Hell hath no fury like a romantically oriented reader of the Tractatus who has thought of the early Wittgenstein as an enchanting mystagogue, but gone on to read the later one and realized subconsciously that the project of the thaumaturgic Tractatus is fundamentally the same as that of the quotidian Investigations. — T. P. Uschanov, “The Strange Death of Ordinary Language Philosophy“
Category Archives: Wittgenstein
Language and Bewitchment: PI 109
A footnote from an old essay of mine:
Think of the instructive amphiboly in the (translation of the) concluding line of PI 109: “Philosophy is the battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.” How is this to be understood? Is it (1) “Philosophy is the battle against the-bewitchment-of-our-intelligence-by-means-of-language” or (2) “Philosophy is the battle against the-bewitchment-of-our-intelligence by means of language”?
And then in the text proper:
The very thing which is to free us from confusion is the very thing which confused us to begin with. The poison is also the antidote.
Merleau-Ponty on Ideal Language
We all secretly venerate the ideal of a language which in the last analysis would deliver us from language by delivering us to things.
Both Object and Means of Interpretation
Cavell notes that in Part IV of The Claim of Reason PI had shifted for him from object of interpretation to means of interpretation. I mention this because of my growing sense of how much of the blog has been devoted to trying to say something about the importance of PI, to reveal something of what and how it is central in my life, and I am chagrined by the error of each trial. Nonetheless, I continue, even as I fail to satisfy myself in treating PI as an object of interpretation, —I continue unabashedly to use it as a means, even as my primary mean, of interpretation. That impresses me now as mysterious. Is it because I am convinced by the rightness of PI beyond my ability to articulate that rightness? But how should I understand that inarticulate conviction? Can it be trusted? Or is it rather that my conviction of its rightness is itself justified for me by my repetitiously endured inability to articulate that rightness, as if being able to articulate it would demote PI from its position as standard for me, so that success would be a form of self-defeat? Or is it rather because my conviction is that PI requires itself to withstand all of its own judgments, understands itself both as supplying and suffering its own terms of criticism, making itself simultaneously object and source of philosophical criticism? Or is it rather because only what shows itself as a faithful means of interpretation is surely worth the difficulty of interpreting?
Distinctions Among Distinctions
I posted the G. A. Cohen impersonation of Ryle (below) both because I thought it was funny and because it seemed to me to satirize moments in my own work. Now of course I am not worthy to lace Ryle’s boxing gloves, but I have on occasion distinguished distinctions from distinctions–or tried to. Here’s a short section from late in my book on the Concept ‘Horse’ Paradox.
At this juncture someone might object that the respondents whose responses I’ve been typifying end up looking quite a lot like Frege (as Wittgenstein read him) and Anscombe and Wittgenstein (early and late)—a lot like the philosophers I think we should follow here. I comment on this as Cavell does on a similar fact: The work of these philosophers forms a sustained and radical criticism of such respondents—so of course it is “like” them. It is “like” them in the way that any criticism is “like” what it criticizes. But ultimately, the work of these philosophers and of the respondents is radically unlike: to use an example of Anscombe’s, as radically unlike as soap and washing.
Why is that? Why this radical unlikeness? Well, I’ve done my best throughout the chapter to provide answers to that question. There is a gulf fixed between the work of these philosophers and the respondents, a gulf that closely resembles the gulf between constative language and ladder-language because it is that gulf. The gulf is another of these distinctions without a genus. The philosophers I think we should follow do not take themselves to be trying to bargain the absoluteness of the distinction between concepts and objects away—although I admit they occasionally slip from the strait and narrow onto the broad way. But, no, they are trying to make clear that we can come to see the CHP as no paradox at all only by letting the distinction between concepts and objects be the distinction it is. It is not a distinction with a genus. It is not a distinction of which we need to be informed; we need rather to be reminded of it. It is not a distinction which we recognize and then, having recognized it, impose on thoughts that were thinkable before the imposition. Again, it is know-how, not know-that.
The distinction is of philosophical importance not because it can be given as an answer, in some bit of constative language, to a deep philosophical question. The distinction is of philosophical importance because it is implicated as deeply in thoughts as any distinction could be. No matter how far into thinking nature we retreat, when we turn to think we find such distinctions retreating and turning with us. They are a part of what we are. They are elements in that tawny grammar, that mother-wit, that know-how, that we are initiated into when we are initiated into what Cavell calls “human speech and activity, sanity and community.” They are what we do. They are what thinkers do.
There are distinctions and distinctions—and so of course the details make a difference. One of the things that reflecting on the CHP’s respondents reveals is how very hard it is to keep straight distinctions among distinctions. After we have distinguished quantitative distinctions from qualitative distinctions, we think we’ve finished distinguishing distinctions. But there are more distinctions to make yet. Is the distinction between soap and washing quantitative or qualitative? It seems to me to be neither. But it’s still a distinction, for all that.
Drama of the Soul in Exile: PI, (Yet) Again
Those who have been following the blog will recognize this as a both recapitulation and variation on earlier bits and pieces. It is from the essay I am working on.
Hearing Voices in PI
[A thought connected to the paper I am working on today.]
Consider the interlocutory voices in PI. How am I, the reader, supposed to relate to them?
My surmise: I have to find my way to hearing all the voices as mine. I ought not simply choose one and denominate it my champion, or denominate it me. No, I must come to hear the voices as giving voice to different modulations of my existence; I find myself in each voice. To achieve this is to achieve a regrouping of my own mind. The best single term I know to use here is Gabriel Marcel’s: ingatheredness. I find my way to ingatheredness–and the ingatheredness is not achieved apart from the philosophical problems that confront the voices; rather the philosophical problems that confront the voices are themselves factors in the ingathering; they must play a role in my self-recollection because they play(ed) a role in my self-forgetfulness. (Finding myself in all the voices helps to make that clear.)
“But this means that the whole of PI is devoted to putting me back together? To finding in myself all these temptations, these corrections, these murks, these clarities?” –Yes. “So what do I take away from PI?” –Yourself. “I started with that.” –Did you?
To travel the length of PI, really to find yourself in all its voices, to achieve ingatheredness, is to have undergone ‘a change without change’. Marcel:
…[W]e must suppose that we are here in the presence of an act of inner creativity or transmutation, but also that this creative or transmuting act, though a paradox…also has the character of being a return–only a return in which what is given after the return is not identical with what was given before…The best analogy for this process of self-discovery which, though it is genuinely discovery, does also genuinely create something new, is the development of a musical composition; even if such a composition apparently ends with the very same phrases that it started with, they are not longer felt as being the same–they are, as it were, coloured by all the vicissitudes they have gone through and by which their final recapture, in their first form, has been accompanied.
[Footnote: N.B. the relationship between PI 1 and PI 693.]
I win and lose, win and lose ingatheredness: but this isn’t to toggle between the same two conditions again and again, but rather is the local shape of a globally ‘upward’, winning movement. And over and over, PI helps.
Reminders and a Kind of Taste
I’ve been thinking again about Wittgensteinian reminders, and, while I was doing so, I ran across the following from Henry James.
There are two kinds of taste, the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.
It strikes me that much of the power of Wittgenstein’s work in PI is only available to those who have the taste for emotions of recognition. In fact, I wonder if the juxtaposition of PI 127 and 128 is not itself a juxtaposition of the two tastes: in 127 Wittgenstein engages the taste for emotions of recognition and in 128 he denies the taste for emotions of surprise.
I suppose as I have put this it is oversimple–as James’ categorization itself is. But, there is something to it (isn’t there?), something important, I believe. Aren’t the two tastes also being juxtaposed in the final paragraph of PI 89?
The Sublimity of Logic
PI 89: A nodal point in PI–a point where numerous intimate connections can be traced. I am not going to trace them now, not all of them. But one is that the problem of the sublimity of logic is, at least partially, the result of our subliming of logic, of our relationship to the problem. We are not wholly confused in subliming logic–logic is sublime. But its sublimity must square with its not supplying us with new facts, with its investigation of the hardly memorable and easily forgettable. –Can we so square the sublimity of logic without feeling that Wittgenstein has changed the subject?
These considerations bring us up to the problem: In what sense is logic something sublime?
For there seemed to pertain to logic a peculiar depth–a universal significance. Logic lay, it seemed, at the bottom of all the sciences.–For logical investigation explores the nature of all things. It seeks to see to the bottom of things and is not meant to concern itself whether what actually happens is this or that.—-It takes its rise, not from an interest in the facts of nature, nor from a need to grasp causal connexions: but from an urge to understand the basis, or essence, of everything empirical. Not, however, as if to this end we had to hunt out new facts; it is, rather, of the essence of our investigation that we do not seek to learn anything new by it. We want to understand something that is already in plain view. For this is what we seem in some sense not to understand.
Augustine says in the Confessions “quid est ergo tempus? si nemo ex me quaerat scio; si quaerenti explicare velim, nescio”.–This could not be said about a question of natural science (“What is the specific gravity of hydrogen?” for instance). Something that we know when no one asks us, but no longer know when we are supposed to give an account of it, is something that we need to remind ourselves of. (And it is obviously something of which for some reason it is difficult to remind oneself.)
A Thought on Cavellian Generic Objects and Our Relationship to Philosophical Problems
I’ve been talking about our relationship to philosophical problems, and I want to say more about that idea. The idea is made more clear by Cavell’s notion of a generic object–and in its turn makes Cavell’s notion clearer. (I will not now say more about the use to which the notion (and its companion notion, specific object) is put by Cavell. To see that use, look at pages 52ff. of The Claim of Reason.)
Consider Cavell’s crucial comment:
I will not by such titles be meaning to suggest that there are two kinds of objects in the world [generic and specific], but rather to summarize the spirit in which an object is under discussion, the kind of problem that has arisen about it, the problem in which it presents itself as the focus of investigation.”
Here (briefly) is what I take to be crucial: whether the object under discussion is to be ‘classified’ as generic is a matter not settled by the object itself (by its marks or features), but rather by the way in which we are related to the object–but that means by the way in which we are related to the problem of which the object is the focus. To ‘classify’ the object as generic is really to classify the spirit of our discussion, our relationship to the problem. In the Kierkegaardian terminology I habitually use here, to ‘classify’ an object as a generic object is to highlight the how of our relationship to it, not the what of the object. (The distinction between generic and specific objects is not metaphysical but metaphilosophical.)
Cavell’s phenomenologies of philosophizing, populating the pages of The Claim of Reason, are extensions of Wittgenstein’s own (less protracted) phenomenologies of philosophizing, populating the pages of Philosophical Investigations. And the phenomenologies are devoted to revealing our relationship to philosophical problems.
Quantum Est In Rebus Inane 