In this chapter I will examine a set of responses to the threat of
nonsense
attending our pictures of time as these are articulated in PhilosophicalInvestigations.
Constructing a Replacement for the Soul - Bourbon
But if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own.
[[I should have liked to produce a good book. This has not come about, but the time is past in which I could improve it. ]] (x)
As in Emerson, writing toward stimulating others into thinking means how to read him is always at issue. Thus, we can understand his hesitancy to publish as a concern for his work not to be read as his thought, but as his thinking: a philosophical novel as opposed to a philosophical tract.
Wittgenstein writes so as to draw the right kind of picture of the limits marking language and mind, limits understood as the ordinary condition o f being human, as shifting
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between aspects o f a defined set o f ontological commitments. Language in this sense is not directed at things, or the world, or others as such but functions through and as a complexmatrixofcommitmentsthatresolveintohowoneis. Theworld,things,artifacts, others are figured through shifting expressions o f being (understood as an evolving set o f practices), a continual projection o f what counts as real through commitments arising out of de facto commitments to what one is oneself not through self-definition.
Although we inhabit language, we do not 'inhabit our head'. The singularity of my perspective cannot be claimed as mine, as if I said "'At any rate only I have got THIS"'(PI? 398). Wittgensteinimmediatelyasks"Whatarethesewordsfor? Theyserve no purpose," at least, I want to add, as an act o f communication. But how do I inhabit my language if not through my claim that the world is mine? This claim 'I have got THIS' is nonsense if understood to be about my perception, but it expresses an ownership o f a perspective within language that is refracted through my manifestation within language (whatWittgensteincalls'hisstamp'). Onlywhatcanbeownedbyotherpeoplecanbe ownedatall. Wittgensteinasks"Inwhatsensehaveyougotwhatyouaretalkingabout
and saying that only you have got it? Do you possess it? You do not even see it" (PI? 398). Why do we not see this 'THIS"? This claim is a modified version of Wittgenstein's earlier rejection of a picture of my world as if a visual field converging on an eye. I cannot see or say the limit o f my world or else it would not be a limit. One mightrathersay(althoughmisleadingly)thatthelimitofmyworldhasmeandnotIit: "if as a matter of logic you exclude other people's having something, it loses its sense to say
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that you have i t . . . . Inasmuch as it cannot be any one else's it is not mine either" (PI? 398). Thisisagrammaticalremarkabout'beingmine'.
Wittgenstein ends this remark with a description o f another picture o f a landscape: Think o f a picture in a landscape, an imaginary landscape with a house in it. -- Someone asks "Whose house is that? "--The answer, by the way, might be "It belongs to the farmer who is sitting on the bench in front o f it". But then he cannot for example enter his house. (PI? 398)
One should not confuse a representation ofa house for the actual house. This picture of representation is meant to illustrate the metaphor of a 'visual room' as the picture underlyingtheclaimthatmyphenomenalexperienceismine. Justasthefarmerinthe picture cannot enter his house, the 'I' who imagines his world as if it were this visual room "can as little own it as I can walk about it, or look at it, or point to it. " If I move so does the 'visual room'; I can never move from the limit o f my world into it, and thus it is not anything that can be owned or identified (even in saying this I have not pointed to anything).
In the Preface, the ownership of words and their configurations as ideas, methods, stories, perspectives are disputed as the point at which representation and thinking (as versionsofconsciousness)canbecontested. Thedesiretopublishoutofwoundedvanity (or to counter the mistakes o f others as opposed to his own) is contrasted with his desire to publish generated by re-reading the Tractatus in order to "explain its ideas to someone. It suddenly seemed to me that I should publish those old thoughts and the new ones
together: that the latter could be seen in the right light only be contrast with and against
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the background of my old way o f thinking. " As part of a truncated genealogy (a Tractarian beginning and an Investigations end) a context would be established that would establish a point in comparison with which the entire Philosophical Investigations could be seen as a way of doing philosophy different, but still related, to the drive to establish the limits of logical truth in the Tractatus. Would this context, however,
establish his thoughts as his own (for others or himself? Is this my thought in the way these words are mine or not mine? )? :
For more than one reason what I publish here will have points o f contact with what other people are writing today. --If my remarks do not bear a stamp which marks them as mine, - I do not wish to lay any further claim to them as my property. " (x)
One imagines that this stamp would throw out of court those "more or less mangled or watereddown"versionsofhisthinkingthatotherscirculated. Wittgenstein,however, makes a curious claim here: what is 'my property' 'bear[s] a stamp which marks them as mine. ' What is this 'stamp'? The physiognomy o f words that allows us to understand them as particular words within particular sentences with specific meanings somehow also expresses (at the sametime? ) the physiognomy ofWittgenstein's identity- or should I say soul and thus of his body? ("The human body is the best picture of the human soul" [PI
p. 178]). In the Tractatus the grammar of 'my world" required a non-psychological 'I' describing the limit of the world. Has this 'I' been translated from its vanishing metaphysical limit to a more localized limit surrounding or determining the application of particular language games (or sentences) with an expression oftheir origin into a
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particularform? Suchanorigin,sinceitisnotthecauseofasentence,describes,instead, an aesthetic 'I' (a particular form that expresses, and thus is a kind of interpretation).
In the Tractatus Wittgenstein both claimed to have solved the problems of philosophy and yet to make "no claim to novelty in points of detail" (27). The power of the Tractatus is in showing how what we know means, that is, in arranging and interpretingintoclarity(statingthetruthsoflogicintherightform)whatistrue. This clarity o f expression, form and arrangement allows him to claim that "[h]ow far my efforts agree with those o f other philosophers I will not decide. "
Wittgenstein claims that to see his new thoughts "in the right light only by contrast with and against the background of my old of thinking". The Tractatus, like the remarks or sketches that constitute Investigations, will serve as an "object of comparison. " A sketchistothelandscapeasaremarkistoourpractice. Onecanmakeanynumberof different kinds o f sketches. The arrangement o f these remarks serves to bring to light another picture within the landscape of our ordinary and philosophical practices. The object of this arrangment is "to bring light into one brain (Gehim) or another. "
Philosophical Investigations can be seen in the right light through a comparison to the Tractatus, a comparison ofnot only a method ofthinking, but the scope and application of
this thinking as a way of marking and constituting particular kinds of limits. In the preface to the Tractatus Wittgenstein wrote the following:
The book deals with the problems o f philosophy and shows, as I believe, that the method o f formulating these problems rests on the misunderstanding o f the logicofourlanguage. It'swholemeaningcouldbesummedupsomewhatas
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follows: What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.
The book will, therefore draw a limit to thinking, or rather --not to thinking, but to the expression ofthoughts; for, in order to draw a limit to thinking we should have to be able to think both sides o f this limit (we should therefore have to be able to think what cannot be thought).
The limit can, therefore, only be drawn in language and what lies on the other side o f the limit will be simply nonsense. (27)
Even a realm o f nonsense cannot be seen from within language. The articulation o f what can be said clearly (the formulation of a language into the form oftautology) and what this clearly means (tautology) takes up the majority o f the book. Clarity in language describes what can be known as true. The more controversial last part ofthe Tractatus describes the limit between what we can know and is true and nonsense. (I think this last 'part' begins at 6. 342, "And now we can see the relative position of logic and mechanics"; I say this because the discussion of mechanics describes the limit between cause and the realm ofwhat I think we can call interpretation: will, ethics, and aesthetics). The will becomes
in his latter work the target of philosophy; aesthetics as a form of philosophy and in the invocation of art (painting, music, and poetry) comes to describe the limits of sense from
within language; ethics becomes transmuted into modes ofbeing within forms oflife. If the metaphysical 'I' is replaced by the shifting concept of form(s) of life, both constituting and constituted by our language, our practices, our biology, our commitments, by both
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anyone's particularity and the totality organized around this particularity, then ethics are enacted within and as any particular form of life.
To see Wittgenstein's sketch as a picture of some landscape means not only to see each remark as either an observation or a work of art, but to enter into the limit described by the sketch, to see an arranged, edited and delimited version of a trip set out in an album. Theironyofdescribingthisphilosophyasanalbumofsketches,setsouta subterranean frame that includes Philosophical Investigations as both the problem to be solved and a consequence of this problem, an attempted solution. In remark 38 he writes "For philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday. " What counts as a holiday and what counts as ordinary life, what counts as seeing (and misinterpretation) and seeingintherightlightisalwaysinquestion. Thesedistinctionsdescribethedifference between a sketch and the light (the arrangement, the context o f comparison) by which we see it and the light by which we understand, or rather by which we understand ourselves.
This last is the light in our brain.
Wittgenstein's use ofthe image oflight is invariably related to his philosophical
goal o f presenting a perspicuous view o f our language use, to make visible what is already obvious. This use o f light is entwined with a quasi-religious use that describes thinking as if the limits of the world illuminate us:
Is what I am doing really worth the effort? Yes, but only if a light shines on it from above. And if that happens--why should I concern myself that the fruits o f my labours should be stolen? If what I am writing really has some value, how could
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anyone steal the value from me? And if the light from above is lacking, I can't in
any case be more than clever. (CV57-8)
Compare this to both Keats and Adams. I claimed that, for Keats, "The proverb does not illustrate our life, we illustrate it. Thus soul-making is seeing ourselves as an illustration and the proverb as a description to be illustrated. The transformation o f Proverb into proverb and our life into an illustration becomes an actualization--not as a change of being but as a transformation o f aspect: the proverb is not strictly speaking a description ofourlife,butitisawayofseeingourselves: adescriptionofmeaningasopposedto experience, that is why we illustrate it. " The meaning o f our life emerges through how we
use our life to illustrate language (let's say poetry). Wittgenstein's description o f himself, his thinking, illuminated between the limit o f the world (which he cannot see) and his sketches of the world as he finds it spotlights his activity as an illustration of his sketches onlyifitisilluminatedbythislimit,thislightfromabove. Whatisthislight?
I said that Adams called "for a more radical transformation, an objectification of oneself. . . It is as ifthe demands ofthe world require that we become proverbs ourselves, not illustrations, become types not tokens. " Although the mock identification with the formulaic is alien to Wittgenstein (as is the implicit praise or acceptance of science), the sense of containment within a system within which our practices gain meaning is akin to Wittgenstein's picture o f language. One cannot push this too far, and I only mean it to
bring out that Wittgenstein's sense of containment within language is different from that of Keats'. For Keats we apply language (at least proverbs and by extension poetry) by illustrating it with our lives. Are Wittgenstein's philosophical sketches like Keats'
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proverbial illustrations? If these pictures are interpretations, then are they justifications of or for thinking? Do we collect the pictures for our album to prove we went to Greece? An album exhibits a set of possible perspectives. Such an album describes the same limit relation between a non-psychological T and the world as described in the Tractatus, except that this 'I' is continually reconstituted as or at the limit of the shifting landscape.
In the Tractatus the position ofthe non-psychological 'I' as the limit ofthe world was first introduced in the preface as a description of how one should or could read the Tractatus: "This book will perhaps only be understood by those who have themselves already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it--or similar thoughts. It is therefore not a
text-book. " Understanding is dependent on an identity of thought (or an approximate identity,thespaceofindeterminacy). Ourunderstandingmeansstandingatthe metaphysical point (or T ) from which it was written. We, if we are to understand, must become an T . 5 The common perspective in Investigations is our grounding in our ordinary lives as human beings: K[t]he real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck him. --And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and powerful" (PI? 129).
The album of sketches that constitutes Investigations is not static, nor is our understandingafunctionofenteringintoametaphysicalposition. Animplicationofthe non-psychological T understood as a metaphysical limit was to require that understanding function as a common mental state, a set o f brain functions that mean every time 'understanding' such that one could say 'this is the true understanding state'. This
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requirement contradicts the initial insight that one can speak of a non-psychological 'I'. Wittgenstein shows that picturing understanding as a state is mistaken.
A light can emerge, as it were, from within our language as well. Wittgenstein gives a sketch ofhis sketching highlighted as ifby philosophical search lights emerging from conceptual problems: "We must do away with all explanation, and description alone musttakeitsplace. Andthisdescriptiongetsitslight,thatistosayitspurpose--fromthe philosophicalproblems"(PI? 109). Ifaphilosophicalproblemisdissolved,isthe philosophicallightextinguished,orjustdrownedinagreaterlight? Theinvisibilityofthe ordinary would become visible and force philosophical problems into relative invisibility.
This visibility must be both the light animating the truth of Wittgenstein's thinking from above and a light cast by his sketches back onto the philosophical problems: "Our investigationisthereforeagrammaticalone. Suchaninvestigationshedslightonour problem by clearing misunderstanding away" (PI? 90).
One cannot construct a phenomenological language in which the world is fully present. His philosophical attempt to construct such a language, or earlier to describe what is logically true, partly arose from a picture o f reality as divided between language and our experience. An adequate language would establish a completely transparent relationbetweenthese. Wittgenstein'srejectionofthisdesireconstitutesarecognition
that it is not a failure of language that prevents this adequate description of world or experience. Whenhesaysourordinarylanguageisperfectlyadequateheissuggesting that the drive toward what Derrida calls presence is not a problem of logic or language, but a problem of education. The perspicuous description of our use of language is part of
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an education that remakes our involvement within language as perfectly adequate. This too is impossible, but it is a response to the source o f our disquietude. It is never the presence ofthe world that is the problem, but our presence to the world or to our language or to ourselves:
So how do we explain to someone what 'understanding music' means? By specifying the images, kinesthetic sensations, etc. , experienced by someone who understands? More likely, by drawing attention to his expressive movements. -- Andwereallyoughttoaskwhatfunctionexplanationhashere. Andwhatitmeans to speak of: understanding what it means to understand music. For some would say:tounderstandthatmeans:tounderstandmusicitself. Andinthatcasewe should have to ask 'Well, can someone be taught to understand music? ' for that is
the only sort of teaching that could be called explaining music. (CV70) "[Specifying the images, kinesthetic sensations, etc. " ofmusic would mean to construct a phenomenologicallanguage. Anadequatelanguagewouldhavetoincludenotonlythe music but an ideal and functioning human being 'understanding music'. If we all could understand music differently then how can we speak o f an ideal? Rather, understanding is not a state ofmind but is a description ofsomeone's involvement in a piece ofmusic. One
way o f indicating this involvement might be with "expressive movements", another might be by day-dreaming (a certain glazed look) or imagining the next note or bar or progression. An education into this understanding thus cannot be specified outside of our own recognition o f our own involvement in music. This may include learning a particular set of language games or practices, or it may involve a certain kind of silence. Our
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educationwillonlybeadequateifwerecognizeitassuch. Sucharecognition,however, entails an activation o f our form o f life as biological and social human beings: "Appreciating music is a manifestation ofthe life ofmankind" (CV70).
Wittgensteindoesnotsaythatheincludespicturesofhimself. Rather Investigations consists ofnumerous mini-Tractati, each marking a world and an 'I' as its limit. Thislimit,however,existsasmuchwithinthepicturingasoutsideofit. The position ofthe T , both Wittgenstein's and our own, is embedded in the landscape ofthe problems and of our forms of life. This 'I' is never the same. The metaphysical limit described in the Tractatus allows an absolute (or close to absolute) identity between Wittgensteinandanyonewhowouldunderstandhim. ThesketchesoftheInvestigations are not only edited and assembled in an album, but sketching is different from viewing sketches, sketching the landscape around Mycenae is different from looking at a picture of that landscape or from seeing it oneself. Much o f the Investigations works at making clear our ability to stand in for each other, to open up a possibility for understanding, for understanding an 'I' as part of an 'our'--through the uniqueness of any particular 'I': a possibility determined by its impossibility.
1In philosophy we often confuse a requirement for thinking x with an effect of thinking x; a requirement of thinking x might be the consequence of thinking y.
2 The poetry is from Charles Tomlinson, "The Order of Saying" in The Flood, p. 12.
3 See The Foundations o f Arithmetic.
4Letters, n, 21.
5 This is exactly the opposite of what I am attempting by enacting an 'I' as an 'our', and thus as an T by education and as a member of a given human 'our. ' One can write oneself into an artificial intelligence.
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13. 1 Physiognomyofthesoul
13 Grammatical Time
In my analysis ofFinnegans Wake I attempt to describe its articulation of a temporal grammar enacted through our shifting semantic commitments within a kind of sexual aesthetic at the limits of sense.
In this chapter I will examine a set of responses to the threat of nonsense attending our pictures of time as these are articulated in PhilosophicalInvestigations. Onecouldcharacterizethissetofresponsesasmusical, which in this sense suggests both the mathematical and the poetic articulation o f and playing with time (which is to say, music organizes time in the way building with blocks organizes space). One way we could couch our responses to this threat would be by explicating Wittgenstein's statement that "Understanding a sentence is more akin to understanding a theme in music than one may think" in the face of the Wakean "How to UnderstandtheDeaf,ShouldLadiesleamMusicorMathematics? "(307. 21-2). (Whydo we respond to our doubt and confusion by descriptions of the limits of mind or by constructions o f mind(s)? By the construction o f a woman, for example, in Offenbach's "Tales ofHoffmann" or the construction oftemporal becoming as a feminine principle in Finnegans Wake? )
Much o f poetry can be understood as different versions o f what H. Vendler, in WordsChosenOutofDesire,identifiesinWallaceStevens'poetryas the"transformation of a spatial object into a temporal event. . . The temporal unfolding of the moment
Notes for this chapter begin on page 569
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becomes in its turn itselfan aesthetic object" (7). Ifwe believe Bertrand Russell that differential equations are the best description oftime (or the change we call time), what valuecanpoetryorliteraturehaveinitsdescriptionoftime? Orifitdoessomethingelse, like express our bafflement and despair at the losses precipitated or made possible by the ontological force of time, what value can poetry have if it cannot grasp the fundamental mathematicalaspectoftime? Whatkindoffuturecanonebuildoutofpoetry? Whatisat stakeinourconceptualizationsandourpoeticizationsoftime? Sincethesearenotthe same thing, what is offered, solved, pictured, enacted by each, by mathematics and poetry, and by the different forms of philosophy that attempt to link these realms?
In this chapter, aesthetics becomes more explicitly a form o f the soul mutating into a mind through the fragmentary poetics, as a form of philosophy, that instantiates, resists, and expresses Stravinsky's insight, as Adorno claims, that "the linguistic and the organic [are] only possible in a state of decomposition" (Quasi urnfantasia, 147). Our making o f the world out o f whatever given or set o f categories one imagines, seems unable to capture our own making (I mean also our own biological making) even if others like ourselves inhabit our made worlds. Self-reflection, however, builds all sorts of meanings derived and dependent on not only who we are but what we are. Much of Heidegger's work involves attempting to think prior to the separation o f these two questions. Such thinking does not mean reducing one to the other, but requires the protection of the claim both questions have on us. Wittgenstein does this in a number of ways, but most importantly he does this through the interpretive, aesthetic pressure his fragments and his metaphors induce in the reader. He sets up aesthetic barriers to protect
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his separation o f grammar (our language use) from phenomena, moibus-strip twisting us back into our practices and our being. 1 In order to pressure grammatical analysis into the aesthetics o f our temporality, I will constructs the limits and interaction between sense and nonsense along one o f the axes Wittgenstein uses to map our form o f life, whose ends are marked by the sentences "Understanding a sentence is more akin to understanding a theme in music than one may think" and "The human body is the best picture o f the human soul". Why does Wittgenstein invoke the musical and visual, appeal to metaphors o f the metaphoric at these limits, as expressions reflecting back toward language? Our misuse of
words pushes us not only into confusion, but into art. How are these aesthetic appeals like his assertion in the Blue Book that "[a]s part of the system of language, one may say, the sentence has life" (5)? What justifies Wittgenstein's attempt to limit our inquiry into the logic determining a form of life by these two curious appeals to art, justifying these limits aesthetically?
The role o f temporality is very complex and often disguised and displaced into grammaticaldescriptionsinPhilosophicalInvestigations. Asageneralquestiontoshape at least the targets of my analysis, I will begin by asking 'How is the problem of time displaced into a problem of language in Investigations? ' In the "Big Transcript" Wittgenstein articulates his abandonment ofa phenomenological language ofthe present moment for a grammar o f time within language:
Language cannot express what belongs to the essence o f the world. Therefore it cannot say that everything flows. Language can only say what we could also imagine differently.
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Thateverythingflowsmustlieinhowlanguagetouchesreality. Orbetter:that everything flows must lie in the nature of language("Philosophy", ? 91).
While language and time are no longer opposed as either incommensurable (as they are in the Tractatus if language is reduced to tautology) or as confused and incomplete (in his later attempts at figuring a phenomenological language), the nature o f time as flux remains the same. In Philosophical Investigations the effect o f understanding language from within language transforms the nature of time. In this passage temporal flux marks the limit or the "nature" o f language. As we have seen, the nature o f the investigation into the nature o f language, in Investigations, is not described as a flowing, but, rather, as a description o f animation, a wandering on paths (language games) and a shifting between paths. The nature oflanguage has changed partly because the conception oftime is now understood from within language. In the Brown Book, Wittgenstein argues that describing time as "flowing" is a disanalogy. His cure fails to address why we make such a mistake, and thus simplifies language, at least 'time language' into nothing but communication, disguising what is at stake in both our relation to time and how human forms of self- reflectionworkthrough(our)temporalawareness. IntheInvestigationstimeisrewritten into four primary sites o f grammatical change (these sites are neither exhaustive nor authoritative in this form, or any form):
1) the actions, changes and transformations within language games (a kind of unconscious time)
2) the confusion about our involvement in the present in which we imagine that we have to "describe phenomena that are hard to get hold of, the present experience
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that slips quickly by, or something of the kind" (PI? 436) (I discussed on aspect of this in the previous chapter).
3) the enactment ofthe possibility ofthe future in our use of 'hope' or 'expectation' and so on as contrasted with the picture of possibility as itself a subjunctive mode shadowing reality (the future as a machine)
4) the enactment ofa kind oftemporality as a grammatical horizon or dynamic limit (as one ofthe forms ofour life) through our shifting between or out of language games (paths).
Iwillnotexamineallofthese. InfactIwillonlytosketcharoughdescriptionofan answer to the following question: How do the aesthetics o f the Investigations describe a
grammar o f time and limit the inquiry into the way we construct our subjectivity within particular grammars?
Can we think of the displacement of time into grammar as an attempt to conceptualize or protect a soul? If Wittgenstein cannot successfully prevent the objectification oftime as a being or ifhe can't answer the attraction ofusing a metaphoric identification o f time with thing-like behavior, then he has not asked the right questions about either our difficulties conceptualizing time nor about what is at stake in the clearly problematic ways in which we confuse mental events, like understanding, with states and substances. Wittgenstein'sdescriptionscannotprotectusfrombecomingthings.
Thus we find ourselves at the limit ofwhatever motivated Wittgenstein to claim that "[t]he human body is the best picture of the human soul", as a picture of being a human thing, and the claim that understanding is more like understanding a musical theme
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than we think, as a metaphor for our isomorphic involvement in both time and language. . Reaching this limit (between "the human soul" and music [time]) suggests that the problem o f temporality in the Investigations is also a problem o f the aesthetics o f the text.
Is Wittgenstein's claim that "[t]he human body is the best picture o f the human soul" a theological claim? Iltham Dilman successfully argues, I think, that Wittgenstein's use o f 'soul' is "not a hypothesis that human beings have souls and that a human being's soul is not something he possesses -in the way he may possess a liver" (191). He cites especially Wittgenstein's remark "My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul. I am not o f the opinion that he has a soul" (PI p. 178). To have an opinion is to believe something that one could possibly doubt (T thought you had a soul, but now I see I was
wrong'). Wittgenstein uses soul to suggest that we recognize human beings from within our commonality as human beings. I suggested earlier that this means that we see each other as examples of each other, and thus we as human beings (even in our evil) express this species being in our particularity. We approach animals as examples of life in a similar
way. Thesoul,forWittgenstein,therefore,isamarkandexpressionofthesame distinction between the animate and inanimate that describes Aquinas' description o f the soul earlier from within our practices: "Our attitude to what is alive and to what is dead is not the same" (PI ? 284). Dilman, however, also argues that the grammar o f our (human) use o f 'soul' "makes sense only in the framework of certain moral values and that a spiritual life is one that bears a relation to these values" (191). While he argues that
Wittgenstein in his early work thought about ethics as spiritual in this way he does not connect this spiritual sense of the soul with his initial description of the soul as our human
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frameofreferencewithinwhichweappeartoeachotherashuman. IDsanalysisofthe grammar o f the soul is limited and does not take in Aquinas' description o f the soul, for example, which attempts to make exactly this kind o f link between both uses o f the 'soul'.
Without its theological backing is the use o f soul in Wittgenstein a metaphor, either living or dead? To say I treat you as if you have a soul is to describe my stance toward you as within the same form of life. The claim another human form has on me to be treated as a human body is the manifestation o f a soul, the manifestation o f my particularityasanexpressionofourcommonhumanformoflife. Similarly,the physiognomy of the word claims my attention (as does a musical theme) and demands that I orient myself to it either as sensible, in which case I enter into a language game in which it makes sense as what it is, or I reject it as senseless, as not of a form I can recognize. Although the relation between language games and forms of life is complicated (language games express forms o f life but it is not clear if a different language games always implies different forms of life; similarly both language games and forms of life include practices and actions and so on), such an exclusion sets up the possibility that this word or musical
theme will be rejected as part of my form of life entirely, that is, rejected as not human. (This is the danger Finnegans Wake courts). This is what I earlier called an ontological demand, a theological crisis, described in The Waste Land, signaling an anxiety about our inclusion in or exclusion from the world (a crisis about our stance toward the world).
Wittgenstein uses 'physiognomy' both to describe meaning (PI? 568) and to describe a temptation to say that words have "different characters in different contexts" and yet they each also have "one character. . . a single physiognomy. It looks at us" (PI
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p. 181). The stable shape of a word appearing as a word does not, however, function separately from the language game in which it functions: "[How do the meanings of the individual words make up the sense o f the sentence 'I still haven't seen him yet'? ] The sentence is composed o f words and that is enough"(PI p. 181). This shape o f words seems toabsorbmeaningaspartofitsform. Thistakingupofmeaning,however,isa consequence ofour stance toward and use ofwords:
The familiar physiognomy of a word, the feeling that it has taken up its meaning into itself that it is an actual likeness of its meaning--there could be human beings to whom all this was alien. (They would not have an attachment to their words. )-- And how are these feelings manifested among us? --By the way we choose and value words. (PI p. 218)
How could these human beings use language or mean anything? If "meaning is a physiognomy," the failure to take meaning into the physiognomy of words would mean, if words were still to function as part of a language, that the physiognomy would have to be attached in something else, maybe to the sentence or to the sound or tones or to facial expressions accompanying speaking (in which case their written language would have to include marks correlated with these expressions).
In the assumption that words have a single physiognomy, that they look at us, Wittgenstein counters "But a face in a painting looks at us too" (PI p. 181). A painted face looks like a face because we can recognize it as a face (people have faces): "The arrow points only in the application that a living being makes o f it" (PI? 454).
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We want to say: "When we mean something, it's like going up to someone, it's not having a dead picture (of any kind). " We go up to the thing we mean.
"When one thinks something, it is oneselfthinking"; so one is oneselfin motion. One is rushing ahead and so cannot also observe oneself rushing ahead. Indeed
not
Yes: meaning something is like going up to someone. ((PI? ? 455, 456, 457) Ourpicturesofourlanguageuseareboundupinmetaphors. Thesemetaphors,asis explicit in this case, are the means by which we allegorize ourselves into our language. Thinking or speaking describes a movement that changes one's relation to the world, in a way like going up to a person does. If I go up to you I instigate a relationship in which everything means something to you and me, even if I do or say nothing else ("going up to someone" means to enter into that space within which attention is demanded, although the limitsofthisspacevaryfrompersontopersonandculturetoculture). Howisthinking like "rushing ahead"? This seems like a description of the limits of self-reflection, but only if going up to someone is not oneself (can we run up to ourselves? ). In ascribing a physiognomy to words we allegorize them as persons, where their meaning is like their mind.
13. 2 Understanding, or Not, How Not to Go On
The clearest invocation ofthe possibility ofthe future as an essence ofour form of lifeintheInvestigationsoccursinWittgenstein'sdiscussionofhope: "Onecanimaginean animal angry, frightened, unhappy, happy, startled. But hopeful? And why not? " (PI p.
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174). How are the workings of "the phenomena of hopes" (as one kind of "Meaning") related to the grammar ofunderstanding entered into through Wittgenstein's description of "how we go on", in a mathematical series, for example, or in reading Finnegans Wake? The collapse and slippage between these two kinds o f meaning determine the limits o f the problem of "meaning" in both the Investigations and the Wake. In this, these texts come up against Melville's short story "Bartleby. " The story describes the frustration and attraction of a narrator who, as a lawyer, has hired Bartleby as a scrivener. Bartleby, however, soon begins a slow renunciation o f the claims and authority human beings (or society) have on him by reducing his own will to nothing more than a refusal to do anything. Bartleby slowly dies. How could Joyce and Wittgenstein answer or respond to the rejection of any possiblejustification of life, understanding, communication, community, or hope expressed by Bartleby? Bartleby's refusal to reply to all requests put on him, to all interchange beyond his "I'd prefer not to" leaves him a cipher, part o f a code lost to language because it (I mean "he") is lost to all human community, existing at the limit of language, except for his, therefore curious responses (why respond at all? ). He
has lost any future. We inhabit the possibility of a future as the ground of our being, signaled by our hoping, but embodied in our language and thus susceptible to denial.
Bartleby's refusal o f meaning answers a child's asking "What should (or can) I do now? " : heanswerswithhisownacceptanceofhisboredom. Whyisitorhowcoulditevenbe possible for a child to ask such a question? (What is signaled by the difficulty o f knowing whether to ask "why" or "how" here? ). If we have forgotten the child's question what have we replaced it with? Are our everyday practices enough like those o f animals to say
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that this question is no longer relevant in the way it is not for them? How (and why) does the justification Bartleby fails to find underlie our uses o f language? Bartleby has reduced himselfj in a kind o f devolving exhaustion, to a single intention attached to a single desire: to refuse through a complete disengagement from all external, relative to his single intention, demands and intentions. This intention is circular, a continual negation o f the future and therefore an assertion o f a presentness, which does not even include any desire (except his resistance). Without a future or a future directed set o f desires Bartleby has erased hope from his world. He has diminished himselfto the edge of humanity. He remains human primarily through the exercise of his will to resist the demands or appeals directed toward him. This is a way of again asking what is the theological dimensions of
Wittgenstein's use o f the soul in Philosophical Investigations?
I f the moment seems to describe human consciousness, the structure o f the future
as a possibility seems to be described by a machine. Wittgenstein analyzes the figuration ofthe future as a machine:
The machine as symbolizing its action: the action o f a machine--I might say at first--seems to be there in it from the start. What does that mean? --If we know the machine, everything else, that is its movement, seems to be already completely determined. (PI? 193)
In this the possibility o f a movement seems determined by the structure o f the machine. The parts could o f course fail, but "in many cases we don't think o f that at all. We use a machine, or the drawing of a machine, to symbolize a particular action of the machine. " The machine symbolizes its own action, and thus it embodies as the aspect of its structure
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a kind of self-reflection in which its future is determined as a function of what it is. In this itsfunctioningfollowsanidealizedpathalreadytranscendentwithinitsdesign. Amachine seems to generate time through its determined changes in state, the unrolling of a pattern determined by its structure (or seemingly what in the Tractatus Wittgenstein calls, with some ambiguity as Ramsey points out, "the form o f representation [which] is the possibility that the things are so combined with one another as are the elements o f the picture" (2. 1511). Machine time can be described by a diagram o f the machine itself,
where its future actions, its description o f its own changes by those changes, is derived from "the movement of its parts from it [the diagram] (Just as we can give someone a number by telling him that it is the twenty-fifth in the series 1, 4, 9, 16. . . . ). " Such a series , a time-line ofbefore and afters, and our translation into such a machine would translate McTaggert's A-series into a B-series, the existential now into an objectified history, the formula o f dynamism Adams uses to figure himself within a Godless universe.
Wittgenstein diagnoses the mistake in this picturing o f the machine's future movements as if these movements were objects "already lying in a drawer and which we then take out. " These future movements are the way we configure the future for the machine. If faced with an actual machine we no longer assume its parts will not fail. Thus we can see the machine under two different aspects: the putative movements in (1) the machine-as-symbol which functions "far more determinably than in (2) the actual machine. " Thepredeterminedmovementsinthemodelofthemachinesymbolizingitself might seem to be already present in the symbol itself (PI? 193). The motion o f the machine, the movement describing time, seems condensed into the design of the machine
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made manifest in the machine itself as if the machine were a drawing o f itself at all possible moments.
Wittgenstein goes on to investigate this seeming presentness o f the future in the machine as symbol: "When does one have the thought: the possible movements o f a machine are already there in it in some mysterious sense? -- Well when one is doing philosophy" (PI? 194). Putting philosophical pressure on our descriptions of machines separates the concept of the possibility of movement from our actual usage of the "phrase 'possibility of movement' when we are talking about a given machine". We imagine because of the defined character of the parts and actions of a machine that the possibility of its movement is somehow part of it, "like a shadow of the movement itself. "2 This possibility, this shadow, we imagine attached to that which is (or can) move; we imagine an entire world constructed out of possibility and tangent to every actual movement and change. Aheadofit? alongsideit?
[[I should have liked to produce a good book. This has not come about, but the time is past in which I could improve it. ]] (x)
As in Emerson, writing toward stimulating others into thinking means how to read him is always at issue. Thus, we can understand his hesitancy to publish as a concern for his work not to be read as his thought, but as his thinking: a philosophical novel as opposed to a philosophical tract.
Wittgenstein writes so as to draw the right kind of picture of the limits marking language and mind, limits understood as the ordinary condition o f being human, as shifting
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between aspects o f a defined set o f ontological commitments. Language in this sense is not directed at things, or the world, or others as such but functions through and as a complexmatrixofcommitmentsthatresolveintohowoneis. Theworld,things,artifacts, others are figured through shifting expressions o f being (understood as an evolving set o f practices), a continual projection o f what counts as real through commitments arising out of de facto commitments to what one is oneself not through self-definition.
Although we inhabit language, we do not 'inhabit our head'. The singularity of my perspective cannot be claimed as mine, as if I said "'At any rate only I have got THIS"'(PI? 398). Wittgensteinimmediatelyasks"Whatarethesewordsfor? Theyserve no purpose," at least, I want to add, as an act o f communication. But how do I inhabit my language if not through my claim that the world is mine? This claim 'I have got THIS' is nonsense if understood to be about my perception, but it expresses an ownership o f a perspective within language that is refracted through my manifestation within language (whatWittgensteincalls'hisstamp'). Onlywhatcanbeownedbyotherpeoplecanbe ownedatall. Wittgensteinasks"Inwhatsensehaveyougotwhatyouaretalkingabout
and saying that only you have got it? Do you possess it? You do not even see it" (PI? 398). Why do we not see this 'THIS"? This claim is a modified version of Wittgenstein's earlier rejection of a picture of my world as if a visual field converging on an eye. I cannot see or say the limit o f my world or else it would not be a limit. One mightrathersay(althoughmisleadingly)thatthelimitofmyworldhasmeandnotIit: "if as a matter of logic you exclude other people's having something, it loses its sense to say
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that you have i t . . . . Inasmuch as it cannot be any one else's it is not mine either" (PI? 398). Thisisagrammaticalremarkabout'beingmine'.
Wittgenstein ends this remark with a description o f another picture o f a landscape: Think o f a picture in a landscape, an imaginary landscape with a house in it. -- Someone asks "Whose house is that? "--The answer, by the way, might be "It belongs to the farmer who is sitting on the bench in front o f it". But then he cannot for example enter his house. (PI? 398)
One should not confuse a representation ofa house for the actual house. This picture of representation is meant to illustrate the metaphor of a 'visual room' as the picture underlyingtheclaimthatmyphenomenalexperienceismine. Justasthefarmerinthe picture cannot enter his house, the 'I' who imagines his world as if it were this visual room "can as little own it as I can walk about it, or look at it, or point to it. " If I move so does the 'visual room'; I can never move from the limit o f my world into it, and thus it is not anything that can be owned or identified (even in saying this I have not pointed to anything).
In the Preface, the ownership of words and their configurations as ideas, methods, stories, perspectives are disputed as the point at which representation and thinking (as versionsofconsciousness)canbecontested. Thedesiretopublishoutofwoundedvanity (or to counter the mistakes o f others as opposed to his own) is contrasted with his desire to publish generated by re-reading the Tractatus in order to "explain its ideas to someone. It suddenly seemed to me that I should publish those old thoughts and the new ones
together: that the latter could be seen in the right light only be contrast with and against
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the background of my old way o f thinking. " As part of a truncated genealogy (a Tractarian beginning and an Investigations end) a context would be established that would establish a point in comparison with which the entire Philosophical Investigations could be seen as a way of doing philosophy different, but still related, to the drive to establish the limits of logical truth in the Tractatus. Would this context, however,
establish his thoughts as his own (for others or himself? Is this my thought in the way these words are mine or not mine? )? :
For more than one reason what I publish here will have points o f contact with what other people are writing today. --If my remarks do not bear a stamp which marks them as mine, - I do not wish to lay any further claim to them as my property. " (x)
One imagines that this stamp would throw out of court those "more or less mangled or watereddown"versionsofhisthinkingthatotherscirculated. Wittgenstein,however, makes a curious claim here: what is 'my property' 'bear[s] a stamp which marks them as mine. ' What is this 'stamp'? The physiognomy o f words that allows us to understand them as particular words within particular sentences with specific meanings somehow also expresses (at the sametime? ) the physiognomy ofWittgenstein's identity- or should I say soul and thus of his body? ("The human body is the best picture of the human soul" [PI
p. 178]). In the Tractatus the grammar of 'my world" required a non-psychological 'I' describing the limit of the world. Has this 'I' been translated from its vanishing metaphysical limit to a more localized limit surrounding or determining the application of particular language games (or sentences) with an expression oftheir origin into a
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particularform? Suchanorigin,sinceitisnotthecauseofasentence,describes,instead, an aesthetic 'I' (a particular form that expresses, and thus is a kind of interpretation).
In the Tractatus Wittgenstein both claimed to have solved the problems of philosophy and yet to make "no claim to novelty in points of detail" (27). The power of the Tractatus is in showing how what we know means, that is, in arranging and interpretingintoclarity(statingthetruthsoflogicintherightform)whatistrue. This clarity o f expression, form and arrangement allows him to claim that "[h]ow far my efforts agree with those o f other philosophers I will not decide. "
Wittgenstein claims that to see his new thoughts "in the right light only by contrast with and against the background of my old of thinking". The Tractatus, like the remarks or sketches that constitute Investigations, will serve as an "object of comparison. " A sketchistothelandscapeasaremarkistoourpractice. Onecanmakeanynumberof different kinds o f sketches. The arrangement o f these remarks serves to bring to light another picture within the landscape of our ordinary and philosophical practices. The object of this arrangment is "to bring light into one brain (Gehim) or another. "
Philosophical Investigations can be seen in the right light through a comparison to the Tractatus, a comparison ofnot only a method ofthinking, but the scope and application of
this thinking as a way of marking and constituting particular kinds of limits. In the preface to the Tractatus Wittgenstein wrote the following:
The book deals with the problems o f philosophy and shows, as I believe, that the method o f formulating these problems rests on the misunderstanding o f the logicofourlanguage. It'swholemeaningcouldbesummedupsomewhatas
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follows: What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.
The book will, therefore draw a limit to thinking, or rather --not to thinking, but to the expression ofthoughts; for, in order to draw a limit to thinking we should have to be able to think both sides o f this limit (we should therefore have to be able to think what cannot be thought).
The limit can, therefore, only be drawn in language and what lies on the other side o f the limit will be simply nonsense. (27)
Even a realm o f nonsense cannot be seen from within language. The articulation o f what can be said clearly (the formulation of a language into the form oftautology) and what this clearly means (tautology) takes up the majority o f the book. Clarity in language describes what can be known as true. The more controversial last part ofthe Tractatus describes the limit between what we can know and is true and nonsense. (I think this last 'part' begins at 6. 342, "And now we can see the relative position of logic and mechanics"; I say this because the discussion of mechanics describes the limit between cause and the realm ofwhat I think we can call interpretation: will, ethics, and aesthetics). The will becomes
in his latter work the target of philosophy; aesthetics as a form of philosophy and in the invocation of art (painting, music, and poetry) comes to describe the limits of sense from
within language; ethics becomes transmuted into modes ofbeing within forms oflife. If the metaphysical 'I' is replaced by the shifting concept of form(s) of life, both constituting and constituted by our language, our practices, our biology, our commitments, by both
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anyone's particularity and the totality organized around this particularity, then ethics are enacted within and as any particular form of life.
To see Wittgenstein's sketch as a picture of some landscape means not only to see each remark as either an observation or a work of art, but to enter into the limit described by the sketch, to see an arranged, edited and delimited version of a trip set out in an album. Theironyofdescribingthisphilosophyasanalbumofsketches,setsouta subterranean frame that includes Philosophical Investigations as both the problem to be solved and a consequence of this problem, an attempted solution. In remark 38 he writes "For philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday. " What counts as a holiday and what counts as ordinary life, what counts as seeing (and misinterpretation) and seeingintherightlightisalwaysinquestion. Thesedistinctionsdescribethedifference between a sketch and the light (the arrangement, the context o f comparison) by which we see it and the light by which we understand, or rather by which we understand ourselves.
This last is the light in our brain.
Wittgenstein's use ofthe image oflight is invariably related to his philosophical
goal o f presenting a perspicuous view o f our language use, to make visible what is already obvious. This use o f light is entwined with a quasi-religious use that describes thinking as if the limits of the world illuminate us:
Is what I am doing really worth the effort? Yes, but only if a light shines on it from above. And if that happens--why should I concern myself that the fruits o f my labours should be stolen? If what I am writing really has some value, how could
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anyone steal the value from me? And if the light from above is lacking, I can't in
any case be more than clever. (CV57-8)
Compare this to both Keats and Adams. I claimed that, for Keats, "The proverb does not illustrate our life, we illustrate it. Thus soul-making is seeing ourselves as an illustration and the proverb as a description to be illustrated. The transformation o f Proverb into proverb and our life into an illustration becomes an actualization--not as a change of being but as a transformation o f aspect: the proverb is not strictly speaking a description ofourlife,butitisawayofseeingourselves: adescriptionofmeaningasopposedto experience, that is why we illustrate it. " The meaning o f our life emerges through how we
use our life to illustrate language (let's say poetry). Wittgenstein's description o f himself, his thinking, illuminated between the limit o f the world (which he cannot see) and his sketches of the world as he finds it spotlights his activity as an illustration of his sketches onlyifitisilluminatedbythislimit,thislightfromabove. Whatisthislight?
I said that Adams called "for a more radical transformation, an objectification of oneself. . . It is as ifthe demands ofthe world require that we become proverbs ourselves, not illustrations, become types not tokens. " Although the mock identification with the formulaic is alien to Wittgenstein (as is the implicit praise or acceptance of science), the sense of containment within a system within which our practices gain meaning is akin to Wittgenstein's picture o f language. One cannot push this too far, and I only mean it to
bring out that Wittgenstein's sense of containment within language is different from that of Keats'. For Keats we apply language (at least proverbs and by extension poetry) by illustrating it with our lives. Are Wittgenstein's philosophical sketches like Keats'
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proverbial illustrations? If these pictures are interpretations, then are they justifications of or for thinking? Do we collect the pictures for our album to prove we went to Greece? An album exhibits a set of possible perspectives. Such an album describes the same limit relation between a non-psychological T and the world as described in the Tractatus, except that this 'I' is continually reconstituted as or at the limit of the shifting landscape.
In the Tractatus the position ofthe non-psychological 'I' as the limit ofthe world was first introduced in the preface as a description of how one should or could read the Tractatus: "This book will perhaps only be understood by those who have themselves already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it--or similar thoughts. It is therefore not a
text-book. " Understanding is dependent on an identity of thought (or an approximate identity,thespaceofindeterminacy). Ourunderstandingmeansstandingatthe metaphysical point (or T ) from which it was written. We, if we are to understand, must become an T . 5 The common perspective in Investigations is our grounding in our ordinary lives as human beings: K[t]he real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck him. --And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and powerful" (PI? 129).
The album of sketches that constitutes Investigations is not static, nor is our understandingafunctionofenteringintoametaphysicalposition. Animplicationofthe non-psychological T understood as a metaphysical limit was to require that understanding function as a common mental state, a set o f brain functions that mean every time 'understanding' such that one could say 'this is the true understanding state'. This
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requirement contradicts the initial insight that one can speak of a non-psychological 'I'. Wittgenstein shows that picturing understanding as a state is mistaken.
A light can emerge, as it were, from within our language as well. Wittgenstein gives a sketch ofhis sketching highlighted as ifby philosophical search lights emerging from conceptual problems: "We must do away with all explanation, and description alone musttakeitsplace. Andthisdescriptiongetsitslight,thatistosayitspurpose--fromthe philosophicalproblems"(PI? 109). Ifaphilosophicalproblemisdissolved,isthe philosophicallightextinguished,orjustdrownedinagreaterlight? Theinvisibilityofthe ordinary would become visible and force philosophical problems into relative invisibility.
This visibility must be both the light animating the truth of Wittgenstein's thinking from above and a light cast by his sketches back onto the philosophical problems: "Our investigationisthereforeagrammaticalone. Suchaninvestigationshedslightonour problem by clearing misunderstanding away" (PI? 90).
One cannot construct a phenomenological language in which the world is fully present. His philosophical attempt to construct such a language, or earlier to describe what is logically true, partly arose from a picture o f reality as divided between language and our experience. An adequate language would establish a completely transparent relationbetweenthese. Wittgenstein'srejectionofthisdesireconstitutesarecognition
that it is not a failure of language that prevents this adequate description of world or experience. Whenhesaysourordinarylanguageisperfectlyadequateheissuggesting that the drive toward what Derrida calls presence is not a problem of logic or language, but a problem of education. The perspicuous description of our use of language is part of
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an education that remakes our involvement within language as perfectly adequate. This too is impossible, but it is a response to the source o f our disquietude. It is never the presence ofthe world that is the problem, but our presence to the world or to our language or to ourselves:
So how do we explain to someone what 'understanding music' means? By specifying the images, kinesthetic sensations, etc. , experienced by someone who understands? More likely, by drawing attention to his expressive movements. -- Andwereallyoughttoaskwhatfunctionexplanationhashere. Andwhatitmeans to speak of: understanding what it means to understand music. For some would say:tounderstandthatmeans:tounderstandmusicitself. Andinthatcasewe should have to ask 'Well, can someone be taught to understand music? ' for that is
the only sort of teaching that could be called explaining music. (CV70) "[Specifying the images, kinesthetic sensations, etc. " ofmusic would mean to construct a phenomenologicallanguage. Anadequatelanguagewouldhavetoincludenotonlythe music but an ideal and functioning human being 'understanding music'. If we all could understand music differently then how can we speak o f an ideal? Rather, understanding is not a state ofmind but is a description ofsomeone's involvement in a piece ofmusic. One
way o f indicating this involvement might be with "expressive movements", another might be by day-dreaming (a certain glazed look) or imagining the next note or bar or progression. An education into this understanding thus cannot be specified outside of our own recognition o f our own involvement in music. This may include learning a particular set of language games or practices, or it may involve a certain kind of silence. Our
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educationwillonlybeadequateifwerecognizeitassuch. Sucharecognition,however, entails an activation o f our form o f life as biological and social human beings: "Appreciating music is a manifestation ofthe life ofmankind" (CV70).
Wittgensteindoesnotsaythatheincludespicturesofhimself. Rather Investigations consists ofnumerous mini-Tractati, each marking a world and an 'I' as its limit. Thislimit,however,existsasmuchwithinthepicturingasoutsideofit. The position ofthe T , both Wittgenstein's and our own, is embedded in the landscape ofthe problems and of our forms of life. This 'I' is never the same. The metaphysical limit described in the Tractatus allows an absolute (or close to absolute) identity between Wittgensteinandanyonewhowouldunderstandhim. ThesketchesoftheInvestigations are not only edited and assembled in an album, but sketching is different from viewing sketches, sketching the landscape around Mycenae is different from looking at a picture of that landscape or from seeing it oneself. Much o f the Investigations works at making clear our ability to stand in for each other, to open up a possibility for understanding, for understanding an 'I' as part of an 'our'--through the uniqueness of any particular 'I': a possibility determined by its impossibility.
1In philosophy we often confuse a requirement for thinking x with an effect of thinking x; a requirement of thinking x might be the consequence of thinking y.
2 The poetry is from Charles Tomlinson, "The Order of Saying" in The Flood, p. 12.
3 See The Foundations o f Arithmetic.
4Letters, n, 21.
5 This is exactly the opposite of what I am attempting by enacting an 'I' as an 'our', and thus as an T by education and as a member of a given human 'our. ' One can write oneself into an artificial intelligence.
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13. 1 Physiognomyofthesoul
13 Grammatical Time
In my analysis ofFinnegans Wake I attempt to describe its articulation of a temporal grammar enacted through our shifting semantic commitments within a kind of sexual aesthetic at the limits of sense.
In this chapter I will examine a set of responses to the threat of nonsense attending our pictures of time as these are articulated in PhilosophicalInvestigations. Onecouldcharacterizethissetofresponsesasmusical, which in this sense suggests both the mathematical and the poetic articulation o f and playing with time (which is to say, music organizes time in the way building with blocks organizes space). One way we could couch our responses to this threat would be by explicating Wittgenstein's statement that "Understanding a sentence is more akin to understanding a theme in music than one may think" in the face of the Wakean "How to UnderstandtheDeaf,ShouldLadiesleamMusicorMathematics? "(307. 21-2). (Whydo we respond to our doubt and confusion by descriptions of the limits of mind or by constructions o f mind(s)? By the construction o f a woman, for example, in Offenbach's "Tales ofHoffmann" or the construction oftemporal becoming as a feminine principle in Finnegans Wake? )
Much o f poetry can be understood as different versions o f what H. Vendler, in WordsChosenOutofDesire,identifiesinWallaceStevens'poetryas the"transformation of a spatial object into a temporal event. . . The temporal unfolding of the moment
Notes for this chapter begin on page 569
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becomes in its turn itselfan aesthetic object" (7). Ifwe believe Bertrand Russell that differential equations are the best description oftime (or the change we call time), what valuecanpoetryorliteraturehaveinitsdescriptionoftime? Orifitdoessomethingelse, like express our bafflement and despair at the losses precipitated or made possible by the ontological force of time, what value can poetry have if it cannot grasp the fundamental mathematicalaspectoftime? Whatkindoffuturecanonebuildoutofpoetry? Whatisat stakeinourconceptualizationsandourpoeticizationsoftime? Sincethesearenotthe same thing, what is offered, solved, pictured, enacted by each, by mathematics and poetry, and by the different forms of philosophy that attempt to link these realms?
In this chapter, aesthetics becomes more explicitly a form o f the soul mutating into a mind through the fragmentary poetics, as a form of philosophy, that instantiates, resists, and expresses Stravinsky's insight, as Adorno claims, that "the linguistic and the organic [are] only possible in a state of decomposition" (Quasi urnfantasia, 147). Our making o f the world out o f whatever given or set o f categories one imagines, seems unable to capture our own making (I mean also our own biological making) even if others like ourselves inhabit our made worlds. Self-reflection, however, builds all sorts of meanings derived and dependent on not only who we are but what we are. Much of Heidegger's work involves attempting to think prior to the separation o f these two questions. Such thinking does not mean reducing one to the other, but requires the protection of the claim both questions have on us. Wittgenstein does this in a number of ways, but most importantly he does this through the interpretive, aesthetic pressure his fragments and his metaphors induce in the reader. He sets up aesthetic barriers to protect
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his separation o f grammar (our language use) from phenomena, moibus-strip twisting us back into our practices and our being. 1 In order to pressure grammatical analysis into the aesthetics o f our temporality, I will constructs the limits and interaction between sense and nonsense along one o f the axes Wittgenstein uses to map our form o f life, whose ends are marked by the sentences "Understanding a sentence is more akin to understanding a theme in music than one may think" and "The human body is the best picture o f the human soul". Why does Wittgenstein invoke the musical and visual, appeal to metaphors o f the metaphoric at these limits, as expressions reflecting back toward language? Our misuse of
words pushes us not only into confusion, but into art. How are these aesthetic appeals like his assertion in the Blue Book that "[a]s part of the system of language, one may say, the sentence has life" (5)? What justifies Wittgenstein's attempt to limit our inquiry into the logic determining a form of life by these two curious appeals to art, justifying these limits aesthetically?
The role o f temporality is very complex and often disguised and displaced into grammaticaldescriptionsinPhilosophicalInvestigations. Asageneralquestiontoshape at least the targets of my analysis, I will begin by asking 'How is the problem of time displaced into a problem of language in Investigations? ' In the "Big Transcript" Wittgenstein articulates his abandonment ofa phenomenological language ofthe present moment for a grammar o f time within language:
Language cannot express what belongs to the essence o f the world. Therefore it cannot say that everything flows. Language can only say what we could also imagine differently.
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Thateverythingflowsmustlieinhowlanguagetouchesreality. Orbetter:that everything flows must lie in the nature of language("Philosophy", ? 91).
While language and time are no longer opposed as either incommensurable (as they are in the Tractatus if language is reduced to tautology) or as confused and incomplete (in his later attempts at figuring a phenomenological language), the nature o f time as flux remains the same. In Philosophical Investigations the effect o f understanding language from within language transforms the nature of time. In this passage temporal flux marks the limit or the "nature" o f language. As we have seen, the nature o f the investigation into the nature o f language, in Investigations, is not described as a flowing, but, rather, as a description o f animation, a wandering on paths (language games) and a shifting between paths. The nature oflanguage has changed partly because the conception oftime is now understood from within language. In the Brown Book, Wittgenstein argues that describing time as "flowing" is a disanalogy. His cure fails to address why we make such a mistake, and thus simplifies language, at least 'time language' into nothing but communication, disguising what is at stake in both our relation to time and how human forms of self- reflectionworkthrough(our)temporalawareness. IntheInvestigationstimeisrewritten into four primary sites o f grammatical change (these sites are neither exhaustive nor authoritative in this form, or any form):
1) the actions, changes and transformations within language games (a kind of unconscious time)
2) the confusion about our involvement in the present in which we imagine that we have to "describe phenomena that are hard to get hold of, the present experience
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that slips quickly by, or something of the kind" (PI? 436) (I discussed on aspect of this in the previous chapter).
3) the enactment ofthe possibility ofthe future in our use of 'hope' or 'expectation' and so on as contrasted with the picture of possibility as itself a subjunctive mode shadowing reality (the future as a machine)
4) the enactment ofa kind oftemporality as a grammatical horizon or dynamic limit (as one ofthe forms ofour life) through our shifting between or out of language games (paths).
Iwillnotexamineallofthese. InfactIwillonlytosketcharoughdescriptionofan answer to the following question: How do the aesthetics o f the Investigations describe a
grammar o f time and limit the inquiry into the way we construct our subjectivity within particular grammars?
Can we think of the displacement of time into grammar as an attempt to conceptualize or protect a soul? If Wittgenstein cannot successfully prevent the objectification oftime as a being or ifhe can't answer the attraction ofusing a metaphoric identification o f time with thing-like behavior, then he has not asked the right questions about either our difficulties conceptualizing time nor about what is at stake in the clearly problematic ways in which we confuse mental events, like understanding, with states and substances. Wittgenstein'sdescriptionscannotprotectusfrombecomingthings.
Thus we find ourselves at the limit ofwhatever motivated Wittgenstein to claim that "[t]he human body is the best picture of the human soul", as a picture of being a human thing, and the claim that understanding is more like understanding a musical theme
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than we think, as a metaphor for our isomorphic involvement in both time and language. . Reaching this limit (between "the human soul" and music [time]) suggests that the problem o f temporality in the Investigations is also a problem o f the aesthetics o f the text.
Is Wittgenstein's claim that "[t]he human body is the best picture o f the human soul" a theological claim? Iltham Dilman successfully argues, I think, that Wittgenstein's use o f 'soul' is "not a hypothesis that human beings have souls and that a human being's soul is not something he possesses -in the way he may possess a liver" (191). He cites especially Wittgenstein's remark "My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul. I am not o f the opinion that he has a soul" (PI p. 178). To have an opinion is to believe something that one could possibly doubt (T thought you had a soul, but now I see I was
wrong'). Wittgenstein uses soul to suggest that we recognize human beings from within our commonality as human beings. I suggested earlier that this means that we see each other as examples of each other, and thus we as human beings (even in our evil) express this species being in our particularity. We approach animals as examples of life in a similar
way. Thesoul,forWittgenstein,therefore,isamarkandexpressionofthesame distinction between the animate and inanimate that describes Aquinas' description o f the soul earlier from within our practices: "Our attitude to what is alive and to what is dead is not the same" (PI ? 284). Dilman, however, also argues that the grammar o f our (human) use o f 'soul' "makes sense only in the framework of certain moral values and that a spiritual life is one that bears a relation to these values" (191). While he argues that
Wittgenstein in his early work thought about ethics as spiritual in this way he does not connect this spiritual sense of the soul with his initial description of the soul as our human
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frameofreferencewithinwhichweappeartoeachotherashuman. IDsanalysisofthe grammar o f the soul is limited and does not take in Aquinas' description o f the soul, for example, which attempts to make exactly this kind o f link between both uses o f the 'soul'.
Without its theological backing is the use o f soul in Wittgenstein a metaphor, either living or dead? To say I treat you as if you have a soul is to describe my stance toward you as within the same form of life. The claim another human form has on me to be treated as a human body is the manifestation o f a soul, the manifestation o f my particularityasanexpressionofourcommonhumanformoflife. Similarly,the physiognomy of the word claims my attention (as does a musical theme) and demands that I orient myself to it either as sensible, in which case I enter into a language game in which it makes sense as what it is, or I reject it as senseless, as not of a form I can recognize. Although the relation between language games and forms of life is complicated (language games express forms o f life but it is not clear if a different language games always implies different forms of life; similarly both language games and forms of life include practices and actions and so on), such an exclusion sets up the possibility that this word or musical
theme will be rejected as part of my form of life entirely, that is, rejected as not human. (This is the danger Finnegans Wake courts). This is what I earlier called an ontological demand, a theological crisis, described in The Waste Land, signaling an anxiety about our inclusion in or exclusion from the world (a crisis about our stance toward the world).
Wittgenstein uses 'physiognomy' both to describe meaning (PI? 568) and to describe a temptation to say that words have "different characters in different contexts" and yet they each also have "one character. . . a single physiognomy. It looks at us" (PI
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p. 181). The stable shape of a word appearing as a word does not, however, function separately from the language game in which it functions: "[How do the meanings of the individual words make up the sense o f the sentence 'I still haven't seen him yet'? ] The sentence is composed o f words and that is enough"(PI p. 181). This shape o f words seems toabsorbmeaningaspartofitsform. Thistakingupofmeaning,however,isa consequence ofour stance toward and use ofwords:
The familiar physiognomy of a word, the feeling that it has taken up its meaning into itself that it is an actual likeness of its meaning--there could be human beings to whom all this was alien. (They would not have an attachment to their words. )-- And how are these feelings manifested among us? --By the way we choose and value words. (PI p. 218)
How could these human beings use language or mean anything? If "meaning is a physiognomy," the failure to take meaning into the physiognomy of words would mean, if words were still to function as part of a language, that the physiognomy would have to be attached in something else, maybe to the sentence or to the sound or tones or to facial expressions accompanying speaking (in which case their written language would have to include marks correlated with these expressions).
In the assumption that words have a single physiognomy, that they look at us, Wittgenstein counters "But a face in a painting looks at us too" (PI p. 181). A painted face looks like a face because we can recognize it as a face (people have faces): "The arrow points only in the application that a living being makes o f it" (PI? 454).
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We want to say: "When we mean something, it's like going up to someone, it's not having a dead picture (of any kind). " We go up to the thing we mean.
"When one thinks something, it is oneselfthinking"; so one is oneselfin motion. One is rushing ahead and so cannot also observe oneself rushing ahead. Indeed
not
Yes: meaning something is like going up to someone. ((PI? ? 455, 456, 457) Ourpicturesofourlanguageuseareboundupinmetaphors. Thesemetaphors,asis explicit in this case, are the means by which we allegorize ourselves into our language. Thinking or speaking describes a movement that changes one's relation to the world, in a way like going up to a person does. If I go up to you I instigate a relationship in which everything means something to you and me, even if I do or say nothing else ("going up to someone" means to enter into that space within which attention is demanded, although the limitsofthisspacevaryfrompersontopersonandculturetoculture). Howisthinking like "rushing ahead"? This seems like a description of the limits of self-reflection, but only if going up to someone is not oneself (can we run up to ourselves? ). In ascribing a physiognomy to words we allegorize them as persons, where their meaning is like their mind.
13. 2 Understanding, or Not, How Not to Go On
The clearest invocation ofthe possibility ofthe future as an essence ofour form of lifeintheInvestigationsoccursinWittgenstein'sdiscussionofhope: "Onecanimaginean animal angry, frightened, unhappy, happy, startled. But hopeful? And why not? " (PI p.
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174). How are the workings of "the phenomena of hopes" (as one kind of "Meaning") related to the grammar ofunderstanding entered into through Wittgenstein's description of "how we go on", in a mathematical series, for example, or in reading Finnegans Wake? The collapse and slippage between these two kinds o f meaning determine the limits o f the problem of "meaning" in both the Investigations and the Wake. In this, these texts come up against Melville's short story "Bartleby. " The story describes the frustration and attraction of a narrator who, as a lawyer, has hired Bartleby as a scrivener. Bartleby, however, soon begins a slow renunciation o f the claims and authority human beings (or society) have on him by reducing his own will to nothing more than a refusal to do anything. Bartleby slowly dies. How could Joyce and Wittgenstein answer or respond to the rejection of any possiblejustification of life, understanding, communication, community, or hope expressed by Bartleby? Bartleby's refusal to reply to all requests put on him, to all interchange beyond his "I'd prefer not to" leaves him a cipher, part o f a code lost to language because it (I mean "he") is lost to all human community, existing at the limit of language, except for his, therefore curious responses (why respond at all? ). He
has lost any future. We inhabit the possibility of a future as the ground of our being, signaled by our hoping, but embodied in our language and thus susceptible to denial.
Bartleby's refusal o f meaning answers a child's asking "What should (or can) I do now? " : heanswerswithhisownacceptanceofhisboredom. Whyisitorhowcoulditevenbe possible for a child to ask such a question? (What is signaled by the difficulty o f knowing whether to ask "why" or "how" here? ). If we have forgotten the child's question what have we replaced it with? Are our everyday practices enough like those o f animals to say
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that this question is no longer relevant in the way it is not for them? How (and why) does the justification Bartleby fails to find underlie our uses o f language? Bartleby has reduced himselfj in a kind o f devolving exhaustion, to a single intention attached to a single desire: to refuse through a complete disengagement from all external, relative to his single intention, demands and intentions. This intention is circular, a continual negation o f the future and therefore an assertion o f a presentness, which does not even include any desire (except his resistance). Without a future or a future directed set o f desires Bartleby has erased hope from his world. He has diminished himselfto the edge of humanity. He remains human primarily through the exercise of his will to resist the demands or appeals directed toward him. This is a way of again asking what is the theological dimensions of
Wittgenstein's use o f the soul in Philosophical Investigations?
I f the moment seems to describe human consciousness, the structure o f the future
as a possibility seems to be described by a machine. Wittgenstein analyzes the figuration ofthe future as a machine:
The machine as symbolizing its action: the action o f a machine--I might say at first--seems to be there in it from the start. What does that mean? --If we know the machine, everything else, that is its movement, seems to be already completely determined. (PI? 193)
In this the possibility o f a movement seems determined by the structure o f the machine. The parts could o f course fail, but "in many cases we don't think o f that at all. We use a machine, or the drawing of a machine, to symbolize a particular action of the machine. " The machine symbolizes its own action, and thus it embodies as the aspect of its structure
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a kind of self-reflection in which its future is determined as a function of what it is. In this itsfunctioningfollowsanidealizedpathalreadytranscendentwithinitsdesign. Amachine seems to generate time through its determined changes in state, the unrolling of a pattern determined by its structure (or seemingly what in the Tractatus Wittgenstein calls, with some ambiguity as Ramsey points out, "the form o f representation [which] is the possibility that the things are so combined with one another as are the elements o f the picture" (2. 1511). Machine time can be described by a diagram o f the machine itself,
where its future actions, its description o f its own changes by those changes, is derived from "the movement of its parts from it [the diagram] (Just as we can give someone a number by telling him that it is the twenty-fifth in the series 1, 4, 9, 16. . . . ). " Such a series , a time-line ofbefore and afters, and our translation into such a machine would translate McTaggert's A-series into a B-series, the existential now into an objectified history, the formula o f dynamism Adams uses to figure himself within a Godless universe.
Wittgenstein diagnoses the mistake in this picturing o f the machine's future movements as if these movements were objects "already lying in a drawer and which we then take out. " These future movements are the way we configure the future for the machine. If faced with an actual machine we no longer assume its parts will not fail. Thus we can see the machine under two different aspects: the putative movements in (1) the machine-as-symbol which functions "far more determinably than in (2) the actual machine. " Thepredeterminedmovementsinthemodelofthemachinesymbolizingitself might seem to be already present in the symbol itself (PI? 193). The motion o f the machine, the movement describing time, seems condensed into the design of the machine
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made manifest in the machine itself as if the machine were a drawing o f itself at all possible moments.
Wittgenstein goes on to investigate this seeming presentness o f the future in the machine as symbol: "When does one have the thought: the possible movements o f a machine are already there in it in some mysterious sense? -- Well when one is doing philosophy" (PI? 194). Putting philosophical pressure on our descriptions of machines separates the concept of the possibility of movement from our actual usage of the "phrase 'possibility of movement' when we are talking about a given machine". We imagine because of the defined character of the parts and actions of a machine that the possibility of its movement is somehow part of it, "like a shadow of the movement itself. "2 This possibility, this shadow, we imagine attached to that which is (or can) move; we imagine an entire world constructed out of possibility and tangent to every actual movement and change. Aheadofit? alongsideit?
