William Day at the IAI:
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. So if they are nevertheless good – & I don’t know whether they are or not – they must be a law to themselves.” What makes Wittgenstein think he can lay claim to such a judgment? Part of the answer may lie in Wittgenstein’s own remarkable talent for similes and figures of comparison. Given their importance to his way of doing philosophy, it shouldn’t surprise that he was good at making them, and knew he was good.
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.” Compare this marvelous image – revelatory both of its author and of the process of writing, so often felt as a movement without forward motion – 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.” 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, even when one acknowledges that here it is closed to keep something in rather than to keep something out.
More here.
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