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Timestamp: 2019-04-20 10:21:37+00:00

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Here is a paper I wrote for the "Wittgenstein and the Method of Philosophy" workshop at the University of Helsinki in May 2000. It is essentially a reworking of part of my thesis, and presupposes some familiarity with Cora Diamond and James Conant's somewhat idiosyncratic interpretation of Wittgenstein's work. Much of it, however, can be digested and understood even without such familiarity.
The Tractatus speaks so much about logic because logic can unproblematically be spoken of in the language-game of logic, unlike ethics (Engelmann 1967: 97). But the status of the Tractatus as an ethical treatise which nevertheless presents its critique by means of formal logic is, in the end, caused by the fact that the philosophical problems with the logic it expounds are precisely what prevents philosophers from grasping Wittgenstein's ethical views. But these problems with logic also haunt the Tractatus itself. Exactly as Conant says, the tragedy of the Tractatus is that its own dogmatic insistence is too convincing on the level of surface grammar to allow the correct impression that on the level of depth grammar the whole book is a satirical reductio ad absurdum of itself. The reader is liable to feel that every proposition in it should be followed by "— so there" or "— deal with it". The tremendous power of reductio ad absurdum is that it asks us to think something that simply cannot be thought (Wittgenstein 1978: v §28). But most analytically oriented readers of the Tractatus, no matter whether they endorse the positivist or the ineffability variant of the substantial conception of nonsense, have traditionally assumed that they are forbidden from even attempting to think anything that cannot be thought. Wittgenstein's pupil M. O'C. Drury refers painfully appositely to Kierkegaard's simile of a theatre director who rushes to the stage in the middle of a play to warn the audience of a fire. The audience thinks that he's part of the play, and the louder he yells, the wilder the audience applauds (Rhees 1984a: xi). Charles L. Creegan (1989: 39) has even stated, with complete justification to my mind, that those philosophers who are most likely to feel that they have understood the Tractatus correctly — i.e. the way Wittgenstein meant it — have in fact traditionally been the philosophers most likely to have misunderstood the Tractatus.
So, by moving to an earthier style, the later Wittgenstein tried to prevent his readers from getting wrong associations so that the basic ideas of the early Wittgenstein would not go to waste a second time. But this strategy was not very successful; it led mainly to interpretations according to which the radical change in Wittgenstein's style indicated a similar change in Wittgenstein's basic thoughts.4 However, Wittgenstein's preserved5 World War I notebooks testify clearly how the sparse ethical themes at the end of the Tractatus were selected from a large body of material that is stylistically quite close to the later Wittgenstein. And recent studies on the numbering system of the Tractatus (Mayer 1993; Gibson 1996) prove that its final order of presentation had nothing to do with its argumentative order, since the tentative Prototractatus still has the propositions in a completely different order. This has not attracted much attention among Wittgenstein scholars. It has been thought that one form of high-priestliness had merely been replaced by another. On the other hand Wittgenstein couldn't reach the ideal of changing his style completely. Even a few weeks before his death he came up with formulations that sounded to him too much like the Tractatus (Wittgenstein 1969: §321).
The trouble with these formulations — in this case the words "in theory" — was never their denotation; it was always their connotations. If Wittgenstein had said "In theory...," it would again have been thought that he had a theory of meaning or that he used technical terms. Of course this has a lot to do with the way "nonsense" has been misunderstood in most of the literature on the Tractatus. As interpreted by Diamond and Conant, "nonsense" is not the technical term in a theory of meaning most commentators have taken it to be. It is actually a highly evaluative term of ordinary language. The Tractatus is simply nonsense; it is not something to be considered nonsense merely for the sake of argument. Similarly, people who still argue about what Wittgenstein meant by Sachverhalt, Gegenstand or Lebensform should perhaps simply consult a German dictionary first (Ackermann 1988: 25–28; Thompkins 1990, 1991).6 — According to Schlanger (1992: 100–101), philosophers who have something new to say are always the mouthpieces of themselves: themselves, their thoughts, opinions, beliefs, feelings, desires and phantasms. But it is erroneous to believe that a philosophical text could be explicated merely by means of psychologically profiling its author. The author of a philosophical text offers to create an interactive relationship between his own existential position and that of his reader; to find things in the reader which he hasn't noticed himself.7 Wittgenstein noted during one of his lectures that he was trying to prove to his students that they had confusions of a kind they had not even imagined (Gasking & Jackson 1951: 53). In the case of a thinker like Wittgenstein it is difficult to form a healthy relationship to his person: "To get the most out of him, you have to see that he is nothing like yourself" (McGinn 1994: 39). So what was it that Wittgenstein did that was nothing like typical analytic philosophy when he changed from the cosmic Tractarian style to the later quotidian one? And how can Wittgenstein's later philosophy, which deals with such banal everyday matters, nevertheless be every bit as edifying and thrilling as his earlier one? My answer is that in his later phase, Wittgenstein did a double take on what can be construed interestingly as magic realism.
Certain Marxist philosophers (Fann 1974; Mehtonen 1979; Rossi-Landi 1981) have claimed that the alienation of people from their ordinary language, which Wittgenstein's later philosophy describes, really reflects their social alienation. Interpreted thus, Wittgenstein's philosophy is fundamentally political: he attempts to reveal the contradictions between words and deeds that are maintained by the bourgeois workaday world. But it is by no means clear that the interpretation must, in this case, be political. At least the contradictory and fragmentary evidence we have of Wittgenstein's own political views does not show that his philosophy is connected organically with any one political ideology.
— people become more intelligent the more books they own (1982: §806).
According to the Magic Realism Weltanschauung, the world and reality have a dream-like quality about them which is captured by the presentation of improbable juxtapositions in a style that is highly objective, precise, and deceptively simple. The Magic Realist painting or short story is predominantly realistic and deals with the objects of our daily life, but contains an unexpected or improbable element that creates a strange effect leaving the viewer or reader somewhat bewildered or amazed.
He had a very strong, almost abnormal, imagery, and this came out in the bizarre examples he used to produce in class to illustrate his arguments. For example, he likened his soul to a yellow spot over his shoulder ... To illustrate the expressionist character of language he suggested that we try swearing at a dog in an affectionate tone of voice, and to bring out the arbitrary nature of naming, he argued that we might christen the piece of chalk he was holding in his hand "Jack".
As an artist he can ... take a platitude and enhance it so as to make you feel its full significance. As an essayist he would rather draw from the platitude conclusions unexpected and unplatitudinous, or he would take an unnoticed fact or an outlandish thesis and show its merit and significance.
In "Realism and the Realistic Spirit," the paper in which Cora Diamond introduces the concept of the realistic spirit, she says: "We all know that if God sells wine in an English village, we do not call the story realistic; and if the devil turns up in a realistic novel, it is within what we can take to be some extraordinary experience of one of the characters, say in a dream or in delirium" (Diamond 1991a: 40). In T. F. Powys's allegorical novel Mr Weston's Good Wine, God does indeed sell wine in an English village, and another of the protagonists is a thinly disguised devil. But a story like that is in my opinion realistic in exactly the vernacular sense contrasted by Diamond with philosophical "realism," since it belongs stylistically to magic realism — it's not fantasy fiction, but neither is it wholly realistic fiction. Its conversational implicature is that of realistic fiction, and its effectiveness comes precisely from the tension between the everydayness of its pretensions and the eeriness of its subject matter. Diamond's "realistic spirit" omits the part of the vernacular meaning which the word "realism" has in "magic realism". But the philosophical aims are surely the same no matter whether we talk about "the realistic spirit," "transcendental realism" or "magic realism".
In the light Wittgenstein can be seen as a kind of high priest of contingency. As for Hume, for him the causal law is a mere favour granted by fate (Wittgenstein 1922: §§6.3–6.3751); it is a stylistic question whether we speak of a string of seemingly connected events as facilitated by causality (Wittgenstein 1979: 103–104). "At the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena" (Wittgenstein 1922: §6.371); if a squirrel does not need induction to start collecting winter deposits, human do not need it either (Wittgenstein 1969: §287). Another resemblance to Hume is the fact that for Wittgenstein this is something to be positively glad about: "If this upsets our concepts of causality then it is high time they were upset" (Wittgenstein 1967: §610). It has even been suggested that what we must pass over in the Tractatus is the causal law, and that the silence should come from our being awestruck by it (Cudahy 1966: 369–373). But even if this wasn't true, and it isn't, it seems that Wittgenstein sees living in the Humean world of unpredictability as a kind of leap of faith that he recommends equally to logical positivists and Moorean common-sense philosophers (Marcotte 1992: 64–66; Churchill 1995: 63–76). "If I stepped out into the street and found everything completely different from what I was used to, maybe I would just go ahead and join in" (Wittgenstein 1982: §200). And perhaps even Heideggerian fear-of-loss-of-being can be treated using this form of alienation as a philosophical therapy (Cooper 1997: 118–120).
In his last notes from the years 1949–51 Wittgenstein examines Moore's defence of common sense, colour concepts, and concepts in the philosophy of mind, wishing to clarify the peculiar role certain experiential propositions have in our normal world-picture. Although these propositions are a posteriori, their truth belongs to our system of reference so axiomatically that they do not differ in practice from a priori propositions. If a philosopher doubts an empirical proposition like this, then he doubts all other empirical propositions (Wittgenstein 1977: iii §348). "There are cases where doubt is unreasonable, but others where it seems logically impossible. And there seems to be no clear boundary between them" (Wittgenstein 1969: §454). These kinds of recondite and radical deviations from our world-picture, such as rejecting the causal law, are hard to tell apart from madness. "But what is the difference between mistake and mental disturbance? Or what is the difference between my treating it as a mistake and my treating it as a mental disturbance?" (Wittgenstein 1969: §73). One is reminded of Pascal's pensée according to which people are so mad that not being mad would merely be a new form of madness. A central theme of Wittgenstein's final notes is the horror caused by fear of madness and comparing philosophy with madness, as in his "that's a tree" example (Wittgenstein 1969: §467).
The anecdotes told of the strangeness of his lecturing technique by Gasking & Jackson (1951), Goodstein (1972: 271–273), Malcolm (1958: 23–29), Mays (1967: 79–85), Redpath (1990: 17–24) and many others also have to do with the theme of horror. Like magic realists in literature, Wittgenstein tries to convey the heuristic value of horrifying and sinister phenomena: to light a non-evaluative interest in events that are unpleasant as they are. The isolation of new distinctions from our "familiar," "ordinary" language is something uncanny (Cavell 1988: 94–98; cf. Zekauskas 1983: 607–608). "The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity" (Wittgenstein 1953: §129). Wittgenstein snaps his little pictures of reality precisely through the cracks that open up between analytic philosophy and everyday experience. Part of his originality is that he asks the skeptic to define what the skeptic wishes to deny (Cavell 1988: 107). The strangeness of skepticism is then evident to the skeptic, because he managed to define what he thought undefinable. Wittgenstein's thought experiments are planned to be unconvincing (Barnett 1990: 49–50). "Supposing it wasn't true that the earth had already existed long before I was born — how should we imagine the mistake being discovered?" (Wittgenstein 1969: §301).
In the horror caused by philosophizing the most notable thing is its festive nature, which is connected with seeing philosophy as a kind of pious sacrament (Rhees 1994: 578). Even though he doesn't often use this concept, it is a certain lack of piety which Wittgenstein considers to be the cause of unhealthy philosophizing.16 When a philosopher approaches his work with a certain specific devotion, which belongs to ethics and which cannot therefore be put into words, he cannot go wrong according to Wittgenstein. However, piety has fallen out of fashion as a measure of a philosopher's success. This has happened not only because it arouses the wrong kind of religious associations as a concept, but also because it can appear equally strongly in conjunction with several competing philosophical stances (Abrams 1974: 550–554; Phillips 1996: 202).17 The "linguistic turn" has brought to philosophy a disastrous cult of assertoric sentences. Anthony Holiday (1985: 136–138) has noted that when Wittgenstein defends supposedly primitive folkways from Frazer's critique, he uses methods which can also be used to defend the healthy Western understanding from the aberrations of Western philosophy. Wittgensteinian philosophy is a ritual, but it does not fight against any mythical evil spirits; actually it fights attitudes to life, like those of the Vienna Circle, which reject rituals and piety. Science, which sees no reason to believe in God, wants to deprive Wittgenstein of experiences that made the people of the past — but not Wittgenstein — believe in God (Phillips 1996: 206–207; Lurie 1998: 215–219). Wittgenstein's Nietzschean, agonal atheism, which thinks that the non-existence of God is no laughing matter (quite the contrary), is much more horrifying to a scientific atheist than any theistic world religions (Clack 1999b: 129; cf. Churchill 1985: 428). In fact these world religions are often allied with scientific atheists in condemning piety directed towards atheism!
As for philosophers, they do not fight so much against Wittgenstein's own expressions of piety as for their own limitations concerning piety (Hertzberg 1982: 157; Sachs 1988: 149). According to Wittgenstein, the expressions of piety have generally degenerated and cheapened in modern culture (Bouwsma 1986: 33–35). It is too easy to pretend that one is following them for them to reveal their true background of tremendous spiritual forces.
Like his atheism, Wittgenstein's horror is Nietzschean — it does not destroy, but makes stronger; much of his interest as a magic realist is in "the eruption of the demonic into the quotidian" (Cioffi 1981: 223; cf. Clack 1999a: 144–148). Philosophers who have discussed him humorously (Tennessen 1981; Ziff 1981; Aagaard-Mogensen 1984) have invariably used black humor. In a paper which I wish would be read much more widely, Eric Griffiths (1994) has interestingly argued that Wittgenstein can be considered as an essentially comic writer; his terms of criticism, which he applies to traditional philosophy, are those of a comedy of errors. As Rush Rhees (1969: 153) has pointed out, tragedy by no means equals disaster. The most famous line of Sophocles's Antigone speaks of wonders, ta deiua, and declares man to be the most wondrous thing of all. This according to most modern renderings. But the concept of ta deiua in ancient Greek does not usually mean "wonders" in a positive sense, but instead terrors, danger, misfortune and distress. The adjective deiuoV may in turn mean "venerable," "terrible," "bad," "dangerous," "extraordinary," "astounding," "sublime," "strong," "clever," "unheard-of," "outrageous," "strange" and "uncanny" (Kaufmann 1958: 345). Wittgenstein's magic realism can perhaps best be characterized by saying that it tries to test philosophers' skills by unexpectedly adding a deiuoV aspect to their everyday experience.
as Lafeu says in Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well (2.3.1–6). Kierkegaard (1846: 349) echoes: "The very maximum of what one human being can do for another in relation to that wherein each man has to do solely with himself, is to inspire him with concern and unrest."
Elsewhere Wittgenstein connects this idea of a circle of light to Schiller's notion of a "poetic mood" (poetische Stimmung) — a mood in which "man takes receptively to nature and in which thoughts take on a lustre as vivid as nature itself" (Wittgenstein 1980c: 116). Another backdrop to Wittgenstein's remarks is apparently Spengler's dichotomy between culture and civilization (Lurie 1990: 377–378). For example, he expresses an opinion that the modern city environment prevents the formation of a spiritual mood by its houses, streets and cars "wrapped up in cellophane" (Wittgenstein 1980c: 95). Nevetheless Wittgenstein does not dream of a deus ex machina to end this. He believes that the situation can only be changed by modern civilization's being gradually replaced: "In the civilization of great cities the spirit can only penetrate the corners. It is nevertheless not very atavistic & needlessly often it moves above the ashes of the culture as an (everlasting) witness — as God's avenger, as it were" (Wittgenstein 1997: 33).
4. "Quickening the sense of the queer" and the "sublime"
In the English-speaking world Stanley Cavell, one of Conant's heroes and mine, has for four decades been a central developer of a Wittgensteinian interpretation in which the literary and philosophical aspects are inseparable. In his early essays "The Availability of Wittgenstein's Philosophy" (Cavell 1962) and "Existentialism and Analytical Philosophy" (Cavell 1964) he created an idea later developed at considerable length in his main work, The Claim of Reason (Cavell 1979): the philosophy of Wittgenstein — which for Cavell means exclusively the philosophy of the Philosophical Investigations — can best be interpreted as confessional literature comparable with the works of such religious writers as St. Augustine and Kierkegaard. These Christians struggled against ordinary sins, but Wittgenstein is bothered by the sin of philosophizing. In the dialogues of the Investigations the philosopher Wittgenstein tries to seduce the anti-philosophical therapist Wittgenstein, and the book documents the latter's struggles against the former (Cavell 1962: 91–93). Kierkegaard's theologians, who prevent authentic existence, are replaced with Wittgenstein's philosophers, who seek to prevent the authentic use of ordinary language (Cavell 1964: 957). This resembles the secularization of confessional tradition in German Romanticism (Rowe 1994). In addition Cavell often compares Wittgenstein's homages to ordinariness and spontaneousness with the American "homeliness" of Emerson and Thoreau. This is the second main source of his own "homegrown" philosophy.
An important sub-plot in Cavell's philosophy is the strangeness of everyday life from a philosophical point of view — the "uncanniness of the ordinary," to quote the title of one of his essays (Cavell 1988). This has led other Wittgenstein scholars to suggest that a key form of Wittgensteinian therapy is to "quicken the sense of the queer," as O. K. Bouwsma (1961: 150) put it in his essay on the Blue Book, which along with Cavell's early papers was an important early attempt to resist the assimilation of Wittgenstein into conventional analytic philosophy. For Bouwsma, Wittgenstein's thought experiments and bizarre juxtapositions represented surrealism, that family resemblance neighbour of magic realism — according to him there were philosophical "realists, critical realists, semi-critical realists and now surrealists" (Bouwsma 1961: 146). In recent decades the style of scholarship emphasizing "quickening the sense of the queer" has been most widely practiced by the so-called school of "Swansea Wittgensteinians," which formed in the fifties around Wittgenstein's literary executor Rush Rhees, and which has been associated with such names as Peter Winch, D. Z. Phillips, R. F. Holland, Ilham Dilman, H. O. Mounce and Raimond Gaita. As belonging to the same tradition one might also mention Frank Cioffi and his numerous essays on Wittgenstein, anthropology and psychoanalysis, as well as the work done in Finland by Lars Hertzberg on ethics and the philosophy of religion.
Philip R. Shields (1993: 101–108) has examined the similarities and differences between Wittgenstein's religious sensibility and his conceptions of logic and philosophy. He finds in Wittgenstein's texts a repeated theme which can be described as religious piety towards forces that are invisible but not supernatural. A scientific explanation does not necessarily refute all "miracles," unlike the Vienna Circle and the international freethinker movement claim, since the experience of something as a "miracle" can itself be caused by the very fact that it can be explained scientifically (Redpath 1972: 115; Churchill 1995: 76; cf. Hertzberg 1982: 156–157). Research on the preconceptual experience of the miraculous is also the core of the Swansea Wittgensteinians' view of Wittgenstein. The philosophy of religion of the Swansea Wittgensteinians and especially of D. Z. Phillips has often been denounced as "Wittgensteinian fideism," but this is hardly fair. According to fideism a religion can be understood only by someone who participates and practices it. But Wittgenstein himself, even though he wasn't a religious person, said that he understood many religions and religious experiences.20 So he couldn't have been any kind of a fideist (Phillips 1996: 206). Additionally he criticizes the basic epistemological tenets of fideism in many contexts that have little to do with philosophy of religion (Bandman 1990). That Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion reaches its goals best by examining Wittgenstein's own religious sensibility, is a different thing and does not mean that his philosophy of religion has anything to do with attempts to protect religion from criticism.
The most detailed surveying of Wittgensteinian uncanniness has been done by Gordon Bearn (1997), an American disciple of Cavell and the Swansea school, in his recent book Waking to Wonder: Wittgenstein's Existential Investigations. In Bearn's interpretation Wittgenstein's much-discussed "Kantianism" is reflected interestingly from the way in which Wittgenstein treats concept of the aesthetically and ethically sublime. In the Critique of Judgement Kant treated as a key problem the question of whether there are experiences that are qualitatively above other experiences (Deleuze 1963: 46–48). He also developed the same theme when examining the difference between the beautiful and the sublime. Even though Wittgenstein's conclusions differed from Kant's, his ethical view of life reflects Kantianism; today it is already a platitude to say that Wittgenstein replaced the Kantian limits of reason with the Schopenhauerian limits of language. As Jonathan Lear (1982; 1984; 1986) has noted, Wittgenstein brought transcendental idealism "back to Earth" by replacing both the form-content distinction and the idea of a noumenal world with the more simple language-world distinction. According to Lear (1984: 240), his thinking seems to be the same to sociology as Kant's is to empirical psychology.
In his interpretation, Bearn takes all of this into account. But he doesn't stop there. According to him, Wittgenstein's musings in the Investigations concerning the way in which logic is something sublime (Wittgenstein 1953: §89) are connected with his ethics, and that his ethics can best be approached in comparison with Kantian ethics and aesthetics. When Wittgenstein criticizes logic for wanting to produce qualitatively superior propositions, this mirrors his critique of the similar tendency in ethics. Wittgenstein takes the theme of the sublime higher than Kant himself; he replaces the lofty (Erhaben) with the sublime (Sublim). In philosophy the idea of the sublime is usually connected with the aesthetics of Kant and Burke, which treats pleasure caused by fear — such as the fear of abysses, chasms and ravines — as superior to ordinary aesthetic experience (Lewis 1996; Bearn 1997: 86–87, 241–242). Wittgenstein says that the symphonies of Beethoven and Gothic cathedrals are "tremendous things in art"; it is too quantitative, too expert-like to speak of "beauty" in connection with them (Wittgenstein 1966: 8–9). It is unholy to do so. Tremendous art sets by itself the criteria with which it is judged tremendous.
According to Bearn (1997: 86–102), Wittgenstein's "sublime" should be understood primarily as a chemical term, only secondarily as an aesthetic one. In philosophy it is thought that logic sublimes, changes directly from the solid to the vapour state. Wittgenstein disapproves of the thought of logic subliming, because he connects the conception of logic he opposes with the critique of "gaseous thoughts" that he presents elsewhere (Hilmy 1989: 345–346). He speaks derisively of the "conception of thought as a gaseous medium" (Wittgenstein 1953: §109; cf. Stern 1995: 107–109) and of "the queer role which the gaseous and the aethereal play in philosophy" (Wittgenstein 1958: 47). He also speaks of the "dense mists of language" that surround a philosophical problem (Wittgenstein 1993b: 267). A famous passage which is translated by Anscombe as "What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards" (Wittgenstein 1953: §118) is in the original German "Aber es sind nur Luftgebäude, die wir zerstören" — "castles in the sky which we are destroying". And he claims that the myth of mental processes is caused by a fear of "belief in a gaseous mental entity" (Z, §611; cf. §211). "In philosophy all that is not gas is grammar," he also said in a lecture (Lee 1979: 218). When we argue about how meanings can be said to exist, this argument has something occult in it, because the idea of gaseous entities arises so strongly (Rotenstreich 1955: 199). Logic is sublime because it fears that it would look like magical thinking if it acknowledged its limitations; in fact the magical thinking is in believing that staying silent about them is less harmful than acknowledging them.
There is a certain kind of uncanniness that cannot be removed by any scientific explanation, so we shouldn't even search for such an explanation. As Wittgenstein said to the Vienna Circle: "Whatever one said to me, I would reject it; not indeed because the explanation is false but because it is an explanation" (Waismann 1965: 15–16). It is a mistake to think that an explanation is false if it does not make its object less wondrous in an emotional sense. "The explanation leaves the oddity untouched" (Wittgenstein 1982: §80). This theme of "natural unnaturalness" is often found in the essays and fiction of scientist-writers such as Miroslav Holub, Primo Levi or Stephen Jay Gould (Churchill 1994: 412–414).
Whenever I thought of you I couldn't help thinking of a particular incident which seemed to me very important ... you made a remark about 'national character' that shocked me by its primitiveness. I then thought: what is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., & if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life, if it does not make you more conscientious than any ... journalist in the use of the DANGEROUS phrases such people use for their own ends. You see, I know that it is difficult to think, or try to think, really honestly about your life & other people's lives. And the trouble is that thinking about these things is not thrilling, but often downright nasty. And when it's nasty then it's most important.
One can perhaps hope to understand Wittgenstein only if one has yielded to the temptations against which Wittgenstein is fighting in his writings. According to Wittgenstein (1980b: §235) these experiences are characteristic of philosophizing and are not found outside philosophy. It is interesting how many writers have described their own experience in which Wittgenstein makes Sartre — the modernist philosophical iconoclast par excellence — seem dull and bourgeois (Ferrater Mora 1953: 115; Gass 1968: 30; O'Pray 1993: 25).
Do we think and do we use philosophical concepts because this has turned out to be quite useful? Do we live because it is somehow practical to live? (Wittgenstein 1967: §700; Wittgenstein 1978: vii §17). No; we live because we instinctively feel that living is better than not living; "lives are good for you," as the Liverpool poet Roger McGough (1967) puts it. "Language did not emerge from some kind of ratiocination" (Wittgenstein 1969: §475). Wittgenstein's magic realism and "quickening the sense of the queer" rescue the familiar concepts of our own form of life by pointing out that they could be otherwise. This is a central way in which the "realistic spirit" of the Diamond–Conant interpretation combats the chimerical "realism" of philosophers with true realism; the unencumbered and sane understanding. "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" (Wittgenstein 1969: §559).
I would like to thank Dr Veikko Rantala for unwittingly giving me the original impetus of coupling Wittgenstein with magic realism, in a lecture of his given many years ago. Material included in this paper has hopefully also benefited from comments by Hanne Ahonen, Antti Arnkil, Jouni Avelin, Hanna Hyvönen, Pasi Ketelimäki, Tapani Kilpeläinen, Olli Kulmala, Elia Lennes and Jussi Pohjolainen.
1 This difference made itself manifest soon after Russell and Wittgenstein became acquainted. In May 1912 Russell wrote to Ottoline Morrell: "I told him he ought not simply to state what he thinks true, but to give arguments for it, but he said arguments spoil its beauty, and that he would feel as if he was dirtying a flower with muddy hands." Russell's sense of humor, which Wittgenstein detested profoundly, is expressed in his reaction to this: "I told him I hadn't the heart to say anything against that, and that he had better acquire a slave to state the arguments."
2 Of Samuel Alexander's Space, Time and Deity Wittgenstein once said: "If it is right to speak about the 'great problems' of philosophy, that is where they lie, space, time and deity" (Drury 1984: 99). — The mental picture of Wittgenstein as a high priest of the cosmos has sometimes materialized in quite amusing guises. His future student Theodore Redpath (1990: 16–17), who had first became acquainted with the Tractatus at the age of sixteen, had formed an image of Wittgenstein as "a kind of prophet ... I endowed him with the facial appearance of a 'prophet', with a thin long sensitive, El Grecoish kind of face, framed by long strands of silvery hair and set with large, dark, expressive eyes". We can only imagine Redpath's shock when he first met Wittgenstein.
3 Perhaps with this comment of Broad's in mind, Wittgenstein stated at about the same time that when a bad poet finds a new metre, it often disguises the badness of his poems from him. As an example he mentioned the metre of Longfellow's Hiawatha (i.e. trochaic tetrameter — known to Finns as the metre of their national epic, the Kalevala) and expressed a fear that his philosophical style had dazzled him similarly (Anscombe 1969: 373; cf. Drury 1984: 159). Acknowledging the permanence of his overtly compressing tendencies, he said that if it was up to him, the Investigations would be only about a quarter of an inch thick, just like the Tractatus (Anscombe 1969: 375). — Jim Conant (1995: 298–299) has correctly noted that a visible difference between the forms of Wittgenstein's two main works is that the Tractatus reveals its own nonsensicality only at the end, but the propositions criticized as nonsensical in the Investigations reveal theirs even before they are stated; constructions like "I am tempted to say..." and "I would like to say..." abound in the Investigations.
4 Colin McGinn (1994: 34) has described the Investigations in these terms without committing hyperbole: "So canonical is that work, indeed, that it is hard to believe that it was written by anyone. It stands there like a natural monument, the result of superlunary dictation."
5 Wittgenstein ordered most of his pre-1929 notes destroyed in 1950. The three notebooks published as Notebooks 1914–1916 and Geheime Tagebücher 1914–1916 were probably preserved by chance. In the eighties an interesting document written by Wittgenstein in January 1917 came to light; it suggests that the amount of destroyed material has often been exaggerated, and that the temporal gap in the published notebooks does not necessarily refer to a missing notebook (McGuinness 1989).
6 I am willing to say this despite Wittgenstein's philosophical mistrust of dictionaries. — Erik Stenius (1981) has famously defended a view according to which Wittgenstein rejected primarily a misleading manner of speaking when he moved from the early to the later philosophy. According to Stenius, the "picture theory of language" depicted in the Tractatus is preserved in the later philosophy as a limiting case of Wittgenstein's later conception of language. Stenius (1981: 125) quotes a notebook entry from 1944 (MS 127, pp. 38–39), in which Wittgenstein quotes paragraphs 4.22, 3.21, 3.22, 3.14, 2.03, 2.0272 and 2.01 of the Tractatus and then says: "What a linguistic misuse of the words 'Gegenstand' + 'Konfiguration'. A configuration can be made up by balls which are spatially related in a certain way; but not of the balls and their spatial relations. And if I say 'I see here three Gegenstände' I do not mean: two balls + their mutual position." The Diamond–Conant interpretation of the Tractatus probably admits this interpretation; if so, it adds that Wittgenstein held the terminology depicted in the Tractatus misleading already in his Tractatus phase and he merely couldn't beware of it sufficiently back then.
7 Of the texts fulfilling this need, Schlanger pays special attention to the prefaces of philosophical books; cf. his analysis of Wittgenstein's prefaces to his two main works (Schlanger 1992: 104–112), as well as other treatments of this topic (Stüssel 1989; Savickey 1999: 77–88).
8 Other attempts are evaluated at length and with skill by Hilary Putnam (1994) in his Dewey Lectures.
9 Whether he was a great philosopher is debatable, but the influence of G. C. Lichtenberg on Wittgenstein's thought experiments seems to be clear; often there are almost uncanny similarities between his aphoristic style and Wittgenstein's.
10 Interestingly, Judith Genova (1972) thinks that she sees traces of expressionism here and there in the Tractatus. It might be fruitful to look at the relationship between the Tractatus and the later Wittgenstein as analogous to the relationship between expressionism and magic realism.
11 Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, the Workshop of Potential Literature) is a group of mathematicians and writers founded in France in 1960. It creates new literary forms by voluntarily limiting the exploitation of language.
12 Wittgenstein nevertheless wrote at least one poem, stylistically within German Romanticism; it has been printed in the most recent edition of Culture and Value.
13 Taken by an uncharacteristic loss of temper, Gilbert Ryle (1972: 109) once asked O. K. Bouwsma, who had strongly emphasized the tranquilizing qualities of Wittgenstein: "Well! — what of the Wittgenstein who got us interested, fascinated, excited, angry, shocked? He electrified us. Whom did he ever tranquilize?" Apparently Ryle did not notice that the peace Wittgenstein brings with his philosophy comes after this electrification and in fact as a consequence of it.
14 On the other hand, the mere lack of a feeling of strangeness does not yet imply a feeling of familiarity (Wittgenstein 1953: §596).
15 Today the distance of anthropology to its object of study has, particularly in popular culture, been turned topsy-turvy: comparisons with indigenous peoples are used humoristically to prove our own alleged primitiveness, or it is even sought to prove that some negative phenomenon that is usually considered modern is in fact ancient, to free us from feeling guilty for it (di Leonardo 1998: 57–66; cf. Sahlins 1995). Wittgenstein would undoubtedly also have opposed this inverse phenomenon.
16 The concept of piety — primarily in the sense of "a man's faithfulness to his own past" — is also central in the thought of Wittgenstein's early influence Otto Weininger (Rhees 1984b: 182).
17 This train of thought from Wittgenstein's remarks on Frazer illustrates my point excellently: "Recall that after Schubert's death his brother cut some of Schubert's scores into small pieces and gave such pieces, consisting of a few bars, to his favourite pupils. This act, as a sign of piety, is just as understandable as the different one of keeping the scores untouched, accessible to no one. And if Schubert's brother had burned the scores, that too would be understandable as a sign of piety" (Wittgenstein 1993a: 127). Even though the various possible signs of piety are mutually contradictory, it is easy to imagine a way of treating the scores which would be a clear sign of lack of piety (Clack 1999a: 101).
18 On Bataille's conception of philosophy, see Bataille 1954.
19 In light of utterances like these it is nearly incomprehensible how Wittgenstein can be described as a kind of businessmanlike technocrat whose philosophy of mind is an adaptation of the worst kind of Skinnerian behaviourism (Pylkkö 1998). But the existence of interpretations like this proves just how deep the myth of Wittgenstein as a quintessentially analytic philosopher still is is some circles.
20 And that he failed to understand others; cf. the treatment by Rush Rhees (1997: 238–247, 307–317) of Wittgenstein's remarks on election to grace, as well as "picking and choosing" Christian doctrines.
21 It has been suggested that Wittgenstein's anger was caused by his realization that he himself has used "dangerous phrases" on national character in his derogatory early thirties notes on Jewishness, and that Hitler's accession to power was proof of what this could lead to (Lurie 1989: 340–343).
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