Abstract
Wittgenstein’s attitude to writing philosophy is an important part of his complex legacy from Frege. Even the frequently misconstrued phrase, “Philosophie dürfte man eigentlich nur dichten”, is part of that legacy. How should we actually render that sentence in English? How is the idea that Dichtung is a necessary aspect of philosophical method rooted in thoughts that ultimately find their way back to Frege? Where do we find Dichtung in the so-called private language argument? How is Wittgenstein’s view of the role of Dichtung in philosophy related to his appreciation of humor in philosophizing? What is the role of humor in Frege’s work? How does Wilhelm Busch in Eduards Traum illustrate the philosophical significance of humorous Dichtung? What is the link between Dichtung and craftsmanship in writing philosophy for Wittgenstein? These are the central issues that the article addresses.
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Notes
- 1.
This was my goal in writing Assembling Reminders (Janik 2009) .
- 2.
It is telling that when Wittgenstein visited Vienna in early 1950 he participated in philosophical discussions in the circle around Viktor Kraft and not those in the circle around Ludwig Hänsel , who was one of his closest friends. The action was where the analytical philosophers were, nowhere else.
- 3.
The remark reads in full: “Ich glaube meine Stellung zur Philosophie dadurch zusammengefaßt zu haben, indem ich sagte: [P]hilosophie dürfte man eigentlich nur dichten. Daraus muß sich, scheint mir, ergeben, wie weit mein Denken der Gegenwart, Zukunft, oder der Vergangenheit angehört. Denn ich habe mich damit auch als einen bekannt, der nicht ganz kann was er zu können wünscht .” (Wittgenstein 1998, 28).
- 4.
In the context of the research project “Wittgenstein’s Culture and Value: An Electronic Edition” sponsored by the Austrian Science Fund that ran from 2007 and 2010 Kerstin Mayr , Joseph Wang and I carefully compared both translations with Professor Pichler ’s definitive German text line by line, words for word. We also investigated the text genesis and the initial reception of the work carefully. For reasons beyond our control the results could not be published. They are available at (not from!) the Brenner Archives Research Institute at the University of Innsbruck and the Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen in Norway.
- 5.
The word is ultimately derived not from dicht (thick) but from the Latin dictare meaning “to dictate, to set up or to draft” (as one drafts, say, a letter).
- 6.
This way of dividing up the genus “literature ” originating in the eighteenth century is ultimately derived from Friedrich Schlegel . See Jäger (1970, 2–30) .
- 7.
Severin Schroeder made this point to me forcefully and enlighteningly at a Wittgenstein symposium organized by the Bergen University Department of Philosophy in Marifjøra, Norway in 2011.
- 8.
Alois Pichler gave me the first inkling that Frege was involved here at the same Marifjøra symposium.
- 9.
Walter Methlagl was the first to realize this crucial point.
- 10.
Sluga (1980) argues for a Kantian view of Frege’s objectivism against Michael Dummett ’s more Platonic view of it. However, this Kantian variation is hardly identical with the historical Kant . Sluga’s view of Fregean objectivity tends to co-incide with ours as Dummett ’s does not.
- 11.
This is spelled out in more detail in the Frege chapter of Janik (2009) .
- 12.
I have corrected the standard translations of Wittgenstein where required.
- 13.
I profited from listening to the Norwegian philosopher Harald Johannessen’s sobering case against Wittgenstein in Bergen several years ago.
- 14.
See my Janik (2009) for a detailed account of these themes.
- 15.
This is also further developed in Janik (2009) .
- 16.
Personal communication from Rudolf Koder , Vienna 1969.
- 17.
This is a slightly emended English version of the account in Pape (1977, 76f).
- 18.
Commenting upon Wittgenstein’s view that Schopenhauer was a superficial thinker Maurice Drury writes, “…a shallow thinker may be able to say something clearly but…a deep thinker makes us see that there is something that cannot be said” (Drury 1981, 96) . With respect to his nihilistic pessimism Busch stands exactly in this relation to Schopenhauer (see Willems 1998 , chapter 6 “Macht und Ohnmacht des Geistes: Wilhelm Busch , Schopenhauer, Nietzsche ”, 80–90).
- 19.
Hertz ’s influence upon Wittgenstein , which is second only to Frege’s is discussed in detail in Janik (2009) .
- 20.
“Agrammaticality ”; in this volume.
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Epilogue
Epilogue
The remarks above were originally inspired by a discussion with Nuno Venturinha at a symposium in Innsbruck commemorating the 60th anniversary of Wittgenstein’s death. In that occasion Dr. Venturinha set out to re-contextualize the remark that “Philosophie dürfte man eigentlich nur dichten.” In a recent paper on the same topicFootnote 20 he makes the following points about the passage:
-
1.
It was originally prefaced by the remark, “the presentation [Darstellung] of philosophy can only be poetical.”
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2.
It should be read in conjunction with the following text from 1938: “When I do not want to teach a more correct thought, but another /a new/ movement of thought, then my aim is a ‘transvaluation of values’ and I come to Nietzsche as to my view that a philosopher should be a poet.” [Dr. Venturinha’s translation]
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3.
This implies a Nietzschean inspiration for the idea that philosophieren ought to be dichten.
My response is to re-iterate that the use of dichten does not imply poetry or an opposition to prose but a different way of using prose, fictional prose as opposed to representational prose. The point is one of typically Wittgensteinian subtlety. The fact remains that there are not even hints of any attempts to write poetry in the sense of Lyrik anywhere in Wittgenstein’s corpus; he just wants to create more powerful ways of showing alternatives to the conventional philosophical imagination . The idea is less Nietzschean in inspiration than it is parallel to what Nietzsche wanted to do in ethics. Nothing that Wittgenstein does—always his own ultimate criteria—is very like what Nietzsche does when he is being a poet, say in Zarathustra. His continual self-criticism is not the sign of helplessness that it is usually taken to be but a striving for a kind of perfection in the writing of philosophical fiction that would set analytical philosophers on the right track—not one that would put them out of business. If this is right the genuine work of analytical philosophy is fictional but not lyrical and it is every bit as inspired by Frege as it is by the Sage of Sils Maria.
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Janik, A. (2018). The Dichtung of Analytic Philosophy: Wittgenstein’s Legacy from Frege and Its Consequences. In: Bengtsson, G., Säätelä, S., Pichler, A. (eds) New Essays on Frege. Nordic Wittgenstein Studies, vol 3. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71186-7_9
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