Engelmann told me that when he rummages round at home in a drawer full of his own manuscripts, they strike him as so glorious that he thinks it would be worth presenting to other people. (He said it’s the same when he is reading through letters from his dead relations.) But when he imagines a selection of them published he said the whole business loses its charm & value & becomes impossible. I said this case was like the following one: Nothing could be more remarkable than seeing someone who thinks himself unobserved engaged in some quite simple everyday activity. Let’s imagine a theatre, the curtain goes up & we see someone alone in his room walking up and down, lighting a cigarette, seating himself, etc. so that suddenly we are observing a human being from outside in a way that ordinarily we can never observe ourselves; as if we were watching a chapter from a biography with our own eyes, — surely this would be at once uncanny and wonderful. More wonderful than anything that a playwright could cause to be acted or spoken on the stage. We should be seeing life itself. — But then we do see this every day & it makes not the slightest impression on us! True enough, but we do not see it from that point of view. — Similarly, when E[ngelmann]. looks at his writings and finds them [wonderful] (even though he would not care to publish any of the pieces individually), he is seeing his life as God’s work of art, & as such it is certainly worth contemplating, as is every life & everything whatever. But only the artist can represent the individual thing so that it appears to us as a work of art; those manuscripts rightly lose their value if we contemplate them singly & in any case without prejudice, i.e. without being enthusiastic about them in advance. The work of art forces us — so to speak — to see it in the right perspective, but without art the object is a piece of nature like any other & the fact that we may exalt it through our enthusiasm  does not give anyone the right to display it to us. (I am always reminded of one of those insipid snapshots of a piece of scenery which is interesting to the person who took it because he was there himself, experienced something, but which a third party looks at with justifiable coldness; insofar as it is ever justifiable to look at something with coldness.) 

But now it seems to me too that besides the work of the artist there is another through which the world may be captured sub specie æterni. It is — as I believe — the way of thought which as it were flies above the world and leaves it as it is — contemplating it from above, in its flight. (Aug 22, 1930, CV 6-7, MS 109:28)

Wittgenstein wrote that passage on August 22 in 1930 and you can find it in the collection known as Vermischte Bemerkungen which means, “miscellaneous remarks.” The English title of the book is Culture and Value and the remark’s original source is on page 28 of MS 109 in Wittgenstein’s Nachlass, which you can see online in Wittgenstein’s own German handwriting using the University of Bergen Archives electronic edition of the Nachlass. Or you could just read the 1998 second edition of Culture and Value.

Why start here? Why start in 1930 rather than, say, 1921 when the Tractatus Logico-Philosphicus was published, or a bit later in 1934 when Wittgenstein first began to put his new method of philosophizing into writings such as the Blue and Brown Books, the Philosophical Grammar, or the Principles of Linguistic Philosophy which he co-authored with Friedrich Waismann? Well, for one thing, I’ve subtitled this podcast “philosophical fragments,” because I think that Wittgenstein’s work is probably best digested by new readers and listeners in bite sized pieces. 

Virtually all of Wittgenstein’s writings, with the exception of those pieces he explicitly prepared for his students or lay listeners like the Blue and Brown Books or the “Lecture on Ethics,” take the forms of Bemerkungen or “remarks.” Wittgenstein, somewhat like Epictetus, Nietzsche, or Simone Weil, writes aphoristically. Rather than laying out his arguments or views explicitly in treatise form, it often seems that Wittgenstein simply murmurs cryptic utterances and moves on without any explanation. This was intentional on Wittgenstein’s part. In the preface to Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein wrote in 1948, “I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking. But if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own.”

One thing to keep in mind when reading Wittgenstein, is that his remarks often seem sketchy at best. They give the impression that he’s talking about something really deep that you can’t wrap your head around and there aren’t footnotes or commentaries to help you out. But remember that in the Preface to PI Wittgenstein continues saying 

The philosophical remarks in this book are, as it were, a number of sketches of landscapes which were made in the course of [...] long and meandering journeys. The same or almost the same points were always being approached afresh from different directions, and new sketches made. Very many of these were badly drawn or lacking in character, marked by all the defects of a weak draughtsman. And when they were rejected, a number of half-way decent ones were left, which then had to be arranged and often cut down, in order to give the viewer an idea of the landscape. So this book is really just an album.

In this podcast, we will be flipping through the album of Wittgenstein’s philosophy glimpsing the snapshots of his thought on things like language, meaning, ethics, aesthetics, and especially religion. Let’s try to unpack the quote we started the episode with. Paul Englemann was a family friend of the Wittgensteins whom Wittgenstein met at school and with whom he maintained a lifelong correspondence. Apparently, Englemann had an experience familiar to many who have a rich family history, or perhaps an attic or basement full of old junk. When rummaging through his own old papers, or letters of dead relatives, it seemed to him like it would be worth it to somehow show other people. But when he’d actually think about the process of editing and publishing them, the thought lost its magic, and the papers didn’t seem glorious anymore.  

Why is that? I’m reminded of a similar experience in which my mom showed me some of my writings and drawings from when I was in second grade. Not only was it hilarious to see how poorly I wrote, especially since I’m now a graduate student in philosophy (I’m still a horrible drawer by the way), but I felt special, gratified that somebody, even if that somebody is my mother, would save such silly mementos from my childhood. At the same time, I know that I’ve written and drawn things that I’d rather burn than let other people see. When I was a teenager, inspired somewhat pretentiously by Anne Frank, I started keeping a diary which I’d periodically edit expecting that one day, when I was rich and famous, people would want to read about me. I’m livid with embarrassment even saying this since I now know I’ll probably never be rich or famous, and that very few people indeed, beside of course my mother who’d be interested anyway, would really care to read my tormented adolescent thoughts. 

In 1930, Wittgenstein was transitioning from his own earlier way of thinking and doing philosophy epitomized in the seemingly impenetrable “logiceze” of the Tractatus, to the looser more spontaneous reflections epitomized in the Philosophical Investigations. Something, however remains important in both the early and later work, and that is the concept of an übersicht or an overview. It would probably be good to recap some of Wittgenstein’s early philosophy in the Tractatus before explaining why the concept of an overview is and remains important in the later work. 

In C. K. Ogden’s translation, the Tractatus opens with the proposition that “The world is everything that is the case” (TLP 1). At 2.063 Wittgenstein writes, “The total reality is the world.” Starting at 2.1 he goes on, “We make to ourselves pictures of facts. The picture presents the facts in logical space… The picture is a model of reality.” He continues at 2.16

“In order to be a picture, a fact must have something in common with what it pictures. In the picture and the pictured there must be something identical in order that the one can be a picture of the other at all. What the picture must have in common with reality in order to be able to represent it after its manner - rightly or falsely- is its form of representation. The picture can represent every reality whose form it has… The picture, however, cannot represent its form of representation: it shows it forth.” 

When Wittgenstein says that the picture cannot represent its form of representation, but rather “shows it forth” he is drawing the famous distinction between “saying” and “showing,” in German, sagen and zeigen. At 4.022 Wittgenstein writes: “Der Satz zeigt, wie es sich verhält, wenn er wahr ist. Und er sagt, dass es sich so verhält.” “The proposition shows how things stand, if it is true. And it says, that they do so stand.”

What does all this mean? In Wittgenstein’s early thought, language and the world have an isomorphic relationship. In other words, language’s function is essentially to represent or picture reality. This is the so called “picture theory” of language. While there are many interpretive difficulties and disagreements among philosophers who study Wittgenstein, probably everyone agrees to at least this much. While the details can get quite complicated, language fundamentally serves to mirror the world in thought. As Wittgenstein writes at 3.01, “The totality of true thoughts is a picture of the world.”

Propositions or linguistic “facts” represent the way the world is, or a way that it could possibly be. All language is fundamentally about the world. In his earlier Notebooks from 1914-1916, Wittgenstein uses the metaphor of language as a net which captures reality. It is very important for Wittgenstein that propositions, Sätze in German, meaning meaningful sentences or assertions, can be true or false. A sentence that is not truth-bivalent, that is, cannot be true or false, is not meaningful. Language is able to picture the world because it shares what Wittgenstein calls “logical form” with it. However, this logical form is not itself something that can be stated in language. Since language is a mirror of the world, to try to express using language how it is that language mirrors the world would be like trying to put two mirrors in front of each other: you just get the infinity mirror illusion and whatever you can see in that mirror is elusive and imperfectly mirrored. 

Instead of saying or stating what a proposition has formally in common with the reality it depicts, the proposition, according to Wittgenstein shows or manifests this form. That language mirrors the world is not the sort of discovery that can be expressed in words, instead it has to be seen. This is what it means to say that the Tractatus forces the reader to adopt what can be called the transcendental perspective. It’s as if you have to zoom out in far enough, for instance like you might in Google maps or Google earth, to see the world as a whole and its mirror image, namely language as a whole. This is the first type of “overview” in Wittgenstein’s philosophy - quite literally the highest possible overview. A vantage point from which one can, or at least thinks they can, see all of reality as a whole, what’s sometimes called the “God’s eye point of view.” 

As we will see however, this alleged God’s eye point of view will be a perspective Wittgenstein must renounce. It results in the paradoxical nature of the Tractatus itself. For according to the author of the Tractatus, as Wittgenstein refers to himself in the PI, if we understand its implications, we will see that his own propositions are quite literally nonsense. Toward the very end of the Tractatus, at 6.54 Wittgenstein writes:

My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions: then he sees the world rightly.

Before we can understand what Wittgenstein is saying here, and to be honest, it’s not clear that we can understand what Wittgenstein is saying here, let’s back up and recap. What we can say and consequently, what we can think is constrained by the symmetrical structure that language and reality share which makes meaningful language possible. At the same time, it is important to the early Wittgenstein that there are things which cannot be said and consequently cannot be thought. In his preface to the Tractatus he wrote, 

The book [i.e. the Tractatus] will draw a limit to thinking, or rather, - not to thinking, but to the expression of thoughts; for, in order to draw a limit to thinking we should have to be able to think both sides of this limit (we should therefore have to be able to think what cannot be thought). The limit can, therefore, only be drawn in language and what lies on the other side of the limit will be simply nonsense.

This does not necessarily mean that there really is nothing on the other side of this limit: only that whatever may be beyond it is not something we can literally assert anything meaningful about, since we would no longer be speaking about the world of which language is the mirror image. In this way, Wittgenstein’s early philosophy has something in common with the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle, the members of which were greatly influenced by the Tractatus. However, unlike the logical positivists, even though the early Wittgenstein thought that we could not assert anything meaningful about what lies beyond the boundaries of thought, it was important to him that we realize that there is a boundary and that literally everything of value lay on the other side. To see this, we can turn to proposition 6.4.

6.4     All propositions are of equal value.

6.41    The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and 

happens as it does happen. In it there is no value - and if there were, it would be of no value.

    If there is a value which is of value, it must lie outside all happening and being-so. 

For all happening and being-so is accidental.

    What makes it non-accidental cannot lie in the world, for otherwise this would again 

be accidental.

    It must lie outside the world.

6.42    Hence also there can be no ethical propositions. Propositions cannot express anything higher.

6.421    It is clear that ethics cannot be expressed.

    Ethics are transcendental.

    (Ethics and aesthetics are one.)

A little further, Wittgenstein writes at

6.432    How the world is, is completely indifferent for what is higher. God does not reveal himself in the world.

An argument can be made that “value,” in the sense that philosophers speak of value, comes from a perspective or point of view. Remember that even if language is like a mirror, someone still has to be looking in the mirror to see what’s reflected. Language mirrors the world, so all we can see in the mirror of language are the facts of the world. But in order to actually evaluate or pass a judgment on the reflection we see, we still have to be standing in front of the mirror, literally bringing to it our point of view. Any value that we see in the world as it’s reflected in language, pictured to us in our propositions, is not located in the mirror, in the same way that although you can see yourself in the mirror, you are not yourself inside of the mirror. If this analogy holds, Wittgenstein appears to be saying something quite plausible. At the level of representation, since all language serves to do is reflect the facts of the world, all propositions are literally of the same value: namely their truth value which can only be true or false with respect to what fact or combination of facts it purports to represent. 

Value for Wittgenstein, whether ethical, aesthetic, or religious, is literally subjective in the sense that it can only issue forth from a subject, that is, someone endowed with a point of view to whom representations can be represented. Value is not a fact like any other fact, since as we’ve seen, all facts, all goings on within the world, are accidental and contingent whereas a genuine value would have to somehow be intrinsically necessary. This becomes clearer if you read the Tractatus along with the somewhat misleadingly titled “Lecture on Ethics” In his 1929 lecture, Wittgenstein invited his audience to think the following, 

[S]uppose one of you were an omniscient person and therefore knew all the movements of all the bodies in the world dead or alive and that he also knew all the states of mind of all human beings that ever lived. And suppose this man wrote all he knew in a big book. Then this book would contain the whole description of the world; …It would of course contain all relative judgements of value and all true scientific propositions and in fact all true propositions that can be made. But all the facts described would, as it were, stand on the same level and in the same way all propositions stand on the same level. There are no propositions which, in any absolute sense, are sublime, important, or trivial. 

We see here Wittgenstein indicating the “transcendental perspective” by telling the audience to imagine they were an omniscient person, e.g. God. If everything God knows about the world was put into a book, indeed a book rather like the Tractatus, it would contain no “ethical” or other evaluative propositions. It would of course contain the fact that people make, or think they make, evaluative judgments, and, rather like in hedonist utilitarianism, could contain the fact that some things are pleasurable and others not pleasurable, and the fact that people generally avoid pain and pursue pleasure. But it could not contain any judgments of what Wittgenstein calls “absolute” value, i.e. value that is not relative, conditional, or hypothetical based on some other fact, e.g. the fact that people want to live a long happy life, that they don’t like being lied to, or stolen from, or murdered, etc. 

By contrast, if someone could write a book on ethics which really was a book on ethics, i.e. a book containing propositions that successfully expressed or captured “absolute value,” such as absolute goodness, Wittgenstein writes, “that book would, with an explosion, destroy all the other books in the world. If an absolute value somehow could enter into the interlocked system of facts that make up the world, it’s as if it would have to break its way in. Another way of saying this might be to say that if an absolute value really could be expressed in a proposition, the metaphysical subject would literally have to break the fourth wall of reality to utter it. As Wittgenstein says in the Lecture, “Ethics, if it is anything, is supernatural and our words will only express facts; as a teacup will only hold a teacup full of water [even] if I were to pour out a gallon over it.”

In a 1919 letter to Ludwig von Ficker, to whom Wittgenstein turned for help in publishing the Tractatus after he completed it in 1918, Wittgenstein wrote that the point of the Tractatus was ethical. He writes, 

I wanted to write that my work consists of two parts: of the one which is here, and of everything which I have not written. And precisely this second part is the important one. For the Ethical is delimited from within, as it were by my book; and I’m convinced that strictly speaking, it can ONLY be delimited in this way. In brief, I think: All of that which many are babbling today, I have defined in my book by remaining silent about it. 

Now you may be wondering, what in the world, or rather, what out of the world does this have to do with Paul Englemann rummaging through his drawer, and why if I’ve promised to give Wittgenstein in bite sized pieces have I quotes him endlessly. We’ve spoken of the first kind of overview in Wittgenstein’s philosophy: the God’s eye point of view, or paradoxically as it’s also sometimes called, the point of view from nowhere. Nevertheless, let’s quote the Tractatus one more time to see where it leads us. We saw at 6.432 that Wittgenstein said that “How the world is, is completely indifferent for what is higher.” And we saw that by “what is higher” he’s referring to the God’s eye perspective, or as we’ve called it once before in this podcast, the point of view of the “metaphysical subject.” At 6.44 he continues:

6.44    Not how the world is, but that it is, is the mystical.

6.45    The contemplation of the world sub specie aeterni is its contemplation as a limited whole. 

The feeling of the world as a limited whole is the mystical feeling. 

6.522    There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical. 

The words “sub specie aeterni” or as they are also spelled, “sub specie aeternitatis” are borrowed from Baruch Spinoza whose own mathematically modelled book The Ethics is similar in certain ways to the Tractatus. However, we don’t have time here to go into that particular historical connection. What is important is that the words sub specie aeterni or aeternitatis are Latin for “under the aspect of eternity” or “under an eternal aspect.” A “species” in the old sense of the word is the way something appears, a particular instance or appearance of an essence or kind of thing. To hammer home the connection, and as an example, in Catholic Christianity, the Body and Blood of Christ are said to be really present under the species of Bread and Wine. This is not supposed to be a weird biological analysis of the ritual of communion. It simply means that what Catholics believe to really be the Body and Blood of Christ in the context of the Eucharistic liturgy, appear to be, or look like bread and wine, even though they are not. We will talk in a later episode about the Wittgensteinian interpretation of religious rituals, and in particular their assessment of the doctrines of transubstantiation and the real presence of God or Christ in the sacraments, but that is a discussion for another day. Suffice it to say here that an aspect is a way of seeing or looking at something. To see something under an aspect, is to see it with a particular intention, or under a particular description. For instance, as a less holy example, if I am inclined to see someone primarily as a young, supple, attractive body, I may be seeing them under the aspect of a possible or desirable romantic or sexual partner. I might, if I gave it more thought (and chastened my mind), see them under a different aspect, for example the aspect of a human being, (which is not, of course, to say that you necessarily dehumanize those you physically desire). The point is that I can consider one and the same individual at different times as a source or possible source of pleasure, or more neutrally as a person regardless of the pleasure they bring me.

It is important to Wittgenstein, both the early and later, that one and the same thing can have different aspects and that in order to see those aspects we sometimes have to approach the thing or object with a predetermined idea of its value or worth. That is why he said about Englemann that his manuscripts rightly, or correctly, seem to lose their value if they are approached unvoreingenommen that is, without prejudice, or as the older translation had it, disinterestedly, in other words without being enthusiastic about them in advance.

When Wittgenstein says that the contemplation of the world as a limited whole is to contemplate it under the aspect of eternity, or under an eternal aspect, this is related to what we’ve been talking about - namely the ability, or the supposed ability, to zoom out in thought far enough to see the whole world as one thing, the kind of thing that God could write a book about. The feeling that this exalted point of view would give rise to would be what Wittgenstein calls the mystical feeling - the recognition that on one hand, everything in the world is utterly contingent and conditional, and on the other hand, that it is remarkable that the world as a whole is there at all. 

As a quick tangent, this may seem to be related to what theologians and theistic philosophers of religion try to get at when they construct cosmological or evidential arguments for the existence of God. But, as we’ll discuss in a future episode, while Wittgenstein in general was averse to apologetic arguments of this sort, Wittgensteinians have in general preferred ontological style arguments like that of St. Anselm of Canterbury, because what is in question here is not some specific fact about the world as we know it, whether its supposed fine-tuning, its alleged purposiveness, or its ambivalence to the evolution and development of life, still less with silly arguments about bananas and pineapples, what is in question is the remarkable fact that we can think about anything in the world at all, indeed that we could, through language, think about the world as a whole. 

This mystical feeling is reminiscent of the writings of the 14th century English hermitess Julian of Norwich whose work is interestingly titled Showings of Divine Love. In the Showings, Julian writes of a vision she was granted when she lay deathly ill at the age of 30. I’ll let David Barnes from Librivox read you the excerpt.

In this same time our Lord shewed me a spiritual sight of His homely loving. I saw that He is to us everything that is good and comfortable for us: He is our clothing that for love wrappeth us, claspeth us, and all encloseth us for tender love, that He may never leave us; being to us all-thing that is good, as to mine understanding. Also in this He shewed me a little thing, the quantity of an hazel-nut, in the palm of my hand; and it was as round as a ball. I looked thereupon with eye of my understanding, and thought: What may this be? And it was answered generally thus: It is all that is made. I marvelled how it might last, for methought it might suddenly have fallen to naught for little[ness]. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasteth, and ever shall [last] for that God loveth it. And so All-thing hath the Being by the love of God.In this Little Thing I saw three properties. The first is that God made it, the second is that God loveth it, the third, that God keepeth it. But what is to me verily the Maker, the Keeper, and the Lover,—I cannot tell; for till I am Substantially oned to Him, I may never have full rest nor very bliss: that is to say, till I be so fastened to Him, that there is right nought that is made betwixt my God and me. It needeth us to have knowing of the littleness of creatures and to hold as nought28 all-thing that is made, for to love and have God that is unmade. For this is the cause why we be not all in ease of heart and soul: that we seek here rest in those things that are so little, wherein is no rest, and know not our God that is All-mighty, All-wise, All-good. For He is the Very Rest.

We have no way of knowing whether Wittgenstein ever read the Showings. It seems unlikely. However, it is amusing and illuminating to imagine Wittgenstein writing his own book of Showings about what can only be shown but not said. What he might be shown, or try to show us, is the world which is “all that is the case,” no bigger than the size of a hazelnut, always at risk of falling into utter oblivion, but mysteriously or mystically held in place by God’s or the metaphysical subject’s thought, caught as it were, in the spider silk net of language.

But how do we get from thinking about the whole world as God’s completed work, to Paul Englemann thinking, perhaps unconsciously, of his own life as God’s work of art? Once again, in a future episode, we will take a look at the transformative experiences which changed Wittgenstein’s mind about the nature and importance of philosophy, and in particular convinced him that many parts of the Tractatus were gravely mistaken. But the result of Wittgenstein’s changing aspect was that he came to accept that language is not, or not only, the mirror of reality. Indeed, trying to think of things like Reality with a capital R and and Language with a capital L, are in some sense, philosophical illusions that we deceive ourselves with precisely by pretending that we can assume the transcendental God’s eye perspective. The later Wittgenstein recognizes that humans are themselves, limited, contingent, fallible, and embodied beings, and this means that language two, rather than being a perfectly structured scaffolding of thought is also limited, contingent, fallible, and indeed, embodied. Starting at section 122 of the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein writes, 

122. A main source of our failure to understand is that we don’t have an overview of the use of our words. — Our grammar is deficient in surveyability. A surveyable representation produces precisely that kind of understanding which consists in ‘seeing connections’. Hence the importance of finding and, inventing intermediate links.

The concept of a surveyable representation is of fundamental significance for us. It characterizes the way we represent things, how we look at matters…

123. A philosophical problem has the form: “I don’t know my way about.”

124. Philosophy must not interfere in any way with the actual use of language, so it can in the end only describe it. For it cannot justify it either. It leaves everything as it is. 

The German for what in the fourth English edition of the PI is translated as a “surveyable representation” is übersichtliche Darstellung, which is sometimes translated as a “perspicuous picture or representation.” Elsewhere in the PI, Wittgenstein likens language to an old city where there are everything from ancient historical districts to new and modern suburbs. Philosophical problems are like being lost in such a city. What one would really like to be able to do is to look at a GPS or maybe Google maps, but what would be even better would be able to fly above the city and while hovering look down like a drone to see where one needs to go. In other words, you need an overview, in this case, an overview of how we use language in new and confusing ways. What you need is not simply more information, for someone could always try to give you verbal directions that may or may not help. What you need is a new or different perspective or point of view. And for this, you often need another person to literally point you on your way. It’s important to note that in this case, you don’t need to, and in fact cannot, zoom out all the way so as to try to see the whole world at once. That would be as useless as trying to use NASA images to drive to work or school. You just need to be able to zoom out enough to see where you are trying to go and how to get there. 

Hopefully, it is clear by this point how at least some of this is related to Wittgenstein’s remark on Englemann’s comments. Just as everything that happens in the world is on the same level, and therefore nothing is intrinsically more important or sublime than any other, in one sense, Englemann’s papers and the letters from his deceased relatives are just scribbles on pages which may have meant something to someone at some time, but which do not mean anything on their own. That is, until someone, like Englemann, brings to them his own point of view, a point of view that is in some sense prejudiced or prejudged by bringing enthusiasm, care, and attention to what would otherwise be meaningless data. 

An artist, as an artist, has the ability to take one accidental thing or object among all the other things and objects of the world, and to present it in such a way that we see it under a different aspect and therefore are forced to change our point of view. That is why Wittgenstein lamented elsewhere in Culture and Value that: “People nowadays think, scientists are there to instruct them, poets, musicians, etc. to entertain them. That the latter have something to teach them; that never occurs to them” (CV 42). 

The modern “scientistic” worldview assumes that the so-called objective facts which are captured through experimentation, scientific methodology, and analysis are all that there is. Methodological naturalism poorly conceals an assumed metaphysical naturalism. The early Wittgenstein concedes that there is a sense in which the plain and ordinary facts of the natural world as we know it are all that there is. Except for the human point of view. Wittgenstein wrote in 1929, “The human gaze has the power of making things precious; though its true that they become more costly too.” (CV 3). Although scientists and mathematicians may have a handle on all the facts are and say, art is capable of showing us that the totality of facts is not the end of the matter: that the sense of the world lies outside or beyond the world in a way of seeing the world rightly. Artists have something to teach us as well as scientists, but what they have to teach us is not the sort of thing that can be put into textbooks, but has to be displayed to us, perhaps in a museum or temple. 

Someone who understands the movement of Wittgenstein’s early thought, will recognize it in a later remark in he made between 1932 and 1934: “In art,” says Wittgenstein, “it is hard to say anything that is as good as saying: nothing.” When one is able to zoom out just far enough to see the parts of one’s life as something precious and worthy of wonder and perhaps even gratitude, to see one’s life as a limited whole against the background of eternity, one is seeing one’s life as a work of art, the kind of work that only God as the transcendent artist could create.

But on the other hand, this does not mean that one is entitled to be proud. This transcendental perspective “leaves everything as it is” and in a certain sense, recognizes that the individual details are ultimately indifferent and inconsequential. If one tries to go out of one’s way to think of one’s life as a divine work of art, perhaps by planning to publish your diary or to display your life story to others, like Paul Englemann, the whole business should lose its charm and become impossible. The realization of one’s life as something limited and therefore precious is not the sort of thing that one should search for. It has to strike you. All you can try to do is to put yourself in the right position to see it when it is shown. As Wittgenstein wrote just before the lecture on ethics: “You cannot lead people to the Good. you can only lead them to some place or other. The good lies outside the space of facts.” (CV 5).

The second overview therefore in Wittgenstein’s thought, and which we need to adopt if we are to see things aright, is the overview that can be surprised by the ordinariness of everyday life. Which is open to occasionally seeing life against the backdrop of eternity, but which can also come back down to earth, to survey just as much of life as we need to keep on going on. 

In a future episode, we will take a closer look at the importance to Wittgenstien of wondering at the world and others. For now, it should be clear that Wittgenstein’s remark on Englemann’s rummaging, serves as an interesting bridge between the early and later philosophy, and does a good job of showing us the importance of two different kinds of overview or perspicuous representation and the ability to see everyday life as a divine masterpiece. In this way, one can hear echoes of St. Augustine, whom Wittgenstein greatly admired. In Book 10, chapter 8 of Augustine’s Confessions he writes, “People travel to wonder at the height of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars; but they pass by themselves without wondering.” 

Wittgenstein’s philosophy helps us to wonder at ourselves. But, until next time, this has been Faith in the Fly-Bottle.