Literary Wittgenstein

Terry Eagleton reviews a new book on The Literary Wittgenstein (edited by John Gibson and Wolfgang Huemer) in the April 29 issue of the TLS. There are a number of highlights:

1) Eagleton sets Wittgenstein firmly in the glitzy, kitchy world of Vienna. "The place," he writes, "was a cockpit of magnificent art and appalling kitsch, glutted with waltzes, whipped cream, chocolate cake and high culture." In reaction, Wittgenstein pursued a "monkish austerity," eschewing material possessions and, especially in the Tractatus, reaching for purity, a philosoph that was "chaste, lean, disciplined and translucent" (Eagleton's description of logical positivism).

2) Eagleton interestingly contrasts Wittgenstein to the Russian Formalists. For the latter, the purpose of art was to "defamiliarize," to make the familiar seem strange or to capture the genuine strangeness lurking beneath the surface of the normal. Wittgenstein saw strangeness as the problem from which philosophy was designed to deliver us: "It is a sense of estrangement - of vertigo, bewitchment, out-of-placeness [one is almost tempted to say 'thrownness' -PJL] - which the therapy known as philosophy seeks to overcome, revealing to us what was always in place and which . . . we somehow knew without knowing it, all along. For Wittgenstein, as for Sartre, philosophy begins in a kind of existential angst." Hence, Wittgenstein, "this religious devotee of the commonplace," inspires novelists and artists because he is searching with them for "spiritual secrets, auras of mystery and hidden depths."

3) The comparison to Sartre raises the suggestion that Wittgenstein is more Germanic than his "very Oxbridge aversion to grand narratives and abstract theories" would suggest. Eagleton suggests that beneath the surface is a strain in Wittgenstein's thought "closer to Heidegger than to J. L. Austin." While his style aims at clarity, his thought does not follow in lockstep, and particularly after The Philosophical Investigations he turned his attention to "the rough ground of our ambiguous, fuzzy-edged practices."

4) In this respect, Eagleton suggests also another affinity between Wittgenstein and artists: "It is [his] nose for the density and irregularity of things, their distinctive, untotalizable tones and textures, that links Wittgenstein's thought to the great European tradition of realist fiction." Eagleton places Wittgenstein among philosophers like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Benjamin and Adorno, all of whom "were skeptical of the whole genre of philosophizing as they found it, and like avant-garde artists could say what they meant only by inventing a different sort of discourse altogether." This places Wittgenstein in the midst of another tradition, that of literary modernism, in that he "liked his thoughts to jump around rather than being forced into a linear pattern. In this respect, he was closer to Molly Bloom or Mrs Dalloway than to A. J. Ayer." For Wittgenstein, like a poet, form and content were inseparably connected.

5) Wittgenstein is attractive to artists and writers because he shares their wariness of "philosophy's anaemic abstractions." Eagleton's summary is stimulating: "Art is nothing if not fleshly, embodying ideas rather than denoting them; and Wittgenstein's effort to persuade us out of the dualistic view that the soul lurks within the body, that I can know my own experiences directly but only infer yours, or that meaning is a ghostly process in our heads, represents a singularly incarnational project. . . . Literature, one might claim, is that anti-Cartesian phenomenon, public experience. Like writers, too, Wittgenstein understands that language is not a mirror but a social practice in its own right, with its own material thickness."

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, May 13, 2005 at 03:17 PM

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