dangerous. “Philosophy,” we read in his Lectures, Cambridge 1930–1931, “is
not a choice between different ‘theories.’ It is wrong to say that there is any
one theory of truth, for truth is not a concept” (75). At the same time, the
process of investigation is itself of value, provided one is able and willing to
revise one’s ideas and suppositions when necessary. “I ¤nd it important in
philosophizing,” says Wittgenstein, “to keep changing my posture, not to
stand for too long on one leg, so as not to get stiff. Like someone on a long
up-hill climb who walks backwards for a while so as to refresh himself and
stretch some different muscles” (Culture and Value 27). And further:
If I am thinking just for myself, not with a view to writing a book, I
jump all around the subject; this is the only natural way of thinking
for me. With my thoughts forced into line, to think further is torture
to me. Should I even try it? (28)This is, on the face of it, a very odd statement, for why should it be “torture”
(eine Qual) simply to organize one’s thoughts, to produce a coherent linear
discourse? Isn’t this precisely what we expect an “investigation,” especially a
philosophical investigation, to do?
Here we must come back to the 1933 statement about philosophy’s link
to poetry, in which Wittgenstein “reveals” himself as “someone who can-
not quite do what he wishes he could do” (Culture and Value 25). If we read
this mysterious paragraph biographically, it would seem that the student of
Bertrand Russell, who had set out to become the mathematical logician that
we ¤nd in the opening sections of the Tr a c t a t u s (1922)—although even here
the eccentricity of the numbering is a kind of poetic clinamen^12 —had dis-
covered, by the early thirties, that his métier was a mode of writing that de-
pended on constant revision, a casting off of the “egg-shells of the old, stick-
ing to” his prior formulations (Culture and Value 43). Such writing inevitably
takes the form of short, fragmentary, and often gnomic utterance. Not the
“Tractatus” or linear discourse, not even the essay in the spirit of Montaigne
or the Heideggerian meditation, but a sequence of “criss-cross” aphorisms,
sometimes self-canceling or even self-contradictory. Indeed, it is discourse
less designed to say than to be seen as showing something. And we think of
the following aphorism in Zettel:
Das Sprechen der Musik. Vergiß nicht, daß ein Gedicht, wenn auch in der
Sprache der Mitteilung abgefaßt, nicht im Sprachspiel der Mitteilung ver-
wendet wird. (§160)68 Chapter 4