Tag Archives: wittgenstein

Wittgenstein, Detective

September 29, 2011 By in juvenilia, Kierkegaard, Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein Tags: , , 4 Comments

(Digging around in my files, I found what must have been the first handout I ever constructed on Philosophical Investigations (it is dated 5/7/1992). A section of it follows.)

Understanding the Endless Book

Why is the Investigations so “bloody hard”?  Because the book is both a statement of its method and the result of its method.  To quote Cavell:  “The way this book is written is internal to what it teaches, which means that we cannot understand the manner (call it the method), before we understand its work…The Investigations is written in criticism of itself.”

Before even trying to makes sense of these cabalistic pronouncements, it might be a good idea to ask if Wittgenstein gave his reader any hint how to approach the book.  In the Preface he admits that “I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking.  But, if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own.”  Well and good.  What help does this give us?  Maybe a little, especially if we link it with another remark.

What I want to teach you isn’t opinions but a method.  In fact, the method is to treat as irrelevant every question of opinion…If I’m wrong then you are right, which is just as good.  As long as we look for the same thing…I don’t try to make you believe something you don’t believe, but to make you do something you won’t do.

Let me delay comment on this remark long enough to point up its similarity (I think the similarity is instructive, thus the delay) to Kierkegaard’s comments in Section 12  of Purity of Heart.  The talk

…in order to achieve its proper emphasis…must unequivocally demand something of the listener.  It must demand not merely what has previously been requested, that the reader should share in the work with the speaker–now the talk must unconditionally demand the reader’s own decisive activity, and all depends on this.

Wittgenstein, like Kierkegaard, requires more from his reader than merely close attention to the thought–he requires his reader to think the thought as well.  And part of the reader’s “thinking the thought” is the reader having thoughts of his own about it.

To understand, let’s think of the Investigations in a different way.  Wittgenstein had a well-known love for detective magazines.  Interestingly, the letters which follow a detective’s name are “P. I.”–“private investigator”.  Wittgenstein could well have affixed the same letters after his own name:  “P. I.”–“philosophical investigator”.  In fact, Wittgenstein did, in a way, affix them to his name by leaving behind an instruction manual with the appropriate title–Philosophical Investigations.  (Holmes, remember, delighted in calling himself the world’s only “consulting detective”; Wittgenstein may have been the world’s only “philosophical detective”.)  The Investigations is of course more than just an instruction manual, it is also a case book.  When we read it we are watching the detective.  But what we watch is not the completion of cases; nothing is stamped “solved”.  Instead we are given a glimpse into working cases.  We are made privy to conversations with informants, allowed to see mistaken hunches, provided portraits of suspicious characters.  We see reminders, clues not-yet-understood, records of previous crimes.  Interspersed (like voice-overs) are comments on the investigator’s business, how it works, what to do, what not to do, comments on methods that succeed and methods that fail, notes on the variety of temptations that confront the investigator and what happens when he yields to them.  We are taken into confidence, confessed to, told secrets.  In short, we are left with a mountain of pieces, but the puzzles–mysteries, crimes–remain unsolved.  To profit from the book, we must practice the investigator’s technique on the book itself.  We cannot merely read it, memorize it, parrot the book itself.  We must master it.  And mastery requires intense and continuous effort, not only learning the lessons but applying them–on the mean streets, as it were…

Frege and Wittgenstein on the Difficulty of Audience

September 20, 2011 By in logic, Tractatus, Wittgenstein, writing Tags: , , Leave a comment

Please excuse this letter as springing from my unsatisfied need for communication.  I find myself in a vicious circle:  before people pay attention to my Begriffsschrift, they want to see what it can do, and I in turn cannot show this without presupposing familiarity with it.  So it seems I can hardly count on any readers for the book I mentioned…  (Letter to Marty)

This book will perhaps only be understood by those who have themselves already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it–or similar thoughts.   It is therefore not a text-book.  (Preface to TLP)

Quod Erat Faciendum: Philosophical Investigations and Confessions

September 19, 2011 By in Philosophical Investigations, Philosophy, Wittgenstein Tags: , , , 3 Comments

I am currently at work on a new essay on Resolute Readings of TLP.  I am coming at the topic sideways, as it were, beginning with a debate over PI between O. K. Bouwsma and Gilbert Ryle.

With that on my mind, I had a brief but useful conversation with my friends Reshef and Dafi Agam-Segal.  We were talking about PI and about Wittgenstein’s comment to his students that he did not want to make them believe anything they did not believe, but rather to do something they would not do.  It occurred to me then that perhaps a useful way of understanding Wittgenstein’s work, PI included, would be to take it to be punctuated by QEFs (quod erat faciendum:  which was to have been done) rather than by QEDs.

Since I have mentioned Augustine here recently, I will note that I think this distinction applies, albeit somewhat differently, to Confessions too.  Augustine said of Cicero’s Hortensius that it “changed his way of feeling”.  That phrase describes the work of Confessions–to change the reader’s way of feeling, to encourage Christian inwardness to flower:  “Be it granted, be it fulfilled, be it opened.”

Bringing Philosophy Peace?

September 17, 2011 By in availability/disposability, Marcel, Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Self-knowledge, virtue and vice, Wittgenstein Tags: , , 2 Comments

Wittgenstein wants to bring philosophy, the philosopher-in-us-all, peace.  When we encounter this aim in PI, it is easy to believe that what he wants to bring philosophy, the philosopher-in-us-all, is knowledge.  And of course there is something right about that, especially if we modulate the claim to one about self-knowledge.  (After all, Wittgenstein cares particularly about the philosophical questions that bring philosophy itself into question, questions that bring the philosopher-in-us-all himself into question.)  Crucially, however, self-ignorance involves alienation from ourselves more than it involves any failure of introspective acuity.  And so acquiring the peace of self-knowledge is less learning something about ourselves than it is acknowledging something about ourselves.  (Self-knowledge is typically bitter for good reason.)

So the peace Wittgenstein wants to bring is the peace of self-knowledge; we might even call it the peace of faith.  But faith in what?

Before answering, I want to help myself to an idea of Marcel’s.  Marcel talks about faith, about fundamentally pledging oneself, as reaching so deeply into the person pledged that it affects not only what the person has, but who the person is.  His term for this, the idea I want, is existential index.  When person’s belief has an existential index, ‘(e)’, the belief absorbs fully the powers of the person’s being.  For Marcel, beliefs(e) are incompatible with pretension:  A person who believes(e) is humbled by that in which he believes(e).

And now I want to say something that I know sounds paradoxical.  Wittgenstein wants to bring the philosopher-in-us-all to belief(e) in himself, so that he is no longer tormented by questions that bring himself into question.  But this will be a belief(e) in himself–a rallying to himself, to borrow another idea of Marcel’s–that involves no pretension.  In fact, it will be a form of humility, a form of true love of himself.  He will have faith in himself, but a faith that acknowledges his own nothingness.  This is a faith that allows the philosopher to be filled with the spirit of truth (although not, notice, with the truth); it is a faith that allows him to be light seeking for light.  Such humility does not protect the philosopher-in-us-all against error.  It does protect him against depending on himself.

When the philosopher-in-us-all is tormented by questions that bring himself into question, his has fallen prey to self-dependence.  He has lost his sense of his own thinking as a creative receptivity, a dependent initiative.  He believes he has to be responsible for himself, that he has to support every response to a question by responding to questions about that question.  To believe that is to fall into the predicament of being unable to make philosophical problems disappear.  Pretension on the part of the philosopher-in-us-all guarantees the appearance of the philosophical problems.  Pretension is a lack of faith, the surety of peacelessness.

(Probably a bad idea to try to write about such things when it is so late and I am so tired.)

The Form of a Philosophical Problem

September 15, 2011 By in Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein Tags: , , 2 Comments

Wittgenstein comments that a philosophical problem has the form:  “I don’t know my way about.”  –So much in so little.

But I want now only to say this.  To feel the force of Wittgenstein’s comment, keep in mind that Wittgenstein is not lost in terra incognita; he is no stranger in a strange land.  He is lost at home.  He has to find himself, but to find himself where he is, where he has always been.  Everything around him is so alien and so familiar, so exotic and so everyday.  He is gone but he never left.

Sometimes the hallway to my living room becomes non-negotiable.  A philosophical problem has the form of homesickness in my easy chair.

Topsy-Turvy Frege

September 4, 2011 By in logic, Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Tractatus Tags: , , , 3 Comments

Davidson’s Truth and Predication–at least parts of it–have been in front of me this weekend.  Good stuff, although I am out of sympathy with many of the details of the stories he tells, both about the history of the problem of predication and about the solution of the problem.

But I guess my fundamental disagreement with Davidson centers on the reality of the problematic he investigates.  For Davidson, the unity of the proposition must be explained; explaining it requires solving the problem of predication.  Seeing things this way, when Davidson turns to Frege he understands objects and concepts as constituents of propositions, constituents fashioned, as it were, so as to constitute a propositional unity.  Predictably, Davidson is most fascinated with concepts, since they are–even more than objects–fearfully and wonderfully made:  they are incomplete.   Objects of course are complete–as are propositions (although in a different sense (Frege got confused about this, unfortunately)).  The beginning of wisdom in reading Frege is recognizing the varieties of incompleteness and completeness he thematizes in his thinking–but that is a topic for another post.  What I want to consider here is the way that Davidson turns Frege upside-down.  I believe Frege understands objects and concepts as abstractions from propositions, not constituents of propositions.  Objects and concepts are, shifting descriptions, made from propositions, not made for them.  The proposition, the propositional unity, is prior to objects and concepts.  There is no explaining the unity; and there is no problem of predication to solve.  Davidson’s problematic is unreal.

Of course there is a problematic looming here, but it is more metaphilosophical than metaphysical.  Namely, how do we philosophize without this problem?  What would it be to philosophize constrained by the unity of propositions, recognizing that ultimately our only grip on anything as an object of thought is as what we are thinking instead of as what we are thinking about?  Or, to put this in a more Fregean way, what would it be to philosophize constrained by The Context Principle–and its two companion Principles from Foundations?  Frege’s Principles, as I believe (and have argued elsewhere), are the methodological counterpart to the unity of the proposition.  Taken seriously–kept is Frege’s word–the Principles reorient philosophy itself.  Wittgenstein’s work, both in TLP and in PI, strives to keep Frege’s Principles.  Arguably, Davidson senses this.  Although he shies away from Wittgenstein (saying a bit about why in a long footnote) he does at one point talk of a “deep truth” in a “Wittgensteinian thought”–but he seems unable to see how really to entertain the thought.  That is unsurprising, since the thought impugns the problematic that provides the very structure of Davidson’s thinking.

Easy Pieces? (Zettel 447)

August 31, 2011 By in Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein Tags: , , Leave a comment

(Another past class handout.)

In Zettel Wittgenstein writes:

Disquiet in philosophy might be said to arise from looking at philosophy wrongly, seeing it wrong, namely as if it were divided into (infinite) longitudinal strips instead of into (finite) cross strips. This inversion in our conception produces the greatest difficulty. So we try as it were to grasp the unlimited strips and complain that it cannot be done piecemeal. To be sure it cannot, if by a piece one means an infinite longitudinal strip. But it may well bedone, if one means a cross-strip. –But in that case we never get to the end of our work! –Of course not, for it has no end. (447)

This is a paragraph worth frequenting. It is a fine example of the elasticity of Wittgenstein’s philosophical imagination, and of course it’s more than just that. Wittgenstein here disjoins two ways of looking at philosophy, what I will call the longitudinal view and the latitudinal view. On the longitudinal view, the one Wittgenstein believes common, philosophy is divided into (a finite number of) longitudinal strips–each strip a philosophical problem–and each strip itself infinitely long. On the latitudinal view, the one Wittgenstein recommends, philosophy is divided into (an infinite set of) latitudinal strips, each strip only finitely long. Now, on each view, the work of philosophy never ends, but its unendingness is presented under very different aspects. Latitudinally, we can solve individual philosophical problems: they are finite. But we never finish with philosophy, since there are an infinite number of problems.  Longitudinally, we cannot solve individual problems: they are infinite. And we of course then never finish with philosophy either, but only because we never finish with any of its problems. –This last predicament disquiets us. We never finish with any problem and so we never finish with philosophy. We never get nowhere. (You pass no mile markers on The Road to Nowhere, since you are never any closer to nor any further away from your destination.)  On the latitudinal view, there are an infinite number of philosophical problems. That might strike you as showing that what is meant by ‘problem’ on the view cannot be quite the same as what is meant by ‘problem’ on the longitudinal view. In fact, the idea that there are an infinite number of philosophical problems may itself worry you. Yes, such an idea makes philosophical piecework possible, but only a the expense of making mysterious the idea of a philosophical problem. Are there infinitely many? Could there be?

Stepping beyond what is actually said in 447, I consider Wittgenstein to count philosophical problems in person-sensitive ways. E.g., there is Kelly’s skeptical problem, Brian’s, Betrand’s, and so on. The Skeptical Problem is the determinable for all of these determinates, roughly as red is the determinable for cardinal, scarlet, candy-apple, and so on. To engage with skepticism is to engage with Kelly or Brian or Bertrand or whomever, qua skeptic. –At any rate, if we count philosophical problems in person-sensitive ways, it becomes easier to see how there might be infinitely many, particularly if we also are willing to count problems in person-(at-a-time)-sensitive ways, as I suspect we ultimately must be. I can solve, say, Brian’s (lunchtime on Tuesday the 11th) skeptical problem. That is to have achieved something in philosophy. There are an infinite number of such tasks to perform; the philosopher will never go out of business. But his or her business is a cheek by jowl struggle with the dynamics of the actual thinking of an actual person, and not distanced, person-insensitive reflection on the geometry of thought.

Essence and Grammar (and Definition)

August 20, 2011 By in logic, Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Tractatus, Wittgenstein Tags: , , , , 7 Comments

Reshef Agam-Segal has asked about the difference between Socrates’ desire for a definition and Wittgenstein’s for grammar.  The two desires meet or can seem to meet in the word ‘essence’.  Socrates wants to know, say, the essence of piety.  Wittgenstein wants to know the grammar of piety (“theology as grammar”); and, according to Wittgenstein, “essence is expressed by grammar”.  So each chases essence.

What Socrates chases is familiar enough (at least as standardly interpreted).  What Wittgenstein chases is not so familiar. To succeed in construing the grammar of piety would be to express the essence of piety.  The grammar of piety would be construed in an a series of grammatical remarks. But the series of grammatical remarks does not tell us the essence of piety.  Rather, the series of remarks expresses the essence of piety.  ‘Express’ in “essence is expressed by grammar” works intransitively.  That is, what grammar expresses is not something that we can tell, can say. If you like, what grammar expresses is inexpressible. (Moving, in that sentence, from the intransitive to transitive.)

We are here at one of those anti-type spots in PI–of which, of course, TLP contains the type.  We are in the ambit of showing/saying, as indeed in Wittgenstein we always already are.  But, as my typological talk is meant to suggest, what we have in PI is something foreshadowed in TLP; but what we have in PI is not what we have in TLP.  Getting the differences straight is more than I can do; I will though do what I can.  Perhaps the best place to start is with a glaring absence in PI:  the absence of the symbolism.  The symbolism glyphs the pages of TLP.  It wards those pages.  Without a real, active and sympathetic inwardness with the symbolism, TLP is a closed book.  (Anyone who has attempted to teach the book to undergraduates will know this.)  But the symbolism is almost nowhere to be seen in PI.  What does that mean?  And what does it mean for showing/saying in PI?  [Pause here to light pipe.]

One thing it means, I reckon, is that showing or expressing is now something done by means of ordinary sentences, by means of the spatio-temporal phenomena of language.  The crucial issue in PI is the issue of our relationship to those sentences, to those phenomena.  A sentence is a grammatical remark not in and of itself–noumenally, as it were–but rather because of our orientation upon it.  The possibility of the orientation that makes a sentence a grammatical remark, and so one that expresses or contributes to the expression of essence, results from our being in the grip of a philosophical problem.  The problems provide the light, we might say, in which a sentence can shine forth as grammatical, as essence-expression. Without the problem, the sentence is, well, just a sentence.  Philosophy is a battle against the-bewitchment-of-our-intelligence by means of language, by means of the spatio-temporal phenomena of language.  But the language is only a weapon in that battle–a weapon of peace, ultimately, to be sure–if we orient on it in a way made possible by a philosophical problem.

This makes philosophizing in Wittgenstein’s way both easier and harder.  It is easier in that we need no special magical weapon, no Excalibur, no symbolism, to do what needs doing in philosophy.  It is harder because the weapons we have can always appear to be no weapons at all, to be valueless in the fight.  (“So?  That’s just more words.”)  Being in the grip of a philosophical problem makes the necessary orientation possible, but it does not make it automatic.  Being in the grip of a philosophical problem can also make the necessary orientation look only like so much rigmarole, like a willful way of losing track of what really matters in responding to the problem. Losing our way among words can lead us further afield, but it can also allow words to lead us home in a way that they ordinarily do not.  “Where the danger is, also grows the saving power.”  [Pipe dies; re-light.]

Having written all this, I am aware that I have still not answered Reshef’s question.  But I hope this opens the way to answering his question.  And I hope to get back to his question again soon.  (Thanks to D. for a recent useful conversation about these topics.)

Hopeful Philosophical Investigations

August 16, 2011 By in availability/disposability, Marcel, Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein Tags: , 2 Comments

I struggle to express a particular way of taking up Philosophical Investigations–it seems like I have been doing this since I first began to read it seriously.  What I want to express is something I rate as cognate with what others have expressed when talking about the “ethics” of PI, or of its “ethical over/undertones”, with responses to it as “a feat of writing” or as “the discovery of the problem of the other”.  I have in the past expressed it (helping myself to Kierkegaard’s objective/subjective distinction) as a “subjective reading” of PI.

Here I go again.  I am going to try yet again:  I want to say something about hopeful philosophical investigations.  Something brief.

Let me prefix Gabriel Marcel’s summary of the nature of hope:

I hope in you for us.

We can read the miniature dialogues that constitute PI in a variety of ways.  It is natural enough, I suppose, to understand the voices as antagonistic (Cavell, if I remember correctly, uses that word in “Availability”).  But although that is natural enough, is it best?  Or is it, instead, a vestige of non-Wittgensteinian philosophical practice?  –I will call it an analytic vestige.  We know, don’t we? and what would it be to know it?, that Wittgenstein wanted no part of a conception of philosophy as contest, of any agonistic conception of philosophy.  So, although I do not deny that we can perhaps find moments of agon in PI, such moments are not the stuff of PI.  As I read PI, it is not a series of miniature contests, skirmishes, but instead a series of miniature ameliorations, betterments.  Thinking of the voice of temptation and the voice of correction as in an ameliorative relationship, instead of an antagonistic one, frankly makes better sense of Cavell’s confessional understanding of PI than does thinking of the voices as in an antagonistic relationship–it also makes better sense of ‘temptation’ and ‘correction’ as terminological choices.   In particular, ‘correction’ in an antagonistic relationship has a very different critical valence than it does in an ameliorative one.  The hope of the dialogues is for mutual wholeness:  neither the voice of temptation nor the voice of correction may treat the other voice as alien–anything one voice says may be said, and in a certain sense is said, by the other.  And so the voices respond to each other, each finding itself in the other, working at becoming integral, to achieve agreement (in PI’s difficult sense of that term), to come to a meeting of voices, a time at which the passion of each voice is at one with its life (to borrow another bit of Cavell’s phrasing).  The nisus of each voice I take to be expressed by Marcel’s summary of the nature of hope:  each voice speaks from hope, and is constantly saying to the other, sotto voce:  “I hope in you for us.”

I will come back to this.

No Show, Again

August 8, 2011 By in Philosophical Investigations, virtue and vice, Wittgenstein Tags: , , , , 20 Comments

I was re-reading today F. R. Leavis’ “Memories of Wittgenstein”, and came across the following story.  Leavis and Wittgenstein hired a boat and, after Wittgenstein had paddled for a while, he stopped and got out, saying that he and Leavis should get out and walk.  The walk takes them a fair distance and quite a bit of time.  Eventually, Leavis reminds Wittgenstein that they hired the boat, have a long trek back (both by foot and by boat) and that the man from whom they hired the boat must still be waiting for them to return.  They go back, arriving at the boathouse at about midnight.

The man came forward and held our canoe as we got out.  Wittgenstein, who insisted imperiously on paying, didn’t, I deduced from the man’s protest, give him any tip.  I, in my effort to get in first with the payment, had my hand on some money in my trousers pocket and pulling it out, I slipped a couple of coins to the man.  As we went away, Wittgenstein asked:  “How much did you give him?”  I told him, and Wittgenstein said:  “I hope that is not going to be a precedent.”  Not, this time, suppressing the impatience I felt [Leavis had been impatient with Wittgenstein for a good part of the evening], I returned:  “The man told you that he had been waiting for us for a couple of hours—for us alone, and there is every reason for believing that he spoke the truth.”  “I, ” said Wittgenstein, “always associate the man with the boathouse.”  “You may, ” I retorted, “but you know that he is separable and has a life apart from it.”  Wittgenstein said nothing.

Wittgenstein on this occasion provides an example of the sort of thing that Marcel is trying to prevent in himself in the remark I quoted a few days ago:  “I am not watching a show.”  What Marcel wants to prevent in himself is, put one way, a failure of moral imagination, a failure of negative capability.  Wittgenstein gives in to the impulse to see the world (to see the man at the boathouse) as (part of) a closed, rational system oriented on his own desires and habits and needs, as two-dimensional.  The man at the boathouse becomes, slightly alarmingly, somewhat like the owner of the house in PI 398c:

Think of a picture of a landscape, an imaginary landscape with a house in it.–Someone asks “Whose house is that?”–The answer, by the way, might be “It belongs to the farmer who is sitting on the bench in front of it”. But then he cannot for example enter his house.

Wittgenstein’s boatman cannot leave the boathouse; he cannot return to his own home, to his life that is separate and apart from the boathouse.  –We all give in to this impulse from time to time.  That is why Marcel calls the no-show-ness of the world in which he finds himself “a fundamental spiritual fact”.  Like all spiritual facts, ignorance of it counts not as being ill-informed, but as a refusal to know.

One reason this story struck me was because I was again re-pondering Marcel’s remark due to reflections Lowe provides on her blog.