Lectures on a Philosophy Less Ordinary

Language and Morality in J.L. Austin's Philosophy

Niklas Forsberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000468533
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría filosóficas

This book offers a comprehensive reinterpretation of J.L. Austin's philosophy. It opens new ways of thinking about ethics and other contemporary issues in the wake of Austin's philosophical work.

Austin is primarily viewed as a philosopher of language whose work focused on the pragmatic aspects of speech. His work on ordinary language philosophy and speech act theory is seen as his main contribution to philosophy. This book challenges this received view to show that Austin used his most well-known theoretical notions as heuristic tools aimed at debunking the fact/value dichotomy. Additionally, it demonstrates that Austin's continual returns to the ordinary is rooted in a desire to show that our lives in language are complicated and multifaceted. What emerges is an attempt to think with Austin about problems that are central to philosophy today—such as the question about linguistic inheritance, truth, the relationship between a language inherited and morality, and how we are to cope with linguistic elasticity and historicity.

Lectures on a Philosophy Less Ordinary will appeal to scholars and advanced students working on Austin's philosophy, philosophy of language, and the history of analytic philosophy.

1 Approaching Austin

DOI: 10.4324/9781003219026-1

1.1 Learning from a Teacher

J. L. Austin once told Stanley Cavell: “I had to decide early on whether I was going to write books or teach people how to do philosophy usefully.”¹ Austin did not publish much. Sense and Sensibilia and How to Do Things with Words are based on his lectures, and only seven of the thirteen papers included in Philosophical Papers were actually published by Austin.² Apart from that, there is only his well-known translation of Gottlob Frege’s Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik.³ His legacy is teachings, lectures, and I think that Austin’s philosophy can only be properly understood with this in mind.⁴

When I say that we need to think of Austin as a teacher as we try to understand his philosophy, I certainly do not mean to suggest that one cannot understand his writings fully if one hasn’t attended his lectures.⁵ It is, of course, true that somebody who knew an author quite well, and perhaps also had the chance to ask for clarifications about specific formulations or particular points, is in some sort of privileged position. Not everyone can terminate a discussion by saying, “I know that he/she didn’t argue such and such, but thought so and so instead; because he/she told me so!” But the idea that this gives one an ideal position when it comes to reaching an understanding of someone’s philosophy suggests that to understand a philosophical thinker is a work that ends when one can prove what he or she wrote, thought, said, or meant to say. “A did say x and not y, and that’s that!” On such a view, understanding would be reduced to decoding. Understanding a thinker would require raw archeological, or philological, data but not much thinking. But “raw data” makes no archeology. It is obviously false to assume that archeology could be reduced to dusting and it is equally confused to think that philology can be reduced to deciphering. Understanding a line of thinking is not the kind of work that ends when we are convinced that these words have been voiced (intentionally). This is where the work of understanding begins.

What I mean to suggest, when I say that we need to think of Austin as a teacher, is rather that there is a sense in which Austin is a teacher in his texts as well and that there is quite an important connection between good teaching and good philosophical writing. Good philosophical teachers and good philosophical writers strive to be honest in their work, to not dodge any bullets, and to confess their weaknesses. This is where my head starts to spin! This is what I do not understand! This is where I find myself inclined to resist the conclusion, turn my previous thought inside out, or simply find myself unable to form a clear thought or opinion. This is why R. G. Collingwood argued that philosophy needs to be written as a form of “confession.” We do not simply report facts when we write philosophy. Philosophers, Collingwood argued, “must never try to instruct or admonish; or at least, they must never try to instruct or admonish their readers, but only themselves.” Therefore, a philosopher must always be “confessing his difficulties.”⁶ Of course, this does not mean that all forms of philosophy must be written in a confessional tone or that all philosophy has to be “confessional” or that I think that Collingwood’s words need to be taken as a definition of philosophy per se (whatever that is supposed to be). But there is something very true about Collingwood’s claim: one cannot hide one’s uncertainties and unclarities in philosophy; such things will shine through, and as a philosophical author, one will always run the risk of producing dishonest forms of philosophizing if one does not dare to “confess one’s difficulties” (to oneself, at least). Teaching how to philosophize, in contrast to merely telling someone what somebody else once said, thought, or wrote (is that ever done?), is in this respect not especially different from writing philosophy. Clarity comes in philosophy, as does progress, piecemeal—through forced rejections of one’s own thoughts and unexpected turns of events, through the painstaking and unending work of trying to avoid dogmatism (which quite often amounts to one’s very human inability to be fully transparent to oneself), and through the desire to be true to the facts. To appropriate Austin’s works is a matter of returning to the classroom—to the place where we talk, discuss, and strive to become clear, confess our difficulties, and become better (thinkers).

Austin’s works do not merely describe “his philosophy” and they are not merely reports about things that he claims to have figured out. Rather, he aims to teach us how to philosophize. Austin’s emphasis is on the doing, the acts of thinking we call philosophizing, rather than on the doctrines and theories of our predecessors, which is one reason why I do not think we will understand his work rightly if we think of it in terms of “his theory.” In that sense too, Austin’s writings constitute a classroom.

Regarding this theme, Austin’s attitude is on a par with that of Immanuel Kant, who famously said that “we cannot learn philosophy; for where is it, who is in possession of it, and how shall we recognize it? We can only learn to philosophize.”⁷ Reading Austin, trying to learn from this particular teacher, is thus a matter of learning to look in specific ways, learning to do certain things, and learning to direct one’s attention in new ways—it is practicing one’s attention. It also contains a work of discovering philosophy and remaining open to the possibility that we may not know where it is to be found and in what particular form it may present itself. A preconceived idea about what philosophy must be is, in that respect, harmful to the philosophical aspiration. In philosophy, we are thinking about our thinking reasoning about our reasoning, which means that “we” are always, in some sense or other, not entirely disconnected or detached from the object of study. So we always need to be thinking about what we do when we think. This does not mean that Austin’s philosophy is “all method,” but it means that a way of going about is at the core, and, importantly, that we cannot get to the “content” if we don’t learn these ways of “going about.”

This also points to the profundity of Austin’s words with which I opened this book. He wanted to “teach people how to do philosophy usefully” (that is, to philosophize in a way that matters). This claim about importance, or usefulness, invokes certain questions: To whom? Where? When? The claim about usefulness is also connected to a question about Austin’s audience. Would one be stretching Austin’s words too far if one were to suggest that this is not merely a matter of teaching newcomers, the boorish uneducated youngsters, about ways to do philosophy usefully, but that Austin is also reaching out to the philosophical community at large—thus suggesting that a great deal of his contemporaries were not doing philosophy usefully and thus forcing us to ask whether philosophy is usefully pursued now? In such case, one could also say that Austin’s struggle to rediscover philosophy’s usefulness is a matter of rediscovering philosophy, for what kind of wisdom would there be for us lovers of wisdom to love if all our endeavors were useless? And if that is true, we should also ask: What is it that philosophy fails to attend to in such a way that its usefulness has become blocked?

Austin’s works contain a response to these worries, which suggests that Austin’s audience is potentially quite large. In a nutshell, Austin’s answer is that philosophy has lost touch with our world and that we need to seek a way for us, us philosophers, to “return to the realities we use words to talk about.”⁸ This is why Austin has become important to me. His thinking grows out of a suspicion that philosophy, as it is practiced, fails to speak about the world we inhabit. It is hovering above it. It is not anchored. I am inclined to think that sharing this suspicion is something of a prerequisite for attaining an understanding of Austin’s attention to, and interest in, the everyday and our ordinary language, a prerequisite for understanding the philosophical importance of such an attention. We philosophize in order to understand ourselves, our world, and our place in it (better). If philosophy is not in our world, speaking about our words, then it just may have left the real behind—prematurely, for the wrong reasons. Philosophers have philosophized philosophy’s significance away.

Austin’s path is, in this respect, probably rather counterintuitive to that of many philosophers. It may seem natural to think that the “ordinary” is precisely that which philosophy has to escape, pierce through, penetrate, and supersede. This idea of philosophy is probably as old as philosophy is. The standard interpretation of Plato’s cave analogy (to the extent that there still is such a thing as a “standard interpretation”) suggests that what we ordinarily see are shadows of real things and that the true nature of things is something completely different, somewhere else even. What we see are appearances that stand in some kind of contrast to reality. Thus, the philosopher’s job is to break the veil of appearances and move us to the world of the really real.⁹ So there is a sense in which philosophy is just the continuous intellectual dissatisfaction with the ordinary and the everyday.

With respect to ordinary language, the dissatisfaction has taken (at least) two forms. One philosophizes about language either because one thinks that ordinary language is dangerously fluctuating and vague, and so one wants to correct it, or because one seeks to find a way to speak with a higher level of precision (for scientific purposes, for example). Alternatively, one is convinced that the sense of our ordinary language is clear but that this particular meaning does not capture reality as it really is and so one wants to replace ordinary language with an improved language. But even if there are good reasons to keep these two trends apart, they are united precisely in a dissatisfaction with the ordinary and that dissatisfaction is rooted in a philosophical conviction about language: there is a division to be found between true sense and apparent sense, between ordinary and real, and philosophical theorization is called upon to set us straight. There is, of course, no need to think that philosophical problems have only one root. But if one attempts to evade the ordinary because our ordinary language is unclear, one at least is clear about what one wants to say and one knows that the ordinary ways of turning our concepts do not enable saying that—which is to say that one is again driven by a sense of disappointment with the ordinary. That disappointment cannot be disconnected from an idea of what ordinary language means, regardless of whether one thinks that ordinary language means too much, as it were, or that it is lacking the required form of precision. Thus, the general tendency is this: our ordinary language is considered given, and finding a way to penetrate that given language just is what philosophy is. So there is a sense in which philosophy is rooted in a rift between a world and a language of reality on the one hand and a world and a language of mere appearances on the other. Whatever else one may think about Cavell’s philosophy, he is clearly on to something quite central and important when he claims that the desire to repudiate our common ways to word the world “turns out to be something that the very impulse to philosophy, the impulse to take thought about our lives, inherently seeks to deny, as if what philosophy is dissatisfied by is inherently the ordinary.”¹⁰

Ordinary language philosophy initially carried the promise of a future in which philosophy would no longer be driven by a sense of a doubled world. One of the leading themes that guided its proponents—such as John Wisdom, Stuart Hampshire, Gilbert Ryle, J. O. Urmson, Peter Strawson, and Austin at Oxford, and we might also, hesitantly, include G. E. Moore and Ludwig Wittgenstein at Cambridge—was precisely the thought that the supposed need to reach beyond or rise above the everyday and our ordinary language was the path to nothing more than an illusion of clarity. That line of thinking was quickly met with charges of superficiality and naïveté. Philosophy, it was argued, was to be concerned with how we ought to think and talk and not how we actually do think and talk. Thus, ordinary language philosophy often comes out as standing on the side of the naïve. And since our most immediate history in philosophy is one in which language has been underlined as the subject matter for philosophy to dwell on, this traditional line of thinking (with a sharp separation between appearance and reality) comes out as a distinction between ordinary language and a “refined” language. But this kind of hierarchical ordering, where the philosopher who proceeds from ordinary language is said to be on the side of the naïve, assumes that such a philosopher is also committed to the view that ordinary language itself is (always?) unproblematic, neutral, correct, and free from philosophy. But who, really, has subscribed to such commitments? Did Austin? Is it not possible that one can be dissatisfied with the philosophical aspiration to escape the ordinary and still think that the everyday and ordinary language are deeply problematical and immensely difficult to understand—thus suggesting that the ordinary itself is a site of philosophical problems, that there is a great deal of philosophical work to be done in attaining an understanding of one’s ordinary language, and that a flight from ordinary language is a flight from philosophy? This is, at least, the path I am here pursuing, and I aim to show that this is a path singled out by Austin as well.¹¹ Another way to say this is to say that I have found a discrepancy between what Austin did as a philosopher and many of the common pictures of his thought that are in circulation. The work of laying bare and reaching an understanding of the significance of the ordinary and the everyday in Austin’s work is also, at least partly, a labor of challenging flourishing images of what Austin and “ordinary language philosophy” stood for (and of what it may come to stand for).

This book, then, is an attempt to think through the philosophical significance of the ordinary as part of a struggle to return philosophy “to the realities we use words to talk about”—and to make clear that the everyday is, just like “ordinary language” is, one of the most important sites there is for philosophy and philosophical reflection and that a philosophy that evades it evades its own seriousness and is quite likely to betray its own aspirations.

Thinking about how to return philosophy “to the realities we use words to talk about” is also an attempt to craft philosophical lessons about the ways in which one may again learn to philosophize in a manner that matters. Thus, the approach to Austin that guides the reading here presented is rather well captured in the question: “How does one philosophize with Austin on these matters, after Austin?”—which I take to be a richer question than “What were Austin’s views?” Obviously, the question of the truth of his claims cannot be sidestepped, but I think that we go wrong in all attempts to appropriate the thoughts of any philosopher if we do not understand that task in a broad enough way. One might say that this book is written in opposition to a fairly traditional distinction that is often employed to describe two contrasting ways of studying ph...