ma main gauche un reçu.—Mais les conséquences partiques ultérieures
ne seraient pas celles d’une donation.^6In such cases, the issue is neither the connotative power of synonymous
words (the difference between “orders of angels,” “hierarchies of angels,” or
“angel dominions”), nor syntactic suspension, as in Rilke’s opening con-
struction Wer, wenn ich schriee... ,” nor punning, as in Lowell’s “they lay
together hull to hull.” Rather, Wittgenstein is demonstrating the dif¤cul-
ties of pinning down the meanings of even the most ordinary, everyday
words, such as believe, hope, give, pain, right, and left. If, as the central Witt-
gensteinian aphorism would have it, Die Bedeutung eines Wortes ist sein
Gebrauch in der Sprache (“The meaning of a word is its use in the language,”
Philosophical Investigations §43), then these words have no ¤xed denotative
meaning but depend largely on the context in which they appear. If my right
hand puts money into your left hand, I am giving you something. But if
the left hand is my own, the act of putting money into it may be no more
than a nervous habit, rather like playing with rubber bands. For both hands
are mine, and so the verb “to give” (schenken, faire don) does not seem ap-
plicable. Again, the word “pain” (Schmerzen) is one we all use regularly, but
its simulation—perfectly understandable to a young child, who may well
simulate pain so as to get attention or avoid having to do something—cannot
be performed by a dog. And this is the case whether the language in question
is German, English, French, or Chinese.
The logical implication of the distinction I have been drawing is that po-
etry is that which deals with the connotative and tropical power of words
and the rhythmic and sonic quality of phrases and sentences, whereas phi-
losophy (literally “the love of wisdom”) involves the conceptual and abstract
language of making meaningful propositions. What, then—and this is my
subject here—can Wittgenstein possibly have meant by the following entry
(1933–1934) in Culture and Value?
Ich glaube meine Stellung zur Philosophie dadurch zusammengefaßt zu
haben, indem ich sagte: Philosophie dürfte man eigentlich nur dichten.
Daraus mußs sich, scheint mir, ergeben, wie weit mein Denken der Ge-
genwart, Zukunft, oder der Vergangenheit angehört. Denn ich habe mich
damit auch als einen bekannt, der nicht ganz kann, was er zu können
wünscht.I think I summed up my position on philosophy when I said: One
should really only do philosophy as poetry. From this it seems to me it64 Chapter 4