People are born to trouble as surely as sparks fly upward.
Job 5:7
Cease to do evil, learn to do good.
Isaiah 1:16
Seek justice, correct oppression, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.
Amos 5:15, 24
Philosophy, social theory and truthfulness
Why is it so hard for us to speak honestly? What are the family histories and cultural memories that we carry into the present, often unknowingly and unaware of how they continue to shape formative experiences and relationships? What would philosophy and social theory look like if it is demanded that people share themselves honestly as part of their practice of doing philosophy and doing social theory?
Often, we assume within a liberal moral culture that it is a matter of individual will and choice what class, race, ethnic and sexual histories and memories we carry and what aspects of our identities we choose to acknowledge in our relationships with ourselves and others – whether and how we are honest with ourselves and with others. We too readily assume within a liberal moral culture that if we want to be honest, then it depends upon ourselves and the individual choices that we make.
But in our intimate relationships, we sometimes catch how easy it is for us to avoid the truth about our emotional, class, ethnic and sexual histories and say what is expected of us by others. We can be unsure of what it is we are feeling even though we sense a tension between what we seem to be feeling and how we are talking to others. We can feel disappointed and frustrated as we are dimly aware of how far we seem to be from ourselves and what is really going on for us, even though we feel uneasy not knowing how to undo the distance that we can experience as isolation and being locked into ourselves at some level. Often when we want to reach out more honestly about personal, emotional and cultural histories, including traumatic family histories of loss and displacement, we have learnt to silently carry but have little sense of how to do so, even in our close friendships and relationships.
Ray Monk in Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius suggests that ‘the Philosophical Investigations – more, perhaps, than any other philosophical classic – makes demands, not just on the reader’s intelligence, but on his or her involvement’ (p. 366). He says
There is another reason, why it seems appropriate to begin with the book with a quotation from St Augustine’s Confessions. And that is, for Wittgenstein, all philosophy, in so far as it is pursued honestly and decently, begins with a confession.
As Wittgenstein notes, ‘The edifice of your pride has to be dismantled. And that is terribly hard work.’ As Monk comments, ‘The self-scrutiny demanded by such a dismantling of one’s pride is necessary, not only to be a decent person, but also to write decent philosophy.’ ‘If anyone is unwilling to descend into himself or herself, because this is too painful, they will remain superficial in their writing’:
Lying to oneself about oneself, deceiving yourself about the pretence in your own state of will, must have a harmful influence on (one’s) style; for the result will be that you cannot tell what is genuine in the style and what is false…
If I perform to myself, then it’s this that the style expresses. And then the style cannot be my own. If you are unwilling to know what you are, your writing is a form of deceit.1
(pp. 366–7)
Wittgenstein realised the interrelation between the ways we can think and the ways we live in our everyday lives and relationships. While living in Norway and trying to work, he wrote in his diary on 27 August, ‘The way to solve the problem you see in life is to live in a way that will make what is problematic disappear.’ This is a difficult sentiment, and it has led some people to interpret Wittgenstein’s later philosophy as ‘therapeutic’ as if it were a matter of making certain philosophical problems disappear. But the issues are more complex, as Wittgenstein also recognised:
The fact that life is problematic shows that the shape of your life does not fit into life’s mould. So you must change the way you live and, once your life does fit into the mould, what is problematic will disappear.
But don’t we have the feeling that someone who sees no problem in life is blind to something important, even to the most important thing of all? Don’t I feel like saying that a man like that is just living aimlessly – blindly, like a mole, and that if only he could see, he would see the problem.
(p. 375)
If we want to be more honest and truthful with ourselves and in our relationships, we need to pay attention not only to the ways we think but also to the education of our feelings and desires and the ways we are living. We might be aware of tension between ways we are living and the beliefs and values we say we have. We might want to bring more honesty into our lives and relationships. This might involve taking certain risks and questioning certain habitual ways of being as we attempt to share more in our intimate relationships, narrating more of our everyday lived experience, than we are habitually accustomed to doing.
This might break a habit so that it is something that we have to consciously work at through constantly practicing it. This can involve engaging traumatic histories and family memories that we have put aside. It can involve facing everyday structures of inequality and systemic racism we do our best to avoid. Often there are ways that we might want to be present, but as others challenge us with different levels of denial, both personal and political, we seek to distract and avoid.
The truths that we cannot see, for example, about structural inequalities or the global climate emergency can be too challenging to our material class interests and ways of living. We might want to think in Bauman’s terms of a liquid modernity in which individuals are supposedly free in postmodern terms to create their own identities but face realities of structural realities. We might acknowledge how issues others are drawing our attention too are confronting but recognise we are feeling distracted and somehow out of it, even when we think we are present and available.2
Wittgenstein, Freud and arts of living
There are different moments when Wittgenstein turns to Freud. There was a time when he thought of training as a doctor and possibly becoming a psychiatrist. Monk notes that his ‘feeling that he would have made a good psychiatrist seems to rest on a belief that his style of philosophising and Freudian psychoanalysis required a similar gift’. In 1935, he sent his friend Drury, who was training to be a doctor in Dublin, as birthday present, Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, telling Drury that when he first read it he said to himself: ‘Here at last is a psychologist who has something to say.’ At the same time, he reacted angrily when his philosophical method was dubbed ‘therapeutic positivism’ by A.J. Ayer who drew the comparison in an article in the Listener.
But he was still inclined to see some sort of connection between his work and Freud’s. As Monk notes in a lecture on Freud’s work, he summed the achievements of both himself and Freud in strikingly similar phrases. ‘It’s all excellent similes’ he said of Freud, while he said of his own contribution to philosophy: ‘What I invent are new similes.’ As Monk surmises, ‘The ability to form a synoptic view by constructing illuminating similes and metaphors was, it appears, what he wished to contribute to psychiatric medicine’ (p. 357).
According to Wittgenstein, Freud’s work is interesting because it does not provide a scientific treatment. As Monk notes,
What puzzles us about a dream is not its causality but is significance. We want the kind of explanation which ‘changes the aspect’ under which we see the images of a dream, so that they now make sense. Freud’s idea that dreams are wish fulfilments is important because it ‘points to the sort of interpretation that is wanted’, but it is too general. Some dreams are wish fulfilments – ‘the sexual dreams of adults for instance’. But it is strange that these are precisely the kind of dreams ignored by Freud.
(p. 449)
As Wittgenstein argues, this is again connected with Freud’s determination to provide a single pattern for all dreams: all dreams must be, for him, expressions of longing, rather than, for example, expressions of fear.
As Monk notes,
Freud, like philosophical theorists, had been seduced by the method of science and the ‘craving for generality’. There is not one type of dream, and neither is there one way to interpret the symbols in a dream. Dream symbols do mean something – ‘Obviously there are certain similarities with language’ – but to understand them requires not some general theory of dreams, but the kind of multi-faceted skill that is involved, say, in the understanding of a piece of music.
In part, it is a matter of seeing connections and recognising how this is a part of becoming human.
It also involves a willingness to acknowledge and recognise differences for what they are. These are aspects that it takes time and attention to acknowledge in their influence in our lives as we see aspects of ourselves and the histories we carry as connected with formative experiences of class, race, ethnicities, gender and sexualities. Wittgenstein sometimes characterised his later philosophy as a matter of teaching people the significance of the phrase: ‘Everything is what it is, and not another thing’ as a motto for Philosophical Investigations. As Monk notes, ‘the importance of illuminating comparisons lies at the heart of Wittgenstein’s central notion of: “the understanding which consists in seeing connections” but was also regarded by Wittgenstein as characterising his whole contribution to philosophy’ (p. 451).
As Monk also appreciates, ‘Instead of teaching doctrines and developing theories, Wittgenstein came to think, a philosophy should demonstrate a technique, a method achieving clarity.’ The crystallisation of this realisation and its implications brought him to, as he put it to Drury, ‘a real resting place’. ‘I know that my method is right’, he told Drury. ‘My father was a businessman, and I am a businessman: I want my philosophy to be businesslike, to get something done, to get something settled.’3
Life, masculinities and everyday ethics
Wittgenstein left Cambridge in March 1944 when he was granted leave of absence to go to Swansea to work on his book. He loved the Welsh coastline and found the people congenial. ‘The weather’s foul’, he was to tell Malcolm in 1945, ‘but I enjoy not being in Cambridge’:
I know quite a number of people here whom I like. I seem to find it more easy to get along with them here than in England. I feel much more often like smiling, e.g. when I walk in the street, or w...
