an excessively belated response to gary

All of this is probably moot now . . .

I'd like to try address a few of the points and sketches Gary Norris made in the Wittgenstein discussion that started over at Dagzine. I find Gary's thoughts a bit more difficult to address in a timely way than those of Thomas because Gary makes many big points quickly whereas Thomas tends to focus on details, teasing out one implication after another. I'm not saying that one way of doing things is better than any other; I suppose I just find the latter a bit easier to engage with immediately. (And in case you're out there, Thomas, I'm intrigued by your suggestions to the Tractatus word replacement experiment. I haven't had a chance to follow through with your suggestions but will hopefully sooner than later.)

I'll start with Gary's October 6 post, titled Constellations: Point 5, part one.

Gary writes:

I am bothered by [Wittgenstein's] statement in Culture and Value:

[T]here is a way of capturing the world sub specie aeterni other than through the work of the artist. Thought has such a way--so I believe--it is as though it flies above the world and leaves it as it is--observing it from above, in flight.
(5e, U of Chicago edition)

I am quite satisfied that there should be a way of capturing the world other than through art. But that thought is the way is very sly--we shouldn't trust it. I think this attempt to see thought flying above the world illustrates the function of thought in a way similar to how he illustrates the function of spirit--"but spirits will hover over the ashes [of culture]" (3e). Though the German verbs are distinctly different in kind and sense, we may ask what distinction we can make between the two--thought and spirit, flying and hovering. I believe literary artists purposefully perform this function--should perform, since we are talking oughts.

This is where Emerson's "Circles" sits on our map:

Literature is a point outside of our hodiernal circle through which a new one may be described. The use of literature is to afford us a platform whence we may command a view of our present life, a purchase by which we may move it.

Therefore we value the poet. All the argument and all the wisdom is not in the encyclopedia, or the treatise on metaphysics, of the Body of Divinity, but in the sonnet or play....[The poet] smites or arouses me with his shrill tones, breaks up my whole chain of habits, and I open my eye on my own possibilities. He claps his wings to the sides of all the solid old lumber of the world, and I am capable once more of choosing a straight path in theory and practice.

So, a beef with Wittgenstein. The literary artists take their place in society as folks whose labor is useful because it refurbishes all that is the case and re-presents the world allowing us to get it straight. I think Wittgenstein wanted to keep that for philosophy.


I too am bothered by Wittgenstein's remark. At first glance it seems that Wittgenstein here grants thought the very metaphysical/speculative pretensions he determines as beyond the limit of the thinkable. If viewing the world sub specie aeterni is what is "mystical", then isn't he here allowing that thought can indeed, as Thomas would put it, "go beyond the horizon" into the transcendent?

Maybe the word "belief" is key to reconciling this passage with the mainstream of his work -- i.e., with the word "belief" Wittgenstein distances himself from an assertion he wishes to make but which he can't logically defend. Strange admission indeed.

I don't know whether Wittgenstein wanted to keep the "refurbishing function" for philosophy. Philosophy clarifies things, resolves confusions, lets us see the world aright. That doesn't necessarily refurbish anything, it just delivers us from tying our shoelaces together then calling the fact that we can't walk properly a philosophical problem. Philosophy "leaves [the world] as it is". But when Emerson says that the poet "claps his wings to the sides of all the solid old lumber of the world" he indicates poet and world in a kind of direct engagement that I think Wittgenstein would forbid to the philosopher.

In Gary’s essay on Thoreau’s three methods of beholding, he writes the following of Thoreau’s beholding of the ants at war:

The observer witnesses above (remember Wittgenstein on thought and spirit) an event not able to be seen with a patient stillness. Such observation over-comes the observer as he over-takes the observed. Both observer and observed are, therefore, taken by surprise. In other words, Thoreau did not plan to behold ants-at-war. Nevertheless, once Thoreau becomes an observer, he stays to look on; in a significant manner, he fulfills an obligation. It is the case that the ants are at war but it is also the case that Thoreau stumbles across the ants at war.

I’m curious about the obligation. It seems to me that Thoreau pauses in a combination of wonder and horror, not because the scene requires an observer. Or are you suggesting, Gary, that this feeling of wonder and horror is precisely the way we (or at least Thoreau, in this scene) experience a certain kind of existential obligation (itself a form of lack, perhaps)?

The implied parallel (at least as I read it) between Wittgenstein’s view of the world sub specie aeterni and Gary’s take on the ant war scene seems to suggest that the world exhibits itself for the gaze of the poet or thinker. Maybe this is the flipside of the “mystical feeling” which haunts Wittgenstein. Or maybe the “mystical feeling” isn’t just viewing the world sub specie aeterni, but is also the feeling that our lives and their circumstances have a place in some divine drama exhibited for the sake of a transcendent observer (a role that we ourselves step into momentarily when we make/experience a work of art), the feeling that our “heroic” actions deserve a transcendent witness to acknowledge or “register” their significance – and that without the possibility of such a witness, such actions cease to be meaningful.

In relating Thoreau’s pursuit of the loon, I think that Gary intends to show a kind of beholding peculiar to artistic/literary experience and the possibility of which Wittgenstein overlooks. To wildly paraphrase Gary’s essay: a phenomenal “excess” constitutes the being of the work of art as a work of art (and not, say, as the mere physical object of a bound collection of pages with writing on them); this excess is “absorbed” by both audience and artist through appearing as an “unanswered question” (in this case, the loon and its laughter) the pursuit of which provides narrative its forward motion. Gary writes:

The image of Thoreau pursuing the loon appears for what it is worth. Nothing more of the pursuit remains after he retreats from it. The story itself is given. Nevertheless, a lingering unanswered question is there. And that unanswered question marks the call for participation with an audience—a reader or readers—who will use up any significance and behold or interpret the meaning of the event itself—Thoreau and the loon together. Reader and writer absorb anything abundant or excessive that the phenomenon gives up.

This may be huge leap, but I see this an elaboration of the Creely/Olson notion that form is an extension of content, that the poem “is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader” (from Olson’s Projective Verse).

And, well, yes I think I tend to agree (with my paraphrase at least), and I’d like to say that this is very close to what I mean when I say that poetry “reflects” / “projects” / “opens onto” / “embodies” / “enacts” / “recedes from” / “composes” something infinite like “truth”. Something escapes the finitude of phenomena and it is precisely this something which finds its way into poetry or art. But does an excess alone constitute infinity? Might a finite excess escape finite phenomena? Possibly – but then how could the poet, to use Emerson’s phrase, “clap his wings” against the world?