Log24

An essay from . . .

The Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design
by Vilem Flusser

Wittgenstein’s Architecture

The universe of texts can be seen as a landscape. In it one can make out mountains and valleys, rivers and lakes, castles, farmyards and inner-city slums. On the horizon of the scene visualized in this way, the Bible and Homer appear as gigantic ice-covered mountains. The vast, tranquil lake of Aristotle’s texts, where fishermen idly throw their nets and philologists row their boats, occupies a part of the valley bottom. There, the tumbling waterfall of Nietzsche is captured by the broad river of modern pragmatism. Towering above everything, the Gothic cathedral of St Thomas Aquinas’s Summae dominates the cathedral square of the city, in which the roofs and gables of Baroque speculations jostle one another. In the suburbs of this city, one catches sight of the Romantic, Realist and Modernist housing-blocks and factories of more recent litera¬ ture; somewhat apart from all these stands a small, apparently insignificant house resembling scaffolding more than a finished building: Wittgenstein’s building.

This little house is called the Tractatus. This name isn’t the product of a one-track mind. For when one enters the house, one notices immediately that this is not a place that has lost track of things. Quite the opposite: It is a place of mirror- images. The house stands on six foundation pillars which support one another by means of cross-beams organized in a hierarchy. In the middle, however, there rises a seventh pillar whose function it is to cut through the building and free it from the ground. So the house with all its corners, angles and joints is protected, armoured and impregnable. And yet, and for that very reason, it is threatened with collapse and disappearance without trace – condemned in advance and from the outset.

The building is set out: It consists of propositions. Every proposition presupposes all the preceding ones and is itself the 76 presupposition of all the following propositions. Proposition by proposition, anyone who enters progresses through the prescribed rooms, and his step is supported by consistencies. Suddenly, with one proposition, one single proposition, the ground gives way beneath his feet. He falls head first into the abyss.

Wittgenstein’s house is situated in a suburb of that city whose cathedral square is dominated by the towers of Thomas Aquinas’s cathedral. The small, modest pillars of Wittgenstein’s house support one another according to the same logico- philosophical method as the pillars of the cathedral support one another. But there appears to be a world of difference between the cathedral and the little house: The cathedral is a ship pointing in the direction of heaven, and the little house is a trap-door pointing in the direction of a bottomless abyss. But be careful: May Thomas Aquinas not have been right in saying after his revelation that everything he had written before was like straw? May not the heaven above the cathedral be the same black hole as the abyss beneath the little house? May not Wittgenstein’s little house be the cathedral of today? And those mirrors whose images simultaneously mirror one another, may they not be our equivalent of stained-glass windows?

The landscape portrayed in this essay, it goes without saying, is a metaphor. Is it possible to identify it as Vienna? And is it possible for anyone entering Wittgenstein’s little house in that unlikely place to make out a hint of the unsayable? What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence. 77