Indeed, there is a “strange resemblance between a philosophical investiga-
tion (especially in mathematics) and an aesthetic one” (25). And in 1946,
when the ¤rst part of the Philosophical Investigations was ¤nished, Wittgen-
stein noted in his journal, “My ‘achievement’ is very much like that of a
mathematician who invents a calculus” (Culture and Value 50).
Invent is the key word here. Philosophy, as Wittgenstein sees it, is a form
of continual reinvention with a view to making language more functional,
the ideal being the precision of numbers. Language can never, of course, ap-
proximate that precision, which is why the process of removing its false
“signposts,” its mistaken assumptions and usages, is so endlessly fascinating.
And as in mathematics, this is the case regardless of time and place, regard-
less therefore of the speci¤c language in question:
People say again and again that philosophy doesn’t really progress, that
we are still occupied with the same philosophical problems as were the
Greeks. But the people who say this don’t understand why it has to be
so. It is because our language has remained the same and keeps seduc-
ing us into asking the same questions. As long as there continues to be
a verb “to be” [sein] that looks as if it functions in the same way as “to
eat” [essen] and “to drink [trinken], as long as we still have the adjec-
tives “identical” [identisch], “true” [wahr], “false” [falsch], “possible”
[möglich], as long as we continue to talk of a river of time [einem Fluß
der Zeit], of an expanse of space [einer Ausdehnung des Raumes], etc.,
etc., people will keep stumbling over the same puzzling dif¤culties and
¤nd themselves staring at something which no explanation seems ca-
pable of clearing up. (Culture and Value 15)I have put in some of the German terms here so as to show that indeed
language, at the level Wittgenstein studies it, has “remained the same and
keeps seducing us into asking the same questions.” For Wittgenstein, the po-
etic, as I remarked earlier, is not a question of heightening, of removing lan-
guage from its everyday use by means of appropriate troping or rhetorical
device. Rather, what makes philosophy poetic is its potential for invention,
its status as what we now call conceptual art—the art that, in Sol LeWitt’s
words, “is made to engage the mind of the viewer rather than his eye”—or,
more broadly speaking, his senses—the art, as it were, that tracks the process
of thinking itself.^14
In Wittgenstein’s practice, conceptual art begins with the investigation of
grammar, the description of the actual relations between words and phrases
70 Chapter 4