What was Wittgenstein, really?
 

Awhile back a few snarky remarks of mine grew into a long polemic against analytic philosophy which brought this tiny site as much attention as it’s ever gotten. (Controversy is what makes things happen in the blogosphere)._[i]

My argument was that "analytic philosophy" was invented during the sixties and projected backward, and that Wittgenstein had been wrongly inscribed in its list of ancestors. This arguments proved to be hard to defend. Here is a history of “analytic philosophy”, which existed as a movement of sorts at least as early as 1947. And while Wittgenstein never affiliated with this group per se, he shared many of their concerns, and his ideas played a major role in the development of the school.

My backup position is that Wittgenstein was a much more complex figure than any of the other analytic philosophers, and that he had  important concerns which they didn’t share.  Furthermore, as analytic philosophy has developed, it has moved away from Wittgenstein even with regard to the specifically "analytic" questions, and Wittgenstein now exists --  as he indeed hoped would happen -- as an isolate without a tradition._[ii]

This sounds like the much-derided “two Wittgensteins” gambit, but Wittgenstein did explicitly express his “other side” and his discomfort with the philosophical world. This “other Wittgenstein” is not well-developed; a lot of it amounts to little more than inarticulate blurts, and in my opinion some of it is rather unpleasant. But this side of his thinking does have a difficult but intelligible relationship to the rest of his thought (the analytic part), and it does show that Wittgenstein had areas of awareness and concern that were and are almost entirely unshared by other analytics. And for many of us outside philosophy, the "other Wittgenstein" is the more interesting one.   

Fact and Value

I think that this passage from Toulmin gives us the clue: “All that is certain is that, whatever the strict implications of his later position, the absolute dichotomy of facts and values was of great importance to him – of greater importance, indeed, than any particular philosophical argument that might have been put forward to underpin or justify it.”_[iii]

The fact-value distinction is characteristic of the later positivistic philosophies which tried to purge their thinking of the confusion of science, teleology, and smuggled-in moralization characteristic of many or most nineteenth and early twentieth century positivist thinkers. Most positivists still believed that clear scientific or science-like thinking about social and political questions would lead to a better world, but they realized that earlier forms of positivism were often scientifically unjustifiable, in large part because of the introduction of  principles which were nothing more than moralisms or wishful thinking._[iv] Starting with Frege, these thinkers tried to construct a philosophy which would be more genuinely and completely scientific. Normally this means  taking the existing science more or less as given, and trying to divine its principles in order to apply them to not-yet-scientized areas of study – e.g., history or politics.

Most early analytic philosophers were primarily trying to produce a pure objective philosophy uncorrupted by human desires and prejudices, in the belief that this philosophy would be truer and more scientific. Once the scientific philosophy had been produced and the hard scientific work had been done, then they seem to have believed that conventional and basically unproblematic ethical beliefs could be routinely plugged to produce a much-improved practical philosophy of human life.

Wittgenstein, however, had a double motive. He was also trying to protect his ethical, aesthetic, and existential commitments (which in Wittgenstein are all one thing, most often simply called “ethics”) from  contamination by simple-minded factual, logical, common-sense, or scientific argumentation. These concerns show up in his work in the form of scattered ejaculations, plus large holes in the places where the ethical might be expected to be found. E.G. “It is impossible for there to be propositions of ethics”, or ”What we cannot speak of we must pass over in silence”.

Wittgenstein’s Ethical Traces

So there is an opening for an existential ethics in  Wittgenstein’s work which is not to be found in the works of the other analytic philosophers. His ethics is undeveloped, however – it might be said that he lived to complete only his “First Critique”, and that the remainder of his work exists only in forshadowings and scraps -- or we might just say that he was  blocked. While what he says about ethics can be stimulating and suggestive, it really does not add up to much (nor do I think that he would claim that it does).

Much of it consists of conventional Germanisms. It is characteristically Germanic, for example, to put music, as Wittgenstein does, at the center of culture on a par with philosophy and science.  From that point of view, what Wittgenstein says about music seems unexceptional except in its vehemence. (He believed that Mahler’s music is worthless, for example, and went on to speculate as to whether Mahler should have done away with himself for that reason).

Wittgenstein uses a great deal of religious vocabulary, which is always used seriously, as if by a believer: God, The Last Judgment, Hell, predestination, torment, struggle, death. As far as I can tell, none of this is much different than what you would hear from other serious-minded, non-Communist Germans or Austrians of that period.  Wittgenstein affirms the content of these beliefs while bracketing out the factual underpinnings which they are usually thought to have.

This leads to the second category of conventional content. A lot of what I read on these topics in Wittgenstein is very close to the old Faith vs.Reason, Religion vs. Science, Two Truths dualism I was introduced to as a young church-going skeptic. During the whole Christian era there have been incessant attempts to properly delineate these two areas, and much of what Wittgenstein writes fits into that tradition. It does not, however, add much to it, and really seems more valuable as an indication of the kind of thing that Wittgenstein wanted to do than as a real contribution to the debate.

Finally, some of the things Wittgenstein says indicate a very acute “straight-edge” sternness, severity, or rigorism which I believe was characteristic of (though not unique to) the Germany and Austria of his time, and which presumably comes from Luther and Kant as filtered through the Germanic military traditions (perhaps with admixtures of Viennese nihilism and wandervogel extremism). With regard to himself, Wittgenstein’s  rigorism manifests itself as self contempt and thoughts of suicide: “Anyway, I am not happy, nor because my rottenness troubles me, but within my rottenness”. Unsurprisingly, the strictness with which he judged himself was sometimes also applied to others._[v]

What Wittgenstein Actually Said

There are a number of passages which do give some hint at what he was groping for.  He thinks of ethics as  belief, passion, or emotion, as something non-factual which cannot be proven or even expressed, as a starting point before which there is nothing, and as a firm ground or frame of reference making human life possible. (It’s unclear to me whether Wittgenstein thought of this frame of reference as public and shared, or as individual and private. The individualist interpretation would go against his later philosophy, but Wittgenstein’s strong individualist tendencies were especially prominent when he spoke of ethics.)

Wittgenstein’s writings of these type are strongly reminiscent of Pascal, a point which Russell also made somewhere when he accused Wittgenstein of throwing away his talent the way Pascal did.

What Wittgenstein might have done

I have a few ideas about how Wittgenstein might have developed the part of his thought that I claim was blocked. The first of these builds on Wittgenstein’s reference to indexicals in PI:

Indexicals are marks of the speaker; they tell you the point of view from which a statement is made. They have no universal or scientific meaning, but are intrinsically particularistic (or idiocentric, as I use the word). It’s almost the definition of science to bracket these expressions out. “I” thus might be translated “The person who is speaking at x place and y time", (but not "the person who is speaking here and now"). There has been a strong tendency in analytic philosophy to translate expressions of personal identity into universalistic statements about certain physical objects which happen to be persons and have certain characteristics distinguishing them from most other physical objects, rather than allowing the use of the indexical "I" and "you"._[vi]

One mark of mystics and existentialists, many of whom Wittgenstein admired and cited, is that they start from the “I” and speak from the “I”. (It is for this reason, among others, that they are usually shunned by science and philosophy). However, the mystic’s “I” is different than the “I” of conventionalism orthoughtless egoism. The mystic deconstructs the “I”, helping people escape from the constraints of their “I”. But he does not do so by denying or ignoring the indexical, relational nature of humanness, but instead by fully recognizing it. Furthermore, the indexical self exists socially, in a world of other, similar but different selves, each with its own indexical perspective. Writers of the existential or mystiical type (Augustine, Pascal, Kierkegaard, and many others) write personally rather than universally, but (ironically) in such a way that they can provide usable models for other persons in dealing with their own personhood and idiocentric universe.

The universalist “view from nowhere” of analytic philosophy amounts to a fictitious, omniscient, absolute, non-indexical  “God’s eye” view of the world. This kind of approach has been successful in many areas of science, but  problems arise when it is absolutized. In particular, when describing human things, commitment to the “view from nowhere” essentially amounts to saying that in order to understand humans, it’s necessary to make oneself inhuman. This is a rather pejorative view of the subject matter, and the problem is exacerbated by the empirical fact that it is also presently true that only humans are able to understand humans. The scientist-philosopher thus becomes a peculiarly dualistic self-hating human unit -- afflicted with the need to deny his or her own real nature, but simultaneously under pressure from the professional code to misrepresent himself or herself as less indexical and idiocentric than he or she really is. (I discuss aspects of this question here.)

My understanding of Wittgenstein is that in all of his work (including the later work) he was trying, like the other analytic philosophers, to separate the descriptive, universalist, objective, scientific, factual level of language from another level which can be called indexical, existential, self-referential, subjective, emotional, passionate, normative, or projective (in the sense of forming projects or intentions, rather than descriptions). By contrast to the others, Wittgenstein had respect for both sides of the dichotomy and was trying to define each part clearly -- in contrast to the kinds of mixed utopian-existential-scientific-expressive discourse that he despised.  Most analytic philosophy simply tries to suppress the existential and minimize the indexical,  producing exactly what Wittgenstein tried to avoid -- a truth-valued discourse in which persons are one of the natural kinds of massy temporospatial things (or causes in a chain of causes and effects), and in which ethics is the science of truth-functional ethical facts. In this factual discourse, the existential is lost.

In sum: telling me how the mind works (non-indexical), does not tell me who I am (indexical) -- even though my mind is a version of "the mind". Hume and cognitive psychology did the first, Augustine and Kierkegaard gave us hints on the second -- indexed on themselves. Wittgenstein wanted to separate the two kinds of statements with the goal of making both discourses stronger, but he never really figured out how to make the separation, and partly for that reason the second part of his thought is poorly developed.

Why was Wittgenstein blocked? My own feeling is that he was still stuck in the universality trap and was not able to move to the indexical perspective. Second, he attached himself to the mystical notion of silence, without having involved himself in actual mystical practice. (If he had done so, he would have found that the mysticism of silence are supported by extensive bodies of writing; “silence” is a teaching device, not a dogma or absolute rule). And finally, the peculiar form of existential ethics he was born to, a rigorist sort of Germanic Christianity, was not, in my opinion, well-suited to philosophical development.

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APPENDIX

Over the years I’ve learned that,  for a lot of mostly-bad reasons, the mention of Buddhism  usually brings philosophical discussion to an end. Most philosophers have their standard dismissals of Buddhism, often couched in seemingly-sympathetic terms, and seldom based a serious understanding. (Schopenhauer, the absolute idealists, and Alan Watts are not usable sources.)

But I think that the Buddhist development of Wittgenstein would work best. Finch and Gudmunsen in my bibliography lay the foundations for that. Cook’s book describes a Buddhist polycentric indexical world. (Bonus readings: Nishitani, a student of Heidegger’s, has a lot  to say about Heidegger, but prefers Nietzsche, whom he gives a Buddhist reading. Mistry is also good on Buddhism and Nietzsche.)