Space and Vision in Language

Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote two of the core texts of philosophy’s linguistic turn in the twentieth century: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Philosophical Investigations. The Tractatus, revered as the Bible of Logical Positivism, was written by a young Wittgenstein between his studies at Cambridge and his time in the trenches of the Italian front in World War I; the posthumously published Investigations engendered the heterogeneous school of ordinary language philosophy and served as an important influence on practitioners of postmodern philosophy. That the later work was written in part as a corrective for the narrow conception of language and the metaphysical excesses of the earlier work raises the question of what led to the older Wittgenstein’s philosophical transformation. In Wittgenstein’s House: Language, Space, & Architecture, Nana Last has produced an important study of this turn in Wittgenstein’s view of language. Last sheds light on the architectural experiences that led Wittgenstein from an account of language emanating from a putatively panoramic perspective based on knowledge of logical form to an interior view of language, where the spaces that compose what Wittgenstein called “the city of language” unfold before the philosopher as he walks its streets. That is, the experience of planning and building his sister’s house led Wittgenstein to a new way of seeing and describing lexical reality. As Last shows, this way of seeing is consonant with the spatial imagination of the architect.

 
The opening chapters focus on the complex relationship and transformations that occur between the Tractatus and the Investigations. As Last observes, Wittgenstein was interested in far more than simply repudiating his early work. The break from the Tractatus entails a significant and therapeutic alteration of the philosopher’s relation to language-from outside to inside. This transformation is carried out through an array of new spatial metaphors for describing the internal dynamics that constitute linguistic practices as well as the perceptual vantages that permit access to those dynamics. The new spatiality advanced in the Investigations leads ineluctably to more expansive views of language by challenging and ultimately supplanting “the attenuated and restrictive spatiality definitive of the Tractatus” (10). Last’s argument vividly engages the discipline of architecture to stage this critical encounter between the rigid sense of space in the early work and the fluidity of space and perception in the later work. The Investigations could spring from the early work thanks to the liberating spatial analogies provided by architecture. As Last shows in this rich comparative study, this immanent critique of the Tractatus can be appreciated only if we move about the overlapping boundaries between architecture and philosophy in Wittgenstein’s work.

 
Last’s approach, however, raises the question of where interdisciplinarity takes place. How is successful communication across disciplines possible? Last uses Wittgenstein’s house to offer an evocative account not only of the way the spatiality of architecture transformed his early attenuated vision of philosophy by shattering the insularity of the enterprise, but also of the way it alters Wittgenstein’s philosophizing. The work of the philosopher was no longer conceived as the product of a fixed perceptual vantage above language and all other forms of knowledge; rather, for the later Wittgenstein, philosophical seeing becomes a dynamic effect of playful, meandering travel through linguistic spaces called language-games. Ordinary language, conceived now by Wittgenstein the architect as the fluid medium of practices, invites interdisciplinarity. The resulting common ground for a philosophical architecture or an architectural philosophy is replete with conceptual tension; such friction ignites creativity while militating against transcendent and fixed claims to knowledge and authority.

 
Last begins with the vertical spatiality that informs the logical analysis of the Tractatus. This putative view from above allows the philosopher to see the logical distinction in language between the sensical realm of sayable and showable propositions and the nonsensical realm of religious and ethical utterances, which may resemble logical propositions in form but are actually meaningless. With this circumscribed view of what counts as philosophical language, the Tractatus is best understood as a work in the tradition of the Vienna Circle that sought to reform philosophy by eliminating metaphysics and speculative epistemology in service of a logical and empirical science. This line between sense and non-sense is described profitably as distinguishing science from non-science. Paradoxically, the limit of language is discernible only from above, the Tractatus contends, and therefore transgresses its own strict adherence to the immanence of logical form by climbing the ladder to this transcendent perspective. Last analyzes the “mystical,” transgressive viewer of the Tractatus in spatial and perceptual (as opposed to logical) terms, and thereby illuminates a philosophical concern with perception that unifies Wittgenstein’s early and late work. Her emphasis on seeing underscores the importance of the break from the view from above language celebrated in the Tractatus and toward the horizontal and spatial orientation of vision of the architect that is fleshed out in the Philosophical Investigations.
 
The spatiality of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations involves less a repudiation of the vertical space posited by the Tractatus than an incorporation of the early work’s vision of language into a more variegated, contingent, and context-sensitive description of how we use language. This transformation of Wittgenstein’s perspective is tied intimately to Wittgenstein’s experience as an architect. Last substantiates this relation by paying close attention to allusions to and metaphors of building, construction, and designing space-builders, materials, engines, sites, digging to bedrock, the incomplete and expanding city of language, and so on-in the Philosophical Investigations.
 
Last takes up the often repeated contention articulated by Wittgenstein’s student G.H. von Wright, that Wittgenstein’s house is “of the same simple and static kind that belongs to a sentence of the Tractatus,” and, moreover, that its static and stark elegance is in “striking contrast” to “the continual searching and changing in Wittgenstein’s life and personality” (78). That is to say, in von Wright’s view, the house is the aesthetic fulfillment of the logical form of the Tractatus; it cannot be seen as producing or contributing to the dynamic and complex descriptions of language-games in the Investigations. Last argues, to the contrary, three main points: One, that the two years Wittgenstein spent on his sister’s house were part of a decade-long search for peace and purpose outside of philosophy; two, that the spatiality of Wittgenstein’s architectural practices led to and nurtured the philosophical breakthroughs marked by the Philosophical Investigations; and three, that the Investigations themselves created a “philosophical frame” that permits comparison between philosophy and architecture generally. When the house is viewed through the philosophical lenses of the Philosophical Investigations, Last contends, both the philosophical and architectural enterprises are envisioned along dynamic lines. This entails a break from “the line of thinking” encouraged by “the Tractatus-Stonborough-Wittgenstein House association . . . that demands architecture be understood as structured, concrete, and absolute,” an opinion bolstered by the apparent numeric precision of the Tractatus that leads readers to regard the work as architectural in character (81). More significantly, conceiving the house as an innovative and intermediary architectural experience between the Tractatus and the Investigations creates new perceptual ground for comparing the works and seeing them in complementary terms that can erase any conceptual and biographical break between the young and old Wittgenstein. As Last shows, Wittgenstein’s life-long technical, aesthetic, and philosophical interests were striking and substantial, and challenge the accuracy of bifurcated depictions of his life and work.
 
The story of the design and construction of the house is intricate. Last tells how Wittgenstein appropriated responsibility for the plans from his friend Paul Engelmann. In distinguishing Engelmann’s vision of the house from Wittgenstein’s, Last makes it clear that the former’s role was at best minimal. Indeed, Engelmann himself came to regard the house as Wittgenstein’s and saw his own plan as plainly inferior to the one Wittgenstein realized. Last goes beyond Engelmann’s and others’ assessments of the quality and originality of the house’s design to consider Wittgenstein’s contributions to the practice of architecture itself, but with limited success. If Wittgenstein’s architectural work had an innovative effect on the practice of architecture, such an historical and empirical study has yet to be written. It would entail detailed descriptions of the way Wittgenstein’s house altered architectural practices from Engelmann to the present. What Last seeks to show is that in entering into the practice of architecture, Wittgenstein learned how “to overcome the idealized solipsism of the Tractatus and to reintegrate both the subject and the practice of philosophy with the wider culture” (93). Contemporary readers of Wittgenstein will recognize the porosity of the boundaries of language-games, the fluidity of grammar, and his thoughts on the end of philosophy (as a subject rather than as a practice) in this architecturally inspired act of overcoming the closed and unlivable image of philosophy behind the Tractatus.
 
Although the clean austerity of the house’s exterior seems to substantiate von Wright’s claim, Last takes us through the interior to show Wittgenstein’s use of entries and light, as well as the repeated and varied patterns in metal and clear and opaque glass that mark off public and private rooms. These features call to mind the indeterminacy of rules and boundaries, the remarks on continuous seeing and changing aspects, and the calls to the philosopher to “slow down” and return to the “rough ground” of language so central to what Wittgenstein thought of as the “involved journeyings” that compose the Philosophical Investigations. But the tour also includes an assembly of reminders of concerns associated with the Tractatus. Last’s reading of these works and her architect’s eye make her a learned, critical, and informative tour guide through the home’s interiors, as well as a dependable commentator on how aspects of the translation of a two dimensional design into a three-dimensional house illuminate spatial features uniting the entirety of Wittgenstein’s philosophical oeuvre. Consider, for example, her reflection on the spatial relation of the house’s central hall to the dining room: “Wittgenstein’s decision to place translucent glass on the dining room side and clear glass on the hall side,” writes Last, “distinguishes the two spaces even as it connects them.” She continues:
 

This decision highlights the complex nature of the boundary as connector, divider, and sign by emphasizing its materiality and location in space and allowing it to present disparate faces as it is approached from opposite sides. This last aspect literally constructs Wittgenstein’s fundamental understanding of language in the Investigations as presenting distinct images when viewed from divergent points: “Language is a labyrinth of paths. You approach from one side and know your way about; you approach the same place from another side and no longer know your way about.”
 

(99)

 
The transcendence posed in the Tractatus expresses desire for an unencumbered view of language, and that freedom remains desirable even as the Philosophical Investigations operates on the assumption of transcendence’s impossibility. To create unencumbered views, open spaces, and easy access are all interior architectural problems tackled on the horizontal plane of a floor plan. For Wittgenstein, applying this horizontal perspective to philosophizing involves resisting the seductions of transcendence and icy perfection, eschewing claims to privileged knowledge and perception, and devising a provisional and expandable set of therapies to help the philosopher through the various entanglements encountered when moving from architectural plan to actual construction. For Last, the effect of these therapies can be seen also in Wittgenstein’s turn away from a picture of language to a series of studies on how language actually works. Where the fluidity of architectural vision leads to visual and traversable passages between spaces, in Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language this fluidity in seeing leads to “family resemblances,” an informal network of similarities that enrich concepts and connect philosophy as one space in language to the other spaces-music, art, mathematics, etc.-we associate with wider culture. Last’s study leads to an appreciation of the fragile, provisional, and dynamic character of spatiality in both the practice of architecture and in the dynamic relations between and within language-games, as described by Wittgenstein.
 
Language is not an enclosure, for the later Wittgenstein; it is not the “house of Being,” as Heidegger posited. Rather, language is a landscape, a labyrinth, which cannot be seen as a whole: There is no Archimedean perspective available and it is in a constant process of growing and dying. No vantage within language permits a sense that the whole coheres and no boundary is solid enough to be impermeable. This melding of actual and possible in Wittgenstein’s later philosophical vision is the lasting effect of experimenting with architectural design. For any reader of the Investigations, Wittgenstein tells us, there is no single path through the landscape of language. The acts of walking and seeing are primarily creative enterprises impeded by a range of entanglements produced in the complexity of language and by the desire to rise above the uncertainty, mess, fatigue, and friction of travel by foot. For Wittgenstein, the path from architecture back into philosophy is not a linear matter of leaving one for the other. As Last argues convincingly, the path reveals heretofore unseen and unsuspected edifying relations between architecture and philosophy and their distinctive ways of seeing and thinking.