Is Nature Conservative?

: Wittgenstein and Heidegger on Architecture and Poetry

There are interesting similarities, as well as important differences, between the

philosophies of Wittgenstein and Heidegger. One such similarity is that they took an
interest in architecture. Another is that their work is sometimes accused of having a
conservative bias (with dark implications in the case of the one-time Nazi Heidegger). In
this paper I want to look at what Wittgenstein and Heidegger said about architecture, at
the link they both saw between good architecture and nature, and at whether this implies
any particular bias, or other weakness, in their respective philosophies of architecture (if
we can call them that). I will start with a consideration of Heidegger's fairly selfcontained work on architecture and then go on to show how it compares with some of
Wittgenstein's ideas. Because Heidegger explicitly links architecture with poetry, I will
also say something about this connection, and about what some poets have had to say
about architecture. I will later draw on this discussion to make the point that being
guided by nature, as Heidegger and Wittgenstein think architects should be, is not
necessarily conservative, if it can be defined or characterized at all.

1. Heidegger on Building

In "Building Dwelling Thinking" Heidegger considers the relation of dwelling to

building. Dwelling, he says, is the goal of building, even though not every building is a
dwelling (even occupied houses might not be places where dwelling occurs). But "to
build is in itself already to dwell."1 So in one sense building is (part of) dwelling, and in

another it is the means to dwelling. In perhaps a third sense building is dwelling.2

Obviously we need to think a little about what Heidegger means here, how he uses
language. To understand that it will help to consider Heidegger's views on meaning and
language more generally.
Language, rightly understood, "tells us about the essence of a thing," he says.3 At
least part of what it means to understand language aright is to appreciate the fact that we
do not shape and master language, rather it is our master. It is hard to know what to
make of this, but let me try the idea that the only meaning there is to be found is in
language, and this of course exists independent of each one of us and before our birth.
Like the world it is a given and although we can manipulate it in various ways, we cannot
change any limits it might have.
Heidegger's idea that language tells about the essence of a thing is at least similar
to Wittgenstein's idea that grammar expresses the essence of a thing (see Philosophical
Investigations 371 and 373). But Heidegger takes much more interest in etymology
than Wittgenstein did, perhaps because it can reveal not only the use of a word, as
studying its grammar is meant to, but also the trajectory of this use. Wittgenstein rejects
the so-called Augustinian tendency to identify a word with some object that is meant to
be its meaning. We might also call this tendency metaphysical or realist. Instead
Wittgenstein advocates a certain kind of looking around at the use we actually make of a
word, and at the various possible uses we can and cannot imagine making sense of. To
recommend looking is not to guarantee that we will see anything in particular, so in this
way Wittgenstein does not deny realism, but his motivation is obviously somewhat antimetaphysical.

Heidegger might be read as taking this looking around a step further, or perhaps
just in a different direction, by focusing on the dimension of history. This can be seen as
adding to, and thus improving on, Wittgenstein's project, but it brings with it certain new
dangers. Etymology is not an exact science, might, as Heidegger practices it, be selective
in a biased or question-begging way, and is quite specific to each particular language,
which could turn a deep grammatical investigation into a superficial, ordinary language
investigation. One of the reasons why the study of ordinary language is unpopular is that
it can seem very conservative. Why should we be bound by what ordinary people happen
to say? Wittgenstein is not so much concerned with this as with what we find intelligible.
That is why he looks at how we ordinarily use language. The introduction of a historical
element into a philosophical investigation, though, is likely to increase any conservative
tendency in philosophy as linguistic investigation.
Heidegger, needless to say, has his sights set far deeper than the superficial and
the ordinary. This is one of the reasons why he looks historically, to unearth the
associations and connections that exist in the language we use whether we like it or not,
and despite the fact that we are rarely conscious of them. "Our thinking has of course
long been accustomed to understate the essence of the thing."4 Linguistic philosophy,
even ordinary language philosophy, does not have to be itself ordinary or superficial.
So, what does Heidegger's investigation and rumination reveal? To dwell is to
inhabit the earth, to have a life that is habitual, to have, I suppose one might say, a
recognizably or distinctly human form of life. It means to cultivate, both in the sense of
looking after, preserving, the land that is our home, and in the sense of building things up,
raising crops and putting up buildings. But we do this in a certain context. In the context

of the earth and its particular local features but also in the context of our humanity, our
mortality, i.e. death, and in the context of the starry heavens above (which Heidegger
calls simply "sky" but which has a significance for him that is more obviously expressed
in Kant's words) and the divinities that they inspire us to believe in (if only in the form of
hope). And to dwell is to be at home, to live in a state of peace and freedom. This means
not just being oneself free from outside aggression, but peacefully leaving what is around
us free, preserving and cultivating it. True dwelling, as Heidegger understands it, is
harmonious with the context outlined above.
It is into such a context that buildings are raised. What they are is determined at
least in part by this context and of course they in turn help to make the context, or the
world, what it is. The fundamentals of earth, sky, mortals and divinities remain. Any
building, a bridge, say, is brought into the context of these four essentials and so has a
relation to them. Their relation to the bridge is something that they have in common, and
in this sense the bridge brings them together, as it also brings us together with them. As a
place where we live and as a tool or piece of furniture used in our lives a building thus
relates us (freely, peacefully and harmoniously if it is a building and not a trap) to our
world. Buildings thus house our lives, even when they are not literally houses.
Some of Heidegger's claims about essence might seem unproved, or even empty.
Heidegger is not very interested in proof. "All proof is always only a subsequent
undertaking on the basis of presuppositions. Anything at all can be proved, depending
only on what presuppositions are made," he says.5 What is most important, then, is to get
our presuppositions right, or replaced by something more reliable than mere
presupposition. It is the gathering of truth to which Heidegger devotes his philosophical

efforts (which is not unlike the later Wittgenstein's gathering of instances of language use
that we would all accept). And the idea that buildings arise out of and play a part in
human lives is surely undeniable. The existence of a context at least roughly like the one
Heidegger describes must be accepted. Whether we, or architects, should pay attention to
it is another question, but it is hard to imagine a refusal to do so being successfully
presented as anything other than blinkered.
Does anything practical follow from this? At the start of his lecture Heidegger
says that, "This thinking about building does not presume to discover architectural ideas,
let alone to give rules for building."6 However, he ends the lecture with a call to
dwelling, which is to be achieved, he says, by thinking for the sake of dwelling and by
building out of dwelling. When we think, or when we think in the right way, looking
around and back and reflecting, then we will dwell, i.e. live in peace and freedom, in
harmony with the earth, our mortality, the sky, and the divinities. And when we dwell,
then we will truly build, rather than merely construct, one might say. There can be no
doubt that this is what we ought to do, as Heidegger sees things. But what such building
would be like, he does not say. He does give an example from the past of a peasant
farmhouse, built simply in accordance with local geography (taking into account the
mountain-slope and winter snow) and human needs (it is close to a spring and has a place
for an altar, a childbed, and a coffin). But he explicitly denies that we should build such
houses now and even questions whether we could do so. First, it seems, we must think,
then we will dwell, and then we will build as we should. Before the first two stages are
achieved it is impossible to say what the third will look like.

2. Heidegger on Poetry

David Farrell Krell connects Heidegger's thinking on architecture with poetry.

Heidegger himself gave another lecture around the same time as "Building Dwelling
Thinking" called "Poetically Man Dwells" and Krell observes that:

In poetry we are less disposed to manipulate things or reduce them to our

technical-scientific, quantitative frames of reference; we are encouraged rather to
let things be what they are and show their manysidedness.7

In "Poetically Man Dwells" Heidegger says that:

the responding in which man authentically listens to the appeal of language is that
which speaks in the element of poetry. The more poetic a poet is--the freer (that
is, the more open and ready for the unforeseen) his saying--the greater is the
purity with which he submits what he says to an ever more painstaking listening,
and the further what he says is from the mere prepositional statement that is dealt
with solely in regard to its correctness or incorrectness.8

The poet is the person who attends to language and speaks impersonally, or allows
language to speak through him or her. Poetry in this sense expresses the culture, with its
history, whose language it is, but also the world in which and out of which that culture
has grown and lives. Poetry, for Heidegger, is this expression. Our culture, our form of

life, is expressive, is linguistic. So poetry is essential to our form of life. Thus Heidegger
writes that, "we are to think of the nature of poetry as a letting-dwell, as a--perhaps even
the--distinctive kind of building."9 Poetry thus understood is not some fanciful flight of
imagination or escapism. On the contrary, "Poetry is what first brings man onto the
earth, making him belong to it, and thus brings him into dwelling."10
According to Heidegger there is something inescapably moral or religious or
existential about this. In expressing our life poetry expresses our relation to the natural
world, including the earth and the sky, and the dimension to which both earth and sky
belong. "Man's dwelling depends on an upward-looking measure-taking of the
dimension, in which the sky belongs just as much as the earth."11 This is religious
because the sky suggests to us the idea of god. But not in any clear or readily graspable
way. "[T]he unknown god appears as the unknown by way of the sky's manifestness.
This appearance is the measure against which man measures himself."12 And the
measuring here is not precise or purposive in any egoistic, grasping way. The taking of
our measure is "a taking which at no time clutches at the standard but rather takes it in a
concentrated perception, a gathered taking-in, that remains a listening."13 Such listening
or attention does not clarify things or solve any problems (although it might make them
seem no longer important). The world and our place in it, and thus our essence, remains
mysterious. Indeed, "poetry, as the gauging of that strange measure, becomes ever more
mysterious. And so it must doubtless remain, if we are really prepared to make our stay
in the domain of poetry's being."14 The spirit of modern technology is quite opposed to
the spirit of such poetry. "Thus it might be that our unpoetic dwelling, its incapacity to
take the measure, derives from a curious excess of frantic measuring and calculating."15

3. Poets on Architecture

There are different kinds of poetry, of course, but there certainly is a tradition of
poetry that tries to reveal things as they are (but are not always seen to be). Two of the
main British poets of the twentieth century who belong to this tradition are Philip Larkin
and Sir John Betjeman. Interestingly, Larkin wrote that:

at Betjeman's heart lies not poetry but architecture--or, if the concepts are
allowed, a poetry that embraces architecture and an architecture that embraces
poetry.16

Betjeman's thoughts on architecture seem to have been rather similar to Heidegger's. I

quote Larkin again: "it is not so much the architecture of a building that appeals to him as
its relation to human use, to human scale and size, and the degree to which it reflects
human life and emotions."17 The relation of a building to human use is of course likely to
be taken into account by every architect, but what counts as human scale, and what
counts as reflecting human life and emotions, are not likely to be so readily agreed on. It
is hard to prove that Heidegger and Betjeman share the same view since Betjeman wrote
little philosophy and since Heidegger seems to have felt unable to say what would now
count as good architecture. However, it seems to me that there is what we might call a
family resemblance at least between their ideas about what used to constitute good
architecture and also between their ideas and feelings about nature and divinity. Both are

conservation-minded, religiously-inclined, humble beneath the sky and before the earth
and death. Betjeman wrote a good deal about architecture and certainly viewed it in the
full context of human life, not in the abstract but in the sense of actual human lives, in
real, and therefore specific, places such as Great Britain. According to Betjeman:

architecture means not a house, or a single building or a church, or Sir Herbert

Baker, or the glass at Chartres, but your surroundings; not a town or a street, but
our whole over-populated island.18

This of course is not how everyone thinks of, or looks at, architecture, and so Betjeman
has to work to get his audience to share his view. Hence Larkin writes that, "a great deal
of what he writes is, overtly or covertly, propaganda for what he believes"19
This might not sound like what Heidegger is up to, but there is a poetic quality to
Heidegger's writing. He does not straightforwardly tell it like it is, and he knows that his
understanding of the truth is not the ordinary understanding. He has some transformative
work to do on his audience. This he seems to try to achieve partly by argument, but, like
Plato, he combines this with a sort of visionary appeal. Heidegger invites us to see the
world as he does, and perhaps also claims that we do already, and always have, seen it
this way, but he can offer little evidence for such claims. How much empirical evidence
or rational argument is there, for instance, in the following paragraph?:

The sky is the vaulting path of the sun, the course of the changing moon,
the wandering glitter of the stars, the year's seasons and their changes, the light

and dusk of day, the gloom and glow of night, the clemency and inclemency of
the weather, the drifting clouds and blue depth of the ether. When we say sky, we
are already thinking of the other three [i.e. earth, divinities, and mortals] along
with it, but we give no thought to the simple oneness of the four.20

I do not mean that Heidegger's work should be discounted, or that it does not count as
thought. I mean, on the contrary, that it can be valued as thought while at the same time
being recognized as propaganda in the same kind of way that Betjeman's poetry is
propaganda for what he believes. What each believes is that we should look at the world,
at ourselves and the context of our lives, in a certain way. It is a way of looking that is
quite similar to Simone Weil's concept of attention; a patient, loving, accepting, honest
gaze. And it goes hand in hand with thinking a certain way, taking things in, looking
around to see what is there. There is a passivity in each case, a lack of selfish
purposiveness. It is thinking not as means-end or if-then reasoning, but as a kind of
contemplation or seeing. It is thinking of the kind practiced and advocated by another
self-confessed propagandist: Wittgenstein again.

4. Wittgenstein on Philosophy and Architecture

In his lectures on aesthetics Wittgenstein says that he is "in a sense making

propaganda for one style of thinking as opposed to another."21 What the other is he does
not say, but it includes scientism.22 The kind of conservatism that unites Heidegger,
Betjeman, Larkin, and Wittgenstein is the kind that says, "Don't think, look!" But of

10

course there are different ways of looking. One cannot prove that the expansive looking,
the kind that looks in the context of the universe and the whole of human history, or that
tries to do so, is better than the kind that looks in the context of our narrow interests.
Perhaps those who take the narrower view can be embarrassed into giving it up (just as, I
would argue, Wittgenstein tries to embarrass the sceptic in On Certainty without, as
Stanley Cavell has pointed out, proving that skepticism is wrong), but even then we
cannot know that everyone who looks that way will react in the same way, with the same
feelings (unless this is made the criterion of looking in the right way, which would itself
be an embarrassment). So we cannot prove that any of these thinkers is right to adopt
their chosen method. But if we accept the importance and value of truth, of
disinterestedness, and of context, then we will be embarrassed if our beliefs do not
survive such attentive scrutiny. This means both, Can they withstand careful
investigation themselves? and also, Do they remain when we look on the rest of the world
in such a way? Philosophy addresses largely the former question, poetry the latter. Thus
Wittgenstein:

Working in philosophy -- like work in architecture in many respects -- is really

more a working on oneself. On one's own interpretation. On one's way of seeing
things. (And what one expects of them.)23

Work in architecture is like work in philosophy--which Wittgenstein conceives of

as grammatical investigation--because architecture is like language. Wittgenstein writes:
"Remember the impression one gets from good architecture, that it expresses a thought.

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It makes one want to respond with a gesture."24 If good architecture expresses a thought
then it is not so much like language, rather it is part of language. But note that
Wittgenstein says this only of good architecture (which he elsewhere simply calls
architecture, as opposed to mere building for a purpose), and that such architecture only
gives the impression that it expresses a thought, it does not necessarily actually do so.
Still, he does seem to have believed that the best architecture is part of language, not as
words are, but in the way that a gesture is. Thus he says: "Architecture is a gesture. Not
every purposive movement of the human body is a gesture. And no more is every
building designed for a purpose architecture."25 Again he talks of, "Phenomena akin to
language in music or architecture. Significant irregularity -- in Gothic for instance (I am
thinking too of the towers of St. Basil's Cathedral)."26 And again he distinguishes
between real architecture, which expresses or at least gestures toward something (a
gesture can be vague or unmistakably precise) and what is merely called architecture. He
tells us that he does not accept "what nowadays passes for architecture as
architecture"27
Several points are worth making here. One is that Wittgenstein quite clearly does
not believe that the word 'architecture' means simply what most people nowadays call
'architecture'. Ordinary language and use are important, but not in the crude sense that
only the most ordinary uses are acceptable or make sense. It is part of our language that
one can make such distinctions as that between real architecture and what merely passes
for architecture. Being Wittgensteinian does not mean giving in to simple majority rule,
as is sometimes thought.

12

A second point is that Wittgenstein is therefore not committed to a conservative

or populist position on any matter of value. He need not be, for instance, politically
conservative. But he is in fact (speaking for himself, not as a philosophical describer of
what everyone will admit) conservative in just the kind of way I have been describing in
connection with Heidegger and others. It is precisely because he is not committed to
slavishly following what is ordinarily asserted by the community of language-users in
which he finds himself that Wittgenstein is able to be so idiosyncratically conservative
with regard to matters of taste.

In a bad period the task facing a great architect (Van der Nll) is completely
different from what it is in a good period. You must not let yourself be seduced
by the terminology in common currency. Don't take comparability, but rather
incomparability, as a matter of course.28

The second sentence from that quotation is worth repeating: "You must not let
yourself be seduced by the terminology in common currency." There could be no clearer
evidence that Wittgenstein does not believe that we should feel hidebound by ordinary
uses of language. Indeed he urges himself to go against the flow. Such a position is
perfectly intelligible, of course, within our language, but in no way follows inevitably
from it. Wittgenstein is speaking for himself here, not doing what he would call
philosophy. "Philosophy only states what everyone admits," as he says in Philosophical
Investigations 599. When discussing architecture, poetry, politics, ethics, or religion it

13

is important, if not always easy, to distinguish Wittgenstein the man from Wittgenstein
the philosopher.
A third point worth noting, though, is that if we do think of architecture
linguistically (which we do not have to do) then what Wittgenstein says about language
should apply to architecture. What he counts as architecture is expressive, meaningful.
What merely passes for architecture is a kind of nonsense. It is building materials put
together for a purpose but with no thought expressed or gesture made. Philosophically
one cannot show that nonsense is bad (the aim of Wittgenstein's philosophical work is
simply to show that certain combinations of words are nonsense) but it is pretty clear
where Wittgenstein's own sympathies lie. It does seem that it would be embarrassing to
support building that failed to be all that it could be, i.e. meaningful, but some
postmodernists might disagree. Wittgenstein himself, at least in some moods, might have
felt that meaningful, i.e. good or real, architecture was simply not possible in the current
age. "Architecture immortalizes and glorifies something. Hence there can be no
architecture where there is nothing to glorify."29 But is any time as bleak as that? For
Heidegger there is always the fourfold of earth, sky, mortals and divinities, and for
Wittgenstein there is something similar. Even when one's culture is dead or in decline,
there is still nature itself. This, as Heidegger thought, should guide and inspire our
building. Wittgenstein says, "Don't take the example of others as your guide, but
nature!"30

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5. God and Nature as Our Guides

What does it mean to take nature as your guide, though? Only the discerning eye
can really know. Wittgenstein brought such a critical eye to his own attempt at
architecture:

the house I built for Gretl is the product of a decidedly sensitive ear and good
manners, an expression of great understanding (of a culture, etc.). But primordial
life, wild life striving to erupt into the open -- that is lacking. And so you could
say it isn't healthy (Kierkegaard).31

The house expresses something, it is architecture, but what it expresses is not healthy.
There is some life in it, as with a gesture --something biological seems to be necessary
for meaning-- but it is a sickly or weak kind of life, according to Wittgenstein.
Writing about the Modernism shared by Wittgenstein, Karl Kraus, and Adolf
Loos, Colin St John Wilson says that, "The Modernism of Vienna while avid for the
new, was yet, in a fiercely critical and tough-minded way, committed to continuity rather
than revolution."32 He then quotes Wittgenstein, and the passage from which he quotes is
worth giving in full:

You must say something new and yet it must all be old.
In fact you must confine yourself to saying old things -- and all the same it
must be something new!

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Different interpretations must correspond to different applications.

A poet too has constantly to ask himself: 'but is what I am writing really
true?' -- and this does not necessarily mean: 'is this how it happens in reality?'.
Yes, you have got to assemble bits of old material. But into a building.--33

Here again we see links between philosophy (which I take it is what Wittgenstein
is referring to in this passage), poetry and architecture. Larkin remarked that there are
two kinds of poetry. One kind tries to find new ways to say old things, while the other
tries to find new things to say. Only the former is any good, he believed. Wittgenstein's
comment is similar in spirit.
There is another echo of Wittgenstein in Larkin's poem "Church Going." Larkin
wonders what will become of churches in the future, after belief, superstition, and even
disbelief have gone. He sees a future for them of a kind if only because we continue to
have the kind of impulses to religion that Heidegger recognized:

A serious house on serious earth it is,

In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,

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If only that so many dead lie round.

Wittgenstein's Viennese Modernism too "retained a place in its hierarchy of

values for the sacred--or at least marked the spot of its desertion 'where there is nothing
to glorify'."34 Wittgenstein's conservatism, then, is not one that simply recreates a frozen
past endlessly. That would be dishonest, to pretend that times had not changed, that we
had not changed. St John Wilson tells us that:

One of his students wrote of an occasion on which 'as we passed

Swansea's immense new Guildhall, Wittgenstein expressed horror and disgust.
The magnificent stairway in particular annoyed him; he said it was the
architecture of a religion which nobody now professed'. And to another student
he said, of Canada House in Trafalgar Square (which he considered to have taken
over certain rhetorical forms without saying anything with them), 'That's bombast.
That's Hitler and Mussolini'--and then added how truly it showed that they were
one in spirit with us! Conversely another student reported that in speaking about
the Georgian architecture of the Dublin streets Wittgenstein said, 'The people who
built these houses had the good taste to know that they had nothing very important
to say; and therefore they didn't attempt to express anything."35

Heidegger, Betjeman, and Wittgenstein all suggest that architecture should be

somehow natural, guided by nature, expressive of nature. But they each mean this in a
particular way and I have not proved that they had quite the same way in mind. They do

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share a love or reverence of nature, though, and they also share a sense that such a
reverence should guide our building but rarely does any more. Philosophy cannot tell us,
however, how we should build (in much more detail, that is, than I have sketched here),
according to Heidegger or Wittgenstein. For that we need a certain kind of virtue, a habit
of living and thinking in a certain kind of way, and a certain aesthetic sense or skill to see
whether what has been built qualifies as what Heidegger calls dwelling or what
Wittgenstein calls simply architecture.
Nature can guide us in different ways, however. Heidegger's poetic 'listening'
produces a kind of religious response, albeit a religion of an unknown and unknowable
god. Larkin's attempt at poetry as "an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are"
produces something much more ambiguous.36 In a description that might equally be
applied to Wittgenstein, Seamus Heaney writes of Larkin that, "there survives in him a
repining for a more crystalline reality to which he might give allegiance."37 Heaney cites
the poem "MCMXIV" as an example of one of Larkin's "visions of 'the old Platonic
England,' the light in them honeyed by attachment to a dream world that will not be
denied because it is at the foundation of the poet's sensibility."38 This dream world might
not be denied, but it is not presented as anything other than a dream either. "MCMXIV"
was one of two poems that Larkin chose to represent his work in an anthology (the other
was "Send No Money") called Let the Poet Choose. Of these poems Larkin wrote that:

they might be taken as representative examples of the two kinds of poem I

sometimes think I write: the beautiful and the true One of the jobs of the poem

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is to make the beautiful seem true and the true beautiful, but in fact the disguise
can usually be penetrated.39

It seems clear enough that "MCMXIV" is an example of beauty that only seems true.
Describing reality accurately means describing such 'platonic' myths, but it means also
recognizing them as myths, however beautiful.
Larkin says of his poem "Church Going" that it is about "going to church, not
religion."40 Betjeman, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein might (for different reasons) dispute
this distinction, but Larkin clearly is not trying to get at anything extra-human or
metaphysical here. He is concerned with human behaviour and psychology. Churches
are important to Larkin because, as R. N. Parkinson puts it, they are "the visible and
outward sign of devout contemplation, bringing into focus the bearing of ethics,
philosophy, and history upon human nature."41 Churches and visits to churches have
value for Larkin because they bring us together with seriousness, the desire for
seriousness, marriage, birth, death, and the dead. This bringing together is not simply a
matter of reminding us of these things but also of physically bringing us into proximity
with them. We do not only register the fact of marriage, birth, death, and so on, but we
breathe the air where these things are celebrated or commemorated, and we do so in a
public place, with others (living or dead).
The value of Heidegger's listening, or Weil's attention, is also questioned by
Larkin's poem "Send no Money," the representative of truth that is not beautiful. Larkin's
verdict is all the more damning because it comes from one who has listened poetically as
Heidegger says we should (or who has tried hard to do so at least). Instead of the kind of

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grasping life that Heidegger warns us against, the poem's narrator chooses to sit and
watch passively in order to find out the truth:

Dare you look at that straight?

Oh thank you, I said, Oh yes please,
And sat down to wait.

Half life is over now,

And I meet full face on dark mornings
The bestial visor, bent in
By the blows of what happened to happen.
What does it prove? Sod all.

Of course this might be a passing mood for the attentive poet, but it might not be. It
might be what we would think after long and careful reflection. That truth is particular
("untransferable" is Larkin's word) and contingent. The world can seem to speak to us,
but does not actually do so. "The trees are coming into leaf/Like something almost being
said." There is ambiguity always. In "The Trees" what they seem to say is, "Last year is
dead begin afresh, afresh, afresh." This strikes some readers as affirmative, like
Chesterton's God who makes the sun rise every day because he can't get enough of it.42
[reference?]. To others the repetition of "afresh" will seem weary, and the endless cycle
of life and death Sisyphusian.

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6. Architecture as Expression

Part of the problem with understanding nature is that there is so much of it. The
undomesticated parts of nature at least have no clear context except that of the entire
world. It is this immenseness, with its local wild variety and distant ungraspable
darkness, that is spiritually impressive. Wilderness or raw nature points us to it, perhaps
because we naturally look for order and find none there, or because we naturally look for
some defining context and find none.
Where there is a human context or order, though, we are more at home and can
make more sense of things. This is a relative matter, or so it seems. Everything we do,
including our abstentions, 'says' something, is potentially informative, simply because
human behaviour is the kind of thing we understand. Of course people sometimes
behave inexplicably or insanely, but then that in itself is significant. The relativity comes
in when we think of other animals as being more or less like human beings, and we can
even think of the elements in similar terms (the sea being a cruel mistress and so on).
Indeed it is hard not to think in such terms. Words such as 'cold' and 'dark' do not just
describe space, they characterize it. An uncharacterized description (or a description
understood in purely objective terms) might be useful for scientific purposes, but it
involves a kind of detachment that would make one inhuman if it were in effect at all
times.
The built environment, including cultivated farms and gardens, is somewhere
between raw nature and language. We can make some attempt to 'read' anything, but
what is not in fact a text, or what is farthest from paradigmatic texts, will be not only hard

21

to read but inherently vague or ambiguous. The sea might be like a cruel mistress, but it
is like a lot of other things too. Buildings are easier, but are still not actually texts. They
are, as Wittgenstein says, more like gestures. And those not designed by fluent architects
might be incoherent noise.
Of course not all architecture is meant to be expressive and not every attempt to
be expressive will succeed. But every building will nonetheless have or express a certain
spirit. This will depend not so much on the attitude of the architect (since the architect
might fail, or never intend, to express a particular attitude) but on the relation of the
building to its context (built, human, and natural), and the relation of the building's parts
to each other and their context. The spirit of a building is a function of how it makes
sensitive observers and users of the building feel. Sensitivity here can be understood as a
kind of literacy or skill, which is gained primarily by simply attending to buildings and
how they make one feel. It is a literacy that we can teach ourselves.
Nelson Goodman says that:

A gothic building that soars and sings does not equally droop and grumble.
Although both descriptions are literally false, the former but not the latter is
metaphorically true.43

B. R. Tilghman has pointed out, though, that neither description is metaphorically true. It
is not as if the building sings.44 That would be ridiculous and frightening. Rather, the
building makes us feel a certain way, which is like the way we feel when we see things
soar and hear singing (of a certain kind). How is the feeling in the one case like that in

22

the other? In the sense that both prompt us to talk of soaring and singing. The soaring is
neither literal nor metaphorical but rather what Wittgenstein calls secondary, as when one
might say that the word Tuesday sounds thin and Wednesday fat. This, it seems to me, is
undeniably subjective and it is precisely the kind of reaction that is necessary for
aesthetic judgment. There is more that can be said, though, about what makes good
architecture.
Tilghman recommends that we employ a conception of expression in architecture:

in which expression includes the sheltering and encouraging of human activities

and makes clear to us the traditions and cultural heritage in which those activities
are placed.45

This is Heideggerian and questionable. Which activities should be sheltered and

encouraged? Church-going? Shopping? Whichever ones the architect wants?
Whatever the users of the building want? And what if "the cultural heritage in which
those activities are placed" is, say, racist or oppressive in some other way? Should this
racism be made clear in the architecture? Perhaps it should. Perhaps the empty bombast
of fascist architecture is exactly right. But appropriateness is not the only virtue. An
appropriately beautiful building would surely be better than an appropriately turgid or
grim one. The name of the awful Leningrad Square in Wythenshawe is wonderfully apt,
but it would be better for everyone if such unintentional irony were uncalled for.
Tilghman suggests also that the design of a fast food restaurant is an expression of
an understanding of our culture, and that it will maximize utility precisely where it best

23

expresses such an understanding (of what customers and employees will want to do in
the building, in what order, and so on). But, he adds, a work that expresses an
understanding of our culture might not be a work that we want to see. The truth might
be painful, even ugly (although Tilghman does not use these terms). So the idea of
expression as logically linked with utility and understanding of culture is hardly a
replacement for the idea of aesthetic beauty.

7. Wittgenstein on Aesthetics

In his lectures on aesthetics Wittgenstein points out that the word 'beautiful' is in
fact hardly ever used and that it is generally misunderstood by those who think that
certain objects have the quality of being beautiful. He also says that if one were to write
a book on philosophy it would be intelligent to divide it up into kinds of words, and that
'beautiful' and 'good' would belong in the same chapter. This suggests not that the two
words mean the same thing but that somewhat similar confusions arise with each of them.
Language plays the same kind of tricks when we do aesthetics as when we do ethics. To
see through these tricks we should focus not on such words as 'beautiful', Wittgenstein
suggests, but "on the enormously complicated situation in which the aesthetic expression
has a place."46 If we attend to this situation we see, Wittgenstein implies, we will see that
a philosophical concern with beauty is misplaced because talk about beauty is
inarticulate. Generally we use the word 'beautiful' as an interjection (as when almost
dumbstruck one exclaims or sighs "Beautiful!") or else as a very imprecise way of
referring to some dimly perceived quality of which we approve. In criticism,

24

Wittgenstein says, "The words you use are more akin to 'right' and 'correct' (as these
words are used in ordinary speech) than to 'beautiful' and 'lovely'."47
The question of what counts as correct in any given context brings up the vexed
question of rule-following, but there is no need to bring in chunks of material from the
Philosophical Investigations here. Wittgenstein's method is to attend to particular uses of
language, and he does that in his lectures on aesthetics. For instance, when designing a
building, playing a piece of music, or cutting cloth for a suit, we say "That's too much,"
or "This is wrong," and so on. We might mean that what has been done will not produce
the desired result, as when a door will not open properly if made a certain way, or a poem
will not make people feel sad if read a certain way. There could, Wittgenstein says, be a
science that would tell us what would produce what feelings. But this is not an aesthetic
consideration. A good work of art is not one that produces any specific result.
Considered solely as a work of art (if that is possible) it does not matter whether a
building has a leaky roof or not. Certainly one can imagine an artist making building-like
sculptures in which the roofs were meant to be leaky. Good music is not music that
makes people happy. Nor is art like a drug that produces some other specific, "aesthetic"
experience. If it were, we might recommend one poem, say, as being just as good (in the
sense of being just as likely to do the trick) as another. But this is absurd (to anyone who
knows poetry). A good work of art is one in which all elements are right and in which
the elements combine how? Harmoniously, perhaps, but 'appropriately' is a better
word, because harmony might itself be avoided for artistic reasons. In other words, a
good work of art is a work of art that is done well. Aesthetic quality is sui generis.

25

A conservative might point out that there are certain rules that must be followed.
Poems must scan and so on. There is certainly something to this. But of course these
rules can be broken without the results always being artistic disaster. Not all innovation
or jazz is bad. At least, if it is bad it is so contingently and not by definition. If I hate
jazz I might insist that it is all bad "by definition," but then this is my definition, not the
definition. Secondly, where do the rules in question come from? They are something
like rules of thumb, developed over time, by people who know what they are doing.
They are like moral principles. Extremely important, but breakable by the talented or
virtuous person who understands their value and knows just when to break them, and
how much, and in what way.
Wittgenstein's stance is that we should resist the temptation to reduce one thing to
another, to boil things down. Even if we can boil one thing down and get another (he
talks about boiling one of his students at 200 C. until only vapour, ashes, etc. remain) we
run the risk of ignoring all that is most important in the process. Any kind of art can be
treated as a drug, or as political propaganda, or as a way to impress members of the
opposite sex, or as an exercise in cultural tradition, but it need not be, and generally is
not. Wittgenstein does a good job of supplying ammunition in the war against reduction,
but he does not prove that reduction is either impossible or bad. Rather he shows us what
some of the cost of reduction would be, the absurdity, the superficiality, the ugliness of it.
He is in the business of persuasion but he tries to use the least sophistical, least
objectionable, least subjective methods available. As far as possible, he confines himself
to saying only what everyone will admit.

26

But of course not everyone will admit that aesthetic value is sui generis, or that
the very notion of aesthetic value is hopelessly vague. So Wittgenstein does not go in for
such large pronouncements (except as asides or introductory remarks to his lecture
audience, which consists of a small number of people that he knows well). Instead he
focuses on particular cases. My comments on Wittgenstein, which attempt to abstract not
a thesis but a view, are thus not themselves Wittgensteinian in method. But they are
Wittgensteinian in identifying the purpose behind the method.
I said that aesthetic value is sui generis (which makes it sound important) and yet
also not a useful notion (which makes it sound unimportant). How can this be?
Wittgenstein says:

Supposing you meet someone in the street and he tells you he has lost his
greatest friend, in a voice extremely expressive of his emotion. You might say:
"It was extraordinarily beautiful, the way he expressed himself." Supposing you
then asked: "What similarity has my admiring this person with my eating vanilla
ice and liking it?" To compare them seems almost disgusting. (But you can
connect them by intermediate cases.)48

In other words, we can (and do) link quite different experiences, events and cases
together and call them all 'aesthetic', but it is wise to pay attention to the differences.
Focusing on the general abstraction ignores what is most important in a way that "seems
almost disgusting" (as it would if we boiled a person down and said that the physical
remains were all that the person had ever amounted to). Still, when we do look at the

27

details of these linked cases we see that there are similarities, and it is these, what these
cases have in common that they do not share with others, that I am getting at when I say
that aesthetic quality is sui generis.
Conclusion

I think it is worthwhile simply to point out the family resemblance between

Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Betjeman, and Larkin. More importantly, though, I have tried
to show that nature does not dictate any particular attitude or aesthetic response. No
doubt one can be inspired by nature, and those architects, for instance, who are might
well find that their work has something in common. But Heidegger's implication that
there is such a thing as the poetic response, the honest response to the world we live in
(which is relevant not only for poets but for all of us who want to live well) seems nave.
Even when we include our language and its history as an important component of this
world, there is no objective, unambiguously right next move in the history of architecture.
We cannot rely on nature as a culture-independent criterion of existential or artistic
correctness. Within our cultural history we might turn to nature for inspiration, but there
is no guarantee that we will find any (as Larkin shows) or that it will take one form rather
than another (as Larkin also shows). And whether we should turn to nature at all is yet
another question, too big to answer here. Rather than nature being our guide in art, it is
art (i.e. connoisseurs of the arts) that must tell us whether and in what way art should
look to nature.

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Notes
1

Martin Heidegger "Building Dwelling Thinking," in David Farrell Krell (ed.) Basic

Writings (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1977) p. 324.

2

See p. 325.

Ibid., p. 324.

Ibid., p. 331.

Martin Heidegger " Poetically Man Dwells ," in his Poetry, Language, Thought

translated by Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971) p. 222.
6

Heidegger "Building Dwelling Thinking," p. 323.

Ibid., p. 320.

Heidegger "Poetry, Language, Thought" p. 216.

Ibid., p. 215.

10

Ibid., 218.

11

Ibid., 221.

12

Ibid., 223.

13

Ibid.

14

Ibid., p. 224.

15

Ibid., p. 228.

16

John Betjeman Collected Poems compiled by The Earl of Birkenhead, introduction by

Philip Larkin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), pp. xxi-xxii.

17

Ibid., p. xxiii.

18

Ibid., p. xxiii.

19

Ibid., p. xxv.

29

20

Heidegger "Building Dwelling Thinking," p. 327.

21

Ludwig Wittgenstein Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and

Religious Belief edited by Cyril Barrett (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966) p. 28.
22

See ibid., p.27.

23

Ludwig Wittgenstein Culture and Value edited by G. H. von Wright in collaboration

with Heikki Nyman, translated by Peter Winch (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980) p. 16e.
24

Ibid., p. 22e.

25

Ibid., p. 42e.

26

Ibid., p. 34e.

27

Ibid., p. 6e.

28

Ibid., p. 74e.

29

Ibid., p. 69e.

30

Ibid., p. 41e.

31

Ibid., p. 38e.

32

Colin St John Wilson "The Play of Use and the Use of Play: An Interpretation of

Wittgenstein's Comments on Architecture," The Architectural Review Volume CLXXX

Number 1073 (July 1986) p. 15.
33

Ludwig Wittgenstein Culture and Value p. 40e (written in 1941).

34

Colin S John Wilson p. 15.

35

Ibid., p. 18.

36

Philip Larkin "Big Victims: Emily Dickinson and Walter de la Mare," New Statesman

79 (March 13th, 1970) p. 368.

30

37

Seamus Heaney "The Main of Light," in Anthony Thwaite (ed.) Larkin at Sixty

(London: Faber and Faber, 1982) p. 132.

38

Ibid., p. 137.

39

Philip Larkin in Let the Poet Choose (London: Harrap, 1973) p. 102.

40

Ian Hamilton "Four Conversations: Philip Larkin," London Magazine 4 (November

1964) p. 73.
41

R. N. Parkinson "'To Keep Our Metaphysics Warm': A Study of 'Church Going'," The

Critical Survey 5 (Winter 1971) p. 229.

42

G. K. Chesterton Orthodoxy (New York: Doubleday, 1990) p. 60.

43

Nelson Goodman "How Buildings Mean," in Nelson Goodman and Catherine Z. Elgin

(eds.) Reconceptions in Philosophy and Other Arts and Sciences (Cambridge and
Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1988), p. 40.
44

B. R. Tilghman "Architecture, Expression, and the Understanding of a Culture," in

Michael H. Mitias (ed.) Philosophy and Architecture (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B.

V., 1994), p. 58.
45

Ibid., p. 60.

46

Ludwig Wittgenstein Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and

Religious Belief edited by Cyril Barrett (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966) p. 2.

47

Ibid., p. 3.

48

Ibid., p. 12.

31