Wittgenstein and Modernism

Wittgenstein and Modernism

Wittgenstein and Modernism

EDITED BY MICHAEL LEMAHIEU AND KAREN ZUMHAGEN-YEKPLÉ

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2017 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2017.

Printed in the United States of America

26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-42037-0 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-42040-0 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-42054-7 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226420547.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: LeMahieu, Michael, author, editor. | Zumhagen-Yekplé, Karen, author, editor.

Title: Wittgenstein and modernism / edited by Michael LeMahieu and Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016017326 | ISBN 9780226420370 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226420400 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226420547 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1889–1951. | Modernism (Literature)

Classification: LCC B3376.W564 W54325 2016 | DDC 192—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016017326

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Wittgenstein, Modernism, and the Contradictions of Writing Philosophy as Poetry

Michael LeMahieu and Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé

PART 1  Wittgenstein’s Modernist Context

1  Wittgenstein and Modernism in Literature: Between the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations

Anthony J. Cascardi

2  To Become a Different Person: Wittgenstein, Christianity, and the Modernist Ethos

Marjorie Perloff

3  The Concept of Expression in the Arts from a Wittgensteinian Perspective

Charles Altieri

4  Wittgenstein, Loos, and Critical Modernism: Style and Idea in Architecture and Philosophy

Allan Janik

PART 2  Wittgenstein’s Modernist Cultures

5  Loos, Musil, Wittgenstein, and the Recovery of Human Life

Piergiorgio Donatelli

6  Wittgenstein, Benjamin, and Pure Realism

Eli Friedlander

7  What Makes a Poem Philosophical?

John Gibson

PART 3  Wittgenstein and Literary Modernism

8  In the Condition of Modernism: Philosophy, Literature, and The Sacred Fount

Kristin Boyce

9  The World as Bloom Found It: Ithaca, the Tractatus, and Looking More than Once for the Solution of Difficult Problems in Imaginary or Real Life

Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé

10  Lectures on Ethics: Wittgenstein and Kafka

Yi-Ping Ong

11  Bellow’s Private Language

Michael LeMahieu

Notes

List of Contributors

Index

Acknowledgments

We would like to express our deepest thanks to Elizabeth Branch Dyson, whose early commitment to this project saw it through to its completion. We also wish to thank the four anonymous referees whose careful reading of the proposal and the manuscript provided valuable guidance. We are grateful for the support of the School of Liberal Arts at Tulane University and the Department of English and the College of Architecture, Arts and Humanities at Clemson University.

INTRODUCTION

Wittgenstein, Modernism, and the Contradictions of Writing Philosophy as Poetry

MICHAEL LEMAHIEU AND KAREN ZUMHAGEN-YEKPLÉ

How does the category of modernism inform our understanding of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, and how does Wittgenstein’s philosophy elucidate the category of modernism? The essays in this volume take up these questions as they consider how different aspects of Wittgenstein’s philosophy intersect with various uses of the term modernism. Wittgenstein’s philosophy enacts or embodies, alternately or simultaneously, modernism as a historical period, an aesthetic style, and a philosophical worldview. Yet even as the concept of modernism affords new understandings of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, Wittgenstein’s multifaceted thinking raises the vexing question of modernism itself.

On the face of it, Wittgenstein appears to represent a modernist figure par excellence—the philosophical counterpart to poets, artists, and composers the likes of Stein, Picasso, and Schoenberg. Wittgenstein’s lifespan, 1889–1951, coincides almost perfectly with modernism’s core period of about 1890 to 1945.¹ The one major work he published in his lifetime, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, appeared in its influential English translation in 1922, modernism’s annus mirabilis: the year of Eliot’s The Waste Land, Joyce’s Ulysses, and Woolf’s Jacob’s Room.² As those works revolutionized literature, the Tractatus revolutionized philosophy, advancing the most crystalline statement of the linguistic turn in twentieth-century thought.³ The Tractatus secretly belongs, Terry Eagleton suggests, to the great wave of European modernism: For the true coordinates of that astonishing mystical text are surely not Russell or Frege, but Joyce, Schoenberg, Picasso, all those self-ironising avant-gardists who sought in their own fashion to represent and point to their representing at a stroke.⁴ After abandoning and then returning to philosophy, Wittgenstein went on to revolutionize the field a second time. The posthumous publication of the Philosophical Investigations in 1953 set the stage for the appearance of ordinary language philosophy, which in the following decades achieved its fullest expression in the work of J. L. Austin and that of Stanley Cavell—work that has since inspired a wide array of publications in analytical and continental philosophy as well as literary and cultural theory. In each of his two major works, Wittgenstein developed a new style of writing that represented a new point of view from which to regard many of the same crises of language, faith, experience, self, and other that are the central issues of modernism. The prima facie case for considering Wittgenstein a philosophical modernist is thus immediately compelling.

And yet, with the notable exceptions of Cavell and Eagleton, Wittgenstein has rarely been thought of as a modernist figure. As late as the 1990s, Michael Fischer could observe correctly that discussions of modernism usually omit Wittgenstein, and discussions of Wittgenstein usually ignore modernism.⁵ The reasons for this omission or evasion pertain to disciplinary configurations and intellectual history. The first is terminological and field specific: modernism is not a term of art in philosophy; it is, rather, a term of the arts. The designation modern philosophy continues to refer to the period stretching from Descartes to Kant, and as such it distinguishes that period from ancient or medieval philosophy. By these conventions, Wittgenstein is not a modern philosopher, and no philosophers are modernists. The second reason is more substantial: Wittgenstein and the Tractatus were for many years associated with the philosophy of logical positivism, which defined itself as antithetical to the arts and to history. Rudolf Carnap, the preeminent figure of the Vienna Circle of logical positivists, writes in the preface to his 1929 work, The Logical Structure of the World, that a successful scientific approach will eliminate all speculative or poetic work from philosophy.⁶ Carnap’s Berlin Circle counterpart, Hans Reichenbach, who coedited the positivist journal Erkenntnis with Carnap, opens his 1951 work, The Rise of Scientific Philosophy, by proudly pronouncing that philosophy has proceeded from speculation to science and concludes it by wryly remarking that, with regard to the history of philosophy, one should always remember that it is history, and not philosophy.⁷ Although Wittgenstein resisted the logical positivists’ reading and appropriation of his work, they were influential in establishing his reputation as a scientific philosopher.⁸ Anglo-American analytic philosophy would go on to solidify this reputation. From a different quarter, Theodor Adorno likewise characterized the Tractatus as a positivist text, though his evaluation of that fact differed decidedly from Carnap’s: As long as philosophy is no more than the cult of ‘what is the case,’ in Wittgenstein’s formula, it enters into competition with the sciences to which in delusion it assimilates itself—and loses.⁹ In its turn, Philosophical Investigations, all but ignored by Adorno, was criticized by Adorno’s Frankfurt School colleague Herbert Marcuse for its scientism and positivism: Wittgenstein’s assurance that philosophy ‘leaves everything as it is’—such statements exhibit, to my mind, academic sado-masochism, self-humiliation, and self-denunciation of the intellectual whose labor does not issue in scientific, technical or like achievements.¹⁰ Wittgenstein, both early and late, is thus alternately applauded or denigrated as a figure of what Marcuse calls neo-positivism. Either way, Wittgenstein’s philosophy was for many years associated with a techno-scientific worldview that was antithetical to both history and the arts even as the term modernism came to designate an aesthetic style and a period of cultural, literary, and art history. In this narrative of two cultures, with science and technology on one side and literature and the arts on the other, Wittgenstein is positioned squarely in the former camp. His philosophy helped create the disciplinary distinctions that rendered it illegible as modernist.¹¹

But while this narrative of intellectual history accurately reflects the early reception of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, it distorts the nature of that philosophy and its later influence. Far from attempting to eliminate poetic elements from philosophy in the name of scientific strictness, Wittgenstein conceived of philosophy in poetic terms: "Philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition [dichten]," he writes in a 1934 notebook.¹² While a 1937 review of Yeats’s The Vision refers to Wittgenstein as the prince of Positivists, Marjorie Perloff describes him as the patron saint for poets and artists, and Eagleton likewise describes him as the philosopher of poets and composers, playwrights and novelists.¹³ Perloff’s Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary (1996) remains one of the most compelling statements of the affinities between Wittgenstein’s philosophy and literary modernism. In chapter 2 of this collection, Perloff focuses on another bête noire of logical positivism, not poetry but religion, showing how Wittgenstein’s contradictory but nevertheless insistent remarks about Christianity treat religion less as a matter of divine faith than as a set of practices within a form of life. Central to Perloff’s examination of Wittgenstein’s outsider relationship to modernism is an attempt to answer the question of what it means to make self-transformation one’s central purpose in life. Her chapter accounts for ways in which such a desire for transformation informs Wittgenstein’s elaboration of a philosophy of everyday language and life in defiance of philosophical theories or systems. The centrality of transformative longing to both Wittgenstein’s philosophy and literary modernism is also a focus of chapter 9, by Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé, which reads the Tractatus alongside the Ithaca chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses. Zumhagen-Yekplé examines Wittgenstein’s antimetaphysical and antitheoretical philosophical aims in terms of the quests for the right way of living or seeing the world aright that exceed the ephemeral epiphanic moments that have become a critical mainstay of modernist studies. In chapter 5 of this volume, Piergiorgio Donatelli also discusses connections between Wittgenstein’s concerns with everyday life and its relationship to the higher. Donatelli suggests that Wittgenstein aims in the Tractatus to liberate us from desires of idealization that lead us to see the higher as something superluminescent in language rather than as something we find in what is absent from language. Like Perloff, Donatelli asks how a reading of Wittgenstein, situated within the development of Austrian modernism, can help us understand modernism’s concern for new forms of expression in the arts as a need for a radical reform of our lives.

Among literary critics, Perloff’s contribution to our understanding of Wittgenstein’s philosophy viewed within the context of studies in twentieth-century literature is matched perhaps only by that of Charles Altieri, whose groundbreaking work on Wittgenstein goes back to Act and Quality: A Theory of Literary Meaning and Humanistic Understanding (1981), written during the height of American literary scholars’ enthrallment with continental philosophy. In chapter 2 and chapter 3, respectively, Perloff and Altieri adopt different methods to reach similar conclusions regarding Wittgenstein’s relation to modernism. Whereas Perloff takes a biographical approach to studying Wittgenstein’s attitude toward religion, Altieri offers a theoretical investigation into the expressivist values of modernist aesthetics—values occluded in contemporary literary criticism and aesthetic theory but legible in terms of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. Altieri notes that while Wittgenstein did not have great sympathy with modernism, he nevertheless had a modernist distrust of the lyrical subject contemplating its inwardness (57); Perloff notes that although Wittgenstein considered himself a confirmed antimodernist, he is nevertheless a thorough if unwitting modernist (41–42). Both Altieri and Perloff find evidence of Wittgenstein’s apparent antimodernism in his scattered aesthetic judgments—his preference for Schubert over Mahler, for example. But this propensity itself, this habit of propounding aesthetic judgments with little and sometimes no explanation, identifies Wittgenstein, Perloff suggests elsewhere, with the modernist milieu of late-Habsburg Vienna.¹⁴

Thus Wittgenstein simultaneously appears to be an unacknowledged modernist, an avowed antimodernist, and then again a modernist malgré lui. The apparent contradictions that arise in considering Wittgenstein’s philosophy result in part from the apparent contradictions within the idea of modernism itself, particularly the different valences of the terms modernity and modernism.¹⁵ The latter term, modernism, reflects the processes of social modernization and cultural modernity even as it signifies a critique of those processes. On this basis, Cavell distinguishes between modernizers and modernists, the former bent merely on newness and progress and the latter embroiled in a more complex relationship with both tradition and the present moment.¹⁶ By these lights, logical positivism is a modernizing philosophy insofar as it reflects a philosophical and scientific modernity—an underlying assumption of cultural, scientific, and technological progress based on logic, reason, and experiment rather than on faith, dogma, or revelation. Inasmuch as modernist art and literature share these qualities, they also reflect an underlying modernity; inasmuch as they criticize the very idea of progress or the sanctification of science, they simultaneously represent a reaction against modernity.

Wittgenstein’s work reflects this doubled nature of the relationship between modernism and modernity. At first glance, the bulk of the Tractatus appears to embody the type of scientific worldview that the logical positivists espoused (and indeed articulated in large part based on their collective reading of Wittgenstein), but in its final moments, the text turns around to discuss questions of life, death, ethics, and mysticism—remarks the positivists ignored. Wittgenstein famously describes the Tractatus, in a letter to Ludwig von Ficker, as strictly philosophical and, at the same time, literary.¹⁷ As such, the text can be read as a document of either philosophical modernity or literary modernism.¹⁸ More generally, because it embodies elements of both scientific modernity and aesthetic modernism, the Tractatus could serve as the philosophical bible for the positivists even as Wittgenstein could become the patron saint of poets. Wittgenstein’s literary modernism advances an aesthetic critique of a scientific modernity that it appears to embody.

While Perloff finds in Wittgenstein’s writing a negative capability that informs his modernism, in chapter 1 of this volume, Anthony Cascardi suggests that Wittgenstein’s writings, early and late, mark out a negative ground in which the limitations of modernity are revealed and the distinctions between philosophy and literature are troubled:

Modernity is incomplete not because its ambitions never could be fully realized but rather because its limits were bound, in time, to be discovered and reflected back into that very project itself, providing ever new materials for critique. This self-reflective version of modernity is central to modernism, or so I would propose, and it is as part of this process that the various modern disciplines and artforms were transformed by an engagement with the limits of the very elements that are most essential to them and by a discovery of their surprisingly intimate connection to those things that might have appeared most alien (24).¹⁹

Cascardi sets Wittgenstein’s work in dialogue with a series of contemporary literary texts by Woolf, Stein, and Beckett (with reference to Kant and Nietzsche and attention to aspects of the Romantic tradition that continue to inflect modernism). He suggests that the negative ground created by Wittgenstein’s successive redefinitions of the practice of philosophy in the ancillary Tractatus and propaedeutical Investigations brings clarity to the philosophical dimension of literary modernism that shows how conventional distinctions between ‘literature’ and ‘philosophy’ may not hold. With regard to both these forms of writing, Cascardi writes, modernism is not just the place where the distinctions between them break down but rather the place where acknowledging something of value about the other is a crucial element in each one’s overcoming the grip of its own tradition (25). In chapter 8, Kristin Boyce, building on the work of Cavell and Michael Fried, describes a similar state of affairs, one in which modernist philosophy exists in the condition of art and modernist art exists in the condition of philosophy.²⁰ Boyce reads condition as a term signifying both a situation that is enabling (as in conditions of possibility) and as a state that one suffers (as in a chronic condition). Reading the relationship between modernist literature and philosophy along these lines, she suggests, reveals that the relation between these two enterprises is both deeper and more difficult than has yet been appreciated (155), a point Boyce illustrates through a reading of Henry James’s The Sacred Fount. Wittgenstein’s philosophical and simultaneously literary, or poetic, writing reveals these conditions, and the contradictions that characterize them, as exemplary of the modernist situation.

Wittgenstein’s philosophy does not merely reflect the contradictions of modernity and modernism and of philosophy and literature; it also helps situate and describe those contradictions. While modernism’s historical transformations as a term of art have yielded shifting and at times competing definitions, Wittgenstein’s philosophy provides the conceptual apparatus—in its discussion of language games and family resemblances, for example—that allows one to understand these differences as exemplary rather than anomalous: And the result of this examination is: we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail.²¹ Such concepts do not resolve contradictions between this and that definition of modernism; rather, they situate those definitions within the linguistic practices and cultural formations in which they appear. If, as Cavell suggests, and as we discuss further below, the modernist situation arises when the very criteria for deciding whether or not a particular cultural production qualifies as art or as philosophy, when the very conditions for making art or doing philosophy are at stake in the effort to make or do, then it follows that definitions of the enterprise will contrast, compete, and even contradict. Wittgenstein’s philosophy enacts rather than resolves the contradictions of modernism in an effort to dissolve rather than solve the problems of modernity.

Intellectual histories that place Wittgenstein exclusively in the analytic philosophical tradition of Frege and Russell occlude or suppress Wittgenstein’s connections to contemporary artists and the influence his philosophy subsequently exerts on the arts. In his book Signs of Sense (2001), Eli Friedlander sees the Tractatus as representing a bridge between the analytic and continental traditions in philosophy. He draws attention to the fate of Wittgenstein’s book as one bound up with the fate of the divide between the two traditions of philosophy, the analytic or Anglo-American and the existential-phenomenological, or so-called Continental tradition. Friedlander conceives of Wittgenstein’s work, both early and late, as a possible mediation between those two directions of modern philosophy.²² His contribution to this volume, chapter 6, enacts those claims by charting affinities between the work of Wittgenstein and that of Walter Benjamin. All of these texts paved the way for further work on Wittgenstein in relation to modernist literature, art, and culture.

Wittgenstein’s writing became increasingly legible in a modernist context with the publication of his remarks on religion, ethics, and the arts from his Nachlass, compiled in volumes like Culture and Value, to which multiple contributors to this volume refer, as well as with the publication of notes on conversations with Wittgenstein recorded by Maurice Drury, Rush Rhees, and others; the publication of student notes on Wittgenstein’s Cambridge lectures; and with Ray Monk’s influential intellectual biography of Wittgenstein.²³

More than forty years ago, Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin’s Wittgenstein’s Vienna persuasively offered an alternative—and distinctly modernist—intellectual and cultural context within with to situate Wittgenstein’s work, emphasizing the roots of the Tractatus in late-Habsburg Vienna, one of the most fertile, original and creative periods in art and architecture, music, literature and psychology, as well as in philosophy.²⁴ Wittgenstein was a product of fin-de-siècle Vienna, what Janik and Toulmin describe in their groundbreaking book as twentieth-century culture in its infancy; the ‘modernism’ of the early 1900s.²⁵ The decades preceding Wittgenstein’s birth in Vienna saw those of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), Theodor Herzl (1860–1904), Gustav Klimt (1862–1918), Adolf Loos (1870–1933), Karl Kraus (1874–1936), Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951), Robert Musil (1880–1942), Otto Weininger (1880–1903), and Stefan Zweig (1881–1942). Janik and Toulmin demonstrate the significance of links between Wittgenstein and the Viennese, German-language thought and art of his time that have been obscured as a result of his later association with the English-speaking philosophers of, for example, Cambridge and Cornell.²⁶ Wittgenstein’s Vienna, as relevant today as when it was first published, makes plain the modernist characteristics of Wittgenstein’s work by demonstrating how his work shares the preoccupations of a broader cultural modernism encompassing art, architecture, music, and philosophy. This volume similarly interprets modernism as referring more broadly to modernist cultural production, as evinced in Perloff’s discussion of Wittgenstein and religion, Janik’s and Donatelli’s discussions of architecture, and Friedlander’s discussion of photography.

As Wittgenstein’s Vienna makes clear, the tensions and contradictions between modernity and modernism—between the modern and the modernist—are nowhere more clearly evident than in fin-de-siècle Vienna. In chapter 4 of this volume, Janik demonstrates how Loos developed a critical modernist approach to architecture and design (88) that directly influenced Wittgenstein’s concept of philosophy and his way of building. Wittgenstein, who, along with Paul Engelmann (a student of Loos and secretary to Karl Kraus), designed a house for Wittgenstein’s sister Margaret Stonborough, acknowledged his affinities with Loos and listed him as an influence on his work. Wittgenstein’s intellectual affinities with Loos, Janik states, provide deeper insight into Wittgenstein’s concept of philosophical analysis as craftsmanship and thus a key to understanding the philosophical significance of his style (72). One need think only of the opening scenes of the Philosophical Investigations, with their shopkeepers, builders, and teachers, to see the intuitive appeal of this idea. Recall also that when Wittgenstein introduces the Philosophical Investigations as a number of sketches of landscapes, he describes himself as a weak draughtsman (PI ix). In their complementary attitudes toward questions of style, Wittgenstein and Loos, Janik demonstrates, represent a highly peculiar form of Viennese modernism (72). Donatelli’s essay likewise discusses how Loos and Wittgenstein share, along with their contemporary Robert Musil, modernism’s concern for new forms of expression in the arts as a need for a radical reform of our lives (91). Wittgenstein and Musil, Donatelli suggests, view the modernist situation as presenting a new problem which requires an inventiveness, a turning around of our conceptions, a capacity to change our ways of seeing our life in its various moments and dimensions (112). Their shared longing to clarify the relation between facts and values evinces a modernist dissatisfaction with current creative forms of expressivity (113).

This alternate narrative of the origins and reception of Wittgenstein’s early philosophy—Wittgenstein’s Vienna focuses primarily on the Tractatus—a narrative that emphasizes Musil’s Kakania as much as Russell’s Cambridge, helps uncover an ongoing preoccupation with the modern throughout Wittgenstein’s career. Wittgenstein’s later writings evince a confrontational or antithetical attitude toward what he regarded as the spirit of the times. In his initial work after returning to Cambridge—the period in between his early and late philosophy—he repeatedly distinguishes his approach from the dominant trends of the time, which he characterizes as a modern preoccupation with scientific progress. In 1929, the same year that Carnap published The Logical Structure of the World, Wittgenstein delivered his Lecture on Ethics to the Heretics’ Society at Cambridge. In his opening remarks, he implicitly resists the very idea of a scientific philosophy, and of a scientific lecture, insisting to his audience that he would not be delivering what’s called a popular-scientific lecture, that is a lecture intended to make you believe that you understand a thing which actually you don’t understand, and to gratify what I believe to be one of the lowest desires of modern people.²⁷ In chapter 10 of this volume, Yi-Ping Ong discusses this line in detail, comparing Wittgenstein’s use of the lecture form with Kafka’s fictional lecture in A Report to an Academy. In discussing the scene of instruction that the lecture form implies, Ong notes a recurring concern of the lecturer with conditions of voice, a concern that anticipates an antagonistic relation between the desire of the speaking self to communicate and the conventions that shape the expectations of the audience (210). Ong reads Wittgenstein’s lecture and Kafka’s story as modernist scenes of instruction that perform the incommensurability of the desires of the teacher and those of the audience and of the content to be expressed and the available forms of expression.

Behind Wittgenstein’s ambivalence toward the lecture form lies a resistance to what he considers the modern desire for knowledge conceived of narrowly in scientific terms. In November 1930, Wittgenstein drafted a foreword to a volume that would never be completed and would only be published, under the title Philosophical Remarks, more than a decade after his death. In it, he defines his work in opposition to a modernity defined by its ideal of progress:

This book is written for such men as are in sympathy with its spirit. This spirit is different from the one which informs the vast stream of European and American civilization in which all of us stand. That spirit expresses itself in an onwards movement, in building ever larger and more complicated structures; the other in striving after clarity and perspicuity in no matter what structure. The first tries to grasp the world by way of its periphery—in its variety; the second in its centre—in its essence. And so the first adds one construction to another, moving on and up, as it were, from one stage to the next, while the other remains where it is and what it tries to grasp is always the same.²⁸

Wittgenstein defines the dominant spirit of the times as a constant striving for progress, for new structures that would eclipse the existing ones in scale and complexity. He then defines the philosophical spirit of his work as opposed to this spirit (he remarked years later that the idea of great progress is a delusion [CV 56]) and distinguishes his own aims in terms of perspicuity.

That emphasis on perspicuity factors into Wittgenstein’s 1931 remarks on Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890–1915), a text that Eliot drew on extensively in composing The Waste Land. In his treatment of Frazer, Wittgenstein develops similar criticisms of the idea of historical progress or cultural evolution and proposes in their place the concept of perspicuous representation. Wittgenstein suggests that the fallacy of historical progress lies in part in the logical necessity it presumes, as if history could not have unfolded any other way and as if a narrative of progress is the only way to account for differences in cultural practices among different places, times, and traditions: The historical explanation, Wittgenstein writes, "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."²⁹ Wittgenstein’s intervention goes beyond refuting a teleological notion of historical development by calling attention to the fact that such narratives of progress are ways of assembling the data or of seeing the evidence. Against such modernizing notions of progress—characterized by anachronism and anthropomorphism—Wittgenstein lists alternate ways of understanding, for example, a cultural law or taboo of the sort discussed by Frazer as primitive: "I can represent this law, this idea, by means of an evolutionary hypothesis, or also, analogously to the schema of a plant, by means of the schema of a religious ceremony, but also by means of its factual content alone, in a ‘perspicuous’ representation."³⁰ Wittgenstein calls attention to the contingency of evolutionary hypotheses as explanatory schemes, offers alternatives (the schema of a plant or that of a religious ceremony), and then alights upon his idea of perspicuous representation.

These early statements contrasting progress with perspicuity anticipate one of the most telling formulations of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy:

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 connections. Hence the importance of finding intermediate cases.

The concept of a perspicuous representation is of fundamental significance for us. It earmarks the form of account we give, the way we look at things. (Is this a ‘Weltanschauung’?). (PI §122)

In his emphasis on aesthetic form (the form of representation) and a philosophical worldview (the way we look at things . . . Weltanschauung), Wittgenstein’s definition of perspicuous representation functions as a statement of aesthetic modernism, a way of presenting a picture of a phenomenon or practice that encourages a new way of seeing the world. In chapter 7 of this collection, John Gibson joins Boyce and Cascardi in formulating ways in which to see Wittgenstein’s modernism as staging a productive ground for addressing the relationship between philosophy and literature. Like Cascardi, Donatelli, and Zumhagen-Yekplé, Gibson highlights ways in which Wittgenstein’s works raise the same problems at issue in peculiarly difficult works of modernist literature composed with what he calls a willed opacity (134). He describes Wittgenstein’s concept of übersichliche Darstellung, that is, synoptic surveyable, or—in Anscombe’s most familiar English rendering—perspicuous representation, as simultaneously an aesthetic form and a philosophical approach: "This notion of a ‘perspicuous presentation’ is as close as we get in the later Wittgenstein to a statement of philosophical method. Note that perspicuous presentations are not representations of anything real at all . . . perspicuous presentations offer what an aesthetician would call an essentially imaginative experience, yielding typically artificial, fictionalized scenarios the appreciation of which helps us turn back to the real world and see it aright" (144).

In addition to being an aesthetic form in the sense of providing a way of seeing or perceiving, Wittgenstein’s perspicuous representations are also poetic acts, as Friedlander emphasizes in his discussion of the analogous aesthetic strategies of Wittgenstein and Benjamin. The connections that perspicuous representations reveal, Friedlander suggests, are not found but made: "The connectedness of surroundings, the kind of continuity that characterizes not physical space but rather an environment of meaning, is not something given. It is not only the artist that has to make or construct something in order to compel us to see the world from this perspective, but thinking also must be constructive, not thereby creating something artificial or conventional, but precisely allowing us to occupy a more natural point of view (121). It is in this sense of constructing a representation that is nevertheless more natural—Gibson and Friedlander both discuss an ideal of pure realism—that Wittgenstein states that philosophy ought to be written as a form of poetry (Philosophie dürfte man eigentlich nur dichten"; CV 24). Janik reminds us that Dichtung means not lyric poetry per se but the genus fiction of which lyric, drama, and epic are the species (84); in writing philosophy as poetry, Wittgenstein draws on the resources of fiction in his project of clarification (CV 24). This crucial aspect of Wittgenstein’s thought finds its initial articulations in the context of a response to the modern worldview, a point Donatelli emphasizes in describing perspicuous representation as a form of Wittgenstein’s modernism: [E]ven if Wittgenstein retains the sense that the currents of European civilization do not offer the conditions for finding new means of expressing values—new ordering concepts which allow for new forms of individual creativity—his entire later work is addressed to finding such ordering concepts, such surveyable representations, new ways of seeing things, new conceptions (111).

In Wittgenstein’s discussion of perspicuous representation, the truth and method of his later philosophy, one sees elements of modernism as a historical designation, an aesthetic style, and finally a worldview. Wittgenstein, as we have seen, initially appears antimodern in his resistance to what he perceives as the scientific spirit of the age. But his modernism emerges in his critique of evolutionary hypotheses of historical progress. Rather than emphasize progress, Wittgenstein presents a different way of viewing the world that yields an altogether different worldview—a worldview that is not, moreover, divorced from his style of writing but both the cause and effect of it. The modernist connections of this philosophical worldview and aesthetic form are clear, from Forster’s exhortation to only connect (which Cascardi uses as the epigraph to his essay) to Conrad’s definition of his task as before all, to make you see.³¹

Wittgenstein’s remark that philosophy ought to be written as a form of poetry is often evoked as evidence of his literary sympathies or aesthetic sensibilities, but less frequently quoted are the sentences that immediately follow the remark: I think I summed up my attitude to philosophy when I said: philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition. It must, as it seems to me, be possible to gather from this how far my thinking belongs to the present, future or past. For I was thereby revealing myself as someone who cannot quite do what he would like to be able to do (CV 24). To think that philosophy should be written as poetry, Wittgenstein implies, puts him at odds with the present, as someone who cannot quite do what he would like to be able to do. Wittgenstein once said to his former student Maurice Drury that his type of thinking was not wanted in this present age. I have to swim so strongly against the tide, he continued. Perhaps in a hundred years people will really want what I am writing.³² His work, therefore, might belong either to the past or to the future—or to neither. Thus if Wittgenstein’s life and work span the period of cultural modernism broadly conceived, he implies in this comment that he is at odds with the spirit of the modern age (what in the Tractatus he refers to as the whole modern conception of the world).³³ And yet he is at odds with that modernity inasmuch as he thinks that philosophy ought to be written as a form of poetry—inasmuch, that is to say, as he appears much more of a modernist philosopher than his logical positivist contemporaries. Out of Wittgenstein’s antagonism toward modernity emerges a distinctly modernist philosophical style and worldview.

One of the most prescient and longstanding articulations of the relationship between Wittgenstein’s later philosophy and cultural modernism can be found in the work of Stanley Cavell, particularly his first two books, Must We Mean What We Say? (1969) and The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (1979). Cavell’s discussions of Wittgenstein and his discussions of modernism often unfold independently but always resonate distinctly. "I have from the first time I undertook to teach Philosophical Investigations," Cavell writes in his contribution to the volume The Literary Wittgenstein, sought to articulate my sense of it as a work of modernity, one that perpetually questions its medium and its sense of a break with the past.³⁴ It is not simply the case, therefore, that Cavell is a philosopher who writes about (the later) Wittgenstein and who also happens to write about modernism; rather, Cavell is a philosopher whose lifelong consideration of Wittgenstein’s philosophy develops as an attempt to articulate its modernity: "Part of my sense of the Investigations as a modernist work is that its portrait of the human is recognizable as one of the modern self, or, as we are given to say, the modern subject."³⁵ In chapter 11 of this collection, Michael LeMahieu suggests that Wittgenstein’s private language argument—precisely inasmuch as it arises in response to a form of skepticism about the desire for a coherent self and the possibilities for attaining a social bond with others—helps us understand the modernist concerns and contradictions of Saul Bellow’s fiction. Bellow’s novels dramatize Wittgenstein’s imagined private language, which in turn offers both a description of Bellow’s characteristic mode of narration and a figure of the obstacle that those narratives must overcome. The problem faced by Bellow’s protagonists as they seek to recover experiences of shared humanity is precisely the one Wittgenstein addresses in his private language argument: how to refer to a private feeling experienced in the past and go on to use it as a standard applicable to future emotion and behavior.

Cavell’s remarks about modernity and modernism—the modern, as he often puts it—are cogent but not contiguous. The essays that comprise Must We Mean What We Say?, essays that range from music to aesthetics to literary criticism to ordinary language philosophy, represent one of the most compelling arguments for Wittgenstein’s standing as a modernist philosopher.³⁶ In his characterization of the Philosophical Investigations above, Cavell offers two basic features of his definition of modernism: a modernist work is one that breaks with the past and that questions its own medium. The foreword to Must We Mean What We Say? offers more nuanced guidance regarding Cavell’s use of the term: The essential fact of (what I refer to as) the modern lies in the relation between the present practice of an enterprise and the history of that enterprise, in the fact that that this relationship has become problematic (MWMS xxxiii). Such is the condition of art for Cavell when it is placed within the modernist situation or faces the modernist difficulty. More than simply the development of new techniques or practices, art in a condition of modernity reconsiders the relationship of the enterprise’s current state of affairs to its past, taking itself as its own subject matter and questioning the very definition of art:

This is the beginning of what I have called the modern, characterizing it as a moment in which history and its conventions can no longer be taken for granted; the time in which music and painting and poetry (like nations) have to define themselves against their pasts; the beginning of the moment in which each of the arts becomes its own subject, as if its immediate artistic task is to establish its own existence. The new difficulty which comes to light in the modernist situation is that of maintaining one’s belief in one’s own enterprise, for the past and the present become problematic together. (MWMS xxxvi)

Cavell’s description of modernism as a self-conscious, self-referential consideration of its own status as an enterprise recalls discussions of modernism’s aesthetic autonomy in literature and the arts. Cavell refers to this defining feature of modern art as modernism laying bare its art (MWMS 220). But he understands autonomy to be a problem with which the modern artist struggles rather than a point from which the modern artist departs: "In modernist arts the achievement of autonomy of the object is a problem—the artistic problem. Autonomy is no longer provided by the conventions of an art, for the modernist artist has continuously to question the conventions upon which his art has depended" (MWMS 116). Autonomy is a problem in part because, with no given criteria governing what counts as a symphony, a painting, or a poem—let alone how to compose or paint or write—the threat of fraudulence is ever present and, for Cavell, characteristic of the modern (MWMS 229).

Cavell does not claim, however, that modernism breaks entirely from the past in the interests of purity or autonomy; for Cavell, modernism is not a rejection of history but a problematization of history. It is on this basis that he distinguishes modernists from modernizers, who are bent merely on newness, do not have history as a problem, that is, as a commitment (MWMS xxxvi). Thus while Cavell does not deny the modernist desire to make it new—the problem of modernism he defines as the attempt to do in every work what has never been done (MWMS 195–96)—he distinguishes genuine artistic innovation from "an obsession with new-ness" (MWMS 185). Rather than an outright rejection, the very idea of modernism implies a complex relationship to the past: What looks like ‘breaking with tradition’ in the succession of art is not really that; or is that only after the fact, looking historically and critically; or is that only as a result and not as a motive: the unheard of appearance of the modern in art is an effort not to break, but to keep faith with tradition (MWMS 206). Yet modernism’s peculiar way of keeping faith is to question constantly: What the modern puts into question is not merely, so to speak, itself, but its tradition as a whole (MWMS 222). Cavell’s remarks here resonate with Eliot’s understanding of the tradition of literature, of the ways in which individual talents issue out of and in turn inflect entire traditions.

Cavell’s particular version of modernism’s relationship to its past, of enterprise and individual practice, takes the form of repudiation and acknowledgment: Innovation in philosophy has characteristically gone together with a repudiation—a specifically cast repudiation—of most of the history of the subject (MWMS xxxiii). Another way of putting the point would be to say that philosophical innovators, modernists, attempt to effect a paradigm shift in the field, part of which is a repudiation of the past. But Cavell doesn’t just say a repudiation; he points to a specifically cast repudiation, and that specific cast is not indifference, ignorance, or apathy but rather a form of Cavell’s touchstone term, acknowledgment: "In the later Wittgenstein (and, I would now add, in Heidegger’s Being and Time) the repudiation of the past has a transformed significance, as though containing the consciousness that history will not go away, except through our perfect acknowledgment of it (in particular, our acknowledgment that it is not past), and that one’s own practice and ambition can be identified only against the continuous experience of the past" (MWMS xxxiii). With Cavell’s views in mind, consider the difference between the respective openings of the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein expresses an indifference to his philosophical precursors in the preface to his first work—I give no sources, because it is indifferent to me whether what I have thought has already been thought before me by another (TLP 3)—and then goes on to define, unabashedly,