Wittgenstein’s Old Man
_______________________________________
Excerpt from
And Now, I Think, We Can Say:
A conversation about Wittgenstein
and the comforts of our life in language
By William Eaton Warner
tanpaponte@gmail.com
© William Eaton Warner, 2011
On the other side of a partition in a New York Barnes & Noble cafe, a lonely professor hears two
people, Abel and Marsalina, having a conversation, ostensibly about a section of Wittgenstein’s
Philosophical Investigations. He secretly transcribes and later edits this conversation and adds
to the text his own extensive commentary and footnotes. The present excerpt is from the
professor’s commentary.
A
FOOTNOTE IN THE INVESTIGATIONS, the lines in the book that have become central
to my understanding of it:
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.1
1
Investigations, footnote which has been connected with §139, p. 50e. For an alternative reading of this picture,
see Steven Affeldt, “On the Difficulty of Seeing Aspects”. There (in footnote 10) he makes a connection between
the picture of the man and the picture of a galloping horse in Wittgenstein’s discussion of aspects (Investigations,
Part II, xi, 172e):
William Eaton Warner / W.O.M. / Page 1
On first reading, these words may well feel comforting. It would seem that what
Wittgensteinians call our “life in language” — here our life in visual language — offers us
certainty, even where skeptical examination might lead us to think there was none. There is
something zauberhaft (magical, enchanting) or even unheimlich (eerie, uncanny) in how we are
able to understand things — pictures, words, concepts — that on closer examination do not seem
so clear. We might hear in Wittgenstein’s last sentence echoes of the dismissive remarks of selfdescribed realists, realist philosophers included. Of course if we wanted to waste our time we
could wallow in skepticism, wonder if the guy was really walking up hill or if the AfricanAmerican ex-con whose gun and blood were found at the scene of the crime really was the
murderer, or if instead of the Sun going round the Earth, the Earth went round the Sun. But, in
fact, wouldn’t all this wondering be perverse or just a waste of time? We are not really confused
until we insist on being confused — or until, for example, in a time of crisis, in the midst of a
divorce, say, we really are confused, we don’t know if we’re going uphill or down, we can’t
“find our feet”.2 But those times pass, or we end up in a mental hospital. As Stanley Cavell
wrote, “Everyone knows that something is mad in the skeptic’s fantastic quest for certainty.”3
I.e., Cavell is begging a question which proves not so easy to answer: What is this “something”?
I must here recall a childhood memory of Wittgenstein’s. In a bathroom in his childhood
home, in his father’s palace in Vienna, some plaster had fallen from the wall, and Luki, as
Ludwig was then called, always saw this pattern as a duck, but it frightened him because it also
looked like a monster in a Hieronymus Bosch painting. We would seem to have stumbled on a
When I see the picture of a galloping horse—do I merely know that this is the kind of movement
meant? Is it superstition to think I see the horse galloping in the picture?—And does my visual
impression gallop too?
I.e., Affeldt is here proposing a non-skeptical reading of the picture of the old man with the stick. He is heading
only one way: uphill.
2
Investigations, §142: “It is only in normal cases that the use of a word is clearly prescribed; we know, are in no
doubt, what to say in this or that case. The more abnormal the case, the more doubtful it becomes what we are to
say.”
3
Disowning Knowledge, 8. We could get wrapped up in a whole ’nother dialogue based on Cavell’s many,
challenging reflections on skepticism. See, for example, this from “Declining Decline”, 37-38:
Suppose that Descartes discovered for philosophy that to confront the threat of or temptation to
skepticism is to risk madness. Then since according to me the Investigations at every point
confronts this temptation and finds its victory exactly in never claiming a final philosophical
victory over (the temptation to) skepticism, which would mean a victory over the human, its
philosopher has to learn to place and to replace madness, to deny nothing, at every point.
William Eaton Warner / W.O.M. / Page 2
source, if not the source for the adult Ludwig’s interest in optical illusions.4 (Cf., this beginning
of one of the notes published in Culture and Value: “I am often afraid of madness. Do I have
any reason for assuming that this fear does not spring from, so to speak, an optical illusion:
taking something to be an abyss right at my feet, when it’s nothing of the sort?”)
It seems to me also that for the child Ludwig — and for the child Ludwig who, like all
our child selves, lives on in our adult minds — the old man with the cane was yet another such,
frighteningly dual, unstable image. He was sliding downhill, and he was waddling, duck-like
uphill (and we might note that going uphill is often harder, if less frightening than sliding
downhill). From a child’s perspective, the reason we do not need to explain why we do not
describe the man as sliding downhill, or even talk about it, is obvious (painfully obvious, an
adult could say). I can hear the thin, childhood voices of my niece and nephew saying to me —
in response to my too-probing questions — once the questions were about a nightmare, another
time about a conflict, a humiliation at school — “This is not something I would like to talk
about”, “Can we please talk about something else?”
And so, let us adults return to Wittgenstein’s note about the old man again and, with
courage, pause at the assertion that the picture could have looked just the same if the man were
sliding downhill.5 And we might reflect further about how at times, and not just in the midst of
4
Optical illusions in the Investigations include the duck/rabbit of Part II, xi, 166, a convex/concave step (Part II, xi,
173), and what Wittgenstein calls a “double cross” (Part II, xi, 176): a white cross on a black ground that could as
easily be a black cross on a white ground.
The Investigations is also — like most every text? — full of sentences that might be thought of as functioning
like optical illusions, with their meanings capable of being turned inside out, and then outside in again. A famous
one is §109: “Die Philosophie ist ein Kampf gegen die Verhexung unsres Verstandes durch die Mittel unserer
Sprache.” Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language. This could be
interpreted — has been interpreted — as meaning either that philosophers use language to combat bewitchery, or
that philosophers battle bewitchments caused by language itself. (See, Affeldt, “Captivating Pictures”, 258.)
5
See Heraclitus: “The path up and down is one and the same.” (As translated in Barnes, 103, citing Diels-Krantz
reference B60.) This would also seem the place to note that the translation of the German “Bild” as “picture” has
occasioned some discussion in the secondary literature. In Wittgenstein’s Vienna (see 31 and 183), Allan Janik and
Stephen Toulmin trace Wittgenstein’s use of the word back to Viennese cultural debate and German science, and in
the process encourage translations such as “model” or even “artifact”. A Bild “is for Wittgenstein something which
we make, or produce, as an artifact”.
Toward the conclusion of “The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy”, Cavell, in comparing
Wittgenstein’s and Freud’s work, proposes translating Bild as “fantasies”. From page 72: Both Wittgenstein and
Freud are “intent upon unmasking the defeat of our real need in the face of self-impositions which we have not
assessed, or fantasies (“pictures”) which we cannot escape.” (I have deleted citations of the Investigations included
in this sentence.)
Thus, we might think of our certainty that the man is heading uphill (or only uphill) as an artifact of our minds
(and of our language, our culture), or as a fantasy. In “fact”, the man is simultaneously heading uphill and sliding
down. And the shower is an artifact for cleansing and for mass murder, ethnic cleansing. And — imagine a child
William Eaton Warner / W.O.M. / Page 3
personal upheaval, we are fooled — and not only by pictures, but also by people who appear
honest, trustworthy, loving and so forth. By philosophers quoting other philosophers, or by
bankers peddling mortgages, for example.
And why are we deceived by such people — by, say, the heading-uphill impression we
may have of a colleague? Sometimes it is because we are told to believe, or because everyone
believes and we do not want to “stick our necks out”. Often it is, as Abel and Marsalina has
discussed, because we so want to believe. We certainly wish human behavior were not so
relentlessly self-interested. We wish we could trust absolutely the people we work with, and
sleep with. We wish to be able to relax in happy and easy agreement with our fellow men and
women, and with “nature”, the larger world around us. We wish to find pure love. We wish to
find peace — “the peace of repose, the peace of the Sabbath, the peace which has no evening.”6
“The real discovery is the one that . . . gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented
by questions . . . ”7
And so could it be this — this desire for the peace of questionlessness — that has led
Wittgenstein to say there is no need for him to talk about the “flip side”, if you will, of his
picture of the man with the cane? Or is it because one of his particular, peculiar, extraordinary
rhetorical strategies is to point readers in a misleading direction — as if thereby to create a
special, quiet space, right at the back of their brains, for silent, deeper contemplation? Or is his
refusal to explain a failure of nerve on his part, or, perhaps, because it is not the therapist’s job to
lead us over the cliff (or into the empty, electric box of high anxiety), but simply to help us
appreciate its existence and how frightened it can make us feel? In his Memoir, Norman
Malcolm summarizes one of Wittgenstein’s themes: “We are constantly deceived by mental
pictures which are in themselves correct.” I take this “we” to be all-inclusive; that is, Ludwig
too.8
Apparently Wittgenstein thought of using as the epigraph for the Investigations the
famous line from one Bishop Butler’s sermons on morality: “Everything is what it is, and not
building with different colored blocks — our artifacts and fantasies are the materials with which we make up an
understanding of our world.
6
Augustine, Confessions, XIII: 35.
7
Investigations, §133.
8
Malcolm, Memoir, 54. I take the process to be yet more inclusive: We are also ourselves constantly, and often
intentionally, creating mental pictures which are misleading, and which often have as their primary purpose
misleading ourselves. And here, in the parade of misleaders of others and misleaders of themselves, Ludwig looks
to be in the front ranks.
William Eaton Warner / W.O.M. / Page 4
another thing”.9 (It might be said that we now have a colloquial variant: “It is what it is.”) As
regards the old man with the stick, it would seem that what is is that he might be headed up or
down. We are deceived by what Descartes called la précipitation et la prévention: by judging
too hastily while not discounting our prejudices (e.g., our wishful thinking).10
And yet it also needs to be said, again, that something is mad in the skeptic’s fantastic
quest for certainty. To put this another way: On account of our prejudices and hasty judgments,
our wishful thinking, we go through life in a fog, misunderstanding; and without our prejudices,
hasty judgments and wishful thinking we would never escape that electric box, we would be
paralyzed, unable to go through life at all.
9
Butler, originally from Fifteen Sermons, Preface, §39. This Preface is reproduced in the Butler volume in the
“Works Cited” of the present text.
10
Discours, Seconde partie, 89.
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Works Cited
Steven G. Affeldt. “Captivating Pictures and Liberating Language: Freedom as the Achievement
of Speech in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations”. Philosophical Topics 27, No. 2
(Fall 1999).
——. “On the Difficulty of Seeing Aspects and the ‘Therapeutic’ Reading of Wittgenstein”. In
Seeing Wittgenstein Anew. Edited by William Day and Victor J. Krebs. Cambridge
University Press, 2010: 268-288.
Augustine (Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis). Confessions. Translated by R.S. Pine-Coffin.
Penguin Books, 1961.
Jonathan Barnes. Early Greek Philosophy. Penguin Books, 1987. Barnes’s source for the
fragments of early Greek philosophy is the standard: H. Diels and W. Kranz, Die Fragmente
der Vosokratiker (Berlin, 1952, 10th edition).
Joseph Butler. The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of
Nature; to which are added two brief dissertations: on personal identity and on the nature of
virtue; and fifteen sermons. Henry G. Bohn, 1852.
Stanley Cavell. “Declining Decline: Wittgenstein as a Philosopher of Culture”. In This New Yet
Unapproachable America (see below). Also chapter 16 of The Cavell Reader (see below).
——. Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare. Cambridge University Press, 1987.
——. “The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy”. Chapter II of Cavell, Must We
Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969.
René Descartes. Discours de la méthode. Livre de poche, 2000. First published in 1637.
Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin. Wittgenstein’s Vienna. Simon and Schuster, 1973.
Norman Malcolm. Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, with a Biographical Sketch by Georg Henrik
von Wright. Oxford University Press, 1958.
Ludwig Wittgenstein. Culture and Value. Edited by G. H. von Wright in collaboration with
Heikki Nyman. Translated by Peter Winch. The University of Chicago Press, 1980. Bilingual
edition: original German (Vermischte Bemerkungen) with English translation.
——. Philosophische Untersuchungen / Philosophical Investigations. German text with a revised
English translation, 3d ed. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. Blackwell, 2001.
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