Wittgenstein, Ordinary Language, and Poeticity

1 Introduction

In volume 1 of Philosophische Terminologie, Theodor W. Adorno passes the following judgment on Ludwig Wittgenstein:

It no doubt sounds very heroic when Wittgenstein declares that one should say only that which can be said clearly. It also conveys a mystical-existential aura that many today find appealing. But I believe that this famous Wittgensteinian proposition is of an indescribable spiritual vulgarity inasmuch as it ignores the whole point of philosophy. It is precisely the paradox of this enterprise that it aims to say the unsayable, to express by means of concepts that which cannot be expressed by means of concepts. (Adorno 1974, pp. 55–6; tr. Vallicella 2009)

Although Adorno specifically addresses the author of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in this passage, one may assume that he would maintain his charge of “indescribable spiritual vulgarity” with respect to the later Wittgenstein—who, after all, proclaims in the Philosophical Investigations that an understanding which tries to run up against the limits of language bumps itself and results in nothing but plain nonsense (cf. PI, § 119).^[1] In apparent opposition to Adorno’s imperative to push the boundaries of the expressible, Wittgenstein sticks to the idea that whatever can be thought clearly can also be said that way—and can only be thought sensibly to the extent that one can sensibly speak about it (cf. Rosenberg 1998, pp. 8–9): “The limit of language manifests itself in the impossibility of describing the fact that corresponds to […] a sentence without simply repeating the sentence” (CV, p. 13). Therefore, the task of philosophy cannot be to “create a new, ideal language” so as to “produce a real understanding for the first time” (PG, § 72). Its aim, according to Wittgenstein, should rather be to “clarify the use of our language, the existing language” and thereby “remove particular misunderstandings” (ibid.):

Here it is easy to get into that dead-end in philosophy, where one believes that the difficulty of the task consists in this: our having to describe phenomena that are hard to get hold of, the present experience that slips quickly by, or something of the kind. Where we find ordinary language too crude, and it looks as if we were having to do, not with the phenomena of every-day, but with ones that “easily elude us, and in their coming to be and passing away, produce those others as an average effect”.

And here one must remember that all the phenomena that now strike us as so remarkable are the very familiar phenomena that don’t surprise us in the least when they happen. They don’t strike us as remarkable until we put them in a strange light by philosophizing. (PG, § 120)

Seemingly attesting to his sustained refusal to ‘say the unsayable’ is Wittgenstein’s eventual aversion to both the sublime terms of traditional philosophical schools and the formal frameworks of modern logical systems. “The language used by philosophers,” he criticizes, “is already deformed, as though by shoes that are too tight” (CV, p. 47). Instead, Wittgenstein seeks philosophical redemption in the “language of every day” (PI, § 120) and consequently adheres to a pointedly casual, colloquial style in his own lectures and writings: “The philosopher is someone who has to cure many diseases of the understanding in himself, before he can arrive at the notions of common sense” (CV, p. 50).

However, there seems to lurk a certain inconsistency in what one may call Wittgenstein’s ordinary language approach to philosophy. As Perloff (2011, p. 724) notes, Wittgenstein’s ‘ordinary language’ is actually quite extraordinary. His aphorisms and remarks seem to say ‘just what they say’; and yet, they remain mysterious and enigmatic (cf. ibid., p. 719). What is more, many of the terms Wittgenstein coins in his later writings seem to be highly technical. ‘Language-game,’ ‘form of life,’ ‘family resemblance,’ ‘grammar,’ ‘criterion,’ etc.—such concepts are certainly composed of household words. But Wittgenstein uses them in such peculiar, constricted or extended (if not clearly defined) ways that one might wonder whether his verdicts on the limits of language and on the jargon of philosophers might not be turned against his own practice (cf. Read 2005, p. 83). Indeed, even Wittgenstein asks himself: “Why shouldn’t I apply words in opposition to their original usage? Doesn’t e.g. Freud do that when he calls even an anxiety dream a wish-fulfilment dream? Where is the difference?” (CV, p. 50).

So, is Wittgenstein, as Read (2005, p. 83) poses the question, really hoist with his own petard? The present essay intends to probe the extent to which the contravening tendencies in Wittgenstein’s ordinary language philosophy might be reconciled. Section 2 starts with sketching Wittgenstein’s general approach to philosophy and tracks the special rôle that the language of everyday life occupies therein. Section 3 goes on to reconstruct Wittgenstein’s preferred method for philosophy, which he calls “perspicuous representation” (PI, § 122), and argues that this particular method implements an aesthetic conception of philosophy and, more specifically, a poetic approach to philosophical language, in which philosophical insights are not explicitly said, but supposed to be shown in well-worded and creatively composed descriptions. Section 4 closes with a short discussion of how Wittgenstein’s philosophical poetics relates to artificial jargons and ideal languages in philosophy and science.

2 Wittgenstein and Ordinary Language

Ordinary language philosophy is a branch of analytic philosophy according to which philosophical problems are, in the end, conceptual confusions to be treated by some kind of linguistic analysis. In contrast to the ideal language program of logical atomism and positivism—which sets out to clarify and reconcile philosophical propositions employing the apparatus of modern logic—the ordinary language approach deems close attention to the workings of everyday language key to the solution—or dissolution—of foundational issues in our conceptual scheme. Although the method is most closely associated with Oxford philosophers such as G. Ryle, J. L. Austin and P. F. Strawson, it is indeed Wittgenstein who develops many of its central ideas in his later works. In the Blue Book, for instance, Wittgenstein states,

It is wrong to say that in philosophy we consider an ideal language as opposed to our ordinary one. For this makes it appear as though we thought we could improve on ordinary language. But ordinary language is all right. (BB, p. 28)

In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein goes on to criticize philosophers (including his former self) for utilizing concepts without reflecting on their customary conditions of application:

When philosophers use a word—“knowledge”, “being”, “object”, “I”, “proposition”, “name”—and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language-game which is its original home? (PI, § 116)

By contrast, Wittgenstein proposes to “bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use” (ibid.). For example, he recommends analyzing mental concepts like ‘thinking’ by way of considering how the corresponding words and phrases are used in common speech:

Where do we get the concept ‘thinking’ from which we want to consider here? From everyday language. What first fixes the direction of our attention is the word “thinking”. (Z, § 113)

Similarly, Wittgenstein suggests treating St. Augustine’s question ‘What is time?’ by reference to the different kinds of statements that people make about the duration, past, present or future of events (cf. PI, §§ 89–90), just as he advises taking the familiar uses of the word ‘same’ (as when we speak of same colors, same shapes, etc.) as a basis for illuminating the general concept of sameness or identity (cf. RPP I, § 547).

Yet, the appeal to our actual ways of speaking has not merely heuristic value for Wittgenstein—it also serves him as a means of critique and correction. Commenting on the traditional view that the meaning of a word is the object for which the words stands (cf. PI, § 1), he notes, for instance,

the word “meaning” is being used illicitly if it is used to signify the thing that ‘corresponds’ to the word. That is to confound the meaning of a name with the bearer of the name. When Mr. N. N. dies one says that the bearer of the name dies, not that the meaning dies. (PI, § 40)

Likewise, Wittgenstein accuses those who insist on a clear-cut definition of the concept ‘game’ of a failure to see “the actual use of the word ‘game’ clearly” (PI, § 100). And being confronted with the claim that the soul is an immaterial mental entity, he retorts, “Shew me how you use the word ‘spiritual’ and I shall see whether the soul is non-corporeal and what you understand by ‘spirit’” (Z, § 127).

But why should ordinary language be the focal point of conceptual analyses in the first place? Why should what we commonly say bear upon philosophical theorizing at all? According to Wittgenstein, ordinary language is a direct expression of human nature. Reflecting our primordial needs and interests, it is what channels our experiences and guides our actions, determining, as it were, our basic interpretation of the world as well as our peculiar way of coping with it. As such, ordinary language “pervades all our life” (BB, p. 59). This is why Wittgenstein believes that certain concepts—for instance, the mental concepts of our folk psychology—cannot be eliminated:

Could a legislator abolish the concept of pain?

The basic concepts are interwoven so closely with what is most fundamental in our way of living that they are therefore unassailable. (LWPP II, p. 43f.)

The natural foundation of our common sense concepts accounts for the remarkable fact that people of vastly different historico-cultural backgrounds are nevertheless able to communicate with each other (cf. Hanfling 2000, p. 72). Yet, it is not just for anthropological reasons that different societies share, to a large extent, the same concepts. Wittgenstein takes it to be a logical constraint on languagehood that any language must be sufficiently akin to our natural language so as to be recognizable as a language proper (cf. ibid.). Here, he anticipates D. Davidson’s (1973/74) views on the (in)commensurability of conceptual schemes. To prove his point, Wittgenstein invokes the example of explorers coming into an unknown country with a language quite strange to them (PI, § 206):

Let us imagine that the people in that country carried on the usual human activities and in the course of them employed, apparently, an articulate language. If we watch their behaviour we find it intelligible, it seems ‘logical’. But when we try to learn their language we find it impossible to do so. For there is no regular connexion between what they say, the sounds they make, and their actions […].

Are we to say that these people have a language: orders, reports, and the rest?

There is not enough regularity for us to call it “language”. (PI, § 207)

If we are ever able to recognize a kind of coordination between the utterances and actions of people that warrants ascribing the possession of a language to them, then we should also be able to describe, in terms of our own language, how the activities of these people are coordinated—i.e., we should in principle be able to interpret their behavior and translate what it means (cf. Kusch 2012, p. 66). Conversely, if the activities of noise-making people are not organized in a way so that we can make sense of them, we will simply not find enough intelligibility in their behavior to call it a language in the first place.

Wittgenstein expands on this point when he contemplates the possibility of radically different color systems:

[E]ven if there were also people for whom it was natural to use the expressions “reddish-green” or “yellowish-blue” in a consistent manner and who perhaps also exhibit abilities which we lack, we would still not be forced to recognize that they see colours which we do not see. There is, after all, no commonly accepted criterion for what is a colour, unless it is one of our colours. (RC I, § 14)

In the end, the supposition that there might be conceptual systems so alien that we could not possibly translate them into a familiar tongue proves to be incoherent. For whatever might be alleged as evidence showing that people different from us have a ‘language which we do not understand,’ would at the same time be prone to show that they really have no language at all (cf. Ritter 2013, p. 11). In order to establish that what these people actually do is speaking a language, we need to be able to grasp their concepts, at least in outline, in our own terms. As Wittgenstein says, “The common behaviour of mankind is the system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language” (PI, § 206).

His remarks on ordinary language and its connection to our human “form of life” (PI, § 23) explain, not only why Wittgenstein believes that philosophers should concern themselves with the language of ordinary speakers, but also why they, in his view, should philosophize in ordinary language:

When I talk about language (words, sentences, etc.) I must speak the language of every day. Is this language somehow too coarse and material for what we want to say? Then how is another one to be constructed? […] [Y]our very questions were framed in this language; they had to be expressed in this language, if there was anything to ask! (PI, § 120)

Wittgenstein opposes the view, propagated by ideal language philosophers such as B. Russell and W. V. O. Quine, that artificial vocabularies and formalized logics can genuinely advance our philosophical knowledge. For what applies to languages in general applies to professional jargons and technical terminologies in particular: they must always be (re)translatable to the vernacular of ordinary speakers in order to be intelligible at all. Thus, what can ever be said about anything (our experiences, life, the world), must be sayable—in principle, at least, if not in practice—in everyday language. There can simply be no insights, philosophical or otherwise, categorically barred from the understanding of common sense; for what is barred from our apprehension, can be no insight. This is not to deny that certain nomenclatures and notations may sometimes be useful for clarifying or simplifying our customary concepts and distinctions. Such improvements, however, can never exceed the resources of ordinary language. After all, they have to be acknowledged by us—and that means that we have to carry out the clarifying, simplifying, or whatever, in our common idiom (cf. Hanfling 2000, p. 160).

To appreciate the Wittgensteinian stance here, consider one example of an alleged rectification of our (putatively defective) ordinary language by means of formal reconstruction: Russell’s (1905) theory of descriptions. Russell sets out to solve a puzzle about the truth values of sentences containing definite descriptions (i.e., expressions of the form ‘the F ’). He considers the statement

1. The present king of France is bald

and its opposite

1. The present king of France is not bald.

Both statements seem to be false, as France does not presently have a king. But then, the disjunction of (1) and (2) appears to violate the classical Law of Excluded Middle (cf. Russell 1905, p. 85). To escape this dilemma, Russell proposes to explicate the definite description ‘the present king of France’ as a complex expression that carries an existential presupposition into the sentences in which it occurs (cf. ibid., pp. 481–2). Thus, (1) and (2) are rephrased as

and

(where ‘ K ( x ) ’ stands for ‘ x is presently king of France’ and ‘ B ( x ) ’ for ‘ x is bald’). Now, statement (1*) is unquestionably false, since there is in fact no individual who is presently king of France. For the same reason, the opposite (2*) is clearly true. Hence, by substituting (1) and (2) with (1*) and (2*), respectively, the validity of the Law of Excluded Middle is preserved (cf. ibid., p. 490).

It may actually be doubted that the issue addressed by Russell is an ‘initial problem’ (cf. Quine 1960, p. 240) of ordinary language (cf. Hanfling 2000, p. 172). The very fact that ordinary speakers take both (1) and (2) to be false suggests that they do not regard these statements as contradictories, but rather as contraries which admit of joint negation in case that their grammatical subject is vacuous. Russell, on the other hand, is misled into seeing (1) and (2) as contradictories whose joint negation would violate the Law of Excluded Middle only because he imposes a Fregean logic on them which blurs the distinction between contrary and contradictory opposition (cf. Sommers 1982, p. 322).

For the present concern, however, the following observation is more important. Even if sentences like (1) and (2) were ambiguous in the way Russell suggests and thus disposed to engender philosophical conundrums, these misunderstandings could still be cleared up by explaining, in ordinary language, what was meant on a given occasion (cf. Hanfling 2000, p. 161). Surely, normal speakers could upon request clarify that by denying (1) they did not mean to deny the present king of France the predicate ‘is bald’ (because he is actually not bald), but rather meant to deny the whole proposition that the present king of France is bald (because there is presently no king of France). At any rate, the contention that only a “regimented notation” (Quine 1966, p. 44) could avoid or eliminate the alleged “vagueness and inaccuracy” (Russell 1959, p. 242) of common speech seems unfounded.

In fact, it would rather seem that the reformations of an ideal logic would themselves receive their light from nowhere but ordinary language. Even if Russell’s quantificational analysis of descriptions did improve upon the grammatical functions of those locutions in ordinary language, speakers could still appreciate these merits only thanks to their prior understanding—and approval—of the use of quantifiers like ‘everything,’ ‘something’ and ‘nothing’ in constructions such as (1*) and (2*). It shows that, in the epistemological order, formalizations must always follow the insights:

A ‘logically perfect’ language cannot be utilized as a means to philosophical inquiry, because no language could possibly be known to be ‘ideal,’ in the present sense, until after the completion of such a philosophical investigation. (Copilowish 1949, p. 69)

To be sure, philosophical investigations have to be conducted in a language. There is no way of getting hold of the ontological structure of the world (including the social world of human agents) without the grip of a linguistic system. Yet, the one language independent of all the others and therefore the standard against which any candidate language of philosophical inquiry is to be measured is the ordinary language of common sense. The latter is, as Wittgenstein says, the “hard bedrock, deeper than any special methods and language-games” (RPP I, § 648), where we eventually reach the “facts of living” (RPP I, § 630): the ineluctable point of departure—and point of arrival—for all our endeavors.

3 Ordinary Language and Poeticity

Wittgenstein contends that many of the problems which bewilder philosophers arise from the philosophers’ own misunderstanding of the meanings of our common sense concepts:

We mind about the kind of expressions we use concerning these things; we do not understand them, however, but misinterpret them. When we do philosophy we are like savages, primitive people, who hear the expressions of civilized men, put a false interpretation on them, and then draw the queerest conclusions from it. (PI, § 194)

Notwithstanding, Wittgenstein does admit that, to a large degree, it is ordinary language itself which fosters the confusions that lie at the root of philosophical puzzles and paradoxes:

Language sets everyone the same traps; it is an immense network of well kept wrong turnings. […] So what I should do is erect signposts at all the junctions where there are wrong turnings, to help people past the danger points. (CV, p. 25)

More often than not, Wittgenstein thinks, we run into philosophical calamities when we are taken in by superficial syntactical similarities between words which suggest substantial parallels between their use, while, in fact, they provoke a violation of the rules that actually govern the use of these words. For example, the “surface grammar” (PI, § 664) of the verb ‘to mean’—as it is used in sentences like ‘I meant her,’ etc.—might evoke the idea of a mental activity analogous to and concomitant with the physical activity of speaking, determining a certain relationship between our words and reality. Yet, close attention to the actual functioning of the word would reveal that meaning cannot really be a state or process (as it is, for example, nonsense to ask when a putative act of meaning began, how long it took, etc.) (cf. PI, § 661–4; Baker and Hacker 2005, p. 331).

According to Wittgenstein, philosophy is “a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language” (PI, § 109). At the same time, he insists that philosophy’s task is not to reform language: “It is not our aim to refine or complete the system of rules for the use of our words in unheard-of ways” (PI, § 133). What philosophers should do is to “establish an order in our knowledge of the use of language” (PI, § 132) by “giving prominence to distinctions which our ordinary forms of language easily make us overlook” (ibid.). On closer consideration, however, this seems to lead Wittgenstein’s philosophical methodology into an impasse (cf. Andronico 2010, p. 18). On the one hand, the philosopher is supposed not to introduce a new technical language to cope with philosophical issues: “[…] this is what the solution of all philosophical difficulties looks like. Their answers, if they are correct, must be homespun and ordinary” (PO, p. 167–9). On the other hand, it is precisely the ordinariness of ordinary language that blocks our view of the solution of our philosophical puzzles: “The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity” (PI, § 129).

How are these contrary tendencies in Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy to be reconciled? Wittgenstein himself suggests coping with the confusing complexity of our language by way of what he calls a perspicuous representation of our linguistic expressions—in particular, expressions that cause us troubles in philosophy—which is to achieve “complete clarity” (PI, § 133) of the “depth grammar” (PI, § 664) of these expressions by disentangling the rules that govern their use:

A main source of our failure to understand is that we do not command a clear view of the use of our words.—Our grammar is lacking in this sort of perspicuity. A perspicuous representation produces just that understanding which consists in ‘seeing connexions’. Hence the importance of finding and inventing intermediate cases. (PI, § 122)

Wittgenstein makes it plain that the concept of a perspicuous representation is of “fundamental significance” (PI, § 122) for his philosophical methodology: “It earmarks the form of account we give, the way we look at things” (ibid.). Unfortunately, Wittgenstein’s laconic characterization of the concept perpetuates the tension which inheres in his presupposition that ordinary language is both the source and the solution of our philosophical problems. Surely, the idea of a clarification of our concepts by means of a survey or synopsis of the grammatical rules for the use of our words dovetails with Wittgenstein’s maxim that philosophy “may in no way interfere with the actual use of language” and “can in the end only describe it” (PI, § 124). Yet, Wittgenstein’s intimation that, to attain such a perspicuous representation of the grammar of ordinary language, one should find—and even invent—intermediate cases (whatever these are), appears to belie his claim that philosophy “leaves everything as it is” (ibid.).

To get Wittgenstein’s methodological approach to philosophy straight, one has to consider the idea of a perspicuous representation in the broader context of his philosophizing. Wittgenstein introduces the notion in his Remarks on Frazers ‘Golden Bough,’ where he presents it as a general form for anthropological and ethnological accounts of human practices (in particular religious ceremonies and magical rites). Wittgenstein rejects Frazer’s attempts at explaining such practices based on the scientific model of causal explanation:

The historical explanation, the explanation as an hypothesis of development, is only one way of assembling the data—of their synopsis. It is just as possible to see the data in their relation to one another and to embrace them in a general picture without putting it in the form of an hypothesis about temporal development. (PO, p. 131)

Wittgenstein argues that the success of a socio-anthropological explanation of a human practice does not depend on the truth of a genetic hypothesis about the origins of this practice:

Does the sinister, as we may call it, attach to the practice of the Beltane Festival in itself, as it was carried on one hundred years ago, or is the Festival sinister only if the hypothesis of its origin turns out to be true? I believe it is clearly the inner nature of the modern practice itself which seems sinister to us, and the familiar facts of human sacrifice only indicate the lines along which we should view the practice. (PO, pp. 143–5)

According to Wittgenstein, what really makes us understand a particular practice—and its significance within a cultural community—is an “arrangement of its factual content” (PO, p. 133): a “perspicuous representation” (ibid.) of the phenomena relating to the practice which enables us to “see the connections” (ibid.) among them.

When I speak of the inner nature of the practice, I mean all circumstances under which it is carried out and which are not included in a report of such a festival, since they consist not so much in specific actions which characterize the festival as in what one might call the spirit of the festival; such things as would be included in one’s description, for example, of the kind of people who take part in it, their behavior at other times, that is, their character; the kind of games which they otherwise play. (PO, p. 145)

A proper description places a practice which is considered as puzzling and in need of explanation in the context of an encompassing pattern of social behavior, which is informed by general norms of human rationality and sensitivity. In view of the experiences and actions of its participants, and set against the backdrop of the views and customs that prevail in their community, the practice in question is rendered coherent and justified, and hence intelligible. It appears to be endemic to a shared form of life, as part of a common and familiar—and therefore no longer mysterious—code of conduct.

But how exactly are we supposed to apprehend meaningful relations in a perspicuous representation, considering that the facts we seek to understand seem so alien and detached? Again, Wittgenstein stresses “the importance of finding connecting links” (ibid.). As he elaborates, the required links are not, or need not be, causes—indeed, it does not even matter whether they actually exist or not. The intermediate cases merely serve as (imaginary) objects of comparison whose purpose is to create fruitful analogies that can unify the phenomena in the domain of observation (cf. Baker and Hacker 2005, p. 312):

[…] an hypothetical connecting link should […] do nothing but direct the attention to the similarity, the relatedness, of the facts. As one might illustrate an internal relation of a circle to an ellipse by gradually converting an ellipse into a circle; but not in order to assert that a certain ellipse actually, historically, had originated from a circle (evolutionary hypothesis), but only in order to sharpen our eye for a formal connection. (PO, p. 133)

Wittgenstein grants that etiological stories may contribute to our understanding of a human practice. They may do so, however, not due to their uncovering of causal truths, but rather insofar as they, too, reveal pertinent similarities which help to integrate the practice under scrutiny in a certain context of interpretation: “I can also see the evolutionary hypothesis as nothing more, as the clothing of a formal connection” (PO, p. 133). Thus, what appear to be speculative explanations regarding the origins of a human practice really function more like myths: narratives which provide hermeneutic strategies for phenomena that deviate from the usual or expectable in human life by linking them to canonical ideas and procedures of a collective.

In this context, it is instructive to note that Wittgenstein assimilates the manner in which we understand human practices to the kind of understanding that we seek in art: “In this case you can observe the same thing being puzzling, as in an aesthetic question. You ask: Why does this thing [i.e., a practice like the Beltane Festival] impress us so much?” (LC30–33, p. 343). In aesthetic investigations, Wittgenstein maintains, we are not interested in causal (for example, psychological) explanations of our aesthetic impressions either: “Giving a cause does not remove the aesthetic puzzle one feels when asked what makes a thing beautiful” (LC32–35, p. 38). The reasons we give for our aesthetic judgments are rather “descriptions” (ibid.), by which Wittgenstein means “certain comparisons—grouping together of certain cases” (LC, p. 29). Aesthetic descriptions “place things side by side” so as to “draw one’s attention to certain features” (LC32–35, p. 38) which solve our aesthetic puzzlement.

Wittgenstein’s idea of aesthetic understanding is closely related to the phenomenon of aspect-perception or ‘seeing-as,’ which is extensively discussed in part II, section xi, of the Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein speaks of the “noticing” (PI II, p. 193) or “dawning” (ibid., p. 194) of an aspect when, for example, a person realizes the similarity between two faces (ibid., p. 193), sees an ambiguous figure once as a duck, then as rabbit (ibid., p. 194), or recognizes a face in a certain drawing:

I suddenly see the solution of a puzzle-picture. Before, there were branches there; now there is a human shape. My visual impression has changed and now I recognize that it has not only shape and colour but also a quite particular ‘organization’.—My visual impression has changed;—what was it like before and what is it like now?—If I represent it by means of an exact copy—and isn’t that a good representation of it?—no change is shewn. (PI II, p. 196)

To notice an aspect of a picture is not to register another part of it. Rather, it is to recognize a certain pattern or configuration—to understand how the parts of the picture “go together” (PI II, p. 208). Whatever kind of fit is perceived among its parts determines what a picture means to someone. It constitutes the “picture-object” (PI II, p. 194), as Wittgenstein calls it, i.e., the kind of thing one sees in the picture.

Wittgenstein suggests that aesthetic comprehension basically consists in the perception of aspects: “Here it occurs to me that in conversation on aesthetic matters we use the words ‘You have to see it like this, this is how it is meant’ […]” (PI II, p. 202). Aspects convey “what it’s all about” (PI, § 527) in a work of art; they are the features which are exhibited in an aesthetic description: “To tell a person ‘This is the climax’ is like saying ‘This is the man in the puzzle picture’” (LC32–35, p. 38–9).

Aspect-perception is strongly reminiscent of the state of ‘seeing the connections’ which is reached in a perspicuous representation. As in the latter case, what is perceived in the dawning of an aspect is not a newly discovered property of the percept—a further fact—but rather “an internal relation between it and other objects” (PI II, p. 212). And as in the case of ‘finding connecting links,’ Wittgenstein emphasizes the creative moment in aspect-perception: “The concept of an aspect is akin to the concept of an image. […] Doesn’t it take imagination to hear something as a variation on a particular theme?” (ibid., p. 213). The internal relations one perceives when noticing an aspect are established by innovative comparisons on part of the perceiving subject. Thus, a person might, for instance, arrive at seeing a duck-rabbit picture as a rabbit by comparing the picture to (real or imaginary) rabbits (ibid., p. 196–7), just as she might recognize someone whom she has not seen for years by comparing (a photograph or her own memory of) the old face with the altered one (ibid., p. 197). Finally, as in the case of ‘mythological’ explanations in anthropology and ethnology, the comparisons made in aesthetic contemplation are not intended to hypothesize real links between the contemplated objects: “I say all Aesthetics is of [the] nature of giving a paraphrase, even if [the] same words also express a hypothesis. It is giving a good simile” (LC30–33, p. 356).

Following Wittgenstein, then, there are close affinities between the kinds of investigation pursued, and methods employed, in social anthropology on the one hand and aesthetics on the other. Perspicuous representations are supposed to reveal meanings that reside in formal connections among human practices in very much the same way as aesthetic descriptions serve to unearth aspects that consist in internal relations between objects. Now, how can one specify Wittgenstein’s method in philosophy relative to these analogies—considering that he explicitly discusses the concept of a perspicuous representation in the context of both philosophy and social anthropology and, in the latter context, obviously aligns it with the notion of an aesthetic description?

With respect to the objects of investigation, one may say that Wittgenstein takes a socio-anthropological approach to philosophy. The epithet is warranted given Wittgenstein’s view that philosophy basically investigates language, and language is basically a socio-cultural human practice (cf. Hacker 2013, p. 114):

The concepts employed by different linguistic and social groups are the product of social interaction, responses to shared needs, inventiveness and discovery, common interests called forth by the varying circumstances of social life, that evolve in idiosyncratic ways in different societies at different times and places. (Hacker 2013, p. 116)

Corroborating the primacy of practice in his approach to the characterization of concepts and linguistic contents, Wittgenstein calls, for example, the conceptual system of mathematics “an anthropological phenomenon” (RFM VII, § 33). He also addresses questions about the meaning of aesthetic concepts from an ethnological viewpoint:

The words we call expressions of aesthetic judgment play a very complicated role, but a very definite role, in what we call a culture of a period. To describe their use or to describe what you mean by a cultured taste, you have to describe a culture. (CV, p. 8)

Regarding the modus operandi of his anthropologico-philosophical investigations, however, it appears that Wittgenstein takes aesthetics as a paradigm. For him, aesthetic experience seems to model our understanding of human practices, and, more specifically, languages. Correspondingly, aesthetic description seems to set the standard for the method of perspicuous representation in both anthropology and philosophy. One might call this the “aesthetic commitment” (Andronico 2010, p. 18) of Wittgenstein’s conception—or even Wittgenstein’s “aesthetic conception” (Säätelä 2011, p. 170)—of anthropological philosophy.

At any rate, Wittgenstein is well aware of the “queer resemblance between a philosophical investigation […] and one in aesthetics” (CV, p. 29). He equates the philosophical method of perspicuous representation with that of aesthetic description: “In […] Aesthetics, Philosophy, [the] answer to a puzzle is to make a synopsis possible” (LC30–33, p. 358). As he does in aesthetics, Wittgenstein rejects scientistic-theoretical approaches in philosophy. Instead, he advocates a hermeneutic-descriptive method: “There must not be anything hypothetical in our considerations. We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place” (PI, § 109). According to the proposal, philosophical issues—which arise, in Wittgenstein’s view, when one gets “entangled” (PI, § 125) in the rules for the use of our words and no longer ‘knows one’s way about’ (cf. PI, § 123)—are solved “by looking into the workings of our language, and that in such a way as to make us recognize those workings”—“not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known” (PI, § 109).

It is no coincidence that Wittgenstein preferably speaks of philosophical and aesthetic puzzles rather than problems. For a problem is usually something that can be solved by giving new information or hypotheses. In a puzzle, by contrast, one has already all the information and only needs to ‘get the point’ (cf. Säätelä 2013, p. 41). Accordingly, the obligatory way to solve a puzzle is by realizing how its pieces belong together; and to this end one has to set out those pieces so that everything ‘falls into place.’ This is the common idea of perspicuous representations and aesthetic descriptions.

Wittgenstein characterizes the method of perspicuous representation as a comparative one: “Our clear and simple language-games,” he says, “are set up as objects of comparison which are meant to throw light on the facts of our language by way not only of similarities, but also of dissimilarities” (PI, § 130). And, again, Wittgenstein stresses the inventive aspect of his method:

[…] our method is not merely to enumerate actual usages of words, but rather deliberately to invent new ones, some of them because of their absurd appearance. […] The use of expressions constructed on analogical patterns stresses analogies between cases often far apart. And by doing this these expressions may be extremely useful. (BB, p. 28)

Wittgenstein also likens the semantic understanding which is gained in philosophical reflections to the aesthetic understanding that ensues in the contemplation of art. Thus, he proclaims, “‘The sense of a proposition’ is very similar to the business of ‘an appreciation of art’” (LC, p. 29), and likewise makes a “connexion between the concepts of ‘seeing an aspect’ and ‘experiencing the meaning of a word’” (PI II, p. 214). What Wittgenstein wants to suggest is that conceptual cognizance is phenomenologically akin to perception: “a sentence can strike me as like a painting in words, and the very individual word in the sentence as like a picture” (ibid., p. 215). What we experience when we understand a word’s meaning is a “feeling for” (RPP I, § 654) that meaning which seems to us as if the word has “has taken up its meaning into itself” (ibid., p. 218), like a “physiognomy” (ibid.) which “occurs” (ibid.) to us.

In a telling summary of his philosophical method, Wittgenstein states: “really one should write philosophy only as one writes a poem” (CV, p. 28). This confession highlights the perhaps most important facet of Wittgenstein’s aesthetic view of philosophy. The peculiar knowledge that consists in seeing the connections and in the noticing of aspects is, in the end, ineffable. What is understood in a perspicuous representation or aesthetic description is something which itself is not described, but rather indescribably contained in what is described (cf. Engelmann 1967, p. 7). The descriptions merely represent what we know anyway; but, if felicitous, they will make us look at it “in the proper spirit” (PO, p. 169): “The capacity for philosophy consists in the ability to receive a strong and lasting impression from a grammatical fact” (PO, p. 183).

Wittgenstein leaves no doubt that poets “have something to teach” (CV, p. 42) and that they strive for some kind of truth in their writing (cf. ibid., p. 46). He even goes so far as to say that the poetic mood “is the mood of receptivity to nature & one in which one’s thoughts seem as vivid as nature itself” (ibid., p. 75). On the other hand, Wittgenstein reminds us “that a poem, even though it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information” (Z, § 160). Thus, whatever a poem teaches us—whatever truth it approaches—is not said. Rather, it is shown through the poetic composition of words which is capable of evoking meanings that elude and transcend the semantics of prosaic diction:

We speak of understanding a sentence in the sense in which it can be replaced by another which says the same; but also in the sense in which it cannot be replaced by any other. […] In the one case the thought in the sentence is something common to different sentences; in the other, something that is expressed only by these words in these positions. (Understanding a poem) (PI, § 531)

No one would believe that a poem remained essentially unaltered if its words were replaced by others in accordance with an appropriate convention. (PG, § 32)

Like a poet, Wittgenstein struggles with communicating the unutterable. The meaning of a word, he believes, ultimately cannot be asserted; for such an assertion would have to be phrased in a language. Therefore, it would amount to nothing more than to a replacement of one sign by another one—which, in turn, would have to be replaced by yet another sign in order to assert its meaning, ad infinitum (Even in an ostensive definition, the ostension would also merely replace one sign by another one, namely, a word by a gesture [cf. VW, p. 7]). Hence, in all our efforts to articulate the meaning of words, we will always stumble upon residual meanings which cannot be enunciated: “The inexpressible […] perhaps provides the background, against which whatever I was able to express acquires meaning” (CV, p. 23).

This is not to say, however, that there is absolutely no way of knowing the semantics of our language. For the very fact that we use certain signs as a replacement for others—as a definition or description of their meaning—displays their use, hence their meaning. This, then, is how the philosopher may succeed in penetrating the meaning of our words: by giving perspicuous representations which enact these words in all their possible and impossible combinations, their circumstances, consequences and idle runnings, so as to carve out and put on display the overall “morphology” (Malcolm 2001, p. 43) of their use. This, in turn, explains why, for Wittgenstein, word choice is so essential to philosophical elucidation: “because the point is to hit upon the physiognomy of the thing exactly”—“so characteristically that the reader says, ‘Yes, that’s exactly the way I meant it’” (PO, p. 165). “The philosopher,” Wittgenstein explains, “strives to find the liberating word, that is, the word that finally permits us to grasp what up until now has intangibly weighed down our consciousness” (ibid.). It is here that philosophical activity, as Wittgenstein conceives it, develops a poetic quality: what the right words in a perspicuous representation convey is a significance which is not reducible to the rephrasable meanings of those words, but rather consists in our agreement on their ‘resonance’ with each other in the offered constellation.

How exactly is this poeticity accomplished in Wittgenstein’s philosophizing? Generally, by a nonlinear, circling writing style that is “alternately anecdotal and aphoristic, repetitive and disjunctive, didactic and jokey, self-assertive and self-canceling” (Perloff 1996, p. 66). Wittgenstein himself characterizes his procedure in the preface of the Philosophical Investigations as follows:

After several unsuccessful attempts to weld my results together into [a whole in which the thoughts should proceed from one subject to another in a natural order and without breaks], I realized that I should never succeed. The best that I could write would never be more than philosophical remarks; my thoughts were soon crippled if I tried to force them on in any single direction against their natural inclination.—And this was, of course, connected with the very nature of the investigation. For this compels us to travel over a wide field of thought criss-cross in every direction.—The philosophical remarks in this book are, as it were, a number of sketches of landscapes which were made in the course of these long and involved journeyings. […] Thus this book is really only an album. (PI, viii)

The poetic effect emanating from Wittgenstein’s assembled ruminations, also practiced in his lectures at Cambridge, is vividly recalled by two of his students, D. A. T. Gasking and A. C. Jackson:

At first one didn’t see where all the talking was leading. One didn’t see, or saw only very vaguely, the point of the numerous examples. And then, sometimes one did, suddenly. All at once, sometimes, the solution to one’s problems became clear and everything fell into place. In these exciting moments one realized something of what mathematicians mean when they speak of the beauty of an elegant proof. The solution, once seen, seemed so simple and obvious, such an inevitable and simple key to unlock so many doors so long battered against in vain. One wondered how one could fail to see it. But if one tried to explain to someone else who had not seen it one couldn’t get it across without going through the whole long story. (Gasking and Jackson 1967, p. 50)

More specifically, Wittgenstein’s poetics is characterized by the iterative and recursive deployment of analogical and metaphorical figures. Consider, for example, Wittgenstein’s comparison of words with chess pieces (cf. PI, § 108), his analogy of languages and games (cf. PI, § 7), and the association of these with the human “form of life” (PI, § 19) which is the “river-bed of thoughts” (OC, § 97) and the “bedrock” (PI, § 217) of justification: the recurring juxtaposition of these and related similes—all taken from ordinary language, so as to “let our thoughts roam up and down in the familiar surroundings of the words” (Z, § 155)—creates a layering of meanings which tracks down and condenses several, seemingly inconsistent aspects of linguistic meaning: amongst other things, the cultural-historical contingency and anthropological necessity of language, the empiricity and apriority of concepts and the factivity and normativity of meaning. The purpose of this pregnant fusion of features is twofold (cf. Baker and Hacker 2005, pp. 322–3). Initially, it is to free our minds from “pictures” that hold us “captive” (PI, § 115), i.e., too narrow or one-sided interpretations of the phenomena of language which precipitate us into philosophical disasters. Ultimately, it is to clear an unbiased view through language’s seemingly contradictory determinations, eliciting an understanding that these determinations are in fact no more contradictory than the different aspects of an ambiguous figure (that shows both a picture-duck and a picture-rabbit, for instance).

4 Conclusions

With his poetic approach to philosophical language, Wittgenstein approximates Adorno’s ideal of philosophy more closely than both philosophers probably would suspect. Indeed, Wittgenstein’s method of perspicuous representation exemplifies the dialectical effort “to say, through mediation and contextualization, what cannot be said hic et nunc” (Adorno 2008, p. 74); it attempts to achieve “the utopia of cognition […] by unlocking the non-conceptual by means of the concept, and the self-criticism of concepts—without reducing what has been comprehended, the non-conceptual, to concepts by main force” (ibid.).

In the end, however, the question arises what exactly distinguishes Wittgenstein’s philosophical poetics—apart from the fact that it is a poetics of ordinary language—from other descriptive models in philosophy and science. Is not every conceptual framework—philosophical or scientistic, metaphysical or positivist, literary or formal—potentially poetic in the sense that it may facilitate a comprehension of contents which would otherwise be incomprehensible?

Repeatedly, Wittgenstein admires the intellectual virtues of scientific schemes—not so much for their verisimilitude, but rather for their fruitful synopsis of the empirical facts. He remarks, for instance, that the “real achievement of a Copernicus or a Darwin was not the discovery of a true theory but of a fertile new point of view” (CV, p. 26). Likewise, he assesses the merits of Freudian psychoanalysis. Wittgenstein strongly opposes Freud’s own view that psychoanalysis offers scientific explanations or empirically testable hypotheses. By contrast, he holds, “The psychoanalytic way of finding [why a person acts in a certain way] is analogous to an aesthetic investigation” (LC32–35, p. 40). Psychoanalytic explanations have a “peculiar charm” (LC, p. 25)—the “marked attraction […] which mythological explanations have” (ibid., 43). Their acceptability is “not a matter of discovery, but of persuasion” (ibid., p. 27), justified by the fact that when people accept or adopt these explanations, certain things seem much clearer and easier for them (cf. ibid., p. 43):

What Freud says about the subconscious sounds like science, but in fact it is just a means of representation. […] The display of elements of a dream, for instance […] is a display of similes. As in aesthetics, things are placed side by side so as to exhibit certain features. These throw light on our way of looking at a dream […]. (LC32–35, p. 40)

Even formal languages are not entirely discredited in Wittgenstein’s approach. He appreciates, for instance, that “a mathematician is always inventing new forms of description. Some, stimulated by practical needs, others, from aesthetic needs,—and yet others in a variety of ways” (RFM, § 166). In philosophy, too, Wittgenstein thinks new terminologies and logical systems are legitimate—as far as they are put into the service of attaining a perspicuous representation of the philosophical data:

Whenever we make up ‘ideal languages’ it is not in order to replace our ordinary language by them; but just to remove some trouble caused in someone’s mind by thinking that he has got hold of the exact use of a common word. (BB, p. 28)

In the light of these remarks, it would seem inappropriate to take Wittgenstein’s criticism of ideal language approaches in philosophy as a dogmatic rejection of the idea that formal tools and technical vocabularies might be conducive to the pursuit of our philosophical enquiries. If anything, Wittgenstein should be understood as claiming that, so far, the jargonization and technicalization of philosophical speech has contributed practically nothing to the solution, but almost everything to the generation of philosophical problems. But as he observes, “in philosophy the extended use [of a term] is not supported by true or false opinions about natural processes. No fact justifies it (&) non [sic] can overturn it” (CV, p. 50). For Wittgenstein, there are, in the end, no philosophical criteria for choosing particular conceptual systems except two: first, any candidate system must be semantically accessible to ordinary language speakers; second, any such system should enable an overview of the phenomena under consideration and help to dispel confusions that result from straitened perspectives on those phenomena. Yet, if these are the sole constraints on the formation of philosophical languages, then many different styles and façons de parler may prove to be convenient for the respective purposes of our different philosophical endeavors—be it the ordinary language of everyday life, the formal framework of the logician, or the transcendental jargon of the metaphysician.

These considerations challenge Wittgenstein’s image as an anti-philosopher (cf. Adorno 2008, p. 74) and opponent of philosophical neologisms and systematizations. The extent to which his aesthetic conception of philosophy allows for poetic conceptualization and combination is hard to square with the putative self-concept of a philosopher who thinks that the answers to all philosophical difficulties “must be homespun and ordinary” (PO, p. 167–9). Rather, one might say, in slight variation of Wittgenstein’s own words: the language of the philosopher may indeed be ordinary or extraordinary—as long as one looks at it “in the proper spirit” (PO, p. 169).