In § 119 in the “Philisophical Investigations,” Wittegnstein writes,
“The results of philosophy are the discovery of some piece of plain nonsense and the bumps that the understanding has got by running up against the limits of language. They–these bumps–make us see the value of the discovery.”
In class, Josh noted something to the effect that the “limits of language” for Wittgenstein may be marked by practices that are not totally explainable. I find this impetus of the “Philisophical Investigations” interesting as well as mysterious. What are the practices that trip us up where we believe we can explain them? What ontological status do such a practices have if they are “plain nonsense” that nonetheless have force in the world?
Wittgenstein appeals to an idea of bump-as-collision or as “a running up against” something inert. It would seem that limits of language reveal themselves only after we’ve been too reckless. Wittgenstein also seems to be saying that philosophy renders results for those who undertake it only because the understanding will unavoidably fail to look out. In this sense, the philosophic discovery lies in “seeing” for the first time the “bump” we’ve already gotten by a careless use of language. Or, to put it another way, the discovery is in seeing that what we’ve been doing with language has been “some piece of plain nonsense.” Here, it seems that Wittgenstein may be reflecting on his own earlier work in the Tractus and what Josh calls the “Western scientific-Mathmatical culture” that he has turned away from.
Wittgenstien’s “piece of plain nonsense” has powerful effects. This for me is communicated in the strange conjunction of the “bumps” with the “understanding.” Wittgenstein goes on in the Investigations to suggest that, though one is tempted to define “understanding” as a particular mental process, this is an error. Perhaps he says that the “understanding” gets “bumps” to emphasize that what we are tempted to think of as a cognitive faculty operating in the invisible world of mind has spatial dimensions in the physical world. According to my internet German-English dictionary, “Beulen” means “swelling from a blow,” “slight hollow,” “bruise,” “boil,” “bulge.” The understanding that gets “bumps” is a potentially monstrous agency, one that, taking a certain shape, leaves traces of deformity on itself.
Perhaps Wittgenstein chose the word “bump,” which suggests a physical deformity and an aberration from the ‘norm’, because he wanted to suggest that philosophy becomes valuable where it allows us to acknowledge the ineffability of certain signs—the disjunction between an appearance and the original ‘experience’ or ‘mental process’ to which we might take it to refer. One might recognize a bruise and not be sure how one got it or, more seriously, one might recognize a cancerous bump and be told that no one knows for certain how to cure it. Recognizing it, one does not necessarily get rid of it. However, one is now aware that it is there and can assess, depending on how bad it is, how it may change one’s way of doing things.
What fascinates me is Wittgenstein’s interest in engaging the propositions (about understanding, reading, influence) that, upon investigation, prove to be “plain nonsense”—as if he wishes to measure the force that such propositions have by qualifying them again and again. He returns with interest, for instance, to the idea that, while reading, we are tempted to claim that we feel that there is a metal connection between seeing a sign and uttering a word. In § 169, he writes “I’d like to say: when I read, I feel a certain influence of the letters on me.” Wittgenstein goes on to suggest that the word “influence,” as with the word “guidance,” has no essential meaning, but can only be understood in the difference between particular forms and practices of influence. In § 172, he lists “cases”: “You’re in a playground with your eyes blindfolded, and someone leads you by the hand, sometimes left, sometimes right” or “someone leads you by the hand where you are unwilling to go, by force” or “someone leads you along a footpath; you’re having a conversation; you go wherever he does” etc.
On my reading of the Investigations, it’s not that internal feelings of, say, ‘influence’ are not phenomenally palpable, but rather that we invite misunderstanding (we deform our own understanding) by assuming that language provides us with the tools to define influence as an essential inward experience that we all share in common. So what do we do about this problem? In §184, Wittgenstein writes that, “definitions usually aren’t enough” to resolve philosophical paradoxes, but “even less so the statement that a word is ‘indefinable.’” Wittgenstein’s procedure is to describe more clearly the particular criteria among a diverse set that make it meaningful for someone to assert, in a particular circumstance or community, that he or she has been “influenced.” This way we as language users avoid falling into the trap of presuming to know what influence feels like, on the one hand, and casually discrediting the connection between the word and the feeling on the other. I guess I’m wondering: is there room for awe here in the discovery that the language processes that we may take for granted as essential and knowable (like the “influence” the sight of a word has on sensations) aren’t actually so?
I’ll turn finally to a passage in Pascal that appeals to awe in a way that Wittgenstein does not. It’s in XV.199, where Pascal writes “I believe that with his curiosity changing into wonder he will be more disposed to contemplate them [the marvels of nature’s infinite immensity and nothingness] in silence than investigate them with presumption” (61). Here, Pascal warns against the presumptions of knowledge (perhaps scientific knowledge in particular?) and recommends a different attitude of silent contemplation. Is Wittgenstein not also, in showing how little we know about the connection between words and mental processes, warning against presumption and recommending a different relation to knowledge, one where we learn through contemplation to silence the nonsensical assertions we are always already tempted to make?
In answer to your last question about presumption I would say: yes. Wittgenstein doesn’t make the move to faith and he by no means simply a skeptic (though Cavell emphasizes, I think, rightly, that the question of skepticism pervades the Investigations).
Wittgenstein’s remark about the limits of language and the curious figure of “bumps” in the understanding I find one of the most suggestive and difficult remarks in a book that is full of them. Didn’t mean to suggest, btw, that “our practices are not “totally explainable” (what would that look like”) but that they are practices, and their applicability is limited. (Explaining is a practice [or a family of practices; to image that we have some concept of “total explanation” that we are unable, however, to achieve is, for Wittgenstein (and I would agree) to misunderstand how explanations relate to the world, to speak very unguardedly, though it is a misunderstanding and to which we are perpetually drawn. What Wittgenstein will call “nonsense” (“Unsinn” in German) is not unrelated to what Dickinson, with a more sublime valence, will call, for instance, “perplexity” (v. “Low at my problem bending…”
Your question about awe is one I ask myself too. There is this remark (129) in LW, obliquely neighboring one in Pascal: “The real foundations of their inquiry do not strike people at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck them. – And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful.” I am tempted to say that Wordsworth’s apostrophe to the imagination in the crossing of the alps registers such a being struck.