Wittgenstein, Anti-foundationalism, Technoscience and Philosophy of Education: An Educational Philosophy and Theory Reader Volume VIII 2019045554, 2019045555, 9780367861254, 9781003017035

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Wittgenstein, Anti-foundationalism, Technoscience and Philosophy of Education

This book is a collection of essays motivated by a “cultural” and biographical reading of Wittgenstein. It includes some new essays and some that were originally published in Educational Philosophy and Theory. The book focuses on the concept of “technoscience”, and the relevance of Wittgenstein’s work for philosophy of technology which amplifies Lyotard’s reading and provides a critique of education as an increasingly technology-led enterprise. It includes a distinctive view on the ethics of reading Wittgenstein and the ethics of suicide that shaped him. It also examines the reception and engagement with Wittgenstein’s work in French philosophy with a chapter on post-analytic philosophy of education as a choice between Richard Rorty and Jean-François Lyotard. Peters examines Wittgenstein’s academic life at Cambridge University and his involvement as a student and faculty member in the Moral Sciences Club. Finally, the book provides an understanding of Wittgensteinian styles of reasoning and the concept of worldview. Is it possible to escape the picture that holds us captive? This constitutes a challenging introduction to Wittgenstein’s work for academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of education, technology and philosophy. Michael A. Peters is Distinguished Professor at Beijing Normal University, PR China, China and Emeritus Professor in Educational Policy, Organization and Leadership at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. He is currently also Senior Research Fellow at the University of Auckland where he held a Personal Chair (2000–2005). He is the executive editor of the journal Educational Philosophy and Theory and the author or editor of several books on Wittgenstein.

Educational Philosophy and Theory: Editor’s Choice Series editors: Michael A. Peters Beijing Normal University, PR China

The EPAT Editor's Choice series comprises innovative and influential articles drawn from the Educational Philosophy and Theory journal archives, spanning 46 volumes, from 1969. Each volume represents a selection of important articles that respond to and focus on a particular theme, celebrating and emphasizing the heritage and history of the work, as well as the cutting edge contemporary contributions available. The series will create a rich vertical collection across five decades of seminal scholarship, contextualizing and elevating specific themes, scholars and their work. The EPAT Editor, Michael A. Peters, introduces each volume, the theme, and the work selected within that volume. Titles in the series include: Troubling the Changing Paradigms An Educational Philosophy and Theory Early Childhood Reader Edited by Michael A. Peters and Marek Tesar From ‘Aggressive Masculinity’ to ‘Rape Culture’ An Educational Philosophy and Theory Gender and Sexualities Reader Edited by Liz Jackson and Michael A. Peters Feminist Theory in Diverse Productive Practices An Educational Philosophy and Theory Gender and Sexualities Reader Edited by Liz Jackson and Michael A. Peters The Chinese Dream: Educating the Future An Educational Philosophy and Theory Chinese Educational Philosophy Reader, Volume VII Michael A. Peters Wittgenstein, Anti-foundationalism, Technoscience and Philosophy of Education An Educational Philosophy and Theory Reader Volume VIII Michael A. Peters For more information about the series, please visit www.routledge.com/EducationalPhilosophy-and-Theory-Editors-Choice/book-series/EPAT

Wittgenstein, Anti-foundationalism, Technoscience and Philosophy of Education An Educational Philosophy and Theory Reader

Volume VIII

Michael A. Peters

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Michael A. Peters The right of Michael A. Peters to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Peters, Michael A, author. Title: Wittgenstein, anti-foundationalism, technoscience and philosophy of education / Michael A Peters. Other titles: Educational philosophy and theory. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2020. | Series: Educational philosophy and theory reader ; Volume VIII | Most articles previously pubished in Educational philosophy and theory, between 2013-2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019045554 (print) | LCCN 2019045555 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367861254 (hardback) | ISBN 9781003017035 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1889-1951. | Foundationalism (Theory of knowledge) | Education–Philosophy. | Reasoning–Philosophy. Classification: LCC B3376.W564 P3879 2020 (print) | LCC B3376.W564 (ebook) | DDC 192–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019045554 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019045555 ISBN: 978-0-367-86125-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-01703-5 (ebk) Typeset in Galliard by Swales & Willis, Exeter, Devon, UK

Contents

Previously published chapters

vi

Introduction: truth, value and the philosopher as cultural physician

1

1 Wittgenstein, Lyotard and the philosophy of technoscience

12

2 The ethics of reading Wittgenstein

28

3 Wittgenstein as exile: a philosophical topography

48

4 Wittgenstein and the ethics of suicide: homosexuality and Jewish self-hatred in fin de siècle Vienna

65

5 Wittgenstein and post-analytic philosophy of education: Rorty or Lyotard?

80

6 Wittgenstein at Cambridge: philosophy as a way of life

110

MICHAEL A. PETERS AND JEFF STICKNEY

7 “A picture holds us captive”: Wittgenstein and the German tradition of Weltanschuung

128

8 Philosophy as pedagogy: Wittgenstein’s styles of thinking

137

9 Kinds of thinking, styles of reasoning

156

Postscript: Wittgenstein’s anti-philosophy

171

Index

173

Previously published chapters

Chapter 2, ‘The ethics of reading Wittgenstein’, was originally published in Educational philosophy and theory, 51(6), 2019 (published online 5 April 2018). Chapter 3, ‘Wittgenstein as exile: a philosophical topography’, was originally published in Educational philosophy and theory, 40(5), 2008 (published online 9 January 2013). Chapter 4, ‘Wittgenstein and the ethics of suicide: homosexuality and Jewish self-hatred in fin de siècle Vienna’, was originally published in Educational philosophy and theory, 51(10), 2019 (published online 1 January 2019). Chapter 5, ‘Wittgenstein and post-analytic philosophy of education: Rorty or Lyotard?’, was originally published in Educational philosophy and theory, 29(2), 1997 (published online 9 January 2013). Chapter 6, ‘Wittgenstein at Cambridge: philosophy as a way of life’, by Michael A. Peters and Jeff Stickney was originally published in Educational philosophy and theory, 51(8), 2019 (published online 24 October 2018). Chapter 9, ‘Kinds of thinking, styles of reasoning’, was originally published in Educational philosophy and theory, 39(4), 2007 (published online 9 January 2013).

Introduction Truth, value and the philosopher as cultural physician

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. And this description gets its light, that is to say its purpose, from the philosophical problems. These are, of course, not empirical problems; they are solved, rather, by looking into the workings of our language, and that in such a way as to make us recognize those workings: in despite of an urge to misunderstand them. The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known. Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language. – Wittgenstein (1953) Philosophical Investigations, §109

The philosopher as a cultural physician There is an interpretation that views Wittgenstein against the thinkers of Viennese and Austrian modernism rather than as a Cambridge philosopher and placeholder in the analytic tradition. This tradition provides a very different reading of philosophy of education because it views Wittgenstein as much closer to the concerns of Continental philosophers starting with Nietzsche, and it emphasizes the attempt to overcome foundationalist thought. In terms of this interpretation, those who follow in the wake of Wittgenstein are concerned with the question of how to continue to do philosophy after the collapse of metaphysics – after the collapse of truth and transcendental guarantees – that is, after the death of analytic philosophy. Perhaps the best way to introduce this interpretation is to see some parallels between aspects of Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. In the Preface to The Gay Science, Nietzsche (1886) talks of a “philosophical physician”. The philosopher of the future has the task of pursuing the health of a people, race, humanity, “to muster the courage to push my suspicion to its limits and to risk the proposition: what was at stake in all philosophy hitherto was not at all ‘truth’ but something else – let us say, health, future, growth,

2

Introduction

power, life”. Upon the astonishing discovery that “[There is no being] behind the doing, acting, becoming … the doing is everything” (The Genealogy of Morals; Nietzsche 1992: 179), Nietzsche looks for a “cultural physician” to heal the wounds of modernity. The cultural physician is a phrase that appears in Nietzsche’s notes of the early 1870s. He had used the phrase at one stage as a title for a book considered a companion to The Birth of Tragedy. The “Philosopher of the Future” is a phrase that Nietzsche used consistently in his later works. The earlier notion of cultural physician informs and shapes Nietzsche’s notion of the philosopher of the future whose principal concern is the health of culture. The central responsibility of the philosopher of the future is the project of cultivation and education of humanity as a whole. The philosopher-physician does not create cultural health by treating the “sick” individual, by, for instance, enhancing his or her rational autonomy. The cultural malady is not primarily a cognitive disorder which can be cured by reason alone. The philosopher of the future must employ all the cultural resources at his or her disposal to promote what we are capable of becoming. Wittgenstein, like Nietzsche, ascribes to a similar romantic view of culture as a form of life, that is, culture as an expressive and natural force, one that begins in doing (rather than thinking), and one that can be judged in terms similar to the creation of a work of art. Wittgenstein also sees himself as a philosopher of culture and employs metaphors that views philosophy as a kind of therapy. Wittgenstein, for instance, writes: “The philosopher’s treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness” (Philosophical Investigations [hereafter PI], Wittgenstein 1972, §254–255) and “A main cause of philosophical disease – a one-sided diet: one nourishes one’s thinking with only one kind of example” (PI, §593). There is little doubt that Wittgenstein’s cultural pessimism and despair – his rejection of technoscientific civilization, his distrust of progress, his sense of cultural dissolution and decay – were inherited, in part, from Spengler and in a mediated fashion, from Nietzsche, but also directly from Schopenhauer. There is a precedent for this view in the literature. Nietzsche and Wittgenstein are distinctive in that they are only philosophers to have been strongly influenced by Schopenhauer. Wittgenstein started reading Schopenhauer as an adolescent. The young Wittgenstein seized upon Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, believing it to be fundamentally right, though in need of some clarification. Wittgenstein in his maturity came to see a certain shallowness in his thinking. The Tractatus – its conceptual structure, its mysticism, its language of ethics and aesthetics – is unmistakably Schopenhauerian. The connection to Schopenhauer helps explain the ethical interpretation of the Tractatus and the enduring cultural pessimism. McGuinness (1982: 40) suggests a direct historical relationship between Wittgenstein and Nietzsche over the question of nihilism: “Wittgenstein thought that nothing was to be hoped for from by about 1850. The only hope lay in Russia where everything had been destroyed … Hence his kinship with Nietzsche is very evident.”

Introduction

3

Cavell (1988) sees some merit in this idea and views Wittgenstein as a “philosopher of culture”. He provides a reading of the Investigations as a depiction of our times, agreeing with von Wright’s assessment of Wittgenstein’s attitude as “Spenglerian”, suggesting that Spengler’s vision of culture as a kind of Nature is shared in a modified form in the Investigations. Cavell (1988: 261–2) argues that the Investigations “diurnalizes Spengler’s vision of the destiny toward exhausted forms”, toward the loss of culture and community. Cavell draws our attention to the way Wittgenstein’s uniqueness as a philosopher of culture comes from “the sense that he is joining the fate of philosophy as such with that of the philosophy of culture or criticism of culture”. By doing so, he argues, Wittgenstein is calling into question philosophy’s claim to a privileged perspective on culture which could be called the perspective of reason. The therapeutic reading of Wittgenstein now has a strong reading signalled, for instance, in The New Wittgenstein (Crary & Read, 2000). Fin-de-siècle Vienna prefigured certain central themes of postmodernism including the questioning of scientific and technical rationality. The Schopehauerian–Nietzschean ethos which tempered Viennese modernism, helps to explain both Wittgenstein’s scepticism towards modernism – whether in the sciences and technology, or in literature and the arts – and his final dissociation with the logical empiricism of the Vienna Circle, built as it was on a newfound faith in science and of extending the scientific method into philosophy itself. Nietzsche had dwelled upon a fin-de-siècle theme which was to become a defining feature of the new consciousness that Carl Schorske (1980: xix) calls “post-Nietzschean culture”: “the perception of pervasive decadence and degeneration and the accompanying search for new sources of physical and mental health”. Nietzsche (1874/1990) writes in Schopenhauer as Educator: “Everyone who possesses culture is, in fact, saying ‘I see something higher and more human than myself above me. Help me, all of you, to reach it, as I will help every person who recognizes the same thing’” (p. 61). Wittgenstein writes: “All that philosophy can do is destroy idols. And that means not creating a new one – for instance as in ‘absence of an idol’” (Zettel [hereafter Z], Wittgenstein 1970a, 88) and “Philosophy can only describe language … Philosophy leaves everything as it is … Philosophy puts everything before us and neither explains nor deduces anything” (Z, 177). For Wittgenstein all that philosophy can do is help us to “command a clear view of the use of our words. – Our grammar is lacking in this sort of perspicuity.” Philosophy as “perspicuous representation” helps us in “seeing connexions”. It is fundamental in marking “the form of account we give, the way we look at things. (Is this a ‘Weltanschauung’?)” (PI §122).

Truth and anti-philosophy Paul Horwich (2016: 99–100) provides an interesting interpretation of Wittgenstein as anti-philosopher who aims to dethrone truth as the crowning glory

4

Introduction

of modern science. Analysing Wittgenstein’s view of truth in the Investigations, he identifies the following characteristics: • • • •

Truth has no traditional explicit definition or reductive analysis; the nature of the concept is implicitly fixed by the way that each statement specifies its own condition for being true; There are hardly any concepts that are defined in terms of TRUTH, or whose possession requires prior possession of the concept, TRUTH; It is merely a useful expressive device. (abridged)

He cites Wittgenstein’s now famous remark at PI §136: “p is true = p”, that is “ascribing the truth to a proposition is equivalent to asserting the proposition itself” (Horwich 2016: 100). This has become known as the deflationary account of truth, although the term itself leads to the view that a there is some residual thing called truth of which this is an account. Horwich then discusses various kinds of deflationary views: disquototionalism, pro-sententialism, or the redundancy theory. He favours the account that Wittgenstein arrives at in the Investigation preferring it to the more problematic view developed in the Tractatus. Horwich has a clear preference for the use-theoretic view that demolishes Wittgenstein’s “earlier brash, brilliant, initial attempt at a radically antitheoretical philosophy. And this progress is almost entirely due to the way in which his new view of truth improves on the old one” (Horwich 2016: 104). Wittgenstein’s rejection of philosophy as traditionally and currently practised and his “insistence that it can’t give us the kind of knowledge generally regarded as its raison d’être”. Horwich (2013) argues: Wittgenstein claims that there are no realms of phenomena whose study is the special business of a philosopher, and about which he or she should devise profound a priori theories and sophisticated supporting arguments. There are no startling discoveries to be made of facts, not open to the methods of science, yet accessible ‘from the armchair’ through some blend of intuition, pure reason and conceptual analysis. Indeed the whole idea of a subject that could yield such results is based on confusion and wishful thinking. (Horwich 2013) Anyone familiar with Wittgenstein’s views in the Investigations would agree that one of the main aims of this book is to deflate the role of argumentative debate as the principle route to truth, understanding, insight, or what have you. Horwich (2013) concludes that, according to Wittgenstein, philosophy “must avoid theory-construction and instead be merely ‘therapeutic,’ confined to exposing the irrational assumptions on which theory-oriented investigations are based and the irrational conclusions to which they lead”. This is tantamount to suggesting that Wittgenstein is outlining a radically anti-theoretical

Introduction

5

meta-philosophy. Horwich wants to give a clear account of a deflationist view of truth and what philosophy is and what it might be able to achieve. Wittgenstein as anti-philosopher has received quite of lot of commentary, especially in relation to On Certainty and his philosophy of mathematics (Moyal-Sharrock, 2004a, 2004b; Maddy, 1988). The question is – are Nietzsche and Wittgenstein alike in their nihilism? Do they institute a break with philosophy or do they see themselves as offering something that can replace philosophy to continue the philosophical enterprise in a post-philosophical way? Are they offering a post-philosophical response to nihilism? There is a philosophy of education that can learn from this interpretation and, in particular, seek to develop a post-philosophy that sees the question of nihilism as central to education.

The disappearance of culture and value Human life begins in doing rather than thinking, and Wittgenstein naturalizes our conception of culture and human beings by emphasizing actions rather than thoughts and descriptions rather than explanations.. By stressing a mode of being that is grounded in actions Wittgenstein seeks to restrict the role of reason and intellect and to dispel their philosophical importance by returning them to their natural origins. Culture on Wittgenstein’s view, then, offers human beings a spiritual home in the sense that they can devote themselves to its observance through tradition or invent new cultural forms. We now live, Wittgenstein argues using Spengler’s term, in an age of “civilization”, where natural forces which once found their expression in the creation of cultural practices, have been replaced by reason alone. Civilization is an age of spiritual decline, where culture disappears. In 1929 and the early 1930s Wittgenstein talks of “my cultural ideal” (Culture and Value [hereafter CV], Wittgenstein 1970b, 2e), wondering whether it derives from Schumann’s time though continuing that ideal instinctively and in a different way. He distinguishes technical refinement in modern film-making with the formation of a style, where spirit plays a role (CV, 3e). In the context of examining a remark made to him by Engelmann, Wittgenstein says “he is seeing his life as a work of art created by God … ” (CV, 4e). Quoting himself, he says: “The earlier culture will become a heap of rubble and finally a heap of ashes, but spirits will hover over the ashes” (CV, 3e). In the sketch for a Foreword to Philosophical Remarks Wittgenstein is, perhaps, most explicit about his sympathies. This book is written for those who are in sympathy with the spirit in which it is written. This is not, I believe, the spirit of the main current of European and American civilization. The spirit of this civilization makes itself manifest in the industry, architecture and music of our time, in its fascism and socialism, and it is alien and uncongenial to the author. (CV, 6e)

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In 1947 he makes the following astonishing remark, intimating that in an age of science and technology we lose our humanity: The truly apocalyptic view of the world is that things do not repeat themselves. It isn’t absurd, e.g., to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity; that the idea of great progress is a delusion, along with the idea that the truth will ultimately be known; that there is nothing good or desirable about scientific knowledge and that mankind, in seeking it, is falling into a trap. It is by no means obvious that this is not how things are. (CV, 56e) In a wistful passage written in 1931, Wittgenstein reflects upon his work, suggesting an ideal that he does not get close to: There are problems I never get anywhere near … Problems of the intellectual world of the West that Beethoven (and perhaps Goethe to a certain extent) tackled and wrestled with, but which no philosopher has ever confronted (perhaps Nietzsche passed them by). And perhaps they are lost as far as western philosophy is concerned, i.e. no one will be there capable of experiencing, and hence describing, the progress of this culture as an epic. (CV, 9e) Broadly speaking, both Wittgenstein and Nietzsche argue that philosophical illnesses have corresponding physiology given by the representation of expressions that are philosophically problematic. Philosophical problems that arise from misinterpretations of the forms of our language “are deep disquietudes; their roots are as deep in us as the forms of our language, and their significance is as great as great as the importance of our language” (PI, §110). These are primarily questions of cultural health. They concern deep problems that often arise when the practical engagement with human life has been ignored. Wittgenstein writes: “The way to solve the problem you see in your life is to live in a way that will make what is problematic disappear” (CV, 27e). Insofar as we are still preoccupied with the same philosophical problems as the Greeks and have made no “progress”, it is “because our language has remained the same and keeps seducing us into asking the same questions” (CV, 15e).

The organization of this book This book is a collection of essays that I have published over the past few years motivated by this “cultural” reading of Wittgenstein. It includes a couple of new essays, beginning with Chapter 1, “Wittgenstein, Lyotard and Philosophy of Technoscience”, which is an attempt to make clear my own commitments and background as a scholar who was first introduced to the early Wittgenstein

Introduction

7

in the early 1970s at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand in a course in philosophy of science that began with Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein and led on to Popper and Kuhn. I don’t remember whether Wittgenstein’s relationship to the Vienna Circle and logical positivism was discussed, but it seems clear to me that by the time Ramsey persuaded Wittgenstein to re-join the group in 1929 Wittgenstein had changed dramatically. Nothing symbolized this so clearly as the account of Wittgenstein who, instead of answering questions about the Tractatus, read the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore (Wittgenstein’s only influence outside the West) to the Circle with his back turned to them, and then silently departed (Herath, 2016). This changed attitude indicates to me the depth of Wittgenstein’s criticism of his Tractatus and also the scientistic worldview that the Circle was extracting from it. Jean-François Lyotard to my mind was someone who appreciated this change and its wider significance. Hence an essay that makes the case for a reading of Lyotard and Wittgenstein on the philosophy of technoscience. Chapter 2, “The ethics of reading Wittgenstein”, is an argument for an ethics of reading and a set of ethical protocols that provides the appropriate context (Vienna and Cambridge) and conceptual field against which to read Wittgenstein. The chapter traverses in more detail some of the ground that I point to in this Introduction. In addition, the chapter examines the late French reception of Wittgenstein and the engagement with Wittgenstein’s work in French philosophy. It mentions Lyotard’s uptake of Wittgenstein and also the interpretative possibilities of yoking together Wittgenstein and Foucault as the production of a dialogue across different traditions. Chapter 3 argues that Wittgenstein considered himself an exile, imposing it on himself from his native Vienna. Exile is a condition has become a characteristic of late modernity (as much as alienation was for the era of industrial capitalism) and also strongly emblematic of literary modernism. I use the idea of “exhilic thought” as means for understanding Wittgenstein and the topography or geography of his thought to suggest that philosophy might learn to recognize the significance of location and place of reason as part of the logic of globalization that often contributes to postmodern notions of subjectivity that embrace aspects of the condition of being an exile. In “Wittgenstein and the ethics of suicide” (Chapter 4) I examine the ethics of suicide and its importance in Wittgenstein’s philosophy especially in view of the suicide of his brothers and other people the young Wittgenstein was close to. In view of Wittgenstein’s suffering – by all accounts he was a tortured man – and the Jewish cult of suicide in fin-de-siècle Vienna, why did Wittgenstein not take his own life? I examine this question focusing on Wittgenstein’s sources of suffering around what I call his “double identity crisis” caused by his homosexuality and his Jewish self-hatred. In Chapter 5 I present postanalytic philosophy of education as a choice between Richard Rorty and JeanFrançois Lyotard.

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Introduction

Although Wittgenstein often displayed contempt for the atmosphere at the University of Cambridge it is difficult to see his philosophical contributions in isolation from the support from his Cambridge colleagues, his research fellowship and later teaching career at Cambridge. In Chapter 6, co-written with Jeff Stickney, we examine Wittgenstein’s academic life at Cambridge, including his involvement as a student and faculty member in the Moral Sciences Club. Throughout his work Wittgenstein drew a distinction between empirical science and philosophy, which he defined as an investigation of language and the limits of meaning. He despised academic philosophy and offered a therapeutic approach that was designed to help his readers “to stop doing philosophy when they want to” (PI, §132). We use Pierre Hadot’s work on philosophical inquiry as a vital part of the bios, a form of life that is the life-blood of academia that offers insights on Wittgenstein’s philosophy. “‘A picture holds us captive’: Wittgenstein and the German tradition of Weltanschuung” (Chapter 7) was written for a book with that title (Peters & Stickney, 2018), but not used. This chapter provides an interpretation of the German notion of Weltanschuung and its significance for Wittgenstein. To examine one’s own worldview – even to be3come aware of it – is a mammoth intellectual and pedagogical achievement. It is also the basis for a new kind of intercultural understanding. Chapter 8 is entitled “Philosophy as pedagogy: Wittgenstein’s styles of thinking” published in 2001 that charts the use of the term “philosophy as pedagogy” as a way of understanding Wittgenstein’s philosophical style – one designed to enable us to escape the picture that holds us captive – and of providing a cultural and literary reading of his work. It also details Wittgenstein as a teacher and draws some connections between philosophy and teaching. Chapter 9, the final chapter, “Kinds of thinking, styles of reasoning”, builds on this understanding in contrast to dominant cognitive and logical models. The chapter emphasizes styles of thinking and reasoning that are revealed in the work of Nietzsche, Heidegger and Wittgenstein, and by the extension and development of their work in Critical Theory and French poststructuralist philosophy This book is one of five that I have written and edited over the years that also record the opportunity and collaboration of working with a group of excellent scholars and friends: James D. Marshall, Nicholas Burbules, Paul Smeyers and Jeff Stickney. I first worked with Jim Marshall on a book called Wittgenstein: Philosophy, Postmodernism and Pedagogy (1999) that was published in hardback in Henry Giroux’s series for Bergin and Garvey. As the blurb for the book indicates: [It] examines the parallels between the later Wittgenstein and French poststructuralism and investigate the direct appropriation of Wittgenstein’s work by poststructuralists. [The authors] discuss the most pressing problems facing philosophy and education in the postmodern condition:

Introduction

9

ethico-political lines of inquiry after the collapse of the grand narrative, other cultures in the curriculum, and the notion of postmodern science. Working with Jim was a real privilege. He was the supervisor on my PhD on Wittgenstein called “The Problem of Rationality” and he was an analytical thinker who had a genuine passion for scholarship. When I was invited to take up a position as Excellence Hire Professor at the University of Illinois it was largely due to Nick Burbules and Fazal Rizvi, two philosophers strongly influenced by Wittgenstein. Nick Burbules had kindly invited me to co-teach a class with him on Wittgenstein in the late 1990s. It was a fun class. When I arrived at Illinois it wasn’t long before we established a reading group with Paul Smeyers for a book that became Showing and Doing: Wittgenstein as a Pedagogical Philosopher based on the key notion of pedagogical philosopher developed in the work with Marshall, which I explained more fully in the Preface to the paperback edition (Peters, Burbules & Smeyers 2016). It was a reading that owed much to Stanley Cavell’s work and promoted forms of philosophy as cultural criticism. Again, it was a real privilege to work with these excellent scholars from whom I learned a great deal. In 2017 I published A Companion to Wittgenstein on Education: Pedagogical Investigations, working with Jeff Stickney, in my opinion, one the best next generation philosophers of education. This edited collection of forty-seven chapters is perhaps the most comprehensive text on Wittgenstein and education. I decided to include a chapter entitled “Wittgenstein’s Trials, Teaching and Cavell’s Romantic ‘Figure of the Child’” which takes issue with Cavell and investigates the so-called “Haibauer incident” when Wittgenstein hit a child who collapsed unconscious (Peters, 2017). I use the incident to explore Wittgenstein’s state of mind and his trials as a school teacher (see www.youtube. com/watch?v=RnCFOFIr6eQ). In 2018 Jeff Stickney and I collaborated again to co-author Wittgenstein’s Education: “A Picture Held Us Captive” to provide an overview of the connections between Wittgenstein’s later philosophy and his own training and practice as an educator. We argue for the centrality of education to Wittgenstein’s life and works, and discuss the importance of Wittgenstein’s training and dismissal as an elementary teacher in 1920–26. I have titled this work Wittgenstein, Anti-foundationalism, Technoscience and Philosophy of Education to indicate the kind of interpretation that I have been following and trying to develop since completing my PhD on Wittgenstein in 1984. It serves to emphasize the loss of faith in science as the paradigm of rationality and in philosophy as the foundational discipline concerned to provide universal standards of rationality valid for all actual and possible claims to knowledge has forced a re-evaluation of the nature of rationality. More generally it is associated with non-foundationist and fallibilist accounts of knowledge, especially those that emphasize a theoretical or

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Introduction

epistemological holism, and it is often seen to presuppose a coherentism or contextualism. Its detractors sometimes label it “relativist”, while its advocates, though not speaking with a common voice, prefer to call themselves by a variety of terms (non-foundationists, coherentists, contextualists, antiphilosophers and so on). This notion of rationality comes into view most clearly where questions about language are taken seriously: it focuses on the language-dependent nature of belief and emphasizes how beliefs form a web or system. This view of language, knowledge and certainty is central to becoming aware of one’s worldview as a precondition to changing it.

References Cavell, S. (1988) Declining Decline: Wittgenstein as a Philosopher of Culture. Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 31(3): 253–264. Crary, A. & Read, R. (2000) (eds) The New Wittgenstein. London: Routledge (2000). Herath, Charitha (2016) Wittgenstein in Tagore’s Dark Chamber. In: Aesthetik heute/ Aesthetics Today. BeitrŠge/Contributions. 39th International Wittgenstein Symposium. Stefan Majetschak & Anja Weiberg (Hrsg.) Kirchberg am Wechsel: ALWS. Horwich, Paul (2013) Was Wittgenstein Right? New York Times, March 3, 2013, https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/was-wittgenstein-right/? _php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0 Horwich, Paul (2016) Wittgenstein on Truth. Argumenta 2(1): 95–105. Maddy, Penelope (1988) Wittgenstein’s Anti-philosophy of Mathematics. In: Klaus Puhl (Ed.), 1993 Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Mathematics. Vienna: Verlag Holder-PichlerTempsky, 52–72. McGuinness, B. (1982) Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir with a Biographical Sketch by Georg Henrik von Wright. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Moyal-Sharrock, Danièle (2004a) (eds.). Understanding Wittgenstein’s On Certainty. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Nietzsche, F. (1874/1990) Nietzsche’s Third Untimely Meditation: Schopenhauer as Educator. Translated by D. Pellerin. London: Gateway. Nietzsche, F. (1882/2012) The Gay Science. Ed. Bernard Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, F. (1992) The Genealogy of Morals. London: The Athlone Press. Peters, Michael A. (2017) Les Procès Et L’enseignement De Wittgenstein, Et La « Figure De L’enfant » Romantique Chez Cavell. A Contrario 25(2): 13–37. www.cairn.info/ revue-a-contrario-2017-2-page-13.htm Peters, Michael A., Burbules, N., & Smeyers, P. (2016) Showing and Doing: Wittgenstein as a Pedagogical Philosopher. Boulder: Paradigm, Reprinted Paperback, New York: Routledge. Peters, Michael A. & Marshall, J.D. (1999). Wittgenstein: Philosophy, Postmodernism, Pedagogy. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey. Peters, Michael A. & Stickney, Jeff (2017) (Eds.). Companion to Wittgenstein on Education: Pedagogical Investigations. Singapore: Springer. Peters, Michael A. & Stickney, Jeff (2018). Wittgenstein’s Education: ‘A Picture Held Us Captive’. Singapore: Springer.

Introduction

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Schorske, C. E. (1980) Fin-De-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture. New York: Vintage. Wittgenstein, L. (1970a) Zettel, G. E. M. Anscombe & G. H. von Wright, eds; G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Wittgenstein, L. (1970b). Culture and value, G. von Wright, Eds. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. (1972). Philosophical Investigations, G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. Oxford: Blackwell (Reprint of English Text with index).

Chapter 1

Wittgenstein, Lyotard and the philosophy of technoscience

The truly apocalyptic view of the world is that things do not repeat themselves. It isn’t absurd, e.g., to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity; that the idea of great progress is a delusion, along with the idea that the truth will ultimately be known; that there is nothing good or desirable about scientific knowledge and that mankind, in seeking it, is falling into a trap. It is by no means obvious that this is not how things are. – Ludwig Wittgenstein (1980), Culture and Value, p. 56e

An accidental reading: Wittgenstein–Lyotard Sometimes decisions about what to read especially as a younger scholar are determining for one’s entire intellectual trajectory. Systematic approaches to courses and reading lists belie the accidental reading of a text that excites the imagination and somehow combines or blends with other interests to suggest new research directions. This is certainly the case for me. Immediately after completing a PhD thesis on a Wittgenstein and the problem of rationality (Peters 1984) I accidentally discovered Lyotard’s use of Wittgenstein’s concept of language games that I used to articulate the concept of the “postmodern condition” as a context for investigating fundamental changes to science and the role of the university (Peters 1989). Lyotard’s use of Wittgenstein “language games” was a major creative move in the reception of Wittgenstein’s thought in France, in the same way that Wittgenstein had influenced Habermas’s discourse theory in the 1980s. In my PhD I had argued that the loss of faith in science as the paradigm of rationality and in philosophy as the foundational discipline concerned to provide universal standards of rationality valid for all actual and possible claims to knowledge has forced a re-evaluation of the nature of rationality. I contrasted rationality construed as a mode or method which will lead to knowledge and truth and rationality construed as constitutive of any sustaining system of beliefs, the latter I argued was a notion that is closely allied to considerations such as intelligibility and the implicit norms of different realms of discourse. I wrote:

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Of these two notions, the former can be seen as embodying the traditional and fundamental claim of philosophy to underwrite the rationality of knowledge and belief systems. It has been given a formal, algorithmic character and tends to be associated with absolutist [universal] and foundationalist conceptions of knowledge. Often it is seen to presuppose some version of the correspondence theory of truth. Typically, adherents of this view assume a justified true belief account of knowledge so that rationality is seen to consist in holding only those claims that are justifiable. On the other hand, I argued that the constitutive notion is associated with anti-foundationist and fallibilist accounts of knowledge, especially those, which emphasize a theoretical or epistemological holism, and is associated with antifoundationist and fallibilist accounts of knowledge, especially those, which emphasize a theoretical or epistemological holism, and is often seen to presuppose a coherentist or instrumentalist version of truth. As explained earlier, sometimes critics suggest that this notion is 'relativist' because there is no foundationalist absolute or independent standard to adjudicate between competing claims. Those who accept the constitutive notion of rationality notion often embrace an account of meaning and language that emphasise a form of coherentism or contextualism where beliefs are seen as part of a language-dependent system or web of belief. On this view there is no meta-language within which to resolve questions of rationality. Indeed, there is only language, according to Wittgenstein, which is an infinite set of 'language-games' embedded in social practices beyond which we cannot go in terms of the justification of belief. As a meta-interpretive or hermeneutical principle in general, I suggested that it was consistent to view Wittgenstein in his native Viennese context at the turn of the century and at the break-up of the Habsburg Empire, when the national independence movement reached its peak in the early twentieth century. I argued, following Janik and Toulmin’s (1973) path-breaking book Wittgenstein’s Vienna, that Wittgenstein needs to be understood in term of his native Vienna and the Austrian mind (Schorske 1980; Johnston 1983). The fin-de-siècle movement of Viennese Succession (based on Klimt, Moser, Hoffman, Wagner and others) provided the visual presentation of Vienna around 1900, contributed to an intellectual flowering inspiring such thinkers as Mach, Buber, Freud, Brentano, Husserl, Lucas and, of course, Wittgenstein, Kraus and Mauthner. It was a sociology of intellectual history that helped to contextualize “Wittgenstein’s Vienna” and to attest to an underlying anti-fundamentalist contextualist epistemology. Lyotard more so than any analytic philosophers I have read understood the importance of cultural and intellectual background of Wittgenstein. A big part of my academic life has been pretty well determined by this “accidental” reading of Wittgenstein and Lyotard. I have been crossing the boundaries between them ever since. In an essay entitled “Philosophy and Education: ‘After’ Wittgenstein” (Peters 1995a) I developed an argument that suggested that Wittgenstein can be seen as embracing a Spenglerian view of philosophy as a form of cultural criticism and as

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exhibiting important precursor elements in his thinking which mark him out as a philosopher who anticipated central aspects of the current debate surrounding the re-evaluation of the culture of modernity. I emphasized the creative appropriation of Wittgenstein’s notion of language games by Jean-François Lyotard, in order to argue the case for the “postmodern condition.” I also suggested that Lyotard selfconsciously sites his work as taking place “after” Wittgenstein. Lyotard’s creative appropriation of Wittgenstein, I argued, provides the starting-point for a philosophy of education that can seriously engage the analytic-Continental and the modernitypostmodernity divides. Later in various publications I argued that Wittgenstein and Lyotard developed their philosophies as a response to the question of nihilism, the legitimation of knowledge and the crisis of foundationalism and language (Peters & Marshall 1999; Peters 2006). I corresponded with Lyotard for a year – he always wrote in long-hand and in French – before he consented to write a brief Foreword to my edited collection Education and the Postmodern Condition (Peters 1995b). I had arranged to meet him through Bill Readings, who had translated Lyotard’s Political Writings which he asked me to review for his journal Surfaces. In the review I linked Lyotard to Wittgenstein’s anti-scientism: In “Wittgenstein ‘After’” (Chapter 5) Lyotard acknowledges the way in which his thinking takes place “after,” and links up with Wittgenstein, clarifying the diversity and incommensurability of language games as Wittgenstein’s response to the general sense of nihilism and delegitimation characterizing European culture following the Second World War. The transition from “language games” to “phrase regimes” and their linkages, therefore, is Lyotard’s major innovation and response to the ethicopolitical demands following the loss of innocence in a time “diseased by language” and dominated by “industrial technoscience.” (Peters 1995c) Bill Readings had invited me to the University of Montreal to give a paper on Hermann Hesse’s Glass Bead Game as a prototype of the internet. It wasn’t to be because Bill Readings died in a small plane accident a couple of months before I was to arrive in Montreal. Lyotard understood Wittgenstein’s anti-scientism and the claim that the scientific method is superior to all other means of learning or gaining knowledge. Wittgenstein negative cultural outlook was conditioned by Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1926), as von Wright has noted, and others like Beale and Kidd (2017) who suggest that Wittgenstein’s anti-scientism “sheds light upon and reveals connections between some of the central areas of his thinking” (p. 5). Wittgenstein held a negative attitude about the role of science in modern civilization and its overwhelming confidence that it can resolve all problems and that it is only a matter of time before it extends its frontiers to encompass the whole of life. Wittgenstein’s anti-scientism that characterizes his view of modern civilization is the cultural outlook that connects the broader issues of naturalism

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and empiricism. As Anna Boncompagni (2018) points out in a review of Beale and Kidd (2017), scientism for Wittgenstein also carries the corollaries: science has the right, if not the duty, to extend its dominion into any territory; the scientific method is “the” method of inquiry par excellence; other disciplines, if they are to attain knowledge at all, ought to conform to the scientific method; any domain of human experience can and should be reduced to the natural, empirical domain of science (https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/wittgenstein-and-scientism/) Wittgenstein’s anti-scientism also conditions those that embrace his work in philosophy of science and interprets Wittgenstein’s skepticism as a broad reevaluation not only of logicism, the search for a pure language, but also a repudiation of the principles of logical positivism or empiricism that, ironically, the Tractatus had helped to inspire. Wittgenstein shied away from the scientific worldview that positivist like Schlick and Neurath had made central the manifestos of the Vienna Circle. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus as one of the origins of analytic philosophy had inclined members of the Circle to accept the correspondence theory of truth and also conditioned the search for a verificationist concept of meaning encapsulated in Wittgenstein’s dictum “What can be said at all, can be said clearly.” In this light Popper, on the fringe of the circle, sought a demarcation between metaphysical and scientific statements to arrive at the concept of falsification (based on a understanding of the problem of logic of induction). Even the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus displayed an antiscientism in suggesting that in that work he was concerned to seek a demarcation of ethics from the verifiable statements of natural science. Where Wittgenstein was interested in the “unsayable” and “ineffable” the positivists were exploring the ramifications of an empiricist theory of meaning. By the time that Wittgenstein was persuaded to rejoin the circle by Ramsey after giving up philosophy and teaching for seven years, Wittgenstein had returned to Cambridge and philosophy in 1929 and also had begun to question seriously his earlier doctrine and the fundamental tenets of logical positivism. Wittgenstein’s anti-scientism also elucidates new work on Wittgenstein and technology as the editors of a special issue of Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology indicate in a recent call for papers: Few philosophers of technology enlist Wittgenstein’s work when thinking about technology, and scholars of Wittgenstein pay scant attention to remarks about technology in his work. This double neglect of (aspects of) Wittgenstein’s work is symptomatic of a more general gap between philosophy of language and philosophy of technology. This special issue of Techné: Research in Philosophy of Technology, entitled “Wittgenstein and Philosophy of Technology,” aims to close these gaps with innovative research papers that use Wittgenstein to conceptually develop existing

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investigations in philosophy of technology and/or to better understand and evaluate technologies in the 21st century. (https://funkmichael.com/cfp-techne-special-issue-wittgensteinand-philosophy-of-technology/) Wittgenstein and philosophy of technology gave a kind of basis for an interpretation of technoscience. Don Ihde (2009), the distinguished philosopher of technology, uses the concept “technoscience” to argue for the relativity of knowledge to technologies, a view of the entanglement of science and technology now widely accepted in philosophy of science. Ihde (2009), influenced by Wittgenstein, wants to examine scientific practices historically and the ways in which these construct the knowledge. He describes his approach to technology as “empirical” by which he means that he attends to the history of actual technologies and he contrasts his empirical approach with previous accounts of technology that tended to be transcendental with a focus on technology as though it were a single, reified thing. Such a position allows him to contrast industrial technology with the way electronic communication and information technologies seem to differ by through a focus on users in connection with one another. Ihde and Evan Selinger (2003) edited the collection Chasing Technoscience: Matrix for Materiality, focusing on the work of Bruno Latour, Donna Harraway, Andrew Pickering and Don Ihde who provides an introduction to the development of the philosophy of technology in the 1980s with the publications of his own Technics and Praxis (Ihde 1979) and Latour and Woolgar’s (1979) Laboratory Life. The use of the term “technoscience” focused on political interventions and their relations to social movements charting the rise of philosophy of technology, radical science, the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), and more recently, the growth of Open Science. This convergence share the assumption influenced strongly by Wittgenstein that the scholars should study of actual production of scientific knowledge in practice. SSK was built on the basis of Wittgenstein’s work developed further by Mary Douglas, Mary Hesse and Thomas Kuhn. The “strong programme” was developed by David Bloor and Barry Barnes at the University of Edinburgh in the 1970s as a postKuhnian, Wittgenstein-inspired program (Barnes, Bloor, & Henry 1996; Bloor 1997) and Harry Collins at Bath. This convergence of shared assumptions of materiality, actual practice and the importance of historical studies were further enhanced by the anthropology and ethnomethodology of science and the feminist studies of science by Sandra Harding and Donna Harraway. Ihde singles out Steven Sharpin and Simon Schafer’s (1985) Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life as the strategic text that was among the first to examine the social formation of science. The history of technoscience suggests a shift away from a theory of applied science model to one where new digital technologies blur the boundaries with science. Channell (2017) claims that science and technology are indistinguishable from each other partly because they are symbiotic and interdependent rather than

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one being dependent of the other. However, some scholars argue that in the second half of the twentieth century in the shift from industrial to digital technologies, science has become subsumed by technology (Forman 2007). It’s not my purpose here to rehearse the history of the philosophy of technology here but simply to note the significance of Wittgenstein’s work for philosophy of technology and for accepting a concept of “technoscience.” Most recently, Michael Funk (2018) writing for a special issue of Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology, “Wittgenstein and Philosophy of Technology” suggests: “Wittgenstein is still underestimated in the philosophy of technology – although his thoughtful conceptualizations of language, social practice and technology bear important methodical insights for current technosciences like synthetic biology, robotics and many others.” The curious thing is that there is little cross-over or recognition of parallel streams in Continental and Anglo-American thought.

Philosophy of science Perhaps, the accidental reading was not entirely accidental. While a New Zealand secondary school geography teacher in my first year in the early 1970s I was introduced to philosophy of science at the University of Canterbury which was my major for a BSc based in philosophy and geography. I was immediately attracted to the subject. As far as I can remember the course began with Frege, Russell and early Wittgenstein. The later Wittgenstein was not taught in New Zealand universities at that time, and in some departments he was not considered as philosopher. The course then moved to reading Popper and Kuhn. The Popper–Kuhn debate that had taken place in 1965 when a relatively young Kuhn at 43 and historian of science was pitted against the older Popper who was 63 at the time and was regarded as establishment (Fuller 2003). Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery had been first published in German in 1934 (Logik der Forschung) and was used as the basis of a rewrite for the English edition (Munz 1988). As a German escapee-Jew Popper emigrated to New Zealand to take up a position as professor of philosophy at Canterbury University College, Christchurch, in 1937. His work in philosophy of science was virtually unknown in New Zealand and he got into quarrels with Dr Sutherland, the head of department, over the amount of teaching expected and the lack of research time. While at Canterbury Popper wrote his second major work in two volumes, The Open Society and Its Enemies, motivated by a state phobia and directed against totalitarianism (Munz 1988). In 1945 he was offered a position at the London School of Economics, engineered by his fellow Austrian, Friedrich von Hayek (Wittgenstein’s cousin) who had help edit Popper’s work for publication. Even although Popper was pleased to leave New Zealand he had left behind a strong impact and legacy. Popper’s critical rationalism was accepted in most philosophy departments and strongly supported by Alan Musgrave at Otago University, and others.

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Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn 1962), in contrast to Popper’s critical rationalism, as most people know, was a thesis about the history of science that pitted “normal science,” developed by a process of accumulation, against “revolutionary science,” structured by radical paradigm shifts based on the discovery of anomalies. Kuhn and Popper met in 1965 at an event organized by Imre Lakatos who with Musgrave edited Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Lakatos & Musgrave 1970) published five years after the event. Needless to say, this text was one of the main readings in the course. The Kuhn vs Popper debate was regarded by many as “a landmark in 20thcentury philosophy of science” (Fuller 2003: 13) and as Steve Fuller (2003:14) writes the debate took shape in stark oppositional terms: “In terms of scholastic affiliations, Popper is portrayed as objectivist, realist and positivist, while Kuhn appears as subjectivist, relativist and historicist.” My interest was squarely in Wittgenstein rather than Popper, even though Wittgenstein’s (1953) Philosophical Investigations was not taught. My predisposition had been determined somewhat earlier. I had spent a year living in Peter Munz’s house in Wellington in 1970 while he was on sabbatical. Munz had been the only person to be a student of both Wittgenstein and Popper. Munz (1986) had made the case against Wittgenstein (and Rorty and Kuhn) and for Popper, who, while an anti-foundationalist, was not a relativist like Wittgenstein. Later in Beyond Wittgenstein’s Poker: New Light on Popper and Wittgenstein Munz (2004) argued the later Wittgenstein and Popper ought to be seen as complementing one another. I had the benefits of Peter’s conversations and free access to his personal library that included many books and pamphlets by Popper, with messages in the fly-leaf and personally autographed. I never saw the choice as Wittgenstein or Popper but I became interested in the Wittgenstein-inspired philosophers of science, in particular, Stephen Toulmin, Paul Feyerabend and Thomas Kuhn. Toulmin was a student of Wittgenstein’s (and the physicist Dirac) and had embraced his skepticism of science and anti-rationalism. As previously mentioned, his Wittgenstein’s Vienna (Toulmin & Janik 1973), coauthored with Allan Janik, was a strategic text for me that changed forever my view of Wittgenstein as a placeholder in Cambridge philosophy and the analytic tradition. Feyerabend published several papers on Wittgenstein discussing The Philosophical Investigations (1953). Anscombe had provide Feyerabend with manuscripts of Wittgenstein’s later work which Feyerabend said “exercised a profound influence” upon him and as John Preston (2016) notes: Feyerabend planned to study with Wittgenstein in Cambridge, and Wittgenstein was prepared to take him on as a student, but he died before Feyerabend arrived in England. Karl Popper became his supervisor instead …

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Feyerabend became a strong critic of Popper’s critical rationalism and of any rationalist attempt to lay down rules for scientific method. Feyerabend’s (1975) Against Method was also on the reading list for this course. I found Feyerabend’s “epistemological anarchism” immensely appealing. Kuhn while at the University of California at Berkeley was introduced to the works of Wittgenstein and Feyerabend by Stanley Cavell in the early 1960s and discussed his Structure with Feyerabend. Some scholars have remarked how the recent revival of pragmatism can be understood in the context of Wittgenstein’s anti-foundationalism (Hmiel 2016). Certainly, this was a feature of Wittgenstein thought, along with his anti-representationalism based a meaning-as-use conception, that figured largely in my thinking. Wittgenstein’s anti-foundationalism also became the basis for social constructivism in sociology developed by the likes of Ernst von Glasersfeld and David Bloor, although I never read this literature until much later. Having completed my philosophy of science major I could not stay away from philosophy or Wittgenstein and went back to university again to study for a Master’s degree where I engineered an all-paper Masters with most papers on some aspect of Wittgenstein’s thought. I was the only student of Laurence Goldstein’s course on the Tractatus when he visited Auckland. His course which was a painstaking analysis of every word and concept in the Tractatus made me realize that I did not want to become a Wittgenstein specialist. My German was not good enough and the narrowness of scholarship also did not encourage me. I scored a “first” and was offered a scholarship so I decided to combine my interests in Wittgenstein and Education to pursue a PhD on the topic of “the problem of rationality” in relation to the later Wittgenstein which I completed in 1984. I read Jean-Francois Lyotard’s (1984) The Postmodern Condition by accident in 1984, founding it on the library shelf. I was really taken by Lyotard’s use of Wittgenstein’s “language-games” to analyze the social bond as a series of “phrase regimes” as he put it later in The Differend (Lyotard 1988), even although I saw his interpretation as a form of creative appropriation. Lyotard was following Bourdieu’s Wittgenstein take to interpret language-games as social practices. What interested me was Lyotard’s reception of Wittgenstein and the French reception more generally. It seemed to me a way out of the straight jacket of conceptual analysis of the so-called “London School” in philosophy of education led by R. S. Peters and Paul Hirst that was based on “the revolution in philosophy” introduced by Wittgenstein and others. I found this interpretation totally alien and could not understand how Peters and his colleagues at the London Institute could practice philosophy as a form of foundationalist conceptual analysis based on the search for necessary and sufficient conditions for the use of educational concepts. In 1989 I wrote a paper entitled “Techno-science, Rationality and the University” (Peters 1989) as a discussion of Lyotard’s (1984) The Postmodern Condition and based on an implicit understanding of Wittgenstein as a antifoundationalist thinker. I used the term “technoscience” based on Lyotard’s use without too much thought. It seemed to follow on quite naturally from

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Heidegger’s inversion of the traditional science/technology dualism in his attempts to understand Western metaphysics as a form of techne as part of poesis and its use in connection with the concept of epistemology. (Techne is thus considered a kind of knowing from whence we derive “know-how.”) Lyotard’s use of the term also seemed to echo the tradition of French historical epistemology championed by Gaston Bachelard (1953) who popularized the term that characterized the long-term history of tool use and technology that only became combined with a nascent science during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries during the European Enlightenment. Both Lyotard (1984) and Bruno Latour (1987) picked up on the term and used it in both a descriptive-analytic sense – the decisive role of technology-led science – and a critical-deconstructive sense to analyze scientific practices.

Philosophy of technoscience? “Techno-science, Rationality and the University” (Peters 1989) focused on what Lyotard called “the problem of the legitimation of science” in the postmodern age when the traditional legitimating “myths” or “metanarratives” of the speculative unity of all knowledge and its humanist emancipatory potential had allegedly fallen away to reveal that knowledge and power were two sides of the same question. The method adopted from Lyotard was the analysis of language games signaling both a return to pragmatics and an elevation of narrative as a mode of thinking in its own right. The subtext was a polemic against Habermas and his attempts to complete the “project of modernity” to preserve the Enlightenment’s emancipatory impulse in the fully transparent communicational society where validity claims implicit in ordinary talk can be discursively redeemed at the level of discourse. I went on to argue: Lyotard’s single point of departure in attempting to describe and chart the transition in Western societies to the postindustrial age is scientific knowledge. He argues that the “leading” sciences and technologies – cybernetics, telematics, informatics, and the growth of computer languages – are all significantly language based and have transformed the two principal functions of knowledge: research and the transmission of acquired learning. The technical transformations wrought by a continued miniaturization and commercialization of knowledge machines will further change the way in which “learning is acquired, classified, made available, and exploited.” Knowledge is exteriorized with respect to the “knower,” and the status of the learner and the teacher is transformed into a commodity relationship of “supplier” and “user”: “Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorized in a new production: in both cases, the goal is exchange.” (Peters 1989: 98)

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Already we can see here the significance of a semiological understanding of technology as a language based on a deep code that brings informatics into line with the new DNA biology understood at the micro-level (not yet nanotechnology). As I then noted: This scenario, Lyotard admits, is not original or even necessarily true, but it does have strategic value in allowing us to see the effects of the transformation of knowledge on public power and civil institutions, and it raises afresh the central problem of legitimation. Who decides what is “true” or what is to be regarded as “scientific,” as belonging to the discourse of a scientific community? (Peters 1989) If anything the outlines of this “theory” – of a technology-led science reunified at the nano-level and applicable to the human body and brain in the new neuro-cognitive sciences – have remained true and as prophetic as other parts of his thesis in application to the role and status of the university that he foregrounded in his novel analysis of Austinian performance theory rendered by Lyotard as “the logic of performativity”: as he argues, anticipating Foucault’s “governmentality,” “In the computer age, the question of knowledge is now more than ever a question of government” (Lyotard 1984: 9). He traces through the consequences of the crisis of metaphysical philosophy suggesting: “To the obsolescence of the metanarrative apparatus of legitimation corresponds, most notably, the crisis of metaphysical philosophy and of the university institution which in the past relied on it” (p. xxiv). For Lyotard there is no principle of unity and there is no universal metalanguage in which to understand science. The reality is that there are many sciences as there are languages and, as Wittgenstein argued new languages are added to the old ones, like suburbs to an old town. Lyotard acknowledges Wittgenstein’s examples of the symbolism of chemistry and the notation of infinitesimal calculus. Less than fifty years on, he argues, we can substantially add to the list: Lyotard mentions the growth of machine languages, the matrices of game theory, new systems of musical notation, systems of notation for nondenotative forms of logic, the language of the genetic code, graphs of phonological structures, and so on. By reference to modern developments in logic and arithmetic, Lyotard attempts to show that the principle of a universal metalanguage required for demonstrating the truth of denotative statements has given way to the principle of a plurality of formal and axiomatic systems. In terms of the properties required of the syntax of any formal system (consistency, completeness, decidability, and independence of axioms) it is possible to generalize from Godel’s incompleteness theorem that all formal systems have internal limitations. The shift from the principle of a universal metalanguage to one of

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plurality is at the heart of the break from a universal rationality (with its classical metanarrative of legitimation given in the discourse of philosophy) to a “breaking apart” of reason and the development of microrationalities confined in terms of the multiplicity of language games, defined by their irreducible rules. Scientific research does use, and already has used, methods (languages) outside the concept of classical reason. These languages, however, are subject to the pragmatic condition, that is “each must formulate its own rules and petition the addressee to accept them.” (Peters 1989: 103) I think the drift of Lyotard’s argument is relatively clear and my take on his work make the case for technoscience and its relation to the university except to note that Lyotard also addresses the question of the production of proof arguing that it has increasingly fallen under the sway of the game of technology that unlike science whose goal is truth, follows the principle of optimal performance (maximizing output, minimizing input). Its goal or criterion is efficiency rather than truth (the denotative game) or justice (the prescriptive game). Progress in knowledge is thus subordinated to investment in technology and “being right” is a product of research expenditure, and data-driven science. Science thus becomes a force of production – “a movement in the circulation of capital” – and narratives of legitimation are replaced by the new ideological legitimation of science promulgated by the state and corporations in terms of the value of efficiency, which has as its goal power rather than truth. University education as the transmission of knowledge follows a similar route. The general effect of the performativity principle is to subordinate the institutions of higher learning to the existing power, that is, in terms of legitimating myths, subordinating truth (as it figures in the emancipatory narrative) to efficiency and power. I found Lyotard’s analysis compelling and I think it still has much application today. The literature in educational theory on Lyotard is quite large, with over fifty papers in Educational Philosophy and Theory alone.

Technoscience: a history of a concept The notion of technoscience plays a strong theoretical role in Lyotard’s analysis. Yet he does not invent the term. The Belgian philosopher Gilbert Hottois (2019) indicates that he first used the term in the mid-1970s and specifically in a 1978 article “Ethique at Techno-science” He says he coined the term because he wanted to raise practical questions that were hived off by linguistic philosophies that sealed themselves from reality and from the technologization and mathematicization of contemporary science. In “Technoscience” Hottois (2019) traces the pre-history of the term to Francis Bacon who explicitly associated knowledge and power and Gaston Bachelard, who in “Le nouvel esprit scientifique (Bachelard 1934; “The new scientific spirit”) places the new scientific spirit under the preponderant influence of the mathematical and technical

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operations.” He credits himself with inventing the term and then plots its development in both Lyotard, and Latour where: “The technosciences refer to those sciences created by human beings in real-world socioeconomic-political contexts, by conflicts and alliances among humans and also among humans and nonhumans (institutions, machines, and animals among others)” (Hottois 2019). He refers to the work of Donna Harraway which “illustrates well the diffusion of technoscience crossed with the postmodern and social-constructivist discussions in North America.” Turning to Europe and Latin America he first mentions Heidegger and the Spanish philosopher Javier Echeverría whose La revolución tecnocientífica (“The technoscience revolution”) linked to an established political usage in Europe where there is a tendency to attribute to technoscience a host of contemporary ills such as technicism and technocracy, multinational capitalism, economic neo-liberalism, pollution, the depletion of natural resources, the climate change, globalization, planetary injustice, the disappearance of human values, and more, all related to U.S. imperialism. Technoscience here is linked to concepts of Big Science as exemplified in the Manhattan Project and firmly linked to the “industrial-military-technology” nexus funded largely through research universities. He writes: What distinguishes contemporary science as technoscience is that, unlike the philosophical enterprise of science identified as a fundamentally linguistic and theoretical activity, it is physically manipulative, interventionist, and creative. Determining the function of a gene whether in order to create a medicine or to participate in the sequencing of the human genome leads to technoscientific knowledge-power-doing. In a technoscientific civilization, distinctions between theory and practice, fundamental and applied, become blurred. Philosophers are invited to define human death or birth, taking into account the consequences of these definitions in the practicalethical plans, that is to say, in regard to what will or will not be permitted (for example, the harvesting of organs or embryonic experimentation). In particular, Hottois (2019) seems intent on using the term technoscience in relation to questions concerning “the patentability of living organisms” as exemplified in “transgenic mice (Onco mice) used as a model for research on the genesis of certain cancers” and technoscientific “application to the natural (as a living organisms formed by the evolutionary process) and manipulated (as a contingent creation of human culture).” To quote Hottois (2019) one last time: What will become of the human being in a million years? From this perspective the investigation of human beings appears open not only to symbolic invention (definitions, images, interpretations, values), but also to techno-physical

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invention (experimentation, mutations, prosthetics, cyborgs). A related examination places the technosciences themselves within the scope of an evolution that is more and more affected by conscious human intervention. Both approaches raise questions and responsibilities that are not foreign to ethics and politics but that invite us at the same time to consider with a critical eye all specific ethics and politics because the issues exceed all conceivable societal projects. Hottois suggests that the term “technoscience” was introduced into discourse independently by French and American scholars during the 1970s although the approaches were quite different: the American use represented “a factual amalgam” while Hottois own use reflected a trans/posthuman perspective levelled at a political awareness of the trajectory of the human species. Technoscience based on utilitarian values replaces science as a pure and disinterested approach to knowledge. This is a reversal of values. Referring to Forman (2007) Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent (2008) suggests: Whereas modernity was characterized by the high cultural rank of science and scientists – “the primacy of science to and for technology” – postmodernity is characterized by the primacy of technology over science along with a loss of confidence and trustworthiness of scientists. Elsewhere Bernadette Vincent and Sacha Loeve (2018) note that in France “‘technoscience’ means the contamination of science by management and capitalism.” They defend the notion providing epistemological, ontological, politico-ethical profiles. My original reasons for embracing an interpretation of Lyotard’s engagement with Wittgenstein, and a Wittgensteinian-inspired philosophy of technoscience, if anything, are stronger than when I wrote “Techno-science, Rationality and the University” (Peters 1989). In terms of a growing literature in philosophy of technology especially the work of Ihde, and several decades of social studies of sciences in its various guises, the concept would seem warranted. It also makes sense of Wittgenstein’s influence in terms of an antifoundationalist view in naturalist epistemology, one focused more closely on historical and cultural studies of science, anchored in the associated notion of practice and the cultural turn more broadly, and turned away from universal grand transcendental arguments. In particular, there is a historical argument here, suggested by Forman (2007) that technoscience in postmodernity is very different from science in modernity – the shift from industrial science to digital technosciences with the rise of the new digital platform technologies – AI, deep learning, robotics, and quantum computing – that deepens the characteristics Lyotard perceived including the commercialization of research, the relationship to the neoliberal “knowledge economy,” the logic of performativity, and the shift from Big Science to Big Data and, finally, to Big Tech.

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In the 1970s Wittgenstein was more alluded to than interpreted. R. S. Peters and the London School referred to Wittgenstein to talk of “the revolution in philosophy” and to warrant a foundationalist project in conceptual analysis. A Companion to Wittgenstein on Education: Pedagogical Investigations (Peters & Stickney 2017) explored Wittgenstein as a pedagogical philosopher utilizing the work of some forty-five scholars. We might say that this represents a considerable change in philosophy of education and a new willingness to engage in something more than exegesis. Wittgenstein is a notoriously difficult philosopher and I can understand why his work is not widely known and appreciated in education. In Wittgenstein’s Education: “A Picture Held us Captive,” working with Jeff Stickney, I tried to provide a brief introduction to his thought for academics and students that focused on Wittgenstein as a teacher alongside his relationship to education and to a Weltanschuung motivated by the problem of our time that pedagogically “a picture held us captive” (Peters & Stickney 2018). I sincerely hope that this collection of essays helps the reader to appreciate the creative genius of Wittgenstein, who, as a pedagogical philosopher, provided an antifoundationalist epistemology, an antiscientism and account of practice as the basis for belief, knowledge and understanding, and therefore also of education, learning and teaching.

References Bachelard, G (1934) Le nouvel esprit scientifique (The new scientific spirit). Paris: Les Presses universitaires de France. Bachelard, Gaston (1953) La Materialisme Rationel, Paris: PUF. Barnes, B., Bloor, D., & Henry, J. (1996) Scientific Knowledge: A Sociological Analysis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Beale, J (2017) Wittgenstein’s Anti-scientism. In: J. Beale & Ian James Kidd (Eds.), Wittgenstein and Scientism. London: Routledge, 59–80. Beale, Jonathan & Kidd, Ian James (eds.) (2017) Wittgenstein and Scientism. London: Routledge. Bensaude-Vincent, Bernadette (2008) Technoscience and Convergence: A Tranmutation [Sic] of Values?. Omrod/Alsfeld, Germany: Summerschool on Ethics of Converging Technologies, Dormotel Vogelsberg. Bloor, D. (1997) Wittgenstein, Rules and Institutions. London: Routledge. Channell, David (2017) A History of Technoscience: Erasing the Boundaries between Science and Technology. London: Routledge. Forman, Paul (2007) The Primacy of Science in Modernity, of Technology in Postmodernity, and of Ideology. History of Technology, History and Technology 23(1): 1–152. Fuller, S. (2003) Kuhn vs. Popper: The Struggle for the Soul of Science. New York: Columbia University Press. Funk, Michael (2018) Repeatability and Methodical Actions in Uncertain Situations www. pdcnet.org/techne/content/techne_2018_0999_12_3_88. Hmiel, John Erik (2016) Wittgenstein and the Genesis of Neo-pragmatism in American Thought. History of European Ideas 42(1): 131–149.

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Hottois, Gilbert (2019) Technoscience. Trans. By James A. Lynch. Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Ethics. Encyclopedia.comwww.encyclopedia.com/science/encyclope dias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/technoscience Ihde, Don (1979) Technics and Praxis: The Philosophy of Technology. Boston: Reidel. Ihde, Don & Selinger, Evan (2003) (Eds.) Chasing Technoscience: Matrix for Materiality. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ihde, Don (2009) Postphenomenology and Technoscience: The Peking University Lectures. New York: SUNY Press. Janik, A. & Toulmin, S. (1973) Wittgenstein’s Vienna. New York: Simon and Schuster. Johnston, William (1983) The Austrian Mind: An Intellectual and Social History, 1848-1938. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Kuhn, T. (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicagio: University of Chicago Press. Lakatos, I. & Musgrave, A. (1970) Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Latour, Bruno (1987) Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno & Woolgar, Steve (1979) Laboratory Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Loeve, Sacha, Guchet, Xavier & Vincent, Bernadette Bensaude (2018) French Philosophy of Technology: Classical Readings and Contemporary Approaches. New York: Springer. Lyotard, Jean-François (1988) The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (Le différend). Trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele, Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Lyotard, Jean-François (1984) The Postmodern Condition. Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Lyotard, Jean-François (1993) Political Writings. Translated by Bill Readings and Kevin Paul Geiman. Foreword by Bill Readings. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Munz, Peter (1986) Our Knowledge of the Growth of Knowledge: Popper or Wittgenstein? London: Routledge. Munz, Peter (1988) Popper, Karl Raimund, Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, Te Ara the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/4p18/popperkarl-raimund (accessed 24 June 2019). Munz, Peter Beyond Wittgenstein’s Poker: New Light on Popper and Wittgenstein. London: Ashgate. Peters, Michael A. (1995a) Philosophy and Education: ‘after’ Wittgenstein. In: P. Smeyers & J. D. Marshall (Eds.), Philosophy and Education: Accepting Wittgenstein’s Challenge, 189–204. Philosophy and EducationVol. 6Dordrecht: Springer. Peters, Michael A. (1992) Performance and Accountability in ‘post-industrial Society’: The Crisis of British Universities. Studies in Higher Education 17(2): 123–139. Peters, Michael A. (1984) The Problem of Rationality: An Historicist Approach for Philosophy of Education. Unpublished PhD, University of Auckland. Peters, Michael A. (1989) Techno-science, Rationality and the University: Lyotard on the “postmodern Condition”. Educational Theory 39(2): 93–105. Peters, Michael A. (1991) Re-reading Touraine: Postindustrialism and the Future of the University. Sites 23(Spring): 63–83. Peters, Michael A. (1995b) (ed.) Education and the Postmodern Condition. Foreword by J-F Lyotard. Wesport, CT: Bergin & Garvey.

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Peters, Michael A. (1995c) Review of Lyotard’s Political Writings, Surfaces, https://pum. umontreal.ca/revues/surfaces/vol4/peters.html Peters, Michael A. (1997/2004) Lyotard, Marxism and Education: The Problem of Knowledge Capitalism1. In: J.D. Marshall (Ed.), Poststructuralism, Philosophy, Pedagogy. Philosophy and Education Vol. 12, Dordrecht: Springer. Peters, Michael A. (2004) “Performative,” “Performativity” and the Culture of Performance. In: Knowledge Management in the New Economy (Parts 1 & 2) Management in Education, Vol. 18. 1&12. Peters, Michael A. (2006) Lyotard, Nihilism and Education. Studies in Philosophy and Education 25(4): 303–314. Peters, Michael A. & Marshall, James (1999) Wittgenstein: Postmodernism, Philosophy, Pedagogy. Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey. Peters, Michael A. & Stickney, Jeff (2017) A Companion to Wittgenstein on Education: Pedagogical Investigations. Singapore: Springer. Peters, Michael A. & Stickney, Jeff (2018) Wittgenstein’s Education: “A Picture Held Us Captive”. Singapore: Springer. Preston, John, (2016) Paul Feyerabend, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/ entries/feyerabend/ Schorske, Carl (1980) Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture. New York: Vintage. Sharpin, Steven & Schafer, Simon (1985) Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Vincent, Bernadette & Loeve, Sacha (2018) Toward a Philosophy of Technosciences. Sacha Loeve; Xavier Guchet; Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent. French Philosophy of Technology: Classical Readings and Contemporary Approaches New York: Springer 169–186. Wittgenstein, L. (1980) Culture and Value Trans Peter Winch Eds (G.H. Von Wright) Oxford: Blackwell.

Chapter 2

The ethics of reading Wittgenstein

Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd, www.tandfonline.com, on behalf of © Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia.

The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole. – Nietzsche (1879) Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, Mixed Opinions and Maxims, §137 [A]ny interpretation still hangs in the air along with what it interprets, and cannot give it any support. Interpretations by themselves do not determine meaning. – Wittgenstein, (1953) Philosophical Investigations, §198 We spend our lives ‘reading’ but we no longer know how to read, that is to say to stop, to free ourselves of our cares, to return to ourselves, putting aside the search for subtlety and originality in order to meditate calmly, ruminating, letting the texts speak to us. – Pierre Hadot (2002), Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique, p. 52. (Arnold Davidson’s translation)

The reception of a work, an opus, a text, an oeuvre is itself a philosophical question that stands at the heart of both reading and intellectual criticism in ways that defy the taxonomists, doxographers and historians of philosophy who would like to trace the lines of influence, the place and significance of a thinker by what company (s)he keeps, that is, by whom they read, and, perhaps above all, by who taught them—that is, by a pedagogy of ‘begetting’.1 It is possible to distinguish between a close textual reading and a new interpretive or disruptive reading. There is room for both styles of reading where ‘reading’, paradoxically, is a kind of ‘writing’, a written interpretation that follows millennia of textual commentary that form the hermeneutical rules and procedures for reading a text and extracting its meaning or truth. The ways we receive texts are determined in large measure by questions of geography, history and culture, as well as personal agency, and the relationship between the text and the intertext.

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Reading and receiving Wittgenstein, or the texts of any thinker, is a complex philosophical problem that disrupts the traditional divide between author and reader and understands both sides of this binary couplet as involved in the creation of meaning. Wittgenstein, like Nietzsche, was concerned about who would read and understand him. In particular, he was concerned that he might be misinterpreted, especially by those who were closest to him, by his students and colleagues who professed to know what he was saying. He was probably right on this question of misinterpretation. Even Russell who was very close to him misinterpreted the aims of the Tractatus (1961) as Wittgenstein (1974, p. 86) complained in his letters to Russell. Wittgenstein’s aphoristic style of writing and his professed goal to write philosophy as poetry made his work notoriously difficult to fathom. His students became the disciples of his work and were disciplined into his way of thinking through Wittgenstein’s pedagogy and style of thinking but they did not always agree. In ‘Sketch for a Foreword’ (Culture and Value, hereafter CV, Wittgenstein, 1970, 6e) an early draft of the printed foreword to Philosophical Remarks, Wittgenstein writes: ‘This book is written for those who are in sympathy with the spirit in which it is written’ (my emphasis). It is a spirit which expresses a certain ‘cultural ideal’ (CV, 2e); one which would not be understood by ‘the typical western scientist’ who, imbued with the spirit of contemporary European and American civilisation, is committed to the form of ‘progress’ and ‘building an ever more complicated structure’. In this age, even clarity is sought only as a means to this end. Wittgenstein finds the spirit of this age both ‘alien’ and ‘uncongenial’. His way of thinking is different: for him ‘clarity [and] perspicuity are valuable in themselves’ (CV, 7e). Clarity is an aesthetic and ethical ideal; the work of clarification requires courage; it is not ‘just a clever game’ (CV, 19e). The clarity that Wittgenstein is aiming at is, as he says, ‘complete clarity’ which means that ‘philosophical problems should completely disappear’. He goes on to say ‘There is not a philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, like different therapies’ (Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein, 1953/1972, hereafter PI, §133). Wittgenstein’s style of philosophising and the stylistic devices he innovates are designed to command a clear view of the use of words (PI, §5, §122). The ethics of reading for Wittgenstein meant that the reader had to take responsibility for his own thinking. He devises a style of writing that teaches us to read and to think in a particular way: to reject easy assertions, to look beyond the obvious; to understand the partial explanation and intermediate cases of a concept, to listen to the metaphors that cast light on the proceedings, to recognise textual challenges and to accept responsibility for our own acts of understanding and the attempt to make intelligible that which is hidden in the grammar. In the language game of criticism, we should seek clarity but not a correlation of inner processes of

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mental experiences. I use the notion of ethics to refer to these processes of reading and interpretation. I have taken the concept of the ‘ethics of reading’ from a number of different and conflicting sources. First, in Levinas’s work reading is an ethical activity involving the appropriation of the Other and naturally involves relationships to the Other (Champaign, 1998). For Levinas, who maintains that ethics is governed and limited by the face-to-face encounter, the Other cannot be mediated through literature (Dougan, 2016). Levinas’s ‘first philosophy’ ‘is responsibility that unfolds into dialogical sociality’ (Bergo, 2017). Reading is not a neutral activity: ‘how one reads, approaches and responds to a text, is more than casually significant’ (Walker, 2006). In the traditional liberal sense reading is an ethical relation not just to another—an absent author—through a text or corpus but entails a wider responsibility to the community not to willingly misrepresent or deliberately use a source without due acknowledgement; and, perhaps, more importantly, to construct a reading that is a public interpretation that does no to harm to or mistreat another who cannot immediately respond or cannot respond at all but only through others. On this liberal account, there are different levels of a philosophical reading: (1) explication centred on clearly stating the author’s position; (2) elucidation, a clarification of what the author means or the meaning of the text; (3) evaluation, assessing the strength of argument and issuing a judgement about the tenability of the position taken; (4) interpretation, beyond these three levels, a philosophical kind of writing. These levels are related to liberal humanist stylistics that hypothesises the truth of meaning is a semantic matter of establishing the author’s intention. The second source is J. Hillis Miller’s (1987) The Ethics of Reading which is a deconstructive attempt, continuous with Paul de Man’s (1979, p. 206) Allegories of Reading, to develop an ethics that ‘has nothing to do with the will (thwarted or free) of a subject, nor a fortiori, with a relationship between subjects’ but rather with a discursive freedom ‘to block or suspend our more habitual, commonplace habits of judgment’ (Norris, 1988, p. 169); what Pecora (1991, p. 203) calls ‘the play of the critical intelligence … free from the pressure of political engagement with the issues of the day’. I don’t pretend to mediate between these two opposing conceptions: both may be used to different purposes. It may be that the ‘emancipated’ reader or reading can interpret irony, metaphors and other narrative strategies that are part of Wittgenstein’s philosophical repertoire as pedagogical tools, in the Nietzschean sense, that are meant to educate us through suspicion and agonistic or interrogative style (Lachance, 2010). The third source is Pierre Hadot (1995, 2002) on reading and writing as spiritual practices in ancient philosophy and how they define philosophy as a way of life. Reading and writing were part of the spiritual practices observed by the ancients who practiced philosophy as a way of life that pointed to how

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regimes of ethical practices affect and transform the self. This sense of ‘ethical’ is enjoined and explained by Hadot in pursuing Wittgenstein in relation to his ‘historical method’. In working out ancient philosophy as an ethics and praxis of discourse, Hadot drew on Wittgenstein and also opened his work up to an interpretation of an ethics of self-transformation (Laugier, 2011). Wittgenstein’s own thoughts on reading are partially revealed in his list of those he took to influence him the most—an incongruous list of childhood reading and personal engagement with Russell and Sraffa later at Cambridge: ‘Boltzmann, Hertz, Schopenhauer, Frege, Russell, Kraus, Loos, Weininger, Spengler, Sraffa’(cited by Stern & Szabados, 2004). There are in Wittgenstein’s case various styles of reading him that make sense of this incongruous grouping of his influences—a consistent German-Austrian counter Enlightenment critique of language and logic—a precision, simplicity and austereness—as well as a spiritual sense of Western decline. The positioning of Russell and Sraffa are exceptions to this cultural reading—the one relating to the early period of the Tractatus; the other, to his conception of language games. Russell is the only English influence, with no mention of G. E. Moore! Frege and Russell both on the logic of language (the difference between Sinn or Sense, and Bedeutung or Reference), and the form of a proposition. Boltzmann and Hertz were both theoretical physicists who developed a theory of representation or a picture theory of meaning. Schopenhauer (2010) was the author of The World as Will and Representation. He was perhaps one of the greatest philosophical influences on Wittgenstein. I am surprised that Nietzsche did not get a mention in this list. Spengler’s (2006) work The Decline of the West was published in 1918 and had a profound effect on Wittgenstein in terms of civilisational analysis. Karl Kraus’s ethical notion of the Ursprung, as the origin or source of all true value, a concept of pure spirituality, expressible in a language free of both grammatical and ethical errors, had clear parallels to the Tractatus as an ethical project. Adolf Loos’s architecture as free from ornamentation that was part of the modern aesthetic principles of the Vienna Secession and greatly affected Wittgenstein’s sense of style. Weininger’s place on the list needs careful interpretation, beyond me in this essay. He was the Viennese author of Sex and Character, published in 1903, and a cult figure who committed suicide at the age of 23. Wittgenstein followed Weininger’s analysis of the Jewish thought as merely reproductive (as opposed to original), an idea Wittgenstein applied to himself, in a series of remarks in CV in the mid-1930s. The relationship to Sraffa requires a bit of work. Wittgenstein only met Sraffa after his return to Cambridge in 1929. Sraffa was a socialist economist influenced by Gramsci. The two fell into a series of regular conversations including, most famously Sraffa’s response to Wittgenstein on logical form, when in a Neapolitan gesture of scepticism, he brushed his chin with his hand and asked, ‘What is the logical form of this?’ The incident and the argument

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reputedly made Wittgenstein rethink his picture theory of meaning spurring an anthropological account of language. The exchange ended abruptly in 1946 when Sraffa no longer wanted the engagement, exasperated by Wittgenstein’s political naivety (Sen, 2003, p. 1242). In interpretive criticism after the sociological turn the historicity and culture of the reader became more important in understanding the act of producing readings. In order to understand and analyse the reader as a historical and situated construct so as to approach the development of reading publics or reading audiences that depend upon the relations between materiality and meaning and the changing practices of the consumption of text. This set of historical relations is heightened in the reception of a philosophical work of one culture when it is translated and received another culture. In this connection, we might acknowledge the rise of constructivist and subjectivist theories of reading, where meaning is said to reside in the dynamic interplay of reader and text, or is seen to be a result entirely of the reader’s active interpretation. On this model of understanding reading is often viewed as a sociocultural, cognitive and linguistic process in which readers use various systems of knowledge (of spoken and written language, of the subject matter of the text, and of culture) to construct meaning with text, rather than reading it off the page. The development and application of critical methodologies to the analysis of reading or of the production of a philosophical reading also requires some thought as a prevalent and dominant academic or pedagogical practice in the humanities. In terms of this kind of analysis we may read Wittgenstein against a certain field of conceptual or theoretical coherence. Given the historicity of Wittgenstein as a reader and an author we might emphasis the atmosphere of fin de siècle Vienna and Viennese modernism noting the range of contemporary Austrian and European authors, poets, artists and critics across the sciences and humanities that Wittgenstein acknowledged and the select group of philosophers in the Western tradition he referred to. Most importantly, reading Wittgenstein requires recognition of the shape of the logical problems he was working on by reference to Frege, Russell and Moore, and the history of the foundations of mathematics. Ray Monk’s (2005) How to Read Wittgenstein insists on Wittgenstein’s anti-scientism as a key to reading him: philosophical understanding then is like understanding a person or a poem. It is an ethical act to become clear and to avoid appropriating the other, reducing him or her to one’s own prejudices. In the case of Wittgenstein, it is more complex because he rereads and comments on his previous work, often self-correcting or engaging in dialogue with himself. The literature is replete with references to ‘reading’ Wittgenstein: how difficult it is to read him, reading the Tractatus or Investigations, Wittgenstein’s reading of Beethoven, reading Cavell or Monk on reading Wittgenstein, reading Augustine through Wittgenstein, reading with Wittgenstein, reading and writing the self in a confessional or selfinterrogative way. There is also another sense of reading that is playful and interpretive that is suggestive of new ideas or new questions in philosophy.

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This is not so much to read Wittgenstein programmatically to find out what he really said or the amount a scholarly interpretation but rather to use Wittgenstein to make an argument, or perhaps to go beyond Wittgenstein in developing a line of thinking. The ethics involved in these choices take different forms. The former is based on the notion of truth in interpretation based on norms of textual faithfulness, on the veracity of sources, on the principle of empathy and on not appropriating Wittgenstein (or whoever) for one’s own purpose to remake him or her in one’s own image (the worst egological appropriation); the latter is definitely more playful, it is not necessarily interested in exegesis or quotation; in some ways it is less reverent and more focused on the argument or the case; it is, in a word, more entertaining, in the broad intellectual sense of openness, and of establishing connections. Ludwig Wittgenstein against his own intentions has increasingly had an enormous impact on philosophy and thought of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century and yet his philosophy has been picked up and developed mostly by a loyal band of Cambridge students and followers who popularised and developed his way of doing philosophy, in both the analytic style of the Tractatus and ‘poetic’ style of the Investigations.2 And yet the reception of his work has been uneven partly due to the fact that Wittgenstein only published the Tractatus and one paper on logic in his lifetime. Much of his influence during his own life sprang from the position he occupied at Cambridge as well as a set of personal and professional contacts in Vienna. Along with Frege and Russell, Wittgenstein is regarded as one of the founders of the analytic tradition. Yet, of all philosophers in the analytic tradition, his influence has continued to grow in philosophy of mathematics, and in various post-analytic philosophies, of language, art, politics and religion. Within the analytic tradition Wittgenstein’s role and significance has been subject to intense debate with authors, sympathetic and otherwise struggling to find a commanding and clear overview of his work. It is curious that it is only in the late 1990s, some seventy years after the publication of the Tractatus, that someone of the stature of P. M. S. Hacker (1996) should try to provide a history of Wittgenstein’s complex and ambiguous role in the analytic movement. Ray Monk (1991), who wrote a stunning biography of Wittgenstein (and one of the great philosophical biographies of all time) called Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, suggested Wittgenstein was driven by spiritual as much by intellectual concern. Monk (1996) reviews Hacker’s account beginning with an interpretation of the crisis of a movement that acknowledges its past: A feeling has been growing that analytic philosophy is in crisis. Once proud and disdainful of other traditions, it has become unsure of itself; uncertain about its past and fearful of its future. One sign of this insecurity is the debate now being conducted among leading analytic philosophers about their own history. Previously, they cared little about this. Confident

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in the superiority of their methods over those of earlier philosophers, they regarded an interest in history as a perverse preoccupation with the mistakes of the past. Monk sees Hacker’s (1996) Wittgenstein’s Place in 20th-Century Analytic Philosophy as a useful corrective to Michael Dummett’s Origins of Analytical Philosophy and ‘the most impressive history of the analytic movement yet written’. He charts Hacker’s diagnosis of the decline of analytic philosophy to show how analytical philosophers have forgotten the later Wittgenstein in the pursuit of theory and more secure status of philosophy as a scientific discipline. Hacker (2005) provides an account of the origins of analytic philosophy that begins with the revolt by Russell and Moore in the 1890s against Bradley’s neoHegelianism, to develop in the 1920s as a form of Cambridge analysis inspired by Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, later picked up by the logical empiricists in the 1930s who expound variations of verificationism. It was this third phase with the Nazi onslaught and the destruction of the Vienna Circle that those philosophers mostly of Jewish heritage, like Carnap, Feigl, Reichenbach, Hempel, Frank, Tarski, Bergmann, Gödel, fled to the USA to transform American philosophy in the post-war years into different forms of logical pragmatism. Hacker goes on to detail the emergence of post-war Oxford analytic philosophy under Ryle that developed simultaneously with Wittgenstein’s later philosophy including the work distinguished pupils: for example, his successors in the Cambridge chair, von Wright, Wisdom and Anscombe, those of his students who taught at Oxford, such as Waismann, Paul and (again) Anscombe, and those who transmitted his ideas to philosophers in the USA, such as Ambrose, Black and Malcolm. (Hacker, 2005, p. 3)3 Wittgenstein’s Tractatus had inspired a ‘linguistic turn’ where the goal of philosophy is (a) the understanding of the structure and articulations of our conceptual scheme, and (b) the resolution of the problems of philosophy (to be specified by paradigmatic examples), which stem, inter alia, from unclarities about the uses of words. (Hacker, 2005, p. 11) In this way, philosophy was seen to be ‘a contribution to distinctive form of understanding’ (Hacker, 2005). In a footnote, he suggests: It does not enlarge our knowledge of the world and it does not discover new knowledge of the world or produce confirmable hypotheses or theories about it. But it may give us knowledge of aspects of our conceptual

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scheme (our forms of representation) by way of realisation of the character of what is, so to speak, before our eyes. (Hacker, 2005, Fn 10, p. 11) In reviewing Gordon Baker’s interpretation of Wittgenstein Hacker (2007) elaborates the characteristic tendencies, interests and lasting achievements ‘about the nature of linguistic representation, about the relationship between thought and language, about solipsism and idealism, self-knowledge and knowledge of other minds, and about the nature of necessary truth and of mathematical propositions’. He continues: He ploughed up the soil of European philosophy of logic and language. He gave us a novel and immensely fruitful array of insights into philosophy of psychology. He attempted to overturn centuries of reflection on the nature of mathematics and mathematical truth. He undermined foundationalist epistemology. And he bequeathed us a vision of philosophy as a contribution not to human knowledge, but to human understanding— understanding of the forms of our thought and of the conceptual confusions into which we are liable to fall. (Hacker, 2007, p. 37) The difficulty of reading Wittgenstein has in part to do with his intellectual location between Vienna and Cambridge, the intrinsic difficulty of his ideas, the ambit of his thought, and his literary experiments with philosophical forms. Both Hacker and Hans-Johann Glock (2004) clearly do not regard Wittgenstein of the Investigations as analytic in any simple sense but rather as ‘much closer to the oeuvres of Tolstoy, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger’4 (Glock, 2004, p. 419). The troubled history and place of Wittgenstein in relation to analytic philosophy, it could be argued, sheds more light on the category ‘analytic’ than it does on Wittgenstein’s work and also explains why Wittgenstein transcends the movement and category in various configurations of post-analytic thought. Glock (2004) entertains the view that Wittgenstein while regarded by Hacker as an analytic philosopher and indeed ‘the moving force behind analytic philosophy in the twentieth century’ (p. 422), there are other variations of what he calls ‘irrationalist’ interpretations (an unfortunate epithet): existentialist (Engelmann, Drury), therapeutic (Bouwsma), aspect (Baker), nonsense (Conant, Diamond), genre (Stern, Pichler) postmodern (Rorty, Lyotard). He provides the following chart only to reinforce against his own intention the division between Wittgensteinian philosophy and analytic philosophy itself (Figure 2.1). Frankly, I find Glock’s interpretation rather one-sided especially since the ‘Continental’ and specifically the ‘Viennese’ reading of Wittgenstein has gathered force since Alan Janik and Stephen Toulmin’s Wittgenstein’s Vienna (1973) began to contest Wittgenstein as a place-holder in Cambridge philosophy by emphasising Vienna as the cultural milieu of Wittgenstein’s thought, the critique of culture

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Frege

Russell Moore Schopenhauer

LW 1 James Spengler LW 2

VC Cambridge

hermeneutics

Oxford

post-positivists

postmodernism

Wittgenstein’s Historical Connections The names of nonanalytic thinkers and movements are italicized.

Figure 2.1 Wittgenstein’s historical connections. Note: the names of nonanalytic thinkers and movements are italicised.

(Loos, Kraus, Schonberg, von Hofmannsthal, Musil), Fritz Mauthner’s critique of language, and the Tractatus as an ethical treatise. By admitting the Viennese hypothesis Wittgenstein’s cultural aspirations and achievements in relation to European modernism become more apparent. The nature of his relationship with the Vienna circle also becomes more transparent as does Nietzsche’s influence on Viennese modernism, the influence of Otto Weininger and the problem of Jewish self-hatred, the preoccupation with Mach, Boltzmann, Schlick and Neurath, Freud’s therapy and Karl Kraus’s cultural critique. None of these hypothetical lines of inquiry or their historical trajectories can be gleaned from a purely analytical reading. And in the world of scholarship, not narrowly prescribed by the constraints of analytic philosophy, it can be argued that these productive readings have both legitimacy and deserve greater consideration. In ‘Wittgenstein’s Reception in America’, Newton Garver (1987) commented that even in America while Wittgenstein’s prestige is enormous ‘his impact has been minimal’. The fact is, Garver claims, ‘Wittgenstein has no significant following’. He goes on to add (p. 207): one has to say that Wittgenstein has had little impact on such American philosophers as Carnap, Hempel, Feigl, Grunbaum, Quine, Chisholm,

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Goodman, Rawls, Kripke, Dworkin, Gewirth, Donagan, Kaplan, Searle— even though they have all noticed Wittgenstein. The exceptions are fewer: Black, Malcolm, Bergmann (selectively), Cavell, and Foot. The fact is a ‘new Wittgenstein’ had emerged, the title of a collection by Alice Crary and Rupert Read, that understands Wittgenstein as putting forward a positive view of philosophy as a kind of therapy. As Crary (2000, p. 1) explains: Wittgenstein’s primary aim in philosophy is—to use a word he himself employs in characterizing his later philosophical procedures—a therapeutic one. These papers have in common an understanding of Wittgenstein as aspiring, not to advance metaphysical theories, but rather to help us work ourselves out of confusions we become entangled in when philosophizing. This reading didn’t just appear suddenly but is the lifetime result of steady progress in finding a new way around and through Wittgenstein’s texts, exploring Wittgenstein himself and the intertext and metatextual commentaries. With each attempt the vectors of reading must somehow coordinate and match with other facts; it must cohere. This ‘new’ reading nearly twenty years old is associated with the work of Stanley Cavell, Hilary Putnam and Cora Diamond, and is heavily criticised by both Hacker and Glock, on different grounds. Establishing a new interpretation is often a collective responsibility or the result of collaborative endeavour over many years, not necessarily by design. The ‘new Wittgenstein’ coalesces around a series of common interpretive protocols. Wittgenstein is not advancing theories in philosophy but rather employing a therapeutic method to deconstruct philosophical puzzles; he is helping us to work free of the confusions that become evident when we begin to philosophise. At the same time, Wittgenstein is disabusing us of the notion that we can stand outside language and command an external view, and that such an external view is both necessary and possible for grasping the essence of thought and language. By contrast, Wittgenstein, on the new reading, encourages us to see that our intuitions about meaning and thought are best accommodated ‘by attention to our everyday forms of expression and to the world those forms of expression serve to reveal’ (Crary & Read, 2000, p. 1). This new schema for reading Wittgenstein also puts less emphasis on the decisive break in his thought, represented by the Tractatus and the posthumous Investigations, to emphasise significant continuities of his thought centring around his therapeutic conception of philosophy (Peters, 2010). In this collective reading, Cavell’s work stands out for me as faithful to Wittgenstein in style without being slavish; Cavell’s thought is a model of self-exploration without a strong appropriation of Wittgenstein. What makes him attractive to philosophers of education is that he talks of ‘philosophy as pedagogy’ and he makes connections—to pragmatism, to American philosophy, to education, to psychoanalysis, to movies, and to contemporary philosophy including Nietzsche,

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Heidegger, Derrida and the Continental tradition (but not Foucault who did not speak to him). His work is about making connections. At the Harvard seminar for Saito and Standish’s (2012) book on Cavell I presented a paper entitled ‘Philosophy and the Exemplary Text: Cavell’s “Notes and Afterthoughts on the Opening of Wittgenstein’s Investigations”’ that was never published because the transcript of the conversation with Cavell based on my contribution was lost and I had misgivings about my paper. I wrote in my notes: Stanley Cavell, who with Stephen Toulmin, influenced me more than anyone else in making sense of Wittgenstein. By attending this seminar, I had hoped in some small way that I would be inspired to return to what I had written about Cavell and what he had written about Wittgenstein in order to rethink and rewrite it. In particular, I wanted to focus on Cavell’s (1995) sense of acquiring a language, the power of the question and scepticism as a natural attitude attuned to learning to think, acquiring a voice, being a child, and beginning philosophy anew. I also wanted to remark on what I called the ‘exemplary text’ in philosophy which I identified as Cavell’s ‘Notes and Afterthoughts’, a truly pedagogical text in every sense of the term, one that entered into dialogue with his former self, with Wittgenstein, and with a lifetime of teaching the opening of the Investigations. It is to my mind a condensation of grammar, a close reading, a slow reading, a reading that has taken a lifetime, a reading that uses the text to comment upon itself. I wrote in my notes: ‘The ghost of Wittgenstein stalks these pages. Philosophy as a kind of writing; as a kind of reading. As a literary artefact. As a kind of pedagogy.’ I wanted to examine the nature of the pedagogical text in philosophy and the way that Stanley Cavell as a distinctively American philosopher returned the origins of American philosophy—Emerson’s transcendentalism and Thoreau’s Walden—and engaged with the leading figures of contemporary Continental philosophy. I indicated that the reasons why he ought to be read in this way had to do with his own appraisal of Wittgenstein’s Investigations, in which he rescues an ‘aestheticethical’ Wittgenstein, contextualised in a European intellectual milieu, located at the intersection of romanticism and scepticism and in relation to the question of modernism in the arts. I argued that Cavell regards the Investigations as a text rather than a set of problems to be worked through but this is not to deny that there are also problems surrounding, as Wittgenstein says in the Investigations, ‘the concepts of meaning, of understanding, of a proposition, of logic, the foundations of mathematics, states of consciousness, and other things’ (1953/1972: Preface, p. vii). I argued: ‘Yet these subjects are not approached in traditional philosophical ways: Wittgenstein does not employ standard or recognisable forms of argumentation nor does he propose theories about them’ (Peters, 2001a). In short, Cavell writes across philosophy even though he might also write out of a tradition. He is not frightened by

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prevailing opinion and calls the shots as he sees them. I was immediately drawn to his work in part because of his generosity in making connections to recent French philosophy and the philosophical intertext. The encounter with Wittgenstein in France can be seen in terms of the wider context of a colloquium on analytic philosophy held at Royaumont in 1958. Recent commentary between Overgaard and Dummett might indicate that the oppositional standoff between analytic and Continental philosophy actually was more pluralistic than first imagined, with ‘rapprochement between Oxford “linguistic philosophy” and a certain strand of phenomenological thought’ within the broader context that included ‘continental “analytics”, Anglophone non-“analytics”, French historians of philosophy, “analytic” opponents of Oxford philosophy, Franciscan phenomenologists, and Oxonians who called their work “phenomenology”’ (Vrahimis, 2013, p. 177). Stanislas Breton (1959) in his Situation de la philosophie contemporaine classified Wittgenstein’s work as ‘scientific philosophy’, a form of logical positivism, one of three strands along with Heideggerian and Marxism, defining the three dominant approaches in contemporary philosophy (Helgeson, 2011, p. 339). Breton’s text was emblematic of the marginal regard for Wittgenstein and as Helgeson (2011, p. 340) remarks the Tractatus was not translated into French until 1961 although Jean Cavaillès speaks of Wittgenstein as a logical positivist in 1935. This early French misinterpretation of the Tractatus and characterisation of Wittgenstein as a logical positivist not only speaks to the lack of interpenetration of English and French thought and its selectivity, but also the relatively closed nature of national traditions within Europe up until quite recently. As Helgeson (2011, p. 340) remarks: After this, there is silence. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (the only philosophical book he published while alive) long went untranslated and unread in France. And logical positivism—with which Wittgenstein would be associated in French philosophical circles—had virtually no echo. It is striking that a search for ‘positivisme logique’ in the catalogue of the Bibliothèque nationale de France yields no results between 1937 and 1951. Wittgenstein’s French reception is characterised by direct appropriations of his work by practicing analytic philosophers. Perhaps the best known is Jacques Bouveresse (1976) who wrote a series of works including, Le mythe de l’intériorité. Expérience, signification et langage privé chez Wittgenstein (1976). Bouveresse occupies the chair of the philosophy of language and epistemology (‘Philosophie du langage et de la connaissance’) at the College de France and has used his analytic work to attack the likes of Foucault, Lyotard and Derrida.5 One might be forced to assume that Bouveresse was single-handedly responsible for receiving Wittgenstein in the French context in a direct sense and for using a kind of Wittgensteinian analyticity for attacking and polemicising the doyens of French poststructuralism or post-Nietzscheanism.

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Collins (2017) in ‘Thinking Otherwise: Bouveresse and the French Tradition’ provides a useful account of ‘bringing Wittgenstein to Paris’ through his Le Mythe de l’intériorité: Expérience, signification et langage privé chez Wittgenstein in 1976. While he had contributed earlier articles to Cahiers pour l’analyse and Critique it was his book that really sparked ‘a growing number of companion studies on different aspects of Wittgenstein’s thought: anthropology, iconography, religion, aesthetics, architecture, music, Freud, modernity and the idea of progress’ (n.p.). Against Descartes’ ideal of the pure ego, Collins (2017) pictures Bouveresse as making an argument close to the point of view of Ordinary Language Philosophy: Language was indissociable from ‘thinking’, ‘feeling’, ‘sensing’, and philosophers could not afford to ignore it. Humans learn to think in communication with other subjects; language, the intersubjective medium through which they do so, is key to how they think about themselves and the world. Through language, in other words, thinking is necessarily public. Bouveresse confessed that it was Wittgenstein’s ‘anthropological eye’ that had seduced him. He was not the only one. His friend Pierre Bourdieu was also taken with Wittgenstein, and Bouveresse (1995) had specifically written on Wittgenstein and habitus. Bourdieu (1990) was to remark ‘Wittgenstein is probably the philosopher who has helped me most at moments of difficulty. He’s a kind of saviour for times of great intellectual distress.’ He was referring in particular to Wittgenstein’s concept of following a rule. Bouveresse championed Wittgenstein who was virtually unknown in France before 1976 and his vitriolic attacks on Lyotard and Derrida’s postmodern turn probably helped to explain why, in particular, Deleuze responded so violently to the mention of Wittgenstein. Yet, there is also the clear precedent of Pierre Hadot, a classical and historian of philosophy, who published work on Wittgenstein in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Sandra Laugier (2011) comments that Hadot had found in Wittgenstein’s opus an accommodation of the idea of philosophy as an activity. Hadot’s understanding of philosophy as a set of spiritual exercises— as a way of life—found distinct echoes in Cavell and Diamond. Hadot’s (2004) Wittgenstein and the Limits of Language, testifies to the fact that Hadot was one of the first French scholars to explore the relationship between logic and language in the thought of Wittgenstein. As early as 1959 in essays ‘Wittgenstein, philosophe du langage (I) and (II)’ (in Critique) Hadot, like Cavell, recognised the overwhelming significance of Wittgenstein’s style for his thought. (Style is a characteristic that I have insisted upon in in my interpretation of Wittgenstein and explored in a variety of works—e.g. Peters, 2001b.) Hadot (1995) in his conception of philosophy as a way of life latched on to Wittgenstein therapeutic approach and the confessional style arguing that rather than advancing theses philosophy teaches us ways and spiritual exercises. The spiritual aspect of philosophy was

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never far away from Wittgenstein’s own thinking and what is remarkable is that Hadot, across national traditions and across translation, understood how ethics was central to Wittgenstein and to reading Wittgenstein. Hadot’s reading of Wittgenstein is all the more remarkable for his wellknown connection with Foucault. Foucault could not have read Hadot without recognising the influence of Wittgenstein especially in terms of historical method. Derrida has often been described as the ‘French Wittgenstein’ by a range of commentators including Staten (1984) who claims that Wittgenstein’s method is a ‘regulated leakage across the boundaries of established categories’, whereas deconstruction is ‘a regulated overflowing of established categories’ (p. 24). Yet, while the deconstructive reading of Wittgenstein has been challenged (Shain 2007), it is clear that a number of prominent philosophers including Stanley Cavell, Stephen Mulhall, Richard Rorty, Newton Garver and others have read them together rather than in opposition. Moreover, Jean-François Lyotard champions Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘language games’ as a method in his The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979/1984) offering in that work and others an explicit political reading of Wittgenstein philosophy of language, a reading that I find attractive as a ‘creative misappropriation’ of his work (Peters, 1989, 1995). The influence of Wittgenstein is not far away from the thought of Pierre Bourdieu especially in regard to understanding the ‘logic of practice’. And it is clear that Foucault was aware of Wittgenstein work but also wanted to turn his philosophy of language to political purposes. In a little-known paper delivered to a Japanese audience in 1978, Foucault takes up the concept of game in relation to analytic philosophy (and probably Wittgenstein’s influential notion of ‘language-games’, although his name is not mentioned) to criticise its employment without an accompanying notion of power. Arnold Davidson (1997) mentions a lecture ‘La Philosophie analytique de la politique’ in which Foucault (1978) makes an explicit reference to AngloAmerican analytic philosophy: For Anglo-Saxon analytic philosophy it is a question of making a critical analysis of thought on the basis of the way in which one says things. I think one could imagine, in the same way, a philosophy that would have as its task to analyse what happens every day in relations of power. A philosophy, accordingly, that would bear rather on relations of power than on language games, a philosophy that would bear on all these relations that traverse the social body rather than on the effects of language that traverse and underlie thought. (Cited in Davidson, 1997, p. 3) Language, in Foucault’s conception ‘never deceives or reveals’, rather as Foucault states: ‘Language, it is played. The importance, therefore, of the notion

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of game’. He goes on to make the comparison: ‘Relations of power, also, they are played; it is these games that one must study in terms of tactics and strategy, in terms of order and of chance, in terms of stakes and objective’ (cited in Davidson, 1997, p. 4). In this context, it is perhaps surprising that Gilles Deleuze is so virulent in his condemnation of Wittgenstein. In L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze recorded in 1988 and first broadcast in 19966 Gilles Deleuze is recorded as making the following remark on Wittgenstein: Pour moi c’est une catastrophe philosophique […] c’est une régression massive de toute la philosophie […] S’ils l’emportent, alors là il y aura un assassinat de la philosophie s’ils l’emportent. C’est des assassins de la philosophie. Il faut une grande vigilance. In English translation, Deleuze refers to Wittgenstein as representing ‘a philosophical catastrophe’, a ‘massive regression’ of all philosophy. The online summary provided by Charles Stivale reads: Parnet says, let’s move on to W, and Deleuze says, there’s nothing in W, and Parnet says, yes, there’s Wittgenstein. She knows he’s nothing for Deleuze, but it’s only a word. Deleuze says, he doesn’t like to talk about that … It’s a philosophical catastrophe. It’s the very type of a ‘school’, a regression of all philosophy, a massive regression. Deleuze considers the Wittgenstein matter to be quite sad. They imposed a system of terror in which, under the pretext of doing something new, it’s poverty introduced as grandeur. Deleuze says there isn’t a word to express this kind of danger, but that this danger is one that recurs, that it’s not the first time that it has arrived. It’s serious especially since he considers the Wittgensteinians to be nasty and destructive . So in this, there could be an assassination of philosophy, Deleuze says, they are assassins of philosophy, and because of that, one must remain very vigilant. Yet, despite Deleuze’s outrageous comments there are some interesting similarities between Wittgenstein and Deleuze. They are both against the concept of depth in philosophy—with Freud, Marx and Nietzsche in particular being held in great suspicion—and both believed that the line between philosophy and aesthetics should be erased (Wittgenstein even famously writing, ‘Philosophy ought really to be written only as a form of poetry’.) But in terms of style there is a crucial difference: Wittgenstein was a deliberate and austere minimalist, and Deleuze both preached and practiced a rampant maximalism, believing that philosophy should be about creation and not truth (or, as Žižek might say, about Meaning and not Truth). Also, due to their philosophy of the ‘body without organs’, and the plurality of identities created by such a body, the

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realm of raw materiality is of crucial importance for Deleuze and Guattari in a way that it simply isn’t for Wittgenstein, although the play of voices in Philosophical Investigations speaks to multiple selves. Where for Deleuze and Guattari philosophy is about concept creation. Wittgenstein’s notion is more about clarity and the work of clarification, as he says at paragraph 126 in the Philosophical Investigations: ‘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’ (Wittgenstein, 1953/1972, §126, e55). Drawing a parallel between Wittgenstein and Foucault has recently been taken up by Arnold I. Davidson and Gros (2011) who edited seven essays delivered in 2007 at ENS (Foucault, Wittgenstein: de possibles rencontres) that focus on a critical approach to traditional philosophy and the way in which philosophical problems employ deductive reasoning, casting doubt on the ways that language does not offer a transparent or complete representation of things or a straightforward representationalism. Some essays in addition, point to the notion of practice as an embodiment of the way discourse and language do not refer to an eternal reality but rather are a product of communitive and cultural practices. The lesson pointed to in regard to the philosophy of the subject becomes clear, where Wittgenstein talks of language games, Foucault emphasises power relations and discursive practices. There are in my view certainly parallels in conceptions of language/discourse, practice/genealogy and the history of concepts. Some argue that Wittgenstein and Foucault are not in direct opposition but there is a divergence between them. Foucault made some textual allusions and direct references to Wittgenstein while Wittgenstein was not unware of the development of French phenomenology and existentialism. Both reject a causal analysis of phenomena and there are multiple interpretative links that bundle Wittgenstein and Foucault through a third set of influences and sources: Nietzsche, Saussure, and Hadot. Perhaps, most significantly both share a conception of philosophy as a practice and as a set of techniques and exercises to be performed on the self that are seen as capable of a kind of transformation which can change the subject and her own self-understanding—a hermeneutics of the Self. Pascale Gillot and Daniele Lorenzini (2016) have edited a collection entitled Foucault Wittgenstein: subjectivité, politique, éthique that is based on a reading that suggests despite the fact they represent two rival traditions, their work resonates and enlightens each other’s, sharing the common ground of a radical critique of the classical notion of subjectivity and a specific way of conceiving and practicing philosophy as a way of being and living. The aim of the book is: to move the Foucault/Wittgenstein confrontation onto a more explicitly ethical and political ground: a field that had only been barely explored during the 2007 day [seminar devoted to the topic]. But this confrontation is itself only possible that the unearthing of a fundamental theoretical concern common to both authors, namely the rejection of psychologism and the questioning of what could be called a ‘philosophy of consciousness’.

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What is of interest to me is not only the production of a dialogue of sorts between these two thinkers from different traditions and cultures, but the construction of a disruptive reading of Wittgenstein in a projected relation with Foucault’s thought that supplies the missing dimension of power relations in Wittgenstein’s work while at the same time thickening the concepts of ‘game’, ‘play’ and ‘rule following’ in Foucault’s work. That this is part of a new French reception to Wittgenstein that in some measure returns to themes first explored by Hadot is entirely fitting. That it constitutes yet a different kind of reading to Cavellian therapeutics is also philosophically interesting in the complexity of interpretation that perpetually seeks new readings in relation to problems and problematisations.

Notes 1 I use the biblical term ‘beget’ (meaning to procreate, generate or bring forth, especially of biblical genealogies) here to indicate genealogies and descendants of thought that comprise ‘movements’ or ‘schools’. 2 For my emphasis on style and pedagogy see Peters and Marshall (1999), ‘Wittgenstein/Styles/Pedagogy available at http://faculty.education.illinois.edu/burbules/syl labi/materials/chap9.html’ and ‘Philosophy as Pedagogy: Wittgenstein’s Styles of Thinking’ www.radicalpedagogy.org/radicalpedagogy1/Philosophy_as_Pedagogy Wittgensteins_Styles_of_Thinking.html. In this regard see also ‘Writing the Self: Wittgenstein, Confession and Pedagogy’ (Peters, 2002) and Showing and Doing: Wittgenstein as a Pedagogical Philosopher (Peters, Burbules, & Smeyers, 2008). 3 He suggests: This fourth phase of analytic philosophy declined from the 1970s, partly under the impact of American logical pragmatism, the leading figures of which were Quine (much influenced by Carnap) and Quine’s pupil Davidson (influenced by Tarski), and, in Britain, under the impact of Dummett and later of his pupils (p. 4). 4 In Wittgenstein: Philosophy, Postmodernism, Pedagogy (Peters & Marshall, 1999), we view Wittgenstein against the background of Viennese modernism and in relation to the writings of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Freud, to explore the significance of philosophy of the subject (or self) as a tradition in itself and in relation to educational theory. 5 See Bouveresse’s webpage at the College de France: www.college-de-france.fr/ default/EN/all/phi_lan/index.htm 6 An abecedarium is a means to learn the alphabet. In this case Claire Parnet interviewed Deleuze for seven and a half hours. L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze is a telefilm produced by Pierre-André Boutang, recorded in 1988, first broadcast on Arte in 1996. See the online summary at www.langlab.wayne.edu/CStivale/D-G/ABCs.html.

References Bergo, B. (2017). (Fall 2017 Edition). Emmanuel Levinas. The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. (E. N. Zalta, Ed.). Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ fall2017/entries/levinas/ Bourdieu, P. (1990). The logic of practice. (R. Nice, Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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Bouveresse, J. (1976). Le Mythe de l’intériorité: Expérience, signification et langage privé chez Wittgenstein [The Myth of Interiority: Experimence, Meaning and Wittgenstein’s Private Language]. Paris: Minuit. Bouveresse, J. (1995). Wittgenstein reads Freud: The myth of the unconscious. (C. Cosman, Trans.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Breton, S. (1959). Situation de la philosophie contemporaine. Paris-Lyons: Emmanuel Vitte. Cavell, S. (1995). Notes and afterthoughts on the opening of Wittgenstein’s Investigations. In Philosophical passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derrida (pp. 124–186). Oxford: Blackwell. Champaign, R. (1998). The ethics of reading according to Emmanuel Levinas. Netherlands: Brill. Collins, J. (2017). Thinking otherwise. New Left Review, 108. Retrieved from https:// newleftreview.org/II/108/jacob-collins-thinking-otherwise Crary, A. (2000). Introduction. In A. Crary & R. Read (Eds.), The new Wittgenstein (pp. 55–90). London: Routledge. Crary, A., & Read, R. (Eds.). (2000). The new Wittgenstein. London: Routledge. Davidson, A. (1997). Foucault and his interlocutors. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Davidson, A., & Gros, F. (2011). Foucault, Wittgenstein: De possibles rencontres. Paris: Editions Kimé. de Man, P. (1979). Allegories of reading: Figural language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Dougan, M. J. (2016). The ethics of reading: Levinas and Gadamer on encountering the other in literature (Thesis, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)). University of Waikato, Hamilton. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10289/10686 Foucault, M. (1978). La Philosophie analytique de la politique. Dits et Ecrits Volume III Text n ° 232. Retrieved from http://1libertaire.free.fr/MFoucault115.html Garver, N. (1987). Wittgenstein’s reception in America. Modern Austrian Literature, 20(3/4), 207–219. Special Issue: The Reception of Twentieth-Century Austrian Culture in the United States. Gillot, P., & Lorenzini, D. (2016). Foucault Wittgenstein: Subjectivité, politique, éthique. Paris: CNRS Editions. Glock, H.-J. (2004) Was Wittgenstein an Analytic Philosopher? Metaphilosophy, 35(4), 419–444. Hacker, P. M. S. (1996). Wittgenstein’s place in twentieth-century analytic philosophy. Oxford: Blackwell. Hacker, P. M. S. (2005). Analytic philosophy: Beyond the linguistic turn and back again. Retrieved from http://info.sjc.ox.ac.uk/scr/hacker/docs/Beyond%20the%20linguistic% 20turn%20.pdf Hacker, P. M. S. (2007). Gordon Baker’s late interpretation of Wittgenstein. In G. Kahane, E. Kanterian, & O. Kuusela (Eds.), Wittgenstein and his interpreters: Essays in memory of Gordon Baker (pp. 88–122). London: Wiley-Blackwell. Retrieved from http://info.sjc.ox.ac.uk/scr/hacker/docs/Baker%27s%20Wittgenstein%205.pdf Hadot, P. (1995). Philosophy as a way of life. Spiritual exercises from Socrates to Foucault, edited with an Introduction by Arnold I. Davidson, translated by Michael Chase. Oxford/Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell. Hadot, P. (2002). Spiritual exercises and ancient philosophy (New ed.). Paris: Albin Michel.

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Hadot, P. (2004). Wittgenstein and the limits of language. Paris: J. Vrin. Helgeson, J. (2011). What cannot be said: Notes on early French Wittgenstein reception. Paragraph, 34(3), 338–357. Janik, A., & Toulmin, S. (1973). Wittgenstein’s Vienna. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster. Lachance, N. (2010). “Thou shalt not believe (me)”: Nietzsche’s ethics of reading and the movement for emancipation (Electronic dissertation). Retrieved from http://digitool. Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=86710 Laugier, S. (2011, November). Pierre Hadot as a reader of Wittgenstein. Paragraph, 34(3), Wittgenstein, Theory, Literature, 322–337. Lyotard, J.-F. (1979/1984). The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge. Translation from the French by Geoff Bennington and Brian, Massumi Foreword by Fredric Jameson. Manchester, NH: Manchester University Press. Miller, J. H. (1987). The ethics of reading: Kant, de Man, Eliot, Trollope, James, and Benjamin. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Monk, R. (1991). Wittgenstein: The duty of genius. London: Cape. Monk, R. (1996). Only sentences. London Review of Books, 18(31), 30–31. Retrieved from www.lrb.co.uk/v18/n21/ray-monk/only-sentences Monk, R. (2005). How to Read Wittgenstein. New York: W.W. Norton. Nietzsche, F. (1879). Human, all too human: A book for free spirits. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Norris, C. (1988). Deconstruction and the interests of theory. London: Pinter. Pecora, V. P. (1991). Ethics, politics, and the middle voice. Yale French Studies, 79, 203–230. Peters, M. A. (1989). Techno-science, rationality, and the university: Lyotard on the ‘postmodern condition’. Educational Theory, 39, 93–105. Peters, M. A. (1995). Education and the postmodern condition: Revisiting Jean-François Lyotard. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 29, 387–400. Peters, M. A. (2001a). Wittgensteinian pedagogics: Cavell on the figure of the child in the investigations. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 20(2), 125–138. Peters, M. A. (2001b). Philosophy as Pedagogy: Wittgenstein’s styles of thinking. Radical Pedagogy. Retrieved from www.radicalpedagogy.org/radicalpedagogy/Philosophy_as_ Pedagogy_Wittgensteins_Styles_of_Thinking.html Peters, M. A. (2002). Writing the self: Wittgenstein, confession and pedagogy. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 34(2), 353–368. Peters, M. A. (2010). Philosophy and the exemplary text: Cavell’s ‘notes and afterthoughts on the opening of Wittgenstein’s investigations’. Unpublished paper. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University. Peters, M. A., Burbules, N., & Smeyers, P. (2008). Showing and doing: Wittgenstein as a pedagogical philosopher. Boulder, CO: Paradigm. (Routledge edition, 2010, 2015). Peters, M. A., & Marshall, J. D. (1999). Wittgenstein: Philosophy, postmodernism, pedagogy. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey. Saito, N., & Standish, P. (Eds.). (2012). Stanley Cavell and the education of grownups (pp. 73–85). New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Schopenhauer, A. (2010). The World as Will and Representation (Vol. I, J. Norman, A. Welchman, & C. Janaway, Trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sen, A. (2003, December). Sraffa, Wittgenstein, and Gramsci. Journal of Economic Literature, 41, 1240–1255.

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Shain, R. E. (2007). Derrida and Wittgenstein: Points of op-position. Journal of French Philosophy, 17(2), 130–152. Spengler, O. (2006). The decline of the west. New York, NY: Vintage. Staten, H. (1984). Wittgenstein and Derrida. Oxford: Blackwell. Stern,D. G., & Szabados,B. (2004). Reading Wittgenstein (on) Reading. In David G. Stern & Bela Szabados (Eds.), Wittgenstein reads Weininger (pp. 1–28). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vrahimis, A. (2013). Is the Royaumont colloquium the Locus Classicus of the divide between analytic and continental philosophy? Reply to Overgaard. British Journal for the History of Philosophy,21(1), 177–188. Walker, M. A. (2006). An ethics of reading: Adorno, Levinas, and Irigaray. Philosophy Today, 50(2), 223–238. Wittgenstein, L. (1961). Tractatus logico-philosophicus. (D. F. Pears & B. F. McGuinness, Trans.). New York, NY: Humanities Press. Wittgenstein, L. (1970). Culture and value. (G. von Wright, Eds.). Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. (1972). Philosophical investigations. (G. E. M. Anscombe, Trans.). Oxford: Blackwell (Reprint of English Text with index). [First Edition 1953]. Wittgenstein, L. (1974). Letters to Russell, Keynes and Moore. (G. H. von Wright & B. F. McGuinness, Eds.). Oxford: Blackwell.

Chapter 3

Wittgenstein as exile A philosophical topography 1

Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd, www.tandfonline.com, on behalf of © Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia.

The philosopher is not a member of any community of ideas. (Wittgenstein, 1970, §455) I felt strange/a stranger/in the world. When you are bound neither to men nor to God, then you are a stranger. (Wittgenstein cited in Nedo et al., 2005, p. 11) If true exile is a condition of terminal loss, why has it been transformed so easily into a potent, even enriching motif of modern culture? … Modern western culture is in large part the work of exiles, émigrés, refugees. (Edward Said, 1994, p. 138)

Wittgenstein as exile, wanderer, stranger Wittgenstein talked of himself as an exile not only from his home city in Vienna but also of an age. He wrote of his alienation from the dominant spirit of the age and questioned its status as ‘civilization’ or even ‘culture’. He traveled a great deal often spending long periods in isolation in foreign countries, mostly in Europe—in England, Norway, Ireland—but also in the USA. His work, he felt demanded a certain location and he used the experience of travel, of finding one’s way about in a foreign country, negotiating entry into a new culture, acquiring a new language, and learning the streets of a new city as core operating metaphors as part of his philosophy that gave thought a spatial dimension. This chapter begins by outlining the notion of exhilic thought as a central trope for understanding writing in philosophy and for understanding Wittgenstein’s thinking and the intimate connection between the geography of Wittgenstein’s movements and his experience of other cultures, and his philosophy, his style of doing philosophy. It also discusses the notion of the philosopher as exile and how we might begin to understand the basis of exile and of being removed from one’s own culture as a basis for thought. The chapter proceeds to discuss Wittgenstein as exile and to suggest some lines of inquiry in philosophy that might recognize

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the importance of location on thinking, especially in relation to education in an age where increasingly globalization, multiculturalism and internationalization are the norm rather than the exception. This chapter then is an experiment in charting and thinking through the geography of ideas, not so much how ideas travel, as the extent to which the experience of exile and being a stranger in another culture can be the basis for a new understanding of thought that takes space and movement as twin aspects of increasingly common experiences. It represents a first attempt to extend theoretically the old saw that ‘travels broadens the mind’ and to examine the educational significance of movement across and between different locations and cultures that has strong implication for questions of belonging and identity, even powerfully foreshadowing a model of postmodern subjectivity.

Exhilic thought: exiles, émigrés, refugees Exhilic thought is the thought and ‘education’ of the exile, the wanderer, the stranger. It is a kind of uprooted thought developed away from ‘home’ under conditions of displacement and uncertainty, often in a different mother tongue, language tradition and culture. Exhilic thought is sometimes the self-imposed discipline of the ‘stranger’ who develops his or her identity as an ‘alien’ or immigrant against the conventions of a host culture and from the perspective of an outsider. The motif of the exile/stranger in a foreign land finding his or her way about for the first time is fable-ized in ancient accounts of ‘first contacts’ and early cultural exchanges.2 This notion of the exile invokes the model of the anthropologist as ‘participant observer’, of someone perpetually looking in through the window of another culture, who is both observer and participant, and its selftransformative aspects. At the same time ‘exile’ often marks a complex ambivalence to one’s own home culture and, therefore, also to questions of one’s own national, cultural and personal identity and belongings. Exile is one of the central and most powerful motifs of the intellectual in the twentieth century: it describes a profound existential condition of cultural estrangement, and sometimes alienation that defines identity in terms of migration, movement, departure, homelessness. It prefigures a notion of thought that is ‘nomadic’, formed in a different context, and laced with observations that at once make the familiar strange and the strange familiar —an anthropological theme that Wittgenstein returns to again and again. The condition of exile while a characteristic of a globalized late modernity has its diasporic roots in pre-Biblical times, defining Judaic religious identity. It has been revisited by each major ethnic and religious persecution down through the centuries. In an essay called ‘Being Jewish’ from Infinite Conversations Maurice Blanchot, for example, argues that the positive aspect of the Jewish experience and of being Jewish is that:

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the idea of exodus and the idea of exile can exist as a legitimate movement; it exists, through exile and through the initiative that is exodus, so that the experience of strangeness may affirm itself close to hand as an irreducible relation; it exists so that, by the authority of this experience, we might learn to speak. (1993, p. 125) Sauer-Thompson (2005) notes ‘Being Jewish affirms uprooting, the affirmation of nomadic truth, exodus, the exile. For Blanchot being Jewish is being destined to dispersion, to a sojourn without place, to a setting out on the road, a state of wandering, and not being bound to the determination of place’.3 This metaphorical reading of Blanchot’s ‘nomadic truth’ that foreshadows Deleuze and Guattari’s notion suggests that we take the notion of thinking as both a journey and ‘education’ seriously.4 The forced or self-imposed journey requires continual readjustment under new and changing cultural conditions without the security or familiarity of ‘home’ and thus, without the normal structures that anchor and prop up identity. ‘Nomadic truth’ is borne of the traveler’s education, the exchange of ideas, and acquaintance with new landscapes of thought, borne of encounters with the Other, with different cultures often producing new hybridities that are not simply the result of grafted cultural stock. Michael J. Brogan (2004), for instance, argues that the dominance of the question of ‘radical otherness’ in cultural and religious theory is due in no small measure to the influence of Levinas’s ethics of alterity, which he puts alongside Blanchot’s reflections on ‘being Jewish’.5 Both Levinas and Blanchot emphasize themes that tie truth to an existential condition of Otherness; it is these very themes that have provided a series of metaphors for living and being in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Jewishness, Blanchot says, is ‘uneasiness and affliction’ which is not restored through exile so much as attenuated and becomes the condition for the intellectual. As Levinas says of Blanchot, his philosophy of art is a, ‘call to errancy’, a truth (or better, a ‘non-truth’) of ‘nomadism’, an affirmation of the ‘authenticity of exile’ which ‘uproots’ the Heideggerian universe, this fundamentally Greek world which remains stubbornly indifferent or altogether deaf to the call issued by the Hebrew scriptures. (cited in Brogan, 2004, p. 31) The Jewish exodus, synonymous with freedom from persecution, serves to emphasize ‘nomadic truth’ of the exile against ‘sedentary truth’ of the homelander. (There is a necessary connection here between freedom from persecution and freedom of thought.) Blanchot argues against Heidegger, and mobility and homelessness of the refugee against settled nationalism, against the notion of ‘roots’, ‘homeland’, and ‘belonging’ as a natural condition.6 To adopt this orientation is also to set up a series of less desirable parallels—the

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pilgrims’ migration to America, the Afro-American slave fugitives, the establishment of modern-day Israel, the ‘homelessness’ of the Palestinians— seeking the ‘homeland’ or the ‘promised land’. The notion of exile and ‘exhilic’ here refers to the origin and to ‘return to the origin’ as a source of identity and ethnic nationalism. Both these ideas have a ready application to Wittgenstein who at one point, after the 1930s and ’40s, began to recognize his Jewish origins and who referred to himself as both Jewish and someone in exile. John G. Cawelti (2001) makes the most general theological and existential case when he writes: ‘Exile is, perhaps, the central story told in European civilization: the human estate as exile from God, the garden of Eden, the homeland, the womb, or even oneself’. He goes on to make the following pertinent observation: It may be true that exile is the central myth of European civilization, but it takes a twentieth-century mind to make such an observation and to realize its full significance. Exile is both a central theme and a characteristic biographical pattern of artistic modernism. In all the arts, a surprising number of the central figures of high modernism were exiles from their native countries: Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schonberg, Bela Bartok, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, Wassily Kandinsky, Pier Mondrian, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, W. H. Auden, Aldous Huxley, Thomas Mann, Paul Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy—the list is extraordinary.7 ‘Exile’, in the context of postmodernity, has the same theoretical legitimacy that ‘alienation’ had in the context of the modern. ‘Alienation’ in Marxist theory refers to the way in which human beings become estranged from the products of their labor under capitalism, the labor process and their own nature. (‘Work’ in this context is viewed in Hegelian terms as self-realization.) In On the Jewish Question Marx saw ‘alienation’ as originating in the JudeoChristian problematic and the Christian accomplishment of the alienation of man from himself and from nature. Marx takes the notion of alienation from Feuerbach who shows the alienation of man from God. Thus, both concepts have their source in the Judeo-Christian problematic but where alienation in particular seems more wedded to an industrial age, exile is emblematic of the age of globalization with its problems arising from (often forced) human movement and its consequences: displacement, uprootedness, and homelessness— the effects of a space-time compression that both enables greater movement and also demands it. As Eva Hoffman (1999, p. 44) explains, ‘today, at least within the framework of postmodern theory, we have come to value exactly those qualities of experience that exile demands—uncertainty, displacement, the fragmented identity. Within this conceptual framework, exile becomes, well, sexy, glamorous, interesting. Nomadism and diasporism have become fashionable terms in

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intellectual discourse. Mark Taylor (1984), the postmodern theologian, describes the postmodern self as a ‘wanderer’, a ‘drifter’, ‘attached to no home’, and ‘always suspicious of stopping, staying and dwelling’. This ‘rootless and homeless’ self is no more than a ‘careless wanderer’ yearning for neither ‘completion’ nor ‘fulfillment’ and therefore is not unhappy.8 The figures of the exile, the refugee, the nomad, the stranger, the wanderer and the diasporic intellectual bring into play a set of concepts that politically help to define the major movements of romanticism, nationalism, and imperialism: ‘home’, ‘homeland’, ‘homelessness’, ‘roots’, ‘tradition’, and ‘national identity’. Multiculturalism defined against Kant’s universalism and ‘culture’ as the human capacity to will moral laws is an affirmation of the belief in the value of other cultures and of group belonging. In its radical pluralistic form it also signals a belief in the incommensurability of different cultures and societies. In one sense as a late 20th century ideal expressed in the notion of cultural diversity which the modern state can accommodate constitutionally it is not just ‘the politics of recognition’ expressed through the claims of nationalist movements, supranational associations, and ethnic minorities but also the crosscutting and sometimes conflicting ‘multicultural or “intercultural” voices of hundred of millions of citizens, immigrants, exiles and refugees of the twentieth century’ (Tully, 1995, p. 2).9 In this sense we might argue figures of the wanderer, the stranger, and the exile increasingly characterize the shifting metaphysics of identity in an era of globalization and of ‘constitutionalism in an age of diversity’. As Tully (1995, p. 11) puts it so forcefully ‘cultures are not internally homogeneous. They are continuously contested, imagined and reimagined, transformed and negotiated, both by their members and through interaction with others. The identity, and so the meaning, of any culture is, thus, aspectival rather than essential’.10

The philosopher as exile In relation to exhilic thought we can usefully talk of the thought of the outsider, thought in its home context—its linguistic tradition—as against its border-crossings and, not least, the globalization (and spatialization) of philosophy. How ideas travel and are received—the geography of ideas—is a philosophical trope of some significance, especially with the rise of global science and the international knowledge system. Philosophers increasingly have begun to pay attention to philosophy as biography and the influence of biography on philosophy such as with Ray Monk’s (1990) splendid biography of Wittgenstein. By contrast, they have paid little attention to the question of exile (or travel, movement, space), with the exception of Albert Camus,11 which has been left to poets, novelists and historians. Yet the theme of exile and stranger which emphasizes the relation between place and thought, its place in linguistic and cultural traditions, and, perhaps strangely, the materiality and geography of thought, is a philosopheme that characterizes the present age

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and calls out for further analysis.12 As Michael Dummett (2001, p. 7) argues, place does not only refer to a land. It also refers to what gives people an identity, which if ‘it is not grounded in a common ethnicity, religion or language, it must be grounded in shared ideals, a shared vision of the society it is striving to create’. Place, ‘home’, is that which offers a grid for identity, not merely a spatial-temporal location which individuates, but a broad cultural milieu that frames our identities. The exile, the refugee, the émigré, thus is someone who becomes dis-placed.13 This chapter focuses on the figure, the trope and the thought of exile—the wanderer and the stranger—in relation to Ludwig Wittgenstein, both the man and his work, as a means to discuss its contemporary philosophical significance. Wittgenstein was a self-imposed exile; one might say a ‘refugee’ from the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. The bare bones and chronology of his movements tell a story of ceaseless mobility, of the stranger working and living in a foreign land, of a man who deliberately removed himself from his home, his family, his fortune, his country and his native culture. He left home early to enroll in the Realschule in Linz where he studied for three years beginning in 1903, before going to Berlin to get a degree in engineering. At 19 years old in 1908 he moved to England to study aeronautical engineering at the University of Manchester. In 1911 he moved to Cambridge University to study the foundations of mathematics with Bertrand Russell. Later he went to live briefly in Skjolden in Norway with Pinsent where he lived in isolation in order to study logic. When war broke out in 1914 he joined the Austrian army, to end the war in an Italian prisoner of war camp in Cassino. Released from detention he trained as a primary school teacher in Vienna under the Austrian School Reform Movement, teaching for seven years in three mountain village schools in Austria. He gave up teaching, thinking he had failed, in 1925, to take a variety of jobs first as a gardener’s assistant in the Hüsseldorf monastery near Vienna and later as architect of his sister’s mansion house near Vienna. He returned to Cambridge in 1929 where he remained until he resigned in 1947, except for a brief period as a porter at Guy’s Hospital (London) during World War II. During this period he returned to Norway in 1931 to work on the Philosophical Grammar and visited Ireland with Skinner in 1934. In 1935 he visited Russia and Dublin in 1936 with Skinner and again in 1938. In 1948 after his resignation he moved to Ireland; visited Norman Malcolm in the US in 1949, and returned to Norway briefly in 1950 with Ben Richards, before his death from prostate cancer on April 29 1951. This is the chronology of Wittgenstein’s life and the bare bones of his movements but it belies the connection between his life, his movements and his philosophy. Wittgenstein did not draw a sharp line between personal and philosophical problems and his work is sprinkled with references and shot through with metaphors that detail the significance of the exile both for his work—as a fertile starting point for philosophy— and for him as a person. He referred to and thought of himself as an exile—someone who belongs to another time—and

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he employed the idea of the Other, of an individual located in another culture, as a constant working hypothesis not only for his conception of ‘primitive’ languagegames and, therefore, for the acquisition of language and culture, but also more broadly as a condition of being and learning, and of becoming a philosopher. As Michael Nedo (Nedo et al., 2005, p. 11) argues: Wittgenstein’s wanderings are the expression of a lifelong quest for his vocation, his place in the world. They take him from Vienna via Berlin to Manchester, Cambridge and Norway, then back to Vienna; and from engineering to philosophy. And he quotes Wittgenstein: You first have to travel all over before you can return to your native land; and then you will understand the others. (Cited in Nedo et al., 2005, p. 11) Consider the some of the main movements of Wittgenstein throughout his life organized roughly chronologically, a kind of spatial analysis that can be mapped onto Wittgenstein’s thought: • • • • • • •

Vienna, Linz, Berlin. Manchester (Glossop), Jena, Cambridge, Norway (Skjolden). Vienna, Vistula (river), Cracow, Galicia, Olmütz, Vienna, Asiago, Trento, Cassino. Vienna, The Hague, Trattenbach, Puchberg, Cambridge, Vienna. Leningrad, Moscow, Cambridge, Dublin, Norway (Skjolden), Cambridge, Vienna, Norway (Skjolden), Dublin. Cambridge, Vienna, Berlin, New York, Cambridge, London, Swansea, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Swansea, Cambridge, Swansea. Dublin, Rosro, Cambridge, Dublin, Vienna, Dublin, Cambridge, Ithaca (NY), Cambridge, Vienna, London, Cambridge, Oxford, Norway, Vienna, Cambridge.

For the era before and after the war, as can be seen, Wittgenstein travels a great deal, returning to Vienna, Skjolden, Cambridge and Dublin. Norway and Ireland are places of retreat for him where there is no noise and they provide a place for thinking. Vienna is of course his ‘hometown’ where his family is located and Cambridge, more often than not his place of employment. He becomes a British citizen in 1939 after much deliberation. He is keenly aware of himself as a wanderer, as a stranger, and as an exile. These metaphors—the Other or outsider—appear as major tropes in his work as do spatial, landscape and journey metaphors, for example, of finding one’s away around or where he compares language to a labyrinth (Wittgenstein, 1953, §203) or an

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ancient city (§8). In fact these ideas of being lost in a city, finding one’s way around, interpreting the meaning of a signpost (and signs in general) as core operating metaphors. Wittgenstein writes ‘A rule stands there like a signpost.—Does the sign-post leave open a doubt open about the way I have to go? Does it shew which direction I am to take when I have passed it; whether along the road or the footpath or cross-country?’ (Wittgenstein, 1953, §85).

Wittgenstein as exile There are a number of senses of ‘exile’ in relation to Wittgenstein the man and his work. James Klagge (2005) reports in a footnote to a paper that considers ‘Wittgenstein in Exile’ that ‘exile’ was a term that Wittgenstein used to describe himself and his condition of cultural isolation. As he writes, Upon contemplating a move to Norway in 1913 to continue his research, Wittgenstein was cited by his friend David Pinsent as follows: ‘he swears he can never do his best except in exile’. (October 1st, 1913 diary entry, in A Portrait of Wittgenstein as a Young Man, ed. G. H. von Wright, Oxford: Blackwell, 1990, p. 85, and cf. p. 89). What is interesting about this remark is the way it privileges Wittgenstein’s work rather than himself as an individual. It is almost as though Wittgenstein is saying in this cryptic remark that he requires an isolation and insulation from normal or familiar conditions of work in order to focus his intellect. Klagge (2005) in the same footnote records two other occasions when Wittgenstein referred to himself in terms of ‘exile’. In his coded wartime notebook Wittgenstein wrote: ‘This kind, friendly letter [from Pinsent] opens my eyes to the fact that I am living in exile [Verbannung] here. It may be a healing exile, but I now feel it as an exile all the same’ (Geheime Tagebücher: 1914–1916, ed. W. Baum, Vienna: Turia & Kant, 1991, 26.7.16, p. 74). And also his comment in his diary: ‘In my room I feel not alone but exiled [exiliert]’. (‘Movements of Thought’, PPO, 9.10.30, p. 55). Both these fragmentary thoughts highlight elements about Wittgenstein’s selfimposed condition of exile: first that the condition of exile may be healing or therapeutic for a writer or philosopher; and second, that exile does not necessarily mean being alone for one can indeed feel loneliness in a room full of people. Both of these features point to an aspect of philosophy as a chosen form of life for Wittgenstein—not only did he believe that philosophy required renouncement of wealth and the trappings of privilege but also that it required a kind of distance from ‘community’ and an attitude that refused the comfort of belonging to a community.

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Clearly, Wittgenstein thought of himself as in exile and he also indicates in his letters that this condition of cultural isolation was necessary for his work. For example, the frequency with which he went to Norway and Ireland to seek solitude, silence and the right conditions to work. I want to argue that exile was a condition that Wittgenstein thought necessary to a way of life as philosopher. This idea took on a particular hue when Wittgenstein ‘returned’ to philosophy (at least in a formal sense) to focus upon cultural questions. It is as though Wittgenstein’s focus on cultural questions—on questions that stand at the heart of human culture—rather than questions of strict logic, required a simulation of the anthropologist’s ‘observer-participant’ attitude and sense of detachment in order to analyze ‘language-games’ and develop ‘perspicuous representations’. As Wittgenstein says in ‘Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough’, in Philosophical Occasions: The concept of perspicuous representation is of fundamental importance for us. It denotes the form of our representation, the way we see things. (A kind of ‘World-view’ as it is apparently typical of our time. Spengler) This perspicuous representation brings about the understanding which consists precisely in the fact that we ‘see the connections’. Hence the importance of finding connecting links. (Wittgenstein, 1993, p. 133) The philosophical work involved in describing our form of representation seemingly requires the cultivation of an attitude that demands cultural distance. Wittgenstein elaborates in the same passage, highlighting ‘similarity’ and ‘relatedness’ as an aspect of noting formal connections. But an hypothetical connecting link should in this case do nothing but direct the attention to the similarity, the relatedness, of the facts. As one might illustrate an internal relation of a circle to an ellipse by gradually converting an ellipse into a circle; but not in order to assert that a certain ellipse actually, historically, had originated from a circle (evolutionary hypothesis), but only in order to sharpen our eye for a formal connection. (Wittgenstein, 1993) It is an idea he repeats in the Philosophical Investigations at §122 where he talks about getting ‘a clear view of the use of our words’, asserting: A main source of our failure to understand is that we do not command a clear view of the use of our words—Our grammar is lacking in this sort of perspicuity. A perspicuous representation produces just that understanding which consists in ‘seeing the connexions’. Hence the importance of finding and inventing intermediate cases.

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Klagge’s interpretation emphasizes the cultural isolation of Wittgenstein, which is not merely a matter of space or of traveling across territorial boundaries but rather a matter of historical time and change—and one that depends crucially on a distinction that Wittgenstein makes between culture and civilization. As Klagge remarks, commenting upon the influence on Wittgenstein of Spengler’s reading of cultures as organic wholes that flourish and decline: Clearly Wittgenstein saw the era up through Schumann as the flowering of Western culture, and the time since, his and our own time, as deteriorating Western civilization. (Klagge, 2005, p. 3) This thought Klagge traces in the personal note that Wittgenstein strikes in his forewords and letters. The notion of Wittgenstein as a self imposed exile also links with a number of other themes in his work and, in particular, the position of the anthropologist who in fieldwork as shaped by the ethnographic tradition adopts a position of ‘outside observer’ and has to wrestle with the problem of intercultural truth and the difficulties surrounding their own narrative standpoint in relation to representations of other cultures. When the modern discipline of anthropology belonged to Europe and America—before the postcolonial critique—it was relatively easy to locate the anthropological subject against the backdrop of ‘objective’ and ‘scientific’ epistemologies that reflected social scientific positivism and later structural-functionalism as it emerged from natural history. Wittgenstein often used anthropological thought experiments and raised philosophical issues that arose at the intersection of two cultures or where an individual needs to find their way about in a culture different from their own. He also commented on Frazer’s The Golden Bough thinking that his account of magic and religious practices was entirely mistaken by making these practices appear as errors. For Wittgenstein truth and falsity are properties of propositions or theories and insofar as these religious and magical practices do not claim to be theoretical in this sense they are not liable to be changed to the power of argumentation. In essence Wittgenstein provides an epistemological critique of Frazer. Wittgenstein is also suspicious of the way in which Frazer talks of rituals as springing from false beliefs, which is to misunderstand the nature of ritual and culture (but not of various biological processes).

Exile, culture and learning In relation to the aims and themes of this chapter we can ask what is educational in travel and in the experience and notion of exile, beyond the obvious truism that ‘travel broadens the mind’ or even the historical significance of the ‘European tour’ which was seen as an essential aspect of a gentleman’s education during the 19th century, especially in England.

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A preliminary response to the question might focus upon the differences between the meanings of ‘travel’ and ‘exile’, yet a consideration of both in relation to the experience of another culture. Clearly, the notion of travel per se does not necessarily entail learning the language and customs of another culture. Indeed, travel as in the experience of the tourist may involve the security of group travel, package tours, and the prospect of never having one’s comfort or security threatened or risked. Unlike exile, either forced or self-imposed, the tourist is distinguished by the fact that curiosity and a kind of cultural consumption is the hallmark rather than cultural immersion, and the tourist generally does not have his or her zone of comfort and cultural identification threatened. With tourism generally there is not the same prospect of learning the rules, norms and mores of another culture through a constant engagement or encounter with the Other in their own home cultural environment. Exile, in other words, is distinguished by the fact that it is an ‘othering’ experience. It demands a certain kind of learning at the level of practice that is necessary for knowing how to go on within a culture. Generally also it involves the risk and prospect of failure: both failure of communication at the simple level of conversation but also failure at the deeper cultural level that helps to determine a sense of what is culturally appropriate. This continual risk of failure and lack of understanding of the underlying agreed cultural judgments requires a kind of learning that can only be obtained through practical encounters. It necessarily involves the experience of being lost and at times of not knowing how to proceed or what to do. Invariably this kind of learning takes places around the aspects of daily life, the ordinary and everyday events of eating, talking, queuing, exchanging pleasantries, greeting people of different age, sex and gender, drinking, sleeping, dressing, washing and so on. The tourist by comparison never allows his or her sense of ontological security to be threatened and while the intelligent or perceptive tourist might learn something about others and other cultures, generally it is not a learning that takes place under conditions of uncertainty involving the risk of being lost away from home and from familiar structures of familiarity. Study abroad programs that are now an increasingly important aspect of education need to be located closer to the experience of the exile than the tourist, with appropriate formal instruction related to the local context. Veena Das (1998, pp. 171–2) in an article entitled ‘Wittgenstein and Anthropology’ argues that there is ‘a certain kinship in the questions that Wittgenstein asks of his philosophy and the puzzles of anthropology’ and goes on to note: Consider his formulation. A philosophical problem has the form: I don’t know my way about (Wittgenstein 1953: para. 123). For Wittgenstein, then, philosophical problems have their beginnings in the feeling of being lost and in a unfamiliar place, and philosophical answers are in the nature of finding one’s way back. This image of turning back, of finding not as

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moving forward as toward a goal but as being led back, is pervasive in the later writings of Wittgenstein. How can anthropology receive this way of philosophizing? Is there something familiar in the feeling of being lost in anthropological experience? Das (1998) embraces Cavell’s reading of Wittgenstein as a philosopher of culture and goes on to explore some Wittgensteinian themes in relation to the idea of culture, limits to forms of life, concepts of the everyday in the face of skepticism and the complexity of inner life, especially in relation to questions of belief and pain. Certainly, Wittgenstein’s notion of forms of life does signal a kind of availability of Wittgenstein’s thought to anthropology, as Das suggests. This reading might also be deepened into an understanding of the ontological dimensions of multicultural education and pedagogy, as well as refugee education and what we might call a pedagogy of the Other. By ontological relational dimensions we mean focusing on the configuration and dynamic of self and other, of encounter with the other, and of oneself as another. In a work of that exact title Paul Ricoeur (1992) explores the notion of selfhood and the question of personal identity in a way that posits that selfhood implies otherness and that it cannot be understood by itself, as with Descarte’s lonely cogito. Exile forces one to live as the other, as another. It is not simply a matter of learning the language and customs but rather it is about finding the self in the Other, of being lost in relation to the self in a way that creates a rupture with familiar things that shore up ontological security and of identity understood as a form of self-knowledge. We might say that the ‘hermeneutics of the self’ (Foucault, 2004) differs from the philosophy of the subject: where the latter seeks certainty and truth as the foundation of the self, self knowledge and also knowledge of the external world, the former sees self-understanding as a cultural act that can only take place within the dynamic or dialectic of self and other—an active cultural reading and re-reading of self-interpretation. Foucault’s hermeneutics of technologies of the self is precisely an attempt to avoid the history of beliefs and to substitute a history of practices which, unlike hermeneutics of the text, was never based on a body of doctrine. Foucault’s (1988) technologies of the self examines a hermeneutics in Greco-Roman philosophy of the first two centuries AD and Christian spiritual and monastic practices of the 4th and 5th centuries. In a way we can talk of finding the stranger in oneself, not knowing how one might act in new situations or how one is expected to act. This is a very Cavellian scene: this kind of learning is a deep cultural learning that seeks to find the self in the other and the other in oneself; it is a process of selfknowledge and identity formation that involves the possibility and risk of being lost, of an identity constantly on the move likes the pilgrim always being on the way. This theme of an encounter with the other taken up in various ways by Wittgenstein, Blanchot, Levinas, Foucault, Cavell, Ricoeur and Gadamer

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also focuses on what the possibilities of understanding across culture and across difference means; an endless process of confronting the other in oneself and with luck of discovering something new about ourselves; of finding the other in ourselves and recognizing the stranger in oneself. Wittgenstein regarded himself as an exile and in a double sense as we have seen. His exile was both temporal and spatial. While his ‘exile’ from his home Vienna and from his family and way of life was self-imposed he felt that he was living as an exile in a different time and in a culture which he despised. Wittgenstein was rooted in the intellectual life of Vienna at the turn of the century (Janik & Toulmin, 1973) and he was preoccupied with the intellectual values that emanated from that culture: language and the purity of language, what could be said and what could not be said, the relation between the health of a culture and its language. Many of these issues center on the birth of modernism in turn of the century Vienna as evidenced in the work of Karl Krauss, Adolf Loos, Otto Weininger, Gustav Mahler, Gustav Klimt, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Stefan Zweig. The difficulties for Wittgenstein also revolved around the collapse of the Habsburg Empire that incorporated Germans, Ruthenes, Italians, Slovaks, Rumanians, Czechs, Poles, Magyars, Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs. For Krauss as for Wittgenstein Vienna was culturally bankrupt. The answer in part was through the imagination of the arts and philosophy that could provide a renewed and authentic self through symbolic expression: music, poetry, art, architecture and philosophy that focused on the relations between language, ethics and representation. Gellner (1998) argues that both Wittgenstein and Malinowski shared many of the Habsburg Empire’s contradictions such as a deep affinity with a local tradition or one’s ethnic roots as well as a sophisticated and fluent command of a universal culture. These influences shaped Wittgenstein and Malinowski resulting in their particular versions of a solitary individualism and a romantic communalism. Wittgenstein as Welsch (1999, p. 202) points out develops a ‘pragmatically based concept of culture’ that is remarkable ‘free of ethnic consolidation and unreasonable demands for homogeneity’. Language is central to culture and to a kind of authenticity. Culture is based on based on shared practices that create a form of life. Welsch argues: The basic task is not to be conceived as an understanding of foreign cultures, but as an interaction with foreignness. Understanding may be helpful, but is never sufficient alone, it has to enhance progress in interaction. We must change the pattern from hermeneutic conceptualizations with their beloved presumption of foreignness on the one hand and the unfortunate appropriating dialectics of understanding on the other to decidedly pragmatic efforts to interact. And there is always a good chance for such interactions, because there exist at least some entanglements, intersections and transitions between the different ways of life. It is precisely this which Wittgenstein’s concept of culture takes into account. Culture in Wittgenstein’s

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sense is, by its very structure, open to new connections and to further feats of integration. To this extent, a cultural concept reformulated along Wittgenstein’s lines seems to me to be particularly apt to today’s conditions. (pp. 202–3) Wittgenstein’s notion a concept of culture that challenges the concept of a single unified culture (or nation)—internally uniform and geographically separate—and emphasizes, by contrast, the view of cultures ‘as overlapping, interactive and internally differentiated …’ (Tully, 1995, p. 9). Cultures overlap geographically; they are mutually defined through complex historical patterns of historical interaction, and they are continuously transformed in interaction with other cultures, a process that occurs through a variety of exchange mechanisms including trade, tourism, and exile. James Tully (1995, p. 11) explains: ‘The identity, and so the meaning, of any culture is thus aspectival rather than essential: like many complex human phenomena, such as language and games, cultural identity changes as it is approached from different paths and a variety of aspects come into view’. He goes on to argue for a dynamic view of culture that emphasizes that difference is also internal to cultures: As a consequence of the overlap, interaction and negotiation of cultures, the experience of cultural difference is internal to a culture. This is the most difficult aspect of the new view of culture to grasp. On the older, essentialist view, the ‘other’ and the experience of otherness were by definition associated with another culture … On the aspectival view, cultural horizons change as one moves about, just like natural horizons. The experience of otherness is internal to one’s own identity, which consists in being oriented in an aspectival intercultural space … (p. 13) Exile is an educational experience based on finding oneself in another, of shoring up one’s identity in other cultural terms. Exhilic thought is that discourse in philosophy that recognizes the spatial dimension of thought and its necessary complement when one travels and settles, initially a stranger in the community but also one who brings new perspectives, even though it may be one and the many or the few and the many that precipitates a kind of cultural learning that is pronounced not only in understanding others and other cultures but also at the heart of the cultural process of self and other that rest on differences within and between cultures.

Notes 1 Wittgenstein writes in the Preface to the Investigations: ‘The Philosophical remarks in this book are, as it were, a number of sketches of landscapes which were made in the course of these long and involved journeyings’ (p. vii). This is to be contrasted

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Wittgenstein as exile with Gilbert Ryle’s (1949) ‘logical geography’ of the concept. Where Ryle believes the a more or less complete mapping of a concept is possible Wittgenstein emphasizes the indeterminacy of maps and the dynamic character of what it means to understand and follow a map. This is true of the first oral-formulaic epic narratives in the western Homeric tradition including the Iliad and the Odyssey that strongly influenced Plato and were a basis for Roman education. It is also the case with Marco Polo’s travels in 1260 and his presence at the court of Kublai Khan. ‘First contact’ was later systematized in the emerging discipline of anthropology during the early era of European colonization and developed with the formalization of ‘ethnology’ and later ‘ethnography’, which while it had origins in the Florentine Renaissance (especially archeology) and grew out of philosophical anthropological concern principally with the nature of ‘Man’, took its modern form with Durkheim and Mauss (on primitive classification), and later, with Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski. See ‘Blanchot: Limit-experience & being Jewish’ at http://sauer-thompson.com/ conversations/archives/002836.html. For Deleuze and Guattari (1987), nomads are characterized in opposition to the system of the State which is sedentary; nomadism is, thus, a revolutionary alternative to the State. The nomad is the ‘outsider’ and nomadic thought is ‘outside’ thought (an expression borrowed from Blanchot). See also Delueze and Guattari’s (1986) Nomadology: The War Machine. He writes: ‘Blanchot finds the Levinasian meditation on radical otherness an invaluable corrective to a philosophical tradition marred by an ethically and politically insidious predilection for sameness. Like his friend, he regards the West’s suspicion and hatred of the Jew as paradigmatic of this fundamental allergy to difference and even implicitly frames his own thought as a kind of Hebraic reproach to the monistic metaphysics issuing from ancient Greece’: ‘Judaism and Alterity in Blanchot and Levinas’ at www.jcrt.org/archives/06.1/brogan.pdf. Remember that Heidegger’s analysis of nihilism is that ‘man’ has lost all connections with beings and within the present technological enframing that represents the modern age (modernity) ‘man’ is homeless. It is strange he does not mention Wittgenstein. We take both sources from an excellent essay by Farhang Erfani ‘Being-There and Being-From-Elsewhere: An existential-analytic of exile’ at www.reconstruction.ws/ 023/erfani.htm. Tully also mentions feminist and indigenous peoples movements in this light. Interestingly Tully (1995) uses Wittgenstein’s thought and his notion of ‘family resemblances’ for understanding the ‘strange multiplicity’ of the modern state. For example Camus’ collection of short stories entitled Exile and the Kingdom most of which are set in Algeria and clearly involve a strong autobiographical quality (Camus was born in Algeria in 1913) and Camus’ construction of Algerian Arab as Other. Camus also wrote the novel L’etranger (The Stranger) in 1941 at the same point that he met Sartre, and the essay ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ explores the futility of human existence in the face of its absurdity and the absence of any rational structure after the ‘death of God’. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1957. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in What is Philosophy? theorize the connection between geography and philosophy in ‘geophilosophy’, a term they neologize to analyze the flows, lines, grids, and spaces of our world. A Thousand Plateaus provided the basis for their ‘geophilosophy’ as a new materialism that employed many geographical terms (such as ‘territory’ and its processes). We owe this insight to Farhang Erfani in the excellent essay ‘Being-There and BeingFrom-Elsewhere: An Existential-Analytic of Exile’ at www.reconstruction.ws/023/

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erfani.htm (accessed 15 August 2005). Erfani, to whom we also owe the reference to Dummett, quotes Judith Shklar (1998, p. 57) as ‘one of the very few political thinkers who sought to understand exile’ thus: there ‘has been rather little said [by philosophers] about exiles. They have been left to the historians and poets, and that is a pity. Perhaps their numbers and variety have discouraged philosophical inquiry. It is not easy to generalize about exiles, nor do they lend themselves to abstraction’.

References Blanchot, M. (1993) The Infinite Conversation, S. Hanson, trans. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), pp. 123–130. Brogan, M. (2004) Judaism and Alterity in Blanchot and Levinas, at www.jcrt.org/arch ives/06.1/brogan.pdf. Camus, A. (1989) Exile and the Kingdom, J. O’Brien, trans. (Harmondsworth, Penguin). Cawelti, J. G. (2001) Eliot, Joyce, and Exile, ANQ, 14:4, pp. 38–45. Das, V. (1998) Wittgenstein and Anthropology, Annual Review of Anthropology, 27, pp. 171–195. Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1986) Nomadology: The war machine (New York, Semiotext). Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia, B. Massumi, trans. (London, The Athlone Press). Dummett, M. (2001) On Immigration and Refugees (London, Routledge). Erfani, F. (2002) Being-There and Being-From-Elsewhere: An existential-analytic of exile, available at www.reconstruction.ws/023/erfani.htm Foucault, M. (1988) Technologies of the Self, in: L. H. Martin, H. Gutman & P. Hutton (eds), Technologies of the Self: A seminar with Michel Foucault (London, Tavistock), pp. 16–49. Foucault, M. (2004) The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France 1981–82, G. Burchell, trans.; A. Davidson, intro. (London, Palgrave Macmillan). Gellner, E. (1998) Language and Solitude: Wittgenstein, Malinowski and the Hapsburg dilemma (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press). Hoffman, E. (1999) The New Nomads, in: A. Aciman (ed.), Letters of Transit (New York, The New Press). Janik, A. & Toulmin, S. (1973) Wittgenstein’s Vienna (New York, Simon & Schuster). Klagge, J. (2005) Wittgenstein in Exile, in: D. Z. Phillips & M. von der Ruhr (eds), Religion and Wittgenstein’s Legacy (Aldershot, Ashgate) available at www.phil.vt.edu/ JKlagge/WinExile.pdf Monk, R. (1990) Ludwig Wittgenstein: The duty of genius (London, Vintage). Nedo, M., Moreton, G. & Finlay, A. (2005) Ludwig Wittgenstein: There where you are not (London, Black Dog Publishing). Ricoeur, P. (1992) Oneself as Another, K. Blamey, trans. (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press). Ryle, G. (1949) The Concept of Mind (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press). Said, E. (1994) Reflections on Exile, in: M. Robinson (ed.), Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on exile (London, Faber and Faber). Sauer-Thompson, G. (2005) Blanchot: Limit-experience & being Jewish, available at http://sauer-thompson.com/conversations/archives/002836.html. Shklar, J. (1998) Political Thought & Political Thinkers (Chicago, University of Chicago Press).

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Taylor, M. C. (1984) Erring: A Postmodern A/Theology (Chicago, University of Chicago Press), pp. 150, 157, 156, 147. Tully, J. (1995) Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an age of diversity (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press). Welsch, W. (1999) Transculturality: The puzzling form of cultures today, in: M. Featherstone & S. Lash (eds), Spaces of Cultures: City—Nation—World (London, Sage). Wittgenstein, L. (1953) Philosophical Investigations, G. E. M. Anscombe & R. Rhees, eds; G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. (Oxford, Blackwell). Wittgenstein, L. (1970) Zettel, G. E. M. Anscombe & G. H. von Wright, eds; G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. (Berkeley, University of California Press). Wittgenstein, L. (1993) Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, in: Philosophical Occasions: 1912–1915, J. Klagge & A. Nordmann, eds (Indianapolis, IN, Hackett).

Chapter 4

Wittgenstein and the ethics of suicide Homosexuality and Jewish self-hatred in fin de siècle Vienna Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd, www.tandfonline.com, on behalf of © Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia.

If suicide is allowed, then everything is allowed. If anything is not allowed, then suicide is not allowed. This throws a light on the nature of ethics, for suicide is, so to speak, the elementary sin. And when one investigates it is like investigating mercury vapours in order to investigate the nature of vapours. (Wittgenstein, 1961: 91)

Introduction One of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s cousins and three of his four brothers committed suicide. Hans committed suicide by apparently throwing himself from a boat in Chesapeake Bay in May 1902, having run away from home. Rudi committed suicide in a Berlin bar, administering himself cyanide poisoning in 1904, most probably because of homosexuality that he referred to as ‘perverted disposition’ in a suicide note. Kurt shot himself in 1918 at the end of the war when his troops deserted en masse. The profound influences upon young Ludwig were the physicist Ludwig Boltzmann who committed suicide in 1906 and Otto Weininger, author of Sex and Character, who committed suicide in 1903. For the most part, these suicides were committed before Ludwig had turned 15. Young Ludwig was also profoundly influenced by Schopenhauer who he read while still at school. Schopenhauer denied that suicide was immoral and instead saw it as the last supreme act of freedom and assertion of the will in ending one’s life. In ‘On Suicide’ in Studies in Pessimism, Schopenhauer writes that none of the Jewish religions ‘look upon suicide as a crime’. Yet, these religious thinkers: tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice; that only a madman could be guilty of it; and other insipidities of the same kind; or else they make the nonsensical remark that suicide is wrong; when it

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is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every mail has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.1 (https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/ arthur/pessimism/chapter3.html) Schopenhauer remarks ‘the inmost kernel of Christianity is the truth that suffering – the Cross– is the real end and object of life. Hence Christianity condemns suicide as thwarting this end …’ As Jacquette (2000) notes, despite his profound pessimism Schopenhauer rejects suicide ‘as an unworthy affirmation of the will to life by those who seek to escape rather than seek nondiscursive knowledge of Will in suffering’ (p. 43). Young Ludwig while of Jewish origins was baptised a Catholic. It is well known that Wittgenstein loses his faith while still at school. Wittgenstein entertained thoughts of suicide from his early teenage years throughout his life. This suicidal ideation came to the fore even more intensely, if we are to judge from his letters to Paul Englemann, during the years he spent as an elementary school teacher in the mountain villages of Austria. In the period 1919 when he trained as a teacher until 1926 when he abruptly resigned after hitting a boy who fell unconscious as a result, Wittgenstein suffered intense bouts of depression (Peters, 2017). This essay is devoted to the question: in view of his suffering and the Jewish cult of suicide in fin de siècle Vienna why did Wittgenstein not take his own life? I investigate this question focussing on Wittgenstein’s sources of suffering around what I call his ‘double identity crisis’ caused by his homosexuality and his Jewish self-hatred.

Identity crisis; suicide in Vienna Under the heading ‘Suicide Squad’ Jim Holt (2009) reviewing Alexander Waugh’s The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War begins rather sensationally with the following: ‘A tense and peculiar family, the Oedipuses,’ a wag once observed. Well, when it comes to dysfunction, the Wittgensteins of Vienna could give the Oedipuses a run for their money. The tyrannical family patriarch was Karl Wittgenstein (1847–1913), a steel, banking and arms magnate. He and his timorous wife, Leopoldine, brought nine children into the world. Of the five boys, three certainly or probably committed suicide and two were plagued by suicidal impulses throughout their lives. Of the three daughters who survived into adulthood, two got married; both husbands ended up insane and one died by his own hand. Even by the morbid standards of late Hapsburg Vienna these are impressive numbers. But tense and peculiar as the Wittgensteins were, the family also had a strain of genius. Of the two sons who didn’t kill themselves, one, Paul (1887–1961), managed to

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become an internationally celebrated concert pianist despite the loss of his right arm in World War I. The other, Ludwig (1889–1951), was the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. (www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/books/review/Holt-t.html) At the end of World War I, troops under the command of Wittgenstein’s second oldest brother, Kurt, rebelled against his orders, and Kurt became the third brother to commit suicide. This is how Waugh describes the suicide of Rudi, a 22-year-old chemistry student at the Berlin Academy: At 9.45 on the evening of May 2, 1904, Rudi walked into a restaurant-bar on Berlin’s Brandenburgstrasse, ordered two glasses of milk and some food, which he ate in a state of noticeable agitation. When he had finished, he asked the waiter to send a bottle of mineral water to the pianist with instructions for him to play the popular Thomas Koschat number, Verlassen, verlassen, verlassen bin ich. As the music wafted across the room, Rudolf took from his pocket a sachet of clear crystal compound and dissolved the contents into one of his glasses of milk. The effects of potassium cyanide when ingested are instant and agonising: a tightening of the chest, a terrible burning sensation in the throat, immediate discoloration of the skin, nausea, coughing and convulsions. Within two minutes Rudolf was slumped back on his chair unconscious. The landlord sent customers out in search of doctors. Three of them arrived, but too late for their ministrations to take effect. (www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/3559463/The-WittgensteinsViennese-whirl.html) His father forbade any mention of Rudolf in the Wittgenstein household, a decision that caused a rift between parents and children. Johannes ‘Hans’ the eldest son had died in a canoeing incident in America. As Waugh (2010: 29) writes: ‘the most likely scenario is that he did indeed commit suicide somewhere outside Austria, that the family had prior intimations, or direct warnings, of his suicidal intent, and that the spur that induced them to declare openly that he had taken his life was the very public death in Vienna, on October 4, 1903, of a 23-year-old philosopher called Otto Weininger. Weininger’s suicide caused a significant stir in Viennese society. The newspapers ran pages of commentary about him, and his reputation rose from that of obscure controversialist to national celebrity in a matter of days. All the Wittgensteins read his book.’ Weininger (1903/2005) had a profound influence on Wittgenstein through his notorious Sex and Character that he wrote and published in 1903. The book argues that all people are fundamentally bisexual and all individuals are composed of a mixture – the male aspect is active, productive, conscious and moral/logical, while the female aspect is passive, unproductive,

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unconscious, amoral and alogical. While emancipation is only possible for ‘masculine women’ it is the duty of the male to strive to become, a genius forging sexuality for the abstract love of God in which he can find himself. He was a Jewish convert to Christianity, and Weininger analysed Jewishness in terms of feminine qualities, later used by the Nazis. Weininger was a tormented soul who became a cult figure influencing a wide range of people. His genius was acknowledged by ‘Ford Maddox Ford, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Karl Kraus, Charlotte Perkins- Gilman, Gertrude Stein, and August Strindberg’ as well as William Carlos Williams, Freud and Hitler (Stern & Szabados, 2004). He was a deep misogynist, an anti-Semite and self-loather (Rider, 2013). He also deeply influenced Wittgenstein, who writes: I think there is some truth in my idea that I am really only reproductive in my thinking. I think I have never invented a line of thinking but that it was always provided for me by someone else & I have done no more than passionately take it up for my work of clarification. That is how Boltzmann Hertz Schopenhauer Frege, Russell, Kraus, Loos Weininger Spengler, Sraffa have influenced me. (Wittgenstein 1980: 16) Engaging the work of Otto Weininger (1880–1903), one of the most widely discussed authors of fin-de-siècle Vienna, can help illuminate this sense of a ‘crisis of the subject’ and its relationship to the world that informed so much of Vienna’s cultural production and debate at the time. Of all the books Wittgenstein read in his adolescence Weininger’s Sex and Character had the greatest influence (Monk 1990: 25). Achinger (2013: 121) reads Weininger through the lens of Critical Theory to suggest ‘viewing “the Woman” and “the Jew” as outward projections of different, but related contradictions within the constitution of the modern subject itself.’ She goes on to argue: More specifically, ‘Woman’ comes to embody the threat to the (masculine) bourgeois individual emanating from its own embodied existence, from ‘nature’ and libidinal impulses. ‘The Jew,’ on the other hand, comes to stand for historical developments of modern society that make themselves more keenly felt towards the end of the nineteenth century and threaten to undermine the very forms of individuality and independence that had previously been produced by this society. Such a reading of Geschlecht und Charakter not only can help illuminate the crisis of the bourgeois individual at the turn of the twentieth century, but also could contribute to ongoing discussions on why modern society, although based on seemingly universalist conceptions of subjectivity, continues to produce difference and exclusion along the lines of gender and race.

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Certainly, such a critical interpretation coheres with the reading of a ‘double identity crisis’ facing the younger Wittgenstein growing up in fin de siècle Vienna. Le Rider (1990) argues ‘The crisis of the individual, experienced as an identity crisis, is at the heart of all questions we find in literature and the humane sciences’ (p. 1) and remarks that ‘Viennese modernism can be interpreted as an anticipation of certain important ‘postmodern’ themes’ (p. 6). He has in mind, for instance, the way in which Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language ‘deconstructs the subject as author and judge of his own semantic intentions’ (p. 28). He remarks in terms of the crisis of identity how Wittgenstein, ‘like all assimilated Jewish intellectuals, found his Jewish identity a problem’ and the problem of his Jewish identity was coupled with a crisis of sexual identity, when at least at some periods of his life he sought refuge from his homosexual tendencies in a kind of Tolstoyan asceticism (p. 295). He suggests: Wittgenstein, who … looked back nostalgically on a well-ordered world where everyone had his place, found modernity uncultured because it had lost its power to integrate, and left individuals in a state of confusion. The only ones who can keep their balance and personal creativity are those whom Nietzsche calls the strong men, that is the most moderate, who need neither convictions nor religion, who are able not only to endure, but to accept a fair amount of chance and absurdity, and are capable of thinking in a broadly disillusioned and negative way without feeling either diminished or discouraged. (p. 296) He argues that the consequences of this double crisis of identity, much more than is commonly accepted, are intimately tied up with the fundamentals of his thought and with a number of his intellectual preoccupations: his interest in Weininger and in psychoanalysis, his mystical tendencies, but also his reflections on genius, on the self, and on ethics (p. 296). The importance that Le Rider (1993) places upon Nietzsche as part of the cultural fabric of Viennese modernism exercised upon a young Wittgenstein is borne out by other scholars of fin de siècle Vienna. There is a kind of Wittgensteinian hagiography that for years has prevented the investigation of these questions, which is of itself an interesting question in the anthropology of philosophy, especially that form of analysis that insists on a sharp separation between the man and the work. This line of argument suggests that the realm of ideas properly belongs to that of the mind that can be discussed dispassionately and in a technical way that pays attention to the space of arguments and the structure of argumentation; while the realm of biography belongs to that of the body, to the temporal dimension of existence emphasising its finitude. Thus, the mind-body dualism lives on and also prevents the influence of arguments and observations of psychobiography on philosophy per se.

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Viennese Modernism has attracted much scholarly and public interest in recent decades, in part because some of the most enduring works of art, literature, and philosophy produced in Vienna around the turn of the last century question key concepts of liberalism and Enlightenment – such as the notions of progress, of the coherent and rational subject, and of a stable and unproblematic relationship between subject and world in which language is nothing but a neutral and transparent mediator – in ways that seem to prefigure contemporary debates. There are many stories of Jewish artists and philosophers who wrestled with identity issues in a hostile social and intellectual environment of Vienna sometimes internalising aspects of anti- Semitic ideology that no doubt propelled many to seek a new Christianised identity to help mask the transition. How Gustav Mahler, a Bohemian-Jewish artist of genius, responds to the challenges of a German culture that he has appropriated completely but into which he is never fully accepted is the subject of Niekerk’s (2013) Reading Mahler: German Culture and Jewish Identity in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna. Mahler was a frequent visitor to the Wittgenstein mansion when Wittgenstein was a boy. Mahler’s own artistic endeavours are determined by the complex responses to Goethe, the Romantics, Wagner, and, above all, Nietzsche and to rewrite German Romanticism at a time when German cultural history was dominated by Wagner’s anti-Semitic views. Another example is Fritz Waerndorfer who wanted to ‘His House for an Art Lover’ to ‘establish himself as an important participant in the Viennese avantgarde scene but also to promote a new artistic agenda’ and wished ‘to establish a new identity for himself as an assimilated Jew through the modernist redesign’ (Shapira, 2006).

Jewish self-hatred and homosexuality The question of Jewish self-hatred has been an enduring issue for many years. Paul Reitter (2009: 359), author of The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-Siècle Europe, indicates: The tendency not to lean too heavily on anyone else’s theory of Jewish self-hatred has no doubt helped a fairly small discussion produce a wide range of interpretive strategies: social psychological (Lewin), psychoanalytic (Gay), psycho- historical (Liebenberg), intellectual historical (Hallie), ‘topological’ (Gilman), and cultural historical (Edelman and Volker). He refers to Gilman’s (1986) Jewish Self-Hatred that ‘it is only natural, that where some measure of integration is a desideratum, and there is also bigotry in the ‘majority culture’, minority self-loathing will occur’ (Reitter, 2009: 360). He argues Gilman, like W. E. B. Du Bois before him, attempts to explain how ‘German Jews came to “accept” and “internalize” a distorted, decidedly negative image of their own group.’ Du Bois, as Reitter (2009: 360)

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reports, writes: ‘But the facing of so vast a prejudice could not but bring the inevitable self-questioning, self-disparagement, and lowering of ideals which ever ac- company repression and breed in an atmosphere of contempt and hate’ (cited in Reiter, 2009). He quotes from Endelman, who as he remarks is an eminent historian of European Jewry: Self-hating Jews were converts, secessionists, and radical assimilationists who, not content with disaffiliation from the community, felt compelled to articulate how far they had travelled from their origins by echoing antiSemitic views, by proclaiming their distaste for those from whom they wished to dissociate themselves. What set them apart from other radical assimilationists was that, having cut their ties, they were unable to move on and forget their Jewishness. (cited in Reitter, 2009: 366) Reitter (2009) wants to retrace the evolution of the term ‘Jewish selfhatred’ as a more polite concept than ‘Jewish antisemitism’ with redemptive possibilities. The question is complex and the hypothesis that Jews who harboured such a negative self-image and possessed such a strong desire to be accepted in a society that was covertly and residually hostile to Jews’ might be true but it risks becoming ‘a rhetorical weapon to critics of assimilation’, as Janik (2013: 143) suggests in a review of Rietter. He refers to David Sorkin and Steven Beller, who ‘have provided us with accounts of how vigorous Jewish criticism of Jewish life, Socratic self-criticism, was part and parcel of a self-consciously Jewish ‘enlightenment’ (haskalah) from the time of Moses Mendelssohn.’ Wittgenstein’s Jewish self-loathing is a complex affair. David Stern (2001: 237) asks: Did Ludwig Wittgenstein consider himself a Jew? Should we? Wittgenstein repeatedly wrote about Jews and Judaism in the 1930s (Wittgenstein 1980/1998, 1997) and the biographical studies of Wittgenstein by Brian McGuinness (1988), Ray Monk (1990), and Szabados (1992, 1995, 1997, 1999) make it clear that this writing about Jewishness was a way in which he thought about the kind of person he was and the nature of his philosophical work. He answers his own question by reference to Brian McGuinness’s Young Ludwig (1988–1921) –‘First, Wittgenstein did, on occasion, speak of himself as a Jew’, especially in relation to Weininger’s writings on Jewish character in a series of now famous remarks made in the 1930s recorded in Culture and Value. Second, ‘Wittgenstein did, on occasion, deny his Jewishness, and this was a charged matter for him’ (p. 239), in particular in his confessions to family and friends in 1936 and 1937 when he refers to his misrepresentation of

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his Jewish ancestry. Stern later comments: ‘Is there a connection between Wittgenstein’s writing on Jews and his philosophy? What did he mean when he spoke of himself as a “Jewish thinker” in 1931?’ (p. 265) and concludes: Wittgenstein’s problematic Jewishness is as much a product of our problematic concerns as his. There is no doubt that Wittgenstein was of Jewish descent; it is equally clear that he was not a practicing Jew. Insofar as he thought of himself as Jewish, he did so in terms of the anti-Semitic prejudices of his time. (p. 269) Wittgenstein’s sexuality also caused him much anguish and led to bouts of homosexual self- loathing. In Austria and the United Kingdom homosexuality was still outlawed and considered not only a crime but also a psychiatric treatable condition. There were many risks associated with homosexuality and even with writing about in as late as the 1970s. William W. Bartley III (1973) published his book on Wittgenstein that included references to Wittgenstein being gay, much to the dismay of the philosophical establishment that tried to ban such discussion and to deny that there was any link at all between his work and his sexuality and the feelings it generated. Barley made a few off-hand remarks about Wittgenstein’s promiscuous homosexuality while he was training to be a teacher in Vienna. The evidence for this claim has never been established (Monk, 2018). Wittgenstein had relationships with David Pinsent in 1912, with Francis Skinner in the 1930s and Ben Richards in the late 1940s. The first was purely Platonic or unconsummated and it is unclear to what extent the other two relationships involved physical expressions of love. It has been a major problem in Wittgenstein studies to address and analyse his sexuality and homosexuality as though somehow Wittgenstein’s sexual feelings tainted the ascetic moral ideal that had been built around him as a philosopher. It is interesting the extent to which perspectives have changed – not only societal values and the embrace of gay and transsexual rights but also the legitimacy of sexual autobiography in relation to questions of philosophy. The fact that Michel Foucault was gay by contrast is considered strongly to influence his outlook and his work, and he is celebrated because of it. It was a very significant part of his work in his genealogical studies of the history of sexuality and coloured his view of women’s sexuality. For Wittgenstein, a generation older, the societal reaction was quite vicious and Wittgenstein agonised over his sexuality, without ever addressing it, even though there was an underground acceptance of homosexuality at Cambridge. There is little doubt of Wittgenstein’s homosexuality or its importance in understanding the man. The more difficult question is the effects of his homosexuality on his philosophy and on his relationships when he was a teacher. Psychoanalytically, much could be made of this personal secrecy and the need

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to preserve confessional material from prying eyes that might be very damaging. The question is fundamental yet there is no extant work that risks analysis in relation to Wittgenstein to my knowledge. Sex and language as a particular focus of a wider debate on the issue of gender and language now seems almost commonplace. Wittgenstein may have taken some relief from Freud’s analysis of the bisexual nature of human beings where everyone is attracted to both sexes yet Freud’s determinism in ascribing biological and psychological factors on the basis of deep libidinal sexual drives making it difficult to change would have raised questions for Wittgenstein at the point he was trying to change. Gay male culture began to flourish in the late nineteenth century in 1920s Vienna (sodomy was still an imprisonable offence) and sexologists like KrafftEbing and Freud had begun to codify homosexual identity and to see it as a ‘perversion’. There were still very strong taboos in place when Wittgenstein was a teacher. It was not until the 1970s after the ‘Gay Holocaust’ that gay and lesbian activism saw a resurgence. Had Wittgenstein’s homosexuality been known at this time it would almost certainly would have led to his vilification. This anti-gay environment in general society and in teaching forced Wittgenstein’s sexual identity ruminations underground. Derek Jarman’s witty depiction of the gay Wittgenstein (in the film he directed, Wittgenstein, of 1993) is a path-breaking dramatic analysis of Wittgenstein’s opening up as a gay man.2

Wittgenstein on suicide ‘The Ethics of Suicide Digital Archive’ is an exhaustive work accompanying the book prepared by the philosopher Margaret Pabst Battin from the University of Utah3 that begins: Is suicide wrong, always wrong, or profoundly morally wrong? Or is it almost always wrong but excusable in a few cases? Or is it sometimes morally permissible? Is it not intrinsically wrong at all, though perhaps often imprudent? Is it sick? Is it a matter of mental illness? Is it a private or a social act? Is it something the family, community, or society should always try to prevent, or could ever expect of a person? Could it sometimes be a ‘noble duty’? Or is it solely a personal matter, perhaps a matter of right based in individual liberties, or even a fundamental human right? (https://ethicsofsuicide.lib.utah.edu/introduction/) The Digital Archive acts as comprehensive sourcebook, providing a collection of primary texts on the ethics of suicide in both the Western and non-Western traditions, with an archive based on Wittgenstein’s Notebooks 1914–16 and Letters. The introduction to these texts is prefaced by a note on Wittgenstein’s feelings about suicide during the years 1912–13 when he spent time with David Hume Pinsent, a friend, collaborator and Platonic lover of Wittgenstein.

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Wittgenstein friend and collaborator David Hume Pinsent, with whom he traveled on holidays together, describes Wittgenstein’s frequent thoughts of suicide at numerous places in his own diary. In Pinsent’s entry for June 1, 1912, he notes that Wittgenstein told him that he had suffered from terrific loneliness for the past nine years, that he had thought of suicide then, and that he felt ashamed of never daring to kill himself; according to Pinsent, Wittgenstein thought that he had had ‘a hint that he was de trop in this world.’ In his entry for September 4, 1913, when they were traveling in Norway, Pinsent describes Wittgenstein as ‘really in an awful neurotic state: this evening he blamed himself violently and expressed the most piteous disgust with himself … it is obvious he is quite incapable of helping these fits. I only hope that an out of doors life here will make him better: at present it is no exaggeration to say he is as bad – (in that nervous sensibility) – as people like Beethoven were. He even talks of having at times contemplated suicide.’ In his entry for September 25, 1913, Pinsent reports that ‘This evening we got talking together about suicide – not that Ludwig was depressed or anything of the sort – he was quite cheerful all today. But he told me that all his life there had hardly been a day, in which he had not at one time or other thought of suicide as a possibility. He was really surprised when I said I never thought of suicide like that – and that given the chance I would not mind living my life so far – over again! He would not for anything.’ (https://ethicsofsuicide.lib.utah.edu/selections/wittgenstein; italics in original) Pinsent (1891–1918) was a descendant of Hume who gained a first class honours at Cambridge University in mathematics. Wittgenstein had only arrived at Cambridge to talk with Russell about whether he should take up philosophy in October 1911. During the Christmas vacation Wittgenstein comes to the end of a deep depression. He meets David Pinsent in Russell’s rooms and they quickly became friends, taking tea together, attending concerts, and making music. Within a month of meeting Wittgenstein proposed to Pinsent that they go on holiday together to Iceland in September 1912. They took a second holiday together at the same time in 1913 and were to meet in August 1914 before World War I intervened. As Preston (2018) has reported, Wittgenstein received letters which he described as ‘sensuous’. Their relationship was fated when on May 8 1918 Pinsent was killed in an air accident while flying a de Havilland bi-plane. Preston writes: In the immediate aftermath of Pinsent’s death, Wittgenstein was depressed to the point of planning to kill himself somewhere in the mountains in Austria. But at a railway station near Salzburg he bumped into his uncle Paul, who found him in a state of anguish, but saved him from the suicide

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he was planning. Wittgenstein kept in contact with Pinsent’s family at least until mid-1919, and probably beyond that. (https://theconversation.com/how-ludwig-wittgensteinssecret-boyfriend-helped-deliver-the-philosophersseminal-work-96557) Pinsent supported Wittgenstein and admired him. It seems clear that Wittgenstein was in love with Pinsent. He dedicated the Tractatus to him when it was published in 1921. Many of the reports on Wittgenstein’s depressed and suicidal state of mind during this period come from Wittgenstein’s letters and Pinsent’s diary.4 It is during this period that Wittgenstein (1961) comes to a resolution about suicide when he writes in what we know as the Notebooks 1914–1916: If suicide is allowed then everything is allowed. If anything is not allowed then suicide is not allowed. This throws a light on the nature of ethics, for suicide is, so to speak, the elementary sin. And when one investigates it it is like investigating mercury vapours in order to investigate the nature of vapours. For Wittgenstein suicide is the paradigmatic case for ethics and while he seems to have entertained suicide as an idea from when he was a boy he steadfastly refuses to give into his despair. Suicide is an evasion of life and God’s will demands that we should come to terms with the facts as a moral task despite the sheer enormity of it and the difficulties of confronting one’s own nature. To his friend Paul Englemann (‘Mr E.’ who edits the Letters) on May 30, 1920 he expresses how desperate he has become: I feel like completely emptying myself again; I have had a most miserable time lately. Of course, only as a result of my own baseness and rottenness. I have continually thought of taking my own life, and the idea still haunts me sometimes. I have sunk to the lowest point. And writing again to Mr E. he confesses that he is sinking more deeply into depression, that he is contemplating suicide but cannot will himself to take his own life: I am beyond any outside help. – In fact I am in a state of mind that is terrible to me. I have been through it several times before: it is the state of not being able to get over a particular fact … I know that to kill oneself is always a dirty thing to do. Surely one cannot will one’s own destruction, and anybody who has visualized what is in practice involved in the act of suicide knows that suicide is always a rushing of one’s own defenses. But nothing is worse than to be forced to take oneself by surprise.

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One wonders about the state of mind of a man suffering from continual torment and living daily with the threat of suicide and his capacity to teach children under such circumstances. He writes to Keynes in October 18, 1925 just before the so-called Haibauer incident (hitting the boy): I have resolved to remain a teacher as long as I feel that the difficulties I am experiencing might be doing me some good. When you have a toothache, the pain from the toothache is reduced by putting a hot water bottle to your face. But that works only as long as the heat hurts your face. I will throw away the bottle as soon as I notice that it no longer provides that special pain that does my character good. Suicide could not be the answer for Wittgenstein. He had decided to learn to live with it as a test of his moral character. Paul Engelmann (1974) in a brief memoir writes: Wittgenstein experienced the world as filled with ‘vile’ and ‘disgusting’ people, not exempting himself. He told David Pinsent, the close companion of his prewar years in Cambridge, that he felt he had ‘no right to live in an antipathetic world … where he perpetually finds himself feeling contempt for others, and irritating others by his nervous temperament without some justification for that contempt etc. such as being a really great man and having done really great work.’ He began to think of suicide at the age of 10 or 11; a decade or so later he told Pinsent he ‘felt ashamed of never daring to kill himself,’ and in 1918 we find him ‘on his way to commit suicide somewhere.’ … Though Wittgenstein eventually died of natural causes, he was clearly a tormented figure. His search for decency and honesty not only led him to give his entire fortune away but often took the form of browbeating others … In The Myth of Sisyphus Albert Camus (1942/1997) declares ‘There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide’ (Il n’y a qu’un probléme philosophique vraiment sérieux: c’est le suicide), a very similar definitive statement by Wittgenstein some forty years earlier: ‘Suicide is the elementary sin’. According to Schopenhauer, moral freedom – the highest ethical aim – is to be obtained only by a denial of the will to live. ‘When life is so burdensome, death has become for man a soughtafter refuge’. Schopenhauer affirmed: ‘They tell us that suicide is the greatest act of cowardice … that suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person’. Schopenhauer has a significant influence on Wittgenstein, especially in his the early period. Schroeder (2012: 367) notes that Schopenhauer influences his early thinking on ethics and the meaning of life:

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His 1916 Notebook (NB 71–91) and the final pages of the Tractatus contain a number of echoes of Schopenhauer. Like him he describes aesthetic contemplation using Spinoza’s expression ‘sub specie aeterni[tatis]’; he repeats Schopenhauer’s criticism of the categorical imperative: that every imperative calls forth the question ‘And what if I do not do it?’ (TLP 6.422); he also agrees with Schopenhauer (and Kant) that the good action should not be motivated by its consequences (TLP 6.422); like Schopenhauer he thinks that science cannot answer questions of value; like him he places ‘the solution of the riddle of life’ outside space and time (TLP 6.4312), and like him he thinks that ‘what is higher’ cannot ultimately be expressed in words (TLP 6.432, 6.522). Schroeder (2012) suggests that of greater philosophical importance are Schopenhauer’s thoughts on idealism and especially ‘world as idea’ (p. 368) and the notion that ‘the subject is … a presupposition of [the world’s] existence’ (NB 79: 2.8.16) and the attendant idea that the metaphysical subject ‘cannot be encountered in experience’ but ‘must be identified with its experiences’ (p. 369). Wittgenstein came to identify both solipsism and idealism as errors, on the basis of early thinking for the private language argument. It seems the case that Schopenhauer did influence the early Wittgenstein’s thinking on suicide but this thought did not remain with him. Schroeder (2012: 380) writes: As a young man, in times of crisis, trying to formulate his ethics and attitude towards life, he remembered and adopted various thoughts from Schopenhauer, some of which he tacked on to his logical-philosophical treatise; but they have very little to do with his philosophical achievements. His real debt to Schopenhauer lies elsewhere. For one thing, the young Wittgenstein was persuaded by Schopenhauer’s idealism (minus its transcendental side), and that proved extremely fruitful for his own thinking all through his life. In ‘Wittgenstein, Schopenhauer and the metaphysics of suicide’ Modesto Gómez (2018) suggests: the problems that Wittgenstein raised and the views that he emphatically endorsed are in keeping with his overarching transcendental conception of the metaphysical I, the fundamental character of ethics (NB, p. 79), the meaning of life, and the I as ‘the bearer of ethics’ (NB, p. 80), as it is extensively advanced in the Notebooks 1914–1916 and tersely expressed in the Tractatus. Far from demanding further development, what Wittgenstein’s views on suicide would require is an appropriate background. Such considerations naturally stemmed from the core of the metaphysical picture that permeates Wittgenstein’s early writings. This picture is, in its essentials, Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of the Will. (p. 299)

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I think this is correct and there is no doubt that Schopenhauer was decisive in Wittgenstein’s early view of suicide but, at the same time, this ought not to detract from the biographical and autobiographical in explaining Wittgenstein ethics of suicide. Here, it is difficult to deny that Wittgenstein’s own experiences did not have an effect on his existential philosophy.

Notes 1 Schopenhauer writes that suicide is accounted a crime in England which is “followed by an ignominious burial and the seizure of the man’s property” and most often occasions a verdict of insanity. 2 www.openculture.com/2013/03/iwittgensteini_watch_derek_jarmans_tribute_ to_the_philosopher_featuring_tilda_swinton_1993.html 3 https://ethicsofsuicide.lib.utah.edu/ 4 www.wittgensteinchronology.com/6.html

References Achinger, C. (2013). Allegories of destruction: ‘Woman’ and ‘the Jew’ in Otto Weininger’s sex and character. The Germanic Review, 88(2),121–149. 2013. Bartley, W. W. (1973) Wittgenstein. London: Quartet Books. Camus, A. (1942). The myth of Sisyphus (O’Brien, Justin, Trans.). London: Penguin Group. (First published by Gallimard). Engelmann, Paul (1974) Letters From Ludwig Wittgenstein. With A Memoir. New York, Horizon. Gilman, Sander (1986) Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP. Jacquette, D. (2000). Schopenhauer on the ethics of suicide. Continental Philosophy Review, 33(1),43–58. Janik, Alan (2013) On The Origins of Jewish Self-Hatred by Paul Reitter (review) Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, 32, (1), Fall 2013, 142–145. Jamison, K. R. (2000). Night falls fast: Understanding suicide. New York: Vintage. Le Rider, J. (1990). ‘Between modernism and postmodernism: The Viennese identity crisis’ (R. Manheim, trans. ). In E. Timms & R. Robertson (eds.) Vienna 1900: from Altenberg to Wittgenstein, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Le Rider, J. (1993). Modernity and the crises of identity: Culture and society in Fin-deSiècle Vienna (R. Morris, trans.). Cambridge: Polity Press. Le Rider, J. (2013). Otto Weininger: A Misogynist, anti-Semite, and Self-loather as Wagnerite. ‘Wagnerspectrum, 9 (1), 2013, 89–93. McGuinness, B. (1988). Wittgenstein: A life. Young Ludwig (1889–1921). Los Angeles: University of California Press. Modesto Gómez, A. (2018). Wittgenstein, Schopenhauer and the metaphysics of suicide. Rev. Filos., Aurora, Curitiba, 30(49),299–321. Monk, R. (1990). Ludwig Wittgenstein: The duty of genius. London: Jonathan Cape. Monk, R. (2018). Bartley’s Wittgenstein and the coded remarks. In: Flowers, F. A., III (ed. and preface); Ground, Ian (ed. and preface); Portraits of Wittgenstein (pp. 129–134). London; Bloomsbury Academic; 2018. (xiii, 489 pp.).

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Niekerk, C. (2013). Reading Mahler: German culture and Jewish identity in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna. (Studies in German literature, linguistics and culture) Rochester, NY: Camden House. Peters, M. A. (2017). Les proc’es et l’enseignement de Wittgenstein, et la « figure de l’enfant » romantique chez Cavell. A contrario, 25(2),13-37. www.cairn.info/revue-a-contrario2017-2-page-13.htm. Preston, John (2018) How Ludwig Wittgenstein’s secret boyfriend helped deliver the philosopher’s seminal work, https://theconversation.com/how-ludwig-wittgensteinssecret-boyfriend-helped-deliver-the-philosophers-seminal-work-96557. Reitter, P. (2009). The Jewish self-hatred octopus. The German Quarterly, 82(3),356–372. 82.3 (Summer). Schroeder, S. (2012). Schopenhauer’s influence on Wittgenstein, pp.367–384. In Ed. Bart Vandenabeele, A Companion to Schopenhauer, Oxford, Blackwell. Shapira, E. (2006). Modernism and Jewish identity in early twentieth-century Vienna: Fritz Waerndorfer and his house for an art lover. Studies in the Decorative Arts, 13(2),52–92. Spring-Summer. Stern, D. (2001). Was Wittgenstein a Jew? In J. Klagge (Ed.), Wittgenstein: Biography and philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stern, David and Szabados, B’ela, (eds.) (2004). Wittgenstein reads Weininger, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,206pp., $24.99 (pbk), ISBN 0521532604. Szabados, B. (1992). Autobiography after Wittgenstein. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 50(1),1–12. Szabados, B. (1995). Autobiography and philosophy: Variations on a theme of Wittgenstein. Metaphilosophy, 26(1/2), 63–80. Szabados, B. (1997). Wittgenstein’s women: The philosophical significance of Wittgenstein’s misogyny. Journal of Philosophical Research, 22, 483–508. Szabados, B. (1999). Was Wittgenstein an anti-Semite? The significance of AntiSemitism for Wittgenstein’s philoso- phy. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 29(1),1–28. Weininger (1903/2005) Sex and Character. An Investigation of Fundamental Principles Otto Weininger, edited by Daniel Steuer and Laura Marcus, translated by Ladislaus Lob, Bloomington, Indiana University Press. Waugh, Alexander (2010) The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War. New York, Anchor. Wittgenstein, L. (1961). Notebooks 1914–1916, tr. G.E.M. Anscombe. New York: Harper. Wittgenstein, L. (1980). Culture and value, edited by G. H. von Wright in collaboration with H. Nyman, trans. P. Winch, Oxford, Basil Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. (1980/1998). Culture and value. First published as Vennischte Bemerkungen, German text only, G. H. von Wright & Heikki Nyman (ed.). Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977: Amended 2nd ed., traps. P. Winch. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980; rev. 2nd ed., German text only, edited by G. H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman, with revisions by Alois Pichler. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1994, rev. 2nd ed., new traps. P. Winch. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1998. (References will give the pagination for the 1980 and 1998 editions of the book; translations are taken from the 1998 edition.). Wittgenstein, L. (1997). Denkbewegungen: Tagebiicher 1930–1932 1936–1937 (MS 183) ed. Use Somavilla. Innsbruck, Austria: Haymon Verlag.

Chapter 5

Wittgenstein and post-analytic philosophy of education Rorty or Lyotard? Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd, www.tandfonline.com, on behalf of © Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia.

I was thinking about my philosophical work and saying to myself: ‘I destroy, I destroy, I destroy …’ (Wittgenstein 1980, p. 21e) Context: The ‘linguistic tum’ of Western philosophy (Heidegger’s later works, the penetration of Anglo-American philosophies into European thought, the development of language technologies); and correlatively, the decline of universalist discourses (the metaphysical doctrines of modern times: narratives of progress, of socialism, of abundance, of knowledge). The weariness with regard to ‘theory’, and the miserable slackening that goes along with it (new this, new that, post-this, postthat, etc.). The time has come to philosophize. (Lyotard 1988, p. xiii) … there is no danger of philosophy’s ‘coming to an end’. Religion did not come to an end in the Enlightenment, nor painting in Impressionism. Even if the period from Plato to Nietzsche is encapsulated and ‘distanced’ in the way Heidegger suggests, and even if twentieth-century philosophy comes to seem a stage of awkward transitional backing and filling (as sixteenth-century philosophy now seems to us), there will be something called ‘philosophy’ on the other side of the transition. (Rorty 1980, p. 394)

Introduction Is there life after death? After the intellectual demise of analytic philosophy – of logical positivism and ‘linguistic philosophy’ – is there still life in the hereafter for philosophy of education? My answer to this question is unequivocally in the affirmative and I do not mean to construe my answer in terms of the trivial institutional sense that Rorty (1980, p. 393) grants when he writes ‘the need for teachers who have read the great dead philosophers is quite enough to ensure that there will be philosophy departments as long as there are universities’. Rorty’s answer

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does not really impinge on the question of the future of philosophy or the philosopher in a Wittgensteinian sense.1 He takes for granted the question of the unchanging nature of the university in the postmodern condition where the discourse of ‘excellence’ is replacing the idea of culture as the organising centre of the story of liberal education.2 And his answer is problematic in its institutional application to philosophy of education which as a separate and distinctive academic field within universities in the English-speaking world has undoubtedly withered since its high point in the early 1970s.3 My answer is that there was always ‘life’ in the sense of a manifold of possibilities; that such ‘life’ was there from the beginning of the ‘revolution’ in philosophy of education, dating from Wittgenstein’s return to Cambridge, but that it was never seriously contemplated by analytic philosophers of education. This chapter attempts to elucidate such ‘life after death’ for philosophy of education. It does so, in broad terms, by contrasting two interpretations of the later Wittgenstein: a positivistic reading of Wittgenstein represented by the work of Richard Rorty, versus a reading provided by the French poststructuralist philosopher, Jean-François Lyotard. I argue that there are good grounds both, in general, for considering the later Wittgenstein a ‘philosopher of culture’ in the continental tradition rather than a placeholder in the analytic tradition, and for accepting Lyotard’s reading over Rorty’s. A Lyotardian reading, I suggest, provides a new direction for postanalytic philosophy of education.

Wittgenstein, analytic philosophy and education One critic, Joseph Margolis (1995), taking a biopsy of recent analytic philosophy, concludes that it is a muddle. Drawing upon the work of recent heirs of the analytic movement – Quine, Davidson, Kim, Rorty and Churchland – he concludes that the movement can be reduced to three contemporary variants which he calls ‘naturalism’, ‘postmodernism’ and ‘physicalism’. These variants comprise ‘the most salient strategies of current analytic philosophy’ and together constitute ‘an inexplicit generic philosophical policy at the heart of the ‘analytic’ orientation’ (p. 162). Such an enterprise, he suggests, is careless about its largest premises; it speaks only to its own cohort and ignores for the most part any sustained reference to philosophers who challenge its fundamental premises. What is philosophically interesting to me about Margolis’s claims is that Richard Rorty, who purports to walk in Wittgenstein’s shoes, is classified as a ‘postmodernist’ and yet also is seen as an integral part of the analytic project and as demonstrating its inherent weakness. Rorty is a philosopher who champions the ‘most extreme version of recent analytic “naturalism”’, which leads to the ultimate repudiation of philosophy.4 Margolis, in a roundabout way, denies (correctly in my opinion) that Rorty is Wittgensteinian.

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Another author, Nicholas Capaldi (1993), who views analytic philosophy as the twentieth-century descendant and voice of the Enlightenment Project, defines it as a product of the doctrines of scientism, Aristotelianism and an anti-agency view and he maintains its problems result from the interaction of these doctrines. Capaldi argues that neither the strategy of elimination (Russell, Quine), focusing upon syntax, nor the strategy of exploration (Camap, Kripke, Chomsky, Fodor, Katz), focusing upon semantics, proved theoretically capable of developing a form of analysis which could unambiguously construe the relation of word to object. Forced to admit the role of agency, once it was realised that the question of the role and status of the user of language or the community of users could not be easily evaded, analytic philosophy of language or its successor came to treat the agent as an object of scientific scrutiny (that is a structure or set of functions of the brain), thus, transforming itself into cognitive psychology. Significantly, Capaldi (1993, p 58) identifies a third view of the philosophy of language which does not form part of analytic philosophy: explication. Explication as a strategy focuses upon the pragmatics of language and is best typified, Capaldi says, by the Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations, by Heidegger and by the tradition of pragmatism. Wittgenstein’s Investigations stands as a repudiation of analytic philosophy. What distinguishes Wittgenstein’s explication from Quinean elimination or Kripkean exploration is the belief that there is no theory or scientific background against which we can establish the word-object relation. From a Wittgensteinian view, language is learned as part of a community of practices, that is, it is ‘not a structure independent of the norms of the users, nor are the norms isolable from the language’ (Capaldi 1993, p. 81). I take this analysis of Wittgenstein’s position to be the reason why, for instance, Rorty (1991) champions the ‘antirepresentationalism’ of Davidson and Putnam against the ‘representationalism’ of Dummett, for, from Dummett’s viewpoint, the work of the later Wittgenstein gave us no foundation for the future of analytic philosophy of language, no systematic theory of meaning, and hence nothing upon which to build. What of ordinary language philosophy? On Capaldi’s (1993) analysis, ordinary language philosophy, originating with Moore’s defence of common sense, shared Russell’s Aristotelian realism but rejected Russell’s doctrinaire commitment to scientism and, therefore, also the eliminative strategy. The purpose of ‘analysis’ was to clarify our common-sense beliefs so that we could better understand our fundamental presuppositions on which everything else rested, including science. For Moore, committed to Aristotelian realism, our fundamental presuppositions were objective truths about the world. For Moore and those who followed him – Ryle, Strawson and Austin – ‘analysis’ consisted in an Aristotelian exploration of the pretheoretical background of our most basic presuppositions in ordinary language, and philosophical error occurred when we attempted to eliminate

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them in favour of some speculative hypothesis. Capaldi maintains that Wittgenstein could agree that philosophy is the clarification of presuppositions while insisting that such presuppositions cannot be objective truths about the world independent of human affairs, for the pre-theoretical reflects a form of life and cultural action. For Wittgenstein, while the pre-theoretical can be explicated, it cannot be conceptualised. Capaldi (1993, p. 94) explains that ‘In ordinary language philosophy, it is alleged that the pre-conceptual can be conceptualized through the exploration of the semantic structure of usage’ (emphasis in original). This realist commitment of ordinary language analysis as a kind of ‘linguistic phenomenology’ in large part accounts for Ryle’s (1949, p. 10) advertised procedure in The Concept of Mind ‘to determine the logical geography of concepts’; Strawson’s (1959, p. 9) claim that ‘descriptive metaphysics’ aims to ‘lay bare the most general features of our conceptual structure’-an unchanging ‘massive central core of human thinking’ (p. 10); and, perhaps most appropriately, Austin’s (1962) assertion that a revolution in philosophy occurred, albeit in a piecemeal way, when it was shown that many traditional philosophical perplexities have arisen through a mistake-the mistake of taking as straightforward statement of fact utterances which are either (in interesting non-grammatical ways) nonsensical or else intended as something quite different. (Austin 1962, p. 3) Histories and critical accounts of philosophy of education have been marked by the historiographic codes of ‘periods’, ‘revolutions’, ‘ruptures’ and ‘paradigms’ familiar to the history of philosophy proper. Most accounts, for instance, distinguish the earlier phase(s) of philosophy of education from the period, beginning in the late 1950s, when the so-called ‘revolution’ in analytic philosophy began to shape the destiny of philosophy of education. With some variation these accounts tend to write the history of analytic philosophy of education (APE) in terms of both the ‘revolution’ of analytic philosophy and APE’s institutionalisation and dominance in the English-speaking world as the ‘London’ school, under R. S. Peters and others.5 They also tend to provide accounts of APE in terms of ordinary language philosophy. This is certainly the considered judgment of both Robin Barrow (1994, p. 4442) and D.C. Phillips (1994, p. 4450), although Barrow cautions us against identifying analytic philosophy with a particular technique or with one of its more recent manifestations as linguistic philosophy and Phillips, in addition to acknowledging the dominance in the United Kingdom of the ‘London’ school, mentions the work of Scheffler, Green, and McClellan as having ‘achieved virtual hegemony in the United States’. Abraham Adel (1972) was, perhaps, the first to draw attention to the central difficulty in analytic philosophy of education construed as ordinary language philosophy – ‘how to judge what is a correct or adequate analysis’:

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Analytic philosophy was given a certain cast by the dogmas it inherited from logical positivism. There was a sharp separation of philosophical analysis from empirical inquiry, the sharp separation of the analytic from the normative, and the sharp separation of the analytic from genetic-causal accounts. (Adel 1972, p. 133) His theoretical diagnosis led him to propose the integration of the empirical, genetic and normative aspects yet without fully contemplating what such an integration would do for a method of ordinary language analysis, or whether anything resembling ‘analysis’ in the ordinary language sense was still possible, having disposed of its fundamental assumptions. Some critics, such as R. J. Haack (1976), while not being averse to analysis similarly argued against the sharp distinction between philosophy (conceptual truths) and pedagogy (facts), and advocated a return to ‘traditional’ philosophy of education. Others, such as David Aspin (1982, pp. 3–4), seeking to defend analytic philosophy of education from Kevin Harris’s influential attack upon analytic philosophy of education as ideology, disputed the alleged hegemony of the ‘London’ school: ‘It was never really true that Peters and Hirst were the be-all and end-all in the subject’, and, even if it was the case in the 1960s and early 1970s, he maintained, writing in the early 1980s, it was no longer true. Aspin goes on to describe both philosophically and sociologically changes which characterised the, then, complex and diverse nature of a ‘contested’ philosophy of education. While it is probably true to say that ‘Australian’ Marxism did not, by Kuhnian or sociological criteria, ever really attain the status of a paradigm in philosophy of education, it was for me and other New Zealanders, the approach – best epitomised by the work of Kevin Harris (1979, 1980) – which demonstrated the ideological nature of analytic philosophy of education.6 In all of this commentary and criticism it was seldom recognised that the ‘London’ school, or analytic philosophy of education more broadly, while clearly based upon the revolution in philosophy associated with the development of ordinary language analysis, was connected to the thought of the later Wittgenstein in only a tenuous and even contradictory manner?7 Certainly, R. S. Peters himself only sparingly referred to Wittgenstein directly and not always consistently or in an entirely positive manner. My argument is that ordinary language philosophy and analytic philosophy of education, insofar as they were based upon appeals to the authority of the later Wittgenstein, were, in fact, mistaken in principle and open to serious question on grounds of scholarship, ‘method’ and interpretation. It is an argument I originally made over ten years ago. I argued that while philosophers who employed the method of conceptual analysis claimed Wittgenstein as their forefather, their interpretation of philosophy and of philosophical method was antiWittgensteinian. It was anti-Wittgensteinian because philosophy as conceptual

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analysis preserved those essential features from the analytic tradition: its position vis-à-vis other disciplines; its foundational second-order status; its neutral method and its espoused autonomy. The status and method of philosophy, thus, were not greatly affected by replacing a search for atoms of meaning with a search for essences of meaning (see Peters 1984, p. 76). I argued also that the work of the later Wittgenstein represented a break with the analytic tradition which was evidenced in Wittgenstein’s rejection of both nominalism and the doctrine of external relations, and in Wittgenstein’s view of philosophy as an activity – a pursuit separate from science, neither a second-order discipline nor foundational – which is uncharacterisable in terms of a distinctive method. Further, I argued that Wittgenstein’s liberation of grammar from logic, his rejection of any extra-linguistic justification for language and knowledge, and the ‘semantic holism’ of the Philosophical Investigations and On Certainty, simply collapses and renders impossible the set of distinctions (e.g. analytic/synthetic, scheme/content) upon which the legitimacy of analytic philosophy depends. For Wittgenstein, I maintained, there is no fundamental cleavage either between propositions that stand fast for us and those that do not, or between logical and empirical propositions. I argued that the whole enterprise of modern analytic philosophy rested on the fundamental ‘Kantian’ duality between scheme and content, and referred to the way that Rorty (1980, p. 169) had stressed the indispensability of the Kantian framework for modern analytic philosophy. Let me briefly quote Rorty on this matter because I find his argument has even greater stature today. Rorty argues that if we do not have the distinction between what is ‘given’ and what is ‘added by the mind’, or that between the ‘contingent’ (because influenced by what is given) and the ‘necessary’ (because entirely ‘within’ the mind and under its control), then we will not know what would count as a ‘rational reconstruction’ of our knowledge. He remarks: Analytic philosophy, cannot, I suspect, be written without one or other of these distinctions. If there are no intuitions into which to resolve concepts (in a manner of the Aufbau) nor any internal relations among concepts to make possible ‘grammatical discoveries’ (in the manner of Oxford philosophy), then indeed it is hard to imagine what an ‘analysis’ might be. Wisely few analytic philosophers any longer try to explain what it is to offer an analysis. (Rorty 1980, p. 172) Finally, I argued that rather than view Wittgenstein as a place-holder in the analytic tradition, it was philosophically and historically fairer and more accurate to position him in terms of his Viennese origins and the general continental milieu which constituted his immediate intellectual and cultural background.

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Wittgenstein as philosopher of culture I was initially guided in this interpretation by Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin’s (1973) path-breaking book Wittgenstein’s Vienna. I have subsequently become more confirmed in this view of Wittgenstein on the basis of reading Smith (1978), Haller (1981), and Janik (1981), who interpret Wittgenstein within the tradition of Austrian philosophy. Janik (1981, p. 85), in particular, identifies Wittgenstein with the spirit of counter-enlightenment and a focus upon the limits of reason, in the ‘tradition’ of Lichtenberg, Kraus, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Weininger and Nietzsche.8 Von Wright (1982), in an influential essay based upon his intimate knowledge of Vermischte Bemerkungen, while acknowledging that Wittgenstein did not develop a philosophy of history, maintains he possessed a Spenglerian attitude to his times: ‘he lived the “Untergang des Abendlandes”, the decline of the West’ (1982, p. 116). On this view, Wittgenstein understood himself to be living in ‘an age without culture’, an age where modern philosophy was no longer able to provide the meta-language (or meta-narrative) which united the family resemblances of culture’s various manifestations. Von Wright’s (1982) interpretation has given considerable weight to Wittgenstein’s Spenglarian ‘rejection of scientific-technological civilization of industrialized societies, which he regarded as the decay of a culture’. He remarks upon how Wittgenstein found the spirit of European and American civilisation both alien and distasteful and how Wittgenstein ‘deeply distrusted’ its hallmark belief in progress based upon the technological harnessing of science, with its inherent dangers of self-destruction and its capacity to cause ‘infinite misery’. Von Wright suggests that it is this aspect of Wittgenstein’s thinking which constitutes a link between ‘the view that the individual’s beliefs, judgements, and thoughts are entrenched in unquestioningly accepted language-games’ and ‘the view that philosophical problems are disquietudes of the mind caused by some malfunctioning in the language-games and hence in the life of the community’ (Von Wright 1982, p. 118).9 It is a view that von Wright has returned to recently. In an essay ‘Analytical philosophy: A historico-critical survey’ (1993), von Wright identifies analytic philosophy as that which is ‘most typical of the spiritual climate of our time’, in that it exemplifies the form of rationality represented by science and technology. This form of rationality, he suggests, has become problematic ‘due to its repercussions on society and the living conditions of men’ and analytic philosophy ‘itself an offspring of belief in progress through science appears incapable of coping with these problems’.10 In is in this context that von Wright (1993, p. 32) raises the question of whether Wittgenstein can be rightly called an analytic philosopher, only to answer it emphatically in the negative.11 While he agrees with Janik against Nyiri’s (1982) ‘conservative’ interpretation of Wittgenstein, von Wright disagrees with Janik (1985) that there is no close correspondence between Wittgenstein’s philosophy and his cultural pessimism, arguing that Wittgenstein’s philosophy was

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a fight against the dominate climate of modernity with its ‘euphoric belief in progress’ and its ‘managerial uses of reason in industrialised democratic societies’ (Von Wright 1993, p. 101). It was Janik’s reading of Wittgenstein, initially, and von Wright’s interpretation, above all, that encouraged me to view the work of the later Wittgenstein within the intellectual milieu of Continental philosophy and, specifically, within the counter-enlightenment tradition of Austrian philosophy (rather than simply and unproblematically as a place-holder in the analytic tradition).12 Later, having encountered Lyotard’s (1984) The Postmodern Condition, and the ethico-political uses to which he puts Wittgenstein’s notion of language-games, I was led to comment upon an emphasis on pragmatics in Lyotard, motivated by a reading of Wittgenstein, within the context of an article on science, rationality and the university within the ‘postmodern condition’.13 Later still, I proposed a ‘poststructuralist’ interpretation of the later Wittgenstein based upon the creative appropriation of his work by Jean-François Lyotard.14 Lyotard (1993 (1983]) self-consciously sites his work as taking place ‘after’ Wittgenstein. I argued that his appropriation of Wittgenstein’s ‘language-games’ provides the starting-point for a philosophy of education which can seriously engage the issues and problems of what is known as the modernitypostmodernity debate (see Peters 1995a). In particular, I put forward a view of Wittgenstein as a ‘philosopher of culture’, in von Wright’s and Cavell’s (1988) sense, and argued against Rorty’s appropriation in favour of Lyotard’s,15 which seemed to me much closer and more faithful to the spirit of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. Cavell (1988) argues that the Investigations ‘diurnalizes Spengler’s vision of the destiny toward exhausted forms’, toward the loss of culture and community, and he draws our attention to the way Wittgenstein’s uniqueness as a philosopher of culture comes from ‘the sense that he is joining the fate of philosophy as such with that of the philosophy of culture or criticism of culture’, (Cavell 1988, pp. 261–2). By doing so, Cavell argues, Wittgenstein is calling into question philosophy’s claim to a privileged perspective on culture which could be called the perspective of reason. Building upon this view, I am particularly struck by a number of the thematically-related remarks Wittgenstein (1980) makes on contemporary Western culture: ‘The earlier culture will become a heap of rubble and finally a heap of ashes, but spirits will hover over the ashes’ (p. 3e); ‘the disappearance of a culture does not signify the disappearance of human value, but simply of certain means of expressing this value’ (p. 6e); ‘There are problems I never get anywhere near … which no philosopher has ever confronted (perhaps Nietzsche passed them by). And perhaps they are lost as far as western philosophy is concerned, i.e. no one will be there capable of experiencing, and hence describing, the progress of this culture as an epic’(p. 9e);16 Perhaps one day this civilization will produce a culture’ (p. 64e). And, most importantly, the following lengthy remark made by Wittgenstein in 1947:

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The truly apocalyptic view of the world is that things do not repeat themselves. It isn’t absurd, e.g., to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity; that the idea of great progress is a delusion, along with the idea that the truth will ultimately be known; that there is nothing good or desirable about scientific knowledge and that mankind, in seeking it, is falling into a trap. It is by no means obvious that this is not how things are. (1980, p. 56e) Finally, I remarked that Rorty (1980, p. 8) in his provocative Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature had mounted an influential interpretation of Wittgenstein and, in doing so, had formed something of a neo-pragmatist alliance with poststructuralism. I argued that while he had prepared the ground for the dismantling of analytic philosophy as ‘the construction of a permanent, neutral framework for inquiry, and thus for all of culture’, in his later political works,17 he had dangerously compromised any critical intent and ended up by becoming an apologist, at the height of the Reagan era, for rich Atlantic liberal states. Without traversing any further the ground that I have covered, and building upon the interpretation here, I would like to sharpen the contrast between Rorty and Lyotard, focusing upon their politics as it relates to the question of how they approach other cultures.

Philosophy and culture: Rorty or Lyotard? Rorty’ s postmodernist bourgeois liberalism Rorty’s anti-representationalism puts natural science on a par with the rest of culture: knowledge is not a matter of getting reality right, rather it is a matter of acquiring the appropriate habits of action for coping with reality. Rorty sees himself as the Wittgensteinian physician of culture freeing us of the picture that has held us captive for almost a century. His therapeutic desire is to rescue us from a set of pseudo-problems generated by the realist intuition that true statements stand in a representational relation to the world. Antirepresentationalists, equipped with Wittgenstein’s sense of what it is to do philosophy, think that the realist–idealist and scepticism–anti-scepticism controversies have been both pointless and undesirable, if only because they see no way of formulating an independent test of accuracy of representation. The notion of such a test implies a standpoint outside our own conceptual scheme for purposes of analysing and comparing the ‘correspondence’ of representations with nonlinguistic entities. Rorty proposes a highly influential interpretation of Wittgenstein, defending him from the charge of transcendental idealism levelled by Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel, by arguing that Wittgenstein was not attempting to answer realist-type questions, that he certainly ‘was not suggesting that we determine the way reality is’ but rather he was abandoning a picture that had held him captive:

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He was suggesting that questions which we should have to climb out of our own minds to answer should not be asked. He was suggesting that both realism and idealism share representationalist presuppositions which we would be better off dropping. (Rorty 1991, p. 7) Rorty embraces the work of Donald Davidson as that which lets the fly out of the fly bottle, and yet he does not question whether Davidson’s ‘Darwinian’ antirepresentationalism and causal theory of belief is in any sense Wittgensteinian.18 If we take Davidson’s recommendation seriously and we reject the scheme-content distinction, we shall no longer be worried about relativism. If we accept that there is no vantage point for comparison outside our own conceptual scheme we will no longer think of natural science, or physics, as that privileged part of culture which can provide us with a skyhook for escaping our culturally saturated beliefs and an independent standpoint from which we can view clearly the relations of those beliefs to reality. On this view, there are no interesting epistemological differences between natural science, or physics, and the rest of culture. The end of metaphysics is ‘the final stage in the secularisation of culture’ (Rorty in Borradori 1994, p. 106) and philosophy, radically de-transcendentised and deprofessionalised, becomes just one form of ‘cultural criticism’ among others. Deprived of any privileged status or the definitive vocabulary, it must operate with historical and socially contextual criteria in the same way as the humanities and the social sciences. Rorty’s hope is that ‘English-speaking philosophy in the twenty-first century will have put the representational problematic behind it, as most French- or German-speaking philosophy already has’ (1991, p. 12). Rorty uses the notion of ethnocentrism as a link between his antirepresentationalism and his political liberalism. While there is no escape from ethnocentrism or the contingency of ‘our’ acculturation, especially through the appeal to the truth of representations, Deweyan liberalism is the culture of an ethnos which prides itself on the freedom and openness of its encounters with other cultures, and, thus, makes this ‘opennness’ central to its own self-image. This Deweyan culture (as opposed to Heideggerian culture based on the ‘ontotheological tradition’) no longer has the need for the ideas of ‘objectivity’ and ‘transcendence’ as last remnants of metaphysical baggage. It can get along quite happily with the notion of community construed as intersubjective agreement (or ‘solidarity’) – one which is, as Dewey dreamt, equally and at the same time, democratic, progressive and pluralist. By embracing such a notion, ‘we’ will purged of the attempts either to provide epistemological foundations for our institutions or to ask metaphysical questions about who ‘we’ are; rather, ‘we’ will give up trying to escape from culture to ask the question of what sort of human being ‘we’ want to become. Rorty (1989), in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, divides this ‘existential’ into two on the basis of a distinction he

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draws between the public and the private: the first, a question of obligation to others, inquires of the individual’s membership of and identification with various communities; the second is motivated by the question ‘what should I do with my aloneness?’ and it concerns one’s obligation to ‘become who you are’ (Rorty 1991, p. 13). The first concerns the question of ethnocentrism and the development of a culture described as ‘postmodernist bourgeois liberalism’; the second, involves a lifelong project of self-edification where the most important thing we can do is to redescribe ourselves and our past in ever new and singular terms. The effect of this analysis is to erase a picture of the self as a natural, ahistorical entity – ‘the locus of human dignity’ and the possessor of inalienable rights – and, in turn, ‘to break the link between truth and justifiability’, thereby polarising liberal social theory between absolutists and pragmatists. Absolutists, like Ronald Dworkin, identify a transcultural self and insist on talking of human’ rights’ in ahistorical terms; pragmatists, like Dewey and John Rawls, substitute the notion of ‘our own community’ for the Kantian self, ‘something relatively local and ethnocentric’ – the tradition and consensus of a particular culture (Rorty 1991, p. 176). Rorty interprets Rawls in Deweyan terms as ‘simply trying to systematize the principles and intuitions typical of American liberals’ (p. 189) and, indeed, it seems as though Rawls’s (1980, 1985) writings subsequent to A Theory of Justice do gel with Rorty’s interpretation. Rawls’s (1980) distinction between a ‘conception of a person’ and a ‘theory of human nature’ is designed to undermine a conception of justice which is Kantian in nature, known a priori and inferred from a theory of what it is to be human, while promoting a conception which is contingent and culturally congruent.19 Rorty divides liberal social theorists into ‘Kantians’ and ‘Hegelians’, where the latter understand ‘humanity’ as a biological rather than a moral notion and dignity as something that is conferred by a community. He calls the ‘Hegelian’ defence of American democracy ‘postmodernist bourgeois liberalism’, a term that only sounds oxymoronic because of an inherited but optional political vocabulary used to justify bourgeois liberal institutions and the fact the most ‘of those who think of themselves as beyond metaphysics and meta-narratives also think of themselves as having opted out of the bourgeoisie’ (Rorty 1991, p. 199). ‘Bourgeois liberalism’-a set of cultural practices and institutions predominating under certain economic and historical conditions-is contrasted with ‘philosophical liberalism’-a set of Kantian principles. ‘Postmodernist’ is used simply to mean ‘distrust of metanarratives’ and while Rorty attributes his use of the term to Lyotard, it really reflects Rorty’s naturalisation of Hegel and his Wittgensteinian anti-foundationalism. The crucial point, on Rorty’s view, is that the moral self is redescribed in Quinean terms ‘as a network of beliefs, desires, and emotions with nothing behind it’. ‘Cosmopolitanism without emancipation’ is the essence of Rorty’s (1991) approach to the issue of cultural difference given in response to Lyotard’s

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(1989 [1985], p. 314) question: ‘can we continue today to organize the multitude of events … by subsuming them beneath the idea of a universal history of humanity?’ Invoking Dewey’s liberalism, Rorty is happy to drop the philosophical pretence of any metanarrative. At the same time, he wants to spin an edifying first-order utopian liberal narrative about universal history which positions American democracy at the end of a story of world progress continuous with the overthrow of feudalism and the abolition of slavery. This is a consequence of the ‘inevitable’ and ‘unobjectionable’ ethnocentrism which results from the pragmatists’ substitution of a local, historical and contingent sense of self for a transhistorical metaphysical subject. Cultural differences ‘are no more than differences of opinion’ (p. 218) and, like differences between old and new theories propounded within a single culture or the differences between discourses, they ‘are just ways of dividing up the corpus of sentences so far asserted into clusters’ (p. 218) which, as it so happens, has been organised thus far on the basis of ethnicity. On the Quinean view of language that Rorty holds, there are no important linguistic differences which make other languages unlearnable or other cultures incommensurable. Bourgeois liberals of Rorty’s ironic breed pride themselves on the way their culture is ‘free’ and ‘open’: it requires no metaphysical justification and it drops the revolutionary rhetoric of emancipation for a reformist rhetoric of increased tolerance. At the same time there are limits. Rorty writes: We cannot leap outside our Western social democratic skins when we encounter another culture, and we should not try. All we should try to do is get inside the inhabitants of that culture long enough to get some idea of how we look to them, and whether they have any ideas we can use. (1991, p. 212) People from other cultures may have suggestions about further reforms that are needed but ‘we’ will not be inclined to accept until ‘we’ manage to integrate them with our own distinctive form of life based upon ‘our’ social democratic aspirations. And this kind of ethnocentrism is both natural and inescapable in the sense that rational change of belief can only occur if most of our beliefs remain firm. Cultural interaction and changes that occur as a result of such interaction are thus wholly experimental, piecemeal and nonprogramatic. They proceed from the rationality of tolerance and have an aesthetic rather than scientific character. ‘We’ transgress the limits of bourgeois liberalism when ‘we’ take the ethnocentric line of argument too seriously and begin to wonder ‘whether our own bourgeois liberalism is not just one more example of cultural bias’ (Rorty 1991, p. 203), thereby placing our culture somehow ‘on a par’ with other cultures. If ‘we’ continue this line too far ‘we’ lose the capacity for moral indignation, ‘our sense of self dissolves’ (p. 203) and we lose ‘our contingent spatio-temporal affiliations’ (p. 208). The postmodernist

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bourgeois liberal views this as a local psychological problem of ‘wet liberals’ who, as both ‘connoisseurs of diversity’ and Enlightenment rationalists, face a self-referential paradox when they ask whether the Western belief in equality is not simply another case of cultural bias. For postmodernist bourgeois liberals who follow Dewey, there is no justification for liberal ideals by appeal to transcultural criteria of rationality: the Western liberal ideal of procedural justice is just what ‘we’ believe and all ‘we’ can do is point out the practical advantages of it ‘in allowing individuals and cultures to get along together’ (p. 209). Pragmatist utopians like Rorty see political liberalism as providing ‘a rationale for nonideological, compromising, reformist muddling through’ (p. 211) and look forward to a time when every culture ‘will all be part of the same cosmopolitan social democratic community’ (p. 212). Rorty’s ‘postmodernist bourgeois liberalism’ and, in particular, his use of the term ‘ethnocentrism’ has engendered an outpouring of criticism from the left.20 Rorty’s response is to admit a ‘misleading ambiguity’ in his original use of the term which, he says, made him appear as though he was attempting ‘a transcendental deduction of democratic politics from antirepresentationalism premises’ (Rorty 1991, p. 15). He then proceeds to distinguish between ethnocentrism ‘as an inescapable condition’, synonymous with ‘human finitude’, and ‘as a reference to a particular ethnos’, that is, a loyalty to the sociopolitical culture of liberalism.21 While his critics, he says, are willing to accept the anti-representationalism, they see themselves as standing outside the culture of liberalism. Rorty, however, does not see them as outsiders but rather as playing a role within this culture for they have neither developed an alternative culture nor have they a utopian vision to offer. Their rage at the slow extension of freedom to marginal groups is understandable but the ‘overtheoretical and over-philosophized’ form that it takes is of no use. This seems to be Rorty’s most trenchant criticism of the contemporary post-Marxist left: ideology-critique or ‘deconstruction’ of existing social practices or liberal institutions have no point unless they point to alternative practices or a new utopia. He writes: ‘My doubts about the contemporary Foucauldian left concern its failure to offer such visions and such suggestions’ (Rorty 1991, p. 16). It is a point he again emphasises in his response to Lyotard (‘Cosmopolitanism without emancipation’) when he writes: Given our noncriterial conception of rationality, we are not inclined to diagnose ‘irrationalism’ [of French thought as does Habermas]; since for us ‘rational’ merely means ‘persuasive’, ‘irrational’ can only mean ‘invoking force’ … But we are inclined to worry about their antiutopianism, their apparent loss of faith in liberal democracy. Even those who, like myself, think of France as the source of the most original philosophical thought currently being produced, cannot figure out why French thinkers are so willing to say things like ‘May 1968 refutes the doctrine of parliamentary

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liberalism.’ From our standpoint, nothing could refute that doctrine except some better idea about how to organize society … Only another, more persuasive, utopia can do that. (Rorty 1991, p. 220) He suggests in a conciliatory tone: the difference between what Lyotard gets out of Wittgenstein and what I get out of him, and also the difference between Lyotard’s interpretation of ‘postmodernism’ as a decisive shift which cuts right across culture and my view of it as merely the gradual encapsulation and forgetting of a certain philosophical tradition, reflect our different notions of how politically conscious intellectuals should spend their time. (1991, p. 222) Rorty doubts whether there is an identifiable phenomenon called ‘postmodernism’ because he sees no sharp break in Western political or cultural life since the time of the French Revolution, although he does acknowledge there is ‘increasingly less respect for the Enlightenment divisions between spheres of culture’, a process beginning with Hegel and completed in Dewey. Poststructuralism, to him, is simply ‘the latest moment of a historicization of philosophy which has been going on continuously since Hegel’ (Rorty 1990, p. 43). How Wittgensteinian is Rorty? In terms of his philosophical development, Rorty (1991, p. 16) acknowledges that in the decade since writing Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Dewey has gradually eclipsed both Wittgenstein and Heidegger.22 It is clear from the interpretation I have presented above that Rorty differs from Wittgenstein on a number of counts. While Rorty may share Wittgenstein’s anti-foundationalism and even his notion of philosophy as a kind of therapy, there is a world of difference between their general philosophical outlooks. There is nothing utopian in Wittgenstein’s thought and his assessment of American culture is the antithesis of Rorty’s. Where Rorty sees grounds for hope and regards American liberal culture as already having the right institutions and practices in place, Wittgenstein is much more pessimistic. While he, like Rorty, is sceptical of attempts to justify or provide foundations for Anglo-American institutions and practices by appeal to Enlightenment rationalism, Wittgenstein’s counter-Enlightenment outlook exhibits a certain philosophical distaste for the contemporary climate of modernity with its overriding hallmark belief in progress. Rorty’s ethnocentrism and ‘loyalty’ to the North Atlantic liberal bourgeois democracies would be very foreign, and even odious, to Wittgenstein. My guess is that he would not see any grounds for hope in Rorty’s redescription of the sociopolitical culture of American liberalism as a universalising first-order narrative of world progress and freedom. And for a very good reason: Wittgenstein’s interpretation of the contemporary

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West, if anything, is a story of the disappearance or disintegration of culture. Certainly, Rorty’s minimalist notion of culture in respect of American liberalism, unified only in terms of a consensual belief in a Rawlsian procedural justice, would not count for Wittgenstein as a ‘culture’ in any sense of the word. And this philosophical difference, I think, bespeaks a more fundamental difference between Rorty and Wittgenstein, considered in relation to the tradition of analytic philosophy. It is a difference which, given the exigencies of space, is much too complex for me to explore in anything but a superficial manner for it involves genealogical analyses of both American contemporary philosophy and the Austrian counter-Enlightenment as the cultural contexts within which to assess the standing of Rorty and Wittgenstein in relation to the tradition of analytic philosophy.23 Having already commented upon a Continental interpretation of Wittgenstein, I shall restrict myself here to offering one or two observations concerning Rorty’s standing.24 In essence, I believe that Giovanna Barradori’s (1994) interpretation offers an understanding of both Rorty’s developing neopragmatism – the move away from Wittgenstein and Heidegger toward Dewey – and the consequent tensions in his thought. He writes: The point of departure of Rorty’s neo-pragmatist discourse is precisely a critique of analytic philosophy. However, he directs his criticism mainly at its first phase, the most orthodox one, born following the immigration of Viennese logical positivism to the United States. In fact, a second phase of analyticism, embracing authors such as Quine and Davidson, whose proximity to pragmatism is emphasized by Rorty [against their own evaluations], remains untouched by his attack. (Barradori 1994, p. 103) Philosophy as ‘cultural criticism’, radically historicised and democratised vis a vis the other disciplines, in Rorty’s hands, ends up by embracing, in a neo-pragmatist manner, a core ideological but minimalist commitment to the liberal project. What begins as a Wittgensteinian de-transcendentalism and historicisation, ends up as a Deweyan celebration of the culture of liberalism a celebration which Wittgenstein would find philosophically distasteful and undesirably utopian. This kind of reading of Rorty’s philosophical development would make sense of the kind of criticism levelled at Rorty by his fellow pragmatist, Hilary Putnam (1995) who suggests that Rorty’s interpretation, while undeniably influential, is as much a falsification of Wittgenstein as a clarification. His comments are salutary and worthy of quoting at some length: The heart of Rorty’s reading is his comparison of criteria with ‘programs’. Ever since he published Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty has seen what he called ‘normal’ discourse in that book, and what he calls by the Wittgensteinian term ‘language games’ in Contingency,

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Irony, Solidarity, as governed by what he calls ‘algorithms’ or ‘programs’. When we are within ‘normal discourse’, when we are ‘playing the same language game’, we follow programs in our brain and we all agree … This picture of language speakers as automata is deeply unWittgensteinian … I think it is because Rorty sees language games as virtually automatic performances … (Putnam 1995, pp. 33–4) Putnam’s (1995) argument is that ‘Rorty’s notion of a “program” is one that leads to identical behavior in all the members of the speech community’ (p. 37), which fudges the Wittgensteinian point that there are better and worse performances within a language game. This explains, in part, Rorty’s ‘cultural imperialism’ (Haber 1994, p. 64): his inability to take his neo- and post-Marxist critics seriously as speaking from an oppositional counter-culture, and his willingness to assimilate other cultures to a sociopolitical culture of liberalism, glossed as ‘cosmopolitanism without emancipation’. I think that Putnam convincingly demonstrates that, contra Rorty, for Wittgenstein there are not only better and worse performances, but also better and worse language games. Wittgenstein, Putnam maintains, finds the games philosophers play to be nonsensical (and, I might add, Wittgenstein distinguishes among different types of nonsense), while he is ‘more generous’ to other kinds of language games: those of ordinary language and, especially, as Putnam notes, ‘the language games of “primitive” people’ (1995, p. 37). He ascribes to Rorty what he calls the positivistic interpretation of Wittgenstein – based on the idea that if you know under what conditions a statement is confirmed, you understand the statement-and he differentiates this from the interpretation offered by Peter Winch (1963) in The Idea of a Social Science which maintains that ‘the use of the words in a language game cannot be described without using concepts which are related to the concepts employed in the game.’25 It is in regard to the question of other cultures that Putnam offers us a point of reference from which to see the difference between Wittgenstein and Rorty, for Putnam detects not only an emphasis on the primacy of practical reason (the pragmatist strain) in Wittgenstein, but also an ethical aim which is clearly evidenced in his discussions of religious language, ‘primitive’ language games and differing forms of life. He takes Wittgenstein as demonstrating a moral purpose, ‘a kind of empathetic understanding’, when Wittgenstein suggests that the possibilities for an ‘external’ understanding of cultures different from our own are extremely limited: Wittgenstein thinks that secular Europeans see all other forms of life as ‘pre scientific’ or ‘unscientific’ and that this is a vulgar refusal to appreciate difference … The question, the one we are faced with over and over again, is whether a form of life has practical or spiritual value. But

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the value of a form of life is not, in general, something one can express in the language games of those who are unable to share its evaluative interests. (Putnam 1995, p. 51)26 Certainly, I take Putnam’s comments to be centrally in place. Consider when Wittgenstein (1979) is given to understand how Frazer’s remarks (in The Golden Bough) make magical and religious notions from other cultures appear as mistakes: such notions are mistakes only if they are put forward as hypotheses or as scientific theories. As Wittgenstein says, ‘All that Frazer does is to make this practice plausible to people who thinks as he does’ (1979, p. 5e) and he admonishes him: What narrowness of spiritual life we find in Frazer! And as a result; how impossible for him to understand a different way of life from the English one of his time! … Frazer is much more savage than most of his savages, for these savages will not be so far from any understanding of spiritual matters as an Englishman of the twentieth century. (1979, p. 5e)

Lyotard’s the differend Where Rorty (1990) warns us of the ‘dangers of over-philosophication’ and the dubious relevance of philosophy to politics and education, Lyotard (1988), by contrast, proclaims ‘Now is the time to philosophize’. Whereas for Rorty there is always hope of agreement so long as the conversation lasts and ‘consensus’ is the product of an algorithm of ‘normal discourse’ in the liberal community, for Lyotard ‘consensus’ disguises the conflict among players within and between language games and, more importantly, it disguises the fact that consensus can only be established on the basis of acts of exclusion. While, for Rorty, Marxism is dead and ‘postmodernist bourgeois liberalism’ (in a continuous line from the French Revolution) exemplifies the story of world progress and universal freedom, for Lyotard, both Marxism and liberalism are examples of totalising discourses based on foundational Enlightenment meta-narratives, which claim to be able to express the truth without residue. For Lyotard, these meta-narratives do not speak the truth so much as express the desire for truth; they embody moral ideals about which we should remain sceptical or incredulous. Both Rorty and Lyotard self-consciously locate themselves ‘after’ Wittgenstein, although with very different results. In ‘Wittgenstein “after”’, Lyotard (1993, ch. 5) acknowledges the way in which his thinking takes place ‘after’, and links up with Wittgenstein’s. He clarifies the ethico-political background of Wittgenstein’s response to the

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general sense of nihilism and ‘delegitimation’ characterising European culture following two world wars. Wittgenstein’s rejection of philosophy as a meta- language, his emphasis upon the diversity of language usage and the incommensurability of language games are seen as part of Wittgenstein’s philosophical response to his sense of contingency and uprootedness following the ‘decline’ or disintegration of European cultural unity in mid-century. For Lyotard, this same sense of cultural ‘disintegration’ is represented in the figure of ‘Auschwitz’. In The Differend (Lyotard 1988), ‘Auschwitz’ functions as a model which designates an ‘experience’ of language that brings speculative discourse to an end because, as Lyotard maintains, it invalidates the presupposition of that philosophical discourse (viz. that all that is real is rational and that all that is rational is real). For Lyotard (1988, ss. 152–60), ‘Auschwitz’ serves as the symbolic end or ‘liquidation’ of the project of modernity. It symbolises the ‘tragic incompletion of modernity’ by pointing to the moral that universal history does not move inevitably towards the better, that history does not have a universal finality. The transition from ‘language games’ in The Postmodern Condition (1984) to ‘phrase regimes’ in The Differend (1988) is Lyotard’s major theoretical innovation and philosophical response to the ethico-political demands following the loss of innocence in a time ‘diseased by language’ and dominated by ‘industrial technoscience’. As Lyotard writes: Mourning for the unity of language [and of the subject]-a certain ‘joy’ in the description of its strengths and its weaknesses, the refusal to have recourse to metaphysical entities like finality, the will to power, or even thought-ought to make Wittgenstein familiar to us. (Lyotard, 1995, p. 21) I am further encouraged to accept Lyotard’s reading by Plinio Prado’s (1991) Wittgensteinian interpretation of Lyotard’s (1988) The Differend. He shows how and why Wittgenstein comes to form an unavoidable passage for Lyotard’s thinking on the differend and charts the first references to the later Wittgenstein in Lyotard’s work after his withdrawal from the grand narrative and practical critique of radical Marxism. Lyotard, he says, does not approach Wittgenstein’s work from the viewpoint of a professional philosopher interested in questions of logical truth, rather he welcomes Wittgenstein: as a result of ethical and political questions concerning ‘delegitimation’: that is, on the basis of the crisis ‘which resides in any attempt to moralise politics’ … The passage is signalled to us by the general context of nihilism and by the ethico-political stakes of justice … Henceforth, the Idea (in the Kantian sense) of justice, regulating the political realm, is placed … under the Wittgensteinian rule of divergence. (Prado 1991, p. 96)

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The problem of justice and the refusal of a metalanguage, Prado suggests, constitutes the guiding thought of Wittgenstein’s work: For Wittgenstein, ‘injustice’ lies precisely in the claim to occupy the metaviewpoint, to ‘universalise’; that is, to impose one’s rules and criteria upon other games, leaving one’s own language in order to ‘attack’ others. (1991, p. 98) He views Wittgenstein’s remarks upon Frazer’s ethnology as pointing to a classical and eminently political example of such aggression. He refers to Von Wright’s (1982) description of Wittgenstein in relation to his times as evidence of the way in which Wittgenstein was profoundly affected by the nihilism that struck European culture, ‘by the collapse of “grand” aims’, the ‘dispersion’ and ‘dissolution’ of resemblances conferring a unity upon culture. This experience of rootlessness and contingency – ‘the disappearance of culture’ – Prado maintains, can be seen in the Wittgensteinian leitmotif of the indetermination, or of the paradox of the rule. There is no solution to the paradox of the rule; there is always a ‘gaping abyss’ (Wittgenstein) separating the rule from the case, a structural discontinuity between the general (the rule) and the particular (the case) which can always give rise to disagreement and conflict. To determine without rules whether a particular case falls under a rule or not is sometimes called reflective judgment. The stakes of the ethical and the political are located precisely in the gap that opens up between the rule and the case. Prado puts his case in the following terms, linking Lyotard to Wittgenstein: The open multiplicity of language games, autonomous and always irreducible to each other, the refusal of any meta-game, the indetermination and contingency of ‘moves’ (words, actions, gestures) constitute … the horizon of a reflection on justice in the ‘age’ of nihilism and of the collapse of any metaphysical authority. (Spirit, Meaning, Progress, Ideals, Ends). (1991, pp. 100–1) The Differend, then, Prado argues, approaches the question of Nothing, of Being and non-Being-the ‘gaping abyss’-from the perspective of an ontology of sentences (phrases). If there is no ‘correct’ way to ‘follow’ a rule, we are left only with the pure contingency of linkage, between sentences, between the rule and the case which can only be bridged through the use of reflective judgment. Wittgenstein’s thought, then, opens up the path to a justice of multiplicity where ‘the pretension of one game to prevail over others … would be injustice itself’ (Prado 1991, p. 96). In this Wittgensteinian conception, the ethico-political stakes are placed at the heart of the indetermination of the rule allowing Lyotard to resume the task of critical practice in the form of a politics of judgment which has its primary goal ‘to detect the undetermined, to listen

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and bring to hearing the differend hidden under the alleged universal’ (1991, p. 101).27 As Lyotard (1988, pp. xi, 158) clearly states: ‘that a universal rule of judgement between heterogenous genres is lacking in general’, or that ‘there is no genre whose hegemony over others would be just’. A differend, as Lyotard defines it, is ‘a case of conflict, between (at least) two parties, that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgement applicable to both arguments’ (p. xi). The aim of philosophy in this situation, Lyotard argues, is to detect differends (a cognitive task) and to bear witness to them (an ethical obligation).28 One of the clearest pictures of the implications of Lyotard’s Wittgensteinianinspired philosophy for the ethico-political question of other cultures comes from Bill Readings (1992) who, in reference to Australian Aborigines, argues that ‘Lyotard’s rethinking of philosophy as a process of experimental or pagan judgement allows the question of justice to be kept alive in late capitalism’ (1992, p. 168).29 Readings exercises experimental judgment in Lyotard’s sense in the case of the relation between the republican nation-state of Australia and its indigenous peoples, a case which exemplifies for him the clash between ‘the metanarrative of a unitary state claiming to embody universal values and more fragmentary or explicitly local or minoritarian groups’ (p. 169).30 Readings argues that the claim to a universal history (dedicated to the Idea of humanity) in this case is not the ground for global community but rather of victimisation and terror. The differend between the Commonwealth government and the Aborigines illustrates such an injustice: the representational structure of a republican ‘we’ reduces Aboriginal ‘identity’ – an identity radically untranslatable and inaccessible to Western modernist rationality – to an abstract ‘human nature’ assimilable to a community of a homogenous ‘we’. It is, Readings argues, an inherently integrationist ‘we’, a self-authorising, republican ‘we’ which builds its definition of community in terms of a universal claim to humanity. But such consensual republican community-building represses difference in the name of ‘we’ the people and prevents the possibility of asking the question ‘who are we to speak?’. As Readings explains: ‘Any culture that doesn’t understand itself as a “self”, or as potentially human, is silenced, suppressed’ (1992, p. 175). Cultural differences are referred to in the universal language of liberty and freedom which forces thinking of difference into the mould of abstract identity based on atomistic individualism. Readings concludes: the assumption of universal human nature … lights the way to terror even as it upholds the torch of human rights. The problem of averting genocide demands a respect for difference, a deconstructive ethics, that is prepared to relinquish the concept of the human, to separate liberty from fraternity. Deconstruction rephrases the political, not by adding race along with gender and class to the categories by which we calculate oppression but by invoking an incalculable difference, an unrepresentable other, in the face of which any claim to community must be staked. (Readings 1992, pp. 186–7)

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The analysis of other cultures provided by Readings in terms of difference is not an isolated one. I mention it here because of its relevance to an Australian audience. Paul Patton (1995) has provided a similar analysis of Australian society in terms of the ‘philosophy of difference’, focusing on the Mabo debate and utilising a poststructuralist approach to political questions. Patton (1995, p. 167) makes clear, contra Rorty on cultural difference, that Rawl’s theory ‘reflects a deep commitment within liberal theory: to a principle of sameness or identity among members of the political community’. In the idea of difference, he suggests, difference understood as specificity or variation rather than opposition or exclusion, ‘we can find some intimations of a different idea of both society and justice, one that does not entail the assimilation of one culture by another’.31 I do not think that I have to labour the point in respect of the philosophy of education or the crucial nature of these issues of identity, difference and social justice to contemporary education. One of the crucial contemporary choices ‘we’ face in post-analytic philosophy of education is, I believe, between Rorty and Lyotard. It is a choice also that Fritzman (1995) regards as important when he shapes up the educational choice between the two in the following terms: The pedagogical implications of Jean-François Lyotard’s notion of the differend and Richard Rorty’s pragmatism are distinct. Although there is no criterion that could decide between them, the differend overcomes the deficiencies of pragmatism. Moreover, Rorty now recognizes the possibility that some disputes cannot be resolved by criteria that are shared, and so he implicitly recognizes the eliminatable presence of differends. (Fritzman 1995, p. 59) Fritzman (1995, p. 72) has in mind the fact that Rorty (in ‘Feminism and pragmatism’) recognises that once an oppressed group invents a new language, its terms and categories may be commensurable neither with that group’s previous self-descriptions nor with those of its oppressors. In light of this, Rorty believes that ‘we have to give up the comforting belief that competing groups will always be able to reason together on the basis of plausible and neutral premises’. In adopting this position, Rorty allows that conflicts may not be resolvable through litigation.32 My argument is that there always was an alternative to analytic philosophy in the work of the later Wittgenstein and that such an alternative existed for philosophy of education from its institutional beginnings as a specialised and professionalised sub discipline; that if ‘we’ accept the picture of Wittgenstein as a ‘philosopher of culture’ in the Austrian counter-tradition, ‘we’ will also come to accept that Lyotard, rather than Rorty, represents more faithfully the spirit of Wittgenstein’s philosophy; and that, accordingly, Lyotard’s approach to

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ethico-political problems of the age and his ‘philosophy of difference’ is a better language-game for post-analytic philosophy of education than Rorty’s ‘postmodernist bourgeois liberalism’.

Notes 1 In this respect, Wittgenstein’s (1980, p. 61e) remark speaks loudly: ‘Am I the only one who cannot found a school or can a philosopher never do this? I cannot found a school because I do not really want to be imitated. Not at any rate by those who publish articles in philosophical journals’. 2 See the late Bill Readings’s (1995a) ‘excellent’ essay, ‘The university without culture?’, and his related earlier essays ‘From emancipation to obligation: Sketch for a heteronomous politics of education’ and ‘For a heteronomous cultural politics: The university, culture, and the state’ (Readings 1993a, 1995b). See also my essays, ‘Technoscience, rationality and the university: Lyotard on the postmodern condition’ and ‘Performance, and accountability in “post-industrial society”: The crisis of British universities’ (Peters 1989, 1992). 3 D. C. Phillips (1994, p. 4455) regards the situation in the 1990s as ‘complex, and relatively healthy’ in the sense that ‘philosophers are working with a variety of approaches, in a variety of fields and the discipline is marked by an eclecticism perhaps unrivalled in previous periods.’ This ‘postmodern’ eclecticism in philosophy of education ‘after’ Wittgenstein, perhaps, reflects a new understanding that ‘a universal rule of judgement between heterogeneous genres is lacking in general’, to use Lyotard’s (1988, p. xi) expression. 4 Margolis (1995, p. 177) characterises Rorty’s position in terms of Rorty’s (1986, p. 335) own formulation: (1) ‘True’ has no explanatory uses. (2) We understand all there is to know about the relation of beliefs to the world when we understand their causal relations with the world; our knowledge of how to apply terms such as ‘about’ and ‘true of’ is fall-out from a naturalistic account of linguistic behaviour. (3) There are no relations of ‘being made true’ which hold between beliefs and the world. (4) There is no point to debates between realism and antirealism, for such debates presuppose the empty and misleading idea of beliefs ‘being made true’. 5 Maloney (1985) is unusual in this respect. While she categorises philosophy of education in the United States in terms of periods: comparative, 1942–53; transitional, 1954–57; analytic, 1958–67; prospective, 1968–82. She does not acknowledge the influence of the ‘London’ school in the United States. 6 Harris acknowledges his concerns over the troubling notion of ‘ideology’ and attempts to deal with these in Harris (1982). See also Jim Walker’s (1984) ‘The evolution of APE: Analytic philosophy of education in retrospect’ and the local historiographic ‘war’ which broke out between James Kaminsky (1986, 1988a, 1988b) and Kevin Harris (1988). See also Kaminsky (1993). 7 The exceptions to this generalisation are: Gilroy (1982, p. 79) who makes plain that Wittgenstein in rejecting ‘reductive analysis’, rejected also both ‘conceptual analysis’ and linguistic analysis per se; Marshall (1985) who in an excellent paper disputes the Wittgensteinian interpretation of human behaviour as rule governed which is adopted by R. S. Peters (among others) to underwrite the analysis of concept of authority (and discipline); and Rizvi (1987, p. 34) who, in a pivotal paper, first tracks out the espoused indebtedness of analytic philosophers of education to the work of the later Wittgenstein and, second, shows how ‘Wittgenstein’s anti-essentialism would seem to render the philosophical suppositions of conceptual analysis without any theoretical justification’. Only Marshall (1987) in a later publication (and also in conjunction with

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Post-analytic philosophy of education Peters:Marshall and Peters, 1985), spells out an alternative to analytic philosophy of education by reference to the philosophy of the later Wittgenstein. See also recent works by Janik (1985, 1989) and Haller (1988). Haller (1988: 76) demonstrates sympathy for von Wright’s Spenglerian view of Wittgenstein when he remarks that Wittgenstein, in the sketch of a preface to Philosophical Remarks, saw himself as a critic of culture in Spengler’s sense. This paragraph and some of the material on Cavell’s interpretation is based on my earlier essay ‘Philosophy and Education: “After” Wittgenstein’, (Peters, 1995a p. 193). Von Wright (1993) continues: ‘The task lies rather with other types of philosophy, different from and often critical of the analytic current’. Von Wright (1993, p. 86), in his essay, ‘Wittgenstein and the twentieth century’, writes: ‘If Wittgenstein is not an analytic philosopher, what kind of philosopher is he then? This question certainly cannot be answered in the terms of current classifications. He is not a phenomenologist or hermeneuticist, nor an existentialist or Hegelian, least of all is he a Marxist’. In my Ph.D. thesis (Peters 1984), and following Rorty (1980), I interpreted the work of the later Wittgenstein as an assault on the tradition of ‘philosophy-as-epistemology’, on a conception of philosophy which views itself as making a fundamental claim to rationality by providing a set of ahistorical and cross-culturally valid standards by reference to which competing knowledge claims may be evaluated. In ‘Techno-science, rationality and the university: Lyotard on the “postmodern condition’” (Peters 1989), I discuss Lyotard’s appropriation of Wittgenstein’s later work (see p. 100ff.) and the difference between Lyotard and Rorty in the following terms: ‘Where Lyotard and Rorty differ is in describing the nature of the conversation as the ultimate context within which we can legitimate our European form of life. For Rorty there is always hope of agreement so long as the conversation lasts. For Lyotard, “agreement”, “consensus”, and “undistorted communication” disguise the basic conflictual nature of the language game’ (p. 102). See also Peters (1995b). In November 1995, I discovered Stanislav Hubik’s (1990) ‘Wittgenstein-modern and postmodern’ which comments favourably on Lyotard’s interpretation. See also the work of Peter Bachmaier (1990) and Audin Ofsti (1990). Harry Aron’s (1978) article is also interesting in this context. I argued that Rorty’s position is not the only Wittgensteinian-inspired appropriation and construction of ‘postmodern philosophy’ that can be made and indicated that ‘poststructuralism’ provides resources for an alternative reading (Peters 1995a, p. 319). Wittgenstein’s remark (at p. 9e) should be compared to Nietzsche’s Goethean idea of culture as unity in diversity and Nietzsche’s view that modern ‘culture’ lacks genuine unity and therefore is not a true culture, or is false or counterfeit. There is a certain Nietzschean quality in Wittgenstein’s remark in that Wittgenstein, like Nietzsche, seems to want (as evidenced in the above remarks) to forecast a collapse of Western civilisation upon the basis of the disintegration or dissolution of culture. See the selection from Nietzsche’s notebooks of the early 1870s and an introduction by Daniel Breazeale in Philosophy and Truth. (Nietzsche 1990). I found Nietzsche’s notion of ‘The philosopher as cultural physician’ (pp. 69, 76) particularly helpful and suggestive. I am thinking in particular of ‘The priority of democracy to philosophy’, ‘On ethnocentrism: A response to Clifford Geertz’, ‘Postmodernist bourgeois liberalism’, and ‘Cosmopolitianism without emancipation: A reply to Jean-François Lyotard’, collected in Rorty (1991). Rorty provides a neopragmatist reading of Davidson’s work which Davidson himself rejects. See Giovanna Borradori’s (1994, pp. 47 & 49) interview with Davidson.

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19 In ‘The priority of democracy to philosophy’ (Rorty 1991), Rorty discusses communitarianism as a third type of social theory. He distinguishes between three strands of communitarianism (attributed, respectively, to Horkheimer and Adorno, Alastair Macintyre, and Charles Taylor) which share the Heideggerian belief that liberal culture ‘cannot survive the collapse of the philosophical justification that the Enlightenment provided for them’ (Rorty p. 177). For a poststructuralist critique of communitarianism within the educational literature, see Peters and Marshall (1993), ‘Beyond the philosophy of the subject’. See also Jim Mackenzie’s (1995) ‘Peters and Marshall on the philosophy of the subject’ and our response, ‘After the subject: A response to Mackenzie’ (Peters & Marshall, 1995). 20 See Rorty’s (1991, p. 15, fn. 28) for examples of such criticisms. 21 Rorty (1991, p. 15, fn. 29) does indicate that his loyalty might be severely tested if those who are presently in control – ‘an increasingly greedy and selfish middle class’ – continue the process for another generation of depriving the weak in order to reward the rich through tax cuts. If this happens the North Atlantic democracies will become ‘barbarized’ and under those conditions ‘it may be silly to hope for reform, and sensible to hope for revolution’. 22 Rorty says that he differs from Dewey mainly in terms of the account he offers of the relation of natural science to the rest of culture and in stating the problematic of representationalism vs antirepresentationalism in terms of words and sentences rather than in terms of ideas and experiences. 23 I think that Giovanna Barradori (1994) provides the best genealogical reading of contemporary American philosophy and some interesting pointers to Rorty’s place within it; Janik, Haller, and von Wright (cited previously), while not selfconsciously styling their analyses as genealogy, provide some basis for a genealogical reading of Wittgenstein in relation to the Austrian tradition. Barradori’s (1994) observations in offering ‘a new cartography’ of American philosophical culture are particularly suggestive. He suggests that post-analytic thought (with the exception of Quine) reads the preceding analytic tradition according to two moments: ‘an introspective journey into the labyrinth of what it means to do “analysis”, conducted on the basis of its own linguistic instruments’ (p. 4); and ‘the desire to go beyond the analytic horizon’ by building ‘a new language and a spectrum of new references’ (p. 4). What he calls ‘the analytic fracture’ of American philosophy, begins in the mid-thirties, with the emigration of mitteleuropean philosophers (Carnap, Reichenbach, Hempel, Neurath, Feigl). The arrival of a form of neo-positivism, preoccupied with ‘logical clarification rather than promoting new visions of the world’ (p. 8), brought to an end the public era of American philosophy associated with first-generation pragmatism (Pierce, James, Dewey) with the result of promoting a professionalisation of philosophy which was divorced from both public debate and emerging trends of Continental intellectual history. This has been the reason, in part, why literary scholars in the USA have turned to a dialogue with non-analytic European philosophers. The analytic ‘knot’ created through the canonising of a philosophical discourse which remained within a rigid disciplinary confine and which isolated philosophy from history and culture, was untied by Rorty and Cavell with ‘the recovery of two crucial traditions of thought in the intellectual history of the United States, pragmatism and transcendentalism’ (Barradori 1994, p. 20). 24 This interpretation, I think, is congruent with Margolis’ (1995) classification of Rorty as an analytic philosopher or, at least, as still part of the analytic movement. 25 Note that Putnam warns us against Winch’s tendency to regard language games of primitive peoples as incommensurable with our own. In his view such incommensurability was never a part of Wittgenstein’s thinking.

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26 These remarks by Putnam, especially the reference to difference, should not obscure Putnam’s opposition to what he regards as a nihilistic tendency in French poststructuralism. His early political militancy, his recovery of theological Judaism, and the consequent importance he confers on the moral order, distance him from the ‘bourgeois liberalism’ of Rorty in favour of the ‘redemptive’ philosophy of Habermas. His remark, in the interview with Barradori (1994, p. 67), that there are at least two ways of reading Wittgenstein, is interesting in this context: ‘The first is that one can read Wittgenstein as simply a voice of despair, a voice saying that philosophy is over. The second way is much more tentative and much more difficult, but I feel it’s what I would like to do and it’s what I think Stanley Cavell is doing. That is to say that Wittgenstein wants to shut down or disabuse us, or better yet, to disabuse something which has been called philosophy, in order to make room for something else, something that is very hard to characterize.’ Note Cavell’s remark (in Barradori 1994, p.129), ‘when I came to the Investigations, I felt, here is a refusal of philosophy that is philosophy. This is the tone in which philosophy can refuse philosophy.’ Elsewhere Cavell (1995, p. 184) suggests that ‘the theme of the coming to an end of philosophy contained perhaps the most telling contrast between the traditions of philosophizing represented by Heidegger and by the late Wittgenstein.’ For Derrida, it is the whole metaphysical tradition and its ‘powerfully protected’ institutionalisation ‘in or by Western culture, in its pedagogy, its sciences, its writing’ which is the object of deconstruction; for Wittgenstein, what he wishes to destroy in philosophy is ‘a house of cards, something that will collapse of its own weight’ (ibid, p. 77). See also Cavell (1994, pp. 62–3). 27 Prado also countenances and qualifies Lyotard’s critique of Wittgenstein’s ‘anthropological empiricism’. 28 Lyotard’s term ‘paganism’, as Prado (1991, p. 96) points out, refers to the universe of ‘games incommunicable with each other’ resistant to being synthetised in a ‘unifying meta-discourse’ and his associated notion of ‘political minorities’ understood as ‘territories of language’. As he writes in Just Gaming: ‘each one of us belongs to several minorities and, what is very important, not one of them prevails. It is only in this sense that one could say that society is just’ (Lyotard with Thebaud 1985, p. 181). 29 See also Readings’s foreword, ‘The end of the political’, to Lyotard’s (1993) Political Writings, especially the sections entitled ‘Intellectuals: Speaking for others’ and ‘An endless politics’, where Readings writes, ‘Politics becomes a matter of justice, of handling differences, rather than of establishing truth or even countertruth’ (p. xxiv). See also Peters (1994a) for a review of Political Writings. 30 Readings explores the differend between Aborigines and the west as it is witnessed in Werner Herzog’s Where the Green Ants Dream. 31 The literature on the philosophy and politics of difference is now quite extensive: see, for example, Lyotard’s (1989) ‘Universal history and cultural differences’; Iris Marion Young’s (1990) Justice and the Politics of Difference; Anna Yeatman’s ‘Minorities and the politics of difference’ (1992) and Postmodern Revisionings of the Political (1994); Margaret Wilson’s and Anna Yeatman’s (1995) edited collection, Justice and Identity. For a discussion of the ‘politics of difference’ in the educational literature see Peters (1994b, pp. 72–5; 1995c). 32 See also Fritzman’s (1993) ‘Thinking with Fraser about Rorty, feminism, and pragmatism’. For the rapidly burgeoning educational literature dealing with Rorty see: Arcilla (1990) who presents ‘Rortyan motifs’ for philosophy of education, arguing that teachers can ‘tum the tide of epistemological despair into education hope’ by exchanging epistemological paradigms for educational ones (1990, p. 35); Nicholson (1989), who believes that Rorty improves on Lyotard; and Rorty (1990) who

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responds to both Arcilla and Nicholson. See also Neiman (1991), Quiche (1992) and Beista (1995) who believe that Rorty’s views are compatible with liberal ideals and a democratic vision of community; and, most recently, Wain (1995) who takes issue with both Alven and Quiche and disputes Rorty’s Deweyanism, arguing that it is nothing like the kind of community favoured by Dewey. For a view which disputes Rorty’s claim that there is little essential difference between Dewey and Foucault, see Marshall (1995b). For the educational literature dealing with Lyotard, see the edited collection by Peters (1995b).

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Fritzman, J. M. (1995). ‘From pragmatism to the differend’, in Education and the Postmodern Condition, ed. M Peters, Westport, Conn & London: Bergin & Garvey, pp. 59–74. Gilroy, D. P. (1982). ‘The revolutions in English philosophy and philosophy of education’, Educational Analysis, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 75–92. Haack, R. (1976). ‘Philosophies of education’, Philosophy, vol. 51,pp. 159–76. Haber, H. (1994). Beyond Postmodern Politics: Lyotard, Rorty, Foucault, New York & London: Routledge. Haller, R. (1981). ‘Wittgenstein and Austrian philosophy’, in Austrian Philosophy: Studies and Texts, J. C. Nyiri (ed.), Munchen: Philosophia Verlag. Haller, R. (1988). Questions on Wittgenstein, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Harris, K. (1979). Education and Knowledge, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Harris, K. (1980). ‘Philosophers of education: Detached spectators or political practitioners?’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 19–36. Harris, K. (1982). Teachers and Classes: A Marxist Analysis, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Harris, K. (1988). ‘Dismantling a deconstructionist history of philosophy of education’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, vol. 20, no. 1, pp. 50–8. Hubik, S. (1990). ‘Wittgenstein-Modern and postmodern’, in Wittgenstein: Towards a Re-Evaluation, Vol III, R. Haller & J. Brandl (eds), Wein: Verlag Holder-Pichler Tempsky. Janik, A. (1981). ‘Wittgenstein: An Austrian enigma’, in Austrian Philosophy: Studies and Texts, J. C. Nyiri (ed.), Munchen: Philosophia Verlag. Janik, A. (1985). Essays on Wittgenstein and Weininger, Amsterdam: Rudopi. Janik, A. (1989). Style, Politics and the Future of Philosophy, Dordrecht, Kluwer. Janik, A. & Toulmin, S. (1973). Wittgenstein’s Vienna, Simon & Schuster, New York. Kaminsky, J. (1986). ‘The first 600 months of philosophy of education 1935–1985: A deconstructionist history’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, vol. 18, no. 2, pp. 42–7. Kaminsky, J. (1988a). ‘The first 600 months … Revisited: A response to Harris’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, vol. 20, no. 1, pp. 50, 59–62. Kaminsky, J. (1988b). ‘Philosophy of education in Australasia: A definition and a history’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, vol. 20, no. 1, pp. 12–26. Kaminsky, J. (1993). A New History of Educational Philosophy, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. Lyotard, J.-F. (1984). The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. G. Bennington & B. Massumi, Foreword by F. Jameson, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Lyotard, J.-F. (1988). The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. G. Van Den Abbeele, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1988, p. xiii. Lyotard, J.-F. (1989). ‘Universal history and cultural differences’, in The Lyotard Reader, A Benjamin (ed.), Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Lyotard, J.-F. (1993). Political Writings, trans. B. Readings & K. P. Geiman, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lyotard, J.-F. with J. L. Thebaud (1985). Just Gaming, trans. W. Godzich, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mackenzie, J. (1995). ‘Peters and Marshall on the philosophy of the subject’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, vol. 27, no. 1, pp. 25–40.

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Maloney, K. (1985). ‘Philosophy of education: Definitions of the field, 1942–1982’, Educational Studies, vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 235–58. Margolis, J. (1995). ‘A recent biopsy of recent analytic philosophy’, The Philosophical Forum, vol. 26, no. 3, pp. 161–88. Marshall, J. (1985). ‘Wittgenstein on rules: Implications for authority and discipline in education’, Journal of Philosophy of Education, vol. 19, no. 1, pp. 3–11. Marshall, J. (1987). Positivism or Pragmatism: Philosophy of education in New Zealand, Auckland: University of Auckland, NZARE. Marshall, J. (1995a). ‘Wittgenstein and Foucault: Resolving philosophical puzzles’, Philosophy and Education: Accepting Wittgenstein’s Challenge, in P. Smeyers & J. Marshall (eds), Dordrecht: Kluwer. Marshall, J (1995b). ‘On what we may hope: Rorty on Dewey and Foucault’, Studies in Philosophy and Education, vol. 13, no. 307–23. Neiman, A. (1991). ‘Ironic schooling: Socrates, pragmatism and higher learning’, Educational Theory, vol. 41, no. 4, pp. 371–84. Nicholson, C. (1989). ‘Postmodernism, feminism, and education: The need for solidarity’, Educational Theory, vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 197–205. Nietzsche, F. (1990). Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche ‘s Notebooks of the Early 1870s, ed. and trans. D. Breazeale, New Jersey & London: Humanities Press. Nyiri, J. C. (1982). ‘Wittgenstein’s later work in relation to conservativism’, Wittgenstein and His Times, in B. McGuinness (ed.), Oxford: Blackwell. Ofsti, A (1990) ‘“… und laast uns in Ruhe spielen’ – Zur Sprache als Spielverderber’, in Wittgenstein: Towards a Re-Evaluation, Vol III, R. Haller & J. Brandl (eds), Wein: Verlag Holder-Pichler-Tempsky. Patton, P. (1995). ‘Post-structuralism and the Mabo debate: Difference, society and justice’, in Justice and Identity, M Wilson & A Yeatman, A. (eds), Wellington, NZ: Bridget Williams. Peters, M. (1984). The problem of rationality: An historicist approach for philosophy of education, unpubl. Ph.D thesis, Auckland: University of Auckland. Peters, M. (1989). ‘Techno-science, rationality and the university: Lyotard on the “postmodern condition”‘, Educational Theory, vol. 39, pp. 93–105. Peters, M. (1992). ‘Performance and accountability in “post-industrial society”: The crisis of British universities’, Studies in Higher Education, vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 123–40. Peters, M. (1994a). ‘Review of Jean-François Lyotard’s Political Writings’, in Surfaces, vol. 4, pp. 3–13. Peters, M. (1994b). ‘Individualism and community: Education and the politics of difference’, Discourse, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 65–78. Peters, M. (1995a), ‘Philosophy and education: “After” Wittgenstein’, in P. Smeyers & J. Marshall (eds.) Philosophy and Education: Accepting Wittgenstein’s Challenge, Dordrecht, Kluwer. Peters, M. (1995b). ‘Introduction: Lyotard, education, and the postmodern condition’, in Education and the Postmodern Condition, M. Peters (ed.), Foreword by Jean-François Lyotard, Westport, Conn. & London: Bergin & Garvey. Peters, M. (1995c) ‘Radical democracy, the politics of difference, and education’, in Critical Multiculturalism: Uncommon Voices in a Common Struggle, B. Kanpol & P. McLaren (eds), Westport, Conn. & London: Bergin & Garvey.

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Peters, M. & Marshall, J. (1993). ‘Beyond the philosophy of the subject: Liberalism, education and the critique of individualism’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 19–39. Peters, M. & Marshall, J. (1995), ‘After the subject: A response to Mackenzie’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, vol. 27, no. 1, pp. 41–54. Peters, R.S. (1966). Ethics and Education, London: George Allen & Unwin. Phillips, D.C. (1994). ‘Philosophy of education: Historical overview’, in The International Encyclopedia of Education, 2nd edn, T. Husen & T. Postlethwaite (eds), Oxford & New York: Pergamon. Prado, P.W. (1991). ‘The necessity of contingency: Remarks on linkage’, trans. R. Bearsworth, L’Esprit Createur, Passages, Genres, Differends: Jean-François Lyotard, Guest Editor, R. L. Kauffmann, vol. 31, no. 1, pp. 90–106. Originally published in German under the title ‘Die Notwendigkeit der Zufalligkeit. Uber Lyotard’s ‘Nach’ Wittgenstein’, trans. C. Shar, in J.-F. Lyotard. Denker des 20. fahrhunderts, W. ReeseSchafer & B. Taureck, Cuxhaven, Junghans, 1989. Putnam, H. (1995). ‘Was Wittgenstein a pragmatist?’, in H. Putnam, Pragmatism, Oxford, UK & Cambridge, USA: Blackwell. Quiche, J. (1992). ‘Individualism and citizenship: Some problems and possibilities’, International Studies in Sociology of Education, vol. 2, no. 2. Rawls, J. (1980). ‘Kantian constructivism in moral theory’, Journal of Philosophy, vol. 77, no. 9, pp. 515–77. Rawls, J. (1985). ‘Justice as fairness: Political not metaphysical’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 14, pp. 251–73. Readings, B. (1992). ‘Pagans, perverts or primitives? Experimental justice in the empire of capital’, in Judging Lyotard, A. Benjamin (ed.), London & New York: Routledge. Readings, B. (1993a). ‘For a heteronomous cultural politics: The university, culture and the state’, The Oxford Literary Review, vol. 15, pp. 163–200. Readings, B. (1993b). ‘Foreword: The end of the political’, in Political Writings, J.-F. Lyotard, trans. B. Readings & K. P. Geiman, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Readings, B. (1995a). ‘The university without culture?’, New Literary History, vol. 26, no. 3, pp. 465–92. Readings, B. (1995b) ‘From emancipation to obligation: Sketch for a heteronomous politics of education’, in Education and the Postmodern Condition, M. Peters (ed.) Foreword by Jean-François Lyotard, Westport&: London: Bergin&: Garvey. Rizvi, F. (1987) ‘Wittgenstein on grammar and analytic philosophy of education’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, vol. 19, no. 2, pp. 33–46. Rorty, R. (1980). Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Oxford: Blackwell. Rorty, R. (1989). Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, New York: Cambridge University Press. Rorty, R. (1990). ‘The dangers of over-philosophication: Reply to Arcilla and Nicholson’, Educational Theory, vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 41–4. Rorty, R. (1991). Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rorty, R. (1980). Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ryle, G. (1949). The Concept of Mind, London: Hutchinson.

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Smeyers, P. & Marshall, J. (1995). ‘Epilogue’, in Philosophy and Education: Accepting Wittgenstein’s Challenge,P. Smeyers &: J. Marshall (eds), Dordrecht: Kluwer. Smith, B. (1978). ‘Wittgenstein and the background of Austrian philosophy’, in Wittgenstein and His Influence on Contemporary Thought, E.Leinfellner, W.Leinfellner, H. Berghel &: A. Hubner (eds) Wein: Verlag Holder-Pichler Tempsky. Strawson, P. (1959). Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics, London: Methuen. Von Wright, G.H. (1982). ‘Wittgenstein in relation to his times’, in Wittgenstein and His Times, B. McGuinness (ed.) Oxford: Blackwell. Von Wright, G.H. (1993). The Tree of Knowledge and Other Essays, Leiden, New York: Koln, E.J. Brill. Wain, K. (1995). ‘Richard Rorty, education and politics’, Educational Theory, vol. 45, no. 3, pp. 395–409. Walker, J. (1984). ‘The evolution of the APE: Analytic philosophy of education in retrospect’, Access, vol. 3, no. 1. Wilson, M. &: Yeatman, A. (eds) (1995). Justice and Identity, Wellington, NZ: Bridget Williams. Winch, P (1963). The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical Investigations, London, Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. (1969). On Certainty, Oxford: Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. (1979). Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, trans. A.C. Miles, ed. R. Rhees, Retford, Nott.: Brynmill. Wittgenstein, L. (1980). Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Yeatman, A. (1992). ‘Minorities and the politics of difference’, Political Theory Newsletter, vol. 4, no.1, pp. 1–10. Yeatman, A. (1994). Postmodern Revisionings of the Political, New York: Routledge. Young, I. M. (1990). Justice and the Politics of Difference, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Chapter 6

Wittgenstein at Cambridge Philosophy as a way of life Michael A. Peters and Jeff Stickney Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd, www.tandfonline.com, on behalf of © Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia.

Introduction: An anti-philosopher redefines ‘Philosophy’ Am I the only one who cannot found a school or can a philosopher never do this? I cannot found a school because I do not really want to be imitated. Not at any rate by those who publish articles in philosophical journals. (CV p. 61e)1 I am by no means sure that I should prefer a continuation of my work by others to a change in the way people live which would make all these questions superfluous. (For this reason I could never found a school.) (CV p. 61e) One might argue that as an ideal a university is an academic community, no more than a set of enduring relationships, that are structured through feelings for one another and for a discipline or field of knowledge. Our subject, Ludwig Wittgenstein, was attracted to Cambridge University in 1911 – lured away from engineering studies he had begun in Manchester – because he recognized2 in its distinguished philosophy department key figures like Bertrand Russell working on the foundations of mathematics and logic – problems that fascinated the young thinker in spite of a technical education that was not ideally suited as prerequisite to this narrow field. After auditing Russell’s lectures on logic, in one of their early meetings at Trinity College Wittgenstein famously asked Russell if he should pursue philosophy or whether he was a complete idiot and should return to being an aeronaut (Monk, 1990, 40); after reading Wittgenstein’s brief critique of one of Russell’s own papers, Russell became convinced that Wittgenstein was (as he informed Ludwig’s older sister Hermine) ‘the next big thing in Philosophy’ (Wittgenstein, 1984; cf. McGuinness, 1988, 96). Russell collected the intellectually gifted Wittgenstein, whom he referred to kindly as ‘his German’, in much the same way Professor Harding at Cambridge took in the brilliant Indian mathematician Ramanujan, who curiously arrived at his results through spiritual practices rather than proofs. Universities, and especially ones like Oxford and Cambridge that have medieval roots extending through the

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Renaissance and Enlightenment (e.g. the home of Newton), are menageries and museums of sorts: institutions priding themselves on their collection of books and intellectually ‘rare specimens’ (see Nietzsche, 1965). Although their personal relationship withered over time and Wittgenstein disdained academic philosophy, Russell was doubly correct in his prediction about Wittgenstein’s influence on the discipline. Wittgenstein was a leading figure in two revolutions within the field: first, as an inspiring member of the so-called Vienna Circle of logical positivists, led by the physicist Mortitz Schlick (who commended Wittgenstein’s Tractatus to Einstein); and second, as one of the founders of ordinary language philosophy, which took form as the analytic school focused on conceptual mapping (see Peters & Stickney, 2019). Unlike the great system-builders in philosophy like Russell and Whitehead (viz., Principia Mathematica), Wittgenstein undertook its dismantling. In both of his major works Wittgenstein set strict limits on the domain of philosophy, which sets up the central antagonism we explore here: the liberty afforded by a university to question and sometimes push the limits of one’s own field of inquiry, and indeed invigorate the discipline by questioning its very livelihood within an evolving cultural milieu. In his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, published in 1922 and submitted to Russell and G.E. Moore as his doctoral dissertation so that he could begin lecturing in philosophy at Cambridge in 1929, Wittgenstein delineated a sharp boundary between scientific or empirical propositions and philosophical concerns (as he more narrowly defined them). We briefly show this boundary issue to be an enduring concern for Wittgenstein, tracing it through his involvement and eventual dominance of the Moral Sciences Club at Cambridge, including in that vibrant forum his deflationary ‘Lecture of Ethics’, and his second major work, published posthumously as the Philosophical Investigations (1953) in which he dismantled his earlier work in the Tractatus but continued in his insistence on severely limiting the domain of academic philosophy, likening it to a form of therapy that allows one to stop doing philosophy when one wishes (PI §132). We conclude our investigation of Wittgenstein’s relationship with the university and academic philosophy with insights from Pierre Hadot on philosophical inquiry as a vital part of the bios, a form of life that is the life-blood of academia, and his insights on Wittgenstein’s self-limiting narratives as a crucial aspect of what makes universities such important and enduring institutions, in spite of the vitriolic criticism they draw from iconic members like Wittgenstein. This is a concept captured in the notion and practice of philosophy in the ancient sense of the ‘love of wisdom’ as it was practised in Greece. My ideal is a certain coolness, a temple providing a setting for the passions without meddling with them. (CV p. 2e)

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Working in philosophy – like work in architecture in many respects – is really more a working on oneself. On one’s own interpretation. On one’s way of seeing things. (And what one expects from them.) (CV p. 16e) Accepting as our framework the view of ‘philosophy’ as a change in one’s way of life, much can be garnered from correspondence and other documents concerning the role that Cambridge played in the life of Wittgenstein.

Wittgenstein at Cambridge Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5.15 pm train. –John Maynard Keynes, speaking of Wittgenstein’s return to Cambridge in 1925, cited in Monk (1990, 151). Wittgenstein spent by far the better part of his professional life in the privileged and rarefied atmosphere of Cambridge University, some 21 years in total. His mentors (Russell, Moore and Keynes), colleagues (Ramsey, Saffra and Skinner), his friends and younger colleagues like Rush Rhees, Normal Malcolm and Von Wright defined an extended circle of peers. Cambridge institutions like the Moral Sciences Club and the Apostles, effectively the Cambridge branch of the Bloomsbury set revolving around Moore’s Principia Ethica, created a wider cultural circle within which Wittgenstein practised and developed his philosophy. Wittgenstein wrote nothing specifically about Cambridge or the university as an institution, yet he did pass occasional comments on university life at Cambridge, and he did provide a unique philosophical analysis of meaning, rule-following and subjectivity: themes we can apply to institutions like universities. This section briefly discusses Wittgenstein’s academic life at Trinity College, establishing an ideal (perhaps an unattainable one) of the ancient view of philosophy as a way of life. As the University’s own history of philosophy at Cambridge emphasizes: Any account of Philosophy in Cambridge must emphasise the work of at least three philosophers – Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. These three transformed the discipline of philosophy during the first half of the last century and made Cambridge the most important centre for philosophy in the English-speaking world. (Cambridge Philosophy, n.d.)

Early years (c.1911–1913) The history of philosophy at Cambridge in the periods of Wittgenstein’s attendance was in large measure an account of the friendships, interpersonal

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relationships, and machinations that were often evident and manifested in the weekly meetings of the Cambridge Apostles and the Moral Science Club. The Cambridge Apostles was a secret debating club founded in 1820, sometimes called The Cambridge Conversazione Club. Cambridge’s best ‘unkept’ secret included ‘some of the most influential men in British public’: John Maynard Keynes, Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey and his brother James, G.E. Moore and Rupert Brooke were all Apostles. Many members of the Bloomsbury group were also Apostles: Keynes, Woolf and Lytton Strachey being the best known of them.3 In The Cambridge Apostles, 1820–1914: Liberalism, Imagination, and Friendship, W.C. Lubenow (1998) provides a snapshot of the Apostles weekly meetings: The Apostles met each Saturday evening after Hall during term, all members were obliged to attend and each, at regular intervals, read a paper. They gathered in the room of one of the members, and their host called the moderator, read a paper to the Society standing on the hearth-rug. In turn each of the brethren, in an order chosen by lot, took to the hearthrug and commented on the paper. The discussion was spirited and they expected verbal virtuosity, but they were expected to take the paper seriously. They rivalled each other in flights of fancy and wit, but the truth, not display, was their object. The truth mattered; nothing else. (p. 30) Lubenow (1998, 31) describes how the Society ‘created feelings of self-discovery and excitement’ giving them ‘a sense of self-confidence, belonging, liberation and meaningfulness’. The Apostles and the Moral Sciences Club were small, tightly knit groups often of students who loved one another and came from the same bourgeois class layer often taking their privilege for granted. Shortly after his arrival in 1911, Wittgenstein heeded John Maynard Keynes’s advice to join the Moral Sciences Club and presented his first paper in his Trinity rooms in November of 1912, before fifteen members including Professor Morre. Wittgenstein set a club record for the shortest talk with a four-minute dissertation entitled ‘What is Philosophy?’, in which he tersely and rather caustically defined philosophy as ‘all those primitive propositions which are assumed as true without proof by the various sciences’. Perhaps too serious to appreciate the humour and collegiality of the young members, Wittgenstein attempted to resign from the Society and the Apostles suggesting, according to McGuinness, that the younger members ‘had not yet made their toilets. And the process, though necessary was indecent’ (McGuinness, 2012, 4). As McGuinness asserts Wittgenstein was critical of Moore’s Principia, the bible of the both groups, at the level of style and

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content, and especially for Moore’s attempt to describe the good. McGuinness (2012, 4) writes: Wittgenstein wanted nothing but honesty, nothing but to be (as Russell forced him to say) a creature of impulse. His impulses being strong but never shameful, principles and such things seemed to him nonsense. The brittle arguments of the Society, where the paradoxical or the scandalous would be defended for sheer love of argument, seemed to him intolerable. Chronicling the club’s history at the university, Arif Ahmed (Cambridge Philosophy, n.d.) writes: If as Wittgenstein believed philosophy is a vice or disease of the mind, then Cambridge University Moral Sciences Club is a high-class brothel or leper colony, where the degenerate or afflicted may fraternise in a tasteful and secluded environment. Or it is a greenhouse or other horticultural receptacle in which was nurtured the intellectual flower of the early twentieth-century East Anglia: among others, Keynes, Russell, Ramsey, Wittgenstein and Moore. In short, this ancient institution has played a major role in the history of analytical philosophy, and continues to do so today.

The war years and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus In the interval after leaving Cambridge, first retreating to a hut in Norway to write in solitude and during World War I writing while interred in an Italian prison camp, Wittgenstein famously extended Russell’s account of logic to develop his ‘picture theory’ of meaning, redefining the role of philosophy in logical analysis. The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, completed in 1918, expounded a theory of the general proposition: what can be expressed (or pictured) by language (and thought) and what can only be shown in the logic of syntax. It was published first in German in 1921 and later as a bilingual edition in 1922 with an introduction from Bertrand Russell, though Wittgenstein felt that neither Russell nor Moore really understood what he was saying. In his Tractatus Wittgenstein thought he had solved all the problems of modern philosophy by demonstrating the linguistic boundary between sense and nonsense. The aim of the book is to set a limit to thought, or rather – not to thought, but to the expression of thoughts: for in order to be able to set a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought). It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be set, and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be nonsense. (TLP, Preface)

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Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. Philosophy does not result in ’philosophical propositions’, but rather in the clarification of propositions. Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries. (TLP 4.112) Some of the topics about which he initially thought we cannot speak meaningfully were religion, ethics and aesthetics (TLP 6.421)4 – topics he was especially fond of contemplating.5

Wittgenstein’s return to Cambridge (One of the greatest impediments for philosophy is the expectation of new, deep//unheard of//elucidations.) (Philosophy, in PO p. 179; c.1933) In the second period (c.1929–1947), Wittgenstein had returned to Cambridge after trying his hand at elementary school teaching in rural Austria. Wittgenstein was made a lecturer at Trinity College after his early work on logic Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was accepted as his PhD in 1929. Wittgenstein taught at Cambridge University from 1929 to 1947, filling in vacancies initially, receiving a research fellowship (1930–1935) and then being elected professor of philosophy after G.E. Moore resigned from his chair in 1938. In November of 1929, Wittgenstein gave ‘A Lecture on Ethics’ at the Heretics Society meeting at Cambridge. The conclusion about the vacuity of ethical terms echoes his earlier sentiments in the Tractatus on the limits of language and the boundary between scientific and philosophical propositions. That is to say: I see now that these nonsensical expressions were not nonsensical because I had not yet found the correct expressions, but that their nonsensicality was their very essence. For all I wanted to do with them was just to go beyond the world and that is to say beyond significant language. My whole tendency and I believe the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless. Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it. (PO LE, p. 44)

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As a professor he held classes in his rooms at Whewell Hall, which were less formal lectures than public displays of thinking (in his letter to von Wright, 1939, explaining that because he is thinking out fresh instead of reading new people in class would disturb him, McGuinness, 2012, 300; see Peters & Stickney, 2018). Alan Turing was among those who attended Wittgenstein’s lectures and with whom he struggled in working out his own ideas (see LFM p. 180), also teaching a course in 1939 on ‘The Foundations of Mathematics’. What today we read as Wittgenstein’s Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (RFM) was intended to be the second part of his Philosophical Investigations; the first part consists mostly of revisions to his Preliminary Notebooks, otherwise known as the Blue and Brown Books (BB), which he read to students in his early lectures at Cambridge (c.1933). Although his monumental Investigations were composed in isolation during periodic sojourns to Norway (e.g. 1937), it is hard to imagine him refining this dialogical work without during this period having vital interactions among his esteemed colleagues and curious students. As an Austrian intellectually gifted and moody, a genius driven by ethical obligation, as Monk (1990) describes him in his biography, Wittgenstein found a home at Cambridge in the company of Russell, Moore and Keynes, where he could pursue his philosophical interests in an ascetic way of life that is reminiscent of the ancients. Cambridge philosophy in the 1930s and 1940s, was based on a collection of exceptional individuals centred around the Apostles, a virtual branch of the Bloomsbury group, and the Moral Science Club. Perhaps, for the first time in his life Wittgenstein had found an institutional environment which he could tolerate and which, more to the point, tolerated his eccentricities, allowing him to develop his work in a circle of friendship. After Wittgenstein was readmitted to Trinity and the university on 18 January 1929 he took up his past associations with both clubs remaining within the Bloomsbury connexion of his earlier Cambridge years. McGuinness notes that Wittgenstein’s formal return to the Society was based partly on his wider interests in the literary, dramatic, and musical activities of the members. At the same time McGuinness notes that while Wittgenstein belonged to the inner sanctum of Cambridge through his membership in the Society and the Apostles, in his own thoughts he remained an exile: … a special group of his friends, with whom he felt most at home, were, like himself, foreigners, who … failed to fit easily into the cosy world of the colleges. Piccoli, the Professor of Italian, was one example; Bachtin (Nicholas, brother of Mikhail), a linguist, a poet, and a serial exile, was, slightly later, another. But the chief figure of this kind was undoubtedly Piero Sraffa, a protégé (soon to become an equal) whom Keynes had brought from Mussolini’s Italy. (McGuinness, 2012, 8)

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The society also came to public attention when two of its members, Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt were exposed as spies. Wittgenstein’s room at Whewell Court, Trinity College was in the same building as Blunt, and right below Kugmann – the man who had recruited young Cambridge scholars (many also homosexuals) to work for Russia (see Andrews 2015, 33–34). Though not himself a Marxist, Wittgenstein was surrounded by more left-leaning intellectuals than Keynes, such as the Italian economist Sraffa (associate of the famed Communist Party leader Antonio Gramsci) with whom he corresponded and who strongly influenced Wittgenstein’s view on gestural language. Wittgenstein studied Russian, travelled to Leningrad and Kazakhstan and he even offered to move there but heeded Keynes’s advice in declining their offer to teach at Kazan University. Wittgenstein had probably romanticized life in Soviet Russia along the lines of his Tolstoyan retreat from civilization, and concluded after his visit that: One could live there, but only if one kept in mind the whole time that one could never speak one’s mind … It is as though one were to spend the rest of one’s life in an army, any army, and that is a rather difficult thing for people who are educated. (Ludwig Wittgenstein: Professor of Philosophy, www. wittgen-cam.ac.uk/cgi-bin/text/biogre10.html) It is important to note, however, the seriousness with which some of the Cambridge intelligentsia (including Cornforth in classics and Dobbs in political-economy) addressed the grave revelations of the Spanish Civil War and the rise of fascism with Franco in Spain, Hitler in Germany and Mussolini in Italy. In the draft Preface to the unpublished Philosophical Remarks (c.1930) Wittgenstein writes: This book is written for those who are in sympathy with the spirit in which it is written. This is not, I believe, the spirit of the main current of European and American civilization. This spirit of this civilization makes itself manifest in the industry, architecture and music of our time, in its fascism and socialism, and it is alien and uncongenial to the author … . I have no sympathy for the current of European civilization and do not understand it goals if it has any … . Our civilization is characterised by the word ‘progress.’ Progress is its form rather than making progress being one of its features. Typically, it constructs. It is occupied with building an ever more complicated structure … I am not interested in constructing a building, so much as having a perspicuous view of the foundations of possible buildings. (CV 6–7e) Wittgenstein takes the motto of the Philosophical Investigations from a line in Johann Nestroy’s play Der Schiltzling (The Protégé): ‘Anyway, the thing about progress is that it always seems greater than it really is’ (see Cahill, 2006, 71). What Wittgenstein is drawing attention to is the attitude that characterizes the

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West’s worldview of progress. What he takes from Nestroy and Spengler is how technical or technological progress does not change or represent moral progress – and how little moral progress, if any, has been achieved. In his short history of the Moral Sciences Club, Ahmed (Cambridge Philosophy, n.d.) also discusses Wittgenstein’s ‘domination’ both of Cambridge philosophy but also the Moral Science Club after his return to Cambridge in 1929 until he retired in 1947. He notes that after Moore’s retirement on grounds of ill health (c.1944) and once Wittgenstein had taken over Moore’s professorship, Wittgenstein made the club his ‘conduit’ as ‘a medium for his own philosophical ideas and as a source of public debate [that] gave him the opportunity to air – and to infect others with – his contempt for other living philosophers, to their face’. Once again, it was likely his disdain for the members of this philosophical society that drove him both to control the tenure of conversation and cast him out of Cambridge for retreats to Wales, Ireland or Norway. Upon returning from Swansea, where he felt more inclined to smile, he remarked: ‘Everything about the place [Cambridge] repels me. The stiffness, the artificiality, the self-satisfaction of the people. The university atmosphere nauseates me’ (M493, in Sass, 2001). Wittgenstein even likened philosophy conventions to bubonic plague (M487), leading Sass (2001) to refer to him as an ‘anti-philosopher’. David Edmonds and John Eidinow’s book, Wittgenstein’s Poker (2002) records a famous incident in October of 1946 that galvanizes this image of the anti-philosopher (cf. Sass, 2001). Karl Popper had been invited to read a paper for the Moral Science Club called ‘Are there philosophical problems?’ when a confrontation broke out over the nature of philosophy between Popper and Wittgenstein, who was in the chair. They provide an entertaining account of the clash on several levels of personalities, of class and of ideas. Popper’s paper was a deliberate provocation to Wittgenstein’s view that there are no real philosophical problems: only philosophical puzzles caused by the bewitchment of language and that dissolve themselves on analysis. In his Cambridge Lectures we read this familiar motif: What we find out in philosophy is trivial; it does not teach us new facts, only science does that. But the proper synopsis of these trivialities is enormously difficult, and has immense importance. Philosophy is in fact the synopsis of trivialities. (Wittgenstein, 1976, #2, p. 26) In the late 1940s this diminution of philosophy took final form in his pronouncements in the Philosophical Investigations, as captured in a scene of Wittgenstein teaching in his room at Cambridge in Derek Jarman’s film Wittgenstein (see Eagleton, 1993, though here Russell is portrayed as accusing Wittgenstein of trivializing philosophy):

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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) The significance here is that under the helm of Russell, and for centuries prior to him (e.g. the Stoic triumvirate of physics/metaphysics, logic and ethics), philosophy – and within it epistemology or the theory of knowledge – was seen as the central pillar or foundation for all of the sciences and humanities. In this period Wittgenstein was developing a view of philosophy, based upon the perspicuous inspection of grammar (cf. PI §122) and observation of what he called ‘language-games’, that is post-foundational and greatly diminished in stature. It is the business of philosophy, not to resolve a contradiction by means of a mathematical or logicomathematical discovery, but to make it possible for us to get a clear view of the state of mathematics that troubles us: the state of affairs before the contradiction is resolved. (And this does not mean that one is sidestepping a difficulty.) (PI §125) Philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything. (PI §126) Irrespective of the rights and wrongs of the incident or of either’s side of argument – whether Wittgenstein actually threatened Popper with a poker or whether Popper later lied about it – the incident certainly demonstrated how completely Wittgenstein dominated the Moral Sciences Club at a point near the end of his career when he was at the height of his institutional reputation and powers. It was as though Wittgenstein had reshaped the Moral Science Club, rewritten some of the rules, and acted as its chair for an extended period of time. The club became in some way an extension of Wittgenstein and his personality, and he adopted a strict, non-nonsense attitude that defined his asceticism brooking little opposition and no frivolity, lightheartedness or joy. The club was restyled as monastic asceticism based on a concept of living the truth. Escaping again the noise and stifling air of Cambridge (see McGuinness, 2012, 479) to the remote hut in Norway (see Rejali, 2017), Wittgenstein meticulously crafted the typescripts that were later published posthumously in 1953 as the Philosophical Investigations, in which he set out to demolish his own work in the earlier Tractatus (see CV pp. 6–7e). In 1947 Wittgenstein explained to Malcolm that he could not risk mailing a copy of his unfinished typescript across the Atlantic, as only three copies were in

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existence: beside himself, one held by G.E. Moore (who objected to taking dictation from Wittgenstein), and another by Elizabeth Anscombe who eventually became his literary executor and published the manuscripts posthumously (McGuinness, 2012, 393). We pause to mention this because the conveyance of thought is tied to states of technology, whether the papyrus scrolls on which Aristotle wrote (later transferred onto parchment by monks) or today’s even more ephemeral emails and PDFs. Wittgenstein’s entire corpus of work is now available online in the Bergin Nachlass collection, from which we can read his deflationary account of philosophy in the Investigations. Philosophical problems … are not empirical problems: they are solved, rather, by looking into the workings of our language, and that in such a way as to make us recognise those workings: in spite of an urge to misunderstand them. The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known. Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language. (PI §109) Where does our investigation get its importance from, since it seems only to destroy everything, that is, all that is great and important? (As it were, all the buildings, leaving behind only bits of stone and rubble.) What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stand. (PI §118) The results of philosophy are the uncovering of one or another piece of plain nonsense and of the bumps that the understanding has got by running its head against the limits of language. (PI §119) If one tried to advance theses in philosophy, it would never be possible to debate them, because everyone would agree to them. (PI §128; cf. Philosophy in PO, p. 179, c.1933) Strangely, he again concluded that his remarks in the Philosophical Investigations were useful in so far as they help us to stop doing philosophy when we want to (PI §132), and that his shift in attention to philosophical grammar again meant an end to philosophy. Philosophers have to cure themselves of many sicknesses before arriving at notions of sound human understanding. (RFM, IV.53)

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In philosophizing we may not terminate a disease of thought. It must run its natural course, and slow cure is all important. (That is why mathematicians are such bad philosophers.) (Z §382) In spite of seeking a terminus for philosophy instead of advancing bold claims on the meaning of life, both the Tractatus and the Investigations have been hailed as masterpieces.

Wittgenstein and philosophy as a way of life (All that philosophy can do is to destroy idols. And that means not creating a new one – for instance as in “absence of an idol”.) (PO, p. 171) I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking. But, if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own. (PI, Preface, p. x). The French classical philosopher Pierre Hadot (e.g. Hadot 1995, 2002) in a series of publications characterizes ancient philosophy as a way of life based on a series of spiritual exercises that take the form of dialogues and meditations designed to promote contemplation and to cultivate a philosophical attitude to existence and our place in the cosmos (see Peters, 2002 for elaboration of these ideas). Hadot (2005) complains that modern analytic philosophy has lost its way by forgetting its ancient roots. Wittgenstein most certainly would agree. Hadot’s analysis of philosophy as a way of life comes closest to describing Wittgenstein’s own attitude to philosophy and how he practised it at Cambridge. It may seem strange to turn to a French scholar of classical philosophy in regard to trying to characterize Wittgenstein’s own spiritual approach to philosophy yet it is clear that Hadot was an early follower of Wittgenstein (and the first in France) in conceiving of philosophy as an activity of self-transformation rather than a body of doctrines. Sandra Laughier (2011, 322) claims ‘in working out a general model of ancient philosophy as an ethics, a praxis of discourse and an activity of self-perfection, Hadot opened Wittgenstein interpretation to new, original readings for example those of Stanley Cavell and Cora Diamond’. Hadot ‘found in Wittgenstein a fruitful point of departure for ethical reflection’ (Laughier, 2011), a perspective that distanced Wittgenstein from Cambridge analytic philosophy, especially in his second period after 1929 based on the flowering of an approach to be published posthumously as the Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein, 1953). Hadot emphasizes the spiritual phenomenon of ancient philosophy and interprets Wittgenstein in this light. Arnold Davidson (1995, 17) reads Hadot as arguing that the Investigations requires a certain literary genre which cannot

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be divorced from Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy, and he quotes Hadot’s early review of Wittgenstein’s Investigations. Hadot writes: It is a therapeutics that is offered to us. Philosophy is an illness of language … The true philosophy will therefore consist in curing itself of philosophy, in making every philosophical problem completely and definitively disappear … Wittgenstein continues [from the Tractatus to the Investigations] … to devote himself to the same mission: to bring radical and definitive peace to metaphysical worry. Such a purpose imposes a certain literary genre: the work cannot be the exposition of a system, a doctrine, a philosophy in the traditional sense … [Philosophical Investigations] wishes to act little by little on our spirit, like a cure, like a medical treatment. The work therefore does not have a systematic structure, strictly speaking. (cited in Davidson, 1995, 17–18) Hadot’s interpretation is remarkable in Wittgensteinian criticism and is certainly a very early recognition of the importance of questions of the integration of form and style to Wittgenstein as a man. Style was central to Wittgenstein’s ethics, aesthetics, and also to his view of philosophy (Peters, 2001; Peters & Marshall, 1999.). As Davidson (1995, 18) remarks, it was no doubt Hadot’s understanding of ancient philosophy as involving ‘spiritual exercises’ that enabled him to recognize in Wittgenstein aspects that represent a continuity with an ancient conception of philosophy as a way of life. Against the prevailing of philosophy at Cambridge where analytic philosophy is schooled in logic and conceptual analysis utilizing fine distinctions, Wittgenstein embraced a spiritual view of philosophy that is transformative of self – not philosophy as a kind of analytic cleverness of which he was deeply critical. Hadot (1995) used Wittgenstein’s notion of language games as a methodology to argue that we must locate the meaning of propositions and arguments adopted by philosophers within their historical language game. For instance, we must avoid the temptation to read ancient texts as expressions of an author’s psychological states or character. The specifically intellectual exercises of reading, listening, research and investigation provide the substance for meditation, which can be distinguished from attention to the fundamental spiritual attitude of the Stoics, and from the practical exercises designed to create habits. In this context, Hadot analyses the Hellenistic and Roman spiritual exercises in terms of learning to live, learning to dialogue, (first brought to Western consciousness in the figure of Socrates), learning to die and learning how to read. It is especially this last notion that is worth pondering in relation to Wittgenstein’s approach to philosophy. The quest for self-realization and improvement is the final goal of the spiritual exercises and this goal, Hadot (1995, 102) informs us, is shared by all philosophical schools of antiquity. Through ‘spiritual exercises’ including ‘reading’ and ‘writing’ the self is liberated from its egoism, its passions and its anxieties. This thought must sound so familiar to us late moderns,

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especially in a post-Wittgenstein age and after Foucault, at a time when self as subject and object of its own gaze has been the basis of so much debate in terms of both the Cartesian picture the self as a unified, transparent, essence that holds us captive.

Conclusion Much has been written about Wittgenstein’s life. He was clearly a complex man who suffered daily for his thoughts, especially in the period 1919–1929 after experiencing the effects of war in the frontline and becoming a solitary figure who for redemptive religious reasons taught schoolchildren (1920–1926) instead of academic philosophy. During this period: ‘He often thought of himself as worthless and a moral failure with a degree of self-criticism that verged on self-loathing and was constantly agitated and suicidal’ (Peters, 2017). Cambridge, while an alien environment for him, came closest to offering him a place to be in a circle of friends and the fellowship of like-minded individuals. Although he warned Drury that there was ‘no oxygen for you to breath at Cambridge’, he also boasted that this did not matter in his own case as he ‘could manufacture his own oxygen’ (MS 6, 334, in Sass, 2001, 152 nt.98). Part of the difficulty is that Wittgenstein, while practising philosophy as a way of life, never really felt at home at Cambridge; indeed, Wittgenstein did not feel at home anywhere, even in his native Vienna. James Klagge (2001) argues that Wittgenstein was not only a wanderer geographically – always in search of solitude – he was a refugee from an earlier century. Wittgenstein felt more at home in Oswald Spengler’s culture of the nineteenth century. Wittgenstein considered himself an exile (Peters, Burbules, & Smeyers, 2008) and indeed was a selfimposed exile from his native Vienna; this condition of exile is important for understanding Wittgenstein the man and his philosophy; and, moreover, exile as a condition has become both a central characteristic condition of late modernity (as much as alienation was for the era of industrial capitalism) and emblematic of a new literary modernism. In the Preface to the Investigations (PI p. viii), Wittgenstein referred to the post-war (1945) era as a ‘dark age’, but that dire assessment was motivated largely by resignations of a ‘genius’ figure in the face of feeling he could not convey his thoughts to even well-educated people. It is not impossible that it should fall to the lot of tis work, in its poverty and in the darkness of this time, to bring light into one brain or another – but, of course, it is not likely. (PI p. viii) I never more than half succeed in expressing what I want to express. Actually not as much as that, but no more than a tenth. That is still worth something. Often my writing is nothing but ‘stuttering’. (CV p. 18e)

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Wittgenstein felt he was misunderstood by even such luminary figures in philosophy as Russell and Moore, and the inscription on his memorial tablet at Cambridge affirms his worries. Intended to glorify his legacy, and adhering to the university’s motto – ‘From this place, we gain enlightenment and precious knowledge’ – the funerary tablet reads: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Fellow of the College, professor of Philosophy in the University for eight years, showed to many a new way of philosophizing, and perceived and taught by examples that reasoning should be freed from the shackles of language, thus yielding an ever profounder knowledge of the nature of reality. There was a singular integrity in his devotion to the pursuit of truth. He died in 1951 in his 63rd year. (in McGuinness, 2012, 480) If the later Wittgenstein taught us anything in his Investigations and later remarks collected in On Certainty, it is that we should no longer look to escape the confines of language, as though we could get closer to reality outside of language, but that grammar shows us what things are as we find them ‘on the rough ground’ of ordinary language. (PI §108) Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language. (PG, p. 161) Essence is expressed by grammar. (PI §371) Grammar tells us what kind of object anything is. (PI §373) Well, if everything speaks for an hypothesis and nothing against it – is it then certainly true? One may designate it as such. – But does it certainly agree with reality, with the facts? With this question you are already going around in a circle. To be sure there is justification; but justification comes to an end. (OC §191–192) Here we see that the idea of ‘agreement with reality’ does not have any clear application. (OC §§214–215)

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Wittgenstein thought he could only reach those who already had an ‘instinctive rebellion against the traps that lay within our language’, and doubted the messianic abilities of avatars to extricate people: ‘those who following all their instincts live within the herd’ (Philosophy, PO, p. 185). Only a change in practice – ‘modes of thought and life’ – can ‘cure the sickness of a time’: ‘not … medicine invented by an individual’ (RFM, II. 4). Seeking cures for linguistic bewitchment (PI §109), Wittgenstein applied to Cambridge for a research grant to pursue his studies (c.1930s), wishing ‘the College to enable me to produce’ these ‘goods so long as it has a use for them and he can produce them’, which Ramsey supported in recognition of his ‘philosophic genius’ (Monk, 1990, 270). Intellectuals have no guarantee they will have a profound influence on those who follow, as Wittgenstein noted while on reflecting on his own impact. A philosopher says ‘Look at things like this!’ – but in the first place doesn’t ensure that people will look at things like that, and in the second place his admonitions may come altogether too late; it’s possible, moreover, that such an admonition can achieve nothing in any case and that the impetus for such a change in the way things are perceived has to originate somewhere else entirely. For instance it is by no means clear whether Bacon started anything moving, other than the surface of his reader’s minds. Nothing seems to me less likely than that a scientist or mathematician who reads me should be seriously influenced in the way he works … . I ought never to hope for more than indirect influence. (CV pp. 61–62e) Despite these guarded remarks, Wittgenstein has had an outstanding impact on philosophy, albeit somewhat deflationary in terms of the stature of his discipline and his distance from the educational institution that employed him. It is hard to conceive of Wittgenstein succeeding in his intellectual projects without the support he received from academic colleagues and to some extent the sanctuary provided by Cambridge, both through his 5-year research fellowship (1930–1935) during which he lectured and gave papers at the Society of the Apostles, the Heretics and the Morale Sciences Club, followed by his professorship in Philosophy (1939–1947) – but his practice of philosophy, as Hadot illustrates, was less at home in the institution and more of a form of life or bios in which he undertook work on himself.

Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

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Notes 1 Following convention, titles for Wittgenstein’s works are abbreviated as follows: PI = Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein, 1953), RFM = Remarks on the Foundation of Mathematics (Wittgenstein, 1956), OC = On Certainty (Wittgenstein, 1969), CV = Culture and Value (Wittgenstein, 1980), PO = Philosophical Occasions (Wittgenstein, 1993). Citations give section (§) or page number (p.), with full details for each in the References. 2 He had earlier visited Gottlob Frege in Germany and may have been advised by him to seek out Russell at Cambridge (see Monk, 1990, 38). 3 See www.kings.cam.ac.uk/archive-centre/archive-month/january-2011.html. This webpage also displays some of the archives from the society’s foundations to the 1930s. The society came to public attention when two of its members, Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt were exposed as spies. 4 ‘Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same’. Ludwig Wittgenstein (TLP 6.421). 5 For Wittgenstein’s training and work as an elementary teacher in rural Austria (1919–2926), prior to his return to Cambridge, see Savickey (2017), Peters (2017) and Peters and Stickney (2018).

References Ahmed, A. (n.d.) The Moral Sciences Club (A Short History). In Cambridge Philosophy, www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc-history Andrews, G. (2015). The Cambridge communist. In The Shadow Man: At the heart of the Cambridge spy circle (pp. 28–38). London: I.B Tauris. Cahill, K. (2006). The concept of progress in Wittgenstein thought. The Review of Metaphysics, 60, 71–100. Cambridge Philosophy (n.d.). www.phil.cam.ac.uk/aboutus/philosophy-cambridge-history Davidson, A. (1995). “Introduction,” in P. Hadot. Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Eagleton, T. (1993). Wittgenstein: The Terry Eagleton script, the Derek Jarman film. London, England: British Film Institute. Hadot, P. (1995). Philosophy as a way of life. (Michael Chase, Trans.). Oxford: Blackwell. Hadot, P. (2002). What is ancient philosophy? (Michael Chase, Trans.). Harvard University Press. Hadot, P. (2005). There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 19(3), 229–237. Klagge, J. C. (2001). Wittgenstein. Biography and philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Laughier, S. (2011). Pierre Hadot as a reader of Wittgenstein. Paragraph, 34(3), 322–337. Lubenow, W. C. (1998). The Cambridge Apostles, 1820–1914: Liberalism, Imagination, and Friendship in British Intellectual and Professional Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McGuinness, B. (1988). Wittgenstein: A life. Berkeley, London, Los Angeles: University of California Press. McGuinness, B. (2012) (Ed.) Wittgenstein in Cambridge: Letters and documents 1911–1951 (4th ed.). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Monk, R. (1990). Wittgenstein: The duty of genius. New York: The Free Press. Nietzsche, F. (1965). Schopenhauer as educator. Trans. J. W. Hillesheim and M. B. Simpson; introd. by E. Vivas. Chicago: Regnery.

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Peters, M. A. (2001). Philosophy as pedagogy: Wittgenstein’s styles of thinking. Radical Pedagogy, 3:3. http://radical-pedagogy.icaap.org/content/issue3_3/4-peters.html#1 Peters, M. A. (2002). Writing the self: Wittgenstein, confession and pedagogy. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 34(2), 353–368. Peters, M. A. (2017). Wittgenstein’s trials, teaching and Cavell’s romantic “figure of the child”. In M. A. Peters & J. Stickney (Eds.), A Companion to Wittgenstein on education: Pedagogical investigations (pp. 211–230). Singapore: Springer. Peters, M. A., Burbules, N., & Smeyers, P. (2008). Showing and doing: Wittgenstein as a pedagogical philosopher. London: Routledge. Peters, M. A., & Marshall, J. (1999). Wittgenstein: Philosophy, postmodernism, pedagogy. Westport, CT and London: Bergin and Garvey. Peters, M. A., & J. Stickney (2019, in press). Philosophy of education 1945–2010 and the ‘education of reason’: Post-foundational approaches through Dewey, Wittgenstein, and Foucault. In K. Becker & I. Thomson (Eds.), The Cambridge history of philosophy, 1945–2015. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Peters, M. A., & J. Stickney (2018). Wittgenstein’s education: ’A picture held us captive’. In P. Gibbs (Ed.), Springer briefs on key thinkers in education. Singapore: Springer Nature. Rejali, D. (2017). Wittgenstein’s hut. In M. A. Peters & J. Stickney (Eds.), A companion to Wittgenstein on education: Pedagogical investigations (pp. 79–100). Singapore: Springer Nature. Sass, L. (2001). Deep disquietudes: Reflections on Wittgenstein as anti-philosopher. In J. C. Klagge (Ed.), Wittgenstein. biography and philosophy (pp. 98–155). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Savickey, B. (2017). Wittgenstein’s philosophy: Viva voce. In M. A. Peters & J. Stickney (Eds.), A companion to Wittgenstein on education: Pedagogical investigations (pp. 63–78). Singapore: Springer. Wittgenstein, H. (1984). My brother Ludwig. In R. Rhees (Ed.), Recollections of Wittgenstein. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press. Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical investigations. Oxford: Blackwell (PI). Wittgenstein, L. (1956). Remarks on the foundation of mathematics. G.E.M. Anscombe (trans.). Oxford: Basil Blackwell. (RFM). Wittgenstein, L. (1961). Tractatus logico-philosophicus, trans. D.F. Pears & B.F. McGuinness. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Wittgenstein, L. (1967). Zettel (G. E. M. Anscombe, Trans.). Oxford: Basil Blackwell (Z). Wittgenstein, L. (1968). Philosophical investigations. (3rd ed.) G.E.M. Anscombe (trans.). Oxford: Basil Blackwell. (PI§, or PI, pg.). Wittgenstein, L. (1969). On certainty. D. Paul & G.E.M. Anscombe (trans.). Oxford: Basil Blackwell. (OC). Wittgenstein, L. (1974). Philosophical grammar. R. Rhees (Ed.); A. Kenny (Trans.). Oxford: Blackwell. (PG). Wittgenstein, L. (1976). Wittgenstein’s lectures on the foundations of mathematics. In C. Diamond (Ed.). New York: Harvester Press. (LFM). Wittgenstein, L. (1980). Culture and value. G.H. von Wright (Ed.) in collaboration with H. Nyman. P. Winch (trans.). Oxford: Basil Blackwell. (CV). Wittgenstein, L. (1993). Philosophical occasions (1912–1951). J. C. Klagge & A. Nordmann (Eds.). Indianapolis & Cambridge: Hackett. (PO).

Chapter 7

“A picture holds us captive” Wittgenstein and the German tradition of Weltanschuung

Grammar tells us what kind of object anything is. Wittgenstein, 1953, §373 Words have meaning only in the stream of life. Wittgenstein, 1970, §913

Introduction In the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein (1953) writes: A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably. – When philosophers use a word – “knowledge”, “being”, “object”, “I”, “proposition”, “name” – and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language-game which is its original home? – What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use. (§115) The notion of “picture” here, and corresponding notions of “worldview” and “world picture” that Wittgenstein uses in On Certainty as part of his disassembly of Cartesian epistemology, fundamentally shifts the concept of philosophy and its practice away from arguments and the force of argumentation to the context of “worldview” or Weltanschuung, as a deeply embedded cultural paradigm or cognitive orientation, and the question of how one changes a worldview. The concept in English is a troubled concept with a troubled history. In the German tradition, the concept Weltanschuung has a rich and complex history that strongly influenced Wittgenstein. Weltanschuung was used first by Kant and later popularised by Hegel. It was given a linguistic reading in Humboldt’s key concept of Weltansicht (world sight or attitude). Often the term in the German tradition is given an organic reading that emphasised syntactic and meaning structures that characterise a people,

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a language and a territory, and also, by implication, a set of fundamental values and beliefs. Sometimes the organic reading is supported through the folk tradition of music and literature that has grown up in a culture that come to express an organic unity. Often in the past the concept also expresses a fundamental belief orientation of a lived religion that deals with basic questions of life and the afterlife. Philosophically, Weltanschuung was bought into discussion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a result of increasing contact between cultures and especially in relation to questions of cultural and linguistic relativity, rationalism and universality. One guiding theme that animated discussion was how worldviews grow and develop both historically and organically. Another question is how to analyse, change and assess them. In what sense can they be articulated, understood, compared and developed? In their work World Views: From Fragmentation to Integration Diederik Aerts et al (2007: 13) identify seven components of a worldview on the basis of seven questions: 1. 2.

3. 4.

5. 6. 7.

What is the nature of our world? How is it structured and how does it function? Why is our world the way it is, and not different? Why are we the way we are, and not different? What kind of global explanatory principles can we put forward? Why do we feel the way we feel in this world, and how do we assess global reality, and the role of our species in it? How are we to act and to create in this world? How, in what different ways, can we influence the world and transform it? What are the general principles by which we should organise our actions? What future is open to us and our species in this world? By what criteria are we to select these possible futures? How are we to construct our image of this world in such a way that we can come up with answers to (1), (2), and (3)? What are some of the partial answers that we can propose to these questions?

In constructing modern worldview the authors “situate ourselves in the difficult but necessary tension between Modernism and Post modernism, Scientism and Anthropocentrism, Enlightenment and Romanticism, secularism and religion, philosophy and science, the individual and the collective, western and nonwestern culture” (p. 12). It is clear that the discussion of worldview is a German problematic (problem set) that uniquely defines the question of globalisation. It is also a problematic that becomes increasingly significant in the work of Wittgenstein not only to understand philosophical problems that take the form of emerging, changing and seemingly conflicting Weltanschuung, as involving the assessment of a cultural ensemble or totality, but also historical

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shifts in philosophical worldviews such as that between Cartesianism and what comes after; what comes after … essences? the cogito? body/mind? modernism in philosophy? foundationalism? and so on. This chapter demonstrates how increasingly central the notion of “picture” is to Wittgenstein. How Wittgenstein is historically sensitised to the German tradition of Weltanschuung and how it comes to represent something characteristic of Wittgenstein’s style of philosophy and the kind of problems that he tried to address. We are concerned to show how both of these philosophical concerns impact on pedagogy: how do we escape the “picture that holds us captive”? Certainly, not solely by advancing arguments. How do people substitute one worldview for another? And pedagogical how should we proceed then?

“A picture held us captive” in the investigations In the immediate context of the Investigations Wittgenstein seems to be referring to the ideas that he put forward in the Tractatus and specifically the question of pictorial form of the proposition: “the general form of a proposition is: This is how things are.” There are a number of things that we can note about this passage. First, it seems to involve a repudiation of earlier views especially the notion that propositions picture the world, that is facts, by virtue of its logical structure. The proposition thus displays its logical form through a kind of isomorphism. We might generalise to say that the early Wittgenstein suggests that the logical form of the proposition that shows itself is mirror in the syntax of the language. Second, what is significant is this investigation is a linguistic one and not an epistemological one. Fact-stating language is able to picture facts by mirroring a logical structure that exists in the world. Understanding the logic language therefore is the basis for determining which language forms lead us astray. Language provides the “deep grammar” for our worldview and contains within it a metaphysics of subject and object that determines the notion of self and its relation to reality. Third, the aim of philosophy than is to question these basic distinctions and to transcend the culture from within by engaging in a “battle against the bewitchment of or intelligence by means of language” (Wittgenstein 1953: §109) with the aim of showing “the fly the way out of the flybottle” (§309). Fourth, and more broadly, Wittgenstein’s remarks at (§115) can be construed as an attack on the Cartesian worldview, a demonstration of the problems associated with this kind of thinking and the metaphysics of essences. Cartesianism as the form of philosophical modernity cannot be dismissed on the basis of argument – it is not open to argument – what is required is something much more fundamental that employs an approach to language that can work on us like a therapy to focus on everyday use of words in their language game and release us from the temptation to use words philosophically, removed from the context of their use.

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The truly revolutionary aspect of Wittgenstein’s thinking is that he did not want to offer an alternative or another metaphysical system to replace Cartesian worldview. His aim was to liberate human beings from the metaphysical picture that held us captive, a captivity based on pictures, or deep metaphors, that views modern philosophy as having firm foundations and essences where knowledge is based on accurate representations of the world. As Naugle (2002) argues, Wittgenstein wants to replace the Cartesian worldview with the non-Cartesian worldview (Weltbild) that rests on unverifiable forms of life that recognises non-representational functions of language. Naugle (2002: 148) suggests: In attempting to chance the human way of seeing, Wittgenstein introduces a new epoch into Western thinking. Whereas Plato upheld ontology and Descartes submitted epistemology as the primary concern, Wittgenstein nominated grammar and language as the governing principles. Major paradigm shifts in Western philosophy have run roughly from the Platonic form-world of being to the Cartesian inner world of knowledge to the Wittgenstein sayable-world of meaning. Wittgenstein indicates that changing a worldview is not like changing one’s mind and it doesn’t happen easily because it is not an entirely rational process. Worldview core beliefs are held on to even in the face of evidence. Argument, even sustained argument, may have little effect on its own. This problem is really a pedagogical problem that involves a process of reviewing framework beliefs and facts, recognising the system of beliefs and how they constitute a loose network of beliefs. No one fact or even orchestration of facts will necessarily move people to change their views partly because they are so deeply embedded that it does not occur to believers that the worldview is even able to be challenged. It is akin to the same philosophical space as changing one’s mind but much more complex. We can learn from the discourse and process of theory change in science: in Thomas Kuhn’s (1962) account that draws on Wittgenstein’s work, theory change is not a rational process. What he calls “normal science” accumulates anomalies that eventually lead to revolutionary science and the overturning of the old paradigm. Historical philosophers of science like Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, N. Russell Hanson, Michael Polanyi, Stephen Toulmin and Mary Hesse – all influenced by Wittgenstein – started questioning the rational reconstruction of scientific change offered by logical positivists that pictured science progressing in a rational and incremental way. Similarly, Gaston Bachelard, George Canguilhem, Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault in the tradition of French historical epistemology were investigating the question of change vs continuity in theory, epistemes and worldviews on the Continent. The notion of “epistemological break” was first used by Bachelard and later by Althusser and Foucault to describe “ruptures” or discontinuities in thought. Kuhn used the concept of “paradigm shift.” The rupture might be

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moment when science separated itself from its non-scientific past and the history of science, might thus be understood less as a process of discovery and more as the overcoming of obstacle to knowledge, thought and belief based on the reorganisation of the very possibility of knowledge. One lesson we might take from Wittgenstein in retrospect is that social and cultural processes are involved in the change of forms of life that change historically very slowly, a process that Wittgenstein likens to a shifting riverbed. Even if one takes a cognitive orientation to worldview – that is, to consider worldviews as loose networks of beliefs that hang together that can be articulated and recognised – it is difficult to envisage the process of change and what it involves. If our worldview is the way we make sense of the world and our place in the world, then any change that threatens our worldview also threatens our existence. This surely is at once a philosophical and pedagogical problem that is paramount when earlier organic forms of life mesh and intermingle, and come into conflict. If worldviews are also embedded in forms of life and are part of language, speaking, gestures and cultural engagements to what extent are they open to articulation as a system – to what extent are they open to change. This question is relevant to the questioning of specific practices such as genital mutilation of girls or infanticide – the question of the practice might raise basic question for aspects of the worldview (in this case the role and status of women). To what extent do worldviews operate at the conscious level and how accessible are they to discussion and analysis? To what extent do they imply incommensurability or linguistic and cultural relativity? On these and related matters Wittgenstein is very influenced by the German tradition of Weltanschuung. Wittgenstein wanted to liberate us from a view of modern philosophy as certain foundations and accurate representations but he did not want offer another metaphysics to replace Cartesian worldview. Rather for Descartes’ epistemology Wittgenstein sidesteps metaphysics by moving to language and philosophical grammar to talk of a nonCartesian worldview (Weltbild) consisting of unverifiable forms of life and non-representational language. Thus Wittgenstein introduces a new way of thinking in order to change our way of seeing. This is a particular understanding of Weltanschuung (worldview) and Weltbild that Wittgenstein was interested in shifting our modern conception of the world. His aim “To shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle” could not be pursued by the methods of modern philosophy based on logic and forms of argumentation. In On Certainty, Wittgenstein turns to a meta-consideration of worldpictures where his pluralism consist in epistemically unjustified forms of life and language games within which people construct their worldviews. A Weltbild is not chosen but rather culturally inherited and it functions like a governing mythology – basically different conceptual schema, frameworks, or paradigms – which require understanding in terms of pictures (Naugle 2002), that is, in aesthetic terms closer to art than philosophy.

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Weltanschuung In Worldview: The History of a Concept David Naugle (2002) the neo-Calvinist documents the use of the term and philological history of the term Weltanschuung. To summarise Naugle the term Weltanschuung or worldview is first coined by Kant in 1790 in the Critique of Judgement (Naugle 2002: 58 fn) where it is used to mean the sense perception of the world or world given to the senses. The notion was picked up by philosophers in the tradition of German idealism, particularly Fichte and Schelling who interpreted it as understanding the universe of beings (as the purpose of philosophy). For Schelling, it is a product of the unconscious intellect and subterranean impressions and he stamps it with the meaning of an intellectual, rather than sensory perception, of the cosmos. Then it becomes rooted in use by Hegel, Schegel, Novalis, Schleiermacher and Goethe – by poets and philosophers – and enormously popular in the nineteenth century (Naugle 2002: 61). The concept migrates to the English-speaking world being first used by William James in 1868. The Oxford dictionary views it as a loan word comprised of Welt (world) and Anschauung (perception), naturalised as “worldview” and ignored by philosophy or given little attention. In the nineteenth century at the hands of Hegel, Kierkegaard and Dilthey becomes the framework within which to grasp the meaning of life. Worldviews are “rooted in the contingencies of human and historical experience” reflections of the structure of the human soul and as such become expressions of religious and poetic perspectives. Nietzsche used the word often and in the breakdown of idealism following his naturalistic and historicist leanings he came to talk of worldviews as both homogeneous and consistent set of values, allowing him to differentiate Hellenistic, Dionysian, Christian, Hegelian and mechanistic views of life (Naugle 2002: 100).

Wittgenstein on Weltanschuung: the influence of Spengler There is no doubt that Wittgenstein was influenced by Oswald Spengler and especially his conception of history and his method developed in The Decline of the West (Spengler, 1991) – Der Untergang des Abendlandes – published as two volumes in 1918 and 1923 respectively. Wittgenstein acknowledges the importance of Spengler’s thinking on his own in a number of comments in the early 1940s (Wittgenstein, 1999, 125 31v 1 Apr, 1942). Earlier in 1930 he suggests that while there is much that is “irresponsible in specifics” there are also “many genuinely significant thoughts” that touch on what he himself has thought: The possibility of several self-contained systems which, once one has them, look as though one were a continuation of the other. And all of this also connects with the thought that we really don’t know (or consider) how much can be taken from or given to humans. (Wittgenstein, 1999: 183 17 6 May, 1930, cited in Cahill n.d.)

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In the draft Preface to the unpublished Philosophical Remarks Wittgenstein writes: This book is written for those who are in sympathy with the spirit in which it is written. This is not, I believe, the spirit of the main current of European and American civilization. This spirit of this civilization makes itself manifest in the industry, architecture and music of our time, in its fascism and socialism, and it is alien and uncongenial to the author … I have no sympathy for the current of European civilization and do not understand it goals if it has any … Our civilization is characterised by the word “progress”. Progress is its form rather than making progress being one of its features. Typically, it constructs. It is occupied with building an ever more complicated structure … I am not interested in constructing a building, so much as having a perspicuous view of the foundations of possible buildings. (Wittgenstein 1970: 6–7) Wittgenstein takes the motto of the Philosophical Investigations from a line in Johann Nepomuk Nestroy’s play Der Schiltzling (The Protégé):“Anyway, the thing about progress is that it always seems greater than it really is.” What Wittgenstein is drawing attention to is the attitude that characterises the West’s worldview of progress. What he takes from Nestroy and Spengler is how technical or technological progress does not change or represent moral progress – and how little moral progress, if any, has been achieved. The influence of Oswald Spengler can be understood in terms of method, which Haller (1988: 79) characterises as that of a “Gestalt analysis of history” or the “method of descriptive morphology.” Spengler’s bestselling The Decline of the West becomes a critical point of discussion and philosophy of history in the interwar period, projecting an allegedly scientific thesis about the rise and decline of culture – the so-called “the morphology of history” that views cultures as living organic entities (Spengler 1991). This organic conception of history reflects certain racial, biological and genetic paradigms, after Mendel and Darwin, popular in these years to explain the patterns of life and social decay. Wittgenstein’s “forms of life” draw on such an organic conception and the concept of a “perspicuous presentation” (übersichtliche Darstellung) is of fundamental philosophical significance as a means for of coping with what he calls the “unsurveyability” (Unübersichtlichkeit) of “our grammar”: A main source of our failure to understand is that we do not command a clear view of the use of our words. – Our grammar is lacking in this sort of perspicuity. A perspicuous presentation produces just that understanding which consists in “seeing connections”. Hence the importance of finding and inventing intermediate cases. The concept of a perspicuous presentation is of fundamental significance for us. It earmarks the form of account we give, the way we look at things. (A kind of “Weltanschuung” that seems typical of our time. Spengler). (Wittgenstein 1958, §122)

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Perspicuous presentations provide a set of internal connections between the elements that make up a form of life – not only expressions but also gestures and pictures – but all aspects of meaningful human activity.

On Certainty Naugle (2004, p. 161) argues that there are four basic elements in Wittgenstein’s discussion of world picture in On Certainty: First, a Weltbild forms one’s way of seeing and conceiving of the world and its basic character. Second, a Weltbild is not chosen as a result of some verification process, but rather is inherited from one’s content and so serves as the assumed substratum for all thinking, acting, judging, and living. Third, the narratives constituting a world picture function as a kind of governing mythology. Finally, world pictures are promulgated rhetorically and are accepted in faith. Given these characteristics, world pictures and forms of life with their inherent language games seem almost identical. Wittgenstein rejected Weltanschuung as a hangover from the Cartesian era preferring instead “forms of life” that are rooted in life, language, and meaning. As Naugle argues World pictures in Wittgensteinian terms are not to be conceived of as epistemically credible constructs competing for rational adherence, but as webs of belief as ways of organising reality where “framework facts” are the “axis”, “river-bed”, “scaffolding”, or “hinges” of a particular way of thinking and acting. In On Certainty Wittgenstein demonstrates that Moore’s defence of common sense and proof of an external world is undertaken in a Cartesian framework. More broadly speaking, we might say that the question of Weltanschuung pertain to conceptual schemes and the problem of conceptual relativism that lies at the heart of Western philosophy. We have already briefly discussed Kuhn’s “paradigm”, and might equalyy mention in this regard Davidson’s “conceptual schemes”, Goodman’s “world version”, Korners’ “categorical framework”, Carnap’s “linguistic framework”, Marx’s and Mannheim’s “ideology” (Naugle 2002). In an age of globalisation and interculturalism where the “experiment” of openness increasingly creates a communicational and informational interconnectedness developed through the Internet 3.0 and a range of new social media tools based on apps and mobile technologies, the question of the conflict and interactivity of worldviews and forms of life become a dominant philosophical and pedagogical problem. How do we escape the “picture that holds us captive”? How do we teach others to question and escape the picture that holds them captive?

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References Aerts, D., Apostel, Leo, De Moor, Bart, Hellemans, Staf, Maex, Edel, Van Belle, Hubert, & Van der Veken, Jan (2007) World Views: From Fragmentation to Integration. Internet Edition 2007. Originally published in 1994 by VUB Press, Brussels; Internet edition by Clément Vidal and Alexander Riegler, www.vub.ac.be/CLEA/pub/books/ worldviews.pdf Bearn, Gordon Waking to Wonder: Wittgenstein’s Existential Investigations. New York: SUNY Press, 164–166. Cahill, Kevin, M. (n.d.) Wittgenstein and Spengler, http://wab.uib.no/agora/tools/ alws/collection-1-issue-1-article-71.annotate Haller, Rudolf (1988), Was Wittgenstein Influenced by Spengler In Questions on Wittgenstein. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 74–89. Kuhn, T. (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Naugle, D. (2002) Worldview: The History of a Concept. New York: William B Eerdmans. Spengler, Oswald. (1991) The Decline of the West. Ed. Arthur Helps, and Helmut Werner. Trans. Charles F. Atkinson. Preface Hughes, H. Stuart.. New York: Oxford UP. Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical Investigations. London: Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. (1970) Zettel, G. E. M. Anscombe & G. H. von Wright, eds; G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1999) Nachlass. Bergen, Norway: Wittgensteinarkivet.

Chapter 8

Philosophy as pedagogy Wittgenstein’s styles of thinking

I ought to be no more than a mirror, in which my reader can see his own thinking with all its deformities so that, helped in this way, he can put it right. Wittgenstein (1980), Culture and Value, p. 18e How much we are doing is changing the style of thinking and how much I’m doing is changing the style of thinking and how much I’m doing is persuading people to change their style of thinking. Wittgenstein (1967), Lectures and Conversations, p. 28

Introduction In this chapter I maintain that Wittgenstein’s work may be given, broadly speaking, a cultural and literary reading which focuses upon his styles.1 Such a reading legitimates both the importance of Wittgenstein – the person – and the significance of his (auto)biography in a way that analytic philosophers might find hard to accept.2 In particular, I would maintain the question of style is a question inseparable from the reality of his life and the corpus of his work; indeed, we would maintain further that Wittgenstein himself actively thought this to be the case and that this belief is shown in his work. This reading also throws into relief questions concerning his appropriation as a philosopher who had something to contribute to education: Wittgenstein not as a philosopher who provides a method for analysing educational concepts but rather as one who approaches philosophical questions from a pedagogical point of view. One might say, in line with this interpretation, that Wittgenstein style of “doing” philosophy is pedagogical. I believe with many others who have made the point better than us, that the analytic impulse to want to extract a theory or method from Wittgenstein is wrongheaded and that to interpret him as offering a systematic philosophy is to miss the point of his philosophizing entirely. His styles are, I will argue, essentially pedagogical; he provides a teaming variety and vital repertoire of non-argumentational

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discursive forms – pictures, drawings, analogies, similes, jokes, equations, dialogues with himself, little narratives, questions and wrong answers, thought experiments, gnomic aphorisms and so on – as a means primarily to shift our thinking, to help us escape the picture that holds us captive. It is this notion of philosophy as pedagogy that is, I shall argue, a defining feature of Wittgenstein’s later thought. In terms of this reading it is also possible to see the connections between other aspects of Wittgenstein’s life – his cultural background and preferences – and his styles of philosophizing. For example, his “architecture” (see Wijdveld, 1994) and his preference for certain musical and poetic styles and forms: it has only recently become known the extent to which Wittgenstein’s style of composition was directly influenced by certain poetic-musical forms. Michael Nedo, the director of the Wittgenstein Archives, makes the point: The structure of the manuscripts themselves was especially complicated because Wittgenstein’s thinking and writing were very musical, so you have structures and forms that are more common to music than to texts. When he comes to the borderline of his language, his sentences often break apart; one sentence ends and he produces a parallel second sentence that somehow oscillates around the idea of the first. These sets of sentences remind one of a partita where, in order to express something, one has to use different tunes. (Cited in Toynton, 1997: 32) Nedo’s point is not the scholarly point that Wittgenstein used music as a paradigm for understanding in general (Worth, 1997) – Wittgenstein frequently compared understanding a musical theme to understanding a sentence – but that his intense interest in music resulted in the conscious adoption of musical forms for his writing; that there is a “musical” aspect to his philosophical style (Zwicky, 1992). In this regard, perhaps, Wittgenstein could be regarded in terms similar to Nietzsche not only in that Nietzsche gave music a privileged cultural status – the artist-philosopher who is able to create values is the “philosopher of the future” – but also in that Nietzsche himself emulated musical forms in his writing.3 (The crystalline, “pure” structure of the Tractatus is so logical in its branching, tree-like form that it has been scored as a motet and put to music by Mary Lutyens.) The question of whether Wittgenstein, in like terms, self-consciously regarded himself as a “cultural physician” or “philosopher of the future”, able to cure both himself and his readers of deep disquietudes in the forms of our language and culture, is not to be dismissed too easily. There are, at least, three ways, which might demonstrate more robustly the pedagogical styles of his thinking. First, we may seek to investigate historically and (auto)biographically the connections between his styles of teaching philosophy, relying on accounts and reminiscences of his former students, and his

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styles of thinking. Second, we can also investigate historically accounts of his experiences as a primary and secondary school teacher in Austria during the crucial period of 1919 to 1929, and the influences upon his thinking during this period. Third, we can look directly at his writings to observe and document these effects on style. This paper is structured accordingly. In relation to the third section we will concentrate on the pedagogical elements of the dialogue form adopted by Wittgenstein in the Investigations.

Wittgenstein as philosophy teacher There is more than a family resemblance between Wittgenstein’s styles of teaching at Cambridge and his styles of philosophizing. They represent to all intents and purposes a profound and complex continuity: the dividing line between Wittgenstein’s teachings and his posthumously collected and edited works are blurred to say the least. The oral performance runs into and sometimes constitutes the written corpus. Many of his “works” are transcriptions, discussions, notes or lectures recorded by his students and colleagues. His “notes”, at another level of composition, are sometimes reworked even in the process of dictation. His styles of teaching and thinking in performance, therefore, comprise, perhaps more than any modern philosopher, a significant proportion of his extant works. The accounts of his teaching by his students confirm an intensity of thinking that shows itself in his writings; this intensity is driven, in large part, by the ethical and aesthetic requirements of arranging or composing his thoughts. His writings mirror his approach to teaching philosophy and vice versa. Above all they reflect his honesty as a thinker and teacher. And if he was unforgiving in his treatment of his students, it is because he was unforgiving with himself. The long painful silences that interspersed his classes, his disregard for institutional conventions in pedagogy at the time and his relentless (self) criticism were an essential part of his style as a “great educator” (in Nietzsche’s sense). Accounts of Wittgenstein as a teacher of philosophy are now legendary. D. A. T. Gasking and Jackson (1967: 51) report the following description Wittgenstein gave of his own teaching: In teaching you philosophy I’m like a guide showing you how to find your way round London. I have to take you through the city from north to south, from east to west, from Euston to the embankment and from Piccadilly to the Marble Arch. After I have taken you many journeys through the city, in all sorts of directions, we shall have passed through any given street a number of times – each time traversing the street as part of a different journey. At the end of this you will know London; you will be able to find your way about like a Londoner. Of course, a good guide will take you through the more important streets more often than he takes you down side streets; a bad guide will do the opposite. In philosophy I’m a rather bad guide.

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This passage indicates Wittgenstein’s penchant for comparing doing philosophy with making a journey. It belongs to a characteristic set of spatial metaphors we find in the Investigations. Wittgenstein explains in the Preface how he tried to “weld” his thoughts together into a whole but never succeeded. What was to him essential was that “the thoughts should proceed from one subject to another in a natural order and without breaks” (my emphasis). He remarks how his “thoughts were soon crippled if I tried to force them on in any single direction against their natural inclination” (my emphasis). The naturalness Wittgenstein refers to here is the process of thought itself, of having the thought and of emulating in the text the very processes by which he arrived at a particular thought. This naturalness is the naturalness of thinking and thinking aloud. He then comments: “The philosophical remarks in this book are, as it were, a number of sketches of landscapes which were made in the course of these long and involved journeyings.” He suggests that the book is “only an album”, a series of sketches which together might give one a picture of the landscape. Later, at §18, Wittgenstein uses another spatial metaphor based upon the city, asking whether our language is complete and suggesting that the symbolism of chemistry and the notation of infinitesimal chemistry have been added to language, like new suburbs to a town: Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses. He also describes the thoughts of the Investigations as a series of written remarks or short paragraphs – “of which there is sometimes a fairly long chain about the same subject, while I sometimes make a sudden change, jumping from one topic to another”. One might argue that Wittgenstein’s innovative method of composition here is more like a musical score – expressing themes and refrains – than a conventional philosophical genre. It is clearly influenced by the form of the aphorism, a favoured poetical-philosophical form adopted by Lichtenberg, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Gasking and Jackson (1967: 50) focus on the “technique of oral discussion” Wittgenstein utilizes, a technique they describe as, at first, bewildering: Example was piled up on example. Sometimes the examples were fantastic, as when one was invited to consider the very odd linguistic or other behaviour of an imaginary tribe … Sometimes the example was just a reminder of some well- known homely fact. Always the case was given in concrete detail, described in down-to-earth everyday language. Nearly every single thing said was easy to follow and was usually not the sort of thing anyone would wish to dispute.

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The difficulty came from seeing where this “repetitive concrete” talk was leading. He lectured without notes but each session was, nevertheless, carefully planned. Sometimes he “would break off, saying ‘Just a minute, let me think!’ … or he would exclaim ‘This is as difficult as hell’” (Gasking and Jackson, 1967: 52). Sometimes the point of the many examples became suddenly clear as though the solution was obvious and simple. They report Wittgenstein as saying that he wanted to show his students that they had confusions that they never thought they could have and admonished them by saying: “You must say what you really think as though no one, not even you, could overhear it” (p. 53). And they make the enormously important remark: “Whether this ideal is realisable in the form of a book is, in the opinion of many, not yet known; whether, if it were, the book would look much like what we think of as a philosophy book is discussible” (p. 53). Wittgenstein was clearly experimenting with the form his remarks should take: he is to be distinguished as a great philosopher not only for his thinking, or for his styles of philosophizing, but for his deliberate attention to and constant (perhaps, obsessive) experimentation with philosophical form and genre. Moore (1967: 44) in his memory of Wittgenstein’s lectures during the period 1930–33, writes: I was a good deal surprised by some of the things he [Wittgenstein] said about the difference between “philosophy” in the sense in which what he was doing might be called “philosophy” (he called this “modern philosophy”), and what has traditionally been called “philosophy”. He said what he was doing was a “new subject” which Wittgenstein said did resemble traditional philosophy in three respects: in its generality, in the fact that it was fundamental to both ordinary life and the sciences, and in that it was independent of the results of science. Moore confirms the picture of Wittgenstein as the stylist and innovator when it came to “doing philosophy”. Wittgenstein is to be construed as “doing philosophy” equally when he is teaching as when he is writing and Wittgenstein went to great pains to develop a style in the form of his philosophical investigations that enables the reader to think for him- or herself. Karl Britton (in O’C Drury, 1967: 61) reports that Wittgenstein thought there was no test one could apply to discover whether a philosopher was teaching properly: “He said that many of his pupils merely put forward his own ideas: and that many of them imitated his voice and manner; but that he could easily distinguish those who really understood.” Wittgenstein urged his students not to become philosophers or to take up academic posts first because he had scant regard for professional philosophers and because philosophical thinking is strenuous with “long periods of darkness and confusion” (O’C Drury, 1967: 69). There are many other recollections of Wittgenstein as a teacher which testify to the way his style of thinking and teaching had dramatically changed in the

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last twenty years of his life and how his teaching was mirrored or embodied in his work (see, in particular, the contributions of Malcolm and Rhees in Fann’s 1967 collection). They call into question our traditional notion of a “work” in the same way that Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes question the notion of an “author”. Doing philosophy always took priority for Wittgenstein whether this was in oral or written form: it was important to show the deep puzzles in our language (and our culture and thinking) as well as dissolving them by “doing”. Doing philosophy let the fly out of the fly-bottle: it cured our buzzing confusion and allowed us to lead useful and practical lives. Wittgenstein said “a philosophical problem has the form ‘I don’t know my way about” (Wittgenstein 1953: §49) and “A main source of our failure is that we do not command a clear view of our use of words – our grammar is lacking in this sort of perspicuity” (§49). His style of teaching philosophy was designed to enable us to shift our thinking, to untie the knots in our thinking, to overcome our “mental cramps” by “clearing up the ground of language” but in the end by employing this style we are “destroying nothing but a house of cards”. While we believe that there are significant resemblances one can mark out in terms of his method of composition and his style of teaching – notes, discussions, confessions, meditations, dialogues and conversations were as much a part of his repertoire for thinking as they were chosen philosophical genres – there is also an effective biographical element which closely ties in with the pedagogical style of his philosophizing.

Wittgenstein, teaching and philosophy The years 1919 to 1929 are traditionally seen as years of dormancy for Wittgenstein’s philosophical thinking or his active pursuit of philosophy. Yet this period of his life – the period during which he designed his sister’s mansion, trained as a primary school teacher and taught in the Austrian system for some six years – is instrumental (and highly underestimated) in the shift in his thinking and his style. His biographers do not spend much time on this period of his life and tend to underestimate its importance. Ray Monk (1991), Wittgenstein’s biographer, devotes a chapter (“An Entirely Rural Affair”) to Wittgenstein’s years as a school teacher in rural Austria, yet even his otherwise brilliant account of Wittgenstein’s life, does not do justice to the importance of this episode in Wittgenstein’s life or its importance for his later philosophy. His account of Wittgenstein’s teaching service in the village schools of Trattenbach, Hassach and Puchberg is based mainly upon the personal memoirs of surviving pupils which paint Wittgenstein as a teacher with exacting standards, little patience, and one who was given to violent outbursts against his students. These are significant biographical details. Indeed, it is suggested by Fania Pascal (1984: 37–8) that it was an episode in Wittgenstein’s career as a teacher that involved hitting one of his girl pupils (and which he later denied to the

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principal), that “stood out as a crisis of his early manhood” and caused him to give up teaching. Rhees (1984: 191), commenting upon this same episode, quotes from a letter from Wittgenstein to Russell: “how can I be a logician before I’m a human being! Far the most important thing to settle accounts with myself!”. The event is highly significant for Wittgenstein: it constituted one of the two “sins” to which he wished to confess (see Monk, 1991: 367). Monk also notes Wittgenstein’s misgivings of Glöckel’s school reforms and the publication of Wittgenstein’s Wörterbuch für Volksschullen – a spelling dictionary – in 1925, and yet Monk’s account of this period is overshadowed by Ramsey’s visit, the correspondence with both Russell and Ogden over the publication of the Tractatus, and Wittgenstein’s eventual return to philosophy. He does not recognize the significant of Wittgenstein’s experience as a school teacher for his later philosophy or for the question of style. Monk also refers to William Barley’s notorious suspected use of Wittgenstein’s coded remarks in his notebooks of the time to cast aspersions on Wittgenstein’s homosexuality. He ought to have given more attention, perhaps, to the substance of Bartley’s (1973) claims concerning the link between Glöckel, Bühler (a developmental psychologist) and Wittgenstein, a link which tends to get ignored in the literature. Glock (1996), for instance, in his intellectual sketch mentioning the “wilderness years” makes virtually no mention of the significance of these matters. The furore caused by Bartley’s claims concerning Wittgenstein’s homosexuality has clouded the issue concerning the influence of Wittgenstein’s school teaching years on his later philosophy. It is now time, with the distance of some twenty years, to raise this matter afresh and to critically examine the nature of Bartley’s claims. Bartley (1973) despite his notorious and unsavoury claims about Wittgenstein’s sexuality, is one of the few scholars to devote any space to Wittgenstein’s development during the 1920s. Bartley’s (1973: 20) major historical claim is that there are “Certain similarities between some themes of Glöckel’s program and Bühler’s theories on the one hand, and ideas which infuse the later work of Wittgenstein …” He documents how Wittgenstein enrolled in the Lehrerbildungsanstalt in the Kundmanngasse in September 1919. He suggests that the Wittgenstein family in the immediate postwar years of reconstruction had turned its attention away from patronizing the arts to social welfare programs. (Margaret Stonborough was Herbert Hoover’s personal representative in charge of work for the American Food Relief Commission). Otto Glöckel was administrative head of the socialist school reform which was directed at both the economic redevelopment of the countryside and re-education of the peasantry. Under these circumstances, Bartley comments, Wittgenstein’s decision to become a teacher of elementary school was not eccentric. Other talented Austrians also entered the school-reform movement, including two philosophers associated with the Vienna Circle – Karl Popper and Edgar Zilsel. Indeed, Bartley (1973: 89) maintains that “The Vienna Circle itself, in its first manifesto, associated itself with the aims of the school-reform movement”.

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The school-reform movement, under Glöckel and others, had attacked the old “drill” schools of the Hapsburgs based on passive rote learning and memorization (influenced strongly by Johann Herbart), to argue for the establishment of the Arbeitsschule or “working school” based, by contrast, on the active participation of pupils and a doctrine of learning by doing. Bartley notes that Wittgenstein was far from being an advocate of the movement; rather, he mocked its slogans and made fun of its slogans considering them vulgarizations. Bartley provides a detailed account of Wittgenstein’s six years teaching at Trattenbach, Otterthal and Puchberg: he recounts the story of Wittgenstein slapping the face of one of his girl pupils, the “conspiracy” against him led by Piribauer who also instituted legal proceedings, and finally the trial at Gloggnitz that acquitted Wittgenstein. Bartley conjectures that the themes of the Austrian school-reform movement and, in particular, the views of Karl Bühler, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Vienna and at the Vienna Pedagogical Institute, in large measure accounted for the profound change in Wittgenstein’s philosophizing in the late 1920s. He suggests that Bühler, who was invited to Vienna by Glöckel and his colleagues in 1922, strongly influenced Wittgenstein’s thinking. He bases this claim upon the “striking similarities” between their ideas and some historical circumstantial evidence. First, Bühler’s critical variant of Gestalt psychology (said to be close to Piaget’s) was opposed to psychological, epistemological and logical atomism, and stressed, by contrast, a configurationism or contextualism in which theory-making was deemed to be a basic function of the mind. Second, Bühler’s doctrine depended upon a radical linguistic conventionalism and; third, he had developed a notion of “imageless thought” which emphasized that the intentional act of representing did not require an image or model of that which it represented (Bartley, 1973: 145–149). Strikingly similar ideas, Bartley claims, figure strongly in Wittgenstein’s later work and were instrumental in bringing about his change of philosophizing. Bartley documents the fact that Wittgenstein had met but did not like Bühler and hypothesizes that he had probably read Bühler’s Die Geistige Entwicklung des Kindes that was a standard text in the new teacher training colleges. Bartley (1973) also provides some textual evidence; he quotes Wittgenstein (1981) in Zettel (§412), “Am I doing child psychology?” (“I am making a connexion between the concept of teaching and the concept of meaning”; Zettel, 74e), and mentions, in this context, Wittgenstein’s word dictionary. He also recounts a story that Wittgenstein used to tell his pupils in Trattenbach from 1921 concerning an experiment to determine whether children who had not yet learned to speak, locked away with a woman who could not speak, could learn a primitive language or invent a new language of their own. He asks us, by way of corroboration, to consider that the Investigations begins with a critique of St. Augustine’s account of how a child learns a language and suggests that an important theme of the first part of the Investigations is how children learn their native tongues (Bartley, 1973: 85, 149).

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In a further paper, Bartley (1974: 324) extends this thesis concerning the influence of Bühler to include Karl Popper, who also became a school teacher in Austria during the twenties, restating his position on Wittgenstein as one which entertained: the possibility of construing the later thought of Wittgenstein as that of an amateur but gifted child psychologist who turned, partly as a result of his experiences in school teaching during the twenties, from an essentially associationalist psychology to a configurationalist or contextualism closer to that of the Gestaltists. Yet he climbs down from the strong claim: “Whether Wittgenstein was directly influenced by Bühler or other of the Gestalt theoreticians is uncertain. He definitely was familiar with Bühler’s ideas” (Bartley, 1974: 325).4 Bartley is not alone in advancing such ideas. In fact, Stephen Toulmin (1969) had advanced similar ideas some five years earlier. Toward the end of an article considering Wittgenstein’s philosophy, Toulmin (1969: 70) broaches the historical question concerning the sources of Wittgenstein’s ideas for his later philosophical teachings: “How … did he [Wittgenstein] arrive at his later view of semantics, as part of ‘the natural history of man’?” He answers his own question thus: “his experience as a schoolmaster in the 1920s would naturally have redirected his attention to language learning as a fruitful source of idea and illustrations” (p. 70). Toulmin goes further to mention an occasion when Wittgenstein’s sister Margaret (Stonborough) brought Moritz Schlick and Wittgenstein together with Karl and Charlotte Bühler. (This is surely the source of Bartley’s reference and possibly the historical basis of his overall thesis?) Toulmin describes Bühler as one of the chief founders of development psychology (establishing a tradition in which both Vygotsky and Piaget come to stand) and a major contributor to modern linguistic theory. Further, he describes Charlotte Bühler as an original psychologist in her own right. Further, in a footnote Toulmin (1969: fn 8, p. 71) acknowledges Theodore Mischel’s confirmation that the debate over “imageless thought” had “led Bühler to concentrate on precisely those topics – language as the bearer of intentionality, meaning as consciousness of rules rather than images, etc. – that Wittgenstein later put to such good use in philosophy”. The issue is left unresolved by Toulmin: it may have been simply a remarkable historical coincidence. Bartley’s work has been criticized. Eugene Hargrove (1980), for instance, disputes that Wittgenstein was an active participant in the Austrian school reform movement and that this involvement significantly influenced Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. It is difficult to assess the dispute as presented by Hargrove because it depends upon personal communications and on supposition. Hargrove establishes that Wittgenstein was not an active participant in the

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Glöckel reforms but this was not a claim Bartley had made. Indeed, Bartley acknowledges that Wittgenstein made jokes about the movement. Hargrove (1980: 458) maintains that “Karl Bühler’s book was not read at the teachers’ college not were his pedagogical ideas discussed there”, a claim he bases upon personal communications with Franz Schiller and Hans Plass, both of whom attended the college with Wittgenstein. This claim is impossible to assess and yet it is the case that Wittgenstein attended the teachers’ college in 1919 and that Bühler was not invited to Vienna until 1922. This does not mean, of course, that Wittgenstein did not read Bühler and we must remember that the Bühler’s, between them, published many books.5 Most of Hargrove’s effort goes into establishing his case against Bartley over the first claim. He disputes the textual evidence Bartley provides and yet acknowledges with Paul Englemann that it was the direct effect of Wittgenstein’s contact with children rather than the school reform movement or Bühler’s ideas that influenced Wittgenstein’s views about language: I believe we can see the influence of Wittgenstein’s time as a teacher on almost every page of the Investigations, for there are very few pages in a row that do not make some reference to children. Throughout his later philosophy, Wittgenstein often supported the points he was making by citing personal observations about children. It is these observations, which he made as a school teacher and used as a pool of data later, that, as I see it, are the true influence on Wittgenstein’s work, and not principles taught at the teachers college or waived in his face by the school reformers. (Hargrove, 1980: 461) Hans Sluga (1996: 13), most recently, has suggested that having qualified as a primary school teacher in 1919 and taught for six years that Wittgenstein’s “school experience proved an important source of philosophical ideas in later life”. He suggests that it was primarily his school teaching experience which encouraged Wittgenstein to shift from his concerns with the logic of language to the informal language of everyday life: “His attention was now drawn to the way language is learned and more generally to the whole process of enculturation. His teaching experience forms the background to the turn his philosophical thought was going to take in the 1930s” (p. 13). A concern which took Wittgenstein back to Mauthner’s critique of language, which Sluga maintains, influenced Wittgenstein to adopt a view of language, not as a formal calculus based on logic, but rather one emphasizing language as a medium “designed to satisfy a multiplicity of human needs”. In a footnote to these observations Sluga (1996: fn18, p. 32) remarks: “The significance of this episode of Wittgenstein’s life for his subsequent philosophising has yet to be sufficiently explored” (and he mentions Konrad Wunsche’s 1985 Der Volksschullehrer Ludwig Wittgenstein as making an important start).

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The style of the Investigations: dialogue and pedagogy Dialogue is the quintessential pedagogical form of philosophy; it defines both a style of philosophizing based upon the give and take of question and answer, and a process of inquiry. It emulates the form of conversation which, over time, has become more disciplined in its logic. As such and within the tradition of Western philosophy dialogue has been institutionalized as certain set of pedagogical practices and uses: teaching per se; the instructional text as dialogue; “the pedagogy of the oppressed” (Freire, 1972); the oral or written examination; the free exchange of ideas exemplifying the democratic form of life (John Dewey). Above all, dialogue has been characterized in relation to Socrates and a “method” based upon the logic of the dialectic. Wittgenstein’s way of “doing philosophy” differed from traditional attempts to do philosophy: it is aporetic but not Socratic; it is dialogical but not in the traditional philosophical sense.6 Wittgenstein (1980:14e) writes: “Reading the Socratic dialogues one has the feeling; what a frightful waste of time! What’s the point of these arguments that prove nothing and clarify nothing.” Wittgenstein (1958) is concerned that Socrates’ question “What is knowledge?” (the demand for an essence) in the Theatetus is a demand for an exact definition where there is no exact usage of the word “knowledge” (p. 27) and that in asking the question Socrates “does not even regard it as a preliminary answer to enumerate cases of knowledge” (p. 20). It is not just that Socrates’ method rests upon the demand for an essence for which the dialogue seems an unnecessary and elaborate artifice or that such a demand rules out the procedure of advancement by way of examples or that Socrates holds the view that names signify simples and speech is the composition of names:7 it is also the idea that Socratic dialogue is inherently unjust. He elaborates further the way in which the game of eristics takes place unfairly, without justice: Socrates keeps reducing the sophist to silence, – but does he have right on his side when he does this? Well, it is true that the sophist does not know what he thinks he knows; but that is no triumph for Socrates. It can’t be a case of “You see! You don’t know it!” – nor yet, triumphantly, of “So none of us knows anything!” (Wittgenstein, 1980: 56) In so far as dialogue can be regarded as a classical pedagogical for philosophy, Wittgenstein embraces it although not exclusively nor without reservation or innovation. The Investigations is Wittgenstein’s primary example of a dialogical work. Yet clearly it is not dialogical in the traditional sense established by Socrates. And judging by Wittgenstein’s comments on Socrates it is evident why the Investigations does not follow or try to emulate the Socratic form or method. While the Investigations is written in the form of a dialogue, it draws upon a repertoire of dialogical strategies and gestures. Terry Eagleton (1993: 9) recognizes this when he writes:

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[The Investigations] is a thoroughly dialogical work, in which the author wonders out loud, imagines an interlocutor, asks us questions which may or may not be on the level … forcing the reader into the work of selfdemystification, genially engaging our participation by his deliberately undaunting style … Of course, both Wittgenstein and Socrates employed a range of dialogical styles and “devices”. The Socratic approach, however, has tended to be construed as a single intellectual process – at the same time “both the rational path to knowledge and the highest form of teaching” – which assumes “that dialogue can, and should have a definite, predetermined end point” (Burbules, 1993: 4, 5). This is what Burbules (1993: 5) calls the teleological view of dialogue, which he distinguishes from the non-teleological. The non-teleological view of dialogue is both more critical and constructivist in the sense that it does not assume “that in practice it will always lead its participants to common and indubitable conclusions; its benefits are more in edification than in finding Truth”. This notion dialogue as conversation which emphasizes edification (or education) rather than Truth, owes an intellectual debt to both Hans-Georg Gadamer (1972) and Richard Rorty (1980). It is not surprising that in such a context that Burbules (1993: 7) should be seeking an approach to dialogue which can respond to the postmodern critique; by which he means a form of dialogue: that respects difference; that accepts the relational character of dialogue and, therefore, challenges the hierarchical power relations embedded in traditional conceptions of teacher authority; that rests upon a critical and constructivist view of knowledge, which is construed more as a process of mutual edification rather the discovery of right answers or eternal Truths; that accepts (perhaps, after Wittgenstein’s private language argument) that dialogue is not first and foremost an individual performance but rather a cultural act; and, finally, “keeps the conversation open, both in the sense of open-endedness and in the sense of inviting a range of voices and styles of communication within it”. Wittgenstein’s Investigations might be said to embody each of these features and to explicitly teach us the postmodern respect for difference; a respect for the diversity of voices, of styles, and of language use which characterizes a way of “doing” philosophy that no longer conforms to the Platonic search for essences or final Truths but rather attempts to shift our thinking in a never-ending process of mutual edification. Wittgenstein, therefore, defines himself philosophically against those – like Plato, St Augustine, Martin Buber, the early Martin Heidegger, perhaps Gadamer, and even implicitly, Jürgen Habermas – who suggest that our Being is essentially dialogical; that the essence of the self is dialogue. Like Burbules, Bill Readings (1995) investigates what he calls non-dialectical forms of dialogue (rather than non-teleological forms) in the work of JeanFrançois Lyotard and in relation to the question of pedagogy. He suggests that for Lyotard the pedagogical “scene” is structured by a dissymetrical pragmatics such that it belongs to the sphere of justice and ethics than of truth and he

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continues in a way that throws light on the notion of non-dialectical forms of dialogue – a kind of dialogue addressed by Wittgenstein in his remarks on Socrates and well exemplified in the Investigations: Lyotard’s dialogues are not divided monologues … the dialogue form is not designed to display his capacity to occupy both sides of the question; rather, it is dialogic in M. M. Bakhtin’s sense. The dialogues form is not organized dialectically, to arrive at a single conclusion that will be either the vindication and reinforcement of one position (Socrates’ opponent is forced to agree with Socrates) or a synthesis of the two (as in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s account of the fusion of horizons or James Joyce’s “jewgreek is greekjew”). The dialogue does not thaw and resolve itself into a monologue. To put this another way, the dialogue form is not controlled solely by the sender; it is not a formal instrument in the grasp of the writing subject. (Readings, 1995: 196) On the basis of Lyotard’s work and the attention Lyotard pays to Emmanuel Lévinas account of an ethics based on the Other, Readings (1995) wants to shift our thinking away from the notion of “emancipation” in pedagogy to that of “obligation” in the development of a “heteronomous politics of education”. Bringing together Readings, Lyotard and Wittgenstein in this way allows a new reading. Lyotard makes active use of Wittgenstein. In The Postmodern Condition Jean-François Lyotard (1984) locates the problem of the legitimation of knowledge and of education within the general context of the crisis of narratives and distinguishes between the modern and the postmodern in terms of the appeal to a meta-language. The postmodern, he defines simply as “incredulity towards meta-narratives”. The rule of consensus that governed Enlightenment narratives and cast truth as a product of agreement between rational minds has been rent asunder; the narrative function has been dispersed into many language elements, each with its own pragmatic valencies. In arguing this position Lyotard views himself as philosophizing “after” Wittgenstein. The later Wittgenstein, according to Lyotard, teaches us how to philosophize after the end of metaphysics when philosophy can no longer appeal to a metalanguage as a final arbiter to settle matters of Truth; indeed, Lyotard interprets Wittgenstein’s philosophy as a response to the question of nihilism, that is, how to philosophize after the loss of all transcendental standards.8 This is the philo-hermeneutical context within which we can usefully view and interpret the Investigations as a pedagogical form dialogue more concerned to edify – to change our style of thinking – than to arrive at timeless Truths, in the manner of traditional philosophy. The Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein 1953) self-reflectively mirrors and models the multiplicity of languagegames and gestures it attempts to describe. Stylistically, we might say that the Investigations achieves the same consistency of form and content as did, albeit in a radically different way, the Tractatus. It functions as an exemplary

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pedagogical text the aim of which is not for Wittgenstein’s students to imitate his thoughts or his style of thinking but to think for themselves. Recently, Jane Heal (1995) has argued not only that the Investigations is a dialogue (in a precise sense) and that rather than defining himself against the philosophical tradition Wittgenstein employs the dialogue form as a means to pursue in a discursively rational way traditional philosophical questions. Heal (1995: 63–64) argues: We may both recognise a rationale for Wittgenstein’s [dialogical] procedure and also see that there are things to be said against it; we need not be locked into an outlook which thinks that that use of conventional expository forms is a betrayal of Wittgenstein, or a betrayal of lack of understanding of him; but equally we need not think that his particular way of writing is an unnecessary and regrettable obfuscation. Heal’s analysis of the dialogue form of the Investigations is helpful but I believe – for reasons that must now appear obvious – that her interpretation that Wittgenstein in the Investigations is not defining himself against the philosophical tradition, is incorrect, if defining himself thus amounts to a denial that Wittgenstein was actively seeking a new way of “doing” philosophy.9 Nothing follows from my position concerning the use of conventional expository forms. Wittgenstein’s adoption of the dialogue form, along with his adoption of and innovation with other styles – and his close and deliberate attention to the different forms of philosophy – was part of Wittgenstein’s deliberate experimentation designed to shift our thinking. He certainly did not want his students to imitate him – in either the forms or the contents of his thought. If his students could think differently using conventional forms then Wittgenstein would be perfectly happy.10 And yet it is clear that Wittgenstein adopts extra-discursive forms, in addition to conventional forms, in an experimental and innovative attempt to break down the traditional view that there is only one way to “do” philosophy. In a close textual examination of sections §§146–147, §§208–211, and §258, Heal (1995: 73) argues that the Investigations is a deliberately crafted dialogue making use of many different kinds of speech act, in which “the other speaker is each of us, if we recognise ourselves in the words and are willing to enter the exchange”. She comments that there is no consistent device that Wittgenstein uses to signal dialogue: there are no named characters in the tradition of Plato, Berkeley or Hume. It is only from the context that we can identify the other voice; a voice which is not “the soul talking to herself” but a genuine “other” to the dialogue, that is, the reader, who understands. Heal attempts to dismiss the interpretation of the Wittgenstein of the Investigations as defining himself against tradition. By this she means a view of Wittgenstein as non-argumentative and anti-philosophical and she argues that to hold this view one must also hold to a dichotomy “between arguing in a discursive rational manner and promoting insight by

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means other than argument” (Heal, 1995: 76). Heal argues against holding the distinction suggesting that Wittgenstein “wishes to get us to apprehend differently the point of philosophical thinking or the spirit in which one should do it” (ibid.). The appropriateness of the dialogue form, Heal (1995: 80) suggests, is intimately tied up with The difference between one who has read a theoretical non-dialogue version of the thought and one who has pursued them via the dialogue route is closely analogous to the difference between one who realises “All humans are mortal” and one who realises “I, like everyone else, am mortal”. In other words, for Heal, the question of the appropriateness of the dialogue form is tied up with the therapeutic conception of Wittgenstein’s philosophy which acts as a sort of prophylactic to relativism (and conventionalism) and, at the same time can provide personal liberation and an enhanced sense of self responsibility and freedom.11 The dialogue form, then, makes us recognize where we stand (we stand here!) and that, as it happens, “we do make such and such judgements with full sincerity” (Heal, 1995: 82). Heal’s remarks in this context are, we think, perfectly in order. We would simply say that the appropriateness of dialogue is demanded by the pedagogical style of Wittgenstein’s investigations which has as its aim to shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle. The aim of the great educator is to teach us to think for ourselves.

Acknowledgements This paper was written while Michael Peters was a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University, Research School of Social Sciences, Political Science Program, 1998. I would like to thank Professor Barry Hindess for his kindness and support. A version of this paper was presented at the conference Wittgenstein: Philosophy and Biography Prof Klagge, Philosophy Department, Virginia Tech and State University, March, 1999 and another version appears in Michael Peters and James Marshall, Wittgenstein: Philosophy, Postmodernism, Pedagogy, Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1999.

Notes 1 The earliest and most significant “cultural” reading of Wittgenstein was given by Janik and Toulmin (1973). There have been relatively few “literary” readings of Wittgenstein (but see Lang, 1990, 1995 and contributors to the special edition of New Literary History, 1988). Most who adopt a “literary” approach tend to focus upon his aesthetics and/or want to extract a theory or distinctive approach to literature (Perloff, 1992, 1996; Brill, 1995). Brill (1995: 142–143) concludes “A reliance on the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein will prove to

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Philosophy as pedagogy be enormously useful to the future of literary criticism and theory (metacriticism): from issues of axiological debate …, to investigations into the foundational grammars of critical and literary language games; from a realization of the possibility of organic certainties which need not be hegemonic not adversely limiting in their efforts, to an acceptance of the importance of useful critical discriminations.” The traditional analytic position is that there is not only a hard and fast distinction between form (or scheme) and content, (logical and empirical statements), fact and value, but also between the philosopher and his or her works. This effectively rules out the significance of (auto)biography to philosophy. Yet Wittgenstein was fascinated with forms of philosophical writing (the Meditation, the Confession) which “inserted” the writer or thinker in the text or made the writer/ thinker central. For instance, he was interested in the form of the Confession as a philosophical form (and form of life) as it was practised by both St Augustine and Leo Tolstoy. He also engaged in the practice of confession himself at least on one occasion, even after the loss of religious faith (see Monk, 1991). Justin Leiber (1997) presents a convincing account of Wittgenstein’s Investigations as an unconventional biographical narrative, and in a passage which anticipates part of my reading of the Investigations (in the final section of the paper), writes: “But clearly nonetheless Investigations is straightforwardly first person narrative: The I is co-referential with Ludwig Wittgenstein of the title page, and then some, the narrative anchor piece, like the I of Descartes’ Meditations, although Wittgenstein’s I easily becomes we when a general human understanding is examined. But Investigations is also second person: you are asked questions, your answers are suggested or implied and then explained, criticized, or expanded; indeed, there is even second person narration in which you are described as going through various exercises or routines. There is no book I know that is more conversational, interactive, and narrational: you almost hear your responses … and then find yourself caught and turned about by his reply. You want to say, how can I be having an intense conversation with a man who died many decades ago?” Note Nietzsche’s (1968) comment in The Will to Power, at §810: “Compared with music all communication by words is shameless; words dilute and brutalise; words depersonalise; words make uncommon common”; and compare Nietzsche’s discussion of nineteenth century musicians at §105 and §106, with Wittgenstein’s aphoristic statement in Culture and Value. Bartley acknowledges two further papers on these matters: Stephen Toulmin’s “Ludwig Wittgenstein, Karl Bühler and Psycholinguistics”, Mimeo, 1968; and Bernard Kaplan’s “Comments on S. Toulmin’s “Wittgenstein, Bühler and the Psychology of Language”, Mimeo, 1969. Bartley says that both papers are forthcoming in the same issue of the Boston Studies of Philosophy of Science in which his paper is published, but neither Toulmin’s nor Kaplan’s paper appear in that issue. Bartley says Bühler’s book is published in 1918, i.e., one year before Wittgenstein attends teachers’ college, whereas Toulmin says it is published in 1927. For a recent account of dialogue in relation to teaching, see Burbules (1993: x) who uses the term to refer to “a conversational interaction directed intentionally toward teaching and learning”. Interestingly, Burbules uses Wittgenstein’s analysis of “game” and his notion of “language-game” to explore the metaphor of dialogue. He is concerned to develop a theory and practice of dialogue that can respond to the postmodern critique. See the Investigations (§46) where Wittgenstein asks “What lies behind the idea that names really signify simples?” and answers by reference to a statement made by

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Socrates in the Theatetus that names are simples and that the essence of language lies in the composition of names. Wittgenstein is combating a picture of the essence of human language and the (Socratic) idea behind it. He suggests “Both Russell’s ‘individuals’ and my ‘objects’ (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus) were such primary elements” suggesting that he and Russell stood in the same tradition of western metaphysics which proceeded by trying to capture the essence of things. For various readings of the relations between Wittgenstein and Lyotard, especially in terms of education and the postmodern condition, see Peters (1989), 1994, 1995a, 1995b, Peters (1996). The accent on “doing” philosophy – on philosophy as an activity – is important for Wittgenstein not only in terms of his philosophy of language where he suggests that “the whole, consisting of language and actions … [is] the ‘language-game’” (Wittgenstein 1953: §7, my emphasis) or that “the speaking of language is part of an activity, or a form of life” (§23, my emphasis) but also, as he says elsewhere quoting Goethe, “In the beginning was the deed”, suggesting that all forms of “saying” or “speaking” and “writing” are, in some sense, acts or performances. This observation has the intended implication concerning his own philosophizing, in oral or written forms. Indeed, it is the case that most of his first generation “students”, including, for instance, Rhees, Anscombe, Malcolm, Wright, Winch, and Barrett, use conventional expository philosophical and traditional discursive argument forms to “do” philosophy. None of these notable Wittgensteinians could we call radical innovators in terms of style; nor do we see any real attempt to emulate Wittgenstein’s own style. One might argue that, by contrast, Stanley Cavell not only addresses himself to the question of style in philosophy but consciously experiments with the form of philosophical writing. Heal (1995 82–83) also suggests that Wittgenstein’s way of proceeding can have its own pitfalls and dangers: it “can lead to the adoption of a kind of bullying tone”, it may result in a lack of self-irony – a vigilance against all frivolity, and like other forms of therapy and exercises in personal growth, it may lead to the attempt to endlessly recreate feelings of release rather than to encourage us to move on to tackle genuine problems of the self.

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Readings, B. (1995) From Emancipation to Obligation: Sketch for a Heteronomous Politics of Education. In: M. Peters (Ed.), Education and the Postmodern Condition. Foreword by Jean-Francois Lyotard Westport, CT: Begin and Garvey. Rhees, R. (1967) “A Symposium: Assessments of the Man and the Philosopher”. In: K. T. Fann (ed.) Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Man and His Philosophy Sussex, Harvester Press. Rhees, R. (1984) Postscript. In: R. Rhees (Ed.), Recollections of Wittgenstein. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rorty, R. (1980) Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Oxford: Blackwell. Sluga, H. (1996) Ludwig Wittgenstein: Life and Work. An Introduction. In: H. Sluga & D.G. Stern (Eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1–33. Toulmin, S. (1969) Ludwig Wittgenstein. Encounter XXXII(1). Toynton, E. (1997) “The Wittgenstein Controversy”, The Atlantic Monthly, June: 28–41. Wijdveld, P. (1994) Ludwig Wittgenstein, Architect. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. Wittgenstein, H. (1984) My Brother Lugwig. In: R. Rhees (Ed.), Recollections of Wittgenstein. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wittgenstein, L. (1953) Philosophical Investigations. (trans.), G. E. M. Anscombe Oxford: Basil Blackwell 3rd Ed. 1972. Wittgenstein, L. (1958) The Blue and the Brown Books. Oxford: Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. (1967) Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief. C. Barrett (Ed.), Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Wittgenstein, L. (1980) Culture and Value. G. H. Von Wright (Ed.), (in collaboration with Heikki Nyman), trans. Peter Winch Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. (1981) Zettel 2nd Ed. G.E.M. Anscombe & R. Rhees (Eds.), Oxford: Blackwell. Worth, S. (1997) Wittgenstein’s Musical Understanding. British Journal of Aesthetics 37(2): 158–167. Zwicky, J. (1992) Lyric Philosophy. Buffalo: University of Toronto Press.

Chapter 9

Kinds of thinking, styles of reasoning

Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd, www.tandfonline.com, on behalf of © Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia.

A picture held us captive. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953, §115) What is given to thinking to think is not some deeply hidden underlying meaning, but rather something lying near, that which lies nearest, which because it is only this, we have therefore always already passed over. Martin Heidegger (1977, p. 111)

Introduction: why the present emphasis on thinking? There is no more central issue to education than thinking. Certainly, such an emphasis chimes with the rationalist and cognitive deep structure of the Western educational tradition. The contemporary tendency reinforced by first generation cognitive psychology was to treat thinking ahistorically and aculturally as though physiology, brain structure and human evolution are all there is to say about thinking that is worthwhile or educationally significant. Harré and Gillet (1994) provide a brief account of the shift from what they call ‘the Old Paradigm’ of behaviourism and experimentalism, based on an outdated philosophical theory of science and metaphysics, towards psychology as a cognitive science in its first and second waves. The impetus for change from the Old Paradigm they suggest came from two sources: the ‘new’ social psychology which took its start from G. H. Mead and, more importantly, the ‘new’ cognitive psychology that developed out of the work of Bruner and G. A. Miller and P. N. Johnson-Laird. They maintain that the second cognitive revolution began under the influence of the writings of the later Wittgenstein (1953), which gave a central place to language and discourse and attempted to overcome the Cartesian picture of mental activity as a set of inner processes. The main principles of the second revolution pointed to how psychological phenomena should be treated as features of discourse, and thus as a public and social activity. Hence: ‘Individual and private uses of symbolic systems, which in this view constitute thinking, are derived from interpersonal discursive processes …’ (Harré & Gillet, 1994, p. 27). The production of psychological

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phenomena, including emotions and attitudes, are seen to depend upon the actors’ skills, their ‘positionality’ and the story lines they develop (Howie & Peters, 1996; Peters & Appel, 1996). The third ‘revolution’, also utilizing Wittgenstein (among other theorists), was advanced by social psychologists such as John Shotter (e.g. 1993) and Kenneth Gergen (1985; 1991). These views also emphasized a social construction rather than an individualist cognitivist construction. Gergen (2001) acknowledges the sociology of knowledge tradition and maintains that once knowledge became denaturalized and reenculturated the terms passed more broadly into the discourses of the human sciences.1 The movement of critical thinking also tends to treat thinking ahistorically, focusing on universal processes of logic and reasoning.2 Against this trend and against the scientific spirit of the age this paper presents a historical and philosophical picture of thinking. By contrast with dominant cognitive and logical models, the paper emphasizes kinds of thinking and styles of reasoning. The paper grows out of interests primarily in the work of Nietzsche (Peters, 2000a; Peters et al., 2001a), Heidegger (Peters, 2002a) and Wittgenstein (Peters & Marshall, 1999; Peters, 2000b; 2001a,b; Peters, 2002b), and in its extension and development in Critical Theor y (Peters et al., 2003a,b) and French poststructuralist philosophy (e.g. Peters, 2003a,b,c). The paper draws directly on some of this work to argue for the recognition of different kinds of thinking, which are explored by reference to Heidegger, and also the significance of styles of reasoning, which are explored by reference to Wittgenstein and to Ian Hacking. I begin with the admonition, ‘Always historicize! Always pluralize!’, for Reason also has a history. The narrative of critical reason has at least five ‘chapters’ beginning, first, with Kant; followed by, second, its bifurcation with Horkheimer and Adorno into theoretical and practical reason; third, its separation into three by Habermas (1987) according to knowledge interests—technical, practical and emancipatory; and, finally, its pluralization in the material conditions of discourses (Wittgenstein, Foucault, Lyotard). The fifth chapter is in a sense a postscript—a working out of the consequences of accepting that reason, like knowledge and the value of knowledge, is rooted in social relations. In some forms this is both a naturalization and a pluralization of Kant: not one reason, but many. It is clear that the history of reason is the history of philosophy itself, and as history, both revisable and open to interpretation. To talk of ‘thinking skills’—a concept that dominates contemporary educational discourse—is already to adopt a particular view of thinking, that is, thinking as a kind of technology. This view of thinking is a reductive concept of thinking as a means–ends instrumentality, a series of techniques that can move us from one space to another. In the so-called knowledge economy emphasis in the curriculum has passed from the knowledge and understanding of traditional subjects and disciplines to generic, transferable skills that

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allegedly equip learners with the means by which they can learn. These are often described in psychological language as metacognitive skills, that is, learning how to learn, and are now squared off against informationprocessing skills, knowledge management skills, entrepreneurial skills, and social skills like team-building. In part, this reductive notion of thinking receives an impetus from both cognitive psychology and neoclassical economics. The work of the first wave cognitivists, especially Piaget, conceptualized thinking in terms of developmental stages and mental operations. He was among the first to operationalize thinking and to define it according to stages of children’s development.3 Second wave cognitivists, picking up on the information-processing model of the mind, initiated by Claude Shannon’s work in information theory, that began to model the mind on the brain by way of a strict analogy with the computer. This has led, in the third wave, to the study of thinking and the mind in terms of brain states, pursued in different ways by Howard Gardner (1983), who talks of ‘multiple intelligences’, and the Churchlands (P. S. Churchland, 1989; P. M. Churchland, 1995), who talk of ‘neural nets’ (connectionism) and devise naturalized epistemologies.4 In neoclassical economics, at least since the early 1960s, the notion of human capital theory has focused on human competences, which are taken to be both observable and measurable. First developed by Theodor Schultz (1971), an agricultural economist, and then taken up by Gary Becker (1992), the notion of human capital was theorized as key competences that were measurable for economic purposes. Becker himself indicates that when he first introduced the term in the 1960s there was near universal condemnation of it, and only 20 to 30 years later two US presidents, Reagan and Clinton, from opposing political parties, used the term as though it were a bipartisan affair. As the marketization of education proceeded during the 1980s the emphasis on human and social capital grew, as did the emphasis on the related concepts of entrepreneurship and enterprise. First generation cognitive psychology and human capital theory shaped ‘thinking’ as a reductive concept, analysing it as stages, or as a set of intelligences, behaviours, know-hows or skills. This approach, historically, might be usefully indexed and explained in part by reference to prevailing political economy—not only a strong emphasis on national competitiveness and on the ‘core’ generic skills of ‘flexible workers’ for the new globally networked economy, but also the flourishing of a range of new educational technologies and therapies focusing on ‘accelerated learning’, ‘giftedness’, ‘multiple intelligences’ and the like.

Kinds of thinking: Heidegger on What is Called Thinking? In a strong sense philosophy has entertained a special relationship to thinking and reasoning: I suggested earlier that the history of reason is the history of

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philosophy itself. Kant defines philosophy as ‘the science of the relation of all knowledge to the essential ends of human reason’, or as ‘the love which the reasonable being has for the supreme ends of human reason’ (cited in Deleuze, 1984, p. 1). As Deleuze himself reminds us, ‘The supreme ends of Reason form the system of Culture; in these definitions we can already identify a struggle on two fronts: against empiricism and against dogmatic rationalism’(Deleuze, 1984, p. 1). Heidegger (1966, p. 3) begins his course of lectures, delivered during 1951 and 1952, with the following: ‘We come to know what it means to think when we ourselves try to think. If the attempt is to be successful, we must be ready to learn thinking.’5 Learning, in other words, is central to understanding thinking. Yet, while there is an interest in philosophy, there is, he suggests, no ‘readiness’ to think. The fact is that, even though we live in the most thought-provoking age, ‘we are still not thinking’ (p. 4). In What is Called Thinking?, Heidegger is immediately concerned with learning and construes the learner on the model of the apprentice, emphasizing the notion of ‘relatedness’—of the cabinet-maker’s apprentice to the different kinds of wood that sustain the craft. The learner, by analogy, needs to learn different kinds of thinking. In his Introduction to Poetry, Language and Thought (Heidegger, 1971), Albert Hofstadter refers to the language of Heidegger’s thinking: It has created its own style, as always happens with an original thinker. Often a sentence or two is all that is necessary to distinguish Heidegger from, say, Wittgenstein, Russell or Whitehead. The style is the thinking itself. (p. xvi, emphasis added) We should remember in passing that the later Heidegger in Contributions to Philosophy leads us to a post-philosophical project of ‘thinking’ where it is taken to mean precisely not that which defined the essence of the Western scientific tradition. Heidegger recognizes different kinds of thinking that have been defined by philosophers within the Western tradition. More importantly for our purposes here, in What is Called Thinking? He advances what we might take as a tentative typology of conceptions of thinking, before discussing his own conception. I have simply listed his suggestions and added Heidegger’s own conceptions as well. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Thinking as doxa: forming an opinion or having an idea (opining). Thinking as ‘vorstellen’: representing a state of affairs (representing). Thinking as ratiocination: developing a chain of premises leading to a valid conclusion (reasoning). Thinking as problem-solving: scientific thinking (problem-solving). Thinking as ‘beriff ’ (Hegel): conceptual or systematic thinking (conceiving).

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Thinking as understanding or interpreting the particular case in terms of the universal (practical judgement). Thinking as a revealing of what is concealed (the meaning of Being) (Heidegger’s thinking). Thinking as letting be (the later Heidegger’s post-metaphysical ‘thinking’).

We do not need to follow the entangled, mystical and poetic thought of the late Heidegger to understand that he usefully distinguishes different kinds of thinking that have defined the Western metaphysical tradition. All I need for my argument at this stage is the recognition of the historical fact of the diversity of notions of thinking: that there have in fact been dominant and prevailing notions of ‘thinking’ and that these have changed over time, although not in a progression of philosophical sophistication. We might, provocatively, add others to this list. I think we could usefully talk of various forms of cognitive modelling and computer simulation or information-processing as contemporary and technological views of thinking, although this might be considered a category mistake. Or we might, more productively, embrace the different views of Lyotard or Deleuze: 9. Thinking as information-processing (cognitive psychology). 10. Thinking as suspicion of metanarratives: narratology critique (Lyotard). 11. Thinking as creating concepts: philosophizing (Deleuze). This is not yet to naturalize thinking but simply to establish the case for different kinds of thinking—to pluralize it and to recognize its plurality: a range of different kinds, advanced by different philosophers at different points in the history of philosophy. From kinds of thinking to styles of reasoning, from Heidegger to Wittgenstein—this is the transition that we should now make.

Wittgenstein on thinking The work of the later Wittgenstein represents a break with the analytic tradition that is evidenced in Wittgenstein’s rejection of both nominalism and the doctrine of external relations, and in Wittgenstein’s view of philosophy as an activity—a pursuit separate from science, neither a second-order discipline nor foundational— which is unable to be characterized in terms of a distinctive method. Wittgenstein’s liberation of grammar from logic, his rejection of any extra-linguistic justification for language and knowledge, and the ‘semantic holism’ of the Investigations (Wittgenstein, 1953) and On Certainty (Wittgenstein, 1979), simply collapses and renders impossible the set of distinctions (e.g. analytic/synthetic, scheme/content) upon which the legitimacy of analytic philosophy depends. For Wittgenstein there is no fundamental cleavage either between propositions that stand fast for us and those that do not, or between logical and empirical propositions. The whole enterprise of modern analytic philosophy rested

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on the fundamental ‘Kantian’ duality between scheme and content. Rorty (1980, p. 169) has moreover stressed the indispensability of the Kantian framework for modern analytic philosophy when he refers to the way distinctions between what is ‘given’ and what is ‘added by the mind’, or the distinction between the ‘contingent’ and the ‘necessary’ are required for a ‘rational reconstruction’ of our knowledge. Rather than view Wittgenstein solely as a place-holder in the analytic tradition, it is philosophically and historically instructive to position him in terms of his Viennese origins and the general continental milieu that constituted his immediate intellectual and cultural background. Indeed, this rather obvious insight is, in large part, the basis for cultural, historical and literary readings of Wittgenstein and the significance of both the man and his work for education and pedagogy (see Peters & Marshall, 1999). I have explored elsewhere the importance of style to philosophy through a study of Wittgenstein’s writings: what I have called Wittgenstein’s styles of thinking. I want to highlight the fact that the question of style remained an obsession of Wittgenstein’s throughout his career—I have argued that it is inseparable from his practice of philosophy. In terms more fully explored elsewhere (Peters & Marshall, 1999), I have argued that Wittgenstein’s ‘style’ is, in a crucial sense, pedagogical. By this I mean that appreciating his style is essential to understanding the purpose and intent of his philosophy, especially his later philosophy. In the context of the culture of Viennese modernism, I interpret Wittgenstein’s philosophical style as related to his double crisis of identity concerning his Jewish origins and his sexuality, both inseparable from his concern for ethics and aesthetics and from his personal life. With Jim Marshall and Nick Burbules I have explored how these concerns are manifested in his work and his way of doing philosophy, and how Wittgenstein’s style may be seen as deeply pedagogical (Peters & Marshall, 1999; see also Peters, Burbules & Smeyers, 2007). More analytically, we can say that the early Wittgenstein of the Tractatus moves away from both mentalism, where thoughts are understood as psychic entities in the minds of individuals, and the Platonism of Frege and Russel, which was antipsychologistic. The early Wittgenstein uses the concept Gedanke, or thought, in two related ways: as signifying a proposition (Satz), where it is taken to provide a ‘logical picture of facts’, and as a mental entity that stands in a relation to reality in much the same way as words stand to a propositional sign. Wittgenstein understood thinking to be a kind of language. Later he contended that the language of thought faced a dilemma, as Hans-Johann Glock notes: On the one hand, thought must be intrinsically representational. … On the other hand, this means that the psychic elements do not stand in the same sort of relation to reality as words. More generally, Wittgenstein criticized the view that thinking is a mental process, which accompanies speech and endows it with meaning. (Glock, 1996, p. 358)

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Glock suggests that Wittgenstein’s mature position is to jettison both mentalism and his own lingualism of the Investigations to treat ‘thinking’ as ‘a widely ramified concept’ which has four major uses: (a) thinking about or meaning something; (b) reflecting on a problem; (c) believing or opining that p; (d) occurrent thoughts which cross one’s mind at a particular moment. (Glock, 1996, p. 359) Not only does Wittgenstein reject all forms of mentalism, but he links the notion of thinking to behaviour, suggesting that thinking is a mental activity: it is a doing, which is most often expressed in language. As a way of proceeding I suggest that we adopt Wittgenstein’s notion of language games as a basis for understanding different kinds of thinking, based on making discursive ‘moves’ which we can represent in the following form: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Learning the rules of the game; Learning to follow a rule by making ‘moves’ in the game (i.e. practical reason; practice); Inventing a new ‘move’ in the game using existing rules; Inventing a related series of moves (a new ‘tactic’ or ‘strategy’); Inventing a new rule in the game; Inventing a series of new rules, permitting new moves, tactics or strategies; and, Inventing a new game.

Each of these ‘stages’ is subsumed by the next level, and clearly there is a hierarchy that operates. While this notion of thinking recognizes kinds of thinking, it does so in a way that naturalizes thinking to playing language games; in short, to the material conditions of discourse and to the mastery of its rules, tactics and strategies through use and practice. One of the consequences of this typology is that it enables a historicization of reason to its material bases in discourses and discursive institutions in ways that have been adopted by discursive psychology and discourse theorists, following Wittgenstein and Foucault. This approach may permit us to investigate the history of reason and reasoning: for instance, the bifurcation of reason with Horkheimer into instrumental and practical reason; its typification as three under Habermas, with the development of critical reason; and finally, its multiplication in discourse use with Lyotard and Foucault. But these observations are only speculations aimed at an approach to the history of reason and styles of reasoning. It is a thought that I wish to pursue more systematically and in an exposition of some of the recent work of Ian Hacking.

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Styles of reasoning In his Inaugural Lecture as the Chair of Philosophy and History of Scientific Concepts at the Collège de France in 2001, Hacking chose to develop the idea of styles of reasoning, which he credits to Ludwik Fleck. A Polish physician and epistemologist, Fleck developed highly original ideas on science in the 1920s and 1930s that were rediscovered in the 1960s and 1970s by Thomas Kuhn (1962) in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Fleck basically suggested that ‘scientific facts’ are constructed by groups of scientists that he calls ‘thought collectives’. These thought collectives are said to elaborate a ‘thought style’ containing norms, concepts and practices (cf. Kuhn’s ‘paradigms’). Thus, new members of the community become socialized into a specific thought style which shapes ‘scientific facts’ that may be ‘incommensurable’ with facts produced by other collectives. This incommensurability is seen by Fleck as an important source of innovation. Hacking argues that a style of reasoning introduces new ways of finding out the truth and also determines the truth conditions appropriate to the domains to which it applies. He writes: In the sciences we may use many styles of reasoning. Even within mathematics there is still something powerfully right about the distinction between arithmetic and geometry, or, we might better say, between algorithmic and combinatorial styles of reasoning, on the one hand, and on the other what we may loosely call the spatial style, be it geometrical, topological or making heavy use of symmetries. Undoubtedly the most powerful style of reasoning, that which has made possible the modern world, that which has permanently changed the world, large and small, that which is altering and engineering the world at this moment, is what I call the laboratory style, which was emerging four centuries ago. (Hacking, 2002a, pp. 2–3) He offers the caution that ‘there are many more styles of reasoning’ (p. 3), emphasizing by way of example his own interest and work on the statistical style, and, by quoting Bourdieu, proceeds to defend a historical argument for the history of reason: We have to acknowledge that reason did not fall from heaven as a mysterious and forever inexplicable gift, and that it is therefore historical through and through; but we are not forced to conclude, as is often supposed, that it is reducible to history. It is in history, and in history alone, that we must seek the principle of the relative independence of reasons from the history of which it is a product; or, more precisely, in the strictly historical, but entirely specific logic through which the exceptional universes in which the singular history of reason is fulfilled were established. (Cited in Hacking, 2002a, p. 3)

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Hacking himself, picking up on Bourdieu’s lead, argues that each style has its own proof and demonstration criteria, and its own truth conditions. For Hacking, then, a style of reasoning actually creates the truth criteria in a selfauthenticating way. He argues (Hacking, 2002a, p. 4): Each scientific style of reasoning introduces a new domain of objects to study. Each style introduces a new class of objects, and on the side generates, for each new class of entities, a new realism/anti-realism debate. To stick to the most familiar examples, think of the reality of mathematical objects, with—in the extreme—the opposition between Platonism and mathematical constructivism. He emphasizes classification as ‘the essence of one style of scientific reasoning, and also something needed for thought itself’, and considers some fundamental distinctions between classifications in the social and the natural sciences. He acknowledges that ‘classification is at the core of the taxonomic sciences, of systematic botany and zoology’ (Hacking, 2002a, p. 6), but asks which taxa are real. He discusses Duhem as someone ‘committed to the idea of stable, growing and persistent natural classifications’ (Hacking, 2002a, p. 7), putting him alongside Nietzsche in The Gay Science, whom he cites as follows: The fame, name and appearance of a thing, what it counts as, its customary measure and weight—which in the beginning is an arbitrary error for the most part, thrown over things like a garment and alien to their essence, even to their skin—due to the continuous growth of belief in it from generation to generation, gradually grows, as it were, onto and into the thing, and turns into its very body. (Cited in Hacking, 2002a, p. 7) Hacking continues his exposition of Nietzsche by reminding us that naming is an historical activity that takes place in particular sites at particular times. As he says, ‘Objects come into being’, and, signalling his own intellectual debt to Foucault—whose ontology was both creative and historical—Hacking (2002a) mentions his book Historical Ontology, which is both a reflection on the uses of history in philosophy and an interpretation of the work of Foucault. In that work Hacking (2002b) entertains the concept of historical ontology by explaining how his work (and Foucault’s) exemplify it. He also distinguishes it from ‘historical epistemology’ and ‘historical meta-epistemology’. Drawing on the work of A. C. Crombie and what he calls ‘styles of reasoning’, Hacking advocates a conception of reason that is neither subjective nor constructivist. Many statements, he argues, including ‘the maligned category of observation sentences’, are independent of any given method of proof, and much of our scientific knowledge acquires determinate meaning in relation to specific styles of demonstration such as experimental, axiomatic, and analogical-comparative

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techniques. Styles of reasoning relativize what is knowable: they constitute a set of techniques both linguistic and material that make statements candidates for truth in the first place, and are therefore akin to Foucault’s ‘discourses’. Hacking draws largely on Nelson Goodman’s (1978) Ways of Worldmaking to articulate a theory of ‘kind-making’. He credits Goodman with an original discovery with respect to the riddle of induction, which shows that whenever we reach any general conclusion on the basis of evidence about its instances, we could, using the same rules of inference, but with different classifications, reach an opposite conclusion. (Hacking, 2002b, p. 128) Goodman’s conclusion, then, is the basis for Hacking’s claim that we can and do inhabit many different worlds; he quotes Goodman to good effect: Without the organization, the selection of relevant kinds, effected by evolving tradition, there is no rightness or wrongness of categorization, no validity or invalidity of inductive inference, no fair or unfair sampling, and no uniformity or disparity among samples. (Cited in Hacking, 2002b, p. 129) He summarizes Goodman thus: ‘The selection and organization of kinds determines … what we call the world’ and kinds come into being through a ‘fit with practice … effected by an evolving tradition’ (p. 129). As for kinds, so analogically for classifications and names: as Hacking argues, Names work on us. They change us, they change how we experience our lives and how we choose our futures. … They work in an immense world of practices, institutions, authorities, connotations, stories, analogies, memories, fantasies. … An analysis of classifications of human beings is an analysis of classificatory words in the sites in which they are used, of the relations between speaker and hearer, of external descriptions and internal sensibilities. (Hacking, 2002a, p. 9) Thus, the human and the social sciences do not differ from natural ones only because they socially construct their subjects, or because they require Verstehen rather than explanation. ‘They differ because there is a dynamical interaction between the classifications developed in the social sciences, and the individuals or behavior classified’ (Hacking, 2002a, p. 10). If there is a payoff from Hacking’s analysis that ought to be taken on board by educationalists, it is a kind of strong interactive classification that he refers to as looping effects in order to describe the fact that people who become aware of their classification have changed and can change

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themselves. He explains the notion of ‘looping effects’, which work by recursive feedback, by reference to the history of childhood. He suggests that in the wake of Philippe Ariès’s famous Centuries of Childhood (Ariès, 1973), childhood has been called a social construct. Some people mean that the idea of childhood (and all that it implies) has been constructed. Others mean that a certain state of a person, or even a period in the life of a human being, an actual span of time, has been constructed. Some thinkers may even mean that children, as they exist today, are constructed. Children are conscious, self-conscious, very aware of their social environment, less articulate than many adults, perhaps, but, in a word, aware. People, including children, are agents, they act, as the philosophers say, under descriptions. The courses of action that they choose, and indeed their ways of being, are by no means independent of the available descriptions under which they may act. Likewise we experience ourselves in the world as being persons of various classifications. … What was known about people classified in a certain way may become false because people so classified have changed in virtue of how they have been classified, what they believe about themselves, or because of how they have been treated as so classified. (Ariès, 1973, pp. 10–11) Interactive classifications are a very common kind in education. Indeed, the literature abounds with interactive kinds—‘accelerated learner’, contrasted with ‘slow learner’ and ‘recalcitrant learner’—all to do with the speed of learning, as though it characterizes a kind of learner. Yet this takes us further away from the second leg of the argument: styles of reasoning—not only kinds of thinking, but also styles of reasoning. Such an interpretation and argument establishes the importance of philosophical accounts of thinking and reasoning and their assumed centrality to education, at least within the Western philosophical tradition. I have presented these accounts as both historical and pluralist. They introduce theoretical contestability into accounts of thinking that take us away from the pure realms of cognitive science and logic towards views that are historical, temporal, spatial, cultural, and, therefore, also empirical. We may recognize both kinds of thinking and styles of reasoning. If we do then a way opens to also recognizing that new kinds of thinking and styles of reasoning come into existence and are developed and refined over time. This does not diminish their force or efficacy. It is analogously that the double blind experiment came into being at a particular time; that in a short duration it demonstrated a certain kind of efficacy in ‘testing’ that has not been surpassed; and, that the double blind experiment now represents a standard scientific practice: so too, with thinking and reasoning and their histories. The acceptance of this historical approach and plurality might serve as an antidote to the aggrandisement of one dominant

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form of thinking and reasoning in the field of education; it might also encourage a greater sensitivity to issues of discourse (or language games), their material conditions, and the rules that constitute them not only within and across the disciplines but also in their increasingly hybrid profusion.

Notes 1 In his The Culture of Education Bruner (1996) distinguishes the culturalist theory of mind from the computational theory, based on a model of information processing: Culture, then, though itself man-made, both forms and makes possible the workings of a distinctively human mind. On this view, learning and thinking are always situated in a cultural setting and always dependent upon the utilization of cultural resources (Bruner, 1996, p. 4).

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He goes on to highlight the contrast between the culturalist and computational theory of mind in terms of a conception that embraces the tenets of perspectivism (the meaning of a statement is relative to its perspective), constraints (forms of meaning are constrained by our ‘native endowment’ and the nature of language), constructivism (‘The “reality” we impute to “worlds” we inhabit is a constructed one’ p. 19), interaction (intersubjectivity or the problem of knowing other minds), externalisation (the production of oeuvres or works), instrumentalism (the political context, e.g. education for skills), institutionalism (that education in the developed world takes place in institutions), identity and self-esteem (as he says, ‘perhaps the most universal thing about human experience is the phenomenon of “Self ”, and we know that education is crucial for its formation’ p. 35), and narrative (narrative as a mode of thought). See the website www.criticalthinking.org/. On review and critique, see Biesta and Stams, 2001; Weinstein at www.chss.montclair.edu/inquiry/fall95/weinste.html; Burbules and Park at http://faculty.ed.uiuc.edu/burbules/papers/critical.html and Hatcher at www.bakeru.edu/crit/literature/dlh_ct_critique.htm There is now a growing literature on ‘post-formal thinking’, which Ken Wilbur (1995) configures as postmodern (which is radically contextual) and postulates in terms of the evolution of holistic thinking (which is integrative). Formal operations are said to overemphasize the power of pure logic in problem solving and underemphasize the pragmatic quality of real life cognitive activity. By contrast, post-formal thought emphasizes ‘shifting gears’, multiple causality, multiple solutions, pragmatism and awareness of paradox. See Labouvie-Vief, 1980; Sinnott, 1998 and Marchland, 2001. Neural networks are simplified models of the brain that measure the strength of connections between neurons. Against the classical view that human cognition is analogous to symbolic computation in digital computers, the connectionist claims that information is stored non-symbolically in the strength of connections between the units of a neural net. Gardner defines intelligence as ‘the capacity to solve problems or to fashion products that are valued in one or more cultural setting’ (Gardner & Hatch, 1989). Using biological as well as cultural research, he formulated a list of seven intelligences: logical-mathematical, linguistic, spatial, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, intra- and inter-personal, and naturalist. The notion of ‘styles of thinking’ also has been used as a predictor of academic performance and discussed in terms of multiple intelligences. Various integrative models have been proposed: Curry’s (1983) personality model; Miller’s (1987) model of cognitive processes; Riding and Cheema’s (1991) model of cognitive styles; and Sternberg’s (1997) model as a theory of mental self-government, which delineates thirteen styles. This section, which refers to What is Called Thinking?, draws on Peters, 2002a.

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Kuhn, T. (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, University of Chicago Press). Labouvie-Vief, G. (1980) Beyond Formal Operations: Uses and limits of pure logic in lifespan development, Human Development, 23, pp. 114–146. Marchland, H. (2001) Some Reflections On PostFormal Thought, The Genetic Epistemologist, 29:3. Miller, A. (1987) Cognitive Styles: An integrated model, Educational Psychology, 7, pp. 251–268. Peters, M. A. (2000a) Pós-estruturalismo e filosofia da diferença Uma introdução (Belo Horizonte, Autêntica Editora). (Poststructuralism and the Philosophy of Difference: An introduction), trans. into Portuguese by T. Tadeu Da Silva. Peters, M. A. (2000b) Writing the Self: Wittgenstein, confession and pedagogy, Journal of Philos-ophy of Education, 34:2, pp. 353–368. Peters, M. A. (2001a) Philosophy as Pedagogy: Wittgenstein’s styles of thinking. Radical Pedagogy, 3:3 (www.icaap.org/iuicode?2.3.3.4). Peters, M. A. (2001b) Wittgensteinian Pedagogics: Cavell on the figure of the child in the Investigations, Studies in Philosophy and Education, 20, pp. 125–138. Peters, M. A. (2002a) (ed.) Heidegger, Education and Modernity (Lanham, MD, Rowman & Littlefield). Peters, M. A. (2002b) Nietzsche’s Legacy for Education Revisited, Studies in Philosophy and Education, forthcoming. Peters, M. A. (2002c) Wittgenstein, Education and the Philosophy of Mathematics, Theory and Science, 3:3 (http://theoryandscience.icaap.org/). Peters, M. A. (2003a) The University and the New Humanities: Professing with Derrida’, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 3:1, pp. 41–57. Peters, M. A. (2003b) Truth-telling as an Educational Practice of the Self: Foucault, parrhesia and the ethics of subjectivity, Oxford Review of Education, 29:2, pp. 207–223. Peters, M. A. (2003c) Geophilosophy, Education and the Pedagogy of the Concept, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 36:3, pp. 217–226. Peters, M. A. & Appel, S. (1996) Positioning Theory: Discourse, the subject and the problem of desire’, Social Analysis, 40: September, pp. 120–145. Peters, M. A., Burbules, N. & Smeyers, P. (2007) Saying and Showing:Wittgenstein as pedagogical philosopher (Lanham, MD & Oxford, Paradigm Publishers). Peters, M. A., Lankshear, C. & Olssen, M. (eds) (2003a) Critical Theory: Founders and praxis (New York, Peter Lang). Peters, M. A., Lankshear, C. & Olssen, M. (eds) (2003b) Futures of Critical Theory: Dreams of difference (Lanham, Boulder, NY, Oxford, Rowman & Littlefield). Peters, M. A. & Marshall, J. D. (1999) Wittgenstein: Philosophy, postmodernism, pedagogy (West-port, CT & London, Bergin & Garvey). Peters, M. A., Marshall, J. D. & Smeyers, P. (2001) (eds) Nietzsche’s Legacy for Education: Past and present values (Westport, CT. & London, Bergin & Garvey). Riding, R. J. & Cheema, I. (1991) Cognitive styles—An overview and integration, Educational Psychology, 11:3 & 4, pp. 193–215. Schultz, T. (1971) Investment in Human Capital: The role of education and of research (New York, Free Press). Shotter, J. (1993) Harré, Vygotsky, Bakhtin, Vico, Wittgenstein; Academic discourses and con-versational realities, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 23, pp. 459–82.

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Sinnott, J. D. (1998) The Development of Logic in Adulthood: Postformal thought and its applications (New York, Plenum). Sternberg, R. J. (1997) Thinking Styles (New York, Cambridge University Press). Wilbur, K. (1995) Sex, Ecology, Spirituality (Boston, Shambhala). Wittgenstein, L. (1953) Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford, Blackwell). Wittgenstein, L. (1979) On Certainty, edited by G. E. M. Anscombe & G. H. Von Wright(Oxford, Blackwell).

Postscript Wittgenstein’s anti-philosophy

This collection of essays is restricted to those published in Educational Philosophy and Theory with some new essays added that develop the theme of Wittgenstein’s significance for the philosophy of technology and a set of connections with the concept “technoscience” as it was used by Jean-Francois Lyotard. It cements the reading of Wittgenstein as a postfoundational thinker who anticipated the breakdown of philosophy as comprising universal forms of rationality, opening up possibilities for a reading that assets Wittgenstein as an anti-philosopher in Alain Badiou’s sense. Lyotard was himself one of the first to embrace this reading and to see in Wittgenstein’s work a way of proceeding that did not rely on formal models but returned to the social and historical to provide an understanding of the profound shifts that occurred after the cultural turn and the turn to practice in twentieth century thought. While some scholars have been critical of the way that Lyotard uses Wittgenstein’s language games to analyze the social bond, I think this was an inspired move, for it mimicked the Wittgensteinian effects in anthropology and sociology, especially with such thinkers as Bloor, Bourdieu and Giddens. This approach can be carried through into the philosophy of technology in the way that Don Idhe and others have done. Again, Lyotard drawing on the French tradition of historical epistemology helped to lay the basis for a critical view of technology which draws on Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Marx. For Badiou (1992: 57) anti-philosophy is a “malaise” that has afflicted philosophy, exemplified in historicism and hermeneutics and the sophistry of language games which he thinks haunts both analytic and postmodern traditions in philosophy. He wants to restore truth as the central category of philosophy. At the same time, Badiou provides an interpretation that focuses on Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Lacan as critics of metaphysics who, along with Pascal, Rousseau and Saint Paul, constitute a coherent and significant counter tradition which seeks to depose the category of truth to recast philosophy as an act. In contrast to Badiou, I am at home with Wittgenstein’s Remarks on the Foundation of Mathematics (1978) and On Certainty (1969) and am quite content to follow the anti-philosophical consequences of Wittgenstein’s thinking and style for educational and social theory. This is, in part, why I chose the last two

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papers as chapters for this book because they indicate lines of development for “philosophy as pedagogy” and “styles of thinking” which follow Wittgenstein’s trajectory while demonstrating its educational applications.

References Badiou, A. (1992) Conditions. Paris: Seuil. Wittgenstein, L. (1978, orig. 1956) Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, Revised Edition, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, G.H. von Wright, R. Rhees and G.E.M. Anscombe (eds.); translated by G.E.M Anscombe. Wittgenstein, L. (1969) On Certainty. New York: Harper and Row.

Index

L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze (Deleuze) 42 Achinger, C. 68 Adel, A. 83–84 Aerts, D. 129 Against Method (Feyerabend) 19 Ahmed, A. 114, 118 alienation 51, 55, 56–57, 89–90 Allegories of Reading (de Man) 30 aloneness 51, 55, 56–57, 89–90 Althusser, - 131–132 analytic philosophy of education (APE) 83 ‘Analytical philosophy: A historico-critical survey’ (von Wright) 86 Anschauung (perception) 133 Anscombe, 18 anti-foundationalism 19 The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (Reitter) 70–71 antirepresentationalism 82, 88 antiscientism 14–15 anti-Wittgensteinian sentiment 84–85 Apostles debating club 112–113, 116 Arbeitsschule (working school) 144 Ariès, P. 166 Aspin, D. 84 Auschwitz 96–97 Austin, J. 82–83 Australian Aborigines 99 Austrian school reform movement 143–146 Bachelard, G. 20, 22–23, 131–132 Bacon, F. 22–23 Baker, G. 35

Barnes, B. 16 Barradori, G. 94 Barrow, R. 83 Barthes, R. 142 Bartley, W. W. 143–146 Battin, M. P. 73 Beale, J. 14–15 ‘Being Jewish’ (Blanchot) 49–50 Beyond Wittgenstein’s Poker: New Light on Popper and Wittgenstein (Munz) 18 Blanchot, M. 49–50 Bloor, D. 16 Blue and Brown Books 116 Blunt, A. 117 Boltzmann, L. 31 Boncompagni, A. 15 Bourdieu, P. 40, 163–164 bourgeois liberalism 88–96 Bouveresse, J. 39 Breton, S. 39 Britton, K. 141 Brogan, M. J. 50 Bühler, C. 145–146 Bühler, K. 144–146 Burbules, N. 148 Burgess, G. 117 Cambridge University 110–127 Camus, A. 76 Capaldi, N. 82, 83 Cartesianism 129–132, 135 Cavell, S. 37–39, 40, 59, 87–88 Cawelti, J. G. 51 Centuries of Childhood (Ariès) 166 Channell, D. 16–17 Chasing Technoscience: Matrix for Materiality 16

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childhood 166 Christianity 66 Collins, 40 A Companion to Wittgenstein on Education: Pedagogical Investigations (Peters & Stickney) 25 complete clarity 29 Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Rorty) 89–90, 94–95 Conversazione Club see Apostles debating club ‘Cosmopolitanism’ (Rorty) 90–93 Crary, A. 37 crisis of identity 69 critical rationalism 19 Critical Theory 68 Critique of Judgement (Kant) 133 Crombie, A. C. 164–165 culture: disappearance of 93–94, 96–97; exile/isolation 52, 55, 56–61; multiculturalism 52; post-analytic philosophy 86–88 Das, V. 58–59 Davidson, A. 41, 43, 121–122 Davidson, D. 82, 88–89 de Man, P. 30 The Decline of the West (Spengler) 14, 31, 86, 133, 134 Deleuze, G. 42–43, 159, 160 Derrida, J. 41 Dewey, J. 89–93 Diamond, C. 40 The Differend (Lyotard) 96–101 Digital Archive on Suicide 73–74 disappearance of culture 93–94, 96–97 displacement 52–53 Douglas, M. 16 Du Bois, W. E. B. 70–71 duality 69, 160–161 Dummett, M. 34, 39, 52–53 Eagleton, T. 147–148 Echeverría, J. 23 Edmonds, D. 118 Education and the Postmodern Condition (Peters) 14 Eidinow, J. 118 elimination 82 elucidation 30 Engelmann, P. 66, 76 “An Entirely Rural Affair” (Monk) 142

epistemological break 131–132 eristics 147 ethics: reading 28–47; suicide 65–79 The Ethics of Reading (Miller) 30 ‘The Ethics of Suicide Digital Archive’ (Battin) 73 ethnocentrism 93–94 evaluation 30 exile 48–64 explication 30, 82 exploration 82 fascism 117 ‘Feminism and pragmatism’ 100 Feyerabend, P. 18–19 fin de siècle Vienna 65, 66–70 Forman, P. 24 Foucault, M. 41–44, 59, 72, 131–132, 142 Foucault Wittgenstein: subjectivité, politique, éthique (Gillot & Lorenzini) 43–44 ‘The Foundations of Mathematics’ 116 Frazer, J. G. 56, 57, 95–96 freedom 76–77 Fritzman, J. M. 100 Funk, M. 17 Gadamer, H.-G. 148 Garver, N. 36–37 Gasking, D. A. T. 139–141 The Gay Science 1–2, 164–165 Gedanke concepts 161 Die Geistige Entwicklung des Kindes (Bühler) 144 Gestalt psychology 144 Gillot, P. 43–44 Gilman, S. 70–71 Glock, H.-J. 35, 161–162 Glöckel school reforms 143–146 The Golden Baugh (Frazer) 56, 57, 95–96 Goméz, M. 77 Gros, F. 43 Guattari, P.-F. 42–43 Haack, R. J. 84 Habermas, J. 20 Hacker, P. M. S. 33, 34–35 Hacking, I. 162, 163–165 Hadot, P. 30–31, 40–41, 121–123 Haller, 86

Index Hargrove, E. 145–146 Harraway, D. 16, 23 Harris, K. 84 Heal, J. 150–151 Hegel, G. W. F. 90 Heidegger, M. 19–20, 23, 158–160 Helgeson, J. 39 Heretics Society meeting at Cambridge 115 hermeneutics of the Self 43, 59 Hertz, 31 Hesse, M. 16 Hirst, P. 19 Hoffman, E. 51–52 Hofstadter, A. 159 Holt, J. 66–67 homeland 50–51 homosexuality 65, 70–73 Hottois, G. 22–24 The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War (Waugh) 66–67 How to Read Wittgenstein (Monk) 32 The Idea of a Social Science (Winch) 95 identity 59–61, 69; crisis 69; see also Jewish identity Ihde, D. 16 industrial-military-technology 23 internalized hatred 70–71 interpretation 30 Introduction to Poetry, Language and Thought (Hofstadter) 159 isolation 51, 55, 56–57, 89–90 Jackson, A. C. 139–141 James, W. 133 Janik, A. 13, 18, 35–36, 86–87 Jarman, D. 118–119 Jewish identity 51, 69; cult of suicide 65, 66; exile 48–64; self-hatred 70–73 judgement 98–99 justice 97–98 Kant, I. 52, 90, 133, 160–161 Kidd, I. J. 14–15 Klagge, J. 55, 56–57 Kraus, K. 31 Kuhn, T. 16, 18, 19, 131–132 La revolución tecnocientífica (Echeverría) 23 Laboratory Life (Latour & Woolgar) 16

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language, metalanguage 97–98, 100 language games 12, 19; exile 54–55; post-analytic philosophy 94–95, 97; reading ethics 29–30, 41–44; thinking 162 Latour, B. 16, 20 Laugier, S. 40, 121 “Le nouvel esprit scientifique” (Bachelard) 22–23 learning, exile 57–61 ‘A Lecture on Ethics 115 Letters 73–74, 75 Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life (Sharpin & Schafer) 16 Lévinas, E. 30, 149 liberalism 88–96 locus of human dignity 90 Loeve, S. 24 The Logic of Scientific Discovery (Popper) 17 London School 19, 25, 84–85 looping effects 164–166 Lorenzini, D. 43–44 Lubenow, W. C. 113 Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Duty of Genius (Monk) 33–34 Lyotard, J.-F. 12–27, 41, 80–109, 148–149, 160 McGuinness, 113–114, 116 Mahler, G. 70 Margolis, J. 81 Marx, K. 51 Mauthner, F. 35–36 metalanguage 97–98, 100 Miller, J. H. 30 mind-body dualism 69 Modernism 70 Monk, R. 32, 33–34, 116, 142, 143 Moore, G. E. 82–83, 111–114, 112, 113–114, 141 moral freedom 76–77 Moral Sciences Club 112, 116, 118, 119 moral self 90, 91–92 ‘Mr E.’ 75 multiculturalism 52 Munz, P. 18 The Myth of Sisyphus (Camus) 76 Nagel, T. 88 Naugle, D. 128–136

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Index

Nedo, M. 54, 138 Nestroy, J. N. 117–118, 134 ‘new Wittgenstein’ 36–37 Niekerk, C. 70 Nietzsche, F. 1–2, 69, 133, 138–140, 164–165 nihilism 96–97 ‘nomadic truth’ 49–50 non-Cartesian worldviews 131, 132 “normal science” 131 Notebooks 1914–16 73–74, 75, 77 On Certainty 85, 132, 135, 160 On the Jewish Question (Marx) 51 Open Science 16 The Open Society and Its Enemies (Popper) 17 oppressed groups and language 100 Origins of Analytical Philosophy (Dummett) 34 Other, the 59 Overgaard, 39 paradigm shifts 131–132 Pascal, F. 142–143 Patton, P. 100 pedagogy 137–155, 161 perception 133 perspicuous presentation concepts 134–135 Peters, R. S. 19 Phillips, D. C. 83 Philosophical Investigations: Cambridge lectures 116, 118–122; exile 56; pedagogy 140, 144, 147–151; philosophy of science 18; post-analytic philosophy 82, 85, 87–88; reading ethics 32–33, 35, 37–38; thinking 160–162; way of life 121–122; Weltanschuung 128, 130, 134 Philosophical Remarks 117, 134 philosophy as cultural criticism 94 “Philosophy and Education: ‘After’ Wittgenstein” 13–14 Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Rorty) 88 philosophy of science 17–20 philosophy of technoscience 20–22 phrase regimes 97; see also language games Pickering, A. 16 Pinsent, D. 72, 73–75

place and displacement 52–53 Poetry, Language and Thought (Heidegger) 159 Popper, K. 17–19, 118, 143, 145 positivist interpretation of Wittgenstein 95 post-analytic philosophy 80–109 The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Lyotard) 19–20, 41, 87, 97, 149 postmodern self 52 Prado, P. 97 pragmatist utopians 91–92 Preliminary Notebooks 116 Preston, J. 18, 74–75 Principia Ethica (Moore) 112, 113–114 “project of modernity” (Habermas) 20 promised land 50–51 The Protégé (Schiltzling) 117–118, 134 public and private life 89–90 Putnam, H. 82, 94–96 radical science 16 rationality 12–13 Rawls, J. 90 Read, R. 37 reading, ethics 28–47 Reading Mahler: German Culture and Jewish Identity in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (Niekerk) 70 reading and writing 122–123 Readings, B. 14, 99, 148–149 reasoning, styles 156, 163–167 reform movements 143–146 Reitter, P. 70–71 religion 66 Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics 116 ‘Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough’ 56 “repetitive concrete” talk 140–141 representationalism 82 Richards, B. 72 Ricoeur, P. 59 Le Rider, J. 69 Rorty, R. 80–109, 148 Russell, B. 114 Russell, E. 29 Ryle, G. 82–83 Saito, N. 38 Sass, L. 118 Satz proposition 161

Index Schafer, S. 16 Schelling, 133 Der Schiltzling (Nestroy) 117–118, 134 school reform movements 143–146 Schopenhauer, A. 31, 66, 76–77 Schroeder, S. 76–77 science: antiscientism 14–15; Nietzsche, F. 1–2, 164–165; “normal science” 131; philosophy of 17–20; “scientific practices” 16; and technology 15–25, 59 self-hatred 65, 70–73 selfhood 59 self-knowledge and identity formation 59–60 self-realization and improvement 122–123 Selinger, E. 16 semantic holism 85 sense of self 91–92 Sex and Character (Weininger) 31, 67–68 sexuality 65, 70–73 Sharpin, S. 16 Situation de la philosophie contemporaine (Breton) 39 ‘Sketch for a Foreword’ 29 Skinner, F. 72 Sluga, H. 146 Smith, 86 sociology of scientific knowledge 16 Socratic approach 147–148 solitude 51, 55, 56–57, 89–90 Spengler, O. 14, 31, 133–135 spiritual exercises 122–123 Sraffa, P. 31–32, 117 Standish, P. 38 Stern, D. 71–72 Stickney, J. 25 Strawson, P. F. 82–83 strong programme (Bloor & Barnes) 16 Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn) 18 Suaer-Thompson 50 suicide 65–79 Taylor, M. 52 Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology 15–16 Technics and Praxis (Ihde) 16 “technique of oral discussion” 140–141 technology 15–17; of the self 59

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technoscience 16–25 “Technoscience” (Hottois) 22–23 “Techno-science, Rationality and the University” (Peters) 19–20 teleological view of dialogue 148 thinking: Heidegger 158–160; kinds of 156–170; present emphasis 156–158; Wittgenstein 160–162 ‘Thinking Otherwise: Bouveresse and the French Tradition’ (Collins) 40 Toulmin, S. 13, 18, 35–36, 86, 145 Tractacus Logico-Philosophicus 15; Cambridge lectures 120–121; pedagogy 149; reading ethics 29, 32–33, 34, 35–36, 37, 39; suicide 76–77; thinking 161; war years 114–115; Weltanschuung 130 transcultural self 90 Tully, J. 52, 61 Turing, A. 116 übersichtliche Darstellung (perspicuous presentation concepts) 134–135 universal rule of judgement 98–99 universalism 52 University of Cambridge 110–127 unsurveyability 134 Der Untergang des Abendlandes (Spengler) 14, 31, 86, 133, 134 Ursprung (Kraus) 31 utopians 91–92 Vermischte Bemerkungen 86 Vienna, fin de siècle 65, 66–70 Vienna Circle 143 Vienna and homeland 54–55 Viennese reading of Wittgenstein 13, 18, 35–36 Vincent, B. 24 von Wright, G. H. 86–87, 98 Waugh, A. 66–67 Weininger, O. 31, 67–68 Welsch, W. 60–61 Weltanschuung (worldview) 128–136 Weltbild (non-Cartesian worldviews) 131, 132 What is Called Thinking? (Heidegger) 158–160 Whewell Hall, Cambridge 116 Williams, B. 88

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Index

Winch, P. 95 ‘Wittgenstein and Anthropology’ (Veena Das) 58–59 Wittgenstein (film) 118–119 Wittgenstein and the Limits of Language (Hadot) 40–41 Wittgenstein’s Education: “A Picture Held us Captive” 25 Wittgenstein’s Place in the 20th-Century Analytic Philosophy (Hacker) 34 Wittgenstein’s Poker (Edmonds & Eidinow) 118 ‘Wittgenstein’s Reception in America’ (Garver) 36–37

Wittgenstein’s Vienna (Toulmin & Janik) 13; philosophy of science 18; reading ethics 35–36 Woolgar, S. 16 World Views: From Fragmentation to Integration (Aerts et al.) 129 The World as Will and Representation (Schopenhauer) 31 Worldview: The History of a Concept (Naugle) 133 Wörterbuch für Volksschullen 143 writing as spiritual life 122–123 Zettel (Bartley) 144 Zilsel, K. 143