Showing and Doing
eBook - ePub

Showing and Doing

Wittgenstein as a Pedagogical Philosopher

Michael A. Peters, Nicholas C. Burbules, Paul Smeyers

Share book
  1. 244 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Showing and Doing

Wittgenstein as a Pedagogical Philosopher

Michael A. Peters, Nicholas C. Burbules, Paul Smeyers

Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations

About This Book

Three prominent Wittgenstein scholars introduce the broad educational significance of Ludwig Wittgenstein's work to a wider audience of educational researchers and practitioners through provocative, innovative, and playful readings of his work. They vividly demonstrate the influence of his thinking and its centrality to understanding our contemporary condition. Wittgenstein fundamentally shaped contemporary theories of language, representation, cognition, and learning. The book also traces the "pedagogical turn" of his thinking during the period from 1920 to 1926. What is most radical about Wittgenstein's later work is that it suggests learning and initiation into practices are fundamental to understanding his philosophy. The book not only provides a new and fresh interpretation of Wittgenstein's thought but also explores a new way of thinking about education as a way of revealing the educational dimension of philosophical problems.

Frequently asked questions

How do I cancel my subscription?
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on “Cancel Subscription” - it’s as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time you’ve paid for. Learn more here.
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlego’s features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan you’ll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is Showing and Doing an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access Showing and Doing by Michael A. Peters, Nicholas C. Burbules, Paul Smeyers in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Sociology. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2015
ISBN
9781317252146
Subtopic
Sociology
Edition
1

Chapter 1

Wittgenstein as Exile:
A Philosophical Topography

Michael A. Peters
The philosopher is not a member of any community of ideas.
—Wittgenstein (1981, § 455)
I felt strange/a stranger/in the world. When you are bound neither to men nor to God, then you are a stranger.
—Wittgenstein (cited in Nedo et al. 2005, 11)
If true exile is a condition of terminal loss, why has it been transformed so easily into a potent, even enriching motif of modern culture? 
 Modern western culture is in large part the work of exiles, émigrés, refugees.
—Edward Said (1994, 138)

Wittgenstein as Exile, Wanderer, Stranger

Wittgenstein talked of himself as an exile not only from his home city of Vienna but also of an age. He wrote of his alienation from the dominant spirit of the age and questioned its status as “civilization” or even “culture.” He traveled a great deal, often spending long periods in isolation in foreign countries, mostly in the United Kingdom and Europe—in England, Norway, and Ireland—but also in the United States. He felt his work demanded a certain location, and he used the experience of travel, of finding one’s way in foreign countries, negotiating entry into new cultures, acquiring new languages, and learning the streets of new cities as core operating metaphors as part of his philosophy that gave thought a spatial dimension. This chapter begins by outlining the notion of exilic thought as a central trope for understanding writing in philosophy and for understanding Wittgenstein’s thinking and the intimate connection between the geography of Wittgenstein’s movements and his experience of other cultures, and his philosophy, his style of doing philosophy.1 It also discusses the notion of the philosopher as exile and how we might begin to understand the basis of exile and of being removed from one’s own culture as a basis for thought. The chapter proceeds to discuss Wittgenstein as exile and to suggest some lines of inquiry in philosophy that might recognize the importance of location on thinking, especially in relation to education in an age where increasingly globalization, multiculturalism, and internationalization are the norm rather than the exception. This chapter then is an experiment in charting and thinking through the geography of ideas, not so much how ideas travel, as the extent to which the experience of exile and being a stranger in another culture can be the basis for a new understanding of thought that takes space and movement as twin aspects of increasingly common experiences. It represents a first attempt to extend theoretically the old saw that “travel broadens the mind” and to examine the educational significance of movement across and between different locations and cultures that has strong implications for questions of belonging and identity, even powerfully foreshadowing a model of postmodern subjectivity.

Exilic Thought: Exiles, ÉmigrĂ©s, Refugees

Exilic thought is the thought and “education” of the exile, the wanderer, the stranger. It is a kind of uprooted thought developed away from “home” under conditions of displacement and uncertainty, often in a different mother tongue, language tradition, and culture. Exilic thought is sometimes the self-imposed discipline of the “stranger” who develops his or her identity as an “alien” or immigrant against the conventions of a host culture and from the perspective of an outsider. The motif of the exile/stranger in a foreign land finding his or her way about for the first time is fableized in ancient accounts of “first contacts” and early cultural exchanges.2 This notion of the exile invokes the model of the anthropologist as “participant observer,” of someone perpetually looking in through the window of another culture, who is both observer and participant, and its self-transformative aspects. At the same time the concept of exile often marks a complex ambivalence to one’s own home culture and, therefore, also to questions of one’s own national, cultural, and personal identity and belongings. Exile is one of the central and most powerful motifs of the intellectual in the twentieth century: It describes a profound existential condition of cultural estrangement and sometimes alienation that defines identity in terms of migration, movement, departure, and homelessness. It prefigures a notion of thought that is “nomadic,” formed in a different context, and laced with observations that at once make the familiar strange and the strange familiar—an anthropological theme that Wittgenstein returns to again and again.
The condition of exile, although a characteristic of a globalized late modernity, has its diasporic roots in prebiblical times, defining Judaic religious identity. It has been revisited by each major ethnic and religious persecution down through the centuries. In an essay called “Being Jewish” from The Infinite Conversation, Maurice Blanchot, for example, argues that the positive aspect of the Jewish experience and of being Jewish is that
[T]he idea of exodus and the idea of exile can exist as a legitimate movement; it exists, through exile and through the initiative that is exodus, so that the experience of strangeness may affirm itself close to hand as an irreducible relation; it exists so that, by the authority of this experience, we might learn to speak. (1993, 125)
Gary Sauer-Thompson (2005) notes that “[b]eing Jewish affirms uprooting, the affirmation of nomadic truth, exodus, the exile. For Blanchot being Jewish is being destined to dispersion, to a sojourn without place, to a setting out on the road, a state of wandering, and not being bound to the determination of place.”3 This metaphorical reading of Blanchot’s “nomadic truth” that foreshadows Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s notion suggests that we take the idea of thinking as both a journey and as “education” seriously.4 The forced or self-imposed journey requires continual readjustment under new and changing cultural conditions without the security or familiarity of “home” and thus, without the normal structures that anchor and prop up identity. “Nomadic truth” is born of the traveler’s education, the exchange of ideas, and acquaintance with new landscapes of thought, born of encounters with the Other, with different cultures often producing new hybridities that are not simply the result of grafted cultural stock. Michael J. Brogan (2004), for instance, argues that the dominance of the question of “radical otherness” in cultural and religious theory is due in no small measure to the influence of Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of alterity, which he puts alongside Blanchot’s reflections on “being Jewish.”5 Both Levinas and Blanchot emphasize themes that tie truth to an existential condition of Otherness; it is these very themes that have provided a series of metaphors for living and being in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Jewishness, Blanchot says, is “uneasiness and affliction” that is not restored through exile so much as attenuated and becomes the condition for the intellectual. As Levinas says of Blanchot, his philosophy of art is a
“call to errancy,” a truth (or better, a “non-truth”) of “nomadism,” an affirmation of the “authenticity of exile” which “uproots” the Heideggerian universe, this fundamentally Greek world which remains stubbornly indifferent or altogether deaf to the call issued by the Hebrew scriptures. (cited in Brogan 2004, 31)
The Jewish exodus, synonymous with freedom from persecution, serves to emphasize “nomadic truth” of the exile against “sedentary truth” of the homelander. (There is a necessary connection here between freedom from persecution and freedom of thought.) Blanchot argues against Heidegger, and mobility and homelessness of the refugee against settled nationalism, against the notion of “roots,” “homeland,” and “belonging” as a natural condition.6 To adopt this orientation is also to set up a series of less desirable parallels—the pilgrims’ migration to America, the African American slave fugitives, the establishment of modernday Israel, the “homelessness” of the Palestinians—seeking the “homeland” or the “promised land.” The notion of exile and “exilic” here refers to the origin and to “return to the origin” as a source of identity and ethnic nationalism. Both these ideas have a ready application to Wittgenstein, who at one point, after the 1930s and 1940s, began to recognize his Jewish origins and who referred to himself as both Jewish and someone in exile.
John G. Cawelti (2001, 38) makes the most general theological and existential case when he writes, “Exile is, perhaps, the central story told in European civilization: the human estate as exile from God, the garden of Eden, the homeland, the womb, or even oneself.” He goes on to make the following pertinent observation:
It may be true that exile is the central myth of European civilization, but it takes a twentieth-century mind to make such an observation and to realize its full significance. Exile is both a central theme and a characteristic biographical pattern of artistic modernism. In all the arts, a surprising number of the central figures of high modernism were exiles from their native countries: Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schonberg, Bela Bartok, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, Wassily Kandinsky, Pier Mondrian, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, W. H. Auden, Aldous Huxley, Thomas Mann, Paul Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy—the list is extraordinary.7
“Exile,” in the context of postmodernity, has the same theoretical legitimacy that “alienation” had in the context of the modern. “Alienation” in Marxist theory refers to the way in which human beings become estranged from the products of their labor under capitalism, the labor process, and their own nature. (“Work” in this context is viewed in Hegelian terms as self-realization.) In On the Jewish Question, Marx saw “alienation” as originating in the Judeo-Christian problematic and the Christian accomplishment of the alienation of man from himself and from nature. Marx takes the notion of alienation from Ludwig Feuerbach, who shows the alienation of man from God. Thus, both concepts have their source in the Judeo-Christian problematic, but whereas alienation in particular seems more wedded to an industrial age, exile is emblematic of the age of globalization with its problems arising from (often forced) human movement and its consequences—displacement, uprootedness, and homelessness—the effects of a space-time compression that both enables greater movement and also demands it.
As Eva Hoffman (1999, 44) explains, “today, at least within the framework of postmodern theory, we have come to value exactly those qualities of experience that exile demands—uncertainty, displacement, the fragmented identity. Within this conceptual framework, exile becomes, well, sexy, glamorous, interesting.” Nomadism and diasporism have become fashionable terms in intellectual discourse. Mark Taylor (1984), the postmodern theologian, describes the postmodern self as a “wanderer,” a “drifter,” “attached to no home,” and “always suspicious of stopping, staying and dwelling.” This “rootless and homeless” self is no more than a “careless wanderer” yearning for neither “completion” nor “fulfillment” and therefore is not unhappy.8 The figures of the exile—the refugee, the nomad, the stranger, the wanderer, and the diasporic intellectual—bring into play a set of concepts that politically help to define the major movements of romanticism, nationalism, and imperialism: “home,” “homeland,” “homelessness,” “roots,” “tradition,” and “national identity.”
Multiculturalism defined against Kant’s universalism and “culture,” as the human capacity to will moral laws is an affirmation of the belief in the value of other cultures and of group belonging. In its radical pluralistic form it also signals a belief in the incommensurability of different cultures and societies. In one sense, as a late twentieth century ideal expressed in the notion of cultural diversity, which the modern state can accommodate constitutionally, it is not just “the politics of recognition” expressed through the claims of nationalist movements, supranational associations, ethnic minorities but also the cross-cutting and sometimes conflicting “multicultural or intercultural voices of hundreds of millions of citizens, immigrants, exiles and refugees of the twentieth century” (Tully 1995, 2).9 In this sense we might argue figures of the wanderer, the stranger, and the exile increasingly characterize the shifting metaphysics of identity in an era of globalization and of “constitutionalism in an age of diversity.” As Tully (1995, 11) puts it so forcefully “cultures are not internally homogeneous. They are continuously contested, imagined and reimagined, transformed and negotiated, both by their members and through interaction with others. The identity, and so the meaning, of any culture is, thus, aspectival rather than essential.”10

The Philosopher as Exile

In relation to exilic thought we can usefully talk of the thought of the outsider, thought in its home context—its linguistic tradition—as against its border-crossings and, not least, the globalization (and spatialization) of philosophy. How ideas travel and are received—the geography of ideas—is a philosophical trope of some significance, especially with the rise of global science and the international knowledge system. Philosophers increasingly have begun to pay attention to philosophy as biography and the influence of biography on philosophy, such as with Ray Monk’s (1990) splendid biography of Wittgenstein. By contrast, they have paid little attention to the question of exile (or travel, movement, space), with the exception of Albert Camus,11 which has been left to poets, novelists, and historians. Yet the theme of exile and stranger, which emphasizes the relation between place and thought, its place in linguistic and cultural traditions, and, perhaps strangely, the materiality and geography of thought, is a philosopheme that characterizes the present age and calls out for further analysis.12 As Michael Dummett (2001, 7) argues, place does not only refer to a land. It also refers to what gives people an identity, which if “it is not grounded in a common ethnicity, religion or language, it must be grounded in shared ideals, a shared vision of the society it is striving to create.” Place, “home,” is that which offers a grid for identity, not merely a spatial-temporal location that individuates, but a broad cultural milieu that frames our identities. The exile, the refugee, the Ă©migrĂ©, thus is someone who becomes displaced.13
This chapter focuses on the figure, the trope, and the thought of exile—the wanderer and the stranger—in relation to Ludwig Wittgenstein, both the man and his work, as a means to discuss its contemporary philosophical significance. Wittgenstein was a self-imposed exile—one might say a “refugee” from the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. The bare bones and chronology of his movements tell a story of ceaseless mobility, of the stranger working and living in a foreign land, of a man who deliberately removed himself from his home, his family, his fortune, his country, and his native culture. He left home early to enroll in the Realschule in Linz, where he studied for three years beginning in 1903, before going to Berlin to get a degree in engineering. In 1908, when he was nineteen years old, he moved to England to study aeronautical engineering at the University of Manchester. In 1911 he moved to Cambridge University to study the foundations of mathematics with Bertrand Russell. Later he went to live briefly in Skjolden in Norway with David Pinsent, where he lived in isolation in order ...

Table of contents