by Iris Murdoch
Later on, at II xi, Wittgenstein pursues the inner-outer matter, with evident signs of doubt and anxiety, in relation to sensations, perceptions, experiences. What is seeing something as something? Recognition demands mastery of a technique, possession of (public) concepts, ability to interpret. But what is seeing ‘according to an interpretation’? ‘“Seeing as” is not part of perception ... it is like seeing and again not like.’ (p. 197.) ‘The concept of “seeing” makes a tangled impression ... After all, how completely ragged what we see can appear! And now look at all that can be meant by “description of what is seen” ... Here we are in enormous danger of wanting to make fine distinctions. It is the same when one tries to define the concept of a material object in terms of “what is really seen”. What we have rather to do is to accept the everyday language-game, and to note false accounts of the matter as false.’ (p. 200.) ‘It is certainly possible to be convinced by evidence that someone is in such-and-such a state of mind, that, for instance, he is not pretending. But “evidence” here includes “imponderable” evidence. The question is: what does imponderable evidence accomplish? ... Imponderable evidence includes subtleties of glance, of gesture, of tone.’ (p. 228.) ‘The criteria for the truth of the confession that I thought such-and-such are not the criteria for a true description of a process. And the importance of the true confession does not reside in its being a correct and certain report of a process. It resides rather in the special consequences which can be drawn from a confession whose truth is guaranteed by the special criteria of truthfulness.’ (p. 222.) ‘It is no doubt true that you could not calculate with certain sorts of paper and ink, if, that is, they were subject to certain queer changes — but still the fact that they changed could in turn only be got from memory and comparison with other means of calculation. And how are these to be tested in their turn? What has to be accepted, the given, is — so one could say — forms of life.’ (p. 226.)
These last pages certainly make a tangled impression. Wittgenstein now allows ‘imponderable evidence’, ‘fine shades of behaviour’, glances, gestures, tones, also differing concepts of ‘experience’. A moral consideration enters, the concept of truthfulness. There is a laborious piling up of examples. It is as if he were at last feeling bound to envisage the muddled nature of the human condition and hastily to put it inside the confines of philosophy (logic). That indeed is the problem. How much of human doing can be analysed, formalised, philosophically? The great metaphysicians of the past seemed to assume that they could somehow capture it all. Wittgenstein speaks again, so near the end, of language games and forms of life, but still without clarifying either conception. How large or small, local or general, is a language game? How are we to trust ourselves to such a concept, what is it to ‘accept the everyday language game’ and to note false accounts? These would presumably be philosophical (theoretical) accounts noted by philosophers. Forms of life also remain unclarified, though they are finally referred to as to be accepted, the given, das Hinzunehmende, Gegebene, great words of power which suggest something (or some things) transcendentally deduced and utterly unavoidable. Well, we may be inclined to say that language itself is ‘given’. But Wittgenstein’s Lebensformen are introduced as fundamental (logical?) judges of the possibility of meaning. Meanwhile the vast concept of ‘experience’ subsists as something inward (perhaps images or toothache) but dependent upon, situated by, a public outer, which has consequences. Imponderable evidence exists but is suspect. Truth is not exhibited by an account of an inner process (all right) but by criteria of truthfulness. How is truthfulness tested? How is memory tested? By consequences! But surely human society depends largely on trust in the virtue of others, often ascertained on imponderable evidence? There is indeed a clearly discernible area of mistakes made by philosophers (which I have mentioned before). In the later part of the book we should recall the warning in the Preface that we shall have to travel over a wide field criss-cross in every direction.
The Philosophical Investigations has been studied and combed over and argued about and discussed and explained by very many people who know more about the work of Wittgenstein than I do, and I am aware of rushing in where angels fear to tread. I want to say a few things about the end of the book and the light it throws back on the beginning; and also to relate what Wittgenstein says about ‘inner and outer’ to some other (moral philosophical) considerations. Wittgenstein’s analysis of ‘perception’, etc. pursued with so many and various examples, seems to raise new questions of terminology and method, and even raise doubts about matters apparently established earlier. Wittgenstein has claimed that his philosophy offers ‘description’, affords ‘perspicuous presentation’. But at times one wonders, is this phenomenology? Wittgenstein seems sometimes perilously near the edge of empirical science. (See Richard Gregory, The Mind in Science, pp. 196, 388, 428 for a scientist’s reference to these reflections.) Wittgenstein himself notes the peril. ‘Here it is difficult to see that what is at issue is the fixing of concepts.’ He adds, ‘A concept forces itself on one’. (In Culture and Value he wonders whether the concept of God may be forced on one.) This suggests that the argument is a sort of transcendental one, wherein concepts are deduced. Does perception include interpretation? (Pure perception, pure cognition?) ‘Was it seeing or was it a thought?’ How can this question be answered? A description of perceptions, whether by Merleau-Ponty or Richard Gregory, may produce a great variety of facts about visual experiences. (For instance, an approaching train, seen at a distance, at first grows larger while seeming to stay in the same place, then ceases to grow and is seen as moving.) I do not see how Wittgenstein’s question here connects with the more clarified arguments set up earlier (about illusory inner processes, recognising by mental samples, thinking as picturing etc.). We do not normally think of approaching trains in terms of outer object plus inner picture. In a laboratory we might try to describe particular perceptions (now the train is getting larger, now the train is moving), and these might lead to various scientific conclusions. But outside the laboratory, or untroubled by philosophy, our perceptions, which so largely constitute our experienced-being, are intensely individual and polymorphous. Seeing, thinking and ‘interpreting’ are mixed. And, for instance, instinctive value judgments and intuitions are involved. I feel that Wittgenstein’s urgency, his anxiety, as he poses these questions is related to his wish to keep the ‘individual’ and ‘value’ out of the picture. (This would continue the metaphysic of the Tractatus.)
The concepts of experience and intuition ‘embarrass’ Wittgenstein as they ‘embarrass’ Derrida. The experience of seeing the approaching train (Merleau-Ponty’s example) can, when released from phenomenology, be (as truthfully as possible) described in innumerable ways, and involve innumerable considerations. (Is the train late? Will it be crowded? Will it stop? Will she be on it? Is it the blue one? Etc. etc.) ‘Experience’ has layers. Here the intense lively privacy of the individual ‘inner life’ presents itself as something not to be analysed away; and indeed Wittgenstein at moments declares he is not analysing it away, only pointing out ‘grammatical mistakes’. Yet the examples which he pursues and worries in this part of the book seem to postulate a possible further clarification, a subjection of an unconquered field to a particular neater clearer account. He seems to select, as illuminating special cases, examples of perception experience which are in fact hugely and vaguely ubiquitous. I mean, he takes over as a fairly small field (presumed to pose a clearly answerable question) something which is really a very large field, posing many kinds of questions. Must a particular technical mastery be a ‘logical’ condition of someone’s having a particular experience? (What indeed is ‘logic’ doing here!) There must be different concepts of experience. Here Wittgenstein has in mind the dictum about the inner needing outer criteria. May a doubt be thrown on this? What about the ‘experience’ of being guided or influenced, for instance in copying a figure. While being guided I notice nothing special. Afterwards if I wonder what
happened I feel there must have been something else. ‘I have the feeling that what is essential about it is “an experience of being influenced”, of a connection ... but I should not be willing to call any experienced phenomenon the “experience of being influenced” ... I should like to say that I experienced the “because”, and yet I do not want to call any phenomenon “the experience of the because”.’ 176.) This anxiety connects with Wittgenstein’s more general problem about ability to continue a series, ‘how to go on’, how to trust our memory. We (I) reading Wittgenstein here feel the compelling presence of 'logic’, and also a sense of void. Wittgenstein cannot find (and really does not want) any ‘because’. The ‘experience’ of being guided is an illusion. But what is to count as an experience? Back in ordinary language we may say, all right, often (for instance, counting, adding) we do not have any ‘palpable’ experience – but also, often, we are in situations where the concept of experience is clearly in place. ‘Is it seeing or a thought?’ Well, usually it is both, one cannot, necessarily, ‘logically’ prise experiences apart. Experience is consciousness. (Wittgenstein avoids the latter word.) It is deep and complex, it has density, thoughts and perceptions and feelings are combined in the swift movement of our mode of existence. (Swift, as pointed out by Schopenhauer.) Can we experience an influence? Yes, of course, when (for instance) we sit wondering whether we have been wrongly persuaded by another person. Physical feelings as well as mental images attend such anxiety. In ‘setting his face against the picture of the inner process’ Wittgenstein seems to have banished not only (as in the example at 305 — 7) a naive error (or grammatical fiction) but the whole multifarious mixed-up business of our inner reflections, thought-being, experience, consciousness. So experience is consciousness? Let us say to Wittgenstein for the sake of argument, consciousness may be pictured as a stream punctuated by objectified memorable events called experiences. But some events scarcely enter the consciousness, slip quickly from the memory, and cannot or cannot strictly be called experiences. Here we are back with ‘How do sentences do it?’ (Investigations 435.) The concept of experience is huge, generalised and uncertain. Why should we be forced to talk in this laborious way about it? Wittgenstein has been forcing upon us a certain picture of experience as a kind of illusion, thereby discrediting the density and real existence of inner thinking (‘inner life’).
‘Change of aspect’ and ‘seeing as’ are ubiquitous activities or experiences. We are constantly puzzled by ambiguous ‘perceptions’ or ‘seeings’, we ‘interpret’ our surroundings all the time, enjoying as it were a multiple grasp of their texture and significance. We are doing it continuously and this includes intense imaginative introspection, evaluation, focusing upon an image, turning thoughts into things. Shall I do it? becomes a picture of it done. Such activities do not contradict the anti-Cartesian, anti-double-process, arguments offered earlier by Wittgenstein. It is as if he has, at the end, entered into an area of a quite new kind of unnecessary speculation. His terminology here is awkward. He seems at times like a Martian staring at human affairs. It may be said that this is just what a philosopher is. Philosophy is prompted by amazement, by being amazed at what ordinary folk take for granted. The Greeks were amazed by human existence, Kant was stunned by the starry heavens, Heidegger wondered why there was something instead of nothing. But Wittgenstein’s struggles with perception and interpretation seem to throw doubt upon what seemed agreed, throwing a dubious light upon earlier formulations. The idea of values and value judgments is excluded, as if we were still in the world of the Tractatus. The ‘surround’ or ‘stage-setting’ which is the required ‘outer’, the interpretation which gives meaning to the inner, is ‘logically’ construed. But the human situation is muddled and complex. It concerns the activities of individuals. Use of language does not require a logical (accurate, formulated) method of identifying ‘inner experience’. Our whole busy moral-aesthetic intellectual creativity abounds in private insoluble difficulties, mysterious half-understood mental configurations. A great part of our thinking is the retention, the cherishing, of such entities. ‘Inner’ can co-exist or fuse with ‘outer’ and not be lost. (What is inner, what is outer?) This is what thinking is like. The Tractatus has by contrast a certain innocence, it is shameless metaphysics; Schopenhauer would have called it a joke, some of its earliest admirers called it an Ode to Propositional Logic. At the end of that book Wittgenstein limits what can meaningfully be said to ‘the propositions of natural science’ (that is purely factual language), and philosophy to a demonstration, to anyone using metaphysical language, that his remarks were meaningless. All else must be consigned to silence, shown not said. (Logic demands this silence.) By implication not only moral or aesthetic utterance is banned. This austerity may express Wittgenstein’s detestation of (what he felt to be) any careless use of words (as when he banished Norman Malcolm for some time because Malcolm, in 1939, defended the British ‘national character’ as not given to deceits. Malcolm’s Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, p. 32.). Heidegger disliked the ‘vulgar’ talk of ‘ordinary people’ (Gerede), preferring to it not a dignified silence but a language of nobility and poetry, and (ideally) a poeticised philosophy. Wittgenstein certainly did not mean anything like that when he said that he wished he could write philosophy which could be ‘learnt by heart’.
What is the language, or language game, of a Lebensform supposed to be like? Is the substratum, what is ultimate, a reliance upon ‘general agreement’ in a community as an arbiter of sense? Wittgenstein speaks of ‘truthfulness’. Individuals are truthful or otherwise. The owner of sensation S is an individual. How long people go on believing or disbelieving him is an individual matter. How does meaning connect with truth? One language can be more potentially truth-bearing, more precise, more beautiful, richer in concepts than another. Tyrants destroy language, diminish vocabulary. A language is enlarged, improved (value judgment), by truthful utterance. People suffer and are damaged if prevented from uttering the truth. Assent, general agreement, has a background which must be scrutinised. Is there a reason why a despotic state could not be a Lebensform? Any Lebensform may be subject to moral judgment. How about members of the community who do not assent? They may be illiterate or mad, or may be geniuses, artists, free beings who enrich the language. The Lebensform concept suggests loss of the individual. At Investigations 241, Wittgenstein says, by way of clarification of ‘agreement’, ‘It is what human beings say that is true and false; and they agree in the language they use. That is not agreement in opinions but in form of life.’ However, out in the ordinary world, not in a frozen logical example, such distinctions are very difficult to make. Truth and falsehood are in a perpetual engagement with meaning. Meaning is slippery and free, language is a huge place (structuralists are right here). Surely we cannot take the imagined ‘assent’ of postulated ‘groups’ as establishing all correctness and intelligibility? Why is Wittgenstein so anxious to set up this machinery which so pointedly excludes the individual peculiarity of speaking humans? And if it appears that we cannot accept this picture are we rejecting one of his fundamental tenets? Of course language depends very generally upon areas of ‘agreement’, but is also continuously lived by persons. Fine shades of behaviour, imponderable evidence, looks, glances, gestures, tones, whistling. Such modes of human communication are everywhere fundamental, defeating general ‘exactness’, but performing precise jobs in individual contexts. Thinking, communicating, must admit the individual, the moral, the aesthetic. Wittgenstein’s examples and reflections include, but he does not discuss as such, our everyday, every moment use of metaphors which carry so many shades and evidences. Language is full of art forms, full of values, we rely daily upon intuitions and distinctions, life passes on, we have to trust our memories, we have to trust the truthfulness of other people. It may be said that if one lets everything in it isn’t philosophy. Surely one must have a ‘system’? Well, some confusions can be clarified, some questions clearly answered. (For instance t
he matter of cogito ergo sum. Though even here ...) Elsewhere, philosophy does tend, perhaps felicitously, to fall into phenomenology. Wittgenstein claims to describe, but without the psychological or the ethical. The question ‘what is really seen’ may lead our thoughts back to Husserl or to Sekida’s ‘pure cognition’ and to Simone Weil’s ‘pure perception’. Also to Plato’s Cave where subjects have the objects they deserve. An analysis or description of perception, if not scientific, seems inevitably to include a consideration of values, the question of inner-and-outer demands such consideration. Wittgenstein ‘allows’ the aesthetic at II xi, p. 202, ‘Hear this bar as an introduction’. Our private reflections, or ‘inner lives’, are soaked in values. Do we not therefore need to inspect and evaluate our own private thought-being, that inner which is so different from our lived outer? A sense of that separation is one of our deepest experiences. We know very little even about the people who are closest to us. We depend upon intuition and rightly accept many things as mysteries. Is not some denial or obfuscation of this picture a move in the direction of behaviourism? A step further on and we will be being warned against fantasies, private chatter and idle self-scrutiny. The warning will consist in the removal. Perhaps Wittgenstein was pointing toward the necessity, at least the desirability, of an inner silence.