Wittgenstein’s Liberatory Philosophy

Thinking Through His Philosophical Investigations

Rupert Read

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000288827
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Teaching Arts & Humanities

In this book, Rupert Read offers the first outline of a resolute reading, following the highly influential New Wittgenstein 'school', of the Philosophical Investigations. He argues that the key to understanding Wittgenstein's later philosophy is to understand its liberatory purport.

Read contends that a resolute reading coincides in its fundaments with what, building on ideas in the later Gordon Baker, he calls a liberatory reading. Liberatory philosophy is philosophy that can liberate the user from compulsive (and destructive) patterns of thought, freeing one for possibilities that were previously obscured. Such liberation is our prime goal in philosophy. This book consists in a sequential reading, along these lines, of what Read considers the most important and controversial passages in the Philosophical Investigations: 1, 16, 43, 95 & 116 & 122, 130–3, 149–151, 186, 198–201, 217, and 284–6. Read claims that this liberatory conception is simultaneously an ethical conception. The PI should be considered a work of ethics in that its central concern becomes our relation with others. Wittgensteinian liberations challenge widespread assumptions about how we allegedly are independent of and separate from others.

Wittgenstein's Liberatory Philosophy will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working on Wittgenstein, and to scholars of the political philosophy of liberation and the ethics of relation.

1 The Philosopher and Temptation
Wittgenstein’s Augustinian Opening Move

The inclination, the running up against something indicates something: St. Augustine knew that already when he said: “What, you swine, you want not to talk nonsense! Go ahead and talk nonsense, it does not matter!

Wittgenstein, 1929 (in W&VC, 68)¹

Don’t for heaven’s sake be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense.

Wittgenstein, (C&V, 64)

1.1 Augustine throughout the PI

The body of PI opens not with words of Wittgenstein’s own but with a quotation from St. Augustine’s Confessions.² Why? Who is Augustine, to the author of the Investigations?³

We might look at ‘external’ evidence to answer this question. Thus, Drury reports Wittgenstein saying not only, famously, that he “could not help seeing every problem from a religious point of view”, but implying that the Confessions is salient to such seeing of his. Because, quite simply, Wittgenstein took the Confessions to be “the most serious book ever written” (Rhees 1984, 90).

This remark is, to say the least, very suggestive indeed. It strongly suggests that it was not just chance that Wittgenstein opened his book with a take on Augustine’s great book. It certainly didn’t merely provide a convenient stalking horse, a handy quote to lay into. But something much more. And quite different from that.

But it would be even more satisfying if there were ‘internal’ evidence with which to answer the question, too. Let us then ask the following question: after the famous opening sequence of the text,⁴ how does Augustine feature in PI?

The first striking thing to note is that Augustine’s name and the name of his text occurs in PI more often than anyone else’s. But so far that proves little. Possibly, as is widely supposed, Augustine remains little more than a convenient stalking horse for Wittgenstein. A kind of dupe who can be shown up. Someone whose words we can handily stick a negation sign in front of. Wittgenstein’s remark to Drury strongly suggests otherwise; but one is still free, if one wishes, to seek to see Wittgenstein’s Augustine thus.

Let us look. Not think or surmise, but look. At who Augustine is, to the author of PI.

There are three further explicit sets of mentions of Augustine in PI, after his heavy featuring in sections 1–4 and section 32 (which rounds out what is sometimes called the ‘overture’ of the Investigations). These later (generally comparatively neglected) moments in the text are very striking.

First, there is 89–90. Here, at 89, Wittgenstein’s entire text makes an important pivot, as he initiates a more explicit reflection on the nature of philosophy by asking: “These considerations bring us up to the problem: In what sense is logic something sublime?” He seeks to address this question, crucially, by noting Augustine’s famous remark in the Confessions, that “quid est ergo tempus? si nemo ex me quart scion; si quaerenti explicare velim, nescio.” He comments, “This could not be said about a question of natural science (What is the specific gravity of hydrogen?” for instance). Something that we know when no one asks us, but no longer know when we are supposed to give an account of it, so something that we need to remind ourselves of.⁵ (And it is obviously something of which for some reason it is difficult to remind oneself.)”

Does this…remind you of anything?

Most obviously, it pretty directly anticipates PI 127: “The work of the philosopher consists in assembling reminders for a particular purpose”. We need to be ‘reminded’ of something that we are told we ought to “give an account of”⁶; but actually what we need is to be re-minded vis-à-vis that something. That is: We need to be(come) mindful of it, not take it for granted and then merely see ‘through’ it, nor try to explain it as from afar or above. We need to become comfortable with it in its everyday actuality. We need to be ‘returned’, via a more freeing route, to ‘the thing itself’. No longer something we feel compelled to penetrate (to ‘explain’), but something that we are willing now to allow to be. (The closing parenthetical remark in 89 is connected with Wittgenstein’s important remarks, scattered through his later oeuvre,⁷ about the real difficulty of philosophy being one of having the intellectual willingness to look at what one doesn’t want to look at, and more generally the willingness to see the world aright (i.e. as it is), rather than being a narrowly intellectual difficulty requiring elaborate theories or cleverness. We will return to this point.)

In other words, Wittgenstein clearly sees Augustine here as a far-seeing forebear, anticipating his own methods in and conception of philosophy. This role that Augustine plays here in Wittgenstein’s writing is borne out by how the discussion continues, in PI 90:

We feel as if we had to penetrate phenomena: our investigation, however, is directed not towards phenomena, but, as one might say, towards the ‘possibilities’ of phenomena. We remind ourselves, that is to say, of the kind of statement that we make about phenomena. Thus Augustine recalls to mind the different statements that are made about the duration, past present or future, of events. (These are, of course, not philosophical statements about time, the past, the present and the future.)

This is if anything even more striking. Let us be absolutely clear on what is happening here. Wittgenstein is setting out the version of what would become called “Ordinary Language Philosophy”⁸ that he is offering the reader. Who is his exemplar for this procedure?; Who is the closest there is to an antecedent worth citing, at the birth of Ordinary Language Philosophy (henceforth OLP)?: Augustine.

The importance of this portion of PI can be seen moreover in the way PI 90 continues:

Our investigation is therefore a grammatical one. Such an investigation sheds light on our problem by clearing misunderstandings away. Misunderstandings concerning the use of words, caused, among other things, by certain analogies between the forms of expression in different regions of language.

Wittgenstein is setting out here for the first time really the heartland of his method. And it follows directly from his following of Augustine.⁹

Now note carefully, because we will have cause soon to come back to this, the parenthesis in the above-mentioned quotation. “[T]he different statements that are made about the duration…of events” are not philosophical statements in the sense that they do not state a philosophical theory and are not intended as philosophical remarks at all. They are simply ordinary everyday remarks of all sorts and kinds. These are what enable us to start to gain clarity in philosophy. When we recall or imagine the kind of statements we make about phenomena, then we can head off the kinds of confusions that we mire ourselves in. In their very unaware non-philosophical-ness, such remarks offer us a resource. But, there is presumably no guarantee that philosophy (or: ideology) will not infect some such statements. When one’s guard is down, perhaps. Before one has noticed that one is even doing it/that there may be any such ‘infection’ present, perhaps.

Augustine’s procedure in the Confessions, etc. as it anticipates OLP, provides, in Wittgenstein’s understanding, a healthy alternative to metaphysics (N.B.: what this means for Wittgenstein is explicated properly in Chapter 4). But perhaps nevertheless even the best of us might sometimes fall short of such health. Even the best potentially non-metaphysical philosophical mind (or method) may sometimes import some dubious philosophical pseudo-theorising or picturing unconsciously into its deliberations. (Certainly, Wittgenstein was clear over and over of the likelihood and factuality of this – ​including crucially in his own case.)

Augustine appears next, explicitly, at 428–438. This develops the sense of Augustine as anticipating Wittgenstein’s own creation of a viable OLP, while this time indicating also an ambition of Augustine’s that problematically exceeds that of OLP. 436 is the section that draws the sequence together, explicitly invoking Augustine once more. Wittgenstein remarks,

…it is easy to get into that dead-end in philosophy, where one believes that the difficulty of the task consists in our having to describe phenomena that are hard to get hold of, the present experience that slips quickly by… Where we find ordinary language too crude, and it looks as if we were having to do, not with the phenomena of every-day, but with ones that “easily elude us, and, in their coming to be and passing away, produce those others as an average effect.”

(Augustine: “Manifestissima et usitatissima sunt, et edam ruses nimbus latent, et nova best invention eorum”)

The nested quote is once more from Augustine’s great dialogical investigation of time, and specifically from his description of the way we tie ourselves up in knots trying to account for the nature of time. How we might be said to know it when we don’t look directly at it and not to know it when we do. Here is the whole paragraph¹⁰:

“Time” and “times” are words forever on our lips. “How long did we speak?”, we ask. “How long did he take to do that?” “How long is it since I have seen it!” “This syllable is twice the length of that”. We use these words and hear others using them. They understand what we mean and we understand them. No words could be plainer or more commonly used. Yet their true meaning is concealed from us. We have still to find it out.¹¹

Augustine doggedly seeks in Book XI of the Confessions to get some perspective upon our time-talk. He investigates it at length, considering real cases of it (from ordinary language), appealing to God over and over to help him to get somewhere in the investigation. Wittgenstein, I claim, admires this – ​he finds it deeply serious – ​and, crucially, will have admired and agreed with Augustine’s plain willingness to admit that what is plain and commonly understood is so: “They understand what we mean and we understand them”. There is no problem, so long as we remain at the level of ordinary discourse, nor even when we note the efficaciousness of such discourse. When we don’t gaze directly at time-talk, we get along just fine.

So Augustine in these regards comes close to Wittgenstein’s ideal. Nevertheless, Wittgenstein naturally would have been concerned that Augustine was still inclined to express his continued philosophical seeking with the notion that the “true meaning” of time-words and of other terms that fox us, philosophically, is “concealed from us”.¹² We can see Wittgenstein’s alternative (to Augustine’s approach) clearly in play in Philosophical Remarks (Wittgenstein 1980a) (PR) 81–82; he is discussing here the way in which we find ourselves caught by a desire to uncover ‘the nature’ of time, and it is worth quoting at length, because of its plainly liberatory character:

Perhaps this whole difficulty stems from taking the time concept from time in physics and applying it to the course of immediate experience. It's a confusion of the time of the film strip with the time of the picture it projects. For ‘time’ has one meaning when we regard memory as the source of time, and another when we regard it as a picture preserved from a past event. If we take memory as a picture, then it's a picture of a physical event. The picture fades, and I notice how it has faded when I compare it with other evidence of what happened. In this case, memory is not the source of time, but a more or less reliable custodian of what ‘actually’ happened; and this is something we can know about in other ways, a physical event.—It's quite different if we now take memory to be the source of time. Here it isn't a picture, and cannot fade either—not in the sense in which a picture fades, becoming an ever less faithful representation of its object. Both ways of talking are in order, and are equally legitimate, but cannot ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 0 Introduction: Thinking through Wittgenstein
• 1 The Philosopher and Temptation: Wittgenstein’s Augustinian Opening Move
• 2 “It Is as You Please”: PI 16 as an Icon of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Freedom
• 3 What Is (Wittgenstein’s Own Account of) Meaning?: PI 43 and Its Critics
• 4 When Wittgenstein Speaks of ‘Everyday’ Language, He Means Simply Language: A Liberatory Reading of PI 95–124
• 5 Objects of Comparison to the Real (Philosophical?) Discovery: PI 130–133
• 6 Wittgenstein Dissolves the Know-How vs Knowledge-that Debate: PI 149–151
• 7 Logical Existentialism?: An Approach to PI 186
• 8 The Faux-Freedom of Nonsense: Kripke’s Wittgenstein and Wittgenstein’s Wittgenstein at PI 198–201
• 9 Overcoming Over-Reliance on ‘The Bedrock’?: On PI 217
• 10 The Anti-‘Private-Language’ Considerations as a Fraternal and Freeing Ethic: Towards a Re-Reading of PI 284–309
• 11 Conclusion: (A) Liberating Philosophy
• Bibliography
• Index