science … brings confusions if we think that its results reveal to us what the world is like.
—Rush Rhees1
A recent commentator on Wittgenstein claims that “naturalism is fundamental to Wittgenstein’s philosophical method”.2 What is meant by “naturalism” in this context? Like many of the key terms by which philosophers define themselves, “naturalism” has no stable meaning in the history or historiography of philosophy but is subject to a dizzying degree of semantic flux. It is less the solution to a well-defined problem than the site of philosophical controversy most especially concerning the relation between philosophy and science; but it is also associated with philosophical myths about science such as that all sciences posit causal laws or that, in principle, they all ultimately reduce to physics.3 The difficulty of interpreting Wittgenstein as some kind of naturalist is further complicated if we suppose, not unreasonably, that the term “naturalism” refers to a philosophical doctrine or set of such, a claim which stands in stark contrast to Wittgenstein’s unambiguous intention to philosophize without philosophical doctrine.4
I shall assume at the outset that the prima facie tension between the idea that Wittgenstein is committed to some form of naturalism (conceived as doctrine) and his aim to philosophize without theses or a priori dogmas is to be relieved by denying that Wittgenstein’s naturalism is to be thought of as doctrinal. But, then, how is it to be characterized? Given his uniqueness and originality, saying whether he is a naturalist in some interesting sense will be no less difficult than characterizing his philosophy as a whole. The main focus of the discussion will be on Wittgenstein’s post-Tractatarian outlook but it should be noted that he held a consistent line on the relation between science and philosophy, in his sense, throughout his life.
Though it is employed in a wide variety of ways, the term “naturalism” as it is most commonly used in contemporary philosophy refers to the popular program of scientific naturalism. According to this general outlook, science provides, or at least promises to provide, a complete metaphysics and/or epistemology—and what counts as “science” for these purposes can vary considerably along a spectrum from physics at one extreme to a broad range of natural and social sciences at the other. Ontology is provided for by the claim that a complete account of all that exists is provided by the composite ‘scientific image’ of the world which comes from combining the images associated with physics, chemistry, biology, and so on; and epistemology is provided for by the plural ‘scientific method’, the loose assortment of broadly empirical methods of the explanatorily successful sciences. Here, knowledge is identified with scientific knowledge.5
Let us compare this outlook with Wittgenstein’s methodological remarks about his own philosophy (which I shall henceforth, for convenience, italicize as philosophy) such as:
it is … 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.
It was correct that our considerations must not be scientific ones … And we may not advance any kind of theory. There must not be anything hypothetical in our considerations. All explanation must disappear, and description alone must take its place … The problems are solved, not by coming up with new discoveries, but by assembling what we have long been familiar with …
Philosophy just puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything.—Since everything lies open to view, there is nothing to explain. For whatever may be hidden is of no interest to us. The name “philosophy” might also be given to what is possible before all new discoveries and inventions.
The work of the philosopher consists in marshaling recollections for a particular purpose.6
It is at least clear that Wittgenstein’s naturalism, if we should call it that, is not at all the common scientific kind. Indeed, his philosophy seems designed to combat any attempt to answer philosophical questions with scientific materials or methods. More than that, it provides one with critical tools for the strongest opposition to scientific forms of philosophy— scientific naturalism included—in the literature.
Philosophy concerns “what is in plain view”, “what we have long been familiar with”, “what is possible before all new discoveries”, and various “recollections”—by which he means our ‘knowledge’ of language, or, more specifically, our ‘knowledge’ of the logic of language. However we are supposed to understand this unprecedented kind of knowledge— which cannot be assimilated to either traditional a priori or empirical knowledge—we can at least say that it is available, or it makes itself manifest, without performing any observations or experiments.7 Wittgenstein distinguishes philosophy sharply from the empirical sciences, which are precisely attempting to discover new knowledge about objective causal relations between things by observation and experiment in order to explain, predict and control natural phenomena.8 The paradigm is natural science, which typically involves hypothesizing ‘unobservable’ entities (e.g. electrons, quarks, gravity waves, chemical bonds, genes, etc.) to causally explain correlations in observable phenomena. Consequently, ‘science’ in the relevant sense concerns a desire for new discoveries about the hidden, the strange or remarkable—precisely the opposite direction of orientation of philosophy which aims to return us to the manifest world of our everyday lives, but with newly opened eyes.
Scientific naturalism treats the success of modern science as having metaphysical significance, so that science becomes a general theory of being and knowing (e.g. it has been thought to imply: (1) strict physicalism—the view that there is nothing over and above the entities posited by physics; (2) causal fundamentalism—the view that there is a single, causal order; and (3) experiential foundationalism—the view that the foundation of empirical knowledge is subjective experience). Wittgenstein sets himself against the very idea of scientific philosophy, seeing it as his mission to “bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use”—the bearing of which on naturalism depends on the fact that in its orthodox form it is a scientific metaphysics that models itself on science.9
Since Wittgenstein is very far from scientific naturalism we must ask: What kind of naturalism, if any, does Wittgenstein espouse? And what is its relation to his new method of philosophizing without a priori doctrines? In this paper I want to consider these questions by way of first examining Wittgenstein’s conception of the relation between science and philosophy. I shall then discuss the appearance in his work of such ideas as “the natural history of human beings”, “very general facts of nature”, “forms of life”, and “primitive” reactions—all of which seem to turn on some idea of nature or, rather, human nature. Only at that point will we be in a position to consider the question of naturalism, what we might call that, in Wittgenstein’s work.
Wittgenstein is notorious for utterly rejecting the idea that philosophy is one of the sciences; a view in stark contrast to the Quine’s highly influential form of naturalism which states that “philosophy … [is] continuous with the rest of science”.10 In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein is unequivocal in stating:
Philosophy is not one of the natural sciences.
(The word ‘philosophy’ must mean something which stands above or below but not beside the natural sciences.)
The object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thoughts.
Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.
A philosophical work consists essentially in elucidations.11
Philosophical problems are distinct from the empirical questions dealt with in natural science: in philosophy, “It is not problems of natural science which have to be solved”.12 Indeed, we can generalize and say philosophy is autonomous from the natural and social sciences—at least if we follow Wittgenstein and understand “science” not in terms of what Germans call Wissenschaft—a system of putative knowledge and scholarship which includes mathematics, literary studies, theology, etc.—but as empirical studies that attempt to provide objective causal explanations of observable phenomena.13 This unqualified attitude to the empirical sciences as a whole is expressed in the Investigations, “It was correct that our considerations must not be scientific ones … philosophical problems … are, of course, not empirical problems”.14
Whereas the sciences typically posit hidden ‘unobservables’ to causally explain phenomena, philosophy is an activity, “the logical clarification of thoughts,” that depends on the idea that nothing is hidden. Science explains phenomena by subsuming them under local causal patterns (e.g. social sciences) or universal causal laws (e.g. physics); or, alternatively, by appeal to the causal propensities of things.15 Philosophy relies on no more than our prior knowledge of the language acquired when we learnt our mother tongue, and manifested as our capacity to recount “criteria”, in recollecting or imagining concrete communicative contexts, for the application of concepts of ‘objects’ to the world.
In the Blue Book, Wittgenstein observes that traditional philosophy— by which he means, primarily, metaphysics16—tends to use scientific models of explanation. He traces the metaphysical urge to explain phenomena in general to:
our preoccupation with the method of science. I mean the method of reducing the explanation of natural phenomena to the smallest possible number of primitive natural laws; and, in mathematics, of unifying the treatment of different topics by using a generalization.
Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness.17
For example, the early C20th method of logical analysis, which ultimately analyzed propositions of natural language into “atomic propositions”, was modeled on the chemical or physical analysis of a material compound into its component parts.18 In Russell’s work, at least, that was taken to show that the world consisted of atomic facts corresponding to true atomic propositions all of whose elements we must be individually acquainted with. However, let us consider in greater detail the more recent example of Frank Jackson to illustrate the power of Wittgenstein’s diagnosis of the source of metaphysics in the temptation to give science the wrong kind of significance in our thinking.
Frank Jackson combines an ontological form of scientific naturalism with an epistemological commitment to a priori analysis.19 He explicitly models metaphysical explanations on the explanations of physics, remarking:
Metaphysicians seek a comprehensive account of some subject matter—the mind, the semantic, or, most ambitiously, everything—in terms of a limited number of more or less basic notions. In doing this they are following the good example of physicists. The methodology is not that of letting a thousand flowers bloom but rather that of making do with as meager a diet as possible … But if metaphysics seeks comprehension in terms of limited ingredients, it is continually going to be faced with the problem of location. Because the ingredients are limited, some putative features of the world are not going to appear explicitly in the story. The question then will be whether they, nevertheless, figure implicitly in the story. Serious metaphysics is simultaneously discriminatory and putatively complete, and the combination of these two facts means that there is bound to be a whole range of putative features of our world up for either elimination or location.20
Rather than “draw[ing] up big lists” of everything that appears in the manifest image, the job of the metaphysician is to follow the physicist’s mode of explanation by comprehensively explaining the highly complex appearances of things in terms of the smallest possible number of “basic notions”.21 In this spirit, Jackson defends physicalism, which claims that “a complete account of what our world is like, its nature” can in principle be obtained from a relatively small set of physical properties and relations.22
Part of Wittgenstein’s teaching here is to carefully observe the distinction between science and metaphysics; since it is a failure to respect this difference that leads to the confused idea of a “scientific” metaphysics, e.g. scientific naturalism. It is worth observing that science alone does not explain Jackson’s commitment to the metaphysical thesis of physicalism. For a start, science is really a plurality of distinct sciences, there being no wholesale semantic reductions of, say, psychology to biology, or biology to chemistry, or chemistry to physics; not to mention, of physics to physics—say, general relativity to quantum mechanics. The “unity” of the sciences is a metaphysical dream that has not come close to being realized. Even if we were committed only to the entities posited by the successful sciences we would be ontological pluralists acknowledging all the many kinds of things not recognized by physics, say, chemical or biological or psychological kinds.
But why should we be only committed to recognizing the entities posited by the successful sciences? What of, say, persons, a second-person concept whose deployment requires acknowledgement by others, or common artifacts like tables and chairs, whose identity conditions involve certain interests and purposes? Persons and artifacts are too subjective to figure in the objective explanations of science. So we would be mistaken to say that science investigates the world as such. It investigates certain objectively specifiable natural phenomena with a view to discovering objective causal capacities or causal patterns and laws. John Dewey said that “the naturalist is one who has respect for the conclusions of natural science”.23 But one can have respect for the conclusions of natural science, indeed for the conclusions of the successful sciences in general, and still hold that there is more in the world than is dreamt of in scientific theorizing; and by “more” I do not mean anything supernatural. I mean persons, chairs, buildings, clothing, and the like.
It is also worth asking: What does “physical” mean in a context where it is being put to this metaphysical explanatory work? Jackson claims that we can give an ostensive definition of “physical” by pointing to common objects like tables and chairs and then picking out the physical as “the kinds of properties and relations needed to give a complete account of things like them”.24 If we want to know what kinds these are we are told to look to physics or the physical sciences and their explanations of non-sentient reality, especially appealing to “the success of micro-explanations of macroscopic phenomena”.25
Jackson argues that the properties and relations posited by current physics give us a reasonable confidence that we at least know the kinds of properties and relations required to explain things like tables and chairs. But given the many astonishing conceptual innovations in the history of science (e.g. the special and general theories of relativity, quantum mechanics), this is really an unwarranted hope which has more to do with metaphysical ambition than serious reflection on the relation of science to its own past and possible future.
Furthermore, a chair, say, cannot be completely explained in terms of the properties and relations posited by current physics or the physical sciences more broadly conceived. A chair is not a posit of any explanation in the physical sciences. The physical sciences might be expected to be able to explain the physical stuff that the chair is made of—say, atoms of various kinds, organized in complex ways, etc. But, as Aristotle famously noted with regard to a sculpture and the bronze that composes it, there is a difference in identity conditions between an artifact (a sculpture, a chair, etc.) and the physical stuff that it is made of—which is clear if we consider counterfactual circumstances in which, e.g. a chair loses some paint or sustains a scratch or has its fabric or padding replaced without ceasing to be the same chair.
Physical science cannot explain what a chair is or why it exists for the simple reason that any such explanation must involve an appeal to human interests and intentions. A chair is an artifact typically made to be sat upon by people. One cannot fully explain a chair without adverting to the human interests it serves (e.g. relaxing, conversing, reading, listening to a lecture, watching TV or a film, eating together at a table) and the intentions of the designers and carpenters or metallurgists or fabricators who made it (e.g. to make it comfortable, or luxurious, or tailored to a specific function like dentistry or space flight).
Jackson defines physicalism as the view that a complete account of the physical facts entails a complete account of psychological (and other globally supervenient) facts including facts about interests and intentions. The only reason we are given to accept this metaphysical thesis is the proposal that we can give an a priori analysis of folk psychological notions like “intention” in causal-functional terms and then empirically discover the physical states or events that best realize the relevant causal-functional role(s). But why suppose there is an a priori analysis of “intention” or other content-involving psychological notions in causal-functional terms? A major stumbling block is that intention—like other content-involving states in this respect—is a rationally normative notion and, as has often been noted, there is no reducing or explaining rational normativity in merely causal terms.26
If someone has an intention, then one can appropriately ask a “Why?”— question which is understandable as the request for reasons in the standard normative sense. If appropriate reasons for one’s intention, or the actions it gives rise to, are not forthcoming then one (or one’s intentions, or actions) can be criticized as thoughtless, stupid, unjustified, pointless and so on. Such rational normativity cannot be captured in terms of what simply happens, whether by chance or physical necessity, since the very idea of normative assessment involves ideals which may not be instantiated but which are, despite that, still operative in the standard-setting sense. For example, what are in fact ill-considered intentions (i.e. based on inadequate or poor reasons) may still aim at being good ones; just as a false belief still aims at being true. In other words, the standard or ideal retains its normative force, even when it is not instantiated by the states that are bound or beholden to it. Causal notions, or functions understood in causal terms, which account for what actually happens or perhaps what had to happen, are precisely unable to capture this distinctive normative force.
If the problem of normativity cannot be answered, then there simply is no “complete account” of human interests and intentions (etc.) in terms of micro-properties and micro-relations of the sort posited by the physical sciences. And this point is unaffected by whether we consider mental types or tokens. Consequently, Jackson’s attempt to define the physical in terms of examples of ordinary objects like tables and chairs fails to achieve its larger metaphysical purpose. The suggestion that physical properties and relations at the micro level can explain everything in the manifest image, the world of our everyday lives, fails. Persons and the realm of human artifacts go largely unexplained by the physical sciences given that a “complete account” of them must advert to the rationally normative. So, adopting the scientific model of explanation in metaphysics, indeed treating physics as the model of one’s method of metaphysics, leads Jackson into an aporia in the attempt to explain the term “physical” and a blind spot as regards the problem of normativity. This is a good example of what Wittgenstein means by saying that treating science as one’s model of metaphysics leads the philosopher into complete darkness.27
We have seen that Wittgenstein has an antipathy to scientific naturalism and the influence of science on philosophy (e.g. our thralldom to the scientific method of thinking)—which also includes the myths surrounding scientific progress that permeate the culture at large (e.g. that scientific progress is an advancement in civilization). But, despite that, there are aspects of Wittgenstein’s work that we might want to count as elements of something that deserves the name of naturalism. Stanley Cavell writes:
Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations… may be said to propose Wittgenstein’s work there as a naturalizing of philosophy …28
What might this mean? We get some sense of it by contrast with traditional philosophy understood as the metaphysical quest for “something extraordinary” or “strange” or “astonishing”, say, Forms or universals or substances or mindless (living) bodies or a supernatural God—all of which Wittgenstein thinks of in terms of the “pursuit of chimeras”.29 Traditional philosophy of language also sees language as “some non-spatial, atemporal non-entity” and imagines “a super-order between—so to speak— super-concepts”.30 The task of naturalistic philosophy is to root out, diagnose and treat metaphysics, a main source of which is our “tendency to sublimate the logic of our language”.31
Part of the point of calling Wittgenstein’s method a form of naturalism is the importance it attaches to reminding us of the ordinary use of words as they function in the everyday lives of human beings considered as natural beings in a natural world—the relevant contrast being supernatural beings in a supernatural world. The problem is that our ordinary use of words is something that, for the most part, tends to escape our notice. It is in order to get some kind of grip on the prodigious complexity and diversity of how words function that Wittgenstein calls our attention to what he describes as “the natural history of the human”, for example:
Giving orders, asking questions, telling stories, having a chat, are as much a part of our natural history as walking, eating, drinking, playing.32
And in another remark, he adds:
What we are supplying are really remarks on the natural history of human beings; not curiosities, however, but facts that no one has doubted, which have escaped notice only because they are always before our eyes.33
The paradoxicality of Wittgenstein’s procedure is evident in this latter remark since it seems that we need to be reminded of something that we, in a sense, already know, but that we are, perversely, blind to precisely because it is so familiar. But then it seems that perversity, too, is part of our natural history; as is the temptation to pursue chimerical explanations of things in general from the armchair without careful observation or experiment. To use a later metaphor, we have the urge to build philosophical air-castles (Luftgebaude). The image of the human is, then, of something ordinary, familiar and common and, at the same time, of something extraordinary, strange and astonishing. As Cavell puts it, “we might also wish to say that what is natural to the human is precisely the unnatural”.34 So when Wittgenstein writes, “what we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use”, what we are in effect doing is bringing ourselves back from unnaturalness to naturalness.35 But since the everyday use to which we are “returning” is something that we have hitherto failed to notice, we can say that what is natural to us is no more a matter of recovery than of creation. Wittgenstein’s philosophy, then, aims to forge a conception of human naturalness against a vision of ourselves as perennially tempted to unnaturalness.
Another dimension of Wittgenstein’s naturalizing of philosophy concerns his rejection of the idea that reason or the language that expresses conceptual connections (from a “logical” or grammatical point of view) is presuppositionless. Wittgenstein remarks, “concepts … are the expression of our interest and direct our interest”.36 The crystalline purity that the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus supposed characterized concepts— expressed in the vision of “a super-order between … super-concepts”37— is a metaphysical illusion concerning language. Just as our interests can be looked at from the point of view of culture and society or from the point of view of human animality, so, too, our concepts can be looked at from the point of view of two different conceptions of form of life which Cavell has called the anthropological and the biological: the former being a matter of differences at the social or cultural level (say, knowing the difference between a wave and a salute, or between an endearment and an insult); and the latter involving the idea that we share a common human nature involving knowing how we see, hear, touch, smell, and taste, as well as our how we tend to move, and eat, wash, dress, have sex, and so on. In contrast to the form of life of a dog or cat or horse are such differences as greeting versus barking, drinking versus lapping, jogging vs cantering, being aroused vs being on heat. That we greet each other, or drink, or jog, or can find another arousing, are as much as part of our nature as that we issue orders, ask questions, and talk about things. Human nature is one aspect of the “general facts of nature”, an indeterminate and diverse array of more or less stable contingencies, upon which the point of our concepts depends, as Wittgenstein notes:
What we have to mention in order to explain the significance, I mean the importance, of a concept are often extremely general facts of nature: such facts as are hardly ever mentioned because of their great generality.38
That, of course, does not mean that Wittgenstein is doing a kind of anthropology. As we have seen, Wittgenstein strongly denies that philosophy is any kind of empirical science. His quasi-anthropological reflections are either so obvious that they do not require empirical confirmation (e.g. the trivial claim that humans walk, and chat, and play); or they are offered not as plausible empirical hypotheses but simply as possible (i.e. intelligible) causes of how our concepts are formed. An example of this latter appeal to an imagined anthropology occurs when he asks, “How does a human being learn the meaning of names of sensations?” and he responds:
Here is one possibility: words are connected with the primitive, the natural, expressions of the sensation and used in their place. A child hurts himself and he cries; and then adults talk to him and teach him exclamations and, later, sentences. They teach the child new pain behaviour.39
This should not be read as a hypothesis about how we in fact learn the meaning of sensation words. In this instance, Wittgenstein is not concerned with empirical accuracy; even if it seems plausible, it is only intended as a possibility, an intelligible way in which our concepts might have been formed. As he explains:
We are, indeed, also interested in the correspondence between concepts and very general facts of nature. (Such facts as mostly do not strike us because of their generality.) But our interest is not thereby thrown back on to these possible causes of concept formation; we are not doing natural science; nor yet natural history—since we can also invent fictitious natural history for our purposes.40
The point is to communicate the idea of a “correspondence” between concepts and general facts of nature. Such a correspondence might be that between the concept of chair and the fact that humans normally like to sit down to relax, talk and eat. For Wittgenstein’s purposes it is enough to get across the idea of such a “correspondence” to imagine the facts of nature to be quite different from what they, in fact, are. So, e.g. in a world where the weights of things fluctuated unexpectedly and often due to frequent manifestly detectable gravity waves then we would not weigh meat on a butcher shop scales in order to determine its cost. Perhaps under those circumstances, we would determine the price of meat by measuring its volume instead.
A fundamental feature of Wittgenstein’s philosophy is metaphysical quietism, which finds expression in the methodological remark, “All explanation must disappear and description alone must take its place”.41 That is, we must—through skeptical diagnosis and a kind of imaginative therapy that involves replacing good pictures (e.g. ‘meaning is use’) for misleading or bad pictures (e.g. ‘meaning is naming objects’)—overcome the urge to provide metaphysical explanations of phenomena in general from the armchair. We are to replace that chimerical activity with descriptions of particular aspects of the conceptual landscape informing our form of life, by way of recounting or recalling ordinary criteria for the application of concepts of familiar things.
It is important to take note of the fact that scientific naturalism is a metaphysical explanatory program; so if we want to say that Wittgenstein is some kind of naturalist then it must be understood in such a way that it is not at all in the same line of explanatory work as orthodox naturalism. It will have to be understood as playing an important role not in the framing or justification of some metaphysical system but in helping to overcome metaphysics—including the ubiquitous human temptation to use words with a metaphysical emphasis (i.e. something that does not require the background of a fully worked out metaphysical system of the kind typical within academic philosophy).
Thus, the role of Wittgenstein’s naturalism is non-constructive and dialectical. When we are tempted to talk or think in a metaphysical manner— and Wittgenstein’s focus is our tendency to metaphysicalize (say, by inquiring into the essence of) mind and language—its point is to remind ourselves of the ordinary uses of words in human linguistic transactions and to get us to see how little these uses depend upon, and how much they are obscured by, the kinds of a priori explanations traditional philosophy tends to offer.
With this important caveat regarding explanatoriness, we might say that Wittgenstein is a liberal naturalist in the sense that Mario De Caro and I have defined it, which we might characterize thus:
Liberal naturalism, so understood, is a negative discipline that avoids the two extremes of supernaturalism and scientism in one’s philosophical reflections as well as an acknowledging that there is a plurality of different kinds of understanding or knowing both within and outside the sciences. This is a metaphysical quietist version of liberal naturalism, one that avoids supernatural theological commitments in philosophy as well as refusing to give science an unwarranted ontological significance.45
As a trained engineer, Wittgenstein was well versed in a considerable amount of modern natural science and aware of its importance in many aspects of our lives.46 Indeed, he took himself to be living through what he called “the scientific and technological age”.47 Part of what this means is that we learn basic science through our education system48; and established scientific knowledge is at the heart of our epistemic practices which involve the appeal to scientific expertise in many areas such as manufacturing, medicine, pharmaceuticals, mining, law, engineering, agriculture and so on.
Nonetheless, Wittgenstein was deeply out of sympathy with the scientific spirit of his times. He felt that his way of thinking was of an entirely different kind than that of “the typical western scientist”: “I am aiming at something different than are the scientists & my thoughts move differently than do theirs”.49 He was much more sympathetic to religion, although it is clear that Wittgenstein did not accept an interpretation of it in terms of an intelligent being with supernatural powers. He remarks:
Christianity is not based on a historical truth, but presents us with a (historical) narrative & says: now believe! But not believe this report with the belief that is appropriate to a historical report—but rather: believe, through thick & thin & you can do this only as the outcome of a life. Here you have a message!—don’t treat it as you would another historical message! Make a quite different place for it in your life.—There is no paradox about that!50
Although nature or reality is not equivalent to the scientific image of the world, it is important to see that science plays an crucial role in ruling out certain supernatural explanations and posits as otiose (say, because they do not have sufficient or strong enough connections to the empirical). Wittgenstein can be read as demystifying the notion of nature by being prepared to recognize the reality of non-scientific things (i.e. things that are not the posits of any successful explanatory science) that we experience and mark in our language e.g. persons, artworks, and artifacts, like chairs, houses, and cars.
We can further refine this conception by noting that Wittgenstein does not put any explanatory weight on a notion of nature in philosophy. Indeed, we might say that we only come by our idea of nature by excluding various supernatural causes of phenomena e.g. miracles, ghosts, fairies, angels, demons, God. Natural phenomena fit Wittgenstein’s description of normal circumstances: “we recognize normal circumstances [natural phenomena] but cannot precisely describe them. At most, we can describe a range of abnormal [supernatural] ones”.51 This goes with the thought that we only recognize the familiar in retrospect when confronted with what seems unfamiliar or strange.52 Part of the power of philosophy (and, we might add, art) is to be able to transfigure the familiar or natural in order to make it newly available to us.
Notwithstanding his approach to nature, Wittgenstein does appeal to a relatively substantial notion of human nature in his descriptions of grammar—the logical dimension of our use of concepts. That is not to say human nature is a theoretical notion in Wittgenstein’s philosophy. We only need to be reminded of “the primitive, natural, expressions” of pain—say, screaming, howling, moaning, groaning, not touching the painful area, limping, or keeping the damaged part from bearing weight or doing work, applying bandages, or slings, or ointments, etc.—to acknowledge that we know quite a lot about how humans experience and give expression to pain.53 And the same goes for other sensations, e.g. a sour taste, giddiness, an itch. Some of these aspects of the human are common to the animal world; for instance, pets and livestock, for example, display similar pain behavior. The connection with animals also animates Wittgenstein’s view of the expression of intention. He remarks,
What is the natural expression of an intention?—Look at a cat when it stalks a bird; or a beast when it wants to escape.
((Connection with propositions about sensations.))54
Cats express pain in a paw by mewling, holding the paw off the ground and delicately licking it. They need not be able to say, “I have pain in my paw” in order to express it. So, too, they express the intention to catch a bird through the intelligibility of their behavior, by creeping up on it without notice and then making a sudden leap for the bird.
The dialectical reactive character of Wittgenstein’s naturalism is particularly evident in his treatment of how we learn language. His reflections on human nature are motivated, in large part, by a desire to combat our tendency to over-intellectualize language when we reflect upon it philosophically. As we have seen, one technique is to present possible non-intellectualist ways in which we might have learnt language. For example, in the case of learning the names for sensations Wittgenstein says that perhaps “the verbal expression of pain replaces crying”.55 That this is intelligible is enough to break the grip of the idea that the only way of learning the name for pain is the intellectualist view: for example, that defended by John McDowell in Mind and World according to which in learning a language we come to appreciate the way in which “impressions of ‘inner sense’ must be, like the impressions of ‘outer sense’, passive occurrences in which conceptual capacities are drawn into operation”.56 The intellectualist thus holds that pain impressions must come to be seen as already possessed of conceptual content if they are to play the right role in justifying judgments, e.g. of “I am aware that I am in pain now”. Wittgenstein’s alternative possibility at least shows that the argument for this “must” is broken-backed.57
An additional element of Wittgenstein’s naturalist critique of intellectualism is to attempt to expose and replace its imaginative bedding in some spell-binding picture of how language operates. Consider this remark,
I want to regard man here as an animal; as a primitive being to which one grants instinct but not ratiocination. As a creature in a primitive state. Any logic good enough for a primitive means of communication needs no apology from us. Language did not emerge from some kind of ratiocination.58
Here Wittgenstein is replacing the picture of ‘man as intellect’—associated with our tendency to see the mind and its thoughts as something supernatural—with the natural picture of ‘man as animal’ . Pictures are not empirical hypotheses; rather they are simplified imaginative schemas or models that we use as heuristics to help us understand the highly complex and diverse phenomena that confronts us in everyday life and in the sciences. Like an architectural model of a building, they are, in themselves, neither true nor false; that is, unless and until we apply them to the world in some way, such as by an act of comparison.
At the base of language is not rational insight into the unboundedness of the conceptual (contra McDowell) but “primitive” (spontaneous, unreflective, ungrounded) forms of acting and reacting. Consider this remark:
The origin & the primitive form of the language game is a reaction; only from this can the more complicated forms grow. Language—I want to say—is a refinement, ‘in the beginning was the deed’.59
This, too, is a picture as opposed to an armchair contribution to evolutionary anthropology. It is enough to break the grip of the picture that language must have originated in reason and argument to imagine an alternative possibility. It need make no claim to historical accuracy or empirical verification. In order to properly understand its bearing, to put it in the right light, it is important that we make a connection between it and the important Investigations theme of explanations and reasons coming to an end:60
… As if giving grounds did not come to an end sometime. But the end is not an ungrounded presupposition: it is an ungrounded way of acting.61
According to Descartes, if we are intellectually scrupulous and ask what we really know, then we must pursue the regress of reasons for reasons until we reach the claims “I exist” and “I think”, which are combined in the famous cogito. Descartes presupposes that these claims cannot be coherently doubted and that what cannot be coherently doubted must be true. These foundations of knowledge are, as Wittgenstein correctly notes, “ungrounded presuppositions”. Wittgenstein does not argue against this picture—indeed arguing against pictures is futile. Instead, he replaces it with a better, less misleading, one. On Wittgenstein’s alternative naturalist picture, giving reasons is something we do without any philosophical theory of where reasons end or what justifies this terminus. Applying the picture, we might say that we give reasons if and when necessary, depending on the practical circumstances of the case (e.g. its importance, who is asking, how much time and effort we are willing to make, and so on), but there is simply no such thing as giving reasons to remove all possible doubts. To adapt one of Wittgenstein’s remarks, we might say, “[A word or sentence] is in order—if, under normal circumstances, it fulfills its purpose”62—where the question of purpose is an occasion-sensitive matter.
So, there are at least three ways in which Wittgenstein handles the theme of human nature within what I am calling his liberal naturalism:
All of these aspects of the appeal to human nature are directed against intel-lectualist views of mind, meaning, and language that treat what are, in fact, natural and familiar aspects of our life as though they were strange and unheard of. But whilst, as Cavell saw, philosophy is naturalized, Wittgenstein’s vision of human nature is of us as, repeatedly, tempted into unnatural frames of mind for, without that, philosophy would lose its point.66
In On Certainty, Wittgenstein offers an original vantage on the question of naturalism from what we might call an imaginative point of view. The suggestion is that metaphysical theories, for all of their apparent intellectual sophistication, ultimately rest on an imaginative core that is impervious to reason. Naturalism and religion (i.e. perhaps the most pervasive and important form supernaturalism has taken in the history of human thought) are, or rest on, two different imaginative structures or “world-pictures”.67 Elements of the naturalist world picture include:
And elements of the Judeo-Christian religious picture include:
If naturalism and religion are identified with large-scale pictures of the world as a whole—rather than the super-structure of philosophical theorizing built on or around them—then they provide the taken-for-granted background against which we judge truth and falsity, as Wittgenstein remarks:
But I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness: nor do I have it because I am satisfied of its correctness. No: it is the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false.74
That naturalism is best interpreted as a world-picture helps explain an oft-noted feature of it, namely, that it is frequently left unarticulated; and when it is given expression, it is often in the form of crude, highly ambiguous slogans.75
Understood as a world-picture, naturalism is not subject to rational criticism being neither true nor false, justified nor unjustified.76 But, then, the same can then be said for religion. Both the naturalist and religious world-picture are typically acquired in childhood through a particular upbringing and education, rather than through any deliberative process of reasoning.77 The question for Wittgenstein, then, becomes what the relation is between these world-pictures, reflective thought and our forms of life.
What is of particular interest is Wittgenstein’s relatively sympathetic treatment of the religious world-picture of Christianity in comparison to the naturalistic world-picture. It is the latter, not the former, that Wittgenstein thinks tends to force a metaphysical construal upon us consisting of, let us suppose, materialism (including a behaviorist view of mind) and causal fundamentalism, i.e. the claim that there is a single fundamental causal order.78 Although Wittgenstein admits that the religious world-picture leads some to a superstitious interpretation involving belief in a supernatural God with super-human qualities, on the whole Wittgenstein’s focus is on sharply distinguishing religious “belief” from empirical or scientific belief—e.g., the latter, but not the former, relies on evidence—as well as wavering over the question whether a non-believer can be said to understand the person of faith.
Wittgenstein prefers not to see religion in terms of a theistic metaphysics. He is much more impressed by the way religious “beliefs” have the power to change one’s entire life in a way that has no parallel in philosophy:
Amongst other things Christianity says, I believe, that all sound doctrines are all useless. That you have to change your life. (Or the direction of your life) … Wisdom is passionless. By contrast Kierkegaard calls faith a passion.79
It is of particular importance that when it comes to the human Wittgenstein borrows the language of the religious world-picture when he speaks of the human as a “soul”: “My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul”.80 Wittgenstein is here pointing to the misleadingness of the grammar of having in this context as opposed to that of being. Being a soul is being a person whose mindedness is expressed in gestures, facial expressions, and bodily behaviors. Having a soul suggests something supernatural which, somehow, the body “has” and which we have insufficient or no evidence for—hence something that is a matter of mere opinion (in a pejorative sense). The point is to avoid conceiving the body as a mindless lump of matter which is, at best, caused to move in certain ways—a Cartesian picture shared by both the supernaturalist reading of the human as having a “soul” in some superstitious spiritual sense and also by the naturalist metaphysician who denies the existence of any such transcendent soul. That a person, an embodied mindedness, is a soul is Wittgenstein’s way of saying that a person is neither something supernatural nor something wholly explicable in scientific terms.
1 Rush Rhees, Without Answers (London: Routledge, 1969), 8.
2 Marie McGinn, “Wittgenstein and Naturalism”, in Naturalism and Normativity, eds. Mario de Caro and David Macarthur (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 347.
3 I have discussed the relation between metaphysical myths and science in “Taking the Human Sciences Seriously”, in Naturalism and Normativity.
4 See, e.g., Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 4th ed., trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, Peter Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), §109, §126.
5 In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein seems to have adopted this scientistic conception of knowledge himself whilst at the same time denying that philosophy is a matter of knowledge or science. The ground of this view is his identification of “what can be said” with “propositions of natural science”. No doubt this is one of the sources of his influence on the development of logical positivism. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C. K. Ogden (London: Kegan Paul, 1922), 6.53.
6 PI, §89, §109, §126, §127.
7 See Stanley Cavell, “Must We Mean What We Say”, in Must We Mean What We Say (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), ch. 1.
8 That Wittgenstein held this particular conception of empirical science is plausible; although it has to be admitted that the texts are inconclusive on the matter.
9 PI, §116.
10 W. V. Quine, “Reply to Putnam”, in The Philosophy of W. V. Quine, eds. L. E. Hahn and P. A. Schillp (La Salle: Open Court Press, 1986), 430–431. It is not enough to say that since philosophy is a different subject than philosophy there is no tension between Wittgenstein and Quine here. Wittgenstein thought that philosophy was a one way of continuing traditional philosophy. Quine thought the same about his naturalist outlook. For further discussion of Quine’s naturalism, see my paper “Quinean Naturalism in Question”, Philo, vol. 11, no. 1 (2008): 1–14.
11 TLP, 4.111–4.112.
12 Ibid., 6.4312.
13 Wissenschaft is a much broader category than “empirical science”, since it refers to a system of learning, scholarship, and putative knowledge, which applies equally to the empirical sciences and abstract fields (e.g. mathematics, logic) as well as to research into evaluative matters (e.g. political and cultural studies) and systems of metaphysics (e.g. theology, ontology).
14 PI, §109.
15 See, e.g., Nancy Cartwright, The Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
16 Wittgenstein’s conception of traditional philosophy as fundamentally metaphysics has more going for it than we might initially suppose. Metaphysics is at the heart of the beginnings of philosophy in Plato and Aristotle; and if we consider the modern turn to epistemology in Descartes and Kant then these can be translated into metaphysics in so far as we are dealing with what can be known a priori. We might say Descartes is concerned with the metaphysics of physical science; and Kant with “critical” metaphysics.
17 Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969), 18.
18 This is the basis of a criticism Wittgenstein makes of the Tractatus: “My notion in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was wrong … because I too thought that logical analysis had to bring to light what was hidden (as chemical and physical analysis does)”. Philosophical Grammar, ed. Rush Rhees, trans. Anthony Kenny (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974), 210.
19 There is a tension between scientific naturalism and the commitment to a substantial notion of the a priori, as Quine shows in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), 20–46.
20 Frank Jackson, Mind, Method and Conditionals: Selected Essays (London: Routledge, 1998), 156.
21 Ibid.
22 Frank Jackson, From Metaphysics to Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 6.
23 John Dewey, “Anti-Naturalism in Extremis”, in Naturalism and the Human Spirit, ed. Y. Krikorian (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944), 2.
24 Jackson, From Metaphysics to Ethics, 7.
25 Ibid.
26 See, e.g.: Donald Davidson, “Could There be a Science of Rationality,” in Naturalism in Question, eds. Mario De Caro and David Macathur (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), ch. 8; John McDowell, Mind and World, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); and Hilary Putnam, “The Content and Appeal of Naturalism”, in Naturalism in Question, ch. 4.
27 Apart from not explaining what he presumes to explain, Jackson “obliterates the distinction between [the] factual and conceptual”, as Wittgenstein puts it. The facts discovered by physics are treated as playing a foundational role in our thinking on the grounds that physical truths entail truths of every other kind. And knowing this entailment relation is treated as a condition of understanding for the concepts expressed by non-physical sentences. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, 2nd ed., trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (London: Blackwell, 1967), §458.
28 Stanley Cavell, “Postscript (2002) to The Investigations Everyday Aesthetics of Itself”, in Naturalism in Question.
29 PI, §93, §195, §197, §94.
30 Ibid., §108, §97.
31 Ibid., §38.
32 Ibid., §25.
33 Ibid., §415.
34 Naturalism in Question, 276–277.
35 PI, §116.
36 Ibid., §569.
37 Ibid., §97.
38 PI, §142. Emphasis added.
39 Ibid., §244. Emphasis added.
40 Ibid., Part ii, sect. 11, §365. Emphasis added.
41 Ibid., §109.
42 For further discussion of the concept of the supernatural, see my paper “Liberal Naturalism and the Philosophy of the Manifest Image”, in For a New Naturalism, eds. Arran Gare and Wayne Hudson (Candor, NY: Telos, 2017).
43 For convenience, I will use the term “scientific image” to refer not to the image of any given science or branch of such but the composite image which combines all the images of all the explanatorily successful sciences.
44 See, e.g. John Dupre, The Disorder of Things: Metaphysical Foundations for the Dis-unity of the Sciences (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).
45 It is, then, a non-scientific naturalism, but this way of putting it is misleading. I prefer to call it a liberal naturalism since Wittgenstein is not denying the reality of the scientific image.
46 Wittgenstein discusses the theoretical physicist Heinrich Hertz in the Tractatus, 4.04, 6.361; and he is known to have studied the writings of other notable physicists such as Ernst Mach and Ludwig Boltzmann.
47 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, revised 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 64.
48 Scientific discoveries as well as such things as geographical and historical facts are transmitted to us by our system of education. On Certainty, eds. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969), §162–163.
49 CV, 9.
50 Ibid., 37.
51 OC, §27.
52 Wittgenstein remarks, “The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something—because it is always before one’s eyes.)” PI, §129. It is also important to see that the supernatural is not simply the unfamiliar. Abnormal, strange, and unfamiliar phenomena are aspects of the natural world, too. That is one reason I prefer to think of the supernatural in terms of unobservable (and typically superhuman) agencies posited to figure in causal explanations of observable phenomena. Thus supernatural explanations mimic those of science, as Wittgenstein thought.
53 Ibid., §244.
54 Ibid., §647.
55 Ibid., §244.
56 McDowell, Mind and World, 22.
57 Of course, to discover where and how the argument breaks down is a matter for investigation.
58 OC, §475.
59 CV, 36.
60 PI, §1, §87, §326, §485, and Part ii, sect. v, §33.
61 OC, §110.
62 PI, §87.
63 Ibid., §115.
64 OC, §475.
65 PI, Part ii, sect. iv, §25.
66 At Ibid., §109 Wittgenstein remarks, “All explanation must disappear, and description alone must take its place. And this description [of the grammar of particular concepts] gets its light—that is to say, its purpose—from the philosophical [or metaphysical] problems”.
67 OC, §93–95. Anthony Kenny argues that this conception “gives the most satisfactory picture of the relationship between Wittgenstein and naturalism,” at least, where naturalism is understood in terms of human nature. “Whose Naturalism? Which Wittgenstein?”, American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 48, no. 2 (2011): 113–118, 115.
68 Ibid., §203, §233–234, §261–262.
69 Ibid., §167.
70 Ibid., §146.
71 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, ed. Cyril Barrett (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 32.
72 Ibid., 57.
73 Ibid., 71.
74 OC, §94.
75 See Barry Stroud, “The Charm of Naturalism”, in Naturalism in Question.
76 Wittgenstein remarks that world-pictures “lie apart from the route travelled by inquiry”, as is clear if someone challenges you to show that the world could not have come into existence five minutes ago together with “old” rocks, fossil records, memories apparently extending back over the course of our lives, etc. Ibid., §88.
77 So they are not to be identified with any fully worked out philosophical theory.
78 See, e.g. Donald Davidson, “Causal Relations”, Journal of Philosophy, vol. 64 (1967): 691–703.
79 CV, 61.
80 PI, Part ii, sect. iv.
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