A Picture Held Us Captive

On Aisthesis and Interiority in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Fyodor M. Dostoevsky and W.G. Sebald

Tea Lobo

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN:
  9783110610567
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire pour la littérature comparée

While there are publications on Wittgenstein's interest in Dostoevsky's novels and the recurring mentions of Wittgenstein in Sebald's works, there has been no systematic scholarship on the relation between perception (such as showing and pictures) and the problem of an adequate presentation of interiority (such as intentions or pain) for these three thinkers.This relation is important in Wittgenstein's treatment of the subject and in his private language argument, but it is also an often overlooked motif in both Dostoevsky's and Sebald's works.

Dostoevsky's depiction of mindset discrepancies in a rapidly modernizing Russia can be analyzed interms of multi-aspectivity. The theatricality of his characters demonstrates especially well Wittgenstein's account of interiority's interrelatedness with overt public practices and codes.

In Sebald's Austerlitz, Wittgenstein's notion of family resemblances is an aesthetic strategy within the novel. Visual tropes are most obviously present in Sebald's use of photography, and can partially be read as an ethical-aesthetic imperative of rendering pain visible. Tea Lobo's book contributes towards a non-Cartesian account of literary presentations of inner life based on Wittgenstein's thought.

1 Aisthesis and Interiority in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Writings

Calling Wittgenstein’s works “aesthetic” (or “aisthetic”) is not meant to devalue their philosophical contents. The philosophical questions that interested Wittgenstein are very much related to the program of early analytic philosophy, as Wittgenstein credits Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell in the Foreword of the Tractatus for the impulses to the ideas in his book.132 Gottlob Frege was the first to develop a system of formal notation for natural languages, based on mathematics, called Begriffsschift, and Wittgenstein credits Russell in Tractatus 4.0031 for showing that “the apparent logical form of the proposition need not be its real form”.133 As I will show, Wittgenstein used aisthetic methods, such as the visual presentation of logical connections, sketches and poetic language to make his philosophical points. He was furthermore very interested in the perception of art and music, as well as—in his later work—the interactions between the inputs to the senses and the conceptual framework of the perceiver. The resulting view of human ‘interiority’ is that of both immediate sense perception and the kind of conceptual structure based on shared social practices.

Frege’s and Russell’s project of making the logical form of propositions visible when they are obscured by the surface grammar of natural languages is very much an integral part of the Tractatus. For instance, in 3.323, Wittgenstein uses the example “Green is green” to show that two concepts, a personal name and an adjective may be used seemingly so as to result in a tautology of the form a=a. This is an example in which natural language use obscures the difference in logical structure, and it is the Begriffsschrift, mentioned in 3.325, that is meant to be a notation that renders logical structure visible. To use Wittgenstein’s term, this notation should be such that it “shows” the logical structure that the proposition expresses, as he writes in 4.121, “The propositions show the logical form of reality. They exhibit it.”134 For example, as he noted in 4.1272, by contrast to the proposition in natural language “there are two objects, which …”, the use of the existential operator that defines the members of its domain to two variables—∃(x,y)—expresses the same content in a manner that visually elucidates it. It is in this context of the Begriffsschrift project that Wittgenstein’s conception of the picture theory of language (Abbildungstheorie) is placed, as for instance the claim in 4.01 that “The proposition is a picture of reality.”135

There are indeed recurrent visual metaphors in the Tractatus. For instance, to express that the logical form that is “shown” in a proposition cannot itself be put into words, Wittgenstein writes in 4.12: “To be able to represent the logical form, we should have to be able to put ourselves with the propositions outside logic, that is outside the world.”136 And in 4.121 he notes, “Propositions cannot represent the logical form: this mirrors itself in the propositions.”137 Furthermore, he describes the impossibility of representing the subject in 5.633 as “Where in the world is a metaphysical subject to be noted? You say that this case is altogether like that of the eye and the field of sight. But you do not really see the eye.”138 This claim is followed by a schematic illustration of the eye and its visual field in 5.6331. Then he remarks in 6.45, “The contemplation of the world sub specie aeterni is its contemplation as a limited whole.”139 And in 6.54, the second to last decimal statement proclaims, “[The reader] must surmount these propositions, then he sees the world rightly.”140

Myriads of ocular metaphors are present in Wittgenstein’s journals, in which he sketched out ideas for the Tractatus. For instance, on 7 October 1916, he treats art and ethics as ways of looking at the world “sub specie aeternitatis”.141 Art and ethics, in the eudaimonic understanding of ethics as good life, are described as a certain, empirically impossible perspective from outside, with the “whole world” as a backdrop. The next day, he writes, applying the total perspective described above to a concrete object:

As a thing among things, each thing is equally insignificant, as a world each equally significant.

If I have been contemplating the stove and then am told: but now all you know is the stove, my result does indeed seem trivial. For this represents the matter as if I had been studying the stove as one among the many things in the world. But if I was contemplating the stove, it was my world, and everything else colourless by contrast with it.142

And he asks on 20 October 1916, “Is it the essence of the artistic way of looking at things, that it looks at the world with a happy eye?” and then proceeds to quote Schiller, “Life is serious, art is gay.”143 Art is described as providing the otherwise impossible perspective from “outside” the totality of contingent facts that make up the world, and presents them in a way that allow the world to appear meaningful, to make good life possible.

Wittgenstein continues to refer to aesthetics using ocular tropes in his “middle” working period, namely in the 1930s after his return to Cambridge from rural Austria, where he had worked as a teacher in an attempt to put philosophy behind him. For instance, he had noted in his journal in 1930:

A work of art forces us—as one might say—to see it in the right perspective […]

But it seems to me too that there is a way of capturing the world sub specie aeterni other than through the work of the artist. Thought has such a way—so I believe—it is as though it flies above the world and leaves it as it is—observing it from above, in flight.144

At the end of the remark, Wittgenstein suggests that there may be another kind of work that achieves a similar alterity of view. Some of his remarks from lectures of 1930 – 1931 suggest that he considers his own work, that of philosophy, to be akin to art in precisely this manner. For instance, he remarked:

What Aesthetics tries to do, he said, is to give reasons, e. g. for having this word rather than that in a particular place in a poem […] all that Aesthetics does is to ‘draw your attention to a thing’, to ‘place things side by side’. He said that if, by giving ‘reasons’ of this sort, you make another person ‘see what you see’ […] And he said that the same sort of ‘reasons’ were given, not only in Ethics, but also in Philosophy.145

He explicitly understood philosophy to be akin to aesthetics because both involve activities of looking. Therefore, he understood “aesthetics” in the broader sense inherent in its Greek meaning of aisthesis, namely perception. The notion of placing things side by side or overseeing them, from above as it were also comes up in the notion of perspicuous presentation (übersichtliche Darstellung) in Philosophical Investigations, § 122.

It is this understanding of his own philosophical method as a work of aisthesis that we can read a following private note comparing philosophy and architecture from 1931,

Working in philosophy—like work in architecture in many respects—is really more a working on oneself. On one’s own interpretation. On one’s way of seeing things. (And what one expects of them.)146

Wittgenstein had tried his hand at architecture and designed a house for his sister Margarethe at the Kundmannsgasse in Vienna from 1926 – 1928, without any formal architectural education, and based solely on his engineering training and skills acquired while working on the design of an airplane engine in Manchester in 1908 – 1909. In his architectural tastes, he was mostly influenced by the modernist architect Adolf Loos, whom he was acquainted with. Like Loos, Wittgenstein rejected any form of ornamentality in architecture. However, far more so than Loos, Wittgenstein strove for an ascetic simplicity of lines in his designs.147

In his lectures on aesthetics from 1938, the visual as a mode of comprehending aesthetics returns:

It is remarkable that in real life, when aesthetic judgments are made, aesthetic adjectives such as “beautiful”, “fine”, etc., play hardly any role at all. Are aesthetic adjectives used in a musical criticism? You say: “Look at this transition”, or “The passage here is incoherent”. Or you say, in a poetic criticism, “his use of images is imprecise”. The words you use are more akin to “right” and “correct” (as these words are used in ordinary speech) than to “beautiful” and “lovely”.148

And: “If I say of a piece of Schubert’s that it is melancholy, that is like giving it a face (I don’t express approval or disapproval.) I could instead use gestures or dancing. In fact, if we want to be exact, we do use a gesture or a facial expression.”149 But also, “When we make an aesthetic judgment about a thing, we do not just gape at it and say: ‘Oh! How marvelous!’ We distinguish between a person who knows what he is talking about and a person who doesn’t.”150 In earlier periods beauty in art was understood as a manner of depicting or representing the Absolute. Wittgenstein, to describe aesthetics, does not appeal to a single principle like beauty, but he draws attention to the language actually used—which is far more intricate and precise than mere attributions of beauty. It is based on remarks like these that it is possible to speak of a “linguistic turn” in aesthetics, after Wittgenstein.151

In this point, there is a difference to the early Wittgenstein, who in his wartime journals of 1916 wondered whether “the essence” of artistic vision is contemplating the world “with a happy eye” (20 October), mentioned above, and “For there is certainly something in the conception that the end of art is the beautiful. And the beautiful is what makes happy.” (21 October 1916)152 As his remarks from lectures from 1938 show, he has turned to a more practical approach to aesthetics, towards paying attention to more disparate phenomena of aesthetic appreciation in particular contexts. For instance, he explains,

If a man goes through an endless number of patterns in a tailor’s, [and] says: “No. This is slightly too dark. This is slightly too loud.”, etc., he is what we call an appreciator of material. That he is an appreciator is not shown by the interjections he uses, but by the way he chooses, selects, etc. Similarly in music: “Does this harmonize? No. The bass is not quite loud enough. Here I just want something different …”153

Wittgenstein furthermore displays sensitivity towards the necessity of acquaintance with the historical context for aesthetic judgment, as for instance in this remark:

In certain styles of architecture a door is correct, and the thing is you appreciate it. But in the case of a Gothic Cathedral what we do is not at all to find it correct—it plays an entirely different role with us. The entire game is different. It is different as to judge a human being and on the one hand to say, “He behaves well” and on the other hand “He made a great impression on me.”154

Gothic architecture as a prime example of medieval high culture is built to make an impression in the ultimate sense of evoking awe and the feeling of smallness and embeddedness in a larger, timeless reality. Its spires point to heaven, aiming to evoke faith in God, and so to express the Absolute. In Wittgenstein’s terms, an entirely different “game” is played in medieval aesthetic than that of modernity, its visual emblems have to be ‘read’ differently. As he continues,

The words we c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Note on the Russian Transliteration
• List of Abbreviations for Frequently Cited Titles
• Introduction
• 1 Aisthesis and Interiority in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Writings
• 2 Showing Intentions and Seeing Aspects in Fyodor M. Dostoevsky’s Novels
• 3 The Visibility of Pain in W. G. Sebald’s Novels
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects