Language Is a Form of Life

Today at Poets & Suicides we find ourselves thinking about Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose work has had an enormous influence on The Author. This is because Wittgenstein “finished” philosophy for The Author by demonstrating that there were no solutions to philosophical problems because there were no philosophical problems, at least not in the accepted sense; philosophy was something that occurred when we became bewitched by language. W. endeavored to “show the fly the way out of the fly bottle,” by returning us, or perhaps by revealing to us, the way language is actually used and the “patent nonsense” of some of our most profound-seeming propositions. In On Certainty, for example, Wittgenstein responds to the idea (espoused in an article by his friend GE Moore) that a certain kind of unimpeachable knowledge could rescue reality from skepticism. “I know that this is my hand,” Moore wrote in reference to his own hand held aloft, attempting to infuse this knowledge with a Cartesian unassailability. But Wittgenstein reveals, in On Certainty, in his anecdotal and aesthetically unique way, that the way we actually employ language-games regarding certainty always includes the possibility of being wrong. (You might be certain you left your keys on the mantle, but a lot of good it will do you when they’re buried away in the pocket of the last coat you wore.) Wittgenstein had no interest in returning certainty to the skeptics, so that they could maul it and spit on its carcass. No, he was trying to suggest that Moore’s grand idea (“I know that this is my hand”) wasn’t a statement about the world at all (it was not, that is, the kind of statement Wittgenstein would label “empirical”); it was, rather, a statement about our language, about how we use words, about words’ function in the context of our broader language-games. It’s not empirical, but “grammatical” (a term Wittgenstein employed in an unusual way; he wasn’t talking about “grammar and usage,” but about the contextual network of rules governing the way we speak and act).

Moore’s statement, in other words, was the kind of statement you might make to a child if you were trying to teach him how to use the word “know.” Or, I suppose, the word “hand.” It could only be useful in this form; as an empirical proposition, it was “patent nonsense.” (In fact, Wittgenstein had a little test he’d use to see if a proposition made any empirical sense. He’d ask if the opposite proposition [in this case, “I do not know that this is my hand”] made any empirical sense. Here it does not, except perhaps in very rare and particular situations, like for instance we could imagine an individual who had sustained a certain kind of brain injury uttering this sentence, though exceptions like this and their potential to render empirical statements grammatical and vice versa were in fact essential to Wittgenstein’s fluid way of seeing language, which was in some respects a direct refutation of his own earlier work, The Tractatus, which had taken more of a logical positivist’s approach to language, attempting to reduce it to a set of mathematical rules and principles, though The Tractatus also arrives at the very poetic conclusion that most of what matters in life we can’t talk about at all, and that in such cases “we must remain silent.” )

This idea — that many seemingly empirical propositions were only grammatical propositions dressed up in philosopher’s clothes — became incredibly useful to and for The Author as he began Authoring some of his earliest works, or rather, the idea (and a tangential idea that we will discuss in a moment) drove him to the idea of Authorship and away from the study of philosophy. At the time The Author discovered Wittgenstein, he was intent on pursuing philosophy to its deep interior, in the hope that it might teach him how to live. But W. revealed to The Author — not through argument, but through examples, anecdotes, aphorisms, and the occasional koan — that philosophy wasn’t up to the task. Upon further reexamination of Hegel, Heidegger, even Kant, the Author discovered a bevy of grammatical statements dressed up as profound empirical revelations. The Author began to suspect that the reason Heidegger’s language was so overheated and impenetrable was not because Heidegger was on the cusp of saying something that no one had said or thought before, but because Heidegger was trapped in the fly-bottle. “Where we cannot speak, we must remain silent.” So much of philosophy began to seem, to The Author, like a void filled with words that would better be replaced with that Wittgensteinian silence. The language simply wasn’t build to do the things philosophy was asking it to do. Moore’s statement (“I know this is my hand”) couldn’t rescue us from skepticism, but that was okay, because skepticism, too, was only a bunch of “patent nonsense” dressed up in empirical clothes. If the skeptic had any ground from which to ask, for instance, “Yes, but how do you know you’re not really a brain in a vat, experiencing the sensation of a hand when in reality you have no hands?” then the whole system would collapse. The platform the skeptic needs to stand on to dissolve reality must also dissolve the moment the skeptic asks this kind of a question.

That is perhaps a sidebar deserving of its own entry in the Poets & Suicides compendium, so let us table it for a moment.

Wittgenstein cured The Author of a determination to get to the bottom of life — to the phenomenological center of things, where all the pain and love and fear and desire were compressed into feeling — via philosophy, which was clearly not up to the task. But it did not cure The Author of what Beckett called “the obligation to express.” The Author was constitutionally unable to “remain silent.” Wittgenstein famously said that “language is a form of life,” and that “if a lion could speak, you wouldn’t understand it.” (The latter remark suggests, The Author believes, that a lion’s world is so vastly different from ours that any language it developed would be equipped to deal with THAT world, not this one.) So what this meant was that our language formed a kind of circle, or a cage, around what we could express. We humans — like all the “forms of life” in this strange universe — were forever barred from understanding an “objective” reality, which The Author realized was what he had been chasing via philosophy. We could never know the world as God knew it. We were to stay in our cage and accept its limits, because it was the only world we would ever know.

But The Author did not want to remain silent in his cage. He wanted to scream. He wanted to rattle the bars and demand egress. And what he came to realize was that while philosophy could only, at its best, describe the cage, ART could rattle the bars. This, for The Author, became the PURPOSE of fiction. Stories that sought merely to entertain (i.e., 99% of published fiction) had no bearing on The Author’s project; he became interested in the texts that sought to bash themselves against the outer rim of the conceptual framework. Human history, social issues, political movements, these did not interest The Author because they seemed infinitesmally small. Our species had — by cosmological standards — just gotten here and would be gone before the universe could blink. What interested The Author instead was what lay beyond the limitations of the species. It is not the way most writers “use” fiction… The Author’s project puts him in a very particular sub-category of authoring. The Author writes desperately in an effort to see what has not been seen, to suggest — obliquely — what W. says we cannot speak about. The Author cannot succeed, of course. It is a no-win scenario. But he has joined a line of authors who have been determined to take their best shot, to rail against systems and frameworks and to demand more, to demand that God show Himself to us, to demand access to a truth that subsumes our little cage and enters us into the divine.

It is in this spirit that The Author’s latest novel, ANTHROPICA, was written. The connection between its “gorgeous hyperbolic excess” (Rick Moody) and the wide aphoristic spaces of Wittgenstein’s work, may be invisible to those half-dozen some-odd readers of The Author’s work (and of the Poets & Suicides compendium), but rest assured, dear (non)reader, that the connection is there. We editors feel we have done our duty by exposing these threads. The Author is aware that ANTHROPICA is not for everyone; but for those people it IS for, those who do not seek out fiction as a form of storytelling, but as a form of enchantment (Nabokov), those who might have a natural attraction to the kind of “madcap Moebius strip” that ANTHROPICA unspools (Sam Lipsyte), for that reader, The Author hopes ANTHROPICA is as good as it can be. This Poets & Suicides article contains an egregious number of words. But ultimately, The Author offers his novel to you in silence.

Alis grave nil. May language release you from its lies.