Category Archives: Wittgenstein

“I Will Teach You Differences!”

July 16, 2011 By in Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein 2 Comments

Resemblance does not make things as much alike as difference makes them unlike.  –Montaigne

Wittgenstein considered using “I will teach you differences” from King Lear as a motto for Philosophical Investigations. It is not entirely clear why Wittgenstein was drawn to it.  Commentators have sometimes understood the line as an Anti-Essentialist slogan.  Philosophers snub particulars; they crave generality and trust it.  Differences do not matter; differences bury the essential.  Wittgenstein will teach that differences matter.  Generality should be mistrusted.  Philosophers must grace particulars, attend to them, stop excavating the essential.

No doubt there is truth in this understanding of the line.  But it seems to me to that there is looseness in it:  a 7/16 wrench on a 3/8 nut.  Taking the motto as an Anti-Essentialist slogan makes the book too metaphysical, metaphysical in a rather too up-front way. Wittgenstein’s challenge to philosophy looks too fraternal.  Wittgenstein looks like a placard bearer for a minority position in metaphysics.

When Wittgenstein teaches differences he teaches the significance of logical differences, not metaphysical differences.  Part of assessing the significance of logical differences is recognizing that the difference between logical differences and metaphysical differences is itself a logical difference.  From the beginning of his work until the end, Wittgenstein cleaved to the idea that “logic must take care of itself”.  Teaching differences is teaching logical differences.  Learning to read PI is largely a matter seeing that and how Wittgenstein teaches the significance of logical differences–and that means seeing how Wittgenstein understood philosophical problems and proper responsiveness to them.

In an important moment of “Art and Sacrament”, David Jones remarks that understanding a painter correctly involves understanding how the painter can acknowledge his own making and yet insist on its identity with, say, some object or type of object he encounters.  Jones’ point is that, for a painter, what is painted is not so much a painting of a mountain as it is mountain–under the form of paint.  Similarly, when Wittgenstein takes up a philosophical problem–say, Essentialism, since I have mentioned it–he is not taking up the metaphysical problem of Essentialism; he is taking up Essentialism–under the form of logic.  For Wittgenstein that is not a change of topic.  He in effect insists on the identity of the traditional metaphysical problem and what he is taking up.  But he does radically reorient himself on Essentialism.  (The trick of course is reckoning with ‘under the form of logic’.)

The Ocean of Illusion–A Few Thoughts

July 15, 2011 By in Philosophical Investigations, skepticism, Wittgenstein 1 Comment

I was struck again a couple of days ago by the remarkable extended metaphor that Kant uses to open his “Phenomena and Noumena” chapter of CPR.  Here is a bit:

We have now not merely explored the territory of pure understanding, and carefully surveyed every part of it, but have also measured its extent, and assigned to everything in it its rightful place.  This domain is an island, enclosed by nature itself within unalterable limits.  It is the land of truth–enchanting name!–surrounded by a wide and stormy ocean, the native home of illusion, where many a fog bank and many a swiftly melting iceberg give the deceptive appearance of farther shores, deluding the adventurous seafarer ever anew with empty hopes, and engaging him in enterprises which he can never abandon and yet is unable to carry to completion.

Kant advises that, before setting sail on the ocean of illusion, we should take on last look at our map of the land of truth, asking two questions:  (1) Can we be satisfied with what the map discloses, indeed, are we not in fact compelled to be satisfied with it, since there may be nowhere else to settle?; and, (2) By what title do we possess even the land of truth, are we in fact secure against all opposing claims?  Kant takes the “Analytic” to effectually have answered these questions, but he thinks that reviewing a summary answer to them is worthwhile.

The summary is not so much of interest to me now.  I am more interested in the extended metaphor itself.  It is an icon of CPR.  Up to this point in the text, Kant and his reader have been mapping the land of truth, exploring it, surveying it and measuring it.  But now it is time to go down to the ship, to set keel to breakers–to go forth on the ungodly sea.  Now it is time to face illusion.  And we have no choice.  –What mesmerizes me is Kant combining the ideas that we are compelled to be satisfied with our island, that we do possess a clear title to it, and that we are nonetheless gripped again and again by hopes (empty and delusive though they will prove to be) of farther shores out across the enshadowed ocean, tempted by (ultimately idle) adventures.  To be compelled to be satisfied does not guarantee satisfaction.  (The peculiar fate of human reason!)  Against what I take to be the ground on which CPR is figure, namely against the prioritizing of the practical over the theoretical, we can see CPR as thematizing the Church-Man’s skepticism.  Reason provides only conclusions in which nothing is concluded.  That is a topic I will return to in subsequent posts.

(Kant’s extended metaphor also provides an icon of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.  But in PI, Wittgenstein and his reader are almost always sitting amidships, wind jamming the tiller, sailing into and then out of fog banks, up to and then away from swiftly melting icebergs.  He and his reader spend scant time on the land of truth.  They spend their days on deepest water, longing for shore leave, for a dry and homely ingle.  But real needs keep them at sea.  Being at sea and occasionally coming back home:  the rhythm of their lives.)

Disposability, Availability

July 11, 2011 By in Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, religion, Socrates, Wittgenstein 15 Comments

Marcel’s term for ‘disposability’ is ‘disponibilité’.  Here it is translated as ‘availability’:

[Availability] of course does not mean emptiness, as in the case of an available dwelling (local disponible), but it means much rather an aptitude to give oneself to anything which offers, and to bind oneself by the gift.  Again, it means to transform circumstances into opportunities, we might say favours, thus participating in the shaping of our own destiny and marking it with our seal.  It has sometimes been said of late , “Personality is vocation”.  It is true if we restore its true value to the term vocation, which is in reality a call, or more precisely the response to a call.  We must not, however, be led astray here by any mythological conception.  It depends, in fact, on me whether the call is recognised as a call, and strange as it may seem, in this matter it is true to say that it comes both from me and from outside me at one and the same time; or rather, in it we become aware of that most intimate connection between what comes from me and what comes from outside, a connection which is nourishing or constructive and cannot be reliquished without the ego wasting and tending toward death.

Perhaps we might make this clearer by pointing out that each of us from the very beginning, appears to himself and to others as a particular problem for which the circumstances, whatever they may be, are not enough to provide a solution.  I use the term problem absolutely against my will, for it seems to be quite inadequate.  Is it not obvious that if I consider the other person as a sort of mechanism exterior to my ego, a mechanism of which I must discover the spring or manner of working, even supposing I manage to take him to pieces in the process, I shall never succeed in obtaining anything but a completely exterior knowledge of him, which is in a way the very denial of his real being?  We must even go further and say that such a knowledge is in reality sacrilegious and destructive, it does no less than denude its object of the one thing he has which is of value and so it degrades him effectively.  That means–and there is nothing which is more important to keep in view–that the knowledge of an individual being cannot be separated from the act of love or charity by which this being is accepted in all which makes of him a unique creature or, if you like, the image of God…

I supply this quotation as a commentary on and extension of my earlier post, Making Ourselves Disposable.  One striking thing about this, for anyone who is a fan of Cavell’s work, and especially of his essay, “The Availability of the Later Wittgenstein”, is how much like Cavell it sounds, and how much light it sheds on at least one meaning of the title of his essay.  I am quite sure that one sense of ‘availability’ in the title is Marcel’s sense.  The second paragraph reads like a digest of Cavell’s thinking about Other Minds, setting up, as it does, Cavell’s crucial understanding of acknowledgement.

Making Ourselves Disposable

July 10, 2011 By in Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Socrates, Wittgenstein 1 Comment

One use of a term I have lately been fascinated by is Gabriel Marcel’s use of ‘disposable’ (at least that is the word used in the translation I am reading; I have little, really no French).  For Marcel, the term represents a spiritual ideal, a goal to be worked toward as one matures in Christian life.  But it also represents for him a philosophical ideal, a goal of philosophizing—although I admit that he makes this less clear.  Marcel’s use of the term overlaps interestingly with the Authorized Version’s use of ‘humble’ and of ‘meek’. But Marcel does not use the term merely as synonymous with the AV’s use of either. It also overlaps to an extent with the AV’s use of  ‘charity’, both ‘love’ and ‘gift-giving’, and it is connected by important lines of filiation with its use of ‘hope’.

The ideal is to make yourself disposable to others, to be willing to give them not only the first word in philosophical investigation, but also the last word too.  It is to philosophize in a way free of possessions, where possessions are understood as, say, theses, some philosophy or other that guides, indeed requires, my pushing or pulling, forcing or resisting for the sake of some philosophical claim or other.  These possessions make me philosophically non-disposable.  Marcel writes,

I wonder if we could not define the whole spiritual life as the sum of activities by which we try to reduce in ourselves the part played by non-disposability.

And he treats non-disposability as “inseparable from a form of self-adherence”.  Treated as a philosophical goal, being disposable would be to understand philosophy as practiced readiness of response, as a willingness to hear what another has to say and to work through that from the inside, from the side of the person who says it.  Philosophical progress would be made by reducing in our responsiveness the non-disposability that to some degree or other inevitably infects it.  As I read him, Plato’s Socrates aims for a form of non-disposability; as I read him, Wittgenstein aims for a form of it too.  Wittgenstein’s desire for it shows (it seems to me) in the way that he begins Philosophical Investigations, giving the first words to Augustine and speaking himself only in response to Augustine; it shows in his interest in what he calls “the liberating word” and in his willingness to yield wholly to the other prerogative over whether any word is in fact liberating.  (The poet, John Ciardi, somewhere speaks of the aim of poetry as the speaking of “the enlarging word”, an idea that I take to be related to Wittgenstein’s of “the liberating word”. I reckon that the ideas of “the enlarging word” and of “the liberating word” are not merely showings of an aim at being non-disposable, but of an aim at making the other more fully disposable to himself and to others.  The image of being a fly trapped in a fly-bottle (a passage that my talk of Wittgenstein’s aim makes unavoidable) I take to be an image of finding oneself non-disposable, both to oneself and to others.)  Cavell has insisted on this feature of Wittgenstein’s philosophizing, as has Cora Diamond, in her underscoring of Wittgenstein’s desire to philosophize in a way that does not lay down requirements.

Socrates’ desire for disposability shows in his repeated, often deeply frustrated hope that his interlocutor will state what the interlocutor actually believes, whether about piety or about courage or about knowledge; it shows in his understanding of himself as a philosophical midwife.  (Look again at the almost unbelievably wonderful passage in the Theaetetus 148e-151d; it deserves reading and re-reading, with, as Burnyeat memorably says, “feeling as well as thought”.)  It shows in his deference to the Logos.  It shows in his averment of his own ignorance.  Virtually all that Socrates does shows his aversion to philosophical self-adherence.

I will return to this again.

Yet More on Eat, Pray, Love: Following a Rule

July 6, 2011 By in mysticism, religion, Wittgenstein Leave a comment

Wittgenstein famously and rightly disses attempts to follow rules privately.  But it seems to me that ultimately Gilbert’s quest uncovers as an attempt at just such private rule-following:  she will have her own ritual, her own ceremony, her own meaning.  Sure, she gabs on about these as she does everything else; yet she cannot, and in a way knows she cannot, and in a way she does not want to really share them with anyone else.  To be able to do so would be for them not to be hers. As long as it means something to her, it means something. Admittedly, that sounds tautological.  But given what she wants, it is not.  She wants it to mean something only to her, because then it really means something.  She wants something of more grandeur than a bettle in a box; she wants a Beetle, her Beetle, in the Ark of the Covenant.

 Now someone tells me that he knows what pain is only from his own case!–Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a “beetle”. No one can look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle.–Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing.–But suppose the word “beetle” had a use in these people’s language?–If so it would not be used as the name of a thing. The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty.–No, one can ‘divide through’ by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is. –PI 293

Motto?

June 30, 2011 By in Albritton, Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein Leave a comment

Rogers Albritton

Philosophy, as he [Wittgenstein] means to be practicing it “simply puts everything before us, [it] neither explains nor deduces anything” and it “may not advance any kind of theory” (Philosophical Investigations I 126, 109). Its aim is, rather, “complete clarity,” which “simply means that the philosophical problems should completely disappear” (ibid., 133). I’d like nothing better. Moreover, I believe it: the problems (at any rate, those I care most about) should indeed, as he says, completely disappear. That’s how they look to me. I love metaphysical and epistemological theories, but I don’t believe in them, not even in the ones I like. And I don’t believe in the apparently straightforward problems to which they are addressed. However, not one of these problems has actually done me the kindness of vanishing, though some have receded. (I don’t have sense-data nearly as often as I used to.) And if there is anything I dislike more in philosophy than rotten theories, it’s pretenses of seeing through the “pseudoproblems” that evoked them when in fact one doesn’t know what’s wrong and just has a little rotten metatheory as to that.