Throwing away ‘the bedrock’
Abstract
If one
is impressed with Wittgenstein’s philosophisizing,
then it is a deep mistake to think that some terms that he made famous --
philosophical terms like “form of life”, “language-game”, “everyday”, “bedrock”
-- are the key to his philosophy. On the
contrary: they are, in the end, an obstacle to be overcome. The last temptation
of the Wittgensteinian philosopher is to treat these terms as providing a kind
of ersatz foundation. They are,
rather, a ladder that takes one ... to where one already is, only now undeluded. Provided, that is, that one throws them away, at
the first sign that one feels oneself to be securely grounded by -- or holding
onto -- them.
Are
technical terms eliminable from philosophical and social scientific enquiries?
I am going to suggest that there is a
sense in which they are and ought to be eliminated, or rather, to use terms
drawn from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus -- because the term “eliminate”, with its Carnapian echoes, carries all the wrong connotations here
-- overcome, or ‘thrown away’.[1]
This
may seem surprising. Technical terms: terms being used in specified ways, in
particular constricted or extended ways. Who could object to this? Isn’t the
use of technical terms absolutely essential to the pursuit of rational enquiry?
(Indeed we have been taught so, taught that philosophy (and ‘social science’)
will proceed well if it proceeds rather like science, in this regard.)
This is a question that Wittgenstein
asks himself in Culture and Value:[2] “Why shouldn’t I apply words in ways that
conflict with their original usage? Doesn’t Freud, for example, do this when he
calls even an anxiety dream a wish-fulfillment dream? Where is the difference?”
Now of course, we should immediately be on our guard here: for Wittgenstein
does not in fact consider the Freudian move here an
unproblematic one, as we know for instance from his explicit treatment of the
extension of the term “wish-fulfillment” in the Conversations...on Psychology.[3] Freud
does use words in ways that conflict with their original usage, and this for
Wittgenstein is a sign that what we have in Freud is a mythology, a persuasive
and potentially-insight-delivering and dangerous
effort to get one to think in a different way about something, about important
aspects of our lives and minds and words.
The point must be that Freud takes himself to be a scientist, and
thus thinks he is licensed in using technical terms, in using terms in (in this
case) a ‘bloated’ manner. Thus the problem with Freud is not the extended use,
it is that the extended use is not scientifically justified, but (moreover)
that there is then a systematic unclarity, in that
Freud continues to act as if it is a scientific claim that is in question, in
his work.
If there is to be extended use of
terms beyond what we are used to, then it had better either be scientifically
justified, or at least clear about its own groundlessness.
Wittgenstein is asking, in effect,
why a human scientist or a philosopher shouldn’t do simply what natural
scientists do: where is the difference between himself or Freud on the one hand
and a (natural) scientist, with whom there can be no quarrel in principle
concerning her use of technical terms,[4] on the
other?
This is his answer:
“In a scientific perspective a new
use is justified by a theory. And if the theory is false, the new extended use
has to be given up. But in philosophy the
extended use does not rest on true or false beliefs about natural processes. No
fact justifies it. None can give it any support.”
This quotation makes quite clear the
vital difference that Wittgenstein sees between the use of technical language
in the natural sciences and in philosophy. And, if we are impressed by the
arguments of Wittgenstein and Winch, we will tend to place ‘the human sciences’
more on the side of philosophy here than on that of natural science. The kinds
of extended or signally altered uses of terms which Thomas Kuhn has placed at
the centre of our understanding of important shifts in scientific theorizing
and practice do not, Wittgenstein claims, have a decent analogy in philosophy
and in disciplines akin to it. Science is (everyday) language that uses
technical terms, that for instance ‘bloats’ terms relative to their standard
usage, on the grounds of the theoretic efficacy of so doing. Whereas a
philosopher cannot similarly undergird such a
‘bloated’ use. An extended use made by a philosopher needs to be justified, if
at all, in some other way.
“But how can it possibly be the case
that Wittgenstein’s idea here is applicable to philosophy in general, let alone to salient and central cases across the human
sciences? ...And what about Wittgenstein’s own work: Can his remarks not be
turned against his own practice? Surely, the technical terms which Wittgenstein
himself employed give the lie to these remarks from ‘Culture and Value’. And so:
Are technical terms truly eliminable,
even in principle, from philosophical and allied enquiries? Doesn’t
Wittgenstein’s own practice show that they are not?”
This is the question of my paper.[5]
Isn’t Wittgenstein
hoist on his own petard? For doesn’t
Wittgenstein himself use various terms in extended, ‘bloated’ fashions? If when
we see Freud saying “All dreams are wish-fulfillment dreams” we start to worry,
then shouldn’t we worry even more when we see Wittgenstein(-ians)
saying things along the lines of “Humans are essentially rule-following
creatures”, or “All language-use is the playing of language-games”? What about
“form of life”, and other of Wittgenstein’s ‘technical terms’ -- is nothing excluded by such terms? If they do not
feature in a genuine theory -- like, say, the terms “force” or “atom” -- then can their heavily-extended use be
justified?
Let us recall the wording of the
quotation we started with once again: “[I]n philosophy...extended use does not
rest on true or false beliefs about natural processes. No fact justifies it.
None can give it any support.” If Wittgenstein himself uses terms thus,
‘technically’, then it would appear that he has no coherent basis for
criticizing philosophy, metaphysics. Indeed, he would have no coherent place
from which to make such criticism. He would, it seems, be guilty of exactly the
same crimes as they -- he would indeed be hoist on his own petard.
Now it is worth noting that most, at least of the candidates for
‘technical term’ status in Wittgenstein are rarely used by him. For example,
‘form of life’ occurs only five times in PI,
and less often than that in the entire remainder of his published works. The
volume of the secondary literature on ‘forms of life’ is out of all proportion
to what would appear to be its importance in Wittgenstein’s actual work.[6]
But still, if Wittgenstein even sometimes used terms bloatedly,
‘technically’, as part of a theory, this would still pose a problem for our
understanding of what his philosophy is.
Let us look then at another term
Wittgenstein hardly ever uses, but which has been seized on by many of his
admirers (and by some of his critics): “bedrock”. PI 217,[7] in the
heart of the rule-following considerations, features a key use of this term not
unrelated to the famous uses shortly afterwards of the concept of ‘form of
life”:
“ “How am I to obey a rule?”---if this is not
a question about causes, then it is about the justification for my following
the rule in the way I do.
If I have exhausted the
justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am
inclined to say: “This is simply what I do.”
(Remember
that we sometimes demand definitions not for the sake of their content, but of
their form. Our requirement is an architectural one; the definition a kind of
ornamental coping that supports nothing.)”
That
idea of supporting nothing is important, and directly relevant to what we are
about here. “Bedrock”, and Wittgenstein’s account of it, is not a new
foundation.
But nevertheless, there is a kind of
psychological reassurance that 217 can give us. We Wittgensteinians
may be satisfied, thinking thus about explanations coming to an end. And this reassurative satisfaction may, unless we are very vigilant,
lead us in practice to treat a term like ‘bedrock’ as a term that solves a
problem, a philosophical problem. And thus we come close to literalising
the metaphor of ‘bedrock’, and treating it as a foundation -- the foundation
for our ‘philosophical theory’ --
after all.[8]
This, it seems to me, is what
happens over and over again to commentators on and followers of Wittgenstein.
Under pressure from mainstream Anglo-American philosophy (“What is Wittgenstein
saying? Where’s the argument? What’s
your position?” Etc.), trying to explain and justify what one is doing to oneself
and others, one seeks recourse to a new ‘system’, one seeks refuge in
Wittgenstein’s ‘magic words’. Much as Heidegger has his magic words, and
Derrida has his (“hymen”, “dissemination”, “différance”,
etc.), so Wittgenstein apparently has
his -- and they are quickly gone to town on.
Wittgenstein once remarked that his
greatest fear was that he would foster only a new jargon. I think that his fear
has been to a substantial degree realized. The profligate use of the term
“language-game”, the vast efforts expended on ‘figuring out’ what exactly
‘objects’ (in T L-P[9] ) and ‘forms of life’ (in PI) are, even the ‘analytic’ textual practice of those who Crispin
Wright has sometimes called the ‘official’ Wittgensteinians
(Peter Hacker et al); all these have,
I think, involved the technicalisation and jargonisation of what Wittgenstein himself was and must
above all be an activity, a set of methods without any controversial theses,
without an assertoric content.
But our problem remains: did the
secondary literature have any alternative? In his use of terms such as
“bedrock”, or “ordinary”, or “form of life”, does Wittgenstein himself (and do we / I) guard successfully
against the not unreasonable fear that all that is happening is the fomenting
of a jargon? In short, does Wittgenstein practice what he preaches? Or do his
terms slip continually into being a pseudo-scientific jargon? And could they do otherwise?
I think that there is a CONTINUAL
temptation to use ‘Wittgensteinian’ jargon in
conversation-stopping tactics of an unsatisfactory nature, with philosophical
discussants and opponents. And I think that it is bound usually to be
unhelpful, and even insulting, to wheel out
PI 217, for example, and expect that a rational co-conversationalist must
be impressed by it, must see the logic of the alternative ‘programme’
(in this case, to that of scientific explanation of rule-following behaviour) that Wittgenstein apparently lays out for us. We
Wittgensteinians shouldn’t expect our opponents to
magically be reassured by the mantras or architectonics which 217 etc. offer us. For, as Wittgenstein
himself says, what we are talking about here are our inclinations: and these may differ, are highly-individual. And if
and when we do say “This is simply
what I do”, we must be aware that the whole point is that there is no efficacious
further spelling out of the “This” available. Such further spelling out would
indicate that we had in fact not yet reached bedrock. Further, our ‘claims’ and
definitions support nothing, claim nothing: they are only a way of trying to
get us to think...what we already think. If we have not had these thoughts
already, there is no strictly rational process of being got to think them.[10] Check
out PI 217 again:
“If I have exhausted the
justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: “This is simply what I
do.”
(Remember that we sometimes demand definitions
not for the sake of their content, but of their form. Our requirement is an
architectural one; the definition a kind of ornamental coping that supports nothing.)” (Italics added)
No, we cannot expect someone not
already in sympathy with the Wittgensteinian take on philosophical matters to
be instantaneously impressed by any of this. They must be persuaded, rather,
that there just isn’t anything of the kind that they imagine they want to
do/say that they do in fact want to do/say. In this case; they must be persuaded that they can be satisfied
with not asking more questions, when (as we see it) ‘at bedrock’.[11]
Persuasion is crucial -- because you
can’t prove the opposite of nonsense.
Why? Because to assert the opposite of nonsense is to utter nonsense. Negating
“Then, the cat sat on the square circular mat” (viz. producing “The cat did not then sit on the square circular
mat”, or even “It is not the case that the cat then sat on the square circular
mat” or “It is not true that the cat then sat on the square circular mat”)
produces something bizarre. It does not, I would submit, produce something sensical.
What we do, then, is to try to bring
words back to their everyday uses by means of trying to get others (and
ourselves) to think that they (we) don’t need anything other than those
everyday uses in order to do all that one really can do with language. (And to
think that the idea of it being possible or necessary to do anything other than
what these words are after is in fact only the fantasy of an idea. Again: ‘the
everyday’ is not counterposed
to science. It is counterposed only to metaphysics,
to myth – that is, to nothing.)
Now we are getting closer to
establishing whether it can really be that that Wittgenstein does in and with
his own words.
We can imagine someone saying now,
“But what’s the big deal? So what if
“form of life” (or what-have-you) is a term of art? A way of expressing
some particular abstract way of understanding culture, or something. Just
define your terms, and all will be well. And after all, isn’t that how Analytic
Philosophy has made so much progress. And in part how sociology and psychology
have progressed in solving problems bequeathed to them by philosophy.” But I am
deeply sceptical, for just the reasons given in and
around our opening quote from ‘Culture
and Value’, as to the rigour and groundedness of the sets of binary oppositions which
structure Analytic Philosophy and the human sciences: such as necessary versus contingent, mental vs. physical, structure vs. agency, holism vs. individualism, culture vs.
nature.
A more satisfactory option might
appear to be the coining of new terms, the use of technical terms which don’t
contain baggage from the old terms which reach or echo back to debates with
over-long histories.[12] But
with new terms, there is a great danger of thinking that we’ve escaped entirely
from the ordinary terms / roots which arguably must be at the basis of anything
that we understand. There cannot be,
I want to say, a wholly new vocabulary. Still less so, if we are dealing with
anything that has to do with people and with language, as the human sciences
and philosophy plainly do. For again, I would follow Winch and the ethnomethodological sociologists [13] -- what
one is doing in understanding human beings is only elaborating what they
already know.
Now it may seem as though I am on
the verge of ascribing a sociological-cum-philosophical theory to Wittgenstein.
For it may seem now that, in order to avoid treating terms such as “form of
life” as a theoretical term, as committing one to a metaphysical system
depending on the meaningful employment of terms such as “form of life” or
“bedrock”, in order to avoid hoisting Wittgenstein on his own petard, I am
committed to turning Wittgenstein’s uses of such terms into an embryonic
cultural theory or a sociologistic thesis. As if that
would help. “But is there any other option?” One can treat the term “form of
life” as encoding a quasi-biological thesis for instance. Is that any better?
Perhaps the problem is in the question which implies various answers as
options.
The above-mentioned are indeed the
various main options in the massive war over how to interpret “forms of life”,
so often an alleged ‘keystone’ to Wittgenstein’s later thought. But (how) can
we avoid interpreting Wittgenstein’s (few) remarks involving this term as
controversial theses at all?
Well, we can interpret them ‘ineffabilistically’. We can read them as some of Wittgenstein’s -- relatively
sophisticated -- commentators do, and as those do who wish to find a mysticism
in Wittgenstein: as hints at the kind of thing which we get in far more detail
at points in Heidegger, for example.[14]
We can read “forms of life” as part of a gnomic gesture toward the aspects of
human life which, strictly speaking, cannot be said, as part of a background
which we can foreground only by violating the limits of language.[15] Perhaps
what cannot be helpfully spelt out further is nevertheless an unknown
inexplicable something that can yet be ‘gestured at’? Perhaps that helps?...
Leave aside that if Wittgenstein had
wanted to do what Heidegger does, he could have done it. Why didn’t he write a
book of “Unsayable remarks on the human form of
life”? Leave aside the fact that Wittgenstein was extremely reticent about
these matters, and always very cautious in his phrasing of these rare moments
in his text -- for example, he famously writes on p.226 of PI that, “What has to be accepted, the given, is -- so one could
say -- forms of life”, but how often
do commentators note or take seriously that this remark, is so obviously hedged
and hesitant? (And leave aside that Wittgenstein is at least talking here of accepting something, an important
difference of emphasis from proclaiming a philosophical thesis). The real
problem with the ineffabilist interpretation of the
later Wittgenstein -- and this rarely gets brought out, because it is so
uncomfortable to acknowledge -- is of course a philosophical problem. The
problem that confronted Wittgenstein in the Tractatus, just as it had confronted, besides many lesser minds, those of
Hume and Kant and Schopenhauer before him, and as it would go on to confront
Heidegger and Foucault and Derrida after him. The difference being that,
manfully though Hume and Kant and Heidegger and Foucault, especially, have
wrestled with the problem, Wittgenstein, according to Diamond et al, mastered it -- not only in PI but already in the Tractatus. This is what Diamond explains in her
“Throwing away the ladder”, and Conant in his “Throwing away the top of the ladder”
and “Elucidation and Nonsense in Frege and
Wittgenstein.” [16] It is
the Diamond/Conant reading of Wittgenstein, often now known as ‘resolutism’,[17]
which I wish to apply to (a little of) the detail of Wittgenstein’s later work
… in the service of throwing away the ladder that (most or all) of that work
is. Of overcoming the tendency to think that in concepts such as “bedrock’ we
have at least found something that we can rely on, that we can rest some weight
on.
If we think of the term “form of
life” -- or similarly of terms such as “attunement in basic concepts”, or “the
conditions for the use of concepts”, the kinds of terms often and understandably
reached for by Wittgenstein’s commentators -- as gestures at the ineffable,
then we are not finding a new foundation. Rather, we are hopelessly reaching
for one, and meanwhile more or less self-admittedly taking ourselves, absurdly,
to be saying the unsayable. To be peeping over the
‘edges’ of the ‘limit’ of language.
To illustrate how we can understand
later Wittgenstein as beyond ineffabilism, and yet
not as committed to any kind of quasi-social-scientific anti-Realism, I have
attempted what may be a helpful exercise in ‘transliteration’. I have taken
some of the crucial closing portions of Diamond’s “Throwing away the ladder:
How to read the Tractatus”,
and just slightly re-written them. I have replaced elements of the Tractatus
discussions with roughly symmetrical elements of the Investigations discussions. It seems to me that the result stands
up pretty well, and is illuminating:
“Wittgenstein, I claim, says,
roughly, that we cannot say "There are forms of life -- they are
fundamental to everything." How so? Well, he indicates that there could be
no such things as philosophical theses. Everyone would agree with them, as
trivialities -- and that is not what one wants a thesis to be. One wants it to
be something troubling, controversial -- something that says something. But his
remarks do not say anything. He makes no claims. He has no opinions.[18] So,
when he says that we cannot assert philosophical theses, that we cannot have
philosophical opinions, when he says that we cannot assert “There are forms of
life”, he does not mean "There are, all right, only that there are has to get expressed another way." That the
sentence means nothing at all and is not illegitimate for any other reason, we
do not see. We are so convinced that we understand what we are trying to say
that we see only the two possibilities: it
is sayable [positivism / anti-Realism], it is not sayable
[‘ineffabilism’]. But Wittgenstein's aim is to allow
us to see that there is no 'it'.” [19]
It's not
that one cannot assign a meaning to "There are forms of life". Of
course one can. It is rather that one has strong grounds for thinking that no
assignment of meaning will be lastingly satisfying to one. No assignment of
meaning which stops us ‘hovering’, which rids us of a systematic unclarity about what we are trying to do with these words,
will seem to have expressed what we took ourselves to be aiming to express. No
assignment of meaning will do for us what we want a philosophical thesis to do.[20]
"[A]nd so you see that there is no coherent understanding to be
reached of what you wanted to say. It dissolves: you are left with the
sentence-structure "There are forms of life”, (or “What has to be
accepted, the given, is...forms of life” [PI
p.226], or “Meaning is use”, or what-have-you) standing there, as it were,
innocently meaning nothing at all, not any longer thought of as illegitimate
because of a violation of the principles of what can be put into words and what
goes beyond them. Really to grasp that what you were trying to say shows
itself in language is to cease to think of it as an inexpressible content: that which you were trying to
say.
Take Wittgenstein's remark that “I
must speak the language of every day. Is this language somehow too coarse and
material for what we want to say? Then
how is another one to be constructed?--And how strange that we should be
able to do anything at all with the one we have!”[PI 120]. Clearly, there is a sense in which Wittgenstein here is
denying the intelligibility of anything which would justly be called a
non-everyday-language.
But then this remark is itself
ironically self-destructive. It has the form, the syntactic form, of
"There is only this sort of thing," i.e. it uses the linguistic forms
in which we say that there are only thises rather
than thises and thats.[21] It
belongs to its syntax that it itself says something the other side of which can
be represented too. If there is only squiggledy
wiggle, the language allows wiggles that are not squiggledy
as well. But whatever Wittgenstein’s remark aims to do for us, it is not to
place the necessariness and centrality of everyday
language as opposed to an intelligible opposite. It is not that this opposite
has a sense that is nonsensical. It does not convey to us the philosophical
but unsayable fact that there is only everyday
language not genuinely supra-everyday language. In so far as we grasp what
Wittgenstein aims at, we see that the sentence-forms he uses comes apart from
his philosophical aim. If he succeeds, we shall not imagine everyday language
or forms of life as things, as entities, as at all. And we shall not imagine
the sentence that “What has to be accepted, the given, is forms of life” as
informing us of anything, or instructing us to do some-thing rather than an
intelligible other-thing. We throw away the sentences about ‘forms of life’,
and even about ‘language-games’; they really are, at the end, entirely empty.
But we shall be aware at the end that when we go in for philosophical thinking,
the characteristic form of such thought is precisely that the sentence-forms
we use come apart from what we have taken to be our aims. Not because we
have chosen the wrong forms.[22]
This is what I mean by
‘throwing away (e.g.) “the bedrock”’.[23]
What Wittgenstein is inclined to say
in PI 217 is a perfectly fine thing
to say -- in certain very particular circumstances. But it would be a mistake
to think that anything can be hung or built on it. As it would be a mistake to
think that it can or even should force
someone to change their ways, to roll over and acquiesce in a ‘practice-based
account’ of social life, or whatever. No. PI
217 is itself no more than a move in a dialectic, an effort to persuade a
reader to give up ambitions that are actually only the illusions of ambitions [24]--
e.g. for a foundation to practice. Justifications come to an end somewhere, we
will say to such a person. And there are probably many more things to say
before they are persuaded.
And we
are not in possession of truths which make it essential or rationally necessary
that they be persuaded. This implies: that part of the responsibility of the
philosopher, including (and in fact above all) the therapeutic philosopher, is
to engage in a genuine dialogue with someone whom one is trying to explain. The
criterion of the dialogue being genuine is in part this: that one is ready
oneself to be persuaded away from one’s preconceptions. Wittgensteinian therapy
is not like most forms of psychotherapy or psychoanalysis. It is
non-hierarchical, a conversation between equals. It is corrupted the moment one
is convinced of one’s own rectitude, and (therefore) single-mindedly trying to
cure the other. Such cures can go
both ways; so a Wittgensteinian who has ceased to
practice therapy on herself, and who is certain of her prescriptions for
others, is no Wittgensteinian.
Unless and until I am persuaded otherwise, I shall go on
saying things like this: that terms such as “bedrock”, “forms of life” and so
on need to be ‘thrown away’, endlessly, in truly Wittgensteinian philosophy.
Why the scare quotes around “thrown
away”, in the previous paragraph? Because there is of course nothing whatsoever
wrong with these words, or indeed with any terms. This is one of the key morals
of my ‘New Wittgenstein’ collection.
It is I think particularly deftly expressed in the closing sentences of Ed
Witherspoon’s essay, “Conceptions of nonsense in Carnap
and Wittgenstein”: “Applying Wittgenstein’s conception of nonsense...requires
an intense engagement with the target of criticism; an examination of the words
alone is not enough. When Wittgenstein criticizes an utterance as nonsensical,
he aims to expose, not a defect in the
words themselves, but a confusion in the speaker’s relation to her words --
a confusion that is manifested in the speaker’s failure to specify a meaning
for them.” [25] There
is nothing wrong with words like “bedrock” or terms like “form of life”; but
if, as the Buddhists would put it, we attach
to them, we will be lost. We need thoroughgoingly to overcome our attachment to them. To
put the point just slightly ‘poetically’: we need to throw away these words, if we feel like holding onto them,
having thrown away all hitherto-existing metaphysics by means of them. We need to overcome these words, if we
are to truly follow Wittgenstein. Most of Wittgenstein’s ‘followers’,
regrettably, hold onto his words, and
in effect turn them into technical terms that they are attached to in just the
sense I have just criticized.
True followers of Wittgenstein,
then, will actively work not to do what he most feared -- accurately -- would
be done with his work: namely, to turn it into a kind of jargon. Nor will they
do what is very similar, and indeed usually still worse in its effects: to
‘translate’ his thinking into a new or an old jargon. An example would be the
following, from Dan Hutto’s handy recent book; “The
process [of doing Wittgensteinian philosophy right] requires not just removing
the source of our puzzlement but being reminded -- normally, by means of
examples -- of the conditions in which we deploy the concepts in question.” [26] The trouble with this remark (and it is very
easy to find similar examples, and much worse, in thoroughly-competent
philosophers such as Pears, Hacker, Meredith Williams, and many more) is that
it gives the strong impression that there really are conditions for the deployment of concepts. Only unfortunately these
conditions cannot be directly stated. This is a sophisticated form of
‘chickening out’, of irresolution. So is any
‘elucidatory’ reading of Wittgenstein, early or late, any reading of him that
insists that Wittgenstein had a positive task in his work. Elucidatory readings
remain aligned with the meta-philosophies of world-revealing metaphysics, or of
concept-creating recent Continental philosophy, just insofar as they insist on
such a positive task.
Am I being too hard on Hutto? In a
way, I certainly am. For it is possible to find reasonably similar examples in
everyone’s work, including mine, and, for that matter, Wittgenstein’s. There is
no such thing as a formulation which is invulnerable to being rendered as
(including) a technical term. Our problem is at bottom one of will and lived
attitude, not one of carrying out a once-and-for-all intellectual achievement
or discovery. Our problem is one of finding a way of responding to good efforts
at philosophical therapy which does not turn such efforts, as one always can turn them if one is so
minded,[27] into
the statement of a position or view or opinion, into a reified philosophical
object, and yet which does not, in the course of being impressed or persuaded
by the attempt at aspect-switching involved in the therapeutic manoeuvre, attach to the manoeuvre
itself. There are deep lessons to learn, I think, from mystical spiritualities
and philosophies, perhaps especially from Zen, on the question of how in practical terms to do what
Wittgenstein urges. Buddhist traditions such as Zen [28] have a
long tradition of providing practical means of attaining insight without
becoming attached to the means. A challenge for those impressed with
Wittgenstein’s philosophizing is to find ways of doing the same, without being
committed to the insights attained being ineffable truths. As the Buddhists
might put it: If you see a Wittgensteinian on the road to enlightenment, kill
him. Our task, let us not forget, is one of leaving everything as it is. The
true insight is the ‘returning’ to the ordinary. An ordinary which includes, of
course, all the strivings for the extraordinary without which life might even be
tedious or inhuman...
It would be absurd then for me to
claim that Hutto is wrong or mistaken in what he says, as quoted above. If I
give the impression that it is a matter of fact that philosophy truly is purely
negative, I have of course fallen into the trap of seeming to have a doctrine
of my own. Similarly, if I give the impression that I am (contra Quine) asserting the independence of grammar from fact, that
I am as it were stating that as a matter of fact philosophy is not a matter of
matters of fact, a similar trap and a similar defeat beckons.[29] The
implication is, I take it, that at some point we must simply accept therapeutic
interventions as what they are, and must take some words at face value.
What words can be absolutely relied on here, unproblematically
taken at face value, in philosophy? None. We are always in process, in
philosophy. In fact (sic.!), we
always are in all of life, but we can safely abstract away from our
boat-rebuilding-at-sea-ness, usually, and take some frame for granted. True
philosophy is never taking any frame indefinitely or absolutely for granted. We
are always at a place in a very long conversation, when we do philosophy, and
we can do no more than try to grow forward as best we can from that place,
which is never any Archimedean point. So, the “must” in the previous paragraph
is misleading (What isn’t? All
philosophical interventions are equal[ly misleading],
but some are less equal than others, I hear you cry?...). There is no
compulsion to accept Wittgenstein’s method. This point again has tended to be
sadly absent from Wittgenstein’s exegetes, and indeed from his readers more
generally. They have looked to be compelled
by Wittgenstein’s ‘arguments’ (as if by [their fantasy of] a rule...), and have
been disappointed when they have not been. But (An attempt at saying something
helpful; what else can one do?), Wittgenstein’s task is to uncover the
compulsions we labour under in philosophy, not to
impose new ones. If one is shown one’s intellectual compulsions, and yet does
not want to give them up, but rather insists on reiterating them, then there is
little or nothing more to say. (For it is not likely to be therapeutic for you – it is not likely to lead to
your emergence from the dis-ease of the intellect
which Wittgenstein tries to cure – to insist that such a one has said something
false.)
To return then to the quote from Culture and Value with which I began
this paper: One can of course use a word in an extended sense, in the course of
one’s philosophizing, when using our method, when following Wittgenstein if I
am right about who Wittgenstein is. The point is that so doing is not using a
technical term, but ‘simply’ enacting a particular, person-relative therapeutic
maneouvre. (The contrast implied here is, of course,
itself almost inevitably misleading... It makes it sound as if I am (say)
differentiating ordinary water from heavy water, whereas a better metaphor is
perhaps differentiating that activity
from alchemy. Though that metaphor in turn is no doubt misleading, for
basically the same reason...) For
example, one might use a term, such as ‘ordinary’ or ‘everyday’, in a bloated
way, precisely to facilitate the indirect dawning of an understanding in one’s
interlocutor that there is (there ‘is’?) no contrast-class intended here.
Understanding what a Wittgensteinian is doing with a term like “everyday” is
letting go of the wish to turn philosophy into a quasi-science with technical
terms, terms with more or less fixed meanings differing from ordinary usage, and is overcoming in particular the wish
for “everyday” to be such a term (a would-be ‘meta’-technical term, in
philosophy). This is all implicit in my play with the long quote from Diamond’s
“Throwing away the ladder”, earlier. When Wittgensteinian
philosophy really works, the means of cure [30]
is expelled with the disease. As with Sextus Empiricus: nothing remains of the curative agent, ideally. One
doesn’t keep holding onto “everyday” or “bedrock” or whatever. One overcomes
these terms, too. That is, just insofar as these terms risk continuing to
mislead one, they need to be ‘thrown away’. (Of course, if no-one is misled by
some particular use of them, in that sense they are just fine.) The work of a concept like “form of life” or
“the bedrock” in Wittgenstein is probably only done when one throws it away, and in
the throwing away.
One of Wittgenstein’s readers who
has understood all this extremely well is the later Gordon Baker.[31] Baker,
following Waismann, emphasized that ‘our method’ –
the kind of method in philosophy on which I have here been reflecting and which
I hope also to have been enacting -- is not compulsory, and, paradoxically,
loses its power if one tries to make it so, if one tries to turn it into the method.[32]
So, it is with that in mind -- with
my reader understanding, I hope, that, here as throughout, I am not asserting
something that I insist must stand, nor that something I claim to have or even
want to have an ungainsayable warrant for … nor even
(in an important sense) anything at
all -- that I say this: It is time to
overcome “the bedrock”. Indeed, it is now always
time to overcome such terms, and whatever replaces them. It is a task we are
called to, over and over again. The search for liberating words is probably
endless. For it needs to be continually remade, re-undertaken, as cultural
conditions change, as personal life-trajectories and philosophical educations
proceed and change, and so on. Even very well-chosen words will tend to
‘ossify’, over time; the process of purifying oneself of attachments to
particular terms is one which a wise philosopher will continually pursue vis-a-vis their own work, as Wittgenstein himself did, as
we ‘New Wittgensteinians’ need to do. The words in my
edited collection, the words in this essay, these very words, are no exception.
Even if they are well-chosen, and well-placed, there can be no such thing as a
guarantee against their being misunderstood, against their seeming to state a
position, or seeming to be the
liberating words. As soon as one thinks one has found the liberating words, at least for oneself, one is probably again
in delusion.
The process of philosophy as
Wittgenstein (but in reality few of his ‘followers’) understood it is in
crucial part a probably endless therapeutic task of the overcoming of the
nonsense that is implicit in taking Wittgenstein to have decisively overcome
nonsense, through the terms and the ‘ideas’ of his writing. But then, of
course, in the unlikely event that I have thoroughly and decisively convinced
you even of this, I have failed...[33]
[1] A note on quotation
conventions: I have used single quotes and double quotes in a
way which conforms mostly to the way that Wittgenstein so used these devices
(VERY roughly, this is: double-quotes for quotes; single quotes for scare
quotes). This is philosophically
consequential, in a way internally related to the topic of my paper. It has
to do with the way in which, very roughly, philosophy does not much involve
ordinary saying. I could write a whole paper on the relation… Such a paper
would make plain how good writing in philosophy will almost invariably involve
use of peculiar conventions of notation and punctuation, repeated use of terms
like “roughly”, and more – and how these will still not satisfy the author or
their readers. A paper which would have an important family relation to that
imaginary paper is Gordon Baker’s masterly “Quotation marks in Philosophical
Investigations”, Language and Communication 22 (2002), 37-68.
[2] G. H. von
Wright (with H. Nyman) (ed.), trans. P. Winch (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980); p.44.
[3] Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics,
Psychology and religious belief, C. Barrett (ed.) (Berkeley: U. Cal. Press,
1970).
[4] An
interesting recent borderline case, like Freud, is Chomsky; see note 12, below,
and my “How I learned to love (and hate) Noam
Chomsky”, Philosophical Writings
15/16 (2000-1), 23-47.
[5] Here are some examples to have in mind (and
perhaps try out) during the course of our
investigation:
language-game,
form of life, family resemblance, depth grammar, (philosophical) grammar,
bedrock, ordinary, everyday, hinge-proposition, nonsense, agreement, criterion,
description, internal relation, perspicuous presentation.
[6] See the
consideration of the term “form of life” in my “Meaningful Consequences”
(jointly written with James Guetti), The Philosophical Forum XXX:4 (1999), 289-314., for instance. A
salient recent example of the kind of over-reading of “form of life” that I/we
have in mind is Dan Hutto’s Wittgenstein and the end of philosophy: neither theory nor therapy
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004), p.103, where Hutto characterizes the change in Wittgenstein’s philosophy
between early and later as being one from ‘logical form’ to ‘forms of life’.
[7] Philosophical Investigations R.Rhees and G.E.M. Anscombe (eds), trans G.E.M.Anscombe (revised
edition) (New York: Macmillan, 1958 (1953)).
[8] And Wittgenstein is playing
with this metaphor of foundations when he talks about ornamental coping stones. He is surely warning us not to expect any
kind of foundations, when he writes of definitions such as those that he makes
perspicuous supporting nothing. (Notice
the tight connection between this and the Culture
and Value remark with which this paper began.)
[9] Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,
trans. C.K.Ogden (with F. Ramsey) (New York: Routledge, 1922).
[10] See T L-P, Preface. (p.27, ibid.)
[11] My use of
the term “Persuasion” here echoes Winch’s superb and difficult essay of that
title, in MidWest Studies in Philosophy 17 (1992),
123-137. Winch draws it, of course, from Wittgenstein himself.
[12] Compare Chomsky’s
(in-)famous introduction of the term “cognize”.
[13] Such as
Harold Garfinkel, Jeff Coulter, Wes Sharrock, Rod Watson, Mike Lynch.
[14]See Charles Taylor’s writing
on Wittgenstein and Heidegger on forms of life and life-forms, in his Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge:
Harvard, 1997).
[15] For detail,
see my “Meaningful Consequences”, op.cit. .
[16] Cora
Diamond, “Throwing away the ladder: How to read the Tractatus”, in her The Realistic Spirit (Cambridge: MIT,
1991); James Conant, “Throwing away the top of the ladder”, Yale Review 79
(1991), 328-364; & “Elucidation and nonsense in Frege
and Wittgenstein”, in my and A. Crary’s The new Wittgenstein (
[17] For exposition, including
discussion of the term “resolutism” (including
warnings against the probably-misleading impression given by the term “resolutism” – the impression that a doctrine is in the
offing), see my ““Nothing is shown”: a ‘resolute’ response to Mounce, Emiliani, Koethe and Vilhauer”
(joint-written with Rob Deans), Philosophical
Investigations 26: 3 (July 2003), 239-268.
[18] See the
remark cited in Ray Monk’s Ludwig
Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: MacMillan,
1990), during Wittgenstein’s debates with Turing: “Obviously...the whole point
is that I must not have an opinion.” (P.420 (see also p.418). I disagree with
Monk’s comments on this remark in his text: Monk’s view of the later Wittgenstein’s
‘views’ is in the end positivist. He takes Wittgenstein to have quasi-verificationist, finitist ‘views’
in the philosophy of maths.)
[19]
"Throwing away the ladder", pp.197-8. See also Wittgenstein's On Certainty (
[20] For further support for this
crucial point, see Cora Diamond’s presentation of the ‘rule-following’ and ‘anti-private-language’
considerations, in her “Rules: looking in the right place”, in Wittgenstein: Attention to particulars
(eds. D.Z. Phillips and P. Winch; London: MacMillan,
1990).
[21] It is worth noting parenthetically one
important implication: that it is an appalling caricature of the ‘resolute’
reading of Wittgenstein’s philosophy to take Diamond et al literally to be claiming that “There is only one kind of
nonsense”. Just look at the form of
such a remark!
[22] I.e. Not
because the real / the right forms are available somewhere, only not speakable. (This is a transfiguration of "Throwing
away the ladder", pp.197-9. (Underlining mine)) Note also that our remarks – mine and
Diamond’s -- are also self-destructive. They too are transitional, and must be
overcome. (Same with this note, too.)
[23] The careful reader of the
above will see that the point is not quite that there are NO philosophical propositions,
in the sense that propositions allegedly are and must be truth-apt. This is not
quite the game – the trading in illusions -- that Wittgenstein plays with the
word “satz” in Tractatus, nor, analogously, in
his later work. Rather, the things we want to do with the word “satz” (“proposition”) increasingly come to seem to us
mutually incompatible. We are not told by Wittgenstein’s unutterable
philosophical theory that we can’t have philosophical propositions; rather, we
come to give up, of our own accord, the wish -- the felt need -- to hold onto
any philosophical propositions, even Wittgenstein’s, when we realize that we
have conflicting desires with regard to ‘them’; with regard, that is, to our own
words. So, it is not – neither early nor late -- that Wittgenstein has a
knowingly self-defeating theory of language. Rather, he offers one illusions of
theories to work through and throw away, as Diamond does, and as I have tried
to here.
[24] I.e. Wittgenstein wants to
facilitate a realization (that must be freely-arrived-at on one’s own part)
that one is not / will not be satisfied when one fully explores the
implications of what it was one was attempting. That one will come to think
that one wasn’t actually attempting anything coherent.
[25] Op.cit., p.345.
[26] Hutto, op.cit., p.126.
[27] This, for
example, is what Derrida is expert at. Derrida for instance looks at the
attempt at a non-metaphysical philosophizing in J.L. Austin, and, after
acknowledging its wonderfully “Nietzschean” aspects,
takes it to task for failing to overcome the urge to metaphysics allegedly
implicit in the Austinian concept of “total
situation” or “total context”. Derrida’s vigilance is similar to
Wittgenstein’s, but it is in the end excessive. Derrida leaves one hopeless,
condemned to metaphysics, whereas Wittgenstein (and, in my view,
[28] These
remarks are relevant to the disparaging attribution by Peter Hacker (in his
“Was he trying to whistle it?”), in The
New Wittgenstein, op.cit.) of a close kinship between
‘dialectic’, post-modernism, Zen, Kierkegaardian
irony, and the New Wittgenstein. The kinship with post-modernism has been
greatly exaggerated; there are several published texts showing so, including of
course Martin Stone’s “Wittgenstein and deconstruction”, which argues
powerfully for the differenciation of the two, in The New Wittgenstein itself (See also
the note above). But it seems to me that the concept of a ‘dialectic’ can be an
extremely helpful one in understanding Wittgenstein’s method; I think that
Conant is quite right to emphasize the deep parallelisms between Kierkegaard’s
method and Wittgenstein’s; and in future work I will myself develop a detailed
account of the powerful and underestimated commonalities in method and
‘substance’ between Wittgenstein and Buddhism, especially Zen. (I suspect that
part of the problem is that Hacker has an inadequate understanding of the
philosophical sophistication of Kierkegaard, and, a fortiori, of Zen.)
[29] The
mythological error that beckons here is identical to that in Anti-Realism that
I identify in my recent debate with Dummett, in the
pages of Philosophy.
[30] It is worth noting that
“cure” is one of the most clear-cut cases of an achievement term. It is also a
transitive verb: one must be cured of
something. (Though in the present case, of course, it is curative to insist on
the phantom character of such ‘somethings’…)
[31] My argument
above is for instance quite consonant with his powerful paper, “Wittgenstein on
Metaphysical/Everyday use”, Philosophical
Quarterly 52: 208 (2002), 289-302, reprinted in his Wittgenstein’s Method: Neglected Aspects, edited by K. Morris
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).This book explicates beautifully what ‘our method’ in
philosophy – that of Waismann at this best, of
Wittgenstein, of the later Baker, and (I hope) of myself – amounts to. (It is
important not to confuse the later Baker with the Baker of ‘Baker-and-Hacker’.
Baker experienced a serious change in philosophical outlook, in the mid-late
80s.)
[32] In a
forthcoming paper, “Anchoring therapy”,
[33] Thanks to several
audiences over the years – including at ‘Mind and society’ in