Handles

Handles May 31, 2016

During Wittgenstein’s hiatus from philosophy in the 1920s, he worked for an architect to build a home for his sister Margarete. His task was to design the door and window handles. As Christopher Benfey points out in a splendid essay on handles at the NYRB, this was no menial task: “it is precisely these details that lend what is otherwise a rather plain, even ugly, house its distinctive beauty. The complete lack of any external decoration gives a stark appearance, which is alleviated only by the graceful proportion and meticulous execution of the features designed by Wittgenstein.”

Wittgenstein took to the tasks, plaguing craftsmen with his designs and standards. And the experience stayed with him. When he returned to philosophy, he had abandoned the language philosophy of the Tractatus in favor of something more pragmatic, a view of words that one can get a handle on. Benfey even speculates that handles drive him back to philosophy.

“Think of the tools in a tool-box,” he wrote in Philosophical Investigations. “There is a hammer, pliers, a saw, a screw-driver, a rule, a glue-pot, glue, nails and screws.—The functions of words are as diverse as the functions of these objects.” Words are tools, indeed handles: “It is like looking into the cabin of a locomotive. We see handles all looking more or less alike. (Naturally, since they are all supposed to be handled.) But one is the handle of a crank which can be moved continuously (it regulates the opening of a valve); another is the handle of a switch, which has only two effective positions, it is either off or on; a third is the handle of a brake-lever, the harder one pulls on it, the harder it brakes; a fourth, the handle of a pump: it has an effect only so long as it is moved to and fro.”

Wittgenstein wasn’t the only thinker to fasten on the handle. Georg Simmel wrote an essay in 1911 on the subject, pointing out that handles distinguish an artifact that is used for practical purposes from an art work: “unlike a painting or statue, is not intended to be insulated and untouchable but is meant to fulfill a purpose—if only symbolically. For it is held in the hand and drawn into the movement of practical life.” Even when the handle is artistically designed, it stands out and turns the object into a different sort of object: “This contrast between vase and handle is more sharply accentuated when, as frequently happens, the handle has the shape of a snake, lizard, or dragon. . . . These forms suggest the special significance of the handle: it looks as though the animal had crawled on to the vase from the outside, to be incorporated into the complete form only, as it were, as an afterthought.”

As Benfey puts it, “the vessel stands in two worlds at one and the same time: whereas reality is completely irrelevant to the ‘pure’ work of art and, as it were, is consumed in it, reality does make claims upon the vase as an object that is handled, filled and emptied, proffered, and set down here and there. This dual nature of the vase is most decisively expressed in its handle.”

He traces Emerson’s remark that “everything has two handles” back to an essay on murder as a fine art written by Thomas De Quincey in 1827. De Quincey argued, “Everything in this world has two handles. Murder, for instance, may be laid hold of by its moral handle (as it generally is in the pulpit and at the Old Bailey), and that, I confess, is its weak side; or it may also be treated aesthetically, as the Germans call it—that is, in relation to good taste.”

It’s a neat way to help us grasp some of the directions of twentieth-century thought.

(Photo by Olga Vologda.)


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