Source: http://wittgenstein-initiative.com/writing-philosophy-as-poetry-literary-form-in-wittgenstein/
Timestamp: 2019-04-23 22:54:10+00:00

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From The Oxford Handbook of Wittgenstein, ed. Oskari Kuusela and Marie McGinn (Oxford: Oxford U Press, 2011), Chapter 31,714-28.
And Wittgenstein himself, hoping, in 1919, to persuade Ludwig von Ficker, the editor of the literary journal Der Brenner, to publish his controversial Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus , remarked, “The work is strictly philosophical and at the same time literary” ( Monk 1990 , 177 ).
Die Tragödie besteht darin daß sich der Baum nicht biegt sondern bricht.
Die Religion ist sozusagen der tiefste ruhige Meeresgrund, der ruhig bleibt, wie hoch auch die Wellen oben gehen.
But “sozusagen” literally means “so to speak,” not the coy “as it were,” and the “Meeresgrund” would not today be designated as the “sea bottom” but rather as the ocean floor, the stillness at whose deepest point is compared by Wittgenstein to the unshakability of true faith, impervious as that faith is to the passing religious fashions (the waves) of everyday life.
Ich glaube meine Stellung zur Philosophie dadurch zusammengefaßt zu haben indem ich sagte: Philosophie dürfte man eigentlich nur dichten.
I am either happy or unhappy, that’s all. It can be said: good or evil do not exist.
He who is happy must have no fear. Not even of death.
In order to live happily I must be in agreement with the world. And that is what “being happy” means. . . .
The fear of death is the best sign of a false, i.e. a bad, life.
When my conscience upsets my equilibrium, then I am not in agreement with something. But what is this? Is it the world ?
Certainly it is right to say: Conscience is the voice of God.
For example: it makes me unhappy to think that I have offended this or that man. Is that my conscience?
the final line of this sequence suggests that all one can say is “Lebe glücklich” (Be happy!). And this bit of non-advice leads, in its turn, to the formulation of 29 July 1916, that “the world of the happy is a different world from the world of the unhappy”—a return to the tautological mode of 8 July 1916 that is picked up verbatim in Tractatus 6.43.
The world of the happy is a different world from that of the unhappy.
The world of the happy is a happy world.
Can there then be a world that is neither happy nor unhappy?
The Notebook entries on “happy” were made over a three-month period, and the reader may well wonder why variations on the original distinction between “happy” and “unhappy” are made again and again, both here and in the Tractatus . But repetition with slight permutation—a form of repetition reminiscent of Gertrude Stein or Samuel Beckett rather than of Plato or Heraclitus—is the key to Wittgenstein’s method here.6 Only by beginning again and again, to use Stein’s phrase, by reformulating a particular notion until it gradually manifests or reveals itself, can philosophy make any sort of progress. And “progress” is too strong a word here, for, as Wittgenstein puts it in a 1930 Lecture, “Philosophical analysis does not tell us anything new about thought (and if it did it would not interest us).” Rather, “Philosophy is the attempt to be rid of a particular kind of puzzlement.” (WL, 35, 1) In this case, it is only by circling round the proposition “The world of the happy is a happy world” that we begin to understand that happiness, man’s most persistent goal, cannot be defined or even specified. Nor is definition or specification necessary. When, for example, we read the famous opening sentence of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina —“Happy families are all alike. Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”—we don’t stop to ask what Tolstoy means by the words “happy” and unhappy.” We know very well what is at stake; we also know that this novel is not going to be about happy families.
Die Grenze der Sprache zeight sich in der Unmöglichkeit die Tatsache zu beschreiben, die einem Satz entspricht (seine Ubersetzung ist) ohne eben den Satz zu wiederholen.
Poeticity , these statements suggest, depends upon the conviction that “language is not contiguous to anything else. We cannot speak of the use of language as opposed to anything else.” (WL, 112) For if one begins with the actual words spoken or written, word choice and grammar are seen to be everything. The variations on the proposition “The world of the happy is a different world from the world of the unhappy” are essential, not because they say anything “new”—they don’t—but because the very act of repetition and qualification, repetition and variation brings home to the reader, as to the philosopher-poet himself, the impossibility of defining happiness, even as its central function in our lives is clearly demonstrated.
Indeed, unlike traditional aphorisms, Wittgenstein’s short propositions don’t really “say” anything. Or, to put it another way, what they “say” is enigmatic. “Death is not an event in life,” (TLP 6.4311), for example, is an arresting aphorism but not because it is true. For death (someone else’s) could certainly be an event in my life. And even the specter of my own death determines how I live, what I do. Wittgenstein’s sentences are thus characterized, not by their metaphorical force or their use of the rhetorical figures like antithesis and parallelism, but by what I would call their opaque literalism. The sentences say just what they say—no difficult words to look up!— but they remain mysterious, endlessly puzzling, enigmatic. In what context and to whom is it meaningful to say “The world of the happy is a happy world”? Isn’t it rather like saying, to quote a famous little poem, “So much depends / upon / a red wheel / barrow / glazed with rain / water / beside the white/ chickens”? And how do we move from one proposition to the next, the decimal system of the Tractatus constituting, as David Antin has so convincingly demonstrated (Antin 1998 , 151–6) , a framework that defies the very logic it claims to put forward?
[End of §30.] One must already know something (or do something with it) in order to be able to ask its name. But what must one know?
31.When you show someone the king in a game of chess and say, “This is the king”, you are not explaining to him how the piece is used—unless he already knows the rules of the game, except for this last identification: the shape of the king. It is possible that he learned the rules of the game without ever having been shown an actual chess piece. The form of the piece here corresponds to the sound or the physical appearance of a word.
Consider this further case: I am explaining chess to someone and begin by pointing to a chess piece and saying “This is the king. It can move like this, etc. etc.” In this case, we’ll say that the words, “This is the king” (or this one is called “king”) only provide a definition if the learner already “knows what a piece in a board game is.” That is, if he has already played other games or watched other people playing “with understanding”—and so on. Again, only then would he be able to ask the relevant question, “What is this called?”—that is, this piece in a game.
We can say: only someone who already knows how to do something with it can meaningfully ask for its name.
And we can also imagine a situation in which the person questioned answers, “You choose the name”, and so the questioner would have to take the responsibility for the whole thing.
Bare, ruin’d choirs were late the sweet birds sang.
Here the identity of old age and the autumn of the year is complete; the metaphor, moreover, doubles over in line 4 as the bare branches “where late the sweet birds sang” become the “bare, ruin’d choirs” of medieval churches—perhaps the Gothic vaults of monasteries destroyed during the Reformation. The choristers (sweet birds) no longer sing in the empty church stalls (the tree branches).
Such proverbial statements, as Wittgenstein students have long remarked, are characterized by their homely, everyday wisdom, their common sense. Old ideas can’t be recycled any more than silver foil can be smoothed out again; outmoded thoughts are like shriveled husks; seemingly brilliant solutions to philosophical problems are like those fairy tale gift s that emerge in the harsh light of day as pieces of junk. Wittgenstein knows very well that the items compared are discrete, that words and phrases function only in specific language games.
Now let us return to the chess passage in §31. Here, as throughout the Investigations, the author presents himself dialogically—as someone having a conversation with someone else. Typically, he begins with a question: here, at the end of §30, “But what does one have to know?” Question, exclamation, interruption, interpellation: even when, as in the Investigations , there is a written text, not a series of lecture notes recorded by others, Wittgenstein “does” philosophy by setting up everyday dialogues or interviews, as enigmatic as they are childlike. In the chess discussion, for example, Wittgenstein begins by positing that the explanatory sentence “This is the king” makes no sense unless the player already knows the rules of the game. But there are other possibilities. The interlocutor might have learned chess by watching, first simple board games and then more difficult ones. “This is the king” might refer to an unusual chess piece, one that doesn’t have the usual shape of the king. Or again, the sentence “This is the king” may be spoken by a master of the game to explain what move he is about to make. Or a non-native speaker who knows how to play chess may ask what this particular piece is called in the foreign country he is visiting.
—far from providing closure, opens up the debate for further possibilities?
Someone coming into a foreign country will sometimes learn the language of the natives from ostensive definitions that they give him; and he will often have to guess the meaning of these definitions; and will guess sometimes right, sometimes wrong.
The continuity between §31 and §32 is at first elusive. Just when we think we understand that the word “king” in chess is meaningless unless we know how to play the game, Wittgenstein shifts ground and attacks the Augustinian theory of language as pointing system from a different angle. The new analogy—wonderfully absurd—is between a stranger in a foreign country and a child communicating within its own not-yet-learned language system. Is the child’s “thought” then like the foreigner’s native language, prior to the “new” language to be learned? The posited analogy is patently absurd, for what could that prior language possibly look and sound like? How does one talk to oneself without talking? As Wittgenstein puts it frequently, does a young child hope before it has learned the word “hope”?
Analogies thus provide sometimes positive, sometimes negative reinforcement: in either case, they lead us to revise our previous understanding of this or that fixed notion. It is this processive, self-corrective, and even self-canceling nature of Wittgenstein’s propositions—their deployment of language as “a labyrinth of paths” (PI §82), their use of countless examples, anecdotes, narratives, and analogies—that gives the text its poetic edge. For the “naturalness” of its talk, its colloquial, everyday language and story-telling is everywhere held in tension with a set of larger assumptions that are as fixed and formally perfect as is the architectural design of the severely modern house Wittgenstein designed for his sister in Vienna. However much the individual exempla in the text are open for discussion and debate, the unstated axiom governing them is that “language is not contiguous to anything else,” and that accordingly, the meaning of a word is its use in the language. And the text enacts that theorem, presented as a non-theorem, at every turn. Showing , not telling , is the mode.
In a literary context, the “exciting moments” described here are known as epiphanies. Suddenly, in such Wordsworthian “spots of time,” the object of contemplation becomes radiant, and we see into the life of things. Consider Wittgenstein’s late notebook entries published under the title On Certainty (Über Gewissheit).9 The basic subject of this little book is what one knows and how one knows it: the paragraphs numbered 300–676, written in the last months of Wittgenstein’s life, try to define the point when doubt becomes senseless—a question that is answerable only by referring it to actual practice. And here Wittgenstein’s examples are especially imaginative.
332. Suppose that someone, without wanting to philosophize , were to say, “I don’t know if I have ever been on the moon; I don’t remember ever having been there”. (Why would this person be so alien from us?).
In the first place: how would he know that he was on the moon? How does he picture it to himself? Compare: “I don’t know if I was ever in the village of X.” But I couldn’t say this either if X were in Turkey, because I know that I have never been to Turkey.
333. I ask someone, “Have you ever been to China?” He answers, “I don’t know.” Here one would surely say, “You don’t know ? Do you have any reason to believe that perhaps you have ever been there? Have you for example ever been near the Chinese border? Or were your parents there at the time you were about to be born?”— Normally, Europeans do know whether they have been to China or not.
343. But it isn’t that we just can’t investigate everything and are therefore forced to be satisfied with assumptions. If I want the door to move, the hinges must be intact.
343. My life consists in that there are certain things I am content to accept.
Here is the negative capability of the late Wittgenstein—the capacity, in Keats’s words, “of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason”10 —a mental state closely allied to the moment of poetry. Of course, Wittgenstein suggests, one can always demand specification of a proposition to the point where there could be certainty, as in “2 X 2 = 4,” but, even in this case, “the spoken or written sentence ‘2 X 2 = 4’ might in Chinese have a different meaning or be pure nonsense” (OC §10).
But Wittgenstein’s “ordinary language” is of course extraordinary. In the passage above (§§332–43) and throughout On Certainty , persuasion depends on the poet-philosopher’s astonishing rhetorical skill. Examples must be short and concrete; they must speak to the interlocutor’s everyday experience, using conversational speech patterns, reinforced by vivid analogies like that of words turned to corpses or worn-out ideas like crumpled silver foil. The exempla must meet the test of common sense; indeed, they must be so literal that they make us laugh. Even in our own age of moon exploration, the response “I don’t know” to the question, “Have you ever been on the moon?” is absurd. Indeed, the absurdity of many of Wittgenstein’s propositions shows their affinity to the joke, the riddle, or the tall tale, as these variants appear in the language game itself: “Imagine a language-game ‘When I call you, come in through the door’. In an ordinary case, it will be impossible to doubt that there really is a door” (OC §391). A child, presented with such a possibility, would either laugh or put forward an alternate game—for example, “Let’s pretend none of the things in this room exist.” And therein would lie a different language game, a different poetic act.
Raisins may be the best part of a cake; but a bag of raisins is no better than a cake; and he who is in a position to give us a bag full of raisins, cannot necessarily bake a cake with them, let alone do something better.
I am thinking of [Karl] Kraus & his aphorisms, but of myself too & my philosophical remarks.
The last remark here is especially telling. Aphorisms, so central to the Tractatus and earlier work, cannot in themselves make a poetic-philosophical discourse. If they remain discrete, like so many separate raisins in a bag, they fail to cohere into a fully-formed “cake.” But coherence, in this instance, is not a matter of linearity, of logical or temporal movement from a to b to c. For Wittgenstein, the criss-crossing of threads must be dicht—thick and dense—and, as in the case of lyric poetry, only slow reading can unpack the meanings in question.
“My sentences must be read slowly .” The necessity, in an information age, of slowing down the reading process, was central to the thinking of many of Wittgenstein’s contemporaries—for example, the Russian avant-gardists Velimir Khlebnikov and Alexeii Kruchenykh: the term ostranenie (estrangement, defamiliarization) was always associated with slowing down the reading (or viewing) process in art. Duchamp’s concept of the delay, as in calling his Large Glass (The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even) a “delay in glass,” is another instance. To say “Philosophy must be written only as one would write poetry” is to be aware of the need for density and resonance—rather than logic and sequential argument—in the verbal construct.
I read among many similar examples, of a Rain-King in Africa to whom the people pray for rain when the rainy period comes. But surely that means that they do not really believe that he can make it rain, otherwise they would do it in the dry periods of the year in which the land is “a parched and arid desert.” For if one assumes that the people formerly instituted this office of Rain-King out of stupidity, it is nevertheless certainly clear that they had previously experienced that the rains begin in March, and then they would have had the Rain-King function for the other part of the year. Or again, toward morning, when the sun is about to rise, rites of daybreak are celebrated, but not during the night, when they simply burn lamps. (PO, 137).
“Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough ” was, of course, not intended for publication, at least not in the present form, and so our expectations of it are different from those we have of the Investigations . But when we remember that even the latter, his most “finished” work, was undergoing continual change between the time of its “completion” and Wittgenstein’s death in 1951,12 we can see that the formal constraints are quite similar. To insure that the reader will absorb them “slowly,” Wittgenstein’s sentences are paratactic and metonymic; they circle around a “point,” at first quietly, even casually, then with increasing deliberation, until the “meaning” of this or that argument suddenly crystallizes. From the gnomic aphorisms of the Tractatus to the “common-sense” analogies that multiply and spill over into the next paragraph in the Investigations and On Certainty , Wittgenstein’s writings enact their central motive: words and phrases can be understood only in their particular context, their use. Not what one says but how one says it is the key to doing philosophy. And that, of course, is what makes it poetry as well.
Marjorie Perloff teaches courses and writes on twentieth and now twenty-first century poetry and poetics, both Anglo-American and from a Comparatist perspective, as well as on intermedia and the visual arts. She is Professor Emerita of English at Stanford University and Florence R. Scott Professor of English Emerita at the University of Southern California. She is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.
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1 I have used my own translations of remarks from Culture and Value and Philosophical Investigations .
2 Having chosen Anscombe as the official translator of the Philosophical Investigations , Wittgenstein arranged for her to spend some time in Vienna to improve her Oxford-acquired German. Wittgenstein’s own last stay in Vienna (December 1949–March 1950), on the occasion of his sister Hermine’s death, coincided with Anscombe’s, and they evidently met two or three times a week, but he was himself so ill he may not have paid much attention to the actual translation process (see Monk 1990 , 562) .
written only as one would write poetry” (2004 , 56). Or, to be even more colloquial, one can follow David Antin’s “One should really only do philosophy as poetry” (1998, 161).
4 The reference is to Wittgenstein’s 1933 note: “The man who said that one cannot step into the same river twice said something wrong; one can step into the same river twice” (PO, 167).
5 My translation: there is not yet an English translation of the Geheime Tagebücher. The methodological importance of this and subsequent passages in the GT was first noted by Antin ( 1998 , 154–5).
6 I discuss in Perloff 2002 Lyn Hejinian’s Wittgensteinian long poem “Happily” (Hejinian 2000 ), which plays further variations on the word happy and its cognates and shows how this kind of conceptual poetry works.
8 I owe my knowledge of this and related passages to David Antin ( 1998 , 160) . Antin’s own “talk pieces” are later instances of this Wittgensteinian paradigm.
9 The selection of notes and their numbering was made posthumously by the editors, not the author.
10 Keats 1982 , 43 .
11 In Philosophical Occasions . In their head note, the editors point out that the first bilingual book edition of this text (Retford: Brynmilll 1979) left out a considerable number of the remarks; “the extant editions disagree about what to include and what to leave out of Wittgenstein’s remarks” (PO, 116). There is, then, no definitive text of this essay.
12 See especially Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology , vols. 1 and 2. In these volumes, Part II of the Investigations is heavily revised and expanded.

References: §30
 §31
 §30
 §31
 §32
 §82
 §10
 §391