“I doubt that the return to philosophy was prompted by social connections, which were always a mixed bag for the antisocial Wittgenstein. I prefer to believe that the prompt was in the handle.”
“For when Wittgenstein returned to philosophy, the idea that drove him beyond all others was that the nature of language had been misunderstood by philosophers, “including,” he noted winningly, “the author of the Tractatus.””
“Words did not, he had come to believe, primarily provide a picture of life (the word “snake” representing, or sounding like, an actual snake); they were better conceived of as a part of the activity of life.”
“As such, they were more like tools.”
“(We do things with words, as J. L. Austin famously argued, things like, from a list of Wittgenstein’s, “thanking, cursing, greeting, praying.”)”
““Think of the tools in a tool-box,” Wittgenstein wrote in his epochal Philosophical Investigations (1953). “There is a hammer, pliers, a saw, a screw-driver, a rule, a glue-pot, glue, nails and screws.—The functions of words are as diverse as the functions of these objects.””
“Words may look similar, especially when we see them in print. “Especially when we are doing philosophy!””
“The analogy Wittgenstein drew was precisely with handles.
It is like looking into the cabin of a locomotive. We see handles all looking more or less alike. (Naturally, since they are all supposed to be handled.) But one is the handle of a crank which can be moved continuously (it regulates the opening of a valve); another is the handle of a switch, which has only two effective positions, it is either off or on; a third is the handle of a brake-lever, the harder one pulls on it, the harder it brakes; a fourth, the handle of a pump: it has an effect only so long as it is moved to and fro.”
“It is the utility of handles that Wittgenstein insists on here. The pump don’t work ’cause the vandals took the handles.”
“This utility of handles had also caught the attention of the pioneering German sociologist Georg Simmel, but he thought utility was only half the story. In his brilliant 1911 essay “The Handle,” Simmel argued that the handle of a vase bridges two worlds, the utilitarian and the non-utilitarian. A vessel, according to Simmel, “unlike a painting or statue, is not intended to be insulated and untouchable but is meant to fulfill a purpose—if only symbolically. For it is held in the hand and drawn into the movement of practical life.””
“For Emerson, too, handles had a dual nature. “All things have two handles,” he wrote in his American Scholar address, “beware of the wrong one.””
“Stanley Cavell notes that this gnomic admonition “itself has two handles.””
“Apart from the familiar reminder that there are two sides to every argument, Emerson urges scholars not to unmoor themselves in their thinking from what he called, in another essay, “the city and the farms.””
“In Cavell’s summary of Emerson (whom Wittgenstein was reading during his military service in World War I), effective thinking and writing require, on the part of the scholar, a certain “doubleness, of worlds, of words,” a straddling of the practical and philosophical worlds, like Simmel’s handle.”
“Thus the vessel stands in two worlds at one and the same time: whereas reality is completely irrelevant to the “pure” work of art and, as it were, is consumed in it, reality does make claims upon the vase as an object that is handled, filled and emptied, proffered, and set down here and there. This dual nature of the vase is most decisively expressed in its handle.”
“Was Robert Frost also channeling De Quincey’s murder essay in this arresting run of (seemingly) free association, from a 1916 interview?
Love, the moon, and murder have poetry in them by common consent. But it’s in other places. It’s in the axe-handle of a French Canadian woodchopper…. You know the Canadian woodchoppers whittle their axe-handles, following the curve of the grain, and they’re strong and beautiful. Art should follow lines in nature, like the grain of an axe-handle.”
“Of course, Frost may be seen to be alluding to other things—here and in his related poem “The Axe-Helve,” in which a French-Canadian woodcutter named Baptiste criticizes a machine-made handle, showing with his thumbnail how the grain ran “Across the handle’s long drawn serpentine,/ Like the two strokes across a dollar sign.” Handles here stand in for the way Frost’s poetry followed the crooked, and perhaps non-commercial rhythms of ordinary speech, the grain, or what he called “sentence sounds.””
“Such a view of how the grain must dictate the lines of the handle—recalling how Michelangelo claimed to free the statue imprisoned in a chunk of marble—would seem the opposite of Gary Snyder’s praise of previous patterns in his poem “Axe Handles,” in which his son wants to replace a missing hatchet-handle, and Snyder suggests they repurpose a broken ax-handle.”
“There I begin to shape the old handle
With the hatchet, and the phrase
First learned from Ezra Pound
Rings in my ears!
“When making an axe handle
the pattern is not far off.”
Snyder traces the quotation to a fourth-century Chinese source, translated for him by his own teacher Chen. “And I see,” he concludes in an epiphany: “Pound was an axe,/ Chen was an axe, I am an axe/ And my son a handle, soon/ To be shaping again, model/ And tool, craft of culture,/ How we go on.” Snyder’s patterns lack the machine-made precision decried by Baptiste, resembling, instead, the pattern a writer of sonnets has in mind in setting pen to paper.”
“Snyder invokes the idea of literary tradition as a “handing down,” from father to son and from teacher to student, “how we go on.” In such a transfer, the ax stands in for the pen (in a different context, Snyder compared a laptop to a nice little chainsaw). In his seductive praise of the “craft of culture,” Snyder recalls Elias Canetti’s moving assertion: “It is the quiet, prolonged activities of the hand which have created the only world in which we care to live.””