wittgenstein's smile

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Emile Cioran:

When, after a series of questions about desire, disgust and serentity, Buddha was asked, ‘What is the goal, the final meaning of Nirvanna?’, he did not answer. He smiled. There has been a great deal of commentary on that smile, instead of seeing it as a normal reaction to a pointless question. It is what we do when confronted by a child’s ‘why?’. We smile, because no answer is conceivable, because the answer would be even more meaningless than the question.

Yet Cioran himself spent large chunks of his life thinking about questions for which there are no answers. Not only that, he invested considerable swaths of time in equally superfluous attempts to write it down…to publish it…to share it with others. No mere smiles from Emile, right?

And, of course, a scant few from any of us either.

In this respect, perhaps, one has to admire someone like Wittgenstein. He lived as hermetically as one can in philosophy circles and after the LT he allowed [to the best of my recollection] nothing substantial of his to be published until after he died.

Now that is smiling!

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Related to the above:

From Simon Critchley’s, Very Little…Almost Nothing:

Although Beckett’s protagonists desire to be done with words, to be finally silent, such silence is impossible, unattainable…Although le vide and its positive vision of annihilation is what the protagonists in Beckett devoutly wish for, it is precisely this that they cannot have, and the words continue, ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on’…If language is a medium which no longer satisfies us, then there is no recourse outside of language to which we might turn for support.

Here, Critchley seems to be telling us that once you have acknowledged there is nothing essential “outside of language” to anchor you [in the phenomenal world], what happens when you have to acknowledge in turn that language is also just a point of view respecting those things most important to you? You communicate not because you believe that what you communicate reflects what is essentially true but because to be a human being necessitates communicating—something. You have to live with the futility of communication that can never be dispensed with if you choose to interact with others. And when you do you find the most achingly controversial communicaion has very litttle to do either/or, true/false, yes/no. Instead, it revolves ambiguously around what we ought or ought not to think and feel and do [around others] relating to things like political power and value judgments and God and war and starvation and human torture and social justice and individual freedom. And here we communicate because we have no recourse but to. In my view, however, if you are not confused and uncertain about this sort of communication it is only because you haven’t a clue about what thinkers like Sam Beckett are trying to tell us about the profound limitations human comminication. Wittgenstein might have proposed that we remain silent about these things because—ultimately---- nothing could be said, but Beckett makes it clear that unless we choose to largely seal ourselves off from the world of people [as Ludwig more or less did], “I can’t go on…I’ll go on” is, alas, the best of all possible worlds. And that includes the manner in which we communicate this.

3

I don’t think he was placidly contemplating the folly of questioning, so much as a cripplingly neurotic perfectionist. But he did live very authentically, if not at all happily.

4

Yes, he was authentically naive. He was no more naive than others, but he was more passionate about drawing the conclusion.

His brother was also a strange example of authenticity. They were both driven to persevere like their father did, but had a deeply romantic notion of philosophy and art… it is sympathetic but I wonder what people get out of it in terms of understanding the world or the mind.

I’m sure that now and then someone had an insight provoked by the man… but what?

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I’ve never had any insights from reading Wittgenstein. But maybe I just didn’t try hard enough.

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Regarding the role that language plays in our lives, consider this from Ray Monk’s biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein:

[b]In his lectures, Wittgenstein ridiculed [the] concern for ‘hidden contradictions’, and it was to this that Turing voiced his most dogged and spirited dissent. Take the case of the Liar’s Paradox, Wittgentstein suggested:

‘It is very queer in a way that this should have puzzled anyone—much more extraordinary than you might think: that this should be the thing to worry human beings. Because the thing works like this: if a man says ‘I am lying’ we say that it follows that he is not lying, from which it follows that he is lying and so on. Well, so what? You can go on like that until you are black in the face. Why not? It doesn’t matter.’

"What is puzzling about this sort of paradox, Turing tried to explain, is ‘that one usually uses a contradiction as a criterion for having done something wrong. But in this case one cannot find anything done wrong.’ Yes, replied Wittgenstein, because nothing has been done wrong: ‘One may say, “this can only be explained by a theory of types.” But what is there that needs to be explained?’

"Turing clearly needed to explain, not only why it is puzzling, but also why it mattered. The real harm of a system that contains a contradiction, he suggested, ‘will not come unless there is an application, in which case the bridge may fall down or something of the sort.’

In the following lecture, he returned to the fray, and almost the entire lecture was taken up with a debate between the two on the importance of discovering ‘hidden contradictions’:

'Turing:

You cannot be confident about applying your calculus until you know that there is no hidden contradictions in it.

Wittgenstein:

There seems to me to be an enormous mistake there. For your calculus gives certain results, and you want the bridge not to break down. I’d say things can go wrong in only two ways: either the bridge breaks down or you have made a mistake in your calculation—for example you multiplied wrongly. But you seem to think there may be a third thing wrong: the calculus is wrong.

Turing:

No. What I object to is the bridge falling down.

Wittgenstein:

But how do you know that it will fall down? Isn’t that a question of physics? It may be that if one throws dice in order to caulculate the bridge it will never fall down.'[/b]

I suppose it is pointless to ask: who is right? Pointless, perhaps, because, as Wittgenstein seems to suggest [to me], in trying to align our language with What Is True we find over and again that words aren’t always suited to the task. Here, in other words, we are dealing with intricacies of human biology and consciousness…with logic and epistemology and psychological states and philosophical analysis and linguistics. We soon find ourselves becoming hopelessly ensnared in a semantic and syllogistic hell.

On the other hand, someone might say, “I am a murderer”. Now he is either lying or he is not. He either did murder someone or he did not. Here, in fact, things tend to become problematic only when when someone says, “John is a murderer”, and then, when asked for confirmation, says, “John performs abortion in a Planned Parenthood clinic”. So, is he a murderer? Or, perhaps, another possible problematic context is when someone says he is a murderer and actually believes he is even though he has murdered no one. He lives his life, however, as though he were, in fact, a murderer. He repents, turns himself in to the police etc. This illustrates the sometimes puzzling gap between reality as it exists and reality as we think it exists [and say it exist in language]. It’s importnat to note because many, many times what counts regarding our behavior [behavior that carries very real consequences] is what we believe is true, not necessarily what can be demonstrated to actually be true.

In any event, when someone says “I am a liar” and does not reference that to any particular circumstantial context, the context becomes the words themselves. They don’t refer to any actual bridge or actual murder, do they? We can’t either validate or falsify his contention because it is entirely self-referential. It is in his head. It is the linguistic equilvalent of a house of cards.

But this is surely related in turn to what Wittgenstein meant by embracing silence regarding the relationship between language and aesthetics and ethics and religion. There are, however, philosophers who create deductions about such values and they duel with the deductions of other philosophers. They think they are saying something substantial about human moral interactions when, instead, the interactions are really only revolving around the internal logic of the conceptual assumptions themselves.

They are, it might be said, not really about bridges staying up or falling down at all. Except as they are constructed out of words.

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Essentially, Wittgensteinian thought, what it represents, more abstractly, is the destruction or prevention of the possibility for thinking well. One might see a ‘paradox’ in “I am lying” because one is unable to understand that language is a system of referents and references. Where language referents refers only to other “purely” linguistic objects, fine, this is unproblematic; but of course the vast majority of the time linguistic referents (words) refer to objects outside of the dominion of the linguistic, to perceptions, emotions, expectations and intentions, questionings, or the memory or future imaginings of one or more of these. Reifying language in the manner of Wittgenstein entirely destroys the possibility that one might come to an understanding of how language connects with what is outside of itself - this sort of understanding itself being akin to intelligence generally, where by intellect we mean also the possibilities for self-observation and self-criticism.

“I am lying” means “I am lying about…”, whether this about is explicit or implicit, or in the case of the Wittgensteinian, dishonestly and intentionally omitted entirely. The notion of lying has meaning because to lie is to lie about - there is no"lying" “in itself”, we can understand the broad abstraction of a lie generally without appeal to a particular situation, but in the total absence of such a situation “to lie” becomes an entirely empty and meaningless utterance. So, “I am lying” might be true or false, depending on whether or not it is infact true that the lie in question is, in fact, a lie. The fact that the statement does not refer only to itself but is necessarily, to be meaningful at all, which is to say to be linguistic at all rather than a mere string of unintelligible utterances, a reference to some state of affairs (real of imaginary, it makes no difference) outside of itself is something that the Wittgensteinian thinker simply cannot grasp. Which is astounding, really, since this is perhaps among the most rudimentary and simple sort of understandings imaginable.

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I’m not sure why you think so; he explicitly tackles meaning at great length throughout all of his work. In fact, the Tractatus is essentially the defining proclamation that (and elucidation of how) language refers to states of affairs, which he then spent the remaining 30-odd years of his life dissecting and repudiating. Grasp it, at least, he can.

The later Wittgenstein saw such problems as puzzles, nothing grander or more serious than that. And his approach to solving such puzzles was, as yours, to look at how language is used. Not semantics and grammars, but embedded in life. And that it is certainly a lot more complex than “referring to states of affairs” as he first thought. So his argument goes: if someone says “this sentence is a lie”, what do we gain by trying to solve it? It’s a word-game, that’s all; there’s no practical application or great truth behind it. He made the complaint that philosophers (like himself) tend to take an example and solve it, and then claim grand universal theories off the back of them.

He certainly had his weak spots - I don’t think his theory of mathematics really holds together, let alone stands up to criticism, and his aphoristic notes leave a lot of room for people to fill in their own interpretations - but meaning was his meat and veg.

9

It is good to know he need not be judged based on his admirers, then. What I have read of him, admittedly only parts of two of his works, never caused me to question the association between the idiotic simple-mindedness of those who invoke him (I once had a prof. who went on for an entire class about “this statement is false”, who loved Wittgy and referenced him often) and his own thought. Perhaps I will give him another go… not that I would expect a whole lot of insight, after already progressing through a decent amount of linguistics and post-structuralism, but… couldn’t hurt, I suppose.

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Here is what John Searle had to say about Wittgenstein and human language in an interview with Bryan Magee:

[b]…once we get out of the idea that meaning is entirely a matter of introspectable entities in the mind, or that meaning is a matter of words standing for things in the world—once we we see the analogy between the use of words and the use of pieces in a game like chess—then we can see that the meaning of a word is entirely given by its use. Just as the ‘meaning’ of the king in chess is entirely exhausted by its role in the game, so, similarly, the meaning of words—including philosophically puzzling words such as ‘good’, ‘true’, ‘beautiful’ and ‘just’----is entirely exhausted by their role in the language games that are played with them.

"…there is another aspect of this analogy that is disconcerting to many traditional philosophers. Wittgenstein insists that we shouldn’t look for the foundations of language games any more than we should look for the foundations of games such as football or baseball. All of these are just human activities. These activities have to look out for themselves.[/b]

Imagine, for example, you lived in a culture in which chess was nonexistent. You had never heard of it. Suppose an anthrolpolgist brought a chess board with her and set up the pieces on the board in your village. You would look at the board and at the pieces. But they would be all but meaningless to you. At best you might imagine that it is some sort of contest…some sort of game. Only when you learn the rules of the game – when you learn how to use the language that accompanies the game – will it all make any real sense to you.

The same thing with human moral and political relationships. Meaning is embedded in the language as it is actually used contextually. You might go into a culture and determine that men and women are talking about what you construe to be “freedom”. But it is not “played” by the same set of rules you are used to. Can you imagine, for instance, an Objectivist listening to some third world hunter and gatherer tribe express what human freedom means to them? What would she say: “No, no…you don’t understand. You have freedom all wrong! Let me explain to you what freedom really is.”

Then she proceeds to read passages from Atlas Shrugged or Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal. But for some strange reason the natives just don’t seem to “get it” at all.

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The question seems improperly framed here, as “the meaning OF words”. But words themselves are not meaningful, words are only representations of, symbols for meaning(ful experiences). The question is more accurately put: the meaning behind words; the meaning invoked by words. The relationship between language and what spans beyond, underneath it - what sustains it, colors it with life and substance.

What is meaningful? Feelings, sensations, desires, hopes, imaginings, expectations, conceptions, the relations of any of these to each other, the recollection of these, etc. Words are what we use (among other things) to trace along the pathways of experiences we are having or have had. Why is this? Because we have formed words precisely as a history of past meanings, and thus words invoke a context of meaningfulness (make of meanings objects which are then related to each other within the larger meaningful-objectified context) in terms of MEMORY (the remembrance of past experiences). Words do not have meaning in themselves because they are GIVEN into meaningfulness through representing something else that is going on in the mind/body and its interactions with an environment.

It’s like saying chess pieces might have meaning as chess pieces if there were no human, anywhere, who understood chess. Of course this is not the case, the pieces would mean something else, symbolise something different (even if this were just “carved pieces of wood”), just as words mean different things to different people. It is people who give meaning, because it is people who have meaningful experiences. And yet this does not imply any sort of linguistic ‘closed circle’. Our use of language is a bridge, a representational object-system that touches deeply upon, draws from, and acts as media for the very nature of the most meaningful within our human experiences.

We shouldnt’ be expecting words to have meaning in themselves in the first place, we should be asking, “What is the nature of the meaning that is invoked by this word, and why”?

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Yes, it would be helpful if this were the manner in which all intelligent men and women approached the language they use— language able to be defended with sophistication and nuance.

But many do not approach it in this manner at all. They are either indoctrinated as children to embrace particular meanings as denoting “this thing here” but not “that thing there”, or they manage to convince themselves that all words must convey – can convey – a precise meaning. In other words, a principled assessment it is their duty and obligation as, say, patriotic citizens or the God fearing faithful to convey to others.

And [if necessary] to enforce in others, in turn.

They might grasp the meaning given to chess pieces as inherent only in the game itself but they do not approach the meaning given to the words used to convey human value judgments in that manner. And they certainly don’t see human interaction here as a language game.

Instead, language used in this realm exist solely to reflect what must be said regarding particular behaviors that come into conflict.

This is the language of either/or. And it is invariably used where the language of moderation, negociation and compromise might be more appropriate.

13

Erich Heller in “Wittgenstein: Unphilosophical Notes”:

The break between Tratactus and Philosophical Investigations is of the same kind as that between Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy and his Human, All-Too-Human. In both cases it was brought about by the abnegation of metaphysics, the loss of faith in any preestablished correspondence between, on the one hand, the logic of thought and language, and, on the other hand, the “logic” of reality.

And:

It was Nietzsche’s declared intention not to follow any longer this ‘instinct’ and thus to cure the philosophical sickness of centuries, just as it was Wittgenstein’s to ‘solve the philosophical problems’ by recognizing their source in the ‘functioning of our language’—‘in spite of an instinct to misunderstand it.’ For Nietzsche the truth about man was that he must live without Truth.

This is why I always come back to Wittgenstein and Nietzsche—to the manner in which both seem to grasp that ultimately human language is unable to describe – to describe fully and objectively – the crucial relationship between human knowledge, the meaning we give to words and the manner in which this relates to the value judgments we make in our lives. Language, reason and logic, in other words, can only take us in so far…and no farther.

When any particular person reacts to any particular value judgment, it is like reacting to any particular piece of music or to any particular movie. The reactions can be widely – wildly – diverse. And that is because our reactions often become a cacaphonous jumble of mental, emotional and psychological states entangled further still in all the many conflicting and convoluted existential variables that make up our individual lives. The words often grope about fitfully in the cracks and crevices of these particular transactions. Yet these are some of the most important ones of all because they revolve around the potential for human conflict—the consequences of which can devastating. There is no way to articulate know how one ought to behave objectively in any particular context. And yet, through the internal logic of the arguments themselves, language is often used to invent such dogmatic agendas.

The paradox, however, is that, even in attempts to discuss this, you find yourself using words as though, through the use of language, it were in fact entirely possible to discuss these things in an entriely rational manner. And yet, at best, we can express these things only in a way that seems reasonable to us individually from day to day. And then we can find others that – more or less – think and feel the same way.

But these ever and on-going “consensuses” are always precarious – historically, culturally, experientially – in a human all too human world submerged in contingency, chance and change.

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More Heller:

[b]One of Wittgenstein’s aphorisms runs as follows:

‘Philosophy results in the discovery of one or another piece of simple nonsense, and in bruises which the understanding has suffered by bumping its head against the limits of language.’

And in one of the jottings of his late years Nietzsche wrote under the heading ‘Fundamental solution’:

‘Language is founded upon the most naive prejudices…We read contradictions and problems into everything because we think only within the forms of language…We have to cease to think if we refuse to do it in the prisonhouse of language; for we cannot reach further than the doubt which asks whether the limit we see is really a limit…All rational thought is interpretation in accordance with a scheme which we cannot throw off.’

For the world as it is has neither meaning nor value. Meaning and value must be given to it: by God or by man himself. If God is dead and man fails, then nothing in the world has any value and our own language deceives us with all its ancient intimations of higher meaning.[/b]

If there is a particular self-delusion almost all men and women share in common it is the one that revolves around the psychological tendency to confuse the words we express about meaning “in our heads” with whatever the world actually does “mean”—whatever it actually “is”. And, sans God, these relationships may well be essentially meaningless and absurd. The brute facticity of raw existence itself might prevail in the end. And even this is obliterated for each “I” upon death.

We don’t know what is “behind” reality—human or otherwise. At best we now ponder: can we know?

But those philosophers who, by and large, live in a world of words will sometimes line the words up into concepts that are often presumed to express exactly what reality means—what it is.

And, again, even this analysis itself is not exempt from the consequences of acknowledging how our reaction to words like these can only be a self-referrential contraption.

And yet we know how, time and again, our words can, in fact, reflect the shortest distance between two points. So how do we make the proper distinction between language that reveals what is true and language that lies about things we may never be able to express wholly…fully? And might it not be argued that human freedom itself is more richly explored in a world marbled through and through with ambiguity and uncertainty?

In any event, what human truths lie beyond the limitations of language itself? And how can this be known? And what can be used to communicate this if not language? A true paradox, it seems.

15

Still more Heller:

[b]When philosophers use a word----“knowledge,” “being,” “object,” “I,” “proposition,”—and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language in which it has its home?

One may well ask: who, with language speaking in a hundred tongues through our literatures, dialects, social classes, journals and newspapers, establishes this actual use? Shakespeare? Donne? James Joyce? the Oxford English Dictionary? the College Porter? the habitual reader of The news of the World?

Wittgenstein said:

‘Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it…It leaves everything as it is. We must do away with all explanation, and the description alone must take its place.’[/b]

In some respects, however, this is analogous to suggesting the function of an anthropologist is to make contact with other cultures and merely observe what he or she sees…to describe this in papers or in books. Yet in doing so the anthropolgists are using language that reflects their own acculturated understanding of what the words mean. And those who read these “scholarly” efforts will likewise take out of these cultures what they first put into them: their own.

And, ironically, what is Wittgenstein doing above but offering us an “explanation” about what we should or should not do with language? He is describing the inherent limitations of language. And rightly so. But that does not mean we can’t evaluate this description and draw conclusions as to how it might impact on our own social interactions with others.

And how it does, of course, is by way of suggesting that, in some respects, we don’t come to own the language we use so much as the language comes to own us. We are often describing the world not as it is nearly as much as we are depicting the way in which we see it.

But this is always going to happen up to a point. So, in my view, one critical function of philosophy [perhaps the most important fucntion of all] must be to point this out over and over again.