Was Wittgenstein a Closet Literary Critic?

In 1929, when “odd couple” Leavis and Wittgenstein were taking their one-sided walks in Cambridge (the exhausted philosopher needed someone to lean on), Wittgenstein was working on “A Lecture on Ethics,” which explains his notion of how ethics and aesthetics fit in the “world-book.” Distinguishing between “trivial or relative” and “absolute” judgments, Wittgenstein argues that “[e]thics and aesthetics are one.” At the time, C.K. Ogden’s theory of “Basic English,” which would soon be spelled out in The System of Basic English (1934), was a lively topic of debate. Five years earlier, with Frank Ramsey’s help, Ogden had translated Wittgenstein’s Tractatus into English, and it was Ogden who arranged presentation of Wittgenstein’s public “Lecture on Ethics.” Leavis recalls Wittgenstein’s rapid, apparently disjointed rejoinder to his exposition of Ogden’s theory of “Basic English,” not recognizing in that articulation a major feature of Wittgenstein’s philosophical and literary style. Brilliantly, Wittgenstein truncates his interlocutor’s argument, presenting it as it should be framed, and preempting, in this case, Ogden and his proxy, Leavis, from giving the flawed account of Ogden’s mistaken theory (on which Leavis was shaping his work in progress, Mass Communications and Minority Culture [1930]). So does this relationship suggest that Wittgenstein held literature and literary criticism in low esteem? On the contrary, throughout his life, Wittgenstein’s thought was imbued with an “aesthetic sense.” He read widely, and, as his remarks on Nietzsche, Newman, Freud, and Frazer indicate, often critically. So Leavis probably misunderstood Wittgenstein’s famous order, “Give up literary criticism.” Here, Wittgenstein registered skepticism regarding the broad claims of articulation implicit in Leavis’s concept of the “Great Tradition.” Wittgenstein valued poetry, as he did music; Carnap was right on target when he observed that Wittgenstein did philosophy as a creative writer. If we believe Leavis, when confronted with a particular question about a particular Empson poem, Wittgenstein analyzed it, word for word, as Leavis would have, had Wittgenstein allowed him to speak.