The nature o f the
investigation
"compels us to travel over a wide field o f thought criss-cross in every direction.
Brett Bourbon - 1996 - Constructing a Replacement for the Soul
(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". It is not something that "lies beneath the surface" (PI? 92), nor in
phenomena,norinthepenetrationofphenomena(PI? 90). Itisdirected,"asonemight say, towards the1possibilities' ofphenomena" (PI? 90). What are these possibilities, or rather how are we to understand this invocation o f Kant and his transcendental deduction in relation to the analysis o f grammar and the construction o f language games that constitutes Wittgenstein's method? These possibilities function and exist as the form our language and perception and thinking. These possibilities are the enveloping possibilities determinedbytheworldandourinvolvementinit. Thisisnotatranscendentaldeduction to determine the synthetic a priori given ofour own mind; even ifwe might posit a mind
by determining a set o f possibilities--these possibilities constitute limits within which we make sense, they are not constitutive forms o f our mind as in Kant; one cannot determine whetherthesepossibilitiesareexternalorinternalbecausetheselimitsareneither. They are, instead, objective in Frege's sense in which the equator o f the earth is objective although not actual. 3
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? The resistance these fragments mount against the welding into a natural order is in "thevery natureoftheinvestigation[NaturderUntersuchungIs'theverynatureof the investigation' the same as the 'natural inclination' o f these remarks? Do we say that our writing expresses our thinking? Or is writing our thinking? The whole in which these fragments work is not in relation to the imagined ideal o f a natural order without breaks, but within the investigation: 'I have written down all these thoughts as remarks . . . . I sometime make a sudden change, jumping. . . '.
Does the animation o f these fragments describe how the inanimate is animated for human beings through our awareness ofthe incompletion ofour lives? Ifthis animation does not describe a mind, how does the transformation o f language and sentences into things that function, act, incline, etc. express the workings and the form(s) of our life and ofournaturalhistory? AlthoughIwillanswerthisquestionmorefullyinthenextsection, a preliminary answer would be that our animation is at least partially a grammatical effect (an organization o f a grammatical 'I' within a temporal order). The nature of the investigation and the natural inclination ofthese fragments ofthought compel 'us',
together in this thinking, to enter into another picture of nature:
For this compels us to travel over a wide field ofthought criss-cross in every direction. --The philosophical remarks in this book are, as it were, a number of sketches o f landscape which were made in the course o f these long and involved joumeyings. (bc)
The natural inclination of a thought, the form of its links, the grammar of its expression, its grammatical inclination, the unfolding of its logic is limited by the grammar of a particular
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? setofconcepts. Lookedatgrammatically,therefore,noparticularconceptcanbeself- standing. Putting any interpretive weight on a picture or a concept will create a gap between the scope of this picture or concept and the grammatical limits of the language articulatedasandinourlanguagegames. Thisisthespacewhichwefillwithanalogies and in which philosophy works (or does not).
The nature o f the investigation "compels us to travel over a wide field o f thought criss-cross in every direction. " How can the nature o f the investigation compel? And this compulsion from one Natur sends us into another, a wide field, a landscape. The continuity ofthe book is a function ofthis common landscape and thisjourneying, such that the 'I' thatjourneys functions as the limit ofthese sketches. Thisjourney is not
linear: the text was edited, reduced, and continually rearranged. This arrangement serves as the main constituent of thinking the ordinary into clarity, overcoming the disguises of our grammar and our forgetfulness of the obvious. Why should we be so forgetful? "The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have alwaysknown"(PI? 109). IfIamremindedofsomethingIamnotrelearningit. IfIam reminded about how I am riding my bike, I might find myself slipping off the pedals. Or I
might feel amazed that I am riding at all, that I learned to go so fast on two wheels, and in this amazement I might look around me and feel a greater amazement in the fact ofthe road and the sky and at life. Each moment of self-reflection can itselfgo in either direction: toward paralysis or awe and joy.
We cannot see the landscape at all as a landscape without these sketches. Such sketches illustrate our involvement with language, that is, they illustrate us. The landscape
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? of language is neither inside nor outside what we are. These sketches are one way of constituting ourselves as something at all. This is a way o f saying that self-reflection is a peculiar kind o f limit.
Wittgenstein pictures us as flies:
What is your aim in philosophy? - To shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle. (PI? 309)
A fly in its bottle is an image of nature contained. But do we think that, as an image for philosophy, we have made this bottle and translated ourselves into some beyond so that we do not see our making. Maybe such making is literature and such forgetfulness is what Derrida means by philosophy's denial of writing, in which case we have translated ourselves into this fly. A clear picture ofthe trap only allows our translated and reduced form, the 'I' of our grammar, to escape. The trap itself, pointing as it does to some mysterious purpose, only shows our transcendent presence. But this is not a metaphysical transcendence,andwearenotleftwithTractariansilence. Thistranscendentpointis something like metaphoric or aesthetic transcendence. It is what is captured in the phrase "the nature ofthe investigation. " This nature is our ordinary involvement in our world. "The aspect o f things that are most important for us are hidden because o f their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something --because it is always before one's eyes)" (129). How is this importance determined? or known at all or as 'importance'?
The fly-bottle forms a limit, a picture of our world as if within a clear sphere, but this limit does not act to distort what we see (or let's say minimally) but rather to restrict
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? the scope of our world. We cannot see the glass because we have no way of contrasting it with what we see:
We predicate of the thing what lies in the method of representing it. Impressed by the possibility o f a comparison, we think we are perceiving a state o f affairs o f the highest generality. (PI? 104)
One thinks that one is tracing the outline ofthe thing's nature over and over again,
and one is merely tracing round the frame though which we look at it. (PI? 114) This frame expresses itselfas a necessity, a must, that confuses the requirements or the criteria organizing a picture or a language game with the nature of what we see. We forget the distance between our descriptions and what is because we fail to recognize our involvement within these descriptions. This is also a lesson ofFinnegans Wake: "Wipe your glosses with what you know" (304. F3). Neither the glosses (interpretive frames and explanatory emendations) nor what is seen constitutes knowledge (although they may constitute knowing). This knowledge is something like 'enveloping facts' and thus suggests that not only does it form the context o f our seeing (that is our knowing functions through and within what we already know) but what we know functions as the corrective means by which we enter particular language games or locally defined
epistemes. )
An aspect (how we see something, a cube, a face, our language, ourselves) and an
image (the thing presented) can be seen as aspects or images, as embedded interpretations of each other. Wittgenstein calls them akin, and then in a subtle form of self-reflection
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? describes seeing this kinship as both the result of imagination, and thus o f creation or interpretation, and ofperception, and thus ofpresentation, that which is given: "Doesn't it take imagination to hear something as a variation on a particular theme? And yet one is perceiving something in so hearing it" (PI p. 213). There is a limit, however, to what I am calling here 'embedded interpretation. ' Both "[s]eeing an aspect" and imagining are subject to the will. There is such an order as "Imagine this", and also: "now see the figure likethis";butnot:"Nowseethisleafgreen. " Thefactthatweseethegreenofaleafcan
bedescribed,andinthiscaseexplained,byphysicsandourbiology. Thismightjustify Wittgenstein's claim from a page before that "To interpret is to think, to do something; seeing is a state". When he says a few remarks latter that the concept of an aspect ('I am now seeing it as . . . ") is akin to imagining and is a form of seeing, and in both cases is subject to the will, he seems to have contradicted his initial claim that seeing is not thinking but a state. This contradiction follows from exploring the grammar o f 'seeing an aspect', a function of the family resemblance between meanings of words. But the effect of this contradiction or multiplicity is the demand that the sense of these two remarks be
justified in relation to the other. This is not the same justification for the fragmented character of the text as a whole, or of any particular fragment or set of remarks. It is akin, but this justification describes as the limit o f these fragments the journeying and the ordinariness of our involvement in the world (form of life). It is a picture of this fragmentationfromtheinside. Thisinsideisthe'I'asembodiedwithinourlanguage games and form of life. This 'I' labels our involvement within language games, in our form o f life, and in our interpretations allegories, concepts, metaphors, fly-bottles, engines,
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? and so on. The T cannot be pictured as anything at all; the conceptual structure o f our forms o f life are slippery and vague because we cannot get outside o f them. Language games, by comparison, are more defined because we slip in and out o f them.
Such an T , therefore, is a kind of aesthetic interpretation. Does this mean that we enter into language games through such interpretations? We animate language both through(1) theuseoflanguage,asiffromthelimitsofourformoflife,asafunctionof biology, within history and culture, and through (2) the functioning o f language, o f words withinsentencesandofsentenceswithinlargerholisims. This'I'isfiguredthroughthis use and within this functioning as a point o f shifting within the totalities o f sentences, metaphors, language games, fictions, worlds, form(s) of life. We can find ourselves both
within and outside of language games. Language games can function within our form of life (we can use them) or our form of life can be read under the aspect of such games (where our form of life can seem constituted by [a] language game[s], and in this sense these gamesfunction).
"When I read a poem or narrative with feeling, surely something goes on in me which does not go on when I merely skim the lines for information. " --What processes am I alluding to? --The sentences have a different ring. I pay careful attentiontomyintonation. Sometimesawordhasthewrongintonation,I emphasize it too much or too little. I notice this and shew it in my face. I might later talk about my reading in detail, for example about the mistakes in my tone of voice. Sometimes a picture, as it were an illustration, comes to me. And this seems to help me read with the correct expression. And I could mention a good
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? deal more o f the same kind. --I can also give a word a tone o f voice which brings out the meaning ofthe rest, almost as ifthis word were a picture ofthe whole thing. (PI p. 214)
If a picture can model my speaking of a poem, then the picture illustrates the poem in the same way in which my reading it does. If a poem 'moves me', such movement is not a processthat"goesoninme",butratheramarkofhowIinhabitthislanguage. This inhabitation, however, is an interpretation, that is an illustration ofthe poem. Do the fragments ofInvestigations give 'a word a tone ofvoice which brings out the meaning of the rest'? The totality of language is present in every sentence. This presence is not a proof or a justification of the fragment as it is in the Tractaius (It is the characteristic mark o f logical propositions that one can perceive in the symbol alone that they are true; and
this fact contains the whole philosophy of logic" [6. 113; see also 5. 47]) or by the criterion Keats gives for a poem ("They will explain themselves-- as all poems should do without any comment [2 January 1818])4(This is a way of construing the romantacism of logic). These fragments function as both interpretations or illustrations (sketches) ofthe landscape o f our language and ourselves and as expressions o f an aspect o f our language and ourselves. The limit of interpretation is determined by our involvement in our language not by any special form of words. This involvement might be dictated, more or less, by circumstances or context, but it remains a function of my involvement:
I have a theme played to me several times and each time in a slower tempo. In the end I say "Now it's right", or "Now at last it's a march", "Now at last it's a dance". --The same tone ofvoice expresses the dawning ofaspect. (PI p. 206)
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? This tone ofvoice marking a recognition ofa criterion or a model in a particular performance (an example) expresses the involvement within the forms o f experience that Wittgenstein expresses when he asserts that he will only accept as his own property, his ownvoice,thoseideasthatbearhisstamp,histone: "Ifmyremarksdonotbearastamp which marks them as mine, --I do not wish to lay any further claim to them as my property"(x). Tosayherecognizeshimselfinhiswork(let'ssayasanexpressionofhis intentions) like he recognizes a march in music is not meant to describe an argument between a picture and an example. Does he say 'I could have written these words'? Or when he reads his words does he inhabit them as if expressing his beliefthat X? Do we recognize Wittgenstein's hand in his words as we might recognize his face in a picture?
What constitutes language as property, especially for a philosopher famous for arguingfortheessentialpublicnatureoflanguage? Thisclaimofownership,or renouncing o f ownership, is partly a response to his own vanity, as he claims, and to the distorted theft o f his voice:
Up to a short time ago I had really given up the idea o f publishing my work in my lifetime. It used, indeed, to be revived from time to time: mainly because I was obliged to learn that my results (which I had communicated in lectures, typescripts and discussions), variously misunderstood, more or less mangle or watered down, were in circulation. This stung my vanity and I had difficulty in quieting it. (ix-x)
I do not want to investigate the publishing history surrounding his work, nor the psycho- dynamics o f intellectual pride and power in Wittgenstein's conception o f teaching and thinking. One can at least suggest that his vanity is also a function o f his concern that
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? thoughts be properly expressed, or even that what constitutes truth is as much (or more) a function of expression than of the content of any particular claim. In reading Wittgenstein one should always ask what is the difference between an example or a metaphor and an argumentoraclaim. Howandwhereonemakesthesedistinctionsoftenconstitutes thinking for Wittgenstein. This is one way of understanding "What I am looking for is the grammatical difference" (PI p. 185). In Wittgenstein's philosophy o f distinction and expression (or form) misrepresentation is a greater failure than the mangled theft of his ideasmightatfirstseem. ItisalsotruethathedidnotpublishtheInvestigationsinhis lifetime. Thisultimateresistancetopublicationbearssomescrutiny. Initselfitisa statement about what and how philosophy functions within the impersonal relations created in the modem university and in publishing. But the importance o f this resistance is also linked to his use of remarks and fragments. He says,
I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble o f thinking. 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.
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". It is not something that "lies beneath the surface" (PI? 92), nor in
phenomena,norinthepenetrationofphenomena(PI? 90). Itisdirected,"asonemight say, towards the1possibilities' ofphenomena" (PI? 90). What are these possibilities, or rather how are we to understand this invocation o f Kant and his transcendental deduction in relation to the analysis o f grammar and the construction o f language games that constitutes Wittgenstein's method? These possibilities function and exist as the form our language and perception and thinking. These possibilities are the enveloping possibilities determinedbytheworldandourinvolvementinit. Thisisnotatranscendentaldeduction to determine the synthetic a priori given ofour own mind; even ifwe might posit a mind
by determining a set o f possibilities--these possibilities constitute limits within which we make sense, they are not constitutive forms o f our mind as in Kant; one cannot determine whetherthesepossibilitiesareexternalorinternalbecausetheselimitsareneither. They are, instead, objective in Frege's sense in which the equator o f the earth is objective although not actual. 3
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? The resistance these fragments mount against the welding into a natural order is in "thevery natureoftheinvestigation[NaturderUntersuchungIs'theverynatureof the investigation' the same as the 'natural inclination' o f these remarks? Do we say that our writing expresses our thinking? Or is writing our thinking? The whole in which these fragments work is not in relation to the imagined ideal o f a natural order without breaks, but within the investigation: 'I have written down all these thoughts as remarks . . . . I sometime make a sudden change, jumping. . . '.
Does the animation o f these fragments describe how the inanimate is animated for human beings through our awareness ofthe incompletion ofour lives? Ifthis animation does not describe a mind, how does the transformation o f language and sentences into things that function, act, incline, etc. express the workings and the form(s) of our life and ofournaturalhistory? AlthoughIwillanswerthisquestionmorefullyinthenextsection, a preliminary answer would be that our animation is at least partially a grammatical effect (an organization o f a grammatical 'I' within a temporal order). The nature of the investigation and the natural inclination ofthese fragments ofthought compel 'us',
together in this thinking, to enter into another picture of nature:
For this compels us to travel over a wide field ofthought criss-cross in every direction. --The philosophical remarks in this book are, as it were, a number of sketches o f landscape which were made in the course o f these long and involved joumeyings. (bc)
The natural inclination of a thought, the form of its links, the grammar of its expression, its grammatical inclination, the unfolding of its logic is limited by the grammar of a particular
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? setofconcepts. Lookedatgrammatically,therefore,noparticularconceptcanbeself- standing. Putting any interpretive weight on a picture or a concept will create a gap between the scope of this picture or concept and the grammatical limits of the language articulatedasandinourlanguagegames. Thisisthespacewhichwefillwithanalogies and in which philosophy works (or does not).
The nature o f the investigation "compels us to travel over a wide field o f thought criss-cross in every direction. " How can the nature o f the investigation compel? And this compulsion from one Natur sends us into another, a wide field, a landscape. The continuity ofthe book is a function ofthis common landscape and thisjourneying, such that the 'I' thatjourneys functions as the limit ofthese sketches. Thisjourney is not
linear: the text was edited, reduced, and continually rearranged. This arrangement serves as the main constituent of thinking the ordinary into clarity, overcoming the disguises of our grammar and our forgetfulness of the obvious. Why should we be so forgetful? "The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have alwaysknown"(PI? 109). IfIamremindedofsomethingIamnotrelearningit. IfIam reminded about how I am riding my bike, I might find myself slipping off the pedals. Or I
might feel amazed that I am riding at all, that I learned to go so fast on two wheels, and in this amazement I might look around me and feel a greater amazement in the fact ofthe road and the sky and at life. Each moment of self-reflection can itselfgo in either direction: toward paralysis or awe and joy.
We cannot see the landscape at all as a landscape without these sketches. Such sketches illustrate our involvement with language, that is, they illustrate us. The landscape
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? of language is neither inside nor outside what we are. These sketches are one way of constituting ourselves as something at all. This is a way o f saying that self-reflection is a peculiar kind o f limit.
Wittgenstein pictures us as flies:
What is your aim in philosophy? - To shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle. (PI? 309)
A fly in its bottle is an image of nature contained. But do we think that, as an image for philosophy, we have made this bottle and translated ourselves into some beyond so that we do not see our making. Maybe such making is literature and such forgetfulness is what Derrida means by philosophy's denial of writing, in which case we have translated ourselves into this fly. A clear picture ofthe trap only allows our translated and reduced form, the 'I' of our grammar, to escape. The trap itself, pointing as it does to some mysterious purpose, only shows our transcendent presence. But this is not a metaphysical transcendence,andwearenotleftwithTractariansilence. Thistranscendentpointis something like metaphoric or aesthetic transcendence. It is what is captured in the phrase "the nature ofthe investigation. " This nature is our ordinary involvement in our world. "The aspect o f things that are most important for us are hidden because o f their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something --because it is always before one's eyes)" (129). How is this importance determined? or known at all or as 'importance'?
The fly-bottle forms a limit, a picture of our world as if within a clear sphere, but this limit does not act to distort what we see (or let's say minimally) but rather to restrict
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? the scope of our world. We cannot see the glass because we have no way of contrasting it with what we see:
We predicate of the thing what lies in the method of representing it. Impressed by the possibility o f a comparison, we think we are perceiving a state o f affairs o f the highest generality. (PI? 104)
One thinks that one is tracing the outline ofthe thing's nature over and over again,
and one is merely tracing round the frame though which we look at it. (PI? 114) This frame expresses itselfas a necessity, a must, that confuses the requirements or the criteria organizing a picture or a language game with the nature of what we see. We forget the distance between our descriptions and what is because we fail to recognize our involvement within these descriptions. This is also a lesson ofFinnegans Wake: "Wipe your glosses with what you know" (304. F3). Neither the glosses (interpretive frames and explanatory emendations) nor what is seen constitutes knowledge (although they may constitute knowing). This knowledge is something like 'enveloping facts' and thus suggests that not only does it form the context o f our seeing (that is our knowing functions through and within what we already know) but what we know functions as the corrective means by which we enter particular language games or locally defined
epistemes. )
An aspect (how we see something, a cube, a face, our language, ourselves) and an
image (the thing presented) can be seen as aspects or images, as embedded interpretations of each other. Wittgenstein calls them akin, and then in a subtle form of self-reflection
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? describes seeing this kinship as both the result of imagination, and thus o f creation or interpretation, and ofperception, and thus ofpresentation, that which is given: "Doesn't it take imagination to hear something as a variation on a particular theme? And yet one is perceiving something in so hearing it" (PI p. 213). There is a limit, however, to what I am calling here 'embedded interpretation. ' Both "[s]eeing an aspect" and imagining are subject to the will. There is such an order as "Imagine this", and also: "now see the figure likethis";butnot:"Nowseethisleafgreen. " Thefactthatweseethegreenofaleafcan
bedescribed,andinthiscaseexplained,byphysicsandourbiology. Thismightjustify Wittgenstein's claim from a page before that "To interpret is to think, to do something; seeing is a state". When he says a few remarks latter that the concept of an aspect ('I am now seeing it as . . . ") is akin to imagining and is a form of seeing, and in both cases is subject to the will, he seems to have contradicted his initial claim that seeing is not thinking but a state. This contradiction follows from exploring the grammar o f 'seeing an aspect', a function of the family resemblance between meanings of words. But the effect of this contradiction or multiplicity is the demand that the sense of these two remarks be
justified in relation to the other. This is not the same justification for the fragmented character of the text as a whole, or of any particular fragment or set of remarks. It is akin, but this justification describes as the limit o f these fragments the journeying and the ordinariness of our involvement in the world (form of life). It is a picture of this fragmentationfromtheinside. Thisinsideisthe'I'asembodiedwithinourlanguage games and form of life. This 'I' labels our involvement within language games, in our form o f life, and in our interpretations allegories, concepts, metaphors, fly-bottles, engines,
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? and so on. The T cannot be pictured as anything at all; the conceptual structure o f our forms o f life are slippery and vague because we cannot get outside o f them. Language games, by comparison, are more defined because we slip in and out o f them.
Such an T , therefore, is a kind of aesthetic interpretation. Does this mean that we enter into language games through such interpretations? We animate language both through(1) theuseoflanguage,asiffromthelimitsofourformoflife,asafunctionof biology, within history and culture, and through (2) the functioning o f language, o f words withinsentencesandofsentenceswithinlargerholisims. This'I'isfiguredthroughthis use and within this functioning as a point o f shifting within the totalities o f sentences, metaphors, language games, fictions, worlds, form(s) of life. We can find ourselves both
within and outside of language games. Language games can function within our form of life (we can use them) or our form of life can be read under the aspect of such games (where our form of life can seem constituted by [a] language game[s], and in this sense these gamesfunction).
"When I read a poem or narrative with feeling, surely something goes on in me which does not go on when I merely skim the lines for information. " --What processes am I alluding to? --The sentences have a different ring. I pay careful attentiontomyintonation. Sometimesawordhasthewrongintonation,I emphasize it too much or too little. I notice this and shew it in my face. I might later talk about my reading in detail, for example about the mistakes in my tone of voice. Sometimes a picture, as it were an illustration, comes to me. And this seems to help me read with the correct expression. And I could mention a good
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? deal more o f the same kind. --I can also give a word a tone o f voice which brings out the meaning ofthe rest, almost as ifthis word were a picture ofthe whole thing. (PI p. 214)
If a picture can model my speaking of a poem, then the picture illustrates the poem in the same way in which my reading it does. If a poem 'moves me', such movement is not a processthat"goesoninme",butratheramarkofhowIinhabitthislanguage. This inhabitation, however, is an interpretation, that is an illustration ofthe poem. Do the fragments ofInvestigations give 'a word a tone ofvoice which brings out the meaning of the rest'? The totality of language is present in every sentence. This presence is not a proof or a justification of the fragment as it is in the Tractaius (It is the characteristic mark o f logical propositions that one can perceive in the symbol alone that they are true; and
this fact contains the whole philosophy of logic" [6. 113; see also 5. 47]) or by the criterion Keats gives for a poem ("They will explain themselves-- as all poems should do without any comment [2 January 1818])4(This is a way of construing the romantacism of logic). These fragments function as both interpretations or illustrations (sketches) ofthe landscape o f our language and ourselves and as expressions o f an aspect o f our language and ourselves. The limit of interpretation is determined by our involvement in our language not by any special form of words. This involvement might be dictated, more or less, by circumstances or context, but it remains a function of my involvement:
I have a theme played to me several times and each time in a slower tempo. In the end I say "Now it's right", or "Now at last it's a march", "Now at last it's a dance". --The same tone ofvoice expresses the dawning ofaspect. (PI p. 206)
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? This tone ofvoice marking a recognition ofa criterion or a model in a particular performance (an example) expresses the involvement within the forms o f experience that Wittgenstein expresses when he asserts that he will only accept as his own property, his ownvoice,thoseideasthatbearhisstamp,histone: "Ifmyremarksdonotbearastamp which marks them as mine, --I do not wish to lay any further claim to them as my property"(x). Tosayherecognizeshimselfinhiswork(let'ssayasanexpressionofhis intentions) like he recognizes a march in music is not meant to describe an argument between a picture and an example. Does he say 'I could have written these words'? Or when he reads his words does he inhabit them as if expressing his beliefthat X? Do we recognize Wittgenstein's hand in his words as we might recognize his face in a picture?
What constitutes language as property, especially for a philosopher famous for arguingfortheessentialpublicnatureoflanguage? Thisclaimofownership,or renouncing o f ownership, is partly a response to his own vanity, as he claims, and to the distorted theft o f his voice:
Up to a short time ago I had really given up the idea o f publishing my work in my lifetime. It used, indeed, to be revived from time to time: mainly because I was obliged to learn that my results (which I had communicated in lectures, typescripts and discussions), variously misunderstood, more or less mangle or watered down, were in circulation. This stung my vanity and I had difficulty in quieting it. (ix-x)
I do not want to investigate the publishing history surrounding his work, nor the psycho- dynamics o f intellectual pride and power in Wittgenstein's conception o f teaching and thinking. One can at least suggest that his vanity is also a function o f his concern that
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? thoughts be properly expressed, or even that what constitutes truth is as much (or more) a function of expression than of the content of any particular claim. In reading Wittgenstein one should always ask what is the difference between an example or a metaphor and an argumentoraclaim. Howandwhereonemakesthesedistinctionsoftenconstitutes thinking for Wittgenstein. This is one way of understanding "What I am looking for is the grammatical difference" (PI p. 185). In Wittgenstein's philosophy o f distinction and expression (or form) misrepresentation is a greater failure than the mangled theft of his ideasmightatfirstseem. ItisalsotruethathedidnotpublishtheInvestigationsinhis lifetime. Thisultimateresistancetopublicationbearssomescrutiny. Initselfitisa statement about what and how philosophy functions within the impersonal relations created in the modem university and in publishing. But the importance o f this resistance is also linked to his use of remarks and fragments. He says,
I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble o f thinking. 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.
