heimlich (“uncanny,” “sublime”).^9 Negative judgments are just as emphatic:
Alfred Ehrenstein’s poetry is ein Hundedreck (“dog shit”), Mahler’s music is
nichts wert (“worthless”), “the characters in the second part of ‘Faust’ erregen
unsere Teilnahme gar nicht” (“are ones with whom we can’t identify at all”).^10
The recitation of a fellow of¤cer at Monte Cassino was so unbearable in its
“false pathos” that it was like “receiving an electric shock.”^11 And so on.
The almost comic vehemence of these extreme aesthetic judgments is a
function of what we might call le côté Viennoise of Wittgenstein—the social
code of his time whereby those who are gebildet (cultured, well educated)
took it to be incumbent upon them to pronounce on the given artwork or
performance or concert as großartig or schrecklich, and so on. In this respect,
as in his actual tastes for classical music and literature, Wittgenstein was very
much of his time and place. To understand what he meant by the proposition
that “One should only do philosophy as a form of poetry,” we must, accord-
ingly, look elsewhere—not at what Wittgenstein said about the poetic but at
the example his own writing provides. In the preface to what was, with the
exception of the Tractatus, his one consciously designed book, the Philo-
sophical Investigations (1953), he notes:
I have written down all these thoughts as remarks [Bemerkungen],
short paragraphs, of which there is sometimes a fairly long chain about
the same subject, while I sometimes make a sudden change, jumping
from one topic to another... the essential thing was that the thoughts
should proceed from one subject to another in a natural order and
without breaks.
After several unsuccessful attempts to weld my results together into
such a whole, I realized that I should never succeed. The best that I
could write would never be more than philosophical remarks.... And
this was, of course, connected with the very nature of the investigation.
For this compels us to travel over a wide ¤eld of thought, criss-cross in
every direction.... Thus this book is really only an album. (v, my em-
phasis)Such commentary cleared the way for the publication of the many frag-
ments found after Wittgenstein’s death, some in notebooks, some on sepa-
rate scraps of paper or Zettel, as a further assortment of Wittgenstein’s
remarks—this one left in a single box ¤le—is called. As G. H. von Wright,
the editor of the Vermischte Bemerkungen (“Assorted Remarks,” which came
to be translated under the misleading title Culture and Value), explains:
66 Chapter 4