STEPHEN MULHALL
Before attempting to relate Wittgenstein’s work to that of continental philosophy, we need to acknowledge just how contentious the term “continental philosophy” actually is.
For most of the twentieth century, academic philosophy in the English‐speaking world was conducted in ways that made no such acknowledgment. On the contrary, it presupposed that there was a clearly‐understood and clear‐cut choice to be made between two fundamentally different traditions or approaches to the subject, the analytic and the continental, with most philosophy departments in that world choosing to identify themselves as analytic. And since Wittgenstein’s work, both early and late, is deeply woven into the origins and development of what was referred to as analytic philosophy, this presupposition in turn made it seem self‐evident that his writings should be characterized as essentially analytic, so that his relation to continental philosophy could be simply characterized in wholly negative terms – as essentially uncontinental, and most likely anti‐continental, that is, not only having nothing in common with that other tradition, but also providing distinctive terms for its criticism.
However, even the labels used to articulate this supposedly fundamental division raise suspicions about its intelligibility, let alone its usefulness. For they define one side in terms of allegiance to a certain method – that of the analysis of language or concepts – and the other in terms of a geographical location. Bernard Williams once compared it to an attempt to divide cars into front‐wheel drive and Japanese. This peculiar cross‐categorization also obscures the fact that many of the most influential members of the analytic tradition, including Wittgenstein himself, came from continental Europe, and that some philosophy departments in both North America and the United Kingdom stubbornly retained an allegiance to continental ways of doing things. It seems unwise to place much initial trust in such a patently misbegotten dichotomy.
Nevertheless, good sense can be made of the idea that there is or was such a thing as the analytic tradition in philosophy, and that Wittgenstein was central to its development. Simplifying ruthlessly, we might distinguish three main evolutionary phases (see Glock, 2008). It began at the end of the nineteenth century in Cambridge, when Frege’s and Russell’s revolutionary developments in logical theory were then applied (with the help of G.E. Moore and the early Wittgenstein) to the field of philosophy, and purported to demonstrate that a clear understanding of the logical structure of language and thought revealed that many of the perennial problems of philosophy (to which its metaphysical theorizing was a response) were based on a misunderstanding of our means of representation. Its second phase was inaugurated when the Vienna Circle transformed the ideas contained in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus into the tenets of logical positivism. Their verification principle condemned as meaningless not only all evaluative propositions, but also the metaphysical propositions and projects of the Western philosophical tradition; philosophy could therefore justify its own continued existence only by restricting itself to winnowing out the meaningless from the meaningful, and analyzing in further detail the logical structure of scientific propositions.
Political developments in Europe during the 1930s led many of the leading logical positivists to flee to America, thereby embedding their version of analytic philosophy into this new cultural context, just as Wittgenstein began to criticize the presuppositions of the Tractatus and develop a wholly new way of philosophizing (thereby inaugurating the third phase of analytic philosophy). On this later view, the confusions characteristic of philosophy could be clarified by means of a careful description of the overt grammatical structures of our ordinary practices of employing words, an approach that seemed to dovetail with that of J.L. Austin in Oxford, and brought about the brief hegemony of what became known as ordinary language philosophy. Its dominance was ultimately ended by the importation from America (in the 1960s and 1970s) of arguments and ideas associated with Quine and Davidson, which were themselves both developments of and critical reactions to the earlier American importation of logical positivism, and put in question any attempt sharply to distinguish the normative structure of language from its empirical content – a distinction without which it appeared that neither logical positivism nor ordinary language philosophy could continue to defend its methods. At this point, analytic philosophy began to fragment into an increasingly heterogeneous array of projects.
The story of analytic philosophy is relatively easily narrated at this level of generality, because it makes sense to regard it as a distinctive school or movement – a collective enterprise held together by shared (or at least overlapping) commitments to certain methods and doctrines that developed over time, but only within recognizable limits. Of course, any such narrative risks characterizing the contributions of individual members of the tradition in a way that underplays their individuality, and thereby underestimates the range and depth of disagreement between them. This is particularly important in Wittgenstein’s case, since it is arguable that his early work was as radically critical of Frege’s and Russell’s philosophical orientation as it was supportive of it; that it was profoundly misunderstood by the Vienna Circle; and that his later work is less happily described as a final evolution in the development of analytic philosophy than as a fundamental internal critique of it.
However that may be, an analogous story cannot be told of continental philosophy, because that label was used to denote all the major philosophical schools or movements that held sway on the continent of Europe (primarily in Germany and France) from the death of Kant to the present day. It thus includes German idealism (especially Hegel), Marxism, Nietzschean genealogy (including Foucault), existentialism (from Kierkegaard to Sartre and Camus), phenomenology (from Husserl to Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau‐Ponty), critical theory (especially the work of Adorno, Horkheimer, and Habermas), deconstruction (Derrida), and so on. Analytic philosophy could usefully be compared with any one of these schools or movements, each of which is held together by certain shared commitments; but it makes no sense at all to compare it with all of them – as if there were some set of commitments that every one of them shared, or some particular continental philosopher who could go proxy for all.
So it is unsurprising that these continental philosophers never identified themselves as such (even if their stubborn Anglophone defenders were sometimes forced to do so). Rather like the idea of a continental breakfast, that of continental philosophy is one used primarily by those outside the cultures to which it primarily applies. It is, in short, essentially an invention of analytic philosophers, and applies to anything and everything in the post‐Kantian philosophical scene that is not analytic philosophy. And it’s true that many continental philosophers did (although each in different ways) reject commitments central to the analytic tradition – whether by questioning the priority of logical analysis, by pursuing avowedly metaphysical (and so purportedly meaningless) projects or at least taking them seriously enough to engage in critical dialogue with them (and so presenting the history of the subject as an essential context for its current work), or by aligning philosophy more with the humanities and social theory than with the natural sciences.
In that sense, there is a minimal (although essentially negative) descriptive content to the idea of continental philosophy. But it was never really a purely descriptive category; anyone who grew up within the philosophical culture that deployed it knew that it was a term of disapprobation, and at the limit a term of abuse. For it tended to be assumed (not entirely without justification, or at least provocation, in some cases) that continental philosophers not only did not do philosophy the right way, they did it in such a way as to threaten the very integrity of the subject: their querying of the philosophical value of formal logic was taken as a rejection of rational standards, and their willingness to construct metaphysical systems was taken as a willing embrace of obfuscation and nonsense. Continental philosophy was thus a kind of anti‐philosophy, what Plato would have called sophistry (see Glendinning, 2006). Such an assumption is hardly likely to encourage rigorous or charitable engagements with the texts and traditions indiscriminately denoted by this label.
Clearly, then, we will have to make some preliminary assumptions about these textual fields if we are to have two sufficiently precisely defined phenomena of appropriately comparable scale to relate to one another with any prospect of illuminating either. So I propose to focus exclusively on the relationship between Wittgenstein’s later philosophy and three philosophers who are commonly described as “continental”: Heidegger, Derrida, and Nietzsche (without presupposing that the label is attached to tokens of a single general philosophical type, and with primary attention paid to Heidegger). This approach leaves open what form or forms the relation between Wittgenstein and continental philosophy might take. In the present context, the most pertinent possible modes of that relation would include: presenting Wittgenstein as a critic of the continental philosophers under consideration; presenting these continental philosophers as critical of Wittgenstein; identifying points at which Wittgenstein and these “continental” philosophers criticize similar philosophical targets, for similar reasons; and identifying methodological analogies between them – in particular, similarities between their conceptions of philosophy’s nature and point.
Because the idea of a division between analytic and continental philosophy, and the related idea of Wittgenstein as an exemplary instance of the former approach, have gone so deep in Anglophone philosophical life, most of those willing to take an interest in the topic of this chapter have tended to assume that Wittgenstein’s work is primarily a resource for criticizing continental philosophy (e.g., Stone, 2000; Rogers Horn, 2005). Of the rather smaller number of continental philosophers who have taken a similar interest, whilst some have been content to view Wittgenstein as one more suitable object of a given continental line of criticism, others have been more interested in identifying and elaborating analogies between his approach and that of some continental counterparts (e.g., Staten, 1984). And as the unquestionable status of the analytic/continental opposition has crumbled, along with the obviousness of Wittgenstein’s analytic allegiances, as Anglophone philosophers became ever more aware of the historical specificity and internal complexity of the analytic tradition in the aftermath of its fragmentation, so more American and British philosophers have begun to explore those putative analogies (e.g., Glendinning, 1998 and 2007).
My treatment will primarily aim to identify overlapping targets and terms of criticism and methodological analogies, primarily by exploring relations between Wittgenstein and Heidegger, although I will also touch on themes in Derrida and Nietzsche. In so doing, I must assume the legitimacy of a particular reading of each; and I must likewise take for granted certain ways of reading Wittgenstein as a critic of analytic philosophy. Leaving myself unguarded in these ways is unavoidable; whether there are compensating benefits is for the reader to judge.
Heidegger’s Being and Time begins with a quotation from Plato’s Sophist (244a):
‘For manifestly you have long been aware of what you mean when you use the expression “being”. We, however, who used to think we understood it, have now become perplexed.’
Do we in our time have an answer to the question of what we really mean by the word ‘being’? Not at all. So it is fitting that we should raise anew the question of the meaning of Being. But are we nowadays even perplexed at our inability to understand the expression ‘Being’? Not at all. So first of all we must reawaken an understanding for the meaning of this question. Our aim in the following treatise is to work out the question of the meaning of Being, and to do so concretely. Our provisional aim is the interpretation of time as the possible horizon for any understanding whatsoever of Being.
(Heidegger, [1927] 1962, foreword)
Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations begins again in section 89, orienting its sustained discussion of its methods with a second quotation from Augustine, whose words also inaugurate the book’s first section:
[Logical investigation] arises neither from an interest in the facts of nature, nor from a need to grasp causal connections, but from an urge to understand the foundations, or essence, of everything empirical. Not, however, as if to this end we had to hunt out new facts; it is, rather, essential to our investigation that we do not seek to learn anything new by it. We want to understand something that is already in plain view. For this is what we seem in some sense not to understand.
Augustine says in Confessions XI. 14, ‘quid est ergo tempus? Si nemo ex me quaerat scio; si quaerenti explicare velim, nescio’. [What, then, is time? I know well enough what it is, provided that nobody asks me; but if I am asked what it is and try to explain, I am baffled.] – This could not be said about a question of natural science (‘What is the specific gravity of hydrogen?’, for instance). Something that one knows when nobody asks one, but no longer knows when one is asked to explain it, is something that has to be called to mind.
(And it is obviously something which, for some reason, it is difficult to call to mind.) (PI §89)
The network of specific differences between these two passages is difficult to evaluate, but the general similarity is hard to deny. For Heidegger sees in the words of Plato’s Stranger from Elea exactly what Wittgenstein finds in those of Augustine: the onset of a prototypically philosophical mood or moment, in which a taken‐for‐granted understanding of something utterly everyday reveals itself to be unreliable, and thereby induces a tormenting bewilderment. Both thereby characterize a distinctively philosophical question as one expressive of disorientation rather than ignorance – a loss of one’s bearings with respect to one’s ordinary practical comprehension of things (centrally manifest in our ordinary capacity to talk about them); recovery from such bewilderment will therefore amount to an achievement of reorientation, to be brought about by re‐collecting or re‐membering the everyday, pre‐theoretical understanding with which we have somehow lost touch. And both suspect us of overlooking the significance of questions of this kind – of failing to be struck by the distinctiveness of such questions, and so by the sheer strangeness of the fact that we can find ourselves gripped by them; this is implicit in Heidegger’s talk of our needing to “reawaken an understanding for the meaning of [such] questions,” and in Wittgenstein’s concluding registration of the sheer “difficulty” of responding to them in the way their distinctiveness requires.
Both certainly agree that the natural sciences (or indeed any ontic science, as Heidegger would call it – any body of systematic knowledge) could not help in this kind of task. They further agree that recovering the relevant understanding is in the first instance a matter of calling to mind what we mean by the relevant words or expressions. To be sure, Augustine expresses bewilderment about a phenomenon, whereas the Eleatic Stranger is perplexed by an expression; but Wittgenstein quickly interprets Augustine’s condition as one to be addressed by reminding him of the various kinds of statement we make about that phenomenon, just as Heidegger moves happily between talk of inquiring into the meaning of “Being” and talk of inquiring into the meaning of Being. Each therefore presupposes that recovering our understanding of an expression and recovering our understanding of that to which it refers are internally related.
Admittedly, where Heidegger presents grasping the meaning of one particular expression as the fundamental philosophical project, Augustine is specifically baffled by a different expression, and Wittgenstein anyway appears less concerned with which expression that is than with the exemplary nature of the bafflement it induces and the means for its alleviation – as if the moral to be drawn concerns the capacity of any and every expression at once to induce such bafflement and to provide the grammatical means for its overcoming. On the other hand, Heidegger no sooner identifies “Being” as his privileged term than he claims that the perplexity it induces can be addressed only by relating it to the very term about which Augustine expresses bewilderment – that of “time”; and it soon turns out that the privilege granted to “Being” is granted precisely because a grasp of its meaning is internal to grasping the meaning of pretty much anything:
Whenever one cognises anything or makes an assertion, whenever one comports oneself towards entities, even towards oneself, some use is made of ‘Being’ […]. ‘The sky is blue’, ‘I am merry’ and the like.
(Heidegger, [1927] 1962, 1.23)
Heidegger quickly emphasizes the breadth of this range of reference. For his key introductory elucidation of the term “Being” runs as follows:
In the question which we are to work out, what is asked about is Being – that which determines entities as entities, that on the basis of which entities are already understood […]. The Being of entities ‘is’ not itself an entity […]. Being is always the Being of an entity.
(Heidegger, [1927] 1962, 1.25–6, 2.29)
“Being” is not an entity, not an object or a property of an object, but that which determines any and every object as an object, which means determining it as an object of a particular kind or nature (hence necessarily equipped with properties of a particular kind or nature), and as really existing as opposed to not being there; to be a particular kind of thing, that thing must be, and nothing can be without being something in particular (possessed of an underlying or essential nature). Hence, Being is met with always and only as the Being of an entity; but by the same token it is necessarily encountered whenever one encounters anything.
Heidegger’s careful alignment of an understanding of Being as “that which determines entities as entities” with an understanding of it as “that on the basis of which entities are understood” makes it hard to overlook the analogy with Wittgenstein’s conception of grammar as revelatory of the underlying nature of things – as articulated in his claim that “Essence is expressed in grammar” (PI §371). Wittgenstein’s formulation is also simultaneously turned toward reality and toward our means and modes of understanding it (thereby presenting them as internally related); and it is equally general in its implications – it is the essential nature of anything whatever that finds expression in the grammar of our expressions for it.
Since Wittgenstein’s methodological assumptions are in this respect far closer to Heidegger’s than one might have expected, it’s worth considering the possibility that other aspects of Heidegger’s conception of Being might bring out dimensions of Wittgenstein’s conception of grammar that would otherwise escape our notice. The dimension I want to highlight here is Heidegger’s sense that the various different ways in which entities disclose themselves to us are simultaneously interwoven with one another – that they display what Aristotle called a unity of analogy, or a categorical interconnectedness.
Heidegger thinks of ontic sciences such as biology, history, and physics as what results from our making an issue of our implicit everyday understanding of a given range of the world we inhabit; we rigorously thematize it with a view to systematically interrogating it, and develop thereby a body of knowledge that may surpass or even subvert our initial understanding, but that is made possible by it and that is no less open to further questioning. In particular, everything we thereby come to know takes for granted certain basic ways in which the ontic science demarcates and structures its own area of study – conceptual and methodological resources that can themselves be thematized and interrogated (when, for example, a philosopher of science inquires into the validity of inductive reasoning). Such inquiries concern the conditions for the possibility of such scientific theorizing, what Heidegger calls the ontological presuppositions of ontic inquiry; and whether one inquires into them as a practitioner of the discipline or as a philosopher, the subject matter could not be within the purview of a purely intra‐disciplinary inquiry (which would necessarily presuppose what is here being put in question). It is, in short, the business of philosophy.
The object of investigation here is a regional ontology; every region of ontic knowledge presupposes one, and thus invites this kind of questioning. And the results of that questioning themselves provoke further inquiry: given that each ontic region discloses an ontology, the relations between the various regional ontologies inevitably become a matter for philosophical inquiry. For on the one hand, each ontology will differ from others, as each ontic region has its own distinctive nature. But on the other, each region may open up onto cognate regions (as chemistry might shed light on biology, or as Heidegger thinks theology has deformed anthropology, psychology, and biology ([1927] 1962, p.10)), thus revealing that its ontology bears upon those others; and of course each regional ontology is an ontology – each performs the same determinative function with respect to its region, each determines the Being of a certain range or domain of beings, even if differently in each case. How, then, is this synthesis – this plaiting or interweaving – of categorial diversity and categorial unity to be understood? What is it for beings to be? This is the question of the meaning of Being – what Heidegger calls the enterprise of fundamental ontology.
Note that Heidegger does not and could not think of fundamental ontology as an inquiry into some domain that is essentially distinct from (say, foundational in relation to) regional ontological inquiry – as if Being as such had a domain of its own in addition to the domains of regional ontology, as if we could directly contemplate Being as opposed to one of its regions. On the contrary, since Being is always the Being of some entity or other, the question of fundamental ontology must always take regional ontologies and their interrelations as its concern; and anyone who pursues a given regional ontological inquiry without reflecting upon how, if at all, its deliverances and presuppositions relate to those of other such inquiries is simply failing to pursue that inquiry in a properly rigorous manner. Fundamental ontology is regional ontology radicalized, or fully realized; it is not an alternative or supplement to regional ontological inquiry, but a manner of relating oneself to it.
The relevant relation is one that acknowledges (as opposed to either repressing or prematurely fixing) the inherently and multiply situated or contextual nature of regional ontological inquiry: the way in which it relates to other regional ontological inquiries (or might do so otherwise, or utterly fails to do so), which involves acknowledging the way in which the ontic science from which it arises relates to other ontic sciences (or might so relate or fails to), which in turn involves acknowledging the way in which the aspect of our pre‐theoretical understanding of things from which that science arises relates to other aspects of that understanding (or fails to). Every one of these nodes or elements – be it a branch of philosophy, a means of acquiring knowledge, or a mode of practical activity – is what it is by virtue of its actual and possible relations to all of the others; so a proper grasp of any requires acknowledging that relatedness as an undismissable issue, something about which questions can always be posed and inquiries pursued.
Call this Heidegger’s context principle: its implications are widely ramifying, but for present purposes, one is most pertinent. Since philosophy is parasitic upon the ontic sciences, then insofar as its constituent regional ontological inquiries hang together with one another, so must the ontic sciences from which those inquiries take their bearing. Their results hang together internally (making it possible to form coherent bodies of knowledge, as opposed to accumulations of purely local data) and externally (insofar as the understanding they systematize has a possible bearing upon other such forms of understanding – whether by complementing, qualifying, challenging, or otherwise putting it in question). And for Heidegger, if the ontic sciences (and the pre‐theoretical understanding that engenders them) did not manifest this kind of unity‐in‐diversity, then to precisely that extent the idea that they are ways of disclosing a reality that holds (and holds together) independently of our ways of grasping it would lack any genuine substance.
It is the multiple bearings of each such mode of inquiry on other such modes that gives substance to the thought that each mode gets a purchase on some aspect of things as they really are. For they make manifest that and how the purchase that each offers hangs together with the purchase offered by other such modes. Hence, to show that and how these inquiries relate to one another just is to show that genuine comprehension is attainable by their means – that each can claim to articulate a way of distinguishing reality from illusion, a way of getting at the truth of things; and to show that each really is a way of getting to grips with reality just is to show that there is a multifaceted reality with which we might intelligibly get to grips.
In short: to think of the question of the meaning of Being as a genuine question is to think of our ontic sciences and their pre‐theoretical antecedents as genuine modes of understanding – as ways of disclosing how things really are; it is to think of them as discursive articulations that are also articulations of reality.
What bearing do these matters have on Wittgenstein? The short answer is: they might lead us to reconsider the significance of Wittgenstein’s own context principle: “To imagine a language means to imagine a form of life” (PI §19). A longer answer would take us back to the first appearance of Augustine in Wittgenstein’s text, at the very beginning of Philosophical Investigations, which Wittgenstein’s most recent translators render into English as follows:
When grown‐ups named some object and at the same time turned towards it, I perceived this, and I grasped that the thing was signified by the sound they uttered, since they meant to point it out. This, however, I gathered from their gestures, the natural language of all peoples, the language that by means of facial expression and the play of eyes, the movements of the limbs and the tone of voice, indicates the affections of the soul when it desires, or clings to, or rejects, or recoils from, something. In this way, little by little, I learnt to understand what things the words, which I heard uttered in their respective places in various sentences, signified. And once I got my tongue around these signs, I used them to express my wishes.
(PI §1 [Augustine, Confessions, I.8])
Wittgenstein detects in this passage a particular picture of the essence of human language (“the words in language name objects – sentences are combinations of such names”), notes that Augustine “does not mention any difference between kinds of word,” and then asks us to think of the following use of language:
I send someone shopping. I give him a slip of paper marked ‘five red apples’. He takes the slip to the shopkeeper, who opens the drawer marked apples; then he looks up the word ‘red’ in a chart and finds a colour sample next to it; then he says the series of elementary number‐words – I assume that he knows them by heart – up to the word ‘five’, and for each number‐word he takes an apple of the same colour as the sample out of the drawer. – It is in this and similar ways that one operates with words.
(PI §1)
And in the very next section, he invites us to imagine a language for which the description given by Augustine is right:
The language is meant to serve for communication between a builder A and an assistant B. A is building with building stones: there are blocks, pillars, slabs and beams. B has to pass him the stones and to do so in the order in which A needs them. For this purpose they make use of a language consisting of the words ‘block’, ‘pillar’, ‘slab’, ‘beam’. A calls them out; B brings the stone which he has learnt to bring at such‐and‐such a call. – Conceive of this as a complete primitive language.
(PI §2)
If we assume that the shopping trip exemplifies an ordinary operation with words for which the description given by Augustine is not right (Mulhall, 2001, queries this assumption), then what is it about that tale that resists Augustine’s description? The most obvious such feature is the diversity of the kinds of words at work in the tale: although “apple” is a word of the kind that Wittgenstein claims Augustine was primarily thinking of (nouns and proper names), “red” and “five” are not. The contrast here with the builders seems clear, since all of their words are nouns, and indeed names for the same kind of object. Then we will take away from Wittgenstein’s tale the moral that philosophers need to recall and display differences – that language‐games are astonishingly various, and that this variety is itself subject to variation over time (as new games come into existence and others suffer obsolescence) (PI §23).
But an equally striking feature of the tale is the extent to which the three different words used by the list‐writer, the shopper, and the shopkeeper interact with one another as smoothly as do the three people involved in this transaction – each word as if made to work in the company of the others. How the shopkeeper responds to the word “apple” certainly differs from his modes of response to the words “red” and “five,” but those responses are coordinated: each relates him differently to a single line on the list, to the items inside one particular drawer, and to the contents of a single bag he finally hands over to the shopper – the five red apples on which all three words have an equal and integrated purchase, and without which this particular purchase could not have been planned or made. At the same time, part of the significance of the shopping list is that it asks for five red apples, and not five red tomatoes, or five green apples, or one red apple; it therefore involves grasping the way in which each of those three words operates within a more general linguistic field (those of number, color, and fruit) whose ranges of application connect the words on the shopping list to an indefinite variety of other contexts in which number words, color words, and words for fruit might be put to work. The grocer’s counting aloud as he extracts apples from his drawer might equally well have accompanied a bird‐watcher’s annotation of her observations; the color chart he uses to discriminate between the items in his apple drawer might equally well have been used to pick out the right fabric with which to upholster his sofa; and the label on his apple drawer might equally well have been used beside an illustration in a child’s alphabet book.
In short, each way of using these words in this context is what it is because it could also be employed elsewhere; the collective capacity of these words to effect an economic transaction at the grocer’s is inseparable from their individual ability to effect a widely‐ramifying range of equally but differently collaborative operations elsewhere, each differently dependent on the availability of other words with which to achieve something in a variety of other environments or work‐worlds. Their individual significance is thus constituted by their distinctive place in an interlocking, overlapping, and crosscutting network of forms of human practical activity. By contrast, the builders’ “language” consists of individual words that shun collaboration with each other – even, apparently, that of conjunction – and that conjure up no other obvious contexts of human practical activity into which they might fit, except perhaps other building sites, as long as they require no other kinds of building stone. It is precisely the perfection of their fit with the four kinds of object they name that reduces their capacity to transcend their current context toward a bare minimum, and raises the self‐sufficiency of their mode of operation toward an airless maximum. Such a conjunction of the primitive and the complete risks depriving us of grounds for regarding what we have before us as a language at all; and what secures that conjunction is precisely the difficulty of regarding this tale, unlike that of the shopping trip, as a depiction of one amongst a variety of related ways in which one operates with words – as a situated part of a form of life with language.
So it is vitally important accurately to depict this variety and interrelatedness – call it the way in which words worthy of the name generalize, project themselves from context to context. This becomes clearer when, a few sections after introducing the builders, Wittgenstein restates his critique of Augustine’s picture:
If we say ‘Every word in the language signifies something’, we have so far said nothing whatever; unless we explain exactly what distinction we wish to make. […]
Suppose someone said ‘All tools serve to modify something. So, a hammer modifies the position of a nail, a saw the shape of a board, and so on.’ – and what is modified by a rule, a glue‐pot and nails? – ‘Our knowledge of thing’s length, the temperature of the glue, and the solidity of a box.’ – Would anything be gained by this assimilation of expressions? – (PI §§13–14)
This comparison of words to pieces of equipment naturally calls to mind Heidegger’s attempt to clarify the distinctive nature of human modes of existence by means of a phenomenology of tools, objects understood as ready‐to‐hand, handy for the performance of certain tasks. His example is a hammer; and his complex analysis results in the claim that our ability to grasp a hammer as a hammer is ultimately conditioned by a socially‐constituted web of assignments of significance or meaning. But he insists that these meaning‐relations must not be understood in an overly formal or formalized way:
The phenomenal content of these ‘Relations’ and ‘Relata’ […] is such that they resist any sort of mathematical functionalization [: that is, having] their ‘properties’ defined mathematically in ‘functional concepts’. They are rather relationships in which concernful circumspection as such already dwells.
([1927] 1962, pp.18, 121–2)
Heidegger’s point is not just that the capacity to grasp a hammer as a hammer involves grasping its role in a complex web of interrelated carpentry equipment; for a hammer is not just something with one particular functional role in one precisely definable kind of practical activity. A hammer is certainly something we use to drive nails into surfaces: but anyone who understands its nature as a tool for this particular purpose must also possess an indefinite range of related know‐how – when to use nails as opposed to screws and which kinds of nail in different cases, the variety of materials from which a usable hammer can be made (and when one material is more appropriate than another), and so on. Moreover, anyone who grasps a hammer as a hammer will also grasp the indefinite number of other tasks that a hammer can be used to perform (securing wedges, loosening joints, propping open windows, repelling intruders, playing “toss‐the‐hammer,” and so on); and he will also grasp the ways in which an indefinite range of other objects might be used instead of a hammer – as a hammer – to perform any of these tasks. Knowing what a hammer is involves knowing all of this: it is an inherently open‐ended capacity, one that cannot be captured by a finite list of precise rules. For our practical activities always engage with and are developed in specific situations, but there is no way of specifying a closed set of all the possible ways and contexts in which our knowledge of a hammer and its capacities might be pertinently deployed. This kind of (circumspective) understanding is more like a capacity to improvise in the face of unforeseen demands and opportunities – to find new ways of marrying tool to circumstance, of seeing how this object can be used to achieve this goal in these conditions, and thereby to deepen our understanding of just what it means for it to be a tool of this kind.
In the light of this understanding of tools, the critical force of Wittgenstein’s analogy between the claim that all words signify something and the claim that all tools modify something takes on a new aspect. To be sure, he wants us to question whether anything is achieved by assimilating words and tools in the envisaged manner. If we stretch our initial everyday notion of “modification” so that it applies not only to those tools that we do normally say modify things (such as hammers) but also to tools about which that thought never crosses our mind (such as a glue‐pot), we have to jettison more and more of its initial grammatical substance, to the point at which it becomes an empty form, which can be applied to any and every tool only because its applicability tells us nothing of substance about how any of them actually works. So advanced, the claim that “all tools modify something” does not even tell us something true about hammers, since it doesn’t tell us anything at all.
But Wittgenstein doesn’t ever say that the notion of “modification” cannot – with sufficient ingenuity and commitment – be extended far beyond its original sphere of reference; on the contrary, he offers us a short series of examples of exactly how that extension might be grounded (ones strangely reminiscent of his later willingness to allow that, and to show how, sense might be made of the idea that “roses have teeth” (PPF §314)). In short, he acknowledges that the term “modification” is itself inherently modifiable: it is precisely capable of being projected beyond its initial contexts of use in ways that were not always already encoded within it, but that are facilitated by our grasp of the shape or point of its uses within that context, and with respect to which we can elicit agreement from others.
So we cannot coherently respond to the Augustinian tool‐characterizer by flatly denying that the term “modifier” can be applied to anything outside its initial context of use; that would be to deprive the term of the very open‐endedness or projectibility – the modifiability – that is implicitly at work in the shopping trip tale, and that is fatefully reduced to a minimum in the builders’ language‐game (the “use” of “language” for which Augustine’s description is right). Doing so would mean countering the Augustinian in a way that aligns us with his most fundamental confusion; and it would obscure the fact that what leads us into the distinctively philosophical condition of failing to mean anything by our words just when we take ourselves to be conveying a metaphysical revelation is the very projective capacity without which words simply would not be words. In this sense, Wittgenstein’s vision of language locates the root of philosophical bewilderment in the nature of language itself, and not merely in some essentially accidental misapprehension of it.
So one might say that the analogy Wittgenstein draws between a claim about words and a claim about tools invites us to see that the former would be closer to the truth if it made use of the concept invoked in the latter. For the capacity of words to signify is in truth a matter of their being inherently modifiable, essentially open to new contexts of use in ways that illuminate further reaches of significance in both word and context. And one might further say that, so modified, the concept of modification is not far from the truth about tools either: characterizing a hammer’s essence in terms of its ability to modify the position of a nail is both a profoundly misleading claim about its equipmental nature (insofar as it identifies that nature with one specific task, as the builders’ language tethers each of its terms to one kind of object), and a profoundly illuminating way of conceiving it (insofar as it invites us to consider hammers, and by extension all tools, as inherently modifiable, adaptable in ranges of ways to ranges of equipmental and non‐equipmental contexts). In short, the way to make both claims at once substantial and illuminating is to modify each in the light of the other.
In conclusion, I shall gesture toward ways in which Wittgenstein’s citations of Augustine might also facilitate a conversation with two other continental philosophers – Derrida and Nietzsche (the former inheriting Heidegger, the latter inherited by him).
Derridean concerns are at work in various ways when Wittgenstein responds to Augustine by telling the tale of a shopping trip. Anyone familiar with Derrida’s writings about writing in relation to speech could hardly avoid being struck by the fact that, whereas Augustine’s child is grappling with words as spoken by his elders as they go about their own business, Wittgenstein’s shopper is operating with a written text, which functions in the absence of any oral contribution from its bearer. Furthermore, whereas the words in Augustine’s tale coexist with those uttering and hearing them, never quite detaching themselves from (as if reinforced or substantiated by) their presence (and in particular by the child’s presence to himself in his own consciousness), the shopping list achieves the satisfaction of the desires of its composer in his absence – quite as if unobtrusively endorsing Derrida’s view that the meaningfulness of words is such as to make it necessarily possible that they can function in the absence of their author. Indeed, the implicit presence in Wittgenstein’s tale of an indefinite range of interrelated contexts in which each word on that shopping list might find or resist finding a home, and in the absence of which they would not be the words they are, would for Derrida be another aspect of the iterability that the list‐maker’s absent presence already indicates.
When Derrida offered his first and (I believe only) reading of Wittgenstein (in Glendinning, 2001), it was a response to just this tale, and in particular to the shopkeeper’s peculiarly externalized ways with words whose meaning he has patently internalized:
To me what this description highlights is the installation of a certain ‘technology’, through iterability, within our mental operations […]. [T]he technology which is implied in arithmetic, in calculation, in grammar, in semantics, and so on […]. [This] would imply that a certain ‘techne’ is already at work within the so‐called ‘private’ or ‘inner’ sphere of mental operations […]. But in the ‘running’ supposed by iterability, ‘techne’ is not simply opposed to the possibility of a non‐mechanical decision. Indeed it is its very chance […]. Otherwise, that of which it is the chance would be […] just a programmed effect implying a predictability or a pure know‐how, which would be the annihilation of every responsibility. (p.117)
This reading positively demands further dialogue between Wittgenstein and Derrida – in the first instance, concerning the costs and benefits of aligning arithmetic and calculation with grammar and semantics in a list of “technologies” or “techne” (an alignment that Wittgenstein famously questions in questioning the analogy between language and calculi, despite the fact that his own rule‐following remarks appear to treat the technique of expanding an arithmetical series as if it could be exemplary of the normativity of language use more generally). But of course, to claim that a technology is implicit in all the items on that list is not to say that it is involved in each in exactly the same way; and one should not overlook Derrida’s resistance to any implication of a pure know‐how – call it a philosophically purified conception of know‐how: one that would make such understanding a matter of programming or the algorithmic, rather a matter of taking personal responsibility for the particular ways in which we find ourselves unpredictably willing to project the grammar of a word. His claim is not that iterability is either the mechanical aspect of a techne, or a composite of its mechanical and nonmechanical aspects; it is rather that iterability puts in question the idea that any kind of techne can be properly grasped except as involving both dimensions or aspects – each enabling and enabled by the other.
As for Nietzsche: dialogue might begin from Wittgenstein’s response to his second citation of Augustine in reflecting on his philosophical methods, which he presents as counters to philosophy’s drive to sublime the logic of our language. I’ve argued elsewhere that this notion of subliming has at least three facets: that of the subliminal, of sublimation, and of sublimity; Wittgenstein thereby attributes to traditional philosophy a sense of the essence it seeks as hidden behind or within the empirical, hence as needing to be distilled from its impurities, with a view to liberating it and us from our own confinement in the everyday (Mulhall, 2001, pp.87–93). But the truth as Wittgenstein sees it is otherwise:
We have got onto slippery ice where there is no friction, and so, in a certain sense, the conditions are ideal; but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk; so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!
(PI §107)
It is difficult to think of a more concisely elegant expression of the signature Nietzschean thought that philosophy is constitutionally and lethally inclined to privilege Being over Becoming – investing in the construction of an ideal realm of essence, rather than facing the messiness of spatiotemporal reality, and in particular the humiliating reality of our ambulatory animal need for the friction it makes possible. Now recall that Wittgenstein’s primary way of characterizing that rough ground is his invocation of family‐resemblance concepts – the unity of which consists of overlapping strands of resemblance. Given that such resemblances hold not just within a generation but between them, and so presuppose not only the passage of time but also a reiterated generative mechanism of grafting external elements onto the family tree (by marriage), thereby identifying its continuing vitality with an ability to renew its inner logic by means of external contingency, it’s hard to avoid the implicitly genealogical dimension of Wittgenstein’s analogical figure. Might he then intend a distinctively evaluative – an ethico‐spiritual – critique of philosophy, as implicitly committed to an ascetic ideal that denigrates the distinctive vitality of the human animal? Perhaps this is why he once compared philosophical uneasiness and its resolution to “the suffering of an ascetic who stood raising a heavy ball, amid groans, and whom someone released by telling him ‘Drop it’” (PO 175).