Ludwig Wittgenstein - Wednesday, February 26, 2025

Ceci n'est pas un bureau; c’est un atelier

Something I know I should do and that I don’t do (there should be a word in English for this category of things; I suspect there is such a word in at least one other language), the thing I should do is to cultivate more of an audience on Substack. This seems to be a platform where it is still possible to organically reach people just because they are interested in similar things as you. Occasionally I am delightfully surprised by someone finding me on here and subscribing. (Hi, you guys!) While it’s still possible to reach people in a way that it isn’t on most social media platforms, reaching people does require effort. Effort I prefer to put into writing and recording songs, performing, making collages, and writing these little essays. So until I can convince myself to put in a moderate amount of time reading and commenting somewhat regularly on others’ posts on here, things will stay more or less like this—which is ultimately fine by me, apparently.

Wittgenstein

I have a list of topics I intend to write about. Sometimes I get too in my head about them and feel like I can’t write something because I have to write something BIG about whatever the topic is—because that topic is so important to me and/or so complex. I know that’s dumb, and I still do it. (There should be a word in English for this category of things also, as well as a word in English for the desire for there to be a word in English for something for which there is no word in English). Wittgenstein is one of those topics that I’ve been hung up on—that seems too important.

Occasionally since I left the PhD program in English at UIC with only 2-10 more years left to completion, I think about going back to grad school. For many years (I left the program late in ‘08), I would, soon after the idea of returning to grad school popped into my head, experience a wave of relief that I didn’t have to do that—i.e., go back and write a dissertation and then face the bleak to nonexistent job market for academics, or face the even bleaker prospect of being overqualified for most jobs (because of the PhD) but not actually qualified for any jobs (because I squandered by 20s in grad school). But lately…

I never stopped reading literary criticism and theory. In fact I found I got a lot more out of that kind of writing—which is what I read the most these days—than I did when I was compelled to read it and felt a lot of pressure to have something insightful to say about it. One of my interests in this area, which started when I was working on my MA thesis at UGA, is Ludwig Wittgenstein.

David Markson, the fiction writer whose work was the subject of my thesis, which crazily is available online, wrote a novel called Wittgenstein’s Mistress. (There is a whole subgenre of books titled Wittgenstein’s [noun], btw, and include, off the top of my head, Wittgenstein’s Poker, Vienna, and Nephew, but there are lots more.) And though this book wasn’t a focal point of my thesis—I focused on the three books Markson wrote after the Wittgenstein one. (Those books are Reader’s Block, This is Not a Novel, and Vanishing Point; these books and a fourth, The Last Novel, would come to be known as the notecard quartet, but the fourth book wasn’t out at the time; in fact, Vanishing Point was published the semester I defended my thesis.) Wittgenstein’s Mistress is inspired formally and thematically by Wittgenstein’s work, and that influence is also present in the subsequent ones. But I never got deeply into Wittgenstein himself in school because I couldn’t make the time to read things just because I was interested in them, which is either a flaw in the nature of grad school, or at least in my approach to it back then.

LW was Austrian, the youngest son of a steel magnate, think Andrew Carnegie but Austrian. There are numerous books about the family, but suffice it to say his family life was complicated. While he was a prisoner of war in Italy (after having volunteered for the front, despite not having to) during WWI, he wrote the only book that he would publish during his life—Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, or the Tractatus, as it’s usually called. You can translate the title as something like ‘Essay on Philosophical Logic’ or ‘Tract on the Logic of Philosophy.’ He wasn’t wild about the title, but apparently couldn’t come up with something better.

This little book comes in at under 200 pages, and in a series of mostly aphoristic passages, Wittgenstein sets out to “solve all the problems of philosophy,” and arguably he does so. It’s a little bit of a trick because he “solves” them by showing that the topics/issues/questions that are the traditional territory of philosophy—ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, etc.—are, in fact, nonsense, and therefore not the province of philosophy, logic, or language—which is not to say that these topics don’t matter or that they aren’t real, but rather that philosophy and language aren’t going to help you with them. Those tools are just going to keep generating more nonsense.

Agree or disagree, it’s a compelling attempt. Not least because of the structure of LW’s book. It consists of a series of statements structured by a numbering system that indicates which statements are further comments on previous ones. For instance, the first line of the book in the recent Searls translation (which is excellent) is:

1 The world is everything there is.

That’s a killer opening line. You can’t argue with it. It’s a definition that is, as the book will go on to demonstrate, tautologically true. Then the second line, number 1.1, is a comment on that first one:

1.1 The world is the sum total of all facts, not all things.

Then there are a few statements that expand on 1.1, until we get to 1.2, which further expands on 1:

1.2 The world as a whole is broken into individual facts.

In total there are 7 root statements, with varying volumes of subpoints and subsubpoints and subsubsubpoints, etc. Such as (chosen at random):

5.453 All numbers in logic need to be justified. […]

Beyond the paywall, I’ll talk a little bit more about why I like this book so much!

Collage of the Day: Empire Train Station

This is a big one, like a few feet by a few feet. I’ve found lately that the larger ones are often dissatisfying at least partially because the images I have to work with on a larger scale are limited and I end up shoving things together arbitrarily, and not arbitrarily-good, like most of my collages, but arbitrarily-bad—in a way I have trouble articulating. But this one works.

Subscriber Collage: Don’t Touch My Axe