Witlesstein & Shakespeare.

Language is game theoretic. It isn't about following rules in a mechanical manner. Witlesstein didn't understand game theory. Instead he wrote nonsense about 'language games'. 

 William Day a Professor of Philosophy, writes- 

Ludwig Wittgenstein may have had a fraught relationship with the English language, his adopted tongue.

Most important English books had been translated into German.  

But his animosity towards Shakespeare can't be explained by the foreignness of Elizabethan English.

What does explain it? The answer is that Witless didn't understand that drama is created when we see people engaging in strategic behaviour.  

His remarks on Shakespeare aren't much to look at: they occupy two brief moments in his notebooks, amounting to no more than a handful of pages that can be read in about five minutes.

His remarks were always stupid. He had fallen behind developments in his field and thus was writing retarded shite.  

Yet they fascinate by offering an engagement with Shakespeare’s language

Nonsense! He doesn't engage with Shakespeare's language at all. He just says he doesn't like the plays because they don't conform to Aristotelian 'unities' or some such shite.  

different in kind from the excursions through philosophical temptations and their diagnoses that are the work of his Philosophical Investigations.

The philosophical temptation is to think philosophy isn't stupid shite.  

Consider the following summary remark on Shakespeare that Wittgenstein wrote in 1950:

The reason I cannot understand Shakespeare is that I want to find symmetry in all this asymmetry.

We all do find that symmetry. Why? What Shakespeare creates is 'non-dissipative'. Continuous symmetries have corresponding conserved properties or conservation laws. If Harry changes, Falstaff must remain the same precisely because Harry hasn't changed. Falstaff has. Age will do that to you. Still, Shakespeare has endowed them with an imperishable haecceity.  

It seems to me as though his pieces are, as it were, enormous sketches, not paintings; as though they were dashed off by someone who could permit himself anything, so to speak.

He wasn't German. 'Rules are for fools' as Ophelia said to Macbeth. 

And I understand how someone may admire this & call it supreme art, but I don't like it.

To appreciate Shakespeare, try rewriting his lines or changing what a character does or says. You soon realize why Nahum Tate's Lear was shit compared to Shakespeare's even though the former was more popular for 150 years.  

– So I can understand someone who stands before those pieces speechless;

You aren't supposed to talk while watching a play. Indeed, even farting is discouraged.  

but someone who admires him as one admires Beethoven, say, seems to me to misunderstand Shakespeare.

And someone who hears the String Quartet Op. 18, No. 1, without thinking of the tomb scene in Romeo & Juliet hasn't understood Beethoven. Apparently, his music wasn't commissioned by the hotdog industry. Fidelio, on the other hand, is about the need to put mustard, not ketchup on your hotdog. No. By hotdog I don't mean penis. 

It's hard to explain away the brashness of this appraisal.

It is easy. The man was stupid. Game theory was taking off but he didn't get the memo.  

Even if it were defensible as a thesis about Shakespeare, Wittgenstein doesn't present it as part of a thesis.

Because he wasn't angling for a job as a Professor of Literature.  

He doesn't do more with his few remarks, and their aim is not to present a conclusion of criticism so much as to articulate a feeling or intuition.

Poor chap, he probably didn't think his notebooks would be published. He hoped what would make him famous would be the posthumous discovery of his laundry list nachlass.  

I think they spring not from a philosophical disagreement with Shakespeare – let alone from a sense that Shakespeare lacks philosophical weight – but from a difference in philosophical temperament, the nature of which marks two distinct possibilities in responding to the threat of skepticism

e.g. saying ghosts don't exist- even if they keep telling you to kill Uncle.  

and to the naturalness and inevitability of tragedy.

Death is natural and inevitable. Tragedy really isn't. Nor is comedy. My farts are funny because they are so exquisitely well-timed.  

The most striking assertion in Wittgenstein's critique of Shakespeare may be this, written in 1946: "Shakespeare's similes are, in the ordinary sense, bad.

They were so good, he made a lot of money.  

So if they are nevertheless good – & I don't know whether they are or not – they must be a law to themselves."

Germans are totes into laws and rules and everything which is not forbidden being compulsory. True, Witless was Austrian but he attended the same school as Hitler who was his age.  

What makes Wittgenstein think he can lay claim to such a judgment?

Anyone can lay claim to any judgment whatsoever. Witless's problem was that his judgment on Godel was wrong. Gentzen's work was useful and could be used to make out that Witless too had something interesting to say. But neither knew of each other.  

Part of the answer may lie in Wittgenstein's own remarkable talent for similes and figures of comparison.

They were stupid. The ineluctable modality of language is Time. For Pictures, it is Space. Language can't be compared to a picture.  

Given their importance to his way of doing philosophy,

i.e. writing gibberish 

it shouldn't surprise that he was good at making them, and knew he was good.

Sraffa kept telling him to fuck off anytime he sidled up to him for a chat. Apparently, GE Moore did the same to Bertrand Russell. But Russell, at that time, had very bad breath. Still, there's a pattern here is all I am saying.  

Here is one example, drawn from a remark he thought to include in the Foreword to the Investigations: "Only every so often does one of the sentences I am writing here make a step forward; the rest are like the snipping of the barber's scissors, which he has to keep in motion so as to be able to make a cut with them at the right moment."

Gentzen's 'cut elimination theorem' was useful. But so is every snip that the barber makes. There is no 'right moment' to make a snip. It doesn't matter if you do one side of the head first and then the other or if you alternate your snipping while keeping up a lively conversation.  

Compare this marvelous image – revelatory both of its author and of the process of writing,

shite. If you are writing something useful or interesting every sentence pushes forward the thesis.  

so often felt as a movement without forward motion

loose motion is the mot juste for Witless's work.  

– to a Shakespearean metaphor that Wittgenstein once mentioned to a friend, from Richard II. There Mowbray says, "Within my mouth you have engaol'd my tongue / Doubly portcullis'd with my teeth and lips."

Natural Justice requires hearing the defendant's side of the story. The King had undermined the rule of law and would pay for it with his life. I suppose there were prisoners in the Tower of London whom contemporaries felt had been denied justice in a like manner. 

Part of Wittgenstein's critique of Shakespeare's figures might be the obviousness of such an image as the teeth and lips as a gate for the tongue,

That isn't the image. We picture a man clenching his teeth and tightening his lips. This is an angry man. He will seek vengeance. Kill him, if you must. Don't exile him. The next two lines reveal the source of the problem-  And dull unfeeling barren ignorance / Is made my gaoler to attend on me. England is a jail. The turnkey is the King who is ignorant and lacking in empathy- i.e. imagination. This is a state of affairs which can't endure. 

even when one acknowledges that here it is closed to keep something in rather than to keep something out.

The Professor has noticed that, if he doesn't close his mouth, his tongue escapes and takes up a career in Media Sales or Business Process Outsourcing. 

See whether you think Shakespeare's portcullis'd tongue is as striking as the similative tongue in the following, from Wittgenstein's so-called "Big Typescript": "The philosopher strives to find the liberating word,

No. He tries to find the accurate word unless he is writing utter shite.  

and that is the word that finally permits us to grasp what until then had constantly and intangibly weighed on our consciousness.

Witless is thinking of the 'mot juste'. Aesthetes may have gone in for it. Philosophers were expected to be accurate.  

(It's like having a hair on one's tongue; one feels it, but can't get hold of it, and therefore can't get rid of it.)"

It is easy to get rid of a hair on your tongue even if you eat a lot of pussy. It's when a hair entwines itself around your epiglottis that you may need medical help.  

In these examples at least, it seems fair to say that Wittgenstein could hold his own against Shakespeare.

No. Shakespeare's similes push the action forward. There is an element of 'foreshadowing'. Witless tells us stupid lies about barbers and how difficult it is to get rid of a hair on your tongue.  

So when Wittgenstein says that Shakespeare's similes "must be a law to themselves"

there is no law relating to similes. You can compare anything to anything though your g.f might punch you if you compare her to a Summer's day if both of you happen to live in Delhi.  

(because he was a "creator of language" who "could permit himself anything"), he’s disagreeing with the conventional wisdom that Shakespeare's writing exhibits his linguistic mastery.

Suppose I had made myself a master of the law and thus was appointed Chief Justice. I could be said to be creating new law by my judgments. I might even be said to be a 'law unto myself' because the Supreme Court is not bound by stare decisis (or even Res Judicata, in India). Shakespeare may indeed be said to be a master of the English language.  A usage only found in his work would nevertheless pass muster. The sternest critic would be obliged to admit that it is permissible.  

Wittgenstein does not misunderstand Shakespeare.

Nor does he understand him. He was too stupid.  

He sees himself as speaking neither from understanding nor from misunderstanding, but from that particular poverty of one who wants to articulate the cause of an absence in himself, the lack of appreciation for a body of work generally praised as the best of its kind.

This is easily done. Just say 'I like detective novels. I don't like Shakespeare. Reading him makes my head hurt.'  

In a remark from 1949 he compares the effect of Shakespeare's language to that of a dream: "Shakespeare & the dream. A dream is all wrong, absurd, composite, & yet completely right: in this strange concoction it makes an impression. Why? I don't know."

I suppose, back then, people thought dreams were the 'royal road to the unconscious' or some such shite. But Shakespeare was a craftsman. He made his money by writing and staging plays. If a speech worked, it stayed in. If it put people to sleep, out it went.  

Wittgenstein's stumbling block, I believe, arises from an anxiety or fear that The Bard's language stirs up in him.

Maybe Witless was afraid that he'd get his cock out while watching Hamlet and jump on the stage and try to bugger Sir John Gielgud. I'm not saying that wasn't what Keynes did, but behaviour tolerated in an Old Etonian is considered infra dig in lesser mortals.  

The telltale evidence for this is the sentence that concludes his disparaging of Shakespeare's similes. Wittgenstein writes: "That I do not understand him could then be explained by the fact that I cannot read him with ease. Not, that is, as one views a splendid piece of scenery."

Kids read Shakespeare with ease. Why? There is narrative energy. There are colourful characters. There is an element of dramatic tension. Then, there are the fart jokes. Say what you like but nothing in Harry Potter can compare to the moment Ophelia farts in Macbeth's face and says 'chew on that you great big haggis.'  

The notion of an inability to read "with ease" is related to a concept that occupies Wittgenstein throughout his later career and that he names "aspect-seeing." The iconic figure for illustrating the meaning of "aspect-seeing" is the duck-rabbit – a line drawing that can be seen as either duck or rabbit.

Both can be seen with ease. It is also easy to read a narrative which is ambiguous. Indeed, the thing becomes more gripping.  

Wittgenstein notes the ease with which we typically effect the gestalt-switch from one to the other. But to someone incapable of exercising this freedom or ease in reading the aspects of the world, Wittgenstein gives the name "aspect-blind."

Which is no big deal. It's like the question of whether the Blade Runner is actually an android. What's important is that he gets the girl.  

And a characteristic of the aspect-blind is the inability to register how something invites the seeing of different aspects.

Actual blind people can register stuff about colours and shapes and so forth. Indeed, Ved Mehta wrote better descriptive prose than his sighted contemporaries. Witless was worrying about an imaginary problem.  

Now notice that Wittgenstein describes his difficulty with Shakespeare in the language of a condition (aspect-blindness), rather than as a temporary aesthetic difficulty.

This is like saying 'I'm not a boring shithead. I have a deficit in being interesting and intelligent.'  

For comparison, here is Wittgenstein describing how we see a depiction "with ease": "I might get an important message to someone by sending him the picture of a landscape. Does he read it like a blueprint? That is, does he decipher it? [No.]

Because it isn't a blueprint. Nor is it a gramophone record which is why he doesn't stick it on the record player.  

He looks at it and acts accordingly. He sees rocks, trees, a house, etc. in it."

He may do. Alternatively, he may say 'ah! That's a Constable painting. The meaning is 'go to the police'.'  

But Wittgenstein imagines his difficulty reading Shakespeare as akin to the aspect-blind, someone who reads a picture of a landscape the way we read a blueprint.

We don't read blueprints unless we are architects of builders or whatever. Blind people get somebody to describe stuff to them. When I look at a landscape by a great painter, I google in and read what experts have said about it. In this way, I learn to appreciate it more. Indeed, this may be a lifelong process.  

To read a picture as if it were a blueprint is to merely know what it is about without seeing it.

No. It is to imagine it.  

That seems to be how Wittgenstein understands his condition as a reader of Shakespeare.

Sadly, he didn't get that he was equally stupid in his reading of Godel. He didn't even bother with Gentzen etc.  

While Wittgenstein professes aversion to other writers and composers, his most concentrated articulation of a failure to understand another's writing is reserved for Shakespeare.

Fuck Shakespeare. It was Witless's inability to understand Godel which damns him.  

And yet, I think Wittgenstein is being disingenuous. Casting himself as suffering from a condition (an inability to read with ease, a blindness), he avoids coming to terms with what lies behind his condition: something he does see, an aspect of Shakespeare's words that is blocking understanding.

He doesn't see that language is strategic- i.e. game theoretic. There are coordination and discoordination games. We can have Schelling focality but not 'naturality'.  

There is a likely candidate for what lies behind Wittgenstein's uneasiness over Shakespeare. Like Wittgenstein, Shakespeare can be read

in any idiotic manner by any idiot. Nobody cares.  

as responding to the threat of skepticism,

 One can have faith while remaining doubtful regarding any particular belief. 

just as Descartes can be read as skirting that threat.

by embracing Occasionalism. What does Shakespeare embrace? Fatalism? No. Beauty. What happens is not inevitable but, properly depicted, it may be sublime or otherwise aesthetically gratifying.  

The argument is made in Stanley Cavell's readings of Shakespeare,

good enough in their time, but that was long ago.  

which he offers alongside his understanding of Wittgenstein's diagnosis and treatment of our modern condition, our interest to turn our relation to the world and to others into matters of knowing, and so into matters of doubt.

The solution was the reverse game theory of mechanism design. That was what was happening in the England of Francis Bacon & William Shakespeare. Essentially, Society was trying to move from Nash equilibria to Aumann correlated equilibria based on public signals. Shakespeare himself contributed to this. We first read his History plays as kids. When we return to them, we appreciate the manner in which they contributed to the ongoing process of making this country a better and better place for all its people.  

Here is Cavell on tragedy's revelation of skepticism:

This is what I have throughout kept arriving at as the cause of skepticism

or cynicism or just going to live in a cave like Timon of Athens.  

– the attempt to convert the human condition, the condition of humanity, into an intellectual difficulty, a riddle. . .

this is only cool if 'intellectuals' have tenure and can sell their worthless books to undergraduates.  

Tragedy is the place we are not allowed to escape the consequences, or price, of this cover.

Only if the tragedy is happening to you. Otherwise you can leave after the first Act.  

If one grants this connection,

There is no connection. Tragedy is about bad things happening to good people or the high and mighty being brought low. It has nothing to do with scepticism. Even the Donald will die.  

one is likely to wonder how Wittgenstein could have failed to see in Shakespeare's tragedies, as he saw in Augustine's Confessions, a working out of his own most pressing concerns.

I may see in James Joyce's 'Finnegans Wake' a working out of my own pressing concern- which is to find the TV remote- but there is no actual connection between the two.  

But we need not imagine that he missed it. To miss how philosophy's skepticism of the existence of others mirrors our failed relations with others,

there is no connection between the two. Our relations with others fail if we end up hurting them or boring them or borrowing money off them. Philosophical scepticism is about getting tenure and publishing yet another imbecilic book.  

and how Shakespearean tragedy trades in the extreme consequences of these failed relations, would be to simply misunderstand Shakespeare.

Shakespeare's tragedies are diverse. Why? They had to make money. It was a question of 'bums on seats'. Today, ghosts and witches are cool. Tomorrow, they are a drug on the market.  

Such a reader would be left to praise Shakespeare for all the wrong reasons (e.g., for his linguistic mastery).

That is the right reason to praise him.  

Wittgenstein is not such a reader. Rather than missing how Shakespeare shares his concerns, Wittgenstein is merely covering his ears to the sound of them.

No. He merely says he doesn't like the dude. What he didn't add was that he liked hard boiled detective fiction.  

But for fear of what does Wittgenstein cover his ears?

Claudius might pour poison into them.  

Recall the charges leveled by Wittgenstein against Shakespeare's language: its unnaturalness;

no Englishman ever felt so.  

its dream-like strangeness;

it doesn't put us to sleep because it is vivid and engaging.  

its disturbing asymmetry and spontaneity,

as opposed to being well mannered and observant of Aristotelian unities.  

the sense that anything is permitted.

As in Aristophanes and Euripides.  

This is a picture of the natural world as seen from the side of chaos,

Nothing can see from that side.  

or in which chaos and madness threaten to break out at any moment

anyone can go mad at any time. 

(as they do in King Lear, in Othello, and even in the late-Shakespearean romance The Winter's Tale).

Things are resolved well enough. Catharsis is achieved. The audience goes home to their dinner feeling they got their money's worth.  

If Wittgenstein doesn't miss the skeptical problematic running through Shakespeare, then what he covers his ears to is the sound of the raw motives to skepticism,

stupidity or doing useless shite 

and of words gone wild,

not so wild that they become ugly 

absent from the philosophical elaborations and filigrees that help to preserve Wittgenstein even as he does battle with them.

Sadly, Witless's 'philosophical elaborations' were shit. He hadn't kept up with the math, didn't understand Brouwer's choice sequences or what Turing did with them, and said stupid shit about Godel. Von Neumann's game theory was useful. His own language games were useless. 

It is Shakespeare's tragic expression of skepticism,

Hamlet reproduces Agrippa's Trilemma. But the solution is independent, protocol bound, verification. Interestingly, Hamlet does find an ingenious way to get this. Then he does something rash- viz. stab Polonius. Blood will have blood.  

a skepticism untamable by the methods of Wittgenstein's grammatical investigations,

but easily tamed by independent verification. Madam Wu's experiment put paid to Kant's incongruent counterparts. The 2022 Nobel went to the guys who found experimental proof of Bell's inequality.  

that Wittgenstein has in mind when he declares: "The reason I cannot understand Shakespeare is that I want to find symmetry in all this asymmetry."

Look for the conserved properties and you can work out the continuous symmetries because the system is non-dissipative. I suppose Witless was too old to have been taught Noether's theorem in Collidge. 

Perhaps Wittgenstein's fastidiousness with regard to formal design betokens in this case a wish to repudiate what the unbridled unfolding of events in a Shakespeare tragedy – the turns of mind that lead to turns of fate – itself betokens.

Nonsense! A guy who enjoys a pulp detective fiction can get his head around a Shakespeare play well enough. He just can't say anything very interesting about it unless he isn't as stupid as shit.  

And that would be something Cavell means by the truth of skepticism: that humans naturally desire, not only an end to the bumps that the understanding gets by running its head up against the limits of language,

there are no such bumps. Language has no limits for the same reason that mathematics has no limits.  

but an end to the consequences of speaking altogether

there are no consequences to talking nonsense to imbeciles even if they get a sheepskin in return.  

(the consequences of expression, the consequences of acknowledging others).

Professors of shite subjects live in constant fear that they won't be 'acknowledged'. People will start using them as urinals.  

What Wittgenstein covers his ears to may be just this silence, this nothing, that the Shakespearean tragic hero craves.

The tragic hero may say 'I fucking hate this world' but we know he would feel differently if things hadn't gone badly for him.  

But if it is, then what is revealed in Wittgenstein's dislike for Shakespeare is the anxiety or fear that – as in King Lear – something will come of this nothing.

Something does. Love triumphs- if it was there in the first place. But so does death. But, that too shall pass. 

As for Witless something did come from the nothing that was his career in philosophy. It was an availability cascade of witlessness. Still, if it kept Professors from having to turn tricks at truck-stops, perhaps we shouldn't be too hard on the fellow. After all, he was a foreigner. Allowances should be made.