by Iris Murdoch
To return to Kant, in his thought the barrier, the perfect conceptual ‘fit’, essential to the validity of science, and to the segregation of a purely phenomenal world of empirical experience, is at a certain level of generality. (Causes, the general idea of an object, etc.) He did not worry about ordinary empirical concepts (boots and shoes) which were at a ‘lower level’ and looked after themselves. Analogously in the realm of moral conduct he was not concerned with detailed secondary moral concepts, the middle-range mediating moral vocabulary which carries so much of our ever-changing being. States of mind and qualities of consciousness would be regarded as pathological phenomena, not any part of practical reason. Kant thus ‘loses’ (as Schopenhauer would agree) a whole fundamental area of human existence. In the Grundlegung he ‘translates’ the sovereign demand of Reason into moral concepts of great generality, such as truthfulness, benevolence, justice and teleological concern for humanity. The light of Reason shows us these great generalities and the empirical facts to which they are relevant. No assistance is (on Kant’s view) required from intermediate variously named value-qualities (such as vanity, envy, sentimentality, gentleness, loyalty and so on) which might be thought of as hanging around as moral quasi-facts at the empirical level. (Our instinctive and so necessary moral modes of speech.) One might say in general that puritans make stronger, more confident, less detailed moral judgments. (‘Don’t lie’ means don’t lie.) To resort to detail is to obscure the issue and make excuses. ‘Character’ is unreal. For Kant the transcendental barrier occurs at a higher (or deeper, either image would do) level. Hegel, who was interested in boots and shoes, rolled his transcendences (as it were) over and over until the all-consuming organism of universal mind had ultimately sieved and united everything, and nothing was left behind or outside. The great Hegelian image may be treated as a kind of ‘mystery’. There are many and various problems which lie between logic and the nature of the world.
9
Wittgenstein and the Inner Life
Modern philosophy, in parting company with Descartes, has also rightly disposed of various metaphysical entities postulated by previous philosophers. The removal of these images is to be welcomed on grounds of Occam’s razor and because their shadowy existence could occasion a mystifying agnosticism. (‘Perhaps there’s something in it?’) Locke’s Substance, Kant’s Thing-in-itself, Schopenhauer’s Will. New styles of philosophical argument send them away, and the Zeitgeist does so too. What they represented can be dealt with less picturesquely. The philosopher tends to think there are deep foundations, there must be a source, a cause, a radical reality. But if he cannot credibly explain or describe this he might as well do without it. We no longer think that things are named by God. We have to understand language itself as a subject for philosophical reflection. Yet, for instance, when reading Wittgenstein, we may worry about the ‘inner life’. Can there not be too fierce a removal of entities deemed to be unnecessary and unknowable? In the context of arguing à la Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein that language is telegraphic, we may also agree that memory does not depend on mental images (etc.). ‘Do not try to analyse your inner experience.’ (Investigations II xi, p. 204.) This sounds more like moral or religious advice: do not spend time scrutinising your conscience. But Wittgenstein’s remark must be addressed to philosophers. Others may well say, ‘Why not? It’s up to me!’ Surely Wittgenstein’s attack on the inner-thought-outer-thing dualism concerns a philosophical mistake and is not intended by him to suggest there is no such thing as private reflection, or to support a behaviourist ethics? The revolution occasioned by Wittgenstein and Heidegger most famously removes the Cartesian starting point. We are not ‘most certain’ of our momentary concentration upon our private self-experience. We cannot ‘know’ in a solitary instant. Knowledge involves concepts, context, surroundings. ‘A great deal of stage-setting in the language’ must be presumed. (Investigations 257.) What is primary is an awareness already in the world. Heidegger pictures us as ‘thrown’ into the world, our ‘I’ is a being-there (Dasein), our state is being-in-the-world (in-der-Welt-sein). Heidegger emphasises our contingency. Wittgenstein (Tractatus) pictures a language-user as ‘an extensionless point’ in the centre of its world. The I is its world. Wittgenstein even (in Philosophical Remarks VI) suggests the removal of the concept of Ego or first person. So, ‘it thinks’, ‘it sees’, ‘there is thinking’, ‘there is seeing’. Like, ‘it rains’, ‘there is rain’. It has been suggested that here he has been influenced by the Buddhism of Schopenhauer. The Buddhist removal of the ego is a spiritual achievement, however, spoken of in this sense by Schopenhauer. In Zen and the Art of Archery the master tells the pupil to try to achieve ‘it shoots’. The ‘influence’ is more probably Lichtenberg. An aphorism of Lichtenberg: ‘We should say it thinks, just as we say it lightens. To say cogito is already to say too much as soon as we translate it as I think. To assume, to postulate the I is a practical requirement.’ (Notebook K.) (I return to this later.) Heidegger’s Dasein, though he too sounds like a depersonalised entity, is in effect more like an adventurer in a real human scene.
‘An “inner process” stands in need of outer criteria.’ (Investigations 580.) ‘“But surely you cannot deny that, for example, in remembering, an inner process takes place ...” The impression that we wanted to deny something arises from our setting our faces against the picture of the “inner process”. [My italics.] Why should I deny that there is a mental process? But “There has just taken place in me the mental process of remembering” means nothing more than “I have just remembered” ... “Are you not really a behaviourist in disguise? Aren’t you at bottom saying that everything except human behaviour is fiction?” If I do speak of a fiction, then it is of a grammatical fiction.’ (305 — 7.) By a grammatical fiction Wittgenstein presumably means something entertained by a philosopher. At 295 he speaks of pictures we see ‘When we look into ourselves as we do philosophy’, and at 299 of ‘being unable, when we surrender ourselves to philosophical thought, to help saying such-and-such’. All right, we do not require an inner thought process which coincides with and produces outer speech. I think Schopenhauer explained this more clearly than Wittgenstein. Such beliefs, if held by philosophers, are rightly pointed out by other philosophers as philosophical mistakes or ‘fictions’. Ordinary people, if left alone, get on perfectly well holding, or not holding, similar vague pictures of their inner mental existence. Thus far, concerning the matters mentioned above, philosophers should be grateful to Wittgenstein, and to the structuralists, for a removal of errors. However there is another, not separable but deeper, even fundamental, aspect of Wittgenstein’s thinking. Very early in the Investigations he introduces us to ‘language games’ and ‘forms of life’ (Lebensformen). ‘To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life’ (19). ‘One thinks that learning language consists in giving names to objects’ (25). Then we can refer to things, we can point to them. However ‘an ostensive definition can be variously interpreted in every case’ (28). To explain ‘red’ it is not enough to point to something red. The thing pointed at is ambiguous, it is not just red. To remove such ambiguity should not all words be proper names of unique individuals, ‘simples’, primary elements, of which no further account can be given? Wittgenstein refers here to the Theaetetus, the dream of Socrates (201E), and adds ‘Both Russell’s “individuals” and my “objects” [Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus] were such primary elements’. Wittgenstein goes on to picture language games which are to assemble primary elements into orderly complexes subject to rules. ‘Seeing what is common’ (72). But what is following a rule (82.) or continuing a series (143)? How do we ever know that anything is the same again, or that a system has been understood? ‘The certainty that I shall be able to go on after I have had this experience — seen the formula for instance — is simply based on induction.’ What does this mean? ‘The certainty that the fire will burn me is based on induction.’ ... Is our confidence justified? ‘What people accept as a ju
stification — is shown by how they think and live.’ Also later (292) ‘Don’t always think that you can read off what you say from the facts, that you portray these in words according to rules. For even so you would have to apply the rule in this particular case without guidance.’ The concept of induction, and anxiety about cause and ground, takes us back to Hume’s scepticism. Hume overcame his scepticism by cheer-fulness and common sense. Wittgenstein is more profoundly troubled. He refers us back to the imagery of primary elements in Plato and in the Tractatus. He offers an unnerving account of the bases of language and thought. He sets his face against the inner process. An inner process requires outer criteria. He appeals to forms of life. Of course this is a kind of metaphysics, though more empirical and confused than the Tractatus, and in this respect harder to understand. But how does all this leave us, the individuals, where does it leave our thought-stream, our private reflections, where does it leave truth, if our foundations are so shaky and our judgments so shadowy? What sort of criteria are required to sanction the genuineness, even the real existence, of our ‘inner’ world, or indeed of ‘the world’? Wittgenstein’s fable (258) about ‘Sensation S’ concerns a person who says he has a particular sensation whose recurrence he notes in his diary as ‘S’. He cannot define S or offer any description or explanation of it. How does he know it is the same each time? He just knows when it comes again. But how? Well, he concentrates his attention on it, he impresses on himself the connection between the sign S and the sensation. He gives himself, as it were, a private ostensive definition, a pointing inward at a feeling. ‘But what is this ceremony for? ... “I impress it on myself” can only mean I remember the connection right in future. But in the present case I have no criterion of correctness. One would like to say: whatever is going to seem right to me is right. And that only means that here we can’t talk about “right”.’ This is an extreme case (a reductio ad absurdum some might say), a tailor-made situation designed to show the emptiness of the inner when not evidently connected with the outer. Out in real life the owner of S would be an individual living in time. Wittgenstein’s example suggests but a perfunctory interrogation. The truth or falsehood of the claim is not allowed into the picture, which should include an immense number of details about character and situation. (Is he mad, a trickster, a liar, a foreigner, a genius, a poet, almost anyone trying to ‘make something out’?) Wittgenstein’s S man is a prisoner of Wittgenstein’s relentless thinking, part of a general attack upon the (his) concepts of ‘private language’ and ‘inner process’. There is a distinct smell of tautology. We must distinguish here between the case of the otiose dualism, for instance, the ‘inner process’ which is supposed to articulate and present the finished outer speech; and the very general idea of ‘processes’ as stream of consciousness, inner reflection, imagery, in fact our experience as inner (unspoken, undemonstrated) being. It is this huge confused area which is being threatened, even removed. What are we to do for criteria? The picture of ‘producing them’ seems out of place. Wittgenstein himself says that he sometimes has a dream image which he cannot describe. (Culture and Value, p. 79.)
At the end of the Investigations (which I discuss shortly) Wittgenstein seems anxious to remove the concept of ‘experience’, also obliterated by Derrida. Are we to be left with the rather rigid, and indeed not clearly explained, ideas of language games and Lebensformen? Can this be a full philosophical account of human life and language? In the Investigations Wittgenstein seems to be shaking off views expressed in the Tractatus and the Notebooks; we were to be liberated from an earlier cage. But is the ‘second book’, for all its liberating anti-Cartesian aspects, not in some respects another cage? There is a feeling of constraint. Perhaps what lingers is a shadow of logic? In the Notebooks (2.8.16) ‘Yes, my work has extended from the foundations of logic to the nature of the world.’ At times Wittgenstein seems to be reluctantly questioning logic. ‘Thought is surrounded by a halo. Its essence, logic, presents an order, in fact the a priori order of the world; that is the order of possibilities, which must be common to both world and thought. But this order, it seems, must be utterly simple. It is prior to all experience, must run through all experience: no empirical cloudiness or uncertainty can be allowed to affect it. It must rather be of the purest crystal. But this crystal does not appear as an abstraction; but as something concrete, as it were the hardest thing there is.’ (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 5. 5563.) ‘We are under the illusion that what is peculiar, profound, essential, in our investigation, resides in its trying to grasp the incomparable essence of language.’ (Investigations 97.) The pages which follow continue this tone of reflective even frenzied doubt. ‘We see that what we call “sentence” and “language” have not the formal unity that I imagined, but are families of structures more or less related to each other? But what becomes of logic now? Its rigour seems to be giving way here. But in that case doesn’t logic altogether disappear? For how can it lose its rigour? Of course not by our bargaining any of its rigour out of it. The preconceived idea of crystalline purity can only be removed by turning our whole examination round. (One might say: the axis of reference of our examination must be rotated, but about the fixed point of our real need.)’ (108.) This last sentence beautifully expresses a reaction to a philosophical dilemma.
There is a sort of strained anguish in the Investigations, thought being constantly stretched to its limit. The problem about the ‘inner life’ has to be connected with ‘continuing the series’, for instance by the idea of ‘criteria’. One is tempted to say: the author of the Tractatus solved by metaphysical fiat the problem of the relation of language to the world. (Of course language refers to the world, ‘and there’s an end on‘t’ as Dr Johnson would say.) Cannot the author of the Investigations simply emulate Hume and solve the problem of induction in a similar manner? Are not the intelligent things which Schopenhauer said to him (about the telegraphic nature of language which we somehow manage) enough? Apparently not. ‘It is difficult to keep our heads up ... We feel as if we had to repair a torn spider’s web with our fingers ... The conflict becomes intolerable ...’ (106, 107.) Quite apart from anything else Wittgenstein, obsessed with language, is being unfair to it. It has been suggested by some that Wittgenstein and Derrida are saying similar things. But here let us glance at the picture of language presented by Saussure, as if it were a vast ocean of linkages and possibilities over which we cannot see very far. This is indeed the sort of thing language is, this is the way to picture it in order to understand it. Derrida took the further step of ‘freezing’ the picture into some sort of postulated reality. Wittgenstein’s strong but unclear concepts of language games plus Lebensformen freeze his different, quasi-logical picture of language. He says (108) that ‘we are talking about the spatial and temporal phenomenon of language, not about some non-spatial, non-temporal phantasm’. Added here in square brackets: ‘[Note in margin: Only it is possible to be interested in a phenomenon in a variety of ways.]’ Out in the real world language is a colossal infinitely various creative ferment. (No wonder some are tempted, metaphysically, to say that it is all there is.) Here we (I) must prefer, as far more suggestive of the nature of language, Derrida’s free play, to Wittgenstein’s more (logical?) restricted language games and life forms. In Derrida’s realm the sensation S man would not be persecuted. Wittgenstein’s image of ‘outer criteria’ seems, in his use of it, unbearably narrow; and, one feels, motivated by a desire to restrict and curtail the whole jumbled field of our inner musing. (Experience, consciousness.) This area, so immense, so personal, is admitted to be the home of ‘fine shades of behaviour’ (Investigations II xi, p. 203). Here we are told that ‘what we have rather to do is to accept the everyday language game.’ But what is this? Of course, in a general sense, language must have rules. But it is also the property of individuals whose inner private consciousness, seething with arcane imagery and shadowy intuitions, occupies the greater part of their being.
