The Literary Wittgenstein

John Gibson, Wolfgang Huemer, John Gibson, Wolfgang Huemer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134438938
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The Literary Wittgenstein is a stellar collection of articles relating the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) to core problems in the theory and philosophy of literature.
Amid growing recognition that Wittgenstein's philosophy has important implications for literary studies, this book brings together twenty-one articles by the most prominent figures in the field. Eighteen of the articles are published here for the first time.
The Literary Wittgenstein applies the approach of Wittgenstein to core areas of literary theory, including poetry, deconstruction, the ethical value of literature, and the nature and logic of fictional discourse. The literary dimension of Wittgenstein's own writings is also explored, such as the authorial strategy of the Tractatus, and writing and method in the Philosophical Investigations. Major literary figures discussed in the book include William Faulkner, Joseph Conrad, and Friedrich Hölderlin.
By mapping out the foundations of a new approach to literature, The Literary Wittgenstein is essential reading for anyone interested in the relevance and application of Wittgenstein's thought to literary theory, aesthetics, and the philosophy of language and logic.

Part I


PHILOSOPHY AS A KIND OF LITERATURE/LITERATURE AS A KIND OF PHILOSOPHY

INTRODUCTORY NOTE TO
“THE INVESTIGATIONS’
EVERYDAY AESTHETICS OF ITSELF”

Stanley Cavell

More than any other single work, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations has held out for me the promise of philosophy as a distinct, present activity to which I felt I had something to contribute. My encounter with it (which was at first fruitless – it took the intervention of the work of my teacher J. L. Austin, and a certain dissatisfaction with that intervention, in particular with Austin’s dismissal of the significance of skepticism, to overcome my sense of the Investigations as a kind of unsystematic pragmatism) came at a time when many young readers of Wittgenstein’s text believed Wittgenstein’s apparent claim (more apparently unequivocal in the Tractatus than in the Investigations) that he had solved all the problems of philosophy that were open to solution, and accordingly abandoned the subject, sometimes intellectual life altogether. The effect upon me, when it came, was rather the opposite. The problems of philosophy – above all the problem of philosophy, philosophy as a problem – became live for me as if for the first time. Suppose it were true, as Wittgenstein early and late has been taken to assert, that the problems of philosophy arise from a misunderstanding of our language. What could be a more intimate study of human self-defeat – humanity distinguished, for many, from the rest of creation by its possession of language – than to seek to learn how, and why, for millennia mankind has engaged in tormenting itself in the creation of false systems of reason; how and why, as Kant puts the matter at the opening of The Critique of Pure Reason, human reason suffers the fate of asking itself questions that it can neither ignore nor answer?

Kant’s answer to this question, and his attempt to create an intellectual structure to forestall this form of torment, stands as a great, for some the greatest, achievement of modern philosophy, although it has been under continuous attack since the decade of Kant’s death. My first essay at getting something of my response to Wittgenstein into communicable form (“The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy,” the second piece in Must We Mean What We Say?, hence the second piece of published work that I still use) uncovers the connection with Kant and proposes explicitly, but with little characterization, the link between Wittgenstein’s transfiguration of Kant’s perception of the fate of human reason and the undisguised literary claims, let’s call them, that Wittgenstein’s text continuously presses upon its reader’s attention. I suppose I already sensed that the communication between reason’s struggle with itself and the eruption of an expressive range of language generally associated with the work literature does, was part of a sense that, instead of Kant’s attempt to confine or restrain the insatiability or perverseness of reason’s ambition (which serves to increase its temptation to know all), philosophy’s task should be rather to air the ambition.

In Wittgenstein’s practice (in the work that goes into Philosophical Investigations), this means coming to think and write within persistent earshot of reason’s dissatisfaction with itself, in the absence of any assurance that reason’s limits can be penned along, or within, the totality of points at which it may find itself to stray (the points are as endless as the occasions of desire, as the promptings of speech), but only with the conviction that at each point it has the power to catch itself, draw even with its experience, for the moment. But then reason has to be refigured, not as something that as such must be limited, but as something still not discovered, as it were still outstanding, like a debt. Or like my self, which is always and never what I am.

Where Kant speaks of reason’s laws as providing the conditions of a world of what we can know as objects, Wittgenstein speaks of returning to the world of the ordinary (returning from metaphysical intensities desiring to transgress our everyday requirements of exchange), a world in which each occupant has its conditions – this chair, this cow, this coin, this hand, this handle, this beetle, this rose, this aroma, this construction of stone or wood, this imaginary rubble, this mythical field of ice, this friction, this man in pain, this god, this ardor, this doubt, this equation, this drawing, this face. The liberation I felt getting into Wittgenstein’s text, and for which I remain grateful, was its demonstration, or promise, that I can think philosophically about anything I want, or have, to think about, not merely what I am able to formulate in a particular way (which is what so much of philosophy as it was conveyed to me in school sought to impress me with – indispensably, but somehow, always, suspiciously). Now I could be impressed with anything my language is impressed by – if somehow, often, with suspicion; but then again, as often, with wonder. And now I have the sense of approaching from another direction what the Tractatus means in saying that the world is my world. I might accordingly learn how to say, with much of philosophy, that it is not mine, that, as Nietzsche puts the matter, the philosopher lives in opposition to today (Emerson having said, in aversion to conformity). Learn, I mean, how to be responsible for both gestures.

One way I have put such thoughts is to say that Wittgenstein’s Investigations became for me not simply an object of interpretation but a means of interpretation. This formulation, however, is doubly insufficient. First, because the transition of object to means is apt to be true of any text to the degree that one takes it seriously. Second, because any text to whose understanding the Investigations (for example) contributes is one to whose interpretation it in some measure submits. But what confers the right to such intertextuality? And what shows it to be pertinent or perverse, trivial or deep, evasive or responsive? I have, for example, variously troubled over the years to emphasize the role of becoming lost, hence of finding oneself, or say one’s footing, in the Investigations, and set it against the loss of way, or the question of finding one’s way, at the opening of Emerson’s essay “Experience,” and of the Introduction to Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, and of the first Canto of The Divine Comedy. But this, as Wittgenstein roughly says about the act of naming, so far says nothing. (Cf. Investigations, §49: “Naming is so far not a move in the language-game – any more than putting a piece in its place on the board is a move in chess. We may say: nothing has so far been done, when a thing has been named.”) Does my placing of these texts so much as mark specific places, within texts whose powers to inspire commentary can seem infinite, at which something of some interest is to be said? This at best remains to be seen.

But isn’t the question what at best might be seen? What is the point of going over such knots of culture – for some tiresome, for others lurid? Well, for me, for example, expansiveness and illumination here would show that a work that represents, controversially, a contemporary site of philosophy (Wittgenstein) reaches back to a signal search for God (Dante), as well as to the assertion that the search has ended in trauma (Nietzsche), through a work willing to teach the suffering of America’s perpetual discovery and loss of itself (Emerson). And because the philosophy in question is one whose originality is partly a function of its stress on the idea of the ordinary or everyday, especially its way of allowing philosophy’s return to what it calls the everyday to show that what we accept as the order of the ordinary is a scene of obscurity, self-imposed as well as other-imposed, fraudulent, you might say metaphysical (the thing Emerson calls conformity and Nietzsche calls philistinism), it links its vision with aspects of the portraits Kierkegaard and Marx and Heidegger and Walter Benjamin make of what Mill calls our mutual intimidation, what Proust, we might say, shows to be our mutual incorporation.

Is this swirl of anachronism supposed to be a benefit, namely of inserting philosophy back from a profession of expertise into the mess of culture? But of course it is already inescapably inserted, whether professional philosophy is offended or not. And as for anachronism, culture is itself made of anachronistically buckled strata of past and present, as the self is. The philosophy I seek is not one that promises an always premature unity but one that allows me in principle to get from anywhere, any present desire, to anywhere else that I find matters to me.

I have from the first time I undertook to teach Philosophical Investigations sought to articulate my sense of it as a work of modernity, one that perpetually questions its medium and its sense of a break with the past. That I had turned to philosophy after a crisis in pursuing a life as a musician is no doubt in the background here. A chief contribution my text to follow here seeks to achieve, in presenting what I call the Investigations’ aesthetics of itself, is to discover a contemporary form of Kant’s portrayal of reason’s self-torment that shows it, in Wittgenstein’s work, to elaborate into a portrait of the modern subject, which is to say, the reader for whom it understands itself as written.

If the Investigations occupies for me a privileged place among the texts I call means of interpretation, it is perhaps because as I go on learning to ask for further conditions of this text’s existence – its form as fragments, its palette of terms of criticism, its sparseness of theoretical terms, as if every term of ordinary language can be shown to harbor the power of a theoretical term – I continue to find responses in its greatly compressed pages (Wittgenstein calls Part I “the precipitate” of sixteen years of philosophical work) that surprise me, that open spaces of understanding, and of further understanding, that are models of what I seek in finding my way in any text that elicits my interest, that is, in anything that is for me an object of interpretation. And nowhere more instructively than in its demonstration that an interpretation, however persistent it must at its best be, comes to an end somewhere – as though, precisely unlike the idea of a formal proof, philosophy’s beginning and ending are matters of contestable judgment. And as though philosophical persistence is to an unavoidable extent a matter of awaiting the dawning of dissatisfaction with whatever end of invention one has so far arrived at. Emerson calls this patience.

1

THE INVESTIGATIONS’
EVERYDAY AESTHETICS OF ITSELF

Stanley Cavell

We have all, I assume, heard it said that Wittgenstein is a writer of unusual powers. Perhaps that is worth saying just because the powers are so unusual, anyway in a philosopher, and of his time and place. But why is this worth repeating – I assume we have all heard it repeated – since as far as I know no one has denied it? Evidently the repetition expresses an uncertainty about whether Wittgenstein’s writing is essential to his philosophizing; whether, or to what extent, the work of the one coincides with the work of the other. If you conceive the work of philosophy as, let’s say, argumentation, then it will be as easy to admire as to dismiss the writing – to admire it, perhaps, as a kind of ornament of the contemporary, or near contemporary, scene of professional philosophy, hence as something that lodges no philosophical demand for an accounting. But if you cannot shake an intuition, or illusion, that more is at issue than ornamentation (not that that issue is itself clear), and you do not wish to deny argumentation, or something of the sort, as internal to philosophy, then a demand for some philosophical accounting of the writing is, awkwardly, hard to lose.

I describe what I am after as the Investigations’ everyday aesthetics of itself to register at once that I know of no standing aesthetic theory that promises help in understanding the literariness of the Investigations – I mean the literary conditions of its philosophical aims – and to suggest the thought that no work will be powerful enough to yield this understanding of its philosophical aims aside from the Investigations itself. Does this mean that I seek an aesthetics within it? I take it to mean, rather, that I do not seek an aesthetic concern of the text that is separate from its central work. My idea here thus joins the idea of an essay of mine, “Declining Decline,” which tracks the not unfamiliar sense of moral or religious fervor in the Investigations and finds that its moral work is not separate from its philosophical work, that something like the moral has become for it, or become again, pervasive for philosophy. (As Emerson words the idea in “Self-Reliance”: “Character teaches above our wills [the will of the person and of the person’s writing]. Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment.”)

There is something more I want here out of the idea of an ordinary aesthetics. The Investigations describes its work, or the form its work takes, as that of perspicuous presentation (§122), evidently an articulation of a task of writing. And it declares the work of its writing as “lead[ing] words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use” (§116), a philosophically extraordinary commitment not only to judge philosophy by the dispensation of the ordinary, but to...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Wittgenstein, Language and Philosophy of Literature
• Part I: Philosophy As a Kind of Literature/Literature As a Kind of Philosophy
• Part II: Reading With Wittgenstein
• Part III: Literature and the Boundaries of Self and Sense
• Part IV: Fiction and the Tractatus
• Part V: The Larger View