Cosmos/Laws (»und sie dreht sich doch…«)

Today, in the History of 20th-Century German Thought I am teaching at the moment, we were engaging with Wittgenstein’s Sprachspiele (language games) and his ways to keep meaning spinning in imaginative multiplicities. After going through the text, I brought up a list of tensions that the philosopher is playing with to make his points—which he does in a very performative way. To sum up, our discussion I mentioned the more obvious ones, such as: child/parent, primitive/advanced, soldier/philosopher, logic/imagination, architect/worker, static/motion, etc.; and towards the end I listed moved/mover and universe/laws. I illustrated my point with a photograph of my writing desk, where I had done my reading and prepared the class. On my desk, were my ›bible‹ (ergo Nietzsche’s Wille zur Macht) and underneath it a beautiful watercolor painting that my co-teacher had made me for my birthday. I asked the students in class why I brought up this example of universe/laws and referred the question back to the creator (of the paining), asking what her idea for painting the cosmos, was, and the stated that she had just followed her imaginative intuition rather than thinking much about it. Wittgenstein would probably have liked that answer, as bringing back imagination into (the understanding of) language seems to be close to his heart. I explained my choice of Laws/Cosmos by stying that Nietzsche described the will to power as the ultimate principle that organic and inorganic matter operate on (according to my interpretation of his thought), but it could also refer to the other invisible laws (like relativity theory or quantum mechanics) that govern the cosmos [before adding Nietzsche I had Einstein’s E=mc² in place], whereas the overwhelming visuality of it is the cosmos in all of its colorfullness that we can explore in be in awe of, just as the kids and the spinning top. In response to that, the creator brought up chaos/order as the overarching tension that defines the universe (and her painting). I ended with a remark that the spiraling galaxy on the painting came really close to Wittgenstein’s spinning top—thus we came back full circle; and ever since, we are still spinning -