A Short History of Modern Philosophy: From Descartes to Wittgenstein, Second Edition (43 page)

The later Wittgenstein

The emphasis of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is decidedly anthropocentric. While still interested in questions concerning meaning and the limits of significant utterance, the starting-point has become, not the immutable abstractions of an ideal logic, but the fallible efforts of human communication. At the same time, the human element has not entered through the usual channel of epistemology, but in a wholly surprising way. Wittgenstein introduces it through
a priori
reflections on the nature of the human mind, and on the social behaviour which endows that mind with its characteristic structure. What is ‘given’ is not the ‘sense-data’ of the positivists, but the ‘forms of life’ of Kantian philosophical anthropology. To put it in another way: the subject of any theory of meaning and understanding is the public practice of utterance, and all that makes this practice possible. Thus Wittgenstein begins his later investigations into the nature of language at the point where Frege broke off. He develops the thesis of the ‘publicity’ of sense, which had already led Frege to reject traditional empiricist theories of meaning. The result is not only a new account of the nature of language, but also a revolutionary philosophy of mind. The metaphysical problems that had occupied Kant, Hegel and Schopenhauer are rephrased as difficulties in the interpretation of consciousness. Construed thus they suddenly seem capable of resolution.

The social perspective caused Wittgenstein to move away from Frege’s emphasis on the concept of truth, or rather, to see this emphasis as reflecting a more fundamental demand that human utterance be answerable to a standard of correctness. This standard is not God-given, nor does it lie dormant in the order of nature. It is a human artifact, as much the product as the producer of the linguistic practices which it governs. This does not mean that an individual can decide for himself what is right and wrong in the art of communication. On the contrary, the constraint of publicity binds each and all of us; moreover that constraint is intimately bound up with our conception of ourselves as beings who observe and act upon an independent world. Nevertheless, it is true that there is no constraint involved in common usage other than usage itself. If we come up against truths which seem to us to be necessary, this can only be because we have created the rules that make them so, and what we create we can also forgo. The compulsion that we experience in logical inference, for example, is no compulsion, independently of our disposition so to experience it.

This kind of reflection led Wittgenstein towards a highly sophisticated form of nominalism: a denial that we can look outside linguistic practice for the thing which governs it. The ultimate facts are language, and the forms of life which grow from language and make language possible. Nominalism is not new, nor has it lacked exponents in our day. Nelson Goodman (b. 1906), for example, has advocated, using arguments that often resemble Wittgenstein’s, a kind of nominalism that incorporates a whole philosophy of science together with a theory of knowledge. What is peculiar to Wittgenstein is the transition that he makes at this juncture from the philosophy of language to the philosophy of mind. During the course of this transition, he attempts to overthrow the major premise of almost all Western philosophy since Descartes—the premise of the ‘priority of the first-person case’.

Wittgenstein uses a variety of arguments, designed to show what this premise really means, and in the course of doing so to demonstrate its untenability. Together these arguments provide what can best be described as a ‘picture’ of human consciousness. This picture has many aspects, some metaphysical, some epistemological: it involves the rejection of the Cartesian quest for certainty, the demolition of the view that mental events are private episodes observable to one person alone, the rejection of all attempts to understand the human mind in isolation from the social practices through which it finds expression. It is impossible here to give all the considerations whereby Wittgenstein upholds ‘the priority of the third-person case’. I shall therefore mention one or two central strands of argument and draw some conclusions as to the historical and philosophical significance of the thesis.

The private language argument

The most famous argument advanced for the Wittgensteinian position is that which has come to be known as ‘the private language argument’. This occurs in many versions in the
Philosophical Investigations
and has been the subject of much commentary. In outline, it seems to me the argument is as follows: there is a peculiar ‘privilege’ or ‘immediacy’ involved in the knowledge of our own present experiences. In some sense it is nonsense to suggest that I have to find out about them, or that

I could, in the normal run of things, be mistaken. (This is the thought which also underlies Kant’s thesis of the ‘Transcendental Unity of Apperception’, see pp. 137-8.) As a result there has arisen what we might call the ‘first-person illusion’. I can be more certain about my mental states than about yours. This can only be because I observe my mental states directly, yours indirectly. When I see you in pain, I see physical behaviour, its causes, a certain complex state of an organism. But this is not the pain that you have, only some contingent accompaniment of it. The pain itself lies hidden behind its expression, directly observable to its sufferer alone.

That is, in brief, the Cartesian theory of mind, presented as an explanation of the first-person case. Both the theory, Wittgenstein argues, and the thing that it is put forward to explain, are illusions. Suppose the theory were true. Then, Wittgenstein argues, we could not refer to our sensations by means of words intelligible in a public language. For words in a public language get their sense publicly, by being attached to publicly accessible conditions that warrant their application. These conditions will determine not only their sense, but also their reference. The assumption that this reference is private (in the sense of being observable, in principle, to one person alone) is, Wittgenstein argues, incompatible with the hypothesis that the sense is public. Hence, if mental events are as the Cartesian describes them to be, no word in our public language could actually refer to them.

In effect, however, Cartesians and their empiricist progeny have always, wittingly or unwittingly, accepted that conclusion, and written as though we each describe our sensations and other present mental episodes in a language which, because its field of reference is inaccessible in principle to others, is intelligible to the speaker alone. Wittgenstein argues against the possibility of such a private language. He attempts to prove that there can be no difference made, by the speaker of that language, between how things seem to him and how things are. He would lose the distinction between being and seeming. But this means losing the idea of objective reference. The language is not aimed at reality at all; it becomes instead an arbitrary game. What seems right is what is right; hence one can no longer speak of right.

The conclusion is this: we cannot refer to Cartesian mental events (private objects) in a public language; nor can we refer to them in a private language. Hence we cannot refer to them. But, someone might say, they may nevertheless
exist
! To which Wittgenstein replies, in a manner reminiscent of Kant’s attack on the noumenon, that a nothing will do as well as a something about which nothing can be said. Moreover, we
can
refer to sensations; so whatever they are, sensations are not Cartesian mental events.

Wittgenstein accompanies this argument with an acute description, from the third-person point of view, of many complex mental phenomena—in particular those of perception, intention, expectation and desire. His arguments, as he acknowledges, refute, if successful, the possibility of a ‘pure phenomenology’, since they have the implication that nothing about the essence of the mental (or about the essence of anything) can be learned from the study (in Cartesian isolation) of the first person alone. The ‘immediacy’ of the first-person case is an index only of its shallowness. It is true that I know my own mental states without observing my behaviour; but this is not because I am observing something
else.
It is simply an illusion, thrown up by self-consciousness, that the necessary authority that accompanies the public usage of ‘I’, is an authority about some matter of which only the ‘I’ has knowledge.

The priority of the third person

Despite this rejection of the ‘method’ of phenomenology, however, Wittgenstein showed himself sympathetic to an ambition which had become—through a series of historical accidents—allied to it. Thinkers like the Kantian Dilthey (see p. 255) had sought for the foundations of a peculiarly ‘human’ understanding, according to which the world would be seen, not scientifically, but under the aspect of ‘meaning’. Wittgenstein, in common with some phenomenologists, such as Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, argued that we perceive and understand human behaviour in a manner different from that in which we perceive and understand the natural world. We explain human behaviour by giving reasons, not causes. We address ourselves to our future by making decisions, not predictions. We understand the past and present of mankind through our aims, emotions and activity, and not through predictive theories. All these distinctions seem to create the idea, if not of a specifically human world, at least of a specifically human way of seeing things. Much of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is devoted to describing and analysing the characteristics of human understanding, and demolishing what he thought to be the vulgar illusion that science could generate a description of all those things with which our humanity (or to put it more philosophically, our existence as rational agents) is mingled. He defends the positions not only that our knowledge of our own minds presupposes the knowledge of the minds of others, but also that as the phenomenologist Max Scheler (1874-1928) put it—‘our conviction of the existence of other minds is earlier and deeper than our belief in the existence of nature’. In other words, despite the attack on the method and metaphysics of phenomenology, Wittgenstein shares with the phenomenologists the sense that there is a mystery in human things that will not yield to scientific investigation. This mystery is dispelled not by explanation, but only by careful philosophical description of the ‘given’. The difference is that, for Wittgenstein, what is ‘given’ is not the contents of immediate experience, but the forms of life which make experience possible.

The demolition of the first-person illusion has two consequences. First, we cannot begin our enquiries from the first-person case and think that it gives us a paradigm of certainty. For, taken in isolation, it gives us nothing at all. Secondly, while the distinction between being and seeming does not exist for me when I contemplate my own sensations, this is only because I speak a public language which determines this peculiar property of firstperson knowledge. The collapse of being and seeming into each other, as in first-person awareness, is a ‘degenerate’ case. I can know, therefore, that if this collapse is possible, it is because there are people in the world besides myself, and because I have a nature and form of life in common with them. I do indeed inhabit an objective world, a world where things are or can be other than they seem. So, in a standing way, the argument of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction is found. The precondition of self-knowledge (of the Transcendental Unity of Apperception) is, after all, the knowledge of others, and of the objective world which contains them.

Much has changed in philosophy since Wittgenstein produced his arguments. One thing is certain, however. The assumption that there is first-person certainty, which provides a starting-point for philosophical enquiry, this assumption which led to the rationalism of Descartes and to the empiricism of Hume, to so much of modern epistemology and so much of modern metaphysics, has been finally removed from the centre of philosophy. The ambition of Kant and Hegel, to achieve a philosophy which removes the ‘self’ from the beginning of knowledge so as to return it in an enriched and completed form at the end, has perhaps now been fulfilled.

The purpose of this bibliography is to direct the reader towards reliable English-language versions of the more important texts of the philosophers discussed, and to provide a brief review of the available commentaries.

The study of the history of philosophy has only recently acquired a firm place on the curriculum of universities in the English-speaking world. Nevertheless, the long-delayed discovery of this fertile territory has in recent years led to an explosion of publications, which it would be a life's work to summarise. Particularly influential at the scholarly level have been the volumes published by Routledge, in the series edited by Ted Honderich entitled 'The Arguments of the Philosophers'. Oxford University Press's 'Past Masters' series contains many useful guides for the less specialised reader. It remains true, nevertheless, that the original texts, properly translated, are the surest guides to the thought of those who wrote them.

General

The most comprehensive history of philosophy in English remains Frederick Copleston's
History of Philosophy
12 vols, London, 1950 onwards.

Bertrand Russell's
History of Western Philosophy
(London, 1944) is amusing, but suffers from defects that make it inadequate as a supplement to the present volume. First, it deals largely with ancient philosophy, and is curt and selective in its treatment of the post-Cartesian tradition. Secondly, it is dismissive towards all those philosophers with whom Russell felt no personal affinity. Thirdly, it shows no understanding of kant and postkantian idealism. It is for all that, a classic of wit, elegance and resolute idiosyncrasy. Readers seeking a reliable, lengthy exposition of the subject might be better advised to try D.J.O'Connor (ed.), 4
Critical History of Western Philosophy,
London, 1964, a book which suffers, however, from being written by many different hands.