ABSTRACT
I describe what I am after as the Investigations’ everyday aesthetics of itself to register at once that I know of no standing aesthetic theory that promises help in understanding the literariness of the Investigations – I mean the literary conditions of its philosophical aims – and to suggest the thought that no work will be powerful enough to yield this understanding of its philosophical aims aside from the Investigations itself. Does this mean that I seek an aesthetics within it? I take it to mean, rather, that I do not seek an aesthetic concern of the text that is separate from its central work. My idea here thus joins the idea of an essay of mine, “Declining Decline,” which tracks the not unfamiliar sense of moral or religious fervor in the Investigations and finds that its moral work is not separate from its philosophical work, that something like the moral has become for it, or become again, pervasive for philosophy. (As Emerson words the idea in “Self-Reliance”: “Character teaches above our wills [the will of the person and of the person’s writing]. Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment.”)
There is something more I want here out of the idea of an ordinary aesthetics. The Investigations describes its work, or the form its work takes, as that of perspicuous presentation (§122), evidently an articulation of a task of writing. And it declares the work of its writing as “lead[ing] words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use” (§116), a philosophically extraordinary commitment not only to judge philosophy by the dispensation of the ordinary, but to place philosophy’s conviction in itself in the hands, or handling, of ordinary words. But we also know that Wittgenstein invokes, indeed harps on, the idea of the perspicuous as internal to the work of formal proofs. Then is his use of the idea, in this one section of the Investigations that explicitly invokes it, meant to signal an ideal of lucidity and conviction that he cannot literally expect in a work made of returns to ordinary words? Yet he goes on in the next paragraph to insist: “The concept of perspicuous presentation is of fundamental significance for us. It earmarks our form of presentation, how we look at things.” So is the idea that the writing of the Investigations contains the equivalent, or some analogy or allegory, of proofs? Or that it is meant to project arguments of formal rigor, even though its surface form of presentation does not, to say the least, spell them out? How else could we account for the influence of this work, such as it is, in institutions of professional philosophy?
