6 Afterwords
Positivism holds – and this is its essence – that what we can speak about is all that
matters in life. Whereas Wittgenstein passionately believes that all that really matters
in human life is what, in his view, we must be silent about.... When he nevertheless
takes immense pains to delimit the unimportant [that is, the scope and limits of
ordinary language], it is not the coastline of the island which he is bent on surveying
with such meticulous accuracy, but the boundary of the ocean.
(Englemann 196 7 : 9 7 )^1Why does many a man write? Because he does not possess enough character not
to write.
(Kraus 1966: 12 4 , cited in Janik and Toulmin 19 7 3: 201)Post-script
This chapter is connected with a particular event, the death of my father. I feel a
need to write the event and yet, as I make clear in this chapter, I am not at all sure
that this is what I want to do. In a sense, I believe that this writing down is a part
of the problem. I do not want to take over my father’s being by making him into
fodder for yet more interpretation, by colonizing his traces.
Why? Because my father was a good man who did a lot of good; more than
most, I suspect. Almost nothing that he ever did was written down and whereas
I once would have seen this as a problem I now think that putting his life in order
through text, in order to rescue him from the enormous condescension of
posterity, may, in certain senses, be just another form of condescension. I am not
sure, in other words, that he needs writing down, or, put in another way, we need
a form of writing that can disclose and value his legacy – the somatic currency
of body stances he passed on, the small sayings and large generosities, and, in
general, his stance to the world – in such a way as to make it less important for
him to be written.
As I work up a non-representationalist style of work that I hope can describe
and value this legacy, this thought lies constantly at the back of my mind.
‘Sometimes, we go into a man’s study and find his books and papers all over the
place, and say without hesitation: “What a mess! we really must clear this room
up”. Yet, at other times, we may go into a room which looks very like the first;