Category Archives: Philosophical Investigations

Wittgenstein, Bouwsma and Our Relationship to Philosophical Problems

February 28, 2012 By in availability/disposability, Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein Tags: , , , 9 Comments

O. K. Bouwsma once declaimed that “…Wittgenstein’s interest was not in any particular problem, but in the bothered individual, particularly the hot and bothered.” He was rhetorizing about PI.

I believe Bouwsma is on to something quite important here, even though he seems to me to miss a better way of putting his point. It is not that Wittgenstein is not interested in any particular philosophical problem in PI–he is, in fact, interested in many–but rather that he keeps steadily before himself the puzzled (“hot and bothered”) person (now his interlocutor, now his reader, now both, now both in different ways), the particular problem, and the relationship of the person to the problem. Wittgenstein’s specific focus, the spotlight of his attention, shifts across this structure in complicated, sometimes dizzying ways, but more often than not, he spotlights the relationship between the person and the problem. Wittgenstein over and over again tries to make that relationship the available to the person, often doing so (in part) by making his own relationship to the problem available to the person–i.e., by making himself exemplary (in one sense of the term). (H/T to j.) As I understand Wittgenstein, he believes that the person believes that the particular problem is just there, palpitating problematically in its isolation, and that his or her relationship to the problem has nothing whatever to do with its being problematic. But the person’s belief is confused. I do not have time now to go into detail, so let me try to explain briefly by means of two quotations, both from Remarks on Color:

In every serious philosophical question uncertainty extends to the very roots of the problem.
We must always be prepared to learn something new. (I, 15)

In philosophy we must always ask: “How must we look at this problem in order for it to become solvable?” (II, 11)

Each of these is a response to the relationship between the person and the problem. The first is a reminder that we are all-too-often guilty of a philosophical knowingness, of a carried-with-us conviction that we are certain at least of the roots of the problem, that we understand its logical aetiology. We are prepared to learn something new, but not at the root level: that would mean that we have misunderstood the problem completely, or fancied a problem where there is none. The second is a reminder that we tend to occupy one fixed position in front of a philosophical problem, as if there were a chair bolted to floor and as if we had to sit in that chair in order to see the problem for what it is. We will not unfix our position, bound from the chair, and take a look around, hunting specifically for an angle of vision on the problem that allows us to undo it, like an apparently complicated knot that simply falls out of the string when we pull on the right end. –We can comment on one thing that unites these remarks by using a term of Kenneth Burke’s, occupational psychosis. An occcupational psychosis is a kind of blindness created by the aquisition of certain skills, the shadow, as it were, of our occupational accomplishments. (By ‘psychosis’ Burke does not anything strictly psychiatric; instead, “it applies simply to a pronounced character [Burke’s emphasis] of the mind.”) We approach philosophical problems as philosophers, where that means that we approach the problems occupationally: we believe we know what the problems are and we believe we know how to see them–knowing these things is what makes us philosophers. We are not prepared to learn that we do not know what a philosophical problem is, that we are at the root confused. We are not prepared to abandon our familiar angle of vision on the problem. To abandon these would be to approach the problem non-occupationally, to approach the problem with empty hands. That is hard, really quite hard, to do. Our occupation is our preoccupation. How could philosophy become unskilled labor and still know itself as philosophy? (Forgive me for that.)

How often the conjuring trick that illudes us is one we play on ourselves, one that we play on ourselves when we pride ourselves on our skill at avoiding illusion.

The Second Law of Punctuation

February 24, 2012 By in Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein Leave a comment

Reading this morning, I found the following description of William Law’s punctuating.  It put me in mind of Wittgenstein punctuating PI, even if Wittgenstein’s practice is much more considered and discriminating than Law’s.

…Law defies all reason and custom in his use of stops.  He sprinkles them over his pages like a cook shaking out flour from a dredger and with far less discrimination.

Terms of Engagement–A Question

February 21, 2012 By in Philosophical Investigations, Philosophy, Wittgenstein Tags: , 7 Comments

I am currently writing a new paper and have been developing in it a ‘variant’ of a point of Cavell’s–his point about the importance of identifying and thinking through a philosopher’s terms of criticism in reckoning the significance of the philosopher’s work.  I want to say that there is a genus of which terms of criticism are a species, namely terms of engagement.  These include the terms of address (of reader, of interlocutor) used by the philosopher, the expositives, exercitives, commissives, behabitives and verdictives typically employed, etc.  Assuming this makes sense, I am curious:  what stands out to you about Wittgenstein’s terms of engagement in PI?

A Triptych of Quotation

February 6, 2012 By in Philosophical Investigations, Philosophy, Wittgenstein Leave a comment

Three quotations that came to me, more or less together, this morning. The first is from Wittgenstein, the second from Marilynne Robinson, the third from Roger Teichmann:

…[D]on’t think, but look!

I have spent my life watching, not to see beyond the world, merely to see, great mystery, what is plainly before my eyes. I think the concept of transcendence is based on a misreading of creation. With all respect to heaven, the sense of miracle is here, among us. The eternal as an idea is much less preposterous than time, and this very fact should seize our attention.

Yes, I’m sure it was through her contact with Wittgenstein that Anscombe came to see the pitfalls of over-systematic thinking, and on the other hand the real potential in philosophical methods which aim to elucidate rather than to reduce. Like Wittgenstein, she had both intellectual honesty and philosophical stamina, and these are necessary when it comes to resisting the charms of system-building, since those charms have a lot to do with having an easier time of it. Getting an accurate overview of a complex and tangled set of problems is always more difficult than constructing a system and airbrushing out the inconsistencies and counterexamples.

Wittgenstein and the Ordinary, the Everyday

January 24, 2012 By in Kierkegaard, Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein 5 Comments

Kierkegaard’s Judge William distinguishes two histories, external (outer) and internal (inner).  The two histories have different structures.  In the first, the person whose life is historized is understood as a stuggler who does not have what he wants or desires to have, but who eventually acquires it.  In the second, the person whose life is historized is understood as a stuggler who has what he wants or desires, but who cannot take possession of it, because of a series of obstacles.  The first is a “Someday…” history.  The second an “Already but not yet…” history.   The nature of external history allows for shortening, for omission.  Not every moment of the time that passes from lack to acquisition matters; shortening is allowed, even to be encouraged.  But the nature of internal history makes each moment matter; shortening would lose the history itself, lose what it is, in a sense, a history of.

In Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein characterizes what he calls “the aspects of things that are most important for us”, “the real foundations of our inquiry”–what I want to call the ordinary or everyday–as “hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity”.  How can simplicity and familiarity camouflage anything?  How can simplicity and familiarity hide anything, much less what is most important, the real foundations of inquiry, even–what is “most striking and powerful”?

The answer involves Judge William’s distinction.  According to the Judge, anything that has an internal history is, in an important sense, unrepresentable.  But this also renders anything that has an internal history easy to miss–there are no fanfare moments, no peak instants, in the internal history that would allow what it is a history of suddenly to become conspicuous, to step into view.  No, anything with an internal history is, as such, inconspicuous at each moment.

I take it that the ordinary or the everyday has an internal history.  It is not representable.  Wittgenstein understands the ordinary, the everyday, to be the real foundations of our inquiry, and so rests his philosophizing on something that cannot be singled out, moved into prominence, made striking.  –Or at least it cannot in any straightforward way.  As Wittgenstein puts it, “The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all.  Unless that fact has at some time struck him.”   We might gloss this as saying that the ordinary, the everyday, comes into view only once we have realized that they do not come into view.  Which means that they do not come into view at all as do those things with external histories.

Here’s a kind of Kierkegaardian parallel.  Take humility.  The genuinely humble person, as C. S. Lewis once pointed out, doesn’t talk of himself or of humility, but is instead wholly interested in others .  As far as humility goes, the genuinely humble person will not strike us as humble.  But that fact about a person can strike us, and, in so doing, reveal the person as genuinely humble.  What it will reveal is not some one moment, however, in which the person’s humility manifests itself, but rather it will reveal to us the shape of the person’s whole life, of all of his moments.  His life is his taking possession of humility, overcoming the obstacles of empty self-obsession that prevent possession.

The work of Philosophical Investigations is taking possession of the ordinary, the everyday, overcoming the obstacles of philosophy that prevent possession.

(H/T to Michael Fried and Stanley Cavell)

St. Mark the Ascetic on Wickedness

January 23, 2012 By in Philosophical Investigations, Philosophy, religion, virtue and vice, Wittgenstein 4 Comments

Wickedness is an intricate net; and if someone is careless when partially entangled, he gets completely enmeshed.

This strikes me, to almost borrow a phrase from Cavell, as St. Mark’s religious interpretation of a perception he shares with Wittgenstein.

Clarity, Combative Clarity

December 12, 2011 By in Kierkegaard, Marcel, Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Philosophy, Wittgenstein Tags: , , , , 2 Comments

Does philosophy have results?  –As I practice it (ahem!), I guess not.  Or at least it has no results that are not internal to philosophical investigation itself.  I am Wittgensteinian enough, or Kierkegaardian enough, or Marcelian enough to believe that what philosophy aims for is clarity.  But one is always becoming clear; one is never finally clear.

Clarity.  Clarity is internal to philosophical investigation:  it is not a separable result, isolable from the activity that realizes it and such that it confers value onto the activity because of a value it has independent of that activity.  If a result is separable, isolable and independent, then it has a career cut off in an important way from the process that realized it.  Indeed, in one sense its history only begins after the process that realizes it is finished.  The result can be seized and put to purposes quite different from anything that those involved in the process of realizing it intended or foresaw.

But clarity is valuable because of the process of philosophical investigation that realizes it.  And there is no clarity in isolation from the philosophical investigation that realizes it.  Philosophical investigation does not realize a clarity that someone could hope to enjoy who is no longer involved in philosophical investigation.  (“I got clear, you see; and now I am enjoying my clarity, although, thank God!, I am no longer involved in the travails of philosophical investigation.”)  –Kierkegaard’s Climacus talks about the true Christian, the subjective Christian, as “combatively certain” of Christianity, as certain in a way that requires that the certainty be daily won anew.  “Eternal certainty” (his contrast-term) is not something that the subjective Christian can enjoy on this side of the blue.  Similarly, the clarity realized by philosophical investigation is combative clarity, not eternal clarity.

It was once fashionable to charge that clarity is not enough. Someone (Austin, I believe) rejoined that we could decide whether clarity was enough once we’d gotten clear about something.  I worry that both the charge and the rejoinder treat clarity too much as if it were a separable result.

Sufficient unto the day is the clarity thereof, I reckon–the combative clarity thereof.

Philosophical Investigations 309: My Redacted Version

November 19, 2011 By in Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein Tags: , 1 Comment

What is your aim in teaching philosophy?  –To increase devotion to philosophical questions, to increase promptitude, fervor, inwardness and agility in responding to them.

‘Responding’–so you want to help the students find answers?  –No, I want them to learn how to interrogate philosophical questions.  The questions must answer for themselves–or not.

Resolute Reading–New Paper Intro (Draft)

November 2, 2011 By in Philosophical Investigations, Philosophy, Tractatus, Wittgenstein Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

Below is the draft intro of my new paper, “Resolute Reading”.  I will post more as I finish the draft.

The Resolute Reading of TLP exerts a willy-nilly but mesmeric fascination. Its fans try to substantialize it; its opponents try to prevent its substantialization. We all know about food fights. But this is a recipe fight. Before the cake has been baked, indeed before the batter battered, the bakers fall on each other, rending and tearing.

Well, ok, so it is not quite as bad as all that. But it is bad, bad enough. Perhaps the worst of it is the seemingly interminable character of the debate. How is it to end? What are the (are there?) conditions of winning? What kind of debate is it, really?

I want to provide an answer to that last question. I hope that doing so will allow me to shed some light on the previous two. –When I say I want to provide an answer, I do not mean to say that I want to dogmatize about the answer. I want instead to suggest an answer that strikes me as helpful. If it turns out not to be the final answer, that is fine with me, so long as it helps us to the final answer.

Here is how I want to reach my suggestion of a helpful answer: I want to backtrack to a debate about Philosophical Investigations between O. K. Bouwsma and Gilbert Ryle. After reconstructing that debate, I will talk a bit about why it seems hopeless, why it is that Bouwsma and Ryle resemble two blindfolded fencers back-to-back, each lunging to deliver the final blow to his opponent, but each stabbing nothing but air. –Well, ok, so it is not quite as bad as all that. But it is bad, bad enough.

Wittgenstein on Doing Philosophy: Stop or Go?

October 11, 2011 By in Philosophical Investigations, Philosophy, Wittgenstein Tags: , 8 Comments

Yesterday, I had a useful conversation with my friend and former student, Andy Bass.  He described how strongly Wittgenstein’s critical remarks about philosophy struck him and how much they worried him.  Given what Wittgenstein says, why persist in philosophy?  Why not find something else to do?

It seems to me that Wittgenstein’s critical remarks generally should be thought of in this way:  (1) Much of what he says is about Philosophy-as-Other, i.e., philosophy not as he does it but as it is all-too-often done.  (2) Wittgenstein deliberately employs a deflationary rhetoric about the way he does philosophy.

(1) When Wittgenstein is talking about Philosophy-as-Other, he wants to highlight especially the false enchantments of traditional philosophy–highlighting such is important, as Auden notes, because it is a mark of a false enchantment that it “can all too easily last a lifetime”.  Austin provides a nice way of characterizing this false enchantment–the self-image of the philosopher as “a specialist in the sui generis”.

(2) Wittgenstein’s deflationary rhetoric about he way he does philosophy is aimed primarily at himself, I believe, at his vanity and his tendency to high hat.  Wittgenstein’s way of being in philosophy, deeply personal, ascetic, purified, made it easy for him to treat his way of doing philosophy as something special, too special.  He needed to constantly warn himself against that.  But the rhetoric is aimed secondarily at others.  Wittgenstein did not want his way of doing philosophy to falsely enchant.  He knew that it could enchant, and he wanted it to enchant truly, where the mark of true enchantment, as Auden notes, is that it “fades in time.”  Wittgenstein’s deflationary rhetoric is a warning to others against false enchantment, and a warning against the future fading of its true enchantment.  He knew that eventually the enchantment would go and that we would need then to “walk alone in faith”, as Auden puts it–walking alone in faith without either denying the promise of Wittgenstein’s way of doing philosophy, treating its promises as deceptions, or trying to recover its promise by distorting it into something else, something it is not (a form of naturalism, a closeted metaphysics).  No:  we must take up our fly-bottles and follow the path alone.