How to Read (and How Not to Read) Wittgenstein: Notes for Students

I'm convinced that many of the secondary sources regarding Wittgenstein, most of the work done by those who profess to have been influenced by him or who use his lingo, and many students, make some common mistakes in reading him. These remarks I hope will prevent those mistakes. They are a mix of suggestions, reminders, and arguments.

Read W. as engaged in struggle. This has some implications. With many of the topics, I think the struggle is unfinished at the time of his death, and so we must not take what he says as the final word. Thus, we should read not for positions so much as for methods and clarifications of issues, issues on which then we must continue to struggle. This will help us avoid the most common mistake, reading for punch lines, concentrating as we read on getting clear his main claims.

Don't despair. Some with whom I went to graduate school came to have some dim appreciation of this struggle and decided then that the situation is hopeless-it's an unending task, or any position is as good as any other. Both these are false. It's hard, and so you have good grounds for quitting and changing your major to nursing or elementary education or alcohol and drug counseling, or some other field closely related to philosophy, but that is no excuse for dissing philosophy. With hard work we will make progress, and it's interesting progress.

I'll describe the nature of the struggle. I am convinced that a description of that is also a description of one of the major developments in philosophy. Most of you know Socrates' account of his own work in Plato's _Apology_, as an attempt to articulate the boundaries of our knowledge, to examine ourselves and to be clear about what we do not know. I think of W. as continuing this work, with the added realization that almost always we are strongly tempted to think we know things which in fact we do not know. The struggle, then, has a moral dimension which ties in with humility and with honesty. It is a struggle to articulate temptations and to examine how we might have given in to them when we should not because in fact they are mistaken. Some of these temptations are in fact temptations to which Socrates and Plato (not to mention you and I) did succumb. Especially, they (and we) often give in to temptations to think that certain questions are perfectly good philosophical questions when in fact there are confusions and missteps we have to accept in order to ask the questions. That is, part of the struggle is a struggle to understand the genesis of philosophical problems and this is a struggle because of the insight that some philosophical problems we take to be good are based on mistakes.

We are proceeding here in the absence of examples of these mistakes. This is because that is the main work of the course, working with one example after another of mistakes which generate philosophical problems, philosophical thinking, philosophical issues, and temptations to think some philosophical insights are obvious facts. With each, there is a delicate untangling required, like unraveling a knot by pulling the end back through all the places it went to make the knot. These remarks will make less sense to you in the absence of these examples, but we haven't time.

Thus there is a great deal of resentment in philosophy catalyzed by W., which resentment runs in two directions--philosophers in general often see W. as anti-philosophical, as calling into question their hard work and even the topics upon which they expend their hard work; W'ians often see those philosophers in general as doctrinaire, speculative, uncritical, and unwilling to consider the possibility that their work is perpetuating systematic delusions or nonsense--rather as if philosophers were doing ornithology on hallucinated birds and then insisting (successfully) that governments and schools adopt their findings. These feelings of being misunderstood and feelings of rejection and resentment run high.

Read for method, then, rather than for positions on the issues. The methods have grave implications for our own positions, and the simple direction, "read for method," requires a kind of openness to at least articulating possible revisions in our own views if not openness to actually changing our minds.

Why is there this emphasis on methods? Why don't we just get down to it, down, that is, to doing philosophy? Here's the framework for the basic argument for W's methods. Philosophical questions or problems (problems, now, not just positions) are sometimes based on mistakes, and the issues are thus not to be solved by sorting the various arguments for the possible positions, but rather they are to be dissipated or evaporated by exposing the mistakes on which the problems are based. As soon as we grant it is possible we have been mistaken in setting up any of our problems (an early item for our agenda in the course), a further issue is raised, namely which philosophical problems are based on these kinds of mistakes? and the result of this is a new kind of investigation, namely an investigation of our other philosophical problems to test them for whether they too are based on these kinds of mistakes. In order to do this, we have to understand the kinds of mistakes we might be making, be able to recognize evidence that the mistakes might have been made, and have some way of recognizing if we are successful, if we have avoided the mistakes. This itself is a difficult enterprise, and a formidable hurdle we have to get over before we can actually get back to the earlier business of arguing for one or the other solution to any philosophical problem. If we are at all impatient, then, we may throw up our hands and apprentice to someone doing similar work but with a clearer and quicker result, perhaps Roto-rooter work instead. Or, more commonly, we might be confident enough in the particular problems on which we are working that we will just skip this part, the part of checking to see whether the problem is a result of having made mistakes. Then we will go blithely on with business as usual. Of course, our confidence had better be right.

At this point we need to characterize the kinds of mistakes W. has detected and provide some examples. We'll trot out examples W. works on but also some investigated by others following his lead. I am ambivalent about characterizing the examples--in a way it seems I should only be providing the examples of mistakes, because I have doubts that the summary description of the kinds of mistakes can be complete or helpful. The examples, in any event, are the crucial part, and the description of the kinds of mistakes are parasitic on them. Among W'ians there is a striking lack of consensus on the nature of the mistakes we make which generate those philosophical problems which are mistaken. John Cook has attributed to philosophers the reflexive move of supposing that for every substantive in the language there must be a substance, for which then we have the job of providing an account (e.g., knowledge is such a substantive, and philosophers reflexively think that there must then be a thing, knowledge). O.K. Bouwsma tends to attribute philosophical confusions to our tendency to think guided by some analogies and similes when in fact they are misleading. J. L. Austin suggests that oversimplification is the occupational disease of philosophers, unless it is the occupation. Frank Ebersole talks of our primitive grasp of a philosophical topic being like or in the form of a picture (Ebersole is following scattered remarks made by W.), something, he says, we could draw in the sand with a stick, and then we are guided by the picture to suppose that there must be relationships to elucidate or questions about the things we think the picture is about, when in fact there are not those relationships or questions about the things--they are relationships or questions only about the picture, or they are generated by our letting the picture guide us. Some philosophers also remind us that doing very abstract work leaves us open to forgetting the relationship between the abstractions and the examples from which we have supposedly abstracted, so that sometimes the abstractions have no content--no examples of which they are an account--with the result that the abstract account we construct is empty in a peculiar way. (W. speaks of some of the ways we philosophers work as dependent on language being on holiday.)

In all these characterizations there is the implication that we can save ourselves from these mistakes by close attention to the relation between our philosophical work and the examples to which our philosophical work allegedly applies. If we are doing philosophy of knowledge, then we need some examples of knowledge and people's talking about knowledge which are not shaped by our philosophical thinking; if we are doing aesthetics, we need similar examples of art; if ethics then examples of morality or moral judgments; if philosophy of language then examples of language--examples, then, of those things of which the philosophical account is an account. At this point there arises a grave problem, in that often we find the philosophical account has such overwhelming charm that it may blind us by its charms and guide us to identify examples wrongly--we will think some things are examples of language, for example, when in fact the basis for our thinking is nothing else than our own philosophical account. W. speaks of our bewitchment, and the phenomenon of being in the grip of our own philosophical account is like the phenomenon of being persuaded by charisma rather than by careful arguments. The task of being able to properly identify examples, then, is not as simple as we might think, because our philosophical background has the effect of making us project it onto the things we think of as examples. The task of being able to properly identify examples is absolutely crucial if we are to avoid doing philosophy based on delusion.

In the grip of a philosophical insight it is possible that we will misidentify examples, and our misidentification may nevertheless seem to us to be obviously right, in part because it is consistent with what feels like profound insight or like the only possible way to think. The result of working to disentangle this, and then detecting our own mistakes, is a terrible distress, and then a recurrent worry which sometimes feels like paranoia. In the development of W's thought, we see strikingly a deepening of this worry and a deepening of the appreciation for this insight that we cannot trust ourselves. Understanding the relation between the philosophical account and the examples of which the account is meant to be an account is difficult, and the main threats to our ability to do it properly are our own temptations, the charm of our own insights. To put it in the tradition reaching back to Socrates, we must constantly be on guard against our own tendency to think we know things we do not know.

Analytic philosophy has properly been credited with making philosophy more rigorous, with requiring that we pay attention to arguments at every step of our work. I think of W's ordinary language methods as an extension of that, a requirement that we pay attention to arguments for the legitimacy of the problems as well as the arguments for and against the various possible positions on those problems.

For some students this may seem bewildering or dizzying as if the room in which we stand suddenly turns out to be an elevator. The problems will often feel as though they are obviously problems, and it is hard then to conceive of doubts as to their legitimacy. There is also a bit of history which comes in on the side of granting the legitimacy of the problems, in that the dismissal of some problems as "pseudoproblems" (one of Carnap's favorite terms, one that shows up in one of his book titles) or as nonsense by the logical positivists has been shown to be mistaken, and that dismissal looks from a distance much like what W. is doing. --And then for some students who have not been analytically trained or who do not find their requisite profundity fix in analytic work, there is sometimes great appeal in a method which is absolutely anathema to W's methods--that method is to lean back and read off out of our speculations what looks most reasonable and appealing. A call to doubt those feels like an unexpected and unwanted cold shower. Some literary philosophers and some philosophers in the continental tradition might reinforce this kind of blithe and speculative approach. W. over the course of his life progresses from being a young, confident logician to being at the end of his life obsessively worried and wracked by doubts about his own philosophical reflexes--where's the appeal in that? --for some students, it's nowhere.

To review: Here's the argument (though pieces need filled in as we go through the course) for adopting W's method of checking our philosophical claims against what we would say in examples outside philosophy: It's possible for us in philosophy to deceive ourselves into thinking the things we say make sense when they do not. (Establishing this is part of our early work in the seminar.) The reasons include our tendency to be guided by the philosophical positions we have entertained unawares as we set up our problems. We may have taken some facts to be obvious when they are the results of philosophical thinking which should be at issue, or perhaps we have taken the basic structure of the problem from some kind of oversimplified schema or picture. At any rate we beg questions when we did not mean to do so. The result is that we make mistakes at a deeper level than at the level of the contest between the possible answers to the philosophical issues--we make mistakes at the level of setting up the playing field for that contest. How can we check to see whether we have done this? The answer is to go in search of whether we have done this, by whatever methods we can dream up. One way is to look to see whether in our philosophical work we have altered the things we say so that they can be understood only by accepting philosophical doctrines which might possibly be at issue. One way to do that is to keep an eye on how we in philosophy talk in ways which would not make sense outside of philosophy. We find that out by deliberately checking how we talk in philosophy against how we talk when we are not doing philosophy. We collect what W. calls a perspicuous array of examples of how we talk outside philosophy and then compare that to how our temptations lead us to talk when we are doing philosophy. For some of us, when we begin this work the results are massively dismaying--we find that much more often than we suspected we talk in philosophy in ways which require suspect philosophical claims to be granted going in, granted without argument.

Where do we go from here? Next we need to take up some examples. Some of you have seen some of these before in the 399 reading groups from past semesters. These are going to come in the form of fragments from several sources. I'll lay out some old-chestnut ones and some from recent work in philosophy, all at such a high rate of speed that you should regard them only as abbreviations, but I'll guide you to places where the actual work on them can be read. You can also regard the bulk of W's _Philosophical Investigations_ as providing many of these same kind of examples, though I would caution you that W. is doing construction work still as we make our way through. Hard hats are required.

jwp, 22 August 99

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