Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals

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by Iris Murdoch


  ‘The results of philosophy are the uncovering of one or another piece of plain nonsense and of the bumps that the understanding has got by running its head against the limits of the language.’ (Investigations 119.) Elsewhere (Waismann, Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, p. 68), Wittgenstein is quoted as saying that this running up against ‘is ethics’, that is, theorising about morals. (By Moore, for instance.) He also speaks in this piece (which I quoted earlier) about Heidegger and Kierkegaard. The image of language, thought of in this philosophical context, is that of a cage. There are stern and clearly defined limits. This goes with ideas of ‘logic’ and the ‘conceptual’: of rather abrupt collision with the transcendent (as limit). Wittgenstein’s method, in Tractatus and later, is professedly negative, a defence against useless metaphysical formulations. ‘This method would be’ to the aspiring metaphysician ‘unsatisfying — he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy.’ (Tractatus 6. 53.) The Investigations retains the abruptness of this method, but concealing or burying it in a stylistically different whirl of questions and examples. Herein it is instructive to look for, or dig out, the points of inconsistency or doubt. Wittgenstein is ‘embarrassed’ by the concept of experience. This huge concept directs us toward the messiness of ordinary life and its mysteries. He persecutes sensations S. He denies ‘experiential volume’ to meaning, intending, being influenced (p. 217). He also denies it (II xi, p. 219) to the expression ‘the word is on the tip of my tongue’. In more relaxed and less logical mood, in Culture and Value, p. 79, he describes ‘cases where someone has the sense of what he wants to say much more clearly in his mind than he can express in words. (This happens to me very often.) It is as though one had a dream image quite clearly before one’s mind’s eye, but could not describe it to someone else so as to let him see it too. As a matter of fact, for the writer (myself) it is often as though the image stays there behind the words, so that they seem to describe it to me.’ He goes on to say: ‘A mediocre writer must beware of too quickly replacing a crude, incorrect expression with a correct one. By doing so he kills his original idea, which was at least still a living seedling. Now it is withered and no longer worth anything. He may as well throw it on the rubbish heap. Whereas the wretched little seedling was still worth something.’ Here, with a free and apt use of metaphor, with swift intuitive imagination, Wittgenstein describes the experience of thinking. Yes, it is like that. We can come close to these things and do them justice. At the border-lines of thought and language we can often ‘see’ what we cannot say: and have to wait and attempt to formulate for ourselves and convey to others our experience of what is initially beyond and hidden. We look out into the abyss, into the mystery, intuiting what is not ourselves. A difficulty is a light, an insuperable difficulty is a sun. Great poetry may be for all thinkers an ideal image of ‘pure creativity’ (compare ‘pure cognition’). Of course philosophy is definitely not poetry. (I stay with the ‘old quarrel’.) But, even in philosophy, language is not a cage.

  Here I refer to Saul Kripke, who has discussed with greater clarity the matters with which I have been engaged. In his book Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, Kripke argues that the attack on ‘private language’, supposed to have started round about Philosophical Investigations 243, in fact began much earlier in the form of a more general sceptical paradox which is (Kripke says) the fundamental problem of the Investigations. The question is, as Kripke points out, very like that posed by Hume. How can we be sure that the future will resemble the past? No past state of my mind can entail a future one. Further explanations or clarifications or rules for interpreting rules may all be misunderstood. How can we ever be sure that something is the same as before? Kripke admits that, in contemplating this situation, he has something of an eerie feeling. Surely there is something in his mind which instructs him what he ought to do in all future cases? ‘It seems that the entire idea of meaning vanishes into thin air.’ This sceptical approach is applied later in Investigations to problems about sensations. Here the attack on ‘private ostensive definition’ or ‘private language’ takes the form of the removal (irrelevance) of the ‘inner thing’. The case of ‘sensation S’ (258) and ‘the beetle in the box’ (293). Can I know something (pain for instance) only from my own case? It is difficult here (returning to Wittgenstein) to separate out what is ‘all right’. Of course a confession of what we thought is not a ‘literal’ account of an inner process (etc.). What is ‘eerie’ is the background picture of solipsism, the ‘empty box’, which seems to imply a form of behaviourism.

  On pp. 100 — 102 Kripke says that the demand for outward criteria is not to be seen as a verificationist or behaviourist premise. It is rather deduced in a Kantian sense (it is forced upon us). ‘A sceptical problem is posed and a sceptical solution to that problem is given. The solution turns on the idea that each person who claims to be following a rule can be checked by others.’ Methods of checking constitute a ‘primitive part of the language game’. ‘Outward criteria’ for pain sensations are just ‘the way this general requirement of our game of attributing concepts to others works out in the special case of sensations’. In footnotes (pp. 101 — 4) Kripke expresses some doubts. Wittgenstein ‘often seems to be taken to suppose that for any type of sensation there is an appropriate “natural expression” of that sensation type (“pain behaviour” for pain)’. Investigations 244: ‘A child has hurt himself and he cries.’ This natural expression would be some sort of typical external behaviour ‘other than and prior to the subject’s avowal that he has the sensation. If the theory of §244 that the first-person avowals are verbal replacements for a “primitive natural expression” of a sensation has the generality it appears to have, it would follow that Wittgenstein holds that such a “primitive natural expression” must always exist if the first-person avowal is to be meaningful.’ Kripke refers here also to Investigations 256 — 7 (which lead on to ‘sensation S’). He tells us that he (Kripke) in his presentation of Wittgenstein’s private-language argument has portrayed Wittgenstein as holding that ‘for each rule I follow there must be a criterion — other than simply what I say — by which another will judge that I am following the rule correctly. Applied to sensations, this seems to mean that there must be some “natural expression”, or at any rate some external circumstances other than my mere inclination to say that this is the same sensation again, in virtue of which someone else can judge whether the sensation is present, and hence whether I have mastered the sensation term correctly.’ Kripke says that, in this (his) essay, he has ‘largely suppressed my own views’; however he will venture to ‘remark here that any view that supposes that, in this sense, an inner process always has “outward criteria”, seems to me probably to be empirically false’. (Kripke’s italics.) This is a welcome admission. Kripke goes on to offer a ‘liberal’ version of the argument which may be compatible with Wittgenstein’s intentions, allowing that in some cases a speaker might use sensation terms with no outward criteria for the presence of the sensations other than his sincere avowal. No one else can check. This, Kripke says, will not have ‘the objectionable form of a “private language”’ provided the speaker can ‘demonstrate, for many sensations that do have public criteria, that he has mastered the appropriate terminology for identifying these sensations’; then the public criteria for the intelligibility of his avowal may be allowed to be the avowal itself. So there can be some rules where relevant mastery cannot be checked, but is assumed on the basis of community membership. Kripke’s ‘liberalisation’, together with his welcome intrusion of his own opinion, may be understood to extend beyond the field of sensations to cover similar instances of inner phenomena lacking outer criteria. Kripke’s exposition of Wittgenstein’s argument began with the very general case of following rules, the scepticism occasioned by the thought that there is no way of being sure that something is the same as before. Wittgenstein (here I resume) certainly returns to the idea of Lebensformen as something absolutely fundame
ntal. (Of course this is not an appeal to anthropology.) A ‘community’ here suggests an enclosure, a dominant group of judges, or a thoroughly reliable general will. What constitutes a ‘confidence’ in another person’s language, the belief that what he says means something? Of course we are always dealing with this problem! But it strikes one (me) here that the ‘goings-on’ of language recede from ‘clear cases’ into the wildest strangest most individualistic regions of human existence. Would it not be better to bypass the community and appeal to language itself as that which simply does what is necessary? (What is necessary for meaningfulness, and so also for truth.) The term ‘language game’ suggests some sort of particular control of language. Is not the best solution indeed that of Hume, or of, one might add, the author of the Tractatus? Language just does refer to the world, we just do possess the essential talent of knowing that something is the same again. Without this human nature would perish and go to ruin. Here we can see it as a Kantian-Humian deduction. It just has to be so for us to be as we are. If we recall here Kierkegaard’s image of philosophical thinking as having to knot the thread, the admission that it is empirically false to say that an inner process must always have outer criteria must seem to constitute a cutting of a thread, by which we are liberated into conceptions of the ‘inner life’ which are considerably closer to common-sense. Perhaps the rather ‘tangled’ impression made by the relevant last part of the Investigations arises from Wittgenstein’s (late) realisation that his previously offered picture was far from clear. I like and pick up another ‘personal opinion’ of Kripke (p. 43) that the force of Hume’s picture (of an irreducible ‘impression’ corresponding to each psychological state) whose simplistic version Wittgenstein rejected, has been if anything too little felt. This suggests a thinking which tends to restore being and body to philosophical conceptions of consciousness.

  Relevant quotations. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I:

  ‘All our reasonings concerning causes and effects are derived from nothing but custom; and that belief is more properly an act of the sensitive, than of the cogitative part of our natures.’

  (Part IV section 1.)

  ‘This sceptical doubt, both with respect to reason and the senses, is a malady which can never be radically cured, but must return upon us every moment, however we may chase it away, and sometimes may seem entirely free from it. It is impossible, upon any system, to defend either our understanding or our senses; and we but expose them further when we endeavour to justify them in that manner. As the sceptical doubt arises naturally from a profound and intense reflection on those subjects, it always increases the further we carry our reflections, whether in opposition or conformity to it. Carelessness and inattention alone can afford us any remedy.’

  (Part IV section z.)

  ‘I must distinguish in the imagination betwixt the principles which are permanent, irresistible and universal; such as the customary transition from causes to effects and from effects to causes: and the principles which are changeable weak and irregular ... The former are the foundation of all our thoughts and actions, so that upon their removal human nature must immediately perish and go to ruin.’

  (Part IV section 4.)

  ‘For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never catch myself at any time without a perception, and can never observe anything but the perception ... If anyone, upon serious and unprejudiced reflection, thinks he has a different notion of himself, I must confess I can no longer reason with him. All I can allow him is that he may be in the right as well as I, and that we are essentially different in this particular. He may perhaps perceive something simple and continued which he calls himself; though I am certain there is no such principle in me. But setting aside some metaphysicians of this kind, I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.’

  (Part IV section 6.)

  ‘Thus the sceptic still continues to reason and believe, even though he asserts that he cannot defend his reason by reason; and by the same rule he must assent to the principle concerning the existence of body though he cannot pretend by any arguments of philosophy, to maintain its veracity. Nature has not left it to his choice, and has doubtless esteemed it an affair of too great importance to be trusted to our uncertain reasonings and speculations. We may well ask what causes induce us to believe in the existence of body? But it is in vain to ask whether there be body or no? That is a point we must take for granted in all our reasonings.’

  (Part IV section 2.)

  Stanley Rosen, The Ancients and Moderns, p. 131:

  ‘Wittgenstein’s later writings are filled with one passage after another in which intuition is first rejected, either explicitly or implicitly, and then a puzzle arises with respect to how we know some simple fact or another of our experience. For example, how do we know that someone is in pain? The answer, I think, is quite simple: sometimes we do not, but when we do, it is through an intuitive unification of a variety of perceptions, some visual, some aural, and so on. If we are not allowed to have an intuitive grasp of the sense of connected phenomena, but are left with a person, his face contorted in a grimace, who shouts “I am in pain!” then the puzzle arises whether the grimace and the shout are enough evidence for the inference that the man is actually in pain. And they are not enough evidence. This leads Wittgenstein to fanciful speculations about whether we require a “picture” of the pain as distinct from the grimace and the shout, or whether we would need to look inside the interior of the shouting person in order to try to see the pain, and so on. These speculations arise because the obvious answer to the problem has been ruled out. There is no analytical or theoretical account of how we know that certain symptoms show a man to be in pain, because we intuit this.’

  Postscript. Henry Staten’s lucid and learned book, Wittgenstein and Derrida, throws light upon both writers. Staten tells us that the ‘underlying theme of the whole book’ is

  ‘the question of what kind of functioning of language is involved in deconstructive discourse, which is neither poetry nor (quite) philosophy. Derrida picks up the view of language developed first by the symbolists and then by the modernists, that language is a quasi-material medium that is worked not by fitting words to the requisite meanings but by attentiveness to the way the words as words (sounds, shapes, associative echoes) will allow themselves to be fitted together. This is called in contemporary jargon “the play of signifiers” and has probably always been the way poets choose their words ... I will argue that Wittgenstein himself did treat language this way ...’

  (Preface, pp. xiv – xv.)

  Later, Staten refers us to Wittgenstein’s ‘attack on the conception of rules as transcendental and super-hard’ at Investigations 193 — 4. Wittgenstein: ‘When does one have the thought: the possible movements of a machine are already there in it in some mysterious sense? Well, when one is doing philosophy. And what leads us into thinking that? The kind of way we talk about machines.’ (194.) Staten comments,

  ‘The possibility of a particular movement as given in the diagram of the machine or ideal machine seems absolute and immutable, whereas an actual machine is subject to accidents; Wittgenstein wants us to stop thinking of the operation of rules on the model of machine-as-diagram and think, rather, in terms of something actual that is subject to contingency, to which accidents may happen. To think an essential law of contingency, as Derrida does, is to generalise as a “grammatical rule” the principles of the kind of critique that Wittgenstein here instantiates. Whereas “metaphysical grammar” subordinates accident to essence, the empirical to the logical, and so on, “deconstructive grammar” does not. Rather, it attempts to let accidental being operate upon deconstructive writing, deforming it and preventing it fr
om achieving transcendental form.’

  (Introduction, p. 18.)

  I don’t think the example given is helpful in suggesting a similarity between Derrida and Wittgenstein. What emerges is rather an interesting difference between them. One way of explaining deconstructive discourse would be to contrast it with ordinary language; with which Wittgenstein has no quarrel. What he is talking about is what philosophers, and laymen, wrongly picture or imagine. The discussion round about 194 concerns Wittgenstein’s continuing anxiety about ability to follow a rule. How can we know that the future will resemble the past? At 199 he says, ‘To obey a rule, to make a report, to give an order to play a game of chess, are customs (uses, institutions).’ Hume’s terminology. Whereas Derrida is thinking of felicitous accidents and contingencies brought about by the interlacing nature of language and made use of aesthetically (expressively) in discourse. His ‘law of contingency’ is an encouragement to word play. (He is a literary man, Wittgenstein was not.) Wittgenstein’s distinctive style should not be mistaken for a deliberately poetic use of language.

 

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