Meaning is not a function o f a word having a
particular
meaning or essence which we then grasp.
Constructing a Replacement for the Soul - Bourbon
Our knowledge, under the rubric of skepticism, consists of nothing but forms.
It is out of theseforms, outofthepotentialityofcontentimplicatedinformbytheplayofconflicting grammars and logics, that poetries, philosophies, and operas construct bodies and souls.
We might as well call this body and soul a mind.
Finnegans Wake, Opera, and, as will become clear, Philosophical Investigations, construct a mind as a shifting set of limits. They construct a mind not simply as or by an analogy, but in order to negotiate between and among inwardness and exertiority, type and individual, language and music, sense and absurdity. We recognize ourselves within the forms o f art, including philosophical art, because they can successfully construct an aesthetic entity equivalent to our subjectivity, which performs a similar negotiation between different grammars and worlds in order to construct a continuous temporality. Art, in its attempt to approach Thoreau's fantasy of seeing through another's eyes as if
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through the eyes of God, by presenting us with the subjectivity of an other that is not fully human, cannot help but suggest that the confusion we need to fear is not that between an automaton and a human, but between and automaton and God.
Hegel recognizes a similar limit in the a trans-subjective frame, the continuity from Sense-Certainty to Absolute Knowing, providing the continuity in temporality (becoming) that Being conceived within formal identities cannot give. For Hegel this trans-subjective frame is Spirit, the condition ofBeing as Becoming that marks existence as necessarily historical. Spirit is generated as a necessity out ofthe interaction between our subjectivity, or cognition, and change translated into language and representation.
The present is neither a mystic point, nor, as Wittgenstein demonstrates, a thing or anidentity. Itisaconstructionofoursubjectivity;itistherealmofbecomingbeyondthe objective form of language but within our intention, within the criterion of meaning used toconstructknowledgeandmeaning. Thisrealmofintentionenfoldsthemovementof subjectivity between self and text--and thus between moments. The present offers itself as Spirit, not simply as the frame o f temporal continuity but as the substance o f being as
becoming.
AtthispointHegel'stheologyconfrontsBenjamin's: spiritastemporalityagainst
spatialtheology. ThetheologyanimatingBenjamin'smaterialismplaysbetweenhis messianic need to redeem the past in memory (the completion o f the dead) and in action (toward utopia) and his spatial conception o f the mystic configurations and monads communicatingtheinorganicandmysterioussubstanceofhistory. Benjaminwritesin"Re the Theory ofKnowledge, Theory ofProgress" that
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. . . historyisnotjustasciencebutalsoaformofmemoration. Whatscience has "established," memoration can modify. Memoration can make the incomplete (happiness) into something complete, and the complete (suffering) into something incomplete. Thatistheology;butinmemorationwediscovertheexperiencethat forbids us to conceive o f history as thoroughly a-theological. . . (61)
Historydoesnotexistwithinanoumenalrealmbeyondoursubjectivity. Historyas "memoration" moves life beyond the present, beyond the phenomenal plane oftexts, into
the realm of ontological values that Benjamin calls theology and into our own subjectivity constructing these values. In Benjamin these values are embodied in messianic logic empowering the dialectic o f history, which is our becoming (i. e. our creation o f ourselves as history and therefore through memory, action, and hope). By ontological values I mean the necessary axiological hierarchies generating any criterion for determining actuality which we recognize as real: the values that attach a 'reality' to our subjectivity in spite of the irrevocably unbridgeable epistemological estrangement. (Hegel's chapter on "Sense- certainty" demonstrates this estrangement, and within its logic invokes a double hierarchy ofvalues: essentiality/inessentialityandimmediacy/mediacywhichempowersthe dialectic throughout the entire Phenomenology). We construct and function within a continuity of substance that exists beyond the present, much like our brain constructs a
very elaborate visual field from limited visual stimulus. Theology is a faith beyond the knowing of sense-certainty, beyond immediacy and essentiality, that re-constitutes knowing within the continuity of Spirit: the creation of Being out of the temporal fragmentation of our subjectivity in successive moments. We exist beyond the immediate
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in the mediacy oftime. This theological mediation allows for the possibility for the present to redeem the past (Benjamin, Origin, 34-36). This present functions like Hegel's subjectivity (or Heidegger's hermeneutic circle): it serves to structure the continuity of temporality out of our cognition, dissolving the separation between subject and object, phenomenal and noumenal in the becoming of history. Thus Benjamin's theology is reconciled to the logic underlying Hegel's use of Spirit.
Benjamin will not override the dialectical movement o f history in anything resembling what de Man calls a "synchronic juxtaposition. " Benjamin constructs a history of power broken into discontinuities that can only be reconstructed in diachronic
juxtapositions, where the mystic unity ofthe moment, the identity ofthe individual, of subjectivity in its singular date, exists in the silence between these juxtapositions. Benjamin cannot ultimately replace becoming with being, and must rely on the silence, in which voices occasionally crystallize as words, as the trans-subjective medium in which memory can be invoked and can redeem the oppressed.
The dynamic between the realm o f intention and representation, between meaning (criterion) and truth, becoming and being, subjective and objective cannot be epoxied into thematerialityoflanguage. Thecontext,grammar,anduseandthesubjectivity,intention, and silence in which meaning is enacted transform our thinking into temporality itself. To ask whether time exists beyond our cognition, beyond ourselves is to ask nonsense; it is to think of temporality as an object like a log.
What I mean to say by this, but which I could only pretend to prove in some other essay, is that our cognition o f time simultaneously and necessarily constructs the paradigm
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through which meaning is possible. Meaning organizes reality within an axiological hierarchy determining ontological value and significance in order to define a realm of actuality in relation to a subjectivity challenged by the minatory presence o f its own dissolution.
Time is the creation of art just as it is the construct of our cognition. Temporality, disguised as the Phoenix ofBeing, becomes an aesthetic image ofour subjectivity simulating the play between intention, where the text becomes the realm o f intention pointing toward some beyond, and representation, where it becomes the verbal effect of someintention. Farfrombeingsimultaneous,thisdoubleness(asonlythebeginningofa multiplicity of conflicting vectors) brings the diachronic beasts of change and loss into our perception as the condition of our existence. Representation and art bring death into our own subjectivity, and thus can be said to generate the cognitive reality o f time.
Derrida interprets Celan in relation to this threat and its dramatic transformation in language into the redemption of communication:
The name September arises in a poem, a poem which "speaks"; it is readable to the extent that it is caught up within a network o f marks which signify and are, by convention, intelligible; it has its share in the poem's beauty. But to the same extent, it pays for its readability with the terrible tribute of lost singularity; what is encrypted, dated in the date, is effaced in it, the date is marked in marking itself off. (330)
A date marks the singular moment by translating this singularity into a standardized convention which can then be exchanged and understood within a social community.
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Thus Derrida claims that the date effaces itself in a kind o f "synchronic juxtaposition. ". Derrida structures the moment as an identity (engaging in the disanalogy o f the moment as a log), whose content is mired in paradox but whose identity remains constant and reiterable. This iterability forms the trans-subjective frame providing the continuity between moments. This iterability, however, is predicated on the effacement ofthe singularity the date refers to (337). This singularity, the 'actual' date, if we follow the logic o f Derrida's use o f "effacement", is encoded within the semiotic date only to be markedoverandlosttotherecurrent"modernity"ofthesignifier. Derridascrupulously avoids reinstituting a Kantian noumenal realm. But he also avoids Hegel's subjective realm o f intention. The 'now' that 'has been' is marked as that which is effaced, and the signifier becomes a palimpsest. By avoiding the notion o f a subjective Criterion, Derrida dissolves any notion o f a temporality generated through subjectivity. The real becomes restricted to the immediate: the signifier and the moment.
The date, however, can neither be effaced nor communicated: it is not a thing but a condition o f being circumscribed and defined by the movement o f subjectivity between identities in different moments. A date refers to time by representing things understood as identities,whicharesometimesstableandatothertimeschanging. Torecapturethe temporality of texts one must not construct reading within an atemporal mode of renewal and ossification (interpretation and assertion), but one must negotiate between the diachronic unfolding of the text and the diachronic realm of meaning, or intention, the text reticulates through its representations of identity. Ultimately it is the not that time provides the possibility for poetics, but that art actualizes the possibility o f time: Art
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becomes the origin and the answer to our existential terror, but always within the logic of history, always within this very terror as a kind of irony. The irony of terror is built out of the contiguity of tradition translating the individual (a particular) into the context of history (recognizing oneselfas the exemplar or expression ofthe Volk, for example) or in translating the individual into the self-redeeming continuity ofmemory that protected the Jews in their diaspora and which preserves destroyed lives and cultures, if preservation can be so immaterial, tenuous, and tragic.
1In Wittgenstein's Lectures: Cambridge, 1930-32, ed. Desmond Lee (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980). 2Thejustification for Wittgenstein's hostility to science is poorly understood. He does not in general concernhimselfwithhowscientiststhink(intheirdifferentfeilds),butwithwhattheythink. Heidegger makesthissamemove. ForWittgenstein,thislimitationispartlytheresultofhisconcernsabout mathematics and psychology, both describing the limits ofscience.
3 See the last two chapters of his Wittgenstein on Mind and Language.
4For Stem's discussion of the history of Wittgenstein's anempts to construct a phenomenological language and then his abandonment of this attempt see both chapter 5 and chapter 6 in his Wittgenstein on Mind and Language.
5"(Augustine: Manifestissima et usitatissma sunt, et eadem rusus nimis latent, et nova est inventio eorum. )"
6The separation between noumenal and phenomenal reality is predicated on equating Being with a conceptofobjecthood. Thisseparationisthustheresultofobjectification,andthusis notthecauseofa subject/object economy but a result
7In Gottlob Frege, Collected Papers on Mathematics, Logic, and Philosophy.
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12
The T in the nature ofPhilosophicalInvestigations
Models of time are invariably models of animation. We invest ourselves in the marks oftime ('now', 'date', 'today', and so on) in the same way as we invest ourselves in our use o f 'I'. These investments lead to philosophical confusions and serve as vehicles of redemption. This redemption can proceed through a model o f thinking which is often a model of animation (as with Benjamin). Under philosophical pressure, however, this investment can seem to describe the principle o f life as dynamism plus identity. Such a picture o f life erases the grammatical investment from which it was extracted.
Wittgenstein courts this danger in the preface to Philosophical Investigations. Following a list o f the philosophical subjects he investigates, Wittgenstein describes the shape o f his
writing or of his thinking in relation to these subjects within a picture of animation (one can take this as one picture among many o f the soul o f Investigations) -.
I have written down all these thoughts as remarks, short paragraphs, o f which there is sometimes a fairly long chain about the same subject, while I sometimes make a sudden change, jumping from one topic to another, (be)
The list o f philosophy is ballasted by a length o f chain, local areas o f continuity matching in some sense the objects ofphilosophy, and rocked by "sudden change," from the inclusion of"other things. " One could imagine this description ofthe book functioning as a kind ofjustification for the form ofthe list of his philosophical topics. This description can read like a philosophical picture ofthinking, ofthe world or ofphilosophy built out of
Notes for this chapter are on page S31
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metaphorsofdynamismandidentity. Thebookisorganizedthroughcontinuity(local identity) and change, founded on the relation between identity and change that finds philosophy in between the fragments o f (change) Amdmander and Heraclitus and (identity) ParmenidesandZeno. OneofWittgenstein'sstrategiesincombatingourphilosophical extraction o f ourselves from our language games is to transform philosophical theories and concepts into aesthetic pictures and justifications. This is true o f his own philosophy as
well: he unwinds the Tractatus and other earlier philosophical temptations and models into apoeticsoflanguagegames. Thispoeticsbothgroundshisanalysisofconceptsintheir everyday use and picture our involvement in language and philosophy through our interpretive allegories and our allegorizations o f ourselves into language. Animation is one ofthe central motifs for such allegorization. PhilosophicalInvestigations could as well be calledapoetryoffragmentsandapoeticsoffragments(orfragmentation). Thiscollapse of poetry and poetics marks Wittgenstein as a modernist.
The preface describes Wittgenstein's involvement in language as his involvement in philosophy. Philosophical Investigations begins (with the preface) with an aesthetic
justificationforthefragmentedformofthebook. Fragmentsrequirejustificationbecause they require the construction of (an) interpretative frame(s). This means that a fragment (or its justification) must teach us how to read it, and thus the preface attempt to teach us how to read Investigations. Consequently, I will analyze (through a kind o f exegesis) the preface as a fragment o f Philosophical Investigations that begins and enacts our involvement and investment in language as bound by aesthetics: metaphors, fictions, conversation, fragments and so on.
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Wittgensteincallshimself'I'inthepreface. IntheTractatus,Wittgenstein describes a non-psychological or metaphysical 'I' that forms the limit to the propositions that constitute the facts ofthe world. Is there a non-psychological 'I' inPhilosophical
Investigations? Investigations is organized to dissolve our metaphysical attachment to this kind of question into nonsense. One of the ways, however, this non-psychological 'I' emerges (as a local, not a metaphysical limit) is in the failure o f language games. There are a number o f ways in which language games fail and succeed. The peristalsis o f this movement in and out of language games describes a kind of temporality enacting a kind of theological limit (one ofthe ways grammar becomes theology: ? 337). Another kind of language game failure, however, is philosophy understood as metaphysics:
Whenphilosophersuseaword-- "knowledge","being',"object","I", "proposition", "name" --and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language-game which is its original home? (PI? 116)
A lot rests on how "original home" is understood here, and how the appeal to ordinary language accommodates the different kinds o f sublimation o f the word "knowledge. " Knowledge can be sublimed in a theory of knowledge where we might presume the requirement for knowledge is absolute identity, or it can be sublimed as in Steven's use of "knew" (and "self' and "song" and "maker") in "The Idea of Order at Key West":
And when she sang, the sea, Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
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As we beheld her striding there alone, Knew that there was a world for her Except the one she sang and, singing made.
Wittgenstein suggests that the expressiveness o f poetry (as a version o f self-interpretation) resists the philosophical attempt to link necessity with essence as a way o f describing the conditions, the given, of our being human. 1To explore the relation between poetry and philosophy is to investigate the nature and role o f what counts as the given in poetry (a poem). Iunderstandsuchaninvestigationtomeanthatourpoeticuseoflanguage,our investment in language or poetry, articulates a relationship to the ontological limits (what is given as the real) in relation to which we live. The sense o f poetry would then be a function ofthis relationship, that is, its sense could be understood as meaningful or true, whatever these might mean, through the analysis and articulation o f this relationship and these limits).
What counts as a limit is continually at issue: "A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably" (PI ? 115). Philosophy, in Wittgenstein's hands, becomes a poetic response to what seems like logical necessity in order to break the hold these picture and false analogies have on us, and an attempt to present the correct (at least in particular circumstances)grammarofourlanguageuse. Wittgensteinassertsthat"Philosophyought really to be written as a poetic composition" partly because it is a response to a logical aesthetic, at best, or, at worst, to a logical prejudice (CV24). But what kind of poetic composition?
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Wittgenstein utilizes a number o f recurrent metaphors and analogies throughout Investigations. ThedominatemetaphorsinthePreface,however,"[d]rawingtheirlight and currents o f the air/ [i]nto their mass and depth" revolve around 'nature' (and landscape). 2 The grammar o f 'nature' opens up a site o f contestation between metaphysics, in which nature can be understood as essence, and science, in which the natural is understood as defined by causal connections, and Wittgenstein's method, in which nature describes our ordinary embeddednesss within language, language games, human practices, and forms of life. Does Wittgenstein's use of nature, or let's say the
justification o f his philosophy described in the Preface, describe a poetics or philosophy of fragmentation that addresses the motives and effects ofthe fragmentation oftime, identity and world described in Keats, Adams, Eliot, Heidegger, and Joyce?
Wittgenstein provides a list of many of the subjects of his Investigations in the preface: "[t]heconceptsofmeaning,ofunderstanding,ofaproposition,oflogic,the foundations of mathematics, states of consciousness, and other things. " This is a description ofphilosophy that clanks into the vagueness of "other things" [undAnderes] in a way exactly at odds to the demands oflogicjustifying these other problems as philosophical problems. The anti-climax ofthese "other things" can be read as a diminishment or a promise. What are these other things, at least? Do we imagine that
thinking can be described by a list of traditional things to think about?
These philosophical subjects do not form a given set ofquestions and responses,
determined by clear conceptual boundaries, towards which someone thinks. Investigations could never have been called 'The Problem ofMeaning' or 'Of
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Understanding'or 'Logical Propositions'and so on. It consists of"the precipitate of PhilosophicalInvestigationunified not by a specific subject (although there are rough limits: o f Wittgenstein's two major concerns it concerns the philosophy o f psychology more than the philosophy o f mathematics, but this is a way o f saying it concerns the limits ofthe mind as opposed to the limits oftruth). A precipitate [Niederschlag] is a kind of resultoreffect,atraceofthinkingthatisitselfanotherformofinvestigation. Thevery first sentence of the Preface, therefore, describes the kind of self-reflexive form organizing the book. The investigation ofthese subjects takes place from within the language of these problems. And thus this investigation is another version o f this language (not the language of theory, however, but a description of how one might be gripped by how or why something means, for example). Each remark, therefore, remarks on itself as a redescription of a previous picture (this is one way of explaining why Investigations
begins with a quotation, a picture of language-learning, from Augustine). How does this self-reflection take place?
Wittgenstein's philosophical self-reflection proceeds through the invention of primitive and specialized language games as objects o f comparison with our misleading and our everyday language games, through the description of our ordinary usage of language, through metaphors and analogies, through grammatical jokes, and so on. He pressures those points or moments when a language game fails (the point at which we start to theorize for example). This pressure shifts incoherence not simply back into coherence but from one point of incoherence to another, describing the distinctions in our languageusageastheshiftinglimitsbetweenlanguagegames. Oneoftheways
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Wittgenstein describes these limits is as and through invented "intermediate cases": language games that simplify an aspect o f our use in order to highlight the logic o f our ordinaryusage. Hesays
A main source o f our failure to understand is that we do not command a clear view oftheuseofourwords. --Ourgrammarislackinginthissortofperspicuity. A perspicuous representation produces just that understanding which consists in 'seeing connexions'. (PI? 122)
These connections are made visible by intermediate cases because they sketch the limit of the frame through which we view something in relation to another frame: "We predicate ofthe thing what lies in the method of representing it. Impressed by the possibility of a comparison, we think we are perceiving a state ofaffairs ofthe highest generality" (PI? 104). In what sense is language or the world fragmented? Our language games or rather their grammar provide frames through and in which we and the world are figured as sensible. Investigatingthegrammar(thelogicoraestheticsofourusage)ofourlanguage means to make these frames visible, to configure language as a complex set o f shifting frames. This in effect means to display our language as a set o f fragments within which and in relation to which we figure ourselves and the world.
Wittgenstein suggests that the kind of necessity that can lead to Kant's transcendental deduction, where the question is what is necessary for cognition or knowing to be possible, can not be described or captured in rules (that is, this necessity cannot be said). The problem of knowledge is translated into how we understand language. The site o f this understanding is within or in relation to language games.
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Wittgenstein explores the nature of how words function within these language games, in a typical self-reflexive move, by describing the grammar o f the word 'game' in order to show that it has no essence, but is rather part ofa complex set ofuses that mark any particular use o f 'game' (as in 'a game o f chess') as related to another usage (a guessing game or football) as if by family resemblance. Wittgenstein distinguishes between the demands of philosophy for the definition or the essence of concepts and our everyday use of concepts in differing degrees ofexactitude and vagueness. If one looks at the examples of how we use a word like 'game' to describe our games we cannot find nor describe the essence of being a game, nor can we determine or describe the essential criteria for using the word 'game'. We find instead "family resemblance"; "for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross [kreuzen] in the same way. --And I shall say: 'games' form a family"(PI? 67). Ifwords"haveafamilyofmeanings"(PI? 77),thenonecannotdiscover an essential meaning o f a word.
Meaning is not a function o f a word having a particular meaning or essence which we then grasp. He suggests that the "concept of a game is unbounded", that what a game is cannot be determined by a rule or expressed as an essence (gameness).
The interlocutor responds, "But then the use o f the word is unregulated, the 'game' we play with it is unregulated. " This assertion is answered by, "It is not everywhere circumscribed by rules; but no more are there any rules for how high one
throws the ball in tennis, or how hard; yet tennis is a game for all that and has rules too" (PI? 68). One can imagine that a coach might invent rules for how high and hard to throw
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a tennis ball--but would this rule have to include a description ofwhen it is allowed to throw a tennis ball and not hit it with a racket? Even if invented these rules do not determine the rules that make tennis a game--but are really rules for a particular player in relation to his coach. The game will not be forfeit ifthe player breaks these rules of serving (even if he loses the point). One could also describe the laws of physics (which are themselves descriptions) as rules determining what kind of games can be played. Within this picture the laws of physics function as ontological limits (along with our
biology, the construction of the court, the economics that makes such courts and such games [or leisure] possible, and so on). We can not ask, sensibly, however, how the relation between physics and human biology makes tennis possible as a human activity which we call 'a game. ' We can ask what makes the activities we perform in playing tennis possible, but the concept o f 'game' is not meaningful as an expression o f physics or biology. Learning a word is always learning a language, or rather one must already function within language games in order to understand what counts as a word let alone whatitmeans. Thismeansthatonealwaysfindsoneselfwithinlanguagebecauseoneis always within a human form oflife.
In dictation to Alice Ambrose, Wittgenstein claims that "In philosophy matters are not simple enough for us to say 'Let's get a rough idea', for we do not know the country except by knowing the connections between the roads. So I suggest repetition as a means of surveying the connections. " Investigations consists of following and escaping these roads (or paths) in a search for clarity:
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The same or almost the same points were always being approached afresh from different directions, and new sketches made. Very many ofthese were badly drawn or uncharacteristic, marked by all the defects of a weak draughtsman. And when they were rejected a number oftolerable ones were left, which now had to be arranged and sometimes cut down, so that ifyou looked at them you could get a picture o f the landscape. Thus this book is really only an album, (ix)
The "result" of his Investigations of family resemblance shows that our uses of a word (or words), the language games in which they function, describe "a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similaritiesindetail"(PI? 66). Thislandscapeofcriss-crossingpathsleadstoconfusion: "Language is a labyrinth of paths. You approach from one side and know your way about; you approach the same place from another side and you no longer know your way about"(PI? 203). I f these paths are language games, then how 'consciousness' means (or appears) in the sentence "I was conscious of my fault" is not the same as in "The patient regainedconsciousnessatthreea. m. " Istheproblemofconsciousnessalwaysaddressed by the word "consciousness"?
The degree o f vagueness and clarity in our use o f words is not stable. This instability undermines the picture o f learning language as learning essences or names. Such learning takes place already within language: "nothing has so far been done, when a thinghasbeennamed. Ithasnotevengotanameexceptinthelanguagegame. Thisis what Frege meant too, when he said that a word had meaning only as part of a sentence" (PI? 49). Wittgenstein analogizes philosophy's attempt to stabilize meaning as the demand
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tosketchasharplydefinedpicture"corresponding"toablurredone. . . ifthe colours in the original merge without a hint o f any outline won't it become a hopeless task to draw a sharp picture corresponding to the blurred one? Won't you then have to say: "Here I might just as well draw a circle or heart as a rectangle, for all the colours merge. " Anything--and nothing--is right. --And this is the position you are in ifyou look for definitions corresponding to our concepts of aesthetics or ethics. (PI? 77)
Wittgenstein's analogy describes an incommensurability between a demand o f clarity associated with a method of drawing and the object to be represented. The fact that color and shape are related as visual properties o f objects (forms which our eye is built to recognize or construct) suggests that such an incommensurability should be resolvable. The contradiction, however, is a grammatical one.
Wittgenstein extends this grammatical incommensurability to aesthetics and ethics. He claims that definitions do not capture our aesthetic and ethical concepts. While this is unsurprising for words it might seem surprising for art and morals. Words seem both more amenable to definition (one can give a list o f common usages), but because one understands that one can use language often without being able to give definitions of the words one uses (a definition of'the', for example), the limits ofdefinition are obvious. Moral and aesthetic definitions are seldom understood as descriptions (as is a definition of a word), but more often than not as prescriptions (moral maxims or proverbs). This is confusing. Moral and aesthetic definitions are interpretations of our practices within particular communities (whether we think that this implies a relativism or not one should
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still be able to recognize that morality and art arejudgments of actions or of particular cases). The meaning ofthese interpretations orjudgments cannot be encapsulated in a definition ofthe objects ofjudgment, but onlyinthe process ofmaking thejudgment. We cannot say what is good, but only how it is good. Would the criteria for particular
judgments constitute a definition? Sometimes colored squares form lines o f demarcation between them, and sometimes they do not. There are always questions about application. Unlike in the Tractates, in Philosophical Investigations this incommensurability is
not a dividing line between language and silence. In some cases our confusion is a functionofmisappliedcriteria. Wittgensteinaskshimself(oranyone)tocompare knowing and saying in the following cases:
how many feet high Mont Blanc is-- how the word "game" is used-- how a clarinet sounds.
One's initial comparison might conclude that one cannot say what a clarinet sounds like, but one can both know and say how high Mont Blanc is. Wittgenstein, however, says that "if you are surprised that one can know something and not be able to say it, you are perhaps thinking of a case like the first. Certainly not of one like the third"(78). Of course we cannot say how a clarinet sounds. Our failure is surprising if we imagine that knowing this sound is like knowing the height o f a mountain.
Incommensurability of one kind arises ifwe fail to recognize the limits of our mediaofdescriptionandrepresentation. Theselimitationsaretiedtotheformsofour
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sensoryexperience. Languageseemstoofferthepossibilityofsynesthasia,andsuch synesthasia seems to describe who we are as the nexus ofour sensory inputs.
Describe the aroma of coffee. --Why can't it be done? Do we lack the words? And for what are words lacking? --But whence comes the idea that such a description must after all be possible? Have you ever felt the lack o f such a description? Have you ever tried to describe the aroma and not succeeded?
(PI? 610)
Why do we want our descriptions to be reenactments or reanimations? Language might be a form o f memory, but it is not only that. We want to reenact the memory o f the thing as if it were its own memory that is enacted in our language. Description is confused with animation, where the drive toward an adequate description o f my experience can only be satisfied by the animation o f this experience within language.
The distance between Wittgenstein's intentions (temptations, requirements, sublimations) and the intentions of his sketches is a form of self-reflection, the discovery of an interiority in or between language and the world. This is to say that one form of self-reflection is the expression of self-reflection as a metaphor of language:
Suppose we expressed the fact that a man had an intention by saying "He as it were said to himself, 'I will. . . . '" --That is the picture. And now I want to know: how does one employ the expression "as it were to say something to oneself'? For it does not mean: to say something to oneself. (PI? 658)
The subjunctive "as it were" provides the possibility for intention to be mapped into 'saying something to oneself, and thus pictures an intention or willing as a self-reflexive
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loopbetweenanagentsaying,an'I',andadescriptionofintention('Iwill. . . '). This circle wants to collapse the act of willing into the description of content that is what is willed. TheTractarianpictureofthewillseparatesthisactionintothenonsenseofthe metaphysicalT andthecontentoftheworld. IntheTractatusthewillentailsonekindof limit to the world:
6. 423 O f the will as the subject o f the ethical we cannot speak.
And the will as a phenomenon is only ofinterest to psychology.
6. 43 If good or bad willing changes the world, it can only change the limits of the world, not the facts; not the things that can be expressed in language.
In brief, the world must thereby become quite another. It must so to speak wax or wane as a whole.
The will enacts values andjudgments (determining the world as happy or unhappy) and thus is not a part of the world, which is "the totality of facts"(l. 1). The will is therefore not the will, not a thing or state or organ at all, but the form or meaning of the world. If weignoremostofthedifficultyandcomplexityof thispictureofthewill,wecanatleast see that such a picture is also a response to this picture of self-reflexive commentary--a disengagement between the agent and the description. The first wants to configure the 'I' as language and the other wants to configure the 'I' beyond language. For Wittgenstein, in Investigations, both are confusions.
Wittgenstein describes three different kinds (or agents) of intention. The first is described by and in the sketching of different versions or views of language (of meaning, understanding, logic, mathematics, consciousness and so on). . This sketching is the
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precipitate, which he then intends to organize as a part o f a further sketching (making clear):
It was my intention at first to bring all this together in a book whose form I pictured differently at different times. But the essential thing was that the thoughts should proceed from one subject to another in a natural order and without breaks.
Whether a failure o f will or understanding his initial intentions are unsuccessful because the sketches resist his intentions. In this resistance they express a kind of will or intention oftheirown. TheyareanimatedbecausethesubjectiveforceofWittgenstein'sintentions cannot form these remarks as objects. This is because these fragments are not objects, in spite of being precipitates of his thinking. Forming all of his remarks in a continuous whole would mean to configure them under the aspect of a philosophical thesis, and thus asaworldwhoselimitonlycontainsan'I'understoodasanexpressionofthisthesis. For Wittgenstein, however, no such totality is possible because we can neither get outside of ourselves, as an T to be configured under an aspect, or outside ofthe world, sub species
aetemitatis.
There seems to be a separation or a distance between my willing and my doing, and this distance must be traversed, and that traversal would require willing myself to move--and thus I am forced to will willing. If T am not myself'my will' how do I will my willing? Or how is my will mine? Wittgenstein argues that these questions are senseless: "I can't will willing; that is, it makes no sense to speak of willing willing" (PI? 163); to willing willing is to fall into an infinite regress.
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To say "When I raise my arm 'voluntarily' I do not use any instrument to bring the movement about. My wish is not such an instrument either"(PI? 614) is to say against Platothatthebodyisnotaninstrumentofthesoul. Willingasavoluntaryactionisthe animating principle ofbeing human, what Aquinas calls the rational soul. If the will is not an instrument then it is an action; but an action is not the will but the manifestation ofthe willaswalking,talkingetc. (PI? 615). Wecansay,however,thatthewillisan interpretation o f an action that highlights the agency involved in the action. The statement 'I will myself to walk' is an interpretation o f the fact that I walked after breaking my leg. The concept o f the will, however, has a causal function (or at least force): 'I walked because I willed myselfto walk. ' Such a causal concept is more like an animating principle accompanying any action not determined by instinct or by our autonomous nervous system (even being under someone else's will must be accompanied by my willing intheirname). Theconceptofthewill,whateveritsontologicalstatus,collapsesacausal function into an interpretive function as an aspect (or even an entity) o f the mind or o f personhood (to not have a will of one's own is to be an automaton or can be given as an excuse for acting outside of human obligations):
Why do I want to tell him about an intention too, as well as telling him what I did? --Not because the intention was also something which was going on at that time. But because I want to tell him something about myself, which goes beyond what happened at that time.
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I reveal to him something o f myself when I tell him what I was going to do. -- Not, however, on grounds o f self-observation, but by way o f a response (it might also be called an intuition). (PI? 659)
What Wittgenstein reveals in his intention to shape his book into a natural order is something about himself, about his attachment to the philosophical uses o f 'essential' and 'natural order'. The variety of forms he imagined for his book were all dictated by an essence, by the requirement that the text not form only local continuities punctuated by suddenjumps. Wittgenstein's description ofthe Investigations sets offthis demand for a natural order as his own demand. This is a confession. The demands o f this intention and
this natural order suggest that the Investigations is both a failure and unnatural. The ideals expressed by this intention is a putative requirement or criteria assumed to describe the truth of any investigation.
Wittgenstein describes his "failure", and in this offers a justification for Investigations' current form. He claims to have attempted to construct a 'natural order' by 'welding together' [. zusammenzuschweifien] his remarks into "such a whole"[solchen Ganz]. Such welding produced a 'crippled' text: "my thoughts were soon crippled if I tried to force them on in any single direction against their natural inclination [natiirliche Neigung]. " The attempt to produce "a natural order without breaks" generates instead a crippled, in this sense, degenerate artificial being? or society? ofthoughts. The natural order o f the putative whole is opposed to the "natural inclination" o f the fragments, which gain a kind of organic animateness.
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A 'natural inclination' figures these fragments with a nature. This nature is not a picture of essential being (or identity) or even proximate cause (or logical necessity). These fragments have 'natural inclinations' within an interpretation comparing their fragmentation with the ideal of natural order. Such an interpretation works out the grammar o f 'nature' for a whole, limited totality or universal, and for particulars, thoughts, examples. The details of language and thought conflict with the demands of logicalorder: "Themorenarrowlyweexamineactuallanguage,thesharperbecomesthe conflict between it and our requirement. (For the crystalline purity of logic was, of course, not a result o f investigation: it was a requirement)" (PI? 107). The crystalline
purity o f logic, a super-order, is the sublimation o f logic into 'the bottom o f all sciences. -- Forlogicalinvestigationexploresthenature(Wesen)ofallthings. Itseekstoseetothe bottom of things and is not meant to concern itselfwhether what happens is this or that" (PI? 89). Logic is simultaneously the universal form (sublimed) and the essence (the bottom) o f all things. Logic does not pursue "Das Wesen aller Dinge" [the essence (nature) o f all things] in "Tatsachen des Naturgeschehens" [the facts of natural occurrences] nor in the "causal connexions" o f science. Wittgenstein understands logic to be, as Frege argued, independent o f psychology (and thus o f the empirical facts that Mill and the early Husserl grounded in logical and mathematical relations). Wittgenstein, however, develops this independence away from ideal language Frege posited to correct the errors o f ordinary language and from the quasi-facts o f new logical discoveries:
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it is, rather, ofthe essence (Wesen) ofour investigation that we do not seek to learn anything new by it. We want to understand something that is already in plain view. For this is what we seem in some sense not to understand. (PI? 89)
"Der Natur der Untersuchung" and "unsere Untersuchung wesentliche" lies neither in a 'natural order" nor in an essence that would serve as an answer to 'what is a proposition? ', 'what is a word? ', 'what is language? ', etc. Wittgenstein's Investigations "are trying to understand the essence o f language--its function, its structure" (PI? 92). This essence is "something that already lies open to view and that becomes surveyable by a rearrangement".
Finnegans Wake, Opera, and, as will become clear, Philosophical Investigations, construct a mind as a shifting set of limits. They construct a mind not simply as or by an analogy, but in order to negotiate between and among inwardness and exertiority, type and individual, language and music, sense and absurdity. We recognize ourselves within the forms o f art, including philosophical art, because they can successfully construct an aesthetic entity equivalent to our subjectivity, which performs a similar negotiation between different grammars and worlds in order to construct a continuous temporality. Art, in its attempt to approach Thoreau's fantasy of seeing through another's eyes as if
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through the eyes of God, by presenting us with the subjectivity of an other that is not fully human, cannot help but suggest that the confusion we need to fear is not that between an automaton and a human, but between and automaton and God.
Hegel recognizes a similar limit in the a trans-subjective frame, the continuity from Sense-Certainty to Absolute Knowing, providing the continuity in temporality (becoming) that Being conceived within formal identities cannot give. For Hegel this trans-subjective frame is Spirit, the condition ofBeing as Becoming that marks existence as necessarily historical. Spirit is generated as a necessity out ofthe interaction between our subjectivity, or cognition, and change translated into language and representation.
The present is neither a mystic point, nor, as Wittgenstein demonstrates, a thing or anidentity. Itisaconstructionofoursubjectivity;itistherealmofbecomingbeyondthe objective form of language but within our intention, within the criterion of meaning used toconstructknowledgeandmeaning. Thisrealmofintentionenfoldsthemovementof subjectivity between self and text--and thus between moments. The present offers itself as Spirit, not simply as the frame o f temporal continuity but as the substance o f being as
becoming.
AtthispointHegel'stheologyconfrontsBenjamin's: spiritastemporalityagainst
spatialtheology. ThetheologyanimatingBenjamin'smaterialismplaysbetweenhis messianic need to redeem the past in memory (the completion o f the dead) and in action (toward utopia) and his spatial conception o f the mystic configurations and monads communicatingtheinorganicandmysterioussubstanceofhistory. Benjaminwritesin"Re the Theory ofKnowledge, Theory ofProgress" that
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. . . historyisnotjustasciencebutalsoaformofmemoration. Whatscience has "established," memoration can modify. Memoration can make the incomplete (happiness) into something complete, and the complete (suffering) into something incomplete. Thatistheology;butinmemorationwediscovertheexperiencethat forbids us to conceive o f history as thoroughly a-theological. . . (61)
Historydoesnotexistwithinanoumenalrealmbeyondoursubjectivity. Historyas "memoration" moves life beyond the present, beyond the phenomenal plane oftexts, into
the realm of ontological values that Benjamin calls theology and into our own subjectivity constructing these values. In Benjamin these values are embodied in messianic logic empowering the dialectic o f history, which is our becoming (i. e. our creation o f ourselves as history and therefore through memory, action, and hope). By ontological values I mean the necessary axiological hierarchies generating any criterion for determining actuality which we recognize as real: the values that attach a 'reality' to our subjectivity in spite of the irrevocably unbridgeable epistemological estrangement. (Hegel's chapter on "Sense- certainty" demonstrates this estrangement, and within its logic invokes a double hierarchy ofvalues: essentiality/inessentialityandimmediacy/mediacywhichempowersthe dialectic throughout the entire Phenomenology). We construct and function within a continuity of substance that exists beyond the present, much like our brain constructs a
very elaborate visual field from limited visual stimulus. Theology is a faith beyond the knowing of sense-certainty, beyond immediacy and essentiality, that re-constitutes knowing within the continuity of Spirit: the creation of Being out of the temporal fragmentation of our subjectivity in successive moments. We exist beyond the immediate
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in the mediacy oftime. This theological mediation allows for the possibility for the present to redeem the past (Benjamin, Origin, 34-36). This present functions like Hegel's subjectivity (or Heidegger's hermeneutic circle): it serves to structure the continuity of temporality out of our cognition, dissolving the separation between subject and object, phenomenal and noumenal in the becoming of history. Thus Benjamin's theology is reconciled to the logic underlying Hegel's use of Spirit.
Benjamin will not override the dialectical movement o f history in anything resembling what de Man calls a "synchronic juxtaposition. " Benjamin constructs a history of power broken into discontinuities that can only be reconstructed in diachronic
juxtapositions, where the mystic unity ofthe moment, the identity ofthe individual, of subjectivity in its singular date, exists in the silence between these juxtapositions. Benjamin cannot ultimately replace becoming with being, and must rely on the silence, in which voices occasionally crystallize as words, as the trans-subjective medium in which memory can be invoked and can redeem the oppressed.
The dynamic between the realm o f intention and representation, between meaning (criterion) and truth, becoming and being, subjective and objective cannot be epoxied into thematerialityoflanguage. Thecontext,grammar,anduseandthesubjectivity,intention, and silence in which meaning is enacted transform our thinking into temporality itself. To ask whether time exists beyond our cognition, beyond ourselves is to ask nonsense; it is to think of temporality as an object like a log.
What I mean to say by this, but which I could only pretend to prove in some other essay, is that our cognition o f time simultaneously and necessarily constructs the paradigm
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through which meaning is possible. Meaning organizes reality within an axiological hierarchy determining ontological value and significance in order to define a realm of actuality in relation to a subjectivity challenged by the minatory presence o f its own dissolution.
Time is the creation of art just as it is the construct of our cognition. Temporality, disguised as the Phoenix ofBeing, becomes an aesthetic image ofour subjectivity simulating the play between intention, where the text becomes the realm o f intention pointing toward some beyond, and representation, where it becomes the verbal effect of someintention. Farfrombeingsimultaneous,thisdoubleness(asonlythebeginningofa multiplicity of conflicting vectors) brings the diachronic beasts of change and loss into our perception as the condition of our existence. Representation and art bring death into our own subjectivity, and thus can be said to generate the cognitive reality o f time.
Derrida interprets Celan in relation to this threat and its dramatic transformation in language into the redemption of communication:
The name September arises in a poem, a poem which "speaks"; it is readable to the extent that it is caught up within a network o f marks which signify and are, by convention, intelligible; it has its share in the poem's beauty. But to the same extent, it pays for its readability with the terrible tribute of lost singularity; what is encrypted, dated in the date, is effaced in it, the date is marked in marking itself off. (330)
A date marks the singular moment by translating this singularity into a standardized convention which can then be exchanged and understood within a social community.
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Thus Derrida claims that the date effaces itself in a kind o f "synchronic juxtaposition. ". Derrida structures the moment as an identity (engaging in the disanalogy o f the moment as a log), whose content is mired in paradox but whose identity remains constant and reiterable. This iterability forms the trans-subjective frame providing the continuity between moments. This iterability, however, is predicated on the effacement ofthe singularity the date refers to (337). This singularity, the 'actual' date, if we follow the logic o f Derrida's use o f "effacement", is encoded within the semiotic date only to be markedoverandlosttotherecurrent"modernity"ofthesignifier. Derridascrupulously avoids reinstituting a Kantian noumenal realm. But he also avoids Hegel's subjective realm o f intention. The 'now' that 'has been' is marked as that which is effaced, and the signifier becomes a palimpsest. By avoiding the notion o f a subjective Criterion, Derrida dissolves any notion o f a temporality generated through subjectivity. The real becomes restricted to the immediate: the signifier and the moment.
The date, however, can neither be effaced nor communicated: it is not a thing but a condition o f being circumscribed and defined by the movement o f subjectivity between identities in different moments. A date refers to time by representing things understood as identities,whicharesometimesstableandatothertimeschanging. Torecapturethe temporality of texts one must not construct reading within an atemporal mode of renewal and ossification (interpretation and assertion), but one must negotiate between the diachronic unfolding of the text and the diachronic realm of meaning, or intention, the text reticulates through its representations of identity. Ultimately it is the not that time provides the possibility for poetics, but that art actualizes the possibility o f time: Art
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becomes the origin and the answer to our existential terror, but always within the logic of history, always within this very terror as a kind of irony. The irony of terror is built out of the contiguity of tradition translating the individual (a particular) into the context of history (recognizing oneselfas the exemplar or expression ofthe Volk, for example) or in translating the individual into the self-redeeming continuity ofmemory that protected the Jews in their diaspora and which preserves destroyed lives and cultures, if preservation can be so immaterial, tenuous, and tragic.
1In Wittgenstein's Lectures: Cambridge, 1930-32, ed. Desmond Lee (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980). 2Thejustification for Wittgenstein's hostility to science is poorly understood. He does not in general concernhimselfwithhowscientiststhink(intheirdifferentfeilds),butwithwhattheythink. Heidegger makesthissamemove. ForWittgenstein,thislimitationispartlytheresultofhisconcernsabout mathematics and psychology, both describing the limits ofscience.
3 See the last two chapters of his Wittgenstein on Mind and Language.
4For Stem's discussion of the history of Wittgenstein's anempts to construct a phenomenological language and then his abandonment of this attempt see both chapter 5 and chapter 6 in his Wittgenstein on Mind and Language.
5"(Augustine: Manifestissima et usitatissma sunt, et eadem rusus nimis latent, et nova est inventio eorum. )"
6The separation between noumenal and phenomenal reality is predicated on equating Being with a conceptofobjecthood. Thisseparationisthustheresultofobjectification,andthusis notthecauseofa subject/object economy but a result
7In Gottlob Frege, Collected Papers on Mathematics, Logic, and Philosophy.
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12
The T in the nature ofPhilosophicalInvestigations
Models of time are invariably models of animation. We invest ourselves in the marks oftime ('now', 'date', 'today', and so on) in the same way as we invest ourselves in our use o f 'I'. These investments lead to philosophical confusions and serve as vehicles of redemption. This redemption can proceed through a model o f thinking which is often a model of animation (as with Benjamin). Under philosophical pressure, however, this investment can seem to describe the principle o f life as dynamism plus identity. Such a picture o f life erases the grammatical investment from which it was extracted.
Wittgenstein courts this danger in the preface to Philosophical Investigations. Following a list o f the philosophical subjects he investigates, Wittgenstein describes the shape o f his
writing or of his thinking in relation to these subjects within a picture of animation (one can take this as one picture among many o f the soul o f Investigations) -.
I have written down all these thoughts as remarks, short paragraphs, o f which there is sometimes a fairly long chain about the same subject, while I sometimes make a sudden change, jumping from one topic to another, (be)
The list o f philosophy is ballasted by a length o f chain, local areas o f continuity matching in some sense the objects ofphilosophy, and rocked by "sudden change," from the inclusion of"other things. " One could imagine this description ofthe book functioning as a kind ofjustification for the form ofthe list of his philosophical topics. This description can read like a philosophical picture ofthinking, ofthe world or ofphilosophy built out of
Notes for this chapter are on page S31
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metaphorsofdynamismandidentity. Thebookisorganizedthroughcontinuity(local identity) and change, founded on the relation between identity and change that finds philosophy in between the fragments o f (change) Amdmander and Heraclitus and (identity) ParmenidesandZeno. OneofWittgenstein'sstrategiesincombatingourphilosophical extraction o f ourselves from our language games is to transform philosophical theories and concepts into aesthetic pictures and justifications. This is true o f his own philosophy as
well: he unwinds the Tractatus and other earlier philosophical temptations and models into apoeticsoflanguagegames. Thispoeticsbothgroundshisanalysisofconceptsintheir everyday use and picture our involvement in language and philosophy through our interpretive allegories and our allegorizations o f ourselves into language. Animation is one ofthe central motifs for such allegorization. PhilosophicalInvestigations could as well be calledapoetryoffragmentsandapoeticsoffragments(orfragmentation). Thiscollapse of poetry and poetics marks Wittgenstein as a modernist.
The preface describes Wittgenstein's involvement in language as his involvement in philosophy. Philosophical Investigations begins (with the preface) with an aesthetic
justificationforthefragmentedformofthebook. Fragmentsrequirejustificationbecause they require the construction of (an) interpretative frame(s). This means that a fragment (or its justification) must teach us how to read it, and thus the preface attempt to teach us how to read Investigations. Consequently, I will analyze (through a kind o f exegesis) the preface as a fragment o f Philosophical Investigations that begins and enacts our involvement and investment in language as bound by aesthetics: metaphors, fictions, conversation, fragments and so on.
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Wittgensteincallshimself'I'inthepreface. IntheTractatus,Wittgenstein describes a non-psychological or metaphysical 'I' that forms the limit to the propositions that constitute the facts ofthe world. Is there a non-psychological 'I' inPhilosophical
Investigations? Investigations is organized to dissolve our metaphysical attachment to this kind of question into nonsense. One of the ways, however, this non-psychological 'I' emerges (as a local, not a metaphysical limit) is in the failure o f language games. There are a number o f ways in which language games fail and succeed. The peristalsis o f this movement in and out of language games describes a kind of temporality enacting a kind of theological limit (one ofthe ways grammar becomes theology: ? 337). Another kind of language game failure, however, is philosophy understood as metaphysics:
Whenphilosophersuseaword-- "knowledge","being',"object","I", "proposition", "name" --and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language-game which is its original home? (PI? 116)
A lot rests on how "original home" is understood here, and how the appeal to ordinary language accommodates the different kinds o f sublimation o f the word "knowledge. " Knowledge can be sublimed in a theory of knowledge where we might presume the requirement for knowledge is absolute identity, or it can be sublimed as in Steven's use of "knew" (and "self' and "song" and "maker") in "The Idea of Order at Key West":
And when she sang, the sea, Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
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As we beheld her striding there alone, Knew that there was a world for her Except the one she sang and, singing made.
Wittgenstein suggests that the expressiveness o f poetry (as a version o f self-interpretation) resists the philosophical attempt to link necessity with essence as a way o f describing the conditions, the given, of our being human. 1To explore the relation between poetry and philosophy is to investigate the nature and role o f what counts as the given in poetry (a poem). Iunderstandsuchaninvestigationtomeanthatourpoeticuseoflanguage,our investment in language or poetry, articulates a relationship to the ontological limits (what is given as the real) in relation to which we live. The sense o f poetry would then be a function ofthis relationship, that is, its sense could be understood as meaningful or true, whatever these might mean, through the analysis and articulation o f this relationship and these limits).
What counts as a limit is continually at issue: "A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably" (PI ? 115). Philosophy, in Wittgenstein's hands, becomes a poetic response to what seems like logical necessity in order to break the hold these picture and false analogies have on us, and an attempt to present the correct (at least in particular circumstances)grammarofourlanguageuse. Wittgensteinassertsthat"Philosophyought really to be written as a poetic composition" partly because it is a response to a logical aesthetic, at best, or, at worst, to a logical prejudice (CV24). But what kind of poetic composition?
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Wittgenstein utilizes a number o f recurrent metaphors and analogies throughout Investigations. ThedominatemetaphorsinthePreface,however,"[d]rawingtheirlight and currents o f the air/ [i]nto their mass and depth" revolve around 'nature' (and landscape). 2 The grammar o f 'nature' opens up a site o f contestation between metaphysics, in which nature can be understood as essence, and science, in which the natural is understood as defined by causal connections, and Wittgenstein's method, in which nature describes our ordinary embeddednesss within language, language games, human practices, and forms of life. Does Wittgenstein's use of nature, or let's say the
justification o f his philosophy described in the Preface, describe a poetics or philosophy of fragmentation that addresses the motives and effects ofthe fragmentation oftime, identity and world described in Keats, Adams, Eliot, Heidegger, and Joyce?
Wittgenstein provides a list of many of the subjects of his Investigations in the preface: "[t]heconceptsofmeaning,ofunderstanding,ofaproposition,oflogic,the foundations of mathematics, states of consciousness, and other things. " This is a description ofphilosophy that clanks into the vagueness of "other things" [undAnderes] in a way exactly at odds to the demands oflogicjustifying these other problems as philosophical problems. The anti-climax ofthese "other things" can be read as a diminishment or a promise. What are these other things, at least? Do we imagine that
thinking can be described by a list of traditional things to think about?
These philosophical subjects do not form a given set ofquestions and responses,
determined by clear conceptual boundaries, towards which someone thinks. Investigations could never have been called 'The Problem ofMeaning' or 'Of
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Understanding'or 'Logical Propositions'and so on. It consists of"the precipitate of PhilosophicalInvestigationunified not by a specific subject (although there are rough limits: o f Wittgenstein's two major concerns it concerns the philosophy o f psychology more than the philosophy o f mathematics, but this is a way o f saying it concerns the limits ofthe mind as opposed to the limits oftruth). A precipitate [Niederschlag] is a kind of resultoreffect,atraceofthinkingthatisitselfanotherformofinvestigation. Thevery first sentence of the Preface, therefore, describes the kind of self-reflexive form organizing the book. The investigation ofthese subjects takes place from within the language of these problems. And thus this investigation is another version o f this language (not the language of theory, however, but a description of how one might be gripped by how or why something means, for example). Each remark, therefore, remarks on itself as a redescription of a previous picture (this is one way of explaining why Investigations
begins with a quotation, a picture of language-learning, from Augustine). How does this self-reflection take place?
Wittgenstein's philosophical self-reflection proceeds through the invention of primitive and specialized language games as objects o f comparison with our misleading and our everyday language games, through the description of our ordinary usage of language, through metaphors and analogies, through grammatical jokes, and so on. He pressures those points or moments when a language game fails (the point at which we start to theorize for example). This pressure shifts incoherence not simply back into coherence but from one point of incoherence to another, describing the distinctions in our languageusageastheshiftinglimitsbetweenlanguagegames. Oneoftheways
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Wittgenstein describes these limits is as and through invented "intermediate cases": language games that simplify an aspect o f our use in order to highlight the logic o f our ordinaryusage. Hesays
A main source o f our failure to understand is that we do not command a clear view oftheuseofourwords. --Ourgrammarislackinginthissortofperspicuity. A perspicuous representation produces just that understanding which consists in 'seeing connexions'. (PI? 122)
These connections are made visible by intermediate cases because they sketch the limit of the frame through which we view something in relation to another frame: "We predicate ofthe thing what lies in the method of representing it. Impressed by the possibility of a comparison, we think we are perceiving a state ofaffairs ofthe highest generality" (PI? 104). In what sense is language or the world fragmented? Our language games or rather their grammar provide frames through and in which we and the world are figured as sensible. Investigatingthegrammar(thelogicoraestheticsofourusage)ofourlanguage means to make these frames visible, to configure language as a complex set o f shifting frames. This in effect means to display our language as a set o f fragments within which and in relation to which we figure ourselves and the world.
Wittgenstein suggests that the kind of necessity that can lead to Kant's transcendental deduction, where the question is what is necessary for cognition or knowing to be possible, can not be described or captured in rules (that is, this necessity cannot be said). The problem of knowledge is translated into how we understand language. The site o f this understanding is within or in relation to language games.
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Wittgenstein explores the nature of how words function within these language games, in a typical self-reflexive move, by describing the grammar o f the word 'game' in order to show that it has no essence, but is rather part ofa complex set ofuses that mark any particular use o f 'game' (as in 'a game o f chess') as related to another usage (a guessing game or football) as if by family resemblance. Wittgenstein distinguishes between the demands of philosophy for the definition or the essence of concepts and our everyday use of concepts in differing degrees ofexactitude and vagueness. If one looks at the examples of how we use a word like 'game' to describe our games we cannot find nor describe the essence of being a game, nor can we determine or describe the essential criteria for using the word 'game'. We find instead "family resemblance"; "for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross [kreuzen] in the same way. --And I shall say: 'games' form a family"(PI? 67). Ifwords"haveafamilyofmeanings"(PI? 77),thenonecannotdiscover an essential meaning o f a word.
Meaning is not a function o f a word having a particular meaning or essence which we then grasp. He suggests that the "concept of a game is unbounded", that what a game is cannot be determined by a rule or expressed as an essence (gameness).
The interlocutor responds, "But then the use o f the word is unregulated, the 'game' we play with it is unregulated. " This assertion is answered by, "It is not everywhere circumscribed by rules; but no more are there any rules for how high one
throws the ball in tennis, or how hard; yet tennis is a game for all that and has rules too" (PI? 68). One can imagine that a coach might invent rules for how high and hard to throw
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a tennis ball--but would this rule have to include a description ofwhen it is allowed to throw a tennis ball and not hit it with a racket? Even if invented these rules do not determine the rules that make tennis a game--but are really rules for a particular player in relation to his coach. The game will not be forfeit ifthe player breaks these rules of serving (even if he loses the point). One could also describe the laws of physics (which are themselves descriptions) as rules determining what kind of games can be played. Within this picture the laws of physics function as ontological limits (along with our
biology, the construction of the court, the economics that makes such courts and such games [or leisure] possible, and so on). We can not ask, sensibly, however, how the relation between physics and human biology makes tennis possible as a human activity which we call 'a game. ' We can ask what makes the activities we perform in playing tennis possible, but the concept o f 'game' is not meaningful as an expression o f physics or biology. Learning a word is always learning a language, or rather one must already function within language games in order to understand what counts as a word let alone whatitmeans. Thismeansthatonealwaysfindsoneselfwithinlanguagebecauseoneis always within a human form oflife.
In dictation to Alice Ambrose, Wittgenstein claims that "In philosophy matters are not simple enough for us to say 'Let's get a rough idea', for we do not know the country except by knowing the connections between the roads. So I suggest repetition as a means of surveying the connections. " Investigations consists of following and escaping these roads (or paths) in a search for clarity:
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The same or almost the same points were always being approached afresh from different directions, and new sketches made. Very many ofthese were badly drawn or uncharacteristic, marked by all the defects of a weak draughtsman. And when they were rejected a number oftolerable ones were left, which now had to be arranged and sometimes cut down, so that ifyou looked at them you could get a picture o f the landscape. Thus this book is really only an album, (ix)
The "result" of his Investigations of family resemblance shows that our uses of a word (or words), the language games in which they function, describe "a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similaritiesindetail"(PI? 66). Thislandscapeofcriss-crossingpathsleadstoconfusion: "Language is a labyrinth of paths. You approach from one side and know your way about; you approach the same place from another side and you no longer know your way about"(PI? 203). I f these paths are language games, then how 'consciousness' means (or appears) in the sentence "I was conscious of my fault" is not the same as in "The patient regainedconsciousnessatthreea. m. " Istheproblemofconsciousnessalwaysaddressed by the word "consciousness"?
The degree o f vagueness and clarity in our use o f words is not stable. This instability undermines the picture o f learning language as learning essences or names. Such learning takes place already within language: "nothing has so far been done, when a thinghasbeennamed. Ithasnotevengotanameexceptinthelanguagegame. Thisis what Frege meant too, when he said that a word had meaning only as part of a sentence" (PI? 49). Wittgenstein analogizes philosophy's attempt to stabilize meaning as the demand
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tosketchasharplydefinedpicture"corresponding"toablurredone. . . ifthe colours in the original merge without a hint o f any outline won't it become a hopeless task to draw a sharp picture corresponding to the blurred one? Won't you then have to say: "Here I might just as well draw a circle or heart as a rectangle, for all the colours merge. " Anything--and nothing--is right. --And this is the position you are in ifyou look for definitions corresponding to our concepts of aesthetics or ethics. (PI? 77)
Wittgenstein's analogy describes an incommensurability between a demand o f clarity associated with a method of drawing and the object to be represented. The fact that color and shape are related as visual properties o f objects (forms which our eye is built to recognize or construct) suggests that such an incommensurability should be resolvable. The contradiction, however, is a grammatical one.
Wittgenstein extends this grammatical incommensurability to aesthetics and ethics. He claims that definitions do not capture our aesthetic and ethical concepts. While this is unsurprising for words it might seem surprising for art and morals. Words seem both more amenable to definition (one can give a list o f common usages), but because one understands that one can use language often without being able to give definitions of the words one uses (a definition of'the', for example), the limits ofdefinition are obvious. Moral and aesthetic definitions are seldom understood as descriptions (as is a definition of a word), but more often than not as prescriptions (moral maxims or proverbs). This is confusing. Moral and aesthetic definitions are interpretations of our practices within particular communities (whether we think that this implies a relativism or not one should
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still be able to recognize that morality and art arejudgments of actions or of particular cases). The meaning ofthese interpretations orjudgments cannot be encapsulated in a definition ofthe objects ofjudgment, but onlyinthe process ofmaking thejudgment. We cannot say what is good, but only how it is good. Would the criteria for particular
judgments constitute a definition? Sometimes colored squares form lines o f demarcation between them, and sometimes they do not. There are always questions about application. Unlike in the Tractates, in Philosophical Investigations this incommensurability is
not a dividing line between language and silence. In some cases our confusion is a functionofmisappliedcriteria. Wittgensteinaskshimself(oranyone)tocompare knowing and saying in the following cases:
how many feet high Mont Blanc is-- how the word "game" is used-- how a clarinet sounds.
One's initial comparison might conclude that one cannot say what a clarinet sounds like, but one can both know and say how high Mont Blanc is. Wittgenstein, however, says that "if you are surprised that one can know something and not be able to say it, you are perhaps thinking of a case like the first. Certainly not of one like the third"(78). Of course we cannot say how a clarinet sounds. Our failure is surprising if we imagine that knowing this sound is like knowing the height o f a mountain.
Incommensurability of one kind arises ifwe fail to recognize the limits of our mediaofdescriptionandrepresentation. Theselimitationsaretiedtotheformsofour
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sensoryexperience. Languageseemstoofferthepossibilityofsynesthasia,andsuch synesthasia seems to describe who we are as the nexus ofour sensory inputs.
Describe the aroma of coffee. --Why can't it be done? Do we lack the words? And for what are words lacking? --But whence comes the idea that such a description must after all be possible? Have you ever felt the lack o f such a description? Have you ever tried to describe the aroma and not succeeded?
(PI? 610)
Why do we want our descriptions to be reenactments or reanimations? Language might be a form o f memory, but it is not only that. We want to reenact the memory o f the thing as if it were its own memory that is enacted in our language. Description is confused with animation, where the drive toward an adequate description o f my experience can only be satisfied by the animation o f this experience within language.
The distance between Wittgenstein's intentions (temptations, requirements, sublimations) and the intentions of his sketches is a form of self-reflection, the discovery of an interiority in or between language and the world. This is to say that one form of self-reflection is the expression of self-reflection as a metaphor of language:
Suppose we expressed the fact that a man had an intention by saying "He as it were said to himself, 'I will. . . . '" --That is the picture. And now I want to know: how does one employ the expression "as it were to say something to oneself'? For it does not mean: to say something to oneself. (PI? 658)
The subjunctive "as it were" provides the possibility for intention to be mapped into 'saying something to oneself, and thus pictures an intention or willing as a self-reflexive
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loopbetweenanagentsaying,an'I',andadescriptionofintention('Iwill. . . '). This circle wants to collapse the act of willing into the description of content that is what is willed. TheTractarianpictureofthewillseparatesthisactionintothenonsenseofthe metaphysicalT andthecontentoftheworld. IntheTractatusthewillentailsonekindof limit to the world:
6. 423 O f the will as the subject o f the ethical we cannot speak.
And the will as a phenomenon is only ofinterest to psychology.
6. 43 If good or bad willing changes the world, it can only change the limits of the world, not the facts; not the things that can be expressed in language.
In brief, the world must thereby become quite another. It must so to speak wax or wane as a whole.
The will enacts values andjudgments (determining the world as happy or unhappy) and thus is not a part of the world, which is "the totality of facts"(l. 1). The will is therefore not the will, not a thing or state or organ at all, but the form or meaning of the world. If weignoremostofthedifficultyandcomplexityof thispictureofthewill,wecanatleast see that such a picture is also a response to this picture of self-reflexive commentary--a disengagement between the agent and the description. The first wants to configure the 'I' as language and the other wants to configure the 'I' beyond language. For Wittgenstein, in Investigations, both are confusions.
Wittgenstein describes three different kinds (or agents) of intention. The first is described by and in the sketching of different versions or views of language (of meaning, understanding, logic, mathematics, consciousness and so on). . This sketching is the
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precipitate, which he then intends to organize as a part o f a further sketching (making clear):
It was my intention at first to bring all this together in a book whose form I pictured differently at different times. But the essential thing was that the thoughts should proceed from one subject to another in a natural order and without breaks.
Whether a failure o f will or understanding his initial intentions are unsuccessful because the sketches resist his intentions. In this resistance they express a kind of will or intention oftheirown. TheyareanimatedbecausethesubjectiveforceofWittgenstein'sintentions cannot form these remarks as objects. This is because these fragments are not objects, in spite of being precipitates of his thinking. Forming all of his remarks in a continuous whole would mean to configure them under the aspect of a philosophical thesis, and thus asaworldwhoselimitonlycontainsan'I'understoodasanexpressionofthisthesis. For Wittgenstein, however, no such totality is possible because we can neither get outside of ourselves, as an T to be configured under an aspect, or outside ofthe world, sub species
aetemitatis.
There seems to be a separation or a distance between my willing and my doing, and this distance must be traversed, and that traversal would require willing myself to move--and thus I am forced to will willing. If T am not myself'my will' how do I will my willing? Or how is my will mine? Wittgenstein argues that these questions are senseless: "I can't will willing; that is, it makes no sense to speak of willing willing" (PI? 163); to willing willing is to fall into an infinite regress.
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To say "When I raise my arm 'voluntarily' I do not use any instrument to bring the movement about. My wish is not such an instrument either"(PI? 614) is to say against Platothatthebodyisnotaninstrumentofthesoul. Willingasavoluntaryactionisthe animating principle ofbeing human, what Aquinas calls the rational soul. If the will is not an instrument then it is an action; but an action is not the will but the manifestation ofthe willaswalking,talkingetc. (PI? 615). Wecansay,however,thatthewillisan interpretation o f an action that highlights the agency involved in the action. The statement 'I will myself to walk' is an interpretation o f the fact that I walked after breaking my leg. The concept o f the will, however, has a causal function (or at least force): 'I walked because I willed myselfto walk. ' Such a causal concept is more like an animating principle accompanying any action not determined by instinct or by our autonomous nervous system (even being under someone else's will must be accompanied by my willing intheirname). Theconceptofthewill,whateveritsontologicalstatus,collapsesacausal function into an interpretive function as an aspect (or even an entity) o f the mind or o f personhood (to not have a will of one's own is to be an automaton or can be given as an excuse for acting outside of human obligations):
Why do I want to tell him about an intention too, as well as telling him what I did? --Not because the intention was also something which was going on at that time. But because I want to tell him something about myself, which goes beyond what happened at that time.
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I reveal to him something o f myself when I tell him what I was going to do. -- Not, however, on grounds o f self-observation, but by way o f a response (it might also be called an intuition). (PI? 659)
What Wittgenstein reveals in his intention to shape his book into a natural order is something about himself, about his attachment to the philosophical uses o f 'essential' and 'natural order'. The variety of forms he imagined for his book were all dictated by an essence, by the requirement that the text not form only local continuities punctuated by suddenjumps. Wittgenstein's description ofthe Investigations sets offthis demand for a natural order as his own demand. This is a confession. The demands o f this intention and
this natural order suggest that the Investigations is both a failure and unnatural. The ideals expressed by this intention is a putative requirement or criteria assumed to describe the truth of any investigation.
Wittgenstein describes his "failure", and in this offers a justification for Investigations' current form. He claims to have attempted to construct a 'natural order' by 'welding together' [. zusammenzuschweifien] his remarks into "such a whole"[solchen Ganz]. Such welding produced a 'crippled' text: "my thoughts were soon crippled if I tried to force them on in any single direction against their natural inclination [natiirliche Neigung]. " The attempt to produce "a natural order without breaks" generates instead a crippled, in this sense, degenerate artificial being? or society? ofthoughts. The natural order o f the putative whole is opposed to the "natural inclination" o f the fragments, which gain a kind of organic animateness.
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A 'natural inclination' figures these fragments with a nature. This nature is not a picture of essential being (or identity) or even proximate cause (or logical necessity). These fragments have 'natural inclinations' within an interpretation comparing their fragmentation with the ideal of natural order. Such an interpretation works out the grammar o f 'nature' for a whole, limited totality or universal, and for particulars, thoughts, examples. The details of language and thought conflict with the demands of logicalorder: "Themorenarrowlyweexamineactuallanguage,thesharperbecomesthe conflict between it and our requirement. (For the crystalline purity of logic was, of course, not a result o f investigation: it was a requirement)" (PI? 107). The crystalline
purity o f logic, a super-order, is the sublimation o f logic into 'the bottom o f all sciences. -- Forlogicalinvestigationexploresthenature(Wesen)ofallthings. Itseekstoseetothe bottom of things and is not meant to concern itselfwhether what happens is this or that" (PI? 89). Logic is simultaneously the universal form (sublimed) and the essence (the bottom) o f all things. Logic does not pursue "Das Wesen aller Dinge" [the essence (nature) o f all things] in "Tatsachen des Naturgeschehens" [the facts of natural occurrences] nor in the "causal connexions" o f science. Wittgenstein understands logic to be, as Frege argued, independent o f psychology (and thus o f the empirical facts that Mill and the early Husserl grounded in logical and mathematical relations). Wittgenstein, however, develops this independence away from ideal language Frege posited to correct the errors o f ordinary language and from the quasi-facts o f new logical discoveries:
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it is, rather, ofthe essence (Wesen) ofour investigation that we do not seek to learn anything new by it. We want to understand something that is already in plain view. For this is what we seem in some sense not to understand. (PI? 89)
"Der Natur der Untersuchung" and "unsere Untersuchung wesentliche" lies neither in a 'natural order" nor in an essence that would serve as an answer to 'what is a proposition? ', 'what is a word? ', 'what is language? ', etc. Wittgenstein's Investigations "are trying to understand the essence o f language--its function, its structure" (PI? 92). This essence is "something that already lies open to view and that becomes surveyable by a rearrangement".
