Understanding Wittgenstein, Understanding Modernism

Anat Matar

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781501343704
• eBook ISBN: 9781501302442
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria europea

In the last half-century Ludwig Wittgenstein's relevance beyond analytic philosophy, to continental philosophy, to cultural studies, and to the arts has been widely acknowledged. Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was published in 1922 - the annus mirabilis of modernism - alongside Joyce's Ulysses, Eliot's The Waste Land, Mansfield's The Garden Party and Woolf's Jacob's Room. Bertolt Brecht's first play to be produced, Drums in the Night, was first staged in 1922, as was Jean Cocteau's Antigone, with settings by Pablo Picasso and music by Arthur Honegger. In different ways, all these modernist landmarks dealt with the crisis of representation and the demise of eternal metaphysical and ethical truths. Wittgenstein's Tractatus can be read as defining, expressing and reacting to this crisis. In his later philosophy, Wittgenstein adopted a novel philosophical attitude, sensitive to the ordinary uses of language as well as to the unnoticed dogmas they may betray. If the gist of modernism is self-reflection and attention to the way form expresses content, then Wittgenstein's later ideas - in their fragmented form as well as their "ear-opening" contents - deliver it most precisely. Understanding Wittgenstein, Understanding Modernism shows Wittgenstein's work, both early and late, to be closely linked to the modernist Geist that prevailed during his lifetime. Yet it would be wrong to argue that Wittgenstein was a modernist tout court. For Wittgenstein, as well as for modernist art, understanding is not gained by such straightforward statements. It needs time, hesitation, a variety of articulations, the refusal of tempting solutions, and perhaps even a sense of defeat. It is such a vision of the linkage between Wittgenstein and modernism that guides the present volume.

Part One

Conceptualizing Wittgenstein

1

Language, Expressibility and the Mystical

John Skorupski

In this chapter I discuss two elements in Wittgenstein’s thought: mysticism (or, more broadly, asceticism) and cultural alienation. Throughout his life, they interacted with his more purely philosophical ideas about language and logic – through the surprising idea that spiritual anxieties could somehow be alleviated or eased by close philosophical attention to language. This is Wittgenstein’s distinctive contribution to a main stream of modernist art and thinking; it developed, as we shall see, from the explicit mysticism of his earlier philosophy to the ascetic restraint and indirection of his later thought.

It may be thought odd to treat mysticism and cultural alienation as characteristic elements of modernism. I do not think it is. Culture develops dialectically: an optimistic mood of collectivist technological progressivism is certainly one characteristic of modernism, a strong recoil against it is another. Carnap and the Vienna Circle are philosophers of modernism in that optimistic mood; ­Wittgenstein and Heidegger are philosophers of modernism in the recoil against it.

The mystical and ascetic elements in Wittgenstein’s thinking are, to be sure, by no means the only aspects of his modernism. They were not central to his general influence in philosophy. That influence arose from the great governing idea that the ‘philosophical’ concept of aprioricity has to be replaced by the linguistic concept of syntax or grammar – together with the conclusion drawn from this, that philosophy stands revealed as pseudo-problematic. This was the most salient contribution of ‘analytic’ philosophy to modernism, and Wittgenstein’s work was crucial to it.¹ In the same period, Carnap developed closely related ideas that were equally crucial; Carnap’s focus, however, was always on formal languages rather than on actual language use. Connectedly, the spiritual significance these ideas about language had for Wittgenstein was very different to the scientific significance they had for Carnap. What makes Wittgenstein the pre-eminent philosophical modernist – as it seems to me – is the way he fused the ideas about the pseudo-problematic nature of philosophy with the distinctively ‘mystical’, ‘ethical’ and cultural interests that he shared more with Heidegger than with Carnap, and which connect his thinking and his attitudes to much modernism in the arts. These are the particular aspects of his thinking that I am concerned with here.²

The contrast between what can be said – and is only relatively important – and what can only be shown – and is absolutely important – remains with Wittgenstein throughout his life, even though the particular connection he tried to draw in the Tractatus between this contrast and his account of logic and reality does not. It is also true that that particular conception of importance has a vitality and a history in its own right, which it is important to have in mind before one considers how it shaped modernism in philosophy and the arts. I take it up in the next section, before turning to the development of Wittgenstein’s ideas concerning ‘unsayability’ in the following two sections, and their relation to modernism in the final three.

1 Mysticism: Philosophical and anti-philosophical

Mystical elements are explicit in Wittgenstein’s earlier thought. In the Tractatus we have:

6.44 It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.

6.45 To view the world sub specie aeterni is to view it as a whole – a limited whole.

Feeling the world as a limited whole – it is this that is mystical.

6.522 There are indeed things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest.

They are what is mystical.³

The term ‘mystical’ (das Mystische) certainly appears – but does it connect Wittgenstein’s thoughts to ideas characteristically expressed in historical mystical writings?

Those writings vary hugely, as one would expect given their ubiquity and how far back they go. Still, the most basic mystical idea expressed throughout is a contrast between the ordinary standpoint on the world, including the ordinary procedures of inquiry that are applied within this standpoint to achieve knowledge, and another standpoint: a standpoint that is taken to yield knowledge of the whole as it absolutely is. Call this the idea of two standpoints (A).

Furthermore (B), whereas the ordinary standpoint is largely pre-reflective, and in a sense ‘natural’ to us – expressed in concepts that, however complicated and technical they become, are ‘easy’ in that they appear to be accessible, at least in principle, to common cognition – the mystical standpoint is, on the contrary, not ‘easy’. It is, indeed, in a very important way ‘simple’, but it is not expressible within the concepts of the ordinary standpoint; in fact, whether or not it is expressible in discursive concepts at all is contested. If it is not, then an important consequence is that it cannot be sought through the inherently discursive discipline of philosophy but only through a variety of ascetic or ecstatic techniques, or through meditation or religion or art.

Another basic feature of historical mysticism (C) is that mystical knowledge is in some way insight into self-world identity: knowledge that I and the absolute One are one. It is this insight that is quite simple, yet not easy: inexpressible in the concepts of the ordinary standpoint or perhaps in any concepts. To be grasped, it must be experienced and lived.

Finally, (D), only this knowledge, achieved in mystical insight, has absolute value. The knowledge that is proper to the ordinary standpoint has conditional or instrumental value only. From the absolute mystical standpoint, no such knowledge is any more or less valuable than any other such knowledge, because the everyday aims of the common understanding have no absolute value.

Let us call the view that there is a mystical insight that cannot be expressed discursively anti-philosophical mysticism. There is also a philosophical mysticism. It agrees with (B) that mystical insight has to struggle against the natural attitude, and cannot be expressed in ordinary concepts. But it does not agree that it cannot be gained discursively. True, it cannot be gained through ordinary concepts, but that does not mean there is no discursive path, even if the path can be travelled only with great difficulty. Furthermore, as in (C) and (D), the difficulty or uneasy simplicity of mystical insight lies in its content, and only this content has absolute value.

At the beginnings of philosophy, the two standpoints are characterized by Parmenides as the path that is (and/or leads to what is), and the path that is not (and/or leads to what is not): the path of ‘steadfast and well-rounded truth’ and the path followed by ‘the opinions of mortal men’ – against which the Goddess strongly warns the young traveller.⁴ Coming closer to the period that interests us, we can turn to Hegel. Here the contrast is between Reason (Vernunft) and Understanding (Verstand). The terms are from Kant, and Understanding, as in Kant, is the capacity to apply concepts to the phenomena and reason about them in terms of the ordinary logic of the natural attitude. This is the way of seeming, the path to the phenomena. But whereas pure Reason in Kant can provide no route to knowledge of absolute reality (as against providing Ideas, regulative principles, the Moral Law), in Hegel, precisely on the contrary, it provides just that route, the way of truth – through the dialectical logic of the speculative method.⁵

Between the time of Parmenides and the time of Hegel, there were many mystical traditions, but I will take these two as paradigms of philosophical mysticism. Both hold that there is a philosophical path, a path of reason, to mystical knowledge. It can be travelled only with difficulty, because the way of seeming is so ingrained. Furthermore, since the mystical insight, for both of them in their different ways, is that ‘the World is One’, ‘the Truth is the Whole’, the normal logic of abstract identity does not apply. Nothing is not. The One has all determinations and is unconditioned; therefore it necessarily is as it absolutely is. The full nature of this truth cannot be expressed in the categories of the Understanding. Nonetheless, according to this philosophical mysticism, it can be discursively expressed, though only in radically innovative forms of language or thought, which may break the ordinary limits of language.

In contrast, there are philosophical as well as non-philosophical views that hold that the mystical cannot be discursively expressed. Of course, one of these views says, quite simply, that that is because there is no such thing as mystical insight. If you can’t say it, you can’t whistle it either; or to give this comment a further twist, if you can’t discursively express it, you can’t manifest it or show it in music, or any kind of art, there being nothing to manifest or show. Against that stands the view that although the mystical cannot be discursively expressed, it can make itself known, through art, religion, etc. This is a common view in the modernist period. It, in turn, divides. It may be a strongly anti-philosophical mysticism, which says that philosophy can contribute nothing at all to the achievement of mystical insight. Or it may say that what philosophy can contribute is in a way negative, yet still distinctive and valuable – namely, not a discursive expression of mystical insight but a way of making a clearing in which insight becomes possible. Perhaps, even, only philosophy can do that.

This last view is, I think, the distinctively modernist version of philosophical mysticism: call it anti-philosophical philosophical mysticism. Heidegger may be thought to belong here.⁶ At any rate, it is the form of Wittgenstein’s view, as stated in the Tractatus, though I will suggest that he held something like it throughout his life. However, let us turn first to the Tractatus.

2 What can and cannot be said

In Wittgenstein’s hands, the idea I have labelled (A) becomes the contrast between what can be put into words and what can only be manifested. This is immediately followed by (B). As is familiar, at least at the stage of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein makes these points from within a general account of logic and meaning. The world is everything that is the case – the totality of facts – and a statement that has sense pictures a fact. A fact is the existence of objects in a combination; only a fact can picture a fact and a fact can only picture a fact. Of course, none of these (apparent) theses about facts and sense picture facts, and since none of them picture facts, they have no sense. Nonetheless, they manifest or show the essence and substance of the world.

The presence of (C) is at best less clear. Yet, something like it makes itself felt in what Wittgenstein says about self and world.

5.6 The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

5.63 I am my world. (The microcosm.)

5.64 Solipsism, when its implications are followed out strictly, coincides with pure realism.

5.641 Thus there really is a sense in which philosophy can talk about the self in a non-psychological way.

What brings the self into philosophy is the fact that ‘the world is my world’.

The philosophical self is not the human being, not the human body, or the human soul, with which psychology deals, but rather the metaphysical subject, the limit of the world – not a part of it.

(D) is expressed in 6.4:

All propositions are of equal value.

Here Wittgenstein does not say that no proposition has any value, or that they all have at most instrumental value. However, 6.41 affirms that nothing in the world has value:

The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no value exists – and if it did exist, it would have no value.

If there is any value that does have value, it must lie outside the whole sphere of what happens and is the case. For all that...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Abbreviations
• Series Preface
• Introduction: Giving the Viewer an Idea of the Landscape Anat Matar
• Part 1 Conceptualizing Wittgenstein
• Part 2 Wittgenstein and Aesthetics
• Part 3 Glossary
• Index
• Copyright