Bibliography | Supplement to Wittgenstein's Logic of Language

Selections from Engelmann's Memoir of his friend Ludwig Wittgenstein. With my comments.

All human culture is based on faith in the existence of a higher sphere.... What Kraus, Loos, and Wittgenstein have in common is their endeavour to separate .... to uphold the distinction -- now lost and beyond the comprehension of our age -- between the higher and the lower spheres.

[Source: Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein, with a Memoir by Paul Engelmann (1891-1965) [concerning the years ca. 1916-1937], ed. B. F. McGuinness [Appendix with Wittgenstein's letter to Ludwig Ficker, ca. 1919, p. 143-144], tr. L. Furtmüller, Oxford: 1967, p. 130, 131, 130.]

The method used by Kraus and Loos is to present afresh the sublime that exists in art: this is their proof of the existence of the higher sphere .... (ibid. p. 131)

As though you were still sitting in the concert hall after the performance had ended, waiting for the proof to be given. But no, the music itself was the proof; there is nothing more to give you.

But such proof is no proof at all. Grounds for belief that cannot be put to the test are not grounds for belief. It is not our (educated) way of life (thinking) to treat people's testimony about their private experiences as evidence. Compare testimony about religious experiences. According to William James, people who have had these experiences tend to regard them as definitive: their experiences settle for them what James called the question of religious belief. But they do not count as proof or grounds.

[For the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus such testimony does not belong to the propositions of mechanical physics; it does not say "This is how things stand in the world".]

Such testimony does not belong to the facts as conceived by our educated community of standards (propositions of fact (statements of knowledge) belong to the community, not to the individual).

In his Varieties of Religious Experience, a book Wittgenstein told both Bertrand Russell and M. O'C. Drury had helped him, James says that people believe for many different reasons, while others settle the question of religious belief by becoming atheists. What Wittgenstein wanted was to eliminate bad reasons for believing or disbelieving, which he said were a form of cheating oneself (Lectures & Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief p. 59), in which context he told Drury that both Russell and the parsons of the church had done a lot of harm (Recollections of Wittgenstein (1984) p. 102).

Engelmann's view of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

... we do not understand Wittgenstein unless we realize that it was philosophy that mattered to him and not logic,

which merely happened to be the only suitable tool for elaborating his world picture. (ibid. p. 96).

... the attempt to engage in philosophy on a consciously one-sided logical basis is directed against feeling, intuition, the irrational, etc. not in general but only where they are out of place. And these vital values will not suffer through such a clean separation .... (ibid. p. 122).

Was this still Wittgenstein's method in On Certainty? The statement that a language game "is not based on grounds" but "is there -- like our life" (OC § 559) -- is, like his much earlier statement "The world is there" (Lecture on Ethics - Notes on Talks with Wittgenstein p. 16), a statement of logic only in the sense that it says how Wittgenstein is going to look at our life, that he is not going to treat "the riddle of existence" as if it were something to invent a metaphysical theory to solve.

So Wittgenstein's method of demanding "a clean separation" had not changed. Wittgenstein wanted to put a full-stop to inquiry just at the point where the riddle is encountered, "the mystical" shows itself.

"All that music has meant in my life"

Engelmann quotes a passage (which I quote here in another translation) that Wittgenstein valued for its description of "musical effects in words", a passage he would "recite with a shudder of awe" (p. 86):

From far away starry spheres the silver trumpet notes seem to fall through the blue night, to pierce the soul with the icy tremor of doom. "Chi va là? Who goes there? Answer!" one hears Don Giovanni ask.

[Source: Eduard Mörike's Mozart's Journey to Prague [1855], London: 1957, tr. Leopold von Loewenstein-Wertheim, p. 85.]

To place Mörike in context, other passages from this book are:

"On the threshold of any great and tragic work of art ... there hovers an intimation of eternal beauty.... [Man] feels that the infinite will touch him" (p. 81) "... in sight and sound we apprehend the supernatural and our hearts are tossed helpless from one extreme of emotion to another." (p. 86)

Wittgenstein wanted to show clearly the limits of the factual, to separate the factual from value and sentiment -- i.e. to draw the line between the objective and the subjective, in order to protect the subjective in an age that he thought denied its importance (Engelmann p. 130), an age of Positivism and later Logical Positivism that would dismiss the subjective as unverifiable and therefore nonsense, rather than recognize it as what is of highest value.

The "picture" or "belief in" the higher is itself foundational (OC § 559). And so it makes no sense (i.e. it is language without meaning) to ask for its foundation.

The subject aesthetics, according to Wittgenstein, like logic, is "prior to any question of value" (LC). It describes facts in plain view, all that is objective. And therefore 'the higher' is not, any more than 'the beautiful', a concept belonging to aesthetics. Is 'the higher', like 'beautiful', a word subjectively applied, i.e. not applied according to rules, being as it were a language without "grammar" = logic?

[Related: Engelmann and Count Eberhard's Hawthorn: Wittgenstein's idea: to let the meaning of the poem show itself rather than try to say (put into words) what's its meaning is: "Then nothing gets lost." (But how do you know? Is art held to a non-Socratic standard, one where "whatever seems right is going to be right, meaning that there is no right or wrong" (PI § 258), which is no standard.)]

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"The Higher" as a Category

Engelmann's ideas are background I absorbed -- but, I should have written above: with quite limited understanding -- and accepted long ago. Because it is easy to be confused about a fundamental question here (as indeed I was for a long time), to imagine that Wittgenstein was picturing "the higher" as a world outside human sense perception, on "the other side of the sky" (Plato) maybe. A world that one might -- despite Wittgenstein's choice of silence -- seek a proof for the existence of, as people seek proofs for the existence of God (as if 'the higher' and 'God' were names of things). An invisible world that one might alternately believe in and have doubts about -- as if, as some say about religious belief, it were a feeling that waxed and waned and the waning was called 'doubt'.

Rather, 'the higher' is a category -- but not a category of existence, and it is not a category of "grammar" (in Wittgenstein's jargon) either. Unlike 'color-words', 'number-words', there is no part of speech 'higher-words' -- i.e. "the higher" may be a category -- but it is not a category of metaphysics (a speculative theory), and it is not a category of grammar either (I was confused about this fundamental question for a long time).

What Wittgenstein did with the expression 'the higher' was to make a distinction between different ways or forms of life. The expression contrasts with 'the lower', as e.g. in the distinction between art and pastimes (entertainment), or maybe in the story of Martha and Mary: Mary has chosen the higher part (Luke 10.38).

• Categories of reality (metaphysics)
• Categories of grammar (logic, classification)
• Categories of reference (examples of characteristic music, literature, fine art, but of philosophical problems as well, the TLP notwithstanding)

As I think Engelmann and Wittgenstein use the expression 'the higher', it does not allude to "another category of existence", an imperceptible something (as Plato's Forms do) or a spirit realm (as the pictures of an afterlife do). Wittgenstein's Tractatus is not a work of metaphysics in that respect.

Note that the points of reference of the man who has "a sense of the higher" -- i.e. for whom that idea is point of reference like a lighthouse, a principle that guides his thought and life -- will be different from the points of reference of the man who does not have that sense. Their allusions to literature, music -- those points of reference will be different. As to the community's common allusions, they will differ in their response with matter-of-course acceptance or censure and dismissal. Not making -- or being able to make -- a distinction between the higher and lower is to be concept-blind; it is an example of being poor in categories, like Nietzsche's good people who have only the categories "business" and "pleasure".

The "existence of a higher sphere" has nothing, in Engelmann's and Wittgenstein's context, to do with metaphysical speculation about the real existence of anything. It is a way of looking at or seeing the world (our life), and it is not limited to aesthetics.

Music and the Philosophical Investigations

A statement Wittgenstein made to Drury about the Philosophical Investigations in 1949 may show that Wittgenstein maintained the self-disciplined separation that he had imposed on himself in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to the end of his life.

It is impossible for me to say in my book one word about all that music has meant in my life. How then can I hope to be understood? (Recollections p. 160; cf. DW p. ix, xiv)

The question that puzzles me is in which sense of 'impossible' couldn't Wittgenstein say one word? Was it only in his book of logic-philosophy (where it would have been out of place), or was it in any book that he or anyone else might write?

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Nachklänge aus dem Theater. Epilogue.

This Epilogue is from circa 1986, an earlier life, but it was not written for the sake of scribbling a wretched satire about that confused gentleman Eichner, who I can't now remember who he was. I think the quoted words are from E.T.A. Hoffmann's stories (cf. also his Beethoven's Instrumental Music), but I can't remember now. What Wagner said about "having the courage of a true adagio", that is what faith in the higher means.

How does The Golden Pot (tr. Carlyle) end: "Can aught else but Poesy reveal itself ... as the deepest secret of Nature?" This "ultimate truth about the world", which art expresses in "symbolic language", is not "a philosophy"words or a "philosophic system" -- it is something "felt" (but not with the five senses). It is complete confidence that poetry and not prose, that the higher and not the lower, is the "truth". It is not a proposition to be demonstrated or refuted.

"Symbolic Language"

But if Wittgenstein's logic of language, his standard for making a verifiable distinction between sense and nonsense in language, is held to outside philosophy -- then music cannot be called "symbolic language", because symbolic language = metaphor. And metaphor must be rewritable in prose, and music -- i.e. instrumental music which is not programmatic -- cannot be restated in "the rational, discursive language of ordinary prose", not according to Hoffmann it cannot be.

"The meaning of music is not rational" -- in which sense of our word 'meaning'? "All that music has meant in my life," Wittgenstein said -- in which sense of 'meaning'? Not in Wittgenstein's grammatical sense.

One can't really say "There is the invisible", because that is precisely what man "cannot unveil" (if it were perceptible it wouldn't be imperceptible), but the "picture" that there is, as the Catholic Profession's words "I believe in all things visible and invisible", may nonetheless guide someone's life, be both "an expression of our interest and direct our interest" (PI § 570).

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