WITTGENSTEIN=S METHODS: TO TRAIN US IN NEW TECHNOLOGIES OF THE SELF

 

AThe aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something B because it is always before one=s eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck him. - And this means; we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful@ (1953, no.129).

 

A... it is not that before you can understand it you need to be specially trained in abstruse matters, but the contrast between understanding the subject and what most people want to see. Because of this the very things which are most obvious may become the hardest of all to understand. What has to be overcome is a difficulty having to do with the will, rather than with the intellect@ (CV, 1980, p.17).

 

AA main source of our failure to understand is that we do not command a clear view of our use of words. - Our grammar is lacking in this sort of perspicuity. A perspicuous representation [portrayal] produces just that understanding which consists in >seeing connections=. Hence the importance of finding and inventing intermediate cases.@ (1953, no.122).

 

Such an understanding need not lead to any new theories, but to the kind of practical understanding which enables us to be more >at home= within our own cultural creations, to know our Away about@ (no. 123) within them, and thus to avoid being at cross-purposes both with each other and with ourselves.

 

AIt is the business of philosophy, not to resolve a contradiction by means of a mathematical or logico-mathematical 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... The fundamental fact here is that we lay down rules, a technique, for a game, and then when we follow the rules, things do not turn out as we had assumed. That we are therefore as it were entangled in our own rules. This entanglement in our own rules is what we what to understand (i.e.. get a clear view of)...@ (PI, no.125).

 

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AIn logic we do not want to know how the understanding is and how thinks and how it hitherto has proceeded in thinking, but how it ought to proceed in thinking. Logic must teach us the correct use of the understanding, i.e., that in which it is in agreement with itself@ (Kant (1974) Logic, trans. Robert S. Hartman and Wolfgang Schwartz. Indianapolis and New York, p.16).

 

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First, let us note a remark of Wittgenstein=s (1980): AWorking in philosophy....is really more a working on oneself... On one=s way of seeing things. (And what one expects of them.) (CV, 1980, p.16).

 

          Wittgenstein=s project here is similar to Foucault=s (1984), outlined in his discussion of Kant=s 1784 essay: AWhat is Enlightenment?@ Foucault first notes that AKant... characterizes Enlightenment as a process that releases us from the status of >immaturity=. And by >immaturity=, he means a certain state of our will that makes us accept someone else=s authority to lead us in areas where the use of reason is called for...@ (p.34, my emphasis, cf. Wittgenstein, 1980, p.17 quoted above ).

 

AThinking back on Kant's text, I wonder whether we may not envisage modernity rather as an attitude than as a period of history .And by "attitude," I mean a mode of relating to contemporary reality; a voluntary choice made by certain people; in the end, a way of thinking and feeling; a way, too, of acting and behaving that at one and the same time marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a task. A bit, no doubt, like what the Greeks called an ethos... To characterize briefly this attitude of modernity,  I shall take an almost indispensable example, namely, Baudelaire; for his consciousness of modernity is widely recognized as one of the most acute in the nineteenth century@ (p.39)...

 

Why Baudelaire?

 

AModernity is often characterized in term of consciousness of the discontinuity of time: a break with tradition, of vertigo in the face of the passing moment. And this is indeed what Baudelaire seems to be saying when he defines modernity as Athe ephemeral., the fleeting, the contingent.@ But, for him, being modern does not lie in recognizing and accepting the perpetual movement; on the contrary, it lies in adopting a certain attitude with respect to this movement; and this deliberate, difficult attitude consists in recapturing something eternal that is not beyond the present instant, nor behind it, but within it@ (p.39, my emphasis).

 

Our task is, then, not to provide any new information or knowledge of facts, but to train ourselves in a new Aattitude@ (in Foucault=s sense) toward our surroundings, to relate or orient ourselves toward them in a new way. In other words, we are not seeking to explain anything, but to leave everything as it is - for we want to know >what= we are talking of when we are talking of Athe workings@ of our language. Our task is simply to notice what has not been noticed before:

 

S                      A... it is, rather, of the essence of our investigation that we do not seek to learn anything new by it. We want to understand something that is already in plain view. For this is what we seem in some sense not to understand@ (1953, no.89).

S                      AWe must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place. [For] 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 spite of an urge to misunderstand them@ (1953, no.109).

S                      AThe problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known@ (1953, no.109).

S                      APhilosophy 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@ (1953, no.124).

S                      ANothing is hidden@ (1953, no.435)

 

So, what can we do? We can give reminders - for they can draw our attention to something that would otherwise pass us by unnoticed.

 

S                      ASomething that we know when no one asks us, but no longer know when we are supposed to give an account of it [cf. Augustine - on >time=], is something we need to remind ourselves of@ (1953, no.89).

S                      AWe feel as if we had to penetrate phenomena: our investigation, however, is not directed towards phenomena, but, as one might say, towards the >possibilities= of phenomena. We remind ourselves, that is to say, of the kind of statement that we make about phenomena@ (1953, no.90, my italics).

S                      AWhen philosophers use a word - >knowledge=, >being=, >object=, >I=, >proposition=, >name= - and try to grasp the essence of the thing,@ he comments, Aone must 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@ (1953, no.116).

 

A >social poetics=: the >methods=, the >therapies=

 

AIt is not our aim to refine or complete the system of rules for the use of our words in unheard-of ways. For the clarity that we are aiming at is indeed complete clarity. But this simply means that the philosophical problems should completely disappear. The real discovery is the one that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy when I want to. - The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself in question. - Instead, we now demonstrate a method, by examples; and the series of examples can be broken off. - Problems are solved (difficulties eliminated), not a single problem@ (no.133),

 

AThere is not a philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, like different therapies@ (1953, no.133).

 

S                      i) noticing in practice: Agiving prominence to distinctions which our ordinary forms of language easily make us overlook@ (no. 132): >stop= >look=, >listen to this=, >look at that= (breaking routine ways of responding by pointing out features of the flow from within the flow) (no. 144).

 

The point here is to arrest or interrupt (or >deconstruct=) the spontaneous, unself-conscious flow of our ongoing activity, and to give Aprominence to distinctions which our ordinary forms of language easily make us overlook@ (1953, no.132).

 

S                      ii) new connections and relations: Aa picture held us captive@ (no. 115): the use new metaphors to reveal new possible connections and relations between events hidden by the dead metaphors in routine forms of talk.

 

By the careful use of selected images, similes, analogies, metaphors, or >pictures=, he also suggests new ways of talking that not only orient us toward sensing otherwise unnoticed distinctions and relations for the first time, but which also suggest new connections and relations with the rest of our proceedings.

 

AI wanted to put that picture before him, and his acceptance of the picture consists in his now being inclined to regard a given case differently: that is, to compare it with this rather than that set of pictures. I have changed his way of looking at things@ (1953, no.144).

 

S                      iii) continue to gather examples: Adon=t think, but look!@... Aand the result of this examination is: we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing@ (no. 66);

 

S                      iv) bring some order to our experiences by making comparisons using (sometimes invented) Aobjects of comparison which are meant to throw light on the facts of our language by way not only of similarities but dissimilarities A (no. 130);

S                      v) this will help us Ato  establish an order in our knowledge of the use of language: an order with a particular end in view [so that we can all participate in discussions toward that end]; one out of many possible orders, not the order@ (no. 132);

 

Other possible ways of talking, other Alanguage games@ both actual and invented, suggest other relational dimensions.

 

S                      vi) our task is not to see something behind or underlying appearances, but to see Asomething that lies open to view and that becomes surveyable by a rearrangement@ (no. 92) -- the depths are on the surface (in the relations we can learn to see between features as we survey the scene before us)!.

 

Indeed, the aim of all these moves is to achieve a Aperspicuous representation@ {Ger: übersichlichte Darstellung}, an >inner= way of surveying a sequence of experiences (as if they were moments of fixation in one=s visual scanning over a landscape) with the aim of producing Ajust that understanding which consists in >seeing connections=@ (no. 122). Here:

 

AOur thought here marches with certain views of Goethe=s which he expressed in the Metamorphosis of Plants... [Goethe=s] conception of the original plant [Ürpflanze] implies no hypothesis about the temporal development of the vegetable kingdom such as that of Darwin. What then is the problem solved by this idea? It is the problem of synoptic presentation. Goethe=s aphorism >All the organs of plants are leaves transformed= offers us a plan in which we may group the organs of plants according to their similarities as if around some natural center... We follow this sensuous transformation of type by linking up the leaf though intermediate forms with the other organs of the plant.

That is precisely what we are doing here. We are collating one form of language with its environment, or transforming it in imagination so as to gain a view of the whole space in which the structure of our language has its being@ (Waismann, 1965, pp.80‑ 81).

 

Such an understanding leads to a Avisibly-rational-and-reportable@ (Garfinkel, 1967, p.vii), practical understanding of the Asocially standardized and standardizing, >seen but unnoticed=, expected, background features of everyday scenes@ (ibid, p.37), enabling us to be more >at home= within our own cultural creations, to know our Away about@ (no. 123) within them, and thus to avoid becoming  Aas it were, entangled in our own rules@ ( no. 125). The remarks which draw our attention to the previously unnoticed features of our lives together, Wittgenstein calls Areminders@ (no. 89) because they direct attention to Awhat we have always known@ (no. 109): about our relations to our circumstances; about how we intertwine our activities in with those of others; about how we make sense of our surroundings, and create living relationships. Rather than information, they provide orientation.

 

ADisquiet in philosophy might be said to arise from looking at philosophy wrongly, seeing it wrong, namely as if it were divided into (infinite) longitudinal strips instead of into (finite) cross strips. This inversion of our conception produces the greatest difficulty. So we try as it were to grasp the unlimited strips and complain that it cannot be done piecemeal. To be sure it cannot, if by a piece one means an infinite longitudinal strip. But it may well be done, if one means a cross-strip. - But in that case we never get to the end of our work! - Of course not, for it has no end. (We want to replace wild conjectures and explanations by the quiet weighing of linguistic facts) (1981, no.447).