“As If I Could Read the Darkness”: Some Stakes of Reading in Philosophical Investigations

Abstract

The number and variety of images of reading in the Investigations suggest that, for Wittgenstein, reading is an essential part of our natural history and of the human form of life. Further, his treatments of reading show that different forms of reading express and sustain different forms of life. This essay explores what the Investigations reveals as the existential stakes of different modes of reading. Beginning with Wittgenstein’s opening engagement with Augustine, it argues that in the Investigations, as in the Confessions, different modes of reading both bespeak, and open us to, blessed or cursed forms of life. It then develops extended interpretations of individual passages in order to detail some specific shapes of, and conditions governing, modes of reading tied to these blessed or cursed forms of life. Finally, given these existential stakes of reading, it examines how the Investigations itself asks to be read and outlines specific ways in which its notorious difficulty and obscurity are essential to achieving its philosophical aims and, in particular, to promoting an ongoing practice of reading through which we are able to awaken to the wonder of our lives in language.

“Should not every apartment in which man dwells be lofty enough to create some obscurity over-head, where flickering shadows may play at evening about the rafters?”

—Thoreau, Walden, “House Warming”

1. Introduction: The Reading Form of Life

If you start to look for them, images and instances of reading permeate the Investigations. The longest consecutive consideration is the extraordinary set of sections, running from §156–§171, that investigate the phenomenon of reading construed simply as “the activity of rendering out loud what is written or printed; and also writing from dictation, writing out something printed, playing from a score, and so on” [1] (§156).1 However, the text also considers reading signs, words, sentences, mathematical symbols and formulae, as well as reading tables, gauges, the hands on clocks and the numbers on a watch, faces and facial expressions, bodies, postures, gestures, and more. This range of instances is instructive. Immediately, it reminds us of the different kinds of activities we call reading and invites consideration of relations among them. But more importantly, it suggests that Wittgenstein regards reading as an essential part of our natural history and of the human form of life.2 We are, he suggests, incessantly and inescapably driven to read, to find things legible, to apprehend and/or create meaning and significance. Indeed, as there are many forms of activity we call reading, so too there are many purposes for, and attitudes animating, our drive to find or create meaning. Compare, for example, the attitudes and purposes animating reading a pressure gauge versus reading the expression on a face, or reading an X-ray versus reading a weather map, or reading a legal brief versus reading a horoscope, or reading assembly instructions versus reading (and perhaps rereading) a book of scripture or a work of philosophy. Distinct modes of reading, then, both reflect and sustain different dimensions of, or modes of, our human form of life.

In this essay, I bring out some of what the Investigations reveals as the existential stakes of different modes of reading.3 Beginning with Wittgenstein’s opening engagement with Augustine, in Section 2 and Section 3, I argue that in the Investigations, as in the Confessions, different modes of reading both bespeak, and open us to, what we might call—by way of placeholder—blessed or cursed forms of life. In Section 4 and Section 5, I develop extended interpretations of individual passages in order to detail some specific shapes of, and conditions governing, modes of reading tied to these blessed or cursed forms of life. Finally, in light of these existential stakes of reading, in Section 6 and Section 7, I turn to the vexed matter of how the Investigations itself asks to be read. Drawing on a remark in §168, I introduce an idea of the textual viscosity that enables productive reading and use it to outline specific ways in which the notorious difficulty and obscurity of the Investigations are essential to achieving its philosophical aims and, in particular, to promoting an ongoing practice of reading through which we are able to awaken to the wonder of our lives in language.

2. Augustinian Openings: Reading for Your Life

Given the recurrent images of reading throughout the Investigations, it should not surprise us that Wittgenstein’s first example of a “use of language” in §1 involves a shopkeeper reading a “slip marked ‘five red apples’.” However, the text’s first instance of reading occurs even earlier, in Wittgenstein’s opening quotation from Augustine. This quotation, and Wittgenstein’s decision to open his text with it, have received a great deal of attention.4 However, the fact that the passage depicts a scene of reading has not been considered. Indeed, Wittgenstein’s opening passage can be seen as the first of a pair of sharply contrasting Augustinian scenes of reading that, together, establish some of the fundamental stakes of the Confessions as a whole.5 I want, then, to consider these Augustinian passages, as a way of beginning to frame some of the existential stakes of reading in the Investigations.

In the opening quotation, we see the infant Augustine reading the sounds and movements of the elders around him and “grasping” that the sounds “were meant to point out [the] objects” toward which they moved and also to express their thoughts, wishes, and intentions. This act of reading, Augustine tells us, rests on his God-given capacity to understand a language prior to any particular language; what he calls the “natural language of all people.” It is his understanding of this language that allows him to read in “the expression of the face, the play of the eyes, the movement of other parts of the body, and the tone of voice” the expression of “states of mind.” Accordingly, when Wittgenstein claims that “Augustine describes the learning of human language as if the child came into a strange country and did not understand the language of the country; that is, as if it already had a language, only not this one” (§32), he is fairly accurately representing Augustine’s own view.

Many of Wittgenstein’s readers, and perhaps Wittgenstein himself, construe Augustine’s remarks as a description of how, as he retrospectively reconstructs it, he must have learned to speak. However, while this is not simply wrong—Augustine is characterizing his entry into language—it misses the force of his words. Read in their context, the aim of Augustine’s remarks is not primarily to describe his acquisition of language, but to confess the sinful character of his infantile mode of reading and of the form of life that animated it and developed from it.6 As Augustine came to understand it, his infantile reading was sinful in two important ways. First, it was motivated by a will to seize power and to demand the satisfaction of his desires. Like a foreigner thrown into a strange country and trying to communicate with mere sounds and gestures, the infant Augustine’s inarticulate cries and movements did not reliably convey his wants or ensure the satisfaction of his desires. However, when he learns to read the expressions and movements of those around him, “gradually gathers the meaning of words,” and “trains [his] mouth to use these signs,” he is able, as he puts it, to “express the intentions of [his] heart [and] persuade people to bow to [his] will” [8] (1.8.13).7 Second, this infantile reading was focused on acquiring names for things and this, as Augustine comes to see it, expressed a sinful desire to seek satisfaction in objects that he believed would meet his needs. However, as he confesses (and Wittgenstein illustrates in the opening few sections of the Investigations), a language focused on names for things both reflects and promotes a profoundly impoverished form of life. Indeed, Augustine ultimately recognizes that this object-centered language, and its corresponding form of life, impeded his recognition that only God is the true source of his satisfaction and that God is not an object. As such, the language he acquires through his infantile mode of reading stands in the way of what he comes to recognize as his deepest desire—the desire to praise God.

So understood, we may see Augustine’s infantile reading as illustrating the motto from Nestroy that Wittgenstein used for the Investigations: progress generally seems greater than it actually is.8 For Augustine himself, however, this mode of reading embodies and recapitulates the biblical Fall and human subjection to Original Sin. It is an effort to seize knowledge and power, and that effort disrupts his connection with God and exposes him to the vicissitudes of life within the fallen human conditions. Hence, Augustine depicts his movement into this object-centered language as an access to power in the ability to use words to express his desires, but also as a curse in that, through it, he “entered more deeply into the stormy society of human life” [8] (1.8.13).

If the fact of reading is largely implicit in this first Augustinian scene, it is fully explicit and thematic in the second; the famous account of Augustine’s conversion and its climactic act of reading. Longing to give himself to God, but restrained by his divided will—“Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet” [8] (8.7.17)—Augustine leaves the group of friends with whom he has been discussing stories of conversion to seek solitude in a garden. There, he tells us, he heard the voice of a child from a nearby house chanting “over and over again ‘Pick up and read, pick up and read’” [8] (8.12.29). Interpreting, which is to say reading, this chant as a divine command, Augustine “hurried back to the place where … [he] had put down the book of the apostle … opened it, and in silence read the first passage on which [his] eyes lit”—a brief passage from Paul’s letter to the Romans enjoining a life in Christ rather than in “riots and drunken parties.” He goes on: “I neither wished nor needed to read further. At once, with the last words of this sentence, it was as if a light of relief from all anxiety flooded into my heart. All the shadows of doubt were dispelled” [8] (8.12.29).

As in his infantile reading, here too Augustine depicts his reading as directed toward saving or securing his life. However, where his infantile reading was directed toward the doomed project of securing his life through seizing power, this scene inaugurates a new mode of reading that forms the pivot of Augustine’s life and, therefore, of the Confessions. That is, while Augustine’s conversion is shown to be produced by a moment of (inspired) reading, his ongoing lived expression of that conversion consists in his embracing a new mode of reading his life and, therewith, a new mode of living his life. From this moment in the garden, Augustine begins to read his life with the aim of discovering in it the continual presence of a loving God, and his post-conversion form of life is structured by his effort to sustain this mode of reading; that is, to use it to inform how he understands both his past and his present life. Indeed, the biographical books of the Confessions that culminate in this account of his conversion are themselves Augustine’s written demonstration of this new practice of reading.9

Wittgenstein does not discuss this second Augustinian scene of reading, and his engagement with the first is quite partial. Not only does he break his opening quotation mid-sentence, at Augustine’s apparently triumphant acquisition of the capacity to express his own desires, he does not note that Augustine himself criticizes the vision of language depicted in the scene—and, indeed, criticizes it in terms that anticipate points he himself will raise.10 And yet, as Wittgenstein illustrates the poverty of the “picture of the essence of human language” embodied in the quoted fragment (§1), he implicitly places the possession of language within the horizon of the biblical expulsion from paradise projected by Augustine’s remarks. As Wittgenstein begins to enter his own words, his first two examples depict speakers managing the curses of life outside paradise. In stark contrast to his later insistence on the “countless kinds” of “tools in language” and “ways they are used” (§23), in these opening examples we are thrown into a bleak world of commerce and labor where the prize of language is used solely in service of our most mundane needs. We have a tale of shopping, which speaks of the demand to “eat our bread in the sweat of our brow” (Genesis 3:19), followed by a story of two builders, easily imagined as alone in an otherwise empty world, which speaks of our need, after the Fall, to provide ourselves with some protective shelter (Genesis 3:7).11

Even if my claims for these biblical resonances are not accepted, they suggest a more general claim that is, I think, undeniable: Wittgenstein, like Augustine, regards our possession of language as both a blessing and a curse—depending upon our modes of inhabiting it. Through it, we can render ourselves bewitched, bothered, and bewildered, and we can equally make it the vehicle of our liberation and ecstasies of expression—such as, for example, Rogers and Hart’s “Bewitched (Bothered and Bewildered).” This duality is embodied in Wittgenstein’s aphoristic conclusion to §109: “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.” For this may be read as saying that language bewitches our intelligence and that language is the means by which we battle that bewitchment. It is the rope with which we tie ourselves in knots, and the nimble fingers through which we gain our release; and it could not be either of these unless it also had the power to be the other. But further, as I will now begin to illustrate, Wittgenstein also follows Augustine in regarding different modes of reading as bespeaking, and as opening us to, blessed or cursed forms of life.

3. Reading in the Dark

A suggestive image around which to begin developing this claim appears in §635—the section from which I have taken my title. There, Wittgenstein has this:

“I was going to say …”—You remember various details. But not even all of them together show your intention. It is as if a snapshot of a scene had been taken, but only a few scattered details of it were to be seen: here a hand, there a bit of a face, or a hat—the rest is dark. And now it is as if I knew quite certainly what the whole picture represented. As if I could read the darkness [Als könnte ich das Dunkel lesen].

Wittgenstein’s focus in this and several surrounding sections is on intention and the nature of claims to know our own unfulfilled intentions. However, I am not concerned to engage his treatment of these issues or the part this passage plays in them.12 Rather, I invoke this passage in order to extract, and to employ for my own purposes, its example of the obscured snapshot and its arresting image of grasping a whole from scattered details as a matter of being able to read the darkness. Much of the Investigations, I suggest, can be connected with this kind of reading the darkness and the text shows this capacity, depending upon how it is employed, to be either a blessing or a curse.

Wittgenstein’s example in §635 invites an understanding of reading the darkness as involving bringing fragments together into a meaningful whole, or seeing meaning in and beyond what is directly present. As such, this ability will both draw upon and express our capacities for grasping significance, recognizing salience, appreciating connections, anticipating continuations, envisioning possibilities, and the like. If we think of reading the darkness in this way, we can see it as essential to Wittgenstein’s vision of our possession of language and as involved in many of the key linguistic and proto-linguistic phenomena explored in the opening two or three hundred sections of the Investigations. It is involved in understanding ostensive teaching of words and ostensive definition—that is, in grasping that a pointing hand is indicating and in grasping what it is indicating. It is at work in our following the weave of connections linking instances of so-called “family resemblance” words and, more generally, in our following projections of words into new contexts and uses. It underlies our appreciation of explanations even though they are not, as an anxious interlocutor puts it at 87, “the final” explanation, as well as our ability to operate with shifting explanations—whether the explanations are of a name, of the meaning of a word or remark, of an instruction, or of an action. And, to mention only one more example, reading darkness is centrally at play in our ability to grasp and follow rules and, more generally, our ability to determine how to go on. “A rule,” Wittgenstein tells us, “stands there like a sign-post.” But understanding how to follow the sign-post depends upon the capacities at work in our ability to read the darkness. Apart from those capacities, Wittgenstein emphasizes, even “a chain of adjacent [sign-posts] or of chalk marks on the ground” will not tell us how to go on (§85).

The fact that our possession of language depends upon the human capacities involved in reading the darkness highlights an essential fragility of that possession and of our agreement in language. As features of what Wittgenstein calls our “natural history” (§25), these capacities and the agreement they enable are nothing more than natural and, as such, they are deeply contingent. Wittgenstein underlines this point with his frequent examples of individuals for whom it “comes natural” to understand and react differently than most (§185) and through his more general insistence that all teaching and communicating depend upon “a normal … learner’s reaction” (§143). If another does not share our sense of salience, of sameness or similarity, of “natural” projections, and the like, there is no deeper level of appeal through which we may seek to make ourselves understood or to find a common ground of intelligibility. It is “no use,” Wittgenstein remarks, to “repeat the old examples and explanations” (§185) and so, at least for that moment, we have “reached bedrock, and [our] spade is turned” (§217). At the same time, our dependence on contingent capacities to read the darkness opens our lives in language to freedom, evolution, and transformation. Since we necessarily take things—expressions, words, events, objects, etc. — in some way or other, and since the ways in which we may take them are not fixed, our reliance upon the human capacities involved in reading the darkness promotes vitality in our lives and in our lives in language. When we take things in new ways and project our words into new contexts, our concepts are transfigured (for good or ill), and our familiar ground of understanding is put under pressure. This may open a (temporary) rift between us or extend our shared terrain; but in either case, the topography of our mutuality is, in small ways or large, forced to change. If, or to the extent that, our ways of speaking and of taking things become fixed and resistant to such transformation, our language has, to that extent, become a dead language—as have our lives in the language.13

However, the Investigations also shows this same ability to read the darkness, in another guise, to be a central source of just this kind of deadening fixity. In particular, it shows our all-to-ready conviction in our capacities for finding sense to contribute to the insistent metaphysical emptiness and rigid (mis)understanding that Wittgenstein shows endlessly shadowing our lives in language. The broken and fragmented image of §635 presents an obstacle to comprehension. In resisting our immediate grasp, the obscured image may produce frustration, but that obscurity, as in my epigraph from Thoreau, also provides an opening to thought and imagination. It affords an opportunity to imagine different scenes or objects the image may depict, to supply various interposing objects between the visible fragments, to conceive a range of ways in which they may be joined or not joined, and the like. The darkness in Wittgenstein’s tableau, then, allows freedom for seeing anew or afresh and, perhaps, for discovering something hitherto unforeseen.

But in its more troubling guise, the ability to read the darkness functions as a power of confident illumination that eliminates obscurity. The capacities for recognizing salience, grasping significance, appreciating connections, and the like that enable our lives in language here become a curse. In the face of potentially liberating and transformative obscurity, these capacities bring a familiar stock of anticipations, convictions, customary ways of seeing, of reading, and of making sense. They banish the darkness and thrust us into a world of luminous clarity. There are no flickering shadows, no dark woods in which we might discover that we “don’t know our way about” (§123) and so consider that our “axis of orientation” needs to be rotated (§108). There is not even a dim, unswept corner in which we may imagine a mouse springing into being from grey rags and dust (§52). Here, the glad certainty of dawning vision in §635 becomes, instead, the blind fixity of the all-seeing and all-knowing.

Wittgenstein frequently associates this confidently luminous mode of reading the darkness with the philosopher or the metaphysician. It is a mode of reading and a posture of mind that is held captive by its absolute conviction in the correctness—indeed, the necessity—of its reading. We see this in Wittgenstein’s account of the philosopher for whom the “crystalline purity” of logic “does not appear as an abstraction; but as something concrete, indeed, as the most concrete” (§97) or, similarly, in his account of those who know that the “ideal ‘must’ be found in reality … for we think we already see it there” (§101).14 However, this mode of reading is all too familiar. We find it in the police officer who “sees a weapon,” in the political zealot who “knows the cause” of all our troubles, and in the exasperating partner in any number of ordinary domestic squabbles who is so certain about what their partner means that they cannot hear what they say. Indeed, the ubiquity and, in many cases, utter banality of this mode of reading serves to underscore Wittgenstein’s conviction that the philosopher is less a specific kind of person than a dimension of us all.

Although more could be said at this general level, these remarks should suffice to support the suggestion that the human capacities in play in reading the darkness may, in different modes, represent either a blessing or a curse. In the next two sections, I elaborate individual examples of each of these modes and, in so doing, articulate some of their specific aspects and mechanics.15

4. Reading Bodies and Embodied Conditions on Reading

In his extraordinary book And Now, I Think, We Can Say, William Eaton devotes several pages to an unnumbered note in the Investigations apparently tied to §139. The note reads:

I see a picture; it represents an old man walking up a steep path leaning on a stick.—How? Might it not have looked just the same if he had been sliding downhill in that position? Perhaps a Martian would describe the picture so. I do not need to explain why we do not describe it so (p. 54).

Without using the expression, Eaton seems to see this passage as engaged with the phenomenon of reading the darkness. He speaks of it as touching on something “magical” and “even unheimlich in how we are able to understand things—pictures, words, concepts—that on closer examination do not seem so clear [13] (p. 155).16 He is skeptical, however, of what he takes to be Wittgenstein’s concluding assurance about how “we” will read the image. Instead, Eaton reads the note’s image of the man who may be climbing up or sliding down as an emblem of a pervasive indeterminacy in words and images, and so also as a reminder that we should not be too confident about how we see things or the direction we imagine we are heading. For Eaton, then, the suggestion that, for us, it is natural to see the image in only one way reflects an ethically, politically, and aesthetically problematic complacency about, and over-confidence in, the “correctness” or “naturalness” of our habitual ways of seeing/reading.

Of course Wittgenstein himself regularly insists that images—along with signs, words, expressions, sentences, etc. —can be read in various ways. He invites us to “[i]magine a picture representing a boxer in a particular stance. Now,” he continues, “this picture can be used to tell someone how he should stand, should hold himself; or how he should not hold himself; or how a particular man did stand in such-and-such a place; and so on” (p. 11). Indeed, Wittgenstein is emphasizing the fact that an image may be read in different ways in the passage to which his note about the picture of the man walking seems to be tied. In response to the idea that understanding a word might consist in “something like a picture” coming before our mind, he points out that this will not explain our understanding since the picture itself might be taken in various ways (§139). At the same time, Wittgenstein also frequently highlights the “naturalness” of some of our ways of reading and the fact that, in many cases, our apprehension of images—as well as signs, names, expressions—moves beyond reading them at all. In some cases, a meaning and a sign or image seem to be inseparably fused. So, for example, Wittgenstein speaks of the “familiar physiognomy of a word, the feeling that it has taken up its meaning into itself, that it is an actual likeness of its meaning (II, xi, 218).17 And, at §537, he considers the experience of directly apprehending meaning in connection with reading a face. He remarks:

It is possible to say, ‘I read fearfulness [Furchtsamkeit] in this face’ but at all events the fearfulness does not seem to be merely associated, outwardly connected, with the face; rather, fear lives in the features [sondern die Furcht lebt in den Gesichtszügen].

Here, it is possible to speak of reading, but doing so is strained; the face shows its fear.

I am in sympathy, then, with Eaton’s desire to check our complacent assurance in our “natural” readings. However, in his effort to challenge fantasies of fixed and univocal meaning, he slides past attending to the kinds of conditions that inform and constrain our ways of reading (and this likely accounts for his impression that reading the darkness is tinged with something magical or unheimlich). But much of the value of Wittgenstein’s image of the old man walking lies precisely in its helping us to recognize such informing and constraining conditions—conditions rooted in both our broadly cultural and our broadly biological forms of life.18

Wittgenstein’s climbing man did not appear out of nowhere—or come from Mars. For Wittgenstein, he emerged out of a quite particular biographical context (to which I will return), but for all of us, including Wittgenstein, he appears within a specific cultural horizon. Works as different as Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” and Miley Cyrus’s “The Climb” have contributed to forming a cultural horizon within which the image of a laborious climb is emblematic of the effort to overcome limitations, to emerge out of illusion and ignorance, to achieve intellectual or spiritual transformation, and the like. Indeed, Wittgenstein himself employed the image of a climb in just this way when explaining his resolution to give away his fortune and adopt a rigorously austere way of life. “If you were going for a long hike up a steep mountain,” he told his nephew, “you would deposit your weighty rucksack at the bottom.” Wittgenstein understood his (philosophical) life as an intellectual and spiritual quest, which he quite naturally figured as a long hike up a steep mountain, and so he wanted to “release himself from a heavy burden” by leaving the “rucksack” of his wealth behind [15] (p. 67). Hence, although Wittgenstein says nothing about the purpose behind the man’s climb when he introduces his picture of an old man walking up a steep path, our shared cultural horizon—which I have simply gestured toward here—conditions our reading of his image. In particular, while we recognize that a person seeking liberating intellectual and spiritual transformation may, alas, be sliding backward even when they feel themselves to be laboriously climbing, we do not regard intellectual or spiritual transformation as something that even the most fortunate among us simply slide into.

Of course, part of why our cultural representations of personal transformation feature climbing or ascending is that, given the nature of our world and the kind of creatures we are, climbing is difficult and requires more effort than moving along level ground or descending. Here we touch upon some of the broadly biological conditions informing our reading of Wittgenstein’s image. Some relevant features of our world and our biological nature include, for example, that we generally move in the direction we are facing—a fact that reflects, among other things, our reliance on sight to orient ourselves (rather than touch, sound, or smell). Further, the forces of gravity and friction, along with the shapes of our bodies and their typical capacities for balance (among other factors), mean that it is not physically possible for (most of) us to slide downhill in a posture that could be taken for “walking up a steep path leaning on a stick.” This is not to say, of course, that Wittgenstein’s image cannot be taken to depict a man sliding downhill. It might be, and not simply by a Martian but by one of “us”. Perhaps it is a fantasy, or a dream image, or perhaps we imagine the man as Gene Kelly, or Buster Keaton, or Michael Jackson. It is amazing, and sometimes horrifying, what we can train our bodies to do. However, these kinds of considerations underscore the fact that broadly natural and biological conditions inform our reading of the image, for they emphasize how exceptionally difficult it is to surmount those conditions and, hence, why it is most natural for us to read Wittgenstein’s old man as moving in accordance with them.

The points I have touched on suggest some of how the ability to read the darkness on which our shared lives in language depends is informed by our natural/biological conditions and our shared cultural horizon. Whether our reading in individual instances is more heavily informed by our biological or by our cultural conditions will vary depending on the degree of our initiation into language and the nature of what we are engaged in reading. (In some circumstances, Wittgenstein suggests, you can “define the word ‘red’ by pointing to something that [is] not red” (p. 14), but that is not how we begin to initiate children into our language games with color.) Further, some regions of our cultural horizon are broadly drawn and widely shared, while others are more finely woven and sharing them marks a special intimacy of agreement. There is also no sharp boundary between the cultural and the natural—consider recognizing an extended hand as an offer, hearing a rising inflection as a question, taking the sounds made by another as significant, hearing a cry as an expression of pain, and the like.

As I noted earlier, the ways in which our ability to read the darkness, and to do so in sufficiently similar ways, depend upon a natural/biological substrate and a shared cultural horizon highlights the deep contingency of our shared life in language. It is nothing more than natural. Someone might, after all, find it natural to direct their line of sight up a pointing arm rather down the finger; some do not read facial expressions as conveying emotion or vocal inflections as significant; and the exponentially accelerating splintering of our cultural horizon makes it increasingly difficult to know with whom we can speak about many of the things that may matter to us the most.

At the same time, these natural/biological and cultural conditions of our ability to read the darkness give our shared life in language a deep stability and resistance to change. It is true, of course, that our lives in language are flexible and dynamic, and that our (culturally informed) natural reactions change. Riddles that turned on entrenched gender roles no longer work and, for many of us, it is no longer surprising to hear a man speak of his husband or a woman of her wife. Still, and for better and worse, there is a natural drag on such change. Contrary to Eaton’s suggestion, we cannot simply leap free of the natural/biological and cultural conditions of our lives in language, or abruptly shake them off and leave them behind. Indeed, while he is certainly right to emphasize the dangers of ethical, political, and aesthetic complacency in resting with our “natural” and habitual ways of seeing/reading, it may be no less dangerous—even irresponsible—to imagine that we can simply (will ourselves to) step into a new way of seeing; for that undermines our appreciation of how difficult it is to change our “natural reactions” and so also our preparation for taking on, and persisting in, the kinds of work required to do so.19

We can read Wittgenstein’s tale of the rucksack, and the difficulties he faced in his own climb toward a simple life, as a kind of figure for, or allegory of, these issues. There is obvious wisdom in leaving your “weighty rucksack at the bottom” before embarking on a long hike up a steep mountain, and it was relatively easy—although by no means trivial—for Wittgenstein to give away his fortune. However, as he recurrently discovered to his shame and horror, it was quite another matter for him to overcome his aristocratic tastes and attitudes or his deeply ingrained sense of entitlement. Those burdens he continued to carry, much as he struggled to leave them behind.20

Of course, the natural/biological and cultural conditions informing our ways of reading the darkness and so of inhabiting our language are not simply burdens. They are at least as much the hiking boots, the stick, and the canteen of cool water as they are the heavy rucksack. But when we find that our individual or societal ways of reading need to change, it is not simply a matter of taking off our rucksack and leaving it behind; it is typically a slow and laborious climb.

5. Captivating Reading

In turning now to a specific instance of what we might call the dark side of reading the darkness, I begin with these frequently cited remarks from §115: “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.”

This passage fairly directly invites an idea of reading, especially if we think of reading, as Wittgenstein suggests in §156, as including “writing from dictation.” For it suggests that our language inexorably dictates some picture to us that we, therefore, read in everything we consider. However, even if we regard §115 as an instance of reading, it may seem a poor example for my purposes. For it may seem to suggest that our (philosophical) griefs are not due to our adopting one or another mode of cursed reading, but to captivating pictures lying in our language itself. Overcoming our griefs, then, will require a reform of our language or achieving an understanding of its forms that will allow us to avoid the traps they contain.

The thought that some philosophical griefs arise from features of our language is not entirely foreign to the Investigations. In §90, for example, we are told that a grammatical investigation “sheds light on our problems” by clearing away misunderstandings “caused … by certain analogies between the forms of expression used in different regions of language.” Further, this suggestion seems to be followed up in §§93–94 where, in addressing philosophical puzzlement over the notion of a proposition, Wittgenstein remarks that “our forms of expression prevent us in all sorts of ways from seeing that nothing out of the ordinary is involved” (§94).21

However, §115 is not well read as expressing such ideas, and the widely held conviction that it attributes philosophical griefs to pictures lying in our language is itself a striking instance of what I have called metaphysically convinced modes of reading. That conviction reflects our leaping to read the passage as expressing a familiar, broadly positivist, account of the sources of philosophical illusion and failing to notice anything that might disrupt this view. However, a more attentive reading reveals that §115 is not a free-standing aphorism about how pictures in language lead us astray, but is, rather, the culmination of a set of passages treating an obsession of Wittgenstein’s in the Tractatus.22 The passages trace the development of that obsession and, in so doing, provide a schematic account of one kind of origin of metaphysically confident misreadings; hence my focus on them.

Let us read more closely. The set of passages culminating with §115 begins at §112 and runs as follows:

§112: A simile that has been absorbed into the forms of our language produces a false appearance, and this disquiets us. “But this isn’t how it is!”—we say. “Yet this is how it has to be!”

§113: “But this is how it is——” I say to myself over and over again. I feel as though, if I could only fix my gaze absolutely sharply on this fact, get it in focus, I must grasp the essence of the matter.

§114: (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 4.5): “The general form of propositions is: This is how things are.”——That is the kind of proposition that one repeats to oneself countless times. One thinks that one is tracing the outline of the thing’s nature over and over again, and one is merely tracing round the frame through which we look at it.

And then the set concludes with:

§115: A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.

§§112–114 involve the Tractatus’s idea that the essence of propositions is to picture states of affairs, and there is a clear weave of connections among them. In §112, Wittgenstein suggests that this idea begins as an innocent simile; propositions are like pictures in showing how things are. But the simile meets with a range of “disquieting” counterexamples and exceptions—“But this isn’t how it is!” In response, the philosopher digs in, elevates the innocent simile into a general philosophical truth, and is driven to insist on the correctness, indeed the necessity, of the claim—“Yet this is how it has to be!” §§113–114 sketch the urgency of this insistence and the effort required to establish and maintain the picture—the picture, that is, of propositions as picturing states of affairs.

To recognize §115 as the culmination of these passages, consider the vicissitudes of two of their prominent motifs; repetition, and seeing or straining to see. Regarding repetition, in §113 “But this is how it is——” is something “I say to myself over and over again” and, in §114 we are told that this is “the kind of proposition that one repeats to oneself countless times.” Regarding seeing or straining to see, in §113 I struggle to “fix my gaze absolutely sharply on this fact, get it in focus,” and in §114 the effort to see is emphasized in the image of thinking “that one is tracing the outline of the things nature” when one is “merely tracing round the frame through which we look at it.” These motifs of repetition and seeing are also prominent in §115, but their appearance is now marked by striking reversals. In the opening passages of the set, my struggle to overcome the disquieting concern that “this isn’t how it is!” demands that I work to produce a picture of the nature of a proposition for myself and I repeat the picture to myself over and over. The repetition is essential to my effort to produce the picture for myself and to fix my gaze on it absolutely sharply. These strenuous efforts show that the picture is neither simply given nor stable. However, in §115, the picture is no longer something I am working to produce, and it is no longer I who repeat it. Instead, the picture is now simply present before me, lying in language, and it is language that seems to “repeat it to us inexorably.”

With these reversals of §115, the tormented philosopher of §§112–114 secures a kind of peace. He is able to end his ceaseless and repetitive efforts to produce a picture and to keep it clearly in view. Now, the picture is inescapably present, lying in language and holding him captive. The philosopher’s peace, then, comes at the price of captivity.

We can now begin to see the schematic account these passages offer of one source of our fixated ways of reading the darkness.23 The odyssey they recount illustrates the philosopher’s active role in creating his own captivation and, in §115, his bad faith denial of that role. In §115 the philosopher projects his own urgent and repetitive efforts of §§112–114 into language itself and, in so doing, represses his self-captivating activity and occludes his role in producing the picture that, he now maintains, holds him captive. These passages, then, suggest that it is our own actions, our individual and collective histories of insistent and “necessary” ways of making sense of experience (“this is how it has to be!”), that come to hold us captive. Our metaphysically confident and fixated modes of reading the darkness begin in (perhaps quite innocent) expectations of ourselves, the world, and others. But these expectations turn to rigid demands as we struggle to repress the disquieting fact that neither we, the world, nor others are (sufficiently, exactly, reliably) as we expect we and they will be, should be, must be. A dark lesson of these passages is that our efforts do not simply fail. We can, with enough insistence and repetition, speak a world (including ourselves and others) into being that accords with our demands and in which, therefore, we can be at peace. However, these passages also show that this peace comes at the cost of captivity for ourselves, our world, and those with whom we would share it.

6. The Textual Viscosity of (Re)Reading

At §168, in the midst of the most extended consideration of reading in the Investigations, Wittgenstein observes that “our eye passes over printed lines differently from the way it passes over arbitrary pothooks and flourishes.” He suggests that this difference is connected to the “extremely characteristic” look of a printed line of text—“the letters all roughly the same size, akin in shape too, and always recurring”—and also to the fact that most of the words are “constantly repeated and enormously familiar to us, like well-known faces” (§167). The eye passes over a line of text, §168 continues, “with particular ease, without being held up; and yet it doesn’t skid.”

While these remarks provide reminders of the experience of fluency in reading, I want to focus specifically on the notion of the eye skidding or not skidding. By emphasizing that even in the most fluent reading the eye does not skid, Wittgenstein suggests that reading can be defeated not only by the eye being stopped or held up, but also by encountering so little resistance or friction that it simply skids along.24 Several remarks in the sections surrounding §168 can be understood as sketching some of the conditions under which such skidding undermines or prevents our efforts to read. Most generally, though, Wittgenstein associates the eye or mind skidding with a sequence of marks or signs being insufficiently familiar and, equally, with a sequence being too familiar. In §169, for example, we are invited to “look along” a line of apparently random symbols and “say a sentence as you do so.” Although the symbols appear in roughly word-length groupings, we have no familiar practices using these symbols and so nothing that might ground our connecting them with one sentence rather than another. Whatever sentence we hit upon will be, and will feel, accidental or arbitrary.25 Consequently, as Wittgenstein puts it, the seeing and the saying go on “side by side … without any connection,” and our words and our eyes simply skid along the line of symbols. On the other hand, in §161 we are asked to “Try this experiment: say the numbers from 1 to 12. Now look at the dial of your watch and read them.” Here, the numbers and their order are so familiar that there is too little resistance or drag for us to read them. The eye and mind skid ahead, and we find ourselves resorting to laughable efforts to read the numbers by slowly and deliberately fixing our attention on each number in turn; as though such deliberate fixing of attention amounted to reading.

I am taking these examples, primitive as they plainly are, as opening elements of an investigation into what I will call the textual viscosity of reading. As Wittgenstein presents the examples, they are concerned simply with reading in the most basic sense; that is, with deriving words from a printed text rather than, for example, repeating words from memory or guessing them from context. However, they also invite us to consider phenomena of textual viscosity more broadly, and to ask after the kinds and degrees of textual familiarity and unfamiliarity, obscurity and transparency, resistance and fluidity, and the like that enable productive reading and rereading. What kinds of viscosities of a text allow us, or call us, to break its surface, develop its images, seek its underlying aims, or wonder about, and at, its words? And what viscosities support our (repeatedly) returning to a text, and returning not primarily with the goal of understanding something that has previously eluded us but in hopes that something new may appear within the familiar? Although I cannot address these questions here, I raise them as a way into a few, admittedly brief and incomplete, thoughts about some of the viscosities of the Investigations and how they are meant to inform our reading of it.

In the Preface to the text, Wittgenstein memorably remarks that the book “is really only an album.” The questions it engages, he says, cannot be addressed in a single, linear manner, but compel “us to travel over a wide field of thought criss-cross in every direction.—The philosophical remarks in this book,” he continues, “are, as it were, a number of sketches of landscapes which were made in the course of these long and involved journeyings” and their arrangement is meant to provide “a picture of the landscape” (ix). Conceiving of the Investigations as an album of sketches separated by spaces of darkness invites comparison with the obscured and fragmented photograph of §635, and suggests that reading this text is, and must be, an exercise of reading the darkness. However, unlike that fragmented image, the obscurity of Wittgenstein’s text is not simply a matter of occluded or blank areas and it involves forms of reading the darkness that go beyond those I have so far described.

The Investigations is a famously obscure and difficult text. It is not more obscure and difficult than many other texts, but it is differently or distinctively so. It does, to be sure, exhibit familiar forms of philosophical difficulty. There are arguments that are hard to follow (e.g., the “beetle in the box” argument that “if we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of ‘object and designation’ the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant” (§293)) and oracular claims that are hard to decipher (e.g., “If I listened to the words of my mouth, I might say that someone else was speaking out of my mouth” (p. 192)). However, in the Investigations these familiar forms of difficulty take on a distinctive cast through being overlaid with, or magnified by, the further difficulty of discerning the philosophical point or bearing of Wittgenstein’s arguments or claims. A great part of the difficulty of the Investigations, that is, lies in determining why Wittgenstein enters his claims, and this is a matter of determining what position he thinks we occupy—e.g., what (unstated and/or unrecognized) assumptions he believes we hold or what temptations he imagines we face—that would inspire him to offer just these words at just this point. Understanding the Investigations, then, is inseparable from understanding the ways in which it is, from moment to moment, constructing us as its readers. Indeed, this dimension of the text’s difficulty often emerges most plainly when the structure and (surface) meaning of its remarks are, by customary philosophical standards, clear: e.g., “Couldn’t I imagine having frightful pains and turning to stone while they lasted? Well, how do I know, if I shut my eyes, whether I have not turned to stone? And if that has happened, in what sense will the stone have the pains?” (§283).

Here, though, I want to highlight a feature of the text that I think has not received sufficient attention: namely, its deliberate production of obscurity. Of course, from at least as early as Socrates, many philosophers have used the production of obscurity to disrupt our illusions of understanding and drive us toward a truer, or deeper, illumination. Wittgenstein, too, employs the revelation of obscurity for this kind of end. As he reminds us in §308, it is often what we take to be obvious and uncontroversial that “commits us to a particular way of looking at the matter” that is distorted or problematic. “The decisive move in the conjuring trick,” he memorably remarks, “has been made, and it was the very one we thought quite innocent.” By producing obscurity at just these points, where we imagine that nothing of philosophical consequence has yet begun, Wittgenstein brings us to a stop and so opens reflective space within which we may notice that we are perpetrating a conjuring trick on ourselves and, indeed, have already rushed past the decisive move. Hence, too, his claim in §464 that he is teaching us “to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense.” If what we take to be clear is actually disguised nonsense, revealing it as patent nonsense will place us at a loss and cast us into confusion about what to think or how to proceed. But recognizing that we are embroiled in nonsense is essential if we are to have any hope of moving beyond it.

However, Wittgenstein’s efforts move beyond producing obscurity to reveal unrecognized errors, confusions, or illusions. He also produces obscurity to disrupt our real, and sometimes hard won, clarity, to unsettle matters that have become taken for granted, or to provoke us to ponder matters that typically fall below the level of our attention. His aim in these kinds of cases is to engender enriching obscurities that awaken and liberate our thinking, nourish our imagination, enhance our appreciation, and inspire our wonder. In terms of my opening epigraph, he is working to produce obscurities that allow us to appreciate the loftiness of the dwelling that is our life in language and, indeed, to enhance its loftiness.

This is not to deny that Wittgenstein is also seeking, as he puts it in §133, “complete clarity” and that “philosophical problems should completely disappear.” However, entirely removing specific philosophical problems is not equivalent to, and does not depend upon, making the entirety of our lives in language transparently clear and lucid. As he emphasizes, “[p]roblems are solved (difficulties eliminated), not a single problem.” Accordingly, although Wittgenstein’s thoughts about complete clarity prompt him to voice a fantasy of a “real discovery” that will give philosophy peace, he immediately turns against that fantasy; instead of seeking such a “real discovery,” he says, “we now demonstrate a method, by examples” (§133). Indeed, while Wittgenstein undoubtedly seeks to offer relief from our various (philosophical) torments, he also aims to disturb our peace and to disrupt our (complacent) certainties about ourselves and our lives in language.26

By way of moving toward a conclusion, I will consider a couple main forms of Wittgenstein’s production of obscurity, forms that enrich our ideas of how the Investigations asks to be read and so also of the forms of (philosophical) life it aims to support.

One of the most immediately striking features of the Investigations is its revelation of our apparently endless subjection to (philosophical) disorientation and metaphysical emptiness. Our lives in language, and so our coherence and competence, may be upended at any moment and even the simplest question or most mundane request—e.g., “In what did your meaning Mr. N.N. consist?” or “Point to an object; now point to its color”—can send us tumbling into an abyss of confusion in which we “do not know our way about” (§123). Further, our efforts to extricate ourselves—e.g., by constructing elaborate metaphysical machinery or imagining ourselves endowed with extraordinary (mental) powers—only increase our confusion.

For Wittgenstein, this confusion and disorientation is not due to misleading features of our language or to the exceptional difficulty of the philosophical issues he addresses. It is not, as he puts it, that “we have to repair a torn spider’s web with our fingers” (§106). Rather, it is due to what he calls a human “drive [einem Trieb] to misunderstand” (§109), to repudiate our own conditions of sense and cast ourselves into confusion. Arguably, it is that drive, rather than any specific philosophical problems, that is both the center of Wittgenstein’s philosophical interest and, therefore, the central fact of the Investigations.27 It shows that specific manifestations of this drive express various human fantasies, cravings, anxieties, and the like, and much of the work of the Investigations consists in diagnosing and treating its individual occurrences and shapes. Hence Wittgenstein’s claim that the “philosopher treats a question; like an illness” (§255). He does not take questions (or illusions, captivations, metaphysical insistence or emptiness, etc.) at face value and seek to resolve them in their own terms. Rather, he takes them as symptomatic of underlying conditions and it is those conditions that he aims to discover and treat.28

However, just as a doctor may probe an area for tenderness or sensitivity to pain, Wittgenstein is as concerned to provoke our leaps into confusion and nonsense as he is to diagnose and treat them. For where our confusions arise, and the specific shapes they take, illuminate our nature. Each instance of metaphysical captivation adds a brushstroke to our portrait of the human or casts it in a new light. In reading the Investigations, then, we are engaged in the ancient philosophical task of seeking to know ourselves, but with a couple of important differences. First, for Wittgenstein there is no essence of human nature, so the task of knowing ourselves is not directed toward a fixed or settled end. Indeed, part of what we gain from reading the Investigations is a deeper understanding of the ways in which our nature is malleable and conditioned. For Wittgenstein, then, the task of seeking to know ourselves is necessarily unending—as is its pleasure. Second, in reading the Investigations, we do not simply come to know ourselves but, as importantly, to wonder at ourselves. As the Investigations discloses us to ourselves, in our familiarity and strangeness, we shake our heads in puzzlement, smile in amazement, and laugh with delight at the extraordinariness of our ordinariness and, equally, at the ordinariness of our extraordinariness.

In addition to provoking us to stumble into nonsense, Wittgenstein also disturbs our peace and provokes productive obscurity by breaking into and disrupting our familiar relation to our words and language. It is true, of course, that he works to “bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use” and to restore them to the language games that are their “original homes” (§116). But it is no less true that he seeks to place us at a distance from our words and, even, to provoke us to send them into metaphysical exile; and he does so for at least two reasons.

First, it is by taking distance that we can survey our home, take in some of its character and forms, and recognize it as our home. At §129, Wittgenstein remarks that “[t]he aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity” and, he adds, this means “we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and powerful.” But nothing is more familiar, more available and ready-to-hand, than the ordinary language in which and through which we have entered into ourselves and our world. When our lives in language unfold smoothly, both the character of and the conditions for that life recede into invisibility. We move along well-worn paths across a linguistic landscape that we largely fail to register. Accordingly, Wittgenstein aims to disrupt our paths, slow our steps, and even bring us to a halt, so that we are forced to attend to the ground on which we walk. As he puts it in §524, his aim is to interrupt our tendency to take our language and our lives in language “as a matter of course” and to encourage us, instead, to “find it surprising”.29 And in §130, he speaks of this as the purpose of his “clear and simple language-games;” they are “set up,” he says, “as objects of comparison which are meant to throw light on the facts of our language by way not only of similarities, but also of dissimilarities.” So, for example, when he invites us to “imagine that the language of §2 [is] … the whole language of a tribe” (§6), or tells us “it is easy to … imagine a language consisting only of questions and expressions for answering yes and no” (§19), we are compelled to bring our own language into imagination and to consider its character. When he suggests that if we “imagine certain very general facts of nature to be different from what we are used to, [then] the formation of concepts different from the usual ones will become intelligible to [us]” (II, xii, p. 230), we are led to recognize that our concepts are not “absolutely the correct ones” and are prompted to reflect on the kinds of facts of nature to which they are responsive. In these and other examples across the Investigations, Wittgenstein disrupts our ready familiarity with our language and creates moments of obscurity and perplexity that allow us to attend to, and to be struck by, its character. The hope, of course, is that in addition to gaining a fuller appreciation of our language, we will also be moved to cultivate a richer and deeper inhabitation of it.

Second, Wittgenstein provokes us to exile our words into metaphysical emptiness precisely so that we experience the loss and recovery of their ordinary conditions of sense and, through this experience, come to recognize these conditions, understand their importance, and feel their power. In reading the Investigations, we are not mere observers but are the protagonists in its philosophical drama. We voice its dialogues, ask its questions, play its language games, conduct its experiments, carry out its grammatical investigations, and, even if we do not provide its sense-restoring observations, we must confirm them for ourselves.30 Hence, our relationship to its teaching is not simply intellectual. It is crucial, of course, that we achieve new insights and reach new levels of understanding. However, our access to these intellectual results comes only in and through experiencing the anguish of metaphysical disorientation and the relief of recovering our ordinary capacities.

Consider, as one simple but clear example, Wittgenstein’s request: “Point to a piece of paper.—And now point to its shape—now to its color” (§33). As we attempt to meet this request, we ourselves suffer the sudden loss of our power to point. The unquestioned efficacy with which we initially pointed to the paper vanishes as we struggle to point to its shape and color. We move our pointing finger weakly through the air as if tracing the shape, stab emphatically toward its color, or, as Wittgenstein emphasizes, we try to recover our pointing power through a mental act; we try to “mean” a “different thing each time we point” or to “concentrate our attention on the color, the shape, etc.” (§33). But we feel the futility of this added mental ray we try to project along our finger (a ray we had not felt ourselves to need when simply pointing to the piece of paper). We are lost—and we not only know it, we feel its anguish. However, if we are now reminded that we can point to the shape or color of an object by pointing to something else that shape or color, the power of our pointing finger returns as quickly as it was lost, and requires no special concentration or mental ray. We simply point to any rectangular or off-white object in view.31

Through this circuit of the loss and recovery of efficacy, we come to understand that we have driven our concept of pointing into metaphysical emptiness by severing it from the ordinary conditions of its employment, and we gain a new or further understanding of these conditions; conditions that had been largely invisible to us. These insights are essential and valuable. However, it is in the lived experience of this circuit, in suffering loss and then finding the relief and happy rush of restored potency, that we are struck by the ordinary conditions that enable our lives. It is in this experience that we are able to “find it surprising” or take it as “a remarkable fact” that these utterly mundane features of our lives should be so absolutely decisive and so astonishingly powerful.

Although pointing is certainly an important human capacity, in reading the Investigations we undergo other circuits of loss and recovery that involve capacities more directly touching our sense of our humanity and our individuality and that may, therefore, impact us more deeply. To recall just a few. We lose and recover: our grasp of how our words signify anything at all (§13) and how names pick out particular things (§59) or persons (§79); our ability to understand an explanation (§87) or make sense of any distinction between correct and incorrect responses to a rule (§186); our capacity to expect the arrival of a friend (§444); any idea of the distinctiveness or uniqueness of our own experience (§253); and, to mention just one more circuit, our conviction in the possibility of expressing our own pain or recognizing and responding to the pain of others (§283).32 Each of these circuits has its own contours, and the specific steps we take in enacting them are integral to how we are instructed and transformed by them. But for all of their individual differences, they share a general structure and produce a common kind of experience. As in our circuit through pointing, we repudiate the ordinary conditions enabling our capacities without realizing that we are doing so or recognizing what these conditions are. We then experience the tormenting impotence of life on the slippery ice of metaphysical exile (§107). And we find a new insight into, deeper appreciation of, and a transfigured relationship to, these ordinary conditions in the relief of recovered capacity as we return to them. In undergoing these circuits, one central aim of the Investigations is to compel us to self-consciously attend to the ordinary conditions sustaining our lives and so to achieve a richer and more nuanced understanding of them. However, while our deliberate attention to these conditions necessarily ends and they recede into the background of our activity, the experience of a transfigured relation to our language and to our lives in language remains; and producing that transfigured relation, I am suggesting, is another equally central aim of the Investigations. To read the Investigations is to be repeatedly awakened to wonder, not at the mysterious or transcendent or deep, but at the very ordinariness and open availability of the conditions sustaining us—“nothing is hidden” (§435).33 As we move into and across the landscapes it sketches, we undergo a mounting sequence of experiences of the marvelousness of our lives and of the now somewhat more visible web of threads on which our lives are strung. Indeed, one measure of the responsiveness of our reading is our growing readiness to consider any and every previously overlooked detail of our lives in language as a cause of amazement, a site of wonder waiting to be explored.

7. Reading Our Lives: The Joy of Living

Having begun with Augustine and the suggestion that we can see the Investigations taking on the same stakes of reading that frame the Confessions, I will close by sketching a further affinity between these texts.34 As I noted in Section 2, Augustine’s conversion inaugurates a new practice of reading; a practice in which, rather than seeking to discover means to satisfy his carnal desires, he reads the events and incidents of his life seeking to discover within them the sustaining presence of a loving God. We are not surprised, of course, that Augustine discovers God’s presence—and neither is he. But what Augustine may be surprised by, and is certainly thrilled and amazed by, is the absolute ubiquitousness of God’s presence in his quite unexceptional life—hence in all lives—and, equally, by the apparently limitless variety of ways and means through which God discretely directs his life. He discerns God’s presence in obviously weighty moments of crisis and transformation, but he also discovers that God is no less present in moments that he might well have passed over as too trivial to note. Similarly, he discovers that God does not simply work through obvious people or means, but that any event, incident, or person may be the form through which God is quietly working now. No moment is too small, and nothing is too insignificant, for God. For Augustine, then, every moment, and every aspect of his life and his world, is charged with the possibility of discovering God’s presence within it. Hence, Augustine’s reading of his life, and the writing that records his reading, become forms of praise and celebration. And, since his longing to praise God is unlimited, his passionate devotion to reading his life is, in principle, endless. The text of the Confessions comes to an end, but the practice of reading for God’s presence that informs and shapes the text does not; it has become (a central strand of) Augustine’s spiritual life.

Without denying critical differences between Augustine and Wittgenstein or between their texts—one of which I will emphasize in a moment—I want to suggest that the Investigations also exemplifies, and so introduces us to and instructs us in, a quite similar practice of reading. We may begin reading the Investigations because we seek solutions to, or therapeutic treatments of, specific philosophical perplexities or because we hope to find measures of respite from our recurrent “drive to misunderstand” (§109). However, and in line with a structure Augustine demonstrates through recounting his experience in the Confessions, if we faithfully pursue these goals and refuse to rest with illusory satisfaction, these motives for reading will themselves drive us beyond their narrow aims and into a practice of reading directed toward celebrating the continuous presence of our sustaining ground. Critically unlike the Confessions, in the Investigations the sustaining ground of our lives (in language) is nothing other than the ordinary human conditions of sense that are constituted and maintained through those lives themselves. But for Wittgenstein (and his faithful readers), the very fact that we are sustained solely by our own ordinary conditions—not by God, or by God in the guise of a metaphysical order of logic (a “super-order between super-concepts” (§97)—excites the same kind of awe and wonder that God inspired for Augustine. As revealed in the Investigations, the staggeringly rich and complex everyday realities of our lives, unfolding without any divine or metaphysical backing, are fully as marvelous as the presence of God. Through the instruction and inspiration of the Investigations, then, we develop the same kind of endless appetite for reading that Augustine experienced. And as we read the all-but-unimaginably various and utterly specific shapes of the ordinary conditions of our lives, we experience the same delight that Augustine experienced in reading the pervasive presence of God. The text of Investigations breaks off, and our reading of it comes to an end—at least for a time. However, and as in Augustine, in our time with the text, the practice of reading our lives itself becomes a form of life; a form of life directed toward apprehending and celebrating the wonder of our perfectly ordinary lives in language.

I will give the final word to Wittgenstein. It struck him, at some point, to say to himself: “The delight that I take in my thoughts is delight in my own strange life.” And that realization prompted him to ask: “Is this joy of living?” [20] (p. 22).35