You are learning wittgenstein at dinner: you will read the scene it happens in, learn 10 words and phrases, take apart the pattern behind them (language games, meaning-as-use & the limits of expression), hear them in a conversation, rehearse them, and finish by saying one thing out loud to be graded.
Neue Galerie, Fifth Avenue (Austrian art & Cafe Sabarsky), then dinner at Wallse
The Neue Galerie on Fifth Avenue is a museum of Austrian and German art housed in a Beaux-Arts mansion. Inside, Cafe Sabarsky replicates a Viennese coffeehouse — dark wood, marble tables, Klimt on the walls, and a seriousness about pastry that borders on the ontological. I ordered a melange and an Apfelstrudel and opened my notebook to Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations.
'The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.' I have lived with this sentence for years and I still find new meaning in it — which is itself a demonstration of meaning-as-use. The sentence participates in different language games depending on who reads it: a linguist sees cognitive constraint, a poet sees creative possibility, a refugee sees survival.
Sitting in a Viennese cafe in New York, reading an Austrian philosopher in English, I thought about the language games I play daily. English is not my first language. For years I played it cautiously — staying within the rules I knew, afraid of errors. Now I inhabit it. I dream in it. I argue, joke, grieve, and fall in love in it. The limits of my English have expanded, and my world has expanded with them.
At Wallse that evening, over Wiener Schnitzel, I tried to explain this to my companion. Some of what I felt was ineffable — it resisted articulation. 'Whereof one cannot speak,' I said, quoting Wittgenstein. My companion smiled: 'And yet here you are, speaking.'