heller - wittgenstein unphilosophical notes

MEN AND 1DEAS

Ludwig WittgensteinUnphilosophical Notes--By E~c~ HELLER

The hall-firs of life consumes only the sdect amo@ men.The rest stand in front of it, warm;rig their hands.

FRIEDR] CII HEBREL

WHATmanner of man was LudwigeWais~g~onStce~e ~;? answer, which is

vague, large, andtrue, is: a man of rarest genius. Of al words thatdefy definition--which may be, simply, allwords--genius is the most defiant. But how elsedescribe a man who was a logician of the firstorder; a writer of German prose abundant inintellectual passion and disciplined clarity (per-haos only talent is needed for writin r such nrosein any other language, but certainl,, gemus forwriting it in German); an engineer of greatpromise and some achievement; the architect ofa modern mansion; a gifted sculptor; a musicianwho very probably would have beck,me, had hechosen this career, a remarkable c~nductor; ahermit capable of enduring for long periods theutmost rigours of mind and loneliness; a richman who chosepoverty; a Cambridge professorwho thought and taught but neither lectured nordined?

He was also an Austrian who conqueredBritish philosophy; but this, as befits Austrianconquests, was due to a misunderstanding. Atleast he himself believed that it was so. Whenthe. pa.ges of the journal Mind were filled withvarlauons on his philosophical themes, hepraised a certain American detective-story maga-zine, and wondered how, with the offer of suchreading matter, "anyone can read Mind withall its impotence and bankruptcy." When his in-fluence at Oxford was at its height, he referredto it as "a philosophical desert" and as "the in-fluenza area." These are ironical exaggerations,but undoubtedly serious as expressions of Witt-genstein’s discontent.

Why should he have been so displeased withthe rble his thought played in contemporaryphilosophical circles? What was the source o£ hissuspicion that a misunderstanding was viciouslyat work in the proliferation of his views andmethods throughout the departments of philo-sophy? And if it was a misunderstanding, wasit avoidable? These questions raise a bigger one:what is the nature of philosophical opinion?

Tar occasion o/ these notes is t ~e recent appearance o/ Ludwig Wittgenstein’s xr~r rr~rsBROWN BOOI~S (Basil Blackwell, ~558), and Norman Malcolm’s rv~w~ w~r~o~s~"~N--^with a Biographical Sketch by Go.org Henrik yon Wright (Ox[ord University Press, ~958).*a~v~. ̂~r~ ~ow~ Boo~s, illuminaffngly prelaced by Mr. Rush Rhees, were dictated by Wittgen-stein to some o[ his pupils at various times between ~933 and z935. They are indispensable/orany study o/ the intellectual history that led, within the li/etlme o] the mature generation o/Anglo-Saxon philosophers, to a [undamental change in philosophical opinion---a break outwardlyless dramatic but probably more significant than that which occurred when Bertrand Russelland G. E. Moore banished the tery much "post"-Hegelian metaphysics o[ F. H. Bradley andBernard Bosanquet [rom the acad:mic scene.

It is the most strange characterirtic o] the new "revolution" that it was the same man, LudwigWittgenstein, who both per[ected the "old system" (in the r~^cxa~:vs ro¢ico-vmLosovmcus,finished by z9z8, first pubhshed in ~92z) and initiated its destruction (with vmrosovmc^r~rqvrsrI¢^’rxor~s, complete by s949, posthumously published in ~953). Mr. Malcolm’sgreatly assisted by Pro[essor yon ~Frlght’s in]ormative sketch, is a noble biographical document,the more moving by virtue o/its simplicity and affectionate restraint. It is/rom this book thatthe biographical re/erences o/my notes are taken. E. H.

40

PRODUCED 2003 BY UNZ.ORGELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED

Ludwig Wittgenstein

T H r R r are philosophies which, howeverdifficult they may be, it is in principle easy

to teach and to learn. Of course, not everyonecan teach or leain philosophy--as little as highermathematics; but the philosophies of certainphilosophers have this in common with highermathematics that they present the simple alter-native of being either understood or not under-stood. It is, in a final analysis, impossible tomisunderstand them. This is true of Aristotle,or St. Thomas Aquinas, or Descartes, or Locke,or Kant. Such philosophies are like mountains:you can climb to their tops or you can give up;or like weights: you can lift them or they defeatyou; and in either case you will know what hashappened and "where you are." But this is notso with the thought of Plato, or St. Augustine,or Pascal, or Kierkegaard, or Nietzsche. Theirphilosophies are like human faces on thefeatures of which are inscribed, disquietin 1 ,the destinies of souls; or like cities rich in ~iYs-

tory. "Do you understand Kant?" is a questionlike "Have you been to the summit of MontBlanc?" The answer is yes or no. "Do you un-derstand Nietzsche?" is like asking "Do ybuknow Rome?" The answer is simple only if youhave never been there. The trouble with Witt-genstein’s thinking is that it sometimes looksmore like Descartes’: you believe you can learnit as you learn logic or mathematics. But italmost always is more like Pascal’s: you may bequite sure you cannot. For to understand it onits own level is as much a matter of imaginationand character as it is one of "thinking." Itstemperature is of its essence, in its passion lies itsseriousness, the rhythm of its sentences are astelling as is that which they tell, and sometimesit is a semi-colon which marks the frontier be-tween a thought and a trivialit How is this?Are we speaking of an artist o~Y’a philosop,,h, er?We are speaking of Ludwig Wittgenstein. DerPhilosoph behandelt eine Frage; wie eine Kranl~-heit.’" It is a profound semi-colon, and not evenMiss Anscombe’s competent work as a translatorcould save the profundity: "The philosopher’streatment of a question is like the treatment ofan illness" is, by comparison, a flat apersu.

p r~ I L o s o v K v, for Wittgenstein, was not aprofession. It was a consuming passion; and

not just "a" passion, but the only possible formof his existence. The thought of losing his giftfor philosophy made him feel suicidal. He couldnot but have contempt for philosophers who"did" philosophy and, having done it, thoughtof other things:, of money, publication lists,academic advancements, university intrigues,love-affairs, or the Athenaeum--and thought ofthese things in a manner which showed evenmore clearly than the products of their thought

41that they had philosophised with much less thantheir whole person. Wittgenstein had no diffi-culty in detecting in their style of thinking,debating, or writing, the corruption of thedivided life, the painless jugglery with wordsand meanings, the shallow flirtation with depth,and the ear deaf to the command of authenticity.Thinking for him was as much a moral as anintellectual concern. In this lay his affinity withOtto Weininger, for whom he had great respect.The spectacle of the detachability of a thoughtfrom a man filled him with loathing and withan anger very much like that with which Rilkein the fourth of the Duino Elegies denounced,through the image of the dancer, the cursed non-identity between performer and performance:

... How grace/ully he moues!And yet he is disguised, a dressed-up philistine,Who will come home soon, entering through the

&itchen.1 cannot bear these mas&s, hal[-filled with life.

Had Wittgenstein ever cared to write abouthimself, this apparendy most "intellectual" ofphilosophers might have said:

I have at all times thought with my wholebody and my whole life. I do not know whatpurely intellectual problems are .... You knowthese things by way of thinking, yet your thoughtis not your experience but the reverberation ofthe experience of others; as your room trembleswhen a carriage passes. I am sitting in that car-riage, and often am the carriage itself.

This, however, was written by Nietzsche. Andit was Nietzsche whom he resembled in manyother ways: in his homelessness, his resdess wan-derings, his perpetual search for the exacdy rightconditions in which to work, his loneliness, hisasceticism, his need for affection and his shynessin giving it, his intellectual extremism whichdrove thought to the border of insanity, theelasticity of his style and (as we shall see) in onephilosophically most important respect. LikeNietzsche then, he knew that philosophicalopinion was not merely a matter of logicallydemonstrable rights or wrongs. This most rigor-ous logician was convinced that it was above alla matter of authenticity--and thus, in a sense,not at all of negotiable opinions. What assumedwith him so often the semblance of intolerableintellectual pride, was the demand, which hemade upon himself still more than upon others,for the absolutely authentic utterance. The ques-tion was not only "Is this opinion right orwrong?" but also "Is this or that person entitledto this or that opinion?" This lent to his mannerof debating the tone, at times, of an Old Testa-ment prophetic harshness: he would suddenly beseized by an uncontrollable desire to mete outintellectual punishment. He reacted to errors of


42 Erich Hellerjudgment as if they were sins of tie heart, andviolently denied opinions, which in themselves--,if this distinction were possible--might havebeen harmless enough or even ",:orrect"; anddenied them because they were untrue in the selfthat uttered them: they lacked th: sanction ofthe moral and intellectual pain suffc red on behalfof truth.

W I T T G E N $ T E I N, as Mr. Malcolm remem-

bers, once said, using a corr parison withswimming, that "just as one’s body has a naturaltendency towards the surface an¢ one has tomake an exertion to get to the bottom--so it iswith thinking." And in talking about the statureof a philosopher, he remarked "tha: the measureof a man’s greatness would be in terms of whathis work cost him." It is Kantian ethics appliedto the realm of thought: true moral goodnesswas for Kant a victory over natural inclination,the cosdier the better. Nietzsche too was, bycharacter and insight, such a Kantian moralistof the intellectual life; yet he, wl’o was nevermore ingenious than ’in producing the devas-tating argument against himself, could also saythis:

The labour involved in climbing a mountainis no measure of its height. But wh( re knowledgeis concerned, it is to be different; ;Lt least this iswhat we are told by some who c, msider them-selves initiates: the effort which a truth costs isto decide its value l This crazy morality isfounded upon the idea that "truths" are like theinstallations in a Swedish gymnasium, designedto tire one out--a morality of tht: mind’s ath-letics and gymnastic displays.

Perhaps it is a pity that Wittgens:ein was notthe man also to say things of this k nd. It mighthave lightened the burden of earnc st irritabilitycarried by many a contemporary ?hilosophicaldebate.

II

T I~ r appreciation of Wittgenstein as a personand thinker (and how misleading is this

"and"I) is bedevilled by a persistent opticaldelusion. The high moral pathos cf his life (inwhich his "legend" has already taken firm roots)seems at first glance to be unconne~ ted with thedrift and trend, the content and rrethod of hisphilosophical thought. Every page of Pascal orKierkegaard or Nietzsche at once c 3nveys, how-ever impersonal may be the subj.~ct-matter, asense of urgent personal involvement. But it is

~ossible for anyone but the most seasitively pre-isposed to read many pages of Wittgenstein’s

without suspecting that the ruthl:ss precisionand often apparently eccentric virtuosity of thisthinking, which has neither models nor parallels

!.n the history of philosophy, is anything but theresult of the utmost intellectual detachment. Itsfirst emotional effect upon the reader may wellbe one of exasperated melancholia--the effectwhich Robert Musil (not for nothing an Austriancontemporary of Wittgenstein’s) ascribes in TheMan Without Qualities to a certain thinker:

He had drawn the curtains and worked in thesubdued light of his room like an acrobat who,in an only half-illuminated circus tent and beforethe public is admitted, shows to a select audienceof experts his latest break-neck leaps ....

Yet Wittgenstein’s work is none the less suffusedwith authentic pathos, and will one day be seenas an integral part in the tragically self-destruc-tive design of European thought.

I F s v some miracle both European history andthought continue, then the future historians

of thought will be not a little puzzled by Witt-genstein. For nothing could be less predictablethan that a work which more de6ply than anyother affected contemporary Anglo-Saxon philo-sophy, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investiga-tions, should have as its motto a sentence fi:omthe classical comic playwright of Austria,Nestroy. Or that its philosophical author shouldhave experienced a kind of religious awakeningthanks to a performance of Die Kreuzel-schreiber by Anzengruber, a considerably lesserAustrian dramatist. However, these will beminor surprises, less important, certainly, thanProfessor von Wright’s perspicacious discoveryof the affinities between Wittgenstein’s mannerof thinking and writing and that of the greatx8th-century German aphorist Lichtenberg. Butof greater weight still would be the realisationthat the name of Wittgenstein marks the his-torical point at which, most unexpectedly, thecool, analytical intellect of British philosophymeets with those passions of mind and imagina-tion which we associate first with Nietzsche andthen, in manifold crystallisations, with suchAustrians as Otto Weininger, Adolf Loos, KarlKraus, Franz Kafka, and Robert Musil.

Like Otto Weininger, Wittgenstein believedin the surpassing ethical significance of thinking,and in thought as both a deeply personal andalmost religiously supra-personal dedication.With Adolf Loos he shared the radical rejectionof all ornamental comforts and decorative re-laxations of the mind, and the concentration onthe urest lines of the intellectual architecture;withPKarl the conviction anKraus, o£ inescap-able bond between the forms of living, thinking,feeling, and the forms of language (Wittgen-stein’s dictum, "Ethics and ~esthetics are one,"may serve as a perfect characterisation of KarlKraus’ artistic credo). As far as Kafka and


Ludwig WittgensteinMusil are concerned, a comparison between theirstyles of writing (and therefore modes of per-ception) and Wittgenstein’s would certainly beas fruitful as that between his and Lichtenberg’s;and the more revealing because there can be noquestion of influence beyond the anonymous andpeculiarly Austrian dispensations of the Zeit-grist, which even suggests that there is a familyresemblance between the logical structures,the motives and intentions, of Wittgenstein’sTractatus and those of SchSnberg’s musicaltheory--for SchSnberg too is guided by the con-viction that the "language" of his medium,music, has to be raised to that level of logicalnecessity which would eliminate all subjectiveaccidents. It is in such a constellation of mindsthat Wittgenstein is perhaps truly at home,whereas in t,h,e history of British philoso,p.hy hemay merely hold an important position.’ Thisat least is one way of accounting for the dis-comforts he suffered from the British philo-sophical climate and on a philosophical scenewhich so deceptively appeared to be largely ofhis own making.

W HAX are the motives and intentions ofWittgenstein’s philosophy? What is,

beyond and above its own philosophical declara-tions, the historical meaning of that "revolution"which changed the face of Anglo-Saxon philo-sophy in the course of Wittgenstein’s gradualmodification and final abandonment of some ofthe principles laid down in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus? Has it analogies with the revolu-tionary effects of other philosophies?

In his book, My Philosophical Development,Bertrand Russell engages in a bitter attack onthe author of Philosophical Investigations, abroadside which, if it is not damaging, is yetilluminating.* The man who was one of the firstm recognise Wittgenstein’s Tractatus as a workof philosophical genius (even if he interpreted ittoo exclusively as the culmination of his owndoctrine of "Logical Atomism") says now of thePhilosophical Investigations that he has notfound in it "anything interesting"--"I cannotunderstand why a whole school finds importantwisdom in its pages." He abhors the suggestion,which he believes to be implied in Wittgen-stein’s later work, "that the world of languagecan be quite divorced from the world of fact,"and suspects that such a view must render philo-sophical activity trivial ("at best, a slight helpto lexicographers, and at worst, an idle tea-tableamusement") by insidiously giving to "languagean untrammelled freedom which it has never

* See "Russell and Wittgenstein," in ENCOUNrZR,January, pp. 8, 9.

43hitherto enjoyed." He disagrees with thedisciples of Wittgenstein most radically whenthey tend to regard "as an outdated folly thedesire to understand the world"--as distinct, itwould seem, from their own desire to under-stand the workings of language. If incompre-hension can ever be significant, then this can besaid of Lord Russell’s estimate of PhilosophicalInvestigations. For he certainly knew what heattacked when once upon a time he victoriouslyfought. . the domineering influence of Bradley’stdeahsm, and also knew what he welcomedwhen Wittgenstein first sent him the Tractatus.But the later Wittgenstein is to him, on his ownconfession, "completely unintelligible." Thismight clearly show which of the two recentchanges in philosophical oudook--R,ussell’s dis-lodging of Bradley, or Wittgenstein s supersed-ing of Wittgenstein--is the more profound.

Bertrand Russell was at intellectual ease withBradley as well as with the Wittgenstein of theTractatus because both were, like he himself,philosophers thinking within the metaphysicaltradition of European philosophy. This goeswithout saying in the case of Bradley. In the caseof the Tractatus it may sound alarming. But it istrue to say that in its own way--and an exceed-ingly subtle way it is I--the Tractatus partici-pates in a pre-Kantian metaphysical faith: thatthere is, in however small an area of human un-derstanding, a pre-established correspondencebetween the cognitive faculties of man and thenature of the world. In other words: what manthinks and feels--and therefore says--about theworld, has a chance of being metaphysicallytrue. At a time when philosophers were still onintimate terms with God, this metaphysicalfaith found its luminously comprehensivedogma: God is no deceiver; He has created theworld and planted in man the desire to under-stand it; He has also endowed him with percep-tion and rationality, which man cannot helptaking for the servants of this desire. Could ithave been God’s intention to frustrate it fromthe outset by giving man nothing but theillusion of understanding? Is the creature madein His own image to be the eternal dupe of theuniverse? The simple faith that this cannot belies at the heart of even the most complex philo-sophical systems which ever since the I7th cen-tury have profoundly affected European thought.This faith is discernible behind the scholasticapparatus of Leibniz’s Pre-established Harmonyand Descartes’ Cogito ergo sum, those grandioseattempts logically to demonstrate the integralaccord between human thought and the truenature of Being. And it is the same faith inreason’s power, to "comprehend the wondrousarchitecture of the world," which inspires thegreat cosmic discoveries of that age. "Thanks be


44 Erich Hellerunto you, my Lord, our Creator, /~or grantingme insight into the beauty of your creation."Thus speaks Kepler in concluding The Har-mony of the Cosmos.

I X ~ s a far cry from Descartes to Wittgenstein’sTractatus. Yet there is an an,~le of vision

from which the Tractatus looks like a last vic-tory of the traditional metaphy.,ical faith: aPyrrhic victory.

Compared to the vast dominions that meta-physical thought had claimed in the past for itssettlements of truth, there is now hardly morethan a little province of "significa:at" speech ina vast area of silence. But with!n this catas-trophically narrowed space man can still confi-dently assert some truths about th~ world, utterwords the meaning of which is not imprisonedwithin themselves, and speak sent,:nces the sig-nificance of which is not whol.y embeddedwithin the flux of linguistic commerce and con-vention. No, there are still words ;~nd sentenceswhich are true in an absolute sense, reflect "that:which is the case," and picture Reality. Ofcourse, this ideal correspondence be :ween pictureand model, thought and world, language andreality, is not easily attained. Its co adifion is theobservance of the strictest logical xules. Thus itwill hardly ever occur in the actuality of humanspeech. Yet it is realised, nevertlteless, in theessence of language: indeed, it is its real mean-ing. True, in order to speak "essmtially" and"significantly," we must leave muc a unsaid. But:once we respond to the "atomic facts" (thebricks of the intelligible world) with "atomicpropositions" or their "truth-functional com-pounds" (concepts which Wittgenstein, consider-ably modifying and refining them, took overfrom Russell), our speech, and ’:herefore ourthought, is perfectly attuned to Reality: for"Logic is not a theory but a mirro :-reflection ofthe world." And although Wittgenstein cour-ageously insisted that in proposing this relation-ship between language and fact he iaimself brokethe law governing meaningful prcpositions, hisTractatus is yet built upon a site salvaged fromthe metaphysical estate of the Fre-establishedHarmony. The ground, however, was soon togive; and as it gave, Bertrand Ru.,sell (for one)saw nothing but collapse. And it is true thatfrom the Blue Bool(s onwards Wittgensteinimmersed himself in a philosophical enterprisewhich, if set up against the traditional hopesof philosophers, looks desperate in.]eed.

For its intention is to cure philosophers of asickness the name of which may w:ll be--philo-sophy. His aphorism of the philosopher’s treat-ing questions as if they were patients has morethan epigrammatic relevance.

III

T ~ r. B ~ S A ~ between Tractatus and Philo-sophical Investigations is of the same kind

as that between Nietzsche’s The Birth oITragedy (~87~) and his Human, All-too-Human(r879). In both cases it was brought about by theabnegation of metaphysics, the loss of faith inany pre-established correspondence between, onthe one hand, the logic of our thought and lan-guage, and, on the other, the "logic" of Reality.In the course of those eight years stretching fromThe Birth of Tragedy to Human, All-too-Human, Nietzsche came to believe that he hadfreed himself of this "philosophical prejudice"--which he diagnosed as the prejudice vitiatingthe whole history of thought--by turning (to useWittgenstein’s obviously autobiographical wordsfrom Investigations) his "whole examinationround. (One might say: the axis of reference ofour examination must be rotated, but about thefixed point of our real need.)" Nietzsche couldhave written this. Indeed, it might serve as anexact description of what he claimed as hisgreat achievement: to have turned through rSo°our whole horizon around the point of our "realneed" which "needed" another vision, a needradically different from that

which had been at work in forming the...[traditional] categories of thought; namely, theneed not to "recognise" but to subsume, toschematise, and, for the sake of communicationand calculation, to manipulate and fabricatesimilarities and samenesses .... No, this was notthe work of a pre-existent "Idea"; it happenedunder the persuasion of usefulness: it was profit-able to coarsen and level down things; for onlythen were they calculable and comfortable ....Our categories are "truths" only in so far as theymake life possible for us: Euclidean space is alsosuch a purposeful "truth."...The inner com-pulsion not to contradict these "truths," theinstinct to reach our kind of useful conclusionsis inbred in us, we almost are this instinct. Buthow naive to take this as proof of a "truth per se."Our inability to contradict proves impotence andnot "truth."

It was Nietzsche’s declared intention not tofollow any longer this "instinct" and thus to curethe philosophical sickness of centuries, just as itwas Wittgenstein’s to "solve the philosophical~roblems" by recognising their source in "the~unctioning of our language"--"in spite of aninstinct to misunderstand it." For Nietzsche thetruth about man was that he must live withoutTruth. This was the "real need." The creaturethat would satisfy it Nietzsche called Superman--and never mind the offensive word, poeticallybegotten in a great mind by a Darwinian age.~n his letters he often used less grandiose, if not


Ludwig Wittgensteinless ambitious, words in speaking of his philo-sophical goal, words to the effect that

he felt as though he were writing for people whowould think in a quite different way, breathe adifferent air of life from that of present-day men:for people of a different culture ....

But this is reported by Professor von Wright asa saying of Wittgenstein’s.

I X w o u ~.D, of course, be absurd to representWittgenstein as a latter-day Nietzsche, and

the comparison is certainly not meant to"manipulate and fabricate similarities and same-nesses." The two philosophers could hardly bemore different in scope and.object, approach andhumour, key and tempo of their thought. Yetthey have in common something which is of thegreatest significance: the creative distrust of allthose categorical certainties that, as if they werean inherited anatomy, have been allowed todetermine the body of traditional thought.Nietzsche and Wittgenstein share the genius fordirecting doubt into the most unsuspectedhiding-places of error and fallacy: namelywhere, as Wittgenstein puts it, "everything liesopen to inspection," where everything is simpleand familiar, where, day in day out, man takesthings for granted--until suddenly one day justthis fact strikes him as the "most striking andmost powerful." This may happen on the daywhen suspicion reaches the notion of "meaning,"that is, the idea, held however vaguely, thatthrough some kind of cosmic arrangement,made by God or logic or the spirit of language,a definite meaning had become attached to theworld, to life, to facts, or to words. WhenNietzsche discovered the "death of God" theuniverse of meanings collapsed--everything, thatis, that was founded upon the transcendentfaith, or was leaning against it, or was inter-twined with it: in fact, everything, as Nietzscbebelieved; and henceforward everything was inneed of revaluation.

With Wittgenstein the decisive change ofvision, which occurred between Tractatus andInvestigations, seemed centred upon a moremodest event: the vanquishing of the belief in acategorical logic of language, and hence in acategorically harmonious relationship betweenwords and world. But the event behind the eventwas of the same magnitude. It entailed the samecrisis of metaphysical confidence that, with somemetaphysically more fanatical Germans andFrenchmen, leads to the great perversion of meta-physics: the lost belief in any rationally reliabledealings with Reality was replaced by the notionthat (on the contrary) it was a Pre-establishedAbsurdity which determined the relationshipbetween the intellectual constitution of man and

45the true constitution of the world. Nietzsche wasthe first to conceive of such a possibility. Afterhim European art and literature excelled inshowing man and world labouring under thetragic or melancholy or grotesque or hilariouscompulsion to make nonsense of each other. Andthere is a historical sense in which the twoextremes of contemporary philosophising--Heidegger’s tortuous metaphysical probingsinto language and Wittgenstein’s absorption inlanguage-games (and some of the examples hechooses reveal an almost Thurber-like talent forabsurd and grotesque inventions)--can be seenas two aspects of the same intention: to trackdown to their source in language and there tocorrect the absurdities of the human endeavourto speak the truth. It is an intention which wasby no means alien to Nietzsche. Certainly, hisuniversal suspicion did not spare language, andsome of his utterances on the subject are almostliterally indistinguishable from Wittgenstein’s.

Very early in his philosophical life, Nietzscheknew that he "who finds language interesting initself has a mind different from him who onlyregards it as a medium of thought," and he leftno doubt which of the two he regarded as themore philosophical mind: "Language is some-thing all-too-familiar to us; therefore it needs aphilosopher to be struck by it." This isNietzsche’s way of saying the same as Wittgen-stein when he discovered that "the most impor-tant aspects of things are hidden from us byvirtue of their simplicity and familiarity." Orwhen some time later Nietzsche found that "thephilosopher is caught in the net of Lan-guage," he meant much the same as Witt-genstein who, referring to his own Tractatus,said: "A picture held us captive. And wecould not get outside it, for it lay in our languageand language seemed to repeat it to us inexor-ably." Indeed, Nietzsche sounds as if he had inmind the metaphysics of the Tractatus when hespeaks of the conclusion of a primitive meta-,p, hysical peace which once upon a time fixedwhat henceforward is to be called truth": "A

universally valid and compelling notation offacts is invented and the legislation of languageissues into the principal rules for truth"--in themanner, precisely, of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus:"To give the essence of proposition means togive the essence of all description, therefore theessence of the world." But Nietzsche asks: "Islanguage the adequate expression for all reali-ties?" And soon he was to be still surerthat it was not. On the contrary, the gram-matical and syntactical order of language, itssubjects, predicates, objects, causal and condi-tional connections, were "the petrified fallaciesof reason" which continued to exercise their"seductive spell" upon our intelligence.


46 Erich HellerPhilosophy is a batde against the bewitchment

of our intelligence by .means of language.

This last aphorism is by Wittgen.’tein; but itwould be impossible to guess wheie Nietzscheends and Wittgenstein begins.

IV

O N r of Wittgenstein’s aphorisms (unfortu-nately mistranslated by Miss Anscombe--

a rare flaw in her work) runs as follows:

Philosophy results in the discovery of one oranother piece of simple nonsense, and in bruiseswhich the understanding has suffered by bump-ing its head against the limits of lan~age. They,the bruises, make us see the value of that dis-covery.*

And in one of the jottings of hi~ late yearsNietzsche wrote under the heading fUNDA-MENTAL SOLUTION:

Language is founded upon the most naive pre-judices .... We read contradictions and problemsinto everything because we thlnl( on,’y within theforms of language .... We have to c, mse to thinl(i/ we re~use to do it in the prison-~iouse of lan-guage; for we cannot reach further than thedoubt which asks whether the limit we see isreally a limit .... All rational thouT, ht is inter-pretation in accordance with a wherae which wecannot throw off.

Yet neither Nietzsche nor Wittgens:ein "ceasedto think." In Nietzsche’s thought, the persistentmisgiving that the established cor ventions ofphilosophical language did not cater for our"real" intellectual needs was only one facet of hiscentral thesis: with the death of God, with thesilencing of that Word which was : t the begin-ning, all certainties of faith, belief, metapyh sics,morality, and knowledge had come to an end,and henceforward man was under the terriblecompulsion of absolute freedom. Hi~ choice wasthat of either creating, with the surpassingcreativity of the Creator, his own world, or ofspiritually perishing. For the world as it is hasneither meanin nor value Meanin z and valuemust be g~ven to it: by God or by man himself.If God is dead and man fails, then nothing inthis world has any value and our own languagedeceives us with all its ancient intimations ofhigher meanings.

In the world everything is as it is and happensas it does happen. In it there is no value--and ifthere were, it would be of no value.

* And this is one of Karl Kraus’ aphorisms onlanguage: "If I cannot get further, thi.,, is because Ihave banged my head against the wall of language.Then, with my head bleeding, I withdraw. Andwant to go on."

These sentences from Wittgenstein’s Tractatusmight have been invented by Nietzsche--andmany like these were in fact invented by him~when in The Will to Power, like an inspiredactor, like an initiate, he spoke the mind ofEuropean Nihilism which he so urgently desiredto overcome.

Wittgenstein’s Investigations would be astrivial as Bertrand Russell thinks they are, weretheir infinite intellectual patience not informedwith a sense of urgency not altogether unIikethat which inspired Nietzsche’s prophetic im-petuosity. To bring some light into "the dark-ness of this time"--this was the hesitant hopeo~ the author of Philosophical Investigations.This hope, like all true hope, was founded uponthe paradox of faith: the faith despite doubt. Itwas, with Wittgenstein, the faith in language;and language retained for him its all-importanceeven after it had ceased to be the mirror ofReality. For when all the dangers of languageare exposed, when the captivity is shown inwhich our minds are held by its metaphors,when the witchcraft is denounced with whichit assails our intelligence, there still remains theineradicable trust in its ultimate wisdom andits power to heal our disease.

N O T H I N G in Wittgenstein’s work is more

vulnerable to further questioning than thistrust; indeed, its very intellectual vulnerabilityestablishes it as his faith. Often he speaks oflanguage with utmost vagueness:

When philosophers use a word--"knowledge,"being, object, I, proposmon, name --

and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one mustalways ask oneself: is the word ever actually usedin this way in the language in which it has itshome?"*

One may well ask, who, with language speakingin a hundred tongues through our literatures,dialects, social classes, journals, and newspapers,establishes this "actual use"? Shakespeare?Donne? James Joyce? the Oxford Dictionary?the College Porter? the local M.P.? the habitualreader of the News oI the World? And whenWittgenstein says: "What we do is to bringwords back from their metaphysical to theireveryday usage," or "When I talk about lan-guage...I must speak the language of everyday," one cannot help being struck by thehomely imprecision of this programme. Onewonders why he should not rather wish to bringlanguage back to Lichtenberg’s or GottfriedKeller’s usage, or to the speech of Karl Kraus,

* Was it the vagueness of this which induced thetranslator to use "language-game" where the Ger-man is simply "Sprache"?


Ludwig Wittgensteinwhich was in fact much closer to Wittgenstein’sown than that of a Vienna or London "every-day." Or again, he says:

Philosophy may in no way interfere with theactual use of language; it can in the end onlydescribe it .... It leaves everything as it is.

or

We must do away with all explanation, anddescription alone must take its place.

But might we not be "held captive" by a picture"actually used" in language, and can we be surethat "actual usage" will never "bewitch our in-telligence"? And if it does, how are we to loosenits grip without "explaining" its nature? (AndI am using "explain" here as it’ is "actuallyused.")

Or is Schopenhauer, who so indignantly "in-terfered" with the "actual use" made of languageby those who corrupdy spoke and printed itevery day, guilty of errors of iudgment becausehe wrote a prose modelled on the example of aclassical literary tradition as remote as can befrom the everyday traffic in words?

And what is the "everything" that philosophy"leaves as it is"? Not, surely, the manner ofthinking and uttering thoughts. Many philoso-phers, like all great poets, have deeply affectedperception, and therefore language, and there-fore have changed our world: Plato, for instance,or Descartes, or Rousseau, or Kant, or Nietzsche,or indeed Wittgenstein.

H ~ N Wittgenstein speaks of the languageW of every day, he does not mean what"actual usage" would suggest he means. Infact, he means Language--something that is ofsupreme importance as the repository of humancommunity, understanding, knowledge, andwisdom. What he calls "actual usage" and "thelanguage of every day" is hardly more than theuneasy concession made by an absolute faith tothe demand for an empirical criterion, or else hismanner of disdainfully denouncing the viola-tions of language of which many a philosophiserhas been guilty in his pursuit of spurious heightsand depths. With two aphorisms of Investiga-tions above all, Wittgenstein can be observed inthe very act of avoiding, in the manner of anempiricist fighting shy of metaphysics, the opendeclaration of his all-but-metaphysical belief inlanguage:

The problems arising through a misinterpre-tation of our forms of language have the char-acter of depth. They are deep disquietudes; theirroots are as deep in us as the forms of our lan-guage, and their significance is as great as theimportance of our language.

47How true; and yet how disquieting is the word"misinterpretation"l What does it mean? Itseems to suggest that there is, or can be, anabsolutely reliable rule for deciding, philo-sophically orphilologically, what is a correct andwhat is a false interpretation of every par-ticular "form of language." But no such stan-dard can apply to a medium like language,which has no little share in the allusiveness ofdance and gesture, the elusiveness of music, theungrammatical extravagancies of life itself. Forno sooner have we left the field of logic,grammar, and syntax, than we have entered thesphere of ~esthetics where we no longer wonderwhether a writer has "interpreted" words cor-rectly, but rather whether he has used them wellor badly; and this will be a matter not of anypower to interpret but of something more ade-quately described as the feeling for language, afeeling which has its ground in sensibility orgenius, and has been formed by,tradition--thatis, by the particular "form of life’ within whichalone, according to Wittgenstein, language hasits meaning.

"To imagine a language," he says, "means toimagine a form of life."

That this is so, is one of Wittgenstein’s moststriking realisations; and indeed it not onlyrenders the "rules of language," as he wellknew, logically unmanageable but also makestheir "description," which he hoped for, a taskthat could not be fulfilled by even a legion ofProusts and Wittgensteins. For what is the"form of life" which, in one language, is sharedby Goethe and Hitler, or, in another, by Keatsand the Daily Mirror?

T H ~. word "misinterpretation" in the quotedaphorism conveys yet another suggestion

which is even more erroneous; namely, thatdepth is a by-product of error. But if words likedepth and truth and error are to have any mean-ing at all, then truth is deeper than falsehood.Indeed the suggestion is withdrawn by theaphorism’s very form and rhythm which unmis-takably intimate that language itself, not merelyits misinterpretation, has the character of depth,and that the disquietudes which arise from itare as deep as is the peace which sometimes itmay bring: through a great writer and even,rarel~, through a philosopher whose thought isdeeply rooted in the mystery of words--or, to usethe terms of that other aphorism of Witt-genstein: in the ground of language. For thissecond aphorism comes close to revealing hismetaphysical secret.

"What is it that gives to our investigation itsimportance," he asks there with the voice of animaginary interlocutor, "since it seems only todestroy everything interesting? (As it were all


48the buildings, leaving behind only bits of stoneand rubble.)" And he replies: "What we aredestroying is nothing but houses ~f cards andwe are clearing up the ground of language onwhich they stand."

The ground of language--it is :. transparentmetaphor. And what shines through it is amystical light, even if there is nothing left forit to illumine but a philosophical landscape mostthoughtfully cleared of allthe fragile and dis-figuring edifices built throughout the ages bythe victims of linguistic delusion, s~ach as Plato,St. Thomas Aquinas, Spinoza, or ImmanuelKant.

It is an ending a litde like that of Goethe’sTasso where a man, a poet, with all his certain-ties shattered, grasps hold of his la: t possession:language. It has remained an open question ofliterary interpretation whether that ,mding spellsan ultimately happy consummation or a tragedy.But so far as philosophy is concerne :1, this enterswith Wittgenstein the stage which has beenreached in this epoch by many another creative

Erich Heller:ctivity of the human mind--by poetry, for in-stance, or by painting: the stage where every actof creation is inseparable from the critique of itsmedium, and every work, intensely reflectingupon itself, looks like the embodied doubt of itsown possibility. It is a predicament whichNietzsche has uncannily anticipated in a sketchentitled "A Fragment from the History ofPosterity." Its subject is "The Last Philosopher."Having lost faith in a communicable world, heis imprisoned within his own self-consciousness.Nothing speaks to him any more--except hisown speech; and, deprived of any authority froma divinely ordered universe, it is only about hisspeech that his speech can speak with a measureof philosophical assurance.

Wittgenstein says in Philosophical Investiga-tions: "What is your aim in philosophy?--Toshow the fly the way out of the fly-bottle." Butwho asks? Who answers? And who is the fly?I~ is an unholy trinity; the three are one. Thisway lies no way out. This way lie only fly-bottles,and more and more fly-bottles.

Song

As the images pullThe fog of distance apart,Under that steep-browedCliff with the echoes calling

I ~ee the water’s light-blue sweep.

The lake is c:~ear and motionless,In it i~t depth upon depthIs reflected the changing cloud,The sv-aying pines, the world.

My heart is like the lake, full.

Throw in a s~one, it dropsThrough the reflected world,Out of sight, still fallingTo darkness, the water heart.

My love is like the lake, deep.

Bobert Conquest


heller - wittgenstein unphilosophical notes

Documents