I read somewhere that Wittgenstein is the great “crossover hit” of twentieth-century philosophy. He is one of the few moderns, the argument goes, who has been a source of philosophical inspiration for thinkers as varied as Veena Das and Saul Kripke, Stanley Cavell and John Searle. Perhaps this is overstating the appeal of Wittgenstein. Moi, observing the same reception of his thought across intellectual traditions, writes instead of an “intimate quarrel.” Adopting a despondent tone, Moi notes:
I have sometimes felt that it is simply impossible to convey a position inspired by ordinary language philosophy to an audience steeped in the post-Saussurean tradition. The experience makes me feel helpless, as if I suddenly were speaking a foreign language. (10)
This turn to the personal, disturbing experience of not sharing a common language struck me.
To elaborate, Moi then turns to Cavell, who similarly wrote of an encounter between an analytic philosopher and an ordinary language philosopher where “both know what the other knows, and each thinks the other is perverse, or irrelevant, or worse” (Must We Mean What We Say? 90). Moi interprets this in Kuhnian terms:
the two philosophies see exactly the same things, yet somehow they don’t seem able to communicate their different visions to each other. Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit comes to mind, and so does Thomas Kuhn’s “paradigm-shift,” a concept built on the duck-rabbit: “The proponents of competing paradigms,” Kuhn writes, “practice their trades in different worlds. [They] see different things when they look from the same point in the same direction.… That is why a law that cannot even be demonstrated to one group of scientists may occasionally seem intuitively obvious to another.” (10, citing Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 150)
Do proponents of competing paradigms really exist in different worlds, or do they just assume different perspectives on the same thing? This is the crux of the problem, not just of Wittgenstein’s reception but also at the core of Wittgenstein’s philosophical insight.1 These “intimate conflicts” (another Cavellianism) are relationships neither of agreement nor of straightforward opposition. To my mind, they are like lines in three dimensions: neither parallel nor intersecting, the path traced by two airplanes can be skew. Under such circumstances, simple translation is impossible. One cannot argue one’s way into the Philosophical Investigations; to enter this paradigm we just have to throw ourselves in.
For Moi, borrowing from Cora Diamond and Richard Fleming, Wittgenstein is a philosopher of spirit. Rather than giving us a method or theory, he offers us a “mood” or “thought style” with which to go about our investigations. As students of language, society, or culture, Wittgenstein asks us to give up our envy of science. Instead, we should borrow from the “spirit of the ordinary” — “ordinary” here meaning not “unreflective, conventional common sense” but “the exemplary, the public, the shared” (6).
Take, for instance, the view of language, the primary subject for both Moi and Wittgenstein. Traditional semiotics rests on the idea of representation — as old as Augustine and as new as Saussure and his followers (who for Moi include just about all twentieth-century theorists).2 Wittgenstein challenges this view. But he does not say that representation fails and therefore we must get beyond it. Rather, according to Moi’s reading of Wittgenstein,
representation — naming — is one of the many things we do with language. After all, it makes no sense to deny that we sometimes name things. But there are so many other language-games, so many other things we do with words that have nothing to do with representation. (14)
Yet there is still a way in which Wittgenstein offers an alternative to Saussure, to the “doxa” that meaning lies in the arbitrary relation of signified and signifier.
Wittgenstein’s core insight is that “the meaning of a word is its use in the language” (§43). Moi stresses that this does not mean use simply becomes a new “ground” of meaning:
Use is a practice grounded on nothing. Use is simply what we do. … But as long as we are willing to continue to speak to each other, use creates a semblance of ground, what Cavell calls “a thin net over the abyss” (CR, 178) (29)
Wittgenstein is thus bringing us to an alternative to Augustine’s ground of ostension. “Use” is not context (which would be an alternative ground for meaning). Rather, different kinds of use — pointing, naming — are practices within a particular language-game. I need to know how to play the game to access language at even the most basic level: only someone who has already learned the rules of chess can meaningfully ask “what does the king look like?” (§31). And in order to learn a language from pointing, we need to already be able to speak another language. Where Augustine’s child learned to speak by learning names, Wittgenstein’s child is initiated into practices, into the relevant forms of life (§32). Learning a language is learning to see and acquiring a world: “to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life” (§19).
The question that remains for me is how to speak across languages. On the one hand, this is a question of how to speak between fields: from ordinary language philosophy to post-Saussurean theory; or from analytic philosophy to post-phenomenology; or from philosophy to anthropology. On the other hand, it is equally a question of how to work between language-games/forms of life. I think these are overlapping projects: learning about language with Wittgenstein might also teach me better how to weave his philosophy into other kinds of investigations.
- After all, Moi reminds us, “the Structure of Scientific Revolutions is deeply Wittgensteinian, not to say Cavellian. In the 1950s, when Kuhn was writing his classic book, he and Cavell were colleagues and friends at Berkeley, ‘at times almost in possession of something you might call an intellectual community,’ Cavell writes. Kuhn for his part calls Cavell his ‘creative sounding board,’ and the ‘only person with whom I have ever been able to explore my ideas in incomplete sentences.’” (10)
- Moi writes: “I think one could show, had one but time enough, that all recent theory formations that seek to get past subjectivity and language still work with the Saussurean and post-Saussurean picture of language, even if only implicitly and for lack of other alternatives” (17).