How To Undo Things With Words: Wittgenstein and Heidegger on the Dissolution of Philosophical Problems David Egan Draft version for Wittgenstein Workshop January 16, 2015 1. Introduction Although they worked in different philosophical traditions, and seemed mostly ignorant of one another’s work,1 the Wittgenstein of Philosophical Investigations and the Heidegger of Being and Time exhibit striking similarities, in terms of both their aims and method. These similarities are all the more striking when we consider how different they are from one another on the level of style: Wittgenstein’s terse aphorisms in plain language seem a world apart from Heidegger’s difficult prose, loaded with allusions to the mighty dead of the philosophical canon, coinages that forge their own new jargon, and divagations into Greek, Latin, and German etymology. And yet the similarities are there. Both Wittgenstein and Heidegger see themselves not as advancing new theories or models, but rather as trying to retrieve an understanding that we already have, but have somehow lost sight of. This understanding is lodged within our everyday lived experience, and retrieving it is difficult precisely because we are so embedded in it, like the proverbial fish who has no conception of water. Heidegger: “That which is ontically closest and well known, is ontologically the farthest and not known at all; !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 I am aware of only three instances in which Wittgenstein or Heidegger refers to the other. The best known is Wittgenstein’s remark “On Heidegger” in Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle (Waismann 1979, 68–69), which presumably is a response to “What Is Metaphysics?” (and not Being and Time, as the editor’s footnote suggests), which Carnap had recently attacked. The other two are brief remarks by Heidegger, one in Heraclitus Seminar (Heidegger and Fink 1993, 17), in which Heidegger makes passing reference to Wittgenstein to illustrate a point about extricating oneself from the hermeneutic circle, and the other in “Seminar in Le Thor 1969” (Heidegger 2003, 35), in which he misquotes the Tractatus. 1 and its ontological signification is constantly overlooked” (BT 43/69).2 And Wittgenstein: “Something that one knows when nobody asks one, but no longer know when one is asked to explain it, is something that has to be called to mind. (And it is obviously something of which, for some reason, it is difficult to call to mind)” (PI §89). If their aim is not to tell us anything new, but rather to remind us of what we already know, what stands between us and the proper acknowledgment of these reminders cannot be a lack of information, the sort of thing that could be straightforwardly supplied by assertions. Properly speaking, what stands between us and what we need to be reminded of is we ourselves: we are complicit in a kind of blindness that prevents us from seeing clearly what we already know, and part of the trouble is that we don’t even notice that we’re blind. For Wittgenstein, we persistently talk nonsense without noticing that we are talking nonsense. For Heidegger, we have lost sight of what it means to be, and we relate to the world around us, to each other, and to ourselves, as if we were primarily objects of knowledge whose properties can be discerned through scientific investigation. For both, traditional forms of philosophical investigation and expression are deeply implicated in this blindness, such that the problem is not simply that philosophy has traditionally provided the wrong answers to its questions, but that it has framed its investigations in such a way that it has asked the wrong questions. They aim not so much to solve philosophical problems as to dissolve them.3 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 2 References to Being and Time will be given as BT with the page number of the original German edition followed by the page number in Macquarrie and Robinson’s translation. I will use the following abbreviations to refer to other texts of Heidegger’s: HCT for History of the Concept of Time, BP for Basic Problems of Phenomenology, and PIA for Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle. References to Wittgenstein will be given with section numbers, and with the following abbreviations: PI for Philosophical Investigations, OC for On Certainty, and Z for Zettel. 3 See e.g. PI §133: “For the clarity that we are aiming at is indeed complete clarity. But this simply means that the philosophical problems should completely disappear.” And BT 206/250: “The ‘problem of Reality’ . . . turns out to be an impossible one . . . because the very entity which serves as its theme, is one which, as it were, repudiates any such formulation of the question.” 2 In other words, and despite the radical stylistic differences I remarked on above, their unusual and distinctive styles have similar aims: both Wittgenstein and Heidegger need to find words not of persuasion but of transformation. They don’t want to win us over to a particular point of view, but to change our sense of what it means to have a point of view. As Rush Rhees reports Wittgenstein telling him, “I don’t try to make you believe something you don’t believe, but to do something you won’t do” (Rhees 1970, 43). What Wittgenstein and Heidegger try to do is quite radical, and very difficult: if they think there is something wrong with philosophy to the extent that we have to ask behind the traditional ways of framing problems, they need not only the insight to see behind these framings, but also the language to get behind them. Furthermore, they need language that will bring their readers with them. There is a frequent temptation—I speak from my own experience as a reader as much as in criticism of anyone else—to try to understand them in terms that are more familiar, more easily grasped, and this temptation often results in assimilating them to particular positions within the philosophical dialectic they are trying to get behind.4 They also face the constant danger of using language that vindicates the suspicion that they are in fact taking up a particular position within a dialectic they purport to be getting behind. And therein lies a challenge: they have to find a form of expression to get behind the problems they have inherited, and it has to be a form of expression that tempts neither them nor their readers into interpreting them as contributing to these problems instead. To telegraph the point I am moving toward, I think Wittgenstein is more successful in this regard than Heidegger. And despite the striking similarities in method that I’ve remarked upon, I think Wittgenstein’s greater success is due to a difference in method. One way to highlight this difference in method is to note a difference in each philosopher’s !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 4 Wittgenstein frequently invokes the language of temptation, especially in dialogue with his interlocutor. And if Cavell (1976, 71) is right in reading the Investigations in the confessional mode (and I think this way of reading Wittgenstein is indeed quite fruitful), Wittgenstein is as much subject to the temptation to assimilate his views to familiar problematics as his readers. 3 terms of criticism, to borrow an expression frequently used by Stanley Cavell. Heidegger’s language of deficient, inauthentic, or levelled off forms of understanding differ markedly from Wittgenstein’s confusions and temptations: his criticisms are more condemnatory, the prospect of redemption seems more remote.5 One expression provides a particularly striking contrast: where Heidegger frequently appeals to more authentic modes of apprehension as being “covered up” (verdeckt) and looks to what phenomenological investigation can “uncover” (entdecken), what Wittgenstein aspires to uncover isn’t truth but nonsense: “The results of philosophy are the discovery [Entdeckung] of some piece of plain nonsense and the bumps that the understanding has got by running up against the limits of language” (PI §119).6 In describing his phenomenological method, Heidegger claims that “[c]overed-up- ness [Verdecktheit] is the counter-concept to ‘phenomenon’” (BT 36/60), and says that the phenomenon “is something that lies hidden [verborgen]” (BT 35/59), whereas, for Wittgenstein, “nothing is concealed [verborgen]” (PI §435). For Heidegger, there is something more primordial, more authentic that we need to discover, whereas for Wittgenstein, discovery consists in exposing nothing where we thought we saw something.7 The differences I remarked upon in the previous paragraph—not only their differing sense of what their investigations uncover, but also the greater pessimism implicit in Heidegger’s terms of criticism—stem, I think, from Wittgenstein’s greater faith in ordinary language. For Heidegger, ordinary language is complicit in the cover-up of the more primordial understanding of being that he seeks to bring to light: his own difficult prose seeks precisely to dislodge the prejudices we inherit from our ordinary forms of speech and !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 5 I want to draw attention to differences in their terms of criticism, but I should also note that there are similarities: both find forms of expression or understanding empty and frequently call attention to misundestandings. Heidegger’s critical talk of indeterminacy and undifferentiation is similar to Wittgenstein’s emphasis on noticing differences between things that seem superficially the same. 6 For emphases within quotations, I use italics to preserve the author’s own emphases and boldface for my own emphases. 7 Consider also PI §133: “The real discovery [Entdeckung] is the one that enables me to break off philosophizing when I want to,” or PI §126: “The name ‘philosophy’ might also be given to what is possible before all new discoveries [Entdeckungen] and inventions.” 4 understanding. But for Wittgenstein, our deliverance lies precisely in ordinary language, and in a perspicuous grasp of how it is used. Where Heidegger tries to jolt us out of our confusion by speaking in unfamiliar language, Wittgenstein’s therapeutic work proceeds within ordinary language. In drawing out these proposals, I will start by considering the way that Wittgenstein and Heidegger attempt to dissolve one of the perennial problematics in modern philosophy: the conflict between realism and idealism. Both see this conflict as requiring dissolution rather than solution: the alleged conflict between rival positions only arises through misunderstanding. Wittgenstein sees the conflict in terms of each side insisting on a different form of expression, with no practical difference between the two. For Heidegger, the conflict relies on a subject-object model that cannot arise if we acknowledge Dasein as always already being-in-the-world. Unlike Wittgenstein’s approach, however, Heidegger’s embroils him in the difficulty of saying something positive about Dasein while also eschewing positive assertions. I will argue that his method of formal indication carries distinct disadvantages in contrast to Wittgenstein’s use of dialogue and contrast. 2. Dissolving the Problematic of Realism and Idealism I: Wittgenstein Wittgenstein remarks only briefly on the “dispute” between realism and idealism at PI §402 as part of a discussion of solipsism and the self.8 The thread that leads to this remark begins at PI §398, where Wittgenstein responds to the insistence of an interlocutor that she9 has a distinctive kind of ownership over her own imaginings. By pushing on this !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 8 These topics receive more extended treatment in the Blue Book, but the discussion there strikes me as more limited. In the Blue Book, Wittgenstein focuses almost exclusively on the idea that realists, idealists, and solipsists are insisting on different forms of expression, and on the different uses of “I” as subject and object. In Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein engages in a more nuanced and sympathetic dialectic with his interlocutor. This footnote is a good moment to commend Minar 1998, which offers a subtle reading of these passages, and a more detailed one than I provide here. 9 In order to avoid occasional ambiguities, I will use feminine pronouns to speak about Wittgenstein’s interlocutor. 5 insistence, Wittgenstein reaches a point where purported theses of realism, idealism, and solipsism cannot clearly express a substantive difference from one another. PI §398 begins with the interlocutor’s insistence that “when I imagine something, or even actually see objects, surely I have got something which my neighbour has not” (PI §398). But, Wittgenstein claims, none of her words do the work she wants them to do: “can’t one add: ‘There is here no question of a “seeing”—and therefore none of a “having”—nor of a subject, nor therefore of the I either’?” (PI §398). To speak of “having” a visual experience makes the connection between the self and the experience too weak. My relationship to my experience, unlike my relationship to my shoes, or even to my feet, is not one of having, since to talk about having something, it must be conceivable that I not have it. I can cease to have this visual experience—by turning my head, for instance. But when I turn my head, the visual experience does not then slip out of my possession as I might cease to have a penny if it falls out of my pocket. The visual experience has no existence independent of my having it, and so the transitivity of the verb “to have” is misleading. Similarly, to the extent that speaking of experience in terms of ownership is confused, so is it confused to speak of an owner. Conceiving of the visual experience of a room as the “visual room,” Wittgenstein writes: “I can as little own it as I can walk about it, or look at it, or point at it” (PI §398). Wittgenstein’s interlocutor gets muddled early on when she insists on having something “which [her] neighbour has not.” I may stand next to my neighbour, but visual experiences do not have neighbours. I cannot pick out visual experiences the way I can pick out shoes, saying that these ones are mine, but those ones are not. The visual room is an entirely different kind of thing from the sorts of things—physical rooms, for instance—that can stand in an owner-owned relationship: “One could also say: surely the owner of the visual room has to be of the same nature as it; but he isn’t inside it, and there is no outside” (PI §399). Not only are talk of “I” and “having” confused, but the familiar dichotomy of inner and outer lacks clear sense when we deal with a neighbourless experience that has no “outside.” 6 Then, responding to the idea that the visual room constitutes a discovery (Entdeckung), Wittgenstein struggles to find a more appropriate characterization, ultimately settling on “conception” (Auffassung: PI §401). Wittgenstein frequently uses Auffassung and its cognates to talk about a way of conceiving of a matter where other options are available, and no absolute criteria for correctness compel a particular choice. For instance, in exploring the uses of “simple” and “composite” in relation to one another, Wittgenstein writes that we needn’t think of the smaller parts as simple and the larger as composite, but that “we are sometimes even inclined to conceive [wir . . . geneigt sind . . . aufzufassen] the smaller as the result of a composition of greater parts, and the greater as the result of a division of the smaller” (PI §48).10 His interlocutor’s visual room is not a something that she has got, but rather constitutes an alternative way of speaking, which we can take or leave, but we shouldn’t confuse it for a discovery. Step by step, Wittgenstein works to dismantle the language with which his interlocutor struggles to give expression to her impulse. Revealingly, however, Wittgenstein does not try to shut down or refute his interlocutor, but actively encourages the dialectic: “I understand you” is his initial response at PI §398. Note that Wittgenstein does not say, “I understand what you are saying.” His interlocutor doesn’t herself know what she’s saying: what he understands isn’t the sense of a proposition, but an impulse that finds words in a confused manner. It’s true I said that I knew deep down what you meant. But that meant that I knew how one thinks to conceive this object [wie man diesen Gegenstand aufzufassen . . . meint], to see it, to gesture at it, as it were, by looking and pointing. I know how one stares ahead and looks about one in this case—and the rest. (PI §398) !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 10 See also PI §§2, 4, 20, 28, 29, 38, 58, 201, 520, 539, and 557. 7 Rather than shut down the interlocutor’s confused impulse, Wittgenstein teases it out. The endgame is not to make his interlocutor agree with him, but to help her see that they didn’t disagree about anything substantial in the first place. This dialectic with the interlocutor drives the investigation forward. Wittgenstein’s initial “I understand you” precedes an attempt to give clearer expression to the interlocutor’s insistence, and the block quotation in the previous paragraph leads Wittgenstein to the coinage of the “visual room.” When, in PI §402, his interlocutor expresses dissatisfaction with the use of “have” in characterizing our visual experiences, Wittgenstein tries to rephrase this dissatisfaction, suggesting that his interlocutor misplaces the blame in finding something suspect about our ordinary way of speaking. In this way, Wittgenstein prods his interlocutor’s initial impulse to the point where it moves from a sense of discovering new facts to a feeling of discomfort with our ordinary forms of speaking. Only at this point does Wittgenstein bring in the isms of philosophical debate: For this is what disputes between idealists, solipsists and realists look like. The one party attacks the normal form of expression as if they were attacking an assertion; the others defend it, as if they were stating facts recognized by every reasonable human being. (PI §402) For Wittgenstein, the point at which confusion creeps in—the “decisive movement in the conjuring trick” (PI §308)—is not in formulating theses of philosophical idealism, solipsism, or realism, but in the discomforts, inclinations, temptations, and pictures that accompany our ordinary use of language. His response is to work through these difficulties with his interlocutor to the point where the temptation to advance them as substantive philosophical theses subsides. 8 By reframing the temptation toward one or another philosophical thesis in terms of a dispute over forms of expression, Wittgenstein pushes us to see that, on any question of substance—on any question where actual moves in a language-game are at stake rather than disputes over the rules by which the language-game is played—realists and idealists do not disagree. He discusses this point in Zettel §§413–14: One man is a convinced realist, another a convinced idealist and teaches his children accordingly. In such an important matter as the existence or non-existence of the external world they don’t want to teach their children anything wrong. [. . .] But the idealist will teach his children the word “chair” after all, for of course he wants to teach them to do this and that, e.g. to fetch a chair. Then where will be the difference between what the idealist-educated children say and the realist ones? Won't the difference only be one of battle cry? In contrast to PI §§398–402, where Wittgenstein engages with an interlocutor struggling to give coherent expression to an impulse, the passage in Zettel imagines two antagonists who think they have full-blown philosophical positions to communicate. But in terms of what they actually do—and teach their children to do—they are no different. The difference between them boils down to empty sloganeering. In both cases, Wittgenstein does not only not try to refute his interlocutors—which would be contrary to the spirit of his investigation, as it would admit that they had advanced a positive thesis that could be contradicted—but he actively encourages them, working with the interlocutor of PI §§398–402 toward some articulation of her view and imagining a life for the realist and idealist of Zettel §§413–14. This encouragement is central to Wittgenstein’s method: he doesn’t play the role of language police, telling people to stop saying the wrong things, but rather develops what they’re saying to the point where it loses 9 the force it initially appeared to have. Only by working through these views can we emerge with a clear sense of how little they amount to. And indeed, only by working through these views can we get a clear sense of where the confusion lies: But is it an adequate answer to the scepticism of the idealist, or the assurances of the realist, to say that “There are physical objects” is nonsense? For them after all it is not nonsense. It would, however, be an answer to say: this assertion, or its opposite is a misfiring attempt to express what can't be expressed like that. And that it does misfire can be shown; but that isn't the end of the matter. We need to realize that what presents itself to us as the first expression of a difficulty, or of its solution, may as yet not be correctly expressed at all. Just as one who has a just censure of a picture to make will often at first offer the censure where it does not belong, and an investigation is needed in order to find the right point of attack for the critic. (OC §37) For Wittgenstein, both the nature of the confusion, and the method of resolving the confusion, emerge in a dialogue for which there is no clear starting point and no pre- determined ending. Terms of criticism like “nonsense” or “misfire” are not in themselves sufficient, but rather emerge in a dialectic in which the appropriate terms of criticism are not given in advance. 3. Dissolving the Problematic of Realism and Idealism II: Heidegger My reading of Wittgenstein emphasized his attitude of encouragement rather than refutation in response to his interlocutor, and the way that this encouragement aims to uncover what seems to be a dispute about metaphysical facts as in fact a dispute over forms of expression, which has no bearing on what the disputants actually do. The text of PI 10