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.
Continue reading “Notes on Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations and Toril Moi’s Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies after Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell“
