Resolute Reading
What is it to read Wittgenstein resolutely? In this essay, I make a suggestion about how to answer that question. I backtrack in time to a debate about Philosophical Investigations (PI) between O. K. Bouwsma and Gilbert Ryle. I selectively reconstruct that debate, highlighting features of it that I take to be interesting in their own right and in relation to debates about PI, but also interesting in analogy with debates about resolute and standard readings of Tractatus logico-philosophicus (TLP). As will be clear, my sympathies are with Bouwsma against Ryle, and with resolute readers against standard readers. But I do not vindicate Bouwsma; I will, in fact, be critical, carefully or guardedly critical of him.
Nor do I vindicate resolute reading of TLP. I suggest a way of seeing resolute reading that makes clearer what it is and how it contrasts with standard reading, and, in so doing, that makes clearer what some of the difficulties of the debate between the readings really are, whether about TLP or about PI.
On Kierkegaard: I represent a life for you & now see how you relate to it, whether it tempts (urges) you to live like that as well, or what other relation to it you attain. Through this representation I would like to as it were loosen up your life.
—Wittgenstein
This book, though to many this affirmation will appear strange, is really an edifying book . . . for one who has the predisposition to let himself be edified by a reading which is in other respects laborious.
—Kierkegaard [End Page 101]
1. INTRODUCTION
Resolute reading of Tractatus logico-philosophicus (TLP) exerts a willy-nilly but mesmeric fascination. Its proponents try to materialize it; its opponents try to prevent its materialization. We all know about food fights. But this is a recipe fight. Before the cake has been baked, indeed before the batter battered, the bakers fall on each other, rending and tearing.
Well, okay, so it is not quite as bad as all that. But it is bad, bad enough. Perhaps the worst of it is the peculiar character of the debate. How is it to end? What are the conditions of winning? What kind of debate is it, really? What is it to read resolutely?
In what follows, I make a suggestion about how to answer the last question, and that suggestion will in its turn yield suggestions about how to answer the others. Let me reiterate: I am making suggestions, not dogmatizing, about how to answer. My hope is to be helpful.
Here is how I provide help: I backtrack in time to a debate about Philosophical Investigations (PI) between O. K. Bouwsma and Gilbert Ryle. I selectively reconstruct that debate, highlighting features of it that I take to be interesting in their own right and in relation to debates about PI, but also interesting in analogy with debates about resolute and standard readings of TLP. As will be clear, my sympathies are with Bouwsma against Ryle, and with resolute readers against standard readers. But I do not vindicate Bouwsma; I will, in fact, be critical, carefully or guardedly critical, of him, but not in ways that reflect sympathy with Ryle. (I have a certain sympathy for Ryle too, but it will not be reflected much in what follows—and at any rate, that sympathy is not for Ryle’s conclusions.)
Nor do I vindicate resolute reading of TLP. I suggest a way of seeing resolute reading that makes clearer what it is and how it contrasts with standard reading, and, in so doing, that makes clearer what some of the difficulties of the debate between the readings really are, whether about TLP or about PI.
My understanding of TLP will not be stated at length, explicitly. I aim for it to be suggested primarily by what I do say explicitly about Bouwsma and Ryle’s debate over PI. So, this essay consists of two parts, a long (PI) and a short (TLP), with the long part meant to suggest how to lengthen the short part. The short part is not the most important part of the essay, despite its station at the end; but it is important, and I do not want it to be minimized because it is short.
What I say on Bouwsma and Ryle and PI stands on its own, even while it suggests points, mutatis mutandis, about the debate between resolute and standard readers of TLP. The debate between Bouwsma and Ryle provides a ponderable object of comparison to the TLP debate. But if I am wrong about that, it need not invalidate my understanding of the debate between Bouwsma and Ryle, or about resolute reading of PI. Ultimately, I hope to make clearer what resolute reading is.
In what I say about Bouwsma, I will be working outward, away from the details of his view, and by using Ryle I will eventually sketch a more reflexive version of [End Page 102] Bouwsma’s reading of PI; and, what I have to say by way of criticism of Bouwsma will be said in the effort of sketching that version. Along the way, the more reflexive version of Bouwsma’s reading—which I will call subjective reading—will involve me in complexities that I cannot enter into fully: complexities about the meta-philosophical remarks of PI, about the voices of PI, about the structure of PI. But I will try in each case to respond usefully, even if only partially, to the complexity. Again—my goal is to be helpful, not to pretend that any buck stops with me, with what I say. I am sure others will come along and do better. (Who knows, maybe even I will, perhaps my vegetable understanding of PI will grow, if I am granted world enough and time? However that goes, I am reasonably sure that what I say is worth saying, as long as I say it reasonably well, and so it will retain value, even after it has been passed by.)
2. BOUWSMA V. RYLE: READING PI
The contributions of Bouwsma and Ryle to their debate are unequal. Bouwsma’s essay is fairly long, complex. Ryle’s response to it is short, fairly simple. I will spend more time on Bouwsma than on Ryle. What I am concerned to do primarily is to understand Bouwsma’s side of the debate. I will need to consider Ryle’s in order to do that, but I will not devote the attention to Ryle’s side that I do to Bouwsma’s.
Bouwsma’s tack on the question of PI is to contrast it with Ryle’s Concept of Mind. So he begins his description of PI by offering an imaginary introduction to it, modeled on but in marked contrast to Ryle’s introduction to Concept of Mind.
2.1. bouwsma: a certain warfare
From Bouwsma’s imaginary introduction:
This book offers what may, I think, be described with reservations, not at all as a theory of mind, in fact as no theory at all. It gives us no new information. We are well enough provided with information in the form of language to serve as the field of our confusions. It contains no arguments at all. There are no proofs. It rectifies nothing. There is nothing to rectify. There are no refutations. What then does the book do? It furnishes us with the rudiments of a certain warfare, instructs us in the use of certain instruments, instruments with which we are already furnished. Besides, it furnishes us with exercises, exercises without end, war games. And to what purpose? That we may perfect our skill in the warfare against our own confusions.1
Let’s consider this.
Bouwsma understands PI as a book-sans-theory. It is not in the business of informing its readers of anything new. All the information—if we may so call it—all the information a reader needs is already his in virtue of his capacity to write and read, to listen and talk, in virtue of his being a producer and consumer of [End Page 103] language. Wittgenstein is not arguing for anything; after all, if the book contains no theory and is not in the information business, what place would argument have in the book? Ditto proofs. Wittgenstein is not writing to correct anyone or to refute any argument or proof. But then what is there for the book to do? What is its business? What is it about?
Bouwsma’s answer is martial: The book provides the “rudiments of a certain warfare”—the warfare against our own confusions. Rudiments: Bouwsma does not take Wittgenstein to be providing anything beyond a beginning, beyond a beginning of instruction. To progress beyond the beginning is up to the reader: and in this book, something is left to the reader, something, always. Wittgenstein helps the reader to find a way; it is up to the reader to take it, to make his or her own pilgrim’s progress along it. We come to the book already burdened by our own confusions. But Wittgenstein is not trying to set those right for us. We will have to do that for ourselves. Our confusions are, like our sins, something we can only find for ourselves, since it is only when we find them that they have been found, even if everyone else knew about them before. So Wittgenstein cannot find them and cannot set them right. The ties that bind us in and to our confusions hold us with the strength of our own freedom. We are the ones who must then be ranged against those confusions. They are cut to our measure, not to anyone else’s. Still, our confusions are not just ours; none of us is unique. We have to find our confusions and we have to fight them, but others can profit from lessons we have learned in fighting. My confusions are mine to find, mine to fight; but my confusion and yours may be similarly (mis) shaped, may be similarly treated, may be similarly caused. So what I have learnt in fighting can be of use to you, so long as you do not forget to lard in any necessary mutatis mutandis ditto. So long as you do your part for yourself. Bouwsma continues:
Wittgenstein might have had all these thoughts and might have made all these remarks, have enjoyed the thoughts, and have perfected the remarks, and thrown them out the window. He did not. Why not? They were kept for us. I am not going to suggest a reason. He was concerned to teach us a skill. Quite early he invented a skill. Whether he discovered himself practicing it and then reflected on what he was doing, and so discovered the skill, perhaps someone knows. Two things are involved. There is the practice of the skill and the teaching of the skill. In the teaching there is also practice. Not only does one learn by doing but one also teaches by doing. But in teaching one must, besides exercising the skill, explain what one is doing, lead someone into doing it, prepare the way, nudge one into taking part, and so on. Accordingly, this is how I am regarding this book. In this book, Wittgenstein teaches a skill.2
For Bouwsma, the book is devoted to the purification of war, ad bellum purificandum. The book teaches us warfare—a warfare against ourselves, against our own confusions.
Thus Bouwsma.
One crucial feature of Bouwsma’s reading, a feature Ryle will predictably pounce on, is that the book “contains no arguments at all.” We will have to figure out what that means. But before we do, I want to look at Ryle’s response to Bouwsma. [End Page 104]
2.2. ryle: a soothing bedside murmur
Ryle’s response is vintage Ryle.
Well!—what of the Wittgenstein who got us interested, fascinated, excited, angry, shocked? He electrified us. Whom did he ever tranquillize? Like Wittgenstein, Bouwsma shudders at the idea that the philosopher has theories. Very well, let us relinquish to the Royal Society this vulgar noun. But Bouwsma’s primness gets the better of him when he, abetted by Wittgenstein, says of the PI, “. . . not at all as a theory of mind, in fact as no theory at all . . . It contains no arguments at all. There are no proofs. It rectifies nothing. There is nothing to rectify. There are no refutations.” . . . No theory of mind? No refutations or corrections of mistakes? Yet Wittgenstein declares that quite definite mistakes had been committed by St. Augustine, Russell, and the author of the TLP. Nothing to rectify? Yet Bouwsma quotes, “The philosopher’s treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness” (255). No arguments? Yet, “that is to confound the meaning of a name with the bearer of the name. When Mr. N. N. dies one says that the bearer of the name dies, not that the meaning dies. And it would be nonsensical to say that, for (denn) if the name ceased to have meaning it would make no sense to say Mr. N. N. is dead” (40). No arguments? Yet, “You say the point isn’t the word, but its meaning, and you think of the meaning as a thing of the same kind as the word, though also different from the word. Here the word, there the meaning. The money and the cow you can buy with it. (But contrast, the money and its use.)” (120) No arguments? Yet, “I remember having meant him. Am I remembering a process or a state?—When did it begin, what was its course, etc.?” (661) No arguments? But lots of Wittgenstein’s wearisome interrogatives are, like this last one, the rhetorically barbed conclusions of reductio ad absurdum arguments. The clang of Wittgenstein’s metal against the metals of Frege, Ramsey, Brouwer, Moore, and the author of the Tractatus is here muted to a soothing bedside murmur.3
Thus Ryle.
Ryle does not just pounce; he pounces, pounces, pounces, pounces.
2.3. anything but argument? subjectivity and objectivity
What is Bouwsma doing—denying that there are arguments in the book? I believe Bouwsma is working with a conception of the book that makes it the case that it does not contain arguments, at least as Ryle would understand that idea.
2.3.1. Bouwsma’s How-To Reading
Reconsider Bouwsma’s imaginary introduction. There, what he says is that PI contains exercises, “exercises without end, war games.” What Ryle reads as arguments, in particular as arguments leading to conclusions that we are to understand as stated in Wittgenstein’s voice, Bouwsma reads as exercises, war games. If you want to say, “But, look, Bouwsma, those ‘war games’ are arguments; they are argumentative,” I do not think Bouwsma would object or demur. But I think he would dispute [End Page 105] taking that to mean what Ryle would take it to mean. He would dispute treating the relevant passages as arguments leading to conclusions stated in Wittgenstein’s voice, as arguments that secure Wittgenstein’s ‘results’. For Bouwsma, and shifting to another of his metaphors, the passages form an obstacle course on which we can develop the skills that Wittgenstein is concerned to teach. And that is what he is concerned to teach—skills, methods. Treating the passages as securing Wittgenstein’s conclusions would be to turn the passages from war games into war—the clang of Wittgenstein’s metal against the metal of others. For Bouwsma, PI is a how-to book, and he reads it in that way, as structured in that way. It tells its reader how to do something and then it provides the reader with exercises in which the skill is first acquired and then further honed. But the exercises, although constructed by Wittgenstein purposefully, were not for the purpose of establishing conclusions. They had another purpose: training.
But there is more to Bouwsma’s how-to reading than this. Bouwsma also understands PI as doing more than training the reader. It also aims at changing its reader.
Wittgenstein was not thinking of what he was doing as correcting mistakes. It was not mistakes, but an urge, a bewitchment, a fascination, a deep disquietude, a captivity, a disorientation, illusions, confusions—these, the troubles of the mixed-up intelligence, that Wittgenstein sought to relieve. I have emphasized that Wittgenstein’s interest was not in any particular problem but in the bothered individual, particularly in the hot and bothered.4
Bouwsma’s stress on Wittgenstein’s stress on the individual—it matters centrally. We might say that Wittgenstein focuses not on the philosophical problem itself, but rather on his own, and thus his reader’s, relationship to the problem. Borrowing the distinction between the objective and subjective from Kierkegaard’s Johannes Climacus, we can say that Wittgenstein, as Bouwsma understands him, is writing subjectively, writing so as to be read subjectively.
2.3.2. Kierkegaard’s Objectivity and Subjectivity
Let me make this distinction clearer.
The distinction bears on the object or on the relation of the subject to the object. A category is objective if what matters, all that matters, is the object; subjective, if what matters is the relation to the object. The aesthetic is the category of the object. It is the category of disengaged, disinterested reflection. The ethical and the religious are the categories of the relation of the subject to the object. They are the categories that bear on the character of the subject’s concern with the object. In the category of the aesthetic, a subject relates himself to an object so that emphasis falls on the object itself and not on his relationship to it. But in the category of the ethical or of the religious, the emphasis falls on his relationship to the object and not on the object: the relationship is interested. A subject’s relationship to an object is interested if it is tied to his task of becoming the sort of person he hopes to become or to his task of living his life in accordance with what is valuable. [End Page 106] This is why Johannes Climacus (Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous author) says that a relationship is objective when the what is accented, subjective when the how is accented. To note the accent in a relationship is neither to praise nor to condemn the relationship, at least not in and of itself.5
Here, for the sake of clarity, it is important to keep to the following ‘principle’: Always sharply to separate Climacus’s objective/subjective distinction from Frege’s objective/subjective distinction. Frege’s distinction is, we might say, broadly an epistemological distinction; Climacus’s is broadly an existential one. This is hard sometimes to keep straight because it can seem that the ‘objective’ side of each distinction is the same, making it seem as though the ‘subjective’ side should be too. Or, it is hard sometimes to keep straight because it can seem that Climacus’s distinction is itself simply a sub-distinction between two different ‘objective’ topics, and so a sub-distinction of the ‘objective’ side of Frege’s distinction; and then it can look as though both Climacus’s ‘objective’ and his ‘subjective’ contrast with Frege’s ‘subjective’.
2.3.3. A Cavellian ‘Clarification’
To understand better the possible confusions that concern me, note the following passage from Cavell:
We know of the efforts of such philosophers as Frege and Husserl to undo the “psychologizing” of logic (like Kant’s undoing Hume’s psychologizing of knowledge): now, the shortest way I might describe such a book as [PI] is to say that it attempts to undo the psychologizing of psychology, to show the necessity controlling our application of psychological and behavioral categories; even, one could say, show the necessities in human action and passion themselves. And at the same time it seems to turn all of philosophy into psychology—matters of what we call things, how we treat them, what their role is in our lives.6
A tricky passage: the trickiness clusters around the term ‘psychology’. What does that term mean as Cavell uses it in the passage? Does he use it to mean what Frege meant when he contrasted logic and psychology? Clearly not. That would be psychologized psychology. So what is depsychologized psychology? Pretty clearly not what is studied in departments of psychology, even if we do not think of them as doing psychologized psychology. Whatever Cavell has in mind, it is something with ‘necessities’, with a ‘logic’, with an ‘algebra’ (Swenson: Kierkegaard’s “algebra of the passions”). But does that mean that Cavell’s psychology rates as ‘objective’, in Frege’s sense?
As an answer to that question, I want to mull over Cavell’s final sentence, about PI seeming to turn all of philosophy into psychology: a similar charge might be leveled at Climacus: by writing subjectively, to be read subjectively, has he not abandoned philosophy for psychology? (A question hard to ignore, really, and, I submit, asked and answered affirmatively by many Kierkegaardian commentators who rate him a psychologist.) But notice what Cavell goes on to list: calling, treating, roles. And it is not just calling, treating, or roles that matter, but our calling, [End Page 107] our treating, the roles in our lives. You might say that these ‘objectivities’, if we call them that, find their proper significance in Wittgenstein’s investigations (or in Climacus’s) if they are owned, acknowledged, by us, by me. They are to be tested against our lives, and our lives tested against them. What we call things, how we treat them, their roles in our lives—these find their proper significance only when I understand that they are not to be simply ‘objectified’, but that they are to be ‘subjectified’, when I understand them, in a suitably active sense, as structuring my own life: but, the difficulty with that is that these structures are not such that I can renew live, gravid intimacy with them at will, and so the remarks that register them are always in danger of losing their proper significance, of lacking the urgent personal content and contact with my life that makes them worth registering at all. For example, simply knowing that, given our lives (“given our world”: Cavell), love or hope cannot be felt for “the space of one second” (PI 583) matters only if my life is one in which love or hope is meaningfully present or absent, in which love or hope matter, matter to me, and in which I can be confused about my loving or hoping, or failing to love or to hope. These ‘objectivities’ matter for the sake of ‘subjectivity’. It is worth bearing in mind, further, that among the things that I may come to know is that there are limits to the ‘objectification’ of ‘subjectivity’, that some attempts at ‘objectification’ forestall or infect the subjectivity I aim to be, can despoil my subjectivity. What we need not to lose track of is that these ‘objectivities’ are first and foremost acknowledged (or not). And we need to remember what Cavell says about acknowledgment:
[T]he concept of acknowledgment is evidenced equally by its failure as by its success. It is not a description of a given response, but a category in terms of which a given response is evaluated. (It is the sort of concept Heidegger calls an existentiale.) A “failure to know” might just mean a piece of ignorance, an absence of something, a blank. A “failure to acknowledge” is the presence of something, a confusion, an indifference, a callousness, an exhaustion, a coldness. Spiritual emptiness is not a blank.7
PI is confessional partly by engaging its reader’s capacity to acknowledge. It calls on its reader and its reader can respond or not, but will in either case be ‘judged’. For in the face of such a book, a failure to be responsive is the presence, not the absence, of something; it is not a blank but is a form of spiritual emptiness. The book is written as, or aims to be written as, a poetic composition because, among other things, it would make us grateful for itself in the way we are grateful for poetry: for its providing us with forms of words for expressing acknowledgments, forms of words we can trust for such expression. For example: “My attitude toward him is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul” (PI, 178). That acknowledgment is the category of evaluation for response to these ‘objectivities’ makes it the case that they are not simply Fregean ‘objectivities’. Failing to know what PI teaches is not like failing to know other things, like phone numbers, or still other things, like how many sense-data can dance on the head of Russell’s pen. But all this is getting me well ahead of my story. [End Page 108]
2.3.4. More on Kierkegaard’s Distinction
Let me pause so as to further contextualize my use of Climacus’s terms. A number of commentators on PI testify to, and struggle to understand, the ‘ethically charged’ nature of the book. Although there is little, if anything, in the book on ethics, as that subject is typically understood in philosophy, it seems to some commentators to be true nonetheless that the book—all of it—is on ethics, or is ethics, or makes ethical demands, or . . . something . . . ethical. My own view is that there is something deeply ethical, even ‘religious’, about the book. But I think this is ‘in’ the way it is written, ‘in’ its being written subjectively. The book is written so as to bring us into a particular sort of subjective relationship to philosophical problems and with ourselves, and, as such, it is (I will say) personally demanding in much the way that a certain kind of ethico-religious writing (Kierkegaard’s) is personally demanding. The book throws us back on ourselves, on our way of relating to philosophical problems. It will not let us treat the problems objectively, or purely so. Who each of us is, the individual each of us is, is at least as much at issue as the problems are, and is not independent of the issue of the problems. PI is an edifying book.
I will dwell on this for a moment.
To call a piece of writing “edifying” or to call it “advice,” etc., is not yet to have decided the issue between calling it objective or calling it subjective. If I tell someone: “You should know God and enjoy him forever,” it is possible that I am using the words objectively. If I am, then I am stating what I take to be a fact about you. Given how I am using the words, I will expect you to take what I have said objectively: You will take me to have stated what I take to be a fact about you. You will, if you concern yourself further with what I have said, judge whether it is true or false, or probably true or probably false. Should you judge it to be true or probably true, then you will believe what I have said. What matters in this is that your relation to my statement, and its stages, are like your relation to another objective statement like, say, “There are 3,000 species of butterflies.” Given how I am using those words, I will expect you to take what I have said objectively. True, you are not the object, as you were in the first case, but that makes no essential difference. You will, if you concern yourself further with what I have said, judge whether it is true or false, or probably true or false. Should you judge it to be true or probably true, then you will believe what I have said.
Compare this to what I have been saying. In St. James’ Epistle (2: 19) we find:
Thou believes that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble. But will thou know, O vain man, that faith without works is dead?
I am particularly interested in the believing devils. A natural first reading of the passage suggests that the believing devils and the (believing) Christian share a common factor—a belief that there is one God. The Christian differs from the devils in adding something to the common factor—say, adding works—or perhaps adding works plus adding other things, say, loving God. But on a second reading, the common factor looks like a misunderstanding. The devils’ belief and the [End Page 109] Christian’s are different beliefs; they are different sorts of beliefs. The devils’ belief that there is one God is objective. The Christian’s belief is subjective. The devils’ belief is in no way tied to the kind of person, if I may use that term, they hope to become. Their fear is not a fear of failing in the task of becoming the kind of person they hope to become, but is rather a fear of a powerful being, like our fear of a natural disaster, a hurricane, tornado, or earthquake. The devils hear “There is one God” much as you heard “There are 3,000 species of butterflies.” Call the form of words “You should believe that there is one God” edifying, or call it advice, but the form of words does not self-classify as objective or as subjective. So to classify requires that we consider the devils’ and the Christian’s use of, relationship to, the form of words.8
It may help to clarify what I have in mind if I point out that the ‘you’ in a “You should believe there is one God” may be used in either as a genuine address to a particular person, that is, second personally, or can be used simply as a placeholder, addressed to no one in particular. Call this the ‘third-person’ use of ‘you’. (To call you by name is not the same as mentioning you by name.) When the form of words “You should believe that there is one God” is used subjectively, the ‘you’ tends to be second personal: A particular person, as the particular person he is, is being spoken to. But when the form of words is used objectively, the ‘you’ is often ‘third person’. No one in particular, as the particular person he is, is being spoken to. Should the devils James mentions be spoken to subjectively, it would be clear that they do not believe—do not have the relevant sort of belief. Their belief is not of the sort that can be caught up in a subjective discussion; they are not engaged in the task of becoming a certain kind of person.
2.4. the individual
I want to return to the idea that PI is addressed to the individual. This idea is thematized in Bouwsma. Bouwsma treats this focus on the individual as a deeply important contrast with Ryle.
Bouwsma understands Wittgenstein to be interested, not just in the individual, but the individual additionally individuated by his or her being “hot and bothered”—troubled, we might say. He is interested in the individual who is tasked, tasked with a task that either is or is related to the task of becoming a certain person or realizing certain values.
[Wittgenstein] isn’t satisfied with telling the reader something. He nags. He intends to get under your skin, to get into your hair, to make you uncomfortable, to drive you to self-examination and improvement.9
Bouwsma understands Wittgenstein to be addressing the troubled individual. It is not the case, I submit, that Bouwsma has somehow missed or is for some reason willfully ignoring the passages Ryle adduces to show that there are arguments in PI. But Bouwsma takes those passages to be exercise passages; he takes them subjectively. Their point is to teach a skill and also to change the reader, to open [End Page 110] the reader, to make him or her receptive where before he or she was resistant. The point is not, we might say, the conclusion’s relation to the premises, but the readers relationship to the issues being argumentatively engaged with. Self-examination, self-investigation, that is the desired result of Wittgenstein’s tactical intentions. This is the particular subjective way in which I judge Bouwsma would understand Wittgenstein’s line from the Preface: “I should not like my writing to spare anyone the trouble of thinking. But, if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own.” The accent falls on ‘own’ and on ‘stimulate’. Wittgenstein is not trying to compel agreement but to invite a kind of reflection, to urge the reader to think, and to think on his or her own, and to think in a way that Wittgenstein thinks not especially easy given the posture of thinking adopted by most philosophers as they think. (Change the posture of Le Penseur? Unthinkable?) But Wittgenstein knows that stimulating such thinking requires jettisoning the aim of arguing as Ryle understands it. He is not trying to compel belief or agreement (in the relevant sense of agreement); he is inculcating a skill, changing the spirit in which the philosopher understands himself and philosophy.
Cavell argues convincingly that to track a philosopher’s work, or judge its significance, we collect its terms of criticism, and then think them through. We can say similarly that another good way of doing such is to collect a philosophy’s terms of engagement, thinking them through. (We might treat terms of engagement as the genus of which terms of criticism are a species.) What are Wittgenstein’s terms of engagement? ‘Think’, ‘Imagine’, ‘Look’, ‘Ask yourself ’, ‘Review’, ‘Compare’, ‘Keep in view’, ‘Recall’—to collect just a few. Reacting in part to this list, Ryle talks about what he calls Wittgenstein’s “governessy accents” and “solicitous shepherdings.”10 Why? Because even Ryle can hear something other than argument in the book. (He can hear what Cavell calls “exhortation,” “exhortation not to belief but to self-scrutiny.”11) But he takes these accents to be bearable because we also hear the clang of Wittgenstein’s metal with, say, Frege’s metal, mettle to mettle—argument at last! And that is where the action is. The governessy accents are thankfully drowned in the clanging of metals.
For Bouwsma, Wittgenstein is showing us how to do something so that we can go on to do it for ourselves. Learning here is learning-how. Argumentative exercises are suspended in that task. For Bouwsma, PI is engaged in a subjective task. Its goal is to bring its reader into a position from which a certain kind of thinking can be pursued, and then to entrust the reader with performing that thinking for himself or herself, to use it as a weapon of peace against his or her relevant individual troubles. It is engaged in the task of changing the reader’s relationship to philosophical problems; it is not engaged with the problems independently of that task.
For Ryle, PI, at least at its best, is engaged in an objective task. Its goal is to establish the truth of certain philosophical claims, to compel the reader to conviction. The reader is not engaged qua hot and bothered individual, but simply as the reader, ‘third personally’, as the occupant of a certain formal role. The book [End Page 111] is occupied with philosophical problems; it engages the reader only as audience. Wittgenstein is on stage, strutting and fretting his hours, perhaps a poor player, perhaps not, but not, or not simply, a tale-telling idiot—and the tale he tells is full of sound and fury, clanging metals, signifying something. The audience listens; the audience keeps score, judges. That is the way Ryle understands it. But Bouwsma understands it differently. Compare Kierkegaard on properly listening to a devotional address. Kierkegaard begins in the theater, then leaves it—
[O]n the stage, as you know well enough, . . . someone sits and prompts by whispers; he is the inconspicuous one, he is, and wishes to be overlooked. But then there is another, he strides out prominently, he draws every eye to himself. For that reason he has been given his name, that is actor [Skuespiller, show- or display-player] . . . No one is so foolish as to regard the prompter as more important than the actor. Now forget this light talk about art. Alas . . . the foolishness of many is this, that they . . . look upon the speaker [of a devotional address] as an actor, and the listeners as theatergoers who are to pass judgment on the artist. But the speaker is not the actor—not in the remotest sense. No, the speaker is the prompter. There are no mere theatergoers present, for each listener will be looking into his own heart. The stage is eternity, and the listener, if he is the true listener (and if not, he is at fault) stands before God during the talk. The prompter whispers to the actor what he is to say, but the actor’s repetition of it is the main concern—is the solemn charm of the art. The speaker whispers the word to the listeners. But the main concern is earnestness: that the listeners by themselves, with themselves, and to themselves, in the silence before God, may speak with the help of this address. The address is not given for the speaker’s sake, in order that men may praise or blame him. The listener’s repetition of it is what is aimed at. If the speaker has the responsibility for what he whispers, then the listener has an equally great responsibility not to fall short in his task.12
And just to finish up the thought, let me quote from Kierkegaard once more, from a passage prefatory to the one I have just quoted.
But the intelligibility of the talk, and the listener’s understanding of it, are still not the talk’s true aim . . . For in order to achieve its proper emphasis the task must unequivocally demand something of the listener . . . It must demand . . . unconditionally the reader’s own decisive activity, and all depends on this. The talk . . . will not have the presumption to pass judgment upon you . . . The talk does not address itself to you as if to a particularly designated person, for it does not know who you are. But if you weigh the occasion vigorously, then it will be to you, to whoever you may be, it will be as if it spoke precisely to you. This is not due to any merit in the talk. It is the product of your own activity that for your own sake the talk is helpful to you; and it will be because of your activity that you will be the one to whom the intimate “thou” is spoken. This is your own activity, it really is.13
Wittgenstein, for Bouwsma, aims at his readers’ decisive activity, at their finding themselves spoken to by the book. Wittgenstein is whispering lines to his reader, [End Page 112] but everything turns on the reader’s activity, on his or her repetition of the lines. Wittgenstein whispers: a soothing bedside murmur?
3. DIFFICULTIES ABOUT METAPHILOSOPHY
One striking feature of the different readings of Ryle and Bouwsma is their very different reckonings with Wittgenstein’s metaphilosophical remarks. For Bouwsma, these remarks are crucial. They embarrass Ryle—‘governessy’, ‘solicitous’. Bouwsma does not think we can have a reading of PI without them. That is, the importance of the metaphilosophical remarks for Bouwsma has to be assessed by how much the remarks help in reading what is, almost everyone concedes, a puzzling and unique book, a book that seems to compel us to ask how to read it. (Even Ryle concedes that, more or less.) Although the brevity of Bouwsma’s reading of PI may create the wrong impression, I think it safe to say that he believes that any particular metaphilosophical remark has to earn its way by enabling a reading of the philosophical remarks.14
Let me stress again: for Bouwsma PI is a how-to book. Calling PI that is a way of insisting that the metaphilosophical remarks have a crucial status, of refusing to relegate them to a category like (Austin’s of) “the cackle” (a category that Ryle would like). To call PI a how-to book is to see its philosophical remarks as suspended in its how-to instruction, and so to see a way to treat them as exercises. But I think we must be careful with this how-to talk, because it can itself create a misunderstanding. It can seem as though the relationship between the meta-philosophical remarks and the philosophical remarks is a one-way, or largely oneway relationship, running from the first to the second. But the relationship runs the other way, too; it is a two-way relationship. Bouwsma sometimes forgets or tends to forget or at least to obscure this.
A good example here is the (an?) announced goal of PI: clarity. When Wittgenstein stakes out that goal, he is not staking out something that we understand unproblematically in isolation from the philosophical remarks in PI. Rather, he is staking out a goal that cannot be understood apart from an understanding of what happens in those other remarks. That is, clarity is not just clarity, some notion we might have had external to what Wittgenstein is doing and which we can import into what he is doing so as to render what he is doing intelligible to us without having to work through what he is doing. The term thus is caught up in a matrix of significance that includes other terms like ‘perspicuious (re)presentation’, ‘survey’, and so on, as well as what is happening in the philosophical remarks. Clarity is thus bound up with what is happening in the book and the book with clarity. To borrow a phrase from Gabriel Marcel, we might say that, for Wittgenstein, philosophical investigation is investigation “wherein the link with its result [goal] cannot be broken without all loss of reality to the result [goal].”15 So if we say, as Bouwsma might be willing to say, that PI teaches us the skill of becoming clear, we will also have to [End Page 113] add that it teaches us what that is as well as how to do it. Bouwsma does not seem so clear on that.
3.1. commentary, subjective and objective
3.1.1. The Distinction
Bouwsma provides a different kind of commentary on PI than Ryle takes him to provide, than I think Ryle himself would provide. Bouwsma’s commentary is a continuation of PI. Now, it is a peculiar kind of continuation, because it is not meant ultimately to be content the reader of PI is meant to set alongside the content of PI, additive content, but is instead meant ultimately to shift from content to form—to inform the reader’s relationship to the content of PI. Bouwsma comments on how to read this how-to book. Such commentary is itself caught up in the task of PI and cannot be what it is meant to be while shirking that task. But this means that such commentary can have its status as commentary disputed. Commentary is normally thought to take place in a different dimension than the text commentated upon. Say that commentary is normally thought not to share the conditions of being of the commented-upon text. While commentary is no doubt dependent upon the text commented upon, it forms a distinct text in its own right, with its own conditions of being. What Bouwsma is producing is not meant to be distinct from PI in that way.
Let me try this again. The way commentary often conceives of itself is as stepping back from active participation in the task of the text and as a study of the text qua text itself, as an object in itself. And so we become concerned with the text, with how it is arranged, with how it puts things. We are not commenting on Wittgenstein’s metaphilosophy but instead on his concept of ‘metaphilosophy’. We are no longer thinking with Wittgenstein, employing language-games, say, as we do so; instead we are constructing an adequate representation of Wittgenstein’s concept of language-games or his doctrine of language-games. Our so doing may be perfectly clear; but it is a perfection of clarity altogether different from the one Wittgenstein aimed at. Wittgenstein’s own activity is abandoned and a derivative, meta-activity supplants it. Think of this as a common form of objective commentary. But what Bouwsma has in mind as commentary strives to be philosophy as Wittgenstein would have understood it: a repetition or recurrence of a prior moment of understanding, and one which enables new moments that are not repetitions or recurrences of prior moments but are nonetheless internally related to them, say are variations upon them. This is a form of subjective commentary.
3.1.2. Verbal Twins: Thompson Clarke
One reason why I want Kierkegaard’s distinction between the objective and the subjective is this: the differences between them are such as to allow for the production of what Thompson Clarke (in his “Legacy of Skepticism”16) called verbal twins. For Clarke, it is crucial to see that the very words on which the anti-skeptic calls can be the very words on which someone who is not responding to [End Page 114] the skeptic can call. Consider: “I am not dreaming” as it might fall from the lips of Norman Malcolm and as it might fall from the lips of a psychologist discussing an experiment he is conducting on himself. Clarke’s point is that although the very words called on are the same, Malcolm and the psychologist mean different things by them. Kierkegaard takes the same thing to be true where Christianity’s vocabulary and the subjective/objective distinction is at stake. It is possible to call on the very same words to say something objective and to say something subjective. My earlier discussion of the devils and the passage from James turned on and so illustrated the phenomenon. The crucial thing to notice is that although Kierkegaard thinks Christianity is properly subjective and its vocabulary properly used subjectively, it is possible to understand Christianity objectively and to use its vocabulary objectively. So we can have verbal twins: “I am a Christian”-subjective and “I am a Christian”-objective. Kierkegaard’s point is missed if we take him to deny that we can have these verbal twins: he is not denying that there is something that someone can mean when he says “I am a Christian” objectively. Kierkegaard’s point in fact requires that he not deny this, since the plight of mind and soul that he is most interested in is that of the person confused by the twins, suspended between them. (An under-description, but it will have to do for now.)
The existence of verbal twins makes deciding the issue between Bouwsma and Ryle especially hard. Although I have drawn attention to various features of the text and said something about how I think Bouwsma reads them, and even a little about how I prefer to read them, the fact is that those features do not really finally decide anything. We might say that the remarks in PI are “twinned” in the debate between Bouwsma and Ryle. Each can cite the same remark in favor of his reading. For Bouwsma, the remark is to be read subjectively; for Ryle, objectively. Some remarks are harder for one reading than the other, because of certain features of the remarks, but so far as I can see, none is in principle invulnerable to twinning. So deciding between the two readings is especially tricky. Neither Bouwsma nor Ryle can clinch the argument between them by adducing passages from PI. Bouwsma can produce them, and does; Ryle can read them his way, and does.
But the problem goes deeper than this even. Not only can citation not clinch any argument, but the existence of verbal twins can obscure the difference between the kind of commentary that Bouwsma provides and the kind Ryle provides. Each side needs to keep this in mind, because it is all too easy for the objective commentator to understand what the subjective commentator says objectively, as the objective twin of some subjective remark. This can lead to serious and sometimes systemic failures to understand. Since the subjective commentator is, of the two, more likely to be aware of and to worry about twinning, and about the nature of the difference between the two commentaries, it seems to me that the subjective commentator bears a certain burden, namely that of trying to keep the phenomenon of twinning in view and of making sure that it is clear that the difference between objective and subjective remarks cannot be reduced to a matter of vocabulary or even of mode of address. [End Page 115]
I am not of course claiming that there is no issue between the two sorts of commentary. Obviously, there is a disagreement between them. But the disagreement is peculiar, at least when judged against our standard expectations about the nature of disagreements. Each side really needs to understand what the other side is doing or is trying to do. It is always open to the objective commentator to treat ‘subjective commentary’ as some sort of contradiction or impossibility, and so to reject it on general grounds, or to do so in relation to a specific text; but charity demands that the objective commentator make an effort to see what the subjective commentator thinks he is doing.
3.2. hearing voices
As I have suggested, I have certain worries about Bouwsma’s how-to reading. One I mentioned: the relationship between the metaphilosophical and philosophical remarks looks too one-way, left to right, and not enough two way, left to right and back again. I suspect the problem is that Bouwsma is himself tempted to treat the methodological remarks facially, as if they could be understood without having recourse to the philosophical remarks. Calling the book a how-to book privileges the metaphilosophical remarks, and so far that’s well and good; they do have a kind of privilege. But it privileges them too much as if they were instructions or directions, such that they could be, indeed such that they need to be understood, before embarking on the task they explain how to do. I should note, in case my wording here is not sufficiently clear, that I mention this worry hesitantly, because it is not clear to me whether Bouwsma is guilty of reading the remarks facially or whether that is a relatively uncharitable reading of his essay (and indeed of much of his work on Wittgenstein). This worry hooks up with another, however.
To frame this new worry correctly, I need to enlarge my scope and to use Cavell’s well-known distinction between voices in PI, the voice of temptation and the voice of correctness. It is clear that these voices are locked together dialectically. But there are interesting questions about that locking-together. Here is one: Is the voice of correctness really the voice of correctness punkt, or is it the voice of correctness on location, as it were, but not punkt? Put another way, is the voice’s correctness a correctness here-and-now, at this dialectical juncture, or is the voice’s correctness simply that, correctness, such that what is said marks a dialectical destination and not a rest area? One part of the difficulty here is deciding on the dialectical structure of PI. Is all of PI ultimately caught up in one dialectical space or is it instead a congregation of dialectical spaces? A glance at the Preface might suggest the latter, especially Wittgenstein’s explicit comment that his remarks “sometimes make a sudden change, jumping from one topic to another,” and his confession that he was not able to weld his comments together in such a way that they proceeded from one subject to another in “a natural order and without breaks.” But a glance at the opening of the text proper and its ending, both focused on “the philosophical concept of meaning” or on “meaning as a mental activity,” can suggest that, however crisscrossing the remarks may be, however jumpy they may [End Page 116] be, they nonetheless belong together in one dialectical space, albeit one irregularly shaped dialectical space. (No Quinean desert, this landscape; no, not even a flatland.) I bring this issue up because it involves our conception of the voice of correctness. If we think of that voice as marking dialectical destinations, stopping points, then we are likely to think of PI as a congregation of dialectical spaces. If we think of it as marking dialectical rest areas, then we need not think of the book as a congregation of dialectical spaces. This would mean that what is said by the voice of correctness does not bring the dialectic to an end. To see what I mean, consider: we could think of the voice of correctness as correct on location, and in so doing we hear what the voice says in a particular way. As a placeholder for that way, let’s just say we hear no insistence in it that matches the insistence of the voice of temptation, but rather that we hear it as uninsistent, companionable, available.17
Heard this way, the voice is not so much ending anything as it is providing a moment of rest, of peace, a moment in which the estranged halves of the mind the voices represent can reconcile. The dialectic has not ended, but it has reached a point of temporary stabilization.
But what of the metaphilosophical remarks in PI? Are those in the voice of correctness, the voice of temptation, or in some other voice? I take the middle choice to be unlikely, so what about the opposite ends—are the remarks in the voice of correctness or some other voice? In what voice is PI 123, for example?
Bouwsma, giving the particular pride of place he does to the metaphilosophical remarks, hears them as in Wittgenstein’s voice. What Cavell calls the voice of correctness is for Bouwsma a voice that is internal to the exercises, and so is not to be taken as Wittgenstein’s voice, at least not straightforwardly. Ryle hears what Cavell calls the voice of correctness as Wittgenstein’s voice, and as the voice of correctness punkt; and he also hears the metaphilosophical remarks as in Wittgenstein’s voice—but one clangs triumphantly and electrifies, and the other murmurs indulgently and tranquilizes.
Bouwsma, it seems to me, takes the metaphilosophical remarks to be themselves in a way external to the dialogues of PI. This is something that he shares (at least in a limited way) with Ryle. But for Bouwsma, the metaphilosophical remarks direct the dialectic, direct the exercises. They tell the reader what he is doing, in what spirit it is being done, they engage his affective dispositions, sensibility, etc. Ryle thinks of them as doing similar things and regrets them both as what they are and as unnecessary interruptions of the arguments—since all that does and should matter finally is the arguments.
I need to make clearer part of what I am doing—the part that bears on Bouwsma. I am taking up the question of dialectic spaces and of voices in part because it bears on Bouwsma’s reading. Bouwsma reads PI as a congregation of dialectical spaces, exercises, punctuated at points by metaphilosophical remarks. The metaphilosophical remarks stand external to the exercises in that, while they exert a force on the exercises, there is no return force exerted by the exercises on the remarks. Or at least I worry that Bouwsma’s reading works like that. And part [End Page 117] of the reason for wanting to treat PI as one dialectical space is to suggest that the metaphilosophical remarks do not stand so external to the philosophical remarks.
What is it to read PI as I am suggesting, as one dialectical space, as such that its metaphilosophical remarks are caught up in its dialectic? Well, as I read it, the book’s central concern is with the nature of philosophy, with philosophical problems, and with us as mixed up with philosophy and philosophical problems. The dialectic is a drama, one in which the reader is to be a participant, in fact, one in which the reader is to find himself in all the parts, in all the voices. Call it “The Drama of the Soul in Exile.” The soul in exile is a soul who has become a stranger to itself, who can no longer understand itself, who has lost its way. What such a soul needs is to reconnoiter itself, to reconnoiter its life. An exiled soul is not one that is in exile because it refuses reflection. No, it is reflection that causes the exile. PI is not to be read as if the soul in exile is not philosophical, not reflective. No, the soul is philosophical, and it is in exile because it is philosophical. What PI puts pressure on is precisely the notion of ‘philosophical’. The exiled soul needs to become philosophical in order to end its exile—but the difficulty of finding its way back is that it seems to itself already to be what it needs to be, namely philosophical, and so it tends to try to find its way back, to reconnoiter, by continuing to do what it has already been doing, and so it worsens its exile in its desperate attempts to end it. What PI does is to present the reader, the soul, with another conception of philosophy, one that is at once familiar and deeply strange, one that presents the soul with values that it darkly acknowledges but that it does not wholly understand, one that addresses the soul’s real needs but in a way that baffles it (because of its misunderstanding of those needs). So one of the difficulties of the book is that it asks the exiled soul to adopt a conception of philosophy that leaves it at a loss, feeling lost. But it is by adopting that conception that the soul can end its exile—the soul loses itself to find itself. The early parts of the book serve to illustrate the liabilities, the costs, of philosophizing in the way that the exiled soul philosophizes; the center of the book presents the familiar/strange conception of philosophy that is to be adopted; the later parts illustrate how to philosophize in that way, how to render that conception homely, no longer strange—and in so doing how to end the soul’s estrangement from itself. How? By coming to find a conception of philosophy, and of oneself in philosophy, on which the voices of PI are all existential modulations of the soul’s own voice, and hearing those voices not as contesting one another to see which is right and which wrong,18 but rather as available or disposable to one another, making themselves handy to one another, revealing the full reach of the soul, its powers of both dispersing itself and in gathering itself—a conception of philosophy on which the soul is to know itself again, and which understands that such self-knowledge is largely an overcoming, not of the soul’s ignorance, but of its refusals to know, and which understands that such self-knowledge is at once genuinely creative and genuinely a discovery, a return of the soul on which, although the return is real, what is returned to is also really new, renewed, transfigured. The exiled soul finds its way back by finding itself again and by claiming the places in which it finds itself, so that the ending of exile is not so much returning to old haunts as it is of dwelling in new habitations, making itself at home. [End Page 118]
3.3. methodologizing pi?
I want to register one other worry about Bouwsma’s how-to reading. James Conant has convinced me that when we think about Wittgenstein’s work from TLP to PI, we should see in it a transition from method to methods.19 As I said, Conant has convinced me. But I do think that it is easy to fetishize the notion of method or of methods in Wittgenstein’s work, and although I do not charge Conant with this, I do worry that even his argument leaves its flank not fully protected from the fetishizer. That is, someone who has fetishized method in Wittgenstein might read Conant as simply providing a friendly amendment to his or her view, and not reckon with his or her fetishizing at all.
Here’s what I have in mind. Reflecting carefully on PI reveals that much of what happens there cannot be rendered methodological. The commentator on Wittgenstein who is clearest about this is G. A. Paul. He writes:
Instead of a concentrating into a gaze, I am to make a wide survey; and it is not that cases just come before me in their arrangement, for there are cases to be invented by me, and arrangements of them made by me. Here is why Wittgenstein presents no method in philosophy; there is no method for inventing cases, no method for arranging them. And there is no method for “being struck by” one fact rather than another. Yet no matter how much detail about a use we may methodically assemble, we may, and commonly do, “fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and powerful.” The fly in the fly-bottle may countless times eye the way out—and not be particularly struck by it.20
Paul’s basic point is sound. No method presents itself for generating intermediate cases, for finding objects of comparison, for identifying reminders, for being struck by things, for noticing correspondences between our concepts and very general facts of nature—and no method for rightly arranging or assembling or anyway achieving perspicuity in the employment of these. Note that I do not want to dispute the use of the word ‘method’ for describing these things: we can talk so if we want to. What matters is that we realize that there is nothing algorithmic about these ‘methods’, no way of doing these for oneself by simply memorizing a set of steps and then applying those steps to some problem. If Wittgenstein supplies a method in PI, it would be better to understand it as a “way of hearkening, a kind of receptivity” (232). That would make it easier to be clear about what is really going on.
My worry about Bouwsma I again want to state guardedly. I do not know that Bouwsma methodologizes Wittgenstein, but he often talks in ways that suggest that he may. When contrasting PI with The Concept of Mind, Bouwsma harps away on the notion of ‘skills’ and ‘methods’ and, as we have seen, ‘exercises’. While all that harping need not be methodologizing, it can easily be heard that way. What I am trying to put my finger on is a worry related to something that I said earlier. Bouwsma talks of skills and so on, but he also talks about a change in Wittgenstein’s reader that it is hard to attribute to the how-to lessons that PI provides. I worry that Bouwsma has not really thought through the connection between the how-to lessons and the personal change. Bouwsma helps himself at once to the how-to notion [End Page 119] and to a receptivity notion and never really worries about how the two (inter) relate. Maybe the acquisition of the skills just is the acquisition of the receptivity, maybe the acquisition of the skills tends to produce the acquisition of the receptivity, maybe the acquisition of the receptivity allows for mastery of the skills—whatever. I have no clear sense of what Bouwsma thinks here.
3.4. chiastic structure and reading
Over the last handful of years, I have pointed out repeatedly that PI is chiastically structured—as is TLP. This seems like a good time to point it out again and to develop the point. Getting it into view helps to clarify my worries about Bouwsma’s reading.
In each book, the concentration of metaphilosophical remarks occurs in its dialectical middle (a middle not necessarily the same as its paginal middle): the 4s in the Tractatus and in 89–133 in PI. Rhetorically, each of the books is a large epanados, a chiasmus. That is, each of the books is organized spatially around a center or middle. Each has the structure, roughly, of a large ‘x’, with the metaphilosophical remarks primarily stationed at the crux of the ‘x’. (A handy example of a small epanados is Unamuno’s false but memorable sentence, “Martyrs create faith, faith does not create martyrs.”) The chiastic structure of the two books needs to be recognized and reckoned with. In the case of PI, I understand the structure to signal the reader to resist thinking that the remarks can be understood in isolation from the other philosophical remarks that stand to the left of them and to the right of them. I understand PI as unified by both a centripetal and a centrifugal energy, the first the movement of the left-hand and right-hand remarks inward toward the center, and the second the movement of the center outward toward both the left-hand and right-hand remarks. The metaphilosophical remarks 89–133 thus serve as the pivotal theme of PI.
Let me say more about PI’s chiastic structure and chiastic reading.
Abstractly, a text with a chiastic structure is of the following sort. It is composed of what we might call sequences, more or less separable parts of the text that have a particular theme. The text will proceed through its sequences until it reaches its pivot theme, its crux, and it will then continue through its sequences. But the sequences will be organized in a particular pattern around the pivotal theme. Imagine that the text has sequences 1–5. Imagine further that sequence 3 is the pivotal theme. Then sequence 1 be paralleled or answered by sequence 5, and sequence 2 by sequence 4. We could bring this out by writing out the sequence thus: 1(A), 2(B), 3, 4(B), 5(A). The parallel or answering sequences can stand in a variety of relations to those that they parallel or answer. In the simplest case, they are repetitions of those sequences. But in more complicated—and more typical—cases, the parallel or answering sequences modulate, extend, respond, even ‘deny’ those sequences. It is further worth noting that the sequences can be of quite different lengths, and that even a sequence and its parallel or answering sequence can be of quite different lengths. Sometimes, sequences themselves are made up of [End Page 120] subsequences that are chiasticially structured. And, as you might expect, the book’s structure does not have to work out with entire consistency among sequences and their parallel or answering sequences. The primary structural fact is the pivotal theme. (This structure is on display in various Old Testament books as well as various New Testament ones, particularly St. John’s Gospel. It is also on display in various plays of Shakespeare.)
And how do we read a chiastically structured book? Well, we have to give up on a reading that conforms to the laws of narrative and instead work to produce a reading that conforms to the laws of chiasmus. What we might have found as a gap or displacement or dislocation in the book if it were narrative we will come to see instead as a change of sequence. We will not take the significance of what we are reading to be fully displayed as we read it, but only once we have read it and read its parallel or answering sequences, as well as pondered its relationship to the pivotal theme, where that relationship is at once spatial and logical.21 And so on.
I do not (yet) have a worked-out, detailed story about the chiastic structure of PI, although I do believe it is easy enough to see that the book has that structure. The pivotal theme is clear. We can even see the beginning of sequencing in the relationship of PI 1 to PI 693 (and more generally between, roughly, PI 1–64 and 654–93). Working out that reading is a task for another day. But I think the structuring around a pivotal theme is clear—that is the primary structural fact.22
I do want to say a little about what it would be to read PI chiastically. One thing we would need to do, as I have hinted, is to come to see PI as primarily spatially structured, not primarily temporally structured. We would have to give up on reading PI linearly, on what we might call our linear and teleological dialectical expectations. For PI to be chiastically structured is in no way inconsistent with its being dialectical, even with it being one dialectic space. But it will not be linear, it will not proceed reasonably straightforwardly from left to right (for those of us reading it in English or German) and produce, at the end (telos) some sort of dialectical climax. No, the climax (although that is not quite the right word) happens in the middle, the climax is in the pivotal theme. It will also be true—and now I hope some of what I said earlier will be clearer—that we will not really understand the beginning of the book until we have an understanding of the pivotal theme, and we will not have that until we understand the ending of the book (no sequence can be understood in isolation from its parallel or answering sequence and from the pivotal theme: i.e., no sequence can be understood without understanding the chiastic structure and its place in it). It strikes me that Wittgenstein signals the structure of the book in the Preface, in passages to which I have already alluded. When he says that book is a sketchbook or album, containing sketches or pictures of a landscape, when he warns that the book’s remarks sometimes suddenly change topic, jumping around, when he concedes that he could not write a book that proceeded from one topic to another in a natural order and without breaks, when he says all this I think he is signaling that the book does not have a linear, teleological structure. Of course, he says nothing to show that the structure, while [End Page 121] not linear and teleological, is chiastic. But my claim is that the book is so structured, not that Wittgenstein knew it to be so structured. But he did structure the book deliberately: it “had to be arranged.” So his not explicitly knowing that he was structuring it chiastically need not have prevented him from giving it such a structure. (I suspect he did know at least that he was structuring the book around a pivotal theme—but perhaps he did not even know that. At any rate, he at least twice wrote books with such a structure, and I find it hard to believe that he was unaware of that similarity.) Anyway, I believe that many of the complaints about PI’s apparent lack of structure, and the associated temptation to read it as if it were just a loose assemblage of remarks without any but local structures (structure in an isolated chain of remarks), is a result of expecting a linear, teleological structure, not finding it, and then declaring the book unstructured.
Wittgenstein’s book rejects, we might say, our assumption that a book must be read directionally, up or down or left to right or right to left, it rejects the further assumption that with every text there is a beginning and an ending. Wittgenstein’s book begins but has no beginning, it ends but has no ending; our fixation on beginnings and endings is frustrated. (I dare say every teacher of PI has wrestled with this fact, even if not clearly understanding it: How do you start teaching PI?) Why should the beginning or the end matter so much more than the middle? Why can’t the middle matter most? Why can’t we read from the outside in and from the inside out? Perhaps we cannot do that all at once. But can’t we hope that our eventual certainty of and completeness of possession of the book takes, as it were, that form? I believe we can.
By comparing his book to an album or a picture of a landscape, Wittgenstein underscores the way in which his book must not be read simply—and reading simply, as we do it, makes the text importantly invisible, deprives it of image, scale, and perspective—but also looked at, seen, visualized, perspicuously represented. The crucial concept of ‘perspicuous presentation’ is itself a visual concept, and it is clear that the text itself is to instance the concept. In an interesting sense, to see the book as it should be seen, we have to resist reading it, as we typically understand reading, and look at it: Don’t (just) read, look!
4. RESOLUTE READING OF TLP
Let me give a little hint on how to listen. The point is not to listen to a series of propositions, but rather to follow the movement of showing.
—Heidegger
I want to finish by taking what I have been saying about the debate between Bouwsma and Ryle and about subjective readings and applying it to the debate between resolute and standard readers of TLP. I will do this at a fairly brisk pace, and I will aid myself in keeping to that pace by pitching what I have to say at a level [End Page 122] of abstraction that will allow me to talk about the debate without talking about its particular participants. My hope is to save time by avoiding interpretive questions about how to understand particular readers. I note that what I say here is intended to respect the points made about resolute reading by Conant and Diamond in their paper, “On Reading the Tractatus Resolutely.” I have no quarrel with anything in that paper, and some of what I am myself about to say simply diversifies the surface of the knowledge that their paper provides. I understand resolute reading of TLP to be what I am calling subjective reading. It is concerned, first and foremost if not everywhere and always, with the relationship of the reader to the book, and to the problems treated by the book. Resolute readers understand Wittgenstein (in the sense of 6.54—contrasting with understanding the propositions of TLP) as himself concerned with the relationship of his reader to his book and to the problems treated by the book. As a subjective reading, resolute reading offers what I call subjective commentary on TLP, not objective commentary. The standard reading is an objective reading and offers objective commentary. Deciding between the two views cannot be simply a matter of the citation of the text, of the ipsissima verba of TLP, since the twinning problem presents itself here as well as in the reading of PI. I want now to say something more about each of these.
4.1. subjective reading of tlp
Resolute readers understand Wittgenstein to be himself concerned with the relationship of his reader to the book, and to the problems treated by the book. 6.54 is crucial in this respect. There, Wittgenstein gestures toward a distance between himself and his propositions, between understanding him and understanding his propositions. But more than that, he gestures also toward a distance between his reader and the propositions. The reader is supposed to ‘surmount’ or ‘transcend’ the propositions of the book, thus opening up a distance between herself and the propositions. What we might take Wittgenstein to be doing here is aiming at a Fregean “meeting of the minds” with his reader. These distances, Wittgenstein’s and the reader’s, are integral to resolute reading. But it is crucial to note, before it gets lost in the shuffle, that the distances are not pictured as simply opening up at will, either for Wittgenstein, presumably, or for his reader. For the reader, the distance is secured by wrestling with the propositions themselves: the distance is achieved when the reader has come to understand that she cannot understand the propositions (a phrase to be used with care, since that understanding is not something that TLP teaches in its propositions—at least not when resolutely read. In other words, that understanding is not to be found in the content of the propositions of the book or in any super-content that they are related to in a principled way, even while failing to have that super-content as their content). That understanding is won by climbing out of TLP through, on, and over the propositions—by making of them a disposable ladder, to be trashed after the reader has clambered up it.
Presumably, Wittgenstein won his way out of the book in similar fashion, so although he was the ‘producer’ of the propositions, there is an important sense [End Page 123] in which his distance from them is the reader’s distance. To enable a meeting of minds with Wittgenstein, the reader and he must stand together at a distance from his propositions. We might say that, in the light of 6.54, Wittgenstein has to be rated as much a reader of TLP as he is its author. TLP needs to be deliberately written, then, so as to allow the reader to become the climber, the author to become the reader, assisted upward by the book, not ultimately weighted down by what is in it. How is that to happen? Well, just as Wittgenstein needs to undergo a process like the reader, the reader must undergo a process like Wittgenstein: she must become the ‘producer’ of the propositions, taking them up ‘spontaneously’ and not merely ‘receptively’; attempting to think them by herself, with herself, and to herself, and not merely attempting to think about them. But the catch here is that, resolutely read, the attempt to think the propositions breaks down—as it must, if the reader is to come to understand that they are nonsense. This means that ultimately the crucial thing for the reader, as it was presumably for Wittgenstein, is to come to be concerned with the how of her relationship to the propositions of TLP, not with the what of the propositions themselves. (There is no what.) That is, the crucial thing is to come to see how, as the reader, she has been tempted to attribute sense to the propositions in some way or another, but without success—at least, success as her relationship to the propositions construes it.
4.2. subjective commentary
Resolute readers of TLP are offering what I have called subjective commentary. It is subjective commentary because it is directed finally to the cultivation of a subjective reading of TLP. What I think is most important about this is the way that resolute commentary on TLP partakes of the conditions of being of TLP itself. Since the propositions of the book are to be understood to be nonsense, any attempt to ‘explain’ those remarks will entangle itself in nonsense. For example, any resolute commentator that undertakes to comment on formal concepts in TLP will quickly find himself calling on forms of words that he cannot take actually to say anything at all. So the ‘producer’ of subjective commentary is also going to have to hope for a meeting of the minds with the commentary’s reader. We have to finally understand the resolute commentator and not the resolute commentary (or not all of it: I am focusing here only on parts of the commentary engaged directly with the propositions of the book and on enacting involvement with those propositions). On a resolute reading, TLP has no content, or very little. So commentary cannot take the form of reciting the content, say by means of paraphrase, re-description, development, or illustration. Of course, resolute reading could limit itself to simply pointing out the subjective aim of TLP and then shut up, but that would not be a “reading” in any sense. Rather, what resolute reading does, in part, is to illustrate how to approach particular propositions or strings of propositions in TLP. Standard readers offer what I call objective commentary on TLP. It is objective because it is directed finally to the recitation of the content of the book. The point is not the relationship of the readers to the book and to the problems treated by the book, [End Page 124] but rather the problems themselves. The goal is the recitation of the content, as well as a judgment on that content. One striking difference between the two readings is that objective reading, standard reading, can take itself to be such that it can culminate in a more or less global rejection of TLP, in a judgment of the book as a more or less complete failure. But can resolute reading take itself that way? Can a resolute reading culminate in a more or less global rejection of TLP, in a judgment of more or less complete failure? Maybe this is possible—but just barely possible, I find myself wanting to say. I am not denying that it is open to resolute reading to judge the book locally to fail, to for example fail in its implementation in some particular place or places or to fail to follow its commitments through in particular ways. But resolute reading seems to me to have to contend for the success, even if the limited success, of TLP. Objective reading need not, though of course it may. Put it this way, even if it strains the terminology: resolute reading has an apologetic cast. Standard reading need have no such cast. Resolute reading begins in a sense with a story about the aim of TLP and about its success more or less in meeting that aim, about how it does so. Of course, it is possible for someone to read TLP resolutely, and, having done so, then to argue against the philosophical propriety of resolute reading. But such a reading would more condemn the aim of TLP, and less condemn its success in achieving that aim. The apologetic cast of the subjective reading is an important source of (often unacknowleged) dislike for it, I think.
4.3. resolute reading v. standard reading
As can be guessed, I have been rehearsing all of this because I want to highlight just how odd the debate between resolute reading and standard reading really is. It is not a clash of differing objective commentaries; it is not a struggle between differing subjective commentaries. Instead, it is a mismatch, in one sense of that term—a contest between different sorts of commentaries. So there is no straightforward way for resolute reading and standard reading to get hold of each other and to settle the issue between them. Making matters worse, the phenomenon of subjective/objective verbal twins means that there is going to be no simple procedure of settling the issue by adducing passages that can only be read one way and which can, therefore, settle or go some way toward settling the issue. So how is it to be settled? I guess I believe the best answer is this: by deciding, if possible, which reading better makes TLP play and pay—that is, play and pay philosophically.
NOTES
1. O. K. Bouwsma, “A Difference Between Ryle and Wittgenstein,” in Toward a New Sensibility, ed. J. L. Craft and R. E, Hustwit (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 24.
2. Bouwsma, “A Difference,” 25.
3. G. Ryle, “On Bouwsma’s Wittgenstein,” in On Thinking, ed. K. Kolenda (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1979), 132. [End Page 125]
4. Bouwsma, “A Difference,” 28.
5. For more on the objective/subjective distinction in Kierkegaard, see my “(Kierkegaard’s) Climacus on Discipleship and Incarnation,” New Blackfriars 93, no. 1043 (January 2012): 84–98. My understanding of the distinction has been shaped by James Conant’s writing on Kierkegaard and by conversation with him.
6. S. Cavell, “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy,” in Must We Mean What We Say? (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969), 91.
7. S. Cavell, “Knowing and Acknowledging,” in Must We Mean What We Say?, 263–64.
8. A useful comparison: In the Disney movie The Lion King, the hyenas, enemies of the lions, fear Mufasa, the lion king. One of the hyenas trembles whenever someone mentions Mufasa. But the hyena sort of enjoys her fearful reaction, and entreats the other hyena, who has mentioned Mufasa, to “Say it again.” This is like the devils’ belief—they hear and tremble, nothing more.
9. Bouwsma, “A Difference,” 29.
10. Ryle, “On Bouwsma’s Wittgenstein,” 131.
11. S. Cavell, “The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy,” in Must We Mean What We Say?, 71.
12. S. Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart, trans. D. Steere (New York: Harper and Row, 1956), 180–81. Wait a minute! Eternity? God? How does this sort of talk earn a place in a discussion of PI? Well, we can always translate out of the sacred into the secular, or near-secular. E.g., consonant with, say, Gabriel Marcel’s perfectionism, we might say that the stage is the depths of my own life and that I stand before my true and better self.
13. Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart, 178. As the reader of PI, I must perform an activity that makes it addressed to me, in particular. Wittgenstein writes so as to encourage that activity on my part. That activity is reading the book subjectively. Wittgenstein cannot, of course, speak second personally to each of us in particular (he does not know us so as to address us second personally in particular). But he writes so as to be read as if he spoke precisely to each of us, if we weigh each passage vigorously. I take this to be an important part of what it means to have written a book, as Wittgenstein hoped to do, which would not spare anyone the trouble of thinking.
14. I distinguish between metaphilosophical remarks and philosophical remarks, but I should note that I take metaphilosophical remarks themselves to be philosophical remarks, albeit ones addressing philosophy itself. So my distinction is not one between remarks that are philosophical and remarks that are not, but between differently targeted philosophical remarks. Metaphilosophical remarks are philosophical remarks.
15. Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being, vol. 1: Reflection and Mystery (South Bend, IN: St Augustine’s Press, 2001).
16. T. Clarke, “The Legacy of Skepticism,” Journal of Philosophy 69, no. 20 (November 1972): 754–69.
17. Here I paper over numerous difficulties. First, I treat PI as if the two voices I am discussing are the only two voices in PI. I do not actually believe that is true, but now is not the time to inventory the voices. The point I want to make can be made taking their only to be two. Second, the voice of correctness can be heard in many ways—the options are not only as companionable or as insistent, as I now pretend. Third, temptation is one thing, sin another—for us or for the voices. Fourth, the philosophical ‘valences’ of the voices is not fully clear since it is not clear that the voice of temptation is always wrong, or at any rate that allowing the voice of temptation to speak need lead to something regrettable, and since it is not clear that the voice of correctness is always right, or at any rate that it should always get the last word. Fifth, I do not think that the voice of temptation is rightly construed as always insistent—after all, someone might note, if you are insistent, you are well past temptation, or your current temptation lies elsewhere. I do think that the voice is often insistent, but I think it is also often other things as well—stunned, confused, displeased, unsure, doubtful, annoyed, pleased (sometimes with itself), etc. One difficulty here is that the very terminology is, in one way, misleading. To call a voice “the voice of temptation” need not be to say anything about what the voice is expressing—it may only be a way of describing the voice’s ultimate function in the dialectic. The voice might be expressing, say, confusion, and still be reckoned the voice of temptation. (I should note that I am indebted to Steven Affeldt for generous conversations about the voices of PI. My thanks to him.) [End Page 126]
18. A character in Marcel’s L’Emissaire: “Yes and no, that is the only possible answer where it is we ourselves who are in question.”
19. J. Conant, “A Development in Wittgenstein’s Conception of Philosophy: From ‘The Method’ to Methods,” in Sprachspeile vestrickt- oder: Wie man der Fliege den Ausweg zeigt, ed. S. Tolksdorf and H. Tetens (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), 55–80.
20. G. A. Paul, “Wittgenstein,” The Revolution in Philosophy, ed. G. Ryle and A. J. Ayer et al. (London: Macmillan Co., 1963), 96.
21. Spatiological?
22. Perhaps the best example of a sacred text with such a structure is St. John’s Gospel. Following the work of John Gerhard, we can see John as divided into six major sequences: • (1) 1:19–4:3 • (2) 4:4–6:15 • (3) 6:16–21 • (4) 6:22–12:11 • (5) 12:12–21:25. These are structured basically in the way I discussed just moments ago, with sequence 3 as the pivotal theme. (There are also chiastic structurings internal to the sequences too; we need not descend to that level of structural detail.) [End Page 127]
