Tag: Wittgenstein

Notes on Stephen Best’s None Like Us

Aliosha BielenbergLeave a comment

I take the main thrust of Stephen Best’s None Like Us to be that the past cannot and should not in any straightforward be a source of “lessons” for the present. As Reinhart Koselleck put it in an essay he wrote in a Festschrift for Karl Löwith, today the old Ciceronian adage, historia magistra vitae, is dissolved “within the horizon of modern, dynamic history” (Sediments of Time, 264–65). Or as Löwith himself put it, “we find ourselves more or less at the end of the modern rope” (Meaning in History, 3) such that history cannot be a straightforward source of models for our political present (no more monumental history, to put it in Nietzche’s terms). For Löwith, Koselleck, and a whole host of other postwar German thinkers, it was the experience of the Third Reich that marked a “break in tradition” (Arendt) after which the idea of progress in history simply cannot be entertained any longer; for Best, that which “breaks the modern rope” is the transatlantic slave trade. But in both cases, the ways in which these historical events intertwine with the thinkability of history as a source for political action today is… complicated, to say the least.

Best critiques the idea that the past is ours to simply learn from, whether to redeem or to redress. He is particularly concerned with the relationship history has to politics of the present. As Best puts it:

The idea of continuity between the slave past and our present provides a framework for conceptions of black collectivity and community across time. This idea, a proxy for race, nests within it a significant thesis: the present most African Americans experience was forged at some historical nexus when slavery and race conjoined. … If we take slavery’s dispossessions to live on into the twenty-first century, divesting history of movement and change, then what form can effective political agency take? Why must our relation to the past be ethical in the first place — and is it possible to have a relation to the past that is not predicated on ethics? (64)

To rephrase: Best is concerned about the way in which a particular past, the “historical nexus when slavery and race conjoined,” becomes an ineluctable horizon for politics today. What Best wants to do is to clear a space for “effective political agency” that is not predicated on theses of continuity or organic ties to a collective past. To put it more simply: Best wants a kind of politics that deals with history outside the framework of “collective memory.” If we wanted to speak with Wittgenstein and Cavell (in a way that Best invites us to do elsewhere [None Like Us, 43]), we might talk about this as the task of knitting together a “thin net over the abyss,” those “very shaky foundations” upon which we feel “terrified that maybe language (and understanding, and knowledge) rests” (Claim of Reason, 178). Or, to put it in David Scott’s terms (another body of work that I read as foundational to None Like Us) Best is most basically concerned with “the conceptual problem of political presents and with how reconstructed pasts and anticipated futures are thought out in relation to them” (Conscripts of Modernity, 1).

So, what is Best’s distinctive proposal? His explicit aim is to “run against the grain of work advanced under the banners of ‘recovery’ and ‘melancholy'” by “specify[ing] some of the limits to these modes of critique and to propose other ways to think about loss” (65). I want to pick up one strand of this project, which I hope we can further unpack together: Best’s particular reading of Nietzsche’s “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life.” The passage Best focuses on goes as follows:

A historical phenomenon, known clearly and completely and resolved into a phenomenon of knowledge, is, for him who has perceived it, dead: for he has recognized in it the delusion, the injustice, the blind passion, and in general the whole earthly and darkening horizon of this phenomenon, and has thereby also understood its power in history. This power has now lost its hold over him insofar as he is a man of knowledge: but perhaps it has not done so insofar as he is a man involved in life. (Untimely Meditations, ed. Breazeale, 67)

Best’s summary of the “project” he finds in Nietzsche’s text is that he seeks to “unburden history writing of both presentism and teleology” (95). Trying to understand what it means to be “untimely” prompts Best to ask: “what specific orientation toward the past allows it to remain still alive to my critical senses? What orientation forestalls the moment in which a ‘historical phenomenon’ resolves into a ‘phenomenon of knowledge’?” (96)

Once again, to provide an answer Best turns to Stanley Cavell — this time his essay “The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear.” Best writes:

There is non-appropriable or missed experience that will always evade our attempts to grasp it. … To try to articulate what I am thinking here, I find Stanley Cavell helpful. … When we insist that the past has to be made relevant to the present, or understand it as already so relevant, we fall into the typical error of parents and children — “taking difference from each other to threaten, or promise, severance from one another.” But we are severed. To confirm that is “neither a blessing nor a curse”; it is simply a fact. To deny that, however, is to give up not only knowledge of the position of others, but also “the means of locating one’s own.” Our charge in dealing with figures from the slave past, whatever our critical orientation, is to make their present theirs, and (if I might hijack Cavell’s language here) “it is only in this perception of them as separate from me that I make them present. That I make them other, and face them.” (98)

The “problem of other minds,” in the end, is just that: others are, irreducibly, there, and separate from me. To maintain this separateness forestalls the collapse of history into a “phenomenon of knowledge.” The challenge is to nonetheless maintain the power of the past insofar as “man is involved in life.”

At this point, I find myself agreeing with Best: “To be honest, I must admit to feeling a bit stuck” (100). If Best’s aim had been to “specify some of the limits to these modes of critique” in Black Studies, perhaps too we could say with Wittgenstein that “This running against the walls of our cage [of limits, of “the boundaries of language”] is perfectly, absolutely, hopeless. … But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it.” (Lecture on Ethics, 19) Perhaps it is best at this point, in closing, to once again quote Wittgenstein, who said: “The real discovery is the one that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy when I want to.” (Philosophical Investigations, §133)

Reading Asad Reading Wittgenstein

Aliosha BielenbergLeave a comment

I don’t think it’s an accident that Wittgenstein and Cavell both grew up in intensely musical environments. Brahms frequented the Wittgenstein household, and his brother Paul was the dedicatee of Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand (because he had lost his right arm in the First World War); Cavell’s mother was also intensely musical, and he studied composition at Juilliard before switching to philosophy at UCLA. Playing the piano is reading and not-reading at once. As Asad puts it:

When a practiced pianist plays, thoughtfully and with feeling, a piece of music she has mastered without having to read the score, one can say that signs have dissolved into her hands. To say that is not to imply that the activity is meaningless but that it is the result of practice that has eventuated in an ability to act in a particular way. (404)

Sometimes, when I play piano, my thoughts drift. This is not to say that my playing is mechanical, as if I could separate my body’s machine-like movements from my higher faculty of thinking. As Asad says, it is quite the opposite: my habit of playing allows me to inhabit a form of life and so take grammatical rules to be perfectly ordinary. It is as if I am a native speaker who has mastered that language’s grammar without knowing what rules I am in fact following.

In this opening passage we see the two questions that I think preoccupy Asad in his turn to Wittgenstein. First: what to do with signs and symbols, or how to make sense of culture after Geertz. Second: what to do with the category of “religion,” or how to make sense of religious practice after genealogy (in Foucault’s sense). We can find resources to address these queries in Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein had as his primary object of inquiry meaning, i.e. representation/signification/ostension; he carried out his inquiry through grammatical investigations of e.g. pain, language-games, and rule-following. Asad is a significant anthropologist of religion, and specifically of “formations of the secular” like pain and agency; but I see an overarching concern in his work for rethinking meaning, representation, and agency. In my view, where they meet is in that they both locate agency in use (of, e.g., descriptions or pain) rather than in representation.

One way into these questions might be to look again at “practice.” I don’t usually think of practicing the piano as something like the religious practices anthropologists sometimes claim to study. But they bear deep similarities, after all: children are forced to practice piano and to practice making the sign of the cross in church — both ways of enforcing discipline, of shaping habit, of learning to follow rules. In other words, practice is a central way of inculcating a form of life. One might think there is something of value in “unmasking” the origin of these practices — for instance, in pointing to the role of religion in reinforcing power dynamics, rather than being a “true” expression of “faith.” In Foucault’s terms, this would be a genealogy. In Wittgenstein’s, it is a rather different matter. As Asad puts it:

My point is simply that he [Wittgenstein] not only helps us see that looking for meanings underneath signs (whether in the form of writing, voice, or gesture) is mistaken because meanings are embodied in practice. He also makes us aware that to the extent that a form of life has been mastered through practice—once the practice becomes part of the everyday, of an ordinary form of life—explicit signs may become unnecessary. (404)

To show that a given practice is part of an ordinary form of life is exactly that: ordinary. Saying that, e.g., “religion” is a category that must be located within the history of Christianity isn’t to radically unsettle a theory of the world, but rather to show how the meaning of “religion” is constituted by its everyday use.

Thus, for Wittgenstein (in Asad’s words), “religious practice isn’t necessarily based on a theory about the world; it is first and foremost a way of being” (405). Wittgenstein’s critique of Frazer was that he illegitimately confused these two interpretations of religion. As Asad puts it, Wittgenstein “finds particularly objectionable Frazer’s extension of judgments of truth or falsity, of sense or nonsense, from propositions where such judgments are appropriate to situations where they are not” (405). Asad astutely notes that this parallels, in a way, Malinowski’s own proposition that myths are not “childish accounts of the past but narratives that functioned as justi­fi­cations of social claims and institutions in the present” (405). But Asad also cautions us not to conflate this reorientation with Wittgenstein’s turn from meaning to use: “the latter doesn’t simply argue that meaning is necessarily determined by use (thus generalizing Malinowski’s interpretation of the meaning of myth), but that the multiple ways in which language is used—by sender and by receiver—require us to investigate the complex relationships of discourse to life through the idea of ‘grammar’” (406). It is worth thinking in just what way Wittgenstein differs from Malinowski, that is in what way the “complex relationships of discourse to life” are not reducible to “culture.” I would propose that this gap hinges on our understanding of “use” not primarily as a noun but as a verb: we use descriptions as instruments, not because we are justified in doing so but because we have a right (PI §289, §291).

Note again that this is not using descriptions for the purpose of, say, advancing critique (as Horkheimer thinks “traditional theory” can be put to critical uses). Instead, Asad says: “If language is rooted in ways of being and doing, description is not merely necessary to critique; it may be critique” (409). Then, we might think the prime example of critique is the re-description of a form of life “in another way than the one generally familiar to us” (410), with the purpose of changing behavior. In other words, “criticism is an activity rooted in and directed at what binds people to their forms of life, not simply an expression of ‘rational argument’” (410).

To begin again, in a different key: I do not think it is an accident that my feelings when I heard Grigory Sokolov play in the Concertgebouw in June were religious. Once again, my thoughts drifted away, but not quite to be replaced with feeling. To play the piano well, Asad tells us, is to play with both thought and feeling. Thus Augustine, in his Confessions, is both the literary writer of great feeling and the Neoplatonic philosopher of great thought. Showing that one is reducible to the other brings us nowhere — and is untrue, besides. Augustine did not give up his philosophy when he became a Christian, even if its trappings fell away; a great pianist does not give up caring about scores when they master a piece of music (quite the opposite; the great interpreters of Bach will often make their own editions from his manuscripts). Signs do not dissolve into thin air. Rather, they “dissolve into hands.” Representation is redirected to embodied agency, our “ability to act in a particular way” (404).

Bibliography

Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Cultural Memory in the Present. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2003.

———. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.

———. “Thinking about Religion through Wittgenstein.” Critical Times 3, no. 3 (December 1, 2020): 403–42. https://doi.org/10.1215/26410478-8662304

Cavell, Stanley. Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010.

Monk, Ray. Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. New York: Free Press, 1990.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1968.

Notes on Talal Asad and Clifford Geertz on the Study of Religion

Aliosha BielenbergLeave a comment

A longer paper that grew out of this essay can be found here.

What might be an appropriate and useful way to talk about something like “religion” across times, locales, and disciplines? This is a question shared by classical approaches to the study of religion like those of Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, and Max Müller, and more recent scholars like Clifford Geertz, Talal Asad, Tomoko Masuzawa, and Jonathan Z. Smith. What Smith, Asad, Geertz, and Masuzawa share in common is a sense of the inadequacy of the classical approaches. Asad, Smith, and Masuzawa in particular offer as alternatives paying more attention to reflexivity, disciplinary history, and the relation between power and knowledge. In this post, I want to offer some comments and a question based primarily on Asad’s chapter “The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category” in his seminal book Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).

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

Aliosha BielenbergLeave a comment

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.

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