Philosophical Apprentice offers a brief, but telling sample of John Holbo’s revelatory essay !
The Literary Wittgenstein
John Gibson and Wolfgang Huemer (eds.), The Literary Wittgenstein, Routledge, 2004, 368pp, $33.95 (pbk), ISBN 0415289734.
Reviewed by John Holbo, National University of Singapore
2005.06.02
https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/the-literary-wittgenstein/
…
The core of Gould’s essay is a close reading of PI par. 112-138, elucidating an oft-quoted bit: “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably” (par. 115). Oversimplifying, Gould’s point is that the vatic, aphoristic quality of the line tempts readers into an ‘isolationist’ reading, when what is needed is an understanding of therapeutic function in context. That Wittgenstein is attempting ‘therapy’ is of course the least original of theses, but Gould is painstaking and plausible in his tracing of a narrative of restless oscillation — but it must be! but it can’t be! — leading to fixation on linguistic forms, which turn out to be delusive rudders, leading to attention to ordinary use. To get the details, read Gould. But the complex irony he is exploring can be appreciated in the abstract. A typical effect of par. 115 is almost a parody of its purpose. ‘A picture of pictures as things in language held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in Wittgenstein’s language and his language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.’ Here we get some hint as to why Gould thinks Wittgenstein’s compulsion to show what he is saying is problematic — when it seems it ought to be helpfully reinforcing. At the very moment he wants to send us ‘back to the rough ground’, he gives us some artfully epigrammatic frame — which we then trace around and around until its contours seem necessarily isomorphic with wisdom. By exemplifying the target pathology too potently, Wittgenstein’s rhetoric infects rather than inoculates.
But I have not explained how Gould makes the connection between his close reading and Wittgenstein’s allegedly fraught post-Romanticism. Eldridge helps here. Let me first quote one bit without context, because the subject could be almost any page of The Literary Wittgenstein:
“But now the worry arises that such a working through and dramatic display could not be philosophically significant. No theses seem to be quite established. Arguments appear at best as moves within an ongoing self-interrogation, not as routes to definite results. It seems too ‘optional’ whether anyone responds to the protagonist’s worries and to the drama of the text. Is philosophy here, within this reading, being vaporized into bad literature, as some of my colleagues sometimes ask?” (p. 212).
A drop of philosophy vaporized into a cloud of grammar. Indeed, all the contributions to The Literary Wittgenstein risk accumulating into a nebulous reversal of Wittgenstein’s therapeutic intentions; especially when half orbit around an inevitable few — tantalizing, ambiguous, vague — drops from Culture and Value, e.g. “I think I summed up my position on philosophy when I said: philosophy ought really to be written only as a form of poetry” (CV 24). This sentence appears as a blurb on the back of the book.
…
Philosophical Apprentice.
StephenKMackSD's Blog 