Peter Hacker has reminded us in his contribution to this volume that the apparently unbroken sequence of remarks on the nature of philosophy running from section 89 until section 133 of the Philosophical Investigations is, in fact, constructed from material dating from two different periods. Sections 108(b)–133 were written in 1931, but sections 89–108(a) were written six years later, in 1937. The question I would like to address here is how far, if at all, this information about the prehistory of this portion of the Philosophical Investigations1 might inform our reading of it in its final form, the form in which Wittgenstein eventually presents it to his readers.
Since Wittgenstein presents us with both sequences, he cannot have felt that the later material simply superseded the earlier; we must, rather, assume that both contribute in their own way to Wittgenstein’s purposes and, hence, that both must be accommodated in any account of his views on the nature of philosophy. The crux of the matter is exactly how this is to be done. For example, can we assume, simply from the fact of their joint retention, that–as most commentaries imply–individual remarks and sets of remarks culled from each sequence can simply be combined, as ingredients on an entirely equal footing, in our overall account of Wittgenstein’s views on philosophy? Or might it, rather, be a matter of some significance that Wittgenstein’s own mode of combining the two sequences is one of juxtaposition–in other words, that he did not himself produce a single, hybrid or composite sequence consisting of interwoven strands from both subsequences, but rather ensures that his reader will encounter each sub-sequence entirely within its own historical horizon of composition?
This essay hazards the thought that sections 89–133 essentially constitute a diptych–two portraits or sketches of the same landscape made from different points in Wittgenstein’s long and involved journeyings, the second delineated with both the landscape and its earlier portrait in view, but placed before its chronological predecessor in Wittgenstein’s final ordering of his philosophical album, and with the hinge or pivot between them placed silently between one sentence and its successor within a single section.
An initial reason for judging this thought worth the hazard might be found in the fact that Wittgenstein’s final text is not, in truth, entirely silent about its own historical lamination–call it the doubleness or duplexity (the duplicity?) of the sequence. For the sentence from the 1937 panel of section 108 that constitutes one arm or plate of this textual hinge itself invokes the idea of a hinge or pivot (‘… our examination must be rotated … about the fixed point [Angelpunkt–central point, pivot, hinge] of our real need’). Since it is uncontroversial to regard an understanding of this remark as crucial to any proper understanding of Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy, it might be worth considering the possibility that its deployment of the figure or image of a pivot has a three-fold function. It characterizes at once the nature of the operation Wittgenstein intends to perform on the philosophical tradition, the nature of its own contribution to the discussion in which that characterization is developed, and the hinged or pivoting nature of the discussion as a whole. And why might anyone seek to make these three points by means of a single trope or turn of language, unless he took them to be internally related–each point only fully graspable in the light of the other two?
Is it not, however, a decisive objection to this characterization of Wittgenstein’s sentence that the third of its putative purposes must remain invisible to any reader lacking the necessary knowledge of the historical evolution of the text of the Philosophical Investigations? How could Wittgenstein’s figure be meant to invite such an interpretative turn if its immediate context offers no indication of the historical suture it effects? This objection would indeed be decisive, if the text did not mark this historical break or stratification in other ways–ways that any sufficiently reflective reader might be in a position to remark upon without scholarly aid. We must, accordingly, begin by asking whether the two chronologically distinct sub-sequences in this stretch of Wittgenstein’s text are also distinguishable thematically, stylistically, formally and tonally–in short, with respect to any dimensions of form and content to which an author might reasonably expect his readers to respond directly (even if not immediately).
The 1931 sequence contains a number of Wittgenstein’s most famous remarks about his own philosophical method or methods–remarks which faithfully encapsulate the ways in which he goes about his business both before and after this point in the Investigations. My question is whether they are equally faithfully observed at the very point in that text at which they find expression.
Here, it will help to place two of those remarks together with a third perhaps less famous, but no less significant. The first two run as follows:
[W]e can avoid ineptness or emptiness in our assertions only by presenting the model (paradigm) as what it is, as an object of comparison–as, so to speak, a measuring rod; not as a preconceived idea to which reality must correspond. (The dogmatism into which we fall so easily in doing philosophy.)
(PI 131)
If one tried to advance theses in philosophy, it would never be possible to question them, because everyone would agree to them.
(PI 128)
The third occurs a little earlier:
One might think: if philosophy speaks of the use of the word ‘philosophy’ there must be a second-order philosophy. But it is not so: it is, rather, like the case of orthography, which deals with the word ‘orthography’ among others without then being second-order.
(PI 121)
According to this third remark, any sequence of remarks that a Wittgen-steinian philosopher might produce about the nature of philosophy ought to have exactly the qualities characteristic of her remarks about any other topic–whether it be Augustine’s picture of words as names, family resemblance or determinacy of sense. In particular, taken in conjunction with the first two quoted remarks, Wittgenstein’s philosophizing about philosophy should strive to avoid dogmatism and to refrain from advancing theses. Do the remarks that run from 108(b) through to 133 appear to fit this putative self-description?
Re-reading the second panel of Wittgenstein’s diptych in this light, some of its features–any one of which might more or less understandably pass unremarked on a first (or indeed, on any given subsequent) reading–take on a certain prominence. To begin with, this stretch of the text is loaded with definitive pronouncements about the nature of philosophy. The barrage begins almost immediately:
… our considerations could not be scientific ones. It was not of any possible interest to us to find out empirically ‘that, contrary to our preconceived ideas, it is possible to think such-and-such’–whatever that might mean … And we may not advance any kind of theory. There must not be anything hypothetical in our considerations. We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place.
(PI 109)
It continues in a manner that can come to seem unremitting:
Your scruples are misunderstandings.
(PI 120)
Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it.
For it cannot give it any foundation either.
It leaves everything as it is.
(PI 124)
And its concluding sections sustain the same note:
Philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything.–Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain. For what is hidden, for example, is of no interest to us.
(PI 126)
The dominant tone of voice here is striking. For a writer usually inclined to deploy a multitude of qualifications to both the content and the assertoric form of his remarks (‘We might say’, ‘I am inclined to say’, ‘I want to say’, ‘What does it mean to say?’, and so endlessly on), and to such seductive effect, this stretch of text appears overbearingly to be in the business of laying down the law. There is so much that we must and must not do, so much that we could only do and cannot do, that any self-respecting reader is likely to find herself resisting Wittgenstein’s claims with increasingly vehement annoyance. After all, Wittgenstein himself is inveterately suspicious of philosophical ‘musts’ (‘Don’t say: “there must be something common…”, but look and see…’ (PI 66)); and where he does resort to them, they are typically presented as epitomizing articulations of grammar painstakingly laid out in the immediate textual context. Here, however, no such pains are taken; and it is, anyway, difficult to see how the necessities he adverts to could be thought of as articulating aspects of the grammar of ‘philosophy’. His remarks certainly don’t recall us to the way that word is ordinarily used by philosophers; and if they are, rather, stipulations governing his own use of that word, with the preceding examples of his philosophical method at work being what is meant to motivate us to accept it, then even a reader duly impressed by those examples might hesitate to conclude that every philosophical problem will necessarily be similarly amenable to those methods, and to them alone. A philosophical voice that repeatedly arrogates such authority to itself, without laying out the grounds of its own authority or that of any of its specific pronouncements, will only create the impression of an arrogance as bottomless as it is groundless.
The closest cousin to this voice encounterable elsewhere in Wittgenstein’s writings is that of the Tractatus; and with this recollection, a number of other features of the 1931 sequence come into prominence. For example, we are told that ‘the results of philosophy are the discovery of one or another piece of plain nonsense and of bruises (welts, wounds) that the understanding receives as a result of trying to storm the limits of language. The bruises allow us to recognize the value of the discovery’ (PI 119). This idea or image of the limits of language, together with its correlate notion of simple or plain nonsense, seems strongly Tractarian; as does the idea (prominent in section 120) that any question not expressible in our ordinary language simply cannot be a genuine question (cf. the analysis of scepticism in TLP 6.51: ‘For doubt can exist only where there is a question; a question only where there is an answer, and this only where something can be said’). The same is arguably true of the opposition employed in section 120 between using language fullblown and adducing mere externalities about language in our explanations of language. In short, even without knowing the date of their composition, it would not be difficult to receive the impression that this sub-sequence has not entirely shaken off Tractarian inspiration and attitudes.
We might further characterize this impression by saying that the voice of Wittgenstein’s interlocutor, never sounded in the Tractatus but a pervasive stylistic signature of the first eighty-eight sections of the Philosophical Investigations, is rarely present in the 1931 sequence; and on the few occasions on which any even indirect objection to authorial pronouncements is voiced, it is done in citation marks which function as signs of reported or imagined rather than dramatized speech. Wittgenstein happily diagnoses the illusions under which the makers of such remarks must (he tells us) be operating, but never actually replies directly to them and, hence, never makes any effort to respond on the same conversational level either to the words or the fantasies to which (he claims) they give voice. At best, he seems to be talking to us, his readers, about these others’ utterances, as if we have attained a level of insight of which they are unfortunately deprived.
‘Language (or thought) is something unique’–this proves to be a superstition … itself produced by grammatical illusions.
(PI 110)
‘The general form of propositions is: this is how things are.’–that is the kind of proposition one repeats to oneself countless times. One thinks that one is tracing the outline of the thing’s nature over and over again, and one is merely tracing round the frame through which we look at it.
(PI 114)
Wittgenstein doesn’t even try to set about proving that he is, here, citing a superstition, or the mere tracing round of the frame through which we look at things; he simply expects us to take his word for it. In short, his previously unwavering commitment to a diagnostic or therapeutic dialogue with those who might disagree with him–his concern to respond precisely to the fine details of their words, and to articulate as fully and convincingly as possible what motivates them, as well as what is going awry with them–vanishes almost without trace. And what rushes into the textual void is an authorial voice that appears to recognize no conversational or dialogical others; what it is minded to say is rarely a response to anything specifically said by another but, rather, a self-originating enunciation, a laying down of the law.
The impression that, with respect to philosophy, Wittgenstein is anxious to have the first as well as the last word, is reinforced by the rhetorical strategy he employs to clarify his own conception of how philosophy should, or must, be done. For he presents us with a long list of specific respects in which the distinguishing characteristics of the true philosophical method are presented as standing in clear, simple, absolutely sharp opposition to the distinguishing characteristics of its scientistic other: explanation vs. description, hypotheses/theses vs. reminders, metaphysical vs. everyday usage, theories vs. perspicuous presentations, interference vs. leaving everything as it is, and so seemingly endlessly, on. The two philosophical ideals appear to be polar opposites in every specifiable respect. It is as if an endless list of such distinguishing marks can be generated from the underlying essential difference between them, with every item on that list essentially uncontaminated by any trace of its other.
As Augustine might have put it, the philosophical universe as the 1931 sequence presents it is thoroughly Manichean, not only in its conception of good and evil as utterly alien each to the other, but also in its conception of evil as something substantial–possessed of a reality at least equal to the good. This sits uneasily with Wittgenstein’s declaration elsewhere in the 1931 sequence that ‘[W]hat we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards [literally, structures of air]’ (PI 118), which suggests that his investigations stand in opposition to that which has only the appearance of genuine substance. But when one’s own conception of authentic philosophizing is constructed as a systematic negation of the distinguishing features of another conception of philosophizing, it is hard to take seriously the claim that the authentic conception has no competitors, that it really is the only possible way of doing things and, hence, that advocating it is not a matter of advancing a contestable methodological thesis.
The threat of internal incoherence in Wittgenstein’s chosen strategy here is marked by its tendency to lead him into repeated self-contradiction. For example, despite being told in section 126 that ‘what is hidden … is of no interest to us’, we are told almost immediately afterwards that ‘the aspects of things that are of most importance for us are hidden…’ (PI 129). Second, despite being told that ‘the results of philosophy are the uncovering [Entdeckung] of … plain nonsense’ (PI 119), and of ‘the importance of finding and inventing intermediate cases’ (PI 122)–not to mention the concluding claim that ‘the real discovery [Entdeckung] is the one that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy when I want to’ (PI 133)–we are then firmly told that ‘one might … give the name “philosophy” to what is possible before all new discoveries [Entdeckungen] and inventions’ (PI 126). Third, after condemning our desire to fix our gaze ‘absolutely [completely] sharply’ on the facts (PI 113) and to construct ideal languages in place of our everyday, spatio-temporal one, we are told that we can and should aim at ‘complete clarity’ and the ‘complete’ disappearance of philosophical problems by means of the construction of ‘clear and simple’ imaginary language-games (PI 130, 133). These difficulties, of which Wittgenstein gives no indication of being aware, let alone of having the resources to overcome, hardly encourage the reader to share his apparent conviction in the purity and self-evidence of his methodological vision.
And if we imagine the sequence containing these contradictions as picking directly up from section 88, its thematic and tonal discordance with those preceding remarks is obvious. For of course, the great question that sections 1–64 bring us up against, and to which sections 65–88 are responsive, is that of the essence of language; and Wittgenstein’s response famously denies that the concept of ‘language’ has an essence, if by ‘essence’ one means something that is common to all its instances, something articulable by a merkmal definition (i.e. in terms of distinguishing marks, necessary and sufficient conditions for its application). After reading the twenty or more sections in which Wittgenstein articulates the idea that this and other concepts might, rather, have a family resemblance structure, and points out that concepts with such a structure could be accused of vagueness or inexactness or indeterminacy of sense only if one deploys variously inept or empty conceptions and standards of exactness and determinacy, it is all the more striking to imagine oneself then embarking immediately upon sections 108(b)–133, in which the structure of Wittgenstein’s concept of ‘philosophy’ is rigorously, even rigidly articulated–quite as if it possesses a pure, underlying essence whose characteristic marks precisely, exactly and determinately distinguish it from even its closest competitors. Since section 134 then draws us into an exploration of our concept of a ‘proposition’, in which Wittgenstein attempts to show that its structure resembles that of the paradigmatic family resemblance concept (that of a game–cf. PI 135), our sense as readers that sections 108(b)–133 operate on an altogether different plane from that of the remarks preceding and succeeding them could only be intensified.
In effect, then, the 1931 sequence, in general, plays into the hands of those readers of Wittgenstein who believe that his view of philosophy as something other than a matter of advancing theses about the phenomena under examination is itself a thesis, in fact a meta-thesis about philosophy and, hence, not only highly contentious (given its more or less obvious dependence on a variety of inter-related claims about language, grammar, forms of life, natural reactions and so on) but essentially self-subverting. And if much of the tone, spirit and approach of the 1931 sequence appears to confirm this, then the many individual remarks in that sequence which deny it will, at best, be seen as self-deluding–expressive of an unattainable, and probably undesirable, ideal of the subject, a fantasy or illusion.
But of course, Wittgenstein in fact prefaced his 1931 sequence on the concept of philosophy with a sequence written in 1937 (within which there is a reiterated denial (PI 97) that any concepts–presumably including that of philosophy itself–constitute a super-order in relation to any others). How, then, is the impact of the 1931 sequence, and its perceived relation to the first eighty-eight sections of the book, modified by this intervention? How far, and in what ways, does the 1937 panel of this diptych discriminate and even provide the necessary diagnostic and therapeutic resources for its readers to go on to discriminate, between what the 1931 panel means to say, and what it (self-subvertingly) shows in the saying of it? In short, to what extent can we think of the 1937 sequence as aiming to pivot the 1931 conception of philosophy, as well as the conception of philosophy from which both sequences claim to avert themselves, around the fixed point of our real need?
As always, it is worth trying to begin at the beginning–at the renewed beginning of Wittgenstein’s extended consideration of philosophy, the beginning of section 89:
These considerations bring us face-to-face with the problem: In what sense is logic something sublime?
(PI 89)
There is no mention of the concept of the sublime, or of any obvious ancestor or analogue to it, in the 1931 sequence. This is not, however, its first appearance in the Philosophical Investigations; but its earlier emergence occurs almost in passing, and without any extensive development, although its immediate context is strikingly similar to the present one:
If you do not want to produce confusion you will do best not to call [indexical] words names at all.–Yet, remarkably, the word ‘this’ has been called the only genuine name; so that anything else we call a name was one only in an inexact, approximate sense.
This queer conception springs from a tendency to sublime the logic of our language–as one might put it. The proper answer to it is: we call very different things ‘names’; the word ‘name’ is used to characterize many different kinds of use of a word, related to one another in many different ways;–but the kind of use that ‘this’ has is not among them.
(PI 38)
The notion of a family resemblance structure is plainly at work here also, although not yet explicitly so labelled (one might say that it is subliminally present), and ‘subliming’ is thereby anticipatorily presented as characterizing a tendency in us to resist any acknowledgement of such a possibility. But section 38 takes us beyond a further diagnostic or therapeutic concern with this tendency, towards a more detailed grammatical investigation of the modes of use of ordinary names that the ‘queer’ conception of them passes over. It is only in the 1937 sequence on philosophy that the notion of ‘subliming’ is recalled, elaborated and put to work–brought to textual consciousness, one might say, by the need to bring the phenomenon of family resemblance concepts explicitly into play. Even here, however, Wittgenstein refrains from offering any direct explications of this apparently technical term. Instead, the ensuing sections of the 1937 sequence are crowded with imagery and metaphor–inter-linked chains of figuration that attempt to capture our sense of the peculiar character, the queerness, of logic. We must, therefore, unfold the logic of those chains.
I have argued elsewhere (Mulhall 2001: Secs. 20–2) that Wittgenstein’s concept of the sublime has (at least) three facets–that of the subliminal, that of sublimation understood as refinement or purification, and that of sublimity. When we sublime the logic of our language, we think of it as lying at ‘the bottom of things’, as ‘the ground or essence of everything empirical’ (PI 89) and, hence, as ‘something that lies within, which we see when we look into the thing, and which an analysis digs out [exhumes]’ (PI 92). In other words, logic lies beneath the surface of ordinary experience and ordinary life, below the threshold of everyday awareness. If, however, logic ‘is prior to experience, [it] must run through all experience; no empirical cloudiness or uncertainty can be allowed to affect it–It must rather be of the purest crystal’ (PI 97). Here, the priority of logic to the empirical realm which it nevertheless informs is pictured as the pollution or dilution of logic by the world of experience; we must distil its crystalline forms from the impurities in which it is suspended. Once we do, however, we isolate something sublime and encounter something exalted; we are elevated to or perhaps beyond a certain threshold. It is as if we stand at the very limits of human experience, aware at once of the finitude of human understanding and of that which transcends it. The sublimity of logic, its ideality, ‘is unshakeable. You can never get outside it; you must always turn back. There is no outside; outside you cannot breathe’ (PI 103). As Wittgenstein’s formulations suggest, we oscillate between an idea of logic as a limit or condition, and an idea of it as a limitation, as fencing us off from something. Is there no outside, or just no outside for us (living, breathing creatures)? We find ourselves on ‘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’ (PI 107).
Just as the 1937 sequence is held together by the interweaving implications of these three dimensions of the concept of subliming logic, so those dimensions are themselves unified by a common inflection or implication–the idea of logic as imprisoned and imprisoning. The sublimity of logic is experienced as a constraint or barrier–as if the inhuman void we picture lying beyond it constituted a wished-for emancipation from or fulfilment of our humanity, the satisfaction of the all-too-human desire to transcend humanity. And the ideas of logic as subliminal and as requiring sublimation ask us to think of logic itself as imprisoned in the empirical, as needing to be exhumed or crystallized out of the circumstances of ordinary human life; it is as if the embrace of the everyday were that of the grave, from whose disfiguring pollution logic must be resurrected or transfigured.
But if we think of logic as imprisoned in the ordinary, and of ourselves as imprisoned by logic, then we must think of ourselves as imprisoned, even entombed, in the ordinary; so attempting to dig logic out from the everyday will at once symbolize and realize our attempts to enact our own freedom from ordinariness. For if we bring logic back into our grasp, then we must surely at least bring within our view that which it places beyond our grasp; how could we bring the limits of human reality into focus without at least glimpsing the sublimely icy vacuum that lies beyond that threshold? And by the same token, if we can overcome the idea of logic as imprisoned in the ordinary, we might thereby overcome our own sense of logic as liminal, as demarcating that which is within from that which is beyond human experience and, hence, overcome our own sense of imprisonment in the (mere, the impure, the entombing) everyday.
Wittgenstein’s counter-concept of family resemblance concepts centrally contributes to this enterprise of desublimation and, hence, directly confronts us with the sense in which the sublimity of logic is a problem (a product of our subliming), because it contests our willingness to attribute a hyperbolic rigidity to the logic of our language–to picture the underlying structure of the empirical as if it exhibited a species of rigor mortis. What makes a graveyard of the everyday is our urge to impose fantasies of precision upon its logical ground–fantasies about the meaningfulness of words as dependent upon the existence of rules for every possible context of their application (PI 80), rules which stop up all the cracks through which doubt might conceivably creep in (PI 84), rules whose exactness is thought of as absolute, and thus as entirely independent of any human goal or purpose (PI 88). For anyone in the grip of such fantasies of precision, their rejection will seem to invite catastrophe; for:
What becomes of logic now? Its rigour seems to give way [become enmired, held in birdlime].–But in that case, doesn’t logic altogether disappear?–For how can it lose its rigour? Of course not by our bargaining away any of its rigour.–The preconceived idea of crystalline purity can only be removed by turning our whole examination round.
(PI 108)
Set against the fantasy of logic as ‘the most concrete, as it were the hardest thing there is’ (PI 97), the recovery of everyday conceptions of its rigour will appear only to weaken or render it, to make it glutinous by contaminating it with the glutinous mire of ordinary life–quite as if logic were a spiderweb, prone to distort and tear, and to enmire those investigating it, rather than the superlatively strong reinforcing that prevents our everyday inhabitations from giving way.
Set against the conviction that such imagery is the outthrow of fantasy, however, the question arises: how might one achieve a return to the ordinary, an acknowledgement of the (everyday) sense in which logic is sublime, that will not present itself as a loss or weakening of logic? If the illusion of super-rigidity is ‘like a pair of glasses on our nose through which we see whatever we look at’ (PI 103), then how could anything we see through them convince us to take them off? Wittgenstein’s answer–the culmination of his 1937 reflections–appears to be: by a turn, a turning around, a conversion. And its pivot is ‘the fixed point of our real need’. But what is our real need? And why must it, and how can it, bear the weight of this turn?
We need to look again, and in rather more detail, at the opening sections in the 1937 sequence.
These considerations bring us up to the problem: in what sense is logic something sublime?
For there seemed to pertain to logic a peculiar depth–a universal significance. Logic lay, it seemed, at the bottom of all the sciences.–For logical investigation explores the nature of all things. It seeks to see to the bottom of things and is not meant to concern itself whether what actually happens is this or that.–It takes its rise, not from an interest in the facts of nature, nor from a need to grasp causal connections: but from an urge to understand the basis, or essence, of everything empirical. Not, however, as if to this end we had to hunt out new facts; it is, rather, of the essence of 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 the Confessions ‘quid est ergo tempus? si nemo ex me quaerat scio; si quaerenti explicare velim, nescio’.–This could not be said about a question of natural science (‘What is the specific gravity of hydrogen?’, for instance). Something that we know when no-one asks us, but no longer know when we are supposed to give an account of it, is something that we need to remind ourselves of. (And it is obviously something of which for some reason it is difficult to remind oneself.)
We feel as if we had to penetrate phenomena: our investigation, however, is directed not towards phenomena, but, as one might say, towards the ‘possibilities’ of phenomena. We remind ourselves, that is to say, of the kind of statement that we make about phenomena. Thus Augustine recalls to mind the different statements that are made about the duration, past present or future, of events. (These are, of course, not philosophical statements about time, the past, the present and the future.)
(PI 89, 90)
The ‘logic’ that is subject to subliming here is not just (as in PI 38) ‘the logic of our language’, but also (consonant with Wittgenstein’s lifelong practice with the term) the distinctive kind of investigation that takes the logic of our language as its topic or subject-matter–logical investigation, or philosophy; and this referential duality pervades the discussion. First, Wittgenstein links a certain fantasy of logic as grounding all the sciences with a fantasy of logical investigation as seeing through or to the bottom of things; then he appears to acknowledge nevertheless that the originating urge or interest of any logical investigation is indeed to understand the basis or essence of empirical phenomena; and then he characterizes his own (‘our’) logical investigations as themselves possessing an essence. In short, his concern with the nature of philosophy (in both its traditional and its Wittgensteinian forms) is with what is essential to them; it is just the kind of concern that philosophical remarks about philosophy should manifest if they are to treat its nature as one more first-order philosophical issue.
Wittgenstein goes on to characterize the essence of his way of philosophizing without subliming it. His opening claim (that genuine philosophizing is not furthered by learning anything we did not already know) is not presented (in his 1931 manner) as an ungrounded or self-grounding starting-point from which further methodological generalities can be unfolded. Instead, he presents it as determined by the nature of distinctively philosophical questions or, more precisely, by the distinctive kind of confusion or bewilderment such questions express and, hence, to which any authentic philosophical method must see itself as responsive; and he illustrates this distinctiveness by citing a particular, canonical example. The example comes from Augustine; hence, Wittgenstein anchors this sequence of remarks about philosophy in the text from which the preceding eighty-eight philosophical remarks about language took their initial orientation (thus further declaring his aversion to second-order philosophizing, the deliberate flatness of the textual terrain of the Philosophical Investigations); and he anchors his general claim about philosophy in the actual unfolding of the Western tradition of philosophizing. To adapt other words of the 1931 sequence: from the outset of the 1937 sequence, we are dealing with philosophy as a spatio-temporal phenomenon, not as if it were some non-spatial, non-temporal unthing [Unding] (PI 108).
More specifically, the example allows Wittgenstein to develop his conception of authentic philosophizing in just the way in which, in section 90, he tells us that he would articulate his philosophical remarks about any phenomenon. For of course, by reminding us there that Augustine addresses his philosophical problem by recalling what kind of thing we (nonphilo-sophically) say about time, he also invites us to remark that in section 89 he addressed his current philosophical problem (that of identifying a distinctively philosophical problem) precisely by recalling the kinds of thing we say when expressing philosophical bewilderment about such things as time. To the extent we acknowledge Augustine’s words as genuinely exemplary of what we philosophers are inclined or driven to say, we must also admit that they express a kind of bewilderment to the resolution of which new information is patently not relevant (if we know what time is when no-one asks us, our inability to give an account of its essential nature cannot result from ignorance, and must be overcome by reminding us of something). Put this together with the fact that the progress of section 90 is, itself, hinged or pivoted around such apparently throw-away phrases as ‘as one might say’, and ‘that is to say’; and it becomes evident that, to this extent, Wittgenstein’s philosophical investigation of philosophy presents itself as a grammatical investigation.
Why, however, might anyone who views philosophy and, hence, any phenomenon in which she takes a philosophical interest, as possessed of an underlying essence, find what Wittgenstein calls a ‘grammatical investigation’ (PI 91) to possess any recognizably philosophical significance? After all, it explicitly eschews the penetration of phenomena in favour of reminders concerning what we say about phenomena; if so, how can it satisfy our urge to understand the basis or essence of phenomena?
A crucial part of Wittgenstein’s response to this concern comes in section 92.
This finds expression in questions as to the essence of language, of propositions, of thought.–For if we too in these investigations are trying to understand the essence of language–its function, its structure–yet this is not what those questions have in view. For they see in the essence, not something that already lies open to view and that becomes surveyable by a rearrangement, but something that lies beneath the surface. Something that lies within, which we see when we look into the thing, and which an analysis digs out.
‘The essence is hidden from us’: this is the form our problem now assumes. We ask: ‘What is language?’, ‘What is a proposition?’ And the answer to these questions is to be given once for all; and independently of any future experience.
(PI 92)
Here, Wittgenstein explicitly declares that he inherits the philosophical tradition’s characteristic concern with essence, and thereby identifies a perspective from which his grammatical investigations can be seen as continuous with that tradition, a way of satisfying the need that draws us to participate in philosophy at all. However, he also declares his difference from that tradition, the respect in which he proposes to reorient or reconstitute its ways, in declaring that only a conception of essence as finding expression in grammatical structure and function and, hence, as always already open to view (or at least surveyable by a rearrangement of what we always already know), can give real substance to that concern–can make philosophy anything other than a pursuit of the chimerical. What he opposes is thus not a concern with essence as such, but a particular fantasy of what such a concern must be–the structure of air which the picture of ‘essence as hidden from us’ reveals itself to be.
This picture of Wittgenstein’s relation to the tradition is very different to that which we might have gleaned from the 1931 sequence alone, with its Manichean division of authentic philosophizing from its sophistic counterpart by means of a list of straightforwardly opposed features or qualities–as if each is constructible as a point-by-point negation of the distinguishing marks of the other. According to the 1937 sequence, we need the concept of ‘essence’ to characterize Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy’s subject-matter in both its traditional and Wittgensteinian forms and, hence, to see that what he propounds as the only authentic philosophical method really is a way of doing something recognizably philosophical, an inheritor of that cultural form; but we need a different (more precisely, a genuinely substantial as opposed to an empty or sublimed) conception of that concept.
Furthermore, that conception of essence cannot (pace the 1931 sequence) be characterized without using terms that are central to (Wittgenstein’s best attempt to give voice to) philosophy’s traditional self-understanding. Take ‘hiddenness’, for example; if the tradition thinks of essence as hidden, so too does Wittgenstein.
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.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck him.–And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and powerful.
(PI 129)
This conception of the hiddenness of essence is, of course, not that of the tradition; but (as the 1931 sequence shows, despite its repeated attempts to deny it) we cannot characterize genuine philosophizing without making use of the term. The same is true of the notion of ‘depth’, which Wittgenstein employs at the outset of section 89 to characterize a sublimed conception of logic, and of our investigation of logic: ‘For there seemed to pertain to logic a peculiar depth’. This, too, is a concept Wittgenstein turns out to need (to have needed even in 1931) in order properly to characterize his own conception of philosophy:
The problems arising through a misinterpretation of our forms of language have the character of depth. They are deep disquietudes; their roots are as deep in us as the forms of our language and their significance is as great as the importance of our language.–Let us ask ourselves: why do we feel a grammatical joke to be deep? (And that is the depth of philosophy).
(PI 111)
One could go on. Traditional philosophy assumes that essences can be brought into view by analysis; but Wittgenstein tells us that aspects of grammatical investigation ‘may be called an “analysis” of our forms of expression, for the process is sometimes like one of taking a thing apart’ (PI 90). Traditional philosophy aims to achieve a certain kind of ordering of our concepts; but grammatical investigations also ‘want to establish an order in our knowledge of the use of language; an order with a particular end in view’ (PI 132). Traditional philosophy makes use of discoveries; but grammatical investigations make use of, and embody, ‘the real discovery’ (PI 133). Traditional philosophy invents new languages; grammatical investigations invent new language-games (PI 130). Traditional philosophy yearns for complete resolutions of problems through complete analyses (PI 91); grammatical investigations aim at the kind of complete clarity that makes philosophical problems completely disappear (PI 133).
From the perspective established at the outset of the 1937 sequence, then, traditional philosophizing and grammatical investigations are not utterly distinct from each other in every specifiable respect. Rather, pretty much any term needed to capture the central concern and the implicit (although ultimately empty or fantasized) self-understanding of traditional philosophizing can come to seem equally compelling in an accurate characterization of the activity Wittgenstein proffers in its stead. In a sense, then, nothing–no specifiable thing–is different after the Wittgensteinian event in philosophy; and yet everything is different. Every word the tradition says about itself chagrins him, precisely because they are the right words used in the wrong spirit–or more precisely, in a spirit which voids them of sense, sublimes them. In his philosophical revolution, every such term remains, but is meant (put to work) differently, or rather properly put to work for the first time–recovered from emptiness by being given a genuine, everyday use.
Each word is not, then, to be rejected but rather projected differently, turned aside from metaphysical subliming, returned to the everyday sublimity of its use in characterizing a genuine possibility for philosophy and, thus, a way of making our urge to understand the essence of things humanly intelligible (a drive we can satisfy). If one source of Wittgenstein’s counter-conception of philosophical method is a grammatical investigation of ‘philosophical problems’ and ‘philosophical bewilderment’, then another is what one might call a grammatical construction or reclamation–the delineation of a perspective from which we might mean what the tradition subjects to subliming, so that each unmoored but undismissible word of its implicit self-understanding is turned around the fixed point of (made capable of giving expression to) our real need.
Wittgenstein’s recurrence here, in 1937, to the dimension of need and desire is of real moment. Traditional philosophy might have a false conception of the needs it addresses–it might even engender false (inauthentic) needs in those it attracts; but Wittgenstein in 1937 sees nothing false or fantastic in the idea that it is an essential part of philosophy’s business to attract us, to be responsive to a real human need, to satisfy our desires as well as–say–our reason. But what, according to Wittgenstein, is that real need? At the very end of the 1931 sequence, he says this:
It is not our aim to refine or complete the system of rules for the use of our words in unheard-of ways.
For the clarity that we are aiming at is indeed complete clarity. But this simply means that the philosophical problems should completely disappear.
The real discovery is the one that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy when I want to.–The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question.–Instead, we now demonstrate a method, by examples; and the series of examples can be broken off. Problems are solved (difficulties eliminated), not a single problem.
There is not a philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, like different therapies.
(PI 133)
As we might now expect from the 1931 sequence, there is a certain unresolved tension within these four paragraphs. The second deploys conceptions of clarity and disappearance that recall absolutized conceptions of exactness, precision and determinacy, not only from Wittgenstein’s general discussion of family resemblance concepts, but also from the sequence’s own earlier characterizations of traditional philosophizing (e.g. its desire for an absolutely sharp or clear gaze (PI 113), or for the delineation of the super-order of concepts (PI 132)). For its author to think of his own philosophical practice as effecting the complete disappearance of philosophical problems (all of them? completely?) is surely as idealized as the sublimed conceptualizations of other phenomena for which he castigates traditional philosophy.
And yet, the third and fourth paragraphs develop a perspective that is far more in tune with the sequence’s own best methodological perceptions. For they link specific philosophical questions with the question of philosophy, quite as if reaching towards the conviction that Wittgenstein begins from in section 89, six years later–that the concept of philosophy itself is as much a site of philosophical problems as any other concept, that philosophy itself can be put in question not only by, but in exactly the same way, and for exactly the same reasons, as any other philosophical topic. These paragraphs also link the business of giving philosophy peace with the acknowledgement of the internal multiplicity of philosophical method; to talk of philosophy as consisting of a variety of related methods, each of which can be explained by example, is to picture ‘philosophy’ as a family resemblance concept, and thus to resist the impulse to sublime it. In other words, at the very end of his 1931 reflections, Wittgenstein achieves a perspective from which he can treat ‘philosophy’ as just one more first-order concept and, hence, can present his philosophical remarks about philosophy as flowing seamlessly in theme and tone from the preceding eighty-eight sections of his book.
The 1937 sequence picks up from there by pointing out that there is no necessity to conceive philosophical problems as having the form the tradition pictures them as having (thereby rendering them insoluble): ‘The essence is hidden from us’. There is a sense in which philosophy is concerned to understand essence, and in which that essence is hidden from us; but it is not compulsory to fantasize essence as hidden from us by the phenomenon whose essence we are trying to understand–by its surface, its appearance, the ordinary or everyday aspect it presents to us. The essence of any given thing is hidden from we philosophers not by the thing itself but by us. More specifically, it is hidden by our tendency to idealize our concept of the ideal in philosophy–to sublime or absolutize its real, everyday ideality, and then to predicate it of that in relation to which it is an ideal.
Wittgenstein offers two examples. The second concerns a philosophical problem about the essence of language, specifically one concerning the idea of determinacy of sense that preoccupied him in sections 65–88:
On the one hand it is clear that every sentence in our language ‘is in order as it is’. That is to say, we are not striving after an ideal, as if our ordinary vague sentences had not yet got a quite unexceptionable sense, and a perfect language awaited construction by us.–On the other hand it seems clear that where there is sense there must be perfect order.–So there must be perfect order even in the vaguest sentence.
(PI 98)
Our ordinary sentences make perfect sense, and we know this; but we tend to sublime this concept of perfection, and then–when that sublimed concept patently fails to apply to what we know to be perfectly intelligible ordinary sentences–we conclude that it must be hidden beneath or within them, and, hence, that we must accordingly penetrate the sentences themselves to dig it out.
We now inhabit or live out (are absorbed or gripped by) the idea that the ideal ‘must’ be found in reality. We do not as yet see how it occurs there, nor do we understand the nature of this ‘must’. But we think that it must be in reality because we think that we already see it there.
This way of thinking of the ideal is unshakeable. You can never get outside it; you must always turn back. There is no outside; outside you cannot breathe.–Where does this idea come from? It is like a pair of glasses on our nose through which we see whatever we look at. It never occurs to us to take them off.
(PI 101, 103)
In other words, philosophical problems have two roots: our tendency to idealize or sublime our ideals (as if essentially dissatisfied with their sheer ordinariness, their everyday sublimity), and our inability to deny our satisfaction with the ordinary, our knowledge that the everyday is, in fact, perfectly in order. The first drives us to say that ‘this isn’t how it is!’; the second drives us to say ‘yet this is how it has to be!’ (PI 112). Hence, to overcome our fantasy of the everyday as hiding its essence from us, we need to reconfigure or reorient both our dissatisfaction with the everyday, and our satisfaction with it. Since ideals are objects of comparison that we employ, in relation to which phenomena are judged wanting in some specific respect, we need to acknowledge that the everyday can legitimately be viewed as in need of improvement–for example, as lacking in clarity. But since the ordinary role of ideals in our language and our lives is to induce improvements for specific purposes and in specific ways, we need to acknowledge the emptiness of attempts to judge the everyday as absolutely or completely unclear, as essentially wanting or imperfect. Any particular ideal provides a way of representing the actual as imperfect in a specific respect; but no such method of representation is necessary, and the application of any such method is ultimately our responsibility, the expression of our commitment to a possibility of comparison.
Wittgenstein’s first example of subliming and then misapplying an ideal relates not to a philosophical problem about language but to the philosophical problem of characterizing the nature of philosophy.
[A grammatical] investigation sheds light on our problem by clearing misunderstandings away. Misunderstandings concerning the use of words, caused, among other things, by certain analogies between the forms of expression in different regions of language.–Some of them can be removed by substituting one form of expression for another; this may be called an ‘analysis’ of our forms of expression, for the process is sometimes like one of taking a thing apart.
But now it may come to look as if there were something like a final analysis of our forms of language, and so a single completely resolved form of every expression. That is, as if our usual forms of expression were, essentially, unanalysed; as if there were something hidden in them that had to be brought to light. When this is done the expression is completely clarified and our problem solved.
It can also be put like this: we eliminate misunderstandings by making our expressions more exact; but now it may look as if we were moving towards a particular state, a state of complete exactness; and as if this were the real goal of our investigations.
(PI 90, 91)
These remarks track the idealization of an ideal of, or for, philosophy. In each specific case of a philosophical confusion, there will be a way of achieving a clear, reorienting view of our ordinary use of the words that have generated our bewilderment. This may take the form of offering a reformulation of a given expression, something Wittgenstein is happy to call an analysis of it. But the possibility that, for any given confusion an expression generates, there is some reformulation or clarification of it that will dissipate that confusion, is sublimed into the possibility that some reformulation of that expression will entirely eliminate any possible confusion that it might generate ‘once and for all, and independently of any future experience’ (PI 92).
This idealization of the philosophical ideal of exactness, precision or clarity is what torments actual, everyday philosophizing; for, because it projects an empty or inept idea of the kind of clarity that a philosophical recounting of our speech might attain, no mundane or ordinary achievement of clarity–one that entirely dissolves the specific confusion to which it is responsive–can satisfy our fantasized need for a guarantee that any other confusion will be equally responsive to it. Hence, even a successful analysis of a philosophical problem will leave philosophy itself in question, by tormenting us with the ever-receding prospect of an apparently attainable, but actually unattained state of clarity or precision.
Our fantasized philosophical need is one of complete clarity, where ‘completeness’ is understood in a sublimed way and, thereby, rendered both undismissable and unattainable (‘this [specific analysis] is how it must be; but this can’t be how it is’ (PI 112)). Our real philosophical need is also one of complete clarity; but here ‘completeness’ is understood as determined by the specific problem in response to which clarity is sought. A philosophical problem has the form, ‘I don’t know my way about’, but there is no such thing as absolute or unspecific disorientation; when someone has lost her bearings, she has done so somewhere, with respect to a particular starting-point and a particular destination. Hence, for each specific philosophical problem, a complete resolution of that problem is attainable, without any residual dissatisfaction about the fact that the specific analysis that achieved this resolution cannot guarantee that no further, specific confusions might be generated by the relevant expression in other circumstances. Hence, our desublimated philosophical ideal really can give me peace, can make me capable of stopping doing philosophy whenever I want; but this is not because it identifies our ideal state with our present actuality (analysis, reformulation, perspicuous re-presentation is needed in each specific case). Rather, it is because I can completely resolve any given philosophical problem (or series of them) without feeling that I have not yet reached the only truly satisfying philosophical goal.
Once again, we can see that Wittgenstein’s 1937 remarks give us the means to understand the best of his 1931 remarks while resolutely treating the question of the nature of philosophy on a par with any other philosophical question. For his tracking of our idealizations of our philosophical ideals of analytic exactness, precision and determinacy draws all-but-explicitly on insights established in sections 65–88, in his identification of various inept and empty sublimings of our everyday concepts of exactness, precision and determinacy of sense in the field of philosophical problems concerning language. For what, after all, would it be like to have an analysis of a form of expression that stopped up all the gaps (cracks, holes) through which a philosophical confusion might creep (cf. PI 83)? ‘Exact’ is praise; to call something ‘inexact’ is to say that it attains its goal less perfectly than that which is more exact. Hence, the crucial point here is what we call ‘the goal’; and if the goal of a philosophical analysis is to remove a particular confusion, then what will allow us to attain that goal will depend entirely upon the nature of each specific confusion, a genus whose species will be as various as our language and its myriad forms of expression. Hence, there is no more a single ideal of philosophical analysis than there is a single philosophical confusion. And if we try to lay one down, we will find it difficult (to say the least) to hit upon one that genuinely satisfies us (cf. PI 88).
Wittgenstein’s target is, of course, in part the Tractarian conception of a completely analysed expression, and its counterpart ideal of a notation which would display its logical form such as to prevent any possible confusions between logically distinct forms of expression. But it also targets those aspects of his 1931 writing that fail either to say or to show their adherence to the desublimated conception of philosophy that other aspects of that sequence articulate. The difference can be vanishingly small–the difference between saying ‘the philosophical problems should completely disappear’ and ‘each philosophical problem should completely disappear’ (PI 133); or it might be as large as that between speaking and acting as if grammatical investigations are essentially purified of any traces of the distinguishing features of traditional philosophizing (hence, essentially emancipated from, a singular transfiguration of, that historical tradition), and acknowledging that grammatical investigation orients itself at every point by reference to its traditional predecessor, by transfiguring every term of its self-understanding, and that it must do so (if it is to maintain its claim to be a mode of philosophizing at all) by satisfying our real philosophical need, the need that draws us to the subject in the first place–the need to recover at once from some specific instance in an unending series of (a distinctive kind of) disorientation in our lives with words, and from our tendency to orient ourselves in that task by reference to a sublimed conception of the reorientation that might be achieved thereby.
One might say: the hidden essence of traditional philosophy is its sublimed conception of its subject-matter as hidden by that which it grounds, rather than by its own conception of it; whereas the hidden essence of grammatical investigation is its conception of itself as the uncanny other of traditional philosophy–as turning the tradition at every familiar point, but around the pivot or hinge of our continuing need to achieve a clear view of the essence of things and, thereby, to release ourselves from self-induced disorientation. The desublimated ideal of how we might attain such a goal is, itself, a reorientation. It depends upon recognizing that we are tempted to picture even our own counter-conception of philosophy as possessed of a pure, singular essence (rather than as a family of problem-sensitive methods), as essentially transcending, purifying and liberating us from the philosophical tradition (rather than internally reorienting it, finding a way genuinely to mean every word it says), and as aiming at a single, final state of pure and perfect clarity and peace, from which all possible torment and bewilderment has been excluded (rather than at overcoming specific, tormenting disorientations from case to case, every day). Each step in our progress is one which must entirely resolve our problem; but there is no step that can finally resolve all conceivable problems. To think otherwise is to substitute an inept or empty conception of a state of perfect philosophical clarity for one that sees perfect clarity as the unattained but attainable prospect of each specific state of philosophical unclarity.
What the 1937 sequence shows is that even the Wittgenstein of 1931 remained partially or episodically haunted or possessed by the false or in-authentic philosophical perfectionism he had begun to identify and criticize. And by placing the chronologically earlier sequence after the later one, Wittgenstein makes three different, although related, points. First, he ensures that the 1931 sequence, with its tendency to maintain itself at a level of abstract generality (as if analysing a super-order of concepts) is grounded or earthed and, hence, can arrogate to itself the authority earned by the 1937 sequence’s persistent attentiveness to concrete, historical expressions of philosophical bewilderment and self-understanding.
Second, he declares that authentic clarity about the nature of philosophy (and, hence, of philosophical clarity) is attained or unattained in exactly the way in which it is attained or unattained with respect to any philosophical topic. If the 1937 sequence had followed the 1931 sequence, the overall trajectory of their readers’ experience with them would have been one of smooth, step-by-step progress from an episodic and partial grasp of the nature of philosophy to a deeper one–quite as if Wittgenstein’s own personal development (from the Tractatus to 1931 to 1937 and on) exemplified the universal truth of a kind of Whig theory of philosophical progress; as if, once started, philosophical insight inevitably deepens and purifies itself. By putting the earlier sequence after the later, he enacts the contrary perception that philosophical clarity (even, perhaps particularly, about philosophy itself) is never perfectly attained, attained once and for all; it can always be lost, although it can always be recovered.
Third, since the 1937 sequence, properly appreciated, provides us with everything we need to identify, comprehend and avert ourselves from the subliming aspects of the 1931 sequence before we encounter it, Wittgenstein also ensures that if, despite that preparation, we fail to distinguish the sublimed from the desublimated in those textually subsequent remarks, then we have only ourselves to blame. In other words, by making it possible for us unknowingly to participate in the enactment of renewed disorientation that his text performs, to hide from ourselves the fact that his later methodological remarks are not a reiteration but, rather, a subliming of his earlier insights into philosophy’s true sublimity, he deepens the methodological moral of the diptych as a whole. For what could be more chastening to us, as philosophers and as readers, than to find ourselves identifying with an icily subliming condemnation of the sublimers of logic? What could better awaken us to the depth of our perverse drive to misunderstand the ordinary, to miss its satisfactions, than the experience of finding ourselves praising its everyday sublimity in the very terms and tones that fence us from it, making it humanly uninhabitable, within and without philosophy?2
1. I have amended Anscombe’s translation whenever I felt it necessary in order to convey the full implications of Wittgenstein’s remarks.
2. This chapter was written during my appointment as John Findlay Visiting Professor in the Philosophy Department at Boston University. I would like to thank the members of that department for their invitation to take up this post, and the Warden and Fellows of New College, Oxford, for making it possible for me to accept it. I would also like to thank the participants in my class on Wittgenstein and Heidegger at Boston University, as well as audiences at Colgate University and the University of Chicago, to whom earlier versions of this material were delivered, for their stimulating questions and suggestions. The comments of James Conant, Ed Witherspoon and Juliet Floyd were of particular help in clarifying my thinking about these matters.
Mulhall, S. (2001) Inheritance and Originality, Oxford: Oxford University Press.