¹ Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Culture and Value, ed. von Wright, G. H. and Nyman, Heikki, trans. Winch, Peter (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), p. 12Google Scholar.

² Culture and Value, p. 15.

³ Culture and Value, p. 15.

⁴ In ‘Assessments of the Man and the Philosopher’, in Fann, K. T., ed., Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Man and His Philosophy (New York: Dell, 1967), pp. 77–78Google Scholar. This passage is helpfully discussed in Suter, Ronald, Interpreting Wittgenstein: A Cloud of Philosophy, a Drop of Grammar (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), p. 48Google Scholar.

⁵ I am referring here to Wittgenstein’s imagined microcosm of linguistic usage, the ‘builders’ language’; see Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, 3^rd ed., trans. Anscombe, G. E. M. (Basil Blackwell, 1958)Google Scholar, §§ 1–38. See Also Rhees, Rush, ‘Wittgenstein’s Builders,’ in Discussions of Wittgenstein (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), pp. 71–84Google Scholar; Goldfarb, Warren, ‘I want you to bring me a slab. Remarks on the opening sections of the Philosophical Investigations,’ Synthese 56 (1983), pp. 265–282CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Malcolm, Norman, ‘Language Game (2),’ in his Wittgensteinan Themes: Essays 1978–1989 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), pp. 172–181Google Scholar.

⁶ Culture and Value, p. 7.

⁷ In Wittgenstein: A Way of Seeing (London: Routledge, 1995).

⁸ In her Chapter 1, ‘Commanding a Clear View,’ pp. 27–54.

⁹ This itself, I would suggest, is deeply analogous to the methodological imperatives of modernism in architecture: to strip away ornamentation, where this is understood as a form of concealment, in order to reveal the aim and functioning of the elements of the structure.

¹⁰ Discussed in Genova, p. 29.

¹¹ Culture and Value, p. 34.

¹² Culture and Value, p. 22.

¹³ Culture and Value, p. 42.

¹⁴ On this point see Wittgenstein’s observation in Philosophical Remarks, trans. Raymond Hargreaves and Roger White (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), pt. 1, sec. 2: ‘Why is philosophy so complicated? It ought, after all, to be completely simple. –Philosophy unties the knots in our thinking, which we have tangled up in an absurd way; but to do that, it must make movements which are just as complicated as the knots. Although the result of philosophy is simple its methods for arriving there cannot be so. The complexity of philosophy is not in its matter, but in our tangled understanding.’ Applied to the issue of self-understanding (of the kind that is the result of the autobiographical or self-directed therapeutic conceptual work being examined presently), this rightly suggests that the tracing of the etiology of conceptual confusion standing in the way of self-knowledge may well be no less complex and intricate than the life of a human being, but the end result may be a state of clarity that, in contrast to the complexity of the autobiographical labour that led to it, seems liberatingly simple. A deeply absorbing example of this process as it traces layered complexity and multiple resonances across and through a life, but then emerging in moments of perspicuous clarity, is shown in Bela Szabados, In Light of Chaos (Saskatoon: Thistledown Press, 1990). In the final passages of this autobiographical novel Szabados articulates the nature of the labour he has actually undertaken from the first page. In referring back to his reading of Popper and Marx with a group of young students and the impulse to not only understand the world but to change it, he writes: ‘Yes, change it, but for the better, and this can not be done in terms of rigid schemes and systems, where the voice is privileged, univocal, and the source of violence. Perhaps the real revolutionary is he who revolutionises himself. I incline toward clarification, the dispelling of myth and confusion in the personal life and in the world – my conception is that of a cognitive therapist where the therapist is himself always the therapee, as well’ (p. 124). This book also shows the considerable value, the meaning-determining significance, of the most fine-grained particularities in experience as they uniquely allow the kind of ‘tracing’ mentioned just above; Szabados closes the book with the line ‘I resolve always to stay close enough to see the terrain clearly, never to lose sight of the terrain’ (p. 125). His epigraph is Wittgenstein’s remark: ‘The lover of wisdom has to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there.’

¹⁵ I offer a discussion of the relations between linguistic and stylistic language-games in Meaning and Interpretation: Wittgenstein, Henry James and Literary Knowledge (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); see esp. Chapter 1, ‘Language-Games and Artistic Styles.’

¹⁶ Culture and Value, p. 16.

¹⁷ Culture and Value, p. 3.

¹⁸ Culture and Value, p. 3. Good architecture is thus, in a sense, a moral matter (in that there is a prescriptive sense of what ought, and particularly ought not, to be done). Conversely, Wittgenstein describes (some) moral issues in architectural terms: in 1937, he writes, ‘The edifice of your pride has to be dismantled. And that is terribly hard work.’ Culture and Value, p. 26.

¹⁹ Culture and Value, p. 38. Also in 1934 Wittgenstein had written ‘In my artistic activities I really have nothing but good manners.’ (p. 25).

²⁰ Wittgenstein described his philosophical work in these terms, further underscoring the commonalities between architectural and philosophical work. See Culture and Value, p. 2: ‘My ideal is a certain coolness. A temple providing a setting for the passions without meddling with them.’

²¹ Culture and Value, p. 16.

²² I offer a study of various ways in which preconceptions concerning linguistic meaning powerfully shape conceptions of artistic meaning in Art as Language: Wittgenstein, Meaning and Aesthetic Theory, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). Of such connections Wittgenstein notes: ‘Phenomena akin to language in music or architecture. Significant irregularity—in Gothic for instance (I am thinking too of the towers of St. Basil’s Cathedral). Bach’s music is more like language than Mozart’s or Hayden’s….’ Culture and Value, p. 34.

²³ Culture and Value, p. 27.

²⁴ Such progressive interrelational clarifications are precisely what a reader sees while closely following the development of the eponymous protagonist in Goethe’s great (and arguably first and most influential of the genre) Bildungsroman, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, ed. and trans. Eric A. Blackall in cooperation with Victor Lange (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).

²⁵ Richard Wollheim offers a helpful discussion of some of the constraints under which such an interpretation may proceed in The Thread of Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 171–177. He writes: ‘That interpretation, properly understood, has something to tell us about the structure of the mind derives from the constraints under which it operates. In all domains interpretation is possible only under constraints – constraints imposed upon the interpreter, and specifying conditions that interpretation of one and the same text, or one and the same legal system, or one and the same person, must satisfy’ (p. 171). But lest this be misunderstood, a special virtue of Wollheim’s discussion is that he does not import a false (because radically oversimplified) model of belief-consistent rationality as the primary governing constraint in the interpretation of persons; rather, he rightly (and realistically) suggests that ‘Instead of trying to devise in the abstract constraints upon interpretation intended to capture rationality, what we should do is to examine the actual processes by which persons do regulate, or try to regulate, their beliefs and desires, and then argue back to the constraints. It is to such processes, which are in turn part of leading the life of a person, and not to some idealized rationality, that the constraints upon interpretation must ultimately answer’(p. 173). Wollheim does not say so here, but this suggests why the close and exacting philosophical study of literature, i.e. particularized and highly detailed descriptions of the nuanced moral psychology of characters that show at a reflective distance what it actually is to lead the life of a person, is of irreplaceable value.

²⁶ Culture and Value, p. 34.

²⁷ I offer a fuller discussion in Describing Ourselves: Wittgenstein and Autobiographical Consciousness (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008).