It is not surprising that in Anglo-American philosophy there have been very few attempts to link Nietzsche and Wittgenstein or to examine the philosophy of one in terms of the other. Philosophers in the analytic tradition who read Wittgenstein have not been inclined to read Nietzsche (this is certainly the case up until recent reception of Nietzsche in Anglo-American philosophy); and those who read Nietzsche sympathetically tended not to view Wittgenstein as an analytic philosopher.

There are a number of reasons for the absence of this link in Anglo-American philosophy. Nietzsche's initial reception in the English-speaking world took place during the period 1896-1915, from the period immediately following his death through until the outbreak of the First World War. The reception was both literary (Bridgwater, 1972) and philosophical, although there was little apparent connection between them. A philosophical revival of his work, driven by an interest in his ethics and especially its connection to evolutionary theory and positivism, took place in Anglo-American philosophy in the period immediately following his death, even though it was not always flattering. Nietzsche's philosophical reception on the Continent began in ernest in the late 1920s with Karl Jaspers, E. F. Podach and Julian Benda. The ‘nazification’ of Nietzsche dated from the same period. The contemporary philosophical reception of his work occured mainly in Germany and France during the post-war period with the most influential interpretations being those of Martin Heidegger (1961), Georges Bataille (1945), Gilles Deleuze (1962) and Jacques Derrida (1972).3 While it was primarily Walter Kaufmann (1950) who, in the post-war period, introduced Nietzsche to Anglo-American philosophy, and, later, Arthur Danto (1965), the 'new' Nietzsche that has emerged from literature departments in the United States has been more a product of the influence of Continental readings.4 A serious revival of his work in the English-speaking world, motivated once again by an interest in his ethics, did not occur again until the 1980's.5

Taubeneck (1991: 160) maintains ìKaufmann's interpretation shaped the reception in English from 1950 to at least 1974, or for nearly quarter of the centuryî. Kaufmann (1974: v) in the Preface the 1968 edition of Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist provides a snapshot of the English philosophical bias against Nietzsche that prevailed up until recently:

It is only in the 1980s and, partly, as a result of the impact of German and French receptions of Nietzsche that the study of Nietzsche's philosophy has become acceptable in the English-speaking world. Strangely, neither Bernd Magnus and Kathleen Higgins (1996) nor Ernst Behler (1996) see fit to comment upon the relative absence of Nietzsche in the Anglo-American philosophical literature and curriculum prior to the 1980s. Given this absence of Nietzsche it is no wonder that there have been few attempts to link Nietzsche and Wittgenstein (at least in the analytic tradition). There are, of course, some exceptions to this generalization.6

This chapter aims to make a modest start in rectifying this situation. It has two main parts: the first section presents an historico-cultural reading of Wittgenstein interpreted within the context of Viennese modernism, an intellectual context strongly shaped by Nietzsche. This section is designed to show that Nietzsche's work was, in effect, part of the shared intellectual background against which Wittgenstein crystallised his own ideas. We invoke the French concept of an energetics to explain a pervasive and background cultural influence of Nietzsche upon Wittgenstein. There is also clear historical evidence that Wittgenstein read Nietzsche and that he grew up in the company of intellectuals strongly influenced by Nietzsche, including the musician Gustav Mahler and the painter Gustav Klimt, both of whom were regular visitors to the Wittgenstein family mansion. In a more indirect historical sense, Wittgenstein was influenced by the Nietzschean, Oswald Spengler, and both Nietzsche and Wittgenstein (perhaps more so than any other two modern philsophers) were strongly influenced by Schopenhauer.

The second part of the chapter is more directly philosophical in that it discusses aspects of Wittgenstein's philosophy, especially his later philosophy, which exhibits clear ìfamily resemblancesî with aspects of Nietzsche's work. We discuss these resemblances by focussing, first, on the notion of ‘The Philosopher as Cultural Physician’ -- a phrase that appears in Nietzsche's notes of the early 1870s and which he had used at one stage as a title for a book considered a campanion to The Birth of Tragedy -- and, second, on ‘The Philosopher of the Future’, a phrase that Nietzsche used consistently in his later works. The earlier notion of cultural physician informs and shapes Nietzsche's notion of the philosopher of the future whose principal concern is the health of culture. The central responsibility of the philosopher of the future is the project of cultivation and education of humanity as a whole. The philosopher-physician does not create cultural health by treating the 'sick' individual, by, for instance, enhancing his or her rational autonomy. The cultural malady is not primarily a cognitive disorder which, thus, can be cured by reason alone. The philosopher of the future employs all the cultural resources at his or her disposal to promote what we are capable of becoming.

Wittgenstein ascribes to a similar romantic view of culture as a form of life; culture as an expressive and natural force, one that begins in doing (rather than thinking), and can be judged in terms similar to the creation of a work of art. Wittgenstein also sees himself as a philosopher of culture and philosophy as a kind of therapy.

Wittgenstein, Nietzsche and Viennese Modernism

Janik and Toulmin’s (1973) Wittgenstein’s Vienna was the first to demonstrate the significance of a historico-cultural approach to understanding Wittgenstein and the importance of the Viennese cultural milieu to understanding his work. Adopting a Kantian interpretation of the early Wittgenstein they argued he was addressing the problem of representation, a problem which arose in the culture of Viennese modernism. Janik and Toulmin argued that Wittgenstein was extending in his own way the critique of language and culture initiated by Karl Kraus (and Fritz Mauthner) and they emphasised a romantic and ethical interpretation of the Tractatus where, as they assert, "Only art can express moral truth, and only the artist can teach the things that matter most in life" (Janik & Toulmin, 1973: 197).

In retrospect, there is a notable absence in Janik and Toulmin's interpretation: it neither mentions nor makes anything of Nietzscheís influence on fin-de-siècle Vienna or upon many of Wittgenstein’s intellectual contemporaries and forbears. Alan Janik (1981: 85) identifies Wittgenstein with the spirit of the Austrian counter-enlightenment characterized by a focus upon the limits of reason, in the ìtraditionî of Lichtenberg, Kraus, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Weininger and Nietzsche. And von Wright (1982), in an influential essay, argues that Wittgenstein displays a Spenglerian attitude to his times: Wittgenstein understood himself to be living in "an age without culture", an age where modern philosophy was no longer able to provide the metalanguage which united the family resemblances of cultureís various manifestations. While von Wright (1982) attributes Wittgenstein's notion of ìfamily resemblanceî to Spengler's ursymbol he does not go further to discuss the direct influence of Nietzsche upon Spengler or the way Nietzsche's influence upon Wittgenstein is mediated through Spengler.7

In a similar manner, Stanley Cavell (1988) views Wittgenstein as a "philosopher of culture" and provides a reading of the Investigations as a depiction of our times, agreeing with von Wright’s assessment of Wittgensteinís attitude as Spenglerian suggesting that Spengler’s vision of culture as a kind of Nature is shared in a modified form in the Investigations. Cavell (1988: 261-2) argues that the Investigations "diurnalizes Spengler’s vision of the destiny toward exhausted forms", toward the loss of culture and community. Cavell draws our attention to the way Wittgenstein’s uniqueness as a philosopher of culture comes from "the sense that he is joining the fate of philosophy as such with that of the philosophy of culture or criticism of culture". By doing so, he argues, Wittgenstein is calling into question philosophy ís claim to a privileged perspective on culture which could be called the perspective of reason.

It is worth investigating Spengler's influence a little further. Wittgenstein refers to Spengler a number of times in his notes during the 1930s. In 1931 in the context of a discussion of his own Jewishness as a thinker, that is, one who merely reproduces rather than invents a line of thinking (which, he considers, is the mark of a true genius). He lists Spengler among those (including, Boltzmann, Hertz, Schopenhauer, Frege, Russell, Kraus, Loos, Weininger and Sraffa) who influenced him most (Wittgenstein, 1980: 19e).

The irony of Wittgenstein's remark is that Spengler owed much to Nietzsche. The Decline of the West was an imaginative reception of Nietzsche's ideas and as he himself commented in a letter written in 1921 "today it is not possible to express anything which hasn't already been touched upon in Nietzsche's posthumous works" (cited in Farrenkopf, 1992-93: 166). There is no doubt that Wittgenstein's cultural pessimism and despair -- his rejection of technoscientific civilisation, his distrust of progress, his sense of cultural dissolution and decay -- were inherited, in part, from Spengler and in a mediated fashion, from Nietzsche, but also directly from Schopenhauer.

As Christopher Janaway (1994: 104) remarks, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein are to date the only philosophers to have been strongly influenced by Schopenhauer. Wittgenstein started reading Schopenhauer as an adolescent not in an academic setting but "as part of the stock of ideas with which Viennese high society was furnished" (ibid). Weiner (1992: 9) suggests that since the groundbreaking work of Janik (1966), the connection between the two thinkers, and the early Wittgenstein's intellectual debt to Schopenhauer, has gradually come to light. The young Wittgenstein seized upon Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation, believing it to be fundamentally right, though in need of some clarification; while Wittgenstein in his maturity came to see a certain shallowness in his thinking. The Tractatus -- its conceptual structure, its mysticism, its language of ethics and asethetics -- is unmistakably Schopenhauerian. The connection to Schopenhauer helps explain the ethical point of the Tractatus and an enduring cultural pessimism.

McGuiness (1982: 40) suggests a direct historical relationship between Wittgenstein and Nietzsche over the question of nihilism:

In his biography of the young Ludwig, McGuinness (1988: 36), discussing Grillparzer's opposition to nationalism, radicalism and progress, suggests that such a view was not peculiarly Austrian but was rather apart of a wider German counternarrative shared by both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. McGuinness (1988: 225) indicates that the young Wittgenstein brought a copy of volume eight of Nietzsche's collected works -- which contained The Anti-Christ -- and that Wittgenstein responded to Nietzsche's "hostility to Christianity" in a diary entry dated 8.12.14. McGuinness (1988: 225) says: "Nietzsche seemed important for Wittgenstein because Nietzsche's starting point was the same as his own."

This reading of Wittgenstein is given additional credibility by Jacques Le Rider's (1990, 1993) interpretation of Viennese modernism. Le Rider (1990) argues that the Viennese ìmodernsî by whom he means Loos, Kraus, Schönberg, Klimt, Mahler and Hofmannsthal, among others, were "less aggressive" than their counterparts in other European capitals. Viennese modenrism, he suggests, "was not a triumphant movement ... Without exception, they were marked by Nietzsche's contempt for such ‘modern’ ideas as democracy, historicism, scientism or progress" (p. 2). He argues that fin-de-siècle Vienna prefigured certain central themes of postmodernism and lists "the triumph and crisis of individualism", "the quest for mythologies capable of regenerating modern culture", and "the questioning of scientific and technical rationality". The Schopehauerian-Nietzschean ethos which tempered Viennese modernism, helps explain both Wittgenstein's scepticism towards modernism -- whether in the sciences and technology, or in literature and the arts -- and his final dissociation with the logical empiricism of the Vienna Circle, built as it was on a new found faith in science and of extending the scientific method into philosophy itself.

Le Rider (1991) sees Nietzsche as the common starting point for most Viennese modernists, arguing that "The crisis of the individual, experienced as an identity crisis, is at the heart of all questions we find in literature and the humane sciences" (p. 1) and remarks that "Viennese modernism can be interpreted as an anticipation of certain important ëpostmoderní themes" (p. 6). He has in mind, for instance, the way in which Wittgenstein's philosophy of language "deconstructs the subject as author and judge of his own semantic intentions" (p. 28). He remarks in terms of the crisis of identity how Wittgenstein, "like all assimilated Jewish intellectuals, found his Jewish identity a problem" and the problem of his Jewish identity was coupled with a crisis of sexual identity, when at least at some periods of his life he sought refuge from his homosexual tendencies in a kind of Tolstoyan ascetism (p 295). He suggests:

He argues that the consequences of this double crisis of identity, much more than is commonly accepted, are intimately tied up with the fundamentals of his thought and with a number of his intellectual preoccupations: ìhis interest in Weininger and in psychoanalysis, his mystical tendencies, but also his reflections on genius, on the self, and on ethicsî (p. 296). The importance that Le Rider places upon Nietzsche as part of the cultural fabric of Viennese modernism exericised upon a young Wittgenstein is borne out by other scholars of fin-de-siècle Vienna.

McGrath (1974: 2) traces the intellectual biography of the Telyn Society ("Pernerstorfer circle") in Vienna during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This group which was named after Engelbert Pernerstorfer, included amongst its members both Gustav Mahler and Victor Adler, and Sigfried Lipiner (the boy genius). In response to the political and cultural crises of the brief liberal era, the members of the circle were drawn with increasing force to the ideas of three great thinkers whose works expressed profound alienation from liberal ideals: Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Nietzsche. Although it has been frequently argued that Nietzsche's influence began to be felt significantly only in the 1890s, the history of the circle shows that as early as the 1870s this philosopher attracted an intensely loyal following among the student population of Vienna.

The Telyn group prepared well during their student years carried on their crusade for cultural renewal within the variety of professional activities in their adult years. As McGrath (1974: 83) indicates: "Nietzsche provided them with the ingredients for an all embracing outlook based on a belief in the coherence of the arts and cultural unity of art and society".

The Telynen explicitly accepted Nietzsche as their educator and pledged themselves to a life of self-overcoming on the model set forth by Nietzsche in ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’ in which Nietzsche calls for members of the cultural community "to further the production of the philosopher, of the artist, and of the saint within us and outside us" (p. 56). They lived the teaching of Nietzsche: "Everyone who possesses culture is, in fact, saying ‘I see something higher and more human than myself above me. Help me, all of you, to reach it, as I will help every person who recognizes the same thing’ (Schopenhauer as Educator p. 61)."

Aschheim (1992: 14) notes that Nietzsche had dwelled upon a fin-de-siècle theme which was to become a defining feature of the new consciousness that Carl Schorske (1980: xix) calls "post-Nietzschean culture": "the perception of pervasive decadence and degeneration and the accompanying search for new sources of physical and mental health".

One of the earliest attempts to link the two philosophers comes in an essay called simply ‘Wittgenstein and Nietzsche’ written by Erich Heller (1988) on the occasion of the appearance of Wittgenstein's The Blue and the Brown Books in 1958, originally published in Encounter in 1959, and later published in The Artists Journey into the Interior and Other Essays (1965). He suggests that Wittgenstein resembled Nietzsche:

Heller first notes the ‘family resemblances’ between Wittgenstein and the major figures of Viennese modernism (he mentions Weininger, Loos, Kraus, Musil, Schˆnberg) and goes on to suggest that the break between the Tractatus and the Investigations is of the same kind as that between Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy and Human, All Too Human, in the sense that in both cases the break is attributable to a disenchantment with metaphysics and a loss of faith of any formal or logical correspondence between language and thought, and reality (p. 149). In the turn away from a correspondence version of truth Heller believes that Nietzsche and Wittgenstein share a similar nihilism which "one day will be seen as an integral part of the tragically self-destructive design of European thought" (p. 145) in that their work is both "inseparable from the critique of its medium" and embodied in the doubt of its own possibility (p. 157). While Heller recognises differences between the two thinkers in "the scope and object, the approach and humour, the key and tempo of their thought", he maintains they share an all important "creative distrust of all those categorical certainities that ... have been allowed to determine the body of traditional thought" (p. 150). Heller concludes that Wittgenstein's statement "What is the aim in philosophy? -- To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle" masks a kind of nihilism. In Heller's interpretation here is no way out, only more and more fly-bottles. Our interpretation runs against Heller's.

It also runs against that of Meredith Williams (1988: 403), who argues that while "there is overlap in project, method, and style -- there are equally striking differences". She argues:

We disagree with Williams both in terms of the comparison of method and problems to be overcome. Williams overestimates the differences in terms of method: Nietzsche's method is also grammatical and conceptual, and Wittgenstein's method inclines him toward accepting a description of our language-games as a form of "natural history". As will become clear later in this chapter, while philosophy for Wittgenstein is intensely personal, we believe his later philosophy clearly addresses problems and "disquitetudes" in our language and culture.

Gordon Bearn (1997: xv) starts from and accepts Heller's position that Nietzsche and Wittgenstein share a similar philosophical break and development but he does not read them as ìexacerbating the nihilism of contemporary cultureî. Rather he interprets them, following Stanley Cavell, as providing us with a rest from a kind of nihilistic anxiety aimed at easing our existential cares and "waking us to the wonder of existence". While we agree with Bearn against Heller's nihilistic interpretation of both Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, our argument is, rather, that Wittgenstein can be usefully seen, in Nietzsche's sense, as a physician of culture and as a philosopher of the future. If we adopt Nietzsche's conceit of the philosopher as cultural physician and use it to understand both Wittgenstein's view of the role of philosophy and his style of philosophising, we will come to see Wittgenstein's later work as offering a philosophical response to nihilism. To embrace such an interpretation has several advantages: most broadly, it provides a reading consistent with the influence of fin de siËcle Vienna upon Wittgenstein's thought (and, more specifically, makes sense of the influence of Schopenhauer, Spengler, Kraus, Mauthner); it also helps us to understand both how the question of culture was central to Wittgenstein's thought and the role he ascribed to philosophy; finally, it elucidates what it means to philosophise at the end of the twentieth-century, after our loss of faith in what Jean-François Lyotard (1984) has called ‘metanarratives’. Our strategy in the remainder of the chapter will be to identify the Nietzscheís concept of culture and cultural significance of philosophy and, second, to use these ideas as a framework to interpret Wittgenstein’s ‘philosophy of the future’.

During the period 1872 to 1875 Nietzsche started working upon a major project which was to provide a sequel or companion to The Birth of Tragedy. He variously titled this proposed work The Last Philosophy, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, and The Philosopher as Cultural Physician. The notion of culture runs through these notes, as it does through the corpus of Nietzsche's works: not only was he concerned to understand what it is and to develop knowledge of the conditions for its renewal in the age of science, he wished to define the cultural significance of the philosopher, and above all, to signal the importance of the philosopher as a physician of culture, as one who could prepare the ground of culture, and in the figure of the future philosopher-artist, create new values. But in order to do so the philosopher must first turn his life into a work of art for the philosopher's product is his life, before his works (#48, p. 108).

The prospect of a purely scientific culture, for Nietzsche, was an impossibility: "because science lacks the ability to determine value and command obedience which characterizes genuine cultural force; because it opposes human needs and values; and because it stands in opposition to itself" (Breazeale, 1979: xxvii). Scientific knowing based upon a correspondence theory of knowledge and a mirroring of an independent reality, could not in itself legitimate itself or determine the meaning or value of the truth it sought. Investigating the natural antagonist to the ascetic ideal in The Genealogy, Nietzsche (1956: 289) says "Science is too dependent for that, it always requires a normative value outside itself in order to operate securely". To make philosophy ‘scientific’, to turn it into a science, is ‘to throw in the towel’" (#55, p. 111).

In the notes he compiled for ‘The Philosopher as Cultural Physician’ (1873) Nietzsche outlines what he sees as the value of philosophy in clearing up superstitions, eliminating the theory of the soul and dismantling the fixed value of ethical concepts. Against the ascetic deals which rule traditional philosophy, Nietzsche’s ‘philosophy’ does not oppose the sensuousness of the body. His ‘philosophy of the future’ has essentially a destructive task: to destroy dogmatism in all its forms -- in religion and in science -- and what he calls ‘blind secularism’. As such "Philosophy is not something for the people; thus it is not the basis of a culture but merely the tool of culture" (#174, p. 74). In this role it serves as the tribunal of education in an age without culture: schools must follow philosophy in destroying secularisation and subduing the barbarizing effects of the knowledge drive: "Philosophy reveals its highest worth when it concentrates the unlimited knowledge drives and subdues it to unity" (#30, p. 9). During this early period Nietzsche felt that modern education showed all the symptoms of decay. As part of a secularisation and with the promotion of a scientific world view it had lost its ability to confer unifying values. Above all: "Education contradicts a man's nature" (#41, p. 104). The so-called ‘educated classes’ only hindered the cultural physician and Nietzsche placed his hope in the education of the lower classes.

Philosophy, in terms of its own self-critique, must overturn naive realism of science to undermine it from within, by mastering the knowledge drive, but it must also move beyond the purely negative moment of scepticism, if philosophy was to become an affirmative cultural force and philosophers were to become cultural legislators in the form of the philosopher-artist. Philosophy can pave the way or clear the ground for culture by showing anthropomorphic character of all knowledge but also by recognising the power and necessity of illusion.

Culture emanates from the central significance of great art which makes self-conscious use of illusion. By accepting the ultimacy of illusion and by recognising illusions for what they are, art can deal creatively with them: "truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force" (‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’, 1873, p.80). The ‘new’ philosopher will disentange the nets of language, realising that words cannot establish an unambiguous relation to the world.

David Breazeale (1979: xxvii), in his introduction to the early notebooks of the 1870s, describes the notion of culture underlying Nietzscheís view:

Nietzsche states his aim is "to comprehend the internal coherence and necessity of every true culture" (#33, p. 10) and he interprets the goal of culture as the production of great works which unifies by mastering the drives of the people. Culture is "the unity of artistic style in every expression of the life of a people" (Untimely Meditations, p. 4).

The central task of the philosopher-artist is to create new values capable of guiding us in the future, values which will shape our institutions, particularly our schools, and help us to evaluate our past. It is a prominent theme in his later writings. His early view of the philosopher as cultural physician shapes Nietzsche's notion of the philosopher of the future. The fundamental concern of the philosopher of the future, like the cultural physician, is the health of culture. Nietzsche never abandons his early view that philosophy might effect a cultural regeneration. Nietzsche speaks of "a new species of philosophers" (BGE, #2) for whom the falseness of a judgment is not necessarily an objection against it: "The question is to what extent is it life-promoting, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps even species-cultivating" (BGE, #4). Only a philosophy which risks recognizing "untruth as a condition of life" places itself beyong good and evil, and, thereby, can accomplish the task of the re-evaluation of all values. Such a philosopher of the future will be free from "the seduction of words" (BGE, # 16) and will understand that what we take to be the truth of beliefs are often only the result of grammatical habits (see, in particular, Nietzsche's discussion of the will, which he suggests "is a unit only as a word", BGE, #19). While Nietzsche insists that he is the first psychologist -- one interested in an explanation of belief rather than its truth -- he is speaking of a depth psychology that would enable him to understand the development of the will to power, morphologically (BGE, #23); in short, a genealogy of values. The philosopher of the future is "the man of the most comprehensive responsibility who has the conscience for the over-all development of man -- this philosopher will make use of religions for his project of cultivation abnd education just as he will make use of whatever political and economic states are at hand" (BGE, #61). Nietzsche talks of "genuine philosophers" in contrast to "philosophical laborers": "Genuine philosophers, however, are commanders and legislators: they say, 'thus it shall be!'-- Their 'knowing' is creating, their creating is a legislation, their will to truth is -- will to power" (BGE, #211).

"In the beginning was the deed".

Ludwig Wittgenstein, (quoting Goethe), CV, p. 3.

Wittgenstein, like Nietzsche, holds a Romantic view of culture. Romanticism is that counter-movement of thought which sought to redeem the spirit of man in relation to culture and nature. In this sense, it can be interpreted as a movement which provides a counterpoint to the Enlightenment view that construed the essence of man as consisting in the possession of reason. Against this image of man which subject both man and cuiture to the ultimate tribunal of reason, the Romantic view emphasised man as a cultural being where human life was seen as emerging through culture as both a expressive and natural force. As Yuval Lurie (1992: 195) argues:

Lurie (1992) suggests that Wittgenstein sought to redeem the idea of man as a cultural being in two different literary contexts: in the remarks Wittgenstein makes about what he calls "the natural history of man" and in a series of remarks he makes about art, religion, and ritual. The first set describe rule following activities through the processes of initiation into certain basic linguistic practices (language games), centering around topics such as naming, meaning, intending, knowing and the like. The second set, referring directly to Kultur (aesthetics), describe religious, artistic and ritualistic behaviour as manifestations of "the spirit of man". Lurie (1992: 196) maintains: "Ultimately the goal is to bridge the gap created in philosophical thinking between culture and nature by offering both a naturalized view of the spirit of man and a cultural view of the nature of human beings and their doings".

Human life begins in doing rather than thinking and Wittgenstein naturalizes our conception of culture and human beings by placing an "emphasis on actions rather than thoughts, on responses rather than reasons, on descriptions rather than explanations, on attitudes and skills rather than on opinions and justifications" (p. 197). By stressing a mode of being that is grounded in actions Wittgenstein seeks to restrict the role of reason and intellect and to dispell their philosophical importance by returning them to their natural origins. Concept formation comes about through an extension of human beings in their ability to learn to react in culturally determined ways to different things being the same: "It is the ability of a group of human beings to adopt shared responses and to develop common judgements (as to what counts as the 'same') which brings about the formation of concepts" (p. 198). Rule following, on Wittgenstein's account, are "formulated abstractions of certain cultural practices" (p. 199). As Lurie (1992: 199) explains further:

Linguistic practices do not come into being as a result of rules formulated and interpreted in the realm of reason and then pursued to their logical conclusions in understanding and speech. Rules are not the metaphysical basis for the emergence of language games. It is the other way round. Language games are the basis in action for the emergence of what is referred to as 'reason'. And it is on the basis of such practices athat rules are later derived and articulated by means of abstract reasoning. Rules are merely the abstract expressions of socially administered and refined deeds.

Culture on Wittgenstein's view, then, offers human beings a spiritual home in the sense that they can devote themselves to its observance through tradition or invent new cultural forms. Language is the "foremost cultural creation of man" (p. 203) for it provides "a cultural and hence also a spiritual expression of refined, natural (forms of) life" (pp. 202-3).

It is against this background that Lurie (1992) interprets Wittgenstein's remarks that the spiritual (forms of) life which we refer to as culture no longer exists. We now live, Wittgenstein argues using Spenglar's term, in an age of "civilization", where natural forces which once found their expression in the creation of cultural practices, have been replaced by reason alone. Civilization is an age of spiritual decline, where culture disappears.

It is this view of culture which Wittgenstein embraces that brings him into close proximity to Nietzsche. Jacques Bouveresse (1992: 29) discusses Wittgenstein's view of the epic of the disappearance of his own culture where "the dissolution of traditional organic relations consecrates the triumph of individualism". He suggests "Just like Nietzsche, Wittgenstein saw in the disappearance of the will to tradition and the triumph of disorganisation principles for the essential characteristics of the modern age".

Building upon this view, we are particularly struck by a number of thematically related remarks Wittgenstein makes on contemporary Western culture and the scientific world view in the context of remarks made in 1929 and the early 1930s. He talks of "my cultural ideal" (CV, 2e), wondering whether it derives from Schumann's time though continuing that ideal instinctively and in a different way. He distinguishes technical refinement in modern film-making with the formation of a style, where spirit plays a role (3e). In the context of examining a remark made to him by Engelmann, who looks at what he has written and finds it splendid, Wittgenstein says "he is seeing his life as a work of art created by God --" (CV, 4e). Quoting himself, he says: "The earlier culture will become a heap of rubble and finally a heap of ashes, but spirits will hover over the ashes" (CV, 3e). In the sketch for a Foreword to Philosophical Remarks Wittgenstein is, perhaps, most explicit about his sympathies.

In an age of civilization the arts disappear (as does culture), yet their disappearance does not imply a judgement about those individuals who make up civilization. The strong simply turn their attention to other things. This passage has the unmistakeable ring of Nietzsche about it in terms not only of the conception of culture it outlines but also in the concern for the audience or reader and the idea that the work will be understood only by those "fellow citizens" who share a similar ideal and form his "cultural milieu" (CV, 10). Wittgenstein continues:

Our age, Wittgenstein suggests, is not that where "men" work towards the same end in the formation of a great cultural work but rather one of an "unimpressive spectacle of a crowd" where the best work for purely private ends. Still this is not to deny that the energy exists: "I realize then that the disappearance of a culture does not signify the disappearance of human value" (CV, 6e).

Wittgenstein suggests that the typical western scientist will not understand the spirit in which he writes since the scientist belongs to a civilization characterized by 'progress' and dedicated to constructing an ever more complicated structure. For such scientists clarity is only a means to en end. By contrast, for Wittgenstein, clarity is an end in itself. By way of distinguishing his way of thinking from that of the typical scientist he says: "I am not interested in constructing a building, so much as in having a perspicuous view of the foundations of possible buildings" (CV, 6e). Wittgenstein sharply distinguishes between science and philosophy. As Hans Sluga (1996:25) observes, Wittgenstein stands in opposition "to those movements in the twentieth century that have sought to reconstruct philosophy in a scientific manner", and he refers to Wittgenstein's ironic remark in the Blue Book (p. 18) that the philosophical tendency to ask and answer questions in the manner of science is the real source of metaphysics. He elaborates why he considers this to be the case in the following lucid remark made in 1947:

The truly apocalyptic view of the world is that things do not repeat themselves. It isnít absurd, e.g., to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity; that the idea of great progress is a delusion, along with the idea that the truth will ultimately be known; that there is nothing good or desirable about scientific knowledge and that mankind, in seeking it, is falling into a trap. It is by no means obvious that this is not how things are (CV, 56e). While he find scientific questions interesting, they never really grip him as philosophical problems do (CV, 79). The problem of culture is a philosophical problem which cannot be resolved through science or through adopting a scientific method because "scientific civilization" is part of the problem.

In a wistful passage written in 1931, Wittgenstein reflects upon his work.

Only the "language of prophecy" in which the great poets speak is it possible to provide a epic description of this culture as a whole because the end can only be foreseen. Its signs are subtle and obscure and the description is comprehensible only to the few. Yet Wittgenstein holds open the possibility that ìPerhaps one day this civilisation will produce a cultureî (Cv, 64e).

Notes

1. Leiter (1997: fn 1, 250) provides a sample of papers written in the early 1900s. Hequotes one source (Herbert Stewart in 1909) as commenting that "nothing quite so worthless as 'Thus Spoke Zarathrustra' or 'Beyond Good and Evil' has ever attracted so much attention from serious students of the philosophy of morals".

2. Steven Aschheim's (1992) The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890-1990 is, perhaps, the most comprehensive cultural history of Nietzsche's reception and influence in Germany. His account provides a reading of the complex and "changing relations between Nietzsche and German politics and culture" (p. 15). His interpretation avoids reducing the significance of Nietzsche's work to a single 'authentic' and authoritative meaning. His account centers on the "complex and interconnected modalities of irrationalism and modernism and Nietzsche's definitive complicity in both" (p. 16) and he argues,

For recent overviews of Nietzsche's reception see Behler (1996), Shrift (1995,

1996), and Large (1993).

3. See, for example, Allison (1977), de Man (1979) and Nehamas (1985).

4. Leiter (1997: 251) provides the following survey of the new appreciation of Nietzsche's ethics in the English-speaking world:

For Alastair MacIntyre "Nietzsche is the first to diagnose the failure of the project of post-Enlightenment moral theory". For Annette Baier, he is one of those "great moral philosophers" who show us an alternative to the dominant traditions in modern moral theory in which we "reflect on the actual phenonomenon of morality, see what it is, how it is tranmitted, what difference it makes". For Susan Wolf, he represents an "approach to moral philosophy" in whixch the sphere of the "moral" comes to encompass those personal excellencies that Utilitarian and Kantian moral theories seem to preclude. For other recent writers, he figures as the exemplar of a philosophical approach to morality that these writers either endorse (e.g., Philippa Foot) or reject (e.g., Thomas nagel, Michael Slote). Indeed, in looking at the claim common to critics of morality like Slote, Foot, Wolf, and Bernand Williams -- that "moral considerations are not always the most important considerations" -- Robert Louden has recently asked, "Have Nietzsche's 'new philosophers' finally arrived on the scene?"

The essence of Leiter's (1997: 252) position, one that is consistent with the theme of this chapter, is that Nietzsche is "a genuine critic of morality as a real cultural phenomenon, while recent Anglo-American writers are only critics of particular philosophical theories of morality".

5. See, for example, Heller (1959), Williams (1988), Janaway (1989), and most recently, Bearn (1997).

6. Baker and Hacker (1980: 32) note that (familien-nlichkeit) appears in Nietzsche's Good and Evil. It occurs at #20 in the section entitled "On the Prejudices of Philosophers" where Nietzsche is explaining how philosophical concepts do not just suddenly appear in the history of thought or evolve autonomously but grow up in relationship with each other in a linguistic system. The section, because of its resonances with Wittgenstein's own views, is worth repeating:

It also clear that Wittgenstein read Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human as he refers to it in a note in 1947: "Nietzsche writes somewhere that even the best poets and thinkers have written stuff that is mediocre and bad, but have separated off the good material" (CV: 59e).

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