Pascal’s unclassified papers, perhaps due to the ease and freedom with which they can be rearranged, tend to focus on more particular issues. There is however an undeniable difference between the classified papers and those unclassified, or yet to be classified by Pascal himself. They have a dual concern: how to understand the world and how to exist within that world. I would suggest that although Pascal approaches both of these notions from a Christian perspective, he seems less concerned with the truth of Christianity and more with its application. The project of the later unclassified papers share this project with Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, even though Wittgenstein makes effort to approach from a more neutral position focusing on the universality of language and not an overarching truth.

I would like to use this blog post to look at where these two projects appear, at least to me, most similarly and when Emily Dickinson also turns her attention to this notion of how to be in the world. The three thinkers share an approach through individual will, control, and a connection between speaking, action, and intent.

Wittgenstein begins an investigation into the nature of willing, how it differs from wishing, and how much control or power one can have over it. In remark 618, he seems to disagree with Augustine’s idea “My will does not obey me” posing instead the idea that the body and the will can be divided, and in disagreement, but only through physical capability “I will, but my body does not obey me.” There is no possibility for Wittgenstein of a failure to will or an attempt to will. It is a certainty. What is not certain, and consequently what fascinates Wittgenstein and Pascal, is the uncertainty with which our will and actions are interpreted, how they function in the world.“Doing itself seems not to have any experimental volume” from the doer, yet it is impossible to know what the reaction will be (remark 620).

I am reminded of a quote of Hannah Arendt from her discussion of the Vita Activa in which she claims that it is only through speaking and action that man can exist in the world. Yet, outside of the initial motivation —or will as it would be so named in Wittgenstein— there is always an element of uncertainty. “This is the simple fact that, though we don’t know what we are doing when we are acting, we have no possibility ever to undo what we have done. Action processes are not only unpredictable, they are also irreversible, there is no author or maker who can undo, destroy, what he has done if he does not like it or when the consequences prove to be disastrous.” Arendt uses her conclusion to urge individuals to consider the cause behind their actions, as Wittgenstein does with his investigation into the nature of will, and to stress the importance of know what effect one’s actions can have on another. It is here that Wittgenstein differs from Arendt. “We can often predict a man’s actions from his expression of a decision” (remark 632) suggests that Wittgenstein is using his discussion of will, action, and intent to look at how we can read these in another person. It is through an understanding of the nuances and limitations of language that Wittgenstein believes understanding of one another can be achieved, and a knowledge of the nature of our own will and the actions it causes will allow us to articulate it fully and understanding the meaning of others’ articulations.

Pascal, similarly, points to the importance of understanding the nuances of language. In remark 784, for example, he notes “different arrangements of words make different meanings, and different arrangements of meanings produce different effects.” Pascal, in his traditional style, does not expand on this aphorism leaving it for his reader to unpack. However, in light of the later discussion he has, about voluntary and involuntary acts, it is likely that he is either warning readers of being careful of their words and the effect they may have or encouraging the same readers to notice word patterns— or language games— in others. Pascal’s discussion of voluntary and involuntary actions is, for the most part, posed in order to stress the importance of one’s actions and the motivation behind them. He belittles involuntary actions by comparing sneezing, something small and insignificant, with the prestige of being master of one’s actions. “It is because it is not pain that tempts and attracts us; it is we ourselves who voluntarily choose it and allow it to get the better of us, so that we are masters of the occasion, and in this it is man giving in to himself” (remark 795). It is, then, the feeling that becoming master of occasion gives to us that tempts us. Later, in remark 815, Pascal warns against the dangers of not thinking, or the dangers of this possibility: “Ordinary people have the ability not to think about things they do not want to think about.”  Implying that it is precisely the blind chasing of this feeling of mastery which we must be on guard against.

Dickinson, as a poet known for her peculiar punctuation, is constantly playing with the meaning and syntax of words for particular effect. However, at times she directly addresses the possibility words and their use have. Poem 913 is an example of when Dickinson looks directly at these issues and, in many ways, her investigation is in a similar vein to Wittgenstein’s and Pascal’s. The poem opens on the everyday occurrence of a man saying something “a quiet thing” without giving it too much thought. Dickinson immediately magnifies the possible effect of the words “that may furnish the Fuse unto a Spark”. The last line of the first stanza is of particular interest as it carries with it the same uncertainty in Wittgenstein’s notion of action: “In dormant nature-lain.” The fuse was there, but inactive, there is no way of knowing how it would or if it would be of effect. The second stanza follows in a similar vein. The emphasis is on the plural us, the need for care, and the importance of discourse. One must speak careful of what effect one’s words can have, be mindful in listening to what others say and how, and favour discourse over powder, charcoal, and fire.

I would like to use this blog post to explore the ideas of pain, wholes, and individuals found in Pascal and Wittgenstein in connection to another French thinker, Simone Weil. For me, she seems to lie somewhere between the two on these issues and, as she had studied Pascal extensively, offers some interesting insights to the limitations of his theory.

Pascal’s analogy, in remark 372, of a human made up of thinking members to represent how individual men relate to humanity as a greater whole is only really made up of two parts: the separated member and the body to which is belongs. It is almost as if Pascal is imagining the type of absurdity Wittgenstein asks his readers to through his discussion of how pain relates to the body (286). In Pascal, it is not a question of pain but a question of faith, or more specifically Christian faith. The separated member, or bodily appendage, is a follower of Christ who, even if it believes itself to be whole and dependent eventually “comes to know itself […] and loves itself for the body’s sake.” The process is a discovery of faith or a truth that, for Pascal, is the only possibility: “but he that is joined to the Lord is one spirit”. We can only know ourselves if we know God. The two figures of Pascal’s analogy do not directly correlate to the human and the Lord; individual members of humanity can, in fact, think. Therefore if the analogy is to work it’s literal meaning must be ignored; the literal figure of the organic body must be posited and replaced with something more abstract.

Simone Weil, in her essay on “Human Personality”, approaches a similar topic to Pascal: how we relate to one another as individuals, and how we relate to a greater whole. For Weil, however, there are three parts to the equation: the Personal, the Collective, and the Impersonal. Her three roughly correlate to Pascal’s as follows; the Personal is like the separated member of the analogy, the Collective is similar to the whole body (Jesus Christ), and the Impersonal is something else. The best correlation I can imagine is to see it as either the separated member once if has found it’s home in the body, or the human once it has found the lord. However, neither of these is quite right. Weil describes the Impersonal as all that is sacred. “What is sacred in science is truth; what is sacred in art is beauty. Truth and beauty are impersonal.” (I believe there are similarities in style with Pascal here, the use of aphoristic phrases with no guarantee the reader is following.) She goes on, still sounding like she is in agreement with Pascal, to state “Perfection is impersonal. Our personality is the part of us which belongs to error and sin”. However, it is her application of these three which marks her against Pascal and, at least for me, makes her more accessible. The personal is unimportant in both, selfish, foolish and unknowing of itself, however for Weil there is also a sense of selfishness in the collective; it too acts with itself as priority. Her collective is not Jesus Christ, it is perhaps more an institutional religion, or a nation. The impersonal then is what is missing from Pascal’s analogy, the gap that means the literal body must be posited. Similarly to Pascal she separates parts, yet not to join them together in Jesus Christ but as a way to find a different truth; Weil’s truth is Justice. The impersonal is the part which can ask “what are you going through” without relating to one’s own experience, or worrying about how it affects the collective whole.

Wittgenstein’s investigation of whether the body has pain or whether the consciousness does (although he never uses this word himself) is in a similar vein to Pascal’s analogy discussed above. However, Wittgenstein’s aim is different. He is looking at how we understand pain and how, then, we can understand the pain of others. This latter aim is what connects him to Simone Weil. Wittgenstein leads his readers through the idea that it is “absurd to say of a body that it has pain” to the question “How does it become clear that it is not the body?” (286) because for Wittgenstein, this is true. Wittgenstein moves his discussion to the larger concept of sensations to explore how they only exist in the signals and signs language, or we through the medium of language, have created in order to represent, but more importantly, to express pain and sensations to others. This focus fits into Wittgenstein’s overall investigation of language. Earlier he poses the question “what about language which describes my inner experiences [sensations] and which only I can myself can understand?”(256) Is it possible for sensations, whether pain or otherwise, to remain private and not understood when they must be expressed in a language which “is not a ‘private’ one”? Weil’s answer would be, I believe, that they should not be private; the focus should not be on your personal pain but on the pain of others. She would agree with Wittgenstein most when he demands that we do not comfort the body “but the sufferer: one looks into his eyes.”(286)

Emily Dickinson uses the ambiguity in her poem, created by punctuation and false opposites, to explore what it means to be mad. She appears to support Plato’s notion that certain madness is linked to a divine truth and uses this idea to criticise earth-bound human attitudes to madness.

The poem opens by playing with the idea of madness and sense as contrary states by linking them together: “Much Madness is divinest sense/ Much Sense- the starkest Madness”. Dickinson suggestively starts both statements the same way presenting them as opposites. However, they are not true opposites. The word “much” cancels out their opposition; as long as Dickinson is not talking in absolutes both statements can be true, to varying degrees. Dickinson seems to be simultaneously undermining the dichotomy between madness and sense whilst drawing a connection between them. Through the use of dashes, she makes it unclear whether it is the former or latter statement which is apparent “to [the] discerning eye”. A discerning eye has good, sharp judgement; an attribute Dickinson does not credit the majority with. Regardless of which statement is true to the discerning eye, the implication is that the majority do not see it. They cannot see the sense in madness, nor the madness in their sense. The dashes add to this ambiguity and coyly invite the reader to use their own discerning eye to read the lines as they deem proper.

Dickinson presents a divide between bodily senses (the five senses) and divine sense. However, once again, she is not using absolutes. The otherworldly “divinest sense” is still tied to the other senses although it is an elevated variation. It is the divinest sense not a divine sense. General sense, on the other hand, is described as “starkest madness” implying that it has a corporeal existence. Stark conjures images of stark naked, stark light, and stark raving mad. Stark naked is the body in its purest form; a stark light would be bright, obvious, and a contrast to what a discerning eye can see; someone who is stark raving mad has a physical frenzy which is different to madness as divinest sense. The stark light image echoes that found at the end of 336 “where other creatures put their eyes- /I Incautious- of the Sun-“ furthering the divide between seeing and guessing, reason and faith.  These distinctions between types of madness may be why Dickinson cannot speak in absolutes: she acknowledges the potential reality of other madness but they are not madness in the divinest sense and the two should not be aligned. The divide between corporal and divine senses becomes important in the judgement of the majority over what classes as sane and what does not.

Interestingly, in a poem full of opposites Dickinson never contrasts sanity and madness directly.  To do so would be to undermine the different types of madness and place stark raving madness and madness connected to the divine. To her this is the real false opposite.  The word madness is given so many inferences and meanings throughout the poem that it seems insufficient in getting Dickinson’s meaning across. The critique of the treatment of madness, or rather the classification of madness, by the majority reaches its climax at the end of the poem. The majority are criticised for their black and white divide. To them the opposite of sane is dangerous. Dickinson undermines this distinction with the word demur. Demur is not a true antonym of assent but, as Anna pointed out, a mild hesitation or slight divergence. “Handled with a Chain” refers to the imprisonment of the mad and “handling” invokes the idea of touch- one of the five senses- aligning this treatment away from divinest sense. The image of the chain offers another explanation of the ambiguous nature of the poem. If the punishment is a result of simply demurring Dickinson may fear being too blatant in her critique. Not only is Dickinson claiming that the treatment of the non-sane is cruel but that the supposedly sane cannot comprehend the divine sense nor the concept of a divine truth and this is certainly more than a slight demur on her part.

However, if we consider this poem within Dickinson’s oeuvre there may be something else at work here. The last three lines read like advice, perhaps from someone who has already made the wrong decision, one who did demur and was consequently handled with a chain. The tone, if the poem is read this way, is similar to the one Pascal takes up in his “Wager”. Both Pascal and Dickinson speak with a voice of experience. However there are other elements of the poem which do not coincide directly with Pascal’s views but with his way of thinking. In his discussion of who can know God— surely a form of divinest sense?— in passage 394, Pascal claims there are:

“two sorts of persons who know him: those who are humble of heart and love their lowly state, whatever their degree of their intelligence, high or low, and those who are intelligent enough to see the truth, however much they may be opposed to it.”

The type of truth Pascal is discussing here is not one connected to intelligence or education but one that exists from faith according to the first half of the passage. A notion, I believe, Dickinson shares. Truth is not something you learn from from your traditional five sense no matter how highly tuned they are. Pascal’s second group is trickier. The intelligence in the second group seems to be a different type from the first. If one’s intelligence is irrelevant then how can one be intelligent enough to see the truth? It is too much of a stretch to connect this to those who demur in Dickinson’s poem but both share the idea that truth, whichever form of it you are looking for, is not something that necessarily aligns with one’s reason or nature.

In the reading for this week I kept coming back to the idea of knowledge, knowing, and the different types of each. Pascal addresses these concepts most patently. In passages 290 and 292, he directs his attention to the oral tradition and the importance of genealogy it often carried. Before they had “studies, sciences or arts”, topics which Pascal believes fill conversations in his time, people took more care to preserve their genealogy. As one of  Pascal’s main concerns in the Pensées is Christianity and its truth, Pascal connects the tradition to how Moses passed on his teaching. “For it is not the length of the years but the number of the generations which makes things obscure, for truth is only altered when men change” (292) creates the image of Chinese Whispers: the more people it passes through, the more the message changes. Passage 292 reads like a defence of the different practices in Christianity; men have changed over time so their practices have too. It also, I believe, speaks to the idea of communities created around people who share the same understanding (not those with the understanding creating the community). How forgiving Pascal was of those communities different to his is unclear. “This evidence is conclusive among certain people who really understand the matter” suggests that he is part of one group that sees things a certain way, and there is a sense that, he privileges this way of understanding the matter.

Pascal carries this idea of different communities of understanding over to his next collection of passage: “Proofs of Jesus Christ”. He separates out three types of knowledge as being carnal knowledge, intellectual knowledge, and wisdom. It seems Pascal does not believe the three can overlap. “Great geniuses [i.e those with intellectual knowledge] have their power, their splendour, their greatness, their victory and their lustre, and do need carnal greatness”(308). They occupy the realm of the mind and are recognised through it. The carnal knowledge then, is left to the body and to the eyes, although they are unable to see the greatness of intellectual people. It is wisdom though, which is cut off from both. “The greatness of wisdom […] is not visible to carnal or intellectual people.” Perhaps it is more accurate to separate, not types of knowledge but, the types of men who have these types of knowledge. Wisdom, as Pascal describes it, exists on another plane. It is not through the human body — “bodies know nothing” — nor through the human mind but by some other entity.

Emily Dickinson, to a lesser extent, also addresses this concept. She suggests that the eyes are not the only way to see, nor the body the only way to know. In poem 336, she uses the phrase “finite eyes” to describe sight which could not take the vision, or the possession, of the meadows, mountains, stars, birds, etc. Is it that the eyes, physically, are unable to see all of nature in its entirety? Or the movement of nature cause the eyes to miss something? The knowledge received solely by eyes is finite either because the eyes themselves are finite i.e they cannot see everything, or because, even if they do see everything figure in nature, they can not see it in its infinity. The poem ends with the speaker deciding to see “with just [her] soul” and it is then that she can look “incautious” at nature and the sun. The image of the sun if particularly neat to finish on as it is commonly known that the human eye will be blinded by looking directly at the sun. The speaker, however, does not need this caution as she has thrown off her eyes and looks with her soul. Is this the same soul that Pascal’s notion of wisdom comes from? There are certainly similarities yet Dickinson does not add the mind into the equation. In fact, the speaker is the only human figure in the poem; it is only “other creatures [who] put their eyes” cautiously towards the sun.

Pascal, in his discussion — perhaps justification— of the Bible, points to the difference in figurative and literal language; it is the interplay between the two which is the key to understanding scripture and solving the contradictions that exist. For Pascal, it is necessary to solve these contradictions and Christianity is the true faith because it is the only which has succeeded in doing so through figures. Christ, for example, is figuratively a great king; it is his spirit and his eternal kingdom which make him great not what he possesses on Earth. This method of thought is central to Pascal’s work as he tries to balance his mathematical history with his faith. In passage 260, Pascal names the tool for this type on understanding as a “cipher”. For him, “a cipher has two meanings” the literal and the figurative or the spiritual. A cipher is the only way Pascal can envision the Bible with its obscurities and contradictions. The work of the prophets and the apostles was to decode this cipher, or these ciphers, to spread the truth of God to his followers: “they broke the seal, he rent the veil and revealed the spirit.”

However, Pascal does not investigate the nature of ciphers. They can be understood in two ways. Firstly, by being cracked and the true meaning being extracted and secondly, by a predetermined system between the author of the cipher and its reader or recipient. The duality attached to ciphers is complicated further by the nature of scripture. Were the ciphers first created in the Old or New Testament? Or did Christ teach in ciphers delivered to the apostles? Did they then keep the ciphered message when they wrote the scripture? Or were they in the latter type of cipher-breakers and already had the means to crack it? It is interesting to note that Pascal does little to resolve them. In 268 he claims “the letter kills […] This is the cipher St Paul gives us.” It follows that the apostles created the ciphers and it is for followers to unravel. This result is slightly unsatisfying as it just raises the question of why write contradictory scripture? Later (276) the whole of the Old Testament is labelled a cipher. Are we to presume then that the New Testament is not?

Pascal is somewhat contradictory in his guide of how to unravel contradictions. He is caught in a world of ciphers and needs to use them to escape it. This situation is one Wittgenstein believes language ties us all into. In his passage 120, Wittgenstein poses an imaginary conversation in which an unknown figure asks him to further explain his language-games and their function in our language system, and the system in which our language functions. (By this qualification I refer to Wittgenstein’s questioning of the importance of language to us as a species and our use of it to raise ourselves above the rest of the animal kingdom as he discusses in 25.) Twice in a short passage Wittgenstein notes the problem with using the tool— in this case language— being examined for the examination:“Well, your very questions were framed in this language; they had to be expressed in this language, if there was anything to ask!” and “Your questions refer to words; so I have to talk about words.” Wittgenstein, in comparison to Pascal, appears to be more aware of the limitations of his chosen tools. The difficulty of separating a word, its meaning, and, to a lesser extent, the use of  the word in the system in which they only function as a combination is an area Wittgenstein is deeply concerned with. Unlike Pascal, he does not seem to be moving towards a final truth, or to resolve the contradictions but, rather, to look at how these contradictions function in showing the limits of the system they emerge from.

Briefly, there is one significant stylistic difference between the two that is of interest to me. Opening Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations on almost any page one would find frequent use of the third person plural, i.e we and us. Even page 54, where we can find the imagined conversation, has multiple uses of this address. As readers, we allow him to lead us through the steps of his logic as if he was working through them with us; his goal is “how can these observations satisfy us?” no how can they satisfy him. Reading Pascal, with his strong faith and belief in the universal truth of God, is, at least for me, more difficult. Regardless of one’s personal faith or lack thereof, the resolution of contradictions through ciphers is not as inclusive as Wittgenstein’s line of questioning. Pascal does not think of himself as one who has “unaided knowledge”(199); it is clear he has found the truth he believes we all must do.

As Dickinson writes poetry one must always read her texts as one would a cipher. The literal meaning of her poem and its figurative one, to borrow Pascal’s terms, may rarely be the same. Although, I do not believe that in poetry is something “is false literally, so it is true spiritually”(BP 272). In much of her work Dickinson makes great use of the layers of meaning this type of dual reading allows. To keep with the theme of ciphers, Dickinson’s poem 303 discusses ghostly visitors “who baffle Key”. Key here could simply be the key to the door; these visiting hosts could arrive even though the door is locked. (Even naming her visitors as hosts is playing with double meanings.) In the following stanza Dickinson states that “They have no Robes, nor Names – / No Almanacs – nor Climes – “ i.e without those items which state something about their rank, identity, customs etc. The use of key now takes another meaning. There is nothing to give a hint of who, or what, these hosts are; they cannot be read against a key for understanding. The capitalisation of the first letter of “key” helps to align the word with robes, names, almanacs and climes, all of which are similarly capitalised.

The second half of this poem is still more allusive. In what way these hosts are like gnomes is still something that alludes me. However there is certainly a strong religious slant to poem 303. “Their Coming, may be known / By Couriers within – “ is possible a reference to Christ’s coming to the Earth which is known by some (Christians) and not others (Jews). The couriers within harkens back to the use of ciphers; things can only be known to those within the predetermine system or those who break their way in. Are these couriers some reference to the apostles? It was the word of God that they were to deliver? “Their going – is not – / For they’re never gone – “ refers back to the hosts. They do not leave but what position does this ending leave the couriers in? They do not seem to have full knowledge of the movements of the hosts whereas the speaker of the poem does. Dickinson gives us no key to help our understanding, we are excluded like the couriers in the closing two lines of the poem as those with unaided knowledge.

Blaise Pascal, Emily Dickinson, and Ludwig Wittgenstein all performed acts of curation on their works. Whether with thread, bundles, or experiments in assembly, the three writers had unusual ways they wanted their works to be collected. Consequently, it has been difficult, for me, to read these texts without engaging with the methods of their collections, or thinking of others who had similar acts of collection. I do not wish to use this blog post to theorise on why Pascal, Dickinson, and Wittgenstein worked in such a way, but rather, to explore how their methods effect the knowing reader, and how the reader then experiences their work.

However, before turning to the three writers who make up the course I would like to take a moment to discuss another artist who works and thinks in pieces: Henri Matisse. During his later years, Matisse, suffering from ill health, lost the ability to paint in the way he once had. Matisse needed a new method of creating his art and began working with “cut-outs”. The method was simple, he has lost his ability to paint precisely so cut pieces out of pre-painted pages and, then, bundled them together to create collage style paintings. The 2014 exhibition, at the Tate Modern in London, showed the different stages and versions of composition. It is reminiscent of Wittgenstein’s experiments in the assembly of his pieces. The “cut-outs”, as the art world has named them, are also in a similar style to Matisse’s earlier work even though their crafting and presentation are different. The reclining and dancing figures are gone but what they were against remains.  Matisse has used the cut-outs to bring the background into the foreground.

During the week’s reading I have been thinking about why I was thinking of Matisse. It is, I believe, how knowing the collection method effects the understanding of the work. The different ways the same pieces are collected creates different emphases. Reading Emily Dickinson offers similar possibilities. Her poems are collected in two ways: chronologically and by fascicle. There is some overlap, of course, but reading them in these two orders offers a different overall experience. Dickinson uses pronouns ambiguously, without real clarity as to who, or what, they stand in for. I found myself following different figures through her poems depending on whether I was reading them in chronological order or in the order dictated by fascicle.

The poem numbered 131, for example, has two figures the speaker and an unspecified she. Reading this poem chronologically, one may carry over the female “mama” figure, or perhaps the sparrow in the previous poem, 130. However, 131 appears in Fascicle 10 following a series of poems featuring only inanimate objects (244-47). There is then, an added mystery to the she in 131; even more so when the figures increase and a direct address of “you” is made. Dickinson plays with the relationship of the speaker of her poems with the other, often ambiguous figures in it, and the reader. They oscillate between inviting a reader in to an private world and excluding one from it. The poems, at times, feel intrusive to read however, it is when Dickinson is experimenting with punctuate that this dual movement exists most.  The dashes in poem 80 make it unclear whether it is the “you” or the “I” of the poem which is “unsuspecting” or whether the feeling is “almost- a loneliness” or whether the feeling is “almost” in existence. The frequency with which Dickinson has an unexpected turn, or word at the end of her poem causes a similar effect: in her own words “perplexity”(99).

Pascal in his Pensées has a similarly convoluted relationship between writer and reader. His, however, is more informed by the history of the crafting and production of his work than Dickinson’s. Not all of the pieces in Pensées were collected, and what Pascal intended the work to be in unclear. It has elements of both a rhetorical piece and elements that are more immediate and appear personal to Pascal. It is these more internally inflected pieces that show similarities to Dickinson and Matisse. To take “Vanity” as one example, Pascal makes statements without offering much in the way of explanation. “An inch or two of cowl can put 25,000 monks up in arms” (18) has no direct relevance to the statements on either side of it nor is it clear whether Pascal means it to be a criticism or whether it is purely an observation. Similarly with “we do not choose as captain of a ship the most highly born of those aboard” (30). The logic of the statement is easy to follow— that is not a reasonable way to choose a captain— but Pascal offers no other possibility. Readers are left to puzzle what they would do, and what Pascal means by it.

With Wittgenstein, too, the knowledge of the way he crafted his work effects how it is read. In his preface he claims “until recently I had really given up the idea of publishing my work in my lifetime.” What then did Wittgenstein make of his work? And how much did it change once he knew it was to be published in his lifetime? The answers to these questions I have not (yet[?]) found in his work but it leads me to another which I am sure will follow me through his Philosophical Investigations, Pascal’s Pensées, and Dickinson’s oeuvre. How much should this knowledge of collection, curation, experimentation in assembly, or intention effect the way these texts are read? Is it the same for each of the three writers? Or for Wittgenstein, with his more complete work, does it matter more?