature, even if they are driven in different directions by their passion: Mitya’s passionate heart leads him to excessive drinking and numerous love-affairs, Ivan, the apparently cold and abstract thinker, reveals passion in his doubts about God and in his fury at the cruelties in the world, Alyoscha passionately pursues an ethical way of life in the sense of Jesus Christ, a life devoted to others in active love.²⁵ The varying forms of passion to be found in the brothers could equally well have led to other consequences, that is to say, they all have something “higher” within their heart, but also an inclination for the “lower”. Even pure and innocent Alyoscha once remarks to his brother Mitya that he fears to have the impulse to do something wild and sinful, and to Lise he similarly confirms that he is “a Karamazov, too”, having touched in his thoughts a lot of issues she would not imagine him capable of being occupied with. All of them have inherited the “primitive force of the Karamazovs”, a “crude, unbridled, earthly force” (Dostoevsky 2009, p. 241) – a dark force reminiscent of Schopenhauer’s will – that is apt to result in sensual excesses and vileness as is the case with Mitya and his father. In addition, the strength of the “Karamazovian baseness” is a strength that endures everything (Dostoevsky 2009, p. 289).

describing what has happened to them; whatever gloss someone may want to put on it!” (VB 1998, p. 32e) 24 After having met Wittgenstein for the first time on the 23rd of July in 1914, Ludwig von Ficker wrote that he reminded him of Dostoevsky’s Alyoscha Karamazov or Duke Myschkin (cf. Ficker 1954, p. 236f.). To me, Wittgenstein has also features which resemble Ivan’s, especially in his rational reasoning and scepticism, his doubts as regards religious belief. 25 Similarly, Wittgenstein’s idea of an ethical and religious way of life lay both in a change of life (as discussed before) and in active love for others. To Drury he remarked: “If you and I are to live religious lives, it mustn’t be that we talk a lot about religion, but that our manner of life is different. It is my belief that only if you try to be helpful to other people will you in the end find your way to God.” (Drury 1981b, p. 129)

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However, despite his inclination for the so called lower physical drives, Mitya, deep inside, has something noble; not only is he a good-hearted and generous person, but also a thoroughly religious and philosophical man, and so is his brother Ivan despite his doubts and scorn about religiosity. Fyodor Karamazov, their father, is the most sensual and “mean” character, however, there are a few moments when he shows an impulse for philosophical and religious questions, as well  – despite his mockery about them. Above all, he now and then seems to have compassion for others, despite his cruelty and apparent heartlessness. The so-called “Karamazovian nature” can be seen as symbolizing man’s ambiguous nature in general, his conflicting tendencies towards all kinds of different traits and deeds – towards vileness and nobleness, towards cruelty and compassion alike.

Joy and Love as Determining Factors for a Happy Life The ethical aspect of the happy life is not only to be understood in terms of a life of knowledge, devoted to the spirit, but – most importantly – as an ethical way of life that shows itself in a change of life and in deeds of active love for others. Besides, the happy life lies in the awareness of life’s beauty, its preciousness, in other words, in an attitude of wonder at the existence of the world. Thus, love and joy of life are intrinsically related and the signs of a happy life. All these aspects can be looked at in both an immanent and in a transcendent perspective  – transcendent in the transformation of the individual’s physical nature into a spiritual one, i.e. his elevation beyond sensual drives and beyond space and time (similar to Schopenhauer’s pure subject of knowledge), thus living in the present, not in time; immanent in the sense of being devoted to the concrete phenomena of the physical world and in loving care for one’s fellow human beings. In this sense the contemplative approach toward the existence of the world as illustrated in Wittgenstein’s Lecture on Ethics is an ethical approach which prepares the path to a happy life in the sense of living in harmony with the world, and with an attentive and responsible attitude towards others – thus fulfilling the ultimate purpose of life. The aspect of happiness as discernible in a spiritual and ethical way of life, and in the love for and the joy about the world, can be observed throughout the Brothers Karamazov. According to Father Zossima, it is the actual meaning of life: “For men are made for happiness, and any one who is completely happy has a right to say to himself, ‘I am doing God’s will on earth.’ All the righteous, all the saints, all the holy martyrs were happy.” (Dostoevsky 2009, p. 54f.)

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It is precisely through the experience of guilt that man comes to realize how happy life could be if he were not guilty; he longs for this “other life” like a man in the dark for the light. The same occurs through suffering and in the change of one’s life, i.e. by a resurrection, so to speak, as the person resurrected perceives the world as if newly born, so that he wonders at its existence, the miracle of the cosmos as if seen for the first time. And the same holds in the case of a life of knowledge: in a state devoted to the spiritual man is acutely aware of the fullness of life and thus experiences those ’rare moments of happiness’, as described by, say, Schopenhauer in connection with aesthetic contemplation. From here it is only one step to the ethical which causes even more lasting happiness by compassionate empathy toward one’s fellow human beings, by active love (as is the case with Alyoscha and Father Zossima). In his diary of the 1930s, when reflecting on the significance of miracles, Wittgenstein refers to a passage in The Brothers Karamazov in which Brother Passaij, at the coffin of Father Zossima, reads a passage from the Gospels about the wedding in Kana. The effect of the story is expressed by Alyoscha who realizes the deeper meaning of the story: By transforming water into wine, Jesus Christ wanted to give joy to men, for this lay at the centre of his heart. “Whoever loves men, loves their joy, as well”, Zossima used to say to Alyoscha, and he taught that “life was a great joy and not a vale of tears” (Dostoevsky 2009, p. 369). Zossima appears in Alyoscha’s dream and also tells him that he now was invited to the wedding and that Jesus was expecting more and more people, as he wanted to transform water into wine so that their joy would never end. After this dream Aljoscha has a mystical experience, in communion and love with the earth and men – similar to the experience of the Steinklopferhanns in Anzengruber’s play. And similar to the distinction drawn in the Lecture on Ethics between a scientific view of a fact and the view of a fact as a miracle, Wittgenstein emphasizes that the significance of the transformation of water into wine at the wedding of Kana as portrayed by Dostoevsky does not lie in the extraordinary nature of the event, but in the spirit in which this was done, a spirit symbolizing Christ’s love for men. (Cf. DB 1997, p. 82f.) There are a number of other passages in the novel where Dostoevsky’s notion of joy and happiness can be found: Mitya’s belief to find joy even in a life in prison or Alyoscha’s steady joy in his compassion and love for others. When praying to God, he praises him and the beauty of the cosmos, thus finding peace and joy (Dostoevsky 2009, p.  258)  – a joy reminiscent of Wittgenstein’s “wonder at the existence of the world” – an ethical and religious attitude towards the world. To summarize, I contend that to perceive the preciousness and beauty of the world and, as a consequence, to live in happiness, can be achieved in the following ways:

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a) by a life of knowledge as discussed in Wittgenstein’s Notebooks 1914–1916 – a spiritual life that renounces material wealth etc. b) by an ethical approach towards the world, a mystic contemplation as described by Wittgenstein (as well as by Anzengruber, Schopenhauer and others). c) by the experience of personal sufferings as expressed in Mitya’s fate, or the fate of Markel, the brother of Father Zossima, who died young and when approaching his death became acutely aware of the beauty and joy of life he had not realized before. “Life is great and joyful” he exclaims (Dostoevsky 2009, p. 317), and it is a sin not to be aware of the miraculous nature of the world, and not to praise life. d) by the awareness of guilt, portrayed in the figure of Mitya, and in the mysterious stranger Mihail, who had murdered a young woman – let alone Raskolnikov and other characters in Dostoevsky’s novels. This leads to the realisation how happy life could be if it were not ruined by sin. e) by a change of life, a spiritual rebirth, that leads man to see the world as if for the first time, as if “born anew”, and thus let him appreciate and love the uniqueness of life. It is from the very consciousness of the uniqueness of one’s life that religion – science – and art arise, as Wittgenstein noted. (Cf. TB 1961, 1st August 1916) All of the five points mentioned are interlinked and to be seen in connection with ethics and religion – the awareness of God’s love and mercy, as Dostoevsky shows. In Wittgenstein’s personal writings, the same awareness can be found: in his incessant awareness of guilt and his longing for salvation, for a happy life that stands in contrast to the unhappiness he experienced in what he took to be his sinful life: “[…] there is a glorious sun here, & a bad person.– ” (DB 1997, p. 222), he put in code in his diary alluding to his situation. Or, two days later: “I am petitioning & I already have it as I want to have it: namely half heaven, half hell!” (DB 1997, p. 223) However, he knows that suffering is an indispensable requirement for reflecting on philosophical, in particular ethical and religious questions, and states: “To get rid of the torments of the mind, that is to get rid of religion.” (DB 1997, p. 191) In his last conversation with Alyoscha, Father Zossima tells him that he ought to go out into the world and that he would have many misfortunes but that he would find happiness in them and bless life. To realize life’s beauty and happiness after having suffered severely, and then bless it and inspire other people to bless it, as well, is what matters most for Zossima (Dostoevsky 2009, p.  314). In the moment of death, he kneels down and kisses the earth in a gesture of love and praise for its very existence. (Dostoevsky 2009, p. 361)

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Similarly, Alyoscha in his mystical experience after his dream, throws himself down on the earth, embracing and kissing it, weeping, vowing passionately to love it for ever and ever: “[…] his soul, overflowing with rapture, yearned for freedom, space, openness […] There seemed to be threads from all those innumerable worlds of God, linking his soul to them, and it was trembling all over ‘in contact with other worlds.’” (Dostoevsky 2009, p. 404) “Life is a paradise, and we are all in paradise, but we won’t see it, if we would, we should have heaven on earth the next day”, said the brother of Zossima when approaching his death and he cried  – for joy, not for grief. (Dostoevsky 2009, p. 317f.) The crucial point in trying to achieve happiness is to be aware of happiness, in other words, man’s indifference to the miracle of life is one of the hindrances to leading a happy life. In this respect Wittgenstein’s example of “wonder at the existence of the world” as his foremost experience for an understanding of ethics conveys Dostoevsky’s concern about the happy man. And Mihail, the mysterious stranger in The Brothers Karamazov, confirms Zossima’s opinion in saying that “life is heaven” and “heaven lies hidden within all of us”. However, we are all responsible for it. As soon as we would understand this, the “Kingdom of Heaven” would be “not a dream, but a living reality”. (Dostoevsky 2009, p. 335) Any crime and guilt in the world is caused by us, Dostoevsky contends (reminiscent of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of the will). And similar to Schopenhauer’s description of the principium individuationis, he sees the reason for unhappiness and cruelty in man’s egoism and isolation. (Cf. Dostoevsky 2009, p. 336) It is an absolute necessity to break one’s isolation and face other people with compassion and love. Indeed, love is the principal demand and the most important step to leading a life in joy and happiness. Despite its unsparing portrayal of the cruelties committed and endured by man, Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov reads like a praise of life: a praise of its beauty and uniqueness and a credo to love it passionately – as the only means to conquer pain, suffering and sin.

III. Conclusion In conclusion, I would like to suggest that the significance of authors like Anzengruber and Dostoevsky (and Tolstoy) for Wittgenstein’s notion of ethics and religion was invaluable and can hardly be overestimated. These authors, in his view, were successful in leading their readers to an understanding in matters about which abstract theories are unable to teach us anything. Only in the fields

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of literature and the arts did he think it possible to show something about these matters. The message that we should strive after a happy life despite the misery of the world, as conveyed in Dostoevsky’s novels, seems to have impressed Wittgenstein in a similar way as did Anzengruber’s depiction of the mystical experience of a union with nature and God. We can see this clearly in his early Notebooks, but also in various remarks scattered throughout the Nachlass. Above all, traces of these ideas can be found, and are developed, in the Lecture on Ethics, where Wittgenstein  – in a style more literary than scientific and based on his very subjective experiences – deals with the issues which were closest to his heart and at the centre of his thought: ethics and the limits of language, along with his appeal for an attitude of awe towards the world, the cosmos and one’s life which, despite its hurtful paradoxes, man has to accept with a kind of joy. Wittgenstein’s appeal to wonder at the existence of the world – his “example par excellence” – reads like a hymn which is meant to praise the world for the pure fact that it is.

Bibliography Alber, Martin/McGuinness, Brian/Seekircher, Monika (Eds) (2000): Wittgenstein und die Musik. Briefwechsel Ludwig Wittgenstein – Rudolf Koder. Innsbruck: Haymon. Anzengruber, Ludwig (1872): “Die Kreuzelschreiber”. In: Ludwig Anzengrubers Gesammelte Werke. Vol. 6. Stuttgart, Berlin: G. Cotta’sche Buchhandlung Nachfolger. Baum, Wilhelm (Ed.) (1991): Ludwig Wittgenstein. Geheime Tagebücher 1914–1916. Vienna: Turia & Kant. Dostoevsky, Fyodor (1922): Die Dämonen. Vol. 2. Munich: R. Piper & Co. Dostoevsky, Fyodor (2006): Crime and Punishment. Translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett. The Project Gutenberg EBook, http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2554, accessed 08/03/2013 Dostoevsky, Fyodor (2009): The Brothers Karamazov. Translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett. New York: The Lowell Press. The Project Gutenberg EBook. http://www.gutenberg. org/files/28054/28054-h/28054-h.html, accessed 08/03/2013 Drury, Maurice O’C. (1981a): “Some Notes on Conversations with Wittgenstein”. In: Ludwig Wittgenstein. Personal Recollections. Rush Rhees (Ed.). Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, p. 90–111. Drury, Maurice O’C. (1981b): “Conversations with Wittgenstein”. In: Ludwig Wittgenstein. Personal Recollections. Rush Rhees (Ed.). Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, p. 112–184. Feldman, Seymour (Ed.) (1992): Spinoza, Baruch: Ethics. Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect and Selected Letters. Translated by Samuel Shirley. Indianapolis, Cambridge: Hackett. Ficker, Ludwig von (1954): “Frühlicht über den Gräbern. II. Rilke und der unbekannte Freund. In memoriam Ludwig Wittgenstein.” In: Der Brenner 18, p. 234–248.

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Iven, Matthias (Ed.) (2006): “Ludwig sagt…” Die Aufzeichnungen der Hermine Wittgenstein. Berlin: Parerga. Jaspers, Karl (1970): Chiffren der Transzendenz. Munich: Piper. Malcolm, Norman (1984): Ludwig Wittgenstein. A Memoir and a Biographical Sketch by G.H. von Wright. New Edition with Wittgenstein’s Letters to Malcolm. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. McGuinness, Brian (Ed.) (1979): Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle. Conversations recorded by Friedrich Waismann. Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble. McGuinness, Brian/von Wright, Georg Henrik (Eds) (1995): Ludwig Wittgenstein. Cambridge Letters. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. McGuinness, Brian/Ascher, Maria Concetta/Pfersmann, Otto (Eds) (1996): Wittgenstein. Familienbriefe. Vienna: Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky. Parak, Franz (1991): “Wittgenstein in Monte Cassino”. In: Wilhelm Baum (Ed.): Ludwig Wittgenstein. Geheime Tagebücher 1914–1916. Vienna: Turia & Kant, p. 141–154. Rhees, Rush (Ed.) (1981): Ludwig Wittgenstein. Personal Recollections. Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield. Schopenhauer, Arthur (1977): Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung I und II. Zurich: Diogenes. Somavilla, Ilse (Ed.) (2012): Begegnungen mit Wittgenstein – Ludwig Hänsels Tagebücher 1918/19 und 1921/22. Innsbruck: Haymon. Somavilla, Ilse (Ed.) (2004a): Ludwig Wittgenstein. Licht und Schatten. Ein nächtliches (Traum-) Erlebnis und ein Brief-Fragment. Innsbruck: Haymon. Somavilla, Ilse (2004b): “Wittgensteins Metapher des Lichts”. In: Ulrich Arnswald/Jens Kertscher/Matthias Kroß: Wittgenstein und die Metapher. Berlin: Parerga, S. 361–385. Somavilla, Ilse/McGuinness, Brian (Eds) (2006): Wittgenstein – Engelmann. Briefe, Begegnungen, Erinnerungen. Innsbruck: Haymon. Somavilla, Ilse/Unterkircher, Anton/Berger, Christian Paul (Eds) (1994): Ludwig Hänsel – Ludwig Wittgenstein. Eine Freundschaft. Briefe. Aufsätze. Kommentare. Innsbruck: Haymon. Tolstoy, Leo (1995): Volkserzählungen. Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun. Tolstoy, Leo (2009): War and Peace. The Project Gutenberg EBook. (An Anonymous Volunteer and David Widger). http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2600, accessed 08/03/2013. Trakl, Georg (1985): Das dichterische Werk. On the basis of the historical-critical edition by Walther Killy and Hans Szklenar. Munich: dtv Klassik. Salzburg: Otto Müller. Von Wright, Georg Henrik (1982): Wittgenstein. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Von Wright, Georg Henrik/Methlagl, Walter (Eds) (1969): Ludwig Wittgenstein. Briefe an Ludwig von Ficker. Salzburg: Otto Müller. Watzlawick, Paul: Wie wirklich ist die Wirklichkeit? In: Dostoevsky, Fyodor: Der Großinquisitor. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der Großinquisitor, accessed March 16, 2012.

Paul Davies

A Remarkable Fact: Wittgenstein Reading  Tolstoy 1. Don’t take it as a matter of course, but as a remarkable fact (ein merkwürdiges Faktum), that pictures and fictitious narratives (erdichtete Erzählungen) give us pleasure, occupy our minds. (“Don’t take it as a matter of course” means: find it surprising, as you do some other things which disturb you. Then what is problematic will disappear, by your accepting the one fact as you do the other.) ((The transition from obvious nonsense to something which is unobvious nonsense.)) (PI 2009, p. 150)

This section (524) from the Philosophical Investigations comprises three seemingly straightforward parts, each permitting an equally straightforward summary: (A) an opening instruction or invitation – treat as remarkable the fact that you draw pleasure from and think about pictures or fictional narratives; (B) a clarification of the instruction or invitation – find the fact as surprising as you do other more disturbing things and the “disturbing” features of these other things will fade; and (C) a comment on the results of following the instruction or of accepting the invitation  – you will move from the obvious (patent) nonsense of what disturbs you or what you have previously deemed to be problematic to the unobvious (latent) nonsense of something you have always found unproblematically pleasurable and thought-provoking. On a first reading, this appeal to a remarkable fact and to the transition it brings about seems consistent with a dominant pedagogical method of the Investigations. A “philosophical problem” or set of “philosophical problems” is robbed of its problematizing power by being brought into the vicinity of a phenomenon that we must accept functions unproblematically. This latter phenomenon is sufficiently like those supposedly generating the initial problem that to be forced to recall the phenomenon is to realise that the error lay in the generating of the problem itself rather than in any of the theoretical attempts to resolve it. So summarized, this first reading, invites us to recall the ease with which we accede to the content of the painting or story, to its fictional worlds, characters and events. It then asks us to contrast this experience with one in which a series

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of doubts or worries has rendered things difficult, a situation in which we find ourselves no longer trusting to the relations among and between what we see and say and between what we see and say and the seen or said world. Somehow, in the very act of drawing the contrast, what is problematic or disturbing in the one experience can itself be experienced as dissolving or fading away. The absurdity or nonsensical nature of the worry becomes apparent. And yet, assuming for the moment that we can identify some relevantly unproblematic element in our experience of paintings and fictitious narratives, is its specificity not going to be immediately lost in the generalising qualification of (B)? On this first reading, (B) seems to treat the invitation to find these fictions remarkable as a means to an end, namely to dispel philosophical confusion about something other than these fictions and our experiences of them. But, if this is the case, surely any unproblematic phenomena or experience would do. In other words, the only “remarkable” thing about pictures and fictitious narratives is going to turn out to be a feature they share with all “unproblematic phenomena”, and the only reason for its being remarked on is simply in order to restore an “unproblematic” status to the rogue phenomenon in question, i.e., something that is not a picture or narrative of the relevant sort? Consequently, the point of our finding X remarkable would seem to be ultimately to admit its unremarkableness, its being enough like the unremarkable not-X to be effective as its remarkable analogue. And on this reading and despite appearances, the section really has nothing to do with pictures and fictions however remarkable. Peter Hacker’s interpretation of § 524 unfolds along just these lines: Why ought we to find it surprising that we enjoy fiction or genre-painting? Because they share features with factual discourse which occasion puzzlement in philosophical reflection about the latter. If those very features do not strike us as puzzling in the domain of fiction and painting, then arguably they should not disturb us in the domain of factual discourse either. (Hacker 1996, p. 226)

Although Hacker agrees that Wittgenstein identifies and remarks on fiction and genre-painting as “proto-phenomena”, the purpose of the identification and remarking are primarily “methodological”. Hacker hastily notes the languagegame(s) or, rather, notes Wittgenstein’s mentioning of them, and then steps back, considering the whole section as a “methodological observation” on the general aims and procedures of the Investigations. It is ironic then that the final parenthetical comment which, on this first reading, should presumably do no more than simply restate the aim of the “remarking” turns out to be such an idiosyncratic one. The transition announced in (C) from “patent to latent nonsense” cannot help but remind the reader of the famous formulation of § 464 (“My aim is: to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is

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patent nonsense”). But doesn’t § 524 reverse § 464, naming or describing a move from obvious or unhidden nonsense to hidden nonsense, from patent to latent rather than from latent to patent, where the latter gives us the familiar general lesson of the Investigations? Putting a brave gloss on it, Hacker writes that the transition in § 524 “ostensibly reverses § 464 although the methodological point is essentially the same” (Hacker 1996, p). But is it? It is not difficult to see why Hacker has to think there is nothing worth pursuing in the reversal and so nothing to be gained by our trying to understand the transition “from patent to latent” otherwise. We know that we are expected to read through it to the dominant moral or result that concludes each and any noting of a language-game, but do we have to accept it? Hacker cites § 654 where Wittgenstein underscores the irreducibility of a language-game by employing the notion of a “proto-phenomenon”. To note and to realise that here it is a matter of a language-game or proto-phenomenon is inter alia to show that explanation is neither warranted nor available here. § 655 adds the requisite emphasis: “The point is not to explain a language-game by means of our experiences, but to take account of a language-game (die Feststellung eines Sprachspiels)” (PI 2009, p. 175). The temptation is to move as quickly as possible from the noting or taking account of a language-game to the appeal to the effects of that noting, namely, words productively and legitimately at use in this context, to the generalising conclusion about metaphysics, grammar, and the everyday. But what if noting or taking account of a language-game was not always an easy thing to do? What if, for example, far from being a methodological aside, the invitation issued in (A) – “Don’t take it as a matter of course but as a remarkable fact that pictures and fictitious narratives give us pleasure and occupy our minds” – was not an easy invitation to accept and that its being issued in this manner by Wittgenstein ought to make the reader hesitate. Hacker is confident. There is no need for hesitation here. (A) is quickly read and the remarkable fact noted. In moving from (A) to (B), we are to induce “(artificial) puzzlement about fiction or painting” in order to disabuse ourselves of the philosophical and in some sense “real” puzzlement that has arisen in “our understanding of factual discourse”. When we do this, the patent nonsense of the theories we develop to try to resolve this “artificial puzzlement” will emerge and the liberating contrast with the “real” or “philosophical” case can be made. On Hacker’s interpretation then, the noting or taking account of the fictional case leads to the contriving of a worry about it where the absurdity of the lengths we would have to go to in order to develop a theory capable of handling that worry should convince us of the absurdity of the inherited or already established philosophical case. But is there not something peculiar in being asked to generate an artificial puzzlement about these proto-phenomena? Must problems about the fictional case be contrived? Are they not already well-es-

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tablished, and has not philosophy, at least since Plato, found much that is deeply troubling in our capacity to produce and enjoy fictions and fictional representations? There are a host of attempts – epistemological, metaphysical, moral, and logical – to constrain and to legislate for that capacity, and again at least since Plato. It is surely a bit odd to be asked first to admit the lack of any perplexity and then to have to contrive to induce some. This first reading (Hacker’s interpretation) is thus vulnerable to at least three criticisms. Firstly, it does not really treat genre pictures and fictitious narratives as anything remarkable, nor does it accept them as philosophically noteworthy, and there is no lingering either with them or with Wittgenstein’s invitation to consider them. Secondly, it implies, mistakenly, that genre pictures and fictitious narratives are not to be counted among those phenomena or experiences that have traditionally troubled philosophy. And thirdly, it seems to have taken that closing double parenthetical comment (C) to mean the opposite of what it appears to mean, there being no need to spend any time wondering about what might be going on with a deliberate inverting or re-ordering here. In what follows, we will move towards an alternative reading of §  524. We will read it as issuing a very different invitation or instruction than that presumed by Hacker. § 524 asks us to consider not only what is remarkable in our engagements with certain sorts of pictures and narratives but also what is involved in remarking, noting, or taking account of it. Although the reference is fleeting, §  524 also gives us an opportunity to reflect on the relationship between Wittgenstein’s later philosophy and literature, in particular literary fiction, for here, we shall argue, is an instance when Wittgenstein says something specifically about fictions as proto-phenomena and about how we might be expected to attend to them. To help us, we will draw on a particular fictional or fictitious narrative, beginning with some of the features that first make that fiction distinctive for Wittgenstein and then make it worth distinguishing philosophically for us.

2. Much has been written about the striking differences between two of Tolstoy’s late fictions, his last novel, Resurrection, and the posthumously published novella Hadji Murat, differences reflected in almost every aspect and on almost all levels, differences of style, form, and content, differences in the narrating voices and in the way the narratives themselves are framed, introduced and brought to their conclusions.

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Resurrection ends with the central character finding a sort of despairing peace after his lengthy encounters with the injustice, social shame and degradation visited upon the poor, the weak, and the sick. These encounters began with his realisation that through his seduction of a servant he was the protected and seemingly invulnerable cause of one such visitation. The relentlessness of Nekhlyudov’s moral and spiritual dismantling brings him, alone and unable to sleep, to the Gospels, and especially to a reading of St. Matthew’s gospel where the incoherence of its instructions cannot undo his sense that they contain something essentially good. The Sermon on the Mount comes to seem less like the propounding of an abstract moral theory than the practical description of a possible life. The closing sentences: “This, then, must be my life’s work. One task is completed and another is ready to my hand.” That night an entirely new life began for Nekhlyudov, not so much because he had entered into new conditions of life but because everything that happened to him from that time on was endowed with an entirely different meaning for him. How this new chapter of his life will end, the future will show. (Tolstoy 1966, p. 568)

Hadji Murat opens with the narrator walking in the fields and coming across a “Tartar-thistle bush” (Tolstoy 2006, p.  558). The strength of the thistle in resisting any attempt to pick or gather its flowers reminds the narrator of “an old tale of the Caucasus” and prompts its retelling. Hadji Murat, a Chechen warlord, betrays the separatist cause and joins the Russians. Despite gaining their respect and friendship, his value as a bargaining tool leaves him in an impossible position, ill at ease everywhere and with everyone. The novella ends with the recounting of his death. Fatally wounded, Hadji Murat thinks of his closest Russian acquaintance, he thinks of his son and wife, he thinks of his non-Russian enemy. And these memories running through his mind evoked no feelings in him, no pity, ill will or desire of any kind. It all seemed so insignificant compared to what was now beginning and had already begun for him. But his powerful body meanwhile continued what it had started to do. (Tolstoy 2006, p. 463)

And when even this physical struggle ceases: He did not move, but could still feel, and when Hadji-Aha, the first to reach him, struck him across the head with his great dagger, he felt he was being hit on the head with a hammer and failed to understand who was doing this and why. This was the last conscious link with his body. He felt no more, and the object that was trampled and slashed by his enemies had no longer any connection with him. (Tolstoy 2006, p. 463)

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As his killers celebrate, the narrator makes two closing remarks, one inside the recollected story of Hadji Murat (“The nightingales, which were silent while the shooting lasted again burst into song, first one nearby, then others in the distance.”) and the other outside the recollection, drawing it back to its inauguration (“This was the death that was brought to my mind by the crushed thistle in the ploughed field.” Tolstoy 2006, p. 464). The thematic and stressed differences between the fictions are obvious and might be arranged as a series of binary and non-binary contrasts, among them: Russian/Chechen (or Russian/Chechen-Russian; war/peace; a conclusion focused on a soul/a conclusion focused on a body; Christian/Muslim (or Christian/MuslimChristian); the spiritual/the natural; and “lilies of the field”/“Tartar-thistle”. It is the stubbornness of the thorn that reminds the narrator of Hadji Murat as a genius of resistance. Hadji Murat refuses to give up easily on life, a refusal to submit that extends to the non-negotiable demands of friendship and family. The thistle and the tale show Hadji Murat as admirable even in his betrayals, for it is friendship and family that lead him into a paradoxical “between”. Resurrection closes with the promise and possibility of a new and genuinely good life; the story of Hadji Murat closes with the end of an impossible life, a life become impossible. How pallid is Nekhyludov’s conversion in comparison to Hadji Murat’s death and, as a fiction, how ill-conceived. Throughout the novel a hectoring voice seems to accompany our reading, permitting no ambiguity or complication. No narrative or literary tension is detectable between the life stories Nekhyludov hears, the moral lessons he and we are supposed to discern in them, and the telling of these stories and lessons. Resurrection seems to resent being a work of narrative fiction; Hadji Murat seems to delight in the fact that it can be nothing else. Consider, on the one hand, the intricate and deliberate staging of the stories within stories in the novella, Hadji Murat’s early Chechen life narrated to his new Russian companions or captor-companions, his killing recalled following the presentation of his severed head, and, on the other hand, the tedious litany of woeful experiences in the novel. But hope will have to come from somewhere the central character and the reader of Resurrection think, already of course knowing where it is supposed to come from and where it will come from when both have suffered enough to warrant it. In Hadji Murat, there is no hope, yet the story has presented and represented the hopes of individuals, families, and cultures so forcefully, that they and the tale grow visceral in the reading of them. Consider as well the complex events of communicating and non-communicating in the novella. A character begins to recount his experiences of Hadji Murat and a single misplaced word reveals another unintended truth. A character can be genuinely mourned and his death bring genuine and selfish relief to the same person in the self-same instant and the self-same thought. When Hadji Murat and

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Prince Vorontsov meet, the need for interpreters intensifies and disseminates the non-interpretable content of the first conversation: Vorontsov listened to the interpreter, then looked at Hadji Murat. Hadji Murat, too, looked at Vorontsov. As they met, the eyes of these two men said much that words could not express and not at all what the interpreter had said. Without a word passing between them each stated the plain truth about the other: Vorontsov’s eyes declared that he did not believe a single word of what Hadji Murat had said, that he knew he was the enemy of everything Russian and always would be, and that he was submitting now only because he was forced to. Hadji Murat understood this, but nonetheless assured him of his loyalty. At the same time his own eyes were saying that this old man ought to be thinking of death rather than war, but, old as he was, he was sly and he would have to be on his guard. Vorontsov understood too but nonetheless explained to Hadji Murat what he considered necessary for a successful outcome of the war. (Tolstoy 2006, p. 384)

This is a meeting between strangers, but nothing in the meeting or in the references to the concealed thoughts and non-verbal messages conveyed by the participants reduces the particular strangeness of Hadji Murat. In Hadji Murat we are introduced to a voice and figure served by a silence. That voice and figure appear in many contexts, remembered, misremembered, quoted, and misquoted, his name whispered around the drawing-rooms (a “buzz of voices”), but none of these explains or captures it. Everything in the tales and in Tolstoy’s tale itself testifies to a fascination, but one that does not conform to an easy or invented exoticism. Again, compare this with Resurrection’s refusal to let anything be silent or to tell and be told on its own terms. Nekhyludov’s story is easily told and can be summarised and retold after the most perfunctory of readings. When we know all the story has to tell us of Hadji Murat we realise how little we know and how strange he remains, a strangeness that bequeaths to all the characters who meet or hear of him a surfeit of rumours, fantasies, and misconceptions. All of which, perhaps, is simply to say that the most important and the most striking difference between the two late fictions is that one fails and the other succeeds. In September 1945, Norman Malcolm reads Resurrection and in a letter to Wittgenstein includes a passage that he thinks especially impressive: One of the commonest and most generally accepted delusions is that every man can be qualified in some particular way – said to be kind, wicked, stupid, energetic, apathetic, and so on. People are not like that. We may say of a man that he is more often kind than cruel, more often wise than stupid, more often energetic than apathetic or vice versa, but it could never be true to say of one man that he is kind or wise, and of another that he is wicked or stupid. Yet we are always classifying mankind in this way. And it is wrong. Human beings are like rivers: the water is one and the same in all of them but every river is narrow in some places, flows swifter in others, here it is broad there still, or clear, or cold, or muddy or warm. It is the same with men. Every man bears within him the germs of every human

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quality, and now manifest one, now another, and frequently is quite unlike himself, while still the same man. (Malcolm 1984, p. 38; Tolstoy 1966, p. 252–253)

This is how the passage continues and how Tolstoy ploddingly reconnects the reflection to the story and to the central character: “In some the volte-face is particularly abrupt. And to this category belonged Nekhlyudov. His shifts of mood were due both to physical and to spiritual causes. And just such a change took place in him now” (Tolstoy 1966, p. 253). One can see why the novel might have struck Malcolm as the sort of literary artefact likely to appeal to Wittgenstein. It insists on moral change and improvement and seeks the exemplary simplicity of the Gospels purged of doctrine and dogma. St Matthew’s gospel was also Wittgenstein’s favourite and the experience of reading it, in the spirit and company of Tolstoy’s integrated edition of all four gospels, was one that he seems to have regarded as transformative.¹ On this occasion however, Wittgenstein’s response is dismissive: I once tried to read Resurrection but couldn’t. You see when Tolstoy just tells a story he impresses me infinitely more than when he addresses the reader. When he turns his back to the reader then he seems most impressive. Perhaps one day we can talk about his. It seems to me his philosophy is most true when it is latent in the story. (Malcolm 1984, p. 98)

Hadji Murat is the story of Tolstoy’s that Wittgenstein mentions most often; he recommends it to colleagues, friends, and students. Perhaps we can think of Tolstoy’s as the hectoring voice mentioned above, the voice that in Resurrection seems always to interrupt and explain and moralise the novel. And in Hadji Murat the absence of such a voice demonstrates Tolstoy’s “turning his back on the reader”, letting the story unfold in its own time and on its own terms.

1 This of course is something of an understatement. For a fuller account see Russell’s famous letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell where he recounts Wittgenstein’s buying a copy of Tolstoy’s Gospels in Brief while on active service in Galicia in 1915. And in a letter to von Ficker, Wittgenstein asserts that “this book in its time has almost kept me alive.” (Both are cited in Klagge 2011, p. 10 and p. 159–60.) There is of course much more to say about the influence of Tolstoy’s religious thought on and for Wittgenstein, and particularly on his reflections on the nature and possibility of a happy and harmonious life. (See Woodruffe 2002). For the present paper, it is enough to note that, however strong this religious and moral influence and so however profound Wittgenstein’s indebtedness to Tolstoy’s Christianity or his “ethical totalitarianism” (Engelmann, 1967, p. 109), what is compelling is how adamant he is about the failure (perhaps even the necessary failure) of its literary and fictional representation in Resurrection. To affirm or to opt for Hadji Murat in this context is perhaps to show that, for Wittgenstein, literature and fiction carry their own expectations and demands that a story will be told well.

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This turning of the back does not imply any lack of interest in the world beyond the story or even in the relation between the work and the world. It is not that the novella is more contrived than the novel, the novel more of a roman-a-clef or more dependent on its knowledge of the world. In the writing of both Resurrection and Hadji Murat, Tolstoy draws extensively on historical events and journalistic reports and on exhaustive research into the details of institutional and economic life. Indeed some of his most painstaking requests for information are found in letters pertaining to the composition of Hadji Murat, but this amassing of information never overruns the status of the project as a literary one. It always serves the writing of the story itself, the writing of the narrative as fiction. In turning his back on the reader, with this authorial non-interference, Tolstoy enables us to see and hear something we have never seen and heard before.² The reference to Tolstoy’s “philosophy” being “most true when latent in the story” cannot plausibly mean that the aim or even an aim of reading the story is to access a paraphraseable philosophical content. I take it that the passage cited by Malcolm could not or ought not to reappear in a presentation of Tolstoy’s “philosophy”. The failure of Resurrection is not just that it makes explicit what remains implicit or “latent” in Hadji Murat. Would reading the story for this philosophy or this content, even if it were a philosophy and a content unique to Hadji Murat, not also be tantamount to imagining Tolstoy turning to face us to explain or unpack the story? Surely such a reading would lose both the story and whatever there is in it that might be called “philosophy”. The “philosophy” said to be inherent within the story is not to be confused with a theory, moral or otherwise, that the reader can either extract from the work or apply to the work – a theory, moral or otherwise, that we might appeal to in order to present the work as an exemplary instance or manifestation of the theory. The “philosophy” integral to the story is indistinguishable from the integrity of the story. To refer to the latter already gives us all we can ever have of the former; it is, effectively, what must be meant by the former. Wittgenstein’s preference for the integrity of Hadji Murat over Resurrection and the extrinsic moralising and theorising that accompanies it chimes with a comment we find in Culture and Value concerning the idea that a work of art can have a communicative function. What if we were to suggest, as Tolstoy himself

2 It is worth wondering whether there is a significant specificity in its being Tolstoy’s fiction that is said to suffer when he addresses the reader. No generalizable claim is necessarily being made about a certain type of fiction. For instance, Wittgenstein much admired Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, a novel that constantly addresses, implicates and acknowledges the reader, and tries to imagine and second guess the reader’s thoughts and reactions.

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has done, that what is intrinsic to a work, say Hadji Murat, might be thought of as a feeling, a feeling the story succeeds in conveying? There is a lot to be learned from Tolstoy’s bad theorising about how a work of art conveys a “feeling” – You really could call it, not exactly the expression of a feeling, but at least an expression of feeling, or a felt expression. And you could say too that in so far as people understand it, they “resonate” in harmony with it, respond to it. You might say: the work of art does not aim to convey something else, just itself. Just as, when I pay someone a visit, I don’t just want to make him have feelings of such and such a sort; what I mainly want is to visit him, though of course I should like to be well received too. (VB 1980a, p. 58)

To receive or to respond to the work well might involve a feeling, but what is felt and the expression of that feeling cannot be indicated or considered apart from the work and my reading of it. Again the result of Wittgenstein’s intervention is to return us to nowhere else and to nothing other than the work. A “bad” aesthetic theory, such as Tolstoy’s, might be one in which a work is theorised as communicating a feeling and is subsequently judged in terms of the quality of, first, the feeling and, second, the means by which it is communicated. Wittgenstein renders the theorising acceptable by revising it: neither the communicated feeling nor the work considered as the means of communicating the feeling is separable from the work itself. What is felt when the work succeeds? The work. What is communicated when the work succeeds? The work. We go wrong, theoretically and philosophically, if we propose any other answer. “Hadji Murat” could successfully stand as a value for “work” in each of these answers; “Resurrection” could not. Does this comment from Culture and Value and our gloss on it contribute to a “good” theory of the literary work of art? Are we now theorising well? If we have gone wrong, theoretically and philosophically, in trying to identify an externalisable and paraphraseable content, have we not then gone right, theoretically and philosophically, in giving up on the attempt? More pertinently and as it appears to be consistent with the revised theorising alluded to in the extract from Culture and Value, is Wittgenstein’s comparative assessment and evaluation of Hadji Murat and Resurrection philosophically and theoretically significant? Everything here seems to hinge on a distinction between the composing of a story in which the concern is solely with the story itself and the composing of a story in which the reader is referred to a particular moral or message. This is not quite the familiar distinction between the story as an end in itself and the story as a means to an end, rather that the story written and read as story is thereby enabled to function in a way that thoughtfully engages us. But, the question remains, however thoughtful it may be, is that engagement philosophical? Is it

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philosophy that is being called on or called for here? Consider one reason for thinking that it is not.

3. In his essay on the overcoming of metaphysics through the logical analysis of language, Carnap famously exempts Nietzsche from achieving or aspiring to the status of metaphysics and so from the charge of producing nonsense. What Nietzsche gives us are works that are best categorised either as speculative but empirical (and therefore straightforwardly true or false) investigations into the history of morals, values, and concepts or as exercises in poetry and literature. Carnap has no problem in conceding the possibility and significance of literature and literary production. All sorts of things might be said or done in and with poems and novels, and such things may add to our thoughts and conversations about the world and our experiences of it or about moral predicaments and the absurdities of human existence, but nothing is to be gained by calling any of this philosophical or by insisting that the work literature is doing is somehow implicitly philosophy. Even in its most austere incarnation, logical positivism can easily reject the accusation of philistinism. Novelists, poets, literary scholars and critics can all be said to contribute to the knowledgeable appreciation of the world. Carnap’s description of metaphysicians as musicians without musical ability might have also been rendered as poets or literary writers without poetic or literary ability. Whatever content a poem or novel possesses it is crucially its content, and it is to be encountered and understood only by reading the poem or novel. To the accusation that philosophy does not take literature seriously, it is again possible to reply that there is an arrogance in presuming that “taking literature seriously” must be synonymous with treating it as implicitly philosophical. A philosopher can take literature seriously by taking it as literature rather than as disguised philosophy, or again, by learning its languages or by trying a hand at literary criticism. A philosopher convinced of the importance and value of aesthetic enjoyment might demonstrate taking literature seriously by the simple act of recommending to others the works that have given her or him the most pleasure. A.J. Ayer seems to have had such a thought in mind when he expressed surprise at someone being interested in the contributions his philosophy might make to aesthetics (Ayer 1992, p. 326). He suggests that the part of his writing he thinks of as literary criticism can be counted as a kind of aesthetics although he sees no reason to regard it as philosophy. It seems that we can have the critical evaluations and discussions of, say, the differences between Resurrection and

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Hadji Murat without any of it being philosophy. There will I think be a Wittgenstein sympathetic to these responses, even to the extent of taking them to be true, but this cannot be the end of the matter. Why does it seem clear that Wittgenstein’s extra-philosophical remarks on literature will not stand in quite the same relationship to his philosophical work as Ayer’s do to his work? In 1949 Wittgenstein listened to a radio discussion between Ayer and Copleston on logical positivism, religious language, and the existence of God, and although he thought that what Ayer was saying was true, he expressed disapproval of the lack of seriousness on Ayer’s part.³ Copleston’s arguments were invalid but neither their invalidity nor the validity of Ayer’s objections to them could ever hope to clarify the nature and purpose of a religious life. For various reasons, some of them Tolstoyan, theistic belief for Wittgenstein has nothing to do with doctrine or demonstration. Ayer’s dismissals of Copleston’s demonstrations necessarily miss something important because they share with those demonstrations the assumption that they play a crucial role in establishing and justifying religious belief. Any treatment of Wittgenstein and religion would have to go far beyond any arguments or logical procedures he might share with Ayer. Is there an analogy here with how things stand in relation to literature? At first, it looks unlikely. Ayer was arguing against Copleston and engaging philosophically with his theological commitments. Philosophy, for Ayer, is entitled and is perhaps even obligated to challenge and undermine some of the essential components of theism. Wittgenstein does not accept this as an appropriate or tenable philosophical objective. But Ayer, cheerfully and modestly, denies any philosophical implications of his discussions of literature. Here, surely, Ayer and Wittgenstein stand together, the difference between Resurrection and Hadji Murat is not a philosophical difference and no philosophical argument expresses or secures it. Yet this was not quite the way I envisaged the analogy working. Ayer’s philosophy is incompatible with Copleston’s theism, as is Wittgenstein’s, if what is meant by Copleston’s theism includes Copleston’s claim that philosophy can demonstrate the validity of theism. Ayer, of course, wants to go further. His philosophy is incompatible with any acceptance of theism because even if the acceptance itself is not philosophical, the theism at issue, namely what is accepted, involves certain claims that are vulnerable to being undermined by philosophy. To the extent that Wittgenstein disputes the possibility of this further undermining, his philosophy is compatible with a theistic faith, with, for example, Tolstoyan Christianity. But does this not simply re-emphasize why the analogy fails. With respect to their remarks on literature, neither philosopher claims any philosophical justi-

3 The event is recalled in Monk 1991, p. 543.

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fication for their judgements or beliefs. The disparity that holds in the religious case does not hold here. Yet notice that Ayer’s slightly breezy dismissal of the idea that his literary criticism might in any way impinge on or be implicated in his philosophy effectively asserts that the question of the compatibility between his literary and his philosophical writings does not arise. His philosophy is non-trivially incompatible with theism and so non-trivially implicated in his beliefs about theism and theistic religion, whereas it is trivially compatible with his views on literature. Why trivially? Perhaps because any philosophy or any philosophy that admitted the possibility of pleasurable aesthetic experience could be compatible with those views. There is no argument or thesis propounded by Ayer that can be challenged by his evaluation of Flaubert and no evaluation of Flaubert with which Ayer’s philosophy could disagree, save one that aspired to be philosophical, which is what is ruled out on logical positivist grounds and which is also where we came in. Now consider Wittgenstein’s situation. His philosophy, on my reading, is non-trivially (i.e., interestingly) compatible with some versions of theism and so non-trivially consistent with his views on (Tolstoyan) Christianity and the religious life. What of his views on literature, for example on the differences between Hadji Murat and Resurrection? It seems to me that trivial compatibility does not accurately describe the situation. Although it is somehow obvious that Wittgenstein’s views on poetry and literature, on art and music, can be held sincerely and consistently by both the author of the Tractatus and the author of the Philosophical Investigations whatever the differences in the philosophical content of those works and however different their conceptions of philosophy, it is nevertheless also obvious that the Wittgenstein who continued to engage with the question of language and the understanding of language increasingly allowed the difference between literary or fictional and non-literary or non-fictional contexts to be mentioned and remarked on. With Ayer we find a philosophy non-trivially dismissive of theism and trivially comfortable with literature, a philosophy that will qua philosophy be troubled by neither, that will to this extent take neither seriously. With Wittgenstein we find a philosophy non-trivially responsive to both religion and literature (art and music) and to the lives, experiences, and language-games they help determine and make possible. Although this can never quite be an argument, I find it easier to accept Wittgenstein’s philosophical explorations as being non-trivially compatible with his extra-philosophical observations on literature, poetry, and music than to accept them as either (non-trivially or trivially) dismissive of them or trivially and uninterestingly compatible with them. Never quite an argument, because like Wittgenstein’s reaction to that radio programme, it is a matter of tone and of taking something seriously, of admitting that here there are phenomena to give the philosopher pause. There is an intensity to Wittgenstein’s interest in literature that must have repercussions

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for his philosophy. Literature, for example Hadji Murat and whatever it is that Tolstoy gets right in the composing of it, genuinely engages philosophy and the philosopher Wittgenstein.

4. At one point in the Philosophical Grammar, Wittgenstein does reflect on what it is to read and understand a sentence in a literary context, but having done so he almost immediately brings the reader up against what might be called the parenthetical temptation. I read a sentence from the middle of a story: “After he had said this, he left her as he did the day before.” Do I understand the sentence? – It’s not altogether easy to give an answer. It is an English sentence, and to that extent I understand it. I should know how the sentence might be used. I could invent a context for it. And yet I do not understand it in the sense in which I should understand it if I had read the story. (Compare various language-games: describing a state of affairs, making up a story, etc. What counts as a significant sentence in the several cases?) (PG 1974, p. 43)

Between parentheses, Wittgenstein asks us to “(c)ompare various languagegames: describing a state of affairs, making up a story, etc.” He asks us to consider “(w)hat counts as a significant sentence in the several cases”. By now invitations and questions of this sort seem to be easily read and assimilated. Characteristically Wittgensteinian, they have become so familiar, as has the emancipatory purpose for which the comparisons are supposedly being made. We are to notice and to take note of differences and different linguistic contexts, to see how even the smallest and subtlest of variations serves not only to question an overarching philosophical theory that would apply to all of them but also to check the tendency to theorise in this way at all. The concepts and words any such theory would analyse or utilize are returned to the “language-games” (the only domains) in which they can be seen to be genuinely meaningful. Whether we regard this critique of a certain type of theorising as entailing a further positive Wittgensteinian philosophical account of meaning or as an essentially therapeutic exercise, we are to begin to see how so many of our philosophical difficulties stem from an inattentiveness to the relevant and sense-determining differences at play when a sentence, the same sentence, appears in, say, a fictional story and a factual description, or rather, when the same sentence appears in different language-games among which we might mention “describing a state of affairs” and “making up a story”, for we know the list cannot be properly or

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finally completed. We are comfortable with Wittgenstein’s “etc.” and find nothing unusual in his choosing to end the sentence in this way. But should we be so sanguine? Given Wittgenstein’s extensive investigations into the complexities of rule-following and the various ways we might need to interpret “and so on”, is it so clear that we should find nothing difficult about the implied extension in this instance? And is there not a complacency here on our part, as though the appeal to “language-games” and the concluding “etc.” draws our attention away from the very things we were supposed to be comparing and from the very differences that we claim to value and that we argue have elsewhere and previously been underestimated or misconstrued. The temptation in reading the later Wittgenstein is thus to celebrate the invitations to compare and contrast and, having done so, to compliment ourselves on our ability to admit and to respect differences, all the while letting the ubiquitous notion of the “language-game” militate against our taking up the invitations or our even wondering what such taking up might really involve philosophically. We gesture towards an ever expanding field of potential empirical or anthropological observations (concerning, for example, the similarities and non-similarities between describing a state of affairs and making or telling a story), leaving “language-game” to function as a signal for a sort of under-determined pragmatic relativism. How easily and quickly we seem to be swept from (1) the metaphysical question “What is understanding?” to (2) the adumbration of everyday contexts within which alone “understanding” is productively and correctly used to (3) the account of that transition from the metaphysical to the everyday where “What is understanding?” now productively serves as a grammatical enquiry rather than a substantive but unproductive metaphysical one. A context named or mentioned during the course of (2) is the understanding of sentences in stories and narrative fictions but there seems little opportunity for lingering with it or of noting it philosophically. This focus on the “general Wittgensteinian project” succumbs to the temptation to allow some of Wittgenstein’s often parenthetical remarks to dictate the terms of the commentary. Such remarks can and perhaps should be read as providing an overview or summary of his philosophical project and so as permitting the reader to step back from the precise terms of any particular reflection or comparative investigation that might happen to be underway. But a consequence of overly privileging these comments (these parenthetical voices) is to regard the naming or mentioning of different contexts and languagegames as the philosophically important matter rather than attending to any of the differences themselves. For what could attending to the differences themselves involve apart from their empirical or anthropological description or cataloguing? We want to avoid this temptation and to check this tendency to

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downplay or undervalue certain significant differences. If it is correct to say that there are such language-games as making and telling and reading a story, then it is also worth spending some time with the thought of what makes those games different and how and why Wittgenstein sometimes chooses to accentuate and to entertain that difference. Noting or taking account of these games might also then be a philosophically interesting and consequential matter. The penchant for likening Wittgenstein’s project to a literary one seems to arise from the way in which, again at the most general level, that project deliberately resists an unambiguous philosophical categorisation (realism, idealism, etc.). No metaphysical thesis or doctrine seems to capture its content or to guide its enquiries, and in refusing to conform to a general philosophical position, the project leaves its commentators to decide how best to introduce and represent its methods, its forms, and the nature of its self-understanding. Literature is a useful resource in this regard. Wittgenstein’s general stance can be assigned a literary genre (for example, “satire”)⁴ where its attitudes to substantive philosophy and the philosophical tradition can be construed as mocking or ironizing. His well-known reflections on how philosophy ought to be written or composed (“as poetry”) and his experiments in new styles of philosophical writing can be adduced as evidence of a thoroughgoing literary sensibility. Methodologically, the manner in which he works with examples, generating fictional scenes, lends credence to the idea that this is also a substantive literary undertaking. So conceived, it unfolds as a conversation, the guiding question being “What are we to say about this?” where this is preferably a well-constructed and nuanced literary fiction, an exemplary fiction. Obviously, in these circumstances, the skills to create and to judge such fictional scenarios will not be incidental ones. But whatever the exegetical benefits of presenting Wittgenstein’s general project in literary terms, it can obstruct the sort of reading and discussion we want to develop in this paper. There is a blurring of difference at the generalising level here that undermines our attempt to argue for the significance, elsewhere in the project, of the differences between philosophy and literature, between reading or hearing a fictional narrative (being caught up in a story) and making use of a fictional example, and between certain literary works. Such a blurring might also discourage us from considering the literary uses of language as being themselves part of the everyday and the ordinary. To employ literature as a means for representing the everyday as though, methodologically, it were a proxy for the everyday, is to run the risk

4 See Rorty (1982, p.  34): “When Wittgenstein is at his best, he resolutely avoids such constructive criticism and sticks to pure satire. He just shows, by examples, how hopeless the traditional problems are. …”

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of deeming it secondary to or parasitic upon the everyday.⁵ For if literature finds itself alongside philosophy, and philosophy, in Wittgenstein’s hands, becomes a literary affair, what sense can there be in insisting on noting and preserving the specificity of language-games such as making, reading, enjoying, and thinking in and with fictions? For our purposes, the problem with the parenthetical temptation is twofold: firstly, yielding to it prevents a philosophically informed lingering with the named and mentioned language-games, and secondly, in appropriating literature as a kind of alibi, it denies significance to the noting of specifically literary language-games, the literature and the literary things with which we live and which we value. In short, for example, and again uncontroversially, Wittgenstein is not Tolstoy, nor is he, in a philosophically relevant sense, like Tolstoy; nor, in a philosophically relevant sense, are any of Wittgenstein’s philosophical writings like any of Tolstoy’s literary or fictional writings. But can we leave the matter, even on this general level, quite so brusquely. Consider briefly an ingenious and particularly instructive defence of a “literary Wittgenstein”. For Cora Diamond, how one responds to the literary features of the Investigations will determine not only one’s reading of it but also one’s conception of what philosophy is and might be. And one will respond either, on the hand, with Gordon Baker, by regarding those literary features as essential to the text and so as capable of being called on to answer substantial questions about its philosophical content, or, on the other hand, with Strawson, by acknowledging the features as contributing to a rhetorically charged and beautifully composed text, one that can and should be valued for these features, but denying them the authority to answer for the content. Thus, for Strawson, we do not go wrong in endeavouring to provide and reproduce systematic arguments for the claims, interrogations, and descriptions that in the text are given to us without systematic argument. Strawson does not deny that the argument-free feature of the Investigations contributes to its effectiveness. The indisputable power of the text is inseparable from the brilliance of its styles and its breaks with conventional philosophical writing. But to understand that text we need to treat all of these features as strategies, as means of getting us beyond the text to the communicable and systematizable thoughts and arguments that prompted

5 A point brought home when commentators insist that the real aim of the making of fictional examples is to provoke wonder and puzzlement at the everyday, to make the familiar unfamiliar and the ordinary extraordinary (Savickey 2011). Literature’s own status, the status of the fiction-making itself, remains unexamined here. And when it is examined, it will be in terms of its indeterminate or subordinate relation to the quotidian, as though what is strange and unique in literature derived from this indeterminacy rather than from literature and the literary proto-phenomena themselves (see Guetti 1993).

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its being written as a contribution to philosophical investigation in the first place. As Diamond stages the dispute between Baker and Strawson, for the latter, this is in fact the only philosophically responsible way to read the Investigations and to try to begin to understand it. Anything else would amount to a sort of literary critical or aesthetic evaluation which, however interesting, would surely necessarily overlook almost everything the text has to say. For Baker (and Diamond), Strawson’s response fails to see how the text calls into question and re-educates us as to what philosophically responsible reading and understanding can be. It introduces its topics, its multiple voices, and its questions in a manner that (i) means we necessarily miss what is crucial and insightful in them if we look only to what can be systematized, and (ii) defies us to devalue any more appropriate reading by rejecting it as non-serious or insubstantial, as though such a reading ought to be restricted to literature. For Diamond, the Investigations confesses its literariness at each moment and to admit as much is to begin to re-evaluate philosophically and for philosophy the role and meaning of literature and the literary. The literary feature of the Investigations to which Baker responds positively and which he allows to inform his readings and interpretations is nothing other than this absence of argument, but in order for it to register as such it must be deemed “a significant absence”. For Strawson, the absence of argument cannot itself count as a reason for the philosophically minded reader not trying to provide an argument; for Baker, again on Diamond’s reading, the absence of argument, a literary feature of the text, is reason enough. Diamond is persuaded of the force and tenability of seeing this absence as significant by the example of Wittgenstein reading several literary works, among them Hadji Murat. And here she seems to come very close to some of the points we made earlier in our reading. She writes that “the ethical character of the story depend(s) on the absence in (it) of the explicitly ethical” (Diamond 2004, p. 131). The story is a story of significant absences, of absences whose significance becomes more apparent and more meaningful the longer one stays with the story and reflects on what it is telling. Of all the stories and novels of Tolstoy, none gives more deeply a sense of the mysteriousness of life, and of the ways life goes than does Hadji Murat, and that is part of what Wittgenstein was responding to in the story. For him, philosophy too, if it was worth engaging in, had to connect with that sense of life. (Diamond 2004, p. 131)

And the lesson or moral for the reading of the Investigations? What we should connect with “the literary Wittgenstein” is this: Baker’s reading of Wittgenstein can be seen as a response to a literary feature of the text of the Investigations, namely “significant absence”, absence which belongs to the way the text is meant to be read, a feature which it shares with Hadji Murat … as Wittgenstein read (it)… My suggestion is that

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we can see disputes about how to read Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, and about what the philosophical significance is of grammatical descriptions of parts of our language, as tied to the way in which the Investigations is seen as a literary work, or not. Wittgenstein’s own “habit of reading”, as we might put it, was a reading for absences; and he writes absences… (Diamond 2004, p. 131)

Wittgenstein like Tolstoy? The Philosophical Investigations like Hadji Murat? This is a more cautious and thoughtful likeness than the one we dismissed earlier and, in fashioning it, Diamond also asks us to consider its meaning and to hold back from extending its remit. The uniqueness of Tolstoy’s fictional narrative is curiously and uniquely likened to the unique Investigations. Nevertheless I wonder how Diamond would respond to the passages we will consider in the remaining two parts of the paper. How would she respond to the readings we offer which, although Strawson-like in their attempt to track the thought and the argument behind the words, leave us with a sense of what is extraordinary about those extraordinary absences in Hadji Murat? It may be however that the text (the Investigations) that best shows us how to return to these absences and how to appreciate them must, in some crucial sense, exempt itself from the status it accords the story. To the extent that it allows us to note and to remark on such a thing – this fiction, this literary work – it must perhaps itself be something other than fiction and a literary work, a piece of philosophy, for example, and its author not a storyteller but a philosopher. It may be only on the generalising level that the differences can be blurred, and that when it comes to noting them and arguing for them, they have to be re-affirmed. Or, better, it may be that only on the general level, that the likeness can be formulated as carefully as Diamond does so as not to engender a blurring of differences. When it comes to noting the difference a specific fiction is (and the difference a specific fiction makes), neither the noting itself nor the philosophical text in which the noting occurs can be usefully or thoughtfully described as being like the fiction.

5. Return for a moment to that passage from the Philosophical Grammar. What if what we would like to do is to think about “making up a story” and about the significance of the sentences that appear in a story, and about our experiences as listeners or readers of those sentences? In other words, what if, with Wittgenstein, we thought there might be something philosophically worthwhile in such investigations?

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The sentence Wittgenstein actually cites in the passage (“After he had said this, he left her as he did the day before”) reappears in a sequence of paragraphs from the Philosophical Investigations (§  522  – §  537) dealing with the uses and senses of “understanding”. Here Wittgenstein notes various differences, contrasts and gradations. He refers to our understanding of pictures (historical portraits and genre pictures), facial expressions, and melodies or musical phrases, to our understanding of narrative fictions and poems and the sentences that comprise them, and of course to our understanding of sentences as they occur in factual or prosaic contexts. To read these sections without stepping back or reminding ourselves of the general project is to have to accept that we are being implicitly invited to discern where and when the similarities between certain phenomena contribute to a more productive awareness of what it is to understand and where and when they lead us astray. We seem to be encouraged to learn to recognise, on the one hand, the differences that matter and that must be seen philosophically to matter and, on the other hand, the differences that can be better re-described as likenesses to as to yield another sort of insight. Understanding in each of these cases is something serious.⁶ Importantly, there is in these paragraphs, no classifying of literary or poetic or artistic activity as non-serious or as requiring no further appreciation or consideration. Whatever language is doing in a poem or a story, it is not “idling”, and whatever we are doing when we understand a sentence in a fictional narrative, our understanding of the sentence is just as serious as our understanding of anything else and our experiencing of the fiction just as worthy of investigation as any other experience. The sequence that concerns us here is § 522 – § 525, with the central focus being on § 524. 522. If we compare a proposition to a picture, we must think whether we are comparing it to a portrait (a historical representation) or to a genre-picture. And both comparisons have point. When I look at a genre picture, it “tells” me something, even though I don’t believe (imagine) for one moment that the people I see in it really exist, or that there really have been people in that situation. But suppose I ask: “What does it tell me, then?” 523. I should like to say “What the picture tells me is itself.” That is, its telling me something consists in its own structure, in its own lines and colours. (What would it mean to say “What this musical theme tells me is itself”?) 524. Don’t take it as a matter of course, but as a remarkable fact, that pictures and fictitious narratives give us pleasure, occupy our minds.

6 For an attempt to demonstrate the specificity Wittgenstein seems to be obliged to accord to poems and poetry in these paragraph, see Paul Davies (2008).

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(“Don’t take it as a matter of course” means: find it surprising, as you do some other things which disturb you. Then what is problematic will disappear, by your accepting the one fact as you do the other.) ((The transition from obvious nonsense to something which is unobvious nonsense.)) 525. “After he had said this, he left her as he did the day before” – Do I understand this sentence just as I should if I heard it in the course of a narrative? If it were set down in isolation I should say, I don’t know what it’s about. But all the same I should know how this sentence might perhaps be used; I could myself invent a context for it. (A multitude of familiar paths lead off from these words in every direction.) (PI 2009, p. 150– 151)

As we saw at the beginning of the paper, in the fourth volume of the “Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations,” Peter Hacker regards § 524 as standing apart from the sections that immediately precede and succeed it. In his diagram of the structure of the work, § 524 branches off to nowhere. For Hacker, the section stands as a methodological observation, helpfully reconnecting these enquiries into the different contexts of understanding to the dominant lessons and emancipatory aims of the book. One of the perhaps unintended consequences of this interpretation is that the very thing we are supposed to find remarkable in it is almost immediately forgotten or set aside. Let us finally come to the promised attempt at a second and alternative reading of § 524, one informed by the two sections that precede it. In noting what is remarkable in our engagements with specific types of pictures and narratives, it asks us to observe and to sustain a difference, one that is elsewhere easily blurred or misunderstood. Much that is strange about § 524, the specificity of what it is we are supposed to find remarkable in its first moment, the awkwardness of the clarification in its second, and the “reversal” of its third, are best interpreted as deliberate attempts to affirm and to refine this difference. The first reading (Hacker’s interpretation) encouraged us to see the pleasure and thought worthiness of genre painting and fictitious narratives as a part of our lives untroubled by philosophical speculation, the phenomena not yet theorised or problematized, and we as viewers and readers of these fictions innocently untroubled. There is something correct in this but it is lost in the assumption that, having been noted and remarked upon, the pleasure and thought-worthiness are to be artificially discarded. The move is not from an as yet untheorised state of affairs to the tactical constructing of transparently nonsensical theories but rather from a state of affairs in which we already have good reason for not accepting any such theories. That there is fiction and that we can speak so easily of fictional names, events, and worlds, and engage so easily and pleasurably with the creation and circulation of fictional stories and texts has, at least since Plato, seemed to require some

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sort of philosophical explanation. One way of proceeding, although arguably not one taken by Plato, is to treat fiction (the fictive and the fictional) as a self-evident subset of a larger category and to hope that one’s theory of that category will suffice for fiction as well. Thus a suitably thorough account of pretence or pretending, say, or of imagination or possibility will also account for fiction. Yet none of these terms quite succeeds. The fictional is coextensive neither with the possible nor with the imaginable. There are impossible (contradictory) fictions, even if one does not accept arguments to the effect that fictional worlds and characters are by definition impossible. The disjunction between the imaginable and the fictional suggests that more (or less) is going on in our engaging with fiction than our imagining it to be non-fiction, as though every novel or story was accompanied by an invisible or silent instruction to “imagine this is real.”⁷ And fiction making and appreciating can only be construed as a matter of pretending by begging the question of the particular nature of the “pretence” reserved for the fictional: “Pretend this is real.” Is there not something puzzling about a theory of x that proceeds by claiming it must treat x as though x were not x? To treat x as a fiction – and because x is a fiction that means to treat x as the thing it is – is to pretend or to imagine that it is not a fiction. We have so obviously gone wrong here, that it comes as a shock to see how so much philosophical writing on fiction concerns itself ever more subtly with imagining, pretending, and playing, and with tampering with the parameters of the possible. But why would the philosophical posing and handling of the question of fiction have turned so quickly away from fiction? When philosophers raise the issue of fiction, although they invariably begin with narrative fiction, be it in literature, film or genre painting, and although it is such fiction that identifies and ushers in the problem, the handling or solution of the problem can be deemed to lie elsewhere. The gesture is twofold. Firstly, narrative fiction is merely one species or class of fictional object. Other candidates are easily identifiable: metaphors, hypotheses, games, models, etc., and the list can be expanded to include anything that might be usefully reconstituted as a fiction (for example, numbers or universals). Secondly, the theory of fiction takes its focus now to be this larger set of “fictions”. Note how matters come to a head in the case of fictionalism, a doctrine stating that terms and concepts which in ordinary discourse seem to imply real existence are better construed philosophically as fictions. Thus one can be a fictionalist about numbers, universals, and moral properties. In each case, one avoids reification by treating the relevant name or noun as a fictional one; numbers,

7 If someone asks me whether I imagine Hadji-Aha striking Hadji Murat’s head with his dagger, I am surely entitled to reply “No. He does strike him with his dagger.”

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universals, and moral properties are fictions, useful fictions, and in our ordinary dealings with them we speak as if they were real. But this analysis, although it achieves a seemingly satisfactory deflation or de-reification of metaphysically contentious entities cannot plausibly be applied to fictional narratives or genre paintings themselves, that is to the very things generating the interest and difficulty. On a fictionalist account, we would have to say of Hadji Murat that although in ordinary conversation it is perfectly appropriate to speak of events befalling the character in Tolstoy’s story as though they were real and although our ordinary engagements with the character and the story imply that they are real, we must admit philosophically that they are only fictions. But, in the case of Hadji Murat (and Hadji Murat), of course, we begin with fiction. We concede, accept and delight in fictionality from the very beginning, and in the ordinary run of things, unproblematically so. Yes, we may refer to illusion, play, the imaginary and “as if” in reflecting on the experiences of reading a story or novel and of thinking about its characters, events, and worlds, but such references imply neither that fiction is best theorised by being subordinated to each or all of them nor that the fiction as such, the story or novel, is actually in any way being treated as non-fiction.⁸ 522. If we compare a proposition to a picture, we must think whether we are comparing it to a portrait (a historical representation) or to a genre-picture. And both comparisons have point. When I look at a genre picture, it “tells” me something, even though I don’t believe (imagine) for one moment that the people I see in it really exist, or that there really have been people in that situation. But suppose I ask: “What does it tell me, then?” (PI 2009)

§ 522 introduces the distinction between two sorts of picture, one historical, the other fictional. It does so initially in order to caution us on simply comparing propositions to pictures. Either comparison might be helpful but we need to specify which sort of picture we mean. There are two levels of comparison here: vertical (proposition with picture) and horizontal (historical portrait with genrepicture). The vertical is then doubled and rendered specific (proposition with

8 And would we would not also have to admit to a difference between the narrative fictions with which we can be so remarkably caught up and concerned, on the one hand, and those fictional examples, those “as if” constructions that usefully direct us to situations and states of affairs as experiment or hypothesis, on the other hand? The “useful fiction” seems to have to sublimate its fictionality to its usefulness. Perhaps a convincing fictionalist account of narrative fiction needs to presuppose this tempering of the tale, already consigning it to a moral or psychological or cognitively advantageous result. I will try to develop this line of argument in another paper.

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historical portrait; proposition with genre-picture). With every clarification and distinction, the reader is aware that in each instance the task of the comparison and so the nature of the relevant differences needs to be carefully judged. ⁹ Having introduced the distinction pictorially between the historical and fictional, Wittgenstein considers the latter: When I look at a genre picture, it “tells” me something, even though I don’t believe (imagine) for one moment that the people I see in it really exist, or that there really have been people in that situation. But suppose I ask: “What does it tell me, then?” I should like to say “What the picture tells me is itself.” That is, its telling me something consists in its own structure, in its own lines and colours. (PI 2009)

The fictional aspect of the picture is to be understood as involving neither belief nor imagination. Nevertheless something is being shown or told here, something that requires neither belief nor imagination. What is it? § 523 offers an answer. I should like to say “What the picture tells me is itself.” That is, its telling me something consists in its own structure, in its own lines and colours. (What would it mean to say “What this musical theme tells me is itself”?) (PI 2009)

It tells itself, as though what marked the fictional aspect of this sort of picture was this capacity, an integral self-telling. Note again the hesitancy induced by the parenthesis, asking and can this or ought this to be said of music as well. It tells itself. We are dealing with something fundamental here, something that gives genre pictures, and perhaps not only genre pictures, a distinct shape or quality, and a sense already dawning on the reader that genre pictures do not need to look outside themselves for their reason or explanation. By the time we get to §  524, we have already liberated genre pictures and fictitious narratives from the contexts and theories that make it impossible for us to regard them as proto-phenomena. In other words, we are now being asked to think of them as what they are, namely, the sufficient and necessary constituents of experiences and thoughts that do not involve imagining, pretending, or believing. The invitation or instruction that constitutes the first moment of § 524 pertains to things that “tell themselves”. It asks us to treat as remarkable, the fact that we can derive thought-provoking pleasure from reading and looking at

9 For an example of an almost unwittingly zealous blurring of distinctions at the very moment they are drawn, see Hintikka (1986, p. 229). A historical picture “has its meaning in virtue of its structure, i.e., because it is an isomorphic replica of a possible state of affairs which would make it true. Hence the same must according to Wittgenstein hold of genre pictures – and of the sentences compared by Wittgenstein with genre pictures.”

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them. It follows that in order for the painting or narrative to work in this way it must succeed in telling itself. It must be such that I can lose myself in the telling and such that the pleasure and thoughts it sustains are neither interrupted nor problematized. The class of “genre pictures and fictitious narratives” includes the class of “genre pictures and fictitious narratives that give us pleasure and occupy our minds”. Resurrection and Hadji Murat are both members of the larger class. But, as far as Wittgenstein is concerned, only Hadji Murat belongs to the smaller class. Let us reread the first moment of § 524 substituting the novella (the member) for the class: Don’t take it as a matter of course, but as a remarkable fact, that Hadji Murat gives us pleasure, occupies our minds.

The substitution might seem whimsical but it is not arbitrary, and in enforcing the idea of what matters here, it reminds us of the nature of the language-game or proto-phenomenon that Wittgenstein is asking us to note and take account of as remarkable. How then are to read the second moment? (“Don’t take it as a matter of course” means: find it surprising, as you do some other things which disturb you. Then what is problematic will disappear, by your accepting the one fact as you do the other.)

If one continues to keep Hadji Murat in mind here, it is implausible to think that we are being asked to remove from our pleasurable and thought-provoking engagement with the story all the elements that have made it such. This would amount to our being asked to take Hadji Murat, this proto-phenomenon, whose justification and reason lies with nothing else but itself, its telling itself, its communicating or expressing itself and, instead of letting these features qualify and expand on what can be meant by telling, communicating, and expressing, instead represent the novella (its characters, events, and worlds) as another phenomenon, one requiring a theory or justification that would bring it in line with other non-thought-provoking linguistic or non-fictional artefacts. The contradiction in this reading should be clear. The first moment draws our attention to Hadji Murat as a proto-phenomenon, the second demands that we contrive to think of it as a dependent or explanation-begging phenomenon. Is it going too far to say that this second demand would rob the story of its integrity, its integral fictionality, leaving it seeking an external meaning or justification, for example and for Wittgenstein, as does Tolstoy’s moralising Resurrection? As we argued earlier, and as we argued was implicit in Wittgenstein’s dismissal of it, Tolstoy’s last novel at the very level of its narration subordinates fictional narrative and

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literature to a larger and higher imperative and context. The characters, the events, and the world of the novel all seek this external judgment, the means by which they and the novel, and perhaps Tolstoy’s literary project itself, can be redeemed. What is extraordinary about Hadji Murat is that there is nothing in it of this impatience or dissatisfaction with literature and narrative fiction. If we are to think of making a story, writing and telling a story, and reading and being caught up in the world of the story as language-games and as literary proto-phenomena, we can only begin to do so by admitting that an artefact such as Hadji Murat in contrast to one such as Resurrection succeeds in attaining this remarkable status. Whatever sense we make of the second moment of § 524, it cannot entail the loss of this status and the blurring of the very difference we have been asked to note and appreciate. But what other sense can we make of it? “Find it surprising.” Find it surprising that here is a story that succeeds wholly in and on its own terms that the language-game, the proto-phenomenon, provides the logic, rules and grammar for whatever is to count as its being successfully engaged with and enjoyed. But what is the outcome of the comparison if we cannot translate that engagement with this story into terms shared by other engagements with other objects and artefacts? I am not sure there is an easy answer here because I am not sure Wittgenstein wants us to find the initial identifying of the fictional proto-phenomenon an easy thing to do. The integral simplicity of Hadji Murat’s telling of itself coheres with the manner in which the story teaches its readers how to remain with it, and remaining with it also means remaining content with that being the only appropriate answer they can ever expect to receive to the question of what the story tells. The story, the proto-phenomenon, the language-game, tells us we have gone wrong when we seek the answer elsewhere. To learn this here, and from this fictitious narrative, is to learn something essential about the understanding proper to the sentences in this story. It is also, if lingered with, to be able to begin to compare this successful encounter (with something unique and irreplaceable) with other encounters where it seems harder to determine or delineate the proto-phenomenon, and where the inappropriateness of a certain philosophical theorising or speculating has yet to make itself felt. What disturbs us in these latter cases is the thought that something needs to be identified as the source of the problem but the problem itself evades any precise expression. The disturbance is thus exacerbated by the fact that we cannot quite say what it is that disturbs or worries us in any particular situation. Whatever precision the theoretical presentation of the problem might possess seems to be undone in the complexities of its practical instantiations. The comparison § 524 encourages, as long as the success integral to the story is protected, allows us to see what success can be in such matters, and how a resolution might be reached or at least recognised and accepted.

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And the third moment? What of the double parenthesis? ((The transition from obvious nonsense to something which is unobvious nonsense.))

Of course Hacker is right in holding that the transition here must be consistent with the seeming reversal of § 464 if what is meant is that § 524 fits into the project of the Investigations, but it is worth spending a moment or two considering the possible motivations for Wittgenstein’s ordering here and for his letting this parenthetical voice emphasize a discrepancy or mischievous qualification. In the case of the yet to be settled phenomena, those contexts where problems arise because the correct context or a satisfactory description of the correct context seems unavailable, what is being sought is a means of achieving that description and so of specifying the context. The philosophical worries or theories preventing or inhibiting such specification need to be countered or diagnosed so as to reveal or make explicit the nonsense they are concealing. Here, we would step, as we do so often in the Investigations, from a concealed nonsense to a revealed nonsense, from latent to patent nonsense. However, § 524 has invited us to remain with an already specified proto-phenomenon and to note both it and the way in which it negotiates its successful operations. In § 524 we do not find the Wittgensteinian dismantling of an erroneous theory, nor do we find the reconfiguring of the metaphysical into the grammatical. Unusually, what we find is the noting of, say, a story where what is to be valued and sustained remains unsaid and concealed in its telling. And as has been repeated now several times, all we have is the dull repetition: the picture or story tells itself; it is its own answer, Hadji Murat expresses Hadji Murat, etc. The outcome of the comparison of the second moment of § 524 turns us from the outward looking extrinsic concerns of the yet to be settled difficulties to the intrinsic but contented inexplicability (nonsense) of the story or picture. A talent to discern differences or, rather, to discern where and when particular differences are consequential and worth remarking and where and when they are not, is arguably one of the key philosophical virtues for the Wittgenstein of the Investigations. Many responses to the Investigations seem to succumb to the temptation to generalise its projects and to refer it and them to literature. There are many ways in which this might be done. We have tried to challenge some of the assumptions behind them, suggesting that the invitations and instructions we find in § 522–525 can plausibly be read as an emphasising of differences that ought to matter and that cannot be blurred or conflated without losing something essential to understanding, language, and thought, the telling differences, among others, between philosophy and literature, between fictions and factual discourse, between narrative fictions and examples, and between the

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understanding proper to sentences in narrative fictions and the understanding proper to sentences in nonfictional contexts. And hovering over our discussion of these differences and arguably consistent with the transitions and descriptions we have found in the Investigations, are the differences between Resurrection and Hadji Murat. In part and crucially, here we see a difference between a literary failure and a literary success, one that when remarked on philosophically draws our attention to a perhaps unique and easily overlooked experience of reading, and to a latency worth lingering with and worth protecting and preserving. There was no moon, but the stars shone brightly in the black sky and in the darkness you could make out the roof tops of the houses and standing above the other buildings, of the mosque and minaret at the top of the village, where a buzz of voices could be heard. (Tolstoy 2006, p. 356)¹⁰

Bibliography Ayer, A.J. (1992) “Reply to Peter Kivy”. In: Lewis Edwin Hahn (Ed.): The Philosophy of A.J. Ayer. LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court, p. 326–328. Carnap, Rudolf (1959): “The Elimination of Metaphysics through the Logical Analysis of Language”. In: A.J. Ayer (Ed.): Logical Positivism. Glencoe, Illinois: Free Press, p. 60–81. Davies, Paul (2008): “A Poem and Its Context”. In: Textual Practice 22, p. 635–656. Diamond, Cora (2004): “Introduction to ‘Having a Rough Story about what Moral Philosophy is’”. In: John Gibson/Wolfgang Huemer (Eds): The Literary Wittgenstein, London: Routledge, p. 127–132. Engelmann, Paul (1967): Letters from Wittgenstein, with a Memoir. Oxford: Blackwell. Guetti, James (1993): Wittgenstein and the Grammar of Literary Experience. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Hacker, Peter (1996): Wittgenstein: Mind and Will: Part II Exegesis §§ 428–693. Oxford: Blackwell. Hintikka, Merrill, B./Hintikka, Jaako (1986): Investigating Wittgenstein. Oxford: Blackwell. Klagge, James, C. (2011): Wittgenstein in Exile. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press. Malcolm, Norman (1984): Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (New Edition with Wittgenstein’s Letters to Malcolm). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Monk, Raymond (1991): Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. London: Vintage. Rorty, Richard (1982): “Keeping Philosophy Pure: An Essay on Wittgenstein”. In: Richard Rorty: Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. 19–36. Savickey, Beth (2011): “Wittgenstein’s Use of Examples”. In: Oskari Kuusela/Marie McGinn (Eds), The Oxford Handbook to Wittgenstein. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 667–696.

10 I would like to thank Stephen Mulhall for his helpful and critical comments on an earlier version of this paper.

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Tolstoy, Leo (1996): Resurrection. London: Penguin. Tolstoy, Leo (2006): The Cossacks and Other Stories. London: Penguin. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1974): Letters to Russell, Keynes, and Moore. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. Woodruffe, David Joseph (2002): “Tolstoy and Wittgenstein: The Life Outside of Time”. In: The Southern Journal of Philosophy 40, p. 421–435.

David LaRocca

Note to Self: Learn to Write Autobiographical Remarks from Wittgenstein In 1931 Wittgenstein made the following note, apparently a lesson learned or moral discerned from reading Leo Tolstoy: 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 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. (VB 1977, 17)¹

“What people most want to see” in this context is not a “want” of desire, but rather of delusion that is driven by vanity. In turn, this delusion obscures what should otherwise be apparent. Partly the delusion points directly to the very notion of “self-knowledge,” how it, for instance, reinforces the assumption that the self can be known and that such knowing is a function of intellectual insight. With this picture of self-knowledge, intellect gives rise to the image/story/picture of the self that one is tempted to be vain about. The investment in this knowledge can lead variously to acts of protection, preservation, or promotion, and also to denial, disguise, and delegitimization. Will, on the other hand, isn’t constrained by a picture or story. Will is always in the present, so experience just means one thing happens after another; consequently, one isn’t as severely hampered by vanity and can see more clearly, and thereby write more truthful remarks – not on oneself, but as oneself. For life-writing in this vein, then, the shift must be  – as Tolstoy suggests according to Wittgenstein – away from an intellectual understanding of the self (e.g., as a concept much less as an essence) and toward an ethical or religious understanding of the self as a conscious agent in the world. The shift highlights a crucial contrast, namely, between autobiography and autobiographical remarks, the former being an act of intellect (given over and dedicated to narrative across

1 I wish to thank K. L. Evans for her comments on an earlier version of this essay; she helped to give shape to the work, and made crucial contributions to several of its core notions. I am indebted to her understanding of Wittgenstein, and grateful for her generosity with that understanding.

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time registers), while the latter is all present tense and naturally fragmentary. In narrative autobiography meaning is generated by telling a story of the self, while autobiographical remarks refuse any effort to find premeditated cohesion and consecutiveness. Since such remarks deprive us of intellectual intervention – in, for example, a desire for continuity, an attempt to make sense of contradiction, or a wish to promote some feature or version of the self above others – they are more useful for philosophical purposes. The writer uses his will to block vanity rather than employs it, as with intellect, to discover or invent something about himself. The aim of autobiographical remarks is neither to represent nor create the self, but to orient one’s attention away from narrative constructs, and to provide a continually refreshed context in which to think and act. The greatest obstacle to truth in conventional autobiography is not insufficient insight (about facts, memories, desires, or ideas elucidated by the intellect) but vanity – a resistance by one’s will to that very difficult type of understanding we may call self-understanding. Vanity encourages us to think of the self as a phenomenon one draws – as if in a mode of portraiture – whereas Wittgenstein, by way of Tolstoy, saw (not the self) but work on one’s self as a kind of activity of will, often manifested as a mode of attention. Autobiographical remarks, as contrasted with autobiography, function primarily as a reagent to self-aggrandizement, a practice of continual recalibration to the proper objects of our brief lives. Wittgenstein was a reader and admirer of Tolstoy’s Confessions, a devotee of his The Gospel in Brief, and a careful student of the autobiography genre. In the present essay, in light of Wittgenstein’s reading of Tolstoy, I explore the notion that autobiographical practice does not require a form of self-consciousness, or intellect, that may aid the development of humility, honesty, and decency. The real work of autobiographical practice isn’t done by self-consciousness but is achieved by the true humility that derives from will – a will that blocks vanity. Yet it may be initially unclear how such autobiographical practice can reflect the achievements not of intellect but of will, where for example the practice itself diminishes vanity for the sake of deeper understanding. I don’t offer a theory of autobiographical practice according to Wittgenstein; rather I consider how remarks by Wittgenstein, quoted immediately below, are pertinent to questions about the proper meaning and role of autobiography that is unmotivated by vanity. For instance, can writing autobiographically reflect the achievements not of intellect but of will? Can such writing truly diminish vanity for the sake of deeper understanding? Such questions give rise to a notion – befitting Tolstoy and in some cases prompted by his work, but also present in the writings of Marcus Aurelius and Simone Weil  – of how to write autobiographical remarks. Since Wittgenstein does not explicitly make a connection between Tolstoy’s writing and his own approach to writing autobiographical remarks my approach must

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remain speculative: in this case directed to a reading of Wittgenstein’s remarks on the art, meaning, instances, and purposes of autobiographical remarks as his thinking may have been informed by a dedicated reading of Tolstoy. Part of that speculation, if conducted in a spirit true to Wittgenstein’s stated convictions about the form, should lead naturally – both logically and spiritually, as he might have said – to the work of others who write and think along similar lines. Everything or nearly everything I do, these entries included, is tinted by vanity & the best I can do is as it were separate, to isolate the vanity & do what’s right in spite of it, even though it is always watching. I cannot chase it away. Only sometimes it is not present. (Wittgenstein 2003, K15)² Self-recognition & humility is one. (Wittgenstein 2003, K97)

In his biography Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, Ray Monk reconstructs a scene from Wittgenstein’s life during World War I that is almost apocryphal in its elliptical compression: What saved him from suicide, however, was not the encouragement he received from Jolles and Frege, but exactly the kind of personal transformation, the religious conversion, he had gone to war to find. He was, as it were, saved by the word. During his first month in Galicia, he entered a bookshop, where he could find only one book: Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief. The book captivated him. It became for him a kind of talisman: he carried it wherever he went, and read it so often that he came to know whole passages of it by heart. He became known to his comrades as ‘the man with the gospels.’ (Monk 1990, p. 115–116)

The Gospel in Brief is, of course, that gospel: it is Tolstoy’s expert hybridization of four Greek New Testament gospels into a single narrative. Tolstoy’s translation and treatment of the gospels emphasizes the way Jesus’ biography (and autobiography) is transformative for us, those who read it and are changed by it. As Wittgenstein told a friend of Tolstoy’s text: “If you are not acquainted with it, then you cannot imagine what an effect it can have upon a person” (Monk, 1990, p. 116). The most crucial and prominent effect, for Wittgenstein at least, was that The Gospel in Brief allowed Wittgenstein to think about himself in the impersonal. This was for Wittgenstein a training in thinking about the self more humbly. While it may seem that what Wittgenstein is writing in the excerpts above is conventional

2 All references from the Koder diary (viz., Manuscript 183) come from Wittgenstein 2003; in what follows, all numbers preceded by a “K” refer to the original manuscript pagination, recalling the Koder source.

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autobiography, the work should really be called “remarks on oneself” – because it does reveal a self exploring itself. The “auto,” to work with etymological elements, does not give rise to, or justify, a self-exploration but instead is directed to not letting the self become an object of inquiry. Hence the humility. The result is not a theory of the fixed self  – not a story of origins and influences, not an explanation of how one came to be – but a mode of attending to an evolving self. The Gospel in Brief had a further effect on Wittgenstein, namely, providing him with nothing less than, as he said, something that “kept him alive.” But what he means by “him” is the innovation – not the more narratively and emotionally, even melodramatically powerful notion of being “saved” by something. As Wittgenstein is writing from the battlefield, we aren’t meant to take this literally – as if the Tolstoy book stopped a bullet or blocked a piece of shrapnel. Rather, we can glimpse how Tolstoy influenced Wittgenstein’s notion of selfhood, drawing Wittgenstein closer to an ancient Greek and Roman understanding  – more Stoic than early Christian – of what we mean when we say self or soul. As Monk describes it, Tolstoy enabled Wittgenstein to “lighten his external appearance, so ‘as to leave undisturbed my inner being’” (Monk, 1990, p. 116). For Wittgenstein this meant, as Monk puts it, “whatever happened ‘externally’, nothing could happen to him, to his innermost being.” In September 1914, with Russian troops said to be advancing in his direction, Wittgenstein wrote: “If I should reach my end now, may I die a good death, attending myself. May I never lose myself.” “Attending,” in this context, means not losing his awareness that his proper object is will, not intellect; and this distinction frames his religious sensibility for humility in the face of external forces – a difference meaningfully amplified by reading Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief. The “inner being” is not a self  – not something one can plumb the depths of to discover, not something one can create through introspection – but rather an orientation in attention; “inner being” is a point or position from which to perceive one’s surroundings and one’s place in them. And it is something that can be lost. If the body should be corrupted or destroyed, it takes this position away. Anyone committed to an appreciation of Wittgenstein’s reading will have to contend with the presence and priority of life-writing – autobiographies, biographies, and fictional renderings of both.³ Even as he would regularly and attentively

3 Among the works of autobiography Wittgenstein is known to have adored we find St. Augustine’s Confessions, a passage from which he uses as the commencing remark in his posthumous Philosophical Investigations. He read with admiration Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground, a fictional autobiography. And he read widely in several genres of life-writing as Tolstoy rendered them: A Confession (a religious autobiography), The Gospel in Brief (a biography

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read such works, Wittgenstein often appeared engaged in some form of writing about his life. He assiduously kept notebooks, sometimes dividing his work into coded passages and uncoded reflections (cf. Wittgenstein 2003, p. 3). During the time he wasn’t writing explicitly philosophical work, he retained a conscientious awareness and interest in the autobiographical, for example, how work in architecture felt analogous to “working on oneself.”⁴ We know that Wittgenstein both planned to write an actual work of autobiography, which never came to pass, and used the idea of writing an autobiography as a way of making a philosophical point, as when, in the Tractatus, the only book he published during his lifetime, he claims that if he wrote an autobiography he would call it The World as I found it (cf. TLP 1974, 5.631). What do we make of Wittgenstein having a title for his autobiography, and the intention to write one, but no actual text of this sort – at least in a conventional sense? Alfred Nordmann has suggested that there is no need for something like an autobiography because the philosophical work is suffused with the kind of thinking we might find there: “Nothing is hidden in his private writing; everything is in the open in the published manuscripts” (Nordmann 2001, 161). I agree with the argument that the philosophical and autobiographical are coextensive in Wittgenstein’s work⁵, yet I suppose I am pausing to consider whether there is not something significant in the absence of an official autobiography, despite his apparent desire to write one. Can we come to understand how Wittgenstein felt about the nature of autobiographical remarks by the fact that he never composed an autobiography? Many important and innovative essays and books have been devoted to the influence autobiographical and biographical works had on Wittgenstein and the work he produced.⁶ In the spirit of the investigation invited by the present collection, I turn the other way to see whether Wittgenstein offers some indication of the merit and method of autobiographical writing as he understood

re-told), Hadji Murad (a novella that is based on historical events and Murad’s own account of his life, but reads like a mytho-poetic biography), and Twenty-Three Tales (among them, he was most captivated by the stories focusing on the conduct of men: “What Men Live By,” “The Two Old Men,” “How Much Land does a Man Need?”, and his favorite, “The Three Hermits”). See Barrett (1988, p. 388). 4 “Work in philosophy – like work in architecture in many respects – is really more a working on oneself. On one’s own interpretation. On one’s way of seeing things. (And what one expects of them)” (VB 1977, p. 16). 5 I address this relation in my (2007). 6 See for example essays by Caleb Thompson in Philosophical Investigations (1993, 1997, 2000, 2002), and books by Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin (1973), and Monk (1990).

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it. Many of the contributors to the edited volume Wittgenstein: Biography and Philosophy (Klagge 2001) investigate in this direction. Why was Wittgenstein so impressed and moved by autobiography? Did he believe that autobiographical work is constitutive of philosophical practice? Does the creation of autobiography require a self-consciousness that might aid the appearance or development of humility, honesty, and decency? While keeping Tolstoy’s influence on Wittgenstein in mind – acknowledging it as an early and affecting model of what life-writing might look like, and what its powers may be – I now seek occasions in Wittgenstein’s work, after his penetrating reading of Tolstoy, when he seems the most self-aware about his own practice of making autobiographical remarks. As I proceed, I do not claim a causal or genetic relation between Tolstoy’s mode of life-writing and Wittgenstein’s evolving practice. Instead I trace further lines of affinity between Wittgenstein’s autobiographical remarks and notes – principally by Marcus Aurelius and Simone Weil – that accord with Tolstoy’s concern that external facts of life presented without a deep sense of the internal nature of that life (its spirit or soul) elicit and invite the distorting effects of vanity – and thereby compromise any meaningful account of the self.

Autobiography and Vanity In the Koder diary  – Manuscript 183  – that Wittgenstein kept in two phases (1930–2 in Cambridge, and 1936–7 in Norway), he repeatedly dwells – as he does widely in his other work – on the harmful presence of vanity in his attitude: Everything or nearly everything I do, these entries included, is tinted by vanity & the best I can do is as it were separate, to isolate the vanity & do what’s right in spite of it, even though it is always watching. I cannot chase it away. Only sometimes it is not present. (Wittgenstein 2003, p. K15)

For Wittgenstein, vanity threatened or created many harmful effects, but there was one that bothered him above all. It was not that others thought him pompous, ridiculous, or otherwise proudly narcissistic, or might conclude that there is something vain in worrying about one’s vanity. That was not Wittgenstein’s worry, and “there is no indication that Wittgenstein thought of himself as particularly vain” (Nordmann 2001, p.  167). The problem of vanity lay not with external judgment but rather internal judgment, and generated a specific fear: that his vanity would obscure his chances for true, genuine, clear, and unsullied self-recognition. During the years he added to the Koder diary, Wittgenstein appeared worried that he would be unable to develop what the ancient Greeks called prosoche (an

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awareness of the self, or more literally, self-attention). The problem inherited from antiquity emerges in the tension between self-awareness as, on the one hand, a disciplined habit of determining one’s qualities and lapses, one’s best strategies for being present and virtuous, and, on the other hand, self-awareness as some form of narcissism and self-involvedness. Self-recognition  – present tense, non-narrative, and will-based  – is the former; self-knowledge  – all time tenses, narrative, and intellect-based – is the latter. For Wittgenstein the tension was palpable: one has to be aware of the self in order to recognize how one’s vanity is compromising, and yet that awareness can contribute to one’s vanity. Despite the apparent paradox, though, Wittgenstein had a definite sense of how to undermine circular thinking. Simply put: “Self-recognition & humility is one” (Wittgenstein 2003, p. K97). There is no circle. If one is not humble, self-recognition – of the sort he sought – is not possible. It is quite appropriate that the question of vanity would arise in the context of Wittgenstein’s diary, a form of autobiographical expression. Autobiographical practice invites one directly into the heart of Wittgenstein’s dilemma: can I be sufficiently humble to achieve some kind of true self-recognition? Will I say anything about myself that is not a lie, a fabrication meant strictly to enhance a portrait of myself that has no clear relation to the person I am beyond the portrait? Is autobiography, regardless of one’s intentions, doomed to be a vanity project par excellence? In his biography of Wittgenstein, Ray Monk emphasizes that “all philosophy, in so far as it is pursued honestly and decently, begins with a confession” (Monk 1990, p. 366). Honesty and decency, then, are preconditions for confession since, as Wittgenstein notes: “the vain person cannot confess” (Wittgenstein 2003, p. K116). Thus it follows that the vain person cannot begin in philosophy. Whatever the vain person is doing, we can be sure it is not philosophy. For Wittgenstein, as Nordmann says, “the encroachment of vanity threatens to distort every pursuit of an unadulterated, pure movement of thought toward self-knowledge” (Nordmann 2001, p. 167). Or more precisely for a Wittgensteinian vocabulary, I suggest in the place of “self-knowledge,” self-recognition. The beginning of philosophy, at least in the Wittgensteinian sense, occurs when one fathoms a completely different relationship to oneself. In order to begin doing philosophy one must humble oneself – develop prosoche that does not make the self the subject of the investigation (for example, either as the object of knowledge or as the basis for a story) but instead the point of departure, or the position from which one looks at things. Self-recognition does not mean that one is interested in the self as a philosophical topic, as something to account for or “solve”; and neither is self-awareness a prompt to discover how one can become a literary topic. Autobiography, philosophically understood, is not portraiture but an activity of attention.

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Self-Recognition and Philosophical Work Since the intellectual drive to self-knowledge produces and encourages vanity, and therein threatens the very prospect of philosophical work as Wittgenstein understood it, Wittgenstein did what he could to reinforce practices of self-recognition that stripped him of his vanity. But how does one move from intellect to will, from the impulses that inspire autobiography to those that support autobiographical remarks? One may begin, Wittgenstein seems to suggest, by adopting a different mood – or as he writes in 1929: “The spirit in which one can write the truth about oneself can take the most varied forms; from the most decent to the most indecent.” (MS 108, p. 46–47, quoted in Monk 1990, p. 281–282). Does decency, in this sense, check one’s vanity? Are we to think that if one’s spirit is decent one will write humbly, honestly, truthfully but when one is indecent – perhaps motivated by a picture one has of oneself or wishes to create – one writes vainly, and thereby obscures truths? Wittgenstein complicates a parallelism between decency/will and indecency/intellect by saying that “among the true autobiographies that one might write there are all the gradations from the highest to the lowest” (in Monk 1990, p. 281). Importantly, then, height does not correlate to truth; there are “low” but true autobiographies – and as Wittgenstein intimates, if he were to write an autobiography, his might be at this status: “I cannot write my biography on a higher plane than I exist on” (in Monk 1990, p. 282). But one can, it seems, write autobiographical remarks that transcend the high/low division or spectrum. Since the self is not “on trial,” as Wittgenstein writes, but oriented to “produce … clarity and truth,” autobiographical remarks or reminders usefully change the purpose of writing. As Ray Monk says, such writing, if it were undertaken by Wittgenstein, would have been “fundamentally a spiritual act” (in Monk 1990, p. 282). “Self-recognition & humility is one” in the right spirit, when one’s self-awareness is humbling, and should force one to look away from one’s self. A spirit opposed to this mode of attention yields to vanity because it takes the occasion for self-awareness as an invitation to self-regard; such a spirit is a perversion of Wittgenstein’s sense of “self-recognition.” “When I say I would like to discard vanity, it is questionable whether my wanting this isn’t yet again only a sort of vanity. I am vain & insofar as I am vain, my wishes for improvement are vain, too” (Wittgenstein 2003, p. K130). Wittgenstein’s remark suggests another way of resisting the temptation to consider a paradox of self-understanding (viz., that one must look within to gain self-knowledge, yet in doing so compromises any insight because the knowledge is tainted by vanity). When humility attends self-recognition, as Wittgenstein assumes it must, one is better able to see outwardly – to a world of others, and one’s relation to them, but also to the conditions of genuine, humble work in philosophy.

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In the Koder diary Wittgenstein spends a lot of time worrying about whether, and to what degree, he has committed transgressions of vanity – especially how those lapses may be compromising the quality both of his self-understanding and of his philosophical thinking. Others have noted that there is not a significant difference between these phenomena for Wittgenstein (cf. Nordmann 2001, p.  161), yet given what has been said about the conditions for beginning in philosophy, self-understanding is not in any sense a pre-requisite for the inauguration of philosophical work. If the two are related, the order is reversed: one begins philosophy humbly, without a hope or a demand for self-understanding, and then, in doing philosophy this way  – looking away from one’s self – something like self-understanding might dawn. Still, it will not be a kind of self-understanding that we are familiar with (such as: these are true things I have discovered about myself); rather the self-understanding will come in the form of reminders that are especially suited to keeping one humble. A “real discovery” would be finding a way that one may begin doing philosophy when one wants to; a real discovery would entail finding a way to “bring the self into question” without making the focus an occasion for vain self-regard.⁷

Prosoche and the Need for Humility Pierre Hadot has done much to reinvigorate our sense of and appreciation for the ancient practice of hypomnemata – keeping an assiduous set of notes, often written on a daily basis, that act as an aid to memory and a guide to action (cf. Hadot 1995, p. 179). Most importantly such a journal of reminders should support and improve one’s sense of prosoche, “attention to oneself and vigilance at every instant” (Hadot 1995, p.  13). Hypomnemata, as autobiographical remarks to oneself, create the occasion to thoughtfully consider or reconsider one’s place in the world, and function as a resource to which one may repair for guidance or remembrance about one’s position. The logic of prosoche is present in Hadot’s assessment of Socratic eros and irony: “a divided consciousness, passionately aware that it is not what it ought to be” (Hadot 1995, p. 163). Some of Hadot’s work, especially as edited together in Philosophy as a Way of Life, can be read as a meta-commentary on the spirit in which the ancients practiced prosoche. In the Koder diary, and especially in the few passages I’ve highlighted here, Wittgenstein sustains a similar, and remarkable, meta-com-

7 Compare with PI 1958 (§ 51e).

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mentary on the link between self-recognition and humility in his own work. Wittgenstein’s meta-critical notes amount to a series of judgments about his insufficient humility, an insufficiency that he believes will imperil, compromise, or minimize in some way his effort to see things more clearly, including his own status and the status of his philosophical work. Again, such humbling should diminish the intellect, and its prideful desire for self-knowledge, and should bolster the will that aims to remain aware and philosophically attuned. Many of the authors that Hadot looks to for an ancient understanding of prosoche align with Wittgenstein’s sentiments above, for example that “prosoche relocates man within his genuine being: that is, his relationship to God” and that “Only they know their failures who never let their intellects be distracted from the remembrance of God” (Hadot 1995, p. 132). Appealing to a “higher plane” of existence – an appeal that highlights one’s relationship to God, not one’s desire to be on his level – intensifies one’s immanent, mortal responsibilities. The ancients who preached the importance of prosoche emphasized how “self-consciousness is, first and foremost, a moral consciousness,” and consequently vigilant self-attention presupposes “the practice of examining one’s conscience” (Hadot 1995, p.  130, 134). Hadot describes the positive effects of prosoche as including the development of “techniques of introspection,” for example “an extraordinary finesse in the examination of conscience and spiritual discernment” (Hadot 1995, p. 136). The idea of moral consciousness is not, however, moral policing. Becoming more self-aware does not require that one become more self-denying. Moral consciousness in this sense does not yield an ascetic outlook. Wittgenstein, like the ancients, is often mistaken for embodying, or even preaching, a kind asceticism – yet it is more accurate to read their practice of self-awareness as a variant of “perspicuous representation,” part of a unified effort to see things more clearly, rightly, and truly. A practice of prosoche on these terms helps one see, at least, that one can’t take stock of oneself. One is not in a position to judge oneself – as if from on high; one is instead only in a position to set down reminders to oneself. It is worth noting in this respect that the title given to the notes Marcus Aurelius composed in the first century is almost universally translated as Meditations. As a result, his book of fragments has become part of the expansive and often ambiguously defined category of life-writing (autobiographies, biographies, confessions, memoirs, journals, diaries, and letters). Yet the translation is misleading, with the result that we are unable to appreciate the kind of thing that Aurelius wrote. Pierre Hadot offers a corrective by recommending that we translate Aurelius’ title as Exhortations to Himself (Hadot 1995, p.179). The revised translation effectively counters the notion that Aurelius might be writing down notes about himself as

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if from a distant or distinct vantage, and that such remarks might be intended for posterity – for us, his readers. The work is a collection of notes meant to aid him and him alone in remaining faithful to his practice of prosoche. When placed side by side, Aurelius’ Exhortations to Himself and Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations take on a sibling resemblance, perhaps especially given the Aurelian resonance of Wittgenstein’s remark that “[t]he work of the philosopher consists in assembling reminders for a particular purpose” (PI 1958, §127). Aurelian, and by relation Wittgensteinian, hypomnemata are wholly different from autobiography. Autobiography, regardless of the author’s intentions, presumes a picture of self-relation that is anathema to prosoche. Prosoche as self-attention is misleading in so far as we take attention to the self to mean that we can somehow see ourselves clearly (as a hand drawing itself). Prosoche in a Wittgensteinian sense entails self-attention without self-awareness, or less enigmatically: self-attention without the construction of a self that one might be aware of. In this mode, one harnesses the willed power of concentration (that aids philosophical work) not the intellectual powers of invention that distract from such work. Conventionally understood, writing an autobiography suggests that one is not oneself when writing (about oneself). This is why we never got a conventional autobiography from Wittgenstein. The autobiographer, regardless of talent, is never in a position to master a mental attitude that enables clear and truthful self-assessment, the ability to take stock of himself, confess his sins, and – perhaps because of his account – achieve a new attitude to life. These are fictions built into the genre that do not have analogues in Wittgenstein’s work. For Wittgenstein, there is no such thing as completing an autobiography because there is no such thing as beginning an autobiography. The idea of writing The World as I found it is the useful, insightful content of Wittgenstein’s remark in the Tractatus, not the project it points to that never materialized. Like much conceptual art, once one understands the idea behind a work there is little need to spend a great deal of time with it. The idea is the animating force in such art, not its manifestation. It turns out that any person poised to commit an autobiographical act presumes he has the power to look down upon or preside over himself. The presumption is a mark of vanity. This kind of view should be contrasted with the Aurelian and Wittgensteinian understanding of exhortations or reminders to oneself. Such work, such notes or remarks do not qualify as a statement about oneself. Furthermore, the work is not an account, not a story or narrative, and not a judgment. Wittgenstein does not write autobiographical remarks in order, as mentioned earlier, “to put [his life] on trial” (in Monk 1990, p.  281–282). Instead, the work forms a series of reminders about his place in the world and

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his perception of his relation to it. The proper spirit in which to make such notes must be one of humility, from what Wittgenstein would call a “religious point of view” (Malcolm, 1991, p. 1). The religious point of view is one from which, like prosoche, one is not “distracted from the remembrance of God” and remains dedicated to “spiritual discernment” (Hadot 1995, p. 132, 136). For this reason, it may be useful to consider the ways in which autobiographical remarks function like religious beliefs. Alfred Nordmann posits a useful distinction between the meaning of a proposition in “the life led by the one who believes it” (Wittgenstein 2003, p. K147) and the meaning of a proposition in terms of its “literal or historical truth” (Nordmann 2001, 162).

Autobiography and Autobiographical Remarks Wittgenstein says “there is no better means to get to know oneself than seeing the perfect one. Thus the perfect one must arouse in people a storm of outrage; unless they want to humiliate themselves through & through. I think the words ‘Blessed is he who does not get angry at me’ mean: Blessed is he who can stand the view of the perfect one” (Wittgenstein 2003, p.  K213–214). Rendered with a Wittgensteinian gloss, “self-knowledge” is not a process of getting to know oneself; rather it is a means for working toward something else, something that is not oneself. In this spirit, self-knowledge is not meant to humiliate by exposing one’s imperfect, limited, contingent, flawed status, but rather to humble one to recognize – and vigilantly keep in mind – how having a point-of-view necessarily implies looking away from the self: a perspective that is necessarily implicated with moral and religious significance. Hence the need for reminders and exhortations to oneself. The way we understand self-knowledge in terms of self-reference and self-reflexivity must be revised to reflect the logical relationship inherent in a literary or philosophical understanding of self-relatedness. I am neither looking back on myself nor am I looking out to an image of my self. I am simply looking. Wittgenstein’s description of a person’s viewpoint seems akin to Simone Weil’s account of attention, how it “consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object; it means holding in our minds, within reach of this thought, but on a lower level and not in contact with it, the diverse knowledge we have acquired which we are forced to make use of” (Weil 1951, p. 111). Weil describes a kind of epoché that obstructs the tendency for self-reference; her account reinforces the sense that the self is not the proper subject of one’s attention. At first glance, Weil’s notion of attention as a species of prayer may seem like a form of passivity, but it is better understood as a mood

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of receptivity. Though one is “suspending thought,” this kind of openness and waiting remains a critical enterprise – still not, though, one of judgment in the sense of moral policing. In Weil’s notion of attention, the self is not the object of inquiry, but merely the position from which to develop one’s discipline in looking outward. The autobiographer who writes as if he has a vision of himself having an experience undertakes a wholly different enterprise from the one Wittgenstein and Weil describe. Such an autobiographer treats himself as a writer distinct from the subject of his work, as if he could achieve a “perspicuous representation” of himself, as if he were telling a story about a character (and in an important sense he is). To presume a distance between the writer and his subject transforms the activity from being literary and philosophical into something more like a psychological assessment or an anthropological study  – with the self as the subject under clinical investigation and ethnographic scrutiny. Like Weil, Wittgenstein points to another mode of autobiography, one that is philosophical and at the same time literary. On this view, one does not study the self and call the product of that study one’s autobiographical work; rather, the study alone – this receptivity or attention (as Weil calls it), being in a position to “stand the view” (as Wittgenstein says)  – is one’s autobiographical work. This kind of study means one writes from the self as oneself, looking out onto the world, without separation, with a sense that one is a character who is always coextensive with its author. Hypomnemata are then never notes on oneself, as with conventional psychological autobiography, but always notes to oneself. The result is often a series of fragmentary remarks, maybe a sentence, even just a phrase; not stories, not portraits, not accounts, not narratives. These notes/ exhortations/reminders/remarks are literary and philosophical because they do not reference the world, and do not draw on experience or the empirical to verify claims. Where an autobiography is an explanation, autobiographical remarks are descriptions – notes on the world as I found it. As philosophy is defined by Wittgenstein, so in a related fashion autobiography “leaves everything as it is” (PI 1958, §124). Autobiographical remarks do not create or change a self, rather they describe its orientation. Reading Tolstoy appears to have transformed Wittgenstein’s appreciation for the nature of autobiographical writing. Wittgenstein was already deeply attuned to the moral and religious aspects of Tolstoy’s work, but it was the insight that what has to be “overcome is a difficulty having to do with the will, rather than with the intellect” that gave rise to a particularly Wittgensteinian understanding of autobiographical remarks  – their purposes and effects. Understanding does not require special training but a special mode of attention, a certain willingness to abandon the conceits of the intellect. Wittgenstein wanted to dissipate the

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delusions caused by vanity so he could see clearly, and Tolstoy’s life-writing in its many varieties lent credence to Wittgenstein’s sense that it was possible, and how he might achieve such clarity for himself, in his own writing.

Cheap Remarks In quoting one of the guiding autobiographical remarks of this essay made by Wittgenstein in the Koder diary – “Self-recognition & humility is one” – I intentionally left off until now the parenthetical remark that immediately follows it: “(These are cheap remarks.)” (Wittgenstein 2003, p. K96). It might have been hard to convince readers to consider the work of this essay with Wittgenstein’s parenthetical in mind, since he seems to undermine his own idea, an idea that I understand to be fairly profound. Yet even as I have become more and more invested in the profundity of Wittgenstein’s remark that “Self-recognition & humility is one,” I see that I may be victim to something Wittgenstein warned himself against: “Beware of cheap poignancy when writing about philosophy! I am always in danger of that when little occurs to me. And so it is now” (Wittgenstein 2003, p.  K228).⁸ Though I am intrigued by the reflexive nature of this remark  – that the warning about cheap poignancy is in fact imbued with cheap poignancy – I am also forced to reconsider whether the connection between self-recognition and humility is, in fact, as profound as I have come to believe. Has my vanity obscured my view of Wittgenstein’s admonition? Did I comprehend his warning but suppress it to make a point? Now, at least, it seems clear that Wittgenstein’s parenthetical offers an example of the kind of thing philosophy consists of when fathomed as a species of autobiographical practice. He recognizes how the apparent achievement of an insight such as “Self-recognition & humility is one” conceals a latent vanity; the remark is especially effective at hiding this since on its surface it seems to be about, well, humility. But talking about humility doesn’t necessarily mean one is being humble. He wrote the poignant remark, but did not rest with it. He added the parenthetical as a check to his vanity, as a reminder that he may have achieved nothing but mere cleverness. As a result, at that moment, he began doing philosophy again.

8 Wittgenstein uses the same word – billig – to express his sense of “cheap” in both passages.

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Bibliography Barrett, Cyril (1988): “Wittgenstein, Leavis, and Literature”. In: New Literary History 19, p. 385–401. Hadot, Pierre (1995): Philosophy as a Way of Life. Arnold I. Davidson (Ed.). Oxford: Blackwell. Klagge, James C. (Ed.) (2001): Wittgenstein: Biography and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. LaRocca, David (2007): “Changing the Subject: The Auto/biographical as the Philosophical in Wittgenstein”. In: Epoché 12, p. 169–184. Malcolm, Norman (1993): A Religious Point of View? Peter Winch (Ed.). London: Routledge. Monk, Ray (1990): Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. New York: Penguin. Nordmann, Alfred (2001): “The Sleepy Philosopher: How to Read Wittgenstein’s Diaries”. In: James C. Klagge (Ed.): Wittgenstein: Biography and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 156–175. Weil, Simone (1951): “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God”. In: Waiting for God. New York: Harper & Row, p. 57–66. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (2003): Public and Private Occasions. James C. Klagge/Alfred Nordmann (Eds). Boulder, New York, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield.

Wolfgang Kienzler

Wittgenstein Reads Kürnberger “There’s a rumbling in the skies …” (Bob Dylan, Trying to Get to Heaven) “Wir erkennen, daß eine Linie von Nestroy über Kürnberger zu Karl Kraus führt.” (quoted by Karl Kraus in 1913)

I. A Forgotten Writer “His strongest work, the one which had the most lasting impact, must be sent in first, in order to wake up the memory of Ferdinand Kürnberger, in order to call his personality into the awareness of the modern German, and especially the modern Austrian”¹ (Kürnberger 1910, p. 549). This is the beginning of the brief editorial note to the first volume of Kürnberger’s works published in the early 1910s. At that point Kürnberger was already as good as forgotten, even in his native Vienna, and this has never since changed.² His Collected Works have not been reprinted since and the most recent collection of Kürnberger’s feuilletons with a major German publisher dates from 1967.³ Ferdinand Kürnberger was born in Vienna in 1821 and died in Munich in 1879. He is buried in Mödling near Vienna. He lived rather unsteadily: he partici-

1 “Man muß das allerstärkste, das am meisten nachwirkende Werk vorausschicken, um die Erinnerung an Ferdinand Kürnberger zu wecken, um seine Persönlichkeit dem modernen Deutschen, vor allem aber dem modernen Österreicher zu Bewußtsein zu bringen.” Note: In this contribution the original German phrasing is often supplied, for one because the passages are difficult to find, but also because the way of expression in these quotes is difficult to transform into present-day English. 2 There is a Kürnbergergasse in Vienna and one in Mödling (named thus in 1890), and a Kürnbergerstraße in St. Pölten, but there has, to the best of my knowledge, never been a Kürnberger postage stamp or a Kürnberger School. 3 Karl Riha, the editior of this slim volume of 25 pieces names Wittgenstein, Weber, and Adorno. In the first paragraph of his introduction he emphasizes, rather vaguely: “Ludwig Wittgenstein is said to have liked some of his phrasings (soll einzelne seiner Formulierungen geschätzt haben)” (Kürnberger 1967, p. 7). This edition has never since been reprinted. Riha does not quote or refer to the Tractatus motto and it seems likely that he simply did not know it, as earlier German editions failed to reprint it (see below).

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pated in the 1848 Revolution in Vienna and had to flee Austria. The next year he was convicted to prison for taking part in the unsuccessful 1849 Revolution in Dresden. His personal and political outlook was shaped by these events that tried to bring about the political unity of Germany, including the German-speaking parts of Austria.⁴ Only in 1866 he was able to return to Vienna. He was a prolific writer of several novels, novellas (collected by himself in three volumes), and plays. First and foremost, however, he was known as a newspaper writer, a feuilletonist. Towards the end of his life he edited two volumes of his newspaper articles (feuilletons), titled Siegelringe (Signet Rings, 1874) and Literarische Herzenssachen (Literary Matters from the Heart, 1877).⁵ He intended to publish “five or six volumes, one each year” (Kürnberger 1910, p.  3) but when he died in 1879 only three volumes had appeared. In 1905 a collection of Fünfzig Feuilletons came out and from 1910 to 1912 an edition of his Collected Works began to appear but after four volumes the enterprise faltered. The edition contains enlarged collections of the two volumes of newspaper articles⁶ and two novels, Der Amerika-Müde, Kürnberger’s only work to survive (see below), and Das Schloß der Frevel (The Castle of Hubris). Otto Erich Deutsch, the editor, unsuccessfully tried to continue the edition. Even in 1910–11 the editor felt it necessary to supply some explaining notes, and a two-page “Minister-Tafel” (Table of Ministers) as well as quite extensive indexes of names and works mentioned (1910, p. 551–565; 1911a, p. 577–605).

II. Kraus and Kürnberger How did Wittgenstein learn about Kürnberger? The obvious source is Karl Kraus and his journal Die Fackel (The Torch).⁷ Beginning around 1902 Kraus

4 Unlike many of his generation, Kürnberger greeted the way Prussia and Bismarck brought about a German national state in 1870–71. We may remember that Bismarck was one of Wittgenstein’s favorite authors, although he did not share his views (see his letter to Malcolm, Feb. 2, 1948). 5 The third volume Kürnberger edited in this series was a novella, Der Haustyrann (The Tyrant of the House) (1876). 6 The two volumes contained 99 (12 of them added by the editior) and 62 (26 of them added by the editor) feuilletons, respectively. 7 The writings of Kraus are quoted by number and page of the Fackel pamphlets (F, issue number, page number). Across several decades the Fackel volumes print Kürnberger’s name almost 400 times.

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frequently referred to Kürnberger, he reprinted some of his shorter writings, he urged the necessity of a collected edition, and he especially liked to reprint articles from other journals where he himself was compared to Kürnberger. In 1906 Kraus reprinted Kürnberger’s satirical piece, Die Geschichte meines Passes (The Story of My Passport), about red tape and wilfulness in policing and bureaucracy.⁸ In his introduction he called Kürnberger “the greatest political writer who was ever non-acknowledged by Austria” (den Österreich je verkannt hat), and he complained: “There is no memory of Ferdinand Kürnberger” (Es gibt kein Andenken Ferdinand Kürnbergers) (F 213, p.  5–6/1987d, p.  260–1). Around the same time Kraus urged the necessity of a new edition of the two volumes of feuilletons because they were “the things most Kürnbergerian” (das Kürnbergerischste) (F 217, p.  28). Kraus quoted at length from an article discussing his own “polemics ... which remind in many ways of Ferdinand Kürnberger, one of the finest feuilletonists” (F 267, p.  26). Commemorating the 30th anniversary of Kürnberger’s death in 1909 Kraus reprinted some letters (F 288, p. 4–12). In late 1909 an advertisement in Die Fackel finally announced “Ferdinand Kürnberger gesammelte Werke” to be published in eight projected volumes.⁹ In early 1910, when the first volume, Siegelringe, appeared, Kraus reprinted some more letters of Kürnberger (F 289, p. 17–25). In 1911 Kraus quoted from an article: “Kraus was Kürnberger’s student” (Kraus ist bei Kürnberger in die Schule gegangen) (F 336, p.  22). Eventually, following a shift of emphasis in his own interests, Kraus began to emphasize less Kürnberger’s mostly political topics but

8 Kraus also issued the story as a separate pamphlet of 34 pages (Kürnberger 1907). 9 This coincides with the editor’s note signed “Autumn 1909” (1910, p. 550). The advertisement reads: “Ferdinand Kürnbergers gesammelte Werke werden in 8 Bänden herausgegeben und sollen binnen 2 Jahren vollständig vorliegen. – Als erster Band wird noch im Oktober dieses Jahres die vergriffene Sammlung politischer Feuilletons: ‘Siegelringe’ erscheinen, die in einem Anhang wesentlich vermehrt werden soll. – Die Einteilung der Gesamtausgabe in 8 Bänden ist folgende: 1. Band: Politische und kirchliche Feuilletons (‘Siegelringe’). 2. Band: Literarische und dramaturgische Feuilletons (‘Literarische Herzenssachen’). 3. Band: Touristische und vermischte Feuilletons. 4. Band: ‘Das Schloß der Frevel’, Roman. 5. Band: ‘Der Amerikamüde’, Roman. 6. Band: Novellen (u. a. ‘Das Goldmärchen’). 7. Band: Novellen (u. a. ‘Der Haustyrann’). 8. Band: Tagebücher, Aphorismen, Gedichte. – Wie bei der textlichen Gestaltung möglichste Vollkommenheit erstrebt wird, so soll auch die buchtechnische Ausstattung mustergültig sein. Der Preis wurde trotzdem möglichst niedrig angesetzt. – Alle, die das Zustandekommen dieser Ausgabe fördern wollen, werden gebeten, ihre Subskriptionserklärung möglichst bald an den unterzeichneten Herausgeber oder Verleger zu senden; eventuell mit dem Namen des Buchhändlers, durch den das Werk bezogen werden soll. Ein Verzeichnis der Subskribenten erscheint im letzten Band. [Signed:] Otto Erich Deutsch Wien, I Bartensteingasse 16 // Georg Müller Verlag München, Josephplatz 7” (F 289/Oct. 25, 1909).

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rather his language, his style of writing.¹⁰ In 1911 he once remarked in passing, directed against the easy manner of regular newspaper writers, that “Kürnberger had suffered over every sentence” (der um jedes Satzes willen gelitten hat) (F 339, p. 56/1987d, p. 315). In 1913 Kraus quoted from another journal: “We recognize that there is a line leading from Nestroy to Kürnberger and on to Kraus” (Wir erkennen, daß eine Linie von Nestroy über Kürnberger zu Karl Kraus führt) (F 389, p. 25). Given Wittgenstein’s well-documented interest in Karl Kraus – he had the Fackel forwarded even when he was staying in Norway  – Kürnberger could not possibly have escaped Wittgenstein’s notice. Given the frequency of Kraus quoting from Kürnberger it would even seem probable that Wittgenstein should have encountered the Tractatus motto directly in Kraus’ writings. This however, seems not to have been the case as it does not to occur in the Fackel volumes.¹¹

III. Engelmann and Wittgenstein From his correspondence with Paul Engelmann and his mother Ernestine we know that Wittgenstein gave a copy of Literarische Herzenssachen to the Engelmanns in early 1917. Ernestine Engelmann wrote to Wittgenstein in return: Thank you that you care for our evenings even from afar and probably unknowingly, because Kürnberger’s essays and reflections (critical pieces would be an ill-chosen expression for them)¹², which Paul reads to us every evening – they are a wonderful and noble

10 This attitude is expressed in Kürnberger’s remark about Lessing, applied to Kürnberger himself by the editor: “And thus we have been reading our Lessing (Kürnberger) for a long time for formal reasons only, because everything material (das Sachliche) has been assimilated, and unfortunately almost half of Lessing (Kürnberger) consists of such outdated material” (1911a, p. 17 and 575). 11 The motto for the Investigations, on the other hand, can be found in the back of the offprint of the famous 1912 essay Nestroy und die Nachwelt (Nestroy and Posterity) (F 349–50, p. 56/just the essay: 1987e, p. 220–240). The motto is on the last page of the pamphlet, the second part of which consists of a collection of Nestroy quotes and is not included with the reprinted article in the collected edition. The motto does, however, not give the name of the play it is taken from, so Wittgenstein may have taken it from another source (see below). A copy of the pamphlet, with some markings next to the quote, survives at the Wittgenstein Archives, Cambridge (Nedo 2012, p. 35). 12 “Aufsätze und Betrachtungen (Kritiken wäre ein schlechtgewählter Ausdruck hierfür)” This remark objects to the subtitle of the volume, “Reflexionen und Kritiken”. Ernestine

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treat. It is a pity that you cannot be with us, you would certainly enjoy them again. (CPE 2006, p. 20/Jan. 30, 1917)

This suggests that Wittgenstein had already enjoyed reading, or maybe listening to the Kürnbeger pieces. Somewhat later Paul Engelmann himself expresses his gratitude for the Kürnberger volume: Many thanks belatedly for the Kürnberger book. Almost everything in it is very good, Der Rhapsode Jordan ( Jordan the Bard) and Das Denkmalsetzen in der Opposition (I.) (Setting up Monuments in Opposition)¹³ are great. The book is a monument of the “Eighties” (Achtzigerjahre), as this last period of culture can most conveniently be named.¹⁴ (CPE 2006, p. 23/ April 4, 1917)¹⁵

This observation touches on one of Wittgenstein’s favorite and lifelong pastimes, namely thinking about the right relation between different ages, cultural phenomena, or different composers or writers. There are numerous examples of this to be found in the collection Culture and Value. We also know of the admiration Wittgenstein held for Oswald Spengler, who may be considered to be the most extreme as well as most extended example of this kind of thinking.¹⁶

Engelmann liked to restrict the term “critical notices” to pieces written for the day and she preferably referred to Kürnberger’s pieces as “essays”. 13 This somewhat cryptic title alludes to several types of opposition. Kürnberger distinguishes the easy political bourgeois opposition to the Emperor (Ihrer Majestät allergetreueste Opposition  – ‘His Majesty’s Most Obedient Opposition’) from the moral opposition, and declared himself to constitute the aesthetic opposition (1911a, p. 311) – the opposition against the ‘Denkmal-Fexe’ (Monument-Freaks; 1911a, p. 320). 14 In something of a pun Engelmann called Kürnberger’s article on monuments itself a monument (see below). This way to put it also indicates that he considered Kürnberger to belong to a different cultural era than himself and Wittgenstein, although he did not express the nostalgia Kraus did (see next note). 15 For Kraus the Achtzigerjahre (Kürnberger died in 1879), represented a time seemingly more naïve but really less degraded and still capable of having “culture” in the strict sense of the term, other than his own present, the beginning of the twentieth century. He wrote in one of his aphorisms: “In the eyes of the better-developed youth it is a blemish to remember the Achtzigerjahre with some cultural nostalgia. And yet we could justly call upon nature as a witness against the decline (Entartung) into the twentieth century, and e.g. state that in the Achtzigerjahre spring still was a season and not just a day slain by the blazing sun. One can remember spring, too, like everything mankind no longer has.” (Kraus 1987f, p. 339) In contradistinction to his own unloved “time of iron” Kraus lovingly dubbed it a “time of the horse-iron [horse-shoe]”. Kraus famously called Wittgenstein’s father Karl, a steel magnate, “a man of iron and steal” (pun intended). 16 More on the importance of Spengler in particular and of this vein of Wittgenstein’s thought in general is discussed in (Kienzler 2013).

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In the first article singled out by Engelmann in his letter Kürnberger discusses the problem why there is an undisputed national epos in classical Greece (Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey) while the Nibelungenlied never reached a comparable position and influence in Germany. In addressing this question Kürnberger does not analyze the two epic works but he describes their relative position within the greater scope of culture in general.¹⁷ He first points out that when the Iliad was written, the political, religious and cultural state of the Greek world was by and large still roughly the same as during the time of the action described. Secondly, these general political, linguistic, and religious conditions also remained roughly the same during the centuries afterwards, so that later generations could immediately recognize their own regards in that epic. In the case of the original sagas reaching back to the Migration Period, these stories were first told by a people which would soon after change their religion and accept Christianity. They would also change their entire political and cultural outlook, so that when the Nibelungenlied was written down its author was already alienated from the events and cultural conditions the saga unfolds, and thus from the very beginning it could not be of one piece. Given this dilemma, it comes as no surprise that the Nibelungenlied, or any other epic work, could not be a national epos, expressing the most basic common outlook of all “Germans”.¹⁸ In brief, Kürnberger expressed the idea that a national epic can only be created and continue to live within the scope of a stable system of political, cultural, and religious conditions.¹⁹ The second essay singled out by Engelmann in his letter to Wittgenstein discussed the fact that contemporary Viennese, and Germans like Austrians in general²⁰, were enthusiastic about putting up monuments. Kürnberger decided

17 This very holistic method contrasts markedly from any kind of atomism, logical or other, often attributed to Wittgenstein. 18 The occasion for Kürnberger’s article was the attempt of a 19th century writer, Wilhelm Jordan, to create a new German national epos by going back to the Matter of Nibelungen. In Kürnberger’s opinion this was just ridiculous because it disregarded the limits to which a 19th century writer was confined. This prefigures Spengler’s idea that within each overarching culture only very specific ways of expression are possible. 19 Kürnberger also points out that the most popular stories of the Middle Ages concerned Arthur, a Celtic king, who even was from a different nation than the storytellers. 20 This shows a feature that sets Kürnberger sharply apart from turn-of-the-century Vienna: To him being Austrian did not exclude but rather necessarily included being German. He saw himself as a German, with Vienna and Berlin being the two possible capitals, and he strongly supported the process of German national unification, as well as the war against France in 1870/71. Kürnberger was a fierce German nationalist. Around 1900 in Vienna this attitude would have been regarded a bit embarrassing. It should be noted, however, that Wittgenstein, on occasion, called himself a German, too. His father had been born near Leipzig, and he

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that this could not be explained by reference to art only, simply because, according to him, sculpture was not an art form alive at present. According to his general (roughly Hegelian) ideas about the history of art, (“bodily”) sculpture belonged to Antiquity, and the proper art of modernism was (“spiritual”) poetry and speech. In another article from the same volume, Kürnberger had discussed the Schiller-Goethe Correspondence. There he had made fun of the proposal that “every town and every village should have its Schiller monument, we should see the picture of our poet in every place, at fountains and under village linden trees” (1911a, p. 140). Kürnberger calls this a Greek idea quite alien to the German national spirit. The German spirit was “poetical, musical”, but not at all sculptural (1911a, p.  142). Therefore Germany should not have innumerable Schiller monuments but simply plenty of inexpensive editions of his works: These could really do the job more cheaply and effectively than the monuments of stone. Again Kürnberger juxtaposes two worlds, and he points out that his own age seems to be unable to tell apart two completely distinct ways of expression.²¹ For him, the most basic nature of modernity excludes the possibility that anything artistically important should be expressed through sculpture  – and therefore the obsession with erecting monuments must be accounted for in some other way. His answer will be that we have to view it as a political, not an aesthetic phenomenon. First, however, he explains the basic difference between ancient and modern art: If I ask somebody semi-educated (halbgebildet): What is the difference between ancient and modern art? He will answer in much confusion: Sir, this question stirs up whole universes of ideas. This is a matter for entire books and university semesters. If, however, I ask somebody thoroughly and entirely educated (durchgebildet und ganzgebildet), I will get the answer: Sir, this can be said in three words. Ancient art issues from the body, modern art issues from the soul. Therefore ancient art was sculptural while modern art is lyrical, musical, in short romantic. Bravo! Thus, entire universes of ideas, if you are actually in command of them, can be put in a nutshell; and everything one knows, and which is not a mere rumbling and roaring from hearsay, can be said in three words. (1911a, p. 311)²²

himself was careful to speak high German without any Austrian accent. In 1914 he wrote in his diary, contrasting the English and the German “race”: “The thought that our race should be beaten depresses me terribly, as I am thoroughly German (denn ich bin ganz und gar deutsch)” (Oct. 25, 1914). 21 The same basic point was later expressed by Karl Kraus in his famous aphorism about the chamber-pot and the burial-urn: half of his contemporaries are too precious and nostalgic and thus they use the pot as an urn while the other half is too bold and modern and thus they use the urn as a pot. Neither group acts naturally (Kraus 1987f, p. 341). 22 The passage is also quoted in (CPE 2006, p. 173).

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The main point of the motto is the idea that, regarding any particular point in question, everything that can be said at all, can be said clearly and briefly. This notion was also repeatedly stressed by Kraus. Kürnberger thus suggests that we don’t have to develop a complicated and intricate theory because the main point is very simple. In fact, his message is so simple that most people would not understand it precisely because it was so simple. For Kürnberger, this was just an aside on his way to discuss the confusions of his own day – his ideas about the epochs in art do not claim to be original. His contribution does not intend to give us an original theory but rather to remind us of something which we really (should have) known all along.²³ Wittgenstein used the motto to highlight something about the spirit of his own book. It suggests that the Tractatus has something important to say which can be expressed in a very simple and concise way – if only we are prepared to understand it in the right way, the right spirit: Just a few fundamental distinctions between sentences with sense and those without sense, between internal and external relations and concepts, between saying and showing. Not much of a theory, just some elementary differences that should really be clear.²⁴ It is not that all the facts can be stated in three words, but rather that everything fundamental that can be said about logic and language can be said in a few paragraphs. It should and could really be quite simple and concise, but it will only be understood by somebody who already shared the same basic attitude  – if only one single such person in the right spirit could be found. The motto thus suggests (1) that the book is about something elementary and basically simple, (2) that the book discusses some elementary differences or distinctions that are usually confused, (3) that it takes no technical skills to understand the book’s message but rather the right perspective, and (4) that the main points are expounded in as straightforward a manner as possible. ²⁵ In short: “What can be said at all, can be said clearly; and what we cannot talk of, we must pass over in silence.”²⁶

23 The reminders in the Philosophical Investigations about the way we have been using language are basically of the same piece with this idea. 24 The favorite word in the book is “clear”. 25 I have developed a few ideas along this line of thought in order to suggest a somewhat novel reading of the Tractatus in Kienzler (2009) and (2012). 26 This would make it the first requirement for a successful reading of the Tractatus that any good reading should make the book come out as clear and straightforward as possible.

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IV. Der Amerikamüde: Adorno and Max Weber There are two other examples where bits from Kürnberger have been used, and both of them display remarkable similarities to Wittgenstein’s case. Both examples concern Kürnberger’s novel Der Amerikamüde, first published in 1855. It is the only one of his books that has survived and continues to be reprinted from time to time, mainly on account of its subject matter. The book tells of an Austrian poet and nobleman leaving his native country for America but returning in disappointment.²⁷ The first example can be found in Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, first published in 1904. In it Weber begins the central second section, “The Spirit of Capitalism” with a long quotation from a description of American work ethics by Benjamin Franklin²⁸, translated and included by Kürnberger near the beginning of Der Amerikamüde.²⁹ This may seem doubtful from a scholarly point of view as Kürnberger had never even seen America and he knew hardly any English. However, Weber indicates that he is quite aware of this fact and that he uses the passage to illustrate and highlight a certain fundamental difference, a certain spirit.³⁰ Weber writes: That it is the spirit of capitalism which here speaks no one will doubt, however little we may wish to claim that everything which could be understood as pertaining to that spirit is contained in it. Let us pause a moment to consider this passage, the philosophy (Lebensweisheit) of which Kürnberger sums up in the words: “They make tallow out of cattle and money out of men” (Weber 1930, p. 51).³¹

27 Although we have no evidence that Wittgenstein knew this novel it may be noted that the protagonist of the book is a thinly disguised version of Nikolaus Lenau (1802–1850), the well-known Austrian poet and playwright who emigrated to the United States in 1832, returning in 1833. Wittgenstein repeatedly remarks on Lenau’s play Faust, and more specifically on Lenau’s fear of going insane, which eventually he did (see especially Ms 132, p. 197/ VB 1980a, p. 53). 28 The quote consists of about three pages from Franklin’s Necessary Hints to Those That Would Be Rich and Advice to a Young Tradesman. 29 Kürnberger relates a school scene with a teacher passing on something like the gospel of capitalism to his pupils (1855, p. 17–21). 30 Weber also indicates that he used the quote from Kürnberger’s novel only after emending “the rather free translation”. For obvious reasons this remark about the translation is lacking in the English version. It is striking that Weber who could have quoted straight from Franklin’s text still chose to introduce it via Kürnberger’s novel. 31 Kürnberger’s original reads: “Aus den Rindern macht man Talg, aus den Menschen Geld.” (1855, p. 21) Weber further shortened this: “Aus Rindern macht man Talg, aus Menschen Geld.” (Weber 1920, p. 33) Kürnberger lets his hero retort: “Spirit you are to make of people, not money.”

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In a note appended to this passage Weber explains his own strategy of exposition in more detail: Der Amerikamüde, [is] well known to be an imaginative paraphrase of Lenau’s impression of America.³² As a work of art the book would today be somewhat difficult to enjoy, but it is incomparable as a document of the (now long since blurred-over) differences between the German and the American outlook, one may even say of the spiritual life (Innenleben) which, in spite of everything, has remained common to all Germans, Catholic and Protestant alike, since the German mysticism of the Middle Ages, as against the Puritan capitalistic valuation of action. (Weber 1930, p. 192, n. 3)

In short, Weber found in Kürnberger the ability to combine factual as well as fictional elements in order to express certain opposing attitudes in a very concise way. Weber even quotes such a line from Kürnberger, and he could very well have used that line about the cattle and the men as a motto to his attempt to bring out the characteristics of capitalism. He explains: “Thus, if we try to determine the object, the analysis and historical explanation of which we are attempting, it cannot be in the form of a conceptual definition, but at least in the beginning only as a provisional description (Veranschaulichung³³) of what is here meant by the spirit of capitalism. Such a description is, however, indispensable in order clearly to understand the object of the investigation” (Weber 1930, p. 48). There are no indications that Weber ever used anything from Kürnberger again. The second example comes from Theodor Adorno. He used the book to express his own critical attitude towards America, or rather the United States of America. During his exile there Adorno signed letters using the phrase “your America-tired child” (Adorno 2003, p. 18/1939). However, Adorno also used a line from the book to express his own much more general attitude about the state of life in his own time. For his own book of short critical prose, Minima Moralia,

(Geist macht man aus den Menschen, nicht Geld) – and he has the school servant approve of that answer: “Thank you for this German word.” (Ich danke Ihnen für dieses deutsche Wort). Weber has no use for this continuation. 32 Weber calls Kürnberger’s novel “sparkling with esprit and with poison” (geist- und giftsprühend). 33 The term “Veranschaulichung” could better be rendered as “illustration” or “image”: Weber brings forth a lively picture of this spirit, he does not try to describe it. And Weber finds, that for, or maybe because of, all his prejudiced and emotional as well as fictional and literary way of doing it, Kürnberger makes something “clear” and he “hits the nail on the head” (cf. the Preface to the Tractatus).

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the first part of which was written in the USA in 1944, he used a quotation from Kürnberger as a motto: “Life does not live.” (“Das Leben lebt nicht.”)³⁴ In a radio conversation with Max Horkheimer and Eugen Kogon from 1950, one year before Minima Moralia was published, Adorno elaborated: Maybe we could put it as extremely as to state that life in that sense which for everybody of us resonates with the word ‘Life’, no longer existed. Roughly like the way the important prose writer Ferdinand Kürnberger expressed it already in the 19th century: Life does not live. (Horkheimer 1995, p. 123)³⁵

There are no positive indications that Adorno knew anything else or that he found anything else in Kürnberger interesting. It is, however, striking that his book Minima Moralia is composed mostly of critical short pieces dealing with phenomena of contemporary culture that could very well be compared to Kürnberger’s feuilletons.³⁶ Near the beginning of his book, Kürnberger writes about his hero: “A man stands before us, not under the strain of common want, one who does not live his live as if ordered, yet just one calling seems to have become his: to represent the subject in this world of the objective, merely external” (1855, p. 7).³⁷ Except for Adorno’s dislike of any exceptional individual he might have used this passage as a motto for his collection.³⁸ There is also some irony in the fact that Kürnberger’s book of failed emigration was published in Frankfort while he was in exile from

34 The quote is from Der Amerikamüde (1855, p. 372), in the narrative it is part of the first poem the hero of the book writes in Ohio. The title Amerikamüde is Kürnberger’s satirical answer to the popular contemporary slogan Europamüde (tired of Europe). More details on this can be found in Goehr 2008, ch. 8: Amerikamüde/Europamüde. 35 “Man könnte es vielleicht so extrem formulieren, daß man sagt, daß es eigentlich Leben in dem Sinn, der mit dem Wort ‘Leben’ für uns alle mitschwingt, nicht mehr gäbe. So ungefähr wie der bedeutende Prosaschriftsteller Ferdinand Kürnberger im neunzehnten Jahrhundert bereits es formulierte: ‘Das Leben lebt nicht.’” 36 The pieces from Minima Moralia were not published in newspapers of journals but throughout his career Adorno was a frequent contributor to periodicals and he republished them in several collected volumes. 37 “Ein Mensch steht vor uns, den nicht die gemeine Not beeilt, der sein Leben nicht auf Bestellung lebt, aber ein Auftrag scheint ihm geworden: das Subjekt zu vertreten in der Welt des Objektiven, Äußerlichen.” 38 Adorno, in turn, opens his own book with a note on Proust as a representation of an amateur who is decidely no “professional” (Adorno 1951, p. 15).

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Vienna, while Adorno’s book of exile came out as one of his first post-war books in Frankfort as well, ninety-six years later.³⁹ Thus we find three authors borrowing bits from Kürnberger to introduce their respective main topics (capitalism, life, the basic form of understanding). Only Weber supplied the title, only Adorno gave an overall estimate of Kürnberger as a writer, but none of the three ever again returned to Kürnberger, the man whose favorite game was to powerfully express opposition: he opposed America and capitalism when everybody else opposed Europe and feudalism, he opposed monuments when everybody wanted to set them up, and he opposed everybody’s complicated theories when he found that things were really simple.

V. A Wittgensteinian Outlook: What else in Kürnberger? There is much more in Kürnberger’s writings that Wittgenstein might have liked and found interesting. Kürnberger wrote extensively about the way language is used and misused, or maybe rather transformed through the way the newspaper business works.⁴⁰ Kürnberger also wrote about authors Wittgenstein himself revered, he was one of the early admirers of Gottfried Keller (1911a, p. 223–235). Kürnberger also favored a non-dogmatic, non-ecclesiastical version of seemingly naïve religion. He also wrote about “being Viennese”. In one piece he discussed the ongoing argument whether Vienna was really a cosmopolitan city (Weltstadt), or rather a provincial place (Krähwinkel). However, he does not take sides in this dispute but frames a deeper question: “The question cannot possibly be which of the quarreling parties is in the right, but rather why they are quarreling in the

39 This, in turn, may have led to the reprinting of Der Amerikamüde with Adorno’s publisher in 1986. 40 Kürnberger, like Kraus after him, is careful to note that, while he himself did publish in newspapers, he was never a professional newspaper man. He thought of his feuilletons as things that appeared in newspapers more or less accidentally, and that they were from the start intended to reach deeper than the daily occasion: They took the occasion and used them to dig deeper into the foundations of any particular incident. Kürnberger used the image of a signet ring (Siegelring) as an illustration of this thought: the idea is that he uses his ring to impress his own personal seal on some soft and fleeting material. Another idea is that he does his writing out of love, because he has an inner urge to express something: he is just writing “matters from the heart” (Herzenssachen). In these respects he is a confessing non-professional and anti-modernist writer and person.

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first place, and why it is that there is only quarrel” (1910, p.  520). This way of thinking is a distant relative of Wittgenstein’s idea that the right perspective on the quarrel between realism, idealism and solipsism is not to ask who is right and who is wrong, but to investigate into the relationships between these seemingly opposing, actually complementary views. However, we do not know whether Wittgenstein remembered more from Kürnberger than just a few impressive lines. Wittgenstein used a few lines from Kürnberger for his Tractatus motto, but as it happened to little effect. The book was read as a book in logic – this directed readers to Frege and Russell, and it was read as a book in ethics and religion or mysticism  – this directed readers to Tolstoy and Schopenhauer. Engelmann himself commented later on many aspects of the Tractatus he thought had been neglected, but he never even mentioned Kürnberger’s name.⁴¹ There is also no trace of Kürnberger in the rest of Wittgenstein’s writings or conversations. It is as if he had forgotten about him after he had used the motto. He never seems to have recommended him to any of his friends, and there seem to be no allusions to Kürnberger in the family correspondence. Everything we know comes from the two letters written by Paul Engelmann and his mother in 1917.⁴²

41 All the authors of Wittgenstein’s Vienna have to say about Kürnberger is that he was “typically Viennese” and that Karl Kraus liked his work ( Janik/Toulmin 1973, p. 27 and 81). Kürnberger was not part of the glamorous turn-of-the-century Vienna this book is about. The Wittgenstein Dictionary does not mention him (Glock 1996). The most extensive commentary on the Tractatus so far, Max Black’s Companion, gives a few remarks on the title of the book and scanty fourteen lines on the Preface but it ignores the motto altogether (Black 1964, p. 23), as did already Black’s index to the 1955 edition of the Tractatus (TLP 1955, p. 196). Marie McGinn’s rather long book mentions neither the preface nor the motto (McGinn 2006). Ray Monk’s biography also keeps silent about Kürnberger (Monk 1992). Even an article especially dedicated to the much-neglected Preface fails to mention the motto (Howes 2003). 42 Brian McGuinness relates that Literarische Herzenssachen was “on the library shelves” of the Wittgenstein family library, and also that “Wittgenstein often discussed Kürnberger with Heinrich Groag”. We also read: “Curiously enough he would not say where the quotation came from: it was in fact also quoted by Kraus”. These accounts derive from Groag’s personal communication with McGuinness (1988, p.  37 and 251). (This account does not fit very well with Paul Engelmann’s praise for the Denkmalsetzen essay.) Along with Engelmann Groag was part of the Olomouc circle where Wittgenstein spent quite some time during 1916 and 1917. In a letter dated April 20, 1921 Engelmann tells Wittgenstein that Groag had owned both volumes of Frege’s Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, and when Wittgenstein had asked Engelmann to send him a copy in 1920 he had sent Groag’s copy.

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Appendix: The Fate of the Motto Across the Printing History of the Tractatus The motto was first printed in 1921, but from the beginning until today it has led the life of a displaced piece of writing. This is somewhat surprising, considering the quite explicit and obvious intentions Wittgenstein expressed about its place and role in the scope of the book. This can easily be seen from the way the original typescript is organized⁴³: there is a title page, then on the reverse of that page we meet the dedication, and on the next sheet there is the motto placed above the beginning of the Preface.⁴⁴ This layout seems quite simple and natural, yet it has never been realized in print.⁴⁵ The earliest manuscript version in the Prototractatus has the motto in the top right corner of an otherwise blank page that was to contain the Preface.⁴⁶ The original layout was not used for the original bilingual edition of the book: here we find the title, dedication, and motto all on the title page before the Preface begins.⁴⁷ Above the Preface the title is repeated, instead of the motto, as

43 There are no differences in layout between Ts 202, 203 and 204, as can easily be seen in the Bergen Edition. 44 This arrangement makes the two sentences about “everything we know… can be said in three words” and “what can be said at all, can be said clearly” resonate. 45 Actually the much put-down Ostwald edition is the only one that places the motto immediately above the Preface. This, however, may not be on account of any insight as the title and the dedication are also placed immediately above the motto as the book is printed like an article (TLP 2004, p. 399). 46 This rather obvious conjecture is somewhat obscured by the fact that Wittgenstein decided to write down the Preface in the back of the Prototractatus ledger – without repeating the motto, so that the rest of the page below the motto remained blank. The book publication of the Prototractatus further obscured the relative locations of title, dedication and motto by leaving out blank pages in the facsimile, placing the title page and the dedication on facing pages, while the page containing he motto is placed between two white pages, thus leaving it in the middle of nowhere. The edition of the text has German and English text on facing pages, placing title, dedication and motto on the same page. The text is given in the intended numerical order, but the Preface is not reproduced in its intended place, most probably because the editors believed it to be the preface to the final version, rather than the Prototractatus version of the text. This policy leaves the motto unexplained and without any work to do, up in the air (PT 1971, p. x). These circumstances make the typescripts the prime source about Wittgenstein’s (fairly conventional) ideas on the layout of his book. 47 In his letters to Ogden Wittgenstein is not very specific in his instructions about the layout of the first few pages, but, as he remarks once, in translation “all the finer points are lost anyway” (CCO 1973, p.  46–7). Still he includes dedication and motto with the Preface and suggests that each item should appear in German as well as in English.

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originally intended. In this way the motto never really became part of the book, it was left untranslated, even in the 1961 Pears-McGuinness translation (TLP 1961). Thus it remained very much out of reach of the English-speaking readership.⁴⁸ On the other hand, the dedication was translated and reproduced in English only. This effected in a trilingual title page⁴⁹: Latin title, English dedication and German motto.⁵⁰ Later English-only editions did translate the motto but still placed it along with the dedication on the title page, cutting off its connection to the Preface (for example, Wittgenstein 2000).

Variations of the motto In the 1911 edition the motto reads: “... und alles, was man weiß, nicht bloß rauschen und brausen gehört hat, läßt sich in drei Worten sagen.”⁵¹ The Prototractatus reproduces the motto in very small letters, squeezing the lines in the top right corner, apparently trying to save space for the Preface which later was placed in a different spot⁵²: Motto: ... und alles was man weiss, nicht blos rauschen und brausen gehört hat, läßt sich in drei Worten sagen.⁵³ Kürnberger

48 The motto was first translated in the Prototractatus edition. German readers fared even worse: The first German republication in his Schriften (Wittgenstein 1960) as well as the first separate German edition omitted both motto and dedication (Wittgenstein 1963). It was only with the 1984 edition that the motto was included (Wittgenstein 1984), and no subsequent edition has restored the motto to its obvious and proper place as suggested here (see e.g. TLP 2003). 49 This refers to the page immediately following Russell’s Introduction and preceding Wittgenstein’s Preface. Wittgenstein’s instructions to Ogden indicate that he expected the book’s title page to carry the English (or rather Latin) Title, but that he wished to have everything he had written himself to be printed in both languages. “This is the part I am responsible for and therefore must be left together.” (CCO 1973, p. 47) 50 In the original version everything was in German, of course. 51 This original emphasis on “weiß” was never, it seems, reproduced. Kürnberger’s original 1874 version spells “Alles” and “blos”. Wittgenstein’s rather inconsistent spelling gives no hint as to which edition he may have used. Both pieces mentioned by Engelmann are contained in either version. 52 This positioning makes it very unlikely that the rest of this page was originally intended to be left blank. 53 Slashes indicate line breaks.

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The version in Ts 202, 203, and 204, reads:  Motto: ... und alles was man weiß, nicht bloß rauschen und brausen gehört hat, läßt sich in drei Worten sagen.  Kürnberger.

This arrangement makes it clear that Wittgenstein is quoting a few lines of prose and that the word “motto” is placed outside the range of these two lines. The Ostwald edition reproduces this quite faithfully, except for moving “hat” to the end of line two. The offprint from this edition used in preparation of the 1922 edition (re-)introduces a comma after “alles”, probably in Wittgenstein’s hand (TLP 2004 , p. 399). The 1922 Ogden edition (TLP 1922) reproduces this comma, compresses the motto into two lines, and moves it to the centre of the title page: M o t t o: … und alles, was man weiss, nicht bloss rauschen und brausen gehört hat, lässt sich in drei Worten sagen.  Kürnberger.

The only notable change is the way the second line starts underneath the word “motto”. The Kritische Ausgabe (1989) arranges everything in three lines that are centered on the title page: Motto: ... und alles, was man weiß, nicht bloß rauschen und brausen gehört hat, läßt sich in drei Worten sagen. Kürnberger

This treats the quotation like a piece of poetry. The most recent German edition places the dedication on the title page (3), then gives the motto standing alone on a separate right hand page (5), and has the beginning of the Vorwort on the following right hand page (7), thus giving the motto more prominence than it ever had by reproducing the physical (but not the intended) arrangement of the Prototractatus situation, while leaving out the word “motto” (TLP 2003, p. 3–7).

The translations The 1971 Prototractatus translates the motto:

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... and anything a man knows,/ anything he has not merely heard rumbling and roaring,/ can be said in three words.

The 1974 Routledge edition (TLP 1974) translates: ... and whatever a man knows, whatever is not mere rumbling and roaring that he has heard, can be said in three words.

Both renderings seem to somewhat obscure the basic point of the motto, namely that “everything one knows, and which we have not just heard roaring and rumbling, can be said in three words”. The idea is that the entirety of what we really know, that is, all that we have full intellectual command of regarding a certain question, can be said very briefly and succinctly in a few words – if we leave out all the unclear and only half-understood hearsay. The statement is not intended to express something about the extensive totality of our knowledge. The scope of the question extends to exactly one basic question (about ancient and modern art). The words “rauschen und brausen” would usually be applied to the sounds from a waterfall or maybe from a fairly strong wind in the trees. The point is not that we really know only very little, neither that so much is unknown to us, but rather that we are dealing not with a complicated question but rather with a basic and elementary distinction. There is no suggestion of any weakness of reason, quite to the contrary the idea is rather that the essence of everything really is very simple, yet hard to grasp. The essence can be known and expressed and in his first book Wittgenstein did his best to do precisely this.

Kürnberger and Nestroy: About the Progress from Early to Later Wittgenstein Like the Tractatus, the Philosophical Investigations were first published in a bilingual edition. Unlike the Tractatus, the original edition of the Investigations (PI 1953) has two facing title pages, followed by a translator’s note (English only), then an editorial note (German and English). Then we find the motto on a separate page (German only, but curiously placed on the English side) and finally the Preface (German and English). There is no dedication. This layout arrangement again separates the motto from the Preface – although the typescript has the motto immediately before the Preface – although there are no specific instruction where to place it (Ts 227a, p. 1 and 227b, p. 1). Wittgenstein decided very late to include the Nestroy motto, and in the surviving typescripts it is not even written in Wittgenstein’s own hand (PU 2001, p. 741).

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It replaced an earlier motto from Heinrich Hertz. On April 25, 1947 Wittgenstein wrote down the Nestroy motto, including the name of the play it is taken from and the word “motto”, in Ms 134.⁵⁴ Nestroy was an older contemporary of Kürnberger, living from 1801 (born in Vienna) until 1862 (he died in Graz). The motto immediately precedes the Preface where Wittgenstein especially discusses the relation between his two books. This suggests that progress, “always looking larger than it really is”, means Wittgenstein’s own progress, especially as he expresses the wish that both of his books be published in the same volume. This furthermore suggests that the Nestroy motto could be read as answering the Kürnberger motto.⁵⁵ It actually predates the Kürnberger motto (1847 as opposed to 1873). This replacement of Hertz by Nestroy expresses more of a unity in Wittgenstein’s work, as both are Vienna writers, and none of them a philosopher or scientist. This may have been the last effect Kürnberger had on Wittgenstein, very indirectly and thirty years later.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W. (1951): Minima Moralia. Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Adorno, Theodor W. (1974): Minima Moralia. Reflections on a Damaged Life. New York: New Left Books. Adorno, Theodor W. (2003): Briefe an die Eltern. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Black, Max (1964): A Companion to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Ithaca, NY.: Cornell. Glock, Hans-Johann (1996): A Wittgenstein Dictionary. Oxford: Blackwell. Goehr, Lydia (2008): Elective Affinities. Musical Essays on the Hisory of Aesthetic Theory. New York: Columbia. Horkheimer, Max (1995): Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 13. Frankfurt/M.: Fischer Howe, Bruce (2003): “‘Rethinking’ the Preface of the Tractatus”. In: Philosophical Investigations 30, p. 3–24. Janik, Allan/Toulmin, Stephen (1973): Wittgenstein’s Vienna. New York: Simon and Schuster. Kienzler, Wolfgang (2009): “Die Sprache des Tractatus: klar oder deutlich? Karl Kraus, Wittgenstein und die Frage nach der Terminologie”. In: G. Gebauer/F. Goppelsröder/J. Volbers (Eds): Philosophie als “Arbeit an Einem selbst”. Munich: Fink, p. 223–247. Kienzler, Wolfgang (2012): “Reading the Tractatus from the Beginning: How to Say Everything Clearly in Three Words”. In: P. Stekeler-Weithofer (Ed.): Wittgenstein: Zu Philosophie und Wissenschaft. Hamburg: Meiner, p. 70–102.

54 The date suggests the possibility that Wittgenstein received a volume of Nestroy quotes for his birthday (April 26) and wrote it down as he found it. There exist various such collections. 55 For more on the Nestroy motto see Stern (2002).

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Kienzler, Wolfgang (2013): “Wittgenstein und Spengler”. In: Joseph Rothhaupt/Wilhelm Vossenkuhl (Eds): Kulturen und Werte. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter. Kraus, Karl (1987a): Schriften. Christian Wagenknecht (Ed.). Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Kraus, Karl (1987b): Sittlichkeit und Kriminalität [1908]. Kraus (1987a), vol. 1. Kraus, Karl (1987c): Die Chinesische Mauer [1910]. Kraus (1987a), vol. 2. Kraus, Karl (1987d): Literatur und Lüge [1929]. Kraus (1987a), vol. 3. Kraus, Karl (1987e): Untergang der Welt durch schwarze Magie [1922]. Kraus (1987a), vol. 4. Kraus, Karl (1987f): Aphorismen. Kraus (1987a), vol. 8. Kürnberger, Ferdinand (1855): Der Amerika-Müde. Frankfurt: Meidinger. Kürnberger, Ferdinand (1874): Siegelringe. Eine Sammlung politischer und kirchlicher Feuilletons. Hamburg: Otto Meißner. Kürnberger, Ferdinand (1877): Literarische Herzenssachen. Reflexionen und Kritiken. Vienna: Leopold Rosner. Kürnberger, Ferdinand (1905): Fünfzig Feuilletons. Vienna: Daberow. Kürnberger, Ferdinand (1907): Die Geschichte meines Passes. Vienna: Die Fackel. Kürnberger, Ferdinand (1910): “Siegelringe. Eine Sammlung politischer und kirchlicher Feuilletons”. New, substantially extended edition. In: Gesammelte Werke. Vol. 1. Otto Erich Deutsch (Ed.). Munich, Leipzig: Georg Müller. Kürnberger, Ferdinand (1911a): “Literarische Herzenssachen. Reflexionen und Kritiken”. New, substantially extended edition. In: Gesammelte Werke. Vol. 2. Otto Erich Deutsch (Ed.). Munich, Leipzig: Georg Müller. Kürnberger, Ferdinand (1911b): “Der Amerika-Müde”. In: Gesammelte Werke. Vol. 4. Munich, Leipzig: Georg Müller. Kürnberger, Ferdinand (1912): “Das Schloß der Frevel”. In: Gesammelte Werke. Vol. 5. Munich, Leipzig: Georg Müller. Kürnberger, Ferdinand (1967): Feuilletons. Selected and with an introduction by Karl Riha. Frankfurt/M.: Insel. McGinn, Marie (2006): Elucidating the Tractatus. Wittgenstein’s Early Philosophy of Logic and Language. Oxford: Clarendon. McGuinness, Brian (1988): Wittgenstein. A Life. Young Ludwig 1889–1921. London: Duckworth. Monk, Ray (1990): Wittgenstein. The Duty of Genius. London: Jonathan Cape. Nedo, Michael (2012): Ludwig Wittgenstein. Ein biographisches Album. Munich: Beck. Stern, David (2002): “Nestroy, Augustine, and the Opening of the Philosophical Investigations”. In: Rudolf Haller/Klaus Puhl (Eds): Wittgenstein and the Future of Philosophy. A Reassessment after 50 Years. Vienna: Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, p. 182–196. Weber, Max (1920), “Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus”. In: Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie. Vol. I. Tübingen: Mohr (Siebeck), p. 17–236. Weber, Max (1930), The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons. London: Allen and Unwin; New York: Scribners. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1960): Schriften. Tractatus logico-philosophicus. Tagebücher 1914–1916. Philosophische Untersuchungen. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1963): Tractatus logico-philosophicus. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1984): Werkausgabe Band 1. Tractatus logico-philosophicus. Tagebücher 1914–1916. Philosophische Untersuchungen. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1989): Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung/ Tractatus logico-philosophicus. Kritische Edition. Brian McGuinness/Joachim Schulte (Eds). Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp.

Charles Altieri, Sascha Bru

Trakl’s Tone: Mood and the Distinctive Speech Act of the Demonstrative¹ Dear Sir v. Ficker! I thank you for the poems of Trakl you sent. I do not understand them; but their tone makes me happy. It is the tone of a truly genial man. How much would I like to meet up with you to voice my thoughts on them! Very best wishes from your Ludwig Wittgenstein²

In late November 1914, Wittgenstein wrote this postcard to Ludwig von Ficker from Krakau. Von Ficker, the editor of the Innsbruck-based literary journal Der Brenner, had previously been asked by Wittgenstein to distribute a large sum from his heritage among young writers. The most substantial amount of money went to poets Rainer Maria Rilke and Georg Trakl, and in his capacity of Maecenas Wittgenstein got introduced to their work. This postcard to von Ficker is the closest Wittgenstein ever came to explicitly analyzing the work of both poets  – Wittgenstein had planned to visit Trakl no doubt in part to discuss the poet’s work, but Trakl died a few days before their rencontre. When von Ficker, a few months after Trakl’s death, sent Wittgenstein a posthumously published edition of Trakl’s poems, the philosopher replied that these works too were probably excellent but that, for the time being, he had

1 This chapter builds on previous work of the authors. For Altieri, see: “What Theory can Learn from New Directions in Contemporary American Poetry,” New Literary History 43 (Winter 2012), p. 65–88; “Exemplification and Expression,” in: Garry Hagberg and Walter Jost, eds. A Companion to the Philosophy of Literature, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010, p. 491–506; “Cavell and Wittgenstein on Morality: The Limits of Acknowledgement,” in: Richard Eldridge and Bernard Rhie, eds. Stanley Cavell and Literary Studies: Consequences of Skepticism, New York: Continuum, 2011, p. 62–77. For Bru, see especially: Democracy, Law and the Modernist Avant-Gardes. Writing in the State of Exception, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009; and “Literary Imaginaries. On Experiencing (In)determinacy in German Modernism,” in: Nico Carpentier and Erik Spinoy, eds. Discourse Theory and Cultural Analysis, Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2008, p. 285–306. Bru’s work here is graciously supported by MDRN, a largescale research program of KU Leuven (www.mdrn.be). 2 CLF 1969, p. 22, our translation. The original reads: “Lieber Herr v. Ficker! Ich danke Ihnen für die Zusendung der Gedichte Trakls. Ich verstehe sie nicht; aber ihr Ton beglückt mich. Es ist der Ton eines wahrhaft genialen Menschen. Wie gerne möchte ich Sie sehen und über manches aussprechen! Seien Sie herzlichst gegrüßt von Ihrem.”

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“no desire to assimilate foreign thoughts.”³ And that was that. To little surprise, Wittgenstein’s assessment (or lack thereof) of Trakl’s poems is often cited as an illustration of the philosopher’s rudimentary interest in contemporary, modernist writing.⁴ Yet there are other ways of reading his brief and admittedly underdeveloped rumination on the nature of literary writing that are poignant to our understanding of certain types of (modernist) writing. For despite their brevity, Wittgenstein’s remarks on Trakl’s poems also reveal a view on the vexed issue, at least in literary theory, of tone and its implications for philosophy. In the mind of the young Wittgenstein tone, often used interchangeably with mood or voice, seems to have been an index first and foremost of expression, and more precisely of intentionality. Through intentionality tone, secondly, also brought into play the possibility of emotion – in this case: happiness. Thus also including the domain of affects, Wittgenstein clearly broke from any strict cognitivist position: emotion is not something described as fact but something attuned to as a kind of enactment and so an attitude toward the world. At the same time, the introduction of tone appears to have changed the world to be described for Wittgenstein and so had at least loose cognitive implications as well. For, according to his remark, Trakl’s tone, indeed, was, thirdly, also somehow tied to cognition. Trakl, Wittgenstein implied, meant to express or say something, but what? While indicating to von Ficker that he did not understand Trakl’s poems, the philosopher nonetheless stated that their tone hinted of a genial person expressing himself. Without raking up the complex history of the concept here⁵ or pointing at its significance in Wittgenstein’s personal frame of mind at this point, we have to see “genius” as tied not only to cognate notions such as inspiration and madness. It is also fundamentally linked with the power to change what can be perceived in the world. Trakl’s poems thus possessed a certain type of knowledge, hinted at by their tone, but Wittgenstein could not see what. Finally, his assertion that Trakl’s tone made him happy suggests that he could not conceive of genius divorced from emotion. In producing manifest tonal intricacy, Trakl voices and installs some kind of emotion. In short, for the young Wittgenstein tone appears to have been an index of expression and a certain type of intentionality, inextricably intertwined with emotion and posing questions about cognition: there was a meaning to his words, but Wittgenstein just did not get it; “Ich verstehe sie nicht.” It was as if Trakl’s poetry was pure tone, tone and nothing but tone.

3 Quoted in (Monk 1990, p. 126). 4 See among others Marjorie Perloff’s insightful analysis of Wittgenstein’s pertinence to later writers and artists in her (1996). 5 Consult (Murray 1991).

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As the Philosophical Investigations famously reads: “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about’” (PI 1953, § 122).⁶ It is exactly such an experience Trakl’s poems incited in the young Wittgenstein. As such, what at first sight might appear an insignificant postcard to von Ficker turns out to be a fundamental philosophical problem in (the later) Wittgenstein. Tone in Trakl seemed to be doing everything Wittgenstein would later come to associate it with in the Philosophical Investigations, and everything he deemed impossible in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Indeed, at the point of writing to von Ficker, Wittgenstein gradually began compiling notes for the Tractatus. The complex mixture of attributes he had tied to Trakl’s tone shortly before stands in sharp contrast with at least some of the basic views he saw through in the Tractatus. Theodor W. Adorno, mulling over Wittgenstein’s postcard to von Ficker as well, summed it up this way: [Wittgenstein’s] own behaviour [at the time of writing the Tractatus] was far more flexible than his pronouncements. For instance, he wrote to Ludwig von Ficker ... to say that, although he did not understand Trakl’s poems, he – Wittgenstein – was convinced of their high quality. Since the medium of poetry is language, and since Wittgenstein dealt with language as such and not merely with science, he unintentionally confirmed that one can express what cannot be expressed. (Adorno 1976, p. 53)

What interested Adorno about Wittgenstein’s comments on Trakl was not only that they allowed him to put forth a definition of philosophy diametrically opposed to that of the Tractatus. Of equal interest, though for similar reasons, was that Wittgenstein’s words on Trakl appeared “to suggest that language can sometimes succeed in expressing something even though the attempt to formulate what one wants to say in factual assertions fails” (Foster 2007, p.  52). And tone, Adorno forgot to add, somehow was the vehicle the young Wittgenstein connected to this other type of expression. In the Philosophical Investigations, tone, much like on the postcard to von Ficker, became a facet of sentences in use. Logically a “manifestation of ... feeling” rather than a feeling as such (PI 1953, § 582), tone (along with the subtleties of glance and gesture) here remained tied to certain forms of intentionality and the voice of the subject expressing itself, and was considered as an accompaniment of all sorts of utterances. Gradually, tone here became an integral part of his reflection on the nature of exemplification, certainty and belief. This is particularly apparent in the so-called third Wittgenstein’s turn

6 All parenthetical references and translations to the PI in this chapter are from Philosophical Investigations, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe, London: Basil Blackwell, 1958.

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to “the grammaticalization of experience” (Moyal-Sharrock 2004a, p.  5). Here, Wittgenstein, obviously, explored aspects of thought he had shoved aside in the Tractatus. But in a way he also returned to what he had learned from the pursuit of logical form in the Tractatus.⁷ For the ideal of “perspicuous representation” in the Investigations played an analogous role to the display of logical structure – for a world with no simples. Just as logic cannot be explained but only displayed, perspicuous representations provide alternatives to explanation that have to be content with the role of display. It is the role of tone in such displays that we wish to follow up in this chapter. While grammaticalization is a complex model for replacing explanation with display, we aim to explore only part of it by focusing on the particular expressive, cognitive and emotional functions of tone (in poetry). We do so in order to see better, perhaps, why Wittgenstein at a young age when reading Trakl sensed that the poet’s work was saying something without Wittgenstein seeing what. To his defense, Wittgenstein certainly is not the only reader to have struggled with Trakl. Countless critics and exegetes have searched in vain for the final word about Trakl’s peculiarly menacing semantic universe. We therefore conclude the chapter with a reading of a poem by Trakl and some reflection on the theorization of tone in literary criticism.

Expression, Cognition, Emotion: Tone in Display The tone we use in speaking and communicating has since antiquity been tied to the act of persuasion. Tone can help speakers to convince others of certain things they communicate and it can in turn install conviction in the listener. Yet as Wittgenstein put it, conviction is, the other way round, not to be confused with tone: We should sometimes like to call certainty and belief tones, colorings, of thought; and it is true that they receive expression in the tone of voice. But do not think of them as “feelings” which we have in speaking or thinking.

7 Moyal-Sharrock’s (2004b) makes a strong case for Wittgenstein’s shift from a concern for the grammar expressed by rules to the expressions of grammar “in our ways of acting.” She further makes a strong case for having the therapeutic nature of Wittgenstein’s work “moved off centre-stage in Wittgenstein studies” (5). In this regard we cannot stress too much Wittgenstein’s statement asserting that a physical game is just as certain as the arithmetical: “My remark is a logical, not psychological one” (OC 447). Psychological remarks address states of mind; logical remarks address the structures within cultural frameworks providing possibilities for a society’s actions being intelligible to its various agents.

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Ask, not: “What goes on in us when we are certain that ....?” – but: How is ‘the certainty that this is the case’ manifested in human action? (PI 1953, p. 225)

What kind of linguistic act could best show us the power of tone as Wittgenstein might have experienced it while reading Trakl? To answer this question it is helpful to turn to the grammaticalization of experience in Wittgenstein himself. The perspicuous representation that is perhaps most helpful as a characterization of the possible force of grammaticalization is Wittgenstein’s sharp contrast between a language game that concentrates on descriptions of color and a language game that focuses not on something represented but on “a means of representation” (PI 1953, § 50). For this distinction also clarifies how sentences can occupy “a shifting border between logic and the empirical, so that their meaning changes back and forth and they count now as expressions of norms, now as expressions of experience.”⁸ Probably the most helpful dramatization of this shifting border is Wittgenstein’s simple assertion, “If I let my gaze wander round a room and suddenly it lights on an object of striking red color, and I say ‘Red!’—that is not a description” (PI 1953, p.  187). Let us take this example of the exclamation “Red!”, and its accompanying exclamatory tone, and think it through. This exclamation is not a description because attention is not focused on the object. Rather the statement, and the tone that goes with it, displays and so exemplifies what Wittgenstein calls “the dawning of an aspect,” by calling attention to a state the subject testifies to in relation to how the object appears. Hence, if, as Wittgenstein’s postcard assumed, tone is not to be dissociated from the subject’s expression, it is to be associated with display or exemplification, a mode of involvement in the world that in turn says as much about the speaking subject as the object evoked. Indeed, when we simply describe objects, tone seems of inferior importance, as we do not wish to express our relation to the object but the object itself. Now, obviously, as Wittgenstein himself often observed, we might take any sentence and pronounce it in different tones. But he also explicitly disentangled tone and description (see the “five slabs” example in PI 1953, § 21). We can describe things in different tones but even then our tone will always function as an index of how we as subjects relate to what is said or represented in a specific situation.⁹

8 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour, translated by Linda L. McAlister and Margaret Schattle, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977, Pt. 1, 32. 9 Note that Nelson Goodman arrived at similar conclusions about the distinction between description and display, among others in his (1968, p. 92).

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A shade of red in a painting, for example, might describe what the artist sees, or exemplify a possible shade of red capable of achieving certain contrasts with other colors, or express anger or grief as the artist tilts the metaphoric aspects of what the label is denoted by. Edvard Munch’s The Scream, to remain within the expressionist repertoire, can evoke an anguished vision, can exemplify distorted shapes and intense color for their direct power, and can have these shapes and colors metaphorically exemplify and therefore express a mode of anguish. Expression, assisted by tone, therefore, is display or exemplification that opens possibilities and questions about intentionality. While the self cannot be “described” without turning the subject into an object, intentionality can be exhibited to exemplify some aspect of the person’s activities. In the case of “Red!”, the exclamation becomes a means of making the speaker’s state a distinctive feature of the scene. Now representing the scene only objectively would be an imposition of a severely limited language game. Once the exclamatory tone (here signaled by the exclamation point) contextualizes how the label “red” is being used, this way of deploying the label invites further accounts that may clarify why this particular agent is so moved by this red. Then the assertion of the color provides a label for a specific state of the subject. Many possibilities follow on from this. First, there is the possibility of locating the expression in the self’s life world by what Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations called confession. Second, there is the possibility of self-reflexively entering different kinds of relations with audiences, as if the agent were consciously applying the difference between description and exclamation. One of these relations is the promise that there will a reward for assuming an aesthetic attitude and treating the display as a work of art. Third, one can call attention to how self-consciousness within the artifact functions as an aspect of expressiveness. For Kant this is the domain of purposiveness, which we seek when the contact with an object calls for aesthetic judgment. Imagine, for instance, the following passage in Wittgenstein’s Investigations as a minimalist poem about what cannot be captured by description: “This looks so; this tastes so, this feels so. ‘This’ and ‘so’ must be differently explained’” (PI 1953, p. 186). Here “This” seems to refer to an object and thus calls for some version of testing the adequacy of the description offered. But adding “feels so” contrasts a domain of description with another grammatical domain. “Feels so” need not refer to the object; rather, it invites our taking the sentence as a concrete example that makes manifest how the subject processes the object. The subject experiences the dawning of an aspect, and so transforms the situation from an act of description to an act of expression or display, with a series of attendant shifts in expectations for what responses may now “fit.”

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As “feels so” alludes to, this type of behavior cannot be separated from emotional tone either. Analyzing how an “inner process stands in need of outward criteria,” Wittgenstein observes the following: “If someone whispers ‘It’ll [The bomb will] go off now’, instead of saying ‘I expect the explosion any moment’, still his words do not describe a feeling; although they and their tone may be a manifestation of his feeling.” (PI 1953, § 582) Tone, as it is used in display or expression, is always a manifestation of emotion rather than an emotion as such. In observing such emotions in displays, we in turn take our cues from the tone used in specific contexts: I say “I am afraid”; someone else asks me: “What was that? A cry of fear; or do you want to tell me how you feel; or is it a reflection on your present state?” – Could I always give him a clear answer? Could I never give him one? We can imagine all sorts of things here, for example: “No, no! I am afraid!” “I am afraid. I am sorry to have to confess it.” “I am still a bit afraid, but no longer as much as before.” “At bottom I am still afraid, though I won’t confess it to myself.” “I torment myself with all sorts of fears.” “Now, just when I should be fearless, I am afraid!” To each of these sentences a special tone of voice is appropriate, and a different context. (PI 1953, p. 187–188)

Tone in other words infuses expression with emotion because of the force of display and inevitably “colors” any act of cognition.

The Demonstrative as a Distinctive Speech Act Before we turn to the role of tone in poetry, it is useful to distinguish three types of displaying utterances in which tone has a vital, yet each time somewhat different, function that opens up issues of cognition while refusing to provide any “facts” on which cognitions can be based. Here, we come to see that it may be useful to treat literary works that foreground self-conscious exemplification as instances of what we will call demonstrative speech acts. Such acts become the pendant to what J. L. Austin claimed for the performative (and therefore help us reclaim the rubric “performative” for the purposes Austin developed).¹⁰ If we can postulate

10 This is not the place to rehearse the discussion around Derrida’s problematic reading of Austin, but we do find ourselves in part in agreement here with the issues raised in Jonathan

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a general model for how subjects perform expressive tasks in language, we can also stop asking Austin’s model to deal with subjective states, and therefore can preserve his account of how speech acts meet felicity conditions that do not depend at all on intentions. And we might also find a name for this expressive activity that gives a much more social and less narcissistic cast for that activity than can the idea of “Performativity.”¹¹ There are three basic kinds of demonstrative speech acts, all of which often overlap. The first, the cognitive or pedagogical demonstrative, is especially interesting because it affords considerable cognitive possibilities that derive from exemplification rather than description. The cognitive demonstrative consists in efforts to show concretely how something can be done even though it is difficult or impossible to describe the principles involved. The most basic example is teaching someone how to ride a bicycle – very difficult to explain but fairly simple to show, especially if the showing fully intervenes in how the tutee feels his or her body and develops ways of maintaining balance. It is evident that there is a wide range of such cases – from the intimate processes by which a spouse teaches the partner to pick up cues by exhibiting behaviors, to learning to wield the now current art form of the public apology. The second, expressive mode of the demonstrative emphasizes a possibility of expressive action that is close to the Nietzschean performative. It occurs when speakers try to make the speaking a display of various stylistic or psychological traits with which they want to be identified by an audience. Here we can locate the domain of ethos central to classical rhetoric. The third, affective mode is also fundamentally expressive, but with a very different valence. These call attention to affective states intended to solicit or engage the affective engagements of others – as manifestations of care or as bids for sympathy. We try to find verbal equivalents for what we seem to be feeling or attending to, in order to invite an audience into our own intimate spaces. At times our exclamations of pain or joy go so far as to utter onomatopoeic grunts or sighs or laughs that are clear indices of

Culler’s very interesting essay (1981), even though it, too, fundamentally accepts Derrida’s misreading of Austin. 11 This is all too obvious when we think of Nietzschean contexts, but even Judith Butler’s performative has its closest affinities with theater (hence her interest in mime). Butler is haunted by the call “Who goes there” because that is the primary locus for what Althusser showed was the apparently positive power that secures the work of interpellation: we take on society’s patterns of naming so we can answer this question without arousing the suspicions or the hostilities of the authorities who pose it. Perhaps there is no more dramatic situation than the need to respond to such calls; indeed this is the birth as well of meta-theatrical doubts about the adequacy of the repertoire providing our answers.

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our affective states. Observers must be aware, however, that expression is always haunted by the fact that “expression of” admits both a subjective and an objective genitive. Some expressions or aspects of expressions are under the control of the agent while at other times expressive activity betrays forces working on subjects which the subjects repress or of which they are not aware. A range of representative general sentences can be listed that indicate kinds of demonstrative speech acts: “Follow how I act when he gets foolish.” “Try to recite the poem by emphasizing these variations in pacing.” “Why do you want to make me as worried as I am evidently becoming.” “This is what I can do when I get a chance to speak in public.” “It hurts here not there,” or, more generally, “my feelings are all too evident.” “This is how a good husband would deal with my anger.”

All these sentences reflect the fact that in appropriate cases we often find ourselves relying on modes of display because what we feel or what we want to accomplish is much easier to show than to characterize in discursive terms. Affectively one demonstrates what one is feeling; semantically one provides a model for how some aspect of the language can operate; and stylistically one exemplifies possible powers of a medium for intensifying how the agent can participate in the object of his or her attention. It could be problematic that often these modes coexist, as will be evident in the example we give below of a poem by Robert Creeley. For there is no ambiguity in Austin’s performatives so long as the felicity conditions are satisfied. Yet this potential multiplicity can also be an advantage because it indicates how many kinds of threads bind demonstratives to the practical world. And it captures the strange ways expression in art tends to use examples for all three purposes at once. After all, the demonstrative ultimately seeks to provide an audience first order connections to ongoing states and second-order awareness of what might be at stake in identifying with such states.¹² Readers will have observed that these three types of demonstratives correspond to the three attributes of tone: expression, emotion, cognition. Tone in these three demonstratives, while by no means less complex in each type, is each time used in different ways. In the cognitive demonstrative, tone, while always an index of expression and emotion as well, is exploited to make the audience aware of the deed that is being performed. Similarly, in the affective demonstrative, it

12 Here our model comes close to Garry Hagberg’s work on forming the self by weighing to what sentences it can subscribe. See his (2010).

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is the affective dimension of tone that is foregrounded. Finally, in the expressive demonstrative, tone is deployed first and foremost for its expressive qualities. Again, here too, in particular situations, these tonal dimensions cannot always be rigidly separated, on occasion leading to ambiguity. But as our next two analyses of poems will show, this does not hamper the practical potential of our model.

Creeley’s Song Since (the young) Wittgenstein’s ruminations on tone in our story took off from poetry, it seems fitting to turn to specific poems as we reach the chapter’s close. In this section we exemplify what tone in the demonstrative can involve for literary studies by adapting it to “A Song” by Robert Creeley, a poem concerned to deploy the full range of demonstrative acts. I had wanted a quiet testament and I had wanted, among other things, a song. That was to be of a like monotony. (A grace Simply. Very very quiet. A murmur of some lost thrush, though I have never seen one. Which was you then. Sitting and so, at peace, so very much this same quiet. A song. And of you the sign now, surely, of a gross perpetuity (which is not reluctant, or if it is, it is no longer important. A song. Which one sings, if he sings it, with care. (Creeley 2006, p. 112)

Creeley’s poem is a cognitive demonstrative in that what he demonstrates here can provide an example for other writers. In this poem, Creeley manages a homage to traditional “song” while wresting its elemental structuring devices away from

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how what Charles Bernstein calls the “official verse culture” envisions the obligations of craft. To this act, which presents the poem as a model, Creeley, secondly, binds an intricate psychological and affective drama, thus deploying the two other types of demonstratives as well. The poem is an affective performative in that it immediately draws our attention to the voice’s desire (for quiet and her) as well as its frustration and disgust (at arriving at quiet and satisfaction). The poem seems nervous, moving out of a past into an uncertain present which affords a possibility of quiet, but remains haunted by a self-conscious disgust at efforts to provide a name for that quiet which would inevitably displace it. The effect of this self-consciousness is to turn typical formal devices like rhyme into figures of dissatisfaction, such as parenthesis. This in turn leads the reader to seek satisfaction in how the sense of the author’s breath units and tone becomes the driving force of the lineation. We have embodied a complex relation between unhappy self-consciousness and fundamental rhythms where rest and quiet become active possibilities, in turn emphasized by reference to a (contrasting) monotonous tone. Yet as we attend to these rhythms of breathing we also recognize how much we become caught up in other temporal factors that all establish attention to the poem’s pacing. Every element emphasizes movement, except for the repetition of “A song” that figuratively becomes the space demanding to be mobilized, thereby also fracturing and challenging the monotonous tone elsewhere. It is as if the poem had to find through repetition a version of song that could carry or possess the fullness of care – not a minor resource for the mind to have when it is looking for possible attitudes that might honor the complexity of psychological and emotional life. If we are to become articulate about that fullness we must attend to another aspect of the expressive demonstrative – the working out or realizing of an attitude reconciling the competing pulls in the poem. If this were a typical practical scenario we could assume that the attitude would be named and could be put to immediate practical work. Poets tend to want their attitudes more complex and more perspicuous than that. They want a sense that the poem realizes something by having its naming process produce a fresh twist on our standard cultural repertoire. Here Creeley composes an attitude displaying a synthetic capacity to reconcile three emotional states of mind  – an uneasy care not to embarrass the self by trusting language, the wary care not to expose too much vulnerability (“if he sings it”), and the invested care that allows one to sing the song and participate in the desires it offers for the quiet she can bring. The desire for quiet inspires the song, and the song can celebrate the quiet if the speaker can also take responsibility for the interference that is self-consciousness. Ultimately that taking of responsibility requires simultaneously acknowledging desire and accepting warily the fact that one often has little control over one’s feelings. If he

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sings it, it had better be with the multiple forms of care that the poem comes to exemplify. As so often with art-works and literary texts in particular, this example provides a rich view of the function of demonstratives in ordinary language and culture at large. Creeley’s poem, as it becomes part of the world, provides a complex example of demonstratives. As it embarks on the search for the apt song and challenges us to decipher its various types of performatives, it also confronts us with a banal question: if we were to read this poem aloud, what would be the appropriate tone or mood? What, indeed, is its overall tone? Its multiple demonstratives, while indisputably expressive, affective and in part also cognitive, thus draw our attention to tone as both inherently tied to the poem and inevitably as ambivalent as the poem’s semantic and structural universe. Reading poetry through the lens of their demonstrative and tonal activities, as our all too brief analysis of Creeley’s poem illustrates, teaches us three things. First, it affords a dynamic and dramatic sense of the authorial activity – as making and as emotionally engaged thinking. This emphasis on what Kant meant by purposiveness provides an alternative account of the labor that brings into play predicates like beauty, form, and intricacy of internal relationships. Style is less an aspect of objects than of what projected agents produce – often because they simply enjoy the kind of responsibility that control of the artifice produces.¹³ Literary history then becomes in part the tracing of how authors establish styles as examples by modifying previous examples and trusting their own technical innovations as taking a place in cultural repertoires. As we try to keep track of what tone is demonstrating or accentuating in his poem, Creeley, for example, invites us to see that he is transforming the objective, swift-moving and concrete notational style of William Carlos Williams into an instrument that is available for dealing with complicated states of self-consciousness. Secondly, treating texts as demonstratives allows us to describe the differences poems can make in our understanding of experience even though they cannot regularly satisfy any of the epistemic demands we usually adapt for cognitive claims. As Wittgenstein often reminded us, the concreteness of example affords the best means of bringing people to look at the world in a different way. The demonstrative must be appreciated for what has been accomplished in the singular performance with or in this or that particular tone, and the demonstrative must serve as an

13 There are substantial analogues between our arguments here and Henry Staten’s work on “techne,” for example in his (2010). For Staten “techne” involves a much broader category than modern aesthetics and provides the basis for reading the authorial presence in the constant decision-making that produces significant imaginative writing.

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example of what can be accomplished as a result of attending to the performance. Third, reading poems as demonstratives makes us see that when we grasp their (complex) meanings and accompanying emotions, there emerges an intricate tension between what can be said to be psychological, displayed in the speaking, and what can be said to be social and so a ground for the meeting of several discrete emotional possibilities.¹⁴

Trakl’s Twilight Responding to the sometimes harsh tone of Trakl’s poetry, Ludwig von Ficker wrote to the poet: “Your ... word[s] come from a depth that no longer belongs to you, a depth which has risen out of you, presented itself to me and now belongs to me. It is a depth which cancels out and rises above the personal.” (Trakl 1969, vol. 2, p.  762, our translation) This is a perfect illustration of what happens when emotions acquire a social dimension. Trakl’s tone, von Ficker suggested, was of such singularity that it bombarded readers with affectual display. As far as we were able to determine, it is not known which poems von Ficker sent to Wittgenstein. It is likely that these were poems Trakl had allowed von Ficker to publish in his journal, Der Brenner. But it is quite possible as well that von Ficker, who was a mentor of sorts to Trakl, sent Wittgenstein unpublished work of the poet written before late 1914. In this section we look at just a segment of one of Trakl’s early poems, “Dämmerung” (Twilight), written in 1909. We do so in part to speculate about how Wittgenstein’s reader-response, shared with von Ficker on the postcard, came about, and, more specifically, to look at the potential role of tone in Trakl’s demonstrative performance, a role Wittgenstein himself too hinted at. Naturally, there are a large number of reasons one can imagine that may have incited Wittgenstein’s incomprehension of as well as interest in Trakl. We have no ambition to be encyclopedic in this sense. “Dämmerung” opens with the following patch: Zerwühlt, verzerrt bist du von jedem Schmerz Und bebst vom Mißton aller Melodien, Zersprungne Harfe du—ein armes Herz,

14 Here we try to acknowledge the observation of different directions of affective experience, as advocated by Grossberg and Massumi, without necessarily accepting their claims that affects and emotions represent different ontological conditions, as for them only affects are social. Cf. Massumi (2002) and Grossberg (1992).

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Aus dem der Schwermut kranke Blumen blühen. Wer hat den Feind, den Mörder dir bestellt, Der deiner Seele letzten Funken stahl, Wie er entgöttert diese karge Welt Zur Hure, häßlich, krank, verwesungsfahl!¹⁵

The expressionist Trakl is known for many things, chief among them his indebtedness as well as opposition to the German-language (late) Romantic genre of Erlebnislyrik, a type of poetry that is by nature a mixture of expressive and affective demonstratives because the genre as a rule exploits the display of the poet’s subjective and emotional attitudes towards the world. A naive paraphrase of the first quatrain seems to work quite well at first sight. Here is a voice who informally addresses a you (me?), someone who is upset and torn by pain, quivers (accentuated by the classic, but flawed end rhyme) from the dissonance of all melodies, and whose heart is like a broken or shattered harp from which diseased flowers of melancholy grow. When we move into the second quatrain the tone becomes even darker in a naive paraphrase. The apostrophe leads to a question (with the question mark notably left out!): who has sent the (male) enemy and murderer of the addressee’s soul and the divine on the earth, which now is defiled and denigrated to the status of a whore? Readers will instantly observe the contrast in tone when compared to Creeley’s poem. If this is a confession cast in a poetic mold, it is a dark one covered in shadows: deformation, destruction, pain, if not apocalypse, abound. As an expressive and affective demonstrative, the two quatrains thus seemingly open onto a negative view of the world. The poem’s somewhat quirky versification and rhythm, its use of traditional end rhyme and emphatic deployment of other forms of internal rhyme, too, might ultimately lead a reader into asking what else this poem is voicing than the utter despair, melancholy and Schmerz on one hand, and the complete immobility of the speaker on the other? Emotions and Erlebnisse in this poem are at first sight expressed so adamantly by the poem’s tone and imagery that it seems to display a subject not unlike Munch’s homunculus represented on The Scream, an individual demonstrating a type of comportment fit only when facing the world’s end. Those readers familiar with Trakl’s (later)

15 “You are uprooted and distorted by every pain / And you quiver from the dissonance of all melodies, / You fractured harp—a poor heart, / From which the sick flowers of melancholy bloom. / Who sent to you the enemy, the murder, / Who stole the last sparks of your soul, / Oh, how he has removed the divine from this bare world / and made it into a whore, ugly, sick, and pale with decay!” This translation is from Williams (1993, p. 176). We are in part indebted to Williams’ discussion of the poem here too. The original can be found in Trakl (1969, vol. 1, 218).

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work will be able to confirm that Trakl later on, while formally venturing on different, more exciting paths, never quite excelled in optimism. One can only wonder, then, why Wittgenstein, upon reading this poet, could assert that his “tone made him happy”? There is a strong sense of ethos in the poem as we take a closer look at its expressive mode of the demonstrative, which in turn also shows us the poem’s cognitive mode. For the evoked moment of Apocalypse is less dark than first meets the eye. In the second line, it is the “dissonance of all melodies” (Mißton aller Melodien) that makes people tremble, not dissonance as such. Old (perhaps Wagnerian) melodies, broken, are thus also the cause of trembling, which in itself is still a movement that can be linked to psychological stress but also to excitement and extreme happiness. Flowers, admittedly sick, begin to bud as well. Thus (as often in later expressionists) a moment of redemption is equally evoked, leaving the addressed “du” at the brink of an ethical choice between action or stasis. This “du” on closer inspection also turns out to be ambivalent. Addressing a “du” (an informal address) or “you,” the voice in this poem is either a narcissist talking to himself, or a voice transferring a personal experience onto an unnamed other, thus making the reader identify more forcibly with the addressee than in the case of an “I”. In both cases, however, the addresser obviously wants to represent a specific experiential situation. And this is not necessarily a negative one. Much depends on the kind of mood or tone we attach to the poem. The second quatrain in any case suggests that we can read it in a much more positive and affirmative tone. This is in fact made very explicit by the peculiar use of punctuation in the last line. There, at the end, one would expect a question mark, an index of anguish and uncertainty, but Trakl added an exclamation mark, showing us an aspect of the world displayed in his lines we might otherwise have missed. Here, finally, we come to see how this poem, despite its seeming formal dullness, is also a cognitive demonstrative that displays a model for other poets in the genre of the Erlebnislyrik to respond to. Leaving aside that these eight lines are rife with many other intertextual allusions (ranging from Baudelaire and symbolism and decadence at large to Nietzsche’s Götzendämmerung or Twilight of the Idols), they above all shatter every Romantic dream (the optimism represented by harmonious melody now sounds dissonant; the far more usual and unified “Ich” of the genre is replaced by an incoherent “du” whose emotions from the outset resemble affects; and every transcendental horizon is smashed, new ones suspended). The poem thereby demonstrates what its title alludes to: the moment of twilight, the passing of the old and the arrival of the new, which will show itself not at daytime but at night, in the dark first. Just as in Breughel the elder’s painting, Trakl scaffolded himself here as a blind man leading the blind, and possibly rejoiced.

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Again, we are thus rewarded for reading this poem as a demonstrative. Not only does Trakl’s poem evince clearly that there is a basic difference between the three types of demonstratives we isolated. It also shows us quite a bit about the specific way in which tone functions in poetry. Most notably, the poem demonstrates that the role of the reader or critic engaging in the grammaticalization of experience is vital in bringing home the tone of a demonstrative speech act in a poem. Take Wittgenstein’s reading. It is far from certain if and how Wittgenstein interpreted this (or another) poem by Trakl as a cognitive demonstrative. Most likely he did not, because in that case it does make sense that he should have written that Trakl’s tone made him happy, while at the same time failing to get the meaning of Trakl’s work. This testifies to what for a lack of a better word might be called the “stickiness” of tone. Tone (with its attributes of expression, emotion and cognition) is itself an attribute of the three demonstratives we isolated here. Tone is as such not to be confused with any particular demonstrative and it is possible that mismatches such as an emphatically affective tone (of happiness) is combined with a (blank or non-affirmative) cognitive demonstrative; other such combinations, which we leave to others to document, might also occur. In the end, Trakl’s poem displays that while in ordinary language we normally tend to couple the right tone to demonstratives, poets in their work can exploit tone to different goals, even isolating it as an independent object of aesthetic construction. Perhaps this was, indeed, what might have given Wittgenstein the sense that Trakl’s work was tone and nothing but tone, a voice or vehicle without a manifest tenor.

Tone in Theory: By Way of Conclusion Tone in literary theory has long been an orphaned concept. Interestingly, when it was addressed in Wittgenstein’s time, literary theorists hardly ever coupled tone to expression or the expressive subject in conjunction with cognition and emotion, as Wittgenstein did on the postcard to Ficker. Tone, in theory, for a long time seemed to be tied to a variety of things, to almost anything except the expressive subject. Wittgenstein’s contemporaries in New and Practical Criticism, for example, tended to see tone as a rhetorical element stemming from the literary text and separated from emotion. I. A. Richards, in Practical Criticism (1929, p. 175), still defined tone as “an attitude ... some special direction, bias, or accentuation of interest” arising in the relationship between the speaker and the implied listener. Yet he was also one of the first to divorce tone from emotion or what he called “feeling.” Later critics of a New Critical bent went even further,

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in locating Richards’ “speaker” within the text entirely – the implied listener in Richards already being a textual entity.¹⁶ Affect theory in recent years has brought a fundamental shift in theorization of tone. Sianne Ngai’s work is particularly worth mentioning here. For Ngai, tone, mood or voice, is to be regarded as the instance which, in the process of reading (and thus in a dialogue between the reader and a work), gives shape to the overall (ideological) meaning and impression of a work’s totality readers are left with after reading a narrative or poem.¹⁷ Obviously, this marks a giant leap forward, and this has produced a great many new insights. Yet as we hope to have shown in what we hope to have been a truly Wittgensteinian argument, much is still to be gained and learnt from starting with the beginning: with expression and intentionality.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W. (1976): “Introduction”. In: Theodor W. Adorno: The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology.Translated by Glyn Adey and David Frisby. London: Heinemann, p. 1–67. Creeley, Robert (2006): The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1945–1975. Berkeley: University of California Press. Culler Jonathan (1981): “Convention and Meaning: Derrida and Austin”. In: New Literary History 13, p. 15–30. Empson, William (1989): The Structure of Complex Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Foster, Roger (2007): Adorno: The Recovery of Experience. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Goodman, Nelson (1968): Languages of Art. Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill. Grossberg, Lawrence (1992): “Mapping Popular Culture”. In: Lawrence Grossberg: we gotta get out of this place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture. New York: Routledge, p. 69–87. Hagberg, Garry (2010): “Self-Defining Reading: Literature and the Constitution of Personhood”. In: Garry L. Hagberg/Walter Jost (Eds): A Companion to the Philosophy of Literature. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Massumi, Brian (2002): “The Autonomy of Affect”. In: Brian Massumi: Parables for the Virtual. Durham: Duke University Press, p. 23–45. Monk, Ray (1990): Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. New York: The Free Press.

16 Consider, for instance, William Empson’s notion of “mood” which widened Richards’ view of tone to incorporate anything that relates a textual “me” to anyone else within the text. See Empson (1989, p. 17). 17 See Ngai (2005).

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Moyal-Sharrock, Danièlle (2004a): “Introduction: The Idea of a Third Wittgenstein”. In: Danièlle Moyal-Sharrock (Ed.): The Third Wittgenstein: The Post-Investigations Works. Hampshire: Ashgate, p. 1–12. Moyal-Sharrock, Danièlle (2004b): “On Certainty and the Grammaticalization of Experience” in: Danièlle Moyal-Sharrock (Ed.): The Third Wittgenstein: The Post-Investigations Works. Hampshire: Ashgate, p. 43–62. Murray, Penelope (Ed.) (1991): Genius. The History of a Concept. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Ngai, Sianne (2005): Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Perloff, Marjorie (1996): Wittgenstein’s Ladder. Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Richards, I.A. (1929): Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Staten, Henry (2010): “Art as Techne, or, The Intentional Fallacy and the Unfinished Project of Formalism”. In: Garry Hagberg/Walter Jost (Eds): A Companion to the Philosophy of Literature. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, p. 420–435. Trakl, Georg (1969): Dichtungen und Briefe. Walther Killy/Hans Szklenar (Eds). Vol 2. Salzburg: Otto Müller. Williams, Eric B. (1993): The Mirror and the World. Modernism, Literary Theory, and Georg Trakl. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

António Sousa Ribeiro

The Chimera of Language? Karl Kraus and Ludwig Wittgenstein In a lecture held in 1948 but published only posthumously in 1967, Paul Engelmann felt compelled to remind his audience of the apparently plain fact that “Wittgenstein was born in Vienna, in an epoch which, in retrospect, one has to consider as having been intellectually extremely productive” (Engelmann 1970, p. 102).¹ That such a reminder should be deemed at all necessary is a clear indication that the relevance of Wittgenstein’s Viennese background was for a long time far from being commonsensical. Until well into the early seventies, not only had the path-breaking achievements of what was later to be labelled “Vienna 1900” largely fallen into oblivion, the formative significance of the Viennese cultural milieu for central aspects of the work of a philosopher who tended to be considered simply as a logician from Cambridge was also essentially not recognized. How this has changed is a story that has been told many times, the publication of Alan Janik’s and Stephen Toulmin’s Wittgenstein’s Vienna in 1973 building a relevant landmark in the process. In their study of Wittgenstein’s Viennese background, the authors of what would soon become a major reference book helped change the philosopher’s image in fundamental ways. In particular, they were able to foreground the notion that the deep-rooted concern with ethics which is indissociable from the development of Wittgenstein’s ideas could best be understood in connection to the Viennese brand of cultural critique as expressed, among others but with special relevance, in the work of Karl Kraus. The main biographical facts concerning Wittgenstein’s relationship to Kraus are well known. Since his adolescence, the former seems to have been a faithful reader of Kraus’s journal Die Fackel, which he had forwarded to him during his decisive stay in Norway before the Great War (Engelmann 1970, p.  102) and on other occasions, including during his military service on the eastern front, his interest only having reportedly faded in the mid-twenties, when he came to the conclusion that Kraus was “no longer funny” ( Janik 1999, p. 67). The contact with Ludwig von Ficker, to whom Wittgenstein wrote in July 1914 the famous letter asking him to act as an intermediary in the distribution of the stately sum of 100,000 crowns among artists in need (Rilke, Trakl and Else Lasker-Schüler were among the beneficiaries), was suggested by the reading of Die Fackel, where Der

1 Where not otherwise indicated, English translations are my own.

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Brenner and its editor had been the object of lavish praise. After having finally completed the Tractatus, the first effort to find a publisher led the author straight to the Viennese firm Jahoda & Siegel, Kraus’s printers. This effort was ultimately unsuccessful, but it is significant that Wittgenstein clearly had expected to capitalize on what he must have considered the proximity of his own book to the main concerns of Kraus’s critical endeavour. That, after having received a final negative answer, he wrote to Paul Engelmann in a letter dated 25th of November 1918 how much he would have liked to know “what Kraus said about it”, hoping his friend might have “an opportunity to find out” (Engelmann 1970, p. 20–21), rests upon a singular equivocation – Kraus had most certainly not even heard of his manuscript, and, if he had, it is highly unlikely, considering his usual practice in such matters, that he would have been prepared to even take a look at it. At the same time, however, such a naive desire amply testifies to Wittgenstein’s high respect for the editor of Die Fackel and his feeling of having followed a track which in important respects was parallel to Kraus’s development as a cultural critic. Finally, it is of major significance that Kraus’s name was included in the list of ten influences on his intellectual development drafted by Wittgenstein in 1931: I don’t believe I have ever invented a line of thinking, I have always taken one over from someone else. I have simply straightway seized upon it with enthusiasm for my work of clarification. That is how Boltzmann, Hertz, Schopenhauer, Frege, Russell, Kraus, Loos, Weininger, Spengler, Sraffa have influenced me. (VB 1980b, p. 19)

This is perhaps the most salient of the relatively scarce direct references to Kraus in Wittgenstein’s writings.² In what way Kraus should have influenced him is something that is nowhere made explicit and can only be the object of speculation.³ Influence has in any way to be understood in very broad terms in this context. Instead of postulating a direct line of continuity or assuming that Wittgenstein’s topics of thought were simply being borrowed from others, it seems much more adequate to consider that in the course of his intellectual development he was drawing upon the work of others as the material he needed for his own “work of clarification”, or, in the terms of his famous image near the

2 Most of the quite few references occur in letters and reported conversations. Some scattered references and allusions in the Vermischte Bemerkungen have been analysed by Werner Kraft (1981). 3  Such a difficulty is not uncommon with the Viennese philosopher – as Alan Janik reminds us, the same applies e.g. to the elliptic meaning of the emphatic acknowledgement of the indebtedness to Sraffa in the preface to the Philosophical Investigations ( Janik 1999, p. 68).

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end of the Tractatus, as the ladder to be abandoned as soon as its service has been done. Therefore, rather than looking for “influences”, one should instead search for those parallels and convergences that establish the allegiance to a common paradigm of thought as the essential mark of a productive relationship. Some such points of convergence with Kraus’s paradigm of cultural critique and satiric writing have been variously highlighted in the few existing studies on the relationship between both authors, all of which have to struggle with the difficulty I identified above of having to resort to speculation and conjecture concerning central aspects of that relationship.⁴ In broad terms, the points of contact between Kraus and Wittgenstein pertain to two central, indissociable issues: the question of ethics and the question of language. In the following, I propose to revisit briefly both issues, trying to concentrate on aspects that have so far perhaps not been sufficiently highlighted. There can be no doubt that Wittgenstein’s interest in and high respect for Kraus must have rested in the first place upon some kind of strong subjective identification: the example of moral integrity, the unswerving consistency of a satiric and polemic programme intent on “tearing down the façades” (F311–312, 1910, p.  13)⁵ of a hypocritical society, culminating in the stance of embattled isolation taken by the editor of Die Fackel within the Viennese public sphere, must have exercised a strong appeal on a young man stubbornly intent on following a path of his own and on setting himself apart from any current expectations regarding his choice of career and social role. To be sure, Wittgenstein was never an adept of the kind portrayed e.g. in Elias Canetti’s description of the fanatic crowds who gathered to attend Kraus’s public readings (Canetti 1982). He was far too independent not to question any notion of authority and, indeed, his later allusions in Vermischte Bemerkungen reflect in the main part an ambivalent, critical evaluation of Kraus’s views. Moreover, in some important respects, Kraus’s influence did not make itself felt at all: Wittgenstein could be a reader of Die Fackel and still take it for granted that it was his duty to enlist as the war broke out.⁶ Kraus’s anti-bellicose writings, culminating in the great war drama The Last

4 See in particular: Kraft 1968, 1981; Engelmann 1970; Janik and Toulmin 1973; Barnouw 1981; Bodine 1989; Bouveresse 1990; Nethersole 1990; Janik 1999, 2001a, 2001b; Garver 2003. 5 Quotations from Die Fackel are given using the abbreviation F, followed by date of publication and page number. 6 Wittgenstein joined the ranks as a volunteer as soon as 7th of August 1914. It is certainly true, as emphasised by Ray Monk (1991, p.  111–12), that his attitude towards the war was more governed by personal reasons (the desire to put himself to the test and to become “a better person”) than by strictly patriotic ones. Still, the fact remains that he accepted or even

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Days of Mankind, seem to have struck no particularly sympathetic chord in him and to have left no imprint on his reflections. Be it as it may, it remains undoubted that Kraus’s treatment of the question of language must have been the decisive influential element for Wittgenstein. From the very start, that question is crucial to Kraus’s satiric endeavour. In the editorial of the first issue of Die Fackel, published in the beginning of April 1899, Kraus had established as the programme of the new journal the “draining of the vast swamp of commonplaces” (F1, 1899, p. 2), particularly as these manifest themselves in public discourse and may be captured in the pages of the daily press. Discourse critique – in ways which over the years he would refine to an ultimate level of sophistication – was to remain the satirist’s fundamental method. His primary concern is indeed about discourse, i.e. the uses of language. Discourse critique is defined from the start as an ethical task – the “swamp of commonplaces” corresponds to those current practices which, by turning language into a mechanism of meaningless repetition, make it impossible for it to resonate with those – ethic and aesthetic – values which are by definition only accessible through a non-instrumental conception of language. That the artist does not possess language, but is instead a “servant of the word” is an often asserted central tenement of Kraus’s conception of the relationship between the subject and language and, concomitantly, between language and the world.⁷ His main keyword in this context is “fantasy”, as the ability to perceive and construe the whole extent of lived possibilities that are mediated by language and, accordingly, to be conscious of the practical consequences of words and the responsibility inherent to the use of words. Contrary to mistaken interpretations of Kraus’s notion of language, usually subsumed under the charge of “language mysticism”, this does not mean that there is some kind of essence or of ideal harmony underlying that notion.⁸ Indeed, “fantasy” is not a given, but rather a performative condition,

welcomed the outbreak of the war in an uncritical way which was totally at odds with Kraus’s position. 7 “Language is the only chimera whose illusory power is endless, the inexhaustability which keeps life from being impoverished. Let men learn to serve language.” (Kraus 1986, p. 63). 8 One has to consider that Kraus’s fascination with language is essentially of a practical nature – this is why, contrary to Wittgenstein, who would only be prepared to return to the “rough ground” of empirical language in the Philosophical Investigations (PI 1978, p. 46), he has an ear for the whole universe of current discourse of his time. He does offer a theoretical framework, having long entertained the project of a book with the title Sprachlehre that would collect his main essays on the topic. Eventually, the book was only published posthumously, in 1937, under the title Die Sprache. The ambiguities entailed by the very title of Kraus’s project can hardly be rendered adequately in English (Sprachlehre can simply mean “grammar”, but also means literally “language doctrine” or “the teaching of language”, with quite evident

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the activity of the mind that may be triggered by what are for Kraus the infinite potentialities of language use.⁹ Correlatively, “Ursprung”, the “Origin” which “is the goal”, in the terms of the final line of the central programmatic poem “Two Runners”, “Zwei Läufer” (F300, 1910, p. 32), is not to be conceived as some kind of primordial, idyllic harmony between the self, language and the world, something to be metaphysically presupposed, but, instead, as something to be actively pursued, a utopian horizon whose realization is contingent upon active practices, including practices of discourse.¹⁰ Under this light, “fantasy” is not simply an individual or even solipsistic dimension, but has clear social and historical relevance. Later on, especially in his war writings, Kraus would be drawing apocalyptic consequences from his critical diagnosis of the devastating effect of current language uses in this regard, culminating in his uncompromising indictment of the role of the press as a main responsible for cultivating a mechanics of language that is essentially thoughtless and thus turns people blind to the true reality of the war, including first and foremost the actual suffering of concrete individuals. Under these conditions, the first critical duty must be, in consequence, to clean up the universe of communication, which explains why Kraus’s task has to be by definition a polemic and satiric one  – he has to take everything literally and to look most closely into each and every utterance in order to be able to expose the intellectual vacuity and ethical nothingness of current discourse practices. In the apt

pedagogic undertones – the main task being, according to the author, “to teach how to spot abysses where there are commonplaces” [F885-87, 1932, p. 4]). Such a “doctrine” is, however, not constructed normatively. Although at times, in his “theory”, Kraus seems to come close to a Romantic notion of language as a living organism, his steady concern with discourse critique and the practice of discourse forecloses any essentialist tendencies. In a sense that can be brought near Voloshinov’s/Bakhtin’s theory of dialogicity, language is for Kraus first and foremost something which occurs not “within”, but among its speakers (see Voloshinov 1973). 9 This is why the work with language is conceived by Kraus as “an adventure”, meaning both a risk and an opportunity. An aphorism that Wittgenstein most probably knew and which later found its way into the important essay “Heine and the Consequences” (“Heine und die Folgen”) reads: “O, the burning delight of experiences with language! The danger of the word is the joy of the thought. What is it that has just gone around the corner? Not yet seen and loved already! I throw myself into this adventure.” (F272–273, 1909, p. 49). 10 That the line “The origin is the goal” should have been used by Walter Benjamin as the motto of his fourteenth thesis on the concept of history is a highly significant corroboration of such an anti-metaphysical interpretation of Kraus’s notion of “Ursprung”. Alan Janik uncovers a clear echo of Kraus’s poem in the Vermischte Bemerkungen ( Janik 2001b, p. 113). His understanding of Kraus’s notion of “Origin” as connected to an idyllic notion of primordial nature is, however, highly questionable.

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words of Jay F. Bodine, “Kraus’s critique of language and literature is ultimately a type of verification procedure; it checks for the truth content of an expression in the social context” (Bodine 1989, p.  152). Checking for the truth content of an expression is also a good description of Wittgenstein’s philosophical undertaking. Although one could argue that, at least in the Tractatus, the concern with “social context” plays no significant role, a proposition such as “All philosophy is ‘critique of language’ (but not at all in Mauthner’s sense)” (TLP 1933, p. 63), by demarcating itself explicitly from Mauthner’s sceptical notion of language critique, points clearly in the direction of Kraus’s efforts. “Babbling” is certainly something Wittgenstein abhorred.¹¹ One can easily speculate how much he must have enjoyed features of Die Fackel like the “Translations from Harden”, which, starting in 1908, Kraus offered throughout several issues of the journal. These are part of his satiric campaign against the then well known publicist Maximilian Harden. As a perfect example of his programmatic “draining”, Kraus provides in this essay series the “translation” in plain, clear language, of Harden’s turgid, convoluted sentences, abounding in obscure images and metaphors. His satiric target is the unlogical composition of Harden’s sentences, which he literally translates into a logical structure, exposing in the process the sheer banality of his opponent’s style. The inspiration Wittgenstein’s own thinking while working on the Tractatus must have drawn from Kraus is easily apparent. If, according to proposition 4.115 of the Tractatus, philosophy “means the unspeakable by clearly displaying the speakable” (TLP 1933, p. 77), such work of clarification is very much akin to Kraus’s programme of draining the vast swamps of commonplaces. Underlying the stylistic register of the at times aphoristic, apodictic propositions of the Tractatus there is a polemic undertone that is parallel to Kraus’s style of polemics. But there are a few other aspects that should be highlighted. First of all, the question of ethics. This is a question that, as is well known, became increasingly important for Wittgenstein during his work on the Tractatus. According to the letter to Ludwig von Ficker of the beginning of November 1919 (Ficker 1988, p. 196–197), it is the subject of the second, the “truly important” part of the book, the one which was not and could not have been written. In the eyes of the author, defining the boundaries of language, of what can be said, is the way to point at that which cannot be said, and thus of delimiting the ethical as it were “from within”. The proposition “Ethics and aesthetics are one” (TLP 1933, p.  183) is perhaps the

11 Cf. the well-known passage in the letter to von Ficker of 7th of October 1919 concerning the structure of the Tractatus: “The work is strictly philosophical and at the same time literary, but there is no babbling in it.” (Ficker 1988, 190; English transl. apud Monk 1991, p. 177).

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point in the book where Wittgenstein comes closer to a definite pronouncement in this regard. It is, however, a most enigmatic pronouncement, whose meaning has been the object of constant controversy. Following Cyril Barrett, Alan Janik reminds us that this famous sentence in no way signals an identity between both terms, but rather hints at a condition of mutual interaction (Janik 2007) – ethics and aesthetics are one, but not the same. It should not be overlooked that the sentence stands within parentheses, almost as an afterthought or an additional clarification that was felt to be needed. Although one may easily agree with Janik when he writes that “on the ground of Wittgenstein’s text it is almost impossible to determine a clear meaning for this assertion” (Janik 2007, p. 11), one can venture the hypothesis that perhaps the most plausible meaning of the proposition would be that the non-instrumental use of language which is defining for aesthetic practice is the utmost instance of the running up against the limits of language which is a precondition for the appearance of the ethical as the unutterable that is made manifest in that which can be uttered. Responding to a poem by Ludwig Uhland sent by Paul Engelmann that had made a big impression on him, Wittgenstein writes the following in a letter of April 1917: “And this is how it is: if only you do not try to utter what is unutterable then nothing gets lost. But the unutterable will be – unutterably – contained in what has been uttered!” (English transl. apud Monk 1991, p. 151; emphasis in the original). But for this to be true, there has to have been an effort to push the utterable to its limits, something which is not a characteristic of everyday discourse, but is absolutely defining for aesthetic practice – and the same applies to Wittgenstein’s philosophical discourse. Indeed, the question of the limits of language in thematized again and again by Kraus and is crucial for his self-definition as an artist of language. The image of language as a wall occurs in two related aphorisms published in January 1917. The most significant reads: “When I don’t make any progress, it is because I have bumped into the wall of language. Then I draw back with a bloody head. And would like to go on.” (Kraus 1986, p. 67).¹² Such an agonistic perspective of the artist’s relationship to language points to a difference in accent, subtly indicated by Kraus’s “And would like to go on”, a difference that may hint at the margin of non-coincidence between the philosophical and the aesthetic approach. What it means “to go on” in Kraus’s sense is programmatically conveyed by an aphorism

12 As pointed out by Alan Janik (2001b, p. 116), this image has a direct correspondence in the Philosophical Investigations: “The results of philosophy are the uncovering of one or another piece of plain nonsense and of bumps that the understanding has got by running its head up against the limits of language. These bumps make us see the value of the discovery.” (PI 1978, p. 48).

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published in 1915: “Only he is an artist who can make a riddle out of a solution.” (Kraus 1986, p. 51). Compare proposition 6.5 of the Tractatus: The riddle does not exist. If a question can be put at all, then it can also be answered. (TLP 1933, p. 187)

That every question that may be asked can be answered is not in contradiction with Kraus’s stance. However, the answer for Kraus is just a new starting point in the unceasing movement of language, which would mean that in aesthetic terms the work of clarification never reaches some kind of final logical conclusion, but, instead, permanently opens itself up to the indeterminacy of meaning. In other words, having reached the limits of language is to have come to the point where whole new territories of meaning may be discerned, albeit in the enigmatic form pointed at by the figure of the riddle, and it is because of the promise spelt out by this enigma that the artist would always like “to go on”. The riddle, in the terms of Kraus’s aphorism, is a kind of silence, in that it is generated by the impossibility of saying, but a silence which is operative and performative, since it is able to point at the possibilities inherent to that which cannot be said. To my mind, this is not far from Wittgenstein’s method in the Philosophical Investigations, in which the figure of the query, and no longer the one of the apodictic assertion, plays such a prominent role, substituting, as Newton Garver points out, clarification through analysis with clarification by “perspicuous representation” (Garver 2003, p. 69). It is easily apparent, however, that such a method remains closely connected to the central question of the Tractatus and “the cardinal problem of philosophy” for Wittgenstein (Monk 1991, p.  164), the question of the relationship between saying and showing. Regarding this question in the framework of the relationship between Wittgenstein and Kraus, there is a central issue that has been barely touched upon by the various interpreters and which hinges decisively upon Kraus’s self-understanding as a satirist. For this self-understanding, the indissoluble connection between ethics and aesthetics builds an almost natural presupposition. Although the commonalities should not be overstressed and the notorious distances underplayed, it is easily apparent how the question of satire is connected to Wittgenstein’s problem of defining the place of ethics. Indeed, the question of ethics is central to the very definition of the genre of satire. In Schiller’s classic formulation: The poet is a satirist when he takes as subject the distance at which things are from nature, and the contrast between reality and the ideal. … In other respects it is by no means essential that the ideal should be expressly represented, provided the poet knows how to awaken it in our souls, but he must in all cases awaken it, otherwise he will exert absolutely no

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poetic action. Thus, reality is here a necessary object of aversion; but it is also necessary, for the whole question centres here, that this aversion should come necessarily from the ideal, which is opposed to reality.¹³

Satire is thus defined by its negativity, as a poetic mode that operates by circumscribing the domain of ethics (“the ideal”) so to speak from outside its boundaries. For Schiller’s classical aesthetics, other modes of artistic expression, such as tragedy, may very well convey a representation of the sphere of values; in the satiric mode, however, that sphere, albeit not straightforwardly defined as unutterable, would best be silenced and manifest its presence only ex negativo. In the framework of a modernity perceived as intrinsically violent and as totally indifferent to the sphere of values, Kraus radicalises this view of satire, since taking on the mask of the satirist is no longer a matter of choice between different possibilities of artistic fulfilment, but seems rather the only option there is left for the artist who defines his vocation as an agonistic being “against his times”.¹⁴ For such an artist, silence cannot be mere temptation, but something imposed by the conditions of public discourse. In the great speech “In These Great Times” (“In dieser großen Zeit”), held in Vienna in November 1914 and published in the following month, with which, after an initial period of restrainment, Kraus reacted to the outbreak of the War, silence is presented as the only option remaining for the one who refuses to join his voice to the immense cacophony of bellicose and chauvinistic discourse filling the European and, in particular, the German and Austrian public sphere.

13 I use the English translation at http://www.egs.edu/library/friedrich-schiller/articles/ aesthetical-essays-of-friedrich-schiller/satirical-poetry/. A central passage in a letter of July 1915 to Sidonie Nádherný shows clearly how much Schiller’s definition is relevant for an understanding of Kraus: “If I only had to say that the flower is beautiful, I could as well keep it for myself, in an ugly world that does not allow it. But since I am someone who deduces the beauty of the flower from the ugliness of the world, which it allows even less, I have to spell things out. This is the pain I live in.” (Kraus 2005, p. 202). One is tempted to paraphrase: whereof one cannot speak – the beautiful – thereof one must be silent – by implying it ex negativo through the spelling out of its opposite, the ugliness of a world that has become a “laboratory of Apocalypse” (F400–403, 1914, p. 2). It remains, of course, to be demonstrated how this can possibly be done, the answer lying for Kraus in the development of a poetics of quotation which I will still be dealing with. 14 “The true enemy of the times is language. It lives in direct understanding with the spirit which is outraged by those times. This is the point where the conspiracy named art may originate.” (F360–362, 1912, p. 22).

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Those who have nothing to say because actions are speaking continue to talk. Let him who has something to say come forward and be silent. (Kraus 1984, p. 71)

Silence is here presented not as an absence, but as an action, as stressed by the gestural character of the sentence and the implied image of the witness coming forward to provide a truth content through testimony.¹⁵ The figure of silenceas-action, or silence-in-action, underlies the whole of Kraus’s satiric practice and would explicitly occur again most saliently following the Nazi coming to power. Third Night of Walpurgis (Dritte Walpurgisnacht), the long polemic essay which builds the satirist’s immediate response to the political tragedy, opens with an injunction to silence reminiscent of 1914: “I can think of nothing to say about Hitler”. It is sometimes overlooked that this all too often misunderstood opening sentence is the introduction to over 300 pages, in the course of which undoubtedly quite a lot is said about Hitler. But it is not by chance that this text, which was to remain unpublished until 1952, is the one in the whole of Kraus’s oeuvre to present the densest intertextual web, mixing a wealth of literary quotations, mainly from Goethe and Shakespeare, with, as has been estimated, over a thousand quotations from the press and other sources. Quotation is, as a matter of fact, the most conspicuous form of silenceas-action practised by Kraus. In the text “In the Thirtieth Year of War” (“Im dreißigsten Kriegsjahr”), published in 1929, he vindicated for himself the at first sight oxymoronic title of the “creator of quotation”, presenting the justification that the practice of quotation was the only possible way out of the difficulty of writing satire in modern times: The art of language there consists in the omission of the quotation marks, in the plagiarism of the suitable fact, in the grasp that turns its clip into a work of art. (F800–805, 1929, p. 2)

The satiric and aesthetic value of quotation is totally dependent on its being literally translated from its original context into the pages of Kraus’s journal. It is crucial to understand that the dialogicity of Kraus’s satire, which has been

15 In the poem “On the meaning of the ten-line poem in number 888 of Die Fackel”, written in October 1933 as a direct reaction to the poem “Don’t ask why” (“Man frage nicht”), published in September 1933, in which Kraus provided the grounds for his silence following the Nazi takeover in Germany, Bertolt Brecht captured this gesture with absolute accuracy: “As the eloquent man apologized / Because his voice was failing / Silence appeared before the judge / Took the veil off its face and / Presented itself as a witness.” The echo of Kraus’s passage of 1914, whether explicitly intended by Brecht or not, is unmistakable.

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emphasized e.g. by Elias Canetti¹⁶, implies that the satirist present himself not simply as the outraged moralist or, in the words of Canetti, the “master of indignation”, but, at the same time, as the artist and the fool. The figure of the fool, conjured up in in the poem “After Thirty Years” (“Nach dreißig Jahren”) (F810, 1929, p. 12), is moulded upon the Shakespearean character, who, conspicuously, as a herald of non-instrumental reason, is a specialist in speaking by riddles, i.e. in using language as a means of presenting the terms of a query which will literally expose the truth hidden behind the social façades without having to spell it out in a conventional logical manner. In the same vein, Benjamin significantly named Kraus’s practice of quotation “a silence in reverse” (Benjamin 1980, p. 338). What has most often not been duly recognized is the gestural nature of this silence. Antoine Compagnon’s definition, according to which “the meaning of a quotation is not the meaning of an utterance, but rather the meaning of the repetition of an utterance” (Compagnon 1979, p.  86) is tantamount to defining quotation not as a way of saying, but of showing. In can only be the object of speculation to what extent Wittgenstein perceived the dialogicity of Kraus’s satire as a poetics of quotation to present a paradigm of language use very much akin to his own reflections on the limits of language and the relationship between ethics and aesthetics. But there can be no doubt that that poetics presents a most apt illustration for the complexity of the dialectics of saying and showing which builds the central problem of the Tractatus. All the more so if one keeps in mind the gestural and even scenic character of the use of quotation by Kraus. In the central essay “Nestroy and the Modern World” (“Nestroy und die Nachwelt”), of 1912, Kraus quotes a passage by the Viennese popular playwright which illustrates satirically the notion of progress: I once saw an old grey horse push a cart loaded with bricks. Since then, I cannot stop thinking about the future.¹⁷

Kraus praises in the Nestroy quotation “the absolutely Shakespearean character of such an instantaneous illumination of a mental landscape” (F349–50, 1912,

16 “It was the strangest of all paradoxes: this man, who despised so many things […] let everyone be heard” (Canetti 1981, p. 46; emphasis in the original). 17 It may be reminded that the motto to the Philosophical Investigations, a satirical utterance on the meaning of progress which is quite parallel to the quotation above, is borrowed from Nestroy. Both Johann Nestroy and Ferdinand Kürnberger, who provided the motto to the Tractatus, were authors conspicuously present in Die Fackel. This need not imply that Wittgenstein drew his acquaintance with both writers from his Kraus readings, but it is certainly a strong hypothesis.

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p. 10). The spatial image of the landscape points to an antipsychological stance that is very much consonant with an antimentalist notion of language such as is arguably to be found in the picture theory of language developed in the Tractatus (Aalto, 2001). As a form not of saying, but of showing, the Nestroy quotation is the equivalent to the fool’s riddle. It is not about finding an image for a psychic content, a form for the soul, but, instead, to dwell in the materiality of the verbal utterance until it discloses its meaning, which, such is the case with successful artistic expression, may indeed happen instantaneously, literally at the speed of lightning (blitzhaft). For the Krausian satire, in conformity, such a scenic and gestural use of language has a constitutive significance. While, however, the picture of the world which is thus conveyed is logical in itself, this is not in the Tractatus sense of a logical correspondence, but rather in the sense later theorized by Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations around the notion of a “lightning-like [blitzartig] thought” (PI 1978, p. 104, § 318). This brings me to some final reflections on the different conception of the relationship between language and thought in both authors. This different conception manifests itself clearly if one recalls proposition 4.002 of the Tractatus: “Language disguises the thought” (TLP 1933, p. 63). The root of the German verb “verkleiden” used here by Wittgenstein is “Kleid”, the dress, i.e. language dresses up the thought in order to conceal it, to make it disappear from sight. The same image of “Kleid” often occurs in Kraus, to be consistently negated in the name of a notion of language which is unable to distinguish between language and thought. The central notion coined by the Viennese satirist in this regard is “Sprachgedanke”, which may perhaps be translated as word-thought. According to this notion, there is no psychic content and no mental activity which is not dependent on the materiality of language and what defines verbal art is precisely its ability to produce new meanings out of the body of language. Kraus’s often reiterated central assumption that “language is the mother of thought, not its hand-maiden” (Kraus 1986, p.  65) is parallel to Wittgenstein’s reflections on “speech with and without thought” in the Philosophical Investigations, which may well be taken as a revision of the above quoted proposition of the Tractatus.¹⁸ Consider the following aphorisms: There are two kinds of writers. The ones who are writers and the ones who are not. For the former, content and form go together as soul and body, for the latter, content and form go together as body and dress. (F259–60, 1908, p. 44)

18 See in particular sections 327 to 352.

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The thoughtless man thinks that one only has a thought when one has it and dresses it up in words. He does not understand that in reality only he has a thought who has the word into which thought grows. (F323, 1911, p. 18)

In this light, the picture of reality provided by language is contingent upon the materiality of the word in its concrete contextual appearance within a universe of discourse. This is what is meant by Kraus’s notion of “Wortgestalt”, the word-form, a concept he began to use in the early twenties and that sums up the whole of his life-long reflection on language and discourse. Kraus’s reflections on “the way in which, in the word that has been laid down, there stands a situation with its whole background” (F572–76, 1921, p. 69) is just another way of referring to the unity of “language and the actions into which it is woven”, to recall Wittgenstein’s broadest definition of the language-game (PI 1978, p. 5). Again, in the text “Die Wortgestalt”, of 1921, from which the quotation above was taken, it is a dramatic situation in one of Shakespeare’s tragedies (Gloster’s line “Der Turm! Der Turm!”, “The Tower! The Tower!”, in the third part of Henry VI) that provides the paradigmatic example for the potentialities of the word to reverberate and generate by itself a whole universe of associations which project a complex picture of the world. For Kraus, any word, even the most common one, like in Shakespeare’s passage, may develop such a potential. What in decisive is the question of the practical context into which that word is interwoven. Indeed, the ability to generate specifically such a context, which detracts the word from the in-difference of everyday discourse, is for Kraus one of the defining features of literary art.¹⁹ The correlation between Kraus’s context-oriented notion of “Wortgestalt” and Wittgenstein’s theory of “language-games” certainly deserves to be pursued further in more detail. Since Wittgenstein is not at all explicit about the kind of “influence” Kraus exerted on him, any approach to the relationship between the satirist and the philosopher will be tentative and, to some extent, conjectural and speculative. As hinted at by Alan Janik (2001b, p. 119), the utopian impulse grounded on a belief in language as a liberating force that drives Kraus’s satire is entirely missing in Wittgenstein. Still, the parallelisms which offer themselves to an attentive reading are powerful enough to provide ample ground for bringing both authors together in highly significant ways.

19 Again, Kraus is not far in this regard from the theory of discourse of the Bakhtin circle. See in particular Voloshinov 1981.

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Bibliography Aalto, Maija (2001): “Thoughts of the Tractatus: Mentalism vs. Non-Mentalism”. In: Rudolf Haller/Klaus Puhl (Eds): Wittgenstein and the Future of Philosophy. A Reassessment after 50 Years. Papers of the 24th International Wittgenstein Symposium. Kirchberg am Wechsel: Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society, p. 13–21. Barnouw, Dagmar (1981): “Loos, Kraus, Wittgenstein and the Problem of Authenticity”. In: Gerald Chapple/Hans H. Schulte (Eds): The Turn of the Century. Bonn: Bouvier, p. 249–273. Benjamin, Walter (1980): “Karl Kraus”. In: Gesammelte Schriften. Werkausgabe. Vol. 4. Rolf Tiedemann/Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Eds). Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, p. 334–367. Bodine, Jay F. (1989): “Karl Kraus, Wittgenstein and ‘Poststructural’ Paradigms of Textual Understanding”. In: Modern Austrian Literature, 22. No. 3/4, p. 143–183. Bouveresse, Jacques (1990): “Tradition et rupture: Wittgenstein et Kraus”. In: Marcel Huys et al. (Eds): Wittgenstein et la critique du monde moderne. Bruxelles: Editions de La Lettre Volée, p. 87–115. Canetti, Elias (1981): “Karl Kraus, Schule des Widerstands”. In: Elias Canetti: Das Gewissen der Worte. Frankfurt/M.: Fischer, p. 46–51. Canetti, Elias (1982): Die Fackel im Ohr. Lebensgeschichte 1921–1931. Frankfurt/M.: Fischer. Compagnon, Antoine (1979): La seconde main, ou le travail de la citation. Paris: Seuil. Engelmann, Paul (1970): Ludwig Wittgenstein. Briefe und Begegnungen. B. F. McGuinness (Ed.). Vienna, Munich: Oldenbourg. Ficker, Ludwig von (1988): Briefwechsel 1914–1925. Ignaz Zangerle/Walter Methlagl/Franz Seyr/ Anton Unterkircher (Eds). Innsbruck: Haymon-Verlag. Garver, Newton (2003): “The ‘Silence’ of Wittgenstein and Kraus”. In: Wolfgang Huemer/ Marc-Oliver Schuster (Eds): Writing the Austrian Traditions: Relations between Philosophy and Literature. Edmonton: Wirth-Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies, p. 67–79. Janik, Alan (1999): “Kraus, Wittgenstein et la philosophie du langage”. In: Austriaca 49, p. 67–83. Janik, Allan (2001a): Wittgenstein’s Vienna Revisited. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Janik, Alan (2001b): “Karl Kraus und die Entwicklung der analytischen Philosophie im 20. Jahrhundert”. In: Gilbert J.Carr/Edward Timms (Eds): Karl Kraus und Die Fackel. Aufsätze zur Rezeptionsgeschichte. Munich: iudicium, p. 109–119. Janik, Alan (2007): “Das Ästhetische im Ethischen und das Ethische im Ästhetischen”. In: Wilhelm Lütterfelds/Stefan Majetschak (Eds): “Ethik und Ästhetik sind Eins”: Beiträge zu Wittgensteins Ästhetik und Kunstphilosophie. Frankfurt/M.: Peter Lang, p. 11–19. Janik, Allan/Stephen Toulmin (1973): Wittgensteins’s Vienna. New York: Simon & Schuster. Kraft, Werner (1968): “Ludwig Wittgenstein und Karl Kraus”. Rebellen des Geistes. Kohlhammer: Stuttgart, p. 102–134. Kraft, Werner (1981): “Ludwig Wittgenstein und Karl Kraus – direkt und indirekt”. In: Walter Methlagl et al. (Eds): Untersuchungen zum “Brenner”. Festschrift für Ignaz Zangerle zum 75. Geburtstag. Salzburg: Otto Müller, p. 451–459. Kraus, Karl (1984): In These Great Times. A Karl Kraus Reader. Harry Zohn (Ed. and trans.). London: Carcanet. Kraus, Karl (1986): Half-Truths & One-and-a-Half-Truths. Selected Aphorisms. Harry Zohn (Ed. and trans.). London: Carcanet.

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Kraus, Karl (2005): Briefe an Sidonie Nádherný von Borutin, 1913–1936. Friedrich Pfäfflin (Ed.). Göttingen: Wallstein. Monk, Ray (1991): Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. London: Vintage Books. Nethersole, Reingard (1990): “Kraus, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein”. In: Joseph Peter Strelka (Ed.): Karl Kraus. Diener der Sprache, Meister des Ethos. Tübingen: Francke, p. 309–318. Voloshinov, V. N. (1973): Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Translated by Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik. New York, London: Seminar Press. Voloshinov, V. N. (1981): “Le discours dans la vie et le discours dans la poésie”. In: Tzvetan Todorov (Ed.): Mikhaïl Bakhtine, le principe dialogique. Suivi de Écrits du cercle de Bakhtine. Paris: Seuil, p. 181–215.

Helen Thaventhiran

Well-Versed: Wittgenstein and Leavis Read Empson “Give up literary criticism!” Wittgenstein’s peremptory remark to F.R. Leavis is one of the better-known moments of encounter, or rather refusal of encounter, between Wittgenstein and literary-critical reading (Rhees 1984, p.  59). But to this antagonism another occasion from these Cambridge years provides a counterpoint; an occasion on which the philosopher not only took up literary criticism but seemed to outplay the literary critic at his own language-game. As Leavis recalls, Wittgenstein demanded an introduction to the poems of William Empson, recently published by the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press in Cambridge Poetry 1929. Leavis selected “Legal Fiction”, a sixteen-line poem, which opens with this stanza: Law makes long spokes of the short stakes of men. Your well fenced out real estate of mind No high flat of the nomad citizen Looks over, or train leaves behind. (Empson 2001, p. 37)

This dialogue followed: When I had read it, Wittgenstein said, “Explain it!” So I began to do so, taking the first line first. “Oh! I understand that,” he interrupted, and looking over my arm at the text, “but what does this mean?” He pointed two or three lines on. At the third or fourth interruption of the same kind I shut the book, and said, “I”m not playing.” “It’s perfectly plain that you don’t understand the poem in the least,” he said. “Give me the book.” I complied, and sure enough without any difficulty, he went through the poem explaining the analogical structure that I should have explained myself, if he had allowed me. (Rhees 1984, p. 67)

This, then, is Wittgenstein reading; in fact, as Leavis tells it, he appears to be participating in an exercise in ‘close reading’ a modernist poem in the same year as Empson’s tutor, I.A. Richards, published one of the seminal works for twentieth-century methods of critical reading, Practical Criticism, A Study in Literary Judgment. The Ricardian method was to present readers with anonymous poems to trace the variety of their responses  – a familiar experimental scenario for Wittgenstein, who had, as David Pinsent’s diaries for 1912 record, conducted his own trials in the Cambridge Psychological Laboratories to record variations in the subjective perception of accents within a musical line (Pinsent 1990, p. 3–7). If Wittgenstein discovered that his subjects often located accents where they

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were not, then Richards found his readers to be still more drastically unreliable: his results amount to a “modern Dunciad” (Wimsatt 1973, p. 107) of difficulties, eccentricities and failures of reading. So when Wittgenstein reads a poem by Empson in 1929 he is, among other things, participating in a version of this topical scenario for early twentieth-century literary criticism as it attempted to determine what the full scope and possibilities of ‘reading’ might be. Wittgenstein plays this game of reading first by adopting the Ricardian role of commentator to Leavis’s fumbling reader, then by becoming the experimental subject, offering his own reading, which in turn exposes itself to critical comment. Any force this anecdote carries seems, however, more that of the joke than the exposition; Leavis’s narration works by the strong lines of caricature, in which comprehension of a poem is reduced to “explaining the analogical structure” and Wittgenstein to a stock figure of impatient single-mindedness. To extract from this a formula for Wittgensteinian close reading would, to vary on the conceit of Empson’s poem, be no more than a critical fiction. Still, for our purposes here, a version of this principle – that a probably fictitious assertion can be considered true for the matter in hand – may be salutary. Some brief suggestions, or critical fictions, about just what Wittgenstein might have said can serve as a starting point for some wider speculations about different disciplinary techniques and tactics for answering the question that Wittgenstein later framed in Philosophical Investigations: “Well, what does go on when I read the page?” (PI 1953, § 165). So, to engage in this spectral ventriloquy, Wittgenstein might perhaps have said something like this of the poem: Empson takes the legal fiction that ownership of any piece of land extends above it to the sky, below it into the earth (thereby encompassing your own patch of heaven and of hell); in this way, the individual can seem securely the possessor of his own rational mind; neither overlooked nor vulnerable to incursion or to loss. But such cosmic ownership is, in the last measure, contingent; we are nomadic in our mortality; like a brief flash of a beam of light on the firmament, we waver, then go dark. “A poet’s words can pierce us.” “A good simile refreshes the intellect” (Z 1981, §155 and VB 1998, p. 3). He might, in other words, have summarized the poem, explained its analogical relations and, given his assertion that “really one should write philosophy only as one writes a poem” (VB 1998, p. 28), he might also have suggested something of the potential force of such poetic thinking by analogy. But equally important is what he might not have said. Wittgenstein would not, for example, have explained the analogical structure of this poem in terms of the conceit, which is, in literary-critical idiom, a good term for the particular variety of over-worked analogy in Empson’s poem. Conceits were certainly congenial to Wittgenstein’s mode of thought; his remarks supply a rash of examples in which he works from the commonplace or dead metaphor along an analogical chain

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towards either over-elaboration, or slightly excessive literalism about a particular figure. “The book is full of life – not like a human being, but like an ant-heap”, he writes on one occasion; on another, he again proposes then clarifies a metaphor to a far point of literalism: “There is no more light in a genius than in any other honest human being  – but the genius concentrates this light into a burning point by means of a particular kind of lens” (VB 1998, p. 71 and p. 41). Conceited thinking, perhaps? Yet, as Leavis recounts, his own first explanation of “Legal Fiction” in terms of the conceit fell on stony ground with Wittgenstein who had, unsurprisingly, not read John Donne or the metaphysical poets (Rhees 1984, p. 66). The subject of Wittgenstein’s reading, Empson, was a firm defender of a democratic principle of reading  – since “everybody’s reading is miscellaneous and scrappy” (Empson 1987, p.  71), only critics who work by “snob interest” (Empson 2001, p.  113) would count a reader disabled by factual gaps in their literary-historical knowledge. Yet in this case Wittgenstein’s omission can be figured as more than an insignificant absence. In reading this poem, to note the conceit would not be a matter of mere technical statement, the tuning-up exercises of formal description and feature-spotting that might precede criticism proper; it would instead be to make a fully critical remark. The conceit was a device revived from the metaphysical poets by certain modernists, in order to bring into the current models for poetic organization a more thoroughly argued kind of analogical thinking to set alongside (and against) the nebulous suggestiveness of the Symbolists, or the images, fragments and vortices championed by various avant-gardes. To read this poem closely by remarking the conceit is, then, to participate in this history and to calibrate the particular experience of meaning this poem unfolds against some of the different shades of modernist experiment with forms of meaning. This small but symptomatic detail  – that Wittgenstein did not know Donne – already suggests how much is assumed, even in the most apparently empirical practice of criticism; how far even the most practical critic, to produce the kind of reading that would count as an explanation of the poem, must be well-versed in certain varieties of reading experience. On reflection this anecdote becomes less an example of Wittgenstein experimenting with ‘reading’ in the sense that we know it from literary criticism, more an indication that we’re not so clear as we might think about just what that term assumes and excludes. “Reading”, as Geoffrey Hartman has remarked, “is a modest word, and to defend reading may give the impression of venturing on the minimal” (Hartman 1975, p. 248). Close reading can seem an even more modest enterprise: mere commentary alongside its object, rather than strenuous interpretation that has to seek its own speculative form. But of course, in practice and in any discussion of principle, reading exposes greater complexities. Empson

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quipped in later notes on “Legal Fiction” and its reception, “[a]s this has been found all right by both Chinese Communist students and American stratosphere lawyers I can claim it doesn’t need explaining” (Empson 2001, p. 229). But if the poem needs no further explanation, then the thoughts Wittgenstein’s response to it provoke about reading philosophical remarks for the purposes of literary criticism – and vice versa – do demand some more careful thought. In particular, this slight story of contested reading urges further consideration of an area where close reading criticism and grammatical investigation seem to meet; in considering analogies and how far they can carry an explanatory burden. What kind of cognitive work goes on in explaining analogical thinking, in persuading someone to see something as something? How might the activities of Wittgenstein, as philosopher, and Empson, as practical critic, help us to explore this? Before any serious address to this can begin, a preliminary question remains: why, for this meditation on reading, consider Wittgenstein and Empson? Beyond this chance encounter, and the shared context on which it draws, is there any more substantial affinity, or even sufficient common ground for observing differences, between such thinkers? Certainly in my initial anecdote Empson is no more than the counter for the negotiation of what Leavis summarised as a “tacitly accepted difference … potentially an intellectual incompatibility, and perhaps something like an antipathy of temperament” between critic and philosopher, Leavis and Wittgenstein (Rhees 1984, p. 66–67). Yet the pairing of Empson with Wittgenstein occurs with sufficient frequency in literary-theoretical writing to seem more than incidental. For example, in a special issue of New Literary History, “Wittgenstein and Literary Theory”, Henry Staten argues that “the notion of ‘ambiguity’ itself as Empson deploys it seems to refer to something much like that quality of language that gives rise to Wittgenstein’s style of investigation” (Staten 1988, p. 289). Christopher Norris also aligns Empson’s analysis of complex words with Wittgenstein’s grammatical investigations (Norris 1978, p. 9). James Guetti argues that Empson “virtually discovered in literature the importance of ‘grammar’ in the sense that I have extended from Wittgenstein” (Guetti 1993, p. 26). While none of these comments feature in particularly convincing structures of argument, they do suggest that the possibilities for consonance between these two figures merit some more careful modes of enquiry. Here, I propose this by concentrating on some particular, practical examples of occasions on which Wittgenstein and Empson might, or might not, be described as ‘reading’; on which they show, with as much variety as I.A. Richards’s experimental subjects, what it might mean to see something (particularly an orphaned sign, or set of words on the page) under different aspects. In Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein develops the concept of aspectseeing in relation to the experience of verbal meaning by imagining an encounter

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with an inscription isolated from any obvious circumstances that could determine its meaning: I can imagine some arbitrary cipher – this, for instance [)(] – to be a strictly correct letter of some foreign alphabet. Or again, to be a faultily written one, and faulty in this way or that: for example, it might be slap-dash, or typical childish awkwardness, or like the flourishes in a legal document. It could deviate from the correctly written letter in a variety of ways. – And I can see it in various aspects according to the fiction I surround it with. And here there is a close kinship with “experiencing the meaning of a word”. (PI 1953, p. 210)

Much as the standard Gestalt diagram can yield a duck “or again” a rabbit, an inscription such as this becomes a variously intelligible graphic by being seen under the array of its possible aspects. The first specific scenario that Wittgenstein draws around the cipher to make it intelligible is that “this should be read as some form of letter” – a more than incidental illustration when, as he adds, this encounter can describe by analogy “experiencing the meaning of a word”. If, Wittgenstein’s example implies, we arrested a word, or other small verbal occasion, from the practical flow of language-in-use then it would, like this “arbitrary cipher”, gain meaning from the particular details, re-descriptions and circumstances of use with which we chose to “surround it”. Wittgenstein’s cipher is both like and unlike that on which Descartes meditated in his Principia Philosophiae: And if someone, in order to decode a cipher written with ordinary letters, thinks of reading a B everywhere he finds an A, and reading a C where he finds a B, and thus to substitute for each letter the one that follows it in alphabetic order and if, reading in this way, he finds words that have a meaning, he will not doubt that he has discovered the true meaning of this cipher in this way, even though it could very well be that the person who wrote it meant something quite different, giving a different meaning to each letter. (quoted in de Certeau 2011, p. 171)

Descartes’s cipher presents an apparently soluble problem, underpinned by radical recalcitrance; a sense that “the true meaning” may escape from the reader’s failure of skepticism. Wittgenstein’s cipher is less like a cryptogram, more like a blank canvas for the aspectual experience of any situation in which we lack sufficient information or suffer from its surfeit. To see a sign or word is always, to some extent, to see it under an aspect; with words in arbitrary relation to their meanings, a non-aspectual experience of words seems barely possible. Yet we do not, as Wittgenstein remarks, trouble to see a fork “as” a fork; the experience of aspect-seeing only becomes conscious and acute on particular occasions when we encounter something that is not fully participating in what Wittgenstein calls, in Zettel, “the language-game of giving information” (whether

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by under- or over-determination). The minimalist diagrams of the duck-rabbit, or the convex-concave stair, for example, can solicit a simple form of the process from their structural indeterminacy. So too can orphaned texts, although here the indeterminacies are greater in number and scope: how, for example, do we interpret the fragment, discussed by Derrida, found among Nietzsche’s papers, which reads, simply: “I have forgotten my umbrella”? (Derrida 1979, p. 129). At the other end of this spectrum, poems also seem to be language-games giving particular licence to the kinds of verbal occasions on which it is often unclear how the reader should ‘see’. As past literary criticism and theory that has drawn on Wittgenstein has been eager to demonstrate, poems are fertile ground for some accentuated forms of this; most obviously in metaphor and simile, which feature implicit and explicit versions of an aspectual grammar (something as something) in their figurative logic, but also in pun, with its deliberate, playful jumps between two fairly determinate aspects (as, for example, in the phrase from the quoted stanza from “Legal Fiction”, “real estate of mind”). These small-scale illustrations, however, although useful preliminaries, risk narrowing the concept of seeing-as too far, so that it appears to apply only to occasional highpoints, or even quirks, of style. This inhibits any shift of attention to the wider puzzles surrounding the concept; those concerning complex cognition, the radical uncertainties of figuration, the phenomenology of “experiencing the meaning of a word”. To see the full literary-critical potential of Wittgenstein’s remark it needs, then, to be read more expansively. If “experiencing the meaning” of words is a matter of supplying the surrounding fictions, the further descriptions, then does this offer a template for the literary critic’s task of surrounding, with the intimacy yet distance of commentary, any word, line, verse, paragraph or work isolated for critical reading? What happens, in other words, if we take Wittgenstein’s remark and put “poem” in the place of “arbitrary cipher”? Empson, in the first chapter of his virtuoso collection of close readings, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), takes a single line – “Brightness falls from the air” – from Nash’s Summer’s Last Will and Testament, highlights a word that renders this line difficult by its uncertain reference (“falls”) and lists some of the various aspects under which it might be seen: [T]here are stars falling at odd times; Icarus and the prey of hawks, having soared upwards towards heaven, fall exhausted or dead; the glittering turning things the sixteenth century put on the top of a building may have fallen too. (Empson 2004, p. 26)

Rather than following any of the more obvious routes towards the determination of an uncertain meaning (parsing, for example, or glossing), Empson’s list here reaches out to some of the broadest possible contexts for making sense of the word, drawing on astronomy, mythology and architectural history. This expansive

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kind of re-description prevails as Empson shifts his mode of critical analysis from re-situating the word “falls” in other imaginable scenarios to giving equivalent sentences for the gist of the line: “All is unsafe, even the heavens are not sure of their brightness,” or “the qualities in man that deserve respect are not natural to him but brief gifts from God; they fall like manna, and melt as soon.” (Empson 2004, p. 26)

These thematic statements achieve something between judgments of the sense of the poem, at the widest extent of its reach, and – whether seriously or with irony – some rather empty commonplaces that make up the possible stock responses to the line. Empson then takes in the possibility of a textual variant; that “hair” was intended where we now have “air”, and uses this to throw in a comment, poised between an analysis of sound interacting with sense and a fashionable grumble, on how the history of pronunciation changes and how these changes may be caught up with social notions of correct speech: Elizabethan pronunciation was very little troubled by snobbery, and it is conceivable that Nash meant both words to take effect in some way. Now all this fuss has been made about aitches it is impossible to imagine what such a line would sound like. (Empson 2004, p. 26)

All this serves as further description, or surrounding fiction for the one line: “Brightness falls from the air”. Here, two occasions of ‘reading’ – Wittgenstein’s of the cipher, Empson’s of the line of verse  – appear consonant in their pragmatic principle yet radically distinct in the tone and texture of their performance. Empson’s ease of reference to “several different topics, several universes of discourse, several modes of judgement or of feeling” (to take the definition for his third type of ambiguity), gives his prose a thick-textured descriptive mode; Wittgenstein’s prose presents a sparser landscape occupied by a series of questions, remarks, and possible pictures, directed towards the relief of philosophical confusion. “If a sign is not necessary then it is meaningless. That is the meaning of Occam’s razor”, Wittgenstein remarks in the Tractatus (TLP 1922, 3.328) and, against Empson’s superfluity of ways in which to tease out a verbal puzzle for its contexts of intelligibility, Wittgenstein’s schematic account seems to follow the stronger lines of necessity. These are of course two different language-games: Wittgenstein is clarifying the logic of concepts, in part by uncovering grammatical deceptions; Empson is exploring a whole sweep of linguistic understanding, with various kinds of excitements other than, or additional to, the grammatical, including the etymological, intonational, historical, and rhythmical aspects of words. But how far do these differences in detail, style and purpose extend? Perhaps far

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enough to indicate that, rather than a good scaffold for literary-critical practice, Wittgenstein’s puzzling over the arbitrary cipher cannot usefully be considered as “reading” at all? His further descriptions are instead only speculation around something blank, possible fictions for what the mind does in encountering a cipher, rather than carefully judged responses to the particularities of a complex verbal occasion. There are two main respects in which this difference between versions of “reading” appears: first, in presenting the conditions for intelligibility for the cipher, Wittgenstein, unlike Empson, does not summon up any particular readers or possible interpretive communities; secondly, and related to this, the varieties of persuasion at work here differ, a difference that can be characterized partly in terms of deciding where to stop in the activity of further description. To address these differences I will draw on a further example where Empson and Wittgenstein seem to meet and yet to diverge in their sense of how we might experience the meaning of the same word. In his chapter on sixth-type ambiguity, Empson takes a typical simile, that of comparing a thing to “gold”, and shapes these further descriptions for it: Thus to say a thing is like gold may mean that it is glittering, strong, lifegiving, like the sun, young, virtuous, untrammelled, like the Golden Age, expensive and hence aristocratic, capable of being drawn and beaten into delicate ornaments, a worthy setting for jewels; or it may mean simply “mercenary”, and a heavy symbol of wealth, suitable for storage. (Empson 2004, p. 184–185)

Empson’s associating – liberal if not untrammelled – can be compared in some respects with the body of meaning for “gold” given by a dictionary. The Oxford English Dictionary, for example, in its first definition gives the following range of descriptive statements, mixing physical properties with adjectival associations. Gold. The most precious metal: characterized by a beautiful yellow colour, non-liability to rust, high specific gravity, and great malleability and ductility. Chemical symbol Au.

Such lists and dictionary definitions achieve some work of clarification and prohibition with regard to the grammar of use of “gold”; we cannot, with any seriousness, use it for something of low value. But their effect is notably different to Wittgenstein’s grammatical investigation of how the meaning of “gold” is experienced by tracing what, in terms of the grammar of our concepts, makes it thinkable or unthinkable. “We speak of the ‘colour of gold’ and do not mean yellow”, Wittgenstein writes in his Remarks on Colour; “‘Gold-coloured’ is the property of a surface that shines or glitters” (ROC 1977, § 33). Such remarks have no very simple locus, belonging neither, as Wittgenstein notes, “to the physics nor to the psychology of colour” (ROC 1977, § 40) but it is evident that they do not

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belong to the same kind of language-game as those of Empson or of the lexicographer. Both these figures are considerably more interested in what, to take a phrase from Zettel, we might stumble across as “we let our thoughts roam up and down in the familiar surroundings of the word” (Z 1981, § 155), what “gold” means to chemists, to jewelers, to moralists or to mock-heroic poets. Although the borrowed phrase might suggest some proximity, Wittgenstein at no point makes “[letting] our thoughts roam up and down in the familiar surroundings of the words”  – a remark he offers in description of the practice of poets  – a principle of his method; in fact, the more typical method for his investigations is that of targeting conceptual confusions precisely by taking words out of their familiar surroundings. Around “gold”, for example, Wittgenstein achieves a practical interrogation of what “we” can say, without implying, by this “we”, any particular interpretive communities, such as those sketched in, however loosely, by Empson’s further descriptions. With no particular interpretive communities implicit, these versions of explanation or further description differ markedly as to rhetorical form and force. When Wittgenstein describes his “arbitrary cipher”, his remarks can be seen as a series of minor epiphanies – “now! I see it as a badly formed letter!”, “now! It’s a legal character!”  – compactly convincing perhaps but with a different kind of claim to attention than the workings of logic, dialectic, or rhetorical argument. These remarks refuse to strain for effect and so demonstrate a point that Wittgenstein made in his lectures between 1930 and 1933, in comments for which G.E. Moore offered the following mix of paraphrase and transcription: Reasons, he said, in Aesthetics are “of the nature of further descriptions” … all that Aesthetics does is “to draw your attention to a thing”, to “place things side by side”. He said that if, by giving “reasons” of this sort, you make another person “see what you see” but it still doesn’t appeal to him that is “an end” of the discussion. (Moore 1972, p. 88)

For Empson, this model of aesthetic reasoning does not go far enough. Close reading, he argues, should be a matter of supplying so many further descriptions, so many implicit or explicit reasons for viewing something in certain ways, that the critic achieves a “rhetorical triumph” (Empson 1993, p. 55). If Wittgenstein is content to leave his interlocutor unpersuaded, Empson often wants his reader to be dazzled; reading is virtuoso display. But where does such reading stop? Is there a point of saturation or surfeit beyond which further descriptions fail to be persuasive and at which the experience of meaning fails to be acute? Gertrude Stein, in “The Gradual Making of The Making of the Americans”, offers an oblique meditation on how we might judge this: “certainly a complete description is a possible thing”, Stein writes, “[b]ut as it is a possible thing one

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can stop continuing to describe this everything. That is where philosophy comes in, it begins when one stops continuing describing everything” (Stein 1946, p. 223). Critics implicitly negotiate this question of the possibility of “a complete description” on each occasion of reading, but can philosophy bring to this perpetual difficulty some sense of an ending? There are, of course, different ways of ending; completion and closure might be granted by a philosophical approach, but it is also conceivable that such an approach might bring a premature end to the possibilities that unfold in reading. To consider this from one angle, we might turn to a concept, that of aspectblindness, which Wittgenstein introduces, alongside his concept of seeing-as – partly to gauge the latter’s significance by imagining its absence: “Could there be human beings lacking in the capacity to see something as something”, Wittgenstein enquires, “and what would that be like? What sort of consequences would it have? – Would this defect be comparable to colour-blindness or to not having absolute pitch?” (PI 1953, p. 213). Wittgenstein extends this meditation with a more specific example, which returns us to the physiognomy of verbal experience: What would you be missing, for instance, if you did not understand the request to pronounce the word “till” and to mean it as a verb, – or if you did not feel that a word lost its meaning and became a mere sound if it was repeated ten times over? (PI 1953, p. 214)

Would you, he wonders, be missing a basic cognitive capacity or would you be missing the talent for articulating the finer shades of aesthetic experience? The enigmas here are, if anything, greater than with aspect-seeing, nor can one concept provide a straightforward clarification of the other. But to suggest some possible directions of enquiry, I return to where I began: to some ‘critical fictions’. What if, rather than offering “Legal Fiction”, Leavis had presented Wittgenstein with another poem by Empson? – “Poem about a ball in the nineteenth-century”, for example, which opens: Feather, feather, if it was a feather, feathers for fair, or to be fair, aroused. Round to be airy, feather, if it was airy, very, aviary, fairy, peacock, and to be well surrounded. (Empson 2001, p. 18)

This was a response, by Empson, to Gertrude Stein’s famously iterative formulations (“suppose, to suppose, suppose a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose”) and more specifically to attending her equally iterative lecture, “Composition as Explanation”, which she had delivered in Cambridge in 1926. Such repetitions would, according to Wittgenstein’s remark about the repetition of “till”, render the words mere sound, suffering a loss of meaning. Stein, her appre-

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ciative readers, and Empson, her imitator, are, on this account, “aspect-blind”. What might this speculative, or counterfactual occasion of reading, this imagined scenario in which Wittgenstein read a different poem, by Empson, in 1929, imply about the scope and limits of our understanding of reading? Can Wittgenstein’s remarks about aspect-blindness offer a measure for some modernist varieties of experimentation at the edges of meaningfulness, or does the measure perhaps work the other way round; to mark the limits of the usefulness of such concepts as aspect-blindness for our literary-critical sense of reading by exposing where they become vulnerable? This imagined scenario might seem to present an unfair challenge: Wittgenstein demanded from Leavis Empson’s best poem, and his mimicry of Stein, is not only an exceptional case for his poetry but hardly that – as his own note to the poem admits: There is a case for hating this sort of poetry and calling it meaningless; I had better explain, to protect myself, that no other poem in the book disregards meaning in the sense that this one does. (Empson 2001, p. 175)

Such modernist “disregard” for word-meanings seems all too obviously beyond the scope of Wittgenstein’s remarks about “experiencing the meaning”. Stein represents one extreme of experimentation with the conditions for sense-making, and so perhaps her work, as Empson suggests, only “implores the passing tribute of a sigh” (Empson 2004, p. 7). Yet in some respects the example is not as exceptional as it looks; its capacity to put pressure on borrowings for aesthetics of Wittgenstein’s concepts of aspect-seeing and aspect-blindness is accordingly greater. Literary form is, often and significantly, iterative, whether in an established formal structure such as that of the sestina, or in a more local instance of the phonological repetition that is rhyme. To take another example from Empson, we can see the possibilities of this in his reading of one of the most iterative of the fixed forms, the double sestina, here from Sidney’s Arcadia. Empson analyses how the repetition of the poem’s six keywords at its line-ends (mountaines, vallies, forrests, musique, evening, morning), the tolling of these same sounds, creates plenitude of sense rather than an evaporation of meaning. These words, Empson writes, circumscribe the pastoral world and “in tracing their lovelorn pastoral tedium through thirteen repetitions, with something of the aimless multitudinousness of the sea on a rock, we seem to extract all the meaning possible from these notions” (Empson 2004, p. 36–37). Wittgenstein’s phrase “mere sound” may not, then, quite suffice for the kinds of aspect-seeing at work in the language-games of poetry. Examples from a modernist avant-garde – Stein, or Empson imitating Stein – may throw this into rather sharp relief yet the point holds much more generally. Reading the page,

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in the case of a poem, involves some attunement, some close listening, to the meaning-effects that are created, rather than dispersed, at these very moments of abandonment of “sense” into “sound”. Wittgenstein’s versions of reading may have relatively little to say about this to the techniques and tactics of the language-game that is literary-critical reading. Of course his remarks intend and achieve something quite other than a poetics of formal or formally innovative language. But the limits to “complete description” they suggest do indicate some of the edges to the rather imperfect fit that is “the literary Wittgenstein”. So, it would seem that there is a case for reading such anecdotes and such remarks as those with which I began as both general and particular. They bear by analogy on our wider understanding of forms of reading, as well as elucidating Wittgenstein’s brush with a particular model of criticism, the practice of surrounding isolated poems with further descriptions, which dominated Cambridge in the 1920s–30s and which left a long legacy for the study of English literature. Leavis’s anecdote is also an occasion for remembering that analogies are a matter not only of resemblances but also of differences and so that any pairing of distinct thinkers may be best framed along the lines of that familiar joke formula, What’s the difference between…? For Wittgenstein and Empson in particular, both of whom devote analytical energies to the joke, it is worth considering that more might be learnt about the differences between their versions of reading by considering their encounter along the lines of a joke, with its blend of absurdity and ordinariness, unexpected and obvious, than by attempting to draw out major hermeneutic differences between such differently complex bodies of work. To the joke formula, “What’s the difference between Wittgenstein reading and Empson reading?”, the punchline is not so much a neat piece of verbal wit as all that unfolds in the readings discussed here; the small but symptomatic points of difference in these readers’ approaches to explaining some meanings, some analogical structures: “gold”, “brightness falls from the air”, the arbitrary cipher, and the legal fiction. In a diary entry from 1927, in which he also mentions his reading of Wittgenstein, Empson offers a definition for “the perfect mind”, as the “mind which can grasp every aspect of a situation at once” (Haffenden 2005, p. 105). The human mind is not perfectible, grasping only “a limited number of aspects” but it has cognitive resources such as philosophy or, to take Empson’s example in this instance, mathematics, which can, by their logical forms, vary this minimal set of aspects so that “the power of the mind appears to be enlarged”. The result of this, Empson argues, is aesthetic; we experience a “perpetual slight surprise, which on the next moment’s consideration is turned to a richer acceptance”. Literary-critical reading from this context strives towards perfection by considering a plenitude of possible meanings, possible aspects. But philosophical reading,

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although it may, against this measure, at first appear sparse, unrevealing, can also enlarge our sense of this “minimal” activity, reading. It does not, these remarks suggest, always require a well-versed mind for a poem to be “well surrounded”. Some erasure of what Empson’s poem, “Legal Fiction”, terms our “well-fenced out” distinctions between philosophy and criticism can suggest some routes towards a “richer acceptance” of what goes on when we read the page.

Bibliography De Certeau, Michel (2011): The Practice of Everyday Life, translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press. Derrida, Jacques (1979): Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, translated by Barbara Harlow. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Empson, William (1987): Argufying: Essays on Literature and Culture. John Haffenden (Ed.). Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Empson, William (1993): Empson in Granta: The Book, Film and Theatre Reviews of William Empson, Originally Printed in the Cambridge Magazine Granta, 1927–1929. Tunbridge Wells: Foundling Press. Empson, William (2001): The Complete Poems of William Empson. John Haffenden (Ed.). London: Penguin. Empson, William (2004/1930): Seven Types of Ambiguity, 3rd ed. London: Pimlico. Guetti, James (1993): Wittgenstein & the Grammar of Literary Experience. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Haffenden, John, (2005): William Empson: Vol.1: Among the Mandarins. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hartman, Geoffrey (1975): The Fate of Reading and Other Essays. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Moore, G.E. (1972): “Wittgenstein’s Lectures in 1930–33”. In: Harold Osborne (Ed.):Aesthetics. London: Oxford University Press, p. 86–88. Norris, Christopher (1978): William Empson and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism. London: Athlone Press. Pinsent, David (1990): A Portrait of Wittgenstein as a Young Man: From the Diary of David Hume Pinsent 1912–1914. G.H. von Wright (Ed.). Oxford: Blackwell. Rhees, Rush (1984): Recollections of Wittgenstein. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Richards, I.A. (1929): Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgement. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Staten, Henry (1988): “Wittgenstein and the Intricate Evasions of ‘Is’”. In: New Literary History 19, p. 281–300. Stein, Gertrude (1946): Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, Carl van Vechten (Ed.). New York: Random House. Wimsatt, W.K. (1973): “What to say about a poem”. In: Reuben Brower/Helen Vendler/John Hollander (Eds): I.A. Richards: Essays in His Honour. New York: Oxford University Press, p. 101–118.

The contributors of the volume Steven G. Affeldt is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Director of the McDevitt Center at Le Moyne College. His work draws upon figures such as Rousseau, Emerson, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Cavell to reveal and explore areas of intersection among ethics, aesthetics, and political philosophy. His many publications include “On the Difficulty of Seeing Aspects and the ‘Therapeutic’ Reading of Wittgenstein,” in Seeing Wittgenstein Anew (Cambridge UP, 2010). Charles Altieri (Berkeley) teaches literature and literary theory at the University of California, Berkeley. His recent books are The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects (Cornell UP, 2003), and The Art of American Poetry (Blackwell, 2006). Now he is interested primarily in how training as a modernist influences one’s reading of the classical canon. Andrew Barker (Edinburgh) is Emeritus Professor of Austrian Studies at the University of Edinburgh and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of London. Among his many publications are Telegrams from the Soul. Peter Altenberg and the Culture of the Viennese ‘fin-desiècle’ (Camden House, 1996), and most recently A Cold Sun. Literary Reflections of the First Austrian Republic 1918-1938 (Camden House, 2012). Sascha Bru (Leuven) teaches literary theory at the University of Leuven. He has written extensively on the poetics and politics of writing in the modernist period including Democracy, Law and the Modernist Avant-Gardes: Writing in the State of Exception (Edinburgh UP, 2009) and co-edited volumes including The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, Vol. III: Europe 1880-1940 (Oxford UP, 2013). Steven Burns (Dalhousie) is professor of Philosophy (retired) at Dalhousie University and professor of Contemporary Studies at the University of King’s College (Halifax, Canada). His areas of expertise are the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and aesthetics. Recent publications include: On Last Things (translation of Otto Weininger’s Über die letzten Dinge. Edwin Mellen Press, 2001), “Sex and Solipsism: Weininger’s On Last Things” (in: Wittgenstein Reads Weininger, Cambridge University Press, 2004), “The World Hued: Jarman and Wittgenstein on Colour” (in: Wittgenstein at the Movies: film and philosophy, Rowman & Littlefield, 2011).

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Paul Davies is Reader in Philosophy at the University of Sussex. Recent publications include: “A Poem and Its Context” (Textual Practice, 2008); “Asymmetry and Transcendence: On Scepticism and First Philosophy” (Research in Phenomenology, 2005); “Withholding Evidence: Phenomenology and Secrecy” (The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, 2006); “Sincerity and the End of Theodicy: Three Remarks on Levinas and Kant” (The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, CUP, 2002); “This Contradiction” (Futures: Of Jacques Derrida, Stanford University Press, 2001); “From Constructive Philosophy to Philosophical Quietism” (The Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 2000). William Day is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Le Moyne College (Syracuse, New York). He is contributing co-editor, with Victor J. Krebs, of Seeing Wittgenstein Anew (Cambridge UP, 2010). Among his other publications are articles and book chapters on Wittgenstein, Cavell, Emerson, the Confucian thinkers Xunzi and Wang Yangming, moral perfectionism, jazz improvisation, and contemporary Hollywood comedies of remarriage. Kim L. Evans is the author of Whale! (University of Minnesota Press, 2003) and the forthcoming Melville’s Moby-Dick: the Making of a Whale. She has taught literature and philosophy at the University of Redlands and at Yeshiva University in New York City. Recent essays on Wittgenstein have appeared in the journal Philosophy and in Stanley Cavell: Philosophy, Literature and Criticism. Her current interests are in what Melville would call "the Spirit above the dust" and in learning without explanation. Garry L. Hagberg (Bard) is the James H. Ottaway Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics at Bard College, and has in recent years also held a Chair in the School of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia. Numerous papers at the intersection of aesthetics and the philosophy of language. His books include Meaning and Interpretation: Wittgenstein, Henry James, and Literary Knowledge (Cornell, 1994), Describing Ourselves: Wittgenstein and Autobiographical Consciousness (Oxford UP, 2008). He is editor of Art and Ethical Criticism (Blackwell, 2008), and co-editor of The Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of Literature (2010), as well as editor of the journal Philosophy and Literature. His current book project is Living in Words: Literature, Language, and the Constitution of Selfhood. Wolfgang Huemer (Parma) is ricercatore at the University of Parma. His main interests are philosophy of mind and philosophy of literature. He is co-editor of The Literary Wittgenstein (Routledge, 2004) and of The Sense of the World: Essays

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on Fiction, Narrative and Knowledge (Routledge, 2007) and of several essays and book chapters on Wittgenstein, philosophy of literature, philosophy of mind, and Austrian philosophy. Wolfgang Kienzler teaches philosophy at the University of Jena, Germany. His publications include Wittgensteins Wende zu seiner Spätphilosophie 1930–1932 (Suhrkamp, 1997), Ludwig Wittgensteins ‘Philosophische Untersuchungen’ (Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2007), and Begriff und Gegenstand. Eine historische und systematische Studie zur Entwicklung von Gottlob Freges Denken (Vittorio Klostermann, 2009). His research interests include the history of early analytic philosophy as well as questions in the philosophy of language, of logic, and of mathematics. He also investigates forms of humour and satire used as a philosophical tool. Julian Lamb is currently Assistant Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge on a Commonwealth Scholarship. He is interested in early modern English pedagogy and poetics, and Shakespearean language. He is currently working on a monograph which utilises Wittgenstein’s philosophy to understand early modern approaches to language teaching. He is a member of the Cambridge Commonwealth Trust. Brian McGuinness (Siena) is Fellow of Queen’s College, Oxford, and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Siena, Italy. He is also Honorary Professor at the University of Graz, Austria. He has translated (with David Pears) Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1961) and Prototractatus (1971). He is author of the acclaimed biography, Wittgenstein, A Life: Young Ludwig 1889-1921 (re-published in 2005 as Young Ludwig. Wittgenstein’s Life 1889-1921 by Clarendon) and of numerous articles on Wittgenstein, a collection of which has been published in Approaches to Wittgenstein (Routledge, 2002). David LaRocca is Writer-in-Residence at the New York Public Library and Fellow at the Moving Picture Institute. Author of On Emerson (Wadsworth, 2003) and Emerson’s English Traits and the Natural History of Metaphor (Bloomsbury, 2013); editor of Stanley Cavell’s Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes (Stanford, 2003), The Philosophy of Charlie Kaufman (Kentucky, 2011), and Estimating Emerson: An Anthology of Criticism from Carlyle to Cavell (Bloomsbury, 2013), his articles have appeared in Epoché, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, and The Journal of Aesthetic Education.

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António Sousa Ribeiro (Coimbra) is professor for German Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Coimbra. He is also a senior researcher at the Centre for Social Studies at Coimbra. He has written extensively on several topics in Austrian and German Studies (especially on Karl Kraus and Viennese modernity), Comparative Literature, Literary Theory, Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Studies and the Sociology of Culture. His most recent book (ed. with Irene Ramalho Santos) is Translocal Modernisms. International Perspectives (Lang, 2008). Josef Rothhaupt teaches philosophy at the Ludwig-Maximilian-Universität, Munich. His area of specialization is the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and the philology of the entire Nachlass. His interests include the philosophy of art, aesthetics, and the didactics of philosophy and ethics as well as principles of editorial practice. Author and editor of numerous publications on Wittgenstein, such as Farbthemen in Wittgensteins Gesamtnachlaß (1996) and Kreation und Komposition – a philological-philosophical commentary on several volumes of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass (in preparation). Co-founder and vice president (2008– 212) of the Internationale Ludwig Wittgenstein Gesellschaft (ILWG) and director of the Arbeitskreis Wittgenstein-Nachlass (AK-WN). Ilse Somavilla (Innsbruck) studied philosophy, psychology and English. Dissertation on Wittgenstein. Since 1990 research work at the Brenner-archives, Innsbruck. Editor of Ludwig Wittgenstein: Denkbewegungen. Tagebücher 1930–1932/1936–1937 (1997); Licht und Schatten (2004); Wittgenstein-Engelmann. Briefe, Begegnungen, Erinnerungen (in collaboration with Brian McGuinness, 2006); Begegnungen mit Wittgenstein. Ludwig Hänsels Tagebücher 1918/1919 und 1921/1922 (2012); Wittgenstein and Ancient Thought (with James Thompson, 2012). Numerous articles and lectures on the philosophy of Wittgenstein. Bela Szabados is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. His publications include Wittgenstein Reads Weininger (co-edited with David Stern, 2004), Hypocrisy: Ethical Investigations (co-authored with Eldon Soifer, 2004), Wittgenstein at the Movies: Cinematic Investigations (co-edited with Christina Stojanova, 2011), Ludwig Wittgenstein on Race, Gender, and Cultural Identity: Philosophy as a Personal Endeavour (2010). Areas of expertise and interest: Wittgenstein; aesthetics and philosophy of music; moral psychology. Daniel Steuer (Brighton) currently teaches cultural and critical theory in the School of Humanities at the University of Brighton. Numerous publications on literature and philosophy, and social and political theory. He is the editor (with

The Contributors to his Volume 

 407

Laura Marcus) of the first unabridged translation of Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character (Indiana UP, 2005), co-author of Wittgenstein (Metzler, 1992), and author of a monograph on Wittgenstein and Goethe (Böhlau, 1999). His recent publications include a chapter on Wittgenstein and Jarman in Wittgenstein at the Movies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2011). Helen Thaventhiran (Cambridge) is a Lecturer and Director of Studies in English at Robinson College, University of Cambridge, where she teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and criticism. Her research interests include prose style, philosophy of language, intellectual history and modernism. Her first book, Radical Empiricists: meaning and modernist criticism, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press and she is currently working on a new edition of William Empson's The Structure of Complex Words. Elisabeth Van Dam (Ghent) is a sculptor, dancer, performer and philosopher. She trained as a performing dancer at CODARTS Rotterdam Dance Academy (the Netherlands) and studied Art science, Literature and Philosophy at Ghent University (Belgium). In 2010 she obtained a fellowship from the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) at the Centre for Critical Philosophy (Ghent University) and is now finalizing her Phd in Philosophy, working on Goethe and Wittgenstein and the problem of ‘complete expression’. She recently published on Immanuel Kant in Psychoanalytische Perspectieven (2012).

Index of Names Adorno, Theodor W. 139, 141, 194, 335, 343, 344, 345, 346, 352, 357, 371 Affeldt, Steven 6, 10, 15, 21, 22, 49, 403 Agamben, Giorgio 123, 131, 135 Alber, Martin 269, 287 Alighieri, Dante 41, 254, 261 Althusser, Louis 362 Altieri, Charles 355, 403 Ambrose, Alice 206, 225 Anderson, Maria 222, 225 Anscombe, G.E.M. 136, 198, 206, 357 Anzengruber, Ludwig 263–287 Arndt, Walter 199, 202, 218, 220, 223, 224, 225 Arnim, Bettina von 278 Augustine 3–22, 49, 151, 166, 189, 190, 232, 267, 322, 353 Austin, John L. 22, 261, 361, 362, 363, 371 Ayer, Alfred Jules 299, 300, 301, 316 Bach, Johann Sebastian 182, 184 Bachtin, Nicholas 237, 238, 239, 241 Baedeker, Karl 217, 218 Baker, Gordon 142, 150, 226, 305, 306 Bakhtin, Mikhail 236, 237, 241, 377, 385 Barker, Andrew 137, 150, 403 Barnouw, Dagmar 375, 386 Barrett, Cyril 73, 323, 333, 379 Barthes, Roland 153, 161, 162, 163, 164, 169 Bartley, William Warren 143, 150 Bartók, Béla 176 Basil, Otto 4, 101, 143, 150, 194, 195, 241, 288, 357 Bate, Jonathan 72, 73 Baudelaire, Charles 369 Beardsley, Monroe 191, 195 Beethoven, Ludwig van 24, 25, 28, 35, 39, 40, 62, 63, 140, 159, 182, 184, 185, 193, 277 Bell, Clive 191, 194 Beller, Steven 154, 155, 169 Benjamin, Walter 134, 135, 139, 343, 377, 383, 386 Berg, Alban 139

Berger, Anton 225, 267, 288 Berkeley, George 177, 187, 194, 225, 359, 371, 401, 403 Bernhard, Thomas 1, 4, 101 Bernstein, Charles 365 Bieler, Max 228 Biesenbach, Hans 23, 36, 202, 225 Billroth, Theodor 137 Bismarck, Otto von 336 Black, Max 347, 352 Bloor, David 147, 148, 149, 150 Blumenberg, Hans 132, 133, 135 Bodine, Jay F. 375, 378, 386 Boltzmann, Ludwig 25, 138, 374 Booth, Stephen 69, 70, 71, 73 Bouveresse, Jacques 375, 386 Bouwsma, Oets Kolk 23, 26, 33, 36, 79, 101 Brahms, Johannes 137, 174, 182, 184, 191, 193 Brecht, Bertolt 382 Breithaupt, Fritz 115, 135, 136 Breton, André 164 Breuer, Joseph 25 Breughel, Peter the Elder 369 Broch, Hermann 139 Bru, Sascha 355, 403 Bruckner, Anton 25, 47, 158, 174, 193 Bunyan, John 213, 281 Burdach, Konrad 132, 135 Burns, Steve 158, 169, 403 Busch, Wilhelm 3, 197–226 Butler, Judith 362 Cahill, Kevin 148, 150 Canetti, Elias 139, 375, 383, 386 Carnap, Rudolf 211, 299, 316 Carus, Paul 211, 212, 213, 225 Cavell, Stanley 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 15, 22, 48, 49, 52, 134, 135, 246, 247, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 254, 255, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262, 355, 403 Cioffi, Frank 244, 258, 262 Clement XIV, pope 154 Cohen, Ted 249, 262

410 

 Index of Names

Compagnon, Antoine 383, 386 Condell, Henry 58, 73 Copleston, Frederick 300 Coppola, Francis Ford 193 Craft, J.L. 36, 79, 101 Crary, Alice 10, 22 Creeley, Robert 363, 364, 365, 366, 368, 371 Culler, Jonathan 362, 371 Dahn, Felix 209 Dauber, Kenneth 93, 101 David, Pinsent 31, 37, 83, 85, 98, 101, 136, 141, 142, 147, 149, 150, 151, 194, 195, 234, 243, 262, 288, 317, 319, 320, 322, 324, 326, 328, 330, 332, 333, 353, 371, 389, 401, 405, 406 Davies, Paul 308, 316, 404 Day, William 17, 22, 46, 52, 138, 262, 404 de Certeau, Michel 393 Deligiorgi, Katerina 106, 112 Demeter, Tamás 147, 149, 150, 151 Derrida, Jacques 22, 361, 362, 371, 394, 401, 404 Descartes, René 48, 108, 393 Deutsch, Otto Erich 336, 337, 353 Diamond, Cora 305, 306, 307, 316 Dickens, Charles 41, 51 Dieterich, Johann Christian 103 Dobb, Mauriceb 235 Doderer, Heimito von 148 Donne, John 391 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 227–241, 243–262, 263–288 Drury, Maurice 2, 4, 23, 26, 35, 36, 172, 175, 179, 228, 233, 235, 241, 250, 262, 263, 266, 276, 282, 287 Duncan-Jones, A.E. 73, 238, 241 Dylan, Bob 335 Eldridge, Richard 7, 15, 22, 355 Eliot, T.S. 56, 63, 73, 147, 243, 262 Eller, Henriette 217 Empson, William 3, 95, 371, 389–401, 407 Engelmann, Ernestine 338, 339 Engelmann, Paul 23, 27, 76, 82, 83, 86, 100, 101, 175, 194, 201, 211, 225, 226, 228, 229, 230, 232, 241, 274, 278, 288, 296,

316, 340, 347, 349, 373, 374, 375, 379, 386, 406 Evans, K.L. 319, 404 Fedajewa, Tatjana 237, 241 Ficker, Ludwig von 76, 77, 92, 233, 277, 282, 287, 288, 296, 355, 356, 357, 367, 370, 373, 378, 386 Figdor, Fanny 155 Flaubert, Gustave 301 Fogg, Dave 224 Forman, Paul 147, 151 Forster, Johann Georg Adam 104 Foster, Roger 357, 371 Frank, Joseph 73, 77, 229, 234, 236, 241, 258, 262 Frazer, James George 35, 39, 116, 118, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 234, 262 Frederick II 106 Frege, Gottlob 5, 25, 86, 87, 90, 95, 101, 131, 138, 142, 321, 347, 374 Freiligrath, Ferdinand 209 Freud, Sigmund 25, 39, 45, 68, 71, 72, 104, 138, 151, 229, 241, 262 Galway, Carol 213, 216, 217, 225 Garnett, Constance 227, 262, 287 Garver, Newton 147, 151, 375, 380, 386 Geibel, Emanuel 209 George III 103 Glock, Hans-Johann 347, 352 Goehr, Lydia 178, 194, 345, 352 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 1, 4, 34, 41, 104, 111, 112, 113, 115– 136, 148, 198, 214, 341, 382, 407 Goldberg, Leah 83 Goodman, Nelson 359, 371 Gracián, Baltasar 104 Griesecke, Birgit 125, 136 Grillparzer, Franz 3, 25, 34, 148, 153–169 Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm 198 Groag, Heinrich 347 Grossberg, Lawrence 367, 371 Guetti, James 305, 316, 392, 401 Hacker, Peter 142, 150, 290, 291, 292, 309, 315, 316

Index of Names 

Hadot, Pierre 327, 328, 330, 333 Haffenden, John 400, 401 Hagberg, Garry 129, 136, 258, 262, 355, 363, 371, 372, 404 Haller, Rudolf 98, 99, 101, 151, 155, 169, 353, 386 Hallett, Garth 142, 151 Hanna, Patricia 87, 94, 99, 101 Hänsel, Ludwig 198, 211, 222, 225, 228, 267, 271, 278, 288 Harden, Maximilian 378 Harrison, Bernard 80, 87, 94, 99, 101 Hartman, Geoffrey 391, 401 Häusler, Wolfgang 141, 148, 151 Hawkes, Terrence 33, 36 Hebel, Johann Peter 134 Hedley, Jane 68, 73 Heidegger, Martin 42, 95, 131, 132, 133, 134, 136, 403 Heiti, Warren 160, 161 Hemminges, John 58, 73 Heraclitus 243f Herder, Johann Gottfried 132, 141 Hertz, Heinrich 25, 138, 352, 374 Hintikka, Merrill B. 312 Hintikka, Jaako 316 Hitler, Adolf 190, 382 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von 148 Homer 180, 227, 254, 340 Horace 243, 246 Horkheimer, Max 141, 345, 352 Howes, Bruce 347 Huemer, Wolfgang 24, 36, 41, 52, 128, 136, 197, 316, 386, 404 Hughes, Peter 42, 43, 49, 52, 71, 73 Hume, David 98, 243, 244, 260, 262, 401 Hustwit, Ronald E. 36, 79, 101 Hutt, Rowland 235 Hyginus, Gaius Julius 132 James, Henry 5, 22, 31, 36, 37, 101, 113, 115, 119, 120, 169, 194, 195, 220, 242, 257, 262, 316, 333, 392, 401, 404, 406 James, William 136 Janik, Allan 137, 139, 140, 147, 148, 151, 211, 242, 323, 347, 352, 373, 374, 375, 377, 379, 385, 386

 411

Jaspers, Karl 273, 288 Jetzer, Charlotte 156 Jolles, Stanislaus and Adele 321 Jonson, Ben 58, 61 Jordan, Wilhelm 339, 340 Joseph II 154, 155 Kaerrick, Elisabeth 227 Kafka, Franz 41, 139, 221 Kállay, Géza 52 Kaller, Robert 4 Kanigel, Robert 238, 241 Kant, Immanuel 81, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 110, 112, 113, 141, 287, 288, 360, 366, 404, 407 Kenny, Anthony 202 Kienzler, Wolfgang 339, 342, 352, 353, 405 Kierkegaard, Søren 5, 104, 183, 227, 228, 230, 275, 278, 403 King, John 23, 36, 48, 250, 251, 262, 266, 403 Klagge, James C. 31, 36, 37, 101, 113, 116, 169, 194, 195, 242, 296, 316, 324, 333 Klein, H. Arthur 203, 204, 209, 225 Koch, Sabine 4 Koder, Rudolf 23, 211, 228, 269, 287, 321, 324, 327, 332 Kogon, Eugen 345 Kraft, Werner 129, 374, 375, 386 Kraus, Karl 3, 25, 109, 138, 139, 140, 143, 144, 148, 151, 227, 335, 336, 337, 338, 339, 341, 342, 346, 347, 352, 353, 373–389, 406 Kremberg, Bettina 115, 135, 136 Kürnberger, Ferdinand 3, 335–353, 383 Labor, Josef 25, 158 Lacan, Jacques 108 Lamb, Julian 65, 73, 405 LaRocca, David 335, 405 La Rochefoucauld, François de 104 Lasker-Schüler, Else 373 Leavis, F.R. 44, 52, 56, 63, 73, 333, 389–401 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 107 Lenau, Nikolaus 25, 158, 343, 344 Lenbach, Franz 212 Lensing, Leo A. 138, 151

412 

 Index of Names

Lessing, Johann Gottfried 75–101, 156, 198, 338 Lewis, Peter B. 36, 44, 51, 52, 316 Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph 103–113 Locke, John 98 Loos, Adolf 25, 138, 139, 374, 386 Lurie, Yuval 176, 194 Macdonald, Margaret 206, 225 Mahler, Gustav 171, 176, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 191, 194 Malcolm, Norman 2, 4, 6, 20, 22, 140, 141, 142, 149, 151, 156, 158, 169, 250, 262, 263, 288, 295, 296, 297, 316, 330, 333, 336 Mann, Thomas 41, 117, 118, 137, 144, 184, 190 Mannheim, Karl 146, 147, 149, 151 Marcus Aurelius 320, 324, 328 Maria Theresa 154 Massumi, Brian 367, 371 Mates, Benson 8 Mauthner, Fritz 98, 99, 101, 378 Mautner, Franz 143, 151 McAlister, Linda L. 359 McCarty, David Charles 83, 98, 101 McDowell, John 128, 136, 261 McGinn, Marie 316, 347, 353 McGuinness, Brian 24, 36, 77, 86, 89, 100, 101, 115, 136, 174, 175, 194, 230, 238, 241, 242, 265, 280, 281, 287, 288, 347, 349, 353, 386, 405, 406 McKenzie, John R.P. 140 Melville, Herman 79, 93, 101, 404 Mendelssohn, Felix 171, 181, 182, 183, 185, 186, 187, 188, 191, 192, 194 Metternich, Klemens von 154, 177 Meyerbeer, Giacomo 177, 188 Milton, John 3, 28, 44, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 65, 67, 69, 71, 73 Monk, Ray 43, 52, 92, 101, 115, 136, 155, 158, 169, 240, 241, 300, 316, 321, 322, 323, 325, 326, 329, 333, 347, 353, 356, 371, 375, 378, 379, 380, 387 Montaigne, Michel de 104 Moore, Dorothy 174

Moore, George Edward 161, 165, 169, 177, 187, 192, 194, 317, 397, 401 Morrell, Lady Ottoline 296 Morris, Michael 95, 96, 101, 225 Moyal-Sharrock, Danièlle 358, 372 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 25, 35, 153, 155, 159, 184, 238 Mulhall, Stephen 7, 15, 22, 316 Munch, Edvard 360, 368 Munro, Alice 163 Murdoch, Iris 236 Murray, Penelope 356, 372 Musil, Robert 137, 148 Nádherný, Sidonie 387 Nagl, Ludwig 155 Napoleon, Bonaparte 206, 207 Necker, Moritz 167, 169 Nedo, Michael 197, 225, 338, 353 Nestroy, Johann Nepomuk 3, 34, 137–151, 335, 338, 351, 352, 353, 383, 384 Nethersole, Reingard 375, 387 Neururer, Alois 266 Ngai, Sianne 371, 372 Nietzsche, Friedrich 104, 227, 299, 369, 387, 394, 401, 403 Nordmann, Alfred 37, 101, 108, 109, 113, 169, 194, 195, 242, 323, 324, 325, 327, 330, 333 Norris, Christopher 392, 401 Nyíri, J.C. 147, 151

Oberhummer, Hermann 227, 241 Oberländer, Adolf 209 Offenbach, Jacques 218 Ogden, C.K. 77, 94, 348, 349, 350 Okshevsky, Walter 95, 101 Ottocar II 157 Ovid 243, 246 Oxenford, John 138

Parak, Franz 266, 276, 288 Pascal, Fania 241, 250, 262, 266 Pascal, Roy 238 Pattisson, Gilbert 213

Index of Names 

Pears, David 77, 85, 86, 89, 100, 101, 349, 405 Perloff, Marjorie 34, 35, 36, 356, 372 Picasso, Pablo 47 Pinsent, David 194, 234, 389, 401 Plaice, Stephen 138 Plato 28, 61, 73, 79, 93, 160, 177, 187, 189, 239, 278, 292, 309, 310 Pope, Alexander 56, 154 Prawer, Siegbert 239 Priestley, Raymond 237, 238 Pugh, Jonathan 27, 36, 43, 53 Puttenham, George 64, 65, 66, 69, 73 Raatzsch, Richard 115, 135, 136 Rahsin, E.K. 227 Raleigh, Sir Walter 64, 66, 67, 68 Ramsey, Frank P. 77, 177, 228, 240 Read, Rupert 10, 22, 101, 230, 333, 389, 391, 393, 395, 397, 399, 401 Rembrandt (Harmenszoon van Rijn) 201, 258 Rentsch, Thomas 133, 134, 136 Rhees, Rush 3, 4, 5, 22, 36, 50, 52, 53, 121, 179, 184, 186, 194, 198, 222, 223, 235, 241, 244, 246, 262, 266, 287, 288, 389, 391, 392, 401 Richards, Ben 198, 370, 371, 389, 390, 392 Richards, I.A. 372, 401 Riha, Karl 335, 353 Rilke, Rainer Maria 287, 355, 373 Rommel, Otto 143, 151 Rorty, Richard 95, 101, 304, 316 Rossini, Gioachino 177 Roth, Joseph 148 Rothhaupt, Josef G. F. 226, 353, 406 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 182, 403 Rowe, M. W. 111, 112, 113, 115, 136 Russell, Bertrand 25, 86, 87, 91, 92, 94, 95, 98, 101, 104, 108, 115, 119, 138, 142, 147, 227, 234, 239, 241, 281, 296, 317, 347, 349, 374 Saar, Ferdinand von 144, 145 Savickey, Beth 305, 316 Savile, Anthony 153, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 166, 169

 413

Schattle, Margaret 359 Scheffel, Joseph Victor von 209 Schiele, Egon 139 Schiller, Friedrich 148, 274, 341, 380, 381 Schlick, Moritz 140, 146, 211, 237 Schnell, Ralf 216, 226 Schoenberg, Arnold 139 Schopenhauer, Arthur 25, 104, 138, 175, 264, 268, 269, 273, 282, 283, 284, 285, 286, 288, 347, 374 Schubert, Franz 193 Schulte, Joachim 115, 125, 136, 142, 197, 226, 240, 241, 353, 386 Schumann, Robert 116 Schwind, Moritz von 209 Scruton, Roger 184, 194, 258, 262 Seaford, R. A. S. 238, 241 Seferis, Giorgos 240 Shakespeare, William 1, 3, 23–37, 39–55, 56–73, 138, 214, 227, 382, 385 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 56 Skinner, Francis 228, 235, 238, 239 Smythies, Yorick 230, 235 Snow, C.P. 137 Somavilla, Ilse 209, 211, 225, 226, 267, 271, 274, 276, 277, 278, 280, 286, 288, 406 Spengler, Oswald 25, 138, 147, 148, 149, 237, 339, 340, 353, 374 Spinoza, Baruch de 277, 280, 287 Spitzweg, Carl 209 Sraffa, Piero 25, 138, 235, 237, 240, 241, 374 Staten, Henry 366, 372, 392, 401 Stein, Gertrude 397, 398, 399, 401 Steiner, George 24, 36, 41, 42, 44, 49, 52, 53, 62, 63, 73 Stern, David G. 31, 37, 103, 107, 108, 113, 137, 140, 141, 142, 143, 146, 150, 151, 178, 195, 352, 353, 406 Sterne, Laurence 297 Steuer, Daniel 4, 26, 115, 123, 134, 136, 197, 198, 218, 232, 236, 406 Stifter, Adalbert 148 Stonborough, Margarethe 222 Stoppard, Tom 138 Strauss, Richard 176 Strawson, P.F. 305, 306, 307

414 

 Index of Names

Szabados, Béla 136, 140, 151, 195, 406 Tacitus 243, 244, 246 Taylor, Charles 7, 22 Taylor, James 220 Tennyson, Alfred 56 Theophrastus 104 Thompson, Caleb 323, 406 Thomson, George 73, 241 Thomson Katherine 238, 240 Tihanov, Galin 237, 241 Timms, Edward 139, 148, 151, 386 Tolstoy, Leo 3, 5, 36, 41, 51, 52, 186, 191, 195, 227, 228, 230, 233, 238, 241, 263, 264, 265, 273, 276, 286, 288, 289–317, 319–332, 347 Toulmin, Stephen 137, 151, 323, 347, 352, 373, 375, 386 Trakl, Georg 3, 139, 277, 281, 288, 335–373 Uhland, Ludwig 379 Unterkircher, Anton 225, 267, 288, 386 Virgil 11, 254, 261 Visconti, Luchino 184 Voloshinov, V. N. 377, 385, 387 Vyatcheslav Ivanov 236, 241 Wagner, Richard 158, 171–195 Warner, William Eaton 7, 22

Watson, Alister 235 Watzlawick, Paul 279, 288 Weber, Max 335, 343, 344, 346, 353 Weil, Simone 210, 320, 324, 330, 331, 333 Weininger, Otto 25, 138, 139, 140, 148, 151, 157, 158, 159, 169, 374, 403, 406, 407 Wetzel, James 7, 22 Wilder, Thornton 138 Williams, William Carlos 190, 195, 366, 368, 372 Wilson, Francesca M. 238 Wimsatt, William K. 191, 195, 390, 401 Winch, Peter 23, 153, 197, 210, 212, 333 Wisdom, John 261 Wittgenstein, Hermann 137 Wittgenstein, Hermine 155, 158, 169, 201, 227, 228, 233, 235, 265, 269, 288 Wittgenstein, Paul 233 Wittgenstein, Rudolf 209 Woodruffe, David Joseph 296, 317 Wordsworth, William 56 Wright, Georg Henrik von 20, 33, 37, 77, 101, 104, 136, 151, 156, 171, 195, 198, 220, 222, 277, 278, 288, 401 Yates, W.E. 143, 151, 156, 167, 169 Zöller, Günter 109, 113 Zweig, Fritz 175