There is an apocryphal story hereabouts (recalled from memory) about Wittgenstein when he was working as a laboratory assistant in the Royal Victoria Infirmary, Newcastle upon Tyne during the second world war (lodging in the Jesmond house - illustrated above - that is currently, inhabited by some family friends).
Apparently he turned up - unannounced, and at first unidentified - at a philosophy department, seminar presumably after his work had finished: I like to imagine he was still wearing his white lab coat. He sat, stony-faced, through the fumbling talk, as the whisper went around that he was present. When it came to the question time, nobody said anything - waiting for W to speak.
Wittgenstein is supposed to have delivered the following crushing line: "Well, that was very interesting... Now! Shall we do some philosophy?"... And then he, of course, proceeded to take-over the proceedings.
If there is any truth in this, W was being typically arrogant and cruel; but there is a "moral": he did have a point - In the sense that there are few things more boring and futile than studying and expounding "about" philosophy (as happens in 99-point-something percent of seminars); yet (for those with the taste for the activity) there is little in life more fascinating than actually doing philosophy.
In other words; I think Wittgenstein may have been making the point that there is a world of difference between talking-about and doing.
Actually doing philosophy - by oneself or with a few other people - is (like many of the best things) something that can only be done from a genuine motivation; from genuinely wanting to know oneself and for personal reasons.
Wittgenstein himself tried to do philosophy in a formal academic setting, in his "lectures" - but, while he sometimes found an audience of suitable stooges who stimulated him in the ways he required; I don't think he truly succeeded for other people.
Because W's motivations were not their motivations; and his disciples turned-out every bit as conventionally academic and externally-driven as the adherents of any other "school".
So perhaps, like all creative work, real philosophy is essentially a solitary activity.
Note: The "insane" of the title may seem obscure. What I was getting at was that is that when some person, usually an individual, is doing philosophy - he is doing so for personal reasons, that may not be at all widely shared. His work is quite likely to seem incomprehensible, even crazy - especially when seriously pursued, and over a significant timespan. To other people; he seem to be engaged in a trivial pursuit, using idiosyncratic methods, in a thought-world of his own. Insane!...
6 comments:
Oh, man, this so resonated with me. I've never tried to study Wittgenstein, but have rather only read a few pages here or there; enough to tell that I was standing at the edge of a precipice, but without wanting to take the trouble of plunging over it. The question being whether doing so would be worth the trouble.
Anyway, the impression I have always had of Wittgenstein is that I have been reading a page or ten from his private journal. He uses a jargon that can be understood only from within a whole system of thought. The same goes for the philosophers I have at least begun to study seriously: Whitehead, James, Peirce, Hartshorne, Dionysius, and Aquinas. If you don’t understand the terms they employ in the same way they do, you can’t begin to understand what they are saying. Or then, to understand why one might want in the first place to pay attention to what they are saying.
To understand why these guys are important, you must first simply suppose that they are important – for after all, everyone says they are – and then get on with it.
With James and Peirce, and indeed Hartshorne, it was fairly easy; they lived in the same intellectual world that inculcated me. Late 19th Century American idiom; no problem. Having read Twain. But with the others … not so much.
I'm a scholarly dilettante, you see; not a serious philosopher. So I read where my inward urges tell me next to read, and in no way systematically, or according to any prior plan. That I know of, consciously. But which, come to think of it, must be out there ahead of time and indeed to begin with, or else how could the flux of my thought find its next bit of channel on its ex ante inscrutable way to the sea?
Anyway, I daresay that a reader dipping into my own Journal would find it almost as impenetrable as Wittgenstein is to the casual reader. My personal jargon is about 50 layers deep. A lot of it must creep into my writing at the Orthosphere. I hope it is not too obscure.
I regret that jargon, a bit. I mean, in writing to oneself, economy and precision are almost the same thing, and must by nature invoke work already done. But the result must be like what I gather of Wittgenstein as an outsider to his entire realm of discursive interest. It is interesting, to be sure, and it has the smell of importance; but, not perhaps worth the considerable prospective effort involved in the penetration of it, prima facie. Better perhaps to read the next thing on the list from Plotinus or Hobbes or Berdyaev.
Compare Pascal. His Pensées ought to be the model for us all. He wrote a daily journal, like that of any amateur philosopher or mystic involved in a personal quest for understanding and wisdom, or for mere prudence; yet despite the solipsity of its intended audience, it was entirely open to the casual reader.
I am by no means widely read, but the only other such philosophical writers I can think of are Plato and William James, and Augustine. Aurelius, too, of course, and Solomon; but their pellucid aphoristic wisdom is more ethical and practical than strictly philosophical (as we nowadays construe philosophy).
Anyway. Great post, if only as a reminder of the way I ought to write, even when writing only to myself.
I think that's pretty much right about the difference between talking about philosophy and actually doing philosophy.
There are two main things that have fallen under the heading of philosophy. The first is teaching a particular philosophy (or expounding on the history of philosophy in general) such as has been done with Thomistic philosophy in the Catholic seminaries for many years. The second is the individual activity.
The first can be professionalized and (provided the motivations are good) it's well that it should be, but the second one neither can nor should be professionalized. For a relatively brief period of time, professional philosophy allowed some individuals a niche in which to do the second, including Wittgenstein. Maybe that's part of why Wittgenstein sometimes expressed dissatisfaction with his position, because he recognized that what he was doing wasn't a job in the normal sense.
In a sense, the problems of philosophy are the opposite of the problems of mathematics.
A mathematical problem can be solved, the solution written down and that's it (though that doesn't have to be the end of the story). Intermediately, you have problems that can be solved, but then you have to implement the solution. But philosophy is about the problems that won't go away: whichever problems confront a particular individual, it's not enough that they were previously solved to someone else's satisfaction; each individual has to think through those problems himself.
Though there's a higher level than that, which is religion, concerning the fundamental problems of the human condition, that even if solved still have to be lived through.
The distinction between doing and talking-about may not be so clear or stable in this case. We learn how to do philosophy largely by talking about it with other people--talking about what philosophers thought and trying to understand, trying on the ideas and language of other people, then trying on other ideas and language...
Wittgenstein himself could have learned far more, and done far better work in philosophy, if he hadn't been hellbent on "doing" without ever trying to really understand what others had already thought. Often he made basic, seemingly stupid errors for this reason. Though typically the nature of the error was very hard for others to recognize or correct--partly because, in his vain quest to play the role of a "genius" he obfuscated and dissembled. It seems that he often didn't want to be understood but instead wanted to be admired for his unintelligibly "deep" thoughts which only he could think.
Though I agree with your point in a general way this story strikes me as good evidence of Wittgenstein's un-philosophical temperament. It's not just that he was being arrogant and cruel, but that if he were truly a philosophical genius he could probably have found something *philosophical* in the "fumbling talk" of this lesser person. Was there really *nothing* of any philosophical interest in what the other person was saying? Not even a hint of some real engagement with a deep question?
I get the impression that Wittgenstein's real motivation (very often, not always) was social rather than philosophical. He had to be The Genius in every situation, had to be revered and feared--then, perhaps dimly aware of himself, he loathed the sycophants and poseurs who gave him what he wanted. He did produce some interesting and possibly original work in philosophy but it's often buried under a status-seeking performance.
I believe it was in Richard Russo's Straight Man -- but it could have been another book in the genre of novels about academic life -- where one of the characters cuttingly corrects another character who has referred to Professor So-and-So as "a philosopher", by saying, "No, his isn't a philosopher; he is a philophilosopher", i.e. someone who merely "loves" (studies) other philosophers but does no actual philosophical work himself.
@Kristor - Glad this one resonated for you!
@NLR - "whichever problems confront a particular individual, it's not enough that they were previously solved to someone else's satisfaction; each individual has to think through those problems himself." - That's it. But the study of philosophy seems usually to interfere with this, rather than assist it.
@Jasper - You *seem* to be speaking from an implicit conceptualization of a canon, and evaluating in terms of contributions to that canon. That's not a perspective I share. I regard almost the entirety of philosophy since the ancient Greeks as having made some wrong fundamental (metaphysical) assumptions, without acknowledging they are assumptions (which is how the errors have been sustained and propagated down the centuries).
For me; Wittgenstein is just one instance of many many fundamentally wrong thinkers. On the other hand, I have learned several valid - albeit negative, "to be avoided" - things from studying him.
On the other hand, I am not defending Wittgenstein either as a philosopher, or a man, as you can see from the linked posts.
W did me considerably more harm than good when I was most engaged with his work (and world), when I sought guidance from him; at least until after I became a Christian.
Nowadays, I am recurrently fascinated by what he was doing personally; his positive religion (?Christian) impulses and why he was not able to commit to them or take them forward.
@Daniel F - Yes, it is a distinction of relevance now; when there are probably no "philosophers" At All in the world of academic-philosophy/ philophilosophy. As of the past several decades; no real - i.e. properly motivated - philosopher could possibly qualify for a recognized position in that social system.
Philosophers of the past considered themselves to be real-deal intellectuals who create actual useful knowledge, but in 19 and 20 centuries this status was taken away by the science. For example neurobiologists are now responsible for all that is related to consciousness even though consciousness is not observable and therefore should be considered as a non-scientific concept. So, if any philosopher will claim that he gain real knowledge by logical reasoning and whatever, he will be laughed at or simply ignored as an irrelevant weirdo. So, what is left for those who want to look decent is reading and talking about people who lived ages before with serious faces, even though their philosophy is already wide-known and doesn't seem to change much in modern world
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