Guy Davenport: ‘Wittgenstein’

The introductions to Wittgenstein’s philosophy are a lot longer than his Philosophical Investigations, the book he hoped would stand for his mature thought. I think Guy Davenport got the main points in a five-page essay:

• Wittgenstein sometimes liked other philosophers’ questions, but he never considered their answers.

• He had no philosophical tradition. “The philosopher is not a citizen of any community of ideas. That’s what makes him a philosopher.”

• Wittgenstein’s central idea is that language is a game we learn to play. If you can imagine an anthropologist from Mars trying to learn the rules of a human language, connecting spoken language to behaviors, you might get an intuition of what language is like. You might also get a sense of what Wittgenstein’s philosophy is like.

• Wittgenstein thought that a healthy intellect would be unaware of itself. Thinking is about some thing, rather than about itself. He also thought that philosophy might be a kind of therapy to direct thought back into healthier channels.

• Wittgenstein, like Heraclitus, wrote in fragments. He left behind an enormous collection of notes.

• For all the difficulties people report in understanding Wittgenstein, he’s not abstruse. His writing his clear.

There you have it: a half dozen observations. I think they would help anyone trying to get the gist of an important thinker.

I’m thinking of Davenport because I recently found myself telling someone about his essays. I then wondered how often I’d done that through the years. Time and again, I’ve run across someone who is working on an interesting line of thought. I find myself thinking that person might be encouraged and aided on his or her own way by something Davenport wrote.

I recommend Davenport often to serious people working on serious ideas. It’s a measure of the value I put on Davenport’s work, I guess.

• Source: Guy Davenport, The Geography of the Imagination; San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981. The essay “Wittgenstein” is on pp. 331-35. The quotation is on p. 334.