ABSTRACT
In the course of his 1929 project of constructing a “phenomenological language,” Wittgenstein devotes particular attention to the structure of visual space and the ways it differs from the physical space of ordinary language. This chapter explores these structural differences between the immediately given in visual space and language in the physical world, and thus the structural reasons for the impossibility of a linguistic representation of phenomena as “givens.” As will be shown, visual space has an affirmative and topological-spatial structure that constitutes its immediate reality, whereas our ordinary language has a linear-successive and subject-perspectival structure that inevitably brings in hypothetical elements into the description of phenomena and thus is incapable of grasping the immediate reality of phenomena. To this end, the first section will sketch the background and goal of Wittgenstein’s phenomenological language. In Section 2, the structural differences between visual space and language will be discussed, drawing on Wittgenstein’s 1929 remarks on hypotheses, negation, and possibility space. Although he soon discarded the project of a phenomenological language, Wittgenstein’s reflections on it contain many interesting insights into the structural constitution of the given and the limits of its linguistic representation. Drawing on his draft of an “I-less” language, I argue in the last section that these insights are also relevant to Wittgenstein’s “late” project of describing the grammar of our ordinary language.
