Wittgenstein

Key Concepts

Kelly Dean Jolley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781844651887
• eBook ISBN: 9781317492375
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Wittgenstein's complex and demanding work challenges much that is taken for granted in philosophical thinking as well as in the theorizing of art, theology, science and culture. Each essay in this collection explores a key concept involved in Wittgenstein's thinking, relating it to his understanding of philosophy, and outlining the arguments and explaining the implications of each concept. Concepts covered include grammar, meaning and meaning-blindness language-games and private language, family resemblances, psychologism, rule-following, teaching and learning, avowals, Moore's Paradox, aspect seeing, the meter-stick, and criteria. Students new to Wittgenstein and readers interested in developing their understanding of specific aspects of his philosophical work will find this book very welcome.

ONE

Wittgenstein’s philosophical remarks

Kelly Dean Jolley

Philosophical remarks and Philosophical Investigations

In his always instructive essay, “The Philosophy of Wittgenstein”, Rush Rhees underscores that “If you do not see how style or force of expression are important you cannot see how Wittgenstein thought of philosophical difficulties or philosophical method” (Rhees 1970a: 38). Notice that Rhees binds together Wittgenstein’s understanding of style or force of expression, and his understanding of philosophical problems and methods. In doing so, Rhees properly follows Wittgenstein. In the “Preface” of Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein confesses that “the best [he] could write would never be more than philosophical remarks; [his] thoughts were soon crippled if [he] tried to force them on in any single direction against their inclination”.¹ But, after a long pause (embodied in one of his everlastingly elongated dashes), he redirects the force of his confession by binding his need to write remarks and to follow the inclination of his thoughts to the nature of his philosophical work: “And this was, of course, connected with the very nature of the investigation.” I shall return to this binding of philosophical remarks to the nature of the investigation – but first I want to consider philosophical remarks themselves. What are they?

Philosophical remarks: a first look

Wittgenstein offers a couple of very brief characterizations of philosophical remarks. He calls them “short paragraphs”. He adds that the short paragraphs sometimes form a fairly long chain about the same subject but that they sometimes jump from one topic to another. He also calls them “sketches of landscapes” – sketches made “in the course of … long and involved journeyings” criss-cross in every direction a wide field of thought. The sketches together provide a picture of the landscape. The collection of them is, he says, “really only an album”.

Philosophical remarks are short paragraphs: this may seem hardly informative, if it seems informative at all. But it is informative, even if it informs negatively. As short paragraphs, Wittgenstein’s philosophical remarks are not aphorisms, at least not generally. Understanding the philosophical remarks as aphorisms has been common among commentators. There are good reasons for understanding them this way: first, some of the short paragraphs are aphorisms and some contain sentences that are aphoristic; second, Wittgenstein’s palpable concern for style and for achieving a peculiar force of expression finds natural expression in aphorisms. (Compare, as commentators have done, Wittgenstein’s short paragraphs to the aphorisms of Lichtenberg.) But many, and perhaps most, of the short paragraphs neither are aphorisms nor contain aphoristic sentences.

I need to clarify my point. An aphorism is a short, pithy, pointed sentence: “Life is short, and art is long” (Hippocrates). As I have said, some of Wittgenstein’s philosophical remarks are philosophical aphorisms or closely akin to them:

A philosophical problem has the form: “I don’t know my way about.”

(§123)

It is in language that an expectation and its fulfillment make contact.

(§445)

And certainly many of the philosophical remarks contain sentences that are aphoristic (especially concluding sentences). For example:

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.

(§109)

But Wittgenstein’s philosophical remarks are not generally, as such, aphorisms. The most accurate thing to say is that aphoristic sentences sometimes punctuate the philosophical remarks. But if Wittgenstein is not generally writing philosophical aphorisms, what is he writing when he writes his philosophical remarks? Is he writing philosophical maxims, precepts, dicta, apothegms, adages, proverbs, epigrams or truisms? I take it that the answer in each of these cases is negative, although, as was true of philosophical aphorisms, some of Wittgenstein’s remarks are or contain philosophical maxims, precepts, dicta, apothegms, adages, proverbs, epigrams or truisms. To answer the question of what Wittgenstein is writing, I need to explore some of the dimensions of the remarks. As I do so, I hope to body forth their complicated nature.

Wittgenstein’s governessy accents

Gilbert Ryle once complained about the “governessy” accents of Wittgenstein’s philosophical remarks and about the “solicitous shepherdings” that characterize him as mentor of his reader (Ryle 1979: 131). Ryle’s complaints are worth noting because they direct attention to a crucial dimension of Wittgenstein’s philosophical remarks. Wittgenstein’s philosophical remarks teach – and do so in a very specific way. They are the remarks of a master to an apprentice, the teacherly remarks that a master makes while observing the actions of an apprentice, actions performed as the apprentice struggles towards mastery of particular arts. The arts Wittgenstein is teaching are, to borrow another phrase of Ryle’s, the “arts of conceptual disentanglement” (ibid.). When they are thus described, it may seem to some that Wittgenstein arrogates a role to himself that he ought not, in the interest of good manners, to arrogate to himself: the role of master. Even if he is a master of these arts, we might ask, need he take on the role of master? Of course, asking this, while it may express a genuine reservation about Wittgenstein’s taking on the role of master, more probably expresses our disrelish for taking on the role of apprentice. Ryle complains about Wittgenstein’s governessy accents and solicitous shepherdings on behalf of “undocile souls”, especially including his own; Ryle has no taste for apprenticeship. But Ryle confuses apprenticeship and docility. While an apprentice is docile relative to the master during the apprenticeship, the purpose of the docility, because it is the purpose of the apprenticeship, is to acquire mastery. The master or the apprentice or both fail if the apprentice does not himself become a master. The purpose of Wittgenstein’s teaching is not to make the apprentice perpetually docile, forever an apprentice. Far from it: Wittgenstein’s purpose is for the apprentice to join him in mastery. Ryle, we might say, reacts to Wittgenstein’s teaching as if it were to have no end, as if Philosophical Investigations had no final page, as if there were no graduation day. Another problem with Ryle’s complaints is that they ignore the important fact that Wittgenstein is Wittgenstein’s own (first) apprentice. Stanley Cavell has convincingly described the alternating voices that occur in Wittgenstein’s philosophical remarks as the voice of temptation and the voice of correction. I would add that the apprentice’s is the voice of temptation and the master’s the voice of correction. But each of the voices is (first) Wittgenstein’s. Wittgenstein views philosophy as a way of working on himself. He never so completely identifies with the role of master that he loses his active, inward sense of what it is to be in the role of apprentice. The temptations he corrects are temptations he (still) feels. Wittgenstein is concerned not just with the subject he is thinking about, but also with the subjectivity of the person whom he is training in the arts of conceptual disentanglement – about his own and his apprentice’s subjectivity.

The source of Ryle’s complaints is his misunderstanding of the form of Philosophical Investigations. Ryle believes that behind the mentor there is a philosopher: “The knots which Wittgenstein shows us how to untie are the knots which he himself had first to find out how to untie” (ibid.). And Ryle is right. But Ryle seems to think that the mentoring is simply an add-on to the philosophizing. He seems to think that the real content of the book is the philosophizing; the mentoring is a perhaps useful but finally mildly embarrassing way of presenting the real content, call it a rhetorical error. We might put what Ryle seems to think this way: Philosophical Investigations’ expositing of its content can be separated, and really should have been separated, from its modulating of its content. But this way of thinking mistreats Wittgenstein in two ways: it treats his modulation of the book as external to its exposition; and it treats a putative error of modulation as if it were a merely rhetorical and not a philosophical error. Wittgenstein does not think that the modulation of the book is external to its exposition: what he has to teach has to be taught in a certain way. And Wittgenstein does not think that an error of modulation is merely a rhetorical error; it is a philosophical error.

Style and force of expression

Here is the place to return to Rhees’s remark binding Wittgenstein’s understanding of style or force of expression to his understanding of philosophical problems and method. In the “Preface” Wittgenstein writes 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.” Notice how this comment looks in light of the master/ apprentice distinction we have been exploring. The remark does not mean that Wittgenstein wants to stimulate others into thinking about what he is thinking. No, the object of the others’ thoughts is whateverWittgenstein is thinking about. As I said above, Wittgenstein’s remarks are the teacherly remarks made by a master as he observes an apprentice struggling towards mastery, employing the arts to be mastered. In such a setting, the remarks of the master are not the sole object of the apprentice’s attention. In such a setting, the remarks of the master are not the sole object of the master’s attention. The master focuses on what he says in so far as he works to say whatever will best guide the apprentice’s action. So the master is focused simultaneously on what the apprentice is focused on and on the remarks he makes in guiding the apprentice’s actions. We might say that, for the master, the actions of the apprentice guide his offering of guiding remarks. The apprentice focuses on what the master says in so far as he needs guidance, in so far as his actions threaten to fall into incoherence. So the apprentice is focused simultaneously on what he is doing and on the remarks the master makes in guiding his actions. We might say that, for the apprentice, his actions guide his appropriation of the master’s guiding remarks. Wittgenstein does not want to spare his reader the trouble of thinking, because only in so far as his reader is actively thinking, acting so as to acquire mastery of the arts of conceptual disentanglement, will Wittgenstein’s remarks work as they are intended to work. His remarks are intended to teach by guiding a particular activity of philosophy. If the reader stops doing philosophy in that way, stops attempting conceptual disentanglement, and makes Wittgenstein’s remarks the sole object of his thinking, then the reader is in the unteachable (because unguideable) position of an apprentice who stops acting so as to focus solely on remarks intended to guide his action. Consider the following from Martin Heidegger:

A cabinetmaker’s apprentice, someone who is learning to build cabinets and the like, will serve as an example. His learning is not merely practice, to gain facility in the use of tools. Nor does he merely gather knowledge about the customary forms of the things he is to build. If he is to become a true cabinetmaker, he makes himself answer and respond above all to the different kinds of wood and to the shapes slumbering within wood … In fact, this relatedness to wood is what maintains the whole craft. Without that relatedness, the craft will never be anything but empty busy-work … Whether or not a cabinetmaker’s apprentice, while he is learning, will come to respond to wood and wooden things, depends obviously on the presence of some teacher who can make the apprentice comprehend.

(Heidegger 1968: 14–15)

The arts Wittgenstein teaches can be taught only where the apprentice maintains a relatedness to what is being thought about, and never allows himself to become related only to the teaching. Wittgenstein’s concern with style or force of expression in part measures his devotion to writing in such a way as to maintain the reader’s relatedness to whatever is being thought about. If we take a moment to look over just a few pages of Philosophical Investigations we see sentence after sentence that begins “Look”, “Think”, “Conceive”, “Ask yourself” and so on. The entreative/imperative force of such beginnings maintains the reader’s relatedness to what is being thought about and prevents the reader from thinking solely about the remarks themselves. That the remarks are expressed with a certain style or force of expression is the result of Wittgenstein’s intent-ness on guiding the thinking of the reader, and on guiding it in a way that is memorable, in a way that can be internalized. The decisive activity of his reader, of the apprentice, is crucial. Were Wittgenstein’s remarks to spare others the trouble of thinking thoughts of their own, the remarks could not teach what they are to teach. Although docility is involved, in no way is the docility of the reader the aim of the mentoring in Philosophical Investigations. “What is your aim in philosophy? – To shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle” (§309). The aim of the mentoring in Philosophical Investigations is freedom, not docility. But the freedom to which Wittgenstein shows the way is a freedom obtained by disciplined mastery – and docility is required to acquire that disciplined mastery.²

So what is Wittgenstein thinking about?

In Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein is thinking about philosophical problems. Now, this might be taken to be ambiguous: it might be taken to mean (i) that he is thinking about the philosophical problem of, say, meaning, the philosophical problem itself, or (ii) that he is thinking about the concept of meaning. If we look at the opening remarks, we may say that Wittgenstein is thinking about the philosophical concept of meaning. Does that mean that he is thinking about (i) or about (ii)? It means that he is talking about both: the ambiguity is deliberate. That he is talking about both is one reason why he chooses to begin his remarks by quoting from St Augustine. Augustine, as Wittgenstein notes, works with “a particular picture of the essence of human language”. As Wittgenstein thinks outwards from the quotation, he is thinking about Augustine’s picture of meaning as well as about meaning. To think as Wittgenstein does about the philosophical concept of meaning is to think about the ways philosophers have thought about the concept of meaning, the philosophical problems they take to be grouped around the concept of meaning, the ways they have responded to those problems, and – it is to think about the concept of meaning. Someone might complain that all the philosopher needs to think about is – the concept of meaning. Thinking about the concept of meaning should not be mediated so complicatedly. But, first, it is worth noting that such mediation is constant in Wittgenstein (even if it is not always so complicated). He begins The Blue Book (a preliminary study for Philosophical Investigations) by asking: “What is the meaning of a word?” And then, instead of answering, he advises his reader: “Let us attack this question” (BB 1). Well, attacking the question requires thinking about the meaning of a word, to be sure; but it also requires thinking about the question, too. Thinking about the meaning of a word is mediated by thinking about the question “What is the meaning of a word?” It is mediated by thinking, among other things, about all the different questions that that interrogative form of words might express, and the ways the different questions (and answers) might become entangled, especially since they may be expressed by the same interrogative form of words.³

Second, given that Wittgenstein is teaching the arts of conceptual disentanglement, his insisting on mediation should not really surprise us. When we begin to philosophize about the concept of meaning, our thinking...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Key Concepts
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Wittgenstein's philosophical remarks
• 2. Wittgenstein on meaning and meaning-blindness
• 3. Language-games and private language
• 4. Wittgenstein on family resemblance
• 5. Ordinary/everyday language
• 6. Wittgenstein on rule-following
• 7. Thinking and understanding
• 8. Psychologism and Philosophical Investigations
• 9. Moore's paradox revisited
• 10. Aspect perception
• 11. Knowing that the standard metre is one metre long
• 12. Therapy
• 13. Criteria
• 14. Grammatical investigations
• 15. Teaching and learning
• 16. Expression and avowal
• Chronology of Wittgenstein's life
• Bibliography
• Index