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 Philosopher
of the Month
June
2001 - Wittgenstein
Rupert
Read
Central
to Wittgenstein's work was the nature of language and its role in
the process of philosophising. He played a leading role in the 'linguistic
turn' of modern philosophy, away from ideas and toward sentences
in contexts. But his iconoclasm and deep distrust of any
theory makes it misleading to classify him as a 'philosopher of
language'.
The
brilliant, gnomic, and influential Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
(1922) was the only book Wittgenstein published in his lifetime
(1889-1951). This book offered an elaboration of its prefatory dictum,
"What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one
cannot speak thereof one must be silent." Many philosophers
have argued that Wittgenstein believed that the truths which one
could not speak - those supposedly found in ethics, religion, and
philosophy itself, for example - could still be 'shown'.
A new, alternative interpretation, associated especially with Cora
Diamond and James Conant, is that Wittgenstein meant the dictum
quoted above quite austerely and resolutely - that there was simply
nothing to be said about what cannot be said. On this interpretation,
Wittgenstein was quite in earnest when he wrote that the Tractatus
itself was nonsense. The illusions of sense that it produced would
be thrown away by one who, in reading it, understood his point in
writing it.
After
completing the Tractatus, Wittgenstein was silent on the
subject of philosophy for some years, before returning to it publicly
at the close of the 1920s with a renewed interest and some strikingly
new formulations. In contrast to the crystalline simplicity of the
Tractatus's depiction of an ideal language, Wittgenstein's
later thought was expressed as a motley of considerations about
the motley that language actually is. In contrast to the early focus
on the essential form of logic and language, the later philosophy
chiefly works by pointing out differ ences within and between
real or imagined 'language-games'. The Tractatus gave the
appearance of being a magisterial theory of logical form. Philosophical
Investigations, the masterpiece of his later period,
was fashioned rather after a dialogue with interlocutors
or students.
Wittgenstein
held throughout his life that clarity of thought and expression
were hard to obtain because we fail to notice that we are always
doing things with language. Uses of language have to be contextualised
within living practice if they are to be understood, and there is
all the difference in the world between the contexts of significant
use of sentences which appear extremely similar - for example,
consider "Swifts fly very fast", "How time flies!",
and "The boat flew down the rapids". He summed
this up thus: "Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment
of our intelligence by means of language". As it stands, this
proposition is perhaps ambiguous: does it mean that it is language
itself that befuddles our intelligence; or does it mean that
we can combat philosophical confusions through particular
clarificatory uses of language? Arguably, both. Wittgenstein thought
that it was indeed only through investigation of what it made sense
to say when, and of the sources of the compulsion to misunderstand,
that philosophers could begin to put an end to conceptual confusions
and pacify perturbed reflective minds. He also thought that it was
precisely conceptual (i.e. linguistic) confusions - such as that
that might be engendered by the failure to distinguish different
uses of 'fly' - which led to philosophical perturbation in the first
place. In this way, language (and our relation to it) is both the
cure and the disease.
Finding
methods of 'cure' was far more important for Wittgenstein than arriving
at dogmatic philosophical theses. Indeed, the very quest for and
defence of theses was for Wittgenstein a symptom of philosophical
confusion, because he held that only in scientific and other empirical
disciplines could meaningful assertions about 'how things
are' be made. This methodological precept, together with his disinterest
in giving arguments, has contributed to his being hard to
absorb within any professional thought-community, including the
discipline of philosophy.
Thus
his philosophical 'position' might be described as evanescent. Wittgenstein
hoped to get us to see how most philosophical questions - and the
positions which we take up in response to those questions - are
based in an unsatisfactory relationship between us and our words,
a kind of linguistic confusion in which we want to say things that
don't make any sense.
In
fact, the challenge which Wittgenstein makes to philosophy today
can perhaps best be put precisely thus: try to philosophise, to
think, without putting forward any 'position' at all.
Suggested
reading
Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein (Routledge)
Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein (Blackwell)
A
new philosopher of the month will be featured from July 1st 2001
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